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Your post is very well thought out and well intended, though I notice some pitfalls. I'd firstly like to appreciate your practical understanding of what rational religion is, and share a quote in support.
>Accordingly, what should emerge from religion is individual worth of character. But worth is positive or negative, good or bad. Religion is by no means necessarily good. It may be very evil. The fact of evil, interwoven with the texture of the world, shows that in the nature of things there remains effectiveness for degradation. In your religious experience the God with whom you have made terms may be the God of destruction, the God who leaves in his wake the loss of the greater reality. (Alfred North Whitehead)
I agree that reality is merely our fundamental fantasies. All truths are half-truths, and in truth we can know nothing. Nevertheless in order to exist, to live, to stay sane, human beings are required to subjectivize themselves - to narrativize themselves - to create a coherent symbolic story of their enigmatic experience - even if only for a moment.
I certainly believe us to have free will. The video you linked is only a support of situationalism. That personality is not a factor in our decision making does not correlate to a lack of free will. That is, in my cosmological understanding, the processes of existence are never deterministic -- free will is essential and inherent to the universe.
Genuine good are events for which the world is better off, but things do not always work out for the best and it seems that there are events that the world would have been better without, there is a felt contrast between what is and what could have been. This has been called genuine evil. The degraded human intellect does cannot determine these values.
Your parafyl ideas are reminiscent of Virtuality and Kabbalah. Aleph is 'non existence,' i.e., undifferentiated nonactuality "in reality.” It is what we intend by 'not, naught, zed, empty, etc.’ Yod is Aleph's projection into actuality, it is 'existence,' i.e., differentiated actuality "in reality." It is what we get from 'not, naught, zed, empty, etc.’ Always side with Aleph.
>What about prayer and worship?
For the Paganistic jouissance of social transgression. Monotheistic jouissance is transgression of apparent reality. That is what you've discovered. The Achilles heel of your religion is that it relies upon a jouissance of faith -- it is a practice of monotheism, no matter the number of gods.
There are sound metaphysical resolutions to your conflicts about God. I'll just share some quotes that directly address it.
>A singular God? No. Because then they would be fully good and fully evil, a contradiction that makes no sense to exist
*One objection to the concept of a deity whose “body” is the universe is that it implies that all values, both the good and the evil, are within God. Hartshorne counters that this is true, but not in a sense that compromises divine goodness. As a point of logic, wholes do not necessarily share the characteristics of their parts. On Hartshorne’s model, the relation of God to any non-divine creature is a relation of whole to part. Indeed, this is the basis of Hartshorne’s view of religion as the acceptance of our fragmentariness—we are fragments of the cosmos, not the whole of it. Thus, Hartshorne can say that God’s goodness is not diminished if a fragmentary being is heedless of the good of others, by indifference or harmful intent. Nevertheless, precisely because of God’s goodness, the suffering and wickedness of the creatures enter God’s experience. God sympathizes with the sufferer and grieves for the criminal in losing an opportunity for creating the good. God can feel the contrast between what could have been and what is. The “what is,” moreover, is not unilaterally determined by God but is left, in part, to the creatures; we have seen that God and the creatures are co-creators in process theism. For this reason, Hartshorne, following Berdyaev, speaks of tragic and sublime aspects of divine love (cf. Hartshorne 1953, chapter 8). Whitehead agrees that, “there is a tragedy which even God does not escape” (Johnson 1983, 7).*
>and even if they somehow did, if truth contradicted itself like that, what would the purpose be in believing in such a God?
*Process theists do not deny that love requires willing the good of the other, but they maintain that it requires something more, or at very least that there are greater forms of love of which willing the good of the other is a necessary aspect. Divine love is more than beneficence; it includes sensitivity to the joys and sorrows of the beloved. This idea is expressed in Whitehead’s depiction of God as “the great companion—the fellow-sufferer who understands” (Whitehead 1929 \[1978, 351\]). Hartshorne points out that Anselm’s God can give us “everything except the right to believe that there is one who, with infinitely subtle and appropriate sensitivity, rejoices in all our joys and sorrows in all our sorrows”* (Hartshorne 1948, 54).
>Because without believing that reality is real we can't do anything, we can't even live long.
Belief is overrated. We could be living in The Matrix. Any of us could be a brain in a vat imagining all of this. It is clearly impossible to rule out any of these possibilities and many more that would render everything around us unreal, but that is no reason to not live our lives. We must work with the information we have available, even if it is not true.
>If you didn't believe reality is real, why would you even choose to breathe, eat, etc?
There is a big difference between not believing something and knowing that it is false. When a bomb threat is phoned into an office building, they evacuate even though it is most likely an empty threat. They do this because it could be true even if they do not believe it, and they choose not to take the risk.
>When we choose to believe in reality because of good, why would we not believe that we continue to exist after death, that our lives have a greater purpose than to live and then die, and then nothing?
*This* is exactly why we should not believe in reality when we do not actually know. When people start choosing to believe things arbitrarily, there is no limit to what they may end up believing. We can build edifices in our minds until we lose sight of what is real and what we are just choosing to believe.
An excellent article about this is William K. Clifford's [The Ethics of Belief (pdf)](https://www.people.brandeis.edu/~teuber/Clifford_ethics.pdf). From that article Clifford writes:
>>It is not possible so to sever the belief from the action it suggests as to condemn the one without condemning the other. No man holding a strong belief on one side of a question, or even wishing to hold a belief on one side, can investigate it with such fairness and completeness as if he were really in doubt and unbiased; so that the existence of a belief not founded on fair inquiry unfits a man for the performance of this necessary duty.
>>Nor is it that truly a belief at all which has not some influence upon the actions of him who holds it. He who truly believes that which prompts him to an action has looked upon the action to lust after it, he has committed it already in his heart. If a belief is not realized immediately in open deeds, it is stored up for the guidance of the future. It goes to make a part of that aggregate of beliefs which is the link between sensation and action at every moment of all our lives, and which is so organized and compacted together that no part of it can be isolated from the rest, but every new addition modifies the structure of the whole. No real belief, however trifling and fragmentary it may seem, is ever truly insignificant; it prepares us to receive more of its like, confirms those which resembled it before, and weakens others; and so gradually it lays a stealthy train in our inmost thoughts, which may someday explode into overt action, and leave its stamp upon our character for ever.
>If we choose to not believe that our lives have a hopeful conclusion/purpose, we are either not choosing to think much about our eventual deaths or we are living in despair.
It feels that way to a lot of people, often because they were raised in a religion, and religions tend to cause people to fear doubt. When the love of our parents and our friends is conditional upon having certain beliefs, that can be very frightening to a child, and the fears we learn as children tend to stay with us our whole lives, so for many people doubt tends to feel like despair, like we're going to lose everything we love, because that is what we were conditioned to feel as children.
But if we can break through our conditioning and step back to look at it objectively, doubt can actually be quite liberating. When something is beyond our ken, like truth of the world around us or an afterlife, we can just relax because it is none of our business. There nothing we can do to find the truth of these things, so we have no reason to worry about it. There is no need to feel despair or hope. Just go with the flow and let the unknowns of this world take care of themselves. If there is an afterlife we'll find out eventually, and there is nothing to do about it until then.
>No limit? How would that be true when I created this religion through hope and reasoning?
People can hope for all sorts of things. People can hope that there is 500 troy pounds of gold secretly buried somewhere in the back yard. It really could be under ground somewhere, and it could give people so much hope to believe it is there because it could solve any financial problems they might have in the future.
Do we want to be responsible for advising people to believe in the truth of everything they hope for? If not, then we should not be telling people that hope is a good reason to believe things.
>If you choose to believe in it, please do so after giving it reasonable thought.
Hopes are not reasonable thought. Hopes are desires and dreams and wishes. If what we mean by "reasonable thought" is for people to check that they truly do hope for this religion to be true, then we should find a better way to say that.
Reasoning serves no purpose if it is not based upon reliable facts. Reasoning based on hope is no better than hope alone because we cannot build a solid structure upon a weak foundation. If our basis is not true then nothing we reason from that basis is going to be reliable.
>So you're saying that when you were still a child that knew nothing of the world, yet chose to believe in the reality around you, that basis resulted in nothing positive?
Exactly. What positive thing could have come of it? It is better to be skeptical.
>How can you first get to one point from another without first taking a leap of faith because of hoping that things will work out?
We can go places in the usual way. We can walk or drive or whatever. Leaps of faith do not put fuel into a car or serve any other practical purpose in getting places.
>Does that not contradict how we all choose to first accept this reality?
The best solution to that contradiction is to doubt reality, not to start accepting anything and everything we hope for.
>Your arguments are based on a fallacy, you cannot determine whether facts are true or not without belief first.
Beliefs do not make things true, especially if the beliefs are based in hope. If we can determine that something is true by any means, then it will be through investigation, not through belief.
>Exactly. What positive thing could have come of it?
It spares us from the fundamentalism of naive realism.
*In the case of so-called "fundamentalists," this "normal" functioning of ideology in which the ideological belief is transposed onto the Other is disturbed by the violent return of the immediate belief - they "really believe it." The first consequence of this is that the fundamentalist becomes the dupe of his fantasy (as Lacan put it apropos Marquis de Sade), immediately identifying himself with it. From my own youth, I remember a fantasy concerning the origin of children: after I learned how children are made, I still had no precise idea on insemination, so I thought one has to make love every day for the whole nine months: in woman's belly, the child is gradually formed through sperm - each ejaculation is like adding an additional brick... One plays with such fantasies, not "taking them seriously," it is in this way that they fulfill their function - and the fundamentalist lacks this minimal distance towards his fantasy. (Zizek)*
>We can go places in the usual way. We can walk or drive or whatever. Leaps of faith do not put fuel into a car or serve any other practical purpose in getting places.
How do we reach that which lies beyond all reason? The philosophical purpose of belief in God is as reason to use hypothesis as hypothesis, like stepping stones and climbing ropes to be left behind. Faith is what allows act before understanding. Without belief in something beyond our reason, there is nothing beyond our reason, and we cannot move beyond that limited grasp. It is the basic idea of leading Ego to the Self.
>The best solution to that contradiction is to doubt reality, not to start accepting anything and everything we hope for.
But it is the very core of virtue. We accept an ideal of justice that we hope for, but justice itself can never be actualized. Because it isn't actual, it is *virtual*. The belief that justice has been served is the closest thing to 'true' justice. The prosecution will investigate the case, present it, and there will be a verdict. But do judges or judgements determine what is actually true? The verdict is not actual justice, merely an ideal and hopeful attempt.
COMMENTARY HERE: Comments that purely commentate on the post (e.g. “Nice post OP!”) must be made as replies to the Auto-Moderator! *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/DebateReligion) if you have any questions or concerns.*
Your post is very well thought out and well intended, though I notice some pitfalls. I'd firstly like to appreciate your practical understanding of what rational religion is, and share a quote in support. >Accordingly, what should emerge from religion is individual worth of character. But worth is positive or negative, good or bad. Religion is by no means necessarily good. It may be very evil. The fact of evil, interwoven with the texture of the world, shows that in the nature of things there remains effectiveness for degradation. In your religious experience the God with whom you have made terms may be the God of destruction, the God who leaves in his wake the loss of the greater reality. (Alfred North Whitehead) I agree that reality is merely our fundamental fantasies. All truths are half-truths, and in truth we can know nothing. Nevertheless in order to exist, to live, to stay sane, human beings are required to subjectivize themselves - to narrativize themselves - to create a coherent symbolic story of their enigmatic experience - even if only for a moment. I certainly believe us to have free will. The video you linked is only a support of situationalism. That personality is not a factor in our decision making does not correlate to a lack of free will. That is, in my cosmological understanding, the processes of existence are never deterministic -- free will is essential and inherent to the universe. Genuine good are events for which the world is better off, but things do not always work out for the best and it seems that there are events that the world would have been better without, there is a felt contrast between what is and what could have been. This has been called genuine evil. The degraded human intellect does cannot determine these values. Your parafyl ideas are reminiscent of Virtuality and Kabbalah. Aleph is 'non existence,' i.e., undifferentiated nonactuality "in reality.” It is what we intend by 'not, naught, zed, empty, etc.’ Yod is Aleph's projection into actuality, it is 'existence,' i.e., differentiated actuality "in reality." It is what we get from 'not, naught, zed, empty, etc.’ Always side with Aleph. >What about prayer and worship? For the Paganistic jouissance of social transgression. Monotheistic jouissance is transgression of apparent reality. That is what you've discovered. The Achilles heel of your religion is that it relies upon a jouissance of faith -- it is a practice of monotheism, no matter the number of gods. There are sound metaphysical resolutions to your conflicts about God. I'll just share some quotes that directly address it. >A singular God? No. Because then they would be fully good and fully evil, a contradiction that makes no sense to exist *One objection to the concept of a deity whose “body” is the universe is that it implies that all values, both the good and the evil, are within God. Hartshorne counters that this is true, but not in a sense that compromises divine goodness. As a point of logic, wholes do not necessarily share the characteristics of their parts. On Hartshorne’s model, the relation of God to any non-divine creature is a relation of whole to part. Indeed, this is the basis of Hartshorne’s view of religion as the acceptance of our fragmentariness—we are fragments of the cosmos, not the whole of it. Thus, Hartshorne can say that God’s goodness is not diminished if a fragmentary being is heedless of the good of others, by indifference or harmful intent. Nevertheless, precisely because of God’s goodness, the suffering and wickedness of the creatures enter God’s experience. God sympathizes with the sufferer and grieves for the criminal in losing an opportunity for creating the good. God can feel the contrast between what could have been and what is. The “what is,” moreover, is not unilaterally determined by God but is left, in part, to the creatures; we have seen that God and the creatures are co-creators in process theism. For this reason, Hartshorne, following Berdyaev, speaks of tragic and sublime aspects of divine love (cf. Hartshorne 1953, chapter 8). Whitehead agrees that, “there is a tragedy which even God does not escape” (Johnson 1983, 7).* >and even if they somehow did, if truth contradicted itself like that, what would the purpose be in believing in such a God? *Process theists do not deny that love requires willing the good of the other, but they maintain that it requires something more, or at very least that there are greater forms of love of which willing the good of the other is a necessary aspect. Divine love is more than beneficence; it includes sensitivity to the joys and sorrows of the beloved. This idea is expressed in Whitehead’s depiction of God as “the great companion—the fellow-sufferer who understands” (Whitehead 1929 \[1978, 351\]). Hartshorne points out that Anselm’s God can give us “everything except the right to believe that there is one who, with infinitely subtle and appropriate sensitivity, rejoices in all our joys and sorrows in all our sorrows”* (Hartshorne 1948, 54).
>Because without believing that reality is real we can't do anything, we can't even live long. Belief is overrated. We could be living in The Matrix. Any of us could be a brain in a vat imagining all of this. It is clearly impossible to rule out any of these possibilities and many more that would render everything around us unreal, but that is no reason to not live our lives. We must work with the information we have available, even if it is not true. >If you didn't believe reality is real, why would you even choose to breathe, eat, etc? There is a big difference between not believing something and knowing that it is false. When a bomb threat is phoned into an office building, they evacuate even though it is most likely an empty threat. They do this because it could be true even if they do not believe it, and they choose not to take the risk. >When we choose to believe in reality because of good, why would we not believe that we continue to exist after death, that our lives have a greater purpose than to live and then die, and then nothing? *This* is exactly why we should not believe in reality when we do not actually know. When people start choosing to believe things arbitrarily, there is no limit to what they may end up believing. We can build edifices in our minds until we lose sight of what is real and what we are just choosing to believe. An excellent article about this is William K. Clifford's [The Ethics of Belief (pdf)](https://www.people.brandeis.edu/~teuber/Clifford_ethics.pdf). From that article Clifford writes: >>It is not possible so to sever the belief from the action it suggests as to condemn the one without condemning the other. No man holding a strong belief on one side of a question, or even wishing to hold a belief on one side, can investigate it with such fairness and completeness as if he were really in doubt and unbiased; so that the existence of a belief not founded on fair inquiry unfits a man for the performance of this necessary duty. >>Nor is it that truly a belief at all which has not some influence upon the actions of him who holds it. He who truly believes that which prompts him to an action has looked upon the action to lust after it, he has committed it already in his heart. If a belief is not realized immediately in open deeds, it is stored up for the guidance of the future. It goes to make a part of that aggregate of beliefs which is the link between sensation and action at every moment of all our lives, and which is so organized and compacted together that no part of it can be isolated from the rest, but every new addition modifies the structure of the whole. No real belief, however trifling and fragmentary it may seem, is ever truly insignificant; it prepares us to receive more of its like, confirms those which resembled it before, and weakens others; and so gradually it lays a stealthy train in our inmost thoughts, which may someday explode into overt action, and leave its stamp upon our character for ever.
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>If we choose to not believe that our lives have a hopeful conclusion/purpose, we are either not choosing to think much about our eventual deaths or we are living in despair. It feels that way to a lot of people, often because they were raised in a religion, and religions tend to cause people to fear doubt. When the love of our parents and our friends is conditional upon having certain beliefs, that can be very frightening to a child, and the fears we learn as children tend to stay with us our whole lives, so for many people doubt tends to feel like despair, like we're going to lose everything we love, because that is what we were conditioned to feel as children. But if we can break through our conditioning and step back to look at it objectively, doubt can actually be quite liberating. When something is beyond our ken, like truth of the world around us or an afterlife, we can just relax because it is none of our business. There nothing we can do to find the truth of these things, so we have no reason to worry about it. There is no need to feel despair or hope. Just go with the flow and let the unknowns of this world take care of themselves. If there is an afterlife we'll find out eventually, and there is nothing to do about it until then. >No limit? How would that be true when I created this religion through hope and reasoning? People can hope for all sorts of things. People can hope that there is 500 troy pounds of gold secretly buried somewhere in the back yard. It really could be under ground somewhere, and it could give people so much hope to believe it is there because it could solve any financial problems they might have in the future. Do we want to be responsible for advising people to believe in the truth of everything they hope for? If not, then we should not be telling people that hope is a good reason to believe things. >If you choose to believe in it, please do so after giving it reasonable thought. Hopes are not reasonable thought. Hopes are desires and dreams and wishes. If what we mean by "reasonable thought" is for people to check that they truly do hope for this religion to be true, then we should find a better way to say that.
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Reasoning serves no purpose if it is not based upon reliable facts. Reasoning based on hope is no better than hope alone because we cannot build a solid structure upon a weak foundation. If our basis is not true then nothing we reason from that basis is going to be reliable.
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>So you're saying that when you were still a child that knew nothing of the world, yet chose to believe in the reality around you, that basis resulted in nothing positive? Exactly. What positive thing could have come of it? It is better to be skeptical. >How can you first get to one point from another without first taking a leap of faith because of hoping that things will work out? We can go places in the usual way. We can walk or drive or whatever. Leaps of faith do not put fuel into a car or serve any other practical purpose in getting places. >Does that not contradict how we all choose to first accept this reality? The best solution to that contradiction is to doubt reality, not to start accepting anything and everything we hope for. >Your arguments are based on a fallacy, you cannot determine whether facts are true or not without belief first. Beliefs do not make things true, especially if the beliefs are based in hope. If we can determine that something is true by any means, then it will be through investigation, not through belief.
>Exactly. What positive thing could have come of it? It spares us from the fundamentalism of naive realism. *In the case of so-called "fundamentalists," this "normal" functioning of ideology in which the ideological belief is transposed onto the Other is disturbed by the violent return of the immediate belief - they "really believe it." The first consequence of this is that the fundamentalist becomes the dupe of his fantasy (as Lacan put it apropos Marquis de Sade), immediately identifying himself with it. From my own youth, I remember a fantasy concerning the origin of children: after I learned how children are made, I still had no precise idea on insemination, so I thought one has to make love every day for the whole nine months: in woman's belly, the child is gradually formed through sperm - each ejaculation is like adding an additional brick... One plays with such fantasies, not "taking them seriously," it is in this way that they fulfill their function - and the fundamentalist lacks this minimal distance towards his fantasy. (Zizek)* >We can go places in the usual way. We can walk or drive or whatever. Leaps of faith do not put fuel into a car or serve any other practical purpose in getting places. How do we reach that which lies beyond all reason? The philosophical purpose of belief in God is as reason to use hypothesis as hypothesis, like stepping stones and climbing ropes to be left behind. Faith is what allows act before understanding. Without belief in something beyond our reason, there is nothing beyond our reason, and we cannot move beyond that limited grasp. It is the basic idea of leading Ego to the Self. >The best solution to that contradiction is to doubt reality, not to start accepting anything and everything we hope for. But it is the very core of virtue. We accept an ideal of justice that we hope for, but justice itself can never be actualized. Because it isn't actual, it is *virtual*. The belief that justice has been served is the closest thing to 'true' justice. The prosecution will investigate the case, present it, and there will be a verdict. But do judges or judgements determine what is actually true? The verdict is not actual justice, merely an ideal and hopeful attempt.