So perhaps there is no foundation of knowledge

A dialog with a madman.
from: https://existentialcomics.com/comic/5

What shall we do with the ‘God’ signifier?

I’ve started rereading The Case for God by Karen Armstrong which moves away from the Christian Fundamentalist-New Atheist false dichotomy towards a more measured approach to the unknown and how it relates to our shared human condition. Karen Armstrong is a religious historian and writer who has published many books about the Abrahamic tradition and its place in the wider context of other historic and extant religions. The Case for God is a grand history of how humans have related to God/Allah/Brahman/Dao starting over 30,000 years ago and finally bringing us to the present day and our own predicament and inscrutabilities.

Early in the book, she asks an unanswerable question (which puts butterflies in my stomach if I stand on the edge of it for too long): Why is there something rather than nothing? (ponder what ‘no thing’ is, how it lies beyond comprehension and what could have been):

The Catacombic Machine

I have been aware of The Catacombic Machine podcast for about a year and up until recently only listened to a few of them, mainly when they had a guest I already knew a bit about. With a lot of the others I couldn’t really make out where they were coming from and I wasn’t really up to speed with the background information needed to follow a lot of the discussion. Anyway I persevered and now I really like what they do and enjoy listening in. I’ve downloaded a significant portion of the back catalogue and am working my way through them. The last one I listened to was a discussion with LeRon Schults a professor who is American but lives in Norway and is an atheist working to understand aspects of religion at the University of Agder.

I was particularly taken by a part of the conversation that happened just under an hour in (if you look the podcast up and want to dive in then it starts at 58:33). It starts with Josef, the interviewer and the gist of what they said went like this…

Antony Flew

"Since the beginning of my philosophical life I have followed the policy of Plato's Socrates: We must follow the argument wherever it leads." – Antony Flew

Parable of the Invisible Gardener

I'm doing Atheism for Lent again this year. The first couple weeks of which provide daily thoughts that are intended to question widely received ideas about "God", especially the Theistic God of many Westerners. The intent is that the thought is from a respected and intelligent individual and is therefore supposed to be considered with an open mind rather than dismissed out of hand as one might ignore someone talking about something about which they have no specialist or professional connection.

The latter part of Atheism for Lent moves on to what I think are more interesting ideas about what I would describe as a non-theistic god (i.e. a god that is not necessarily a conscious agent or that has a mind).

Anyway, back to the earlier thoughts and the Invisible Gardener...

On Ignosticism

'The word God has become empty of meaning through thousands of years of misuse. I use it sometimes, but I do so sparingly. By misuse, I mean that people who have never even glimpsed the realm of the sacred, the infinite vastness behind that word, use it with great conviction, as if they knew what they are talking about. Or they argue against it, as if they knew what it is that they are denying. This misuse gives rise to absurd beliefs, assertions, and egoic delusions, such as “My or our God is the only true God, and your God is false,” or Nietzsche’s famous statement “God is dead.”'

Do I believe God exists?

Recently I was talking to a Christadelphian I’d not met before. It wasn’t long before the question came up, “Do you believe God exists?”

Russell's Teapot

Attribution: xkcd

Thoughts on the Sunday School Prize Giving

Today was the occasion of the Sunday School Prize Giving at my family’s meeting. One of my kids particularly wanted to see me there so I agreed that I would arrive after the breaking of bread meeting was over while some people stayed for a picnic lunch prior to the prize giving in the afternoon.

A conversation

Atheism for Lent led me into another Facebook group that is made up from a similar cohort of people; those who have or are deconstructing their previous religious ideas. As part of that I agreed to having a recorded face to face conversation to be shared online. I thought I'd post the resulting chat on my blog here for those who may be interested...

CrashCourse

I've previously posted a YouTube by Hank Green, one of the VLogBrothers, his brother being John. Well, as you can imagine from a couple of talented guys they do other stuff too, so keep a look out for them (and their friends).

One of the things they do is run another YouTube channel called 'CrashCourse'. It's a great resource for learning...well...stuff. Take a look and see if they have anything on a subject that interests you. Here three videos that interest me because they relate to some of life's big questions:

Good Without God?

The BBC World Service runs a programme called 'Heart and Soul' which describes itself as, "a weekly half-hour programme that has the scope and understanding to explore different experiences of spirituality from around the world. Whether examining religious faith or any other belief-system, the programme talks to believers and non-believers, and tries to get beyond superficial notions of spirituality and religion"

Atheism for Lent

I’d never done anything for Lent before this year. Obviously I knew about lent and as a child I looked forward to ‘pancake day’, but being a Christadelphian, and therefore not following the church calendar, it wasn’t really something on my radar to actively take part in. This year was different, this year I decided to join an online course where a group of people spent a short time each day reflecting on a critique of theism, with the aim of throwing out the superfluous.

The most beautiful emotion

The most beautiful emotion we can experience is the mystical. It is the sower of all true art and science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger ... is as good as dead. To know that what is impenetrable to us really exists, manifesting itself to us as the highest wisdom and the most radiant beauty, which our dull faculties can comprehend only in their most primitive forms - this knowledge, this feeling is at the centre of all true religiousness. In this sense, and in this sense only, I belong to the ranks of devoutly religious men.

- Albert Einstein

What sort of god do you affirm or deny?

Everyone carries around with them an idea in their mind which they call ‘God’/’god’, and which they choose to either affirm or deny the existence of. What is immediately striking is that everyone has their own personal ideas about their deity concept. This is true even limiting ourselves to the Judeo-Christian tradition, which Christadelphians should know since they deny the doctrine of the Trinity which most other Christians affirm, but it runs much much deeper than this with many different historic and contemporary ideas about God that go far beyond what most of us have ever heard of.

The fact that everyone carries around a different idea of God in their mind should make us more open-minded towards others in that just because we superficially disagree with someone about God that doesn’t mean we are talking about the same God concept, and may actually find we have more in common with them than we think.

Talking Faith and Deconversion with Andy Stanley

Andy Stanley is the senior pastor of North Point Community Church a megachurch in Atlanta, GA. In this episode of 'Life after God' Andy talks to the shows host, Ryan Bell, who was an ordained minister with the Seventh Day Adventists before becoming an atheist.

I think this is a model conversation, in terms of attitude, between two people with different views, especially between a Christian and an Atheist who have different worldviews.

The show opens with this quote from Andy,

Pints and Parables

I've been following Pete Rollins more of late. Wacky stuff for some I'm sure, but I find the ideas really interesting. Anyway, one of the things he does is called 'Pints and Parables', and I was listening to some of these in the car to and from work today. I've decided to write one up here, adapted slightly, because I thought it may provide some food for thought...

Jumping to conclusions bias: How our minds actually work

I’ve been reading a book called Thinking: Fast and Slow by Dr Daniel Kahneman who is a Psychologist and won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2002. His findings challenge the assumption that human rationality prevails in economic judgement.

Worldview Orbit

It could be said that every worldview has an orbit, a stable and continuous path through which adherents travel that is unaffected as long as there is no external influence. The Christadelphian worldview is no exception and those immersed in the Christadelphian echo chamber will live out their lives in the Christadelphian orbit. Outside that echo chamber things get a little more interesting and, as I’ve previously noted, our conscious minds are biased towards maintaining the orbit we are already in. But occasionally people will find themselves in an unstable orbit for one reason or another, and that is when their worldview can change – and it can change in one of two ways: falling back to earth with a bump or spinning off and becoming lost in space.

Towering Mountains of Ignorance

It's a bit of a slow start, but bear with it. The second half is excellent.