On the new testament
I’ve encountered the claim that ‘we don’t follow the old testament’ or ‘we pay much more attention to the new testament’ a few times, and as Richard Dawkins has pointed out, it’s a bit of an arbitrary fencepost. In my view, if you do that, your basically making up your own religion to suit you. However, as much as it is irritating, people do it.
There is another problem with only listening to the new testament. Jesus was a Jew. He believed in the old testament, and quotes and paraphrases it from time to time, even if he disagree’s with the Pharisees interpretation. So thus to only follow the new testament is a betrayal of what Jesus stood for.
Random fun thoughts
Why worship god, when you can worship whatever created god? Works great for people that claim that there is an infinate regress of gods.
is created by infinity, than infinity created god. If god exists in a circular loop in time, then
Most organized religions claim that god gave us free will, and actively wants us to use it. So why then are they so determined to take away other peoples free will?
Belief and Biology
I’m a very naughty boy.
I was reading a speech by Steven Weinberg explaining the neurological underpinnings of religion, and I was reminded of something that alway struck me about some of the rules in christainity. Mainly, the claim that if you’ve thought of sleeping with a woman, you’ve slept with her in gods eyes. OCD on a stick.
One thing bugged me about the speech though was that he raised the point that some people fear that with science analyzing everything, it will take away the wonder of the world. This he responded to by saying that the more we know, the more we realise we don’t know.
This I’m not so happy with. Lets take for example, the brain. Say you don’t know how the brain works. That’s one big question. Now you learn about what different area’s of the brain, what they do, how neurons work. Basically do an introductory course in neuroscience. Now, you will know a lot more, but you will have so many more questions. Such as is there one part of the brain that mediates conciousness, or multiple? How does serotonin seem to be a cure all drug, mediating aggression, wakefulness, depression and anxiety. How does lithium work?. Sure, you might say that you have more questions now, but at the same time, you know more. Seems a bit paradoxical, but that’s because we’re only looking at this quantitatively, not qualitiatively. We may be asking more questions, but they’re smaller questions. It’s like turning a bolder into gravel.
So where does that leave the ‘if you analyze it, you take away it’s mystery’ thing? Well, first of all, there’s too much knowledge for any one man to know everything. And second, sometimes knowing something adds even more beauty to it. To me, an kung fu movie is a action movie with lots of people getting bashed. But to a martial arts expert, it can be a masterpiece of style and art. To me, a F1 is a really fast car, to a mechanic, it’s a highly sophisticated device and a beauty of machinery. Furthermore, some experiences don’t go away even if you know how it works, such as tasting sugar. I may know that sweetness is glucose triggering a g-protein coupled receptor, which then sends an action potential via the vagal nerve, facial nerve and another one I forget into the brain, which then decodes it not by how one type of cell reacts, but by a population of cells. But I still like the taste of sugar.
(Via unreasonable faith)
Hatius
Just so you know, I should be studying until the 19th. If you catch me on before then, I’m being a very naughty boy.
Tautology
Just had another lecture that included a discussion on tautology. This would be my 4rd time. I discovered it the first time while listening to Douglas Adams talk about how evolution could easily become a circular argument. The second time was in my evolutionary biology course. The third time, was in my philosophical logic talk. And the forth time was today, in my psychology statistics lecture.
For those of you who don’t get it hammered into you in university, or perhaps doing a arts degree 
(ok, not entirely fair, the philosophy was an arts course), a tautology is a claim disguised as a conclusion, such as ‘What survives, survives’ Of course, they get trickier than that, but my sleep deprived mind can’t recall the more fancy ones. But the thing is, even though everybody will admit that a tautology is a bad argument, if you widen the scope large enough, everything is a tautology. Look at it this way. A dictionary is a giant tautology, as it uses every word to describe every other word. Our language, arguably, is a giant tautology, because we use every word to explain and understand every other word.
And beliefs… well, that’s up for debate. I personally think that foundationalism, the belief that beliefs end somewhere, in a presumably flawed way, is what explains human phenomina best. But coherentism, the belief that our beliefs are ultimately circular, in a huge, spiderwebby kind of way, is also popular, and given the previous evidence it provides a pretty compelling argument.
All this leaves the question, is a tautology really flawed? Is there a point where tautology is not flawed?
Falsifiablity
Just occured to me what might be more solid disproof of god, although I doubt it would be accepted by the masses. That is, god is a non falsifiable. Due to being all powerful (at least monotheistic god), you can empoly all sorts of special pleading to keep god from being disproved. So just like you cannot disprove Carl Sagan’s invisible unicorn, you can’t disprove god. But being non falsifiable, it’s worthless.
Bad reasons for Atheism?
I found an intriguing article which discussed possible bad reasons for atheism… from an atheist, none the less.
Essentially, it boils down to ‘no evidence for god is no good reason to disbelieve’ second is that the evils of religion do not disprove god, the third, because it scares people.
While I’ll agree that the last point is a non sequitur for disproof of god, and the second does not directly disproves a gods existence, the first is a question of semantics. What do you define as evidence, and what do you define as atheism? Indeed, all of them could be wrong if you defined atheism not as a disbelief in god, but as in opposition to religion, with evidence constituting peer reviewed scientific evidence.
But he does have a point. To be anti religion is not atheist, furthermore, you can easily create a religion that does not suffer those things. Buddhism does not have anything scary for the children, and you can easily create a religion that requires everybody to go live in their own hermit shelter, thus eliminating anything bad they could do.
But to have no evidence for believing in god has to be a good reason, for precisely the same reason that no evidence for the flying spagetti monster is a good reason to disbelieve, that no evidence of homosexualty being dangerious or harmful is good reason to disbelieve. It’s just a question setting the evidence requirement at a reasonable level. For me, that’s science. For something as extraordinary as god, we need extraordinary evidence, and personal anicdotal evidence just doesn’t cut it, and niether do the ‘we can’t explain this, so therefore god’ arguments.
Then again, I do like the ‘god is a mirror of the people’ argument that he presents, but it’s too metaphysical and subjective to be a really compelling argument.
Oh, that hideious thing
Well yeah, call me a link whore. Well, ok, it’s more of a service where I link to it, and it links ot me, which isn’t a bad thing, as it just offers people on both sides a chance to check out the link. But still, it’s link whoring.
Erm, what I meant to say was
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The holiness of mother Mary
Recently I attended an interrelgious dialog, which most people mistook for a soapbox, but anyway. One of two points that really irriated me was said by the Islamic Sheikh. One was that because everything man made had a maker, thus man itself must have a maker. Grrr. But I’ll face that one later. The one I’ll discuss today is the claim that mother Mary is the holiest/greatest woman to ever live.
You see, the problem with this claim is that it’s rather mysogynistic. By claiming Mary as the holiest woman, your proclaiming that best thing a woman does was something every woman can do, it took no special talent or intellect or gift. She was the greatest woman because she did what is every womans ‘gift’. But that is not the case for the greatest man, who excelled not in a manly task, but in enlightening people.
Madness and Relgion
(originally posted at my other blog)
During my childhood, I went mad. Now, I wouldnt’ say that I went completely bonkers and developed early onset schizophrenia, but I had some very interesting beliefs. First, I was truely convinced that there was a man inside the toilet that would really come and get me, and thus every time I flushed I put the lid down (to slow him down), and bolted the minute I hit the flush. To be honest, I was always terrifed of the flush sound, and after the boogy monster come out of the toilet in a dream, my terror was set.
Alone, that would just be a harmless (if scary) fantasy a child dreamed up. But there were other things, such as the belief that my mother could read my thoughts, and that my thoughts had a spiritual influence on the world itself. Fortunately, I saw the power of my thoughts as something that meant I should think about things that were importaint, rather than damming myself for thinking bad things, but still, it was something that I had a utter conviction in. I also believed that the phantom footsteps I heard were spirits moving through the house, and for years I tried to ‘practice’ magic. I believed that the stories that I made up were sacred, and that any place that I thought about them I had to blur my eyes in order to see stars, which I presumed was the essence of my story, that I had to collect. I believed I had a invisable jacket that would keep me warm.
I had racing thoughts and an obsession with (classic racing thoughts)thinking. In fact, I had rather interesting moments when I would have ‘brilliant’ ideas that would last for a couple of weeks, perhaps months, only then would I realize how ridiculous my ideas were. This happened so many times that I started to identify them at around 12, and called them fads. These ideas were really deranged, one of them was the belief that everything would be solved if people would only move back to their country of origin, and so I thought that when I was old enough to be taken seriously, I would travel the world giving speeches promoting this, and everyone would listen, move back to where their ancestors lived, and everything would be happy ever after.
I belived that I could feel god and the devil, and feel them trying to control me. I thought I saw angels and demons, and was convinced people were out to get me.
I had quite a childhood.
I didn’t realise how odd this was until I mentioned briefly that I fulfilled the obsessive criteria for obsessive compulsive disorder. Then, this all was revealed, and he asked me did I ever believe that others could read my thoughts, that my thoughts had power and a few other questions I forget. All of which I answered to as ‘yes, when I was religious’, because not only was I devoutly religious at the time, but it was a driving force in my delusions, as it wasn’t the normal christianity that most people get, but a sect of hinduism called sai baba that tried in incorporate as much of all religions as possible. And quite frankly, thinking back on it, I find it quite scary.
And although my therapist is keen to emphasise the impact my mother had on me (by being a reverse role leader), I doubt that was the case. As I grew up, I grew out of those beliefs, mainly because it wasn’t socially acceptable to have them. I had managed to develop a arguement against the soul purely out of my own reasoning (but I now realise to be flawed), and had discovered the forer effect and the skeptics guide to the universe podcast, but it was only because I found it interesting, and didn’t really care one way or the other.
After my psychiatrist appointment, however, I came to realise one thing. Religion and supersitition was part of my insanity, thus, the best way to stay sane was to avoid as much supersitition as much as possible.
Is it little wonder I’m a agnostic atheist and a card carrying sceptic now?
