Marian Paroo, another non-comprehending nit-wit leaves a comment on my blog

Marian Paroo left a comment on my post "Thank You, Mother Teresa...." that perfectly illustrates how theists try to force their frames on an argument to the point of ignoring what is actually said in my post.

Marian wrote:

For someone who is an doesn't believe in God, you sure have spent a whole bunch of time and space on God (or the lack thereof). I wonder why. If you don't believe-you don't believe. Frankly, how can one who doesn't believe in God even begin to discuss God? How does one disprove the existence of something that doesn't exist? Do you see my confusion here?

Marian apparently didn't bother to read the post she commented on. The existence of God is only one assertion made by theists. I even said in that very post that you can't disprove a nebulous and undefined conception of God. I also said in that very post that it is the least important assertion. It's not about whether something like a God exists; it's about whether you can make any claims to knowledge about God. It's those claims, many and varied as they are, that cause all the problems.

The confusion that I see is all yours, Marian. You seem to think I've written something about God. I haven't. I've written about people who believe in God, in that case, Mother Teresa. Do you think that believers have no effect on the lives of others, like they don't fly airplanes into skyscrapers, or start wars in Iraq, or blow up abortion clinics, or mess up our lives in all sorts of ways? You're a perfect illustration of how theists try to force their frames on us to the point of ignoring what is actually said in my post.

The very question Marian asked, "Frankly, how can one who doesn't believe in God even begin to discuss God?" was answered in that very post. You talk about the claims made by people who do believe in God and you examine the effects of those beliefs.

As an example, if Mother Teresa, as Greta Christina claims, believed that suffering would bring people closer to Jesus, and said; "I think it is very beautiful for the poor to accept their lot, to share it with the passion of Christ. I think the world is being much helped by the suffering of the poor people." If she saw human suffering as a gift from Christ, something that would bring people closer to him, then those beliefs would effect how she acted. In this case having her hospitals and hospices offering grotesquely inadequate medical care, revoltingly unsanitary and even abusive conditions, and little or nothing in the way of pain relief, allowing the sick to suffer and the dying to die in terrible pain.

We can see and judge the effects of people's beliefs. That is what I'm writing about, not God, but the various affects of believing in various conceptions of God.

So, stop being an ignorant twit, Marian. Your frame doesn't work.

And that name, Marian Paroo, isn't that a fictional character from "The Music Man"? If fictional characters can leave comments on my blog that would seem to be evidence that we are indeed living in Nick Bostrom's simulated universe.

Thank You, Mother Teresa (Part 2)

For those with faith, no explanation is necessary. For those without, no explanation is possible. -Thomas Aquinas

Continued from PART 1

The biography, "Come Be My Light," that Time magazine says is coming out consists of letters Mother Teresa exchanged with her church superiors. The letters may only reveal that she felt as if God had withdrawn his presence "…neither in her heart or in the eucharist," according to Brian Kolodiejchuk, the book's editor. Some excerpts from Teresa's letters seem to reveal a deep depression:

I call, I cling, I want — and there is no One to answer — no One on Whom I can cling — no, No One. — Alone … Where is my Faith — even deep down right in there is nothing, but emptiness & darkness — My God — how painful is this unknown pain — I have no Faith — I dare not utter the words & thoughts that crowd in my heart — & make me suffer untold agony.

So many unanswered questions live within me afraid to uncover them — because of the blasphemy — If there be God — please forgive me — When I try to raise my thoughts to Heaven — there is such convicting emptiness that those very thoughts return like sharp knives & hurt my very soul. — I am told God loves me — and yet the reality of darkness & coldness & emptiness is so great that nothing touches my soul.

Anyone who thinks the Mother Teresa quote above is about doubt doesn't know what doubt is. The kinds of "doubts" expressed in the few quotes I've gleaned from Mother Teresa’s letters (just from a few online articles I've read) make me wonder what kind of expectations for God’s presence are made in the Roman Catholic church. What kinds of stories of God’s presence are told about the Eucharistic presence of Christ? They are apparently promising some people in the church hierarchy a feeling of the presence of God. Mother T. expected to feel God. But as far as I know there is no scripture or recorded experience that gives a coherent view of any expected experiences.

Now, Pentecostals, who do things like speak in tongues, are known to preach on the joy of feeling a divine presence and think they get some “holier than thou” status from it, but are Catholics doing the same? Mother T's letters suggest they are doing it and my not knowing that until now no doubt reveals how ignorant I am of Catholicism.

When I watch a preacher in an evangelical TV megachurch say “I can feel Christ’s presence here tonight, God is going to work miracles...,” I suspect he may honestly feel something -- but whatever it is, it is not an objective reality perceptible to an outsider. It's only his internal, subjective, experience and it is mediated through expectation and interpretation. Others in the church might shout out that they feel it too, but what do they actually feel? Have they ever compared the sensations? Any weird good feeling might seem to be the presence of God and once others confirm that interpretation you'll think whatever weird feeling you had is God's presence. The expectation comes from the promises and possibility of God’s presence that the preacher makes and has heard before.

When it happens I don't see any testing or questioning of what is felt. No one asks, "Can you describe what God's presence feels like?" And if they did would someone say; "No, no, God's presence is more like a warm tingle along the spine with a warm glow in you belly." When I search the web with Google looking for entries on "testing whether it is the presence of God" or "testing for the presence of God" I don't get any hits. When I remove the quotes I get a ton of stuff that looks irrelevant to the question I'm asking. Maybe I just don't know what I'm looking for?

I suspect that most people, when they "feel the presence" of God, are probably misinterpreting some induced psychological state, some chemical, neurological high that, judging by Mother T's account, has addictive properties. It's a kind of spiritual heroin, a real opiate of the masses. Need a quick high? Get a does of God’s presence. The word hallucination isn't quite right, but the word illusion probably fits. They would be superimposing a theological, spiritual interpretation onto a highly emotional but natural neurological state. But as I said before, it's easier for us to doubt other's experiences than our own. I can eliminate a lot more probable causes when it's my own experience I'm judging. Who knows what causes other people's experiences? I can't even be sure they're honest.

It seems to me that if people are going to claim to experience some direct awareness of God that such experience be subjected to some kind of testing. They should at least have some tradition of community discernment, which would still be a poor test considering what happened to the researchers who claimed to replicate René-Prosper Blondlot's N-ray experiments.

The best that Christians on the web had to offer was stuff like this "How do you know if it is God speaking to you?" where the only test is of verbal messages from God, not a vague feeling of presence. And the test is only whether it agrees with the Bible. That might be okay if the Bible itself wasn't full of crazy and dangerous stuff and it still wouldn't be a proper test even then. What if the Bible is wrong? Well, for that they only have the circular reasoning of the Bible's own insistence that it's the word of God.

So, if a "cured" Ted Haggard tells a bunch of Christians that God has told Ted that God wants all true Christian men to cut off their penises in order to avoid sexual temptation they'll do it if Ted can show them this Bible passage where Jesus says, as in Matthew 19:11-12, "There are some eunuchs who were born that way, and there are some who made themselves eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of heaven. Anyone who can accept this should accept it." Jesus also said, "If your right eye offend you, pluck it out . . . . If your right hand offend you, cut it off . . . . If your foot offend you, cut it off. If your family gets in the way, hate your father, hate your mother."



Another test offered was no test at all:

How do I know when God is talking to me? I just know. His voice is always crystal clear to me, and it is not an audible voice either. His words, when they come to me, bring a very deep peace and contentment. Some of His beautiful words have simply been, "I love you". Sometimes he gives me word pictures.

I also found this, "Entering the Presence of God," where they openly admit there’s a lot of confusion about worship and the presence of God. Then we get this strange bit of meaningless white noise that just side steps the whole 'what is the experience like' question and redefines all terms; “Fundamentally, then, drawing near to God means believing the gospel and making ‘personal appropriation of salvation.’” And then:

Objectively, what brings us into the presence of God is the death and resurrection of the Lord Jesus. If we ascribe to worship (meaning, in this context, our corporate praise and adoration) something of this power, it will not be long before we think of such worship as being meritorious, or efficacious, or the like. The small corner of truth that such expressions hide (though this truth is poorly worded) is that when we come together and engage in the activities of corporate worship (including not only prayer and praise but the Lord’s Supper and attentive listening to the Word…), we encourage one another, we edify one another, and so we often feel encouraged and edified. As a result, we are renewed in our awareness of God’s love and God’s truth, and we are encouraged to respond with adoration and action” (Worship by the Book, 50-51).

All of which misses the point. Instead of trying to find any objective measure of what an experience of God's presence is like or how to test it they just encourage subjective self-validation and that is a highly dangerous and irrational approach. Revelation and strange experiences inevitably carry an authority for the experiencer and if that experiencer is mentally ill, how would you know it? Do you just blindly encourage it and tell them to have "faith"?

Mother T. never got to the point of atheism. Atheists do not "struggle with their faith." A lot of Christians will say that "it takes more faith to be an atheist," but that depends on what you mean by faith. It really takes no faith at all as Christians seem to understand "faith."

There’s an old story about a physics teacher who, on the first day of class, showed his class a huge pendulum with a heavy iron ball on the end. He takes the ball, holds against his nose, and then lets go of it. The pendulum swings away, then starts swinging back, the class gasps as it looks like the heavy ball will smash the teacher's face. But the ball, almost touching his nose, seems to stop and then starts swinging back away. The teacher never flinched. He looks at his class and says: “Now that’s faith!”

The teacher had faith in the laws of science. We don’t really know that god won’t give that ball an extra boost of energy and smash the teacher's nose. He just believes a pendulum can never return to a point higher than the point from which it was released. It must fall short, because of friction and gravity, when it swings back to, but cannot reach, its origin point. Each time it swings it makes less and less of an arc, until finally it is at rest. This point of rest is called the state of equilibrium, where all forces acting on the pendulum are equal.

Is that faith or is that knowledge? It's both, and that's the key. I know that pendulum can't swing farther than the teacher's nose as surely as I know anything, but I don't know absolutely and I'm not sure I wouldn't flinch the first couple times I tried it, but I could learn not to flinch. My knowledge is based upon both experience and replicable, scientific evidence.

This is not a faith one has to struggle with. If pendulums stopped behaving the way I've always experienced them then my beliefs about pendulums would change. That kind of faith is a natural faith derived from experience. There is no struggling with that kind of faith, so it is in no way like any Christian or religious "faith." The struggle is just keeping track of all the little facts and mathematical formulas we collect to describe how the world works. At least it's not like those who "struggle with their faith." There simply is no struggle and faith shouldn't be a struggle. If it is, then something is wrong.

We all live with this kind of easy faith in physics facts everyday. But the replication of some scientific experiments we have to take on trust, or "faith." I can study a pendulum myself easily, but I can’t replicate experiments done on billion dollar particle accelerators, I just trust them. Astronauts sit on top of huge firecrackers that have been known to blow up on occasion for short trips into space and that could be called "faith" too. We take expensive drugs on the say-so of our doctors and that's faith too. We have a faith in science and scientists that goes beyond our everyday experience. But again, the scientists have earned our faith and it comes easily, too easily. I had to learn not to trust everyone who calls them self a scientist. Parapsychologists claim to be scientists, they claim replicable, scientific evidence, and yet I doubt them now.

When I was in my first years of high school there were guys, like Uri Geller and the Amazing Kreskin, showing up on TV and I bought into their psychic powers claim easily, I saw it and believed. I trusted and had faith without questioning for a little while. One of the things that made it easy to believe in Geller was the claim that Geller had been tested at the Stanford Research Institute by scientists. It wasn't until I found James Randi's book about Geller that I learned to doubt. I had no idea that someone could get away with being that dishonest while exposed to national media attention.

Faith was easy, it's doubting that is the hard work, and it's enjoyable work. It takes more thought and creativity to doubt than it does to believe. It requires questioning things you never thought to question before. We trust assertions by authority figures too quickly and easily. Doubt may lead to a bit of disillusionment and disappointment, but it shouldn't cause the kind of pain and suffering Mother T. expressed.

To an atheist like me doubt is not a pain to suffer or an attitude of conviction about the non-existence of God. I don't believe in God because I have no good evidence that there is a God. Doubt and skepticism are, as the Barefoot Bum says, tools. Doubt and skepticism are embedded in the very method of science and it is that which links science and atheism. It's a process of subjecting our beliefs to logical and sensible scrutiny. This is apparently something that religious people are not doing very well. How can they be if there has never been any investigation into the subjective experience of God that Mother T. suffered for? It's a mystery and they don't ask questions about what they hunger for.

To struggle with faith, to act as if convinced of it when you really aren't sure, is not the kind of faith I know, it's what Sartre called "bad faith." Based on Mother T's letters we can not even conclude that some believers do in fact "doubt" in the sense that I discussed above, the sense of creative questioning. You haven't really doubted until you've applied the tools of skepticism and science to what you doubt.

So, the point of attack I suggest is this -- when religious people tell you they doubt too, challenge that. Explore whether they even know how to doubt effectively.

Thank You, Mother Teresa. You've shown me a new way to frame atheism.

“The priests used to say that faith can move mountains, and nobody believed them. Today the scientists say that they can level mountains, and nobody doubts them.”
— Joseph Campbell

I've been following the articles about the publication of the letters where Mother Teresa revealed her personal crisis of faith. While reading Christopher Hitchens "Teresa, Bright and Dark" (also on Richard Dawkin's site) it finally hit me, the difference that really matters between atheists like me and theists of Mother Teresa's type is how we deal with doubt, ignorance and uncertainty. We atheists really have been framing a lot of our arguments badly.

I think I can show you all a better way to frame this debate. You decide.

The Barefoot Bum writes that the "supposed coexistence of faith and doubt—in either sense of the word—is a transparent sham." And that's pretty close to my own views. However, doubt and faith do co-exist in all of us, but not both doubt and faith in the same assertion. There are only three options for any single assertion you're asked to believe: 1) "I trust it," 2) "I don't know," or 3) "I doubt it." You can't claim to mix two opposite ends of that spectrum, doubt and faith, and make sense unless you're talking about trusting some claims and assertions while doubting others. For example, Andrew Sullivan who makes a big deal about his mix of doubt and faith has faith in claims about some happy after-life but doubts biblical passages saying homosexuality is an abomination to God.

I'm bringing up this rather obvious point because I think a lot of us atheists are focusing on the wrong assertions. It's not about whether something like a God exists or doesn't exist so much as whether you can make any claims about knowing anything about God. For example, consider how much there is to agree with in the works of non-atheists like Thomas Paine and Voltaire in their criticism of religion. Much of what they had to say about religion is still relevant today and is still rejected by most religious people.

For another example, there's an old article in the New York Times, "Our Lives, Controlled From Some Guy’s Couch," about Nick Bostrom's idea that it is almost a mathematical certainty that we are living in someone else’s computer simulation. Maybe our universe is a simulation and if so, wouldn't the programmer(s) be our god(s)? If such gods exist they are so unknowable that there are few rational beliefs I can have about them/him/her/it. The only thing that would make the programmer gods of Nick Bostrom's future supercomputers more knowable than the gods of traditional religion is the concept that the simulation we are in is an ancestor simulation. It would mean our gods were once like us. They would have evolved in a godless universe too.

You don't find atheists complaining about Nick Bostrom's speculations because Nick isn't claiming to have talked to the programmers and come back to tell us how to live our lives and to have "faith" in the programmers. I don't know what to do with Nick's idea. I just go on living as I have before. Nick doesn't ask me to do anything much with the idea.

And what is religion? In some ways a religion can be defined as a collection of assertions that comprise a world view. Each different religion and sub-sect has a mix of different assertions. Some theists like to say atheism is a religion and the usual response to that is to say something like "if atheism is a religion then bald is a hair color," or, "... then off is a TV channel," or "... then sanity is another mental disorder." Well, we are turning off all assertions made about gods and there isn't necessarily any other assertions made to replace them, but most of us do have a naturalistic world view.

The problem with taking down the whole collection of religious assertions, made by every religious variant, in one debate is that it is like trying to nail jello to a tree. The theist can avoid stating his most doubtful assertions, like Al Sharpton did when debating Christopher Hitchens, and focus on the things you can't know either, like whether there is a god.

What Mother Teresa has shown us is what would be a good focus for future books and debates. We can skip over all those complicated arguments about God and religion and get to the real issue, which is how do you deal with doubt, ignorance and uncertainty? Mother T. has shown us this by showing us how badly some theists deal with doubt. She suffered not because she doubted, but because she didn't know how to effectively doubt.

I think Hitch might have missed something important in his article, and in his Hardball debate with Bill Donohue. Hitchens seemed to think that when Mother Teresa wrote in her letters things like; "Jesus has a very special love for you. As for me, the silence and the emptiness is so great that I look and do not see, listen and do not hear," that she was talking about doubting God's existence. But that doesn't make sense. How can you doubt God before you doubt the church? She retained her faith in her spiritual directors and confessors while she doubted God? That would be like me rejecting Nick Bostrom's speculations about our universe being a simulation yet still believing him when he tells me what the programmer wants me to do. I have to doubt the claims made about the programmer before I can doubt there is a programmer.

The same thing would apply for a flock of Christians who certainly believe in God but who might then be confronted by a preacher who tells them, "God wants you all to drink this cyanide laced kool-aid," as they probably wouldn't believe that preacher even though they believe in God. Oh, wait... I forgot Jonestown. Alright, how about a preacher who tells them God wants his followers to fly airplanes into skyscrapers... Oh, wait... Well, we hopefully can assume most religious people will not just follow anything someone who claims to speak for God says. Those are the ones we might reach with this different frame because they at least can doubt someone who merely claims to speak for God. It's impossible not to doubt many of the contradictory and absurd religious claims we encounter in our society, even believers doubt most of them.

I'm sure most Christians don't believe that everyone who thinks they’re hearing God’s voice really is. After all, most of us don't believe that because a schizophrenic is claiming that they can feel the microwave beams the CIA is sending into their brains that this is evidence that the CIA is doing such a thing.

The point is that if Mother Teresa really doubted God's existence she would have necessarily started by doubting those people who were telling her about God. You can't get to atheism while still believing in people who send you to an exorcist. You might trust them to be honest about their own beliefs and experiences, but you can't think they got the interpretation right, you can't believe that they know anything about a God you don't believe in. You might experimentally try things like prayer and exorcism, but not the same people over and over when nothing is working. The great tragedy of Mother T. is that if she really doubted she might have sought help from a psychologist and found out she was clinically depressed and then have gotten real help.

The Time magazine article I read had said that only a couple of the letters can be interpreted as expressing doubt about God's existence. They really seem to be indicating a hunger for some experience within her. The letters are also being published as part of the investigation into Mother Teresa's suitability for sainthood and I don't think Catholics would ever begin to make a saint of a real atheist or skeptic.

Mother Teresa is more unlike us, Hitchens and me at least, in her doubts than she is like us. Did she ever come to doubt her past experiences? Mother Teresa supposedly had a period of time where she literally heard God’s voice directing her to go to in India and help the poor. As soon as she did start her mission, God's silence began. In spite of the lack of instruction and encouragement from God, she continued her work.

Feeling the abandonment by God is not the same as doubting God. Mother T. knew something of what she was missing. I don't think she doubted her interpretation of her own past experiences. You can't doubt the meaning of your own past experiences without doubting the meaning of the experiences of others. The doubt of other's experience necessarily precedes doubting your own experience. It necessarily begins by seeing yourself in others. Quite a few Christians will claim confidence in their own experiences of God while doubting others merely because they haven't seen themselves in those others, but Mother Teresa did not doubt her confessors, she was just feeling a lack of something she expected. Mother T. did not really doubt and if she called her experience doubt, then she didn't really know what doubt was.

"I gave my love to Jesus, but now he never calls."
-Betty Bowers

Continued in PART 2