Nourishment and spirituality.
The following essay was written for the classification to the International Philosophy Olimpiad to take place in Vilnius, Lithuania next year.
“The doctrine of foods is of great ethical and political significance. Food becomes blood, blood becomes heart and brain, thought and mid stuff. Human fare is the foundation of human culture and thought. Would you improve the people? Give them, instead of declamations against sin, better food. Man is what he eats.” — Ludwig Feuerbach
Currently the world’s population is at a crossroad, where not only people are starving to death in the most precarious conditions that children, women and men shouldn’t be forced to live in the most cruel form of punishment. On the other side of the Atlantic however, people are over fed and live comfortable if extremely sedentary lives, which has caused the percentages of obesity to rise steadily and also of the cases of diabetes and overweight related health issues such as heart conditions, lower stamina, lumbar problems and even some mental conditions. Ludwig Feuerbach, a member of the extreme left in the Hegelian school of philosophy, famous for his borderline nihilistic, anti-religious thinking who even went as far as saying that religion lowers the human race as a whole and that philosophy should stop being considered as a standalone science and should be integrated into a branch of anthropology for its body of study is a product of the human mind and logic. In this particular quote, Feuerbach calls that people should basically stop worrying so much about religion and sin, instead focusing on feeding and keeping humanity alive.
On the statement Feuerbach calls nourishment “the foundation of human culture and thought”; food and drink have most certainly been an important part of our culture and our evolution as human beings. When our old ancestors stopped hunting and gathering to become sedentary societies who commence to farm and raise livestock, civilizations began to flourish and expand in population numbers began to increase steadily, incidentally overpopulation has been one of the leading causes for both lack of food and the advancement of Genetically Modified Organisms, or GMOs, which are blamed by the organic and raw-food community as a grand cause of the increase on the developed countries’ dress size.
In modern times food is still a remarkably important part of our society as most of our traditions during the year involve special food for the occasion as is the case for the humble christmas tamal. Food is deeply ingrained into our modern society where even our smart refrigerators are capable of telling us which plates we can cook with the ingredients inside it. In almost perfect synchronization with the industrial revolution and the dot-com boom in the late 90s atheism has become increasingly present in modern society where in several, more forward thinking societies; if I may, are finally letting people let go of the social and philosophical implications of being tied to a particular religion. Marcus Mumford, lead singer of the folk band Mumford and Sons, who grew up in a biblical environment as a child said in an interview for the March 2013 issue of Rolling Stone: “Calling myself a Christian just carries too much baggage and it’s not something I’d like to burden myself with” He does maintain that, after all, he does believe in God.
In a world where our figures of power are accepting that religion may not be the universal solution for keeping everyone at peace inside and out, but quite the opposite, where acts of terror are executed by hate groups who using the excuse of religious agendas are murdering thousands of innocent people in suicide bombings, shootings at places of praise, or the iconic 9/11 terrorist attacks on the United States. Terrorist groups such as AL Qaeda, Hezbollah and in a lesser, less violent degree, the officially recognized hate group Westboro Baptist Church in the United States who in the past decade went from an evangelical congregation of a rather radical agenda to a violent organization who pickets funerals for dead soldiers and children murdered in shootouts at their schools claiming it was all done in God’s will and created the now famous motto “God Hates Fags”. Their attacks are so aggressive and frequent that even the Klu Klux Klan has offered their services to protect people from the church’s attack at funerals and parades. So in a world where at least a percentage of every religion can be considered a threat to society itself what course of action can we take?
Personally, I don’t believe that religion should be eradicated or banned in any manner whatsoever for it brings people solace in their darkest moments and offers some kind of answer for our existential doubts about the great unknown that is life after death. Regardless of what people believe or the strength they hve in their beliefs and customs, they should be able to express their faith in any way they please, as long as it’s not a bother to other people or harmful for other human beings. It’s quite difficult to imagine a world where there are no religious groups, as John Lennon himself imagined, even more so in this era where technology is beginning to finally break down the mysteries of the universe and what gave birth to the world we know today. If there’s a way to keep everyone satisfied and reduce the friction between science and religion, I believe it should be a new scholastic movement with the goal of finding a way of making both science and spirituality to accept each other as important and necessary for the proper growth of a human being and both of their good qualities not being exclusive to their part of the equation.
Saint Thomas Aquinas and his colleagues took the task of finding a way to find some common ground between religion and science, being successful as to integrating scientific knowledge into the education that was given to children during their time, as well as religious education. In this time and age I believe we need to renew this link between the scientific community and the spiritual part of our lives. Because, let’s face it we’re not that far away from the day where you can get new body parts “printed” out and attached to your body or the day where cancer is a concern of the past. The scientific community has begun to conquer the seemingly insurmountable task of making the human being eternal. If we can finally clone body parts or who knows entire human beings in the near future what does that mean for our soul or essence? This fact reminds me of the philosophical conundrum of Odysseus’ ship, this problem states that after each journey, the ship was repaired in its pier by Odysseus’ engineers until after many journeys every single part of the ship had been replaced and fixed, which brings up the question: Is it still the same ship it was at the beginning of its service or have the repairs and replacements made it a whole new ship, unrecognizable from its first iteration? I think if we have a good spiritual and moral foundation this should be no problem but what would happen if religion was a thing of the past? True, religion is not the sole way of having spiritual growth and if we want to be balanced human beings we should look far from the teachings we grew up with. As Friedrich Nietzsche once said: “The end of society begins when humans are taught to value more people with their same thinking rather than people who think differently from them.”
Spirituality has always been present in societies since the beginning of civilization, seeking to explain the occurrences in our lives by supernatural means. Rituals offering praise to deities often have specific procedures involving food and drink. From last dinners to praise the victims to be sacrificed to please their gods, to the ingestion of the body and blood of Jesus Christ himself on an act of communion, nourishment and spiritual practices have been forever intertwined. If “man is what he eats” that would imply to a certain degree that we are in more than one way ingesting our beliefs and continuing our ancestors’ spiritual traditions, which is a form of cultural preservation which to my judgment is really helpful as groundwork to maintain our societies’ soul and keeps traditions alive which would otherwise disappear for the only thing that reminds us of them is the food we associate with them.
Feeding the disenfranchised of the world, who are dying by the thousand in the most unfair of circumstances a human being can face seems to be a more concrete and logical way of solving the world’s problems, We do need to not only be full physically but also spiritually to be able to cope with life’s challenges and have some sort of moral compass to guide people in their darkest time. We should discuss further over a cup of coffee sometime.
