Probably my biggest problem with religious people, as I generally find them here in the United States, is that it is all style and no content. I usually refer to them as “Cultural Christians.” And that’s a good why to sum them up, although the problem is not limited to Christians by any means. What it gets at is how people use their religion. And I want to be very clear: the Cultural Christians are often very serious about their Christianity—ridiculously so. But they use it primarily as a cultural signifier and not as a way to get closer to God, how ever they may define the concept.

And the poster child for the Cultural Christian movement is, of course, Tim Tebow. Now for those of you who are neither Cultural Christians nor football fans, Tim Tebow is a middling NFL quarterback who was a cause celebre for his ostentatious praying on the field. Of course, the Cultural Christians will tell you that he is pure of heart and just witnessing for the Lord. But I don’t think that’s true. I’m sure he started off pure enough, but after a while it became a thing. And he got lots of extra attention for it. I wrote about this before, Tim Tebow Hypocrisy.

To me, the most interesting gospel is Matthew. I actually like Mark better. But Matthew is where we get the Sermon on the Mount, which is really the best condensation of Jesus’ message. It contains the only part of the Bible I actually have memorized, “Our Father who is in heaven, hallowed be your name, your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors. And do not lead us into temptation, but deliver us from evil. For yours is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever. Amen.”[1] Now that’s a prayer!

The whole middle section of the Sermon deals with not being a Cultural Christian. It is all about not doing “good works” just to get in good with God. Jesus explicitly says that when you pray, you should shut yourself away in a room. Just look at what our man Jesus has to say about public expressions of holiness:

This actually comes back to a recurring theme throughout the Bible: be modest, not prideful. The word I most associate with the Old Testament is “hubris.” And God really doesn’t like it. He has this tendency to wipe out whole cities when he sees it. But among the Cultural Christians, I see almost nothing but hubris. There is this constant drone coming from the movement that they know what the Bible means and so they know what God wants. This is particularly offensive when one of the things they know is that abortion is wrong, which is not only not in the Bible, but which was an issue debated for centuries by the church.

So it was with some annoyance that I saw a headline at the Huffington Post, North Carolina Diner Offers Customers 15 Percent Discount For “Praying In Public.” The wait staff at Mary’s Gourmet Diner in North Carolina, have the option to give a 15% discount when they see “someone in [the] restaurant honoring their gratefulness at my table.” Long before I started reading the Bible I found people saying grace in public offensive. There is no denying it: as heartfelt as it may be, a large part of it is making a spectacle of the person praying. “Look at me! I love God so much that I’m making a big deal of telling him out loud that I’m grateful that he didn’t make me born in some poor time or place when I would be too busy surviving to make a spectacle of myself in a restaurant”!

But this is so much worse. It says on the receipt that the discount is for, “Praying in Public.” It makes you wonder: are these actually Devil worshipers who are just trying to anger God? After all, he sent his only begotten son down to earth to make a big speech—very likely the most famous speech in the history of mankind—and the people at Mary’s Gourmet Diner are encouraging people to do exactly what Jesus told his followers not to do. But that, I’m afraid, is exactly the point.

The Cultural Christians are not followers of Jesus. Largely, they are people who want to wipe out dissent. They want to create a theocracy based upon their own interpretation of the Bible. And that interpretation of the Bible is that women’s birth control should be illegal and gays should be in jail at the very least. At the same time, of course, they will just as ostentatiously “love” the women who they are forcing to die of blood poisoning resulting from a dead fetus. And they will “love” the gay men who are beaten to death. But most of all, they will love that 15% discount at Mary’s Gourmet Diner!

[1] This is actually not what I have memorized. I always quote from the New American Standard Translation, because it is reputed to be the closest to the original Greek. Also, the last part—”For yours is the kingdom…—is a later interpolation. So even if you think Jesus actually did give this sermon, that part is not in the earliest manuscripts of the Bible. But you can see why they added it: it is, as Jimmie Walker would say, “Dyn-o-mite!” (I mean that: it gives the whole thing a great cadence.)

H/T: Mad Kane

Non-overlapping magisteria (strangely given the acronym NOMA) is the idea that there is no conflict between science and religion—they exist in different realms that do not overlap at all. This is an idea that is most associated with Stephen Jay Gould. And to me, it’s always seemed rather obvious. The problem is that most religions do in fact make scientific claims. What’s more, many atheists like to pretend that there is nothing outside of science. But by my definition of religion and science, Gould is completely right.

The biggest problem that I run into with Christians is that there are certain statements in the Bible that are factual claims. And if they see the Bible as literally true, we get into all kinds of problems. The most bizarre is the claim that the world has four corners and thus is flat. This brings about things like the actual Flat Earth Society. But Creationism is no more reasonable a position.

What most bugs me about this kind of stuff is that these people are clearly missing the point of having a religion at all. At one time, it might have been comforting to believe that thunder was the sound of Thor’s hammer. But it was never really useful and it never addressed actual theological questions. So such religious thought not only soils science, but it blinds believers from any theological insights they might gain from their religion.

On the other side, we have atheists who I really think are just trying to annoy me by claiming that they don’t understand basic theology. My favorite example of this was an article I saw in an astronomy magazine. It expressed amazement that people didn’t accept the big bang theory the way they did evolution by natural selection, even though the theory was as well established. The article did an excellent job of explaining why the big bang theory was correct. But the author clearly didn’t understand that it wasn’t that people didn’t accept the theory, but that they found it useless.

Too often, scientists present the big bang theory as an explanation for why the universe exists. In a certain technical sense, the theory does just that. But it is not a complete explanation. It suffers from the very same problem as the explanation that God created the universe. A child of five knows how far this gets you, “Then what created God?” Just the same, “Then what created the big bang?” And it is here that we get into theology.

I think there is only one fundamental theological question, “Why does anything exist?” And I don’t see how this is a question that science can ever address. There is now Lawrence Krauss’ feeble explanation that, “Nothingness is unstable.” And even after 200 pages of A Universe from Nothing, he still can’t see that the instability of “nothingness” means it isn’t nothingness: it has a characteristic; it is “unstable”; it has the remarkable property that allows it to spit out universes now and then.

Now I’m fine with people saying that this theological question makes no sense and there is no answer to it so it’s all rubbish. That’s fine. That is the same as saying that religion is not interesting to you. But to say that such questions don’t exist is simply wrong.

About a year ago, I heard a man I think very highly of, Richard Carrier, say that he didn’t accept NOMA. That surprised me because I have always thought him a deeper thinker than that. But maybe he has an argument I haven’t heard. The standard arguments against NOMA are all straw man arguments. They mostly come down to attacking the fact that as a practical matter, religions make all kinds of falsifiable (and thus scientific) claims. And while this is true, the atheists should be debating Denys Turner and not Pat Robertson.

What’s more, when someone is using a term as pretentious as “non-overlapping magisteria,” one is not making a practical case about what people think religion is. It is rather making a theoretical case for what science and religion both are and are not. It seems to me that atheists would want to use NOMA to convince religious people to at least stop soiling the science ground and to stay on their own very theoretical ground. But alas, they do not. Increasingly, I find the atheist community as ignorant and dogmatic as the religious community.

I’ve kind of given up on calling myself an atheist. This is mostly just because atheists seem to hate it so much. Normally, I’d do it just for the fun of angering them. But I really do qualify. I don’t believe in “God” as some being or thing or process that has any interest in me at all. In fact, I don’t believe in any ideas about cosmic consciousness that might have any interest in anything at all. And I certainly don’t believe that there is anything like life after death. Still, I am a mystic.

Recently, I’ve been thinking that time doesn’t exist. It seems to me that time is nothing more than a construct of consciousness—a way that we perceive reality, which itself is eternal. What we see as past, present, and future are just a thing. It’s like existence is a video and we are only able to see one image at a time. We mistake the image we are currently looking at for “now.” But it isn’t “now.” Every image on the tape is “now.” It exists now and forever. The problem is not the video tape, which is just a bunch of information. The problem is the very limited ways that we have figured out how to experience that information.

The analogy goes further. Video isn’t continuous. In general, it consists of 30 (29.997) frames—individual images—per second. Because of the ways that our brains work, it seems continuous. This is called the “phi phenomenon.” But what we’re interested in is how we don’t notice the nothing between the images. This is called “persistence of vision.” If you look at something and it disappears, your brain will think it is still there for a fraction of a second. So even though the video tape is just a series of static images, it is a representation of something that is more or less continuous. For example: tape me as I walk across the room. Then watch the tape. It looks the same. But it is not. It’s just a trick! In film it is even clearer, because you can see the mechanism: light projects an image, light turns off, next image is moved in place, light is turned on and projects the new image. You just didn’t notice the dark moment when the light turned off.

Thus, I don’t think what we see as reality is continuous. I think we see little snapshots of reality. But unlike persistence of vision, which allows us to disregard the absence of an image for about a 25th of a second, our persistence of reality would be very very small. I figure something like the Planck time:

   =    5.4×10^-44 s

This would explain to me the great “Why?!” of quantum mechanics: why can we only look so far into reality before it stops being concrete? Why is it we must use statistical tools the way other scientists do when they can’t deal with actual individuals. And I say it is because our perception of reality has those dark spots where the light turns off. But because of our “persistence of reality” we think it is continuous.

You might wonder: does this matter other than to theoretical physicists and other crazy people? On a day to day basis, it doesn’t. For example, I’m about to go and make some baked potatoes, because they are delicious. I’m going to finish writing this article because I enjoy it. I will go on living my life just the same. But it bugs me. Because I am part of reality. And I wonder what happens to me between one bit of reality and the next. And it makes me think that my consciousness is just a trick. And that brings me back to the same place I always end up back at: Schopenhauer.

This is why I no longer fear dying. My existence strikes me as a great big cosmic joke. I like life and baked potatoes and all that. But it’s all so curious. I think Hamlet was wrong when he said, “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” I think there are actually fewer things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in our philosophy. If our dreams exist at all.

Afterword

The ultimate question is whether I believe any of this. A little. What I actually think is a lot more complex and I’m still working on it, as you can probably tell. It’s hard to find the language to talk about this stuff.

I have said it many times before and I stand by it, “It is more important to be interesting than to be right.” It just so happens that usually, the most uninteresting people are wrong most of the time. This is because uninteresting people just think the same things over and over. Take Dick Cheney. Did he really have to make the media rounds for us to know what he thinks of the current situation in Iraq? Of course not! He might as well be a really simple program running on a Commodore 64. But one can be completely wrong and be incredibly interesting. So keep this in mind as you read my next sentence.

The philosopher Donald Davidson was wrong. He could not have been more wrong. And what amazes me is that most people think that he was right. I am speaking, of course, about the Swampman thought experiment. Here it is:

Well, actually, in a trivial way he’s right. Because you can’t just be talking about atoms. You have to get all the quantum states exactly the same. But let’s just assume that Davidson didn’t know any better (which is probably true). In that case, he’s totally wrong.

My memory of what my mother looked like is not the result of my eyes having processed the light reflected off of her. Sure, that was the way that I got the information. But then that information was stored in the atoms of my body. Note: I don’t say brain, even though clearly that’s the biggest part. But I’m sure that we think of ourselves as beings in much more than just the brain. Anyway, the brain is hardly discrete from the rest of our bodies. But it doesn’t matter. All the atoms and quantum states and all that jazz are the same.

What bothers me about this thought experiment is that most people seem to think that Swampman wouldn’t have all the information that the original did. This implies that there is you body and then the rest is a kind of fairy dust. (Maybe a soul?) But think about it for a moment. What does it mean for my eyes to have gazed upon my mother. The eyes I have now are different. Every year, the vast majority of your body’s cells are replaced. You are not the same person you were a year ago or even an instant ago. So who exactly are “you” anyway?

This is an issue that has long fascinated me. I don’t think I exist as a going concern. Rather, I exist for an instant, to be replaced by another version of me that is very similar, but not the same. This is why humans so love narratives. That’s what keeps us going: the narrative that we are a single thing. I have in my mind that I am the same person who was playing on the sidewalk at four years old. But I’m not. I just have that memory. And I have all the memories in between and so I think it’s all me. But it is not.

(So why don’t I just kill myself? I mean, since I do nothing but die over and over again at every instant? Just because I think these things doesn’t mean it feels that way. It seems like I’m the same person who started writing this article. And even if I’m not, why should I stop future iterations of me from their instant of existence?)

Getting back to Swampman: what I’m saying is that what goes on with the creation of Swampman is what goes on with us all the time. These eyes I have right now have never seen my mother who has been dead for over a decade. And yet I recognize her when she shows up in my dreams. The people who want to say that Swampman would be different in a fundamental way are missing the nature of our existence.

But you will have to forgive me if we disagree. I understand that a lot of people think there is some “secret sauce” that makes us conscious. All I can say is that you need to read more Schopenhauer. And then you have to obsess about it for a couple of decades.

Since I just used an Atheist Eve cartoon, I was reminded of another of her cartoons where she takes people to task for being “spiritual” but not “religious.” With all due respect to my fellow atheists, this kind of determined ignorance is the main reason that I feel queasy about self-identifying as an atheist. In the cartoon, one character says, “I’m a spiritual person, but not religious. Know what I mean?” And the other character (presumably Atheist Eve herself) says, “Actually, I have no clue what you mean. Do you?” I don’t believe this for a second.

I too have my problems with the whole spiritual crowd. Their thinking on spiritual matters is usually very sloppy. What’s more, it is very easy: they believe whatever they want. They are rarely constrained by the implications of their belief because they don’t take it seriously enough to consider the implications. On the other hand, they aren’t dogmatic. They are open minded enough to search for answers themselves rather than accepting pat answers from religious authorities. And here is the best thing about these people: I can talk to them about spiritual matters without getting a load of crap like, “We know God loves us because it says so in John 3:16!”

Regardless of one’s belief system, there is still one unanswered question, “Why does anything exist?” Now it is possible that one day this question will be answered by science. But atheists who claim that natural selection and the big bang answer it are being disingenuous. There is only one way to deal with the question: define it as unanswered and move on. But it is wrong to say that those of us who do want to think about the question are just the same as people who think that God impregnated a woman so the child could die for the sins of the world. To me, serious spiritual thought is an extension of mathematics. I think, for example, that Godel’s incompleteness theorems tells us something about the nature of systems. Existence is paradoxical, but then so is algebra. The point of thinking about ontology is to gain insight that allow us to ask better questions. I’m not really interested in answers because I don’t think any exist.

I understand that most atheists will object at this point. “But that isn’t spiritualism, that’s math!” they will say. Not at all. Regardless of how you go about gaining insights, it is still spiritual thought. It is true that the character in the comic doesn’t think this carefully about spiritual matters. But that just takes us back to the fundamental problem with most atheists: they are constantly arguing against the most childish religious beliefs. I realize these are the most common beliefs, but the net effect is to devalue atheism itself. “Hippy punching” does not a great movement make.

There is a very general question here: if my interest in ontological questions is not spirituality, what is it? My belief is that there is some kind of process that explains the nature the existence but that it is outside what we think of as reality. If you wanted to, you could say that I was interested in negative theology. But I don’t like the idea of theology—it implies intention, which I don’t accept. So I’m going to continue to use the word “spiritual” because that is broadly what people mean when they use the word.

Except that isn’t how many atheists want to define it. That’s fine, they can do whatever they want. But it isn’t good for the movement. It makes atheism seem like the mirror image of Christianity: just another dogmatic system. I know that atheists will go into fits on reading this, “But religion is based upon faith and science is not!” Yeah, right. Every human uses faith throughout every day without having much idea they are even doing it. And this is why atheists largely do come off as closed minded.

If we want to make inroads with theists, we need to understand why people quite understandably believe in God. There are questions that people have that religion, while mostly doing a terrible job, tries to answer. I am extremely interested in these questions and it amazes me that most atheists are not. But that in itself is fine. The problem is that most atheists want to dismiss those who are interested in these questions. The questions are valid and valuable. And they should be treated with respect.

The big question for the atheist movement is whether it is going to be like Protestantism. Is it going to break up into a thousand pieces over minor issues of thought? Because I’m inclusive. I certainly think that anti-ontological atheists are limited in their thinking, but I would never say they don’t belong. And in truth, no one is especially questioning my place as an atheist. But I think “spiritual” neo-hippies are good candidates for our movement. Atheists tend to confuse their beliefs with science. They aren’t the same. Just as religion and spiritualism are not the same. If sloppy thinking prevented atheists from being part of the movement, there would only be a handful of people in the movement.

Afterword

Some may wonder why I don’t just use the word “ontology.” The reason is that most people I talk to have no idea what that word means. I have enough of a problem with people thinking I’m an ostentatious intellectual. I will admit, however, that “spiritual” is a difficult word. But it grounds any conversation in the right area without turning it into a discussion of dogmatic beliefs.