RE: Can anyone explain how this wasn't God?
January 12, 2012 at 8:35 am
(This post was last modified: January 12, 2012 at 8:37 am by genkaus.)
Pity.
The single, overarching emotion I felt upon reading this wall of text was pity. Even if the entire story is an anti-atheist propagandic piece of fiction, it accurately describes the effect religion has on a person.
Religion (or more accurately, faith) destroys man's rational faculty. It destroys one's ability to reason by telling them to accept things without evidence or examination. Even the rare moments of rationality, like atrophied muscles being spurred into action by intermittent blood flow, do not last and the muscles don't work as they should or could.
Here we have a person who has been taught from the beginning to believe, but not to reason. As a result, he never learned how the process works. When briefly struck by a flash of rationality, he began to question. But never knowing how to question, all he could question were the ideas he could perceive. He could not perceive the ideas underlying those ideas and thus it never occurred to him that they are open to investigation as well.
The result was obvious.
Instead of simple disbelief in the idea of god, he found hatred.
Instead of realizing that now he had to find the meaning of his own life, he assumed that his life had none.
Instead of trying to reason why the drinking, smoking and partying people were happy, he tried to achieve happiness by mimicking their actions.
But reason tolerates no falsification and happiness cannot be made true by faking it. If his capacity for forming new concept was indeed destroyed, he'd have had no choice but to turn to those that were already there. And that is what he did.
The acid trip might have been the catalyzing factor, but the consequence was coming all along. Having shut down his mind, it became easy to accept anything as truth, whether it be a hallucination of god talking or that of the dog talking. Things that a rational mind would reject contemptuously.
While the process of slow smothering of his rationality seems to have started from his childhood, he delivered the final blow by rationalizing his decision to return to faith.
The only thing interesting I see is the phone call from the ex-atheist friend. Though its not much of a stretch. He did not go from starting to doubt to begging god for signs in a matter of minutes. He probably struggled against it on his own for some time. Maybe even wrote on his blog to reaffirm his faith. Coincidentally, Tyler was going through the same process. That Tyler came across his blog while looking for more knowledge on the subject is unsurprising and expected.
What's more the author would have probably seen it as a sign even if Tyler had called three days later, six days later (time of creation) or forty days later.
The single, overarching emotion I felt upon reading this wall of text was pity. Even if the entire story is an anti-atheist propagandic piece of fiction, it accurately describes the effect religion has on a person.
Religion (or more accurately, faith) destroys man's rational faculty. It destroys one's ability to reason by telling them to accept things without evidence or examination. Even the rare moments of rationality, like atrophied muscles being spurred into action by intermittent blood flow, do not last and the muscles don't work as they should or could.
Here we have a person who has been taught from the beginning to believe, but not to reason. As a result, he never learned how the process works. When briefly struck by a flash of rationality, he began to question. But never knowing how to question, all he could question were the ideas he could perceive. He could not perceive the ideas underlying those ideas and thus it never occurred to him that they are open to investigation as well.
The result was obvious.
Instead of simple disbelief in the idea of god, he found hatred.
Instead of realizing that now he had to find the meaning of his own life, he assumed that his life had none.
Instead of trying to reason why the drinking, smoking and partying people were happy, he tried to achieve happiness by mimicking their actions.
But reason tolerates no falsification and happiness cannot be made true by faking it. If his capacity for forming new concept was indeed destroyed, he'd have had no choice but to turn to those that were already there. And that is what he did.
The acid trip might have been the catalyzing factor, but the consequence was coming all along. Having shut down his mind, it became easy to accept anything as truth, whether it be a hallucination of god talking or that of the dog talking. Things that a rational mind would reject contemptuously.
While the process of slow smothering of his rationality seems to have started from his childhood, he delivered the final blow by rationalizing his decision to return to faith.
The only thing interesting I see is the phone call from the ex-atheist friend. Though its not much of a stretch. He did not go from starting to doubt to begging god for signs in a matter of minutes. He probably struggled against it on his own for some time. Maybe even wrote on his blog to reaffirm his faith. Coincidentally, Tyler was going through the same process. That Tyler came across his blog while looking for more knowledge on the subject is unsurprising and expected.
What's more the author would have probably seen it as a sign even if Tyler had called three days later, six days later (time of creation) or forty days later.
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