One of the reasons why I don\u2019t have much desire to be involved with religion right now is because of GROUP-THINK<\/b>. I don\u2019t like group-think. Group-think is when a group of people believe in some common idea or set of ideas because everyone else in the group believes in it. If you trace out the logic of it, you wind up with a big circle. John believes because Judy believes; Judy believes because Andrea believes; Andrea believes because Phil believes; Phil believes because . . . and eventually, the trail leads right back to John. Everyone feels good talking about Jesus and the saints (or Moses and the prophets, or the Buddha and the bodhivistas, or Mohammed and the caliphs, or Krishna and all his friends). They feel confident in believing in the sacred myths, because everyone else in the room believes. Loops and loops and loops. Loops from the ancient past making their way across time into the present, and cruising on into the future. No the circle won\u2019t be broken.<\/p>\n
But as I\u2019ve said before, I haven\u2019t left religion because I\u2019m an atheist. At best (or worst) I\u2019m a somewhat skeptical agnostic. But I still want there to be a God, and I still haven\u2019t heard an air-tight explanation as to why God doesn\u2019t exist. Some atheistic rationales for the non-existence of God are just as laughable as what the snake-handling Pentacostalists way back in the hollers of West Virginia ever said or did. For example, Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson (of the Hayden Planetarium and PBS\u2019s NOVA series) gives a presentation citing a long list of reasons as to why the Universe could not have had an intelligent creator. One of Dr. Tyson\u2019s complaints is that for most animals, including humans, the sexual organs are located near the waste excrement apparatus. Personally, I can\u2019t help but wonder if there is a wise lesson in that fact; something along the lines of \u201cremember human that you are dirt, and to dirt you shall return\u201d. Perhaps it was intentional to have the flowery pleasures of new life and the revolting stuff of death juxtapositioned. I myself see a lesson in it, a lesson that a wise creator might well have intended after designing the bubbly, mindless feeling of sex.<\/p>\n
(And furthermore, I\u2019ve never heard of anyone deferring from sex because the main physical events occur too close to where the yucky stuff comes out. In fact, certain people seem to enjoy that fact . . . . but I\u2019ll stop there.)<\/p>\n
The \u201cnew atheism\u201d movement is the only thing worse than group-think religion. The modern anti-God voices (Dawkins, Hitchens, Harris … and Elton John<\/a>, ugh) seem to be growing a group-think of their own. Here\u2019s a blog devoted to debunking it<\/a>. And I say bravo! I hope the guy will post some more.<\/p>\n The thing for me is that God is too important to pursue through group-think. I personally feel that philosophy is a better approach to God than religion. It\u2019s too bad that philosophy is such a small and limited institution, existing as a rare hot-house flower in a far corner of the academic grove. You can find churches on every other street; but you can go for hundreds of miles before you can find a place where theistic philosophy is discussed and debated. Socrates would surely find that to be a shame; certainly Lao Tsu also (if there was a Lao Tsu). And I think so would Jesus, and Mohamed, and Moses, etc. Ultimately, I believe that they were well beyond group-think religion, and really didn\u2019t want to condemn their followers to drowning in such a mental whirlpool. Too bad that\u2019s what ultimately happened.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" One of the reasons why I don\u2019t have much desire to be involved with religion right now is because of GROUP-THINK. I don\u2019t like group-think. Group-think is when a group of people believe in some common idea or set of ideas because everyone else in the group believes in it. If you trace out the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,23],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/352"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=352"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/352\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5326,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/352\/revisions\/5326"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=352"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=352"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=352"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}