Science is great. It's simply observation, prediction, investigation and explanation. Then you do it over and over until you are satisfied. It's one of the few sets of beliefs I know that openly thrives on the fact that it can be wrong. It embraces this as part of its general belief.
For fun lets compare science with religion. It's not a tough comparison as they are a lot alike.
A scientist studies publications of other scientists to learn about how they practiced their beliefs. A religious leader studies similar publications such as scripture or testimony of other religious leaders. They both become well versed in their area of study and great experts. Both science and religion attempt to take what is known by the leaders of the communities and explain the world around them. This is great!
Here is where they differ. The basic belief of science is that you can observe the natural world and attempt to explain why what you observe happens. Then you test your observations to see if your predictions stand up to your tests. If they don't, that's cool. You don't have to question your entire belief system, you simply accept that you were wrong, learn from your mistake and try again.
Now religion on the other hand approaches the world from a completely different perspective. Religion will make a claim based on the testimony of a respected religious leader or what is written in a book. This claim is then fact without being subject to any test, questioning or interpretation by others. This of course assuming we are talking about one religion, I know there are about a million religions who have interpreted the bible (or other religious texts) differently, but let's simply choose one for now - pick your favorite.
Let's say the scientific community sets a belief. Let's use continental drift for instance. If another scientist comes along 40 years later and says "hey, this old belief we had about continents plowing across the ocean doesn't seem to make sense since continents are weaker than the bottom of the ocean." the community will go "hmm.. yes.. maybe you are right, what could they be doing instead? Oh, maybe the continents are shattered into pieces that slide around a ductile layer underneath them and the continents are less dense causing isostasy and this is why they are higher in elevation" Then people are allowed to agree or disagree based on their observations and interpretations of them.
Religion says, "Noah stated that around 5,000 years ago there was a great flood which covered the whole Earth, all animals went extinct except for those Noah saved, so this is true." and then over time people start observing things that don't seem to fit with this such as lack of an index flood deposit covering the Earth and the fact that land animals which Noah would have had absolutely no way of accessing, from the middle-east, still exist such as Kangaroos or Alpacas. Religion then reconsiders their beliefs and states, "Noah stated that around 5,000 years ago there was a great flood which covered the whole Earth, all animals went extinct except for those Noah saved, so this is true and your observations are invalid."
Yet hundreds of millions of people still believe that Noah and his ark contained the sole survivors of a catastrophic flood that wiped the planet clean. Why? Because they have faith in what the top religious figures say.
What is faith? One of my favorite scriptures was written by an ancient North American prophet named Alma. He says that faith isn't knowledge, faith is simply hope. I like that. It's a great and wise statement. He almost seems like he's smarter than most of these religious folk. He's not saying "have faith for it is true" he's saying "have faith because you want it to be true." Well yeah, I want to die and meet God and have him say "Wow Brandon, you really did some good stuff with your life. You became well versed in the knowledge of the world I gave you to study, you treated your fellow man with compassion and you even tried to please me in situations where it was very hard for you." Though I have absolutely no empirical reason to believe this whatsoever. All I have is faith... or hope.
Unfortunately I also faith that Utah State will win the WAC in basketball. I have no empirical reason to think they will, but I sure hope they do. Is my hope of the Aggies winning the WAC the same as my hope that a creator who understands me is waiting for me after my bodies biological functions become unable to sustain what I know as life? Yes, actually it is. Neither faiths are backed by empirical evidence. Both are based on hope and testimony. One has people who make religion their life telling me God created me and is waiting for me in an after-life while the other has people who make sports their life telling me that the Aggies will win the WAC.
One could say that I can observe the past and predict that it is likely Utah State will win their division, but that doesn't mean at all that they will. They COULD finish dead last. Likewise one can come up with all sorts of arguments for me to believe in the LDS church (my personal specific faith) and it's quite possible that it is true, but it's also possible that it is not. A good Mormon is not allowed to believe that it is possible that it is not true. A scientist is completely allowed to reject a well accepted theory if they have reason and data to back it up with.
Is it so hard to see why so many people have become atheist or agnostic over the last few decades? The way we view religion is becoming obsolete.
Why can't religion be more accepting of the observed natural world? Why can't a religion be strong enough to say, "Hey we understand that a catastrophic world-wide flood has absolutely no observable evidence other than a written story, so maybe it was just a parable." or "Yeah, using many different dating techniques we can observe that the earth has been around for far longer than is written in the bible, likely even billions of years."? Religion can't do this because for so long religion has based their legitimacy on the fact that God is omniscient and therefore men of God are omniscient.
Bullshit.
God may be omniscient but men of God are nothing but flawed mortals trying to relay his messages in the best way they know how. Guess what, the Pope can be wrong. Your Pasteur or Bishop or Prophet can be wrong. They are imperfect humans, it is in their nature to be wrong. If a religion were to admit that religious texts and interpretations of religious text are subject to fallacy, they would become far more honest and correct, but they would lose followers. Religion doesn't want to lose followers. They want to save (or collect money from - depending on the religion) as many people as they can. Accepting fault is unacceptable in religion. That is too bad. I wish religion was able to simply observe their set beliefs could be wrong and modify them like science can.
God is right, God is always right. It's his job to always be right. Religion is humans trying to imitate and please God. Humans aren't very good at being perfect and we never will be, hell we're not even that good at being right. Science is a set of beliefs that embraces our incompetence as humans and teaches us to learn from it and modify our beliefs to try and get as close to right as we can while knowing that we can never be fully right. This is why I love science. I also love God who I know exists because of the aforementioned faith I have in him. To quote a man far more brilliant than I will ever be,
"Even if there is only one possible unified theory, it is just a set of rules and equations. What is it that breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to describe?... Why does the universe go to all the bother of existing?"
Well Professor Hawking, the answer to this question is simple. God :)
Showing posts with label God. Show all posts
Showing posts with label God. Show all posts
Friday, October 29, 2010
Wednesday, July 28, 2010
Post 20, impressive
I'd set my alarm to go off at this time so I could text Trisha to go to work. I'd forgotten why I was texting her, so the text kind of just said "uh, I'm supposed to text you, I forget why, bye." Apparently I'd sent the text an hour late as I was supposed to send it at 5 rather than 6. Sadly I got back into bed and, I'm not tired.
I've taken some Nyquil to both curb my headache and hopefully get me back to sleep, but in the 20 or so minutes before it kicks in I thought I'd write.
So I have this irrational fear that I'm going to fall asleep and never wake up. That I'll just die in my sleep. Sounds peaceful I guess, but it scares the hell out of me. I don't want to stop existing. I don't ever want to stop existing. I got to thinking tonight while laying there, just about every religion in the world teaches a form of immortality for us whether it be resurrection, reincarnation or an experience like rebirth into a new world, they all kind of seem to teach that we go on. They are all frighteningly similar:
Islam believes in an afterlife where there are seperate levels of heavan and hell which you can attain based on your deeds in life, sound familiar? I suppose it makes sense for an Abrahamic religion founded by a man called by many a prophet who found some texts in a mountain long after the departure of Jesus Christ to sound similar to another Abrahamic religion founded under similar circumstances.
Hinduism believes that we do things in life and accumulate karma. Based on the goodness or badness of this karma we are brought back to Earth in a situation that could be quite pleasant, or rather terrible. So terrible that you may come back as a chicken.
Buddhism believes nearly the same as Hinduism. You accumulate karma and based upon your karma you can come back as the next Steve Jobs or possibly in a "hell realm" where you would live a life in which you'd attempt to improve. (Maybe Earth is "hell realm, wonder who I pissed off in my last life?) They have a fascinating belief of what happens between life where you are confronted by a light and thoughts of deeds of your life and these thoughts try to keep you from the light which is immortal salvation. If you lived a poor life the light is impossibly to confront, but if you lived one of goodness and service you can follow this path. Many of us are unable to confront the light will be helped by Buddah's to choose a life where we are able to help others so we may have a better chance next time.
Sikhs believe that our soul belongs to a spiritual universe where we reincarnate and store up goodness until we have filled up enough good deeds to meet with God. At this point we can choose to stay with God or to choose to accept a lower class and continue serving our fellow man. There are also lower classes such as plants and even microscopic life, but it's unclear to me how one attains these, I would suppose they'd be a punishment of too many poor lives.
Christianity is where it gets complicated, every Christian sect seems to have their own twist on the afterlife, but the main point is that Christ died and saved us from our sins and we are here to prove that we are worthy to accept his sacrifice. Our life accumulates.. for the lack of a better word.. karma and on judgment day we are assigned a new home based on our works. Some sects of Christianity, Universalists for example believe salvation is for all, you simply start with more in the afterlife based on how you conducted yourself on Earth. Then there are seventh day Adventists, which I won't pretend to understand, but are far more strict than even Mormons on who is and is not saved and basically you and I and everyone we know will burn in fire and brimstone when Satan comes to reclaim the rest of us. Christian Science (whatever that is) believes that there is no eternal judgment of heaven and hell and that we move freely between different states in another plane of consciousness. Honestly that sounds somewhat sci-fi to me, but I can't tell them they're wrong. They teach that we can experience heaven here if we so try enough. All that has to be done is to conquer sin through Christ.
Even looking back at ancient religions in Greece and Rome say that we are judged after death and sent to heaven or hell. After a period in hell we can be reincarnated to try again. Zoroastrian beliefs state that after you die you stay on Earth for 3 days with your corpse chanting some prayer. Then after this you are judged using scales (a term of any measurement, not simply weight) to see if your good deeds outweighted the bad, or if they were more or less equal. Then you are sentenced to one of 3 afterlives.
So extremist beliefs and slight differences aside, those all sound almost exactly the same to me. There is an afterlife, if we don't quite get the afterlife we want, we may choose to continue learning and try to achieve this ideal afterlife. The major differences I believe between religions are more ethical than metaphysical. What is good and what is bad? In India killing cows is bad karma, in America telling your neighbor you won't come to their BBQ and eat a burger is not thought of very highly.
It's comforting to think that all these billions of people who can't seem to agree on anything happen to agree, in a loose sort of way, that the afterlife is basically the same. Our existence continues and it continues in a way that a life of good deeds is rewarded with a pleasurable afterlife and a life of bad deeds is punished with a not so fantastic afterlife. That seems incredibly convincing to me. It makes me want to be a good person. It makes me want to give my peanuts to a homeless guy begging for money and makes me feel good about it for the next week because of the friendship him and I will have now, even if we never see each other again as mortals, and because of the overwhelming good feeling that I had inside me. Good karma feels nice!
Now if people could simply quit arguing about what's good and what's bad. If we could just accept each others differences and share an idea of a God who is smart enough (and he IS smart enough, trust me, he's God.. or they're God.. or she's God, whatever) to differentiate between who was trying to be good and who didn't give a damn, then all 7 billion of us (minus a few scientists who are absolutely convinced that nothing happens at all after death) could agree and get along just fine.
The only problem with this is that it would create a somewhat xenophobic society. We value civil rights and universal suffrage in western society, middle-eastern society will never see this viewpoint and if we concentrate on that, we will fight. Fighting over who's God is tougher, when in all likelihood it's the same God, seems like an incredibly fast way to get bad karma. If we simply accept that we're all trying to just be good people and serve the people most dear to us in the best way we know how, why can't we all end up in the afterlife together? The God that I know exists would be accepting of Christains, Jews, Muslims, Taoists and Buddhists alike, as long as we all gave it all, whenever we could on Earth. He would reward us accordingly. Whether this be with a world of my own or another life on another world where I am someone of power or with some reward I can't comprehend with my human mind in the ensuing rebirth as something greater, I can't say for sure. I like to believe the first, but I can't say that IS how it is. Only that an afterlife must exist, and it must be based on rewards I earned as a human.
I guess I figured after my last blog a nice pacifying "can't we all just get along" blog was a good followup. I really want to believe that when I talk to my grandma she acknowledges it in a way I just don't quite understand. I want to believe those hundreds of funky stories where a dead person is revived and can describe stuff that would have been impossible for them to know because they perceived it through some extrasensory means in the "afterlife." Such a happy thought. I miss my Grandma dearly. I want to be her friend again.
I've taken some Nyquil to both curb my headache and hopefully get me back to sleep, but in the 20 or so minutes before it kicks in I thought I'd write.
So I have this irrational fear that I'm going to fall asleep and never wake up. That I'll just die in my sleep. Sounds peaceful I guess, but it scares the hell out of me. I don't want to stop existing. I don't ever want to stop existing. I got to thinking tonight while laying there, just about every religion in the world teaches a form of immortality for us whether it be resurrection, reincarnation or an experience like rebirth into a new world, they all kind of seem to teach that we go on. They are all frighteningly similar:
Islam believes in an afterlife where there are seperate levels of heavan and hell which you can attain based on your deeds in life, sound familiar? I suppose it makes sense for an Abrahamic religion founded by a man called by many a prophet who found some texts in a mountain long after the departure of Jesus Christ to sound similar to another Abrahamic religion founded under similar circumstances.
Hinduism believes that we do things in life and accumulate karma. Based on the goodness or badness of this karma we are brought back to Earth in a situation that could be quite pleasant, or rather terrible. So terrible that you may come back as a chicken.
Buddhism believes nearly the same as Hinduism. You accumulate karma and based upon your karma you can come back as the next Steve Jobs or possibly in a "hell realm" where you would live a life in which you'd attempt to improve. (Maybe Earth is "hell realm, wonder who I pissed off in my last life?) They have a fascinating belief of what happens between life where you are confronted by a light and thoughts of deeds of your life and these thoughts try to keep you from the light which is immortal salvation. If you lived a poor life the light is impossibly to confront, but if you lived one of goodness and service you can follow this path. Many of us are unable to confront the light will be helped by Buddah's to choose a life where we are able to help others so we may have a better chance next time.
Sikhs believe that our soul belongs to a spiritual universe where we reincarnate and store up goodness until we have filled up enough good deeds to meet with God. At this point we can choose to stay with God or to choose to accept a lower class and continue serving our fellow man. There are also lower classes such as plants and even microscopic life, but it's unclear to me how one attains these, I would suppose they'd be a punishment of too many poor lives.
Christianity is where it gets complicated, every Christian sect seems to have their own twist on the afterlife, but the main point is that Christ died and saved us from our sins and we are here to prove that we are worthy to accept his sacrifice. Our life accumulates.. for the lack of a better word.. karma and on judgment day we are assigned a new home based on our works. Some sects of Christianity, Universalists for example believe salvation is for all, you simply start with more in the afterlife based on how you conducted yourself on Earth. Then there are seventh day Adventists, which I won't pretend to understand, but are far more strict than even Mormons on who is and is not saved and basically you and I and everyone we know will burn in fire and brimstone when Satan comes to reclaim the rest of us. Christian Science (whatever that is) believes that there is no eternal judgment of heaven and hell and that we move freely between different states in another plane of consciousness. Honestly that sounds somewhat sci-fi to me, but I can't tell them they're wrong. They teach that we can experience heaven here if we so try enough. All that has to be done is to conquer sin through Christ.
Even looking back at ancient religions in Greece and Rome say that we are judged after death and sent to heaven or hell. After a period in hell we can be reincarnated to try again. Zoroastrian beliefs state that after you die you stay on Earth for 3 days with your corpse chanting some prayer. Then after this you are judged using scales (a term of any measurement, not simply weight) to see if your good deeds outweighted the bad, or if they were more or less equal. Then you are sentenced to one of 3 afterlives.
So extremist beliefs and slight differences aside, those all sound almost exactly the same to me. There is an afterlife, if we don't quite get the afterlife we want, we may choose to continue learning and try to achieve this ideal afterlife. The major differences I believe between religions are more ethical than metaphysical. What is good and what is bad? In India killing cows is bad karma, in America telling your neighbor you won't come to their BBQ and eat a burger is not thought of very highly.
It's comforting to think that all these billions of people who can't seem to agree on anything happen to agree, in a loose sort of way, that the afterlife is basically the same. Our existence continues and it continues in a way that a life of good deeds is rewarded with a pleasurable afterlife and a life of bad deeds is punished with a not so fantastic afterlife. That seems incredibly convincing to me. It makes me want to be a good person. It makes me want to give my peanuts to a homeless guy begging for money and makes me feel good about it for the next week because of the friendship him and I will have now, even if we never see each other again as mortals, and because of the overwhelming good feeling that I had inside me. Good karma feels nice!
Now if people could simply quit arguing about what's good and what's bad. If we could just accept each others differences and share an idea of a God who is smart enough (and he IS smart enough, trust me, he's God.. or they're God.. or she's God, whatever) to differentiate between who was trying to be good and who didn't give a damn, then all 7 billion of us (minus a few scientists who are absolutely convinced that nothing happens at all after death) could agree and get along just fine.
The only problem with this is that it would create a somewhat xenophobic society. We value civil rights and universal suffrage in western society, middle-eastern society will never see this viewpoint and if we concentrate on that, we will fight. Fighting over who's God is tougher, when in all likelihood it's the same God, seems like an incredibly fast way to get bad karma. If we simply accept that we're all trying to just be good people and serve the people most dear to us in the best way we know how, why can't we all end up in the afterlife together? The God that I know exists would be accepting of Christains, Jews, Muslims, Taoists and Buddhists alike, as long as we all gave it all, whenever we could on Earth. He would reward us accordingly. Whether this be with a world of my own or another life on another world where I am someone of power or with some reward I can't comprehend with my human mind in the ensuing rebirth as something greater, I can't say for sure. I like to believe the first, but I can't say that IS how it is. Only that an afterlife must exist, and it must be based on rewards I earned as a human.
I guess I figured after my last blog a nice pacifying "can't we all just get along" blog was a good followup. I really want to believe that when I talk to my grandma she acknowledges it in a way I just don't quite understand. I want to believe those hundreds of funky stories where a dead person is revived and can describe stuff that would have been impossible for them to know because they perceived it through some extrasensory means in the "afterlife." Such a happy thought. I miss my Grandma dearly. I want to be her friend again.
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