Why Atheists are as Brain Dead About God as Religious People

Posted by Josh in July 30th, 2008

Posted in: Religion, Art & Spirituality Tags: Atheist, God, Jiddu Krishnamurti, Joseph Campbell, Theist

I’m close to finshing Dawkins’s book The God Delusion and I haven’t come away with much more than I started with. I’m already a believer in Natural Selection (which I knew has nothing to do with random chance as so many religious people ignorantly claim). It just makes sense to me that over time, species adapt to their environment and each other in a way which guarantees their survival. Really, that’s a no brainer to me. Memes and all that other shit I find to be scientifically and sociologically (which I guess is a science also) valid.

And religious people…c’mon. You’re seriously telling me that you believe that two thousand years ago a man was born of a woman who was a virgin, that he raised someone from the dead, was killed and rose from the dead three days later, ascended to some place in the sky 40 days after that and now sits at the right hand of his father (who is also him) and listens to every prayer and passes judgment on every soul that ever lived? And somehow, this story is supposed to have significance to the fortitude of my eternal soul?

Seriously? Pass me some of that shit you’re smoking.

If I cut my brain stem at the root, punctured my ear drums and poked my eyes out with sharpened tinker toy sticks; I still don’t think I could believe something so ludicrous as historical actual fact.

But some swear up and down that it is. Fine, I give this final argument. If Jesus ascended to “heaven” two thousand years ago, give or take 33 and 1/3, then even traveling at the speed of light his body wouldn’t even be out of our own galaxy yet–not to mention the 100 billion other galaxies (if I’m remembering my Carl Sagan correctly).

But I digress.

Metaphors. Every word is a metaphor. Ideas are metaphors. Signs and symbols are metaphors. God is a symbol. The word “God” is a metaphor which refers to something completely outside human knowledge and experience.

So you can’t think about it.

You can’t explain it.

You can’t talk about it.

You can’t put it on a greeting card and sell it on Sunday morning.

You can’t put its likeness on a flag and use it to drop bombs on brown people on the other side of the world.

You can’t sell it.

You can’t smell it.

And you damn sure can’ t build a system of worship around it (which is really a system of power over peoples’ minds and emotions, lets’ be honest).

Science is the systematic study of the nature of the Universe, what it actually is like. And this changes from moment to moment as our methods deepen our understanding. And science is far superior to religion if we’re talking about a methodology that actually helps us evolve by utilizing our natural and mental resources to their most efficient uses. After all, science is a system set up to prove its fundamental laws wrong through controlled experimentation and broad communication. Religion, on the other hand, is exactly the opposite–a closed-minded hurt machine built on channeling dread of death into total and absolute self immolation.

But science has a limit just as thought itself has a limit. Krishnamurti once said, “Intelligence comes into being when the brain recognizes its own fallibility–when it discovers once and for all what it is capable of and what it is not.”

And so just as the general theist thinks they know that an intelligent designer is pulling the strings of existence; the general atheist thinks they know that Natural Selection is at the heart of all existence and that somehow that should be enough for everyone.

It’s not. The humility that comes at the edge of the end of thought is the secret knowledge of what that one step beyond death is–ultimate transcendental (meaning unknowable) release.

This is the only meditation worth undertaking (all the “Ohms” and cross-legged sitting stances are just posturing) and in the end makes the intellectualization of the atheists look like a just-slightly higher floating turd than the idol worshiping of the theists.

Read Krishnamurti.

Read Joseph Campbell.

All will be clear.

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jdallen Said in July 30th, 2008 @9:49 pm

And yet, people that are firmly convinced that there is no God, Jesus was only a really cool guy who had a good line of BS, find it easy as hell to believe bullshit like aliens from another star system.

People are pretty fucked up, huh.

Infidel753 Said in July 30th, 2008 @11:44 pm

the general atheist thinks they know that Natural Selection is at the heart of all existence and that somehow that should be enough for everyone.

I have yet to meet any atheist who would make a statement as meaningless and religious-sounding as “Natural Selection is at the heart of all existence” (or capitalize “natural selection”).

But to address what I think is your larger point, the natural universe is all there is. It doesn’t matter whether some humans think it’s “enough” for them or not. We can believe in souls and yearn for “higher” meaning all we want. That doesn’t mean those things exist.

The humility that comes at the edge of the end of thought is the secret knowledge of what that one step beyond death is–ultimate transcendental (meaning unknowable) release.

How is it possible to have knowledge, secret or otherwise, of something one defines as unknowable? Actually, of course, it is unknowable, since by definition no living human has experienced a post-death state. However, observation gives as a fairly strong basis for an educated guess about “what that one step beyond death is”. Damage to a particular part of the brain usually leads to impairment or total loss of whatever ability that part of the brain performs. By logical extrapolation, total cessation of all brain activity (such as happens at death) probably produces exactly the result it appears to produce: total cessation of all the mental functions the brain normally performs, that is, the end of consciousness and all the other components of the mind, meaning the plain and simple end of that individual’s existence. If you start a bunch of complex programs running on a computer and then smash the computer, the programs don’t go anywhere, they just stop. If your brain completely stops functioning, most likely, the same thing happens to you — you just stop.

Actually, my impression is that most flying-saucer nuts are religious. Most first-person tales of encounters with aliens are thinly-disguised rehashes of religious wish-fulfillment — 500 years ago the same people would have been reporting encounters with angels or demons.

As for actual scientists, ten or twenty years ago it was actually quite rational to believe that there was intelligent life elsewhere in the universe, based on our knowledge of the universe at that time. But very few actual scientists were among those claiming that aliens had actually visited the Earth.

And I don’t believe Jesus was “a really cool guy” — most likely he was completely mythical. As far as I know, there is no evidence suggesting that Jesus ever existed at all.

Josh Said in July 31st, 2008 @8:43 am

Infidel, good to hear from you my friend. I’ve been following your “I told you so’s” lately about how the Obama nod will lose the Democrats their shot at the Presidency yet again–interesting stuff.

The title of this piece was actually a play on words and your comment underscores the point. The medical definition of death is when all brain activity ceases. This is also what happens once the brain recognizes that the process of thought has a beginning and an ending. Thought is a natural function of the human organism like peristalsis. Thought is the analysis of information relayed to the brain by the five senses and comparison against the content of consciousness. The content of consciousness is experience, that storehouse of memory that composes one’s identity, what we call “Me.”

So thought is an encapsulated function of consciousness which has a beginning (we are born) and and ending (we are dead). What happens to a mind that accepts this ending as a fact of nature–is such a mind apart from the acceptance? The observer which is accepting this fact of death is not apart from it; it is the death of itself which it is recognizing and then what happens?

My point is that the atheist, as an observer, is generally still mentally standing as an entity apart from the observation at the end of their argument. They say that death is the ending but they have not yet ended themselves. Once the realization actually occurs, there is no longer an entity there to observe. The ego has actually “died to the waking moment” and this transcendental action is a movement inwardly in all directions at once.

It sounds like I’m splitting hairs but I suspect that the secret to world peace and universal happiness is close to the distinction.

Infidel753 Said in August 1st, 2008 @9:01 pm

Greetings Josh,

I’m not sure I do understand your point here. It’s true that when we accept the fact that biological death simply means the permanent end of consciousness, we do so without having experienced the permanent end of consciousness, since this is something which, by definition, no conscious entity can “have experienced”. Indeed, we can’t really even imagine the permanent cessation of our own consciousness — our brains aren’t structured to be able to do that. But so what? We accept the reality of, and can even say we “understand” (to an extent), many things which we can’t truly imagine. We can’t really imagine how large the solar system is, or the nature of quantum mechanics, or the conditions at the center of the Sun, or even exactly how the sex act physically feels to a person of the opposite gender. Yet we can claim some empirical knowledge of such phenomena.

In any case, none of this refutes the obvious conclusion. We can observe the behavior of the world around us and realize that biological death almost always means the permanent cessation of conciousness. The validity of the conclusion is unaffected by the fact that we can’t experience or imagine what that would be like.

To me, it’s somewhat academic since I don’t expect to ever die — but that’s a whole other issue.

Infidel753 Said in August 1st, 2008 @9:09 pm

PS:
.
I suspect that the secret to world peace and universal happiness is close to the distinction.
.
I can’t see any basis for thinking that such a “secret” exists. Generation by generation the world grows less violent; today’s rates of death from crime and war today are far lower than those of the Middle Ages, which in turn were far lower than those of hunter-gatherer societies (which were universal before the dawn of agriculture). Compared with where we started, we’ve already come 99% of the way toward a totally peaceful society. Will we ever make it 100% of the way? I really doubt it — human nature is what it is — but I don’t see how philosophical abstractions have much of a role to play.
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Regards
.
The Infidel