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Saturday, July 11, 2009

Religion.

I've become increasingly aware in recent months that I'm going to have to work out some sort of religious beliefs. I'm not really sure what my family believes--we're Jewish, but that's more our culture than our religion, I never hear any of my relatives actually mention God like a real thing. You have a Bat Mitzvah because it'll bring the family together and give the kid a sense of belonging and accomplishment and the elders a sense that their traditions are being passed on, but you don't really have it for God. Even the funerals in my family don't mention God much.

Which leaves me adrift, and a little too aware of my own vulnerability to fate and mortality to ignore the issue entirely and just be a secular agnostic by default. For a while I was one of those "magical sky man, hurrr" Internet Atheists, but that ends up as arrogant and obnoxious as any hellfire evangelical--it's really just about cherry-picking the worst in religion as a justification for ignoring subtler possibilities. Science and religion aren't adversaries, and taking a side--either side--makes you a jerk.

It's enough to make me believe in the snake-god-puppet Glycon.

Which I do. My current tentative, confused stance is that I should believe in everything. Everything, not just Jesus and the Buddha but also Tinkerbell and Spring-Heeled Jack and artichokes and Br'er Rabbit and Paris Hilton. Everything that there is an idea of exists. I don't know if God made the world in seven days while cleverly disguising everything as billions of years old, but I do know that the Creation exists. Saying "it's all in your mind" of something ignores an extremely important fact (the only certain fact)--my mind exists. A mental image isn't some ephemeral thing that doesn't "really" exist; mental images are all we freakin' have.

At the same time obviously the billions-of-years thing works better if you'd like to prospect for oil rather than the totally real and valid mental idea of oil. Our perceptions of the physical world are fairly consistent and science is the reasonable way to understand and predict those consistencies. But saying the physical world is all there is doesn't fit with my ability to have mental images--with my ability to have a "mental," or for that matter a "my," at all. Evolution can explain the existence of a sociable bipedal mammal sitting here typing; it doesn't explain why that's me. "Me" exists on the same level as Jesus and Tinkerbell, and that's why I can't discount their existence. I'm not sure if they can change anything in the apparent physical world (although, hmm, I can), but I know absolutely that they affect me.

I hope this makes some sense. I feel the need to clarify that I'm sober. I have no idea how to translate my ideas into practice. I still don't know what's going to happen when my body dies.

And may Barney Rubble bless you all.

23 comments:

  1. So you're an ecumenical agnostic?

    The point isn't simply whether God exists, but whether He's God. Equating him with Ginsu knives, Nessie, and ringworm seems indistinguishable from atheism.

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  2. It's true that evolution can explain only how a physical organism came to be and not why that organism is conscious. But there could be natural laws that explain why any organism of a certain level of complexity must be conscious. See David Chlamers's 1995, 1997, and 2002 papers on this subject.

    Also, while everything that there is an idea of exists as an idea, and while people who learn of these ideas can change their behavior based on them, most religious people would say that their god or gods can influence the world more directly, as people and animals can but with greater powers. Everyone needs to decide whether a particular religion is just a set of practices that can be discarded if they're not working, or whether the beings it describes can cause him or her great suffering if they're ignored.

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  3. Bruno - Sort of. I think a more on-the-nose term would be "fluffbunny."

    No; just because God exists and cranberries exist don't mean that they're the same thing. I don't know if I can believe in a God who literally controls anything, but God is definitely an exceptionally powerful and important idea.

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  4. GreenEarth - I'm reading the Chalmers papers but I've gotta tell ya, I'm not sold. I understand what he's saying when he describes the problems in our understanding of consciousness, but when he gets to offering solutions he seems (properly) completely uncertain. I don't see him getting much more confident than "I don't know if it's possible that one day we'll know whether we even can know."

    I think a truly religious person would answer your last sentence by saying neither convenience nor consequences is ultimately most important, what matters is what's true. Christians don't always worship Jesus to get into Heaven, at least some of them worship him because he's the son of God.

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  5. I think a truly religious person would answer your last sentence by saying neither convenience nor consequences is ultimately most important, what matters is what's true. Christians don't always worship Jesus to get into Heaven, at least some of them worship him because he's the son of God.

    It's astonishing how many atheists completely fail to grasp that.

    I think a lot of people, especially people who aren't brought up with any particular belief system, completely disregard the idea that some religious types actually believe in God and aren't just making it all up as some elaborate excuse to oppress everybody else.

    ...okay, that came out a lot more bitter than I expected. I need to stop reading radfem blogs.

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  6. I like to think I've got a pretty decent theoretical grasp on how consciousness can work in a completely materialistic universe. Decent enough that "why 'me'?" isn't a pressing question to me.

    That said, all assumptions of complete materialism rely on an assumption, much as theological ones do. Science can only comment on the material- it's inherently unable to do otherwise.

    I'm on what you'd call a sliding scale of atheism/agnosticism. If the question: "Do I believe the Bible/Koran/scripture" is an accurate and complete description of the being in charge of the universe", then I'm pretty much an atheist. If the question is "do I believe there may be something more than the material and that maybe there is one or more vast intelligences out there capable of creation", then I'm definitely an agnostic. Hell, I'm not even remotely sure that, if there is such a being, it's even remotely interested in us any more than we're interested in our pets' skin flakes.

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  7. labrat - I was quite interested in my cat's skin flakes for a while. So much so that I took her to a cat hospital and went through elaborate rituals to force her to eat pills to make them go away. Maybe that's what people are to God; pets with skin flakes which he is trying and failing to remove.
    in case you were wondering, my kitty's okay now.

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  8. Labrat pretty much covered it for me. Even when I was a "believer" (culturally Catholic family, 12 years of Catholic school), I never really cared about the "why me?" question. It was more of an intellectual(?) belief, I guess--I just accepted God and Jesus as fact. There was no joy or comfort in faith for me, like there is for many religious people I know. I loved, and still do, the whole mythology of it all. There are some awesome stories there that give me the same feelings that all great fiction does.

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  9. Well, I suppose I could chime in here with my core beliefs...


    "Religion" deals with Humanity's connection to Deity. I think we can all agree with that.

    Deity, it seems to me, is something that transcends mankind's ability to understand it: we all can "get" little pieces of it, but not the whole picture.

    Imagine Deity as a large sphere. The Christians understand a portion in the right/upper quadrant. The Muslim and Jews are nearby (similarity of beliefs). The Wiccans are somewhere over in the lower left, Shintos over in the upper left (Buddhists on another damn sphere, as they're followers of a philosophy, not a religion). All followers of the same "Deity", but with "getting" different aspects of it.

    Of, as a Sikh friend of mine says: "God is One, and We are all His Children"...

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  10. I've seen some religious types who seem to be claiming that without god there is no meaning, and since they cannot conceive of a universe lacking in meaning, god must exist. Assuming I'm understanding them right (which I may not be) I would like to point out that "meaning" is not a property which exists independently of any observer. Rather, it is a reflective process which exists only in the mind of an observer. I suppose it might be interesting or useful to know what meaning everything has to god if he/she/it exists, but it has zilch to do with proving anything other than the fact that *you* exist.

    Or else perhaps they're confusing "meaning" with "purpose". In that case, I rather suspect that if there is a purpose to everything (which I personally doubt), then people would be disappointed if they ever found out what it was. For example, maybe somebody was just really bored.

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  11. Yes, David Chalmers definitely said that his ideas about how consciousness fits into the rest of physics are just initial guesses. But I don't think it's been shown that it's impossible to find fundamental laws that will allow you to predict what things are conscious, etc. Of course, given that we can't "see" the consciousness of anyone except ourselves, we might not be able to do more than narrow down the possibilities for these laws. Still, I'm not inclined to say that the existence of consciousness is evidence of supernatural forces, given that so many other phenomena that have once been thought miraculous have turned out to be ordinary.

    To clarify the other thing I said, I shouldn't have implied that Christians, say, worship God simply because they don't want him to punish them. But I bet most of them would say that being in touch with the creator of the universe fills them with such joy and peace that they couldn't imagine being cut off from him; i.e., they wouldn't say simply that they worship God because he is God. (At least I hope they would think their actions through more than that.)

    Also, if your belief can be summed up as "I don't know if I can believe in a God who literally controls anything, but God is definitely an exceptionally powerful and important idea," aren't you basically a "secular agnostic"? Most agnostics and atheists would agree that religions have been "powerful and important" throughout history, and that there is some wisdom and good advice in most religions (though it might be outweighed by the falsehoods in them).

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  12. I guess I'll chime in like Strings did(nice bit about the sphere, btw, I really like that description), and share a bit about my process(I call it a process, because it's still evolving). I am, in name, Asatru, which is to say that I follow the folkway of those old gods/goddesses of the viking people. That's sort of like saying I'm Christian, though, as there are so many different groups encompassed by one faith.

    I began as I was raised, nondenominational Christian. Around about 15, I got heavily involved in a Christian youth group. Bible study three times a week, summer retreats and so forth. I read the bible cover to cover, twice. That convinced me it wasn't for me. I studied some Judaism, Buddhism, Islam, Wicca, and Native American Spirituality(I'm part Apache). I tinkered with everything I found, and none of it seemed to fit, until I had several excellent sources on the Nordic gods fall into my lap.
    My current feelings are that the Gods were men who wrote their lives large upon the consciousness of their tribe, and became revered as more than men. Whether the faith of a tribe makes them actually Gods in fact rather than in name, I do not know. Agnostic Asatru?
    I've always had a small amount of atheism in me as well. Currently, it's running strong, which actually fits in with the core of my faith, as we place a focus on the deeds done in this world, rather than trying to secure a place in the next. If there really is nothing but this one life, then at least the deeds I have done may preserve some small part of me.

    Anyway, here's a place to do some reading, if you like. The Internet Sacred Text Archive contains texts from many different faiths, from the Sagas and Eddas of the Northmen, to the Vedas of Hinduism.

    http://www.sacred-texts.com/index.htm

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  13. Truth is a statement about the inside of other people's heads. Much like meaning.

    I was asked, once-- well, I was on a message board where the general question was asked-- "What religion would you tell me to be?"

    I answered, "Whichever one is most true in its understanding of the world to your experiences. Failing that, whichever one helps you best to be the best human being that you can. Failing that, whichever one you find most beautiful."

    This was not the sort of answer that they wanted.

    I dunno, man, I'm just a pagan mystic who takes the exact opposite approach to the OP, enough so that we're probably doing the same damn thing: I don't do belief. Stuff just is. The stuff in my head, including gods, may or may not exist outside of my head, but since I'm stuck in my head, welp, that's what I deal with.

    Just file me under 'mad priest' and move along, y'know?

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  14. I am a bit late to the party but I'll throw in my two cents.

    I am a full bore atheist. I believe in what I can see, or at least get good scientific corroboration on and nothing more. If I ever come across proof of the existence of some sort of deity (such as Jesus/Elvis/Flying Spaghetti Monster landing in my backyard) I will be forced to chance my beliefs based upon this new information. But so far I've seen nothing that leads me to believe there is any type of higher power.

    However I do find the whole Christian/Atheist "culture war" to be rather tiresome. Fighting Christmas trees and treating atheism as if it were a religion itself is just stupid. So long as someone doesn't have "death to all nonbelievers" as a core tenant of their belief system I rally don't care what the do.

    I am also fascinated, though in a rather clinical sense, by the religious beliefs of those close to me. I currently have a reasonably new friend who is some sort of Wiccan or something and I would really like to know more about that, that I am afraid that any attempt to do so would be misunderstood as either mocking them or a surreptitious attempt to join.

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  15. I've come to realise that Heinlein shaped a lot of who I am. Recently re-read _Job_, first time I read that I was pre or early teen... hey! So that's where my religious beliefs come from!

    Also, _Dogma_'s a pretty good movie...

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  16. If you have extra time, read Neil Gammon's "American Gods." Its a novel, but it has an interesting outlook on religion. Gods (any, all) exist because people believe in them.

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  17. "I think a truly religious person would answer your last sentence by saying neither convenience nor consequences is ultimately most important, what matters is what's true. "

    No, that's what atheists say.

    Where we came from, what we're supposed to do, and what our ultimate fate is (our past, present, and future) are among the deepest, most profound, and most personal questions that any human being can possibly contemplate. I think we can all argree on that, no?

    I am an atheist because I care about those questions. I care about having the right answers to those questions, and I expect those answers to be based on at least the same amount of due diligence as when buying a used care.

    Bullshit and fantasy (read: every religion on Earth) doesn't satisfy that.

    "For a while I was one of those "magical sky man, hurrr" Internet Atheists, but that ends up as arrogant and obnoxious as any hellfire evangelical--it's really just about cherry-picking the worst in religion as a justification for ignoring subtler possibilities. Science and religion aren't adversaries, and taking a side--either side--makes you a jerk."

    And the subtler possibilities are just subtler bullshit.

    Your mind exists, but that doesn't mean that the things in your mind exist outside of your mind. Surely you don't believe that Tinklebell and Br'r Rabbit are actually real, because I have trouble believing that anyone could be that stupid.

    Materialism has no conflict with you being you. Simply put, "the mind is what the brain does". As a computer analoy: Brain = hardware; mind = software.

    Full discussion of the implications of these ideas requires more discussion than I'm willing to put into a blog comment on my crappy keyboard (especially since my typing coordination seems to be shit right now), because it would likely take me a few days to put all my thoughts together coherently.

    If you would like a sex-positive, atheist woman to read, look up Greta Christina on freethoughtblogs.com.

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    Replies
    1. There may or may not be any kind of supernatural or higher power, but honestly, I'm offended by people who act like it's obvious there isn't.

      What is obvious is that there are things that are real that are not obvious in the "you can sit it on a table and look at them and poke them" sense. There's gravity and time and subjective experience, and things in scales far larger and smaller than our own. Questioning the nature of these things, and wondering if there are ones we haven't yet discovered (or can't discover) is not at all the same thing as making up stories about a magic sky man and declaring those to be the only true stories.

      Anyway, how can you say Tinkerbell doesn't exist? We have pictures. :p

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    2. I didn't say it was obvious. I was raised Christian and remained that way until reading The God Delusion just a few years ago in my late teens. My eyes weren't open until then. I would never say that it's obvious.

      After reading it, on the other hand, I don't think there's any way I could go back. It would be like believing in the Tooth Fairy again.

      Far more damning than the lack of physical evidence for a god (or gods) is the psychological evidence that humans have very overactive imaginations.

      We very easily see things that aren't there; we believe things happened for a purpose rather than random chance; we hope for justice in the world. There is a lot of positive psychological evidence that religious thinking comes from a combination of cognitive biases, wishful thinking, and perhaps a small dash of deliberate manipulation of the masses (re: Scientology).

      The most damning question to religion is "How do you know?"

      Take my own field" electricity. There are equations describing electricity and magnetism. Some of these equations will tell you that if you arrange copper wire and an iron core in the right configuration, you can create a motor that uses the invisible, untouchable force of manetism to spin things. Not only that, they will tell you the voltage, current, torque, and RPM of the motor.

      "How do you know?" Because you can build the motor and try it. And it works. The starter in your car, the compressor in your fridge, the fan cooling your computer's CPU all were made like that.

      Now take a religious statement, ANY religious statement. I'll not cherry pick some stupid fundy belief; here's probably the most common religious statement in the world: "God is good."

      "How do you know?"

      Seriously, how? War, plagues, natural disasters, famine, drought, etc; one could easily reach the conclusion that god is a dick and doesn't give two shits about us, or perhaps delights in our torment.

      How do we know that "God is good?" WE DON'T. It's nothing but wishful thinking with no basis in reality at all.

      Once you truly understand the illusory and fantastic (read: fantasy) nature of religion, you can't look at it the same again.

      Atheism is not arrogant. We are a small, unimportant part of a literally incomprehensibly large universe. Atheism is humbling.

      Believing that the universe was created just for you and that its all powerful creator cares about your day to day life and your sex habits and listens to all your troubles and the end of the day is, on the other hand, narcissism on a cosmic scale.

      PS: Religion and science are adversaries, and they have been even since they began to coexist. The conflict is fundamental, reaching all the way down to their base virtues, and I don't think it can ever be resolved. People holding up religious scientists as an example against that only demonstrate the power of cognitive dissonance on one hand, or the able to misinterpret or lie about another person's faith (like Einstein's).

      Scientific thinking requires rigorous skepticism, an unwaveringly disciplined mind that never stops asking the question "How do you know?"

      Religious thinking subverts that, by encouraging wishful thinking, fantasy, and delusion.

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    3. I think you're seriously confusing my "I'm willing to consider the possibility of unknown consciousness and forces in our universe" with me saying "I'm an American Evangelical Christian and I believe God is my personal friend who gives me whatever I need!"

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    4. Yeah, that probably is my vibe. I guess I'm just completely pissed the fuck off about all the current Republican candidates for President right now.

      Sloppy thinking like yours is still not good.

      ""Me" exists on the same level as Jesus and Tinkerbell, and that's why I can't discount their existence."

      I can't even understand the reasoning here. Jesus and Tinkerbell are ideas, they exist only in the mind. Just because something can exist inside your mind does not mean it has physical reality outside of your mind.

      Consciousness is not a fundamental force of the universe, like electricity or gravity. It is an emergent property of the operation of a very complex physical brain.

      "I still don't know what's going to happen when my body dies. "

      Death is like the melting of a snowflake. Each one unique, defined by the structure of their crystals, just as your self is defined by the structure of your body and mind. Once the snowflake melts, and your body dies, that structure dissolves. It is gone from this world, never to be seen again.

      Think about the implications of that next time you shovel snow.

      And finally, something I just finally had sink in:
      "and taking a side--either side--makes you a jerk."

      Picking sides makes you a jerk? Seriously? Is that only for religion, or does feminism and gay rights count too?

      "MRAs and feminists aren't in conflict, and picking sides only makes you a jerk."

      All religions subvert critical thinking to transmit their message. Some messages are benign, like "love your neighbor"; others are not so much, like "wives, submit to your husbands"; many are horrible, like "man shall not lie with another man as with a woman, it is a abomination".

      It is impossible to apply proper critical thinking to get rid of the bad kid of religion without also getting rid of the good. Fortunately, not even good religion is necessary. There are a great many wonderful things in this world to admire without having to make any up.

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    5. You may be pleased to hear that considering how many Christians are not Republicans, having very loose spiritual beliefs definitely does not make me a Republican.

      I can't even understand the reasoning here. Jesus and Tinkerbell are ideas, they exist only in the mind.
      Well, so do I. Sure, you could see me and touch me, but you'd perceive that seeing and touching in your mind.

      Consciousness is not a fundamental force of the universe, like electricity or gravity. It is an emergent property of the operation of a very complex physical brain.
      We don't know that.

      Frankly, you're striking me as a religious atheist--someone who believes without proof all the subsidiary things necessary to believe in a world without the supernatural. And that's okay. We all believe things without proof.

      Only thing that gets my hackles up is when you pretend that there is totally ironclad proof.

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    6. I think I'll wade in here 3 years after the original post. What you seem to be arguing for is an old philosophical view called Idealism, famously held by Bishop Berkeley, and argued for in "Three Dialogues Between Hylas and Philonious". Quick summary: There are only minds and ideas, to say that there is something behind the idea, such as matter which is being hit by lightwaves which stimulate your retina and so on is just empty hand waving because you don't have any concept of what this matter or lightwaves is other than as an idea in your mind.

      But do you really think that is true? I concede that tinkerbell exists in a certain sense in that you have an idea and I have an idea of a character in a disney film and these ideas are probably quite similar. But that is a very different usage of "exists" than when I say the table exists, or the chair or another person. In the latter sense we not only mean it exists as an idea but we also mean that they have some existence independent of us, that they would have even if I wasn't having an idea of it. The first sense makes existence kind of trivial and leads to difficult questions like "If Jesus exists like Christians think he exists, and Muhammed exists like Muslims think he does, how can we have the Jesus is the son of God like Christianity says, but he isn't according to Muslims?"

      Doesn't this view lead to a total truth-value relativism (what is true is relative)?

      Other points: If "(the only certain fact)--my mind exists" is indeed the only certainty wouldn't the prudent thing to be not to believe anything else, rather than believing everything?

      "Evolution can explain the existence of a sociable bipedal mammal sitting here typing; it doesn't explain why that's me" it is my understanding that scientists are working on this, give them some time.

      Sorry for getting to the debate so late, I only found this blog recently and have been working through it instead of revising for my finals.

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