As promoted by Oprah Winfrey, scores of megachurch pastors and an endless flow of self-help best sellers, the idea is to firmly believe that you will get what you want, not only because it will make you feel better to do so, but because “visualizing” something — ardently and with concentration — actually makes it happen.I believed this so ardently in 1989 that I suffered an excess of mania and on its magic carpet sailed for most of the summer, believing that I would win the Publishers Clearing House $10,000,000 Sweepstakes and publish a best-selling book that would tell the world how Youie (a.k.a. “God”) Herself revealed these wonders to me in advance.
Over the years since 1989, I came to see that the psychotherapist who helped me when the inevitable happened and my carpet crashed me into depression was right, it really was mania and not divine revelation.
Ehrenreich's article concludes:
When it comes to how we think, “negative” is not the only alternative to “positive.” As the case histories of depressives show, consistent pessimism can be just as baseless and deluded as its opposite. The alternative to both is realism [emphasis mine] — seeing the risks, having the courage to bear bad news and being prepared for famine as well as plenty. We ought to give it a try.I hadn't thought in these terms, but one way for me to think of the turn my thinking about god and religion took last year is as a turn to realism. Of course, you may dispute whether this is valid, because what is real is, ultimately, a matter of belief, perhaps even "religious" belief.
Of course, in terms of what I myself believe is real, I think I did turn from optimism (God exists and will take care of the righteous, who will live forever in heaven, their young, sexy bodies restored) to realism (we're all alone here, bud, the atoms in our bodies will be recycled, and our spirits evaporate with them). Of course, many people shudder violently at that view; to them it's the rankest pessimism. They cling to their magical optimism.
Comment from a friend, relative to "believing what you want to believe":
ReplyDeleteHmmm....What do we mean by want? I can understand "wanting to believe," but I'm not sure that applies to my approach to my acceptance of (much of) what scientists have discovered/proven over the centuries. Yes, there is some "wanting" and some "belief" on my part in my acceptance of the Scientific Principle and its results. But nothing, I think, approaching those aspects of a religious person's acceptance of their particular church's creed / dogma / doctrine.
I can easily test Aristotle's and Galileo's theories, and even some of what Newton says, so belief isn't really a part of the issue. However, I don't think that I can test much of what Einstein, Planck, et al. have postulated/theorized in the past century or so. Therefore, I have to develop a belief in what they say, and I have to want to believe it. The same is true of paleontological and archeological studies. I can prove that some fossils come before others in the geological strata, as I can with human artifacts. However, I can't prove all their claims. So, I develop a belief pattern. The clincher, though, is that scientists in these fields use a logical process that is based on previous, provable observations and processes to develop their theories. And that, to me, is the difference between religious belief and belief in scientific theories. Religious belief takes a leap of faith. Belief in scientific theories takes hard work studying not only what the current theorists say, but also studying what their predecessors said.
Hot-diggity and by-cracky! I think he's identified why I don't need to equate my wanting to believe in science with the next person's wanting to believe what the Bible says! The religious person takes an unmediated leap, but the professional scientist (who, unlike laymen such as my friend and me—and you who are likely reading this—really, really knows his field) takes tiny, verifiable steps from one proven or very highly probably fact to the next (or something like that, however we might more accurately characterize the scientific method). We laymen have to "believe" also (in the work of the scientists), but there is sufficient evidence to warrant that our belief is rational. The big leap of religious faith is not rational but ir- (or extra-) rational.