Materialism - A Hate Story

During virtually all my life my greatest spiritual enemy has been the Materialist ("Physicalist" might be the better term all things considered, but in my own language there is no such alternative available so I will stick with "materialist" in this particular text). The Materialist has been standing on the side line looking at what I've been doing regarding religion or spirituality and as soon as there were any opportunity they smugly have noted something along the lines of "You know that what you are doing is absolutely bogus, right?". It didn't help that the spirituality of my childhood and young adulthood had the aspiration to reach out and "spread the word" about our religious business - this approach forced me to come in contact with the Materialist on their playing field over and over again and the interactions ended a bit too often with that all my arguments or talking points had ruthlessly been taken down or at least ridiculed in a way that made me either furious or deeply sad - often both.

During all this time I wished I could let the Materialist alone and that they could do the same to me. I liked my religion, I liked my spiritual life - I didn't care if the Materialist or whoever liked something else, it wasn't my business and it wasn't theirs to care about my way of living and understanding life, I thought. The prosyleteric agenda from my religious surrounding made a cease fire ultimately an impossibility but the constant fight between me and the Materialist wasn't only my own doing or fault. 

No, the Materialist could attack from anywhere since they had, well, all of society on their side to be only a tiny bit hyperbolic. Everything in our society is tainted and affected by the Materialist views and values. It is their History that gets presented in our schools, it is their interpretation of Science that is considered valid (every other interpretation of the neutral data of science gets the label "woo" before one even has finished the first sentence of the abstract..) and if you try to withhold a different value system or argue for something that goes outside of their definition of "reality" you can count on being attacked in various ways. Mostly by being ridiculed to death, but other - more serious options was always available to them if they wanted to. Materialism was dangerous. To my young self the Materialist was indeed an enemy in a very real sense. 

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Today, all this is merely annoying. Not because that materialism is "stupid" or "scandalous" or anything that would suggest I hate the thought system because I myself has become excessively closed minded. No, I can quite clearly see why materialism is so popular or why the Materialist has reasons to be so constantly smug and generally content with their views. Materialism works. Ever since it grew out of the Cartesian dualism of Descartes and tried to be a thought system of its own the world has changed in deeply remarkable ways. If you look at existence with materialistic eyes you can apply an utilitaristic approach to life, the world and humanity that makes it possible to figure out and solve, well, everything. As long as there is a question you can ask in the form "Does this work? If not, how do we make it work?" materialistic science has no limit to how far it can go in its effort to reach a satisfying answer. This has been shown time and time again. Materialism holds incredible power, I won't and don't deny that the slightest. 

The price for this power is however that the other side of the Cartesian dualism, the Soul, needs to be discarded. The Soul can't - as matter can - be measured in any single way. The Soul is invisible, arbitrary, and frustratingly mood dependent. There is no proof that the Soul exists, even worse, there is no good suggestions on how to put up an experiment to even attempt to prove the existence of a soul or a realm of the Soul. So, the soul need to go, but hey, it isn't all bad for the Materialist since the authorities of the domain of the Soul can be discarded with it. Goodbye churches, goodbye "holy" books, good bye all things that stinks of arbitrariness and woo! In a materialist world you don't even have to confront these aspects of existence, you can simply ridicule them from a distance and then proceed to ignore them as much as you may wish. Comfy! 

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Again: I can clearly see why materialism has such popularity. It's simple and it's quite elegant. If something is real, you can put it in a lab and - given enough time and resources applied - guaranteedly figure out the properties and qualities of the object or the phenomena. It really cannot fail. If something can't be put in a lab for whatever reason you can declare it to be fictional, humbug, a waste of time or - once more for them in the back - to be woo! 

My problem with this is that the Materialist willingly ignore a huge chunk of what existence and the world entails. I won't say that every materialist would claim that all "non-lab" aspects of existence must be fictional or false (it's just the most likely scenario for them, the a priori assumption), I won't even claim that every materialist necessarily would treat these aspects with boredom or any other form of aversion - no, materialists can absolutely be engaged in for instance spiritual techniques such as meditation, have a interest in dreams or what have you. But from what I've seen the materialist is always a bit vary to take these things too seriously and any claim about these things that tries to be factual but fails to back it up with Science gets treated with a surprisingly high amount of hostility. You can play with the Soul, you can spend time in the domain of the Soul, but you can not treat the Soul as if it was real in the same way as Matter* definitively is real. 

Did I say I find this tiresome? 

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Lately I've been through a rough patch and intellectually this has been.. interesting.. I found myself give up on every supposed fact or supported theory. I just couldn't buy anything that wasn't an axiom and hardly even them at times. I got to know what true scepticism actually looks like (and as a result I can claim with certainty that the self proclaimed "sceptics" out there actually is materialists with a fundamentalistic twist to them - they have no business calling themselves sceptics in any form of real sense) and was stuck in a solipsistic loop for quite a while. The deal I made to not go completely insane was that since I couldn't accept any statements about existence as true I could try to consider every one that presented itself to me seriously, regardless of their intellectual rigor. So during this time I spent time lurking conspiracy forums, fringe philosophy dito, I listened to UFO-podcasts, I entertained flat earth - theory, you name it. The only thing I just couldn't stomach was... yes, materialist view points and ideas. They just made me angry, annoyed, even furious at times. I really didn't know why. God wasn't important to me during this time, religion of any sort gave me allergic reactions and I was aware of the appeal and strength of materialism as described above - Why couldn't I even consider the dominating view and finally be a normie of sort? An acceptance of ideas in that direction would be a terrific relief in the state I was in, I can tell you that much. The best idea regarding my instinctive distaste I had was that Materialism was responsible for a society I had grew to hate and therefor I rejected it so harshly and bitterly. I was the Joker to the Batman of Matterham, if you will..

Now my mind is healthier. I can lovingly leave solipsism in the box labeled " for times where nothing (else) makes sense" and take a better look at the movements happening in my intellectual mind space. And now I can see why materialism is so incredibly ugly and just an intellectual dead end to me. "Drypaintism" (or whatever) is more appealing to me than what the Materialist can present and here's finally why:

I believe human life and mind activity entails a few certainties on an intuitive level. Most of us don't know why we find them certain and many of us consciously denies them even if we aren't convinced materialists, most of us find these areas incredibly mystifying and even if we can be said to be certain on an intuitive, subconscious level - on a conscious, logical level we doubt, we argue to the degree that we fight wars among ourselves on all kinds of scales about ideas on these topics. It's terribly confusing, and in my opinion it should be the highest priority to - if it is even possible at all - reach some kind of "scientific" answers to these topics.

Anyway, what I'm talking about are threefold at this point:

We are certain about the existence of God 

I repeat. The certainty is subconscious and intuitive. Of course I'm well aware about the myriad of ideas about God and all the, well founded or not, arguments about their probable non-existence, but in its simplest form "God" is only a label, a short-hand for a intuition that tries to connect our own configuration and our own modus operandi in the world to that of the Universe and Cosmos as a whole. We create, think, emote, contemplate being - surely someone or something does the same but on a cosmic, universal scale!? The intuition ends there because we lack more information if we don't surrender to various scriptures from the religions of the world - but the intuition is enough to take the question about how God is seriously and skip if God is entirely. The later question is not needed. Of course God is. Look around (or close your eyes and take a deep breath) for Darwins sake!  

Materialism chooses to not participate in the discussion about the nature of God. At all. They proclaim their death, or at the very least their total absence, and with that they think the intuition is ready to be overlooked and ignored - but it isn't so simple. "God", if only as a near-empty label, works as a protector of the domain of the Soul and makes everything that happens there valuable and real in a deeper sense. Everything we do in our minds has a deeper meaning because "God" is there and relates to it in some way. We just don't know in what way they care about it if we would choose to ignore religious traditions. More conscious certainty in this area would be a blessing, but yeah, don't go to the Materialist. They won't even understand the task, any less have any ability to try to help out in any meaningful way. Their God is dead and void and there's that.

We are certain about a Life after Death

I repeat again because if I get a single reaction claiming I believe that any of these three statements are a universal conscious certainty I will go bonkers. No. Again, universally they are an intuitive and subconscious certainty. We currently know them in a way that is near impossible to explain properly and those who try need to muster tremendous amount of energy to display a near correct image of what their intuition is telling them. Still, this one is rather clear.

Materialism claims that "nothing" happens after death. This is because materialism states that every one of us as a conscious entity is nothing more than a combination of our brain, nervous system and a few other bodily functions. This body system will stop functioning eventually and quite soon there after deteriorate to almost complete oblivion (bones may hang around a while, but I digress). Where would the conscious life be contained, even? The Materialist has issues even comprehending why the belief of an after life is still hanging around at all in this day and age. 

Yet, the belief is indeed still around and is as strong as it has ever been. Yes, humans seem to always have been assuming that there is an after life and even if the ideas has varied quite a lot (heaven/hell realms, incarnation systems or spiritual "parallell worlds" almost identical to our current one just to name a few) the belief is rather constant. Even today constant anecdotal evidence is virtually bombarding the one who wishes to look. Reports of NDE:s, previous life memories and meaningful encounters with passed spirits through mediums are absolutely plentiful and even if you would discard every single report as made up fantasies - isn't it strange that the fantasies about an after life keep having such a captivating power to our minds? Why really? If we truly are biological systems passing a bit of time in a specific configuration we have reason to fear death, yes - evolution is a bitch in that regard - but why would we care about an after life this much? 

Odd. But the Materialist doesn't care the slightest. They have invested everything they got on "nothing" and therefor we can't count on them to sort out among all the ideas, unhinged fantasies or hope-injected dreams about the content of an after life. The intuition is undeniably there for all to see, but to get actual conscious and stringent answers on this topic we need to find a way to do some proper science. Just don't wait for the materialist. They are too busy trying to explain what "nothing" is supposed to be, experientially speaking...   

We are certain there is meaning in "hyper spiritual experiences"

This one might be a bit more fiddly so I skip my repetition about the meaning of intuitive certainty here and tries to go right to business: A Hyper Spiritual Experience (HSE) is my own short hand for the different kinds of transcendental experiences that is widely reported in the literature. (See William James et al). The existence of these kind of experiences can not be seriously denied, they are so common place and so well studied already that their place in general existence is a simple fact. Instead the battle field is about their meaning. Anyone that have ever had one of these can relate to the phrase "more real than real" in one way or another. To the experiencer the certainty that there is a very distinct and important meaning to these kind of experiences is undeniable. Most that have them, myself included, claims that they are "the most meaningful event of their life" or something similar to that degree. For us the question isn't if they are meaningful but what the meaning actually is supposed to be - beyond the egos wishful thinking, biases or just plain ignorance that isn't always immediately clear and if one for some reason don't want to trust a particular religious authority on the matter, what are we actually supposed to conclude? 

The materialist doesn't care. Whatever source of the HSE they are quick to state that all of it were some form of strong "hallucinations" and hallucinations, by definition non-real, is the most uninteresting kind of experiences of the whole lot. They're just, beautiful and intriguing as they might be, utter nonsense in the end. No need for answers, no need for scientific exploration or investigation. Nothing needs to be done here, okay mate? 

This is actually particularly weird to me because by the nature of materialisms premises even hallucinations and especially strong, universally reoccurring and symbolically structured ones needs to have a physical structure and order to them. An order that scientists in principle should be able to figure out and fully explain! Everything is matter, everything is structured according to physical laws - even strange and anomalous movements of the mind!  Yet, the interest to go deep diving in these mostly uncharted waters seems so minimal by the general materialist-minded scientific community. And it isn't because HSE:s exclusively are secluded to religious environments where it is difficult, if not impossible, to set up reliable lab-secured tests and experiments. That may have been the case before but since the reemergence of psychedelics in the west we have an amazing opportunity to make repeatable observations of at least one kind of HSE. Yet, the silence from the Materialist aren't only deafening, it's actually deadly for real since their governments has banned almost every psychedelic substance on the planet! Why all the fear? Where is the curiosity? The urgency to know what is yet unknown? The Materialist is a damned coward on this specific topic and I can't help but feel that I know why. They know how wrong their world view is, that it is so incredible fragile that a few grams from a humble fungi specimen can completely obliterate it in the span of a few hours. So they shut up and yet on another field we are left to ourselves by the Materialist. We are still in need of better, more conscious and stringent answers to be able to say that we know things about the nature of HSE but the Materialist is simply useless, as strong as they are when they want to it's mind- boggingly to me how often they are worse then a red-painted fence in terms of utility when it actually matters.

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So, there we have it at last. I reject and despise materialism not because the ideology threatens my belief in God, not because it claims I'm a simple blob of brain matter and not because they claim my deep experiences of spiritual character are pointless non sense but because materialism have nothing of value to offer! You don't need materialism to do proper science, Cartesian dualists did it long before materialism came to be - priests and theologians camped in droves in the labs of yesteryear to study the wonderful and mysterious creation of God without loosing a jota of their faith and the idealists - the inverse of materialists (only the domain of the Soul is truly real, take that all balony- lovers) - stands in the wings today, eager to the teeth to take over and do a science worthy an age that needs to find ways to ignore the temptation of Utility above all other values. Materialism ultimate selling point was their ability to work, but we don't need it anymore - We made things work only to discover we lost sight of everything that is worth anything when things don't work. This age sees several crisis over the horizon but the worst thing that can happen when they hit us is not that we lose most of our wealth and advanced form of civilisation - it is that when all that is done, it forces us to realize we did what the Master warned us about doing so long time ago. We won the world, but we lost our soul. Thank you materialism, thank you Materialist! I sure hope you find it worth it at the moment! 

So yeah, no. Go to hell, Materialist. It's where you came from and it's where you ultimately belong. I don't want to deal with your rubbish ideas a single moment more than I absolutely must from now on...

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*Here is a time I would have preferred to use "physicalist" - matter may be an illusory phenomenon even in materialism - but every "illusion" is still governed by unchanging physical laws, aka "the real matter".





























Materialists don't care about 1) God 2) the after life 3) Spiritual hyper experiences