--- ---WARNING--- --- THIS IS RAW UNEDITED CONTENT --- it essentially amounts to stream of conscious and I have not gone back over it since I wrote it. I have included it because it contains some elements that I want to convey that links with ideas from previous exerpts. Also It is helpful for me to see peoples comments on what I have so far. I do plan on breaking this down and starting from scratch. I hope to publish the final product. --- --- And now... Explanation Part Two...
Religion was useful at a time when humanity had no knowledge of physical properties and thought that the wheel was a pretty neat idea. Creation myths are a part of human culture. Because the question of how is it possible that we exist is so complex we are still exploring it. This question has always been important to us as humans and every culture has a creation myth that attempts to answer it. From the bearers of these myths came our shamans, from shamans came ritual. The rituals serve to help the individuals and the society to feel as if they had control and give them an impression of order. From these rituals came religion. Religion established a basic system of rules to live by that were environmentally appropriate to civilizations struggling to come out on top in a world that had very limited accessible resources and with no other real way of establishing a dominate ruler. Religion assured that the leaders of the society had control over their growing population.
Humans naturally play a balancing act between unhindered change and miserly obstinacy. Change without thought is as dangerous as the inane habit of insisting things should remain exactly the way they are. The politics of the 21st century are on the left and right of the political realm are revolving around the preservation of sure fire doom. Religion hinders any rational thought through an unjustifiable insistence that everything that some guys said a couple thousand years ago about impossible occurrences and outdated tribal traditions hold just as true today as they did then. The problem is of course that most of these ideas never resembled anything even close to truth or reality. They were primitive methods of localized social cohesion. This does not stop religious fundamentalists from running these theories as a platform to base agendas that will have global repercussions.
<?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office" />
The term atheism is a misnomer in a sense. Atheism implies a negative; against theism while in reality in the truest sense so called atheists are not just without religion they are separate from religion. They have no relation. People who believe that the scientific method is the best way to learn do not follow a belief system, they use a method to investigate reality, one that can change and disprove pre-conceived notions. There are many theists who see Atheism as a religion, and that shows a deep misunderstanding of science. The term Atheism is derived of a religious conception of absolutes i.e. you are religious or have rejected religion. I haven’t rejected religion I just have no reason to believe any religion is the religion and further I don’t even know what god is supposed to be.
You can say many things about the idea of god but you cannot describe what god is. That is because god does not exist and so of course cannot be defined. Furthermore there are an endless amount of religions and sects so how is one from outside of religion to determine which the correct interpretation of reality is? They can’t all be right. If one is right then it is purely by an insanely low probability, about the same probability of a fire breathing dragon appearing in front of me right now and doing a jig, or a black hole being created by the Large Hadron Collider that swallows the earth, so for all intents and purposes, none because that did not happen since you are reading this. They certainly would not be right do to any exclusive knowledge of truth but because of some freak bit of chance.
There is no term to describe my perception of belief; I simply believe that the scientific method is the best way to understand how things are. This is a belief but certain beliefs are more legitimate than others. My beliefs revolve around accumulated evidence not a text around a thousand years outdated or concocted by a science fiction writer on an acid trip. My beliefs are also flexible to allow new evidence in addition to or discrediting earlier studies. Religion is based on texts and ideas people have passed down through generations while science is based on what the world reveals to us not what someone says is reality with no evidence. Science is based on experiments with proper controls and have been independently repeated and verified which can be repeated later and come out with the same result.
The major reason why I don’t like the term atheist is because it would be unscientific to say there is definitely no god, for one because it (god) cannot be defined and that makes it difficult to not believe in something because I wouldn’t know what I am not believing in. On the other hand if god were at some point defined and there were sufficient evidence for it, whatever it would be, I would believe in it as much as I believe anything else.
I’m not agnostic because I certainly am not unsure of my beliefs; I sincerely think there is no reason for me to believe any religion bears any deep knowledge of reality beyond what anyone else knows and that religion’s beliefs are generally contrary to all evidence.
And no it doesn’t bother me that science can’t answer the question what came before the big bang. Just because we don’t know a part of something does not discredit everything else related to it and automatically prove that something totally unrelated is true. The simplest answer tends to be the correct one, and yes I do believe there are correct answers, (it’s the belief in the answers I’m skeptical of) so the idea that “god”, whatever that is, created the universe is a further complication. The age old question what created god is legitimate. And if the answer is it just is, and always was why is it so hard to believe the universe just is and always was? There is no need to complicate the issue with creationism.
Religion and the English language so far cannot accommodate for this style of thought. That is because as I said religion sees everything as black and white. It misses the colorful spectrum that makes up what we consider the light. The English language was evolved at a time when religion was essentially unquestioned and therefore by a mindset that fits this view of reality. The language forces definition and lacks the subtlety that pervades reality. This is why math is the language of science. Unknown variables, spectrums and approximations are well defined and understood operators in mathematics.
In order to discuss any of these ideas non-mathematically yet succinctly would require a complete linguistic overhaul, or maybe I am just not proficient enough with the English language. But if there is and I did I don’t think that this text would be accessible to the general audience. I am not a non-believer or an atheist, this type of mindset is completely separate from religious belief not a rejection of religion, per se.
If I were to state my style of ideas I would suppose I am closest to an Objectivist, though they may object to that. The problem with Objectivism is in the name, it is a philosophy that assumes a purely objective reality and disregards the subjective world that the memes guiding our lives reside in. My philosophy is essentially the same as Objectivism but with more specific conditions to account for the moral relativism that has sprung up because it assumes its own validity where in reality competing philosophies are a real threat. There must be rule sets to enforce the philosophy or it will have no way of defining a threat to its moral base. It is especially crucial in a world dominated by religions that have obsessive fundamental faith in their beliefs which they will do anything to defend or promote.
In Objectivism there is no good or evil, from an objective viewpoint these words are meaningless. The universe does not care if we live or die. Only on the subjective plain of the human mind is there any form of good and evil. These terms are based on subjective viewpoints and only have any relevancy within these bounds. An Objectivist philosophy only sees the world as it physically is, it has no consideration for the individuals living in this objective world.
There truly is no meaning to life in Objectivism because it excludes what makes us human, it doesn’t account for the higher plane of reality that is human civilization. Logic does not always apply here. You never know what a person or group of people might do. We cannot predict human’s actions as we can a planet’s. Even if we are slaves to fate in some sense we must assume otherwise because the complexity of the system is too high. The variables are too high. We can never accurately predict what humans will do in the way that we can the rest of the relativistic universe.
In the objective realm all is equal, everything just is. In the objective realm our traditions, cultures and indeed our civilization have no importance. Everything becomes quite ridiculous. But this is not our reality. Our reality is not just in the objective but in the subjective in our minds; it is our perception and our knowledge and all that we have created that is our plane of reality, our understanding of the objective world and its relation to us. Our intelligent consciousness and our ability for intent give us meaning.
This book has no meaning in the objective world. These words and letters have no meaning objectively. The meaning comes as you interpret these lines and shapes as written language, then as composite words and sentences that take on a whole other meaning when put together that is attempting to describe the human experience. Meaning is only possible in the subjective realm.
And there is meaning and purpose in this realm. We attribute meaning and purpose to everything that we see. Every day we wake up and live another day because we have some notion that life does matter and is important in some way. That what we do is important in some way. Humans see meaning in nearly everything. We are set up to see symbolism and to relate everything to our selves. This does not mean that everything has meaning. Much of what we see is our brain trying to understand something it does not have the ability to comprehend. These are delusions in a sense. If something cannot be attributed to the objective reality, as in it cannot affect us or we cannot affect it then it is a phantom that exists only in our mind and can only serve to distract us from our reality. Our reality is the point at which objective and subjective unite.
The best example of this is civilization itself. We have utilized the objective world through, irrigation, stone, mortar and steel to separate ourselves from the objective world, that indifferent omniscience. It is the physical representation of our minds. Our society is a creation of our subjective reality, the implementation of this plane of order and meaning onto the objective realm.
There is a fundamental difference between the world we have constructed and the world that caused us to be. We control our own fates and make up our own rules on this plane of reality. We can and do affect the universe around us with intention. We interact with others with intention. We control how we interact.
Religion is humanities way of protecting itself against itself; science is humanities way of protecting itself against nature. Religion is society’s relationship to the subjective world while science is society’s relationship to the objectives world. In the same sense religion is a product of the collective sub-conscience and science of the collective conscience.
The collective sub-conscience is the need driven body of philosophy and politics relevant to a society. This was the driving force of change as society developed. These are the developments of society that occur as an evolution of beliefs and lifestyles. All societies have at least three things; spirituality, tools/weapons and art. From there most societies moved to pastoralist and/or agricultural. Religion and government evolved in these societies in order to control the growing populous of sedentary society with plentiful food resources. Eventually written language was either created or adopted by these societies. These are all universal developments of independent cultures from the Mayans to the Chinese. All these developments were created independent of outside influence in human societies.
Pyramids are found in many independent societies as well. This could be attributed to divine intervention or aliens but more likely they were driven by the collective sub-conscience. The pyramid structure is the most basic of all large scale-structures, it is no coincidence that most of the early structures of human civilization are in the form, nor is it surprising. No other three dimensional shape is so easily achieved in large scale. These new civilizations, particularly the people in charge wanted to leave no question of their or control of society so they built excessively large structures to let everybody know this. The best way to do this was to build up and out and the best way to accomplish that is to make every level above the first smaller than the first so it doesn’t fall over. Try to see what the biggest stable structure is that you can achieve, with limited resources, with children’s building blocks. Of course you have built a pyramid. To realize this principle at its most basic level just look at mountains and ant hills.
Just like the pyramids all these societies developed similar structures because those were the only things they could build with what they had, and they had to build in order to maintain growing populous’. No one person dictated this, it just happened in response to society’s needs. Thus these societies sub-consciously developed according to their needs. This is a form of evolution. We are still subject to this principle though as society grows more complex the evidence is more convoluted. These are all things that seemingly just happened, government, religion and agriculture, but they were all slowly developed and evolved to what we have today. In the objective world none of these have any meaning and are irrelevant. In the subjective world of the human mind it is everything that matters. In this process all societies developed some form of science, some did not get to achieve science as we know it today but it was developing up until the societies fell.
This development that began with the creation of stone tools and fire is the collective conscience. The collective conscience is the body of collective knowledge that a society maintains. As we build this body of knowledge we begin to understand how things work, what works and ideally why it works. As we understand something we begin to have the ability to manipulate it with intent instead of waiting for it to happen. Science developed out of the collective sub-conscience along with everything else, but just as humans evolved out of apes freeing ourselves from traditional purely objective evolution science evolved out of the collective sub-conscience − society being evolved by societal environment – with science and the collective conscience we can intentionally change society.
Stones tools and fire have evolved to lasers and nuclear power plants, religion has evolved to psychology, philosophy and politics and art is still telling the story in the most objective way possible for humans… subjectively.
Religion is an evolutionary remnant of our primitive past when we had very limited control or understanding (understanding being a prerequisite of control) of nature or ourselves. It is a passive driver similar to objective evolution that demonstrates how little we knew of our world and how little we still know of ourselves. Science actively drives society with intent and allows us to adapt more rapidly to our conditions both present and predicted. At this stage of development waiting for passive evolution could mean extinction of not only us but of all life on earth.
We cannot leave our lives to fate, because fate has left us. Others in this world who have not over intellectualized their existence into nihilism and relativism will impose themselves upon us if we just let fate sweep us up.
