phenomenal_graffiti
Active Idealist
Number of posts : 88
Age : 57
Location : Austin, Texas
Registration date : 2009-01-14
 |  Subject: WEIRD CHRISTIANITY #7 (FINAL ISSUE)...."OF LOVE AND MARVEL!"  Sat Sep 03, 2011 7:32 am | |
|    Weird Christianity is nothing more or less than a metaphysical hypothesis: a hypothetical view of the world or the nature of reality. Like beliefs in extraterrestrial life (on other planets) and alternate universes, the concepts in Weird Christianity fail sensory perception or availability to scientific experimentation (to a fault) and demarcation according to the dictates of Karl Popper or John Stuart Mill.
It's worth, then, lies ultimately in its logical possibility, as a member in the set of logically possible worlds, which by definition are imaginary worlds that nonetheless could or might exist for all we know and whose explanatory nature yields a world indistinguishable from the world we currently experience.
Despite the fact that I am theist, I owe a great debt to atheists, of all people, for the creation of Weird Christianity. If not for them, I would not have begun the long, arduous journey toward metaphysical and finally existential understanding, and would have, to this day, continued to languish in--as I see it---the cognitive dungeons of the simple and magical thinking of my early Baptist upbringing. It was the atheists, those cruel brigands my untrained mind dared to fence in argumentative chatrooms of yore who turned me on to simple physics, quantum physics, and the specualtive wonders of psychophysicalism.
Overwhelmed and astonished at my conditioned ignorance, I fled. I retreated to their literature, their thoughts, to learn more about the secular world and its perception of reality. From quarks and leptons, bosons, fermions, and right- and left-handed spinning particles I set sail, at last, toward the Aman of consciousness. Guided I was by the winds of David Chalmers, former Consciousness Studies Professor of the University of Arizona. I am forever in his debt, for he opened the door, in his brave defiance of identity between the physical and consciousness, to the greater worlds that waited beyond.
I was aided in the building of my metaphysical world by movies such as The Matrix (ha ha), which though it supported the belief in a ground state physical realism nevertheless betrayed through its cracks the raw sunshine of pure phenomenalism. It made the mistake of hinting that consciousness itself is a virtual reality: a simulacrum, if you will, of an external world that could easily exist without consciousness (Chalmers wrote a lengthy paper about the metaphysical possibilites posed by the film, as did Nick Bostrom, who before the film preached the gospel of his Simulated Reality Hypothesis, which states that our reality is a simulation run by higher-dimensional humans).
Nevertheless, aided by Hume, Kant, and others (and even negatively by Bertrand Russell), I was shoved, finally, through the door into the fearful suspicion that the physical may not necessarily exist. As my philosophical vessel bouyed and swayed in the dark waters of outer metaphysical thought, I pulled the telescopic lens of critical analysis and aimed it at the common belief that the brain generates or creates consciousness. The logical disconnects began to rain like hail from the sky.
Disavowal of the physical, at last, allowed my ship to travel to the edge of Reality, like Jim Carrey's titular character Truman in the film with the same name, and it bumped against the false wall beyond which I believe resides Pantheopsychism: the notion that only consciousness exists and we reside within the mind of the Judeo-Christian God.
Why God? Why not Odin? Or Zeus? Or Quetzalcoatl? No reason, really. The only explanation that works is a causal one: psychological natural selection. My mind, formed even as I type this by an inscrutable Whatever (which I believe to be combined influences of the conscious and unconscious mind of God) responsible for each and every subjective experience I have, happens, by chance, to create in me a belief that the Christian God and the Freudian forces governing the mind of this God is the Power behind our collective virtual-reality existence.
But it's just a belief, right? A belief whose only merit is that it is, perhaps, a member in good standing in the nigh-infinite family of logically possible worlds. Nevertheless, I owe a ton of gold to those bloodthirsty atheists who laughed at my simple Christianity, ripped me to shreds, and by their action forced me to think.
So enjoy, if you will, this final issue of the Weird Christianity comic series: you have landed upon the Aman of my philosophy and religious belief. Journey with me, then, toward the Valmar of Pantheopsychic theory and the Valinor of a strange experience in Waco, Texas, that opened my eyes to the true nature of Christ's sacrifice and the nature of the Afterlife. In this issue we climb, at last, the snow white cliffs of that highest of metaphysical mountains, psychic Taniquetil, Love and Marvel, upon whose summit dwell not Tolkien's gods, but the Judeo-Christian God and his alter, Jesus Christ.
Once more, I must give wholehearted thanks to the mighty Moderators of Dissidents Philosophy Forums, for graciously allowing Weird Christianity a place in the first place. I will forever be thankful for their generosity. It has been a pleasure to present this work over the span of almost two years (November 2009-September 2011) for your perusal.
Thank you,
Jay Marcus Brewer
September 3, 2011                                                                   | |
|
