The religious person looks at the world through the lens of their own reasoning and all the evidence seems fit so seamlessly. Assuming that you buy into the ‘truth’ of this far-fetched story about ‘the brain constructing what is reality’ that is going around (seems like a contradiction between these terms here, eh?): how do you get out of this mess? Perhaps you look for evidence of good and evil in the world. Well, when the options are to see random chance or miracle survival against all odds, it doesn’t seem too far a stretch to see divine intervention. The drive for coherence in human beings leads to conservatism. The less revisionary beliefs are more likely to make the cut, the more conflicting impressions ready to be axed to salvage the whole. From what I can tell, this is the sole appeal of miracles: otherwise reasonable people would be happy to believe that miracles could exist in the world as long as it gives credence to their otherwise overtly sanguine beliefs. What other reason do you have to justify such a belief in a deity: that you’ll go to heaven for it? Such egoistic beliefs don’t carry any convincing weight; you have to believe that your god is working around you to avoid looking like such a selfish prick. So each observation of low probability will most likely lead to confirmation of miracles. How do you angle out of this anachronistic circle, assuming you’re one of the unfortunate to be sucked in before you have the ability to fend off such viruses? One would assume that you’d just keep talking non-stop and heading nowhere, like any viciously circular reasoning leads to.

But look at this constant self-critical barrage that comes from us Socratics. The never-ending questioning that we’ve trained ourselves to appreciate is second nature now. Each move, each step that we make is marked by indecision and scorn, scepticism and indignation, having the arrogance to not let anyone else be our own worst critics. Each decision will be perceived as providing further questions, further confirmations of your Socratic nature and possible self-loathing. Regardless of any trends in pop-neuroscience, this seems to be a pretty decent self-enclosed circle of reasoning. If questioning absolutes is your maxim, then you’re not inclined to notice a way out when you’re so adept at spotting other questions that you haven’t asked. Once you start, there’s not any way of getting out unless you radically alter your ideas about ‘reason vs faith’.

The optimistic atheists that sincerely buy into the ‘Darwin Awards’ (and I have not met many of them, but they do exist!) posit that we could see the effects of natural selection in our lifetimes as the implications of deeply held religious belief lead to further crazy deaths. But this circle of confirmation bias is everywhere and people do have a tendency to value conservatism. I’m not sure if there are any studies about this, but I’d be interested in reading over any attempts. However, extreme religious belief hasn’t been too phased in the past 50 years, while those closer to atheistic thinking such as moderately religious families have been more inclined to abandon their religiosity (see the census data of most developed nations – but if you are reading this and know otherwise, please let me know).

One of the main benefits that I see in the Socratic position is that it offers a clear way out of the circle – eventually, critical thought turns on itself and wonders what use critical thoughts is. The positives and negatives are both weighed up, but then rejected and scorned because of the circularity. The Delphic shrine, seat of knowledge and wisdom, is left entirely alone in the care of Dionysus sometimes. The sheer psychological balance of the Ancient Greeks was profound, even in a puritan like Socrates. The great bearded man would outdrink and outreason everyone at the table and still be able to return home to his poor family as the sun rose, just as his God Apollo gave his finest blessings.

Where does this leave a contemporary Socratic who is unsure about how best proceed? There are at least one too many *hard* decisions that need making at the moment. I’m far too inclined to the Dionysian option and it seems to be working well so far. But this is clearly not a reliable solution.

However, the dialogical methods that Socrates used that made him such a formidable rationalist relied upon his followers and friends sacrificing themselves and their beliefs to be analytically dissected when needed. There is a distinct interpersonal commitment to rationality. I’ve lost this active element of this discursive model. I’ve lost the desire to question and upset those beliefs which have the possibility of teaching me something. For one, methods of communication across space/time have vastly improved from oral -> text -> mass-produced text -> internet. However, I’ve also tried to move away from this Apolline trait – Apollo was not only the god of rationality but a ‘social retard’ by today’s standards, twice as likely to overturn these ‘conventional rules’ and appeal to the ‘laws’ of the cosmos at the expense of a marginalised and less educated segment of the populace (Apollo was known as a bit of a womanizer). So now, my inputs and outputs are passive, contrived pieces (like this one) that stand on their own as objects to battle other objects to shower whoever participates with new thoughts and insights. Temporalised text battling other text: much less authentic than human input and output.

Maybe it’s smarter but slower. I’m usually a slower thinker than most people I meet, but this is getting intense. And even if this is true that smart thinking takes longer, it feels fucking empty in the mean time. Pity I can’t be hoping for a miracle, because I could use a blowjob from a godly man right now.

“I’m haunted by ghosts… but I’m inclined to think that we’re all ghosts… it’s not only the things that we’ve inherited from our fathers and mothers that live on in us, but all sorts of old dead ideas and old dead beliefs, and things of that sort. They’re not actually alive in us, but they’re rooted there all the same, and we can’t rid ourselves of them…. …I’ve only to pick up a newspaper, and when I read it I seem to see ghosts gliding between the lines. I should think there must be ghosts all over the country - as countless as grains of sand. And we are, all of us, so pitifully afraid of the light.” - Ibsen, ‘Ghosts’ (1881)

Thomas Kuhn writes that people didn’t bother taking Aristarchus’ heliocentricism too seriously because Ptomelaic explanations were doing pretty well for themselves and corresponding with precise observations detailing the movement of the stars. This example is supposed to underline the conservative nature of the sciences, not willing to change lanes when it is on a lucky streak. While our enquiries are not troubling us and we’re making progress in the problems that we are working, there’s no need to question these paradigmatic rules. But the anomalies pile up, theories are clung to, sometimes for their theological significance. However, after a paradigm change, after we have accustomed ourselves to the gravity that the mass of each object exerts, what use are such problems?

I wonder if people stopped believing in demons and ghosts around the same time as demons and ghosts became irrelevant as an explanation? There’s no doubt that the idea of ghosts and demons were once a problem to be explained away (often literally) in a variety of different ways. These are no longer real problems in the sense that probability distributions in quantum fluctuation or dark matter are problems. What other polysemous connotations were lost in paradigm translation though? This is a real question without the added assumption of incommensurability, mind you. How do we get by without ghosts moving our shit, without demons possessing us and making us do crazy things? But more seriously, what are these forces pushing me towards things, well beyond my own will? These things are in no way physically or metaphysically real as entities, pretty safe in saying things like that. This is some real progress towards this type of knowledge. But what of those other connected ideas thrown away? Our heads have been ignored by investigation or cast aside far too quickly with a presumption of simplicity for far too long. Just as the psychological explanatory power of ancient Greek mythology was re-explored by Jung, I’m feeling the need to retrace some medieval genealogy here. I don’t think a brief reading of Dante helped, but the puritan inside of my head is yelling out for some type of sacrifice.

I’ve had ghosts talking behind my shoulder for a while now. They say the damndest things. One ghost taught me how to create my demons on my own, taught me how the implications of the stupidly misquoted “Hell is other people” can get tangled up within one entity. Anyway, I’ve been romancing this one demon for a few years now and it’s been good, but I’m starting to wonder if it is getting in the way of my human relationships. It’s reminding me how little I have destroyed lately. It’s appropriating that feeling of death that’s followed me since I was a child who had yet to experience death. I have these crazy desires and moods that a psychoanalyst would surely be able to categorise but which don’t seem to fit that coherently together. Contrary to my sexy demon, this egoist likes his arms and neck way too much; I may just have to devour some souls, some dreams or friends. That nonexistence simply stopped being so scary and that there are still those ghosts who are scared of it just seems silly. How much light us fatty white kids can dance in, despite getting a tan from the moon! I like these ghosts for their quirkiness, but they don’t know how to party at all.

Anyway, it won’t be long before these booming cognitive sciences begin their archaeological excavations into etymology of these mythic, prescience mumbojumbo ideas to resurrect what might have once given some sense to our internal lives as human beings. Cos despite these interesting ideas, not much has changed re how we (humans) are made in the last couple of thousand years and we’ve only just begun to reflectively piece it (history) all together - all of this cultural imagery won’t be going anywhere either, might as well appropriate it.

By the time we’ve developed the ability to read, speak and differentiate between ourselves and others, culture has taken hold. That squishy grey mass in our brains drastically reshapes and remoulds its neural pathways quite drastically during our first decade. As machines who have evolved to learn, the environment that we find ourselves in shapes not only the information that we have access to, but the possible means by which we can encounter it. Knowing what we know now about cognitive development, it’s almost unbelievable that Freud could have had such insight with such little evidence (comparatively, of course): Freud’s Oedipus Complex is to cognitive studies what Copernicus’ heliocentrism was to Newton. We know now that the scope and possibilities available to us for the rest lives can be already predetermined to a large extent at a very early age.

The first episode of South Park’s 13th season not only acknowledges the implicit marketing strategies of so-called ‘tween’ culture, but subtly underlines the parasitic tendency of Christian culture to tap in to and appropriate our most general biologically motivated inclinations.

Sex sells. This is a well-worn advertiser’s slogan, the justification of many advertising campaigns across the ages. Only in recent decades, however, has it been increasingly popular to market sex to a presexual audience who are yet to understand such experiences. Sex does sell. But sex sells better when the target audience is already acquainted with the fundamentals of sexual desire by the time when their bodies are equipped to be influenced by such campaigns.

This understanding is taken (amongst many, many others.. *cough* Funtastic *cough) up by those who produce magazines like Australia’s Total Girl (and the American equivalent, Cosmo Girl) – and of course, as emphasised by the recent South Park, the wide-world of child entertainment embodied by Disney, including such teen icons as The Jonas Brothers, Miley Cyrus and the High School Musical franchise. According to the allusions of the South Park episode, the supposedly explicit message of sexual conservatism (falling alongside the joys of consumerism) is masking the implicit sexual undertones that permeate the plethora of dolls, songs and advertising campaigns marketed at these pre-pubescents. Selling the notion of sexual conservatism so thoroughly is getting these developing teens to think about and desire sexualisation, while avoiding the undertones of molestation that would otherwise be associated with an explicit marketing tactic (think, for example, of the outrage often caused by parents who deliberately dress their 10 year olds to look ‘sexy’).

Considering the ignorance at which many fundamentalist groups approach sexual education, the damage that such ignorance can cause to individuals and families is no surprise. One only has to think of abusive ministers and priests, or barbaric genital mutilations that can occur. But even the less extreme cases like Ted Haggard’s repressed homosexuality lead one to conclude that these sexual policies might be bit irresponsible.

But this implicit sexual advertising has been promoting the Christian faith from the very outset. In his thoroughly derisive book The Antichrist, Nietzsche pointed out that the very Christian tendency to deride bodily desires and functions as dangerous has been (rather counter-intuitively) one of the reasons that the religion has spread so prominently. The in-your-face anti-sexuality campaigns involved in conservative religious preaching produces even greater sexual desires. Denying our basic functions instead of harnessing them, Christianity has produced beings who build up such a resistance against their bodies that these thoughts are always eating away at their minds – more so than a healthy teenager who isn’t scared to jack it a few times a week – thus reinforcing the belief that such thoughts are dangerous and reinforcing allegiance to the religion.

At one point, the ‘Christian Union’ at my university put up posters with ‘SEX’ written in large bold letters, across half the page. Apparently, they were advertising a campaign to get people to think responsibly about sex. It wasn’t the first thought that came to the minds of people walking past. Not all publicity is good publicity. The so-called ‘new atheist’ movement (Dawkins et al) has also been criticised of throwing believers into a position of either/or: deny any shred of religious experience until it becomes verifiably credible, or recognize the supposed arational nature of their beliefs and move closer to the fundamentalist way of thinking about these things.

Not everyone can be sceptics. Foster doubt where you can. There is no point having expectations that will never be achieved – or worse, lead some to the opposite of what you aim.