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I need a wise man to tell me the truth. Is there anyone wise out there who could talk to me meaningfully about god, the purpose of life and the ways to change? I'm still such a child. I need a grownup to make it all OK
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I too have no god.
And there was a point in my life where I realized that internally consistent frames of knowledge, "methods" of knowing, like science or even voodoo, could all, through their descriptions of the world, produce viable knowledge. Whether this knowledge is consistent with the big R is irrelevant to the person experiencing it, because their experience of an event is parasitic on their method of description. Edict vs. Emic explanations of the world are similar in that they are both approximations of R, but dissimilar in that edict explanations offer high resolution descriptions into the mechanics of an event, where emic explanations offer vague, high level descriptions into the results of some mechanical process: "The sun god is angry with us. He has spoiled our crops as punishment.", as opposed to "global warming - caused by runaway pollutants such as...and have ultimately led to droughts...etc."
With long and careful consideration, some investigation of the Incompleteness Theorem and an assload of relativism, I decided that
a) no emic explanation is any more valid than any other emic explanations. As such, it would be unfair and even unethical for me to openly criticize a group for their beliefs. Plus it's just rude, don't ya think?
b) much insight into the nature of human beings can be found by exploring ideas and behavior which occur cross-culturally and independently of geographical location and history. Religion is a human universal, and this suggests that religious experience and the proclivity to describe the universe in this fashion is inherent to us. E. O. Wilson claims that since human beings have been recording their thoughts and ideas, there have been on the order of 100,000 distinct religions. It is not unlikely that each of their constituents had what we might refer to as "religious experiences" or religious epiphanies, and given that most religions are mutually exclusive - taking two major religions, one cannot simultaneously be a Jehova's Witness and a Hindu - it is extremely unlikely that any single religion could provide spiritual answers for someone of a scientific bent, since such contradictions usually agitate that person's mind. Rather, it seems more likely that the person would find answers they seek by exploring religion itself, and by carrying out epistemic investigations. Also, given a above, there is nothing "wrong" about settling into some religion and searching for answers there. Most scientists I know are far more comfortable with Eastern religions.
Still, a high resolution, mechanistic investigation is in order, provided we remember that science only makes approximations of R, and the reduction of one's experience of say, "God" or "love" to a series of chemical reactions in the brain does not in any way make the experience less valid or prove in any fashion that it is somehow false and not what the person claims it to be. (The name/object model of rationalization is a problem for too many of us. Sometimes we go too far. To use a weak example, an unmarried and celibate Buddhist monk is not a "bachelor" merely because the word's definition technically describes him. If we ignore this and decide that a celibate Buddhist monk is a bachelor after all, any ad hoc inferences we make about his new classification would become increasingly inadequate the more we explore them.)
c) there is so much more, but I don't want to babble all over your journal and I have to run now anyhow.
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