An Atheist State of Mind
This is an old blog post of mine that I recently edited on my site. Thought I'd copypaste it here:
One thing I'd like to make clear is that I'm more of an objective atheist than a utilitarian atheist. To elaborate, there's beliefs which we have that we likely maintain for utility, because they make us feel better. Then there's beliefs which we have that are more objective, that Earth is rotating, that it has a moon and so on. Those we believe because we observe them, we see them with our very eyes and the scientific process reveals the workings of them. The atheistic outlook doesn't necessarily make me any happier in itself but insomuch as I can gather, I see this as a more objectively truthful outlook than believing in gods. And I prefer using the term "gods" because I don't want to forget about the polytheists. If you believe in a god or gods that are made in the likeness of man, then it makes just as much sense to believe in a masculine and feminine entity that creates life as it does one single entity creating life. Now I'm aware polytheists generally don't believe in this way but it's a way of putting other beliefs in perspective, but I digress, that's another topic.
And to reach some middleground, I think those that believe in a god or gods are believing in a truth of some sort. I see them as believing in what they do because perhaps to them it's the proper way of living and the wish to survive and thrive is a valid truth in and of itself. I suppose I define "truth" a bit more liberally than some also. In my assumption, I'd say the word in whatever translations it's had has historically been about survival instead of what we typically think of as "truth" these days. The scientific process is a means of discovering the world for a purpose of survival and some would say curiosity, which is an aspect of awareness leading to advancement and therefore survival, and sometimes not so much for the unfortunate. This might not sound very pleasing to any religious people reading, but I also view religion in much the same way; observations based not exactly on objective truths but humanistic truths revolving more around social survival.
I also think that belief is a choice and belief being a more objective aspect of religion and that faith is more or less hope, a more utilitarian aspect of religion in that you hope to believe because it makes you feel better. But belief is something you can't have until you become convinced to believe. I can ask you to believe in Santa but you won't until I convince you that such a man exists with seemingly supernatural powers. You can say you do but unless you're truly convinced, it'll be shallow words and one could almost say a lie. You may have faith, or hope, that such a man exists because it would make you happier but I'm not convinced that searching for what makes one happier is necessarily the best way to go about life. And if you were trying to convince me of your god or gods, what would make you think that I view your god or gods as having higher priority over my attention than other peoples' gods . One of my biggest criticisms with the Abrahamic god Yahweh is that if you can't convince yourself to believe then you're eternally doomed. Even if the punishment is an eternity from Yahweh's love instead of hellfire as some preach, then why, if you're an omniscient, omnipresent, and omnipotent entity that supposedly knows all, would you willingly give life to your offspring knowing they won't believe? Some would say because Yahweh endowed us with free will but in response, if my child was playing in the road and even if I knew the child would lose five minutes of freedom, I'd keep them to their room so they don't end up spending an eternity away from me with certain death from a car accident. In my limited love and understanding as a human, would a god not have even more?
But to put my outlooks in a more social perspective using an analogy, life is like a set of Legos, you never know which one you're going to step on barefooted in the middle of the night cursing your way to the kitchen. No, just a little jest there, pardon my digression. When we're born, we're given this fundamental building block set with instructions by which they can go together. We teach our youngest the properties of each block and how they play with the others, this is analogous to morality and social conditioning. Then adolescence hits and we've usually gotten a grip on the basics of what's expected but sometimes we want to go outside the instruction set and be more adventurous, trying to find other ways we can configure the blocks and how to better arrange them for ourselves, to make our own sort of legacy and strut our independence. And sometimes we go too far outside of what we're taught and get ourselves in trouble so sooner or later we realize the importance of the instructions as a safe guideline. Some make it a duty to best adhere to these instructions at some point, be it the religiously, politically or judicially minded individuals. But sometimes conflict arises when we realize other people from different cultures and locales have grown accustomed to following a different rule set, a different way of arranging the blocks in a sometimes unspoken social contract that works smoothly for that group and its goals.
This is the point I'm at in my life. I realize the validity of the other groups and their goals. If religion is supposedly for the greater good then I think it's consequential that if you experience enough cultures and customs that the greater good would be to have tolerance of other views. Also to realize that to some people, there are no instructions other than the very fundamental laws of physics that restricts us from arranging these blocks in designation. There is no anarchical society without religion or law, as some would fear. There is order to the social fabric due to inherent physical laws.
For reference, if you're familiar with Game Theory, which was derived from the psychological operations of the Cold War and still in use today in economics, artificial intelligence, and other forms of predicting social response, you could make a safe assumption in saying even without artificially constructed morals and laws, there are fundamental rules at play to keep us in check. This is, in my own anecdotal observation, the primal rules by which nations and humans play. There is order in the universe and subsequently the behavior of humanity; this is why we have PR firms, group psychology experts, military psyops, etc that can establish algorithms and parse data to find a method to the seeming sociological madness. A dichotomy of man is that we like the unknown in some ways, the mysteries and sometimes chaos of life. It's like a big Christmas present yet to be wrapped, an exciting surprise. In other ways, we like rules and the known. We like order and knowing what we're going to get. I think some of us think that because we may sometimes see very few rules in the game of life, that there must be some arbiter somewhere, some gamemaster heading all this. And because we like to anthropomorphize things, that the arbiter is like us in a lot of ways and has rules for us that were discovered directly by few men. But like anything else that I inspect on a deeper level, I feel comforted to know that I've found many established rules in the game of life and that there is order in the universe without a religious rulebook and those rules are based on the inherent rules of the physical properties of the universe. Sure, you may say, maybe things are fine without belief in a god but does that mean a god or gods don't exist? It seems we're anthropomorphizing again. Just because we have parents that created us doesn't mean there's an entity in our image that created us all. We tend to think because we're great that something greater had to create us, something more intelligent and complex. If you look at our biological composition, we're a complex and intelligent entity created from lesser complex and less intelligent entities. You probably don't generally think so but neurons, you could argue, have an intelligence, a complex response, as well as other cells to a lesser degree.
You may not agree with me on the definition of intelligence just as the word "truth" and that's understandable. It's something entirely arguable at this point in science but I feel like things would be simpler if we'd view the universe in a more thermodynamic or mathematical sense rather than this arbitrary grammatical way which we communicate through it and about it. In the thermodynamic sense, life and intelligence is something spectral. The broad line we define for ourselves in how human life and less intelligent life operates likely wouldn't be viewed so distinctly from a thermodynamic view. In its simplest form, life is particles responding to particles. So what am I getting at? Just because we may view ourselves as intelligent and complex entities doesn't necessarily mean we came from something of greater intelligence and complexity. We definitely create things every day of lesser complexity than ourselves and I also think it's possible one day we could create something more intelligent and complex than ourselves as a person and a people. On some level we do create things that are better than us at certain tasks. But some of us seem to have this top-down view of creation. I don't necessarily believe that what precipitated us has to be or have been more intelligent or complex. In evolution, it very well tells us the opposite. Life, you could say is a low-entropy agent, seeming organization and complexity derived from seeming disorganization and simplicity. You could just as well make a point that a god or gods is a less intelligent yet simpler, more elegant and pure entity than ourselves. Perhaps there's a few that do view their god or gods in this way. But the furthest I could take theism is that there is a universe, an entity that could be called a god just as much as anything, a soup that we're a part of and ingrained in us is a certain way to go about life. But I don't pretend my way is the only way, that is until my ideological wave function is collapsed, so to speak, that it becomes something relevant to myself and possibly to others. In other words I don't view it as a very defining part of myself until I have to make relevant choices. Otherwise, in my daily living I have pretty well the same views as most other people, in some ways more typically conservative than average and some ways more liberal.
But I'm just as a-political as I am a-religous yet religion is more a concern to me because you can run for office if you're a different political persuasion yet if you don't believe in gods, you can't in some states in the US and parts of the world. Also if suppose you view clubs as being irrelevant to your life but when everyone else is in a club, you feel you should have a club for those that don't have clubs as a way of standing up for yourself and others that are in the same situation, a preservation and in some ways perpetuation of that part of society and those views. For some clubs, perpetuation of that view is a big part of it as it's seen as "spreading the gospel" in Christianity and in Islam, I'm not sure the popular term used but as far as I'm aware, it's also generally encouraged to spread the word. And in fairness, some religions tend to be more benign such as Buddhism, Taoism, etc. But for the most part, that's why I feel my view should be something relevant, because you're essentially forced into it being a "thing", so to speak. Sometimes your ideological wave function has to be collapsed and you as well as others have to make your position a thing. I think atheism is naturally a more benign view though with most, a lot of it depends on the host of the view. So in credit, I don't think religion is in itself necessarily negative as even the most supposedly peaceful of religions or beliefs will tend to have a few extremists.
I apologize if my irreverence for religion offends anyone but I feel too often than not that the fear in accepting other religious, cultural, or behavioral differences is counter intuitive to most religions' goals. I think it's crucial to recognize these people that play by other instruction books if we want to insure a good and safe future for the ones that will come after us. And so I don't just speak untowardly about religious hypocrisy but there's plenty of secular individuals whose behavior is supposedly implied to be for the greater good yet their ignorance and short-sightedness negatively affects hundreds if not thousands of other people in some fashion to save a few, what we may sometimes refer to as tyrants. Of course, not everyone claims their moral purpose is for the greater good, it may be for a few or for one but in due time, their selfishness may likely get the best of them. And if not, then congratulations, they played the game, won, and can enjoy the spoils of short term victory. But humanity will be on the lookout for people like them, or not. In between entertainment and working, most people may not have time to be intellectually aware as much as desired. This is why intellectual vigilance is important so we can look out for others; I think humans are the supreme arbiters of humans. If we fail to care for one another, then it's on us, not a god or gods that didn't look out for us. If we fail to take care of our world, that's on us. When we're not environmentally aware and in the end, wind up creating a world for our children that's worse than when we entered, then that's on us to fix it and not to expect a god to come in and fix our mistakes. That's a response generally prompted if someone asks me if I don't believe in a supreme arbitor, then how can fairness exist in the world? I don't believe in a "god" of mistakes. There may be instances where things don't go our way but I believe they're going the way as intended, or to be more specific so I don't imply intelligence, they're going as they're going. Water just doesn't flow and suddenly stop in its tracks unless something stops it. I view life just as deterministically as I view all other physical properties. When we believe in a perfect god, we're sometimes let down when things don't seem to go or appear perfectly. When we accept that in life there's imperfections according to us and failures, it comes more graciously as well as our recoveries from failure. We have to accept that we can't solely rely on gods to fix ourselves and our world at all times.
This post was originally meant for the atheists who feel out of place in the social fabric of the bible belt and for those of you not very aware of atheistic perspectives. But atheistic views vary just as wildly as religious views, on the moral and political scales so don't assume most atheists view things as I do. There's a different game out there some people are playing, you could call it a checkers and chess comparison. Even though we may not like chess or its more complex rule set, sometimes we're best off at least learning the rules in case we're in a situation where we have to play by those rules, for our safety and others. What I'm getting at here besides showing some people an atheist state of mind is that I think people are perhaps better off relying more on academics along with a healthy blend of street smarts and self/social defense than relying on an invisible arbiter who arguably doesn't exist (ducking from religious readers).
One thing I'd like to make clear is that I'm more of an objective atheist than a utilitarian atheist. To elaborate, there's beliefs which we have that we likely maintain for utility, because they make us feel better. Then there's beliefs which we have that are more objective, that Earth is rotating, that it has a moon and so on. Those we believe because we observe them, we see them with our very eyes and the scientific process reveals the workings of them. The atheistic outlook doesn't necessarily make me any happier in itself but insomuch as I can gather, I see this as a more objectively truthful outlook than believing in gods. And I prefer using the term "gods" because I don't want to forget about the polytheists. If you believe in a god or gods that are made in the likeness of man, then it makes just as much sense to believe in a masculine and feminine entity that creates life as it does one single entity creating life. Now I'm aware polytheists generally don't believe in this way but it's a way of putting other beliefs in perspective, but I digress, that's another topic.
And to reach some middleground, I think those that believe in a god or gods are believing in a truth of some sort. I see them as believing in what they do because perhaps to them it's the proper way of living and the wish to survive and thrive is a valid truth in and of itself. I suppose I define "truth" a bit more liberally than some also. In my assumption, I'd say the word in whatever translations it's had has historically been about survival instead of what we typically think of as "truth" these days. The scientific process is a means of discovering the world for a purpose of survival and some would say curiosity, which is an aspect of awareness leading to advancement and therefore survival, and sometimes not so much for the unfortunate. This might not sound very pleasing to any religious people reading, but I also view religion in much the same way; observations based not exactly on objective truths but humanistic truths revolving more around social survival.
I also think that belief is a choice and belief being a more objective aspect of religion and that faith is more or less hope, a more utilitarian aspect of religion in that you hope to believe because it makes you feel better. But belief is something you can't have until you become convinced to believe. I can ask you to believe in Santa but you won't until I convince you that such a man exists with seemingly supernatural powers. You can say you do but unless you're truly convinced, it'll be shallow words and one could almost say a lie. You may have faith, or hope, that such a man exists because it would make you happier but I'm not convinced that searching for what makes one happier is necessarily the best way to go about life. And if you were trying to convince me of your god or gods, what would make you think that I view your god or gods as having higher priority over my attention than other peoples' gods . One of my biggest criticisms with the Abrahamic god Yahweh is that if you can't convince yourself to believe then you're eternally doomed. Even if the punishment is an eternity from Yahweh's love instead of hellfire as some preach, then why, if you're an omniscient, omnipresent, and omnipotent entity that supposedly knows all, would you willingly give life to your offspring knowing they won't believe? Some would say because Yahweh endowed us with free will but in response, if my child was playing in the road and even if I knew the child would lose five minutes of freedom, I'd keep them to their room so they don't end up spending an eternity away from me with certain death from a car accident. In my limited love and understanding as a human, would a god not have even more?
But to put my outlooks in a more social perspective using an analogy, life is like a set of Legos, you never know which one you're going to step on barefooted in the middle of the night cursing your way to the kitchen. No, just a little jest there, pardon my digression. When we're born, we're given this fundamental building block set with instructions by which they can go together. We teach our youngest the properties of each block and how they play with the others, this is analogous to morality and social conditioning. Then adolescence hits and we've usually gotten a grip on the basics of what's expected but sometimes we want to go outside the instruction set and be more adventurous, trying to find other ways we can configure the blocks and how to better arrange them for ourselves, to make our own sort of legacy and strut our independence. And sometimes we go too far outside of what we're taught and get ourselves in trouble so sooner or later we realize the importance of the instructions as a safe guideline. Some make it a duty to best adhere to these instructions at some point, be it the religiously, politically or judicially minded individuals. But sometimes conflict arises when we realize other people from different cultures and locales have grown accustomed to following a different rule set, a different way of arranging the blocks in a sometimes unspoken social contract that works smoothly for that group and its goals.
This is the point I'm at in my life. I realize the validity of the other groups and their goals. If religion is supposedly for the greater good then I think it's consequential that if you experience enough cultures and customs that the greater good would be to have tolerance of other views. Also to realize that to some people, there are no instructions other than the very fundamental laws of physics that restricts us from arranging these blocks in designation. There is no anarchical society without religion or law, as some would fear. There is order to the social fabric due to inherent physical laws.
For reference, if you're familiar with Game Theory, which was derived from the psychological operations of the Cold War and still in use today in economics, artificial intelligence, and other forms of predicting social response, you could make a safe assumption in saying even without artificially constructed morals and laws, there are fundamental rules at play to keep us in check. This is, in my own anecdotal observation, the primal rules by which nations and humans play. There is order in the universe and subsequently the behavior of humanity; this is why we have PR firms, group psychology experts, military psyops, etc that can establish algorithms and parse data to find a method to the seeming sociological madness. A dichotomy of man is that we like the unknown in some ways, the mysteries and sometimes chaos of life. It's like a big Christmas present yet to be wrapped, an exciting surprise. In other ways, we like rules and the known. We like order and knowing what we're going to get. I think some of us think that because we may sometimes see very few rules in the game of life, that there must be some arbiter somewhere, some gamemaster heading all this. And because we like to anthropomorphize things, that the arbiter is like us in a lot of ways and has rules for us that were discovered directly by few men. But like anything else that I inspect on a deeper level, I feel comforted to know that I've found many established rules in the game of life and that there is order in the universe without a religious rulebook and those rules are based on the inherent rules of the physical properties of the universe. Sure, you may say, maybe things are fine without belief in a god but does that mean a god or gods don't exist? It seems we're anthropomorphizing again. Just because we have parents that created us doesn't mean there's an entity in our image that created us all. We tend to think because we're great that something greater had to create us, something more intelligent and complex. If you look at our biological composition, we're a complex and intelligent entity created from lesser complex and less intelligent entities. You probably don't generally think so but neurons, you could argue, have an intelligence, a complex response, as well as other cells to a lesser degree.
You may not agree with me on the definition of intelligence just as the word "truth" and that's understandable. It's something entirely arguable at this point in science but I feel like things would be simpler if we'd view the universe in a more thermodynamic or mathematical sense rather than this arbitrary grammatical way which we communicate through it and about it. In the thermodynamic sense, life and intelligence is something spectral. The broad line we define for ourselves in how human life and less intelligent life operates likely wouldn't be viewed so distinctly from a thermodynamic view. In its simplest form, life is particles responding to particles. So what am I getting at? Just because we may view ourselves as intelligent and complex entities doesn't necessarily mean we came from something of greater intelligence and complexity. We definitely create things every day of lesser complexity than ourselves and I also think it's possible one day we could create something more intelligent and complex than ourselves as a person and a people. On some level we do create things that are better than us at certain tasks. But some of us seem to have this top-down view of creation. I don't necessarily believe that what precipitated us has to be or have been more intelligent or complex. In evolution, it very well tells us the opposite. Life, you could say is a low-entropy agent, seeming organization and complexity derived from seeming disorganization and simplicity. You could just as well make a point that a god or gods is a less intelligent yet simpler, more elegant and pure entity than ourselves. Perhaps there's a few that do view their god or gods in this way. But the furthest I could take theism is that there is a universe, an entity that could be called a god just as much as anything, a soup that we're a part of and ingrained in us is a certain way to go about life. But I don't pretend my way is the only way, that is until my ideological wave function is collapsed, so to speak, that it becomes something relevant to myself and possibly to others. In other words I don't view it as a very defining part of myself until I have to make relevant choices. Otherwise, in my daily living I have pretty well the same views as most other people, in some ways more typically conservative than average and some ways more liberal.
But I'm just as a-political as I am a-religous yet religion is more a concern to me because you can run for office if you're a different political persuasion yet if you don't believe in gods, you can't in some states in the US and parts of the world. Also if suppose you view clubs as being irrelevant to your life but when everyone else is in a club, you feel you should have a club for those that don't have clubs as a way of standing up for yourself and others that are in the same situation, a preservation and in some ways perpetuation of that part of society and those views. For some clubs, perpetuation of that view is a big part of it as it's seen as "spreading the gospel" in Christianity and in Islam, I'm not sure the popular term used but as far as I'm aware, it's also generally encouraged to spread the word. And in fairness, some religions tend to be more benign such as Buddhism, Taoism, etc. But for the most part, that's why I feel my view should be something relevant, because you're essentially forced into it being a "thing", so to speak. Sometimes your ideological wave function has to be collapsed and you as well as others have to make your position a thing. I think atheism is naturally a more benign view though with most, a lot of it depends on the host of the view. So in credit, I don't think religion is in itself necessarily negative as even the most supposedly peaceful of religions or beliefs will tend to have a few extremists.
I apologize if my irreverence for religion offends anyone but I feel too often than not that the fear in accepting other religious, cultural, or behavioral differences is counter intuitive to most religions' goals. I think it's crucial to recognize these people that play by other instruction books if we want to insure a good and safe future for the ones that will come after us. And so I don't just speak untowardly about religious hypocrisy but there's plenty of secular individuals whose behavior is supposedly implied to be for the greater good yet their ignorance and short-sightedness negatively affects hundreds if not thousands of other people in some fashion to save a few, what we may sometimes refer to as tyrants. Of course, not everyone claims their moral purpose is for the greater good, it may be for a few or for one but in due time, their selfishness may likely get the best of them. And if not, then congratulations, they played the game, won, and can enjoy the spoils of short term victory. But humanity will be on the lookout for people like them, or not. In between entertainment and working, most people may not have time to be intellectually aware as much as desired. This is why intellectual vigilance is important so we can look out for others; I think humans are the supreme arbiters of humans. If we fail to care for one another, then it's on us, not a god or gods that didn't look out for us. If we fail to take care of our world, that's on us. When we're not environmentally aware and in the end, wind up creating a world for our children that's worse than when we entered, then that's on us to fix it and not to expect a god to come in and fix our mistakes. That's a response generally prompted if someone asks me if I don't believe in a supreme arbitor, then how can fairness exist in the world? I don't believe in a "god" of mistakes. There may be instances where things don't go our way but I believe they're going the way as intended, or to be more specific so I don't imply intelligence, they're going as they're going. Water just doesn't flow and suddenly stop in its tracks unless something stops it. I view life just as deterministically as I view all other physical properties. When we believe in a perfect god, we're sometimes let down when things don't seem to go or appear perfectly. When we accept that in life there's imperfections according to us and failures, it comes more graciously as well as our recoveries from failure. We have to accept that we can't solely rely on gods to fix ourselves and our world at all times.
This post was originally meant for the atheists who feel out of place in the social fabric of the bible belt and for those of you not very aware of atheistic perspectives. But atheistic views vary just as wildly as religious views, on the moral and political scales so don't assume most atheists view things as I do. There's a different game out there some people are playing, you could call it a checkers and chess comparison. Even though we may not like chess or its more complex rule set, sometimes we're best off at least learning the rules in case we're in a situation where we have to play by those rules, for our safety and others. What I'm getting at here besides showing some people an atheist state of mind is that I think people are perhaps better off relying more on academics along with a healthy blend of street smarts and self/social defense than relying on an invisible arbiter who arguably doesn't exist (ducking from religious readers).
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