I have a hangover. Not a huge one, but the worst I've ever personally had. Which is strange considering I didn't drink a ton of alcohol. More than I usually have, certianly, but no huge amount. It was doubtless the mixture of wine and beer that did it. The great irony of alcohol for me is that consumption of too much of it means that you wake up early the next morning. Happens ever time. Which is to say, it's happened all three or four times, but still.
I'm going into the lab for the first time in a week to actually do some work today. I need to crunch some numbers and plan some experiments.
Also, CNN.com reports that 'The Da Vinci Code' is aparently a crappy movie. This makes me happy on many levels. At this point, it's not even so much the misrepresentation of Christianity visa vie the total absence of the Orthodox perspective in Dan Browns book, as it is the fact that it's so damn popular. I worked in a bookstore for five and a half years and I swear the hardback never left the top ten until recently, when it's own paperback was
finally released. Anything this popular, with the exception of Harry Potter, is something I dislike. And it pleases me to no end to see it finally suck in an observable and public way.
Please. The story was faction. That area between historical fiction and polemic which lacks the willingness to admit that it's a mixture of both instead of a straight one or the other. What really pissed me off about this book is the tone that it takes. If you were to read it, and you had no knowledge whatsoever about what it was about (which is manifestly impossible today but follow me here for a moment) you would discover that the book was impossible (and I mean it as though it were glued to your hands) to put down. It is so phenominally well told, and so engaging that I litterally stayed up all night reading it...
...right untill the middle where it reveals it's premise. Ohhhhh,
I see the Rosecruxians and the merovingians had it right all the time! Clearly the historical record of the crucifixion of Christ is a load of crap perpetuated by a bunch of clergy who wanted to cement their authority and, hence, their wealth and power!
He litterally postulates, with no backup I might add, that the early church did not regard Christ as the Messiah, or the Son of God, but as a mortal prophet who lived, had a wife, had sex with that wife, had kids, and then got killed. The Merovingian theory. Yippie.
What it fails to address is why the apostles were brutally murdered (to a man) in the name of a 'Messiah' who, in fact, never was. Nor does it give the Orthodox church any nod whatsoever, instead continuing in the grand tapestry of 'Church Conspiracy' faction, which regards the Evil Juggernaut Catholic Church as the one, true Christian Authority for better or for worse.
And
then there are the droves of slavering fans who see it as a vidication (and such a good way of phrasing) what they
always believed! I can't remember how many (I refrain from using an ephithat) people expressed this sentiment to me over the counter when they were buying themselves a second copy because they loaned their first one out and were so pleased their friend liked it that they just didn't ask for it back etc...
Grow a damn brain. Putting as much time as it takes to read 'The Da Vinci Code' into independant research of the history of the early church would give you enough data to at least be well informed on the topic in your own right so that you didn't have to base your opinion off of a highly disputed
NOVEL. I'm not a theologen in the sense that the word has ever been applied to anyone that deserved it, but I did do a bunch of research into Orthodox history before I joined up. A friend and I more or less researched our way into Orthodoxy, coming to the conclusion along the way, that anyone who put in the time and effort to dig up the history and compair the theologies of the various 'Christian' denominations and their theology to, you know, the BIBLE would reach the same conclusion. And, in very truth, people have. Friends of ours, people we know, we watched the conversion spread like a chemical reaction of a reagent introduced into a base solution. It was impressive.
It continues to be impressive. My friend Chris has decided to join the Orthodox church (I cannot remember right now if I already wrote about this). And it looks like his family may follow him (may: this is by no means assured at the moment, but it looks promising). Now, if only I could knock off the damn porn long enough to get my spiritual arsenal back into working order I'd really have something.
Ten months. That's how long I was clean untill I got stupid. Ever since then it's been a battle. And I can say, that after long introspection, the avilability of an internet connection is only part of the problem. Boredome, lonliness, and good old faishoned lust would be just as deadly without it. Indeed, it's arguable that with this kind of...focus...it at least has an observable bad outcome, as opposed to insidiously lurking and working in the background. I need something to do. I need...I don't know. Something. I'm going to get a job for the summer because I'm not salaried, and I'm thinking of going back to the Bookstore, my womb as it were. They'll have me of course, five and a half years of experience is something they won't sneer at, if only because it'll be like re-activating a veteran instead of having to train a new recruit. That or the video game store. The bookstore gets more buisness though, the video game store might be boring.
I had a huge crisis of faith a little while back. I'm a psychologist by training, and I got myself into the following logical loop:
With enough repitition, you can convince yourself of ANYTHING. Jim Jones got a hoard of people to drink poisoned Kool Aid, Hitler whipped up an entire nation via Anti Semitism, Stalin managed to kill a hundred million people, and most convincigly of all, Brittany Spears is a fuc^ing millionaire.
So, I reasoned, if I'm expected to fail unless I pray, it might very well be that any success is only
psychological reenforcement and might very well have nothing to do with an actual God working within me. The human mind is, as we know very well, succeptable to suggestion and indoctronation. Ergo, I'll never know if I'm giving myself to an actual real live God, or to a psychological construct in my brain which only exists because I've made it exist.
Ugly eh? Well, I logic-ed my way back out of it. Cognitive dissonance theory states that when we are presented with a situation which flies in the face of what we know to be true, we do one of two things. We change our beliefs to reflect this fact, or we change how and or how much we care about it. In other words, if a situation is intensely psychologically discomforting to us, we shift our own position until that discomfor is resolved. There is a lot of bullshit in this.
The favorite example that psychologists
love to use runs thusly: If you work really hard for some kind of reward, and it winds up being very costly (somehow or other) then you convince yourself that the reward wasn't the point, the experience of chasing the reward was rewarding unto itself. You do this so that you don't feel bad about having gotten diddly squat in exchance for a huge effort.
This can be demonstrated in an experiment. There is a classic example from the fifties. Two subjects are brought into a room and given the single most boring task in the known universe. They are litterally sat down in front of a board with a bunch of knobs on it and told to turn them one by one, for an hour. It's supposedly a 'manual dexterity task' but like most psychology experiments, it involves a deception. After the 'manual dexterity' task is over, the researcher experiences a 'problem' and they recruit the subject to 'help them out'. Here is where the actual experiment kicks in. They tell both subjects that one of their lab personel has called in sick, and they need you, the subject to fill in and explain the experiment to the next subject (in reality a confederate of the researcher) and they're willing to pay.
The catch is that one subjects gets 20 bucks, and the other only gets a dollar. So they both take the money, and sit down and explain the task to what they believe to be the next guy who'll have to do it. The confederate always asks the following question, "Well, did
you enjoy it?". Here is where it gets interesting. Both subjects experienced the same, God awful boring task. They both do their job and play it up as an interesting task. But the kicker is that the one who only got a dollar does an observably more convincing job. And the theory is that in order to do the job at all, he must convince himself that it is true, and once that is done, they sound very convincing indeed.
Afterwords, both subjects fill out a 'standard questionaire' which includes only ONE relevant item. How satisified were you with your experience here today?
The guy who got $20 says it was crap, the guy who got $1 says it was good. Very convincing. In order to resolve the dissonance between the truth (the experimentw was a horrible waste of time) and what they were forced to actually say, they changed their own perception of truth. Wow. Or more accurately,
holy shit, sine we now have evidence that people will believe ANYTHING in order to not feel like a DAMN MORON for having just done something AMAZINGLY STUPID. This is the reason that people are often impossible to argue with. They aren't
unaware that thier position is patent
bullshit they are
accutely aware of it, and to resolve this discrepancy, they irratinally believe it to be true, and hence become impossible to argue with, except that you have OVERWHELMING and IRREFUTABLE EVIDENCE to the contrary, and even then sometimes not.
But there is another side to this. Some humans ride the wheel of abuse like it's a carnival ferris wheel that doesn't charge money, but a lot of people jump the hell off even before it's finished it's first spin. Not everybody is so psychologically weak as this. And I get the feeling, though I've not tested it out yet, that at least some people who got the dollar, and some who got the twenty dollars, might, if convinced they were alone, confess that they thought the 'manual dexterity task' was basically as boring as shit.
That and, the argument has only limited application to Christianity as far as I can tell. Our own Messiah and our own prophets tell us that the earthly consequence of our faith, if we hold true to it, will be brutal suffering at the hands of others. Gee, theres a good incentive. Arguably, the belief could be self fulfiling prophecy, since there will
always be someone who hates you for what you say, no matter what it is, it would be difficult for this belief
NOT to be true. And then some people could feel like they alone were in posession of the truth. A belief which might well be fulifillling enough to some poeple that they would willing suffer in order to have it. But the vast majority of people are not seriously religious. Most of them get the hint and give it at most, lip service, and then do the worldy thing and reap the
"rewards" offered by the dark one to those who don't bother to pick up their cross and follow Christ. The reality of their beliefs is that they resolve the cognitive dissonance by NOT being religious. I have NO DOUBT, that some so called 'believers' believe only because it fills a psychological need. Be it for 'authority' or simple fear of death, some peoples belief is unmitigated bullshit motivated by a desire for personal gain. Not improvement, gain.
But some people, IN POSESSION OF THE BELIEF THAT BELIEVING AND KNOWING THE TRUTH GIVES YOU A GREATER OBLIGATION AND, THERFORE, A HARSHER JUDGMENT THAN SIMPLE IGNORANCE, believe anyway.
It would be, and is, easier not to do it. Just ask a guy who hasn't been to church in a month for varoius reasons. I'm heading back, don't worry about that, but the war continues my friends.
Time to get back in the trenches.
Alexei.
