World Religion - Belief Systems

This is a section of my final project for a World Religions class I had last semester. The prompt for this section was to describe your own belief system. I ended up cover the same subject of the podcast so I figured we could publish this along with the episode in case anyone wanted to read more. Enjoy.

Describe Your Own Belief System

Prior to this course I hadn't found it necessary to structure my beliefs into a formal system. It's not because I hadn't given it thought. If anything I've given it too much thought. Attempting to understand my existence in a physical universe has been one of my life goals. Over the years, studying various religions, praying, meditating, speaking and listening to others, I have come to formulate my own beliefs concerning many of the questions traditional religions attempt to answer. If there is a primary reason I have yet to assemble my beliefs into a system it is because they are still a work in progress. The reason I feel somewhat comfortable now is because I have come to realize that there will probably never be a moment when I can declare that I have it all figured out—which I suspect might just be an important aspect of our being

Before going further I'd like to give a few caveats. 1. Words, with their dual nature, tend to fail when attempting to describe the grandest of ideas and concepts. 2. There are still many issues concerning ultimate reality that I do not currently understand. This is not because I haven't put in the work—on the contrary, it is because part of my personal belief system is that there are facets of Ultimate reality that are beyond the cognitive abilities of human comprehension. And 3: An insufficient word count for this project. To accurately describe my entire belief system would take hundreds of pages, not hundreds of words.

That being said, I should start closer to the beginning of my search to give context to the origins of my beliefs.

My search started early. The first explanations I received concerning the meaning of the Universe were of Christian origin. I bought in. I prayed to, and I worried, and I loved, and I feared God, in the same way one might relate to your average stepdad. Around the age of 12 some of the logical inconsistencies within Christianity (mainly the Old Testament) pushed me away from organized religion.

Over the next few years I got farther away from any Deity oriented explanation for the existence of the Universe. To be honest, at that point I felt betrayed by the Christian church—misled even. Fear and guilt didn't strike me as the qualities any decent God would impose in a not-so-bad kid like me.

In my teens I began to adopt a more scientific explanation for existence. Provable, repeatable, measurable data offered something tangible, something I didn't have to take someone else's word for. I liked that. This eventually evolved into a somewhat atheistic worldview. I read famous atheist authors such as Dawkins, Hitchens, and Sam Harris. A lot of what they said made sense to my young contrarian mind, and it fed my emotional rebellion. However, by my mid twenties it became clear that materialist atheists have set their ceiling too low by dismissing the possibility of ANYTHING outside of currently measurable phenomenon. I was forced to admit that my desire to know EVERY knowable thing wouldn't be satiated by a strictly atheistic worldview.

I then began researching Eastern religions. I went through various forms of Buddhism(Lotus Sutra, Dropping Ashes on the Buddha...etc) and ended with some Hinduism(Bhagavad Gita and Yoga Sutras of Pantangali). I was amazed to learned of the Eastern tradition of wisdom seekers going back thousands of years. I was attracted by the personal responsibility they placed on seeking out the answers to life's ultimate questions. These spiritual practitioners weren't as focused on selling anything as much as they were on simply reporting the techniques that worked for them, and what they'd discovered. Most refreshing was that they weren't claiming they were the only conduit to God or Ultimate reality. Instead, they suggested that anyone could make that connection and, in fact, everyone should experience it for themselves rather than take someone else's word for it. This really appealed to me. Many Western religions can have a very insecure way when it comes to their belief systems. It was refreshing to read Buddhist practitioners suggest that the path wasn't as important as the destination, even suggesting that if another religion made you a better person then you should stick with that religion. With this they gained a credibility with me. The one thing all of these seekers suggested was that the answers, and the connection to god, was within. One only needed to turn inward to find answers. This made sense to me. If there was a Supreme being, or even just a knowable purpose to the Universe where humans hold a unique place, why wouldn't the knowledge be accessible to everyone, not just a single person in the distant past.

So I went inward, with a genuine and disciplined meditative practice.

I've developed my worldview through several different methods of acquiring understanding. 1: I study the paths of other seekers, from Christianity(Sir Thomas Merton, Aquinas...etc) to Buddhism and Hinduism. 2: I study philosophy and the mechanisms of logic and reason, in order to learn how to think. 3. I pay attention to the workings of the physical Universe. 4: I meditate in order to understand the interrelatedness of all these things in the hopes that a larger picture will begin to emerge.

This is what I've come to thus far:

First, I believe that there exists something beyond the strictly physical world of spacetime. I say "something" because I don't know specifically what it is that lies beyond the hard boundary of physical existence.

Second, I refrain from venturing a guess to what is outside of physical spacetime because I suspect there is a biologically based cognitive threshold that prevents human beings from perceiving Ultimate reality or even understanding it while within physical spacetime.

Third, because of this cognitive limitation, if we hope deduce meaning for our existence, we must look for and analyze clues within the realm of physical existence, rather that hoping to find overt proof or relying on faith.

These are some of the clues that imply meaning to our existence:

1.The physical laws of the universe, in combination with the vast amount of space, matter, and time, seem to be set up for the emergence of life.

2: Once life emerges, there is an arrow that dictates biological organisms evolve directionally from single-celled simplicity towards ever-increasing complexity.

3: Once a certain threshold of biological complexity is reached the organism will inevitably gain, among other things, self awareness.

4: Organisms will continue to gain cognitive abilities on the ascent through complexity, such as the use of logic, reason, art, love, altruism, and curiosity, that we associate as primarily human attributes.

In a crude summary, I believe that the Universe is specifically tuned to eventually create intelligent, self aware, beings.

Now, for what purpose is Universe set up in this very precise way? The search for clues continues.

Based solely on the life of this planet it appears that the higher the cognitive abilities of an organism the more unique their place in the universe is, based on the varieties of being that complex cognition unlocks or allows for. There is an implied correlation between the intelligence of an organism and the spectrum of emotional and intellectual states available to that organism. There is also an inherent uniqueness to the variety of possible states of experience. Humans, being the most complex entities that we are currently aware of, therefore have a special place in existence in relation to the spectrum of our being beyond simple survival, such as selfless love, compassion, empathy, art, forgiveness...etc.

One might then ask, what makes these "specifically-human states of being" good rather than bad, or just unique? Guilt, jealousy, and intellectual deception are also relatively unique in humans(in degree).

Once again we must turn to indirect evidence to uncover a purpose. It seems to me that if we could identity any universal preferences of humanity they would serve as an arrow pointing towards potential meaning for the Universe's production of intelligent beings. It turns out, there is a giant clue of universal human preference. It's Love. The one thing that all humans are in search of, and hold as inherently and ultimately valuable as to allow one to infer special meaning, is LOVE. Now love can and does take many forms, but the emotion of love, whether giving or receiving is so universal that it suggests some underlying meaning to our existence. I could go on, but must digress here for the sake of word count.

So now that there is a loosely defined meaning, is there any moral extrapolations to be made within this worldview?

I believe there is. And it involves a variation of the Golden Rule. The Golden Rule states that you only, "Do unto others what you would have them do unto you." On the surface it sounds like a good rule. And in many ways it is. However there is a loophole to this rule. See, the Golden rule allows a person to do anything, so long as they'd be okay with it being done to them. And since everyone has a different threshold for what they would allow to be done to them, it isn't an entirely FAIR rule. For example, just because I'm okay with being punched as retribution for cutting someone off in traffic doesn't mean the next person is okay with being socked for that transgression. However the Golden Rule allows for punching everyone who cut you off, so long as you are okay with it.

So I suggest the Platinum rule, which is "Do unto others only that which they would have you do unto them." This rule requires a little more empathy in order to discern the wants of another, but it seems to me to be a better rule to live by. When an old church lady cuts me off I can reasonably assume she would not be okay with being punched.

But who says "fairness" is moral?

The fact that these rules of fairness ring so universally true is yet another clue to infer further meaning. It's a fact that humans inherently and universally appreciate fairness and disdain hypocrisy(the antithesis of fairness). People don't have to be taught these things. There are no societies that love liars and hypocrites and hate fairness. These scales come preset in human beings. This is a HUGE clue to innate human morality.

Therefore if the search for love is universal to humanity, and the application of fairness is also universal to humankind(which has also been exhibited in other animals, which doesn't weaken the clue, it strengthens it), then we have the beginnings of a moral code. To promote love and fairness is moral. To indulge the antithesis of love and fairness is therefore immoral.

Another important aspect of my belief system, one that serves as a guiding principle in fact, is that I willingly embrace the possibility of the unknowable. In fact not only do I embrace the unknown, I believe it is an important aspect of physical existence. Yet another clue about meaning. It is easy to take this admission and apply it to promote a blind faith, however this would be a misrepresentation of the sentiment. There will always be a certain level of mystery involved in Ultimate knowledge. Claiming you have anything entirely figured out, or that there is ZERO mystery to any of it, is a very large indicator of deception, or at the very least ignorance. I maintain that there is not only a beauty to the unknowable aspects of existence, there is likely a profound meaning in it as well.

There is so much more to cover, however this format requires a truncated or a concise-ish portrayal of my ever-evolving belief system. So I must exhale here and accept this stifled explanation as my offering for my own belief system.