Come and See the Violence Inherent in the System!

TL;DR: As a species, we used to need religion and other pleasant fictions in order to cope with the wild world that spawned us. Now that we Homo sapiens are the wildest threat on Earth, we need truth more than fiction. Religion was initially an adaptive invention of Homo sapiens. Eventually, religion became maladaptive, threatening our survival. We need to put aside dangerous religions, especially the monotheistic religion, since monotheism tends to breed violence.

We don’t know when, how, or why apes experienced a cognitive revolution and became sentient, conscious, so-called wise ape-people (Homo sapiens: “Wise man”). We do know that consciousness brought to the newly sentient Homo sapiens mental abilities which enabled the species to ultimately dominate the planet. Abstract ideas now became tools and weapons.

Contemplation of abstract ideas was a new tool unavailable to non-sentient species, but it came at a cost. Now the species could ponder death, not simply witness, grieve, and experience it. Now they could recognize violence, be impressed or disgusted by it, instead of just instinctively using it as another tool of survival. Now they could contemplate the meaninglessness of existence, and be crushed by it, or even driven insane by it. Unless, of course, they could find a way to cope with this unwelcome awakening.

Along with all the civilization-building tools sentience eventually brought, it also threatened the survival of the species by distracting or debilitating them. Being distracted or depressed or insane were dangerous vulnerabilities, especially before the wild world had been tamed. These distractions from the hard work of survival were extinction-level threats when the new species was few in number and faced the stark binary of evolution: survival or extinction.

Now uniquely vulnerable to despair and existential grief, our species coped by inventing beliefs and faith narratives free of connection to physical observation. Fiction was born: Look at the trees; they’ve always been here… someone must have planted a garden and put us in it! Fictional legends became beloved myths, which became religious “Truth”. The new ability to see philosophical facts about the world encouraged formation of the basic original religious narratives.

Monotheistic religions (Judaism, Christianity, Islam) injected a uniquely aggressive exclusivity (All those OTHERS are wrong; OURS is the right one) into their narratives.  From Abraham to Moses, the creators of the Jewish nation/religion insisted that they were the exclusive source of Truth. The Old Testament was asserted to be the unique scriptural collection in which to find the “only true God,” Jehovah. From Christ to Paul, the creators of the Christian religion insisted that Jesus’ death was the culmination of Old Testament prophecy, ushering in a new doctrine of grace through faith in their exclusive Savior. There was only one way to their gated heavenly neighborhood, and that was letting Jesus Christ control your mind. From Muhammed to the Sunnis and the Shia, the creators of Islam insisted that their spin on Old and New Testaments was the fulfillment of prophecy, making Muslim doctrine the only pure faith.

The aggressive exclusivity of these various flavors of monotheism quickly escalated into coercion and physical violence. That addiction to violence resulted in species-wide, self-inflicted suffering. Over the past two thousand years during which their narratives obsessed and distracted Homo sapiens, monotheism turned religion– the ancient coping mechanism– into a global killer.

Moses in the Old Testament taught his followers to slaughter the Canaanites in order to seize their land; he claimed he received this command from God. The willingness of Israel to defend their land with violence and cruelty continues today. Islam modified Moses’ shtick to fit their conquering narrative and have been in an ideological war with Christianity since the 7th century CE. Their fundamentalists drive themselves suicidally insane with their prophetic mission, “Jihad,” and have perfected the supremely maladaptive tool of terrorism. Christians went from persecuted to persecutors when the dominant empire in their area embraced the new religion in order to control their power-drunk narrative. The history of the last thousand years in Europe and North America drips with the blood of those brutalized and exterminated in the name of their god.

The most popular and dangerous ideas on earth are cherished by the violent, aggressive monotheistic religions crippling so many powerful cultures. Homo sapiens is at risk from the maladaptive mental virus of religion.

Moderates Become Extremists

Mutually exclusive dogmas cannot coexist.

When I was a religious extremist, I embraced every teaching of the Bible as if it could be none other than directly from the mind of a loving God to his lost children. One year of college, then one year of missionary service, only made me more extreme. Meeting and marrying my wife, having our first child, returning to the mission field, and then returning to college to complete my teaching degree were all life events which eroded away my extremism. By the time I was a seasoned teacher, I was religiously and politically liberal. I had become a moderate.

My definition of a religious moderate is one who ignores the bad ideas in their scriptures; extremists embrace the bad ideas. Some extremists move away from the bad ideas, and toward moderation like I did. This phenomenon is healthy for open discussion across political and religious boundaries and results in progress for international and ecumenical relations.

Read more

Why I Doubt Daniel 2 Is True

Daniel 2 Doubts Wrapped Up in Daniel Book/Doctrine Doubts

The relevance of the second chapter of the book of Daniel to a believer in Seventh-day Adventist doctrine is entirely dependent upon the church’s twin doctrines, “The Sanctuary” and “The Investigative Judgment”.

Both of those doctrines depend heavily upon a view of the whole book of Daniel which has largely been abandoned by modern liberal scholarship, as noted below. Both of these doctrines build upon that abandoned interpretation of Daniel 2 which relied upon it as prophecy written before the events it predicted rather than as ‘history’, written after the events which it pretends to predict (the modern view). Both of those doctrines are unique to a single denomination within Christianity, the Seventh-day Adventist Church; but even within that church, there is no agreement as to the reliability of those very doctrines! The best summary of the controversy over those twin doctrines is found in three parts:

Read more

Good Without God, Better Without God

For whatever reason (I’m not sure I’m willing to guess), in the few years since I’ve come out atheist, I have experienced a motivation to behave ethically and morally far beyond that which two and a half decades of Christianity ever provided.

My denomination was the Seventh-day Adventist Church. I was not your average pew-warmer, either. Within 18 months of my baptism at the tender age of 20, I had embarked on a year-long foreign missionary teaching assignment, been ordained a local elder in that mission’s church (at the ordination ceremony, when the pastor read to his church the biblical requirements of an elder, he literally skipped over the verse in 1 Timothy 3 which states that the elder must not be a recent convert; I swallowed hard and kept smiling), and had preached sermons and taught lessons more than many elderly members who had been Seventh-day Adventists all their lives.

Read more

A Christian Mind Cannot Open

I remember being convinced that the Seventh-day Adventist worldview was the only correct lens through which to judge all incoming information, including political information used to make voting decisions. For decades I perceived everything I read, heard, observed, learned, and discovered through that very narrow lens, also known as The Great Controversy:

Read more

How Do I Know?

These past few months, I’ve become more interested in how I know, than what I know. While facts play a big role in the formation of my values and beliefs, the primary concern is summed up in my title, How Do I Know?

How did I decide that my favorite set of values are ‘right,’ as opposed to all those ‘wrong’ values? How did I settle on my particular list of ‘good to know’ facts, and how do I test and retest their reliability in the real world?

Read more

Case Study in Deluded Christian Credulity

“Earth, as it would appear should the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets melt, raising ocean levels by an estimated 67.5 meters (~221.5 ft). The Greenland ice sheet is estimated to contribute 7 meters to global ocean levels. The Antarctic ice sheet would contribute 60 meters if fully melted. Additional glaciers and ice caps in the margins of Greenland and Antarctic peninsula would contribute an additional 0.5 meters. “
source

Read more

Credulity

Religion is a gateway drug. Well, drug, in the metaphorical sense, as in an anesthetic for critical, rational, logical, skeptical thinking. But it is a gateway also, in the sense that when you assent to the claims of a religion, you thereby make it much easier to assent to other dubious claims. Claims against which, if you hadn’t tied up your critical thinking and thrown it down in the basement, you would have had some defenses.

Read more