Like a contra-theological quilting-bee, I offer my thought to Voltaire and Des Cartes’ ontological idea. Not only if God didn’t exist it would be necessary to invent him. Not only if God existed, would it be necessary to invent him. Irrelevant if God existed or not, it would be necessary to weaponize him as a vehicle for our hopes and prejudices.
This evening I finished Jack Miles’ God: A Biography, and concluded that a fair percentage of Atheists have the Abrahamic-God wrong from the sense of vesting-by essentializing and over-trivializing this sophisticated character (drawn from the amalgamation of many peoples, places, and practices of a god assembled from many). Not to leave the believers in the clear; hoards of the Lord’s (Judeo-Christo-Mohammedan-Sikhist-Moronistic) devotees have sabotaged possessing and drawing from a more interesting and robust deity. In my opinion both have it wrong-though the Jehovists are more right in what they get wrong.
What I mean by this, is that they forgo the natural world in appellation of revealed mystery. They paint magnificent and ineffable castles in the sky for their god to live in, His Heaven and his realm. The disbelievers miss the mark by shooting at those castles in the sky with real ammunition. Of course there is a good show, and of course you may hit where a devotee claims the target is; and absolutely if the target were real, it would instantly crash-shattered by a physical bullet’s expectations of producing the dance of kinetic energy on physical objects- but because of its strictly nuomenal properties, the castle remains.
And these sky-castles are not individual perceptions of a single and distinct entity, no. These castles are individual emanations of a believer’s hopes, fears, prejudices; erected on a skeleton of social expectations-raised long ago beyond distant memory-partially in tatters and broken tablets buried in the ground.
This does not preclude the fact that such satyrical artillery isn’t fun or necessary… it is. I have been thinking lately about values, ethics, and strategy.
What are my values? I do not like pain or the promotion of pain. I do not like to be exploited or exploitation of others. I really appreciate Immanuel Kant saying that morality laws cannot possibly come from a god, because they would need to stand on their own and exist independently of a god. Beyond that, any type of individual agent (be them divine or diminished) has their own preferences; and meeting them to prohibit punishment or propitiate favor is not moral law but prudence. I also agree that with Kant in that we should account for others as an ends always and not merely a means. I agree with John Stuart Mills that happiness is an end in and of itself. There are many things of high value for me ethically and morally that exist independent of my thoughts of god and other supernatural agents.
I think that this is a highly useful way to look at the world. Before we talk about whether a god exists or not; we should examine the self-evident and self-sustaining first principles of our core values before we account of outside agents. Then when we have reached the definition and parameters of our summum bonum (greatest good), then we can (if necessary) dip into the god pool. If supernatural agents have something to bring to the table to enhance our independent first-principle values (and if we find that those agents express acceptable qualities of existence); then we can allow those supernatural agents to be participatory (but accountable) actors in our value system. Alas, if those supernatural agents do not meet their burden of proof for existence or moral arbitration; then they are not necessary in this whole enterprise beyond allegory and fairytale.
Beyond that, I don’t see a place for gods in a moral-calculus.
What I do see as necessary however, is individual agency of and collective responsibility of human actors and moral agents. I am clumping all humans (even those incapable of rational thought [e.g., those without a cognitive structure for such: brain-dead babies and the severely mentally retarded]), and leaving the door open to other rational creatures that can produce a demonstrated theory of mind and independent correspondence with the moral laws of all rational creatures.
In essence, the Atheists create a ridiculous but easy target out of a socially-structured (*but ultimately individual-psychological phenomenon), the believers aren’t protecting anything with more than emotional weight behind it, moral-laws must stand on their own for rational creatures and their kind, and if gods are invited to the table they have to meet certain standards to play or must be ignored.
That being said, after finishing Miles, I picked up Hugh McLeod’s The Religious Crisis ofthe 1960′s. I just finished the first chapter and I am now being drawn into several different thoughts. These thoughts lead the goals and values that I esteem (which happen to be the values typically agreed upon as “Secular Humanist”), why they have emerged, and how we can advocate and expedite their adoption. This has led me to two distinctions that I would like to explore:
1. Secularization vs. De-Christendom
2. Freethought vs. Nontheism
I am a theist. That is to say I do believe in a higher power. If one reads the torah with knowledge they will find that this deity is spoke of as a male and, at times, a female. It is also spoken of in the singular and in the plural. This G-D which I profess exists is all powerful but mad man as the only creature with choices. Making the wrong choices does have its consequences though. There are errors in the translation of torah from Hebrew to German and then to Greek. The Messiah will come from a young woman, not a virgin. We are built in the essence of the holy one, not the image. There are other errors but space is limited. Anyone with knowledge of Hebrew sees the errors and moves past them. Your thoughts were interesting though. Many of the laws we look at came from the 19 commandments many years ago. You accept them as though they were your own but they are not and the old tablets you speak of prove that. As older copies of the Torah are found they are exactly as the ones we read today. HMmm:)
That should have been ten commandments