Monday, March 31, 2008
Atheist Blogroll
Hi Everyone. I'm happy to say I am officially on the Atheist Blogroll. If you'll kindly look to the left, the Link is happily displayed for all to indulge in. Please do so, as there are so many deliciously sacreligious folk out there, whose words are so much more important to hear than those of the local Pester (oops, I mean Pastor) Thanks much.
Monday, March 24, 2008
Supernatural versus natural
I do not think it is appropriate to believe the supernatural to be the source of the natural. Every system we know of behaves naturalistically. Weather, Oceanic currents, Glacial formation, Planetary orbital pathways, Radioactive decay, Nuclear Fission, Procreation, Immunity to disease and infection, Nourishment; all conform to the laws of nature. Plants do not call anyone "lord". Mountains do not move according to the verbalized mantras of wishful thinkers. There is only one natural system, influential to humanity, that has ever been considered to be a part of the supernatural realm (to its own detriment) and that is the system of thought.
Human beings are aware we exist. We are aware that others like us exist. We know that we are capable of gaining and retaining knowledge. We understand our own ability to think. Our awareness is what sets us apart from most other living creatures today (aside from the great apes, some primates, dolphins, parrots and other assorted animals). It is from this awareness that, long ago, we conjured up the idea of an immortal soul for ourselves. It's easy to look back and see how we could've viewed ourselves in such a self-important way, when the surrounding animals and plants were decidedly less intelligent than we were (and still are). How could such an advanced species not be endowed with something so esoteric as a "soul". We could think, we were aware, for cripe's sake. Our intelligence simply had to be the result of some divine intervention. We must've been born with this invisible attribute of immortality. The problem is we kept dying, and no one liked(s) that scenario. Death is not conducive to immortality, the two are most definitely at odds. And so, the discomfort with the idea of our concurrent intelligence (awareness) and our inescapable physical mortality led us as a species to invent many stories; ones designed to subvert the inevitability of our physical (and soul's) death (albeit a subversion which is delayed until after we physically die). We have not always been as intelligent as we are now. We were once ignorant of what most today would deem as common-sense. The sun does not revolve around the earth, the earth is not flat nor is it held up on the back of a great turtle, cutting someone deeply in order to "bleed" out an infection is a bad surgical treatment, the use of anesthesia during surgery results in more successful surgeries than the disuse of it does. The awareness of ourselves that gave rise to the idea of our possessing a "soul", has been coupled with a more complete knowledge of the world around us, more so now than at any other time in our brief history of life. Neuroscience is uncovering more and more each day of the buried behemoth of the human brain, and by doing so they are displaying the inessentiality of the concept of a soul. This may sound a bit gloomy for those who have grown up believing we have a soul, but it doesn't need to. To me, the fact that we are all that make us up and nothing else, composed of the same basic elements as everything in the universe, and we can still create works of grandeur such as the Goldberg Variations of J.S Bach, Stonehenge, or the internet is the mother of all testaments as to how wonderful we all are. On the flip side, I see it as unnecessarily condescending, to ascribe our worth to a being who is somehow simultaneously the same as and better than us. I see my son as the most wonderful human being in the world, but that feeling is in no way due to the benevolence of "god; it is due to my son. I will take no credit away from him for being the wonderful person he is. There is not now nor has there ever been a need for god. We are human beings and we are worth our own attention and accolades.
Human beings are aware we exist. We are aware that others like us exist. We know that we are capable of gaining and retaining knowledge. We understand our own ability to think. Our awareness is what sets us apart from most other living creatures today (aside from the great apes, some primates, dolphins, parrots and other assorted animals). It is from this awareness that, long ago, we conjured up the idea of an immortal soul for ourselves. It's easy to look back and see how we could've viewed ourselves in such a self-important way, when the surrounding animals and plants were decidedly less intelligent than we were (and still are). How could such an advanced species not be endowed with something so esoteric as a "soul". We could think, we were aware, for cripe's sake. Our intelligence simply had to be the result of some divine intervention. We must've been born with this invisible attribute of immortality. The problem is we kept dying, and no one liked(s) that scenario. Death is not conducive to immortality, the two are most definitely at odds. And so, the discomfort with the idea of our concurrent intelligence (awareness) and our inescapable physical mortality led us as a species to invent many stories; ones designed to subvert the inevitability of our physical (and soul's) death (albeit a subversion which is delayed until after we physically die). We have not always been as intelligent as we are now. We were once ignorant of what most today would deem as common-sense. The sun does not revolve around the earth, the earth is not flat nor is it held up on the back of a great turtle, cutting someone deeply in order to "bleed" out an infection is a bad surgical treatment, the use of anesthesia during surgery results in more successful surgeries than the disuse of it does. The awareness of ourselves that gave rise to the idea of our possessing a "soul", has been coupled with a more complete knowledge of the world around us, more so now than at any other time in our brief history of life. Neuroscience is uncovering more and more each day of the buried behemoth of the human brain, and by doing so they are displaying the inessentiality of the concept of a soul. This may sound a bit gloomy for those who have grown up believing we have a soul, but it doesn't need to. To me, the fact that we are all that make us up and nothing else, composed of the same basic elements as everything in the universe, and we can still create works of grandeur such as the Goldberg Variations of J.S Bach, Stonehenge, or the internet is the mother of all testaments as to how wonderful we all are. On the flip side, I see it as unnecessarily condescending, to ascribe our worth to a being who is somehow simultaneously the same as and better than us. I see my son as the most wonderful human being in the world, but that feeling is in no way due to the benevolence of "god; it is due to my son. I will take no credit away from him for being the wonderful person he is. There is not now nor has there ever been a need for god. We are human beings and we are worth our own attention and accolades.
Friday, March 7, 2008
On The Biblical Trees in the Garden of Eden
Everyone who has ever been to a christian church, and probably many who have not, has some level of understanding of the biblical story of a paradise called the Garden of Eden. In this place, the biblical god placed the first two humans ever to live. Along with all the food-bearing trees and plants known to us today, there were two "forbidden trees" planted; The Tree of the Knowledge of good and evil and the Tree of Immortality. This is recounted in the first few chapters of Genesis. The following are some questions about this story, questions that draw attention to some sensible inconsitencies.
First of all, the story in genesis recounts that, for Adam and all the generations to come, a route to immortality was definitely needed, as Adam was created as a mortal man. In Genesis 3:22 the "inerrant word of god" says "And the Lord god said, "The man has now become like one of us, knowing good and evil. He must not be allowed to reach outhis hand and take also from the tree of life and eat, and live forever."" This verse clearly shows that the author of genesis understood Adam to have been created a mortal man, one who would die a natural death. Some Christians, however, believe that Adam was created as an immortal being and only lost his immortality when he and eve chose to sin by eating of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. This belief does not fit at all with what genesis 3:22 says, it's flatly contradictory. For my part, I just can't comprehend how these christians can assert the "truth" of the bible when their arguments for such claims simultaneously rely on and are in contrast with what the bible says, but I digress.
Who besides mankind would have wanted or needed a tree of life?
God, as he is described in the bible, would not have required it. Immortality is part and parcel of the christian's definition of god, and if it were not, then I suppose christianity couldn't exist as it does today.
Other possible recipients of the fruit of the tree of life were the animals. Since there are no animals that we know of that are 6,000 plus yaers old and still kicking, I think we can safely assume the animals did not benefit from the tree of life.
Tangentially speaking, I wonder if any of the tree of life's fruits ever dropped to the ground after ripening, and were eaten by the animals in the garden. If this did happen, there should be some really old cows out there somewhere. The bible doesn't mention this ever happening, but I think it's a reasonable thought to have. I mean every fruit bearing tree that lives today drops its fruits once they are ripe, in order to propagate itself. Animals eat this fruit all the time. If the tree of life did not behave in this same way, then I think christian's should have to explain this. I'm sure any apologetic would retort with some blather about god's miracles not needing to follow the rules of nature and all that, but we all know what kind of "explanation" that is. Evasion is a tactic apologetics have mastered.
So, since god did not need the tree of life and animals keep dying, that leaves only us as the benficiaries of the flora of paradise.
If god planted the tree of life for us, then why did he forbid us to eat its fruits? Again, I can hear the apologetic saying, god was using the tree to "test" the faith of Adam. This is just stupid, for any number of reasons. Here are a few.
1. God had no need to test Adam's faith because Adam had no reason to not have faith in god, having no one to compare god with, no one to influence him away from having faith in god.
2. God did not need to test Adam's faith in him because he walked in the garden in plain earshot of Adam, presumably physically (genesis 3:8). If, however, he was "walking" in a purely spiritual sense, he was still the only other "voice" there (excepting eve and the talking snake, I wonder if Eve was a parselmouth?), so Adam would have had no reason to "lose his faith", but as we shall see perhaps Adam's faith was rightfully tested to show the error of it.
Perhaps god was using the tree not to test Adam's faith, but his obedience. This is also stupid. Here is why.
God, as the bible describes him, is omniscient (all-knowing). As an all-knowing being, god would not have been in need of a tool (such as a tree of life) to test for an outcome of obedience level. An omniscient god would have already known exactly how obedient Adam was ever going to be. Either god was not omniscient, or the tree of life (or the other tree) was unecessary in this capacity, pick your poison.
But what about the Tree of the knowledge of good and evil? Why did god plant that one there? Remember this is the tree in question at the trial all of us should hold within ourselves, of the truth of Christianity as narrated in the bible. Genesis 3:3-7 says:
"but god did say, "you must not eat fruit from the tree that is in the middle of the garden, and you must not touch it, or you will die." "You will not surely die," the serpent said to the woman. For god knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like god, knowing good and evil." When the woman saw that the fruit of the tree was good for food and pleasing to the eye, and also desirable for gaining wisdom, she took some and ate it. She also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate it. Then the eyes of both of them were opened, and they realized they were naked, so they sewed fig leaves together and made coverings for themselves."
Let's examine this passage shall we? (I feel like a pastor in Bizarro world)
First, god tells eve that she mustn't eat from the tree or even touch it, upon pain of death. So there is a tree that will provide death to Adam and Eve if they touch it, but there is also a tree that will provide immortality to both of them if they eat of it. It seems like a good idea to have an antidote ready in case of an accident, I mean what if Adam and Eve were wrestling one evening and one of them just happened to roll up against the tree of "death"? Wouldn't it be prudent to have that tree of life handy as well? The problem arises when we acknowledge that the god of the bible prohibited BOTH trees. This is perfectly illustrative of how the authors of the bible probably weren't philosophers by trade.
Second, the serpent says she will not die, but only gain the knowledge of good and evil, thereby becoming as god himself. Well, she ate, in fact they both ate, and neither died an unnatural death, so who was right? God said they would die, the serpent said they would gain knowledge of good and evil. Let's look to the unreliable, inconsistent, yet inerrant word of god for our answer. Again to genesis 3:22 " And the lord god said "The man has now become as one of us, knowing good and evil. He must not be allowed to reach out his hand and take also from the the tree of life and eat, and live forever."
Survey says..... The serpent wins. God was not just wrong, but pathetically so. The death for Adam, that is described in genesis 3:19 and attibuted to god, "by the sweat of your brow you will eat your food until you return to the ground since from it you were taken; for dust you are and to dust you will return" cannot be claimed as fulfillment of god's earlier threat to Adam and Eve, since the tree of life was the only path to immortality ever available to Adam, and neither he nor Eve ever ate from that tree (at least as the bible recounts).
As a last point, I'd like to say that the biblical narrative from above is a fairly benign example of humanity in the throes of pyschological ignorance, being creative, cognitive beings, attributes that clearly seperate us from our more primitively(?) evolved cousins in the great ape family, constructing elaborate but ultimately false stories, in order to explain and cause to discuss two of the most sought after ideas of humanity, namely wisdom and living forever. One we can certainly achieve, the other might be possible, but we are not there yet (keep at it scientists).
Remember, I am an Atheist, I only use the bible to point out its own fallacies as professed in the christian perspective of the biblical story of creation. I criticize from a psychological and logical point of view.
First of all, the story in genesis recounts that, for Adam and all the generations to come, a route to immortality was definitely needed, as Adam was created as a mortal man. In Genesis 3:22 the "inerrant word of god" says "And the Lord god said, "The man has now become like one of us, knowing good and evil. He must not be allowed to reach outhis hand and take also from the tree of life and eat, and live forever."" This verse clearly shows that the author of genesis understood Adam to have been created a mortal man, one who would die a natural death. Some Christians, however, believe that Adam was created as an immortal being and only lost his immortality when he and eve chose to sin by eating of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. This belief does not fit at all with what genesis 3:22 says, it's flatly contradictory. For my part, I just can't comprehend how these christians can assert the "truth" of the bible when their arguments for such claims simultaneously rely on and are in contrast with what the bible says, but I digress.
Who besides mankind would have wanted or needed a tree of life?
God, as he is described in the bible, would not have required it. Immortality is part and parcel of the christian's definition of god, and if it were not, then I suppose christianity couldn't exist as it does today.
Other possible recipients of the fruit of the tree of life were the animals. Since there are no animals that we know of that are 6,000 plus yaers old and still kicking, I think we can safely assume the animals did not benefit from the tree of life.
Tangentially speaking, I wonder if any of the tree of life's fruits ever dropped to the ground after ripening, and were eaten by the animals in the garden. If this did happen, there should be some really old cows out there somewhere. The bible doesn't mention this ever happening, but I think it's a reasonable thought to have. I mean every fruit bearing tree that lives today drops its fruits once they are ripe, in order to propagate itself. Animals eat this fruit all the time. If the tree of life did not behave in this same way, then I think christian's should have to explain this. I'm sure any apologetic would retort with some blather about god's miracles not needing to follow the rules of nature and all that, but we all know what kind of "explanation" that is. Evasion is a tactic apologetics have mastered.
So, since god did not need the tree of life and animals keep dying, that leaves only us as the benficiaries of the flora of paradise.
If god planted the tree of life for us, then why did he forbid us to eat its fruits? Again, I can hear the apologetic saying, god was using the tree to "test" the faith of Adam. This is just stupid, for any number of reasons. Here are a few.
1. God had no need to test Adam's faith because Adam had no reason to not have faith in god, having no one to compare god with, no one to influence him away from having faith in god.
2. God did not need to test Adam's faith in him because he walked in the garden in plain earshot of Adam, presumably physically (genesis 3:8). If, however, he was "walking" in a purely spiritual sense, he was still the only other "voice" there (excepting eve and the talking snake, I wonder if Eve was a parselmouth?), so Adam would have had no reason to "lose his faith", but as we shall see perhaps Adam's faith was rightfully tested to show the error of it.
Perhaps god was using the tree not to test Adam's faith, but his obedience. This is also stupid. Here is why.
God, as the bible describes him, is omniscient (all-knowing). As an all-knowing being, god would not have been in need of a tool (such as a tree of life) to test for an outcome of obedience level. An omniscient god would have already known exactly how obedient Adam was ever going to be. Either god was not omniscient, or the tree of life (or the other tree) was unecessary in this capacity, pick your poison.
But what about the Tree of the knowledge of good and evil? Why did god plant that one there? Remember this is the tree in question at the trial all of us should hold within ourselves, of the truth of Christianity as narrated in the bible. Genesis 3:3-7 says:
"but god did say, "you must not eat fruit from the tree that is in the middle of the garden, and you must not touch it, or you will die." "You will not surely die," the serpent said to the woman. For god knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like god, knowing good and evil." When the woman saw that the fruit of the tree was good for food and pleasing to the eye, and also desirable for gaining wisdom, she took some and ate it. She also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate it. Then the eyes of both of them were opened, and they realized they were naked, so they sewed fig leaves together and made coverings for themselves."
Let's examine this passage shall we? (I feel like a pastor in Bizarro world)
First, god tells eve that she mustn't eat from the tree or even touch it, upon pain of death. So there is a tree that will provide death to Adam and Eve if they touch it, but there is also a tree that will provide immortality to both of them if they eat of it. It seems like a good idea to have an antidote ready in case of an accident, I mean what if Adam and Eve were wrestling one evening and one of them just happened to roll up against the tree of "death"? Wouldn't it be prudent to have that tree of life handy as well? The problem arises when we acknowledge that the god of the bible prohibited BOTH trees. This is perfectly illustrative of how the authors of the bible probably weren't philosophers by trade.
Second, the serpent says she will not die, but only gain the knowledge of good and evil, thereby becoming as god himself. Well, she ate, in fact they both ate, and neither died an unnatural death, so who was right? God said they would die, the serpent said they would gain knowledge of good and evil. Let's look to the unreliable, inconsistent, yet inerrant word of god for our answer. Again to genesis 3:22 " And the lord god said "The man has now become as one of us, knowing good and evil. He must not be allowed to reach out his hand and take also from the the tree of life and eat, and live forever."
Survey says..... The serpent wins. God was not just wrong, but pathetically so. The death for Adam, that is described in genesis 3:19 and attibuted to god, "by the sweat of your brow you will eat your food until you return to the ground since from it you were taken; for dust you are and to dust you will return" cannot be claimed as fulfillment of god's earlier threat to Adam and Eve, since the tree of life was the only path to immortality ever available to Adam, and neither he nor Eve ever ate from that tree (at least as the bible recounts).
As a last point, I'd like to say that the biblical narrative from above is a fairly benign example of humanity in the throes of pyschological ignorance, being creative, cognitive beings, attributes that clearly seperate us from our more primitively(?) evolved cousins in the great ape family, constructing elaborate but ultimately false stories, in order to explain and cause to discuss two of the most sought after ideas of humanity, namely wisdom and living forever. One we can certainly achieve, the other might be possible, but we are not there yet (keep at it scientists).
Remember, I am an Atheist, I only use the bible to point out its own fallacies as professed in the christian perspective of the biblical story of creation. I criticize from a psychological and logical point of view.
Sunday, March 2, 2008
On Hope and Faith
Keep the Faith.
Abandon Hope all ye who enter here.
You better watch out, you better not cry, you better not pout, I'm tellin you why..... You're gonna go to hell, and cook for eternity in ovens of burning brimstone......
DAMNATION AWAITS!!!!!
Heh, heh, heh, heh....
Christians would have us all believe that the principles of Faith and Hope are the greatest possible gifts we could ever have been awarded by their god-head.
Hogwash.
Neither of these ideas are conducive to living a fulfilled life, they are only ideas born of unmerited, wholesale fear.
Consider the word Hope. It conjures mental pictures of pleasantness, freedom from unhappiness, bliss. It represents the wish of every single person. However, contained within it, is the implied sinisterly opposite despair.
You cannot have one without the other. No Hope, No Despair (the words hope and despair are easily interchangeable with the words good and evil).
To illustrate what I mean, ask yourself the following question:
"Without evil, how would a person be able to distinguish good?".
If everything were good all the time (as is the example of heaven), how would a person be able to retain the exuberance of eternal pleasure, without ever growing numb to it's effects?
In order to fully experience anything, good or bad, the opposite of what you're experiencing has to exist and be known to you, or you'll never be aware of what you're experiencing. A person could never live in unending bliss because of this paradox. Eternal bliss is impossible because without it's opposite (torture) being somewhere in the mix of eternity, we would not recognize it as being bliss.
In the same way we would not know what cold felt like without the corresponding hot, we would also be unable to distinguish hard from soft, tall from short, good from evil or hope from despair. There is a spectrum of experience which we all are subject to. Without it, we would be automatons with no gamut of feelings.
Now let's consider the word Despair.
What does this word conjure? Thoughts of helplessness, inherent "badness", imprisonment in unhappiness. Now ask yourself in what ritualistic, weekly excercise a person might hear these words spoken. Christians, especially those hell-fire and damnation evangelicals that so wisely want to turn our country into an 18th century theocracy, love to spout out these threats of condemnation to human comfort every weekend (and sometimes during the week if a revival is in town) to the flocks of folk who are all-too eager to "repent" of their evil (there's that word again) ways and be safely returned to the fold, only to stray away as soon as the service is over.
If heaven is the object of hope for christians, then hell has to be the object of despair. As I said before, we can't do without despair, so hell has to exist if heaven exists. But imagine if we took the despair of hell out of the equation. We would be left with Hope on one side and nothing on the other. How then could the Hope of Heaven possibly exist? Actually, I should ask why then would anyone even care about a possible heaven? If no one feared death, or financial difficulties, or disease, or any other malady humanity is subject to, then would anyone even consider afterlife? Of course not, because an afterlife is a form of Hope, and without the form of despair (fear of death), an afterlife becomes pointless and redundant.
If we eliminate the idea of hell, then we needn't bother with the idea of heaven.
Contrary to what christians profess to the media, especially moderate ones, my thought is that the idea of hell is radically more important to their dogma than the idea of heaven is.
I submit that despair is always the initial deciding factor in whether someone believes in something or not. A person will consider whether their possible belief in an idea will offer them hope, but only because they need hope to counter a preexisting despair they may or may not already be aware of (this is one of the sad realities of evangelical churches, that they more often than not, instigate the feelings within their own congregations which lead said congregations to
"be saved"). Said another way, A person will choose to believe something if it offers them the chance at hope for the future, because the past has overwhelmingly offered them despair. This being the case, the idea of hope is always secondary. It is what is utilized to counter despair. Again, without the despair, why the hope? Despair, or the Fear of it, is without a doubt the absolute foundation of all the abrahamic religions. Fear of what will happen to us after we die is an idea that has led many a person to the altar.
Romans 6:23 says “For the wages of sin is death, but the gift of god is eternal life through christ our lord”. This is a good example of how despair is offered first and then the promise of hope secondarily counters. I will concede that there have been people converted because of the hope offered by the salvation message; however, the hope would be meaningless if the converted-to-be didn't either already fear something, or didn't get led to believe they had something to fear. During altar calls (public admissions of guilt, to those of you who've never been to a protestant church service), people tend to attach themselves to the immediate benefit of their actions and at that time the benefits of converting usually outweigh the threat of not converting by a dramatic margin, which is, at best, a flimsy reason to convert. Indeed the very idea of death can terrify millions of people at any given moment, but it is also quite fleeting and easily forgotten in lue of what sounds good for dinner.
There is also the herd mentality which some might offer as a reason for prospective-converts to move out of their pew. If so many other people are doing it, they might either look bad in the eyes of someone in the church who knows them, or they might be simply hedging their bets, in the idea that if so many people are going down front maybe they should too. A superficial look at both of these reasonings will all-too-easily reveal their fundamental basis of fear. The herd mentality is itself a defense mechanism, designed to ward off attackers (representations of fears held by the herd). Christianity, Judaism and Islam were all founded on the principle of Fear. Look at the terms “Lord” and “God-fearing” for an easy illustration of this.
An example from the bible (the inerrant word of god mind you): Luke 12:5, “But I will show you whom you should fear: Fear him who, after killing the body, has the power to throw you into hell. Yes, I tell you, fear him.” Now. I’m not completely sure if the author is referring to god or “the devil” here ,but that is beside the point. It is this foundation of fear that supports the pillars of Christianity.
Having this foundation, Christianity offers a way around this fear; Do what Jesus said. Believe he was the ticket to heaven as the son of god sent from above to pay the debt of all mankind. If you do, you can subvert the eternal damnation in store for you after you die and instead receive eternal comfort. It provides hope to counter the fear. In organized monotheistic religions, hope comes after fear, not before. Christians who truly believe they are saved, obviously don’t live in fear for their lives or souls, for the simple reason that they have chosen the path of eternal comfort, hope in Jesus' not being a crazy, lying lunatic. In their eyes, sinners (all the rest of us) have chosen the path of fear and despair, by recognizing jesus as being just another dude (who most certainly no longer abides ). My personal hope does not lie in this fantasy realm of Christianity, Islam or Judaism, because I reject the notion that my life is in any way subject to manmade hopes and fears. I no more hope for anything fantastic than I fear for anything cataclysmic. I do not center my life's philosophy around the fear of death or the loss of loved ones as one might suppose. That might seem improbable to many,but what I mean is although I would miss them beyond comprehension, I do not now fear for their deaths, because I of course recognize that everyone will die. I certainly do not wish for anything cataclysmic to happen to any of my loved ones, but I also understand that this wish is only a wish. It has no bearing on whether anything will ever happen to them or myself. At the same time that I don’t fear for their death, I also don’t hope to see them after they or I die. I spend my life with them and myself each day, because this life is what I know we are in possesion of. I no longer waste the time I have with them.
I actually think the principles of Christianity belittle the preciousness of life, rather that preserve it, as the term “sanctity of life”, which is thrown around like a hot potato by evangelicals these days, would imply. The very idea that my life now is less important than an unprovable afterlife is an idea that I find not only preposterous but also wildly arrogant on the part of both christians and their fictitious god.
For example: I ask someone to play monopoly right now, and they say no because they want to play a better game of monopoly after they die. This doesn’t make any sense but it’s the same as saying “ I’m not going to live my life now, because I’m going to have a better life after I die” My hope lies indeed in myself and my family. I am a thinking person who did not need to be created in order for me to be worth placing my own trust in.
Faith is unnecessary. Having faith in something rather than trying to find a real natural-born answer, is simply taking the lazy way out. It is the same as saying, "I don't know what this is about, so I'll just make up something and tell everyone I believe that". In that respect, what most christians do is even lazier, in that, most christians that I can remember from my days growing up in evangelical churches in the south, don't even bother to waste time thinking up something on their own. They simply latch on to what everybody around them has already said. Faith is the belief in something without the evidence to back it up. This is absurdity. If there is no evidence to show that a crime has been committed, then how do we know one actually was committed? Of course we don't, this is precisely why the courts don't allow hearsay evidence to be admitted as evidence. Better yet, why would anyone claim that their bank was robbed, if no money was missing and no employees witnessed a robber coming into the bank and sticking it up? Should we just have faith that the person saying there was a bank robbery is telling the truth? Should a jury convict the person he says robbed the bank without any evidence to support his claim? Of course not. An even more absurd notion is that christians somehow think that having faith is virtuous or noble. To paraphrase Christopher Hitchens,
“Christianity requires us to voluntarily relinquish our single greatest attribute, our ability to think critically.” Any institution that encourages us to not critically question the principles of its existence is not an institution worthy of subscription to. Blind faith is an excuse to gloss over the inconsistencies of outdated dogmas. To paraphrase another fellow rationalist, Sam Harris, “Religious moderates don’t ask the question of how they came to be moderate in the first place. At one point, all religions and religious people were fundamentalist. At what point did the fundamental side of religion give way to the moderate position and why did it do so? The answer is certainly not that the religions themselves evolved to be more “modern-thinking. It is that religious moderation is the result of centuries of rational freethinking individuals who have questioned the validity of fundamentally religious dogmas. Those dogmas simply could not stand up to the constant barrage of disbelief, and over time they melted into the sanguine christianity we see today". To now chastise religious fundamentalism, if you are a moderate, is to deny the very root of your own existence. Religious moderation provides a cover for fundamentalists who exact terrible events on the world by creating the ban associated with the questioning of religion. I speak of religion in the abrahamic sense, because hinduism, buddhism and other various eastern religions espouse the practice of not harming or causing suffering to other living beings, above all else . It is, by-and-large, off limits to question someone’s religious beliefs. Blind faith is, in the eyes of it's posessors not only virtuous but also impervious to disbelief. This should not be, and it is my hope to contribute in some way to the overturning of this menace of rationality. Life is worth living without faith in the preposterous, and we need not hope for anything outside of the ability to experience our life as long as we have it.
Abandon Hope all ye who enter here.
You better watch out, you better not cry, you better not pout, I'm tellin you why..... You're gonna go to hell, and cook for eternity in ovens of burning brimstone......
DAMNATION AWAITS!!!!!
Heh, heh, heh, heh....
Christians would have us all believe that the principles of Faith and Hope are the greatest possible gifts we could ever have been awarded by their god-head.
Hogwash.
Neither of these ideas are conducive to living a fulfilled life, they are only ideas born of unmerited, wholesale fear.
Consider the word Hope. It conjures mental pictures of pleasantness, freedom from unhappiness, bliss. It represents the wish of every single person. However, contained within it, is the implied sinisterly opposite despair.
You cannot have one without the other. No Hope, No Despair (the words hope and despair are easily interchangeable with the words good and evil).
To illustrate what I mean, ask yourself the following question:
"Without evil, how would a person be able to distinguish good?".
If everything were good all the time (as is the example of heaven), how would a person be able to retain the exuberance of eternal pleasure, without ever growing numb to it's effects?
In order to fully experience anything, good or bad, the opposite of what you're experiencing has to exist and be known to you, or you'll never be aware of what you're experiencing. A person could never live in unending bliss because of this paradox. Eternal bliss is impossible because without it's opposite (torture) being somewhere in the mix of eternity, we would not recognize it as being bliss.
In the same way we would not know what cold felt like without the corresponding hot, we would also be unable to distinguish hard from soft, tall from short, good from evil or hope from despair. There is a spectrum of experience which we all are subject to. Without it, we would be automatons with no gamut of feelings.
Now let's consider the word Despair.
What does this word conjure? Thoughts of helplessness, inherent "badness", imprisonment in unhappiness. Now ask yourself in what ritualistic, weekly excercise a person might hear these words spoken. Christians, especially those hell-fire and damnation evangelicals that so wisely want to turn our country into an 18th century theocracy, love to spout out these threats of condemnation to human comfort every weekend (and sometimes during the week if a revival is in town) to the flocks of folk who are all-too eager to "repent" of their evil (there's that word again) ways and be safely returned to the fold, only to stray away as soon as the service is over.
If heaven is the object of hope for christians, then hell has to be the object of despair. As I said before, we can't do without despair, so hell has to exist if heaven exists. But imagine if we took the despair of hell out of the equation. We would be left with Hope on one side and nothing on the other. How then could the Hope of Heaven possibly exist? Actually, I should ask why then would anyone even care about a possible heaven? If no one feared death, or financial difficulties, or disease, or any other malady humanity is subject to, then would anyone even consider afterlife? Of course not, because an afterlife is a form of Hope, and without the form of despair (fear of death), an afterlife becomes pointless and redundant.
If we eliminate the idea of hell, then we needn't bother with the idea of heaven.
Contrary to what christians profess to the media, especially moderate ones, my thought is that the idea of hell is radically more important to their dogma than the idea of heaven is.
I submit that despair is always the initial deciding factor in whether someone believes in something or not. A person will consider whether their possible belief in an idea will offer them hope, but only because they need hope to counter a preexisting despair they may or may not already be aware of (this is one of the sad realities of evangelical churches, that they more often than not, instigate the feelings within their own congregations which lead said congregations to
"be saved"). Said another way, A person will choose to believe something if it offers them the chance at hope for the future, because the past has overwhelmingly offered them despair. This being the case, the idea of hope is always secondary. It is what is utilized to counter despair. Again, without the despair, why the hope? Despair, or the Fear of it, is without a doubt the absolute foundation of all the abrahamic religions. Fear of what will happen to us after we die is an idea that has led many a person to the altar.
Romans 6:23 says “For the wages of sin is death, but the gift of god is eternal life through christ our lord”. This is a good example of how despair is offered first and then the promise of hope secondarily counters. I will concede that there have been people converted because of the hope offered by the salvation message; however, the hope would be meaningless if the converted-to-be didn't either already fear something, or didn't get led to believe they had something to fear. During altar calls (public admissions of guilt, to those of you who've never been to a protestant church service), people tend to attach themselves to the immediate benefit of their actions and at that time the benefits of converting usually outweigh the threat of not converting by a dramatic margin, which is, at best, a flimsy reason to convert. Indeed the very idea of death can terrify millions of people at any given moment, but it is also quite fleeting and easily forgotten in lue of what sounds good for dinner.
There is also the herd mentality which some might offer as a reason for prospective-converts to move out of their pew. If so many other people are doing it, they might either look bad in the eyes of someone in the church who knows them, or they might be simply hedging their bets, in the idea that if so many people are going down front maybe they should too. A superficial look at both of these reasonings will all-too-easily reveal their fundamental basis of fear. The herd mentality is itself a defense mechanism, designed to ward off attackers (representations of fears held by the herd). Christianity, Judaism and Islam were all founded on the principle of Fear. Look at the terms “Lord” and “God-fearing” for an easy illustration of this.
An example from the bible (the inerrant word of god mind you): Luke 12:5, “But I will show you whom you should fear: Fear him who, after killing the body, has the power to throw you into hell. Yes, I tell you, fear him.” Now. I’m not completely sure if the author is referring to god or “the devil” here ,but that is beside the point. It is this foundation of fear that supports the pillars of Christianity.
Having this foundation, Christianity offers a way around this fear; Do what Jesus said. Believe he was the ticket to heaven as the son of god sent from above to pay the debt of all mankind. If you do, you can subvert the eternal damnation in store for you after you die and instead receive eternal comfort. It provides hope to counter the fear. In organized monotheistic religions, hope comes after fear, not before. Christians who truly believe they are saved, obviously don’t live in fear for their lives or souls, for the simple reason that they have chosen the path of eternal comfort, hope in Jesus' not being a crazy, lying lunatic. In their eyes, sinners (all the rest of us) have chosen the path of fear and despair, by recognizing jesus as being just another dude (who most certainly no longer abides ). My personal hope does not lie in this fantasy realm of Christianity, Islam or Judaism, because I reject the notion that my life is in any way subject to manmade hopes and fears. I no more hope for anything fantastic than I fear for anything cataclysmic. I do not center my life's philosophy around the fear of death or the loss of loved ones as one might suppose. That might seem improbable to many,but what I mean is although I would miss them beyond comprehension, I do not now fear for their deaths, because I of course recognize that everyone will die. I certainly do not wish for anything cataclysmic to happen to any of my loved ones, but I also understand that this wish is only a wish. It has no bearing on whether anything will ever happen to them or myself. At the same time that I don’t fear for their death, I also don’t hope to see them after they or I die. I spend my life with them and myself each day, because this life is what I know we are in possesion of. I no longer waste the time I have with them.
I actually think the principles of Christianity belittle the preciousness of life, rather that preserve it, as the term “sanctity of life”, which is thrown around like a hot potato by evangelicals these days, would imply. The very idea that my life now is less important than an unprovable afterlife is an idea that I find not only preposterous but also wildly arrogant on the part of both christians and their fictitious god.
For example: I ask someone to play monopoly right now, and they say no because they want to play a better game of monopoly after they die. This doesn’t make any sense but it’s the same as saying “ I’m not going to live my life now, because I’m going to have a better life after I die” My hope lies indeed in myself and my family. I am a thinking person who did not need to be created in order for me to be worth placing my own trust in.
Faith is unnecessary. Having faith in something rather than trying to find a real natural-born answer, is simply taking the lazy way out. It is the same as saying, "I don't know what this is about, so I'll just make up something and tell everyone I believe that". In that respect, what most christians do is even lazier, in that, most christians that I can remember from my days growing up in evangelical churches in the south, don't even bother to waste time thinking up something on their own. They simply latch on to what everybody around them has already said. Faith is the belief in something without the evidence to back it up. This is absurdity. If there is no evidence to show that a crime has been committed, then how do we know one actually was committed? Of course we don't, this is precisely why the courts don't allow hearsay evidence to be admitted as evidence. Better yet, why would anyone claim that their bank was robbed, if no money was missing and no employees witnessed a robber coming into the bank and sticking it up? Should we just have faith that the person saying there was a bank robbery is telling the truth? Should a jury convict the person he says robbed the bank without any evidence to support his claim? Of course not. An even more absurd notion is that christians somehow think that having faith is virtuous or noble. To paraphrase Christopher Hitchens,
“Christianity requires us to voluntarily relinquish our single greatest attribute, our ability to think critically.” Any institution that encourages us to not critically question the principles of its existence is not an institution worthy of subscription to. Blind faith is an excuse to gloss over the inconsistencies of outdated dogmas. To paraphrase another fellow rationalist, Sam Harris, “Religious moderates don’t ask the question of how they came to be moderate in the first place. At one point, all religions and religious people were fundamentalist. At what point did the fundamental side of religion give way to the moderate position and why did it do so? The answer is certainly not that the religions themselves evolved to be more “modern-thinking. It is that religious moderation is the result of centuries of rational freethinking individuals who have questioned the validity of fundamentally religious dogmas. Those dogmas simply could not stand up to the constant barrage of disbelief, and over time they melted into the sanguine christianity we see today". To now chastise religious fundamentalism, if you are a moderate, is to deny the very root of your own existence. Religious moderation provides a cover for fundamentalists who exact terrible events on the world by creating the ban associated with the questioning of religion. I speak of religion in the abrahamic sense, because hinduism, buddhism and other various eastern religions espouse the practice of not harming or causing suffering to other living beings, above all else . It is, by-and-large, off limits to question someone’s religious beliefs. Blind faith is, in the eyes of it's posessors not only virtuous but also impervious to disbelief. This should not be, and it is my hope to contribute in some way to the overturning of this menace of rationality. Life is worth living without faith in the preposterous, and we need not hope for anything outside of the ability to experience our life as long as we have it.
Tuesday, February 19, 2008
On Reading, Writing and Arithmetic
What makes a person intelligent? Intellect? Knowledge? Education? Cognition? While there are a plethora of tributaries to this particular river, I'm speaking only of the constitution of intelligence. For instance, we all go to school (well most of us, and some of us for a very long time), but not all of us, at the end of the day, can be described as being particularly intelligent. It is the variation in degree of intelligence that I wonder about. I know some remarkably intelligent people and I also know some real dunces. I wonder about this discrepancy, why are there really smart folk, and not-so-smart folk? Specialization in education is the mark of the day, but I think it is not all that it is cracked up to be. I hold two degrees (bachelors and masters) in my particular field, and I believe I am at least more intelligent than the average bear in this area, but I do not count myself as an intelligent being because of my knowledge of this specific discipline. Doctors are, on the whole intelligent folk, but I would not consider their intelligence due solely to their knowledge in the field of medicine. It is through the study of those subjects we learn as children that we gain intelligence, subjects such as, Reading, Writing and Arithmetic. And it is through the lack of adequate emphasis on these subjects in the earliest developm,ental years of children's lives, that, I believe harbors the reason for the division we see in intelligence levels of particular people. For instance, children of illiterate parentage, tend to grow up apathetic towards reading and writing.
I cannot imagine what it would feel like to be unable to read. Furthermore, I cannot imagine what it would feel like to not want to read. I have been a lifelong reader and I can see my son being the same way, even now at the tender age of three. The last part of his everyday is book-reading. Of course we are reading to him (with an occasional romp into sounding out words himself) and the practice is routine. I have no doubt that this will continue into his later childhood, adolescence and finally adulthood, as it did mine and my wife's. What is the point, that our family puts a high value on reading? Not just that, but also that I say the desire to read, along with the ability, is one very important path to intelligence. It is not enough to teach kids how to read, we should, as parents, mentors, teachers, or any persons of authority, be instilling the love of reading to our kids. Learning itself comes from Reading. Without our reading about information already known to others, humanity would be relegated to reinventing the wheel day-in and day-out,never progressing beyond the days of cavemen.
But there are other, interrelated, paths to intelligence. I just finished writing a response to a christian apologetic friend of mine, in which I spoke of thought leading humanity to answers. This is the next path to intelligence. The ability to think, critically and to such a deep degree, is probably the most human attribute we have, and the best exercise for the development of this trait we laymen have to avail ourselves of, is the practice of writing. Why do you think, the most learned people in whatever field(s) have to publish to maintain their cutting edge knowledge and reputation? Why do candidates for the PhD, in practically any field, have to write a dissertation in order to receive their degrees? It is because writing simply requires so much more thought than other practices. A good book is a well thought-out book. Good books require structure, flow and nuance. Authors have to think of these things before they produce any physical work. Editors have to think as they read, if they are to offer any suggestions for improvement. What is the point? Children need to be taught how to and encouraged to write about everything. For example, My 13 year old neice is an avid reader and writer, she recently won a writing competition (with a $100 prize to boot). She is an intelligent person, and it is because she spends time thinking in order to write. Not everyone will be an author for a living, but all humanity can become more intelligent if we take the time to develop a love of writing. Just look at the Blogosphere, and for that matter me. Humans (thinking ones) cannot avoid the realm of authorship. We all want to do it, but again as parents, teachers, mentors, etc., we need to foster the budding writer in our children, by modeling it and encouraging it. Which brings us to the last area of education, Arithmetic.
What would our world be like if we had no understanding of mathmatical principles? We would still be living in the forest for one thing. Without math, we don't build houses. We would also still be foragers, without math, there would be no agriculture. W e live as we do because. as a species, we have learned math. The Cosmos, the Corporeal, the Psyche all have their roots in the precepts of Math.
Children should be learning math in school, as they are, they should also be learning to love to read and how to write.
Reading, Writing and Arithmetic. Those are the three foundations of what our education should be. Math is being taught, but I worry that reading and writing are not, especially at the younger age levels. The specialization offered at the high school level, loses track of the real goal, that of making informed, intelligent human beings, in lue of "preparing" students for going to college, where they will specialize in something. College is a place to develop a life's philosophy, primarily. Specialization, outside of the professions of Science, Medicine and Law (with some others thrown in, that I can't think of right now), is what we learn "on the job". I became adept at fixing my car by doing it, not by learning how to do it. Musicians become proficient at their chosen instruments by practicing them, not by studying them in a classroom. High schools should rethink what subjects of study they present their students with. The Math subjects (Trigonometry, geometry, Calculus, etc...) yes! The Literature and Writing classes, by all means. The Football training class, not-so-much. The Band or Choir class,while they might be nice to do as pasttimes, kids can and should pursue those on their own, outside of school, and mind you I am a musician. I think kids should be allowed to pursue whatever they'd like, educationally speaking, I just don't think all of the variety of subjects in school is really going to lead them to be smarter in the long run. They only provide a distraction to the real tenets of human intelligence. I may be wrong, however, who knows?
I cannot imagine what it would feel like to be unable to read. Furthermore, I cannot imagine what it would feel like to not want to read. I have been a lifelong reader and I can see my son being the same way, even now at the tender age of three. The last part of his everyday is book-reading. Of course we are reading to him (with an occasional romp into sounding out words himself) and the practice is routine. I have no doubt that this will continue into his later childhood, adolescence and finally adulthood, as it did mine and my wife's. What is the point, that our family puts a high value on reading? Not just that, but also that I say the desire to read, along with the ability, is one very important path to intelligence. It is not enough to teach kids how to read, we should, as parents, mentors, teachers, or any persons of authority, be instilling the love of reading to our kids. Learning itself comes from Reading. Without our reading about information already known to others, humanity would be relegated to reinventing the wheel day-in and day-out,never progressing beyond the days of cavemen.
But there are other, interrelated, paths to intelligence. I just finished writing a response to a christian apologetic friend of mine, in which I spoke of thought leading humanity to answers. This is the next path to intelligence. The ability to think, critically and to such a deep degree, is probably the most human attribute we have, and the best exercise for the development of this trait we laymen have to avail ourselves of, is the practice of writing. Why do you think, the most learned people in whatever field(s) have to publish to maintain their cutting edge knowledge and reputation? Why do candidates for the PhD, in practically any field, have to write a dissertation in order to receive their degrees? It is because writing simply requires so much more thought than other practices. A good book is a well thought-out book. Good books require structure, flow and nuance. Authors have to think of these things before they produce any physical work. Editors have to think as they read, if they are to offer any suggestions for improvement. What is the point? Children need to be taught how to and encouraged to write about everything. For example, My 13 year old neice is an avid reader and writer, she recently won a writing competition (with a $100 prize to boot). She is an intelligent person, and it is because she spends time thinking in order to write. Not everyone will be an author for a living, but all humanity can become more intelligent if we take the time to develop a love of writing. Just look at the Blogosphere, and for that matter me. Humans (thinking ones) cannot avoid the realm of authorship. We all want to do it, but again as parents, teachers, mentors, etc., we need to foster the budding writer in our children, by modeling it and encouraging it. Which brings us to the last area of education, Arithmetic.
What would our world be like if we had no understanding of mathmatical principles? We would still be living in the forest for one thing. Without math, we don't build houses. We would also still be foragers, without math, there would be no agriculture. W e live as we do because. as a species, we have learned math. The Cosmos, the Corporeal, the Psyche all have their roots in the precepts of Math.
Children should be learning math in school, as they are, they should also be learning to love to read and how to write.
Reading, Writing and Arithmetic. Those are the three foundations of what our education should be. Math is being taught, but I worry that reading and writing are not, especially at the younger age levels. The specialization offered at the high school level, loses track of the real goal, that of making informed, intelligent human beings, in lue of "preparing" students for going to college, where they will specialize in something. College is a place to develop a life's philosophy, primarily. Specialization, outside of the professions of Science, Medicine and Law (with some others thrown in, that I can't think of right now), is what we learn "on the job". I became adept at fixing my car by doing it, not by learning how to do it. Musicians become proficient at their chosen instruments by practicing them, not by studying them in a classroom. High schools should rethink what subjects of study they present their students with. The Math subjects (Trigonometry, geometry, Calculus, etc...) yes! The Literature and Writing classes, by all means. The Football training class, not-so-much. The Band or Choir class,while they might be nice to do as pasttimes, kids can and should pursue those on their own, outside of school, and mind you I am a musician. I think kids should be allowed to pursue whatever they'd like, educationally speaking, I just don't think all of the variety of subjects in school is really going to lead them to be smarter in the long run. They only provide a distraction to the real tenets of human intelligence. I may be wrong, however, who knows?
On Dinosaurs and Man
Here's another one for all of you young earth creationists. There is published literature out there (and I use the term literature very loosely) stating that dinosaurs and man could have and did actually live at the same time. Kent Hovind says so, as do some of his disciples (pun definitely intended). They often cite the river bed in Texas that has dinosaur footprints fossilized in it along with "giant man" footprints. The Paluxy River dinosaur and man footprints have been thoroughly discredited by science. They do not represent man and dino footprints side-by-side in geologic time at all. The "man" footprints aren't even universally accepted as being "man" footprints. But the geologic timetable is not enough of a deterrent to you young earth folks, so here's one to think about:
If man and dinosaurs existed at the same time in the same basic places on earth, how in blazes did we survive?
Velociraptors were arguably the world's most lethal predator, EVER. Six feet tall, they were just the right size to take a frail human out like a package of Ribeye in the meat section of the grocery store. We would've been like cows to them or any other carnivorous dinosaur, for that matter, that happened to spot us strolling down the wooded path whistling a merry tune. There were plenty of other similarly-sized dinosaurs that could've dined on a meal of us and still had room for dessert. There is simply no way we would be the dominant species on the earth now, if we were around when dinos were.
Look at the top predators in the world today, Lions, White Sharks, Orcas, Tigers, Crocodiles, Hyenas, etc... All are lethal to humans, if confronted with them. This is why we, as a generally uneducated population, tend to stay away from these animals. If we were to suddenly begin waltzing around the serengeti plain day-in and day-out, eventually lions and hyenas would catch on to our vulnerability and start adjusting their menus accordingly. Yes, they might not much like the way we taste at first, but I'll bet they'd get used to our stringiness and proportional lack of body fat after enough time. The same scenario would easily apply to great white sharks. Although we are not a part of their regular diet of seals, I'll bet if we were to take to swimming and bathing and generally frolicking in the tropical waters around Seal Island for an extended period of time, we'd see a dramatic rise in the number of reported great white attacks and subsequent deaths. If you can't see how this has anything to do with dinosaurs, just increase the number of lions, tigers, sharks etc. which we have on the earth today by at least a few orders of magnitude and you'll arrive at a reasonable census for the height of the population of carnivorous dinosaurs who might've been interested in us as prey. For instance, let's use Dilophosaurs (the spitting venom dinosaurs from the book Jurassic Park by Michael Crighton) as one of many examples of dinosaurs who would probably have hunted and eaten us if they could have done so. Now, let's implant those dinosaurs into the landscape of the middle east of 6,000 years ago, complete with mud and clay houses, no gunpowder or nuclear technology and only our trusty trumpets (which could come in handy if we want to knock the walls of a certain city down) and swords for hand to claw combat. No tanks, horses (although these wouldn't fare all that well against dinos either) or helicopters. Only us agriculturalists against the marauding (and very hungry) "terrible lizards". Would we even stand a chance? With nothing substantial to defend ourselves? I'm glad I don't live in this fictional world. For that matter, let's transplant all the dinosaurs from, say, the Cretacious Era into the present, and see how we humans in our clapboard houses and Ford Tauruses would stand up against a ten-ton triceratops. Would you enjoy walking out of your house everyday knowing there are hungry and voracious hunters, bigger and more cunning than you, just outside your house waiting to rip you to shreds and devour while you're still kicking and screaming? It might be nice to see or think about a dinosaur, but to confront a living and breathing one in the world, think again!
It's absolutely ridiculous to even entertain the thought of humans and dinosaurs living at the same time. It's absurd. Creationists, give me a break. Do yourselves a favor and just acknowledge the science. Your making yourselves sound ridiculous.
If man and dinosaurs existed at the same time in the same basic places on earth, how in blazes did we survive?
Velociraptors were arguably the world's most lethal predator, EVER. Six feet tall, they were just the right size to take a frail human out like a package of Ribeye in the meat section of the grocery store. We would've been like cows to them or any other carnivorous dinosaur, for that matter, that happened to spot us strolling down the wooded path whistling a merry tune. There were plenty of other similarly-sized dinosaurs that could've dined on a meal of us and still had room for dessert. There is simply no way we would be the dominant species on the earth now, if we were around when dinos were.
Look at the top predators in the world today, Lions, White Sharks, Orcas, Tigers, Crocodiles, Hyenas, etc... All are lethal to humans, if confronted with them. This is why we, as a generally uneducated population, tend to stay away from these animals. If we were to suddenly begin waltzing around the serengeti plain day-in and day-out, eventually lions and hyenas would catch on to our vulnerability and start adjusting their menus accordingly. Yes, they might not much like the way we taste at first, but I'll bet they'd get used to our stringiness and proportional lack of body fat after enough time. The same scenario would easily apply to great white sharks. Although we are not a part of their regular diet of seals, I'll bet if we were to take to swimming and bathing and generally frolicking in the tropical waters around Seal Island for an extended period of time, we'd see a dramatic rise in the number of reported great white attacks and subsequent deaths. If you can't see how this has anything to do with dinosaurs, just increase the number of lions, tigers, sharks etc. which we have on the earth today by at least a few orders of magnitude and you'll arrive at a reasonable census for the height of the population of carnivorous dinosaurs who might've been interested in us as prey. For instance, let's use Dilophosaurs (the spitting venom dinosaurs from the book Jurassic Park by Michael Crighton) as one of many examples of dinosaurs who would probably have hunted and eaten us if they could have done so. Now, let's implant those dinosaurs into the landscape of the middle east of 6,000 years ago, complete with mud and clay houses, no gunpowder or nuclear technology and only our trusty trumpets (which could come in handy if we want to knock the walls of a certain city down) and swords for hand to claw combat. No tanks, horses (although these wouldn't fare all that well against dinos either) or helicopters. Only us agriculturalists against the marauding (and very hungry) "terrible lizards". Would we even stand a chance? With nothing substantial to defend ourselves? I'm glad I don't live in this fictional world. For that matter, let's transplant all the dinosaurs from, say, the Cretacious Era into the present, and see how we humans in our clapboard houses and Ford Tauruses would stand up against a ten-ton triceratops. Would you enjoy walking out of your house everyday knowing there are hungry and voracious hunters, bigger and more cunning than you, just outside your house waiting to rip you to shreds and devour while you're still kicking and screaming? It might be nice to see or think about a dinosaur, but to confront a living and breathing one in the world, think again!
It's absolutely ridiculous to even entertain the thought of humans and dinosaurs living at the same time. It's absurd. Creationists, give me a break. Do yourselves a favor and just acknowledge the science. Your making yourselves sound ridiculous.
Monday, February 18, 2008
On Abraham and Issac
Abraham and Issac, the story of faith, the story of love and obedience, the story of devotion and godliness, right? Wrong!!! I’m sure anyone who reads this blog post will already be familiar with this story about how Abraham was instructed by god to sacrifice his son to “prove” his trust and faith in god. God had promised Abraham to multiply and continue his line through Issac, but now god was asking Abraham to kill him. How, without faith, could this be?
My contention, along with countless other freethinkers is, If Abraham were alive today and acted as he did in the bible story i.e. listened to invisible voices that told him to kill his son, he would be arrested and either thrown into jail on child endangerment charges, or attempted murder, or else he would be committed to a psychiatric institution for as long as possible.
Abraham lived in a time of human history when sacrificing a child was not thought of as absurd, on the contrary, it took place quite often, which brings up a thought. The fact that the times were as such does not even approach excusing such reprehensible behavior. If it were right to do so, then the practice of human sacrifice to invisible god(s) should have survived to the present day in modern society. It obviously has not, and thank goodness for that, although I’ll allow the possibility of the practice surviving somewhere in the world in a backwards god-fearing, servile society. In some ways we have progressed beyond the state in which ignorance can breed ill-advised behavior. The example from Judges, chapter 11 (see below) only serves to reinforce the fact that in our infancy, the human race lived in relative, wholesale ignorance.
In Hebrews 11:19 it says “Abraham reasoned that god could raise the dead and figuratively speaking, he did receive Isaac back from the dead”. By what “reason” did Abraham arrive at the conclusion that god could raise the dead. There is no mention of bodily resurrection actually taking place during that time in the Old Testament. The only references made in the OT, are in Daniel 12:2, Isaiah 26:19, and Psalms 17:15 in which all are “prophecies” about the end times.
What tests did Abraham contrive to see if god could really raise the dead? How many tests were there, and who were the volunteers? Of course I'm being facetious, but the point is valid. There was absolutely no reasoning on the part of Abraham. It would be much more accurate to say that Abraham assumed that god could raise the dead.
Let’s suppose that god could raise the dead and that Abraham assumed correctly so. Abraham would have then actually killed his son. Nothing after the fact would have been able to change this, excepting of course god His decision to follow the command would simply have not been excusable. It is a simple thought, Abraham killing his son; a horrible one but simple nonetheless. I question not Abraham’s obedience, but god’s intestinal fortitude, arrogance and outright gall in asking such a thing.
Murder, as a test of faith, is deplorable.
What would god have done, had Abraham refused this test on the basis of the sanctity of human life? Would god have killed Abraham for Abraham’s refusal to take the life of another of god’s children? Would he have rescinded his promise by withholding the proliferation of Abraham’s line of descent? Would he have destroyed the earth again as he supposedly did with the flood? A god that asks something of the sort in question is not a benevolent, loving, caring god. He is a jealous, pedantic, juvenile, altogether human god, who exhibits distinctly human behavioral characteristics, characteristics that, at least in humanity, are the result of the development of fear throughout our life history.
God did not create us in his image, we created god in ours. Indeed, god represents everything that we as children simultaneously fear and seek. God is a parental figure to us, both the source of approval for our behavior and dread if we trespass his demands.
I would even submit that such a “test of faith” is really not much of a test at all. If Abraham knew (reasoned) that god could raise the dead in advance, then he exhibited really no faith at all, only obedience. A better and more accurate test of faith would have been if god had allowed Abraham to go through with it completely. Abraham kills his son, takes his life, sees his son’s blood flowing out of his body, and only then does god raise him from the dead, healing his wounds and restoring life to his body. Abraham would have to show incalculable faith to trust that god would still fulfill his promise after Isaac was actually dead. Instead, god fells the hand of Abraham before he actually kills Isaac. This reminds me all too much of the familiar story of the one that got away. “Boy it was down to the wire, my hand was at my son’s throat with a knife, I was so strong in my faith that I was willing to do such a terrible thing, but at the last minute, wouldn’t you know it, The angel Gabriel showed up and said,” Naw just kidding, you don’t really have to kill your son, we were just testing you, here’s a ram instead.” Whew…., that’s a load off. What…., you don’t believe me, well, yeah no one else was there to see it but it’s true, I swear….”
There is an example in Judges that is illustrative of the juvenile nature of god when it comes to fulfilling a vow to kill for him. Jephthah makes his vow to sacrifice the first thing out of his door (in this case it turns out to be his daughter) if only god will help him to conquer (meaning kill and then occupy the lands of) the Ammonites (what did they ever do?).
A god who watches out for the welfare of his “children” would not let a man make such a vow, knowing full well what he was promising, seeing that the man’s vow would result in the death of another of god’s children, through murder. Now at this point in biblical history, the ten commandments did exist, and they explicitly disallow the act of murder. They do not say, thou shalt not murder, except in the name of me (god). They say in no uncertain terms, “Thou shalt not kill” So, the fulfillment of this vow to god, was itself a violation of the fundamental laws that god handed down to moses (supposedly). This is a prime example of the paradoxes offered up by the bible all throughout the old and new testament. Hypocrisy is frowned upon by society at-large, is most certainly preached against in christianity and by all religious accounts a sin worthy of eternal damnation, yet the bible’s god and his “son” constantly illustrate this offence to the intelligent mind. It is high time we cease celebrating the ignorance in which the overwhelming majority of humankind wallows in every sunday (or saturday depending).
My contention, along with countless other freethinkers is, If Abraham were alive today and acted as he did in the bible story i.e. listened to invisible voices that told him to kill his son, he would be arrested and either thrown into jail on child endangerment charges, or attempted murder, or else he would be committed to a psychiatric institution for as long as possible.
Abraham lived in a time of human history when sacrificing a child was not thought of as absurd, on the contrary, it took place quite often, which brings up a thought. The fact that the times were as such does not even approach excusing such reprehensible behavior. If it were right to do so, then the practice of human sacrifice to invisible god(s) should have survived to the present day in modern society. It obviously has not, and thank goodness for that, although I’ll allow the possibility of the practice surviving somewhere in the world in a backwards god-fearing, servile society. In some ways we have progressed beyond the state in which ignorance can breed ill-advised behavior. The example from Judges, chapter 11 (see below) only serves to reinforce the fact that in our infancy, the human race lived in relative, wholesale ignorance.
In Hebrews 11:19 it says “Abraham reasoned that god could raise the dead and figuratively speaking, he did receive Isaac back from the dead”. By what “reason” did Abraham arrive at the conclusion that god could raise the dead. There is no mention of bodily resurrection actually taking place during that time in the Old Testament. The only references made in the OT, are in Daniel 12:2, Isaiah 26:19, and Psalms 17:15 in which all are “prophecies” about the end times.
What tests did Abraham contrive to see if god could really raise the dead? How many tests were there, and who were the volunteers? Of course I'm being facetious, but the point is valid. There was absolutely no reasoning on the part of Abraham. It would be much more accurate to say that Abraham assumed that god could raise the dead.
Let’s suppose that god could raise the dead and that Abraham assumed correctly so. Abraham would have then actually killed his son. Nothing after the fact would have been able to change this, excepting of course god His decision to follow the command would simply have not been excusable. It is a simple thought, Abraham killing his son; a horrible one but simple nonetheless. I question not Abraham’s obedience, but god’s intestinal fortitude, arrogance and outright gall in asking such a thing.
Murder, as a test of faith, is deplorable.
What would god have done, had Abraham refused this test on the basis of the sanctity of human life? Would god have killed Abraham for Abraham’s refusal to take the life of another of god’s children? Would he have rescinded his promise by withholding the proliferation of Abraham’s line of descent? Would he have destroyed the earth again as he supposedly did with the flood? A god that asks something of the sort in question is not a benevolent, loving, caring god. He is a jealous, pedantic, juvenile, altogether human god, who exhibits distinctly human behavioral characteristics, characteristics that, at least in humanity, are the result of the development of fear throughout our life history.
God did not create us in his image, we created god in ours. Indeed, god represents everything that we as children simultaneously fear and seek. God is a parental figure to us, both the source of approval for our behavior and dread if we trespass his demands.
I would even submit that such a “test of faith” is really not much of a test at all. If Abraham knew (reasoned) that god could raise the dead in advance, then he exhibited really no faith at all, only obedience. A better and more accurate test of faith would have been if god had allowed Abraham to go through with it completely. Abraham kills his son, takes his life, sees his son’s blood flowing out of his body, and only then does god raise him from the dead, healing his wounds and restoring life to his body. Abraham would have to show incalculable faith to trust that god would still fulfill his promise after Isaac was actually dead. Instead, god fells the hand of Abraham before he actually kills Isaac. This reminds me all too much of the familiar story of the one that got away. “Boy it was down to the wire, my hand was at my son’s throat with a knife, I was so strong in my faith that I was willing to do such a terrible thing, but at the last minute, wouldn’t you know it, The angel Gabriel showed up and said,” Naw just kidding, you don’t really have to kill your son, we were just testing you, here’s a ram instead.” Whew…., that’s a load off. What…., you don’t believe me, well, yeah no one else was there to see it but it’s true, I swear….”
There is an example in Judges that is illustrative of the juvenile nature of god when it comes to fulfilling a vow to kill for him. Jephthah makes his vow to sacrifice the first thing out of his door (in this case it turns out to be his daughter) if only god will help him to conquer (meaning kill and then occupy the lands of) the Ammonites (what did they ever do?).
A god who watches out for the welfare of his “children” would not let a man make such a vow, knowing full well what he was promising, seeing that the man’s vow would result in the death of another of god’s children, through murder. Now at this point in biblical history, the ten commandments did exist, and they explicitly disallow the act of murder. They do not say, thou shalt not murder, except in the name of me (god). They say in no uncertain terms, “Thou shalt not kill” So, the fulfillment of this vow to god, was itself a violation of the fundamental laws that god handed down to moses (supposedly). This is a prime example of the paradoxes offered up by the bible all throughout the old and new testament. Hypocrisy is frowned upon by society at-large, is most certainly preached against in christianity and by all religious accounts a sin worthy of eternal damnation, yet the bible’s god and his “son” constantly illustrate this offence to the intelligent mind. It is high time we cease celebrating the ignorance in which the overwhelming majority of humankind wallows in every sunday (or saturday depending).
Saturday, February 16, 2008
God needs us more than we need him
We've all heard the saying "If a tree falls in the forest, but no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound?". Well, does it? The air pressure differential created by the impact would say yes, but the lack of receptor organs (such as ear drums) to quantify that impact would say no. An interesting question about a natural phenomenon. Can we ask the same question about a supernatural phenomenon?
If god were to "say" something, but there were no humans to "hear" him, does this mean he actually "said" anything? Stated another, perhaps more clear, way; Assuming creation to be true, god has an audience, but what if there was no audience? What if we were never here, would there still be god. What would be the need of a god in an existence that includes only him/herself?
Christians make lots of assumptions, indeed the entirety of their faith is assumptive, but perhaps no one is bigger than this: Christians believe that god existed before we did. The only accounts we have of this are the holy texts, which were written by men. Even if we allow the premise of divine dictation, the words themselves were originally written down by men, not god. Since no one was alive to see a god dictate these texts, it is an assumption to say we know he existed before we did, an assumption based on text written by the creation of this eternal being, but not by the eternal being itself.
I say, what point is there for a god without an audience. How would an omnipotent being demonstrate omnipotence if there were no one to convince? Without someone to ooh and aah over the tricks of a magician, there are no tricks, only rehearsals of slights-of-hand. A magician can't fool himself, he needs someone who does not know how the trick is done to impress. Without such a person, the magician has no career. Without a creation to parade his godliness in front of, god is not god. He could be everything, but without a created humanity, he would be simultaneously nothing.
There are two ways of looking at our existence. We were either created by an omniscient god, or we are the most recent evolutionary waystation. I suppose there are really a myriad of ways to explain our existence, such as extraterrestrial implantation, but I think the two most dominant areas of discourse on our origins are the two I mentioned above, so we'll stick with them.
If we were created by an omniscient god, then he must have had no choice in the matter, in that without us he would be not be omniscient. He couldn't be. If there are no uniscient (non-omniscient) beings to compare omniscience with, omniscience cannot exist. If it's the only game in town (being omniscient), then exaltation this element would be absurd since having this trait would simply be the norm (again in an existence with only god). Since we are indeed here to discuss this, then of course the christian god had to create us, if we are to believe in his most divine characteristics of omnipresence, omnibenevolence and omniscience. If god had no choice but to create us, then he is in no way immune to the governances of human logic and semantics. His subjectivity to these governances requires an explanation. Either our disciplines are unsatisfactory to describe god's existence, or he is a fraudulent mixture of humanity's least positive components. If our disciplines are unsatisfactory then, all disciplines must be, including our ability in recognizing god in the first place. If we cannot design suitable regulations for the understanding of the existence we all have, and the surroundings we are all among, then how could we possibly be able to design a system of recognition with which to distinguish the divinity of god? He is the result of the primitive minds of primitive men who were obviously incapable of designing constructive, optimistic and self-reliant societies (the exception being of course the great greek civilizations). Men such as these relied on the fear of the unknown to establish control of the masses, because it was easier than thinking completely through problems. Humans don't need a god. We don't claim the unclaimable, so we need no audience to display to. We do however, have as large an audience as we like, but it certainly didn't come from a creator. We arrived here on our own and rightfully so.
If god were to "say" something, but there were no humans to "hear" him, does this mean he actually "said" anything? Stated another, perhaps more clear, way; Assuming creation to be true, god has an audience, but what if there was no audience? What if we were never here, would there still be god. What would be the need of a god in an existence that includes only him/herself?
Christians make lots of assumptions, indeed the entirety of their faith is assumptive, but perhaps no one is bigger than this: Christians believe that god existed before we did. The only accounts we have of this are the holy texts, which were written by men. Even if we allow the premise of divine dictation, the words themselves were originally written down by men, not god. Since no one was alive to see a god dictate these texts, it is an assumption to say we know he existed before we did, an assumption based on text written by the creation of this eternal being, but not by the eternal being itself.
I say, what point is there for a god without an audience. How would an omnipotent being demonstrate omnipotence if there were no one to convince? Without someone to ooh and aah over the tricks of a magician, there are no tricks, only rehearsals of slights-of-hand. A magician can't fool himself, he needs someone who does not know how the trick is done to impress. Without such a person, the magician has no career. Without a creation to parade his godliness in front of, god is not god. He could be everything, but without a created humanity, he would be simultaneously nothing.
There are two ways of looking at our existence. We were either created by an omniscient god, or we are the most recent evolutionary waystation. I suppose there are really a myriad of ways to explain our existence, such as extraterrestrial implantation, but I think the two most dominant areas of discourse on our origins are the two I mentioned above, so we'll stick with them.
If we were created by an omniscient god, then he must have had no choice in the matter, in that without us he would be not be omniscient. He couldn't be. If there are no uniscient (non-omniscient) beings to compare omniscience with, omniscience cannot exist. If it's the only game in town (being omniscient), then exaltation this element would be absurd since having this trait would simply be the norm (again in an existence with only god). Since we are indeed here to discuss this, then of course the christian god had to create us, if we are to believe in his most divine characteristics of omnipresence, omnibenevolence and omniscience. If god had no choice but to create us, then he is in no way immune to the governances of human logic and semantics. His subjectivity to these governances requires an explanation. Either our disciplines are unsatisfactory to describe god's existence, or he is a fraudulent mixture of humanity's least positive components. If our disciplines are unsatisfactory then, all disciplines must be, including our ability in recognizing god in the first place. If we cannot design suitable regulations for the understanding of the existence we all have, and the surroundings we are all among, then how could we possibly be able to design a system of recognition with which to distinguish the divinity of god? He is the result of the primitive minds of primitive men who were obviously incapable of designing constructive, optimistic and self-reliant societies (the exception being of course the great greek civilizations). Men such as these relied on the fear of the unknown to establish control of the masses, because it was easier than thinking completely through problems. Humans don't need a god. We don't claim the unclaimable, so we need no audience to display to. We do however, have as large an audience as we like, but it certainly didn't come from a creator. We arrived here on our own and rightfully so.
Friday, February 8, 2008
On Universal Origins
Where did it all come from? Where did we come from? It all had to come from somewhere, and so did we, isn’t that right?
These are questions that Christian apologists rather pugnaciously ask nontheists whenever the issue of creation versus evolution comes up.
There are two references alluded to when such questions are asked; the argument from design (for the origins of life) and the argument of first cause (for the origins of the universe). The two arguments are very closely associated with each other and I’ll speak to both of them together.
The argument of first cause is summed up in saying “everything has to have a starting point, an initial beginning”. The universe may have been around for a long time but no matter how far back in time you go, there has to be a starting point. This is an assumption, one that quite obviously leads to the idea of an eternal creator which in turn leads to the argument from design which is summed up by saying “ anything as complex as life, or even individual organs within a lifeform, is inherently so complex that without some higher intelligence controlling the assemblence of the complex entity, the lifeforms or organs could never have come into being. Chance is not a possibility”. There is an inherent problem with this line of reasoning. If we can agree that the universe is complex (as is life), then we have what’s referred to as an argument of infinite regress. If a system (universe, life, computer virus) is complex and has a designer, then it follows that the designer has to be at least equally as complex if not dramatically more so. This leads to the conclusion that complex design requires designer complexity. If the designer is indeed himself complex, then of course something even more complex than the designer must have designed him, due to the original designer’s inherent complexity requiring complex design. Said again, something even more complex had to have designed the designer. If one argues that the complex designer has simply been eternally in existence, then of course we could simply use the same logic and apply it equally to nature, due to nature’s inherent complexity. Since Christians make the argument that the universe and all of life was created at a finite point in time by god, we have a paradox, which is not a good position to argue one’s case. Who created the creator, who created his creator, who created the creator of the creator, etc. If no one created the creator, then complexity itself does not require design, since god would have to be more complex than his creation. If the complexity of god required no designer, then how does the complexity of nature require one?
A second problem with this line of reasoning is illustrated with the statement that the idea of a beginning for the universe does not necessarily require a creator. It may very well have had one, but to say it required one is simply not true. In fact, it's exactly not true that the universe had to have a beginning. It is perfectly plausible that what we now see as the beginning point of the universe (the big bang moment) may actually have been only a starting over point for the colossal oscillation of the entire universe; kind of like a big balloon being constantly blown up and deflated over and over again. Why could this oscillation not possibly be eternal? Why would it absolutely require a starting point? The fact that we can’t imagine something which pertains to the cosmos, such as eternity being completely non-supernatural, does not mean that it is categorically impossible. Read The Elegant Universe by Brian Greene for an explanation of this potential manifestation of superstring theory. Plausibility is a concept we as humans sometimes are simply incapable of completely comprehending, especially when it comes to the idea of eternity. The more we learn of our natural surroundings, the more plausible concepts will become.
Another seemingly implausible explanation for what we see as a universal beginning can be explained as the other “side” of a black hole (black holes being points in space of infinite density and mass, or singularities). If a black hole’s gravitational pull is so immense as to pull in light photons (which it is) along with everything else, and if the gravitational effect is increased infinitely, as you approach the center of a black hole (which it is), then the possibility for the black hole to invert itself, expanding instantaneously and enormously into another universe on the"other side" is there, although it might be somewhere outside of our ability to currently study. There is a possibility that our universe is not the only universe that exists. Indeed, there may very well be an infinite number of universes comprising a multiverse, each being the expanded other side of black holes in our universe. To categorically apply the notion of a required creator for the beginning of the universe, which is so rudimentarily understood, is the equivalent of packing up the clubs and saying “ I just don’t have my game today fellas” after the ball falls off the first tee without you ever having taken a swing at it.
There should be no confusion of biological evolution with the expansion of the universe, which are two completely different things. For example, biological evolution most likely requires replication, the passing on from generation to generation of observable traits through the inheritance of genes encoded in DNA. This a process that does not, as we understand it, happen as a fundamental force for the expansion of the universe at large. Galaxies don’t spawn daughter galaxies which inherit traits of their parent galaxies. Evolution through natural selection does not apply to the universe.
The questions posed at the beginning are the exact questions that science, specifically the fields of astrophysics and quantum physics, is trying to answer. Religions do not approach answering these sorts of questions. Indeed religion could never answer these sorts of questions. Religion demands us to ignore such pursuits of the knowledge of the fundamentals of existence. The discipline of Philosophy is as close as religion will ever come to these questions. Thought will lead us to the answers we seek, thought and experimentation, nothing else.
These are questions that Christian apologists rather pugnaciously ask nontheists whenever the issue of creation versus evolution comes up.
There are two references alluded to when such questions are asked; the argument from design (for the origins of life) and the argument of first cause (for the origins of the universe). The two arguments are very closely associated with each other and I’ll speak to both of them together.
The argument of first cause is summed up in saying “everything has to have a starting point, an initial beginning”. The universe may have been around for a long time but no matter how far back in time you go, there has to be a starting point. This is an assumption, one that quite obviously leads to the idea of an eternal creator which in turn leads to the argument from design which is summed up by saying “ anything as complex as life, or even individual organs within a lifeform, is inherently so complex that without some higher intelligence controlling the assemblence of the complex entity, the lifeforms or organs could never have come into being. Chance is not a possibility”. There is an inherent problem with this line of reasoning. If we can agree that the universe is complex (as is life), then we have what’s referred to as an argument of infinite regress. If a system (universe, life, computer virus) is complex and has a designer, then it follows that the designer has to be at least equally as complex if not dramatically more so. This leads to the conclusion that complex design requires designer complexity. If the designer is indeed himself complex, then of course something even more complex than the designer must have designed him, due to the original designer’s inherent complexity requiring complex design. Said again, something even more complex had to have designed the designer. If one argues that the complex designer has simply been eternally in existence, then of course we could simply use the same logic and apply it equally to nature, due to nature’s inherent complexity. Since Christians make the argument that the universe and all of life was created at a finite point in time by god, we have a paradox, which is not a good position to argue one’s case. Who created the creator, who created his creator, who created the creator of the creator, etc. If no one created the creator, then complexity itself does not require design, since god would have to be more complex than his creation. If the complexity of god required no designer, then how does the complexity of nature require one?
A second problem with this line of reasoning is illustrated with the statement that the idea of a beginning for the universe does not necessarily require a creator. It may very well have had one, but to say it required one is simply not true. In fact, it's exactly not true that the universe had to have a beginning. It is perfectly plausible that what we now see as the beginning point of the universe (the big bang moment) may actually have been only a starting over point for the colossal oscillation of the entire universe; kind of like a big balloon being constantly blown up and deflated over and over again. Why could this oscillation not possibly be eternal? Why would it absolutely require a starting point? The fact that we can’t imagine something which pertains to the cosmos, such as eternity being completely non-supernatural, does not mean that it is categorically impossible. Read The Elegant Universe by Brian Greene for an explanation of this potential manifestation of superstring theory. Plausibility is a concept we as humans sometimes are simply incapable of completely comprehending, especially when it comes to the idea of eternity. The more we learn of our natural surroundings, the more plausible concepts will become.
Another seemingly implausible explanation for what we see as a universal beginning can be explained as the other “side” of a black hole (black holes being points in space of infinite density and mass, or singularities). If a black hole’s gravitational pull is so immense as to pull in light photons (which it is) along with everything else, and if the gravitational effect is increased infinitely, as you approach the center of a black hole (which it is), then the possibility for the black hole to invert itself, expanding instantaneously and enormously into another universe on the"other side" is there, although it might be somewhere outside of our ability to currently study. There is a possibility that our universe is not the only universe that exists. Indeed, there may very well be an infinite number of universes comprising a multiverse, each being the expanded other side of black holes in our universe. To categorically apply the notion of a required creator for the beginning of the universe, which is so rudimentarily understood, is the equivalent of packing up the clubs and saying “ I just don’t have my game today fellas” after the ball falls off the first tee without you ever having taken a swing at it.
There should be no confusion of biological evolution with the expansion of the universe, which are two completely different things. For example, biological evolution most likely requires replication, the passing on from generation to generation of observable traits through the inheritance of genes encoded in DNA. This a process that does not, as we understand it, happen as a fundamental force for the expansion of the universe at large. Galaxies don’t spawn daughter galaxies which inherit traits of their parent galaxies. Evolution through natural selection does not apply to the universe.
The questions posed at the beginning are the exact questions that science, specifically the fields of astrophysics and quantum physics, is trying to answer. Religions do not approach answering these sorts of questions. Indeed religion could never answer these sorts of questions. Religion demands us to ignore such pursuits of the knowledge of the fundamentals of existence. The discipline of Philosophy is as close as religion will ever come to these questions. Thought will lead us to the answers we seek, thought and experimentation, nothing else.
Thursday, February 7, 2008
On Spiritual Defection
Everyone knows of people who have deserted what once they professed to believe. I myself am one who has done such a thing. The existence of defectors from one side of the science/creation dialectic to the other is well-documented: Some examples of highly esteemed individuals who have accepted christ and christianity after having tried to disprove it are most notably C.S. Lewis, Francis Collins and Alistair McGrath. I won’t try to list all the ex-christians who have given up the fantastic claims of the religious, there are too many.I confess I have not read McGrath’s work, The Dawkin’s Delusion, but I have listened to him argue against a fellow rational thinker, Richard Dawkins. I have read Dawkins’ The God Delusion, which is, biasedly-speaking, a fascinating book. I’m not sure if Collins has written anything (he was one of the original geneticists working on decoding the genome, if I’m not mistaken). I have however read Lewis’ works including but not limited to The Chronicles of Narnia. I am currently rereading “Mere Christianity” and I have read “The Joyful Christian”, The Screwtape Letters and others.
Lewis was no doubt a great author and literary giant who argued his points well enough, but made generalizations in doing so. Read Mere Christianity and you’ll see what I mean. I willingly concede his literary prowess, but this in no way diminishes the observed fact of evolution through natural selection. The simple fact that there have been refugees from one camp or the other does nothing to prove or disprove either side, it simply illustrates a rebellion by either side against their own inherited concepts. b. The concept of supposition from above undermines the argument christians make that they are looking for the truth and have found it in Jesus. They look for things they've already read, in a book that contains the answers they already believe. They find only what they’ve already decided to see. You cannot be looking for something if you already believe you've found it.
The same cannot be said of scientists. They have no book, readymade with answers they hope to hear. In order to get an answer they have to and do ask questions constantly, even of things they might have thought they already understood. The very idea of science is to study and to question.
Religion demands the opposite, do not question, have faith. To only make a point, children look for nothing. They only see things as they are. To say that any child has ever honestly asked jesus to “live in their hearts” is to turn them into play dolls. A child is in no way capable of deciding to do anything of the sort that the previous statement suggests. There is no such thing as a christian child, just as there is no such thing as a capitalist child or fundamentalist child to paraphrase Richard Dawkins. There are only children. Only adults can look for such things.
I submit that those who have “found god” have done so at times of trouble in their life, not during times of bliss. You don’t hear the testimony of someone “coming to jesus” because they were having such an easy time in life. Even celebrities such as Kirk Cameron from “Growing Pains” who admittedly was quite comfortable with his wordly possesions but felt he was missing something, come to religion, or christ in his case, from some point of dissatisfaction. Again, I’d like to hear of someone coming to god who wasn’t going through some difficulty in their life, it would at least make the idea more respectable. Christianity is a poor source of meaning for the preciousness of life that we humans have. Our lives can and do have all possible meaning if we recognize that there is no need to pay alms to a ghost of our fear-laden, overactive imaginations.c. As an assay,C.S. Lewis said something I find interesting in Mere Christianity. He said “ either jesus was a lunatic, or he was the son of god. “ I completely agree with this statement. I have seen no proof, or evidence of his divinity, although I was raised to unquestioningly believe in it. I have since read and thought of a great deal of evidence against it. I think it’s clear he was a egomaniacal, adolescent, totalitarian madman who most certainly believed himself to be divine and who had a few good things to say along with a host of more subtle and vastly more influential bad things.
Update: I have since read Mcgrath's Dawkins' Delusion. I found it to be well-written, but ironic in it's analysis of the God Delusion. Mcgrath spends his time belittling Dawkins' blunt stance on the backwardness of religion, as opposed to spending his time defying the philosophical points Dawkins relays in his own book. I thought Mcgrath's book should have actually disproven something from Dawkins' book, but Mcgrath purposefully states that while it is possible to do so, he chose not to. Why not? If it can be done, and Dawkins represents the antithesis of what you as a human believe why not write a book that actually does dispel what Dawkins says (especially when you take time in your book to say it can be done). This is a good example of how a person can sound intelligent and think semi-intelligently, yet still, spiritually speaking, behave as, at best, an adolescent and at worst, an infant.
Lewis was no doubt a great author and literary giant who argued his points well enough, but made generalizations in doing so. Read Mere Christianity and you’ll see what I mean. I willingly concede his literary prowess, but this in no way diminishes the observed fact of evolution through natural selection. The simple fact that there have been refugees from one camp or the other does nothing to prove or disprove either side, it simply illustrates a rebellion by either side against their own inherited concepts. b. The concept of supposition from above undermines the argument christians make that they are looking for the truth and have found it in Jesus. They look for things they've already read, in a book that contains the answers they already believe. They find only what they’ve already decided to see. You cannot be looking for something if you already believe you've found it.
The same cannot be said of scientists. They have no book, readymade with answers they hope to hear. In order to get an answer they have to and do ask questions constantly, even of things they might have thought they already understood. The very idea of science is to study and to question.
Religion demands the opposite, do not question, have faith. To only make a point, children look for nothing. They only see things as they are. To say that any child has ever honestly asked jesus to “live in their hearts” is to turn them into play dolls. A child is in no way capable of deciding to do anything of the sort that the previous statement suggests. There is no such thing as a christian child, just as there is no such thing as a capitalist child or fundamentalist child to paraphrase Richard Dawkins. There are only children. Only adults can look for such things.
I submit that those who have “found god” have done so at times of trouble in their life, not during times of bliss. You don’t hear the testimony of someone “coming to jesus” because they were having such an easy time in life. Even celebrities such as Kirk Cameron from “Growing Pains” who admittedly was quite comfortable with his wordly possesions but felt he was missing something, come to religion, or christ in his case, from some point of dissatisfaction. Again, I’d like to hear of someone coming to god who wasn’t going through some difficulty in their life, it would at least make the idea more respectable. Christianity is a poor source of meaning for the preciousness of life that we humans have. Our lives can and do have all possible meaning if we recognize that there is no need to pay alms to a ghost of our fear-laden, overactive imaginations.c. As an assay,C.S. Lewis said something I find interesting in Mere Christianity. He said “ either jesus was a lunatic, or he was the son of god. “ I completely agree with this statement. I have seen no proof, or evidence of his divinity, although I was raised to unquestioningly believe in it. I have since read and thought of a great deal of evidence against it. I think it’s clear he was a egomaniacal, adolescent, totalitarian madman who most certainly believed himself to be divine and who had a few good things to say along with a host of more subtle and vastly more influential bad things.
Update: I have since read Mcgrath's Dawkins' Delusion. I found it to be well-written, but ironic in it's analysis of the God Delusion. Mcgrath spends his time belittling Dawkins' blunt stance on the backwardness of religion, as opposed to spending his time defying the philosophical points Dawkins relays in his own book. I thought Mcgrath's book should have actually disproven something from Dawkins' book, but Mcgrath purposefully states that while it is possible to do so, he chose not to. Why not? If it can be done, and Dawkins represents the antithesis of what you as a human believe why not write a book that actually does dispel what Dawkins says (especially when you take time in your book to say it can be done). This is a good example of how a person can sound intelligent and think semi-intelligently, yet still, spiritually speaking, behave as, at best, an adolescent and at worst, an infant.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
