Friends, Romans, Countrymen...

...Lend Me Your Eyeballs (as I introduce this blog/book)

George Edward Robertson, “Marc Antony’s Oration at Caesar’s Funeral”

My name is not actually Thomas Reid. The real Thomas Reid was a philosopher of the Scottish Enlightenment perhaps best known for complaining that David Hume needed to touch grass. Aside from the fact that his name is not famous and is therefore relatively unobtrusive, I chose it as a pseudonym because his idea that reason cannot justify itself rationally, and thus that some things must be taken for granted pre-rationally, hangs in the background of everything this blog will be about. Namely, the intersection of religion, science and philosophy.

The main reason I’m starting this blog is as a vehicle to publish a book. I briefly considered traditional publishing, but it seemed less degrading just to go ahead online than to spend a year getting ghosted by agents with nothing to show for it. I haven’t thought of a good name for the book yet beyond just the title of this blog, Cataspectral, so for now that will be its working title. I’ll publish Part I as a whole now and will follow up with further chapters on a weekly or perhaps biweekly basis.

This book, working-title-Cataspectral, is for you if you think something is “off” about the world, if you have a vague sense that life is at risk of being meaningless, purposeless, disconnected, empty or doomed, but you’re not sure why. It’s also for you if you have a culprit in mind. Perhaps the problem is the elevation of rationality over intuition, the alienation of labor under capitalism, suppression and mistreatment of various minority groups, the anomie engendered by globalization or disconnection from the divine, and maybe even all of them rolled into one.

While at least some of these are legitimate issues in themselves, I think the root of this feeling is common to all of them: mortality and the related threat to the meaningfulness of our lives. The difficulty isn’t in recognizing this as a problem, but in learning how to navigate it. You may be someone who has found a good navigation strategy. If you have, I hope that what follows will be useful in gaining new perspectives on your own solutions or those of others.

If you don’t agree that there’s anything of this kind necessarily wrong with the world, but you are dismayed at the current political insanity in the United States and beyond, you may find this book interesting as an explanation of why certain people are so attracted to such seemingly crazy ideas. If nothing else, it will surely be entertaining to observe at first hand the lengths to which a highly neurotic author’s mind will go to convince itself it is achieving something real in tangling with its own shadow-demons.

I have three goals in this book: 1) to work out the contours of a new concept, the ‘cataspect’, applicable to the murky zone of spirituality, religion and the meaning of life that hopefully makes it clearer which sorts of things are “in” and which are “out” in a constructive way, 2) to give a potted history of how we got to the current state of affairs regarding catapects and why it is bad but not unfixable and 3) to suggest a way we might start improving things.

Countless other people have thought and written about this topic, some of whom I reference here and many of whom I’ve regrettably left out. I don’t pretend to be saying anything particularly revolutionary. If I am successful, I will only be adding my own humble, but hopefully helpful, contribution to the larger discussion.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

PART I - The Concept of the Cataspect

• Chapter 1 - ‘Cataspect’ Defined

• Chapter 2 - The Self

• Chapter 3 - What Do We Mean by ‘Meaning’?

• Chapter 4 - Mysticism

• Chapter 5 - Death and Spiritual Astigmatism

PART II - The Decline and Fall of Christianity

• Chapter 6 - The Orthodoxy

• Chapter 7 - Reformation

• Chapter 8 - Science and Magic

• Chapter 9 - The University, Doubt and the Death of God

• Chapter 10 - Is Secular Humanism Enough?

PART III - Brave New World

• Chapter 12 - Nazism

• Chapter 13 - Marxism-Leninism

• Chapter 14 - The Antimodernist Coalition

• Chapter 15 - The Fifth Wave

• Chapter 16 - The Origins of the New Age

• Chapter 17 - The Age of Aquarius

• Chapter 18 - The Dark Enlightenment

PART IV - Theosis

• Chapter 19 - Getting to the Point

• Chapter 21 - Nature Religion and Singularitarianism

• Chapter 22 - Metaphysical Foundations

• Chapter 23 - The Scientific Sacred

• Chapter 25 - Eternalism

• Chapter 26 - A Physicalist God

• Chapter 27 - A God that Cares

• Chapter 28 - God as Love