I'm so glad others can come along and articulate arguments I "feel" but cannot adequately put into words. Scott Clifton does a wonderful job.
Follow me on Twitter. Golden Platypus is updated often; the easiest way to get your regular dose is by subscribing to our news feed. Stay on top of all our updates by subscribing now via RSS or Email.
This is where semantics can get us into unnecessary difficulty. What is meant by religion? Does the term necessarily include the supernatural? This is important because, to my mind, absent the supernatural, religion can be quite benign, helpful, even.
There are certainly bad religions, as in any that promote distrust or hatred of people who don't look or think like we do, but let's set those aside for this discussion.
What's left? Simply this: Philosophies of life based on long human experience and traits not easily reduced to scientific study. Sets of principles and guidelines that, when understood and followed, increase peace and tranquility in the lives of individuals and societies.
I'm all for that, and I can cheer on and value the role of such religion in the human journey.
Follow me on Twitter. Golden Platypus is updated often; the easiest way to get your regular dose is by subscribing to our news feed. Stay on top of all our updates by subscribing now via RSS or Email.
DSM IV: anxiety about being in places or situations from which escape might be difficult (or embarrassing) or in which help may not be available in the event of having an unexpected or situationally predisposed Panic Attack or panic-like symptoms. Agoraphobic fears typically involve characteristic clusters of situations that include being outside the home alone; being in a crowd, or standing in a line; being on a bridge; and traveling in a bus, train, or automobile.
This disorder is commonly thought of as a fear of open spaces. It occurred to me that a moral version of this fear can be a strong motivator towards religiosity. Allow me to explain:
I remember well a metaphor used by preachers of my Church of Christ years. When is a train most free? When it's running on the tracks. Rather than seeing the rules and strictures of Christianity as constraining, we were encouraged to see them as "freeing" us to live as God intended, just like that speeding train.The idea was that, free from rules, boundaries and limitations (as Cesar is fond of saying on The Dog Whisperer),we will necessarily run amuck and headlong into self-destruction.
When Mom and Dad said goodbye and left me on the doorstep of my new residence hall at the University of Florida, my new freedom was both exhilarating and terrifying. Mostly terrifying. I was strongly attracted, therefore, to the outreach of Christians, whose religion promised to provide comforting moral safeguards, tracks upon which I could run safely.
The religions seem to offer us a ready-made set of rules. They offer clear markings on the pavement of our lives that tell us that we may go so far and no farther. There's a degree of comfort in that, yes? It is frightening not to know where the danger lies. Religions promise to keep us safe.
One problem, though, is that they often go beyond moral guidelines and stray into demands for absolute devotion, this devotion often involving the performance of rituals that have no bearing on moral virtue. They are frequently more concerned about their own preservation and supremacy in our lives than about relieving suffering and bringing peace and happiness. Another problem is that they feel it necessary to call upon the authority of a fictional all-powerful deity who will punish us eternally if we stray, as a means of keeping us in line. It isn't enough to point out the reasonableness of morality, that being the goal of bringing joy to the lives of others. They have to beat us about the head and shoulders with silly superstitions to cow us into submission.
The moral codes of most established religions seem worthy enough to stand on their own, as the fruits of millenia of human experience, without the unnecessary baggage of superstition and religion.
Follow me on Twitter. Golden Platypus is updated often; the easiest way to get your regular dose is by subscribing to our news feed. Stay on top of all our updates by subscribing now via RSS or Email.
Now to Him who is able to do far more abundantly beyond all that we ask or think, according to the power that works within us, to Him be the glory in the church and in Christ Jesus to all generations forever and ever. Amen. (Eph 3:20-21)
I pray that the eyes of your heart may be enlightened, so that you will know what is the hope of His calling, what are the riches of the glory of His inheritance in the saints, and what is the surpassing greatness of His power toward us who believe. These are in accordance with the working of the strength of His might which He brought about in Christ, when He raised Him from the dead and seated Him at His right hand in the heavenly places, far above all rule and authority and power and dominion, and every name that is named, not only in this age but also in the one to come. (Eph 1:18-21)
These passages from the Bible, and others like them, use soaring rhetoric to describe the Christian life. According to them, there is abundant power available to and at work within the Christian, power that is both qualitatively and quantitatively equivalent to the resurrection of Christ from the dead!
Now, if this is true, shouldn't it be somewhat evident to the rest of the world? Shouldn't there be some glimpse of the supernatural in the Christian's life? But there isn't. They are ordinary. They live and love, lie and lust, do good and evil in the same proportions as the rest of the populations they inhabit. So, show me the power.
Follow me on Twitter. Golden Platypus is updated often; the easiest way to get your regular dose is by subscribing to our news feed. Stay on top of all our updates by subscribing now via RSS or Email.
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_a.png?x-id=b6764862-cfab-4ddf-8932-c5ad84c31e4c)
It should be self evident that conscious, sentient beings like ourselves can derive meaning and fulfillment most effectively by the adoption or construction of a valid worldview. Having concluded that Christianity is lacking in validity simply because it is not, as far as I have been able to tell, based upon a foundation of what is real, I can now attempt to find a worldview that is. Based on reality, I mean.
A bit more on the "real." A worldview does not have to be based on reality. Clearly, many are not. But it is important to me that the way I see the world is as closely wed to reality as I can make it.
I am aware that there is nothing new under the sun, in the sense that humans have been at it for thousands of years and have pretty much thought of everything in terms of viable philosophies already. So let me comment on some philosophies that resonate with me.
Epicureanism
Epicureanism is a system of philosophy based upon the teachings of Epicurus (c. 341–c. 270 BC), founded around 307 BC. Epicurus was an atomic materialist, following in the steps of Democritus. His materialism led him to a general attack on superstition and divine intervention. Following Aristippus—about whom very little is known—Epicurus believed that the greatest good was to seek modest pleasures in order to attain a state of tranquility and freedom from fear (ataraxia) as well as absence of bodily pain (aponia) through knowledge of the workings of the world and the limits of our desires. The combination of these two states is supposed to constitute happiness in its highest form. Although Epicureanism is a form of hedonism, insofar as it declares pleasure as the sole intrinsic good, its conception of absence of pain as the greatest pleasure and its advocacy of a simple life make it different from "hedonism" as it is commonly understood.-- Wikipedia
In the Epicurean view, the highest pleasure (tranquility and freedom from fear) was obtained by knowledge, friendship, and living a virtuous and temperate life. He lauded the enjoyment of simple pleasures, by which he meant abstaining from bodily desires, such as sex and appetites, verging on asceticism. He argued that when eating, one should not eat too richly, for it could lead to dissatisfaction later, such as the grim realization that one could not afford such delicacies in the future. Likewise, sex could lead to increased lust and dissatisfaction with the sexual partner. Epicurus did not articulate a broad system of social ethics that has survived.
Are you surprised to hear that Peter, Paul and all the saints had anger issues? According this post at Triablogue, they all did, just like Jesus, which would be appropriate.
Anger Managment
Golden Platypus is updated often; the easiest way to get your regular dose is by subscribing to our news feed. Stay on top of all our updates by subscribing now via RSS or Email.
Any Christian-type person has heard the argument for the Bible being God's word that says we all need an owners' manual since we don't come with one. When I discarded my erstwhile, misbegotten conviction that the Bible was of divine origin, I felt a dramatic sense of freedom, the lifting of a burdensome intellectual folly. And yet I realized that I do, in fact, need an owners' manual of sorts, and I could begin to appreciate the attractions of religion.
How does one avoid life's many possible pitfalls and find oneself on a path to felicitous outcomes unless one has some sort of guide? When facing the myriad decisions of consequence one faces every day, what does one use to weigh options and sift the wheat from the chaff? I decided that I needed to consider what my guiding principles should be and to express them clearly and with concision.
Which led me to admit that the Bible is, in fact, one source of tried and true principles for living this human life. Not the only source, and certainly not a supernatural source; every claim about the existence of spirits and souls, of heaven and hell, of life eternal and vengeful gods can be discarded as fanciful and without a shred of evidence to justify belief in them. But is there not wisdom therein nonetheless? I think so.
Is it not clear to everyone that striving for and possessing qualities like love, patience, self-control, thrift, fidelity, kindness, gentleness and respect et al is more likely to bring about better outcomes for one and all than things like deceit, selfishness, anger, promiscuity, et cetera?
So I will continue to quote and try to live by wisdom from the Bible, without giving obsequious and unnecessary homage to a non-existent deity. What say you?
One of Christianity's most over-used arguments for the validity of their belief in God is as follows: If there is no God, you have no basis for judging between right and wrong. You can never deem anyone's actions, no matter how detrimental to you, to be wrong.
The question is then posed: How can a court judge a recreational murderer to be guilty of a crime if he or she is simply acting in accordance with his or her own standards of morality?
First, as a society we have every right to enact and enforce laws that protect us from harm. People who enjoy killing strangers for fun put us all in danger. We don't have to put up with that. Whatever we think about the killer's ability to control his actions, he must be stopped. So we do what we can to stop him. Consider the pride of lions that drives out the animal that has a mental screw loose and likes to kill the cubs. They don't need an absolute moral code. All they need to do is instinctively recognize that the mentally ill lioness poses a threat to the rest of the pride and cannot be allowed to mix with them.
Second, whether or not an absolute standard of morality is good for mankind is irrelevant to the question of God's existence or non-existence. Even if I were to concede that, yes, I really can't logically call anything "wrong" without accepting that there must be an ultimate law-giver (an argument I do not concede, as argued above), this would not make belief in God correct. Such a belief may allow moral judgments to make more sense to some, but that belief is then no more than a convenience, not an accurate description of reality.
