Chapter 7

Discovering philosophy

Apparently thinking is evil. Apparently God designing humans with incredibly powerful brains capable of analysing, perceiving and questioning … just so it would make our lives harder when He told us to conquer our minds and just submit to His will.

As if living wasn’t hard enough with 99.9% of the world’s population being sinners, all bent on tearing us away from God’s grace not to mention the insanely high criteria for actually being accepted into the Kingdom of Heaven on Judgement Day.

Philosophy was banned from the cult, mostly due to this single scripture (and I’m quoting the KJV because that was the only version allowed, having been determined to be the most accurate translation):

Beware lest any man spoil you through philosophy and vain deceit, after the tradition of men, after the rudiments of the world, and not after Christ.

There were of course many other scriptures which were used suppress free thought but in regards to philosophy this was the most explicit. We were taught: Don’t think, just believe. Don’t trust your own mind, trust God – and thus trust the man up the front preaching his interpretation of the Bible.

I’ve already mentioned previously A.C. Grayling’s The Meaning of Things which I kept hidden under the drawers in my bedroom, but the start of my discovery of philosophy started some time before that with a film trilogy I have already mentioned in my blog, The Matrix.

I know some of you will groan when I mention The Matrix and roll your eyes but please bear with me. While I admit I’m a fan of science-fiction and a special effects junkie my love of The Matrix trilogy is grounded in the depth of it, the philosophy, the symbols and metaphors. It was my Philosophy 101 disguised as an entertaining movie about virtual realities, robots and war which is probably why I got away with owning the box set – although my mother did not approve of the “high” frequency of swearing.

On the bonus DVD Roots of The Matrix, several philosophers including Dr. Cornel West, Richard Hanley, Dr. Rachel Wagner, Ken Wilber, Mark Rowlands, Colin McGinn comment on the deep themes intertwined into the plot of The Matrix. I had never heard of many of the names and theories they mentioned apart from the obvious ones such as Plato and Socrates. Causation, Descartian dualism, metaphysics, critical reasoning, fatalism, Kant, Nietzsche, Baudrillard, Nozick, Berkeley and more.

I think my head exploded a little bit watching that DVD, overwhelmed with new concepts. For me, watching that DVD was like taking the red pill. I felt foolish afterwards for the transgression which I immediately knew had irreversibly changed my life – it opened my eyes, in a sort of Adam and Eve, and the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil way. I immediately wanted to be ignorant again, but it was too late.

I knew it for what it was. I had just been given access to the tools that I was going to use to make sense of my world, to draw my own conclusions, to ask the right questions. It took me quite a while to figure out how to use those tools, and I went barking up many a wrong tree.

It’s funny, because in my diary entry on 10 March 2006 I wrote:

I was given the red pill at birth; fated to always have the knowledge of the truth and be apart from those outside the lie from the very start; one of those born in Zion

Complete opposite to reality. I had gone full circle at that point, believing that I had broken free and arrived back at the beginning – that in my original state I was already free, that it was everyone on the outside who was in bondage.

The cult placed a big emphasis on freedom, that we have a free will and follow God freely. That outside the walls of the church everyone was in bondage to Satan, that their notion of free will was false.

I did some weird things to try and figure out which side of the fence I was on – free or not free. In February 2006 I tried self-hypnosis, sleep deprivation and other techniques all with the intention of just breaking out of normal, to just cause ripples in the pond and see if something would break and reveal the truth; to separate the mind from the body:

As Morpheus describes the program contained in the red pill: “it’s designed to disrupt your input/output carrier signal”. That’s what I was attempting to do – to free my mind from the world as perceived through my senses.

If you think that experiment was weird then wait until I tell you some of the other things I tried. You have to understand that I didn’t know if I was upside down, in or out – I didn’t even know how to pose the question to determine what it was I wanted to know. Everything became so slippery, going around in circles, doubling back, dead ends.

And all the time I knew that these thoughts, these forays into philosophy and my mind experiments, were eroding my faith and making it harder and harder to just believe and follow God in simplicity. I was overthinking it, overanalysing – but I could not stop. I had to know, I had to get to the bottom of it.

I will be exploring faith in another article soon but I can see why people like faith. It’s like a nice big box where you can place all your doubts, all your unanswered questions, everything you don’t know … just throw them all in the box, close the lid and proclaim “I trust God” and be done with it. I can see the attraction in that – and it’s something I asked myself many times. Do I really need to ask the questions, will the answers actually help me live a better, more fulfilling life?

It didn’t help that King Solomon in Ecclesiastes had pursued such questions and nearly gone mad in the process, arriving back at the beginning, not to mention others like Descartes and even Blaise Pascal to some extent. I didn’t care – I pushed on. I had already gone mad and the urge was too strong. The more I learned about philosophy, the greater the sense I had that not everything was as it seemed – and yes it took quite some time for me to even realise that my reality (and the church that entirely subsumed it) had a seam, something tangible that I could leverage as a variable in my equations.

In my diary entry of 28 February 2006 I accepted that the state of my life and my knowledge had been deliberately crafted by the church:

It’s fair to say I’ve been brainwashed. Even looking at it at a totally objective and unbiased way the evidence is there to show that ever since I was born I’ve been force fed the Christian doctrine. Whether that’s a good or a bad thing, I don’t know. It does mean that I have a perspective of the world that’s different from most other people.

I also set myself an ultimatum:

If I am to follow God, then I must put off all desires to partake of the things of this world. Completely. If I am to heed the unrelenting call of the world and the Devil, then I must somehow dissolve all the religious teachings and memories of experiences relating to the church in order to live a life outside the church without fear of eternal damnation in the fires of hell.

On 3 March 2007 I listened to an interview on Alan Saunder’s The Philosopher’s Zone radio segment with Mark Colyvan – I remember because I copied part of the transcript into my diary. The most important part of that discussion was when Alan posed the question “Does God exist?” to which Mark replied definitively “No”. That really got my attention. Up until then philosophy had been incredibly complex for me to come to terms with and just wasn’t delivering the solid answers I was looking for – but that single word answer gave me hope. Of course, I didn’t accept the answer – I absolutely believed in the existence of God at that time – but nonetheless it changed the game for me. The tools of philosophical theory were beginning to take on real potency, not just fluffy toys and plastic hammers but something of value that would inflict real damage on the bubble of lies I finally realised I was living in.

I still have much I want to learn about philosophy – but having achieved what I wanted those tools for, to break me out of captivity, it’s now just a hobby, something for my spare time rather than being intricately involved in matters of life and death, sanity and insanity.