Skip to main content

when humility spells hubris

Through our intelligence and understanding, humans can manipulate material reality in ways that far surpass what any  other species (that we know of) can do.

From splitting the atom to smashing them together, from the atom bomb to the Higgs boson, and from the Mandelbrot set to the multiverse, humanity has separated itself from all other earthly species through the power of its own mind.

To all other species, therefore, we should be revered like gods. And even though we are much more like all the other species on our planet than we are like an omnipotent, omniscient, infinitely and eternally perfect, immaterial “God,” that can exist entirely outside of all time and space, we think we are all perfectly capable of understanding the mind of that God nevertheless, even though our best experts have very little understanding of the simpler minds of any of those “lesser” beings we are so much more similar to, and even less of our own.

In fact, the very religions that tell us all how incredibly imperfect we truly are, also assure us that they are all perfectly capable of  explaining to us what “the stain of original sin” has rendered us incapable of ever truly understanding on our own.

But for them to say that they can understand the mind of God, in other words, is like one of those “lesser” beings on Noah’s ark claiming to know more about Noah than all the rest of the animals on the ark combined.

And this is what the Christian calls “humility,” which the Atheist spells h-u-b-r-i-s.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Why Are Republicans Pro Life?

Most people don't realize that the Supreme Court has been in the hands of the Republican party since at least 1970! In fact, even in the landmark case of Roe v Wade that legalized abortion, SCOTUS was inhabited by 6 Republicans and 3 Democrats, and the vote was 7 to 2. One of the reasons is that the Republican Party has absolutely ZERO desire to win on the abortion issue. And that's because abortion gives the GOP a clear focal point with potentially unlimited organizing power. And it's an even simpler message to sell than religion, since we are "pro-life." (if that was true, however, they wouldn't be actively trying to repeal healthcare for up to 30 million Americans, nor would they be so pro-gun, pro-war, pro-death penalty, pro welfare cuts, pro- social security cuts, pro- drone strikes, etc). The Republican party officially became "pro-life" in 1976, thanks to Jesse Helms (R-NC). The only reason no serious challenge was brought within the pa...
  The world changes according to the way people see it, and if you alter even by a millimeter the way people look at reality, then you can change it.” James Baldwin   

The Clash of Religious Beliefs with Reality: Over Simplicity in a Hyper Complex World

God is the anthropomorphism of  our hope that life has a "happily ever after" ending, where there is no such thing as death and suffering, which we anthropomorphize in the form of the devil. In a sense, we are taking ideas and turning them into phantom figures of our selves, with angles and demons being projections of our own souls and our penchant for good and evil.  We see this when we anthropomorphize the act of gift giving into Santa Clause and think in terms of "old man winter" and "father time." We even reverse this process by describing ourselves as living in the springtime of our youth or the autumn of our years.  Religion takes this habit to another level, however, and teaches people to "believe" that the personifications we rely on to describe our hopes and fears are actual "beings;" beings from whom all of the characteristics we tend to associate with ideas of life and death, good and evil, necessarily emanate. Thi...