Mr. Moderate

In the Bible, the Book of John, Chapter 8, verses 31-32 reads (more or less) like this:
8:31 Then Jesus said to those Judeans who had believed him, “If you continue to follow my teaching, you are really my disciples
8:32 and you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.”

In this essay, I will make the same claim that Jesus made, above. If you believe me, and you follow my teaching, “you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.”

Now, Jesus was trying to teach the Jews to be free from sin. But of course, my objective is to teach you to be free of sin too. In my case, you will be free of sin by recognizing it as an incoherent concept which cannot have any hold over you unless you willingly enslave yourself to the idea of sin. Once you reject the idea of sin, you are immediately free of sin, and of coercion by any church which preaches that you must do penance (usually by paying money) repeatedly for your sins, which the church will repeatedly assert you commit almost continuously when you are not at church doing penance (usually by paying money). Thus, this freedom I give you is economically valuable to you, as it gets you out of a lifetime of doing penance (usually by paying money).

In church-speak, sin is an offense against God, and once you commit sin, you are never safe from the wrath of God. And of course, just to ensure that nobody escapes from God’s money-making machine, we have the doctrine of “original sin,” where you are guilty of sin from the moment you are conceived. Now, does this make sense? What did you do to deserve that sort of a judgment? The answer is, you did nothing, and the judgment is unjust by any measure of reason.

And at that point, the battle is firmly joined. I have invoked reason against God, and that is the real sin here, because if there is one thing that God cannot abide it is reason. God hates reason, and wants reason banned from public discourse.

But the real irony here is that we cannot possibly “know God” without employing our rational faculties. The only possible way for humans to acquire knowledge is through personal experience, and most of us (or, I would assert that none of us) will never (ever) experience God. Nonetheless, grown adults continue to scare small children by telling them that they are going to Hell if they do not blindly believe in God and follow “God’s laws.” Well, what small child would not believe such a statement when it comes from so many authority figures in their lives? So, beginning as small children, we all “know God” through the atrocities that God threatens to commit against us, and through the stories of the atrocities He is claimed to have committed against others. But is that really the image of God we want our children to have?

I was raised in a liberal Christian church which taught us to sing “what a friend we have in Jesus,” and told us only happy stories about God. This is a much healthier image of God, in my opinion. But what is the truth? We have one group teaching Hellfire and Damnation and the other teaching love and forgiveness. It can’t be the same God, can it?

At some point we have to grow out of our tiny community and gain some knowledge about people who don’t go to our same church every Sunday. And for most of us, at some point we will feel the need to “know the truth.” But just how is it that we go about “knowing the truth?”

If we are lucky enough to take a class in philosophy (with at least a good lesson on epistemology), we will begin to understand that there is no way to know the truth except through personal experience and logical reasoning to analyze, filter, and draw truth from our personal experiences. This is exactly why so many people claim to “grow” after they go through a difficult set of personal experiences. They have learned some deeper truth about the world, and that constitutes “growth.” But we don’t get truth just from the knowledge we acquire through personal experience. We have to process that knowledge through the filter of logic and reason before we can distill truth from our experiences.

This situation is a universal truth in and of itself: it pertains at all times and all places for as long as humans have had reasoning abilities. For as long as humans existed, we could have personal experiences, but we could only distill those experiences into truth using reasoning abilities. Before the onset of reasoning abilities in the human mind, we were nothing more than animals, learning things by rote from our experiences, as any animal does.

And actually, there are two steps to humanity: the first is reasoning (as discussed above), and the second is communication. We not only need to reason about what the truth is, we need to communicate the results of our reasoning to others. It is our ability to share our experiences and the truths we have acquired from them that makes humans “special” among the animals. Terrance Deacon used this state of affairs to label humans “the symbolic species,” as our reasoning produces symbols which we then are able to communicate to others as our “special trick” among all animals.

But you do not need to be around humanity for very long to clearly understand that not everything communicated from one human to another human is necessarily the truth. In fact, for many reasons, we clearly understand that there are large quantities of untruth for which we find ourselves on the receiving end. Thus, we each need to exercise our own reasoning abilities to be able to sort out which bits of information are true and which bits are untrue, and what degree of (potential) truth or (potential) untruth we ought to assign any such bits of information. This is a difficult job for adults, but the younger the children involved are, the more impossible it is for those children.

And that is why religion chooses to indoctrinate the very young. You need to get them indoctrinated before they develop any reasoning abilities that might cause them to reject the truth of the religious stories you use to indoctrinate them. If a 50-year-old from Missouri who has never heard of Christianity is told that Jesus walked on water, that story will be rejected out of hand. But a 5-year-old from anywhere is totally gullible and will believe that story as younger children believe the world is largely a fantasy land and men walking on water fits in just fine with their fantasy worldview.

If we, as adults, decide to investigate the truth of some ancient claim, like Jesus walking on the water, we are immediately stuck. It isn’t like we can go into a physics lab and test Newton’s laws of gravitation (or some such idea from modern science). Science has it easy: it only concerns itself with things that can be observed, and perhaps controlled, by mankind on a repeating basis. Even “one of a kind” events can be investigated if proper scientific instrumentation is properly deployed in advance. But usually, this is not necessary, as even “one of a kind” events are really just individual instances of a species of events. Mt. St. Helens will never blow its top again (at least, not for a very long time), but other volcanoes will, and by studying numerous instances of volcanic eruptions, science can draw out some good true conclusions about how volcanoes work.

But even “one of a kind” events from ancient history can be studied through this process of reason. And, if we honestly question whether Jesus actually walked on water or if that was just a story invented to demonstrate the divinity of Jesus, most rational people would conclude (as President Thomas Jefferson did) that it was just a story. It takes some really good indoctrination to reject the conclusions of reason and adopt the miracle stories from the Bible as truth.

And therein is the rub: nothing compels us to use reason to reach conclusions. In fact, many of the modern God-believers have found it convenient to totally renounce reason since reason produces blasphemy. And from their perspective, that is really necessary, because when it comes right down to it, reason is the enemy of religion (and therefore God).

Part of me yearns for the peace of a compromise position. But theology and epistemology have been at war for thousands of years, and eventually one must exterminate the other. As I have shown, there really is no place in either world for the other.

So, to those of you who have read this far, you are left with a stark choice. You either must reject theology as reason demonstrates that theology is incompatible with epistemology, or else you must reject reason, as epistemology is (again) incompatible with theology. Of course, once you reject reason, you have gone back to being just another animal to be led to the slaughter by your local priest.