03.23.05 - 5:05 p.m.

I took the "Philosophical Health Check," and my tension quotient was 13%, which is lower than the "average" tension quotient of 29%. The first area of tension they identified was the "problem of evil." Well, yes. I admit and acknowledge the "problem of evil" - which threads through every philosophical and theological treatise of almost any substance, except, of course, for the strange, inconstant, and self-aggrandizing moral philosophizing of the fundamentalists and far right wing.

From the check:

"These two beliefs together generate what is known as 'The Problem of Evil'. The problem is simple: if God is all-powerful, loving and good, that means he can do what he wants and will do what is morally right. But surely this means that he would not allow an innocent child to suffer needlessly, as he could easily prevent it. Yet he does. Much infant suffering is the result of human action, but much is also due to natural causes, such as disease, flood or famine. In both cases, God could stop it, yet he does not.

Attempts to explain this apparent contradiction are known as 'theodicies' and many have been produced. Most conclude that God allows suffering to help us grow spiritually and/or to allow the greater good of human freedom. Whether these theodicies are adequate is the subject of continuing debate."

Very well, gentlemen. All acknowledged. I don't subscribe to any of the theodicies that speculate that god (God?) allows suffering to help humans grow spiritually, although I could be persuaded to the greater good of human freedom. Or, perhaps, to the greater good of flawed beings, finite, living with both joy and sorrow, limited, frustrated, perhaps, but (largely) unbroken. In truth, I think that God (god?) or... whatever, started the whole thing up, and we are one of the (peculiar, lovely) consequences, both a curiosity and a sadness to the old man (I don't subscribe to the familiarity - not in any visceral way. The expression is one of mere convenience. I can't begin to fathom or quantify god, nor would I ever wish to do so. Everything I think or say or believe limits her, somehow, to my narrow vector, to my tiny world in the outflung arm of an accumulation of stars, in a universe filled with a hundred billion stars in a hundred million galaxies and limiting god, my friends, is the essence of arrogance, and one of the root causes of the blight of self-involved self-righteousness consuming our nation and our world.)

The second "tension" centers around the "Seat of the self" problem, and essentially this tension is artificial, in my opinion, because the statements in the test were more absolutist than my beliefs, and yet mirrored (in some way) a portion of my beliefs regarding the life of the mind and soul. From the check:

You agreed that:
Severe brain-damage can rob a person of all consciousness and selfhood
And also that:
On bodily death, a person continues to exist in a non-physical form

These two beliefs are not strictly contradictory, but they do present an awkward mix of world-views. On the one hand, there is an acceptance that our consciousness and sense of self is in some way dependent on brain activity, and this is why brain damage can in a real sense damage 'the self'. Yet there is also the belief that the self is somehow independent of the body, that it can live on after the death of the brain. So it seems consciousness and selfhood both is and is not dependent on having a healthy brain. One could argue that the dependency of the self on brain only occurs before bodily death. The deeper problem is not that it is impossible to reconcile the two beliefs, but rather that they seem to presume wider, contradictory world-views: one where consciousness is caused by brains and one where it is caused by something non-physical.

Of course, I don't necessarily believe that our consciousness floats up to gold-paved heaven, or even that whatever peculiar soup of chemicals and organic molecules and electric impulses animates our individual, conscious minds is so necessarily special, so extraordinarily privileged, that we live on after death as we are, intact, a discrete thing apart floating on clouds, eating Philly cream cheese, and trying out our wings. I imagine that - sure, absolutely. I'm Catholic, I always have. I dreamed that my dead grandfather watched me (and perhaps malevolently) when I was in my grandmother's basement in Philly. I usually slept there - on the sofabed downstairs - when we visited, and although I never met him, he was a (n unknown) presence in the back of my mind, a hanger-on in family stories, an incomplete cipher. When I was a teenager, and had accumulated even more dead of my own, I added them to my celestial audience - but that's how the mind works. Just as the sun revolved around the earth in the middle ages, god always, somehow, revolves around us. I can believe in life after death - I can be Catholic, (and even catholic), in my belief in life after death, without believing that I will live, as I am, after death, in some netherrealm. And I don't need to name it. I don't need to own it beyond that cross-roads of faith and realism, I don't need to make it familiar, or strange, or cheapen it by naming it and owning it and breaking it down to some trite recitation of this or that human half-truth.

And I'm at peace with that. I am. In the end, it's almost liberating.