Some of the providers of the most profound sense of meaning are some cults, providing their members with a very powerful sense of purpose or identity not easily found outside of a cult context. (Finding a strong sense of your own identity is by no means an easy process, is it?) Allow me to use the example of Scientology, and let their poster boy (Tom Cruise) express this in his own words, if you haven’t seen it already: below is the old “Tom Cruise, Scientologist” video (~10mins) which was played on the awards ceremony where they awarded him with their “Freedom Medal of Valor”. Alternatively, look at this shorter news report video clip which gives extracts with explanations. (For explanations of the uncut version, I include the jargon mini-dictionary below.)

I copied this mini-dictionary from the description on the YouTube clip above:

Scientology mini dictionary:

• KSW: (short for Keeping Scientology Working): A policy written by Hubbard in the 1960’s that requires all Scientologists to follow his words and his rules exactly.
• Orgs: Orgs is an abbreviation for ‘organizations’ and describes all churches of Scientology throughout the world.
• David Miscavige: He is the current leader of Scientology. He’s the equivalent of the Pope to the Catholics.
• Out-ethics: any behavior that violates any of Hubbard’s rules of conduct.
• Put ethics in on someone else: make others conform to Hubbard’s rules of behavior.
• Criminon: Scientology front group that tries to recruit through the prisons.
• SP: Suppressive Person. Anyone that doesn’t like Scientology and/or criticizes Scientology.
• PTS/SP: another Hubbard term to define behavior that goes against Scientology rules.
• LRH technology or ‘tech’: all the Scientology policies, rules, mandates, procedures.

Tom Cruise’s day job is acting, entertainment. Being an entertainer is a good job, an important role to play in life, people need to be entertained (entertainment is the opiate of the masses), and in making people happy, you even get a fan club! (Actually, you’re even a provider of meaning yourself, you provide fanboys with an opportunity to hero-worship ). However, it isn’t profoundly meaningful (maybe depending on the roles you get to play). Consider also that Wikipedia claims that at some point in his youth Tom Cruise aspired to become a Catholic priest, a role of profound or ultimate significance to those of that faith, one of divinely ordained altruistically motivated service to (ideally) to your community/tribe. If that were my biography, such aspirations would be an expression of my innate desire to do something more profound and meaningful than a role as a movie star acting in the kinds of movies he has been doing lately.

And Scientology provides him with that sort of meaning. Tom Cruise says (according to a source I need to dig up again, or replace this quote with another):

That’s what drives me. I know that we have an opportunity to really help for the first time, effectively change people’s lives and I am dedicated to that. I’m absolutely, uncompromisingly dedicated to that.

As delusional as he seems in the video clip above, as much as this might be motivated by the experience of being so important and so pivotal in “the most important thing in the world”, LRH tech and Scientology, there is also at least some motivation born from truly caring about humanity and the people around him. Our innate care for one another, perverted and manipulated through the mortal sin of pride, causing it to become an agent to promote abominations like Scientology…

Senior Indigenous people in the Northern Territory have called on the Prime Minister to officially recognise their customary laws including traditional punishments such as spearing.

Apparently our Western culture’s methods of punishment, namely jail time, is insufficient — relative to traditions, it seems unsatisfactory for implementing deterrence or retributive justice. An idea behind retributive justice is that it can provide satisfaction and psychological benefits to the aggrieved party, its intimates and society. We have the same reactions in Western culture, we are just more satisfied or accepting of prison terms.

So what’s the difference in this instance? Are prison terms quantitatively less than public shaming or getting speared in the leg, as explained in the above article? (Please read it.) No! Apples and oranges! The difference is found in the meaning Western culture and those communities’ traditional culture place in these punishments.

We are not born with beliefs and meanings assigned with regards to the sufficiency of one punishment versus another. Sure, we are generally born with innate intuition that getting stabbed and having your freedom taken away by others in response to a wrong constitutes punishment, but the meaning assigned to the different punishments are assigned by our culture.

According to the article, some communities become more violent when traditional punishments are not used. Not only more “original violence” (if I understand the third paragraph correctly), but also more retaliatory violence.

I propose recognising this as being due to the loss of a prior tradition with particular meaning in the culture, the loss of meaning thus. The loss of meaning can be particularly traumatic.

Things to think about:

• What do you think of their traditional punishments?
• Do you think there are some good reasons for permitting them?
• What would be your suggestions for the future of justice in Australia if it were up to you?
• Are campaigns in some Western countries or US states to bring back the death penalty similar?

At the heart of his theory is a conviction that the primary human drive is not pleasure but the pursuit of what we find meaningful.

It seems absurd to borrow words from a book on surviving Nazi death camps when I’m mostly thinking about my little life of luxury, but I do find myself in agreement with Frankl. Of late, I’ve spent quite some time contemplating where I find meaning in my life, with regards to both work and play, and I will continue spending time on this subject.

Since meaning is so important, the loss of meaning can be particularly traumatic. The things we choose to spend our lives building are the things things whose loss would hurt us the most.

Consider the loss of something with sentimental value only (created meaning, likely from memories), versus the loss of something with utility value only (something that can be replaced). Consider the White Tribe of Africa and its struggles for meaning and identity in a post-apartheid South Africa (closely related to meaning is a sense of identity). Consider the mid-life crisis in which the meaning of the past is rediscovered to be empty in the present, followed by a struggle for finding some meaning for the future. Consider a mother finding meaning in her children’s lives and happiness, in raising them well, grappling with Empty Nest Syndrome when the children move on.

I think a lot of memetic conflict can be viewed in this light, in terms our pursuit of meaning, and when we have some strong sense of meaning, the defence of it against any that threaten to take it away.

I don’t think I said anything profound in this blog post, but it should serve as an adequate introduction to the theme.

I now believe the tradition to be very much about grappling with scripture and the tradition, not about finding all the correct black-and-white answers. When it comes to human culture, there aren’t any final correct answers, there’s only the grappling and interactions and relationships through which lifestance “truths” are able to touch the heart… (Please see Reduce or Wrestle — Peter Rollins.)

Back to the fundie perspective, “I have the Truth, the True Fundamentals at least, and I know… because I know”.

The belief is that the truth or value of everything seen in life should be tested according to “the Word of God”… which many a fundie believes to be identically equal to The Bible, the Whole Bible, and Nothing But the Bible. Yes, I’m being a tad hyperbolic here, bear with me as I continue doing so: the point is, to them, the Bible doesn’t contain letters written by Paul, or a culture’s valuable narratives written down after decades of oral propagation, or poems by poets grappling with life, or creation mythologies from ancient tribes from the Near East, it contains the Word of God, and nothing but the Word of God.

Fair enough.

Yes, you hear me right, I just said “fair enough”, because I don’t want to talk about that right now. I’ll try to illuminate something about the fundie approach through use of my own experiences in the second post. In this post I’m talking about

Interpretation

It is impossible to read something without interpreting it. Language is like that.

The original author of a piece of text had something in mind, something they wanted to communicate. They then convert this into the symbolic representation that we call “language”. This conversion is done according to the words (symbols) as defined in the author’s culture. Now the reader has a go at the text. The symbols are read from the text, and then converted into meaning by the mind of the reader. What each symbol, word, concept, idea means, to the reader, is defined in the reader’s culture. A reader can either take from the text whatever their interpretation of it is, much like some post-modern art works being more about what the observer observes and interprets than what the artist had in mind.

Alternatively, the reader/scholar can attempt a thorough exegesis of the work in an attempt to understand the intentions of the author. With no direct access to the author’s mind, getting this as accurate as possible requires in-depth knowledge of the author’s culture and symbolism. This is of course much harder work than a reader simply using their own symbolism, definitions and concepts.

For more on all of this, see Hermeneutics on Wikipedia. If the idea of “moral relativity” scares you… language is in exactly the same situation, meaning being culturally dependent, changing over time and space.

Implications for being “right” about scripture

Traditional Jewish exegesis differs markedly from the Christian tradition. In fact, just within Christianity there is already very significant diversity in how scripture is understood.

A quick aside: did I just say the diversity is of a significant quantity, or did I say there is significance in the kinds of diversity found? A silly little example, but I often write things like this with awareness of multiple interpretations. Thus, my intentions are not to be perfectly and absolutely understood by all (that’s impossible anyway), I’m often intentionally leaving various interpretations of my writing open to my readers. (And they could always ask if they want to know what I really meant.)

How much tougher is it to understand the author’s intentions when the writing took place in Hebrew and Greek thousands of years ago, was translated, sometimes numerous times (which requires another round of interpretation and re-”symbolising” into a new language), and is now read from within a radically different culture? If it is that hard to know what I wrote, today, in our culture, in English, how much tougher is it to read and correctly understand scripture? Is it even possible?

Now tell me, in particular, what makes a Christian’s approach to exegesis of the Hebrew Bible (the Old Testament) more “correct”, more “true”, than that of a Jew, practising within a tradition much more closely related to the culture the scripture lived in over the centuries? “We have discovered a fuller truth as revealed by Jesus and the New Testament” is no answer to that question, because as I mentioned, there’s great diversity within the Christian tradition as well, with some having an exegetical approach that draws much more on the approaches of the Jewish tradition.

Even if you want to argue the “Jews had it wrong in the Old Testament, the new revelation of the New Testament puts it all right”, you’re first going to have to understand how they interpreted it to be able to understand what they had “wrong”! This has implications for things as “fundamental” as the meaning of an offering or sacrifice in Judaism (which can influence the meaning ascribed to the crucifixion*), and the meaning of a question like “what must I do to inherit eternal life?” (Mark 10v17, here’s RLP’s dramatisation).

* I’m referring to interesting insights I learned from The Last Week by Borg and Crossan, a book I can’t recommend highly enough for those intent on following the Christian way.

The conversation was great. It rotated around the meaning of life, the source of values, “why be good”… And it helped hack out some terminology and ways of expressing ourselves in order to bridge philosophical divides. Bring two thinking people together, coming from somewhat different perspectives, and figure out the language that you could both agree on, leads to increased ability to communicate the ideas to others.

So that’s what I’ll be trying to do soon: namely, trying to share all the ideas from that conversation (discussing the likes of theistic existentialism, atheistic existentialism, absurdism and nihilism, referring to the table)… but it will take me some time to get there. I will make some run-up posts (stalling for time?), and maybe tie up loose ends of previous “threads” if I feel I need to do so first.

Here’s a thought to start off with then, another attempt at “defining God”, :n the general sense: god as the source of meaning in your life, the source of your values, the source of your concept of what is right and what is wrong, especially including the reason that you stick to doing right and avoid doing wrong. (The answer to “why be good?”… and “why bother living?”)

God: the assigner of meaning and value in life…