Subject: uplift
From: Scottie Bowman (rbowman@indigo.ie)
Date: Tue Apr 24 2001 - 02:39:21 GMT
'... anything overtly religious can create discomfort ...
We don't exactly live in a spiritual world ...’
I mustn’t speak for Cecilia but I sense an element of regret
in these sentences. But isn’t she deploring this bustling,
materialistic world where we’ve lost our sources of nourishment
in the ‘spiritual’? At least, doesn’t Salinger work from some
similar assumption - that the ‘real’ reality underlies the visible
& people will live in vain until they renew contact with it?
My problem isn’t an indifference to these eternal values.
MY problem - & I don’t think I’m alone - is how difficult
I find it (& more so with every passing year) to combat
the argument that they are essentially illusory, that there
need be no underlying supernatural ‘explanation’ to things,
that the universe is best understood as a sequence of arbitrary
events & that these wonderful, numinous experiences that
we call ‘spiritual’ or ‘religious’ are no more than the firing
of certain groups of neurones in the human cortex.
Do people REALLY believe their consciousness - & with it
their whole understanding of things - is somehow independent
of the quality of blood flow to their skulls, on the nature
of the circulating chemicals, on the integrity of the circuits,
on the behavioural conditioning of earlier years ...
Acknowledging that it IS intimately dependent on these
physical factors, how can anyone ever have anything but
the gravest doubts about the validity of their ‘spiritual’
experiences?
Why should I regard Franny - or JD himself, or his gurus,
or fakirs, or saints, or the rest of them - as anything other
than self-deludinig narcissists whose funny diets have, most likely,
disrupted their blood sugar levels? Their lives have had no
effect, after all - except in the most transient, ‘Ooh-er, isn’t
that lovely?’ sort of way on the most suggestible.
There’s nothing new about this position. It’s been around
forever & I suppose became properly respectable through
the conflicts between Darwin & the Church.
That doesn’t make it any easier - for me at least - to ignore.
Scottie B.
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