Here is a very small sample of the paradoxes involved in religious belief.


Omnipresence - This means everywhere, no exceptions. If god is omnipresent this means there is nothing in the universe but god. The only way to dispute that is to change the meaning of the word.

Omniscient - If god knows everything, past,present and future, then free will is a myth since all decisions have already been made and, of course, there is only god to be acting (see omnipresent).

Omnipotent - if god is the only thing which exists, knows everything and is all powerful, and, as holy books insist, has a plan, then everything that happens is exactly as god wishes. Which leaves you with the problem of evil. The religious like to blame satan, or some variation, but god created satan, knew exactly what he would do, and ditto for us.

Ever notice how the phrase "act of god" always refers to a disaster?

By the way, I believe that the overwhelming majority of people who profess to believe in god or follow a religion, do not. This is based on the fact that they cannot give even the most superficial definition of the god they claim to believe in, have the barest minimum of knowledge of the religion they profess, and do not follow its precepts.
- posted by Martin Eagle @ 3:53 PM

 
Danger of Faith

To believe in a god as defined by every major religion, is to come up against logical paradoxes which are unresolvable. To maintain belief in the face of these paradoxes there are several strategies available. One can attempt to compartmentalize mental processes, so that the reasoned approach generally used everywhere else in life, is abandoned in this one context, in favor of faith which requires neither logic nor evidence and is, in fact, asserted even in the face of logic and evidence against it. Or one can simply pretend that these paradoxes do not exist, engaging in some version of what Freud called "denial." Or one can use elaborate semantic constructs which have the grammatical appearance of meaningful sentences, but which actually contain no content which has any definable relationship with reality, or involve circular reasoning - using their own hypothetical constructs to prove their existence, or which confuse a metaphor, which is meant to help illuminate something, with the thing itself.

Compartmentalizing doesn't work. The conflict always bleeds over from one area to the other. This makes faith vulnerable and fragile and, the more fervently it is held, the greater the tension between belief and reality, the more desperately and with more desperate measures the believer will defend it. Likewise, it makes reason subject to the whims of belief, promoting myth, superstition, and enabling the justification of any behavior which can be forced into the structure of that belief. As long as the faithful believe what they do is right, that belief can never be discredited since there exist no criteria or tools to do so.

Denial also fails because, in order to deny something, one first has to experience it and recognize it as threatening. Once "denied," this knowledge does not disappear but is simply forced out of the top layer of consciousness into more sub-conscious levels. These levels of awareness are constantly interacting. Being forced to maintain and act upon mutually exclusive data induces, at best, anxiety and neuroticism and, at worst, psychosis of every variety.

The semantic approach teaches one to construct and accept meaningless arguments, to develop habits of thought which pervert logic and meaning, and generally to lose the capacity for accurate, critical thinking.

Since ideation and perception are intimately connected, all of the above phenomena distort not only our thinking, but our experience of reality. Further, since faith defines itself as not subject to logic or evidence, it can neither be substantiated nor refuted. There is no way to determine its truth or falsity. This essentially robs the faithful of the one characteristic generally though to define our species - our ability to think.

All of the above means that faith both arises from and perpetuates the worst aspects of human consciousness.
- posted by Martin Eagle @ 11:07 AM