How I see it (part 3)

[[This is a blog series - if something doesn't make sense, wait until the series is finished]]

And as such, I have often tried to explain these kinds of things to people who attribute them so, and encounter a closed mind (of which I have been a victim during my religious hay-day), and an unwillingness to even consider there may actually be a physical explanation for things.

It wasn't until I lost my job for the first time, not of my own volition (fired) back in 2006 that I realized what some people tended to do with religion. I was sitting at home, having talked to some people, and found that there were those out there that advised I "pray for God to provide me a job." Pray for a job? Like, ask God to up and give me one? Where's the personal responsibility in that? I've heard it said before that "God is not a cosmic bellhop."

That being the case, there had to be some participation on my part to make this effort come to fruition: getting my resume out there. The odds of me landing a job, simply sitting on my couch praying day and night were extremely slim. Someone would have to do the leg work - whether it was me actively looking, or someone who knew me and my situation actively looking. It wasn't just going to fall into my lap through prayer.


Several other times throughout the past couple years, I've heard similar statements: "It's in God's hands." Or "It wasn't God's Will." And even something along the lines of "You're not asking for the right things."

It wasn't until just recently that I had heard similar after-the-fact statements in a religious discussion on my website, www.the-spot.net, dealing with Job and how God let Satan do whatever he wanted to him, that things became clear. That clarity was how convenient it is to say that something is the cause, after the fact, when really there is a direct cause before it.

If someone dies of cancer, there are 2 ways of looking at it:
1.) They couldn't beat it, and the disease destroyed their body.
2.) God called them home.

But what if they weren't a Christian? Did God call them home? Or did he decide it was time for them to go to Hell, so he pulled the plug. People seem to overlook that part of the scenario when they're at a funeral of someone they know never went to church, and didn't believe in God - they simply look at the crying family members' faces and lie to them about their relative "being in a better place." A lake of fire is a better place than what? Here on earth?

Consider Job from the Bible. Per the discussion on my website, started by others, not me, God let Satan mess with Job - took his job, his possessions, his wife, his family...everything Job had. Then in the end Job got everything back (different, but restored). And throughout it, Job didn't lose his faith.

The commonly voiced theme of the story says God knew Job would be faithful, and he let Satan do all that stuff because God is omniscient and knew Job wouldn't stray. If that's true, there is no Free Will. If it's not true, God isn't omniscient. If it's both true and false simultaneously - then either God knows all possible outcomes to any possible decision branch to infinity - or the story was written after-the-fact in order to prove a particular characteristic of a supreme being that the Bible is in the process of defining to the reader.

I provided the example on my website that back in July of 2008, I knew Obama would become president (for various observances of the national psyche). I also knew that the Health Care Bill would pass, for those same reasons. I could have easily said that I knew the future of both instances, and thus didn't need to vote for Obama, or need to write for encouragement of the Health Care Bill. On the other hand, if they had failed, they would not have shown up as examples in this discussion.

The same goes for various books of the Bible that are often used to pronounce something as definitively true. Saying that I know the future by telling this story is only knocked off its metaphoric-parallel to the book of Job and God by the fact that I am not a supreme being. Writing the story of Job after the fact, and attributing its outcome to God is the same thing as one of my friends writing a blog post about how I predicted the future president and the passing of legislative bills. Creating evidence to prove a case...aka circumstantial evidence.

Unfortunately, extrapolating this throughout the bible brings into question what other stories are circumstantial and written with the purpose of describing God, but after the fact. Nearly every book (if not all of them) in the Bible is written years, decades, sometimes hundreds of years after the fact. Some of them (like Job) are purely about a single person, with a major life lesson in them (and possible other smaller bits one could extract for themselves). In other literature, those life-lesson stories are called "fables." Jesus called them "parables."

So why is it that some people have to tout these stories as absolutely true, instead of a possible 40-chapter parable? And who told them these stories were true to begin with? And what basis did that person give for them being true?

[[Part 4 coming soon...]]

How I see it (part 2)

[[This is a blog series - if something doesn't make sense, wait until the series is finished]]

Consider this: all the time the earth has existed before you were born, you have no recollection of. That is BILLIONS of years of things existing prior to your cognitive recognition that anything could exist.
Now consider this: our life span is merely 120 years tops...often less - far less.
Finally consider this: when you die, without religion in the picture, there is no more cognitive recognition of existence. There is no realization that you are dead...there is no realization that you were ever even alive. There is no realization period - everything in the world will go on without you, and you will not be the wiser. People will continue to be born, and die, and you will have spent your one blip of life doing things that were supposed to make you happy.

What a bleak picture that paints. Rationally thinking, though, it begs the questions - what if religion was put into place to help people cope with such a bleak result to life? What if people knew this was what happened, but in order to console others they conjured up a place of happiness and joy to give people something to look forward to when they died?

This happens to be the premise of a movie called "The Invention of Lying" but there was a time before that movie was even released that I was contemplating such a possibility.

Consider all the rules in the Old Testament that the people and priests had to follow. The long list of things that were unclean to eat (pigs, aquatic animals with out the combination of fins *and* scales, buzzards, rabbits, hawks, camels, etc) usually were carriers of disease or created health concerns. Sleeping with relatives and being gay produced genetic disorders and/or transmitted diseases. Disobeying elders, or authorities, created chaos for a civilization. Worshiping other gods and introducing other religions into the society undermined those which were put into place to maintain order and consistency.

If read from a worldly point of view, it appears that the rules of the Old Testament were to get people into some kind of civilized fashion after having just come out of an environment of slavery and thrust into complete freedom. Such freedom to do and be whatever you want requires constraint or the result is bad...like a teenager moving out on their own for the first time, and realizing they can stay up as late as they want, go out to eat as often they want, and buy whatever they want - only to find responsibility waiting for them in the morning, and when bills come due.

Consider the New Testament: it's mostly about loving each other and not focusing so much on the Law of the Old Testament. After generations of generations had dealt with the Law for so long, the ones who prided themselves on keeping the Law took it upon themselves to make sure others did as well as they had.

Jesus came, saying in Matthew 5:17-20 that he did not come to abolish the law but to fulfill it...that the law was still in place, but his role was to provide an example of how to live according to the law and what that kind of lifestyle should look like.

He spends much of his time teaching people how to love each other and how to forgive. He also spent a lot of time explaining that in order to get to heaven you have to believe in Him, and get others to believe, and also still live according to the rules. He doesn't go into what heaven is like all that much - and if the thought is followed that it's simply a reward-stimulus, it makes sense not to describe it any other way to that to say it's amazing beyond words. After all, I am not interested in going to heaven to spend all my time singing church hymns and being with my family...that sounds pretty boring and stressful to me. I'm also not interested in the proposed alternative either.

The reason I'm not interested in being around this stuff is the people that I've been around here on Earth. It's so often misconstrued that it is the Job of a Christian to go and recruit people into Christianity, no matter what it takes, and whether they want to or not. I've seen it attempted nicely, through guilt trips, and through insults. I've rarely seen it actually be successful though. Someone has to be looking for something else out of life to take on a religion and belief factor. As an academically-minded person, there are too many things that offer more realistic explanations to the very things people attribute to be Works of God. And as such, I have often tried to explain these kinds of things to people who attribute them so, and encounter a closed mind (of which I have been a victim of during my religious hay-day), and an unwillingness to even consider there may actually be a physical explanation for things.

How I see it (part 1)

[[This is a blog series - if something doesn't make sense, wait until the series is finished]]

I am a programmer and system developer.
It is my job to understand how systems interact, and how data relationships are interconnected.
It is my nature to dissect things and reassemble them to learn how these relationships exist.
I am actually in the process right now, at work, developing a piece of software to manage the intrinsic relationships between our ecommerce store platform, and how we manage our site.

It is with this perspective of dissection, and the culmination of certain bits of knowledge, experiences, and observations that I have taken a serious look at what it is I believe with regard to religion, and what I do not.

Such an investigation was spurred by observing several people I had known anywhere from a couple years to my entire life...having been with the assumption that we were in agreement on many aspects of our upbringing.

The turning point for myself was the morning of January 22, 2009 - when I hopped on Facebook to find that everyone I had shared many ideals with were suddenly standing in opposition to what I considered a fair and inevitable event...the election of President Obama.

My primary concern was the status updates and twitter posts from people who had professed prior that they were Christians. However this morning, there was nothing but pure hatred coming from their mouth just as there was the morning after elections in November 2008.

I did not and still don't understand why this is the case - I can only conjecture that it is for the very same reason I considered it to be OK to shun people who did not believe as I did only a few years earlier.

It was over the course of the previous 6 months that I had finally realized that the very things I was taught to believe in was precisely in opposition from what this country was founded on.


Since I was a child, I was taught that I must go out and explain to people that how they are living their life is completely wrong in God's eyes - even if they were of another denomination than Baptist, it was still wrong...priority was on the people who didn't go to church, of course, but even non-Baptists were still subject to be living in sin.

I had no problem patching up the gaps in the Bible between what I had learned via science and what I had learned in church. To me, the idea was to bridge the gap with some kind of faith-based truth, grounded in the Bible.

If I came across people who didn't believe like me, I would just remove them from my life, which was fairly easy, since my step-dad provided such a great example of how to shun friends and family, and to live independently.


Fast forward to 2003, and you'll find me in the process of being kicked out of my parents' house after being pulled out of East Texas Baptist University. Why am I being kicked out? Because I had learned to question that which was presented as infallible truth by my parents. I felt the need to understand why things were being carried out the way they were because I had just spent the previous year and a half being required to make decisions for myself while living independently on a college campus.

During this time, my communications were cut from the people I had gone to church with, and I was made to go to a previously forbidden church (the Methodist Church with the woman pastor) by these same parents who forbade it. Over the course of 5 years, my mom and step-dad had changed from Baptist to Church of God, to non-Denominational, to a break-away church, to Methodist. This went completely against what I had been taught - but I figured if they were doing it, it was somehow OK.


Jump to 2005, and I had been kicked out in 2003, and living with my dad and step-mom for the following 2 years, trying to go to a previously visited church in Arlington, because I knew my mom & step-dad had gone there, so it must be an OK place to go. Unfortunately during the 2 years I attended it, I felt as if the point of it all was very meaningless. I had one semi-close friend there, and the sermons were not very applicative, and the Sunday school was equally weak.

I moved out on my own in August of 2005, and did not feel like it was worth the 25 minute drive to visit the church any more. I also did not want to try other churches for the awkward introduction phase - I simply wanted to go and be left alone, or just not go at all.

Instead, I watched the Science Channel almost exclusively, and learned a great deal about the world around me - nature, space, earth, and people. I learned how planetary systems form, how stars die, and even the projected time left for the sun's energy to burn.

It was during the next couple years that I came to a sobering conclusion: that without religion in the picture, one's life is as bleak as a speck of dust carried away in the wind.


Consider this: all the time the earth has existed before you were born, you have no recollection of. That is BILLIONS of years of things existing prior to your cognitive recognition that anything could exist.
Now consider this: our life span is merely 120 years tops...often less - far less.
Finally consider this: when you die, without religion in the picture, there is no more cognitive recognition of existence. There is no realization that you are dead...there is no realization that you were ever even alive. There is no realization period - everything in the world will go on without you, and you will not be the wiser. People will continue to be born, and die, and you will have spent your one blip of life doing things that were supposed to make you happy.

What a sobering thought about our petty existence in the universe.