Hobbs

In the thread on <a href="http://iidb.org/ubb/ultimatebb.php?ubb=get_topic&f=45&t=001274&p=2" target="_blank">Why didn't Jesus fly</a>, I asked woodchuck a brief question about why I should be denied the evidence Thomas is supposed to have been given, and he responded with a long and heartfelt post which I think deserves a response in a separate thread. Thus, the following:

Thanks for your obviously heartfelt and sincere answer; I do appreciate it. And, no, it's not anything new to me, and that's not just because I have heard it before. I believed it before, I lived it before. 20 years ago, I sounded just like this.

Actually, in a way, I do agree with you. With the experience anyway, but no longer with your (and my previous) understanding of it. Perhaps what you are calling "god" and your experiences of god are actually your own maturing and growing, your own increasing capacity for experiencing emotional/psychological depth. I can imagine your probable immediate reaction, but please follow me on this, I'll explain further below.

Good advice, and I do my best to follow it. I hope I can be correct in assuming you do your best to follow it, too. (You never know where it may lead ...)

No, it wouldn't necessarily have to be a physical visitation, though that would certainly be effective. But I found problems with the experiences you speak of. Or, rather, with your understanding of those experiences.

I used to believe the latter of myself, but I found another option, one that has made more sense to me than either of those options. I can't deny the experiences I had (and still have). But I have a different understanding of them than I used to. Perhaps this "new life" in you that is changing you is your life, "new" in the sense that it is constantly growing and changing and renewing itself, sometimes in sudden great and unexpected spurts, most often at a slower more measured pace often hardly noticeable day by day but accumulating over the months and years to amazing new capacities.

I agree fully. It is only one of many methods we have tried to learn more about ourselves and our universe. But it is by far the most effective and reliable. As the saying goes, "it is said that faith moves mountains, but experience shows that bulldozers are more effective."

Put a hundred scientists to work on a problem, and yes they may all start out with different hypotheses and discover, interpret, and reinterpret facts in different ways along the way, but they eventually come to a consensus on an answer, and the answer will be one we can effectively use. Sure, the weekly New York Times Science section always reports new discoveries and disputes and challenges and the like, but that is because scientists work at the edge of their knowledge. They don't keep going over the things they have already settled. Yes, science changes, but it changes by improving.

But put a hundred theologians to work on a question by using faith, and though they may all start out from the same religious perspective, you will end up with at least a hundred denominations, factions, and even new religions (all with their own denominations and factions), and there will be no objective, reliable way to decide between them. With those track records to compare, I'll go with science's evidence without certainty over religion's certainty without evidence.

I'll even take science over religion in dealing with moral questions. Evidence does a better job than intuition of determining which among a list of possible alternative actions is likely to be more effective in promoting human well-being, and even in estimating what constitutes and is encompassed by the very vague category of human flourishing.

What science believes today is not what it believed yesterday because it has more, better, and better understood evidence than it did yesterday. Science doesn't give us perfect or perfectly reliable knowledge, but it's more reliable than its competitors. It may not be what we ideally would want, but, as far as I can tell, it's the best we've actually got.

Yes, I've experienced all the subjective elements you list here, so, yes, it makes sense to me. And your understanding of those experiences is precisely how I used to understand them, so that makes sense to me, too. But I no longer find it to be an adequate explanation. That explanation, as far as I can now tell, no longer can encompass my experiences.

Now, this is where religious believers seem constantly to misunderstand my perspective. I most certainly do not "put the biggest part of being human [what you are labelling as 'spiritual'] on the bottom shelf or even reject it completely." Call it 'spiritual', call it 'consciousness', call it 'subjectivity', it is something all humans [well, with the exception of people with e.g. severe brain damage or abnormalities] are capable of, and increasingly so as they grow and mature. I don't say "all is physical" in the sense of denying the spiritual/conscious/subjective/whatever, and, in spite of what so many religious believers tend to think, I don't think anyone really says that. How could they? Just by thinking the thought one proves that thought exists; by making the effort to expound upon it one proves that one values thought. What I do say is that all this is the product of the physical. It is part of what the physical is capable of.

Given that this is what I thought of myself and my experiences as compared to those "without Christ" when I was a Christian, I know the perspective you are coming from, so I realize that this is not at all meant to be condescending or insulting. Given that, having once believed that and now realizing that people of all sorts of religious beliefs and of no religious beliefs at all (such as me now) are capable of living lives that are as "abundant" to them as mine was and is to me, your statement above does come across as condescending and insulting.

That thought held me in theism for quite a while after I found I had to reject the born-again evangelical Christianity I so fervently believed, until I realized that the evidence points to the conclusion that there's a lot more to this "big evolving glob of molecules" than I had previously realized. What I though of as the "more to it than that" was already in the "that".

Now, what brought me to that conclusion? I won't go into the whole long story (this is already ridiculously long for an internet post), but at one point the problem of so many so different interpretations, all sincerely and certainly believed, of God and his will and his word hit me as a real problem.

It hit me after a prayer and planning meeting for a group I was involved in in which I was certain that God was leading the group to do A, but a friend came to the meeting just as convinced that God was leading us to do B, but then after much prayer and discussion and deliberation and more prayer we concluded that God wanted us to do C. It struck me later that we really didn't have any way to reliably test what God was really saying, or if indeed he was saying anything at all. All three options were, we all believed, consistent with the Bible as we understood it, but we couldn't do all three at the same time, so God wouldn't have actually been leading us in three different ways. Then it hit me that people of other religions were just as sure as I was that their interpretations and understandings of God and his will and word were true and accurate, yet I had always thought that they were mistaken and had been deceived. There was no objective, reliable way to determine who was right. When I asked others how to tell what God was trying to say in answer to a prayer, or even whether he was saying anything at all, all they could say was "pray about it and God will answer you."

In other words, rely on subjective feelings that I had, which, I realized, I had no real way of distinguishing between my own subjectivity and the "spirit of God" I had been certain was in me. I've seen people's lives changed by a variety of religious beliefs and by no religious beliefs at all. It is obvious that a belief does not have to be true to change a person, for a person to use it to live an "abundant" life. It need only be believed. But that meant that I could not use my own testimony, my own understanding of my experiences, to verify the accuracy of that very understanding which was coming into question.

If mine were the only form of the only religion that really changed lives, I'd have something to go on. But that clearly wasn't the case. If the author of whatever set of "scriptures" that may actually exist would, in a publicly verifiable manner, state which set of alledged scriptures really were his and which interpretation of those scriptures were accurate, we'd all have something to go on.

But, as it is, it ultimately comes down to, as you put it, a spirit inside us, a spirit which I realized none of us really has a way to reliably distinguish from our own. To say that this spirit wasn't there before and is now, therefore it is something from outside me, is no more valid than to say that because the set of teeth now in my mouth are not the set of teeth I had as a toddler, therefore the teeth are from some outside source. Your own "spirit" is capable of growth and change, of newness, of increasing depth and complexity and "abundance" to degrees you would never have thought possible before.

And this is along the lines of what makes me a bit suspicious of claims that there is a separate spirit of God in God's believers. It seems that, in matters of theology, morality, politics, whatever, God always invariably agrees with his followers. Even when his followers disagree with each other on so much and with such vehemence. It makes a lot of sense to me to conclude that religious believers must take their own notions of what an ideal human should be and call it 'God'. Since they can't possibly all be right, I think that even you would have to agree that most believers in various gods and various versions thereof are "worshipping" their own subjective ideals rather than a real external god. It's not far from there to the conclusion that they all do.

I went through a bit of an intellectual odyssey after my initial realizations to come up with the rest of all that, and to see such things as that the Bible really does have errors, contradictions, and absurdities, and is much more understandable as a product of many different humans than of an omniscient God, and that, without some sort of objective way to determine, these humans' understanding of the divine were not necessarily any more accurate than mine or anyone else's.

But it still took me a while to give up some form of theism, or at least deism, completely. What still kept me in it was what you said about there being more to it all than the physical. Again, for the sake of brevity (hah!), I won't go into the details, but it eventually hit me that there are such things as real emergent properties. Even on the physical level, water, for example, is in one sense nothing but a bunch of H2O molecules, but it has properties and capabilities that those molecules don't have. So really water isn't just the molecules that comprise it; it is also the interaction of those molecules.

That, I think, is where your commonly stated critique of what could be called "physicalism" falls short: it fails to recognize that physical things can do stuff, that it interacts with itself, and it can do this because it has energy as an essential component of itself, it is energy in another form.

This includes brains, and their neurons and synapses. Psychiatric drugs, merely by altering the chemical composition of brains, alter the minds those brains produce. I've heard people on Prozac say that they are a different person on the drug, and mean that quite literally. Damage to the brain causes damage to the mind. And similar damage to different brains causes similar damage to the minds those brains produce. Are we to think that when a brain is destroyed the mind goes on unaffected? Are we to conclude that the mind is something other than an activity the brain performs?

A mind isn't some "thing", or some sort of separately existing spiritual "non-thing". 'Mind' is not a noun; it is a verb. Mind is an activity of a brain. Minding is something brains do. Minds are as real as baseball games, but they are no more separate from brains than baseball games are from the players, coaches, an umpires who play them. This realization is what led me to conclude that "there's a lot more to this 'big evolving glob of molecules' than I had previously realized." It's all there, at least potentially, already.

I have found that the Christianity you quite eloquently expounded in your post, which I used to accept and believe, can no longer account for, contain, embrace, my experiences and reality and life as I see it. It can consistently account for a wide range of phenomena, but I've found too much that doesn't fit. It can't explain how believers in other religions can have the same experiences of abundance. It can't explain how some believers in itself do not experience this sort of abundance. It doesn't account for how a morally perfect God would allow innocent infants to suffer horribly (without discounting any meaning or point to this life and such occurrences in this life, yet it is supposed to be what provides this life with meaning). I think a naturalistic universe in which brains can evolve to produce minds does a much better job of accounting for all this. Thus, I am no longer a Christian, or a theist.

I know that this, too, is not at all meant to be offensive. But I hope you can understand how, from my perspective, to blame me for hiding comes across as extremely offensive. Quite frankly, given how I have searched as honestly as I know how for truth, and having begun this search with a certain conviction that all truth is God's truth and that as long as I searched prayerfully and carefully my search would bring me closer to God, and given where this search has brought me, if there is a God then he has a hell of a lot to answer for before I would judge him to be worthy of anyone's worship.

Don't take that to mean that I am mad at God or bitter about life. I truly do not believe that there is a god to be mad at, and I truly do enjoy life and desire to continue living and to live well. If it turns out that "this is all there is", it is more than worth the effort. But if it turns out that there really is a god, I'd have to say he's been toying with me in a very offensive manner, and, at least until I got a damn good explanation, the discovery of his existence would likely significantly diminish my happiness and cause me to be quite bitter.

babelfish

Hobbs, I hope woodchuck reads this!

<img src="graemlins/notworthy.gif" border="0" alt="[Not Worthy]" />

K

Ditto. <img src="graemlins/notworthy.gif" border="0" alt="[Not Worthy]" />

Living Dead Chipmunk

Just for clarification, when I chose my name I didn't know there was already a "woodchuck" here. Name change is in the works to avoid confusing myself again.

I != "woodchuck". Just so ya know.

Hobbs

Thanks for the kudos.

But I gotta say, the ratio of "time spent writing" to "discussion induced thereby" is a bit one-sided. So I'm bumping this up to make sure woodchuck has a chance to see it. Or for any other theists who may want to comment on whether this makes sense of how a Christian who is sure he has experienced God can become a former Christian without the benefit of some sort of tragedy or something else to make him "mad at God."

woodchuck

Hey yah Hobbs-
Great post. That was one of the most honest, transparent, and unsarcastic "atheism testimonies" I've ever heard on here.

I am very sorry if I sounded offensive in any part of my post. I did not mean to accuse you of hiding, I only meant to explain that it is possible to be hiding and not know it, and God will allow this (from my perspective). I did not mean to say that this is what you are doing- I merely wanted to point out that it was possible, because even I do this still in my life. I in no way claim to be the perfect example of any aspect of evidence for the proof of God. I know that it is often argued that God should just show himslef to us all, and the fact that he doesn't proves he does not exist. I was just offering a different view.

The only thing about all this is I don't see a whole lot to debate- which is fine. We both made our points and have our own way of looking at life. You obviously have given a ton of thought to all this stuff and I respect your conclusion- or at least, where you are now in your view of existence. This does not mean that I think we have both found "the truth" for oursleves- I do believe in an objective, absolute truth- but all I'm saying is that we both seem to be in honest search of this truth.

We seem to have a lot in common. We both like to know why we believe what we believe.

If you are willing, perhaps you could continue to challenge my worldview. I am not saying this as if i want to battle- I am asking you to ask me the questions you asked yourself as you came to your conclusions about God. Post a question (like your Thomas question) and I will be challenged. It will be good for me, and maybe even for you.

the only thing I would prefer is- judging from my post and your post in response- we are both very capable of writing a lot, so try to keep the questions parted out and not so overwhelming that I would have to spend a week typing my response. This is also why i am not reponding to your entire post, and as I said, I think we both made our perspectives clear.

Anyway- just an invitation. I am plainly asking you if you would be interested in helping me to examine my beliefs and the effects, however they turn out, will bring me closer to the truth.

Thanks again for the reply, and the respect. I hope we can keep on keepin on.
-eef the wood chucker

Hobbs

You didn't sound offensive to me, both because I think I can understand the statements "from the inside" and because they were stated in an inoffensive manner. You sound like a Christian who truly cares about others and genuinely wants to help them (like the majority of Christians and other theists I know) rather than one who looks forward with great relish to the prospect of watching those who disagree with him roasting in hell (unfortunately, I've encountered some of them, too). But I hope I did a good job of explaining how and why some might find such statements offensive (especially to those who have mainly experienced, or been hurt by, the offensive religous types).

I thought that, too, as I was writing my response. It wasn't meant as a debate, more as an explication of a viewpoint on or way of understanding life, the universe, everything.

I agree. And, obviously, I have found "the truth" while you are in error.

We've both found answers we are currently intellectually comfortable with, but obviously intellectual comfort is not on its own a reliable indicator of truth. But I think I can truthfully say that we are both wrong about at least some things (though I may be wrong about that).

That part about being capable of writing a lot is why I hesitate. I don't have as much time to spend here as I'd like (or even as much time to spend here as I do). Also, I could speculate about your specific beliefs (they are certainly at least similar to, but probably vary in at least some ways from, what I believed), but I may ask a question that is beside the point.

If you'd like, though, you can comment on one part of my "extimony" above if you find a part to be an interesting challenge, and I'll try to find time to respond. Or, if I see a post of yours in another thread, I may respond with a challenge there (sort of like the Thomas question that spawned this discussion).

babelfish

Is hiding the same as being "lost?" Because my fundie sister assured me once, when I told her I was quite satisfied with my life and didn't feel very lost, "oh, sometimes people like you are the ones who are the most lost," as she smiled at me sadly and condescendingly.