The Mind Openers

(Author's Note: I am not a completely open-minded person, though I'd like to be. After all, open-mindedness is just an ideal, not even the greatest of ideals. This essay contains wild caricatures and extreme generalizations related to open-mindedness, but only to emphasize some points I'd like to make about this highly favored modern word...apparently because I have too much time on my hands.)

There are two kinds of open-minded people, those who say that any idea may be true, and those who say that their current ideas may be false. The problem is that while one kind is perfectly sane, the other is utterly lunatic. It is a problem because they are two opposite things, and one goes against the very meaning of “opening your mind to other ideas”. In other words, the lunatic kind of open-mindedness is not open-minded at all.

I know of someone, let’s call him Pierre, who is very fond of saying things like “don’t call someone wrong because in his view he may be correct” or “since we don’t know everything, anything might be possible”. Pierre is a good diplomat, always helping to break-up fights using his “everybody’s right so let’s all hug” approach. He defends everything. Now that sounds really nice, until you hear him defend cheating, theft, and suicide. Some say that this is perfectly open-minded behavior, but they fail to realize one side-effect that, if it was called open-minded, would render the word absolutely useless.

Every time you try to argue that Pierre is mistaken on a certain point, whatever evidence or logic you may use, he would insist that, no, he’s not wrong. He’s not wrong, not because your argument is flawed, not because your evidence is lacking, he is not wrong because in his view he is correct. He is not wrong because anything is possible. He is not wrong because everybody is right. That is what I mean by rendering the word “open-minded” useless. If all opinions are equally correct including yours, then what is the use of listening to criticism? And what the hell is this fascist open-mindedness? When the most vicious, terrifying and inhumane tyrant reigns a dystopian future from a throne of cracked skulls, slaying all who dare question his authority, Pierre shall be sitting on his right side, as Chief Mind-Opener, uttering sycophantically “I assure Your Highness that you need not ponder upon your dead critics’ last words, for as you know all beliefs are equally acceptable, and so of course you were fully justified to order their brains removed. It has, at least, opened their minds.”

If you call yourself open-minded, it should only be because when faced with reasonable and constructive criticism, you are prepared to admit that you might have been wrong. It does not mean that you are always wrong, or that you should give in upon the first utterance of a critic. Any man with a sense of pride won’t let go of long-held opinions without good and adequate reason. But the open-minded person, once cornered, does not hide behind authority, and he most definitely should not hide behind that stupid agnostic relativist truthiness so prevalent amongst the skull-cracking Mind-Openers, the new bigots-in-disguise of today.

Is there anything to know?

Realizing that, as Socrates said, "I know nothing", will ultimately be either crushingly depressing or positively encouraging for a scientist. It depends on whether or not the scientist believes that Someone Else knows everything.

Or he could simply ignore Socrates.

Mystery and Absurdity

Roughly two thousand years ago, a baby was born inside a rock amongst farm animals. (Let us for now admit the irrelevance of the exact date, and assume the truth of the baby's birth...feel free to express agnosticism about the farm animals; I just need to get a point across.) A few decades after, a certain group of men and women were exclaiming rather strange things that seemed to be connected to this baby. These included the following (note to skeptics, try not to snigger too much):

• The baby was God Incarnate
• This particular "God" is the creator of the universe, a benevolent living thing who is both One Being and a Trinity of Three Persons, each of whom is the same complete God, only different, obviously, in Personhood.
• The baby was specifically the Second Person of this Trinity, the Son.
• The baby was not a hybrid Man-God, but was rather of two full natures: He was both a complete Man and a complete God.
• The baby was born without a biological father: his mother was a complete virgin.
• His mother was sinless and spiritually immaculate from conception even unto death.
• He was the Savior of mankind, and he saved mankind by letting himself be killed, calling the act as his "sacrifice". He rose from the dead afterwards and went back to heaven, of course.
• As part of his sacrifice and salvation plan, he also asked his followers to eat his flesh and drink his blood regularly.
• He later qualified the previous statement by saying that he could turn bread and wine into his complete "Body, Blood, Soul, and Divinity". This "transubstantiation" changes the food products such that though they are still bread and wine in appearance, they are actually and substantially God, and ought to be worshipped. And eaten, of course.
• In order for his followers to continue gnawing at his body and doing other bizarre things while he's away, he instituted a priesthood. Whenever a priest is performing a "sacrament", the one actually doing the action is not the priest, but the omnipotent Savior himself, so of course the bread does become God, the married couples are actually united for life, sins are truly forgiven, etc.

I could go on and on about the other strange and improvable claims of Christianity. These, I tell my skeptical friends, sometimes with forced seriousness, are the dogmas that Catholics like myself are required to believe in. "They are just fairy tales", they tell me, "mere myths invented by sad people to delude themselves."

Of course, petty ridicule won't change my mind on Religion, but there was a time when I decided to at least consider the skeptical point of view. After all, Catholic dogma sometimes can be exasperating to defend, since the Church itself claims that we cannot fully know the nature of these mysteries until the Beatific Vision in Heaven. Mysteries, that's what we call them. To the skeptic, they are "Obvious shams, absurdities forced upon people's throats so that they may be oppressed and abused by the clergy." Well then, I thought, these skeptics seem to be reasonable, intelligent, freedom-loving men. They love Science, and I myself find Science to be incredibly valuable. So I thought, what if I go peek outside my dogmatic curtain and see what's beyond? And so I studied atheistic and agnostic writings, listened to various skeptics. From what I gathered, here are the things that "enlightened men", the "Brights", believe in:

• Morality is just an invention of Man, and has no universal meaning. But we must all still be good-hearted, well-meaning, honest, and lovers of Truth and Justice because it's what bright people are.
• The universe is absurd, and we all need to form our own realities using the unreliable organic computers in our skulls. And the best way to do this is to be intelligent and follow the scientific method.
• Empirical evidence cannot factor in anything outside our material world, so there is absolutely nothing outside our material world. Also, dogmatism is bad.
• Mankind is not special, and we are merely a blip in the space-time continuum (what an inspired phrase!). But that's okay, because we can all have fun and be merry while our puny lives last. Or, we could contribute to The Race.
• "The Race", as I call it, is the evolutionary race. All living things are currently trying to run as fast as they can towards the goal of Survival. Those who do not run fast enough are shot down, like in that Stephen King story.
• In fact, the living things themselves aren't the ones evolving. We are all just fancy vessels for our Ideas and our Characteristics (aka our Memes and Genes), who are the real actors in this farce...I mean...evolutionary theater. Yes, our masters are mere abstractions, but don't worry about it, because our universe is inherently absurd.
• Wait, we are special, after all! Don't get confused now. Listen, life actually has meaning, and we should all strive to care for each other so we can all live our lives to the fullest. Forget our differences, or at least tolerate them. We can believe in whatever we want, as long as we do not force it on other people. And then we'll all live in peace and happiness. (Doesn't relativistic irreligion make you feel so warm and fuzzy inside?)

I hope to put my thoughts about all these things into more coherent posts later on, but maybe I could describe an abstract and non-logical feeling of mine that relates to what we are celebrating right now. Skeptics laugh when we say that a baby born in a rock is God who has come down to give us the gift of eternal happiness, and ask why don't we just have happiness here and now. Then when they remember the pitifully temporal and futile state of here and now, they elaborate that, after all, we can live relatively happy lives though we are mere inconsequential absurdities in an absurd universe.

In other words, we are all doomed prisoners, but, after all, prisoners are sometimes allowed to have feasts and play games. The convict may eat the most delicious meal before he is hanged. Why do we need to think about the joys beyond the cell and the gallows, if there is even a beyond, when we have full and comfortable lives within?

Somehow, I can never relate to that quasi-optimistic line of thought; it seems like a morbid joke, made even more humorous (in a sardonic kind of way) by the fact that the joke is on the joker. Because for all his boasts of being happy in the freedom of his enlightenment, he is after all just a prisoner laughing madly, desperately ignoring the crushing despair of living in his dark, tiny cell of absurdity.

Then I imagine the tiny baby from two thousand years ago, smiling silently at the happy little secret he was about to unveil to the world: the Good News more bewildering and mysterious than any myth, yet saner than the absurd private jokes of puffed-up intellectuals.

Merry Christmas, and welcome to my journey of self-definition and philosophical development. I am Francis Ocoma, Beta version.

And now for something completely different

I created The Brain during the height of what may be called the "Slashdotter Phase" of my life. That was when I became really into the whole "I'm a computer geek" thing, studying the biases, opinions, sense of humor, lingo, and habits of a "real geek", and trying to assimilate them. And during that time, the definition of the ideal blog became one that concentrated all this geeky knowledge into one place, as a sort of external memory for my brain, a storage for things I want to remember.

That's why I called my blog The Brain. I used the blog address hackmybrain.blogspot.com to extend the metaphor of my brain being a PC, for which my blog is an external hard drive, one which can be "hacked" (yes, a poor use of the term; very n00b, I admit). One funny outcome of this was that some people didn't get what the URL meant and interpreted the blog name as an arrogant title for myself, which was preposterous. Even if "The Brain" was intended as a synecdochical nickname, the first thing that comes to mind (ha! pun!) would be this megalomanic mouse; hardly a flattering comparison.

Well, anyway, what happened was that the geeky theme of the blog became somewhat of a limitation. At first, I was still able to insert a few philosophical/theological posts. As a parenthetical note, I'm also very interested in theological discussions, particularly Catholic Apologetics, poor sick papist that I am. But then, the overwhelming amount of Google-posts, so to speak, made me very wary of posting anything deeper than critiques of beta software. Emphasis on "deeper", because that's when I realized that I've outgrown the Slashdot fanboy that was once who I am, and that praising Google over Yahoo or talking about Linux, chess, and astronomy doesn't sound so deep anymore. I'm now faced with a me who's already defined his intellectual tastes and is now longing to define his intellectual convictions. I've seen what it's like to be a technophile; I have yet to really experience being a thinker: one who defines his own beliefs independent of any "guru".

At least, I can look back at the Slashdotter Phase as the point where I finally started to define who I am and who I wanted to be. In fact, The Brain will still continue because I still love being a geek. But developing that blog was just the first step. I will now use this new blog (with the awesome features of Blogger Beta! Yay!) to try and create some thought-provoking content. Seeing what the hard drive contained was pretty interesting. Let's try looking at the processor.