I was listening to my favorites Armstrong and Getty yesterday-via their podcast-and they brought up a topic that I wanted to expound on.
To my excitement, Joe (Getty) read an article from Psychology Today about names. Apparently, recent studies have shown that people who have a first name beginning with A are more likely to get A's in school where people with a first name beginning with C are more likely to get C's. Denise's and Denis' are more likely to become dentists. See the pattern? The point of the study was to point out how something like a name can effect someone's life because of the preference it instills in a person for a certain letter.
Jack called the story the stupidest story he's heard in years, and while I agree with him that it seems silly to make such a one to one correlation between names and careers or even crazier names and the grades one gets, I thought the story had a point.
That is it brought up something that I had been thinking before that.. which is..how much does something little like your name effect who you are and your vision, your perspective of the world? How much are you shaped by your name? I think it is obvious that people tend to favor the letter of their name. I have 4 s' in my name. So for me, in my particular life, s is a letter that resounds for me. It has meaning that it wouldn't have for say someone whose name was Jack.
This brings me to another over arching question and that is, how much of what shapes us here in this world will we bring to the afterlife? Will I still have my name in the afterlife? When I was thinking about this before, I was thinking about sex. No not like that. I mean gender. And I was thinking about whether or not there would be gender in heaven. And it seems obvious to me that there will be. Think about how much I am shaped by the fact that I am a woman. Or how much you are shaped by the fact that you're a man. Or woman. It's actually part of your identity that you can't really extrapolate from yourself, can you? If you are a woman you are more likely to be nurturing, more likely to favor certain colors, more likely to be passive as opposed to aggressive. If you're a man you are prone to lying. haha jk. Really I was just trying to be funny. Lighten up...Anyway, but if you take away that genderness what will there be? And what does this say about us as people? That we are really gender neutral beings put into gendered bodies? Is gender simply an earthly thing? If so, then we are created, how does God decide which gender we will be? Does God create our personality and then realize that one or another personality is better suited to one gender or another? Is gender arbitrary or is it an implicit part of us and who we are? If it is an implicit part of us then it would naturally follow that we will have gendered bodies in heaven because it's something that CANNOT be removed from us.
Another reason I believe that there will be gender in heaven is because obviously when Jesus was resurrected he had a body, and it was male.
This makes me wonder further, how much of what we are made of, of what we are made up of, will survive to the afterlife? For example, our dna-which seems to us a mechanical earthly thing. Some people might think it less holy that we would have this earthly makeup at work in our glorified bodies. I don't. I think God made us with a spark of the divine and everything he gave us is holy, beautiful and we will continue to have it later. God made us the way he wanted us so he wouldn't change that later on.
Which brings me to the topic of race-of course. And even ethnicity. Will I be Italian in heaven? Will I be American? Or even have a concept of what that is? This may seem like an obvious question. You may be thinking of course we will have our ethnicities in heaven. But if that's true, does that mean we will speak different languages? Think of how closely intertwined language and culture are. Is one of those components simply going to be removed? Otherwise, how will understanding happen? Will it just be "magic"?
The reason I ask if ethnicity will even be something that we remember in heaven is, I think that while we're in heaven we will completely come to forget earthly things. It's like when I'm here in Boston, California seems so far away, it's easy for me to forget about it-and my old life there. I think this is also a coping mechanism-but at any rate, I do think that will happen in Paradise as well. Our earthly lives will seem so far away-infinitely far to be exact. Ok, maybe not far enough away to forget basic things about ourselves. But how much a part of our soul, our metaphysical selves are ethnic? Or gendered? Or have names?
Maybe these questions are incredibly basic. Or, you may be thinking, what difference does it make anyway?
I was just wondering.
venerdì 16 novembre 2007
What's in a name?..and other questions..
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1 commenti:
You bring up several interesting points. About how names effect us, I think that we constantly correlate complex emotions with each major environmental stimulus we come across (including names), and this serves many purposes down the round. In general it creates an intuitive tag that is quick and easy to reference, as well as add upon later when new variables are presented. For instance, when we first play with legos, we have a mental reaction to the exercise that allows us to properly categorize and quickly make decisions about legos that work to our ends: to fulfill our desires and avoid various kinds of pain. The key to getting the best use out of anything is to correlate it properly in as many ways as possible, or in the strongest of ways possible, so that your future reaction to related stimuli is as informed and prepared as possible to bring about all of your desired ends. What’s interesting is when people have the ability to give us a stable identity, like a name, that is already highly attached to certain emotions that we did not choose. Even for a name, we may be conditioned to think of the name, and therefore ourselves to a degree, as associated with what others think of it, either directly, or because of the way they treat us because of the name. Of course when we are young most of our personality is a combination of the stable identities that people directly and indirectly impress upon us. But quite often there is some kind of personal reason behind the making of these impressions, and we are only loosely guided in our correlating reactions to them. The impressions that are made not by some specific individual though, but by a large group of people in a complex way, or in a seemingly random way, often do not fit in with the way we imagine our development (as a series of purposeful and chosen causes), but are there just the same. Although I think it would be silly to try to show a strong connection between a vague social impression and a career choice, but not always impossible. I don’t think such impressions would make nearly as much difference though if we had already chosen strong correlations on our own for an identity, or if the pressure of society on us wasn’t strong in some way, or if we knew how to rewrite the way we looked at an identity by choosing to attach new emotions to it. I guess a passive person named Denis who did not develop an attachment to a career based on other correlations of his own making, who was highly impressionable and liked the simplicity of the correlation between his name and dentistry, and who did not ever question whether or not it was a good thing to let such vague connections choose something so important for him, would probably let such a correlation grow within him until it became a significant identity. Or maybe most of us just fall into careers without much deep consideration and planning, who knows, it’s all a matter of degree. I’m idealistic enough to think that most people, at some stage of their life, consider their career seriously and have the mental capacity to change their mind about the way they see more compatible careers.
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