The Atheist Spy

All non-Christian religions are demonic

2006-06-10T00:10:00.000-07:00

Islam Vs Christianity

2006-06-09T23:58:00.000-07:00

This one is the best of all:

Daily Show and the 10 Commandments

2006-06-09T23:57:00.000-07:00

This one's pretty good too:

Even Stephvens

2006-06-09T23:49:00.000-07:00

This video may sound unrelated to this blog, but give it a minute or two:

All Right, I'm Convinced

2006-05-17T11:48:00.000-07:00

Proof of God's existence using a banana:

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-4472004596147265716

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QGMuIyBK5P4

http://www.dumpalink.com/media/1146213904/Proof_Of_God_By_Banana

http://www.videovat.com/videos/1714/god-banana.aspx

http://thatvideosite.com/view/2204.html

(These all link to the same video, on different sites).

Of course, this is just Intelligent Design at work. Still pretty funny, though.

Another Rondam Rambling

2006-05-17T11:44:00.000-07:00

This one is not about me, though. Still, do check it out, it's good stuff. "The right way for religion to critique science (and vice versa)":

http://rondam.blogspot.com/2006/04/right-way-for-religion-to-critique.html

The post Ron wrote just before that one is about this awesome talk by the great (and, unfortunately, late) Douglas Adams. Also very good reading.

In Response To Feedback

2006-05-16T17:53:00.000-07:00

I have received some comments on this blog (Wow, people are actually reading!), and I now want to reply to some of them.

Before I do, though - thank you all so much for reading and for helping me figure all of this out. I could use all the help, input, feedback, ideas, and perspectives I can get in trying to understand all this stuff. So if you have religious or atheist friends who like to think about this stuff (or who usually don't but might like the challenge), do send them this way and have them help this project along.

Now, to my responses.

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"Quantamos" a.k.a Amos Anderson wrote a long and thoughtful comment about how hard it would be for an atheist to accept any proof of God's existence and how hard it would be for a theist to accept any proof of God's non-existence. The comment ended with

Being a Christian does not primarily deal with "why". Christianity is all about asking *how* one might become righteous before God. If you don't feel unrighteous before God, then Christianity is guaranteed to mean nothing to you.

My answer to that is: But why would you want to become righteous before God? Why is that important? The basics of Christianity is about believing that it is important to want to be good, to want to follow God's plan. But if you don't believe in God's plan (which is the Christians' answer to "Why"), then you will not feel the need to be righteous before God. So, sure, day-to-day Christianity deals with how to be good, but for you to be a Christian in the first place, you must incorporate into your belief system the idea that you must be good BECAUSE it's what God wants, and that the whole world exists BECAUSE God deliberately made it.

You can pursue "how to be good" through means other than religion, but the unique thing about religion is that it includes the "why" as well.

In another comment, Amos said, among other things:

If ID is ever shown to be correct, to any degree, it will have been because scientists demonstrate it to be so. i don't see any problem with Christians proposing theories or critiquing science since after all scientists have taken the liberty of critiquing religion, but in the realm of science, only scientists get to decide what's right in the end. i'll leave "the end" to be ambiguous. :-)

Of course anyone is free to criticize science, and anyone is free to criticize religion. It is by addressing criticism that institutions grow and legitimize themselves - and it is by making your criticisms heard that you can cause positive change in these institutions.

The thing is, though, real scientists can never say Intelligent Design is true, because all that Intelligent Design says is "We cannot figure out how this works, so God did it". A scientist cannot propose a theory that says "No scientific theory can explain this". That just doesn't make any sense. A scientist's job is to investigate the mechanical, natural, causal processes behind something we observe. While a particular scientist or group can abandon the pursuit for a particularly elusive cause, a real scientist does not say "No scientist could ever possibly figure this out". A real scientist does not validate Intelligent Design because Intelligent Design is the claim that THERE CAN BE NO CAUSAL / NATURAL PROCESS behind certain things. Even if this claim is true, the whole purpose of science is to investigate causal, natural processes, so Intelligent Design is not science - even if it is right.

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An "Anonymous Coward" (as they say over at /.) said

Why are you trying to model their worldview? It's readily noticeable that theists appeal to emotion rather than reason. I don't see how making up a contrived model helps atheists become more emotionally persuasive.

I tried to answer this in my second post and I have addressed it in other places too. Let me see how concisely I can put it: I am not trying to figure out how Christians think just so I can present atheism to them in a way they will accept it. My mission is NOT to sabotage the local Baptist church. I am trying to understand how they think because 1) it might reveal some interesting things about how I think, 2) too many people are theists for me to be able to easily dismiss the whole idea as junk, 3) too many SMART, REASONABLE people are theists for me to be able to easily dismiss the whole idea as junk, and 4) I honestly want to understand how someone can live with basing so much of their lives on things they cannot know are true (or, if they know these things are true, I'd be curious to know how they can know that). I think that atheism is a more honest world view, but I can see that theism might be a happier one. Do many people see the choice this way? The ones who don't, what choice (if any at all) did THEY make? The ones who do see the choice this way, why did they make one choice or the other?

There are smart, reasonable people who are theists, and there are smart, reasonable people who are atheists. How can that be? That's what I really want to find out. How and why are leaps of faith taken?

I think that exploring this issue will allow me to build a bridge that will make atheism acceptable/understandable to more theists, and will make theism acceptable/understandable to more atheists. This whole thing was triggered by my reading of a very bad atheism book where I saw unfair criticisms made about theists. Both theists and atheists need to understand their mindsets better so that they can more honestly compare it to the other side's mindset. That's what I am trying to help achieve.

So the model may be contrived, but if I can model atheist AND theist views in a way that atheists AND theists agree with, and if that model shows that we are not so different after all (or are different in a relatively inconsequential way), then I will have achieved something neat, something I feel needs doing but I don't see anyone else doing it - I just see people writing books very far on one side of the spectrum criticising people who are all the way on the opposite end, making the whole debate not-at-all compelling to moderate and pragmatic centrists like myself and, I suspect, like most liberal Christians.

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Zachary Moore, in response to my response to his response to my "spiritual orientation" model, said:

But I was a person who wanted to know "Why?" for those 20 years. You make it sound as if I was so unconcerned with the idea of faith and meaning that I was only a Christian in name. That's by all means not the case - my apostasy was very much a change in the types of questions I was asking. And the reason why I stopped asking, "Why?" is precisely because I realized how irrational it is to ask a question that can't be answered! So I still think I'm a glaring counterexample to your thesis.

First of all, Thanks for writing in! Now, I think your case is NOT a counter-example to my theory. All I'm saying is that belief in God comes from a need to ask "Why". I called this need (or lack thereof) "spiritual orientation", which makes it sound like a fundamental part of one's personality. I put it this way because it is very hard to say that this need is influenced by, or caused by, any other dimension of your personality or identity. I did NOT mean to say that this need can't change. It DID change for most atheists at some point in their lives.

You said "My apostasy was very much a change in the types of questions I was asking. And the reason why I stopped asking, "Why?" is precisely because I realized how irrational it is to ask a question that can't be answered!". And that's when you became an atheist! I'm not saying that you were not really a Christian up until that point. Up until that point, you cared about the why, so you were a Christian. When you stopped chasing after the "Why", you stopped being a Christian. So the way I see it, your story fits inside my thesis, rather than being "a glaring counterexample to" it.

In the end, I'm not really sure I see what we're disagreeing about, but I'll try to figure it out.

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Breakerslion wrote a fairly long but very nice comment:

Hi. I really enjoyed your first post, and I thought that the "how" versus "why" argument did explain a few things that were seemingly irrational about scientific theists.

I think that I too do not fall neatly into your thesis. I still wonder "why?", but I do not exclude the possibility (probability) that there is no "why". I also do not believe that there is a superstitious/theistic answer necessary to explain "why", at least not one that the human brain is capable of imagining. I differ from Zack in two ways, I think. I believe that truth is stranger than fiction, and I believe that one must ask questions that have no answer in order to confirm that they are unanswerable and not just not yet answered.

I too had a religious upbringing, and only turned my back on it in my 18th year. My reasons were not so much disbelief in the possibility of god at that time as they were my disbelief that my fellow man knew jack about the nature of the alleged god. All that I now believe followed from my decision to find out for myself just how improbable the whole god idea was. Once I saw that, the ulterior motives for theism presented themselves.

One thing about your thesis dos not coincide with my life experience. In my experience, males, or children who have been raised in the male paradigm, or however you want to think of it, are more easily able to compartmentalize aspects of their lives than females. You might think this sexist, but in the case of men and women, emotionally, hormonally, and cognitively, there are measurable differences over large numbers. That is to say, there are masculine females and feminine males, but these do not represent the peak of the bell curve. My concern is, that if I apply your theory against the backdrop of my life experience, then I should see more religious male scientists than female religious scientists, and this does not appear to be the case.

Your thoughts?

Firstly, I am very glad "that the 'how' versus 'why' argument did explain a few things that were seemingly irrational about scientific theists". I do give Ron Garret the credit for phrasing that whole issue in such an elegant, simple, and powerful way. Also, Stephen Jay Gould's idea of Non-Overlapping Magisteria really laid the groundwork for this kind of thinking. So I'm really just standing on the shoulders of giants here. This is so clear to me now, I'm always surprised when so many people seem to find science and religion incompatible. I guess we have the Intelligent Design idiots to thank for that.

Moving on... The need to ask why can manifest itself at different levels. You only need to ask, and to find out it might be unanswerable. Some people need an answer. So I do stand by my model, although I admit that "atheism vs the need to ask why" is not a black-and-white issue; There are more shades of grey involved, and I'll try to think about them and what impact they have on my model.

The role of compartmentalizing - or, rather, of the difficulty in compartmentalizing that some people (you say, mostly women) experience - is potentially another interesting factor in how people "follow" their faith, let their faith become a part of more or less of their lives. I am not a woman, and I would be curious to learn more about this. Many of my conversations with my then-girlfriend ended with her saying "People can't compartmentalize things the way you think they can", to which I replied "Sure they can", and that was basically a stalemate we did not manage to progress from. If you have done serious thinking about what this means, and concluded anything from it, then I would love to hear/read about it. I never really thought this was an area of study for psychologists or gender-studies academics, but if it is, I want to look into it a bit.

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Robert Sutton a.k.a. SouthSide RabbitSlayer wrote in a few times. Once was to say

You're doing a wonderful thing, thank for being our spy. I did a little peepin' myself into scientology. I'll put up a post soon. There just as crazy as the Christians.You're doing a wonderful thing, thank for being our spy. I did a little peepin' myself into scientology. I'll put up a post soon. There just as crazy as the Christians.

My pleasure, glad you liked the blog. And you're absolutely right: Scientologists are crazy - crazier than most Christians. While some of Scientology is about discipline, learning to control your desires, and other very practical almost-Buddhist things, the religion has some very serious problems. The first one is that they discourage Scientologists from being exposed to other ways of thinking, from critically evaluating Scientlogy for themselves. Even worse, if they leave their religion, no other Scientologist can be in contact with them, so if your family consists of Scientologists, they can't even have a relationship with you any more if you leave, which scares a lot of Scientologists into just shutting up about their doubts. The other very bad thing is that a lot of the theology is withheld from Scientologists unless they pay the church a fortune over a long period of time. Each of those two things, individually, makes Scientology a religion I want to go nowhere near. There are a lot of very emotional, almost unbelievable criticisms of scientology on the internet. But one very ojective, very reasonable, very impartial article that still confirms how messed-up Scientology is can be found here.

Another comment by Robert Sutton:

The UU church. Don't waste you time. At least focuse on a church that has a belief.

Like I've said, I think a world view with less faith and more doubt is more honest. However, like my roommate says, if you doubt everythin, you discover nothing, so you are right in that the UU church would not make my thoughts on religion grow the way this experience has been doing. Then again, at some point I might want to take a break from all this and become a part of a church where I know most of my opinions and beliefs regarding spirituality are pretty much the same as everyone else's, and at that point the UU church looks like the most likely option. Even if my roommate thinks he can be a Baptist and not believe in a lot of things, I know many people in his church would disagree with him. If I want to be comfortable, I'd rather be in a church where everyone would accept my beliefs (or lack thereof).

And one more by Robert, broken up into three chunks:

I was raised catholic. When I tuned 11 I found out there were other religions and couldn't get past the fact that there were people that believed in other "Gods" If "God" was to be an ultimate truth there certainly couldn't be different versions of him. 1 god or a 1000, eat pig or don't eat pig or don't eat animals, it just didn't add up. For many years I searched without success. I clamed to be agnostic as this seemed the most logical to me. I was willing to accept the fact that I may never know this thing called god. Last year though I saw something that changed my life, I saw "Zero" and the answers I was looking for came rolling in. I made a philosophy called Zero. Complete with ethics and a description of what I think god is. Most religious people call me an atheist but I don't find myself latching onto the title. Most of the atheists I've met think that this was all an accident and pointless. I feel quite the opposite. I think life is inevitable and the highest form the universe can manifest as. I think we are god. And I think that death will be a wonderful "place". I believe that when we die we go back from where we came.... ZERO It's a wonderful place without any sense of self.

I would love if you take a look a my work: www.robertsutton.net, read "Zero" and "State of the Union" Give me all the criticize you can muster. Prove me wrong. Show me my errors. I am now almost as bad as the religious because I have tried to create a Religion. I did this because I think if there is an ultimate truth the whole world would have to unite in it for lasting peace to ever exist.

I must admit I haven't checked that out yet, but I will. Sounds interesting. (Robert's blog can be found at southside-rabbitslayer.blogspot.com - check it out). Moving on with Robert's comment...

I have given your question considerable thought. I have been asking that very question myself for many years. The reason religious people don't like to question their religion is because of fear. They must believe in a happily ever after place were they will be chillin' with all there dead friends and family. They can't cope with the fact that after they die that might be it. Only a person that has loved their life (good and bad times), living every day like it might be their last day in existence, being true to themselves, will be comfortable with the idea there is no after life...

That's certainly one dimension, but probably not as dominant as many non-theists think it would be.

...Buddhist being the strange exception. I used to like Buddhists, now however I feel bad for them. If this life is all we have it is a crime to spend your whole life trying to rid yourself of your self. The self is all we ever going to have and it should be respected.

But they try to go BEYOND themselves, beyond the thinking/wanting entity, since they believe that this will lead to enlightenment. A big part of Buddhism is that you can only be happy once you have learned to not want things you do not need, once you have learned to take what is given and expect no more. The way I understand it, Zen Buddhists go further, trying to stop thinking and wanting altogether, so that they can just "be". Striving for this probably gives them a cleaner, more honest picture of the nature of the human mind than most other people ever get. By getting rid of their superficial selves, I guess they might see the real core underneath. It sounds like you "respect" your desires, your personality, and your thoughts so much that you never want to try to move them aside to see what is at the core of "self" underneath all that, what "I" really means. I'm not saying I understand what the human self and the mind are all about, but I suspect they're simpler and more fundamental than the way most westerners define themselves by what they want, what they enjoy, what they believe, and what they are good at. Other authors have done too good a job writing about the nature of consciousness, identity, memetics, etc, for me to try and do it here, but a few quick online searches will bring up many books on the topic. Most of them require "trying to rid yourself of your self" in one way or another so that you can glimpse what a human mind really is.

I'm obviously no expert on Buddhism. All I know about it comes from reading Gödel Escher Bach, from taking one class in college that also talked about other religions, and from having a roommate who is interested in Buddhism and talks about it a bit from time to time. Basically, the idea of making oneself want less and expect less in order to be more content seems like a valid one. You can't NOT suffer, but if you teach yourself to be content and to no longer want things, then you suffer less: You are less-often disappointed, you are less-often dissatisfied, you do not expect things should be other than they are.

As usual, Watterson says it best: The key to happiness is lowering your expectations to the point where they're already met. (This one's pretty good too).

As for the whole Zen "stop thinking, stop wanting, only BE" thing, all I know about it is what is said in Gödel Escher Bach, but it still seems really interesting. I wonder how accurate a portrayal of Zen Buddhism that book presents.

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In response to how my roommate thinks (and I agree) that religion is fundamentally about fooling yourself into being a better person, one last "Anonymous Coward" (this one far less cowardly, as he gave me his email address) said, among other things:

Just because you believe that Christianity is TRUE doesn't mean you are prone to make unreasonable decisions or that your actions are in some way superior to those who use religion just "to fool themselves". While I am of the latter ilk, the people I've learned the most about faith from, the people who've made faith most useful to me, are people who think Jesus was the son of god and that he could walk on water.

They avoid fooling themselves by understanding, as many Christians do, that the ability to perform miracles, at least miracles as profound as walking on water or failing to stay dead, are extremely rare.

The main point of that post was to say that I, personally, think I can learn more from a "to fool themselves" kind of person than I could from a "This is TRUE" kind of person. It doesn't mean that the "to fool themselves" person is superior or more right (although I personally think that this way of looking at it is more honest). It just means I want to learn - or at least to START learning - from someone who thinks like me. In fact, I do plan on sitting down and having long, patient conversations with people who think christianity is "TRUE". I've had some of those conversations already, and I have more planned. I can indeed learn a lot from these people. In fact, one of the main points of the effort I am making, of going to church and learning about Christianity, is for me to learn enough so that I can talk to these people and understand what the heck they're saying, rather than being turned off by the way they say it.

And about miracles, this is something I have been talking about with my ex-girlfriend quite a bit, so you can expect more on that soon in upcoming posts. Still, when you say "They avoid fooling themselves by understanding that the ability to perform miracles is extremely rare", this is still fooling yourself. NOT fooling yourself would be keeping in mind the possibility that no miracles may have happened at all.

Regarding my post about prayer, this same reader wrote a comment, an excerpt from which is below:

Anybody who thinks that what you're supposed to do when you pray is beg god to give you stuff and change things just because you want them to change didn't pay attention in Sunday school.

Even the so-called "Lord's Prayer", i.e. "our father, who art in heaven", although it seems to pander to God's will to "lead us not into temptation", the effect that imploring god not to lead you into temptation has or is meant to have is to encourage YOU not to give in to temptation. Every time you ask God to give you strength, you are necessarily asking yourself to give you strength.

So what you're saying is, EVERY Christian sees prayer fundamentally in the same way I do? Even if you do, and even if a lot of other Christians do, I seriously doubt that all Christians, whenever they pray, never ask God to do something for them. I guess you could be right, but I doubt it. I'll have to ask more Christians about how they feel about prayer.

Anyways, that reader also wrote one more comment, most of which follows (split into 6 chunks):

First of all, I think your blog and the mission behind it are incredible. This is the kind of thing that needs to be done in conjunction with the debunking of the more dangerous breed of religious dogma that exists so as to create positive social change. Dawkins' and Dennet's approaches to the problem cause me so much outrage that I literally lose sleep over (I am currently losing sleep over it as I write this to you).

My pleasure.

I am one of those people who needs to as Why, but I also need to ask How. I do believe in god, but only insofar as his effect on what I intend to do, and insofar as the effect my faith has had on my ability to translate my good intentions sometimes in physical reality. Otherwise, I'm quite willing to, at any moment, utterly discard the idea that there is a god, that there is such a thing as moral perfection, and the like if it means that I can better understand the causal nature of things. But understanding the causal nature of things often leads us into murky waters in respect to bettering ourselves and the world in tandem.

Right. Any atheist (and most Christians, and most religious scientists) can see that the methods of answering "Why" are not very good at answering "How". But, as you noticed, it is important to point out that using the methods of answering "How" to try and answer "Why" is a bad idea.

There's a guy in the class who is under the impression that all behavior is selfish, even altruistic behavior. What's so funny is that if altruistic behavior is selfish behavior, then this introduces a paradox that is far less rational than a belief in god.

...

A recent theory that's starting to be put forward to explain unconditional altruistic behavior is costly signaling theory. The idea that risky actions are displayed before a general audience for the purpose of developing coalitional ties and perhaps reaping reproductive benefits. So what some assholes are starting to imply is that every altruistic action, even unconditional ones, are really just selfish because we only incur undue risk to impress people so that we can take advantage of them.

I think followers of Gandhi and MLK Jr. would reply to this tripe with a resounding, "Fuck you", and then go back to selflessly and peacefully protesting, incurring the risk of getting beaten and/or killed for the sake of the future, regardless of whether or not they have offspring. Let's not forget that MLK and Gandhi were both deeply religious.

The relationship between religion, motivation, rationality, and altruism (and morals in general) is a very interesting one. However, I think you're making this more complicated than it has to be. You can read my reflections on this issue (which are by no means final or perfectly conclusive) here - more coming soon.

Religion, or faith, is a very useful tool in encouraging altruistic behavior given that humans are just as prone toward selfish behavior.

I think we're in agreement on that one.

Picking up the Bible and saying it is all rubbish because there is a lot of junk in it is like picking up a banana that has a bruise and throwing the whole thing away.

I guess that sounds less terrible than "Don't throw the baby out with the bathwater", but yes, I think we're in agreement again. I think most reasonable atheists have to agree that there's some really good stuff in the Bible. The thing is, some Christians seem to not see that there's some really bad stuff in the Bible. If everyone were as centrist and pragmatic as we are, the world would probably be a better place.

Thank you again for making a case for faith. I know it must be hard for you given that all the evidence points toward the nonexistence of god, the good, and the True (as opposed to the verifiably, falsifiably true). I have much respect for you whereas, beyond their excellent ability to describe the way many things are, I fucking despite Dawkins [and Dennett] and his ilk.

I'm glad you like my blog. If you believe in God, hate Dennett and Dawkins, but like my work, then I must be on the right track.

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Sorry I've Been Gone So Long

2006-05-16T15:31:00.000-07:00

Hello again everyone. First of all, please check out my new post, which appears below some posts you've already read. It's called "Religion and Morality" and will probably be the first of at least a few posts on that subject. You can read this new post here.

Now, I want to apologize for not having posted anything new for over 3 weeks.

One reason for this is that I started a new job. I had been unemployed for the previous 5 months (and I knew I would be getting a great job for the last 2 of those months, so I wasn't too stressed out about my unemployment). This means I had been going to sleep whenever I felt like it and waking up whenever I felt like it. I did a lot of reading, a lot of writing, worked on other projects, and basically got used to only leaving what I was working on (like a blog post, or a chapter of a book) when I was done with it. Now, I have to leave what I'm doing at 11PM at the latest, which requires me to think differently about my evening activities. It requires me to be disciplined and organized, to say "I will finish this later" or "I must not watch one more episode of Seinfeld". I haven't had as much discipline in that department as I hoped, so on many nights the allure of writing, reading, TV, and other things, can keep me up way past my bedtime. Bottom line: I have been super tired for the past 4 weeks. This means I have not gone to church and that I have not thought too much about religion and faith for the past few weeks, and also that I have not been in much of a writing mood.

One other cause for my absence lately is that I had an extremely interesting talk with my roommate right after Easter service (4 or 5 Sundays ago), one that got me thinking about things like the motivation for valuing selflessness over selfishness, the nature of altruism and compassion and the conscience, the value of humanism and faith-based morals, and the ways in which faith and rationalizing are involved in (possibly) EVERY moral system. I did not want to go to church or think any more about these issues (that is, I did not want to make any further progress) until I wrote down all the arguments and ideas we had in that conversation. I really wanted to document my state of mind at that point before I went any further. What can I say, in the field where I work, if you don't document what you're doing thoroughly enough for someone else to pick right up where you left off, then your work is next-to-useless. And even before I worked in this field, I've always been kind of a documentation freak, drawing maps of video game levels to make sure I explored every corner and gathered every power-up, drawing annotated diagrams about things I made and how I made them, etc.

One last thing that has kept me from blogging in the past few weeks is that my very good friend and ex-girlfriend read all of this blog and sent me a fairly massive (>1400 words) email giving her reaction to each of the points I made. I read it all, thought about it, and responded with an even longer email that addresses each of the points SHE had made. She then replied to my email just as thoroughly and thoughtfully, and then I just recently replied to that second email of hers (this all took a while). She really forced me to think about the points I make here, to refine them, to think about how to best phrase them, to make sure they are consistent with each other, and to think about how they compare to a variety of different "Christian" sets of beliefs. With her permission, I might be posting this email exchange we had, since it does clarify a lot of things I want this blog to communicate.

So, because I have not gone to church in a while, because of how tired I've been, because of how my ex-girlfriend's emails used up so much of my thinking-and-writing-about-religion energy, and because I did not want to go any further before documenting my Easter-Sunday talk with my roommate, this blog has not seen much action lately. But that will change soon, especially since I have finished documenting that Easter-Sunday talk, so I will be going to church and small-group again and will have more to report soon.

Please do check out my new post. It appears below some newer ones since they are in the order I started writing them (rather than in the order I finish them), and since many of them refer to events that took place on a specific date and I want the blog's timeline to reflect this. I am also writing a "Pagan origins of Easter" post which will probably also end up buried under some of the posts you see below, since I started writing it BEFORE Easter.

And one more thing: I have received much feedback about my blog and I want to reply to some of them. That's coming up next.

Explaining Spiritual Orientation a little better by defending it

2006-04-23T14:04:00.000-07:00

I decided to Google "atheist spy" and other phrases from my blog and I found two other blogs, besides Ron Garret's, that mentioned it. Woo hoo! I'll try to not let the fame get to my head.

One of them is this entry on My Grassy Knoll:

http://mygrassyknoll.com/node/7562

The other is Goosing The Antithesis:

http://goosetheantithesis.blogspot.com/2006/04/is-atheism-spiritual-orientation.html

They are both written by Zachary Moore (personal site, Blogger profile, MyGrassyKnoll page). Not too surprisingly, they say the same thing, and as you will see, I think he misses some of the point, although this was probably caused by my not being too clear:

The implication is that some people are just born religious, and others are not- the obvious analogy is that of sexual orientation, and which the Atheist Spy refers to as a "spiritual orientation." This solution he feels will promote greater understanding between theists and atheists, since it removes the decision to accept a deity from rationality. But how accurate is this? I would submit as a counter-example, evidence A: myself. I was born into a Christian home, accepted Christian theism without complaint or question for two decades, and only began to question Christian doctrine upon closer examination of the source text. My path out of Christianity was facilitated exclusively by academic means and rational appraisal of arguments. So I would argue strongly that the choice of atheism was definitely rational- but according to the Atheist Spy, I'm an atheist because I had to be- because of my "spiritual orientation." If the analogy to sexual orientation is accurate, I would think that one's orientation is something inborn or intrinsic. So that means that for two decades, I was a closeted atheist- so closeted, in fact, that I didn't even know it.

If this phenomenon of "spiritual orientation" is true, then what causes it? The Atheist Spy doesn't offer any explanation of its origin. Is it genetic, like sexual orientation? There are some possibilities, but at best they predispose individuals to hallucinogenic or spatial orientation experiences that would suggest some kind of supernatural realm, but nothing which assigns purpose.

I think that going back to the Atheist Spy's original post provides a better explanation for the difference between theists and atheists. "If a skeptical, logical, scientific-minded, reasonable person grants that these two axioms are true, how much of Christianity are they enough to justify?" The problem is in granting those two axioms. Are the Christian axioms coherent, and are they necessary to understand the world? Obviously, they're neither. So I think that there is, in fact, a difference in rationality between theists and atheists- theists add a couple incoherent, unnecessary axioms to their worldview. That they do so because they want to believe in an intelligent purpose to the Universe may be relevant from a psychological perspective, but it doesn't set theism equal to atheism as a rational belief.

One, I did not say people were born with tendencies to be an atheist or a theist. Some of it might be genetic, some of it might be determined by other pre-natal factors, but I would guess that the bulk of it is determined by upbringing, by the kind of thinking one is exposed to as a child, by education, etc. In any case, by the time you're in your late teens, your mind has probably been "set" to either need to ask Why, or to not really find much meaning in that kind of question, thus eliminating the need, the hunger, for religion.

I would guess the most important factor would be whether the religious people you know talk about religion in terms of apologetics, Bible verses, the strict truth of the religion's mythology/theology, and other such "details", or in terms of more fundamental reasons why they find religion fulfilling, meaningful, insightful, and important. If religion is about Bible verses and the "truth" of myths and details, then of course any moderately smart, analytical person can do some reading and reject that. If religion is about the importance of being good, about compassion, about how to be happy, about what you have to worry about and what you don't have to worry about, about God's plan, about how God usually (but not always) helps those who help themselves, about Jesus as a moral leader, and about the validity of those ideas whether or not any of the stuff in the Bible actually happened, then someone brought up with that might not have as much reason to reject it all - because even if the mythology and dogma are rejected, the idea of God still stands, and it can only be rejected if the person figured out that nothing in the world needs those ideas to be explained or justified.

So Zachary got it backwards: He says that someone is either born a theist, whose mind hungers for supernatural but unecessary and meaningful things, or an atheist, bound to reject all supernatural ideas by the use of reason. What I said is that, by the time you're an adult, either you need meaning and purpose in the world, or you don't. If you need it, then this need usually is fulfilled by supernatural things - and these things (or something like them) to you ARE necessary, because that's what this weird hunger is all bout.

If this phenomenon of "spiritual orientation" is true, then what causes it? ... There are some possibilities, but at best they predispose individuals to hallucinogenic or spatial orientation experiences that would suggest some kind of supernatural realm, but nothing which assigns purpose.

No, no, no. What I'm saying is, by the time you become an adult, you're disposed to look for SOMEthing which assigns purpose, and the suggestion of a supernatural realm just comes as a consequence because it is what is most likely to satisfy that disposition.

So that means that for two decades, I was a closeted atheist- so closeted, in fact, that I didn't even know it.

No. That means that, for 20 years, you were a person who never really cared for the Why that much. When you finally figured out that theism is only useful for people who care about the why (in other words, when you found out that Christian apologetics are a futile attempt to obscure a leap of faith), then you became an atheist, because of a lack of a need for meaning and purpose, a lack that had been a part (or a non-part) of you for 20 years.

"If a skeptical, logical, scientific-minded, reasonable person grants that these two axioms are true, how much of Christianity are they enough to justify?" The problem is in granting those two axioms. Are the Christian axioms coherent, and are they necessary to understand the world? Obviously, they're neither. So I think that there is, in fact, a difference in rationality between theists and atheists- theists add a couple incoherent, unnecessary axioms to their worldview.

No, my whole point is that, if you think Why is an important question, then those axioms - or something like them, something that requires some leap of faith - are necessary to answer Why. These axioms are necessary to THEM (the Christians), for them to explain questions that THEY have and that YOU (the atheist) don't. And they're not necessarily incoherent. If asking Why is necessary, you have to make some kind of leap of faith, and the Christian axioms are as good as any. So given that one must make some kind of leap of faith, Christians are not necessarily less rational (although many of them are, by incorporating tons more axioms (axioms that are not necessary even to answer Why) in the search for coherence). Of course, if you don't make any leap of faith, if you choose not to try and answer Why, then you can stay within the bounds of the really rational, so yes, an atheist is more rational. But a theist needs to ask why, so for him, not making a leap of faith is not an option. He feels he needs to venture down a path that can only be entered by making a leap of faith. After that point, though, he can be rational, and he can even keep in mind that he made a leap of faith, which forces him to remember that any conclusions made down that path are not as true as things found by reason alone, but they "feel" true because the need to ask Why is a path that leads to them.

That they do so because they want to believe in an intelligent purpose to the Universe may be relevant from a psychological perspective, but it doesn't set theism equal to atheism as a rational belief.

That's basically what Daniel Dennett says: Just because they need to ask Why, doesn't mean that this need legitimate, it just means they're mildly crazy; The need to ask why is a problem that causes people to make leaps of faith that land them in dangerous places beyond any logic. I disagree (or I think it's not that simple). The leap of faith is necessary, but a small leap of faith that leads to believing in a deliberate creator (and even the larger leap of faith that leads to believing that a morally perfect dude lived 2000 years ago), can still land you in a position where your choices are still made through Humanist methods - a religiously-motivated Humanism, since the magisteria between religion and morality can also be non-overlapping. You only get in trouble when the magisterium of religion starts overlapping those of science and morality.

In other words, one cannot answer "Why is the universe as it is? Why must we be good?" perfectly rationally without a leap of faith. But the answers to these questions don't have to affect anything else in a person's life, so when it comes to making decisions and doing things and living life, a theist can choose to do the same things as an atheist - they just see an additional "meaning" behind it all.

So, in the areas where an atheist is rational, a theist can still be as rational. The difference is that the theist has explored one additional area that the atheist, for the sake of rationality, chose to stay out of.

So it's really not as simple as "atheists are more rational". (Well, it can be, but I think that that way of looking at it is too divisive to make it more worthwhile than my approach).

And the causes for religious orientation (which I never said is decided prenatally) are probably the way religion is justified by those who justify it, but might be other things like education, the emphasis placed during upbringing for aksing Why and for asking How... And maybe, just maybe, some prenatal factors as well, who knows.

No church again

2006-04-23T13:42:00.000-07:00

I missed church today. I had an extremely long and fairly exhausting day yesterday, and a new daily schedule imposed on me this past week by my job caused me to not get my daily dose of sleep on any of the past 6 days. So I needed a day to sleep in. And to catch up on this blog and on other things I want to write and projects I want to work on. I'll probably go to Bible study this week, though.

A Rondam Rambling

2006-04-18T21:41:00.000-07:00

When I first published this blog, I sent an email about it to a few bloggers, skeptics, atheists, etc, whom I admire and whose work I like. One of them is Ron Garret. He apparently liked what he saw, because he posted about it on his blog:

http://rondam.blogspot.com/2006/04/why-vs-how-false-conflict.html

I was very happy - and not very surprised - that he mostly agrees with my ideas on spiritual orientation.

Indeed, he puts it very well and concisely: When inquiring about the universe, the best methods used to ask Why are not very good at answering How, or vice versa, and people get into trouble when they try. That's basically the idea behind the "non-overlapping magisteria": There are ways to go about investigating Why, and there are ways to go about investigating How, and one should be able to do both without one getting in the way of the other, or without one trying to sneak into the other. They're two separate, non-conflicting areas of thought, if you're reasonable about it.

My main idea, though, is not just that there is no real conflict between Why and How. Like I've already said, both are questions that could be asked and pursued by a reasonable person (like many scientists who are religious or otherwise spiritual).

What I really want to say is that, if you don't feel the need to answer Why, then you can reasonably become an atheist (unlike what some religious people think), and if you do feel the need to answer Why, then you can reasonably become a theist (unlike what some atheists think). So theism vs atheism is not about evidence or about who is "right", it's just about whether or not you care about the Why. There is no conflict between Why and How, but there does exist some conflict between atheists and theists, because they don't understand that the only reason why they are atheists/theists is because of their relationship with the question Why.

In any case, I am farly sure Ron agrees with me, I just wanted to make what I said more clear using the very cool way he put it.

One great excerpt from his entry about my blog: Here, Ron talks about why Intelligent Design is bound to fail (besides the fact that it tries to answer How using the tools used to answer Why):

"These fail because they attempt to critique science using logic, and that can never work because science by definition *is* logic. It is rather like trying to critique faith by saying, 'Jesus can't be the Son of God because I don't believe it.' It doesn't work."

Brilliant!

Well, science isn't logic, not exactly. But science is a way of thinking, of planning and interpreting experiments and observations (and it tries to be based on logic as much as possible). Using that way of thinking to "prove" that that way of thinking cannot be applied to certain mechanisms - in other words, using an argument to show that that very argument is fallacious - just doesn't make much sense. Of course science is limited and imperfect, but you can't use science to "prove" that a certain mechanism will never be explained by natural, mechanical, causal, deterministic, non-miraculous forces. That would be like using faith to de-bunk a faith-based statement - although THAT would obviously never make any sense.

Religion and Morality

2006-04-16T15:50:00.000-07:00

The service today was pretty interesting. The pastor talked about how the crucifixion and the resurrection are the ultimate symbols for how hard, how important, and how rewarding it can be to lead a good life. Jesus went through the crucifixion, because he knew that NOT doing it would mean a life led with less virtue, with moral compromise, without sticking to the plan. The only way for him to be happy about his life on earth after he died would be for him to go through with the hardest parts of the plan, so that he could "save" humanity, whatever that means.

(I think the only explanation of "save" that makes sense to me is illustrating to the world how bad we are and that it is possible - and more just, and better - to be good, thus motivating us to be good and showing us how. But to many Christians, "saved" has meaning that involves the afterlife and the apocalypse, and I'm not even going to try to go there).

In other words, when one chooses between either comfort and convenience, or a course of action that might bring pain and suffering but that is morally superior and that ultimately leads to spiritual development, then it is better to choose the latter. If you believe all the Christian stuff about souls and the afterlife, this second, better, more painful path will allow you to live again in a better state - "God is about life, not about death", whatever that means - and Jesus was so perfectly good, he came to life again to show us how important and powerful "good" can be, how intimately it is tied to God's plan. John 5:11 sez only those who have Christ have life. Um, yeah, ok, whatever. In a way, Easter highlights the importance of the most mythical part of Christianity.

I suppose all this could help motivate people to be good. I mean, if you tell people that their afterlife will be happier if they can look back on a life of virtue, that the better you are now the more you will "live" in the afterlife, then people will want to be good. However, ideally at least, virtue should be its own reward, good for its own sake: You should be able to look back right away and be happy for having done what you did. You shouldn't do good just hoping for a nicer afterlife. That's like a kid being good during the last month or two of the year just so he can get what he wants for Christmas (a topic Watterson has illustrated in depth: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, and 11, and then the quite philosophical 12, and 13, and the obviously theological 14 (Old Testament "Acting Good" vs New Testament "Being Good"), 15 (Pascal's wager), and 16).

The pastor also talked about how the end of Jesus' life was part of God's plan all along, how it was foretold in the old testament (if you take a few lines really out of context and stretch what they could possibly be saying), how the whole thing was necessary to improve humanity and humanity's relationship with God. Well, I don't believe in souls or the afterlife (as nice a thought as immortality is) or in the resurrection, but it is fairly clear to me that, if there is a God and he is all-powerful and all-knowing rather than just making stuff up as he goes along, then everything that happens is obviously part of the plan from the start.

Well, what I really want to talk about is how, after church, my roommate and I had an extremely interesting talk about stuff like keeping the leaps of faith in mind, and the relationship between faith, morality, and religion. It went something like this.

First, I told him my latest thoughts on the leaps of faith that are required for one to believe in Christianity, and how Christians don't really keep them in mind but bury them under rationalizations, dogma, Bible trivia, and other kinds of apologetics. They create a system so rich and so complex, it is easy to lose sight of the fact that that whole system hangs off a handful of central axioms (God is perfect and all-knowing and all-powerful, God loves people, Jesus existed and was perfectly good and helped us along God's plan, Jesus was God incarnate and could perform miracles).

Of course, I realize that, if you're realistic about it, this is pretty much the way most people approach most moral decisions: You set up a system - based in part on faith in the law, on rationalizing "wrong" behavior, and on what everyone else does - and then you make decisions based on that system, losing sight of the most basic ideas of virtue, justice, and compassion that should have been driving your decisions to begin with. You pretty much have faith in the system and know that it seems ok to get away with certain things which, if you think about them, aren't really ok. But everyone else does them... For example, I speed, I don't recycle every recyclable, I don't donate almost any of my free time / extra money to charitable causes, I write personal emails at work... It's hard for me to feel bad about these things since they all fit in the system so well. I allow myself to lose sight of what is fundamentally valid so that I can get away with that is most comfortable. And I think it's that way with a faith-based religious belief system as well - not for myself or my roommate, but for other people in the church. And maybe they SHOULDN'T keep in mind all the things they can't know for sure about their religion, since that would be counter-productive to their faith. "Managing doubt", as I've already mentioned.

What's the alternative?, my roommate asks. Humanism, of course. Humanism can logically lead to actually-good morals based on logic.

Now, my roommate has always thought this idea was invalid. He always thought Humanism required faith just like religion, and could allow for bad things to be rationalized as good. I agree that Humanism isn't perfect - it is only as "good" as the compassion, honesty, and rationality of the person using it to make decisions, and in any case we all know that Utilitarianism (upon which Humanism is largely based) is far from an exact science - but it still seems to me that Humanism is a cleaner, more scientific, more logical, less confusing tool for coming up with ethics than, say, religion is. It is not FOUNDED in a faith-based set of ideas. My roommate always disagreed with this, and today he finally was able to make me understand why.

He asked me to explain Humanism to him again. As I see it, it means trying to determine what is best and most just for everyone, using compassion, valuing the worth of every human being, but also valuing humanity and the behaviors which could lead to a world that is more just for everyone. Basically it is trying to derive morals from compassion. That's my take on it, anyways.

But why is being good defined as being compassionate?, he asks. Why value selflessness over selfishness? Well, because that is what is best for everyone. But why do you want what is best for everyone, not just what is best for you? Well, because if everyone did just what is best for them, the world would be a terrible place to live. Yeah, but most other people are NOT doing that, and I could get away with doing it to some extent, but I do not. Why be selfless when one could get away with being selfish? Why do we feel that's wrong?

All right, 1) A belief in God could motivate one to think this, 2) I was brought up this way; My parents see unjust selfishness as a reason for shame, and 3) I guess in the end it's arbitrary. I'd rather be able to think of myself as a "good" person than to get all the things I want through unjust means, especially since I know I can get most of them anyways through work and patience.

I had to admit, though, that the only rational reasons for valuing selflessness are 1) to shut up my conscience (which is basically my valuing my image of myself as "a good person") and 2) because it comes back to you, you get something out of it. That number 2 is an idea Nietzsche has written about: There is no true altruism. You do good to others because you get something out of it: Others like you and they do good to you. We make up ideas of "duty", "doing right", "being nice", etc, just to make it easier to remember (and justify) being selfless in ways that, in the end, are really just watching out for our own best interests. According to him, we teach ourselves to think "I don't steal because it's wrong", "I want to be nice to my neighbors", "I have a sense of duty to do a good job in the work my boss assigns to me", when in reality it's more like "I don't steal because I don't want to go to jail", "I want my neighbors to like me, trust me, and do me favors", and "I want to do a good job at work so I am not fired and maybe even get promoted". The conscience is a construct that tricks us into valuing selflessness for its own sake, but it's really there for our best interest.

Humanism, and most religious morality, though, are about genuinely wanting justice for everyone, and happiness to everyone to the extent that this is possible and fair. But for you to say "I genuinely value the good of others over my own, not just to shut up my conscience or to watch out for my own interests in the end", this always required a leap of faith. You have no rational reason to value selflessness over selfishness.

(My reason is that I want to see the world evolve into a more civilized place, where everyone has the same opportunities, and this requires doing the right thing. However, my saying that I want to make the world a better place (and making an impact which will go on after I die) is not really rational, since all this means is that my conscience bugs me about injustice to such an extent that I get more satisfaction from being selfless than I would from selfishly getting the things I want. And, if you think about it, the conscience is not a part of your rational mind, to the extent it makes you want things that are often not good for YOU in the end. It's just an impulse. Like wanting to ask "Why?".)

"You have no rational reason to value selflessness over selfishness". I have to admit he has a point there. I wonder how it is that my roommate has managed to voice disapproval of the "logic" of Humanism for so long to me without making this point clear to me.

A belief in a God that wants us to be good to one another so as to follow his plan, though, makes the genuine valuing of selflessness a little easier. Choosing selflessness is NOT arbitrary when God is in the picture.

Ok, I grant him that point. However, religion can very easily say it values compassion, but then twist that into discrimination, disapproval of homosexuality, disapproval of comprehensive sex education, disapproval of the separation of church and state, disapproval of atheism and/or humanism... it could even lead to people who fly airliners into buildings. If you define "being good" as "doing what God wants", then your morals are only as good as your interpretation of your religion's holy texts and of your religion's image of God. Most Christians think that God wants them to do whatever is best for everyone, and that it is largely up to the individual to figure out what that is - this is basically religiously-motivated Humanism. Some Christians think that God's idea of "good" is pretty well laid out in the Bible - so things like homosexuality and sodomy are wrong, and people who do wrong should be punished severely.

My roommate then says that this church we go to is pretty good about keeping the most fundamental moral ideas up front - compassion, justice, almost-utilitarian ideas of happiness, fulfillment, etc - so it is less likely to stray into supporting discrimination or war. It values highly the lesson taught in the story about Jesus and the Pharisees. Other religions, like most of modern Buddhism, and some modern Christian churches, got too focused on little details and have lost sight of what the religions were basically founded on: Making the world a place where more people can be happier and where there is less injustice. My roommate thinks that this church does a good job of keeping that in mind.

The relationship between faith, the conscience, morals, humanism, religion, motivation, and making the world a "better" place, is something I want to think about a lot more. But this is enough progress on that front for today.

Anyways, stay tuned.

No Bible Study again

2006-04-14T23:05:00.000-07:00

I ended up not going to Bible Study small-group this week, because I was very tired that day. Next week we will only meet for dinner, so I guess it will be a while until I post more on my reflections about the importance of learning about the Bible to "strengthen" faith, and about the insights of the Epistle To The Hebrews.

Why now and not before?

2006-04-13T13:27:00.000-07:00

Like I said in my previous post, I had dinner with my ex-girlfriend last night. She asked me a good question: Why am I choosing to explore Christianity now, with my roommate, while I refused to do it with her for the more than 4 years we dated? (This was obviously frustrating to her, as my atheism was one of the things about me that made the long-term prospects of our relationship pretty unlikely, a fact neither of us liked).

The reason I came up with right away is that my roommate's approach was better. He knew that religion is basically about fooling yourself - about making a leap of faith and "managing doubt", keeping track of what faith-based axioms are needed for each opinion or conclusion. My ex girlfriend, on the other hand, thinks that Christianity is fundamentally TRUE. That Jesus really did live, perform miracles, bring himself from the dead, spread God's word, and so on.

Going to church with my roommate is like exploring with a like-minded person, someone who asks and worries about the same things as me (and then some), where we both want to learn and explore without taking anything for granted and knowing that the whole thing is basically made-up. Going to church with my then-girlfriend would have been like exploring with someone for whom my questions and worries aren't important, someone who already got somewhere via a path very different from any I am likely to take. When I asked her questions, she often could not answer them, and often thought I was missing the point, since her exploration into religion was motivated by needs and questions very different from my own. It's not that I can't trust someone like that as a guide or as a fellow explorer. It's that someone like that is bound to lead me into ideas that to me are dead ends, and bound to not be helpful when I try to feel my way around ideas that to me look promising. It would be like Lobachevsky asking Euclid (if such a thing were chronologically possible) for advice and feedback on his explorations of hyperbollic geometry. All he would get would probably be "Yes, this is all very interesting, but what's the point of asking all these questions? Just do it THIS way..."

I've thought about this some more, and I came up with more reasons why I feel comfortable going to church with my roommate. One is that, when going to church with my ex-girlfriend (we did go to a Christmas service once), I felt like a huge impostor. This is because, for her, Christianity is about accepting the divinity of Jesus. If you don't think Jesus was more than just a very nice, wise, exemplary guy who taught people about compassion - if you don't think he could perform miracles, chat with God, and bring himself back from the dead - then you're not really a Christian. Even if I contemplate the possibility of Jesus and of God, I am fairly certain I could NEVER believe in the miracles. That's clearly mythology - so "clearly" that any trip to church, any attempt by me to accept the validity of what she calls "Christianity", would be a waste of time. My roommate, however, believes that being a Christian is about knowing that you can't answer some important questions without God, and that Jesus probably lived and is someone who everyone ought to try and learn from. Being a Christian is about finding, in the idea of God and in the story of Jesus, the motivation to do good, even while knowing that it takes a leap of faith to see God and Jesus as TRUE. Whether or not one is a Christian before one makes that leap of faith - or, rather, whether or not one is a Christian if one accepts that a reasonable person is perfectly justified in thinking that God is unnecessary and that Jesus is made up - is somewhat debatable for him. However, he wants to think of himself as a Christian, and he is apparently OK with the idea that a Christian has not rejected all doubt. Because no one can reject ALL doubt. But as long as you reject NO doubt, you can't learn anything, as Descartes says - your world could be a Matrix-like illusion imposed into your consciousness by an evil external entity. Anyways, my point is, if HE does not think of himself as an impostor (while in the middle of a crowd of people who make all kinds of leaps of faith and justify them with apologetics or don't bother to justify them at all), then I feel comfortable going to church with him. I feel like I don't have to pretent TOO much, that I can honestly say that I'm just exploring and learning and not making any assumptions. I feel like, if someone starts preaching and evangelizing to me, that this someone can be ignored and does not represent the church as a whole. I feel like I can go at my own pace, ask my own questions, and find my own answers, and be respected for just that.

(Not that I HAVE been explicit to anyone in church (other than my roommate) about the thoughts going through my head and onto this blog. But I feel like I could be. In fact, I have seriously been contemplating talking to my roommate's brother about all this, and to this one person in church who has talked to me about how happy she is to have found God and how happy she is for me that I am starting on that path. It is clear to me that my path, if I take one, would be extremely different from hers. But she has also done a good job in keeping herself from directing me too much - it is obvious that she wants to tell me about all kinds of inspirational verses and ideas that she finds powerful, but I can see she is holding back and letting me do my thing. So I want to explain to her what my thing is, and ask her about the path SHE took, how she manages doubt, etc, because I know she would be open to it. I've asked her whether she wants to talk about religion and spirituality and faith sometime, and she loves the idea. So I'll probably do it soon).

I guess what it comes down to is that I feel confident going to church and interacting with groups of religious people if I am with someone who is on "my side". Not even for rational reasons, just because I would be too nervous and uncomfortable if surrounded by a sea of people on "their side". If I went to church with my ex-girlfriend, she would be someone on "their side", and I would still be alone.

By asking the same kinds of questions that I ask ("How does this make sense?", "Why is it important to believe in this?"), and being a little better at finding answers to those questions, my roommate is helping me build a bridge between how I think and how "they" think. By helping to build that bridge, I can keep in mind that my priorities, goals, questions, motivations, and religious paradigms, are very different from "theirs", while at the same time learning how "my way" and "their way" of thinking about it both make sense given our different questions, goals, motivations, and different levels of comfort with faith of different kinds.

For example, he helped me figure out the vocabulary and symbology of a lot of Christian-talk. This might have possibly been the biggest obstacle he helped me overcome. We talked about this for a long time, and it was after I was satisfied (and impressed) with his interpretation of Christian-talk that I said "All right, I want to go to church with you". What I mean is that Christians say all kinds of things that, when taken literally, are extremely unappealing to someone who looks at the world in the orderly, deterministic way we do.

One simple example is how Christians (in this church, anyways) talk about the Devil as if he were a real, influential entity. Of course, I see "the Devil" as the embodyment of all our selfish and short-sighted desires, our non-civilized animal side, all the things we want to do but know are bad, all our temptations. This is like ancient Greek theater, where virtues, desires/impulses, and emotions were often anthropomorphised into characters. So when people talk about "The Devil got to him" or "The Devil is trying to influence us", this is really metaphorical, talking about the selfish and short-sighted aspects of our own nature sometimes being hard to control. "The Devil" is just a symbol for all that, like in the old cartoons where a devil sits on one shoulder and tells the character to take the easy way. We don't think this actually happens, but it is a handy way to illustrate what goes on in people's heads. Some people in the church probably do believe that the Devil is an entity, but when they talk about it that way, I can translate that into MY way of thinking about what "the Devil" is, and then translate what I think back out in such a way that it sounds compatible with what they believe. In the end, it doesn't make that much of a difference, if I tell myself that both I and them are just talking about people and their impulses/desires, not about a supernatural entity.

The example that REALLY "won me over" is this: when Christians say "and then God made this happen", my roommate translates that into "When God set up every subatomic particle just before the Big Bang so that the universe would run the way he wanted, he set it all up so that X would happen, because he wanted Y to happen and X is a way to trigger that", or something like that. In other words, if a Christian sees something bad being fixed by chance, they might imagine that God saw this bad thing, was unhappy, and just now made this random thing happen to fix it. To me, however, 1) the universe is causal and deterministic, and 2) God should be able to foresee everything at the very beginning. Therefore the only "divine intervention" that is remotely acceptable to me is the idea of God setting up the Big Bang in such a way that events would unfold exactly as he planned. This takes the idea that God thinks some things are "bad" and some things are "good", the idea that God puts things in our path to make us grow or learn or be punished or be rewarded, and the idea that God wants to indirectly tweak the development of humanity according to a plan, and makes these ideas compatible with a causal, deterministic, natural, mechanical universe. So all of a sudden, I was no longer turned off by phrases like "God then did this" or "Thanks be to God" even "This was a godsend". So while many Christians sound like they think God interacts with the universe in a real-time way (and some of these Christians might actually believe this), I can translate that into my deistic world view, and translate my deistic thoughts back out in such a way that they too sound like God influences the world in real time.

I realise that this kind of translating may be deceptive, condescending, and dishonest, but it is the only way I have to learn about (and learn to respect) Christian theology. And my roommate does it too, so it can't be TOO bad. That's the kind of thing my ex-girlfriend would probably never have helped me with. Without this translating, Christianity just sounded like some primitive mythological mumbo-jumbo, but through this translating it becomes an interesting way to think about people and the universe. And after I do enough of it, when some Christian idea is thrown at me that I don't know how to translate, I am learning to think like "Hmmm, how can this mythological-sounding thing be translated into a metaphor for something about people and the universe", rather than to think "Why would you believe such a thing? What happens, happens. There's nothing more to it than that, you idiot".

This is also helpful so that I can see how Christianity describes all kinds of things that are not really Christian in nature, things you don't need Christianity to figure out but that can be illustrated well with Christian metaphors. My ex-girlfriend, however, thinks that these metaphors are real, that God affects people's lives, so she sees all kinds of things in Christian terms while these things can be seen in secular terms. That, too, would make it much harder for her to be of any kind of help while I explore Christianity, because (unlike my roommate) she would not help me see that my secular models and the Christian models just say the same things in different ways.

She believes that people are unpredictable to God, and that God has to tweak the universe in consequence of what people do, AFTER they do it. That God affects people's lives in the way a mechanical, natural, random, causal universe could not. Maybe these things were also too big an obstacle for me to want to learn from her, because her God (a God who cannot predict the behavior of something so simple as a human brain, made from particles HE designed... a God who can't set things up right the first time and needs to go in and fix things) is simply not all-knowing enough for me.

Or it could just be that Santo de casa não faz milagre - that is, a saint cannot perform miracles in his own home. Sometimes the people we are closest to are the ones most difficult to teach, since they will be less patient, and less willing to give us the benefit of the doubt, than they would with a stranger.

In any case, I am fairly sure I would never think of God as that imperfect, and that I will never say it is probable that Jesus performed miracles, so I will never be a Christian under my ex-girlfriend's definitions - I will be a deist, at best. That hasn't changed. I am not so much exploring Christianity as trying to put as much of it into deist-friendly ideas as possible. I hope she realises that a deist is not the same as a Christian - and that, fundamentally, I don't really NEED to ask Why, and will always be bothered by theological leaps of faith.

I am fairly sure I will ask my children to not take theological/miraculous/supernatural ideas too literally, to be skeptical, to really think about whether religion makes sense, to understand that you can come to the same conclusions by just thinking about the world in a compassionate way. That's something else my ex-girlfriend and I disagreed about - she did not like the idea of her children having a skeptical father who disagreed with her faith and who shot down whatever they learned in Sunday school. I don't think I would be that bad, but if I were ever asked a question by my kids about religious things, they would get an honest answer.

Then again, MY dad somehow was never asked by me or by my sister about his theological beliefs, and he just went along with our catholic upbringing. To this day, I don't know where he stands on the issues I'm writing about on this blog. When I was a Christian little kid, I did not ask because I was sure that he, like EVERYONE else, believed in God and Jesus and all that. Every good person does, right? Then, when I started doubting, I didn't want to ask him about doubt and skepticism because, if he ISN'T skeptical, I'll lose some of my respect for him. That's still where I stand now. In any case, I admire him a lot - he showed me (and still does) that a person can be compassionate, humble, hard-working, loving, disciplined, fun, and happy, and that all these things should be motivated by their own value, not by something external. That's secular enough for me.

A more useful way to think about it

2006-04-12T22:35:00.000-07:00

Had dinner with my ex-girlfriend today. Like I've said, she and I have had tons of very long conversations about religion, so we mainly talked about this little project of mine. I eventually reformulated the main question of what I want to understand, in a way that I think is more useful. Not so much "Why do you believe" but "Why do you not bother actively doubting" and also "Why do you not explore the holes in your belief structure? Why/How do you not keep the leap of faith in plain sight all the time?"

Well, it's not like I do these things on the systems I have built for decision-making, so I can guess an answer to these questions ("I have better things to do"), but I am not going to assume that most Christians' lack of skepticism is due to lazyness. I also want to know how they deal with skepticism when it does arise in their minds.

Most Christians probably question their religion to some extent, but don't want to bother questioning too much, because they like the benefits of being a Christian, the happiness and meaning it brings. I imagine that some other Christians, though, must KNOW they are right. The first kind, I can understand: They were raised Christian, they know that a reasonable person can be a non-Christian, and that even they could be non-Christian if they tried, but they're not going to bother trying because they like being a Christian (even though I think they would still be the same person if Christianity was "removed", but they may not be able to see that). They realize that too much doubt leads down a road that goes away from Christianity, and if necessary they call in faith to justify not going down that road. As my roommate put it, every Christian has to "manage doubt", as it is a natural part of everyone's thinking, but one that is destructive to faith. (I may be oversimplifying the average Christian's relationship with doubt, which is why I want to learn more about it). The second kind of Christian, though - the confident kind, the kind that KNOWS that they are right and that atheists are wrong - I am fascinated by. Do they really think that the leap of faith into Christianity is smaller than what they see as the leap of faith into secularism? Can they be shown that this is a result of a relatively arbitrary spiritual orientation? Are they really convinced by the circular arguments and fallacious logic of apologetics? Do they really think the atheist world view could not possibly be right? Even if they know that one can only go towards God through faith, how do they KNOW that those who do NOT go towards God are wrong? (I guess the meaning of "KNOW" gets complicated if that question is to be meaningfully answered). I'd be very curious to learn about what goes through their minds.

Ah, and if one is supposed to go towards God through faith, not through reason or evidence, then how can they possibly hope to convert new people? If you need faith to have faith, how does the loop begin? Just by immersion?

Christianity, Intolerance, and Free Speech

2006-04-10T21:06:00.000-07:00

Here's a tough question: Do Christians have a right to vocally disapprove of homosexuality?

I think they do, as long as they're not breaking the law. Not employing someone because they're gay, or breaking some other law while discriminating, is clearly wrong and illegal. But, to be honest, I think one has the right to think that certain behaviours are wrong (even when most of the rest of society disagrees) and to voice that opinion. Of course, one does that at one's own risk. That is, one voices such opinions knowing that one ought to expect some harassment from the smarter people who realize that homosexuality is not a "lifestyle choice". If I make it known that I hate a group of people for a series of ludicrous reasons, I can expect at least the same in return.

I know liberals who are often vocally disapproving of conservatives, and vice versa. This is fine, as long as they treat each other as human beings and realize that people who disagree with you can still be reliable, honest, hard-working, trustworty, and, well, not scary, although you may personally find them unpleasant or be certain that some of what they think and do is standing in the way of humanity's progress.

Of COURSE religious people will think that people of other religions are somehow "wrong". As annoying as it is to deal with evangelicals, I can hardly blame them for what they do. If I thought I had some insight into the forces that created the universe, if I thought I had an especially good understanding of what these forces want people to do, if I were certain I knew I could tell people how to make the world progress in the way it is meant to, then I too would be walking around the street, handing out books, talking to everyone I find, trying to reach as many people as I could with my enlightened and important message.

Not only that, but freedom of expression should mean the freedom to criticize a large group of people, even if this large group of people is a minority that is often discriminated against. Open debates about these criticisms are the only way to realize that discrimination is stupid. When these debates are themselves assumed to be overly discriminatory, that's when the discriminators go underground with their hate and become much harder to reach and to deal with.

In other words: Being vocal about stupid/wrong/intolerant beliefs is

1) a right that is a corollary of the freedom of expression,

2) perfectly understandable,

3) important to fighting stupidity/intolerance.

Michael Shermer makes the same point here about Holocaust deniers, another breed of vocal nutjobs.

It may also be worthwhile to remember that Google refuses to remove from its search index (to the extent it legally can) sites that promote violence, discrimination, racism, anti-semitism, homophobia, neo-nazism etc. (Google's SafeSearch filter can keep most of these sites out of your results if you want). Google feels that learning about prejudice and ignorance is greatly aided by being able to search through this content, disturbing as it may be. (Google also believes strongly in the algorithmic, rather than editorial, nature of its search results: The voice of the internet shines through, and not the beliefs or preferences of the Googlers who run the search engine, since the line between editorializing and censoring is blurry at best. If the law demands censorship, of course, this can be implemented algorithmically, but that's another story).

No Church tomorrow

2006-04-08T13:05:00.000-07:00

This weekend I have to help a friend out with something on Sunday morning, so no Church tomorrow.

I'll probably still go to Bible study group this week.

As you know from the previous entries, I think I might be at the point where either I want to ask some Christians why they believe, or I think that no meaningful answer is possible. I'm leaning towards the latter, but I do want to give these interviews a shot, just to see what happens. Who knows, these Christians could have some new insights. But I am seriously contemplating quitting this little Christian project and starting to go to a Unitarian church. I'll stick with the project for now, but it probably won't be much longer.

Bible Study Episode 3: A New Hope

2006-04-06T22:56:00.000-07:00

During this week's Bible study session, I had a few interesting thoughts about the validity, or the point, of "studying the Bible" (and studying the interpretations of what it could mean) as a means of strengthening/deepening one's faith. I want to talk about that. But first let me write about what the Bible study group actually talked about, because that was pretty interesting too.

Moving on in Hebrews, we talked about chapter 7. A lot of time was spent talking about passages that address how the messages of the New Testament, and the authority of Jesus, supercedes the Old Testament laws:

Now if there was perfection through the Levitical priesthood (for under it the people have received the law), what further need was there for another priest to arise after the order of Melchizedek, and not be called after the order of Aaron? For the priesthood being changed, there is of necessity a change made also in the law... This is yet more abundantly evident, if after the likeness of Melchizedek there arises another priest, who has been made, not after the law of a fleshly commandment, but after the power of an endless life... For there is an annulling of a foregoing commandment because of its weakness and uselessness (for the law made nothing perfect), and a bringing in of a better hope, through which we draw near to God... By so much, Jesus has become the collateral of a better covenant... For the law appoints men as high priests who have weakness, but the word of the oath which came after the law appoints a Son forever who has been perfected.

The idea here is that Jesus came to change the relationship between God and people, to formulate a new covenant. (I know that other parts of the New Testament say clearly that Jesus' teachings do not negate any of the Old Testament law, but let's ignore that for now). Jesus represents a new kind of priesthood, a new testament, a new covenant, a new law, a new hope. The resurrection is about breaking beyond the old Levitical system built on lineage and sacrifice. Behavior should be guided by love, not by law. Law does not lead to perfection - it only highlights people's sin, people's imperfections. And the law can also allow one to be immoral, to see just how much they can get away with. The law allows one to act acceptably good without actually being good. An important binary in the New Testament is the opposition between law and love, between ACTING good and BEING good. We talked about this, about the Pharisees**, about whether and how and why the Old Testament law is still important in the face of this new covenant. One can go on for hours on the relationship between morality, motivation, compassion, rules, choices, behavior, character, selfishness, selflessness, law, punishment, etc. Does one follow rules because one gets in trouble if one doesn't, or because one sees that this is best for everyone? (And what if following a rule is not what is best for everyone? Many Christians realise that some Old Testament laws are not best for everyone - but some do not. Most of the people in this group seem to be confident enough in the Bible to think that, if the Old Testament clearly says something right out, then it's almost certainly not false. But that's a whole different story).

So that's what we talked about. It was pretty interesting, thinking about the relationship between the Old Testament and the New Testament, and about how Jesus symbolizes an expectation for people to be motivated by compassion rather than by rules.

But what was really on my mind is whether, and how, this kind of studying can strengthen's one's faith. I am coming to the conclusion that this kind of studying gives the illusion that it is strengthening one's faith. Let me explain.

This whole system is basically all made up. At the core of this system is the most made-up part of all: The beliefs that the universe was deliberately created, that God wants what is best for us, and that 2000 years ago a person lived who was perfectly moral (and, if you want, the belief that he was immaculately conceived, was crucified, performed miracles, claimed to be God incarnate, and WAS God incarnate). Believing in these beliefs requires a leap of faith. These beliefs can only be supported by a leap of faith, by arguments that believing in them will make your life better, or by circular reasoning. The more this system is explored, the more things it explains about itself (and about the world) in terms of other components of itself. In other words, the diverse ideas in this system (some of which do not require those central beliefs but can always be supported by them) can explain almost everything about the world and about the system, often through convoluted lines of reasoning, obscure references, etc. So, while suporting a system by using ideas from this system is circular reasoning, the path of the reasoning goes from "circular" to being so zig-zaggy that you lose sight of the leaps of faith required to make that whole thing necessary. One other way of looking at it is: There are so many ideas, that the "circle" in the "circular reasoning" becomes huge, and you can only see a little of it at a time - so it starts looking like a straight line. The system has an answer for everything - such as "Well, God intended it to be this way" - except its complexity clouds the fact that a leap of faith is necessary. And once this system is used to explain many many things, it becomes harder and harder to see that all these things could also be explained without the system. Once the system encompasses and connects everything you think about, it becomes harder to see how individual things - let alone all of it - could be explained without the system. Studying the Bible and the rest of Christian theology and apologetics just makes more connections that allow more things to be better explained in terms of Christian ideas. This makes the Christian faith seem stronger, while it in fact is only getting more convoluted, more complex, and more circular. You become so comfortable in this system that can explain everything that you lose sight of the idea that the central beliefs of the system require huge leaps of faith. You lose sight of this because it seems like these central ideas can be explained/rationalized by components of the system, and this circular reasoning gives the illusion that faith is not quite so necessary, that it is justified, that it makes sense. It only makes sense once you make the leap of faith and build this system. NOT taking the leap of faith to begin with makes at least as much sense.

Once, when talking with my then-girlfriend about why she believes, I was able to track one of her arguments all the way around one of those convoluted circles, to the point where she had to admit that it was circular reasoning and a leap of faith was required. To her, however, the circular reasoning "feels" like a good answer when she is asked why she believes. So all this Bible-study apologetics mess just covers up the leap of faith.

I am actually starting to feel uneasy at how comfortable I am becoming in hearing about Jesus, God's plan, and so on, during service and during Bible study. Everything is so nice, it's all about being a good person, about being strong and forgiving and loving and compassionate and sincere and caring, it's about being connected to the rest of the world, to everyone else, to the entire universe, past present and future. And it's all fairly consistent, internally, if you don't nitpick at the details. So it's not that hard to lose sight of the leap of faith required to start building the system that ties all this together. What is starting to bother me is that I am starting to "believe" this illusion that the system is valid, that it explains everything, and that no huge leap of faith is required. I am starting to really see how, the more you think about this system and the more you apply it, the harder it is to see the leap of faith. And I've only been doing this for a few weeks! For someone who has been going to church for years, really seeing the leap of faith for what it is must be DANG hard. Seeing that it is not necessary to explain the world and to be a good person must be nearly impossible. Rejecting it - and the whole systrem built up around it - must be actually impossible to all but a few people.

Religious faith is a mental parasite. The more you feed it, the more it becomes a part of you, the less alien it seems, and the harder it becomes to remove (and the less you will WANT to remove it).

That's enough cheerful reflection for today.

PS: Yes, I know that "A New Hope" is the title of Episode 4, not 3.

PPS:The Pharisees are portrayed in the New Testament as obsessed with law. They scorn sinners whereas Jesus seeks them out. Because of the New Testament's frequent depictions of Pharisees as self-righteous rule-followers, the word "pharisee" (and its derivatives: "pharisaical", etc.) has come into semi-common usage in English to describe a hypocritical and arrogant person who places the letter of the law above its spirit. The Pharisees are not just Bible characters, though, but a real order of Jewish priests, and their biblical characterization is not approved of by modern Jewish people.

Prayer - Oh please!

2006-04-05T10:52:00.000-07:00

I've already explained what I think about prayer. But given all the recent talk about a scientific paper that kinda disproves the power of prayer, I thought I'd share my thoughts on the issue, and take the opportunity to link to a few interesting online opinions about it.

I think prayer makes NO sense, theologically.

Like I already said, it has many psychological advantages: It makes people feel better, it makes people think they are developing a relationship with God, it makes people learn what they can do something about and what they can just not worry about, it helps people to bond and to help each other, it teaches people about right and wrong, and it might have somewhat of a placebo effect to it (and the placebo effect can be immensely powerful). So, if done right, prayer is a good thing.

If you believe in Christian theology, though, then you should realize that God is all-knowing and all-powerful, so he 1) knows what's going on inside your head, 2) has a plan for how things will happen, and 3) will not change that plan just because you brought something to his attention. If you want something really bad, he knows you want that really bad. If you see some injustice going on, he sees it too. He will make things happen because he wants them to, because it's a part of the plan, not because people whine to him. Even Jesus, of all people, supposedly prayed in order to not be executed, and got turned down so to speak. So clearly prayer has zero to do with what happens in the world.

The interesting thing is; there are even plenty of hard-core fundamentalist Christians who realize this. These Christians still pray, of course, but they do so because God commands them to in the Bible. They do it realizing that it will not change what happens, but thinking that it is their duty as a Christian to summarize and express to God what they want, even through God knows it already. They also do it because they recognize the benefits I see in it.

One of them puts it very concisely (in the blog linked to above): Prayer does not have power, God has power.

(And if God chooses to use that power only to do things that could possibly be explained by a godlessly scientific world view, it is because "he wants us to go to him through faith", which again just points out how a leap of faith is required before Christian theology can make any sense at all).

Even if you believe in God, you should not think that prayer is like a machine where you put something in and, some fraction of the time, get something out (like a vending machine, or one of those "claw" machines that sometimes grabs you a toy at an arcade, but usually just takes your money). Using prayer in a scientific experiment is an attempt to turn God into a giant lab rat, by testing this "machine" view, and both atheists and religious people should be able to see that this is just a waste of everyone's time. And money. Think of how much money went into this heart-disease study, and of how many other ways it could have been spent, ways that might actually help people... Grrr.

I might quit soon

2006-04-04T19:06:00.000-07:00

It has recently occurred to me that this whole project may be pointless, that it is impossible for me to find what I'm looking for. Let me explain.

The main points of this project are 1) to see how Christians might react to my idea of spiritual orientation, and 2) to be able to ask Christians why they believe (why they make leaps of faith) and maybe to better understand their answers. I'm starting to see these points may be hopeless.

I am starting to see how and why it would be extremely hard for a Christian to "buy" the atheist world view, and how a Christian would probably come no closer to re-thinking their leaps of faith even if exposed to the view that faith arises from a need to see agency behind the world, which in turn arises from natural causes and evolution. Once the leap of faith is made, you need to backtrack more and more before you can see the atheistic world view as "quite possible". Circular logic eventually "traps" you into faith, when you come to support your faith by arguments that only make sense once you have faith (but this is not a problem to you since you have faith so the arguments feel very compelling. Even if you recognize that a leap of faith is necessary, that leap "feels right").

But there's more. (The part about having a hard time backtracking and not being persuaded by circular reasoning, I have understood for a while). Here's what I'm thinking: Say I ask someone why they believe, why they make the leap of faith. Now, "Why" can mean two different things: There's the natural/causal "why", as in "Why do things glow when they become hot?", and there's the agent/intent "why, as in "Why did you buy the Honda instead of the Toyota?". One implies that faith "happens" (possibly because of psychological mechanisms), one implies that faith is a deliberate choice. Like I wrote about in my "spiritual orientation" post, I think it's somewhere in between: It's a choice, but it's backed up by psychological mechanisms.

Anyways, what could possibly be a satisfactory answer to either "why"? Say a Christian takes the "why" in the natural/causal sense. They might describe a kind of divine epiphany, a "God touched my heart and opened my eyes" kind of moment, something spiritual and indescribable that made it easy to let faith in. Or they might describe a need to see agency in the universe (which I see as the most honest answer). In any case, no answer to the natural/causal "why" makes faith right - they just make faith natural. So an answer to the natural/causal why might be true, it might be accurate, it might be sincere, and it might even be fairly complete, but it will not persuade anyone that faith is the right choice. Given that faith is natural, one then has to analyze it critically to decide if it is worth keeping or worth trying to reject, which is where the "choice" comes in.

So on to the second "why", the "Why do you choose to ignore doubt and to keep faith even when you know you could be wrong?".

One answer to this might be a form of Pascal's Wager: I think God would want me to believe, so I have more to lose by not believing and being wrong than by believing and being wrong.

One other answer to this is that faith brings a sense of connectedness with the universe and everyone in it, a sense of a greater plan, of meaning, of being a part of something greater, of the most important thing there is. This brings happiness, trust in God, and a motivation to be good.

One last answer to this is that, once you're deep into faith (by being brought up very religiously and/or by going out of your way to learn about the ideas and theology that define your religion), it's hard to get out. Once you start seeing all the complicated, convoluted, and honestly interesting ways through which faith "makes sense", you lose sight of the possibility of faith not being necessary to understand the world, since all the things you learn become the way through which you think about the world every day. You lose sight of the initial leap of faith, and you think that you believe because of all these interesting apologetical arguments and because of all these interesting ideas in the Bible about people, the world, and God. It becomes harder to remember how one could believe in some of these things but not others. A cynical atheist could say that faith is like a parasite, one that invades your system so thoroughly that it would be extremely hard to remove it completely, even though you were just fine before it showed up, and would be fine if it had never been there. (Processes of mutation and natural selection and evolution have given religions several thousands of years to become very successful parasites indeed). But since the believer welcomes faith and thinks (or at some point thought) that the leap of faith is one worth making, then it becomes hard for the believer to see how rich, full, interesting, and satisfying a faith-less world view can be. Once a system of faith has grown enough, it blocks the believer from truly contemplating a faithless world view, from "believing"/buying/taking in a proposition like "So imagine there is no God".

In other words, I think "Why do you believe" can only be answered in the following ways:

- God made me. (I can't really help it)

- My brain made me. (I can't really help it)

- I don't want to NOT believe and then be wrong.

- It makes my life happier, gives me strength, puts me in a meaningful world of which I like being a part. It requires doubt to be ignored to some extent, but the payoff is nice.

- It clearly true in everything I do and think about, in a way I could not take apart; It is a part of who I am; It feels true since everything I do is based in it. It seems probably right since it explains everything, even if you need to have faith in the first place for it to explain anything.

I'm not sure I would find any of those answers satisfactory. I don't know why. I'll interview some Christians about it, and I'd be very surprised to hear something that falls beyond the "answers" above. Which is why I'm thinking this whole project is pointless. But I'll stick with it for a little longer, since I keep learning more and more about faith and about Christianity each time I go to church or to small-group Bible study.

The Official God F.A.Q.

2006-04-03T15:31:00.000-07:00

A fellow atheist sent this to me by email, and I thought I should post about it here. It is a thorough discussion and investigation of all the important theological questions people may ask themselves. In a question-and-answer format, it addresses all the relevant tricky points of theology, and explores all relevant answers. One wonders if they could have shortened it a bit, but it is still fascinating reading. I present to you; The Official God FAQ:

http://www.400monkeys.com/God/

Brilliant...

3rd Church Sunday - God's P.R.

2006-04-02T22:25:00.000-07:00

Throughout a lot of the church service today, I kept thinking about how much of a leap of faith is required to "trust" God, to think that "Humans learning to be good" is the whole point, the climax, of the "plan", rather than being skeptical and thinking we're just another rung in the ladder, another step in the process, just being TOLD we're more important to the "plan" than we really are. That God has a hidden agenda that is not fundamentally about out welfare or our spiritual development.

(I keep putting "the plan" in quotes because it always reminds me of Hari Seldon's plan. There are some fundamental similarities: If you understand the mechanics of the universe well enough, you can set things up in such a way that they mechanically and naturally go your way. If you're powerful/smart enough, you can get a whole species to develop the way you want. Theoretically you can get this to happen even without controlling every little detail, even without being able to predict every little thing. That's where the Foundation books get real interesting, and where the Bible gets much less than believable, because God IS supposed to be able to predict every little thing. But the parallels are strikingly similar, especially when it comes to faith in the plan and the assurance this brings of a good future and a meaningful life, even if this is NOT what the plan is actually about).

In any case, I do think it takes an added leap of faith to believe that God does not have ulterior motives. However, I admit it is a small leap of faith: If you believe we were created deliberately - and especially if you believe that that God especially created one man to show us all that it is good to be considerate and to do what's best for everyone - then it not unlikely that the point of the plan is our learning to overcome our animal impulses, to be motivated by ideas and knowledge and compassion rather than by hungers and greed, to overcome the physical into the abstract, intellectual, and spiritual. That makes sense. And even if that's not the last step of the plan, then plan is still "good" for us in the end, since it ends with our transcendence, not our extinction or some end to our race that is useless or painful. It does not take a huge leap of faith that a powerful creator would want to set up a physical system having as a goal the emergence of thinking, reasonable, compassionate entities similar to himself at some level.

In any case, regardless of whether or not it takes a leap of faith, regardless of how big or small that leap is, it IS clear to me that trusting God and devoting oneself to the plan is at least as central a concept in Christianity as, say, believing that Jesus existed. That is where Christians draw confidence, strength, and happiness from: Lay down your burdens, just do what you can, everything is in God's hands, que sera sera (and whatever will be, will be good), Don't worry / Be happy. It's a nice thought. If someone comes to believe it, I can see how their life can become substantially happier.

The other side of the coin is admitting that our natural impulse is to do what's best for us, which often can be detrimental to the plan. That's why doing what our selfish animal impulses say, rather than doing what's best for everyone, is sin. Sin is at the core of Christianity, in that it is essential in defining what a Christian is and how a Christian should view himself. The idea of sin encapsulates the motivation for being good (helping the plan) as well as the fact that people CANNOT be good all the time. Whether you feel guilty about this inevitable imperfection depends on... well, I don't know on what it depends. I don't think you need guilt to motivate yourself to be better, though. It's not like you're scoring points, "Oh I did this bad thing / was born with this bad nature in me, so I better make up for it". I think you need to be motivated by compassion, by the fact that doing what's best for everyone is what makes humankind progress, whether you see this progress as having a secular nature or a divine one. Well, whatever works for you, I guess. Even as an agnostic, I really like the idea that, every time you do what's good rather than what's easy, you take one small step in helping humankind transcend its animal origins and move towards being a race of reasonable, intellectual entities, who live in a world with justice and compassion.

The topic of the sermon today was the crucifiction (Easter being in two weeks and all). Sin means getting away with being bad, which in turns means punishing the good for their being good, since being bad means you get an unfair advantage you did not earn. This idea is distilled into the crucifiction - people are so bad, it takes our KILLING of the one perfectly good person for us to all see just how bad we all are. To me that is the only meaningful interpretation of "He died for our sins", since I don't believe in Heaven or salvation, and I'm quite sure people don't have souls or spirits. However, I am also quite sure that every person is at times greedy, selfish, unfair, inconsiderate, or in some other way "bad". What the crucifiction illustrates is that, every time we are like that, we take something away from someone good who deserves it. As a society, we took Jesus' life away (if you believe the mythology), practically as a consequence of his being so good. His death embodies all injustice, all the consequences of bad acts. Either you're good like Jesus, or you're hurting good people like Jesus. Either you're with him or without him. Yet another nice, motivating idea, one that can be appreciated even by those who realize that the Jesus story is almost certainly one made up to incorporate those of many pre-Pagan man-gods.

One other interesting take on the crucifiction is that it is a time when God expected people to be good with less guideance, to be more than animals. Up until Jesus' time, people and animals did what they did because they feared or expected certain consequences. You do whatever you can get away with, no more, no less. Laws can be set down that prevent you from stealing, killing, etc, but that just means you can't get away with doing these things, so you don't do them anymore. There are hardly any morals, just those dictated by circumstance, opportunity, consequences, and law. This leads to the creation of a system of laws where people CAN get away with doing bad things, if they follow the letter of the law but not the spirit. They are basically still like animals, exploiting the system around them in whatever way they can. Jesus' death showed that this is not sufficient, that being good takes more than doing what is required by law, that people need to be motivated primarily by compassion and by seeking justice. Using the Christian imagery to illustrate this, it's like saying that God's relationship with people changed gears; Before, God expected people to act good, and now he expects people to BE good. It can be seen as a watershed moment in the progression of people from animals who follow impulses to rational, compassionate beings who try to do what is best for everyone. Yet another nice image everyone should be able to appreciate, whether or not you think the story is made up.

But let me explore my skepticism of "God is Good" just a little further, because, well, that's what I thought about for most of the service today.

Jesus, the perfectly goog person, supposedly died in the name of God, so this means that God is good, right? Well, implied here are three leaps of faith (other than "Jesus existed and was a perfectly good person"): 1, Jesus made the theological claims attributed to him in the Bible; 2, He believed them; and 3, They are true. Taking all these leaps of faith naturally brings us to the conclusion that God is good - because Jesus said so in the Bible. This is, obviously, an extremely flimsy argument (calling it an "argument" at all is an insult to good arguments). So let's backtrack a little bit, and see if skepticism of the theology in the Gospels can bring us any better (i.e. less faith-based) reasons to believe that God is good.

If you take neither of these three new leaps of faith, but if you believe that Jesus existed and was perfectly good, then you can believe that Jesus was a way through which God taught people how to be good - although this does not indicate that our goodness is the goal of the plan, or that God really wants what's best for us before anything else.

If you believe that Jesus made those theological claims but did not believe them, then your Jesus is a manipulative liar, and arrogant too. Which is a possibility. If you believe Jesus made those claims and believed them, except they were false, then your Jesus was arrogant and insane. These last two possibilities can still, however, be the consequence of a godly plan, one where God plants this Jesus guy among us to spread lies that make God look good, that make it seem God wants nothing more than for us to be good. In that sense, Jesus is doing God's P.R. work. In other words, it is possible that God is NOT good but fooled Jesus (and almost everyone else) into thinking God is good (or had Jesus' help in fooling almost everyone else). In that sense, God is like a big company: It has its own intentions and its own plans, but through PR it tries to convince the masses that it has their interests at heart.

It is worthwhile to note that, in the Bible, Jesus defines "God" and "good" in ways that are closely intertwined. God is defined to be perfectly good, and good is defined to be what God wants, what goes along with the plan. Through language, the idea of the creator became to connected with the idea of making good choices, it is hard from some Christians to separate them. "Of COURSE God is good", they might think, "How could God NOT be good?". They've somehow gotten into their heads the idea that the creator embodies all that is good, as if this were necessarily, inherently true.

To that, I say "Of COURSE what happens is exactly what the creator wants, if the creator is all-powerful. How could anything happen that is not part of the plan? How do you know the plan is good for US, not just good for God? God designed the world, so he always gets what he wants, so "good" and "bad" are human inventions that relate only to how humans deal with each other, not to how humans deal with God".

Well, I'll admit that overcoming animal impulses, and understanding how the world works well enough so that we can do what is best for everyone, are "good" AND "Godly", in that they are the essence of transcending our animal nature and thinking/acting in reasonable, abstract ways. But that doesn't mean that God is good. It means that being good comes from being God-like in just one way. There could be a lot more to God, and the rest can be stuff we would not consider to be "good". Again, the way that a company or a government may ask us to be good, while all kinds of stuff happens behind the scenes.

What I mean is, "God is good" is a huge oversimplification. Even if you believe that the universe was deliberately created, and that the creator is trying to show humans how to be more reasonable and more considerate of one another, this does not mean that being considerate is what God is all about - he might just want us to THINK it is. Trusting God and his plan to lead people to what is best for them takes a leap of faith, not just "trust". It's not a huge leap of faith, but it's there.

I should also point out that the God of the Old Testament was not that good. He was unforgiving, cruel, even moody and angry and unpredictable. He was clearly not omniscient or omnipotent, since his anger and disappointment at the actions of humans make it seem like he did not see them coming, did not set up the world with them in mind. Even Christians seem to not believe that God is like that, though.

OK, that's long enough for today. See you after this week's small-group Bible study.

The Selfish Gene

2006-03-29T01:45:00.000-08:00

Richard Dawkins' awesome book The Selfish Gene is 30 years old this week. To celebrate, an event was held where some prominent scientists and philosophers (and other experts on the things the book talks about) came together to talk about why the book is so great and insightful, and still relevant today.

You can read what they said, or listen to the talk on MP3s, by following this link. One of the speakers was Daniel Dennett, mentioned already on this blog. I like him.

Link via BoingBoing.

Ah, and while I'm blogging, there will be no Bible study, and thus no Bible study post, this week.

See ya Sunday, if not earlier.

Church-&-State Separation, and Catholic Politicians

2006-03-27T16:33:00.000-08:00

Here's an interesting video on CSPAN about Catholic politicians (from both sides) discussing the Catholic point of view on the most important political issues:

rtsp://video.c-span.org/60days/ap031106.rm

Throughout this video, Catholic politicians kept effectively asking: What does the Church say, and why? What if they seem to be wrong and supply no good explanations for their stand on an issue? Can we still be Catholic if we reject some of it? How much can the Catholic Church force us (rather than persuade us) to do? Does the Church have the right to hold a person's Catholic identity hostage in exchange for political actions?

If you vote for abortion and birth control and euthanasia, and then go to confession, are you all clear with Jesus now, or do you need to actively broadcast the message that you think you made a mistake? What if you DON'T think you made a mistake - does the idea of a righteous, necessary sin make any sense?

In short, religious people have to continuously debate how closely their morals and opinions follow those of their churches. (Well, smart religious people do. Dumb religious people just try to have their owm morals match those of their churches as closely as possible). A politician should be free to decide what is best for everyone without his/her religious identity being on the line, without a church threatening his/her connection with God if he/she makes the wrong vote.

Which is just one reason why organized religion is dangerous and Humanism is the only way.

Third Church Sunday - "Good God!" part 2

2006-03-26T14:22:00.000-08:00

Continuing right on from my post from last Sunday. In that post, I asked why it is that God is good. Why can we trust that God's plan leads to our happiness? Why can we trust that God makes sure there is justice in the end? Why can we trust that God's plan does not include our extinction? Why can we trust that it is godly to seek what is good and just?

The basic answers to this seem to be 1) God loves people, even if this means being unreasonaly compassionate and lacking vision, and 2) people are made in God's image, so our thinking is what makes us "higher" than the rest of nature and closer to God.

While I agree that abstract thought, formalized models, deliberate decision-making, logic, mathematics, etc, make us special and maybe even more "Godly" than the natural stuff around us, I don't see why struggling to find justice and to do good makes us more Godly.

Firstly, compassion is present in nature and arose through evolution and natural selection. Doing what is best for the group ensures the survival of the group, so a "selfless" gene preserves itself.

Secondly, things like "good" and "justice" and "compassion" imply DESIRE. Only beings that can WANT, that can think that one state is much better than another, can suffer.

I'm not being super relativist here. I'm not saying that the ideal is thinking that poverty is as fine a goal as wealth, that disease and physical disabilities are as fine a goal as health, etc. What I'm saying is; you can have a goal, without being emotionally tied to it. Only emotional beings suffer through injustice, rather than just taking what they get.

"Injustice", "suffering", and "happiness" all have to do with the fact that people are emotional. These things made it with us from when we were animals: Our brains compells us to dislike the thought of not having shelter, not having food, being physically restrained by others, and not being alive. So we are compelled to preserve our life, our food and shelter, our freedom, and those of others, by an animalistic emotion, as well as by the abstract idea that this maximizes justice.

But "justice" itself is driven by what people mind, by what makes people suffer, by what people desire. "Justice" would not be so important if people didn't CARE about everything.

Or would it?

I think that this is an important question. Are "justice" and "good" and "a goal in life" and "a goal for making the world better" dependent on the fact that people worry and suffer and care and desire, or can you have a system of decisions that aims for justice without being driven by the fact that people desire and suffer (i.e. by the fact that injustice HURTS)?

I ask because the discomfort that comes from experiencing injustice is a remnant from our animal brains wanting to stay alive and safe. It's not a "spiritual" thing. So if we were to be purely rational, purely logical and intellectual and mental beings who did not MIND discomfort or unpredictability, who took what we got and did the best we could with it... Would it still be important to think of "good" and "justice"? If we were like this, we would not pursue excess pleasure, we would not harm others or steal or cheat or lie except maybe to save our own lives... By not desiring, we would automatically become good.

Which, it turns out, is actually what many Christians seem to aim for, and what (to me) the idea of a God would embody.

Hmmm, so that actually makes sense. It dresses up Christianity in kind of a Buddhist framework, but it works.

"Good" means overcoming desire and emotion, so as to follow your goals for making yourself and the world better. It means being rational, it means having discipline, and it means not caring so much about your own well-being. It means working towards a world where everyone has similar resources to pursue a life they find intersting.

So just because "justice" only really make sense while talking about beings that suffer like animals, you don't need to be one of those beings yourself in order to be "good", in order to try and adjust the world in such a way that justice is maximized and suffering is minimized.

I guess that this is what God is supposed to be. He "loves" people in the sense that his plan for the world is for it to evolve towards a just world, and the thoughts and actions of "good" people are in synch with that plan. The goal of the plan is to have people become good and just, which they could become once the world causes animalistic suffering to be minimized. In other words, if enough people are good enough for long enough, widespread justice will eventually allow us to dedicate ourselves to the truly "godly" contemplation of the nature of thought and what we can do with it, rather than having to spend so much time keeping people's desires from standing in the way of justice (which is "sin", the opposite of "good"). I suppose I could believe in a God like that.

The question still remains, though, of why Christians trust that what God wants is good for us and will lead to less suffering. It might be a form of Pascal's Wager: You have more to lose from not believing and being wrong, than you do from believing and being wrong. And, actually, as long as you realize what things you can chance and what things are left to chance, it makes no difference: I can do this and that, and the rest is up to God, so whether or not God is good should not affect what I do.

But if we do assume that God deliberately created the universe, then we know God had some goal, some plan, and that this plan included us, and us trying to be good. I guess that, from this, it makes sense that the point of the plan is to cause "good" entities to rise from the natural, chemical, biological world, for them to learn through rationality how to be good and just, how to overcome the desires necessary for survival in the wild, how to not want excess, how to be compassionate towards those one never sees. But the goal of the plan could be something different.

Still, it seems that people - and the world in general - are making progress towards becoming good and just. We all WANT to, anyways, and hope for it, and work towards it with varying degrees of dedication. So it might happen. In which case it's part of the plan. But that doesn't mean that random natural events, and/or human-driven events outside our control, will help us along, so even then it hardly seems appropriate to "trust" God, to rely on God's goodness, to feel safe or comforted by it. Even if God did create the universe, it still seems foolish to think he will set things up so as to help us do what we want to do and/or what we think is best. There are certainly plenty of things people still must overcome.

So I think I'm going to say that it is fair to conclude that trusting in God, that thinking God is good, that the main point of the plan is for us to suffer less... requires an extra leap of faith. Just saying that God has a plan for the universe and that humanity learning how to be good is part of that plan does not mean that humanity learning how to be good is the objective of that plan, or (even if it IS the objective) that God will make it easier for us to get there.

From an earlier conversation, I know that my roommate seems to think that, given that God created everything, then God must love everything, because if you were a creator, you'd love the complex things you create. I think that's just anthropomorphizing God, but I might be missing part of his point. I'll have to ask him about it.

Understanding faith, and understanding faithlessness

2006-03-25T15:22:00.000-08:00

After thinking about my Bible-study friend's not-too-well-developed structure of beliefs, I'm starting to think I might be approaching this the wrong way, trying too hard. The goal is me trying to understand how a group of Christians think well enough to ask them why they believe. I'm starting to think that maybe this question just can't be answered in a way I find satisfying. I mean, what I want is for the Christian to list the "leaps of faith" their belief requires (God created the world, Jesus lived and was perfectly good, God loves people, the Bible teaches what is right, etc), and to ask why they make these leaps and reject the opposite possibilities. I'm starting to think that they might not be able to answer why they reject the opposite possibilities. Heck, it took me years to figure out that the question of "Why is the world as it is" question, the "spiritual orientation", has a lot to do with it. If some people of faith are not very introspective and do not try to identify and analyze the causes/reasons for those leaps of faith, then my talking with them won't tell me anything I don't already know.

Why does a believer reject the possibility of a godless world? Maybe just because they want to. Maybe it IS a form of Pascal's Wager; Because they are afraid to incorrectly fail to embrace the spiritual nature of the world. And maybe that's all right - maybe evaluating the possibility of the godless possibility is not the only way to choose, maybe it's not even the way I chose... Maybe I WANT to believe in a world that is orderly before anything else, in a world where things just exist, in a world where everyhing I do is not part of a plan, because I just like that world better. Maybe there is not such a distinct line between "That is the world I would prefer to live in" and "That is the world we appear to live in".

Maybe the unnecessary complications of a godly world aren't so distinct from the added duties it brings. Well, no, that's not right, I should have the same duties towards everyone in the world as I would if there were a God that wanted me to. OK, maybe I like living in a world that I control, in a world where greater forces don't conspire to control or undo the effects of my actions. Well, no, I don't really control the godless world I live in any more than I would if I lived in a world created by God. So is my aversion to the idea of a godly world just caused by laziness? No, I think it's an honest feeling that "stuff just exists, there is no Why" is simpler, more elegant, and more honest than this made-up anthropomorphized God. But I can't besure that that's the reason.

I guess what I'm saying is, "Why do you believe" and "What causes you to believe" are questions that are extremely hard - maybe impossible - for a believer to answer in a satisfying way. They should be able to identify the leap(s) of faith required for them to build their belief on. But when asked why they took those leaps, why they preferred taking those leaps rather than living in a godless world, they may not be able to go beyond "because I think that that's right". It might be like asking why a heterosexual guy likes girls, or why a homosexual guy likes guys - they just do, it feels right.

I'll pursue this project a little further, but I should make it clear that, the more I think about asking these Christians about their faith, and the more I think about the nature of "spiritual orientation" and "making a leap of faith", the less I think it can be explained. (But this defeatist attitude is the one taken by the Intelligent Design people in relation to the development of biological systems, and I refuse to give up like them).

NOMA take 2

2006-03-24T19:15:00.000-08:00

This week's e-skeptic newsletter (03/24/06) had some criticism of NOMA (non-overlapping magisteria) which I feel I ought to address.

The article is a review by David Ludden of Moti Ben-Ari's Just a Theory: Exploring the Nature of Science. From the review:

Ben-Ari is no more sympathetic to Stephen Jay Gould’s idea of non-overlapping magisterial, or NOMA. On this view, “Science and religion are deemed to have authority in different areas of human life — science describes the natural world, while religion prescribes how humans should live their lives in terms of ethics and morals” (p. 134). NOMA is a philosophy that enables scientists with religious beliefs to reconcile their faith with their scientific vocation. However, Ben-Ari points out two difficulties with this philosophy. First, the philosophy of NOMA is too subtle for the ordinary person, who wants simple answers to simple questions. Second, NOMA can be regarded “as an attempt to evade dealing with religion in scientific terms” (p. 135) by setting religion off-limits to scientific inquiry.

Well, if your religion doesn't make claims about the natural world, then it really is off-limits to scientific inquiry.

If your religion makes claims that science could investigate and/or disprove, then this is bound to eventually happen. All you need is for the right Copernicus, Galileo, Darwin, or Hubble to come along, and down the drain go your theories about an Earth that is 4000 years old, at the center of the universe, and miraculously populated by spontaneously-created species.

If, however, your religion restricts its teachings to non-testable claims - such as the afterlife, the creator's plans for the universe, the life of people whom history did not bother to document properly, and myths no one believes anyways - then you're fine. More importantly, religion should be about the reason and meaning of existence - Why is there something instead of nothing, and to what purpose could the world have turned out as it did.

I guess some religions do make claims about the natural world. But only religious nuts would believe them over what real scientists say. So the magisteria covered by science and by a reasonable person's religion are still non-overlapping.

However, I should make my own criticism of NOMA as it is explained by Gould. My criticism is that, unlike Gould, I do not believe that religion should be a guide to good morals and ethics. While it is obvious that many (probably most) religious people get at least some moral/ethical guideance from their religion, I think it's better to get that from your own observations about the world, about what people want, about the impactof people's choices on other people, about justice, and so on. In other words, I think morals should be derived from Humanism. (I should also point out that many religious people effectively use Humanism to formulate their morals - that is, they use their own ideas of right and wrong derived from reason and often contradicting with some of the teachings of their religion. They still believe that God wants them to be good, and that their duty to be good is a duty God, to everyone, to God's plan, and to Jesus. This is what I call religiously-motivated Humanism, and it's fine by me - those people end up doing more good than most other people).

So I guess my NOMA is not Gould's NOMA. Religion should not determine morals, it should just answer "Why". Humanism determines morals. And science tries to describe the physical world. I guess my NOMA is three-way.

Second Bible Study Session

2006-03-23T23:50:00.000-08:00

Went to my second Bible Study session this week. A couple notes:

Remember that girl I mentioned before, who said she likes to use the "reasoning" (i.e. small technical details and obscure verses, which require faith to make sense in the first place) from the Bible to answer people who ask "How can you believe in that stuff"? Well, at one point in this latest session the leader asked us to talk about why it can be hard to determine what is right, and why it can be hard to actually do it (which relates to the sermon last Sunday). After a bit of interesting discussion, this girl then says "I know what's right because the Bible teaches me what's right". Mmmm, okay... MAN, I'd love to ask her to back that up, or discuss why she believes that. As an atheist, I am becoming more and more amazed that someone who takes Christianity so seriously seems to care so little about understanding the structure of her belief. (Then again, since it's all based on faith anyways, I guess it doesn't make that much of a difference). She reminds me of that Daily Show video with the "Even Stevens; Islam vs Christianity". I'll have to find it. It makes fun of (among other things) people who justify their beliefs by "We know this because it says so in the Bible, and every word in the Bible is true, and we KNOW that every word in the Bible is true because it says so in the Bible, and, if you remember from earlier in this sentence, every word in the Bible is true". In any case, I would love to ask her why she believes what she believes. (I told this to my roommate, who then said that if my objective was to convert people to atheism and destroy their faith, then he didn't want me to come anymore. I said no, I don't want to sabotage the church and I don't think I could if I wanted to - my objective is to understand Christianity, and to understand it well enough so that I can ask about faith without seeming like an outsider, which I did not feel I had done yet since I was still learning so much each time I came. He then said that Christianity is like life - there is ALWAYS more to learn, and if you feel like you've learned enough and can stop learning, that just means you got lazy. He's probably right - and I think this implies that life is simpler when you're an atheist - but I do want to learn more, not until I can stop learning, but until I can ask questions about faith without getting shut out, which is different).

In the Bible Study we read and discussed Hebrews 6. Something interesting that came up is: How do we know someone is saved? What does it even mean? A passage mentioned on Sunday said that, as we identify a tree by the fruit it produces, so a saved Christian can be identified by producing good fruits, or, as is in Hebrews 6:7-8, like a soil that produces good crops rather than thorny plants. But the beginning of that passage (starting with verse 4) goes:

For concerning those who were once enlightened and tasted of the heavenly gift, and were made partakers of the Holy Spirit, and tasted the good word of God, and the powers of the age to come, and then fell away, it is impossible to renew them again to repentance; seeing they crucify the Son of God for themselves again, and put him to open shame. For the land which has drunk the rain that comes often on it, and brings forth a crop suitable for them for whose sake it is also tilled, receives blessing from God; but if it bears thorns and thistles, it is rejected and near being cursed, whose end is to be burned.

So a person can be saved, but if they later reject it, then they can't be saved again... or does that mean they weren't saved to begin with? It probably means that if someone was exposed to Christianity and rejected, then they are irreparably lost (and were never saved), but it could mean that someone who was properly saved and then who rejects Christianity is irreparably lost because of this rejection. All this just highlights the fact that there is no way to tell who is "saved", that it cannot be treated logically. Are you "not saved" if you accept the possibility that the Jesus story is a myth, even if you are a good person? Because if you produce "good fruit", then you should be good... Not that I care about this stuff - I don't believe in the afterlife, the soul, the return of the Messiah, or any of that mess - but this seems to be one of the most important aspects of Christianity (being saved and going to heaven) while at the same time being the one most widely open to debate and to one's own definitions.

As I keep saying, being an atheist is so much simpler...

Going to church for the 2nd time - Good God!

2006-03-19T23:34:00.000-08:00

So today I went to the local Baptist church for the second time.

My thoughts were similar to last time:

1) The repertoire was even better than last time. This band is awesome. It really is too bad they only play songs about Jesus and God and stuff.

2) The sermon was really great. It was basically about walking the walk; We all want to be good people, we all know what it takes, but we fall short, we give in to temptation, we get lazy, we get rude. Why? The pastor illustrated this by saying spirituality like a backpack. Inside it are objects that illustrate people's relationship with God - I won't go into the details of the analogy. During church, and right after church, and at other times when we talk to people or read books or see movies that inspire us to be good, we wear the backpack proudly. But then we put it down - sometimes we drop it right away, sometimes it takes a little while. Sometimes we leave it at home in the morning, sometimes we carry it around most of the day but set it down in difficult situations, etc etc. In other words, we know what is right, but when the going gets tough, sometimes we just forget, or think we can get away with doing what's easier. A sign of spiritual maturity, he said, is knowing what those times are, seeing them coming in advance, and being ready for them. We should always be carrying the backpack, and should notice when we're putting it down. He then went through a bunch of Bible verses about integrity and about the times when integrity is required. And he recommended we create a clear picture of the times we are most likely to slip up, to require reminding or motivation to do what's right - maybe we should even tell friends to watch out for certain behaviors and nag us that those are bad. Strong people aren't strong all the time - they just need to be strong at the few right times here and there. The way I thought about it was, it's like a structure: If it's the same thickness everywhere, it cracks at the corners, at the joints, at the welds and bolts. If your structure takes a load and then cracks at the corners, while someone else's doesn't, it's not because their whole structure is twice as thick as yours or made of better stuff (although it may appear that way) - it's just like yours, but the corners are reinforced. Discipline is about the times when you slip up. Myself, I've been needing motivation to improve a couple things in my life (diet and exercise, basically), and I actually think this sermon will help. Of course, a lot of times something seems super motivating at the time but it quickly fades away. That was the point of the sermon - don't drop those inspiring thoughts. You know what you have to do. Now walk the walk. It's what so many great thinkers have said: Man is what he does. Virtue is a habit. I hope this will help me motivate me to do what I know I must. Given my terrible track record, I'm not optimistic, but I can't allow myself to be pessimistic. We'll see.

3) The Jesus talk didn't bother me so much this time, but this allowed one other thing to become clear: They keep talking about how good God is. God is love, God loves you, what God wants is what is good by definition of "God" and "good". God is good, "goodness" is God.

Does this require one more leap of faith beyond "The universe was deliberately created"? I think it might, but I admit it might not. That question occupied most of my thoughts for the rest of the day.

So much of the service was about Good is good, we love God, God loves us, we trust God, we do what he wants because we know it is good...

This tangling up of the definitions of "good" and "God" deserves some analysis.

Let's say God created the universe. It's a big experiment. Two possibilities branch from this:

a) The goal of the experiment lies way in the future, and the existence of humankind is just a stepping stone in the process. We're just pawns of an experiment whose goal is not our happiness. We're lab rats. It's nice if we're happy, but God will deceive us and make us suffer if that's what it takes for the experiment to progress. Our extinction could be part of the plan.

b) We are the goal of the experiment, we are the species that will, through introspection, decide to develop a just system of living, because the goal of the project is for people to approach God's vision of love and of doing what's right.

Why do Christians reject "a)" so readily?

Well, let's see... If you just assume that God created the universe and that Jesus was uniquely and almost impossibly good, and thus probably a special part of the plan... then I guess that, if Jesus' message was "be good to one another", then God wants us to be good to one another. That does not guarantee that God wants what is best for us, because 1) Jesus was good to everyone, look at where it got him... and 2) God may want us to be good to one another as part of a greater plan where our goodness is only a stepping stone to the final desired state. In other words, just because God wants us to be good, does not mean God wants to be good to us.

I guess the idea of a deceptive, hypocritical, manipulative God that teaches us how to be good but who is not himself good, might be a little too much to take.

Or maybe Christians place their desire to see God's plan work out higher than they place their desires for their own lives to work out. I mean, all the time you hear that the things out of your control are in God's hands, so you should not worry because God will do everything so that it goes according to his plan, even if those things don't go according to YOUR plan.

Well, I guess you could say that God has more vision, that the things that LOOK bad are in fact things that make us better and happier people in the end. That's similar to the "parent" theory - God knows what's best for us even when we don't. But the fact is, a plan for humanity could still mean unnecessary suffering and injustice to some people for all their lives - "you have to break a few eggs". So God's vision might not be used only for our sake, but rather for HIS plans most of the time.

You could also say that God supposedly ensures justice by giving us the afterlife we deserve - a good one if we suffer unfairly in life, a not-so-good one if we benefit unfairly. I guess that would be easy for God to do, and would not alter the earthly side of the plan, so I suppose it's reasonable to believe that, if there's a God, he might as well give us justice in the afterlife.

You could also say that, when God carries out parts of the plan that make people suffer, that God suffers in sympathy. Again, I would think this means God is unreasonable and does not have that much vision. To which it is answered that God loves people, and "love" cam mean being unreasonably compassionate. That sounds pretty, but I don't buy it. Why are we so special?

To that, it is said that man was created in God's image, that man's existence transcends the natural and touches the spiritual, that the pursuit of justice and of doing good elevates us from the rest of the animals. It is godly to pursue what is good. Thinking about compassion, and being motivated by it, makes us more than animals, and makes us in part divine. Which is why sin is so bad - it is the opposite of acting godly, it allows our animal impulses to take over.

I'm not sure how to phrase why this doesn't sound right to me. I'm going to have to think about it.

No church today

2006-03-12T12:23:00.000-08:00

So today would have been the second Sunday I went to this church. However, yesterday I was driving over some mountains and got caught in some nasty weather (easily the worst weather I have ever had to drive through, in the car least well-equipped for it), which delayed my arrival home last evening by several hours and caused me to arrive home in a really exhausted state... So I did not go to church today. Which is probably good, I might have fallen asleep during the service... I'm not sure I am awake right now as it is.

And the Bible study this coming week will not happen. The group will just meet to go out to dinner and hang out, as they do one out of every so many weeks. I will go, because it's fun (I have actually gone a couple times before, just to hang out), but I probably will not have any Christian / theological / atheist / apologetic insights to share. So expect my next post to be one week from today, unless a conversation or article about these topics exposes me to any further interesting ideas about Christian belief prior to next Sunday.

Going To Bible Study For The 1st Time

2006-03-11T00:10:00.000-08:00

So, like I said, I went to church, and then had this long conversation about why Jesus was so important even if he wasn't supernatural, and about whether it is possible for God to "sacrifice", "love", "want", and "suffer".

The week following this - a few days ago - I went to Bible study for the first time.

Now, I already knew these people in Bible study. Most of my roommate's friends, and most of his brother's friends, are the people from Bible study. So I have hung out with them on occasion. They're very cool, very funny, great people to hang out with. And they're not Jesus freaks or anything. Other than for the fact that some of the group's inside jokes are obviously Bible-related, their religion did not come up in the previous times I hung out with them. So I was curious to see their Christian thinking come out.

However, the Bible study session mostly consisted of my roomate's brother talking. (Well, it actually consisted mostly of us hanging out, chatting, catching up with each other, making fun of each other, and so on - the actual Bible-studying took about 50% of the time there). We read Hebrews 5, and my roomate's brother offered his explanations of what he thought it meant, of why he thought the different verses were relevant, what they said about the role of Jesus, what it means to be a high priest, the story where Abraham meets Melchizedek, and verses pointing out that this text is intented basically for Jews to see that Jesus fits into their system of beliefs by being a high priest (and through more complicated ways not to be discussed yet until the Hebrew priests learn more about the foundations of Christian theology, for although by this time you should be teachers, you again need to have someone teach you the rudiments of the first principles of the oracles of God). A high priest is a person who is especially close to God, a person to whom others ask questions to be answered by God or through special insights about God. High priests are chosen by God for this position.

(So this was actually relevant to the "Why was Jesus special?"-type questions I was asking earlier, except the answers were effectively 1: Because he is especially close to God, especially familiar with God's will, 2: Because God said so, and 3: For complicated reasons to be gone into later once the reader understands more about God. Of these, only "1:" (and MAYBE "3:") is believable by someone who does not think Jesus is divine and who does not think God speaks directly to people).

When we were summarizing at the end, we could say a lot of Hebrews is basically about explaining Jesus' "specialness" in such a way that the Hebrew priests would appreciate it. For non-Jewish readers (like us), it's more of a technical detail, it's not really something that helps us strengthen faith, because we don't really have faith in the hierarchy of the Hebrew church to begin with. Still, it does talk about why Jesus is special in a way a non-Christian can appreciate it.

But then one person in the group, towards the very end, said that these things do help her strengthen her faith. She likes to know about these kinds of reasoning, because when people ask her "How can you believe in this kind of stuff?", she needs to have some answers.

This made her stand out to me as a very likely future target for my atheistic interviewing, because she apparently thinks it is important to defend her faith, and because, well, I think she is going about it the wrong way, at least in this case. If you believe, and if you think your belief makes sense and can be defended to others, then it must be because you have thought about why you believe and about why it makes sense. I am quite sure that the arguments for or against belief should come from the validity of the structure of belief, they should speak for themselves. Knowing how Christian theology matches ancient Hebrew theology should not strengthen your Christian faith - or, at least, should not make your faith appear to make any more sense when it is scrutinized by an atheist. Stories from the Bible should be the arguments you use. Rather, they can illustrate or inspire those arguments, help you form them, but the arguments should be able to stand on their own. Many of the pro-atheism arguments I like the best, I learned from books. But when I am presenting them and trying to show this is valid, I never say "In such and such a book, the author says", I just present the argument right out. To the credit of the Bible study, this is what they were doing for almost the entire time: trying to learn the thinking and meaning behind the verses, independent of who said what. In other words, the Bible study was largely (but not entirely) aimed at taking that chapter and making the transition from "It's true because the Bible says so" to "It's true because it makes sense", it was largely about internalizing these ideas, making them stand on their own without needing their biblical origins for support or justification. And that, I think, is awesome.

I used to think that studying the Bible was the wrong way to go about strengthening one's faith. First of all, because saying "the Bible says this" is a surefire way to get a non-Christian to tune you out. Arguments for the Christian faith had to come from observations about the world and conclusions about the nature of God and the role of humankind and of Jesus. The way these follow from each other should stand logically on its own, rather than through justifications from the Bible itself. If you have an opinion, then this opinion should be based on reasoning that you can explain to someone - learning about what some book says can't make that reasoning stronger, not if whatever reasoning you already know is already good enough for you to stand behind what you believe. For example, if I am an atheist, then I should already have plenty of explanations for why I think that this belief is right, and reading a book on atheism should only give me ADDITIONAL reasons, rather than being what allows me to go from "I think this is right but I could be wrong" to "I can now explain my position well".

But I was wrong in thinking this. For two reasons: One, you can have a gut feeling for your position, and require study in order to find arguments that make that gut feeling more defensible. Just as I thought atheism was right before I learned about the reasoning that made me be sure it is right, I guess I can see that a Christian can have a gut feeling that Christian theology and the stories in the Bible make sense before learning how and why they actually make sense. However, it is important to realize that, until you learn these logic-based arguments, your gut feeling could be wrong. A Christian who believes, but who cannot explain why their belief is not illogical, has to admit that they might be wrong, or at the very least that they cannot possibly expect that a non-believer will be convinced of the logical validity of Christianity by talking to them. I think this is a very weak form of belief. If you want to believe in something, you have to learn as much about it as you can, otherwise you don't know why you believe. If you feel strongly about an issue, it must be because of evidence, logic, and maybe some internal convictions, but you have to develop a realistic view of how these come together to form an opinion, a structure of belief. Until then, you're just confused, and you can't know what to believe. Of course, people whose beliefs are primarily motivated by faith don't seem to have a problem with this. I guess I just don't see faith as a reliable or legitimate reason to believe in something. Or, if faith is a component of an opinion, I have to understand the reasoning behind the opinion well enough to say "If you have faith in X, then this is how you come to believe in Y, but I can see that if you do not have faith in X, then you legitimately come to believe in Z". Most complicated beliefs and opinions and ideas - or, rather, most DIFFERENCES between opposing complicated beliefs and opinions and ideas - really boil down to differences in people's very basic axioms about how the world works. I think any debate or discussion between two sides of an issue should be about figuring out what those axioms are, and whether it is ok to be on either side of the basic axioms. Like the spiritual orientation thing.

Anyways, so I will grant to you that Bible study (and the apologetics that come from this kind of analysis) can strengthen one's faith, if you grant that faith is pretty dang weak BEFORE this.

The other reason why I was wrong in thinking Bible study was useless is that I thought it was about learning what the Bible said, and basing your beliefs on these ideas since they were valid because they came from the Bible. In other words, I thought it was about strengthening faith not though ideas you accept on their own merits, but through ideas taken to be "true" / "part of Christian faith" just because they are in the Bible. If you use the Bible to illustrate these ideas, and to inspire you to come up with more lines of reasoning for your belief, then this is fine. This is like me reading the atheism books and adopting the ideas I thought were powerful (and rejecting the ideas I thought were junk, many of which I put in the "Typical Atheist Criticisms" post a couple days ago), NOT about reading a long list of ideas and being ready to regurgitate them with little thought.

However, the person who at the end of Bible study said that the ideas in Hebrews were compelling support for her faith... might not have been making this distinction. I am very curious to approach her about all this and get her take on it, but before I do I am going to have to go to a lot more Bible studies to see if I can learn more about how these Christians view the relationship between faith, scripture, theology, the Jesus story, God's plan, the role of humanity, apologetics, and the rest of this mess.

It's interesting to learn all this, but MAN, you gotta admit being an atheist is so much simpler...

Going To Church For The 1st Time - Jesus!

2006-03-10T19:09:00.000-08:00

Ah, now here's where we get to the meat of it.

Like I said, last Sunday I went to church for the first time in many many years - for the first time since I started leaning towards atheism. My impressions can be summarized into

1) The sermon was awesome.
2) There was a lot of singing. The music was surprisingly not bad.
3) There was a lot of Jesus-talk.

Here's what I mean:

1) During the sermon, the pastor basically made two points: One, learn to not worry about things that are out of your hands. And Two, keep in mind why you do what you do, learn to turn "I have to" into "I want to". It was all supported by numerous Biblical references, and each of these ideas was really the conclusion of a series of points made when analyzing the meaning of a certain chapter of scripture, but these basic ideas stand on their own very well. Personally, I think they are the most fundamental ideas for happy living. Change what you can, accept what you can't, and learn to tell the difference. (The pastor went beyond this to say that the things that are out of your hands are in God's hands, so pray that they go well, and if they don't, it's all part of the plan, so there is no reason to worry about things out of your control). And remember that you do everything you do for good reasons, to make the world a better place, to make people's lives better (and often your own as well), so nothing should be done out of "duty" or "obligation", or because it is required by law or by your work or by some authority or superior. These things that you "have" to do are part of mechanisms that ensure society runs well, that ensure justice is maximized. The pastor didn't put it that way, but he might as well have. It's basically what the scripture he quoted was saying. This made me think that understanding where the Bible came from, who really wrote it and why, etc, and believing that it is the divine word of God, is not really that important when it comes to learning from it. When people say "The Bible says this", they don't usually mean "...so it must be true", but rather "it's said in an elegant and nice way that helps me apply it to everyday life". You don't quotethe Bible to support a point as much as to illustrate it. It can just be an example, a "think about it this way", not a "and therefore it's right". I'll talk more about this in my next post, about Bible study.

2) I must admit I have always liked Christian music. On long drives I sometimes stumble upon a Christian rock station and appreciate how pleasant the music is. And in this particular church, the music was played by a really good band. So that was cool. The only thing that bothered me (other than the fact I did not know the songs, so I pretty much just watched while everyone else sang along... except my roommate, he doesn't like to sing) was how all of them were about Jesus, worshipping Jesus, etc. (Which is the reason why, as much as I like how Christian rock sounds, I end up changing the station after a few songs). Which brings us to...

3) All the Jesus talk. Now, you should be thinking "Duh, it's a Christian church! Of course it all revolves around Jesus!". Well, yes, you'd be right. But still, it's a huge leap to go from "I believe that the universe was deliberately created, and that a guy lived 2000 years ago who was morally perfect" to "That guy died for our sins, that guy has conversations with God, that guy rules the world of the afterlife, that guy will come back to the world, that guy has a special connection with God no one else has, we should be very excited we know about that guy, that guy loves us so very much". Trying to see how much of this can be derived from "I believe that the universe was deliberately created, and that a guy lived 2000 years ago who was morally perfect" dominated my thoughts after the church service, and for the rest of this post I want to write about where those thoughts went - as usual, with the guidance of my roommate.

After church we went to have lunch, just me and him. I asked him how he could put up with all the Jesus-talk. How can any of it make sense if you don't believe that Jesus is divine?

He asked what I mean by "divine". I said that basically it means he has supernatural powers, that he could perform miracles, that he could come back from the dead, that he could speak with God in a more direct way than anyone else. That he was unique.

My roommate said that Jesus could have been a non-magical person and still have been divine and shared a special relationship with God. My roommate does not believe Jesus performed miracles, came back from the dead, or "chatted" with God in prayer. But, supposedly, Jesus was a perfectly moral person, always doing what is right, never compromising, never taking the easy path, never cheating, not even fighting back against his enemies. In that, he was unique - no other person can be that driven, that moral, that perfect, that fair, that unfailingly idealistic, that disciplined. So he can be unique and exemplary and worthy of praise not for being magical, but for being essentially a perfectly good person. As for his connection with God; If he is more moral and more dedicated to good than anyone else, if he has a clearer understanding of what is good than does anyone else, and if people's relationship with God consists in part of figuring out what is good and right, then Jesus had a closer connection with God.

If you believe that God set up the universe so that things would happen as they did, then you must believe God "designed" Jesus. Jesus was a "special project", not just any random person, but one of the few (and the foremost one of those few) made to change the world. In that sense, he can be more than just a person while at the same time NOT being more than just a person. And the whole "God incarnate" deal is probably about how Jesus was designed so as to embody and exemplify God's idea of virtue and morals.

If you assume that Gd created the world and everything on it quite deliberately, and if you assume that 2000 years ago a man lived who was unique, perfectly moral, unfailingly idealistic, who never took the easy path and was never deceptive or unjust, then you have to admit that, therefore, this man was created by God as a special part of the experiment. Since this man was so exemplary, you have to admit that God must have meant for him to be an example, a message, an illustration of an idea. In other words, if God created everything and if Jesus was uniquely good (even if he was not magical and did not break physical laws), then you have to admit God created Jesus in a special, unique way, and that people ought to reflect upon Jesus and his life and choices and teachings.

Maybe God created people in such a way that the only way for them to see what's good, and to be motivated to be good, would be to actually have the world generate a perfectly good person - but now we're speculating beyond the "if, then" logic.

All right. I will grant that, if God created the world deliberately and if Jesus was uniquely good (two big "if"s I will grant for the sake of argument), then Jesus was probably put there by God so people would learn from him.

But there is another whole dimension to this thing that I really don't get, and it's the "sacrifice". "God sacrificed his only son", Jesus went through so much pain, etc. My usual objection to this idea is that, if Jesus had supernatural powers and could cure the blind, then he could have simply not felt pain if he wanted, and if Jesus knew his life was a aprt of this plan and chose to go along it, then everything that happened to him must have been intentional - he must have known and accepted that all that bad stuff was going to happen to him. But here we are assuming Jesus did not have supernatural powers, so he did feel pain. And he was not in especially close touch with God's plan, so some of what happened to him must have come as a surprise, but he went through with it anyways. So, all right, Jesus deserves to be admired for his suffering. He was good and he paid the price ("No good deed goes unpunished", right?) and that was an extremely hard thing we can all learn from.

But how can God suffer in the process? If God is omniscient and omnipotent and all that, then he simply wants things to happen, and they happen. Why would this involve suffering? God created a special person, and this person had to suffer as part of a plan (and this person did not cease to exist, since Jesus is supposedly in heaven now, so it's not even a sacrifice in the "and then you're gone and I don't have you and can't interact with you anymore" sense, just in the "I'm going to put you through some suffering" sense). How can God build the universe and the people in it according to a plan, and then suffer as this plan is executed? Suffering means he wishes things could go a different way. But things can go whatever way God wants.

My roommate's answer to this was, God loves people. God suffers when people suffer, and God especially suffers when Jesus, the only perfect person God ever created, suffered terribly. If you were all-powerful, what else would you do with your time other than create complicated, interesting, beautiful things that you would love?

And then I said, but if God loves people, then he will make things turn out in a way that is best for humanity, and so he won't suffer, he won't "sacrifice", he will just set things up the way they must be so that things go the way he wants them to go.

My roommate says, Look at it this way: When a parent punishes a kid, the parent suffers, even though they are doing what is best for the kid. Just because what you're doing will lead to less suffering and more happiness in the future, it can still be hard now.

And I replied, not for an all-powerful all-knowing God. The reason a parent punishes his kid is to increase the overall amount of happiness, and decrease the overall amount of suffering, in the kid's life. If the parent really could vividly see all the good done by the punishing, as vividly as he sees the relatively small amount of present suffering, it would not be hard to punish the kid. Punishing the kid is hard because the present sways our emotions more strongly than the probable future - for the same reasons work is unpleasant, because we have an imperfect sense of predicting and visualizing and anticipating future gratifications and rewards. God, on the other hand, can't have this problem. He knows what's going to happen, so if a certain event leads to an overall increase in happiness and moves humanity towards the goal of the divine plan, then he can't suffer over that, he just did what he has to do. If God wishes people (especially Jesus) could just not have to suffer (because people suffering causes God to suffer), but you also want to help humanity make progress by allowing for suffering, then (if you're perfectly reasonable) you'll realize that you can only pick one of the paths, and once you make your decision, there's no use letting it make you suffer. Things are only hard if you're not good at convincing yourself you did the best thing. For a God who can see the future as clearly as the present or the past - for a God who stands outside of time and created all four dimensions of the universe at once - then suffering over having to make compromises in that design is just unreasonable and stupid. God can do whatever he wants, and if he places certain restrictions and certain goals in his design, then that's his own fault.

My roommate then said that I'm ignoring the nature of love. The nature of love is suffering when your loved one suffers, even if the suffering is necessary and brings about good and happiness in the end. I said, then, that I can't imagine a perfect God "loving", because this kind of suffering indicates you're not looking at the big picture, that you are being overwhelmed by an irrational compassion rather than letting your compassion look at how much better things will be in the long run.

You can see we're starting to go in circles here.

My roomate said something like, Ok, let's take a step back. God creates things that he loves - just like you would if you had that much power. But he has a plan for these things. And for the sake of the plan, some of his creations have to suffer, they have to not fulfill their potential, they have to not get what they deserve. And you wish this were not the case, and that's hard.

But then I said wishing both for the goal of the plan AND for the well-being and justice of all your creations is simply irrational if you understand the whole system well enough to see that getting both is impossible. Besides, God set up this system, he can do whatever he wants. What happens IS what God wants, there's no way around that. How can God want conflicting things, and suffer because it's impossible to get both? This is an irrational and not-all-powerful God.

My roommate then said that the plan can still include the suffering of people and the suffering of Jesus, and God can see that this is the best thing but still allow his compassion for people and for Jesus to make this unpleasant.

But how can anything be unpleasant to a God who is all-powerful? Any unpleasantness, he brings upon himself by setting up a world with injustice, with suffering, and with a Jesus that led a very hard life.

Well, just because you bring the unpleasantness upon yourself, doesn't mean it's not unpleasant.

Sure it does. If you bring unpleasantness upon yourself as part of fulfilling a larger goal, then you only really mind it if you're short-sighted.

Not if it means you're bringing unpleasantness upon OTHER PEOPLE, unjustly, in order to fulfill your goal.

Ah.

All right. I see now. God does what is best for humanity, but for this to happen, some people - including Jesus - have to suffer a lot, unjustly. So God is sacrificing the well-being of some people (who do not deserve this) for the sake of the plan. In a way, he is being selfish. Even if these people are rewarded in the afterlife, and even if humanity as a whole benefits, it's still not quite fair from the point of view of those people (like Jesus) who suffer during their earthly life. And God suffers because of that. Especially Jesus, who deserves suffering least of all, and who is God's most special human creation, but who leads a painful life.

But that means that, in being God, God HAS to suffer, there's no avoiding it. Unless he makes a world where there is no sufferign and injustice - which, as we can see from looking at the world, is for some reason not the design he chose to create. Either he suffers for his beloved creations, or he makes an unsatisfactory design, and he chose to make a design where he suffers for his creations. So God chose to suffer. Is that still really sacrifice?

Sure, in the same way parents choose to suffer so as to bring them up in a satisfactory manner - they deserve credit for that choice.

But this kind of suffering implies wishing things could be some other way than they are. It means being unreasonable, wishing for what can not be. If God is perfect, can't he just see what has to be done and do it? How can God "want" anything at all? He should be able to decide what is best, and then that is the way things happen. Only an imperfect God has to "make touch choices" and "make difficult compromises in the design" like this. If God is perfect, God does what is best. So, in a way, loving people is an imperfection?

Maybe that's one root reason why I don't buy atheism. If God created the universe, he must have wanted something. But "wanting" implies the possibility of not getting it, or of executing something imperfectly, or of not being sure what you ought to do to get things to go your way. So only an imperfect God would go through all this trouble of having a plan, a relationship with people, a Jesus, and so son. A perfect God would just make things go and then proudly step back.

My roommate insists that a perfect God can suffer for his beloved creations, and can "want". I'm not so sure. I'm gonna have to think about it.

Dr. Daniel Dennett and Spiritual Orientation

2006-03-10T15:41:00.000-08:00

Remember how I said that, once I figured out that religious faith probably comes from a desire to see meaning and purpose behind the world, that I tried to find someone else who has said the same thing? (Because, really, I could not be the first one to think of this). And that all I found was a technical book that was NOT going to be read by the people who could most benefit from it?

Well, a consice, clear, easy-to-understand review of that book is here. The book is Dr. Daniel Dennett's Breaking The Spell. (He also has written a bunch more atheism books about science's explanations of consciousness, evolution, etc).

Dennett's theory is well summarized by Michael Shermer: Humans have brains that are big enough to be both self-aware and aware that others are self-aware. This “theory of mind,” or what Dennett calls “adopting the intentional stance,” leads to a “Hyperactive Agent Detection Device” that not only alerts us to real dangers, such as poisonous snakes, but also generates false positives, such as believing that rocks and trees are imbued with intentional minds, or spirits. “The memorable nymphs and fairies and goblins and demons that crowd the mythologies of every people are the imaginative offspring of a hyperactive habit of finding agency wherever anything puzzles or frightens us.” This is animism that, in the well-known historical sequence, leads to polytheism and, eventually, monotheism. In other words, God is a false positive generated by our Hyperactive Agent Detection Device.

So, basically, we see intent, goals, and intelligence where they in fact are not. We do this because, when we lived in the wild, brains that did this made their owners safer. Animals with brains that did this were less likely to be killed and more likely to have offspring. When we then became smart enough to think of the world and the people on it as one giant system, naturally our “Hyperactive Agent Detection Device” tried to tell us that the nature and existence of such a system are the manifestations of an agent's intent. Which is why so many people think "Why does stuff exist? Why is the world as it is? Why did life and intelligence arise? Why did I get certain lucky, improbably opportunities?" are important, meaningful questions - because their brain (which evolved to keep them safe from dangers in the wild) tells them that events are the result of intelligent intent.

I also said that Only the most intolerant atheist could say that this need for answering the big "Why"s is wrong, silly, illogical, or meaningless. I am fairly sure you cannot prove or explain to a believer why it is that asking "Why?" is meaningless. Well, it appears that Daniel Dennett is such an atheist. He thinks that evolutionary processes can be blamed for making the brain see purpose and intent where in fact there is none (much as a technological world trains us to recognise "design" in such a way that we sometimes see deliberate design where there is none; in the products of evolution, random mutation, and natural selection). Dennett is probably right in his theory of where this impulse comes from, this impulse to see purpose, reason, and intent where they probably don't exist.

But I don't think Dennett is right in thinking that presenting this idea will "break the spell", will cause people to realize they believe for no good reason. Most reasonable believers ALREADY admit they believe for no good reason, that you need faith, you need to want to believe. If when they say "I think the universe has to have a purpose, a reason, intent", you say "You only think this because your brain was wired to think this, due to evolutionary processes", the believers will probably then reply "Well, these processes were intended by God so that people would realize God exists". By attributing the rise of faith to a natural cognitive process likely to arise during the natural selection of intelligent life-forms, he has both pleased atheists (in doing what I too am trying to do: showing a logical, natural, and understandable cause for faith) AND given believers something they will think was created by God to help people find God.

This is yet another demonstration of how reason, logic, and "evidence" will not switch someone's spiritual orientation. Saying "Faith is caused by a natural phenomenon" will just make the believer reply "This phenomenon occurs because God created the universe this way: He created a universe where this phenomenon would occur, so that we can find him", or something. If natural phenomena are intended by God, then showing that faith is a natural phenomenon gets you nowhere in the theism-atheism debate... even though this really is an interesting point that enlightens the atheist's understanding of faith.

In fact, there is an interesting debate going on between Dr. Daniel Dennett and Christian apologist Richard Swinburne, author of several books about why faith supposedly makes logical sense.

(I must admit I have not yet read the letters leading up to this debate, but they are supposed to put to the test the ideas I presented in the previous post. I can't wait to read this).

Spiritual Orientation, Non-Overlapping Magisteria, and Intelligent Design

2006-03-10T12:36:00.000-08:00

A lot of atheists think that anyone reasonable and honest enough should be able to think himself into atheism - that atheism is obviously right to anyone who cares to understand the logic behind it, the problems with theism, etc. (I used to feel that way, but as you will see in this post, I no longer do). Similarly, a lot of theists think that they can convince an atheist that they are right - that they can "convert" an atheist to theism if they present enough evidence and enough logical arguments.

The point of this post is to explain why I think this can be impossible in many cases. In other words: The point of this post is to explain why I think a perfectly reasonable person can be a theist, and why I think a perfectly reasonable person can be an atheist. This may at first sound illogical and inconsistent, but bear with me.

(By "atheism", I mean 1: "a God is not necessary to explain the universe", 2: "it is not possible to prove that God exists", 3: "and so he might as well not". I do not think one can prove God does NOT exist, but one can believe that nothing in the world needs a divine cause, in which case you might as well live in a godless world since God cannot be shown to influence the world. I guess this is a position some people call "agnosticism", but "atheism" can mean "no belief in God" rather than "belief in no God" depending on how you break it down: a-theism (No "God-ism", no faith in God, God might or might not exist) or athe-ism ("No God"-ism, belief that God does NOT exist). Once atheist author David Mills was asked the difference between an atheist and an agnostic, and his answer was "Guts". But I digress).

I will talk about the idea that we have an innate, internal, personal "leaning" towards theism or atheism. Depending on which way that leaning goes, we are more likely to interpret the world we see around us as a result of mindless, unguided , deterministic natural systems that can be modeled by simple rules, or as a result of God's work.

I will also talk about why I think science can fit comfortably and with no conflict inside a theistic world view (one of the most religious people I know is a physicist), and why I think them more spiritual-looking aspects of human behavior can fit comfortably inside a materialistic world view. This should further demonstrate how anything we observe in ourselves or in the world around us can easily be thought of as evidence of divine work or as consequences of unguided, automatic, simple systems.

(And by the way, I do think that the people who say "Intelligent Design" is science... are idiots. I think it is possible for a strongly religious person to believe that God deliberately created everything in the universe, but also to believe that evolution and natural selection and mutations and other "automatic" chemical/biological processes led to the biodiversity and complexity we see today. To me, a God who sets up a system that can generate complex life automatically is far superior to a God who has to "cheat" and create new life in a way that is not natural or deterministic. This point will be a corollary of the things I will talk about in this post, but I thought I'd bring it up now before anyone thought I have ANY sympathy for ID proponents or for what they want to do to science classrooms).

All that having been said... what IS this big "Spiritual Orientation" idea I'm so excited about?

It basically goes like this:

Some people, when they try to understand a complex, intricate system, are very likely to think that this system was the result of a deliberate design. That is, some people think that anything complicated, anything generated/triggered by non-obvious mechanisms, has to have a "reason", a "meaning".

These people think about the world around us - the physical constants that allow for chemistry and planetary systems, the biological systems that allow for life and intelligence and consciousness, the unlikely events in people's lives that led to happiness, justice, and opportunities - these people look at all this and are compelled to think these things have a purpose, a meaning. To them, it is just short of inconceivable (or it might be completely inconceivable) that all these things simply exist, simply happen, as random, natural, mechanical consequences of complex systems made up of elementary bits that follow simple rules. These people are compelled to think that these things happen, arise, and exist for a purpose. These people have a harder time thinking that coincidences and accidents are just that. To them, almost everything happens for a reason. To them, "Why?" is a fundamental question that cannot be ignored. They cannot help themselves but believe that the universe has a purpose. They must answer "Why do things exist?", "Why are the physical constants of the universe such as they are", and "Why did life and intelligence arise?" with more than "They just are. Accidentally. For no reason. Things have to be SOME way (except in an empty universe, which could have happened) and that's the way things happened to be". A purpose is a "required" part of the universe as much as a framework of energy, physical constants, and particles.

Naturally, a "purpose" means a deliberate decision made by an intelligence so as to achieve a goal. Anyone should be able to see that there is no "meaning", no "purpose", no "reason", no "Why/because", unless there is a goal, and that "a goal" means that an intelligent entity desires something to happen, and understands the universe well enough to trigger events that will make that happen. So, if you need an answer to "Why?", you get a creator, an intelligent creator with a plan, a creator who wants something to happen. That is the only reasonable answer to asking "Why?" about the existence of the universe, about the appearance of live, and about the development of human society - because just by asking "Why?" you're already assuming deliberate intelligent intentions.

Now, some OTHER people do not feel this is necessary. These other people feel that asking "Why do things exist? Why is the universe as it is? Why did intelligent life develop? Why did I have these lucky opportunities in my life?" is meaningless. These other people think that asking "How?" is really as far as you can reasonably and meaningfully go. These other people think that studying the mechanisms behind what exists is enough, studying how these systems can be broken down into small, simple bits that follow simple rules and have simple properties. These other people see the development of the universe as a straightforward consequence of the physical constants and of the arrangement of matter and energy during and right after the Big Bang - constants and arrengements which just happened to be as they were, with no reason or purpose, but accidentally. These other people see the rise of microscopic life from chemistry, the rise of complex multicellular life, and the rise of intelligent life, as simple straightforward consequences of natural selection and probability, a cumulative preservation of the random mutations that best allowed biological systems to preserve themselves. These other people see lucky opportunities in their lives not as a gift (or reward or a plan) from the force that created the universe, but as the results of probability and of the social structures that make up modern civilization.

So we can basically divide people into two camps:

People who think asking "Why?" about the way the universe and life and intelligence came into existence and developed, and about accidental events, is meaningful. These people believe that the universe was created and/or is guided by a higher entity with a plan, with purpose. They will not be satisfied with a model of the universe that does not answer "Why?" - for them such a model would be incomplete.

and

People who think asking "Why?" is not meaningful, useful, or likely to lead to any relevant (or true) ideas. Rather, asking "How?" should expose the mechanisms which automatically (with no guidance or purpose) led to things being as they are.

I think this distinction really points to the driving force behind faith, to the reason why believers are reluctant to imagine themselves in a godless world, to the inexplicable but solid part of their world view that almost requires them to want to believe in God.

In other words, I think that believers believe because they need an answer to "Why?". Any world view that does not offer an answer to "Why?" is incomplete. For them to believe that things "just exist" and "just happen" (i.e. as the result of accidents and of natural, mechanical, deterministic systems that follow simple rules) would require a huge leap of faith. It is far easier for them to believe that things are as they are, and happen as they happen, due to some grand purpose, due to a creator's plans, rewards, punishments, desires, and goals. The thought of a godless world to them lacks answers to very fundamental questions. They need to think about "Why?".

By now you can see why I think my last "Christian interview", the one I wrote about two posts ago, the one where a fundamentalist evangelical told me my world viw has no meaning and requires a huge leap of faith, did actually present me with good insights, although I missed seeing them at the time.

Believers think one needs faith to accept that the world probably came to be as it is on its own, automatically, accidentally. Atheists think that this is the simplest and most comfortable explanation, and think that faith is required to believe that the world was deliberately created and guided for a purpose. Depending on whether or not you think "Why?" is a compelling question (Why are physical constants just right to allow for chemistry and for life? Why does matter exist at all, why is the universe not empty? Why did life and intelligence develop? Why did I get these lucky opportunities in my life?), you will either think that "God, and a universe with a purpose" is the simplest explanation, or you will think that "no God, and a mechanical, deterministic, accidental universe driven by probability and by understandable systems" is the simplest explanation.

This, to me, is a very powerful idea. It shows that religion (well, belief in some kinf od creator) is pretty much the only way to answer certain questions. Some people think these questions are meaningless, and some people think these questions are extremely important and must be answered.

This is why you get atheists and theists. Atheists don't need a creator to explain the universe. Theists do. An atheist will say that a creator is not necessary to explain the world around us. A theist will reply that, without a creator, the world has no meaning and no purpose, it's just one giant accident, and that this cannot be - or that it COULD be, but sounds unlikely and improbable, and makes less sense than the universe being a huge project, a huge narrative, a huge creation, something with a goal.

A particularly harsh atheist might say that this need for purpose is a form of madness. That people should not NEED to have an answer to a question that is so clearly meaningless, so clearly impossible. To him, it's clear that the world and its things and mechanisms do not have to have a "Why?". But to a believer, it is equally clear that things DO have to have a why, otherwise the universe makes a lot less sense. I hope that even the most intolerant atheist can recognise the power of this need for purpose, can recognise that it is not unreasonable.

Not very long ago, right after I started trying to develop these ideas ideas (about how belief may be a direct and fairly reasonable consequence of the need for purpose and meaning and a "Because"), my ex girlfriend (with whom I had had many conversations about faith, most of them enlightening and frustrating at the same time) pointed me to an article that compared atheists, as a minority, to homosexuals. It's a great analogy. In fact, atheists are in many way discriminated against in the same way homosexuals were discriminated against 20 years ago! They've made more progress than we have! "You can be elected as an openly gay politician in this country, but you can't be elected as an openly atheistic one," said Lori Lipman Brown, ... the first paid lobbyist for the unbelievers in the nation's capital. I thought it sounded like a very good parallel, and it was not at first obvious to me why I liked it so much. I thought about it, and realized that people who are gay are gay because of their sexual orientation - their brain just tells them that some people of their gender are sexually attractive, that the thought of physical intimacy with them is a pleasant one. That's all it takes to be gay, is for your brain to point that way. It seemed to me that atheism comes from a similar, analogous "orientation", and after I thought about it for a while, I realized the following: All it takes for you to be an atheist is to think that you don't need a creator to explain the universe, is to be satisfied by an explanation of a world with no purpose and with no God. That's when I really was able to see how this is the one basic "orientation" that leads to theism or atheism. So this is where "spiritual orientation" comes from, as a parallel to "sexual orientation" when I was talking about the article with my ex girlfriend.

(I do realize the phrasing is misleading, because an atheistically-oriented person might not consider themselves "spiritual" - it would be like calling sexual orientation "homosexual orientation" instead. But since the orientation is about spiritual needs and spiritual questions - or their rejection - I think I'll stick with the phrase. If you think of something better than "spiritual", let me know).

Phrasing it this way allowed me to see how belief goes beyond "reason" and "evidence" - and thus, theism and atheism go beyong "reason" and "evidence". Atheists complain that there is nothing that you can tell a believer that will make them change their minds - no evidence is enough. But it is also true of atheism - I know I would interpret any seemingly-miraculous event as a hallucination, as the work of technologically powerful aliens, as an optical illusion, etc, LONG before I thought it was a real miracle. I am certain that there is nothing on this side of death that can convince me that a God probably exist and that anyone/anything has supernatural powers.

Once you understand that both theism and atheism are just opposite sides of the same coin, of this "orientation", it becomes clear why. Your orientation allows you to look at any information, any idea, any evidence, any logic, and to fit it inside your world view. For a theist, any proof that the world is mechanical, accidental, driven by simple understandable processes, is just further proof that God did a good job in designing it. For an atheist, any extremely lucky event is just a coincidence, the tail end of some probability distribution. For a theist, showing that the coincidence could just be a result of statistics will not make it less "meaningful" or purposeful. For an atheist, the fact that science can't explain many things is not proof that science will NEVER be able to explain them. For a theist, even if science could explain everything we observe, this would still only be a description of the machine God created, of the "stage" created for the sake of human development and existence. Science can't explain everything, and religion can't explain everything ("God works in mysterious ways"). But your orientation says that one approach, or the other, is the one looking at the most fundamental questions. For a theist, science is a subset of religion - it is the study of God's creation. For an atheist, religion and faith are a subset of science - a quaint psychological/neural phenomenon that can be explained by memetics, evolution, and the less-than-logical needs and higher processes of the human mind.

What this means is that no evidence, no logic, will be enough to convince an atheist that he is wrong. And no evidence, no logic, will be enough to convince a theist that he is wrong. Your orientation allows you to look at anything and rationalize it into your world view. That is the power of the "spiritual orientation" - it frees the theist vs atheist argument from things like "logic" and "evidence", and shows it for what it is: a personal preference that cannot be changed unless the person herself wants to change it.

And at the core of this orientation is the need to ask "Why?" regarding the universe, life, intelligence, and improbable events. If you really want to try and change someone's spiritual orientation, you need to get him to think about this need for purpose and meaning. You need to get them to realize that if you don't need purpose and meaning, then you don't need God, but that if you do need God, it must be because you need purpose and meaning.

I will admit that, if someone believes that the possibility of this world having been deliberately created is more probable than the possibility of this world having accidentally come to be as it is, then this person might not be compelled to believe this ONLY because of a need for purpose and meaning. Other things might come into it as well. However, I believe that these things probably are caused by ignorance of science. The more you know about science, the more you can see how pretty much everything we see in the world around us, even human behavior, can be explained by simple, mechanical, natural, deterministic, probabilistic systems. It does not take much knowledge of science to think that science will probably, at some point, be able to explain everything in terms of the interactions between small particles. At this point, your need for God will be distilled to the need for a purpose and meaning, for the need to believe that the giant machine we call the universe was not an accident.

Some people think that God is a "God of the gaps", that God is only needed to explain things that science cannot explain. While this used to be true (ancient gods drove the weather, the seasons, seismic activity, ocean waves and currents, the sun, etc) and is still true for some people (ahem Intelligent Design ahem), it is not necessary for a belief in God. In fact, I think a healthy and honest belief in God is one that does not conflict with the idea that everything that happens in the world is caused by natural, unguided, simple processes, almost a direct consequence to the arrangement of matter and energy at the time of the Big Bang (which, one could believe, was carefully arranged by God).

Of course, a theist can still believe that the physical world is driven by understandable, determinsitic processes. Many of the people trying to figure out the mechanisms of the universe - physicists, biologists, psychologists, scientists of all kinds - believe in God. These people believe that the mechanical, deterministic, physical universe was created by God as part of a plan, for a reason, as the "stage" for the development and existence of people. They still ask "Why?", even though they believe that the mechanisms of the universe are understandable and deterministic. It's like they believe they live inside a computer, and figuring out how the computer works is almost independent from thinking about the intentions of the programmers and designers and builders of the computer's systems. So the scientific world can fit well inside the mind of someone who needs to ask "Why?", of someone who is religious. However, people who dedicate their lives to studying the processes and mechanisms of the universe tend to, in general, be more likely to NOT need to ask "Why?"; A large fraction of scientists are atheists. Science is necessarily an atheistic pursuit: If you study a phenomenon scientifically, then you must believe that it is a necessary, repeatable, reliable, direct, automatic, mechanical, determinsitic consequence of some state of things that came just before.

Like I said, you may think that the FIRST state of things - the one that caused everything else, like the Big Bang - was divinely guided. You may even think that some phenomena which are non-deterministic, chaotic, or best modeled by statistical distributions (like quantum phenomena, fluid motion, some chemistry) can be influenced supernaturally towards some goal: if a particle has a 50-50 chance of doing A or B, then God can make the particle do A when A trigges some divinely desired event, and do B when the event triggered by A is not divinely desired, as long as A happens half the time and B happens half the time. Quantum behavior is truly random and non-deterministic, the behavior of a particle can only be described in terms of probability distributions. So one could say God chooses what the particle actually does (if the particle is ever forced to pick one path/action/position/property), but that what ALL the particles do, when put all together, has to match the probability distribution. (It's like saying that it God wants a guy to win at the roulette, then God can make the ball fall where the guy bets AS LONG AS the ball does not fall in one area much more often than it should, that is, as long as the guy does not get lucky beyond what the probabilities of the roulette possibly allow).

Still, it is completely against the point of science to say "This phenomenon cannot possibly be explained in terms of simple, deterministic, automatic, mechanical processes caused by systems that follow simple rules - the only explanation is that God performed a miracle we cannot explain". Even if this view IS true - even if God does perform miracles, making things happen that could not be explained by causal systems - it is not what science is about. Science requires "faith" in the idea that any phenomenon can be explained by causal relationships, by mechanical processes, by things always following the same simple rules. If you step outside of that - even if you're right - you're not doing science.

I just thought I'd add my thoughts on religion and science, since so many people think that science and religion are incompatible. If religion is about "Why?" and science is about "How?", and if they can answer their questions without the other, then they're fine - this idea is called "Non-Overlapping Magisteria", and is what allows religious people to be perfectly good scientists. But if religion makes predictions about the physical world, if religious ideas are framed as scientific theories, then, well, it's not really science. It's an approach to understanding the world that might LOOK like science, that might use scientific VOCABULARY and even the observations made by scientific experiments, but it does not ask scientific questions. It, in effect, says "science cannot answer how this works" - or, rather, it says "I can show you scientifically that science cannot answer how this works", which is of course ridiculous. The basic idea of science is that everything can be explained by natural causal processes. If you believe this is not the case, then this cannot be proven scientifically, since this belief lies outside of science. Which is why Intelligent Design is not science. It may be right, but it's outside the realm of science.

But I digress. Hopefully, you can see that a perfectly reasonable person can be a theist, and that a perfectly reasonable person can be an atheist, depensing on whether they think the universe needs to have meaning, a purpose, that things happen and exist for a reason. Only the most intolerant atheist could say that this need for answering the big "Why"s is wrong, silly, illogical, or meaningless. I am fairly sure you cannot prove or explain to a believer why it is that asking "Why?" is meaningless.

So any "evidence" or "logic" that an atheist gives to a believer will only show that the physical world does not need God to function - it will not disprove the existence for a creator, so the believer will keep believing in a creator because he wants the universe to have a purpose. And similarly, any evidence given to an atheist about how it is improbable that our world formed itself on its own will not prove that it is impossible the world could not come together and function through natural processes, through unlikely tails in the probability distributions.

This means atheists and theists can stop debating with each other, and realize that the need for purpose and meaning - or the lack of it - make both sides' beliefs (or lack of beliefs) very reasonable. Both sides have found the simplest explanation for their own universes: the universe that needs to have meaning and purpose, and the one that does not.

Now, what I want to try and do is figure out Christianity well enough to see how much of it is justified by needing to believe the world has a purpose, and to understand how Christians approach spiritual questions so that I can ask a Christian "Do you think that your belief in God is primarily motivated by a need to see purpose and intent behind the universe?" in such a way that they actually think about it.

The Typical Atheist Criticisms

2006-03-10T12:04:00.000-08:00

Atheist books ask all kinds of tough questions to point out how it does not make sense to believe in God, especially not in the Christian God. Some of these are pretty good, some of these are actually fallacies themselves and have good answers for them. So that we are all on the same page, let me quickly review the most famous arguments for atheism.

(However, in my next post, I will talk about why I think that whether or not you believe in God is not directed by logic, arguments, or evidence, but by something that is actually beyond reason, almost like an unavoidable consequence of how your brain is wired. But for now, let's pretend that atheists and theists believe what they believe (or don't) as a result of "evidence", logic, and the kind of reasonable arguments I will now describe).

The Good Points:
(These are some of the reasons why I am an atheist)

If nothing can "just exist" / If everything that exists needs to be created, then who created God? And who created HIS creator? And so on. If God has always been around and did not need to be created, why can't this be true of the universe itself?

What exactly does the soul do? Can it really be responsible for any of the thought or decision-making that goes on in the brain? That is, do soul believers really think that, one day, neuroscientists will discover that much of the brain's organization arises, in an impossible way, out of randomness, defying all chemical / quantum / statistical probabilistic laws?

The problem of free will. Let's skip the whole "What IS free will" discussion and say it means people are not deterministic in the eyes of God - in other words, let's say that when God puts a person in a situation, God cannot predict what the person will do (which is what many theists believe, but not all. It happens in the Bible enough times). Can God create a people so unpredictable, even he himself cannot predict them? Can God be omnipotent, omniscient, and surprised/mad/disappointed at people? It seems to me that if God understands the universe and is all-knowing, then he knows exactly what people will do in any situation. This could mean we do not have free will. Does a deterministic decision-making machine that follows simple rules have free will? Does my computer?

Theists think that the universe, life, etc, are a lot more unlikely than they in fact are. You don't need God in order to get a universe with constants such that chemistry can happen. And you don't need God to explain complex biological systems. For example, people think life develops and evolves "by accident", rather than as the cumulative effects of gradual random mutations "picked" by natural selection.

Jesus might not have existed. The divine parts of the Jesus story all predate Jesus: immaculate conception, crucifixion, resurrection, an eventual return, and even some of the miracles Jesus supposedly performed during his lifetime. This makes it very likely that, even if there is a historical Jesus, he's almost nothing like the magical Jesus from the Gospels - texts written many decades after Jesus supposedly died.

If you believe in the afterlife, why be sad when people die? (I realize this is a mean and heartless hing to ask, but it sounds like a fundamentally valid point).

The Not So Good Points:
(Even though I am an atheist and believe that religion is essentially made up, the following points are, I believe, unsuccessful when used to try to "prove" that Christian theology doesn't make sense)

There are inconsistencies in the Bible. And the Old Testament "prophecies" have to be taken way out of context in order for Jesus to fulfill them. Additionally, the Bible is bloody and talks of revenge, intolerance, and harsh punishment. The Old Testament is war after war, massacre after massacre, and describes terrible physical punishments. (Refutation: The Bible is to be taken with a grain of salt. It is not Truth, it is not the word of God, it's just a collection of stories, some of which can be used to elegantly illustrate points and to inspire thoughts about morality, about choices, and about people. You don't have to agree with all of it - no one really does. And most of it is metaphorical).

If Good loves people, why is there suffering in the world? (Refutation: Suffering and injustice can be a part of a grander plan to shape humanity into the strongest, most just, happiest, and most compassionate that it can be. Just as a parent loves his kids but knows they must suffer now in order to be happier, better people later. Some suffering now might minimize overall suffering. To which you answer "But if God can do anything, he could make it such that there is no injustice or suffering at all, so God wants people to suffer for the sake of suffering". To which one could say: Maybe a humanity who has never seen suffering and injustice will not have the motivation to avoid it later. A future society would only be proud to have largely overcome injustice and unnescessary suffering if, well, humanity started out in a state where injustice and excessive suffering existed. Maybe part of the plan is to make a species that is smart enough to get rid of injustice and unnecessary suffering, and then test this species. And maybe running the test is better for some reason than just knowing they could do it, or making them think they did it. Maybe overcoming suffering and injustice is the whole point of existence. And there is such a thing as "tough love", you know. Ah, and remember that an even easier answer is the following: Any excessive suffering or injustice you suffer on earth is made up for in the afterlife, so what LOOKS to us like suffering and injustice is just the uglier (and smaller) fractions of those people's existence. Besides, could we really enjoy how good our lives are without being aware that other people have it far worse, for no good reason? And one more point: Imagine God skipped the suffering-and-injustice "stage" and created a world with no injustice or unnescessary suffering but made it LOOK like people had overcome an earlier stage when there WAS injustice and unnescessary suffering... You have to admit this kind of deceit makes as little sense as creating the world 4000 years ago and making it look billions of years old, or as spontaneously and miraculously creating all species of life on earth but making them look like they evolved from each other. If you believe in any of those things, then your God is a deceitful one.)

Religion makes you miserable, guilty, inferior, and powerless. (Refutation: Quite the contrary. Religion makes you happier. The very force that created and set up the universe is personally interested in your happiness and in justice. Everyone is equal under God. Everyone gets what they deserve in the end. If something bad happens to you, it's part of a plan, it was what's best for mankind, and something good will happen to make up for it in the future. You can have the confidence of knowing you live in a caring world, while at the same time having the challenge of being the best person you can be by playing your part in the cosmic plan of the development of humankind towards a better world. And if you don't want to be honest with yourself, you can even blame God for some bad things you DID cause and/or deserve - although, in the end, it's all part of the plan, so you don't have to worry about it, just about doing what you can. You have to admit this world view is comforting and motivating and likely to lead to happiness if followed).

Sacrifice is meaningless if you are a God-man. Any suffering Jesus went through, he chose to go through, and could easily not have felt pain if he so chose. If he could cure the blind, then doesn't his mastery over the human nervous system allow him to not feel pain? And he didn't really "die", God didn't really "sacrifice him", if he's still alive in heaven, if he can resurrect himself. (Refutation: Jesus was just a man. And just because you decide that suffering is necessary to achieve a goal, it's still not pleasant, and you still deserve credit for it).

Religion leads to war and to unreliable (possibly bad and intolerant) morals. (Refutation: Religion today probably does more good than harm. And many religious people have what are essentially humanist morals which are guided by a religious motivation. However, it is true some religious people think homosexuality is wrong, while others fly airliners into buildings, for religious reasons one cannot logically argue. But it is important to realize many religious people do not trust religious texts/dogma in determining what is most just - they only trust their experience, knowledge, reason, and compassion, which is just what Humanism is, except that these people feel that God wants them to figure out what is good and to do it. And remember that religion is behind much of the charity and other efforts that go on today towards social equality and care for the poor).

Prayer is useless. (Refutation: Prayer helps you figure out what you can do and what you can't do in relation to each problem in your life, leading to a much more stress-free, healthier, happier, more successful life. Group prayer can make people aware of each other's struggles, making them more likely to help each other. It can help people realize how lucky they are, if they pray for the less fortunate or to give thanks. And, of course, it makes people feel better, if they believe God is hearing them out, if they believe each person has a special place in God's plan and that God loves every person. Even if you don't believe all these things - I certainly don't - you still have to recognise how prayer allows people to be happier and more successful by realizing what they can and can't do about their lives).

You can't be a skeptic or a scientist if you're religious. (Refutation: The world can be a deterministic system, completely explainable by particle interactions and needing no divine intervention (or maybe just occasional divine intervention as documented in the Bible), but still be the result of a project, still be an attempt by a superior intelligence to create intelligent and moral beings. Given this, a theist can still believe that the universe is guided by mechanical, automatic processes, and to believe that nothing supernatural affects the world. Skepticism of superstition, psychics, telekinesis, homeopathy (and other useless "medicine"), free energy, crying statues, ghosts, dowsing, etc, is thus not necessarily inhibited by theism, nor is the ability to look for deterministic physical causes to all phenomena).

Faith is dangerous. Once you accept something on faith, anything you decide later (as a conseqeunce of the thing you take on faith) may or may not be right. You can't reasonably prove these things to anyone else, it is perfectly possible for a reasonable person to disagree, so you should remember they could be wrong. (Refutation: If you doubt everything, you can learn nothing. I bet you take on faith that the world is not a dream, or a "Matrix"-like illusion, or a "The Truman Show"-like conspiracy, that other people just like you exist, interact with you, and live in the same physical reality. I bet you take on faith that the universe follows simple rules, allowing for phenomena to be repeatable - just because it has so far, doesn't guarantee that it ALWAYS did or always will. You might even take it on faith that the world is not part of a divine plan, that things only happen as accidental and direct consequences of deterministic processes caused by the previous state of the universe - remember, this COULD be wrong. All these things seem likely enough that it should not be a big deal to take on faith - but, to believers, that's how they feel about God, Jesus, Allah, or whatever else they believe).

If God didn't exist, people would invent the concept anyways. (Refutation: But just because people DID come up with the concept, doesn't mean that God does not exist. "Since q, then p" does not follow from "If p, then q").

The basic message here is: It is impossible to prove the existence of God, and it is impossible to disprove it. So you basically believe whatever seems to make the most sense. As long as you don't think every word in the Bible is true, you're probably all right.

Like I said, I am an atheist. I am able to defend faith, but as soon as I think "Religion, Faith and Spirituality are all made up!", I snap out of it. It's an interesting shock, to change points of view like that. It's almost like speaking one language and changing to another. Becoming more used to both "languages" is the point of this project - right now, I only speak fluent "atheist", my "Christian" is extremely rusty.

An Atheist Attempts To Understand Faith

2006-03-09T23:40:00.000-08:00

So, in my previous post, I described how I slowly went from Catholic to confident atheist. What I could not figure out as an atheist is why smart, reasonable people still had faith, even when complicated theology was not necessary to explain the world. This question was one I desperately wanted to investigate. And investigate it I did. At first, I got pretty much nowhere. Eventually, I only found satisfactory answers when I started criticizing a badly-written atheism book. But I'm getting ahead of myself. Let me start at the beginning.

From the autumn of my Sophomore year until about one year after I graduated from collegre (that's four years), I dated a wonderful girl. We are still extremely good friends - we broke up because I moved away one year after I graduated. She is extremely smart, extremely nice, and has the most complex and thorough system of ethics and morals I have ever seen. And she happens to be Christian. Throughout our relationship, I asked her many of the "tough questions" I was exposed to in skeptic writing and in atheism books. A few of them, she had surprisingly good answers to. A few of them stumped her. A few of them, she admitted were impossible to answer without self-referential (thus fallacious) arguments or without wanting to believe in the first place. (These questions-and-answers will be the topic of my next post). So, on the one hand, she confirmed the main point of my atheism books - a lot of Christian belief does not make sense unless you want it to make sense, and unless you start out assuming that it is right to begin with. But on the other hand, she showed me that plenty of Christians took the Bible with a grain of salt, had morals constructed based on justice and compassion (the same as humanist morals, but motivated by her thinking that God wanted her to do good), and even admitted that maybe, just maybe, there is no God and the Jesus story is a lie. She put it this way: Are you sure your parents are not psycho axe murderers? They MIGHT be. But if they are, they do such a good job of hiding it, and have given you so much reason to love them and trust them for decades, that you can effectively dismiss the possibility, even if it might conceivably be right. Of course, much of the "evidence" she saw of God's work was, to me, just chance and natural processes, so your conclusion in the end depends highly on what conclusion you WANT to draw to begin with. This, too, by itself, will the the topic of an upcoming post.

After many such discussions, she said she was tired of being the only Christian person to be asked those questions, that she was tired of being THE face of Christian belief. She wanted me to ask someone more knowledgeable, like a priest, a minister, someone like that. I told her that, since she believed, then what I wanted to know was why her reasons were good enough - she should not require other people's information to support her own belief, because her own reasons were apparently enough to support it. She said that her reasons were good enough for her but not good enough for me, that the questions I asked just did not seem important and relevant to her, but that they might be important and relevant to other religious people, who will therefore have better answers for them.

Fair enough. I talked to the Dean of Religious Life in my school, a Unitarian Universalist minister. His beliefs were surprisingly similar to mine: He admitted that, although he considered himself a Christian, he thought Jesus was an exemplary person and an admirable moral leader, that stories of miracles and resurrection were exaggerations and mistakes. He admitted that there might be no God, but that it seems to him that there probably is. He can't prove to me that there is a God, I can't prove to him (or to anyone, even to myself) that there isn't, so you just believe what makes you comfortable. This kind of religious relativism was nice and tolerant, but not what I was looking for. I wanted to talk to someone who was more convinced that believing is more "right" than not believing, I wanted to know WHY they believed that strongly. I talked to some religious students, friends and friends of friends. They talked to me about how much strength they get from faith, how it makes life easier, how it allows them to put much in God's hands and only have to focus in doing what they can, when they can. They told me about prayer, about not so much hearing/seeing God answer, but knowing that this reminded them that their lives were part of a plan, and that people are special to God. I started thinking that maybe religion is a positive thing after all. They still did not, however, have an answer about WHY they believed, what made them reject the atheist world view when I exposed to them, even when they admitted that they could not convince me of the theist world view unless I really wanted to believe.

Eventually, I talked to an evangelical Christian, a guy who organizes many of the different Christian student groups on campus, Christian events, etc. He started out trying to convince me with things like the Empty Tomb argument (which requires that, to begin with, you accept that the Jesus story is not a legend), and with asking me how I could explain the claims of Jesus' miracles: Either they were true, or a lot of people hallucinated, or the whole thing was made up - which it could not have been, because if a bunch of people want to preach Jesus' message, the worst thing they can do is invent a bunch of lies. If they wanted to preach righteousness and faith, why lie? I still told him that the conspiracy-theory approach, even if far-fetched, seemed to me much more likely than resurrections, immaculate conceptions, walking on water, or curing the blind. He saw that this evidence-based approach was going to get nowhere. He then tried to point out to me that religious-based morals did much good in the world, charity, etc, and that religious morals were at the heart of every successful society. This would do an even worse job of persuading me: While I admitted that religion might do more good than harm thanks to charity and other religious social initiatives, I refused to ignore things like religious wars in the past (so religion is not guaranteed to do more good than harm), and I insisted that the most successful societies were held together by a respect for secular rules and by people who understood the society and were good at figuring out what is best for everyone, based on observation and reason (I am a HUGE supporter of the separation of church and state).

He then said: But you realize your world view offers no MEANING, right? I answered that figuring out how to be happy, and figuring out how to make the world a better place, were still huge challenges, and that an atheist can be a very happy person, but I have to admit that no, this world view does not tell you that "Everything happens for a reason" or that life has any purpose other than what you choose to do with it. Still, this seems better than finding meaning from an imagined spiritual dimension - I don't need any "fake meaning", thank you, and nothing that Christianity provides can be conclusively shown to be valid unless you want to believe to begin with. So he finally said something like: All right, look at the world around you. There are people, some of them do exceptional things to make the world a better place, but even the most ordinary person is an absolutely remarkable thing. Society is an amazing thing. The physical world, and the chemistry and biology it allows to exist, are all amazing. Now, you can't possibly claim that science can explain ALL this. (I can't). Then he said, I think religion does a good job of explaining all of it. But believing that God exists and has a plan, and beieving in Jesus, requires a leap of faith. And believing that science COULD someday explain all this, also requires a leap of faith. To him, the religious leap of faith seemed to be a smaller one than the scientific one, and happened to lead to more happiness, meaning, and a better life.

As you will see when I write a post about my current theory of why believers believe, all the stuff that guy said (and made me say in return) in the above paragraph was much more insightful than I gave him credit for at the time. At the time, all I could think was "This still has not revealed any good reasons for abandoning skepticism of religion, for being a believer - this whole project of interviewing Christians is a waste of time".

Just before I graduated from college, I found out about the Unitarian Universalist "religion" (if you can call it that). Note to any Latin American readers: this is NOT, I repeat, NOT, the same as the Universal Church Of The Kingdom Of God - the "Jesus Cristo e' o Senhor" people - an extremely fundamentalist neopentecostal religion. In fact, Unitarian Universalism takes the OPPOSITE approach to religion as the Universal Church, in that Unitarians believe something like "Figure out your own answers to spiritual questions, and be helpful and open-minded when others seek answers to theirs and possibly arrive at different conclusions", while the Universal Church believs in something like "Do exactly what the Bible says, or go to hell". The two links above (plus this one) should be more informative, and a little less cynical than I, if you don't know what I'm talking about.

But I digress. I found out about the Unitarian Universalist religion towards the end of my Senior year, read a bit about it, and it all seemed very agreeable. You don't have to believe anything except what you want, what feels right to you. Ethics and morals should be based on Humanism. No religion has all the answers, but all religions have insightful and wise lessons to teach and good stories to learn from. People should help each other ask the tough questions and work out what answers feel right - even while different people arrive at different answers. I then looked up my local UU church, which apparently was made up largely of atheists, and had some incredibly insightful and well-written sermons up on their website. And my then-girlfriend kept telling me she wished I was part of a community of faith, so I can share my spiritual thoughts with other people (apparently the "Rational Thought" student group didn't count). So I sent the minister an email, met with her, chatted about what I was looking for and so on, and borrowed a UU book from her. The following Sunday, I went to service, and the week after that, I went to two small-group meetings (a "man's group", where a few men talked about male-related issues, family issues, identity issues, etc, and a "humanist root group", where a few of the humanists / atheists / agnostics in the church (and one theist humanist) met to talk about skepticism, humanism, the heritage of atheist and agnostic and humanist philosophies, and so on). All of it was quite interesting, except... 1) Everyone was quite old - there was a handful of people about 5 years older than me, but everyon else was in at least their late 30s... and 2) there wasn't that much energy to it, I didn't feel the excitement and passion that I thought should be important in this kind of group spiritual pursuit. And right after that week, I graduated, spent some time at home, and then came back to my college town to start on a full-time job - which I hear is what you're supposed to do after you graduate from college; Get a full-time job. So now I only got to sleep in two days a week - only ONE day if I kept going to that not-so-exciting UU church... so I didn't go again. I still have great respect for the UU religion (although I'm not sure "religion" is the best word to describe it), and I do hope to become a Unitarian as soon as I find a Unitarian church I like (even if this does mean I only get to sleep in one day a week instead of two). Like I said in a previous post, one year after I graduated from college, I moved away to a new city, but right after that move, I thought I would pause my search for a cool UU church for a while so as to pursue the project I am describing on this blog.

Anyways, on with my "first attempts at understanding faith".

My sister, about five years younger than me, around this time started showing an interest in these kinds of questions, so I tried to offer some information on the atheist/agnostic/humanist perspective to her over the year after my graduation. I first gave her George H Smith's "Atheism: The Case Against God". Many months later, I gave her David Mills' "Atheist Universe: Why God Didn't Have A Thing To Do With It". But I had not read this second book - I got it for her based on recommendations and reviews. Since she was reading something else at the time, I decided to read it myself. And I found it really misrepresented Christians, the reasons why they believe, the impact of faith in their lives, and other good things about religion and the mostly-positive impact of modern religion in the world. It stated as fact that not believing is easier, simpler, and more fulfulling than believing. That doubt should never be abandoned or dismissed. That, because believing in God was not necessary to understand the universe, then NOT believing in God was simpler and easier. It said religious people have no way to see if their morals and ethics are actually good. And it asked some "tough questions" about Christianity that my Christian friends actually had good answers to. In other words, it was a terrible book, it misrepresented Christians and their faith in so many ways, and knew nothing about the reasons why people believe or don't believe.

But then... what ARE the reasons why some people believe, and others don't? In my talks with Christians, I had found out that a perfectly reasonable person can be a Christian, and that a perfectly reasonable person can be an atheist (although it was not yet clear to me HOW this was possible - I eventually thought about it came to the conclusions I will explain later). A book that tries to paint the other side as a bunch of fools, and does it through exaggeration and through building inaccurate and easily-destroyed straw men, could actually be damaging to the cause of bridging the gap between atheists and theists, to the cause of trying to figure out how atheists and theists are different and how they are similar. But wait, NO BOOK does that. All the books just try to go as far to one side as possible, and to say people who disagree are clearly missing something important. So I started to write an outline for a better, more honest atheism book. The argument that ended up emerging from my reflections on the subject (on how I could show to an atheist that a perfectly reasonable person could be a Christian, and vice versa) is the argument I want to make 2 posts from now, the "Spiritual Orientation" argument. (Turns out it's not really long or complex enough to deserve its own book, so I choose this blog as my way to publicize it).

Once I had this "Spiritual Orientation" idea in my mind, I could be a strong atheist and at the same time have a lot of respect for someone who is a Christian. I finally understood why people believe. I understood why it is that I can show a believer that you do not need God to explain the world we see, but then fail to get the believer to stop believing in God. With this theory about the foundation and motivation behind the Christian mindset, I could really empathize with, and respect, Christian thought.

As an atheist, I already understood how to express this idea to atheists. (I found one other book that expresses this idea, but it is very technical, and clearly aimed at an atheist audience). But now I wanted to express it to Christians, to see what their reaction is when I propose to scrape away all their theology so as to expose the one force that holds it all together, and then question that force, show it for what it is. But I can't do that yet. To do that, I need to understand the Christian mindset.

So I started going to church. Which brings us to last Sunday. And to this blog. And to where I currently stand on my spiritual journey. In two posts, I will explain my "Spiritual Orientation" theory, my theory about why believers REALLY believe, my theory about how a perfectly reasonable person can be a Christian while another perfectly reasonable person can be an atheist.

Stay tuned.

Becoming An Atheist

2006-03-09T00:00:00.000-08:00

How did I become an atheist? Just what is it that I believe in (or don't)? The route I took from Catholic to materialist, and the questions and reasoning I was exposed to which fueled this journey, may be of importance to this blog. (Or they might not. But I want to write about them and this seems like a good place to start).

It seems like most atheists today have a similar story. So if you're an atheist, you're not likely to learn much from this post. I'm just indulging myself here.

Like I said, I was brought up Catholic. Mass every Sunday. Religion class in school. First Communion. Singing in choir. All that good stuff. For as long as I can remember, my family told me that God looks over the world, punishing bad actions, protecting those who need protection, looking out for everyone's wellfare, for justice. Good people go to heaven and meet Jesus, and bad people go to hell, which is not nearly as nice. But I was never terrified with visions of eternal torture - that was just never a part of the motivation to be good. I thought only REALLY bad people went to hell, while "mostly good" people were punished in this life, which I guess is like the idea of Karma (so hell is those for whom bad Karma is not enough punishment). My parents weren't (and aren't) very religious - my mom believes in all kinds of supernatural things, including psychics and astrologists and feng shui and some odd African religious rituals (which some might call "voodoo") common in Brazilian culture. For her, organized religion is just one of many possible ways to get in touch with the spiritual part of the universe, but she found Christianity offered too narrow a spiritual world. My father... to be honest, I have no idea what he believes or doesn't believe, and I'm quite happy to let it stay that way. My father is one of the most moral, dedicated, wise, respectful, disciplined, and happy people I know. He taught me how to be a good, happy person, and did not need God or Jesus to do it.

I have many uncles and aunts, two grandmothers, and a handful of great-aunts. My maternal grandmother, and HER mother, are atheists (although sadly they rarely talk about spirituality - I only discovered how they feel about it all after I became an atheist myself). Everyone else is quite catholic and quite spiritual. On my dad's side it's all church-going Catholics with pictures of Jesus on the living room. On my mom's side it's mostly random spiritual superstitious people, with crystals and spiritually-meaningful plants and weird astrological charts and African-religious artifacts on their feng-shui-friendly houses, except for the two atheists and two obviously-very-Catholic nuns. Both my parents' families are of Itlian heritage, so we have big family gatherings frequently, and I talk on the phone with my grandmothers almost as often as with my parents, so this huge mass of people actually talk with me often and influence who I am. Which is why it was so easily for me to be pretty much Catholic when I was a kid, with a sprinkling of more eastern ideas. (I did always think astrology and crystals and psychics and feng shui were BS, though).

I actually learned about religion, and went to mass and all that, primarily as part of my school education. My parents themselves very rarely mentioned any personal interest in religion (they are less spiritual and religious than pretty much all the rest of the family). It's basically like studying math or science in school - the parents would ask "So what did you learn in class today", and I might talk about math or science or languages, etc, or I might mention religion, and that was pretty much that. Or I might ask them a question while doing homework, or if something in class didn't make a lot of sense, and they would answer if the question was very simple and straightforward, otherwise they would recommend I ask someone who knows more about religion. In Brazil, where I grew up, all the best schools are catholic schools, so learning about Jesus and the Bible, and going to mass once a week, and doing First Communion and all that stuff, is basically like any other class. And like any GOOD class, once school is over and you're out having fun and doing neat things over the weekend, the stuff I learned in that class became quite aparent when I thought about the real world. Stuff I learned in math, science, history, and religion, all had consequences I could observe in daily life.

Up until I was 10 I just bought all of it. At age 10 we started learning about more of the Bible (not just the Gospels and the Epistles). We started, where else, at the beginning. Genesis. Seven days. Adam and Eve. I had heard the story of Adam and Eve before, and the idea that God created the universe all at once. It comes up in comic books, cartoons, movies, and some of the books I read - it's just a part of culture. But I had not realized it was right at the beginning of the Bible, the book that defines what Christians believe in. The book that tells the story - or, as I thought of it then, the history - of Jesus' life and of the birth of Christianity. All that stuff had to be true. But creation, and Adam and Eve, could not be true. I knew about the Big Bang, I knew about evolution. I knew the universe had been around for billions of years before a big cloud of dirt coalesced into the sun, the earth, and the planets. I knew the earth had no life for billions of years, and that it took a couple billion years for life to go from microbes to coral to jellyfish to fish to amphibians to reptiles to mammals to us. At this point I already had a great admiration for science, and the desire to dedicate my life to it. (Because in movies, scientists were the ones making cool things like time machines and spaceships and teleporters and monsters, so clearly science was the way to go if I wanted to understand how the world works and how to make cool things people thought would be impossible to make until I made them. I basically wanted to be like Gyro Gearloose and Doc Brown when I grew up. My current aspiration, to be like Burt Rutan and Paul MacCready, is not really that different).

So was Genesis just a story? Are Christians supposed to believe Genesis really happened as described? I asked the most religious people in my family as soon as I could. Their answers were too complicated, talking about metaphors, "a day" not really being one day, Genesis actually matching what science has found out if you stretch it a little... To my 10-year-old self, this made no sense. Either you think it happens the way it says in Genesis, or you don't. And my relatives said that, if I wanted to put it that way, then no, they did not believe the universe, the earth, the animals, and people, were all created spontaneously by God over a short period of time.

So, I thought, Genesis is just a story. The Bible is an imperfect guide.

I had never been that comfortable with the idea of Jesus doing the magic tricks the Gospels said he did. Especially the water-into-wine thing. Those, however, many people seemed to think had happened just as described. But privately, I started thinking that, if Genesis is just a story, then maybe Jesus is just a story too, or at least some very exaggerated history. Because it really does seem very unlikely.

Later that year, I started preparing for my first communion. We learned about "the body of Christ", "the blood of Christ". You don't really expect me to believe that this little cookie thing and this glass of grape juice are transformed into something else, do you? I went along and pretended to be all moved by this - and given how the ceremony was held in one of Brazil's oldest and most beautiful cathedrals, and how our families all came and made a huge deal about how this meant I was growing up and becoming a man, it was not too hard to pretend that what was at the heart of all this - the communion - was a big deal. I could see the ceremony was a big deal, and that it symbolized something major, but the communion itself did not seem to be magical, but just an act.

The year after this, my family moved to the US. I was 11. Going to church in English in a place full of strangers did not sound too appealing to me, so I stopped going to church every sunday. I mostly stopped thinking about religion and spirituality altogether. I figured God existed, and people are clearly too special and too interesting to be explainable just by chemistry, so we probably have souls. But when the rest of it stopped being a part of my regular life, I realized it just didn't seem to be necessary, so it was probably not "the truth" the way I had been told to think it is, since I did not need it to explain the world or understand life around me.

I did go to a private school. Religion had been important to the founding of the school, but modern tolerance (and the desire to have the school also be a good environment to non-Christians) all but removed religion from school life. The exception is that, every Friday morning, we would have one period of "chapel", where my grade and two more would all meet in the chapel and hear the school pastor talk. (It was also a convenient forum for announcements and other issues that concern everyone). The pastor talked about spirituality in general, as well as morals and happiness and how and why to be a good person. He took little belief for granted, as students ranged from very Christian to not-at-all religious. He told and talked about stories from the Bible, treating them like fables rather than like history, and showing us how much we could learn from them. Once, when I was 14, one of his talks was about understanding God's plan for the world and for people. He understood that some stidents might not even believe in God, but he asked them to consider the possibility, to think about why the universe came to be, and how unlikely it is that it came along well enough to lead to the rise of these fantastic beings that populate it. So that got me thinking about all that. Why is there something instead of nothing? Why did God create the universe? How much godly guidance was required for the universe to have the properties that allowed for life, and the systems that led evolution to happen? These thoughts led me to become basically a deist: If God knew what he was doing; he could just set it all up in the beginning to mechanically run the way he wanted. No need for miracles or tweaking. That sounded really awesome. I was still quite convinced that people's intelligence and self-awareness required more than just physical particles interacting in chemical ways.

As I was about to go to high school, my family moved back to Brazil. This time I went to a non-religious school (but still a very very good one). However, if anything, I became more spiritual during high school. The more physics and biology I learned, the more convinced I was that the universe and the life on it was just too good to have been an accident - it must have been designed! The more I thought about human behavior, thinking, emotions, motivations, and awareness and consciousness, the more convinced I was that there was a soul responsible for at least some of it. The more I thought about math and logic, the more convinced I was that the abstract world of ideas was some kind of approximation of a higher level of existence, it was a microscope into the design of the universe and into fundamental existence. And in reading Michael Crichton's autobiography, I even thought that there possibly might be something to things like psychics, auras, and the rest of that new-age stuff. Possibly.

Then I went back to the US to go to college - an experience known to shatter many people's spirituality. While my spirituality did indeed not survive my college experience, I cannot blame the college for it. It was all books and websites I read on my own, and conversations with friends. Freshman year, I did take a class about religions. The class showed me that organized religions were basically the results of conspiracies of powerful people trying to come up with ways to keep the masses happy and dedicated to their roles, motivated despite hard circumstances. But by the time I was 14 I already had little or no need/respect for the ideas of organized religion, so the stuff I learned in this class when I was 18-19 came as no surprise.

Just before going to college, I saw a documentary on the Discovery Channel about the investigation of paranormal claims; from Houdini debunking psychics, to studies of ESP and telekinesis in the 60s-70s, to the modern efforts by James Randi and CSICOP. One day some time into my Freshman year, the topic came up in conversation, and after that conversation I wanted to look up Randi's work (since I remembered little about him besides his million-dollar prize, although just the fact the prize went unclaimed was excellent proof that people do not have supernatural powers). I did look up Randi's writing, and I quickly became an avid reader of all things skeptical. Reading about skepticism led to reading about the separation of church and state. This meant reading about how faith-based morals are unreliable and unfounded, about how dangerous it is to make decisions based on religion rather than on looking at the world, taking observations everyone could agree on, and trying to decide what is best for everyone. This in turn led me to be exposed to more and more atheist literature.

(And just when I was starting to consider the view that religion might be oppressive and destructive, as if on queue, a group of people flew airliners into buildings in New York and DC, motivated as much by religious thinking as by a disapproval of the way the US is taking over the world. This got me thinking about how religion is at the root of most wars, and about how much blood has been shed over the last several centuries in the name of religion. And it just so happened that my family decided to spend a week in New York before I had to go back to school to start my sophomore year (we were to leave NYC on the evening of the 11th), so I got to experience first-hand the terror and destruction caused by religious fanaticism. Once US airline operations got going again on the 15th and 16th, I was able to return to school to start my Sophomore year).

At first I didn't buy atheism, though. How can all this stuff happen by accident? Look at the physical constants in the universe, which seemed to be fine-runes so as to allow energy to become matter and matter to go through so much interesting chemistry! Look at DNA! Look at the cell! At the brain! At the modern globalized society! Can some people really think that God does not necessarily exist? One friend of mine was a vocal atheist, so I asked her. Her answer was, If you took all the little gears that make up a clock, put them in a bag, and shake the bag for long enough, isn't it possible you could get a clock? You have to admit, it's not impossible. That was a good point. The universe could have started as an unguided, unplanned mass of matter and energy, and have just happened to coalesce into the world we have today. At first it didn't seem likely, but the more I thought about it, the more I liked it. It freed everything (except human behavior, awareness, and consciousness, or so I still thought) from the mess of supernatural theology, from what we want the world to be about, from a "plan". Stuff just happens because it happens. It's so simple! It's so beautiful! This was a MAJOR turning point for me, a watershed period in my life. Looking at the world as anything but particles moving around accidentally and following simple rules is just adding unnescessary complications to an already-complicated world. I could finally see the world for what it is - not the execution of a plan, but a giant, dumb, mechanical machine following simple rules we could understand. It was so amazing. It was like stepping out of a cave, like seeing the world from the top of a mountain, like OWNING a world that previously had not been mine. The world became clearer, simpler, and at the same time more complete and more exposed. How does it go... "For we knew in part, and we prophesied in part; but when that which is complete has come, then that which is partial is done away with. When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I felt as a child, I thought as a child. Now that I have become a man, I have put away childish things. For we saw in a mirror, dimly, but now we see face to face. I knew in part, but now I know fully, even as I am also fully known". Good stuff, those Epistles.

But stuff still EXISTS, and the universe does have all kinds of interesting properties, so I thought a creator was still very very likely, even if it was inconsistent with this beautifully simple atheistic natural world I was discovering. I was still thinking to myself as a deist. So over my winter break during sophomore year, I read George H Smith's "Atheism: The Case Against God". It went over many of the atheist ideas I had read before, but in even better detail, in clearer language, and with better examples. It also made one interesting point: People think that, if stuff exists, then it must have been created. But then, if there was a creator, then HE must also have been created, right? Who created HIM? Who created HIS creator? And so on. The only way to stop this is to say "But God did not need to be created. He has always just been around". But then why can't the stuff in the universe also simply just have always been around? I thought about this for a while, and it made so much sense! You don't need a creator! SOMETHING must have always existed, so it might as well be the stuff we see around us! Brilliant! So I finally could shed my deist belief and be a proper atheist!!!

The soul was, then, the last remnant of supernatural belief left to be eliminated. I had to find a way to see how human behavior, consciousness, thought, awareness, and so on, can be possible with just a deterministic system. For a while I thought that maybe the brain is capable of all the thinking, remembering, decision-making, and so on, and that all that the soul does is watch and give awareness and consciousness. Maybe each brain is watched by a bit of soul-stuff (or by one big soul in another dimension or something) and this is why we have consciousness. Maybe the soulstuff in that other dimension is governed by simple, natural-like, deterministic rules, rather than by a god (maybe, once a thinking machine in our dimension becomes good enough at thinking about its surroundings and/or about itself, this draws the attention of some of the consciousness-causing soul stuff, making awareness gravitate towards it). It could all be automatic. This was pleasantly deterministic and automatic and with no need for a ruling intelligent god, but it was still supernatural in that I thought it could only be explained by a mysterious thing in another dimension that science could not reach. So I wanted to figure out a way to get rid of THAT idea too, so that I could explain this only in terms of the physical world. Matters of free will go into this issue as well: What is free will, Do we have it, How are we different from a computer that makes decisions, and so on. I thought about it all through my Sophomore year, including one particularly interesting discussion during the road trip I took with friends over Spring Break.

What I eventually and very slowly came to see is that, if a computer could think like a human, and maybe even be programmed to emulate emotion, it would be indistinguishable from a human. I would not be able to tell the difference - the good ol' Turing Test. Or, I imagined a friend of mine: Imagine he is NOT self-aware, is not conscious, but his brain keeps processing data and making him act normally - or say I replaced his brain with a computer that deals with information in the same way - then I would not be able to tell the difference. If I ask him if he is conscious, he would probably look around himself, realize that in his mind he has a replica of the world around him (a combination of the experience supplied by his sense organs and his brain), and say "Yes", even if he is just a brain-like computer. So consciousness is, in a way, an illusion. It's just a by-product of looking at the world around us and recognising that we are a thinking entity in this world. "Cogito ergo sum", right? So this convinced me that the lump of atoms that is my brain can have an image of the world around it, and that image includes myself and my thoughts and my identity, and this is pretty much all that consciousness is.

I slowly stumbled towards this idea for many months - it's really hard to think about this stuff, thinking about thinking about thinking, defining just what it means to be conscious. Two things that really helped crystallize my final idea (if something appears conscious and thinks it is conscious, then it IS conscious, that's all it takes) were, first, "The Measure Of A Man", an EXCELLENT Star Trek episode, and second, the absolutely amazing book "Gödel, Escher, Bach; An Eternal Golden Braid" by Douglas Hofstadter.

In the Star Trek episode, Commander Data (a humanlike robot) is ordered by StarFleet to go through a disassembly procedure that might permanently damage his "brain". The technology behind the design and functioning of his brain has been lost, and the procedure is part of a research project to re-develop this technology. Damage to the brain is possible and would be irreparable. Data cannot refuse the order, but places his existence and his brain's integrity above the goals of the scientific procedure, so he asks to resign from StarFleet. The scientist pushing for the procedure says Data can't resign, as he is StarFleet property, not a sentient being with rights. Captain Picard (Data's immediate superior, who wishes not to lose him) requests a trial-like hearing on the matter, where they conclude that it is impossible to determine that a person is any more of a sentient being than Data is. That episode illustrates my ideas on consciousness very well (and also illustrates the fact that Star Trek: The Next Generation is one of the most interesting and thought-provoking fictional shows in the history of TV). "Gödel Escher Bach" goes further, in asking how something can be a conscious entity when it is made of small bits that just follow simple deterministic rules. The book basically claims that the self-referential nature of our thoughts is what causes the strange effect we call "consciousness": I have an image of the world in my head, and this image includes an image of myself and of my thoughts and of the image of the world included in these thoughts. I know, I know that I know, and I know that I know that I know, and this makes me conscious. The book explores these ideas through a few hundred pages of cleverly-structured texts about mathematics, music, and language, much of it self-referential, much of it formatted in such a way to illustrate the subject of the text itself. The book is written by an Artificial Intelligence scientist, so it is not so much about human thinking as it is in general about self-referential systems (leading up to, in the end, the most complex self-referential system; The human mind). The book describes how, when a system tries to explain everything including itself (and its own explanation of itself, and its explanation of its own explanation of itself, etc), something unique happens that almost defies logic. This to me was a satisfyingly non-supernatural explanation of consciousness. (And if you're wondering about the title: The book develops many tools out of linguistics, mathematics, art, poetry, and logic, so as to help the reader understand these self-referential systems. For example, the book goes through some analysis of Bach's Canons, Escher's lithographs, and Gödel's incompleteness theorem, to help the reader learn to think about different ways in which a system can be self-referential, and the consequences of self-reference).

So, at long last, I had expelled all supernatural beliefs from my world view, I had cleaned it of this unnescessary, inexplicable, almost nonsensical junk. I could almost breathe easier.

That was, in one way, the end of my atheist journey. I was a proud atheist. I was infuriated in hearing the president quote scripture, in seeing In God We Trust on the money, in hearing oaths end with So Help Me God, in hearing that some people wanted to teach Creationism as science, in seeing that kids are made by schools to say "One nation under God". (Actually, I still strongly disapprove of those things). I cringed when hearing people talk about Jesus. I was part of a student "Rational Thought" group - we protested with signs outside an Intelligent Design talk, we had a showing of "The God Who Wasn't There", we organized talks about skeptic / atheist / humanist topics... It was great. I devoured anything written by James Randi and Judith Hayes. I read all of this great site about how the Jesus story was composed by combining many pre-existing myths as part of an process of getting all the people in the Mediterranean to believe in one religion, and how the Bible was compiled through similarly shady and insincere conspiracies. The world was simple: Religion is made up, and people need to realize that what you see is what you get, that there is no plan, that there is not a caring God imposing divine justice, that Jesus is an amalgamation of pagan legends, that people do not nescessarily have souls and are probably just matter.

My next challenge was to understand why people believe what they believe, to understand how a reasonable person could miss being compelled by the idea that religion is all made up, that you can't prove to me that any of it is right.

That part of the "journey" is what my next post is about. Stay tuned.

Being A Little More Honest

2006-03-08T23:51:00.000-08:00

Some atheists reading this so far might be wanting to ask me, "Why do you want to give the Christians a chance? Their theology is flawed and unnescessary. The details of their religion are just trying to rationalize and explain ideas that, in the end, don't make sense. Why bother trying?"

The REAL answer is, "Just to see what I can learn, and to develop more respect for people of faith". In the first post, I said I wanted to basically infiltrate the Christian mindset so that I could explain it better to atheists and so that I could, essentially, "preach" atheism more effectively to them. That's not really the reason that's driving me (although it is a minor reason why I'm doing it). I really just want to see what I can learn. I'm just curious. I think that, for the first time in many years, I might be able to experience these wonderful things that Christians keep talking about, and I want to see if I can. For the past several years, I have been building an atheistic world view, and I think I did an excellent job. I now have an airtight package of atheist thought, a series of rock-solid reasons for why you don't need supernatural explanations for the world around us, for why theism is unnescessary, for why Christianity is flawed and self-contradictory and confusing and made-up and ultimately pointless. I am now so confident in the validity of this package of thought, I think the next exercise is to see if I can set it aside for a few hours a week. I know it will still be there, waiting for me after church, as valid and convincing and simple and beautiful as ever. But I want to suspend disbelief just for the heck of it, just to see what it's like. Possibly for similar reasons that people have for bungee-jumping.

I do also want to feel less alienated from Christian people. I want to not impulsively dismiss their spirituality as an unnescessary, complicated, flawed, self-contradictory, made-up jumble of clumsy ideas. I want to see how a reasonable person can erect the structure of Christian belief inside himself using as little faith as possible - just a creator and a man named Jesus, no miracles, no "every word in the Bible is true", just a deterministic universe that was deliberately set up as a stage for some kind of divine project, and a guy who 2000 years ago always chose what is right over what is easy. And of additional bits of faith are required as a foundation for some specific beliefs later, I'll know how far each bit of faith goes, and what depends on what - i.e, I'll know what axiom is needed to prove each higher-level theorem.

Christianity is a system of ideas, ideas about why the universe was created, why people are around, why people struggle, why people are good, why people are happy or unhappy, what God wants, why things happen, what all the different things in the Bible mean, who Jesus was, and what his role is in the grand scheme of things. I want to become comfortable inside this system, so I can figure out the kinds of things most Christians agree on, the kinds of things that are really up to individual interpretation, the kinds of things that depend on other things (and the ones that don't), what is derived from what, what is a consequence of what... It's a confusing web, and unnescessarily so, but it looks like it will be fun to explore and to map.

I should also say that I realize "Christianity" means different things for different people. Christian belief ranges everywhere from "Every word in the Bible is true" to "God set the universe in motion and never touched it again, and this includes planning everything that has ever happened, including the birth and life of an examplary man of uniquely perfect morals 2000 years ago... And it's up to us to figure out how to increase justice and happiness in the world and how to be good people, because that's probably what God wants us to do, if there is a God". So each Christian is somewhere along this spectrum (well, it's actually several different parameters, each with a spectrum of its own: how divine the Bible is, how much of the Jesus story you accept, etc), and each branch of Christianity (really, each individual church) has its own approach to figuring out how to answer the tough questions, figuring out where to get inspiration, figuring out how to be a good person, figuring out the impact of God in people's lives, figuring out the value of prayer and worship, figuring out how much is story/myth and how much is true, figuring out what can be questioned (and maybe even dismissed) and what must be believed in. So I can't hope that one "Christian" system of ideas will match another. But the church and Bible study group I am attending are Baptist (with people who think homosexuality and abortion are horribly wrong, all that shockingly conservative stuff), which is way on the opposite side of atheism, so if I can figure out THEIR system of ideas, then I think I pretty much have all my bases covered, because everyone else is somewhere in between where they are and where I started out.

And one last thing for now. A lot of this has been motivated, facilitated, and inspired by my roommate, who is one of my best friends. He's an extremely analytical person, and a good Buddhist. He has an interesting relationship with the belief in God: He recognises that the world can be explained atheistically just as easily than it can be explained theistically. He recognises that doubt and skepticism is the only really really true/valid way to feel towards religion. But he also thinks that, if you doubt everything, you can discover nothing. Even science has to "believe" that the world is repeatable, and that we all live in the same external physical reality. That's not asking much, but it's SOMEthing. He also thinks that, in a state of spiritual doubt - in a state where you think the universe is completely made up of atoms behaving automatically and mechanically - it is very hard to not be selfish. He thinks that the only true motivation for being selfless, for doing what is best fro everyone (not just for oneself), for being a good person, comes from religion. Of course atheists feel compassion too, but that is usually an impulse limited only to suffering that is easily visible, and/or in people we care about. It's hard to be compassionate towards humanity as a whole. Even when "the right thing to do" is clear, it's usually hard to not take an easier choice. But it's a heck of a lot easier if you believe God has a plan for humanity and that you have a role to play in that plan. When you're not a good person, you're not just letting a person down, you're letting the whole universe down. (When he first explained this to me, I asked him "So, trying to believe in Christianity is basically about fooling yourself into being a better person?", and he said something like "Yes, that's basically correct, but I bet a lot of people at church don't look at it that way and would not be receptive to that idea - they might say it's heretical and blasphemous, not just incorrect".)

So, wanting to be motivated by this kind of world view, he started going to church. Recognising that one HAS to suspend doubt (on some level) in order to learn pretty much anything, he decided to suspend doubt on only the barely necessary beliefs: That there is a creator, and that two thousand years ago a man lived who was morally perfect. He has found that a surprising amount of Christian belief is a direct consequence of these basic ideas, even if you are highly skeptical of Biblical texts, of the idea of an afterlife, and of other things Christians have invented to augment the more basic ideas. And since he is an analytical, logical person, since I have great respect for his reasining skills, I can usually trust him that, if he believes in something being said in church or in Bible study, that it derives fairly clearly from the basic axioms. I then ask him why he thinks it does, and his explanations are really what has been guiding my exploration of Christian though - although I have a feeling my questions are guiding HIS exploration about as much, because I am a safeguard that keeps him from believing anything too outrageous or unfounded (other than believing in a creator and in a historical, human, and and morally perfect Jesus).

So it's really a collaborative effort, and he probably deserves more credit than me for whatever thoughts I discover and write here. However, he is the one who thinks letting go of doubt is important, he is the one who wants to "believe" so that he can be a better person, he is the one who wants to be able to call himself a Christian, while I think it is important to keep doubt (i.e. atheism) somewhere in mind, to call myself a humanist and atheist rather than a Christian, to never REALLY forget that religion is basically made up. So this whole "going to church" thing is a lot harder for me than it is for him...

Introduction

2006-03-07T19:33:00.000-08:00

I am an atheist. In talking with Christians about their beliefs over the last year or two, I have come to find out that their faith is more complex, subtle, diverse, powerful, and justifiable than we give them credit for. No, I'm not falling for some of the dumb arguments outlined and debunked in atheism books. And I'm quite certain you don't need God to explain the world we see around us. But many smart and reasonable people do, and their answers as to why are fascinating. If I question them in a careful enough way, they allow themselves to admit that they believe what they beleive even while recognising no logic or evidence could disprove an atheistic world view - that is, even when they admit we could be right. What is it that makes an atheistic world view so unappealing to them? And how is it that so many smart, reasonable people admit that an atheistic world view is possible, only to then shy away from it?

I decided I want to find out. And the best way to find out is to learn enough about the Christian mindset, so I would be able to approach them and ask these questions without being treated like an outsider - or even so I would be able to emulate Christian thought. When an atheist asks a Christian "Why do you believe" and "Don't you see the world could form itself on its own", they are often answered with useless statements like "You're missing the point" or "You just have to believe". I do think there is more to it than that. I'm not sure how or why, but I think there is. So I have started attending a local church (one attended by one of my best friends, who takes me there and introduces me even though he knows about my beliefs and intentions) and a weekly Bible study (run by a good friend of mine who does NOT know about my beliefs and intentions). I want to learn enough about how Christians think about spirituality so that I can communicate with them, ask them about their faith without sounding like an outsider, maybe even present them with the possibility of the atheistic world-view (or at least with the logical inconsistencies in their image of God, and maybe other such "problems" with their beliefs) in a way that they don't immediately shut me out. I want to ask them the tough questions in a way that they will listen, think about their beliefs, and give back insightful answers, about which belief is a consequence of which belief. I have gotten a handful of Christians to go through this kind of questioning, but (despite the extremely interesting and insightful things I have learned) it was a fairly painful process - both painful for me, who had to be very careful in order not to disrespect or offend them, and painful also for them, who were having their beliefs torn apart and feeling like they had to explain music to a deaf person. So I want to try to make it less painful. By immersing myself in the system of thoughts that makes up Christianity, I will know how to ask questions without getting responses like "You're missing the point" or "That's disrespectful". In the analogy of them trying to explain music to a deaf person, it's like I am going to try and learn to hear, or at least try to understand the mechanisms that cause, and result from, hearing.

Like geometry, each belief is a consequence of a group of simpler beliefs, and I want to go through the "proofs" to find out what the basic axioms are, and why these basic axioms are so compelling to so many people - and so difficult for atheists to agree to, even just to grasp.

I want to learn as much as I can about the structure of Christian belief and report back to the atheist world, so that atheists can have an honest, "benefit of the doubt" portrait of Christian belief - rather than thinking of Christians as the idiots and fundamentalists, as the straw-men, that keep being portrayed in atheism books.

I am learning to suspend disbelief and to emulate Christian thought; Once you teach yourself to stop thinking "This is all made up", some interesting possibilities can be honestly scrutinized, possibilities you either would not expect or would reject outright as an atheist. (Don't worry, though. I do realize religion is basically all made up, if you look at it in the way that, to me, is most comfortable).

If you "suspend disbelief" for just one second and suppose that the world was deliberately created by an intelligent entity, and that 2000 years ago a man lived who was morally perfect... How much of Christian theology and mythology can be derived from just these two simple propositions? In other words, if a skeptical, logical, scientific-minded, reasonable person grants that these two axioms are true, how much of Christianity are they enough to justify, if you believe the world runs in a scientific, natural, deterministic way (no miracles or "tweaking" by God after the very start), and WITHOUT believing that Jesus had supernatural powers? The answer is; A surprising amount of Christianity follows from just that. Figuring this out is like playing with non-Euclidean geometry: Just change two basic axioms but leave the other ones the same, and explore the crazy new world you get.

This blog will consist of my observations and thoughts. Christianity presented in a way an atheist might better understand it (so as to then be able to realise that Christians aren't crazy. Not all of them anyways). Atheists, I am your spy into the Christian mindset. Let's see what I can find out.