More Irreal Folk Blues

I've been curious about the apparent fact that, even though people posit certain concepts as being beyond, more than, or other than reality (God, new-age healing, the square root of negative one), they immediately seem to try to stuff such concepts back into the box of reality by attempting to "prove" they "exist" (with the last verb defined pretty much the way we'd define it in speaking of a table, a pony, or a camcorder). Yet (and I do not have the brain of a logician, or particularly of a philosopher, so I may well be completely wooly here) since "reality" is pretty much defined as that which "exists" - i.e., the two terms are interdependent - it seems almost absurd to attempt to define the irreal (I'll borrow the mathematical term to generally describe things that are beyond, more than, other than real) in terms of a quotidian notion of existence.

More practically: things can also exist in the sense that they have effects on people. The concept of race, for example, isn't really rooted in anything that contemporary biologists would recognize (a random set of biological indices - some other set could have been chosen, including ones we attach no significance to: handedness vs. skin color, for instance), yet to say that it follows from that that "race" can have no significance in culture because it's not "real" is, well, stupid. God may or may not "exist" in the "real" sense - but certainly, God (as concept, as influence on human behavior: that is, as motivator for various manipulations of what's pretty much indisputably real) exists insofar as people act on that belief.

I'm not sure, though, how far to take this. I suppose some people do believe that God real-ly is a very tall, elderly white man with a long flowing white beard - but does that belief (only that belief - not other beliefs about God) affect their actions in any significant way? Certainly, defining an irreal entity in terms of the everyday real is doing what I complained about above (stuffing back into the box etc.). But if you define God only as (to ridiculously quote Frank Zappa parodying late-sixties proto-new-age "seekers") "a cosmic love pulse matrix," as some sort of abstraction approachable only through counterliteral metaphoric waxings, why apply the label "God" to it at all?

At any rate, I'm finding it somewhat useful to be wary of re-realizing the irreal: to defend against both those who'd reduce the irreal to something you could pack in cardboard and throw into the back of a 1978 Chevy Nova, and against my own tendencies to utterly dismiss whatever isn't rationally explicable. That last attitude, in some respects, is rather like dismissing Wallace Stevens' jar because you can't pour water into it.