Everyone has a Religion, and Some are Even True

So, is common sense rooted in principles, or do principles flow from common sense? And is common sense universal, or does it change from epoch to epoch, culture to culture, cable network to cable network?

First, we had better define the term. Before looking it up, I would say that it must have to do with knowledge accessible to every normal man by virtue of being one. It is what my pal Bion would call "pre-conceptual," meaning that it is not quite knowledge, but ready to become so: pre-knowledge, so to speak:

Bion introduced the idea of a pre-conception, a psychological entity waiting for for a realization that will "mate" with it. The "unexperienced" pre-conception mated with a realization produces a conception, and from this thoughts and thinking can develop.

Note the role of experience (or lack thereof): if the innate pre-conception doesn't meet with an experience in the outside world, it is still there, only unrealized. This then contributes to psychic pain, except the person will have no idea from where the pain is coming. Unexperienced pre-conceptions that fail to become concepts nevertheless result in experienced distress.

Example? Like "original sin," evidence is everywhere. Psychic pain is quite fungible, such that it is readily exchanged, converted, transformed, and falsely attributed to other psychic levels, persons, or environmental factors.

One of the specialties of the left is the transformation of existential pain into political grievance. Some pain is indeed unavoidable by virtue of being human. But if you cannot tolerate this realization, the left is always ready to help you to attribute it to something else, and more to the point, promise an end to the pain. But this is no more effective than curing physical disease by electing your preferred candidate.

Since the election of President Trump, we have seen how millions of people persist in attributing their mental illness to him. Is there anything comparable on the right? I've never claimed to be normal, but I don't remember blaming Obama for it.

Back to pre-conceptions for a moment. A large part of mental illness revolves around a kind of psychic miscegenation, or a union of pre-conception with toxic experience, resulting in an inverted or perverted conception. Thus, for example, a child who is abused by his parents may grow up to be an abusive parent.

It seems that for every absolute there is a false absolute -- which is still an absolute, only in denial of itself. I would say that our awareness of the Absolute per se is a consequence of our pre-conceptual knowledge of God: a proper mating of this divine pre-conception with spiritual experience results in a normally religious person. A mismating -- or no mating at all -- results in its many alternatives, from polytheism to materialism and everything in between. Or, just say idolatry: an idol is a false absolute. Put another way, everyone has an absolute, and some are even true.

In the excellent Book of Absolutes, Gairdner devotes various chapters to the universals of human life and culture, the constants of nature, the universals of human sex and biology, the universals of language, and the universals of law. I am tempted to just say Read the Book, because that's an awful lot to cover in the spacetime of a post, especially because it's been a decade or so since I read it.

Since then, Gairdner has published another called The Great Divide: Why Liberals and Conservatives Will Never, Ever Agree. This second book is no doubt a logical extension of the first, for what is leftism but the political implications of relativism and (pretended) rejection of absolutes, i.e., a deeply principled political stupidity at war with the nature of things?

Another book we haven't discussed but which I can heartily endorse is Frithjof Schuon and the Perennial Philosophy, which is an introductory guide to his thinking -- which, for me, comes close to a description of what thinking ought to be at its highest and deepest levels. Yes, there is a proper way to think, and philosophy should be all about providing prescriptions for it. What's the alternative? Providing bad ways to think? Or ways to avoid thinking? Isn't that what college is for?

Chapter five condenses his system to the very essence of what we might call Metacosmic Common Sense -- although he would hasten to add that this is no more "his system" than the sun can be private property. Rather, it shines equally upon the good and evil, the intelligent and stupid, the gifted and the tenured. People of below average intelligence can have perfectly adequate common sense, while so-called intellectuals can be entirely lacking in it. In the words of the Aphorist,

--Until we come across instructed fools, instruction seems important.

--Great stupidities do not come from the people. They have seduced intelligent men first.

--The learned fool has a wider field to practice his folly.

I could be wrong, but I like to think that truth is anterior to revelation. i.e., that Truth is like the ultimate pre-conception that is filled by the experience of revelation. This would explain why a simple person of faith can be so much wiser than a brilliant scientist when it pertains to essential human truths beyond the scope of science -- and why we would prefer to be governed by the first 500 people in the Boston phonebook than the Harvard faculty.

Here is an example of a first principle that seems to me unassailable, that "God is ineffable," such that "nothing can describe Him or enclose Him in words." What mischief results from believing otherwise!

For it is not as if we are faced with a binary choice between a conceptual absolute posited by the mind and a paltry relativism that implicitly elevates man to God. Rather, we simultaneously posit the existence of the Absolute and our inability to contain it/him; or, if you can contain it, it isn't God.

Before starting this post, the thought popped into my head: any valid knowledge of God is obviously already God and must come from God. However, the converse is not true: God cannot be reduced to knowledge of him, no matter how valid.

A map is not the territory, but nor is it other than the territory, in the sense that it provides points of reference on a human scale. Just so, metaphysics and revelation provide us with humanly realizable points of reference that permit us to orient ourselves to eternity via time, or heaven via earth, or the celestial via the terrestrial, etc.

Indeed you could say that earth is heaven, but that of course heaven is not earth. We couldn't even know of paradise if we didn't sometimes catch glimpses of it herebelow. Or so we have heard from the wise.

For Schuon, "metaphysical doctrine is nothing other than the science of Reality and illusion." The postmodern secular leftist type will usually say that we can only know appearances and not reality, but we respond that we can know appearances precisely because they are appearances of a reality anterior to them; optical illusions only exist because of optical realities.

Now, the same doctrine "might be articulated in a number of ways, from a variety of viewpoints," for the same reason a truth can be expressed in different languages. You could say that a valid religion is a richly symbolic "metaphysical vocabulary" -- or that, conversely, a religion that fails to embody and communicate these truths is no religion at all.

I suppose where I differ from Schuon is that his preferred vocabulary is ultimately Advaita Vedanta, whereas I believe this fails to adequately convey certain principles that are better expressed in the language of Christianity, e.g., the Trinity.