Thoughts

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1-12-09

So, perhaps my transgression isn’t quite as serious as I’ve made it out to be. But I still feel like I must explain this, just for the sake of having it said. Not for me, but for theists. And not to the atheist and the agnostic I was debating, but to all the non-religious.See, we were in the middle of this debate on another forum… the title was “atheism discussion”, but we had somehow meandered onto the grounds of objective moral truth. My fellow debator had some difficult questions that I didn’t quite know how to respond to. Anyway, everytime I tried I came up with the same cyclical argument. Without getting into too much detail, I realized my error, that I was leading the discussion in a roller coaster ride of neverending loops and circles.

So I took the time to apologize for my failure to answer the questions and I think in this apology I finally understood something very important. Besides being a pretty well-written piece of fluff on my part, I think realizing what I said as an apology to my to opponents brings to light an issue I would like to pursue further. Perhaps this will help theists and atheists to better understand the other’s position.

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“I’ve been unfair. It became clear to me, through my own adventures as a nontheist that much of what I’ve been saying must seem a bit cyclical and illogical. I know I used to think that about theists all the time and it was very difficult and annoying to deal with.

But now, seeing it from the other side, I had forgotten. From this side, however, I realized that before I used to miss the fact that theists have a really good reason to be cyclical and illogical. See, most theists believe in God for a personal reason. Most of us don’t believe because of Pascal’s wager or any of those theistic defenses. We believe because of the things that have happened to us that we can’t seem to find any other explanation for.

I don’t think you can prove God objectively, it must be subjective. There are certain subjective things that happen in the life of a believer that believers call religious experiences and non-believers call coincidence. Because of these unbelievable coincidences, theists are compelled to try and reconcile logical with illogical, rational with irrational, and natural with supernatural. Until we know everything there is to know, theists will never be able to do this.

But I assure you: it is quite a bit of strain and pressure to explain it. Once these coincidences take hold on your life, “because God did it,” becomes a logical answer in your mind. It would be quite the same if I were to ask you why the sky is blue. You cannot formulate any other possible, logical answer based on your subjective experience. Fortunately, there is a study with which to back up our answer as to why the sky is blue: science. Fortunately for me as well there is a study with which to back up my answer of why God exists: theology.

So, I hope that you can understand that I don’t mean to be silly and lead you in circles, but I’m trying to rationalize the irrational things that have happened to me and reconcile them with the logical world. The truth is, I don’t know the answers to any of the questions you can ask any better than you do. I know possible answers and I also know how to refute those possible answers. But I can never be certain.”

2-26-08

A clock maker uses every piece for a purpose, for a reason. He makes no piece without a use. A cog likes nothing more than to be a cog, which is good because that’s what it is. I like nothing more than to be a writer and a servant for God, which is good because that’s what I am. God uses all things for His own good pleasure, for His Will.

2-5-08

People say that God never changes. This is true. But that proves nothing. I believe that not only do we grow as people, but we grow as a society. The truth is in the process of being recovered. I think it’s been lost in fundamentalism for far too long. People have been scared into believing for too long and forced into believing through that fear for too long. Now it’s time to rectify that.

12-10-07

I love my mistakes and I would never want to be parted from them. I love making them, I love thinking about them, I love learning from them. I love messing things up and seeing the end result. I am the Liberty Bell with its crack. I am the Sphinx without its nose. I’m the misfit, unique because of my weaknesses and strengths, and I would never do away with that.

12-5-07

In response to my shock at having discovered people who actually don’t consider the death of a person a big deal or an occasion to mourn, particularly if they didn’t know the person personally:

“The same difficulty that appears in the cognitive sphere with respect to comprehending the mass of empirical data arises also in, for instance, the sphere of emotions. If, for example, the occasion of a death caused a person to recall that in Europe 100,000 people die every day, his grief would seem ludicrous to him. Hence the need to maintain national peculiarity in cognition!”

–Soren Kierkegaard, 15 Jan. 1836

An interesting thought. Why mourn the death of one man when so many die every day (even as I write these words)? It is not the death of the man you mourn, but the death of the individual, the loss of the man’s daily mark on society, for its death is unique and separate from any other event.

And out of this thought we reveal that a man is unique even unto death.

11-19-2007

“I want to be a liaison for all walks of life; I want to speak for everyone and ultimately cause everyone to see that the other person’s way of thinking isn’t really all that bad. Or at least that you can still get along despite such differences.”