Like this bridge collapse in Baltimore this morning. All over facebook, praying hands and people claiming they’re going to pray for the victims. If you thought that worked, why wouldn’t you pray that no one would be on the bridge at that moment? Why wouldn’t you pray that no ships hit the pier of the bridge? Surely those two things would be within God’s power.
I used to see an SUV near work that had a vinyl cut on the rear window that said something like, “so-and-so, 1978-1998 - God cured his pain and called him to heaven”. In other words, no matter what, God comes out on top - either he’s cured and look how great God is for curing him! Or he dies and look how great God is for ending his suffering!
My mom is a strong believer in God, and claims that she and I surviving my birth is proof enough. Her body rejected me at 28 weeks because our blood has different rh factors. She went into eclamptic seizures and I had to be surgically removed. We both almost died. I was an incredibly sickly child. At one point, my mom was as looking into signing me up for Make a Wish, because so many people, my mom included, thought I was just going to die. I was that unhealthy. My left lung has permanent scar tissue from having pneumonia so much when I was younger. You can still see it clearly on x-rays. My lungs weren’t fully developed until I was 19. Doctors were tracking their development to make sure I wouldn’t need any extra care as an adult.
Now I’m an adult who is relatively healthy considering all of the debilitating ailments I have, most likely a direct result of being born early. My mom says it’s a miracle and a blessing from God that I survived and am as successful as I am. I don’t think it’s any of that shit. I think it’s modern medicine and my desire to succeed to spite people who’ve wronged me. God ain’t got shit on antibiotics and spite.
It should also be said, “It’s hard to be a Theist when you’re taking a stroll through a cemetery with 100+ year old tomb stones where every other one is a dead child.”
In a pre-modern science era, religion really makes sense for these people.
I couldn’t imagine losing a child. Let alone more than one. And then having absolutely no understanding of why? I consider myself and atheist and a cynic, but in the shoes of a pre-industrial revolution parent…I may not be able to accept “god has a reason”, but I could absolutely accept “they are in heaven”.
Nowadays it’s inexcusable. Childhood mortality is incredibly low, especially from non-accidental causes like disease. MCs are less frequent due to improved societal factors (diet, stress, exercise, prenatal care, etc), and we can identify the causes a shockingly high percentage of the time.
To be fair, it’s hard to be a Christian or someone who presumes a benign creator when looking at children’s wards or the overrepresentation of children and youth in disaster, plague and famine mortality.
As a player and occasional programmer of sims and models, the degree of suffering in the universe is compatible with a creator when the well being of the individual units (or even species) are not a goal.
If the objective is drama and entertainment, creation as Reality TV, where Anyone Can Die™ then mountains of dead babies is all part of the show.
No, what makes it hard to be a theist is how everything is procedural. None of the life around us looks like a pocket-watch made by an artisan. It looks like a pocket-watch made by generative AI, itself programmed by generative AI, itself programmed by generative AI. We aren’t the Sims, we’re the dead drunken cats in taverns who got alcohol poisoning from spillage on the floors ingested when cleaning ourselves.
This doesn’t entirely disprove intelligence creating the universe, of course. The simulation hypothesis is still valid, but we can expect God to be more like Azathoth ( Long may be slumber ) than Adonai. And we are microbes in the tree bark of a single Sequoia Redwood in central California, rather that God’s chosen. Heck, if there is a divine purpose to the universe ( ꜰᴏʀᴛy ᴛᴡᴏ ) then we are just as likely incidental to its function, or even an emergent antagonistic side effect thanks to the chaos of complexity, than we are a critical element of its function.
But then, You are a redundant functionary in God’s great machine to prepare Its morning breakfast does not sell people into your organized money-driven religious ministry.
It’s a little more complex than that. Our sense of beauty is emergent from eons of conditions that are fruitful for survival. A sunset reflecting on water indicates you’re next to a body of water, which is often a good place to settle. It’s why we consider spiky, bleak architecture to signify where we’ve buried our toxic waste.
The emotions come from what’s in our head, but why we experience those emotions is well informed by eons of ancestors and what clear water vs murky water meant to them. And human art is informed by these instincts, either our love of painting sunsets, pastorals and beautiful human specimens, or in the abstract, tinkering with supernormal stimulus. (Hence why all fast-food brands are red and orange)
This is why green is a narrow bandwidth in the center of our visible color spectrum. We have good cause to see green (typically chlorophyll related) things, since either we want to eat them, or eat things that eat them. That said, it means that the qualia of subjected experiences that differentiate PCs from NPCs (or p-zombies in the mind-body problem) are largely informed by eons of survival-driven evolution, hence red is an alarm color whether or not we have a soul or are the protagonist. Even NPCs experience beauty and color subjectively, with instincts and experiences to inform them.
Why are people floored into faith by the scale of the Grand Canyon, when they can just look up at the sky, and see a gigantic rock that has been falling towards us for millions of years, and feel the heat from the nearby (in cosmic terms) star which is an accumulation of hydrogen so massive that it’s gravity alone has enough force to sustain a fusion reaction? But a trough in the ground caused by flowing water, that gotta be the work of god.
Not to downplay the Grand Canyon. It sure does look amazing!
Because as far as orbital mechanics are concerned it’s falling toward us (because that’s what orbiting usually involves) but because the orbit is slowly getting larger it’s falling is slowed, maybe? Well can’t really be that because the speed should be pretty constant?
Huh, that’s kinda a hard thing to answer comprehensively for someone who didn’t take that astrophysics course everyone else took…
Seems why you’re overcomplicating it a little bit. The moon used to be much closer to the earth thousands of years ago and now it’s not, slowly has been getting slingshotted out of orbit since the big bang.
That’s bot exactly what I was referring to, I meant the creation of the earth so I was incorrect there referencing the big bang. Rest of the point stands though, shortly after the earth formed or was forming it was struck and the moon was created and slowly started falling away to it’s current position. Quick search shows it is locked in a dynamic orbit now. I did need some brushing up of the subject, cheers
Orbits are closer to spirals, earth and the moon are moving around the sun, with the moon spiraling around earth. It’s just a larger and larger spiral.
Falling is a relative term. I’d just say it’s accelerating slightly towards us, creating a wonky spiral through space.
I can’t remember who said it, but it’s a great thought…
Looking at all the beauty of the Earth, the ocean, the forests, mountains and every living creature, then looking to the moon, the sun, all the planets, the stars, galaxies, with a seemingly endless amount of space and possibilities…
With all this, why do religious people feel like that’s not enough? Is that not grand enough for you already? Why does there have to be something greater?
Tbh I think this one’s on the Bible. It does say that we are the Shepherd of God’s creation or something, and I guess a shepherd is technically allowed to exploit the fuck out of their flock 🤷
Yeah, but we are looking on as our flock gets slowly but surely smaller and smaller. Our neighbor has warned us for decades about the wolves, but we don’t believe him and maybe a little culling is good for the flock in the end.
Well… That one sort of depends more on what variety of spirituality is in play. If you have something very human centric where people are considered the apex of creation or that things were created for people to inherit then people tend to treat natural resources as theirs by divine right.
Critically there ARE theistic systems that veiw things from a decentralized point of view. If humans are just one of many or if the spirits/God’s / ghosts of the ancestors etc. are tied to the well being of the land and the whole thing is treated spiritually as shared property or a closed system you see a very different attitude. It’s part of why many indigenous peoples tend to foster very symbiotic arrangements with land use. Multi or pantheistic belief systems are more likely to be this way than monotheistic systems and the problem with monotheistic religions is they tend to be very aggressive at taking over the space and support a colonizers mindset of “this is mine because it is otherwise unclaimed or the claim is illegitimate.”
Too many times in discussion people conflate Theist to basically just mean Monotheist religions… Which sucks because it kind of feels like it buys into the monotheistic mindset of being the only thing out there worth learning or caring about.
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