creating sickness | recovering from religion [cc]

[Music] Oh hmm you recently an individual are called Kroy sent me a message saying he feels like he's stuck between atheism and theism he identifies as an atheist but continues to lapse back into theism these lapses are prompted by accidents like denting his car or twisting his ankle he experiences a strong guilt response believing his being punished by a Supreme Being and finds himself reciting prayers lately he started to feel like he'll never shake the idea that he's been watched and judged as defective by a Supreme Being I relayed troye story to my patrons and asked if any of them experienced similar episodes in a strawpoll 20 out of 70 individuals registered that they did experience temporary lapses several folks registered that the concept of lapses didn't apply to them because they'd always been atheists some folks said they used to have lapses but they didn't last some described more fleeting experiences of detach reflection that had no big emotional impact some said they had lapses but in response to other stimuli like coincidences choral music or when they found themselves in a group practicing communal prayer but for others their episodes like troy's were about anticipating punishment and judgment I want to drill down into this notion of an all-knowing all-powerful omnipresent judge and look at why if it existed this so-called Supreme Being should be apologizing rather than judging this is not going to be a list of divinely perpetrated atrocities cited in religious scriptures tales of divinely sanctioned subjugation persecution genocidal bloodbath that list is long and the atrocities are caliphs and sadistic as it gets but you don't have to subscribe to any specific religion to find this hypothetical judge guilty the charges go deeper than scripture to the essential nature of the judge and for theological foundations of the concept of evil but first I want to say something about these persistent anxieties some folks feel about being punished and judged by some all-seeing presence in my psychological work I've spoken with men and women involved in abusive relationships and it didn't take long to spot theistic echoes in a session with one of my very first clients a man I'll call Ben who presented with depression I was struck by the sense that the partner had been describing didn't sound human she sounded like some omnipresent entity seeping into every moment of his life scrutinizing his every move anticipating every thought and wielding the power of ultimate judgment on them I shared this with Ben and commented that it was as if he was talking about a God rather than a human being after a cavernous silence gazing up at the ceiling he wryly remarked that he'd swapped one tyrant for another at first I wondered if he was referring to a previous relationship he explained he was talking about a God and spoke about the struggle he'd had extracting himself from the religion had been indoctrinated into as a child as we compared these divine and human dictators and how both of them had taken hold of him some parallels emerged both of these abusive regimes had substantially diminished Ben's capacity for independent thoughts by conditioning a range of reflex responses into him when Ben first encountered unreasonable ideas and behavior in both his religion and his relationship there was an explosion of thinking on his part his brain went into problem-solving mode as he tried to figure out what was going on and how to respond you tried various strategies using logic and reason into fairness and compromises Graham giving away more ground but authoritarian regimes aren't big on compromise and in both his religion and his relationship the conflict only ended when been admitted he was wrong the next time he encountered unreasonable ideas and behavior he again tried to think through a considered response but put up less of the defense before admitting he was wrong he said it was like a hole opening up behind him that became easier to fall into each time soon it learned to admit he was wrong immediately with no intervening period of thought this unthinking response to a stimulus is known as a reflex and abusers can build up a range of these reflexes in their target so eventually the target can be played like a puppet twitching mechanically to various cues when targets begin to see these reflex responses they can begin to reintroduce the missing element of conscious thought for instance targets who realize they always robotically obey certain orders like getting their partner a beer can begin to think about this reflex response and to consider and implement different outcomes in many cases the ultimate outcome will be a parting of the ways when targets of abuse start thinking for themselves and rebuilding their eroded sense of worth impossible ideas can become possible including the idea of leaving people recovering from abusive religious pseudo-scientific and socio-political ideologies that have instilled a range of reflex responses in them reflex compliance reflex guilt reflex fear have to do similar work to reintroduce the conscious thought there's been conditioned out of them something else that can aid recovery is taking a good long critical look at the abuser then noted that in relation to both his partner and his religion he became so consuming ly preoccupied trying to meet the superhuman standards they set for him and feeling anxious and fearful when he failed to do so but he didn't stop to consider how well they matched up to those standards themselves when we turned the spotlight on abusers we repeatedly find not only that they come nowhere near the standards they set for others but that they operate on a completely different set of rules one that shields them from all of the hardships their targets are expected to ensure we have no control over the circumstances of our birth throughout history we humans have found ourselves randomly born on parts of the Earth's landmass where a substantial percentage of the population has happened to follow a particular religion many of us will have found ourselves being labeled members of that religion from birth and taught to accept it's mythology uncritically as truth will often be told that the purpose of our life is to serve one or more of thousands of mythical beings proposed by humans over the centuries and made to attend regular worship services in religious temples dedicated to these entities in some cases the entity concerned will be conceptualized as a single all-knowing all-powerful omnipresent Creator but this nebulous concept is difficult for little minds to grasp to make it seem more personal and relatable some religions humanize it by claiming we were created in its image implying that we share significant characteristics with it this personification might be underscored with anthropomorphic language the Creator might be pictured walking around the garden or enjoying the aroma of animal sacrifices which would seem to require legs and a nose of some description there might be references to friendly face-to-face conversations other more obscure parts of its Anatomy might be mentioned like its backside Thrones are built for asses and various religions including all the Abrahamic ones speak of a divine ceremonial chair polytheistic deities can be humanized by adding family members ancient Greek religion was overrun with divine siblings and offspring including a slew of demigods products of numerous dalliance is between the gods and the mortals the concept of family might seem off limits to the monotheistic religions but Christianity famously manages to have it both ways or more accurately three ways in Christian mythology the Creator Yahweh had a son the Christian Messiah Jesus who according to a Christian prayer called the Gloria sits at his father's right hand presumably spaces reserved at Yahweh's left hand for the Holy Spirit which after Yahweh and Jesus forms the third prong of what Christians call the Holy Trinity a mathematics defying celestial equation in which one plus one plus one equals one all this humanizing language and physical imagery can go a long way towards making the cloudy concept of an all-knowing all-powerful omnipresent creator feel concrete relatable accessible personal in particular using intimate forms of address like father can make it so easy for children and adults to project onto that cloudy concept all their fantasies of a supreme parent arousing all the infantilizing feelings associated with those fantasies things of implicit trust loyalty deference and respect but none of this humanizing language and imagery holds up and when we begin to get to grips with just how utterly inhuman this God concept is it becomes clear that if this alien character had created us it would have more to answer for than any human phrase created in its image has various interpretations it's been said to refer to physical image emotional image moral image intellectual image and maybe most obscure of all relational image even allowing the progressively swollen poetic license behind these interpretations all of them fail but they do provide a handy framework for presenting the charges against this divine judge the idea that our bodies bear any physical resemblance to an all-knowing all-powerful omnipresent creator is one relatively few folks in keen to defend these days of our knowledge of biology and physics has increased we'd come to appreciate that the physical form of a being is intimately connected to the specific environmental conditions that inhabit wings come in many shapes and sizes but we've learned those shapes and sizes are constrained by factors like drag thrust lift and weight and we've realized that some of the mythical winged characters humans have dreamt up over the centuries from Icarus with his wings of feathers and wax to the biblical six winged seraphs M would simply never get off the ground likewise we now appreciate the absurdity of a vast naturally humanoid God possessing depth perceiving forward-facing eyes with nothing external to see stereo perceiving is with nothing external to hear agile limbs with no external space through which to move and so on the most common view I've encountered from folks proposing a mythical creator is that it has no physical form at all so why do we expanding on those four words why do we have a physical form that can be damaged or destroyed by other humans predators microbes poisonous materials and natural disasters the frequently attacks itself with debilitating and deadly cancers and that quickly perishes without adequate food water or oxygen or if its core temperature falls or Rises by just a few degrees Fahrenheit perform that if it survives these hazards can look forward to incapacitation and decay before its inevitable death why are we subjected to these sufferings by a creator that's immune to them when I was a Christian I was told human suffering was a result of being endowed with the most precious gift from Yahweh the gift of free choice the reasoning went like this Yahweh created us with free choice to do bad or good that meant people had to be allowed to do bad things even if they ended up hurting or even killing countless others preventing them from doing bad things would take away their free choice in effect they would be forced to be good against their will so Yahweh couldn't interfere either by restraining an abuser or protecting the abusers target the meagre consolation offered to us was that all about - the other hardships we endured diseases predators natural disasters these were all presented as extensions of the same principle the first humans had been given a paradise to live in but because they disobeyed their Creator they were expelled to the world we now live in with all of its dangers so even these forms of suffering were ultimately down to human free choice when I was a Christian I found this reasoning persuasive for a time he didn't stop me resenting the suffering we had to endure but I could appreciate that the alternative of forcing everyone to be good was also extremely undesirable in fact the lack of freedom entailed by forcing people to be good could itself be seen as a form of suffering given the option of free choice plus suffering or no free choice plus no suffering I could see the appeal of option 1 I later realized that I'd fallen for a false dichotomy the presentation of two alternatives as the only alternatives when in fact others exist clue that this was a false dichotomy was staring me in the face albeit in a non-physical way it was Yahweh and this demonstrates another parallel with human abusive relationships in that we spend so much time absolutely focused on these dictators and yet not seeing them at all here supposedly was a being that enjoyed total free choice with full knowledge of good and evil but experienced no suffering it was impossible to harm this being to do so would diminish its greatness in some way violating its divine incorruptibility so free choice and suffering weren't inevitably paired you didn't have to either accept both or reject both not if you are incorruptible so why weren't we created in this incorruptible image why are we down here in these bizarre fragile bodies being infected beaten starved raped tortured and murdered while this supposed Creator enjoys an existence devoid of suffering it's been put to me that the Creator couldn't create themes like itself when reason offered is that its creation might then overpower it first how could it overpower its creator they'd be like two perfect chess players able to anticipate every one of their opponent's moves the only possible outcome is stalemate second wouldn't a desire to overpower its creator indicate some deficiency if the creation was a copy of the Creator this deficiency would have to exist in the original if you're arguing that a copy of the Creator could go rogue you're arguing that the original could go rogue the Christian undergrad student I once knew suggested that a god-like creation might abuse its power in other ways for example by creating less powerful beings and subjecting them to torture she didn't realize she was describing her own God we have to look at things from the perspective of an all-knowing all-powerful creator vulnerability hardship abuse claim distress fear it has no experience of these things it have to design beings utterly unlike itself in order for them to be capable of experiencing suffering in designing those beings it would bring these previously non-existent phenomena into existence the theological implications are clear it created suffering it created torment it created sickness claimed we were made in the emotional image of a creator it can have a profoundly humanizing effect when we imagine we were created by a being that experiences all the feelings we do but the emotional landscape we experience becomes incoherent when applied to an all-knowing all-powerful creator just like wings emotions only make sense under certain conditions we use emotions in dealing with our lack of control and our lack of foreknowledge to a Creator that has total control and total knowledge the human emotional landscape is meaningless this creator can't feel fear fear is a response to real or perceived threat an all-powerful being experiences neither of these it can't feel disappointment disappointment is a response to the non fulfillment of hopes and expectations and all-knowing being doesn't hope it knows and its expectations are never wrong does it feel anger well religious scriptures are full of scenes of divine rage but the characters they describe have the same stage II feel as the great oz from Lyman frank Baum's Wizard of Oz whose overblown theatrics are designed to impress and intimidate in fact these scriptural tantrums make no sense whatsoever anger is a response to provocation while human dictators are often easily provoked because of their flaccid egos the truly all-powerful being would have no such weakness anger is also a response to things not going our way an all-knowing all-powerful being knows every outcome before it sets any plan in motion everything goes its way feels sorrow sorrow is a response to regret and misfortune both of these indicate a desire that things had happened differently such notions are incompatible with an all-knowing all-powerful being whose plans could not be improved on which brings us to an emotion that this creator should feel in abundance guilt the response to the sense we've done wrong specifically that we've caused harm an all-knowing being would be aware of all the unnecessary harm is brought into existence by creating us with such excessive capacity for suffering but guilt is the one divine emotion we never hear about some claim we were created in the moral image of an all-knowing all-powerful omnipresent creator again this only draws attention to our polar differences morality is intrinsically grounded in knowledge it's only through a comprehensive knowledge of relevant factors that sound moral decisions can be made and all-knowing creator would have that knowledge we don't and that puts our moral images well depart the sight from making us instantly vulnerable to deception something to which an all-knowing creator is impervious our lack of knowledge makes us vulnerable to all kinds of errors we still misinterpret harmless human variation as sick and sinful leading us to pathologize and punished countless healthy innocent people we misinterpret sickness as divine curses leading us to abuse the hill we misinterpret sickness as divine blessing in Jeanette Winterson 'he's brilliant autobiographical novel oranges are not the only fruit she describes a period in her childhood when she became deaf and her Pentecostal evangelist mother who yearned for the apocalypse and whose favorite song was God has blotted them out declared her daughter to be in a state of rapture thanks to external intervention Jeannette was taken to hospital for a vital operation because of our lack of knowledge we twist the very concept of harm some of us cry harm when others point out the flaws in our ideas or merely expressed disagreement valid criticism is twisted into an amoral harmful act on a par with physical harm merely because we don't like having our fallacious ideas challenged on the flip side actual physical harm gets twisted into therapy savage creatures beatings are reframed as tough love and moral guidance the sadism justified with the false analogy of unpleasant medicine that's horrible to take but makes us better without the essential ingredient of knowledge we label all kinds of bad good and all kinds of good bad maybe most ironic of all because of our lack of knowledge there are times when we want to help but simply don't know how it could be anything from wanting to cure a disease to wanting to rescue someone who's been recruited by a harmful group here the urge to help is palpably there but our lack of knowledge holds us back here we are the reverse image of a creator that knows the cure to every sickness and the solution to every problem but declines to help folks claim that as reasoning logical beings we reflect the intellectual image of a creator but this creator has no use for reason or logic we use reason and logic to lever our way out of ignorance and uncertainty into knowledge we use logical syllogisms to work out that if either one is true and I dare to is true and logically idea three must be true and the all-knowing creator already knows if I dare three is true without having to work through any logical process it also knows when either of the first two ideas are false something we often fail to recognize leading to unsound conclusions an all-knowing creator is immune to the scores of logical fallacies to which we're vulnerable there's an appealing irony in the fact that if this creator existed it would be listening in on all the fallacious arguments some people make for its existence like appeals to ignorant where a God is presented as true just because the individual can't imagine any alternative an all-knowing creator never has to learn learning and reliance on imperfect memory our burdens exclusive to his creation and let's not forget the burden of faith which requires the suspension of a critical faculties further diminishing her already severely diminished intellectual capacity in the service of religious beliefs and all-knowing being is incapable of faith it will never have to believe something for which he has no evidence and it will never experience the dissonance that results from finding out it's faith was misplaced Josh and Shawn Miguel's Bible handbook of difficulties when addressing the difficult verse in Genesis that speaks of the Christian creator making us in its image the authors skip every other kind of image so far mentioned and go straight for relational image they claim we inherited from their God the ability to communicate our thoughts intents and feelings to others and cite the repeated scriptural phrase God said as evidence that relationships mean communication to others but what kind of communication one of my first teachers was always complaining you can't talk to a book she was expressing her frustration as a reader at being unable to ask authors about their intended meaning change one word and we have the problem with divine communication you can't talk to a god the being claimed by some to be the most important in the universe with the most important message for Humanity doesn't take questions instead it claim to use two of the most error-prone kinds of communication possible the first is scripture open to multiple conflicting interpretations with no way of verifying which ones are valid the second consists of signs in the form of arbitrary life events including coincidences and odd physical sensations here the recipient first has to somehow determine that the sign is a sign rather than just a random event the recipient then has to determine its meaning again with no divine verification it's a recipe for chaos and chaos is exactly what we see with religious groups clashing often violently over competing interpretations frankly human communication doesn't follow this inferior one-way relational image our relational image goes both ways employing the revolutionary concept of dialogue this allows us to check with each other for errors in our understanding it also allows cooperation and negotiation to more concepts conspicuously lacking in the creator's image the McDowell's also claimed that taking care of the poor and defending human rights find their basis in each of us because we were purposely created in their gods relational image with value dignity and worth but if we had been made in the relational image of this supposed God we shall know compassion and offer no help we'd stand by watching and doing nothing just as it does passively committing every kind of suffering we might try to shield ourselves from harm in an ultimately vain attempt to emulate a creator that's conveniently shielded from all harm but there'd be no taking care of the poor and no defending of human rights the reason we support and fight for others is because we're not made in this creators relational image the concepts of competition and worship are also absent from the creators relational image meanwhile we're forced to compete for limited resources just to survive and we're threatened and deceived into worshipping false icons the more we try to pin down what it might mean to be created in the image of an all-knowing all-powerful being the more fundamental differences we expose on every level physical emotional moral intellectual and relational all of these fundamental differences reflect burdens we endure that this mythical Creator does not even the positive ones if we were all-knowing we'd have no need for dialogue if we didn't suffer compassion would be redundant as creators ourselves we constantly model our creations on our own image from service robots to video game characters to remotely operated avatar androids like the Telenoid created by Japanese roboticist Hiroshi Ishiguro endowed with arms for giving hugs we're drawn to interact with human-like creations is what we understand but as we begin to explore the possibilities of creating actual artificial life artificial consciousness artificial intelligence should we instead follow the example of our mythical creator and make our creations completely unlike us should we impose new forms of suffering on them dream up new kinds of vulnerability should we introduce them to a range of environmental hazards unknown to us should we invent a collection of distressing emotions for them that we were incapable of experiencing and should we threaten terrible punishments if after all this they decline to worship us if you're feeling squeamish about any of these suggestions you're showing how different you are from a hypothetical all-knowing all-powerful creator who's willing to do all of the above wanting worse for others than for yourself is no indication of greatness on the subject of artificial life in isaac asimov short story run around engineers Mike Donovan and Gregory Powell traveled to mercury with a robot called speedy to restart a mining station finding that the life-support system is running low on selenium Powell and Donovan send speedy out to a selenium pool a few miles away to obtain some hours later speedy hasn't returned despite the fact he hasn't stopped running the whole time in runaround Asimov introduces his famous Three Laws of Robotics three laws embedded in the programming of all robots designed to maximize safety for humans and robots law 1 a robot may not injure a human being or through inaction allow a human being to come to harm your - a robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the first law law 3 a robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the first or second laws eventually the engineers venture out onto the boiling mercury landscape in search of speedy and find him running in circles by the selenium pool doesn't take them long to figure out what's happened Speedy's become caught between law 2 and law 3 there are unexpected corrosive gases around the pool this activates law 3 which directs PD to protect his own existence and run away from the pool but when he's far enough from the pool for danger subsides and law 2 kicks in directing speedy to obey his order to collect selenium so speedy runs back to the pool his stuck in an endless loop one that will soon have life or death consequences for Donovan and Powell later on speed is depicted offering endless apologies and feeling scared about being judged but he's told that it wasn't his fault he wasn't responsible for his flawed programming just like speedy we appear to come hardwired with deeply flawed programming that obstructs our ability to process reality with substantial consequences for us and those we interact with one of the many intriguing and unsettling lines of research in this area concerns the human tendency to infer personality traits from faces absurd as it seems based solely on the physical structure of people's faces we instinctively score them on a range of psychological characteristics including likability trustworthiness competence and aggressiveness and we make these judgments within as little as a hundred milliseconds this has huge implications for human relationships of every stripe from choice of life partners to the political direction of Nations research by Todorov and his colleagues suggests the inferences of competence that occurred within a one second exposure to the faces of electoral candidates could predict the outcomes of Elections short of having clones run for each political party it's not clear how this kind of facial prejudice could be canceled Todd iraf has commented we decide very quickly whether a person possesses many of the traits we feel are important such as likability and competence even though we've not exchanged a single word with them it appears we're hardwired to draw these inferences in a fast unreflective way his research with Engel & hax buri using functional magnetic resonance imaging suggests that the amygdala automatically codes faces according to features associated with untrustworthiness and this is just one example of a hardwired human bias psychologists have identified dozens of biases involving memory visual recognition decision-making and social perception and behavior all operating outside of our awareness and therefore outside our conscious control all actively distorting the way we process reality introducing errors that directly contribute delusions and in justices of every scale it's only through our own meticulous study that we've learned about these hidden psychological glitches and it's only through learning about them that we've begun to be able to look out for them and to try and compensate for the errors they produce so in theological terms who's to blame for this flawed programming talking about random cases of birth defects that might be put down to environmental accidents we're talking about errors resulting from normal brain function in Asimov's runaround Speedy's creators step forward and acknowledge responsibility for his flawed programming reassuring him he's not to blame if we were designed by some creator shouldn't it step forward and do the same instead we're left in the same guilt-ridden apologetic state speedy was in before his creators reassurances anxious about being judged as defective by a creator that if it existed would be directly responsible for those defects many of us including myself have spent a number of years looking up to some imaginary divine dictator in awe of its greatness the very phrase God is great has become a mantra for some religious groups but being great isn't an absolute property no more than being large or being fast it's a relative prophecy the word great indicates that something is substantially above average mythical creator had created beings in its own image it would be considered entirely unexceptional by its creation in theological terms the greatness and power of this mythical creator rests purely on its decision to make its creation so small and powerless relative to itself what do we think about those who have to diminish others in order to feel great like recovering from domestic abuse recovering from religion can take time even when we've realized on a rational level that we have no reason whatsoever to believe in any gods our imaginations sometimes take a while to catch up we sometimes have to contend with persistent negative thoughts deliberately encouraged by Hannah indoctrinate errs designed to make us feel bad defective small miserable one of those images is that of a mythical judge meeting out sentences and punishments from its bench but if it existed this judge would have no place sitting on the bench its place would be in the dock on a charge so wicked that no earthly criminal could hope to come near it the charge of creating sickness [Music]

Channel: TheraminTrees

Views: 516,080

Keywords: atheism, god, religion, yahweh, jesus, allah, jehovah, christianity, islam, judaism, monotheism, domestic abuse

Id: QRbnws-zITg

Length: 38min 6sec (2286 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 30 2017

Reddit Comments

[u/DoYouWonda]

Best channel on YouTube. His videos are truly remarkable

[u/[deleted]]

I love Theramin. His videos along with reading Bertrand Russell were the turning point in my deconversion when I was struggling with my beliefs/doubts. I love that guy and that he does these. He really helped me.