Philosophy

American Toy Boxes Made In China

Toy boxes are incredible, no? Simply imagine one. Yes, this moment! What so you see? A chest of all kinds of toys? And what about the adult side of you? Does it not find a metaphor instead? Such as for our beliefs, where beliefs are toys and the box is the system which organizes them.

After all, isn’t that what children’s toy boxes do, organize toys and other playthings? And what are beliefs but toys of the mind, intellectual playthings that we manipulate for our amusement? For example, isn’t believing in deities just an intellectual game we play? Perhaps there is a God, or gods, or some supernatural beings – but this discussion is about the belief in them, the claim to know that they exist (whether they really do isn’t really the point here). So aren’t such beliefs just toys that give us pleasure?

Why, that’s so, for the overwhelming vast majority of people who subscribe – yes, “subscribe!” – to them. It is nothing more than a kind of toy, a kind of tranquilizer, even; something to help them (that is, us) relax, to deal with our hectic lives and this crazy world of forces beyond our ken and certainly beyond our control.

Thus the belief in God, as under such a view at least someone knows what’s going on, even if we ourselves do not! Never mind that God said to do this and not that; belief alone is all we care about – our relief, through the belief.

There are those who just take what’s given to them. Then there are the ones who’ve actually made a bit of an effort to confirm what they’ve been handed. There are even those who discover things for themselves, up to a point, at which point they settle back into intellectual complacency, never again to mount another serious inquirty into the nature of things, as if the world was forever unchanging.

So what are beliefs but toys, and belief systems richly manufactured boxes for their storage? And what of the believers but that they are simply children writ that much larger?

To be sure, this is an idea that presents the severest challenge to people’s egos, which they often mistake for their true selves. But with a calm and quiet mind it is possible to see that much of our lives is similarly illusory, made up of nothing but our own thoughts – like a toy car which we have deliberately chosen to mistake for the real thing!

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