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07-22-2020, 03:55 PM
Who Would Jesus Infect?
(07-21-2020, 11:21 PM)mordant Wrote: When I have spoken, now and again, about spending years prying theistic notions out of my head with a crowbar, that is the kind of thing I'm talking about. Fortunately on some level I understood that it was fucked up and it made me uneasy, but for a long time I just didn't know anything else. Also, the fiction that the ruler of heaven and earth has you in his back pocket is quite addictive, and getting away from that notion is definitely a short-term loss. Also, it's a blow to one's ego: the stark fact that you are of no importance at all, that you're not special and chosen and living out a plan prepared from the beginning of time ... that's no fun realization when you are taught from the cradle that these things are so.
Whenever I read posts like this (and others in this thread), I'm grateful that I was, as I always say, a self-taught religionist, so I was happily choosing only the good things about religion and discarding the bad. It was later much easier to get rid of the whole lot of it, as there wasn't that much to get rid of.
All this reminded me of an essay by my beloved Greg Egan (seriously, I *love* this man's brain (the only thing *to* love about a man. Or a woman, to be fair )). I knew he wasn't religious (how could he be!) and often he'd put into words things I've often thought and felt (but much better than I could) but I was really surprised to find out that he *did* use to be religious at one point.
Speaking in tongues aside, his experience seems to have been very similar to mine, including a disbelief in hell (seriously, anyone who could honestly accept the idea of a hell without being greatly disturbed and revolted, is a moral vacuum), a picking and choosing the good things from religion and kind of discarding or twisting the bad ones ( "Given that I’d ended up with a faith that was perfectly compatible both with my own conscience, and with anything the natural sciences might reveal, it might easily have lasted my whole lifetime. Having access to a sense of great peace and contentment, and a conviction that in the end all wrongs will be made right, is not a burdensome state to be in.").
And of course, the inevitable realisation that you belonging to one religion instead of another is almost entirely a matter of pure, random chance of birth (I still remember finding this one especially unfair): "I don’t recall any one thing that finally drove a stake through the heart of my faith. Perhaps it boiled down to a question of which was most likely: that I had been born into a culture that, out of all the many religions on Earth, happened to worship the true creator of the universe, or that I had put my own spin on an emotional Rorschach blot that could easily be explained without invoking anything supernatural at all."
"What I do suspect I once shared with a great many religious believers is not so much the core of mystical experience as the larger package that was wrapped around it: the belief that the universe has a purpose, and that despite the unspeakable horrors of our history and the smaller miseries of everyday life there is a promise that everything will be put right in the end. This is a powerful and appealing notion; once you have it in your grasp it’s hard to let go, and some of us will go to very great lengths to rationalise holding on to it."
Show ContentSpoiler:
Though I have never encountered a persuasive argument for the metaphysical claims of any religion, for more than a decade — from the age of twelve until my mid-twenties — I was convinced that I had direct, firsthand, and incontrovertible knowledge of God’s existence.
My father was a moderately devout Anglican who encouraged his children to attend church; he occasionally taught Sunday school, but he rarely discussed religion at home. I don’t recall my mother ever expressing an opinion on the subject. My elder brother, though, began to take religion very seriously in his early teens, and eventually converted to Catholicism.
The particular group of Catholics my brother associated with were involved in what was known as the Charismatic movement; they believed that “Baptism in the Holy Spirit” was essential for salvation. This practice, probably most familiar to the wider community these days from its prominent role in various strands of American Protestantism, is based on the Biblical account of Acts 2, 1-4:
And when the day of Pentecost was fully come, they were all with one accord in one place. And suddenly there came a sound from heaven as of a rushing mighty wind, and it filled all the house where they were sitting. And there appeared unto them cloven tongues like as of fire, and it sat upon each of them. And they were all filled with the Holy Ghost, and began to speak with other tongues, as the Spirit gave them utterance.
In the summer of 1973-74, I was eagerly awaiting high school, convinced that it would be the start of a great intellectual adventure. Though I had already taught myself calculus, my brother, four years older than me, seemed dazzlingly intelligent and sophisticated in comparison; he had studied foreign languages and mastered what seemed from my twelve-year-old’s vantage point to be vast swaths of worldly knowledge. We shared a room, and each night — after our mother finally succeeded in making us switch off the light and stop reading — we’d often spend an hour or so talking in the dark, chewing over some perennial scientific or philosophical question.
One night, the conversation turned to God. Though church services bored me witless, I was still a believer by default. I don’t recall having experienced any profound sceptical insights; there were things I found puzzling about the claims of religion, but my attitude was that some of these would probably be resolved in the course of my education, and as for the remainder, I was well aware that understanding the universe was an ongoing human project, and there was no reason to expect to be living in an age when every question had been answered.
My brother talked about the history of Christianity, and the arguments for belief that various theologians and philosophers had made over the centuries. To my surprise, he freely admitted that all of those arguments were inadequate; you could not, he said, reason your way to God. Belief had to be a matter of faith, and faith was a gift from God. But it was not a gift to be bestowed only upon a select few. If I asked God sincerely for this gift, it would be granted to me. All I had to do was kneel down and pray, and ask Jesus to send the Holy Spirit into my heart.
I’m sure I sensed that I was being led towards a place I didn’t actually want to go, because I tried to argue my way out of the ambush, or at least buy myself some time. Maybe this wasn’t necessary for everyone, I suggested. Maybe I could think about it for a few days. But my brother was having none of this. Anyone who wasn’t baptised in the spirit would be damned, and the fear I felt was being put there by Satan. This had to be done now, or Satan would claim my soul.
So we rose from our beds and knelt down together, and I did as I was told.
When I’d finished praying, I felt a great sense of contentment, but I wasn’t actually sure that the crucial event had taken place. My brother assured me that it had, and the feeling grew stronger. When I silently prayed, my prayers were answered immediately by a powerful upswell of emotion, and this wordless dialogue became richer and more intense, until all I had to do was mentally invoke the name of Jesus and I felt overwhelmingly happy, safe, and loved. Within a matter of hours, I had gone from someone who would dutifully repeat the tenets of his religion, but might easily have been persuaded to reconsider them, to one who found it as absurd to question God’s existence as to question the reality of the sun while lifting his face to the sky at noon.
In the weeks that followed I entered my brother’s circle of friends as a kind of mascot, tagging along with him to prayer meetings and services at the local Catholic church. This was the era of the musical Godspell, and the nuns, monks, priests and lay people who formed the Charismatic movement resembled nothing so much as guitar-strumming, drug-free hippies. If they had any political or social agenda, though, it went right over my head; all I remember is a lot of praying and singing. I even began praying in tongues myself, emitting strings of foreign-sounding syllables that favoured the consonants sh and l. My brother recounted the anecdote of a woman who had begun praying in Hebrew, despite never having heard the language; a speaker of Hebrew had supposedly authenticated this claim. But nobody was making recordings of our prayer meetings and sending them to linguists to analyse; if the thought ever crossed my mind, I probably dismissed it as vaguely blasphemous. Faith wasn’t meant to be tested.
I don’t recall exactly how long I spent as part of this group, but eventually some sense of adolescent independence kicked in, and I cut myself loose. I stopped going to church services, Anglican or Catholic, and in a superficial sense my life returned to normal.
But the Holy Spirit wasn’t something you could walk away from as easily as a roomful of singing nuns. I still woke up every morning knowing, beyond all possibility of doubt, that Jesus had died for me, that his Father loved me, and that ultimately everything would turn out right.
Apart from the absolute core of Christianity, though, I found myself uncommitted to any doctrinal, or even scriptural, detail. I could not believe that people who failed to be baptised in the spirit — or even people who believed in other religions entirely — would be damned; I wasn’t even sure that I believed in Hell, except perhaps as a purely voluntary alternative to Heaven, where anyone too proud to accept God’s love could sit around and endure each other’s Sartrean company. As I entered my teens, an ever greater proportion of official Christian teaching began to strike me as either unjust or, frankly, childish and silly, but the messenger from Jesus living inside me had none of those qualities, and that took precedence over anything a Pope, bishop, theologian or dodgily-translated apostle might declare. The bottom line was, I knew that God would save all of humanity, because the love I felt from Him was unconditional.
My religious convictions certainly didn’t diminish or constrain my interest in science; I’d never even met a Creationist. Still, my sense of God as a kind of supervisory presence had an uneasy accommodation with my growing understanding of the laws of physics. I even went through a phase of subscribing to the inane notion that quantum uncertainty allowed a window for divine intervention and the actions of the soul upon the human body. But I didn’t really expect a neat resolution to be at hand. The existence of God was a given, as much as my own existence. Science would continue to reveal whatever it revealed, and I had nothing to fear from that. Since I didn’t even grasp more than the tiniest fraction of what scientists had found, and they themselves seemed to have no shortage of unanswered questions, any suggestion that the whole conceptual jigsaw puzzle might fail to fit together seemed ludicrously premature.
Given that I’d ended up with a faith that was perfectly compatible both with my own conscience, and with anything the natural sciences might reveal, it might easily have lasted my whole lifetime. Having access to a sense of great peace and contentment, and a conviction that in the end all wrongs will be made right, is not a burdensome state to be in.
Why, then, did it finally unravel? Very slowly, I turned my attention to the thing itself: the reason for my faith, the source of my conviction. What exactly had happened to me when I prayed beside my brother that night? What exactly was going on, each time I called upon the Holy Spirit?
My faith didn’t like to be scrutinised. When I asked myself these kinds of questions, the reply was a jolt of transcendental happiness and a reminder that I shouldn’t expect to understand such things. But I was not part of any religious community; there was nobody around to reinforce the interpretation of the experience that had first accompanied it. I felt joyful when I prayed. This proved ... what? Perhaps it simply meant that I’d discovered a way to feel joyful when I prayed. The human brain is a flexible organ, and compared to all the complicated trance states and meditative practices of other religions this seemed like a very modest achievement, something even a twelve-year-old child subject to the right kind of duress might manage.
Nevertheless, I resisted that conclusion for years. A vague alternative explanation was not a disproof of my original interpretation — and even if someone could have put me in a scanner and pointed out every detail of some physical mechanism, what would that mean? That religious joy — just like every other kind of joy — had certain physical correlates. How was the Holy Spirit supposed to comfort me without laying a finger on my neurotransmitters?
I don’t recall any one thing that finally drove a stake through the heart of my faith. Perhaps it boiled down to a question of which was most likely: that I had been born into a culture that, out of all the many religions on Earth, happened to worship the true creator of the universe, or that I had put my own spin on an emotional Rorschach blot that could easily be explained without invoking anything supernatural at all.
It would be absurd to over-generalise from my experience, but equally absurd to treat it as singular. Perhaps neurologists will eventually pin down a particular mechanism associated with the kind of religious practice I’ve described, but to me it seems equally likely that the mechanisms will be diverse. What I do suspect I once shared with a great many religious believers is not so much the core of mystical experience as the larger package that was wrapped around it: the belief that the universe has a purpose, and that despite the unspeakable horrors of our history and the smaller miseries of everyday life there is a promise that everything will be put right in the end. This is a powerful and appealing notion; once you have it in your grasp it’s hard to let go, and some of us will go to very great lengths to rationalise holding on to it.
“We drift down time, clutching at straws. But what good's a brick to a drowning man?”
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07-22-2020, 09:02 PM
Who Would Jesus Infect?
(07-22-2020, 03:55 PM)Vera Wrote: (07-21-2020, 11:21 PM)mordant Wrote: When I have spoken, now and again, about spending years prying theistic notions out of my head with a crowbar, that is the kind of thing I'm talking about. Fortunately on some level I understood that it was fucked up and it made me uneasy, but for a long time I just didn't know anything else. Also, the fiction that the ruler of heaven and earth has you in his back pocket is quite addictive, and getting away from that notion is definitely a short-term loss. Also, it's a blow to one's ego: the stark fact that you are of no importance at all, that you're not special and chosen and living out a plan prepared from the beginning of time ... that's no fun realization when you are taught from the cradle that these things are so.
Whenever I read posts like this (and others in this thread), I'm grateful that I was, as I always say, a self-taught religionist, so I was happily choosing only the good things about religion and discarding the bad. It was later much easier to get rid of the whole lot of it, as there wasn't that much to get rid of.
All this reminded me of an essay by my beloved Greg Egan (seriously, I *love* this man's brain (the only thing *to* love about a man. Or a woman, to be fair )). I knew he wasn't religious (how could he be!) and often he'd put into words things I've often thought and felt (but much better than I could) but I was really surprised to find out that he *did* use to be religious at one point.
Speaking in tongues aside, his experience seems to have been very similar to mine, including a disbelief in hell (seriously, anyone who could honestly accept the idea of a hell without being greatly disturbed and revolted, is a moral vacuum), a picking and choosing the good things from religion and kind of discarding or twisting the bad ones ("Given that I’d ended up with a faith that was perfectly compatible both with my own conscience, and with anything the natural sciences might reveal, it might easily have lasted my whole lifetime. Having access to a sense of great peace and contentment, and a conviction that in the end all wrongs will be made right, is not a burdensome state to be in.").
And of course, the inevitable realisation that you belonging to one religion instead of another is almost entirely a matter of pure, random chance of birth (I still remember finding this one especially unfair): "I don’t recall any one thing that finally drove a stake through the heart of my faith. Perhaps it boiled down to a question of which was most likely: that I had been born into a culture that, out of all the many religions on Earth, happened to worship the true creator of the universe, or that I had put my own spin on an emotional Rorschach blot that could easily be explained without invoking anything supernatural at all."
"What I do suspect I once shared with a great many religious believers is not so much the core of mystical experience as the larger package that was wrapped around it: the belief that the universe has a purpose, and that despite the unspeakable horrors of our history and the smaller miseries of everyday life there is a promise that everything will be put right in the end. This is a powerful and appealing notion; once you have it in your grasp it’s hard to let go, and some of us will go to very great lengths to rationalise holding on to it."
Show ContentSpoiler:
Though I have never encountered a persuasive argument for the metaphysical claims of any religion, for more than a decade — from the age of twelve until my mid-twenties — I was convinced that I had direct, firsthand, and incontrovertible knowledge of God’s existence.
My father was a moderately devout Anglican who encouraged his children to attend church; he occasionally taught Sunday school, but he rarely discussed religion at home. I don’t recall my mother ever expressing an opinion on the subject. My elder brother, though, began to take religion very seriously in his early teens, and eventually converted to Catholicism.
The particular group of Catholics my brother associated with were involved in what was known as the Charismatic movement; they believed that “Baptism in the Holy Spirit” was essential for salvation. This practice, probably most familiar to the wider community these days from its prominent role in various strands of American Protestantism, is based on the Biblical account of Acts 2, 1-4:
And when the day of Pentecost was fully come, they were all with one accord in one place. And suddenly there came a sound from heaven as of a rushing mighty wind, and it filled all the house where they were sitting. And there appeared unto them cloven tongues like as of fire, and it sat upon each of them. And they were all filled with the Holy Ghost, and began to speak with other tongues, as the Spirit gave them utterance.
In the summer of 1973-74, I was eagerly awaiting high school, convinced that it would be the start of a great intellectual adventure. Though I had already taught myself calculus, my brother, four years older than me, seemed dazzlingly intelligent and sophisticated in comparison; he had studied foreign languages and mastered what seemed from my twelve-year-old’s vantage point to be vast swaths of worldly knowledge. We shared a room, and each night — after our mother finally succeeded in making us switch off the light and stop reading — we’d often spend an hour or so talking in the dark, chewing over some perennial scientific or philosophical question.
One night, the conversation turned to God. Though church services bored me witless, I was still a believer by default. I don’t recall having experienced any profound sceptical insights; there were things I found puzzling about the claims of religion, but my attitude was that some of these would probably be resolved in the course of my education, and as for the remainder, I was well aware that understanding the universe was an ongoing human project, and there was no reason to expect to be living in an age when every question had been answered.
My brother talked about the history of Christianity, and the arguments for belief that various theologians and philosophers had made over the centuries. To my surprise, he freely admitted that all of those arguments were inadequate; you could not, he said, reason your way to God. Belief had to be a matter of faith, and faith was a gift from God. But it was not a gift to be bestowed only upon a select few. If I asked God sincerely for this gift, it would be granted to me. All I had to do was kneel down and pray, and ask Jesus to send the Holy Spirit into my heart.
I’m sure I sensed that I was being led towards a place I didn’t actually want to go, because I tried to argue my way out of the ambush, or at least buy myself some time. Maybe this wasn’t necessary for everyone, I suggested. Maybe I could think about it for a few days. But my brother was having none of this. Anyone who wasn’t baptised in the spirit would be damned, and the fear I felt was being put there by Satan. This had to be done now, or Satan would claim my soul.
So we rose from our beds and knelt down together, and I did as I was told.
When I’d finished praying, I felt a great sense of contentment, but I wasn’t actually sure that the crucial event had taken place. My brother assured me that it had, and the feeling grew stronger. When I silently prayed, my prayers were answered immediately by a powerful upswell of emotion, and this wordless dialogue became richer and more intense, until all I had to do was mentally invoke the name of Jesus and I felt overwhelmingly happy, safe, and loved. Within a matter of hours, I had gone from someone who would dutifully repeat the tenets of his religion, but might easily have been persuaded to reconsider them, to one who found it as absurd to question God’s existence as to question the reality of the sun while lifting his face to the sky at noon.
In the weeks that followed I entered my brother’s circle of friends as a kind of mascot, tagging along with him to prayer meetings and services at the local Catholic church. This was the era of the musical Godspell, and the nuns, monks, priests and lay people who formed the Charismatic movement resembled nothing so much as guitar-strumming, drug-free hippies. If they had any political or social agenda, though, it went right over my head; all I remember is a lot of praying and singing. I even began praying in tongues myself, emitting strings of foreign-sounding syllables that favoured the consonants sh and l. My brother recounted the anecdote of a woman who had begun praying in Hebrew, despite never having heard the language; a speaker of Hebrew had supposedly authenticated this claim. But nobody was making recordings of our prayer meetings and sending them to linguists to analyse; if the thought ever crossed my mind, I probably dismissed it as vaguely blasphemous. Faith wasn’t meant to be tested.
I don’t recall exactly how long I spent as part of this group, but eventually some sense of adolescent independence kicked in, and I cut myself loose. I stopped going to church services, Anglican or Catholic, and in a superficial sense my life returned to normal.
But the Holy Spirit wasn’t something you could walk away from as easily as a roomful of singing nuns. I still woke up every morning knowing, beyond all possibility of doubt, that Jesus had died for me, that his Father loved me, and that ultimately everything would turn out right.
Apart from the absolute core of Christianity, though, I found myself uncommitted to any doctrinal, or even scriptural, detail. I could not believe that people who failed to be baptised in the spirit — or even people who believed in other religions entirely — would be damned; I wasn’t even sure that I believed in Hell, except perhaps as a purely voluntary alternative to Heaven, where anyone too proud to accept God’s love could sit around and endure each other’s Sartrean company. As I entered my teens, an ever greater proportion of official Christian teaching began to strike me as either unjust or, frankly, childish and silly, but the messenger from Jesus living inside me had none of those qualities, and that took precedence over anything a Pope, bishop, theologian or dodgily-translated apostle might declare. The bottom line was, I knew that God would save all of humanity, because the love I felt from Him was unconditional.
My religious convictions certainly didn’t diminish or constrain my interest in science; I’d never even met a Creationist. Still, my sense of God as a kind of supervisory presence had an uneasy accommodation with my growing understanding of the laws of physics. I even went through a phase of subscribing to the inane notion that quantum uncertainty allowed a window for divine intervention and the actions of the soul upon the human body. But I didn’t really expect a neat resolution to be at hand. The existence of God was a given, as much as my own existence. Science would continue to reveal whatever it revealed, and I had nothing to fear from that. Since I didn’t even grasp more than the tiniest fraction of what scientists had found, and they themselves seemed to have no shortage of unanswered questions, any suggestion that the whole conceptual jigsaw puzzle might fail to fit together seemed ludicrously premature.
Given that I’d ended up with a faith that was perfectly compatible both with my own conscience, and with anything the natural sciences might reveal, it might easily have lasted my whole lifetime. Having access to a sense of great peace and contentment, and a conviction that in the end all wrongs will be made right, is not a burdensome state to be in.
Why, then, did it finally unravel? Very slowly, I turned my attention to the thing itself: the reason for my faith, the source of my conviction. What exactly had happened to me when I prayed beside my brother that night? What exactly was going on, each time I called upon the Holy Spirit?
My faith didn’t like to be scrutinised. When I asked myself these kinds of questions, the reply was a jolt of transcendental happiness and a reminder that I shouldn’t expect to understand such things. But I was not part of any religious community; there was nobody around to reinforce the interpretation of the experience that had first accompanied it. I felt joyful when I prayed. This proved ... what? Perhaps it simply meant that I’d discovered a way to feel joyful when I prayed. The human brain is a flexible organ, and compared to all the complicated trance states and meditative practices of other religions this seemed like a very modest achievement, something even a twelve-year-old child subject to the right kind of duress might manage.
Nevertheless, I resisted that conclusion for years. A vague alternative explanation was not a disproof of my original interpretation — and even if someone could have put me in a scanner and pointed out every detail of some physical mechanism, what would that mean? That religious joy — just like every other kind of joy — had certain physical correlates. How was the Holy Spirit supposed to comfort me without laying a finger on my neurotransmitters?
I don’t recall any one thing that finally drove a stake through the heart of my faith. Perhaps it boiled down to a question of which was most likely: that I had been born into a culture that, out of all the many religions on Earth, happened to worship the true creator of the universe, or that I had put my own spin on an emotional Rorschach blot that could easily be explained without invoking anything supernatural at all.
It would be absurd to over-generalise from my experience, but equally absurd to treat it as singular. Perhaps neurologists will eventually pin down a particular mechanism associated with the kind of religious practice I’ve described, but to me it seems equally likely that the mechanisms will be diverse. What I do suspect I once shared with a great many religious believers is not so much the core of mystical experience as the larger package that was wrapped around it: the belief that the universe has a purpose, and that despite the unspeakable horrors of our history and the smaller miseries of everyday life there is a promise that everything will be put right in the end. This is a powerful and appealing notion; once you have it in your grasp it’s hard to let go, and some of us will go to very great lengths to rationalise holding on to it.
Thank you very much for passing this extensive quotation on, Vera. I think it is one of the best and clearest explanations of how religious faith works and self-reinforces itself, that I have heard or read. I urge non-theists to read it for insight. It is very accurate. It does not take much to be "hooked" and to feel subjectively validated in one's beliefs.
I did not even have the subjective "warm fuzzies" he describes so much as everyone around me claimed to have them and I actually took their subjective positive response as proxy evidence. I knew myself well enough to understand that I'm not much given to such responses and unlike him I was part of a sect that very much distrusted subjective emotional responses and thought they were rife with opportunities for "deception". Ours was a more cerebral faith that appealed to my more cerebral style. Our positive reinforcement came from our study of theology and the Bible, and the smug belief that we had insider info not available to outsiders. Also there was none of this undignified charismatic stuff.
The basic underpinning, as he points out, is the overarching notion of being protected, cared and provided for, and loved unconditionally. Whether that means, as it did to me, a sense of epistemological certitude and clarity and simplicity, or, as it did to the quoted author, a subjective emotional response to perceived unconditional love, it is very powerful and not to be under-estimated. People don't leave these belief-systems until the pain of leaving them is less than the pain of staying in them.
For me that happened when I saw the abstraction leaking way too much and too often. Most of the time, the explanations and predictions of my faith were not just wrong, but 180 degrees wrong. And I don't like surprises. And so it gradually become more painful to explain away / excuse these inconsistencies than to just admit that they existed, and to begin to accept the implications of that. Various bereavements helped me along in this process, because each one was horrible to contemplate through the lens of faith, but somewhat tolerable to see as just a series of unfortunate events of no particular import, or the end points of certain causal chains, some of which I could perceive and some of which I even had a role in. Such understandings of life events give you at least some control over them and understanding of them, compared to a capricious deity's actions and the need to square them with your understanding of an exacting system of revealed black-and-white truth.
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07-24-2020, 03:29 PM
(This post was last modified: 07-24-2020, 04:32 PM by Vera.)
Who Would Jesus Infect?
(07-22-2020, 09:02 PM)mordant Wrote: Thank you very much for passing this extensive quotation on, Vera. I think it is one of the best and clearest explanations of how religious faith works and self-reinforces itself, that I have heard or read. I urge non-theists to read it for insight. It is very accurate. It does not take much to be "hooked" and to feel subjectively validated in one's beliefs.
I did not even have the subjective "warm fuzzies" he describes so much as everyone around me claimed to have them and I actually took their subjective positive response as proxy evidence. I knew myself well enough to understand that I'm not much given to such responses and unlike him I was part of a sect that very much distrusted subjective emotional responses and thought they were rife with opportunities for "deception". Ours was a more cerebral faith that appealed to my more cerebral style. Our positive reinforcement came from our study of theology and the Bible, and the smug belief that we had insider info not available to outsiders. Also there was none of this undignified charismatic stuff.
The basic underpinning, as he points out, is the overarching notion of being protected, cared and provided for, and loved unconditionally. Whether that means, as it did to me, a sense of epistemological certitude and clarity and simplicity, or, as it did to the quoted author, a subjective emotional response to perceived unconditional love, it is very powerful and not to be under-estimated. People don't leave these belief-systems until the pain of leaving them is less than the pain of staying in them.
For me that happened when I saw the abstraction leaking way too much and too often. Most of the time, the explanations and predictions of my faith were not just wrong, but 180 degrees wrong. And I don't like surprises. And so it gradually become more painful to explain away / excuse these inconsistencies than to just admit that they existed, and to begin to accept the implications of that. Various bereavements helped me along in this process, because each one was horrible to contemplate through the lens of faith, but somewhat tolerable to see as just a series of unfortunate events of no particular import, or the end points of certain causal chains, some of which I could perceive and some of which I even had a role in. Such understandings of life events give you at least some control over them and understanding of them, compared to a capricious deity's actions and the need to square them with your understanding of an exacting system of revealed black-and-white truth.
He's brilliant. I wasn't kidding when I said I love his brain. He has a great story, The Moral Virologist ( free on his website, about "John Shawcross is a fundamentalist Christian who is disappointed that safe sex has limited the spread of HIV/AIDS, which he considers to be God's punishment for sexual immorality; consequently, he becomes a virologist, so that he may create a new, more lethal virus."
There's also Silver Fire, coincidentally about a pandemic, which has this, scarily probable quote in it: "Maybe, in the West, we'd delivered the death blows to the old doctrinal religions, the old monoliths of delusion ... but that victory meant nothing at all.
Because taking their place now, everywhere, was the saccharine poison of "spirituality"
It's interesting, though, reading about other people deconverting because of horrible things that happened to me. My case was very different. Frankly, I've no idea why I became religious, nor much of a one why I stopped. I mean, yes, there was the moral abhorrence of hell, the unfairness of having being born, by pure chance, into the "right" religion, but I often say that it's like a switch got flipped in my brain... and then it got flipped back again.
I do remember, at uni, starting to "lose" my religion, as I'd feel and feeling despair and dread about. Being very "uneducated" in matters of religion (I would pretty much read the bible and that was it), I stumbled upon William Cowper, who was a Calvinist (or sth. similar) and believed, poor man, that he was *not* one of the elect (seriously, there are few things viler than Calvinism. And its followers, smugly convinced that *they, themselves* (and, of course, their loved ones. Imagine that!) have been saved. Not because they've done something but because they've been chosen. It doesn't get any more arrogant and repugnant than that). Anyway, Cowper believed that he wasn't saved/was damned and there was nothing he could do about it. For a while, while my faith was growing weaker, I felt the same. It was rather dreadful.
Couple of years later I was doing my master's in Sweden and things started to unravel, albeit, mostly subconsciously. It's funny (and sad) because it's very obvious in my thesis paper, where I might have babbled crap about 20th century being "devoid of meaning" (or rather, life was, for many people). I was never like this when I was religious, but I was in the grip of a deconversion right then and I think those were the death throes of me religiosity. Pity they've been preserved in writing
I was ever so "grateful" though, that when my mum was diagnosed with lupus *and* my grandfather was suffering nightly hallucinations because of his Parkinson's medication, I was already safe in the knowledge that neither of those things were a punishment for something we've done, but a purely random.
There's just as much comfort in the knowledge of a random and indifferent universe. At least to me. At least in a violent world, full of horrific suffering. To believe that it can be the product of a loving god must be hell. Unless you never give it a thought, of course, which seems to be what most religious people do.
“We drift down time, clutching at straws. But what good's a brick to a drowning man?”
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07-24-2020, 03:29 PM
(This post was last modified: 07-24-2020, 03:30 PM by Vera.)
Who Would Jesus Infect?
God damn double posts!
“We drift down time, clutching at straws. But what good's a brick to a drowning man?”
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07-25-2020, 01:19 AM
Who Would Jesus Infect?
(07-24-2020, 03:29 PM)Vera Wrote: I do remember, at uni, starting to "lose" my religion ... ... and no wonder so many fundamentalists hate higher education. They lose SO many of their young that way, usually in the first year. On some level those kids have always smelled bullshit, and it's like a dam breaks for them.
(07-24-2020, 03:29 PM)Vera Wrote: I was ever so "grateful" though, that when my mum was diagnosed with lupus *and* my grandfather was suffering nightly hallucinations because of his Parkinson's medication, I was already safe in the knowledge that neither of those things were a punishment for something we've done, but a purely random.
There's just as much comfort in the knowledge of a random and indifferent universe. At least to me. At least in a violent world, full of horrific suffering. To believe that it can be the product of a loving god must be hell. Unless you never give it a thought, of course, which seems to be what most religious people do.
I totally agree, although it took me awhile to come around to seeing comfort in a universe not presided over by some sort of benevolent being, as I'd been heavily conditioned to consider that nihilistic and despairing. It actually isn't though. In fact nihilism itself, as I'm sure you know, was conceived as a hopeful and positive thing in any event.
And you are so right that personal challenges and tragedy are far more easily borne without the useless questions and inconsistencies of faith. Why me, why them, why now, how can this be ... the grieving and suffering are not served by being additionally burdened with such questions.
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07-25-2020, 02:09 AM
Who Would Jesus Infect?
(07-21-2020, 06:01 AM)Tomatoshadow2 Wrote: (07-21-2020, 05:15 AM)Thumpalumpacus Wrote: (07-21-2020, 05:11 AM)Tomatoshadow2 Wrote: I shouldn't be surprised with everything going on, that people who believe in God, act like he'll fix everything.
... as they occupy ICUs because those prayers just ain't workin' ...
Yeah, they aren't praying hard enough, like they tell every atheist.
(07-21-2020, 05:41 AM)Minimalist Wrote: (07-21-2020, 05:11 AM)Tomatoshadow2 Wrote: I shouldn't be surprised with everything going on, that people who believe in God, act like he'll fix everything. We atheists are still waiting, wait we know it will never happen.
Odd isn't it that no god humans have ever worshiped has ever done shit?
It's almost like the made the whole idea up!
Right, just makes the believers so mad, that atheists are giving them doubt about their God.
We could ask You-Know-Who back, and he can teach us how to do A.S.K. prayer.
Test
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07-25-2020, 02:17 AM
Who Would Jesus Infect?
(07-25-2020, 02:09 AM)Bucky Ball Wrote: (07-21-2020, 06:01 AM)Tomatoshadow2 Wrote: (07-21-2020, 05:15 AM)Thumpalumpacus Wrote: ... as they occupy ICUs because those prayers just ain't workin' ...
Yeah, they aren't praying hard enough, like they tell every atheist.
(07-21-2020, 05:41 AM)Minimalist Wrote: Odd isn't it that no god humans have ever worshiped has ever done shit?
It's almost like the made the whole idea up!
Right, just makes the believers so mad, that atheists are giving them doubt about their God.
We could ask You-Know-Who back, and he can teach us how to do A.S.K. prayer.
I'm not that far from you. Don't make me go over there and smack you one, young man!
If you get to thinking you’re a person of some influence, try ordering somebody else’s dog around.
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07-25-2020, 02:53 AM
(This post was last modified: 07-25-2020, 02:59 AM by Thumpalumpacus.)
Who Would Jesus Infect?
Lord, you know that as a non-believer, I haven't asked anything from you in 26 years. I'm easy company and make few demands.
But if you in your wisdom are going to allow a scourge to kill a million or two people, might I ask you to consider a couple of names for your list?
Of course Trump is first, you knew my heart before I spoke it, dear Lord.
And I'm pretty sure you guessed Kim Kardashian was high on that list as well.
I'd also appreciate it if Mitch McConnell had a sudden stitch of cancer.
That guy in Turkey -- what's his name, Erdogan? -- could you arrange for a nasty cold or perhaps a urinary tract infection? That'd be swell.
Perhaps if you're not too busy managing the spread of Covid this year, you could see that medical and charity workers are miraculously protected from this virus of yours? What's that? You're too busy? Oh ... sorry I asked too much of you.
On hiatus.
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07-25-2020, 03:07 AM
Who Would Jesus Infect?
(07-24-2020, 03:29 PM)Vera Wrote: I do remember, at uni, starting to "lose" my religion, as I'd feel and feeling despair and dread about. Being very "uneducated" in matters of religion (I would pretty much read the bible and that was it), I stumbled upon William Cowper, who was a Calvinist (or sth. similar) and believed, poor man, that he was *not* one of the elect (seriously, there are few things viler than Calvinism. And its followers, smugly convinced that *they, themselves* (and, of course, their loved ones. Imagine that!) have been saved. Not because they've done something but because they've been chosen. It doesn't get any more arrogant and repugnant than that). Anyway, Cowper believed that he wasn't saved/was damned and there was nothing he could do about it. For a while, while my faith was growing weaker, I felt the same. It was rather dreadful.
Couple of years later I was doing my master's in Sweden and things started to unravel, albeit, mostly subconsciously.
Did it help being in Sweden? In my limited experience and what I hear from my relatives, there are more Muslims immigrants than native Christians there.
"The advantage of faith over reason, is that reason requires understanding. Which usually requires education; resources of time and money.
Religion needs none of that. - It empowers the lowliest idiot to pretend that he is wiser than the wise, ignoring all the indications otherwise "
- A. Ra
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07-25-2020, 03:53 AM
Who Would Jesus Infect?
(07-24-2020, 03:29 PM)Vera Wrote: God damn double posts!
Yeah, but your posts are always worth reading twice Vera
No gods necessary
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07-26-2020, 03:56 PM
(This post was last modified: 07-26-2020, 04:37 PM by Vera.)
Who Would Jesus Infect?
(07-25-2020, 03:07 AM)M.Linoge Wrote: Did it help being in Sweden? In my limited experience and what I hear from my relatives, there are more Muslims immigrants than native Christians there.
Help with what? I was moving almost exclusively among other students, international, from my course, and my corridor-mates (dorms there were "divided" by corridor, eight (single) rooms per one. I swear, my accommodation was better than some flats I've seen. A big room, a hallway and a HUGE bathroom, and a shared big living-room (for the eight in the corridor), with huge fridges and stoves and sofas (they replaced them with new ones, for free, while I was still there) and a TV. We had this tradition, that each week one of us was responsible for taking out the recyclables (I found it rather zen, putting everything in the right container (they had separate ones for hard and soft plastic, for coloured and colourless glass, for metal and what have you) and then this person would buy (or make) something sweet and we'll have fika (coffee and something to nibble on).
Pity I was so depressed near the end of my stay (due to deconversion, having to go back to Bulgaria, etc.). They eve made me a birthday cake.
Here's my dorm room (mini flat, really) (and me, much younger and weirder-looking )
This was the view from my window. Ah, I miss this place.
Strangely enough, as Sweden isn't known for being especially religious, one of my corridor-mates was (her fiance was going to be a pastor, of all things) and we'd go on walks and talk (among other things, obviously) about religion. I never really like to talk much about religion; I think it was a mixture of me not liking to talk about things that really important and personal to me but also because I was embarrassed about being religious. Like I always say, many and varied personalities live in my head
(07-25-2020, 03:53 AM)brunumb Wrote: Yeah, but your posts are always worth reading twice Vera
“We drift down time, clutching at straws. But what good's a brick to a drowning man?”
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07-26-2020, 04:13 PM
Who Would Jesus Infect?
Meanwhile it seems that "jesus" has fucked up again!
https://friendlyatheist.patheos.com/2020...onference/
Quote:22 People Caught COVID at Preacher Andrew Wommack’s Bible Conference
Quote:The Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment now says that they’ve traced a COVID outbreak back to his Bible conference, “with seven staff members and fifteen attendees testing positive.” And those are just the people we know about! Who else did they come into contact with?!
A few days ago, Wommack addressed this issue by saying an upcoming “Healing is Here Conference” would be live-streamed only. Even he noted the obvious irony:
The county where we are located has seen an increase in Covid-19 cases and a few of our staff and attendees at our last conference have tested positive too. Our local health officials have expressed their concerns over this being a live, in-person event. I believe we have the Constitutional right to hold the event live, but I also do not want anyone to get sick if we can avoid it.
I know it seems ironic that I’d be canceling a healing conference due to a sickness outbreak. If it was just me, I believe that if I touch someone, they’ll catch my healing instead of me catching their sickness. But since the Covid-19 cases in this community have risen lately, I have to consider the safety and well-being of everyone involved. I know that God wants to heal Covid, just like every other disease, and he can do that no matter where you are!
Moron.
Robert G. Ingersoll : “No man with a sense of humor ever founded a religion.”
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07-26-2020, 04:14 PM
(This post was last modified: 07-26-2020, 04:35 PM by Vera.)
Who Would Jesus Infect?
(07-25-2020, 01:19 AM)mordant Wrote: ... and no wonder so many fundamentalists hate higher education. They lose SO many of their young that way, usually in the first year. On some level those kids have always smelled bullshit, and it's like a dam breaks for them.
Oh, it had nothing to do with university, it just happened there, timewise. I wasn't studying anything even remotely scientific. Plus, here we learn about evolution in high school so it wasn't a question of expanding my horizons or knowledge or anything. It just... happened.
I'm reminded of an interesting article I came across some time ago, on patheos I think, but can't find it now, by an ex-fundamentalist and how he used to be afraid that one day scientists would discover something he wouldn't be able to twist and squeeze into the glass-slipper of his religious belief. It was about a recent discovery or something to do with astronomy, and he was "celebrating" being able to rejoice in this knowledge, without fear. It was a good article.
That being said, I'm becoming ever more pessimistic. Even leaving the "saccharine poison of spirituality" about which Egan was spot on, it would appear that there's never been a time where so much knowledge has been so easily accessible to so many... and at the same, never a time where so many have been so proudly and wilfully ignorant. We gorge ourselves on McKnowledge, McLiterature, McMusic and McEntertainment in general and we get offended when someone so much as dares suggest not all examples of those things are created equal.
I'm afraid Aldous Huxley was a hundred percent right and we are fiddling (or should I say twerking?) while the whole planet burns.
Quote:I totally agree, although it took me awhile to come around to seeing comfort in a universe not presided over by some sort of benevolent being, as I'd been heavily conditioned to consider that nihilistic and despairing. It actually isn't though. In fact nihilism itself, as I'm sure you know, was conceived as a hopeful and positive thing in any event.
And you are so right that personal challenges and tragedy are far more easily borne without the useless questions and inconsistencies of faith. Why me, why them, why now, how can this be ... the grieving and suffering are not served by being additionally burdened with such questions.
Spot on!
“We drift down time, clutching at straws. But what good's a brick to a drowning man?”
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07-26-2020, 09:11 PM
Who Would Jesus Infect?
(07-25-2020, 01:19 AM)mordant Wrote: ... And you are so right that personal challenges and tragedy are far more easily borne without the useless questions and inconsistencies of faith. Why me, why them, why now, how can this be ... the grieving and suffering are not served by being additionally burdened with such questions ...
Here is one of the most expensive yet hidden costs of belief in a "protector" and/or a "just universe" - the magnified pain of life's setbacks in increased angst. How many suicides has this unexpected expense incurred? The religious plink their 10% into the collection plate unaware the true cost of belief could overwhelm their whole economy.
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07-27-2020, 10:17 AM
Who Would Jesus Infect?
(07-26-2020, 09:11 PM)airportkid Wrote: (07-25-2020, 01:19 AM)mordant Wrote: ... And you are so right that personal challenges and tragedy are far more easily borne without the useless questions and inconsistencies of faith. Why me, why them, why now, how can this be ... the grieving and suffering are not served by being additionally burdened with such questions ...
Here is one of the most expensive yet hidden costs of belief in a "protector" and/or a "just universe" - the magnified pain of life's setbacks in increased angst. How many suicides has this unexpected expense incurred? The religious plink their 10% into the collection plate unaware the true cost of belief could overwhelm their whole economy.
The believers will go through a very challenging time or something that is horrible. They, say to themselves or others, that it was God testing them. I just shake my head that believers still think that God would give them a challenge to test their faith. Believers, give away money and great point, don't even probably think what happens to it, just thinking it might make a difference.
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07-27-2020, 10:27 AM
Who Would Jesus Infect?
"When God closes a door he opens a window."
"Cool, jump out of it."
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07-27-2020, 10:47 AM
Who Would Jesus Infect?
(07-27-2020, 10:27 AM)Gawdzilla Sama Wrote: "When God closes a door he opens a window."
"Cool, jump out of it."
Right and believers are always trying to bring someone with them or telling atheists about the wonder of their God. They have their God, they can leave the atheists alone.
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07-29-2020, 01:11 PM
Who Would Jesus Infect?
(07-27-2020, 10:47 AM)Tomatoshadow2 Wrote: (07-27-2020, 10:27 AM)Gawdzilla Sama Wrote: "When God closes a door he opens a window."
"Cool, jump out of it."
Right and believers are always trying to bring someone with them or telling atheists about the wonder of their God. They have their God, they can leave the atheists alone.
The operant conditioning / learned helplessness of their faith causes them to feel that life is completely unworkable without god and the only reason the godless don't embrace god is that they just don't know what they're missing. They imagine they couldn't survive, and therefore conclude that we cannot.
The irony is that people like my wife, when presented with the appeals of religious faith, are simply confused and baffled, and see no coherence, much less value, in it. Much less feel a need for "meaning" or "purpose" or "transcendence" that would be sought therein. To the extent they have life challenges (just like everyone does), they don't see such lacks as central to solving them.
In other words the "wonder of their God" is a faux solution to a problem they are projecting outward on others. The real problem of religiosity is a desire for things to be a Certain Way, and to be easily solved with black and white beliefs that don't require hard choices or dealing with grey areas. When you quit insisting that life be as you wish it to be, but allow it to be as it is, and are willing to work WITH it as it is, the value of religion pretty much evaporates.
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08-01-2020, 10:37 PM
Who Would Jesus Infect?
(07-29-2020, 01:11 PM)mordant Wrote: (07-27-2020, 10:47 AM)Tomatoshadow2 Wrote: (07-27-2020, 10:27 AM)Gawdzilla Sama Wrote: "When God closes a door he opens a window."
"Cool, jump out of it."
Right and believers are always trying to bring someone with them or telling atheists about the wonder of their God. They have their God, they can leave the atheists alone.
The operant conditioning / learned helplessness of their faith causes them to feel that life is completely unworkable without god and the only reason the godless don't embrace god is that they just don't know what they're missing. They imagine they couldn't survive, and therefore conclude that we cannot.
The irony is that people like my wife, when presented with the appeals of religious faith, are simply confused and baffled, and see no coherence, much less value, in it. Much less feel a need for "meaning" or "purpose" or "transcendence" that would be sought therein. To the extent they have life challenges (just like everyone does), they don't see such lacks as central to solving them.
In other words the "wonder of their God" is a faux solution to a problem they are projecting outward on others. The real problem of religiosity is a desire for things to be a Certain Way, and to be easily solved with black and white beliefs that don't require hard choices or dealing with grey areas. When you quit insisting that life be as you wish it to be, but allow it to be as it is, and are willing to work WITH it as it is, the value of religion pretty much evaporates.
Yeah believers, think everyone needs religion and don't think about, how millions of atheists are very happy without religion. Religious people, act like God will help them through everything, what they need to realize, is to be strong on their own without faith.
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