Arguing about God

I might regret posting this, but I wanted to put my thoughts into words and maybe bounce ideas off people, so here we go.

(BTW, idk if this is against the rules. Though, if I were in charge of QQ, I'd probably be hesitant about allowing religious arguments, so...)

Some background about me, I was raised Christian. No big surprise there, I bet a lot of people were due to it being, you know, a popular religion worldwide. I always had problems with it growing up (born in the 1990s) and the new atheist movement of the 2000s-2010s certainly didn't help either.

However, whether or not God exists, although the question did bug me, wasn't actually what tripped me up the most (though if anyone wants to argue about the existence of god, id be interested in that as well).

Rather, I had some problems with the biblical idea of God.

My thoughts might get a little messy, but please bear with me, I'll try to make it clear.

So, when you live as a person in the world, as we do, and you start getting older, you start to realize just how powerless you really are. While I do believe a person does have some measure of control, and certainly over their own lives, that 'ability to influence things' runs out really fast.

So lets say for the sake of argument, a person can control their own life. What they eat, whether they exercise, what work they do, who they get into a relationship with and so on...

But what about when you zoom out a little and look at your close family. How much influence do you have over them? Maybe you can argue you actually have a lot of influence, they love you (hopefully) and will actually listen if you say something, like 'this place sucks, its too dangerous/poor/dirty, let's move somewhere else'. So we have some control over our close family.

But what about the local community? What about your city/town? What about your province/ state? What about your country? What about the world? What about the Cosmos at large?

As you can see, the influence of the individual quickly reaches its limit. Now, I don't actually have a problem with that, I personally don't mind being 'weak' in the sense of not being able to control things outside of myself.

However,

I really do have a major problem with other people trying to exert their influence over me. And unfortunately, there are a lot of people who like to play that game, who get a kick out of being the biggest, fattest d*ck at the sausage fest.

So the Bible comes along and God says 'I'm going to rule over you all by virtue of being the biggest, strongest most invincible thing around' and I'm supposed to be happy with that? Though, to give the Bible credit, God is supposed to be a good ruler, not like the human rulers we have on earth...

...except what if God isn't 'just'?

Now, this is where things get tricky, because you can start arguing about what is 'good' and what is 'evil'. Ultimately, I personally agree with the moral relativists in the sense that morality doesn't really exist, being concepts we made up and are constantly being redefined. And because they don't have a fixed definition, the concepts are somewhat useless (because what's the point of a measuring stick that constantly changes sizes?)

so the point is, whether the bible defines God as 'just' doesn't matter in an objective sense. God doesn't 'rule' by virtue of being, well... virtuous, but because he's the most powerful. How is that different from what we have here on earth?

(But what about democracy? We elect the guys we like yada yada...

But what if I dont want a leader? What if I dont want someone to be in charge of me? Can I vote for that? No? Because the politicians like being in charge and would never give up their power.)

So am I a satanist then? Because the satan is exactly the guy who said 'why should I be happy with you ruling over me'? I mean, the word 'satan' itself isn't actually a name, but comes from an old word (either greek or hebrew, i have no clue) that means 'one who opposes'.

Except no, I'm not a satanist, because the devil wants to overthrow God and sit on his chair to rule in his place. And he supposedly hates mankind, so...

(I'm aware of the Gnostic ideology about the serpent wanting to set mankind free, but I don't buy that either. Why would he do that? If you are religious and subscribe to that, you surely have to wonder what your 'god', satan, gets out of the deal.)

So no matter whether you're an atheist or Christian, you run into the same problem of ultimately being unable to escape from under the thumb of something way more powerful than yourself (to the atheist, that's government. and even if you join government and eventually become some bigshot, your ass can still be disposed of by a random hobo with a stolen pistol. wait, how did jfk die again? I digress.)

That one scene with Jesus and the disciples comes to mind where they argue amongst each other about who's the most important among them, so Jesus says:

Luke 24-27

²⁴ Now there was also a dispute among them, as to which of them should be considered the greatest. ²⁵ And He said to them, “The kings of the Gentiles exercise lordship over them, and those who exercise authority over them are called ‘benefactors.’ ²⁶ But not so among you; on the contrary, he who is greatest among you, let him be as the younger, and he who governs as he who serves. ²⁷ For who is greater, he who sits at the table, or he who serves? Is it not he who sits at the table? Yet I am among you as the One who serves.

I don't know what to make of that in the greater context of the bible, so I'll just end this weird rant here. But the idea of having to be a servant not only of God, but other human beings who are just as weak and stupid of myself, is really hard to swallow...

 

I recommend you read Christian apologetics and theology. Actually, throw in some some philosophy in there too. Christianity would not have happened without Plato. (If the only pieces of philosophy you ever read are Plato's dialogues that's good enough, though of course there's much more) Frankly, I always just ignore all arguing about religion on the internet, because it never gets beyond the same idiotic arguments regurgitated over and over again.

Now, as for recs... You could probably start with stuff like Mere Christianity, The Everlasting Man, The Case for Christ, and The Abolition of Man. Beginner type stuff. Of course, I assume you've already read the Bible. If you want to start "chronologically" and understand as much of Christianity as possible without turning into a scholar or whatever, then starting with Plato's dialogues (like I said he's important) and then advance into the Church Fathers' writings. The Confessions, City of God, On Grace and Free Will, etc. After that comes Scholasticism, which is the term we use to define all the philosophical (and thus theological since everything was about God) works made in the medieval period, but you can just skip them, honestly. Post-schism the Church abandoned the Platonism of the Church Fathers and adopted some kind of proto-materialist Aristotelianism, and just about all of works of Scholasticism are about trying to fit Aristoteles' philosophy into a Christian box, which is just meh. I mean, they're not totally worthless. But they're not required reading. Then you could start searching more modern (read: written after the reformation) stuff. I'm sure there's lists online. Whatever you think about Protestantism, there's no denying that the shitstorm Luther started brought back a much-needed vitality and energy back to Christianity. The best works of theology and philosophy that we've got would not have been written down without the reformation giving Europe a shock.

Here's a more full list of recs:

Beginner: Mere Christianity, The Everlasting Man, The Case for Christ, and The Abolition of Man
Intermediate: On The Incarnation, On The Holy Spirit, Christianity and Culture, The Major Works of Anselm, On The Cosmic Mystery of Jesus Christ, Pensees, Reasonable Faith, and On The Marks of The Church
Advanced: City of God, Summa Theologica

That good enough for you? I'm sure 14 books could keep you occupied for a while. There's a lot more even beyond this (there is no end to books) but you can find that stuff yourself.

Oh, and in case you follow my advice and read Plato first, (and you should, everybody should read Plato) then I recommend this order:

1. Eutyphro
2. The Apology
3. Crito
4. Meno
5. The Symposium
6. Gorgias
7. Phaedrus
8. Cratylus, Ion, Euthydemos, Menexenus
12. The Republic
13. Parmenides, Theaetetus, Sophist, Statesman
14. Timaeus, Critias, The Laws

Plato wrote more than this but this is enough. Really, they're easy to understand, not like the obscenely dense works of philosophy that came after. The dialogues are always just a bunch of dudes talking and Socrates makes sure to explain things like everybody else is 5 years old. Of course if you want to understand Plato better, then you could also read a book discussing the pre-socratics (such as The First Philosophers) and also the Illiad and Odyssey and the Theogony. As of all that stuff comes up in his dialogues.

Well, I have nothing more to say. If you actually happen to read all this stuff then you should be able to just find more by yourself. It's not hard. Reading this stuff will either solidify or pulverize your faith. I can't say which because I'm not you.

 

To me, it's not about trying to confirm or deny my beliefs. It's more that I'm just lamenting the weakness of the individual. No matter which way you go, there will always be some kind of force, ready to crush you into a pulp if you step out of line, whether that be God, government or nature.

Though, if there is no God, then at least death provides an escape. If God does exist, well... eternal damnation is an even worse outcome for those who refuse to bend the knee.

Pretty dark, so I feel compelled to put people at ease by saying I have no thoughts of self deletion. It's going to happen anyways, so I might as well stay on the rollercoaster of life until it reaches its inevitable end.

Edit: I read some Plato and ended up going down a weird Gnostic/Hermetic rabbit hole... not in the sense of believing it, but discovering it for the first time. The whole 'proper love of boys' thing was really f*cking messed up... the ancients were kinda messed up in general. Not that modern humanity is any less messed up... I'm honestly disenfranchised with humanity in general...

 

The stuff I mentioned are supposed to help with coping with that. But, well, I'm not Christian or even an Agnostic myself. I'm an atheist, despite having read so much about Christianity. As for why, I'll try to explain to you. It's pretty simple. "A little philosophy inclineth man's mind to atheism; but depth in philosophy bringeth men's minds about to religion." - Sir Francis Bacon. Well, he was wrong. Philosophy makes you believe in God, not in religion. And at some point it makes you stop caring about God, even if he exists. (Well at least it did to me)

Believing in God has never been the issue. There's nothing hard in believing in the existence of some absolute creator. The hard thing, the thing that needs faith, is believing in other men. Believing them when they say that God cares about this or that, or that he wants you to act in a certain way and that he will punish if you don't... How can you believe them when they're just humans like you? How could they know? And of course, they can answer with stuff like an Angel revealed it to them or whatever, but isn't it impossible for you to know if they're saying the truth? Let's say that you have a machine that detects if someone is speaking the truth, and you use it on them and it shows that they believe what they're saying... You still can't confirm whether or not they really got a revelation from God or just had visions from being crazy or doing drugs or whatever. So it's impossible. Nothing about God can be known.

If you read Plato and other such ancient Greek philosophers, you'll notice that all of them dismiss the Greek gods and try to make up some kind of universal supreme "good and virtuous" God. The Jews didn't come up with the idea of a supreme God themselves, they just got inspired by the Greeks. Then, once you get past scholasticism and reach modern philosophy and things like Descartes and Spinoza and Leibniz and so on and so forth (there's so damn many) you'll see that they start doing the same: They start talking more and more about a single supreme God and less and less about Christianity. At some point, simple logic makes them ask the question: "Why would God be good? We keep saying that the Supreme Being must be inherently good, but what's our reason for this?" And suddenly God has no qualities anymore. This keeps going on and on until they reach a point which goes like this: "God created the universe and all its natural laws, but has and takes no action beyond this." But, at that point, doesn't God essentially not exist? He's not doing anything, and he's not gonna judge you or care about you or anything. So there's no reason to do any kind of religious practice. Thus, Agnostics were created.

And shortly after that, atheists too started to come in droves. No need to believe in God in that situation. Though most of them instead of being real atheists were just idiots who swapped one religion for another. (with "Science" being this new religion)

Also, regarding the afterlife... I'd like to talk about my beliefs on what happens after death. It's similar to stuff like Nietzsche's Eternal Recurrence. Put simply, it relies on assuming that these two basic ideas are true:

1. That nothing is ever created or destroyed, only changed.
2. That time is infinite.

When you take this to it's rational conclusions, you get an idea of what can happen after death. You understand that it is impossible for someone to cease to exist forever- That there is no such thing as oblivion. And that all this, everything that you've ever experienced, not only has it happened before, it also will happen again, an infinite amount of times. That's what Nietzsche said. But he failed to understand that things wouldn't always be the same. All possible variations should happen. Eventually, the universe will reconstruct you. The configuration of atoms which makes up your brain will form again, some absurd amount of years after your death. It's not physically possible for that not to happen. Maybe it'll be with your full memories, maybe with only a part of your memories, and maybe you'll be in a totally alien situation or be reliving your life again, or maybe you won't have any memories at all but your entire life down to the last detail will be repeated the exact same way. Your body, too, is unlikely to be the same. Maybe it won't even be a human body anymore. Or maybe it really will be the same body you always had. It's all possible.

Put simply, everything that could ever possibly happen not only has already happened an infinite amount of times, but also will happen an infinite amount of times in the future. You don't even need alternate universes, everything can happen in just this one. It may sound absurd, but its purely "scientific". No religion needed for this. And it's why I'm not particularly scared of death. I'm expecting that "death" will last but a moment and then I'll be awake again in the future. I can only hope I'll be in a pleasant situation and not unspeakably horrible one. (Which is also possible)

That's because you thought it was sexual. For most of Greece it sure was, but for Plato? Nope. He despised sodomy and homosex. He shits on it a lot. Unsurprisingly, when it came to men on men stuff Plato only supported platonic romance. Sexual lust was for inferior "men" who couldn't control themselves. He only accepted having sex with women because it had an actual reason in the form of creating children.

 

That's... too much for my brain to handle, I admit. Though, I do agree with the part about not being able to have faith in other people (my previous comment already included that, so I'm just repeating myself).

The after death thing you talked about however... I don't see it happening. The big crunch has already been debunked to my knowledge, so after the finite universe accelerates outward into infinity, well... thats it, game over.

But really when you get to the realm of talking about theoretical physics and how space could possibly not be infinte, but instead in the shape of a donut or whatever, it gets way too cooky and there are too many different ideas floating around to have any kind of meaningful conversation.

And all this stuff is beyond our control anyway, no matter how the cookie crumbles. You dont even have to talk about life being meaningless or us having to create our own meaning, just purely from the perspective of how much influence the individual has over anything outside himself, it's pretty inconsequential.

I don't think you can ever get away from that fact, no matter your beliefs or worldview. In an effort to keep things... not so dark, we can still live our lives and enjoy things...

 

The real problem is that you actually care about things about things that are beyond you, instead of being merely curious about them. Humans are apes, you know. Hobbes was wrong when he said that the natural state of humanity is a war of every man against every man. The natural state (or, more accurately, the initial state) of humanity is to live like chimps or gorillas. Wandering tribes of hunter-gatherers (composed of about 100 to 150 people) that only use basic tools and either trade with or kill/assimilate any other tribes that they meet. The "tribe" part is especially important. The universalist (I.E caring about the whole world) thought that is very common today sounds nice, but it ultimately runs against what is natural for humans, which is to merely care about the "tribe". Which is why anybody with universalist morals that ends up learning too much about how the world is ends up turning out the depressed from how fucked it all is or whatever. They don't have the brains to deal with it. But it's not like I'm advocating for nationalism or primitivism or whatever. A nation is still too big for a person, and we're never gonna let go of our science and technology even if nukes or whatever ends up pulverizing our civilization. It's dumb to advocate for impossible things.

We wouldn't have these problems if the human brain had evolved to cope with all of humanity, but it only evolved to cope with a small tribe that would always be close to you and that you would keep working with all time. Our societies and technology evolved faster than our brain, which is why people have all these issues with it. Of course, by this point I've stopped caring about it, which is why I'm happy at all.

As for our future, I see three paths forward:

The first one is that once technology reaches a certain point, humanity will turn itself into a bunch of cyborgs and start spreading out into the universe in all directions forever until the universe dies. It's unlikely that all the aliens who would be doing the same would manage to kill us all or that we'd manage to kill all of them, so this humanity wouldn't have to worry about getting exterminated like that. This doesn't sound as good as it does- In the first place, you'll have to consider that probably only a small minority of powerful humans would get to turn themselves into space-exploring cybernetic chromechads, while the rest of humanity would just pulverized for being useless to the elites now that machines can do everything they can. The common people have always both outmuscled the ruling caste and been necessary to sustain them, but automatization and a drone army will change that. And you thought Cyberpunk was bad.

The second one is that our civilization collapses before we advance enough to escape this place permanently and we just repeat the last few thousand years until we either manage to get to the first path or we die out.

The third one is that some aliens who managed to get started on the first path find us before we leave our planet and proceed to exterminate us.

Yeah, that's about it. It sounds terrible, but it stops being so when you learn to stop caring about anything that's too far beyond yourself. Start thinking like an animal and you'll never get depressed or ask stupid things like "Who am I?" ever again.

 

It's only possible to not care about things bigger than yourself until the regime shows up at your front door with a bunch of guns because you had the wrong opinion. Or more likely in my third-world country, to expropriate your property because people who looked like you did something bad to people who looked like them.

Really, the only thing you can do is shut up and keep your head down, and even then, you still might not get away.

 

Having an opinion at all is where you messed up. I don't have any politics, and I don't watch any news. I don't know anything about what's happening outside of my city beyond what my neighbors like to talk about when I'm with them. And besides, if it's inevitable that regardless of how you'll act the government is gonna take a shit on you or whatever, then it's not "bigger than yourself" anymore. It's your problem, in your sphere. So if you're not scared of whatever the consequences (like a violent death) could be, it's perfectly natural for you to try change your situation. If you can accept how your life will be with that problem in it, though, then it ceases to be a problem and you can be happy. Medieval peasants had it a lot worse than us, but they were not all that much unhappier. Testing has shown that the brain will always "default" close to a certain level of happiness once it gets used to/accepts its situation, whether that situation be extreme luxury or extreme poverty. Of course, if you never manage to accept it and at the same time never work up the courage to take action, you'll probably go mad and off yourself eventually.

 

A single person simply can't do anything against the pooled power of a hundred, or a thousand, or ten thousand people. It's just not possible for one person to beat the mob by himself.

 

"Taking action" includes "convincing other people to take action". When I said "it's perfectly natural for you to try to change your situation" I'd have followed it with "form a group". What differentiates humans from other animals is not our ability for rationality, but for empathy and communication. By empathy I don't mean compassion or whatever, but merely the ability to understand other human beings. Empathy is the ultimate and primary determinator of how intelligent a human being is. Every significant political and military figure in history had very good empathy. What we call IQ is minor and secondary compared to empathy. There are a bunch of people with absurdly high IQs nowadays, but they're mostly losers that are good for nothing but math. Thusly, the natural thing for a human to do is communicate and group up with other humans, which can only be done if you first have empathy. Individualism is for fairy tales. There's no point to feeling sad or depressed about how a single person can't stand up to a group of people, all that means is that you should try to make it so that you always have a group behind your back.

The whole "You have to shut up and keep your head down, you can't change the world, an individual isn't so capable" stuff has no effect on me because I don't care about it. It doesn't make me sad, to put it simply. Now, if I had no ability to talk with or be friends with the people in my neighborhood or in my city and to have fun with them, then I'd be feeling pretty shit. Why would I even keep living in that situation? Even if I could keep reading books and enjoying fiction, those things aren't nearly enough to sustain me for all my life.

Essentially, what I'm saying is that everybody should just go out and make friends and have fun. I read philosophy for decades just to come to that conclusion. And if you come to the conclusion that in the future things will inevitably get fucked, that your life will be ruined by the government or climate change or whatever, and that you can't prevent that... Then do it anyways. If it's gonna end painfully no matter what, then better a life where you had fun with the boys than one where you didn't.