Agnostic Universe

Bravo Neil deGrasse Tyson! I wholeheartedly agree with your analysis and views on being atheist or agnostic.

from LOL god

This is a cartoon about militants with the militant atheist portrayed as a rational person typing away at the keyboard while the agnostic buries his head in the sand and the Christian and Muslim both have weaponry. I assume it’s supposed to be a joke and I’ve seen it on some atheist blogs like Friendly Atheist where it seems to be presented as a joke. However, it reads like a smug “we’re better than them” banner. The statement it makes (serious or not) is that atheists are always so rational that even their worst adherents are better than anyone else.

Let’s look at this seriously for a moment because I want to focus on the message it conveys. The word militant means “1) vigorously active and aggressive, especially in support of a cause or 2) engaged in warfare; fighting.” Any time you argue about belief or disbelief, you’re arguing about what is most likely an unprovable viewpoint. When you argue over belief then you aren’t arguing over knowledge. One or both sides in those arguments have no interest in what is truly known or it wouldn’t last as an argument. An atheist could believe so much in their rejection of belief that their militant behavior and insistence on disbelief could be fought for with the same misguided passion as the militant believers. The term militant is about the behavior and tactics of the person and not about the belief or disbelief. Any person could be irrationally aggressive with weapons. Anyone that suggests that could never happen in the freethought community isn’t being honest about human behavior and the ability for some people to forcibly exert their will on others.

I support most of the efforts of the Freedom From Religion Foundation. However, I also see how freedom FROM religion could be twisted into a stronger and more militant stance to remove religion from the public entirely. This is similar to how some Christians want homosexuality to only be a private matter and not allow for any aspects of it to appear in public. On the extreme end of the spectrum are the Christians that don’t want to allow homosexuality in the private either. I believe in equal access in the “public square” for belief and non-belief. I don’t see how it helps society to remove or restrict religion from the religious. I just want to be free from having to support their religions with my tax dollars and from being forced to be more than a bystander as they do their thing. If we really value our own freedom from religion then I think we need to value everyone else’s freedom of religion.

I don’t ever want to see any militant people and that includes militant atheists or agnostics. Going back to that picture, the militant atheist and agnostic would also have weaponry. The militant believers want everyone else to believe as they do and the militant non-believers would also want everyone to not believe just like they do. The militant atheist would tell you that “you don’t believe” when they point the gun at you and the militant agnostic would say “you don’t really know.” I believe none of us really know or can know how or why existence came to be. All there is is belief or disbelief about such things and belief is definitely not knowledge. I’m atheist since I don’t know of anything about a creator or cause for existence that’s worth believing in. However, I don’t see the need for militancy on any side of this question since there’s no true knowledge on this subject to be defended by anyone. This is why I primarily identify as an agnostic “I don’t know, and you don’t either” instead of an atheist “I don’t believe, and you shouldn’t either.”

I just received a message from God. It’s the written word of God and carries the same amount of proof as the written word of the Bible. You haven’t heard from God directly so you just have to believe and have faith that it’s true. The truth is so self-evident that you can’t dispute this! If you don’t believe in it then you just don’t have enough faith to recognize the truth when you hear it. It’s such an amazing message that I simply have to repost it on this site to continue spreading the latest message from the true God. The Bible is just a snapshot in time and isn’t the complete story so you have to receive this message into your mind and into your heart to understand what God and the Bible really is. The Bible is causing problems in this world and in the United States and this latest message can help fix it!

The word is spreading and comes from here where I saw it and here where they saw it.

Here is the message so you can more easily read it, understand it, and use it in your life:

Dear Evangelical Christians:

God here.

First, I do not exist. The concept of a 13,700,000,000 year old being, capable of creating the entire universe and its billions of galaxies, monitoring simultaneously the thoughts and actions of the 7 billion human beings on this planet is ludicrous. Grow a brain.

Second, if I did, I would have left you a book a little more consistent, timeless and independently verifiable than the collection of Iron Age Middle Eastern mythology you call the Bible. Hell, I bet you cannot tell me one thing about any of its authors, their credibility or their possible ulterior motives, yet you cite them for the most extraordinary of claims.

Thirdly, when I sent my “son” (whatever that means, given that I am god and do not mate) to Earth, he would have visited the Chinese, Japanese, Europeans, Russians, sub-Saharan Africans, Australian Aboriginals, Mongolians, Polynesians, Micronesians, Indonesians and native Americans, not just a few Jews. He would also have exhibited a knowledge of something outside of the Iron Age Middle East.

Fourthly, I would not spend my time hiding, refusing to give any tangible evidence of my existence, and then punish those who are smart enough to draw the natural conclusion that I do not exist by burning them forever. That would make no sense to me, given that I am the one who withheld evidence of my existence in the first place.

Fifth, I would not care who you do or how you “do it.” I really wouldn’t. This would be of no interest to me, given that I can create universes. Oh, the egos.

Sixth, I would have smited all evangelicals and fundamentalists long before this. You people drive me nuts. You are so small minded and yet you speak with such false authority. Many of you still believe in the talking snake nonsense from Genesis. I would kill all of you for that alone and burn you for an afternoon (burning forever is way too barbaric for me to even contemplate).

Seventh, the whole idea of members of one species on one planet surviving their own physical deaths to “be with me” is utter, mind-numbing nonsense. Grow up. You will die. Get over it. I did. Hell, at least you had a life. I never even existed in the first place.

Eighth, I do not read your minds, or “hear your prayers” as you euphemistically call it. There are 7 billion of you. Even if only 10% prayed once a day, that is 700,000,000 prayers. This works out at 8,000 prayers a second — every second of every day. Meanwhile I have to process the 100,000 of you who die every day between heaven and hell. Dwell on the sheer absurdity of that for a moment.

Finally, the only reason you even consider believing in me is because of where you were born. Had you been born in India, you would likely believe in the Hindu gods, if born in Tibet, you would be a Buddhist. Every culture that has ever existed has had its own god(s) and they always seem to favor that particular culture, its hopes, dreams and prejudices. What, do you think we all exist? If not, why only yours?

Look, let’s be honest with ourselves. There is no god. Believing in me was fine when you thought the World was young, flat and simple. Now we know how enormous, old and complex the Universe is.

Move on — get over me. I did.

God

Praise be to the true words of God!

A homosexual student killed himself as a result of intense bullying. They introduced a bill in Michigan for an anti-bullying law named after that student. Republicans added a special exception in the law for bullies who have “a sincerely held religious belief or moral conviction.” If you came across that story would you view that as a reasonable addition? I came across it and thought, why would they need any kind of protection for the bullies if whatever words or actions were covered under the term of “bullying”? The bill language is now contradictory:

ALL PUPILS ARE PROTECTED UNDER THE POLICY AND BULLYING IS EQUALLY PROHIBITED WITHOUT REGARD TO ITS SUBJECT MATTER OR MOTIVATING ANIMUS…
…THIS SECTION DOES NOT PROHIBIT A STATEMENT OF A SINCERELY HELD RELIGIOUS BELIEF OR MORAL CONVICTION.

Now the law would have done nothing for the kid this bill was actually named after if the bullies claim they were making anti-homosexual statements based on sincerely held religious belief. I think this is disgusting and a reason why Christianity should never be tied directly to our government and the laws we create over ALL of the people. This would be a terrible country if the Bible was directly turned into law. Is the Christian god really that anti-homosexual and for what purpose or reason? I do believe people are born with different sexual preferences and their minds are wired that way just like I’m wired to be left-handed. Sure, I could be forced to write right-handed and probably could physically do it if laws and my religion forced me to be permanently right-handed, but it just doesn’t work right and is against my nature as a left-handed person. Fortunately I don’t have a religion trying to tell me what to do.

I’m curious as to what the Christian god really tells the religious about homosexuals since religious people are all over the place on this subject from supportive (the general “love thy neighbor” philosophy) to condemnation of death (Leviticus 20:13 as the literal word of their god). Apparently the Christian god supports the death penalty for homosexual acts. This is obviously the written word of some ancient homophobic human and not the divine word of a perfect creator unless he really wants people put to death for being what they were created to be.

Gretchen Whitmer, Michigan Senator, slams new bullying legislation (video)

I was at an event for work that had various speakers. One of the speakers was obviously religious since he mentioned being blessed in general and blessed by God. He always closed his remarks the many times he was on stage with the phrase “God bless you all”. It gave me an opportunity to think about this and what I normally view as an unnecessary public display of a personal religious belief. It also gave me the opportunity to think about the viewpoint that he shouldn’t be allowed to talk like that since this was a person in the government with some amount of power over some of the people in the audience. Does all religious speech cross the line into endorsement and coercion that infringes upon our freedom of religion?

As a recipient of the speeches I didn’t feel like there was any coercion or intent for me to change what I believe. There wasn’t an expectation of participating in his expression of belief or any judgement of what the audience may or may not believe. It wasn’t any different than politicians on TV saying “God bless America”. Everything he said and how he said it sounded like his personal good wishes for us from his viewpoint as a believer including other casual statements about his own beliefs. If I had said “I wish you all well” with the same feeling and inflection then it would have been an equivalent expression without the backdrop of a personal religious belief. It was simply the fact that he was a religious person that his “well wishing” included his God. In that context, I would think it would actually be less meaningful of a wish for us if he left his God out of it since that was his most sincere form of wishing well to others if you knew that was what he believed.

I don’t believe his words were an endorsement or included any type of coercion to agree with his belief. However, I still don’t think he should say those words as a matter of personal choice even though I know I’m in the minority on seeing it as a bad choice. The reason it is a bad choice is that I don’t believe as he does so his expression of belief leads me to think a certain way about his ability to use logic and judgement to make decisions based in reality. I naturally view such devout believers as potentially close-minded to anything that might conflict with their faith-based beliefs. I have less of a desire to follow such a person since they usually place faith above fact when the two conflict.

Interestingly enough, it’s these religious beliefs that makes the religious people in the audience see him as being more worthy of following since he appears to put his trust in what they think is the same faith as their own. Simply using common Christian phrasings really doesn’t tell anyone about what he really thinks about any given topic. I always hear about how clear the Bible is as a moral guide but what does “God bless you” tell you about a person’s views on issues such as abortion, civil unions, birth control, slavery, women’s roles/rights, suicide, death penalties, war, divorce, working on Sunday, etc. etc. etc. A religious person could instantly put the speaker in a better light just because they say the word God regardless of what that person really thinks or does.

The person saying “God bless you” doesn’t harm me or anyone else. It does negatively impact what nonbelievers think of that speaker. That isn’t a big impact currently since we’re in the minority. However, I also think it negatively impacts believers as well since they make positive assumptions about the speaker that are based on faith and have no relation to how that person really thinks or acts. This happens far too often when faith is viewed as more important than facts when the two are in conflict. Add this to the list of the many ways that religion and a reliance on faith does not help you in your life. Faith leads people to follow others based upon faith instead of reality. That’s a potentially dangerous reason to follow another human without question or critical thought of your own. Even if you are religious, please don’t do anything based on faith alone!

I wrote about the “Jesus First” theme prevalent in my brother’s wedding at his Grace Bible Church (whatever that is) and now I want to get into some specifics where that authority was used to promote the church leadership as the master over their lives and thoughts. This is another reason that even if there was an intelligent creator then I definitely wouldn’t believe in the structure and authority of select individuals as the speakers of that god to tell me what god thinks I should do and think. If there is a god interested in me and my actions then it can tell me itself. I haven’t heard any actual words from god so far.

The simple examples of “Pastor Knows Best” was during the reception being held in a recreation building on church property. They weren’t allowed a champagne toast because alcohol wasn’t allowed even though I’ve heard a story about Jesus turning water into wine. They had to get a special exception to have their first dance there because dancing wasn’t allowed since apparently Jesus wasn’t much of a dancer back in the day. All of the music played for the entire reception had to be approved by the pastor for style and lyrical content. They actually approved a song from Harry Potter because it lacked lyrics. Apparently Jesus is big on censorship and the pastor knows his taste in music.

These were the things I heard of in my few days in town and I’m sure during the premarital counseling and wedding planning there were many more examples of the pastor dictating what my brother could and couldn’t do for his wedding before their god. The irony I see in all of this is that my brother has been a long time member of the congregation, taught youth groups there, and has done many things for the church since joining them. However, he’s not trusted to do the right thing at his own wedding and the pastor felt the need to run the entire show all the way down to the reception outside of the religious ceremony.

The issue I made reference to in my previous post was a practical thing my brother and his bride-to-be did a few weeks before the wedding that could have destroyed the wedding itself. She just started a job very close to my brother’s apartment so she moved in with him early to drastically shorten her commute. They’re religious and I don’t know or care about their business but for all I know they slept apart at night even though they were under the same roof. I wouldn’t be surprised either way. Regardless, the best man found out about this and told my brother he needed to inform the pastor of this living arrangement to get right with Jesus or he was going to tell the pastor himself. Apparently my brother was just going to keep it quiet to avoid a potential disruption to the church wedding they had been planning. My mother was one of the people telling the best man that the wedding was about the bride and groom and he should leave it alone. That is when he said “No, this day is about Jesus and doing everything right for Jesus is more important than the bride and groom.” He would have tried to derail the wedding because he thought something wasn’t being done right for Jesus.

In the end, my brother was forced to tell the pastor and they had some extra counseling or prayers or something that made it all better. This was another moment where I would have had enough of “their” nonsense and just done what I felt was right. If my brother and the rest of my family want to worship a god then I wish they’d just do it without any of the meddling middle men I saw that weekend. All those other people did was cause problems, confusion, distress, and worry for brother, his wife, and the rest of the family by constantly telling them they’re not doing it “right”. It was all completely unnecessary and didn’t make them better or worse members of that church and in the end I believe it had no impact on what they’re becoming as a couple. If they had done everything the way they had wanted with a champagne toast, dancing, and whatever music the bride wanted it wouldn’t have made them less Christian. If they had openly moved in together earlier then they would still be the same people they are today. They’re a man and woman that have vowed to go through life as partners and they even vow to follow their god while doing it. They are together now despite the church and their nonsense.

I’m glad my wife and I didn’t have any of that nonsense and we don’t have anyone that can tell us we’re not doing it right. That is the freedom you get with thinking for yourself and not blindly following a religion. The religious and their churches can try to tell us we’re not doing it right but we’re not listening. In the end we’d just be who we are and they’d still just be nosy neighbors more focused on my household because they probably don’t want to face their own problems. When it comes to how I should live and love my wife and children… I know best.

We were raised Catholic with a Methodist dad and as that dropped off for our mom we all found our own paths for belief. I chose critical thought and higher standards for truth that led me to acknowledge all that I do not know. I see an obvious truth that humanity is clueless and making it all up in every fiction we call religion. My brother was pulled in by a friend at a young age to a local Grace Bible Church. All I can figure out about these churches is they say they are non-denominational followers of the “true” words of the Bible. I can’t figure out where these churches came from or how they might be affiliated but I see a lot of them on the web. Is this what the evangelical movement looks like? Grace Bible churches look like independent local churches but they share the Grace name and have common themes on their websites. If there’s an organization behind it all it appears to be hidden from the casual observer, which in my mind makes it seem a little sinister in purpose.

I had 2 days exposure to this place for the wedding rehearsal and actual wedding. I hadn’t been to a church in probably a decade and it was nice to see what I’m missing because it scares me to know people expose themselves to this indoctrination once a week. Unfortunately my parents have joined this church as well and my mom volunteers many times a week in support of it. I shouldn’t be so critical since they did leave me alone and never noticed I only bow my head out of respect to my family and never offered a single prayer. On the face of it all it seems all very innocent with good intentions. However, I see that their focus is building out their flock and controlling them for good or bad. I have no problem with good intentions but overall I think flocks of sheep are a very bad concept.

The pastor is a good looking younger man with a wife and young children. He’s charismatic and always in a calm control over everything around him. He’s the leader I’d pick to serve as my example and spread the message I was trying to sell, particularly if the message needed to be sold to be accepted. I’ll save some of the other details of the wedding for other posts but I want to focus on one particular message or theme that permeated the weekend. That message was that we have no meaning, purpose, or value without Jesus.

The central point of the wedding was a speech by the pastor saying the wife was there to serve the leadership of the couple, which is the man. She is there to help him as he serves Jesus. They will be divorced and have nothing but misery and continued sin without their marriage being about and for Jesus. Everyone is sinners and they will produce little sinners and the only way for us to overcome our evil ways is to follow Jesus. I still don’t understand how my mom follows this church since there’s a riggid structure of Jesus first, men second, and women are at the bottom in importance. They definitely don’t preach equality.

I’ll dig into this deeper in another post to keep this short but this structure was highlighted by a comment made by the best man. He’s one of the sheep in this church along with my brother. There was an “issue” and he was told by a few people that this day was about the bride and groom so why couldn’t he just leave it alone since it was their day. He followed the party line and said “No, this day is about Jesus and doing everything right for Jesus is more important than the bride and groom.” He would have tried to derail the wedding because he thought something wasn’t being done right for Jesus.

This is what I see as being very dangerous. Jesus rules and commands. The pastor speaks for Jesus. Members of the congregation parrot this and then the pastor is now in full control of everyone to blindly follow the rules and commands of the pastor as being unquestionable because they are synonymous with a unquestionable god. This all had a big impact on my brother’s wedding even though he is one of their faithful. In the end, he and his new wife aren’t living a life of love and happiness for each other because of religion. If they do, they are doing it despite the religious structure around them that is obviously trying to control their actions down to their very thoughts. They are not trusted to love each other naturally and I see the pastor and the church will always put their noses in their business as long as they let them.

I don’t need anyone else to tell us how my wife and I should love each other and our children. We can look for examples, guidance, and even use non-religious mentors or counselors to help us be a better couple but I’m very grateful that we’re in full control of our marriage. I can’t imagine putting myself into a setting where my neighbor gets to tell us that our living right isn’t right enough and I need to do it differently because they know Jesus better than I do when NONE of them know any of these things. All they are doing is imposing their own opinions on others using the authority of an imagined god.

My mother forwarded yet another religious spam email. This one was titled Billy Graham’s Prayer For Our Nation and ends with a call for a return to “One Nation Under God”. According to Snopes it isn’t from Billy Graham but that doesn’t really matter much regarding the intent of the email. The general text of the email sent to me is in that Snopes article if you’re interested.

Taken on face value as simply human values what does most of these items have to do with anything written in the Bible and a supposed dictated word of God? Does that book really give an exact recipe for a Christian-only government and such things as the nuances between a government sponsored form of charity and an overly dependent welfare system that is detrimental to society? The Bible does say certain things are punishable by death (usually a stoning) so how is the killing of an abortionist contrary to the general morality of the Bible? I do believe in the wisdom and values of the forefathers of this country but they didn’t create One Nation Under God as this email implied. Kenneth Davis had a good article on CNN recently about this. One Nation is inclusive and Under God is exclusionary so this phrase never made any sense to me.

Look at this fantasy art piece I came across while searching for information about One Nation Under God. I found this to be hilarious because the artist honestly believes in Jesus as the origin of our government and the Constitution for the people even though the Constitution has zero mentions of God, Jesus, or any creator reigning over “We The People”. It is a great visual depiction of what a Christian nation would be if one existed because the Constitution would have dictated the leadership of God and Jesus over the People as central to the government with a setup for worship and fidelity to that specific structure. This contrasts to the actual setup we have of a self-governing organization of checks and balances that were an attempt to protect individual liberties and societal justice instead of defining an exact and unchanging morality dictated by a religious leadership under the direction of One Nation under One God and following the literal word of the Bible as the rule of law.

Oh well, most people get these emails and just say it sounds good and it matches with the feel-good things they think they believe. This is cotton candy for the mind that reinforces “God is good, humans are evil, and we should listen to the God-believing humans to tell us how to think and what we should do with our resources.” The same goes true for politics and I wish people wouldn’t consider themselves Republicans or Democrats even if politicians are doing it. We should actually think for ourselves without labels while expecting the same from our political leaders. If we really had One Nation Under God in practice we could have just one political party because the religious right version of the Republican Party would be the only one true party needed under God.

Instead, since we are in practice a country of E Pluribus Unum (Out of Many, One) then we really should have more choices and parties representing our political beliefs and all of the variations in the reality of humanity. It seems like we’ve been reduced down to a country of Out of Two, One with one side of that really pushing One Nation Under God to kick out the views of the other half of the two.

LOL, the cartoon is titled “let me rephrase that…” but there’s definitely some truth to this one. When it comes down to it, all of us unbelievers are both agnostic (without knowledge) AND atheist (without theism). The important thing for “freethinkers”, “unbelievers”, etc. is that we don’t blindly follow ancient religions.

I’m a weak atheist and strong agnostic. A weak atheist is a person lacking in a theistic belief. A strong atheist would be akin to an anti-theist and a belief that it is proven that there are no gods or a creator of this universe. I’m a strong agnostic and believe that we don’t know about anything supernatural since we are natural and possibly aren’t capable of knowing the true origin and nature of the universe we live in. I assert that even if the big bang is provable that it is an incomplete view of the origin of this universe because it is from within this universe after the event occurred. I don’t believe we are intelligent enough to figure out what may or may not be outside this universe from our vantage point and that we may never know what truly happened in the first moment of existence.

If someone asks me about my religious beliefs then I view my weak atheism as the lesser trait and my strong agnosticism as the dominant trait since I value knowledge over belief. A label of me as the atheist unbeliever just doesn’t adequately describe me. I prefer the label of the unknowing agnostic and I would assert that it best describes us all. I believe agnosticism should be shared as a universal truth. It makes more sense to speak to god believers in terms of what they don’t really know instead of the simply contrary view of “I don’t believe you and you shouldn’t believe it either”. Agnosticism is more of a philosophical methodology that can be used to frame your beliefs and examine the supernatural instead of just using atheism as a lack of belief. What is the rejection of belief based on other than to say the burden of proof is on the believer? I see my weak atheism about defined religions as a result of my active use of agnosticism. Some people trace their movement to freethought as moving from not knowing (agnostic) to not believing (atheist) as two different beliefs. I first thought of myself as an atheist because I stopped believing and after further reflection decided agnosticism was the reason for my rejection of the defined religions.

Here is where we get into the main difference between myself and the typical atheist and where the atheists accuse me of heresy to “their belief”. I have the agnostic nuance of saying that even though all of the defined religions I know about appear to be fiction when critically examined, I do not fully reject the possibility of a creator or gods we don’t know about. Theists jump on that statement and think they can convince me of their nonsense, but I think even if there were a creator or gods then we’re unable to understand such a thing and it or they have no dealings with us as far as I can tell. If there is a god and it cares about me then let it interact with me directly instead of through my fellow humans. None of you can be trusted to give me the correct truth about something so important and bigger than our insignificant existence. I’m still waiting for the gods to speak to me directly but I’m smart enough to not hold my breath in anticipation.

The main point of this post is to say that I’ve given creation itself some more thought lately and I’ve come up with a possible god hypothesis to support my reason for not being a complete anti-theist. I have to consider the possibilities of an infinite physical universe, multiverses, the big bang of this universe, string theory, m-theory, the theory of everything, etc. I’m just an average person and read a little here and there about these things but I think there’s enough there for a basic god hypothesis that I’ll call the Rube Goldberg Machine for Creation of this Universe.

If infinity, mulitiverses, origin theory, etc. is capable of randomly creating our one specific universe as a subset of all of existence with the right conditions to evolve the human intellect, then the infinity, mulitiverses, origin theory, etc. could have been capable of randomly creating an intelligent being capable of creating our one specific universe as a subset of all of existence.

So I think that if there were an intelligent creator of this universe then it was just something that arose within the entirety of existence and only created our one universe and wasn’t the cause of all of existence itself. This creator wouldn’t be all-powerful and all-knowing and would just have to be powerful and intelligent enough to create RNA, DNA, etc. and code macromolecules for life. I don’t believe that such a being is necessary to create us and Occam’s razor suggests the extra step of an intelligent designer for our universe is an unnecessary addition of complexity. This is why I call the hypothesis the Rube Goldberg Machine for Creation because it throws in an extra creation step just to make it more interesting. However, if you’re being intellectually honest and believe that we could arise from randomness and think and create what we are able to create then a singular being or beings that could intentionally or unintentionally create the building blocks of our life could also be a possibility. I still firmly believe that we don’t know and are generally clueless about the true origins of our universe. I still believe it’s all a big mystery and I choose to remain firmly agnostic.