Why do people pray? What is prayer? What is a person doing when they are praying? Does prayer succeed? Does it fail? Or both? Or neither?
Friends and family (Christian) have been saying (typing) to me recently, that they are praying that I will come back to god. The have told me that Jesus can fix my headaches, and that wherever two or more are gathered.... so I'm being prayed for. I am glad that people respond in such a way when they hear of my interpretedly spiritual decrepitude. It makes me feel good knowing that there are people who feel afraid for me, because of the life path I am on. I am not gladdened that these people think I am wrong and headed for trouble, that part actually saddens me, and so I return the favor to them by feeling bad that they are so happily misguided. I am happy that these people are concerned with my well-being. That is a nice thing to have, outside concern. My family is the most concerned, obviously, and I have known that for a while. Even though I have thought my way through my beliefs to a conclusion, they seem to think that (because of their beliefs) if they pray to god hard enough or long enough, he will cause me to see the error of my ways, and return to the fold. They have been and are praying for me to be saved (again). They love me, and are afraid for me. They think I have chosen poorly (as though there were ever a choice to be voluntarily made) and as a consequence I will be going to hell. I'm not sure if every member of my family thinks this part about hell. I am simply basing my assumptions on my knowledge that most of them have stagnated in their religious stance for the past 30 years. To be fair, perhaps some of them have softened on the whole lake of fire business, but I really don't think so.
In earlier blog posts I have discussed the fear factor involved in religion, and nowhere does this element seem more clearly illustrated than in the conviction my family has about the need for their prayers for my soul.
I am an adult. I will never return to being a child. I am also A-theist. I will never try to believe in god again. I don't know there is no god, just as I don't know that I will wake up tomorrow. I do however have reason to trust that I will wake up. I take care of my body, I am nowhere near the end of my average male life expectancy and I have no debilitating diseases or chronic syndromes. These are some of the reasons how I can trust that I most likely will wake up tomorrow, alive and well. I don't have to pray that I will wake up; I just rely on the reasons I have squirreled away to come through once again for me. However, I have no reason to trust that there is a god. For all practical purposes, god has always been an invisibility. He no longer walks in the cool evening breeze amongst the flora and fauna of the garden as he did according to the author of the book of genesis. We (no one) has ever seen god. No one has ever heard god, no one has tasted him, touched him or smelled him. The only thing people have ever been able to do about god is think about him. There is no argument to be made about the physical existence of god. He simply has not been here. Which is why we have to "Believe" in him in the first place. If he were here, then belief would be a redundancy. We don't "believe" in gravity, we experience it. We don't "believe" in viruses, we experience their flourish (unpleasantly to say the least). We have never physically experienced god so we have to " believe" in him or not. Having no physical reasons to think god exists, I also have no reasons to think that prayers to him will either succeed or fail. I'll get back to the whole success or failure thin in a moment, but for the time being understand my family and to a lesser extent friends think otherwise.
To them the belief in god, en-masse, is itself a reason to believe he exists. Because the vast majority of all humans who are living or have ever lived, have also believed in some sort of supernatural creator/overseer being, my folks say he must exist, indeed no doubt in their minds about his existence is warranted in light of this fact. Superficially, this is a reasonable position to take, superficially. Everyone believes the sun will burn you if you stay out in it too long with no protection, but how many of us have ever seen an ultraviolet light photon (I say photon not ray, because this is the smallest amount of light that exists). None of us have ever seen one without the aid of a spectrometer, but there's the rub. With the aid of a spectrometer, we can see one (or billions). With the aid of a telescope we can see the rings of Saturn, something the New Testament authors could not do. The problem with such thinking is that there have been many issues over the millennia that have been believed by the vast majority of living folks, the most obvious example being the earth being flat, that have been outright wrong. Just because everybody thinks something, doesn't make it true. If the claim is ridiculous, like the claim made by Copernicus that the earth was not at the center of the universe, then either the claimant must be exiled or the claim itself must be meticulously investigated. Luckily for us, Copernicus' claim was validated, as were Newton's, Einstein's and Planck's. But, at this point we have to ask, well "why do people think something is true if it's possible for it to be untrue?". What do you think? My thoughts are:
1. There are varying degrees of human intellect, governed by genetics and environment, which give rise to varying degrees of depth of insight about metaphysical issues, such as the existence of god i.e. some people are smarter than others, or at least have proven to be so far, and as such have been able to delve deeper than most into philosophical questions.
2. Most people are of average intelligence and have little to no interest in asking deep questions, they simply want to live life.
3. Many "truths" about the big questions were formulated by people living pre-dark ages, pre-enlightenment, in fact just post-iron Age.
4. Those who have subsequently dug into the big questions have perpetuated for most everyone else the "truth" about life.
5. Curiosity didn't kill the cat, it made the cat realize it wasn't a cat, it was a bulldozer.
6. Time has ingrained in the minds of most people, incomplete data sets about the world, sets gathered by folks woefully unaware of much important but unattainable information (germs, molecules, radiation, neuroplasticity, geological deposits, the speed of light and it's inviolability, etc...).
7. The longer intellectual apathy remains, the more difficult it is to replace with new information.
There are many other reasonings I have about why people think untrue things, even in the blinding light of their untruth, but for now I'll go on to prayer. Prayer is something that many people hang their religious hat on as being evidence of god. So I ask, what is the purpose of prayer? When someone prays, they are asking for something from their god. If they are not asking for something then they are not praying, but praising. You can either ask god for something or tell him he's great, that's about it. So when people pray they are asking for something. The point of prayer is to receive something. It doesn't matter what, just something. You can pray for anything you mind can come up with. You can pray for impossibilities, like the destruction in a supernova of our own sun next week, or trivialities like your awaking the next day to find that you are happy again. or you can pray for things in the middle of these two extremes, things like your dog's leg will get healed from the fracture he sustained, or you'll find a job soon, or the weather will cooperate while you're on vacation. There are varying degrees of difficulty about prayer request subject matter, some are more improbable than others. but the thing about prayers that seems to get glossed over is that while we all (well I used to pray) pray so that our prayers succeed (I know of no one who deliberately prays for their requests to be denied) and result in our getting what we are praying for, they most often fail miserably. Adherents of prayer never seem to accept this reality. They do however have an endless supply of excuses for why things didn't turn out the way they wanted; things like " god works in mysterious ways, or sometimes the answer is no" and so on.
The things is, prayer is designed to work for our benefit. It does nothing for god. According to the religious, god owns everything, so for him to give stuff away is not the same as it is to parents down here. For us, the joy of giving our kids stuff can be precisely attributed to the fact that we have a limited supply of such stuff, and although we may get a little smug about ourselves and how hard we had to work to get this stuff, we do know that our kids will enjoy it even if only for a brief time. The sacrifice we made, does make us feel good, since we did it on behalf of our kids, and it was truly a sacrifice. So when we pray for something to happen, or to be given or granted, and it doesn't happen, those prayers have in fact failed, haven't they? For something to fail, effort must be made. With prayer, no effort is made, so no failure can take place. If god is capable of answering prayers, and all the Christians I know believe so, then he is incumbent to do so. Since it is obvious that prayers are regularly unsuccessful, then it stands to reason that there is no god up there, hearing those prayers at all.
A familiar refrain comes to mind now, one that harkens back to the earlier stated " sometimes the answer is no" that is, " Just because we don't get what we think we might want when we pray, doesn't mean god hasn't heard our prayer. It just means that god has something different (and the implication here is better) in mind for us. This is why many prayers go unanswered". I respond to this by asking that you think about this situation: A person who has contracted the Ebola virus by simply living in a region of the world that this virus thrives (Eastern Rift Valley, Congo) prays to the Christian god for healing for themselves. This person dies within two weeks, after suffering through ever-increasing agony as his internal organs are rapidly liquefied. he progressively gets worse, eventually coughing up the lining of his stomach, which is now purely black. The disease destroys his body exponentially, but everyday he prays for healing. His body not only is destroyed but it becomes a harbinger of the deadly virus, which turns him into an Ebola factory. Simply simply breathing it in can spread the virus, and so our praying victim's body is now a spreader as well. His prayers are not answered. He dies. So the question is, what greater purpose did god intend for this person, such that he had to endure the utmost agony prior to his premature death? We as a society gained no more information about how to prevent this disease through his infection, we did not suffer a global epidemic because efforts WERE made to contain the virus (mind you the man was not praying that god would spread the word about the virus, he just wanted to not die). Obviously the man suffered and died, so his immediate prayer was unsuccessful. I have no guess as to what possibly better or more valuable answer god could have been delaying for this man. By the way, if you'd like to read a real author's account of this incident, which did actually take place, read Douglas Preston's The Hot Zone. Also, I'd recommend reading Dr. Bart Ehrmann's great expose on the problem of suffering, God's Problem, how the Bible fails to answer our most important question; why we suffer.
For prayer to work, there has to be someone or something on the other end. We have no idea if there is, so at best prayer is wishful thinking, EVEN IF WE GET WHAT WANT. There is no way to verify that prayers have been answered because there is only an open dial tone at the other end. Inexplicable healings of cancer do not point to god's existence or the efficacy of prayer. They point to inadequacies of our understanding of pathogens. God has no interest in our knowing more about diseases and how to prevent them, and subsequently god's children don't have any real interest in knowing more about this stuff either; they are content with wishing on a star. By praying for respite, Christians and (other praying folk) are testifying to their own willful and preferred ignorance of the real causes of suffering in the world. A great website to make you think is www.whywontgodhealamputees.com The basic premise of this website is god has never regrown an amputees limb, ever. How is that to be explained outside of the familiar responses of mysterium and "quit arguing with me". Prayer doesn't work, because it can't work without god. God simply doesn't exist. If you think he does, you are mistaken. You might be comforted by the thought that there is something more than ourselves watching out for us, but that doesn't make it so. You might also be comforted by the thought that your prayers will be answered, but you are mistaken. Even if the outcome you hope for eventually comes to fruition, you will have no reason to authoritatively say it was because you prayed for it. I know my friends and family are distraught that I am no longer of their faith, but for them to think that by praying that my mind will be changed/opened/ softened or whatever is simply to misunderstand the person I am. There is no way I could ever believe in a god now. I see too clearly how he is creation of ourselves. If you are reading this, and you are one of the ones praying for my salvation, thanks, but no thanks. Why don't you instead go for a walk in nature, or help feed a hungry person, or teach some child to read, something, anything that would be constructive. While I appreciate the concern, you should know that no amount of prayer for me would/could never work, because your prayer's are unheard by anyone but you.
Wednesday, May 13, 2009
Sunday, May 10, 2009
My Deconversion
When I was growing up, I was taught that I was a Christian. I went to church with my family every Sunday morning and Sunday night. All of my friends were also taught they were Christians, and they also went to church with their families every Sunday morning and Sunday night. For a good while we even went on Wednesday nights as well. We weren't Baptists, or Episcopalian, or Catholics. My family attended Pentecostal churches. There were people speaking in tongues, people prophesying, dancing in the aisles, and so forth. Sometimes church services would go for three hours or more. I went to Sunday school before church as well. We'd get there at 9:00 a.m. and sometimes not get out of there until close to 1:00 p.m. I didn't really like going to church, but as a kid I didn't have much choice in the matter. My parents were going and did what they did, cause I was a kid. This is not to say, there weren't things about church going I didn't enjoy. I did look forward to seeing my best friends. But mainly so that we could have fun goofing off together in Sunday school and in between Sunday school and the regular church service. During the service we didn't get to screw around much, because important things were going on. God-worship was taking place, so we knew better. But we would still try and screw around long distance. My family would sit on one side of the sanctuary and my friends would be sitting somewhere else. My friends and I would certainly try and make eye contact with each other, and sometimes we'd be able to access some inside joke through our own made-up sign language and the laughing would ensue, which of course led to the inevitable parental reprimand of SSSHHHH!! I rarely paid attention in church, as I suppose most kids don't, but there were times as I grew older that some things would perk-up my ears. I went to three different churches as a kid. The first was a sort of non-denominational, evangelical, Pentecostal church. My family stopped going there when my sibling became a teenager and I was probably 11 or twelve. We then moved to a more fundamentalist church that was a bit closer to our house. I know we left our old church because of some political controversy within the church administration, but I don't really remember what went on. For one thing I was really to young to give a rip, other than I knew that I was going to have to make new "Church" friends. This is why we left, but I still don't know why we started going to the new church, but I do know it was about this time that I started to hear things that made me pay at least a modicum of attention in the service. Once we moved to the new church, we really didn't go to Sunday school much anymore, again I don't know why, but decisions were made, and Sunday school sort of faded into the past. As I said, this new church was very Pentecostal, especially the music potion of the service. But the preacher (she was a preacher not a pastor) was also very hell-fire and brimstone. It was this stuff that started getting my attention. Up till this point I had never really been told of all the horrors of hell that awaited me when I died. It was mainly doing unto others and Jesus healed the sick, and Noah took two of every animal on the ark, and all that business, kid stuff, if you will. But now I was a preteen, and was capable of understanding consequences. So at our new church I sat up and took notice whenever the preacher would single out the youth of the church (not the kids, but the Youth, which definitely included me) as being particularly susceptible to the wiles of life of sin. And it seemed like the preacher was always singling us out, you see, the youth all sat together in one section of the sanctuary, away from our parents (for the first time). She would (the preacher was a red-headed lady, not that being red-headed matters, but it's just something I remember) look directly at us and speak directly to us about how Satan wanted to corrupt our minds and lives, and he was (at that very moment) waging a WAR against our sanctity. To me it was clear that I must have been losing this battle, because as a preteen, I was just becoming aware of my ideas about good and evil. Up till then I was really concerned with how many transformers I might collect come next Christmas. But now I was being confronted with a call-to-arms for battle with the father of lies, who was supremely intent on destroying me eternally. Every Sunday. I remember leaving church feeling sad and rather despondent about my prospects of success against Satan’s legions. Over time, I actually began to feel myself a lost cause, because sometimes in church when I was supposed to be glorying in god's presence, I would literally shiver (not from being cold). Chills would run up my spine momentarily, and at that point I would think to myself, Satan is attacking me with all he can. I would redouble my efforts. I would shut my eyes tighter, I would lift my hands higher in the air, and I would talk gibberish a little more gibberishy or faster. At this point I had been told I should be speaking in tongues, as that is one of the gifts of the spirit, and so I did this at every service, thinking that I was learning the ropes of spiritual battle. Granted, I never thought I was actually speaking some extinct language, but maybe it was a language that had never existed outside of heaven, or maybe god could understand it, even if I couldn't, or maybe just making the effort was enough, I don't know. The point was I always felt discomfort at this new church. Ironically, it was about this time that I noticed for the first time a really pretty girl. Though, she was much older than I was, and had a boyfriend (the preacher's son no less, and I swear I'm not making this up), ahh... unrequited love...., I did look forward to seeing her every Sunday, and was supremely disappointed on those Sundays when she was not there for whatever reason. For some reason, we did not attend this church for more than a few years and then we moved on to another church, one which was actually farther from our home than the very first church we went to. If I remember correctly, the impetus for this change was again political controversy, but of what nature, I'm sure I never knew. Nevertheless, my sibling had made some new friends at high school and really wanted to go check out the church they went to, they were so cool. So as it turns out, we did just that. In addition, our old church music minister, who was one of the highlights of the church (great piano player) had moved to this new church as well. Now, I personally was hoping at this point that the new church would be more like the first church I remember, and not so much like the last church. It actually ended up being about halfway between the two. Although the services themselves were about as long and as athletic, the pastor (he was a pastor not a preacher) was a bit less hell-fire and brimstone, but to be sure, that stuff was definitely still a big part of the experience. I was in high school now, so I was particularly aware of the females surrounding me at church. This is important because, I found that if I wanted to impress the ladies, I had better show some reverence before god. My thinking was " These girls are gung-ho Christians. If I become gung-ho as well, that might be my in with one of them". And so I embarked upon my phase of radical Christianity. Mind you, at this point it had less to do with my dread of the afterlife fate that surely awaited my sinning persona, as it did with my here-and-now predicament of landing a foxy lady. I had had a few "girlfriends" in middle school, if that's what you'd like to call them, but I had had many more unrequited crushes than actual girls, during that time. I was however, supremely aware of my Casanova guy friends who were always hooked up with the finest girls in school. I was JEALOUS! I wanted a hot girlfriend now. So, I figured this was my path to amour, being all Churchy. What's more, I think every guy that went to this new church of mine was doing the same thing I was. Maybe not, but I suspect as much. Anywho... I'm not sure my devious and not-so-clever plan actually worked. After a year-long pursuit, I did get a girlfriend for a summer out of the deal, and she was hot. But the summer fling didn't last, even all summer, she hooked with a new guy at our school before the summer was even out, HUSSY :-) but that is neither here nor there. The real point of all of this is, I approached religious conviction with ulterior motives in mind. It was a means to an end, in this case the end being success in love. I did not really think about the tenets of the particular faith I was being fed. All I knew was that there were hot girls there and I wanted in on some of that. At my previous church, I had unbeknownst to me, developed a pretty healthy personality aspect of self-loathing. I remember in late 1987, the preacher at this other church told the congregation that a mathematician had calculated that Jesus' return was going to happen on either September 11,12,or 13 of 1988. I was petrified at this news. I figured, I'm screwed, I've only got a year left (not even that) and I'm only thirteen years old. I'm not gonna get to learn how to drive a car, I'm never gonna get laid, no getting married, having kids, none of that. The world is going to end and I'm fucked. of course that guy was wrong, and when those days came and went, I felt relieved and also a bit perplexed. I think this was the very first time I asked a question about Christianity’s truth. I figured, " Jesus didn't come back, but he said he was going to, so why has it taken so long, why hasn't he come back yet? I remember thinking the world was probably as bad as it was ever going to get, so what was the holdup.
For a while I was convinced I was the Antichrist. The shivers I would get in church made me think I was somehow naturally averse to the Christian teachings. I would get the heebie-jeebies in church, but nowhere else (this is actually not true, I got the shivers in school too, I just selectively forgot those times). I just knew I was going to turn out to be the Antichrist. It always seemed to me that if I wished one thing, the opposite would happen, good or bad. I think this contributed to my confusion over my supernatural apocalyptic role, in some way. During my middle school years, I learned from church that I was going to go to hell, most likely, because Satan wanted me. I never really learned that god wanted me much though. I know, I know, god loved me enough to save me from sin through his son's crucifixion and all that. but that happened 2,000 years ago, according to my middle church (the really Pentecostal one) Satan was after me right then and there, as soon as I walked out the building I was going to be under attack. As they say, there's no time like the present, and to me Satan was going full-tilt and god was resting on his laurels. I figured I had no chance, thus I came to think I might be the antichrist. Believe it or not, this thought persisted with me in a much hidden and subdued sort of way until after high school. I buried my worry, but it was always there. My rebellious stage in high school was probably due in part to this deep-seated paranoia, that and I was an adolescent, chock-full-of-hormones, guy. All throughout high school, I went to this new church, although it eventually became just my church. the girls were certainly a huge attraction (pun intended) but I was also drawn to wanting to be like the cool older guys there as well. I went through a copycat phase, where I wanted to play all the same instruments as this one guy who was about 7 years older than me. The church had a band which played for the music portion of the service each Sunday, and so I joined, thinking I could boost my coolness factor by doing so. I unwisely thought I could single-handedly buck the band nerd moniker and effectively be the salvation of all instrumentalists worldwide. To this day it has yet to work, we are all still nerds. I also wanted a low rider diesel truck, because one of the guys at church had one and everyone kinda thought he was cool because of it. I desperately wanted to be cool.
There are times when I was moved at church. The Easter services were usually moving to me. The church would put on a cantata (not in the liturgical sense) and usually have someone dress up as Jesus carrying his cross, with a crown of thorns, bloody, up to Golgotha (where he was crucified). Then the troop would act out the crucifixion itself complete with the big hammer, accompanied by thunderous booms for effect, and big-ass railroad spikes as nails. it was always a tear-jerky moment. Suffering is never a happy time. I would cling to these memories during the rest of the year in order to prop up my faint faith. If for no other reason than to maintain the facade of devoutness for the girls, I honestly tried to feel like a Christian as often as I remembered to do so, which wasn't very often (usually there was hot girl near me). But the thing is, I never really felt like a Christian, at least not in the ways I saw on display around me. When I would hear someone give some tongue-infested prophecy, I would feel uncomfortable. I was always a little nervous if someone spoke out in tongues during the service and nobody would come forward to "interpret" it. I was uncomfortable and also a little sniggerish. I would sometimes smile a bit to myself if this happened. I knew those tongue-speakers were full of it then. Now, I tried my hand at the tongue-speaking for a good long time, but I never really thought I was supposed to be doing it. It was more like wind sprints on the baseball team for me. The running had little to do with playing the game, but they did force us to get a bit of exercise. The situation was similar to my speaking in tongues, I knew I'd never really be in the prophesying game so-to-speak, but I practiced the skill nonetheless. but these moments in church where no interpretation would follow the Swahili being spouted, I finally figured it out, everyone was making it up. Then I realized nobody was speaking a real language, it was all just gibberish, not gibberish-sounding to the ignorant, just plain old gibberish. I think I lost a bit of ability to be a Faither around this time.
After high school, I went to college. For a year, I lived at home and went to junior college. I had stopped going to church by now, placing myself instead with the church of drinking beer and hanging out with new college friends. I didn't give much thought to the Christianity of my youth, but it was still there. I spent my time drinking, working, studying trombone, trying to get laid, and so forth. It was at work that I met my wife (future) who come to find out was going to be a nun before she met me, heh, heh, heh.... That's right ladies, she gave up celibacy for a life with me. Seriously, she was a devoted fairly new Christian, having come to her faith within a few years of our meeting. I fell into the old trap of false fronting in order to keep the girl. She was hot, I was lucky, and I didn't want to screw it up, so I hopped back into the world of Christianity after a brief albeit immensely relief0laden hiatus. We got married very quickly and moved away to start college together. Away from family, friends. It was just we, in a new town surrounded by a huge state university (The Florida State University to be precise). It was here that I was exposed to the history of my childhood religion in ways I was never afforded while actually involved in it. The world of music illuminates religion(s) in ways most people would never think of. To most, music is background sound to a worship service, but not to all. I won't lecture on music theory or history here, but suffice it to say, my studying music made me view religion (my religion) much differently and much less reverently as I had once purported to do. This being said, I still tried to be a Christian, not a good Christian, just a Christian, but it never stuck to me, like a religion ought to. We played children's church leaders for a little while, I tried coordinating the music at our Assembly of God church for a while, none of it worked well. I was (still am) a fairly defensive kind of guy. I don't like being affronted by anyone, especially if I think that person knows considerably less about a particular topic than me. Because of this, I didn't really fit with the whole church leader role, and so I gave it up. But truth be known, I was only playing at being such a thing, my heart was never in it, and I think it showed. I started thinking about philosophical issues during my time at FSU. Economics, Politics, but curiously enough not other religions. I wanted to hang on to my inherited conservatism and so I jumped on the impeach Clinton bandwagon, I later recanted. I even would have voted for W. in 2000 if I had been registered in Pennsylvania, which is where we moved to go to graduate school. But I found myself leaning ever so slightly to the left while in graduate school in Philadelphia. I also found myself, as did my wife, not caring about going to church anymore. We tried a few in Philly, but didn't like any of them so we just stopped trying after a few attempts. During Graduate school, I started reading non-stop. Mainly fiction. I plowed through every Stephen King novel he wrote and published and I could get from Half.com for $1.00 or less. I have quite the collection now. Grisham, Clancy, Crighton, Tolkien, etc... I read a lot, and of course I studied and practiced my horn too. I'm sure my adopted practice of reading played a part in my deconversion. there's nothing like reading the printed word to make a person think, about anything. Television requires nothing, movies nothing, watching a baseball game nothing. Of course no one is prohibited from thinking whilst participating in one of these activities, but there is no requirement implied. On the other hand, thinking is requisite while reading. Even though I was reading fictional stories my mind was beginning to formulate some ideas about myself. We lived in Philly for almost two years before moving away to Michigan for work. It was in Michigan that I finally gave up trying to be a Christian altogether.
I have mentioned how as a kid I was never really inclined to be all that devout. I did however glean a great deal of information about Christianity. The virgin birth, the walking on water, the resurrection, the money lenders in the temple, etc... I knew the New Testament stories. I had absorbed them over time, and they are still with me, but I certainly was no budding biblical scholar. I have read the entire bible once, completely. I have read a lot of the parts that are essential to any amateur Christian many times more. When I was trying to a Christian I hardly ever thought about the bible, but ironically, as an apostate, I have thought about the bible and it's stories a great deal more.
A few years ago, I decided to start writing down in a notepad what my real true thoughts about life and religion were. I began in 2002 with a great deal of personal despair. I had thoughts that god was either evil or non-existent. I was hurt over personal disappointments in life and I found the god I had tried to believe in to be the most readily available scapegoat. Fortunately this did not last long, I realized after a while the only way I could divert my life around these disappointments was to figure the route myself. My blame of god dissipated, but it also sowed real doubt in god's existence. I continued to write down my thoughts. Things like " the stories in the bible were written by men, not god; 2003", "creation did not happen, evolution did; 2003", and "god does not exist; 2004". It's important to note the dates. I had begun to write these thoughts of mine down years before I had ever heard of the "New Atheists". Not once in my life had I picked up a book criticizing religion at this point. I had however moved from Stephen king to Stephen hawking, and other similar books. probably one of the single most eye-opening books I've ever read, Hawking's " A brief history of time" was the nail in the coffin which had been buried years before. It taught me that nothing from religion is as cool as the universe itself. In 2007, after I had been effectively an atheist for a few years, I came across a you tube video of a guy named Sam Harris giving a lecture in Toronto on religious fallacies. I had never heard of the guy, but I was intrigued nonetheless. After watching the whole hour presentation I was floored. I had just heard someone else saying the exact things I had been thinking and privately writing down for nearly two years. I had no idea there were other people who thought as similarly as I did. I grew up thinking that atheists were as bad as Satan worshippers. Now being one, I knew better, but it was refreshing to know the network of freethinking individuals out in the world. I have read both of Harris' books, and I follow his blog. I have since read many other free thought books, some I agree with, and some I don't wholly. My abandonment of Christianity has led me to philosophy, and I have read a great deal of philosophy in the last few years. It also allowed me to explore cosmology and particle physics (on an amateur scale). I have many more widely-spread interests now than I ever did as a Christian- poser. My blog posts explain my position on the various tenets of Christianity so I won’t replay them here. Having written this, I'm glad. I've put it off for a while, but it was nice to go back in time for a while. I know I've never been a Christian, despite the efforts of my childhood church. Although I did try for a long time, for various reasons. I understand why people resort to religion. For some it comforts, for others it is a tether to hang onto in an otherwise tumultuous life, for still others it is a way to lift themselves over their fellow humans. But the thing is, none of those reasons matter, because in the end, religion is an idea. Ideas are only ideas until they are realized. There is no possible realization of religion until we die, and at that point it's too late to get anything out of it, which is why heaven and hell were invented. The ideas that religion itself stakes claims to, morality, ethics, and the like are certainly realizable, but the thing is, they aren't religion's ideas, they are mankind's. And at the risk of becoming a bit tautological (circular) religion is also an idea of mankind. Humanity has no need for religion, it has come up with it's own ideas about ethics and morality. Religion has usurped these ideas and gathered them under its umbrella, when really they are the same types of ideas as religion itself. if religion spawned only good in the world, then that would be great, but it does not. Nothing does. And how is that? Because everything we concern ourselves with, global warming, overpopulation, nationalism, religious freedom, everything has two sides, affirming and opposing. Religion is man-made because it has both sides of the coin. This is probably the most telling aspect of religion's origins, but there are others. I am not a Christian, anymore. Maybe one day, you won't be either.
For a while I was convinced I was the Antichrist. The shivers I would get in church made me think I was somehow naturally averse to the Christian teachings. I would get the heebie-jeebies in church, but nowhere else (this is actually not true, I got the shivers in school too, I just selectively forgot those times). I just knew I was going to turn out to be the Antichrist. It always seemed to me that if I wished one thing, the opposite would happen, good or bad. I think this contributed to my confusion over my supernatural apocalyptic role, in some way. During my middle school years, I learned from church that I was going to go to hell, most likely, because Satan wanted me. I never really learned that god wanted me much though. I know, I know, god loved me enough to save me from sin through his son's crucifixion and all that. but that happened 2,000 years ago, according to my middle church (the really Pentecostal one) Satan was after me right then and there, as soon as I walked out the building I was going to be under attack. As they say, there's no time like the present, and to me Satan was going full-tilt and god was resting on his laurels. I figured I had no chance, thus I came to think I might be the antichrist. Believe it or not, this thought persisted with me in a much hidden and subdued sort of way until after high school. I buried my worry, but it was always there. My rebellious stage in high school was probably due in part to this deep-seated paranoia, that and I was an adolescent, chock-full-of-hormones, guy. All throughout high school, I went to this new church, although it eventually became just my church. the girls were certainly a huge attraction (pun intended) but I was also drawn to wanting to be like the cool older guys there as well. I went through a copycat phase, where I wanted to play all the same instruments as this one guy who was about 7 years older than me. The church had a band which played for the music portion of the service each Sunday, and so I joined, thinking I could boost my coolness factor by doing so. I unwisely thought I could single-handedly buck the band nerd moniker and effectively be the salvation of all instrumentalists worldwide. To this day it has yet to work, we are all still nerds. I also wanted a low rider diesel truck, because one of the guys at church had one and everyone kinda thought he was cool because of it. I desperately wanted to be cool.
There are times when I was moved at church. The Easter services were usually moving to me. The church would put on a cantata (not in the liturgical sense) and usually have someone dress up as Jesus carrying his cross, with a crown of thorns, bloody, up to Golgotha (where he was crucified). Then the troop would act out the crucifixion itself complete with the big hammer, accompanied by thunderous booms for effect, and big-ass railroad spikes as nails. it was always a tear-jerky moment. Suffering is never a happy time. I would cling to these memories during the rest of the year in order to prop up my faint faith. If for no other reason than to maintain the facade of devoutness for the girls, I honestly tried to feel like a Christian as often as I remembered to do so, which wasn't very often (usually there was hot girl near me). But the thing is, I never really felt like a Christian, at least not in the ways I saw on display around me. When I would hear someone give some tongue-infested prophecy, I would feel uncomfortable. I was always a little nervous if someone spoke out in tongues during the service and nobody would come forward to "interpret" it. I was uncomfortable and also a little sniggerish. I would sometimes smile a bit to myself if this happened. I knew those tongue-speakers were full of it then. Now, I tried my hand at the tongue-speaking for a good long time, but I never really thought I was supposed to be doing it. It was more like wind sprints on the baseball team for me. The running had little to do with playing the game, but they did force us to get a bit of exercise. The situation was similar to my speaking in tongues, I knew I'd never really be in the prophesying game so-to-speak, but I practiced the skill nonetheless. but these moments in church where no interpretation would follow the Swahili being spouted, I finally figured it out, everyone was making it up. Then I realized nobody was speaking a real language, it was all just gibberish, not gibberish-sounding to the ignorant, just plain old gibberish. I think I lost a bit of ability to be a Faither around this time.
After high school, I went to college. For a year, I lived at home and went to junior college. I had stopped going to church by now, placing myself instead with the church of drinking beer and hanging out with new college friends. I didn't give much thought to the Christianity of my youth, but it was still there. I spent my time drinking, working, studying trombone, trying to get laid, and so forth. It was at work that I met my wife (future) who come to find out was going to be a nun before she met me, heh, heh, heh.... That's right ladies, she gave up celibacy for a life with me. Seriously, she was a devoted fairly new Christian, having come to her faith within a few years of our meeting. I fell into the old trap of false fronting in order to keep the girl. She was hot, I was lucky, and I didn't want to screw it up, so I hopped back into the world of Christianity after a brief albeit immensely relief0laden hiatus. We got married very quickly and moved away to start college together. Away from family, friends. It was just we, in a new town surrounded by a huge state university (The Florida State University to be precise). It was here that I was exposed to the history of my childhood religion in ways I was never afforded while actually involved in it. The world of music illuminates religion(s) in ways most people would never think of. To most, music is background sound to a worship service, but not to all. I won't lecture on music theory or history here, but suffice it to say, my studying music made me view religion (my religion) much differently and much less reverently as I had once purported to do. This being said, I still tried to be a Christian, not a good Christian, just a Christian, but it never stuck to me, like a religion ought to. We played children's church leaders for a little while, I tried coordinating the music at our Assembly of God church for a while, none of it worked well. I was (still am) a fairly defensive kind of guy. I don't like being affronted by anyone, especially if I think that person knows considerably less about a particular topic than me. Because of this, I didn't really fit with the whole church leader role, and so I gave it up. But truth be known, I was only playing at being such a thing, my heart was never in it, and I think it showed. I started thinking about philosophical issues during my time at FSU. Economics, Politics, but curiously enough not other religions. I wanted to hang on to my inherited conservatism and so I jumped on the impeach Clinton bandwagon, I later recanted. I even would have voted for W. in 2000 if I had been registered in Pennsylvania, which is where we moved to go to graduate school. But I found myself leaning ever so slightly to the left while in graduate school in Philadelphia. I also found myself, as did my wife, not caring about going to church anymore. We tried a few in Philly, but didn't like any of them so we just stopped trying after a few attempts. During Graduate school, I started reading non-stop. Mainly fiction. I plowed through every Stephen King novel he wrote and published and I could get from Half.com for $1.00 or less. I have quite the collection now. Grisham, Clancy, Crighton, Tolkien, etc... I read a lot, and of course I studied and practiced my horn too. I'm sure my adopted practice of reading played a part in my deconversion. there's nothing like reading the printed word to make a person think, about anything. Television requires nothing, movies nothing, watching a baseball game nothing. Of course no one is prohibited from thinking whilst participating in one of these activities, but there is no requirement implied. On the other hand, thinking is requisite while reading. Even though I was reading fictional stories my mind was beginning to formulate some ideas about myself. We lived in Philly for almost two years before moving away to Michigan for work. It was in Michigan that I finally gave up trying to be a Christian altogether.
I have mentioned how as a kid I was never really inclined to be all that devout. I did however glean a great deal of information about Christianity. The virgin birth, the walking on water, the resurrection, the money lenders in the temple, etc... I knew the New Testament stories. I had absorbed them over time, and they are still with me, but I certainly was no budding biblical scholar. I have read the entire bible once, completely. I have read a lot of the parts that are essential to any amateur Christian many times more. When I was trying to a Christian I hardly ever thought about the bible, but ironically, as an apostate, I have thought about the bible and it's stories a great deal more.
A few years ago, I decided to start writing down in a notepad what my real true thoughts about life and religion were. I began in 2002 with a great deal of personal despair. I had thoughts that god was either evil or non-existent. I was hurt over personal disappointments in life and I found the god I had tried to believe in to be the most readily available scapegoat. Fortunately this did not last long, I realized after a while the only way I could divert my life around these disappointments was to figure the route myself. My blame of god dissipated, but it also sowed real doubt in god's existence. I continued to write down my thoughts. Things like " the stories in the bible were written by men, not god; 2003", "creation did not happen, evolution did; 2003", and "god does not exist; 2004". It's important to note the dates. I had begun to write these thoughts of mine down years before I had ever heard of the "New Atheists". Not once in my life had I picked up a book criticizing religion at this point. I had however moved from Stephen king to Stephen hawking, and other similar books. probably one of the single most eye-opening books I've ever read, Hawking's " A brief history of time" was the nail in the coffin which had been buried years before. It taught me that nothing from religion is as cool as the universe itself. In 2007, after I had been effectively an atheist for a few years, I came across a you tube video of a guy named Sam Harris giving a lecture in Toronto on religious fallacies. I had never heard of the guy, but I was intrigued nonetheless. After watching the whole hour presentation I was floored. I had just heard someone else saying the exact things I had been thinking and privately writing down for nearly two years. I had no idea there were other people who thought as similarly as I did. I grew up thinking that atheists were as bad as Satan worshippers. Now being one, I knew better, but it was refreshing to know the network of freethinking individuals out in the world. I have read both of Harris' books, and I follow his blog. I have since read many other free thought books, some I agree with, and some I don't wholly. My abandonment of Christianity has led me to philosophy, and I have read a great deal of philosophy in the last few years. It also allowed me to explore cosmology and particle physics (on an amateur scale). I have many more widely-spread interests now than I ever did as a Christian- poser. My blog posts explain my position on the various tenets of Christianity so I won’t replay them here. Having written this, I'm glad. I've put it off for a while, but it was nice to go back in time for a while. I know I've never been a Christian, despite the efforts of my childhood church. Although I did try for a long time, for various reasons. I understand why people resort to religion. For some it comforts, for others it is a tether to hang onto in an otherwise tumultuous life, for still others it is a way to lift themselves over their fellow humans. But the thing is, none of those reasons matter, because in the end, religion is an idea. Ideas are only ideas until they are realized. There is no possible realization of religion until we die, and at that point it's too late to get anything out of it, which is why heaven and hell were invented. The ideas that religion itself stakes claims to, morality, ethics, and the like are certainly realizable, but the thing is, they aren't religion's ideas, they are mankind's. And at the risk of becoming a bit tautological (circular) religion is also an idea of mankind. Humanity has no need for religion, it has come up with it's own ideas about ethics and morality. Religion has usurped these ideas and gathered them under its umbrella, when really they are the same types of ideas as religion itself. if religion spawned only good in the world, then that would be great, but it does not. Nothing does. And how is that? Because everything we concern ourselves with, global warming, overpopulation, nationalism, religious freedom, everything has two sides, affirming and opposing. Religion is man-made because it has both sides of the coin. This is probably the most telling aspect of religion's origins, but there are others. I am not a Christian, anymore. Maybe one day, you won't be either.
Wednesday, March 18, 2009
On John 3:16
" For god so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten son, that whosoever believed on him should not perish, but have ever lasting life" John 3:16. Most famous verse in the bible. The hallmark of the christian contention that god is love, that the news of the gospel is "good news" and that we are sinners "saved" by grace. On the surface, this verse certainly seems like the definition of altruistic mercy, but just as in life, all that glitters is not gold. There are many,many things we encounter in life that seem to be one thing, but upon closer inspection and longevity of exposure actually turn out to be the opposite. Pitbulls seem to be great dogs until the day they kill a child for no apparent reason. When we sit in a chair,it seems as though our derry-air is in contact with the seat surface,when in reality, what we feel is the miniscule repulsion of trillions and trillions of atoms pushing us away from the their surface. It seems as though we snap opur fingers and we see, hear and decide to do this all at the same moment, but actually the decision to snapthe fingers happens before the act, and we see our fingers snap before we hear them snap. Our mind is a clever mechanism, capable of editing what is offered to us for observation into a false, but seemingly true narrative of observed events.
The christian's contention is that faith is what replaces evidence. The atheist's contention (which is coincidentally mine) is that any extraordinary claim, such as a god existing, must be supported by extraordinary evidence, faith is only circular. This verse states " that whosoever believes on him...." This seems to be a supportive statement of the faith side of things, yes? but let's look closer, shall we...
For god "SO" loved the world. The author could have said " For god loved the world". He did not. By inserting the word "SO" into the sentence he introduced an element of standard of comparison, which is a form of evidence. God didn't just simply love the world. There was a very high degree of affection that god had for the world, high enough to warrant the sacrifice of his son on its behalf (as is evidenced by the use of the word so), as opposed to a very low degree of affection for the world, which would not have warranted such a sacrifice. Using standards of comparison is what we animals do. We weigh the benefits and detriments associated with the options available to us, and use our deterministic brains to guide our behavioral choices. It is a completely natural (nonsupernatural) process. If god SO loved the world that he blah, blah, blah... then god himself was doing the same thing that we lowly animals do all the time. He weighed the benefits and detriments associated with his choices and chose accordingly. He decided to love the world not unconditionally mind you, but to such a degree that his love level would be enough to allow mankind a justified return to grace. Not very godly, not very godly at all. SO this first portion of the verse reveals that the most highly-touted verse in scripture pointing to the wonder of god and the greatness of his love for us, actually is evidence against god being god. Else, why would he need to "SO" love the world, in order to save us. It is easy to see however how a human author of such a story could think that such a wording of a verse would seem to be foolproof in it's evocational ability, but that would be because we humans are nothing but the smartest animals. It has been trial and error all along. I've yet to figure out why religious folks seem to be so averse to the trial and error process. How is it that religious folks need someone who is not going to screw up and learn something by doing so. And how do they come to think that such a scenario is even possible. What makes them think a god existing is even possible? I am getting off track.
We've examined the first part of the verse, so let's continue with the second part.
" that he gave his only begotten son".
Some christians I know argue that evidence does exist for belief in god. It is just evidence that we do not understand, we cannot understand, because god works in mysterious ways. I submit that this part of the verse contradicts such a statement. Infact all of the bible's memorable verses do exactly what this verse does; they frame the sentiment in a context we CAN understand, in this case, love for a child. If god's ways are so mysterious, then how is that the bible ended up being written in such a way that we can understand? Death we understand. Love we understand. Jealousy we understand. Retribution we understand. Justice we understand. Fairness and unfairness we understand. All of these affects are how the bible frames it's messages of life-assurance. This verse is no exception. The author offers as evidence of the level of god's love, the fact that he willingly sacrificed his son, on our behalf. This is a form of evidence, albeit one that is severely deficient in it's degree of verifiable truth. By including the word "So" in the first part of the verse, the author's hands were tied. They had to include some evidence to illustrate the level of love implied by the word "So". So doesn't this give credence to the christian's point? NO. They say simlutaneously, that god's plans are unknowable, because we as humans cannot understand god, but if god were intent on hiding his true nature from us, then why bother giving us a book full of feeble attempts to explain the heavenly nature of he and his minions in words and phrases we are overtly aware of, and completely capable of understanding; love, death, etc...?
Such a book, to those who read it a lot, is both credible evidence for the existence and wonder of god, and impossible for mankind to fully understand, as it is from the unknowable, unfathomable mind of god. This is self-reinforcing logic, and also bull-corn.
Christian : "I'm right, because I understand it, and you're wrong because you don't. The things I don't understand are still true, it's just that I'm not meant to understand them cause I'm not god, and the things I do understand, I can because god has chosen to reveal them to me".
God: " I'm right because I wrote the book, see it says so right here. You're wrong because you can't understand my plans because you are not me, see it says so right here." Bullox!
Enough of the second part, onto the third:
"That whosoever believed on him". This part is self-contradictory to the earlier part of the verse that said that god so loved the WORLD. If god's affection were for the entire world, then this part is unneccessary. Because this section of the verse is included, it makes clear that the verse was authored by a human being. It is riddles with elements of psychological bullying, jealousy, and low self-esteem. Only those who freely choose to believe the verse says the truth, will reap the benefits of exhibiting such faith, all others can literally go to hell. This is not love for the world at large, it is pedantic, juvenile, short-lived and ultimately disingenuous affection for the population that most resembles the author in mindset. Those of like mind will follow suit more easily. Independant thinkers represent more work for the clergy to bring into the fold and thus they quickly become not worth the effort. Infact, this verse reveals that god's affection surely does not extend to the entire world, and furthermore that he could never have intended to extend such affection out to the entire world, all because of the clause included, the catch in the deal... you have to believe.
And so we come to the final part of this awesome verse:
"Would not perish, but have everlasting life." Reward for good behavior. Another example of a context which we lowly humans can fully understand. We know what it is like to receive a reward for good behavior, and what better reward than to be able to live forever, pain-free? But, doesn't logic tell us that if something is the truth it must exist wholly independant of any type of influence. Math is math, It doesn't matter if it is cold outside, or if your mother-in-law is a bitch, 2+2 =4. Math is independant of human concerns. Belief in god however, is intricately tied up with humanity. Infact without humanity, god would be unnecessary. If god actually existed, then the belief we obviously are capable of harboring, should need no reward (such as ever lasting life) attached to it, precisely because of the inimitable truth of it, kinda like math. The truth of the concept would be the truth, and we would recognizeit as such even without the reward, kinda like math. As parents, we bribe our kids all the time, because they won't do what we ask of them otherwise. They are too busy playing to sit down at the table and eat, or wash their hands, or pick up their toys. So I can hear the christian saying right now, that we are like children to god, and he attached the reward of everlasting life so that we would be more inclined to do what he asked of us, knowing that what he was asking of us was in our best interest, even if we did not know it. Yes, that seems to be what we do with our children, but it is not. Picking up toys, eating dinner at the time we have designated, etc... are all things that are in our (parental) best interests, not the children's. A kid will eat when they are hungry, if they break a toy, they will quickly adopt a new one. parents are the ones who want things to be a certain way, and we try our best to instill these ways onto our children, and there is nothing wrong with that, as long as we acknowledge that in reality it is primarily for our benefit that we do such things. God, who doesn't exist, has rewards attached to belief in him, because, the authors and perpetuators of religion know that without such rewards, belief in god becomes a very hard sell indeed. This reveals the falsity of god's existence more than anything else. Because the author included the reward in the verse it reveals that this verse was authored by not an omnipotent god, but a person who was not very sharp in psychology, which makes sense if you consider when the words were probably written.
John 3:16 is not what it seems. It is not an appeal to discard evidence in lieu of belief, it is instead a wholehearted validation of the reliance we all have on evidence. In this case the evidence is not for god's existence but rather for the human authorship of this verse and indeed the entire bible. It shows that god had to wratchet up his level of affection for us to get us back home, it also shows that christians do indeed rely on evidence to "believe" in their premises; evidence like god giving his son, see that shows he loved us so much, he gave his son up....
It also shows that he didn't love the whole world, only the part that loved him back.
It also shows that god was not confident enough in the veracity of his omnipotence, so much that he felt it neccessary to sweeten the deal by attaching immortality to it.
Truth is truth, regardless of how many people believe it. The attempt to sway the populace into his corner, with the offer of immortality is all the evidence I'll ever need to know that god is a figment of the imagination, and nothing else.
The christian's contention is that faith is what replaces evidence. The atheist's contention (which is coincidentally mine) is that any extraordinary claim, such as a god existing, must be supported by extraordinary evidence, faith is only circular. This verse states " that whosoever believes on him...." This seems to be a supportive statement of the faith side of things, yes? but let's look closer, shall we...
For god "SO" loved the world. The author could have said " For god loved the world". He did not. By inserting the word "SO" into the sentence he introduced an element of standard of comparison, which is a form of evidence. God didn't just simply love the world. There was a very high degree of affection that god had for the world, high enough to warrant the sacrifice of his son on its behalf (as is evidenced by the use of the word so), as opposed to a very low degree of affection for the world, which would not have warranted such a sacrifice. Using standards of comparison is what we animals do. We weigh the benefits and detriments associated with the options available to us, and use our deterministic brains to guide our behavioral choices. It is a completely natural (nonsupernatural) process. If god SO loved the world that he blah, blah, blah... then god himself was doing the same thing that we lowly animals do all the time. He weighed the benefits and detriments associated with his choices and chose accordingly. He decided to love the world not unconditionally mind you, but to such a degree that his love level would be enough to allow mankind a justified return to grace. Not very godly, not very godly at all. SO this first portion of the verse reveals that the most highly-touted verse in scripture pointing to the wonder of god and the greatness of his love for us, actually is evidence against god being god. Else, why would he need to "SO" love the world, in order to save us. It is easy to see however how a human author of such a story could think that such a wording of a verse would seem to be foolproof in it's evocational ability, but that would be because we humans are nothing but the smartest animals. It has been trial and error all along. I've yet to figure out why religious folks seem to be so averse to the trial and error process. How is it that religious folks need someone who is not going to screw up and learn something by doing so. And how do they come to think that such a scenario is even possible. What makes them think a god existing is even possible? I am getting off track.
We've examined the first part of the verse, so let's continue with the second part.
" that he gave his only begotten son".
Some christians I know argue that evidence does exist for belief in god. It is just evidence that we do not understand, we cannot understand, because god works in mysterious ways. I submit that this part of the verse contradicts such a statement. Infact all of the bible's memorable verses do exactly what this verse does; they frame the sentiment in a context we CAN understand, in this case, love for a child. If god's ways are so mysterious, then how is that the bible ended up being written in such a way that we can understand? Death we understand. Love we understand. Jealousy we understand. Retribution we understand. Justice we understand. Fairness and unfairness we understand. All of these affects are how the bible frames it's messages of life-assurance. This verse is no exception. The author offers as evidence of the level of god's love, the fact that he willingly sacrificed his son, on our behalf. This is a form of evidence, albeit one that is severely deficient in it's degree of verifiable truth. By including the word "So" in the first part of the verse, the author's hands were tied. They had to include some evidence to illustrate the level of love implied by the word "So". So doesn't this give credence to the christian's point? NO. They say simlutaneously, that god's plans are unknowable, because we as humans cannot understand god, but if god were intent on hiding his true nature from us, then why bother giving us a book full of feeble attempts to explain the heavenly nature of he and his minions in words and phrases we are overtly aware of, and completely capable of understanding; love, death, etc...?
Such a book, to those who read it a lot, is both credible evidence for the existence and wonder of god, and impossible for mankind to fully understand, as it is from the unknowable, unfathomable mind of god. This is self-reinforcing logic, and also bull-corn.
Christian : "I'm right, because I understand it, and you're wrong because you don't. The things I don't understand are still true, it's just that I'm not meant to understand them cause I'm not god, and the things I do understand, I can because god has chosen to reveal them to me".
God: " I'm right because I wrote the book, see it says so right here. You're wrong because you can't understand my plans because you are not me, see it says so right here." Bullox!
Enough of the second part, onto the third:
"That whosoever believed on him". This part is self-contradictory to the earlier part of the verse that said that god so loved the WORLD. If god's affection were for the entire world, then this part is unneccessary. Because this section of the verse is included, it makes clear that the verse was authored by a human being. It is riddles with elements of psychological bullying, jealousy, and low self-esteem. Only those who freely choose to believe the verse says the truth, will reap the benefits of exhibiting such faith, all others can literally go to hell. This is not love for the world at large, it is pedantic, juvenile, short-lived and ultimately disingenuous affection for the population that most resembles the author in mindset. Those of like mind will follow suit more easily. Independant thinkers represent more work for the clergy to bring into the fold and thus they quickly become not worth the effort. Infact, this verse reveals that god's affection surely does not extend to the entire world, and furthermore that he could never have intended to extend such affection out to the entire world, all because of the clause included, the catch in the deal... you have to believe.
And so we come to the final part of this awesome verse:
"Would not perish, but have everlasting life." Reward for good behavior. Another example of a context which we lowly humans can fully understand. We know what it is like to receive a reward for good behavior, and what better reward than to be able to live forever, pain-free? But, doesn't logic tell us that if something is the truth it must exist wholly independant of any type of influence. Math is math, It doesn't matter if it is cold outside, or if your mother-in-law is a bitch, 2+2 =4. Math is independant of human concerns. Belief in god however, is intricately tied up with humanity. Infact without humanity, god would be unnecessary. If god actually existed, then the belief we obviously are capable of harboring, should need no reward (such as ever lasting life) attached to it, precisely because of the inimitable truth of it, kinda like math. The truth of the concept would be the truth, and we would recognizeit as such even without the reward, kinda like math. As parents, we bribe our kids all the time, because they won't do what we ask of them otherwise. They are too busy playing to sit down at the table and eat, or wash their hands, or pick up their toys. So I can hear the christian saying right now, that we are like children to god, and he attached the reward of everlasting life so that we would be more inclined to do what he asked of us, knowing that what he was asking of us was in our best interest, even if we did not know it. Yes, that seems to be what we do with our children, but it is not. Picking up toys, eating dinner at the time we have designated, etc... are all things that are in our (parental) best interests, not the children's. A kid will eat when they are hungry, if they break a toy, they will quickly adopt a new one. parents are the ones who want things to be a certain way, and we try our best to instill these ways onto our children, and there is nothing wrong with that, as long as we acknowledge that in reality it is primarily for our benefit that we do such things. God, who doesn't exist, has rewards attached to belief in him, because, the authors and perpetuators of religion know that without such rewards, belief in god becomes a very hard sell indeed. This reveals the falsity of god's existence more than anything else. Because the author included the reward in the verse it reveals that this verse was authored by not an omnipotent god, but a person who was not very sharp in psychology, which makes sense if you consider when the words were probably written.
John 3:16 is not what it seems. It is not an appeal to discard evidence in lieu of belief, it is instead a wholehearted validation of the reliance we all have on evidence. In this case the evidence is not for god's existence but rather for the human authorship of this verse and indeed the entire bible. It shows that god had to wratchet up his level of affection for us to get us back home, it also shows that christians do indeed rely on evidence to "believe" in their premises; evidence like god giving his son, see that shows he loved us so much, he gave his son up....
It also shows that he didn't love the whole world, only the part that loved him back.
It also shows that god was not confident enough in the veracity of his omnipotence, so much that he felt it neccessary to sweeten the deal by attaching immortality to it.
Truth is truth, regardless of how many people believe it. The attempt to sway the populace into his corner, with the offer of immortality is all the evidence I'll ever need to know that god is a figment of the imagination, and nothing else.
Friday, February 27, 2009
Evangelicals are the worst people in the world
I know, I know, the title is terrible and mean-spirited, but they are horrible. I just finished watching the movie "Jesus Camp". A friend had recommended it to me a year or so ago, and I saw it tonight at the movie store and decided to rent it, thinking I would be laughing my ass off. For the first two scenes or so, I was. But very soon I realized the film was not a comedy, but rather a tragedy, or maybe a horror, I haven't decided yet.
It is a film, very well made by the way, about the evangelical demographic in America, and how the adults of this demographic are "teaching" their children to literally pray for America to be "revived" and to "return" to being a christian nation. I have never wanted to live in another country more than I do right now; however, I have also never wanted to offer resistance to lunacy more than I do right now either, and it would be hard to justify criticism of a certain populace within this country if I no longer were in this country.
I am so sad for the children in this movie. These kids have bought the evangelical bullshit message hook, line and sinker, and they think (as do their parents) that they "decided" on this position of their own accord, through the diligent efforts of both their parents and the pastor of a christian children's camp, to willfully indoctrinate them into thinking the things they now have no choice but to think. I mean the parents really believe they have raised their kids to "choose" to be evangelical christians. These are preteen kids, kids who joyfully and willingly preach to other kids, put on puppet shows about how the world is going to end just as soon as enough people pray for jesus to come back and think they have supernatural abilities such as jibber-jabbering literally in blatherous nonsense (which they call speaking in tongues, mind you, the sounds they make (as do their parents) are NOT long-deceased languages or even remnants of languages, they are just nonsense vocables), being able to prophecy (mind you, the prophecies these kids give are always given in the most vague and generalized manner, exactly like astrologers give their "readings", and never are they checked up on later to verify their accuracy) and "discerning of spirits", whatever the hell that means (the little girl who claimed she had this "gift" also clearly had no idea what the hell such a set of words were possibly referring to, you could see it on her face and hear it in her voice). The kids go to a camp in North Dakota for, I guess a week, and get preached to every night about sin and the punishment that accompanies it. The "pastor" lady even consciously picks a graphic of the word death (the wage of sin according to Romans 6:23) that has, what she described as, dripping blood falling off the letters of the word. I mean she actually typed the word, and then purposefully chose the bloody font for this particular slide in her powerpoint show she was preparing for the kids to see that evening. The kids were psychologically beaten up with the idea that if they had ever been or were currently being "phony" in their claims to "righteousness" that their hypocrisy was in need of being cleansed, literally. She had those kids come up and hold their hands out so that she could pour water from a water bottle over them to "wash" the kids' hands clean of the sin of hypocrisy. Needless to say, but I'll be damned if I'm not going to say it anyway, these kids were in tears at these sessions, and they clearly wanted to be. That is what has incensed me so much. These poor children, only a little older than my own son, were bawling over their sinfulness, how bad they were as people, and the adults were not only allowing this to take place, they were actually CAUSING it to take place. The had not only hoodwinked their kids into thinking they were terrible people, but they had, even worse, taught their kids that by recognizing their own horridness, they could then be "fixed" if only they prayed real hard for god to "forgive" them. And so, these kids weren't crying because they were afraid, they were crying because they were happy. They had a way out of going to hell. These were tears of unbridled relief and subsequent gratitude. I absolutely hate the practice of ridicule in education, and the evangelical contingent in this country is absolutely mired in it.
First: Get them to believe they are going to burn in hell for forever, just because they were born. Make them think that through no fault of their own, they have to suffer the worst tortures imaginable, eternally.
Second: Get them to accept this fate through constant reminders of their innate sinfulness, until they have no mind to analyze the validity of such an accusation.
Third: Tell them that they can escape this fate, if they do the religious thing i.e. Verbally "accept" jesus as their lord and saviour, and confess their sins to everyone who will listen, so that their humiliation will be complete, and they will have no ability to "choose" otherwise.
Fourth: Get them to go and tell everyone they know the exact things they themselves have been inexcusably exposed to, so that they become "warriors of christ".
PEER PRESSURE!!!!!
And I'm not talking about teenagers here who struggle with the decisions brought on by peer pressure, decisions like "should I or should I not", or "I know better but all my friends are doing it so maybe I should to". Teens can analyze for themselves, even though most do not, they at least have the ability to. No, these are 9, 10, and 11 year olds. Kids who will adopt whatever behavior they are asked to adopt, if there is a clear reason to do so. Evangelical adults are bullying their children into corrosive and destructive mindlessness, and they think this is an acceptable child-rearing technique. Indoctrination is TERRIBLE!!!! it's inexcusable and should be a criminal offense. All it does is disengage the victim from the process of critical thinking. No 11 year old should think they are capable of preaching, to anyone, about anything. They are not experts at anything yet, except for howto be a kid. For crying out loud, 11 year olds can't drive a car, they can't vote, they can't drink alcoholic beverages, or smoke. They are disallowed these, for one simple reason, they are not cognitively developed enough to be able to understand all the ramifications and responsibilities of these behaviors. So how in the world do the evangelical parents of this country think that although their kids can't do all the above mentioned activities, they can and should be poisoning other equally impressionable kids with unsubstantiated nonsense like they do in this movie? I would like to shoot these parents, or better yet, go back in time and sterilize them.
They have these kids actually touching buildings and praying that jesus (even though he is rather inconveniently dead, and has been so for thousands of years, if he ever existed at all, which is questionable) will cause the planned parenthood clinic housed within to close down. These kids have been lit with a flame of ignorance and sympathy for the unborn by their parents. They can't possibly be educated enough on both sides of the debate to be able to say, as the children they are, that they are pro-life. They claim to be pro-life, because they have only seen the side of abortion that the churches show. The inflammatory side, the one with all the dead babies, and the little plastic fetuses that look just like a tiny baby, etc... they have not seen the other side, enough to weigh for themselves the data and decide on their own. Their parents think certain things, and then choose to indoctrinate their kids in a similar vein.
This movie touched on a lot of subjects of which I am well aware, having grown up in an evangelical christian home. Creationism vs evolution, abortion, national christianity, the end times, the need for constant repentance and the ultimate need for salvation. All of these are topics which have driven me away from the ridiculousness of christianity. You could see the fear in these kids eyes, and felt the resonation of memory, having been bombarded on a bi-weekly basis with these toxins for nigh on twelve of the most impressionable years of my life. And that is the basis for the whole sham, as I have written about in some of my earlier blogs. FEAR. There is an assumption that there is a continuation of our life in some capacity after we die, and that capacity is directly determined by our choices and activities while we are alive now. This assumption comes from the fact that we feel like we are conscious beings, and that our consciousness is a manifestation of an invisible greater world of spirituality, one which we cannot see. Based on this assumption of spirituality, christians assign a place of good or ill to our post-life selves. It is this heaven and hell that outlines the real basis for the fundamentals of the christian faith. Christians don't fear hell,because they've chosen the right path. They also "know" that non-christians have everything to fear because they have not chosen the right path. They have constructed this farcical fantasy world, which is wholly dependant on fear, and in doing so have ensured that those who are exposed to it have to choose one way or the other. It is all based on the false assumption that we go somewhere after our deaths. Once that assumed foundation is forged, the good vs evil scenario is as valid a scenario as any other, and it is the one christians hang their hat on. But the foundation is false, and consequently the structures built upon it, such as the christian faith, are also. Even for those religions or spiritual people out there that are not of the christian faith, the fundamental assumption that we are transcendent of our corporeal selves, is not true. How do I know, because I am not a child, and I no longer have to fear the boogeyman of death. I and my wife have taught our son that when living things, like people die, they turn back into dirt, over time. He is four and thinks that is really cool. When he is older, more capable of abstract thought, he will inevitably come to us with the familiar questions of what happens to "us" when we die. Thankfully, I know our answers will remain unchanged. We are not filling him with bullshit, and I am so glad that I was able to jettison all the bullshit I injested in my youth. But I still feel like vomiting after having watched that putrid filth tonight.
It is a film, very well made by the way, about the evangelical demographic in America, and how the adults of this demographic are "teaching" their children to literally pray for America to be "revived" and to "return" to being a christian nation. I have never wanted to live in another country more than I do right now; however, I have also never wanted to offer resistance to lunacy more than I do right now either, and it would be hard to justify criticism of a certain populace within this country if I no longer were in this country.
I am so sad for the children in this movie. These kids have bought the evangelical bullshit message hook, line and sinker, and they think (as do their parents) that they "decided" on this position of their own accord, through the diligent efforts of both their parents and the pastor of a christian children's camp, to willfully indoctrinate them into thinking the things they now have no choice but to think. I mean the parents really believe they have raised their kids to "choose" to be evangelical christians. These are preteen kids, kids who joyfully and willingly preach to other kids, put on puppet shows about how the world is going to end just as soon as enough people pray for jesus to come back and think they have supernatural abilities such as jibber-jabbering literally in blatherous nonsense (which they call speaking in tongues, mind you, the sounds they make (as do their parents) are NOT long-deceased languages or even remnants of languages, they are just nonsense vocables), being able to prophecy (mind you, the prophecies these kids give are always given in the most vague and generalized manner, exactly like astrologers give their "readings", and never are they checked up on later to verify their accuracy) and "discerning of spirits", whatever the hell that means (the little girl who claimed she had this "gift" also clearly had no idea what the hell such a set of words were possibly referring to, you could see it on her face and hear it in her voice). The kids go to a camp in North Dakota for, I guess a week, and get preached to every night about sin and the punishment that accompanies it. The "pastor" lady even consciously picks a graphic of the word death (the wage of sin according to Romans 6:23) that has, what she described as, dripping blood falling off the letters of the word. I mean she actually typed the word, and then purposefully chose the bloody font for this particular slide in her powerpoint show she was preparing for the kids to see that evening. The kids were psychologically beaten up with the idea that if they had ever been or were currently being "phony" in their claims to "righteousness" that their hypocrisy was in need of being cleansed, literally. She had those kids come up and hold their hands out so that she could pour water from a water bottle over them to "wash" the kids' hands clean of the sin of hypocrisy. Needless to say, but I'll be damned if I'm not going to say it anyway, these kids were in tears at these sessions, and they clearly wanted to be. That is what has incensed me so much. These poor children, only a little older than my own son, were bawling over their sinfulness, how bad they were as people, and the adults were not only allowing this to take place, they were actually CAUSING it to take place. The had not only hoodwinked their kids into thinking they were terrible people, but they had, even worse, taught their kids that by recognizing their own horridness, they could then be "fixed" if only they prayed real hard for god to "forgive" them. And so, these kids weren't crying because they were afraid, they were crying because they were happy. They had a way out of going to hell. These were tears of unbridled relief and subsequent gratitude. I absolutely hate the practice of ridicule in education, and the evangelical contingent in this country is absolutely mired in it.
First: Get them to believe they are going to burn in hell for forever, just because they were born. Make them think that through no fault of their own, they have to suffer the worst tortures imaginable, eternally.
Second: Get them to accept this fate through constant reminders of their innate sinfulness, until they have no mind to analyze the validity of such an accusation.
Third: Tell them that they can escape this fate, if they do the religious thing i.e. Verbally "accept" jesus as their lord and saviour, and confess their sins to everyone who will listen, so that their humiliation will be complete, and they will have no ability to "choose" otherwise.
Fourth: Get them to go and tell everyone they know the exact things they themselves have been inexcusably exposed to, so that they become "warriors of christ".
PEER PRESSURE!!!!!
And I'm not talking about teenagers here who struggle with the decisions brought on by peer pressure, decisions like "should I or should I not", or "I know better but all my friends are doing it so maybe I should to". Teens can analyze for themselves, even though most do not, they at least have the ability to. No, these are 9, 10, and 11 year olds. Kids who will adopt whatever behavior they are asked to adopt, if there is a clear reason to do so. Evangelical adults are bullying their children into corrosive and destructive mindlessness, and they think this is an acceptable child-rearing technique. Indoctrination is TERRIBLE!!!! it's inexcusable and should be a criminal offense. All it does is disengage the victim from the process of critical thinking. No 11 year old should think they are capable of preaching, to anyone, about anything. They are not experts at anything yet, except for howto be a kid. For crying out loud, 11 year olds can't drive a car, they can't vote, they can't drink alcoholic beverages, or smoke. They are disallowed these, for one simple reason, they are not cognitively developed enough to be able to understand all the ramifications and responsibilities of these behaviors. So how in the world do the evangelical parents of this country think that although their kids can't do all the above mentioned activities, they can and should be poisoning other equally impressionable kids with unsubstantiated nonsense like they do in this movie? I would like to shoot these parents, or better yet, go back in time and sterilize them.
They have these kids actually touching buildings and praying that jesus (even though he is rather inconveniently dead, and has been so for thousands of years, if he ever existed at all, which is questionable) will cause the planned parenthood clinic housed within to close down. These kids have been lit with a flame of ignorance and sympathy for the unborn by their parents. They can't possibly be educated enough on both sides of the debate to be able to say, as the children they are, that they are pro-life. They claim to be pro-life, because they have only seen the side of abortion that the churches show. The inflammatory side, the one with all the dead babies, and the little plastic fetuses that look just like a tiny baby, etc... they have not seen the other side, enough to weigh for themselves the data and decide on their own. Their parents think certain things, and then choose to indoctrinate their kids in a similar vein.
This movie touched on a lot of subjects of which I am well aware, having grown up in an evangelical christian home. Creationism vs evolution, abortion, national christianity, the end times, the need for constant repentance and the ultimate need for salvation. All of these are topics which have driven me away from the ridiculousness of christianity. You could see the fear in these kids eyes, and felt the resonation of memory, having been bombarded on a bi-weekly basis with these toxins for nigh on twelve of the most impressionable years of my life. And that is the basis for the whole sham, as I have written about in some of my earlier blogs. FEAR. There is an assumption that there is a continuation of our life in some capacity after we die, and that capacity is directly determined by our choices and activities while we are alive now. This assumption comes from the fact that we feel like we are conscious beings, and that our consciousness is a manifestation of an invisible greater world of spirituality, one which we cannot see. Based on this assumption of spirituality, christians assign a place of good or ill to our post-life selves. It is this heaven and hell that outlines the real basis for the fundamentals of the christian faith. Christians don't fear hell,because they've chosen the right path. They also "know" that non-christians have everything to fear because they have not chosen the right path. They have constructed this farcical fantasy world, which is wholly dependant on fear, and in doing so have ensured that those who are exposed to it have to choose one way or the other. It is all based on the false assumption that we go somewhere after our deaths. Once that assumed foundation is forged, the good vs evil scenario is as valid a scenario as any other, and it is the one christians hang their hat on. But the foundation is false, and consequently the structures built upon it, such as the christian faith, are also. Even for those religions or spiritual people out there that are not of the christian faith, the fundamental assumption that we are transcendent of our corporeal selves, is not true. How do I know, because I am not a child, and I no longer have to fear the boogeyman of death. I and my wife have taught our son that when living things, like people die, they turn back into dirt, over time. He is four and thinks that is really cool. When he is older, more capable of abstract thought, he will inevitably come to us with the familiar questions of what happens to "us" when we die. Thankfully, I know our answers will remain unchanged. We are not filling him with bullshit, and I am so glad that I was able to jettison all the bullshit I injested in my youth. But I still feel like vomiting after having watched that putrid filth tonight.
Sunday, February 22, 2009
Another fatal flaw
Recently, a reader friend made the observation that, in their opinion, the primary focus of my blog posts seem to be centered around the old testament god, and not so much the new testament christian one; so, here's one for those who share this sentiment (although in my own defence, I have always felt my criticisms were really directed towards the new testament side of things, but nevertheless).
In the new testament, god supposedly sent his son to pay for the sins of mankind by dying in our place (John 3:16). Also in the new testament, god and his "son" are purported to be different incarnations of the same being (Matthew 1:22-23). Jesus calls himself god, or at least he leads his disciples through indirect implication to call him as such (Matthew 16: 13-20). Additionally, lest anyone forget, god is also supposed to be omniscient, he knows everything. Now, it seems to me, that since god and jesus were the same being, this must mean that logically, jesus was also omniscient. If we are to believe the bible's teachings, jesus must have known ahead of time that he was going to be killed, as he was really god and all that. Infact, he did know ahead of time (Matthew 16:21, 17:22-23, 20:17-19). This is afterall, the "good news" isn't it, that there was someone to offer a reprieve for us from god's wrath. Additionally, jesus knew he would be resurrected ahead of time (Matthew 26:64). So here's the rub, if jesus, being the omniscient being he supposedly was, knew he was going to be killed ahead of time, then the sacrifice would have actually been a sacrifice, but unfortunately he also knew he would be resurrected ahead of time. HE KNEW HE WAS GOING TO BE RESURRECTED BEFORE HE EVEN DIED. This is not sacrificial in the least, infact it completely destroys all semblance of a sacrifice being made. It's only sacrificial if the act itself is horrible and simultaneously altruistic. It is in the unspeakableness of the act that the sacrifice is made. If I throw myself in front of a moving car, pushing a mother and her baby out of the way, but I do so knowing I will not be harmed in any way, then I have made no sacrifice at all. Infact I have only done what anyone with my particular power should do. If I am invincible, then, if afforded the opportunity to save someone, I should do so without a second thought, and people should have an understandable expectation of me to do so. I hesitate to say people would have a right to expect me to do such a thing, but an expectation of me to do so, seeing as how I am invincible and all, is not out of reason .
Jesus knew he was going to be resurrected after he died, so the sacrifice not a sacrifice. He did not actually die, he died and came back to life. A real sacrifice would have been if he had died and never came back to life, butstayed in hell on behalf of all sinners for all of eternity. I mean that's the punishment for humanity if we reject the "lamb of god". We won't get a three-day pass in hell (which is a place that really doesn't exist, see my other blog posts or visit www. godvsthebible.com), so why do christians think jesus spending three days down there is enough to satisfy god almighty? The afterlife for jesus, be it ever so short, was not part of the sacrifice, the death was it. It was in jesus' dying, that supposedly god's wrath against us lowly humans evaporated. It doesn't say " For god so loved the world that he temporarily gave his only begotten son (three days maximum and then he took him back) blah,blah,blah... No, the death was what mattered. If he was resurrected then the death was not truly death to begin with, and this point really becomes clear when we see that jesus knew he was coming back anyway before he ever took a nail in the ol' slapmaster. The "good news" is retarded. The god of the old and new testament was a sheister, which really means the men who concoted him, the history of mankind which concoted him over thousands and thousands of years were sheisters, and not very good ones at that. There wasno resurrection, there was no sacrifice, furthermore, there wasnever any need for one, because god simply doesn't exist. God's laws are not laws, they are fabrications of the collective mind of humanity, which is why they make absolutely no sense. I'll give the bible this though, it does imply that man can never understand god. That is absolutely true, but not because god is some unknowable being; rather it is because god is no longer needed; whereas when he was invented, or rather they were invented, god was sorely needed. As the saying goes, necessity is the mother of all invention, and at one point, humanity needed to invent god, because we were too intelligent to sit idly by without some explanation of ourselves, and yet we were still too incapable of learning what the world really was. Happily we are no longer as incapable, but apparently we have collectively decided that our intelligence and our thirst for an explanation is now a moot point, because god and religion have been around for so long, we might as well keep them.
Logic tells us the story of jesus' sacrificial death and victorious resurrection is false. It is one thing to believe in something without evidence to support it, it is another thing entirely to completely disregard evidence which clearly contradicts a particular premise, just because you aren't comfortable giving up your belief in the false. I understand that belief in Christ gives many, many people comfort, but not for one instance does that mass comfort make the story itself real. Mass delusions have existed in the past, and a few mega-mass delusions are still around today. Still, I know that this entire blog post will have no effect on the willfully blinded. They will continue to wallow in the slop of religion, lapping it up happily, all the while begging for more putrid filth (which they are convinced is 5 star cuisine) to be dumped into their sty. They will also continue to believe that the arabs are heathens and wrong and that they are christians, and are consequently right. Problem is every religion is wrong, no matter how right it might seem. Open your eyes folks, the emperor is just plain naked.
In the new testament, god supposedly sent his son to pay for the sins of mankind by dying in our place (John 3:16). Also in the new testament, god and his "son" are purported to be different incarnations of the same being (Matthew 1:22-23). Jesus calls himself god, or at least he leads his disciples through indirect implication to call him as such (Matthew 16: 13-20). Additionally, lest anyone forget, god is also supposed to be omniscient, he knows everything. Now, it seems to me, that since god and jesus were the same being, this must mean that logically, jesus was also omniscient. If we are to believe the bible's teachings, jesus must have known ahead of time that he was going to be killed, as he was really god and all that. Infact, he did know ahead of time (Matthew 16:21, 17:22-23, 20:17-19). This is afterall, the "good news" isn't it, that there was someone to offer a reprieve for us from god's wrath. Additionally, jesus knew he would be resurrected ahead of time (Matthew 26:64). So here's the rub, if jesus, being the omniscient being he supposedly was, knew he was going to be killed ahead of time, then the sacrifice would have actually been a sacrifice, but unfortunately he also knew he would be resurrected ahead of time. HE KNEW HE WAS GOING TO BE RESURRECTED BEFORE HE EVEN DIED. This is not sacrificial in the least, infact it completely destroys all semblance of a sacrifice being made. It's only sacrificial if the act itself is horrible and simultaneously altruistic. It is in the unspeakableness of the act that the sacrifice is made. If I throw myself in front of a moving car, pushing a mother and her baby out of the way, but I do so knowing I will not be harmed in any way, then I have made no sacrifice at all. Infact I have only done what anyone with my particular power should do. If I am invincible, then, if afforded the opportunity to save someone, I should do so without a second thought, and people should have an understandable expectation of me to do so. I hesitate to say people would have a right to expect me to do such a thing, but an expectation of me to do so, seeing as how I am invincible and all, is not out of reason .
Jesus knew he was going to be resurrected after he died, so the sacrifice not a sacrifice. He did not actually die, he died and came back to life. A real sacrifice would have been if he had died and never came back to life, butstayed in hell on behalf of all sinners for all of eternity. I mean that's the punishment for humanity if we reject the "lamb of god". We won't get a three-day pass in hell (which is a place that really doesn't exist, see my other blog posts or visit www. godvsthebible.com), so why do christians think jesus spending three days down there is enough to satisfy god almighty? The afterlife for jesus, be it ever so short, was not part of the sacrifice, the death was it. It was in jesus' dying, that supposedly god's wrath against us lowly humans evaporated. It doesn't say " For god so loved the world that he temporarily gave his only begotten son (three days maximum and then he took him back) blah,blah,blah... No, the death was what mattered. If he was resurrected then the death was not truly death to begin with, and this point really becomes clear when we see that jesus knew he was coming back anyway before he ever took a nail in the ol' slapmaster. The "good news" is retarded. The god of the old and new testament was a sheister, which really means the men who concoted him, the history of mankind which concoted him over thousands and thousands of years were sheisters, and not very good ones at that. There wasno resurrection, there was no sacrifice, furthermore, there wasnever any need for one, because god simply doesn't exist. God's laws are not laws, they are fabrications of the collective mind of humanity, which is why they make absolutely no sense. I'll give the bible this though, it does imply that man can never understand god. That is absolutely true, but not because god is some unknowable being; rather it is because god is no longer needed; whereas when he was invented, or rather they were invented, god was sorely needed. As the saying goes, necessity is the mother of all invention, and at one point, humanity needed to invent god, because we were too intelligent to sit idly by without some explanation of ourselves, and yet we were still too incapable of learning what the world really was. Happily we are no longer as incapable, but apparently we have collectively decided that our intelligence and our thirst for an explanation is now a moot point, because god and religion have been around for so long, we might as well keep them.
Logic tells us the story of jesus' sacrificial death and victorious resurrection is false. It is one thing to believe in something without evidence to support it, it is another thing entirely to completely disregard evidence which clearly contradicts a particular premise, just because you aren't comfortable giving up your belief in the false. I understand that belief in Christ gives many, many people comfort, but not for one instance does that mass comfort make the story itself real. Mass delusions have existed in the past, and a few mega-mass delusions are still around today. Still, I know that this entire blog post will have no effect on the willfully blinded. They will continue to wallow in the slop of religion, lapping it up happily, all the while begging for more putrid filth (which they are convinced is 5 star cuisine) to be dumped into their sty. They will also continue to believe that the arabs are heathens and wrong and that they are christians, and are consequently right. Problem is every religion is wrong, no matter how right it might seem. Open your eyes folks, the emperor is just plain naked.
Wednesday, February 4, 2009
The Ten Commandments?
The ten commandments. Everyone, mostly, has heard of these. Controversies have abounded about their postings in federal court houses throughout the country. Also, schools have petitioned for the right to display them in publically funded schools. many people regard them as the rules for living. Mandates of morality. God's injunctions upon us lowly sinners, designed to help us live the life he wants us to live. There are ten of them. Ten of the most moral, ethical thought-provoking and good laws, right?
Well, except there are actually two sets of these commandments. That's right, two seperate sets, housing some repeated commandements, and other completely different ones. So my question(s) are for the devout, bible-believing christian.
1. Did you realize the bible has two versions of the ten commandments?
Ex. 20:3 - You shall have no other gods before me
Ex. 20:4 - You shall not make for yourself an idol in the form of anything in heaven or on the earth or in the waters below
Ex. 20:7 - You shall not misuse the name of the lord your god
Ex. 20:8 - Remember the sabbathday by keeping it holy
Ex. 20:12 - Honor your father and mother
Ex. 20:13 - You shall not murder
Ex. 20:14 - You shall not commit adultery
Ex. 20:15 - You shall not steal
Ex. 20:16 - You shall not give false testimony against your neighbor (Lie)
Ex. 20:17 - You shall not covet your neighbors house, wife, servants, livestock, or any other belongings (paraphrased)
These are taken from the Life Application Study Bible, New International Version puublished by Zondervan on pages 137-138
Good so far, right? We all know these commandments very well. But, before we get to the second set, let's look at the first set a bit more closely.
1. You shall have no other gods before me.
Isn't god supposed to be the only god, all others aren't really gods. How would the only god that exists think it necessary to issue these life-messages to his most prized creation, while simultaneously saying there are no gods but him, and that we should lift no other gods higher than him? Which is it? Are there other gods, or aren't there? If god is the only one, Commandment number one is pointless. Because it is obviously there for us to read, then there can be only a few reasons for it:
a. We made them up (we meaning the ancient arabs of a few millenia ago)
b. God really isn't the only one in town, he is competeing for our allegiance with a myriad of other, also invisible, evidence-lacking deities.
c. God is kinda stupid, as he is portrayed in the bible.
My vote is obviously for reason number 1, we made these laws up, which would explain why the first is so petty in nature.
2. You shall not make for yourself any idols
How is this moral? How is a statue an idol, but a cross is not? Any symbolic thing is something that on some level worshipers are worshiping, be it cross, multi-armed elephant statuette, or intergalactic space-traveller talisman. All are stand-ins for the real object of worship, and since the god of the big three has been consistently absent, allowing only symbols to remain behind him (shroud of turin, the cross, the crown of thorns, etc...) he himself is an idol. Humanity possesses only objects associated with the creator of all things, even the idea of god is a possession. Again, the idol worship was something born of fairly non-sophisticated thinking, something religious folk would not want to attach to their god. We made this one up too, and not very well.
3. You shall not misuse the name of the lord. Goddamn it! There I did it, no punishment though. This is just a silly law. How is it even possible that the supposed creator of everything in existence would give a rip about the particular vernacular vehicles his favorite creations used in life. It's not like teaching a kid to not swear. Parents do this for the benefit of the child, not their own. God's commandment to abstain from taking his name in vain is the ultimate example of his very own vanity (though I should say our own vanity). This is about as far from a moral precept as one could get when trying to come up the most important social laws. We made this one up too, who else but insecure, power-hungry, miscreants would say something so playground-oriented was a great law? We are so petty, but we don't have to be.
4. Remember the sabbath by keeping it holy. How exactly is a calendar day that is not even universally recognized as such supposed to be involved with the massive issue of morality? Christians say the world was created in six days and that god rested on the seventh day, but they don't tell us whether that seventh day was a thursday or a sunday. We have established, WE have established that sunday is the day of worship, except that catholics recognize saturday as the day to worship. it is an arbitrary assignment, just as the whole idea of a sabbath day itself is arbitrary and silly. there is no moral behind such a stupid commandment, only control measures designed to instill fear into those who are to be controlled. Why would we need to remember something so important as a sabbath day, wouldn't anyone under the yolk of supernatural control be able to remember something like that without the need for a commandment like that? Couldn't god have used that space for a more moral commandment, like say, don't rape anyone? Guess what folks, we made this one up too. It's so obvious, because it's such a childish thing to require.
5. Honor you father and mother. Okay, now we're at the morality side of things. This is a good one. We should respect those who gave birth to us, but I think mostly that we do this without turning to the bible each time the thought of parental honoring pops into our mind. Point being, while this a good rule to live by, there is no reason to ascribe it's origin to god. Children, by and large love their parents, especially when they are children. I know my son thinks the world of both me and his mother. You can see it in his eyes, when we are playing. He has never consulted the bible on this issue, yet he still loves us more than anyone on the planet. The commandment is honor your parents,not love your parents. To me, this speaks not to the children of the world but the adolescents, those who are most likely to willingly disobey their parents. So what reason would an omniscient god have to include a provisional commandment for the adolescents of the world? Aren't the ten comm. supposed to be for everyone. A bit shortsighted, if you ask me, and again shortsightedness on god's part is not an association religions are comfortable with. However, shortsightedness on the part of men (and women) is something we all recognize. Painfully obvious, we aren't very good at writing morally absolute laws.
6. You shall not murder. Sounds good to me. I don't want to be killed, so what would make me think anyone else wants me to kill them? Except that we do it all the time, war is state sanctioned-murder. There is no other word for it. War requires death at the hands of an intentional being. Warriors set out for the purpose of taking the lives of as many intended victims as possible. We all labor under the belief that life is sacred. But not all life, only life that conducts itself as we see fit. Animals have no sanction within this mindset, yet they are as alive as we are. Death elicits thoughts of fear in most people, not because of the pain which might be involved, but because we have no idea what actually happens to "us" after we die, but we assume there will still be an "us" at that point. Where does this assumption come from. What makes us think we are more than our bodies? Our minds? The fact that we can think? Murder, taking someone else's life prematurely, is an immorality only because we think so much of ourselves, but an immorality it is, nonetheless, and rightfully so. Are we to believe that prior to Moses decending from Mt. Sinai with those tablets that mankind had no qualms about killing each other (ironically, this is probably the case, at least in our very early ancestry, when we first came down out of the trees)? I'm sure the week before god's gift to mankind, the whole of the world's population was not slaughtering each other willy-nilly. Point being, Murder is an immorality to humans, because we are mortal, and as such are very aware of the opposite state of being, that of not being alive. We were aware of this unpleasantness well before moses brought the words of god to the hebrews. We did not need god to point out to us that murder is something we should avoid, afterall we are the mortal ones, not him. What would god know about death, he is supposedly the beggining and the end, here before us and here after, so what the hell, why should we give a shit what an immortal being says about the ending of life. Again folks, moral though it may be, we decided to include this one in the commandments, not god, god doesn't exist.
7. You shall not commit adultery. Ahh, the first of the many biblical reprimands on sex. The moral issue at hand here is not lying to the one you promised your life to. It has nothing to do with sticking a penis in a vagina, whether or not those two reproductive organs have bodies attached to them which possess a piece of paper stating said bodies are legally allowed to practice such enjoyable hobbies. This one could have been saved for the later one about covetousness, or atleast rolled into it, because the lie is the real immorality. The sex is just that sex, animals do it, hell most animals committ adultery as a rule. Ever heard of the alpha male? There's a reason why all the smaller lions practice fighting with each other. So they can one day fight off the head of the pride and take over all the newly available lionesses. Seems to me an omniscient being would have known that adultery is an issue of lying, not sex, just as covetousness is also an issue of lying, and such a great being would have known to roll those into one big don't lie commandment, freeing up a space for a commandment like say, don't abuse children. I can however see very clearly how a society which degraded the value of women such as we see in the bible could easily come up with that whole sex is bad, you should be punished severely for ever thinking it is more than the most sacred thing, thus including it in a set of timeless social rules. man how can anyone think the ten commandments are anything but manmade?
8. You shall not steal. Good, I agree. But as in the murder one a few back, I'm pretty sure mankind did not need to told in tablet form that stealing is bad and should be avoided. Infact, I'm equally sure that any society throughout history has had in place, non-biblical means with which todeal with thieves. Again, this seems a bit redundant, but a good rule nonetheless.
9. You shall not give false testimony against your neighbor. Again, a good rule, but lying is something which society at large is more than capable of dealing efficiently with. No need for god to write it down for us, even society back then was capable of self-regulation.
10. You shall not covet your neighbor's stuff. This one's a bit touchy. I mean what's wrong with wanting what your neighbor has? If you do something about that desire, something which would violate another of the commandments, then I can see the danger, but the simple desire itself seems a bit over-the-top. We all want our share. Consumerism is the basis of all progressive economies, including ours. Without products, people would not buy things. that in and of itself is not a bad idea. I kind of like the concept of self-suffiency. But to include it as one of the unbreakable moral codes of humanity is bit extreme. Seems, jealousy was high on the minds of the authors of the bible. I guess it's not a bad rule to have, but I for one have some reservations about it.
Now to the "other" set. the one no one ever talks about.
In exodus chapter 34, moses has to chisel two new stone tablets to replace the first set which were broken. On these tablets were written, by god (supposedly) the ten commandments:
Chapter 34:27 -28 "Then the lord said to moses " Write down these words, for in accordance with these words I have made a covenant with you and israel." Moses was there with the lord forty days and forty nights without eating bread or drinking water. And he wrote on the tablets the the words of the covenant --- the ten commandments."
1. Do not make cast Idols (34:17)
2. Celebrate the feast of unleavened bread (34:18)
3. The first offspring of every womb belongs to me, including all the firstborn males of your livestock, whether from herd or flock. redeem the firstborn donkey with a lamb, but if you do not redeem it, break it;s neck. redeem all your firstborn sons. (34:19)
4. No one is to appear before me empty-handed. (34:20)
5. Six days shall you labor, but on the seventh day you shall rest (34:21)
6. Celebrate the feast of weeks with the firstfruits of the wheat harvest, and the feast of ingathering at the turn of the year (34:22)
7. Three times a year all your men are to appear before the sovereign lord, the god of israel. I will drive out nations and enlarge your territory,and noone will covet your land when you go up three times each year to appear before the lord your god (34:23).
8. Do not offer the blood of a sacrifice with anything containing yeast (34:25)
9. Bring the firstfruits of your soil to the house of the lord your god (34:26)
10. Do not cook a young goat in it's mother's milk (34:26)
WOW!! This is such an awesome set of moral rules. How many times have I sat down to boil up a goat in it's mother's milk and thought to myself, ehhh, I better not do that, it's so wrong. Give me a break. I don't even need to go into how inane this new set of rules is, except to say, the bible itself, says these are the ten commandments, not those other ones from before, although at one point in the timeline those earlier ones were the covenant, but since the tablets were broken, they aren't anymore. These new ones are even better. So which set do you, Mr. Christian, adhere to? The first set which are morally either not, or obvious, without the hand of god needed at all; or the new set regarding cooking practices and feast celebration protocol?
The bible is just stupid.
Saturday, December 27, 2008
On the spectrum of morality, right and wrong
I got a cool gift from myself for Xmas this year, the BBC's Planet Earth on dvd. Last Xmas, I bought the same for my parents and I got to watch a little of it after dinner was over, so I knew I was eventually going to buy it myself. I also have the BBC's Blue Planet, which is comparably spectacular. Today while watching it I asked myself what it was I liked so much about the program. My answer was... the spectacle displayed on the screen of the world at it's largest, it's massive life-herds, landscapes, and planetary isolation in the sort of context that could only be providedby a satellite view. Seeing the world I live on from this vantage, was and is both breathtaking and humbling. Seeing horizon-spanning flocks of birds mid-migration, a continuous shot showing the actual spanse of the horizon as the flock extends past it, is eye-poppingly wondrous. For those who have never seen this documentary, do yourself a favor and buy it, rent it, check it out from the library, something, but see it. It will be worth your while.
So after asking myself what I liked about it, I asked myself what I thought my very religious parents probably like about it. I came up with the same answer, the sheer spectacle of our world.
I found this an interesting thought to pursue, so I continued my self-interrogation roughly as follows.
Question: What do my parents see in the grandiosity of our world that I do not?
Answer: Nothing, we see the same beauty.
Q: So where do my parents think the beauty of the world comes from?
A: God.
Q: And where do I think the beauty of the world comes from?
A: Nowhere. The beauty of the world does not exist in the world. In other words, it is not a feature of the world, but an interpretation within the confines of my mind, of the world as it exists. If I were not here, or for that matter, were no humans at all here, then beauty being an idea would not exist. Beauty is a thought that we are capable of having, and thoughts are without a doubt confined to the mind. Without our minds, beauty's state of idea-ness could not exist and thus would not exist. The world is what it is, the mountains we look at are big to us because we are comparing our size with their's, the rivers are blue to our eyes, the diversity of life and it's various manifestations are noteworthy to humanity only because we can compare them (since they exist) to the idea of them not existing, an ability which is unique (probably) to humans. The act of comparison is what creates our ideas including that of beauty. So again, I do not attribute the world's beauty as having come from somewhere, much less a god. It is of our own devising, and our ability to do such a thing is the direct result of our brains being developed as much as they are. And just to be clear, the notion of ideas being planted in our minds (by some outside interloper) can be adequately put to rest when you consider the alternative of comparison generating discrimination. We compare. We then discriminate, assigning beauty to one side and ugliness to another, with banality somewhere in the middle. Our minds, in the act of comparison, are the generators of what we say is beautiful.
My parent's see the beauty of the world as the proof of god's existence.
I see the beauty of the world as the beauty of the world, as my mind determines it to be, through comparison and subsequent discrimination.
But, here's the real point, we both see the beauty of the world. It is the world, visible, measurable, and tangible to which, at least in part, those who believe in god point to as a reason to harbor such a belief. These people are relying on evidence for their belief. Evidence in the form of the extant world and it's vastness. The sheer size of the world as displayed by the BBC's documentary is proof of god's creativity and handprint, to my extended family.
But the thing is, the evidence they are relying on to solidify their position is, in this case, evidence for the exact opposite as well, namely that the world is tangible and explainable. The mountains majesty is there for all to see, and if so desired, to touch and analyze. the rocks and elements that comprise the mountain can be discovered, named and repeatedly recognized, thus pulling back a little bit more of the veil of the physical world. Indeed the physical world we see has an explanation completely devoid of divine invocation. Infact, the explanations offered by the last few centuries of ever-progressive scientific discovery reveal complexities of nature that no religious text has ever even described, much less adequately explained away. For instance, there are cave systems throughout the world that house life forms that simply were unknown to the arabs and jews of the 1st century a.d. Animals that are pigmentless, and eyeless, because these physical characteristics were and continue to be unnecessary to them, have lived in these isolated areas of the world for more time than the bible recounts. To the testimony of these animals, the great flood of noah as described in the bible, is incompatible. It is understandable that the authors of the middle eastern religious texts did not know of animals like these, or others (emperor penguins, carrier pigeons, dwarf mastodons (who were alive at the time of the writing of the old testament)). And without the knowledge of these animals, or better said, with only the knowledge of the largely agriculturally-domesticated animals with which they were surrounded( such as rams and goats), the civilizations who passed these stories of man's superiority over the animal kingdom (and interestingly enough also the plant kingdom, but not the fungus or slime-mold kingdoms) are easily forgiven for concocting a story to describe, as best they could with the information they had, the world as it appeared to them. What is harder to forgive is the determination through time to cling to these abhorridly incomplete descriptives of the world we live in. We know polar bears exist, but the biblical authors did not. Should we then trust that these stories created so long ago, and designed to describe the natural world and our kingship over it are still representative of the truth of our world? Of course not. We cannot allow ourselves to "believe" in something that has been overturned by a wider discovery, yet that is exactly what the world at large has been doing for more than 2 millenia. Religions request that we suspend our disbelief quite in the face of more satisfying and sensible explanations. To that end, over time, religions have surriptiously altered the arena of disparity to another more slippery slope, that of the mental accuity of humankind.
The soul, the consciousness, the human condition is undoubtedly what my family would now point to in defence of their belief in the religious. There is, in their minds, something which has yet to be explained, the human condition and all the stuff that goes along with that; concepts like morality, right and wrong. To the religious, these are concepts about which science can offer no insight, or better said, the natural world has not nor could ever have a way to explain. They also would maintain that morality is something that transcends humanity and is part of a divine set of laws laid down long before mankind ever stepped foot out of the good-ol-garden . I would take issue with these concepts, and infact I do. Here's how.
Morality is commonly accepted as the umbrella term for defining right and wrong, but the word actually offers no clear definition of anything. It harbors the other two terms but does little else. Ask yourself " what does morality mean". what answer do you come up with that doesn't invoke the words right or wrong? Morality is only a word, one which at best simply makes reference to a particular realm of humanity. In this respect, it is just like the words right and wrong. Ask yourself "what does right mean" or "what does wrong mean". What answer do you come up with that doesn't invoke the words morality or right or wrong. Instead of offering definitions, all three of these words rely on the assumptive practices of those who say them to divert the attention of those who hear them uttered or see them written on a page. The word morality assumes that there is an outside standard to which all behavior is measured, a spectrum that at one end reflects universally acceptable behavior, and at the other end, universally unacceptable behavior. These poles of universal acceptance or rejection are what the words right and wrong are in reference to. The words right and wrong are not descriptors, they are instead judges of what is acceptable and what is not. Something intersting yet subtle to notice is that these words also rely on the assumption that this spectrum actually exists, that there is some universal standard, removed from the behaviors themselves, to which the behaviors can be judged. Now I'm not sure how far Heisenberg's uncertainty principle can extend (that which you observe you change i.e. if you know the position of a particle you cannot know it's velocity and vice versa) but what is clear is that none of the words include a description or even a measurement of what is most important, behavior.
Morality refers to the entire spectrum, Right refers to the acceptable side of things and Wrong refers to the unacceptable side of things, but again none of the words properly addresses what the spectrum should be used for, actually measuring behavior(s). The words morality, right and wrong don't describe actual behaviors, they only report where along the spectrum behaviors might fall. So in this sense there is no value to use words like right, wrong or morality, because at best they simply place undescribed behaviors along a possibly non-existant spectrum of judgement mostly, as we will see, in an deceptively arbitrary manner. Again, all three assume there is such a spectrum. But when that assumption is abandoned we can see that such judgemental practices become silly. To return a previous point, without the human mind, ideas simply don't exist, and this applies to idea that a spectrum exists with which to assign a place to human behavior(s). We created this spectrum, without us, there is no concept of morality. Just look at the idea of killing. Non-human animals do it all the time and show no remorse for their victims. It's all in a day's work so-to-speak. Certainly these predators recognize that their prey are alive, yet they commence to killing them anyway, and as if that was not bad enough, they then EAT what they killed, and why, because they "know" if they don't eat they will suffer and maybe they know they will die. There is fear present in predators. And certainly the prey animals recognize that predators are trying to kill them, so one cannot say that they do not display fear of pain or death. If such was the case, and these animals showed no fear of predators, then they certainly wouldn't be the excellent runners they are, or so adept at camoflauge, infact the entire arms race between predator and prey would have never gotten off the ground, because the predators would have wiped out all the prey, seeing as how the prey didn't resist, which would have of course led to the demise of the predators themselves, because if you don't have a steadily resupplying reserve of prey, eventually you will run out of food and die yourself. So fear of death most likely exists for the prey and predator alike, yet the killing still goes on. Such "emotions" don't cause the predators to stop their hunt or the prey from standing idly by. No, the predator-prey relationship abounds and has done so since the beginning of life. Predators don't feel bad for their prey, certainly not enough to not go after them. Rather, murder (the premature and intentional ending of a life) is a natural part of the life cycle. It is we who have villified the practice.
Now of course we qualify murder as the killing of someone for the sake of killing someone. The choice to kill someone (of our own species) is what has made the practice fall at the "wrong" end of the spectrum. But, and this is crucial to keep in mind, the act of killing is no different to a lion as it is to us, the only difference between our two species is the reason behind the killing. And where does reasoning come from, the human mind. So the origin of morality's spectrum is again revealed to be a concoction of the human mind.
Cannibalism is another good example to look at. Across the animal world, cannibalism is not a universally accepted behavior, but it is also not a universally unacceptable behavior either. In some species, it happens all the time, as a part of the life cycle. Even plants practice it, although the process is much longer, and consequently doesn't cause humanity to cringe at the thought, like we do when considering animalistic cannibalism. Since the practice is not universal on either side of our spectrum of judgement, then it must lie somewhere in the middle. Well, but, murder is also acceptable in some instances (self-defense, war-times, capital punishment) so shouldn't it too be considered to fall somewhere in the middle of our spectrum, rather than at the polar end of unacceptable behavior? (Notice again, the spectrum does not describe the behavior, it only assigns a judgement to the acceptability of it). Cannibalism is interesting in that most everyone would agree that it is a "wrong" behavior, but how so? In the same manner that we think murder is "wrong"? Mind you, I am not condoning either practice, I am only discussing the idea of whether or not there is an outside standard of comparison which exists, by using familiar and extreme behavioral examples such as murder and cannibalism. For the record, Don't kill anyone or eat anyone. Caveat done, back to the blog.
Well what about, the good or "right" side of things? We talked about murder and cannibalism, and have shown that the spectrum doesn't provide the definitions we think it does, and also incidentally we have shown that, at least the polar end of universally "wrong" is not so polar afterall, since the extremes of human behavior actually fall in the middle.
So let's look at altruism. That seems like a behavior that would certainly fall at the "right" polar end of our spectrum. What altruism is, our spectrum doesn't tell us, it again only assigns it a place of "rightness", and again only within our minds. If we weren't here, altruism (doing good for others regardless of effect on the doer) would not exist. All we have to do is look at the non-human world again and we can see that the closest non-human animals, and plants for that matter, ever come to altruism is through the phenomenon of symbiosis (where two species perform services for each other to the mutual benefit of both). It may be a uniquely human concept, altruism, but before we can examine it's place on our spectrum we must ask does it really exist at all? Well what are some altruistic behaviors we could examine? How about military service in times of war? That seems like a good one, especially right now. Except, military people get a paycheck when they are in the military, whether or not there is a war going on, so nope, military service does not meet the criteria of being altruistic because there is a benefit to the doer (paycheck). Brave and to be commended, but not altruistic.
What about religious persecution, standing up for your beliefs? Well, we all know that those who are religiously fervent enough in their beliefs to be persecuted for them, are also banking on the paradise that awaits the martyrs of the faith, so nope, the benefit to the persecuted is there (at least in their minds) and thus religious piety does not qualify as altruistic either. But let's say somewhere in the world there is an example of pure unsullied altruism taking place right now. what does it matter if that example is being performed by a human to a member of a different species. Nothing. It is only altruistic if it helps our fellow man. Before the animal rights folk jump all over me, let explain a bit further. Let's say the unsullied example of altruistic behavior took place in a world where no humans existed save our one hero, instead there were only non-human animals incapable of creating a concept like altruism. This human constantly behaved altruistically, to the other animals around them, but with no accolades or reciprocity (thus adhering to the qualifications of being considered an altruistic individual), how would this person ever go about discerning that their behavior was altruistic? To this individual, altruism would simply be the way of life. Having no other humans (individuals capable of coming up with altruism) with which to compare their behavior, this human would not really be altruistic so much as they would just be a (the) person. In such a scenario, we can see how altruism is another concoction of the human mind, and as such, it easily falls onto the "right" end of the equally concocted spectrum of judgement.
Now we can ask whether altruistic behavior isreally deserving of being on the "right" end of the spectrum. What about the case of euthanasia? For a doctor to perform this procedure to a dying cancer patient, who clearly has expressed the desire for it to be done, would result in imprisonment for the doctor (Dr. Kevorkian), and before you say "well there's your altruism for you", remember that Kevorkian got paid for his services, so he might have had some detriments to weigh his decision against, but there were also some benefits, so no altruism there on his part. So if the procedure takes place, is it right? Certainly to the patient it is, and probably to the doctor, but not to the opponents of the practice. So again we have muddy waters here. If euthanasia cannot be qualified as absolutely altruistic (again in our human minds) then it certainly cannot fall at the "right" end of the spectrum, but rather like the concepts of murder and cannibalism, it should and does fall somewhere in the middle.
So now I must ask, do we really even have a spectrum? Examples from both ends, seemingly clear cut examples, don't fall where we superficially think they do. It's more like a big cauldron of behaviors that sometimes allow certain behaviors to roil up to the top and be deemed "good" or "bad". The surface behaviors are really only that surface ingredients, that periodically burst forth to our eyes, long enough for us to denounce them or glorify them while all the rest of the time the cauldron is mixing everything together creating the soup of the human experience.
We make our own rules, like it or not. We determine what we think is good, bad or indifferent. We compare, discriminate and isolate everything around us, especially ourselves. There is no spectrum chiseled in stone tablets, sent from above by some invisible yet all powerful overlord. We have made it up and it is not true. The world is not the handiwork of god, nor is it the handiwork of us, it is the handiwork of it. We call it beautiful because we have decided it is. When we are gone, the world will still look like whatever the world will look like then, and no one will be the wiser. Happy new year, everyone, and thanks to those who have been periodically reading this blog over the past year.
So after asking myself what I liked about it, I asked myself what I thought my very religious parents probably like about it. I came up with the same answer, the sheer spectacle of our world.
I found this an interesting thought to pursue, so I continued my self-interrogation roughly as follows.
Question: What do my parents see in the grandiosity of our world that I do not?
Answer: Nothing, we see the same beauty.
Q: So where do my parents think the beauty of the world comes from?
A: God.
Q: And where do I think the beauty of the world comes from?
A: Nowhere. The beauty of the world does not exist in the world. In other words, it is not a feature of the world, but an interpretation within the confines of my mind, of the world as it exists. If I were not here, or for that matter, were no humans at all here, then beauty being an idea would not exist. Beauty is a thought that we are capable of having, and thoughts are without a doubt confined to the mind. Without our minds, beauty's state of idea-ness could not exist and thus would not exist. The world is what it is, the mountains we look at are big to us because we are comparing our size with their's, the rivers are blue to our eyes, the diversity of life and it's various manifestations are noteworthy to humanity only because we can compare them (since they exist) to the idea of them not existing, an ability which is unique (probably) to humans. The act of comparison is what creates our ideas including that of beauty. So again, I do not attribute the world's beauty as having come from somewhere, much less a god. It is of our own devising, and our ability to do such a thing is the direct result of our brains being developed as much as they are. And just to be clear, the notion of ideas being planted in our minds (by some outside interloper) can be adequately put to rest when you consider the alternative of comparison generating discrimination. We compare. We then discriminate, assigning beauty to one side and ugliness to another, with banality somewhere in the middle. Our minds, in the act of comparison, are the generators of what we say is beautiful.
My parent's see the beauty of the world as the proof of god's existence.
I see the beauty of the world as the beauty of the world, as my mind determines it to be, through comparison and subsequent discrimination.
But, here's the real point, we both see the beauty of the world. It is the world, visible, measurable, and tangible to which, at least in part, those who believe in god point to as a reason to harbor such a belief. These people are relying on evidence for their belief. Evidence in the form of the extant world and it's vastness. The sheer size of the world as displayed by the BBC's documentary is proof of god's creativity and handprint, to my extended family.
But the thing is, the evidence they are relying on to solidify their position is, in this case, evidence for the exact opposite as well, namely that the world is tangible and explainable. The mountains majesty is there for all to see, and if so desired, to touch and analyze. the rocks and elements that comprise the mountain can be discovered, named and repeatedly recognized, thus pulling back a little bit more of the veil of the physical world. Indeed the physical world we see has an explanation completely devoid of divine invocation. Infact, the explanations offered by the last few centuries of ever-progressive scientific discovery reveal complexities of nature that no religious text has ever even described, much less adequately explained away. For instance, there are cave systems throughout the world that house life forms that simply were unknown to the arabs and jews of the 1st century a.d. Animals that are pigmentless, and eyeless, because these physical characteristics were and continue to be unnecessary to them, have lived in these isolated areas of the world for more time than the bible recounts. To the testimony of these animals, the great flood of noah as described in the bible, is incompatible. It is understandable that the authors of the middle eastern religious texts did not know of animals like these, or others (emperor penguins, carrier pigeons, dwarf mastodons (who were alive at the time of the writing of the old testament)). And without the knowledge of these animals, or better said, with only the knowledge of the largely agriculturally-domesticated animals with which they were surrounded( such as rams and goats), the civilizations who passed these stories of man's superiority over the animal kingdom (and interestingly enough also the plant kingdom, but not the fungus or slime-mold kingdoms) are easily forgiven for concocting a story to describe, as best they could with the information they had, the world as it appeared to them. What is harder to forgive is the determination through time to cling to these abhorridly incomplete descriptives of the world we live in. We know polar bears exist, but the biblical authors did not. Should we then trust that these stories created so long ago, and designed to describe the natural world and our kingship over it are still representative of the truth of our world? Of course not. We cannot allow ourselves to "believe" in something that has been overturned by a wider discovery, yet that is exactly what the world at large has been doing for more than 2 millenia. Religions request that we suspend our disbelief quite in the face of more satisfying and sensible explanations. To that end, over time, religions have surriptiously altered the arena of disparity to another more slippery slope, that of the mental accuity of humankind.
The soul, the consciousness, the human condition is undoubtedly what my family would now point to in defence of their belief in the religious. There is, in their minds, something which has yet to be explained, the human condition and all the stuff that goes along with that; concepts like morality, right and wrong. To the religious, these are concepts about which science can offer no insight, or better said, the natural world has not nor could ever have a way to explain. They also would maintain that morality is something that transcends humanity and is part of a divine set of laws laid down long before mankind ever stepped foot out of the good-ol-garden . I would take issue with these concepts, and infact I do. Here's how.
Morality is commonly accepted as the umbrella term for defining right and wrong, but the word actually offers no clear definition of anything. It harbors the other two terms but does little else. Ask yourself " what does morality mean". what answer do you come up with that doesn't invoke the words right or wrong? Morality is only a word, one which at best simply makes reference to a particular realm of humanity. In this respect, it is just like the words right and wrong. Ask yourself "what does right mean" or "what does wrong mean". What answer do you come up with that doesn't invoke the words morality or right or wrong. Instead of offering definitions, all three of these words rely on the assumptive practices of those who say them to divert the attention of those who hear them uttered or see them written on a page. The word morality assumes that there is an outside standard to which all behavior is measured, a spectrum that at one end reflects universally acceptable behavior, and at the other end, universally unacceptable behavior. These poles of universal acceptance or rejection are what the words right and wrong are in reference to. The words right and wrong are not descriptors, they are instead judges of what is acceptable and what is not. Something intersting yet subtle to notice is that these words also rely on the assumption that this spectrum actually exists, that there is some universal standard, removed from the behaviors themselves, to which the behaviors can be judged. Now I'm not sure how far Heisenberg's uncertainty principle can extend (that which you observe you change i.e. if you know the position of a particle you cannot know it's velocity and vice versa) but what is clear is that none of the words include a description or even a measurement of what is most important, behavior.
Morality refers to the entire spectrum, Right refers to the acceptable side of things and Wrong refers to the unacceptable side of things, but again none of the words properly addresses what the spectrum should be used for, actually measuring behavior(s). The words morality, right and wrong don't describe actual behaviors, they only report where along the spectrum behaviors might fall. So in this sense there is no value to use words like right, wrong or morality, because at best they simply place undescribed behaviors along a possibly non-existant spectrum of judgement mostly, as we will see, in an deceptively arbitrary manner. Again, all three assume there is such a spectrum. But when that assumption is abandoned we can see that such judgemental practices become silly. To return a previous point, without the human mind, ideas simply don't exist, and this applies to idea that a spectrum exists with which to assign a place to human behavior(s). We created this spectrum, without us, there is no concept of morality. Just look at the idea of killing. Non-human animals do it all the time and show no remorse for their victims. It's all in a day's work so-to-speak. Certainly these predators recognize that their prey are alive, yet they commence to killing them anyway, and as if that was not bad enough, they then EAT what they killed, and why, because they "know" if they don't eat they will suffer and maybe they know they will die. There is fear present in predators. And certainly the prey animals recognize that predators are trying to kill them, so one cannot say that they do not display fear of pain or death. If such was the case, and these animals showed no fear of predators, then they certainly wouldn't be the excellent runners they are, or so adept at camoflauge, infact the entire arms race between predator and prey would have never gotten off the ground, because the predators would have wiped out all the prey, seeing as how the prey didn't resist, which would have of course led to the demise of the predators themselves, because if you don't have a steadily resupplying reserve of prey, eventually you will run out of food and die yourself. So fear of death most likely exists for the prey and predator alike, yet the killing still goes on. Such "emotions" don't cause the predators to stop their hunt or the prey from standing idly by. No, the predator-prey relationship abounds and has done so since the beginning of life. Predators don't feel bad for their prey, certainly not enough to not go after them. Rather, murder (the premature and intentional ending of a life) is a natural part of the life cycle. It is we who have villified the practice.
Now of course we qualify murder as the killing of someone for the sake of killing someone. The choice to kill someone (of our own species) is what has made the practice fall at the "wrong" end of the spectrum. But, and this is crucial to keep in mind, the act of killing is no different to a lion as it is to us, the only difference between our two species is the reason behind the killing. And where does reasoning come from, the human mind. So the origin of morality's spectrum is again revealed to be a concoction of the human mind.
Cannibalism is another good example to look at. Across the animal world, cannibalism is not a universally accepted behavior, but it is also not a universally unacceptable behavior either. In some species, it happens all the time, as a part of the life cycle. Even plants practice it, although the process is much longer, and consequently doesn't cause humanity to cringe at the thought, like we do when considering animalistic cannibalism. Since the practice is not universal on either side of our spectrum of judgement, then it must lie somewhere in the middle. Well, but, murder is also acceptable in some instances (self-defense, war-times, capital punishment) so shouldn't it too be considered to fall somewhere in the middle of our spectrum, rather than at the polar end of unacceptable behavior? (Notice again, the spectrum does not describe the behavior, it only assigns a judgement to the acceptability of it). Cannibalism is interesting in that most everyone would agree that it is a "wrong" behavior, but how so? In the same manner that we think murder is "wrong"? Mind you, I am not condoning either practice, I am only discussing the idea of whether or not there is an outside standard of comparison which exists, by using familiar and extreme behavioral examples such as murder and cannibalism. For the record, Don't kill anyone or eat anyone. Caveat done, back to the blog.
Well what about, the good or "right" side of things? We talked about murder and cannibalism, and have shown that the spectrum doesn't provide the definitions we think it does, and also incidentally we have shown that, at least the polar end of universally "wrong" is not so polar afterall, since the extremes of human behavior actually fall in the middle.
So let's look at altruism. That seems like a behavior that would certainly fall at the "right" polar end of our spectrum. What altruism is, our spectrum doesn't tell us, it again only assigns it a place of "rightness", and again only within our minds. If we weren't here, altruism (doing good for others regardless of effect on the doer) would not exist. All we have to do is look at the non-human world again and we can see that the closest non-human animals, and plants for that matter, ever come to altruism is through the phenomenon of symbiosis (where two species perform services for each other to the mutual benefit of both). It may be a uniquely human concept, altruism, but before we can examine it's place on our spectrum we must ask does it really exist at all? Well what are some altruistic behaviors we could examine? How about military service in times of war? That seems like a good one, especially right now. Except, military people get a paycheck when they are in the military, whether or not there is a war going on, so nope, military service does not meet the criteria of being altruistic because there is a benefit to the doer (paycheck). Brave and to be commended, but not altruistic.
What about religious persecution, standing up for your beliefs? Well, we all know that those who are religiously fervent enough in their beliefs to be persecuted for them, are also banking on the paradise that awaits the martyrs of the faith, so nope, the benefit to the persecuted is there (at least in their minds) and thus religious piety does not qualify as altruistic either. But let's say somewhere in the world there is an example of pure unsullied altruism taking place right now. what does it matter if that example is being performed by a human to a member of a different species. Nothing. It is only altruistic if it helps our fellow man. Before the animal rights folk jump all over me, let explain a bit further. Let's say the unsullied example of altruistic behavior took place in a world where no humans existed save our one hero, instead there were only non-human animals incapable of creating a concept like altruism. This human constantly behaved altruistically, to the other animals around them, but with no accolades or reciprocity (thus adhering to the qualifications of being considered an altruistic individual), how would this person ever go about discerning that their behavior was altruistic? To this individual, altruism would simply be the way of life. Having no other humans (individuals capable of coming up with altruism) with which to compare their behavior, this human would not really be altruistic so much as they would just be a (the) person. In such a scenario, we can see how altruism is another concoction of the human mind, and as such, it easily falls onto the "right" end of the equally concocted spectrum of judgement.
Now we can ask whether altruistic behavior isreally deserving of being on the "right" end of the spectrum. What about the case of euthanasia? For a doctor to perform this procedure to a dying cancer patient, who clearly has expressed the desire for it to be done, would result in imprisonment for the doctor (Dr. Kevorkian), and before you say "well there's your altruism for you", remember that Kevorkian got paid for his services, so he might have had some detriments to weigh his decision against, but there were also some benefits, so no altruism there on his part. So if the procedure takes place, is it right? Certainly to the patient it is, and probably to the doctor, but not to the opponents of the practice. So again we have muddy waters here. If euthanasia cannot be qualified as absolutely altruistic (again in our human minds) then it certainly cannot fall at the "right" end of the spectrum, but rather like the concepts of murder and cannibalism, it should and does fall somewhere in the middle.
So now I must ask, do we really even have a spectrum? Examples from both ends, seemingly clear cut examples, don't fall where we superficially think they do. It's more like a big cauldron of behaviors that sometimes allow certain behaviors to roil up to the top and be deemed "good" or "bad". The surface behaviors are really only that surface ingredients, that periodically burst forth to our eyes, long enough for us to denounce them or glorify them while all the rest of the time the cauldron is mixing everything together creating the soup of the human experience.
We make our own rules, like it or not. We determine what we think is good, bad or indifferent. We compare, discriminate and isolate everything around us, especially ourselves. There is no spectrum chiseled in stone tablets, sent from above by some invisible yet all powerful overlord. We have made it up and it is not true. The world is not the handiwork of god, nor is it the handiwork of us, it is the handiwork of it. We call it beautiful because we have decided it is. When we are gone, the world will still look like whatever the world will look like then, and no one will be the wiser. Happy new year, everyone, and thanks to those who have been periodically reading this blog over the past year.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
