Deep Thought Of The Day: The Atheist's Dismissal VS. The Religious' Faith

I like to think myself to be an open-minded person - willing to hear and consider new ideas, even those that contradict my own. If you have read some of my past posts, you probably have in inkling that I am not religious though I do consider myself to be a Theist (I believe there is a God) and Spiritualist (I believe that life has subject and intangible qualities that are yet to be scientifically quantified). I am however, extremely anti-religion. I have the Paltalk Instant Messenger program and I love going into the "Atheists VS. Christians" chat rooms and listening to the debates. I have yet to hear a Christian intelligently defend their position or win a debate against an Atheist and that's because a debate is won by the one with well articulated, rational and verifiable positions. The very basis of religion is unreasonable and irrational as it requires "faith." For those of you who don't know what the word "faith" really means, at it's simplest, it means to BELIEVE (Accept something as true) without any evidence to support that belief. In other words, if I came to you with my fists closed and declared that I have a mountain concealed in my hand and that I would like you to believe me; it would be ignorant for you to accept that claim as truth without evidence and intelligent for you to reason that it is unlikely that there is a mountain in my hand. To accept my claim would make you a person of faith but it would also necessarily make you an ignorant person. To dismiss my claim would make you a person without faith but also a reasonable person. Why believe that there is a mountain in my fist if all of the observable evidence suggests that, that is an impossibility? First off, my hands are not of a size that is capable of concealing a mountain. All known evidence says that no person is strong enough to actually hold an entire mountain. Lastly, and probably more important is; if I have a mountain in my hand that I want you to believe is actually in my hand; why don't I just show it to you? You see the problem that religion has with debating a person who refuses to be ignorant or blindly follow something just because someone else says it is so? Religion says that there is a God who created all things and has a purpose for every creation. Religion goes further to claim that God's desire is that we all be "good" people and do "good" things and if we don't, he will punish us. Religion goes even further and lays out how God achieved creation, his rules for how we should live, the rewards & punishment for abiding by or breaking the rules, etc., etc. The cherry on the top of the religious argument is that God wants us to accept him via faith, not reason, not evidence, not common sense. So the question becomes; if God wants us to be faithful, he obviously doesn't provide evidence of his existence so where do the religious doctrines get off claiming to be the "word of God"? Religion wants it both ways; they want you to be faithful when they don't have the answers but 'use the "word"' where the answers are provided.

I dropped religion over twenty years ago when I decided to actually take it upon myself to study its origins and establishment. I was raised a Christian and it's ironic that I learned nothing about Christianity until I researched secular sources which had no vested interest in me believing one thing or the other. Imagine my surprise to realize that Christianity was fabricated of the books and concepts of various faiths and intellectual thinkers. Imagine my surprise when I realized that books of the Bible were arbitrarily added, removed or edited at will. Isn't this the word of God? How can you edit the word of God? Imagine my surprise when I realized that the person called Jesus might be a complete fabrication and in fact, if he did exist, he practiced Judaism and never claimed to be the literal "son of God". So if Jesus believed in Judaism, why create Christianity? Shouldn't we all become Jews if the Messiah himself taught from Jewish doctrine and followed the Jewish faith?

The fact is that every religious doctrine was conceived in the mind of a man, penned by the hand of a man and disseminated by the mouth of men. God had no part in creating religion. Men desire validation of their lofty ideas and they get that validation by convincing others to agree with what they believe. What better way to achieve agreement than to declare your ideas to not be your own but rather, the intellectual property of God. On the other side of the debate are the Atheist who say that they choose to not believe there is a God because there is no evidence of his existence. Atheists can argue, debate and demonstrate to no end, the evidence for the obvious but have no argument that actually disproves God's existence. Atheists have successfully disproved the validity of religion but invalidating religion doesn't necessarily invalidate the potential for there to be truth in the idea that there is a God. In other words; proving that it is impossible that the world was actually created in 7 days, only proves that the doctrine of the faith(s) which make that claim, are wrong - it doesn't mean that there wasn't a God who created the world. When I made the decision to believe that there is a God, after having considered a wide array of religious, spiritual and anti-religious/spiritual beliefs, the chief factor in me making that decision was that the logical conclusion to the Atheist logic is that there had to be an intelligence at some point to start the ball rolling, at the very least. Perhaps that intelligence or God is completed uninterested in us, perhaps we are a mere inevitable/by chance consequence of the universe taking form. Perhaps there is a God and he/she/it is completely undeserving of praise and worship. Perhaps a lot of things. When it's all said and done, the debate isn't what kind of God, God is, if he exists; the debate is whether or not he does. While I can make no claim to know God's intent or his place in the grand scheme of things (he might actually be just like us - trying to figure out what's going on), I believe it to be reasonable to believe, from a scientific perspective, that there was always an intelligence present and in all likelihood, is the ultimate causality of things.

My reasoning for my position begin with the logical notion that all existing or potential matter and energy, has always existed - things were not created from nothing. Though things evolve (change form) the base elements of the construct have always existed. Because I believe this, I have to also believe that the energy that we identify as "intelligence," has also always existed. There is no reasonable concept that says that everything has always been but intelligence. Then there is the scientific fact that all things within the universe seem to be traveling outward and way from a source of force. What that suggests to me is that there is an origin, a place from which all things are traveling, a state before being pushed outward. Were the universe chaotic and had no order to it, it would make sense to me to assume that there was no intelligent cause for the current state of things but that's not the case. The fact is that there was obviously a cause for things to go from the state and they were in to their current state. If you accept the notion that intelligence is an energy that has always existed along with everything else, it becomes just as reasonable, perhaps even more so, to believe that the cause was due to that intelligence, as opposed to an inexplicable act of nature.

What it comes down to for me is a choice between to brands of ignorance. Religion offers you unverifiable and often contradicting concepts based on you trusting that what their doctrine says was actually written/issued by God. Atheism offers you the comfort of believing in the absolute and obvious but dismisses the potential that there is a God. What I have decided is that science is that truth and God fits into scientific reasoning somehow, we just haven't yet figured out the details of what God is. What we do know is what is the truth that stares us in the face: whatever God is, he/she/it does not care to or have the ability to control the actions of man. If the religious concept of God were true, it would terrify me to think that the King of reality beckons us to be "good" yet sat back and observed as the bloody Holy Crusades took place, the American slave practices were conducted, the Holocaust occurred, the Darfur genocide was waged, etc., etc. Rather than believe that an all-powerful and all-good God was able to sit back and allow such things to happen, it makes more sense to me that either God is not all powerful or isn't all-good or isn't watching our every move. Life is our own responsibility and we can be as wicked or righteous as we choose to be and God will not prevent us from doing either.

So another question is inevitable and this is; why choose to believe that there is a God if one believes that God serves no real purpose to man's life? I answer that by saying that it really doesn't matter to me what God's purpose is - I don't pretend to know, but I can no more deny that I believe he/she/it does exist than I can deny that there are clouds surrounding this planet. To me, it is just a reality. I accept many things to be true that serve no benefit to me, simply because it makes sense. I believe that I will drown if I swim too deep in a body of water for too long. I have never drowned before but should I find myself swimming in a deep body of water, I'll be cautious not to go too deep or stay under for too long. Until the day comes that my belief about drowning in deep water becomes relevant to my life, it's just a belief. When/if the day comes that an understanding of God becomes relevant to my life, I will have one.

Deep Thought of the Day: Time

Anyone who has taken more than a few minutes in life to earnestly contemplate the concept of Time, has probably arrived at the truthful conclusion that it does not exist. Time is a concept, manufactured by man, so that we can organize our thoughts around the incomprehensible eternity that exists about us. This order allows us to operated in a constructive fashion. The absence of the concept of Time would be like the absence of language. If you can not communicate your desires, you are left with the only option to act out every little thing that crosses your mind. Language affords us the luxury of patient consideration and input from without before acting out recklessly when our intent may be the opposite. We have instituted the concept of Time to keep track of our place in the grand scheme of things, as well as to recognize the place of everything else.

There is no physical/objective thing or energy that can be identified as Time. The concept of numbers is the same as Time or language. Numbers are manufactured concepts that we use to understand things. People have always posed the question, "can we travel through time"? I'd like to ask the question, can we travel through language or numbers? After all, they're the same thing. It's a ridiculous proposition. What we do know is that light captures the images of everything it touches and from what we know, those images exist forever. It is how we are able to see a distant star go super nova in today's night sky, though the star actually exploded millions of years ago. It took the light, holding that image, millions of years to reach earth thus we are literally looking into the past. If the image can be held in the light for millions of years, there's no reason to believe that it doesn't last forever. In spite of the magical seeming looking glass of light, this still isn't confirmation of the existence of Time; it is more a statement about the nature and properties of light & distance.

Even if we were to accept the notion the light is Time itself, we would also have to accept the reality that we can only view it (not participate) and only view the past as the only images trapped by the light are the images of events that have already come to pass. The most fundamental use of Time is as a measure of movement. We measure the motion of the planets about one another to calculate years, months, weeks, days, hours, minutes, seconds, etc. In other words, Time is just a man-made ruler and system of measurement. The properties of light are far more interesting but we convolute the truth and study of the subject by falsely attributing the concept of Time to it. While the system of Time can be used to measure the movement of the light, it should not be confused as being the light itself. It would be an interesting venture to catch up to the light that has passed the Earth. Somewhere far passed the Earth, the events of the Earth's entire history are being fed into the skies of a distant world. If we could catch up to that light that has passed us, we could perhaps view our own history, as it actually happened. Perhaps we could even develop a technology that allows us to sort through the images and isolate specific events and places at specific points in history. It's all very intriguing. Anywho, that's my Deep Thought of the day.