Freedom of the Mind
I’ve been thinking about preferences, and what matters to us, and what we put first – how we rank what matters to us; and about freedom. I’ve been thinking about the fact that freedom of certain kinds seems to matter to me very profoundly indeed, and about why that is, and what flows from it.
I won’t bore you with the why that is part (and I have only guesses anyway), but I will talk about one thing that I think flows from it. It offers one reason I dislike religion so much. Why I’m not just indifferent or uninterested but actively hostile, especially when religion comes out of its churches and mosques and isolated farmhouses to engage in public discussion. It’s because religion is not a free way to think, and since that’s one of those kinds of freedom that matter to me (and, I think it’s fair to assume, to a lot of people) more than most things, religion makes me bristle mentally like a cat seeing a dog. I dislike religion because it’s not a free way to think.
Granted, for determined people it can be made to be that way, but typically and averagely, it isn’t. Religion has a body of doctrine, a dogma, which is given, and which is not empirical or rationally arrived at – it is a mental prison house. I mean that somewhat literally as well as figuratively – in the sense that it feels prison-like. It feels imprisoning and also desperately stale; and the two feelings are related. Ideas that seem fresh (alive, adaptable, open) don’t feel prison-like; ideas that feel confining and rigid don’t feel fresh or open.
And dogmatically religious people give that impression themselves – that they are inmates, and that their thoughts are unpleasantly stereotyped and unfree. ‘God says.’ ‘What Allah wants.’ ‘Peace be upon him.’ ‘It is a sin’ – it’s all so many walls, bars of a cage, locks; barriers to thought. Unthought, the opposite of thought, the prevention of thought – like that brilliant phrase at the end of ‘The Dunciad’: ‘light dies at thy uncreating word.’
This is also, obviously enough, why I hate all those conscriptive words like community and respect: because they are intended to balk and prevent free thinking. They are intended to compel us to want various groupthink virtues more than we want the ability to let our minds dart around unimpeded, and I think we ought not to want that and ought not to be manipulated into wanting that.
Difficult just right now, cos’ I have been out tonight and may be a bit drunken, but here goes: I took the bus tonight – in the future you may want to avoid the 345 from Peckham to Clapham – and this woman was there. Kind of lay preacher, but not a very competent one. “You need to be born again” she kept saying over and over. And she was obviously enjoying having a captive audience.(We all had to wait 30 minutes for our bus, so we weren’t likely to leave and get the next one) And: “it may seem cool not to believe in the Bible… but the Bible said, if you don’t believe in me, you will surely die” with extra emphasis on the “surely”. All this for more than half an hour at the top of her voice. Bit of an ordeal really.
But what really got me was the “we are all sinners because of Adam and Eve”. You know, all this original sin crap. And I was: What? I am no saint but “surely” my sins, whatever they are, are mine. My decisions are mine. Whatever I do, I’ll try and stand by it. If I do wrong, it will be me doing wrong.
So no, it’s not a cage. It is that terrible open space of freedom from morality that is given to you when you know you are a sinner but your god will forgive you nevertheless if you believe in him. (Sorry, a terribly clumsy sentence but, as I said before, I may be a bit drunk) An atheist who tries to behave in an ethical way is a lot more “caged” than that!
As for the rest, I am afraid most people find dogma rather comforting. Save them from thinking by themselves and allow them to justify anything they do really: the funny thing about dogma is that it’s SO malleable.
I can’t find it now, but recently I read something along the lines of they’re bad because they kill, and we have to kill them because we’re good.
The 345 from Peckham to Clapham – oh dear – well perhaps it’s only bad on Friday nights?
“It is that terrible open space of freedom from morality that is given to you when you know you are a sinner but your god will forgive you nevertheless if you believe in him.”
Interesting. True, I suppose – but perhaps only really applicable to justificaction-by-faithists? And even they don’t seem to hesitate to predict punishment from the deity – Pat Robertson for example.
Anyway though I was thinking more of mental cages more than cages on action. Of dogmatic answers that close off thought rather than opening it up.
Still, you have a point, despite ivresse!
Whatever happened to antinomianism, being saved and therefore *really* not having to give a damn? A proper theological argument for taking conventional hypocritical religious moralising and shoving it up its own backside… Can’t imagine why it went out of fashion, except perhaps that people lost the need for a religious justification for absenting themselves from morality, leaving religion to those who felt the need of it to assert ‘moral values’…
Not, to be clear, that I associate religion with morality, or atheism with immorality, of course. Amoralism would have a strong claim for being the philosophy of the century so far, however…
OB – and because “The unexamined life is not worth living.” – Socrates