megaphone
if you had a megaphone, you said, and all the people who are lost were gathered together, what would you say to them?
well, i say, stroking my imaginary beard, i understand why you ask the question but i don't believe in the usefulness of hypotheticals. if you won the lottery what would you do with the money, that kind of thing. it's a good one for a conversation after christmas dinner with your mother (my mother loves this question and she always starts with, first i would pay off the mortgage — she's 85 and a half and she still hasn't paid off her mortgage! how cruel is capitalism? — and then i would give half of the rest of the money to you x) but it's not so useful when you're talking about the human condition and the meaning of life and the suffering of the world.
for me the point about talking with people is that it needs to be a dialogue, a conversation between people who trust and respect each other, and it requires a willingness to listen. you are only going to be prepared to listen to someone you trust and respect and you are only going to be prepared to talk about things that really matter to you with someone you trust and respect.
the utter stupidity and uselessness of a 'debate' is mind boggling. nothing that i could say to people whose trust and respect i don't have would be of any use to them because they would all hear something different and interpret what i say in their own way, because that's how language works.
to have a meaningful conversation with a small group of people who are gathered together for a reason is certainly possible and what is also possible there, if you gather with that group of people on a regular basis, is for respect and trust and friendship and love/care (agape) to develop between those people.
but to go into depth you need to talk with each person one to one, on a regular basis over a number of years — which is time consuming and impractical.
but the point of your question is something like, what would you ask everyone to consider, to think about and i'm glad you asked that because i've been thinking about this for half a century.
so ok i will play your game.
you'd have to be some kind of weird megalomaniac (or malignant narcissist) to entertain this but can i change it slightly and say, if all the humans in the world were gathered together and i had a megaphone and i could speak a language that they could all understand, what i would i say?
there would two things :
first i would ask : are you a believer in, or agnostic about — or even just interested in — the possibility of there being a mystery — the mystery at the heart and soul of the universe (or of the ten to the power of five hundred universes and the eleven dimensions) what the beat poet alan ginsberg called 'the starry dynamo'.
and i ask that because it is as if the people in the world can be divided into two groups : those that say yes to that question and those that say, no definitely not. (if you say, i don't know you can join in with the yes group :)
and then of course there are the people who don't have enough to eat and/or who are sick and live in places where there are no adequate medical facilities and/or they are in pain and you might say, if you are a humanist or a person is committed to helping those people, quit all this talking and let's help these people and eradicate the injustices in the world first and you'd have a good point.
but this is hypothetical is it not?
so all the people who say no to that, well they can all go back to what they were doing since we have nothing to say to each other which is of any use because the next question i would ask is if you think/feel/believe you are in some way connected to this mystery or whether you believe or hope that it is possible to experience a connection with this mystery.
and now it becomes interesting because the ones that have a specific religious affiliation, all of whom are still with us in this yes/maybe group, will answer yes to this question and they will have specific ideas or a narrative about this connection and they will have a name for this mystery, which may be allah or god or something else, and they are fine these people, they don't need me and they don't need to hear what i've got to say. i learned this working in a cancer hospital as a spiritual carer. they will talk to their imam or priest or rabbi and they will hear what they they want or need to hear from them, i.e. allah is great and/or god will (or will not) forgive your sins provided you do this that or the other thing.
so all those people can go over there and sit in the shade under those trees and talk together. that's great. i don't have an issue with what they do or do not believe — and if the reverse is also true, then we can all be friends, and please, if you are interested in joining in with the conversations in our group at any time, you are most welcome.
the group that remains are the people i am interested in talking with, but not through a megaphone.
these are the people who have an inkling of this mystery but who cannot name it (and perhaps do not want to name in case naming it destroys it somehow) but they are interested in the possibility of having some kind of connection with this mystery.
they are different to the people who have gone back to what they were doing before, call them the naysayers if you will,
somehow they know, and they know this is not rational or logical, it is not science, it cannot be proven, there is no evidence for it — although we might point to this grain of sand and say, well maybe the fact that there are fifty million million million atoms in this one grain of sand and that each of those atoms is like a little universe consisting of electrons and protons and subatomic particles and so on and on, maybe that's evidence — or the fact that there may well be as many galaxies and stars in the cosmos as there are atoms in this single grain of sand maybe that's evidence — but this is all highly speculative, you and i don't really know anything about this mystery other than we somehow know it's there, or that there is Something.
these of people i would like to think of as postatheists or post(a)theists.
we agree that there is some kind of mystery, something deeply mysterious about being, about existence — and that it may be possible to feel or to somehow experience a connection with this mystery and we are interested in having a conversation about this with each other.
we are not interested in a debate about whether or not god exists and which way of believing in a god or gods is the best way.