How often do we read and hear of such laments, especially coming from the younger people, less often from older generations whose members sometimes do not as easily as others give up or give in. Some pine away, their mood one of a person expecting bad news who hates to foresee it coming and has lost all hope that things could be any other way than that which elicits pity even from the most quickly passing strangers. Their depression grows as they flip from one thing to another while their energy saps and their steps turn to the mushy wading of someone in water almost too deep for touching bottom.

¹Ecclesiacs love to see their angst; it warns them that here has appeared a new target, one that has not quite gotten led into the fold. Self interest, they know, must be swept away and the soul before them become filled with the presence and influence of God before it is too late. The opportunity seems too precious to pass up, and the sense of propriety too important to displace with whatever other concerns may fill their day.

And so life, for the depressed sufferer, gains new meaning as God steps in to displace the aimless searching psychological process we call 'Self' while tears of joy course down the now forgiven face of a new victim taken by the church of happenstance. The ecclesiac feels loved. He feels appreciated. He feels ready to do this chore again, and longs for the next opportunity to come along, for his self, too, has been usurped and cast aside to make room for that god that deposed it, maybe many years before. His greatest hope, his secret dream, is to be the one "some day responsible for the salvation of another Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell, or maybe even a Billy Graham, men of obvious greatness who must have personally shaken the hand of God and become blessed."

So, why am I writing this? Why do I feel so concerned that something may be amiss in all of this great performance and presentation of proper piety?

The arguments of religion that introduced predestination to Xian converts, the arguments of Determinists that serve to continue that into the metaphysical realms attached to science (mainly, it seems, through psychology), work to the benefit of those who would impose their own ideals onto human societies wherever they can grab a purchase. The first aim of the memes that perpetuate religions is to remove the personal autonomous self from the mix, after which gullible converts become convinced they should do away with such an evil concept, and work for the glory of their religion or political body even against their own best interests.

All religions seek and strive to always replace the self with their own set of ideals, for their own self-perpetuation, by fixating attention upon whatever each self has been fed, the indoctrinational materials passed to each individual by all the proselytizers in their lives. Memes get built upon by a constant influx of religious ideas until each formerly self-aware host has been given a new internal identity as a "man or woman of god" as ready to defend their facsimile self as viciously as they should have fought to save the original, had it not gotten so surreptitiously stolen. Most of us never get to know our selves before they have been banished while we still were adolescents. Self out, god in.

Is 'Self' Real? My approach to the creation of this entire website, all the other writing I have done, and the design of my own personal philosophy, has been to keep myself reminded that, "Whatever is true, is true in spite of what I want to believe." Whether or not any of us like an idea, if it is true it cannot do us any good to deny that; and, if it is false, it will be false no matter how much we love the way it seems. If an idea is testable, if it is accessible to our common awareness, then it can be either true or false, but only as a matter of whether or not it can pass or fail our tests. Our best lives can be lived by acknowledging that and designing our existences around it, and our worst kinds of lives will be those lived by people who fail to do so.

The philosophy named 'Determinism' has done the secular world a continuing disservice by promoting its false view that, mainly, infers the autonomous self is only an illusion, and then works hard to convince all parties that means 'delusion'. To make their case against the reality of our perceptions of 'self', Determinists rely upon the accuracy and dependability of the very same systems of perception they strive to discredit. Their notion that selfness is an illusion cannot be supported by any kind of objective testing that cannot also better support better alternative hypotheses, and that most often gets misinterpreted to a view that includes all of existence as only a "delusion" by those who have no facility with which to perceive the difference and so will treat both words as synonyms.

The harmful nature of that philosophy comes from its tendency toward a nihilistic view of life: "Oh, what's the use?" "We're all going to end up dead anyways, so why should we care?" "Why should human beings struggle to better themselves, only to have the universe die around us and turn to frozen rocks?" It is such sentiments as those that spring from delusion, whereas 'illusion' presents the metaphor by which we correctly or incorrectly understand what is real and what is required for us to survive and thrive. That 'us' is the selves by which each of us recognizes our inherent individual autonomy as presented in each sovereign 'self' in any group. This works through a process modern thought has given the name 'emergence', of which you can read more by clicking the link at the bottom of this page.

Determinism not only is too easily misrepresented, too easy to misunderstand, and too easy to make inferences from that are absolutely incorrect, it uses a concept called 'free will' as a strawman to decoy skeptics away from the autonomy of self as something that has risen up by evolutionary processes, by insisting that only 'cause and effect' determine responses by some unformulated automatic process. The basis upon which determinism rises up is a right enough description of cause/effect relationships, which can be most concisely expressed as "Nothing happens uncaused." In the material world, events occur because something made them happen. The part that gets overlooked is that "Something made them happen because it could." Material existence provides a complex array of materials that will enable all kinds of events: 1) If something will initiate them; and 2) If something is present with which to do that. Determinists commonly describe that as "things happen because they were determined to." It would be more correct to say, "Things happen because they were able to," as in the interactive view of cause and effect.

The opposing view to determinism is indeterminism, which claims free will does exist, but offers no explanation or definition beyond a wide brush stroke supposed to account for all of humanity's actions. In my mind, both sides of this argument avoid the true issues and are actually non-issues that use red herrings to make their arguments seem sensible.

The correct description of the misnamed "Free Will" determinists claim to be the only alternative to their creed, is that "thoughts and actions cannot self-originate (paraphrased)." That, in just that expression, makes sense enough, but determinists do not stop there when they get involved in discussions about it. A few of them want to deny us actual consciousness, deny us an ability to make choices, and/or deny our 'selves' any meaningful role in our existence. Self out, determinism in, wherein determinism becomes the force that drives us and takes the place God first sought to usurp.

'Self', as I reference it in all my writing, is not the reification of electrochemical processes inherent to all sentient beings, which is the 'self' the determinists and other nihilists have put up as a strawman that they can then deny. Self is an autonomous process inherent to sentience. You and I both know of ourselves as the living, breathing, thinking portion of our bodies, a concept we can grasp without making untestable claims of its separateness as a being on its own. We know, if we have ever experienced it, that when an accident (or the doctors operating on our bodies) renders us unconscious, we have no self awareness, and except in the twilight zone wherein we fade into or out of consciousness, we have no awareness of even being alive. In the twilight zone, we may be aware of doctors' voices, or those of people working over us, and dream of them in their uniforms while we try to self-explain all that is taking place around us. When loss of consciousness is complete, we will not experience even that, nor will we experience not having the experience.

That occurs because the electrochemical processes Nature has put in charge of our bodies —our internal computer guidance system— has been interrupted in its operations. It is the product of our awareness, as centralized in our bodies and brain, that we generally consider to be our own distinct 'self'. To recognize that does not require the reification of a second being in violation of Newton's Rules of Reason or any other of the Principles of Atheology. 'Self', then, is as real as any other kind of process commonly recognized by human beings at all levels of our presence.

How to retrieve your stolen self: The first step is to realize whether it actually has been stolen; the second to realize what it can mean to you to understand yourself.

We saw in a previous paragraph how deterministic cause and effect actions are, in a manner of expression, interactive in their natures: For there to be an effect, an event must be involved, a cause for that event gets presupposed, that material was present to enable the action initiated by that would-be cause, and also that no events or causes act alone nor do they act without feedback from later events that modify our perceptions of them. Why must we view our mentality in any way different from that?

The material for our autonomous 'self' starts with our genetic heritage, out from which we each rise as unique, self-sovereign individuals. Our mental 'realm' accretes from the materials we filter into it as we grow and mature, and thereafter. Our filters get stricter as we age and learn new ideas by experience and various kinds of exposure. Our pictures —the metaphors we live and work by— become clarified by this kind of process as we refine it. All of the events and knowledge we have passed through those filters becomes the material from which we glean new concepts and initiate actions of our own. No internal force bears down upon us to make us unable to select from whatever options may be available. I see determinism as limited in that, and not the all-powerful facsimile deity that so often gets proposed. The role determinism plays is limited to that which has become available: No thought or action arises from nothing, inside or out, but thoughts and actions will arise from interaction with ongoing events according to the available materials, inside or out. Most of those ongoing events are passing us by, not bearing down on us, until we decide to interact with them.

Most important, and far more important to you than misrepresentations by opinionated determinists can ever be, is to understand the way in which your self became displaced by parasitic memeplexes (look for memeplex in my Glossary). Memes, active ideas that so surreptitiously (and yet obviously) reside in your brain and nervous system (see: Dawkins, The Selfish Gene), displace the genetic self by adding an over-layer if they are symbiotic, or by subduing it if they are parasitic. We all suffer from parasitic memes to at least some extent, and very few of us get to experience life with symbiotic memes for all kinds of reasons. That is something well worth the struggle, and the risks are not all that they may seem unless we have vested interests to feel concerned about.

Young people will find the struggle easy, in comparison to someone who has matured and may find himself face to face with great odds to overcome, such as the threat of job-loss, or a spouse whose views are hard and fast. The struggle involves dedicated questioning of your own deeply held beliefs, which most people apparently find to be an impossible task to consider. What you believe, what you can verify in nature using the scientific method, and what cannot be verified by the processes of science (either by yourself, or by studying the works of others), are items you must discover for yourself and determine what kinds of actions will work for you. Your aim is to rediscover and reaffirm your actual self and then to determine your lifetime aims. I am not a professional psychologist, the kind of person to whom you should turn if you get stuck; but, mainly, even he or she can do little more than help or guide you. You will have to do the hard stuff on your own. It may take years.

Copyright ©2005 by Lloyd Harrison Whitling. All rights reserved.