Belief, 9-15-2010 (Part One)

 I urge anyone interested in religious matters to read William James's Will to Believe. Yes, is philosophical. Do not let that scare you, read and learn - those abilities remain to all. You can find Internet sites on and about Williams James - just google them - that will help to understand him. James wrote for a popular audience more than he wrote for other academics. Here is the Stanford Library of Philosophy for James.

I found the following passage in St. Augustine's Confessions (Book VI, iv, (6)):

...and with delight I heard Ambrose, in his sermons to the people, oftentimes most diligently recommend this text as a rule —The letter kills, but the Spirit gives life; while, drawing aside the mystic veil, he spiritually laid open that which, accepted according to the letter, seemed to teach perverse doctrines — teaching herein nothing that offended me, though he taught such things as I knew not as yet whether they were true. For all this time I restrained my heart from assenting to anything, fearing to fall headlong; but by hanging in suspense I was the worse killed. For my desire was to be as well assured of those things that I saw not, as I was that seven and three are ten....

Nietzsche always had trouble with faith. It is not quite rational for him. No, faith is not always rational, but rationality recognizes faith. Therein lies the difference between the Lutheran and the Baptist. I suffered from a slightly different problem. I know too much history to not know the iniquities committed by the Christian Church. Reading only about The Thirty Years War is enough to have serious doubts about organized religion. Experiencing church politics in my early twenties did nothing to good for me, either. Christianity and Christ remained in my mind and my heart, but I also kept my reservations about the church. 

Sharper minds than mine will see the fallacy in my reasoning. The church is composed of humans, and everything human is fallible. I also did not like what I saw as superstition. Even as a child, I questioned how the Bible has been passed onto us. That put me in opposition to what I thought as a superstitious, literalist interpretation of Christianity. You can thank my read Francis Bacon's Novum Organum for my aversion to superstition. Nietzsche only reinforced my distaste for superstition. Like St. Augustine, I wanted more certainty in my church.

I will not spring any maudlin jailhouse conversion upon you. I reject that as a shallow desperation. I am here for my immorality, although that covers more than the crimes charged against me, but includes my self-destructiveness. Seeing no hope of doing good in this life, that ugliness and wrong-doing spread like kudzu - cut it down, and it kept coming until it buried all in its path.

Reading St. Augustine, I recognize these emotions:

...How wretched was I at that time, and how You dealt with me, to make me sensible of my wretchedness on that day wherein I was preparing to recite a panegyric on the Emperor, wherein I was to deliver many a lie, and lying was to be applauded by those who knew I lied; and my heart panted with these cares, and boiled over with the feverishness of consuming thoughts. For, while walking along one of the streets of Milan, I observed a poor mendicant — then, I imagine, with a full belly — joking and joyous; and I sighed, and spoke to the friends around me of the many sorrows resulting from our madness, for that by all such exertions of ours — as those wherein I then laboured, dragging along, under the spur of desires, the burden of my own unhappiness, and by dragging increasing it, we yet aimed only to attain that very joyousness which that mendicant had reached before us, who, perchance, never would attain it! For what he had obtained through a few begged pence, the same was I scheming for by many a wretched and tortuous turning — the joy of a temporary felicity. For he verily possessed not true joy, but yet I, with these my ambitions, was seeking one much more untrue. And in truth he was joyous, I anxious; he free from care, I full of alarms....

(VI, vi, 9)

Surely every can see there the collision between conscience and ambition. The image I had of myself in 2009 was of trying to plug a leaking dike with my fingers and running out of fingers.

I gave up trying. I decided that if I could not do good then, then I needed to destroy myself. I did a pretty good job of destroying everything other than my physical self.

sch

[Continued in Belief, 9-15-2010 (Part Two). Some of Bacon on superstition:

LXV. The corruption of philosophy by the mixing of it up with superstition and theology, is of a much wider extent, and is most injurious to it both as a whole and in parts. For the human understanding is no less exposed to the impressions of fancy, than to those of vulgar notions. The disputatious and sophistic school entraps the understanding, while the fanciful, bombastic, and, as it were, poetical school, rather flatters it.

There is a clear example of this[38] among the Greeks, especially in Pythagoras, where, however, the superstition is coarse and overcharged, but it is more dangerous and refined in Plato and his school. This evil is found also in some branches of other systems of philosophy, where it introduces abstracted forms, final and first causes, omitting frequently the intermediate and the like. Against it we must use the greatest caution; for the apotheosis of error is the greatest evil of all, and when folly is worshipped, it is, as it were, a plague spot upon the understanding. Yet some of the moderns have indulged this folly with such consummate inconsiderateness, that they have endeavored to build a system of natural philosophy on the first chapter of Genesis, the book of Job, and other parts of Scripture; seeking thus the dead among the living.[28] And this folly is the more to be prevented and restrained, because not only fantastical philosophy, but heretical religion spring from the absurd mixture of matters divine and human. It is therefore most wise soberly to render unto faith the things that are faith’s.

sch 3/31/23.]