Lesson two of the journey of deconstruction touches on probably one of the hardest subjects and the most prone to philosophical confusion, the nature of the self. This isn’t a mere dive into Buddhism, as so many atheists end up doing, but a reflection on what it means to be a human being bound within biology and embedded in an evolutionary history. A great many religious ideas are easy to fall into and difficult to get out of precisely because they make a certain intuitive sense from how we feel ourselves to be in the world. Those intuitions are not only false, they contribute to a lot of needless hurt, and get in the way of a journey out of religious ideology.
This lesson contains a couple of articles to go over to hopefully flesh out even further the presentation. Ultimately, you don’t need to understand all the ins and outs of a philosophy of the flesh, but learning to distance yourself from your own thoughts and see yourself as more than one thing can be extraordinarily freeing and is a distinct contrast from the notion of sin that Christianity teaches.
