DELUDED BY WORDS Human beings are basically full of themselves. I don’t know how else to say it. They made up all the words and all the definitions of all the words, but they prance around acting as if what they say actually means something. The best example is evident in our use of the word God, a word that we have all heard issue from the mouths of other human beings. So far as people know, God is only a word that we have heard other people say. But we act as if there really is such a thing as that which the word refers to. This is at very least a neurotic human foible, and quite possibly a form of insanity. And the way we pass it on to our children is virtually criminal. Think about it. We teach our children that there is an invisible being outside our heads, all around us, a being who has the power to look inside our heads and see what we’re imagining. If we see a picture inside our heads, the invisible being can see it too. I would like for someone to explain to me why the practice of teaching our children this nonsense isn’t a form of child abuse. We just don’t get it. We made up the word God. We also made up its definition. The last time I checked, words weren’t raining from the sky or growing on trees. We humans make them up. Not long ago we made up the word “computer.” We keep on making them up. As talking animals, we will continue doing it, probably for a very long time. And it’s perfectly okay that we’re doing this, so long as we recognize that we are truly doing it. But so often people act as if we did not make up the words, like maybe God gave them to us, or something. This is when we get ourselves into some sticky gooey stuff. Here’s a newsflash: God did not give us words. We made them up to describe (and to help us get a better grasp on) the world around us as well as the feelings we were experiencing inside our heads (like the feeling about the possibility of invisible beings), heads that had learned how to think in abstract terms (making the idea appear in the first place). Because we made up the words, it doesn’t mean anything when we say that something (like some particular action) is good, or evil. We made up the words good and evil (and made up the definitions at the same time). We’re playing word games, literally. We really don’t know anything, except perhaps that we don’t know anything. There is nothing inherently dysfunctional with not knowing anything. But it is very likely not okay to go around believing that we do know something. To do that is to drown ourselves in a sea of delusion. It would be like a young woman hosting a beauty contest for herself and acting as the judge and deciding that she is indeed the most beautiful girl in the world. If we heard of a woman actually doing something like this, we would undoubtedly conclude that she was psycho. But we (the human collective) are just such a woman, but instead of hosting our own beauty pageant, we are conducting a quest for meaning, in which we decide what is worthy of meaning, and we pronounce our judgments with words, words that we have made up, including the word “meaning.” Yes, human beings are completely full of themselves.
|
