on discussing god and religion

Yes, this approach to determinism “works” for you. Somehow in your head there’s this “compatible” reconciliation between the immutably laws of matter and a conscious human mind choosing one behavior rather than another.

And, sure, sometimes I’m able stuff my own frame of mind into that too.

Just not all the time.

Think about dreams, for example. I don’t know about yours, but in mine, I am choosing what to do and how to react to others. It all seems so fucking real “at the time”. In the dream. However distorted or improbable “my” behaviors unfold.

Really, how do you go about measuring how real things seem to be in the dream compared to our waking hours?

In other words, to what extent are the behaviors I choose upon waking really my own: Wholly, freely, autonomously?

Either this exchange is unfolding in accordance with folks able to freely choose these particular words, rather than those, or whatever the words turn out to be were only the words that could ever have been chosen. If mind is itself wholly embedded in the immutable laws of matter.

And then on a religious thread there’s the part about reconciling the autonomy of mere mortals with an alleged omniscient God.

I said changed, you are adding in choosing. Neither the billiard ball nor the human have control. But unlike a billiard ball a human can, as you have, changed when information impacts his or her mind. You made it seems like it would not. My pointing out the consequences of believing in determinism could not change your mind, according to you, but in fact they can.

This is strawman stuff here. I never said those things. The fact that you think these are precluded by determinism, which is compatible with my sense of determinism, means, for example that your confidence in the is/ought divide - we can know one but not the other - is undermined completely. And also the use of ‘wholly’ is confused. It is as if one could choose partially.

The latter, yes.

i am sure the contradictions of certain theists is a welcome distraction from your own epistemological and moral contradictions.

You are not responding to my very concrete, moral question. Here i am asking a specific person about a specific act. This is not abstract, it is not about epistemology, I am asking

since you do not know what is good or evil or bad or right, by your own admission

why would you pull someone down into your hole, a process that you seem to think makes them suffer?

This is a more concrete and real situation than all the abstract discussions and proofs you demand, for exampel around abortion in general. None of us pregant or aborting and not universal case. All along I respond to you and what you are doing in the world, sometimes in terms of epistemology, sometimes in terms of social interaction. This is concrete and grounded and nowhere near as abstract as how you want to discuss the issues.

Again, a concrete moral situation in which you have concrete effects, by your estimation, in the world…

Why do you do things that you seem to think trigger fear in people,
yanking them down into your hole,
when have no way to know if this makes the world better or worse?

and let’s remember: your philosophy does not simply entail that you cannot be certain about what is good, it entails that you cannot know at all. The statement ‘I think X leads to a better society, but I might be wrong’ goes against your philosophy. It should read ‘It appears to me that X leads to a better society, but I have no way of knowing and cannot even estimate a percentage chance what appears to me to be true is true.’

And now that you have been told that, we will see how this information impacts your determined course. Some humans are more like billiard balls, only physical interactions can change their course, information generally fails. I make no assumptions about this collision.

I always acknowledge here that points such as this [raised in regards to determinism] may well be correct. That, in fact, the problem revolves more around my being unable to grasp these points correctly.

That, once I do, I will change my mind.

But…

If this is unfolding in a world in which the immutable laws of matter propel/compel all material interactions only as they ever could/would unfold then, for all practical purposes [on or off the billiard table], the changes are “beyond my control” given the manner in which free-will advocates speak of human autonomy.

If chemical and neurological interations in my brain propel/compel these changes then all of the new information I receive would seem to be just so many more dominoes toppling over only as they ever could have.

The change is made and I’m convinced I made it of my own free will. But that is only an illusion. Just as in the dreams I have, I’m absolutely convinced “in the moment” that I am calling the shots.

Last night for example I dreamed I was back in the company I was employed at for 27 years. I was interacting with my old boss in very familiar surroundings. And if it ever became possible to film this dream, you would have seen me absolutely convinced that I was calling the shots then and there too.

But then I woke up.

As for my own “epistemological and moral contradictions”, if we do interact in a determined universe what does that really mean as it relates to the arguments I make here?

I make them. Period. I was never, ever going to make any other arguments. They just weren’t “fated” to be.

But:

That still leaves the profound mystery emdedded in 1] why this something exists and not nothing at all and 2] why this something exists and not another something.

What propels/compels one set of material laws rather than another?

And who on earth among us here and now can rationally, logically, deontologically, epistemologically, ontologically, teleologically, etc. etc. etc., pin that down for us?

And then, on this thread, some will argue it is all subsumed in one or another God.

And that’s where I come in with my own queries here.

My point however is this: that the answers mere mortals give when asked very concrete moral questions revolve around the manner in which I constue the meaning of dasein, conflicting goods and political economy. As that pertains existentially to actual conflicted behaviors that most here are likely to be familiar with.

And, in acknowledging that my own narrative is in turn merely an existential contraption, I am clearly suggesting that, while I might yank others down into the hole I am in, they may well succeed in yanking me up out of it.

First, though, they need to describe for me contexts in which they are convinced that they are not down in it already.

Thus, with regard to an issue like abortion, I root the evolution of my own value judgments in the manner in which I construe the meaning of “I” here:

1] I was raised in the belly of the working class beast. My family/community were very conservative. Abortion was a sin.
2] I was drafted into the Army and while on my “tour of duty” in Vietnam I happened upon politically radical folks who reconfigured my thinking about abortion. And God and lots of other things.
3] after I left the Army, I enrolled in college and became further involved in left wing politics. It was all the rage back then. I became a feminist. I married a feminist. I wholeheartedly embraced a woman’s right to choose.
4] then came the calamity with Mary and John. I loved them both but their engagement was foundering on the rocks that was Mary’s choice to abort their unborn baby.
5] back and forth we all went. I supported Mary but I could understand the points that John was making. I could understand the arguments being made on both sides. John was right from his side and Mary was right from hers.
6] I read William Barrett’s Irrational Man and came upon his conjectures regarding “rival goods”.
7] Then, over time, I abandoned an objectivist frame of mind that revolved around Marxism/feminism. Instead, I became more and more embedded in existentialism. And then as more years passed I became an advocate for moral nihilism.

In other words, as an existential contraption rooted in a particular sequence of actual experiences.

Then it becomes a matter of forging a philosophical argument in reaction to that. An argument that is able to transcend it such that a moral narrative can be derived able to be demonstrated as applicable to all rational [and virtuous] men and women when confronted with their own unwanted pregnancy.

From my frame of mind, it’s not a question of whether “the hole” here makes the world better or worse, but whether [in the is/ought world] it is reasonable to believe that it exists.

But my philosophy here is no less an existential contraption. I start with the assumption that it is rooted in the components that are embedded in my own rendition of moral nihilism, in my own rendition of a No God world.

So, sure, there certainly may well be a way in which to know necessarily what is a good or bad, a right or a wrong behavior.

I simply ask those who embrace this to demonstrate why all rational men and women are obligated to share their own moral narrative and their own political agenda.

If you were never not going to provide me with this new information and I was never not going to react to it as I do, well, what exactly does that tell us about this exchange?

“Dualism” applies here such that the conscious human brain is either able to embody these change in whatever manner one construes the meaning of “autonomous”, or dualism itself is just another illusion embedded in the only way that anything can ever interact with anything else.

Period.

Unless of course there is a God who created all of this in such a way that no mere mortal will ever by privy to how or why He did it.

I asked you a concrete question about your behavior in the context of your beliefs and you did not answer it.
The closest you come is to say

So it does not matter whether your actions make the world a better place or not, and even though you think, as you have said elsewhere, your arguments trigger other people’s fears (iow make them suffer), all that matters to you is whether you get an answer to your question.

The rest you have said hundreds of times and frankly just seems like squid ink to distract from your not answering the question.

Please restate this concrete question.

Now, if someone were to ask me about the evolution of my value judgments/behaviors relating to abortion over the years, this would be my concrete answer:

1] I was raised in the belly of the working class beast. My family/community were very conservative. Abortion was a sin.
2] I was drafted into the Army and while on my “tour of duty” in Vietnam I happened upon politically radical folks who reconfigured my thinking about abortion. And God and lots of other things.
3] after I left the Army, I enrolled in college and became further involved in left wing politics. It was all the rage back then. I became a feminist. I married a feminist. I wholeheartedly embraced a woman’s right to choose.
4] then came the calamity with Mary and John. I loved them both but their engagement was foundering on the rocks that was Mary’s choice to abort their unborn baby.
5] back and forth we all went. I supported Mary but I could understand the points that John was making. I could understand the arguments being made on both sides. John was right from his side and Mary was right from hers.
6] I read William Barrett’s Irrational Man and came upon his conjectures regarding “rival goods”.
7] Then, over time, I abandoned an objectivist frame of mind that revolved around Marxism/feminism. Instead, I became more and more embedded in existentialism. And then as more years passed I became an advocate for moral nihilism.

What would your concrete answer be? And if not relating to abortion, another set of well-known conflicting goods.

If I am of the opinion [embedded here and now in a particular existential contraption embedded in my own subjective take on moral nihilism] that descriptions of a world said to be better or worse are rooted intersubjectively/intersubjunctively in dasein, conflicting goods and political economy [out in a particular world], then others will react to that depending on the extent to which they share that opinion.

If they are of the opinion that, on the contrary, an objective morality is within reach [re God or political ideology or deontology or descriptions of “natural behavior”] then they fear nothing of what I suggest.

Then it comes down to the extent to which we are able to demonstrate that all rational men and women are obligated to embrace either moral nihilism or objective – universal? – morality.

But I am the first to admit that my own frame of mind is not something that I can demonstrate in such a manner. I am not at all certain of it. If for no other reason then the fact that I recognize the gap between what I think here and now and all that would need to be known about Existence itself in order to be certain.

I asked a pretty damn clear question. I then phrased it statement form in the previous post. In neither response do you make an effort to interact with what I wrote, but do manage to be reminded or triggered by what I wrote to repeat things you have repeated endlessly. What you said made me think of something i like to say. I do understand that things need clarification, often. But when no effort is made and my posts are simply used as excuses to repeat yourself, it is just rude. I can only hope I really do stay away from you.

Look, you will either repeat the question clearly again and elaborate on the manner in which I did not “interact with it” or you won’t. And the fact that above and on other threads you do not even respond to many of the points I raise may be less rudeness than the realization that you really don’t have an effective argument.

Let’s focus just on this point for now:

[b]Now, if someone were to ask me about the evolution of my own value judgments/behaviors relating to abortion over the years, this would be my concrete answer:

1] I was raised in the belly of the working class beast. My family/community were very conservative. Abortion was a sin.
2] I was drafted into the Army and while on my “tour of duty” in Vietnam I happened upon politically radical folks who reconfigured my thinking about abortion. And God and lots of other things.
3] after I left the Army, I enrolled in college and became further involved in left wing politics. It was all the rage back then. I became a feminist. I married a feminist. I wholeheartedly embraced a woman’s right to choose.
4] then came the calamity with Mary and John. I loved them both but their engagement was foundering on the rocks that was Mary’s choice to abort their unborn baby.
5] back and forth we all went. I supported Mary but I could understand the points that John was making. I could understand the arguments being made on both sides. John was right from his side and Mary was right from hers.
6] I read William Barrett’s Irrational Man and came upon his conjectures regarding “rival goods”.
7] Then, over time, I abandoned an objectivist frame of mind that revolved around Marxism/feminism. Instead, I became more and more embedded in existentialism. And then as more years passed I became an advocate for moral nihilism.

What would [u]your[/u] concrete answer be? And if not relating to abortion, another set of well-known conflicting goods.[/b]

I’m just trying to grasp the extent to which you are yourself an objectivist. In the manner in which I construe the meaning of that from above.

Also, the aim of this thread is to connect the dots between your moral narrative on this side of the grave and your imagined fate on the other side of it — as that relates to your God/religion narrative.

Go ahead, give it a shot.

Someone can assert something of this magnitude without ever once 1] demonstrating the existence of these gods 2] describing that which constitutes stupid shit or 3] noting how, in being like the gods, this is actually manifested in their day to day interactions with others out in a particular world.

In other words, it is just something that they believe in their heads because in believing it, it brings about a mental and emotional and psychological “sense of reality” that allows them to feel in touch with something analogous to a true identity anchored in a true understanding of themselves in the world around them.

Again and again: it’s not what they believe that counts, but that they believe it.

Nothing is actually able to be pinned down empirically but the human “I” is still capable of believing all manner of such fantastic “truths” about the “meaning of life”.

And that’s the beauty of it. You can believe practically anything. And it only has to be true for you.

On the other hand, so are any number of secular narratives that make an attempt to reduce the complexity of human interactions down to one or another scripted dogma.

Maybe God is not up there to provide us with the one and only sanctioned set of commandments, but any number folks down here are eager to provide you with the next best thing: the “natural” way in which to live. Or the “idealistic” way in which to live. Or the “rational” way in which to live. Or the “enlightened” way in which to live.

Now, tell me all of these hopelessly conflicting and contradictory agendas don’t have their origins historically in one or another psychological rendition of this: viewtopic.php?f=15&t=185296

And how then are all of the secular facsimiles not meant to enable mere mortals to embody in turn much the same comforting and consoling foundations for “I”?

I am this or I am that. But make no mistake about it, I am that which makes me “one of us”.

What is this but yet another stubborn attempt to imagine that we can come up with words, put them in a particular order, and communicate them to others so as to suggest [or even demand] that they too ought to use the same words put in the same order in turn.

Or is this just the self-delusion that in terms of God and religion there really are a set of words able to be set up in the right order such that they really do capture Jesus and love and ideology and self and good.

Of course the even more stubborn reality seems to revolve around the particularly stubborn fact that there are very, very different meanings ascribed to these words by men and women who have lived very, very different lives in very, very different times and places.

But then for some is the belief that philosophy was invented and/or discovered precisely in order to lead rational men and women to the one true rendering of such words.

If and when the philosophers themselves can ever come to agree on the most precise meaning of the words placed in the most precise sequence.

On the other hand, what do all of these things seem to share in common?

This: that to each and every unique, individual human being there will be a unique, individual understanding of what a “transcending concept of enlightenment” means.

On the other other hand, given particular historical, cultural and actual lived contexts there will inevitably be considerable overlap such that communication regarding this does not appear to be just gibberish to others in your own particuar community.

And since throughout history and across all cultures there is clearly a capacity to experience what is construed to be an enlightened frame of mind, there would appear to be a biological component in turn.

Thus, we all come into the world hard-wired congenitally to make sense of the idea of enlightenment, to experience the feeling of being enlightened.

Instead, the part that gets considerably more problematic is when, in the course of interacting with each other from day to day, our behaviors come into conflict regarding just what exactly it means to choose wisely when our own enlightened self is not in sync with another’s enlightened self.

For example, ask the folks in Gaza and Israel if they do not in fact embody an enlightened frame of mind regarding the behaviors that they choose.

So much for that “transcending concept of enlightenment”. Let alone a practical agenda in which behaviors in conflict might come in sync around an optimal political narrative.

It’s always easy to discuss “enlightenment” in one or another general description of human interactions. But what the idealists tend to steer clear of here is in probing why those general descriptions always seem to fall apart when it comes down to actively legislating one or another set of behaviors designated as either prescribed or proscribed.

Here struggling to sustain conflicting renditions of “the best of all possible worlds” may well be as enlightened as the human species can get.

Whatever the particular path chosen to God or to spirituality or to enlightenment, the religious narrative will invariably get around to the “true self”.

And, sure, to the extent one is able to believe that, if your peel away all the historical, cultural, and experiential layers, there is a “real me”, a “core me” that reflects [necessarily] the foundation needed [psychologically] to embody a greater certainty in one’s interactions with others, it’s a wonderful thing to have.

A soothing frame of mind.

But with respect to tumultuous human interactions as we know them to be, what does it really mean to be more in touch with the “animal” in us? To be more in sync with the limbic brain?

Doesn’t it really just come down to everyone either agreeing or disagreeing [in any one particular context] as to what it is more “natural” to do?

How do folks in sync with the “real me” in sync with the “animal” in them deal with others who insist that they too are in sync with the “real me” in sync with the “animal” in them when their moral values come into conflict?

Yeah, I can imagine a community of Buddhists living together, all sharing the same set of values. They get along just fine. They simply agree to embody a particular set of behaviors. Right makes might.

But as soon as they take their argument out into a world in which there are either 1] countless other paths to enlightenments, or 2] countless nihilistic agendas, they become just one more voice in the crowd.

If Buddhism works for someone more power to them. My only reservation revolves around the extent to which some might try to argue that their path [and only their path] is the one true road to enlightenment.

Especially when they get around to indoctrinating children to follow that same path.

I say defend it with the next generation if that is your wont. But always encourage them in turn to consider alternatives.

Edit:

Consider this practice among particular Amish communities: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rumspringa

Now, I’m not really at all familiar with how this works “in reality”, but it is certainly going in the right direction in regards to children. You show them your way and you defend it. But you let them challenge it…even to the point of going out into the world and seeing how others choose to live.

Then they make a more informed decision regarding which direction they want to go.

Eexcept these youths go out and go from very clear guidelines and very low stimuli to highly manipulative environments of which they have no experience, no knowledge of how to manage drugs, alcohol, sex - set boundaries, see warning signs of abusers, have social circles that know how to see warning signs of problems, parents to give emotional feedback to the crises that arise and so on. I do not think the Amish elders are rubbing their hands in Machievellian glee, but the truth is most of the youths come back precisely because it is not a realistic way to experience new things. It is tossing them in the deep end when they have never waded. They do this without the support of elders. Throw your kid in the ocean without ever giving them swimming lessons and that kid will stand a good chance of developing a phobia.

I see it as a very clever way to make it seem like the Anglish have a sick culture. Which they do. All cultures are sick or perhaps better put dangerous. And you are damn well going to feel sick and aweful in most cases if you have no orientation, no guidance, total freedom with things you have never experienced before, and vultures and parasites in that other cultures well aware of your naivte, lack of boundaries, etc.

To send you girls out like that is basically setting them for a very high liklihood of date rape or worse. The boys also run a set of serious risks. Of course most come crawling back into mommy and daddy’s arms and think that other culture is fucking nuts.

It’s a fake test.

Still, the narrative there is not all that far removed from the narrative here:
viewtopic.php?f=24&t=179469&p=2333208&hilit=witness#p2333208

That any children John Book might bring into the world will have a better chance at either surviving or even flourishing in the modern world, doesn’t change the part about the psychological foundations built right into objectivist religious dogmas.

His children will quite clearly be better acclimated to the postmodern mishmash of hopelessly conflicting narratives. But they still pay the price of living in a world that they construe [if they are a chip off Book’s cynical block] to be essentially meaningless. And one that ends for all of eternity in oblivion.

The conflict here is still between the comfort and the consolation rooted in religion [on either side of the grave] and the many more options – the “freedom” – available to those who reject religion.

Still, the Amish are no more able to actually demonstrate the existence of their God than the atheists are able to demonstrate that we live in a No God World.

But: How would the choice that any one particular individual might make here [child or adult] not be profoundly embodied in the manner in which I construe the meaning of dasein?

OK. Let’s look at the context. You make a value judgment, see your post above that I quote in my previous post, that the Amish are going in the right direction with rumspringa. (see there you are, making value judgments like all the objectivists, but that’s not a problem with you as a dialogue partner, which is what I want to focus on). I point out the serious problems with what you consider ‘the right direction’. It’s is not a real allowing of freedom or exploring, it is in fact careless parenting, putting your children in harm’s way and precisely not a process that allows exploration in a way most children can integrate. It does not allow an integratable experience of another way of living. Each culture includes mechanisms that protect people - to varying degrees - from the excesses or dangers of that culture. With NONE of these the dangers have no checks and balances. It’s a rigged test. A fake test. Not an exploration of what it is to live in another culture. But in fact a process almost guaranteeing a return or at least a dangerous, likely in many ways unpleasant experience.

Instead of dealing with your value judgment in the context of my counterarguments that it might not be a right direction - Good, positive, moral, ethical - you shift to your criticism of objectivist postions, here religious ones.

You finish with:

[/quote]

[/quote]
Note how we return to binary.

You make an value judgment evaluation of a process - rumspringa - that it is in the right direction. IOW not best practice, not without problems, but better than not doing this perhaps. Somewhere on a scale of good/bad as evaluated by you.

This meets my argument - well done or not - that this is actually not a good or even better process, but one designed to lead to failure and unpleasance.

You do not even acknowledge this questioning of your value judgment - iow you do not respond to my post - but simply drop back again into your binary value judgment - which includes that you have no way to evaluate, though you just did - and go on to talk about your issues, in part of the ad naseum - to use an adverb as a noun, which your approach has earned.

This is not a unique pattern on your part. It comes off as ‘you have a value judgment of objectivists’. That because they are objectivists they are less likely to follow moderation, compromise, etc., which is the most morally acceptable position, given the problems of knowing what is objectively moral. You saw the Amish as, with Rumspringa, to that extant and on that issue, have a more moderate, exploratory option for their children. That is one that fits with what you consider the Good approach to human relations.

Now of course you do not couch this whole agenda with the moral judgments openly placed. They are implicit. But who cares about the hypocrisy implicit. Seriously, who cares.

The problem is the solipsism.

Again and again and again: If we choose to interact with others – either online or offline – we can expect others to react to our own reaction to human behaviors. My point is that my basically positive reaction to this Amish practice is rooted in dasein. Just as your basically negative reaction to my reaction is in turn.

In other words, where are the theologians or the philosophers or the ethicists able to demonstrate that this practice either is or is not in fact the “right thing to do”?

Instead, as with other “conflicting goods”, we have reasonable arguments that can be made from both sides, arguments that are able to be deflected in some respects, but not made to go away entirely.

That is always my point here.

The objectivists among us are those who [in my view] insist that their value judgments reflect the optimal or the only rational [virtuous] point of view. And they predicate this assumption on God or reason or deontology or political ideology or on one or another rendition of what it is “natural” to do.

And this thread was created in order to explore with zinnat13 the manner in which religious folks might connect the dots between what they construe to be moral behavior on this side of the grave and what they construe to be their fate on the other side.

Also, for those who are not religious, the manner in which they configure “I” in their head in those contexts in which they must choose particular behaviors deemed by them “here and now” to be the “right thing to do”.

How exactly does that work for them when they are entangled with others in one or another moral or political confrontation? How are they not in the hole that “I” am in then?

Sure, for all practical purposes, I agree with this. But that doesn’t mean that the test can’t be reconfigured to minimize these objections.

We are still back to the point being made in Witness: that religious societies [in sync with God] embody human interactions that instill considerable comfort and consolation in mere mortals both on this side and the other side of the grave.

In Book’s world that is basically missing. But out there he is afforded considerably more options from which to choose. He is “freer”. Unless, of course, the No God folks concoct one or another political dogma, deontological intellectual contraption or assessment of Nature in which it is argued that in order to be deemed “one of us” others must toe the line.

Rachel: He’s leaving, isn’t he?
Eli: Tomorrow morning. He’ll need his city clothes.
Rachel: But why? What does he have to go back to?
Eli: He’s going back to his world, where he belongs. He knows it, and you know it, too.

How on earth would this exchange not be embodied in dasein?

Or has Eli actually pinned down the Whole Truth here?

My point is only to suggest that our reaction to the film and to Rumspringa are basically the same: existential contraptions. There are facts “in reality” here that we can both agree on as the objective truth. Out in the either/or world. But in shifting gears to our assessments of the facts in the is/ought world, objectivity often gives way to the subjective and the subjunctive.

Until you are able to grapple more effectively with the gap between my assessment of my own value judgments – as existential contraptions rooted in dasein – and your assessment of that – as just another rendition of objectivism – we are not likely to make much headway.

On the other hand, given the complexity of human psychology in all of this, that really doesn’t surprise me. Here “I” is only more or less understood and/or controlled.

Or, sure, until I am able to grapple more effectively with your point here.

From my frame of mind, a “binary” argument here would revolve around value judgments as either wholly embodied in dasein or as wholly embodied philosophically in the epistemological truth. Whereas I have come to see it as a profoundly complex and problematic intertwining of “I” and “we” and “them”. Out in particular historical and cultural and experiential contexts. Entwined in both nature and nurture, genes and memes.

And ever evolving existentially in a world bursting at the seams with contingency, chance and change.

And then going all the way back to the explanation for 1] why anything exist at all and 2] why this existence and not another.

This is clearly a relationship that revolves around a sophisticated technical knowledge of human language. How it evolved genetically as a component of the evolution of life on earth and how, given the evolution of culture over the millenia, it evolved memetically to encompass any number of historical contexts.

But I would imagine a factor just as significant is the advent of science.

After all, before science enabled us to understand nature with the level of sophistication we take for granted today, any number of human communities attributed the forces of nature to “the Gods”. Gods connected to the Sun and the Moon and the Earth. Gods interwined in the flora and the fauna around which human interactions became so crucial. Gods embedded in the stars and in extraterrestrial phenomena like solar and lunar eclipes, comets and asteroids.

Then one by one these events were explained as “natural phenomena” rooted in the “laws of nature”.

But all the science in the world doesn’t explain why anything exists at all, or what happens after we die, or how we ought to live our lives from the cradle to the grave.

Instead, that seems to revolve around the fact that our brains have evolved to a point where we can even raise questions like these.

And here a God, the God, our God fits the bill like nothing else.

And the icing on the cake of course is this: that to the extent we can think ourselves into believing in the God, the psychological and emotional components of our lives have something really, really soothing to fall back on.

In other words, whether God does or does not exist, He is almost certainly something that is going to be invented over and over and over again.

And all the more so in a postmodern world where the “meaning of life” has been deconstructed into any number of mere “lifestyles”

In this sense religion is not all that different from any number of secular dogmas that most here are familiar with. It seeks to impose order on that which can only really be tamed by “thinking” oneself into a frame of mind that allows you to fall back on some overarching truth behind human interactions. Even the subjunctive “I” is made to do its bidding.

Sure, you feel powerful emotional and psychological reactions to the world around you; you are “driven” viscerally, sexually, primordially etc., by components of the brain that are ever in sync with the evolution of life itself.

But it is still all rooted in actual cognitive functions in actual individuals interacting with others in actual contexts. Thus both the controlling and the judging are no less existential contraptions.

It still always comes down to the specific behaviors that one is intent on controlling and judging.

And then the subjective/subjunctive reactions of those being controlled and/or judged.

In a No God world my own frame of mind here seems to be a reasonable assessment of “the human condition”.