This question of good behavior dominated a good portion of the evening’s proceedings. It seemed that most attendees accepted that one of religion’s core tenets was the imposition of rules upon society; but questions remained as to whether moral codes arose out of religious belief structures or out of practical necessity. Did humans originally condemn killing because “God commands it”, or because society functions much better when the default position is to restrain ourselves from hurting one another?

Of course, the “rules” do not always forbid killing. There is war, there is the death penalty; there are honor killings, the murder of Osama Bin Laden, and other “justified” ending of life. While some argued an innate understanding of morality, most were skeptical. “Look at the behavior of children,” one participant said. “They often act like sociopaths.” We need to be taught how to behave toward others. Religion is remarkably consistent in its teachings: it usually boils down to the Golden Rule. So did each religion crib this from a common and ancient human understanding, or is religion necessary to create morality? I’d argue you don’t need God to tell you hurting others is wrong, and too often we’ve seen people justify the hurting of others based on the teachings of some deity.

Maybe higher belief is just a cop-out. If it’s too taxing to contemplate right and wrong in an infinite universe, just avoid it completely and lay it all on God. One doesn’t have to worry about the consequences of his actions if he believes his god holds all responsibility. On the other hand, consider the luxury of religion versus the necessity of religion. It’s easy to decry the fundamentalist who uses religion to deny the rights of others, or ridicule the man for whom “spirituality is just something you use to pick up chicks.” A religious community that provides real support to people who are in dire straits is much harder to attack. I have nothing against anyone who finds solace in their beliefs, even if we disagree – but skip the proselytizing, please.

Ed, an agnostic, posed a question to Trevor, an atheist. Isn’t atheism just as strong a belief system as any religion? An atheist believes that there is no god, as strongly as an evangelical believes there is; it is the expression of doubt on the question which marks the agnostic. I recalled our conversation with Pete from three years ago, when he put forth the case for atheism. The burden of proof, he asserted, rests with those who say god exists. Trevor upheld this, and said that, much like Christopher Hitchens, he reserves the right to change his mind should he see some persuasive evidence. Yet stubborn belief in the face of all reason can be something to admire. “Belief can be a powerful force for good,” said one participant, and he meant the conviction to carry on even when no one else believes in what you’re doing. Revolutions are made thus.

Sometimes I see a movie scene in a hospital, where something dangerous has happened, some awful accident or death-sentence diagnosis, and I have a small panic attack. I have a healthy fear of death. As a child, I lost two grandparents in two years, and it kept my spirits low and my writing morbid. Today, picturing my own end, I am horrified by the image of powerlessness – the doctor’s verdict that you will be slowly destroyed from within. Your body – or worse, your mind – will fail you, and you’ll be trapped. It’s metaphysical claustrophobia.

The idea that we can transcend our bodies and go beyond this life is very appealing to me. The idea of heaven, where we can see all of our lost loved ones, is a beautiful one. My own theory is that we cannot possibly conceive of how this “heaven” works, nor what exactly it means to be “reunited” with your dead grandparents. It’s beyond our capacity for thought.

Aldous Huxley was onto something when he conceived of human consciousness as a water faucet. Normal mental existence, he said, was like a dripping faucet – because the human brain is ill-prepared for the full, gushing flow of true reality. He believed psychedelics had shown him a glimpse of this reality; I’d say God is like the most powerful trip you could take. To know God is to slip the bonds of the mind; to achieve Nirvana as the Buddhists speak of it: an escape from the cycle of suffering that is human life.

That, to me, is sacred. Physically, life may only be a fortuitous combination of elements. But I refuse to believe the soul is nothing more than a chemical reaction. A soul makes something alive, makes it fight to stay alive. A living creature is more than just the sum of its physical parts. Which is crazy, because by that logic, it’s not only humans that have souls, but animals, too – even plants. Even mushrooms, which are neither animal nor plant! Impossible!

Surely that’s going too far. Fungus doesn’t have a soul! Or does it? What’s the difference between being alive and having a soul? My Catholic forefathers argued that souls were reserved to humans. Not even little Fido had a soul, they said, which meant the family pup was doomed to eternity in fire and brimstone, cursed among all creatures. Now why would I subscribe to that?

The longer I consider it, the more firmly I believe that the Great Religions of the world are based on things that were simply made up by good storytellers thousands of years ago. Whether the Church wants to advocate world peace or denounce condoms, I’m free to make my own conclusions. Further, I can create my own stories about what happens when we die. Because if “God” exists at all, then She exists inside each of us equally, and the Pope is no holier than thou.

7:30 pm

What should humans be allowed to do, and what should they be prevented from doing? Besides the obvious rule against killing people who piss you off, how far should the law restrict our personal freedoms to drink, use drugs, prostitute ourselves, get married, vote, practice medicine or religion, or any number of things we might come up with?

Legalizing weed is a trending topic. Lots of people use it, despite its being illegal, and there is clearly a profit to be made by regulating and taxing it. But at what cost?

Should tobacco, whose use can be directly linked to over 5 million deaths per year (worldwide; in the US it’s 400,000), be outlawed?

If causing mass death is our gauge, maybe we shouldn’t let so many people drive. Forty thousand Americans die on the road each year.

Of course, we all know that Prohibition didn’t work out too well – but what about the prohibition of heroin? Hasn’t that done us well?

Then there’s religion. Americans used to pray in school, or so I’ve heard, until the Supreme Court said that wasn’t cool. More recently, a federal appeals court ruled that it was totally cool for a guy to sacrifice goats in his house as part of a “complex ritual for ordaining priests”.

What else can you think of – what should be made legal/illegal and why?

UPDATE: Forgot all about prostitution, the top example of an illegal activity that just won’t go away. NPR did a great debate, “Is It Wrong to Pay for Sex?”, which I heartily recommend everyone listen to (about 50min). On a related note, the Economist recently made a case for looser restrictions on how we treat pedophiles (Megan’s laws, sex offender registries).

And organ sales. People need kidneys; other people have kidneys to spare. Should we be selling our organs? The New Yorker did a story on people who felt motivated to donate their kidneys to total strangers, for nothing. There is also an audio interview with the author.

Leading the discussion was Pete, fresh off reading Richard Dawkins’s The God Delusion and Christopher Hitchens’s God is Not Great. Pete’s argument boiled down to atheism; literally, the opposite of theism, the belief in one god. A rejection of the belief that there is one thing determining the faith of your soul.

Pete talked mainly about Dawkins, who argues in his book that those who believe in science cannot possibly believe in God. Essentially, according to this theory, “God” has been the historic and traditional explanation for anything and everything that humans could not explain themselves: why the sun came up over here and went down over there, why the nights were longer in winter and the days in summer, why plants grew, etc. Having no understanding of these things, early humans created the idea of God: that which explains the unexplainable.

As time went on, of course, humans discovered the science behind all of these things, and God was no longer used as the catch-all explanation. It stands to reason, then, that after another thousand years, humans will understand many things that are unfathomable today – the nature of light, the origins of matter, black holes and so on. In time, the atheists say, science will explain all things to us.

Don brought up at interesting point here: science is its own faith. For example, we can read of the method of carbon dating, in which the age of ancient organic matter is determined by the amount of carbon-14 that is left in it. By this method scientists determine the age of artifacts and fossils. It is an accepted scientific method, and yet the majority of us have no idea how it works. We take it on faith that it is true. Isn’t science therefore just another religion, which most of us cannot verify, but instead put our blind trust in? It’s just another kind of faith.

Yet Pete came back with an effective (in my opinion) retort: science relies on the scientific method. Experiments must be repeated and verified by others before being accepted by the community. Everything they do is documented, recorded, repeated. In contrast, consider the miracles the Jesus performed. Though it was written in the New Testament that Jesus raised two people from the dead – from the dead! – no one ever thought to interview these people and hear about what an incredible experience that must have been. Brought back to life from death – yet it is simply recorded, never questioned, never followed up.

Further on the subject of Jesus, Don aired a point which I agree with completely: that Jesus definitely existed, that he was a guy who had a radical worldview, he was wildly charismatic, and his opinions reached a vast number of people because they were morally upright and essentially human. But he didn’t leave any of his own writings. He left that to his followers, who argued over it for years, who delayed, who made political compromises and ended up with the New Testament, a decidedly human work. Whether Jesus was the “Son of God” is beside the point, Don said. I would put forth that if there is a God, then we are all his sons and daughters.

Further to that, Don touched on the fundamentalist factor. That is, the chance that he, having been born a Catholic in Kansas, was “lucky” enough to fall into the “right” religion, unlike millions of others around the globe. How can fundamentalists be so exclusive, so narrow-minded, as to think that their God is the only god, that other people who believe just as fervently as they do in different gods are dead wrong, and not only that, they will be punished by burning in hell for all eternity? Don’s personal opinion was that anyone who thought that way, who truly believed that their way was the only way, and that others would be punished by their God in The End Times, were his intellectual inferiors.

Jeff chimed in on proving the existence or nonexistence of God, saying that both are impossible. That is the essence of faith: believing in that which cannot be proven. Just because science has learned the real reason the sun rises in the east and sets in the west does not rule out the possibility that there is an omnipotent God stroking his white beard in the heavens (though Jeff did not endorse this version of the Supreme Being). But his point was that no matter how much science figures out, it cannot prove that there is no God. Pete’s counterpoint came straight from Dawkins, who said the burden of proof is on those who claim that there is an invisible, omniscient being that created the universe and controls all things, but for whose existence there is exactly zero proof. You might as well claim that there is a giant green teacup hovering over all of us which controls the weather: hey, you can’t prove it’s not there, right?

Religion as Taste

All of this points to Dawkins’s conclusion that people’s religious opinions should be given no more preference or respect than their music opinions – because they are just that: opinions. I can’t prove that the Rolling Stones are a good band, and you can’t prove that Allah is the only true God. Some might believe in the creationist argument of “irreducible complexity,” as Jeff mentioned – the idea that some things about life are just too complicated to have come about by chance, by evolution. But others would argue that evolution is more than just blind chance; it’s the result of millions of years of trial and error. If the progress of life forms is a mountain, evolutionists believe that steps were made slowly up the mountain, one by one, over an impossibly long period of time. Intelligent designers picture a crane which lifted humans and their sophisticated organ systems right to the top of the mountain.

What about creativity, though? Where do ideas come from? Pete may argue that inspiration is just random sparks along our nerve endings, pulses jumping from neuron to neuron – but I can’t accept that, and my impression was that the others present are in my camp. Maybe it’s just a basic human impulse to believe in a higher order – maybe it’s an animal impulse and atheists are actually more developed life forms that us – but my own preference is that there are some mysteries that will never be solved by science, because they are divine. The field of quantum mechanics gives me hope, because my own limited following of the situation there indicates that the more our brilliant scientists discover about the nature of matter, of atoms and electrons and smaller particles, the more questions they raise. Pete would say that all will be revealed in time, but his argument is based on history, and history has not only shown us that we can figure things out, it has shown us that the more we learn, the more we realize how much we don’t know. But his riposte would be that “the world is amazing enough without a supernatural being.” Well, touche.

Or maybe Don put it best: “In the end, we’re all just a bunch of hairless monkeys, and when it’s over, the lights go out, and that’s it.”