If Any Limb Offend Thee

With regard to excommunication, I don't think anyone necessarily disputes the church's right to exclude people from among its ranks for publicly questioning it. Mostly, I think, people are just lamenting the fact that it has become a place that finds it necessary to do so. It used not to be this way. The church has altered significantly since the 70s when I grew up. It has gone, metaphorically, from an "employee owned and operated" enterprise to a strictly hierarchical command-and-control model that, it appears, brooks no insubordination.

Also, we obscure much when we say "the church does this" or "the church does that". Churches are not animate objects that "do" things. What this type of speaking obscures is the fact that WE are the church. If there's any doing of deeds, it is people who are doing them. In this case, what it boils down to is that some people in the church are deciding to kick other people out of the church.

The people ordering or doing the kicking out consider themselves authorized and justified in do so. Perhaps they are. We all understand how the church is set up. "Mine house is a house of order, saith the Lord." And in this house of order, power and authority flow, in one direction only, from the person at the top of the org chart, through various intermediate layers, and finally down to the worker bees.

It is generally assumed that the source of that power and authority is divine. Perhaps it is. But perhaps it is more accurate to say that the source of power is really people's *belief* that it is divine -- a subtle but important difference.

Either way, the hierarchical nature of the church makes it impossible to tell the difference between what is actually the Lord's will and the personal agenda of someone authorized to act in the name of The Lord. Of course we always have the option to ask The Lord directly for a testimony that a church leader is acting properly, but note that it is never, ever acceptable for the answer to be "no". And so, there is no way for people lower down the hierarchy to discover and remove corruption from a location higher up. Such an action, if it ever comes, could only come from above in the hierarchy.

However, we have learned as a people, through hard experience, the immutable law that any governing structure really derives its legitimacy from the consent of the governed. In the case of the church, this takes the form of belief on the members' part that The Lord is in control. Regardless of whether that's true, if the members suddenly ceased to believe it, the orderly hierarchy of control would cease to function.

And belief, it turns out, is a precarious thing to maintain in these days of Information. So the hierarchy, in order to maintain its legitimacy feels compelled to act when threatened by the prospect of unbelief. That is why public disagreement becomes an excommunicable offense.

The problem is that the sword of excommunication, which at one time could be wielded with impunity, is no longer the tool it used to be. The people in the hierarchy of control now run the terrible risk of appearing to be a self-serving organization interested only in maintaining their position of power. If a critical mass of the church members were to place such an interpretation on this event, who knows what the consequences would be?

In any case, "the church" is stuck between a rock and a hard place. The legitimacy of the strict hierarchy of the church is increasingly imperiled by the free flow of information. But to decentralize is also not without significant risks. Since the church -- any church -- largely exists because of the willing belief of its members, it must tread lightly lest in its efforts to maintain order it cut off too many valiant members who also happen to be independent thinkers and/or can't fit into the sanctioned gender molds.

Far better in the long run, I think, to expand the tent even at the risk of offending its hard-core base. Of course it is precisely that base that is in firm control right now, so that will not happen easily. But we have seen what pressure can be brought to bear by people voting with their feet. I hope things turn out for the best.

 

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Just imagine what you'll know tomorrow

As a "computer guy", I have frequently had people ask me to help them with their hardware or software problems. Many of the people I have helped have made statements like this: "this computer doesn't like me" or "this stupid thing is cursed" or "sometimes it just does that for no reason".

These are all statements of faith or belief, not statements of fact. Every time I have looked deeply into their claims of seemingly inexplicable behavior, I have invariably found the root cause to be a mundane one: user behavior, environmental factors, software defects, etc.

In this context, people's statements of belief are the result of ignorance, lack of expertise, or just being too lazy or not caring enough to get to the bottom of the problem.

I think that in the case of religious belief there is a similar but not identical phenomenon at work. People who believe that God exists start with the idea in their head that inexplicable things may sometimes be accounted for by the Will of God. They are willing, even anxious, to discover the hand of a benevolent deity at work in their lives. The very fact of this belief is sufficient to stop them from looking more deeply into the reasons why things around them happen. Someone overcomes an addiction? It's God's hand at work. But if you look deeply, I absolutely guarantee that you'll find it's really something like a change in neural wiring or brain chemistry that did the trick.

Ever since the introduction of conscious cognition in our genome, we humans have been trying to figure out why things are the way they are. Before we discovered the existence of the invisible world of microorganisms, we were perplexed and baffled by the appearance of illness and disease. Why did people get sick and die all the time? Our indomitable drive to identify cause and effect led us to conclude the existence of evil spirits, arbitrary deities, or other supernatural hypotheses to try to account for the seeming randomness of life because we simply could find no other explanation.

When Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, the father of microbiology, first looked through a lens and discovered the first hints of existence of this unseen world, it forever altered our perception of illness and disease. From that point onward, we were in possession of knowledge that would forever banish the need to resort to supernatural explanations about illness and disease. As of that moment it officially became a cop-out to say "God did it" in reference to bodily sickness.

That pattern of the natural displacing the supernatural has continued consistently over the centuries. Whenever we have bothered to get to the root of any problem or previously unexplained occurrence, we have always, Always, ALWAYS found that the root cause could be explained by the regular action of discoverable, testable laws that arise naturally as an inevitable consequence of the fundamental properties of matter/energy/space/time. Not once, not one single time, have we ever been forced to conclude that something has been the result of an arbitrarily powerful deity.

So when I hear people testify that they "know" this or that thing that God has done, I am deeply cognizant of how that type of non-fact-based thinking is inherently impermanent and unreliable. To quote the great line from the movie, Men in Black: "Just imagine what you'll 'know' tomorrow."

 

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Standing on Your Own Two Feet

On a Facebook group that I read, a young man posted the following:

So... I'm kind of struggling right now, and I want to reach out to try to receive some support from those who have been where I am now. 

Friends, it's like every morning I'm waking up feeling more and more depressed. When I first started questioning, I felt hopeful because I still had a commitment to many of my old standards... but now, as I have questioned and deconstructed more, it feels as if my moral compass is shattering. It's as if I no longer know what things are healthy for me and for society, and I am scared of giving in to only my baser desires now that I have lost whatever used to counteract them. 

Has anyone been here? How did you cope? Is there a place beyond this in which I can hope to recover healthy restraints for myself, ones that are authentic for me and in which I believe?

Here is my response:

This is the nihilistic phase. If you have grown up in the church, you were like a vine growing on a trellis. Suddenly the trellis is removed and you feel the loss of both the support and the protection it gave. I can best explain with an analogy.

When you were a boy, perhaps you learned to ride a bike with the help of training wheels. If you did, you might remember how you felt when those training wheels were removed: a sense of exhilarating freedom, a release from the constraint of those wheels. But that sense of freedom was probably not unmixed with fear and a little vertigo. With those training wheels off, you could ride anywhere as fast and freely as you wanted. You could fly like a bird, but you could also crash and injure yourself. With that freedom came a scary but wonderful sense that you were now wholly responsible for keeping yourself alive and safe.

When the religious framework on which you had built your life to this point dissolved from underneath you, you initially experienced the exhilaration of sudden freedom. You are now experiencing the great and terrible realization that you alone are responsible for your actions and your life. You miss the certainty of relying on the idea of absolute truth and you are scared that you will make a terrible decision and ruin your life or wreak havoc around you. 

But there is reason for confidence and hope. You are no longer a frail, thin shoot that collapses to the ground if the stake holding it up is removed. You are a grown man with a strong, substantial stem that can support itself.

You have a lifetime of experiences to draw upon to show you how to be a good man. Look around you and find the examples of good people living vibrant lives of honesty and integrity. Also look around you to see examples of the results of bad choices and dissolution.

You know inside you what it is to be a person of worth. Your inner voice is still there and will guide you if you listen to it. You just need to dig down inside and feel that sudden rush of realization that you are a free and independent person and you can take charge of your destiny and succeed!

Once this happens, you will no longer live in fear that you will offend God. Do you want to do something that the church forbade you. Fine! You are free to do it! You are free to jump in and experience that sensation. But also remember you are responsible -- only you -- for the consequences. Think first. Think of yourself. Think of those around you. Ask yourself if the action you are contemplating is consistent with being a man of integrity. Ask yourself if that action will bring harm to yourself or another. If the benefits outweigh the risks and the costs, then you are right to pursue that course of action. If your inner voice advises you to steer clear, then give it a miss. 

The church teaches some good and right things. That is why you loved it. The church also teaches some indifferent or dubious things. That is why you doubted it. The church also teaches some wrong and bad things. And that is why you left it, at least in some sense. Keep the good. Discard the indifferent. Eschew and decry the bad.

Several years ago, I left religion and have since entirely discarded all belief in the supernatural. What I used to call the influence of the Holy Ghost I now simply refer to as my inner voice. It still speaks to me as strongly and consistently as it always has, perhaps even more. I have a clear and strong sense of right and wrong. That which increases the total happiness in the world is right, that which decreases it is wrong. I know that if an action brings me some benefit, but only at the expense of another or at the expense of my own integrity, it is wrong and I will eventually regret it. That is the only measuring stick you need to carry around with you to live a good life, free from the unnatural constraints of religion.

My dear young person, take a lesson from someone a little further down the path: if you can increase the amount of light in your life and be a beacon, reflecting that light in the lives of those around you, you will have a happy and fulfilled life. Seek out the good with an unprejudiced heart and an open mind. Discard the bad and banish it from your mind and your life. Peace, Love, and Music.

The Cosmos and I

I no longer entertain any belief in religious doctrines or deities, but I am nevertheless sympathetic to the impulse to invent an explanation that helps us forget our intolerable nothingness relative to the majesty and grandeur of the cosmos.

It also makes me dizzy to contemplate the atoms of my body relative to my whole body so many orders of magnitude larger. We stand, as it were, midway between the inconceivably small and the incomprehensibly vast; and, as quantum physics has shown, we cannot really understand or relate to either extreme.

Ever since the emergence in our genome of the apparatus to support consciousness, memory and language, we have made discoveries about ourselves and our world that we couldn't account for. So we have made up stories to explain the unexplainable.

As our capacity for Reason has grown and our technology has expanded our ability to perceive and understand the inner workings of things very small, very large and very far away, we have been able to discover that the stories we invented in the infancy of our species were just whistling in the dark.

The time has now come when to continue to rely on the supernatural is to deny the real font of every blessing: Reason, Science, Ethics, Technology, and our own ingenuity and drive to understand and improve ourselves and everything around us.

We are in the habit of associating ethical behavior with religion, but that association is nothing more than a happenstance of history. We can learn and teach ethics better and more effectively without the divisiveness that religions invariably impose on their followers.

I do not know whether the thing that thinks my thoughts will continue to exist after my body ceases to function, and frankly I don't really care, not deeply anyway. If I do continue to exist in some form, I hope it will be an agreeable existence. If I don't, I won't be around to be bothered by it.

But whatever state follows this one, if any, my stunningly improbable little spark of consciousness, my brief flicker of existence in the cosmos, though just a ripple in an inconceivably vast ocean of matter/energy, is nevertheless glorious to me.

 

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Sculpting Species

Today on Facebook, someone posted the comment: "nothing evolution designs is rational." This got me to thinking along the following lines. I'm not so sure that statement is true. I don't mean to turn this into a word game by twisting definitions to suit my purpose, but let me try to recast that phrase for purposes of discussion: "because none of the adaptations that have resulted in an increased chance of survival is the result of ???" The result of what? Conscious deliberation? Is that the only thing that can possibly qualify as logical or rational. What about suitability for a particular purpose? Is it a rational or logical outcome if something is repurposed to fill a role that suits its particular nature?

Take feathers, which first appeared on the evolutionary stage as an insulator, a role they're well suited for. But when they chanced to also confer an increased survival advantage by enabling the organism to briefly take to the air, were not their particular properties really being put to a use even more striking than insulation? I think one could argue that it is a rational use of the feather to enlist it in the task of flying.

To design is a deliberate act. It is natural and easy to speak of evolutionary processes in terms that suggest the exercise of a conscious will because organisms so often display such an elegant commingling of form and function. But it is a misleading metaphor and one that contributes to peoples' reluctance to acknowledge its role in speciation. 

I think sculpting is perhaps a more apt analogy for how evolution actually works. We've all seen examples of a block of stone turned into a beautiful statue. No one doubts that these works of art are deliberately created by human artists. But beautiful works of art and magnificent creations can also be created by nothing more than the constant movement of water or air on rock. 

The exigencies of survival exert a similar influence on species of living organisms over time. A tiny random change gives a slight survival advantage to an organism and the genetic code that produced that change is passed on. Later, another tiny random change results in another improvement and is likewise introduced into the species' genome. Other random changes occur that are neutral or harmful to the organism and thus do not confer a survival advantage. Over a very long time and many, many generations, these tiny random changes that pass through the sieve of natural selection gradually accumulate. In invisibly tiny increments they refine the contours of the species, outfitting it ever more perfectly to make a living in its particular ecological niche. 

The reason we know this works is because we have used the principle of exerting selective pressure of our own manufacture, exploiting the gradual accumulation of random mutations to create countless varieties of dogs. All it takes is time and enough genetic variability to give us options.

So to circle back to the original point: I think there is a type of inevitability to evolution. Given a particular set of ecological conditions, species will gradually acquire traits that make them increasingly fit to occupy a particular niche in that ecology. For me, there is a beautiful, but perhaps unconventional rationality in that process.

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.