As a newcomer to the religion forum, let me introduce myself as yet another atheist. 
So I used to hang out mostly in the sci area, but noticed there's a lot of posting here and sometimes by some rather intelligent people. I lurked here for a while, and observed the faith wars. And now I've got to ask y'all something, especially the intelligent types.
See, intelligent people being religious is just something I can't grok (I'm not saying it's impossible; I just can't wrap my mind around the concept.) Personally, I can imagine only pretending to be religious, but even then it'd be hard for me to do without overtly cracking up (then again, I was never very good at playing pretend.) But here I find some pretty brainy people professing belief in creators and such, so maybe some of you can enlighten me a little.
Basically, my main problem is how very human religions are. Possibly religions are the finest example of the human mind projecting itself onto the environment above and beyond all utility. I'm not even going to go into the personification of animals, nature or even the entire universe in the pagan religions. I'm not even going to expound on the human-like gods with their human-like motives and escapades of various polytheistic and monotheistic faiths.
But let's just focus on the most advanced, the least precise, the latest and greatest monotheistic religious notion of a vague universal creator. Is this not ridiculously anthropomorphic?
In our daily experience, goals are set and met. So by extension we project a goal upon the universe itself. Or rather, we refuse to accept a universe that has no goal. And on what basis do we draw such a firm line? Apparently, no other basis than our own conscious experiences of our own narrow human circumstance.
In our daily experience, causes give rise to effects. So by extension we project an ultimate cause upon the "effect" of the universe itself. On the surface this might even appear reasonable. But what I don’t get is how one jumps from a causality within the universe, to a causality applied to the universe’s very existence. We might as well conclude that because life stems from life the universe itself is alive. Or we might conclude that because air carries sound, air is itself a sound, or that because fire spewes smoke then fire itself is smoke. Even more weird, how can you possibly find the notion of an “uncaused cause” self-consistent? How can something that is not causal spontaneously become causal and yet remain a-causal all the while?
We are complex, and yet we can’t (so far) give rise to anything nearly as complex as ourselves via artifice. Is that the reason why we tend to semi-automatically insist that natural complexity can only arise from even more complexity? Why is it that for so many people, many quite intelligent, the notion that complexity self-assembles out of simplicity is so inaccessible, despite the overabundance of real-life examples? How very human for us to pretend that sentience, consciousness, etc. can only be borne from such and cannot rather be merely an emergent phenomenon on top of far more primitive processes. How myopically self-centered the notion that our fine structure is somehow more fundamental than its own simple building blocks – to such a point that we posit our imaginary and impossible uncaused cause to be the pinnacle of sentience, consciousness, etc.
So confined are we in the prison of the self that we find it nearly impossible to disengage from the human and contemplate the universe in absence and apart from ourselves. Is that it? The true deep drive behind theism is an obsessive-compulsive entanglement with the self? A never-ending, pathological human game of pretend projected onto the universe at large.
So I used to hang out mostly in the sci area, but noticed there's a lot of posting here and sometimes by some rather intelligent people. I lurked here for a while, and observed the faith wars. And now I've got to ask y'all something, especially the intelligent types.See, intelligent people being religious is just something I can't grok (I'm not saying it's impossible; I just can't wrap my mind around the concept.) Personally, I can imagine only pretending to be religious, but even then it'd be hard for me to do without overtly cracking up (then again, I was never very good at playing pretend.) But here I find some pretty brainy people professing belief in creators and such, so maybe some of you can enlighten me a little.
Basically, my main problem is how very human religions are. Possibly religions are the finest example of the human mind projecting itself onto the environment above and beyond all utility. I'm not even going to go into the personification of animals, nature or even the entire universe in the pagan religions. I'm not even going to expound on the human-like gods with their human-like motives and escapades of various polytheistic and monotheistic faiths.
But let's just focus on the most advanced, the least precise, the latest and greatest monotheistic religious notion of a vague universal creator. Is this not ridiculously anthropomorphic?
In our daily experience, goals are set and met. So by extension we project a goal upon the universe itself. Or rather, we refuse to accept a universe that has no goal. And on what basis do we draw such a firm line? Apparently, no other basis than our own conscious experiences of our own narrow human circumstance.
In our daily experience, causes give rise to effects. So by extension we project an ultimate cause upon the "effect" of the universe itself. On the surface this might even appear reasonable. But what I don’t get is how one jumps from a causality within the universe, to a causality applied to the universe’s very existence. We might as well conclude that because life stems from life the universe itself is alive. Or we might conclude that because air carries sound, air is itself a sound, or that because fire spewes smoke then fire itself is smoke. Even more weird, how can you possibly find the notion of an “uncaused cause” self-consistent? How can something that is not causal spontaneously become causal and yet remain a-causal all the while?
We are complex, and yet we can’t (so far) give rise to anything nearly as complex as ourselves via artifice. Is that the reason why we tend to semi-automatically insist that natural complexity can only arise from even more complexity? Why is it that for so many people, many quite intelligent, the notion that complexity self-assembles out of simplicity is so inaccessible, despite the overabundance of real-life examples? How very human for us to pretend that sentience, consciousness, etc. can only be borne from such and cannot rather be merely an emergent phenomenon on top of far more primitive processes. How myopically self-centered the notion that our fine structure is somehow more fundamental than its own simple building blocks – to such a point that we posit our imaginary and impossible uncaused cause to be the pinnacle of sentience, consciousness, etc.
So confined are we in the prison of the self that we find it nearly impossible to disengage from the human and contemplate the universe in absence and apart from ourselves. Is that it? The true deep drive behind theism is an obsessive-compulsive entanglement with the self? A never-ending, pathological human game of pretend projected onto the universe at large.
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