Primal Pt. 2

Here's something to think about.  IQ roughly resembles a bell curve, with 100 as the peak (the average).  The statistical deviation from mentally handicapped to average is the same as average to moderately high (not even genius).  While IQ alone isn't a great indicator of functional intelligence, the general principal remains consistent.

We generally consider ourselves as being more intelligent than the animals around us.  But what makes us intelligent?  How do you define what makes us smarter than the animals around us?  That we can use tools?  Numerous animals, including chimps, use tools.  That we can communicate?  Most animals communicate to some degree, and without understanding the "language" they use, it is arrogant to suppose they do not communicate concepts or ideas as we do (indeed, the chimps again, seem to do so). 

Something that consistently categorizes a degree of intelligence is train-ability.  An animal that is too low in intelligence can't be trained, and those high in intelligence may learn obey when it is convenient, but will betray this training when it no longer suits their interests.  Only in the middle is an animal truly trainable

Humans, despite our so-called intelligence, fit the very same mold.  A vast majority of people believe with absolute certainty everything they were taught to be true.  If a parent told them it was true, or a trusted teacher, or preacher, then it must be true (without doubt).  Santa Clause is a good example of this.  As the human grows older (and more intelligent), it will gradually question these truths.  A truly intelligent person will dismiss their earlier training in favor of their new experiences.  

As small children, we are learning about the world.  We examine with our senses, test by interaction, and use the experience to create a framework by which we understand everything that happens to us.  This framework affects our very thoughts, telling us how to interpret our very feelings and impulses, and how to control them.  This framework is not something simple to shake, even a little.  Anything that casts doubt on it can be perceived as a threat, causing a defensive reaction.

The more intelligent the individual, the more likely they are to doubt their framework, the more likely they are to constantly question their beliefs, the less likely the reaction will be defensive.  Intelligent individuals deal in reason and argument, not in personal attacks or emotional provocations.  This, however, is far from the norm for humans in general.  Most people are so dependent on this framework that even the slightest contradiction to is (say, evolution) is a serious threat to their psyche, and they react hastily to it.  The non-believer isn't a direct threat to them, but the idea that someone doesn't believe the same way causes them to doubt, at some level, their convictions, and the terror of losing those convictions, of having been wrong, of having their whole world torn down, provokes the kind of aggressive, defensive (and in mass, offensive) posturing that one would normally find from an animal trapped in a corner.

People fight and die to preserve this framework, to be "right."  They kill those who are different from them, because they are afraid, not of the people themselves, but what they represent: doubt.  Even more dangerous, however, are those behind them, egging them on.  Many of the instigators of violence don't believe what they preach.  In fact, for them the beliefs of the crowd are nothing more than a tool, a means of control and manipulation, of power.  To them the non-believer isn't a threat to their psyche, it's a real threat to their power, for with belief so goes their power.  Even the animal in the corner will desist after a while, when it realizes the threat is subsided and it can escape.  The constant anger and violence is not a crowd reaction, but spurred by men who use it to achieve their own ends.

The concept relayed in Christianity of the sheep and the shepherd is prevalent in this relationship.  Someone must watch over the sheep and protect them.  The extension of this concept has lead to the label "sheeple," referring to people who blindly follow the lead of another.  The problem is, the shepherd isn't in this to keep the sheep safe.  Yes, ultimately his ends are met better if the sheep are safe from predators, but when he sells the sheep for slaughter, it is not their interests he has in mind.  The very same people that are versed in this sheep analogy also recall that in Judaism, the lamb is a SACRIFICIAL animal.  All good families sacrificed lamb to God at Passover.  Good job sheeple, I guess ultimately you get what you deserve.

I can't abide humans behaving as sheep.  We have the capacity to question, to reason, to explore and experience, and to see the world through our own eyes.  Why let ourselves be deceived and manipulated for someone else's benefit?  It is easier to accept someone else's explanation rather than find your own, but in the end it is your life you life, not theirs, and your life you surrender if you follow blindly into the abyss.  

Religion Part 1

Being Easter and all, and viewing the endless number of posts from church services, candy, and Jesus, I figured this would be a good day to discuss religion.  Like all of my posts, this will be a fairly long one, and must start at the beginning...  of something.  Should we start at the beginning of religion?  Or the beginning of me?  Both?

OK, so if you know about the beginning of religion already, skip this.  In fact, unless you like reading snippets from my auto-biography, or need some clarification on why I got where I am today, you can stop here and pick up with Part 2.  Otherwise, here's the hurried version of things:  Man faces the world and tries to figure it out, but can't.  Other men don't care, but are sick of running around hunting, so they come up with an idea: blame it all on a supernatural force. Since people are stupid, make said supernatural force look human (and/or animal).  Then they claim to speak to supernatural force, giving them power over the people.  Thus, all-in-one, government and religion are born.  As tribes fight and merge, more and more gods and beings are conflated, spread, and converted.  As humans spread out, they take these gods with them.  That's the gist of things.

Now, for me, I was raised Christian (in the Baptist-Presbyterian tradition).  The bed time stories my mother read me were Christian themed.  I went to pre-school, kindergarten, and vacation bible school a few years at a nearby baptist church.  I also went to Sunday School there for several years before transferring to my family's Presbyterian church. I learned all of the stories, was bombarded with the conflicting messages, and learned.

I have an early memory from about three at Christmas, when I got some toy riding train and some other presents,  My father told me Santa had brought them, and I refuted that Santa doesn't exist.  He couldn't be responsible: the world's too big and nothing moves that fast.  From an early age I had come to see the world objectively, and knew when to call bullshit.

That's about my thought process some years later sitting in Sunday School being read the story of Noah.  We (those raised Christian, Jewish, or Muslim) grow up hearing that ALL animals on earth that we see were horded aboard a giant boat (at least two of each).  Even at an early age I know better than to believe this.  There are billions of species of animals across multiple continents.  If that story was bullshit, then what of the others?  And the girl, probably sixteen, reading us this story.  She seemed to believe it.  And as I watched her, I came to understand how empty her mind was.  I felt sorry for her.  That was the beginning of the end for me.

By the next summer, I refused to go.  I had had it with the brainwashing and lies.  I was sick of being surrounded by those who were too stupid to see this as non-sense.  I had better things to do with my weekends.  As my father never went to church, I would simply stay home with him.  For the next ten years or so, when asked, I would call myself an atheist.

In elementary school I was mostly a loaner.  I spent recess talking to one or two friends I had, and we'd walk and talk about sci-fi movies, or building things.  By forth grade, though, I was starting to get a following.  They weren't really my friends, but rather people interested in the more philosophical, political, or scientific topics we had migrated to.  One day, in the middle of a discussion, another loaner approached the group.  I didn't know him well, but knew of him.  I was not, however, about to reject him from our group of social outcasts.  He asked a simple question of me: "Do you know what the meaning of life is?"  I pondered this for about three seconds and answered straightly, "To grow and reproduce."  I could still stand behind that answer, as it is bulletproof.  If life doesn't grow and reproduce, then there won't be life long.  The boy, however, had another answer: "To serve God."  I spent the rest of recess debating that point, hoping I could get through to him.  It didn't work.  He stayed with us, though, our little group of outcasts.

It turned out that my mother knew him.  His parents had a local business growing and selling plants, and his mother was active in the church I had been in for many years.  I would have known him back then, but I don't remember most of the kids, just some of the teachers, and swinging alone at recess.  I decided to invite the boy to my birthday party in hopes to broaden his mind. My parents rented a projector and screen so we could watch movies, and I rented a few.  After the first movie (a Star Trek, but I don't remember which), and after my mother retired to her room, I put Species on.  He stayed in until the first nudity.  Shocked, he retreated to the kitchen.  I followed, asking what was wrong.  He responded obstinately that he couldn't watch that.  I told him his parents won't know, but he refused.  I pitied him, but with such conditioning, I couldn't fix him (or rather, help him fix himself as I managed to do).  That night was the last time I interacted with him.

A year later and it was a new school, new friends, and a new perspective.  I found another sheltered boy to work on, and a intellectual, though unstable, colleague.  The further I went down the road of pure skepticism, the better my grades, and the clearer my thought.  Three things happened, however, to derail my perspective.

First of all, I've always had heightened senses.  I'm more sensitive to light, sound, and even touch than any boys I know.  That was a large part of my social withdrawal, feeling the pain physically and emotionally far more intensely than my friends.  Whether there's a psychic element to it, or simply good observation, I've always been able to tell if someone was lying, or at least believed what they said.  I never believed in magic, or supernatural, but I did believe in deception.  I understood that that was all "magic" was.  One day my father, frustrated by my lack of belief, took me into the next room and made a pencil spin, seemingly with his mind.  Seeing no other way he could have done it, I started to explore psychic phenomena.  I learned a form of hypnotism, to read cards, to be deeply emphatic.  While there are hundreds of stories from this time of my life, they will have to wait.

Second, puberty is a bitch.  My already tentative hold on emotional stability became a desperate grasp, slipping with each traumatic event.  Nearing psychosis exploring telepathy, sensing a sinister presence, and desperately seeking escape, I started to retreat to the absolutism of my early years.  I started praying, and it seemed to help.

Then I fell in love.  She was perfect, in every way I could think of, but I was a fat little social outcast.  Why would she even consider going out with me?  I fell in love over the coarse of a year, and when she was in my classes again the following year, I swore I'd work up the courage to ask her.  That didn't happen.  So, between my seventh and eighth grade years, laying in bed one night, I prayed:  "God, if you give me another chance, if she's on my team next year, I'll take the worst teacher, the hardest classes you can give me."  She was on my team the next year (a group of students and teachers who work together on curriculum).  I also had the worst teacher in the school, who was an English teacher (and spelling Nazi) teaching Science.  I still can't spell.

That year was a pinnacle one for me in many ways.  I could FEEL God.  I could talk to him (two-way conversations).  I could feel the storm, and even direct lightning in my interest (like killing power to the school).  I still couldn't get the courage to ask the girl out, but I was a little distracted.  At the end of the year a few things happened that brought my life spiraling down.  I was investigated by the principle for trying to petition to get the teacher fired, I couldn't continue in Orchestra because I couldn't learn vibrato (do to some posturing and size issues), and most significantly, my baby bird I was weening died.  An emotional train wreck, I wanted to but it all behind me.  The telepathy, telekinetic, God, all of it.  I was done with the psychosis.

High school started with putting it all behind me.  Only a couple of people knew me, and not well. The girl had gone to a different school, and I to a magnet school far away from home.  I made new friends, fell in love again, slowly, and thought this new start was working out.  By my second year things were getting strange again.  It all started with an upper-class boy who felt...  different.  As I spoke to him, I learned of his history, not so different from my own, except where I simply walked away, his ended with a suicide attempt.  But we looked at each other and almost simultaneously said something strange is going on about five seconds before the school went into lock-down.  I never doubted my abilities, but like a wizard seeing the dark potential of his craft and fearful he may be drawn into them, I wanted out, and that meant ignoring them.

As my new love started playing games with me, and my feelings became stranger, I started leaning on my skills more and more.  I never reached the point I had a couple of years earlier, but I was more focused now, ready to fight.  I think that the very thing I turned to to help her made her fear me more, and turned her away.  It didn't help that I ignored the voice in my head that stated repeatedly, and in no uncertain terms, to stop perusing her.

Despite going to different schools, and not living particularly close to each other, the girl from middle school kept showing up at strangely coincidental times.  I was helping recruit from my middle school my freshman year, and she was skipping school to help move.  We happened to go to the same place to eat (and this "we" is actually a small group, but still).  She went into Theatre, as did I, and we shared a bus to the Theatre honor society's state gathering.  The last time I saw her, she saw me in a hallway at the district UIL One Act Play competition (the first and only time I went).

I left High School to go to UT, where, once again, I didn't know all that many people.  A few of us from my school went, but none that I was particularly close to.  And, once again, I settled against using my abilities.  This time it wasn't to forsake them so much as to balance my emotional state, which tended to become exaggerated severely.  Both of the girls had gone to different schools, and I had no expectations of seeing either of them again.  New school, new city, new life.  It did, however, all add up to one important thing...

Continues on Part 2.

Religion Part 2

It's still easiest for me to say I'm an atheist.  There's far less confusion, far less muddy water.  The conversation is always short, albeit pointless.  The truth is, however far more complicated.  I am, to summarize succinctly (yeah, as if I ever do that), an agnostic spiritualist.

Do I believe in God?  Kind of.  I think I believe in the same God Yehoshua believed in (that's Jesus to all of you Christians).  This isn't the God described in the old testament (who's origin is a conflation of polytheistic near-eastern gods and the god of Israel, YHW).  In dead the languistically accurate translation of Genesis is "El created the heavens..." and "The Gods created man..."  El, by the way, is a name for the local equivalent of Cronus, or Saturn.  If the plural form Elohim is to refer to the children of El (think Zeus), then there's parallels between Greek mythology and ancient Jews.  In fact, Sumerian and Jewish Genesis stories read extremely similarly.  Then came to mono-theist movement (Moses), and the one God to rule them all.  Think about it.  "Thou shalt not worship any gods before me."  That's not "There are no other gods to worship but me."  Even with the birth of mono-theistic Judaism, they still believed in other gods, but they were to worship only THEIR god.

Yehoshua spent much of his time re-defining scripture.  Scripture had been used, primarily, as a means of the church to control the population (as is the case of every religion).  Yehoshua stood up and simply said that the church was wrong.  While he pulled from the Torah often, most times he turned the traditional interpretation on its head.  Think about it.  The Torah says to stone the sinner.  Yehoshua said that those without sin should cast the stones.  He ultimately re-defined God as a loving, forgiving, tolerant God, rather than the petty, vengeful, blood-thirsty god of the Torah.

I'm shaped by my past, including my indoctrination in Christianity, my subsequent atheism, my voyage into psychic, and the coincidences.  I feel a powerful energy, but it isn't what created us, not physically.  I believe it to be a spiritual manifestation of us.  Whether it created our souls or results from them, it seems to be a part of them, linking all of us together.  The pain of one man is the pain of all men (and I use man and men in the non-sex specific way, as short for human).  I feel, with this energy, that a wound of one person becomes a wound for it, and this matches the non-violent, loving, and tolerant philosophy that Yehoshua preached.  If I'm right about that, which I don't claim to be, then being close to this energy would allow you to speak directly to someone's soul, which could help motivate physical changes.  Perhaps heal.  Perhaps resurrect.

What is a soul to me?  The soul is an energy form, an extension of us.  I believe that even animals have them, that anything with a sophisticated nervous system does.  At the least, the soul is a byproduct of our own nervous system.  When we die, that signature doesn't go away, but rather many things can happen to it.  If the soul is at peace, then it can be absorbed into the collective.  If it is not, it could remain in place, or could be destroyed.  Either way it could find a similar nervous system and re-embed.  I believe this link between souls to be the key to telepathy, and the physical ramifications to be the basis of telekinetics.

None of my beliefs, however, should matter to anyone else.  This is where I am, and I can no more say I'm right than anyone else.  The truth is, we don't know yet.  We may never really know.  Humans lack infinite capacity, despite our self-confidence.  I know that there is no one religion that is right, because I know that one cannot be right and all others wrong.

Religion has within it two opposing premises.  The first, it is rooted in the mechanics of control.  That is, religion is the means by which a few elite maintain power over the masses. Even after Yehoshua worked to undermine the idea of a central church, Rome made one in which he is their Messiah.  The existence of that church directly contradicts his teachings.

Yet religion is also rooted in us.  It is an attempt to understand our world and ourselves, and as such, there is wisdom in it.  The less power-centric the religion, the more wisdom it seems to possess.  To ignore such wisdom is foolish.

Religion must be viewed, overall, for what it is.  This has left me to answer the question of my religion very differently than I once did.  My answer now is, "The question is more important than the answer."  The fool may take this to mean the question "what religion are you" is important, as it is not.  What this means is that wondering, and attempting to determine if there is a God, is more important than finding the answer.  Why?  As soon as you know the answer, you stop looking for it.  Since none of use really CAN know the answer, than closest we can come is to keep searching, keep trying to understand, and keep seeking to learn.  Regardless of your religion, this process will bring you far closer to the answer than some man on a stage.  I'm not talking about a speaker at a "self help" seminar, either, though they are one and the same.