Realism and Idealism
There is an objective reality out there and it's all in your mind!
I've been reading up on early archaeology in Israel and its relationship to the Bible. Let's just say that the writers of the Bible were not always devoted to representing history accurately. As I've opined before, if the Exodus never happened, then all of the rest of the Bible is just stories and the three Yahwist schools are not rooted in solid historical fact. Some fact, yes. The careful decision to make up a story about the creation of Israel shows a calculated fraud on the part of powerful men and their scribes. One can say that all scripture is inspired, but it only applies to certain facets having to do with morality and deity. The rest is take or leave.
The reasons for this fraud are rooted in a desire to forge a nation out of disparate tribes in early Palestine who were otherwise separated by cult, customs and economic livelihood. Yahweh was borrowed from earlier cultures, where he may have served as the patron deity of metalworkers, before becoming an underling of El – the supreme god in the Canaanite pantheon – in ancient Palestine. Somewhere along the way, Yahweh got fed up with his place on the totem pole and claimed El's spot. El disappears early from the scene along with the other gods who are vaguely alluded to in Genesis. By the time of Deuteronomy and the historical books like Kings and Chronicles, it's all Yahweh, all the time. If the story sounds familliar, it's because Satan attempts the same thing – the overthrow of a so-called superior (The Police again) in order to become top dog. The difference between Yahweh and Satan is that the former pulled off his coup, but we are not made privy to the palace intrigue or how it went down. No one worships El anymore, his portfolio having been absorbed by his former underling thanks to commentators, editors and theological traditions. The word "El" continues on after Genesis, in a compound form that is used as a title for the same character who we know as Yahweh.
My bit about Yahweh overthrowing El is intentionally cheeky. Scholars think that Yahweh was appropriated and rebranded as a Judahite deity for nationalistic reasons. El was broadly recognized and worshiped in Canaan, making him an unfit choice for a people in need of a god they could bind to their tribal identity. Chemosh was the national deity of Moab, a nation east of Judah and chronic threat, so the Israelites were not breaking new ground in ancient Palestine by claiming a patron deity with whom a legal contract was set.
For some believers who get into comparative mythology and the study of archaeology in the ancient Near East, the dichotomy between the Bible and reality can be very significant on key points. On the other hand, the Bible and archaeology go together really well, at least on some points.
When I was a kid, Reader's Digest would arrive in the mail and my step father would read some new article about a recent excavation in Israel confirming a Bible story. This to say that if you are a believer, then you will know about X because it fits into your community's belief system, but you won't know about Y because it doesn't. For example: There is no archaeological evidence at all to support the Bible's claim that Israel conquered a series of city states in Canaan after forty years of wandering in the desert, but there are archaeological finds supporting claims from much later periods of Israelite history, such as the invasion of Israel by Babylon. If you are a traditional believer, you will be less likely to know about the former because it's not information likely shared in your circles. The archaeological evidence in fact contradicts biblical claims on various points of simple historical fact, so one must take great care not to see the Bible, especially the Hebrew Testament, as reliable history. This will not be the default view of conservative Christians.
Pursued long enough, the believer may conclude that there is no solid evidence for the claims of the Bible on important matters and is therefore not something to base your life around. They eventually "lose their faith" and stop participating in group activities related to Yahweh. On the other hand, many observant Yahwists simply do not think examination of the evidence, whether for or against, matters as they have a conviction that their god is real and that he sent Moses/Jesus/Mohammad to testify to his existence and greatness. For them, the historicity of Exodus isn't important, it's the story that matters since it shows a caring god who will gladly slay the first born of an entire nation, made in his image and likeness, to protect the people he really cares about, the Israelites. Sarcasm aside, believers generally list any number of reasons for holding to Yahweh and scholarship doesn't necessarily factor into those. Young evangelicals in my day would claim to have had a personal encounter with their savior Jesus Christ.
This to say that Yahweh is for many former believers and never-Yahwists, a human construct who reflects the deficiencies and biases of his creators. Yahweh doesn't advance morality and if genocide and barbarism are in his nature, it's because they were part of the milieu he was born into. Whatever advanced ethical precepts claimed by his partisans (one day of rest per week, debt jubilees, etc.) are of a decidedly human origin and if you look more closely, you'll probably find another culture which was more advanced overall. Believers tend to claim a special status for their deity's revealed law that makes it stand out from cruder contemporary ethical systems in the region. If you know nothing about the religions and peoples that died out, perhaps victims of war and cultural conquest, then you don't know in what ways you are beneficiary of their rites.
To generalize, there are two broad meta-schools in the human family: the believers who are Idealists because the concept of Yahweh/God is all that matters and physical reality is just a prop; and then the Realists who think extraordinary claims require physical evidence if they are to have serious consideration. The extraordinary claim that one million people emerged from a forty year trek in the desert and went on a major military campaign which saw the conquest of city states requires evidence. Otherwise, it is not part of reality. If it's not real physically, it cannot be believed since belief must rest on evidence. Archaeology says no such campaign ever took place based on the place names and excavations performed in the last few decades.
A belief that Abe Lincoln faked his death and entered into a time machine which transported him to 2350 CE is not reality. Reality is what we all must agree upon as sentient creatures living in community and this is shaped completely by sense experience and consciousness. Yahwists don't make these sorts of claims as a rule but rely instead on a shared adherence to a lineage in which these types of claims were made in the past and, somehow, just stuck.
This however is a simplistic, even foolish claim in light of Jung. Religions make marvelous, miraculous claims but their success is rooted in the way they touch upon human psychology and need. The belief that Christ suffered and died a brutal death is for many people a great consolation: even God himself would take on a human nature and put himself through a miserable existence to show his love for his creatures. If you don't understand the power in this, you are insensate. And yes, the claim is fraught with all sorts of logical and moral problems. If you are God, why not just create a better world where suffering is non-existent? These questions will come naturally, but it's best to just take in the claims organically, holistically as they are found.
That's the problem with humans, it leads some to value sankhara – mental phenomenon – over the physical world and its endless objects. For others, mind requires there must be a possible physical analog if it is to be taken seriously. Ideas which have a physical backing are credible; the other ideas of indeterminate nature or of a nature at odds with physical reality should be discarded or relegated to a field of minor academic study, probably under the heading of religious studies or anthropology. The Realists will only pay lip service to the role that consciousness has in shaping perceptions of reality. Science is objective, measurable, repeatable and observable irrespective of any one scientist. Consciousness is just assumed at the outset and this is where Idealists push back. The Realist assumes consciousness as a precondition and places greater weight on natural and scientific laws to explain reality. The Idealists sees the physical as ancillary to the field of consciousness.
Schizophrenia is a condition in which a person experiences mental phenomenon with no attending analog in the world of sense experience. It is hard for us to imagine what a schizophrenic is going through mentally, when they are seeing vivid images and hearing distinct, clear sounds and voices. The problem with mental phenomenon is that they are subjective so far as Realists are concerned and therefore, impervious to systematic classification.
The psychiatrist Thomas Szasz claimed, against his whole field, that schizophrenia was a kind of malingering since it had no somatic correlate. People who wanted to escape work or the stresses of life would make up fantastic stories about auditory and/or visual hallucinations. Some would spontaneously go into remission after a period, resuming work and family life. For the Realist Szasz, this was explainable by the choice to commit fraud followed by the decision to give up the onerous pretense once it became inconvient. By treating the behavior as a mental illness, psychiatry was bound to encourage further fraud from malcontents while increasing the reach of the pharmacratic state, which needs only the thinnest excuse for expansion.
Schizophrenia is a an extreme form of Idealism and there are any number of religious mystics who could easily be diagnosed as such based on their testimonies and writings. Religious people tend broadly to fall into the Idealist camp and Thomas Szasz aside, will place greater weight on the contents of consciousness since these objects are immediate. Disputes over whether King David actually existed may never be settled because of the challenges of accurately reconstructing the distant past, but the idea that a god has in some way touched a life can run very deep, very wide.
Buddhism is about the middle way in most things, but in the case of Realism and Idealism, there are gradations of opinion among practitioners. Yogacara is sometimes known as mind-only, a hard stance which sees physical reality as an emanation of mind in the sense that whatever physical reality out there is heavily filtered and interpreted by our consciousness. Other schools within Buddhism like Theravada seem to give the physical world a kind of respect as an objective, separate thing. I've heard one Thai Forest ajahn refer to reality as an illusion, a feeling I sometimes share. The word "illusion" is context-sensitive, linked in Buddhism to the emptiness that is found in all compounded things, which change microsecond to microsecond, never resting, never solidifying into a definite substance.
The Buddha focused on the senses in many of his talks. Sense experience gives rise to sense-consciousness which in term becomes another object of consciousness proper. Taste-consciousness of this burrito I am eating right now (instead of typing) is like this and will become a memory, another piece of archival data that is highly interpreted by consciousness. I may recall that the burrito I ate was really good and had these toppings, etc. It is this recollection in our consciousness at a later date that propels us to go and get another one. Physical reality transmits things, experiences, sensations to us we could not produce on our own. Mind-only is not really yogacara as I understand it and it's part of Buddhism. Nor is physicalism/materialism the ground of being either as it is in the West.
Buddhism's hedging between the two camps is challenging. If we take the Buddha at his word, then a lot of spiritual beings were involved in his ministry. The basis of any number of suttas is the occasion of an angelic being visiting him in a grove, lighting it up by their presence, as they sought his counsel. What are we to make of these? An encounter with an angel or a god would be a pure mental phenomenon or an event with a physical analog?
If we say it was a physical event, then Realists are right to ask about evidence and possibilities of recreating the event through contact. The Idealists could view the encounter with a god as a mental event, but of a kind so numinous as to make other things – like the eating of an especially tasty burrito – seem like nothing. Who would meet a god from the brahma realm and not find it to be one of the most defining experiences of their life?
I ask because in reading and watching material on Ajahn Sao and a couple of others, they reported encounters and even dialogues with nagas and devas. Similar stories are reported in the West, where people have had encounters with the Virgin Mary. Are these encounters between schizophrenics and mind-created entities?
Realists can't really answer the question at all because the ground of truth is the physical world with consciousness as a by-product of that process. Mental phenomenon between a fully rational person and a deva are not possible except as a fraud, a delusion, a medical condition and so on. In other words, certain mental experiences can be so profound yet so subjective because they are by nature, confined to one person (in most cases).
