Maybe I’m not sure, but I doubt it
The only people I am bothered by more than people who ask too many questions are people who are too certain.
In my opinion one of the main hindrances to humanity’s health, now and throughout history, is that there is just too darn much certainty.
What do I mean by that? Well, the fact is that nothing is all that certain in this wacky world, and yet people believe with absolute certainty in things for which they have absolutely no proof. For example, some people believe things like, “I just know that if I ask that girl to go out with me she will say no”, or “I am certain that I will never be good at math”, or even, “That person will surely burn in hell because they are not a member of my religion”.
All of these so-called certainties are based solely in the mind of the believer and are projected to the outside world by them. These certainties are no more than mental constructs standing in the way of free thought.
There can be no reasoning with certainty. With certainty the universe becomes closed off and, there is no room for debate or growth, at which point you might as well end your life because there is nothing left to know. No surprises. Once you are certain of everything there is no more reason to think. Deciding that all of something is a certain way, and then deciding your decision applies to everyone else clearly causes ignorance and bigotry.
Both politics and religion throughout the ages have conditioned people to act with intolerance based on unfounded certainty. People who are certain use words like sinner, or heretic, or infidel to rationalize their own violence.
Bush was certain Saddam had WMD’s. Hitler was certain he was doing the right thing for Germany. Racists are certain they are better than other races. Suicide bombers are certain they will be rewarded in heaven. Torquemada was certain when he led the Spanish Inquisition.
One of my biggest problems with religion in general is the concept of dogma, which is just a big list of immutable rules beyond question. The major religions are just so damned certain their dogma is right and everyone else’s is wrong, and yet once again, this certainty is based on nothing, absolutely nothing other than what they think they believe.
Religious people throughout history have read a book (or worse had it interpreted for them), and then decided to base the entirety of their soul on it forever, and ever. Amen. To me, this is insanity.
I recently met a couple hardcore fundamentalist Evangelical Christians. They actually believe that The Bible is the true word of God. They just know that every word in The Bible is true, and yet they have no extraordinary evidence at all to back up this extraordinary claim other than the fact that their blind faith tells them they are certain.
Their fanatically literal Creationist interpretation of a book written by many men’s hands demands that they believe the universe began on page one of The Bible. They have so much faith in their imaginary certainty that they actually believe the Grand Canyon, the Earth, the Moon, Jupiter, the Sun, and the universe itself are all around 5000 years old, simply because that’s supposedly when the story of The Bible begins. In the face of overwhelming scientific evidence to the contrary, (not to mention common sense) they believe with utter certainty that The Bible is literally true, and the universe is 5000 years old.
They have had to essentially amputate their own critical faculties in order to cram the way the world really is into the imaginary way they are certain it should be. It is as if they’ve gone crazy rather than grow up. To me, the decision that every answer to every question resides in one book is the height of spiritual and intellectual laziness. It’s like saying Jesus is the answer to every question. 2+2= Jesus, Why is the sky blue? Jesus. Is there more to life? Jesus. What’s for lunch? Jesus. These are the sorts of mental and spiritual cop-outs that have kept Christians (and Muslims, and Jews, etc.) living in the dark ages for all these years. Its like a massive group hallucination passed down through the generations, and I believe it is this cognitive dissonance between fantasy and reality that is the cause of a great deal of physical and mental disease in the world.
I don’t mean to seem like I’m just picking on the Creationists I met. Other than their fearful and childish spiritual philosophy they are extremely nice people, and one must keep in mind that they are members of a parish which has been sermonized into sharing the same insane certainty. Furthermore, their parish is a part of a larger religion that is equally, if not more certain of its certainty that The Bible is the true word of God, and that accepting Jesus Christ as your lord and savior is the only way save your wretched soul.
And by the way, for the record, as far as I’m concerned it is more than OK to be certain that Jesus Christ is your lord and savior. What the heck do I care what stories get you through the day?
My problem is when people like that are certain that Jesus Christ is MY lord and savior. My problem is when pious people seek to dictate the parameters of MY worldview, and decide for themselves that they know what is best for MY soul, whether I like it or not.
My own choice of personal spirituality resonates most with the CHURCH OF THE SUBGENIUS. (It is the industrial-strength “religion” which helped to make me the man I am today. Praise “Bob”!)
The profound power and glory of J.R. “Bob” Dobbs’ CHURCH OF THE SUBGENIUS is beyond the scope of this article. I mention it here simply to introduce one of the church’s core “beliefs”. They have something called a Short Duration Personal Savior, or “ShorDurPerSav”.
A ShorDurPerSav is a disposable messiah. It allows you the flexibility to believe in whatever you need to at the time in order for you to go about your day in the best and easiest way possible. Then you can move on with your life and find another source of strength and meaning. It can be anything at all. It doesn’t even have to really exist.
Sometimes “Bob” is my ShorDurPerSav. Sometimes it’s my cat. Sometimes it’s the ocean. Sometimes it’s a book. Sometimes it’s a slice of pizza. Sometimes it’s the constellation Orion. Sometimes it’s a friend or a hero I want to emulate. Sometimes it’s my skateboard. And sometimes it’s me.
It’s whatever I need whenever I need it most, and the best part is that I’m not stuck with it when it no longer serves me, (however the same one can be used multiple times). Short Duration Personal Saviors allow one the mental and spiritual flexibility to adapt to any situation, and I feel it is this flexibility that is key to life.
But don’t take my word for it. Lao Tsu teaches in Chapter 76 of the Tao Te Ching that:
“Human beings are soft and supple when alive, stiff and straight when dead…Therefore it is said: a rigid person is a disciple of death; the soft, supple, and delicate are lovers of life…A tree that is inflexible will snap.
Or as Confucius said:
“The green reed which bends in the wind is stronger than the mighty oak that breaks in the storm.”
So don’t be afraid to let your mind bend a little.
Speaking of mind bending, the counter-intuitive world of Quantum Mechanics has recently shown us that there is no such thing as certainty anyway. In Quantum Mechanics everything is based on probability.
Werner Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle basically says that it is impossible to simultaneously determine the position and velocity of a sub-atomic particle. This is not a limitation of our instruments or our ability to observe objects. It is how the universe appears to function on a fundamental level.
There is always a trade off in accuracy between present and future knowledge. The more you know about a particle’s position the less you know about its velocity, and vice versa.
It’s like pinning a butterfly down in a glass case. If you do, you can inspect the butterfly’s parts but in doing so you have killed it, and lost perspective of what it really means to butterfly.
Quantum mechanics also teaches us that we can never fully know exactly where an atom is. We can only know the relative probability distribution of its possible locations. We are then able to extrapolate predictions out of this cloud of uncertainty. Thus, precision does not get rid of the gray areas, it just pins the grayness down.
Which brings us to black and white. People who are extremely certain, tend to perceive the world in “black and white”, but the fact is that the world consists of grayness. Black and white are just special cases of gray, in the same way that zero and infinity are special cases of numbers.
These polar opposites are just that, they are polar, and they are therefore united by their need for each other. In their explicit differences there is an implicit unity. This is why there is a white dot in the center of the black portion, and a black dot in the center of the white portion of the Yin/Yang symbol.
In the same way that throughout history the idealist revolutionaries have gone on to become the corrupt establishment, the attainment of any extreme position is the point where it begins to turn into its own opposite. Carl Jung called this state “enantiodromia”.
So in a way, the more certain you are, the less you know.
The beauty of science is that it doesn’t claim to be certain. Science tells us that things are in flux, and that flux is in things.
While some scientists can be as dogmatic as popes, in their heart they know that things change. Science, (when it’s being honest), tells us that the laws of the universe as we know them are really just tendencies we have observed recently in our particular part of the galaxy. The best we can say about the laws of science is that they happen to work right now. That’s why they tend to call them theories.
But, there is no theory of Jesus’ divinity that can be tested. There is only certainty based on utter lack of evidence. There is no theory that Mohammed was a prophet of Allah. There is only the certainty that people will kill and die for. There is no theory that Yahweh is the one true God. There is only certainty based on feelings and blind faith.
How can anyone be so certain about something they have no proof of whatsoever?
All dogmatic religions are certain they are right, but their certainties are mutually exclusive, which means by definition that if any one of them is right, then the rest of them have to be wrong. So exactly how true can this certainty be if it is both right and wrong at the same time?
It’s unbelievable how some people can choose to have absolute blind faith in miraculous stories that someone else wrote thousands of years ago. Just because you choose to believe in something does not make it true.
If I told you I was absolutely certain that Michael Jackson is alive because a friend of mine’s cousin knows a girl who says she has a boyfriend whose father saw him walking down the street last week, you would doubt the heck out of me, and then you would use your common sense to decide that I was probably either gullible, or crazy, or both.
So why are people so keen to believe 2000 year old hearsay? Why are people so desperate to be certain? Perhaps its because their certainty is an attempt to control the universe, or perhaps it is just easier to believe someone else’s fairy tale than to contemplate and take responsibility for one’s own existence.
I’m not saying people shouldn’t know things. I don’t mean you should believe in nothing, have no core beliefs or values, and dwell in chaotic, doubt-filled insecurity. In fact, believe it or not, I want you to be certain.
Be certain you love yourself. Be certain you appreciate your life. Be certain you live in the present moment. Be certain you are confident. Be certain you don’t know everything. Be certain your logic is sound. Be certain your thoughts are your own. Be certain you will die. Be certain you are alive.
I know who I am, and I know what I believe, and that’s about all I can say other than I hope you do to.
I choose to be mostly certain about everything, (for the most part). I leave my mind some wiggle room. I crack a window and leave the doors unlocked. I allow my brain the ability to change.
Unfortunately, billions of souls throughout history have chosen the rigid path of certainty based on dogma and blind faith. To me this is like being locked in a windowless room with pictures on the wall. Once the vault is sealed, all they have left are the stories that they tell themselves. Their mind becomes a reversed black hole. Rather than a traditional black hole from which light or information cannot escape, their mind becomes an inverted black hole into which no light or new information can enter. They no longer have any idea what is happening in the world outside. Their mind is cut off from the universe and is ultimately buried alive, starving to death in a self-enforced solitary confinement of the soul.
But, as I have said before, “the good news is that doors of hell are locked on the inside”. So open your mind, and let go of what you think you know.
As the great Alan Watts once said: “We can never, never describe all features of the total situation, not only because every situation is infinitely complex, but also because the total situation is the universe!”
I don’t have all the answers. I just don’t ask that many questions.
The only thing I’m certain about is that maybe I’m not sure, but I doubt it.
