Muse – Another Religious Musing

Yep, poking at that topic again. One I have no real taught experience in, having drawn all I know off reading the works of others on multiple sides of the equation. There are those who go all theological, those who go all scientific and those who mix it up in strange ways with a little of both and something else.

Me, I go for the most basic terms I can manage. Ultimately, I believe no one knows enough to prove the existence or nonexistence of a God to anyone save themselves or those who are willing to listen and who already hold a lighter version of said person’s beliefs within them. Usually.

When it comes right down to it, if you believe, you’ll believe. If you don’t, you won’t. To watch ‘high power’ theists and atheists debate is a bit like watching people beat each other with foam bats. It’s amusing, few people really get hurt and the net effect for the participants is effectively nil. No one ever changes their minds, save in a few extreme cases.

A recently RCed entry by Atheist Under Ur Bed was an interesting read. Taking a rather impressive article rebuffing several points of atheist reasoning against God. It was relatively simple to invalidate the theist remarks in return, resuming the eternal cycle.

The original article was quite confusing at points, delving into time and space, different dimensions and the like with half explanations that only work if you know a few things the individual in question took as facts to base his arguments off of. Overall, it can convince by generally impressing the reader, but beyond that is a lingering sense of doubt in that the arguments aren’t quite basic enough for the layman to truly understand save in the most basic of terms.

And currently there is no real logical layman’s proof for the existence or nonexistence of God. No one has tried to make it because its impossible to make something convincing and simple, unless one is convinced by ‘God exists’ itself.

Ultimately, this is a matter for the individual. We don’t know if God exists. It he does, then we don’t know if he’s good, bad or somewhere in the middle. Some reasoning suggests it’s impossible for him to be all good, but that is simply by our definition of good, which is subjective to the human experience. And God could be anything but human. Even if we did know what God’s nature was, we couldn’t know his intent. Why did he make us? Why does he ‘allow evil’ and more.

One interesting bit form the article AUUB dissected was that it shifted the blame for evil from the creator to the creations as we were created with the free will to do as we will for good or evil. That’s all nice and good, but that doesn’t explain when a child is born with a disease or when a child is miscarried, which is beyond human action to prevent. It doesn’t explain natural disasters, which strike with the cold indifference of an unthinking force.

But then we could argue the why and why not of things like this for a decade and likely come to the same impasse of a fundamental lack of any real data that anyone can agree upon as factual. Personally, I have no faith in any proof that is quoted from the bible. As far as I’m concerned, it’s as likely a creation of man as a creation of God through man. There is no way to prove it right and I wager parallels to ancient times are simply what was written in as it was made over however long it was written and updated oh so long ago.

It is with that I will end this little foray into the unexplainable. I remain agnostic. I don’t know if God exists, I don’t know if he doesn’t. I don’t believe that I need to kiss up to God to get into his good graces if he does. Personally, any God I would worship would have to accept what I do in this life as my statement of faith to certain principals. If he sees fit to punish me for the small things I do wrong rather than the things I do right, there won’t be a whole heck of a lot I could do about it.

But I know I won’t do things based off the faulty assumptions of those who think themselves intelligent enough to speak in the stead of an inscrutable higher being of at least fantastic, if not incredible powers. Talk about vanity. If God wants to really tell me what I need to know, he’ll tell me in ways I can understand, because if he is all powerful he’ll know exactly what I understand.

And I am listening.