No. of Recommendations: 2
Goofy,
It doesn't really matter if 25% of the world or even 95% of the world thinks the bible is some sort of magically produced list of little miracles, not to me. I am used to knowing things other people don't know. No amount of new age discussion of good vibrations being associated with high energy souls is going to make me forget that the energy of a photon is Planck's constant times its frequency measured in cycles per second, and that a certain amount of energy can lift a certain weight a certain height above the ground or heat a certain amount of water a certain number of degrees.
I am fascinated by meaning, and by meaning I mean purpose and moral good vs bad and so on. I am glad I learned about the ancient greeks at a young age, with their very different idea of excellence as virtue vs modern religious teaching of obsessing over whether you were being bad by not obeying god. And learning the greek gods, it seemed like a bad saturday morning movie it was so funny with their Peloponesian God Swan Love Association and 3-headed pit bulls and so on. It helped immensely to put the bible stories in perspective. We have our myths, they have theirs. I'm guessing, in some sense, they, or at least some of them, BELIEVED their myths, they certainly put a lot of effort into building temples and so on. And we in some sense, or at least some of us, BELIEVED our myths.
And here I was, caught in the middle, being able to see the cartoonishness of it all. And wondering, how does one go meta from here?
Even today you can find intelligent people who wonder: where can right and wrong come from if not from god? Are Right and Wrong even real? It does seem we have a word, nihilism, for the assertion that they are not.
I decided relatively early that right and wrong are more a choice than they are not a choice. "Ah-ha!" said the goddies. "you just stepped on the moral relativism land-mine." But the thing is you can't save yourself from moral relativism by invoking a make-believe god. Fake things can't have real life-changing effects, we don't think.
So I decided I would have my own conclusions about right and wrong, and I would kill to enforce them, and it didn't matter that I didn't have a make believe monster to back up my arrogance.
But the thing is, Goofy, I'm pretty sure you have decided something like that, too. You clearly from all your posts have some pretty complex ideas about what is right and what is wrong, and it seems from the outside you don't have a lot of patience or tolerance for people who disagree with you on those things, which I take it to mean you really think they are real.
Do you ever wonder where you get that from? Where your knowledge of good and evil comes from? Is it just what was coded into you as a child, irretrievably dictating what you would believe as an adult? Is it just the rules of the club you have decided to affiliate with?
In my case it is mostly the rules of the club I have decided to affiliate with, I think. I don't think right and wrong are somehow hard-wired into the structure of the universe, waiting for us to become smart enough and work hard enough to extract a reasonably faithful elucidation of them. And I don't think making up a story about an uber-monster that can make things right and wrong by declaring them, and who also buy the way somehow created the universe anyway as if THAT answers more questions than it raises is helpful. Religious people can have a made up god that answers all their other questions, I just keep the made up stuff (morality) and punt on the question of exactly where it comes from and how I know.
And the whole morass of right and wrong, and the FACT that humans will, especially collectively, make life and death decisions that effect MILLIONS and BILLIONS of people, because we have no choice, even not deciding is a decision when it comes to human morality. We are all moral actors whether we want to be or not. Hah, there's meaning for you. Inescabable moral relevance to your actions.
So yes, I think the idea that god is both the source of the universe and the source of right and wrong and is a conscious being with a personality that likes to pick winners and losers and gets mad and sad when we don't do what he she or they want is, well, a little childish. What better source for understanding some of this than our most ancient texts, the things we chose to preserve when we were incredibly limited in how much we could take with us from generation to generation?
That it is filled with crazy impossible things is part of the answer, it seems.
R:)
