Thinking About God At This Ungodly Hour

Here, in its entirety, is Rob's well constructed comment to my last, passionate post about God, Forgive Me This Trespass.

Hi Sougata..

I think you are looking for answers as to "why" in the wrong
place- Or perhaps in the right place, but nonetheless, answers are not forthcoming. At least answers that suit the questions posed.

Here's my take- For what it's worth.
1) You are entitled to any belief or lack thereof- you wish, provided no harm is done in the name of said beiefs. Many "believers" fail that one right away.
2) I meet very few old atheists. That's not to say that there's no fool like an old fool, but as time passes and mortality approaches, many at least concede the possibility.

In my particular case, I am more concerned with the "how" as opposed to the "why". Let me explain further..

I need not pursue avenues of futility, raging at demons of poverty, disease, injustice and so on. To do something about those things? That's I am here for. I can do something, and if I am being used by a power greater than myself, or simply driven by a sense of injustice, what's the difference?

I simply allow for the possiblity that there is a power greater than I- and I am not that power.

What follows below is a discussion, in good faith (har!), of some of the points that Rob raised. Rob's comments are in blue italics.

1) You are entitled to any belief or lack thereof- you wish, provided no harm is done in the name of said beliefs. Many "believers" fail that one right away.

You are absolutely right. No argument there. And yes, most believers fail that above test right away.

2) I meet very few old atheists. That's not to say that there's no fool like an old fool, but as time passes and mortality approaches, many at least concede the possibility.

That is a good and astute observation. And I strongly suspect that you are right. But if you are, then that is a little depressing. Because it implies that our inclination to accept the divine is directly proportional to our sense of insecurity. Not a cheery thought.

Just like a co-dependent spouse clings on to an abusive dead-end relationship not out of love, but from insecurity, this implies that some of us will only get religion when we're upended over a barrel and overtaken by life. I recognize the truth of what you say, but it disturbs me nevertheless.

I need not pursue avenues of futility, raging at demons of poverty, disease, injustice ...

I myself do not rage at poverty. Most poverty is an economic problem and we are responsible for it. Sometimes it is a production problem, sometimes it is an allocation problem (such as in India, where we are agriculturally self-sufficient, yet over half of us are malnourished).

But disease I am not so sure about. Because disease implies that somehow "Creation" is imperfect, at its source. Which is in direct contradiction to the position that most theists take. And I will not accept that we humans are somehow responsible for the existence of disease. I don't remember the last time that I "made" cancer.

... if I am being used by a power greater than myself, or simply driven by a sense of injustice, what's the difference?

There is no difference.

It is just that I would be a whole lot more comfortable if people most of the time were driven by a sense of injustice than they were driven by a belief system. The motivation that comes from belief is also used to justify wholesale murder and plunder of those whose belief systems don't happen to match that of ours. The motivation that comes from a sense of injustice is much less susceptible to that, for the simple reason that the concept of justice is widely uniform across cultures, but beliefs differ wildly.

To press the point, most cultures don't consider it terribly good form to go out and wantonly murder fellow citizens, or steal from fellow citizens. These are widely frowned upon as unjust things to do, following the common-sense principle of reciprocity. If you endorse murder and plunder in a society, there is a chance that you will suffer too.

On the other hand, some belief systems that we shall not name expressly call on their their followers to go out and murder and plunder deviants from the faith, or at best, spare no effort to convert them. Indeed, their very Holy Books codify this in no uncertain terms.

I simply allow for the possiblity that there is a power greater than I- and I am not that power.

I heartily acknowledge that there are many powers that are greater than I. A twister is a greater power than I. George W. Bush is a power greater than I. Saddam Hussein would have been a power greater than I if I had been a citizen of Iraq in the year 2000. And yes, let us, for the sake of argument, say that somebody named "God" is a power greater than I.

So far so good. What I don't understand is this.

Why do we then proceed to assign qualities to this God dude: like All-Loving, All-Powerful, All-Knowing?

How do we know this? Certainly not from his handiwork. If we assume the conventionally accepted notion of him as being the Absolute Unquestioned Lord of All Creation, clearly he is not All-Loving. He routinely handicaps a not statistically insignificant number of his underlings for no apparent reason. Some are mysteriously earmarked for less lovin' than others.

Also, interestingly, he distinctly shows a marked preference for a subset of his creation over others. To wit, he seems to have a particular fondness for humans as compared to the rest of animalkind as is evident from the different endowments. Clearly not All-Loving. All-human-loving is closer to the mark.

One can argue that it is not malice that drives him to fuck up the lives of some of his brood. But then one must reach an even more disturbing conclusion. Which is that he is not insanely bright at what he does and is just as imperfect as the rest of us; it's just that the job is bigger. And his QA methods suck ass, given the criticality of the process (that of creating sentient beings). So not All-Knowing either. Or All-Powerful for that matter.

That by the way, is the danger of perfection tags and absolute certainties. I don't have to find numerous screw-ups to disprove the tag. It is enough to find just one counter-example to prove imperfection. And the house of cards comes tumbling down.

Is that a fair analysis on my part?


Hasty Footnote:

 
I don't discourage theism by stepping hard on other people's beliefs. In fact, if I had a dollar for the number of times I have been targeted for sermons versus the reverse, I would today be many dollars richer and thus be able to avoid cafeteria food more often.

But theism should not be an exercise in specious rationalization. It should be a scientifically undertaken search for a broader, if not necessarily higher, organizing principle. Which, if and when we find it, may or may not square with the conventional and broadly accepted notion of an All-Loving, All-Knowing, Uppity God. As far as I can tell, the only theistic school of thought that even half-heartedly attempts to do this is Hinduism and Buddhism, once you cut through all the superstitious deadwood. Most of the rest appear to be quite smug with their certainties, thank you very much.

Additionally, and this is important, the fact should be kept in mind that we may not like what we find as a result of our search. We may find, instead of a Loving, Knowing, Powerful, Benevolent God, a Cruel, Base, Naked, Elemental Force. Something more like Gravity, perhaps, than a man with a white flowing beard. Is a theist willing to accept those findings?