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.