Goines On: Goines speaks to G

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Goines’ heart sped up the morning he realized that he knew almost as much about his creator as his creator knew about him! Goines, a character in his creator’s fictional portrait, on a par with his creator!…So why had Goines been content to let the author lay out Goines’ thoughts and doings without Goines ever raising his hand to speak out to him?

Religious belief: what a bargain! (Ten Years Ago Yesterday)

By unknown, a copy of a painting
of Blaise Pascal (of the famous wager)
by François II Quesnel, which was made
for Gérard Edelinck in 1691

By Moristotle

[Originally published on August 1, 2007, not a word different, but the image added.]

Many have been impressed by Pascal’s wager^* and convinced by it to go ahead and believe, what the heck! The odds are unbelievable: nothing whatsoever ventured (if you don’t value your personal integrity), and you might be a huge, huge winner! From Christopher Hitchens’s book God Is Not Great:

Theological half-gainers (Eight Years Ago Today)

By Moristotle

[Originally published on July 18, 2009, not a word different.]

In Christopher Buckley’s unexpectedly caustic memoir about losing his parents, Patricia Taylor Buckley and William F. Buckley, Jr., he recounts his father’s regret that a beloved friend whose ashes he and Christopher have just scattered was not a Catholic. “What do you mean, Pup?” Christopher asked.

Thor’s Day: The need for Christian apologies

Jonathan 3:16

By Morris Dean

In a comment on May 21's column ("What's nihilistic about nihilism?"), I used the English word "apology" for the Latin "apologia" – a formal defense of one’s opinion – meaning it as a joke. It appears that my muse may have had something else in mind that I wasn't picking up on at the time.

Ask Wednesday: Are there as many odd numbers as even?

No...but... yes...but....

By Morris Dean

[Originally published, under the title "More even than odd," on January 10, 2011.]

I was amazed one morning to discover a "proof" for something that is quite counter-intuitive. I mean, there are as many odd numbers as even numbers, right?

Sunday Review: How Jesus Became God (book)

It all started with his supposed resurrection

By Morris Dean

The Nicene creed includes the affirmation that

I believe...in one Lord Jesus Christ, the only-begotten Son of God, begotten of the Father before all worlds...one in Being with the Father.

That is, Jesus is believed to have always been God. There is some irony, then, in the title of Bart D. Ehrman's 2014 book, How Jesus Became God, which refers not to the fact of Jesus's being God, but to the belief. How did that belief come about?

Thor's Day: A new proof for the non-divinity of Jesus or the errancy of the Bible

One or the other

By Morris Dean

On a walk this morning, on the day of my writing this (August 3), I realized that the second installment of "Christian-atheist conversation: About Christianity’s non-'holy days'" [published on August 7] revealed a new proof for the non-divinity of Jesus or the errancy of the Bible, one or the other. Here's how it goes:

Thor's Day: Just us here

Together or opposed

By Morris Dean

Theology: no subject matter there.
Religion: biggest hoax we've had to bear.
    What is: just Earth and us
    with all our daily fuss –
loving, hating, contending...everywhere.
_______________
Copyright © 2014 by Morris Dean

Comment box is located below

Thor's Day: Why I am not a Mormon

By Kyle Garza

I suppose I should begin in a way that lets you see my worldview as best I can explain it, just so you know where I’m coming from. I will try to go from broad to specific. I originally intended for this to be a very different post, but it took a turn I didn’t expect mid-way through.

Thor's Day: The tie that binds

By Morris Dean

The English word "religion" derives through Old French from the Latin religiō, whose ultimate origins are obscure, but some modern scholars favor the derivation from ligare (bind, connect), probably from a prefixed re-ligare, i.e., re (again) + ligare, or "to reconnect." [Wikipedia]

Lost in the numbers

About for days ago (maybe it was five), I noticed that one of our coffee cups was missing, and I mentioned it to my wife this morning as I was putting some dishes into the washer after breakfast.
    She started to count the cups in that pattern, but I said she needn't bother, I was sure that there were only five in the kitchen now.
    She wondered what had happened to the sixth cup, then? Had she set it down some place? She went to look in the spots where she might have done that.
    While she was out of the kitchen, I looked again in the refrigerator—sometimes we set a cup in there.
    Still not there.
    I looked in the free-standing cupboard. Still not there either. (At least, I think I'd already looked there, too—at least once.)
    She returned and said she didn't seem to have set it down anywhere. Had I set it down? How about upstairs (in the "loft" above the garage where my computer is), or out in the shed (where I had recently installed some electrical wiring)?
    I'd looked in these places already also, and the cup was still in neither place.

Okay, then, she said, if we hadn't set it down someplace, what about Joaquin¹? He's the man who cleans our house once a week. He may be the best, most reliable cleaner my wife has ever engaged, but he has nevertheless broken a number of items, including, she says, all of her little ceramic "California Missions" coaster tiles.
    Well, it was possible, of course, that Joaquin had broken it. If so, it would be characteristic of him not to mention it. If it had been broken into smithereens, he might simply have discarded it.
    Still, surely not. We didn't want to believe it.

But if not Joaquin, then, what about André? He'd come over to help us get Thanksgiving over with for another year.
    Could André have taken it when he left?
    No, André could never have done that. Anyway, he left on Friday, and I was pretty sure there had been six cups on Saturday and Sunday. Nevertheless, I went into the guestroom to check whether he might have left it sitting on the nightstand.
    No, not there either.
    I went back into the kitchen to finish loading the dishwasher. Why not count one more time? I asked myself.
    Okay, there are two in the cupboard to the right of the stove. And, in the dishwasher, one, two, three,...four!?

I told my wife the sixth cup had just turned up. "It had just gotten lost temporarily in the numbers," I said.
    "You're probably not getting enough Vitamin B-12," she said. "The vegetarian kick...."
    I thought, but didn't say it, that I was probably eating enough meat. When André was here, she told me that if I didn't eat any turkey, I couldn't have anything else either. No sweet potatoes, no Brussels sprouts and tomatoes, no.... And no pumpkin pie.
    Of course I ate some turkey. Besides, as I've told my readers, I routinely compromise the moral principle of respecting other animals' right to life for the sake of the moral principle of not dishonoring my meal provider by refusing her offerings. (But, as I've also told my readers, I sometimes doubt whether I can honorably justify that compromise. I continue in a quandary over this.)

Things often get lost, or found, in the numbers—the loss or the finding conjured from the whole cloth of imperfect thought.
    When I believed in God, I was but finding him in the numbers. He was nowhere to be found in extra-mental reality.
    Just as I finally discovered that the cup was only missing in the numbers, so did I finally realize that God was only to be found there too, and not worth such finding.
    Most people (a majority of Americans, anyway) are patently more successful in performing that conjuring trick than I was.
    It's probably because of all the meat they eat.
______________

1. Not his real name

The more unbelievable, the greater the...

Thanks to Greg Houston
and indyweek.com

"The Republican Party's slapstick search for a leader," to quote Hal Crowther's August 17 article at indyweek.com ("Why does the right wing worship Ayn Rand?"), has provoked a fair amount of adult commentary this week.
    David E. Campbell and Robert D. Putnam reported in the August 16 New York Times ("Crashing the Tea Party") that

the Tea Party is increasingly swimming against the tide of public opinion: among most Americans, even before the furor over the debt limit, its brand was becoming toxic....
    Polls show that disapproval of the Tea Party is climbing. In April 2010, a New York Times/CBS News survey found that 18 percent of Americans had an unfavorable opinion of it, 21 percent had a favorable opinion and 46 percent had not heard enough. Now, 14 months later, Tea Party supporters have slipped to 20 percent, while their opponents have more than doubled, to 40 percent.
    Of course, politicians of all stripes are not faring well among the public these days. But in data we have recently collected, the Tea Party ranks lower than any of the 23 other groups we asked about—lower than both Republicans and Democrats. It is even less popular than much maligned groups like "atheists" [emphasis mine] and "Muslims." Interestingly, one group that approaches it in unpopularity is the Christian Right.

    Less popular than atheists? The Christian Right unpopular? If true, this is very good news.
    We're all familiar with the First Amendment of the United States Constitution. As I pointed out in "Political magical thinking" about a year ago, it "guarantees the right of the People to believe any damn fool thing they please."
    And they will.
    And the effect of their right to believe damn fool things is magnified by their tendency to make up for the foolishness of much of what they believe by believing it all the more fervently. The more incredible their beliefs, the stronger their belief in them. The greater the foolishness, the greater their faith in it.

Crowther suggests some examples of this foolishness:

Could we start, at least, by dismissing candidates who called for President Obama's birth certificate or raised the specter of Shariah law in America, followed by briskly ushering offstage lunatics who dismiss global warming as a socialist plot?....
    ...When tea-stained legislators gut environmental laws to protect corporate profits, when they sneer at climate change while America bakes in its bedrock like a big green casserole, when Republican educational reform means classrooms with fewer teachers and more guns—there's a temptation for reasonable Americans to throw up their hands and succumb to despair. Is it a death wish or a scheme to kill the rest of us, when "conservatives" fight against clean air laws, or legislate to place a loaded pistol in every yahoo's holster? I've reached the second half of my seventh decade, and I've never seen such an intimidating swarm of fanatics and fools marching under one banner....

In John M. Broder's August 17 article in the Times ("Bashing E.P.A. Is New Theme in G.O.P. Race"), Michelle Bachmann is quoted from Iowa:

"I guarantee you the E.P.A. will have doors locked and lights turned off, and they will only be about conservation. It will be a new day and a new sheriff in Washington, D.C."
    In an earlier debate she said the agency should be renamed the "job-killing organization of America." She has called global-warming science a hoax.
    ...[She] wants to padlock the E.P.A.’s doors, as does former Speaker Newt Gingrich. Gov. Rick Perry of Texas wants to impose an immediate moratorium on environmental regulation.
    ...In his book, Fed Up, Our Fight to Save America from Washington, Mr. Perry described global-warming science as "one contrived phony mess that is falling apart under its own weight" and a "secular carbon cult" led by false prophets like Al Gore.
    But...the American people, by substantial majorities, are concerned about air and water pollution, and largely trust the E.P.A., national surveys say.

Another foolishness is the role sought for religion (Christianity, strikingly in parallel with the role Islamists seek for Islam). Say Campbell and Putnam:

Next to being a Republican, the strongest predictor of being a Tea Party supporter today was a desire, back in 2006, to see religion play a prominent role in politics. And Tea Partiers continue to hold these views: they seek "deeply religious" elected officials, approve of religious leaders' engaging in politics and want religion brought into political debates....
    This inclination among the Tea Party faithful to mix religion and politics explains their support for Representative Michele Bachmann of Minnesota and Governor Rick Perry of Texas....

Fideism is the philosophy, generally applied to theology, that beliefs may be held without evidence or reason, or even in conflict with evidence and reason. And, as I've pointed out, people tend to believe something all the more strongly if the evidence for it is weak or nonexistent (or if it conflicts with the evidence).
    The case of the Tea Party argues that all of this applies to political ideology as well as to theology.
    The Tea Party candidates' rampant ideological and religious foolishness has ascended to dizzying heights. Maybe—just maybe—Americans are starting to demand that they climb down before we all throw up. (I think that some of us already have.)

Beatings will continue

Beatings will continue
until morale improves

I heard a good one yesterday: The theology of the Old Testament, like a cartoon, can be accurately captioned as the corporate dictum: "Beatings will continue until morale improves."
    I "heard" this from Bart D. Ehrman's 2008 book, which I'm currently reading, God's Problem: How the Bible Fails to Answer Our Most Important Question—Why We Suffer. He's surveying the so-called "major" and "minor" prophets of the Old Testament (the designations mean nothing more than the relative word counts of their prophetic books) to show how they tried to explain why the God of the ancient Israelites was treating them so horribly. That is, it was the prophets' answer to that "most important question."
    By the way, it's because the Bible fails to answer the question to Ehrman's satisfaction that he recanted his devout Christian faith and became an agnostic. He went to Moody Bible College in his teens, then to evangelical Wheaton College, and on to Princeton Theological Seminary, where he decided to become a Biblical scholar. He's now at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
    Ehrman points out that those "prophecies" applied only to the times in which they were written, and to the people to whom they were written, so the jehovahs (as I familiarly term Jehovah's Witnesses), and everyone else, for that matter, have no basis for claiming that the Bible foretells what is happening today.
    Nevertheless, "the beatings will continue" made me think of the Holocaust. The Jews took quite a beating from the Nazis (and from many hypocrites around the world who silently approved the Nazis' attitude and actions to kill Jews). Is the Jews' God still trying to improve their morale by helping Muslim jihadists to wipe Israel off the map?

Of course not. But this does raise the question in my mind whether there might be something else going on to explain why the Jews have been persecuted continually down through the ages (besides their having been tagged Christ-killers, which I don't think explains why the Muslims hate them so much).
    It occurred to me to wonder whether it might be the fact that they invented monotheism? (Some credit Moses with the invention.)
    Sure, orthodox Christians and Muslims are proud to believe in the "one, true God," but consider that they might be proud only in the part of their mind that they're conscious of. A twentieth-century Jew by the name of Sigmund Freud taught us that our unconscious can be quite out of step with our conscious.
    The unconscious of a devout believer can have as many misgivings about a God who allows us to suffer (and may even cause us to suffer, to punish us or try to get us to shape up) as the conscious mind of Bart D. Ehrman can.
    What if even devout believers, in their unconscious, are sick at heart that they even believe in God in the first place? Might they not seek a scapegoat on whom to unleash their anger and otherwise self-disgust (all the while preserving their conscious belief, in which they're too invested to join Ehrman in recanting)?

An amusing conjecture, at any rate.

Pricklings of thought from yesterday

"Time unremembered," I said. It's time unremembered and unrememberable, but not entirely temps perdu. A century ago Proust searched his memory and largely found his own lost time, and yesterday we imagined our lost time before our history began to be recorded. We imagined that animal sacrifice predated history's recording. And, of course, there are archaeological records.

"Their God," I said, referring to the god of Arab Muslims. I realized overnight that the monotheistic god of the Abrahamic religions isn't the same "one God" for each of them. The idea that they all three have the same god had always been seductive. "I mean," one explains, "they're monotheistic religions. One god. So, of course, the same god."
    Seductive it may be, but not so.
    The original "God of Abraham" was the tribal god of a wandering people, his chosen. Yahweh (or Jehovah) was fierce and jealous and vengeful.
    The three-in-one god who emerged from all of the theological and pastoral intrigue of the early Christians was benevolent and forgiving (except of the Jews, of course, for whom the case was made that they were the murderers of Christ and deserved everything they would have coming to them).
    And Allah is..., well, a god to whom his people still sacrifice other people.

The number of possibilities when it comes to the number of gods is huge. One? Two? Three? Poly, poly? Or...zero?

America is not a godless nation

...despite the ravings of the wild ayatollahs.

"Strange Tastes," runs the headline of an article in the religion section of this morning's Burlington Times-News.
    Since time unremembered, God is whomever animals are sacrificed to.
    I was in the kitchen when my wife gasped from the dining room.
    "What?" I said.
    "Something disgusting."
    "Donald Trump in the news again?"
    "Worse than that."
    "Muslim terrorists?"
    She read me the caption from the photo: "Chef prepares Rocky Mountain Oysters for deep-frying in advance of festival held Thursday."

Men used to sacrifice animals to God. The Jews still do. At least, in Israel. Jews here, having feasted long in a heathen nation, have given it up.
    And Arab Muslims, of course, sacrifice humans to their God.

Theologian Paul Tillich said that God was "our ultimate concern."
    Okay. In America, where the ultimate concern of most is to feed their trivial tastes, those tastes have become God.
    America remains devoutly religious.

Theological fallout from "birthtime"

The ACLU directrix who proposed the "birthtime (b.t.) method" for calculating your next birthday ("When's your birthday time?") had trouble sleeping the next night. His dreams were haunted by profound theological rumblings, which, round about 3:30 a.m., gave rise to the following proof for the non-existence of God:

God, by definition, created the universe.
    But only a cruel God would have organized the clockwork of our planet around the sun in such a fashion that something as complicated as birthtime is needed to calculate accurate birthdays.
    Therefore, since God, also by definition, is not cruel, birthtime implies that there is no God and also implies that creation is the consequence of random happenstance.

This can't be right, can it? If you think you can refute this argment, please be so kind as to offer your refutation in a comment. Thanks in advance.

More even than odd

I was amazed this morning to discover a "proof"¹ for something that is quite counter-intuitive. I mean, there are as many odd numbers as even numbers, right?
    Wrong. There are actually more even numbers than odd numbers. Here's the proof that came to me while I was eating my grapefruit half:
    If you add an even number of even numbers, you get an even number.
    But you also get an even number if you add an even number of odd numbers! And you don't conversely get any extra odd numbers when you add an odd number of even numbers. Rather, you seem to gain some even numbers—or lose some odd numbers, depending on how you look at.
    Therefore, there are apparently more even numbers than odd ones. And I haven't even tried to find other ways we might gain even numbers or lose odd ones.
    Isn't that amazing!

How can that be? Can that possibly be right?
    If true, it is so astounding, do you think maybe this might be a clue toward discovering a proof for the existence of God? Or maybe for the existence of two of them (God even rather than odd)? Or for their nonexistence? Wow.
    What if duotheism is the True Way, rather than monotheism? Or if atheists have to deny the existence of two Gods in order to be atheists? "Aduotheists" is hard to pronounce.

An odd God limerick

More even than odd...the truth about God?
Then let's swell the ranks of Their Squad,
    Double Their pronouns,
    Use King and Queen crowns,
And on Fridays eat twice as much cod.

Notes for further analysis:

1. The operator "even number of" is equivalent to "multiplied by two" (or "the numerical result made even").
2. The operator "odd number of" is not equivalent to "the numerical result made odd" (if the things there are an odd number of are even numbers).

    Further disquisition
_______________

1. Note: This post is labeled "humor." I only added this note later when I suspected that some readers had not detected the post's parody of wishful or theological thinking, possibly because they'd noticed that I'd lately been taking myself so very seriously.

Theological space [is empty]

I often fall to musing while doing household or personal chores. Like cleaning up the kitchen after dinner, or bathing in the morning. This morning (or perhaps it was last night), I fell to contemplating the billions of hours that human beings have spent theologizing. If God doesn't exist (which I believe "he" doesn't), how could intelligent beings waste so much time that way?
    As often (if not invariably) happens when I muse, an idea came to me, prompted by musing's tendency to pose questions and thereby invoke the principle, Ask and ye shall receive.
    The idea provided by my muse (so to speak) was that humans have also spent billions of hours contemplating mathematics, or what might be called "logical space." Well, inventive minds can also posit theological entities (gods, angels, devils, sins, etc.) and amuse (or torture) themselves for hours puzzling over their conceptual implications. And they have.
    But, though mathematical entities (numbers, for example) don't exist in the way atoms and avalanches and alligators do, they have proven themselves in all sorts of theoretical and practical applications (science, economics, technology, everyday commerce).
    God hasn't.

Captain Skyhook

A skyhook, according to philosopher Daniel C. Dennett, is a source of design complexity that did not build on lower, simpler layers—in simple terms, a miracle. Dennett was apparently the first to apply the term to discuss a certain kind of retort to evolution. Writes Dennett:

The first use noted by the [Oxford English Dictionary] is from 1915: "an aeroplane pilot commanded to remain in place (aloft) for another hour, replies 'the machine is not fitted with skyhooks.'" The skyhook concept is perhaps a descendant of the deus ex machina of ancient Greek dramaturgy: when second-rate playwrights found their plots leading their heroes into inescapable difficulties, they were often tempted to crank down a god onto the scene, like Superman, to save the situation supernaturally. Or skyhooks may be an entirely independent creation of convergent folkloric evolution. Skyhooks would be wonderful things to have, great for lifting unwieldy objects out of difficult circumstances, and speeding up all sorts of construction projects. Sad to say, they are impossible. [p. 74]

Dennett uses the term extensively in his 1995 book, Darwin's Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life (there are thirty-six page citations in the index, some of them spanning several pages of text).
    The danger in Darwin's idea that evolution by means of natural selection requires no skyhooks lay in the terrible quandary into which it pushed people who needed to believe in God. The project of believers who thought that truth was relevant to their belief came to be to try to prove either that species didn't really evolve in the first place or, if they did, that natural processes weren't adequate to explain their evolution. That is, God (or some skyhook, anyway) was necessary, after all.

Not all believers think truth relevant. As my friend Xavier commented once, about people who swear by astrology:

I've come to the realization that people's brains are wired in entirely different ways such that truth is as useless a concept to some as it is useful to others.

I suppose, for "full disclosure," that I'd better provide the rest of Xavier's comment, for he was counseling me on the futility of trying to convince certain people by appealing to reason:

As such, skepticism is either a personal endeavor or an endeavor pursued with like-minded individuals.
    To put it bluntly, when it comes to certain subjects, I just bite my tongue and see the conversations as an exploration into the human psyche.

Xavier appears to have developed better tongue-biting skills than I.

Download your worries

Driving down a country road this morning, on our way to a local park for a walk in the woods, my wife and I (and Siegfried) passed a church (Baptist, probably) with one of those large, ubiquitous glass-enclosed sign boxes identifying the church and the pastor and displaying a pithy saying intended to woo converts, if not make you feel guilty for forsaking religion (or both, I guess). The saying in this box was more "with it" than most:

Download your troubles
Go online with God

    My wife and I discussed the metaphor and couldn't decide whether the pastor (or his publicist) was only semi-computer literate or had a new brand of theology. I mean, why would you want to download worries onto yourself from "up there" (on the Internet)? Wouldn't you upload them, give them up to God (in prayer, supposedly)? Or does the saying mean to suggest that by "going online with God," you ascend to Him somehow, so that in downloading your worries you'd be sending them back down (or leaving them down) there where you no longer have to deal with them?
    Fortunately, it doesn't make any difference.

The pithy saying in the graphic I found on the Internet is more interesting. It addresses a serious, real problem in the world today, in America especially because of the way the First Amendment is usually characterized, as guaranteeing "freedom of religion." The actual text of the amendment is:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

While outlawing laws "prohibiting the free exercise thereof" does seem to guarantee freedom of religion, outlawing "establishment of religion" equally seems to guarantee freedom from religion. It would certainly be strange otherwise, given that some of our leading founding fathers were hardly religious.
    On Earth today, freedom from is in more need of protection than freedom of, what with false advertising like that being downloadable from the Internet. If atheists are currently more active than they have been, I'd say it's because they feel they need to push back. The harder, the more they buy Sam Harris's warning that religion is a menace:

In the best case, faith leaves otherwise well-intentioned people incapable of thinking rationally about many of their deepest concerns; at worst, it is a continuous source of human violence. Even now, many of us are motivated not by what we know but by what we are content to imagine. Many are still eager to sacrifice happiness, compassion, and justice in this world, for a fantasy of a world to come. These and other degradations await us along the well-worn path of piety. Whatever our religious differences may mean for the next life, they have only one terminus in this one—a future of ignorance and slaughter. [p. 223, The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason, 2004]