Monday, March 07, 2005

More from the Conversations with Stagehands files. We've veered off into religion.
I'm agnostic. I really don't know what the definition of spiritual is. I know it's big. It would include wiccans, nature worship, pagans, and even Buddhists, who really don't believe in God. I think in many ways an atheist could be considered spiritual, since they believe in the non-existence of God. As my daughter Jasmine told me when she was 6:
"Daddy, you can't be an atheist, you don't have any faith."
I guess that's why I'm not sure if I could be called spiritual, since I'm very scientific, really. If I don't know something, I don't want to pretend I do, or convince myself to have some revelation so I can stop drinking or whatever. The realizations I've come to, the mistakes I've made, the good I've done are all because of me. That's all I can really know. So, I'm not going to try to theorize about some other explanation for That Which I See.

My apologies to Bertrand Russell and my symbolic logic professor.
I always remember this from Russell:
"I wish to propose for the reader's favourable consideration a doctrine which may, I fear, appear wildly paradoxical and subversive. The doctrine in question is this: that it is undesirable to believe a proposition when there is no ground whatever for supposing it true."

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