I am neither a scientist nor a theologian. I have no doctorate in anything. I am no different than millions of other Black men in America. I was once a Christian. I once bowed and scraped and prayed as I had been taught by my parents and grandparents as they had been taught by their parents and grandparents who had been taught by their ancestors who had been taught by their slavemasters.
I accepted Christian dogma and mythology without question as I had been conditioned to do. I accepted both the authority of the church and the efficacy of prayers with the blind trust and faith of all young children. I felt it no more possible to question the existence of God than that of the sun or the moon. I internalized guilt as I had been taught to do and worried incessantly about which of the many sins I had already committed and were still likely to commit in the future would be the one that would ultimately damn me to eternal torment. No matter how wretched my living conditions or those of the other Black people around me, no matter the sting of racism nor the burning shame of poverty, no matter how many times I was robbed or beaten or teased or bullied, no matter how many prayers went unanswered, I never questioned God’s goodness or his wisdom or his love. I never questioned that all was in accordance with his plan. I was seventeen before the illusion finally shattered.
There is an old cliche' that everyone wants to go to heaven but nobody wants to die. I was perhaps the exception to that rule. I was anxious to die and go to heaven and the wait was killing me. I didn't understand what the purpose of life was. Why did I have to suffer here on earth if God ultimately wanted everyone to join him in heaven? Why couldn't I just kill myself and go join him? I began studying the bible trying to find a loophole that would allow me to kill myself without going to hell. I read the bible over and over again with a critical eye, rejecting everything everyone had told me about it, determined to find the answers myself by going in with a completely open mind, free of all preconceived ideas. This was relatively easy because I had never found it easy to rectify the reality of the streets with what my parents and pastor had told me about the bible. It had never made sense to me, so I had always formed my own opinions about it but I had been doing it from a point of total ignorance, never having read the bible before. When I finally did sit down to read it, what I found horrified me. But more of that later.
I grew up struggling for the meager commodities of happiness available to me on the streets of Philadelphia at a time when designer jeans were a mandatory fashion accessory, when expensive sneakers and sunglasses first became symbols of social status and excessive amounts of gold jewelry the measure of a Black man’s worth, which is to say, at one of the most materialistic times in American History. Crack cocaine was the currency of the street and it was worth more than human life.
I could not afford designer clothes or sneakers or a neck full of gold necklaces. It was against my morals to use or sell drugs. Even amongst other poor people this made me an outcast and often an object of pity and disgust. My sense of humor was my saving grace and the one thing that allowed me to eventually overcome my social obstacles. Still, poverty was not my only handicap.
Prince, Michael Jackson, Ray Parker Junior, sallow-skinned androgynous mega-stars whose racial composition was as ambiguous as their sexual preferences were the standards of beauty for African American males at that time. I was neither light complexioned nor androgynous. By ‘80s pop-cultural standards, I was ugly. Too black. Too strong. This, along with my conspicuous poverty was enough fuel to feed years of ridicule, scorn, and abuse from other young kids. Every day I was teased and bullied and picked on. Every day I fought either in the streets or in the schoolyard and sometimes both and every night I wept, praying to God to make it all better and though Jesus had said “All that you ask for in my name shall be granted.” My prayers went unanswered and my suffering unabated.
Like most young kids I began to speculate on my condition and the condition of the other Black people around me, trying to rectify it with my faith in god. Having not read the bible yet, I began to form my own opinions about why there was so much suffering among my people. I speculated that perhaps I had been some horrible person in a past life for which I was now being punished in this one. Obviously, I was unaware that Christianity had no belief in any sort of reincarnation. I further speculated that perhaps all Black people were reincarnated sinners.
I wondered if perhaps earth was really hell and we were all suffering in eternal torment for sins we had committed while alive and just did not know it. I listened to preachers talk about freewill and accepted that God was perhaps powerless to predict what people would do even though at that young age I already found most human beings to be fairly predictable. I accepted that perhaps God was just not as smart as I was or perhaps, with so many different people to keep track of, it was too difficult for him to predict what all 6 billion of them would do. I accepted this despite what the preacher in the church had said about God being all-powerful and all-knowing.
As I grew older, I began to think that perhaps God was like a scientist and we were all just an experiment in a lab somewhere and that God was just out there watching it, amused by it but not particularly interested in the individual lives of his creations, merely fascinated by it all the way we would be fascinated by an ant farm or bacteria growing in a petrie dish. I even began to suspect that God had been there at the very beginning of the universe to set the ball in motion and then had left to pursue other, more interesting things and perhaps had not thought about us since. Perhaps the entire universe was sitting on a dusty old shelf in his closet like the toys I had long ago grown tired of playing with or perhaps tucked away in his closet. I wondered if perhaps God had simply forgotten about us or grown bored with us or perhaps this was a toy that he didn’t even like and wished he had never made, after all, he had tried to destroy it once with a great flood. Perhaps he had died after creating the universe. In a sense, I had never really been a Christian. I had always been more of a Deist, believing in God as more of a first cause and nothing more.
I learned fairly early on that a God who answered your prayers was pretty much a fairytale right up there with Santa Clause and the Easter Bunny. I think I had stopped believing in a God that intervened on man's behalf even before I had stopped believing in Santa Clause. I had more empirical evidence for the existence of Santa than for Christ. At least Santa did leave presents and drink the milk and cookies I left for him. Jesus had done nothing to make his presence known unless you count a nightmare I once had in which the rosary that hung on my mirror turned into a vampire bat.
Everyone I knew prayed to Jesus Christ and none of them were doing any better than I was. When I was twelve or thirteen and there was a rapist terrorizing our neighborhood, I was pretty sure that all the women he had raped prayed too. But God hadn’t intervened to strike down their rapist before he could attack any of them. My friend Ed had a mother who was a drug addict who had a string of abusive boyfriends who often abused him as well. I was fairly certain that he prayed to god every night to help his mother but still black-eyes and fat lips were fairly common sights on both of them.
So, the possibility of us living in hell or having been reincarnated into these horrific lives to pay for the sins of a previous life, or God having died or forgotten about us all, made infinitely more sense to me than the things the preacher was saying about God. I could not, even then, force myself to believe in a being who was all-powerful, all-knowing, all-loving and all-good, who still allowed my people to go hungry and homeless, die of diseases and addictions, get murdered in the streets, enslaved and then oppressed, robbed and beaten, denied adequate education, adequate healthcare, adequate housing, equal job opportunities, and equal treatment before the law.
It made more sense than the idea that God has the power to change all of this but doesn’t because that’s just not part of his plan. His plan was for me to have to fight much older and bigger kids every other day and sometimes three or four at a time? His plan was for me to get robbed at knife point twice by age twelve? His plan was for me to watch my mother get beaten every night by her boyfriend when I was only five-years old and too young to defend her? His plan had been for my father to abandon the family when I was born because he was too lazy to get a job and for my mother to have to do it all on her own? His plan was for me to have to hear my mother cry every night because the bills were piling up and she wasn’t sure she could make it? It was much easier to think that God had just died or forgotten about us completely than that he was up there controlling all of this and the oppression, rape, murder, and enslavement of Black people for the last 400 years and my own suffering was somehow part of his plan.
I was enraged at the preacher's suggestion that God would put the Black man through such torture merely to test the depths of our love. If God is all knowing then why would he need to test anyone? He would already know who would pass and who would fail. It seemed cruel, capricious, self-centered, egotistical. This God that everyone loved so much seemed to possess some of the most reprehensible human qualities. I began to question every notion I’d ever had about God. I began to wonder if God really loved us after all.
I couldn’t understand why we gave thanks to the overseer that kept us enslaved. Why we thanked him for the strength to endure the whip. I thought about all the times I’d heard my Grandma say how blessed we were to have food on the table and wondered if we were then damned on the many nights when we went hungry. I wondered if we were blessed on the nights we laid awake listening to the big sewer rats rumbling through the cracked and water-stained walls and ceilings, afraid to let our hands or feet dangle off the side of the bed at night for fear that one of them might gnaw off a finger or toe while we slept. Afraid the entire ceiling might come crashing down on top of us from where the floor joists had warped and rotted from the leaky toilet above that was constantly overflowing. I wondered if we were blessed when we couldn’t find a single piece of food in the cupboard that wasn’t infested with roaches. I wondered if I was blessed all those times I was teased for wearing hand-me-down clothes that barely fit. It made no sense that we would praise God when things went well or when we merely survived when things went bad but not condemn him for the many evils of the world. Why would we thank God for giving us the strength to survive horrible atrocities we should have never been asked to endure? It seemed ridiculous, meek and cowardly and reminded me of the happy slave mentality of house niggers. I was shamed and embarrassed by it.
These were my thoughts as I grew up on the streets of Philadelphia trying to make sense of my life. This was the climate under which my own understanding of man’s place in the universe was being formed. I was eight years old when I realized one evening, as I lay crying myself to sleep, that I could not remember a single day that had not ended in tears. That evening I decided to keep track of how many good days I had each year and by good days I meant simply one in which no one purposely set out to hurt my feelings. It would take another six years before I would have my first good day.
By age ten (two years without a single good day) I resolved to murder myself if life ever grew too painful to bear. Knowing that I could end it at anytime and go to heaven was the one thing that made life tolerable. I sat up nights trying to decide how best to terminate my existence when the day inevitably came that it no longer made sense to live. Then one night, I was watching a late night movie on TV, an old black and white flick from the forties or fifties. The movie was about a man who had reached the end of his rope and was contemplating suicide. He was standing on the rooftop of some old tenement building when an angel came to him. The angel tried to convince him not to end it all, first by telling him that suicide was an unforgivable sin for which he would burn in hell. I still remember how I shot upright in my bed, astonished by what I’d heard. Burn in hell for committing suicide? That couldn’t be possible. I suddenly felt trapped. I felt as if I had no way out. I looked around the ghetto and saw it finally for what it was, a dungeon, a torture chamber from which there was no escape, not even death.
This was what first drove me to pick up the bible and read it. I was just searching for a loophole. I read about God creating the earth and the universe and all the animals and finally man in some six days after I’d already read about dinosaurs that had existed hundreds of thousands of years before the first man. I read about how God called his creation good and then later flooded the entire thing in a fit of rage after deciding that it wasn’t as good as he had first thought. God’s startling idiocy in putting Adam and Eve in proximity to the forbidden and then his childish tantrum when the curiosity he’d imbued them with quite predictably led them to eat of the forbidden fruit. I read about how he then capriciously condemned generations of man for what was quite clearly his own error. I read passages in which the bible condoned the enslavement of strangers and their children and even the brutal beating and murdering of those slaves so long as they did not die immediately of their injuries. I read about God’s hatred of homosexuals, the subjugation, dehumanization, and humiliation of women, the beating and murdering of children by their parents, all gleefully condoned in the bible. My mind reeled. This was not the God of love and mercy I had been told about in church. This was a childish, insecure, unstable, mentally defective monster! Is this the God my people had so foolishly worshipped since their enslavement? Still, I found nothing that would have allowed me to escape hell were I to flee this world which was so clearly flawed and imperfect yet had been supposedly created by a perfect deity.
In desperation, I turned to the New Testament. God may have been a lunatic but Jesus had at least come to save us from his insanity. Yet at every turn I read of Jesus condoning his father’s behavior and exalting and holding him up as an icon of peace and virtue. I could understand a son’s love for his father, but even at that young age I could distinguish the failings in my own mother and the man who I’d once thought to be my father and no matter how much I loved them I knew when they were full of shit. Yet apparently Jesus was little more than an apologist for a father who was clearly self-centered and abusive even to the point of demanding the life of his own child, watching as Jesus was tortured and murdered in order for him to change his mind about sending all of us to hell for our sins. This didn’t jive at all with what I’d been told up to that point. If Jesus was God, as my pastor had told us all then what was the crucifixion all about? God sacrificed himself to himself in order to convince himself to change his mind about sending all of us sinners to hell thereby saving us from him? It made no sense. Then, there were the many false promises and outright lies. To me, only an asshole would offer hope to a suffering people and then fail to deliver.
Mathew 7:7 “Ask, and it will be given you; seek and ye shall find; knock. and it shall be opened unto you.
Mathew 7:8 For everyone who asketh receiveth; he that seeketh findeth; and to him that knocketh, it shall be opened.
Mathew 7:9 Or what man is there of you, whom if his son asks for bread, will give him a stone?
Mathew 7:10 Or if he asks for a fish, will give him a serpent?
Mathew 7:11 If ye then, being evil, know how to give good gifts unto your children, how much more shall your Father which is in heaven give good gifts to those who ask him?”
It floored me, because I had been asking for bread for as long as I could recall and had usually received stones and serpents. As I looked around at my people I saw that most of them had likewise learned to subsist on stones from heaven.
As I grew older and read more and more of the bible, my perspective on God and race began to change, seriously eroding my belief. I saw Black preachers driving brand new Cadillacs while their congregations walked, car-pooled, or arrived on public transportation. I heard them echo Jesus’ words about praying for relief and receiving it when every day I saw even the most devout Christians crushed beneath the weight of racism and poverty. I began to wonder if we were all cursed by God. I wondered what type of God would allow the horrors I saw everyday perpetrated against my people. What had we done? And what type of God would hold an entire race accountable for the actions of a few? What type of God would damn an entire race for the sins of generations long past? None of it made sense.
I began to read the bible more and more critically, shocked and appalled by what I was uncovering about our supposed savior. I tried to forget about all the things people had always told me about God and read it with a completely open mind. I wanted to see what the Bible was really saying and not what others said it was saying. Every word I read shook my faith further. Worst of all was the bible’s condoning of the institution of slavery.
“…And the Lord said unto her, Two nations are in thy womb, and two manner of people shall be separated from thy bowels; and the one shall be stronger than the other people; and the elder shall serve the younger. Genesis 25:23”
I thought of all those white power groups that used the bible to justify their prejudice and was shocked to find that again and again the bible does just that. It blatantly stated that Christians should make slaves of the heathen races. It was absurd to me that black people, who had suffered these fates, should worship the God that engineered it all. I could not help but to lose some respect for my own race. It was like they were all blind.
Despite all the begging and praying black folks did and all the millions of dollars they dumped into collection plates, God seemed to avoid the ghetto like the plague. Children got killed every day, and every day the pious were drained of wealth yet none of that ever seemed to shake their faith one iota and not once did I see any of them rewarded with a single oxen let alone a thousand the way Job had been. No sheep. No camel. Nothing. Yet still they believed. It was like God had better things to do than to fuck around in the ghetto with a bunch of poor helpless niggers. He was too busy smiling and tap dancing for the white folks who lived in the nice clean neighborhoods with white picket fences and brand new BMWs. In my mind, God took on the persona of every other criminal and con-man in the ghetto getting fat off the desperate hope and naivety of the under-class.
The story of Job haunted me more than any other. I kept hearing Job’s impossible declaration: “…Though he slayed me yet will I trust him.” How? Why? Why would God persecute someone who loved him so dearly just to prove to Satan how much he loved him? How could he merely replace all the wealth and children he destroyed with twice what he had before and think it excused the senseless suffering he needlessly allowed Job to endure? It seemed so cruel and insensitive to me to kill someone’s children and then say, “Oh, don’t trip. I’ll make sure you have twice as many kids to replace those.” I wondered if that’s what God thought when he saw little black kids gunned down in the street? But when Black kids were murdered, when our wealth and our health was blown away by the wind, despite our refusal to curse his name, we didn’t get so much as forty acres and a mule.
I couldn’t tell you how many times I cried myself to sleep wondering what we had done to make God hate us so?
I envisioned God as one of those white business men looking down on the ghetto from one of those towering office buildings downtown, aloof and immune, wondering how he can suck more profit from our misery. In my young mind, God was white and powerful and he hated us just like I believed all white folks did. I later learned that not all White people were prejudice and out to keep the Black man down. I wasn't so sure about God.
My Mom started dating this Muslim brother that tried to tell me that God was Black. I laughed in his face at first but he persisted. He said that we were all God’s chosen people descended from the tribe of Shabazz. He was trying to make me feel better, I know. But all he did was piss me off even more. If God was black than why the hell wasn’t he doing anything to help Black people?
I thought about all the bourgie Blacks I knew: the doctors, lawyers,
businessmen, and politicians, who talked a good game to gain black support and achieve their positions and then promptly turned their backs on us once they achieved their desired status. They would put as much distance as they could between themselves and the people who helped to make them what they were. I thought of all the big-time players and pimps, the hustlers and gangstas who leeched off the black community and exploited their own brothers and sisters worst than any white man ever had. If God was Black then he was just another bourgie nigga who got large and forgot where he came from. Somehow the idea of a sell-out, house-nigga god, was worse than the idea of a racist white one.
I was eighteen years old before I finally accepted that the God I had heard about all of my life had in fact been as much of a myth as Santa Clause. What did it for me was the simple realization that I had no actual reasons, evidence or arguments to support my belief. I had believed simply because my mother had believed and her mother before her and her mother before her and everyone else that I knew believed. It seemed then the most ridiculous reason to believe in anything. I was ashamed of myself and embarrassed by my faith. I felt like a fool. So I decided to start over.
I decided to abandon every belief I had held up to that point that I had never questioned. Every belief that I had accepted solely on the authority of my parents, grandparents, and church leaders, every idea that I had accepted because of the overwhelming popularity of it and the pressure to believe placed on me by my peers. I examined every moral claim from murder to thievery to incest. I examined every scientific claim and every religious claim and while most of my moral views remained intact. I found that I could not find a single justification for any of the religious beliefs I had held all of my life. I realized that I had asked more questions and been more skeptical buying my last BMX bike then I had when I adopted Christianity, when I took on an entire way of life. True, like most religious adherents, I had only been a child when I had been indoctrinated into the Christian faith and had lacked the cognitive resources to question what I was being told and resist the efforts of my family and friends to convince me of their beliefs, but it still embarrassed me that I had held these beliefs so fervently and for so long. I had once told my best friend that his mother was going to hell because she did not believe in Christ. I had condemned and ridiculed homosexuals because the bible had called men who lay with men as with women abominations. I was ashamed of myself.
For all the freedom I felt being rid of such an oppressive ideology, I also felt a great sense of loss. I went through a period of great existential malaise. In my mind, if God did not exist then life was completely without meaning and thus all of my suffering and all the suffering of my people, unjustified. I sank into a deep depression. I began to read anything I could find about the meaning of life. I read everything from the Greek philosophers to the Existentialists. I picked up book after book trying to find something with which to replace my lost faith in the Christian god. I found a lot of very strong arguments against the existence of God in the writings of Bertrand Russell, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Arthur Schopenhauer, and even Voltaire and Thomas Paine. None of them went quite far enough for me though and I was always left with questions the author had either not anticipated, did not have answers for or often appeared to not have the courage to ask himself. So, I began answering these question on my own. Recently, my quest for answers has been aided by modern day atheist thinkers such as Daniel Dennet, Victor J. Stenger, Richard Dawkins, and Sam Harris who have had the courage to take on religious thinking head-on without apology and without shying away from unpleasant or unpopular conclusions. Their books have reinforced many of the conclusions I had already reached on my own and sparked even more questions, particularly in regards to the arguments against Intelligent Design. Now, my goal is to bring the things I have learned to others and help them to answer the questions I have found answers to and to enlist their aid in finding solutions to the mysteries that still remain unsolved. My goal is to be that Underground Railroad my people so desperately need. To help them to finally escape the great overseer in their minds as I have.
Sunday, December 28, 2008
Saturday, December 20, 2008
The Problem With Miracles (originally published 5/23/07)
More than twenty years ago my mother was diagnosed with cancer in her vertebrae. She underwent several months of chemotherapy and then decided not to continue with the chemo and to try to control it with diet and exercise and the power of positive thought. The cancer went into remission. At that time no one had ever seen cancer shrink before and so they called it a miracle. To this day my mother believes God intervened on her behalf. This is probably one of the many things that led her to become a minister. Today, however, cases of cancer going into remission are commonplace, far from miraculous. That's one of the reasons we shouldn't be so quick to label something we don't understand an act of God. At one time birth itself was considered an act of God before we understood how a sperm cell interacts with an ovum. Lightning, solar and lunar eclipses, child prodigies, the placebo effect in patients with chronic pain and other illnesses, anyone who survived any type of injury or illness whatsoever, were all attributed to some type of deus ex machina. As human knowledge expands we have taken the mystery out of many of the things we once believed to be miraculous. You'd think we would learn not to rush to judgement and label any gaps in our understanding as "miraculous events" yet the "God of the Gaps" remains and the faithful are still quick to label anything we can't readily explain as a miracle. You'd think they would be more cautious with this approach since, as human knowledge continues to increase, their God of the gaps will disappear more and more. The more explanations man is able to uncover the more God's territory will shrink as there will be less unexplained phenomenon for him to lay claim to.
In Richard Dawkins' bestseller "The God Delusion"(and I hate quoting Richard Dawkins but he doies make a point) he makes this telling observation:
"...One of the truly bad effects of religion is that it teaches us that it is a virtue to be satisfied with not understanding...Admission of ignorance and temporary mystification are vital to good science."
One thing I've never talked to my mother about regarding her cancer is the existence of cancer itself and the many millions of people who have not recovered from it and have died of cancer. Was God just looking the other way when they were suffering? Were they not worthy of any divine intervention? Does God have an annual miracle quota? Every time someone thanks God when they win a fight, or a game, or a war, or when they get the promotion or the girl, I always wonder if they believe that God chooses sides? If they think the other guy in the boxing ring deserved a miracle less than they did? If they think God was betting against the other team? If they think that the other guy who was up for the promotion or the girl didn't have enough faith and therefore hadn't earned God's favor? So, if they're the one who's cancer goes into remission, and meanwhile there's some terminally ill young girl who dies in agony in the next bed, how do they rectify that with their faith? When they are the other guy who didn't win the fight or the game, or the war, or the promotion, or the girl, do they think that God wasn't on their side that day? As a friend of mine is fond of pointing out, "You always hear people thanking God when they win. Why don't you ever hear anyone blame God when they loose? I'd love to hear a post-fight interview where someone says, 'I blame Jesus for this loss'". Giving God the credit for a win but blaming yourself for the loss is like taking all the credit when you win a fight and blaming your trainer when you loose. Credit and blame have to go hand in hand.
These "miracles" seem to be extremely arbitrary. As Victor J. Stenger repeatedly points out in his book "God:The Failed Hypothesis", "The world looks just as it would be expected to look were there no God." In fact, as I have pointed out often myself, it is only when you add God into the equation that everything ceases to make sense. Why some people die and others live, why some people suffer and others don't, why some people prosper while others fail, while evil befalls the good and good befalls the evil, these all cease to make sense once you introduce and intelligent creator. Then you have to say things like "God works in mysterious ways" and "Our finite mortal minds are incapable of understanding the infinite mind of God." In other words, God's ways make no sense. For example, in Matthew 7:7 Jesus says:
"Ask, and it will be given you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you. For every one who asks receives, and he who seeks finds, and to him who knocks it will be opened. Or what man of you, if his son asks him for bread, will give him a stone? Or if he asks for a fish, will give him a serpent? If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father who is in heaven give good things to those who ask him!"
So, we pray when we or our loved ones suffer or lay dying and wonder what went wrong when they don't improve because in the bible it says that anything you ask for in the name of the lord Jesus Christ will be given to you yet still our loved ones perish despite our prayers. So we pray for understanding. Yet, were you to eliminate the idea that there is some omnipotent loving father figure who answered prayers with miracles, it would all make sense.
"Of course no one answered my prayers, because there is no God."
"Of course good people suffer sometimes and bad people prosper sometimes, because the universe has no morality and makes no moral judgements. Man does."
"Of course some people die while others live. It's all arbitrary with no one guiding it all."
Makes sense.Add God with his miraculous interventions into it and it gets all confusing and leaves us crying in church pews screaming out "Why?" to the listless heavens.
In the much discussed STEP project (Study of the Therapeutic Effects of Intercessory Prayer) which included six medical centers, including Harvard and the Mayo Clinic, 1,802 patients were prayed for over a fourteen-day period starting the night before receiving coronary bypass graft surgery.
The patients were randomly and blindly divided into three groups. 604 received intercessory prayers after being informed they might or might not receive such prayers, 597 did not receive prayers after being told that they might or might not receive such prayers, and 601 received intercessory prayers after being told they definitely would be prayed for. None of the doctors knew who was being prayed for in the first two groups. The published results showed that in the two groups uncertain about receiving intercessory prayers, complications occurred in 52 percent of patients who received prayers versus 51 percent of patients who did not. However complications occurred in 59 percent of those patient certain that they were being prayed for. Major complications and thirty-day mortality rates were similar across the board. The authors of the study concluded that intercessory prayer itself had no effect on complication-free recovery. Again, these results are consistent with what you would expect to find if there were no God. Trying to fit God into this scenario requires some intellectual sleight of hand.
As the hilariously named yet thought-provoking article "Why Won't God Heal Amputees?" points out, wherever a case exists where an irrefutable miracle is possible it has not occurred. There would be no rational explanation for the spontaneous regeneration of a limb. This would be an incontestably miraculous event yet:
"Prayer does not restore the severed limbs of amputees. You can electronically search through all the medical journals ever written -- there is no documented case of an amputated leg being restored spontaneously."
In fact, if the STEP project had worked and been duplicated with the same results over and over again, that would have been irrifutable evidence in miracles. Yet it didn't and so no such evidence exists. As the author points out, whenever there is no possibility of ambiguity no miracles ever occur.
"...By looking at amputees, we can see that something is wrong. Jesus is not telling the truth. God never answers prayers to spontaneously restore lost limbs, despite Jesus' statements in the Bible....Let's imagine that you have cancer, you pray to God to cure the cancer, and the cancer actually does go away. The interesting thing to recognize is that there is ambiguity in your cure. God might have miraculously cured the disease, as many people believe. But God might also be imaginary, and the chemotherapy drugs and surgery are the things that cured your cancer. Or your body might have cured the cancer itself. The human body does have a powerful immune system, and this immune system has the ability to eliminate cancer in many cases. When your tumor dissappeared, it might be a coincidence that you happened to pray. Drugs, an immune response or a combination of the two might have been the thing the cured you.
How can we determine whether it is God or coincidence that worked the cure? One way is to eliminate the ambiguity. In a non-ambiguous situation, there is no potential for coincidence... When we pray to God to restore an amputated limb, there is only one way for the limb to regenerate. God must exist and God must answer prayers. What we find is that whenever we create a non-ambiguous situation like this and look at the results of prayer, prayer never works. God never answers prayers if there is no possibility of coincidence."
So what am I trying to say? That there is no such thing as miracles? No. I'm trying to say that given the lack of any credible evidence for miraculous events, given the very real evidence that loved ones perish despite prayers and that a great many things that were once considered miraculous are now easily explained and that what we call miracles seem to happen arbitrarily at best with no correlation to the amount of faith a person has or how much he is prayed for or how good a life he has led, given the fact that lightning bolts strike churches as often as strip clubs and bars, miracles are highly improbable and belief in them is entirely illogical and unwarranted. So, am I then saying that God does not exist? No. What I am saying is that given that there seems to be no morality either in nature or the universe itself, given that theories exist to explain much of what we once attributed to God and that there is no reason to assume that everything we now consider to be miraculous will not one day be scientifically explainable, given that events that we call good and events that we call evil seem to occur randomly and without any intelligent guidance behind it, given that these events seem to make less sense when seen through the eyes of religion rather than through science, the belief in a God is illogical and not warranted by the evidence. It is highly improbable that a God who hears the prayers of man and responds with miracles exists though it cannot be said that such a God is impossible.
So should we abandon belief in miracles and stop praying? That's for you to decide. If you are just looking for something to do that makes you feel less helpless in the face of tragic events over which you have no control then it is probably harmless and to that I would simply say: "If it feels good. Do it!" If you are praying in lieu of working to find a solution with the expectation that your prayer will solve the problem on it's own, then I would just ask you to imagine what the world would be like if physicians had not looked for viruses and infections and antibiotics and vaccines to cure them but rather relied on prayer instead. Imagine what the world would look like if everyone turned to faith in God rather than the surgeon or the Pharmacologist. Imagine what it would look like if faith governed the course of human progress rather than science. But first turn off your computer. No miracle created that either. Science did that.
In Richard Dawkins' bestseller "The God Delusion"(and I hate quoting Richard Dawkins but he doies make a point) he makes this telling observation:
"...One of the truly bad effects of religion is that it teaches us that it is a virtue to be satisfied with not understanding...Admission of ignorance and temporary mystification are vital to good science."
One thing I've never talked to my mother about regarding her cancer is the existence of cancer itself and the many millions of people who have not recovered from it and have died of cancer. Was God just looking the other way when they were suffering? Were they not worthy of any divine intervention? Does God have an annual miracle quota? Every time someone thanks God when they win a fight, or a game, or a war, or when they get the promotion or the girl, I always wonder if they believe that God chooses sides? If they think the other guy in the boxing ring deserved a miracle less than they did? If they think God was betting against the other team? If they think that the other guy who was up for the promotion or the girl didn't have enough faith and therefore hadn't earned God's favor? So, if they're the one who's cancer goes into remission, and meanwhile there's some terminally ill young girl who dies in agony in the next bed, how do they rectify that with their faith? When they are the other guy who didn't win the fight or the game, or the war, or the promotion, or the girl, do they think that God wasn't on their side that day? As a friend of mine is fond of pointing out, "You always hear people thanking God when they win. Why don't you ever hear anyone blame God when they loose? I'd love to hear a post-fight interview where someone says, 'I blame Jesus for this loss'". Giving God the credit for a win but blaming yourself for the loss is like taking all the credit when you win a fight and blaming your trainer when you loose. Credit and blame have to go hand in hand.
These "miracles" seem to be extremely arbitrary. As Victor J. Stenger repeatedly points out in his book "God:The Failed Hypothesis", "The world looks just as it would be expected to look were there no God." In fact, as I have pointed out often myself, it is only when you add God into the equation that everything ceases to make sense. Why some people die and others live, why some people suffer and others don't, why some people prosper while others fail, while evil befalls the good and good befalls the evil, these all cease to make sense once you introduce and intelligent creator. Then you have to say things like "God works in mysterious ways" and "Our finite mortal minds are incapable of understanding the infinite mind of God." In other words, God's ways make no sense. For example, in Matthew 7:7 Jesus says:
"Ask, and it will be given you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you. For every one who asks receives, and he who seeks finds, and to him who knocks it will be opened. Or what man of you, if his son asks him for bread, will give him a stone? Or if he asks for a fish, will give him a serpent? If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father who is in heaven give good things to those who ask him!"
So, we pray when we or our loved ones suffer or lay dying and wonder what went wrong when they don't improve because in the bible it says that anything you ask for in the name of the lord Jesus Christ will be given to you yet still our loved ones perish despite our prayers. So we pray for understanding. Yet, were you to eliminate the idea that there is some omnipotent loving father figure who answered prayers with miracles, it would all make sense.
"Of course no one answered my prayers, because there is no God."
"Of course good people suffer sometimes and bad people prosper sometimes, because the universe has no morality and makes no moral judgements. Man does."
"Of course some people die while others live. It's all arbitrary with no one guiding it all."
Makes sense.Add God with his miraculous interventions into it and it gets all confusing and leaves us crying in church pews screaming out "Why?" to the listless heavens.
In the much discussed STEP project (Study of the Therapeutic Effects of Intercessory Prayer) which included six medical centers, including Harvard and the Mayo Clinic, 1,802 patients were prayed for over a fourteen-day period starting the night before receiving coronary bypass graft surgery.
The patients were randomly and blindly divided into three groups. 604 received intercessory prayers after being informed they might or might not receive such prayers, 597 did not receive prayers after being told that they might or might not receive such prayers, and 601 received intercessory prayers after being told they definitely would be prayed for. None of the doctors knew who was being prayed for in the first two groups. The published results showed that in the two groups uncertain about receiving intercessory prayers, complications occurred in 52 percent of patients who received prayers versus 51 percent of patients who did not. However complications occurred in 59 percent of those patient certain that they were being prayed for. Major complications and thirty-day mortality rates were similar across the board. The authors of the study concluded that intercessory prayer itself had no effect on complication-free recovery. Again, these results are consistent with what you would expect to find if there were no God. Trying to fit God into this scenario requires some intellectual sleight of hand.
As the hilariously named yet thought-provoking article "Why Won't God Heal Amputees?" points out, wherever a case exists where an irrefutable miracle is possible it has not occurred. There would be no rational explanation for the spontaneous regeneration of a limb. This would be an incontestably miraculous event yet:
"Prayer does not restore the severed limbs of amputees. You can electronically search through all the medical journals ever written -- there is no documented case of an amputated leg being restored spontaneously."
In fact, if the STEP project had worked and been duplicated with the same results over and over again, that would have been irrifutable evidence in miracles. Yet it didn't and so no such evidence exists. As the author points out, whenever there is no possibility of ambiguity no miracles ever occur.
"...By looking at amputees, we can see that something is wrong. Jesus is not telling the truth. God never answers prayers to spontaneously restore lost limbs, despite Jesus' statements in the Bible....Let's imagine that you have cancer, you pray to God to cure the cancer, and the cancer actually does go away. The interesting thing to recognize is that there is ambiguity in your cure. God might have miraculously cured the disease, as many people believe. But God might also be imaginary, and the chemotherapy drugs and surgery are the things that cured your cancer. Or your body might have cured the cancer itself. The human body does have a powerful immune system, and this immune system has the ability to eliminate cancer in many cases. When your tumor dissappeared, it might be a coincidence that you happened to pray. Drugs, an immune response or a combination of the two might have been the thing the cured you.
How can we determine whether it is God or coincidence that worked the cure? One way is to eliminate the ambiguity. In a non-ambiguous situation, there is no potential for coincidence... When we pray to God to restore an amputated limb, there is only one way for the limb to regenerate. God must exist and God must answer prayers. What we find is that whenever we create a non-ambiguous situation like this and look at the results of prayer, prayer never works. God never answers prayers if there is no possibility of coincidence."
So what am I trying to say? That there is no such thing as miracles? No. I'm trying to say that given the lack of any credible evidence for miraculous events, given the very real evidence that loved ones perish despite prayers and that a great many things that were once considered miraculous are now easily explained and that what we call miracles seem to happen arbitrarily at best with no correlation to the amount of faith a person has or how much he is prayed for or how good a life he has led, given the fact that lightning bolts strike churches as often as strip clubs and bars, miracles are highly improbable and belief in them is entirely illogical and unwarranted. So, am I then saying that God does not exist? No. What I am saying is that given that there seems to be no morality either in nature or the universe itself, given that theories exist to explain much of what we once attributed to God and that there is no reason to assume that everything we now consider to be miraculous will not one day be scientifically explainable, given that events that we call good and events that we call evil seem to occur randomly and without any intelligent guidance behind it, given that these events seem to make less sense when seen through the eyes of religion rather than through science, the belief in a God is illogical and not warranted by the evidence. It is highly improbable that a God who hears the prayers of man and responds with miracles exists though it cannot be said that such a God is impossible.
So should we abandon belief in miracles and stop praying? That's for you to decide. If you are just looking for something to do that makes you feel less helpless in the face of tragic events over which you have no control then it is probably harmless and to that I would simply say: "If it feels good. Do it!" If you are praying in lieu of working to find a solution with the expectation that your prayer will solve the problem on it's own, then I would just ask you to imagine what the world would be like if physicians had not looked for viruses and infections and antibiotics and vaccines to cure them but rather relied on prayer instead. Imagine what the world would look like if everyone turned to faith in God rather than the surgeon or the Pharmacologist. Imagine what it would look like if faith governed the course of human progress rather than science. But first turn off your computer. No miracle created that either. Science did that.
Thursday, December 18, 2008
The Myth of The Afterlife
Life after death. It seems such an obvious contradiction when written out in simple words. Living after you have ceased to live. Seems as if it shouldn't even require discussion. Yet billions of people across the globe from hundreds of different cultures and religions believe in just such a thing. Our senses reveal to us the evidence of life's cessation. We see the heart stop beating, the lungs stop inhaling and exhaling. We can measure brain activity as it dwindles to a halt. Yet we still believe that life continues. We believe without any evidence to support this belief. Those who do believe this seemingly unbelievable idea say that no one really knows for sure. All we have is our faith to show us the way. Is that really all we have? I beg to differ. They point to the lack of evidence against an afterlife. Lack of evidence? Really? I would suggest to you that there is now and has been for several centuries enough evidence to completely debunk the myth of the afterlife. If you have anything close to an analytical mind and you are at all open-minded and you wish to maintain your illusions than do yourself a favor and read no further. Consider this like a movie thread with spoilers in it. Because I intend to tell you exactly how this movie will end and I don't want to ruin it for those who need their illusions. I am well aware that for many many people their faith is necessary to them, something they could not imagine living without. I am not so cruel as to wish to snatch the life preserver from a drowning man. But those of you of strong faith who are already one-hundred percent committed to the conclusions you have reached through faith, who are well-skilled in the art of believing without evidence and against all contradictory evidence may well enjoy this journey and since faith has always been an effective weapon against knowledge I'm sure you will come through this unscathed. Those of you who are truly open minded and not committed to any one conclusion, but are open to all ideas may find this helpful in figuring out your own life philosophy.
First we must agree on exactly what we mean by life after death. Obviously we are not talking about the heart pumping, lungs breathing, growing and reproducing, type of life as it is defined on this planet as we can all safely agree that this does come to an end. For the purposes of this argument we will agree that we mean consciousness after death. Consciousness after the body has been annihilated, brain and all. This theory rests on the belief that the brain is not the seat of consciousness but rather the "soul" is that part of ourselves from which all of our drives, desires, instincts, emotions, and awareness originate and where our memories and personalities are stored. This soul is said to be something non-physical which cannot be physically unmade thus allowing for the consciousness to continue after the destruction of the flesh. If we can agree on that than we have a place to start and here's the first question you must ask yourself:
"How is consciousness achieved? How are you conscious of these words on this screen, the keyboard at your fingertips?"
Of course the answer is because you can see this screen. You can feel the keyboard beneath your hands, hear the click of the keys as you strike them. You can perhaps even smell the plastic from which your keyboard and much of your computer is composed. Baring these senses you could even taste the metals and plastics to confirm the existence of your computer. You are conscious of this computer the same way you are conscious of all things, because you can taste, touch, see, feel, and hear it. Consciousness is a product of the senses, senses which are all destroyed when your flesh decays and rots from the bone.
You can't see without eyes. You can't hear without ears. You can't taste without a tongue. You can't feel without nerves and skin and flesh. All of these things will rot away with the rest of your body and then what will you see with? What will you smell with? What will you hear, feel, taste with? How will you be conscious then? Extra sensory perception perhaps? Maybe there's some mysterious sixth sense that will somehow materialize after you die? Yet, we find no evidence of a sixth sense anywhere. Even those people who claim to have it, speak of it in terms of their five senses. They have visions. I can assure you that people who have never seen before have no visions. They cannot even imagine what the world truly looks like, just as you cannot imagine a color that you've never seen before or a sound that you've never heard. The blind do not have visions and the deaf do not hear voices. At best, any sixth sense would be merely an augmentation of your existing senses, which being dead, you would no longer possess.
So there you would be, alive but unconscious of anything outside your own mind (if we allow that the mind is non-physical, which I'll address soon), a vegetable of sorts. Oh, but perhaps this afterlife is like some of the Eastern religions believe, an eternal dream state? But see, the problem with dreams is that they require memories and you wouldn't have any. Did I forget to mention that? You see, when you die, your brain rots and everyone knows that that's where your memory is housed. That's why a blow to the head, a high fever, consciousness altering drugs, can all screw up your memory. Severe brain damage, we know can delete your memory and your entire personality forever. It can render you unconscious for the remainder of your life as well. Now, how could that be possible if the consciousness where some non-physical spirit? How can you physically affect the non-physical? How could a blow to the head render you unconscious and even wipe out your memory if the soul, and not the brain, were the seat of consciousness? Why is it that we can link the damaging of brain cells to the loss of both memory and consciousness if the brain were not a necessary and vital part of your consciousness? We can infact pinpoint the exact area of the brain where memories are stored and we can directly link the destruction of brain cells in that area to the permanent loss of memory. What do you think would happen to your memory if your entire brain were to disintegrate in your skull and leak out of your ears? If a blow to the head, drugs, or a high fever can render you unconscious what do you think would happen to your consciousness when your entire brain decomposed? Obviously, when your brain goes, so goes your memory and all other type of consciousness.
I knew a guy who was sitting in a coffeeshop when he runs into an ex-girlfriend. I remember the story so well, because he wrote a poem about it. He approached the girl and said hello, smiling from ear to ear. She smiled back and asked him if he knew her. His smile faltered as he replied, "Yes, of course I know you."
"Than who am I?"
She had been in a car accident a few years previous and had total amnesia. They sat down and talked and she began asking him questions about herself.
"I like sports now. Did I always like sports?"
"No, defintely not. You hated sports."
"I'm a lesbian now. Was I always a lesbian?"
"Uh, No."
She blushed realizing that they must have been lovers.
"I paint now. Was I an artist before?"
"No. You weren't."
As they talked he realized that he was talking to an entirely different person in his former grilfriend's body. There was nothing the same. Even her pattern of speech was different, he said. I saw a show on TV about a kid who was a college football star who had an accident, got amnesia, and now hates football and thinks it's stupid, iss shy around girls, is completely opposite of the kid he used to be. His parents say that they had to bury their old kid and treat their son as if he were an entirely new child because he was. So, obviously even with our same bodies our memories go along way into deciding the type of people we will be. So, again I ask you to imagine what it would be like to wake up in a new body with no memories of ever having been anything else. How the hell do you think that "You" by any reasonable definition of the self would continue to exist? Your self would be no more.
So, let's look at this afterlife of yours. You are a disembodied spirit without the ability to see, feel, taste, smell, or hear, no way at all to experience anything new and no memory of ever having experienced anything in the past. You are as unconscious as a stone and you can't even dream. Remember what I said about not being able to imagine a shape or color or taste you'd never experienced? What if you'd never seen or experienced anything? If you had no memory of any shape, any color, any taste, any cutaneous or kinesthetic sensations, how could you dream then? Dreams of an eternal blackness without form or substance or sensation? Does that sound like heaven to you? That is no afterlife.
But maybe those New Age religions are correct and life is just this eternal energy that's a part of everything and last forever. That could very well be possible, but so what? That energy is not you. That sounds like that mindless disembodied spirit with no memory and no consciousness. But maybe those Eastern religions that believe in reincarnation are correct and this energy is transfered into other living things after you die? In fact, considering what we know of matter and energy, reincarnation is probably closest to the truth. Matter and energy cannot be created or destroyed but merely transformed from one form to another. But I doubt we are talking about reincarnation the way it is presented in most religions as your life force being reborn whole and intact in another form, but rather your life force disintegrating, reintegrating with the earth, and then being recylced in many different forms much like the process your flesh goes through. But even if we allowed for the possibility of your memoryless lifeforce being reborn whole and intact in another form, again, so what? Whatever new form this energy is converted into it will not be you. Your self is created by your perceptions of the world, shaped by your own unique perspective and the experiences that shape your personality compiled in your memories. The fact that you are a certain height, a certain weight, a certain race, a certain nationality, a certain sex, that you grew up in a certain area under certain circumstances, all go into shaping your identity. If I were to remove all of that, would you still be you? Think how drastically your perception of the world and your sense of self would change if I were to put your consciousness into my body. How long do you think you'd still retain your identity? Now what if I were to remove all of your memories and then put your consciousness into my body? Would you still be you? Even if I was to remove all memory of you ever having been anyone else? Would you still be the same person or would your entire identity, your entire self, be destroyed? Now imagine I were to take your unconscious memoryless "life-energy" and place it into an animal or a tree or a bird or, more likely, combine pieces of it with other disembodied life forces and disperse it among many different types of life forms? Think your identity would still somehow remain intact? Think you'd retain your sense of self with no memory of ever having been anything but the myriad creatures your soul is now scattered amongst? Would you still be you with your essence broken down and scattered amongst many different creatures? Nope, uh uh, all that you are, all the lessons you learned throughout your life, all the memories and experiences you suffered for and now cherish would be lost forever. You by any reasonable definition of yourself would cease to be.
Now, how about if I didn't put your mind into another body but just set it adrift in the ether without memory and without senses, without consciousness, essentially without you, as dead and lifeless as a stone? Would that mindless, deaf, dumb, and blind thing still be you? Or would you be gone forever? And that's only if you buy into the very unlikely idea that there is some type of life energy that exists independent of the body. More than likely the energy of life is just a chemical reaction caused in the body that ceases once the body ceases to function. It is highly unlikely that this energy exists as some integrated whole even as it lies in your body now. Still, this is a far more likely scenario than your life force exiting the body with all of its senses and memories intact to run off to heaven and continue its existence. I think I've pretty much proven that that ain't happening regardless of what the various biblical texts may lead you to believe.
But what about becoming one with the infinite, uniting with the all, becoming one with the universe? That is like that reincarnation I was speaking about, your life force suffering the same fate as the flesh, being broken down and integrated with the larger body along with Billions of other life forces. Like a drop of ink in an ocean. Pretty nice cozy way to describe the extinction of the self. You become part of the all! Digested by the earth or the universe to be recreated as new things that, of course, would not be you. See, you are more than just some nebulous energy or force. You are a specific thing with a specific definition, specific hopes, specific dreams, specific memories and experiences, a specific way of perceiving the world and interpreting those perceptions. Without a body, without a consciousness and without a memory, you would not be you, but something entirely separate and unique from you. What you are describing is akin to melting down a shiny new Ford and making silverware out of it and still trying to call it a car. Sure, all the same material is there, but that car is gone. Man is more than just the sum of his parts and I assure you that while all the chemicals and minerals and perhaps even the spark of life that animated you shall continue on, it will continue on without you. All that you are shall cease to be. That's what happens when you die. That's why no animal on earth has any desire to shrug off this mortal coil except for man, who alone has the imagination capable of self-delusion. And that's what we all have to look forward to. That's how the movie ends.
So, when someone asks me why I write, this is the long answer. I write because I value all the memories and experiences I have suffered and struggled to acquire. I value them if for no other reason than that they have cost me. Every lesson I have learned in my life has a corresponding physical or emotional scar and it offends me that these should be scattered on the wind and lost forever when my empty, memoryless, unconscious life energy vacates my rotting carcass. So I preserve them through you, the reader. You extend my life. As long as there are readers to discover my thoughts and carry them on in their own heads than my thoughts will not be dead until the last of my readers perish. That is the only afterlife we can hope for.
First we must agree on exactly what we mean by life after death. Obviously we are not talking about the heart pumping, lungs breathing, growing and reproducing, type of life as it is defined on this planet as we can all safely agree that this does come to an end. For the purposes of this argument we will agree that we mean consciousness after death. Consciousness after the body has been annihilated, brain and all. This theory rests on the belief that the brain is not the seat of consciousness but rather the "soul" is that part of ourselves from which all of our drives, desires, instincts, emotions, and awareness originate and where our memories and personalities are stored. This soul is said to be something non-physical which cannot be physically unmade thus allowing for the consciousness to continue after the destruction of the flesh. If we can agree on that than we have a place to start and here's the first question you must ask yourself:
"How is consciousness achieved? How are you conscious of these words on this screen, the keyboard at your fingertips?"
Of course the answer is because you can see this screen. You can feel the keyboard beneath your hands, hear the click of the keys as you strike them. You can perhaps even smell the plastic from which your keyboard and much of your computer is composed. Baring these senses you could even taste the metals and plastics to confirm the existence of your computer. You are conscious of this computer the same way you are conscious of all things, because you can taste, touch, see, feel, and hear it. Consciousness is a product of the senses, senses which are all destroyed when your flesh decays and rots from the bone.
You can't see without eyes. You can't hear without ears. You can't taste without a tongue. You can't feel without nerves and skin and flesh. All of these things will rot away with the rest of your body and then what will you see with? What will you smell with? What will you hear, feel, taste with? How will you be conscious then? Extra sensory perception perhaps? Maybe there's some mysterious sixth sense that will somehow materialize after you die? Yet, we find no evidence of a sixth sense anywhere. Even those people who claim to have it, speak of it in terms of their five senses. They have visions. I can assure you that people who have never seen before have no visions. They cannot even imagine what the world truly looks like, just as you cannot imagine a color that you've never seen before or a sound that you've never heard. The blind do not have visions and the deaf do not hear voices. At best, any sixth sense would be merely an augmentation of your existing senses, which being dead, you would no longer possess.
So there you would be, alive but unconscious of anything outside your own mind (if we allow that the mind is non-physical, which I'll address soon), a vegetable of sorts. Oh, but perhaps this afterlife is like some of the Eastern religions believe, an eternal dream state? But see, the problem with dreams is that they require memories and you wouldn't have any. Did I forget to mention that? You see, when you die, your brain rots and everyone knows that that's where your memory is housed. That's why a blow to the head, a high fever, consciousness altering drugs, can all screw up your memory. Severe brain damage, we know can delete your memory and your entire personality forever. It can render you unconscious for the remainder of your life as well. Now, how could that be possible if the consciousness where some non-physical spirit? How can you physically affect the non-physical? How could a blow to the head render you unconscious and even wipe out your memory if the soul, and not the brain, were the seat of consciousness? Why is it that we can link the damaging of brain cells to the loss of both memory and consciousness if the brain were not a necessary and vital part of your consciousness? We can infact pinpoint the exact area of the brain where memories are stored and we can directly link the destruction of brain cells in that area to the permanent loss of memory. What do you think would happen to your memory if your entire brain were to disintegrate in your skull and leak out of your ears? If a blow to the head, drugs, or a high fever can render you unconscious what do you think would happen to your consciousness when your entire brain decomposed? Obviously, when your brain goes, so goes your memory and all other type of consciousness.
I knew a guy who was sitting in a coffeeshop when he runs into an ex-girlfriend. I remember the story so well, because he wrote a poem about it. He approached the girl and said hello, smiling from ear to ear. She smiled back and asked him if he knew her. His smile faltered as he replied, "Yes, of course I know you."
"Than who am I?"
She had been in a car accident a few years previous and had total amnesia. They sat down and talked and she began asking him questions about herself.
"I like sports now. Did I always like sports?"
"No, defintely not. You hated sports."
"I'm a lesbian now. Was I always a lesbian?"
"Uh, No."
She blushed realizing that they must have been lovers.
"I paint now. Was I an artist before?"
"No. You weren't."
As they talked he realized that he was talking to an entirely different person in his former grilfriend's body. There was nothing the same. Even her pattern of speech was different, he said. I saw a show on TV about a kid who was a college football star who had an accident, got amnesia, and now hates football and thinks it's stupid, iss shy around girls, is completely opposite of the kid he used to be. His parents say that they had to bury their old kid and treat their son as if he were an entirely new child because he was. So, obviously even with our same bodies our memories go along way into deciding the type of people we will be. So, again I ask you to imagine what it would be like to wake up in a new body with no memories of ever having been anything else. How the hell do you think that "You" by any reasonable definition of the self would continue to exist? Your self would be no more.
So, let's look at this afterlife of yours. You are a disembodied spirit without the ability to see, feel, taste, smell, or hear, no way at all to experience anything new and no memory of ever having experienced anything in the past. You are as unconscious as a stone and you can't even dream. Remember what I said about not being able to imagine a shape or color or taste you'd never experienced? What if you'd never seen or experienced anything? If you had no memory of any shape, any color, any taste, any cutaneous or kinesthetic sensations, how could you dream then? Dreams of an eternal blackness without form or substance or sensation? Does that sound like heaven to you? That is no afterlife.
But maybe those New Age religions are correct and life is just this eternal energy that's a part of everything and last forever. That could very well be possible, but so what? That energy is not you. That sounds like that mindless disembodied spirit with no memory and no consciousness. But maybe those Eastern religions that believe in reincarnation are correct and this energy is transfered into other living things after you die? In fact, considering what we know of matter and energy, reincarnation is probably closest to the truth. Matter and energy cannot be created or destroyed but merely transformed from one form to another. But I doubt we are talking about reincarnation the way it is presented in most religions as your life force being reborn whole and intact in another form, but rather your life force disintegrating, reintegrating with the earth, and then being recylced in many different forms much like the process your flesh goes through. But even if we allowed for the possibility of your memoryless lifeforce being reborn whole and intact in another form, again, so what? Whatever new form this energy is converted into it will not be you. Your self is created by your perceptions of the world, shaped by your own unique perspective and the experiences that shape your personality compiled in your memories. The fact that you are a certain height, a certain weight, a certain race, a certain nationality, a certain sex, that you grew up in a certain area under certain circumstances, all go into shaping your identity. If I were to remove all of that, would you still be you? Think how drastically your perception of the world and your sense of self would change if I were to put your consciousness into my body. How long do you think you'd still retain your identity? Now what if I were to remove all of your memories and then put your consciousness into my body? Would you still be you? Even if I was to remove all memory of you ever having been anyone else? Would you still be the same person or would your entire identity, your entire self, be destroyed? Now imagine I were to take your unconscious memoryless "life-energy" and place it into an animal or a tree or a bird or, more likely, combine pieces of it with other disembodied life forces and disperse it among many different types of life forms? Think your identity would still somehow remain intact? Think you'd retain your sense of self with no memory of ever having been anything but the myriad creatures your soul is now scattered amongst? Would you still be you with your essence broken down and scattered amongst many different creatures? Nope, uh uh, all that you are, all the lessons you learned throughout your life, all the memories and experiences you suffered for and now cherish would be lost forever. You by any reasonable definition of yourself would cease to be.
Now, how about if I didn't put your mind into another body but just set it adrift in the ether without memory and without senses, without consciousness, essentially without you, as dead and lifeless as a stone? Would that mindless, deaf, dumb, and blind thing still be you? Or would you be gone forever? And that's only if you buy into the very unlikely idea that there is some type of life energy that exists independent of the body. More than likely the energy of life is just a chemical reaction caused in the body that ceases once the body ceases to function. It is highly unlikely that this energy exists as some integrated whole even as it lies in your body now. Still, this is a far more likely scenario than your life force exiting the body with all of its senses and memories intact to run off to heaven and continue its existence. I think I've pretty much proven that that ain't happening regardless of what the various biblical texts may lead you to believe.
But what about becoming one with the infinite, uniting with the all, becoming one with the universe? That is like that reincarnation I was speaking about, your life force suffering the same fate as the flesh, being broken down and integrated with the larger body along with Billions of other life forces. Like a drop of ink in an ocean. Pretty nice cozy way to describe the extinction of the self. You become part of the all! Digested by the earth or the universe to be recreated as new things that, of course, would not be you. See, you are more than just some nebulous energy or force. You are a specific thing with a specific definition, specific hopes, specific dreams, specific memories and experiences, a specific way of perceiving the world and interpreting those perceptions. Without a body, without a consciousness and without a memory, you would not be you, but something entirely separate and unique from you. What you are describing is akin to melting down a shiny new Ford and making silverware out of it and still trying to call it a car. Sure, all the same material is there, but that car is gone. Man is more than just the sum of his parts and I assure you that while all the chemicals and minerals and perhaps even the spark of life that animated you shall continue on, it will continue on without you. All that you are shall cease to be. That's what happens when you die. That's why no animal on earth has any desire to shrug off this mortal coil except for man, who alone has the imagination capable of self-delusion. And that's what we all have to look forward to. That's how the movie ends.
So, when someone asks me why I write, this is the long answer. I write because I value all the memories and experiences I have suffered and struggled to acquire. I value them if for no other reason than that they have cost me. Every lesson I have learned in my life has a corresponding physical or emotional scar and it offends me that these should be scattered on the wind and lost forever when my empty, memoryless, unconscious life energy vacates my rotting carcass. So I preserve them through you, the reader. You extend my life. As long as there are readers to discover my thoughts and carry them on in their own heads than my thoughts will not be dead until the last of my readers perish. That is the only afterlife we can hope for.
Why Godless and Black?
Felling the need to separate them from my political ramblings and my writings about love, family, and the horror genre, I have decided to create a forum solely for my atheist writings. I am planning on slowly importing past posts from my blog Words of Wrath onto this one as well as newer blogs. If you are new to my writing then welcome. Sit back and enjoy.
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