*"Believe in Aliens Instead of God? "*

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Beginning to see why the protestants repeat all over the place the phrase " a personal god". Nobodys is the same. The monster you describe so well growing up from religious belief, jonk, is what happens when people put them together, or think they are the same. Want them to be the same. hmm.

( Sorry, know this isn't on topic re aliens, but then i no longer think belief in aliens could/would replace religious belief except in most paranoid way, explaining odd happenings, rather than as a simple if inspiring possible existence far away, etc).

I also don't think belief in aliens would "cut it." Probably for different reasons than I see you hinting towards, though. Religious beliefs help set aside (or solve or aid in avoiding facing squarely) many issues. A fear of "not being, at all" once one is dead, for example, is a problem to most. The idea of an afterlife or reincarnation, for example, are two possible "solutions" that give some comfort. A desire for clear guidance, something concrete and positive, about "right living" is another problem. The concept that religion provides a source of absolute morality solves this for some. Something to prove one's own significance (by this, I mean that one's life is somehow meaningful beyond the mere scope of just living it) is another problem and a "personal god" or a "caring god" who has a "purpose for us" can solve this for some, as well. Or just finding some reason for all the suffering and struggles -- something to make that worth continuing to work at instead of just giving up, yet another problem. (In fact, that one is fundamental to natural selection in evolutionary terms, because those who are able to find a reason to struggle through suffering and pain, despite them, are more likely to have improved chances of continuing their DNA through their children who survive.) Again, religious beliefs can be a help. Another problem is just finding "community" in some fashion -- a sense of belonging and through that belonging, also to help feed that need to be "important," as well. Which is another problem -- being important and significant -- a problem where a "personal god" certainly helps soothe. Aliens aren't going to do much for any of that, except perhaps in finding community with others who believe the same way, perhaps. And that isn't enough to survive across place, time, and culture. It's too ephemeral and faint.

Jon

While I agree with the last sentence, broadly, I don't think that answers your first sentence. Protestants (I'm thinking about Luther, in particular, here) was more about politics and power. Don't you recall the history leading up to Luther's 95 theses? The sale of indulgences, the buying and selling of church positions, systemic corruption, repeated interferences in internal and local politics by the Church, intrigues, Church funded military incursions, and of course the invention of movable type which made possible the protestant reaction to central authority by publishing the bible and various tracts and getting them into everyone's hands instead of just those of a few who used their feigned authority for their own benefits?

The idea of a "personal god" used by protestants wasn't so much a disagreement with the Catholics -- both groups felt that god acted in our personal lives. The idea was a reaction and a jab at the central authority of the Catholic Church, the Papacy, with the claim that no one needs to cede their authority to some Pope in Rome and that they can, themselves, read the bible and listen to god speaking to them directly by whatever means to "know the truth." This was a reaction, first and foremost, to Catholic authority. In many ways, though at a very different time and place, as Bhuddism was also most essentially a reaction to Hinduism's suffocating caste system.

A personal god, as the term was and is meant in Protestantism, isn't about the idea that god to each of us is different -- in fact, I almost cannot imagine any authority figure in any of the diaspora-like tribal forms of Protestantism accepting that kind of idea. They'd rail against embracing the idea that god to each of us is different.

It's about wresting power from the Pope, selling it to the peons like you and me on the grounds that we can ourselves speak to god and find out for ourselves, but of course really just grabbing the power away from both the Pope and us and instead again centralizing the control by providing us with people they claim are the only ones who really know what the bible says and that we let them lead us, as well. Different masters. That's all. But shined up and polished to sell folks away from Catholicism.

Jon

I agree with your picture of the worst excesses of the organised religions, and very much with your suggestion that it is the organising of individual beliefs into one body which cause the biggest problems, but I think you are being unecessarily, even unkindly, dismissive of religious faith/belief here.

Why do you say that it can "help set aside", and "aid in avoiding facing squarely", as if religion is necessarily something to do with avoidance , with hiding from reality, with cowardice, or disshonesty, with failure?

I imagine that you do not think human beings are feeble or contemptible for using tools, for sleeping on mattresses, wearing shoes, using bull dozers to clear ground, or a calculator to do their accounts.

Do you want us all to do without tools? Ways to confront the dificulties of life more confidently, more effectively, more efficiently? Would you say that braille for example was a way of avoiding looking squarely at the reality of blindness, a way to "set aside the issue"?

Why pick on religious belief as being in some way despicable in comparison?

Last edited by ouinon on 28 Jan 2008, 9:26 am, edited 7 times in total.

It starts when people put them together. And I don't mean to suggest that this starts out for bad reasons. It usually does not, I think. People get together in common interest, perhaps over some ideal or another, and eventually find that they are forming a community that helps each and all in serendipitous ways. Community is on balance usually a good thing, when still at a small scale.

(Humans derive from common ancestors with chimps, for example, and chimps band in groups of 20 or 30 or so and have for quite some time. I don't doubt that that number would be a reasonably congruent number for human communities, as well. Something bigger than just a family unit, and not so big that people feel largely unimportant and otherwise relatively anonymous within it. We need to feel part of something and a significant part in some fashion or another.)

The "monster" happens when organized religion grows large enough to centralize its authority and power in a selected priesthood that sets itself apart from the community it serves.

Jon

Yes, i wonder how that happened. For instance i find it difficult to imagine leaving it up to someone else to organise my religious belief. But the very NT'ish father of my son would be more than happy to leave the thinking about all that sort of thing up to someone else, if it was some thing that had to be done, like a tax return or something.
But why would someone with religious beliefs impose them on other people in the first place if the other people aren't interested? For the reasons i gave above? ... that in order to believe it, without feeling "silly", (especially with white race brain's tendency to clearer judgement about absolute values than relative ones, unlike the asian races) everybody has to be involved/convinced, or at least in docile agreement?

Is religious belief almost as inherently dangerous a tool as nuclear power?

I don't think so, obviously. I'm merely attempting to point out some reasoning I can see that might explain why aliens won't cut the mustard. Instead of dealing with that assertion of mine, you instead take it (it seems) as an unkindness towards superstition or religious belief. If you don't agree with those suggestions of mine, offer your own which you think are better said regarding why belief in aliens won't replace religious belief. Those are mine, that's all. But let's see where you are going...

The decision of whether a reaction is cowardice or dishonesty is something I didn't address, at all. Each of us can decide that for ourselves, I suppose. But it is irrelevant and such judgments do not affect my point.

Leaving the subject of aliens, I'll say this to your comment: Individual acts as part of religious ritual is about a very human response to nature, it's mysteries and our sense of awe. And elevating superstition to certain belief as a matter of reality is NOT about science fact, at all, but instead about compensations with our internal states of mind.

Whatever works, I say.

No. But of course I never said that, either.

Use what works well, as I said. And for some, this can be Tarot cards, necromancy, tea leaf reading, or whatnot (even a stopped clock is right twice a day) just as well as it might be using a plow to till the soil.

The problem comes when one elevates an internal state of mind to the point where they are willing to kill others or to control the lives of others over it.

For the reason just mentioned.

Jon

The problem is when you think worse of, slightingly about, someone for using a tool that you personally do not feel the need for, so that they seem to be lesser than you.

I would not be surprised if faced with that sort of attitude the NTs connected to the probably particularly intelligent/creative/inventive people for whom religious belief was an important and useful tool for dealing with the complexity of life may have recruited others around them, willing to protect their family member(s), or partner, from the slights and mockery of another family/group down the road who didn't suffer from such a "strange mind".

You say your statement above was "merely" about how ineffective belief in alien life would be as a religious faith, but to do so you, inadvertently perhaps, expressed just how little you think of people who use religious belief. It is a 'setting aside of issues", "an aid for avoiding facing issues squarely". These are deeply critical expressions. You may pretend that they are not value judgements dismissing religious belief and the people who depend on them, but it is very clear that they are, whether in the context of alien life as basis for faith or not.

As to killing people in order to impose ones values on them; i think it is quite likely to have been the people who didn't have the faintest idea what religious belief was actually for/about, who used it to justify massacres. People for whom religious belief actually meant nothing, apart from power and politics.

I think it is important to separate the two up in one's criticism; as you said in a previous post, organised religion is not the same thing as religious belief. The possibility that religious belief may have been/still be a supremely creative response to many of lifes most difficult problems, with implications for increased survival in some cases, as you pointed out, does not seem to be included in your describing 'religious belief" as "helping set aside, or avoid facing squarely, many issues".

Last edited by ouinon on 28 Jan 2008, 10:42 am, edited 1 time in total.

Yet, that is the fact of the situation we find the world in now and have for some time, right? We find a world dominated by the manifest powers of a number of very well organized religious priesthoods and those adherents they can claim and all too often command.

There lies the danger.

That you can even ask this question is unsettling. It is without doubt that folks impose religious views to the point of wholesale murder and war and much suffering. So reasons exist, obviously. I can't pretend to understand that kind of vileness or explain it, having myself lost any beliefs of this kind by the age of 11 or 12 and never having let it (to my knowledge) cause me to harm others while I may have somehow accepted some of such ideas. But then, my dad made me a slingshot from a branch and a piece of innertubing of a tire (back then, real soft red rubber was often used) and telling me at the age of 6 to "shoot at that rabbit" and refusing him, flatly and on the spot. So maybe my heart is different in some way.

That's an interesting thought -- about not wanting to feel silly. And there is an element there. The way I might phrase it is that without a gilded garb of some kind, a belief is like living in a glass house -- it's too easy and maybe too tempting for folks to throw rocks at it. But if you join a pack and if your beliefs are made "mainstream" and even better if your beliefs can also be garbed in the good name of science or the good name of proper government, too, then all the better for you. No one will dare toss rocks at beliefs that perhaps deep down inside you you already know aren't all that solid and have no real evidence, at all... if you have wrapped them up in something else or hidden them there.

Also, there is a very real desire to make others play your game with your children. If you are indoctrinating them in your belief system and don't want them to stray away, you probably also don't want them exposed to different ideas that others around them may have. Especially, when your children are only starting out on this trek and their beliefs are feeble and easily disrupted. Or especially when the ideas others have are powerful -- such as those of science are (because of their high degree of unity, each supporting and gaining support from each other; and because of their dependence on useful prediction and explanation, which science achieves to a degree that religions once would only be able to dream of.) To achieve that kind of control over your own children, you _must_ control others in some way. Either by keeping them away or else by convincing them that they should take extra pains for your benefit to protect your children from their ideas (not so easy to do unless your organization has some measure of power that can influence their lives in some way.)

Also, and this is tricky to say, but we have a meme in our society that says that calling someone else's belief silly is a violation of the golden rule and that each us should respect the religious beliefs of others. This actually can act as a shield for bigoted beliefs that would otherwise be torn to shreds, if expressed publicly. For some, religion is a way to hide their bigotry. "I'm not against gays. I'm just following my beliefs in the bible." Religion can be an effective camoflauge for a few.

Jon

yes, i think it may have done the nascent christianity more harm than good when a roman emperor converted to it. An emperor can not believe in something so slight, so subjective. It is not very dignified. It might even look ridiculous. The "belief" needs reinforcing to protect him/his powers.

I'll stop you there. Now you are trying to tell me what I think and put words in my mouth and, frankly, I am better equipped for that than you are. And no, I don't feel the way you say I feel about it.

I'll leave it at that.

Jon

Nascent is about right. Prior to Constantine's involvement, the disparate Christian groups had never even managed to pull together one full meeting with a representative from each major part. Instead, it was more like a bunch of community robotics clubs, where they sometimes pull off a regional get-together and where they share some basic interests but differ quite widely on the specifics.

As to "harm" I am not sure of your intended meaning. The Christians benefited from tax free status, being launched into a premier position in a powerful gov't, certainly some fame of sorts, and a series of gatherings to nail down their beliefs and eradicate the remaining discord. The result was that for significant periods of time they controlled whole governments from afar and made or broke kings and queens at their whim.

If you lament the loss of their core ideals, those not of their own making but those found in the sermon on the mount, as a matter of real and palpable expression of the Christian groups (for example, their willingness to help anyone ill and in need of care, even in times of plague), due to all this new association they then enjoyed after Constantine.. then yes, there was indeed some harm.

If you are thinking about some other harm, I'm not sure what it may be. They've enjoyed more than a great many organizations, in terms of fortunes and opportunities.

As far as Constantine goes, I guess I kind of gather your point. You seem to be saying that he needed to bolster up the faith a bit so as to make it more befitting his own stature. I suppose. Actually, he needed some way to get out from under all the trouble caused by his killing his own quite popular son. I'm sure he needed some good camouflage and a bunch of disconnected hippy communes just wasn't going to get him that.

Jon

as a result of that i have been reading about the history and development of early christianity. wow.

And finding out a bit about its profound roots in/similarities to pagan and gnostic mysteries, and come across the idea of the heavenly twin.

* * * * *

I hadn't really "heard" any of this before. Now that i am believing in god it suddenly makes sense. Going off to think about it some more before falling asleep.

Last edited by ouinon on 29 Jan 2008, 8:34 am, edited 3 times in total.

I'm just now reading through your link to that "Darwin's God" article. Printed it out, double sided. I've not read Dawkins on the subject, yet. I suppose I need to. The article also brings up Dennett and I have read his book, though, and find it both interesting and, given the notes in the margin of that book I've written, in need of improvement or expansion in a few places. Anyway, so far the article isn't disconcerting in any particular way and I find myself adding to it or disagreeing with it in modest ways. No slap in the face stuff, though. Was there anything there you wanted to point towards, in particular? Or shall I just finish it and say so and leave it there?

Jon

ahh lol, fair enough

yeah the artificially created from "ape-men" by extraterrestrials seems most likely to me, as it would also cover the many holes in our evolution theory's concerning our species. now i mention it, i recall a article i read on a Canadian news site about how some researchers were baffled by the fact that there was also no evidence for "the missing link" to be found within our dna, i tried having a quick search for it on google but couldn't find it, if i do ill post it here.

yes...if you find it i would love to read it...
I have to say that the basic skull differences in and of itself is enough to warrent the theory.(That is,once we actually get our hands on one of an alien anyway.)

On that note there is another reason i continue to look into the multiple hominoid theory...It's actually a separate theory,but it too involves purely terrestrial dna origins... Bottleneck genetics...Like the results of evolution of animals on remote islands (madagascar springs to mind)...The idea is that perhaps we were reduced in number(multiple times) by global cataclysms,which could have resulted in new mutations (repeat this enough times and the resemblance could be difficult to discern from the original species)

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&sa=X&oi=spell&resnum=0&ct=result&cd=1&q=genetic+bottleneck&spell=1
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=+history+of+global+cataclysms&btnG=Search




My own reasoning on this probably originates from a hobby of mine..Ball python mutations.

Here is a link to one of the most diverse collections of color and pattern mutations with the species.
http://www.newenglandreptile.com/nerd/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=543&Itemid=76