"I"

So I just finished Sam Harris’ book, The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason. GREAT book, I highly recommend it to all. It also ended on a chapter that I was totally NOT expecting in the slightest. It touched on Buddhism (how it is not an actual religion), mysticism, and how they can actually be good for you and he touches on the topic of consciousness and blazay-blah. REALLY awesome. and I was totally not expecting him to go there considering he is an EXTREMELY famous atheist (lots of great TED talks out there if you’re interested) who just spent a good portion of the book tearing apart Islam and Christianity and how we need to throw them out for our own sake. (Once again, a really great read and I recommend it to all whether you are religious or not).

Anyway, so I just finished that last night and started reading Ayn Rand’s book Anthem, because it was just next in line and it too dealt HEAVILY with the notion of “I” and how imperative it is for happiness and growth. I also strongly recommend this read, and its VERY quick, I finished it in just a couple hours. And because I read at work now (awesome.) I knew I’d finish Anthem fast so I picked up another book before heading out the door and it was I Am A Strange Loop by Douglas Hofstadter (author of Godel, Escher, Bach). And it’s entire focus is the concept of “I” and his theories on….that.
I’m telling you this, aside from bragging about how much I read, because I just think it is SO awesome when things sometimes just seem to come together. These books, when thought about are all very seemingly random and unrelated turn out to, albeit different topics, deal with some same underlying thread. I love it.

And now, my favorite quotes of these books (thus far):

The End of Faith“Faith is rather like a rhinoceros, in fact: it won’t do much in the way of real work for you, and yet at close quarters it will make spectacular claims upon your attention.”

“Even if we were to grant that one of our religions must be correct in its every particular, given the number of conflicting views on offer, every believer should expect damnation on mere probabilistic grounds.”

“It is time we recognize that belief is not a private matter; it has never been merely private. In fact, beliefs are scarcely more private than actions are, for every belief is a fount of action in potentia. The belief that it will rain puts an umbrella in the hand of every man or woman who owns one. It should be easy enough to see that belief in the full efficacy of prayer, for instance, becomes an emphatically public concern the moment it is actually put into practice: the moment a surgeon lays aside his worldly instruments and attempts to suture his patients with prayer, or a pilot tries to land a passenger jet with nothing but repetitions of the word “Hallelujah” applied to the controls, we are swiftly delivered from the provinces of private faith to those of a criminal court.
     “As a man believes, so he will act. Believe that you are the member of a chosen people, awash in the salacious exports of an evil culture that is turning your children away from God, believe that you will be rewarded with an eternity of unimaginable delights by dealing death to these infidels - and flying a plane into a building is scarcely more than a matter of being asked to do it. It follows, then, that certain beliefs are intrinsically dangerous.”

“That such metaphorical acrobatics can be performed on almost any text - and that they are therefore meaningless- should be obvious. Here we have scripture as Rorschach blot: wherein the occultist can find his magical principles perfectly reflected, the conventional mystic can find his recipe for transcendence, and the totalitarian dogmatist can hear God  telling him to suppress the intelligence and creativity of others. This is not to say that no author has ever couched spiritual or mystical information in allegory or even produced text that requires a strenuous hermeneutical effort to be made sense of. But to dredge scripture in this manner and discover the occasional pearl is little more than a literary game.”

“At the core of every religion lies an undeniable claim about the human condition: it is possible to have one’s experience of the world radically transformed… -most of us know, however dimly, that extraordinary experiences are possible. The problem with religion is that it blends this truth so thoroughly with the venom of unreason. Take Christianity for example: it is not enough that Jesus was a man who transformed himself to such a degree that the Sermon on the Mount could be his heart’s confession. He also had to be the Son of God, born of a virgin, and destined to return to earth trailing clouds of glory. The effect of such dogma is to place the example of Jesus forever out of reach. His teachings ceases to be a set of empirical claims about the linkage between ethics and spiritual insight and instead becomes a gratuitous, and rather gruesome, fairy tale. According to the dogma of Christianity, becoming just like Jesus is impossible. One can only enumerate one’s sins, believe the unbelievable, and await the end of the world.”

“Respect for diversity in our ethical views is, at best, an intellectual holding pattern until more of the facts are in.”

Anthem“There is nothing to take a man’s freedom away from him, save other men. To be free, a man must be free of his brothers. That is freedom. That and nothing else. At first, man was enslaved by the gods. But he broke their chains. Then he was enslaved by the kings. But he broke their chains. He was enslaved by his birth, by his kin, by his race. But he broke their chains. He declared to all his brothers that a man has rights which neither god nor king nor other men can take away from him, no matter what their number, for his is the right of man, and there is no right on earth above this right. And he stood on the threshold of freedom for which the blood of centuries behind him has been spilled.”

“My happiness needs no higher aim to vindicate it. My happiness is not the means to any end. It is the end. It is my own goal. It is my own purpose.”

I Am A Strange Loop“Despite its title, this book is not about me, but about the concept of “I”. It’s thus about you, reader, every bit as much as it is about me. I could just as well have called it “You Are A Strange Loop”. But the truth of the matter is that, in order to suggest the book’s topic and goal more clearly, I should probably have called it “‘I’ Is A Strange Loop”- but can you imagine a clunkier title? Might as well call it “I Am A Lead Balloon”. ”