RE: God: No magic required
February 1, 2014 at 4:40 pm
(This post was last modified: February 1, 2014 at 5:50 pm by lweisenthal.)
Thanks once again, Max.
I know that you and most others understand that I'm not an Evangelical Protestant or orthodox Catholic, coming here as some sort of agent provocateur to save souls. I am precisely what I've represented myself to be ... a "tolerant theist," which I hope is less inscrutable than the religious views of one of the self-described "more intelligent" members of this discussion group, whose views are (also self-described as) "Outside of a dog, a book is a man's best friend. Inside of a dog it's too dark to read." As an aside, I apologize to Mr/Ms/Dr Intelligent for misinterpreting his/her religious views as being atheistic.
Before addressing your most excellent points, I want to reply to the following rhetorical questions/statements (posted by Asimm and The Reality Salesman):
and
I don't think that I'm terribly different from Max, Asimm, and Reality Salesman -- or, at least, I wasn't until December 2011. I'm ethnically half Ukrainian Jewish/half Finnish Lutheran -- but only by birth. Neither of my parents were religious. I was raised in a secular household. When I was 8 years old, my parents took us to a Unitarian "Church" which met in the cafeteria of Oak Park (Michigan) high school, for only a single year. Unitarians are basically secular humanists, with a vague sense of spirituality. We kids went to their Sunday school, where the only lesson I remember is how to hold a hammer properly when pounding a nail.
When I was 13 years old, my maternal grandmother shipped me off to a Christian summer camp. As a result of this indoctrination (which is what it was), a year later, I had a "true" (it's what it felt like) "born again" experience. On my own, I started going to church. I continued to do this through my first three years of college. Then I stopped, mainly because I just got too busy with my young life.
I got married in 1969 when I was 22, to a 19 year old Catholic. This created a lot of problems and my new wife and I agreed that we'd have a secular married life. Neither of us ever went to church, save for family weddings or funerals, and we raised our kids as secular humanists. I've been to Japan many times and I'm impressed by the Japanese concept of honor. So our only household religion was "honor." Beyond that, we were tree hugging bleeding heart liberal Democrats. And that's the way it remained, until December 2011.
To the outside world, and even to my kids, and even to my wife, I was a pure secular humanist. When I wrote that I "passed" for an atheist, this was only in the context of addressing the argument that the longevity and health disadvantages of an atheist resulted from the "stress" of living in a theist-dominated society. My only point was that the world and my own family considered me to be an atheist, and I never felt the slightest "stress" on account of this. I acknowledge that others may have had different experiences.
Being half-Jewish, and with a Jewish last name, and working in the medical profession, most people also consider me to be Jewish. Thus, I have "passed" for being Jewish (which is an advantage in medicine, both because I have many superb colleagues who are Jewish and because Jewish doctors have a pretty good reputation for competence). I have, however, experienced more "stress" in passing for Jewish (including a particularly nasty, heavy breathing middle of the night threatening phone call) than I ever had in passing for atheist.
On my blog, I describe that I've always had a little bit of "background radiation" from my teenage religiosity. That's all it was. Just a nagging sense that there was a little something beyond my Japanese sense of honor which made me feel bad, when I didn't quite live up to the Japanese honor code. Additionally, as a scientist, I've seen so much certitude in the world of big science (grant review and editorial review boards, etc.) and I've seen the opinion leaders be wrong, time and again, that I've programmed myself to be as open-minded as possible to out of the box thinking.
Getting back to December, 2011, I found myself in the throes of a serious character disorder, which was, as I wrote, refractory to conventional management. I was 64 years old, at the time; so I'd been living in a good marriage with good kids as a secular humanist, in a secular humanist family for 42 years. But I had a problem. This sort of thing happens, in life. Commonly with respect to substance abuse. But there are many other situations where individuals have problems that they can't seem to handle. Bereavement. Unemployment. Financial disaster, with regard to a speculative investment portfolio. The burdens of care giving. A horrible work environment. Divorce and/or separation anxiety. Diagnosis of a serious illness, e.g. cancer. There are a whole lot of things which can drive a person to seek help, from wherever help may be available.
So that's what happened to me. And, I believe, this sort of thing can happen to anyone, and if/when it does, there are demonstrable benefits associated with theism, which have passed the test of time -- as well as passing peer-review, in the medical and psychology literatures.
Anyway, I continue to have the same problems with dogmatic traditional religion as many people here. I have recently come to believe (because of self-experience, described previously) in the existence of a higher order of sentient consciousness, with whom I believe I communicate (suspend eye roll -- I qualify with "I believe"). My faith and "communication" are facilitated by participation in the communal worship services (with other anonymous participants -- I described that I'm not into this looking for friends or even fellowship ... simply a shared worship experience).
I don't truly believe in many of the dogmas and doctrines -- I've never in my life believed in Hell, for example, and I still don't. I don't reject these dogmas and doctrines, and I do follow the "rules" -- just as I'd follow the rules of a private club which I'd voluntarily chose to join, even if said rules really made no sense at all to me. If I couldn't in good conscience follow the rules, I shouldn't (and wouldn't) join the club. But the rules of my particular religion are benign and easy for me to follow, and the religion I chose doesn't demand unshakable belief as a prerequisite -- it simply demands an open heart, which I try to maintain.
But my own particular brand of religion isn't for everyone. I think that most religions are just as "true" as all the others. They are simply akin to radio telescopes, which can be used to tune in to the particular cosmic frequencies used by God.
Note that the particular God with whom I believe I communicate (and who is of inestimable help to me in dealing with the particulars of my own life), may not be precisely the classic omnipotent, omniscient, all good God of the Abrahamic religions.
This brings me to back to the thoughts of Max:
Firstly, I agree entirely with the last two sentences of the first of the above quoted paragraphs. I can't pretend to know the nature of God. If the God who seems to have a personal interest in me is some sort of a Boltzmann Brain, then perhaps he has some particular interest in performing simulation experiments with lower orders of sentient beings on trillions of planets in billions of universes, while the other Boltzmann Brains are content to spend their time playing chess with each other.
I do LOVE the thoughts of the second of the above paragraphs. This is the anthropomorphization of God way of thinking. I do this all the time. It's why I could never previously accept conventional religions. "If I were God, I would never do it this way," for example:
1. If I were God, I would never order Saul to kill all the women, children, and animals in the camps of Saul's enemies, much less punish Saul when Saul decided to show some mercy.
2. If I were God, and I wanted people to be guided by an inerrant Bible, I'd have have it written in said Bible that this is what I wanted (all humanity to use this book to guide their lives), and I'd have left behind at least one authentic original copy which hadn't been subject to later editing, alteration, interpolation, etc.
3. If I were God, I would provide equal opportunity for everyone, with respect to getting to know me. It's not fair to reward a kid who is born into a loving, nurturing, religious family and condemn a kid who's raised in poverty by a single parent unemployed drug addict who basically leaves the kid alone to raise himself/herself.
4. If I were God, I wouldn't sentence someone to roast in Hell for all eternity for excessive masturbation, for grand larceny, or even for murder, for that matter, much less for taking communion in a rival church of a different denomination.
Anyway, what does make at least some sense to me is basically the plot of the Jodi Foster movie, "Contact."
There is this advanced civilization. They send out radio waves (broadcasting a sequence of prime numbers). You've got to be actively listening for this signal to hear it. You've got to build an instrument capable of receiving it (could be a very large array, such as the Catholic Church, with its many convenient branch offices, or it could, in some cases, be literally a "cult," or, in yet other cases, it could be an individual, fine tuning his own internal receiver to the frequency on which God is broadcasting).
Now, once us earthlings have shown some initiative, with regard to making the effort to tune in, God does start to talk to us. As an oncologist, I don't believe that God does physical miracles (such as curing cancer). But God does do mental miracles. He does this all the time. Small miracles. Big miracles. Each miracle increases the strength of the receiver to the frequency of the signal. Why would God do this? Why not? He's God; he can do anything he wants. I could see myself doing something like that, were I God.
I don't really believe in an afterlife, but I can see the plausibility. I can best explain by invoking another cinematic reference. In the Star Trek series, there's something called "The Borg." They are an advanced form of consciousness which exists primarily as pure consciousness, with the ability to assimilate every other (always lower level) consciousness which crosses their path. "We will assimilate you; resistance is futile," is what they tell their victims. With each assimilation, the Borg grows in power and capability. After billions of years of assimilating trillions of consciousnesses on trillions of planets in trillions of stars in billions of galaxies, it just might add up, particularly were God pre-screening those consciousnesses to be assimilated by means of applying a filter to include only those who made the willful effort to communicate their wish to work with God and to ultimately be so assimilated. Or whatever.
<Cue the eye rolls>
This is just thought experimentation, obviously. You asked a rhetorical question ("why would God do that?"). So I just offered a hypothetical (be my guest and call it fanciful) reply, which I conjured up in the past, asking myself the same sorts of questions.
In the end, it's obviously just a matter of faith and belief.
If you are fortunate enough to be young and invincible and with good health and with good relationships and if you don't ever to need to go out on foot patrols in Afghanistan, it's pretty easy to set a very high bar, with regard to the level of proof you require to accept the plausibility of God.
If you ever find yourself unable to handle any one of a hundred types of booby traps which life has a way of encountering, and you really can't handle it on your own, you may well find it helpful to lower the bar, and do something akin to what I did, or find another way to determine if you can tune in to the higher order of sentient consciousness which I and billions others believe to be out there, based on personal experience, and not based on the sort of proof that would ever be convincing to a disinterested outsider.
And if it turns out that you never have any need of God, or else if it turns out that you are such a strong-minded, courageous, and resourceful individual that you can sail through life as an atheist, face life's tribulations as an atheist, and die as an atheist, then Mazel Tov! And I agree with Pope Francis that atheists with good hearts will be assimilated into the heavenly Borg, along with theists with good hearts.
May The Force be with us all.
- Larry Weisenthal/Huntington Beach CA USA
I know that you and most others understand that I'm not an Evangelical Protestant or orthodox Catholic, coming here as some sort of agent provocateur to save souls. I am precisely what I've represented myself to be ... a "tolerant theist," which I hope is less inscrutable than the religious views of one of the self-described "more intelligent" members of this discussion group, whose views are (also self-described as) "Outside of a dog, a book is a man's best friend. Inside of a dog it's too dark to read." As an aside, I apologize to Mr/Ms/Dr Intelligent for misinterpreting his/her religious views as being atheistic.
Before addressing your most excellent points, I want to reply to the following rhetorical questions/statements (posted by Asimm and The Reality Salesman):
Quote: Most of us came from a religious background before becoming an Atheist. We were open to the possibility that god didn't exist, thus questioning our beliefs before coming to our conclusion. Why would we go back to a church for even a trial run when we cancelled our membership from basically the same experiment your implementing.
and
Quote:Without some sort of filter to weed out the nonsense, there is no immunity to deception. You don't believe something because it makes you feel good. That's a bias. You believe something because you think it's true. And it either is, or it isn't. I would be interested if you could show that it's true, whether or not it makes you feel good is of little importance to my epistemology. I am interested in more reliable processes for discovering truth.
I don't think that I'm terribly different from Max, Asimm, and Reality Salesman -- or, at least, I wasn't until December 2011. I'm ethnically half Ukrainian Jewish/half Finnish Lutheran -- but only by birth. Neither of my parents were religious. I was raised in a secular household. When I was 8 years old, my parents took us to a Unitarian "Church" which met in the cafeteria of Oak Park (Michigan) high school, for only a single year. Unitarians are basically secular humanists, with a vague sense of spirituality. We kids went to their Sunday school, where the only lesson I remember is how to hold a hammer properly when pounding a nail.
When I was 13 years old, my maternal grandmother shipped me off to a Christian summer camp. As a result of this indoctrination (which is what it was), a year later, I had a "true" (it's what it felt like) "born again" experience. On my own, I started going to church. I continued to do this through my first three years of college. Then I stopped, mainly because I just got too busy with my young life.
I got married in 1969 when I was 22, to a 19 year old Catholic. This created a lot of problems and my new wife and I agreed that we'd have a secular married life. Neither of us ever went to church, save for family weddings or funerals, and we raised our kids as secular humanists. I've been to Japan many times and I'm impressed by the Japanese concept of honor. So our only household religion was "honor." Beyond that, we were tree hugging bleeding heart liberal Democrats. And that's the way it remained, until December 2011.
To the outside world, and even to my kids, and even to my wife, I was a pure secular humanist. When I wrote that I "passed" for an atheist, this was only in the context of addressing the argument that the longevity and health disadvantages of an atheist resulted from the "stress" of living in a theist-dominated society. My only point was that the world and my own family considered me to be an atheist, and I never felt the slightest "stress" on account of this. I acknowledge that others may have had different experiences.
Being half-Jewish, and with a Jewish last name, and working in the medical profession, most people also consider me to be Jewish. Thus, I have "passed" for being Jewish (which is an advantage in medicine, both because I have many superb colleagues who are Jewish and because Jewish doctors have a pretty good reputation for competence). I have, however, experienced more "stress" in passing for Jewish (including a particularly nasty, heavy breathing middle of the night threatening phone call) than I ever had in passing for atheist.
On my blog, I describe that I've always had a little bit of "background radiation" from my teenage religiosity. That's all it was. Just a nagging sense that there was a little something beyond my Japanese sense of honor which made me feel bad, when I didn't quite live up to the Japanese honor code. Additionally, as a scientist, I've seen so much certitude in the world of big science (grant review and editorial review boards, etc.) and I've seen the opinion leaders be wrong, time and again, that I've programmed myself to be as open-minded as possible to out of the box thinking.
Getting back to December, 2011, I found myself in the throes of a serious character disorder, which was, as I wrote, refractory to conventional management. I was 64 years old, at the time; so I'd been living in a good marriage with good kids as a secular humanist, in a secular humanist family for 42 years. But I had a problem. This sort of thing happens, in life. Commonly with respect to substance abuse. But there are many other situations where individuals have problems that they can't seem to handle. Bereavement. Unemployment. Financial disaster, with regard to a speculative investment portfolio. The burdens of care giving. A horrible work environment. Divorce and/or separation anxiety. Diagnosis of a serious illness, e.g. cancer. There are a whole lot of things which can drive a person to seek help, from wherever help may be available.
So that's what happened to me. And, I believe, this sort of thing can happen to anyone, and if/when it does, there are demonstrable benefits associated with theism, which have passed the test of time -- as well as passing peer-review, in the medical and psychology literatures.
Anyway, I continue to have the same problems with dogmatic traditional religion as many people here. I have recently come to believe (because of self-experience, described previously) in the existence of a higher order of sentient consciousness, with whom I believe I communicate (suspend eye roll -- I qualify with "I believe"). My faith and "communication" are facilitated by participation in the communal worship services (with other anonymous participants -- I described that I'm not into this looking for friends or even fellowship ... simply a shared worship experience).
I don't truly believe in many of the dogmas and doctrines -- I've never in my life believed in Hell, for example, and I still don't. I don't reject these dogmas and doctrines, and I do follow the "rules" -- just as I'd follow the rules of a private club which I'd voluntarily chose to join, even if said rules really made no sense at all to me. If I couldn't in good conscience follow the rules, I shouldn't (and wouldn't) join the club. But the rules of my particular religion are benign and easy for me to follow, and the religion I chose doesn't demand unshakable belief as a prerequisite -- it simply demands an open heart, which I try to maintain.
But my own particular brand of religion isn't for everyone. I think that most religions are just as "true" as all the others. They are simply akin to radio telescopes, which can be used to tune in to the particular cosmic frequencies used by God.
Note that the particular God with whom I believe I communicate (and who is of inestimable help to me in dealing with the particulars of my own life), may not be precisely the classic omnipotent, omniscient, all good God of the Abrahamic religions.
This brings me to back to the thoughts of Max:
Quote:The plausibility of higher orders of sentient consciousness causes me no problem at all. This, however, doesn't mean they exist. Might be nice to meet them but they appear to be hiding. It doesn't mean they are God, merely more advanced. It doesn't mean they are singular - there may be many - of a single origin or of multiple origins.
The problem, however, is, for me, in the idea that they are in any way interested in us, at a species level let alone at an individual level. Further - if they are, why the cloak and dagger routine? Why do they need us to seek them out rather than appearing in our brains as a matter of routine?
Firstly, I agree entirely with the last two sentences of the first of the above quoted paragraphs. I can't pretend to know the nature of God. If the God who seems to have a personal interest in me is some sort of a Boltzmann Brain, then perhaps he has some particular interest in performing simulation experiments with lower orders of sentient beings on trillions of planets in billions of universes, while the other Boltzmann Brains are content to spend their time playing chess with each other.
I do LOVE the thoughts of the second of the above paragraphs. This is the anthropomorphization of God way of thinking. I do this all the time. It's why I could never previously accept conventional religions. "If I were God, I would never do it this way," for example:
1. If I were God, I would never order Saul to kill all the women, children, and animals in the camps of Saul's enemies, much less punish Saul when Saul decided to show some mercy.
2. If I were God, and I wanted people to be guided by an inerrant Bible, I'd have have it written in said Bible that this is what I wanted (all humanity to use this book to guide their lives), and I'd have left behind at least one authentic original copy which hadn't been subject to later editing, alteration, interpolation, etc.
3. If I were God, I would provide equal opportunity for everyone, with respect to getting to know me. It's not fair to reward a kid who is born into a loving, nurturing, religious family and condemn a kid who's raised in poverty by a single parent unemployed drug addict who basically leaves the kid alone to raise himself/herself.
4. If I were God, I wouldn't sentence someone to roast in Hell for all eternity for excessive masturbation, for grand larceny, or even for murder, for that matter, much less for taking communion in a rival church of a different denomination.
Anyway, what does make at least some sense to me is basically the plot of the Jodi Foster movie, "Contact."
There is this advanced civilization. They send out radio waves (broadcasting a sequence of prime numbers). You've got to be actively listening for this signal to hear it. You've got to build an instrument capable of receiving it (could be a very large array, such as the Catholic Church, with its many convenient branch offices, or it could, in some cases, be literally a "cult," or, in yet other cases, it could be an individual, fine tuning his own internal receiver to the frequency on which God is broadcasting).
Now, once us earthlings have shown some initiative, with regard to making the effort to tune in, God does start to talk to us. As an oncologist, I don't believe that God does physical miracles (such as curing cancer). But God does do mental miracles. He does this all the time. Small miracles. Big miracles. Each miracle increases the strength of the receiver to the frequency of the signal. Why would God do this? Why not? He's God; he can do anything he wants. I could see myself doing something like that, were I God.
I don't really believe in an afterlife, but I can see the plausibility. I can best explain by invoking another cinematic reference. In the Star Trek series, there's something called "The Borg." They are an advanced form of consciousness which exists primarily as pure consciousness, with the ability to assimilate every other (always lower level) consciousness which crosses their path. "We will assimilate you; resistance is futile," is what they tell their victims. With each assimilation, the Borg grows in power and capability. After billions of years of assimilating trillions of consciousnesses on trillions of planets in trillions of stars in billions of galaxies, it just might add up, particularly were God pre-screening those consciousnesses to be assimilated by means of applying a filter to include only those who made the willful effort to communicate their wish to work with God and to ultimately be so assimilated. Or whatever.
<Cue the eye rolls>
This is just thought experimentation, obviously. You asked a rhetorical question ("why would God do that?"). So I just offered a hypothetical (be my guest and call it fanciful) reply, which I conjured up in the past, asking myself the same sorts of questions.
In the end, it's obviously just a matter of faith and belief.
If you are fortunate enough to be young and invincible and with good health and with good relationships and if you don't ever to need to go out on foot patrols in Afghanistan, it's pretty easy to set a very high bar, with regard to the level of proof you require to accept the plausibility of God.
If you ever find yourself unable to handle any one of a hundred types of booby traps which life has a way of encountering, and you really can't handle it on your own, you may well find it helpful to lower the bar, and do something akin to what I did, or find another way to determine if you can tune in to the higher order of sentient consciousness which I and billions others believe to be out there, based on personal experience, and not based on the sort of proof that would ever be convincing to a disinterested outsider.
And if it turns out that you never have any need of God, or else if it turns out that you are such a strong-minded, courageous, and resourceful individual that you can sail through life as an atheist, face life's tribulations as an atheist, and die as an atheist, then Mazel Tov! And I agree with Pope Francis that atheists with good hearts will be assimilated into the heavenly Borg, along with theists with good hearts.
May The Force be with us all.
- Larry Weisenthal/Huntington Beach CA USA
