Part IX: Answering Eternalist objections to the Complete Stance

Faith, Doubt and Anti-Metanoia series, Part IX. For context, start at the introduction.

I was a Christian but then I stopped being one (Part I); way more on that in Parts II through V. I found meaningness.com (summarized in Part VI) which reformed how I process meaning. Christianity was a big part of my identity, so I had to gain new ways of seeing my identity (Part VII). I had some really bad trouble along the way when I had a brush with nihilism (maybe you can avoid that, see part VII).

I'm still getting used to my new ways of interacting with meaning and on the surface the new ways can seem worse. This post attempts to defend of my new approach (called the Complete Stance) against three possible objections that could come from someone immersed in a belief system similar to what I once held (Eternalism):

• The first objection is "where do meanings come from?", 
• the second is about how to build and sustain community and 
• the third is about staying positive in the face of nebulosity.

tl;dr:

1. The origins of meanings are often obscure, but that doesn't invalidate the meanings themselves.
2. Community is harder to build without the artificially fixed meanings of Eternalism, but it's still possible.
3. Meaning is real even if it's nebulous, so cheer up. Take care of your self and realize that other metaphysical approaches face other difficulties.

Objections beyond these are possible, of course. As I mentioned in Part VII, my zeal for defending my ideas is a lot lower than it has been in the past, but I still find some worth in clarifying my own thinking. However, I’m not specifically trying to convince anyone who doesn’t already agree with me. Also, I'm still learning, so this is an essay also in the sense of being an "experimental trial" by a total amateur. Que sçay-je? Previous posts in this series are like canon shots to the middle of the hull, full of bluster and confidence, but this one is tentative and disquiet like dismantling an atomic bomb. (And without Bono's help.)

Photograph of a model of the Trinity Gadget (part of an atomic bomb) by Marcin Wichary, used under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.

In this post, I assume familiarity with terms from meaningness.com, especially:

• "Eternalism" describes the metaphysical error of considering meaning to be absolutely definite and eternally fixed. Examples of Eternalist systems include certain flavors of Christianity, Islam and Communism.
• "An Eternalist" is someone who follows an Eteralist system. For example, me in 2010.
• The Complete Stance is the position of embracing meaning as being both patterned and nebulous. This requires rejecting both Eternalism (that meaning is fixed and real) and nihilism (that fixed meaning cannot be real). Pattern and nebulousity are blended and fused together, like hills that flow and clouds caught in a photograph.

Beauty in the nebulous: clouds over ESO’s La Silla Observatory. Photograph by A. Fitzsimmons, courtesy of ESO, used under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license.  The clouds are obviously nebulous, but for short time periods, they appear fixed. The hills are obviously fixed, but over long time periods, they morph, crumble and appear nebulous. 

Getting comfortable accepting meanings without knowing all the ‘whys’

One class of objection to the Complete Stance, from the Eternalist perspective, is to ask where certain meanings come from, usually starting with morality. This section discusses such objections. 

I thought that Christianity owned morality. I gave an example in Part I of a metal singer who lost his moral compass when he lost his faith and he tried to hire someone to kill his wife. His understanding of morality was subject to his Christianity. Having someone drifting through society without any morality is a big problem! So an Eternalist should ask serious questions of anyone who denies that Eternalist's system's very foundation of morality itself: "If you reject God and the Bible, then what's stopping you from doing whatever you want?" 

But it's not just morality – I thought that Christianity owned all meaning, hence the fear that nihilism is the only alternative. Here’s a quote from Chapman’s page on No Eternal Meaning:  “…that gloomy guff about the end of time is verbatim from perhaps the greatest nihilist manifesto ever written, by William Lane Craig.” The hairs on the back of my neck stood on end when I read that, because William Lane Craig is a Christian apologist and philosopher. When I was a Christian, I was also an unwitting nihilist apologist, if only to myself.

The threat of nihilism means that removing the Eternalist system puts the existence of all meanings at risk. The first step in the dance of dodging nihilism is to accept that many meanings still exist despite the absence of the Eternalist system. By studying meaningness.com, I see the obvious patterned-but-nebulous meanings, if I can stop myself from actively engaging in nihilism. Suppose such a line of argument: the existence of meaning is as plain as the nose on one's own face. I think we can still genuinely ask: when meanings don’t come from a favored Eternalist system, where do they come from? An Eternalist would identify this question as a weakness of the path of the Complete Stance. 

Eternalism enforces a Procrustean simplification of the origins of meaning, so it shouldn’t come as a surprise that a more accurate view of the origins of meaning would be more complicated, more confusing, less pithy and significantly less catchy. Instead of finding a skeleton key that explains all meanings, we struggle with long and complicated explanations for the origins of each particular meaning. Many meanings have obscure origins. Some meanings emerged in the evolution of human biology or culture. For example, maybe we came to value moral behavior because of group selection pressure. But we didn’t somehow evolve an accurate philosophical justification for morality — all we got was a tendency toward supernatural religion! Probing the origins of meanings is useful and creating new theories of their origins can enrich those meanings. For example, creating a new ethical framework can sometimes be useful.

In the end, we have to be willing to accept a degree of nebulousness in the origins and justifications of meanings. We can make a lot of progress with evolutionary or memetic arguments and analysis specific to a particular domain of meaning, but we won’t (and can’t expect to) find a final and definite answer. If we did seem to find a final answer, then we probably accidentally slid into Eternalism. That Eternalism could be a kind that we can readily identify ourselves, a kind that we don’t know ourselves but is actually old or perhaps we invented a new kind of Eternalism that was previously unknown. (I suppose Karl Marx is an example of someone who synthesized a new form of Eternalism. Sorry, world.) So, for the adherent of the Complete Stance, we have to grant meanings without always knowing the “why” behind each meaning. 

We also find the same depth of mystery in physics. Why is there gravity? Why does the strong nuclear force have 3 color charges while electromagnetism has only 2 polarities? Why did the universe begin? Physicists may make progress on some of these questions or even bring them to tidy conclusions. But for now, we accept the content of physics (at least tentatively) without knowing all the whys. In the same way that we can take physics and make use of it in engineering, despite the missing ‘whys,’ we can take meaning and make use of it in engaging with our community and living a full life. Existence is independent of justification. Wikipedia tells me that there are several competing theories for the origin of Earth’s moon. We can't say exactly why the moon is there, but it’s definitely there! The origins and justification for morality may be obscure, but that doesn’t mean that we have to reject morality. Similar reasoning applies for meanings other than morality.

This conclusion will not be satisfactory to the Eternalist. The Complete Stance does not reclaim meaning in the same shape that the Eternalist seeks. To extend the shape analogy, if you are looking for a living creature, actually a mastodon, and I present you with an elephant, saying “here it is,” then in some ways, you would be right to object that I have not found you a mastodon. But the original question contains a mistaken assumption. The proposed answer is the right answer to the projection of the original question onto the space of actually answerable questions. The Eternalist asks “Without my Eternalist System, where do meanings come from?” and she or he means absolute, eternal meanings (a living mastodon), but the answer is of nebulous-plus-patterned meanings (the elephant).

Stealthy elephant, photograph by Byrdyak, used under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.

Missing community

One key dimension of meaning is creating and reinforcing community. Eternalism is a fantastic tool for forging community; perhaps that could be viewed as Eternalism's evolutionary 'purpose.' The cost of minimizing group membership / identity beliefs (refer Part VII) is that you miss out on being a member of a fanatically well-knit group! Joining a church is to gain community the fast way. Actually, that’s a big part of why I do go to church. But I will never completely belong inside the doors of a church because I fail to make the group membership assertions that contravene reason. When I was a Christian, it seemed like Atheism was “the opposing team.” But now that I am no longer a Christian, it’s definitely not the case that I’ve joined a team. And I’m not particularly against Christianity now; publishing this series is the high water mark of my opposition. Being a Christian is like being part of a perfect silicon crystal lattice, but as “not a Christian,” I’m a helium atom floating by myself through the void, unconnected to all the other helium atom atheist/agnostics out there.

Photograph of a silicon crystal by Simon Fraser University Public Affairs and Media Relations, used under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.

Away from the roaring hot bonfire of Eternalist Community, one has to make do with communities that are linked together with weaker, less intoxicating meanings. I continue to get wonderful value from being a member of my extended family and from being a husband and a father. I have befriended people through various avenues. I also get meaning from my work, where I am an employee and a shareholder in a publicly traded, limited liability company. My company successfully coerces some Eternalist-style meanings but I can reasonably easily cut through those façades and focus on doing practical work that benefits customers. I’m a citizen of a country. That country has some amazing successful Eternalist mythology but I can still participate by following the laws, paying my taxes and receiving the benefits of peace and infrastructure that the government supplies. In the end, I have community in many different forms. 

One key is to accept community without requiring agreement. The Catholic Church “excommunicates” people who deny the tenets of the faith, that is, they deny that person communion, which is not only withholding the sacrement, it’s excluding them from the community. I do exactly the opposite: I offer bread and friendship to those who whole-heartedly disagree with me. By escaping the bind of basing community on shared assertions, I can refocus on the practical problem of making sure that I have and supply social support. I do not require or expect my friends to validate my beliefs with their agreement.

I haven't yet found a community specifically designed to help stabilize the Complete Stance, except perhaps Evolving Ground. I'm investigating Evolving Ground, but for me it has the significant downside of being Buddhist, at least ostensibly. The phrase "Complete Stance" was only recently invented, so perhaps some organizations do similar things under a different banner.

Emotional dynamics of facing nebulosity

It’s one thing to theoretically embrace the nebulous side of meaning, but it’s another to feel ok about it. Maintaining a cheerful outlook is important. In some ways, living out the Complete Stance is like balancing on a fence, teetering on the edges of both Eternalism and nihilism. Accidental momentary dips on the nihilist side are going to happen, especially for the inexperienced. What if the truth of reality was an unfit meme (in the original sense of the word)? Living outside Eternalism can be bad for you; it certainly is in those times and places where you get beheaded for being an apostate or burned at the stake for heresy. But even in a liberal democracy, living with one’s eyes really open to the nebulous nature of meaning can put one in friction with others and even one’s self.

For me, maintaining the Complete Stance takes deliberate, conscious effort and it’s an uphill emotional battle. Eternalism just feels so damn good. I really want everything in life to be coherent and be perfectly and completely meaningful. It took me decades to fully accept that "all" in natural language doesn't mean the same thing as universal qualification in mathematics. In addition to living most of my adult life inside an Eternalist system, I also unconsciously aimed my career away from the nebulous. I studied electrical engineering and got a job in software. With engineering and computers, I tried to hide from the nebulosity. Bits are either zero or one, no ambiguity. (It's obvious in hindsight, but nebulosity is still definitely present! People are involved and even individual bits in memory can accidentally switch state from cosmic rays.)

How can one gather the emotional energy required to stabilize the Complete Stance on an ongoing basis? Knowing on an intellectual level that meaning exists without Eternalism helps. When one rejects the phony absolute meanings of Eternalism, there can be a loss of comfort along with the loss of certainty. However, because non-absolute meanings really do exist, we can reap their emotional benefits. 

Body and mind self-care are both deeply important, but that's true regardless of one's metaphysical outlook. Here are a few suggestions based on my own self-care practices: 

• Exercise
• Prioritize sleep
• Be social
• Be grateful
• Meditate

If the practical problems with your self were better solved, wouldn't that make the metaphysical concerns easier to bear, or maybe even disappear entirely? I guess it works both ways: if one can figure out how to chill out about the metaphysical worries, then there's more mental space to deal with whatever else is happening in one's life. Ultimately, it makes sense to take a multi-pronged approach to feeling better: accept meaning as real and go for a long run (one example).

Actually, the Complete Stance offers me some emotional benefits of its own. I don't need to constantly hold the pose of defending my Eternalist system. For most of the time I was an Eternalist, I wasn't holding a defensive posture, because I didn't feel like my system was under attack. But once doubts in Christianity set in, it was work to resist them. Now, I'm free to relax: Meaning isn't going to fall apart if I stop trying to hold it together. Being free of my Eternalist Christianity lets me sample the smorgasbord of the world's ideas and techniques without concern for their religious provenance. For example, I can do yoga as exercise without feeling threatened by some latent Hinduism. Furthermore, from an emotionally well-defended adoption of the Complete Stance, one can use aspects of both nihilism and Eternalism as cute play things. For example, in music, I enjoy bands like Nine Inch Nails and Slipknot that often put on nihilist-type poses, and also Christian bands that obviously raise an Eternalist flag.

In order to further dismantle my aversion to nebulosity, I ask myself: when does nebulosity work against me? And when does nebulosity work for me? The answer to the first question seems more obvious: I feel like nebulosity works against me pretty much all the time. My wife says I don't like it. Maybe the second question is a more interesting approach. Here's one approach: I realized that every day, the patterns of meaning in my life fade out into nebulosity and then disappear completely – in sleep! Dreams are an inversion of the usual patterns of waking thought, sort of trading nebulosity for pattern and vice versa. Dreamless sleep is a kind of nirvana, free from any entanglement with meaning. But not exactly, because one wakes up again and finds the body healed and the head clear – pattern hiding inside the nebulosity. There are many other instances where the nebulous is aligned with my own interests, like when other people understand me when I grunt and gesture vaguely. Perhaps it's also useful to invert the search and try to align my interests with the forces of nebulosity that exist in the world, riding the flow of meaning and laughing at the thrilling turbulent rapids of the vague.

Photograph of white water on the Cheakamus River by Ruth Hartnup, used under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.

Conclusion

It’s work to continually reject Eternalism and nihilism, at least for me. Part of that work is to continually accept meanings and to work with meaning making, including probing into the origins of those meanings. One cannot expect definite answers of the same form as in Eternalist systems. Another part of the work is to build and maintain community. Staying happy while staring at the unsatisfactory ambiguous confusing emptiness of reality is also a job unto itself. But one cannot expect the paths of truth and of ease to intrinsically coincide.

It might be work to do meaning in better ways, but the reward is to live veridically, in harmony with reality instead of insisting that my cute map is identical to the dirty ground. 

The Psalter world map, complete with dragon locations. Public domain.

My hope is that practice will improve my techniques of working with meaning and that the obstacles will feel less daunting in time. In the ideal case, I will look back on this blog post and cringe at how ham-handedly I distorted this subject matter. Mai j'ai essayé.

Part VIII: Dodging nihilism better

Faith, Doubt and Anti-Metanoia series, Part VIII. For context, start at the introduction. In this post, I assume familiarity with a number terms from meaningness.com. Check out Part VI where I summarize meaningness.com, and, even better, read meaningness.com yourself.

The Nihilist by Paul Merwart [public domain].

This series has a lot on rejecting Christianity. My Christianity carried a Trojan horse dead man's switch nihilism. For this post, I adopt David Chapman's definition of nihilism:

Nihilism holds that there is no meaning or value anywhere. Questions about purpose, ethics, and sacredness are unanswerable because they are meaningless. You might as well ask about the sleep habits of colorless green ideas as about the meaning of life.

(As usual, Wikipedia is also a great source.)

This post speculates on how to jointly reject Christianity and nihilism, and whether or not the nihilistic angst can be avoided. Some of the pain was intrinsic to losing my religion specifically and would have been there even if I hadn’t had a close brush with nihilism. But nihilism was the existential threat. While Eternalist Christianity can be highly functional (perhaps even adaptive!), nihilism is really bad. Therefore, it’s more important to reject nihilism than it is to reject Christianity.

Not every Christian has a nihilistic tendency hiding inside of them. If you don't see nihilism as the "other option," that's great! You're ahead of where I was.

Artfully dodging nihilism is mostly a case of not actively flinging it upon oneself. For me, and I think a lot of Christians, nihilism grew up inside my own heart as the vengeful inverted image of Christianity and the only other logical option. (Theologian William Lane Craig has this view of nihilism too.) So after rejecting Christianity, I had to also reject nihilism. A better way to lose one’s faith would be to reject nihilism first and then reject Eternalism, but I’m not really sure how one could cause this set of belief-state transitions. It must be possible for some people, but for me, I don’t see how it could have worked. 

Consider two possible paths through belief-space:

Belief Trajectory 1, the general path I followed

1. Christianity is true, therefore nihilism is false. (Hidden assumption: meaning is non-nebulous.)
2. Christianity is false because too many statements in Christianity are not well supported by evidence. Nihilism must be true by process of elimination. (Hidden assumption: meaning is non-nebulous.)
3. Nihilistic angst.
4. Christianity and nihilism are both false, because meaning does have nebulous character.  

Belief Trajectory 2, a hypothetical path

1. Christianity is true, therefore nihilism is false.  (Hidden assumption: meaning is non-nebulous.)
2. Christianity is true. Nihilism is false because meaning does have nebulous character. 
3. Oops, the nebulous nature of meaning threatens Christianity!

One could hope that one’s Christianity gradually becomes more weakly held and less intimately connected to one’s identity, so that the nebulous nature of meaning can creep in without coming into a head-on collision with the Christian Eternalism. In fact, some degree of realization of the nebulous nature of meaning did grow in my mind before I rejected Christianity. That germ of realization grew into an escape hatch from the deep-space vacuum of nihilism. Chapman’s somewhat bizarre assertion “You are, therefore, always already implicitly in the complete stance,” rings true to me.

My tour through nihilism was, in hindsight, short. It only lasted a few months. Therapy and a supportive environment were essential. In my heart, I also credit meaningness.com and thank David Chapman. His words accelerated my recovery, but I might have made it through anyway. However, I don’t see my dodge of nihilism as having been a 100% certainty. Ultimate failure was possible. 

The path through nihilistic angst is common and it’s reasonable to expect that a lot of people will have to walk through the valley of the shadow of the meaningless. We on the sidelines can help in two ways: by expounding the obviousness and immediate use of meaning (as Chapman does) and also by providing better symptomatic treatment for the pain, the angst and the depression. As a culture, we need to do better with our mental health. A simple step that we can all take is to start talking about our own mental health issues more openly. 

Perhaps Belief Trajectory 2 is not so unreasonable or improbable. A person could reject Christianity on the grounds of having embraced the nebulous nature of meaning directly, and simultaneously reject Christianity and nihilism. The person would have to reject the false dichotomy between Eternalism and nihilism before rejecting Eternalism. Effectively, that person would have to learn of the third option of the Complete Stance (either in the form presented by meaningness.com or any other). This is not the path I took, so I am less competent to be a guide along that path, but given the upside of avoiding a period of depression, it is the path that I would recommend. This blog post series describes my own path, and I really hope that the description is taken as a prescription. 

In conclusion, yes, leave your eternalist system. But first, reject nihilism. Fully embrace the true richness of meaning, the intrinsic value of life in general and your life specifically. It’s not complicated: a full belly is better than starving, life is better than no life and the beauty of humanity comes from the sum of its parts — including you. From a certain vantage point, the pervasiveness of meaning is obvious. Consider this tiny example: if you don’t accept the existence of meaning, then how are you reading these words?

Part VII: My new identity

Faith, Doubt and Anti-Metanoia series, Part VII. For context, start at the introduction.

In Part I, I mentioned about how I saw a counselor in 2016 and explained to him about the loss of my Christian faith. Removing Christianity seemed to remove my identity. The counselor said that he was excited for me, because I would get a new identity. Indeed, Christianity had a strong grip on my identity. In some sense, the counselor was right: I had a significant shift in the way I saw myself, but he was also wrong: the substance of my identity was mostly unchanged. In this post, I discuss how my new identity is largely the same as my old identity. 

Carina Nebula by Harel Boren, used under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. I now accept the nebulous nature of meaning. This amazing picture reminds me that the nebulous is beautiful. 

Christianity had made a near-total claim on my identity. Furthermore, it made a systematic claim on my identity, such that other aspects of my identity were defined in terms of Christianity. To give but one example of many, I was a Christian husband. My marriage was literally defined in Christian terms. It seemed sensible to wonder who I was if the Christian part were subtracted. The nihilist answer is that I was no one, but fortunately that answer doesn’t survive even a modest degree of sober, well-informed scrutiny. 

From one identity, mostly back to the same

The actual answer to who I have become is the most boring one: I’m the same person as before, just not a Christian. There are confusing philosophical problems around the continuity of the self but we can side-step those by accepting the nebulous nature of identity. I often take mental refuge in the realization that there is no "true self." 

To give a bit more detail on the “new” me: I am still husband to the same woman, I am still father to the same children, I still play the same electric guitars, I still work for the same company, I still have the same last name and the same extended family, I still have the same digital identities on various websites, I am still the same height, my eyes are the same color, my body has aged a bit but that was going to happen anyway, I still have that cluster of small congenital hemangiomas on my right wrist, etc. 

The big realization is that the all-encompassing system (Christianity) doesn’t support the ancillary meanings (marriage, family, music, work, etc.) — actually it’s the other way around! Christianity presses meanings into its service, so that Christians see Christianity as total. But hear me, Christian, actually you are a person, with an identity of unbounded richness and complexity! When I took away the Christianity, I only took away a single part. Most of my identity remains unchanged.

Increased tolerance for contradiction

My Christianity was a grand system of meaning that deliberately and consciously forced meanings to be more consistent with each other. I had a low tolerance for contradiction and a low tolerance for what David Chapman calls “nebulousity.” Individual meanings had to be clear, the connections between meanings had to work well and the entire system tried to be consistent. As seen in “Nash and the Strawman,” I did not require absolute consistency, but consistency was definitely strongly favored. 

I still value consistency a lot, but removing the grand system has significantly reduced my drive to eliminate inconsistencies. Equally, I’ve gotten more comfortable with the nebulous nature of meanings. People are contradictory and inconsistent. It’s ok for me to be contradictory and inconsistent, too, sometimes. And the nebulous is ok — actually it’s beautiful. 

Part of this increased tolerance for fuzz and error is because philosophical and spiritual topics are now a lot less important to me. I don’t have a system as my identity. I don’t go around calling myself a follower of the meaningness.com method of David Chapman, which I summarized in Part VI. (What would that be, a “Chapmanian”?) And that’s because I’m not. I don’t have a system, not even “the system of meaningness.com.” And I don’t need to defend my ideas so ardently any more. I’ve tried to reach the lowest possible potential energy state for my beliefs and now I don’t fear falling further. Prove that I’m wrong and, hopefully, I’ll shrug, laugh and correct myself. Practically, I probably don’t react quite so well, because I’m human. I still repeat my mistake of fusing my identity with my beliefs, but I’m only going to do that in comparatively tiny ways. In the words of The Who, I “won’t get fooled again.”

One could see my newly-failed ardor for "the truth" as evidence of apathy. Maybe it is, but I like to think that it’s a sign that I’m starting to take a meta-systematic approach. Systematic thinking is an enormously useful skill and my attacks on Eternalism shouldn’t be perceived as downplaying the importance of systems. But no one system fits every situation, so I think it’s better to spend energy moving between systems rather than trying to weld all the systems together and smooth over all their differences. The way forward is to use meanings rather than to obsess over them. I ought to refocus on practical problems instead of crashing my head against the dead stone wall called “philosophy.”

The living reverberation of my old Christianity

Defining myself by disagreement with Christianity isn’t actually a goal (in spite of this whole series). My wife is a Christian. I go to church, celebrate Christmas and I join in praying. In a definite cultural sense, I still am Christian. (Imprinted cultural identity is just that strong!) Mostly, I do Christian activities to support my wife and kids. But going to church is also a good way to make friends.

My marriage is very important to me. I love my wife and she’s a Christian, so I walk the line of living in a way that’s respectful to her beliefs. Everyone is on a path of learning and knowledge is so high-dimensional that no one can be in the same state of knowledge as anyone else. Each of us has to learn to cooperate with people who think in different ways and who hold different beliefs. It helps that my no-religion is one that does not seek to proselytize. 

After a period of thinking, I realized that life is too short for me to figure out morality again. Furthermore, while there are several different ethical theories and each has slightly different implications and each produces different answers under extraordinary conditions, generally, I find that morality is just one thing. Everyone thinks you shouldn’t murder people or steal their stuff. Kant’s categorical imperative is a re-phrasing of the Golden Rule. So, as a general rule, I stick with the ethical system that I know from Christianity. Certainly, I don’t hold myself to all the rules in the Bible, for example, the rule against idolatry is a little nonsensical for a person who doesn’t believe in God. And I am not hesitant to accept moral developments that are more recent than the 1st century AD, for example, feminism, universal egalitarianism, and the idea of accepting everyone in the world as my “neighbor” in the parable of the Good Samaritan from Luke 10:25-37.

Some beliefs are about the practical object world: gravity, keeping a job, cooking breakfast, etc. Other examples of group membership statements could include: believing in God, that gun control is bad, that Muhammad designated Ali ibn Abi Talib as his successor, etc. Group membership beliefs are parts of a person’s identity, but practical beliefs aren’t. In “Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind,” Yuval Noah Harari calls socially constructed belief systems “myths” and says that they are required for humans to organize themselves into large groups. My synthesis is that Harari's work implies that we cannot remove all group-membership beliefs. On the other hand, Steven Pinker in “Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters” says that we can eliminate the realm of mythology, but I think his definition of mythology is smaller than Harari’s. (Also, Pinker ignores some of his own socially-constructed identity-beliefs.) 

I aim to minimize my identity-beliefs, an idea from Paul Graham: “If people can't think clearly about anything that has become part of their identity, then all other things being equal, the best plan is to let as few things into your identity as possible.”  For example, if I accepted “New Atheism,” (which, in 2022, is already an old idea!), then in many ways I would be trying to replace one tribal identity with another. I may still have some group identity beliefs, but while I may be outwardly “Christian” in many ways, I do not accept the Christian group membership beliefs.

Conclusion

I stopped being a Christian. Not much else about me changed. But the process of leaving Christianity caused significant trauma at the time and the question of what that meant for my identity was pressing. Fortunately, I was able to detangle the rest of myself from the grip of my former systematic Christianity. In Part VIII, I’ll expand on how nihilism appeared in the crater of my exploded Christianity, and I speculate on how I could have avoided the pain that nihilism caused. 

In hindsight, I wonder what the counselor could have said that would have been more helpful. Maybe he should have said: “I’m excited for you because you’ll be the same person as before, just not a Christian.” On the other hand, he might have said something like that, and I forgot because it’s a less catchy meme. Sometimes the truth is like that. 

Intermezzo: Fast forward to 2022

Faith, Doubt and Anti-Metanoia series, a brief intermission. This post parallels the passage of time between when I wrote most of the material in Parts I-VI (2015-16) and when I wrote Parts VII-X (2021-22). Here's a link to the series introduction.

“Wanderer above the Sea of Fog” by Caspar David Friedrich. (This image is in the public domain.)

In Part I, I told the story of my Christian faith-to-no-Christian faith journey. Part II is my argument against absolute Biblical authority. Part III presents summaries of four books and one essay that fed into my thinking during my period of doubt and seeking. In Part IV, I outline some early Christian writing by summarizing Bart Ehrman’s book “Lost Scriptures: Books that Did Not Make It into the New Testament.” Then I explored the question of which books actually did end up being the Bible, in Part V, by summarizing three scholarly books on the subject. Part V finds that the support for the Biblical canon is less than absolutely solid; that is one way to see that the Eternalist system of Evangelical Christianity is build on a foundation of unjustified dogma, rather than reason.

After too much material on the Bible, Part VI presents a summary of meaningness.com, moving on to the post-Christian part of my journey. Certainly, removing Christianity left a void in my life. But the question of “what to replace Christianity with?” turned out to be badly formed. I think of meaningness.com as a catalyst for my realizing that Christianity needs no direct replacement in my life. It’s not that I had the wrong system, it’s that no system could ever be the perfect one or even the right one. 

The first six posts in this series were drafted in previous years, much of it during a transitional period. Now, in 2021-2022, I have a modicum of hindsight and the benefit of having worked through some of the associated emotional problems. The upcoming posts are my thinking on these questions: 

• After leaving Christianity, where did I land? In my story of Part I, I briefly mentioned the counselor who was excited for me because I would get a new identity. This is addressed in Part VII “My new identity.”
• How could I have made my journey out of Christianity easier? In particular, I’m interested in how I could have avoided the problems caused by passing through nihilism. I discuss more in Part VIII “Dodging nihilism better.”
• What new problems of meaning do I now face and how do I address them? This is the topic of Part IX “Answering Eternalist objections to the Complete Stance.”
• What do I see as the next steps for meaning in my life and in the world? Addressed in Part X “Next steps in meaning-space.”

But before you read the next posts in this series, I recommend that you read these pages by David Chapman: 

• https://meaningness.com/eternalist-systems 
• https://meaningness.com/vaster-than-ideology 
• https://vividness.live/developing-ethical-social-and-cognitive-competence

Part VI: On Meaningness

Faith, Doubt and Anti-Metanoia series, part VI

For context, start at the introduction. I started writing this summary in 2016.

Photograph of David Chapman (used with his permission).

In meaningness.com, David Chapman presents a life philosophy that intends to be practically useful. The essential idea is that meaning is both “patterned” and “nebulous.” Chapman argues that meaning is circumstantially and collaboratively created, rather than either being eternally present and fixed or being completely nonexistent. The titular coinage, “meaningness,” is designed to evoke the notion that the boundaries of meaning are blurry. Meaningness purports to offer “Better ways of thinking, feeling, and acting—around problems of meaning and meaninglessness; self and society; ethics, purpose, and value.”

I suggest that you visit meaningness.com and read everything there. Each of Chapman’s words is worth fifty of mine. I credit Chapman in part for saving my life (on the order of a decade worth of rescue) from the bleak spectre of abysmal nihilism. Part I explains more of my personal story. The upcoming posts in this blog series, Parts VII through X, will build on the ideas of meaningness.com.

Chapman calls the application of a specific approach to meaning as a ‘stance.’ For example, “Eternalism is the stance that everything has a fixed, clear-cut meaning,” and the opposing stance, “Nihilism[,] says that nothing really means anything.” Chapman claims that both Eternalism and Nihilism make the same metaphysical error of considering that “real” meaning is always fixed. Furthermore, Chapman claims that the “Complete” stance corrects that shared error by recognizing that meaning is nebulous. Meaningness expounds on the concept of a stance and discusses a range of stances that relate to unity & diversity, self, purpose, personal value, ethics and other topics. Finally, Chapman discusses the history of meaningness and how Western society has progressed from a ‘choiceless’ (pre-modern) approach to meaning, through a ‘systematic’ (modern) approach to meaning and now has entered a period of atomized meaning (post-modernity).

I find it ironic that one main idea of meaningness.com is our failure to recognize the nebulousness of meaning, but that the whole website is devoted to describing idealized categories. But I'm also highly grateful, because I'm a category junky. I wonder if some people who use non-category-based thinking approaches have direct and intuitive understanding of the dual nebulous and patterned nature of meaning. On the other hand, the medium is a “hyper text book” that is being gradually written over years while simultaneously in the public view. As a recovering Eternalist, I would have preferred a book with a front and a back cover, but I acknowledge the irony in such a preference. Because Chapman published some parts before the whole work was done, I was able to read important parts at a critical juncture in my life.

Accepting the nebulous nature of meaning is a feasible path around the infinite quagmire of reasoning via formal logic from the ground up. Macroscopic human life must be guided by well-chosen heuristics rather than an all-encompassing system built only from physical laws and the initial condition of the universe. Even the basic laws of physics have so far been insufficient to derive what we now know of chemistry. (For more about traversing levels of complexity, including physics-to-chemistry, see “The Quark and the Jaguar: Adventures in the simple and the complex” by Murray Gell-Mann.) Descartes’ “I think, therefore I am” is not the right starting point; a formal logic system will not get us to what to feed our guests for dinner (and Gödel's incompleteness theorem is not the limiting factor). The difficulty with such foundationalism is not "merely" a practical problem; reality is fundamentally not amenable to such an approach.

Brief notes on specific parts

• Sometimes meaningness.com says that ideas are 'obvious,’ but I think the obviousness of an idea is actually quite subjective.
• I believe that the author's main idea is useful to people who are ostensibly inside 'eternalist systems' such as Christianity, because stances are actually continuous and many people who carry the "Christian" label actually think and act according to stances that are partially (and even wholly) complete. (Chapman realizes this.)
• Existentialism is wrong in the sense that meaning is not personal. Meaning is social. 
• One way to see aspects of the complete stance is to look at history and see how the meanings of certain things have changed. This illustrates how meaning is both existent & dynamic and might help one avoid fixating or denying meaning. However, it's difficult not to impose one's current meanings on the past if one adopts an Eternalist stance. 
• Re: https://meaningness.com/representational-theory-of-mind I don't get what he's saying here or perhaps I'm not convinced.
• Christianity (in my old form) uses a blend of total responsibility and victim thinking in the concepts of sin and redemption. 
• Streaming is the atomization of the meaning found in music.
• Re: https://metarationality.com/meta-rationality-curriculum Hypothesis: "Agile" software development is useful when it's applied as a Level 5 meta-systematic practice, but quickly breaks down when people try to interpret and apply "agile" as a Level 4 system. Or even a Level 3 system: “Agile is what my buddies do.” (This page used to be on the meaningness.com domain, but has since moved.)
• I think Richard Hamming's "The Art of Doing Science and Engineering" has meta-systematic reasoning, at least for technical matters.

Hit parade of quotes

"Runs of unexpected good or bad luck trigger the eternalist stance automatically."

"Discovering that you have been betrayed by eternalism, and have lost out on the promises it made, is a horrendous emotional blow."

"Vajrayanists will recognize these—along with “wondrous, delicious, and vivid”—as structural equivalents of “coemergent emptiness, bliss, and clarity,” respectively."

"With the countercultures having passed, there is room for the fluid mode to reclaim a relativized, non-foundational, pragmatic rationality."

"'How do we rescue meaning from nihilistic atomization?' is a more urgent question than whether God exists. Scriptural literalism has definitively failed." (This blog post series is yet another too-little too-late exposition on the definite failure of Scriptural literalism.)

"The atomized mode generates paranoia, because without the systematic mode’s ‘therefores,’ its structure of justification, there are no memetic defenses against bad ideas."

"But at some point you realize that all principles are somewhat arbitrary or relative. There is no ultimately true principle on which a correct system can be built. It’s not just that we don’t yet know what the absolute truth is; it is that there cannot be one. All systems come to seem inherently empty." Bold font is mine. See also “Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind” by Yuval Noah Harari.

“There can be no systematic ‘scientific method.’”

"When it’s obviously impossible to form a systematic self, the task is to surf your own incoherence. Increasingly, this is a practical problem, not an existential threat." This seems to relate to my Nash and the Strawman essay in the following ways: I was mistaken to think that a foundationalist philosophy was desirable, right or even possible. I was right that "Maybe we don't have enough time to eliminate insignificant inconsistencies from our worldview", but maybe I was wrong about both the quantity of inconsistency that one has to tolerate and the general quality of having abundant comparable propositions. Consistency is the exception. Inconsistency is much more common, but fuzzy vagueness is the widespread rule.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to David Chapman for reading a draft of this post.