Methodical Musings

I‘m planning on attending this debate.

Right now it looks like we are having a small group of us meet up beforehand in Champaign, IL. Details to be determined.

If you are going to attend and would like to meet up with us, let me know.

- Josh

A while ago, when I was reading up on the atheist / theist debate, I remember coming across multiple instances where an atheist would say:

“God is non-answer.”

As a Christian I remember going “what? That’s a clever ruse. Just say it isn’t an answer and dismiss it off-hand?” I honestly thought it was a stupid, clever trick to dismiss God.

But then I’ve been thinking about it. “God did everything” or “God allowed everything” or “God made everything” or “God is everywhere” or “God designed everything” or “God has every answer” or “God knows” are not very useful statements. They are just as useful as “Satan is the source of all lies” or “sin is the source of all suffering” or “government corruption is caused by greed”. For, if we were to honestly apply those answers in our daily lives, they would get us no where.

~

For each question below, consider the usefulness of the answers “God”, “Satan”, or “Sin”. Then consider the usefulness of the other answers. Then ask yourself: would ignoring the answers “God”, “Satan”, and “Sin” make any difference in my life?

Q1: Where do babies come from?

A1: God

A2: Sex

Q2: What causes earthquakes?

A1: Sin

A2: Satan

A3: Natural causes that can be studied to help us avoid earthquake prone areas.

Note: if you answer A1 or A2, what method are you going to use to determine which one is the correct answer?

Q3: Where does lightning come from?

A1: Satan

A2: God

A3: Built up electric charges between two large bodies, like a cloud and the earth.

Note: if you answer A1 or A2, what method are you going to use to determine which one is the correct answer? Also note that (A1) and (A2) are polar opposites, so saying “it could be either one” is quite a difference.

Q4: What causes illnesses?

A1: Satan (attack)

A2: God (testing)

A3: Sin (punishment)

A4: Bacteria and viruses that can be avoided by excessive contact with the sick, regular washing of the hands, and medicinal treatments.

Note: if you answer A1, A2, or A3, what method are you going to use to determine which one is the correct answer? Keep in mind that A1, A2, and A3 are radically different answers… it would be best to have a method to determine which one is accurate!

Q5: Why is my marriage falling apart?

A1: Satan is attacking us

A2: My spouse is sinning

A3: I am sinning

A4: I am having an affair

A5: I am lying about my affair and my spouse is catching on…

Out of all these answer, the most practical one is (A5), all the other answers are pretty meaningless, even if they could be said to be “true”. And keep in mind, that saying “having an affair is sinful” is a completely meaningless statement. It doesn’t matter whether having an affair is sinful or not, what matters is that having the affair and lying about it are the cause of the marriage falling apart. We are assuming here that a marriage falling apart is a bad thing. (A5) is the only meaningful and useful answer out of all of them – and it says nothing about whether Satan or sin is involved! (A5) just says “having an affair and lying about it is causing your marriage to fall apart”. End of story. There is no need to insert a spiritual commentary at all and the answer reveals itself without any reference to sin or Satan. The solution? Stop having the affair if you want your marriage to stop falling apart!

~

Answering “God”, “Sin”, or “Satan” to everyday questions may be convenient by categorizing an item as caused by something benevolent (God), caused by ourselves (Sin), or caused by something malevolent (Satan). However, beyond that the answers are completely meaningless. These answers simply give us a way to categorize and personify the source of an item in question. But that is all these answers do.

“God”, “Satan”, and “Sin” are useless non-answers that are completely subjective depending on the mood, the neuroticism, and the doctrinal standing of the individual throwing them around as answers. They are completely useless answers in our daily lives, which is why non-theists can get along just fine without them.

- Josh

Things to ponder about an afterlife / spiritual realm…

1: Reports from Lack of Experience

Every person who has ever described anything about an afterlife has never actually died themselves or their death is highly questionable (like Daniel Ekechukwu). This includes the apostle John, apostle Paul, Daniel, etc.

2: Greatest Possible Reports are Curiously Missing from History

Those who had the greatest chance to report on the afterlife never reported anything except supposedly through third-party individuals who had a reputation to gain or uphold by those alleged reports.

• Lazarus. Zero reports. No book? Not even a sentence describing the experience?
• All the other conveniently unnamed people Jesus rose from the dead. Zero reports on the afterlife. And what’s up with not naming an individual who supposedly rose from the dead? “And then Bob raised a dude from the dead.” Get real, with all the hoaxes out there, I want full names, locations, and ability to track down people who were there.
• All the conveniently unnamed people who supposedly rose from the grave in Matthew at Christ’s death. No reports. And this mass resurrection was reported in only one gospel in a few sentences! That’s it? A couple sentences in the entire historical record to recount a mass resurrection? Not a single soul wrote a book about one of those instances?
• Resurrection of widows’ sons via both Elisha and Elijah. The kids never wrote a book about the experience? Wasn’t anyone curious what the afterlife was like?
• Paul supposedly went to the third heaven, but then claims he could not talk about it. Convenient? Yet even in that case there is no verification that he actually died himself, so how did he know he was seeing the third heaven and not just having a temporal lobe seizure? We’re just supposed to take his word for it?
• The boy Paul rose from the dead after falling out the window. No reports from the boy. At all. Interesting, no?
• Everyone else…

3: Contradictory Reports

Two of the apostles directly contradict each other about the simplest item about heaven you can possibly imagine: whether a person who has been there can talk about it.

Paul: “Can’t talk about it.” (2 Corinthians 12:4)

John: “Let me write everything…” (Revelations)

Interesting.

4: Afterlife Explanations are Always Based on Physical Models

All reports of afterlife experiences are always explained in terms of items in this physical realm (golden streets, ability to speak, human-like bodies floating around, Christ seated on a throne, etc.) If there genuinely was a spiritual ’soul’, there is no reason at all that it would be like our physical body except that the spiritual realm is a human invention modeled after our physical realm.

After all, what would we need a digestive track for in a world where we cannot grow, die, or reproduce? Why would we need legs if we supposedly can float through walls? What is the point of facial characteristics in heaven if we can recognize everyone? Why the need for the ability to speak in heaven if the spiritual realm right now can communicate through thoughts and over great distances?

If your explanation of the afterlife involves superimposed and / or fantastical physical characteristics, you have just revealed your spiritual realm is a mind trick. After all, what’s the point of a physical realm if the spiritual realm already contains those same properties?

If a person cannot describe a spiritual realm but in terms of the physical, then it is safe to say that we do not have spiritual properties. If we were intrinsically spiritual, we would not be limited to describing things only in terms of the physical.

5: Afterlife is aMental Illusion

For those who do believe in an afterlife, I have a mental exercise for you. See if you can pass:

1) Imagine absolutely nothing.

2) Now imagine the existence of a spiritual realm without any physical properties (like space, time, color, light, sound, etc.)

If you can not do this, you have proven you cannot possess a spiritual soul that can coexist independent of your physical body because you cannot comprehend anything without assuming the existence of the physical.

Conclusion

All the key explanations of a spiritual afterlife are always – curiously – a more pleasant or violent realm with physical characteristic.

Therefore, this reveals that our ideas of the afterlife are born of human desires for our present physical realm – not reality of a spiritual one.

- Josh

In a previous post, I expressed how I had shown all of the signs of religious addiction. Since that post, I’ve on occasion thought about this issue and realize that the very act of admitting the problem and recognizing that – without a doubt – that was my issue, things have begun to look quite brighter.

But, until recently I have also been watching my behavior and have recognized patterns in myself that, quite frankly, are almost like a crack addict going back to get small fixes. I’ll turn on my computer and before I know it, like a porn addict immediately beginning to look for “innocent” nudie pics, I will find myself searching through anti-religion blogs or watching YouTube videos on the subject.

Then yesterday something happened.

I was hanging out with my friend Sam before we went out partying and a little of his story began to come out. Apparently he recently had a complete nervous breakdown before I met him. This followed some trauma related to an ex-girlfriend who committed suicide. But the way he describe the experience and the pieces I picked up told me that a large part of his breakdown was due to theology.

In school he began studying theology in depth. I don’t think he was ever a Christian as we would have described it back in my fundamentalist days, but he was certainly driven toward the God-concept.

Then he described how during his complete nervous breakdown, he was looking at his whole life and seeing connections with everything and started imagining that a God was behind it all. On the one hand it was scary as shit thinking about what he went through, and on the other hand it was quite a relief. His experience was like my day-to-day experience in the faith… trying to retain sanity and yet the mind trying desperately to reconcile reality with a concept that every event is a significant clue to God’s working.

Anyway, it only convinced me more that I need to treat religion – even my recent foray into a deist perspective – with the healthy respect it deserves. Like drugs or anything else, it needs to be tempered by self-control and a healthy intellect.

One of the cool things is that now that I have identified a root to a lot of my emotional problems, they are starting to disappear. I’m finding myself with a new stability… a new self-control. I’m learning not to let my mind wander endlessly toward religious concepts, trying desperately to figure it out. Instead, I’m trying to keep a healthy reservation and perspective on it all.

It was great that last night the two theological conversations that did come up… I didn’t start :) It felt freeing. The second one I didn’t even participate in, because it was between a drunk and the cab driver, but still… not getting involved probably felt like an ex-alcoholic walking into a bar and having the ability to refuse a drink.

I don’t check Ray Comfort’s blog anymore. I can turn on my computer without immediately going to religion blogs. I can go for hours without thinking about religion.

I’m seeing the light, and it was here all the time. I don’t need an external source of emotional stability, I have it right here… me. And if I can’t live with myself, what do I have?

- Josh

A room filled with people – the noise pulsating back and forth – each person caught up in the moment. At the edge of the room, several individuals dance their heart out to the deep bass of the jass music coming from the band in front of me. I make eye contact several times with an extremely cute girl who slowly makes her way my direction and ends up standing next to me. I freeze. I don’t know what to say. I don’t want to say anything.  So I don’t hit on her – even though I knew in my gut she wanted me to, her arm brushing mine.

It’s just too much. The whole thing is. Too many bodies, too many faces, too much noise, too much energy to figure it all out. Too many voices, inflections in voices, too many relationships and friends, too many styles of clothing… I feel like I’m in complete overload mode and I can’t handle it. I want to find a chair in a corner and just sit and watch people for an hour… because then I know I will feel comfortable about everything and then I could rock the party with cool confidence and approach anyone out of the blue.  I’ve been that way before, but not with new groups of people!

Every half an hour or so I have to walk to the other quiet room. Each person’s face in that pulsating, crowded room tells a story – a past – and reveals a whole set of emotions and intentions and, in many ways, I feel like I can see through it all. I’m rarely surprised when someone tells me something about themselves… in fact I can often predict things about people and their intentions and on many occasions it has made people mad, confused, or scared about me. But when there are that many faces, it is just too much… too much information to figure out. I don’t know how to handle it.

But tonight, I was trying desperately to enjoy the party like everyone else around me… and I did, but only by getting away from the group almost every 15-20 minutes… into the other quiet room to sit and think seemingly about next to nothing for five minutes. And then I could go back into the party.

And I’ve been trying to figure out why this is. Why do I feel this way? Why do parties and large groups of new people in particular drain all the energy and comfort from me, when it seems like others gain momentum and energy by large groups of people. Sure everyone feels nervous, but I’m not nervous. Honestly, I’m perfectly confident in myself, but I just lack all comfort and energy for some reason – like I’m almost autistic in a way.  Why do I always feel complete overload for the first hour or so in a large group of people and then relax – completely independent of my alcohol intake?

And then it clicked. I figured it out. I figured it out tonight, and it’s a great discovery for the new year.

I’ve always seen things or picked up things that other people never notice. My dad is often the same way.

So here is my theory. When I see large groups of new people, my mind is taking so much information in it just freezes up and doesn’t know what to do. I get uncomfortable and feel like I’m an actor on a stage – like I am not myself. I feel like I have to fake my responses to everything because I honestly don’t know how to relate to someone else when I feel like I am in that overload mode. I have to get away and let my mind process everything I have not yet consciously noticed. I can know something but until I get away and let my mind process it in silence I don’t have confidence in that knowledge.  Once it is processed, I am okay, but I can’t just jump into a situation like that. I can’t do it, without feeling completely and utterly overwhelmed and even somehow bored.

Anyway, then I came home and read this article.

And that describes me to a T. I could not have said it better.

- Josh

What better way to end the year than with my top crushes list!

Here they are:

1. Katie Melua

2. Lily Allen

That’s it. I can’t think of any others.

So here’s my top wish list for 2010:

1. Katie Melua

2. Lily Allen

3. Switch career to computer game design

4. Not think about religion

5. Become famous for being clever

God, I’m in a weird mood.

Haha

- Josh

P.S. If you don’t have a crush on Katie Melua, something is wrong with you.

I’m not really sure why I’m writing this post… maybe a small part of me hopes it helps someone else out. “Let me… help you… help yourself” – or so it goes.

I’ve probably had some pretty whacked ideas in the past, and I hope this post doesn’t fall into that category. Here goes.

Growing up I always either suppressed my real feelings or let them out at the wrong times. Things only grew more and more conflicted as I got deeper into Christianity, but to some extent that is beside the point of this article. The point is that I had an agent that was teaching me to feel certain things and not feel others. Ultimately, I felt all of my emotions were either hijacked by these spiritual voices telling me what I was supposed to feel or suppressed by spiritual voices telling me that I was not supposed to feel a certain way. When emotions are a crime, you can get really fucked up.

So this last year I’ve been learning how to feel again. To feel what comes naturally without those constant urges to not feel that way or to feel differently or to fear certain potential feelings.

One way I have been doing this by letting myself address the exact feelings that I feel, even if they are slight. I used to sometimes stay home all evening and just… do nothing… just let myself feel whatever came to me. Sometimes this lead to extreme anger at people in my past who I felt had hurt me and yelling or cursing them in the privacy of my apartment. Sometimes it lead to getting drunk, other times it lead to going out and drinking at random bars, and other times I would just spend all evening watching porn.

My point is that I let myself feel exactly what I needed to feel in a safe way. Eventually this lead to be open and honest with individuals… letting my emotions be known. And finally that came to a head recently when I really let my parents – in particular my dad – know what I genuinely thought. The emotions were thick and heavy, but I had to get it out.

Since then, I’ve been so much calmer. Something has definitely changed. I feel more alive, more ready to face the world. I find myself feeling more in control of my environment – and even my own emotions. I’m sleeping better and dreaming. I feel feelings I haven’t literally felt since I was probably a child… from emotionally connecting with the tiniest gusts of wind to the excitement of a phone call or just enjoying my little side hobbies in a way I haven’t in a long time.

So I guess what I’m saying is that being honest with yourself about exactly what you feel – even if it scares you – is important. Life is too short to live, but not feel. And if you want to feel, you have to be honest about what you feel and what you want to feel. But you’ll never feel what you want to feel until you acknowledge exactly what you do feel… right now.

If you can’t trust your feelings when you feel like absolute shit or hate the entire world, you won’t truly trust your feelings when you are feeling marvelous – you’ll be suspicious of them and never truly enjoy the beauties of life.

This is especially true for those of us who were Christians are are dealing with all the hijacking that religion did in our lives. You probably have a lot of feelings you don’t want to admit because admitting it will make you feel dirty, and you don’t want to feel dirty. But you need to feel dirty. You need to acknowledge it and recognize it for what it is: conditioning by a group of self-righteous ignorant pricks who wanted you to feel dirty for being normal. Who fucking cares what they thought? This is your only life. Feel it. Better to feel like shit, and feel something, than to ignore it and feel nothing at all. Find a safe place, scream at the top of your lungs. Write out all your awful feelings on a piece of paper. Make a dart board with your pastor’s face. I don’t care, but make sure you find a safe way to express what you truly feel.

Why?

So that you can move on and not feel that – or have to suppress it – anymore. You might be surprised, thinking expressing what you truly feel will unleash a massive beast that will consume you. The honest truth is that you only feed the beast and make it bigger and more dangerous when you don’t let it out regularly.

Oh, one final thing. Most people (that I have met) love emotional honesty, even if it is what they don’t want to hear. Why? Because often they are already suspicious that you feel that way anyway and being honest with them helps them move on too.

Oh, one more thing. If you’ve been suppressing your feelings for a long time, don’t be surprised if you don’t know what you feel about a lot of things. Don’t worry, you’ll figure it out.

Anyway, my probably worthless $0.02…

Cheers,

- Josh

So I’ve made a discovery. After year after year after year of studying philosophy and – more often than studying – thinking about it, I have come to realize that the majority of philosophical questions are the result of mental illusions.

We all know about visual illusions and the seeming fixation that men of time past had on them. In particular it seems that men in the middle ages would spend countless hours creating these illusions that presented paradoxes. Here is one example of a visual illusion:

Which is this?

a) A vase

b) Two faces

c) An optical illusion specifically “designed” to confuse your mind into a paradox.

Of course, the question is invalid. The answer is:

d) All of the above

As we can see, a visual paradox can be created by presenting a question about an image that contains a contradiction.

I think the same thing can happen when asking philosophical questions, and I think that is exactly what happens when people ask the supposedly most important philosophical question of all time:

Why is there something rather than nothing?

This is a silly question that contains its own answer.

Let’s break the question down. At its heart, the question is asking:

What is the something that caused something to exist rather than nothing?

Now, let’s say we find something. Something is now “something that caused something to exist rather than nothing”.

Have we answered the question? Nope.

Replacing something with “something that caused something to exist rather than nothing”, the original question has now become:

What is the something that caused something that caused something to exist rather than nothing to exist rather than nothing?

As you can see, we could keep this up… forever. Ad infinitum. This question is similar, almost mathematically, to the golden ratio, which is a continued fraction.

The reason that there is an illusion created by this question is that the question “Why is there something rather than nothing?” is based on two contradictory premises. Those premises are:

a) Nothing could have existed at one point, but did not.

b) Something cannot come from nothing.

The mental illusion of the question is created by the fact that the premises (a) and (b) contradict each other. Why? Because if something cannot come from nothing (if b is true…), then because something exists it is absolutely impossible that nothing could have ever been a possibility (…then a is false).

The answer? Nothing was either never possible or something can come from nothing, therefore the question is invalid.

So when a theist makes some bold claim that God is the answer to the question “Why is there something rather than nothing?” they have completely missed the point, which can be demonstrated with the question:

Why was there God instead of nothing?

- Josh

This post is -  confession! – mostly a matter of possibilities and imagination, and not science. It works directly from my previous post in which I admitted I am now a deist.

When scientists do calculations on an atomic level, they – for the most part – disregard the gravitational force. The reason for this is that the gravitational force is so tiny compared to the forces that are at work on an atomic level that the force is – for all practical purposes – undetectable at that scale.

However, recent discoveries (forgive my laziness, you’ll have to look them up yourself) have found that a similarly related effect happens when measuring the gravitational force. There is an almost imperceptible tertiary influencing factor at work in the theories of relativity and gravity. As gravitational pull weakens on an object, time also changes on that same object relative to the gravitational pull. As such, satellites have to have their clocks regularly adjusted to align them with clocks on earth because the strength of gravity at such heights is less. I don’t know about all the details, but bear with me – the exact and numerically accurate nature of this effect is not necessary for my point.

However, I’ve seen articles that show they have discovered hitches. Over time, the calculations no longer add up. There is this tiny – almost imperceptible – problem with the calculations we have today. There is obviously some sort of minute force at work out there, almost as imperceptible at the level of planets, moons, and stars as the gravitational pull is at an atomic level.

My point should be quite clear. The forces or – dare I say – even concepts at work in that which exists are not necessarily scientifically testable because they may not always be perceptible. Our own ability to measure and perceive possibilities are as limited on a solar system level as they would be if – say – we existed on the surface of a quark.

So.

Quite simply, I have restored in full my sense of awe at the possibilities of that which may exist. My belief in God extends quite naturally from this – in that even though we may be able to scientifically show that belief in gods is a completely natural phenomena and unfounded (including my own), there is still room for recognition of the incomprehensible which, when comprehended by our limited understanding, takes the natural formulation in the human mind of a Being. In other words, I recognize from the start that my comprehension of this Thing is wrong, and yet somehow find that a belief in it is closer to the truth – despite my recognition that I will be in error no matter how I describe this – than somehow attempting to ram all the data in my head into a singular category of scientific and mathematically predictable calculations.

The God I believe in is to that which I know what consciousness is to brains or the gravitational force is to atoms. It is subtle, sublime, and – from the start – incomprehensible. However, I must confess that the simple recognition of the possibility is quite settling of the spirit. Somehow being able to say “this [the universe as we know it] cannot be it” has renewed my spirit.

I now have an Entity upon which I can fix my spiritual gaze for the time being, rather than destroying over and over the old conception of God which had worn out its welcome like an old wineskin that had already burst.

I’ll stop beating my dead horse and get a new one, even though this one is bound to die someday too.

- Josh

It happened. I don’t know when or quite how, but it definitely – yep – it happened.

I’m a deist.

To some extent, I don’t think there was any particular cause-effect chain that lead me to this conclusion, nor was there any particular logical progression in my thoughts. I take that back… there were several lines of congruent thinking that converged at this near singularity in my conscious experience of this world.

The first line of thinking is one of scale. There is no correlation in the possibilities of that which exists between the parts and the whole. If all you knew was molecules, you would not grasp the possibilities that lie by the combination of said molecules (solar systems, brains, delicious words on a computer screen that evoke qualia in minds that read them). If all you knew was neurons, you would not grasp the possibilities that lie by the combination of neurons. Could anyone grasp the possibility of consciousness by studying a neuron? Now, for a moment, imagine that consciousness is nothing compared to a possible effect we have not yet even imagined. This line of thinking has opened my mind to the realization that possible existing entities is probably, for all practical purposes, endless and incomprehensible.

The second line of thinking is somewhat pragmatic. If belief in a deity resolves the gaps in ones understanding and thus brings a greater sense of peace, then by all practical means a man should resign himself to this belief. I used to hold this erroneous assumption that understanding the truth would always bring greater peace. But then I realized that this was actually wrong and based on theistic assumptions. My assumption was that if a God exists, He is truth and He does not want us to accept a lie and acceptance of a lie will somehow bring a lack of peace because that which I hold to be true in my mind and that which I experience in reality will be in conflict. However, this somewhat took into account a theistic view of God in which God wants or does not want us to do or be something and somehow brings about a lack of peace as a result. However, I’ve come to realize that believing things that may not be true can be healthy. Consider hope for a moment. It may very well be true that there is no hope in a given situation. However, hope is extremely pragmatic for by its very existence it may bring about the needed energy and time to produce the effect it seeks.

The third line of thinking is closely related to the last but psychologically based. According to studies scientists have done, people who are unrealistically optimistic tend to be less depressed. After all, when you think about it, optimism is unrealistic. However, a man who spends his life a complete slave to Murphey’s Law (“that which can go wrong will go wrong at the very worst moment”) will never accomplish anything. Realistic outlooks may be objective, but they can be crippling. By attempting to be realistic a person may lose the imagination to consider alternatives and thus, quite frankly, be unrealistic. The andromeda galaxy may very well one day destroy this beloved planet of ours. So what? If all men focused on this and just accepted it, their imaginations could stagnate before conceiving a very real possibility of saving our beloved mankind from this fate. Optimism is healthy, even when it is not necessarily true.

The fourth line of thinking is one, more or less, of my own. It is this growing realization that nothingness was never possible. There is the classic philosophical question: “Why is there something rather than nothing?” I’ve come to realize this is a very stupid question that comes from a mental illusion. The question assumes that our something could not have come from nothing. Ok, fine, even the scientists who think that our universe came from nothing describe it by saying it was a result of a quantum fluctuation – so their nothingness isn’t very empty after all! Anyway, the question seems to assert this dilemma that nothing was at some point a very real possibility and something caused something to exist. But when you think about it, our mind is just trying to find the something that somehow brought about something instead of nothing. The mental trick, of course, is that if you ever found the answer to the question, it would only beg the question again as to how that something that brought about something instead of nothing existed instead of nothing: ad nauseum. It’s genuinely a stupid, short-sighted question. It’s even stupider when you realize that answering it with “God” only begs the question “why was there God instead of nothing?” Basically, I think the entire question is flawed, which is why no one has ever found an answer.

The smarter question is “why are things the way they are and not different?” The question is subtly asking the causes that brought about the current effects. With a question like this, we can learn something and by learning we can change the future. Not only is it a more intelligent question, but it is pragmatic.

The fifth line of thinking is logical. I’ve come to realize that my lack of belief in any type of deity seems somewhat to come from a fallacy of composition. We cannot study the parts and conclude that the whole is no greater than their combination. We can certainly figure out the pieces that make up everything we know (quarks, quarks, and energy) but that will never mean that all is no greater than that. We cannot conclude that a diety, if It exists, is quarks, quarks, and energy. It would also be fallacious to conclude that a deity is somehow related in scale to quarks or universes. To say a deity is bigger or smaller is ridiculous, other than to conjure up images of transcendence.

The sixth line of thinking is one of definition. The natural / supernatural distinction is taxing. If a deity exists then it is natural.

The seventh line of thinking is somewhat obtuse – even to me – I confess.  It is this realization that my experience of this world is incomprehensibly balanced and beautiful. Beauty itself is, of course, in the eye of the beholder and as such is not a sign of anything. If beauty is evidence for a benevolent God, then ugliness is evidence for a malevolent God. But the balance itself tells me something… it tells me that harmony is intrinsically a principle of our universe. Even the balance between suffering and joy is, in a way, revealing.

If there is no deity, I am sure the universe is not offended by my acceptance that there is one. If there is a deity, I am sure It is not offended by my misunderstanding It. If this deity is only in my mind, I accept it on pragmatic grounds, solely for the sake of the experience.

I accept the infinite possibility of the infinitely incomprehensible transcendence and therefore accept what men have dubbed God.

So, in a sense, I accept the deity of Thomas Edison, Einstein, and Jefferson and respect and revere it for what it is. Can anything be added or taken away from It by mere human misunderstanding?

- Josh