[this is a repost from my personal blog explanationing.wordpress.com. Look there for posts explaining my priors.] Our conscious experience of the world is tuned to the level of detail that our mind deems most important to our continued survival. We experience shapes, colour, depth, size, velocity, et cetera. Anything that...
[this is a repost from my personal blog explanationing.wordpress.com. Look there for posts explaining my priors.] I’ve been playing with belief in God since I was a child. During my adolescent years, when I started really digging the catchphrases of pseudo-rational-types like Terry Goodkind, I became a staunch atheist. It...
[this is a repost from my personal blog explanationing.wordpress.com. Look there for posts explaining my priors.]
Our conscious experience of the world is tuned to the level of detail that our mind deems most important to our continued survival. We experience shapes, colour, depth, size, velocity, et cetera. Anything that would be useful in tracking a deer, climbing a tree, spotting a mountain lion. This world of solid objects, heat, light, and sound, is eminently comprehensible.
However, we know that it is only part of the picture.
Our experience of a body of water changes profoundly when we analyze it at the level of fluid dynamics, or molecules, or quarks. The same... (read 677 more words →)
I agree entirely. What I am arguing is that gods can be a part of "skills, qualities, attitudes, and habits necessary to handle the truth in a sane and healthy manner."
They don't require belief in any untruths, merely interpretation of the truth into a euphorically beautiful form. No where in my post do I advise believing anything untrue, and nowhere do I advise deliberately ignoring true things.
I agree that it's important to be conservative when talking about gods. I would never tell anyone that God is a real person who exists within physical substrate (except in my own brain-meat).
But, I also think that "fiction," while technically accurate, fails to capture the way in which I use God. While a "set" of anything is technically a fiction (in that it doesn't exist in the physical substrate), set theory can be a powerful tool. If you were to dismiss any given set as a fiction without first appreciating the details of its use, you would be losing important details.
E: I'm not familiar with Unitarian Universalists. What's their credo?
I agree that God (in the sense I use it) is often polluting of rationality, but that's only because it's so often accompanied with specious metaphysical claims. I don't pray, except in the sense that I meditate on the shape of God.
"A pleasant fiction that makes you feel nice every time you talk about it" captures some of what I mean by God. These systems of symbols are "fictional" in that they don't exist within consciousness and not the external world. However, "pleasant" is underselling it. Having encountered life long spiritual people of all walks of life, I believe that the transformative love, compassion, and openness made possible by building a relationship
[this is a repost from my personal blog explanationing.wordpress.com. Look there for posts explaining my priors.]
I’ve been playing with belief in God since I was a child.
During my adolescent years, when I started really digging the catchphrases of pseudo-rational-types like Terry Goodkind, I became a staunch atheist. It wasn’t until after my last grandparent died and I really came face-to-face with the living faith of my family that I suspected there might something more to belief in God than had previously met my horny-for-evidence hormone-blinded eye.
So, in order to make sense of this glimmer of an intuition that there’s something to faith, I joined a Bible study in my first year... (read 616 more words →)