—This is my dilemma… I am dust and ashes, frail and wayward, a set of predetermined behavioural responses programmed by my genetic inheritance and by social context, riddled by fears, beset with needs whose origins I do not understand and whose satisfaction I cannot achieve, quintessence of dust and unto dust I shall return, who can expect much of that?
[…]
There is something else in me; there is an awareness that truly, I am not what I am; and what I am and what I am not is what I truly am. Dust I may be, but troubled dust, dust that dreams, dust that has its strange premonitions of transfiguration, of a glory in store, a destiny prepared, an inheritance that will one day be my own.
- Bishop R. Holloway (1978); quoted in Psychology, Religion, and Mental Health, by Montagu G. Barker
Concurrently with Silence of the Lambs, I read this book recently. To be honest, I’d hoped it’d be more interesting than it ended up being, as I think the subject’s quite fascinating, particularly after it was highlighted on a friend’s blog under the topic of Religion and Brain Damage and Religion and Intelligence, based on articles from Epiphenom and HowStuffWorks. The book’s worth a skim, but don’t go out of your way to purchase it. Kinda a shame, as chapters such as “Cults and Brainwashing” made it sound very intriguing!
Come to think of it, it’s also interesting that 99% of Christians that I know would not describe themselves as religious. Religion has such connotations of people whose lives are constrained by rules, are no fun, and work on a merit-based system of trying to earn their way into heaven. The distinction between faith and religion is not, in many articles, highlighted, but I think it’s worth bearing in mind.
And then the quote itself… I liked it. Not sure where I stand on the whole free will debate at the moment, but again a very interesting subject. Can anyone have free will outwith freedom in God? If everything can be explained by science, surely all our actions and thoughts would be ultimately predictable, given enough data: cause and effect producing set outputs. Then surely it’s only if God exists, providing something more than natural law and giving us souls and spirit, that there is any choice for us in the normal sense of the word?
