Penguin Posted March 9, 2015 Posted March 9, 2015 Earlier, I was thinking about the unknowns of life. The past. The future. After death. The unexplained things in life. Every religion I can think of claims to have an answer for these things. God created the heavens and the earth. God will be there for you in the future. God provides a heavenly home. There is a spiritual war going on that can help to explain strange things that happen. In essence, religion is a safety net to keep us comfortable in an otherwise scary world.
Llwellyn Posted March 9, 2015 Posted March 9, 2015 There does appears to be an X-Factor at play. The universe is not inherently rational to the human mind, and there are abnormalities and anomalies that defy complete explanations and likely always will. There are effects without causes, observations that are contrary to theory. "Man finds himself living in an aleatory world, his existence involves, to put it baldly, a gamble. The world is a scene of risk; it is uncertain, unstable, uncannily unstable. Its dangers are irregular, inconstant, not to be counted upon as to their times and seasons. Although persistent, they are sporadic, episodic." Christianity is a malfunction of creative intelligence, which is normally very successful at helping us mitigate risk with theory and practice. But Christianity is pushed past the realm of useful guessing by positing supernatural explanations which do not pay their way, and instead lead us into trouble rather than out of trouble. We thought that we could not tolerate the X-Factor, and thus we called it a Spirit and whispered a prayer to it. But neither science nor religion can make the X-Factor go away. "[W]hen all is said and done, the fundamentally hazardous character of the world is not seriously modified, much less eliminated." And ironically, Christians admit that after all of their shamanistic theories and activities, the X-Factor still remains even for them. "The secret things belong to the Lord our God, but the things revealed belong to us and to our children." Deuteronomy 29:29. As an atheist, I just choose to tolerate the X-Factor without false attempts to channel it and tame it. It is tolerable. Most likely, if we have anything to thank for the existence of the universe (an uncaused effect) or for the growth of life on earth (an anomaly), it is the X-Factor itself. From my perspective, I choose to say that the X-Factor is at play, not at war. 1
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