I've just read the following article:When Religion Makes Grief More Difficult.
It says:
Most Americans grew up with a Sunday school image of God as a protector/punisher, and go through their lives without ever questioning that image. For some, a profound loss or trauma can inspire deeper exploration, but for those don’t – or won’t — question their faith, trying to make that image fit with actual human experience is like trying to put a square peg into a round hole.The square peg is a belief in divine reward and punishment. The round hole is the way life actually works. By the time most of us are young adults we have observed that the good are not necessarily rewarded and the bad are not necessarily punished. Real human experience proves that it just doesn’t work that way.
People have a propensity to subscribe to extreme positions. Further, others tend to assume if you disagree with their position then you must subscribe to the precise opposite e.g. you disapprove that the bottom 80% of people in the USA only have 11% of all wealth? Then you must be a communist who is in favour that everyone has precisely the same wealth! And of course the same applies to concepts of God and an afterlife. You don't subscribe to the notion that the Universe and our lives are pure happenstance, that we are merely sophisticated biological robots with no free will whose lives have no ultimate purpose? Then you must believe in a personal God as a protector and punisher; that if you are good you will go to Heaven, if you are bad you will go to Hell.Personally my beliefs are more along the lines that reality as a whole is somehow infused with awareness, and indeed a manifestation of awareness. And all things, all events, everything that has been, everything that will be, is infused with ultimate meaning. A meaning that eludes us in our daily day to day existence, but whose existence might be very briefly glimpsed with peak experiences and mystical experiences. But this awareness underlying reality, or all pervading spiritual presence, is not some personal being that watches over us and requires us to worship it.
I don't want to argue about the issue of an appropriate "God" though. The point I'm making is that people should think more about what they believe, and avoid believing something simply because most others in your camp believe it. We need to adopt more nuanced positions.
Just read the following article:
Atheists who bring logic to the Easter story are missing the point
The author, Julian Baggini, is conflating one's degree of education with intelligence. The belief in the resurrection might indeed be preposterous, but so are many things that highly educated people believe e.g. colours, sounds and smells don't actually exist out there in the world, they are pure creations of the mind. Or Parallel Universes exist where everything I could do is played out slightly differently in another Universe, hence there are a squintillion differing versions of me! Or animals are not actually conscious (since they lack language).
Put this on facebook last night after I'd had about 5 or 6 pints.
Been to pub. Interesting talking to students in there. The two guys I was talking to gave the impression they were very much convinced that the world as revealed by science is the correct one. They were talking about the "enlightenment" etc, and seemed to be hostile towards any type of religion or God. And the strong impression I got was that they thought that their position was sensible, and indeed, obvious. That they were smart, intelligent and educated.
I think they've been sucked into thinking about the world in certain ways, arguably in a comparable manner to what religious people have been. Namely they've passively soaked up the prevailing "wisdom".
I didn't say that! I just suggested that perhaps there might be some creator of some description even if not corresponding to any organised religion.
Gave me a bit of a the cold shoulder after that. But then I was talking to them later about the pubs near here, and what Grimsby, Lincoln, and other places are like etc, and got on with them quite well. Moral of all this is don't start talking about intellectual stuff to strangers!
I read the following article:
The Reasonableness of Religious Belief
I emphatically agree with just about everything she says! Especially interesting is when she says:
I myself believe that the most epic spiritual battle of our time is . . . with the deadening spirit of secular materialism, which cloaks itself in the guise of reason and enlightenment, and ultimately consumes all its children into a black pit of nothingness.
She sounds like me after a few drinks! I agree with her though, and I also agree that it is not hyperbolic.
[Y]oung children, regardless of their cultural background, are inclined to believe that they have an immortal soul – that their essence or personhood existed somewhere prior to their birth, and will always continue to exist.
Will Religion ever Disappear
Yes, I remember how utterly shocked I was when at a very young age I asked my father what happens when we die, and he said we cease to exist.
Interestingly atheists frequently claim we are born atheists and we are indoctrinated into believing otherwise. But it seems that we are born with the innate supposition that there's an ultimate purpose to our lives, the Universe and all things. Such an innate supposition seems very far removed from the family of beliefs associated with modern western atheism.
