I still don’t get the moral logic of the redemption

I was going to respond to the comments in my last post in the comments section, but since it will be long, it makes sense to answer them in a fresh post.  You can look at those comments first.

None of the commenters explain why the choice of Adam and Eve is inherited.  Why couldn’t God let each individual choose?  Maybe Abel wouldn’t have screwed up, why is he damned for what dad did?  Couldn’t God offer the tree to him as well?  God apparently changed human nature because of the act of these two.  The closest to an answer to this is that the act somehow cracked the mold of humanity or a spiritual law caused it to happen.  Still, it is necessary that God created that spiritual law or created the world such that a choice of two people would rend the mold.  God could have just condemned Adam and Eve and given their children another chance.

Joanna Mallory speaks entirely in terms of an individual wronging God in the present tense (if I choose to be boss of my life, etc.).  I can understand that.  But there is no explanation of why Adam wronging God should affect me.  How is a God that creates all of the suffering in the world because of one act at all just or merciful?

All commenters made some equation between original sin and free will.  Of course, Adam and Eve had free will before their sin as well, or they couldn’t have chosen as they did.  So their act didn’t create free will.  You can use orginal sin just as a metaphor for the fact that humans are free and we often choose to hurt people.  I don’t see that as at all useful.  We already know that, and it is an unsatisfying “just so” story for its origin.  The part about things being perfect prior to the sin is the part that is hard to believe.  All explanations for human origins, scientific or mythic, explain the fact that we make bad choices.  If original sin is just a metaphor for the fact that we are selfish, then tying it to a specific act is pointless.  It makes it worse, because now it is something that could be different, but God imposed it on us because he was pissed at Eve.

I know that the fruit in Genesis 3 is not specified as an apple, nor is the tempter actually called a snake.  But it doesn’t matter what the act is, whether it is eating bad fruit or strange sex acts involving serpents.  Why change the world because of it?

And none of the commenters explain the necessity of sending Jesus.  First, I don’t see how that it really changed anything.  When we are “saved” by Jesus, we are just as selfish and sinful.  Nothing changed in human nature with the coming of Jesus, and believers are no less selfish than others.  If sending God was supposed to save us from original sin, why all of this talk about us still being sinful?  If believing in Jesus made us less sinful you might have a case, but clearly Christians are just as prone to sin as anyone else.

But more importantly, there was really no attempt to explain why killing his son is the way to get rid of original sin.  There is talk about having someone perfect to take on the sins.  How does Jesus dying help at all?

Laurie says that if she wanted to pay for my sin, she would have to be perfect first.  I don’t understand.  In what way could she possibly pay for my sin, perfect or not?  If I hurt someone, only I can pay for my sin, and forgiveness can only come from the person I wronged.  How could any third party pay for it?  She can offer to die for what I did wrong, but it would be a wasted gesture.

If I wrong someone, then I can be redeemed by that person forgiving me.  It must be a free choice between him and me.  If my grandpa wronged someone, it doesn’t make any sense for that person to forgive me.  They have to forgive my grandpa.  And whether it is me or my grandparents, it doesn’t make any sense for that person to say they will forgive me, but only if I kill his son.

If someone is a killer and is condemned to die, would justice be served if someone came in and said I will die in his place?  That’s what Jesus did, he offered to die in our place, even though we are the criminals.  This is an innocent person, being killed for someone else’s crimes.  How does that make sense?  How does that fix the crime?  Would the victims of the crime somehow feel better by having an innocent person killed?

If the victim of our crime is God himself, then what strange terms are these for his forgiveness?  Does it matter if the person making the offer is perfect or not?  And if God demands this, why?  God could forgive the criminal directly, or he could demand an act of kindness towards those he wronged.  Why would God say that I will forgive you, but only if this person is killed instead?

Steve Grove talks a lot about holiness and grace, but those aren’t addressing my question.  When he does address my question, this is the core of his answer: “So, the death of the perfect man is what broke the curse of sin – death.”  There is no explanation for why this would break that curse.  God could have chosen any means to break the curse.  Why a scapegoat?  It lacks any moral logic.  Presumably it is God who sets the criteria for how to break his curse.  The curse was originally put on us for a disobedient or selfish choice.  Wouldn’t it make more sense then to let humanity prove we can make the right choice?

It just seems like God making strange arbitrary rules.  His rule is that if Adam and Eve make the wrong choice, everyone pays for it.  This is a rule created by God, not imposed on him.  He then sat down and tried to figure out how to fix this mess, and decided that he would send his son, his son would collect the sins, and then by killing him, the sins are gone.  That’s the way we can fix our mistake, and he’s sticking with it.  He briefly thought about the option of sending his son as a downtrodden man and seeing if humans would lend a hand, but that would be too obvious.  The best people can say is this is the way God said would redemption would happen, so that’s it.  There is simply an appeal to authority, but no attempt is made to explain the moral logic.

Can someone explain the redemption?

I honestly don’t understand the central idea of Christianity, and if there is anyone out there who can explain it to me, I would appreciate it.  I am talking about the incarnation and redemption.  About Jesus dying for our sins.  Even when I was a believer, I mostly just believed in God and didn’t worry too much about specific doctrines.  When I did believe, I was OK with just this general idea that Jesus died for us, but I didn’t think too much about the logic of it.  I assume at least some believers have thought about the details and it makes sense to them.  Can you explain it to me?

My basic understanding is that Jesus death was necessary to save us from original sin.  Original sin is a problem in the first place, of course.  Why should all of humanity be condemned forever due to the choice of two people?  I usually thought of original sin as more of a metaphor for our imperfect selfish nature, and in that way it’s less of a problem.  But ultimately, it is God damning us.  It is something he imposed.  Presumably, he could lift his own curse at any time for any reason.  What he goes with, in order to escape the death of original sin, is that we murder his son.

I don’t get it.  Why couldn’t he just remove his own curse without the theatrics?  Or if we have to prove we are worthy, how about sending his son and if we treat him nice, then save us?  I still have the problem of cursing and damning being inherited–all of Adam and Eve’s descendants are damned because of their choice, and all of us today are saved by the choices of people 2000 years ago.  If Jesus hadn’t been killed and we had been nice to him, would salvation be impossible?  His crucifixion seems to be prophesied and preordained, so God knew it would happen anyway.  Is there a reason to go through with it?  If he just wanted us to believe in Jesus, why couldn’t we just believe in a preacher and healer?

Why is it that eating an apple gets us damned but murdering God saves us?  What’s wrong with these priorities?  I know eating the apple was disobeying God, but it still seems odd.

How is it that Jesus death saves us?  God could choose whatever he wanted to save us.  Why is his suffering significant?  Of course, we have the problem that people like Pilate and Judas are condemned for doing what was necessary for everyone’s salvation.  Did God need to suffer to have the sympathy necessary to forgive?  An all knowing God must already know about suffering.  It’s not like he learned something from his time on earth.

The salvation story does make sense to me if you understand a common view at the time, the idea of the scapegoat.  A scapegoat originally wasn’t just a figure of speech.  The Hebrews would symbollically put the sins of the people on the goat and send it out into the wilderness, thus symbollically removing the sins from the people.  The similarities to Jesus are obvious.  But of course, a goat cannot actually take sins with it.  At best it is a symbol.  How does Jesus actually remove our sins by his death?  Why should what happened 2000 years ago have any affect on my sins?  Why couldn’t God remove those sins without all of the bloodshed?  It seems to me that the idea of the redemption made sense with a superstitious or simple view of God, but it is nonsense with a view of an all powerful God.

It seems that the redemption is one of those things that makes sense to a lot of people simply because they grew up with it and heard it repeated over and over, but is absurd when you look at it from outside.  If I understood it, that wouldn’t make me believe it.  But it would be nice to at least understand what it is that I don’t believe.

Smuggling in ethics

I have been writing about ethics without God.  I should say that the problem of ethics was the last thing that kept my belief in God.  I was convinced by the argument from C S Lewis about morality.  It was apparent all humans had a very deep sense of morality.  This was universal, not cultural.  It seemed that moral sense was tapping into something outside of us and must have been given by God.  Now I’m not sure why I didn’t consider an evolutionary explanation for that sense, but I didn’t.  We understand quite a bit about how a moral sense can evolve now.  Also, it seemed that without God, ethics were relative and had no solid basis.

In my earlier posts I showed some of the problems with my former view.  God doesn’t really solve the problem of what compels us to be moral.  An enlightened self interest is better than God, and ultimately, God still requires self interest to compel compliance.

When I still believed, I knew that non believers can be ethical, but I thought it was likely that those ethics were smuggled in.  We grow up being taught what is right and wrong.  Those ethics originally had a basis in religion.  Later, we reject the religion, but still accept the ethics we were taught, even though the basis for them is gone.  Eventually, if everyone did that, the ethics would crumble because there is no longer a foundation for them.

I thought that because I had a hard time figuring out how ethics could not degenerate into complete relativity, and I knew that such subjective ethics were dangerous and couldn’t hold up.  Even after I rejected God completely, I still wasn’t quite sure how to ground ethics, but I had at least some idea.

An important insight was realizing that religion smuggles in secular ethics as often or more often than the other way around.  For most of our behavior, we give reasons why something is right or wrong.  When asked why lying is wrong, even believers don’t say it’s just because the Bible says so.  They would say, what if everyone lied, or explain how it hurts people, things like that.  They use purely secular, non religious reasoning.  More impotantly, some religious views have changed, and they have changed not because of revelation or anything related to God, but because of reason.

Slavery is a good example.  The obvious reading of the Bible is that it condones slavery.  It has various rules about how to treat slaves, which certainly implies an endorsement of slavery.  There were no church teaching against slavery for 1500 years.  It was during the enlightenment, when the use of reason lead to concepts of universal rights, that slavery was condemned.  Anti slavery views were often taken up very strongly by the religious, and they felt that it was God’s will and they  might find some Biblical passage to justify it after the fact, but in reality, their newfound belief was smuggled in from secular reasoning.

If we can use reason to justify most of the traditional teachings in the Bible, and if many religious teachings have changed due to reason, what is the need for religion in ethics?  The only thing left purely to religion are rather silly things like whether we should eat pork, and some strictures on purely personal behavior (such as masturbation, etc.).  Strongly secular societies, such as Europe, have not seen a decrease in morality, at least not public morality.  They do better than the U.S. in most measures.  The only thing affected by the loss of religion is private morality and religious observance.

This doesn’t completely get rid of the problem of relativity in ethics.  We are still left with a situation where ethical views change over time.  But it seems that morality has mostly gotten better.  The religious often think we are in moral decay, but I don’t see going back to a time with slavery, racism, oppression, child labor, and women as chattel can be seen as an improvement.  We can take the lesson of science when it comes to ethics.  Science doesn’t know the truth.  It just gets better and better at approaching the truth.  Science has been called knowledge without certainty.  Ethics can be like that as well.  We don’t know for sure what is right or wrong.  We can just approach it.  Just as our science gets better over time, so our ethics gets better over time as we better understand what does and does not lead to human happiness.  If you want absolute unchanging certainty, I guess you need God.  You don’t have to think quite as much that way either.  I prefer the other way.

Can mountain lions get a divorce?

I would like to add to my discussion on how ethics derives from human  nature by using a simple thought experiment.  We can ask how ethics would change if human nature was different, or how ethics would differ for another species or for aliens.  Much of our ethical code deals with how we interact in a society and the structure of the family.  We are a gregarious species with a long childhood.  But let’s say we were a solitary creature, like a mountain lion, that briefly mates and then separates.  How would mountain lion ethics be different?  There would probably be a lot of ethical rules about staying in your own territory and leaving others alone, and there wouldn’t be a lot on obligations to a mate.

We are a species that takes decades to raise our young, and many moral pronouncements follow from that.  We need a long term stable male-female bond to raise children.  If it only took one year to raise children, would there be such strong rules about marriage and divorce and fidelity?  If we laid eggs and left them to their own devices, certainly familial obligations would be drastically different.  Some species are naturally polygamous.  If we were a species like wolves with an alpha male that mates and others that don’t, would our rules about marriage be the same?  If we were a hive society like  ants and bees, wouldn’t our ethics be drastically different?  Perhaps having private property would be seen as sinful.  Sacrifice for the good of the hive would be seen as the highest good.

While many rules will apply to all humans, there could also be differences between societies that could affect what is right and wrong.  Some ethical rules might be true across societies, but some will be relative to the society.

So ethics aren’t necessarily subjective.  They can be derived from a knowledge of human nature.  But they aren’t absolute either.  If you claim that ethics comes from God, what does that mean?  Could God arbitrarily demand the same sexual mores of species that raise children long term, or lay eggs, or have a single queen or have a dominant male?  How could such a one size fits all rule be seen as good in each of these societies?  Clearly, if God makes the rules, he must take the nature of his creatures into account, and what is good cannot be the same for all possible species on all planets.  So why do we need God to determine what is right?  Why can’t we get rid of the middle man, look at human nature, and figure out what is right and wrong from that?  That’s the way God does it.

Can we be moral without God?

Many believers claim that you cannot have morality without God.  I actually agree that there is no ultimate grounding of ethics without God, but where I differ is in the belief that God helps at all.

I will start with a simple example, the well-known tragedy of the commons.  Fisheries have an unfortunate tendency to over fish.  It is in the interest of each fisherman to  maximize his yield, so they harvest as much as they can.  Since everyone does this, the fish decline and soon there are no more fish.  It is in the long term interest of the fishermen to limit their yeild so that the fish can last.  But that is only useful if everyone else also limits their catch.  So we can say that a rational rule is for each fisherman to take only a limited harvest.  But the problem is, why should an individual fisherman comply?  If everyone else is limiting their yeild, then he can take more, get rich, and still have fish left over because of the kindness of the others.  If everyone thinks this, we are back where we started.  That often happens, which is why fish are being depleted.

The point is that you can have an ethical principle that makes sense to follow if everyone follows it.  But looking just at your self interest, there is no reason for an individual to follow it.  There is no reason not to cheat.  If the rules are enforced by a government and a punishment will follow, then there is a good reason to comply.  In this case, the reason to comply is still self interest–the desire not to be punished.

This also applies to more general moral principles.  Let’s say we use Utilitarianism, doing the most good for the most people.  Let’s say we are able to accurately determine which action will do that.  Still, the question for an individual is “why shouldn’t I do what is good for me, even if it does produce less good for others?”  The same is true for any other moral principle, such as the golden rule.  A person can still ask what binds them to this rule?  Why not just pursue your own self interest?

I would say that one reason to follow the golden rule is because it is in our best interest.  If we follow it, others will treat us that way in turn, and we will be happier.  Many moral behaviors follow from human nature.  In the end, most people are happier if we give to others rather than take, if we are honest rather than lie, etc. We are social creatures, we need love, we need the good will of our fellows to succeed.  It’s part of who we are and how others respond to us.  So it is in our own self interest to behave morally.

We still have the problem of cheaters.  Regardless of what I said above, at least some people can be happy by lying and taking advantage of others.  Let everyone else follow the golden rule, and you get all of the benefits.  If a person takes advantage of other people’s good nature, they can do quite well for themselves, in the same way that a cheating fisherman can take advantage of the good will of other fisherman.  Morality appears to be subjective and there is no ultimate answer to why we should behave morally.  If we say that we should behave morally to maximize our happiness, yet others are able to be happy without behaving that way, how can we say they are wrong?

Here is where God seems to be able to help.  In response to the question “why should I personally follow this particular rule, which is good for the group but not necessarily for me”, the theist can say that the reason to behave morally is because of God.

At first this seems to solve the problem because it has taken the source of ethics outside of ourselves.  We now have an objective basis for morality, no longer dependent on human whims.  But it really hasn’t solved the problem.  A person can still ask “why should I care what God says.  I will be happier if I behave different than what he says”.  To this, most theists can respond that if you do not follow the rules, you will not go to heaven, or will go to hell (although this is far from universal among religions).  So in other words, it is just like the fisherman being punished.  The reason to comply is still self interest.  Morality is not based on something outside of myself, but because it is in my own self interest, in the long run, to behave this way.  I don’t want to go to hell, so I should follow the rules.  All that religion does is makes the punishment more guaranteed and more severe, and the long run now is much longer.

Without God, we can say that we should behave morally because, when we consider human nature and society, it is in our own best interests to behave that way.  We will be happier in the long run.  If we believe in God, still the ultimate reason to behave morally is because it is in our self interest in the long run (and often that it is part of our nature).  In some ways it is worse.  Many Christian religions say salvation doesn’t depend on works, on behavior, but only on faith.  Even Hitler could have been saved, if he believed before his death.

We cannot have completely certain ethics without God.  But we can be mostly certain.  Science has been described as knowledge without certainty.  Some people dislike science because of that.  Science doesn’t give absolute answers, it just gives approximations of the truth, and some people are very uncomfortable with uncertainty.  The same is true with ethics.  We have no ultimate policeman, but we can get close to truth, and we can police ourselves.  This is not subjective ethics, it is just not absolute ethics.  Some people are also uncomfortable with this.

I still have many loose ends to tie up on this topic, but this is already too long for one post, so I will write more later.

Does God grade on a curve?

I mentioned the miserable doctrine of hell in passing in my last post.  Its vile nature has been pointed out by many before, but there was one aspect I don’t know if I’ve ever seen addressed.

The reason hell is such a repulsive doctrine is because it is eternal.  Why would any God punish people for all time?  Even on earth with our limited resources we attempt to rehabilitate criminals and like to believe anyone can change.  Not God.  Once damned, you will suffer forever with no possibility of parole.  And yet they claim this God is just and merciful.  If there is a hell, then God is neither just nor merciful.  In fact, if I discovered that there really was a God, and he really did make hell and damn people for eternity in it, I could not worship him, or even respect him.  The only possible reason to listen would be fear.

People try to minimize how damnable this doctrine is, claiming that it is our choice, etc., but none of them are able to excuse it.  There is one other aspect that I think about naturally, since I am a teacher.  Teachers must asign grades.  We have to put people in one category or another.  It’s the least pleasant part of the job.  The most difficult thing to decide is always where to draw the line.  Ultimately, you must say that this student gets an A and a student just a little bit lower gets a B, and likewise for every grade.  In a large class, the difference between the highest B and the lowest A might be very small.  The low A might be quite far away from the high A.  Yet we have to draw the line somewhere, and put each student into one category or another.

How does God do it?  There are only two grades with him, pass or fail.  But for absolutely any criteria, there will be a continuum, especially with billions of people.  How much faith did they have?  It ranges imperceptibly from complete faith to slightly weaker to faltering to no faith.  How kind were they to their fellow man?  Same thing.  Did they choose Jesus?  There are degrees of that.  Ultimately, God must make a decision.  At least with grades, the difference between a B and a C in one class isn’t the end of the world.  Even failing them doesn’t mean they don’t have a chance for happiness in other areas.  But God must separate two people that differ only a little bit in faith.  One is damned forever, one saved.  The person who was just barely saved might barely belong in the same place as those with strongest faith, but both are saved.

It does no good to say that God is omniscient.  With complete knowledge, he will just be able to see how truly continuous and contingent all traits in humans are.  There simply are no important traits that people fit in an either/or manner.  There has to be a cutoff where just one more prayer, one less lie, a smidgeon more faith, would have saved someone.  Forever.

Hell is uncomfortable enough to most people today that it is deemphasized, except in the far right Christians.  In the past, it was thought only a few were saved.  Now many believers would say only the truly wicked are damned (and some reject it entirely).  But it doesn’t matter.  There is still someone just a little less or a little more wicked, and their fate is completely different.

I think the Catholics recently did away with the idea of purgatory (or maybe it was just limbo).  I’m not sure if I understood it completely, but it at least seemed a little more humane.  I saw purgatory as a half way house, a place where those on the border could go and rehabilitate themselves, get a few prayers (or Papal indulgences, I guess) and be on their way.

Assigning a continuum of students into a few arbitrary grades is inherently unjust, but it’s the best system we have.  I hate failing students, but every now and then, I have to.  At least I know they will not be damned forever.  The doctrine of hell is inherently unjust, and no excuses can change that.

Life, the universe, and everything; part 3: the answer

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OK, with a title like that you know I had to do this, right?  With deep regards to the late brilliant Douglas Adams.

Life, the universe, and everything; part 2: death

Note: This is the second of two parts The first part is here.

This brings me to death. The reason religion gives people comfort is because it gives them meaning and because it takes away the sting of death. Believers often cannot imagine how a person could face life without the hope of eternal life. In many ways, I do not see death as a problem at all, but in other ways, I do wish for the comfort of religion.

Although I do not believe the Bible is inspired by God, that doesn’t mean it doesn’t have good literature or philosophy in it. My favorite book is Ecclesiastes, which happens to be one of the least religious of the books in the Bible. Ecclesiastes reminds us that death is the great leveler. All of our vanities have the same fate. The wise man and the fool, the rich and the poor, the virtuous and the non virtuous, none avoid that fate. Most of our attempts to find a greater purpose is just vanity. Being wise or being good doesn’t save us from death nor does it save us from the injustice or the arbitrary universe. The fool or the thief may prosper. God is distant in Ecclesiastes and doesn’t reward the just. Instead, the author concludes, similar to what I did above, that we must find meaning in friends and loves and simple pleasures.

Ecclesiastes does not say this, but even that is not fair. Some of us are blessed with more love and pleasures than others, and this is often an arbitrary result of our genes or our circumstances. If we find meaning in love and sharing, then what of the person who does not have love or anyone to share with, even though they are virtuous? What if the things you have are taken from you for no reason, as happened to Job?

Death as the great leveler shows us that we should live for this life and not for another. For me, living this one life is a better life than living a life that pretends we can cheat death. This is the only life we have. Do the best with it. What a waste it is to live this whole life just as a preamble to another life. If the doctrine of eternal life makes someone live a miserable life now in hopes of a later payoff, it has ruined a life.

But perhaps that is easy for me to say, and easier to say now than in a more harsh past. For many people, this life is full of pain and suffering. They are poor, hungry, oppressed or alone. Even if they try to make the best of this one life, they cannot do much. For those to whom this life is miserable not by choice, I cannot begrudge them the hope that there is something else where they can find the meaning that was deprived them in this life.

For me, death doesn’t make this life mean less. It is not something I need fear. At least I do not believe in that spiteful doctrine of hell which has brought so much anxiety to the believer. Death is just the end of existence, an eternal sleep. But even if this life is well lived and death is not unpleasant, I still admit I would vote for eternal life, or at least a much longer life, if given the chance. The reason I fear death is because it is the eternal separator.

The thought of the end of my ego is scary, even though I wouldn’t be around to actually experience it. I want to be, partly for myself, but mostly because of others from whom death separates me. There are people I love who would survive me, and I would no longer be in their life. I would just be a memory, and soon it is as if I never lived. In the long term, we leave no trace on this earth, and what little trace we start with starts to disappear quickly.

If you don’t believe in eternal life, you can still say that we live on in others. If you have a good life, you will influence others, and you will exist inside of them, and your influence goes on. That gives some comfort, although it logically shouldn’t, since when we are dead we wouldn’t know if we live on or not. If we were forgotten in two days, it would be the same to our non existent selves. But even if we get comfort in living on in others, that slowly fades. The problem with death is the separation from our loved ones, not being a part of them anymore.

The problem is more serious for the living. If someone you love dies, they have ceased to exist. It is an eternal and irreversible separation. It would be much more comforting to believe that you will see them again, that this is only temporary. You can have them live on in your memories and by what you do, but we all know that is not the same thing. You want to be able to share an experience. You want to hold them and see a new reaction, not remember an old reaction. And even if we want to hold on, the person fades. We have to continue with our lives, day to day activities. We find new people to love. Gradually, it becomes more and more like the person never lived. Even the memory becomes faded. We can’t completely stop the life of the living to honor the dead. We call that depression. Such a depression does have a certain honor to it, at least.

It is harder if the life that was lost was incomplete or if the person died too soon: If you never had the chance to share the things that you wanted to, or if there were things you want to say, mistakes you wanted to correct, but didn’t have the chance. Who wouldn’t want a chance to reunite, to make right what was wrong or to experience what you never had the chance to experience?

Since we don’t get that chance, it means we need to treat those we love better. Again, knowing our mortality means there are no second chances. Hopefully we always let people know what they mean to us and we don’t make barriers where there should be none. Only having one life should make us treat those around us better. But again, even if we know this and try, not everyone has the chance. The just are not always rewarded and the world still is arbitrary and unfair and even if we want, we cannot always make the best of what we have with others.

With both meaning and death, I don’t claim to have a complete answer as an atheist. I can see that the religious also only pretend to have the answers. In fact, their views often make our current life worse or have less meaning. It’s not like I could choose to believe differently even if I thought religion would be more comforting, but with most things, I would not find comfort in religion.

I would find the comfort of religion helpful not because death itself if to be feared, but because it is an eternal separation from those things that mean the most. The thought that those that matter are always there, they have not ceased to exist, and you will see them again, share things, and correct any mistakes is something I would love to believe. I cannot. We must try to do the best we can with the one chance we have, and honor those who made our stay here better. We cannot get back what we lost, and the meanings we we can make in life are less because of it.

I miss you, Rashel.

Life, the universe, and everything; Part 1: meaning

Note: this became a very long essay, so I will post it in two parts

Some parts of the world care about us and some parts don’t. In our actions with others, we have a world that has purpose and meaning and love. There is a reason for our actions and the actions of others. This world responds to our actions, it can be influenced, and at least some elements within it care about us. But much of the rest of the world seems to be arbitrary and capricious and indifferent to humans. A tsunami kills millions, disease strikes the innocent, nature is full of powerful and impersonal forces. Much of religion arises out of the conflict between these two worlds.

The religious impulse is an attempt to impose the purposeful world of human affairs on the impersonal forces of nature. Rather than accept that the world doesn’t care about us, we believe that there is something with an intelligence behind it, someone who cares, who does things for a reason, who can be influenced. The forces of nature must have a purpose, with us in mind, in the same way that society does. Sometimes we also go in the other direction, and see the impersonal world in human affairs. The belief in fate is a belief that we cannot control our lives and arbitrary forces are in charge of human affairs.

I don’t understand how religion gives purpose to life. Believers often can’t even conceive of a meaningful life for the atheist. But I’m not sure what purpose religion gives them. They can say that their purpose is to praise God or spread the word, but that is no different from any other cause that feels greater than ones self, whether it is to feed the poor, save the whale, or rock and roll. I think it isn’t that religion gives a definable purpose, rather it’s just the feeling that there is some purpose out there, no matter how inscrutable. The suffering and apparent randomness of life and the universe has some ultimate meaning that is beyond our understanding, because there is a God behind it all.

I don’t see how that gives meaning. We don’t find out the reason for anything until we die. How can we say that gives life a purpose? You live your whole life knowing there must be some purpose but you don’t have a clue what it is until life is over, so it doesn’t help much during life. I would much rather have a purpose while I’m alive.

Sometimes the implication is that our purpose is to have eternal life, but that doesn’t make sense either. If life doesn’t have any purpose in itself, what good is having an infinite amount of it? The desire for eternal life proves that life must have some meaning just in itself. Only if life is desirable on a day to day basis can anyone want to have an eternity of it. To say that the only reason we live our lives is so we can have more of it is like a miser who wants to hoard all of his money just to have more money, not for what he can do with the money.

So ultimately, everyone knows that life can have value and meaning without eternal life, and people don’t live their lives as if it has no purpose until it is over. I think the main comfort from religion, as far as purpose goes, is to make the universe seem less arbitrary and impersonal. That can give comfort, but it can also produce anxiety. If fortune is God smiling on you, then misfortune is also something personal–the universe has it in for you. For the atheist, knowing that things happen in the world without a thought for you can be comforting, because you don’t have to do mental gymnastics to determine what the hidden purpose is behind something that clearly has no purpose.

What are these meanings we all find in life? We each have different things that matter and give meaning. For most people, the most meaningful things we have are the meaning we get from other people. We get meaning from love, from giving, from the pleasure of one another’s company and the sharing of experiences. If we care about other causes or other things, it usually means more if there is someone who also cares about those things. Often, a believer finds the afterlife desirable because they will be with their loved ones. Therefore, even in the afterlife, the source of meaning is the same as in this life. But a life lived for these reasons in the present is greater than a life that denies the meaning in the present in exchange for some future pay off.

So if a believer wants to know what meaning there can be for an atheist, she just must ask what makes life valuable enough to want an eternity of it? Ultimately, they get meaning from the same things as us, they just want to give God credit. They also get meaning from their passion for religion, but don’t believe that someone’s passion for art or science can be just as meaningful.

I must admit this meaning isn’t as much of a sure thing as religion, since it does not have God’s money back guarantee.  The universe ultimately doesn’t care for us and even if we try to make the best in this life, we can be given a bad deal.  And we get meaning from love and others, but human affairs can be just as cruel as the universe.  Some people are lonely and can’t share with others.  People hurt us.  I don’t have any answers to that other than that we do our best, and that should give us motivation to be as kind to others as we can be.  God isn’t around to make it better for them.  There is only us.

The Bible is a mirror

I thought I was finished discussing the claims of “amazing science” in the Bible, but I couldn’t resist just a few  more and one more insight about what these say about the Bible.

I’ve been discussing a pamphlet with supposedly amazing science in the Bible.  Here are a few more.  Try to guess the amazing insight in the following:  Job 38:19 “Where is the way where light dwelleth?”  Without being told what is amazing, can you see any amazingly foretold science in that?  Me neither.  However, we are told that because it says “the way” instead of “the place” that means Job knew that light moves, which scientists didn’t know until Einstein.  I’m sure you can see that, right?  Of course, the next sentence in Job deals with the place darkness dwells.

As usual, the writer doesn’t know a thing about the science.  What does Einstein have to do with light moving?  I guess the writer knows Einstein discovered the speed limit of light, and maybe that the speed is constant for all observers.  He didn’t discover it moved.  Newton and Descarte were looking at ight as moving hundreds of years before that, and viewing light as moving is probably the most common folk view of light (we say that light streams into a room, etc.).  Even though it is unremarkable, the quote from Job doesn’t say anything about movement without stretching it.  Plus this takes away from the obviously metaphorical sense of the phrase.  Are all metaphors in the Bible to be read as literal science lessons?

Here is another, from Proverbs “A merry heart doeth good like a medicine”  Does that sound like advanced science to you, or more like common fold wisdom that a good attitude is helpful?  The writer sees it especially significant because laughing can release endorphins which improve health.  And that is a chemical, so it is like a presciption medicine.  The writer is now taking “medicine” from Job literally rather than metaphorically, and using endorphins as a metaphorical medicine.

But here is my favorite:  Leviticus 17:11 “for the life of the flesh is in the blood.”  The pamphlet believes this is the most amazing observation possible.  It spends the next one and a half pages discussing all of the ways that our blood is like the life of the flesh–the immune system, bringing oxygen, etc.   Look, this isn’t too hard.  I’m sure the Neanderthals observed that if you lose blood, you die.  I won’t even bother searching for similar claims, I’m sure any small effort will find sayings about blood being the essence of life in absolutely every civilization that has ever existed.  I don’t see anything in Leviticus about white blood cells, red blood cells, antibodies, or anything that remotely resembles science.

Which brings me to my main point.  If you decide ahead of time that a book is profound, you will find profundity in it.  This writer was able to wax poetic about the brilliance of “the life of the flesh is in the blood” for pages, even though it is the most mundane of observations.  I have seen writers take a single line from the Bible and write an entire essay on it and it’s relevance for today.  They somehow beleive their insight came not from themselves, but from the Bible.  If someone believed that a pulp science fiction story was inspired, they could mine it for amazing insights, using metaphors and outside information freely.  Some of the insights they come up with might be genuinely profound.  That is not because the source is profound, but because the writer put their own thoughts into it.

Most of what people find in the Bible, scientific or profound, is simply because the Bible can act as a mirror of the readers already existing knowledge and insights.