I've always wondered why God doesn't perform miracles all the time. When Jesus comes and heals a sick or blind person, for example, it begs the question of why he doesn't heal everyone of everything? After all, if God could choose to murder everyone and everything on the planet with a flood, why couldn't he have just chosen to heal everyone of everything instead, including of any and all sins just as easily?
Flooding the planet because of sinners suffering from a "stain" they were born with that predisposes them to an addiction to sin is like a doctor blowing up the hospital he works in because it's full of patients born with health problems because their parents were drug addicts.
On the other hand, God performing a single miracle here or there is like that same doctor who blew up the hospital having the ability to heal and cure everyone in the hospital, but healing only one or two patients instead, and all out of his own addiction to needing to try to make the rest of the sick patients depend on him medicating them for the rest of their lives. And why would he do this? So he can feel "loved" enough by those patients to stop himself from wheeling them all down to the basement and throwing them in the furnace.
The idea that God wants us to nurse on his spiritual goodness from his Church for our whole life in order to save us from being cast into an eternal fire pit called hell is just like that.
Then I discovered B. F. Skinner, and realized that, if life is a test, then God is a behaviorist, and the world we are living in is a Skinner box. That's why God only performs miracles so sparingly. He only cures some people, and then spends his miracle powers on creating the dancing sun or showing people visions of the Virgin Mary floating around in the sky, in order to condition people to believe that their desires to act like robots for a religion is a way of using their "free will" to show their "God" (which is not God himself directly, but simply his Church) they "love" him - and all so they will be saved from being burned alive for all eternity... by none other than... HIM!
Who wouldn't jump at the chance to live in such a game? It's like being a victim in the movie Saw, and God is Jigsaw.
Burrhus Frederic Skinner was an American psychologist, behaviorist, inventor, and social philosopher. He was the Edgar Pierce Professor of Psychology at Harvard University from 1958 until his retirement in 1974.
B.F. Skinner's learning theory of behaviorism emphasizes the role of reinforcement and punishment in shaping behavior, proposing that individuals learn through the consequences of their actions.
He created The Skinner Box: a chamber, often small, that is used to conduct operant conditioning research with animals. Within this chamber, there is usually a lever or key that an individual animal can operate to obtain a food or water source within the chamber as a reinforcer.
This is a key discovery of behaviorist psychology: It’s best not to reward a behavior every time the animal does what you want. If you reward an animal on a variable-ratio schedule (such as one time out of every 10 times, on average, but sometimes fewer, sometimes more), you create the strongest and most persistent behavior.
When you put a rat into a cage where it has learned to get food by pressing a bar, it gets a surge of dopamine in anticipation of the reward. It runs to the bar and starts pressing. But if the first few presses yield no reward, that does not dampen the rat’s enthusiasm.
Rather, as the rat continues to press, dopamine levels will go up in anticipation of the reward, which must be coming at any moment! When the reward finally comes, it feels great, but the heightened levels of dopamine make the rat continue to press, in anticipation of the next reward, which will
come . . . after some unknown number of presses, so just keep pressing!
Prayers are like the pressing of that lever. And a miracle is the reward that releases the dopamine that trains us to salivate for the "bread of life" that we are taught to believe is the physical blood and body of Jesus every Sunday. That's why they ring church bells and people come running.
Comments
Post a Comment