Head and Heart

Until very recently, my journey in seeking Truth has largely been a private one.  The vast majority of my friends and family are strong or moderate Christian believers, and I have often felt uncomfortable sharing my questioning journey with them, because I did not want to argue over differing points of view or to undermine their path or mine, or at least so I rationalized to myself.  I also wanted to keep my journey as “fresh” and as non-biased as possible by not allowing myself to be overly influenced by the emotions of myself, my friends, and my family, which can easily happen with me because I care about them deeply and want to get along with them.  Somewhere along the line I bought in to the idea “getting along” also meant agreeing on everything.  I now see that is not always if ever the case.

Opening up about my true feelings and questions on God and the supernatural to some of my friends and acquaintances, has been most helpful for me in looking at life from a different perspective I might not have considered before I revealed my thoughts to others.  It has been a little disorienting for me to consider both what I am taking in from others’ point of view, while striving to see Truth clearly at the same time.  I also do not want to always sound like a “contrarian” or seem “difficult” when I may rebut or challenge a point of view others may have while speaking with them.  I want to hear what others have to say, and I do not want to be closed off to their words.  I wish to consider all points of view.  At the same time, I also do not want my emotions to rule over my head to the point where I let go of critical thinking and discernment.  There is being open, and then there is being gullible. There is being closed off and a deliberate contrarian, and then there is being genuinely honest about wanting to see things truthfully without the filters of personal bias. That is why I so admire the scientific method in which personal bias is eliminated as much as humanly possible, while data and evidence is analyzed and thoroughly examined before arriving at a conclusion.  It has always seemed to me the only way to be as sure as possible what we are seeing is the Truth, we need to take our heart out of it because it is too easy to give in to our heart’s desire – to believe what we want to believe is true, instead of seeking knowledge of what is actually True, regardless of whether or not it corresponds to what we want to believe.

Whenever the heart overrules the head, we are vulnerable to gullibility. I am keenly aware of this tendency in myself especially, and so I have tried to always let my head ultimately rule over my heart in matters of discerning the Truth.  It seems to me our hearts lead us in our quest for Truth, while our heads enable us to discern the Truth.  My best friend from college once told me our hearts tell us what we want, and our heads tell us how to get it.  While our intuition or hunches can sometimes tell us what is true, it is usually best to not rely solely on our personal intuitions and interpretations, but to consider our hearts as well as our heads if at all possible.  If something is actually true, then evidence, experience, and sound reasoning will confirm it to be true.  Without the checks and balances of reason and intuition – of heart and head, we cannot see Reality clearly with any consistency. While this battle between my head and my heart has raged within me throughout my entire life, what has been nice about opening up to others is the fact I now see they struggle with this same head and heart dichotomy I also struggle with to some degree or another.  Some call this the struggle between the “flesh” and the “spirit.”

While we cannot let our hearts rule over our heads, at the same time we must not let our heads override and negate our hearts.  We must acknowledge our heart and be honest about how we genuinely feel.  In short, we must find a balance between the two in order to be our best as emotionally mature and intellectually honest people.  From my point of view, I try to acknowledge my personal feelings and emotional desires, and then take a step back to look at all the evidence I have in my awareness to discern what is actually true.  In addition to evidence, or lack of evidence, I also try to think critically about even the possibility of something being true.  For example, I ask myself if the proposition is a logical contradiction – like a “round square.”  If it is a logical contradiction, or a double-standard, I cannot accept it as true because I have found through logical thought and rational analysis that all contradictions and double-standards are always false.  Once I come to realize through evidence and critical thinking that something is true or almost certainly true, I then try to come to accept what is true regardless of whether or not it corresponds to what I personally want to believe is true.  This can be especially tricky for me when I listen to and speak with other believers, and I have learned some very valuable lessons over the past two weeks after revealing my questions to some of them.  None of the Christian believers I have spoken with have sounded delusional in their faith.  I can see their faith is genuine, and the core of their faith appears to be unshaken even in the midst of questions they may have.

I however, am not so sure, because my questions go beyond mere objections to the Christian faith.  They are far more fundamental than this because from my vantage point, the fact and Truth of Oneness make the notion of any eternal “separate beings” – including God – impossible to begin with, because this very idea depends on the truth of the fundamentally flawed concept of dualism – the idea there exists two “separate” and “independent” realities – one “material,” and the other “spiritual.”  The problem is, dualism is provably false on more than one level – not the least of which is the fact it is logically impossible. For if there were two opposite, “separate,” and “independent” realities, as theists and substance dualists claim, then one “reality” would cancel out the other, resulting in only nothingness, which is obviously false.  Simple math demonstrates this fact clearly.  If there exists one “material” reality (1), and at the same time a second and opposite “spiritual” reality (-1), then simple math tells us that 1 minus 1 equals 0. That is why there exists only one reality, even though it contains different aspects, including our subjective notions of such opposites as “good” and “bad,” of “pleasure” and “pain, etc.” These opposites are actually nothing more than two “sides” of the same one coin.  But they are not, and cannot be “separate” and “independent” from each other, since again – if that were the case, then one would cancel out the other, which would only result in nothingness.

Dualism is a logical contradiction, which is why it is false.  Logical contradictions like “round squares” cannot exist, and therefore do not exist.  This is the essence of my inability to accept the traditional concept of God as a “separate,” and “independent” eternal being apart from ourselves.  Because I cannot accept the existence of “round squares,” I therefore also cannot accept the existence of God, since both concepts are logical contradictions, which are therefore false.  While I have several other reasons for not believing in God or the supernatural, as I explore in depth on this site, the fact of the logical contradiction of the concept of God and the supernatural is the essence of my inability to believe in these things, and is in fact and ultimately, the only reason I need. What more reasons beyond recognizing the contradiction of the concept of “round squares” do we need to disprove their existence?  What more reasons beyond recognizing the fact that 1 minus 1 equals 0 do we need to disprove the concept of dualism? We need no more reasons to disprove the existence of God and the supernatural either since – like “round squares,” these very concepts are the exact same kind of contradiction.  While we cannot technically “disprove” God, we can demonstrate the fact the very concept of God is a logical contradiction.  Since contradictions are always false, ideas such as the concept of God and “round squares” are also false, and therefore cannot exist. While the Christian believers I have spoken with accept God as a given without question, I cannot accept God as a given because I cannot intellectually accept the premise of dualism in the first place – the premise I would have to accept in order to believe in God as defined as a separate, independent, and “transcendent” being apart from ourselves and existence.  I cannot accept and believe in that which cannot exist due to the logical contradiction I would have to accept in order to believe in its existence, no matter what it is.  I would have to ignore non-contradictory logic and sound reasoning in order to believe in logical contradictions and concepts like “round squares.” I am not comfortable ignoring my head for the sake of my heart no matter what I want to believe.

The question of the historicity of Jesus also poses a huge stumbling block in my way of accepting Christianity as true.  The incredible lack of any evidence for an historical Jesus dated from the time he supposedly lived, with not a single word written either by Jesus himself or by contemporary writers and historians in reference to him to corroborate the Gospel accounts during his supposed lifetime, the lack of a direct and definite reference to Jesus of Nazareth in the “Dead Sea Scrolls,” combined with the strong evidence suggesting the Roman Flavians invented or at least re-invented Jesus for purposes of manipulation and control of messianic Jewish rebels and slaves, also make belief in Jesus as my personal savior impossible for me given my current understanding. Accepting the Jesus story as literal fact is hard enough for me to believe given all I have learned about the Bible being constructed as typological literature, the lack of contemporary, third-party accounts of Jesus’ life, and the Roman Flavians’ mind-control campaigns they were notorious for; but even more fundamentally, the logical contradiction of a “separate” God being the exact same kind of contradiction as a “round square” as I said before, make it impossible for me to accept the concept of God to begin with, even though I emotionally would like to believe the loving and pleasant aspects of a God in his Heaven are true.  Unless someone can genuinely explain a serious error in my logic I may have never before considered, or unless someone can explain to me how squares can be round and how one minus one can equal anything other than zero, I see no way possible for me to accept the concepts of God and the supernatural while maintaining intellectual honesty.  As of now, I have not found any thought, philosophy, principle, insight, or scripture, which would contradict my findings on Oneness, and therefore the impossibility of God.

I have lately mused whether faith is synonymous with the “heart,” and fact is synonymous with the “head.”   I wondered if it was possible for me to reconcile the two by acknowledging my heart wants to believe in a loving God, while my head knows God is not real, because he cannot be real.  I am not sure if it even matters to those of faith whether or not the concept of God is logically possible, but it matters greatly to me, as I still cannot reconcile sound reasoning with the idea of a “separate” and “independent” “timeless” being of any kind, let alone God, because it is synonymous with the concept of a “round square” as stated previously.  In observing Sunday School today, one little child brilliantly asked the question, “who created God?”  Wow.  Out of the mouths of babes… If only he knew the profound depth of his question. It is indeed the impossible contradiction of an “uncreated creator” which makes it fundamentally impossible for me to accept God intellectually.

It is easy for me to accept the idea of a loving God in my heart.  It is impossible for me to accept the concept of God in my head.  Since neither my head nor my heart can “win” over the other if I strive for balance, I feel the most honest thing for me is to acknowledge the ultimate question of “why” is unknowable, and to perhaps acknowledge the “good” that the concept of God can have and does have on many lives, even if God is not real as an actual, factual reality or being outside ourselves.  For me, the only way I could believe in a literal “supreme-being ego-god,” is I would have to choose to believe in God while knowing God is logically impossible at the same time.  I am personally not comfortable with this because I cannot simply ignore what my critical thinking mind tells me what must be true logically, and find it far more comfortable to deal with the mind-heart dichotomy by acknowledging my heart by trying to live as closely as possible to the “Godly” qualities of truth, love, integrity, compassion, and forgiveness, while not attributing them to a “separate” and “independent” being outside myself, nor attributing them to me.  In other words, nobody owns these principles – not me, not Jesus Christ, nor God, as they are Universal.  That is why I reject the idea that Truth is the exclusive property of any one religion.

In short, I see the concept of God as a metaphor – as the embodiment of principles, not as a literal, factual reality or “being” outside ourselves.  It is my feeling it is not what we believe that matters since our beliefs never change Reality, but where our hearts truly are, revealed in how we live, how we love, how we support others and put them ahead of our selfish desires.  My passionate quest for truth is that never-ending, ever-allusive balancing act between my head and my heart.

Listen to the “Head and Heart” audio version