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

Here in the US of A there just isn't the level of discourse going on as I happily find here.

Here's an op/ed from the NYT, an increasingly rare point of view over here in Christian Amerika: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/12/opinion/12zizek.html?incamp=article_popular

And here's something I wrote at http://slancha.blogspot.com/ out of frustration about the way my country is screwing up again:

Most "believers" are certain they are right about their religion's superiority over "heathen" faiths, it seems. Yet it strikes me that the very creed they think is so self-evidently true beyond dispute is almost always a faith not that they came to through a personal process of discovery, but rather one that they contracted from their parents. Most believers can and will point out the obvious fallacies, oddities, and untenable flaws in other belief systems, whether it's the Mormons' hysterical cosmology, the oft-mocked membership rewards for joining the Islamic martyrdom club, or the completely arbitrary and anachronistic process for the canonization of Catholic saints. My parents grew up in an Ireland full of division and hate which was due in large part to the prognostications of Protestant ministers and powerful priests of the Catholic Church, both parties convinced that their God was the right one, and that the other persuasion was heretic evil. I was tortured by the Sisters of Mercy from Galway, who stuffed their fearful and bigoted beliefs into small, defenseless children with a medieval vengeance. And of course I learned that the Lutherans were a little strange, the Jews dammed for killing Jesus, the others were basically primitives.

I read today about Sunni and Shia tearing each other apart, Texas fundamentalist evangelicals waiting for the the Jews to die in a lake of fire for not accepting Jesus (and for the Temple to be rebuilt so that old prophesies might be completed), Sikhs murdering Hindus killing Sikhs over yet more holy real estate, and endless other examples of "people of Faith" wishing ill upon their fellow human beings based on the religions they were born into. I find myself daydreaming that all the fundamentalists--the Mahdi's Army, the JDL, the Lord's Army, Osama and Falwell and Kahane-types and their equivalents from the various traditions would all go into a cave somewhere, fight it out, and just leave us all alone. Religious feelings aren't accountable for all violence in the world, but the pogroms and jihads and crusades of all times have in large part been fueled by "Our God compels us to convert or destroy you", and it continues today, sometimes a bit more subtly, sometimes not. Religion is used as a way of separating. Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities, said Voltaire. And it is absurd that any religion is true.

In other less overt ways, religion also destroys life and warps attitudes. By compelling the child and the adult to adapt and contort their naked and direct experience of the Reality behind everyday reality, religion's function is to strengthen the very subjective, culturally-bound, and often mundane goals of ordered tradition. It acts as a control. Each religious tradition has evolved elaborate, self-referential cosmologies with restrictions and theologies and taboos all meshing into a complete how-to-live package, which can stave off the the most jagged terrors of existence and death for an individual, but which is a lie. It's a lie that conveniently has always had the function of giving privilege to some and consigning others to marginal lives.

Although there are undeniably beautiful elements in all traditions, such as the Catholic Church I was brought up in, the indoctrination most often twists and filters the individual's impulse toward the Divine. He is so brainwashed he can't recall a time when he looked at the big picture with his own eyes. The devils and demons keep him on the straight and narrow. He has long suspended his own critical thinking and understanding from his personal experience and judgement (which, unsurprisingly, are accounted for in the theologies as prideful illusion), and he craves the certainty of his group's dogma and its infallible holy book. The stage is set to make others heathen, to objectify them as being unworthy and against God's will. Of course, they've done the same. And so we have mutually exclusive arrested development. And war.

Religion is childishness, a "Bronze Age leftover" as evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins nails it so well in a recent UK production (which really couldn't be made and distributed widely in the U.S. anymore). Like so many others, I feel organized religion is a crutch which someday humanity will leave behind, as it has so many others. Like others, I want a future in which people will choose their own way of honoring the greater intelligence, based not on a clinging to a received culturally-arbitrary fear of the Void, but rather based on their direct and personal experience--perhaps borrowing metaphors from the traditions to celebrate what can't be described, but not enslaved by the generally silly literal violent tenets of the ancient tribal belief systems we call religion. And if some choosing to deny God because that is where their search leads them, as long as they respect others' choices to believe they will be welcome in our democracy.

Dawkins is arrogant with his interviewees, and as an atheist he doesn't distinguish between organized religion and spirituality. He's such a reductionist that he sees no evidence for a primal force, so can't abide agnosticism, let alone those of us who know there is a Creator but also know that religion is a big lie. The BBC4 film (which can be easily downloaded via BitTorrent) had the great virtue of getting to the main underlying need that religion addresses--the fear that we can't choose good without the wrath of God to keep us honest. And he's also spot-on in describing the damage done by this virus, which is transferred to children before they have a chance to think for themselves. His views are not anything new, they're just the current version of an old critique. But they need to be out there in the marketplace of ideas, especially in these times of growing darkness and competing religious fanaticisms when a President subscribes to the myth of Armageddon and right wing nutters are bent on "Christianizing" our democracy.

Although we seem to be going down the wrong path as a culture by appealing to the worst in our enemies and ourselves, I hope someday we'll leave this fearfulness behind, and that the world can be one camp of humans who think and feel for themselves, not divided into the blessed and the dammed dependent on what barbaric belief system their parents force-fed them (as they were force-fed before). Of course I would defend anyone's rights to believe in whatever nonsense they wanted to when it doesn't infringe on our democratically-derived laws. But just as nationalism has got to go (the only real nation is humanity, after all), organized religion is an unneeded and actively harmful relic of our ugly past, and I hope we evolve out of it. Every month we seem to be moving more and more the other way, tearing down the wall between church and state. Just another beautiful and precious thing about our democracy that we're losing in our culture's headlong embrace of fundamentalism and stupidity. Who would have thought it?

Welcome to the club

<..those of us who know there is a Creator>

Can you provide both definition and proof?

Baiting newbies, Tal?

Welcome, FF!

Pattern-chaser

"Who cares, wins"

You're just jealous 'cause I beat you to it.

'And it is absurd that any religion is true.'

'The stage is set to make others heathen, to objectify them as being unworthy and against God's will. Of course, they've done the same.'


'Religion is childishness, a "Bronze Age leftover"...'

You see that a personal conviction that there is a great maker through ones own experiences of spirituality is a faith, a dogma - a religion of one man. It's still a hangover from the ancester worship that mutated and contracted into the belief in one originator of creation.

The enlightenment that organised religion is a control on the masses is only the first step before realising that personal spirituality of the kind you describe is an internalised control of the fear and emptyness one might feel if you a step further and accept that there is no great designer, no purpose to existence beyond the enjoyment of one life lived.

No, I can't (give definition or proof), or possibly only in the vaguest terms. Recognizing my limited intellect, I only claim to have a knowing that there is something that is of greater intelligence that has created infinitely complex patterns all around me. I think and feel it's non-verbal, this knowing, and pre-verbal, and I don't presume to have any idea what it is, this pattern-maker. Whether it's a single being or a pantheon or nothing describable at all is really irrelevant, I think, because whatever "it" is is much too complex for me to wrap my pea brain around. The thing I say I "know" is of infintely greater importance.

This doesn't create a desire within me to worship, or to construct a cosmology (or dogma). It does function to give me a sense of tranquility, though I'd give that up if I felt my "knowing" wasn't true. I can't defend it rationally, and I'm only happy that it isn't channeled and bastardized by organized religion.

Thanks for your welcomes! I'm enjoying h2g2 on my little PDA.

I suspect few here would or even could deny transcendence.
A casual glance at the starry night sky usually will suffice

If this is what you mean by 'non-verbal' or 'pre-verbal' knowing, perhaps a few would argue, but likely I would not.

It is not, I think, unreasonable to believe reality, although perhaps ultimately un-describable, is not inconsistent, because there seems to me to be fairly compelling evidence this is so.

Therefore, inconsistency results when the existence of a transcendent personalized agent is proposed.
Even if secondary characteristics of this 'creator' remain undefined, the assumed implicit characteristics exhibit unresolveable contradictions.

I remain unconvinced the existence of a 'personal' god/gods; a 'super-agency', etc., can be consistent with the perceived rules of reality.

Transcendence is evident all around and within. What more do we need?
Or, as the man said, "Isn't it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?"

Nice post, Tal.

*waves to Forestflyer*



az

"I remain unconvinced the existence of a 'personal' god/gods; a 'super-agency', etc., can be consistent with the perceived rules of reality."

I agree, and I wouldn't argue for the existence of god/s on that basis.

However...this is a bit I wrote today as part of a reasonable thread on Dawkins' The Theology of the Tsunami that I came across here: http://onegoodmove.org/1gm/1gmarchive/2006/05/richard_dawkins_3.html

While I'm not a "believer", I admit the possibility that there is some reasoning going on that isn't available to my understanding, to my limited intellect. Just because science can't "prove" the existence of a greater intelligence of course does not mean that some kind of directed force doesn't exist.

Whether anyone's faith is a prehistoric remnant, based in the need for the archetypal father-figure is neither here nor there. (I agree that this is what it is, but so what?) The fact is that, independent of the deluded who mediate the gods for the masses and of the drugged masses themselves, science can't know, you can't know whether there is a complex intelligence around independent of the machinery of nature.

"Scientists" ought to have that humility. It's easy to clearly decimate the bull that is organized religion. It's harder to see past the damage that this "virus" (as Dawkins calls it) has done and admit that it can't be proven one way or the other. Why do you need certainty when we clearly don't have the tools to know the answer?

I think a lot of adherents of Atheism are blind to their own emotional reaction to the folly of religion, and to their need to be detached from the possibility of a kind of system outside the reach of the senses and the scientific method.

>While I'm not a "believer", I admit the possibility that there is some reasoning going on that isn't available to my understanding, to my limited intellect. Just because science can't "prove" the existence of a greater intelligence of course does not mean that some kind of directed force doesn't exist.<

According to the Scientologists, we humans are some kind of by-product of evil aliens engaging in an inter-galactic battle.

While there is always the possibility our existence is the result of some unfathomable alien science experiment gone horribly wrong the fact remains the theist notion of a 'supreme being' is inherently meaningless.

A 'super-natural' entity cannot, by definition, affect the known universe, because it must exist outside of the universe. A God which transcends space and time, has no body, and yet performs actions that affect things in space and time, is nothing more than a massive contradiction.

For another thing, the idea of an intelligent creator simply pushes the problem back one step: Who created the creator?

Also, the typical 'definition' of god includes such contradictions as 'omnipotent' and 'all-knowing', which characteristics a 'person' cannot, by definition, have.

Lesser gods there may be, but a supreme one is simply not possible.

Enjoy the garden. Stop looking for fairies at the bottom of it.

And here's a darn good read another researcher posted recently on another thread: http://www.biota.org/people/douglasadams/

I'm not sure I understand what you mean by transcendence, it can mean just about anything from a gods major and minor to a universal truth, 42, a spirituality beyond mere awareness or the what makes humans rather interesting - that appear to be aware of ourselves.

What do I mean by transcendence?

Simply the perception that the unity of existence is a boundless totality.

Thoughts, words, descriptions, etc are necessarily limited. However, despite faulty perceptions, beyond preconceptions, the actual experience-ing of the present, timeless moment includes myself, and all others, simultaneously. Transcendence brings me 'out of myself', for that timeless moment, and I assume it does so for others. Why else do we have music and art?

That is why I mentioned glancing at the star-filled night sky, (although it happens to be raining madly here at the moment!)

A beautiful sunset, a flower, a beach pebble, Euclid's proof; any or all of these may evoke the feeling of transcendence.

I would hesitate to uncritically include ill-defined and erroneous inventions as personified gods, because I think such are more likely the result of wishful thinking, perceptual aberration, or even neural malfunction. What I mean by transcendence typically excludes 'visions', spiritual or otherwise, but rather is to be found in what we normally regard as the mundane.

I look at a star filled sky feel wonderment that turns to terror, I know that the reality [all that exists regardless of any beings persception] that surrounds me began and will end, the time relative and finite that all aspirations and desires and achievemnts will be humbled before the force of change and destruction and that I am a transitory pin-prick of information that will be lost to an unconcious oblivion.

>I know that the reality [all that exists regardless of any beings persception] that surrounds me began and will end,..<

You are quite certain of this?

Sorry. Local reality certainly, the universe, ultimate reality, I expect will undergo an unrecognisable change of state that will mean the loss of all information that preceded it and will be the end of what began. I can not say with certainty that 'all that exists regardless of any beings persception' will come to one final end that is absolute.
Forgive me, I've not slept for some time and am not thriving on it.

Get some sleep, my friend.

We can discuss this later, if you like