I’m not religious. I believe the universe is an accident, and we are a consequence of its randomness. We exist not for a higher purpose, we just exist because stuff happened and we came out of it, like the rest of the universe. Life is random. Nothing is written, none of it is happening for a reason. It’s all chaos and we’re part of it.
We were cells in the ocean, which, the ocean by itself was already a miracle so big it’s basically a mathematical impossibility. And from these cells, we eventually became these weird, mostly hairless apes that are so smart that they can think about the fact that they’re on a giant ball lost in space, moving at ludicrous speed through the vastness of space, kept alive by a giant ball of fire that will give them cancer if they bask in it’s glory for too long or make them blind if they look at it too long.
It’s absolute chaos. And I find all of this to be oddly comforting. I even find it to be beautiful in it’s own way. Life is amazing because it’s all an accident, it’s all random and it’s astonoshing to see the results. But I also get how absolutely terrifying what I just said could be to a lot of people.
I came out of and abandoned the evangelical Christianity that I was raised in. However, I did NOT throw the baby out with the bathwater. I went on to critically examine the Judaic-Christian tradition further. 20 years I spent studying academic biblical scholarship and founded Ask Bible Scholars and AskBibleScholars.com.
In the middle of this adventure, I discovered the Jewish philosopher Abraham Joshua Heschel. One of his best books, in my opinion, is entitled God in Search of Man : A Philosophy of Judaism.
Here are some quotes from said work:
Theology starts with dogmas. Philosophy sees the problem first; theology has the answer in advance. Philosophy is a kind of thinking that has a beginning but no end; the problems outlive all solutions.
We teach children how to measure and weigh, but fail to teach them how to revere, how to sense wonder and awe. Modern man fell into the trap of believing all enigmas can be solved and wonder is a form of ignorance. Mankind will not perish for want of information, but for want of appreciation.
What is, is more than what you see; we are unable to attain insight into the ultimate meaning and purpose of things. We live on the fringe of reality and hardly know how to reach the core. Inaccessible to us are the insights into the nature of ultimate reality. Even what is revealed is incomplete and in disguise.
Awe is an act of insight into a meaning greater than ourselves. Knowledge is fostered by curiosity; wisdom is fostered by awe. Awe is the awareness of transcendent meaning; loss of awe is a great blockage to insight.
“The ineffable” is a synonym for hidden meaning rather than for absence of meaning, a dimension so real and sublime that it stuns our ability to adore it. All creative thinking comes out of an encounter with the unknown. It is a fact of profound significance that we can sense more than we can say.
The world as scrutinized and depicted by science is but a thin surface of the profoundly unknown.
Accidents happen and, at the same time, I will embrace the ineffable.
Would, uh, that be God’s ineffable plan? (with apologies to Pratchett and Gaiman)
No, it’s taken from the Heschel quote in my OP…here it is again:
“The ineffable” is a synonym for hidden meaning rather than for absence of meaning, a dimension so real and sublime that it stuns our ability to adore it.
A couple of these quotes come off as pretty condescending. I’m not sure if that is because of lack of context, or just a general failing of the author to see outside their worldview.
This seems to the worst offender.
We teach children how to measure and weigh, but fail to teach them how to revere, how to sense wonder and awe. Modern man fell into the trap of believing all enigmas can be solved and wonder is a form of ignorance. Mankind will not perish for want of information, but for want of appreciation.
So many people around me have an appreciation for life and pass on wonder to their children. I think it is even more prevalent in my non-religious friends.
The rest of them are not as bad, but still don’t sit right with me.
What is, is more than what you see; we are unable to attain insight into the ultimate meaning and purpose of things. We live on the fringe of reality and hardly know how to reach the core. Inaccessible to us are the insights into the nature of ultimate reality.
The author may not realize it, but this is a situation they supposed the answer in advance as they criticized in the first quote. They pre-supposed the existence of an ultimate meaning or that there is an ultimate reality beyond our current understanding.
Even what is revealed is incomplete and in disguise.
I am not sure what they mean by this. Are they claiming there is a supernatural element to everything?
Awe is an act of insight into a meaning greater than ourselves. Knowledge is fostered by curiosity; wisdom is fostered by awe. Awe is the awareness of transcendent meaning; loss of awe is a great blockage to insight.
“The ineffable” is a synonym for hidden meaning rather than for absence of meaning, a dimension so real and sublime that it stuns our ability to adore it. All creative thinking comes out of an encounter with the unknown.
These are both just kind of word salad that is trying to be deep. I could see if it was meant to be poetry, but if it is meant to be philosophy it kind of fails.
It is a fact of profound significance that we can sense more than we can say.
This is a very bold claim. What exactly is it that we can sense but not vocalize?
The world as scrutinized and depicted by science is but a thin surface of the profoundly unknown.
This is the entire basis of science. Science wants to find out the unknown. It is based in curiosity.
I am not trying to criticize belief. As long as your beliefs don’t infringe on other people’s lives, I am a-ok with them. What I am criticizing is the author’s view on non-spiritually minded folks. The quotes presented here make it seem like those of us that aren’t spiritual lack an awe for the world around us, lack curiosity, and lack creativity. That is condescending as hell.
Like I said, I may be missing context, but the quotes as presented rub me the wrong way.
Who am I?
Ulkesh
What do I believe?
Objective, scientifically peer-reviewed facts.
I mean they didn’t need a whole article for this.
Serious question: What do you do when your perceptions and experience contradicts the results of supposedly objective, scientifically peer-reviewed facts?
Do you assume your perceptions are wrong, or do you assume that the supposed ‘objective truth’ you know to be incorrect?
Not OP, but I’m a gnostic atheist, so I’ll give you my perspective:
The question you’re asking doesn’t make sense in my worldview. The idea of a supernatural cause doesn’t even enter into my consciousness as an option. If my understanding of something does not match evidence, then either my understanding is incomplete, my understanding is incorrect, or the evidence wasn’t measured/understood correctly.
More broadly, when science can’t explain a phenomenon, that’s the interesting part! It’s at the edges of our understanding that scientific progress is made. In some cases, that’s just because a system is so complex that we can’t (yet) model the whole system, like nutrition research, or climate science, or understanding cognition. In other cases, it’s because models made at one scale don’t work at another, like quantum physics or what happened right after the Big Bang.
Reality is everything, so it’s all that I consider. Non-reality based ideas are fiction—lots of fun, but not relevant to my decision making or worldview.
The question you’re asking doesn’t make sense in my worldview
Then your worldview is flawed as science is not yet a complete understanding of everything. I am not invoking the supernatural at any point in my arguments and the fact that you think I am says more about you than it does me.
I am speaking about experiential truth that contradicts current scientific consensus pointing to the fact that current scientific consensus is incomplete. Not trying at all to invoke the supernatural.
Reality is everything, so it’s all that I consider.
How sophomoric and full of yourself you seem.
Can you show me a molecule of empathy? What is the atomic weight of democracy? What standard scale do we measure the love of a mother for her children?
Human thought has created conceptual realities that affect our lives just as surely as gravity. Money, fairness, hope for the future, the concept of states and nations, all of these things are not ‘reality’, they are not inherent in the structure of the universe and do not obey the laws of physics as we understand them.
Look I get it, you’re all doped up on the heady ferment of casting off religious shackles, and you feel that this bright new world absent of supernatural entities is the ‘clear eyed vision’ of objective truth that Sagan spoke about.
I hate to tell you this but your fanatical adherence to atheism has blinded you to the fact that other things exist that do not adhere to your estimation of reality.
And lastly: ‘gnostic atheist’ is a funny title, considering that we have yet to gain complete understanding of the universe so ‘knowing’ that the supernatural doesn’t exist is kind of impossible.
You are just another worshiper of scientism, blind to everything that doesn’t have spin or mass.
I live my life by facts and evidence and I am not reliant solely on my own experiential evidence.
If I come across something that seems to contradict what I believe to be a fact, I research it (to the best of my ability) to see if it’s just me who is wrong.
Of course, I am human, and fallable, and my emotions certainly can get in the way. But I try to be aware of them so I can put them into perspective.
Beyond that, I would need specific examples to address, as I’ve never had any experience that I can recall which contradicted anything already explained by science.
But what in the cases where you are not equipped or educated enough to perform the research properly?
This is especially relevant in the field of medicine and nutrition as we have so much more to learn about biology and chemistry and those are subjects almost no layman has the resources or knowledge to study. .
The example I gave to the original top of this thread was the keto diet.
If you found that by eating very few carbs you lost significantly more weight WITHOUT reducing your caloric intake, would you have the biological and chemical knowledge to research this in a meaningful way?
Yet you would have had the physical experience of losing the weight, you would KNOW it works because it worked for you.
“supposedly objective, scientifically peer-reviewed facts” “supposed ‘objective truth’”
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Please provide some specific examples. Anyone who paints science in such a negative light, as you have, usually has a specific personal example of where their feelings or internalized nonscientific beliefs conflicted with reality and became an issue for that person. If you are not being a troll, please follow through with the conversation sincerely.
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Perception is inherently flawed and for all intents and purposes cannot be as correct as objective, peer-reviewed science. The scientific method exists in large part to remove hand-waving guesswork and pure fictitious nonsense that is speculated from direct perception from our understanding of everything. Being sceptical of our perception and feelings is critically important, arguably even more important than being critical of scientific work.
A great example is a feather falling slower than a bowling ball in atmosphere. Your first perception would not lead you to understand the science of gravity as we now know it thanks to rigorous scientific proof. It would lead you astray, as it has lead many people astray before and today.
Anyone who paints science in such a negative light, as you have
I think you may have some deep-seated issues, I’m a STEM major. Science is pretty awesome, just not the end-all be-all of human experience.
Please provide some specific examples.
Ok. So in the mid-90s the scientific consensus for weight loss was simple: You must maintain a calorie deficit, this is the only way to lose weight.
If you went to your doctor and asked ‘How do I lose weight without burning more calories than I consume’, you would be told it is impossible, against the laws of thermodynamics, and if such a method could be found it would probably involve drugs with strong side effects.
This is not true.
And we’ve known its not true for a while now, but ‘scientific consensus’ refused to acknowledge results that disproved the earlier stated ‘peer reviewed facts’.
You can (easily) lose weight on a low carb diet (keto) even if you exceed your calorie consumption by 1000kcal or more (I was intaking 4500-5000 kcal of food a day and lost over 80 lbs in a pace of two years.
The thing is, scientific consensus is JUST NOW starting to catch up with this, and NOW there are peer-reviewed studies showing losing weight on keto doesn’t require a caloric deficit.
This illustrates my point: There is an arrogance in academia that precludes so many things based on assumptions.
That isn’t even touching the current Reproducibility Crisis that is calling into question decades of supposed ‘objectively peer reviewed’ results.
Perception is inherently flawed and for all intents and purposes cannot be as correct as objective,
I’m sorry but going from 290 to 210lbs in a years time isn’t a flaw in perception.
. The scientific method exists in large part to remove hand-waving guesswork and pure fictitious nonsense
Up until basically only five years ago, nearly all medical professionals called weight loss without caloric deficit pure fictitious nonsense. I think this proves that just because a bunch of out of touch researchers, self-satisfied in their academic prestige, declare something fictitious nonsense that it does not automatically mean that it actually is.
A great example is a feather falling slower than a bowling ball in atmosphere. Your first perception would not lead you to understand the science of gravity as we now know it thanks to rigorous scientific proof.
I sincerely disagree. Everyone on the planet will tell you that the feather will fall slower in atmosphere.
I think you are trying to reference the same experiment in a vacuum.
But I’m getting the impression you are less a practitioner of science than you are a religious fanatic with science as your god.
I grew up going to church and identifying myself as religious but I actually have never been. I was not popular in church and was never really included in anything unless I went out of my way to try to include myself in things. In hindsight it was obvious to others that I didn’t belong. I was trying to be religious while they found what the church provided naturally appealing. They felt something from church while I felt nothing. I wasn’t getting anything from or providing anything to the church experience. When I stopped going no one noticed or said anything about it if they did.
I didn’t stop being religious after I stopped going to church. I had known from the sermons that when the preacher quoted the bible it was always completely removed of the context of the passage to mean something entirely different than what it meant in the bible (I knew because I looked the quotes up in the bible provided in front of me during the sermon). I figured that churches were a kind of con-job and not the real religion, so I read the bible myself. If I ran my own church it would be nothing more or less than me reading the beatitudes out loud from start to finish every week and my Bible would cut everything else out. Christ-like to my own satisfaction since I was living by Jesus’s explicit instructions I continued to claim Christianity and even considered myself a better Christian than almost any other since my religion was unfiltered and uncompromised.
Over the years I grew out of this seriously misled attitude. I still like the beatitudes and consider them highly influential on my present values, but I no longer feel the need to attach that to a religious identity. I realized that if I had to try so hard to be religious while getting nothing out of it, it probably wasn’t for me. Right now I consider religion like alcohol. Fine for most people, some people are highly prone to abusing it and should avoid it, and some people just don’t find it appealing at all. If I didn’t like to drink it wouldn’t make sense for me to spend all my time around people who like to drink while poorly pretending I’m getting drunk with them. Anyone who gets what they need from religion and doesn’t make their faith a problem for other people is fine with me, I just have different ways I prefer to spend my time.
Religion at it’s best is about community. The rituals, the stories, are content/entertainment, extended games of telephone. Selling a product that can’t possibly be vetted, the “afterlife”. People get to like what they like, religion is not for me
I don’t believe anything, I know some things, I’ll guess at others. I’m aware when I’m pulling it out my arse :D Every question doesn’t have to have an answer.
Keep it simple.
There is only one meaningful moral tenet, don’t be a dick. Don’t do things to others you wouldn’t want to have happen to you.
Now I can craft an engaging narrative justifying all manner of bad behavior but, I know better, we all do. Even those with reduced empathy know better.
Don’t Be a Dick!
It’s interesting to me that less people are religious but moral absolutism seems to be on the rise.
That’s only because the ruling emperors of moral absolutism are so fuckdamn lound and persistent.
It creates the illusion that there are so many more of them than there actually are.
Do you remember the Westboro Baptist Church from a few years back? Constantly all over the media shouting their bigoted hate?
Yeah, it was a group of less than 100 people doing it mainly as a source of income.
But they managed to get themselves in front of every camera for like 5 years in a row. Turns out they didn’t even really believe their hatespeech and just found that suing people who tried to interfere with their horrid protests was super profitable.
