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Ch. 5: The Metaphysical Claims of Religion Are False

#64: Mar. - May 2009 (Non-Fiction)
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johnson1010
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in adition, new age-y ideas of god as the universe or god as love are similarly meaningless.

We can dispense with the term God if we are not refering to anything other than the universe itself. In that case we are talking about wonderment at existence, which is essentially the same feeling described as "spiritual" but with no magic.

If we are pointing to something other than God as the universe, then we are talking about a being, or presence that is supernatural. This is often either the diety of the monotheistic religions, or a knock off, so to speak, where a person from a christian background rejects the church and even the bible to a degree but keeps the God.

If you have rejected the bible, the birth place of this god, then what leg does he have to stand on?
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Interbane:
God is a magical creature. There is no way around it, unless your definition is so warped as to become meaningless. If you're attempting to drain the superstition and magic from christianity, you'll also be draining away the christian god.
Ahem!! Excuse me! There is a way around it. I don't think my definition is warped and meaningless. Well, it might be, because the trouble is with basket cases, is, that we don't think we are basket cases.

I don't try to define 'God' because that is ridiculous. But I do think of it in terms of 'the force' like in 'Star Wars'. And the more I see of life, the more I think it is a good metaphore. The 'dark side' and the 'light side' - still the same force. It depends which you want to concentrate on.

Anyway, the Buddhist idea of Brahma - fits this metaphore very well.

(I keep thinking, I won't lose any more friends, and I'll keep out of these discussions, then I see a statement like yours Interbane, which is so provocative, that I can't just stand by and look.)

Anyway, I'm keeping my light-sabre sheathed. :neutral:
Only those become weary of angling who bring nothing to it but the idea of catching fish.

He was born with the gift of laughter and a sense that the world is mad....

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:P Penny!

Jake answered your definition quite well above. The 'force' in Star Wars actually had a scientific explanation given in the new third episode. There are otherwise four forces known to science. Adding a fifth force for your own understanding is okay, but it is still magical.

1. Gravity - This force acts between all mass in the universe and it has infinite range.

2. Electromagnetic - This acts between electrically charged particles. Electricity, magnetism, and light are all produced by this force and it also has infinite range.

3. The Strong Force - This force binds neutrons and protons together in the cores of atoms and is a short range force.

4. Weak Force - This causes Beta decay (the conversion of a neutron to a proton, an electron and an antineutrino) and various particles (the "strange" ones) are formed by strong interactions but decay via weak interactions (that's what's strange about "strangeness"). Like the strong force, the weak force is also short range.
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Jake? Who he? Am I correct in assuming you mean johnson?

I have a son named Jake. Also I have been having a conversation with a young newbie bloke named Danny, and I have a son named that too.

The queer thing is, my sons both talk to me in the same way as the two on here. They try to be patient! They wish I would just 'knit' like a normal Mum. Now, what's your name? It can't be the name of my eldest child, which is Emma! :laugh: and I know you've just become a father!!!

Sorry, just needed a bit of an interlude. Listen more, talk less, me.

But, thank you. I'll carry on lurking now.
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He was born with the gift of laughter and a sense that the world is mad....

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DWill wrote:Robert, I have not expressed myself well at all if you think I believe that the efforts of the past to understand human life and to live morally were all nonsense just because a large part of these efforts involved gods, demons, and spirits. As a humanist, I MUST believe that at the basis of such attempts were good faith and wisdom, and that in our age we have not necessarily gone any farther toward enlightenment than they did. There are true kernels in all Western mythologies, including the Christian. However, I would disagree with you if your thinking is that we should select particular kernels to declare as ultimate truth. This is not the way forward, in my opinion.
Hi Bill, thanks for engaging on this difficult material. It seems we disagree on the value we should give to modern theories of enlightenment. I agree with Hitchens that modern science is far more enlightened than ancient magic. We see absolute proof of this in comparing modern and ancient life expectancy, knowledge, productivity and opportunity. The question I am asking is what in the ancient world view is compatible with modern knowledge. Obviously quite a bit, for example the beautiful idea from Saint Paul that the truth will set you free. Paul acknowledged that his grasp of truth was dodgy, for example his comment that we see as through a glass darkly, but later writers ignored this major caveat by claiming that partial and false ideas were absolutely true. For example, the virgin birth is a belief which I don’t think is grounded in your “good faith and wisdom” as it primarily served to cement the institutional power of the church, detracting attention from the underlying Christian theme of a connection between the temporal and the eternal. Hitchens is right to draw attention to the disgraceful behaviour of the church, but I disagree with him in claiming that more of the religious worldview is legitimate and redeemable than he argues.
However, it is you yourself who castigate belief in the supernatural, which is the same as "magical content." It is really not that I have such an animus toward a belief that can't be explained rationally. Given the ability of the human mind to compartmentalize, it is common for people to say they believe in impossible things while remaining quite normal to all appearances. Not all belief in the supernatural makes people act crazy, far from it.
Again, we must remember Voltaire’s profound observation that ‘who believes absurdities permits atrocities.’ You are right that supernaturalism can be compatible with rational action, but you have to admit that irrational belief presents a much higher risk of irrational behaviour than does rational belief.
My criticism of your proposal to make a newly reformed Christianity the ultimate truth is simply that it seems a bit arbitrary to elevate one tradition which-- for you-- has a rich metaphorical validity over all others. Yes, Robert, this is where relativism comes in again! To many other minds, I daresay what you find so compelling in the resurrection and incarnation simply doesn't resonate. So your insistence that others must accept this as the ultimate truth strikes me as quixotic.
The story of Easter resonates not just for me, but for the whole of Christianity. It is perhaps ironic that the Easter passion story of Christ is rather quixotic, with the cross in place of the windmill. I do not have animus towards irrational belief, only towards the claim that such belief has the same status as scientific knowledge, for it manifestly does not. For example the passion story finds its meaning in the parable of a person who was despised and rejected proving to be the source of salvation. This meaning does not depend on any actual miracles, any more than the proverb ‘slow and steady wins the race’ depends on Aesop’s fable of the hare and the tortoise being about an actual foot race. The lack of resonance you describe is in my view largely due to the over-inflated claims of fundamentalism. A realistic scientific assessment of the tall tales from the hills in the Gospels should indicate these stories are worth a second look as a source of moral teaching.
When you talk about "the concept of God," or using the name in some way, you are not speaking about the same God that Hitchens takes apart in his book. This is also true of Dawkins in his own book. I know you have read Hitchens' book, but you apparently disagree with me that Hitchens makes a distinction between "god" and a "religious god." The notion of god that you are promoting is one that can exist in "societies that [have] learned to tame and sequester the religious impulse" (p. 280) I'm sure that Hitchens doesn't personally subscribe to even these "tamed and sequestered" versions of god, but he does not jump on people who do (well, okay, other than to imply they're irrelevant). In short, I think that your disagreement with Hitchens might not be so fundamental.
One of the most interesting comments in the chapter under discussion here is on page 63 where CH says “faith… that can stand up at least for a while in a confrontation with reason is now plainly impossible.” Yet this is what Einstein presents in his Spinozan faith. Again, Hitchens employs the debating tactic of saying that if religion redefines itself to be possible then it is not religion, that the bad necessarily drives out the good. I agree with Hitchens in deriding literal belief in impossible ideas, but disagree regarding whether those impossible ideas are a metaphor for something true.
you use the words "myth of a creator God," which is far different from belief and places this myth in the optional category, however intensely you believe it should somehow serve us.
A similarly “optional myth” is that all people have the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. This is a belief which cannot be proved scientifically, nor is it a ‘self evident truth’ as the founding fathers called it. However it is extremely useful and beneficial that people should believe it. Calling something optional is a way to subtly deride its value. The idea of a creator god has a valuable mythic status because its existence in the classic formulation as a purposive entity appears implausible, but the idea that love and grace have a cosmic foundation has great practical utility.
[/quote] I do not even know what you mean by 'the core idea of Christology." If I did, I suspect it would not resonate with me.

The core idea of Christology is the claim that Jesus Christ brought together two natures, a human nature (the man Jesus of Nazareth) and a divine nature (the eternal logos or Son of God) into one person. In terms of archetypal mythology, the story of the Gospels is the supreme imagination of what Bonhoeffer called the beyond in the midst of the world – the eternal in the midst of the temporal. The idea is that ordinary life (Jesus) conceals a deep connection to ultimate reality (Christ), and that this connection provides a real meaning and purpose. A range of gospel texts express this Christological vision. For example, the last (Jesus) will be first (Christ), the servant (Jesus) will be king (Christ) and the stone the builder rejects (Jesus) will be head of the corner (Christ). We do not have to believe that the Gospel account is true to find this cosmology meaningful.
"finding meaning in it" is simply entirely different from acting as though "Christianity", which is undeniably a product of history, should be our reference point. If we have to make excuses and apologies for much of the foundational literature, what is the point?
The point is that within the gospels there is a vision of an ultimate reality, a story of human identity with immense meaning for human adaptation to life on our planet. As I have argued previously, core texts such as the Sermon on the Mount and the Lord's Prayer can usefully be reinterpreted as an ecological message, with a story of salvation that is actually useful for a modern scientific context.

RT
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There are many myths, legends and fables that are told with the sole purpose of delivering some sort of message.

Take little red riding hood. Essentially a warning to young girls to not be too trusting with strage men. This message is deliverable in any number of media, with different cheracters, settings, and subtext. We don't need the wolf. If we aknowledge that the cheracters of the bible are plot devices used to deliver a message and have no relation to historic reality (The bible being set agains historic events does not make it a historical document. Spider-man is set in new york and the publishers document such things as the 911 attacks and terrorism. That does not mean this is a source we should look to.) then these cheracters should be disposable.

We could easily produce additional stories in which Jesus delivers new lessons that are applicable to new circumstances in our time. This would meet with considerable resistance because people believe the story of the Jesus cheracter to be historically accurate.

If we are to view these cheracters as messengers of truth, rather than as literal historic persons then what harm would there be in re-writing the bible to take out all of the insanity?


Numbers 16:16-49
The escaped Israelites had been complaining to Moses about the lack of water, sustenence and food in the desert that they have been led to by Moses.
16 Moses commands that 250 of them must come to the tent and present incense at the altar. They do so.
21God says, "Stand back from these people, and I will destroy them immediately."

22 "But Moses and Aaron bowed down and said, "O, God, you are the source of all life. When one man sins, do you get angry with the whole community?"

31-34 "the ground under Dathan and Abiram split open and swallowed them and their families, together with all of Korah's followers and their possessions. The earth closed over them, and they vanished. All the people of Israel who were there fled when they heard their cry. They shouted, "Run! The earth might swallow us too!
35 Then the Lord sent a fire that blazed out and burnt up the 250 men who had presented the incense."

41 "The next day the whole community complained against Moses and Aaron and said, "You have killed some of the Lords people"

45 God speaks to Moses, "Stand back from these people, and I will destroy them on the spot!"

Good lesson?
How about these?

2Kings 2:23-24 [NIV]
"Elisha left Jericho to go to Bethel and on the way some boys came out of a town and made fun of him. "Get out of here, Baldy!" they shouted. Elisha turned around, glared at them, and cursed them in the name of the Lord. Then two she-bears came out of the woods and tore forty-two of the boys to pieces."


1 Samuel 6:19 [NIV]
""But God struck down some of the men of Beth Shemesh, putting seventy [1] of them to death because they had looked into the ark of the LORD. The people mourned because of the heavy blow the LORD had dealt them, "

There are better ways to deliver sound moral teachings than this story which has so much grisly baggage.
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Interbane wrote:God is a magical creature. There is no way around it, unless your definition is so warped as to become meaningless. If you're attempting to drain the superstition and magic from christianity, you'll also be draining away the christian god.
Now Interbane, that is just sloppy. God is a creator, not a creature. The question is, is a real creative principle at work in our universe, and can this be identified with the Christian concept of God? If so, then the supernatural myths of tradition should be seen as metaphors enabling the general public to engage with a complex and difficult idea which cannot be explained easily in simple terms. If the magic is a metaphor for a scientifically accurate idea, then of course we need to drain away the magic to disclose the reality. Again, this is what Jesus was talking about in the parable of the wheat and tares, and what Malachi alluded to in his story about gold and dross.
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RT: "The question is, is a real creative principle at work in our universe, and can this be identified with the Christian concept of God?"

No, the real question is, what is god? Skirting the issue of defining him is a side effect of attempting to hang onto the concept of a god when all the myth that surrounds him is slowly whittled away. There is so much in the bible that is false that it is most definitely written by man without divine inspiration. If god is a creator, you then define him as an entity. As an entity, he'd have to be more complex than the infinite universe he has created, which is ridiculous. The story of Jesus has no more credibility than most fiction novels, so speaking of the parables and allusions contained in it is meaningless. You hang onto the concept by a thread of non-falsifiability and surrounded by much that has been falsified, and that's a terribly weak position.
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My comment that God is a creator was in response to your statement that there is no way around the view that God is a magical creature 'unless your definition is so warped as to become meaningless'. I don't think rejection of God as creature necessarily implies that God is an entity. Rather, the meaning of the term creature, which you may not have intended, is something made by something else. To speak of God as creature implies the creator is man.

The implication is that any claim about God other than as a fantastic invention is warped and meaningless. This goes back to Feuerbach's claim in The Essence of Christianity that God is nothing else than man, the outward projection of man's inward nature.

This idea of religion as solely imaginary wish fulfillment has a basic flaw in its rejection of the idea of fate, revealed in acts of God. The insurance industry calls natural disasters acts of God, not because they postulate an entity planning all events, but from the same view as Saint Paul in Romans 1 that God is manifest in nature.

My suggestion that the Christian concept of God can be identified with a real creative principle at work in our universe does not imply God is an entity. Such an implication fails the test of Ockham's Razor, an unnecessary hypothesis which adds needless complexity.

The underlying issue here is that religious claims about such an entity do have a strong basis in Feuerbach's wish-fulfillment psychological framework, and are of course central to the language of religious text. So, if that language is to be meaningful, it seems this 'entity' idea needs to be considered as a metaphor for something real that operates in the observed universe. I think it is possible to re-interpret faith on these lines.

Your argument that the meaning of parables hangs on the historical truth of the gospels was discussed above by me with reference to Aesop and by Johnson with reference to Little Red Riding Hood. These are meaningful fictional parables.
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So, if god is not an entity, is he a force? Perhaps a force we haven't yet had the pleasure of being influenced by? This is still quite meaningless, as any undiscovered force is not god, it is only a force. To say that man is the creator of god makes sense to me, just as we've created Santa Claus. If you can't define god, perhaps that is simply because once a definition is proposed, it will fall through like all the rest. The last bastion is perhaps 'he simply exists', but then that would reek of denial.

When you speak of fate and insurance companies, you're placing stock in the gap of the unknown. To be sure, reality is immensely complex and therefore incapable of being known, but to encapsulate that complexity into an easy to swallow term like fate or god is to pretend there is more to it than a mechanistic process. There is no evidence to layer more and more explanations on what we know. God has had many reasonable footholds in our history with respect to the unknowns we see him accountable for, and has steadily backpedaled as we've made new discoveries.

When you say god is a creative force, do you mean he sometimes bends our universe to his will? Show me what can't be explained by anything other than God, and I'll show you a foothold that will be overtaken by the progress of human knowledge. If you propose a metaphysical realm in which god dwells, I propose a super-metaphysical realm where a super-god exists. This again becomes meaningless, so we are left with the observably mechanistic.

To say that the parables are meaningful is all well and good, but so are other fictional stories. Are you attempting to understand the universe, or use a fictional story as a source of wisdom? In this case, the two are mutually exclusive in purpose.
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