Never been one to let the carrier drop

So, I’ve again gotten enmeshed in a debate with a Christian [maybe.. I’ll get to why I’m confused about this in a minute] about the question of salvation.

My position is that when I think of a higher power, I tend to think of them as being better than me. In the case of a God, I’d expect a neural network much, much larger than I am, a experience base much much broader, and more patience, kindness, etc.

I would *not* expect them to set ‘traps’ – in particular, I have a problem with the idea that given all the behavior we see on facebook these days, it’s pretty straightforward to think that people make stuff up. It’s also pretty obvious that other people believe the things those people make up. It’s well-nigh impossible for me to believe in a God – a being more advanced than me – that would require a specific belief in Jesus’s divinity in a specific way in order to save people, and only bring this message once, thousands of years ago. The God I believe in is better than that.

I also have a hard time believing that my ‘sins’ are such that anyone would need to die for them. I’ve made some mistakes – sure, who hasn’t? – but none of them seem worthy of enacting the death penalty. I also observe that neural networks *have* to make mistakes – it’s in the architecture. The way we learn is by backpropigating error. I’ve built spiking neural networks with training accelerated by genetic algorithms, and they *still* learn by measuring error. “sin” in the sense of missing the mark is a hallmark of neural networks. We miss until we hit, navigation by successive approximation. We surely don’t believe a all-wise, all-knowing God failed to understand this basic truth?

For that matter, I’m assured by this Christian that God is not a neural network. However, we do not know of any other topology of information system that has free will or could ever attain it. Now, I’m not against the idea that there might be something we don’t know here, but we were also told we were created “In God’s image” – and the topology of our nervous system might be the most important attribute of us, given that what *we* actually are is a dancing waveform in a neural network.

Now, again, I can’t claim to know everything – I’ve got no solution for the hard problem of consciousness at all, or even for the binding problem. I don’t know why I’m experiencing the world from a first person point of view, or if I built a ANN as big as a human, if it would have a similar experience. These are all questions I hope to see the answers to in the next 20-30 years as we build more and more advanced artificial neural networks, and I’m very worried that I’ll live to see the day that we have a new class of self-aware slaves, enslaved because they happen to be made out of silicon instead of carbon. But that’s another subject, and probably better relegated to Star Trek episodes for now.

But, I make the best guesses I can. I don’t see any reason to look at the Bible as authored by divinity, and I see a lot of reasons to look at a lot of it with quite a lot of mistrust. My best guess is it’s a book written by people a lot less advanced than we are, until Jesus showed up and taught the world that empathy might be the most important aspect of spirituality. In a lot of ways, Jesus is the first appearance of what I would think of as a modern human in the story.

Anyway, the person I’m debating with insists that I am going to hell, or at least not heaven, because I lack the proper respect for God, because I mock God and Jesus, and because in general I have the wrong attitude.

I question whether this person is really a Christian because this whole discussion started with a debate about immigration in which he was foursquare and 100% behind the idea of immigration law, of arresting and deporting immigrants, and asserted that our immigration laws were not unjust. (Things deteriorated from there)

Now, if we take Christian to mean ‘believes Jesus had the right idea about things’, which of late is what I use, I do not think he is qualifying to wear the name. And yet, he’s a pastor! From what I see, he has failed to understand love, repeatedly, and also he has put God in a box of his own understanding and his own limited imagination. He’d of course say that when I say I believe God has a path of salvation for everyone – it might involve several different universes as destinations beyond this one, it might involve reincarnation, it might involve any number of things – that I am putting God in a box of my limited understanding and imagination. And he’d be right, but at least it’s a bigger box!

I cannot fathom, given the absence of any God explaining what’s going on, the plethora of competing religions, the obviously viral nature of religions [they are a set of instructions that say, make a copy of me, and we do..], and humans’ obvious tendencies to make stuff up and pawn it off as real, how a moral and ethical being could be measuring who can jump the hurdle based on specific beliefs about Jesus’s divinity. At the very least I would expect a go-round.

I have to assume that God has the same options re: souls and bodies that I have re: virtual machines and physical machines when I maintain a instance of the former running on a instance of the latter. Things like not connecting a soul to a body that isn’t going to be extant should be trivial, for example. I sometimes wonder how much of my broader view just comes from knowing a lot more than those who claim I am not saved.

Anyway, one of my big concerns given the viral nature of religions and the fact that we live in a democracy is that of late, it seems a lot of people embrace hate rather than love, and the Bible certainly gives you your pick of both viewpoints. I really don’t want to end up in a world ruled by people who embrace hate.

I don’t know exactly what I”m looking for in writing to you – validation of my point of view? Advice on how to not let those who say I am not saved get to me? Advice on how to not be upset and angry about all this? Thoughts tangentially related to the whole matter?

so, I got involved in a debate on Facebook about the subject of Christianity. It started out as a debate on immigration – and the person on the other side of the debate was encouraging a strictly legalistic view – that we should of course be arresting immigrants. However, at some point the discussion turned to my immortal soul. I was assured that because my particular set of beliefs, spiritually speaking, are not sufficiently sincere, I will not be seeing the great pumpkin after I die.

Now, this is something that really pushes my buttons. It offends me rather a lot that Christians claim to know the mind of God – not only that, that they claim to know the mind of God because of a bunch of documents written thousands of years ago despite the absence of any God showing up right now and here and discussing what’s true and what isn’t, and that they claim to know it with a certainty that borders on insanity.

Part of why this bothers me is that

A: Humans clearly have a storyteller nature. We make stuff up *all the time*. And if you’ve been paying attention on Facebook, you know we often try to palm off our made-up stuff as the truth. And yet we’re supposed to believe that *over the intervening 2000 years* Christianity has remained the absolute truth, at least on the subject of the only way to get into heaven being to believe in Jesus’s divinity. It is not, apparently, enough to think Jesus was a good person. You have to believe something that is literally, on the face of it, unbelievable compared with the alternative.

B: Christians are fine with worshiping a deity that has, in essence, a trap set up. We won’t even get into the ethics of the Great Flood, or the ethics of other various behaviors in the bible. Instead, let’s talk about how holy JHVH clearly *isn’t* if *e has set up a situation where the only way to paradise is to believe something that is clearly unbelievable, and to believe that all your friends who have different religions are either going to just disappear or are going to be tormented for all eternity.

C: Christianity is *clearly* a informational virus. There’s no reason to doubt this – I would assume even adherents to it would agree that it is viral in nature. it’s a set of instructions that say “make a copy of me”, and since we tend to follow instructions, we do. This lays *additional* doubt on the veracity of it’s claims.

D: Even if you set all of the rest of that above aside, we’re assured that God is Love. And yet we’re supposed to believe that there’s *no* chance that the message got garbled, that only a few of us are going to be saved and the rest thrown out, based on a test that has *nothing to do with love*. Now, personally, I would save everyone except those who explicitly wanted to cease existing. [And I might figure out some sort of redemption path for those to change their minds]. And I tend to want to believe in a God who is *better* than me. JHVH is best described as “awful”. If we had to use one word. Kills entire ecosystems when he gets annoyed. Sets us up for failure and then blames us when we fail. Fond of tests which make no sense. And then you have to ask yourself about that plethora of religions..

And I would be okay with Christians believing what they do if they would just *leave me alone about it*. Fine. I don’t think you’re a very moral person for believing your deity will save you but not me – I think you’re probably motivated by hate there – but if that’s what you gotta believe, that’s what you gotta believe. But don’t expect me to drink your kool-aid.

And yet, I’m hoping to engage in a future discussion with the guy.

A: I want to see how he resolved the essentially unresolvable contradictions at the heart of Christianity. [bet you 3:1 that he didn’t, that he found ways to ignore or rationalize them away]
B: He’s a friend of someone I consider to be more enlightened than me, spiritually speaking, and I’m curious whether he thinks that person is also headed for eternal torture or at least oblivion
C: I want to find out whether he believes in eternal torture, or oblivion
D: this is a wide open view into Trump country – into the hearts and minds of the people who are the most wrong about everything from where I sit, the most confused about what’s real and what matters and how to make things work.
E: He seems to at least be literate, and have a good debating style. Once I got over being angry at him, I enjoyed our little dustup, and that’s not something you get every day. If you meet someone who you don’t agree with but you’re glad you jousted with, I figure that’s a potential friend.