Delusional reason monkeys

Everyone has read The God Delusion and it, it would seem, has released us from the archaic fantasy world in which we all lived before it was published.
I like Richard Dawkins. I like the pained look he has on his face when some creationist asks him a stupid question that he has to dignify with an answer. I like his pompous manner as he looks down on the lesser intelligence that he finds himself surrounded by. Poor old Richard, all he wants to do is tear down the belief systems of several billion people and all he gets is shit for it.
Dawkins is a very important figure in today’s world. If it wasn’t for the rise of radical Islam and their Christian brethren preaching intelligent design in the states we probably wouldn’t have heard of him. Dawkins brings to the table, along with Christopher Hitchens a total modern outlook on life. We are now in the age of reason and, who in their right mind, would have the arrogance to argue against reason.
Yeah you guessed it. Actually no. I have no problem with reason just some of the people that preach it.
I believe in God. I am a theist. Culturally I’m a Christian and although I am a modern, intelligent, inquisitive man I can still get very bronze age about certain subjects. I don’t think a belief in a higher power makes a person ignorant and I certainly don’t think teaching your children there is a God is tantamount to child abuse
It starts getting dodgy when you begin, injecting hell and damnation and guilt into those teachings. It gets really dodgy when you start putting more emphasis on the next world rather than this one. There are Christians working on starting world war three so they can realise the predictions of Revelations and achieve their own personal rapture.
Now I find this rather selfish of these Christians. Setting out to usher in the end of the world in order to bring Christ back and therefore ensure your own personal salvation doesn’t seem a very Christian act.
Rapture is when all the worthy, god fearing Christians will rise up to heaven. Physically rise up to heaven, not their souls, their bodies will be picked up by God and they will ascend to sit by his side. To this end they use their power and their influence to stir up tensions in the middle east because, lets be honest, if its going to kick off it’s going to kick off there.
The problem with all fundamentalists is they take the word of their particular religious book as truth. I was always taught the bible was ment to be taken metaphorically not as an exact version of events.
Even as a small kid I realised that people didn’t live for hundreds of years and the stories themselves were full of inconsistencies. (Adam and Eve are the first people created by God but when Cain kills Able Cain is banished to land of Nod. Cain fears he will be killed in exile. Who’s going to kill him? Clearly there are people other than his immediate family.)
Now to believe that God created Adam six thousand years ago out of dirt literally is a pretty extreme belief but there are millions of Christians that do. Unfortunately Dawkins bundles up all Christians together so along with these crazies even more, moderate, scientifically literate Christians, like me, get tarred with the same brush.
So I end up getting into discussions with God Delusion carrying reason monkeys who feel its there duty to tell you your wrong. Look, I don’t believe the world is six thousand years old. I know its four and a half billion years old. You don’t need to tell me the bible was written by ordinary people fleshing out a creation myth in a desert trying to make sense of their world because I’ve known this for years.
The thing with atheists today is they, now having found a voice and a rabbi in Dawkins, are in danger of adopting all the smug self-righteous certainty that the faithful have monopolised for years.
Science is a great tool that advances mankind. The scientific model has been instrumental in bringing us to where we are now. We do indeed stand on the shoulders of giants. We live off all that has gone before and because of it we live longer, happier lives in a comfort that our ancestors only dreamed about.
I get all this. I understand the universe needs no God. I understand it all operates quite nicely without an intervening deity. I understand how it evolved from the big bang, how all the laws of physics conspire to create stars, to blow them up in supernovas and to spew the heavier elements out to make us.
I’m not stupid but I’m still not prepared to admit I’m an accident of nature.
The galling thing is neither are most modern atheists. It seems to me they want their cake and to eat it. They are happy to put away their judgemental, authoritarian God however they want to keep all the good stuff. They want to keep their eternal soul. They are quite happy to know they’re not going to hell but the baulk at the idea that they won’t be going anywhere.
The modern atheist and I’ve spoken to more than one that believes this still wants to carry on living after their death. I have heard the argument that the laws of physics are compatible with carrying on your conscience existence after your body dies.
Sounds like a soul to me. Sounds rather religious.
They want to go onto a higher plane, a higher place but they just don’t want to meet God when they get there. The reason monkeys still don’t like the idea that when they die, under their rules, they die. That’s it game over. This is probably the chapter in The God Delusion they skimmed over. Dawkins himself has absolutely no problem with ceasing to exist after brain death.
‘I don’t believe in God but I believe in ghosts.’
Ok.
You’re kind of missing the point.
We’ve become the Gods of our own lives but unfortunately as our own God, making ourselves in our own image doesn’t guarantee us eternal salvation. All it means is we don’t have to follow a bronze age doctrine and won’t be judged according to it. We create our own heaven on earth, live our lives as we choose and then we die. No hell, no fire and brimstone but on the other hand no heaven, no angels and no relaxing, chilled out eternity in the clouds. Worm food. Go back and read Dawkins.
The problem seems to be despite living in a world of reason people get rather attached to themselves. They like their personality, they like what they think and they think they’re special.
We live in a culture where everyone is now led to believe they are some how unique and vital. Look at Jedward. They feel they have the right to their dreams, the right to work in an industry without any of the talents or skills which you’d expect them to posses.
Imagine surgeon idol. 12 wannabe surgeons without any of the skills or training to be a surgeon competing to get a job cutting people up at a hospital.
‘This has always been my dream Simon.’
Would you let them operate on you?
This is why the modern spiritual atheist shy’s away from Buddhism.
Personally I’m rather found of the Buddhist view of enlightenment and the eternal soul. When a Buddhist finally reaches enlightenment and breaks the cycle of re-incarnation their spirit rejoins the universe. Their spirit not their personality.
The personality, Buddhists believe, is a completely false construct that we create during our lives in order to manage them. A needy, whiney wanting computer programme whose sole purpose is to keep our body alive and re-produce.
When a Buddhist achieves enlightenment he/she abandons all earthly, human needs and desires. That’s all of them. Not just possessions and monies. Everything, human attachments, love, grief, sexual desire it all has to go. They leave their personality behind because it is the needs of the self that stops the spirit reaching enlightenment.
This grates against our self obsessed culture. So under the Buddhist model you will, eventually, achieve eternal life with enough work and discipline but it isn’t the you you understand as you because that you, the personality that everyone loves, will die. It merely being an artificial, false yet necessary body manager. The soul, the spirit is your part of the universes’ life force that your body borrows while it has its time on earth. It has no needs or cute quirks. It is elemental and constant.
Whenever I’ve explained this model to people I’ve watched their brows furrow and their noses wrinkle. The idea that they weren’t special, that they were merely a by-product of a much bigger process really irked them. The irony is that Dawkins would argue that we are anything but special. We are all very ordinary and our collective life mass and effect compared to and on the rest of the universe is next to negligible.
Dawkins will argue we’re not special we just really, really, really want to be. He would also say if it makes you happy to think that you are and it doesn’t effect anyone else, you go right ahead.
I’m reminded of the nurse in Weston who got into trouble for asking patients if they wanted her to pray for them. The Daily Mail made a big fuss about the oppression of Christians by the liberal secular society.
Personally I think it was right for her to be disciplined because it isn’t her job to pray for people. It’s her job to administer care, scientific care. If you were ill and your medical professional offered to pray for you you’d shit yourself.
Prayer is the last resort don’t you think?
Fundamentally I think she was wrong as a Christian to feel the need to ask permission. Nowhere in the bible does it state that you need a release form in order to pray for someone. In fact we are told to pray for our enemies so one would feel permission would not be a factor in bringing up a third party in your conversation with God.
What we really have here is a woman who wants everyone to know how pious she is. How god fearing and good and special she is. Asking permission was all about ego and nothing to do with God.
Shit Christian shit Buddhist.
I think my main point is this. We still haven’t put away the idea of God. What we have put away is the need to obey him, to live our lives in away that we would rather not. We don’t want to live by set down rules anymore however we still want all the good stuff promised to us by religion. We’re like naughty little children who want to misbehave all year but still get our Christmas presents.
Like I say I like Dawkins. What he has to say is necessary and intelligent and should be taught in schools. However if you’re going to quote him you have to take on all he has to say. You have to accept your mortality and understand that your time is finite.
You are going to die and then you will be gone. Forever.