tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-91213156938574528622024-02-08T15:53:04.789-05:00Cognitive DissonanceUnknownnoreply@blogger.comBlogger89125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9121315693857452862.post-5064966467686828362014-10-27T11:47:00.003-04:002014-10-27T11:57:51.366-04:00"I will not forget one line of this."I finally have the words for what I've been trying to say.<br />
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I need to get my life together, and I can't do that here. There's too much of what I was, too many memories.<br />
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I've done this before, stopped writing here, but this will be the last time. And this time, it's not out of frustration, anger, or sadness.<br />
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The me that was a follower of Christ, that grew up in that subculture and made that his identity, is gone. I can't keep going on pretending like my future has anything to do with it any longer. There is no more processing in writing necessary, it's done. I could write an entire paragraph blaming others for the pain I've experienced, or explaining how everything I say about this is now useless, but that would also be pointless. It's time that I stopped living in the lies I was told growing up by so many beautiful, well-meaning, and loving people, and accept that it's all been a nice story. It's time that bitterness became something that was, and it's time I accept what I've known for way too long. The philosopher is dead, and will make cognitive dissonance no longer. There need not be cognitive dissonance any longer in my mind when there is truth, and when freedom has replaced what once was magnificent and delusional purpose.<br />
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I plan to continue writing one day, but not here, and not in the way I have. It's useless, because the more I bare my soul here, the more people will take it for granted, the more I'll be tied to what I used to be, and the more bitter I will become at humanity and their endless waiting to speak, their inability to listen when they can cleverly disregard others and smugly think they know it all. As it stands, I can barely take myself or anything I think seriously, and anyone that disagrees with me runs me over, while I help them do it. That's no way to live.<br />
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So I'm done with this blog and what it stands for. This is merely a symbol of what I have to do next. Living in the past is done, because there is so much more to see. Observing does not necessitate pontificating, and experiencing does not necessitate explaining. I'll no longer be a know-it-all or the egotist I once was. I'm a fool, and the fool's place is to be quiet and to help others in any small way he can. In addition, I choose to live well and learn all I can.<br />
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Should I choose to write more, there will be one more post here linking you, my readers, to where you can read it. It will be different, but it will still be me. But this is the last time I'll tell you what's really on my mind here.<br />
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There is still the pain, and it is a lot of pain even still. But
there is an infinity of possibility ahead of me, making that pain
unimportant. Sometimes the best way to heal is to move on, and this blog is the last vestige of the pain I've been dragging around for way too long. It's done.<br />
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Readers: live well!Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9121315693857452862.post-90627539616573327012014-10-03T02:27:00.001-04:002014-10-03T02:27:06.230-04:00Something to Believe InI've found that words don't come easy for me lately, when it comes to talking about the important things in life. I used to be asked, seemingly out of the blue, what it is that I believe. It's a hard question to answer because it's not just asking what you believe, but what is important to you. I think I have an answer.<br />
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A few years ago, my answer would have been something along the lines of "Love," with a dual meaning of god. Unconditional love, the perfect way that I longed to be real. But something felt wrong with that answer, and I couldn't figure out what it was. However, I felt it in what was around me. I saw it when people would gloss over other people with their eyes, continually wait for their turn to speak, brazenly show their apathy about other peoples' difficulties that were supposed to be their friends. I watched as people that touted love as the supreme virtue disregarded and minimized the opinions of those not like themselves, and I began to wonder if I did the same thing.<br />
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I've missed the accusations that used to get flung at me within Christian culture. For me, it was a confirmation that I was being compassionate, that I was listening to all sides of a story, that I was at least trying to be objective. It is that intuitive knowledge that began to disturb me most of all, that largely, if you ask questions and are unafraid of answers, if you seek to be kind and compassionate in what you do, and if you listen to the people you're told not to, you will end up with people praying for your salvation at best, and attacking you and calling you sub-Christian or heretical at worst. It becomes a badge of honor to be attacked, a sign that you were doing the right thing.<br />
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The problem is, this only happens if you still claim the name "Christian" and believe in god. Atheism is treated with detached disdain and condescending dismissal by some of the religious "intellectuals," and with confusion and by being ignored by others of the faithful. Truly, it's scary to some people when someone thinks differently than they do. Some have to find convenient ways of disregarding or defeating the evil atheists. I sometimes will seek out these people, the ones that will become angry with me and try to defeat me, because it demonstrates some level of caring from an institution/movement that labeled me unacceptable and invisible long ago.<br />
<br />This is not a cry for help. This is not me being depressed or sad because no one's paying attention to me. This is an observation that I find sad. Those who profess and worship unconditional love fail to show even a basic ability to listen to anyone that isn't within their group, and then disdain those unlike them for attempting to form some kind of community, by calling it a "religion," or "church." It's unfortunate, and I am sad to see that otherwise reasonable, kind people can be so hostile and cold to those not like them. Ignorance just makes it worse.<br />
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The reason I know this is not merely observation, but because I've done it. I understand how freaked out you can get when you talk to an atheist. You think they've got all of these philosophical arguments that they've designed just to trick you, or they treat science as a religion, or they're going to get angry and yell in your face if you say you believe in god or are religious. Furthermore, it's easy to dismiss people who don't think like you do instead of ask questions and listen, especially if they're scary or easy to write off. This is a human trait that religion happens to exacerbate with its' tribal nature, but it's by no means confined to the religious.<br />
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People want to be known and heard and accepted. It floods every piece of media we consume. We watch how even the most despicable characters are listened to, how they all have some redeeming characteristic, even if they're a "high functioning sociopath" or something of that nature, or perhaps they're just interesting. The problem is, many people think that they're the interesting one, and that everyone else should be interested in them.<br />
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The truth is, none of us know what the hell is going on in this life. We may think we know, or we may have some pretty good ideas, but there's always something that needs to be rationalized, always something to get around so that we can keep going until we either can't anymore, or we stop listening to hold onto what is important to us.<br />
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It's hard to continue to be enraged by the injustice you see when you realize this. You instead want to correct it in order to make things better. You want to shake the person who seems to have a soul that's asleep, drifting through life without caring. You want to argue down the angry fundamentalist just so he'll realize how destructive he's being. You want to tear down the false compassion you see when people don't understand those who are different and are condescending and ignorant in their attempt to be kind. You want to scream down the people that are going on and on about how terrible another group that they don't understand is, like atheists, often claiming to be a former one themselves who's "recovered" in order to fabricate an understanding they do not possess, and display their ignorance of every time they open their mouth. And most of all, when you see these in yourself, you want to correct it immediately, no matter the cost, just so you won't hurt anyone else. The past has shown you how hurtful you can be, and you want to do some good, to make people happy and to be happy yourself in life.<br />
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I believe in happiness. Not simply my happiness, but in happiness for everyone. I think it's a goal worth striving for. In a world full of people claiming confidence in their absolute morality and smug armchair philosophers who think people can be easily dismissed if they don't think the same way, happiness is an ideal that flies in the face of it all. There's power in the simplicity of it, and it moves a person forward like nothing else.<br />
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I'm still angry with those who've rejected me, and I don't know if that will change. It always hurts more when good people who were your friends either decide to or have to think of you as unacceptable, or when people you trust to help you decide to not care, or to work against your ability to move forward in life. However, I think if one thing can heal a person who's been wounded, it is long term happiness with their life, and in sharing that with those close to them. This is what I believe in, and I believe it because I choose to.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9121315693857452862.post-52469812245269028812014-07-05T15:52:00.001-04:002014-07-06T14:04:11.512-04:00The Appeal of MysticismI wish to talk for a little while about my journey. Having not written here for a while, it seemed appropriate to put this down for others to see.<br />
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Nearly two years ago, I publicly announced that I was leaving my faith on this blog. What's happened since then has been both harder and more inspiring than I thought possible. It's changed me in ways I never thought would change, and I've moved on from many things I've written here, while embracing others.<br />
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You see, when I first asked the questions that lead me away from the faith of what I've come to think of as my "past life," I was just doing business as usual. Stuff came up, information about the scientific method, history, comparative religion, theology, and more than anything, the epistemology of mystical experiences. It was a messy time with a lot of messy questions, and I've come to believe that I should not have said things how I did at the time. However, had I not done so, I never would have come to understand the way people struggle.<br />
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You see, I was a member of the majority where I live. Sure, I was a Christian with some weird ideas and beliefs, but I was still a Christian. I thought it was persecution when arrogant Christian academics would call me a heretic or say I wasn't really a Christian, but there was always a network of people to fall back on, and you can always make new connections through the network that is the "church," as vague of a term as that is. I had never really learned what it meant to take people as they are, despite valuing it so highly, because everything had to fit into a framework where God exists and controls everything and if people don't believe in God, they can safely be disregarded.<br />
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I had never thought about what it was like to be disregarded until I found myself in this undeniable position of agnostic atheism through my studies, and through my experiences. I can talk to you about evolution, church history, the holes in theological systems and the ways people try to account for them, and even get into more advanced stuff like abiogenesis, metaphysics, and cosmology. These are all things I've looked at and studied, and there are those who have studied them so much they make me look like I know literally nothing. That's the trap of academia, you never have read enough. Your opinion, if it differs with that of another academic, is uninformed, uneducated, able to be disregarded. Yes, this applies to more than just religious academics.<br />
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I've realized one thing of late: I am no academic, at least not in the sense that some people I've met are. I do not wish to disregard others any longer, and I find compassion and acceptance much more valuable than rational certitude. Even writing this is hard for me because of how many times I have been told over the years that I don't care about the truth, because I differ from others in beliefs. I have committed the cardinal sin in the eyes of some: I have changed my mind based on new data, and correction has come to be an exciting experience, in most cases, unless it is one of the many condescending "corrections" that I've had to learn to deal with since my deconversion.<br />
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It is with all of this in mind that I have taken a long, hard look at mystical experiences. You see, god always exists in what we don't know, or perhaps she exists in the realm of the laws that allow our universe to function. Perhaps she exists within our minds, a byproduct of psychological complexity, consciousness manifesting and mirroring itself onto our thoughts in such a way that we transcend ourselves. That is beautiful, and I doubt I will ever stop thinking so, but why call this, the emergence of our consciousness into higher levels of self-awareness, "god"? Perhaps it fits for some, but for others, it carries way too much baggage.<br />
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One day, a long time ago, I was put in spontaneous tears a few hours after seeing the beauty in two of my friends deciding to spend their lives together. It's the only time I really remember crying in public, and it was a beautiful moment that was quickly interrupted by a man trying to help me, but assuming I was crying in shame and praying with me about sin in my life.<br />
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I have never forgotten this happening. It was probably the biggest turning point in my religious journey, and I've come to see what it represented as the biggest reason I have made my exit from religion. You see, this man had no idea what I was going through, what I was thinking, or what was happening inside me, but he took it on himself to bring correction to me, to make it okay. It disturbed and embarrassed me, brought me out of that place where I was appreciating something great, where I was feeling how far I had fallen short of that dream (I had just ended a relationship that was very serious weeks before), where I was seeing two people embrace something truly greater than either of them individually, and it had become a prayer session. A prayer session about shame and sin and correcting oneself.<br />
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In retrospect, I was disturbing others with my outburst, and he used a good method to bring that disturbance in line with the expected environment at the time, and probably just wanted for me not to suffer, as though it were a bad thing.<br />
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This is not an odd story in a religious setting. It's actually quite common. There are stories about people that can "sense" sin on others, and they use the social or religious power they have to try to correct it. I am certain that the man trying to help me in that instance had the best of intentions, but he lacked respect for another person's experience, he made it about his perceptions, and he imposed those on me in a vulnerable state.<br />
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When people ask me why I left religion, I often give academic answers. I've come to see this as an approach that should rarely be taken, as religion is not about that. I've often challenged religious people and have read multiple expositions on why someone believes in the face of our science, our history, and the lack of good evidence in each of these for a god. The answer always comes down to faith, or subjective mystical experience that somehow convinces a person that an institution that's endured for two millennia has power over every aspect of their lives, and they choose to live that way, falling in line with the authority.<br />
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To put it another way, a subjective question requires a subjective answer, because subjective experience is, in fact, of enormous value. However, religion attempts to move subjective experience toward an objective system, and we've seen the results.<br />
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My subjective experience with the church is one of abuse, disrespect, assumptions, and, probably the most damning of all, people being wrong. Being wrong is not a problem, it is an opportunity to learn, but when someone insists on their wrong subjective conclusions in the face of correction by people who would know (like the person they are concluding things about), there is a problem. When people are wrong about dogmas that cause significant suffering and rejection in the lives of others, that makes me mad.<br />
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I have nothing but respect for those who have had experiences that convince them of the existence of a god. I'll discuss Jesus, church history, theology, science, mystical experiences, or whatever with a person, but the moment it becomes about their experiences, that is not my territory to judge, and it never will be my place to say anything about it unless they want an opinion. 99% of the time people don't want an opinion, they want to be listened to, and to have another person accept them at face value.<br />
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My journey through atheism has lead me to value mystical experiences and peoples' religious convictions in their lives, but it has lead me to violently reject any and all authoritarian religion. In retrospect, this began a long time ago, and it's probably some of the cause of people calling me heretical or sub-Christian or whatever other word they wish to use. The Christianity I've experienced is about authoritarian submission, and that's a force I've learned to be extremely wary of. The only "type" of Christianity I've ever encountered that is not subject to this has nearly nothing to do with historic Christianity, and I find that to be interesting. The early church, the formation of the Orthodox and Roman Catholic churches, the Protestant Reformation...they all smack of rejecting previous authority and then imposing their own, and there's been enough blood shed over that nonsense, though I'm sure there will be plenty more. By stark contrast, there are those who wish to share the joy in what they've experienced, who do not have an agenda, who do not wish to force people to believe anything or disregard those that make them uncomfortable, and they freely help those less fortunate, often with no recognition whatsoever. I aspire to be one of those people, though I doubt I'll ever call anything good in someone's life a "god" or "jesus" thing.<br />
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There is nothing wrong with my experiences leading me to where I am now. I have not "only encountered hypocrites," I have encountered a lot of nice, generous and good religious people as well as those attempting to impose authoritarianism on everyone they can, and I will continue to encounter all of the above. My experiences are not "less" than another person's for any reason, though there are many more to have, many more things to change my mind about, and much more adventuring to do.<br />
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If there's one thing I have become convinced of by all of this, it is that I cannot make an objective conclusion from subjective data. So sure, god exists, but she exists in the minds of those who believe in her. Hence, I am an agnostic about the existence of god due to insufficient objective evidence, and that is the best description I can come up with for where I've arrived. It should be interesting to see where this goes.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9121315693857452862.post-11158052505105083522014-04-08T19:56:00.001-04:002014-04-08T20:12:33.714-04:00Credibility, Ad Hominem, and GhostsIf there is one thing that continuously confuses me, it is people that are hung up on talking about the credibility of an individual rather than the facts of an argument. I see it all over the place, and to a certain point I understand it.<br />
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If I were to make a claim, for example, that I see ghosts on October 31st every year in some location that no one ever is, and no one has ever witnessed it, then what I am doing is making a statement tied to my credibility. However, if someone tells me that they think I am a gullible sod that believes inane superstitions, then they are questioning my credibility. This is understandable and warranted, because I have no evidence for what I believe. This is an anecdotal experience, and someone has to believe me in order to believe it.<br />
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However, if I were to see a lot of ghosts on October 31st, and myself and a lot of other people correlate those experiences, we're starting to have a better case to consider. We now have to ask what would delude a large group of people into believing something, or if that thing is actually happening. We also have to define what was seen, and whether it actually was a ghost. In this case, though my credibility is not necessarily the only thing in question, it is reinforced by other anecdotal experiences, so that it need be considered moreso than some insane person seeing something on one else does and trying to convince people of that. The person may no longer have an agenda if a ton of other people agree with them.<br />
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Unless, of course, that witness is paying those other people a large sum of money to lie about it. That throws a wrench in the whole thing.<br />
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Why am I talking about this? Because the way to settle the question of whether ghosts appear on October 31st is to get some evidence that it is happening. This doesn't mean, necessarily, to establish what the ghosts are or why/how it is happening, just that there's evidence that it is happening. The easiest way is probably to get a video recording that can be confirmed to be legitimate without tampering (a difficult task). This is evidence, and it makes the question of my credibility irrelevant.<br />
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So, if I am the only one that sees ghosts on October 31st, and I make a video of it and there are forensic tests done on the video to confirm its' legitimacy, then it doesn't matter what I stand to gain from it, whether I'm paying people to agree with me, whether I am a terrible person or a blight on society. I am still correct about this one thing, and we can deduce from there to find out more.<br />
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This is why I do not understand the question of credibility. To be sure, there are cases where it is important. However, even if there is a large group of people that all think the same thing and they have high levels of it in the form of qualifications, ethical standards, attractiveness, reliability, etc., they can still be totally incorrect. The human capacity for self-delusion alone makes this so, and large groups have, historically, all agreed on things that are, in retrospect, insane when we find evidence to the contrary. We've not only agreed on it, we have killed others who disagree, we have ostracized and hurt people that disagree, and we have created entire groups devoted to telling ourselves that we're right.<br />
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To make matters worse, this level of groupthink makes a fallacy called Ad Hominem very effective. Ad Hominem is rejecting a proposition on the basis of some irrelevant fact about the author of or the person presenting the claim or argument.<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_hominem#cite_note-2"><span></span></a> So say someone claims something for which there is evidence, such as say, the heliocentricity of the solar system (sun at the center, planets and other bodies orbiting), and they show the evidence. Let's say, for the sake of argument, that this person has no qualifications that others do who have a vested interest in that area, and the people with the credibility simply cite that that person doesn't know what they're talking about, and explain how little they are qualified to state such things. Their qualifications, by contrast, show that they know what they are talking about, and they believe that the solar system's center is Earth. Clearly, the sun goes across the sky and comes up every day, and sets every night, as do other bodies that have been identified as planets.<br />
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In this case, the geocentrists' claim is supported by a fallacy of perspective. We appear to, intuitively, be at the center of all we see. So clearly, we are, and what business has the man with no qualifications to say otherwise?<br />
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Well, he has evidence. The question of where we are in the solar system is not a matter of qualifications or credibility, it is a matter of evidence. Observations and deduction from those observations lead to a conclusion that anyone can see.<br />
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Of course, we end up in deeper intellectual water when we discuss philosophy, and deep questions like the existence of god and the implications of scientific discoveries. As familiar as the example of heliocentrism should be the theory of evolution, which is railed against constantly by those with a vested interest in it being untrue, and which I have written about previously. The evidence for evolution is overwhelming, and it is still denied with no counter-evidence, accompanied by irrelevant details about credibility, oftentimes attacking the credibility of the scientific community itself.<br />
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So why the irrelevant details being thrown around? Evolution is a threat to people with an interest in the things it addresses, just as heliocentrism was. In its' time, heliocentrism was a threat to the authority of the church, just as evolution has been today. This is slowly becoming not the case as the evidence is slowly becoming undeniable to all but certain sects, but what should be obvious to the observer is that credibility is a matter of authority in cases like these, whereas evidence can ignore that entirely. I have no scientific qualifications, but if I prove something and the scientific community all tries to disprove it and fails/ends up proving it, I have made a discovery, regardless of whether I have the credibility to back it up.<br />
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I want to come back around to the example of the ghost. You see, there's no totally reliable evidence that ghosts actually exist, but some people tend to think they do. People that are otherwise reasonable and rational people, people interested in evidence, think that ghosts exist. Ghosts are usually witnessed visually, and sometimes audibly, but they are typically believed to be the spirits of the dead, something beyond measuring in all other ways than by sight or sound, and no evidence has been conclusively proven using these criteria.<br />
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They may exist, but to choose to think they exist is a belief, a type of faith. You either have your own experience, or you believe the anecdotes of others. There may even be circumstantial evidence of their existence, like things that could only be caused by ghosts (objects falling over, doors closing). However, those things do not constitute evidence, as they can be caused by any number of things. Again, all of what one feels about ghosts could be correct. But it is a belief, not evidence.<br />
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Why does this matter? Because if you recall, we have discussed that evidence preempts this whole question of credibility. So I could simply say that that belief is incorrect, and I could be just as correct about the issue as the other person is. We could agree to disagree, or the believer could become angry that I don't believe. He could say that it should be relevant to my life, because ghosts are going to end the world. He could even say that they're a superior form of life and deserve veneration in some respects, and because they deserve it, I should bow down. Perhaps a ghost is the source of our world or our universe or all of reality, and that all scientific inquiry should bow down to ghost theorists' views, because their views are all encompassing.<br />
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Perhaps the head ghost got so angry that we were killing each other or venerating not-ghosty things or masturbating that he destroyed us all, and saved a few people, in his ghost-like mercy. Perhaps he has eternal torment by his ghost pals in store for those who don't agree, or perhaps we'll simply be missing out on his ghost-like love if we do not agree with the head ghost that all ghostists know, and we'll be left to our own personal torment by not being in the know, embracing his possibly existent...ghost appendages. Perhaps this analogy is getting creepy, and is as thinly veiled as the ghosts I'm talking about, and you are starting to see the problem.<br />
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You see, we've gone in a few paragraphs from something that is a belief that we can agree to disagree on, to something that people can easily intellectually bully others into believing, with threats, with credibility attacks, with any number of tactics, and we've even usurped and changed what evidence is.<br />
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If people have always believed in something and seen patterns of them throughout history, all we need to do is research it, all we need to do is become an expert, and we gain the authority to call everyone else an idiot if they don't agree, or to bully others into submission, or to terrify them into believing like they do to avoid wrath.<br />
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The problem is not that people disagree, it's that people are far too easy to bully and manipulate with a little sleight of hand, and so we have to ask a question when someone is really into getting us to believe something that lacks evidence. What are they selling? Why are they adamant about this? What do they get? What do words like evidence and love and good mean to them? Why are they attacking those who do not believe how they do and why do their arguments totally ignore the topic, and instead focus on attacking the credibility of the people that say such things?<br />
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I think that at some point, a person can become so used to needing authoritative sources for things that they lose sight of how easily they can be kicked out from under them. They become so entrenched that they stop thinking beyond certain bounds, and those not like them begin to terrify them. When you have everything to lose from changing your mind, you simply do not change it, and defining something, like a ghost, in such a way that it cannot be disproven by anything meaningful makes this even more possible. One's faith becomes unassailable, and the people that don't have it just end up beyond their understanding. They may even begin to shove those people into categories that they already have, and make claims regarding their lack of faith being a type of faith itself. Perhaps, people that are used to having this sort of faith will even create a rudimentarily tribal system that functions in much the same way, building off of authority and credibility, and end up confirming these suspicions.<br />
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How messed up would this all be? I'm just making it up, I must be a madman.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9121315693857452862.post-64878807280513413112014-03-29T08:47:00.004-04:002014-03-29T08:47:46.936-04:00Religion and Science: DissonanceI originally made this blog to talk about cognitive dissonance, and in transitioning from writing in a deeply religious to a more critical of religion tone, there has been an interesting change that I've noticed. For those unfamiliar, cognitive dissonance is descriptive of a process whereby someone holds contradictory beliefs simultaneously, and usually is talking about the mental stress that comes from doing so. One has a few choices when they encounter cognitive dissonance. Embrace it, and not back down from any of the conflicting beliefs, citing things such as paradox and mystery, choose one belief over the other, hopefully because of some kind of epistemic priority (such as growing up being taught that Earth is the center of the universe and then changing one's mind due to the evidence that it is not), or throwing up one's hands and walking away from the entire question.<br />
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I think a healthy individual probably does all of these things. If something is unimportant or distant enough from my ability to change, I readily will choose the third option, and simply walk away from the question. However, the thing I've noticed when I read back over this blog is that my writing has gone from the first option to the second. The best example I can think of for this, and what I wish to write about, is the huge question that's come up lately regarding science and religion.<br />
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Traditionally, people will pit the scientist vs the religious advocate, and basically look to see who wins, such as in the recent debate between Bill Nye and Ken Ham. While this approach is crude and lacks nuance, I think there is a very good reason that we do this.<br />
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The huge reaction I've seen from the moderate religious community is that both sides of this debate are wrong, and that science and religion coexist. This is a point worth engaging, because it has huge implications and because it's just way too smug of a point not to engage, in my opinion. Indeed, this is a point I would have made a few years ago, and it falls solidly within the first choice when dealing with cognitive dissonance. So, what is the dissonance we are encountering here, and what are the full implications of this point?<br />
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The religion usually being referred to here is typically Christianity, and it's my go-to example. So, the academic moderate form of Christian sources that tend to make this kind of point usually stand within the Christian spectrum as close to the middle as possible, with the hyper-conservative young-earth creationist on one end, and the liberal "it's all a metaphor" spiritualist on the other. To the moderate, the Bible is all about genre, intent, and where literalism and symbolism both have their places. A good example of this is one who embraces theistic evolution. The bible teaches that god created everything and all life, and the theistic evolutionist states that we are learning how he did this by learning about evolution. Imagine this approach to every possible theological topic and enough information being given when anything is brought up, and you have an academic moderate Christian. While they usually balk at terming things "mystery," they will call things such as a trinitarian god (three persons in one god) a paradox rather than a mystery or rather than trying to explain with some analogy like an egg or water being 3 states/parts/modes. I am grateful for this, as if I hear one more analogy of this type, I might start pelting them with whatever item they are trying and failing to make this analogy with until they stop.<br />
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Moving on.<br />
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When we speak of science, we are talking about a process of investigating the universe and coming to conclusions based on repeatable and peer-reviewed data. So a scientific claim starts out, usually, as an educated guess, and then that guess gets put through the wringer until it is proven wrong or until it becomes what is called a theory, or a factual explanation of how something works. Some good examples of this are the germ theory of disease, relativity, gravity, biological evolution, and magnetism. Theories are our understanding of how things work, and are subject to proof, in the form of other repeatable and falsifiable hypotheses that contradict the previous theory.<br />
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So we have a method of thinking here that is based in curiosity, understanding, and adaptability. What's wrong with it coexisting, as the moderate would say, with something like christianity?<br />
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Let's go back to theistic evolution. Evolution, by nature, operates off of a mechanism called natural selection. What this means is that things that cannot survive die, and things that are best suited for the environment survive, as life randomly grows and mutates and changes and becomes something else. The adaptation that has enabled our survival is probably consciousness, along with a lot of random chance. We are not stronger than a lot of animals, but our ancestors began developing high intelligence, and ended up outsmarting and innovating its' way to being the dominate species on this planet. However, well before this happened and while it was happening, a lot of death happened. Indeed, 99% of the life on this planet has already died, most of which happened well before homo-sapiens proper came into existence and began trying to figure out what powers govern their lives and why tons of beings die and what they can do to control it.<br />
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Why can god not be involved with this? He could, but which god are we talking about? Is it the christian god? If so, why use such a wasteful, random, and cruel process to do so? Does that not contradict the loving or at least "on man's side" god that we're supposed to be talking about?<br />
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Of course, this is a difficult question to ask, because the christian god is a reference to literally thousands of different gods from denominations, not counting personal differences among people that splinter it even further. So, let's make it simpler. Let's avoid the malevolent god of calvinism altogether and go with the deistic god, the one that created the universe and set it all in motion, and has not interfered since (perhaps even incapable of doing so), allowing evolution to run its' course.<br />
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Alright, so I suppose that is possible. However, if god so obviously created the universe, then why has all scientific investigation thus far not turned up one shred of evidence of this god, and tons of evidence about all of these mechanisms? Perhaps god, in fact, is not a scientific claim at all, and is merely a belief or matter of faith.<br />
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This is fine, but where are we with the eternal insistence that faith and science coexist, then? We not only have had to throw out the christian god to get here entirely, moving to a creator that does not influence what happens after that point, but we've closed this supposedly all powerful and knowable god into merely what we cannot explain. This is the dissonance with theistic evolution, and indeed, with the point that is science and faith in harmony. The god purported by advocates of such things cannot be guiding and influencing evolution and still be all powerful and all loving.<br />
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Perhaps god's ways are higher than my ways. Perhaps my knowledge is limited, and I am merely a tiny human shaking his fist at a god that is smugly existing, asking only that I have faith on bad evidence to "see" him.<br />
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In this area, I must fall into the second response to cognitive dissonance, as it seems the most defensible and reasonable course, and be solidly agnostic regarding the existence of the undefined and irrelevant god that may or may not have created the universe and then had nothing to do with it afterwards, and atheistic toward other gods.<br />
<br />There is a fairly common counter-point to this, in the form of a rebuttal phrased something like this:<br />
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"You are simply interpreting the evidence in favor of atheism, why are you angry at the god you know exists?"<br />
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One need look no further than the preview for the upcoming film "God is not Dead" for proof that this is indeed a point that is made by people.<br />
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Perhaps I am angry at a god, but it is not one that I know exists. The only god that I know exists is the one that people fervently believe in, and there is no direct evidence that he exists outside of those persons' minds. In this case, I am angry about something else, not about a god.<br />
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Perhaps I am interpreting the evidence, so interpret it another way and then explain the DNA and fossil evidence that is there in a different way that supports another theory, one that does not include natural selection.<br />
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While we're at it, allow me to retort and say that it's certainly possible that evolution in its' purest form makes us feel not so special, just another animal that's developed conscious intelligence, with no spiritual or transcendent significance as the christian religion teaches.<br />
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This is the real problem I have with the moderate christian position. Sure, maybe god exists. Sure, maybe we're missing some evidence or interpreting it wrong or some other such thing. However, hidden under that is often the centrality of the doctrine of hell and eternal torment outside of the kingdom of god, explained dozens of different ways. Or perhaps it is a concern that one cannot live a full life without being a theist, and one cannot be spiritual.<br />
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Now you've finally found my anger. We are literally the universe exploring itself, made up of matter that constantly changes and yet we remain uniquely us, and our complexity makes all of us a universe to be explored. Why does one need a god to be spiritual, when there is so much to be in awe of otherwise? Why do I need to stop appreciating scientific exploration and discovery at the point it makes me uncomfortable? Isn't that a more shallow sort of spirituality, polluted by fear and afraid of what we might discover if we explore further?<br />
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I get it, I've had the panic attacks about hellfire and torture and I know about Pascal's wager. For those unfamiliar, it goes something like this: god might exist, so hedge your bets, even if you don't think he's there, just believe so he doesn't punish you! Just have faith!<br />
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There are days I am terrified and I talk to the god that I don't think is there, asking her to prove she exists, challenging him to do anything to demonstrate his existence, calling it out of its' sleep, and being what I was taught not to be by religion: inquisitive of god's ways, and damned hostile about it.<br />
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There is no doubt that I am just as irrational as any human, but that does not change the fact that we can be more, we can be spiritual without needing to wager or be afraid or stop asking questions when our findings begin walking all over what we were taught is sacred.<br />
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Perhaps I am wrong, and the paradox is the correct response, and we don't have the evidence yet. One might hope that if the paradox is correct and god exists, he might be a little more understanding than simply throwing tons of people into hell because they didn't make the right conclusion or believe in him the right way. But hey, maybe he is the calvinistic god, and he wants most of us to be tortured forever for his glory. Gotta make a contrast or good loses its' meaning, right?<br />
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I think, perhaps, we just need to redefine words like sacred and spiritual, and even the word god, to better understand what we are discovering, and perhaps there is no such thing as too much awareness of when we're being sold something, manipulated into something, or scared into something for the sake of keeping people in power or luxury. There is no doubt, however, that science and religion cannot coexist well because they exist in two different universes, and have two entirely different approaches, even if someone can be a christian or believe in some other religious mythology and also accept evolution in the cognitive dissonance that that requires.<br />
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There is a very good reason for our cognitive dissonance regarding science and religion, and I think we should, at the very least, pay attention to it and make our own conclusions and be willing to change our minds and be convinced otherwise.<br />
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9121315693857452862.post-67358328672382453682014-02-28T07:05:00.003-05:002014-02-28T07:05:35.907-05:00SilenceIt is a very easy, a very simple thing to have an opinion, in my experience. It is even easier to take offense to other peoples' opinions, to the point that it happens every day. We call them different things, syllogisms, facts, statistics, absolute truth. However, when we get down to what's really happening, we are relying on our senses to tell us how the world is, and we are relying on our feelings and our ability to think logically and perceive adequately to tell us correctly about reality.<br />
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Sometimes, we are confronted with facts that contradict what we think are the facts. We can then choose how we want to respond. Elementary, but necessary to point out, when the natural reaction may seem to be the only choice, whether it be oppositional defiance, discerning debate, passive acceptance, or any number of other things.<br />
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Regardless, we end up in dissonance, and that's a beautiful thing. It should not be sacrificed to maintain some level of peace or discretion or to, above all things (apparently), avoid bothering others. They may not act offended, they may simply approach you with smug self-assuredness coming from any number of factors, or they may simply dismiss you using clever words, so that any response ends up sounding trite or desperate. Ostracization, attacks on credibility, ad hominem, the infamous gish gallop, condescension, and any number of other things are extremely effective at getting a mob on your side.<br />
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It's extremely fashionable to be intelligently revolutionary, and I think in our many words we have forgotten the value of silence. I have felt it quite often when I would express what I think or feel about a topic, and receive no feedback whatsoever. It was so nonexistent, in fact, that I was left to speculate why this was even the case. Silence, in this case, said more than any number of words could have. Sometimes, you let it speak for you, whether you intend for it to or not. Sometimes, you don't know what to say, or you don't want to say something so that you don't hurt another person, so you hold your tongue, and that very act says everything about how you feel and what you think, especially if it contrasts with what you do say. The contrast says it all, makes what you don't say deafeningly, violently loud.<br /><br />I took a long break from writing here, and was bothered by my own silence. I had become used to making a post when I felt strongly about a topic, and when I found myself in need of a break, it drove me crazy for a time. Then, at a certain point, something in me broke, and I found that the silence was therapeutic, even with that desire to write and be heard there, now free of the pretentious wants that I ended up with. Because sometimes, in our many words, in our cursory examination of philosophies and logic and science and religion and politics and art and our ability to express ourselves to anyone and everyone, we forget that we also have the ability to hold our tongue, the ability to let the facts speak for themselves, the ability to not start the adversarial process so familiar to human nature by putting forward our opinion and demanding that people agree or be mocked, to the point where it becomes trite and meaningless to discuss anything at all.<br />
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Sometimes, the best dissonance comes from holding out tongue, observing, gaining understanding, and not attempting to exert our power over others. The power is in the silence, the dissonance happens without our attempt to explain it all, fix it all, revolutionize it all.<br />
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I do wonder, however, if the destiny of humanity is to end up with everything having been said, so we all stand around a road traveled so many times in silence, with nothing else to do, nothing else to say. However, that day is certainly not today, and we may yet end our own existence or end up discovering boundless new knowledge and gaining new abilities we cannot yet dream of. After all, in the grand scheme of things, are we even the most interesting life in the universe? I have no idea, but it does make me wonder why we get so upset over the smallest things, like who tweeted what about who, or whether this celebrity is being rude, or whatever other random things happen to get us all fired up, as if we enjoy being offended, like being angry, get off on being united against the evil of the moment, to feel as if we have some contrived spiritual purpose. If we'd slow down, stop multitasking 5 things at once constantly, exist and enjoy the one life we get a little, and be excellent at what we do, we could be so much more.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9121315693857452862.post-38407377591009486312014-02-18T19:32:00.000-05:002014-02-18T19:32:16.067-05:00Entrenched Dogma vs the Philosophy of Science, ThoughtsIt's been a while friends. Can't promise that I'll consistently post here again just yet, but let's see what happens.<br />
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I've been giving a lot of thought to the recent debate between Bill Nye and Ken Ham, and have seen a pretty common question pop up. To put it succinctly, people have been wondering if the debate was even worth the time. I have a few thoughts I want to share.<br />
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For those of you that don't know what I'm talking about, you can check it out <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z6kgvhG3AkI">here</a> if you want to. The debate was between a young earth/6 day creationist view of the origins of life and the scientific theory of evolution by natural selection, with Ham and Nye respectively representing their viewpoints in opposition to each other.<br />
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I was pleasantly surprised by a few things in this debate. Firstly, and most importantly, I cannot emphasize enough how right on Bill Nye was about how a lot of people, many of them religious, disagree with Ham's view of origins. Almost everyone I know disagrees, and a lot of them are deeply religious.<br />
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Ken Ham's Creation Museum and his arguments present a very interestingly disturbing view of the world. To break it down as succinctly as I can, he draws a distinction between observational science and historical science, and says that we cannot make any conclusions in historical science, because it is in the past. This point struck me as quite interesting and difficult to square with his very definite view of what happened in the past. On Mr Ham's view, we are meant to take his word for what happened in the past from the authority of a religious text and his literal method of interpreting it, because science cannot tell us anything accurately about the past. An interesting side-debate here might've been how he defines the past, since I presume science could tell us things about the recent past, otherwise crime scene investigation and things of that nature would be a complete dead-end. Regardless, Mr Ham backed up this criticism by drawing on numerous examples of how scientific conclusion aren't "quite right," criticizing everything from dating methods to the scientific method itself, whenever it treads on what Mr Ham calls "historical science." His view, of course, hinges on a view of the Bible as an inerrant and scientifically/historically accurate record of the past preserved by God, and his point was that any other source for the historic past is futile and incorrect.<br />
<br />We can debate the specifics of religious belief and authoritarian claims from religious texts until we're blue in the face. What really interested me is that Bill Nye did no such thing, he merely pointed out where Mr Ham was coming from repeatedly, and how those with similar religious beliefs to his do not agree, nor do they draw the same distinctions he does between "historical" and "observational" science, in contrast to the examples that Mr Ham started his presentation with. Mr Nye spent the rest of the time educating, which is one of my favorite things anyone can do in a debate setting where it's so easy to get caught up in points and counterpoints that the topic becomes obscured. Mr Nye explained multiple topics, especially the details of radiometric dating, in broad strokes and why they lead to the conclusions they do.<br />
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So on one side we have a person who references several people that agree with him and who brings forward criticisms of scientific concepts that are a threat to a view that he admits is an entrenched one, based in an authoritarian view of the universe (I believe God has said this, hence we must be wrong if we say differently), and on the other side we have someone who is educating, bringing forward data, pointing out the ways in which things do not add up and the ways in which other things do, and is honest about what they are disturbed by in the opposing view and what would change their mind (evidence). In addition, the invitation to Mr Ham to write a scientific paper disproving evolution by natural selection is extremely consistent with the scientific method, and I think made it obvious exactly what type of thought process difference we were seeing here.<br />
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I must answer the question of whether this debate was worth the time with a definite yes. Normally I dislike debates, but this one was a very interesting clash, and demonstrated the profound differences in thought processes between the two debaters, and perhaps the differences in schools of thought that they represent. I do not believe this was a debate between religion and science per se, especially since I know a lot of religious people who disagree with Mr Ham's view, I believe it was a debate between entrenched dogmatism and the philosophy of science. This is important, because it is very easy to criticize, very easy to bring forward one's dogma and make strong arguments, but it is far more difficult and worthwhile to take a step back from one's dearly held views and allow them to be destroyed or changed if there is evidence that can do that. The deeply religious can do this as well as anyone else, though it may end up changing them in unexpected ways that I could not begin to imagine.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9121315693857452862.post-73108102587034196702013-11-02T02:18:00.002-04:002013-11-02T02:19:17.395-04:00One thousand pages of erased text.<div>
There are times in life when one has to step back into the shadows, for everyone's sake.</div>
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When I write, I open up a gaping wound in me. I don't even know where it came from, when it started, or what made it get to this level. I just know that for most of my life I have been fighting, criticizing, thinking, and butting heads with people, an action I cannot currently sustain. Every action costs something, and the cost for writing on this blog, a blog specifically made for cognitive dissonance, is too high for me right now. I am exhausted on every level possible, and something has to give.<br />
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I cannot write honestly on this blog anymore, something I swore to myself I would do when I started it. If you've read faithfully, you've seen me journey from faith into faithlessness, from Christian to atheist and, I suspect, into something else entirely. I cannot even claim atheist anymore, as it implies way too much about me that is not true. I respect my Christian friends and family, I am bad at being part of tribal groups such as the popular atheist movement, and I sometimes suspect that there is a god, when I feel like it and when I can successfully dismiss the horribleness that's happened to me from my memory for a time. I am this complex, insane, contradictory, irrational individual, and I've been able to bring about dissonance because of that. However, labels are no longer sufficient for any of that, and I think that means I'm healing. It also means that I cannot be bothered to defend anything constructive or even have a theme for writing (formerly Christianity), and that is suicide for an endeavor like this. Christianity cannot be my theme anymore because it is, for me, writing about a period of abuse. At some point, you have to stop. You have to let your decisions stand alone, you have to criticize yourself privately and with people you trust, and you have to heal in order to be objective again. Even though I stand by what I have to say about making my decisions for objective reasons, that is meaningless in the grand scheme of things, and especially in writing on this level. There comes a point in life when you must make peace with the fact that you are screaming into a void, with trenches on either side filled with people with weapons pointed at each other.<br />
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I do not believe in myself anymore, I do not have the conviction that anyone should take what I have to say seriously, and I'm honestly sick of everyone pointing weapons at me. Until I can heal, it is time that I journey by myself for a while. I don't know what my next move is as a writer, but you can be assured that I am incapable of giving it up. If you enjoy reading what I have to say, watch for another update from me here at some point. Until then, from an absolute no one to all of you who have journeyed with me,<br />
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-Daniel</div>
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9121315693857452862.post-76208915704139448772013-10-01T06:26:00.003-04:002013-10-01T06:26:37.817-04:00Fury, in RetrospectSometimes one feels something so powerfully that they simply cannot even communicate it properly. The extremely fortunate among us will feel love in this way, or perhaps the extremely patient. Regardless of what the state of being is, love, anger, happiness, contentedness and so forth, when one really feels it it takes over their entire being, they become elemental and powerful in it and it's on display for all to see.<br />
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The religious propaganda that is often heard associated with this is that one should be a christian like they are a football fan. I've never related to this analogy very well, as I have apathy at best toward football and most sports in general, but I do understand. Someone who is genuinely passionate about something does not need to convince others of it, they radiate it and can't help but talk about it when the opportunity presents itself, because they want to share it.<br />
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I'm not completely certain if I was ever this type of christian, but I suspect so. I searched the philosophy, I found the truth in it, those things I still hold dear, though not exclusively christian components, such as the golden rule, generosity, passion, justice, and love. When someone's religion or philosophy or passion becomes so elemental, you can just tell. A friend once told the administration of my college, who weren't sure I was a christian at all due to questioning scripture's absolute inerrancy and primary source of truth, that I was what all christians should aspire to be. I never saw myself that way, but I do believe this means I had a true faith, one that was part of me. I never evangelized anyone, except for one regretful incident on my high school missions trip that I will never feel good about, I just believed, and I was what that belief made me.<br />
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I have problems even stating what I want to do with my life now because my career goals were defined solely in christian terms before about a year ago. I am fortunate I didn't go into ministry and establish myself before losing my religion, as the stories I've read of losing the core of one's being and the inspiration for one's career, and having to maintain appearances to support a family are horrifyingly close to home. The organizations I've found that support ex-pastors and ex-ministry leaders are some of the most beautiful organizations I've seen. The apostate need support, more than just monetarily, but not having to worry as much about taking care of their families when they're consumed by such a crisis is beautiful.<br />
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I grew up being taught to question the world, being taught apologetics and critical thought regarding all things secular, especially atheism. However, I was a defective student. I began to turn those questions on the beliefs I was told never to question, much to the horror of the teachers. Where had I gone wrong? I was going to lose my faith! I denied this, because my faith was ultimately important to me, and I absolutely believed it to be true. What is the harm in seeking the truth, I asked, if we really do believe the truth? How am I going to be mislead by the very skills I've learned? If christianity is true, it has nothing to worry about. If it is not true, then I will leave, regardless of the personal cost. This is not just an intellectual statement for me, it is a way of living. I was taught that Jesus IS the truth, and so to seek truth is to seek Jesus. All truth is god's truth.<br />
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In retrospect, I understand why the conservatives that looked at me with so much skepticism and even condemnation felt how they did. When you go out into "the world," your faith is challenged. When you leave "the bubble," you begin to have to deal with things you were never taught to deal with before. I was prepared for this, or so I thought.<br />
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You see, when I detached myself from my faith and truly used my critical thinking skills to look at it, I realized that the evidence is insufficient, and faith is absolutely required. You must assert on bad evidence, because that's the only type of evidence you are going to get. "Hold onto those experiences with god, hold onto this book and how you've been taught to interpret it, or you will lose your faith!" I saw that as propaganda, and I still see it as propaganda that is successfully taught to people. I feel fortunate that a friend threw my beliefs into chaos 10 years ago, as it was that process that really made me test what I'd grown up being taught.<br />
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When I lost my faith, when I truly stopped believing, I was consumed with anger. I was dating a very angry individual at the time as well, but she's not the reason I was as angry as I was, and claiming atheism did not make me angry. You see, I was taught growing up that evolution, at best, was to be treated with extreme skepticism. I was taught that science is the most horribly limited tool ever, because our minds are depraved and broken. I was taught not to trust myself, and the typical social drama of my youth reinforced that when I got a huge culture shock in high school and decided hating myself was the best course of action, because pretty much everyone in my social group, with a few exceptions, thought that I was an idiot, and not worth their time. Women asked me out as a joke, so I must have the horrible sexual motives I was taught growing up, and I should punish myself for ever thinking anyone is attractive. I was taught that the Bible is a defensible book if any book is, when that is not how history works. I was barely taught proper history by a group of people so consumed with nationalistic conservative faith that it's a wonder I ever escaped from the view at all. I was taught that, above all, I must seek out god's will for my life, his perfect plan, his perfect mate that would fix me, his perfect calling that would be the work that I would give my life to. I was taught to coast through life, and that god would do everything for me. As long as I was righteous but humble but faithful but joyous but uncompromising but didn't complain but loving but a thousand other things, god could use me, and it was my sole confidence.<br />
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Imagine my surprise when I had a hell of a time of it, when I found that I couldn't just be lazy. You may read this and say "but Christianity doesn't teach this Dan, it teaches us to work hard and seek god!" What does that mean? How does one seek god? Read their bible? Pray? Do evangelism or missions work, convert others to the same views? How does that have anything to do with a faith that is real, that flows through you like your own blood? Must one train themselves to truly believe?<br />
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You see, I tried both. I tried the ritual, I tried the conservative christianity, the lack of questioning, the uncompromising stance that is unafraid of criticism. Something in me broke doing that, and it made me immeasurably sad. It doesn't make sense that god would kill so much of the race he created on a regular basis, it doesn't make sense that he would allow guilt to be imputed on all of us for wanting knowledge. It does not make sense that god would be a genocidal (but justified by racial purity. clearly.) maniac in 2/3rd of this book I'm supposed to accept on faith, and then I have to use the other 1/3rd to cherry pick it because jesus. Jesus isn't even original anyway, which is the only reason he resonates so much with people. The Christ figure is iconic, a part of our culture, but that does not make him god.<br />
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I tried to really feel my faith, I tried to love god with my heart, soul, strength and mind. I tried speaking in tongues and prophesying, I clawed for something to really make it mine, and I succeeded. I was the unique and special snowflake that would be a legendary christian thinker, respected as a defender of true christianity, a system of my own reckoning, because I was full of faith and love and righteousness and people agreed with me, dammit!<br />
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I really believed. I had answers for all of these questions, theories about how god was progressing along with humanity, how jesus was the latest iteration of cultural norms so god could reach the most people in the fullness of time, about how the bible was not really a historical record or scientific book, but only relevant in what it teaches us about god, and about how the trinity is like a person's three components, mere aspects that god had more truly because he's so incomprehensibly huge. Anyone that took me seriously back in the day can tell you, I could discuss this stuff for hours, and if they really knew me, they knew I did it because it was so insanely important to me, because it was me, in a very real sense. I was elementally christian.<br />
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In the end, it all turned up empty when I put my ideals to the test. The truth won out when I put it up against the sum total of my faith, the church history, the exploration of all of its' branches, the sum total of my experiences, all of my justifications and philosophy and reasoning and reading and learning, the sum total of all of it. I didn't even leave christianity when it put me through years of systemic emotional abuse, because I believed it was true.<br /><br />There is a phrase I once heard, that I cannot remember the exact phrasing of. It goes something like this:<br /><br />If Christianity is not true, then we are miserable above all others, but if it is true, we are happy above all others.<br />
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One might recognize this as a reframing or inversion of the infamous Pascal's wager, pointing out the consequences of leaving christianity if it is, in fact, true.<br />
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It is a miserable thing to devote one's life to something and then, upon investigating and truly searching, find that you have devoted so much time, so much emotional and mental energy, to absolutely nothing. It is infuriating to think of the possibilities your life may have taken on had you not simply been taught to accept something that placed drastic limitations on your potential by teaching you to look down on science and history and scholarship and philosophy. It is infuriating to realize that you really were in the process of losing your faith by embracing those ideals you truly felt in embracing your faith, to realize you were self defeating your own faith for years, and didn't even realize it. It is ultimately frustrating to have to start over just because you will not make an ultimate decision purely based on consequences or what you want to be true or fear.<br />
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Every emotion is immediately converted into an icy, ultimate rage. You live in the frigid torrents of emotion hammered into a singular purpose, your lifeblood solidified in your veins, and you make sure everyone feels your rage just to prove you exist. Your former hope turns to poison in your soul, and you spit it all over everything. You throw around facts and figures and anger and satisfying quotes or images, and you are ready to defend any of it.<br />
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Well, what do you think happens? People give you a wide berth, because they don't want to be touched by the toxic bile you're spewing everywhere. You feel ignored, and that makes you even more angry!<br />
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Or maybe that's just me.<br />
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In retrospect, this type of rage, this brutally powerful anger, is only another method of harming oneself, and all too natural for someone who grew up to hate one's most fundamental urges as a human being, such as curiosity, sexuality, and compassion for its' own sake. It is useless to continue being a vessel of such rage, as it will destroy your health and any chance you have for happiness. It's okay to be angry when someone aggravates you by asserting that this puritanical and toxic morality must be propagated to even more people to stunt their growth and create more converts, but let it go before it chokes your soul and distances you from everyone, before you become a paranoid and delusional individual, and you see demons where none are there. You will end up being the image of what you cannot stand, because you're still tied to it by your own angry soul.<br />
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Becoming elementally enraged is ultimately an exercise in fighting oneself. When you run out of enemies to fight, you start beating on yourself, or looking for more outlets to keep it going, so you don't have to face the difficult and messy business of dealing with life.<br />
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I don't regret my fury, it was a necessary part of my life for a time. After a season of fury, however, must come acceptance, harmony, and progress, for the sake of one's health and happiness. If you feel like I do, know that you do not have to be remain damaged. You can heal, because you're spectacular, and asking for help does not make you weak. Move forward, accept the losses, even if they still feel unacceptable, and you will be able to become singular and powerful in who you are.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com35tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9121315693857452862.post-56272999793737515342013-09-29T10:09:00.000-04:002013-09-29T10:19:37.467-04:00Faithless, ReduxI'd like to explore some things differently than I usually do. Someone once told me that I am very good at "taking the head with the heart," a tendency I've always valued, and I think one I have gotten away from of late. The reasons for that are varied and are unimportant at the moment, but I may get to them at some point.<br />
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For some time, I've been wondering what step is next for me. I've gone through many labels in my life, and regular readers or people that have known me through some of them will know that very well. I change my mind frequently, depending on data and depending on another factor. That factor is what I want to talk about today.<br />
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Firstly, a disclaimer. I speak of labels a lot, using ones like theist, atheist, christian, calvinist, agnostic, etc. I do this only for the sake of clarity, and only so I can avoid explaining in 4-5 sentences what one word will suffice for. I will define something further if I feel there is a need to beyond what would normally be implied by the word, as some labels are not at all clear. Moving on.<br />
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I am 28 years old. To some, that means that I am very young, that I haven't even begun to really live or really come to good views about life. To some, that means I've been through some things that they have not yet, and that I might have a little wisdom. Both are wrong. My wisdom has always turned out to be pretty empty in the grand scheme of things, and I pretty much am never going to stop changing my views, until I just run out of steam. Regardless, I've found a lot of adversity in life so far because of my tendency to ask questions and to never shy away from showing my innocence or experience with things. Some might call that transparency, but those that really know me know that I'm very much not a transparent person about most of who I really am. It's an odd way to live, I admit.<br />
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What seems like a long time ago, I was a fundamentalist christian. What this means is that I grew up being taught the "Essentials" of the christian faith, and how not to associate with those who were labeled as "liberals." I moved from that into a strict calvinism, which is kind of an extension of determinism. Basically, the only thing with true freedom in a strict calvinism is god, and humans are puppets. So if a baby dies and goes to hell, then that's according to god's good pleasure. I poured myself into everything I could find, everything that seemed true according to my data set, and eventually, when my knowledge expanded to begin to ask questions about the book I grew up being taught to revere and idolize, I was eclipsed by vast cognitive dissonance. The type of people that used to be my allies became my enemies, a skill I had been developing and am still very good at, unfortunately. From there, I moved into liberal christianity, and eventually out of religion altogether.<br />
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Regular readers can breathe a sigh of relief at this point. Don't worry, I am not redescribing ad nauseum my deconversion or the scientific and historical reasons for it. I don't mind doing so again, but I don't think a lot of people I've spoken with care.<br />
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Let me clarify. When I speak to a lot of people that have known me a while about god, they have a dissonance of their own to deal with. They must deal with the fact that I poured myself entirely into christianity, and that it is no longer relevant to my life. They're not thinking about the history of the church, the scientific reasoning for leaving a theistic worldview, or even logical inconsistencies that one must get around to affirm something like the inspiration of the Bible. I know this because I've been there. A few years ago, I would've been the same.<br />
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This brings me, finally, to the other factor with which I make decisions like this, one that has bugged me for a long time. I can only describe it as an intuitive grasp of the psychology behind a philosophy. To clarify that needlessly confusing description, I invite you to try out a thought experiment.<br />
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A man believes in god, and sees god in the order of the universe. He investigates scientific theory through his bias and sees god in fine-tuning things so we can live, so we can exist, and so we can bear his image to others. He sees god as the ultimate control, the mechanism for the universe working how it does, and the ultimate determining factor of the eternal fate of all things. If this god wants to create a hell for those who do not know him from the obvious fingerprints of him in the universe, then it is his creations' fault for not acknowledging it, even if he made them thusly destined for destruction. As the ultimate cause and control, god's ways are higher than our ways, and he never had to make us at all. We should glory in whatever he brings our way, for it's all for him.<br />
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Another man is revolted and disgusted by this image of god. He also has faith in god, even claims the same religion as the other man, but he sees god in our ultimate freedom. He also believes that man is the special image-bearer of god, but he sees the universe as constantly changing, humanity adapting by the power given by god, and the ultimate love pouring through the universe from his power and his grace. This man does not see god as the one ultimately in control, even though he must believe he has the power to do so, but as someone who gives up his power to give his creations the free will. Man must freely choose god, or love is meaningless. We are, therefore, ultimately free, beautiful, special, and so forth, necessarily distinguished from other forms of life on our planet. Except for cats, because we were made to serve them. Clearly.<br />
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What of these two men then? Do they worship the same god? Are they even of the same religion? Some say yes, some says absolutely not, and some say it's irrelevant.<br />
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The first man's god is one of security and control, necessarily so. Perhaps if god exists, this is an "aspect" of god, just like the second man's perception of a loving and freely gracious god is an "aspect" in an eternal "paradox."<br />
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The thing is, paradox is unnecessary. For both of these men are not telling you about god when they describe him, they are telling you who they are. Perhaps they debate each other one day, proof-texting like crazy, citing church tradition or instances in their personal life or verse after verse or grudgingly agree to disagree or come to blows and burn with anger. What's really happening here? Are they debating something academic? Not at all, they are debating philosophies born out of who they are. They are literally gods clashing, at odds with each other.<br />
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This is the other factor that I use to decide what I believe is true. You see, my "god" is one of allegiance to the truth, regardless of what that is. Throughout my life, I've allowed social ostracization, ridicule, massive consequences, and ultimately my current state of loneliness because of this alone. I don't give a damn what this group or that group says or how long they've been saying it, I care if they can show me, factually, that what they say has evidence and is defensible. Sure, humans are subjective creatures, prone to whimsy and folly and shenanigans and emotional displays of ridiculousness, but we have the potential to cut through that, to suspend our views at any time for the sake of considering the evidence. This is all I ask of myself, and when I say I've paid a price for it, I am not understating what has come about because of it. But that's irrelevant, because I recognize this tendency in myself for what it is. It's who I am intellectually, it's integrity, and I value it above almost anything.<br />
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I can relate to the martyrs of my former faith for not sacrificing what one truly believes, one's truest self, just to satisfy the sickening whims of those in power. No doubt, many have been persecuted when a discussion might have done better. It is not my job to blame persecution on christians, muslims, atheists, or whatever other label. This is a misuse of labels to me, because it brings about needless drama instead of clarification. It doesn't matter what I am, what matters is whether I'm still thinking, challenging myself, and pestering other people to be better.<br />
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I would not, for a second, trade this tendency for anything. Perhaps that makes it my "faith," though I really have no idea what to call it, and it is certainly not something I believe in or think is important for no reason. "Faith" is a bad word for it, but it may suffice to convey my point. It's not christianity, it's not atheism, it's not agnosticism or nihilism or anything else I've ever heard of, except, perhaps, for critical thinking. I don't really care what the truth is, as long as I can keep looking for it. Give me more data, more information, more experiences. Challenge my perceptions, and don't for a second think I have so much ego that I won't throw it all aside if you're making a good argument.<br />
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A good argument is free of personal attacks, free of needless verbosity in the name of "holistic thinking," and free of summarizations that throw aside nuance and detail. A good argument is not reactionary, it is not based in tradition or appeals to authority, and it is not petty. A good argument is based in good information, consistent interpretation that can be done by anyone, and is falsifiable. It does not appeal to risk or consequence, and it does not needlessly assume things. It is baseline, and deductive from there. A good argument shows the integrity of the person making it, and their ability to adapt to new information, regardless of their disdain for the opposition.<br />
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This is my meaning, and I'm proud of it. Those who hold their meaning in equal pride and can be respectful and honorable doing it have my respect as well. Questioning of motives does not become anyone, and that is the main reason I wanted to write this. Not to puff myself up or talk about how awesome I am (okay, maybe a little bit), but to clarify the most pervasive misunderstanding I've seen to date of those who try to talk to me. It is frustrating, because I come off so wrong so often, and I can't stand it. People think I'm apathetic when they present me with petty and trivial reactionary nonsense instead of what they really think. People think I'm arrogant when I deconstruct and disagree with their most deeply held views, and they get infuriated when they can't do the same to me, because my views are self deconstructing by their very nature. Most of all, I think people mistake my approach to things for coldness or lack of caring, when nothing could be further from the truth.<br />
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I am bad at small talk, have suffered from social anxiety all of my life, and I often do not know what to say, so I either say stupid things, ask about things that apparently everyone is supposed to know about, or just say nothing and appear to think I'm better than everyone. I'm nothing special, but I think my unique blend of growing up how I did, psychological tendencies, and philosophical orientations have lead me to this point, and I'm pretty happy it did. I love discussion, but I sadly have almost no positive views to throw out into discussion, because I tear them all apart the instant I have them. Perhaps this is what it means to be truly faithless.<br />
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I'm sure I'll have more on this later on, but that's enough for now.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9121315693857452862.post-83728620467958138972013-09-10T18:11:00.000-04:002013-09-10T18:11:09.484-04:00Making TroubleI feel that I am caught between two worlds, and most of all, that it shouldn't be that way.<br />
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I really miss my life of being a theist/christian. I had so much more confidence, I could explain so many more things, and the people I became friends with over the past several years knew me. Now that I'm a nonbeliever, I don't have those luxuries anymore. I have become a student of reality all over again, relearning a lot of things I thought I knew. A lot of my old friends no longer speak to me, and I have to believe that it's simply because they're uncomfortable. Some people still talk to me like it's normal all the time, and retain the ability to have normal conversations about disagreements, and if I've made one thing consistently clear, it's that disagreement does not bother me in the least. I don't mind being told I'm wrong, and I don't mind debating issues if people want to. I change my views if it is warranted by evidence and good arguments, and I think that bothers some people.<br />
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I must conclude that some people don't want to discuss issues. Maybe they're scared, maybe they're confused, maybe they're trying to justify themselves, maybe they just don't care. Either way, it really sucks that to some people, I am apparently a set of beliefs instead of a person, and they cannot get past their disagreements enough to still speak to me. It's unfortunate that this sometimes comes out in rather petty ways, and it's sad that people can't take 10 minutes out of their day to thoughtfully speak to me when they think I'm incorrect or out of line. It's sad that a lot of people disregard my continued idealism as anger.<br />
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Then again, it's nothing new. I'm just on the wrong side of the fence now.<br />
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I totally get why some atheists act religious about atheism. Humans are social, and they need social groups. Tribal groups provide that, and they provide a cause, a way of uniting against a common enemy. It seems like a lot of people choose this, and my understanding is because that's how people evolved to act. That doesn't upset me, though it used to. It certainly doesn't make sense to act this way about being an atheist, of all things, but it's apparently the majority. If there's one thing that's always been true about me, it's that the majority is the first thing I question, and if they don't measure up to ideal definitions, then we have a disagreement. Some people simplify that with the term "making trouble."<br />
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I have to accept this part of me, because it's not going away. Though it has made a lot of people go away, that is their decision, not mine. I can't be upset about it anymore, because it's killing me. I'd rather be happy about the people that still want to talk to me and hang out with me and discuss issues and disagree if necessary without it being the end of the world, because that's much more enjoyable.<br />
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I think there's an unfortunate tendency for people to need a tribal group lead by authority figures, and I think that the sooner people can overcome this, the sooner we can have peace. Wars don't surprise me, yet another group of people that trod on the rights of others doesn't surprise me, political manipulation and religious abuse don't surprise me. What surprises and amazes me is when people rise above all of it and care about what's true and choose to act in a way that is transparent and beneficial. Those are the people I enjoy and admire, and there should be more of them. What's funny is, these people are also troublemakers. The people with agendas and axes to grind can't stand them, because they change their mind when it should be changed, they question things when they should be questioned, and they don't swear blood allegiance to a group of any kind.<br /><br />I aspire to make as much trouble as these people. I wish to be dispassionate and at once enthusiastic in pursuing truth, and I wish to never settle for what a majority of people tell me to just "have faith" or "come to conclusions" about. Making trouble is a good goal, I think.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9121315693857452862.post-38715386147566733782013-08-14T07:10:00.003-04:002013-08-14T15:01:39.998-04:00The Death of the PhilosopherA little dramatic, right?<br />
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Disclaimer: What follows is personal, probably overly so. You have been warned. Run away if you don't care to read about my personal life, I won't be offended. Also, I'm aware that I tend to bitch and moan at times, and I've taken an active effort to keep that out of this post. Some things, however, have to come out, and I feel that this should be somewhere where people can see it.<br />
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I've changed a lot lately. I don't know that I can point to a single event that has caused this, and I really wish I could. However, anytime I try to tag it onto anything that's happened to me, such as my time in Ohio or at college or certain events with regard to career, personal life, family, friends, or anything else, I come up short for explanation. The truth is, I think this is just me, and there's no stopping it.<br />
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The first thing one must understand about me as a person is that my arch-enemy shares my body with me. No, I don't have a split personality, I just abuse myself constantly. Psychologically, emotionally, socially, health-wise, and anything that is not overt self-harm. What's really strange is that I didn't realize this for a very long time, and when I did, I became extremely interested in why I would do things like this to myself.<br />
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I developed severe social anxiety when I was much younger. As a result, though I tend to be eloquent with the written word, I am pretty much a blundering mess in any social setting where I'm not completely at ease, and my facial expressions often become weird and my body language exaggerated when I feel I have excess nervous energy to burn off. It offends me, unnecessarily so, when this is pointed out, simply because I can't help it. I'm not good at laughing at myself when I'm under pressure. I have tried to adopt the mentality of not speaking to remove all doubt that I'm a complete idiot as a policy, but I just can't seem to do it. Because try as I might, when I have something to say, I just have to say it. It's important to me.<br />
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If you were paying attention, I just did it again. I called myself an idiot. I'm not gonna keep count of this, but I just caught that reading over this, and I'm not correcting it.<br />
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What can cause a person to hate themselves so much, and why persist in such behavior when that person is rational and understands exactly what they're doing? What is the point? Why not be normal and roll with the punches, make mistakes, get yelled at, and move on without turning every slight error into an internal cycle of self-hatred? Even though I'm the one doing this to myself, it's taken me a very long time to even process sufficiently to figure it out.<br />
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I didn't realize the full extent of what I was doing to myself until around the same time I left my religion. Now this is not an anti-religious tirade. I truly don't care how one rationalizes their religion, or what someone thinks the essence of it is. That is personal. However, this also means that my religion is personal to me. My religion, the one I learned growing up, was overt and extremely damaging self-hatred, wrapped in religious dogma. It would be very easy to point to authoritarian figures teaching fundamentalist faith, and it would be very easy to talk about religious extremism and try to make connections to more moderate religion here, but I don't care about that right now. You see, for me, there were some extremely influential things that happened to me, resulting in repressed memories. I wish I was making that up.<br />
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Firstly, I experienced bullying and being the bully, in reverse order. Quite simply, when I was very young, I was an ass to everyone around me and very popular. This then reversed as I grew up, and I became what seemed like universally ostracized. One might call that justice, and one might be correct to do so. However, because of how this happened, I became acutely aware of what it is like to be disregarded, what it is like to be alone and hated for no apparent reason. The ultimate expression of this happened in high school, when going to school was like stepping into a portal to hell. Socially, I was the weird kid that was constantly criticized while minding my own business, I was the guy that didn't know all of the popular things, and for the most part, people enjoyed ridiculing me about it instead of telling me what I was missing. I learned to stop asking. I learned to mind my own business, aware of the fact that I suck and will be alone, and standing up for myself results in people just walking off and leaving me alone with my thoughts. There were no fistfights, only silence and quiet rejection. The Christian classmates I had at my Christian school, who were all recognized for knowing their Bible, knowing the right answers, and being great, didn't care about me because I was a little different, and any explanation I had to give fell on deaf ears. I learned my lesson well, and it's taken a very long time to unlearn it as much as I have so I can have friends. I was poisoned with what I thought was the knowledge that no one gave a damn about my existence, outside of my immediate family, and if they did, they were there to criticize me and attack me, kick me until I conformed.<br />
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Secondly, I learned about hell before anything else related to religion. It is literally one of the first things I remember, and remembering it is like remembering pure terror. This touches on religious dogma that I reject, but one must understand this above all: to a seven year old, sitting in a church service where someone is screaming about the decay and depravity of humanity, screaming about how we all deserve hell (complete with vivid description) and we'll get it if we die tonight, unless we accept the Lord Jesus Christ as our personal savior, does something very dark. I would go so far as to call it psychological abuse. I never received it from my family, but I did receive it from the church. So what did I do? I prayed for salvation, and I didn't stop. I laid in bed so many nights being terrified of going to hell, being scared that I didn't really mean it, that I wasn't repentant for how terrible I was enough, that I hadn't criticized and destroyed myself enough in the sight of the the Lord to be good enough. I really don't give a damn about grace-based dogma vs performance doctrine, which is the standard response to this. I do not care because I wasn't thinking about that, I was thinking about who I was being told I really am. I was thinking about whether I'd actually repented, because I had been told my heart is deceitful, evil, horrible, two faced, you name it. I believed the core of my being was dark and horrible, and I got saved publicly at least 3 times before the age of 18, and probably hundreds of times in private, with just me and God.<br />
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Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, I discovered that I was being lied to about a book you probably all know called the Bible. This hit me hard because the one thing that kept me sane in high school was getting into Apologetics. If you know standard Christian defenses of the faith, you know they center around classical philosophical arguments for the existence of god and hinge on the Bible being true, inspired, and inerrant. Along with this, I began to believe the things I was being told about being unique, about being a superhero that can save Christianity. I then discovered criticisms about the Bible for the first time, and when I lost my belief in inerrancy, my religious nature was given a killing blow. Then I went to college, was written about as "sub-Christian" in the school paper for debating the inerrancy of the new testament autographs (and winning, by the way). Given what you've already read here, you'll understand when I say I was not surprised when I read those articles, but I was disappointed. That's alright though, I thought! I will be a superhero, I will save Christianity and redeem it from this dead religious dogma and worship of a broken book into true Christianity, true communion with God! All one needs is one's intuition. Of course, as a lot of you can probably guess, this met with serious, serious opposition. Being excluded and alone was nothing new for me, but I wasn't totally excluded. I had good friends at school. It was a golden age for me, and I can't write about it enough to do it justice. Then, well, we all graduated and drifted apart, they to their lives, and me to well...whatever I'm doing. I keep in contact with some of them still, and that's pretty cool. What you have to understand, though, is that the entirety of the controversy around inerrancy was a pivotal period for me, where the apologetics I'd learned imploded and I began clawing for something, anything to save my faith, which I didn't know had been struck with a killing blow. Liberalism, Emergent Christianity, Eastern Orthodoxy, whatever it took, I was going to find that one piece of the church that had anything to do with truth. I was going to prove that I was not "sub-Christian," but the more I met people that had already heard about me, the more I realized that these people were mostly the same as the ones I knew in high school. The more I studied the authorities, the more I realized that "authority" is a word that should barely ever be used, because most of the time it means the person that is the best in a group at fooling everyone into believing we have a clue what's going on.<br />
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I could write an entire paragraph about my experiences dating here, but I can't do that in good conscience. Let's just say if there is a fourth influence, that is it. I do have one thing to say about it that does not apply to anyone in particular: Somehow, I gained a belief that someone was going to fix me, make all of this rejection and despair worth it, be my strong other half to hold me up and point me the right way. This belief was so strong and so poisonous to me that I've not only just figured out I have had it, but how very very wrong it is. You see, no one can do that for you. You have to, and you're the only one that can heal those emotional scars, you're the only one that can bring about fulfillment and wholeness in your life. I, of course, learned the hard way.<br />
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It doesn't take a genius to figure out that at this point, I have brought rejection and despair with me, I had been causing it with my own actions, and the seeds of this tendency were in my past. My religious intuitions began to vary wildly, and when I came into contact with others like me with totally different views, I retreated into the only practice I've felt good about myself for: critical thinking. I began to analyze every bit of data I could find about religion, about the church, about science, about philosophy, about anything claiming knowledge of ultimate reality, or just reality in general. I'm nowhere near complete on this, because there is so much data. However, two things have become obvious to me from this investigation:<br />
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1. Though religions spring out of personal enlightenment, not a single one contains the ultimate truth. I'm inclined to say that there is not one, and that if there is an ultimate truth, a god of sorts, it is extremely well hidden behind layers of our reality, and none of us have the faintest clue about the true nature of reality.<br />
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2. People have an inexhaustible propensity for egocentrism, and to prove they exist, to make their world exist to others, they must compete and be the best at something. Whether it is enlightenment, religious expertise, being spiritual, being mediocre, being revolutionary or intuitive or intellectual or achieving immortality or being the best at one particular thing or being above it all, people seem to have this propensity for going straight for it. It makes great evolutionary sense, and I think if we want to understand religion, we must understand just how psychological it really is, how much it plays into egocentrism and narcissism and vanity.<br />
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I became an atheist for a while, and now I'm at the point where that word doesn't have a meaning for me anymore. I disagree that atheism is a religion or anything like a religious movement, but the movement itself has already corrupted the correct definition of the word (totally apart from recognized experts, by the way), making conversation about it impossible without a fucking sociology study. I will not fight another one of these damned uphill battles just trying to make a simple statement, and the truth is that labels are just too comfortable to hide behind.<br />
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You see, when I became a non-believer, I let the horrible raging fury in me pour out, and it was nowhere near the anger that I've learned to constantly direct at myself over the years. I was so mad that I'd been lied to, so angry that all of this torment I'd put myself through for so many years was all for nothing, all to bring me to this singular moment of loneliness, this death of my god at the simultaneous realization of his name.<br />
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I've just figured out what the title of this post means. You see, my god was called the Philosopher, and he was that idealized version of me that I wanted to be. I'd even have conversations with him and he'd tell me the nature of the universe. Maybe I do have multiple personality disorder. Intuition leads to understanding indeed.<br />
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The truth is, my fury is unimpressive, unimportant, and small. I am one person, and my opinion means less than nothing. All I managed to do is alienate some of my friends, piss people off, and convince even more people that I'm an angry person. I am not an angry person, I am a defeated person. I was given dreams, given all of these grandiose delusions about being unique and special and beautiful and how all of this stupidity I've had to deal with for years would be worth it, and the truth is that it's all for nothing.<br />
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It's in the faces of the people I see, in the words insisting that others should just be quiet, stop ranting, stop railing, just stop, just be quiet. Go get help, go see a therapist, stop being so angry, come back to Christianity for more abuse, just calm down and be cool. Just be silent. Go to your slaughter silently. Buck up and take it in silence like a man, stop complaining.<br />
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Maybe that's why I'm writing this post. This post is as emphatic of a no as I can muster toward every downcast face, every exhortation to shut my mouth, every trite solution and stupid tautology that people use to try to fix me. I have become spite in the face of an unfair and ridiculous society, and I will not cooperate, nor will I participate in the sickening nauseating mob mentality that we're all supposed to just go along with. As much as I enjoy being a mysterious quirky guy that no one understands, this needs to be said. My opinion does matter, my experiences do matter, and so do everyone else's. They don't matter because of some cosmic plan or because of some beautiful spiritual essence they have, they matter because our race is an emergent product, coming out of the sum of its' parts. If that's spiritual, then I'm spiritual. We can be better, but we need to leave this absurdity behind, we need to stop one-upping each other and seeing who has bigger swords/guns/nuclear missiles/insert phallic references here and figure out the power of thought.<br />
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It really doesn't matter that I dealt with some hard stuff in my life. What really disturbs me is that I am unbelievably and unfairly far from being the worst case scenario, and I am nowhere close to the only one. If you want to know why I criticize everything, that is why. Because it's not fair, and people should not have to deal with a world that kicks them over and then keeps kicking until they submit. They should not be poisoned by hope and fear from a young age, they should be taught to rise above their egocentrism, and they should be taught that the universe is scary and beautiful and wonderful and terrifying and we change it with our very thoughts, so we should make them good ones. Maybe I'll be able to take my own advice one day.<br />
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Here's what I really mean to say: the Philosopher is dead. How can I continue to worship a god that does not exist and is such offensive vanity? Who taught me to deify and to destroy myself? Who taught me to be a sheep, silent to the slaughter, simultaneously a god and the ultimate reject, the one that is being killed and takes it all on willingly?<br />
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Yeah, haunting, isn't it?<br />
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If you care at all, if any of this bugs you at all, then do me a favor. Don't pity me, don't apologize to me, don't feel sorry for me. I don't care, it's done. It's painfully clear to me at this point that arguing does nothing and that being a revolutionary will just create more of these delusions. If you care at all, do one thing: question everything about yourself, and don't let this systematic abuse keep happening. Sure, I'm full of shit. That doesn't mean everything I say is wrong. Take what you know to be true from this and really think. Kick over your preconceptions, realize your limitations, and think. Don't hate yourself, but do violence to your ego just for a little while and really come to conclusions because you believe in them, not because of fear or hope or what you want to be true. That is the best gift you can give me.<br />
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The Philosopher is dead, and his eulogy has been read. Time to move on.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9121315693857452862.post-8121541352883113232013-08-07T03:14:00.005-04:002013-08-07T03:20:31.823-04:00AbsurdityEveryone has a past. Things happen, and before we know it, we're not the same person we have been, and we have no idea when it happened. We are expected to be consistent and unyielding and well spoken at all times, and some people just aren't that way, nor should they be.<br />
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We work all of our lives to get jobs we don't enjoy to make money just to survive, and we forget to do stupid things and make mistakes and be bloody idiots on the quest to figure out how to be happy. We die inside every day as people demand more of us, chip away at us, expect more than we have to give, kill us slowly just so they can feel a little better. We give more than we are able to, more than our emotions can handle, because we're literally fighting for our lives. So we think, anyway. We're really fighting for the lives we're supposed to want, to fulfill expectations to move forward. Make your career path at this company, pick us before you pick our competition, like these things so you are cool at parties, be generic enough so you can find that perfect someone to settle down with, believe this so you can be accepted. Don't think, just hope.<br />
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Hope, like so many things, can be so poisonous when we put it in things absurd.<br />
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Don't get me wrong. There is no grand conspiracy, no powerful entity or group trying to keep us down that we need to rise up and overcome. The only way to get anywhere is to overcome ourselves. We must laugh when we feel like screaming in frustration, because we're expected to do such absurd things to justify ourselves, to sell ourselves for money or acceptance or power. It's comical, the absurdity of it. We are blinded from the fact that we are free. We can do what we want, and that scares the hell out of us.<br />
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As Sartre once said, "Man is condemned to be free."<br />
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We live in a society that is poisoned by sophism, where everyone peddles their own revolution for acceptance, so they can be the beautiful flower with the ultimate brand of wisdom that everyone recognizes. What is the point, then, of critical thinking? If we cannot think correctly, if we ultimately kick our own feet out from under us trying to critique and redefine everything, should we not stop and laugh at the absurdity of what we're doing? Who do we have to prove ourselves to? If not to ourselves, then why are we tripping all over our own feet trying to do it? How many people must we sell our soul to to be happy? How many people must we overcome to finally feel ourselves wise, and how deluded must we be to not see the pure hubris of our efforts?<br />
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How can we make universal claims when we are so small and so stupid? We don't even know ourselves, let alone the universe. Who had the idea that we can trace the ontological path back to the source of all truth? How many revolutionaries must we deify before we figure out that no one's coming to save us or enlighten us or beautify us, the universe is vastly indifferent to our existence, and to think otherwise is the most radical arrogance?<br />
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Our one saving grace is that we're idiots. We are indomitable, ingenious, beautiful, ridiculous, innovative, creative idiots, with unbelievable potential. There is so much to learn, so much to explore, so much to do, and so much to live. We're more than we ever have been in cosmic history because we keep going. Stupid, needless shit happens to us all the time, and we plow through it and move on. We laugh and cry and smile and rage and fuck and explore and fight and live, because we choose to. Why sit around accumulating power and wealth and stature when you can UNDERSTAND things? Why allow your ego to rule you when your inquisitive nature can make you better than you ever have been every single day? Why confine your thinking to categories you're told are acceptable when you can learn from every person you come across? Why accept authority figures on such faith when no one has a clue what's going on?<br />
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Can you not see it's absurd? Live, dammit!Unknownnoreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9121315693857452862.post-25955449590388488022013-07-27T18:13:00.004-04:002013-07-27T18:13:56.733-04:00A PersonWhat is a person?<br />
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Some define themselves by labels, and that's helpful. A male or a female or a transexual. A psychologist, a physicist, a medical doctor, a trashman, a chemist, a helpdesk analyst, a philosopher, or any number of other professions/careers. A Christian, Muslim, Agnostic, Atheist, Jew, Scientologist, Hindu, or any number of other religions. Some identify by the popular Myers-Briggs personality test scale or any number of other psychological diagnoses. Bipolar, Schizophrenic, Depressed, Borderline, Sociopath, etc are also labels that people can be identified by.<br /><br />With the amount of information flying through the air all around us at all times, labels can be very helpful. We can also miss who a person is when using them.<br /><br />Because sometimes when someone tells you they're a Christian, you may think they're angry about the Atheist monument and oppose abortion and are a pro-war Republican, and then when talking to them you realize you're not right at all. Because Christian doesn't mean any of those things, it is simply someone who tries to follow the teachings of Christ, as they understand them. To assume more without implicit or explicit information is unwarranted and can lead to misunderstanding. This is fine if you don't care who the person is and want to talk about a movement, but at some point you have stopped talking about the reality that is the person right in front of you. You have stretched the definition so far that it no longer has a meaning.<br />
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Likewise, if you take a word to only mean its' definition when it first appeared, you will once again not be talking about reality. A philosopher thousands of years ago is nothing like a philosopher today. Aristotle, if he lived today, would have probably fallen under some type of scientific field, because of how fragmented and specialized of a culture we have and how much more we know about the universe (though we see but a pinprick of a tunnel of light for a fraction of a second compared to the vastness of cosmic time). In that sense, we must understand, contextually, what something means in the context of culture, and to avoid pitfall #1, we have to understand that every person and/or mob coming forward with a slightly differing definition cannot have their way, unless we want to give up on discussing anything at all because words have lost their meaning.<br /><br />Most importantly, in discussing all of this, it's very easy to make an obvious mistake. When someone says something like "I'm a muslim" or "I'm an INTP" or "I'm a conservative" or "I'm an atheist," we can jump to a thousand conclusions about what they think and who they are, and we can grind our ax and feel good about ourselves for knowing more than that person or feeling more than that person or struggling more and coming to the truth in a better way, but we still have no idea what we are talking about unless we actually ask someone the right questions. This is the essence of the Straw Man fallacy. We set up a "scarecrow" that looks like the person we think we're talking to, we make it say what we think it should say, then we cut it down with our own knock down arguments, comfortable in our smug superiority. Because we're read a bunch of books, we know factoid after factoid, we've had a single conversation with that person or they've made a single statement that makes us think we know them and what they're about, and so we then assert our dominance, our superiority, and get back to being comfortable and happy, in blissful idiocy.<br /><br />If you want to know why cynicism and disconnection and apathy are so prevalent, this is it right here. We've forgotten how to listen, and have become peddlers of information and definitions. Sophism at its' finest. We've lost our empathy for others, which is very easy to do when you interact with thousands of people over the internet or deal with global crises through the news. At our core, we simply don't care that thousands are starving in some other part of the world, because they're not right in front of us. Sure, we can choose to care and choose to help for whatever reason, and that's great, but our heart is not in it when we first choose to do so, and it would be a lie to say that it is.<br /><br />Our minds have outrun our hearts, and our information has preempted decency. The question is who is us, and who is them? What will it take to get us to snap out of it? Who knows, but I do know this is why people use strong language and seem to be very aggressive or word things strongly and are excessively specific and verbose in explaining their contentions. There is simply no way to make a point otherwise anymore, because anything one says is subject to fifty thousand know-it-alls with definitional quibbles or reasons why that person doesn't know what they're talking about, most of which are irrelevant to the point someone is trying to make. Humanity is not a conversation, it is a group of people all trying to scream over each other, and hopefully our race will grow out of it before our screaming turns into blowing each other up. Again.<br />
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What is a person? The fact that there is no definitive answer to this question yet should tell us something, I think.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9121315693857452862.post-23278387565996495732013-06-11T02:30:00.001-04:002013-06-11T02:30:54.091-04:00SpiritualityI have to admit, those associated with my former faith were correct about one thing. Leaving religion leaves a unique restlessness and loneliness, or what I suppose is being spoken about with the "god shaped hole" paradigm.<br />
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I've grown up talking about god with, in my opinion, nearly unequaled passion. In my view, I was given a mind by god to seek out and understand reality, and all things, including philosophy, science, literature, history, and all branches thereof, done with excellence and seeking the truth, would lead any reasonable individual to god.<br />
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I've spoken about leaving christianity before, and I don't intend to do so at length again right now. Suffice it to say, my studies lead me to conclude that the existence of a god is improbable, and that the authority of the christian church was insufficient to justify faith in the christian god. With my decision and my persistent inability to keep my mouth shut about things of importance came many consequences. I believe I have lost a lot of respect in the eyes of some, and probably gained a lot in the eyes of others, among other things. As always, I am who I am, and I try to balance confidence with persistent introspection and self-criticism.<br /><br />The biggest question I've come to, and possibly the biggest one I will for a long time to come, has been rather simple. Outside of the specific context of christianity, what does spirituality even mean? There are thousands of religions exploring one simple question: what more is there beyond what it is to be human?<br />
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We see a fraction of the spectrum of color, live for an infinitesimal period of time compared with the age of our universe, don't even possess all of the data regarding the way our brains work, and have theories regarding the universe that are constantly being revised with the discovery of new data. If there is other sentient life in the universe that is not on this planet, we have yet to discover it because we are stuck in one tiny corner of it. We are discovering mind blowing and revolutionary things every day about this universe that has existed for billions of years, a timespan that I can't even comprehend because of its' length and the tiny length of time I've lived.<br /><br />I am put in awe just thinking of everything I've said. I feel spiritual wonder and awe about it, just as I do when I read some of the greatest minds our race has to offer in recent years. From Lewis to Nietzsche, Bell to Descartes, even just a cursory exploration of the casual to the complex of western philosophy is enough to leave one with more questions than answers, and amaze one about the differences people can hold while still perceiving that there is something more. That is to say nothing of the east, and of philosophy not influenced by christianity, platonism, the enlightenment, and so on.<br /><br />There is much to explore without even leaving one's home, and yet every person is another world to explore, for they are full of ideas all their own, their own synthesis of experience, reason, knowledge, and emotion. The communication of all of this, much like how I'm writing now (and why I love it so much), creates ripples, dissonance, and some of the most interesting synthesis of ideology and collaborative thought at times. To think that one religion has a monopoly on what is true with regards to all of this seems, to me, to be fatally narrow, especially considering how little of a monopoly that the entire human race has on knowledge and truth.<br /><br />It is possible that one day we will meet people that live on other worlds that have entirely different conceptions of religion, morality, science, and what it means to exist than we do. Our philosophy as a race could be rocked to the core because an entirely different kind of life exists, and we may even find it offensive until we escape our narrowness as a species. In the end, there is always more to explore and more to learn, no matter where you are or who you are.<br /><br />I don't know if I've answered the question of what spirituality is, but at least to me, I think this all makes it very interesting to think about. I listen to music when I write, and if I stop to think, I realize I am just another type of artist. Writing is very much like music, with its' colors and moods and tones and counterpoints and melodies. Sometimes I write the equivalent of a symphony, whereas at other times I write metal or rock or ballads or pop or country or grindcore. I probably never write rap because I can't rhyme to save my life, but you get the idea.<br /><br />If I really think about it, I think this is what I think of spirituality. I've been stuck in one genre for such a long time, that I don't even know how to appreciate another without understanding what it's all about, but I do know I enjoy the general exploration of it all. Maybe this music is what I long for, and to find out the music of others and see what kind of dissonance or harmony we can make. It's certainly interesting, to say the least.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9121315693857452862.post-32802412755987366792013-04-24T04:38:00.001-04:002013-04-24T04:43:13.165-04:00"What We Talk About When We Talk About God," A (backwards) ReviewThis is an emotional review for me. Please indulge me, as I'm sure I'll tell a few stories.<br />
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My review of Rob Bell's previous book, "Love Wins," got a staggering (for me) amount of reads, presumably because this man is crazily popular and "Love Wins" was a firestorm within Christianity, igniting huge amounts of controversy for its' "radical" rethinking of the doctrine of Hell, mainly garnering the accusation of universalism from the more "traditional" in Christianity.<br />
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As my readers know, this will come from a different place as my previous one, as I no longer identify as a Christian.<br />
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For those of you who don't know, Rob Bell is the founding pastor of Mars Hill Bible Church in Grandville, Michigan, and best-selling author of Velvet Elvis, Love Wins, among other works. He is also the sole Christian leader I have had continual respect for, for his unerring compassion and ability to engage in dialog about anything, seemingly without almost any agenda besides compassionate understanding. I've met him, and I have a signed copy of Velvet Elvis, a book that single-handedly saved my faith when I was all but finished with it many years ago.<br />
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Obviously, that was not something that lasted, for many reasons, but they are now actual reasons instead of emotions like anger and bitterness and frustration, which I would not consider to be good reasons to walk away from faith.<br />
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Though my respect for Bell remains as a person, this book was the moment that I knew would inevitably arrive. It is the moment when I pick up one of his books and, for once, put it down frustrated. I read "Velvet Elvis" within a week and it changed my life. I read "Love Wins" in two days. It took me nearly a month to get through "What We Talk About When We Talk About God," henceforth referred to as "the book" to avoid me typing it over and over.<br />
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Bell's Christianity is historic and time-honored, though not always mainstream. For this, he's been controversial and prominent. When he sticks to talking about historic Christianity and things of that nature, he is rock solid (though perhaps necessarily in possession of rose-tinted glasses at points). However, this book has an entire section devoted to science, and it's meant to be a book about everything.<br />
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Some of you already understand my frustration.<br />
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There are a few quotes that I think speak for themselves here. Let me first start with one from the very end. Spoiler alert!<br />
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"One morning recently I was surfing just after sunrise, and there was only one other surfer out. In between sets he and I started talking. He told me about his work and his family, and then, after about an hour in the water together, he told me how he'd been an alcoholic and a drug addict and an atheist and then he'd gotten clean and sober and found god in the process. As he sat there floating on his board next to me, a hundred or so yards from shore, with not a cloud in the sky and the surface of the water like glass, he looked around and said, "and now I see god everywhere."<br />
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Now <i>that's</i> what's I'm talking about."<br />
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Rob Bell has a consistent pattern of summing up his entire book at the very end, and this is no exception. If you grew up in Christianity like I did, you will immediately recognize the cliche of the atheist drug addict that found Jesus and now life is beautiful, a la finding a higher power in something like a twelve step program. You want to say something about their theology or their logic or something is just bugging you about the whole thing, but you can't because then you're an insensitive ass and you're not allowing the experience of hearing about this wonderful testimony to change you or some-such thing. You are being strong-armed by an emotional argument from an experience into agreeing with everything that person says, or you're a monster.<br />
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That is the feeling I had when reading this entire book, and that's why it took forever for me to finish it. Bell makes an impassioned argument for who God is and why it is reasonable to believe in him, but not for the existence of God. Like most contemporary theologians not stuck in Christianity's past, he admits that proving God scientifically or philosophically is likely impossible, and asserts that God must be intuitively understood. In other words, he would be in agreement with C.S. Lewis, who said: "I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen: not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else."<br />
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It's really his second chapter, "Open," that I have a big problem with, but it is foundational to the rest of the book. The entirety of the rest of the book is him speaking of a way of understanding god that leads to some very good things, like compassion and peace and caring for the poor and conversation and harmony. The problem is that these things have been irrevocably tied to god beforehand, which I find to be misleading at best. In other words, one can affirm all of what Bell speaks of here, but substitute the Christian god for something like an argument for the consequences of one's actions or another god or any number of other things. In other words, Bell speaks about things we all understand, but he asserts that god is part of it. Obviously, if someone disagrees, then they just have not seen god in it yet, or something of that nature, and around and around we go until we come back to whether there is a reason to believe in god at all.<br />
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The reason why it is asserted in the book that it is reasonable to believe in god is because scientists have discovered that everything is weird.<br />
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I wish I was kidding on this one.<br />
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Here are some quotes:<br />
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"We live in a very, very weird universe. One that is roughly 96 percent unknown."<br />
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"I'm talking about the kind of intellectually honest faith that is open-minded enough to admit that some phenomena have no rational explanation."<br />
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"Science shines when dealing with parts and piece, but it doesn't do all that well with <i>soul.</i>"<br />
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"Which leads us to a crucial truth: there are other ways of knowing than only those of the intellect."<br />
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"But to believe that there's more going on here, that there may be reality beyond what we can comprehend--that's something else. That's being open."<br />
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Bell, unfortunately, seems to be speaking of a lot of classical science, along with some interesting newer twists. He speaks frequently of dark matter and of quantum theory, though curiously I found this extremely telling quote at the beginning of his chapter on science:<br />
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"Or more precisely, <i>the </i>universe?"<br />
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This is in the context of speaking of the expansion of our universe. I spent a good ten minutes reading and looking back to see if this was intentional or not, but I could not figure it out. So there are two possibilities: Bell does not know about multiverse theory, or he is specifically stating that it is false here. Given the implications of the multiverse theory and the amount of reading he's done prior to writing this book, I would not be surprised if the latter is true, as that casts some serious questions on his use of the "finely tuned dials" argument that point to a creator.<br />
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If our universe is the only one, then the fact that life exists at all can be more easily used to argue that a creator probably created it. However, if there are an infinite number of quantum universes (which there are, according to some of the latest research in dark matter/energy), then our universe just happens to be the one with life in it, among many that either don't support life or support a very different kind of life.<br />
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Of course, none of this is actually evidence for or against a creator, it is merely pointing at some things that could or could not be chance and saying "look, someone did that." If you want to know more on this, look up the Anthropic principle. Please.<br />
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Here is the problem. Bell's argument that science does not do very well when dealing with certain things is not relevant, and the rest of his argument falls into the classic "God of the gaps" paradigm.<br />
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No sane person would dispute that science does not have a very keen grasp on the entirety of existence. Science is more about questions than answers, and when it comes to things like love and our emotions and intuitions, we're still discovering things about how the human brain works. Does that mean there is a soul in the classical sense, something that we can never see or understand because it's immaterial? No, it does not. Maybe we'll come to think of the neural energy that inhabits our brain as a "soul" at some point, but this is leaps and bounds away from the "some phenomena have no rational explanation" that we're expected to go with here.<br />
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Now, understand one thing. I'm not attempting to say that Bell's intentionally misrepresenting science or has some kind of malicious purpose here. If anything, he appears to have read extensively on the topic, which is an excellent thing to do before writing about it. Indeed, he references evolutionary theory, the emergence of consciousness, the formation of life, and many other things that indicate that he has a functional understanding of current scientific theory.<br />
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The real hangup I have here is that he runs up against the questions which do not yet have answers, and immediately inserts his faith to fill in the gaps. In other words, because subatomic particles do things like disappear and reappear without traveling the distance in between and reality is just so weird and breaks some classical models of science, god. This is not only an exercise in begging the question, it has been done before and will continue to be done by those with religious faith.<br />
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All of this I can almost forgive, in light of what comes next.<br />
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You see, this is a book about faith, and why it's reasonable. Hence, all of this builds to an overriding point that everyone is a person of faith. To "believe" in the scientific method is the same as to "believe" in god. I won't bother rehashing my last post about faith here, but suffice it to say that this is a blurring of definition at very best. Go read my previous post about faith if you want the full rant. Atheists are not people of faith. For god sake.<br />
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Moving on.<br />
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This book is an overriding attack on skepticism, defining intellectually honest faith as the ability to say "you can't explain that" and calling it open-minded. Indeed, Bell uses this sort of reasoning later in the book when speaking of practices of slavery and misogyny in the Bible, citing it as being "unbelievably progressive" for its' time. The thing is, when Bell gets into the ancient Hebrew culture and the ancient near-east, he moves back to being spot on with his facts. He's correct that to marry a woman you essentially kidnapped from a culture you are at war with and give her full rights under your culture is progressive for the time. Of course, it's still barbaric, but God is about progressing humanity from barbarism to love and respect and peace.<br />
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It's not the facts I have a problem with, or even the observation that religion has sometimes been at the heart of progress. It's the logic. You see, when you continually cite specific examples in a verbose manner and then say "that's god," you're not talking about the historic Christian god anymore. This is why traditional Christians are going to absolutely lose their minds over this book, like all of Bell's other books. His definition of god is so unspecific and open to interpretation and intuitive that it simply lacks a definition other than the most basic philosophical definition of the greatest possible being and the platonic existence of good.<br />
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If you want to define god as something that is intuitively understood from the "hum of reverence" within us or our morality or the awe one feels when they look at the universe and how amazing it is, then why not substitute Allah or the Flying Spaghetti Monster instead of Jesus?<br />
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Of course, Bell consistently references in his other works the "historic, orthodox christian faith" and how he is part of that "wide stream" of thought. He is correct in referencing this, and in saying that there has consistently been a group of people within christianity that are for progress and science and the truth wherever it lies. The world isn't divided in the way the christian religion would overridingly have us believe, into believers and non-believers. There are people who think, and there are people who are stuck on being told what to believe. Some who think are religious (christian, muslim, jewish, hindu, etc.), and they're good people, oftentimes in spite of what they have been taught by their religious upbringing, or with an understanding like Bell's. Christianity can be defined as peace in the same way many other religions can.<br />
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The problem is, once again, a problem of definition. If religion has consistently had to be corrected while claiming authority or correctness for thousands of years, and I am supposed to take my intuitive experiences and simply say there must be a god, then what exactly am I even talking about, and why does he have to exist or be the Christian god? It is simply impossible to define god intuitively and still be a Christian, because Jesus being god is not an intuitive claim, it is a historical and mythological claim, as well as being an irrational leap of faith and, for Bell, metaphysical.<br />
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The problem with Bell's reasoning isn't that he has too many of his facts wrong. The problem is that he is trying to have his cake and eat it too. He asserts that he is part of the wide stream of the historic, orthodox Christian faith, but then god must be intuitively understood. He asserts that the Christian god is progressive as a way of getting around the moral implications of his religion's very real and very bloody historic activity and that Yahweh was a god of war that commanded the death of women and children and then cites other examples. You simply cannot have it both ways. Either you trust in the authority of historic Christianity interpreted through one or a few of its' sects (protestant or lutheran in Bell's case), or you are talking about a god that is incoherent and defined from multiple, cherry-picked, sources. This is why conservatives/traditionalists are angry about Bell. They are purists, and Bell jumps off from the Bible into many other things and then plays semantical games until it is all god, a process that they term as "watering down" Christianity, but that Bell explains as seeing god in everything.<br />
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Not only is this book a case of a "god of the gaps" concept being brought forward in the context of science, it is a case of a "god of the emotional gaps." Because I have an experience and I don't know why or I can't explain it or I feel awe or the presence of something mysterious, I am then inserting god as the explanation for it if I'm going by Bell's logic here.<br />
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All of that said, I echo what Bell says in the very beginning of his book in the exact opposite way he means it:<br />
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"Much of what I've written here comes directly out of my own doubt, skepticism and dark nights of the soul when I found myself questioning--to be honest--<i>everything</i>."<br />
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This entire book hurt me to read because I know exactly where Bell is coming from. I, too, have questioned everything, ever since I learned how to critically think. For that, I have lost friends, been told to "just have faith" in a way hauntingly similar to Bell's contention that all are people of faith, and lost a lot of sleep over what is true and what isn't and whether I would accidentally go to hell or suffer in some other way for asking questions. I still question absolutely everything, because it's how I live, and that nature outlasted my faith, unlike Bell. I've come to no longer trust in historic, orthodox Christianity, as well as the more liberal brand that he is at the center of. However, when I read this book, I see nothing short of desperation, and that he has also paid a very heavy price for being who he is. This is why I have not lost respect for this man. I do not believe this is a book full of good reasoning, but what it is full of is compassion and honesty and the heart of a very real struggle that I understand all too well.<br />
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I'd really like it if Bell's god existed. It would give the world a very unique type of hope, and it is very appealing. However, this book really frustrates me because it ignores or misinterprets evidence, equates skepticism with faith through some arguably blurry definitions, brings forward a god so incoherent and semantically flexible that he literally lacks a definition, and then promotes a hope that I would arguably term poisonous. Something can be good and beautiful and make you feel all sorts of good things, but the question is--is it true? If it is not true, that hope is poisonous to you. Think about it.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9121315693857452862.post-12940849426131295482013-03-20T03:41:00.004-04:002013-03-20T03:44:12.181-04:00The Atheist Approach: On FaithI wish to resume my discussion on atheism and just what it is and why I am here even writing this with you. To do so, I believe it is necessary to start over. I will thus be rehashing a lot of old ground here, hopefully in a way that makes more sense. Let's start with faith.<br />
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Faith has two definitions, one general and one more specific.<br />
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In general, faith is the complete trust of a thing. For instance, I trust that the chair I am sitting in will hold my body from falling onto the ground, I trust that our star will continue emitting solar radiation to keep us alive, and I trust that the computer I am typing on will transmit my message onto a location on the internet for others to read from their internet connection. I trust that certain things are true, even if I do not fully understand them, and even if those things could change, sometimes with drastic consequences. The reason I trust this is because there is a consistent response when I perform an action. I type into this website and it creates posts and I sometimes receive responses from others regarding them. I wake up in the morning or afternoon and I am still alive and not a solid block of ice from our star ceasing to provide warmth. I sit in my chair and I do not end up on the ground.<br />
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If I sit down and 10% of the time my chair decides to fall apart or I go through the chair or it is actually a raptor that attacks me, then the remaining 90% of the time when it functions normally and I am able to sit here and work or write or read or play video games are not enough for me to continue to trust the process. I will perform tests like touching it with my hand before placing my full weight on it. It's the same with people...if they let you down or are abusive to you or flake out, you rely on them less and less. It's the same with institutions. If they constantly say one thing and act completely differently, then you stop relying on that institution. This is a loss of trust. One can choose to trust regardless of the pattern because there is more to take into account, such as screws needing to be tightened on my chair or it not existing beyond a formless projection or my definition of a chair needing to be adjusted to exclude extinct dinosaurs that are in my room for some reason, but in general, blindness is not a part of this trust. This is an active process, one that involves my reason, my senses, and my ability to understand. If I continually or sometimes fall through the chair, or even if I fall through it once or twice and it functions correctly 99% of the time, then I am going to investigate why this has sometimes happened and correct it. Perhaps I am unknowingly using holographic technology that was not adjusted to hold me up properly those few times, or perhaps I am in the Matrix and there was a glitch that caused problems that I will never be aware of, no matter how much I investigate. However, there is an explanation. To assume there is an explanation is part of the process of trust. It would be idiotic to say that the chair is a mystery that will never be understood because answers are not forthcoming. This is not because there might not be an answer, but because it is simply irrelevant. I don't care if it's a mystery why that chair doesn't work sometimes, I want an answer so I don't fall on my ass. In this case, I have lost faith in the chair and I am asking questions. This is not traumatic (unless I fell on a lego or something), it is part of how we interact with things. We find things that give us the results we want and we do them. To choose to "just have faith" in the chair when it has failed me may become a necessity if I cannot figure out why it has failed me (or I'll just buy a new chair), but it is not an acceptable answer when I am theoretically capable of assessing the situation, figuring out what the problem is, and fixing it.<br />
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To reiterate: general faith is one's trust in a thing, to "act in good faith" is to move toward answers using patterns and evidence, and when that trust is broken, one no longer has general faith in that thing until it can be re-established using a process that a person accepts as correcting the problem. When a problem becomes irrevocable with a thing one has put their trust in, then one has lost faith in that thing, and they move on. This is what the general definition of faith means.<br />
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Faith's special definition is to trust in the existence of God or in doctrines of a religion, based on strong apprehension as opposed to proof. Despite being reassured repeatedly by those with this faith that I either did not have the faith I claimed to have or that everyone has faith, especially those that say they don't, I'd like to think I understand this sort of faith as well. This is the sort of trust that some may characterize as blind. The thoughtful of those with faith will say that they have faith in their god or their doctrines because they work, or because it makes their lives better, or because they intuitively understand it. God's existence is apparent from the nature of the universe around them, for instance. Some may also say that God has been proven through a religious text or through witnessed miracles (like a chair not existing in a tangible sense 10% of the time) that should not be investigated, but should be marveled at, because of the mystery and wonder. This is faith, the thing that puts people in awe.<br />
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In other words, faith's general definition is complete trust in something that involves understanding, and faith's specific religious definition is necessarily subjective, intuitive, and lacking in objective proof. However, the common ground we see here is one of trust. Somewhere, for example, a person of religious faith received a message that God exists. This may have been from the natural world and their interpretation thereof, from organized religion, from a proselytizing friend, or wherever. Eventually, they made the choice to trust that person. Or, in the case that there is a god, they interacted directly with that deity and chose to trust in his existence. Considering the turmoil and conflict over which god we could be talking about or if that god exists, this would fall into the category of subjective proof. The point here is that religious faith falls into the same category as general faith because they both involve trust, which is probably why the same word is used for both. However, there is a distinction between the two that I wish to make clear.<br />
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It is true that trust is common to all people. However, religious faith is not. Because I trust that math is consistent and representative of reality or that the chair you're tired of me bringing up will hold me up or that weird things happen in our reality will be explained eventually given enough explanation does not make me religious, and it does not mean I have religious faith. Remember, religious faith is specific to something one does not have complete objective proof of. In other words, religious faith is a choice to trust. Though this may become actualized into a person and integrate into their personality, it initially starts with a choice. Perhaps that choice was given to them at an early age before they understood it, perhaps it was made under extreme emotional duress and they do not see the connection between trusting a person, a historic institution, or an event and implying the existence of a god, but that connection does indeed exist.<br />
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What we are talking about at this point is two difference mindsets. One says that you have to trust in something, you have to believe in something, and here is why what I believe is the best way. The other says that you do not have to believe anything beyond what you can perceive, understand, and reason through, and I will try to convince you based on the evidence available to me of how reality is. One is open to mystery, and the other is open to evidence.<br />
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I would stop trusting in the scientific process being used to gain greater understanding of reality if it began to be unreliable. In that case, we'd need another process. We'd need other theories, other data, and other ways of thinking. This is common sense for most things to most people, because everyone puts their trust in something. However, when this process is applied to religious faith, all sorts of outrage occur if it is rejected. This is because it is commonly understood that religious faith is an exemption, a belief necessarily and rightly held without objective evidence, and there is a special category created for it to exist.<br />
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Historically, the religious type of faith has been the only one to exist for a long time. When the crops received no rain, there was a real threat to survival, hence the higher power in control of weather needed to be appealed to. Personally, I can understand this type of thinking today through something as simple as driving. When I drive somewhere and every single traffic light I come to is red, I do not know enough about the way traffic lights work to assume anything other than the "god of traffic lights," or perhaps "fate" is angry with me and wants me to wait, or "traffic engineers" have designed these lights to screw me over. When there is a pattern, people want to find the reason for it so they can get what they want or need out of it. Somewhere in my mind I am also aware that my anger at "fate" or "traffic engineers" is idiotic and that traffic lights work a certain way and I am not being singled out. This is because I understand that there are holes in my understanding of what's going on, and if I studied it, I would find a way around it or at the very least new things to be mad about when it comes to traffic lights and how they operate. This does not make me special, it makes me a logical thinker.<br />
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At some point when you are investigating reality, things stop making sense. Whether this is through gaps in your understanding or gaps in our race's ability to understand or our lack of sensory or cognitive ability to grasp it, we sometimes cannot make sense out of things we run into. Great and wonderful or terrible things happen and there is seemingly no reason for it. Miracles seem to happen, we become emotionally invested in things happening around us, we feel strongly about things, and we come to conclusions that make sense to us. To some, God lives in those gaps, fed by the initial trust in the conveyor of the message regarding this god. So God lives in those gaps of our understanding, he is the light by which we see all other things (<em style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: small; font-style: normal; font-weight: bold; line-height: 16px;">à</em> la C.S. Lewis) and he is present in the mystery in our lives. This is religious faith.<br />
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Then we learn more things, intentionally or unintentionally, about reality. We come to more understanding about our universe, and those gaps get filled. So god lives in other gaps of our understanding, or he was the primal cause of that bit of reality we discovered, or he lives in any mystery that is left, or we become angry at "science" for having some agenda against God and rail against it for disrupting our world. Whatever the case, God has to exist because of religious faith, because one chooses to trust in his existence from a religious book or from the messages they received or from the way they choose to interpret things or from their feelings regarding the mysterious nature of the universe or from the voices in their head or from any other reason that humanity has yet to come to any consensus on whatsoever. We cannot even agree that there is a god, let alone what his name is, which translation of which book talks about him correctly, if any, or if he's not simply a force holding the universe together which is slowly being eliminated from our understanding by scientific and philosophical progress.<br />
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Regardless, it is a person's choice to have religious faith. However, not everyone makes that choice. Not everyone chooses to trust in the existence of god or in the truth of religious doctrines. There may be reasons for this if they were previously religious, but regardless, this is not religious faith. Choosing to trust in scientific processes or in oneself or in certain people or in only what they can perceive with their senses and understand empirically and philosophically is NOT the same type of faith as religious faith. It is looking for something that works, and moving forward with it until it doesn't.<br />
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For a great many people, myself included, it has become too much to ask to continue to trust in the religion of their upbringing, too much to ask to trust in things with no objective proof being put forward by an institution (or institutions and fragments thereof) with credibility that has been stretched beyond relief by modern scholarship and science. It has become an artifact of their past, and they have moved beyond their shattered religious faith. They require something to put their trust in, because the thing they trusted for a long time is no longer there, and they're realizing it never was in the first place. They still act in a tribal manner, they say "I am an atheist and I am angry at religion and it should be destroyed!" because they're still trying to move out of that mindset, and they feel lied to, betrayed, and like they've wasted a lot of time with pointless guilt and religious fanaticism. So instead of Jesus being their Messiah, Neil DeGrasse Tyson becomes that and they post every photo with a quote of him (real or imagined) they can find because they are trying desperately to trust in SOMETHING and they're driving everyone crazy doing it.<br />
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For me, I trusted exactly one leader in Christianity for a very long time, and that trust has recently come to an end. I will be exploring that further than I already have very soon, once I am no longer blindingly angry that the last vestige of my past has pulled the "you just have to have faith, you can't explain that!" card.<br />
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However, one must not mistake what it is to be an atheist, at its' core definition. It is to lack belief in gods. I lack that belief because I lack the trust in any of the "facts" I have been presented "proving" it, the institutions telling me that they exist, and I do not see any objective proof for the existence of gods. Questions are not proof, they are questions. Gaps are not proof, they are opportunities for understanding. Religious texts are not proof, they are usually ancient collections of writings preserved by institutions, or, if they are in recent historical memory, imaginative writings that no one is sure of their lasting power or influence.<br />
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Being an atheist is not being angry, it is not being anti-religion or anti-religious faith, it is simply not sharing in those things. It is not worshiping Neil DeGrasse Tyson or Richard Dawkins or any other prominent figure associated with atheism (after all, they have almost as little of an idea of what's going on as we do, they just have more data and particular talents for organizing and conveying it). Being an atheist does not mean having every answer and the arrogant certainty that there is no god. I would be happy if someone could prove to me that a god exists, because I miss religious faith a whole hell of a lot. But then, that wouldn't be true religious faith, would it?<br />
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The worst part of writing all of this is that I know nothing I say will put any of this discussion to rest by itself. I've heard "I'm not an atheist because I don't have enough faith" or some absurd variation thereof so many times I want to bash my face into my desk until I lose consciousness whenever I read it or hear it just to make it go away, and it won't stop anytime soon. People are too invested, and my voice is too small. However, luckily, I know I am not the only person making this sort of distinction. Those independent of myself, while seeking truth, also come to similar places. They also lose faith for good reasons, and they move on from it.<br />
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The atheist lacks religious faith, and no person, religious or not, is correct when they say that atheists are people of religious faith in any sense of the word. The only faith we have is trust in what we see working, the adaptive ability of humanity to seek answers and truth and survival, the ability to trust based on evidence. That should not even be called faith based on society's understanding of what faith is, but if we were to go that route then atheism isn't even a label I should claim because I'm not an anti-theist or think that religion is the sole cause of all of society's problems. C'est la vie.<br />
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I was told throughout college to "just have faith" when I had questions about theology. I was told that I should convert to Christianity and "just believe" while holding to the most sincere faith I have ever known and continually asking questions and coming to conclusions in the process. My faith was alive, vital, and full of questions and dizzying moments of ecstatic worship, and 95% of those I came in contact with had written me off entirely because I have a problem with authority and ask questions and most were more concerned about professors telling them, half of the time in class, that I do no believe in the Trinity. My college faith was an exercise in missing the point to most people, and I've come to agree with them for entirely different reasons. Now that I am no longer a person of faith, now that I am an atheist, I'm being told that I have faith because I have to because everyone has faith in something and they're more reasonable so have less faith because obviously God exists, or have different faith and their faith makes their life better than mine so believe in their god. Which god? The one they grew up hearing about or had an emotional experience regarding, of course. One would think that people could make up their mind, and perhaps esteem their primary reasoning for the existence of their god a little higher than ascribing it to their opponents when they claim the opposite, or blindly ascribing it to everyone using blurry definitions and fuzzy thought processes. At the very least, have a little respect. I am angry because people claim to know how I think when they don't have a clue, and people largely seem to lack the basic ability to listen and engage what's being said, because constructing a straw man and attacking it instead is a lot more fun, as are recreating definitions of words like faith until one can make a point that is not true or even relevant.<br />
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At this point, I do not give a damn if a single person listens. I write because it comes bursting out of me and I put it here for people to read because I enjoy sharing. If you're still reading, then please continue to do so in the coming weeks as I explore this topic more fully. I appreciate those of you that read what I have to say and if you want to have a conversation with me about it, I'm open to that, as always.<br />
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To sum it up: I am an atheist because I do not see evidence for the existence of gods, and every institution that has claimed that god or gods exist has been a dismal failure at convincing me of it. I am not a person of religious faith because I do not choose to believe in things that lack evidence, and I do not trust that the institutions or people telling me to have religious faith are correct.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9121315693857452862.post-2716857756423647552013-03-08T00:50:00.002-05:002013-03-08T00:50:36.207-05:00As someone I knew once said, life's thrown a few curveballs my way lately. I'm not even on my feet at the moment, I'm still laying on the ground in a dazed state after some truly insane things happened. I want to continue my series regarding the atheist position, but I do not have the capability to do so until some healing has occurred. Every experience changes a person, and I hope I come through this with more ability to put my thoughts into words with generosity, critical thought, and with my usual edge intact. Perhaps I'll start what I was saying over, or perhaps I'll pick up where I left off. It's anyone's guess at this point. However, I will be back to the topic of deconversion, post-christianity, and atheism in time, count on it. It is far, far too important to me.<br />
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Sometimes I think the whole world has gone mad, and I will do no one a favor writing while I feel this way. Until next time.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9121315693857452862.post-22012331432762017852013-01-24T17:26:00.002-05:002013-01-24T17:26:57.299-05:00The Atheist Position, Part 2: Ethical ScienceAbout 14 billion years ago, existence as we know it emerged from a reality beyond our comprehension.<div>
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About 9 billion years later, our planet formed through accretion from the solar nebula, and life began to emerge from inorganic matter.</div>
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That life changed, evolved, and the natural forces of the universe formed it into what we have today.</div>
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Consciousness emerged and we realized we didn't understand anything going on. So humanity invented gods.</div>
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Eventually, some decided that there is only one god, and they killed anyone who disagreed.</div>
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2,000 years ago, a teacher from this religion created a new one, which remains influential to this day.</div>
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1,400 years ago, another teacher created a religion out of the original monotheism, and it also remains influential.</div>
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When man created the gods, they fought conceptual (and some very, very real) wars until some said there was only one god. We are still fighting wars over which god is the correct one, intellectual and military wars. Is it Allah? Yahweh? Jesus? Is God Tri-Une? Is there only one undivided god? Are there actually many gods and El/Yahweh/Allah/Jesus is just one of them that happens to be claiming their religious writings are the correct ones?</div>
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Could humanity have invented religion out of tribal fear, and subsequently created all of the gods?</div>
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This doesn't even begin to delve into the way religious adherents fight amongst themselves, splintering into many other groups, all with their own god or gods. Among those that believe in Jesus, some say that god is ultimately sovereign and has destined all of history according to his good pleasure. Some say that god, though ultimately sovereign, chooses to allow real choice in the matter of who we serve and what we do, though ultimately he will torture us for eternity (or allow us to torture ourselves) if we do not love him. Still others do not believe god is totally sovereign, and is limited in power, though he is still the greatest possible being, or the god. This is only three of dozens of extremely nuanced views within the wide stream of Christian thought about one particular aspect of its' theology: God's sovereignty.</div>
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If there is one ultimately uniting force to all of these religious movements, it is that of power. Love god or go to hell and burn for eternity, serve my god or die, believe how I do or be ostracized, we are against you. To argue against such things is to be dangerous indeed, but danger is inescapable because no one will ever placate all religious groups. By nature, they are tribal.</div>
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When one speaks of Christianity, for instance, the discussion is not about one thing, but about thousands to millions. Every church, every sect or denomination, even every person represents a tribal religion, influential only through conformity and the power of people.</div>
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This is not theory, it is historical fact about the emergence of religion. Religion exists because we don't understand everything about reality, so dogma sits in the gaps of our knowledge and tells us this god exists that can't be disproven, and is a sort of primal cause for all that we don't fully understand. Ra, the god of the Sun, is a popular and well understood example. Because no one understood that the sun is a massive ball of plasma powered by fusion and giving off solar radiation to keep us alive, it was a supernatural force. Now we understand it all too well, but other things evade our knowledge, such as the nature of reality as multiple universes, dark matter's complete influence, miraculous occurrences within the human body, and any other unexplained or supernatural phenomenon you can think of.</div>
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If you think about it, supernatural refers only to that which we do not have complete knowledge of. Otherwise, it is purely natural. The sun is natural, even though it was presumed to be supernatural for millennia.</div>
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You see, you can and should argue scientific conclusions. Please disprove anything I've said about the nature of reality, or even about religion if you want. It does not change that tribal religion's primary driving force is dogmatic, and it is not the only way to think.</div>
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Where the religious mind is dogmatic, the scientific mind is questioning. While historically religion has demanded drastic action that must be justified, science has been asserting things about the nature of reality, such as the fact that the Earth revolves around our star.</div>
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Some say that religion picks up where science leaves off, that science can only go so far until religion has to take over, otherwise we will lack morality and kill each other. Even if we ignore the bloody and violent history of religion, especially those claiming to be the nature of peace, this argument still ignores the incompatibility of the two's approaches to reality</div>
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Tribal religion is spawned from dogma, which must be defended. This is war.</div>
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Science is spawned from questions, which lead to answers. This is knowledge.</div>
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You do not attack someone that disagrees with your scientific theory, you run tests. If you are disproven you have learned something, you aren't imprisoned or killed or ostracized. Your ego may be bruised, but in general, you do not stab someone that disagrees with your theory, you think better and you come up with a better theory.</div>
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If that does not have moral implications, I don't know what does.</div>
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Our universe is on the order of 13.77 billion years old, and it is possible that there is a god that is the primal cause of this existence. However, this possibility only exists because we do not understand something. Lack of understanding does not constitute assertions about god, it constitutes questions. You can claim things, or you can ask questions.</div>
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The current god has become the primal cause and the personal god. More and more we keep finding out, through questioning, that things seem to all have natural explanations. More and more, our god is not the one that takes care of us, he's a creator and an inner voice. He must be let into our minds and souls and we must lose all of our self esteem and only esteem god because he simply cannot exist anywhere else but the beginning of our universe and the gaps in our knowledge.</div>
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When a person's conscience is given to them by god, anything can be justified. One need not ask questions or read history or participate in discussion when they simply need to read a holy book and allow their inner voice (holy spirit, conscience, intuitive perception of reality, whatever) to tell them what is right. Faith communities can work in this context only so far as groupthink goes, and anyone not part of that groupthink is ostracized by the offended group.</div>
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When a person's conscience is a product of their thinking, their doubts, their questions, and their continued research into the nature of reality, they are learning from others all the time, approaching others for more reasoning, more perspective, and they rejoice when they've been wrong, because they've learned something new.</div>
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No person is truly a scientific creature, and no person is truly a tribal creature. Rachel Evans, a popular Evangelical voice (http://rachelheldevans.com/ if you wanna check it out), possesses a keenly scientific way of thinking, but she claims Evangelical Christianity regardless of this. This creates a unique dissonance that I find very enjoyable to read, not to mention her incredible compassion and attention to morality.</div>
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Likewise, one need only look so far as the popular atheist voice to find that they are far from bereft of tribalistic thinking. The Christians are the enemy for the atheist in America, and a lot of them are very angry about it. Though I find the moral outrage good, and though I am also angry, it is dangerous to bring one's dogmatic thinking with them when leaving religion, lest one become angry at everyone and everything instead of coming to productive and natural conclusions through thought and dialog.</div>
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Regardless, there is a correct way to think, and that way is scientific, not tribal. This way is correct because the consequences of scientific thinking are life and knowledge, and the consequences of tribal thinking are death and war. The well-being of life must be furthered by our approach to life, because we are the most highly evolved beings on this planet.</div>
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Besides these consequences making scientific thinking the moral choice, true knowledge is, in and of itself, an end that we should all move toward for its' own sake.</div>
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God is dead, but we continue to create him wherever there are gaps, wherever there is dogma, and whenever we feel psychological pressure that requires relief. We create our god, and our god continually recreates us in his image.</div>
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The human mind is far from being fully understood, as are some very key things about existence itself. We can continue to create god in those gaps, ignore what understanding there is and assert god in spite of evidence, or we can continue to ask questions and find god, if he does truly exist.</div>
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I assert that the correct position is to ask questions, lose one's need to be right and control others, one's tribal nature, and begin to think scientifically about our reality and its' history, and it is correct because it is by nature compassionate and reasonable and in touch with reality.</div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9121315693857452862.post-46075663511437714372013-01-10T15:11:00.001-05:002013-01-10T15:11:17.871-05:00The Atheist Position, Part 1: DefinitionI've pondered a good bit over how to start saying what it is that I have to say next, and I've found that, as always, a direct approach is the most beneficial and, furthermore, the most necessary. I've always found that people are going to be mad about one's choices, especially if they are well thought out and without regard to sentiment or subjective experience. So, the question is, what sort of decision is this, and how have I come to it?<br />
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A cursory reading of the early days of this blog will tell you that I was a Christian and furthermore, regardless of what type of Christian I was or whether my beliefs fell in line with any definition of the word "Christian," I really and truly believed in the Christian God, and I had a lot to say because of it. One of my first posts was regarding the concept of Virginity and why I believe it is a bad concept. For a Christian to post that is risky indeed, and I paid for it.<br />
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Regardless, this blog has never been about maintaining the status quo. Cognitive dissonance, by its' very nature, is uncomfortable. When you are in a state such as this, your beliefs and your ideas are all thrown into chaos by realizations regarding how reality actually is. In other words, it is a rude awakening. This is what I've sought all my life, and I think I've finally found dissonance that has me overwhelmed.<br />
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What I really wish to address here is how I could go from being a theist and, indeed, a strongly believing Christian, to being an atheist. I've gone over and over this, and the answer is not at all a small nor a simple one. However, if you stick with me, I will endeavor to explain as completely as possible how such a thing could happen to the beliefs of a person like me, and why I'm sure that a reasonable approach to reality will lead people to agree with me.<br />
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I hope none of you take any of this personally. I still love all of you, and I wish to continue in dialog about philosophy, mythology, science, and to maintain the personal relationships I have with you. It grieves me every time personal differences come between me and another person, because I think anything short of direct disrespect can be looked past. I mean do direct disrespect to any of you, but I will criticize your religion. I criticize not out of anger or because I enjoy pissing people off, but because I must criticize that which I find to be worthy of its' sting.<br />
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One final disclaimer before I get started: This is not about my emotions, my experiences, my anger, or anything other than my informed opinion. Though I am all too aware of intuition and emotion's influence on the thoughts that one has, I believe the only way to explain what I mean is to reason with you, the reader, and invite you to follow my line of reasoning to the end. This will take us through many emotional issues, and you can expect a few rabbit trails into the emotional or experiential, but our main path in exploring this is one of a simple question: What is true? I choose to do this because I've never been primarily concerned with anything else when it comes to these things, and I don't believe that an exploration of my emotional state is necessary or beneficial at this time.<br />
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Very well then, on with it! The best place to start here is the question of what is true. This quickly became an overwhelming concern of mine in college when I came to reason that the Bible is not the cornerstone of truth.<br />
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Long story short, through countless hours of research, reasoning, and discovery, I concluded that the Bible is a legendary text, like many others, with an unbelievable amount of historic and scientific flaws. It has historically been used to justify many, many things, and modern society has come to see some of those things as evil, and some as good. Regardless of the fact that the Crusades seemed to be a good idea with Biblical grounding, we have come to realize that they were a terrible stain on an already filthy church history. Combine this with the reality that Jesus is not a unique historical or mythical figure, the Bible is not a book that has stood the test of time but one that has been revised over and over with time, and the many, many errors present in the book if you consider even other historical documents of the same age, and you come to a point of either accepting the book regardless of what you must conclude, or you come to a point of it being a flawed book. This is where I came to, the point of the Bible being a flawed but inspired text, and with it communicating who God is and the saving message clearly, but nothing else. A rather tenuous position that was open to so much criticism that a good portion of my college doubted my status as a Christian, but one that my faith and my reason demanded of me. In other words, I was concerned with both what I must believe and with what I had come to conclude by research and reasoning.<br />
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This is not new to anyone who's tried to do Philosophy or Theology in the context of a faith community. In fact, it is a relatively common struggle to those steeped in religion. Does faith or reason win out in the end?<br />
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For me, this question was already answered with another I'd been asking: What is true?<br />
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If my faith was to survive, then my reason must not disprove it. What I discover about reality, scientifically and philosophically, must not conflict with my faith. If it did, then my faith would be destroyed. There was only one choice, as far as I was concerned, when it comes to this sort of thing. Because I truly believed, however, my assertion was a little different. "If our faith is true then we have nothing to fear from science or from philosophy or thinking well. In fact, it is our calling to think better than any, for we know reality as it is!"<br />
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I could never understand why this made my fellow Christians uneasy. Why were they not agreeing when it was so obvious? Why did my nature as a doubter and one who asks questions make people uncomfortable and make me socially ostracized so many times? Did these people not have confidence in the truth of their beliefs?<br />
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I'm not one to portray myself as one of pure faith or as superior to anyone else, and I never have been. I've always been desperately aware of my own flaws of character and issues, even if they're ones that don't actually exist. However, in this case, I do believe that I demonstrably had such blind faith that I believed that science, philosophy, and reality itself would bend to the faith I so passionately held onto, and that if my beliefs needed to change it would be because I realized I was getting closer to understanding who God is and what reality is.<br />
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As it turns out, the more I discovered about the nature of reality, the farther and farther I moved from being what anyone would term a "Christian." I came to conclude that Evolution was the method by which humans have come to exist, and that church authority did not have any more power than any other political or religious force in history. I studied psychology and became a student of the human mind, only to come to the stark realization that humanity is vastly and scarily capable of self-delusion, many times without realizing it. The state of medicine, archeology, physics, astronomy, chemistry, and history had led me to vastly differing conclusions than those asserted by the people that tell me one God created reality and me along with it, and I was made to love him.<br />
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What's disturbing about this is not that science lead me away from faith, but that it very nearly didn't. You see, the more I learned, the more I believed that I was discovering things that humanity is meant to discover, and God exists in the gaps between my knowledge, or perhaps He exists somehow through this knowledge, as a primal cause of the universe.<br />
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The real problem at this point becomes one of presupposition. I presume that God exists, and so no matter what evidence comes my way about how reality works, no matter what new data comes to light about the people that have historically told us that the Christian God exists, and no matter how little evidence there is for a God existing, one can choose to believe what one wants to. The "God of the Gaps" can survive almost anything scientific or historic thrown at it, but one problem still remains that I had yet to realize.<br />
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The problem is Epistemology, or the way one relates to knowledge. You see, when you orient yourself to reality in such a way that truth acts on you, then you gain the ability to change your mind, should it become necessary. The "God of the Gaps" concept fails this Epistemic orientation spectacularly, for a few simple reasons. Firstly, if God must exist regardless of what one is discovering, then we are talking about asserting a truth claim, rather than discovering or reasoning to a truth claim. By its' very nature, this assertion is at the very least uncomfortable when accompanied by the way we understand reality as beginning in a large explosive event that lead to the formation of our universe and eventually our planet, which in its' cooling state began to generate organic matter that gave rise to life, gradually evolving to our present state.<br />
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This picture of reality not only has a pile of evidence and explains a whole laundry list of things about how our universe works, but it is something that I grew up being taught to be hostile toward, likely because it is scary to the mind that actually believes their faith can be deconstructed by such things (which it can and should be).<br />
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The real problem, however, is that when we have to believe in the "God of the Gaps," we are asserting a particular type of God. The type most commonly asserted in the nation I live is the Christian God. This is a problem because if we accept current scientific and historic data, God had nothing to do with the creation of the universe (or at the very least had very little to do with it beyond some sort of initial spark, AKA the Deistic God), and He's had nothing to do with reality henceforward, unless His objective has been to confuse us with differing legends regarding the God claim and fossils, all of which have much more readily available explanations.<br />
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To accept the "God of the Gaps" is to think badly, but one may do so at this point and be a Deist, if one wishes. At the very least, this god has nothing to do with the religions that exist today, and certainly nothing to do with any sort of Abrahamic religion, the exclusive market on monotheistic religions. The only other option is to ignore what we know about reality and put one's philosophical head in the sand, practicing the science of knowledge no more, and choosing one's own delusion over what is really true. Some days I wish this were an option for me, for it would be far less costly than where I've chosen to go. But I can be no other than who I am.<br />
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I'm not an atheist because I'm angry, I'm angry because I'm an atheist. It makes me angry that I've been lied to about science for the majority of my life, that I've been given false hope and poisonous fear when I should have grown up learning and wondering and being amazed at the way things are. It makes me angry that I have a degree polluted by religious thinking, when I could've studied something useful. But then, one can be angry about these things and change nothing whatsoever.<br />
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I choose to allow that to exist where it will, and to confine my pursuit of truth to the facts. I wish, and have always wished, to be proven wrong where I am wrong. I was wrong about Christianity being true, and it was proven to me by science, by philosophy, and by history. I plan on going into these things all separately, but for now, I wish to lay down a definition of what I mean when I say I am an atheist.<br />
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Atheism - The conclusion that there is a lack of evidence for a tenable belief in god or gods.<br />
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This is the only definition I wish for you to think of in my writings. I may fit the "angry atheist" paradigm at times, but I do not believe that it is necessary to be angry to be an atheist. It is, however, necessary to understand theism to be an atheist. Atheism, by its' very nature, is an opposite conclusion to theism. Theism says that there is a god or gods, atheism says that there is not.<br />
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Atheism has been associated with being a political force, at times. I do not have any interest, at this time, in making what I write or what my life represents political. Indeed, atheism is simply a statement regarding gods. Politically, I would align more as a secular humanist at this point, but one need not be a secular humanist to be an atheist. One need only come to the conclusion that gods do not exist.<br />
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Atheism is not a religion, it is a philosophical orientation. A religion is a specific belief system, and it says specific things. It is, in many ways, much much more specific than a philosophical orientation. One being a Christian or a Muslim or a Hindu is not a philosophical orientation, it is an alignment with a political religious force. In their cases, however, their philosophical orientation includes a type of theism, or an acceptance of gods or a god existing. Atheism is merely the opposite, the philosophical orientation that there are no gods. Whether Atheism has been used as a religion in our society is not something I wish to address at this point, because if I spent my blog posts addressing what every group does with the terms I use, I'd have a very different, and what I would consider to be a pointless, blog.<br />
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To reiterate and conclude what I have to say at this point: Atheism is a position I came to over a period of about 7 years of questioning, reasoning, and research. Atheism simply means that one has concluded that there is a lack of evidence for a tenable belief in god or gods. Atheism is a conclusion I came to by science, history, philosophy, and Cognitive Dissonance. More on these soon.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9121315693857452862.post-77922344939113543332012-12-23T17:13:00.004-05:002012-12-23T17:13:35.016-05:00An Introduction: On Anger, and the Pursuit of TruthMy dear readers:<br />
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It has been a wild ride here lately. I've had a lot of changes coming for me, most of which have been a long time coming. I cannot properly express to you how much so many things have grieved me lately. I am a man consumed in sorrow and in joy all at once, feeling the necessity to make changes for no other reason than my pursuit of truth, and my pursuit of being happy in life. I take this to mean that I am being who I am correctly. However, I think that this has not been the norm for me for a long time. Allow me to explain why.<br />
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As much as I try to keep this blog impersonal, I must address something publicly that may or may not be relevant to you. It has been asserted that I am a very angry person lately. This is not the first time I have been told this, and I doubt it will be the last. However, this time presents an opportunity to explain some things.<br />
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I have been a person of faith for as long as I can remember. A lot of the reason I started on this path is because I was terrified of the divine being I was told about from a very young age throwing me into hell to burn and be tortured and alone for eternity. I still have panic episodes over this deeply engrained fear, for whatever reason. However, over time my faith became something I was very militant about, and something I became extremely passionate about. Even now, I can discuss Christian theology and spirituality with anyone that wants to.<br />
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Christianity has made me very angry for years. I used to be angry when people would attack my beliefs, and I used to be angry when people told me I wasn't really a Christian. As it turns out, the second group may have been correct all along. I became a very liberal Christian in college, and the reason I did is because Christian theology had become untenable. I looked at this book I'd been told to believe, I looked at history, I looked at alternate views, and I looked at my own reasoning. I then concluded that the Bible is a legendary text and nothing more, and that God is something separate from the religion of Christianity, even though I still believed in Jesus.<br />
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Understandably, a lot of people told me that I had watered down my faith, that I had taken all of its' "teeth" away from it. I had a professor at my college tell me publicly that I did not care about the truth because of my views, and any support I received from authority figures was very tentative, as most of them were either trying to save me, and the rest were trying to explain me. Very rarely was I straight up asked about things, and I was told it was because I'm a very intimidating person. This is perhaps true.<br />
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I was raised to be angry because I was raised in fear, which turned to militancy, which turned to feeling stepped on and excluded, which turned into resentment. It is not a good position to be in, and it has affected me more than I can possibly estimate. I can spend my time blaming people, but in the end, I blame the system. Christianity cannot escape its' abuses, and this is a very inflammatory view It is possible that all of my anger has become an issue lately merely because of my change of beliefs, so allow me to be blunt.<br />
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Yes, I am no longer a Christian, and yes, Christianity does make me angry. I am sure a lot of you feel like your beliefs are being attacked, but let me assure you: I never intend to attack someone's personal beliefs. If I stepped over that line, I am sorry. I endeavor to be objective when discussing these things, and sometimes my passion gets the best of me. There is a reason I tend not to say anything when certain things come up: I tend to go too far, and then everyone gets intimidated by my passion and my reasoning. I tend to be very transparent about these things, and it is my gift to people. I think that most people deserve the truth from me. I am very sorry if my anger has gotten involved and this has all gotten out of hand.<br />
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However, it is very important to me that you all understand one thing just as much. I have not made the decision not to be a Christian lately for any other reason than that I do not believe it is true. When I look at Evolution and the origin of biological life, when I look at sociology, history, psychology, archaeology, anthropology and when I really really think and read and research and question and conclude, I do not believe that Christianity is anything more than another historical religion that happens to be involved with the politics and culture of the country I live in.<br />
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I would not have decided to publicly leave the faith I grew up in for any other reason than that I do not think it is true. I have paid for it dearly by doing so, and I will continue to do so with friendships, the deterioration of my relationships with people that are religious, and with a lot of misunderstanding. I have paid for it with my mental and emotional state lately, and I have paid for it with my health. I will probably continue paying for it with some of these things, though I believe that the best thing for me to do at this point is to move on and live well, because I also believe that I am right and that I am living rightly.<br />
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This is an invitation to anyone that runs across this blog. I don't care if what you have to say is that you hate everything I am doing and think I'm wrong: I want to have conversations. I will not back down from my position without a very good reason, but if you give me a good reason to do so and I am convinced that it is the truth, I will in a second. Surely I have proven that by now, and I hope that I have proven that I respect other people, even if I've never done so perfectly.<br />
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Though I do hope you all understand how grieved I am that my relationships with some of you have suffered for the direction I've gone lately, I must make one thing perfectly clear.<br />
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I am right to be angry. I am not just angry, I am furiously enraged at the religion I grew up in, because I feel it is unjust, abusive, psychologically destructive, culturally and historically anachronistic, morally offensive, and a historical and political nightmare. What I have gone through is nothing compared to so many people that have been on the other end of religion in general, and I am grateful that the most I have to deal with is some odd emotional things and some awkward conversations with people. This is something that I feel even those that are a part of Christianity still can agree with, even if they are still "believers." Many would say that Christian history is bloody and it is an indication of man's "fallen" state. Where we differ is that I do not agree with that explanation, nor do I place the same trust in the historic Christian church as they do.<br /><br />What you must understand is that anger is not an emotion that I feel toward Christians. My family's faith is still Christianity, with me being the sole exception. This could make me feel very alone, but I still love them very much, and they still love me very much. I respect many Christians I know very much, and believe they are very smart and educated people. Though I would not disagree with them if I didn't think I was right, this does not mean that I'm going to be hostile or degrading. That's not the person I have ever been, and though I've never been perfect in my goals to respect others, I try my best to do so, regardless of my position on issues, and I expect the same respect from people in discussions. I can no longer tolerate the imposed self-degradation I'm expected to take on in the name of being moral or holy.<br />
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I plan on making a series of posts in the next few weeks regarding my "deconversion" from Christianity, because I believe a lot of my regular readers are stunned and confused or angry about the seeming suddenness with which I have changed. It is important to me that you all understand where I'm coming from, and why things have ended up this way, and what my thoughts are.<br />
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Lastly, I wish to extend one final sentiment. Regardless of what one believes or how one deals with life, I believe we can all respect each other. It is my hope that the future of humanity is full of that respect, and that we can continue to grow together and leave behind all of that that would get in the way of truth and of love.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9121315693857452862.post-14235163936294107272012-11-21T01:07:00.003-05:002012-11-21T01:07:55.618-05:00There Comes a Day."When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought as a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I gave up childish ways." - 1 Corinthians 13:11<br />
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I always liked this statement.<br />
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I write today to commemorate and appreciate what I've learned growing up how I have. I've spoken a lot lately about how I've been traumatized by religion when growing up and how I've moved away from faith, but another part of my journey lately has been recognizing the good that came from this subculture, for it is just as true.<br />
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Without Christianity, I would not have made the friends I have. Without Christianity, I would not have ended up the person I am today. Without Christianity, I would not have the unique and powerful perspective I've ended up with, nor would I be able to do what I will do in the future. For this, I am grateful, among a thousand other things. I can still debate theology with the best theologian out there and stalemate them at best, and that is something I take pride in. Not because I find theology to be true, but because I find it to have been a useful tool for abstract thought and for the development of a very unique sort of logic.<br />
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God, as a concept, is wondrously fascinating to me. Growing up, I went through phases of what I believed about god. I believed in his sovereignty and his absolute deterministic control in high school, and it's intriguing to note that I was also more rejected and alone than I ever have been in my life during that time. I needed control, I needed someone who could give me a measure of control, who could assure me that everything would be okay, and if that meant I affirmed that infant deaths resulted in more souls in hell, then so be it. Horrifying, but where my soul was is still apparent.<br />
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I then became intrigued with god as a lover. When things got better in my life, I began to be intrigued by these notions of god as a pursuer, god as a gentleman, god as not necessarily a father or even male, but genderless and transcendent, sublime and complete and still wanted me regardless. I was no longer looking for security, I was looking for love. Yet, in my pursuit I found these people broken by something, refusing to be great out of "humility" or some such concept. Time after time, my soul would not resonate with the people I met, and I often felt that they did not believe in the same god I did.<br />
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"We shape our god, and our god shapes us." Rob Bell could not be more right about this. Truly, every experience I have had of god, every spiritual experience has been a resonation with humanity or a realization of some greater reality that I was not conscious of previously.<br /><br />I am sure conservative Christians would read what I write as "he never believed in god to begin with, we should save him by bringing him to our one true expression of Christianity." I've never been a person to conform to a group, and the more right a group thinks they are, the more questions I ask. The more authoritative a leadership figure is, the less I care about what they are saying. Truly, I have a "rebellious spirit."<br /><br />
This is a good thing. People aren't created to be lead, they exist to be what they are, no matter how scary that is to people that are afraid or lonely. Nothing can stand in the way of the truth.<br />
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At some point, one must call a concept what it is. There is no doubt in my mind that two things are true.<br />
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1. There is more to humanity than biology, more to life than the surface of what people deal with every day, and there is something that transcends what we as humans know through current science. We must push forward with every aspect of philosophy, every science and every art, to understand more and come up with more questions.<br />
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2. In the context of church and political history, scientific discovery, and the nature of the "supernatural" (anything beyond our current understanding), if there is a god, he is nothing like the one in any major religion. This is because we shape our god, and when a lot of people choose to shape god the same way, we end up with a religious movement that, if it lasts, will become an established religion. This is nothing more than a psychological phenomenon combined with our adolescence as a race, and none of it proves a god.<br />
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I am, without a doubt, an atheist. I would term myself agnostic as well, because I do not think our race has come to a point of making definitive statements about whether an ultimate deity exists, or even whether there are higher developed life forms which can be considered deities exist.<br /><br />I also know that I will spend a good portion of my life studying the concept of god and learning more about it, studying humanity and learning more about our race's psychological makeup, and making a combination of the two. Like I said, Christianity has put me on this path, and for that I am grateful.<br /><br />Christianity has also lead me to the example of Christ, at once a beneficial and a harmful role model. When I was a child, this shaped me a great deal, and I still respect Jesus as an intriguing and beneficial figure, though not necessarily a historical one by any means. However, my idolization of the hero archetype must now become an intrigued study, for I am no longer a child.<br />
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I am a man, and my former ways are cast off. How terrifying, and what a great adventure.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9121315693857452862.post-26091594717162541612012-11-10T00:32:00.003-05:002012-11-10T01:58:11.442-05:00HellfireI've been on a wonderful and terrible and entirely necessary journey lately, grappling with my transition away from faith. I've wanted to skip to the end of it for a while, to be at the point where I can say I'm well again, but I have to journey through some very painful and very rewarding territory to get there. I haven't written here for a while because of this, and because life has been insane and awesome and beautiful and exciting lately, and admittedly a little terrifying.<br />
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I was raised to fear. One of my most fundamental emotions is that of being afraid, and it's one I have struggled against for my entire life. I've dealt with crippling social anxiety over being afraid of rejection from people, and I've been afraid of failing or, perhaps more commonly, of succeeding. I've been afraid that I will be crushed by those I trust. None of these fears are unwarranted, as the way I grew up contained a lot of very intense experiences involving all of those things. I've even been taught (somehow) that every good thing is a trap that is designed to make you hope, after which it will crush you, and that cynicism is the way to live, with no faith in people, even if they give you every reason to believe in them.<br />
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All of this is terrible, and I'm still processing most of it. However, there was one fear I was taught specifically growing up that I have been grappling with for the past few months.<br />
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I fear what will happen to me after my death. Ever since I've transitioned to faithlessness, I've had haunting memories resurface of vivid descriptions of hell. There is fire everywhere, unquenchable fire that burns you eternally, and it never stops. There is smoke and sulfur, to the extent that the very air you're breathing is poison, but you are not allowed to die, and you are not allowed to go into shock or lose consciousness to escape your torment. You are separated from God, the ultimate authority/parental/guardian figure and the meaning of life, the only source of security for you, and he does not want you. You did not accept him in your 100 (or so) years of life, so he will leave you in agony for eternity.<br />
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The entire notion, I've come to feel for many years, is absurd. The logic I grew up with, "That's what the Bible says," even before losing my faith seemed entirely hollow and meaningless. How could something so implausible be true?<br />
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Yet, when you are told something when you are 6-7 years old, these thoughts don't enter your head. All you can think about is how terrible it is, how much you want to be good and you want God to love you, and how you want to live forever in heaven with him and with angels and all good things and where there is no pain. You make decisions based on the fact that you are terrified over something you have just begun to understand, yet it takes over your brain. It inundates you, and you grow up with it. You learn to hate or love or be angry or vengeful or kind and compassionate based on the things you come to believe.<br />
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I learned fear, and I learned that most of the human race will be tormented for eternity because of their lack of belief in Christ. How could I trust these people? How could I believe anyone when they don't have a moral center, when they don't have a god to please? Isn't morality simply a toss up if someone doesn't believe in God?<br />
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I had emotions, open-mindedness, charity, sexuality, philosophy, science, other cultures, and humanity demonized for me, and I was told that all of my answers lie in a book I tried to read every day and fell asleep doing so. I did not want to go to hell, so I became a fighter against anything that could threaten my and other peoples' faith. I did confrontational evangelism on the streets of Costa Rica as recent as 9 years ago because I thought it was my duty, my way of keeping people from endless torture for eternity.<br />
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Eventually, it came to be framed a different way. In recent years, I stopped believing in a literal hell after I studied the Bible and church history and could only find a solid source for this theology in Dante's Divine Comedy and in a very specific and literal reading of what is admitted to be some of the most metaphorical parts of the Bible by all but the strongest literalists.<br />
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It stopped being about not burning for eternity, and it started being about being in God's Kingdom. I reframed the horrifying vision I'd been taught growing up with one of eternal glory in God's presence, and began speaking of how God courts humanity and is a gentleman, so he will not force man to choose him. Hell became less about eternal pain and torment and more about man choosing himself over God, and living with the consequences of that choice. For this portrayal, see CS Lewis' "The Great Divorce," a beautifully written myth regarding the heaven/hell reality. Heaven became the only place where anything is real and about people being larger and more, and hell became about people shrinking into themselves and becoming small and petty and never going anywhere.<br />
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Like all theology, it's about people.<br />
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Sadly, however, this is only a more palatable version of hell. For instead of flames, there is only cold loneliness. Instead of endless conscious suffering, there is eternal emptiness. Instead of God throwing you there, you choose it yourself, whether you realize it or not. In some ways, this version of hell is more horrifying, because it's something you can no longer be angry at God about, and just as terrible.<br />
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"But Daniel, is the question not whether it's horrifying or not, but whether it's true?"<br />
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Hell is simply inseparable from Christian theology. I've run from this notion for years, and in many ways, I can understand why people get so angry over a book like Rob Bell's "Love Wins." When the doctrine of hell is threatened, the mythology of Christianity loses its' teeth, and fear is no longer a weapon in its' arsenal. Or, to put it another way, what is the point of getting saved if you're being saved from nothing? Does this not make Christ's torture and death meaningless? Meaningless indeed.<br />
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I was 7 when I first learned to fear in the name of hell, and even though I no longer consider myself a Christian, the entire notion still chills me at the most basic level. Because even though I haven't believed in hell per se for years, I am now one of the people that preachers ranted about when I was young. I am a secular humanist, someone who believes homosexuals and women and all people regardless of how different they are are equals. I don't believe in the Bible and I understand the evidence for Evolution and the origin of life. I think the entire notion of hell and scaring people into line with it is absurd.<br />
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Yet still, there is a fear that takes hold of my heart when I even think about it. What if I am wrong? What if I will burn for eternity because I've allowed philosophy and my lack of Christian morality and my own desire to do what I want to delude me from the truth presented in Scripture?<br />
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Scripture, which I don't believe in and is historically the product of a religion that cannot be trusted. Morality, which is demonstrably not from an ancient book and obviously not confined to a single creed, especially considering how bloody and politically cut-throat church history is. Philosophy, which is an inescapable part of life, as natural to humanity as breathing. The entire notion that I will somehow burn in hell is absurd, but fear makes me take it seriously, and it's 27 years of it that I have to somehow come to terms with.<br />
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Like I said, this journey has been wonderful and painful and rewarding and entirely necessary. Be who you are, be intelligent, think critically, and have compassion. Do not let fear dictate your choices.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9121315693857452862.post-88721884881511437522012-10-26T19:19:00.001-04:002012-10-26T19:19:12.037-04:00The Strength of Greatness, Vis-à-vis LoveHow small is a person, and how vast is the truth of our existence, not to mention all of reality itself? We live on a planet that has been around for 4.54 billion years in a universe that is 13.75 (or so) billion years old, with an observable size of approximately 46 billion light years, and it is expanding, possibly into infinity or other universes. We have only begun to comprehend our own reality, our own universe, and it is now theorized that our universe is only one part of reality. We live only a fraction of that time, and even our planet is a tiny, tiny fraction of the totality of our universe, let alone existence.<br />
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On this planet, we kill each other over petty things. We speak of men that lived hundreds or thousands of years ago, become angry at others for not aligning with their teachings, and kill each other. We don't get the smallest bit of our small planet when or how we want it, so we kill the people there and take it. We disagree about things like love, a connection with another person that is both inexplicable and beautiful, and kill or do violence to others because of that. We don't like how other people conduct themselves or we quarrel over how to divide the resources of our speck of cosmic dust, so we kill each other, do violence to each other, and make other peoples' lives miserable. The worst part is that we developed this way.<br />
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Tribal division is ancient and has its' roots in our subconscious. We want to own things, control things and have power, even if in the vastness of the universe the power and control and wealth we do gain are less than meaningless. We create subgroups and fragment ourselves, compete and kill and alienate ourselves from others, but compared to the vastness of the universe, we are all right next to each other. We are all we have, and we are on the verge of annihilating ourselves from the universe instead of discovering new ways to extend our race's life and influence and meaning.<br />
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We have evolved beyond this. It is unstable and unnecessary to get into petty squabbles over stupid things like other peoples' choices (so long as they don't harm others) when we could be encouraging people to find meaning and love and to do great things. We raise our children to hate and be divisive and viciously competitive when we could be encouraging curiosity, discovery, companionship, and respect. We get angry over mythological theory, territorial conflict, ideological problems, and matters of pride, yet we cannot take the time to understand another person's perspective or to appreciate how diverse and fascinating reality is.<br /><br />
Feelings are a window into who a person is, and every person is their own universe. Every person has a world that can be observed, all flowing from that spark of energy that makes them unique. Whether it is a product of instinct and sentient thought and emergent consciousness or whether it's some higher spiritual form of reality that people exist on as well as what we can easily see, every person is a unique exploration of humanity. All are fragments of light, and the more we learn the more we illuminate the fullness of the experience that is humanity.<br /><br />People should be loved, because love creates a greater meaning out of the lesser meanings that are individuals. It is a step toward greatness, and it is why that connection between two people that truly love each other is so beautiful. They become greater than the sum of their parts. It is also why that connection can become terrifying or damaging. People can be run over and hurt and damaged very easily when they love, and they must eventually rise back out of the ashes of their pain, which is a very difficult thing to do. So difficult, in fact, that some people remain in the ashes, constantly grieving and living in the past instead of building on it, reaching for the heights of who they are as a person, and regaining the ability to take the risk that is loving.<br /><br />Humanity is small indeed, but each of us are deeper than an ocean, even if we don't realize it. I choose to be an explorer, and to allow myself to love and be loved, allow for the possibility of pain, and allow for the possibility of greatness, with those individuals I meet who are like me. Anyone can choose this, but they must recognize the necessity of connection and respect being balanced. They must recognize that people are who they are, and they must lose their intentions that take away from that greatness. Power-hunger, pettiness, jealousy, the perceived need to control others, selfishness, lust and greed will only destroy those that go after those things. Live a great life, move beyond yourself.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9121315693857452862.post-51945317347546154132012-10-16T03:45:00.003-04:002012-10-16T03:45:34.124-04:00Bleary and Half-finished, an Intermission and a BeginningIt is not what you do, but who you are that is important, because one's actions flow out of one's heart, out of who one is.<br />
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You can only lie to yourself for so long. Eventually, the truth catches up to you, mirrored in the eyes of those you affect, those you love. Even if you think you are the only victim of what you do, others are inevitably affected. There is no action that is meaningless, and there is no real connection with others that is casual, no matter what the pretense may be. There is always something happening, always a meaning.<br />
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Humans spend a lot of time looking for connection with others. It is perhaps the one thing beyond our existence that we all have in common. For some, the question is why? Why look for connection when it causes so much pain, so much dissonance and there is just so much risk? Is it better not to trust, not to risk, not to even try connecting?<br />
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For some, the question is why not? Why not risk when there is so much to gain? Why not risk, if the reward is that connection one has been looking for? Why hold back, and why stop living?<br />
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Sometimes, people need space. And sometimes, when all we want to do is to connect, we have to learn to give that space, to respect others, and to allow them to be without interfering. Respect and trust create a balance, and that balance is unique to each person.<br />
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When one lies to themselves, they inevitably lie to others. One cannot speak the truth when their heart is full of lies. One need not complicate matters to understand them for what they are, one need only stare the truth in the face, regardless of the cost.<br />
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And yet, when it's all deconstructed, when it all falls down and when we seem to have nothing left, on that ground we can build meaning. We build with our choices, create by deciding, construct by living.<br />
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Thought is very powerful. It has an energy that we cannot yet explain. From our sentience comes our wisdom, our consciousness, and even that is far beyond what we understand. How much greater then, is the mystery of why things sometimes happen in ways that make no sense? How much more is there to discover when simple thought can transform any situation, regardless of whether action is taken on it? When thought itself is an action, we must then acknowledge that everything counts, everything has meaning, everything matters. There is so much yet to discover.<br />
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More relevant than any other time, even an end has a start. Let us move beyond anger and the pain in the world of one man, and begin again. There is so much more.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0