Today I want to help you grow easier with saying “I am a kirist.”
It’s no doubt fair to say that you have many beliefs and that many things are important to you. You probably wouldn’t feel comfortable reducing everything you believe in and hold important to a single metaphor of the “golf is my religion” or “shopping is my religion” sort. You would bristle at the idea that you are organizing your life around one thing like golf or shopping … or any one thing, for that matter.
That just wouldn’t make sense to you. To reduce everything that you are to one metaphor would feel wrong in many ways. It wouldn’t capture or represent the dynamism of your many, often competing beliefs. It would functionally reduce your freedom to make up your mind in the moment. It would arbitrarily and artificially assert the primacy of one part of you above all others. It just wouldn’t sit well.
In kirism we honor this truth, that we want to retain the freedom to have many beliefs and to find many things important, by saying “I organize my life around my life purposes” or, more accurately, since the flesh is weak and since we aren’t wonderful at doing what we say we would like to do, “I am trying to organize my life around my life purposes.”
By making this announcement, we are asserting that we aren’t a liberal or a conservative, a Catholic or an atheist, a filmmaker or a novelist, a mother, a lawyer, or anything of that sort, but rather that we are a human being who refuses to take the easy route of letting some simple label rule and who is willing is adjure the comfort of linguistic simplicity. If we say, “I am kirist,” we mean by that, “I am a human being with lots of self-identifications, lots of beliefs about what’s important, and a dynamic belief system that demands that I look at each situation for what it is.” As all of that is a lot to say, we use the shorthand, “I am a kirist.”
We recognize that such a sentence looks like “I am Buddhist” or “I am a spiritual being” or “I am a neo-existentialist” or “I am a poet.” It has the same linguistic structure. But its meaning and intention are different. However, we are stuck with this problem, that if we are to say something in a few words, we must use a few words. We must use language with its grammatical requirements, its brilliancies, and its tragedies. However, that one sentence looks like another sentence is the beginning of the story, not the end of it.
Of course, we could avoid this “metaphor problem” by saying things like “I’m not anything at all” or “I’m not anything in particular” or “I believe what I believe” or “That’s a terrible question.” But then we are stuck having lost something of great value, a way of helping ourselves keep track of our intentions. If we do not have permission from ourselves to say “I am a kirist,” because we hate how sentences of that sort reduce and mislead, then we have lost something of value. Whether that loss is necessary, because we hate such sentences, or whether that loss is too great, is for each individual to decide.
If we do decide to assert “I am a kirist,” we should always say it with a hint of an ironic smile, a smile that is an homage to Orwell and those many other linguistic detectives and that reminds us that we are treading in dangerous territory wherever grammar is involved. And so, perhaps it might better to say “I am freethinker” or “I am an individual” rather than “I am kirist”? Maybe that sort of self-identification does a better job of avoiding any traps, linguistic or otherwise?
Yes and no. “I am a freethinker” or “I am an individual” is probably better than “I am a kirist” in doing the job of avoiding the charge that you “just belong to another religion.” (Though you can still be charged with “making reason into a religion” or “indulging in the cult of personality” or “being solipsistic,” etc. Folks on the other side will always have a way of leveling charges.) On balance, “I am a freethinker” probably does a much better job of insulating you against the criticism that you are “just an adherent of another religion” than “I am a kirist” does.
But there is an important difference between “I am a kirist” and “I am a freethinker.” It is the difference between being a biologist who holds certain beliefs about cells and being a scientist “in general.” The latter adheres to a method and an orientation. The former also has a belief set (which of course can shift and change). Kirists have a shared belief set: that is the primary reason why one might adopt the self-identification “I am a kirist” rather than “I am a freethinker.”
Kirists share a set of beliefs: about an orientation around life purposes making more sense than a belief in “the purpose of life,” about meaning being a certain sort of subjective psychological experience and hence something that naturally comes and goes, and many others. As a kirist, you are indeed a freethinker; but you also share certain beliefs with other kirists, because you believe them.
So, we might say that being a kirist amounts to being a freethinker who shares certain beliefs about the nature of reality, the tasks of living, the complexities of ethical action, the tension between humanistic impulses and self-interest, and so on. Kirism presents a belief system; and if that belief system is yours, then it would make good sense, and it would serve you well, to say “I am a kirist” and to live as one.
To say “I am a kirist” is to say “I am a freethinker and I happen to share certain beliefs with a certain number of other freethinkers.” Kirism grants you full permission to think as you like and it also provides you with some nice company as you venture through life essentially alone.
It provides you with a bit of a home, an existential inn as it were, where, separated by thousands of miles and all sorts of differences, people who are essentially like-minded can gather.
I hope that the above makes it easier for you to begin to say, “I am a kirist.” That is going to sound so strange at first! But try it on for size. Yes, you will then be asked, “What does that mean?” and “What do you believe?” and “What do you stand for?” Until you have your talking points in place, you might want to say “I am a kirist” only internally. But do say it there.
Give it a try. Just whisper it. “I am a kirist.”
You can read more about it here every Saturday and you can enjoy the first twenty books of kirism in Lighting the Way: How Kirism Answers Life’s Toughest Questions.
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