Fri 16 Jul 2010
‘Cause You Gotta Have Faith
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So, if God has existed forever…you know, what did he do in his spare time, like, before he made the Earth and everything? - Father Dougal
People shuffled in quietly to the Church finding a free pew to sit on. Light pours in from the stained glass windows. Everybody is serene as the wait for the bell to ring and the priest to appear. I sit staring at the Apostles’ Creed and thinking is it really a profession of faith or a way of indoctrination?
The problem with being a teenager is that you start to question everything that you were raised to believe is true. I believed that if I stole sweets from my sister then God would be watching me and he wouldn’t be happy. I believed that when somebody died then they looked down on you from heaven. Now I’ve become philosophical and I ask myself whether or not God really exists.
On the one hand religion has been a part of everyday life for at least 4000 years. Maybe people had the same ideas at the same time but there is some kind of collective experience there. There are miracles every day that can’t be explained by science. I don’t want to believe we’re alone in the universe and when you die that’s it, you fade into nothing. For me it doesn’t make any sense that one moment someone could be alive and experience the world and then just disappear.
On the other hand, it’s very easy to see how as a race we would have begun by attributing the unexplainable to a more powerful force. Before science if a volcano erupted it was because a god was angry, but now we know better. It’s easy to see how we would give this force attributes and make it look like us because we don’t have the imagination to think of anything else. Logically, even if the world was created by intelligent design what are the chances that there is a God that cares about each one of us and cares about whether we sin or not? In reality we’re a speck in a great expanse.
The thing is, I really want to believe. I was talking to a friend about this and he told me a heartbreaking story about his friend’s family and the different sorts of illnesses and accidents that have been thrown at them. It made me think, isn’t it easier to be angry at God for neglecting us rather than face being alone in the middle of nothing? I want to have the conviction that some of the people I know have because they are honestly content. I used to have it. My mum described faith and just knowing deep down that there is something more. There’s no logic to explain it, it’s just there.
Does God exist? He may, or he may not. If he/she/it does we have no idea what form God will take or whether it is loving, vengeful or indifferent. In all honesty we know nothing. Yet some people know that something exists beyond our understanding and I wish I was one of them.
Everybody in the Church stands and there is a rustle of paper. The priest clears his throat and the silence is broke with a chorus of “We believe in one God, father the almighty, maker of Heaven and Earth, of all that is seen and unseen…”
So I know that I said on twitter that I was going to go cool down instead of responding to this. But fuck, I will bite.
This blog post is filled with fallacies, incorrect statements and simple ignorance. I’m going too, as I do, pick through the post bit by bit. Like, as they say, a boss.
“On the one hand evolution doesn’t explain how an organ as complex as the eye developed” I have to deal with this shit quite regularly. Usually, the people who spout it have just been told it time after time after time, which makes me sad. They are just regurgitating crap that somebody else has told them, or misunderstanding how evolution works. Dawkins’ (non-religious, so don’t go on about him being anti-religious or anything) book ‘The Greatest Show On Earth’ is the cleanest examination of how Evolution works that I have ever read, and actually cleared up some of my own misconceptions as to the theory.
In actuality, evolution does, quite clearly, explain how organs as complex as the eye developed. Furthermore, the fact that the eye is so inefficient goes to show that it wasn’t ‘designed’, as the creationists would have us believe. I certainly wouldn’t design it to have a huge blind spot, for instance.
As to how it evolved? It is rather complex, as you may well imagine, and I don’t feel that I could do it justice. I recommend you read up on the subject. Wikipedia has a very technical explanation, had you gone looking for it, at https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Evolution_of_the_eye and the wonderful David Attenborough explains where the whole eye-fallacy started from in his documentary “Darwin and the Tree of Life”, in case you don’t want to read the technical explanation. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1TEKDWAe_b8
“There are miracles every day that can’t be explained by science.” I have heard this so often, but nobody can ever really provide proof of this statement. Because 100% of the time, things that were once considered miracles have been completely proven not to be. I promise you, if you DID have something in mind (and I doubt you did) you will probably, on research, find an explanation for it, or in the future it will be explained. Or, as happens quite often, somebody along the chain of Chinese whispers you heard it from was lying.
“I don’t want to believe we’re alone in the universe and when you die that’s it, you fade into nothing.” I’m just going to point out that just because you don’t want it there to be nothing, doesn’t make there something. I would love to be wrong. I would love there to be an all loving god, however unlikely that might be, who would consider my life and say “Well, Cian, you didn’t believe in me. But you lead a good life, helping people, so in you come. Virgins for all!” but just because I would like it to be the case doesn’t make it any more likely. The same goes for your sentence “For me it doesn’t make any sense that one moment someone could be alive and experience the world and then just disappear.”
“Logically, even if the world was created by intelligent design what are the chances that there is a God that cares about each one of us and cares about whether we sin or not?” I’m not a huge fan of the people who claim that there is somebody who knowingly designed us yet doesn’t give a fuck. Because designing something as complex as an ecosystem has gotta be sort of hard. Of course, it could have been an accident. I suspect that the accident scenario is more likely then the god who made us but doesn’t care scenario.
“I was talking to a friend about this and he told me a heartbreaking story about his friend’s family and the different sorts of illnesses and accidents that have been thrown at them.” This seems to describe somebody who uses religion as a crutch, as they can’t face the idea that the shit that happened to them didn’t happen for any particular reason. Religion as a crutch is a very depressing fact of life, and it explains why so many people in prisons and really squalid living conditions are so religious. When life gets horribly tough, it’s just easier to offload blame to an entity, or have the false hope that someday, it might get better, if you just pray every day and wake up early on Sundays. But in reality, it can just get in the way of people helping themselves.
As for your next few sentences, would you honestly truly want to be content with a delusion? I know I certainly wouldn’t. From your wording of it, I suspect you recognise that it is a delusion, yet you still wish you shared it. I can’t understand this at all, and I can’t relate. As for your claim that there is no logic to why people feel that ‘just knowing’ religious feeling, there probably is. Take a look at this essay from the Religious Tolerance on the topic of why religion started and how it evolved to become part of human existence. http://www.religioustolerance.org/rel_theory1.htm At it’s most basic level, they say that religion evolved as a crutch.
Another source is Wikipedia, at https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Evolutionary_origin_of_religions
“Jesus was a real person.” There is no compelling evidence to suggest that he did. The Shroud of Turin, the most compelling and most often quoted piece of evidence, has been shown to be a fraud. Note that the ONLY sources of authority as to the existence of Christ, were all written over 150 years after the man’s supposed death. By people who didn’t know him, and, judging by the life expectancy of those days, certainly didn’t know the original supposed Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. Furthermore, the gospels were originally written in Greek, which is basically impossible since the language of Jesus as well as all his followers would have been Aramaic. And they were NOT translated into greek, something that the vatican has no issue with. The genealogies of Christ as given by the evangelists are worthless, as they all disagree on almost every aspect. They contradict each other on the year of his birth as well! A Jesuit, Antonmaria Lupi, explained how the nativity has been assigned to every single month of the year, at some point in history. Not only that, but there is no proof for a city of Nazareth in the time of Jesus! That’s from the Encyclopaedia Biblica, which is written by Theologians, and considered the best biblical reference work written in English.
I BEG you, before you spread any more of this shite, consider essays like http://www.infidels.org/library/historical/marshall_gauvin/did_jesus_really_live.html . Please. You owe it to yourself.
“Yet some people know that something exists beyond our understanding and I wish I was one of them.” That just annoys me.
So, in conclusion, the above is why I screamed at my screen while reading this, multiple times. I really hope you consider republishing this, corrected, or mark it as fiction.
Oh, and one last thing.
“I don’t want to believe we’re alone in the universe and when you die that’s it, you fade into nothing. For me it doesn’t make any sense that one moment someone could be alive and experience the world and then just disappear.”
Think of it like reverse birth. We were both non-existent for a long time before we were born, and I don’t know about you but it certainly didn’t inconvenience me.
My comment won’t be as long as yours but I will attempt to explain my reasoning behind it.
In terms of the eye thing it’s something I picked up from when I was doing a debate on intelligent design. I just googled ‘intelligent design’ and this came up http://www.allaboutscience.org/darwins-theory-of-evolution.htm In it Darwin says “To suppose that the eye with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest degree.” So the proponent of evolution had expressed that his theory had flaws, thus my point that there may have been something out there. Obviously you have a more recent source so you’re right.
The miracles that can’t be explained by science comes from personal experience. My granny was diagnosed with lung cancer before I was born and her x-rays were so bad that she was given only two weeks to live. When she was still alive three weeks later she went back to the hospital and her x-rays showed that her lungs were completely clear. Sure, maybe she had eaten some curative food or something but she was supposed to be dead and ended up completely cured. Before you suggest that the machine was wrong she had been diagnosed long before this so it wasn’t a sudden thing. Even if some things can be explained, some can’t.
Obviously not wanting to believe in nothing doesn’t make me wrong, that’s just my opinion. Who isn’t honestly scared about the idea of disappearing when they’re dead? Even if you’re not there are still many people who are. You can’t fault me for wanting there to be something more. Of course wanting it doesn’t make it the case, but who knows? Jo went to Medjugorje with Annie and Bobby and she came back more into her faith than before.
Obviously you bit about a careless God is your opinion. It’s not a new theory and my point was that even if there is a superior being why care about us? I don’t know if it has reasons because it’s likely not wired the way we are anyway. It’s the same with the God argument. How are we supposed to know anyway? It’s only a theory.
It’s easy for you to call it a delusion. Obviously you don’t believe a God exists. On some level I do. I have problems with it logically but religions have huge followings all over the world and they obviously don’t think it’s a delusion either. In this case you are dismissing a widely held belief with quite a derogative word.
The Jesus being alive is a widely held belief. I thought the proof came from the census records of the time. Maybe I’m wrong.
So my point is, belief and opinion aren’t fiction. If I wrote ‘God exists cause the Bible says so’ maybe you would be right. For me it was more my thoughts on God and religion as a whole. You obviously disagree with a lot of what I said, that’s your prerogative. But I stand by what I’ve written for the most part.
P.S. Reverse birth kind of comforting thought
Re: Eye. From the exact page that I linked you too: Since 1802, the evolution of a structure as complex as the projecting eye by natural selection has been said to be difficult to explain.[4] Charles Darwin himself wrote, in his Origin of Species, that the evolution of the eye by natural selection at first glance seemed “absurd in the highest possible degree”. However, he went on to explain that despite the difficulty in imagining it, it was perfectly feasible:
…if numerous gradations from a perfect and complex eye to one very imperfect and simple, each grade being useful to its possessor, can be shown to exist; if further, the eye does vary ever so slightly, and the variations be inherited, which is certainly the case; and if any variation or modification in the organ be ever useful to an animal under changing conditions of life, then the difficulty of believing that a perfect and complex eye could be formed by natural selection, though insuperable by our imagination, can hardly be considered real.
What you read was an incomplete quotation.
I promise you, no matter what you believe about your gran, it was not a miracle. It may be unexplained by CURRENT science, but it wasn’t a miracle.
Jo believing more because she went somewhere again has nothing to do with if it’s true or not. Who knows? You do, if you consider it seriously. I really WANT a million pounds, but wanting it won’t make it happen. I could go to live in the slums and want that million pounds so I could build wonderful houses for all the poor, but I still wouldn’t just magic it out of the air by wanting it.
I marked my opinion out clearly as such, and I don’t give huge credence to either. And the existence of a God isn’t a theory. For a theory, you need years upon years of research and evidence. The existence of a god isn’t even a hypothesis, as there is NO evidence.
Again, you are using the ‘if I want it to be true, it might be’ argument, and then backing it up by saying ‘since millions of people believe it, it might be true’. Bullshit.
Please stop using words like ‘Belief’ in this context. It means I have to define them. A belief is something that somebody has with no evidence. If there is a single bit of evidence, it is no longer a belief. This is known by many religious people, and high up Vatican members have even acknowledged it.
And you are wrong. As I said, there is no evidence to suggest the existence of Jesus.
“So my point is, belief and opinion aren’t fiction.” I have personally known people with the very strong belief and opinion that the moon landing was a hoax. Either them or I am wrong, and are thus spouting bullshit fiction. NEVER fall for the idea that an opinion can’t be wrong. It most certainly can. As can belief.
If you have read the links that I posted, I simply can’t believe that you stand by what you have posted, and I must say, I have lost some respect for you if you can still stand by statements such as your one on the eye. I have no issue with people who are willing to learn, I have issue with people who aren’t.
Do you realise how intolerant and arrogant you sounded in your last comment? I lost some respect for you too. You don’t have to be stupid to believe in God and can you, an eighteen year old, really claim to know everything? Because you’ve jut stated categorically that miracles can’t happen, that people are only religious because they are deluding themselves and belief is fiction. Wow.
First of all your friend who believe that the moon landing is a hoax is a different matter because there is concrete evidence to suggest otherwise. Please, prove to me that God does not exist. And belief is not something that exists without evidence. According to Websters dictionary belief is ” the conviction of the truth of some statement or the reality of some being or phenomenon *especially when based on examination of evidence*”. Just because billions and trillions of people over time believed doesn’t necessarily make it true, but it does indeed deserve some kind of credence.
According to your beliefs there is no God, I respect that. But respect mine and stop talking about religion as if you know better because you don’t.
Saw this on FB last night. As always an interesting blog post Liz (you’ve basically said here exactly what I feel on religion). I felt it deserved a comment…
Fair play for writing about this. Admitting anything even approaching a religious belief is (evidently) far from popular nowadays.
As Einstein said “Science without Religion is lame. Religion without science is blind”.
Science explains the how but it is philosophy (religion being a mass popular philosophy) that explains why. As for everyday miracles I would point to; Free will, the nature of the quantum universe and peculiar physical qualities of our universe necessary for life and even the formation of life. Also the power of mind over matter ie the power of the placebo and the nacebo effects.
Would also like to weigh in on the existence of Jesus. Cian, besides the Bible (which even if you disregard generally as a load of rubbish is fairly good evidence that Jesus existed in some capacity), I presume that you are unaware of the referecnes to Jesus in the writings of Tacitus and Suetonius, two of the more widely respected Roman Historians and numerous other secular sources? It is with good reason that Jesus’ “mortal” existence is accepted by historians.
Marginalising and/or dismissing those who believe in God (or those who are simply open to the possibility of his existence) is no different from the forced indoctrination of peoples in the past and the marginalising of non-believers as heritics. Aggressive atheism and fundamentalist religion are two sides of the same, rather unpleasant coin.
@Cian: Congraulations on figuring it all out. Now, all we have to do is wait until we die to see who was right. If there is no God, then all is well and we fade into nothingness; but if there is a God, then what will happen to you?
@Winsome Really? Pascal’s wager? Come on. It is not simply black and white. There are THOUSANDS of other gods that might exist. Statistically, no matter what, each and every one of use is fucked if we take your approach, because most of those gods were believed in before either you or I were born. We had better hope it’s not Zeus though! He was a vengeful bastard. Both of us will be burning!
As for if you are right. Lets say there is a god, let’s pretend that it is the one that you sell books and charge people money to talk about. What’s more likely? He will let me in the pearly gates as a human rights activist, or he will let you in, the person who makes people pay him/her to talk about this god, who clearly doesn’t need anybody to lick his/her ass?