h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

It seems that most atheists like to picture God as some kind of crazy, disturbed being; a drunk, crazy, uncle we keep locked in the basement. Unfortunately, this comes from a misinterpretation of God's modes of communication. Now don't think I'm getting preachy on you, because, really, I am. As far as Western theology goes, God has to adapt to the times to get his point across. If people who really *enjoyed* animal sacrifice and thought it was the best way to honor people really wanted to do it, why would God stand in their way? If the intention was right, so be it. The love/hate relationship between God and His people that you described is actually just conforming to what the people need. They need a hell to make sure they see a consequence in doing wrong; they need a powerful-looking being to be their leader or they'll lose faith. God probably doesn't care for any of the things described in the Bible; he just uses the crude methods of the time to get his point across.
If you choose not to believe in God or any other Supreme Being, fine, but please don't go around bashing people who do. I apologize for anyone else who decides to persecute you for your belief (or lack thereof).

The problem I tend to encounter is that there is a bunch of atheists going round saying "You Christians/Buddhists/Hindus (take yer pick) are always force-preaching us," but then they seem to be the ones putting their views forward more than anyone else. Ironically, atheists have become religious in their refutation of religion.
Great article by the way.

What if I choose to believe in Quetzlcoatl, the Aztec overgod of crop rotation and thunderstorms? Why would your judeo-christian diety, 'God', deserve preference of consideration? Just because the Aztecs died of horrible plagues when the God-fearing Europeans landed on their shores? That's sort of specious reasoning. It's the 'My God is the true God' conundrum that I find so astoundingly idiotic. One billion hindus couldn't give a crap about your views of God or Hell. Does that mean they are bashing your faith, or is yours ill-considered?

While I agree that atheists tend to be aggressive fideists for the most part, I think it's also true that when members of some orthodox institutionalized belief system talk about their faith, it is accepted as worthwhile behaviour, sort of like discussing the weather. When non-theists try to discuss their views, even casually, it is deemed an 'attack' on other people's faith. Hence atheist aggression. I agree it is a sorry state of affairs.


Please refer to my article on critical rationalism at http://www.h2g2.com/A262739

"If people who really *enjoyed* animal sacrifice and thought it was the best way to honor people really wanted to do it, why would God stand in their way?"

a) because He should have known that it would disgust people later on, and make his name a laughing stock.
b) because animals have rights too. Or at least, they do if you don't base your morals on holy books...

"It seems that most atheists like to picture God as some kind of crazy, disturbed being; a drunk, crazy, uncle we keep locked in the basement."

Not true. I don't like to picture God at all, though sometimes people from religious organisations like to paint a vivid picture of their loving deity and the bed of fire and brimstone I will burn upon if I don't convert sometime before I die.

Later you say that people need hell to realise that their actions have consequences. If these people have lived more than five years, they should realise that their actions do have consequences, and act accordingly. Those who don't typically inhabit prison or caskets. I need no concept of hell; all I need to know is that if I act outside socially acceptable behavior, society will punish me, based on their interpretation of right and wrong; not my own, and not God's.

I do not actively pursue Religion bashing. When I feel that my lack of faith is being imposed upon, I defend it to the best of my ability.

I have no quarel with people who do not tell me how to think.

-jb

Is it possible for two or more people to have a conversation on beliefs without bashing each other or cramming a belief down the other person's throat? The worse thing to do is to try to force someone to believe something. Perhaps the best thing to do is to sit down and try to find the truth together.

The problem arises when we 'believe' things in the first place. Try having opinions instead of beliefs, and you might find yourself learning a lot more. Hope, thought, discussion, reason, and so forth are all much better ways of pursuing answers than a fideist commitment to notions of what is absolute.

Again, the point is not to find what is 'true' but what is meaningful. Truth and falsehood went out the window with Heisenberg's uncertainty principle.

well - Heisenberg just tells us that we can't find the truth or falsehood of everything - he doesn't say that that truth isn't there...

Besides, that principle deals with things on the smallest scale. God has been claimed to be many things, but small isn't one of them.

And I'm sure old Werner himself would have agreed that things are pretty certain on the macro scale. For example, I can't imagine him standing next to an about-to-detonate bomb on the principle that the blast might just happen to all go in the other direction. The reason that the uncertainty principle seems so unintuitive is that it generally has minimal effect on the normal operation of the human-scale world.

Considering TG's post, I suppose things depends by what different people mean by 'belief'. Personally, I'd take it to indicate my current best theory in the area under question, but I'm always open to new evidence, and I try to keep an accurate idea of what other knowledge any particular opinion/theory/belief of mine is based on, and therefore of my confidence in my various opinions. I try to avoid being rigid, as it's a serious barrier to learning.

To that extent, I suppose most of my 'beliefs' could be called 'opinions'. Effectively, the two words are very similar in meaning if we adopt the belief/faith distinction of faith being belief despite the paucity of evidence, or the presence of contradictory evidence.

Some years ago, I did experience complete faith for a few hours until I returned to my senses. I know the feeling of unshakeable certainty, and it's not something I'm hoping to experience again. The way my brain is wired, I feel much more comfortable with a lttle doubt. (Just in case anyone's worried, it was irrational faith in a person, not in any religion )

If opinions / beliefs are both flexible, we can have a discussion. If someone is claiming infallibility, they're good for little apart from the occasional wind-up.

Actually I think you might be underestimating Heisenberg's capacity for mysticism, or at the very least giving him credit for your own interpretation of his theories. Suffice to say that several of his colleagues spent a good deal of time arguing about just how certain things could be said to be on different scales.

You refer to the macro scale as if reality only manifests itself in binary levels of perspective, but I would point out that not only are there innumerable ways of scaling our models of reality, but we human observers do not in fact have direct access to any conceivable macro scale of observation, because of our linear perspective (which according to relativity is a perspective-related subset of "macro-scale" universal being).

That aside, (and in the link mentioned above I have attempted to discuss the relevancy of defining absolutes in our cognitive models of reality) I think a case can be made that if uncertainty did manifest itself on our scale of observation, that we would have a difficult time recognizing it as such. The essential issue here is that, whether one is bouncing photons off of each other, or trying to place one's own sentient processes into total context, our ability to make assertions about reality are limited by our inability to independently verify the usefulness of our methods of gathering such information.

It may be that the human brain has deep structures relating to belief and religionism that override our comparatively tenuous abilities in deductive reasoning. The paths by which we arrive at conclusions seem quite varied, but once most of us have formed an opinion about something we are loathe to see it suffer doubt.

Whitehead once noted that most new ideas that are worthwhile seem at first glance somewhat ridiculous, because they shake up established paradigms. He also noted that very astute thinkers are those who can productively undertake an analysis of the obvious, and are therefore continually in the process of questioning their own paradigms.