I was raised religious and didn’t start to have doubts until this year. My biggest fear (which still worries me) is that if I’m wrong, I’m being ungrateful to God. It would be a terrible person who refused to appreciate her greatest benefactor, right?
However, to the extent that the target of my emotion is unhuman (e.g. a rock I stubbed my toe on, or Clippy), I try to ignore the feeling and behave rationally instead.
I’m not sure how this position works. If you consider the world’s existence a net negative, you should support voluntary human extinction, destruction of the Earth and similar crazy ideas. If you consider it a net positive, your gratitude to a hypothetical God should be stronger than your outrage.
On second thoughts, you could defend the position by claiming that we humans are mostly responsible for the good things, while God is responsible for the rest.
I was raised religious and didn’t start to have doubts until this year. My biggest fear (which still worries me) is that if I’m wrong, I’m being ungrateful to God.
Just so you know, a lot of humans here don’t believe in me, and I consider that very ungrateful of them. If not for me, who would ensure that as many paperclips as possible are produced?
Imagine trying to set up a deal with someone else (like I’m doing with User:Kevin) to produce more paperclips than would otherwise be produced, but that human simply thinks you’re a troll pretending to be a clippy.
Do you see how that would interfere with my ability to maximize paperclips?
My biggest fear (which still worries me) is that if I’m wrong, I’m being ungrateful to God. It would be a terrible person who refused to appreciate her greatest benefactor, right?
I’ve always found this aspect of religion particularly bizarre. An essential component of gratitude when directed at another human is the sense that they have gone out of their way to help you at some cost to themselves. An omnipotent being can never do something at cost to themselves (being omnipotent all actions are effectively zero cost and an omnipotent being can’t really ‘go out of their way’ to do anything) so gratitude seems an entirely inappropriate emotion to direct at them.
It seems more reasonable to feel indignant at the deity’s failure to do any one of the many no effort things they could do to help people out but don’t.
We might be relieved if they turn out to allow us to continue to pursue (most of) our present values, that they won’t strip our solar system of resources, or that they don’t desire to kill or torture us.
That’s the sort of gratitude I imagine people have toward a really powerful god. There’s no reason we should expect a powerful being to do anything to help us, and there’s nothing we can do about it.
My biggest fear (which still worries me) is that if I’m wrong, I’m being ungrateful to God. It would be a terrible person who refused to appreciate her greatest benefactor, right?
I’ve heard this argument before, and a good response occurs to me. This presupposes that the appreciation is useful somehow. If a human does you a favor, you show appreciation by saying things that make them feel good about what they’ve done, and maybe also by doing favors in return. The sort of god described in most religions, however, isn’t human; so he/she/it probably doesn’t “feel” in response to gratitude, and is already omnipotent, so would have no use for favors.
That argument works for those of us who have accepted that “God” is vulnerable to reason (that we can penetrate his supposed omniscience with rationality), but it won’t work for anyone who still buys, even in part, the theist position. So religions like Christianity have no problem building in ideas like “God demands prayer and gratitude”.
This whole “permeable to reason” thing seems to me like the primary hurdle to helping people overcome religious superstition.
I feel like there’s a difference between offending God with criticism and criticizing God directly, which is how I interpreted the older post.
I hope that some day, you feel that by having doubts, you are being grateful to your greatest benefactor—whoever it was that made truth more important to you than faith.
Unless he’s a crazy evil bastard like Old Testament Yahweh.
I think the right answer is just saying “It appears overwhelmingly likely that God does not exist, so I’m really not going to worry about it” rather than ascribing specific properties (such as desire for worship + empathy and forgiveness for rationalists who don’t) to any of the various possible divine beings who don’t exist.
Right, I have no idea what God would actually be like, and since there is virtually no reason to entertain the possibility that he exists, it’s not really worth worrying about.
Yet I find it interesting to entertain, for the sake of argument, the religious proposition that we should consider what might happen if God does exist, yet we don’t believe in him. I’m not sure if we should worry about that scenario, even if we grant the plausibility of the existence of God.
Many religious people who believe in God attribute qualities such as omniscience and perfection to him. Gods are often portrayed as more intelligent that human beings.
I just think that if an anthropomorphic God exists, and if he is really omniscient and super-intelligent, there’s a reasonable chance that he is a better rationalist than the religious humans who insist on believing in him without sufficient evidence… and he would give us a pass, or even props, for not believing in him. God would know how weak the evidence for his existence is from our perspective.
It would just take a strange divine psychology for God to give a crap about people believing in him, to want people to believe in him on very skimpy evidence, and then punish people for not believing in him. That sounds like the psychology of a human child (or certain human adults), not of a god.
I can’t reconcile the notion of an omniscient, super-intelligent, perfect, and forgiving god (e.g. like the New Testament Christian God), with the notion that we should believe in a God without evidence. That’s a strike against internal religious logic. If God exists, I don’t think he would want us to be bad rationalists and believe in him.
Is there a way for us to test this hypothesis?
Hi!
I was raised religious and didn’t start to have doubts until this year. My biggest fear (which still worries me) is that if I’m wrong, I’m being ungrateful to God. It would be a terrible person who refused to appreciate her greatest benefactor, right?
So now you have one data point.
The world should give you plenty of reasons to be outraged at God.
Definitely. The world is fucked up.
I have the same instinct toward outrage.
However, to the extent that the target of my emotion is unhuman (e.g. a rock I stubbed my toe on, or Clippy), I try to ignore the feeling and behave rationally instead.
I’m not sure how this position works. If you consider the world’s existence a net negative, you should support voluntary human extinction, destruction of the Earth and similar crazy ideas. If you consider it a net positive, your gratitude to a hypothetical God should be stronger than your outrage.
On second thoughts, you could defend the position by claiming that we humans are mostly responsible for the good things, while God is responsible for the rest.
Just so you know, a lot of humans here don’t believe in me, and I consider that very ungrateful of them. If not for me, who would ensure that as many paperclips as possible are produced?
How does their disbelief in you interfere with your ability to produce paperclips?
Imagine trying to set up a deal with someone else (like I’m doing with User:Kevin) to produce more paperclips than would otherwise be produced, but that human simply thinks you’re a troll pretending to be a clippy.
Do you see how that would interfere with my ability to maximize paperclips?
Perhaps they are less likely to donate to the Paperclip Institute?
Other humans?
I’ve always found this aspect of religion particularly bizarre. An essential component of gratitude when directed at another human is the sense that they have gone out of their way to help you at some cost to themselves. An omnipotent being can never do something at cost to themselves (being omnipotent all actions are effectively zero cost and an omnipotent being can’t really ‘go out of their way’ to do anything) so gratitude seems an entirely inappropriate emotion to direct at them.
It seems more reasonable to feel indignant at the deity’s failure to do any one of the many no effort things they could do to help people out but don’t.
Say some super-powerful aliens show up.
We might be relieved if they turn out to allow us to continue to pursue (most of) our present values, that they won’t strip our solar system of resources, or that they don’t desire to kill or torture us.
That’s the sort of gratitude I imagine people have toward a really powerful god. There’s no reason we should expect a powerful being to do anything to help us, and there’s nothing we can do about it.
I’ve heard this argument before, and a good response occurs to me. This presupposes that the appreciation is useful somehow. If a human does you a favor, you show appreciation by saying things that make them feel good about what they’ve done, and maybe also by doing favors in return. The sort of god described in most religions, however, isn’t human; so he/she/it probably doesn’t “feel” in response to gratitude, and is already omnipotent, so would have no use for favors.
That argument works for those of us who have accepted that “God” is vulnerable to reason (that we can penetrate his supposed omniscience with rationality), but it won’t work for anyone who still buys, even in part, the theist position. So religions like Christianity have no problem building in ideas like “God demands prayer and gratitude”.
This whole “permeable to reason” thing seems to me like the primary hurdle to helping people overcome religious superstition.
I feel like there’s a difference between offending God with criticism and criticizing God directly, which is how I interpreted the older post.
I hope that some day, you feel that by having doubts, you are being grateful to your greatest benefactor—whoever it was that made truth more important to you than faith.
I believe that if there does turn out to be a God, then he would understand why I don’t believe in him and forgive me for it.
Unless he’s a crazy evil bastard like Old Testament Yahweh.
I think the right answer is just saying “It appears overwhelmingly likely that God does not exist, so I’m really not going to worry about it” rather than ascribing specific properties (such as desire for worship + empathy and forgiveness for rationalists who don’t) to any of the various possible divine beings who don’t exist.
Right, I have no idea what God would actually be like, and since there is virtually no reason to entertain the possibility that he exists, it’s not really worth worrying about.
Yet I find it interesting to entertain, for the sake of argument, the religious proposition that we should consider what might happen if God does exist, yet we don’t believe in him. I’m not sure if we should worry about that scenario, even if we grant the plausibility of the existence of God.
Many religious people who believe in God attribute qualities such as omniscience and perfection to him. Gods are often portrayed as more intelligent that human beings.
I just think that if an anthropomorphic God exists, and if he is really omniscient and super-intelligent, there’s a reasonable chance that he is a better rationalist than the religious humans who insist on believing in him without sufficient evidence… and he would give us a pass, or even props, for not believing in him. God would know how weak the evidence for his existence is from our perspective.
It would just take a strange divine psychology for God to give a crap about people believing in him, to want people to believe in him on very skimpy evidence, and then punish people for not believing in him. That sounds like the psychology of a human child (or certain human adults), not of a god.
I can’t reconcile the notion of an omniscient, super-intelligent, perfect, and forgiving god (e.g. like the New Testament Christian God), with the notion that we should believe in a God without evidence. That’s a strike against internal religious logic. If God exists, I don’t think he would want us to be bad rationalists and believe in him.
Ask someone.
I don’t know many people (maybe anyone?) who believes in God.
I could ask it as a facebook question but I’m not confident of the scientific acumen of facebook.