by madmin | Jun 26, 2021 | Culture, Philosophy, Science
(This is a working document, which you can read. When you check back tomorrow, or next week, it will differ)
We all start somewhere, we all change over time, we all believe one thing one day, and another the next. We don’t all come to the same conclusion, even when presented the same facts or considerations. This is what makes us human. To give some insights, I will try to write a bit of my own journey here.
Ever since I was a kid, I have been busy finding what is most likely to be true. I was raised by a single mother, from a Catholic home. She gave me all the freedom, but of course the religious notion of a superior being called god was already taught. Not that it was real, just that everything in society around me and the talks would have such a notion in the back. I even was going to church at some point, wondering how the minister could believe the contradictory parts himself. I started to have issues with the idea of a superior being already by the age of 7. I was living in the country side and had all the time to think about it. Of course the first part was the self search. All humans are looking at themselves first. (All children start with this) then I started to look at relations around me. Between people, between all sorts of things. I had some personal moments that have influenced who I am, greatly and not in a positive way I must say). From the age of 11/12, I researched/looked at events and experiences that were seen as ‘mystical’ or ‘spiritual’. I was sure I was experiencing some of them myself at several points (due to the working of my brain as a pattern recognition system and the emotional bonds placed by my upbringing regarding a ‘reason’ for life). I have gone through hardship and happiness in life and found all of them the strongest when together with others. Being each other’s ‘salvation’ is what I saw life is about. All that I saw was about learning. Finding new information, creating new knowledge. All I have done since was try to live by that creed: any new day should bring new knowledge and it should be shared, because we can’t survive alone.
Though I have been somewhat introvert outside of home, I was rather extrovert with people I knew well. At some point I found out that to read people, I had to send signals. A bit like a bat. When you send a signal, you receive a signal (or not, which is just as much a signal) from another person. When you act sincere, it is not defined that you will receive a sincere response signal. When you give a crazy or out of place signal, you are more likely to receive a response or even more likely to receive a more sincere response. This gave me good insight on who I could trust and what signals would result in certain return responses. Living on this, I became extrovert outside the house, and learned a lot about people around me.
From the age of 9/10 I have been very avidly trying to figure out whether there was any reason to believe in supernatural things…..
by madmin | Jun 26, 2021 | Philosophy, Psychology, Science
Below is the answer to a friend who asked why I couldn’t let people who believed and people who don’t in their respective ‘realities’. This was after I got word this friend had a mission to do so. I thought back and found that at some point (I even have the reasons and ways I would act written down somewhere…yes..on actual paper) I was the same. Idealistic I thought after I chose to leave that path, but it is something each person has to choose.
So as the question, if I could elaborate on WHY I failed that path:
“No problem. I felt it dishonest to my own reality to keep accepting that religion (based on controlling masses of people who believe) was okay for my surroundings. I saw what happened and couldn’t keep closing my eyes.
(Just had a conversation with my neighbor just the night before, which was about the same thing, but she was raised muslim and she was appalled by the vision of burqa wearing women at their holiday stay, while the muslim men were taking baths with European skin clad women. She was going to speak to the women about the fact that you either hold to religion all the way and the men should not bath there, or they should not wear a burqa there. (she thought it pure hypocrisy) However, because it was their holiday and she feared (yes there it is) that there would be other things behind some actions, she kept from it.)
You can accept people to ‘believe’, but if that believe isn’t believe but following a belief, it becomes religion. Nobody in the whole world can say: I believe in a god that already is written about. Why not? Because they haven’t come to believe this god existed on their own. Only children do that, when they are about 4, their imaginary friend. But reality catches up to them, because of their parents and peer pressure of the imaginary friends of other children (actually the fact that they find out that everyone has them and they are all called differently and are all imagination). Except if their parents hold on to an imaginary friend that is accepted globally, then they will eventually either accept that imaginary friend, or not. But those that don’t will first search for a replacement ‘imaginary friend’ and eventually, depending on their path find one, or none and come to terms with reality.
Holding to a god that is premade, is dishonest, because you either believe your own experience, or you take another’s because it is easy.
See, the gods that have been prefabbed up to today have all been rebuked by our growing reality. As you already stated:
Creationism accepts the stories of any one holy book to be true and all was created as it is.
Educated people accept that science has caught up with ‘believe’ and shows it is wrong.
Now what is the consequence? The story that tells you there is a god, is the same story that explains there has to be one, because he fabricated all that is, in the current state. BUT, if the story is false on account of created in current state, it fails its value as reason for a god. (you can create any number of other reasons for A god to exist, but then you are on the right track: You will try to find YOUR god, which will eventually lead you to a life of soul searching, whether you find one, or not, or find out that there is none.)
Simply said: I couldn’t reconcile the fact that you either:
Believe 100% or Know 100%. They are mutual exclusive by honesty.
If you believe something, you don’t know something. But if you know something, you can’t believe in it anymore. To believe something is to fear not something is (yes, this strange grammatical abhoration is meant this way). We believe something, because we need to overcome fear that it is the reversed (the unknown). When we know something, the fear retreats.
by madmin | Jun 26, 2021 | Philosophy, Psychology, Science
All humans by definition are irrational.
This is the emotional state we are in. We have out grown the animalistic rationale behaving solely on survival, yet animals when not in their everyday behavior of such survival show emotions and irrationale.
Are theists more irrational than non-theists?
The point is here that rational or irrational isn’t a general state of mind. You can be fully rational about one thing and totally irrational about the other. For the deduction whether one person is more irrational than another, we need to look what it would be that we call irrational. Irrational behavior or thinking means it is inconsistent with logic (hence irrational could be equalled to illogical).
So, irrational would be illogical response to specific stimuli, information or knowledge.
For instance, if we know snow is cold, illogical would be to say it is hot. If we know snow melts from heat, it would be silly to say you can’t melt it with a fire. That would be irrational.
Humanity started of as an animal with a totally changing habitat, which gave its nervous system many new possibilities. It didn’t need as much responses (all based on fear meant for survival) to survive anymore, it could predict, plan and imagine. Eventually the huge brain mass was used to make causal connections which weren’t needed for survival of the individual, but for the generation, and next and next. Communication became more complex and caused holding knowledge from one generation to another other than the fear etched instincts that are inherited genetically.
Cognitive knowledge was growing. But this cognitive knowledge was build on emotional knowledge (patternicity), for survival. As with all species, the choice for survival supersedes that of the cognitive mind. Thus fear is still causing people to choose rather on fear than cognitive insights. This is what we can define as irrational (as long as the choice is not warranted by actual stimuli). Patternicity eventually caused agenticity and this is where belief started.
As with every theory, one first has to believe something occurs for a specific reason. At first, like children, humanity saw patterns that seemed connected to arbitrary events. Mostly connected to their own actions. Opening your eyes in the morning would bring the sun back. That kind of magical thinking. But like children, humanity learned how to distinguish more and more.
When more and more humans populated the earth due to the improving temperatures and more secure locations, more and more ‘technological’ advancement came about. BUT, emotions came first, societies grew on the same fears and emotions as the first humans. They still needed soothing for these fears, to not go crazy. Religion was the structure that, based on answers given by ancestors, to these fear questions, controlled the societies (like witch doctors and medicine men and others ), even when people were using less emotional driven choices to decide who should lead (often out of greed, or alpha male protection).
Eventually humanity started to become fragmentised. As everyone (literally) had their own belief, they would teach their children a little bit different. Eventually folklore and superstition were slowly discredited by logical thinking. We now could philosophize what was a rational thought and irrational thought. Something that was (by test and deduction) an illogical choice or reaction to the pletoria of impulses, was seen as irrational. As such, holding to any superstitious idea from before, was seen as irrational, because these ideas were rebuked by science and advancement in human intellect.
Answering that ancestors were both rational and irrational, is correct. We all still are. Humanity doesn’t know everything yet, but we do know where certain ideas came from. We even know that in some way, believing (irrational sometimes) isn’t mutual exclusive or is even required to get to the next step of finding out.
Irrational in a way is subjective to the observer, like quantum physics. Don’t tell Highs by the way.
So, yes, when a person is religious AND chooses to deny humanity’s collected facts, he/she is irrational. If one keeps to religion for the comfort of it, but still tries to find new knowledge to equate away the leftover beliefs, he/she isn’t automatically irrational.
by madmin | Jun 26, 2021 | Culture, Mythology / Religion, Philosophy, Psychology, Science
<some non-specific theist> thank you for bringing pascal’s wager or some statistical change for reality to be what it is, up. I have already explained the error in thinking with when it relates to chance and mathematics by simply stating that we exist, so any CHANCE of reality to be what it is by chance is 1, also on ‘our’ regards on numbers and what we see in the world around us. Quick example: what numbers would we have used if we had more fingers or less? How would we have calculated distance and other ‘equations’?
Anyway, that should already have set you straight, but here is the fun part: Your claim might that the chance of life to have evolved this way is of 10 to power of 54th is worse then the chance that this chance has happened and the outcome you chose to believe that there is yet another level of chance. Basically the chance of your god theory IS <10 to the power of 54th, as it would require us to exist first. Now lets step back, because you will start ranting that that is not what you mean.
What is a theist presupposition?
Here it is: We exist, the universe exists and the chance to that is 1, because it happened.
Now, we go to your theory of a god. Basically it is only assumed from a book to be a workable theory.
Now, lets leave all science away and take the obvious: Can there be a god? what are the odds that this could be true? Well….actually incalculable small, because there is nothing to calculate the chance from. It is an imaginary conclusion. Additionally what would be the chance there would be a superior being, considering to create a universe that consists of NOTHING except for 1 blue planet and decided to create some ‘life form’ there AND knows exactly how to do it, but fails to recognize the fact that what he/she/it created had the chance on rebelling and destroying what he/she/it intended. Then we come to the closure: Taking the moment before the alleged Genesis moment, What are the odds that a super being (what created it? what would it consist of? how did it learn to do something? how did it come create existence without existing (in time and space)? If this was the case, its ideas would not include humans, as he/she/it would not be able to fathom them, as they are only a speck on a speck on a speck on a speck so small, that the chance this being of a totally different energy/signature/element/existence level would recognize or even realize the existence is way smaller then the made up number you though for chance of existence of life as it is now.
The realist stance
The chance of life in this universe is 1 for 2 reasons: 1. because we exist and because it can happen again, simply because the universe is so big, that all chances can come to exist at some moment. What is likely? We are god in the future and tried to make our ancestors believe in us, so there would be enough life in the future, or to prevent too much progress to be made, so the errors in the future will be prevented. Anyway, the chance of life by chance is 100% as it happened and we can redo the events. We even can already show how it has become on our world, from the conditions: We breath as the tide of the seas, because all that happens on earth happens from this single effect. Chances are that new life is still created in the depths of the ocean, chances are highly existing life has been created by other conditions on other planets, but those types of life don’t need to be recognizable by us. However the chance is 1, we are proof.
by madmin | Jun 26, 2021 | Culture, Mythology / Religion, Philosophy
Thanks to Ricrab, I spend time putting some sense to questions that seemingly ‘smart’ theists bring forth. Below is a copy of it. 12 amazingly intelligent (and not a bit ironic, presuppositional or loaded, of course) questions from William Lane Craig;
1. If all of life is meaningless, and ultimately absurd, why bother to march straight forward, why stand in the queue as though life as a whole makes sense?
Learning. Life has evolved to a sense of selfawareness and as someone said: We are the voice that looks up at that universe that brought it forth and asks: why?
2. If everyone completely passes out of existence when they die, what ultimate meaning has life? They aren’t related. The fact that all life (and non-life) dies or ultimately falls to entropy, doesn’t discern with the meaning we give to our lives. Because that is ultimately what we do: Only with our cognition we distinguish that it helps to feel there is meaning. Nowhere from the start of this universe to now, there is any moment that states that an event happened for a meaning, let alone a reason. But that doesn’t make life less beautiful now you are here. To think so is yet another self deception religions want you to hold.
3. Even if a man’s life is important because of his influence on others or by his effect on the course of history, of what ultimate significance is that if there is no immortality and all other lives, events, and even history itself is ultimately meaningless? Because there isn’t. A man can feel important. Others can feel the man is/was important, but eventually there is the here and now. History is past so it is ultimately always meaningless. It is a done deed. Looking forward, an individual, as well as a whole group or species like ourselves can look say: Look, this is the road that would benefit the most to individuals and groups, lets go this direction. Meaning is what the aware gives to a pattern.
4. In a universe without God or immortality, how is mankind ultimately different from a swarm of mosquitoes or a barnyard of pigs? An empty presupposition. Immortality would (if all life forms could attain such state) be disastrous to the universe. As we know the universe contains a limited amount of resources. So if nothing would perish to make way for new, all would eventually become really ‘meaningless’. Ultimately we aren’t different from a swarm of mosquitoes, or pigs (though a barnyard is a created environment and pigs are ‘bred’). We can choose to be different. That is where we are beyond them. But if we choose to keep to the same embedded fear to ancient ignorance, we won’t go beyond anything further.
5. What viable basis exists for justice or law if man is nothing but a sophisticated, programmed machine? Justice exists based on the fact that man is not a sophisticated programmed machine. Nature programs, but the awareness of man has put it in the place where it can use its empathy but also methodical deduction and induction to decide what is ethically (and in religious words: morally) correct for the greater good. That greater good is the limitations of awareness of the individual, group and civilization. IE. the more each becomes aware, the broader the justice will be for the greater part of the ecosystem/biosystem.
6. Why does research, discovery, diplomacy, art, music, sacrifice, compassion, feelings of love, or affectionate and caring relationships mean anything if it all ultimately comes to naught anyway? Because we can. Why would a microbe feed and multiply, if eventually he doesn’t live to see any outcome on the organism it attacks? Man is able to learn. We are able to improve and since we have become aware, we have been searching. Life has been adapting (learning) since the first selfreplicating RNA. Our cognition was only waiting to be come (either in us or some other species). But even our mind evolves. We have a meaning, as we can choose it to have a meaning.
7. Without absolute morals, what ultimate difference is there between Saddam Hussein and Billy Graham? They were both human. But whether they are different can be observed from many different perspectives. So, the ‘implicated’ absolute morals have no use.
8. If there is no immortality, why shouldn’t all things be permitted? Actually if immortality would exist for humanity, why shouldn’t all things be permitted. Is it not true that if you couldn’t die, not really, you had no end, so you could be ruler of everything for ever if you chose to? And again, immortality would mean organic material would not be able to reproduce without the risk of running out of energy.
9. If morality is only a relative social construct, on what basis could or should anyone ever move to interfere with cultures that practice apartheid, female circumcision, cannibalism, or ethnic cleansing? Post hoc, morality is an observation OF the social construct. When the construct changes, so does morality. History has shown this in every aspect. Exactly FOR the examples you give.
10. If there is no God, on what basis is there any meaning or hope for fairness, comfort, or better times? There is no if. Humanity, despite the believing in over 5000 gods have survived itself up to now. It is pretty clear that hope for fairness and comfort or better times come from becoming aware of the ignorance in what religion has left humanity with.
11. Without a personal Creator-God, how are you anything other than the coincidental, purposeless miscarriage of nature, spinning round and round on a lonely planet in the blackness of space for just a little while before you and all memory of your futile, pointless, meaningless life finally blinks out forever in the endless darkness? What a strange ad hominem kind of call from ignorance. If one was a miscarriage, you would not exist. So the question fails in sentence one. We all have a creator. Our parents. They are proven to have created us, and from that both coincident (and often purposelessness) falls from the equation. They (our parents) didn’t choose the biosystem either. They are as much a victim as we are. Yes, we are on a ball of magma and rock, iron and heavy materials that kill us over time, with a huge amount of water that we can’t really live ‘on’, but can’t live without either. We live here in this thin layer of solution we call air, that is kept to the surface of this planet, by the universal force of gravity (weak force at that too). Luckily we are not the start of any ecosystem, we are the result of millions of years of evolving plantlife and microbiotic life, that found a balance creating a sustainable environment where we are now ‘rulers’. And yes, if something disastrous would happen, it would all be over in a blink and there had been no reason and nothing is left. But that doesn’t change, that you have been able to ask this question on retrospect.
12. Suppose the universe had never existed. Apart from God, what ultimate difference would that make? Nonsensical question. If the universe had never existed. There would have been nothing. So what would there have been use for any idea of a god? It requires a mind to imagine a god, so that would ultimately have not existed either.
And these are my short answers to these questions.
by madmin | Jun 26, 2021 | Neurology, Philosophy, Psychology, Science
Overall introduction
From the moment of conception, our body is build to respond to impulses. Though we could look at the neural responses and the way it influences our psychology from this point, I rather go a bit deeper.
The human neurology is based on millions of years of evolution. Starting (like the conception of our current organism/life) at it’s conception. As humans we are often very easy to add emotions and thoughts to organisms that are not aware like us, don’t have the same intrinsic responses as we have. However, like everything that evolves, our responses are all based on those of who came before us.
To explain what is meant by the inherited responses, I like to take the examples from research, where mice bred from mice that have walked a maze repeatedly. The next generation would be able to solve the maze more easily. Their neural pathways had adapted to possible stimuli. If they merely had the same pathways and had to learn, they would roughly need the same amount of time. This is what we already learned from research on the short term, but we haven’t just come to this point of learning, adapting, living. These adaptions are caused by the way we have evolved. At each point they are the optimum mode of operandi for a species. Until the habitat changes to fast and the adaption within the culture is not possible within enough generations. When a species is the optimum of operandi, a stasis in development can be observed. It means that the neural pathways are optimally used for responding to the environment the organism is living in. We have already found the track back to the initial primates. But the actual decisions are based on much older neural choices/responses to stimuli.
Life is about consumption It is about continuing motion. In organical sense, our bodies have started somewhere as as simple an motion as the tides of the oceans.
The Layers
The human mind is currently the top level of several layers of processes that are going on within us as an organism. Though many other animals show signs of behavior that we describe to ‘intelligence’. Intelligence isn’t necessarily the same as mind/self awareness.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence Reference to human and animal intelligence.
In all, we can say that because humans aren’t the only ones with a minimum level of intelligence, it is NOT the mind (the cognitive decision taking) that holds ‘intelligence’.
So, there is a layer before the layer of ‘mind’ that can hold ‘intelligence’.
——— insert from my other blog to be edited in —–
1. Animals don’t have such valuation system (regarding good and bad/right and wrong). They learn what is healthy and what is not, but they are not making a conscious choice to implicate a future situation to mean this cause of effect to be positive or negative on their health. Water is to drink. Positive. No matter if it is poisoned. Some animals have a nose that will tell them that water is undrinkable, yet most don’t have that luxury, because their ancestors lived in environments that had an abundance of clean flowing water, or very little water, so the ‘society’ of the species stayed so small, they would not evolve the reaction to a deadly situation, so that the species would act on instinct (this is a neural pathway created by genetic material).
2. This is also something that animals don’t reasonably have. They can be fierce, deceiving, agressive, but that is from instinct and not by choice (we have choice, because of the abundance of neural options). So, how can we figure out what is objectively good or bad/right or wrong? Any action we do ourselves is with ‘intent’ and as such is already given value by acting. From the point of an animal, we will have to assume, the animal is not too much domesticated, that it will adher to human behavior and be deceitful by choice. Also, we now know that for instance dolphins have the option to choose to be nice to other animals (likely there are more). Now, what would be a thing to see without emotional value?a rock. But we know a rock will just lie and do nothing. Until we pick it up and act with it. It will not influence us, except when we interact WITH it. Automatically putting the value of action on our own part.
—————- end ————
