Lay Theism

I finally was able to skate through Christmas without attending a religious service.  In a family full of Christians, it’s pretty tough to not get roped into a evening service or a choral presentation or some other faith-based celebration.  Because of a scheduling fluke, my wife and I were able to bow out gracefully and head home to prepare dinner.

It’s been an interesting year for me…  Next year I want to open up more via this blog.  Seems the best blogs to me are the ones where people reveal a little about themselves and their life experience.  I like several “link puke” blogs, but I really like the ones where people have something to say or something to share that I might learn something from their point of view, or at least be entertained!

Many things that took place in my life this year will allow me to open up more next year, to my readers, and to my family.  I hope you have a happy, healthy, prosperous next year, and if you care one way or the other, please let me know.  I promise to be interesting, if you promise to tell me when I suck.  All the best…  Hugh.

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The Naked Pastor posted these random thoughts the other day…

1. People don’t change their minds. Only rarely. Transformation is not a desirable option to our brains. It seems to require trauma, the threat of imminent death, to provoke real change of mind and bring about true transformation. Is it possible to enter death and be transformed while we are alive?

2. The greatest enemy of community is fantasy… visionary and wishful thinking. The lack of gratitude for what is, the unwillingness to appreciate what is, or the disdain for what is, erodes the fabric of community. Can we love unconditionally without coercion?

3. Our gross naiveté about the principalities and powers and their persistent desire and ability to enslave groups and individuals perpetuates the abuses institutions, including the church, are notorious for. Can all people be free?

4. Avoid naysayers as well as yes-men. You can always find complainers to agree with you. You can always find encouragers to agree with you. Can we find the courage to form our own minds independently, wisely, and compassionately?

I thought, hey… I like him.  He’s is talking about deconversion in #1, because that’s what it was like for me to step away from faith.  Constant bombardment with strange teachings in the Baptist church forced me to reevaluate the world we live in.

THEN, in #2 he nails it with typical religious thinking about the fantasy of a higher power vs. just appreciating this temporal gift of life on Earth, not just mine, but the whole human experience.  We just got here (relatively speaking), and the Earth will be here long after we have faded to extinction. I already love unconditionally without coercion and don’t know how else you could.

#3… tell me about it.

And, regarding #4, don’t “seek approval” for your point of view.  Establish it intellectually, with reason, and knowledge of the world and your fellow man. You don’t need other people to tell you what you should believe.

Holy crap, this dude’s batting 1000 in my book so far… but then came #5:

5. Listen to what the atheists are saying about the unprovability of God; discern the Christ-Principle in all things; have compassion for all beings. Is it possible to see all things as being reconciled?

Wha?! I rarely discuss the “unprovability of god”, but since you brought it up, what exactly is the evidence for God?  If you look at the sum total of the things the Christian God gets credit for in the Bible, why would you WANT to believe in him?  He wasn’t a good or just god. Jesus tried to correct all that, but please… look at the “miracles” he performed.  His teachings were in line with to Mohammad, Confucius, Buddha, Plato, etc. (borrowed, ex post facto, by reasonable men writing down “history” many years later). Other than these writings, what evidence is there for god?  For everyone good work, “divine” occurrence, or saved soul you can conjure, I can cite a dozen horrific, sad, disgusting things about the world that a good and just god would not allow… even a passive creator (with any “heart”) would not have created such a chaotic place.

Also, how would I find the “Christ-Principles in all things”?” As I understand it, the Principles of Christ are roughly, first, Faith in the Jesus Christ; second, Repentance… it really doesn’t matter after that because I get hung up on the FIRST one. I have faith that the human race has been duped for several millenia, for sure.  With regard to “sin”, seriously, Catholics (et al), get a grip and just be good people… forget about all the EXTRA rules and regulations that the church has piled on. It’s not a “sin” to eat meat… ever. Weird.

How about we all just skip ahead to “have compassion for all beings”? I can get on board with that… why make it sound like I need belief as a crutch.  See “The Golden Rule“.

The last sentence is stupid… no, we can’t reconcile all things, particularly mystical belief with intellectual reason.  They are incompatible.  Even less likely, reconcile your Christian mythology with a Islamic stranger an ocean away. Good luck.

However, abandon your fantastical beliefs, and then living with your fellow man, particularly the ones not like you, becomes much easier.  I guess his thoughts were pretty random after all.

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Someday I hope that this point of view dawns on us all…  Seen on Verbal Razors:

I regard monotheism as the greatest disaster ever to befall the human race. I see no good in Judaism, Christianity, or Islam — good people, yes, but any religion based on a single, well, frenzied and virulent god, is not as useful to the human race as, say, Confucianism, which is not a religion but an ethical and educational system.

— Gore Vidal

Wow… color me stunned and awed.  Clearly I need to brush up on my Gore Vidal.  I think I’ll start with Creation: A Novel.

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I really enjoy listening to NPR and This American Life… I actually pick up TAL from the free podcast most of the time.  I am currently listening to the latest episode where this poor woman named Trisha was moved by the good works of a decent man (who happens to be a Christian):

This past Christmas a story swept the internet about a football coach at a Christian high school in Texas who inspired his team’s fans to root for the opposition: a team from the local juvenile correctional facility. Among the thousands of emails that the coach received in response to his actions, one stood out to him. Trisha Sebastian mentioned her loss of faith, and coach Hogan got a message from God that he was meant to bring her back. We eavesdrop on their phone calls.

Problem is, she sent him an e-mail.  She was not just moved, but moved to action.  She had a friend that had died of colon cancer a few years earlier and never could reconcile this with her Catholic faith (”very lapsed Catholic”).  She also made the mistake of saying that she is “borderline agnostic”… a big mistake.  After this admission, there was a protracted exchange where God “moved his spirit” repeatedly to witness to her about “the idea of God”.  His first e-mail response to her even included the admonishment “I expect to hear back from you, young lady”.

They spoke on the phone and with permission Trisha recorded the call.  It really went off the rails when Coach Hogan dragged Hitler into the conversation in the context of “objective good” and “objective evil”:

Hogan: If you say “Good” is only people’s opinion it stems from our own… [stammer]… you define true for you and I define true for me then how do you reconcile that with Hitler saying it is true that if we can eliminate Jews and other people on the planet then it will be a better planet because we are a superior race?  And he of course he gets his world view from Charles Darwin.

Sebastian: Right.. Wait. Wait Wait…

And that’s where he pretty much lost her.  I’m sure there was plenty of nonsense and weirdness before this, but she took a GIANT step away from him when he went there.  There are so many issues with that asinine statement, it’s difficult to know where to begin.

1. The concept of “race” to Darwin, Hilter, and modern science are very different.
2. Hilter was a Christian (aka, Hitler was not an Atheist)
3. Darwin was correct about Evolution (it’s a fact)

 
It’s a shame that we have to live with the legacy of Darwin’s relative ignorance about the similarities of men.  At the time (150 years ago), class, geographic isolation, religion, and extreme differences in culture and skin pigment contributed to the classification of people as coming from different races.  While evolution certainly was responsible for the genetic variations Darwin and others observed, we know now that there is common ancestry of ALL humans less than 8,000 generations ago.  It certainly wasn’t the Tower of Babel, The Great Flood, or some other cataclysm that caused our differences.

I wish I had more time, more energy, and more knowledge (I am only a laytheist, after all) with which to explain and debunk Christian bullshit, but there are so many angles… if you aren’t happy with scientific comparisons, just compare to other religions.  That should be enough to convince anyone that religion was made up solely by men at different, overlapping times all over the world.

Why would one be better than the next?

Trisha, I’m so sorry about your friend.  The truth is that she had a groups of cells in her colon malfunction and go bad.  In what sounds like a fairly serious cell breakdown, the cancer was virilent enough to cause the rest of her body to ultimately lose. Now, do you really think that this is a mechanism that God put in place to eliminate some people for reasons we can’t know? If so, why are there so goddammed many mysterious ways for the body to break down and die?  Wouldn’t two or three be adequate? Is suffering necessary?  Why have we been able to permanently eliminate some previously fatal diseases and maladies?  Doesn’t it make more sense that it’s a product of millions of years of evolution and change…?  And that sometimes the shit just breaks?

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I am totally blown away.  Almost makes me want to believe in myths.  Based on the creator’s bio (not THE creator… the creator of the website, Marcus Shepard), he has been doing this since 1999.  Not that the guy doesn’t have talent, but it’s a bit of a one-trick-pony sideshow.

It’s like Judge Dredd meets the Matrix meets World of Warcraft meets the Terminator meets Ted Haggard (with a dash of Denzel Washington).

Take a look at the SharperFX web site… look for the “WEBSITES” link — it has a “NEW SITES” sign sticking out of it with a pop-up laser shield behind THAT (wait for it…) contains eight pages of MAXIMUM FLASH… for God. Crowd favorite seems to be ICCM-1 (dash 1?). Ah, turns out all the other “good” ICCM website URLs were taken.

What would be amazing is if someone spoofed it and went WAY over the top — with flash animation, spinning logos, swords, lightning, voiceovers, random steel foundry noises…  aw crap.  He already has all that in there.  How do you spoof a caricature?

Anyway, in the spirit of the WWE, please to enjoy some wacky propaganda for… The Holiest of Holies… The Alpha and the ChrOmega… The Master of the Universe… The reigning Heavyweight champion of the world… (closest challenger is Islam the Destroyer)…  the ONE… the ONLY…  CHRISTIANnnnnn… FAITHHhhhhhh….  [CROWD CHEER].

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