I’ve recently had a Facebook debate with Oskari Kuusela about religion. The trigger for the debate was a brilliant cartoon by Paul Noth published in The New Yorker, which Oskari shared.
The brilliance of the cartoon—I think—is that it can be taken to show how silly religion is, but at the same time how deep religion is. Oskari’s gut reaction was the former, mine was the latter. His tendency was to say that he is nothing like the people in the cartoon; I was struck by how much I’m like them.
The cartoon thus suggests a question about our ways of finding things meaningful and manners of caring about them. It calls upon us to re-appreciate what we care about—to find the dimension in which we care about things. It suggests that it may take time and will to find things meaningful and deep, it concerns the tendency sometimes to find the deepest things trivial, and thus shows how hard it might be to get someone to appreciate the meaning of things (sometimes to get ourselves to do so). It forces us to think about the nature of importance itself, and about the very nature of meaning. And it taints it all with a worry that the most important things can be invisible, that we might be meaning-blind, and that the most meaningful things can have the aspect of nonsense.
I have said very little explicit about religion. I've talked about meaning. But the connection between religion and meaning seems to me a useful connection to make. I would understand, for example, someone who said "God is meaning," or "To see the symbol in a sign (or form in matter, or action in movement...) is to get a glimpse of God." And I would understand someone whose goal in life was to discover as much meaning in his life as they can: their relations, their job, their bodies, their thoughts. So I take all these questions about meaning that I said the cartoon raises to also be questions about religion.
Which is more interesting: to suppose that the people in the cartoon see that the flags have the same ambiguous picture on them, or to suppose that they don’t?
The cartoon thus suggests a question about our ways of finding things meaningful and manners of caring about them. It calls upon us to re-appreciate what we care about—to find the dimension in which we care about things. It suggests that it may take time and will to find things meaningful and deep, it concerns the tendency sometimes to find the deepest things trivial, and thus shows how hard it might be to get someone to appreciate the meaning of things (sometimes to get ourselves to do so). It forces us to think about the nature of importance itself, and about the very nature of meaning. And it taints it all with a worry that the most important things can be invisible, that we might be meaning-blind, and that the most meaningful things can have the aspect of nonsense.
I have said very little explicit about religion. I've talked about meaning. But the connection between religion and meaning seems to me a useful connection to make. I would understand, for example, someone who said "God is meaning," or "To see the symbol in a sign (or form in matter, or action in movement...) is to get a glimpse of God." And I would understand someone whose goal in life was to discover as much meaning in his life as they can: their relations, their job, their bodies, their thoughts. So I take all these questions about meaning that I said the cartoon raises to also be questions about religion.
Which is more interesting: to suppose that the people in the cartoon see that the flags have the same ambiguous picture on them, or to suppose that they don’t?
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