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Eric Dietz
Thursday, 10 July 2008
Note: If this one offends you, you're not reading it right.
WE ARE ALL SLAVES TO FREE WILL. SAVE YOURSELF FROM YOURSELF. Although you can never really be freed from yourself, you can always trust in Jesus
Christ to save you from you. Don't let the free will to choose your own purpose burden you any longer. Predefine your purpose today! Glorify God
and be saved from all Evil. * Purge yourself of SIN (Self-withIN) -- the urge to glorify man -- and instead glorify a figure in whose IMAGE we are
made (e.g., the FATHER, or the COMMON ANCESTOR of all of Man)! Rectify your inherent sin and save your soul! Evangelise others
and be deemed worthy in the eyes of God **!
New evidence suggests that God MUST EXIST, and that we have written Infallilble Truth, ordained directly from GOD (through his human pens which
were inspired by God when no one was looking), which constitutes the Law of All Lands. This must be instituted internationally as quickly and
completely as possible! Spread the Good * News!
* Note that Evil does not necessarily equate to Bad, nor does the Aristocratic "Good" necessarily equate to the uni-moralist ("monotheist")'s
definition of "Good".
** Note that God may be imaginary, but as anything provable (or "real") must be Finite, and God is Infinite, it is impossible to prove the existence
of God, and therefore, based on our assumption that he exists, there is no need to try to prove that he exists. If you question His existence, just
ask yourself, how has God impacted YOUR life? For the answer to that will be the all the proof you need as all Knowledge is inherently experiential.
If your experience differs, you're doing it wrong ***!
*** For those of you naysayers, this is nothing like the Freudean trap of affirming the unaffirmable -- if you disagree, you're just in denial. This
is much different ****.
**** Insert reasoning here. You can't inductively prove that inductive reasoning is reasonable, therefore induction is mutually agreed upon to be
reasonable. You can only ever disprove empirically by showing contradictions in assumptions, but as the root assumption Infinitely escapes proof, it
can never be said to be Known "for sure." So, even though we can never say we know of God "for sure," we can nevertheless mutually agree to Believe
in Him and therefore never to bring up the topic again.
I am what I am. I am skeptical, curious, and observant. I find the need to evangelise to be one of a lack of intellectual rigor. People who try to
evangelise me say things like, "but the first cell that existed would require X perfectly harmonized functions, it could never have happened
randomly". I always find that the closer you look, the more you find. I find the almost obsessive need to believe in an intelligent creator to be a
desperate aversion to rigor. And yes, my generation will NOT find the underlying explanation for it all, but we will have many more gaps in
knowledge filled, which is a worthy purpose in itself. My life is not to glorify what you call the Judeo-Christian God. It is to glorify what I
choose to call God: The harmony of the interaction of mind and body that creates what might be called the Soul. The elusive spirit of life that
always drives to continue existing. And to "glorify" it, is to know it truly and still be in awe. No averting of the eyes required. And indeed,
even the cell is not the most primitive building block of life. The cell was itself a revolution in evolution. At it's core, life is just self
replicating DNA, and some sort of Body, or membrane for safety. What gave rise to DNA may well have been a miracle, by some definition. A
statistical mircale perhaps?
Man puts much credence in statistics. Remember, that statistics give you the odds of something occuring or not, as well as significance of unlikely
events, in raw numerical form, based on observational data. For those of you that wish to cite statistics as a means of the proof of God, I say:
statistically insignificant does not necessarily mean impossible. Yes, the odds of the events being right for the rise of DNA is highly unlikely,
but I say: look at the universe. The universe is very large. Perhaps infinitely expanding. We can look forever because we are forever accelerating
in expansion, so the universe is observationally infinite. So, as the old adage goes, given an infinite amount of monkeys with typewriters and an
infinite amount of time, well, Shakespeare, you know how it goes. In other words, something which is so extremely unlikely to happen that we could
only expect to see it once in 10 billion years, actually makes it likely, if you consider the age of the universe. And the notion that there is
nothing before the big bang is flawed. As time is relative (neither constant nor independent of space), it may be only unknowable and therefore
slightly meaningless to talk about the concept of time before the beginning of time, the big bang. Perhaps time is neither linear nor circular,
but rather forms as an ever expanding slinky, going in cycles, each longer than the last. Or perhaps the universe will forever expand and
black holes will maximize entropy everywhere, but then we will all be irradiated again as Hawking radiation. What then? Will gravitational cohesion
kick in again and cause another big bang? Was the big bang just an explosion of the ultimate super massive black hole from the last cycle? Perhaps
entropy disinitigrates the differentiation between matter and energy, and both miraculously merge into one, generating new matter/mass from old
energy? If we have figured out how to create energy by splicing atoms and converting microscopic bits of mass from one atom into energy, then
perhaps the process can be reversed, and we can create mass out of the confluence of great energy? Perhaps large amounts of mass?
As we are all unbindably limited by subjective perception, objective truth (if there even is such a thing), can never be known. As such I consider
it unknowable, and I consider the claim that anyone "knows" that which is "unknowable" to be a fallacy. Indeed then, the question of "what does it
mean to know? How do you Know you know?" and so forth, comes down to a question of induction through the medium of our senses and physical body.
Here again is the problem of the unprovable truth; the induction of induction. How can one escape the root assumption other than to propose a more
narrow assumption to take its place? If knowledge is entirely gained through experience, then perhaps the best working definition of knowledge would
be: The interpretation of sensory input by the mind; making sense of observed phenomena. If, then, what you Know is experiential, and you know Jesus
through your experience, then no further proof is needed. What then, of those who have experienced something else, and Know, truest to themselves,
something else -- perhaps something completely contradictory? Who decides who is right? To make such a decision would require an intelligence not
bound by perception, as humans are. So perhaps a more practical question rises: which of these two hypothetical persons has a more LEGITIMATE
belief? How do you valuate an experience? Why is it that evangelists are so certain that their experience of the uni-moralist God have more value
than an experience without this God? That actually strikes me as arrogant. Anyone who assumes their God is the true God without questioning it or
considering the legitimacy of the experiences of those who find morality by other means, always willing to admit that they may be wrong in
everything, has lost their intellectual rigor, and chosen the easy and lazy path of uni-morality. Such people are difficult to talk to, since in the
end, they use their base assumption as an unquestionable proof unto itself; claiming to Know the unknowable. And I admit, that even as a skeptic, I
must have "faith" in my basic assumption. But many people believe that I am rigid in logic and reason, and therefore I must have a cold,
unemotional, unhappy, unenlightened, and essentially meaningless life. To them I say, that having the free will to choose my purpose is invigorating
and reassuring, and in fact liberating, as liberty itself is the freedom to choose. I say that some, NOT ALL *, especially the noisy, JC-monotheists
(Judeo-Christian monotheists), in assuming that sin originates from within, and that people are inherently evil or bad, and therefore need to be
saved from their own evil tendencies, are in fact living in misery themselves. A whole philosophical system based on altruism through guilt,
leading, hopefully, to a reward of being coddled for all eternity in heaven, does not seem particularly happy or appealing to me. But, I do still
seek enlightenment. If I were to choose a so-called religion, it would probably be Buddhism. Just consider the obvious physical evidence - you are
what you eat, and what you eat is life; it was once alive; and it becomes new life, in you. When you die, you become food for other life, which in
turn becomes food for yet other life. In the physical / materialist view, reincarnation is indisputable. The evidence is everywhere. So then the
question becomes, what of your Soul? Here again we must ask, what definition of Soul do you use (isn't language just so very vexing!!!)? If it is
the "harmony of mind and body" definition of soul, then your soul perhaps spreads out and bits of it are given to all the life that you create in
death. Is that really so bad? Are you so attached to who you are now that you must be assured that your "psychological self-identity" soul will
remain in-tact forever until the end? Why? So that you can finally see what happens in the end? I'd like to see that too, but; I must think
practically. The world is not going to end in my lifetime. Perhaps somewhere on the order of between billions and quadrillions of years from now.
So, the best I can do is to contribute to the whole of human knowledge, in the hope that in the future, someone may stand on our shoulders and see
the "truth" (not the unrigorous "Truth"). And leaving the world better off than I found it is the best way I can do that. Which, not coincidently,
is basically the message of most uni-moralists. "Leave the world better off than you found it."
So I once asked an evangelist: if, in the end, my way of life is to benefit the world and try to alleviate suffering, and YOUR way of life is also to
benefit the world and try to alleviate suffering, then, why should there be so much emphasis on doing it "to glorify God"? Should we not both make
it to heaven? Isn't the value of a man based on what he DOES, or must there also be that INTENTION, as a criteria of getting to heaven? Then I ask,
what if the INTENTION is in no way evil, self-serving, self-glorifying, or glorifying of any other god? Is this simply a morally neutral action
then? You see, I'm very uncomfortable with black-and-whites, as the improbable, "miraculous" exception always seems to crop up somewhere. But then
again, as a moral relativist, it's not really a hang-up for me.
In counterpoint, I would argue that under such a universal morality, if you live your life glorifying God, yet still only make it to Hell in the end,
then you'd have to accept that you'd fulfilled your purpose and are therefore you are okay with spending eternity burning and rotting, etc, "down
under."
I acknowledge that my whole system of personal morality may be objectively incorrect and immoral, and yet I choose to follow it anyway, keeping an
open mind that, "when the facts change, I change my mind". Some might argue that the humbleness to accept that one may be entirely wrong in their
actions, and therefore not to take their word without disbelief, is a wise trait, and not necessarily a weakness. After all, historically,
closed-mindedness has not served humanity well in the past. Simplicity may be an evolutional advantage, but cutthroat tactics, simple though they
may be, are only advantageous in a certain niche. Being that I seek a niche of coexistence, self-realization and communal-realization, such
closed-mindedness would not serve my purpose well.
* I do not make this generalization of all religious nutters. I do not consider them as adversaries, but rather conversationalists.
My take on most evangelists is, "I have enough trouble trying to answer questions that have no answers without people imposing on me answers to
questions that no one asked."
I digress, the point is my purpose is to keep asking these questions and looking deeper, and although, no, I can never say with certainty that I know
the truth, at least I don't CLAIM to know the truth, for such a claim can never be trusted. Peace and love.
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