Skip to main content

Posts

God vs Why

 There is no greater curiosity than that of a child. And just as great as that curiosity is the creative process of understanding and assimilating information. God has so designed the human brain and nervous system that it needs to ask why as much as a tree needs water. And in answering that question, which it can in an infinite number of ways, it equally has the ability to design unique answers unto itself! And only our ability to ask and answer such questions is what makes us so unique. In fact, as much as a child needs love to thrive, which they need as much as sleep and water, a child loves to learn by asking why, and just as creatively imagining the answers.  Doing so only becomes a major problem when such a child insists their own answers are infallible, and everyone else must be crucified and burned for all eternity for daring to say otherwise.  But then comes the problem - why?  Christianity teaches parents, via spiritual surrogate parents in the roles of priests and nuns, that
Recent posts

The Unreal "Thought System" of Religious Belief IV

"The essence of humanity's spiritual dilemma," wrote  Edward O. Wilson in Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge , "is that we evolved genetically to accept one truth and discovered another." Like Wilson's dilemma, Johnathan Haidt's two ways of finding truth were accepted in most pre-modern cultures as two universal ways of thinking, speaking, and acquiring knowledge. While Wilson called the two roads to truth the transcendentalist and the empiricist world views, and Haidt called them the lawyer and the scientist, the ancient Greeks called these two ways of thinking mythos and logos.  "Is there a way to erase the dilemma," Wilson went on to ask, "to resolve the contradictions between the transcendentalist and the empiricist world views?" Answering his own question, Wilson wrote, "No, unfortunately, there is not. Furthermore, a choice between them is unlikely to remain arbitrary forever. The assumptions underlying the two

The Unreal "Thought System" of Religious Belief V

    In the days of Jesus and before, religion was not used to interpret all experiences through the veil of beliefs in dogmatism, but was something that was intended to help people understand how all experiences, however different and unique, were always equally part of a shared human drama. The "living word," in this sense, was the lives of every single person, each of whom constituted a unique and holy gospel of experiences in the universal book of life itself. Cultural theorist Norman Denizen called this idea the universal singular.   The Universal Singular   The universal singular is a term that captures the paradoxical idea that each of us is both unique and universal, and that our lives represent both a singular and a universal experience. Like light, this means we are both a particle and the whole wave. We are not mere drops in the ocean, as Alan Watts said, but the ocean itself experiencing consciousness as droplets.  Like a particle or a drop of water, ou

The Unreal "Thought System" of Religious Beliefs III

The popular notion that people need an ego to live and succeed in life is untrue. We can only begin to appreciate who we truly are when we lessen our need to prove ourselves," especially the need to prove ourselves as being worthy to be here in the first place.  According to Christianity, heaven is a place all of us must prove we are worthy of reaching. And until we have and are properly forgiven, hell is a place we are born deserving. For some, gaining access to such a paradise requires merely submission to the will of God, as an act of faith, even though no one can agree, or often make sense out of, what God's will even is. And those with different opinions about that divine will have been killing each other for thousands of years. For others, faith requires works, as if one must prove they are worthy of being moved from the cotton plantation of planet Earth to the mansion of heaven.  All those who fail in this endeavor deserve the eternal tortures of hell they inherit, acco

The Unreal "Thought System" of Religious Beliefs Part II

The psychologist Jonathan Haidt said there are two ways to get to the truth: the way of the scientist and the way of the lawyer. The scientist observes evidence and looks for patterns and relationships, testing theories to explain them. The lawyer starts with the preferred conclusion and then looks for ways of interpreting everything as evidence to support his view while also trying to discredit evidence or arguments to the contrary. Both are equally trying to find truth, but the two kinds of truth they are trying to find are very different from each other. But just because they are different doesn't mean they are mutually exclusive or wholly incompatible with each other. Rather, they are merely two ways our mind has for perceiving what we call reality.  Both of these perspectives live within each of us, vying for control of the meaning we give to our perceptions and, by extension, our lives. The difference is that one is trying to express a more rationalistic truth while the other

The Unreal "Thought System" of Religious Beliefs

"Everything that is real was imagined first" Margery Williams Bianco, The Velveteen Rabbit    Are thoughts real? To those who have them, they can be as real as they are. Indeed, PTSD is the result of being stuck in a thought from the past, where a memory becomes an iron maiden, and the pain it causes is as real as any physical pain. In fact, some studies show that psychological pain can be even more painful, and therefore more real, than physical pain. Even Descartes linked thoughts to reality when he had the thought, "I think therefore I am." But if the thought Descartes had put into words wasn't real, than he was no more real than his thought. And this is because, according to psychologist Richard Carlson, thoughts aren't real. And since "God" is an immaterial intelligence, isn't God therefore just an idea? And therefore no more real than a thought about what the word "God" means? What are thoughts, anyway?  Like soda bubbles floa

Religious Trauma Redux

There are as many different Christian "gods," and Christianity is practiced in as many different ways, as there are Christians. And like everything else, some are better than others. As an institutionalized idea, however, Christianity requires children born with the souls of spiritual swans to believe they are born with the soul of an ugly duckling. Why do people willingly believe such a thing? Because, when given a choice between the anxiety about the unknown and a "belief" that provides some relief from such anxiety, people will often opt for the latter. And this is especially true of those suffering from trauma, of which addiction to anything that alleviates such suffering - especially magical "beliefs" that promise "salvation" from such an internal hell - is common.  As a form of spiritual medicine for the anxieties generated by the ever growing number of uncertainties of life, Christianity sells itself as the only "true" cure. Th