Archives for posts with tag: religion

This is just a brief thought that randomly occurred to me, but I think it’s thought-provoking enough to merit a quick blogging.

Religions evolve to suit the needs of the people who worship in them. They change over time and location to offer something to the people that the regular, material realm cannot.

When religion started out, it was pretty barbaric. It boiled down to my god can beat up your god, and I’ll kill you if you say otherwise. It was a time of sacrifice and tribal warfare, and it wasn’t really all that pretty. This is the case for early Judaism and Hinduism, where there was a whole lot of focus on killing.

Later, during the axial age. (which is a few hundred year period when all religions pretty much had an overhaul, independent of one another) things began to change. The Hindu Upanishads were published, calling for a ban on animal sacrifices, Buddhism was founded, Judaism went through its own revolution, and although it was a couple hundred years after the official Axial age, Jesus was born. This period of religion was basically, hey, maybe instead of all this killing, we should be nice to one another?

Even later than that, Islam came along. Islam is a religion of social justice that was founded on the belief that maybe there was more to religion than being nice to one another, and maybe society as a whole should actually take care of its people. And though it happened a thousand years later, I would call the Protestant Reformation similar to this, as though it focused more on the individual, it did call into question the power dynamics of authoritarian regimes. These would be the revolutionary religions (that have since stopped being so revolutionary, but isn’t that always the case?)

These days, the new religions offer nothing so revolutionary. The newest being the super scam-y Scientology which is obviously just a disaster, but Mormonism, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and all the recent, weird Christianity sects don’t offer anything new to the world either. They’re just slightly different stories, with slightly different rules and regulations, but there is nothing actually new being offered.

However, we do have an abundance of grass-roots organizations today fighting for social justice and equality. Not just the belief that we need to take care of those less fortunate, but that the less fortunate also have a voice and need to be seen as equals. Could we be in the middle of a new religious reformation, but with society’s general disenfranchisement towards religious institutions making it a secular one? All of the previous religious revolutions happened during times when religion was simply a part of the worldly paradigm. However, that paradigm has drastically shifted towards a much more secular version, and perhaps that means that our methods of revolutionizing the way people think has taken that turn as well?

I have no evidence for this and it would be impossible to prove anyway, but it’s certainly something interesting to think about.

This is obviously a very bare-bones retelling of the history of religion, and if you’re interested I’d recommend reading A History of God by Karen Armstrong.

I don’t actually hate science. I mean, some of my friends are scientists, so believe me when I say I have nothing against it. However, there is a Facebook page that keeps popping up on my newsfeed called, “I Fucking Love Science” that always makes me cringe.

Don’t get me wrong; science can be a great tool. We have longer, more comfortable lives because of it, and for that I am grateful. However, the amount of mindless knob-slobbering that goes on whenever Science is mentioned irritates me to no end.

My biggest gripe with the salivation over science is how it always goes hand in hand with the dismissal of religious thought. Like they are somehow incompatible, and that only science and reason can save us from the certain doom that the path of faith, hope, and love would certainly lead us.

Yes, there are certainly those who believe that religion and ideology are our only possible salvation while science will lead us down the path of sin and degradation, so those choosing science could just be fostering a bit of petty rivalry which I guess is certainly one reason to blindly worship at the tabernacle of reason. But which is the more destructive practice? I’ve mentioned some reasons that science is dumb in a previous blog that I will go over again, so if you are an ardent follower of my every word, there might be some overlap.

First let’s look at how science probably isn’t actually going to save us.

You remember how SimCity 2000 promised us fusion power by the year 2050? Maybe that’s just me. Anyway, extraordinary amounts of clean, wasteless energy would go a long way to solving a good number of worldwide issues. How many folks do you think are working on it? How many do you think are working on an ever-so-slightly faster microchip? Or a more efficient means of extracting crude oil? Or specific kind of bomb that only kills people who have a subconscious distaste for Freedom?

We live in Capitalism Land, ladies and gentlemen. And those scientists are working on things that will make money, because they’re only going to get grants from companies or governments that see some kind of profit behind it. And apparently scientists need to eat too.

If you are actively working against somebody who is making money, there is a good chance that people will actively work against you. Here in Canada we have an epidemic of scientists being muzzled by the government for the environmental work that they are doing in regards to the tar sands in Alberta. There are global warming deniers everywhere, simply because of how people with money paid off their own scientists to claim that it isn’t man-made, or that it is a figment of Al Gore’s imagination.

But Dan, you might say, This isn’t our beloved Science fucking up the planet, it’s people bastardizing the use of science for their own personal gains! Yes, I might say, Just like how one might bastardize the use of religion for their own greedy purposes, perhaps?

But now to shut you up even further, let’s look at how science is basically going to murder our faces. Yeah, I said it.

Everyone seems to think that 9/11 was religion’s fault because the people that did it happened to believe that America was fucking up their homeland, and their religion saw that as a bad thing, and then were persuaded by somebody to do something pretty extreme about it. But it never would have happened if science hadn’t invented airplanes and high rises in the first place.

Gun reform gets brought up every time a school is redecorated with bullet holes from an unruly youth, and the heated topic always mentions that if the student tried doing something with a knife then he would be stopped with much fewer casualties. How is the progression of weaponry not a huge black eye on the smug face of science? I mean, the atomic bombs in Japan killed 150 000 – 246 000 people. That was 70 years ago. Progress has been made on that front as well, and to think that no one would ever use such a deadly scientific discovery (again) is naive.

People will always disagree. Sometimes violently. If that violence becomes excessive, blaming it on the disagreement rather than the unchecked progress of weaponry is myopic.

Hey remember that global warming thing I mentioned earlier? You know what’s causing that? Oh yeah baby, it’s science. The great industrialization of the world, the high mark of scientific progress, the evolution from the uncivilized medieval period to the age of glorious reason, has basically bent over the planet for imminent penetration. I don’t want to turn this into a climate change blog because that’s not my ranting forte, but we’re screwed. Dumping into our oceans, smogging up our skies, ripping out our forests: all of these things in the name of scientific progress. Not just the pollution that comes from science is destroying the planet, but everything we need to fuel our addiction we have to rip out of the earth. We’re using up all our finite resources in such a way that we are causing untold damage to our planet. Which sustains us, by the way, so when it is irreparably fucked, it’s not like we can whistle a jaunty tune and carry on with our lives. We dead, folks, we dead.

Know how else science is going to kill us? You like eating? Science has “improved” on food by a substantial margin over the last few decades. No longer content to let our food not have poisonous chemicals on it, we now let our agriculture be sprayed with toxic pesticides among other fun and zany chemicals in order to make sure that there is an abundant enough crop to sell. Or a cow is pumped full of hormones in order to make it bigger, so you can sell more steaks off of it. This isn’t “improving” food; it’s making more money off of it. And if a few people get sick along the way, well, fine. We have too many people on this planet anyway, right? (I’m adding an interjection here: I work in a butcher shop, and I know what dead animal parts are supposed to look like. Looking at processed foods that have been scienced all to hell, I can assure you that they look nothing like the original pieces. At all. Just sayin’.)

So science is murdering us and our planet, and guess what? It’s murdering us economically as well.

The progress of information technology has accelerated greatly since the invention of the computer lo those many years ago. And the price has plummeted, with its computing power growing exponentially. That’s pretty swell, right? Except with technology being able to do more and more, that leaves less and less for humans to do. Instagram was recently purchased for about a billion dollars and it employs 13 people, whereas Kodak went bankrupt and employed 17 000 people, down from 63 000 just a few years earlier.

There is a Taiwanese company called Foxconn that is coming to America, and it is bringing along with it one million robots to put together its products.

Big companies will crush smaller ones with their access to expensive technologies that can predict consumer habits based on collected data, leaving the mom and pop shops to fall to the wayside of obsoletion.

This trend will continue for decades, with manufacturing prices plummeting along with the need of human workers maintaining the factories.

Big businesses will profit massively from this. The income disparity across the globe is already at staggering proportions, and will only continue to increase as science progresses and those on top will be able to produce massive amounts of product with minimal costs and extraordinary profits, while those at the bottom will no longer have any sort of employment. All thanks to science.

I honestly could go on. There are privacy and spying issues that science has enabled authoritarian governments to use on their populace; there is the decline of face to face social bonding which has been shown to help people psychologically; there’s that damned auto-tune ruining music…

When you think of things most likely to actually kill us, religion is so far down the list it doesn’t even register. It’s a scapegoat that is so easy to point a finger at because it doesn’t agree with our current cultural paradigm. But what if it’s our cultural paradigm of relying on science for everything that is actually the problem? We are already on the tipping point of absolute destruction, and we’ve already fallen so far, and you know what’s to blame? That’s right. Science.

Part of this was inspired by a lecture given by Dr. William Raduchel, titled “Will Technology Save Us or Doom Us?” as well as: https://www.facebook.com/IFeakingLoveScience

Also here are some links:

http://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/muzzling-of-federal-scientists-widespread-survey-suggests-1.2128859

http://nypost.com/2013/12/05/global-warming-proof-is-evaporating/

compared to this part of the Telegraph dedicated solely to the effects of man-made global warming:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/environment/

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/houston-stabbing-rampage-students-tackle-knifewielding-campus-slasher-8567296.html

2 critically injured compared to 32 dead in the Virginia Tech Massacre: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/04/16/AR2007041600533.html

You can look up Foxconn and Kodak and Instagram on your own if you like if you want to check my numbers.

Everyone loves debating the existence of God. It’s been around since the beginning of God. Since it was only recently that the general population started to actually care about whether or not you can actually prove God through some logic or science or non-voodoo-esque methodology, it kind of baffles the mind a little bit that those who were trying to do it were doing it during a time when the belief in God was pretty much on par with the belief in air. But anyway, all the proofs for God that I know of are from way back in those days, so apparently now that people want more and more proof, it’s becoming less and less necessary to give it. Go figure.

So let’s look at some of these proofs and see which ones we like. And by we, I of course mean I. You’re not contributing anything to this, slacker. Keep in mind I’m not talking about the Christian God, or any particular God, just the notion of a creator being. These would be proofs for theism.

I’m going to breeze through a couple first before I get into the more complex ones. First off, the watchmaker proof. Say you find a watch on the beach, and see all the crazy shit that makes up how a watch works. You look at that crazy watch and you think, “Wow, this shit is fancy. Somebody must have built this!” The watch is too complex to exist uncreated, so its existence implies a watchmaker. The universe and all the junk in it are the watch in this obvious metaphor, and God would be the watchmaker. So because stuff is complicated, there must be a God. This is dumb because science happened, and now we know how things became complex. It’s because of science. Thanks, science!

The next one is morality. There has to be a source for Goodness in this universe, God is that source, therefore God must exist. This is dumb because no there doesn’t. Wishful thinking is not proof.

Next up is personal experiences. Witnessing miracles, near death experiences, all the things where people have “seen” or “experienced” the divine prove the existence of it. These might be very personal and subjective reasons to believe in God, but objectively they prove nothing. Judging things you can’t explain by attributing them to God is the same as attributing them to aliens. Or mole people. It also creates the problem of the “God of the Gaps”, which means that as these things become explained, the status of God is lessened until everything is explained and there is no longer any use for God. Once lightning is explained away by electrons and whatever the fuck else makes lightning happen (I studied the arts, give me a break), we no longer have need for Zeus. If you want God to be relevant, find another way to justify Him (Yes I just gendered God. It just makes life easier. I’ll use “Her” next time if it’ll make you feel better).

This next one is a bit more complicated and harder to explain away. However, it’s even more dumb than the previous proofs I’ve mentioned. This one can be blamed on St. Anselm the Asshole, who asks us to imagine thusly, “think of the most absolute perfect being. Now, what would be more perfect: if this being existed, or if it didn’t exist? It would be more perfect if this being existed, therefore ergo and badda bing, this being is God and God exists.” Anselm then tells us to “Suck on that, hosers!” and does a little victory dance because as ludicrous as this argument is, it’s very difficult to counter. Allow me, your lovely narrator, to try.

Our good friend Immanuel Kant has two counters to this argument. The first is that this proof splits God into two: God and the idea of God, which is a fairly shoddy God indeed. It doesn’t really disprove the argument, just suggests that it’s super ambiguous and lame, and therefore not good enough to be considered concrete proof. Kant goes on further to say that perfection is not predicated upon existence. Existence doesn’t make something better or worse; it’s merely Being, and therefore does not actually add anything to that being (pay attention, this is a lot of beings.)

A couple counters to THAT argument are that even if existence doesn’t necessarily make something better or worse, it does vastly change the concept of that being. Does it make it more perfect? Who knows. The other is that necessary existence (not boring, regular-type existence) IS a predicate (such as, a four-side triangle necessarily must not exist), and that’s what Anselm was talking about. However, I disagree that necessary existence is a thing, since all the examples I’ve come across have been closer to necessary non-existence, which I would argue is a completely different notion. Also, this is still confusing even for me, so let’s just look at my idea next which totally refutes the thing to such a point that all of these counter and counter-counter arguments are superfluous.

My idea is that perfection as a concept is flawed. Since Anselm is asking us to do the imagining, he is relying on subjective analysis to create this perfect being. So the problem is, my idea of a perfect being would be one who makes it rain beer, whereas some other person’s idea of a perfect being might be one that really hates beer (looking at you, Mormons). Since there can be no objective definition of perfection, the proof is invalid. Suck on that, Anselm, you jag.

The last argument I’m going to dismiss outright is Aristotle’s Unmoved Mover. Or the First Cause. It has a few names. What this one boils down to is that each event was caused by a previous event. You exist because your parents conceived you, they came from your grandparents, so on back to the apes, back to the primordial ooze, back to the beginning of the universe. If each event has been caused, there has to be something that started the chain. The finger that pushed the first domino, so to speak. That finger… is God. This God has been the God of the philosophers for a long-ass time, since it’s super logical and reasonable and smart people tend to eat that shit up. However, it’s not very popular because Deism is super boring, and not at all relevant to the goings-on of every day life. People typically prefer a more personable deity that they can relate to. One that shares similar values, etc.

Also, I don’t think that it necessarily proves the existence of an Unmoved Mover either. The question that started this was, “what caused everything?” Well, I have to ask, “What caused God?” The answer is, “Nothing caused God; God just is” which is the point of the Unmoved Mover. But how come God just is? Why can’t the universe just is? If the causal chain has to stop, what difference does it make whether it stops at the universe, or at God? Look at this shoddy diagram I’m going to attempt here:

God causes universe causes x causes y causes z….

compared to

Universe causes x causes y causes z….

The argument for what just is seems to be arbitrary. If the universe has to have a beginning (which I don’t necessarily think that it does) then why does it have to be a being that causes it, when it could be just a simple event like the big bang or something with the word quantum in front of it.

Now I’m going to offer one argument that has a bit of clout to it. The universe is bound by mathematical laws. For example, gravity will always be defined by its mathematical formula. Because these laws are absolute (and even if our current laws are wrong, newer ones will still prove this theory), there must be a lawmaker. God is a mathematician.

This still runs into a few of the problems we’ve encountered before. Like with the watchmaker, why does a law imply a lawmaker? But these laws have been here since the beginning of time, have never changed, and continue to define the universe, unlike the complex entities that the watchmaker theory refers to.

The best counter-argument I can come up with is one similar to the First Cause counter-argument. Just as the universe could easily be just is, so too could the laws that define it be as such.

My final proof, however, does prove the existence of God beyond the shadow of a doubt. It all comes down to a sociological theory called the Thomas theorem: “If men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences.” So for example, objectively speaking, race isn’t a real thing. There is no difference between white people and black people outside of the colour of their skin. However, if you’re a black person on trial in the American south during the Jim Crowe era, it really doesn’t matter that race isn’t a thing. You’re fucked. You know why? Because of your race. Same with being white-bread going into Harlem after dark. You can objectively state that race is real because the consequences of race are real.

So it is with God. People recover from addiction, they honestly repent their crimes, they find serenity and strength, they blow up buildings and drink suspicious kool-aid, all because of God. You tell any one of those people that God doesn’t exist, and they will show you the proof in the consequences. The addiction is gone, the criminal is reformed, the spirit is healed, the building is destroyed, and Jonestown is a graveyard. The consequences are measurably real, therefore the thing causing them must be real. So God is real. At least, sociologically speaking She is.