[ChainLegacy]

Originally Posted by TinyRedLeaf

Who said anything about the quest for truth?

The quest for certainty is expressed through our innate need for something to believe in. We all share this. It's part of the human condition. A need for meaning, a desire for life to have value. To be human is to be aware of the concept of value. To be bereft of this awareness is to be something inhuman.

I said nothing about the importance of this awareness. I merely stated that it's there and that it's folly to deny that it exists within each and every one of us. I believe that, for many of us, the denial or ignorance is so strong that it would take a lot of living just to overcome the mental block, to recognise that the awareness exists.

To be happy; to laugh; to whoop with joy — to do any of these is to accept that you've achieved or experienced something you value, something you believe in. You may not have articulated that belief in so many words, but it's there. For some, such belief leads ultimately to God, or some other form of enlightenment. For others, it leads to other, more secular but no less spiritual, state of mind.

I make no judgment on these sets of values. I merely acknowledge that they exist, and point out the foolishness of those who would preach that only religion will lead to ignorance. As it turns out, religion can claim no monopoly over that distinction — humans are pretty capable of deluding themselves without the help of God.

The great joke is that all values are mental constructs. They aren't physical objects that exist independently from the minds of human beings. Without us to observe the beauty of a vase, that object would just be a vase or, rather, a lump of clay.

Yet we continue to seek such values, whether consciously or unconsciously. Yin and yang. There will always be that little bit of messiness in the order we seek to impose. It takes faith to accept that what order we find, whatever comforting certainty we can grasp, is worth the messiness — and uneasy doubt — that it inevitably brings along.

Men of faith learn to laugh, in good humour, at the necessary futility of their task. Men without faith merely succumb to debilitating despair.

42.

Spoiler for extract from Mardock Scramble: The Second Combustion:

"Of course they're contrived — what other sort of value system is there? Or are you saying that there's a physical, tangible object called a 'value' lying around somewhere, just waiting to be discovered so that everyone can see what truth is?"

"Does life have any value?"

"That question is folly — you have it all upside down. Value is not something that just exists. It's a concept, a construct. And when people neglect their duty to construct their own valuation of life, they revert back to being no more than beasts. After all, what is society if not a peculiarly human invention that allows people to conceptualise and propagate their own belief systems?

"It's been observed on numerous occasions that the act of killing other members of one's species is not limited to human beings — it's a trait observable in all animals. The reason that animals are furnished with the ability to kill is so that they can kill. For animals, the impetus to kill is always there, constantly at the ready. That's their system of self-perpetuation — their system is pure and simple, just like human society."

"Are you calling me an animal?"

"All human beings are animals, of course. But you, having lost your sense of values, are trying to fill that gaping hole with a particular set of instincts — that's why you're an animal. When animals cannibalise each other or persecute outsiders or create outcasts or commit suicide, or patricide, or infanticide, or fratricide — all these apparently abnormal acts are nothing more than a regression to a base animal instinct.

"Animals learn from their environment and their circumstances and pass on their learnt behaviours to their children, who inherit what they can from their parents. But when environments and circumstances change, so that they appear to contradict what they have learnt, well, that's when learning goes out the window, and animal instinct kicks in to produce those behaviours that we call 'abnormal'...

"Do you think that human beings are the only animals to wage war? Think again. It's actually fair to say that pretty much any animal with a herd instinct will wage war one way or another. From insects to herbivores, all living creatures wage war… Human beings are a long way from escaping their animal instincts. In which case, what exactly is the difference between man and animal? The creation of values.

"On the one hand, animals have all sorts of reasons — besides simple predation — to kill each other. On the other hand, human beings have, over time, come up with a notion of valuing life and death. It's not that life has any value in and of itself. It's that human beings have come up with a notion of value and applied that in various ways to the idea of life. In so doing, man started to resist total domination by his baser instincts and gave birth to a society overwhelmingly stronger and more complex than any other, surpassing those of all other creatures, and allowing him to ascend to the pinnacle of life on earth, to become the master of all he surveys.

"What is the definition of a human being? It's based on whether a creature understands the concept of a value system. Human infants are very much like animals in that they don't understand the idea of values, but then they study them, and in so doing arrive at their own sense of self-worth, as well as the value of other objects. They grow to recognise the value of other people and, in learning how to heighten their own sense of values, they finally begin to participate in society as human beings."

"In order to defend one set of values, humans have to annihilate opposing sets of values. I'm a being created specifically to bring about that annihilation. If it's humans who make values, it's also humans who break them."

(sighs) "What a profound thought — and yet so helpless at the same time. Is this your compensation for your own sense of helplessness? Having had your emotions denied you, with all the highs and lows that they entail, you seek to bring about nihilism in all living beings?"

"This place you call Paradise was built on the back of people's broken values. You're the ones who know all about toying with nihilism."

"Values come and values go. We've thrown out sacred cows in the past, and I'm sure we will again in the future. But as long as we remain fixed on our aim of creation, new values will emerge from the detritus of the old. This is most definitely not nihilism."


- Tow Ubukata, translated by Edwin Hawkes

How would you define someone who has faith in their conviction of atheism? As in, they admit to a lack of knowledge on the 'great mysteries' of reality, but have faith in their conclusion that the material world can be understood without a creator? Faith is not exclusively tied to spirituality or religion, as I'm sure you know. It's actually particularly important, one could argue, in the scientific discipline, as we to some extent must have faith in both the system, the insights of those before us, and our own ability to wade through those insights to produce our own.

I'm an agnostic, and I believe the conclusion I have faith in, that neither you nor I are even remotely capable of truly imagining how/why (if there is a why) the universe came about. As a result, human religion, often inherently human in nature with anthropomorphized beings and concepts that make sense to our minds, seems to me a dismally improbable occurrence. Admitting my lack of expertise in the finer workings of reality itself , I do not exclude them from possibility outright, but my faith leads me to more or less throw them out as active considerations.

Putting aside my above commentary on faith, don't you think it's possible to completely discount spirituality, and look at reality from a purely scientific point of view, and still be in awe and ecstasy of the world we live in? I am not spiritual at all, but every day driving through my hometown I feel pure and complete wonder at the universe, the Earth, the life on this planet. The sheer magnitude, the diversity, and the incomprehensible nature of the universe is enough for me. I am, by no means, a 'man of faith' from a religious point of view (as I'm sure you intended the phrase to be used), but I can certainly laugh at the futility of grasping reality, and my utter inability to ever truly understand. In fact, this insurmountable, indescribable bounty of concepts we've yet to understand, and mysteries, makes the secular universe, to me, all the more 'divine'.