Who's To Say?

Thursday, March 24,

Dear Internet Diary,

Um, I am having serious doubts about the whole religion thing, I mean, whos to say any of its true. Help me figure out what the hell to do before i go fucking crazy

You need to read about how we find out what is true. You will soon discover that we have the scientific method and induction, neither of which can account for miracles or a god.

But we can know about the non-existence of contradictions. A loving God cannot, for instance, create and participate in eternal torture, yet the bible says it does. We also know that universal laws of logic cannot be violated. Nothing can be created or destroyed. All matter and energy that is in the universe was always here, and here it will stay. No being can pop the universe out of nothing. No being can do an action that requires time, like creating, if time does not exist. Yet the claim is that God created time. That is a contradiction and an absurdity.

We also have this: science is learning more and more about our origins and the processes that got us here. The fact is, natural processes are sufficient to explain things, making a creator or a giant invisible boss unecessary. Such a complex and huge thing and it's not a necessary fact? Telling!

Another problem is that here is nothing meaningful about this character "god" that makes it an object we can understand. All desciptive terms about it are what we call "negative defining" and "secondary attributes." We know what God ISN'T, but that tells us nothing about what it IS. We are told what it DOES, but it still doesn't tell us what it IS. When a word is meaningless, when there is no reason for it, when there is no empirical evidence for it, all we have left is faith.

Yet, is there good reason to have faith in this claim? There is if you respond to threats. If you're grown-up enough to not respond to such threats, I think you'll see a way out of your problem.

Thanks for listening, Diary.