The God Question

Somehow, wherever you go on the web, sooner or later you run into a creationist. But Darkcrusade, assuming that he agrees with the general goal of a stateless society, kind of illustrates the point I made earlier: you do not have to be an atheist to be an anarchist, and if we insist that you have to be, we achieve nothing more than to alienate gazillions of potential supporters.

And thank you Samarami, for illustrating my point a second time: if we are going to insist that anarchism has to be atheistic, then we are going to alienate who knows how many potential supporters.

Personally I couldn't possible care less what other people believe. Without a state to ram their beliefs down my throat, I am safe from their beliefs, and they are safe from mine. That way we can all live in peace.

These complex problems regarding so called preferable behavior have a simple, premised and practical solution. I would suggest "com[ing] back" to this post and progressing and brainstorming that...I refer to DennisLeeWilson's, post on April 02, 2012

"Jim,

I understand the "shock" of "being wrong". I thought *I* was wrong once, but luckily I quickly realized that I was in error to think such....

>>"But still, why does it matter?"

>>"It matters because the prime task of those wishing to bring a free society about is to move our statist neighbors away from their belief in the need for, and efficacy of, government;..."

It DOES NOT matter to me because MY prime task is BEING FREE. [ http://tinyurl.com/Individual-Sovereignty-W] I don't need a "free society" in order to be free. What you are describing is at best, a SECONDARY task for me. I would NEVER reverse the priority of the tasks. MY secondary tasks can never be sacrificed to MY primary task. It is actually not even a secondary task to me, nor a "huge" task. It is an UNnecessary task. See below.

>>"This can only happen when our statist friend begins to think straight; ..."

>>"It is of paramount importance that people _begin to think straight_. Otherwise, they will never, en masse, ditch their absurd, superstitious belief in government."

But THIS (understanding that government is a myth) is ALREADY happening! And it is happening without statists (not MY friend) changing their thinking "en masse". It is happening partly because of other things that YOU have written.

>>"We have to change their _mode of thought._"

Arrrgghhh. The "WE" thing again. NO! WE do NOT have to change their mode of thought. "Billions of humans making trillions of decisions could never be harnessed or thoroughly theorized by even the most brilliant voluntaryist thinkers or free market economists." Chris Dates [ http://tinyurl.com/There-is-NO-WE-W ]

And, as I point out below, it doesn't matter to me what a man thinks or how straight or convoluted his thinking, as long as he respects MY right to exist as per the five Precepts by which I deal with other humans. I have NO desire whatsoever to meddle with the way most other people think. It is like wrestling with pigs. You ALWAYS get dirty and it only annoys the pig. I spent many hours as a youth attempting just what you recommend--and learning about "pigs".

To paraphrase your own statement in Help Wanted, It is futile and a thankless waste of my time "...to try to impose ["MY version of what *I* consider to be rationality"] on people who do not want it and who made their preference lethally clear.". I look for those INDIVIDUALS ONLY who have already indicated by word and especially be deed that they are thinking and acting in a manner I can admire and possibly help or support with what I have learned.

Minimum requirements for living peacefully amongst other people do not require a person to be "fully rational". Education levels vary enormously as do levels of rationality! The basic or minimum requirement is understanding and adhering to the Non Aggression Principle (NAP), a very simple MORAL/ethical concept that is even readily apparent to children.

*But sometimes moral statements are not sufficiently explicit or not easily applied to particular situations. Because of varying education levels, understanding the full consequences of moral statements and/or applying them consistently can become problematic. Enter from stage right: The Covenant of Unanimous Consent. [ http://tinyurl.com/Index-to-Covenant-Articles-W ]

*The Covenant of Unanimous Consent is a Political statement [ http://tinyurl.com/Political-Statement-W] explicitly derived from the Non Aggression Principle, which is a Moral statement. A characteristic of political statements--and a reason why they exist--is that they are more explicit and do not depend as heavily on education level as do moral statements and they are less subject to "interpretations".

*Education is a wider, more encompassing thing than is religion (i.e. religion is a subset of a person's education). And education continues throughout an individual's life and is a primary cause of behavior changes during that lifespan.

*Free State/county/town movements are examples of people with varying levels of education--and varying religious views--agreeing to conduct their interpersonal relationships by the simple principle of live and let live. Personally, I am disappointed that NONE of the "popular" movements has adopted some EXPLICIT political pledge such as the Covenant provides. The closest thing to a pledge of personal conduct has been the Shire Society which needlessly plagiarized the Covenant and then REMOVED what I consider the most important part for a Free State/county/town movement, the Supersedure section!

You, me, Paul Bonneau, Darkcrusade and many (most?) of the contributors to this site--without resolving ANY of our differences--COULD conceivably agree to the entire Covenant and live in close proximity to each other in a "Supersedure Zone" and even trade with each other, without engaging in physical conflict. This is possible because the contents of the Covenant are the COMMON ROOT of everything that each of us considers to be important with regard to interpersonal relationships.

AND, as I pointed out in my article [ http://tinyurl.com/Objectivism-to-Agorism ], people who--for whatever reason--refuse to sign the Covenant, could still live amongst us and trade with us, knowing full well what to expect should THEY (the non-signatories or "dissenters") violate our Covenant's Precepts in their dealings with us.

Dennis Lee Wilson
Signatory: The Covenant of Unanimous Consent.

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Update: -W Are Fixed Broken Links

AtlasAikido

Hello, Jim, and thank you for writing this piece. My favorite sentence was the following:
 
"In the first case, the irrational belief is that someone else can order one's life better than one can order it oneself (or as I noticed somewhere recently, "A politician is someone able to spend your money better than you can"), which is obvious nonsense on its face. "
 
Because I lack the ability to have faith, I am an agnostic. I am not one who denies the possibility of diety, however. It is important to note that most people who call themselves Christian and most people who call themselves atheists have all kinds of false notions about god and theology. I have never yet met a single atheist who has taken a graduate-level class in theology—likewise for Christians, which is even worse. But then again, most people assume that they know something about ethics, too, but this is false as well. Furthermore, most of the straw-man arguments that people like Stephan Molyneux use to "destroy" Christian theology (he’s otherwise an excellent worker for liberty) are just that, straw men and myths. Even your statement (above) that Lucifer fell because he used free will is incorrect. It was the sin of pride that did him in, and my future Dante essay (it's being reviewed now) will clear this notion up. But to give you a peek, the sin of pride is the one that politicians and all wanna-be rulers are guilty of. They lift themselves above their "station" as peers and fellow humans and catapult themselves into an overseer position--judging and ordering people about as if they were their masters. Perhaps this is why Dante considered pride the worst of the seven deadly sins. And we can all agree that the sin of pride is the source of politics and slavery. Pride--as understood by Dante and Aquinas and Catholic theology--is not the good feeling that follows upon performing skillfully or completing a task with excellence. That is satisfaction in a job well done and should not be confused with pride.
 
It is true that the study of diety by Greek interpreters of Judaism and Christianity—and others who were influenced by the philosophy of Plato and of Aristotle—have pasted lots of adjectives such as omniscient, omnipresent, and omnipotent to the concept of god, but none of these attributes is either necessary or warranted. They are the result of the perceived problems of perception and attempts to explain the idea of “change” and “stability,” which the pre-Socratic philosophers focused upon. These Greek philosophers, however, never focused on existence itself and its importance. That’s why their philosophical perceptions were so inadequate to address or grapple with the famous self-declaration of god in the Hebrew writings, namely in Exodus 3:14, where God defines himself by declaring “I am that I am.” That is a purely existential statement--an assertion that there is a kind of being whose existence is necessary. Another translation of "I am who am" or "I am that I am" would be the following: I am that which must exist. I am what is. I am existence itself. I am what must exist. In all of these, existence is the prime reality.
 
But we rarely hear of this existential aspect of Christianity and Judaism in discussions about god and atheism. Why? Because the “bar” of discussion is very low indeed. You have people who never studied theology actually arguing about it, which is why it is so disappointing and absurd. Even most Christians cannot discuss god in a way that is not designed to satisfy the herd, who wants adjectives attached to its golden calf. There are many Christian theologians who concur with me on this--from Augustine to Aquinas—but even they, too, muddy the waters in much of their writing. Nonetheless, it is possible to view Christianity in this existential light. That viewpoint also does away with the "how dare god condemn those who lived before Christ for not knowing Christ" argument. Why? Because it admits that god is NOT omnipotent or any of those other things that the Greeks imposed upon diety without so much as a “by your leave.” Perhaps this diety tried to rectify a great cosmic catastrophe in the only way possible for it--by subjecting itself to death to "get around" (or fulfill)  a blood contract or some similar universal law that demanded the punishment (equation-balancing) of an early existential transgression committed by mankind. And by paying this blood price on behalf of humankind, this diety can only redeem those who become aware of it afterward, not being capable of reversing the flow of space-time itself. It's not a perfect solution for all of our needs for wanting to believe in an all-powerful Oz, but it's a good best attempt by a diety that tries to pay a price out of an overwhelming sense of empathy and love. So you might say that my theory about this Christian god is a scandal because it makes him a bit of an under-archiever in comparison with that Greek straw man that possesses the three Os of omnipotence, omniscience, and omnipresence. But  it helps to keep the focus on existence and thus provide one answer to that eternal question: What was there before space-time existed? Nothing. In this perspective, an ex nihilo creation makes sense. And why is the universe here at all? That's an important question—one that atheists cannot address in the sense of causality—even though they use the concept all of the time anyway. Of course, we can accept Aristotle's theory that the universe is eternal, but the quest for causality is buried in all of us like hard-wiring. No?
 
Anyway, if you are interested in this heretical variant used to define god, I took an idea and twisted it away from a very Catholic source, Professor Etienne Gilson of the University of Toronto's Pontifical Institute for Mediaeval Studies in his book, "The Spirit of Medieval Phiolosophy." That word "mediaeval" is very important. Most philosophers--including Stefan Molyneux are woefully ill-prepared because they jump from Aristotle directly to Descartes. They, without fail, leave out the very important discoveries of the medieval Christian philosophers, who were the first, among other things, to disabuse the world of Plato's (and Aristotle's watered-down version) extreme idealist/realism fallacy--the source of the reification fallacy. The medieveal nominalists such as Roscellinus were the ones who rescued us by acknowledging concepts as mere puffs of air (flatus vocis). Fellows like Molyneux falsely claim that there is a vast gulf between Plato’s super-realism and a fictitious Aristotelian view that properly recognizes concepts as a human construct. Aristotle actually believed that the “universals” or “idea” was indwelling in an object and fused with the matter of that object. But these details are overlooked by the over-generalizers like Molyneux and his many co-atheists. Medieval philosophy is very complex and nuanced and difficult to understand, and that's why most who study classical philosophy and modern philosophy are never aware of their mistakes. They also know nothing of the difficult medieval Latin that is required for its study. So they don’t even have the rudiments of the language needed to study it. Surprise! Modern writers refer constantly to Occam’s Razor, but they have never read Occam. Such philosophers also do not understand the "history of philosophy" which is as important as the "history of science" as opposed to simply studying either "philosophy" or "science." The road to knowledge is littered with people who thought that they had arrived at the final truth for all time. But only the student of the history of philosophy and the history of science will acknowledge this.
 
I write this to you, Jim, because you are probably the most insightful writer on this page in addition to the wonderful Glen Allport--although I love Tzo, too, and many of the other fine writers here. There's a whole fascinating world of theology and heretical theology that beckon!
 
Best, as always,
Lawrence