You are stupid. No, You are stupid.

I was thinking about what people like to call "confirmation bias" and about why it is easy for you to see my confirmation bias, but I, an otherwise rational person, am blind to it myself. It all boils down to the way we think. And that's why the religious and the non-religious can sometimes both appear stupid to the other. This was prompted by someone giving this example:

When someone says they prayed for something (let's say a job to provide for their family), and they don't get a job but they get a surprise sack of groceries on the porch. And they say that God answered their prayer because He took care of them. But then they get kicked out of their house and they say that God answered their prayer because He's blessed them with a trial, which strengthens and humbles them (more blessings) and then they get church welfare. And that's God again, answering their prayer because the Lord provides. What is this called? Is this some sort of logical fallacy?

If your fundamental mindset centers around a belief that a benevolent higher power is personally interested in your happiness, you will interpret the world and all the events of your life in that context. If you are convinced of this deep down, then you are acting with perfect rationality and good sense when you interpret events to fit into this framework.

Conversely, if you are someone who places a high value on evidence and skepticism, i.e. a non-believer, the believer's outlook seems unjustified and you will tend to view his thoughts and actions as irrational, unsupported by evidence, the result of confirmation bias, and stupid. But there, you are trying to fit him into your worldview, and the only slot he fits in is the "stupid stuff" slot.

The believer feels the same way about you. According to his worldview, it is you who are blind, irrational, and your actions shocking and unaccountable. So he is forced to place you in one of the cubbyholes provided by his worldview: you are deceived by Satan, blinded by the world, past feeling, a lost sheep, hardened in sin, etc.

I'm not saying which of these worldviews is "right" and which is "wrong" and, frankly, for the purposes of this discussion it doesn't matter. The point is that the two of you are speaking fundamentally different languages. Each of you is deceived, by the fact that you're both speaking English, into thinking that the other person understands by your words the same meaning you intended those words to convey.

But in reality, your words, which seemed sound and rational when you spoke them, got translated into gobbledygook by the other person's worldview filter, and vice versa. So you're not communicating in any real sense of the word. If you're both patient and kindhearted, you feel mostly pity for the other's delusion. If you're quick to anger, you're mostly annoyed and outraged by the other person's deliberate, intentional intransigence and obstinate refusal to understand what is perfectly clear to you and to any other "rational" person (meaning someone with the same worldview as you).

The key to this dilemma is to try to transcend your worldview and understand not only its limits, but the fact that we all fall into the trap of thinking that our worldview is actually the world. Some escape that trap and some do not. Have pity on those who do not.

Why I Don't Believe

A person posted a testimony on a Facebook group that I follow and the post was liberally sprinkled with the phrase: "we need to believe." I responded as follows:

Why is it necessary for us to believe those things? The world is full of things that we don't have to believe in: this book, that chair, the light coming in the window, the gravity that keeps us from floating away. Those are all things that we can see or feel or experience for ourselves in an unambiguous way and others can do the same.

Let us say I have a chair. I tell people it is the most wonderful chair in the world and so divinely comfortable that every other chair pales in comparison. They will naturally want to see it and sit in it. But what if I don't let anybody ever see it or sit in it? They might suspect that I'm exaggerating or perhaps don't even have a chair at all. Would they be wise or foolish to doubt my word?

Some would say: "show us the chair and then we'll be able to decide for ourselves whether it lives up to your words." Would it be right for me to accuse them of non-belief and to heap scorn on them because of it? Of course it would not be right. Why should I expect people to believe me if I can show them the chair and they can decide for themselves? If I'm telling the truth I have nothing to fear and my word would be vindicated.

It is only if I were not telling the truth or could not produce the chair that I would have to make belief into such a virtue that people would feel guilty or ashamed to admit that they did not believe me. But why would anyone do that? What do I have to gain from their credulity?

Perhaps I could invent another world and tell people that they would go there after they die if only they just believe me. And then, if they believe enough, they will have a chair of their own in that next world. So if things seem tiring in this world, they can comfort themselves with the thought that they'll be able to sit and rest in divine comfort forever in the next life.

If I can get people to believe me, I can invent rules that will place doubt on whether they will go to that good place. Why I could even invent a bad world with no chairs at all where people would go if they didn't believe me. Then think of what I would be able to demand from them -- if they believed me.

Growing up in the church and serving diligently for over 4 decades, I heard much about believing but it wasn't until a few years ago that I started thinking about that. What use is belief? Why would God want to cultivate the characteristics of obedience and belief in his children? We have seen many times that obedience and belief can be misused. Who has not heard of former Nazis claiming they were only following orders? Who has not heard of or experienced snake oil salesmen or other charlatans trying to get people to trust them so they could cheat them out of their money? Blind obedience and belief without evidence are the keys to these bad outcomes.

So I ask again: "why would God primarily want to cultivate these particular characteristics in his children?".

The answer is: "He doesn't." It is only men who claim to speak for God who make credulity and blind obedience into virtues.

Thus when you say "we need to believe", I cannot help but wonder why it is necessary for me to suspend the faculty of Reason in order to accept your words. You say you have a testimony, but feelings you have in your heart are not something I can experience. You say I need to have a testimony, but I have been misled by feelings in my heart before. I have not been able to fully rely on those feelings as a guide for my actions.

And so, I thank you for the kindly intentions of your words, for I feel that they came from your heart with the best of motives. But I think you are deceived and that you would do better to conduct your life by the light of Reason, requiring evidence before allowing yourself to be persuaded to sacrifice your means to another.

Cause and Effect

On a Facebook group that I follow, a person posted the following rant:

Just sent this to an atheist on YouTube...BLEW HIS MIND! I get atheists there to REALLY think about the nonsense they believe in, totally irrational as you see here.
"What do you believe? A first cause which was uncreated and with no beginning or end? No different than me, I just choose to believe that it was God who was uncreated. Evolution breaks the law of cause and effect. Big bang had a cause, and THAT had a cause and THAT had a cause until you MUST reach that first cause which caused everything. This first cause would have to be uncreated, if it was, then you break the rule of cause and effect, it not, then you have an eternal chain of causes going backward for eternity and never has a beginning, thus, you would still be believing in something that does not start anywhere!!! Either way, you CANNOT escape that fact that SOMETHING without a beginning started everything, either God or matter. But if matter, then again it HAS to have a cause which brought it into existence. Now your going backwards again through a never ending eternal chain of causes which never has a beginning, cause if it ever did, it would have to be God since matter cannot create itself from nothing without a cause, here we go backwards again!!! You can't escape God GET IT NOW???"
He wrote back and was PISSED! I notice they get mad, but none have refuted it. They can't.What nonsense do atheists believe in, Steve? It's not a group that makes you proclaim allegiance to a creed before you're allowed to go in the door. It's just a bunch of people who think it's a good idea to have evidence before one can make claims about things. That's about all they have in common.

Here was my response:

You keep saying that science has a law of cause and effect. What is that law? Who formulated it? What facts about the universe is it meant to explain?

The concept you're talking about in this post has a name. It is called an infinite regress. Introducing God into the picture triggers an infinite regress. If I may employ your line of reasoning that everything must have a cause, and we define cause, as you seem to require, as the willful act of a sentient being, then did not that being require a cause to bring it about? And what brought that about? And that? And so on. God does not solve the problem.

The fact of the matter is that we don't know what caused the singularity that preceded our universe, or what caused it to blossom into a universe of immense (to us) size. Reputable science makes no claims on this topic. Why? Because there is no evidence from which to posit a hypothesis. Some people speculate, nothing more, that the universe is engaged in an endless cycle of big crunches where all matter falls into a single point, and big bangs, where it explodes out again into a brand new universe. The thought is intriguing. But we may never know.

All I can say is this. Since the recorded dawn of our species, pretty much everything that could not be explained at the time has been attributed to supernatural power. With the invention of the scientific method, we hit upon a tool that has helped us to systematically discover how things actually work. The history of science is one long train of events where something that had previously been attributed to supernatural influence, was found *and proven* to be the result of discoverable, testable laws. Every single thing to which we have applied the methods of science has yielded the same result. At no time has the answer ever turned out to be "God did it." Not ever. So then why should we now throw our hands in the air and give up trying to understand the universe? Invoking god is a cop out. And a dishonest, lazy, defeatist one at that. I say No Thanks!

Thoughts on the Big Bang

This was my response to a post on a Facebook group that I follow regarding the Big Bang. The poster had been in the habit of berating people for thinking that a Big Bang type of event could be responsible for the universe as we know it. He also tended to insult people for thinking that evolution could be responsible for ... well, anything.

If a lightning strike fells a tree, where was the purpose in that event? It is not possible (I think) to discover the causal chain of events that led up to the final demise of the tree. The felling of that particular tree at that precise second was the result of a discharge of electrical power that had many elements of randomness. One minute there was a mighty oak tree, and the next, there was just a wreck. It had been standing there, growing for decades and a random event destroyed it in an instant.

What were the odds that lightning strike would happen at that precise place at that precise instant? Astronomical. And yet, it occurred. That is the nature of probability. When you're dealing with immense amounts of time and immense amounts of matter interacting in all sorts of ways, it would be surprising if something as rare and astonishing as life did not emerge from time to time.

Here's the second thing I wanted to say. Where would we be today if Kepler and Galileo had just thrown in the towel and said "God makes the planets move. It is not for us lowly humans to question the will of God. Let us not question why. Let us just accept."? They had every reason to throw in the towel. They were as devoutly religious as it is possible to be and were appalled by their findings. They were pressured on every side to just let it be. But the evidence compelled them. So, against their instincts, their better judgment, and their fervent wish that things were otherwise, they bravely incurred the undying enmity of the church and published their findings.

The knowledge they discovered and refined with so much effort and risk has brought us riches beyond price. Truly their contributions kicked off a revolution that has transformed the world from a place where people lived for thirty years on average in the most primitive, filthy, disease-ridden, pain saturated conditions imaginable. It is science that has transformed the world, not religion. Remember it was the church that fought progress every step of the way, decrying it as unnatural, an affront to God, and condemning its followers to eternal damnation.

So where would we be if we just thew our hands in the air and said "well, we'll never understand so we might as well just give up trying."? At every opportunity when we have pushed against the boundaries of knowledge, we have found that what had previously been thought to be in the domain of God's will was really just the operation of discoverable, testable laws working blindly, relentlessly in their particular domains.

There are a million small and large things that science had done to improve our lives. What has religion given us? Persecution, intolerance, inquisitions, jihads, holy wars, Protestants bombing Catholics, Catholics bombing Protestants, Shias murdering Sunnis, Sunnis murdering Shias, Buddhists and Hindus at each other's throats: an endless list of examples of man's inhumanity toward man.

And why do we put up with this state of affairs? Because we persist in believing in the existence of supernatural beings who command us to behave in these terrible ways. So we revere religion that has been the curse and the bane of this world for millennia and we deride and scorn science that has given us long life, prosperity, light, and truth. Can anyone imagine a state of affairs more absurd?

The Restaurant -- An Allegory

Once upon a time there was a world where food was very important -- so important that it was frowned upon for ordinary people to choose and cook their own food. Instead, people went to restaurants where the food was cooked by trained chefs and served by dedicated waiters. There were lots of restaurants and each one would try to get people to come eat there by advertising that their food tasted better or was healthier than their competitors' offerings. Some restaurants even claimed that, if you ate their food, you would live forever!

There was one particularly nice restaurant that made this claim. The interior appointments were elegant and tasteful. Soft, pleasant music was played in the spacious dining rooms. The Restaurant staff were polite and attentive, and the quality of the food was very consistent. The Restaurant advertised that all its food came from only the best farms and was handled and prepared with the utmost care to preserve the nutrients and guarantee its wholesomeness. Many people liked coming to the Restaurant and eating the food that was chosen and prepared by expert chefs. If the food lacked a little variety, or perhaps seemed a bit bland, you knew that it was because this was how food had to be, if you wanted to live forever.

Of course, there is no free lunch, as the saying goes. And to reap the benefit of living forever, you had to agree to certain conditions. First, you had to promise to eat ONLY at that Restaurant and you had to eat everything that was served whether you liked it or not. Second, you had to pay the Restaurant's high prices without complaining. Third, you had to try to get other people to come to that Restaurant and promise to eat all their meals there. If you did all those things well, it was rumored that you could be invited to eat in another, more exclusive dining room upstairs where the decor was more luxurious and the food richer and more varied. In that dining room were served the choicest meats and vegetables, exquisitely seasoned with exotic and expensive spices. Of course the only patrons allowed to eat in that dining room were the best customers, the ones who followed all the rules perfectly.

Some people who came to the Restaurant did not like a few of the dishes that were served to them. They said it gave them indigestion or made them feel unwell to eat those foods. This started to become a common occurrence and so finally, one day, one of the head waiters had to make an announcement. "This is not a cafeteria," he said. "You cannot just pick and choose what foods you want to eat. The menu is carefully planned and prepared, and if you do not eat the whole meal, you will not get all the nutrients that your body needs to live forever." And so, many of the picky eaters started again eating all of the dishes served to them, even if the food didn't agree with them, because they wanted to live forever.

On several occasions, rumors were circulated that some of the ingredients used by the Restaurant did not come from reputable local farms as advertised by the management. When it became clear that the Restaurant had indeed misrepresented the facts about the origins of some of the foods they served, the management instructed the Restaurant staff not to talk to the patrons about these things. The management said that the patrons relied on the Restaurant for their nutritional information, and these were not nutrition-promoting stories. If the patrons persisted in asking pointed or difficult questions about any of these topics, the wait staff were instructed to answer the questions the patrons should have asked instead.

When they saw these things occurring regularly, some customers grew dissatisfied with the Restaurant. Some started sneaking out between courses and going to another place across the street. Others started skipping meals regularly. Still others decided to start going to a different restaurant altogether. Of course, that meant that they were no longer welcome at the first Restaurant and that they would not live forever. There were even some customers who decided that they didn't like the whole concept of restaurants at all. They preferred to choose their own meats, produce and seasonings and cook them at home in their own kitchen.

It was difficult for many of the people who decided to stop going to the Restaurant. They had been going to that Restaurant their whole lives, they were used to the food, and they knew the staff and the other patrons well. For some, it was even more difficult because their family members would be sad or even angry about not seeing them at the Restaurant. But the customers who had stopped believing that they would live forever by eating at the Restaurant every day were tired of being told what to eat. They had also begun to suspect that some of the foods served there were not wholesome at all, but harmful. And so, even though it was difficult, they stopped going to the Restaurant.

Some customers stopped eating altogether (not eating was something that was not fatal in this world). Over time, though, many realized that some part of their being needed the kind of nourishment that eating food provided. Those who had started shopping and cooking all by themselves found that they missed eating with other diners. So these people sought out different ways of getting nourishment. Some went to open restaurants where you eat when you want with no pressure to come back and eat there all the time. Some people decided to just get together and bring whatever dishes they wanted and the whole group would share each others' dishes. One group of people who had once all been patrons of the Restaurant even decided to have a joyous gathering every year -- a sort of reunion. They met in the dungeon of a beautiful castle near a river to share their cooking with each other.

In the end, the happiest people were found to be those who regularly ate a variety of good foods that they chose for themselves, and shared meals often with a community of interesting, unique, independent people who brought lots of other different kinds of dishes to the table. And the Restaurant, where they had all once been regular patrons? Most of them had fond memories of when they used to go there, but did not regret the decision to step into the larger world and take charge of their own nourishment.

Religion and Divisiveness

Several years ago, a large and beautiful expansion to our local Lutheran church building was being erected on a corner near my home. As I watched the stone walls rising gradually, I looked forward to seeing what the building would look like when it was finished. My feelings were a little bit conflicted. On the one hand, I was happy to see a beautiful new edifice adorning our neighborhood. I was also pleased to see that the local congregation was thriving enough to be able to afford such a nice new addition to its building. 


At the same time, I felt like I was being disloyal to my own Church for having positive feelings about another church. I should feel like they were competition. I should feel they were poor misguided souls who needed the Truth. I should feel guilty about not inviting them to Family Home Evening. But I didn't feel those things, and I was glad I didn't. I was struck by the idea that here were a bunch of good people willing to donate their money to build a beautiful building they could meet in. What a pity it was that We were divided from Them over some doctrinal details.


One thing that has struck me about all religions is that, by definition, they divide people. We are sure that We are right because We have prophets and revelations. They are sure They are right because They have the authority of the Bible. We are sure They are wrong and They are sure We are wrong. Multiply this by few dozen churches, add a dash of nice fresh prejudice, stir in two cups of intolerance, and voilà, widespread unfriendliness among people who otherwise would probably get along just fine.


For the spicier version, fold in generous amounts of poverty and ignorance, and an unscrupulous religious leader willing to inflame fanaticism for selfish ends! But be careful, the dish can easily get too hot to handle.


And all this for what? Souls saved? Oh right, but only Our souls, because They don't believe the right stuff. Of course, We can always convert Them, but They are stubborn and don't realize They are wrong. And They are foolish enough to try to convert Us, because They think We are wrong, which of course cannot possibly be.


Many people are capable of stepping back and seeing what belief hath wrought. But most of them just up the ante and say: "Yes, it is sad how much strife there is. All those poor souls are deceived. Fortunately, We actually ARE right." And so it continues, both day and night.

Good and Evil

Most organizations of significant size usually specify many policies and controls which prohibit certain behaviors and encourage others in the members of that organization. Churches do similarly, sometimes invoking "doctrine". Though, instead of simply saying that this or that thing is allowed or not allowed, they frequently employ a much more powerful tool: labeling the various activities or behaviors as "good" or "evil." By adding this extra layer of judgment, of divine approbation or censure, I think that churches obtain several important benefits:

1. Guilt from sin and fear for eternal salvation become potent motivators for guiding or controlling behaviors.
2. The "good" and "evil" labels can be applied to whatever things are needed without regard to truth, reason, or fairness.
3. It gives defenders license to use any means at all to defend the "good" and attack the "evil" without regard to truth, reason, or fairness (and frequently despite those things).

In saying this, I think I have become what I decried for much of my life: a relativist. For the first several decades of my life, I was a staunch and loud believer in Absolute Truth. If you were a Mormon (and a republican, of course), you were right and good. If you were not a Mormon, you were wrong. If you were a democrat, you were wrong and evil. Mormon Democrats: inexplicably misguided. Now when I type that, I can't decide whether to blush, laugh, or just be glad that my mind opened up one day and let in a little daylight. Probably all three.

Edward Gibbon, he of "Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire" renown, famously wrote:

The various modes of worship, which prevailed in the Roman world, were all considered by the people, as equally true; by the philosopher, as equally false; and by the magistrate, as equally useful.

This about sums up my thoughts on the misuse of Good and Evil.