Soul Man? Part 2

I think the idea of a soul is not unusual, we don’t know what death is, and it is something we do not have control over. In the person of Jesus of Nazareth you have the story of a person who overcame death by his so-called resurrection. It does not bother the average believer in Jesus that he conveniently ascended to heaven to no longer be heard from or seen again; or at least until his "second" return. He symbolizes our desire to overcome our greatest enemy, death. Mankind have conquered almost everything on this planet except his death. I think it is our imagination and desire to be associated with something that is eternal and supreme. For example, If you listen to any contemporary gospel or "inspiration" station and if you listened to an average song that the words will be how god was worthy of worship because he is holy and if you asked yourself how do we know this is true, that there's a god who is holy and worthy of worship, to be honest we don't, I have yet seen a sea part or a talking snake. I cannot fault Christianity or Islam because they give the answers to one of our greatest fears, the fear of no longer existing. In Islam and Christianity you are given the promise of immortality, which I think is wishful thinking and nothing more. I hate to be the bearer of reality but this is it folks, there is no second chance, no reincarnation, no resurrection, yes your atoms will be absorbed into the natural ecosystem like other natural things but the you who you think you are, this egocentric identity will end when the brain dies. We need to get over the fear of death and live this life, as Epicurus allegedly stated "Death means nothing to us, for when we are, death isn't and when death is, we are not" and that's the way it is. Think about it...

I'm a soul man?

Do we have a soul? What do we mean by soul? Soul is defined as the animating and vital principle in humans, credited with the faculties of thought, action, and emotion and often conceived as an immaterial entity. (The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition. Houghton Mifflin Company, 2004. ) I don't think we have a soul. The reason I conclude this, if I did not have a brain and nervous system then I as a Homo Sapien Sapien could neither function nor have knowledge or memory of who I am. For example four years ago, Terry Schiavo, a brain damaged woman was unable to feed herself and after two weeks she died from dehydration and starvation because her brain and nervous system could not animate her limbs to feed or hydrate herself. Also, Alzheimer's disease shut down the brain activity over-time until the brain cell shrinks and stop signaling the heart and other key body functions via the nervous system and thus the person die. For an excellent presentation on the brain and Alzheimer see www.alz.org. If I am wrong then I don't lose anything except I had an incorrect conclusion. Apologists like Dr Peter Kreeft and Gary Habermas believe in an immortal soul may disagree with me, but what evidence do they provide that is factual. There is no evidence for an immortal separate soul, because if there was then a person with severe brain damage would be unaffected by the damage, they would be aware of who they are and should somehow be able to communicate this. It is a fact that if the brain is damaged or diseased then my ideas, memory, knowledge, identity of who I think I am will change. This is significant because if I am right then I need to live this life because I won't exist as the personality or identity I currently am because once my brain activity cease at death then my conception of myself dies. Think about it....

To Hell with Hell

Yesterday I was reading one of my favorite blogs called Debunking Christianity which was founded by John Loftus a former minister who is now an atheists. The item on his blog that I want to blog about is a film I watched as a child called the Burning Hell by a Southern Baptist minister who died in 2005 named Estus Pirkle, the film was produced in 1974. I remember as a child my mother who is a minister would have the movie delivered to the house on a movie reel, and she would rent a projector and show it at the small Pentecostal church where she was the pastor. I remember the dread I felt when I would come home from school and see the reel in the house. I remember one year I happen to get home from school before my mother and the reel was waiting at our front door, I took and hid the reel. My mother called the film company and asked them if they sent it and I had to sneak it back to the front door. The scenario was two bikers stopped by a minister's (who they did not know was a minister) house to talk about bible prophecy, it is really not clear why they wanted to stop by a stranger's house to talk about Jesus and bible prophecy. Anyway it appears that both bikers where attending a new church that taught the hell wasn't real but here on earth and a message for the modern age. Then Estus gets up pick up his bible and tell them this bible teaches of a literal hell and that they were going there if they did not change their beliefs, and by the way he just happened to be preaching on the subject of hell for his Sunday sermon. One of the bikers got upset, which I would have too, if someone claimed that I was going to hell, like he knew, he just believed it was true, because he read it in a book. Anyway the biker tell the preacher if he goes to hell he was going to have a party because all of his friends would be there. The other biker apologizes to the minister and they leave. The biker, who got upset and made the partying in hell statement, was driving all erratic and reckless and he wound-up dying in an accident, while his friend just happened to have bike problems and had stopped. The biker leaves his dead friend at the accident site and goes to the minister church (which he never told him where the church was), leaving his dead decapitated friend on the side of the road like road kill. This is one of the worse written movies I have ever seen. This movie scared the heck out of me as a 8 to 10 year old child, you see these demons who looked like the Kiss rock band, people where screaming and all kinds of things where happening showing people who died in the bible stories and went to hell. As I reflected on this movie, I thought about the Christian or Muslim gods (both believe in god and hell), and if hell existed and if god would send people there, god is worst than any recorded despot or serial killer in the history of humanity, this would include Adolf Hitler, Mao Zedong, Pol Pot, Stalin, and Rwanda, Bosnia, or Darfur atrocities. If a god who send people to hell existed he is more worst than any of the genocide mass murderers, because when the genocide victims died, their suffering ended. However, god will allow his enemies, nonbelievers, and those who happen to believe in another god, to be tortured for eternity, I don't know how long eternity is, but it is claimed to be forever, with screaming and gnashing of teeth, were the worms does not die, they eat on you forever, just because you thought for yourself and was skeptical of the fall of man, Jesus, and thought the stories of the bible was just another mythology, or you believed in another god by accident of birth. The bottom line is none of the atrocities of known history could not even hold a candle to the biblical or Islamic god, the one who send infidels to hell. Oh but he loves you... Think about it.

Black Socates

Meaning of Life Part 2

I think one of the best quotes I have every read came from a debate between William Lane Craig and Dr. Ray Bradley in 1994. In the Q and A section of the debate an audience member asked Dr. Bradley if there's no God then what's the meaning of life. Dr. Bradley answered "The quickest way I can answer is to invite you to consider the following analogy. You open a book, a good novel perhaps or a history. You read it. What do you read? You find all sorts of sentences that in the book have meaning. The book comes to an end. There's a period at the last page. There's nothing more thereafter. Does this mean that because the book--your life by away of analogy--has come to end, there is no meaning in life? On the contrary, I want to suggest the meaning of life lies in the little things that we do for each other in life. It lies in the texture of everyday existence. It does not lie in yearning for something in an afterlife. If it lay in the latter, if this life had meaning only by virtue of there being another life afterwards which gave it meaning, then what is the meaning of that life? It would have to be followed by a still a third, and so on." The entire debate with the exception of the Question and Answer section can be heard on Common Sense Atheism , this site have over 400 plus debates.

God's Problem a short review.

Recently I listen to an audiobook by Dr Bart D. Ehrman, a renown Bible Scholar and Professor of New Testament at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, called God's Problem: How the Bible Fails to Answer Our Most Important Question--Why We Suffer. I enjoyed the audiobook, in it he shows that the Bible offers at least five answers that often conflict with each other. 1) The prophets think God sends pain and suffering as a punishment for sin and also that human beings who oppress others create such misery; 2) the unknown writers who tell the Jesus story and the Joseph stories think God works through suffering to achieve redemptive purposes; 3) the writers of Job view pain as God's test; 4) the writers in parts of Job and Ecclesiastes conclude that we simply cannot know why we suffer; and 5) the apocalyptic belief (a dualistic ideology) that was popular during Jesus' ministry in which suffering is caused by the forces of evil (the Devil and his angels) and therefore, God is not responsible. When the kingdom of God comes, God will make things right, and the righteous will inherit the earth. He shows how these answers fall short of answering why we suffer, especially if you take into account gratuitous suffering of innocent infants like those who died in the Nazi's death camps, who were cooked alive in the fires of the Nazis when they did not have enough time to kill them with their mothers in the gas chambers; or the children who died when the 2004 Tsunami that occurred in the Indian Ocean which killed thousands of infants and children; and those infants and children who were killed by God's commandment in the old testament flood, and God's authorized genocides of land claiming by the Israelite Armies. One of the things that really hit home for me that Dr Ehrman brought out was about praying or giving thanks for your food. If you are thanking god for giving you your food, you are at the same time implying that god failed to provide food for someone else, why don't god provide food for the starving infants and children in the refugee camps in Darfur today or even the 25,000 people who die daily from hunger and hunger related diseases and illnesses; why didn't god provide food in Ethiopia during its great famine of the 1980's (he did in the Old Testament for the children of Israel in the desert, when he provided manna and quail). This is why I left the faith of Christianity, because I don't see any evidence for the god it claims to exist, a personal god who is active in the world would be a failure if such a god existed. Think about it...

It is what it is

I think at the moment that life is its own point, and to me that is significant enough. I came to this conclusion: because if life pointed to something else then what is the point of what it is pointing to? For example, if I say the point of life is to go to an afterlife paradise some call heaven or suffer in a torture chamber called hell, I need to ask what is the point of heaven or hell? If someone say to praise and worship a god, still I would continue to ask, and what is the point of that? And to think about the torture chamber of hell, what is the point of that? ( Especially if it does not have a rehabilitation function.) An analogy would be a fly being conceived from an endless chain of ancestors for billions of years, just to hit my windshield, was that the fly’s point? Think about it, for billions of years if the fly ancestors had not met and copulated with the next fly, avoided being food for whatever its natural predators are; if this fly ancestors prior to passing on their genes had died before passed on their genes then this fly would have not existed. All of these string of events happen just to see their lineage end on my windshield, is that the point of life? I think the point (if there is a point) of the fly was to live and be a fly nothing more. The point of a human is to live and be a human (period) nothing more. As a result, if someone ask me: Where did I come from, why am I here and what am I here for, I know how I would answer. Where did I come from? I would reasonably answer that everything in the universe is either matter or energy, and from science I understand that they are two forms of the same thing and that something has always existed, so I did not come from any where, I emerged from the existing universe. I exist because I think, therefore I am, and thus I reasonably conclude that I am a form of matter-energy or as Carl Sagan stated we're "star-stuff contemplating star-stuff". In other words, if there is a point to life it would be that we are one of the many ways the universe is aware of itself. I come from the union of my parents and every ancestor that preceded them; I received half of my genes from each. Why am I here? I am here because the conditions for existence exist; if they didn't exist then I would not exist. What am I here for? I am here, if lucky, to pass on my genes to the next generation. MOST IMPORTANTLY, I AM HERE TO LIVE, TO EXIST, Exist means to stand out, stand forth or emerge. I think its best summed up by Epicurus for he stated about life and death, "Death is nothing to us, since when we are, death has not come, and when death has come, we are not" or to put it into today terms or slang: Death is nothing to fear because when I am alive I aint dead and when I'm dead I aint alive so why should I fear death. The point of a thing is what the thing do (so the point of life is to live), and that’s the way it is, or I would say "It is What it Is". Think about it...

Supernatural vs a Natural Uncaused Caused and Occam Razor

I just read something that I have been thinking about and it deals with a naturalistic view versus a super-naturalistic view of the cause of the universe and Occam Razor. Occam Razor simply means when you have two competing ideas that equally explains an observation go with the one that requires less explanation or the shorter explanation. In both ideas it is believed that the universe has a self-contained uncaused cause; in the naturalistic concept the universe itself is the self-contained uncaused cause while the super-naturalistic concept is a god is the self-contained uncaused cause of the universe, and thus Occam Razor would mean the naturalistic view should be accepted because it is the shorter explanation because of the one additional explanation of god for the theistic view. In other words, naturalism advocates the universe is itself the self-contained uncaused cause; while super-naturalism advocates that a supreme being is the self-contained uncaused cause. Now you have added something that requires an additional explanation: what is a supreme being?, who is the supreme being?, what evidence does god give for this supreme being’s existence? (I refuse to use a gender for god.) In all honesty both view may be false, we simply don‘t know, however I digress one of them is true because if a third alternative is given it would either be natural or supernatural. I too believe that there is an uncaused cause, because you would have to get to a point where there is something that was uncaused or you would have an infinite regression which is meaningless, because you would never explain anything, however using Occam Razor one would lean towards the universe itself being the self-contained uncaused cause because it requires one less step for explanation., therefore I accept the naturalistic point of view.