I wish I was asleep right now
I got up with the baby and haven’t gotten back to sleep yet. Stupid internet, heck, stupid electric light bulbs. I should only light candles when I get up at 3:00 in the morning with the baby so that I’m encouraged to blow them out again when I calm the baby down and hand him back to my wife.
On the other hand, sleep deprived + normal forgetfulness + candles is perhaps not such a good idea.
So I’m up, I’ve read the entire internet, by which I mean that sliver of the Internet Venn Diagram that is shaded both “I know about” and “I care about”. Time to start closing browser tabs (I think the ratio is 1/2 an hour web surfing == 8 hours worth of closing browser tabs).
One tab that I had opened but had lost in the forest of tabs is a recent weblog post by a friend of mine, in the middle of which he says
I had a realization earlier today: being spiritual but not religious is kinda like being intelligent but uneducated.
To which one of my other friends replied in the comments:
Not really sure how to respond to that. It bothers me, though I haven’t been able to pin down why.
It bothers me a bit too, and I think it’s because I think it has too many interpretations. Normally I’m a big fan of multiple interpretations but that line seems like it’s designed to make someone feel bad about themselves. Raised my hackles without me knowing why. I think it just sounds slightly mean taken out of context.
It took me about 20 minutes of thinking about it but I did come up with a positive, nay, a strongly positive interpretation that I rather like, even if it has little to do with my friend’s original intention (I have no doubt he was coming from it in a strictly positive manner and wasn’t trying to put anyone down or anything.)
The best explanation for my positive interpretation I can come up with comes from the other direction, the education side of things. Here are a few things I believe:
The second most important thing I needed to learn from my college degree: how to look things up and find out information about subjects I know nothing about. All those facts I learned in college are helpful, but not essential to life in the same way this is. The most important thing I needed to learn was true, visceral understanding and acceptance that it’s really okay that I don’t know everything.
If I believe this, and if I have the skills to look up anything I need to know, then everything is cool. I need to know something, it’s okay, I’ll just go look it up. Many uneducated people feel shame that they don’t know how to do a lot of things, so they put themselves down as being “dumb” when nothing could be further from the truth.
But look: I just gave you the secret to a college education! Don’t bother going tens of thousands of dollars into debt!
My point: there’s no shame in being intelligent but uneducated. Yes an education is important but can be dangerous if you wind up learning the wrong set of facts (like, for instance, if you go thousands and thousands of dollars into debt learning a bunch of sociology facts and then decide when you graduate what you really need are some facts about marketing, or technical writing. Career changes are not easy with student loans!)
By using the magic of analogy we work backwards to the phrase “spiritual but not religious”. I can think of several ways of doing this that are all mellow and cool for the most part; I’ll leave it up to you to pick one. If you pick an interpretation that’s at all mean or nasty it’s not what I meant.
Now, I strongly suspect that many people who use the phrase “spiritual but not religious” do not mean it in any of the senses I’ve been thinking about here. It’s been my experience that most people who say “spiritual but not religious” are really saying “Oh Jesus, anything but Christianity!”[1] Christianity the religion is often times quite a bit more of a bummer than Christianity the spirituality. This should come as no surprise, when Jesus was on earth he saved his strongest and harshest criticisms for the religious leaders of the day, and many of our current religious leaders deserve equally harsh rebuke. There’s nothing on Heaven or Earth that men can’t figure out how to fuck up somehow. The Bible is all too often twisted and skewed to support the prejudices and biases of whomever is reading it.
But now I’m rambling off my original topic.
[1] Starting from this point, I couldn’t think of an interpretation of Geof’s quote that didn’t lead to some bad vibes.
April 21st, 2009 at 10:31 am
“Being spiritual but not religious is kinda like being intelligent but uneducated”
In a way I agree with this. When I was involved with an evangelical church they considered themselves spiritual, but not religious. In general, uneducated was an understatement there, brainwashed is probably a better word.
Mostly I think the statement is backwards though. It should read: “Being religious but not spiritual is kind of like being intelligent but uneducated”. While Christianity is filled with many religions, the more intelligent and educated of my Christian friends seem to have transcended those religions to a state of Christian spirituality. I have many other intelligent and educated friends who have transcended Christianity entirely to just a state of general spirituality. I believe the most intelligent and educated of my friends, have transcended spirituality entirely in the form of agnosticism. The more you know, the more you realize that you don’t know shit. This, of course, leaves the religious and the atheists together at the other end of the spectrum. They don’t know shit either, they just don’t know that they don’t know shit.
April 21st, 2009 at 4:15 pm
given the choice of intelligent but uneducated VS educated but unintelligent I know which I’d rather be. a merely educated person has memorized a set of facts and from those may think they know it all but outside that set of facts they aren’t really worth much. The intelligent person can learn and grow all through their life without the delusion of knowing it all. To apply that to religion and spirituality, the religious has picked a set of facts to memorize (Christianity, Judaism, Hindu…). The spiritual doesn’t have one set of facts they’re trying to figure it out from everything around them.
April 21st, 2009 at 5:04 pm
of course going back and reading the original post to get the context his meanings seem very different from my interpretation.
he seems to use
religious/educated as actively learning
spiritual/intelligent as stagnant
those wouldnt be my choices of meanings to associate and if I did I’d be inclined to put them in the oposite places
April 22nd, 2009 at 8:00 am
Corey, why are you writing prose in stanzas? Are you trying to illustrate some obscure point or has your grammar degraded into bad poetry?
April 22nd, 2009 at 12:39 pm
Hmmmmm.
[Seriously, I put that out there for discussion. I'm willing to be wrong.]
And if I was knocking anyone, I was knocking myself.
April 22nd, 2009 at 12:49 pm
There’s some discussion for you. I’ll knock you now too. Knock, knock, knock!
April 23rd, 2009 at 4:03 pm
Who’s there, Keir?
April 23rd, 2009 at 6:16 pm
I specifically put in three knocks to avoid a knock knock joke.