Religion

My current definition of God is: that which is absolutely self-created, with no antecedents, no dependencies, no priors. Might be the universe itself, or might be a personality in the sky. I like to think of God – the self-created core of the cosmos – as a superposition. A superposition is a concept in quantum physics which states that light can be both a wave and a particle, both off and on, present or absent at the same time. A cat can be both dead and alive, and you only notice the difference once you observe it. God/not-God is true at once, and the superposition is only settled once you choose which one to see.

Each man being guilty before all and for all, besides his own sins, your reasoning about that is quite correct, and it is surprising that you could suddenly embrace this thought so fully. And indeed it is true that when people understand this thought, the Kingdom of Heaven will come to them

• In other words, the Kingdom of Heaven is nothing other than an unrealized possibility: we are merely a realization away from Paradise.

• So why don’t we take that step? What is it that hinders us? This is what “The Brothers Karamazov” is about.

There are no systems of thought that will get you into knowing true reality, what gives rise to the thought is the eternal quest

We all want to be large and make big impressions, but this is a fast track to mental illness, thinking of ourselves as a speck in time part of a larger narrative is a much more graceful acceptance of my minuscule position in the cosmos which is the gateway to calm and harmony

• Good ways to feel small: pick up an ancient text, read words written by someone 2000 years ago, go to nature and notice the age of the trees and rocks, spend time with an animal that has no concern with my success

• Religions also tell us we are imperfect and this is quite a helpful starting point but we are all doing our best, the gateway to vulnerability and connection to others

• Imagine going on a date with Simone who says they are perfect vs they are slightly flawed

Religion gives you a new song to dance to that isn’t war drums, a glue that keeps society together that is based on truth

• Try it on for size, but don’t buy it for life. What happens if you pray? you’ll experience some sort of connection

Transcendence hacking: the feeling of transcendence that induces religious feelings is better purposed as a guide to know what to pay special attention to in a world of distraction

God is a call to true adventure with some constraints

Establish something of permanent value that is maximally beneficial to everyone else

Religious thought is the record of ideas which have scaled

Pharisees are religious hypocrites meaning the best possible ideas can be used by the worst people

I think there is a mystery at the heart of the universe, not a puzzle. God is there because there will be no finality

I have administrative bones to pick with God. God seems to have kind of a laid back management style I’m not crazy about. I’m pretty much anti-death. God looks by all accounts to be pro-death - Infinite Jest

Doubt is central to faith, the opposite of faith is certainty which destroys the mystery of the unknown

If my neighbor believed in 20 gods or no God at all, it neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg. - Thomas Jefferson (we are extremely religious intolerant today)

You can worship God more closely in nature than in being in cathedrals because it reminds you of your insignificance and becomes more inspiriting, humiliated by your atomic insignificance and only then can you make decisions for not following the well-worn path

Tribalism is good when the tribe and the tribe member both have an independent identity and they happen to be the same. The tribe member has chosen to be a part of the tribe because it happens to match who he really is. If either the identity of the tribe or the member evolves to the point where the two no longer match, the person will leave the tribe. Let’s call this conscious tribalism. Tribalism is bad when the tribe and tribe member’s identity are one and the same. The tribe member’s identity is determined by whatever the tribe’s dogma happens to say. If the identity of the tribe changes, the identity of the tribe member changes with it in lockstep. The tribe member’s identity can’t change independent of the tribal identity because the member has no independent identity. Let’s call this blind tribalism. the more rigid and certain and dogmatic the tribe, the more likely it’ll be to attract blind tribe members. Humans want internal security, and for someone who grows up feeling shaky about their own distinctive character, a tribe and its guiding dogma is a critical lifeline—a one-stop shop for a full suite of human opinions and values. Insecurity can be solved the hard way or the easy way—and by giving people the easy option, dogmatic tribes remove the pressure to do the hard work of evolving into a more independent person with a more internally-defined identity. In that way, dogmatic tribes are an enabler of the blind tribe member’s deficiencies.

“We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal” John Locke, whose intellectual ink is tattooed all over the Declaration of Independence, knew this. His theory of natural rights is based on the idea that God owns us as property. Human equality is self-evident only if you assume, as Locke did, that God has given us the natural rights that modern Americans take for granted. The original Constitution says that our “unalienable rights” are a result not of secular rationalism, but rather an omnipotent God who endows us with those rights. To that end, the pillars of American law rest as much on the Bible as on the writings of Enlightenment thinkers. Even our most “rational” beliefs are downstream of religious thinking.

The idea that the son of God was born of a virgin, traveled through contemporary Israel performing miracles, died on a cross, and came back to life seems as bizarre to me today as it did to the Romans two millennia ago. And yet, the intellectual history of Western civilization orbits around this story.

Religious atheists are people who want Christianity without Christ. They want community without communion, the kingdom without the king, and like Thomas Jefferson, morals without miracles.

Sublimate our hunger - humans require more than life, they demand unnecessary refinements and pleasures

Reading the Bible is a contrarian activity that shouldn’t be contrarian at all. The Bible is the trunk that branches and leaves hang onto. For example, many of the most trivial and seemingly self-evident ideas come from Christianity. Though just about everybody supports human rights, most people don’t realize that it’s downstream from Judeo-Christian ideas. Human rights are downstream of America’s Declaration of Independence, which is downstream of the ideas in the Bible

• So much of our worldview unconsciously rests on Christian ideas that I describe them as the dark matter of Western civilization. Astrophysicists posit that there’s something like a mysterious substance floating in space. Though we don’t know exactly how it works, we know it exists because of the way it exerts a gravitational influence on the nighttime sky. Biblical ideas similarly hold up much of the modern world. It’s easy to assume you single-handedly arrived at manners and morality on your own, but every Westerner I know has the fingerprints of Christ all over their worldview

Christianity was the first religion not to harken back to some lost Golden Age; the Heavenly Jerusalem will not be merely the Garden of Eden; in fact, it will be better. Christianity infected the world with the idea that the future could be radically better than the past

To a Christian, Jesus’ words carry the weight of the world. To me, they’re like a brick: heavy enough to make me careful, but light enough to add other ones to my mental backpack.

God is an all-encompassing term for things we don’t understand. Under that definition, luck is the secular God.

Better yet, the joy and glory of a world after redemption will be greater because humans have suffered to reach it.

Christian theology sees time as linear. It moves away from the Garden of Eden, and toward a day of judgment, justice, and the establishment of a divine, peace-filled kingdom. This is a huge departure from the cyclical view of time of birth-rise-decline-destruction cycle of Hinduism

• If time is cyclical, the future will look like the present. The arrow of time points back towards its origin and ends where it began. Taken to the extreme, cyclical perspectives on time implicitly remove human agency. No matter what you do, the world will return to its original state.

• Christians were the first group to reject cyclical time. They shouted that the future could be meaningfully better than the past. By doing so, they initiated a positive feedback loop, where progress led to progress, which led to more progress.

• Guided by this belief in the possibility of progress, Christians follow a high-resolution painting of a perfect future. It’s as if humanity is on a mission. They believe humans are here to reflect God’s light onto the world. Instead of returning to the Garden of Eden, humanity will march forward, from the past to the future, and create “a new heaven and a new earth.”

In the Western world people stiff-arm religion like it’s the Heisman trophy

Let’s not forget that human culture began with a murder. That culture was fueled by rage and rivalry, which led to violence. Managing that violence is the secret reason for all religious and political institutions.

Original sin is like a fish swimming around in the water and trying not to get wet… we are just dealing with the nature of being an imperfect being dealing with cause and effect, you can’t do it right there’s no way out so just give up trying to be perfect and enter into the “so what am I supposed to do” which is some form of surrender and not do it all yourself grind culture

I think it’s so rude that Jesus didn’t put gloves or bandages on his hands

The devil moves in crowds, God speaks to individuals

Yeah, there is the surface level stuff that is challenging on purpose, but the deeper exploration leads to an encounter with what possibility could be

The crucifix is not man reconciling with God, it is God reconciling with man and said I messed up but I can come down there and experience the torture and pain with you

story of Purple Man and Jessica Jones (strong)… he doesn’t know if anyone actually loves him which relates to the fall in the garden and Jacob wrestling with God (Israel, the name itself is a testament that you can resist God)

Once you get it it’s hard to un-get it

Christianity didn’t spread from Jerusalem to the Roman Empire through preachers of theology, it was martyrs

Faith is also doing things although you know they might be pointless

Beliefs become true as a result of you believing in them, consider how much a group accomplished by holding a concept like the Kingdom of Heaven in their collective imaginations especially if they build magnificent cathedrals and paint beautiful paintings and write soul-shattering music. Inshallah (if God wills it) literally short circuits worrying about if something is true

What is my cherubim and flaming swords that I need to watch out for? (Genesis 3 when he drove man east of Eden)

Deep down, humans are wired for ritual. We have religious impulse and inclinations towards cults and tribes

The theme of most books is how one should behave in the world: the Old Testament theme is don’t worship false gods. If you put too much emphasis on money, on status, on ideology, you will inevitably turn yourself into a circle. Humans always do this, and the value of having a transcendent truth (something you can’t measure or define) is not for us to understand, it is for us to reach for and be reverent of and is watching you

I don’t think the only thing that exists in this world is matter and motion.. there is something else going on

Simone de Beauvoir, in the ethics of ambiguity, argues that meaning isn’t something we stumble upon—it’s something we actively create. It’s not handed down or bestowed by external forces; it’s forged through the choices we make

We see a single human motivation behind the myths of objectivism and subjectivism, namely, the concern for understanding. The myth of objectivism reflects the human need to understand the external world in order to be able to function successfully in it. The myth of subjectivism is focused on internal aspects of understanding—what the individual finds meaningful and what makes his life worth living. The experientialist myth suggests that these are not opposing concerns. But any deep understanding of what we feel, change as we change, and even believe what we believe, takes us beyond ourselves. - Metaphors We Live By

One can enter one’s final days laden down or light-footed

Wait with the patience of Job

“On a jury one could expect to find a sample of the human condition: a patchwork of intellects and experiences, personalities and prejudices. To convince these twelve disparate souls of an argument’s merit, an attorney could not rely on logic, or science, or even justice. After all, Socrates couldn’t convince the elders of Athens of his innocence any more than Galileo could convince the pope or Jesus the people of Jerusalem. To convince the members of a jury, one must instead draw them into a story.” - Table For Two

“Though she couldn’t remember the exact reference, and whether it was from mythology or the Bible, she knew instinctively as they approached the Pier’s limit that no matter what happened she mustn’t look back.” - Table for Two

How can you not respect a faith that requires you to carry a compass? (In order to pray in the direction of Mecca)

Jesus is a myth: something that is not factual but is always true

Secular, reasonable definition of Satan: Satan is the cloud of fear that lives inside the individual and then collectivizes into anger, judgment, etc.

More incredible are the illusions we discover the trick behind and come to find the trick even more enchanting

Psychedelic experiences are usually breakthroughs in part because the world speaks back to me, it seems helpful

Fancy for a moment that at his death Jesus did not find himself in paradise

Help one another according to their DESERTS

Myth provokes explanation but accepts none of it

Jesus calls people morons in Matthew 7 for those who don’t listen to his house building parable

Joseph in Technicolor Dreamcoat

Augustine defined sin as ‘curvatus in se’ or caved in on oneself…the times when I am self-absorbed and retreat inside, well that is hell and it narrows and constricts me (hell is not fire, but ice)

Convince people in few phrases and many images, which is the way of Jesus Christ

What myths have I been indoctrinated into? like if I raised 100,000 kindergarteners with the belief that God is within you, how would that change the world?

If one of two contrary things be infinite, the other would be utterly destroyed…but evil does exist so God can’t be infinitely good

The burning bush was on fire but not consumed

We have to talk about more like what God is NOT… not an entity in the world but a genus of being

Deuteronomy is a call to remember where we came from: if we forget the deserts in our lives, they are wasted, the deserts must shape us and come with us

The hive switch: turn it on to make us less selfish and apart of something bigger

• Religion just flips the hive switch on to create a community and all the impossible beliefs are post-hoc constructions to justify what we’ve done

Archetype: a pattern of behavior, but a larger abstract representation of that behavior, more real than real because it is distilled and extracted from the whole world

Fear of God interpreted: we are not in full control of ourselves/thoughts, but instead subordinate to some natural force

We humans with limited knowledge resolve tension by squeezing life and the world into commoditized ideas, categories, and prepackaged narratives like a procrustean bed

The double standard of exonerating God for atrocities by referencing his mysteriousness but that is also precisely the reason why God is good is exhausting, it’s like playing tennis with no net and its morally narcissistic

Human nature tends to interpret ambiguities negatively

The 16 verses in Genesis 4 are a history of humankind in any culture: it starts with rejection (seemingly unfounded) and then leads to fear and insecurity anger and guilt… ‘thou mayest’ rule over sin

God is a thought, but its reference is that beyond thinking

Religion: guiding fictions, but still fictions. Guiding fictions, but still guiding

Cumin-splitter — Greek expression for pettiness with money because they will cut a cumin seed in half rather than give the other half for free

Have the grit to pray for Judas

“are you so dull?” — Jesus Christ

“It’ll work this time”—Babylonians (this is the soundtrack of Babylon)

Terraced vineyards

Jesus assembled his boys at the garden of Gethsemane

God can use a stone that is in the air, but not the one on the riverbed

Sheep and goats are in the same flock because they don’t use the same resources

Shepherds use their VOICE

Three seahs of fine flour (60 loaves)

Dig a deeper well to get better water, not a wider circumference

Nehemiah’s holy discontent gives emotional conviction

Nothing is wasted in God’s economy

The shelf life of those fantasies has expired

Christianity seems to consist of exactly the kinds of stories humans would tell themselves for comfort

The absurdity is where we apprehend the transcendent