Religion III: Skeptical Evangelism, Psychedelic Shamanism, and other Religions of Us Hairless Apes

[Starkess]

Growing up in an evangelical Christian environment, the god was unquestionably a man. People who called the god "she" were considered very woo-woo and probably not Real Christians. I think the notion of an omniscient, omnipotent, etc god who must be male ties very closely to the deep patriarchal structures of Christianity. God is man, man is better, woman is only good for being a bride.

Now as to other possible gods out there? They have been assigned any gender or both or more. I am not as familiar with them, so I could not say how that reflects in their religion's teachings in regards to gender significance and gender roles.

I myself am an atheist so it only interests me insofar as it effects actual people.

[DanteGabriel]

If the idea of the divine is the highest human ideal, then by saying God is beyond gender, does it mean that humans should aspire to be beyond gender?

I'd say humans should aspire to think of other people as more than their gender and avoid the limitations of old-fashioned gendered thinking, but if you are asking if humans should aspire to no longer have primary sexual characteristics, I'd say no.

[Sci-2]

I figure Attanasio provides the definitive scripture on this matter:

"Everything I am I owe to Her. All the good and the bad in my life. All the sorcery and mystery. All the wisdom and madness...Why do you think we left but to follow Her?

In the very, very beginning, before there was a beginning, when everything was one point, Woman was all the incomprehensible meaning we needed. She held us together. She made us one. Wholly promiscuous, for we were all together with Her - yet wholly chaste, for She was as utterly alone as we were - one whole and single point. What greater happiness could there be?

That was the question that doomed us. That we could think it at all bespeaks a terrible flaw in an otherwise perfect wholeness. But, of course, it was our perfection that inspired the question in the first place. How much happier could we be if we were to be a part of Her yet apart from Her? How much more happiness would there be if we could see Her and be seen?

And with that question came the necessity for the space to see and the time in which to be seen, the space a hug needs, the time a kiss requires, a space and a time vast enough to embrace all the mystery of Her and equally ample enough to make room for all of us that wanted to see and hold Her.

There were many more of us than any of us could have imagined. Each of us had thought we were the one and only one until we fell apart. Our clamoring for Her drove Her away from us - and naturally we followed, out into space and into time, wanting to be with Her as we have always been with Her. But in a new way. And so space and time came into being. Only none of us, except perhaps for Her, could have known how cold and dark it was going to be.

And none of us, surely not even She, could have anticipated the woe that was to follow - and the joy that woe would require to make itself whole again. And none suspected the sorcery and wisdom that we would have to learn and possess to match the mystery and madness of losing Her. Nor did we realize the vast distances, the expanding light-years of space and what great aeonian spans of time it would take even to begin to approximate the generous and true wholeness we had enjoyed when we were all at one point.

Little did any of us foresee our bizarre fate. How strange that, out here in space and time, each of us is so wholly separate from others. How strange that She is everywhere and yet nowhere. How much stranger yet that She has become woman...

We are the immortal points that broke apart from the one point to follow Her here. We are the eternal wanderers. And where is She now? She is everywhere and nowhere. She is the embrace of the great emptiness that is the universe. She is the long-lingering kiss of time. She is everything She always was - and everything we always wanted Her to be. Now we serve Her or we rail against Her, because we can never escape Her or ever really find Her. She is nameless and She is the very breath of all names - for She is the truth that finally embraces us all.

She is God."
--The Dragon and the Unicorn

[Weeping Sore]

@Sci-2:

You really are an apropos-quote A.I., aren't you?

As a quasi-divine A.I. Singularity, what is your gender?

[sologdin]

fairly certain that quasi-omniscient AI is a gender.

[Sci-2]

What Solo said.

I've been told I really shouldn't be allowed to play God, because like SHODAN I'm entirely too good at it. ;-)

[Larry of the Lawn]

Pretty sure that Norwood Fisher is a male so I'm going with that. It was a round-robin coin flip tourney between Norwood, my dog, no gender and pan gender.

[Sci-2]

It's a site that is notorious for posting pseudoscience. So it's kind of laughable that a Huffington Post article might be considered a reliable source of critique against established and respected scientists. There's probably legitimate scientific discussion to be had on Krauss' positions but some guy on Huffington Post spouting drivel about Lawrence Krauss being a psuedoscientist isn't all really the venue for actual scientific discourse. I wonder if any peer reviewed journals would publish this critique.

You don't need peer review to conclude that Krauss's nothing is definitely something. At best he simply sets the cosmological argument back by one remove.

Feser also notes this issue of physicists trying to shift metaphysical questions from philosophy into science.

For another thing, to suppose that since physics confines itself to mathematical models, it follows that there is nothing more to reality than is captured by such models, is fallaciously to draw a metaphysical conclusion from a mere methodological stipulation. The problem is not just that, if there are features of reality which cannot be captured in terms of a mathematical model, then the methods of physics are guaranteed not to capture them (though that is bad enough). It is that there must in fact be more to reality than is captured by those methods, in part because (as Bertrand Russell noted) physics gives us only structure, and structure presupposes something which has the structure and which a purely structural description will of necessity fail to capture.

I think the varied arguments for existence of God might be logically sound...but in addition to the fact that philosophy rarely convinces anyone about metaphysical claims (or possibly anything at all) the arguments don't give the kind of deity most people want to worship. Feser starts out strong defending the basic notions of immaterial beings or teleology but falters considerably when he tries to argue specifics - no reincarnation, God as moral authority, Christianity as the definitive choice, and so on. (Admittedly my own biases might be at work here...)

There's a huge leap to be made from the God of philosophers to the God of any religion. Even arguments for design have alternatives to God - a precursor species (possibly extraterrestrials or ultraterrestrials), collective unconsciousness, spiritual entities that more like us than a deity, etc.

This the problem with appealing to immaterialist metaphysics when discussing policy in the material world. Once you open that door it's unclear why one claim - Jesus as Son of God coming back from the dead to save us from Original Sin - is any more worthy of consideration than another - Otherkin are born with the souls of animals/elves/dragons.

Since the aim of all this is ultimately political for the layperson, it seems to me focusing on this chasm - as well as the historical precedent of any extant religion on prior myth & the deviation of God's morality from the common moral principles - seems like a better bet for secularism than attempting to use science based skepticism to advance humanism.

Humanism, after all, has its own faith based tenets (see intrinsic rights) that are unobservable in a materialist paradigm. Even Harris has to rely on appeals to moral realism in his arguments for science-based morality. The success of this marriage seems incredibly dubious to me, for reasons given by Benjamin Cain:

Just as philosophical speculations can appear juvenile next to an ironclad scientific theory, so too a painting, a song, or an intimate relationship seems preposterous in light of the mechanistic facts of nature. But postmodern scientists are typically neoliberals and so they play the game of the double standard. Secretly, they may worry about the apocalyptic implications of naturalism; perhaps they even soothe themselves by blaming hapless philosophy for cultural nihilism and hyper-irony, as if philosophers weren’t just channeling the upshot of scientific naturalism. But scientists aren’t saints, so they tend not to embrace the posthuman, which is to say antihuman, perspective from which phenomena are stripped of all meaning and purpose except for the horror made plain to anyone with aesthetic detachment. Scientists cling to their neoliberal humanistic values and sacred ideas in spite of the antihuman implications of naturalism. Moreover, they need to preserve the infantilizing culture of the uninformed masses, so the peons can continue to support the scientific enterprise, the latter being self-destructively all-important to the scientists’ higher culture.

[Gears of the Beast]

Yeah, Krauss is using a different definition of nothing than the standard layperson. Does this make him a pseudoscienist? It's not because he's dishonest or simply incorrect, it's probably because he's a fucking physicist and has to deal with shit like quantum mechanics and all manner of things that we (laypeople) are never, ever going to understand.

[Sci-2]

Yeah, Krauss is using a different definition of nothing than the standard layperson. Does this make him a pseudoscienist? It's not because he's dishonest or simply incorrect, it's probably because he's a fucking physicist and has to deal with shit like quantum mechanics and all manner of things that we (laypeople) are never, ever going to understand.

It makes the claim that physics can undercut the Cosmological Argument pseudoscience, which IIRC is all Aczel was getting at.

[Gears of the Beast]

I'm not exactly sure what you mean by that.

The "cause" part of the cosmological argument is fallacious on its own as it is an unfounded assertion, we don't know that everything that exists has a cause, in fact, particularly on the quantum scale it may be that this is not the case at all.

[Stubby]

I've been answering your question about “religious belief” over and over. The answer was even in my opening statement. “I have a much broader definition of god and religion.” Later I said that I felt my belief that I know what electricity is, is a religious one since in reality I really don't.

None of which answers my question. What outcomes can you predict using religious belief?

A wall socket has 3 openings 2 are at ground potential. The third has a 120 volt AC potential. Most surfaces in a home are non-conductive. I would be happy “to stick a steel fork into” it for you. I have faith that nothing will happen.

You do not need 'faith'. You proved it yourself by finding out the knowledge that allows you to predict what might or might not happen. Just because you perform the cognitive breakdancing that puts faith into the equation does not make it so. After looking up the facts, you know what it is likely to happen when that fork goes into the socket. Had you just stuck the fork in without looking up the knowledge, trusting that nothing would happen, then it would be faith.

This feels like a political debate at times. We argue about God but the issue seems to be the church and the power it has to control our lives.

I still have no idea what the fuck who you voted for has to do with the nature of belief vs knowledge.

[TrueMetis]

I still have no idea what the fuck who you voted for has to do with the nature of belief vs knowledge.

To be fair it is like a political debate, in the rawmilkmike is taking words with established meanings and redefining them to suit his purposes.

[Sci-2]

I'm not exactly sure what you mean by that.

The "cause" part of the cosmological argument is fallacious on its own as it is an unfounded assertion, we don't know that everything that exists has a cause, in fact, particularly on the quantum scale it may be that this is not the case at all.

Can you provide a link? AFAIK even virtual particles come from something already extant.

I'd agree that it might be possible for things to exist without a prior cause, but this - AFAICTell - returns the argument to philosophy.

[Galactus]

I'm not exactly sure what you mean by that.

The "cause" part of the cosmological argument is fallacious on its own as it is an unfounded assertion, we don't know that everything that exists has a cause, in fact, particularly on the quantum scale it may be that this is not the case at all.

It's an assumption, yes. Whether or not it is fallacious is a more complex question. (it should be noted that it's a pretty widely shared assumption, the scientific method kind of depends on it, for instance)

Quantum phenomena would still have a "cause" in the philosophical sense. (the "cause" would be "The laws of quantum mechanics" or whatever you want to call it)

[Galactus]

Yahweh is gendered masculine in the grammar, but there can be a queerness to Yahweh even in the texts. Modern theology among liberal Christianity tends to either refer to God with multiple pronouns. Sometimes "she" is reserved for the Holy Spirit, while it is sometimes used for God as well. Even if Christians regard God as genderless, there seems to be an assumed "male as the androgynous default," which I believe Judith Butler has discussed in the context of a wider non-religious phenomenon.

And as usual, it should be noted that grammatical gender != "real" gender. ("girl" is neutral in german, for instance)

[Gears of the Beast]

It's an assumption, yes. Whether or not it is fallacious is a more complex question. (it should be noted that it's a pretty widely shared assumption, the scientific method kind of depends on it, for instance)

Quantum phenomena would still have a "cause" in the philosophical sense. (the "cause" would be "The laws of quantum mechanics" or whatever you want to call it)

I'm saying assumption itself is fallacious as it is a hasty generalisation. I think the main concern is using this kind of everyday concept in extreme situations in which we know very little about like the beginning of the universe, did the laws of nature exist before the universe? Hume talks about this in Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion. On a side note don't you just love reading Hume? Guy's a fucking genius.

[AndrewJ]

Andrew, I have a much broader definition of god and religion. But before I go any farther I have to say, I am just as angry with the church as everyone here appears to be. I don't pretend to know their agenda. And I have little patience with bible thumpers.

What I'm trying to point out here is that the scientific community is not immune to it's own brand of religious belief.

I first noticed this belief system when my kid brother asked me what electricity was. As I regurgitated all that I had learned in science class I realized that it did not really answer the question. Up until that point I truly believed I knew what electricity was. [snip]

I do accept your point that we accept a lot of things on faith. We don't have direct knowledge and complete understanding of what they are and how they work, but we accept that what we are taught is true. You are going a little further and calling that a religion and/or a religious belief. I think that's a fairly long bow to draw, but it's mostly a question of semantics. You're free to phrase it that way if you like and I'm free to reject that phrasing.

When I was 6 years old, I was taught many things and I accepted them on faith. I had faith Santa Claus existed, because my parents told me he did. I had faith that god existed because my grandfather, a Church of England priest, told me he did (along with my parents and Father Chris at the St Martin's church I went to on Sundays). I accepted on faith that electricity powered my lights and my television because that's what my teachers taught me at school.

And I still accept on faith that electricity powers my television.

But it's not blind faith.

I don't understand how electricity works - but I know that others who are specialists in that field do (same as I understand double entry accounting far more than they ever will). I do have faith that what scientists teach is generally correct. I know their knowledge has been built up over time and subject to peer review - and if it was innacurate it would have fallen down long ago. And I can see the evidence for myself. I don't understand electricty - but I know if I try and turn my TV on and the remote doesn't work, then I'm able to put in a new battery and can once again turn on the tv.

So yes - I do place faith in what I'm taught be science is correct. But it's not blind faith and I can see enough of the evidence myself to feel comfortable that my faith is not mis-placed.

I no longer believe in Santa Claus or God, though. My faith in them was blind and they haven't held up under scrutiny as I grew up and learned to question what I was taught.

[Seli]

You don't need peer review to conclude that Krauss's nothing is definitely something. At best he simply sets the cosmological argument back by one remove.

...

Of course the same is true for any appeal to a creator.

[Wise Fool]

I have a hard time believing that God has a gender, and if there is in fact a God (which I personally believe), the concept of it having a gender is clearly born out of human perceptions and biases. I mean, what would God need a gender for, anyway?

It's usually quicker to find an open urinal in a restroom than an available stall. That's why the penis.