Scientific Mysticism

(Vocal rejected my story because it had religious content. But I posted it under Religion in the Futurism section. How can you reject a story about religion in a section about Religion. Did you even read the fucking thing? Or did you read the first paragraph and go, "this guys too churchy". I assure you I am not. Approve the fucking thing.)

I grew up Catholic. I went to Catholic School for 18 years. I got Confirmed. I didn’t want to but I couldn’t fully explain my reasons at 16. My family is Mexican and we went to church in a Cathedral from the 1800’s or possibly 1700’s for a time in my childhood. There are a lot of good things about growing up Catholic. The education is better. You learn , deeply, about the major Monotheistic religions of the world and have a sense of culture. You have a moral compass. Some atheists believe we are born with one…but I can tell you after ten years of teaching…some people need to be told what’s right and wrong. Not everyone is born with an internal compass.

The downside of growing up Catholic…you burn out. Excessive guilt over trivial matters gets old. And avoiding certain activities like premarital sex and alcohol on certain moral grounds means you are not enjoying your life. And it stunts your development growing up. By 18 everyone is an adult and you’re still a child who found out Santa was a lie too late. You’re a virgin and filled with bitterness at being lied to your whole life for making sacrifices that were meaningless. You listened to metal at 16 when others were over it by 12…because you were afraid of the devil until you were 15.

There’s a quote in the liner notes to Tool’s Aenema…I will paraphrase. Ideas are better than beliefs. Beliefs cause the mind to stop thinking, because you rigidly adhere to them in all circumstances instead of thinking of other solutions when the situation calls for it. I’m not sure if its attributed to Drumvalo Melchezidek, who championed sacred geometry. But you may have heard it in Dogma, when Chris Rock as the 13th apostle says something similar.

I read a book in high school called Conversations With God…which was like a primer to the New Age world of moral relativism, the law of attraction, the collective unconscious and other general tenets of Western appropriation of Eastern Spiritualism. At the time it seemed to have all the answers. Though there are some pitfalls to these kinds of beliefs…many of them due to misunderstanding of the book. Like you can’t manifest everything without direct action. Gratefulness is central to happiness…and moral relativism cannot justify or explain extreme acts of immorality. Evil does exist, though I believe it to be rare.

After many years in the philosophical stage many have in their 20’s…after learning many philosophies…(art school is like going to school for philosophy except you make stuff)…and deciding Catholicism was not for me anymore…after graduating…experimenting with psychedelics…and having a mental break down in 2005. I started looking towards science for answers. I always liked science and I knew the best Science Fiction is based on real science. I wanted to write Science Fiction…something like Lord of the Rings but from the perspective of secularism. Then the Golden Compass came out and I had to think of something else. And usually your supposed to write something and then find out what it means. Its supposed to be a surprise…I was so hung up on what I wanted it to mean, that it took me forever to write it…and it still had other meanings. Which is good, you want your stories to be multilayered.

I would later find out that a strong adherence to Science and only Science and its supremacy is the philosophy of Scientism. And I intrinsically knew that there are limits to that. The closest thing to Science being like a religion I suppose would be Carl Sagan’s worldview. It’s like a skeptical romanticized Scientism. But real scientists know that all ideas, even old one’s, can turn out to be wrong…so to classify science as a religion is not adequate. Because it is self-correcting. Though older scientists, because they are human, will often disagree with new ideas. Until they die. It happens.

Something I had learned from SciFi and Star Trek and Star Wars and Conversations with God… is this idea that god is not an old man in the sky. If god exists it probably doesn’t have a gender or a body as we define it. It quite possibly is the universe…everything that exists and doesn’t exist. And since we don’t know what dark matter or dark energy is…maybe that is god. But Neil DeGrasse Tyson would say that that is the God of the Gaps. Anything we can’t explain is God…but then when we explain it, it isn’t. I think, “Why should it stop being God if it’s explained?” I summarized it as: The Big Bang was God creating an extension of himself from which he could subdivide her consciousness into many trillions of little consciosnesses and have experiences…experiences are how you get to know yourself in real life…and that’s what God, the only being in the pre-universe wanted. All the horrors and fears and evils are all very convincing illusions but they are not the true nature of the universe. The true nature is love. Though looking around today, calling death and disease and evil leaders an illusion, is a sick joke.

That was all Neale Donald Walsch stuff (the author of CwG)…though I added the science stuff in there. At my last job as a teacher, I fashioned myself as an atheist. I was teaching science so I thought it would be the best position to take. Complete skepticism like Carl Sagan. Some of the more traditional Christian teachers or students did not like this…and when I taught Evolution I often felt like I was being punished for actually doing my job. Which is more than a little demoralizing. I noticed a lot of the teachers like to stick their morals into the lessons. When I did a lesson about genetic engineering one of the inclusion teachers wanted to go off on how it’s all “playing god”. “Yeah but sometimes playing god saves lives,” was my retort. This sort of atavistic oversimplification of things made me want to quit almost daily for the last few years. And I am currently in a state, where if I ever taught again…I would preach to the choir. You’re never going to win trying to argue with these people…plus everyone has their own spiritual path and though I tried to respect theirs, they seldom respected mine. I am more than a little bitter about it.

However, I am FOR sending my future kids, if I have any, to a Catholic School if the quality of the education is good. For the culture and the work ethic, and moral compass. At least until middle school. By then I will know what their strengths and weaknesses are and I can gauge whether to send them to public school for high school, or to a Technical school which will instill even stronger critical thinking skills based on science.

Unfortunately, where I live I hear horror stories of people who believe NASA is the devil. People who recoil in horror if you say you’re an atheist. Kids who think the earth is flat and the moon landing was faked. And I’m sick of all of it. I want to be around smart people again. Around my own kind. Soon enough hopefully.