I recently attended a funeral (not someone I knew, but I was there to support the family) followed closely by a wedding. And then, as if it was all part of some higher plan (irony intended), I find myself listening to this podcast which I downloaded a while ago, but hadn’t got around to listening to yet.

The funeral certainly reminded me of death (which, one might imagine, might be an unpleasant thing to think about), but because of my recent “brush with death”, I was able to appreciate the wedding so much more. Knowing that life will end (and will not go on forever, as many religious people might hope for) made the celebration much more special that it might have been otherwise. As Joseph Brisendine explains in the podcast - how long could you have a orgasm for before it became boring? Life is wonderful precisely because it ends.

If we were to “transcend” death, and live in a “perfect place” for eternity, nothing in this life would be special or have meaning, because we’d always be longing for this “other world”. And isn’t this exactly what religion teaches us? Religion (at least the Abrahamic ones, and probably most others) teach of an “after” life, which is supposed to be much grander and more fulfilling than this life ever can be.

It is claimed that without “God”, life cannot have purpose, but Nietzsche suggests (at least, Brisendine talking about Nietzsche) that it is only without God that this life can have any meaning.

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1. Jesus was misquoted, or misconstrued
2. Jesus never actually existed

I still maintain that if Jesus did actually exist, he would be quite unhappy about how his teachings have been butchered and interpreted today. So in some sense, I still believe the first option is quite likely. I had not, however (until recently) actually seriously considered the possibility that Jesus didn’t actually exist.

The bible talks about people we know existed, right? Various Kings and so forth? So, it’s fair to assume that Jesus also existed? Given that Jesus is such a central part of the Christian mythology, Christianity would fall if it could be demonstrated that Jesus was simply a myth, right (please, correct me if I’m wrong)? Well, this might just be true!

I first came across these two YouTube videos² a while back, and it made me realise that, if true, it would be an amazing coincidence if he actually existed (of course, perhaps that was God’s plan to make Jesus even more difficult to believe, thus requiring more faith). Dionysus (one of the figures discussed in the videos) was supposedly born of a virgin, fathered by the king of heaven, turned water into wine, died and resurrected. Sound familiar? There are, apparently, many other mythical figures who have extraordinarily similar stories - all of which predate Jesus.

There seem to be many others out there who claim similar things, and while there is some criticism of some of these claims, there are, undoubtedly some parts of the Jesus story which were “borrowed” from earlier myths.

I plan to investigate this further, as I don’t believe it’s quite as clear as is suggested, but I wonder - how much of Jesus’ life has to be true for Christianity to remain?

1. I think it might have originally been by C. S. Lewis, although I could be wrong [↩]
2. Both videos are short clips from Zeitgeist - The Movie, available in its entirety via BitTorrent (legally!), streamed via Google Video, or for order on DVD [↩]

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It’s certainly a valid criticism of most of the churches I’ve gone to, as many Churches aren’t friendly to nonreligious people wanting to see what things are like. I’m utterly sick of people asking me “What church do you go to?”, and then seeing the look of shock on their face when I tell them I don’t go to any church, I’m not religious, or (worse!) if I was to use the word “atheist”.

The quote being discussed by the Friendly Christian is as follows:

“I’m not religious. I don’t think much about God, except when I am in a pinch and need some special favors. I have no particular reason to think he’ll deliver, but I sometimes take a shot anyway. Other than that, I’m just not that interested in God.”

This, to me, sounds like a person who has no reason to believe in God except for the simple fact that many others seem to have this belief. If one is raised in a society where God is almost universally accepted, if one made no effort to actively think about God, what possible conclusions could that person come to?

This is where I think the Friendly Christian has got it wrong. This person doesn’t sound like someone who’s been shunned by the church, but someone who (quite legitimately, in my opinion) has no interest in God because the idea has little or no influence on their life. In an ideal world (one where personal beliefs in supernatural beings remained personal - in the sense that your beliefs were unable to affect my way of life), I think such a lack of interest in God would be quite common.

That’s not to say an interest in God is a bad thing, however. As you might have discovered, however, I do have an interest in religion and the concepts of God. These ideas do have an influence on my life because our politicians make them relevant, and because I want to understand why so many people have these beliefs. I find the idea of God interesting from a historical and cultural point of view, and want to learn more.

Are you interested in God? If not, why not?

1. Well, not so recently, but it was recently when I first drafted this post. As you can probably tell if you’ve been subscribing to my blog, I’ve been quite slack recently. I won’t bore you with the personal details, but lets just say there’s been a lot on my plate. My apologies, and I’ll hopefully get back to a more reasonable blogging schedule again now. [↩]

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While I don’t think Australia will ever be as dominated by fundamentalist religious dogma as is the case in the USA, it’s scary to see religion and politics closely intertwined in Australia, as it’s certainly possibly that we could head down a similar path. Our two major party leaders, Kevin Rudd, and John Howard are both strong Christians (or, so they claim), as are many of the other Members of Parliament.

Democrats¹ leader Lyn Allison says there are too many federal MPs with strong religious views.

Senator Allison says the separation of church and state is becoming blurred.

“The Prime Minister this morning said that there were a great number of Members of Parliament in Coalition ranks with very strong ties to the Christian church,” she said. “I know this is a Christian country but people with very strong religious views are heavily over-represented, if I can put it that way, in the Parliament,” she said.²

I’ve always been a swinging voter, and I don’t support either major Australian party - my votes in the past have gone to the Greens, the Democrats, or the odd independent (with the unfortunate necessity of nominating both of the major parties somewhere with my preferences). It worries me, however, when I can see the line between politics and religion in Australia getting blurred.

Some claim that comments like those of Lyn Allison are misguided, but I think it’s a legitimate concern. There’s certainly no problem with having a reasonable percentage of Christians represented in parliament (if 64% of the population are Christian, then their views might be well represented if we have 64% Christian MPs). My problem is that politics seems to be becoming more about religion than it should be, and who knows where that will lead? Honestly, I don’t care what religious views our leaders have, as long as they’re able to put their views aside when it counts. I worry that the efforts of our potential Prime Ministers to emphasise their Christianity will push the focus where it doesn’t belong.

(Oh, and sorry this post was late - I try to write one major post each Sunday, but I’ve had a rather busy weekend!)

1. A minor party in Australia [↩]
2. Donald, P., Iggulden, T. (August 2007) Howard, Rudd Woo Christians Online, ABC News [↩]

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For those not familiar with the argument from morality, it basically goes like this¹:

1. If God does not exist, then there are no objective (i.e. independent of human opinion) moral values and duties.

2. There are objective moral values and duties.

3. Therefore God exists.

My gut instinct when I first thought about this argument is that the first point has issues. I’ve asserted before that we can have morality without religion², and I still believe that a moral code independent of religion is superior, but as for where this morality could come from - I have no idea. I seem to remember Dawkins talking about how morality could have evolved, but that wouldn’t be objective morality, would it?

Which as got me thinking about the idea of objective morality as a whole, and I can’t help but ask - do we really have objective morality (point 2)? Zach Moore says that, at least at a debate lecture he attended, the idea the objective morality exists seems to be generally accepted, but I can’t help but feel that there’s something wrong with that, too.

What morals do we have that are objective? “Murder is bad” - Surely there’s some times it’s justified³? “Do no harm” - but what if my survival is at stake? “Do the greatest Good” - but, what IS good? Even the golden rule isn’t objective (although the rule itself seems to be the most universal law of morality) - “do unto others as you’d have them do unto you” relies on our own opinions! Perhaps I really wouldn’t care if you stole my girlfriend?⁴

Do we really have objective morals? If so, what?

1. Moore, Zachary (2007) Dr. Craig Meets Dr. Zach [↩]
2. See my three part series on morality. [↩]
3. or is that just when we don’t call it murder? [↩]
4. Try it, and I’ll kill you! [↩]

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I think that all the “prophets” and religious leaders believed in the message they preached, but they didn’t expect (or want) their messages to be accepted as divine and unquestionable truth - they wanted people to think for themselves. I believe that Jesus, if he was a real man and if his message hadn’t been distorted by religion, would still be revered today without needing needing to claim that he was “God”¹.

Christians often ask themselves, “What Would Jesus Do?”, and I think if Jesus lived today, he’d be amazed by the magic all around us, and might even “find God” in a similar way to Einstein:

Sometimes he was really using God as just a sort of convenient metaphor. But he did have, I think, a genuine cosmic religious feeling, a sense of admiration at the intellectual ingenuity of the universe. Not just its majesty, but its extraordinary subtlety and beauty and mathematical elegance.²

I think Jesus, today, would be more like a modern Buddhist or perhaps a “hippy” (jokes are often made about Jesus being the first hippy, but I think all jokes aside there’s a lot of truth to that).

If we ask ourselves the question, “What Would Jesus Believe?”, whatever the answer is, I definitely don’t believe he’d be a Christian, a Jew or a Muslim, for that matter. It makes me think of the Cat’s religion in Red Dwarf…

1. As far as I’m aware, there’s not a lot of evidence that he actually claimed that he was God, but even if he did, perhaps he meant it in an entirely different way. [↩]
2. Davies, Paul (2007) Einstein’s God [↩]

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I must admit, I used to think that science and religion were natural enemies. How can something that relies on faith not be in direct opposition to a practice which specifically relies on reason and evidence? The thing is, it wasn’t always like that, and to some it still isn’t. Of course, there are those who choose to create conflict, but conflict isn’t necessary. Historically, science grew from the church. The first scientists were clergy, and scientific research was sponsored by the church. The church wanted to understand God’s world, and science was one of the ways they tried to do that.

Before I really began looking into things myself, I thought that the only rational scientific view could be that God (as always, I use the term very loosely) does not exist. But there is so much magic in the universe that we can’t help but feel insignificant in it. Even if the universe does exist due to a cosmic fluke, that’s still pretty darn amazing and if we could ever truly understand that, I think that would be on par with a religious experience.

Arthur C. Clark’s famous quote “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic” seems to be true not only of technology as we know it, but also the natural world around us, which possibly explains why many seem to believe the only option is that this world was created by a “sufficiently advanced being”. As our science advances, we discover more and more things that seem like magic - we continually discover new exciting things that seem completely unreal and magical. The quantum world, for example - even the greatest scientific minds still can’t fully grasp what happens in our world on a quantum level. As time goes on, our science progresses, and we understand these things differently, but that doesn’t make them any less amazing. While I accept that both science and spirituality/religion have limits to what they can explain, they both seem to be striving to understand this same magic.

Can’t science be a path to God? If God exists in all things (as is often claimed), then by understanding the world around us through science, we could begin to understand God. Sure, the God we might find wouldn’t be Yahweh, Allah or Jesus - but some parts of the bible have to be interpreted as metaphor, right?

Further Reading:

• The Myth of Conflict
• Ferngren, Gary (2002) Science & Religion: A Historical Introduction

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“I was unhappy … and my life was feeling like a failure on all levels … This time, rather than another letter to another person I imagined to be vicimizing me, I thought I’d go straight to the source; … I decided to write a letter to God.”²

… and, God replies. The book follows with a written dialogue between Walsch and God, talking about prayer, love, divine inspiration and the nature of the bible, and all sorts of potentially controversial topics.

Now, if you haven’t already read these books, you’re probably thinking exactly what I thought when a friend first told me about them - “what kind of nut-job publishes a book claiming he actually had a conversation with God? He’s either nuts, or full of c#@p”. A perfectly valid position to take, but as you read further, you start to understand that it doesn’t matter if Walsch is actually having a conversation with God, if he’s a con artist, or even if he’s nuts - what matters is the book contains some very valid insights.

If God truly did inspire the bible, then why those people? Many of them “never met or saw Jesus in their lives, they lived many years after Jesus left the Earth”³. Some might suggest that the bible as we know it cannot be the word of God unless each of these writers, scribes, translators, etc. were all divinely inspired, which further complicates the issue. Walsch (or, God) suggests the answer to this problem is that the bible is not the only divinely inspired text - “everything in life is holy”⁴, and God’s inspiration is available to anyone who “listens”:

“Listen to your feelings. Listen to your Highest Thoughts. Listen to your experience. Whenever any of these differ from what you’ve been told by your teachers, or read in your books, forget the words. Words are the least reliable purveyor of Truth.”⁵

The God portrayed in “Conversations with God” is exactly the kind of higher power I could imagine being behind all the world’s religions. There’s no way any one religion has got it perfectly right, because each rely on the words that have been passed down through generations, which have been translated, changed and misinterpreted. Each “divinely inspired” text may have come from people who were more in touch with this “God”, and therefore came closer to God’s true message, but each writer had their own human flaws as well, and thus no text is perfect. In the later books, he hints at the idea that by being “in touch” with God, one is really in touch with oneself - God is not only “in” each of us, but we are (collectively) God.

The book certainly solves some of the issues with traditional religion, but possibly so much so that it’s incompatible with traditional religions (which is probably a good thing!). I mentioned in my previous post “Soft Atheist, Hard Agnostic”, that I am a “soft” agnostic when it comes to “spiritual” gods or other non-interfering higher powers. Despite the personal connection Walsch claims to have with this god, to me his ideas seem very close to these types of “gods”

The books are certainly a departure from the seemingly popular non-fiction books on religion and atheism today, but if you haven’t read anything like this before, it’s not a bad place to start.

1. While I happily bought the first three books, and I honestly believe they were written with good intentions, I can’t help but feel the multitudes of subsequent books are just an attempt to “cash in” on a franchise, and hence, I haven’t bought or read any of them. [↩]
2. Walsch, Neale Donald (1999), Conversations with God: an uncommon dialogue - Book 1, p.1 [↩]
3. Walsch, Neale Donald (1999), p.67 [↩]
4. Walsch, Neale Donald (1999), p.68 [↩]
5. Walsch, Neale Donald (1999), p.8 [↩]

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While I was watching a documentary on the history of religion recently, my sister said to me “but aren’t you an Atheist?”¹ At the time I replied, “no, I’m Agnostic”. It has made me think, however, about the nature of Atheism and Agnosticism.

While I generally describe myself as “agnostic”, and avoid describing myself as “atheist”, I could be viewed as both, depending on your definitions. As there seem to be many different views on what Atheism and Agnosticism entails, let me be very clear about what I take the meaning of these words to be.

Belief

Definitions for both Atheism and Agnosticism rely on the notion of “belief”, which itself can be contentious at times. For my purposes, when I say “belief”, I refer “to the attitude we have, roughly, whenever we take something to be the case or regard it as true”² Belief, here, does not imply any lack of certainty - even though it might sometimes in common usage.

Atheism

Atheism, it seems, can mean many things - but broadly it seems to fit one of two definitions:

1. the doctrine or belief that there is no God³, or
2. a lack of belief in the existence of God or gods³

The first definition is the one which I had always taken (I’ll call this “hard” Atheism), and it is why I have never described myself as an “Atheist”. To me, to hold a belief that these is no god is just as illogical as a belief that there is a God - possibly even more so. While it may (hypothetically) be possible one day to prove that there is a God (perhaps he shows himself in some incontestable way, or we find a scientific method for exploring “heaven”) proving the universal non-existence of something is impossible (we can prove something doesn’t exist in one place - say, a box that’s empty - but proving universal non-existence is very different).

The second (”soft”) definition of Atheism, however, is one I’d not been aware of until the last year or so. It seems this definition is common among Atheists, but in my experience it is certainly not the generally understood definition of Atheism. In this definition, Atheism is not the opposite to theism or religion, but an absence of it. It is in this sense that I am an Atheist, although without qualification, I still feel the word “atheist” misrepresents my views.

Agnosticism

This is where we get to Agnosticism. Agnostic means, literally, “without knowledge” and as such an Agnostic holds they they have no knowledge about the existence of God. This is not necessarily a “fence sitting” position, however, as Agnosticism (like Atheism) can be viewed in two subtly different ways:

1. a religious orientation of doubt⁴, or
2. a denial of ultimate knowledge of the existence of God⁴

Certainly using this first definition (”soft” agnosticism), one could argue that the holder of this world-view is “fence sitting” - possibly still exploring or reasoning to discover the truth, or perhaps unable or unwilling to. But again, the second definition offers an entirely different position. A “hard” agnostic does not simply doubt the existence of God (and may, in fact, have faith that there is a God) but makes the claim that it is impossible to ever know if God does or does not exist.

When I describe myself as “Agnostic”, I make the claim that it is impossible to know if any of the Gods described by traditional religions exist. I am also, however, open to the idea that perhaps “God” (if he exists) is nothing like that described by traditional religion, and therefore may one day be provable. For me, the problem with the traditional notions of God are that proponents of these Gods leave no way to ever truly prove his existence - as the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy joke goes:

“I refuse to prove that I exist,” says God, “for proof denies faith, and without faith I am nothing.”
“But,” says Man, “The Babel fish is a dead giveaway, isn’t it? It could not have evolved by chance. It proves you exist, and so therefore, by your own arguments, you don’t. QED.”
“Oh dear,” says God, “I hadn’t thought of that,” and promptly disappears in a puff of logic.

The Christian God, therefore, will always be out of the reach of science because as soon as it becomes answerable by science (no matter what the outcome), God will be relegated (by some, at least) to an even further “far away place ” so as to ensure the existence of God can never be proven.

So in this sense, I am a “hard” agnostic when it comes to Gods like that of Christianity (only because no one is willing to say exactly where this God might exist) but a “soft” agnostic when it comes to other possible higher powers. Either way, the existence of any such higher power seems unlikely (but certainly not impossible).

1. I’ll ignore the obvious issue with the suggestion that Atheists aren’t allowed to have an interest in religion… for now. [↩]
2. Schwitzgebel, Eric, “Belief“, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2006 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.). [↩]
3. WordNet Definition: Atheism [↩]
4. WordNet Definition: Agnosticism [↩]

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• Morality Part 1: God Hating Atheists
• Morality Part 2: Immoral Religion

Non-Theistic Morality (or, what you do when nobody’s watching)

In line with my theory of religious eclecticism, I think that all religions share the same basic ideas on morality.¹ That said, however, morality based on religion is flawed not because of what is taught (be good to others, don’t kill, etc.) but how it’s enforced.

Athiest’s Wager suggests (as I did in my last post) that Christian morality is flawed because of the opportunity to receive forgiveness through religion. Without being able to fall back on forgiveness from God, how could an Atheist respond when given the opportunity to act immorally? Simple, they’d do the right thing.

I didn’t feel that I had a choice since I answer to myself. I am able to tell right from wrong and I would have to live with the knowledge that I had caused harm to someone else. ²

A moral Atheist might have no one to answer to but themselves (which seems to be the reason some suggest that an Atheist has no reason to be moral), but does this make them more or less moral than a Christian who answers only to God? Is a Christian who acts “morally” from fear of eternal punishment more or less moral than an Atheist who acts morally because they feel it’s the right thing to do?

We rightly do not consider a well-behaved dog to be acting “morally.” In the same way, the religious person who obeys not out of love and respect for other people, but in response to the promise of Paradise or the specter of Hell, acts not as an independent, moral person. He is merely a trained animal seeking to please an unseen master.³

A great real-world example of this is described over at Parenting Beyond Belief:

“If not for the seventh commandment,” I once heard a Veneerist proclaim in a debate, “there would be NOTHING to keep me from walking out the door to cheat on my wife!” Nothing? Not love? I wondered. Or commitment? Or simple human decency? If you say so.⁴

While I’d agree that not cheating on your wife is the moral way to act, I think that the reasons behind one’s actions are just as important (if not more so) than the actions themselves. While it’s certainly possible to have immoral Atheists, it’s just as possible to have immoral Theists. I think that a morality based on a true respect for those around us is far better than one based on the threat of hell and the promise of heaven.

True morality is what you do when no one (even God) is watching. Or in other words - being good, for goodness sake⁵

1. While I generally like to keep my definitions as broad as possible, let’s exclude from our definition of religion (for the moment) weird cults that think eating the hearts of live babies (or some similar variation) is a moral thing to do. [↩]
2. Atheist’s Wager, Atheist Morality [↩]
3. Midwestern Gentleman, Letting Go of God [↩]
4. Parenting Beyond Belief - The Relaxed Parent Film Festival [↩]
5. Barker, Dan (n.d.) For Goodness Sake [↩]

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