Insights
I have more than 5200 spam comments to analyze, filter, data-mine, IP deny, delete, and identify the few non-spam comments in there and preserve them. They have waited a while, and will have to wait a while more.
I have a conference to depart for in less than 48 hours, and two installments of my webcomic to work on - preferrably before I leave, because I’m not planning on bringing the software necessary for working on it with me. I should start working on them soon, but they’ll have to wait, because there’s something more important.
I have a meeting at 8:30 AM tomorrow morning and now it is after 9 PM tonight. I should finish dinner, take a shower, and go to bed, but they too will have to wait.
They will all have to wait. I just had some insights that screamed out that they just had to be blogged.
First, I’ve been reading Paula Fredricksen’s “From Jesus to Christ” (2nd edition). In there a phrase hit me: disconfirmation leads to confirmation. The footnote even mentioned a phrase I’ve written a bit about here: CognitiveDissonance.
This connection caused me to see yet another value in belief in the ressurection of Jesus. Belief in the belief of the resurrection as people finding a way around their cognitive dissonance is, to me, a very hopeful sign: it is a sign that people can work around cognitive dissonance; in a sense, it is a sign that it is possible to make sense out of everything, regardless of how depressing it may all seem. In coming to understand this, I came to see that the choice to believe in the historical reality of the resurrection isn’t about historical truth: it is about belief that there is a higher order that makes things better - better in the sense of easing our cognitive dissonance, even when it seems unbearable.
It has been my belief for a while that the desire to work around cognitive dissonance is a primitive driving universal force of human nature. To see this belief vindicated by a mention in Paula Fredricksen’s book as a possible motivation for the creation of the largest (although it has growing competition) and most historically influential (although it has growing competition) religion in the world is both satisfying and terrifying. Have I come that close to understanding what people are really about?
In a world where faith can move mountains, faith in anything but the Truth is extremely dangerous. This, I just had the insight, is probably why many Christian churches really had an objection to Dungeons and Dragons and other such fantasy role-playing games. It wasn’t about the content - it was about the fact that such a world of escapism, combined with a background in a religion which taught that faith could move mountains, would naturally lead to children using great faith to try to make their escapist worlds reality. This is why all those times that one heard of people doing suicidal things after playing Dungeons and Dragons all had to deal with people that otherwise really did need and want an escape.
I also realized that this is why escapism really is anathema to me - because to me, the only faith to have is faith in the Truth, and escapism, by definition, is an attempt to escape from truth and hence to escape from Truth.
When the life, death, and resurrection of Christ is seen in terms of disconfirmation leading to confirmation, one can see how this same metaphor can be applied to so many other processes: such as the synthesis between thesis and antithesis. This is confirmation of the idea, for in many other places and which I’m sure I’ve written about before, that sometimes the best way to go around something is to go through it, or, as someone I once knew once said - the only way to go up is to go down. By this I mean that when things don’t make sense, or when the wages of sin seem too great, or whatever it is that is the source of one’s “down”, whether it be cognitive dissonance, misfortune, or any number of other things, that instead of fighting it, one can flow through it . On the “other side of the rainbow” as it were, there is that place where disconfirmation becomes confirmation, or that moment when salvation from sin occurs, or that moment when an insight strikes and everything comes together.
I have been having such moments in the past few hours. And I’m in awe of the power of the insights that they reveal.
If this post is nonsense to you, that is ok to me. Similar to how the scriptures word it: “Let he who has ears to hear, let him hear.”