I'm pondering getting a tattoo. In fact, there are only two reasons I haven't done so yet. The first is cultural: I'm effectively a yuppie, and the yuppie class in England tends to look down on tattoos. I personally don't hold this opinion, but would I find myself in awkward situations with my peers?
The second reason is metaphysical: I'm not sure what tattoo to get. I feel like, if I start getting needled, my tat(s) should have some sort of theme to them. For example, in Robin Hobb's "Liveship Traders" trilogy, one of the characters gets a tattoo each time he has had insanely good luck. In XMen 2, one of the characters gets a tattoo for every sin. My guiding philosophy is an obsession with reality, so my approach to tats should probably reflect this.
The problem I have is that, as a reality-obsessive, any conclusion I draw about reality would be purely provisional. In other words, it's possible that I'd change my stance later - in which case I'd have to get the tattoo erased. So how about this for an idea: I get a tattoo only when I'm confident enough about my stance that I am willing to take the risk of erasure? Then, when someone asks me how sure I really am about X, I can say "this sure" and point to the symbol of X tattooed on my skin.
This would have an additional psychological benefit. One of the biggest problems that I have is a tendency to revisit old intellectual stomping grounds long after I should have just let the subject drop. If I am truly confident enough to get a tattoo, that will serve as a constant reminder that, absent any major new discoveries, I've done my due diligence and can quit wasting my valuable time.
At this point in my life, I hold two positions that fit the bill perfectly. The first is atheism, for which I would tend to go for the symbol described here (because I'm a maths geek and I love it). The second is evolutionary biology. I'm not entirely sure what to use for this - possibly the Darwin fish?
As an aside, I'd note that any theists or creationists who feel they have a solid reason for belief in God should speak now or forever hold their peace. After I get these tats, Mr Evangelism Target will have left the building.
Monday, December 03, 2007
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14 comments:
Hey Lifewish! Surfed on over from Amanda's.
Do you really consider yourself an Evangelism Target? I had thought your vigorous arguments against belief in God came from an already settled position.
Are you really on the fence about the whole thing?
Are you really on the fence about the whole thing?
My current stance is: I'm a skeptical atheist, which means I'm atheistic by default due to lack of good reasons to believe in God.
The important thing about this is that it is not a "stable" position - a very small amount of good-quality evidence could cause me to change my conclusion. This doesn't cause me any sleepless nights because, to a skeptic, beliefs are merely a side-effect of what we consider to be "good" evidence. I just make sure my standards of evidence are solid and, if that leads me to religion, then so be it. So far it hasn't.
(I know it comes across like I'm a very staunch, very vocal atheist. Would you believe that I'm mostly hoping someone will put up a good counterargument?)
The problem I'm hitting here is pragmatic: I'm spending so much time and effort checking and rechecking the evidence that it's biting heavily into my free time. There are hundreds of religions, and thousands of different arguments presented for believing in them, and I need to accept that there's no way I can review them all. But I'm constantly revisiting the subject in the vain hope that the next discussion I have will provide a rational reason for belief.
Basically I need to snap out of that habit - it's getting obsessive. Obviously if anyone presents me with a good reason for belief, I'll revise my stance. The tattoo would just be a private recognition that I think it's unlikely this will happen.
Do you mind if I ask why you are hoping someone will have a good argument for God?
Do want there to be a God?
Saying yes doesn't mean you are admitting there is one, I am just curious about what it is that makes you personally undecided and ambivalent.
You sort of took me by surprise.
I'm not entirely sure why I'm so frantic to see if God can be shown to exist. One reason is that it genuinely freaks me out to think of so many people believing in God without a good reason. It gives me this weird sensation of vertigo.
Another reason is that my atheism's credibility rests largely on how much effort I put into trying (and failing) to disprove it. For that reason, if someone says "I can prove God", ignoring them would actually damage my atheism. Responding to every crank on the internet is bloody exhausting. I feel like if God existed then I'd be able to stop straining my brain.
A third reason is that I just enjoy being proven wrong - it's usually the more interesting option. For that reason if nothing else, I'm usually slightly ambivalent about everything - it's cool that we know X, but it would be even cooler if X turned out to be drastically wrong.
A fourth reason is force of habit. When you study maths (as I used to), you tend to assume that, if you bang your head against an intellectual brick wall for long enough, either the wall will break or your skull will. Either you prove your theorem to everyone else's satisfaction, or you disprove it to your own satisfaction. It's surprisingly hard for me to accept that the non-academic world doesn't work like that.
My actual motivation may or may not be one of these. The only thing I'm fairly sure of is that I don't have any emotional desire for God to exist - it's all intellectual. And, at this point in my life, it seems like those intellectual desires are as fulfilled as they're ever going to get.
...unless, of course, you have any thoughts on why belief is a good thing? Even at this stage, I still can't stop myself hoping.
hehe..yeah...like I have the ultimate convincing argument! ;-)
I don't think that there is anything I could intellectually prove to you about God, or an argument I could make that would suddenly split the the heavens open for you.
Philosophers and thinkers have been plugging away at this for thousands of years. To think that I am suddenly going to have the argument for God, that surpasses all the others, would be over-reaching on my part.
That being said, I think you might be setting the conditions for belief too high. Is the intellect important? Absolutely. If we are ruled by sheer emotion we can do and believe all kinds of really strange things that do damage to us and those around us.
Belief in God is not about scientific proof of His existence. It is a relational and experiential belief.
I "believed" there was such a thing as a God probably all during my childhood, but what did that mean to me? Not much. It was just something that I thought must be, like black holes and comets. It didn't have any true meaning for me, impact on my life, or prominence in my thoughts.
If someone would have asked me if I "believed in God", I would have said ,"Um..I guess," and then continued on with what I was doing. It didn't really mean anything to me.
I came to really believe in God right before my 17th birthday.(wow...I'm getting old!) It was at that time that He became very real to me, and I became a Christian.
I experienced Him in a way that I couldn't understand Him. Of course, you could say that maybe my brain chemicals were all mixed up and it was all in my head, but it was more than just a singular experience. I became a very different person. My personality was the same, but the things I wanted out of life, the way I viewed other people, the acceptance of myself that I experienced was transformative. There have been moments in my walk that I have had "experiences" in which I sensed God, but even without those, my life is qualitatively different than what it had been and what it would have been.
I know...that's not an intellectual argument for God.
I would ask...at what point would you allow experience to inform your views? IS there ever a time when you could imagine believing something..not just about God either....for which you have no "hard" proof?
Do you see any value in the other parts of your being besides the intellect? Do emotion, longing, relationship, have any intrinsic value in a human other than to further survival of the species?
I would say they do. I would say they are part of what makes a human being human, and to completely cut off or ignore that part of your being creates internal conflict.
Believing something you can never fully hold is scary, daunting and may seem a little crazy. But, that's the nature of relationships. We enter that unpredictable state of being not just in relation to God, but with family, friends and lovers.
The realm of belief largely inhabits that part of our being rather than an esoteric thought system.
Yikes...here I am blathering on. I should have just done a post instead of using this tiny comment box.
I'll stop for now, but I am interested in what you think about what I've said.
That being said, I think you might be setting the conditions for belief too high.
The problem I have is that, if I made my net of reason even a fraction coarser, every fish in the sea would slip through it. There is no standard of belief that will support belief in Christianity without supporting belief in (for example) Islam equally strongly. These beliefs are obviously contradictory.
As a skeptic, I don't choose between beliefs; I choose between reasons for belief, and let my beliefs follow naturally from that. If my standard of evidence permits contradictions of this sort then the skeptical mindset becomes impossible to hold. As far as I can tell, any standard that disallows contradictions also disallows theism in general and Christianity in particular.
In other words: if I were to believe in Christianity then, to retain my intellectual honesty, I would also have to believe in Islam, Hinduism, Mormonism, Sikhism, Buddhism, Scientology, Wicca, Pagan Reconstructionism, Satanism, Taoism, Gnosticism and Hare Krishna. And that's just from reading titles off the books I have on my "religion" bookshelf. I couldn't believe in all of that without my brain exploding.
Of course, you could say that maybe my brain chemicals were all mixed up and it was all in my head, but it was more than just a singular experience.
I'd actually tend not to say that because, as far as I can tell, that statement would adequately describe everything that makes us human, including my propensity to write these words.
What I would say is that, after conducting a fairly wide-ranging literature review, it seems that the transformation you experienced would have occurred regardless of your specific beliefs. I've come across stories of moslems, hindus, buddhists, sikhs, mormons and (believe it or not) atheists who all describe similar experiences. Your experience was focused on God, but it seems likely to me that this was a mere side-effect of your personal circumstances at the time.
For example, consider this poem (translated from the original Punjabi):
"Beloved friend, beloved God, Thou must hear
Thy servant's plight when Thou art not near.
The comfort's cloak is a pall of pest,
The home is like a serpent's nest.
The wine chokes like the hangman's noose,
The goblet rim is an assassin's knife,
But with Thee shall I in adversity dwell.
Without Thee, life of ease is life in Hell."
When I read that I thought "good grief, that's precisely what Christians have been describing to me for years". But the poem was written by a 17th-century Sikh, whose views would have horrified most modern Christians. Same emotion, different focus.
I would ask...at what point would you allow experience to inform your views? IS there ever a time when you could imagine believing something..not just about God either....for which you have no "hard" proof?
I have many beliefs for which I have no hard proof. But they're all labelled "speculative" and, if they don't hold up when subjected to leisurely scrutiny, I discard them.
If they survive this scrutiny, I gradually move them into my core belief set. My long-term ideal is to give each belief precisely the respect it deserves - no more, no less.
Believing something you can never fully hold is scary, daunting and may seem a little crazy. But, that's the nature of relationships.
I recall hearing about a friend of a friend who had an online girlfriend. She filled his head with a variety of completely implausible stories about herself, and managed to come up with truly bizarre excuses for never being able to meet him. The consensus of this guy's friends was that his "girlfriend" didn't actually exist - she was merely some asshole's way of messing with his head.
I accept that relationships are inherently slightly nuts. But it takes two to make a relationship; if only one person sees it as a relationship, then what you have is really just a form of abuse. If the other person doesn't even exist then it's hard for the relationship to be anything else.
Yikes...here I am blathering on. I should have just done a post instead of using this tiny comment box.
It was really interesting "blathering". Please keep doing it. You're far more honest about your beliefs than most people I've spoken to.
The majority of believers see rationality as a pretty bauble, a prize to be claimed on behalf of their beliefs. To someone who values rationality in its own right, it's painful to watch them rape this poor innocent concept. It's unbelievably refreshing to speak to someone who doesn't try to claim that their views are more rational than they actually are. Mi casa es su casa.
In other words: if I were to believe in Christianity then, to retain my intellectual honesty, I would also have to believe in Islam, Hinduism, Mormonism, Sikhism, Buddhism, Scientology, Wicca, Pagan Reconstructionism, Satanism, Taoism, Gnosticism and Hare Krishna.
I don't get why you say you would have to believe all these.If you began to believe that there was some sort of God, the next step would be to examine those religions and sift through the validity of their beliefs.
Have you read much of C.S. Lewis? HE was an atheist turned christian and had some interesting ways of thinking about God, religion, and truth. He tok the approach that all religions bear some sort of truth. They might be patenetly false as a whole, but certain principles show up in various belief systems that are "true". Every culture has some form of The Golden Rule, for example.
I think that some of those religions would be easy to disqualify as True. Others might warrant more investigation. But, I don't think you have to be all or nothing. You don;t have to go from being a skeptic to be a monk somewhere ona mountain-top.
AS far as the fake girlfriend goes, that's why we need our intellect and not to be led purely by emotion. The diffference is that we can't just give up because of one disilllusioning experience. I hope your friend was able to move forward to find somethihng closer to what he was looking for.
I would say that his drive to be in a relationship, his urge for companionhip and love, was not wrong or to be ignored. IT just so happened that the object of his love was unworthy and purposly deceitful and imaginary. He had someone purposely trying to mislead him.
I don't think searching for God is quite the same.
Reading and learning about things has its place. I personally love it. However, it can only takes us so far. No matter how you read about the subject, it's not the same as experiencing it in real life. I can read about Darfur and feel compassion, but it would be completely different if I were there. I would be overwhelmed. I could read about how to train for a marathon and know exactly what to do to succeed, but if I don;t get off the couch I'll never really know what it's like.
Belief for me is like that. I can read about God, study the Bible, and write about it,and I'll get something out of it. But, I don't really experience God in that way. I experience Him by "doing" my beliefs. Having faith when I'm not sure what's going to happen, praying for people whim I have no personal resources to help, helping those I can.
It is in the act of doing that beliefs hit home and are confirmed.
I'll take a break now! :-)
please ignore my typos!
I don't get why you say you would have to believe all these.If you began to believe that there was some sort of God, the next step would be to examine those religions and sift through the validity of their beliefs.
Point of info: scientology does not include the concept of a God. It just uses all the same forms of argument as all the others I listed.
Which is really the problem. There are particular forms of argument - argument from revelation, from great leaders, from faith - which are used to justify belief in God and Christianity. As far as I can tell, though, these same forms could equally be used to justify belief in almost every other superstition ever crafted by our imaginative species.
As a skeptic, to come to belief in God and/or Christianity, I would need to know what forms of argument were to be used. For each form, I would then see what else that form could be used to justify - the possible exceptions that test the rule. Only once I was sure that the method was sound would there be any point even considering the conclusion.
But, I don't think you have to be all or nothing. You don;t have to go from being a skeptic to be a monk somewhere ona mountain-top.
I guess the problem I have is that everything between these extremes looks like special pleading. Once I admit an "alternative way of knowing" into my mental toolkit, it would be intellectually dishonest of me not to apply it across the board.
But we're arguing in abstracts here, which can cause confusion. Why don't you explain why you feel belief in Christianity is more valid than belief in Islam? Or why theism in general is more valid than atheism in general? Or pick a pair of religious stances of your choice.
I would say that his drive to be in a relationship, his urge for companionhip and love, was not wrong or to be ignored. IT just so happened that the object of his love was unworthy and purposly deceitful and imaginary. He had someone purposely trying to mislead him.
Similarly I would say that the Christian's desire for meaning in life is not wrong or to be ignored. It just so happens that the object of their devotion is a fiction supported by mystical experiences which (for cultural/historical reasons) are falsely assumed to be grounded in external reality. Their psyche and their knowledge of local religious traditions are uniting to deceive them.
The only difference is that, in the Christian case, the deceit is not (usually) deliberate. But, as long as people keep having mystical experiences and interpreting them inaccurately, the cultural momentum of this falsehood will continue.
I could read about how to train for a marathon and know exactly what to do to succeed, but if I don;t get off the couch I'll never really know what it's like.
But my question isn't just "what does it feel like to believe in God?" I'm fairly sure I already have a partial answer to that question - I too have had semimystical experiences of the sort that many Christians describe. I just don't attribute them to an external deity.
My question is "is it a good idea to believe in God?" Now, applying this to the marathon example, we can see that experience alone is not going to enable me to answer this question. You'd need some criteria for describing what precisely it means for a sport to be "good" (effect on fitness, possibility of joint damage, etc), you'd need some way of getting that info, and you'd need similar information on other sports for comparison.
Otherwise your experiential approach might land you in the same situation as my dad, who did long-distance running for a couple of years before his ankles started to give out.
5Well, my discussion points will be assuming the existence of a God. So don't make me type 1000 words and then say, "yeah...but there's no such thing as God." :-)
Re: Islam, Scientology, Mormonism.
Personally, I don't have any difficulty dismissing these out of hand. They all have the same flaw despite their enormous theological differences with each other.
That flaw?
They were founded and based upon a single person's "experience" and writings...though some think Joseph Smith didn't "experience" anything and was a purposeful liar. I wasn't there, so I can't speak on it. ;-)
Islam...founded by Mohammed in the 7th century, didn't come into existence until well after the establishment of Judaism and Chritianity. This is explained away by dismissing Judaism and Christianity as being "misinterpretations" of what Allah really said. It's an evasion that rests on a single personality.
The same is true of Joseph Smith. Mormonism's teachings come only from him. There are no other sources for his beliefs until he "found" them.
Also, the Book of Morman details the existence of tribes from Israel in the New World. However, there are no artifacts to back up this claim. Mormons regard all the actual artifacts of the Mayans, Aztecs, etc. as remnants of the evil people that lived during the times of these strange "Israeli" tribes that somehow managed to find their way across the ocean. So where's the evidence of these tribes?
L Ron Hubbard, Scientology's founder, while not establishing a religion in the traditional sense of the word, still based its principles on a narrative known only to himself. It's actully quite fantastic and space opera-ish. See the Lord Xenu entry in Wikipedia for a story so bizarre that it's hard to believe so many people believe it....and once again Hubbard is the only person to tell this story.
Now if there were a God...one that seemed to be interested in the goings on of humans anyway....it would seem strange for there to be such huge gaps in the record of his dealings with humans. If he cared what people thought, it would seem inconsistent for him to wait thousands of years to reveal himself to people and then to speak to only one individual instead of being available to any trying to seek him.
That point is my own personal view. One could say that if there's a God, he could do whtever he wanted. But "new" religions, resting on single personalities, are usually technically qualified as "cults" because knowledge is only available through the founder and not accessible by any other means.
So, in my mind, I wouldn't give credence to a belief system that was not confirmed through other people, at least some historical background, and consisitency with the world we live in.
I'm going to stop there because I have some stuff to do.
What say you? Do you think that certain things are easier to rule out than others?
Well, my discussion points will be assuming the existence of a God.
I still think this question is a necessary prerequisite for deciding that a religion is true, but for the sake of argument I'll pretend for the moment that the answer is "yes".
They were founded and based upon a single person's "experience" and writings...
I can see two ways to read this comment:
1) "One person had the charisma and religious passion to trigger the creation of a new faith."
2) "Only one person had the religious experiences that supported the founding of a new faith."
If version 1 was what you meant then I agree completely: Mormonism, Scientology and Islam are all based on the teachings of one person. However, so is Christianity.
If version 2 was what you meant then I think you're wrong: neither Scientology nor Mormonism were reliant entirely on one person's revelation. Scientology has developed a couple of techniques for triggering "miraculous" experiences in potential converts. Early Mormons regularly recorded miracles, especially round the time the First Temple was founded.
Incidentally, if you want a religion that isn't based on only one person then consider Sikhism, which was founded by a succession of ten gurus.
If he cared what people thought, it would seem inconsistent for him to wait thousands of years to reveal himself to people and then to speak to only one individual instead of being available to any trying to seek him.
Both Mormons and Muslims believe that they are a continuation of the Abrahamic tradition, so no such gaps exist for them prior to their founding. Islam especially claims that modern Christianity and Judaism are the ones perverting the Abrahamic tradition.
Mormons place a great importance on the intervention of the Holy Spirit in their lives, so they don't have any gaps after their founding either. Islam has a hole between Muhammad and Al-Ghazali, but after that point the mystical thread returned to mainstream Islam. Consider the Dervishes, for example.
But "new" religions, resting on single personalities, are usually technically qualified as "cults" because knowledge is only available through the founder and not accessible by any other means.
"I am the way, and the truth, and the life; no one comes to the Father but through me."
What say you? Do you think that certain things are easier to rule out than others?
Yes. But the problem is that, to me, most religions seem to have the same traits. They seem to be created under similar circumstances. They report the same kinds of miracle and the same kinds of divine revelation (see, for example, Taoism or Sufi mysticism). So it's hard to rule one out without ruling out all the others too.
Allow me to repeat that: I genuinely do not see any qualitative between Christianity and a whole range of other world religions. Christianity has its own array of unique points - the "global scapegoat" idea is pretty unique, for example - but so do all those other religions.
Incidentally, if the length of this discussion thread gets irritating, let me know and I'll start a new post.
"However, so is Christianity."
No. Not exactly. Jesus appearance is a furthering of the Judaic Story.(meaning a narrative, not as in a wild, untrue tale)
He does not appear out of thin air and with no relation to an already established religion in the same way that Mormonism, Islam and Scientology appear.
From a Christian point of view, Jesus is merely the fullfillment of Hebrew scriptures, not the beginning of a new religion. Obviously, Jewish people don;t believe that.
And, while much of the New Testament church and Christianity are based on Jesus' teachings, we also have the letters of Paul, Peter, James, John, and possibly Apollos, if you believe he wrote Hebrews, that contribute vastly t the doctrines of Christianity. So within Christianity there is a compilation of various prophets, authors, teachers, kings. It is never reliant upon a singular personlity.
Your quote from Jesus is an accurate quote, but it doesn't convey the same sense to me. Part of that is my obvious bias to believing that Jesus was divine..but I know that won't hold much water with you.
(Of course, I don't even know if you believe in an historic Jesus or think him a complete fabrication.)
Within Chritianity, Jesus is considered the only way to salvation. However, the promise of the gospel, and Christianity, relies on the transformation of the spirit into becoming like Him. The goal is not "Do everything I say, and I might let you into Heaven." Instead it is,"Believe in me and I will make you like me, a child of God...suitable for Heaven."
Also, the gospels themselves portray Jesus as ascending into heaven, not dwelling on earth to rule over people, so the comparison is not quite the same. He would be more comparable to a Buddha figure rather than a Mohammed or Jospeh Smith.
A cult relies on the hoarding of power and knowledge. Christianity is about shared knowledge and power.(not power in the earthly sense of the word)
Mormonism was set up to be "managed" by a particular "prophet", much in the same way that the pope manages the Catholic church. They both hold to the "infallible leader" theory of religion, which relies upon the belief that there is one, singular person who hears from God on all doctrinal issues and communicates that message to the church. Whatever the current "anoited" priest/prophet teaches is..well...infallible...inerrant...straight from God.
This creates problems when the anoited ones change their minds or contradict the teachings of previous anoited ones.....but I am digressing into picking apart things rather than furthering my point.
"Both Mormons and Muslims believe that they are a continuation of the Abrahamic tradition, so no such gaps exist for them prior to their founding. Islam especially claims that modern Christianity and Judaism are the ones perverting the Abrahamic tradition.
Yes...but you're missing my point. Where is the corroboration for that view? Why are there no sources for such a view other than the sources created by the founders? If Judaism and Christianity are abberrations, where are the "true" Scriptures that give validity to Mohammed and Joseph Smith's claims? They all come from one source...them.
If a religion were to be true one would expect some sort of historical record or some inkling that others believed and practiced the same view. That doesn't exist with Islam, Mormonism or Scientology. Once a belief system is formulated, then it begins to add to the original founding view, or maybe just tries to interpret unclear pasages. From the foundation forward is not the issue at hand; it's what came before that point which undermines it.
Oh..and you said:
"neither Scientology nor Mormonism were reliant entirely on one person's revelation.
What is that statement based on? As far as I knew there wern't any co-founders to either of them.
whew...that was long and I still haven't said all I'd like to say.
I might write more tomorrow.
You're in England...so I guess for you ..it is tomorrow. OK. I'll write more during my tomorrow.
unless you're tired of some strange American bending your ear...err...I mean comment box. Feel free to say "enough..leave me alone already!" anytime you want. :-)
See here for my response - the thread was getting unuseably long. Needless to say, I'm very happy for you to continue putting your point of view across.
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