I have lately become more and more aware that I can not simply write and express my self in finnish. On the one hand if I want my thoughts to be heard they must be told in a language that most of the modern world understands. On the other hand I do not want to isolate myself from my american heritage and want also my relatives to understand what I feel, think and who I am. My english isn't perfect but I'm sure that most of it will be understood. But to the issue that I've been thinking about.
Lately I have written a couple of posts about religion and meaning. In general during the last year I believe I have "revolutionized" my way of presieving religion and human activity. Only until lately, however, I have been able to express my thoughts in a clearer way. In the center of this new attitude to reality is the word "meaning", Bedeutung in German and merkitys in finnish. The thought I have had is that behind every person is a certain universal understanding and system of meanings. The ongly difference between people is that these meanings are valued in a different manner and they express these meanings in a different way. By studying different intellectual structures (such has religions, philosophies etc) we may find the underlying meanings that are universal. Now I'm aware that what I claim is quite unusual and critizisable but let me show how it works in practise.
We shall first illuminate what I mean by these meanings and how they can be seen as underlying some human activity. Then I shall show that at least in some cases these meanings seem to be universal or at least shared by several people. In the end I will describe how this attitude towards reality will give help us to understand phenomena in the world.
Let us take beliefs relating to death. Christians believe that after death one will be resurrected and live for an eternity in either heaven or hell (even though the existance of the latter may be disputed by some christians). In Islam a similar attitude is maintained. In Judaism one can see (at least) two different views, depending on wheather one emphasizes the biblical record or later tradition. The biblical tradition seems to promote a view (though not uniformly) that after death most people (except few exceptions such as Elija and Elisa) will after death move to a place of the dead (not heaven or hell) where they will remain for an eternity.
As it is well known the far eastern religions maintain that after death one will live another life and another until one will acheave mocksa or an appifany of some kind and go to nirvana. These religions maintain also that all life is the same and after death one will live again in a possible another form, such as a cow or flea. An atheistic attitude towards death would be that the bodily functions that support life in a human being will simple cease and this will lead to a slow prosess of disintegration caused because of the body losing it's capability of homeostasis.
Now this is a simplified picture and the first important thing to note is that atheistic thought is not this "cruel" or simple, at least in my oppinion. If it would be thought that the body after death would simply dissapear and the "human" within it cease to exist, then what would be the sence of ceremonial burials. A ceremony is rarely held just for fun. There is usually some deaper meaning underlying the ceremony. Here it could be that holding a ceremony after death means that the person still has some meaning dispite his death. Something remains in the body, that is of value. Also the person doesn't lose value as it dies. So in a way the person still exists.
In a similar manner other burial practises reflect this idea of "existance after death". In a way Elvis is never dead. His ideas, life, music and person live within our minds and in the world. On a larger scale every person is part of the world and thus affects it and interacts with it. Thus every person will have a unique, everlasting and absolutely necessary effect on the world. Even all those people, that are not remembered by name still live among us. Even the smallest effect of a persons life might and will affect the world at large.
If I will not be remembered (a statistically very likely fact), then at least I have affected individual lives and thus the world. Even now, if somebody reads this, I have changed you in a way you can not undo. That gives one a certain sence of power, doesnt it? This way of thinking is similar to chaos theory and the idea of Lorenz that a butterflys flap of wings in africa may cause a hurricane in Florida. I could talk much more of this phenomenon and how this may bee seen also in several other phenomena.
So there seams to be a, rationally explainable, link between the idea (or meaning) of death and the idea of ever lasting life. This is expressed in different manners with different emphasis, but all ideas of death seem to have this preception in some form. A person lives after his death. How this is concretely expressed varies a lot.
As we saw in our example, all views of death could be accepted as different expressons of the same basic principle of human thought, which in the end could be thougt as the butterfly effect. To be honest with my self, I left a lot to be discussed in my presentation and thus do not clame to have reached the ultimate truth. And also it should be noted, that I have merely presented my expresson of this basic idea behind death. Well, I hope it illuminated my idea of meanings and them underlying our thought.
Now to the application of this thought. An easy example is that different philosophical and religious views can be interpered in this way and thus understood and reconsiled. Also one can respect different religious and philosophical views as expressing the same "ultimate idea of reality" but with different emphasis, language and phrases. But a different kind of example has been in my mind. As many of you know, I am a pasifist. Thus understanding war and soldiers is hard for me.
Nevertheless during independance days of Finland and the US as well as in every day life I am reminded of all those who died in wars, who mercilessly killed, who did terrible deads and are remembered today by monuments and patriotic discourse as heroes and brave men and are idolized. But we should not just judge the past, but strive to understand those who were involved. Those soldiers who killed did not kill because of killing but instead believed in values such as family, protection, liberty and justice. The terrible crimes of war mask within them the true beauty of humanity, love and death for someone who you love - selfless love.
I am not saying that in order to manifest humanity and this selfless love we should engage in wars and crimes, but instead that many terrible things are actually reflections of the basic ideas uniting humanity. History proves us, however, that the way these meanings and ideas were manifested in the end did not serve the ideal. Thus we may learn from them and at the same time respect what these men did and what they believed in. Admittadly this becomes very hard, if not impossible, when speaking of genocides and hatred between nations, which still prevails.
Now the last idea I will explain is of how pluralism may work. Many critisize, and on good grounds, that pluralism is impossible and ridiculous because everything simply is not good or acceptable. Relativism, another name for pluralism, can not be passivly accepting everything one sees. However, one can accept all views as reflecting some general structure in humanities thought. This means that underlying all thinking we could find a general, universal structure, which is truth as we humans precieve it. This general structure of principals and ideas is best studied and reflected by inspecting different intellectual structures and human thought as a whole. Thus one should strive to understand all religions and whithin them see the undeniable principles and take them as once laws and principles. Thus pluralism would be a study of the human thought and respecting all aspects of it as providing a source for the ultimate truth.
Well this everything is exagrerated, but still you get the idea.
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