Kemstone's Journal

I haven’t done a good philosophical musing in a while, and yesterday I had one worth writing down.

Occasionally I’ll write a blog post and spend the rest of the day worrying about how certain people might react to certain parts. For example, I’m currently a bit worried that Lena might decide to read what I wrote about the lefty protest she invited me to on Saturday and be offended by some of the less-than-flattering things I said about her fellow protesters. Like, did I really have to call them “living stereotypes”? (If you are reading this, Lena, I hope we’re still cool.)

But in the same post I mentioned in passing how I’d gone to Lena’s costume party last year dressed as Jesus and got completely trashed. If a believer were to read that they’d no doubt blink twice and read it again to make sure they read it right. Who is this guy? Dressing up as Jesus and making an ass of himself…how much more blasphemous can you get? This guy is definitely going to Hell.

I got to thinking about how I would respond to the charge. How can I be sure God doesn’t exist? That Jesus isn’t his son? That God wouldn’t be horribly offended that I’d commit such an egregious sin against the person He sent to die for my sins?

The truth is I’m not worried at all. While I definitely lean atheist I’m still open to the possibility that some kind of entity which could justifiably be called “God” might exist. In particular, I find the idea of a ‘universal consciousness’ rather appealing—the idea that one singular entity is the subject of all awareness in the universe, that it lives every lifetime as every conscious life-form and absorbs all experience within itself.

If this being exists, would it really care about some guy dressed as Jesus puking all over a bar? Such an assertion would be nonsensical if you believe in the sort of God I described above. It only makes sense if you believe in the Biblical God—the jealous, wrathful, vengeful God who punishes the slightest disrespect with eternal damnation.

This Biblical God, I am 99.99999999999999999999999999999% certain, does not exist and couldn’t possibly exist. When you consider the unfathomable grandeur of the cosmos—hundreds of billions of stars clustered into hundreds of billions of galaxies scattered across an ever-expanding void of incalculable size and scope, each tiny clump of matter a universe in itself composed of protons, electrons, quarks and gluons locked in an eternal dance from which all reality springs—and then you read, “When a man strikes his slave, male or female, with a rod and the slave dies under his hand, he shall be avenged. But if the slave survives a day or two, he is not to be avenged, for the slave is his money” (Exodus 21:20-21)….well it just doesn’t jive, does it?

Are you telling me the same being that said, “Wives, submit to your own husbands, as to the Lord” (Ephesians 5:22) is the same being that constructed the universe? Sorry, that just sounds absurd to me.

Maybe someone who both believes in the Bible and acknowledges the truth of Astronomy can tell me how one reconciles this, because to me they seem irreconcilable. It would seem to me that the only way to deal with it is never to think about both things at the same time.

But how can you avoid it? How can you believe that Man has such special significance in the universe when you know how old and how large the universe is?

Just consider what a tiny fraction of Existence is made up by human experience. If you add up the experiences of every human being who has ever lived over the past 6,000 years (as Scripture is said to begin around 4,000 B.C.) it would still be a mere fraction of the sum total of all human experience over the last three million years, which is roughly when homo sapiens appeared on the scene. And even if you include the sum total of all human experiences stretching back to the prehistoric days of tribal, cave-dwelling humans, this amount of time still pales in comparison to the total experience of all life-forms that have occupied the earth over the past two to four billion years (depending on when you believe consciousness emerged). And of course we’re still only talking about earth, when it’s almost certain that conscious life-forms have evolved on other worlds as well—and with hundreds of trillions of planets upon which life might have arisen, that adds up to a whole hell of a lot of non-human experience that God has supposedly created. Not to mention all of the things He created that don’t have subjective experience—presumably such things are a part of His awareness as well.

To think that God not only cares about what each and every individual human being to live for a fraction of an eye-blink on a minuscule speck of dust circling one of a trillion stars in His universe does, but that He would react with such petty human emotions as anger, offense, or disgust—it’s just nonsensical to me. I might be willing to consider that in His omniscience He cares about each and every human being, but that He responds with feelings like jealousy or impatience is something I just can’t buy.

If God created me and experiences all that I experience, He must understand me as well as I understand myself. He must know why I don’t believe in Him. He must know why I have no qualms about poking fun at the religions set up to worship Him. He must understand as well as I do that if my lack of belief or reverence—which is a direct result of contemplating the very universe He created—is punished with eternal damnation, that would be an injustice of the most egregious sort.

So if I do wind up in Hell, at least I won’t feel guilty. The moral error will be God’s—not mine. To demand faith in a human-like creator God from a being within a universe that looks nothing like anything a human-like God would create is simply unjustifiable.

The other night I was watching an episode of a TV show (Breaking Bad—outstanding show) and there was a scene in which the president of a small company had a birthday party and one of his employees sang “Happy Birthday, Mr. President” in the voice of Marilyn Monroe. I thought about how every single American above the age of 13 must get that reference—how it’s such a famous bit of American culture—and then I thought about how we might be past the time when events of such huge cultural significance can take place.

During the Marilyn Monroe era, there really seemed to be one over-arching “American Culture”. There were only three TV channels. Nearly everyone watched “I Love Lucy” and got their news from Walter Cronkite. When Neil Armstrong took those first steps on the moon, the entire country was watching.

These days there are thousands of channels as well as the internet, and the only thing that most of America gathers together to watch is the Super Bowl, and even then it’s barely half the country. I suppose you could say the final episodes of “American Idol” are today’s moments of cultural significance, but it’s nowhere near the way it used to be.

Instead of one, mostly homogenous “American Culture” and a few scattered sub-cultures, today we seem completely divided into a slew of non-overlapping sub-cultures. Whether it’s hippies, gangstas, tech geeks, tween girls, college frat-guys, liberal bloggers, or what have you—there’s enough entertainment and news targeting each specific group that each can remain relatively isolated from one another. A moment of cultural significance to one group—say, basketball fans watching LeBron James announce the next team he’ll play for, or tween girls watching the latest escapade of Miley Cyrus—the other groups couldn’t care less. Each culture seems to operate in its own individual sphere, more or less separate from the rest.

Has the drastic change in the media landscape completely undermined the concept of “American Culture”? Are we now just a nation of many cultures with almost nothing to do with one another, or is there anything that still binds us all together?

The question is significant if we’re going to say, as I like to say, that we’re fighting for a better America. Anyone can just look at us and ask, “Better for who?” At best, we can say “the majority of average Americans” but what is an “average American” these days? And considering how polarized we are, is there any majority significantly greater than 50 percent?

At the very least, we should recognize this issue and consider its effect on national discourse. Indeed it threatens the very notion of “national discourse” as it’s really only one segment of the population that pays much attention to matters of national significance in the first place, while everyone else is off in their own little world, remaining within whatever niche within sports or entertainment that most appeals to them.

The only remedy I can suggest is for those of us who do care about political issues to try and draw more people in. News and entertainment have become so intermingled that we lose sight of the fact that beneath all the surface layers of ratings-driven talk-shows, bloviating radio hosts, and gimmicky-blogs, the subject matter actually does matter, and we’d be much better off if everyone from every sub-culture paid attention to it.

There was a thought-provoking piece on the Huffington Post last week by someone named Robert Lanza drawing attention to experiments in quantum mechanics and how the results suggest that consciousness itself has a major effect on the physical universe. The central idea is that we’re more than just physical entities, and that the universe might not be the cold, mechanistic beast that modern science tends to assume it is.

We’re trapped in an outdated paradigm. A few more equations, we’re told, and we’ll know it all — any day now. There’s no adventure left, no lost gardens in far away lands. But we all intuitively know there’s more to existence than our science books grant. It’s the same nostalgic yearning that gives religion its persistent power over humanity.

Whether or not we all intuitively know there’s more to existence than materialism is certainly a suspect claim, but we can at least speak for ourselves. I for one have always felt that there is more to my existence than meets the eye, that every experience has some deeper, more profound significance within a grander metaphysical reality. Yet after studying philosophy and deciding to take a skeptical approach to all claims, I had to abandon intuition as a legitimate factor in determining whether or not something is true.

Yes, it feels true that the consciousness which is currently aware of the thought-processes in my brain existed prior to my birth and will continue after my death, but I have no solid empirical reason for thinking so. Yes, it feels true that dreams are more than just random thoughts floating around the brain during a particular stage of sleep, but I have no good reason to believe that they have any kind of deeper meaning. And with regard to other people, it definitely feels true that I’ve known some of them in past lives or alternate realities, but with no scientific reason to believe that such things are even possible I can’t justifiably assume that I have.

And yet it’s looking like we might be beginning to open the door to a whole new realm of science which can at least put these ideas to the test. Quantum mechanics is the study of the universe at its smallest, most fundamental level, and it’s providing us with some terribly fascinating experimental results.

We assume there’s a universe “out there” separate from what we are, and that we play no role in its appearance. Yet since the 1920s, experiments have shown just the opposite; results do depend on whether anyone is observing. This is most vividly illustrated by the famous two-hole experiment. When you watch a particle go through the holes, it behaves like a bullet, passing through one hole or the other. But if no one observes the particle, it exhibits the behavior of a wave and can pass through both holes at the same time.

Going purely by the scientific models we’ve developed over the past few centuries, there is no reason to believe that a subatomic particle will behave differently based on whether or not someone is watching it, but that’s what these experiments seem to show. When not observed, an object exists as ‘waves of probability’ which collapse into solid objects when observed. If you throw a frisbee into a field and turn around, that frisbee potentially exists all over the field, but as soon as you turn back around it collapses into a particular location.

It’s a long way from that to putting ideas like reincarnation or dream-realities to the test, but it does open the door. If consciousness is as fundamental to reality as quantum experiments suggest, it calls for a fresh look at ideas such as pansychism and hyperdualism.

Our current scientific models are based on a set of assumptions that might not be true, such as the idea that something nonphysical (consciousness) can have a causative effect on something physical (the universe). But we certainly know that there’s a hell of a lot we don’t know. Less than 5% of the universe is made up of atoms—the only kind of material we’re familiar with. 23% of the universe is dark matter, the nature of which we can only speculate about. But a whopping 72% of the universe is dark energy—the force that drives the universe’s accelerated rate of expansion—and we don’t even have a clue as to what the nature of this might be.

Seeing as how 95% of the universe is a big fat question mark, it’s a little more than arrogant of scientists to dismiss the idea of a consciousness-driven universe out of hand. These phenomena may have nothing to do with consciousness, but thanks to the results from our first experimental journeys into the realm of quantum mechanics, I believe there’s at least enough of a justification to hypothesize that they do. For all we know, thought is driving the expansion of the universe, and the reason its expansion is accelerating is because more life-forms are constantly springing up throughout the cosmos.

At any rate, it’s fun to speculate about this kind of stuff but I’m a long way from establishing a Church of the Universal Consciousness. I’m still too devoted to skepticism to accept the existence of anything that might be justifiably called “God” but it’s worth considering that there are scientific reasons to at least entertain the possibility.

When Cenk Uygur of The Young Turks guest-hosted for Dylan Ratigan this past week, one the segments he did was a quick little oddity about UFO lobbyists:

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Apparently the group “Exopolitics” is lobbying the government to release the truth about extra-terrestrials. Stephen Bassett, a lobbyist for the group, claims that the government has known about the “ET presence” since the 40s, that they sequestered the information for justifiable public security reasons, but once the Cold War ended there was no longer a good reason to keep the truth from the people.

First of all, I don’t believe that extra-terrestrials have ever visited earth. As Carl Sagan used to say, “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence” and there is no extraordinary evidence of an ET presence on Earth. That said, there is a plethora of unconvincing evidence that when taken as a whole might lead one to believe that it may be true. After all, if ETs were around, wouldn’t they try to be as discreet as possible?

But watching this segment just got me thinking about how monumentally awesome it would be if it were true. If the government just decided one day to let everyone know that humans are not, in fact, alone in the universe, that the galaxy is brimming with life and interstellar empires—I think my biggest sensation would be one of relief.

We live at what must be a relatively unique time-period in the history of an intelligent species, at which we know how vast the universe is and how incredibly small we are in relation to it, but we still know too little about the formation of life and DNA that we must still face the possibility that we could be the only planet with life—or at least the only planet with intelligent life—in the entire cosmos.

And if that’s the case, think of the tremendous responsibility we have. Through us, the universe has become aware of itself. We could be a miracle of existence, the unlikeliest of unlikely phenomena that arose only because given enough time and enough planets on which organic compounds are floating around, there’s bound to be one in which a DNA molecule forms, replicates, and sets the process of biological evolution into motion, and we just happen to be the result of that process.

If that’s the case and we snuff ourselves out, it would be a tragedy of cosmic proportions. To think of our enormous potential—to go out and explore and experience the entire universe—squashed by our own short-sightedness and thus limiting the universe’s self-awareness to a mere blink of an eye on one speck of dust in the void.

But if intelligent species are the norm, if interstellar empires abound throughout the cosmos, then we’re off the hook in a big way. Even if we go extinct, awareness will continue in other forms and life in the universe will go on without us.

If there are ETs around and the government does know about them, I wish they would tell us. Not only do I think it would create a sense of global community in a way never before imaginable, but it would provide us with a cosmic peace of mind that we’ve never before been capable of.

If I could make a list of five books that would be required reading for everyone on earth, Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death is the first book I would put on that list. Postman explains how the medium of television has by its very nature caused rational discourse to be severely dumbed-down over the last century, using examples from educational programming to religious broadcasting to TV news. Prior to the invention of television, discourse was dominated by the written word which inherently appeals to rationality. Television, with its sounds and images, inherently appeals to the passions. Postman’s work is not only profound but prophetic, as it was published in 1985 before the era of 24-hour cable news, the internet, blogs, and Twitter. What would Postman say about the dominant forms of media in today’s world?

The online universe is filled with all kinds of content, from written words to sounds and images and very often combinations of all three. If the way we think is determined by the media through which we obtain our information, then those of us who spend significant chunks of our time online must actually have different thought patterns than anyone who existed before us. The question is whether this mish-mash of media is an improvement over the old paradigm or just another step towards a culture in which the primary motivation for all acquisition of information is pure amusement.

For a long time I held back my urge to write my thoughts in an online blog, and this was for two reasons. The first was that I didn’t think I had anything to say that wasn’t already being said by a million other bloggers. Second was the strong sense I had, and still have to a great extent, that blogging itself is just an utter waste of time. How many people are actually going to read what some random nobody has to say, let alone give a shit, let alone spend any time thinking about it before moving on to the next thing, let alone share and discuss it with others so as to disseminate it throughout the collective human consciousness? I only changed my mind after reading blog posts that did make me stop and think, that did have a permanent effect on my worldview, and that I was inclined to share with others. I figured that if I was using the internet in what I feel is the “right” way, there must be others out there.

A million different bloggers have a million different reasons for blogging. My biggest reason is the need to feel that I’m not just a passive observer of world events. I’ve always been interested in what have appeared to be the most important aspects of life, whether it’s the deeper metaphysical nature of reality or the political processes which determine the future course of human history. To simply absorb this information is not enough. I feel compelled to analyze it, interpret it, put it into my own words and share my insights with anyone who will listen. Because to me it seems that we’re living at a critical point in human history from which we can either advance to a new, more enlightened way of life or descend into chaos as civilization crumbles and falls under the weight of ignorance and greed, I feel a sense of responsibility to do whatever I can to push us in the direction of the former. Expressing my thoughts in a blog is obviously the least I can do, and I often feel guilty for not doing more.

But there are other, much less noble reasons for blogging. As it’s always been my dream to be a published author, this serves almost as a kind of short-cut. I may not be widely read, but hundreds of people are at least glancing at my posts and considering them, if only for a handful of seconds. It provides me with a weak but tangible sense of significance. And I can’t deny that receiving complimentary comments is always a welcome boost to my ego. Finally, receiving negative comments from people who disagree with me gives me a chance to engage in debate, which I’ve always found to be quite fun. So when I get down to the heart of it, am I really blogging in an attempt to change the world, or am I just doing it because it’s fun?

Of all the bloggers out there, how many are doing it purely for amusement? How many are genuinely interested in influencing their fellow human beings? If there are more in the latter category than in the former, there may yet be hope. But if the scales are tipped heavily in the direction of amusement, as I suspect they are, then the internet is subject to the same indictments that Neil Postman leveled against television.

The tragedy is that the internet does have the potential to alter the course of history in a dramatically positive way. Because the majority of online discourse is still done through the written word, it has the potential to shift our thought processes back towards what they were like in the 19th century, when enormous crowds would gather to watch Lincoln debate Douglas for three hours on a single issue (and these debates were considered relatively short!) The literary mind was accustomed to thinking in terms of propositions, arguments, and rebuttals. The internet provides us with the opportunity to interact on an intellectual level with people from all over the world and from across the widest spectrum of ideas and philosophies ever before available. We can be exposed to thoughts that a hundred years ago we could have lived our entire lives without ever considering, and we can actually discuss these thoughts with their authors. With nothing more than an open mind and a respectful attitude, humans could come to understand one another in a way never before thought possible.

Leaving aside the vast swaths of internet users whose minds are anything but open and whose attitudes are anything but respectful, there are still flaws within the medium itself that pose an obstacle to the elevation of discourse, and I’ll close by looking at two of them.

The first is the dominance of social media outlets such as Facebook and Twitter, which discourage intelligent discourse by their very structure. I like Facebook because it allows me to maintain at least a thread of a connection to people I would have long since lost contact with and never heard from again prior to this decade (and because it helps me promote my blog) but its primary function is certainly not the dissemination and discussion of ideas. People can post links to news stories and leave comments, but rarely do the comments contain much substance. The structure of the site encourages you to condense your thoughts into as few words as possible, so that anyone looking at it won’t have to click “read more” to see the whole thing.

But that’s not nearly as bad as Twitter, which doesn’t just discourage lengthy posts but completely forbids them. If you can’t express your thought in less than 140 characters, you can’t express it. Imagine if Shakespeare had to deal with such constraints:

2b or not 2b: thats the ? whthr tis noblr 2 suffr slings+arrws of outrgous frtune or take arms vs sea of trbles & by opposng end thm, die: sleep: prchance 2 dream. theres rub

To this day I refuse to go on Twitter because I loathe the idea of a 140-character limit. I understand the rationale behind it, but even the underlying purpose bothers me. Twitter is, by its very nature, designed exclusively for amusement. Twitter users can’t and don’t expect to come across any profound, perspective-altering tweets (can you even imagine such a tweet?), but merely to see what their favorite celebrities are up to and to crack little jokes that will hopefully generate more followers. The very term “followers” implies that one uses Twitter to boost one’s own ego. Not “friends”. Not “connections”. Nothing that has any connotation of a serious exchange of ideas. Just “followers”—people who like to read whatever random thoughts that spew out of your head, as long is it doesn’t take more than three seconds to read them.

Clearly, I’m a long-winded kind of guy. If I can make my point in less than a thousand words, then I usually don’t think it’s worth making. I’m not simply interested in putting my thoughts out there, but my actual thought-processes. Asking people to not just hear your ideas but to follow your reasoning is the only way to influence them.

Finally, I’m frustrated with the very words we use for these online forms of communication. The words “twitter” and “tweet” are at least well-suited to that medium. They conjure up images of a swarm of little birds all tweeting at each other at the same time, producing what may be a pleasing sound but ultimately amounts to incoherent noise. If I had any money to start my own form of social media I’d launch a competitor to Twitter with no character limit (only a limit on what gets displayed—people can choose to read more based on the first few lines of a post) and a name that has some kind of an aura of seriousness about it.

But what I’d really like is another word for “blog”. It’s far too close to the word “blather” or the expression “blah blah blah” for my taste. I’ll listen to an “author” or a “journalist”, but why should I care what any “blogger” has to say? The very sound of the word “blogger” seems to imply that it’s someone not to be taken seriously.

I think one of the reasons many older people who could contribute a lot to the world of online discourse keep away is because these words make it sound so trivial. “These kids today with their blogging and their twittering,” I can hear them say, “Why should I give a hoot about all that blather?” A blog post can change your life, but so many people will never know because it doesn’t seem like anything of value can be found in a place called the “blogosphere”.

And so I’ll bring this blathering blog post to an end by once again urging everyone to read Amusing Ourselves to Death, or at least my summary of it, and spend some time considering the nature of our discourse and its affect on how we think. Most importantly, we should consider the potential that online communication has for humanity’s long-term future, and what we can do to make it elevate our discourse rather than dumb it down even further.

Several weeks ago I wrote a piece asking the question of whether the financial crisis would have happened if Wall Street bankers had all been devout Christians, and concluded that there was no good reason to believe it wouldn’t have. That essay sparked a discussion on the TYT forum that wandered into some very abstract metaphysical territory, but it was one of the best online conversations I’ve ever had. Among the many points I was made to consider was whether a belief system, even if it has no scientific basis, can be justifiably adopted due to the potential positive consequences of its widespread acceptance. There is a belief system that would undoubtedly guarantee positive consequences, and while I wouldn’t urge anyone to accept it I’d urge everyone to consider it. If this belief were to be universally accepted by humanity, there would almost certainly have been no financial crisis, no oil spill, no war on terror, no 9/11—virtually none of the tragedies we’ve faced in the last decade or throughout human history.

There were many stops along the road I took from Christianity to atheism, but the one I spent the most time considering was a kind of pantheism I later learned was the core metaphysical belief of Hinduism. Pantheism is the belief that God is everything, a revelation I came to at the age of 13 which gradually led me away from the Christian dogma that conflicts with that belief. Not that Hinduism doesn’t have its fair share of dogma, but the core belief is one I find much more elegant and appealing. It’s a belief I came to on my own (though I’ll confess a few experiences with substances I no longer take might have played a role) and only later discovered that the idea had already been around for thousands of years. In spite of its many gods, Hinduism is at its core a monotheistic religion, with the “Brahman-Atman” in the role westerners would call God. The Brahman-Atman simultaneously creates and experiences the universe. It is the awareness within all of us. When we die, we become one with the Brahman-Atman like a drop of water returning to the ocean.

Picture yourself waking up in total darkness with complete amnesia. You have no body, no memory, no knowledge of what you are or how you came to be. You are aware of only one thing—you exist. But although you lack memory you have the ability to imagine, so you begin to imagine things based on what you experience. If the only thing you experience is darkness, you imagine something else—light. You imagine darkness fading into light and back into darkness—time. You imagine light taking different forms—substance. You imagine the forms operating according to simple patterns—physical laws. You imagine these forms interacting within a confined space—a universe. Once you have all the ingredients necessary for a universe, you begin to imagine very simple universes, perhaps one in which two particles come into existence, meet, and disappear. Next you imagine more particles and more complex interactions. As time goes on the particles and their interactions become more and more complex and eventually you have the hydrogen atom, from which you get stars and galaxies and eventually other heavier atoms and composites of atoms from which you get planets with solid surfaces upon which DNA can form and slowly evolve into life-forms. The life-forms also gradually become more and more complex until they become capable of thought. All the while you have been capable of being any of these things and experiencing these universes of your creation as the elements within them. You can become so involved in being the elements of your creation that while you are in that state-of-being you lose awareness of the fact that it all came from your imagination. While you are experiencing your universe as a tree or a fish or a human, you know only what it is to be a tree, fish, or human. You don’t realize that you are not merely this particular being but every other being in the universe as well, and that all of these beings are your own creation. You are God—everything and everyone else is also God—and none are aware of it.

And yet, many people do seem to arrive at this belief through intuition. Meditation and reflection can lead one to the understanding that everything springs from Mind. Unfortunately, such a conclusion is subject to serious doubt, as it’s not hard imagine why Mind, with only Mind as a tool, would determine that Mind is all that exists. The scenario I described above rests on a whole slew of dubious assumptions which is why I ultimately decided I could no longer accept it as the likeliest candidate for the fundamental nature of reality.

However, we still know so little about awareness and how it works—how consciousness comes into being and the causal relationship between it and the body—that this pantheistic scenario could still be considered a legitimate possibility. And if it is possible that this is the way things are, it has profound implications for morality.

We are not separate beings. At the deepest level, I who am writing this am no different than you who are reading it. The same thing that looks out from my eyes is what looks out from behind yours. It’s the same thing that has looked through the eyes of everyone and everything that has ever lived or ever will live. It’s as though a solitary light is shining through an enormous canvas full of holes and projecting billions of tiny points of light against another wall. Each point of light appears separate and distinct, but the source is the same.

The easiest way to think of this is to imagine that as soon as you die, you are born as another person, and when you die as that person, you are born as another, and so on. You don’t merely have a handful of past lives—every past life is yours. You live every single life that comes into being. You have been every person or animal that has ever existed on this planet or any other planet in the universe. Everything that has ever been experienced has been experienced by you.

If this is what you believe, how likely is it that you will harm another? You don’t even need to live by the “Do unto others as you’d have done to you” principle because everything you do to others is done to you when you live that life. Empathy is not a virtue to be cultivated, but rather the default position. You care about what happens to other people because you must care. You are other people. You are all other people.

It is human nature to be selfish. Selfishness seems far more primal and prevalent than empathy and compassion. But under this belief system, the line between egoism and altruism disappears. If such a belief were universal, even the most selfish individuals would have to help others out of their own self-interest. If you thought the promise of a heavenly reward was a strong motivation to perform altruistic actions for egoistic reasons, imagine how strong a motivation this belief system would be. If one’s sense of self extends to every human being or every living thing, then the most selfish actions would be those that benefit the greatest number.

So let’s take this discussion back down to earth and consider how different the world would be if this were the prevailing belief system. Wall Street bankers would not have caused the financial crisis if they knew they would have to live the lives of everyone who suffered as a result of it. British Petroleum would never have been so negligent as to let their rig explode and spew out all that oil into the sea if they knew they would not only have to live the lives of every fisherman put out of work due to the spill but every last bird, fish, and sea-turtle that chokes and dies on the filth. In fact, it’s likely that there would be no offshore oil drilling at all because humans would have collectively decided that the risk to the many would absolutely outweigh the reward of the few. The American people would never have allowed Bush and Cheney to start the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq because we would have been unwilling to live the lives of the millions of innocent people who would suffer, die, or lose loved ones as a result. But the terrorist attacks of 9/11 wouldn’t have happened anyway, as who would want to blow up a building knowing that in another life they are in that building?

Who would murder someone if they knew they would have to be murdered? Who would rape someone knowing that they also experience the rape? What kind of person would ever harm a child, knowing that they would have to be that child and experience the full degree of fear and horror that the child would have to endure?

What politician would sell out his constituents for the promise of a lucrative job later on if they knew they not only represented those constituents but that they are those constituents? What board of directors of a multi-national corporation would allow their corporation to harm millions of people if they knew they had to live those lives as well? Why would society even allow such an entity that places profit over the common good to even exist and become so powerful in the first place? Would a small group of wealthy and powerful elites make so much effort to accumulate more wealth and power at everyone else’s expense if they recognized how small a ratio of time in which they live their privileged lives would be in comparison to the amount of time in which they would have to live in poverty?

Who can honestly say that if human beings universally believed that we all share the same awareness, that the common good of all living things wouldn’t be the number one consideration on everybody’s mind? That after thousands of years of brutality, all those violent battles we both won and died painfully in, all those heretics we both burned and were burned as, all those people we tortured and were tortured as, all those animals we’ve slaughtered and been slaughtered as—we wouldn’t collectively decide to end the suffering, to stop being so cruel to each other and thus to ourselves, and to do whatever would be necessary to provide everyone with the basic requirements of a comfortable, worthwhile life?

I no longer believe in this Brahman-Atman view of things, but I still look at the world with the possibility in mind. When I find myself loathing someone like a racist carrying a hateful sign or a politician lying through his teeth to protect a corporation, I force myself to consider the possibility that I am that person too. When I consider any new law or policy I think about how it will affect everyone, just in case I am everyone.

So I don’t think the world needs to believe this is true in order to for us to drastically improve things, but it’s enough to believe it might be true. Think of Pascal, who said that it’s better to believe in God because you lose nothing if you’re wrong and gain everything if you’re right, but if you bet against God’s existence and He does exist your loss is infinitely terrible. If we believe that we all share one consciousness and we’re right, we gain billions of lifetimes in an earthly paradise. If we believe that we all share one consciousness and we’re wrong, we gain an earthly paradise anyway, though experienced merely in one life. But if we reject the possibility that we all share one consciousness and it turns out we do, we have to endure billions more lifetimes of pain and suffering.

So to all the egoists out there who are incapable of caring about anyone other than your self: do you want to risk it? How sure are you that your self is limited to you alone? If the little girl in Iran might also be your self, how sure are you that you want to drop that nuclear bomb on her? If that child dying of starvation in Africa might also be your self, do you still not give a damn? If those lefty liberal commie bastards you hate so much might also be your self, do you still refuse to consider what they have to say?

Question with boldness even the existence of a god; because if there be one he must approve of the homage of reason more than that of blindfolded fear.
-Thomas Jefferson, letter to Peter Carr, August 10, 1787

Forget all you learned about how the United States was the first country ever to be founded under no particular religion. According to right-wing political celebrities such as Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck, the United States of America is indisputably a Christian nation. In recent speeches, both have declared that this is “God’s country” and that its founding documents are every bit as sacrosanct as Biblical Scripture. This is the kind of claim that drives me insane, as I just can’t grasp how so many people just accept it without question when the level of absurdity is literally astronomical.

Evangelicals and other fundamentalist Christians believe that the creator of the entire universe is a being much like themselves, which is already ridiculous. If they bothered to learn anything at all about science and cosmology, they’d know that human beings are one of billions of species who have ever walked the earth, that the earth itself is one of potentially trillions of planets orbiting the hundreds of billions of stars in our galaxy, which is merely one of hundreds of billions of galaxies or more in the universe. Do they seriously believe that of the hundreds of billions of galaxies God created, our Milky-Way is His favorite one? That of the trillions of planets in this galaxy, Earth is His favorite? That of the billions of species that have come into being and passed into extinction throughout this time, human beings are His favorite? And of every nation that has ever existed throughout history, the United States of America is His favorite?

Please. This is obscenely irrational. If the history of the universe were condensed into one year, the amount of time humans have existed wouldn’t even amount to a full second. Recorded history is but the tiniest fraction of a second, and American history is merely a fraction of that fraction. If God really created untold trillions of worlds and waited billions upon billions of years so that one particular country in one of those worlds could come into being, then God is one strange character to say the least. And what interest does God have in America anyway? He waited billions of years for its formation so He could what? Help it win wars? Seriously, what does God want with us if we’re so important to Him?

The whole history of these books [the Gospels] is so defective and doubtful that it seems vain to attempt minute enquiry into it: and such tricks have been played with their text, and with the texts of other books relating to them, that we have a right, from that cause, to entertain much doubt what parts of them are genuine.
-Thomas Jefferson, letter to John Adams, January 24, 1814

One thing’s for sure—He couldn’t possibly be a fan of the United States government. There’s nothing these right-wingers loathe more than the government. So apparently God loves America but hates the American government. So it must be the people he loves. But wait, I thought half the people were damned godless liberals. America is filled with atheists and homosexuals and all kinds of other abominations, so I guess He really just loves churchgoing conservatives. He doesn’t love the United States of America—He loves the Red States of America.

And apparently there’s something intrinsically better about American churchgoing Christians than churchgoing Christians from other countries. Perhaps because America is the country He personally founded by, according to Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin, guiding the hands of Thomas Jefferson as he wrote the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. Never mind that Jefferson didn’t write the Constitution—God obviously guided the hands of whomever it was that did.

After all, it certainly sounds divinely inspired:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.
-Thomas Jefferson, Declaration of Independence, June-July 1776

No doubt about it—that’s some eloquent expression of passionate, righteous ideals for you. All men are created equal. What a brilliant concept. Definitely something for America to be proud of. And who knows? Maybe it did come from God. Just like the U.S. Constitution, a part of which reads:

Representatives and direct Taxes shall be apportioned among the several States which may be included within this Union, according to their respective Numbers, which shall be determined by adding to the whole Number of free Persons, including those bound to Service for a Term of Years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all other Persons.
-Article 1, Section 2, Paragraph 3 of the original United States Constitution

Wait a minute, what’s this “three fifths” business? If I’m reading this correctly, it would seem that when we calculate how many representatives each state should have in the federal government, “free Persons” are to count as 1 and “other Persons” (i.e. black people—slaves) are to count as 3/5. So all men are created equal…but black people are 2/5 less equal then white people. As for women…don’t even ask.

This perfect, divinely inspired document has since been amended to count minorities and women just as equally as everybody else, but you’d think if God was guiding the hands of those men who wrote it (themselves nearly as holy and sacred as the Apostles) He would have had them get it right the first time. Unless He really did mean for blacks to be counted as 3/5 of a person and those less holy men of subsequent generations went and fucked it all up by reconciling it with that “all men are created equal” idea that God wrote in that other document. Whether one contradicts the other is just another Great Mystery—like how some passages in Genesis 2 contradict some passages in Genesis 1. Or maybe what God really meant was “all white men are created equal to other white men, all black men are created equal to other black men, all Hispanic men are created equal to other Hispanic men” and so on. I suppose one could interpret it that way.

So it seems I’ve failed to defeat the claim. Just because there are trillions of trillions of planets in the universe doesn’t mean this can’t be God’s favorite. And just because the United States of America has only existed for less than the blink of a cosmic eye doesn’t mean it can’t be God’s favorite country—even though He hates its government and half the people in it. Just because the Constitution contradicts the ideals of the Declaration of Independence doesn’t mean they couldn’t have both been divinely inspired. And in the mind of an evangelical Christian, if something that feels good to believe even might be true, it’s safe to assume that it must be true.

Thomas Jefferson, a deist who believed that God merely set the universe in motion and didn’t interfere in human affairs, a scholar who actually published his own version of the New Testament with all of the miracles and supernatural claims removed, must have been divinely inspired by the God whom he believed did not divinely inspire people to write the founding documents for a country which he and the other [Holy] Founders intended to be a Christian Nation. So all of us liberals who insist on a firm wall between Church and State should just shut up and face the facts—unless you’re a Christian, you’re not fully American, because the two are and were designed to be intertwined.

Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between man and his God, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legislative powers of government reach actions only, and not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should ‘make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,’ thus building a wall of separation between church and State.
-Thomas Jefferson, letter to Danbury Baptist Association, CT., Jan. 1, 1802

One of the most common arguments in defense of religion is the argument from Moral Authority. The challenge is that without God as a source of morality, there is no objective distinction between right and wrong. By no means does this prove God’s existence—unless you argue backwards from the premise that there is an objective moral code and therefore a God who established it—but it can be used to argue that even if God does not exist, we’re better off believing He does. This is a point well worth considering, particularly after a week in which some of the world’s most powerful people—Wall Street bankers—were called to testify before congress to answer for actions which may or may not have been illegal, but which almost everyone would consider immoral.

I will frame the question this way: “If the influence of religion were as strong and pervasive today as it was in the middle ages, would the financial crisis have happened?” To put it another way, would the Wall Street bankers have engaged in the kinds of actions that brought the world economy to the brink of collapse if they believed wholeheartedly in Christianity?

Before going any further I have to clarify exactly what kind of actions I’m talking about. Let’s keep it very simple and limit our scope to what we know the bankers at Goldman Sachs did, which is to sell financial products to investors and bet against those same products, earning a profit from the loss of others. For those who find any economic talk confusing, it’s enough to understand that these financial products were essentially bundles of loans such as home-mortgages made to thousands of people who couldn’t afford them. When you bundle a bunch of these loans together, it doesn’t matter if a few people can’t repay them because at least a few people will and that’s how you earn money. Unless of course almost nobody can pay and the whole thing blows up in your face. Then you lose, the home-buyers lose, the entire population of the country loses because so much of the economy was tied up in these things, and even people on the other side of the world lose because when the American economy goes down it drags many other economies with it. The only winner is Goldman Sachs, who bet on the failure and whose losses are covered by a massive taxpayer bailout.

If such a thing is not immoral, I don’t know what is. But as an atheist, how can I justify condemning it as such?

There are plenty of nonreligious ethical systems, but each is riddled with problems. Most of these systems are Consequentialist, judging an action in terms of whether the good it causes outweighs the harm. Utilitarianism is generally a good way for an atheist to justify a moral claim, but it’s not perfect. For instance, if you could save a million people from slow death by torturing one child, utilitarianism recommends you torture the child because the good clearly outweighs the harm. “The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the one” as Mr. Spock would say. But who would really want to say that torturing a child can ever be a moral action? We can certainly condemn Goldman on utilitarian grounds because it’s clear that far more people suffered than benefited from what they did, but this clearly doesn’t hold as much weight as a condemnation backed by Divine Authority.

Some nonreligious ethical systems are based not on the consequences of an action but on the intention, which address cases in which a person with good intentions inadvertently causes harm or vice versa. Kant’s categorical imperative is something like this—asking us to consider before taking an action whether we would like to live in a world in which everyone behaved the same way. By such a calculation we can condemn things such as laziness and self-indulgence because it’s clear the world would be a far worse place if everyone in it were lazy and self-indulgent. The problem, of course, is that plenty of harm can and is caused by people who believe they have the best of intentions. I’m sure Scott Roeder believed that the world would be a better place if everyone followed his lead and murdered doctors who performed abortions, but the harm done to the victims’ families and to the women who might suffer as a result is, I believe, a more important consideration than the killer’s ‘good’ intentions. So while we can certainly condemn Goldman Sachs on these grounds as well—it’s obvious they had only their own best interests in mind and if everyone behaved as they did it would be the end of civilization as we know it—but it’s just not the same as saying that their actions were wrong because God deems them wrong.

To paraphrase Dostoevsky, “If God does not exist, everything is permitted.” And indeed, without a Divine Authority to impose rules on us, we are left to make our own rules. We are free to adopt any ethical system we like, or no ethical system at all. Wall Street bankers, by in large, are probably not the religious type. I’d be willing to bet that most of them view life as a game with winners and loser, and live by the maxim that “He who dies with the most toys wins.” They don’t judge their actions based on any ethical system, but operate according to the law of the jungle. This is in fact the way the corporate structure works—every decision is based on how it affects the bottom line. If it increases profits, do it. If it hurts revenue, don’t do it. Never is any consideration ever given to whether the action is harmful to others. The morality or immorality of an action is immaterial. Everything is permitted.

So if you want to argue that things might be very different if religion were still as powerful a force today as it once was, I’d be willing to listen. If the CEO of Goldman Sachs had been burdened with the worry of whether his actions were immoral in God’s eyes, and whether allowing deals with the potential to destroy the world economy to be made would earn him eternal punishment in Hell, perhaps he would have decided that in some cases there are more important considerations than the bottom line.

Of course, you’d have to make this hypothetical extend even farther, as it’s quite obvious that any CEO who doesn’t make increasing profit the top priority will quickly be replaced by another CEO without such moral scruples. This is why there are no religious people on Wall Street and if there are, it takes a back-seat to the demands of the job. If you want to argue that religion could have prevented the financial crisis, you’d have to insist that everybody be religious—the owner, the CEO, the board of directors, and every last shareholder. They would all have to agree that doing God’s will is more important than earning a profit.

But I still haven’t defeated your argument. The central question is whether we’re better off believing in God for the sake of morality, and insisting that it would only work if we all believed in God does nothing to defeat this point.

So here’s my objection: Belief in God does not contain any inherent moral prescriptions. By one person’s interpretation of God, homosexuality is an abomination, but by another’s it’s perfectly acceptable. By one person’s interpretation, murder is never justified, but by another’s there are times when it’s not only acceptable but obligatory. By one person’s interpretation, God loves all human beings, but by another’s God only favors one particular group and all others are damned. Even if everyone on the planet were a theist—even if we all believed in the Judeo-Christian God and accepted Biblical Scripture as Divinely Inspired and a legitimate source for making moral determinations, there are enough conflicting passages and possible interpretations of these passages for anyone to justify anything.

And yes, one could even use Scripture to justify derivatives trading, credit default swaps, and all the rest of it. “Prosperity preachers” are all the rage these days—charlatans turning Christ’s message on its head and saying that God wants us to be rich. People can and do use their religion to justify the pursuit of wealth, and simply dismiss the poor and anyone harmed by reckless profit-seeking as lacking God’s grace. If someone is poor it’s their own fault. God has blessed us all with the potential to live in prosperity, and anyone who doesn’t take advantage is ignoring the gift that God is offering. If Wall Street bankers sell bogus financial products to investors knowing that these products are going to cost their investors money, God is on the side of the bankers. The investors should have known better. If Goldman Sachs executives award themselves multi-million dollar bonuses with money given to them by taxpayers, they are merely accepting God’s good blessing as everyone is entitled to do. The citizens could have refused to bail them out, but they didn’t, so the grace of God is with the executives and not the citizens.

So I must conclude that the argument fails—that there’s no good reason to believe the world would be a better place if we all believed in God, or even if we were all Christian. Right and wrong are concepts completely independent of religion. Religion merely offers a worldview whereby we can consider these concepts embedded into the fabric of the universe.

And this, I would even go so far as to say, is actually more harmful than the belief that we determine right and wrong ourselves. One who believes that murder is not only justified but that it is occasionally endorsed by the very creator of the universe is not going to have a second thought about killing. On the other hand, one who understands that the rightness or wrongness of an action is up to us to determine will have to seriously consider its aspects both in terms of intention and probable consequences.

My favorite framework for looking at morality absent of Divine Authority comes from Albert Camus, who insists that values are not intrinsic to nature or determined by any calculation but that they are brought into the world by us. In The Rebel, he writes that every time a slave refuses an order from a master, a value is created. The slave draws a line in the sand, saying that he or she would rather die than follow the order, and thus that order becomes wrong. The most obvious illustration of the creation of values in such a way would be the American Revolution, when patriots stood up and died for the principles of freedom and independence from tyranny. There is nothing inherently good about freedom and nothing inherently evil about tyranny, but we collectively decided to shape our values in such a way.

And so I would condemn Wall Street bankers and the rest of the giant corporations and financial institutions who place profit over the common good not on religious grounds, nor even on utilitarian grounds, but simply because I choose to. Justice is not built into the fabric of the universe. As rational beings, it is our responsibility to bring justice to the universe if we decide to, and I believe that if we all understood that it is our decision, we would decide to condemn the kinds of practices that led to the financial crisis and make sure nobody can ever get away with them again.

God’s death—as Nietzsche framed the decline of religion’s influence over humanity—does not have to be a tragedy. It can be an opportunity. We can finally stop relying on an outside source of morality and take responsibility for creating a morality of our own. A moral system based on reason, arrived at through rational debate and discussion, and implemented through the force of our own will would, in my mind, have far greater value than one that relies on ancient texts and depends on each person’s own interpretation of what God wants.

That Christianity is a major influence on Tea Party conservatives is a truth so obvious it almost goes without saying, but if we’re to figure out the best approach for dealing with these people it might be worth a closer examination of religion’s role in their worldview.

Before I list some of the ways in which Christianity feeds and reinforces Tea Party ideology, I have to get two objections out of the way. First—not all Tea Partiers are Christian. Many of them are Ayn Rand objectivists, an atheist ideology that in many ways is much worse than Christianity. But at least the objectivists don’t have to answer charges of hypocrisy, as whereas selfishness is their core virtue it stands in stark contrast to the teachings of Jesus, and the Christian Tea Partiers who scoff at ideas of social justice and adopt an every-man-for-himself attitude are completely ignoring those teachings. At any rate, atheists in the Tea Party are by far the minority.

The second objection is the inverse—not all Christians are Tea-Partiers. Very true. Many Christians actually live by what Jesus actually said in the Bible as opposed to what their preacher tells them Jesus really meant. As I used to be such a Christian I can tell you that they hate having their Lord hijacked by ignorant bigots and used to justify vile racism and hatred. Unfortunately, while the moral teachings of Jesus are certainly anathema to Tea Party ‘values’, much of the core theology of Christianity is fundamentally detrimental to human moral progress, and the harmfulness of these doctrines shines through very clearly in Tea Party protests. Here are a few of these doctrines:

1- Faith without evidence

No matter what kind of Christian you are, it’s absolutely fundamental to your religion that you accept certain propositions without any kind of empirical or rational justification whatsoever. There is no scientific evidence or logical proof of God’s existence, but you simply must believe it. You can have all the doubt you want, but at the end of the day you have to accept it as true and act accordingly. Sit in your church, partake in communion, recite the Nicene creed—you may not be sure that any of this means anything, but you keep doing it, and this is celebrated as a virtue.

Tea Partiers subscribe to certain political propositions with the same level of religious zeal as they subscribe to propositions about God and Jesus. Big Government is the enemy, the Constitution is sacrosanct, Socialism is pure evil, and so on. These ideas are accepted as basic—just as basic as the idea of an omnipotent God—and any challenge to them is met with sheer indignation. If you ask them, “Why shouldn’t it be the government’s responsibility to provide certain goods that can only be done collectively rather than individually?” they won’t even stop to consider what you’re saying. It’s like some internal alarm bells go off in their mind ringing “Heresy! Socialism! Fascism!” and the idea is never given any actual consideration.

Christians, especially fundamentalists, are taught these mental techniques for suppressing doubt from their early childhood, as doubt is seen as the biggest threat to salvation. They won’t even listen to anyone who argues that religion is all made up and God doesn’t exist, as they’ve been taught that such ideas are evil and anyone spreading them is evil for doing so. These same mental techniques are applied to political propositions, and anyone who challenges the conservative beliefs they were taught in childhood must be evil and should be ignored. Even so much as considering that the other side may have a point is frowned upon in Christianity. You just have to accept certain things as fundamental Truths, and that the fact that you have no evidence for these beliefs is actually seen as endowing them with greater value than beliefs based on evidence.

The virtue of unjustified faith is one of the most detrimental aspects of religion and it is absolutely pervasive in the Tea Party. It’s the biggest reason that trying to change their minds is so hopeless. They are taught to trust their gut before they trust their brains, and their gut tells them they’re right. And that’s all there is to it. Amen.

2- Divine favoritism

According to the Old Testament, the Hebrews are described as God’s “chosen people”, an idea which, when closely examined, is actually far more terrifying than it is at first glance. This means that the creator of the entire universe, of the world and all the people in it, actually prefers certain ethnic groups over others. This provides these groups with the justification to do anything short of defying God. They are free to ransack villages, conquer and occupy, pillage and plunder, and murder every man, woman, and child of any other tribe because they are of lesser value to God. And this is indeed what the Hebrews of the Old Testament did.

Today, you’ll hear Jews try to excuse the ‘chosen people’ idea by saying this doesn’t mean God favors the Jews—He simply ‘chose’ them to be the ones to keep the sacred covenant. Just as He ‘chose’ the Egyptians for their purposes and ‘chose’ the Greeks for theirs, He ‘chose’ the Jews for the purpose of…having the one true religion. This is indeed a lame excuse. “He doesn’t favor us, it’s just that we’re the only ones who worship Him correctly.”

You’ll hear the same kind of lame excuses from Tea Partiers to deny charges of racism. “I have nothing against black people. It’s just that they’re inferior.” I’m sure not all Tea Partiers are racist, but given all the racial and ethnic slurs you see written on their signs and hear them shouting out, it’s a safe best that a great deal of them are. And I’m sure most of them share the sentiment that they are the ‘real Americans’ and their country is being taken from them. Such sentiments are directly related to the idea found in Scripture that God favors certain groups over others and therefore some people are inherently more valuable than others. Namely, whites are more valuable than blacks, Hispanics, and Arabs. After all, Jesus was white…wasn’t he?

3- Demonization of abortion

Jesus never once said anything about unborn fetuses, yet Christians know with absolute certainty that Jesus would have found abortion to be the most evil thing imaginable and condemned anyone to Hell who would justify or make it easier for such a thing to happen. To be fair, I’m sure Jesus wouldn’t be too thrilled with the idea—but neither are most liberals. Not too many people really love abortion and think it’s a great idea and everyone should do it—but hearing the Tea Partiers go on about it you’d think they’re fighting an army of blood-thirsty sadists hell-bent on killing as many babies as possible.

It’s a perfectly legitimate political opinion to be opposed to abortion, but when you add Christian zeal to it, it becomes dangerous and harmful. Doctors who perform abortions are murdered and their killers are celebrated as heroes. Any lawmaker who might even make it slightly less difficult for a woman to have an abortion is treated with just as much contempt and disdain as Hitler or Stalin. Thus any chance we have of actually having a rational, productive debate over policy—of asking whether or not the government should have the power to prevent women from ending unwanted pregnancies—is hopeless. Even an argument you’d think might work on such anti-government zealots: “Abortion may be the wrong choice but shouldn’t a woman be free to make the wrong choice and let God judge her?” is met with closed ears because to them it would just be downright evil to reflect on and modify their beliefs in any way.

4- Demonization of homosexuals

I can point to Leviticus 18:22 as the exact Bible verse at which I gave up on the Bible altogether. My faith was already wavering when I tried to reinforce it by actually reading the Bible cover-to-cover, but I couldn’t make it past the third chapter. I couldn’t believe the kind of vile nastiness coming from the mouth of the supposed benevolent creator of the universe. I’m not gay but I have lots of sympathy for gays—as I’ve always had for any oppressed minority—and when I came to the verse in which God declares it an abomination for a man to lie with another man, I knew in my heart that this was not the word of God at all, but words written by men just as ignorant and prejudiced as those who are around today.

As with abortion, there is just no room for compromise on the anti-homosexual stance among the Tea Partiers. If God hates gays, they are perfectly justified in hating gays and standing in the way of their right to get married or to serve in the military. Some even go so far as to repeal legislation that protects homosexuals from discrimination (it is now legal in the state of Virginia to fire someone just for being gay) and they’ll oppose hate crimes legislation that specifically protects gay people—not because they’re opposed to hate crimes laws in general—but because they see gays as legitimate targets for violent crime. If God specifically said that He hates them, it’s fair game.

To be fair, these last two points are not fundamental aspects of Christian theology, and I think the majority of Christians are probably quite rational when it comes to issues of abortion and homosexuality, but it is within the fundamental nature of religion to see certain things as pure evil, and as such to destroy any hope of genuine reflection and examination of such things.

5- End of the world

Again, not all Christians take the Book of Revelations literally, but you can bet that most Tea Partiers do. This world, they believe, is a temporary one. As such, any attempt on the part of lawmakers to protect the environment is seen as pointless at best, or an encroachment on Freedom at worst.

It’s all going down anyway, so why bitch about global warming or the extinction of species? You want to regulate carbon emissions or prevent off-shore oil drilling? How dare you! Humans need that oil—and if God really gave a damn about the whales He would have sent them a Whale Jesus to save them like He saved us. And who cares how much carbon dioxide is in the atmosphere? So there are a few droughts here and there which kill a bunch of starving people in the third world. They were going to die anyway, and this way they at least get spared the horror of the post-apocalyptic nightmare that awaits all those unlucky souls not pure enough to raptured away like these good Christians know they will be.

Belief in an Armageddon is probably the single most destructive belief in all of Christianity, and it stands to reason that the more people in power who actually believe it, the less hope there is of humanity surviving through the next millennium, or even the next century. If the Tea Party had its way and filled the U.S. government with only like-minded individuals, they’d absolutely do their best to see to it those prophecies are fulfilled. And that would probably mean a few mushroom clouds in the Middle East. There are Christians who salivate at the very idea of a nuclear world war, as they expect it would mean the Second Coming is at hand.

Finally, seeing as how a recent poll showed that one of every four republicans think Obama may be the Anti-Christ, you can be sure that they’ll accept absolutely no compromise with him among their own leaders. I don’t care how many jobs he wants to create, how many sick children he wants to cure, or how many peace treaties he wants to ratify—you just don’t make deals with the Devil.

Conclusion

And that’s where things stand right now. Obama and the democrats find it nearly impossible to accomplish anything because they can get no cooperation from republicans. The republicans are held hostage by their Tea Party base, which is hostage to the Christian theology so deeply ingrained in their minds. Not only does it bring with it destructive beliefs such as end times prophecies, radical demonization of certain groups and actions, and justified racism and bigotry, but the core principle of religion itself—faith without evidence—prevents them from re-examining any of these ideas.

As of now, Obama and the democrats still have large majorities and they’re capable of getting things done without any cooperation from republicans, but this Tea Party movement could very easily reduce those majorities. At that point, the entire government could become just as incapable of doing anything without Tea Party support as the Republican Party is now. We have to recognize and understand this Tea-ology, and push back against it as hard as we can.

It’s a painfully slow process, but religion does seem to evolve over time. Just a few hundred years ago, nearly everybody in the Western world believed that God created the earth over a six-day period about six thousand years ago, that it was at the center of the universe and designed specifically for humans, whose lives were a kind of test to determine which of the two afterlife locations—Heaven or Hell—they would spend eternity in. In spite of all the dogma about angels and demons, saints and saviors, the so-called ‘mystery’ of the trinity, and mathematical formulas to determine the length of your stay in purgatory, it was a remarkably simple, comprehensible view of the cosmos.

But in spite of its best efforts, the Church ultimately failed to hold back the advances of science, and today we know that the earth formed over billions of years, is merely one speck of dust in an unprivileged location within an incomprehensibly vast universe, that humans evolved from other species over eons of time, and that Heaven and Hell can’t be found by looking through a telescope. Religion has done its best to accommodate itself to these facts, going to great lengths to try and reconcile scientific truth with Scripture. But in spite of its best efforts, and in spite of the fact that plenty of people simply ignore science and cling to the old dogma, more and more rational people are turning elsewhere for answers to their questions about the underlying nature and purpose of existence.

Recently there has been an explosion of what some might call the “Deepak Chopra” approach to religion—an approach that sheds itself of the term ‘religion’ altogether and instead adopts the word ‘spirituality’ for its self-description. In contrast to religion, spirituality does not purport to have all the answers, but claims that if we look inside ourselves we can at least know enough about the meaning of our own lives to figure out how best to live them. It casts off the language of saints and sinners, prophets and messiahs, and adopts the scientific language of atoms and quarks, big bangs and quantum probabilities. It is humanity’s attempt to embrace science without letting go of God.

Clearly, spirituality is far superior to religion in terms of a fundamental worldview. It is far more rational to believe that God is some kind of universal consciousness manifesting itself through the laws and properties of nature than to believe God is an old man with a beard who manifests Himself by placing the image of His son’s face on a grilled cheese sandwich. Most forms of ‘spirituality’ involve some form of reincarnation, and it is far more rational to believe that our consciousness takes other forms after bodily death than that it spends a few thousand years in a waiting room and then gets bumped upstairs to paradise for the rest of all eternity, presumably to pass the time by eating as much chocolate as it desires without getting fat.

But many people would say that spirituality is just the same old hogwash, only dressed up in modern clothing. The idea of a universal consciousness, they say, is just as silly as the idea of a personal creator God and ought to be treated with as much disdain. The idea of any kind of immortal soul, whether it spends eternity in one place after death or is reincarnated again and again, is simply a fantasy. Everything can and will eventually be explained scientifically, purely in terms of material and the mechanics of natural laws.

This view is called materialism—not to be confused with ‘materialism’ in the everyday-language sense of placing too much value on material possessions—and its core hypothesis is that everything in the universe can be reduced to material substances and natural laws. And that perhaps these material substances can be reduced to natural laws as well, making the entire universe nothing more than various energy fields interacting with one another. To put it simply—it’s all just particles and forces, and the particles are just a special type of force.

To get a clearer understanding of what each of these views really says about the nature of existence, let’s narrow our scope to one object—the human brain. Religion says that God designed this object as a vessel for the soul, which will depart from it once it no longer functions and fly away to another plane of reality. Spirituality admits that this brain is the product of an evolutionary process, but insists that there is some conscious force guiding this process towards a specific end, namely the coming into being of an object capable of processing rational thought, a kind of window into the material world for a soul which transcends it. Materialism sees this as a clump of matter developed over billions of years through blind natural selection, the extreme level of complexity of the electrochemical processes taking place inside it giving rise to the illusion of consciousness which passes completely out of existence once these processes cease.

Because we still know very little about the brain and even less about consciousness, there is still plenty of room for debate between spirituality and materialism when it comes to the human mind. Materialists have the daunting challenge of explaining how exactly a bunch of electrical sparks in a clump of matter can produce consciousness. Just try thinking about that for five minutes and see if your head doesn’t start to hurt. But materialists insist that such an explanation can be found, and we just need to keep running experiments until we figure it out. And once we figure it out, it’ll be perfectly clear that consciousness and brain matter are simply two aspects of the same phenomenon, that at its core it’s all just interactions among energy fields.

Many philosophers insist that such an explanation simply can not, in principle, be found. You can explain every element of the electro-chemical process in the brain which produces the sensation of ‘red’, but you still haven’t explained what ‘red’ is because the only way to know such a thing is to actually consciously see red. Just think about how you would explain what ‘red’ is to a blind person. You simply can’t do it.

So materialists run into a problem when it comes to consciousness. Just about everything else from the Big Bang on down can be comfortably explained in terms of forces and particles, but when you get to everyday human experience the scientific explanations become much less satisfactory. Materialists insist we just need to learn more, but there are plenty of good arguments to be made that science just can’t and won’t explain certain things.

And so it appears that spirituality will be with us for quite some time. I certainly welcome this as a good thing, a sure-fire improvement from the old dogmatic religious ways of looking at things. While plenty of atheists will blast Deepak Chopra and those like him for simply dressing up religion in new clothing, I for one see it as a positive thing that people are providing an avenue to those unready or unwilling to give up God altogether to at least give up the characterization of God as the Divine Judge who favors certain groups over others and condemns people who disobey Him to eternal torture. The sooner humanity rids itself of the belief in that kind of God, the better.

But the question remains as to whether the slow evolution of religion eventually leads beyond spirituality and finally embraces cold materialism in the end. Do we keep making God more and more abstract until the idea finally disappears altogether, or do we just keep coming closer and closer to understanding God’s true nature?

I simply haven’t decided yet, though I’m currently leaning towards the belief that nothing exists whatsoever that could be justifiably called God. I’m uncomfortable believing anything that can’t be tested scientifically, so as much as I like the ideas of reincarnation and universal consciousness—ideas which I came to on my own during many sleepless nights of my youth undergoing my own personal process of religious evolution—I just don’t want to accept them on the basis of intuition alone.

Luckily, I don’t have to. By contrast with religion, spirituality does not insist that you pay a penalty for lack of belief. The only thing you lose by not adopting a spiritual worldview is the missed opportunity to learn some kind of lesson, if the purpose of each life is in fact to learn a lesson. My soul is in no danger of eternal damnation, so I’m perfectly free to accept or reject any claims of theosophy—a luxury that theology does not grant so freely.

Still, I want to acknowledge that I find many of the ideas of spirituality not only appealing but logical, perhaps even more logical than materialism. Could it be that everything exists purely by accident, that the marvelous complexity of life and the miraculous properties of consciousness such as love and the appreciation of beauty are simply here because given infinite time and infinite universes, these things are simply bound to come into being at some point? Did natural selection really produce beings capable of self-reflection after billions of years of chance mutations without any kind of invisible hand guiding the process? It would seem you’d need trillions upon trillions of years to get from micro-organisms to human beings if the only forces at work are genetic mutation and natural selection. And is consciousness really just a peculiar side-effect of certain clumps of matter being arranged a certain way, of billions of tiny electrical charges firing simultaneously in very specific patterns, or is there something far more fundamental to awareness, something which extends beyond the brain and touches the very fabric of reality itself?

I honestly don’t know. It could be. It might not be. But that, I believe, is the most important advantage that both science and spirituality have over religion—there is no claim to absolute certainty. It’s not the silly beliefs that make up religion (or the silly beliefs that make up spirituality in some peoples’ opinion) that leads to evils such as child abuse, invasion, occupation, oppression and genocide. It’s the belief that one way of looking at the world, that your way of looking at the world, is the one True way, and that you need have no justification whatsoever to believe—and not only that but to know for certain—that you are right and everyone else is wrong, that leads to all the problems associated with religion.

So let’s hope religion keeps evolving, and more religious people let their uncertainty lead them to spirituality or even all the way to materialism. I think both of these views can co-exist quite comfortably. It’s the unjustified certainty of religion that has to go.