Category Archives: Philosophy of Religion

Delusions of Freedom

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Here is the etiology of delusions of freedom.  We are born safe and snug in a very simplified world of very gradually revealed mysteries.  At first, none of the data shared with us seem to conflict, and all is well.  We imitate sounds we hear as infants, verbalize all wants as kids, whisper to ourselves as teens, repeat the sound of our parents voices (in our heads) as young adults, and eventually all the voices, wisdom, idioms, and “rules” of truth from the books, people, and knowledge we acquire converge into one single inward consciousness, completely segregated from the external world.  But during this psychological development from embryonic clones to individualistic birth, we begin to encounter paradoxes which may present strong truths that threaten previously incorporated (but weaker) arguments or fairy tales that helped us sleep soundly.  A few of the more fundamental assumptions may even be mere convenient lies that lubricate social integration and socioeconomic equilibrium.

If you are fortunate and resolve these crises without exaggerated deconstruction (backing up to point zero), or support network trauma, your inner world becomes far more universal and real than the external material world, though it remains subject to empirical validations in some respects.  And even though your inner world has no parts that transcend or do not otherwise derive from physical reality, it nevertheless has fewer self-contradictions and hypocrisies, if you are more committed to honest methods of finding truth and admitting errors, than to saving face and blindly defending a position.  Although you cautiously avoid exaggerated claims of certainty, you are not too cowardly to admit your own potential for bias and mistakes.  A healthy and active imagination excitedly probes many possible theories and while sadly it may sadly admit those things less probable it never stops dreaming for what is still possible.  But not everyone is so fortunate to bravely exist in a world so uncertain.  For some of us, we are still tightly clinging to the supportive web of self-identification with the external.  Rather than honor our heritage from a respectful distance, we find that we have no distinct sense of self beyond it.

For these unfortunate souls the magic of Peter Pan is very different indeed from the supernatural power of the hallowed spiritual realm.  Reverence for tradition demands that questions be silenced whenever the sacred stories are told.  And all that we are is still but a mere series of group affiliations, peer reference group associations, and temporal conflations of situational coincidences.  It’s poor form to stand beyond the first two mundane deviations and certainly poor sportsmanship to break protocol with ones ancestral customs.  But what if those customs no longer serve the “public good” so well, such as when the public is no longer as homogenized and uni-vocal.  And what if literacy enables more individually tailored practices which suite personal preferences for understanding and even self-expression?  What you more often then encounter are intellectual grave-sites where battles fizzle fast between officially sanctioned public values and victimless behavioral practices.  May the strongest emotion win, and reason be silent.

Thus compunctions to defend our inner world (the self) may at times be a result of internalizing principles that conflict one with another.  But that is not freedom.  That is self-enslavement and that is why the delusion of freedom is a delusion instead of an emergent property resulting from a strong sense of one’s own internal moral and rational compass.  It’s a fear of failure in the face of certainty when answering questions that demand answers but have no more universal applicability than that we all eventually ask them.  The delusion of freedom is a tragic paradox for usually those most likely to claim science less useful in service to one’s acquisition of knowledge (relative to supernatural sources), are also those most likely to have surrendered their ability to reason about freedom itself by virtue of blindly accepting explanations based on magic.

Episcopal Liberals vs. Pentacostals

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The Background

An particularly objective journalist at Arkansas Online recently posted a report here: http://tr.im/tCJn regarding homosexuality and conservative Christian denominations (via the popular blog ‘BibleBeltBlogger.com‘).

The report shows that there has been a dramatic increase in membership of Assemblies of God churches, accompanied by a dramatic decrease in membership within the Episcopal church over the last few decades.

What really makes this topic interesting is that the Assemblies of God take a fairly strong stance against homosexuality, where as the Episcopalians are accepting of it. See this entry at Biblebeltblogger for more info: http://tr.im/tCQf

My Reactions

Wow, this is very interesting data.

I wonder if researchers could ever somehow find a way to conduct anonymous survey research, which is conducted in such a way as to be statistically valid, sampled via a representative cross-section of those included in these reported attendance numbers. I wonder what sorts of information people would report.

Some interesting questions I would like to ask are:

  1. Provide a ranking from most to least influential in attending ‘this’ church, rather than some other church.
    • This could actually get much deeper. Factors could be grouped according to all kinds of cultural, demographic, political, philosophical, and of course, theological categories.
    • Some possible factors could be rather mundane such as style of music (full ‘rock’ band, with guitars, drums, and progressive style), attraction to “mega-churches” (which are like entertainment extravaganzas), versus humbler much smaller churches.
    • But the real MEAT of this type of survey would be a deconstruction, and possible attempt at inference based on the ‘official’ position, and unofficial practices of Churches on moral issues, such as: members with addictions, mental illness, evangelism versus purely humanitarian activities. If answers are vague or black-and-white, if the atmosphere is more liberal or traditional, permissive or conformist, personal or formal, etc. These factors may reflect changes in society or culture as a whole where they are strongest.
  2. Do you believe that higher attendance or other types of success are caused by holiness, resulting in God’s favor? Or alternatively, does God choose his servants, and choose who will be blesses, according to his own mysterious ways? Success here can mean many things, such as financial growth, new converts, media coverage, community penetration (provision for private church run education for children of members, in-home support groups, etc.).
    • This question relates to the question of whether moral good exists independently of God, and then God complies. The alternative is that moral good, is perfectly synonymous with God’s will, and that God will’s something is what makes it good. Did God choose the Israelites because they were upright, holy, and good? Or did he choose them first, and that conveyed a special status to them, a dispensation as holy people? If there is no good outside of God’s will, then it is IMPOSSIBLE to be good outside of God’s will. If good exists as part of how God created all the Universe, then that is essentially the same as the good always being at all times, created and existing as such, only as God Will’s it, continually, and subject to change if God so decides. Recall, those evil doers who refused to kill every single last woman and child in the conquered lands (after the 40 yrs in the desert). How wrong they were to suppose they could reason out morality on their own, and still be good, when that conflicted with God’s will.
    • If this research proved useful, you might even decide to study these questions within other religions, and other cultures. Do cultures that are rich and powerful, view God as rewarding the ‘chosen’ one’s, here on earth with victory in war, riches, and power? Consider for instance a culture where far more people live in poverty, without ANY medical care, with much shorter life-expectancies. Would it be logical to expect such a culture to believe in a God (or create their perception of God) as one who is vengeful, who will rescue those who suffer, and bring down the evil powerful rich guys?
  3. Lastly, I would like to attempt to include sections which measure attitudes. For example, you might investigate attitudes toward prejudices. Such a survey should avoid forced continuum’s which require a response between extremes (such as one end being “blacks have just as many opportunities as whites, if not more”, and the other extreme being “descendants of slaves deserve reparations”). Instead, each of these individual attitudes (and some double negatives) could be carefully crafted into “degree of agreement” likert scale prompts, from “strongly agree” to “strongly disagree”. But you could study all kinds of attitudes, such as whether “poor people deserve to suffer poverty, because they are lazy”, or “learned helplessness is a myth, monkey’s in cages are faking it because they are too lazy to jump when the shock hits”. Could the proclivity to empathy be related to emotional maturity? How might one’s capacity for moral reasoning be related to a need for simpler, rule-based, black-and-white doctrine, over a more complex, context dependent, more relative set of interpretations?

Could one somehow get away with such comparisons between denominations?
Has any type of research ever really been conducted on a large scale?
Just curious.

God: The Universal Origin of the 7-day Week

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I have always just assumed that the natural celestial cycles (perhaps lunar) determined the 7 day week.  Imagine my surprise to learn that God set this number arbitrarily and then gave it to man!

A close friend of mine made me curious about this very question by claiming that the 7 day week was support for the evangelical protestant theological position, so I decided to look it up.  I thought surely God would have a better reason (like cosmological balance, or some other feature of nature).  Well, after a bit of searching, it seems that there is not very much agreement about the origin of the 7 day week.  The disagreements mostly revolve around which civilization had it first, but there is also pretty clear evidence it may have also just popped up simultaneously in several places.  Note here, that there have been and continue to be many different formulations of “the week”.   Not only is it possibly quite arbitrary indeed, but it seems that God gave this arbitrary number to numerous civilizations via their religion, rather than nature alone.

First, realize that we do NOT use the same 7 day week that the ancient Israelites did (they used some kind of ‘isolunar system’, whatever that is).  Second, most scholars agree that what they developed derived from earlier civilizations such as the Persians, Babylonians, or Sumerians (there is even one theory that it came from Egyptians).  The point is that culture almost never originates entirely from scratch. It comes from PEOPLE who came from other people, who came from people before them, moving around at times, migrating, or staying in one place for a while, but always coming from other people who also had culture.  If you find some very solid, very well preserved cultural ‘thing’ in a group of people, there’s a strong chance it derived in large part from various other peoples who came before them.  As you go further back to the most primitive original specimens of “modern human”, there’s a lot less of that culture, and fewer cultural “things”.  Not that morphology actually does recapitulate phylogeny (mostly disproven, but useful at times), however, a good analogy here is moving down mentally from adult to baby.  Encoding becomes less and less symbolic, vocabulary smaller and smaller, until eventually you wind up with literal encoding of basic drives.

With that said, there is almost no doubt that most calendars were based at least partly on changes in the seasons and stars, which was often the province of religion all the way up until science began to split from religion.  So, if we only consider the question “when did the Hebrew first develop their religion, and by consequence, their particular 7-day week”, then there is at least some kind of answer.  Orthodox Jews agree that the oldest portions of their scripture were not written before 1500 BC.  In fact, the oldest known small “fragment” we still have in physical existence of Hebrew scripture is dated to about 600 BC, and the oldest complete or nearly complete text (Dead Sea Scrolls) date to about 150 BC.  Now, consider for a moment that “Modern Humans” were first created about 200,000 years ago.  Certainly, that’s a whole lot of time to come up with theories as to why and how things work.  One of the biggest concerns of those early humans must have been the powerful natural elements, which seemed to have cycles.

It is logical to suspect people began to notice that there were big annual cycles, with cold and hot, but also smaller ones like night and day.  A next logical step would be to ask if there were cycles between these two?  Eventually people started to try and count things to know in advance when the cycle was going to repeat to thereby avoid death from not being prepared.  People create our own artificial categories in order to identify them and discriminate patterns, but nature seems to have some groupings too.  Together they combine into the ‘kinds’ we use in language which usually drift in meaning over time.  For most of history, religion was the ONLY means possible to understand the natural world, and many other things too, which involved super powerful forces over life and death.  Science was only a minor component integrated into most of the major religions as man started to organize into proto-states about 6,000 years ago.

As organization grew complex, consolidation or functional collaboration of religions became a key factor of success or failure to a civilization.  If there were incompatibilities, and no clear winner was possible, the civilization stagnated (or even deteriorated), and meaning sharing was difficult.. making progress such as in technology and social endeavors slower or even distracted towards the conflict.  The Christian religion is a direct descendant (and has surpassed in many regards) the older Hebrew religion, and some others which it absorbed to lesser degrees. This supreme dominance has had some influence on the adoption of the Christian calendar by the many other civilizations which previously used other ones (or which continue to use them, with less and less prevalence), although to what degree cannot be segregated from the impact of imperialism and other factors.  Today, I would argue that economics and technology drive this more than religion.