semiprometheus (![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} semiprometheus) wrote,@ 2007-10-06 02:13:00 |
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A Profession of No Faith
Recently I've been reading a lot of skeptical and atheist blogs: The Friendly Atheist, the James Randi Educational Foundation, the Skeptic magazine website (and its magazine, to which I subscribe), P. Z. Myers's blog and the "Bad Astronomy" blog, as well as the clever if angry Chick Tract "Dissections" on Enter The Jabberwock.
Apart from entertainment value and moments of deploring our nation's critical thinking skills, they've prompted me to sort out my own attitudes toward religion, and towards religions' subject matter. No, I am not about to accept Jesus as my personal Lord and Savior. Nor Buddha, nor Muhammad, nor L. Ron Hubbard. Quite the contrary: for a while I've been calling myself an agnostic, when I'm about as agnostic as Elton John is bisexual. At this point in my life I consider myself 99 and 44/100ths percent atheist, with the other 0.66% willing to consider the existence of a Supreme Being, First Mover, or what-have-you ... except for the concept of God as presented in all the Abrahamic religions (Judaism, Islam, and nearly every branch of Christianity).
Back in high school -- a Jesuit-run high school, mind -- my apostasy bloomed into a weird concoction I termed "Pantheistic Deism", which I even wrote a five-page paper on for a religion class. (Sadly, the religion teacher wanted to show it to others; in my paranoid dreams it's locked in a secret basement in the Vatican, but realistically it probably just got binned.) It combined the Deist concept of a God who set the universe in motion and didn't interfere with it further, with an Alan Watts-esqe view of Eastern religion where what we call mere matter is in fact an aspect or a manifestation of God. One of my analogies was with a fiction writer: his characters, props, and settings are really parts of his own mind, but within the context of the story they are separate entities with their own motives and identity. And, like a terrestrial author, this "Divine Author" must make the behaviors of this (to him) imaginary world logically consistent and plausible, or the story falls apart.
I mention this mainly to give my readers (yes, both of them) a good laugh. However, these two views -- a god intimately tied to the universe, and wholly separate from it -- illustrate my intellectual revolt against miracles, revealed religions, and supposedly infinite beings who sound like petty tyrants or spoiled children.
My modern argument against an Abrahamic God is simple: Omniscient, Omnipotent, Loving/Merciful -- pick two. If God is omniscient and omnipotent, then he's not Loving or Merciful because, well, Darfur. If God is loving and/or merciful and omniscient but not omniscient, how much does he know? How can we get his attention? Prayer does bugger all, at least in a double-blind test. If God is loving and/or merciful and omniscient but not omnipotent, we've got the same problem: there's little we can do, prayer doesn't seem to make a difference, and we're still clearly on our own down here.
Yes, this is hardly original. Yes, I've heard most if not all of the standard counter-arguments: "God is like a man in a high building watching an accident", "God gave us free will and lets us exercise it", "God does answer prayers, but sometimes the answer is no", blah blah blah. Even factoring in the people who claim to have witnessed miracles, from what I can tell the only difference the existence of God would make is that when you die you'll go to Hell unless you pick the right belief system and the right moral code from the hundreds or thousands preached by Jews, Muslims, and Christians. Or rather, Orthodox Jews, Conservative Jews, Reform Jews, Hasidic Jews, Shi'a Muslims, mainstream Sunni Muslims, Wahabist Muslims, Orthodox Christians, mainstream Roman Catholics, American Roman Catholics, Roman Catholics who reject Vatican II, Anglicans, Methodists (of various denominations), Episcopalians (of various denominations), Baptists (of various denominations), Lutherans (of various denominations), ... you get the idea.
Occam's Razor, man. Pick the simplest explanation that fits the evidence. Since I can't find concrete, external evidence for God, I've decided to carry on as if God doesn't exist.
And yes, you can be a moral person without the threat of Hell after death. What about the threat of making this life more hellish, for example? The Golden Rule still makes sense, even if the person who said it was just a man.
(Aside: I remember being told that at least some Muslims have/had no concept of a soul that survives death. Rather, at Judgement Day, God will resurrect everyone, and consign the atheists, apostates, unrepentant sinners, and other ungrateful ones to eternal punishment. Apart from the sheer cruelty, it would be less effort just leave them dead, right? Plus, is the resurrected version of me consigned to everlasting hellfire the same person who's typing this sentence, or just a poor shmuck with my memories dropped into his head and suffering in my place? Just an errant thought.)
Recently I've been reading a lot of skeptical and atheist blogs: The Friendly Atheist, the James Randi Educational Foundation, the Skeptic magazine website (and its magazine, to which I subscribe), P. Z. Myers's blog and the "Bad Astronomy" blog, as well as the clever if angry Chick Tract "Dissections" on Enter The Jabberwock.
Apart from entertainment value and moments of deploring our nation's critical thinking skills, they've prompted me to sort out my own attitudes toward religion, and towards religions' subject matter. No, I am not about to accept Jesus as my personal Lord and Savior. Nor Buddha, nor Muhammad, nor L. Ron Hubbard. Quite the contrary: for a while I've been calling myself an agnostic, when I'm about as agnostic as Elton John is bisexual. At this point in my life I consider myself 99 and 44/100ths percent atheist, with the other 0.66% willing to consider the existence of a Supreme Being, First Mover, or what-have-you ... except for the concept of God as presented in all the Abrahamic religions (Judaism, Islam, and nearly every branch of Christianity).
Back in high school -- a Jesuit-run high school, mind -- my apostasy bloomed into a weird concoction I termed "Pantheistic Deism", which I even wrote a five-page paper on for a religion class. (Sadly, the religion teacher wanted to show it to others; in my paranoid dreams it's locked in a secret basement in the Vatican, but realistically it probably just got binned.) It combined the Deist concept of a God who set the universe in motion and didn't interfere with it further, with an Alan Watts-esqe view of Eastern religion where what we call mere matter is in fact an aspect or a manifestation of God. One of my analogies was with a fiction writer: his characters, props, and settings are really parts of his own mind, but within the context of the story they are separate entities with their own motives and identity. And, like a terrestrial author, this "Divine Author" must make the behaviors of this (to him) imaginary world logically consistent and plausible, or the story falls apart.
I mention this mainly to give my readers (yes, both of them) a good laugh. However, these two views -- a god intimately tied to the universe, and wholly separate from it -- illustrate my intellectual revolt against miracles, revealed religions, and supposedly infinite beings who sound like petty tyrants or spoiled children.
My modern argument against an Abrahamic God is simple: Omniscient, Omnipotent, Loving/Merciful -- pick two. If God is omniscient and omnipotent, then he's not Loving or Merciful because, well, Darfur. If God is loving and/or merciful and omniscient but not omniscient, how much does he know? How can we get his attention? Prayer does bugger all, at least in a double-blind test. If God is loving and/or merciful and omniscient but not omnipotent, we've got the same problem: there's little we can do, prayer doesn't seem to make a difference, and we're still clearly on our own down here.
Yes, this is hardly original. Yes, I've heard most if not all of the standard counter-arguments: "God is like a man in a high building watching an accident", "God gave us free will and lets us exercise it", "God does answer prayers, but sometimes the answer is no", blah blah blah. Even factoring in the people who claim to have witnessed miracles, from what I can tell the only difference the existence of God would make is that when you die you'll go to Hell unless you pick the right belief system and the right moral code from the hundreds or thousands preached by Jews, Muslims, and Christians. Or rather, Orthodox Jews, Conservative Jews, Reform Jews, Hasidic Jews, Shi'a Muslims, mainstream Sunni Muslims, Wahabist Muslims, Orthodox Christians, mainstream Roman Catholics, American Roman Catholics, Roman Catholics who reject Vatican II, Anglicans, Methodists (of various denominations), Episcopalians (of various denominations), Baptists (of various denominations), Lutherans (of various denominations), ... you get the idea.
Occam's Razor, man. Pick the simplest explanation that fits the evidence. Since I can't find concrete, external evidence for God, I've decided to carry on as if God doesn't exist.
And yes, you can be a moral person without the threat of Hell after death. What about the threat of making this life more hellish, for example? The Golden Rule still makes sense, even if the person who said it was just a man.
(Aside: I remember being told that at least some Muslims have/had no concept of a soul that survives death. Rather, at Judgement Day, God will resurrect everyone, and consign the atheists, apostates, unrepentant sinners, and other ungrateful ones to eternal punishment. Apart from the sheer cruelty, it would be less effort just leave them dead, right? Plus, is the resurrected version of me consigned to everlasting hellfire the same person who's typing this sentence, or just a poor shmuck with my memories dropped into his head and suffering in my place? Just an errant thought.)
