IF GOD EXISTS, THEN HE CERTAINLY DOES NOT CARE FOR YOU AT ALL

[Angrboda]

"You are persuaded of something which is untrue."


I find it telling that two of the videos you share are set to music, when persuasive findings in neuroscience point to music and rhythm being an integral, even foundational part of the religious experience. J. Anderson Thompson in a talk I recently attended suggested that religion began, not as a complex orchestra of beliefs and claims, but as shared rituals of dance and music. And here you are setting the experience of your beliefs to rhythm and music, and apparently finding something special in that, such that you consider these unique musical experiences worth sharing with me and others. In a sense, it would appear that in an attempt to encourage people to leave the religious, you have inadvertently simply created another kind of religious experience.

I say this, not to point out any personal hypocrisy in you — I don't believe that you were aware of these elements, nor had you been aware of them, that you would have made other choices, or if you had not, that then you would have been duplicitous. I don't suspect you of any conscious desire to deceive, nor unconscious malheur. When I was younger, it was not uncommon for people to remark that one of the most important unexplored frontiers was the world's oceans, as they had limitless depth and complexity which due to our limited technology we had only begun to scratch the surface in knowing. That situation hasn't changed much. But alongside the mysteries of the oceans (and the equally profound mysteries of physics and cosmology), I would suggest one has to place the mysteries of the mind and the brain. And when I say 'mystery', I don't mean that in the sense that there are likely effects and mechanisms that explain it which are based in magic and such, but that like any incredibly deep, structured, nuanced, and largely not understood area of reality, wonders will abound, just like the wonders and majesties celebrated in your videos.

You are fascinated by what goes on outside us. I am fascinated by what goes on inside us. And I must confess a bit of feeling insult at your seeming asserting the categorical superiority of your questions, hypotheses and theories to my own, largely only on account that you are confident of the truth of your explorers and those questions, simply because you have confidence in its greater 'truthiness'. (There is something fundamentally religious in that attitude as well.)

"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy."

Indeed, because, I suspect, you have a facile, and, I rather suspect, a largely incorrect mapping of the nature of the mind and brain, and its fundamental importance to these questions. I don't particularly hold this against you, your thinking on these matters is almost stereotypically ordinary. That you scoff at me and my thinking on such matters on the basis of that thinking only gives me pause to reflect that, perhaps you are not very bright, and perhaps my efforts would be greater rewarded by investing the energy and time in explaining myself to a more capable thinker, instead of to you.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aRxd1nuku8g