NON-FICTION: Two Stupid Arguments: Faith is like belief, God=Argument for Morality

George Michael was the only guy who could make me believe in it

Faith is either a distinct faculty of experience, or a special term for a certain type of belief.

The reason people want to say it is a kind of belief, or equivalent to some kinds of belief, is because there are in fact many things we believe without actually knowing why we believe them, or being able to prove them with utter certainty.

A common sort of reasoning goes like this: I've never seen Australia, but I believe it's there, therefore I can believe in god without seeing it.

Of course, like the stupid man-made watch implies man made design, therefore tree implies design argument, this sort of reasoning ignores the definition of god.  I learned this from Ayn Rand years ago, and it is about the only useful bit of philosophy I still have from her.

Australia is proposed as an observable phenomena, it is a country like other countries, a place like other places, on the same planet as us, known through other people by empirical evidence.

What the theist will do is obfuscate this by referring to direct experience, and something like degrees of trust: People have direct experience of Australia, people have direct experience of god.

But direct experience is also what people have of their delusions. I have had direct experience of delusions, or beliefs that completely contradicted what I understood about reality, and they would have remained if I had not rigorously analyzed and critique them.

Empirical evidence, however, is what we can demonstrate to each other.  I can take you to Australia, I can show you pictures, or I can just tell you that I saw it.

God, on the other hand, is not strictly delineated.  You can't photograph god, you can't falsify god, you can't smell god.

This is where faith comes in!  You have to just trust that there is something there.

And what are you trusting?  That there is something that you can't see, can't demonstrate, can't point at, can't catch, can't go to, and can't touch.  And if you can't do any of that, than where did you get the information to have the belief, and how did you come to believe it?

The answer is you got the idea from someone else.  And that faith/trust/belief is really trust that someone else had a good reason to believe, and then you develop your own reasons to believe. 

Since god is all belief, it has nothing to hold itself out of the grip of human will.  This is why it is not surprising to find that faith in god resolves nothing unless you already prescribe to the same beliefs (which you arrived at through some reasoning in a limited social context.) If we are the same kind of Christian, than we have a framework within which to get along.

If your faith is too different from mine, than you and I, at best, can agree to disagree, at worst, we can dehumanize each other for not recognizing the through god, and at most tiresome, we can just argue about evidence, history, and all the other things we expect to sway others with, even though are faith renders us immune to them.

When we get to the point of trying to pretend that god is a universally agreed upon concept, we near the sad reasoning of modern believers like William Lane Craig, and Rabbi Wolpe, who both debated Christopher Hitchens.

God they say, or Religion, which they conflate, because it all comes down to knowing other religions through viewing them as versions of their own religion, is the only basis for objective moral values.

They love to quote Smerdyakov (I think it was him because he was the jerk) in The Brothers Karamazov: If there's no god, anything goes.

Dear god what nonsense, as Hithcens pointed out, If there is a god, anything goes.

If there is a god, than people can rape pre-pubescent girls, massacre aborigines, stab pregnant women and rip out their fetuses with bayonets, send young men to their deaths, organize genocide, and drop a couple nukes on Japan after they surrendered.  .

If there is a god, than that's what goes in it's/their world.

As for objective moral values, this is where they confuse their own insulated world with all the others that seem close enough to their own, as long as they don't understand these other religions from an insider perspective.  So of course they can be made to seem equivalent.

Religions don't share any more objective values than religious people do with non-religious people. 

Both Craig and Wolpe think that if you don't have a just universe!!! than you cannot just base your morality on expedient context-based guidelines. 

Imagine a just universe, where moral codes for humans were built into the universe  That's the language Wolpe used!

Physicists, astrophysicists, and astronomers have all failed to find these moral laws.  And that's where faith comes in.

And this is what distinguishes faith as a distinct experience.  No matter what fails to verify your belief, or no matter what contradicts your belief, you still know it's true.

And this is the objectivity of the theists, the totality of the absolute monarch and dictatorship.  Amongst other theologians and theists, they talk about mutual appreciation, but in their godly hearts, they know that there way is the only way, and those who don't share their faith, are doomed to suffer.

This is their certainty.  And to sustain it, they use faith.  

NON-FICTION: Further notes on the Force of Faith

The dominant religions of our world cannot exist apart from continuously reinforced ingorance, fear of the outsiders, condemnation of the world available to us through free enquiry, and pressure to believe, starting at youth.

The majority of people in the world who adhere to Zoroastrianism, Sikhism, Buddhism, Hinduism, Christianity, Islam, and Judaism have been introduced to their faith primarily by the awesome power of their parents.

The parents bring the child it's first role model, hierarchical system, and instructions on how to think.  The parents are the witnesses to the validity of faith.  They immerse the child in presumptions that need not be independently verified by the child.  The child's belief in any nonsense that the parent spouts, such as the tooth fairy or Santa Claus is easily taken for granted by the child.  And when the child doubts these presumptions, he or she is inclined to obey the parents admonitions against doubting.  And when this doubt is portrayed to the child as fundamentally dangerous, fundamentally bad, and straight up evil, the child will invest great amounts of energy into suppressing this doubt and reworking his or her thinking in order to conform with these doubtful presumptions.

More than just parents are needed, however, to reinforce the suspicious presumptions.  The child of a lone nut or cult member must be kept  away from other kids in the neighborhood as much as possible, lest the child be corrupted by other views, and led astray by the desire to fit in to his or her peer group.  And the child of a Christian living in a Christian neighborhood, or living in a country where Christianity is prevalent, still must be guarded, against the non-Christian elements of society, which tempt the child all it's life.  This defense of the child's inculcation into an indefensible world view is not something the parent can do alone.  It takes the whole neighborhood.  It takes a group effort.

In addition, then to the force of the parents in inculcating faith, we further need the constant reinforcement of the wider group.  Uncles, aunts, neighbors, grandparents, teachers and principals need to scare the child away from doubting doubtful assertions of miracles and magic. When the child of strong faith enters into a world where that faith is not taken for granted, it hardly survives.  In an environment where assertions of god, battles between gods, resurrection, original sin, the illusory character of the self, contracts between a god and certain ethnic groups, or the communication between god and certain historical figures are generally tolerated, but often looked down upon for their irrationality or dismissal of the need for evidence, there is little hope for the full retention of the faith of one's childhood.

In such situations, the hope of faith lies in fear and incoherence.  The parent and other authorities attach a strict fear of punishment, rejection, and hopelessness to the questionable doctrines they force onto children.

When the time comes that the child's reasoning contradicts the myths of his parents and community, the threats against non-believers come into play.  You're life will be meaningless, if you sustain thought processes that invalidate your faith.  You will be lost, afloat in the universe in a sea of chaos.  You will go to hell, where everything you fear will be inflicted upon you ceaselessly.  You will be a savage, a non-human, at the mercy of your base desires.

And, for children who reject this intimidation, a personal use may be fashioned out of the anti-definition, anti-verification doctrines of god that have been forced on them.

For these children, the entry into adolescence and adulthood may bring the realization that a positive internal experience of the other can be a source of comfort and power.

When we are alone in ourselves, there is that sense of otherness, perhaps it really is some independent entity, or perhaps it is just the corresponding brain mechanism that allows us to latch onto our parents at birth, or maybe it is some creation inspired by our sociality, or tendency to reach out to others in times of distress, to beg for help from the people available to us.  But it is there in me, and I assume that it is there in many people.  I have other presences in me too, some I call myself and some I reject.  Some are paranoid, petty and violent, and some allow me to conform to a standard of behavior that I believe in.

When we are alone in ourselves, we are never alone.  Our selves are a jumble of tendencies and drives and noise and processes.  The anomalous nature of the god that we are forbidden from categorizing, defining, analysing, editing, correcting, or facing with cold logic becomes something ever more capable of survival for it's vagueness.  And it is in this form that it survives within a great deal of adults, especially those in communities where no particular relgious dogma is enforced by the state, peer-pressure, or the clergy. 

If you arm a child with tools of reasoning, evidence, testing, verification, and indepedendence of thought, you need not fear too much that the child will be turned toward Catholicism, Mormonism, or the Moonie cult.

But to go the other way, to arm the child with fear of disbelief in your own particular dogma, to constantly reinforce this fear with the participation of the greater community, and to erase from the child's mind any possibility of other beliefs is the true calling and goal of the fellowship of belief, be it in Saudi Arabia, 14th century Europe, Hindu Nationalist areas in India, the former theocracy of Tibet, the former theocracy of China, the former theocracy of Japan, or the desired theocracy of fundamentalist Christians in the U.S.A.

In the secular forums they speak for equal time, such as in the attempt to combat evolution by theists in my own country.  In societies generated by plurality and a belief in the goodness of equality among different peoples, they demand fairness and respect, such as in the case of moderate Muslims during the Danish cartoon incident.

But in their realms, at Jesus Camp, in the countries where Isalmic clergy holds power superior or comparable to the state, and in other contexts where religion dominates, they let go of the secular appeals to respect, fairness, and tolerance.  In their own worlds, they are free to ban, to kill heretics, to burn books, smash cd's, intimidate their children, subjugate woman, subjugate the poor, punish the victim, and generally deny the tenets of toleration, reason, discussion, evidence, and doubt.

After hundreds of years in Western Civilization of certain factions and camps fighting for ever greater inclusiveness, fairness, and better living for an ever greater portion of society, these Faithful, once again, are reacting against freedom and tolerance.

They fight against the system by appealing to the rules they spit upon.  Christians who deny evidence, deny even the possibility of testing their central beliefs, argue for open-minded science, and embracing a plurality of beliefs.  Their open mindedness extends only to those of their theories that have been rejected by scientists, and their plurality extends to and ends with their singular view of the world and our place in it.  They fight against free speech by utilizing their rights to protest and publish.  Muslims in Britain protest against the system that refuses to condemn them for their beliefs, and they do so in the hopes that they can spread Islam throughout the world, silencing and eliminating secular government and the reviled embrace of pluralism.

All this they call faith.  There is no major, peace loving, fellow-human loving, beuatiful paen to humanity type of Faith around today that was not spread by force, by the threat of death, or some other punishment.

And when idiots promote their religion by appealing to the prevalence of religion, they are also endorsing the continued coercing of children into belief that is the endeavor of many of their co-religionists and a vital issue in their theology.

It is only in the modern times of rejection of religion that they embrace toleration of other religions.  It is only because we skeptics, we heretics, we godless killjoys have had so much influence that religious leaders tentatively accept a society where our rights are protected.  But, for the most part, those leaders only accept this secular society insofar as it serves the end of spreading their own dogma.  For the dominance of the dogma is the general aim of religious leaders.  Not a simple recognition of rights and practices, regardless of personal belief, but obedience to their chosen dogmas.  Just as they were coerced into belief, so must others be coerced into the true belief, either by attacking evolution, democracy, and rational thought, or by attacking the people that don't agree with them, such as non-Muslisms, non-Christians,communists, abortion doctors, apostates, and, of course, the gays.

There will always be plenty of people ready to accept their own beliefs as something that others need not accept.  There will always be people who prefer good social ties and equitable relationships over adherence to unprovable dogma.  But these people don't get to be religous leaders very often, and if they do happen to attain influence, like Marting Luther King, they are slandered and reviled as untrue to their faith.

The religous leaders that hold out, espeicially when simply keeping one's religion to oneself is so banal, are the ones who have a fight, who stand out against the general society in their nonsensical intepretations of their religion (usually they claim to need no interpretation, which is impossible.)

These are the people that threaten our freedom, the progress of our civilizations, and the enjoyment of our lives.

Faith, one of the most revered artifacts of humanity, is nothing more than repetition of dogma backed by the towering authority of the parent, the threat of exclusion from one's community, the threat of physical harm, the internal threat of betraying the only truth one feels validated in accepting, and the kings and armies of history. 

The reverence for faith is a reverence misunderstood and obfuscated by those who profess it.  It is a feeling of obedience and loyalty made into a faculty in it's own right, that no one can find and that no one ought even to look for.

NON-FICTION: Get to the freaking point: Theism/Atheism, Factual Assertions=True/False

How many pathetic centuries of obfuscation have been wasted avoiding this simple truth.  A claim has to be defended, proven, doubted, explained, to be judged either true or false or possible.

The millions of theists, particularly those of the intellectual class, who obfuscate the issue of trust and belief by using a Latinate term, faith, are both unwilling and disinterested in clarifying the issue.

Faith, they say is a higher faculty, or "That's why they call it faith."  As if the assertion can avoid any process of logic by it's common acceptance, as if the atheist could be cowed by ad populum (an argument that is said to be true because a lot of people believe it).

And, in fact, that is where faith really comes from, not from the appeal to the authority of the people, but rather to the appeal of some people: Those in Charge.

It use to be the case that there was a group of True Christians who hunted out the many heresies.  There was noone to stomp out heresy with a police force or armies, so there were many groups with different Christianities.  They listed and condemned the men and woman who deviated from their views.

But, for them, this was a matter of arguments about the state of the world.  There was no controversy between science, because they believed the gods were forces that intervened in their world.  God was something real, and He kept the world going and punished the people who messed around with him.


But when did Christianity spread?  When it became the main authority.  The western Roman Empire became the Catholic Church and that's when it became mandatory to believe in god.  That's when the repression, the torture, the exploitation, and the wiping out of various cultures took the name of salvation rather than mere conquering.


And it is that same authority that confronts us to today.


Christianity was spread by the impulse to empire, the impulse to conquer.  Islam was spread in this way as well.  King Ashoka spread buddhism througout the Indian subcontinent and the nearby regions.  The Tang emperor adapted it for China, and enforced it on the masses, and the Tibetan rulers adopted it in Tibet.


That is where faith gets it's authority from.


When the Christians, theists, and atheists denounce the strident, arrogant new atheists, like Dawkins and Hitchens, what they really mean is that anyone who could so assuredly and bluntly reject theism, must be arrogant.


But what does that presuppose? That there is something to be humble about.  A topic to be humble before.


And just as the ancient Jewish god was akin to the despots of early Egypt or near eastern civilizations, so too is the faith that they refuse to question, and use as a refusal to question anything but why you don't agree with them, so too is this faith a loyalty to belief, a belief that they must believe.


This faith is the faith of the totalitarian state.  It says "We shall do whatever it takes to get you to submit, for everyone must submit.  And we shall never give up our loyalty to these ideas and lords, for to do so would be do to commit evil."


When you are confronted by the imperative to believe, which has to be reinforced constantly, remember that this is now embedded in our cultures because at one time it was picked up by an army, and made into the state ideology.


The only thing you ever need to do with a factual assertion, like "Jesus was killed and came back to life.", or "David didn't burn in the flames." is discuss whether or not it is true, why it might be true, and what would have to confirm or deny it.

If you say it must be assessed by faith, then you are saying it must be assessed by the second thing that faith refers: inner states of feeling.  Assessing a claim by using faith means seeing what you feel about it.

But, between people, feelings must be explained and justified when they contradict.

But Christians don't do that.  They say they you've got to have faith, which means they intentionally trust a set of ideas, and commit themselves to changing the mind of everyone, everywhere, while believing that to change their own minds would be a sin, or unholy, and, therefore, unthinkable.


If you say Jesus did something, that is an assertion on your part.  If you wan't me to believe, than let's talk about it with the awareness that it might be true, and it might be nonsense, and both of us are completely to change our mights without negative consequences.


If, instead you fall back on faith, and recommend it to me, that what this means, is you are falling back on trust of certain ideas, and you seek to convince me to trust these ideas by telling me to trust.


Look at the following example:


A.Every piece of evidence I have and you have doesn't make the possibility of god very likely.


B. Evidence.  Huh huh huh.  That's why they call it faith.


And, since faith means a feeling of trust, despite what the apologists and deep thinkers want to maintain, this statement is equal to: I don't have enough evidence to believie in god?  That's why they call it belief!  Cause you have to blieive it.


And what we end up is with something the person can't understand because they believe it is something that cannot be understood.

And to you the idiot stupid enough to expect things we believe to understandable and subject to confirmation or denial, there is nothing that can be done except to tell you that there is no understanding to be had, only acceptance.

Relgion has been eaten away and replaced to such a great extent in our world, that the modern exponents of religion have no idea that they have inherited a past set of technologies, claims about reality, explanations of weather and illness, and explanations of government.

BOOK REVIEW: Apologetics instead of Exploration

I don't know if the authors of The Spiritual Brain are Christians, but their methodology of advancing their ideas is close enough to Creation science. I'm on cd5 now and so far all I have heard are attacks on materialist ideas of the brain; accusations of dogmatism, the angry attacks on heretics by materialists, intolerance and persecution of pure hearted, well intended, scientific explorers of the soul.

The less than amusing feature of this method is that, so far, I have yet to hear any new ideas about the spiritual brain.

In all honesty, I recall feeling stimulated by a few points, but they are buried in my mind by the inundation of anti-materialist science rhetoric.

Actually, I do remember one bit mentioned a couple of chapters ago, Karl Popper said that there is something called 'promisory materialism' and this sounds like a very interesting critique of certain tendencies in science, especially considering Popper's reputation as a skeptic interested in epistemology.

But that's not from the authors of the book, they just employ the quote in the process of showing that atheists and people who explain god through neurological phenomena are, suprise suprise, the real practitioners of faith.

The earliest I can recall hearing this “So you believe in science! Ah hah! You have faith in science!” was from the head of the Christian club at Cerritos High School. Science is a religion! Well, there goes my denial of the Christ's, who is the same substance as god, according to experts, came back to life and ascended to heaven. In actually, my response then is still more than sufficient for me: The concept of god as I it is generally defined is self-contradictory, and it's proponents say as such, thus it has no clear meaning, or way of evaluating it's validity. Therefore, as a metaphysical proposition, it's nonsense.

I'm listening to the book now, and I just heard another tired point: that materialist explanations of god take away right and wrong, and leave only our base desires. A bit after that comes the logical conclusion of scientific explanations, who all we atheists know and love: Pol Pot.

Pol Pot dehumanized his victims, and do you know why? Not because of some analytic interpretation of the workings of his mind. Not because people, on the whole, are equally capable of helping and hurting each other. Of course, the reason is that Pol Pot didn't have a spiritual view of the soul and morality.

Religion, on the other hand, upholds the value of each life, except for when the gods kill us in their wars, or when the Judeo Christian God is offended and floods the planet or tells his star pupil Joshua to kill his disobedient neighbors.

Christianity, whose anti-science apologetics this book resembles, has many strands that claim that man is unworthy of redemption, unworthy of God's forgiveness, but only saved through the grace, the charity, the whimsical forgiveness of God. Why are we unworthy? Because, we disobeyed!

I think the God family needs counseling.

Anyways, this book is still going on about how materialism is wrong. I was really interested in hearing scientific evidence for a non-materialist view of the mind, but apparently these guys have been too busy crouching under the assault of Dennet, Dawkins, Ramachandran, and all the other unscientific adherents of the religion of materialism.

This is why the authors of the Spiritual Brain have, halfway through the book, declined to mention one single testable hypothesis.

It's the same old shit: You guys can't PROVE we are wrong, so therefore... you know, stop being mean.

Meanwhile, the scientifically rigorous advocates of the, apparently scientific content-less Spiritual Brain continue to attack scientists who take the brain as being identical with the mind.

I thought he was going to get to some evidence just now, but he's just going off again on how scientists who claim to have identified neural correlates of consciousness, at various times, have been shown to be wrong, or drawing false conclusions from their experiments.

He's talking about OCD now, and the cingulate, ganglia, and neuronal plasticity. Let's see... I'm guessing something's coming about how the scientists who thought they could fix OCD by identifying the NCC's of OCD failed, and therefore, the default implication is god!

I have recently listened to the audiobooks Unweaving the Rainbow and Ancestor's Tale.

(Now he's arguing for free will......I assume that's what his opponents are denying and what can only be located in the non-material spirit)

Anyways, in the two Dawkins books, he didn't spend his time attacking non-materialist views of biological diversity. On the contrary, he talked about the topics indicated by the title of each book. He also spent a fare amount of time criticizing certain aspects of thinking among scientists. He spends even less time attacking religion.

Of course, there is a book in which Dawkins attacks all religion. That is The God Delusion. Here again, the book is about the title. And, although he does, at times, make strong, declarative statements against religion and it's adherents, he is also reasoned and precise in his description of what he opposes and why he opposes it.

I became an atheist for philosophical, primary epistemological reasons, back when I was into Ayn Rand and Objectivism, so I was always inwardly dismissive of scientists speaking on the issue of God.

It was, for me, what it still is: an issue to be analyzed on the grounds of it's assertions, which are fundamentally and eternally non-empirical. Thus, the whole discussion of religion in conjunction with the realm of science is offensive and shameful, unless they are finally going to say. “We think God is real, this experiment will test it. If the data conclusively holds up in contradiction of our god hypothesis, we will give it up.” Theists don't think this and, insofar as they discuss or revere Science in conjunction with religion, they are nothing but frauds.

But, after hearing Dawkins, I forget where I first heard him, I was impressed by his way of talking and listened to the The God Delusion. I was even more impressed by the lovely, beautiful diction and accuracy with which he discussed everything. As far as the content, he dealt with many accusations against evolution and science by religious people in a way that I hadn't thought of.

I ve listened to hours and hours of anti-evolution, Christian lectures.

(this guy on the book just said something to the effect of In the decade of the brain, it had already been shown that the Mind can significantly influence the Brain!!!! That's fucking great. On one hand, we have an idea that what we experience is actually a phenomena of the brain. On the other hand, we have this guy saying that the brain is not the mind, and he demonstrates that by showing errors of scientists. Oh dear, while I was typing the previous few sentences, he has been showing how much medical treatment of psychological conditions are placebo effects! Mind over matter. That hasn't been working as indiscriminately as our African ancestors must have had faith it would, when they were faced with death, the neanderthals closing off the northern border of the continent, or any of the little shit that we still face every day. Insofar as it has been verified, it has been verified by quantitative measurement, and empirical observations. Once again, it reminds of me Dawkins, when he says that if a headline announcing that scientists had proof of God appeared tomorrow, you can be sure that the vast majority of theologians would be trumpeting it to their flocks, but, otherwise, they will deny the right of science to evaluate religious claims.)

Anyways, listening to all that Christian Anti-evolution, even though I was listening to it out of enjoyment of ideological apologetics of all kinds, started to grow on me, and I began to think Evolution was insignificant. But I had never thought of it as significant anyways. Now I have really begun to see the beauty and intellectual pleasure of contemplating the complexity of the natural world. But how would I have acquired this if I believed that the most important source of understanding of the world is faith, which, is not demonstrable or experienced as anything other than an emotion or feeling?

(he's still on the placebo effect!)


Alright I'm tired of this now. I want to find a text version of this book so I can scan it to see if there are any interesting conjectures about the actual spiritual nature of the brain. These assholes opened the book with a promise to tell me about the brain in conjunction with it's spiritual nature. But, now it seems to be the typical, oh so typical boasts of those who oppose science in the name of defending ideas they have no intention of giving up, and for which they declare the impossibility of reason to deny.

The fucked up thing is that I am really, sincerely interested in God, that was my first topic on this Blog. But I cannot stand to be cheated with the promise of scientific discussion of a spiritual brain when I'm all I'm getting is stale, logically embarrassing, criticisms of various scientists.

If the authors had said that's what they were going to do for half, or all of the book, then I might still be interested, since it is always useful to go over old criticisms of the things that seem correct to me. I have a bunch of new Advanced HSK books in front of me. I shall let them comfort me. There are also Greg Egan's Distress, which has finally dragged me in, and the Mandarin version of The Yellow Lighted Bookshop to fall back on if studying fails me.