One of the funny things about this blog, wherein I document my spiritual journey to some kind of truth or meaning or whatever, is that whichever twist or turn I take, there’s always a chorus of cheerleaders telling me I’m doing the right thing. That’s why when my journey then takes me away from whatever detour it had me wandering through, I’m often reluctant to say so, in fear of disappointing the people who were excited that I stopped by.

I first noticed this with paganism. When I was looking into neopaganism and druidry, I attracted many neopagans and druids who were excited by the path my journey was leading me down. When it then led me back away from paganism, they mostly kind of faded into the woodwork (with some exceptions- I’ve picked up some good friends along the way). And I was sad to say that I didn’t think paganism or druidry was going to be where I ended up, because I knew those people would be let down in a sense. On the other hand, pagans tend to be really nice, nonjudgmental people, and as long as I’m not making fun of them or damning them to Hel, I’m pretty sure they’ve still got my back.

However, this dilemma was much more acute with atheism. When I ultimately spiralled into nonbelief, I was greeted with accolades and cheers from some of the internet’s atheists, for finally freeing myself from the shackles of atheism and being a mature human being who didn’t need deities as crutches anymore. When I decided that atheism wasn’t going to really work for me, I was reluctant to say so. For starters, accolades are nice. And the opposite of accolades is scorn, and I didn’t really want that.

Of course, I wasn’t really going to let how other people decide how I believe or don’t believe, but there was a minute where I was at least a little bit cagey about saying anything. I was getting so much support for declaring my atheism, and when I recanted, that support would probably vanish.

I say all of that by way of introduction tot his post. My goal hereis to explain why I stopped believing in God and why I started again. This might be a long post, so hang on to your hats.

When I first started seriously questioning the Mormon church last summer, my initial criticisms were centered around my feeling that Mormonism wasn’t Christian enough- Mormonism and Mormon scripture didn’t track closely enough with what I thought Christianity was all about (based on the New Testament, Church history, and the true Christians that I had come across over time). I felt like Mormonism was not leading me closer to Christ, but actually keeping me away from Him. Thus, in leaving Mormonism, my initial question was “what kind of Christian should I be?”

When I started this blog, my wife and I had only recently decided to actually leave Mormonism behind us, after struggling with it for some six months. I had also just read Donald Miller’s Blue Like Jazz, and I felt like becoming a Christian was something I wanted to do, but I wasn’t sure how to go about doing it. For some reason I didn’t feel like I already was a Christian, like I was already really committed to Jesus.

The problem was that my reasons for believing in Jesus, and in fact my reasons for believing in God at all, were basically the same reasons I believed in Mormonism. That is, I had simply been raised to assume that they were true, and this assumption was backed up by emotional “spiritual” confirmations. In deciding that those bases were insufficient for continued belief in Mormonism, I also took out the foundation, as flimsy as it may have been, for my entire belief in God. In other words, the same conclusions that made me question my belief in Mormonism made me ultimately question my belief in Jesus Christ and in any kind of God whatesoever.

I was waiting for some kind of mystical experience, some kind of contact with the divine that was the real deal, not the easy “warm fuzzy” self-delusion of Mormonism’s Holy Ghost. I was waiting for God to reach out and shake me, to let me know that he was real, to give me some kind of contact. But it kept not happening.

With that in mind, I began giving a loud voice to my innner skeptic. I started reading Ebon Musings’s essays on atheism, which are honestly extremely compelling and very difficult to dispute. Eventually, I was in a place where I had to admit that I had no real reason to believe in God other than wishful thinking, and if I was to be honest with myself, I would have to admit that I simply did not believe.

It seemed like a destination of sorts. It wasn’t what I was shooting for when I set out towards Byzantium, but maybe the place we intend to be is often a lot less realistic than the place we really wind up. I wasn’t a nihilist or anything; I still had some core beliefs that I was more or less confident in. But I could not say that I affirmatively believed in God.

The thing was, I wasn’t happy. I didn’t really want to be an atheist. I actually like religion! Specifically, I was (and still am) convinced that while an aheist can be a very good and moral person, and that a religious person can be a complete jerkwad, nevertheless for me personally, religion in general and Christianity in specific were going to have a much greater potential to make me the kind of person that I wished I was. I could be a good person and an atheist, that was never in question. But no atheist philosophy was going to actually transform me into a New Man. And Christianity made that promise.

But my problem was that if I was going to believe something, it would have to be more intellectually honest than my beliefs had previously been. No putting doubts on the shelf. No convincing myself until I was convinced. Nothing like that. I wanted to believe, but I didn’t want it so bad that i was willing to delude myself into believing.

So I went about tentatively trying to figure out how I could believe in God despite my loud internal skeptic (but without squashing him and pretending he didn’t exist) and despite the very good and compelling logical arguments against God’s existence, and the generally weak and limp logical arguments for God’s existence.

I read some Kierkegaard. I thought about how God and logic would interact, if there was a God. I thought about doubt, and whether there was a place for it within faith. I read Brian McLaren’s Finding Faith. I thought about hope.

In the end, I made a place where I thought I could theoreticaly believe in God. I had room for God in my framework again. However, having room for God, i.e., acknowledging the possibility of God, doesn’t equal belief in God. If, at that point, I had simply declared myself a believer, I would have been guilty of doing the very thing I was most loathe to do: talking myself into believing. Instead, I let it simmer for awhile.

At the same time, I started thinking seriously about Jesus Christ, and I found him extremely compelling. Christianity still kind of gave me the heebie jeebies, so I was still reluctant to even express interest in the religion. But the man? The more I thought about Jesus, the more I felt like there was something to him. Something more. I wasn’t really sure what it was, but I knew I liked it, and maybe I even needed it.

I then let this stew for a bit. The more I thought about God, the more I thought that maybe God exists after all, despite my efforts to logic him out of existence. And the more I thought about Jesus, the more he seemed electrifying, powerful, important. Much more so than a simple wise moral philosopher, however great he may have been.

When I read C. S. Lewis’s Till We Have Faces, I finished the book and realized that after reading it, there was no way I could ever say that I do not believe in God. I can’t explain it very well, because the book touched me on an extremely personal, maybe even primal level. But it completely evaporated all of my defenses. It didn’t resolve my concerns or wipe away all of my doubts or anything, but it spoke loud and clear to me: nevertheless, there is a God. It was a life-changing experience that I can’t do justice in writing or even in speaking- it was so strange and powerful that I have a hard time articulating exactly what it was about the book that changed my whole way of looking at God.

Once I had made room for the possibility of God, Till We Have Faces showed me that God was a sure thing.  All of my anger, my logic, my insecurity, my waffling, and my careful arguments are made completely insignificant when faced with God’s existence.

In any case, that’s where I am now. I am sure that there is a God, and I suspect that Jesus might actually have been God. I’ve not got a lot more than that. I suppose it’s a start. I can’t really be the poster child for honest atheism anymore, but I probably never should have been. I’m not at my destination yet- in fact I don’t know if I’ll ever really “have arrived”- but I like where I’m sailing right now, and I’m interested and excited to see what’s ahead.

Still thinking of reasons to believe…

Something hit me about a week ago, when watching the Passion of the Christ: people do really, really horrible things to each other.  The sick twisted stuff that people do to each other, the brutality, the dehumanization, the sadism, the torture, it blows the mind.  Why do people do such horrific things?

At the same time, I wonder if that isn’t a kind of evidence for God for me.  This isn’t a logical argument with premises and conclusions- I don’t even really want to go there right now.  It’s an intuitive thing.  Here goes-

Human beings are capable of unique evil.  We do so much that is purely motivated by malice, and we are capable of an kind of evil that you don’t see elsewhere in the natural world.  Some of the nasty crap we do can be explained as evolutionarily functional: war overresources, for example, or male promiscuity.  I’m not talking about that stuff.  I’m talking about genocide and systematic horror that we inflict on each other, the kind of stuff that isn’t really functional, so it doesn’t make sense, or rather, it doesn’t seem to have a natural explanation.

Nature isn’t malicious; it’s indifferent.  It’s not evil; it’s amoral.  But we can do things that are horrible to each other that go far beyond the harsh indifferent cruelty of nature.

And it’s not limited to the Hitlers and Pol Pots of the world, either.  Just think for a second; I’ll bet you can imagine some pretty horrible things that you could do to another person, if you put your mind to it.  Even if we’d never consider doing it, why can we even think of those things?

By contrast, almost all the good we seem to be able to do is either  1) evolutionarily functional (like parents sacrificing for their children, or pretty much anything good you do that has an element of self-interest or group-interest) or 2) only a matter of correcting bad stuff.  If I feed millions of starving people, for example, I’m not creating a positive good so much as I am merely correcting an evil.

It’s easy to think of horrible and nasty things you could to to hurt other people for no reason and no real benefit to you (and therefore not easy to explain by evolution or nature), but it’s hard to even think of positive good (something above and beyond just correcting something bad) that you can do that isn’t naturally explicable and evolutionarily functional.

To me, this makes me think a couple of things.  One, maybe there’s something to the idea that we’re fallen, broken people in a fallen, broken world that needs fixing.  And maybe unnatural evil means that there might be unnatural good.  It’s hard to even imagine what that kind of unnatural, positive good would look like (because of the T in the Tulip, maybe?), but if there can be malicious non-functional evil, why can’t there be pure good, righteousness, sanctification, holiness.  And if it’s not here in our world, then where is it?

Where did evil come from?  It’s not easily explainable from a naturalistic point of view.  Does that mean it comes from outside the naturalist model somewhere?  And if there is evil from outside, why not good?

I’ve been thinking of reasons why I would decide to believe in God and/or Jesus Christ despite my inability to prove God’s existence (or nonexistence) in a satisfactory way and despite my unfortunate dearth of much-desired mystical experiences.   Like I’ve said before, the same process that allowed me to walk away from Mormonism has left me floundering- my basis for believing in God weas the same set of “spiritual” experiences that were my basis for believing in Mormonism.  Thus my slow spiral into atheism.

Atheism has it’s attraction, sure, and I’m not talking about license to do whatever I want.  There are plenty of checks on behavior other than belief in God: love, empathy, society, law, culture, etc.  And disbelieving in God hasn’t made me a worse person.

But it hasn’t made me a better person, either, and I don’t think it will.  That’s the rub, the real difference between atheism and Christianity for me.  Christianity invites me to be not just a much better person, but an entirely new person.  Atheism tells me I’m pretty good the way I am, and that’s fine.  Don’t get me wrong; I think I am basically a good person.  But I really don’t think atheism is going to make me any better.  In contrast, Christianity has transformation at its heart.  At the very least, Jesus’s teachings invite people to be better people in absolutely radical ways, ways that don’t necessarily come naturally or intuitively. I’m not talking about demanding that we’re perfect- that’s no good because we’ll always fail, and then our lives will be dominated by guilt (which tends to be a problem in Mormonism).  I’m saying that the way I see Christianity, Jesus invites us to come up to a higher level in the way we live with and relate to each other.  On top of that, Jesus’s divinity adds a sense of gravitas to that invitation, a cosmic legitimacy that he wouldn’t otherwise have as a merely human philosopher.

I’m not saying that Christianity categorically makes bad people good, because we all probably know many, many people who are Christians who are pretty crappy people.  I’m not talking about a universal imperative; I’m merely saying why I think I would be better off as a Christian.

I’d be lying if I tried to continuously assert that faith issues and spiritual experience issues were the only things holding me back from committed belief in anything. There are major parts of me that are reluctant to decide for God or for Christ because I don’t want to decide for God or for Christ. Simply put, I have a religious/spiritual fear of commitment.

I’m not talking about the stereotype of the unbeliever who is unwilling to change his life, so he chooses atheism in order to live a life of immoral license. For me, the hard thing about being a Mormon was never the commandments. I’m not saying I never sinned, but I generally wanted to do the right thing, and I was generally successful in repenting of major wrongdoings and staying on the right track. The hard thing was never all of the rules. It was always intellectual.

What I’m trying to say is that Mormonism was so intellectually complete that it was stifling to me. There was no room for the unconventional, or the speculative. That may sound strange in light of rampant “Mormon folklore” and elders’ quorum-style speculation about Kolob, but I assert that it was/is nevertheless so. Sure, there was “room for speculation” in one sense, but it was always limited to certain narrowly defined directions, and even then you’re encouraged to focus on the essentials and warned of the consequences of straying too far out of bounds (just ask the September Six!).

I don’t really feel like I’m articulating this very well, and I’m sure that be failing to articulate it well, I’m inviting well-meaning Mormons to completely disassemble what I’m trying to say.

I like the idea that anything can be true. I like being able to read science fiction and wonder if that kind of thing will really happen someday (whereas the Second Coming of Christ sort of puts a damper on the voyages of the Starship Enterprise). I like entertaining possibilities. As much as religion appeals to me, uncertainty also appeals to me. Freedom to be as heretical as I please is a precious freedom.

I want to be able to wonder if - or even wish that - maybe some crazy thing is true without worrying that it is somehow beyond the walls of my religious/belief system and I need to repent. I want to be able to entertain any idea without feeling like I have to dismiss it for being unbiblical or unbookofmormonical. Or whatever.

I don’t like the idea of saying “I believe x is true” because it shuts down the possibility of a through w and y and z. To me, that is almost suffocating. I know I want spirituality, a spiritual path even, replete with practices and a way of life, but I don’t know if I am even really interested in a worldview. I don’t want to have to interpret everything I see through the lens of Mormonism, Christianity, or anything else for that matter. Maybe it’s the postmodernist in me that wants to be able to hit the buffet instead of ordering just one thing off the menu. I don’t know. Maybe this kind of thinking is intellectually dishonest of me, but if I am to be personally honest, I have to admit that it might be the biggest thing holding me back from belief of any kind.

Thinking about this, is sounds to me like I’m begging to be a Unitarian Universalist, but I have to admit that I’m not interested in the UU at all. I actually like traditional liturgical Christianity, and even Christian theology. And besides, like I said, I’m not reluctant about a spiritual path or well-defined spiritual practices, or even scriptures or many aspects of theology (by which I mean the philosophy of religion). It’s a stifling worldview that I’m spiritually claustrophobic about. I know it has a lot to do with gorwing up Mormon, but I also know it’s not an unjustified fear, because I see it in other belief systems, even more so than in Mormonism.

So one facet of my spiritual fear of commitment is this panicky spiritual claustrophobia that I don’t know how to deal with, or indeed if I even want to deal with it, and certainly I don’t want to have to deal with it.

I have major doubts, but I feel like I’m moving into an area where I want to start seriously considering religion, and specifically Christianity.  I talked about it at length in my last post, so go back and read it if you haven’t already.

Anyway, I’m possibly prepared to accept Christianity in a sort of provisional sense, as the most meaningful mechanism by which I can access the Divine Mystery of Unknowable Universal Truth and Miscellaneous Etcetera.

I even feel like I can turn to the Bible as something spiritually meaningful and religiously relevant.  I would do so with the caveat that the Bible is the record of one nation’s interactions with the Divine, but that it is heavily filtered through their cultural lens and their milieu.  Moreso than many other scriptures, the Bible is open in my opinion to this kind of interpretation.  People wrote the Bible, after all, and they were people who lived in a certain time and place, with certain limitations.  It aims toward ultimate truth even if it is not itself The ultimate truth.

As far as Jesus and his life, mission, and divinity go, I’m prepared to accept it conceptually without worrying whether it is literal fact or not.  I can accept Christianity as a spiritual scaffold without needing to muck around with apologetics and debate.

However, the biggest problem for me, the stumbling block, is Judaism.

Unlike the rest of the Bible, the Law of Moses is supposed to have been directly dictated by God and written down the way He said it.  Even the words of Jesus by comparison are removed enough from their original source to be a little bit shrouded in the mists of time, history, and myth.  But the Law is a full document straight from God’s mouth to the stone tablets, and I think the Law sucks.

Not in the Paul “the law killeth” sense.  I mean that the Law is simply not the kind of thing that could be given by any kind of God I could imagine, and unlike the rest of the stories in the Old Testament which may or may not be just stories, it’s kind of hard to say that the law is just a mythic interpretation of something.

It advocates death by stoning for all kinds of petty stuff.  It condones slavery.  It’s crap.  And the way I see it, it’s not the kind of thing that is Mythic at all.  Either God dictated it to Moses or Moses made it all up.  It doesn;t come down to us shrouded by oral tradition.  And the entire Old Testament from then on is fairly rooted in it.  So what’s the deal?  It’s kind of hard to separate Christianity from the Law.

I’m not talking about the no-brainers like “thou shalt not kill” and “thou shalt not commit adultery.”  I’m talking about stuff like where if a man rapes a girl he just has to pay some money and get married.  I’m talking about where it says to kill your family if they believe differently than you.   I’m talking about the divine mandate to commit genocide.  Or how you’re supposed ot kill your children if they don’t obey you.

You want to see me deny the existence of God?  Convince me that the only possible God is the one that made those rules.  I just don’t buy it.  And that’s a problem, because it means there’s a whole section of the Bible that I can’t simply deal with in my wishy-washy liberal way, and that means I don’t know what to do other than junk the whole thing, other than as a piece of literature.

Like most people, I think, I don’t like to be pigeonholed.  I don’t like people to assume things about me based on single facts, observations, or labels.

Yeah, I left the Mormon church.  I didn’t “get offended,” I didn’t commit adultery, and I was absolutely committed to the Church in a lifelong sense before I left (i.e. I wasn’t a fair-weather Mormon).  Many of my problems with Mormonism aren’t the same as other peoples’ problems with it.  I’m not a bitter, angry anti-Mormon, though sometimes I am bitter and angryabout some things, sure.  I’m not an ex-Mormon caricature.

No, I don’t believe in God right now.  That doesn’t mean I think Richard Dawkins is a prophet.  It doesn’t mean I’m angry or I hate God or anything.  It also doesn’t mean it’s a done deal.  I don’t really want to stay an atheist.  I never did.  If I can find a way to believe in God and still feel like I’m being intellectually and emotionally honest with myself, I will probably return to theism.  If not, I will probably stick with atheism.  Whatever your official definition of “atheism” is, and whether or not you think I should really be classed as an agnostic, is completely irrelevant to me.  I don’t affirmatively believe in God because I do not recognize any affirmaitve evidence for God (even subjective evidence).  I’m not an atheist caricature, and I’m also not a very good poster child for the journey into atheism, because I don’t necessarily plan on sticking around anyway.

And when I was a Mormon, I wasn’t a stereotypical Mormon.  I believed that homosexual marriage should be legal.  I had my own spin and my own interpretation for many doctrines.  I strongly disliked some of the General Authorities (Gene R. Cook, I’m lookin’ at you).  My gut always leaned in a little more of a pluralist direction than the party line espoused.  I was never interested in the Work and the Glory, and I thought a lot of Mormon art, music, and film was really, really lame.

If I become a Christian, I won’t be a stereotypical Christian.  I won’t be a fundamentalist caricature.  I won’t blithely abandon rational thought.  I won’t start lobbying for the Ten Commandments to be put up in courtrooms.  I’ll never claim that I can logically prove Christianity.  I won’t start reading Left Behind books.  I probably won’t vote Republican.  I certainly will never believe in Hell.

The thing is, I shouldn’t have to feel like I have to qualify myself like that.  I wish I could just say “I don’t believe in God” and then enter into a real dialogue where people actually listen to what I am saying instead of assuming they know where i’m coming from already.  Especially since I’d just as soon believe in God.  I’d prefer to be religious, actually.  But when I tell people I don’t believe in God, they either 1) assume that I’m a Richard Dawkins or Sam Harris clone and begin to argue with me or write me off accordingly, 2) try to convince me that I should label myself differently than I do because they don’t agree with my definitions, or 3) congratulate me heartily on growing up and leaving silly religion behind.  None of those approaches comes close ot the mark, and all of them subtly influence how I perceive myself.  So like I said, I’m mildly irked.

I don’t think there’s absolute morality, because such a thing would be completely impractical. Human existence is simply too complicated to tolerate a real absolute set of behavioral guideleines. Thus, to apply a set of absolute morals, you either have to radically change your existence (which I think is pretty much impossible, at least to the extent that would make absolute morality work), or you have to radically change the way you see the world. And I don’t mean that in a good way, either. I’m talking about deluding yourself and constructing a worldview that doesn;t even reflect reality a little bit.

That being said, where’s the basis for morality? I think Dawkins is kind of circling the issue and getting close to it in this interview, but I think he missed the core.

At the core, human morality is (or should be) based on informed empathy, the basic concept of caring about other people, coupled with some active effort to find out how your actions affect them.

So, what makes killing wrong? Simply put, because being killed sucks,a nd I don;t want to be killed. Also, having people close to you be killed sucks, so I don’t want to kill some other mother’s son. But it’s not just the Golden Rule in its simplest form, because empathy means being sensitive to how other people feel about things even when it’s different from how you might feel about it were your positions switched.

It also means trying to be aware of broader effects of your actions. It’s easy to have empathy when you’re ignorant of how your shoes were made, for example. But that’s an irresponsible way of going about things. Part of informed empathy means finding out how your shoes were made, and then exercising a bit of empathy and foregoing products made with sweatshop labor.

I’m not talking about full-blown Utilitarianism, the greatest amount of hapiness for the greatest number of people. Again, that’s an absolute moral system and thus I think it’s impractical when applied to real life. I’m simply talking about taking other people into consideration when we make decisions. Callously disregarding other peoples’ suffering? Easy- that’s immoral.

Sure, things change. Mores and norms change over time. Peoples’ ways lof looking at and thinking about the world often evolve and become more sophisticated. Much of this stuff is what Dawkins was talking about, the external morality. But internally, I think empathy is natural human trait that is truly universal (except for the dysfunctional and the broken- and well… they’re broken). Granted, people often apply empathy to only their own family or their own clan, or whatever. And people can have the empathy trained out of them, by various experiences and circumstances, intentional or un-. But at the heart of it, empathy is universal, and so it seems like an easy basis for a universal (though not absolute) morality.

Informed empathy is simply a matter of extending the sphere, and is by definition universal (in the sense of “this is what everyone should do, even if it not what everyone does”) because it means applying empathy to as large a number of people (and other living things) as possible.

No, informed empathy doesn’t answer all the questions. It doesn’t solve the moral dillemmas, but I think if we’re looking for something that’s going to solve the moral dillemmas, we’re kidding ourselves. Existence is simply too complicated for that. That’s why they’re called “dilemmas.” Sometimes the situation may mean that you have to do something that hurts someone, despite the empathy you feel. Nothing’s going to fix that- if you’re looking for a moral system that never makes you make that kind of hard decision, then you’re either looking for a fictional notion or behavioral paralysis. But the point of informed empathy is that you realize and feel the ramifications of those decisions. You do them knowingly- if you have to hurt someone you feel a bit of their pain, and it makes you take those kinds of questions very seriously. Empathy is not going to tell you what to do; it’s going to tell you the factors to consider when deciding what to do. It leaves the judgment call to you without passing the buck.

What informed empathy does is give a basic moral compass, one that is natural, internal, and universal, while at the same time it invites one to step a little bit outside their comfort zone and actively try to find out how other people feel, so as to better feel and show empathy.

Empathy doesn’t give you answers, it just helps you understand the question. In the end, I think that’s all one can expect from morality. Anything more is unrealistic and out of touch with reality.

As I’ve said before, I do not deny the existence of God, but there are some things that I do deny. Many of them actually assume that God exists, so what I mean then is that “if there is a God, I deny that he is like x.”

Anyway.

I deny the existence of hell. That an even marginally good god would damn people to eternal punishment and torture for finite sins committed in virtual ignorance is absolutely preposterous. That some people do believe this makes my mind boggle.

I deny the infallibility of the Bible (or any other religious text), of human religious leaders, of religions, and of philosophies. The claim of infallibility is unbelievably arrogant, and reality usually shows the truth.

I deny the existence of Fossil-Hiding God. What I mean by that is that I deny that God would create a world that looked like he didn’t create it as some kind of test of faith. I deny that God would say x, and then purposely hide all evidence of x and in fact plant all kinds of counterevidence against x. “Test us,” my eye.

I deny the existence of any one “chosen people.” I deny an ethnocentric God.

I deny that morality is based on God’s decree. I deny that the only line between moral and immoral is the whim of deity. I deny a moral system that is ultimately based on “because I said so.” That’s elementary school morality. God is certainly better than that, if he indeed exists. And we have the potential to be better than that, and I hardly believe that God simply wants us to behave according to the lowest common denominator. At the very least, it would make God an arbitrary and capricious God, and that takes me to two sub-denials:

I deny arbitrary commandments, i.e., things that are not inherently, intuitively immoral. This is of course a subset of the above denial, because the only thing that makes homosexuality immoral, for example, is “God said so.” Or tea and coffee in Mormonism. Being harmful to people doesn’t naturally equal immoral (otherwise getting in a car would be immoral), and the only thing that would make the Word of Wisdom a moral issue would be the fact that God said do. And I deny that God ever said such a thing.

I deny an arbitrary God. If God exists, he certainly doesn’t predestine some people for heaven and some for hell. That’s cruel capriciousness. Being the supreme being doesn’t mean he can just do whatever he wants, and if it does, then I deny the existence of a God who would just do whatever he wanted even if he could.

That’s all I can think of. There are more nit-picky things I deny, but those are specific religious doctrines that I reject, as opposed to these kinds of overarching universal denials.

Just because I have decided that I am an atheist doesn’t mean I believe in nothing.  It doesn’t mean I am a fanatical devotee of the temple of Science, or that I am some kind of Nihilist.

Atheism isn’t a set of beliefs.  It’s not a positive affirmation of anything. All “atheism” says is that I don’t believe in God.  But I do believe in other things.

I believe in a fundamental unity of the universe, that separateness is an illusion.  Physically, we’re all made of the same stuff anyway, and there’s a cycle as we rotate mater into, through, and ultimately out of our bodies.  Our atoms don’t have our names written on them.  The illusion of separateness may have its advantages, but in the end it is an illusion.  Furthermore, if mind and body are really the same thing, then our consciousness is really just a part of everything else the same way our body is.  And if there really is some kind of mind-body dualism, then mind is still part of everything else either by virtue of being connected to body in some way, or in the sense that the mind/soul is all the same as all other mind/soul the same way body is.

I believe in dicsovery, in learning, and true progress.  I believe in the importance of figuring out as much as we can about the world and about ourselves, through all of the fantastic means we have at our hands.

I believe that there is a lot more out there than we can even imagine, that our models of the universe, useful though they may be, don’t come near to explaining everything in an exhausive sense.  I believe in mystery, and in the unknown.  I believe that “there are more things in heaven and earth… than are dreamt of in [our] philosophy.”

I believe in treating other people the way I would like to be treated.  I believe in empathy and compassion.  Even without God, these are the things that make us human and give value to the human experience.  I believe that human beings are important, not because some arbitrary supreme being says so on a whim, but because we have incredible potential.

I believe in being happy, both on an individual and a collective level.  I believe that the pursuit of happiness, again balancing the individual’s happiness against humanity’s happiness, will take us great places.

I believe in making the world better- I believe in taking care of each other and taking care of the world we live in and leaving the place better for the next generation than it was left for us.   Because humanity is wonderful, and the earth is our home.

I believe that love is the most wonderful thing that there is.

That’s all I can think of right now.  I’m sure there is more.

In my last post, I talked about the argument from evil, and I came up with one possibility that would allow god to exist despite the argument’s relatively solid logic: Immoral God. As Adam (the Ebon Muse) pointed out, such a situation would be pretty horrible. However, there would be nothing we could do about it. An Immoral God would be probably be untrustworthy, so there would be no reason to expect that serving him would result in any kind of reward. Therefore, one could reasonably act in any fashion one chose. Sure, Immoral God may damn you for it, but Immoral God might have damned you anyway.

The moral premise is, in my opinion, the easiest way for God to wriggle out of the Argument’s headlock. Omnipotence and Omniscience have tautological definitions. Morality does not. Adam proposed a fairly conventional definition of morality, the desire to end unnecessary suffering, but such a definition is not necessarily a given. Even then, the fact that the moral premise posits that God is perfectly moral makes it even trickier. Applying a standard of perfection to a quality that is abstract and ill-defined? Not as clear-cut as simply saying “omnipotent.” Not that Adam’s definition is ill, but that a person could certainly advance alternate and equally valid definitions for morality without even wading into the quagmire of moral relativism.

With all of that in mind, I have thought of several possibilities for the kind of God that would survive the scrutiny of the argument from evil:

Immoral God: I talked about this one in my last post.

Amoral God: perhaps God exists, and is omniscient and omnipotent, but for some reason is indifferent to good and evil, suffering and pleasure. Perhaps God has a plan for humanity, and good an evil, important though they seem to us, are merely incidentals. I don’t necessarily know what this would mean. Maybe it’s just a matter of perspective: from where God is sitting, all this stuff we’re fussing over is basically irrelevant, and once we get to where he is, it will be irrelevant to us, too.

Nevertheless-Moral God: perhaps there is a definition of morality that closely overlaps with the “desires to end suffering” that is still very good and holy but nevertheless allows for suffering to exist. I don’t know what this moral definition would be, but I guess it could exist. Then, the only reason that the argument from evil is evidence against God is the fact that the moral premise is close, but nevertheless incorrectly defined. This is, I think, the God that most believers picture when they hear the argument from evil and choose to nevertheless believe in God.

Othermoral God: perhaps God is morally perfect, but the definition for “moral perfection” is really quite different than the definition that the argument from evil takes as a premise. Surely there are many possible othermoralities, but one that immediuately comes to mind is one in which wisdom gained by experience is the highest form of “good.” Thus, suffering and pleasure are two sides to the same coin and must both be experienced in different measures. Yes, some people have an overmeasure of one or the other, but if they are both value-neutral, then that doesn’t matter. Morality is aligned on a wisdom-ignorance axis instead of a good-evil axis. Or something else, I don’t know. I think Hinduism looks more like this, actually. But again, it’s just one possible example of an othermorality. Some othermoralities might run up against the same problems in the argument from evil, though. If God is interested in order versus chaos, for example, and he is omnipotent and omniscient, then why does he not simply impose order?

Tautologically-Moral God: Perhaps god is morally perfect by definition, because his actions set the standards for what is moral and what is not. This is probably unsatisfactory for many people, because it leaves open a wide possibility for capricious and arbotrary behavios on God’s part which can then be labeled moral because God’s actions actually define morality. This may be hard to swallow, given the suffering in the world, but if it happens to be the case, then we’ve got little to say in the matter. I also think that many theists believe in this God, whether they realize it or not. If morality is defined by God’s will, then God can be as arbitrary and capricious as he feels like, and whatever he does will still be moral.

Just some thoughts, really. I suppose the whole thing could stand to be thought through and fleshed out a little better.