The other day whilst out and about in town two people from our local Latter Day Saints (Mormon) church stopped us in the street with a bunch of questions like “do you believe in God?” “do you think there’s an afterlife?” etc.
I’m usually polite to people like this – people who stop you on the street for various reasons [1] I mean – as they are just doing a job and these guys actually seemed like nice people! Though it’s a bit much before lunchtime. I’d only had 4 coffees by then!
I wasn’t sure they were quite ready for my “God as aggregation of consciousness”, “heaven and hell as emergent properties” etc beliefs though, so didn’t really get drawn into the discussion or I’d have probably been there all day, not to mention it isn’t nice to string people along with increasingly divergent (from their agenda) statements and questions. (But so much fun!)
How do you come to believe? Is it a rational decision? I’ve never felt that I fitted into a ‘conventional’ church or other religious group (no surprise! I’m totally unique, me…) though I’ve been entered on school forms etc as “C of E” as a sort of religious default (here in the UK). Can you actively decide to believe something? Logic says no.
I remember clearly though, at a young age (about 5) saying to my Mum that “I’ve been thinking about it and I’ve decided there probably is a God, but it’s probably not like the one we have at school” or some similar thing. (My Mum, like me, is of the belief that religion is for the individual to decide and shouldn’t be pushed into it by upbringing etc, which is odd as she has some quite conservative views in other ways! So I’d been thinking about this independently for some reason.)
Image credit: “halved” by Peter Morgan (Creative Commons Attribution license).
Anyway, lately, and especially since getting a cat (!) I’ve had this increasing sense of Dualism, which I gather isn’t fashionable any more. (What? You mean I have to get rid of this tie-dye T-shirt with integrated shoulder pads as well?) Having studied Philosophy with the Open University (course A211 for any amateur biographers following along; sadly discontinued now) where there was a block on philosophy of mind and monism/dualism/Descartes etc it’s something I should have thought about before.
It seems natural to me to think of the mental process of a cat (or person!) going on “inside there” as a self distinct from (and not reducible to a side-effect of) the workings of the physical body. As in “there’s a whole experiencing individual inside there” which I am constantly surprised by! My other half thinks this is pretty strange and that there Is Only One Cat, looks at me and says “there’s a dualist inside there”. (Probably!) He also turned the “do you believe in the afterlife” question back on the missionaries by asking them why they do believe in an afterlife (and perhaps worryingly, they weren’t able to give an answer other than that they just realised this was the case!)…
I don’t always realise clearly the distinction between things I know/believe and things others know/believe and had just assumed really that everyone would see that there’s an individual “inside” the cat etc but on asking a few people it seems like I am in the minority with this now!
[1] Wouldn’t it be good if the Germans had a Schadenfreude-like word to encompass Mormons, chuggers, market researchers, catalogue-signer-uppers, AA sales agents etc? I’d co-opt it in a heartbeat!
