Who Am I?

The question may come up regarding why I am writing about religion and supernatural beliefs.  What qualifies me?  I will admit that I am not highly educated, although I have read a lot.  I have not had a great moral life.  Indeed, I have made many mistakes.  Some of those mistakes relate to my recovery from fundamentalist christian beliefs.  If it really was true that Christians are all about love, truth and real ethics, I would stay mellow about believers.  But there is too much bigotry in the name of religion, too much hatred, too much interference in education, health, ecology, politics.

I am not a great academic or moral leader.  But I feel compelled by the Rick Perrys, Jerry Fallwells and Pat Robertsons of the world to discuss my experiences and the things which I have learned.  It's about adding my voice to the chorus of secularists, physicalists, atheists, agnostics, doubters and other people who are proponents of reorienting our perspectives to physical realism and cognitive clarity.  It's about sharing my experiences as I moved away from religion, supernatural beliefs and other negative cognitive filters.  it's also about looking at the facts before making negative judgments about people or discounting things just because they don't fit within your worldview.  It goes beyond religion and has to do with how we filter things.  It's about how I discovered and corrected, in part, my cognitive filters.  But I think that it needs to also be about discussing what I see as dangerous cognitive filters that hinder human evolution and happiness, as well as does harm to the planet and the future.  I hope to also discuss and, yes, discover, better ways to seeing things and to live.

Yes, I do believe that the better ways are secular.  Religion has and continues to cause conflicts, spread misinformation, limit happiness, and aid in damage to our planet.  I know that these are dramatic statements.  But I have seen the hatreds. I have seen the lies and false science. I have seen the carelessness toward the planet because of ideas of a second coming and afterlife.  I know about the killings of those who believe or live differently.

I want to end this post with a clarification about what I mean by cognitive filters.  We use what we know, what we think we know, what we believe, what we are taught, and so on as filters for what we do and how we interact with people.  The difficulties are that there is a lot of bad data that people use for filters.  Not only do people use these bad filters to make bad judgments but they teach these bad filters to children.  They want to enact laws that enforce the bad filters on other people and to block clearer filters from being available.  An example of a bad filter is when someone believes that an ancient collection of books of questionable authorship are really the work of a deity and they treat people, education and politics according to the dictates in those books.

Surprisingly Secular Quotes

 
 I'm starting this because I keep hearing religionists make religious claims about the U.S. "founding fathers".  The religionists are either ignorant or not being truthful about the early leadership of the United States.

"Actually, after further consideration, I've decided it is indeed possible to rightly govern a nation without God and the Bible" - George Washington

 "But it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no God. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg." - Thomas Jefferson, Notes on Virginia, 1782

"Question with boldness even the existence of a god; because if there be one he must approve of the homage of reason more than that of blindfolded fear." - Thomas Jefferson, letter to Peter Carr, August 10, 1787

"Christianity neither is, nor ever was a part of the common law." - Thomas Jefferson, letter to Dr. Thomas Cooper, February 10, 1814

"What is it the Bible teaches us? -- raping, cruelty, and murder. What is it the Testament teaches us? -- to believe that the Almighty committed debauchery with a woman engaged to be married, and the belief of this debauchery is called faith." - Thomas Paine

"It is the fable of Jesus Christ, as told in the New Testament, and the wild and visionary doctrine raised thereon, against which I contend. The story, taking it as it is told, is blasphemously obscene.”- Thomas Paine

"There is not one redeeming feature in our superstition of Christianity. It has made one half the world fools, and the other half hypocrites." - Thomas Jefferson

"Religious bondage shackles and debilitates the mind and unfits it for every noble enterprise." - James Madison

Why I am opposed to Religions

Although I disagree with beliefs in the supernatural and gods, I accept that there are subjective elements to most of our world views.  Many of us have fantasies and some people confuse fantasies with reality.  People often find comfort and elements of personal control via religion and supernatural beliefs.  Although I believe these comforts and controls can also be found via secular means, I am able to coexist with use of religion for personal reasons.  What I have difficulties with are the ways which religionists externalize their beliefs.  Too many people use their belief systems as control mechanisms not just for themselves but for other people.  They make decisions about physical and social matters based on their filters of belief, often harming people and the planet in the process.  These parasites of illusion invade governments, schools and other institutions.  They attempt to use the government and schools to force their views and biased rules on other people and future generations.  Too many of them are willing to kill people over differing views.

Physicalist

There came a time when I needed to rebuild my thinking about life.  My doubts were too great to go back to my old religious beliefs.  I tried out the other larger and even some obscure religious and supernatural beliefs.  But I found them all short on evidence.  I realized that the best option for me was to start with what I could verify.  I started with the point that, as far as I could determine, I existed in a physical form in a physical reality.  Yes, there were other perspectives that debated that.  But none of those could really be verified.  It appeared that I was a physical being in a physical dimension.  So I moved on from there.  After substantial experiences and studies, I came to the conclusion that everything is either physical or has a connection to the physical which must conform to some kind of consistency which maintains that connection to the physical.

Even down to the quantum mechanics level, we are still dealing with physical existence.  Any valid discussion, theories or beliefs about existence requires some relationship to physical existence.  I admit that there are theories far beyond my understanding but any proposals to me about matters of importance to my existence needs to relate their discussion to the physical existence.  So far, all discussions about gods, the soul, afterlife and other aspects commonly called the supernatural have failed to supply any testable theories of the connection to my physical existence.

This is substantially simplified for this article.  In early stages in new discoveries in physics, there are things that appear inconsistent.  But that has to do with our tool kits for examination.  As we develop better tool kits, we see more of how things work.  Some people might say that this partly answers why I don't understand the gods and my soul.  But it seems to me that, after such a long time, humanity would have developed or the gods would have supplied better tools than the badly written documents and insane acting purveyors of supernatural concepts.  After billions of years, how can the gods still expect us to take anything about their existence on faith?

Transitions

I was once a devout christian.  I was even in the understudy for the ministry when I was in my teens.  I preached in churches which did not have a regular minister and some Sunday evenings in my own church.  But I was taken away from that for a time.  When I returned to the beliefs of my childhood, experiences cast doubt on the truthfulness of the beliefs.  Too many things just did not fit.  I eventually concluded that beliefs in gods and supernatural existence were either false or very inaccurate.  Although I didn't think that I could truthfully claim absolute knowledge that there were no gods or supernatural elements, I did conclude that all human beliefs in gods and the afterlife that I had investigated were filled with fallacies.  The best that I was able to determine was that we were physical beings in a physical universe.  I saw no intrinsic validity in theistic and supernatural beliefs.  I had to rebuild my life from a naturalistic perspective.

The abandonment of my old beliefs had difficulties.  For one thing, I was raised in a culture that associated morals with theistic commandments.  Without belief in any gods or the fear of their punishments, I had to rebuild my ethics from a physical standpoint.  This was difficult for reasons that I will explain in a separate post.  The difficulties were not because of any theistic exclusivity to morals.  On the contrary, the difficulties arose because my early conditioning about morals were tied to theistic dictates rather that physical and social realities.  Another psychological issue was the hell syndrome.  I had been indoctrinated into the belief that non-believers go to hell.  This caused substantial emotional and cognitive difficulties as I transitioned to purely physical perspectives.

One conclusion that I have made is that children should be taught ethics from social and physical perspectives.  My experiences indicate that societies will be far better off if people have common ethics based on physical, social and planetary requirements.  Some people claim bad human behavior as the proof that life does not work out correctly without spiritual beliefs.  But it seems to me that any correlation between increased unethical behaviors and the decrease in religious controls is because too much of society has left moral training as the domain of religion.