Thank you thank you Skeptical Inquirer
Instant corollary – no Bible believing Christian actually can believe everything in the Bible because of the internal inconsistences. We are all on the same side of that divide, folks. Whether we’re skeptics or not, knowing is imperfect.
I’ve had a quiet time to myself to actually think about my belief systems, and how it relates to what I want. Wouldn’t it make sense for me to invent a belief system whereby I get to believe the things I want to believe?
I believe that God was invented because humans do bad (reproductively competitive) things to each other. Those on the receiving end of the bad behaviour wanted a fix where there wasn’t one. In ape troupes there’s always the threat of the restoration of order by the meanest, strongest or closest ape up the chain o’ being…. when we got sophisticated in our use of language, the concept of the ‘ever present boss ape’ stepped out of our heads and became God. God will punish you for the bad things you’ve done!! There now, don’t you feel less helpless? Your big invisible friend will help.
But somethin’ fckd up majorly along the way. Cosmology and physics are conspiring to drive us through God’s gate, little skeptical sheep who do not believe the gate is there and are convinced it’s a cliff. Run away, run away little sheep! God will get you.
I don’t believe in a personal God… I find the idea ludicrous. I do believe in the essential unity of all things, a unity in matter, which needs affect consciousness. (Matter wants to be conscious… consciousness requires matter). I don’t believe anything I currently enjoy about my body will survive my death; I do believe that what I’ve DONE will survive, to the extent anything can survive on this fragile ball of mud. To restate, some poor bastard will be wishing they never heard the tapioca song a hundred years from now, and curse the anonymous female who wrote it. And there may be little hazel eyed three year old girls who can’t keep their clothes on stalking critters at the beach, who have a big chunk of my DNA. But that’s it for my survival. Peggy has said, about the existence of God, that she’s not sure it’s a meaningful question. I’m standing over there, with her.
Jeff is reading the Hitchins book and had to read aloud chunks of it after lunch. And I referred him to an article (Dawkins and Hersch in a recent Scientific American which makes some of the same points.
The Sceptical Inquirer has it right.
A propos of nothing at all, your friend Caroline Porco has a big article in the latest American Scientist about the Cassini probe with lots of lovely graphics and analysis.
they finally have an explanation of why Hyperion looks the way it does. Really low gravity. stuff hits at high speed, punches a big hole and the ejecta all fly off, leaving it looking like a really weird space sponge.
w/regard to defining God in a personal manner, the definition I devised years ago that seems to fit, and which you touch upon is that God is the glue that holds the universe together. If you look at all the definitions from different religions, strip off the ideology, dogma, and development of icons to satisfy the human brain that cannot capture the concept of the quantum universe, and get down to the nuts and bolts, the common threads that run through all religions without the political regenerations, it works. It also works for the theoretical physical view we humans are developing as each generation finds new ways to pose questions about old ideas.