How Cruel is Your God?
I’m endlessly fascinated by how people relate to God by way of images and figures that are important to them. Their preferred images of God may tell us more about their religiosity and about themselves than would the particular community to which they belong.
I’m especially intrigued by my fellow Christians who, while calling God a father who sent his son to restore a broken relationship with humanity, also present the almighty as some deified version of Joffrey Baratheon, cruel and malicious and an all around jerk.
There’s a tradition for this. If you interpret the Bible as a literal record of what God said and did (I would counsel against this), then God commanded human beings to commit some pretty horrible acts. You don’t have to look far to find Christians giving God a pass on these imperatives because he’s God and can morally do as he will.
The cruelty, as you may expect, does not stay with the imagined deity. I know of well-meaning believers who would refuse shelter to a couple “living in sin” on the basis that the needs to the soul outweigh the needs of the body. Because nothing says the love of Jesus like “I must withhold benevolence until you conform your life to my religious tenets.”
I also run into the occasional fellow Christian expressing a deep concern for souls likely destined for hellfire because they call God by the wrong name, invoke the divine with wrong prayers, or hold the wrong objects as sacred. Hell makes sense to me, and not only because I recently heard five seconds of a hit song by the sensation One Direction. I image God as the being of love itself, but love can be accepted or rejected, embraced or refused. People sometimes choose misery over reconciliation. I can see Hell as a chosen state of life, but I find it passing strange that a God who so loved the world that he suffered and died to show that world the meaning of love would then send the masses to Hell because they didn’t score enough points on the test or because they filled out the wrong sheet. The kids would call that an epic fail.
I can see Hell as a chosen state of life, but I find it passing strange that a God who so loved the world that he suffered and died to show that world the meaning of love would then send the masses to Hell because they didn’t score enough points on the test or because they filled out the wrong sheet. The kids would call that an epic fail.
This
There’s a tradition for this. If you interpret the Bible as a literal record of what God said and did (I would counsel against this), then God commanded human beings to commit some pretty horrible acts.
You don’t even have to go back to Biblical times. You can chalk the evil that men do up to free will, but the evil that nature does pretty strongly implies that God is either a myth or a complete bastard.
Or not powerful enough to stop the disasters,, but that’s a problem for monotheism too.
The problem of evil, as it’s called, arises especially when one imagines God as some kind of cosmic manager or engineer whose power functions in a way that could stop disasters if he would only choose to intervene. A lot of believers imagine God this way, but I tend not to do so. No image of God ever really “works,” but this one conceals far more than it reveals. Anyhow, I see evil as less of a problem for God and more for our images of God. Indeed, tragedy of the universe is why I reject imaging God as a manager or engineer or planner. I associate the power of God not with the might of princes, but the self-giving love of a mother and father. In the end, though, we’re all talking analogies and metaphors and, yes, myths.
Although at the end of the day I tend to have sympathy to this logic, let me play devil’s advocate for a moment. If one also assigns to God the role of Creator, then logic dictates at least some role as “engineer” or “planner” for God. The Creation was presumably a volitional act by God, and included at least the capacity in the Creation for the formation of life, and life as it has been created subsists to a substantial degree as a result of and at the expense of suffering. Consider the wolf feasting upon the deer in my example below; consider the adaptation of living creatures to changing environmental conditions over time caused by the environment killing off unadapted individuals before they can reproduce. This is how life persists.
I see three alternatives here: a) the Creator is benevolent but not omniscient nor omnipotent, such that this state of affairs is the best of all possible arrangements; b) the Creator is malevolent or at best indifferent to all of this suffering; or c) the Creator operates on a moral plane in which the suffering of living creatures is a matter of indifference. I suspect that you would reject all three of these possibilities — so what is the fourth that I have missed?
Computer Game. G-d just wrote the rules.
Perhaps that is 3), perhaps it is 1) or 2).
It matters not, because G-d doesn’t have the tools
to influence on our level.
That could be option a).
There’s a fourth alternative, d.), in which we simply don’t have access to all the information. Bad things, like say the tsunami a few years ago, happen in a context of which we only see a part. Perhaps such “evil” things are necessary for the maximum good. How would we know otherwise?
The idea that God is unlimited is not a new one, but it seems to be more dominant now than it was once upon a time, at least within certain breeds of Christianity. It wasn’t uncommon, or even controversial, to say that God was bound by Reason, for example (with the understanding that Reason was in a sense the plan by which God had created reality).
If the tsunami is necessary for the maximum good, then we’re definitely in option a) and this is indeed the best of all possible worlds, tsunamis and all:
I’m not seeing the logical connection between “not omniscient or omnipotent” and “this state of affairs is the best of all possible arrangements.” Seems to me that if a creator, omnipotent or otherwise, were to create a material world from nothing, the material world would function as a material world. It would be temporal and, if it included being capable of sensation, pain. Death as well. Stars and planets don’t last forever. This consequence speaks to the nature of matter; I don’t see that it tells us much of anything about God, if such a being exists.
It’s also important to remember that we cannot really know what “creator” means when applied to the kind of being we would call God, who really isn’t any kind of being. Sure, I know what the word means, but when applied to God, the word is at best an analogy the falls infinitely short of the mark, even if it reveals some insight. We’re still in the dark about God, even if we get all our images of God to cohere.
Consequently, I don’t think God serves very well as an explanation for the universe, either its origin or its operation.
Here’s how I get there. First, the limited Creator: if evanescence is in the nature of matter (or at least, conglomerations of matter like organisms and planets) then why didn’t the Creator create matter to be durable? Which is another way of asking, why don’t we live forever? It’s easy enough to see and understand that it is in the nature of life that it be temporary, that it inevitably must end in death. But a Creator who creates life and death either has chosen death for His living creations, or the Creator has no choice because it’s inherent in the nature of life that death occur. A Creator who has no choice is by definition not omnipotent because that Creator lacks to power to create living creatures which do not subsequently die.
Second: the benevolence of the Creator. If we posit that life, pleasure, and existence are good and desirable things as compared to their opposites, then the Creator would create such that the creations can enjoy them. We can enjoy them, hence, the Creator has given us at least something good. Maybe (obviously) it’s not Paradise. But perhaps it’s as good as it possibly can be. A Creator who was benevolent would arrange creation to the extent of His power to do so to maximize the ability of his creations to enjoy the goods of life, pleasure, and existence, because that is the definition of benevolence — to be benevolent is to bestow good things upon another.
On a separate note, in the OP you write “I image God as the being of love itself”.
That’s different than the being of the Creator. It’s also different than the Great Moral Judge or even the originator of morality. And it seems different than being an actor within the physical universe, particularly but not exclusively as depicted in the Torah or the Old Testament, but also as depicted in the personification of God as man (and then as man resurrected) in the New Testament.
Does God have objective existence apart from humanity, then, or is He somehow a derivative of the human experience of love? If we humans exterminated ourselves as a species over the next century with fearsome weapons of war and more-dramatic-even-than-imagined climate change or both, such that no humans at all were alive, would God continue to exist?
Which is another way of asking, why don’t we live forever? It’s easy enough to see and understand that it is in the nature of life that it be temporary, that it inevitably must end in death. But a Creator who creates life and death either has chosen death for His living creations, or the Creator has no choice because it’s inherent in the nature of life that death occur. A Creator who has no choice is by definition not omnipotent because that Creator lacks to power to create living creatures which do not subsequently die.
A few things. First, Christianity, along with other religions, does claim that we live forever. Death does not have last word; it is a transition, not a final end. Second, I submit that what God’s lack of choice, so to speak, suggests, is not a want of power but a contingency. God chose not to have a choice by creating a universe that operated according to certain rules. Death is one of those rules. Freedom, according to Christianity, would be another. God doesn’t always get what God wants, not for lack of power, but as a choice to allow creation to be what it is.
A Creator who was benevolent would arrange creation to the extent of His power to do so to maximize the ability of his creations to enjoy the goods of life, pleasure, and existence, because that is the definition of benevolence — to be benevolent is to bestow good things upon another.
Sounds reasonable, but how do we know this isn’t actually the case? We don’t, because, God or no, we don’t see the big picture, either of God or of the universe.
Does God have objective existence apart from humanity, then, or is He somehow a derivative of the human experience of love? If we humans exterminated ourselves as a species over the next century with fearsome weapons of war and more-dramatic-even-than-imagined climate change or both, such that no humans at all were alive, would God continue to exist?
I would say this: in being in love, I sense a being of love, as if love itself is something I participate in. I can’t really explain this sense; it’s an inkling and maybe just my imagination, but I would say that it’s where my religious faith begins on a day to day basis. I approach my Catholicism as a way of giving flesh and blood, life and activity, to this relationship with love itself. You could say that my religious faith is a way of incarnating this way of being in the being of love.
“…[T]he evil that nature does…” is not a phrase that makes a great deal of sense to me. Charles Darwin was certainly moved by the suffering of prey animals inflicted by predators and questioned what sort of benevolent God would arrange affairs such that this was how His creations ended their existences. I think that’s the sort of thing that you’re getting at here. I suppose we might agree that an intentional act which causes pain might be classified as “evil,” at least under some circumstances.
But I’m not going to call the wolf “evil” when she takes a deer — the deer may still be alive and in tremendous pain while the wolf feasts, but that still doesn’t make the wolf evil. Likely, were a human to take a deer and harvest its flesh while the animal yet lived, we would condemn him for torturing the deer. But the wolf remains in a state of nature, lacking the quality of conscious self-awareness and orientation within the world possessed by humans, and thus is not a moral actor at all. She acts on natural instinct and without the sort of self-control, self-awareness, or orientation to other actors of which the human hunter is capable.
So, the human has a moral duty to take the deer out of her misery as part of concluding the hunt. The wolf has no similar obligation to her victim; she lacks the capacity to form such an obligation in the first place. Nature, lacking the quality of consciousness humans possess, acts without conscious intent, and therefore is neither good nor evil. It simply is.
So you condemn most bowhunting, as it often is deliberately designed to make the prey animal bleed to death? interesting!
I don’t think that’s the intent. It is the result but I think the bowhunter would prefer and intend to kill on impact, or at least immobilize the deer.
When 50% of the shot animals are not recovered (lazy hunters!), I think it’s safe to say that intent is not terribly relevant to actual outcome.
I was thinking more of disease and natural disasters. God could create the Earth, but he can’t stop it from periodically spilling molten rock on us? He could create human life, but he can’t stop our genes from mutating in ways that cause untold misery?
I suppose that a third possibility is that he’s just a lousy engineer. Some say the world will end in ice, others say in fire; my money’s on a segfault.
the real question is: will G-d reboot from a backup copy?
What do you think deja vu is?
You just asked me that.
Depending on your flavour of Christianity hell is often presented as the default. We all go there by virtue of being human unless Jesus for reasons of his own that we cannot know chooses to save us.
I do not like this picture, the God presented is not only cruel he is incompetent. A workman who keeps making things so flawed he has to throw them away is not someone you would trust to fix a burst pipe never mind run a universe.
I once ran across a guy on the internet who expressed the belief that hell would be empty or nearly so, anyway. The idea was that the only people in hell would be those who fully understood the “deal” and actively rejected salvation in favor of damnation.
I find it more parsimonious to just toss the whole lot.
have you seen the film “the rapture” from the 90s?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rapture_%28film%29
The most interesting thing about this is the evolution of gods over time. They probably started as the assignment of malicious agency to random natural calamities.
Then we have the bad tempered, vindictive, racist, invisible policeman. At least he was racist in your favour. You may have thought your life was not easy but you should see what he did to the other tribes.
And so on down through history until we have the god synonymous with love or pacifism or the “oneness of life” or spiritual nirvana. It’s really only in these last stages that the problem of evil raises its ugly head. If you stick with the invisible vindictive policeman the problem of evil doesn’t arise.
The malicious intelligent agent god actually is natural evil personified.
As an atheist, I suppose I have access to a handful of hypotheses with explanatory power that aren’t available to a lot of theists.
I go back to the birth of Christianity in the Coliseum where many Christians had to watch their friends, family, children die and, worse than that, watch them die to the cheers of the crowd. Assuming no Holy Spirit to bring comfort allows me to assume that they’d come up with comforting thoughts like “you cheer today, you’ll cry tomorrow. When you cry tomorrow, I will cheer the way you cheer today.”
The argument that *REAL* Christians would not respond like that but would limit their responses to this particular list of responses is an argument that has never made much sense to me… but, again, I’m an atheist.
Watch you don’t buy into the myth of Christian persecution!
http://www.amazon.co.uk/The-Myth-Persecution-Christians-Martyrdom/dp/0062104527
Candida Moss is a facile revisionist. We do know the Christians were persecuted. They were also persecuting each other pretty horribly.
Here are the facts, not that you’ll get any from Candida Moss: as the Roman Empire set about organising itself, it did periodically demand public sacrifice to the Emperor, especially as they got weirder and became gods within their own lifetimes. The Christians were hardly alone in refusing to treat the Emperor as a god.
Tertullian gives us a picture of that world in Apologeticus, addressed to Emperor Septimus Severus. The Christians were being abused. Of that there can be no doubt at all. The very idea they weren’t is historical idiocy, may I point you to the emperor Septimius Severus in Cassius Dio, who was a friend of Severus. Cassius Dio documents the persecution of the Christians under Domitian.
But they weren’t being persecuted for being Christians so much as heretics. Yes, a good deal of maudlin crap accreted around the martyrs and shrines around their tombs, but to say there was no persecution of the Christians is complete nonsense.
Moss doesn’t say there was no persecution, only that the scale has been vastly exaggerated and that the reason for persecution in many cases was not specifically related to Christianity but more to civil disobedience.
So, sure. Let’s say that the Christians were totally asking for it by being disobedient to The Proper Authorities.
That doesn’t change the fact that there were letters being written by Ignatius explaining to the Christians out there that “I am God’s wheat, ground fine by the lion’s teeth to be made purest bread for Christ.”
That’s one of those memes that makes the idea of heaven including such pleasures as watching Roman lion handlers be tormented make sense.
And the reason Judaism is ambivalent about an afterlife is its historical lack of persecution.
I thought Judaism was worried that there is an afterlife, but that no one will know where it is being held.
As Rabbi Akiva said, “The path after death is hidden from us, but to be safe bring a change of underwear.”
Eternal nothingness is OK if you’re dressed for it.
@Jaybird
If Christians were truly being persecuted as they are in some Muslim majority countries today or worse, you’ll have to explain how they rose to dominance in 300 years rather than being pushed to extinction as they are in Iraq.
Well, Judaism has always had a huge “There Ain’t No Afterlife!” undercurrent that predates, at least, the Roman Empire. By the time Paul is working the various crowds, there is a debate about how, okay, maybe there’s *NOT* an afterlife… but what about a “resurrection of the dead”, huh? And how this debate always split the room. There’s an awesome (and really, really funny) scene in Acts 23 where Paul gets brought on trial before the Sanhedrin and Paul stands up and loudly proclaims “Brethren, I am a Pharisee, a son of Pharisees; with respect to the hope and the resurrection of the dead I am on trial.”
This, of course, started the mother of all shouting matches in the room. Why? Because there was a huge debate over whether or not there was stuff that happened after death… and the pharisees were on one side and the sadducees were on the other.
I’m of the school of thought that says that one of the main reasons Christianity took off is because of its delightful reward structure. Hey, free heaven. Additionally, there was also a place for those who didn’t sign up to the MLM scheme.
So to answer your question: If Christians were truly being persecuted as they are in some Muslim majority countries today or worse, you’ll have to explain how they rose to dominance in 300 years rather than being pushed to extinction as they are in Iraq.
Christianity had several really awesome memes wrapped together in one:
Monotheism with one god (but if you really want to keep one of your favorite polytheistic gods around, you can because, whaddya know, it’s actually an angel).
An Afterlife where you will see your loved ones again and things will work the way they were supposed to when the Garden was originally set up.
Oh, that thing you already believe? You’re *SOOOO* close! Here’s the real story that overlaps 99% with what you’re already doing! (See, for example, Mithras.)
Additionally, it had the benefit of working in fertile fields for all of the above and that its foil was Rome who didn’t care what other minor gods you worshipped so long as you put their statue in your temple… and Rome was using an old and outdated theory of blasphemy that wasn’t ready for the new and improved version 2.0 that Paul was dragging around.
Plus there’s the whole “inefficiency” thing that they had going on a couple thousand years ago that has since been rectified by, among other things, cars, explosives, the internet, and so on. (Additionally, it’s possible for Iraqi Christians to just up and leave… when, 2000 years ago, knowledge workers were far fewer on the ground and wealth meant something else entirely.)
So there are a lot of dynamics at play.
The best comment on the Christian Hell I’ve ever heard is:
“g-d sends people there to get better. then they go to heaven.”
If you’ve not read Niven and Pournelle’s Inferno, you should. The general idea is that Purgatory is an asylum for the theologically insane. Hell is the violent ward.
They have a sequel that is post the aftermath of Vatican II. Escape from Hell. It’s not as good but, hey. Where else will you get a book tackling these issues?
The Cruel God argument goes exactly nowhere with me. It’s so trivial, so oft-repeated.
Here’s how it really works. Mark Twain: man is the only animal that blushes, or needs to. Other animals clearly exhibit cruelty. The more we study the chimpanzees, the worse they look. They’re nasty, vicious, and calculatingly cruel. They hunt down and eat each other, they bully and terrorise each other, they’re warlike in groups. Of course, they also exhibit many finer traits, self-sacrifice, kindness, they teach each other skills, they seem to have some primitive form of justice — most of the nicer things about being human.
We don’t go about saying the chimps are wicked, though it’s awfully difficult to say they aren’t by any objective standard. We get all fluffy and try to discriminate between ourselves and our fellow primates and the rest of the animals. But really, we’re animals and there’s no getting past that fact.
God, such as he is or could be, even hypothetically, has clearly not eliminated what we deem cruelty from nature. If we are made imago dei, our species has proven amazingly inventive in the Cruelty Department. The Biblical God gets annoyed enough with mankind to periodically entertain the notion of wiping them out, picking a Favoured Few to save along the way, the ones who kill and burn the flesh of animals upon his altars, preferentially, may I add, to those who offer him grains and produce, an act of favouritism which resulted in the first murder on file in the Bible, the first of many. He wants meat and he gets it. If the Christian Myth is to mean anything, it is a story of one innocent man betrayed, mocked, brutalised and crucified that the others might be saved from their sins. As CS Lewis observes “He is not a tame lion.”
God doesn’t fit into our little boxes. Christians must accept the Bible for what it is: the story of man’s relationship with God over the years. We don’t get to pick and choose which parts we like or don’t. The God of the Bible is not a very nice God, not by anyone’s definition. His moods vary. He’s awfully tough on his Chosen People and hasn’t saved them from very much over the centuries.
Nikos Kazantzakis said Pain is not the only essence of our God, nor is hope in a future life or a life on this earth, neither joy nor victory. Every religion that holds up to worship one of these primordial aspects of God narrows our hearts and our minds. The essence of our God is STRUGGLE. Pain, joy, and hope unfold and labor within this struggle, world without end.
Of course we’re going to complain about such a God, struggle is painful. We might just be made imago dei, driven to evolve concepts such as Cruelty and Kindness by this Struggle. If we are made in the Image of God, that definition, that likeness, is defined by that Struggle.
It’s not clear to me that chimps possess the mental ability to universalize rules in the way that humans do. Chimps with issues with one another within the same troupe seem to behave by different rules than do chimps from different troupes.
What’s more, “cruelty” turns out to be a slippery thing to define objectively. What we think of as “cruel” is driven by malleable cultural norms to an uncomfortable degree. If morality is dispensed from God, that standard of what is moral and what is cruel is as arbitrary as any other you might propose.
So the true challenge, as always, is finding a rational and objective basis for morality — a search which does indeed seem to be unique to homo sapiens as it appears only we possess the ability to both universalize and actualize our rules.
Dostoyevsky says talking nonsense is man’s only privilege and it distinguishes him from all other organisms. Evil is terribly concrete and specific, it’s not generalisable. If those chimpanzees aren’t murderous, men aren’t either. There’s no reason, no justification for what those chimps do beyond instilling terror in their fellow chimps.
I think our inner reach to God is for all we are not. The strength to get through the soul-wrenching trouble. The courage to face the unthinkable. The moral superiority to inflict our standards on others. The certitude to judge. The reflection of extreme beauty. The joy of kinship. The tedium of days.
Each and every day, we face things both good and bad that are bigger we are; that overwhelm or underwhelm. And to contain that need for balancing something greater then ourselves, good or bad, we invent god. To explain that need for containing, we invent God. To protect ourselves from overwhelm, we build God, and imbue God with whatever we need in the moment. And I believe this a subconscious process; one that we do and then try to explain doing, which opens the door to organized religion and tradition, religious text as guiding mythology, and religious quackery.
Zic,
I’m of a different persuasion and don’t really see it that way. Still, I think there is a lot of merit in what you say here, and I cannot deny that yours is a thoughtful critique, and I am forced to ask how much of that is true of myself (I’m technically agnostic but find myself closer to the theist side of the spectrum than most agnostics seem to in my experience).
To these following points, however, I would like to suggest a different way of looking at it:
I think it’s possible to have a posture toward whatever we might call the “spiritual” that works toward humility, namely, toward the recognition that it is not our place to judge others. Or more precisely, we might be able to judge people’s actions, but there is a certain aspect to others’ beings of which we cannot be the ultimate judge. I’m not saying that this is a necessary consequence of religious experience. In fact, even if the explicit writings of the religion command humility, there can be, among the believer, a certain tendency to be proud of one’s humility. I’m only suggesting that moral superiority and the certitude to judge are not necessarily tied up with a notion of god or with religious experience and that there are countervailing directions it can take us.
Of course, it can take us the other way, and all too often does. And one might say that a notion of the universe that does not posit a god or a supernatural is, or at least can be, a much more humbling experience. (I think for example of Carl Sagan’s wonder at the vastness of the cosmos, or of Arthur C. Clarke’s story of the “star child” in 2001.)
You are right that I should have included the urge to reach out, to pray or well wish others in a beneficial manner.
I’m only suggesting that moral superiority and the certitude to judge are not necessarily tied up with a notion of god or with religious experience and that there are countervailing directions it can take us.
I simply meant that too often, the manner of exerting control on others turns to religious doctrine for its justification.
Thank you, Pierre.
“I simply meant that too often, the manner of exerting control on others turns to religious doctrine for its justification. ”
I can certainly agree with that.
Hell makes sense to me
I had an immediate viscerally negative reaction to this, and to my surprise it lasted even after I realized the statement could cover even a belief in a much milder hell, more along the lines of a purgatory. Just a couple of years ago, I don’t think I would have. In fact it was just about two or three years ago, on another blog, that a sincere Christian asked me how I could write so thoughtfully and sincerely about Christianity, given that I do not consider myself one, and my answer was that having grown up in the faith, I still had a serious interest in it, and in seeing it achieve its best form among believers, even if I was no longer one of them.
Now I find I don’t care about that anymore, so that my reaction is one of irritation when folks entertain notions of the supernatural. Which isn’t a criticism of Kyle or any kind of suggestion that he ought not to write posts like this. He generally writes so well and thoughtfully that his posts on religion are worth reading despite my internal irritation. I’m just ruminating on the direction I’ve taken in the last few years (and of course, that rumination was inspired by Kyle’s thoughtful post).
I have great sympathy for you for submitting such an intimate part of yourself to scrutiny.
But this isn’t a thing which is particular to you only. All of us feel this at one time or another, directed toward one thing or another.
I believe this irritability you describe is a perfectly rational rejection of misplacement of aspect; very much the same impulse that would make one set a cup upright which is laying on its side– for seemingly no reason at all. It is the recognition of the rational placement of the thing. Again, this is not a thing particular to you.
Properly stated, the supernatural is an extraordinary form of humility; a recognition of things beyond ourselves, beyond our understanding– indeed, beyond our very range of understanding.
A sense of the supernatural begins with humility. Our senses are terribly limited within only those within a small range. I have often longed to have a true nose, like a dog or a cat, to where I could smell who had walked across the room twenty minutes ahead of me. But still, that is a sense that we can understand and relate to, because we have some manner of direct comparison.
Often it is the case that the supernatural is distorted from its rightful and proper place; molded into something secure and predictable– a state of affairs which is improbable at best. But these things stem from complacency. It signifies a loss of humility.
I went to look this up for you, and I found it. I believe it would help you to reconcile things were you to take a look at it.
It’s not really doing me a lot of good telling you about it; but I understand that it is to the fleet of foot to remove the stumbling stone for those who follow behind.
I have no issue in accepting that there are vast unknowns of which I will never fully be aware; even aspects of myself which are the same. But I was once in your shoes, and so I offer you this as a fellow traveler.
It is of no benefit for you to be needlessly irritated so.
Link 1
Link 2
A bit dated perhaps, but very good nevertheless.
Hmm, I’m not sure I fully understand you. As I see it, I have shed my belief in the supernatural because it is not a parsimonious idea. There’s no evidence for it, nor is it necessary for explaining anything about the universe; rather it only begs more questions than it presumes to answer. And I think my irritation is really only that of an ex-smoker who sees someone else light up and wonders why they haven’t quit smoking, too, not pausing to think that we each have our own reasons, and should be hesitant to judge others.
But if that sounds like an irritable reaction to your comment, I hasten to assure you it isn’t. I appreciate your response, and recognize the good spirit that motivated it.
Do you suppose there was evidence of photons at the time Newton was doing his experiments with prisms?
Think about that Dark Side of the Moon cover before answering.
I don’t think we’re talking about the same kind of supernatural. Photons follow the laws of physics. I’m talking about things or beings that don’t follow the laws of physics–magic, gods, demons, the continuation of the spirit after death.
If we find that there is some being that is vastly superior to us, perhaps that even created us, that being will, I expect, still be bound by the laws of physics, and so won[t be truly supernatural.
But I think we are talking about the same thing.
The evidence at hand of the existence of photons in Newton’s time was the same as it is now: Light.
Magic? Yes! Some people in this world believe that flashlights are magic.
Does it make it any more or less magical to believe it to be so?
Gods, demons, spirit– what are these things other than imprecise terms, like so many other terms we might ordinarily use?
Laws and physics, yes; definitely. But what laws? And of what physics?
This world is much wider than our understanding of it.
Never rule out the impossible.
Do you suppose there was evidence of photons at the time Newton was doing his experiments with prisms?
The opposite. Prisms make light appear to be made up of waves, not particles. It’s modern, not classical, physics that says light is both.
Thank you for that.
I had forgotten about that completely.
And really, such geeky little asides really make my day (I’m easily pleased).
But it only makes the point stronger– that the tools of detection were insufficient rather than the object being observed.
Now, if you had read that little excerpt concerning the perception of three dimensional objects by two dimensional beings, you would see that as conclusive.
It is when the three dimensional object is placed into motion that the two dimensional being loses relation to them.
By necessity, the supernatural does in fact exist.
There’s no evidence for it, nor is it necessary for explaining anything about the universe; rather it only begs more questions than it presumes to answer.
It may surprise you, James, but I more or less agree with this. While my own faith has a purpose (I hope), it ain’t explaining the origin of the cosmos or the basis of morality or anything else. I’ve forsaken that sort of faith.
As a Jewish person this is one of my main issues with the Christianity as practiced by the hardcore Christian right. The kind that insist that America was meant to be an anti-Enlightenment, Christian Nation, Sometimes they are called Domionists. Andrew Sullivan calls them Christianists.
But to me they preach a paradox that makes no sense. How can the very embodiment of love and compassion damn people to perpetual pain and suffering because they did not believe Jesus is the Messiah?
Judaism does not really have a hell. All of this is odd to me.
Judaism doesn’t really have an afterlife. We have many ideas on the subject, all of which conflict (someone even suggested reincarnation).
I dunno. There’s plenty about the afterlife throughout Hebrew scripture, including LOTS about Hell, . Might want to take a look at this from Isaiah, and there’s loads in the tillim I could point you at.
But most importantly, the Amidah at Gevurot says there will be a resurrection.
*snort* not trying to say there won’t be. Am trying to say that it’s an open question what happens to people in the meantime.
Random linkie: http://www.jewfaq.org/olamhaba.htm (not saying this is the ultimate authority, but…)
Judaism has tried to walk away from Torah before. These Open Questions usually end up with dancing before some Egel haZahav or another. It’s the one constant in Judaism, heh.
Judaism is contradictory and agnostic on an afterlife because no one has come back and given us an account.
We are logical like that.
Heh. If you go to a Reform congregation, you’ll hear
Atah gibor l’olam, Adonai, m’cheyeih hakol
But if you go to an Orthodox congregation you’ll hear
Atah gibor l’olam, Adonai, m’cheyeih meitim
The first glosses as “Thou art forever mighty, oh Lord, who gives life to all”. The second says explicitly”…who raises the dead.” There’s plenty of dead-raising going on in the texts of Judaism, even the RamBam says there’s a resurrection and his version got him in trouble with everyone. It’s the Reform movement which has walked away from the doctrine of resurrection but they hardly speak for all Jews on this subject.
True but the Jewish talk of resurrection is nothing like the end times of Evangelical Christianity with the anti-Christ and massive amounts of suffering for all/most in the end. Nor is it about the end of time. It is very much about paradise and life in this world. Also even the most Hasidic of Jews are willing to concede a lot of allegory in the Tenakh
Plus the majority of American Jews are Reform.
I don’t quite understand why other religions did not develop variants of reform Judaism. I suppose there are mainline protestants that underplay the revelation stuff or debate it or more liberal Catholic parishes but there does not seem to be a movement like Reform Judaism.
Unitarians == Reform Jews
Puritans == Orthodox Jews.
Kyle, this post brings to mind a question I’ve been meaning to ask you for a while now. Have you read Jack Miles’ God: A Biography? If so, what did you think?
Not yet, but I’ll see if my library carries it.
If you read it I’ll be interested in your take. As a non-beleiver, this was the first book that allowed me to accept the Old Testament God as something other than cruel and uncaring.
I find how non-Jews view the God of Tenakh to be disturbing.
The old issue of the Apostles:
But tell us, who is our neighbor?
The woman at the well.
The Samaritan on the road.
When the Nazarene chose to speak of neighbors, it was typically the Samaritans of whom he spoke.
More on Judaism:
Christian right-wingers love to Levitcus and the put to death quotes. Do you know how hard it was to actually use that stuff? Almost impossible. The evidence required to put two men to death for gay sex was a person testifying that he warned them about the consequences before the act was committed plus a majority of at least 23 judges needed to vote for death:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_and_corporal_punishment_in_Judaism
Do you know how hard it is to get Jews to agree on anything!? Two Jews, Three Opinions! ‘
Also in Judaism, Lesbianism is less of a sin because it does not waste eggs or semen during sex.
Jews we are freaky logical like this.
And that was only really a sin because it was connected with Pagan Faiths. There were many such things…
This is the choice quote because never a more Jewish concept of Justice was created:
“If the Beth Din arrived at a unanimous verdict of guilty, the person was let go – the idea being that if no judge could find anything exculpatory about the accused, there was something wrong with the court.”