Thine Eye Be Single Preparation Part One

I had not intended another exhausting write-up at this point, but yet another post from the Think Theology blog has presented itself, and it seems uniquely suited to my next task.  I will try to write about the way that we persistently decide to assume (or, without a decision process, persist in assuming) a posture of lordship over our souls.  I am not talking about our tendency—lamentable though it is—to usurp the Lordship that should be God’s.  Rather, I am talking about the more fundamental problem (not all that surprising, when we think about it) of our mistakenly thinking that we know ourselves to begin with.

Andrew Bunt, in “In Praise of Brainwashing” (Tues., May 19, 2020), contends that:

...all of us are constantly being brainwashed. My situation is no different; it’s just that fewer people have been brainwashed into the beliefs I have. Those who hold to majority beliefs are no less brainwashed than the rest of us.

And later:

There is good brainwashing and bad brainwashing. The key is distinguishing between the two.

Actually—No.  The “key” of real importance here announces itself with its merest mention: There are lives with more brainwashing in them, and then there are lives with less.  The latter lives, as an aggregate, are infinitely to be preferred.  Brainwashing is bad.

We could, I suppose, conjecture that lives might be good for having just the right amount of brainwashing in them, of just the right kind, and of just the right application, but I fear that such an argument would stagger along for a few steps and then collapse under its own weight.

And then there is the very idea of “more” or “less” or even an “equivalence” of brainwashing (as opposed to the aspired goal of none at all.)  To repeat one of Bunt’s contentions:

Those who hold to majority beliefs are no less brainwashed than the rest of us.

Manifestly, Bunt’s view would seem comforting in the face of a jaded and unbelieving majority (if some such thing is indeed what they are), but this argument as well bears a staggering burden.  It is one thing to state that an agnostic outlook and a theistic one are both postulations about the unprovable; it is quite another to decide that agnosticism—the question of its validity aside—can claim no greater transparency than the thickest theology.

Or to illustrate the matter in a snippet of conjured dialog—a certain type of believer to a generic agnostic:

We are both products of our upbringings.  You believe that God and the origins of our world are unknowable.  I believe that God created the world in 4004 B.C., with a garden of perfect serenity situated among four headwaters that geologists can only guess at, the surface of the earth having been rearranged by a cataclysm that oceanographers have yet to be able to comprehend.  I could go on like this all day.  Scoff if you will, but each of us being products of our upbringings, you have no more warrant to throw around the word “brainwashing” than I do.

The situation is simple.  Brainwashing is bad—the more of it, the worse.  Bunt himself intends to argue his points, not to “brainwash” us.  Or at least that’s where he ends up:

I’m happy to have been brainwashed into Christianity because I have examined it and found it to be coherent; I have experienced it to be beautiful and life-giving, and I think there are very good reasons to believe it’s true.

The part about Christianity being coherent (think two millennia of “mystery,” “paradox,” “miracle,” “prefiguration;” “ineffable,” “inscrutable,” “symbolic,” “prophetic”—you get the idea) is a bit of a stretch.  And Bunt is entirely welcome to his take on what is “beautiful and life-giving.”  And, lastly, for a person like Bunt—having had the fortune to be “brainwashed into Christian belief” and the very good fortune to realize it—it is all to the good that he can say of Christianity:

I think there are very good reasons to believe it’s true.

However, it would only be fair to note that—if brainwashing can put a person “into Christian belief”—then Bunt by his own estimation can expect that (given the likelihood that many others are less rigorous intellectually than he) many of his co-religionists believe it’s true for very bad reasons, or perhaps for none at all.

And so, to extend to Bunt no more than his due, we can see that he intends merely a loose and illustrative use of the term “brainwashing”; his post describes at least three different ways that a person might crawl out from under brainwashing.  What is more, his contention that we are exposed constantly to (perhaps unacknowledged) influences cannot be denied.

The question then becomes one, I would say, of “Well, now that we know that we are all brainwashed—what do we do next?”  Mine is not a novel question; Bunt in his post has been going about addressing it, and I do not want to miss the chance to use his presentation of “three different ways” that I mentioned just above.  Bunt lists “three questions that should be asked of any belief system.”

But before I begin (with the next post) to ask Bunt’s three questions, I need to make sure that I do not lose sight of some other questions that I think we all need to address—not just questions about “belief systems,” but about believers as well.  Or as I wrote above:

I am talking about the more fundamental problem (not all that surprising, when we think about it) of our mistakenly thinking that we know ourselves to begin with.

Just who we people are (the “ourselves” in question) is obviously an indispensable element of any examination of an overall belief system.  Of course, we cannot imagine having godlike knowledge of such a murky subject as our mortal souls, but that does not mean that the subject is any murkier than most others, or any less likely to be an unfolding mystery.

I am reminded of John the Baptist in Matthew, singling out the religious parties as the target of his taunt (which apparently he used regularly): “O generation of vipers, who hath warned you to flee from the wrath to come?” (3:7, KJV)  The Pharisees and Sadducees had tight and well-tested belief systems—so much so, that John directs his thrust not at the intellectual lives of those divines, but at the possibility that undiscovered (or perhaps denied) elements of their souls could be keys to their repentance.

We can ask the same questions of ourselves.  Indeed, both Bunt’s approach and mine hinge on barely-asked questions (or unquestioned assumptions—it can be hard to tell which), and upon rigorous examination all belief systems vocalized by humans are attended by inescapable (though perhaps variable) contentions about who humanity really is.  To give a preview of one of Bunt’s questions about any belief system:

Is it good, beautiful, and life-giving?

This question helps us think about whether we want the belief system to be true. It might be coherent but unattractive and damaging. We want to be shaped by beliefs that will do us and others good.

We do?  We really want that?  Bunt is right, of course, about us wanting “to be shaped by beliefs that will do us and others good,” but that is of course a generalization, one perhaps most consistent with the innocence of youth (think of Jesus and the little children.)  But the desire itself—for human connection; and the value itself—human connection as a good thing; are we talking about “brainwashing” here?

We really don’t know what to make of “origins”—the beginnings of our attachments, our values, our memories—the beginnings of our lives, our history, our species.  We can go back to Genesis for answers, but not without hauling along with us the predispositions of untold centuries, and not without a responsibility for considering how that or any book might have been written under clouds of humanity’s turmoil in centuries preceding.

I contend, therefore, that an essential element of inquiring into any belief system is the simultaneous process of un-learning things about us ourselves.  I will try to describe this more particularly in the next post.