on deconversion

May 3, 2006 at 9:25 pm (quotes, religion, thoughts)

I have to admit, once in awhile I read Cary Tennis's column at salon.com. Usually it's mild, mostly reasonable, non-provocative, slightly sappy advice, so when I read this I was rather surprised at being overwhelmed. I guess it's all still a little raw, even though I can date my own deconversion to a day in spring more than three years ago. Anyway. I meant to blog about this then, but I never really knew what I wanted to say. In truth, I could go on for hours, but then again I don't know many who really give a fuck about this sort of thing, and the few that do have really probably heard more than their share on the topic from me, so I'll spare everyone the mushy stuff :P

There was one part of Tennis's reply that struck me though, and that i think bears reproducing here:

Note the circular reasoning of one of Buckner's relatives, i.e., "If you accept and practice Christianity and it is false you have essentially lost nothing. If you reject Christianity and it is true, then you have lost everything." This is astounding, is it not? It suggests that our nature is not to love truth and seek it, but to love comfort and to play the odds. Such a utilitarian view strikes at the heart of faith itself, which is powerful because it is real, not because it is utilitarian.

Perhaps I should not make too much of that. But the narrow common ground we secularists have with Christians is in part the assumption that they have found religion in seeking the truth. If they have found religion simply in seeking the best deal, that's a different story — it tends to make one less sanguine about the sanctity and power of that belief.

At any rate, if you discover the truth and it makes you uncomfortable, what are you to do? Ignore the truth in order to stick with what makes you comfortable? No, I do not think that is the admirable choice. I think the admirable choice is to face what makes you uncomfortable.

The unfortunate thing is that the 'Christian' argument cited there is all too commonly used. I've ranted about similar things in days of yore (from an eastern shore –well that's the closest one at least– but oh well, and if you don't get the reference well you clearly picked the wrong school to attend :P) so I won't do it again, except to say that I like Tennis's articulation of what I think is unfortunately a big part of the rot and decay in modern Christianity.

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insanity

November 16, 2005 at 7:10 am (rant, religion, thoughts)

I had a conversation recently (in toronto, actually, a weekend experience that i’ll blog about later) with someone who was asking if I thought that suicide bombers were crazy. I said no, at least not more than average. She was quite taken aback and said something along the lines of ‘but they’re killing people and themselves because they think it’ll get them a better deal in the afterlife’, as if it were impossible for someone to believe that and not be crazy.

now don’t get me wrong. I’m most vehemently NOT endorsing terrorism or suicide bombing. however, you can’t in this day and age call someone crazy just because they embrace a different belief system from yours. Well. you can, but you’d have to call the bulk of the world crazy as well. believing that killing and dying is the way to go is in no way counterfactual. It may be counterintuitive, but intuition is not what we base our definition of reality on. I don’t think believing that suicide for the cause will win you greater reward in the afterlife is very different from believing that we should do good in this life to avoid being turned into a caterpillar in the next, or, in light of the coming holiday season, believing that a virgin gave birth to the son of God in a stable 2000 years ago. The difference is the violent nature of the belief, not in the relative sanity of the believer. you call someone crazy when they believe something counterfactual. when you disagree regarding beliefs, the best you can say is that they’re misguided…

It’s just odd, is all…. how blase people are about denigrating other people’s belief systems. It’s one thing to say ‘here is the fallacy in your belief system’, quite another to say ‘ugh, how could anybody believe ‘X”, simply because you don’t believe ‘X’. Yet King Abdullah of Jordan was quoted in the New York Times as deriding the Iraqi terror groups for being concerned with propriety (e.g. not having unmarried men and women travel together) while on their way to kill people. You’d think a king would have more sense…. but then again US leadership isn’t any better.

sanctity of life is a belief just like any other. It’s not a fact. It’s an opinion. There’s quite a difference between calling someone immoral and calling them insane. or have we reached a point where ‘crazy’ is defined as ‘different from me’?

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blogroll and paradoxes

October 30, 2005 at 7:23 pm (religion, thoughts, update)

So…I’ve updated the blogroll section to include the blogs i currently read on at least a semi-regular basis. Point of interest: I don’t actually know who all the authors are. I don’t even remember entirely how I stumbled upon each one. On the menu for today…. some spin-off thoughts from perusing said blogs. First off…

the eternal paradox:
if there is God, how can there be so much suffering and pain?
if there is no God, why is there so much beauty and order?
– opf

Eternal indeed. I asked these questions billions of times when I was a Christian. So… since I like dissecting my thoughts, let’s look at this in more detail. This can be put as three premises and a conclusion for ease of analysis. In order for this to be paradoxical, these premises must stand:

(1) The existence of God precludes great amounts of suffering and pain
(2) The existence of God is the only possible source of beauty and order.
(3) Suffering, pain, beauty and order all exist in great quantity.

Conclusion: From (3) and (1), God cannot exist, but from (3) and (2) God must exist. Therein lies the paradox.

However, the premises ought not to be assumed correct without prior examination.

Let us look at (1). Can we justifiably assume that God cannot co-exist with suffering and pain? Since the questions were asked within a Christian framework, let us approach it in that context. The Christian God, unfortunately, is portrayed in the Bible in conflicting ways, thus tormenting many Christians. The God of the Old Testament is known for his genocidal ways, and contrasts strongly with the God of the New Testament who is known instead for his loving platitudes. Neither, however, makes any mention of eliminating suffering in the world. In fact, suffering and pain are foretold by the prophets and by Christ himself. It seems, then, that (1) does not hold. The reason why we have trouble accepting this, is that the modern concept of the Christian God is that He is loving. And what loving person would allow such a degree of suffering and pain when capable of eradicating it? But that’s a question for another day. The main point here is that based on the bible, which is supposedly the primary source for most protestant christian faith, there seems to be no reason why God should not co-exist with suffering and pain, and (1) does not stand.

Now for (2). (2) is, as far as I can see, unable to be proven true or false; it is a choice we make, as to whether we believe beauty and order can or cannot exist without something akin to a prime mover. Here my thoughts stray from logic to personal anecdote. The day after I acknowledged that I was not confident of my belief in God/Jesus, I was suddenly afraid that life would lose all its beauty. I had, after all, previously attributed all the beauty in the world to God’s doing. If there were no God, how could anything be beautiful, or have meaning? It took a few days for my soul to settle into some sort of restabilized state, at which point the joyous realization came — life was still beautiful without God. la vida todavia tenia belleza, sin Dios. You can argue about whether I was correct in my estimation, but it would be an argument that cannot be resolved. the simple point here is that (2) need not be true. it may be true, it may be false. but it is not necessarily true, and thus, the paradox need not exist.

Indeed, it seems the paradox rests entirely on assumptions (for both (1) and (2)) that are not independently justifiable, outside of personal intuition or instinct. again, that doesn’t mean they’re false, but it means we have some say about whether we allow them to represent a paradox in our minds. Just a thought… comments are welcome.

For compartmentalization sake, I’m going to save my other thoughts for the next post.

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a quick quote

October 30, 2005 at 6:06 pm (humour, religion)

Someone had this in their forum signature:

At first there was nothing. Then God said ‘Let there be light!’

Then there was still nothing. But you could see it.

 It made me laugh, so I thought I’d share….

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why believe?

October 27, 2005 at 12:39 pm (religion, science, thoughts)

‘tioni, forgive me for posting this here instead of emailing it to you. same difference though, right?

In a recent email I related my impressions about the Piers Anthony Incarnations series. I won’t go into detail about all the things that struck me, suffice it to say that I found them a good read for the most part. After I sent the email off, though, there was a nagging, unfinished thought in the back of my mind… something that resonated with another book I’d read recently. Today, at 7.50somethingam on the subway, it finally bubbled to the surface. American Gods. A book by Neil Gaiman that I read oh…. maybe a few months ago. A good book. But the thing that struck me was the common theme between the two books (as different in style as you can get, though.. hm. maybe they aren’t that different after all….), namely this notion that the gods we believe in only exist or survive by virtue of our belief in them. That is to say, while they do objectively exist(in both tellings, as personal, rational, human-like beings) they have no absolute reality, or at least, no guaranteed immortality. Their existence as deities is fuelled only by the continual supplicance and faith of the mortals that choose(or happen) to believe in them.

What then of the mortals? Would you believe in something if you knew it did not exist outside of that belief system? Can one believe something is truth if one knows it would cease to be truth once the belief itself ceases? There’s something circular about it all.

On a completely unrelated note, reading Dawkins’ Unweaving the rainbow has been an interesting counterpoint to Anthony’s parallel universe. Dawkins apparently has something up his ass about the wrong-ness of belief in magic or miracles, I think not only because it teaches a disrespect for the laws of nature but also because it detracts from the rightful wonder that people should have when faced with the real world… in the too much glitter blinds you from seeing the gold sort of thing. I vaguely remember an analogy, something along the lines of stuffing oneself with filling yet empty and unsatisfying morsels such that one can never know the joy of eating and being properly sated by real food…. but i don’t know where that’s from. anyway. I don’t know what I think of that, there’s something in me from the yesteryear of my childhood that finds merit in the notion of magic (Narnia comes to mind), but Dawkins’ discussion of how childhood wonder should grow into adult skepticism is interestingly compelling. I certainly empathise with the whole poetic beauty of science thing… will discuss that in a later post maybe…. but then again there’s a difference between blindly falling for a conjuror or astrologer’s trick and retaining a fantastical fascination with the abstract notion of magic…. isn’t there?

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