Emotionality and Rationality

Emotionality and Rationality and other sundry items.

Emotions and Reasons are not necessarily conflicting. They only seem to be conflicting. Emotions are usually the catalysts for actions, but that does not mean that the actions are necessarily irrational. Take the case of anger, one of the strongest and predominant emotions. Somebody infuriates me to the point I want to take him out of this world and deliver him to the next. This is the usual wish of most people. The reason they don’t act on the wish is due to the costs involved. Some people, however, are impatient; they want immediate gratification. They know the costs involved and they disregard them. They pull out a gun or a knife or use their own fists and feet on the spot. They act on the basis of their value system which is immediate gratification to the dictates of their desires. They are willing to pay for gratification. That looks pretty rational to me. To each his own. Other people have a different value system. They wait for the right moment before they strike, the moment of killing a man without incurring high costs. These people act on their emotions too, but their actions are guided by a different value system. They don’t want the here and now. They know revenge is a sweeter dish when it is served cold. Both groups act in accordance with their values and desires, so we cannot say that both kinds of people will rationalize a posteriori and come up with a reason which is contrary to their initial emotion, their sentiment.

Take the situation used by Mr. XYZ The reason a man chooses his mother over his wife or vice versa is based on the level of attachment he has for the women involved. Most men, if not all, would know before hand what they would do. And the reasons given by them after the choice was exercised are consistent and logical with the degree of attachment, and not necessarily “invented logic”.

Mr. XYZ has a very unusual approach to common concepts and common reality. He has maintained that karma only involves unintended consequences and that monks should not practice politics. Now he is of a view that lawyers “cannot work to change the government or the political system of a country”. I beg to differ on this view as I have done on the other two views of his. Laws and political system of a country are not static. If they are viewed to be detrimental to the welfare of the people, anybody can and should do to change them. Lawyers are not and should not be exempt from this undertaking. In fact, I admire those lawyers in Vietnam who are doing that. They put their lives and the welfare of their loved ones on the line. Oppression preys on the universal fear of death and suffering. When people decide to say no, say enough is enough, to oppression and are willing to rise up and demand that the laws and the political system serve everybody in the country, and not the just ruling elite, do we have changes. The dissident lawyers in Vietnam are the current heroes of the people. They serve as catalysts for change. There are two types of people in this world. One is content to live as slaves because they fear death and suffering. The other is willing to live a life with dignity. I recall reading an account of a battle between the Native Americans and the American cavalrymen. Prior to the battle, the chief of the Native Americans (I believe it was Sitting Bull) said to his fellow tribesmen: “Today is a beautiful day to die.” His words have rung true to my ears ever since I came across them. If our forebears were universally afraid of death and suffering, we would speak Chinese or French today. The time for change is now.

So, now I am viewed or rather accused quite nastily by Mr. ABC (the play on the word “Tu-hood” was noted) as being an apprentice to priesthood. Far from it, I am who I am, a person who try to be better of today than I was of yesterday. I am not entering into any training to be anything other than being who I am capable of. If you follow the sequence of exchange of emails closely, I didn’t drag Buddha and Christ and Stalin and Mao into the discussion. U2 did. And when he stated that Stalin and Mao were in morals, I disagreed with him. I said that Christ and Buddha were in morals. Then he commented that I dragged religion into discussion and since it was a scary subject he would rather not touch it and would stay in this mundane world while watching me entering into some kind of Tu-hood for training for high morals. The whole attitude of ABC smacked of sophistry of not a high order. When I said I expected high morals from everybody, I was showing respect to my fellow men. (Here again, I don’t need to be a slave to political correctness by using the clumsy phrase “men and women”. I respect the intelligence of the readers; I expect them to understand that I mean “men and women”. They know, as well, Man is meant to be Mankind. I don’t need to get into semantics whenever I write words like Man and men. I think my respect for women shows by my disinclination to engage in sexist humor or to post materials which are deemed offensive to women. Respect has more force when it shows by behavior than by words alone). By expecting high morals from them and showing them as such, hopefully they (and I, for that matter) would rise to the occasion and behave accordingly (You would not expect me to say, no, I expect nothing more than low morals from my fellow men and that they are no higher than beasts, would you?) But frankly, I have been more disappointed than not. All my life I have been looking for a few good men, men who I deem to be better and more developed and more evolved than me, but invariably they turned out to have feet of clay. When the hard rain came, the feet cracked and dissolved and the whole edifice of public persona of decency and morality came crashing down. It was then I realized sophistry was rampant in this word and that very few of us were committed to truth. Those who were, were the ones I encountered in books.

When I say Ananda is going to the village for alms, I understand these five empty, evanescent processes of body, feelings, perceptions, thought, and consciousness are going to the village, but for convenience I used the term Ananda.
Buddha

Truth is elusive. I was reminded of that fact, once again, by learning a few days ago that Nguyen Truong To was a fraud. I also learned, as I had expected all along, that the French missionary bishops in the first part of the 19th century were actively engaged in politics, in trying to get France to invade Vietnam in the name of, in the disguise of, under the pretext of, protecting the converts. Religion, admittedly, is a touchy subject. But so is philosophy, and so is politics. Any worthwhile subject is touchy. Knowledge is touchy. Truth is touchy. But that does not prevent thinking and concerned people from talking about them. In fact, by discussing religion and philosophy and politics, a person’s character and level of understanding are revealed. How else do we get to know the person? By talking about sports and weather and sex? Einstein didn’t shy away from talking about religion. He was a devotee of truth and certitude. As historian Paul Johnson recounted, Einstein insisted that the equations in his General Theory of Relativity must be verified by empirical observations and he himself devised three specific tests of this purpose. “The last test (the “red shift”) was confirmed by the Mount Wilson observatory in 1923, and thereafter empirical proof of relativity theory accumulated steadily, one of the most striking instances being the gravitational lensing system of quasars, identified in 1979-80.” (Paul Johnson, Modern Times, First HarperPerennial Edition, 1992, p. 3). Johnson cited the philosopher Karl Popper: “what impressed me most Einstein’s own clear statement that he would regard his theory as untenable if it should fail in certain tests….Here was an attitude utterly different form the dogmatism of Marx, Freud, Adler and even more so that of their followers.” (Johnson, ibid, p.3). Richard Dawkins’s book The Oxford Book of Modern Science Writing (Oxford University Press, 2008) included an article written by Einstein on the subject of science and religion. Dawkins characterized Einstein’s religious views as those of atheistic pantheism. I don’t wish to paraphrase Einstein’s words. I would like you to taste the sparking clear prose of the genius. Even in translation, the clarity of thought was awesome. When you read the fragments of the article that I took the time and trouble to type below, you would understand why I hold the views that Buddha and Christ were moralistic and expected their followers to have high morals and that Stalin and Mao were amoral, if not immoral. As I stated elsewhere, I don’t take a back seat to anybody when it comes to logical thinking. I take a special pride in my ability to sort out sophistry from genuine search for truth and understanding. As I stated yesterday in my latest email, I was surprised. Today, I felt worse. I was disappointed. Actually, I should not since I had seen signs of sophistry all along, but I refused to believe them. I was naïve. I believed in the nobility of men, of certain men, anyway. But I was wrong, as usual, in this belief of mine. I also wrote in one of my posts that one of my greatest pleasures in reading books is to encounter thoughts held by men of esteem that are similar to mine. That gives me a sense of validation and self-affirmation that I was not delusional of my thinking ability, not when it comes to literature, philosophy, religion, and politics. Anyway, it is high time to hear Einstein speak.

“Everything that the human race has done and thought is concerned with the satisfaction of deeply felt needs and the assuagement of pain. One has to keep this constantly in mind if one wishes to understand spiritual movements and their development. Feeling and longing are the motive force behind all human endeavor and human creation, in however exalted disguise the latter may present themselves to us….with primitive man it is above all fear that evokes religious notions—fear of hunger, wild beasts, sickness, death. Since at this stage of existence understanding of causal connections is usually poorly developed, the human mind creates illusory beings more or less analogous to itself on whose wills and actions these fearful happenings depend. Thus one tries to secure the favor of these being s by carrying out actions and offering sacrifices which, according to the tradition handed down generation to generation, propitiate them or make them well disposed toward a mortal. In this sense I am speaking of a religion of fear….the formation of a special priestly caste which sets itself up as a mediator between the people and the beings they fear, and erects a hegemony on this basis. In many cases a leader or ruler or a privileged class whose position rests on other factors combines priestly functions with its secular authority in order to make the latter more secure; or the political rulers and the priestly class make common cause in their own interests.

The social impulses are another source of the crystallization of religion. Fathers and mothers and the leaders of larger human communities are mortal and fallible. The desire for guidance, love, and support prompts men to form the social or moral conception of God. This is the God of Providence, who protects, disposes, rewards, and punishes; the god, who, according to the limits of the believer’s outlook, loves and cherishes the life of the tribe or of the human race, or even life itself; the comforter in sorrow and unsatisfied longing; he who preserves the souls of the dead. This is the social or moral conception of God.

The Jewish scriptures admirably illustrate the development from the religion of fear to moral religion, a development continued in the New Testament. The religions of all civilized peoples, especially the peoples of the Orient, are primarily moral religions….And yet, that primitive religions are based entirely on fear and the religions of civilized peoples purely on morality is a prejudice against which we must be on our guard. The truth is that all religions are a varying blend of both types, with this differentiation: that on the higher levels of social life the religion of morality predominates.

Common to all these types is the anthropomorphic character of their conception of God. In general, only individuals of exceptional endowments, and of exceptionally high-minded communities, rise to any considerable extent above this level. But there is a third stage of religious experience which belongs to all of them, even though it is rarely found in a pure form: I shall call it cosmic religious feeling. It is very difficult to elucidate this feeling to anyone who is entirely without it, especially as there is no anthropomorphic conception of God corresponding to it.

The individual feels the futility of human desires and aims and the sublimity and marvelous order which reveal themselves both in nature and in the world of thought….

The religious geniuses of all ages have been distinguished by this kind of religious feeling, which knows no dogma and no God conceived in man’s image; so that there can be no church whose central teachings are based on it. Hence it is precisely among the heretics of every age that we find men who were filled with this highest kind of religious feeling and were in many cases regarded by their contemporaries as atheists, sometimes also as saints. Looked at in this light, men like Democritus, Francis of Assisi, and Spinoza are closely akin to one another.

How can cosmic religious feeling be communicated from one person to another, if it can give rise to no definite notion of a God and no theology? In my view, it is the most important of art and science to awaken this feeling and keep it alive in those who are receptive to it…

A man’s ethical behavior should be based effectually on sympathy, education, and social ties and needs; no religious basis is necessary. Man would indeed be in a poor way if he had to be restrained by fear of punishment and hope of reward after death.

It is therefore to see why the churches have always fought science and persecuted its devotees….

A contemporary has said, not unjustly, that in this materialistic age of ours the serious scientific workers are the only profoundly religious people.”

Wissai
June 14, 2009