Lack of faith
Now, as a result of some of my activity on facebook, I have been threatened, yet again, by Christians. (Well, threatened-by-proxy, I’ve been assured that they have certain knowledge that God is going to torture me for all eternity for the things I think, believe, and say.)
This strikes me as having a profound lack of faith. They think A: that I’m going to believe that they know anything about love, when they’re threatening me with eternal torment, not for my actions mind you but for my thoughts and beliefs? B: that God is so powerless that he needs people like them to do his dirty work of threatening individuals?
I hate this behavior. I haven’t really come up with a effective response to it – although hopefully at some point I’ll write a article in here that I think is so good that I can just post that article instead of racking my brain for what you say to someone who thinks it’s a good idea to add more pain and fear to a system that already has too much by threatening you about things that are, as far as I can tell, fundamentally unknown and possibly unknowable.
And the thing is, theoretically, I’ve already accepted Jesus’s salvation, back when I was a child. So it shouldn’t matter that I now think the whole thing is akin to a computer virus, except designed to run on human minds instead of state machines. (It’s a collection of information that says ‘make a copy of me or you’ll suffer eternal punishment when you die’. And people tend to infect their children with it when said children are young enough to not think critically about the validity or lack thereof of the information contained in it. Plus, we tend to generally accept anyone who claims authority – see the Milgram effect for more on this)
I don’t doubt that religion has had some good effects, and I don’t doubt that it would be useful to have *something* that virally loads on us. I just doubt a lot that *this* should be the something. Surely we at this point have evolved memetically and in our knowledge about the universe to the point where we can write something better than the Abrahamic religions?
I find it hard to believe that I’m a bad person because I tend to value reality-testable truths over those which fail basic reality testing. I find it *really* hard to accept that the majority of people in the world think that I should be tormented for all eternity. (And, what’s terrifying here is, if we are in fact God as I have hypothesized, and they get to vote, I suppose that’s what they’ll do. I just hope some of them will be at least somewhat aware of the fundamental immorality of their action when they do vote to torture me indefinitely – as I said, not even for my actions, but for thoughts and beliefs which match the reality I’m experiencing.
Now, I have no doubt at all that some of my mental illness and some of my experiences surrounding religion are tied up in each other. I had a nightmare last night in which I was being hugged by $PERSON and it morphed to me being gripped by something hard and metallic on all sides and a voice was telling me “I am SATAN!”. One of those nightmares that is scary enough to wake you up – I don’t know that it was actually valid or sane for me to be as afraid as I was, but it took me several minutes to accept, with some relief, that I was awake and that what I had been experiencing was a dream, not something real.
Now, a conventional Christian would take this as proof that the devil is real. I take it another way. I think that when the devil was described to me as a child I patterned some of my neurons while imagining what such a being would be like and that collection of patterned neural associations / subnets is still in my mind. Your own religion perpetuates the devil, Christians, by having children imagine him you make him real. Is it any wonder that I hate the religion? It seems like all of my periods of insanity have at least some religions subtext and content, and one of the strongest reminders of how little my well being mattered to my parents was them applying pressure to me to go through with confirmation when I already had serious doubts about the validity and usefulness of the religion they were pushing down my throat.
I don’t disagree that neural networks need some form of patterning to be moral – the default behavior of a NNN is to be completely amoral, and if no set of associations that includes morality is loaded, you end up with Hitler. I just think that we could manage to load associations that resulted in moral behavior without loading associations that ended in nightmares, not to mention insanity. I do wonder if part of the problem with religion is that it’s incompatible with my personal choices re: neural topology, which obviously from looking at my experiences compared with other people’s is not the same as everyone else’s.
So, yes, Bill And Ted, please come teach us how to be excellent to each other. And Christians, please stop threatening me with your God that can’t be bothered to show up and explain himself after having left me with a book that contains unresolvable contradictions and things which are obviously false unless *e has been in a regular practice of altering reality, but has mysteriously stopped about the time our ability to take photographs came along. I have enough trouble with religion already without you adding fuel to the fire.