I am the one and only

“Eek! Has Darryl Sloan got a messiah complex?” you cry. Nope. “I aaaam the one and onlyyyy … Nobody I’d rather be!” Good ol’ Chesney Hawkes, eh? You can’t beat ‘im. I’m serious, actually. I love that song. If you can get around the 80s cheese factor and listen to the lyrics, it’s actually carrying a really positive message championing individuality.

Individuality is claiming the freedom to think for yourself, to form and hold your own opinions. And the enemy of individuality is anything which denies you that freedom.

In the previous post I stated that our freedom to think for ourselves is “taken away by Popes, pastors, and every other religious authority that insists it has a right to your mind.” Let me clarify and expand on what I mean by that.

Our freedom to think for ourselves is only taken away because we give it away willingly, and are encouraged to do so. This is illustrated by the way that most Catholics don’t become Protestants; most Protestants don’t become Catholics; the majority of adult Christians are those brought up in Christian homes, rather than people who converted to it from here, there and everywhere. Churchgoers generally aren’t moving towards greater awareness of “the truth,” despite listening to countless sermons week after week. They are buzzing around merrily in their own cliques. That is not my opinion; it is observable reality in all the countless church factions. In my personal case, it is illustrated by the imbalanced state of mind I went through in my earlier years as a Christian – the days when I took at face value what I was told about what it is to be a good Christian. Only by taking back my freedom to think, by slowly realising that I was being fed error on some levels, was I able to say, “No. The way you people want me to think is not right.” And to step away. It was very hard to do, and took a long time. The scope of the problem is illustrated by how many people choose to blindly tow the line of whatever their individual church scene says is right. Churches are not teeming with people who embrace their individuality, nor are they encouraged to be individuals. Paradoxically, all the factions in the church were no doubt created by certain people expressing their individuality and rebelling, but this does not negate the point that the only way to escape the prison of a particular church faction that is in error is to start thinking for yourself and to stop giving up that responsibility to your minister.

The Bible itself, as an authority, is also a problem because when you become a Christian you have to accept all its precepts en masse. If your own intelligence leads you in a different direction on some points, you have to agree with what the Bible says regardless of what you think, because it’s the word of God. Take homosexuality for instance. I believe it’s not natural, okay? I did as a Christian; I still do. But if I allow myself the luxury of disregarding that the Bible calls it an “abomination,” I suddenly find myself able to empathise with other Christians who have been dealing with homosexual urges all their lives, with no evil intent (two of whom I’ve known as close friends, incidentally, and one of whom was responsible for leading me to Christ). And yet, typically, if I’m sitting with another Christian and a homosexual comes on TV, the Christian will happily pass a remark about “that queer.” There is the general feeling among Christians that homosexuality is a great evil, with Bible verses to back that up. My personal individual view is that there’s something very unbalanced about that attitude. So, do I believe what the Bible says, or do I believe what my experience of knowing homosexual Christians tells me? When your indivuality conflicts with a belief system, you’re in trouble. And that’s the problem with belief systems. For me right now, rejecting the belief system and embracing my right to have my own view, it is so refreshing to be able to look at somebody and say, “It doesn’t matter to me what you are,” instead of regarding them with suspicion as if they must be some kind of deviant. If I’m honest, I haven’t looked upon homosexuality as “evil” in a long time; “not normal” is as far as I can reasonably go. So, I’m guilty perhaps of covertly reclaiming a little of my individuality that was not strictly permitted for me.

I’m not just Bible-blasting here. This giving away of one’s freedom to think is equally true of people who vegetate in front of soap operas, and base their moral outlook on the behaviour of what they see there. On the topic of homosexuality, it’s interesting to note how society’s view of it has become gradually more tolerant over the past couple of decades. Is this because people have suddenly become more enlightened? Could be, but (the rights and wrongs of homosexuality aside) I’m more inclined to think the change came about by the bombardment of the population by positive depictions of homosexuality on TV dramas and movies. It’s covert manipulation, folks, made possible only by our willingness to accept what we’re told without thinking for ourselves. True, attitudes to homosexuality really were in the dark ages a couple of decades ago, and social consciousness has probably been moved to a better place, where we’re less likely to kick the crap out of a couple of “queers” in a dark alley, but that doesn’t negate the fact that the means of delivering this better understanding was a manipulative one. I mean, these days a guy like me can hardly raise a single objection to homosexuality on purely rational grounds without being immediately branded homophobic.

The big problem is that we can so easily sacrifice our ability to think for ourselves without realising we’ve done it. Another manipulation I fell prey to at a point in my life is the idea that the scientific view of reality is the only one that holds any water. You get an impression from society – and that’s all it is, just an impression, with no actual substance – that scientists are the truly smart people. Before you know it, you’re beleiving in an axiom like “Nothing is true until I can smell it, taste it, touch it, measure it, or quantify its substance by some means or other.” A man who opens his mind to the possibilty that there may be a God, and who chooses to pray to this God, is seen as backward by comparison. But the wider possibility that science won’t acknowledge is that a whole lot of stuff might be true that we just haven’t discovered with our microscopes and telecopes, etc. It’s no surprise, really, that a great many scientists have an athiestic perspective. They have decided that if they can’t find it, it mustn’t be real. To only have room in your heart for scientific thinking is a great pity. Once you ackowledge that it’s possible to discover truth beyond the narrow constraints of scientific investigation, you realise that the scientific mindset is a prison for your mind – useful within its own capacity, but inadequte as an exclusive principle to live by. The problem is, the wool is pulled over our eyes without us realising it.

Yet another aspect of this lack of freedom to think is what goes on with friendships during our school days. The more I look back on my youth, the more grateful I am to have been a geek – an outcast from the popular crowd. It was painful at times, sure, but the most beautiful gift of this is that peer pressure has absolutely no power over you. Since the popular crowd have already made you an outcast, there is absolutely no benefit to you in doing anything that would please them. You grow into a true individual, making your own decisions, and thinking your own thoughts, without any great feeling that you ought to conform. It’s no surprise that I finished school having never smoked a cigarette or consumed any alcohol.

The ultimate expression of indivuality is when you just don’t give a damn what anybody else thinks of you. That’s largely what’s motivating the direction of many of my posts in recent months. It’s easily mistaken for arrogance, but it’s really just the detemination to live up to a standard that I’ve set for myself: to speak out about what I care about, to be unafraid of rebuttal or ridicule.

It’s an interesting experiment to observe others, keeping your ears peeled for evidence of the fear of what others think – various expressions of the old “What would the neighbours think?” attitude. Even more challenging to look for it in yourself. As ol’ Chesney says, “You are the one and only you.”

I am no longer a Christian

Before admitting this to myself and others, I thought it was best to let the dust settle – to make sure I’m not now embarking on some whimsical spiritual detour. But, after several months, it seems less and less likely that I will be returning to the fold of Christianity. So, how did this happen? I’ll do my best to explain.

You could say it began with reading something inspiring by David Icke on the topic of open-mindedness, from his book I Am Me, I Am Free (see my review), but the real origins of this change go back much further. I’ll get to that in a minute.

First, what exactly is the nature of this open-mindedness? I’ve blogged about it at length over the past couple of months (see Truth seeking vs. emotional attachment). In summary, it’s an attitude of mind that says “Go where the information takes you, not where you want it to go because of a pre-defined set of personal beliefs that will cause you to edit the information to your own ends.” Sorry that’s a bit of a mouthful. Even now, after much discussion with blog commenters, some are still insisting that this kind of open-mindedness is impossible. Of course it isn’t. All you have to do is make the choice to distance your emotional attachment to a set of beliefs, at least on a temporary basis – to take those beliefs away and see whether the same beliefs occur when you reconstruct what you think.

I found that they didn’t. In doing what I did, the dust was being blown off many problems that I had allowed to stay on the shelf for so long that the shelf was pretty much forgotten. These problems related to the Bible itself, to Christian history, and to my life’s experience as a Christian. The latter is what I mean when I say the origins of this change in me go back much further than reading David Icke. This wouldn’t be the first time I’ve stepped away from Christianity (see My 13-year war with doubt and What I learned from being an agnostic. I’ve hopped from Christianity to agnosticism and back again many times. In summary, what would happen is that Christianity would fail to work on a practical level, so I would seek solace in escaping to greener pastures. And it’s not hard to make the jump on a rational level, because you can always go grab some things from that dusty old shelf and give yourself a reason not to believe.

But things have been different for the past seven years. The fallacy of agnosticism & athiesm has been so consistently clear to me that there was no going back to it. And Christianity was much more tolerable because I had also learned to see through some of the BS that made it so difficult, BS that is largely inflicted upon you by erroneous church teachings and attitudes. I remember going through a period where I would feel I was committing a sin just by allowing my attention to drift during the singing of a hymn in church. For a time, church became an activity where we all got together to tell God how much we’ve let him down during the week. I would hear the most depressing prayers, and something in me would be screaming, “It’s not supposed to be like this!” For this reason and others, I don’t relate to church people and church life. I don’t go because it can so easily be an uninspiring and depressing and destructive influence on my life. My previous pastor has such a narrow view of me that he views my lack of church attendence as lack of discipline and he sees me as having lost my way as a Christian. He looks back on the good old days when I was coming every week and participating, and he recently referred to this period as my spiritual peak. He has no idea how I have progressed over the years, and how the memories of those good old days look from inside my head. He has no idea how manipulated I feel. And it’s not as if he’s the manipulator. He’s as much a victim as I was, his own mind shaped by the theologies that he has absorbed through incessant study in a single direction. I hope some of this illustrates reasonably why I abandoned church life and also why I viewed a lot of Christian literature as dangerous (see The Christian book minefield).

Well, I didn’t throw the baby out with the bathwater. I held fast to my Bible – a lonely pilgrim without a home. Hang on, that’s not accurate. Yes, some years ago, I managed to be one of those rare Christians who actually read the whole Bible in its entirety. But in the last couple of years it’s only fair to say that it’s a struggle to pick it up and read it. The struggle has been prevalent for most of my Christian life. And this apathy can only be a reflection of the lack of inspiration I’ve felt. And I don’t think I’m alone. It has to be asked why so few Christians actually read the Bible regularly. And I would hazard a guess that it’s because their experience of their religion is as uninspiring as mine was. For the most part, I was addicted to wasting my life on pointless entertainment. I’ve known there was something wrong with this, that it was a form of escapism in an unsatisfying life, but I’ve felt powerless to counter it, despite my Christian faith (see Altuism and Altruism – Part II). Now, with my new outlook, I appear to have countered it with the greatest of ease, but that’s a larger topic for another day.

What I began to suspect a few months ago was that the leap I made from agnosticism to Christianity seven years ago may have been too great a leap – one that I made because I only saw two options: there is no God (and therefore no religion), or there is a God (with all the trappings of religion by default). No sooner had I accepted the reality of God than I accepted Christianity. There were understandable reasons to do so. It is the big world religion (strength in numbers, so to speak), with a massive history dating back to the ancient world, and the Bible does contain some inspirational material – the Book of Proverbs being a prime example, which I recall reading at the time of my “re-conversion.” What I didn’t see at the time was that there is an alternative to religion, one that does not involve turning to an athiestic view of life and the depression it causes.

When you know, from a rational basis, that athiesm is in error (see The lie of the joyful athiest) and you then learn that there are major problems with your religion that give you good cause to abandon it, this alternative then becomes the only option for you. (I will go into more detail later on the specifics of my problems with Christianity – not here, because numerous heated discussions are likely to ensue.) The alternative is simply to seek the truth without sacrificing your freedom to think for yourself. That freedom is taken away on the one side by the Bible, and by Popes, pastors, and every other religious authority that insists it has a right to your mind. On the other side, that freedom is taken away by the mind-prison where science is seen, not as a tool to help us understand the universe, but as a God-like authority where “this world is all there is” is the unproven principle under which it operates and which many people hang their entire concept of reality. Openness to possibility is where the real answer lies. Freedom to investigate without being forced into an “ism.”

You might think that this alternative view leaves me in a bit of a vague conundrum of not knowing what to believe, since I’m not allowing myself to be tied down to the specifics of a particular school of thought. Not at all. I think intuition has a lot to do with it. But boy, oh boy, that’s a real can of worms for another day. I have so much more to say, on so many things. This post is merely a summary of why I’ve changed.

Briefly, in closing, some of the positive changes in my life: more courage in speaking out; no fear of what others think; massively increased sense of emotional balance in my day to day life; vastly increased resistance to personal vices; most importantly a much greater capacity to love others, along with empathy and tolerance. In short, the past couple of months have felt like one massive great sigh of relief that the spiritual side of me has been longing for but until now unable to make.

Am I merely in the “honeymoon period” of a new belief that will, in time, fall flat on its face? Time will tell. But I figured enough time had gone by for me to start talking about it with some confidence.

Clues about what we are, from a girl with half a brain

One of the major themes of my recent posts has been “What is consciousness?” or “Are we just a brain inside a body, or does our consciousness transcend the physical?” Well, it doesn’t get much plainer than lopping off fifty percent of a person’s brain and discovering that the whole person is still there.

There was an incredible documentary on telly last night about a little girl called Cameron Mott. When only three years old, she started displaying the symptoms of Rasmussen’s Encephalitis, the only cure for which is a hemispherectomy, the removal or disconnection of one entire half of the brain. After the operation, Cameron suffered (as predicted) paralysis along one side of her body, but she was young enough that, after a few days, she was already training the remaining side of her brain to take over, and she regained much of the use of her immobilised limbs.

The most incredible thing to me, and the thing which was beyond the theme of the documentary, was that that Cameron came out of the operation mentally and emotionally intact. She was still the same little girl. Surely this begs the question: if we can lose half of our brain, and still be “all there,” what on earth are we? I think this points very strongly to the idea that the brain is not the person; that consciousness (the core of ourselves), including our self-awareness and possibly our memories, lies somewhere beyond physical matter; that the brain is simply a machine that serves the consciousness and helps us interact with and function in this five-sense reality.

And then there’s my favourite question in all this: If consciousness is non-physical, what happens to it when the body dies? Does it necessarily die, too? Why should it, when it isn’t physical matter?

If I can make any valid point, it’s this: A view of reality that rests strictly on scientific principles involving the denial of anything beyond the physical, just because it is untestable, strikes me as wholely inadequate. When you’ve got scientists running around insisting there is no soul and that we’re just a brain, and then I’m seeing with my own eyes that somebody can lose half of their brain and still be fully compus mentus, well, excuse me for believing in a “soul.”

The full documentary Living with Half a Brain can be watched online via this YouTube playlist.

Truth-seeking versus emotional attachment

If you haven’t already noticed, I’ve been going through a sort of mental transformation lately. “Or maybe you’ve just gone mental,” says you. The best way I can summarise it is this: I stopped caring about being right and started caring about becoming right.

Okay, I wasn’t a stubborn bigot to begin with, but what I did was take a reasonably functional pencil and sharpen it to a point (all the better to stab you with). I took a step back from everything I held sacred, and I willingly allowed the whole construct of my beliefs to come under threat. And you know what? That seems to me like the most objective thing I could ever do.

My Christian faith is right now more in jeopardy than it has been in many years. Good! It’s a chance to look at the cracks properly instead of always trying to paper over them. If Christianity is the truth, well then, it will reveal itself to be so, when investigated. If it’s not, then it’s not. I refuse to care, either way. All I want to do is move closer to the truth, whatever the truth may be.

You know, if I’m honest, I’ve always believed in Christianity because it seemed “most likely to be true,” not because of some eureka experience where it blew the top of my head off. And this is what prompted the great war of my past between Christianty and athiesm. At various points in my life I wanted to escape Christianity, because it had become torturous, and I always had the emotional escape hatch that said, “You’ve never known for sure that this is all true.”

Emotions are such a problem when it comes to truth-seeking. We get emotionally attached to beliefs and it clouds our thinking, provokes us into knee-jerk reactions against opposing beliefs instead of careful consideration, where we attack a perceived threat, rarely asking ourselves if we could be the ones who are wrong.

Let information and evidence lead me wherever they want to lead me. I’m learning, as much as I’m able, to stop caring about where they lead or where I want them to lead.

Here’s an example of how difficult it is to be objective. Back in junior high school, I witnessed someone doing psychokinesis – moving an object with his mind. At the time, with the wonderful open-mindedness of youth (and I don’t mean that sarcastically; it’s a shame we often lose it), witnessing this thing blew me away. But years later I developed a more scientific mindset and I came to view the event as trickery. I even tried reproducing the “trick” and had partial success (I stress partial). So I took the view that true psychokinesis was very likely not real. It was the view that my scientific mindset wanted, to keep things neat and tidy.

More recently, I’ve been back in contact with this same guy and I learned to my amazement that his psychokinesis was the tip of the iceberg. Suffice it to say, he had been experimenting with far more esoteric knowledge and had ended up paying a price for it. Over twenty years later, the guy has no reason to feed me a load of BS, and I certainly didn’t prompt him to say the things he said. Now, with a more open mind, I have no doubt that I witnessed true psychokinesis back in junior high. If I wanted to cling to that strict scientific mindset right now, I would have to view my friend as a liar of staggering proportions.

You see, it’s not as simple as someone saying, “Here is the truth.” The “truth” meant one thing, when seen through the filter of a rigid belief system that insists on a certain view of the world. It meant something completely different, when interpreted through a mind open to possibility.

Here’s a better example (better because you’re a part of it; you heard it on the news, and now you can examine your own memories of how you reacted to it when it when it all came out): the whole paedophile priest scandal in the Catholic Church. If you were interested in defending Protestantism or athiesm, you might have thought, “Here’s the awful results of all the sexual repression of the Catholic Church.” On the other hand, if you are a Catholic, you may have seen it differently: “Jobs involving children attract sexual predators. This is true of schools, Protestant churches. And the Catholic Priesthood is no exception.” Which side has made the right deduction? Ultimately, you don’t know without further investigation, but you’ll get people on both sides who will cling to their own theories as fact. I think this illustrates our tendency to leap to conclusions based on what we want to believe, rather than what the actual truth might be.

There was an amusing moment on a recent episode of Doctor Who when the Doctor and several others were trapped aboard a passenger craft that was travelling over the surface of a planet where it was said that no life could exist. Except someone outside started tapping on the door, repeatedly – even going as far as mimicking the exact number of taps the Doctor did in reponse. The passengers got scared. The scientist on board kept saying things like, “There’s no one out there! It’s impossible!” Whereas the Doctor said, “I’m so glad you’ve obtained the absolute knowledge of everything, but would you mind moving? Because someone’s trying to get in.”

It’s lamentable when our personal views become so sacred that they are put beyond the realm of ever being re-examined. We can be so stubborn that we won’t consciously admit to being wrong in the face of contrary evidence. Or we can be afraid to to change a belief, because there is a cost involved.

I actually find it difficult to write this stuff, because I sense that there may be some Christians who know me wincing and thinking I’ve gone too far. But if you’re not permitted to step outside of your beliefs and look in at them from an open perspective, how can you expect someone else who’s starting off from outside to ever make his way in?

It’s unavoidable that we’ll individually build up a belief system of one kind or another. And it’s unavoidable that we’ll develop an emotional attachment to it. I intend to keep that attachment as flexible as I can.

Bible (mis)interpretation and personal agenda

[Appended 4 July 2008: Since writing the article below, I have changed my thinking on certain aspects of it. Please read the associated comments for a fuller picture.]

I used to believe in the six-day creation account, in the Garden of Eden, in Adam and Eve, the serpent, the eating of fruit from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. Having read the Bible carefully, I was pretty sure that the original writer of Genesis intended the work to understood in a literal, historical fashion. That much is clear by the manner in which it’s written. Genesis is, after all, the history of man, and it starts with the first man, Adam, who I’m clearly supposed to believe was a real person. This view is further supported by the fact that the rest of the Bible puts on display several genealogies that go right back to Adam.

But I had a problem. And that problem was the pressure of scientific thought. The Bible says man wasn’t subject to death until after the Fall. Can you imagine what would have happened if man hadn’t fallen. Can you imagine man, an immortal being, making babies (who make further babies) ad infinitum, in the confined space of the Earth? And that’s just problem 1. The concept of death hasn’t been invented, but you have physical beings dependent on air to breathe, so what happens if you hold your head under the lake? Why does a lion have such big claws, if not to tear up his prey? Why does a hedgehog possess the ability to curl into a ball and project protective spines? Why does a sporpion have a sting? What would happen if a scorpion stung an immortal human? Christian scientists have made attempts to marry the first chapters of Genesis with what we know to be true from science, but the results aren’t convincing.

So, as a Christian, what did I do? I compromised. I said, “I know it couldn’t really have happened like this, so I’ll say it’s some kind of allegory. Something (I don’t know exactly what) happened. Mankind fell from grace. Death and sin resulted. The world is the way it is today because of that.” At the time, this seemed like an honest reasoning process. But is it? No! It’s a prime example of exactly the kind of attitude that I’ve been arguing against in all my recent posts.

Here’s the underlying truth of what really went on in my mind: I read the creation account and I interpreted it in a way that seemed correct (that I was reading historical narrative). I then came to a scientific understanding of the matter, and I found the two “realities” to be incongruous. I then said, “The literal interpretation must be wrong, so I’ll change it to allegory.”

Do you see what I did? I did exactly what I cautioned myself against doing in the previous post (regarding the interpretation of the “sons of God”). I applied a rigid set of existing beliefs (scientific ones this time) to the interpretation of Genesis and I allowed those beliefs to change the meaning of something that was perfectly clear and plain. I’m only now starting to see the intellectual dishonesty of this kind of thinking.

We all have beliefs of one kind or another. And when we encounter new information that conflicts with those beliefs, the solution is not to twist the new information into submission. The solution is to examine both the new information and the existing beliefs and determine which needs to change. The big problem arises when a belief becomes more than a belief – when it becomes an unshakeable treasured possession that must never be tampered with. This is especially true of religious thinking (what with the importance of dogma), but is also true of the scientifically motivated (as has been evidenced by recent comments).

I now have a new-found respect for those Christians who doggedly hang onto the literal creation account, despite the pressure of scientific evidence. At least they’ve chosen their side. What I’m losing my respect for is the mentality (in myself) that is prepared to hang on to some watered-down version that tries to join two sides of an argument into an ill-fitting monstrosity. It’s like saying Frankenstein was handsome.

Now that I’m refusing to come at things with a personal agenda, I can see the matter more clearly. Genesis 1-3 says one thing, science is saying another, and ne’re the twain shall meet. Answer: Pick the one you think is true.

Now that leaves me in one hell of a predicament. Easier said than done. Because I do have a rigid belief system. And the side of the argument that is calling out to me is the side that threatens to put a major crack right up through the centre of those beliefs. This is where I reveal a little of the cowardice of “Reaction 2” from the previous post: “Maybe something’s missing from the way I’m looking at this. Why don’t I just shelve it for now. Good idea. Whew!” One thing’s for sure: a decision will not be put off indefinitely.

I’ve seen many example of personal agenda being brought to bear on Bible interpretation. More than I can remember. The one example that sticks out in my mind is when I heard someone preach on Genesis 1:16. In context:

[14] Then God said, “Let there be lights in the expanse of the heavens to separate the day from the night, and let them be for signs and for seasons and for days and years;
[15] and let them be for lights in the expanse of the heavens to give light on the earth”; and it was so.
[16] God made the two great lights, the greater light to govern the day, and the lesser light to govern the night; He made the stars also.

I’ve heard the words “He made the stars also” interpreted to mean that the creation of the whole universe beyond Earth was like a mere afterthought in the mind of God. The intent is for us to marvel that God would do something so big and complex as a mere afterthought. But an additional side-effect of this interpretation is that we create the mindset that those 200 billion stars in each of those 200 billion galaxies are unimportant and irrelevant. A convenient way to unwittingly encourage the view of reality that says there is no life out there. When, oh when, will preachers stop inventing their own flowery interpretations of Scripture and actually start communicating what the Bible is saying instead of what they want it to say. Look out for this tendency to over-interpret next time you’re in church, because it’s everywhere. And it’s one of the main reasons I can’t stomach church anymore. It’s the subtle difference between “Look what I can make it say” and “Here is what it says.”

In your own quest for truth, learn to drop your personal agendas and let a thing say what it’s trying to say.

The Nephilim: A challenge to the closed mind

The theme of my last few posts has been on achieving clear, open-minded thinking and freedom from conditioning. On that note, let’s do an interesting experiment. Let’s take a controversial Bible passage and try to interpret it in its proper context, on its own terms, without bringing along all the baggage of a pre-defined theology. The passage I have in mind is … cue drum roll … Genesis 6:1-4.

[1] Now it came about, when men began to multiply on the face of the land, and daughters were born to them,
[2] that the sons of God saw that the daughters of men were beautiful; and they took wives for themselves, whomever they chose.
[3] Then the LORD said, “My Spirit shall not strive with man forever, because he also is flesh; nevertheless his days shall be one hundred and twenty years.”
[4] The Nephilim were on the earth in those days, and also afterward, when the sons of God came in to the daughters of men, and they bore children to them. Those were the mighty men who were of old, men of renown.

Getting the right meaning out of this should be pretty straightforward: Find out what happened before these verses. Find out the meaning of any ambiguous or difficult words. And then just let it say what it’s saying.

We’re pretty close to the beginning of the Bible, and this first book of the Bible, Genesis, tells of man’s origins from the Garden of Eden right through to Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and Joseph – the beginnings of the nation of Israel. From the beginning up to chapter 6, in summary: the world is created, man falls from grace by disobeying God, Cain murders Abel, various other sons and daughters are born, industries begin. Several generations (and little detail) later, we read this strange little account. Okay, it’s clear to me we’re reading Bible history at this point. Not some methphor or vision or whatever. This is an event in our history that the author expects the reader to interpret literally.

What are the problem words? “Sons of God” and “Nephilim” jump out. Let’s tackle them. “Sons of God” first. I’m no scholar, but a little research shows me that there are only a couple of other references to the terms in the Old Testament, in the books of Job and Daniel.

Now there was a day when the sons of God came to present themselves before the LORD, and Satan also came among them. (Job 1:6; see also 2:1 and and 38:7)

He [King Nebucadnezzar] said, “Look! I see four men loosed and walking about in the midst of the fire without harm, and the appearance of the fourth is like a son of the gods!” (Daniel 3:25)

Technically, the Daniel reference is a slightly different expression, but we’re splitting hairs. These references are clearly to otherworldly beings. I see no reason to interpret the Genesis 6 passage differently. In fact, the view is strengthened by the “of God” (the sons) being place in direct contrast to the “of men” (the daughters). I’m happy that we’re clearly dealing with angelic beings of one kind or another. (For those still on the fence, a study of 1 Peter 3:18-22, 2 Peter 2:4-5, and Jude 6-7, lends further confirmation of this interpretation.) If you read the New International Version, you’ll notice “sons of God” is confidently translated as “angels,” although that’s actually a little disappointing, as you lose the richness of meaning in the original term.

Moving on. Now what does “Nephilim” mean? It’s tricky. There’s seems to be no clear opinion on the origin of the word, only several suggestions. But speculation doesn’t count. Helpfully, the word is used later in the Bible (as well as qualified), in Numbers 13:33:

We saw the Nephilim there (the descendants of Anak come from the Nephilim). We seemed like grasshoppers in our own eyes, and we looked the same to them.”

Giants.

So, with the difficult words now understood, what is Genesis 6:1-4 saying to us. Simple. A non-human species bred with mankind, creating a hybrid species with giant characteristics. Yes, whatever the Sons of God were, we are talking about actual physical, biological creatures with DNA – with sperm, for goodness sake. There’s just no getting around that.

“Stop, Sloan!” says a little voice in my head. “That’s crazy! Take it back now, before you get laughed at. Angels don’t breed, even evil ones. They’re spirit beings. Man is made in the image of God. It’s monstrous! Impossible!”

Okay, the way I see it, you can do one of several things when you encounter a passage like this (i.e. a passage that has a clear, obvious meaning, but it’s one you don’t like).

Reaction 1: “I’m scared. Don’t make me think about it, and certainly don’t expect me to talk about it.”
Reaction 2: “Maybe something’s missing from the way I’m looking at this. Why don’t I just shelve it for now. Good idea. Phew!”
Reaction 3: “This just doesn’t fit with my existing set-in-stone beliefs. Perhaps there’s another interpretation? No? Well, can I make one up? And can I make this word mean this. Ah-ha! I’m happy now.”
Reaction 4: “Wow. I am learning bizarre and wonderful things here. I don’t know exactly what to do with this info, but it’s exciting.”

Reaction 1 is outright cowardice, from the sort of person who worries about what other people think of him. 2 demonstrates a slightly dishonest attitude to truth-seeking. 3 is the guy who says, “‘Sons of god’ means descendents of Seth. Yes, I know the term isn’t used that way in any other Bible verse, but I need to pull that explanation out of my arse, because the alternative is something insane … What about the giants? Oh, yes, well if we forget about what it says in Numbers and view Nephilim as ‘fallen ones’ instead of ‘giants’ …” Oh boy. Even if I conceded to this mishandling of the words, when you re-read the passage, watch the mental gymnastics your brain has to perform in order to make any kind of proper sense of it.

Yes, I know that the New Testament states that angels neither marry nor are given in marriage. But let’s not forget, we’ve heard about Seraphim and Cherubim, but who knows how many kinds of “angels” there are. And who knows what other business God gets up to in this vast universe, that we are not privy to.

If you want some interesting reading, Google the term “Nephilim” and read through the mix of good and bad interpretations of the passage. With the bad ones, you can almost sense how the writer’s brain is ticking. They aren’t the words of someone whose thinking, “This is mind-blowing stuff!” He’s thinking, “I don’t like this. How can I force it to fit what I already believe?”

Whether Christian or athiest, let’s be aware of cowardly and deceitful tendenies in our own minds, reject the rigidity of our existing beliefs, and be open to all possibility, regardless of where it may take us. I think it’s the only truly honest way to reason.

(Further study: For several in-depth and scholarly treatments of Genesis 6:1-4, follow this link.)

The dark side of Christianity

In the last few “Spirituality” posts, I asserted that we’re all being conditioned, by science, religion, media, culture, education. Science was the category that really came under the spotlight. So, in fairness, and to prove I’m as open-minded as I claim to be, this Christian is going to put his religion under the spotlight.

The first really bad piece of religious conditioning I encountered was an unfair attitude to sex. There I was, a horny seventeen-year-old, sitting in church, listening to a guest preacher say, “Young men, when you see an attractive girl walking down the street, and your eyes linger … turn your eyes away!” If I heard that from a pulpit today, I would stand up and walk out in defiance. It’s the worst example of an attitude that is taught by the church, to one degree or another. And what’s worse is, it’s not even in the Bible. It’s based on a misinterpretation of something spoken by Jesus:

“You have heard that it was said, ‘Do not commit adultery.’ But I tell you that anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart.” (Matthew 5:27-29)

What should be painfully obvious from the above passage is that Jesus is referring to married men who indulge in desire for other women. Notice it said “adultery,” not “fornication.” This is not applicable to boys and girls discovering their sexuality, nor is it applicable to any single person of any age. In a perfect world, what’s supposed to happen? We get our first ever erection on our marriage night? “Eek! What’s happening to me?” The idea is absurd. And yet ignorant preachers will carry on the age-old mission of driving this “sexuality is sinful” message home to the young. We end up with guilt-ridden teenagers who think they’re stuck with a horrible vice. It took a long time for me to realise I could look at a hot chick and think, “Phwoarrr!” without having to feel guilty.

Another issue: One of my pastor’s hobby-horses was the idea of “feelings orientation,” as he called it. When church life became uninspiring for me, and my attendance wavered, I would be accused of being “feelings oriented,” i.e. doing what I wanted to do instead of doing what I knew was right. So, believing myself to be “feelings oriented,” I would feel guilty about that and fix the immediate problem by being disciplined, i.e. attending church once again. It sounds like the problem is solved. But what you’re left with is an unhappy person, going through the motions of a spiritual life out of militaristic duty. And no one ever asks the really important underlying question: “Why is church no longer inspiring?” So the real problem gets neither noticed, addressed, nor fixed.

I should have perceived long before I did that this idea of “feelings orientation” is just some pop psychology that my pastor liked. I imbibed the idea that the “feelings” are not important. All that matters is duty. But then you end up feeling inadequate because you know you’re supposed to be joyful. And you can apply this accusation of “feelings orientation” to any problem that causes a church member to falter; you can make the problem instantly go away and turn them into obedient, guilt-driven robots once again. Cure any emotional problem by denying the importance of emotions. So, you can be a mess on the inside, but that’s apparently okay, as long as you’re going through the motions on the outside.

In more recent years, as someone who had now studied the Bible deeply, I grew sick of hearing error from the pulpit. One example: About a year ago, the pastor preached on the subject of the Sabbath, and it was terrible, conveying the idea that it was wrong to let your child play football on a Sunday. Only not just saying it outright – hinting at it in a subtle, manupulative way. Later, I heard another sermon by a younger member of the church about how “God is our friend.” When it was over, I realised I couldn’t take anything definitive away from it. It was an exercise in pretentiousness.

I was also disappointed by the distance between people in the church, or possibly the distance between them and me. Maybe it’s because I don’t belong to the shirt-and-tie brigade. Maybe it’s because I once turned agnostic, and when I came back they were never sure about me any longer. I can only guess. Maybe it’s just because I feel aloof from them because I see the poison under the surface of what’s being said and they don’t. All I know is, I don’t fit.

You might say, “Go find another church.” Been there, done that. I once wrote an article called “The Christian Book Minefield,” where I addressed the view that I think most Christian books are best avoided, because on a grand scale all those books together are a minefield of opposing and contradictory beliefs. Well, what is true of authors is surely true of preachers. We do, after all, have our Baptists, Reformed Baptists, Presbyterians, Reformed Presbyterians, Free Presbyterians, Methodists, Independent Methodists, Pentecostals, etc, etc. If only it were as trivial as choosing ice cream!

I know what my friend Chris would say. “Become a Roman Catholic.” 🙂 I’m not convinced about that, but I won’t close my mind to it, either. The anti-Catholic attitude possessed by Protestants is yet another example of closed-minded conditioned thinking. It’s only in recent years that I’ve been able to see things a little more clearly, and it’s actually pretty simple, if you’re prepared to step away from your rigid belief system and be open-minded. Think about this: Protestantism was founded sometime in the 1500s. But “The Church” has been around since the first century. And what does history tell us that Church was? Uh-oh. It was the Roman Catholic Church. So what are we Protestants saying – that God was without a true Church for over a millennium? Think about it the next time you feel the words “Roman Catholics aren’t true Christians” coming to your lips. Conditioning! Conditioning! Conditioning! Somebody wake me up!

I’m sure there are some reading this now who are thinking, “Gee, Darryl, if you believe all that, why are you still a Christian?” Because of the Bible. Because I have undeniably learned more insight about life from it than from anything else. So I’m a Christian, but I have abandoned organised religion. And I’ve decided, as of now, to stop feeling guilty about that.

If you are a Christian and you’re feeling a bit angry that I’ve got the audacity to speak out against aspects of our religion, then you need to wake up. Go watch Jesus Camp, then tell me that our religion can’t be hijacked and used as a tool for brainwashing of the young. I refuse to be afraid to wake up to reality, regardless of how much ammo I might be handing to the athiest opposition. If they want to look out from their rigid belief system and add this to their list of reasons not to believe in God, that’s up to them. They’ve got their own conditioning to wake up from, too.

My mind was recently opened up to how much I’ve been conditioned, by a certain writer who isn’t even a Christian. In fact, he is quite opposed to Christianity, and every religion, seeing them all as exercises in control of the many by the few. Nevertheless, what he’s saying in principle is right. We pretend we’re open-minded when we’re really thinking from inside a prison cell in our minds, seeking only to defend a rigid belief system and knock down an opposing argument, instead of being open to all possibility. I have actually been more inspired by this book than by any Christian literature I’ve read, period.

Who is this author? Well, he’s a famous British personality that 99% of the population once thought was completely off his rocker (and many still do). Have a listen. Are these the words of a madman? …

Extraterrestrial life versus the burden of proof

In the last two posts, a heated debate emerged about whether it’s right to believe in an afterlife. And the opposition to that belief kept coming back to one thing: “Prove it! Show me it’s real!” The demand for empirical evidence, if you like, which on the surface seems reasonable. But it isn’t.

Consider the ET question. Is there life on other planets? Many of us believe there is. This belief is based on the knowledge that there are between 200 billion and 400 billion stars in our own galaxy. Not only that, but we can look through a powerful telescope and discover there are an estimated 200 hundred billion entire galaxies out there beyond the boundary of our own. In all of that, surely there must be more than one Earth-like planet able to sustain life?

But if you apply the rigid principle that some people in the last debate applied to the question of the afterlife (the principle that the burden of proof is the be-all and-end-all of rational thought), it works like this: I’ve never seen an alien, therefore I choose not to believe. “But the universe is so big! What about the likelihood of …” Oh, ho, ho! Hold on a minute, there, buddy. I didn’t know we were allowed to consider likelihoods, or weigh up possibilities. Surely you mustn’t contemplate how probable or improbable alien life is. Your only standard is the burden of proof. And without proof, you are required by law to choose the negative – to deny what may or may not be reality. I certainly wasn’t allowed to contemplate the ultimate futility of the human race. Likewise, if you are consistent, you should not allow yourself to contemplate the absurdity of this universe being 100% devoid of life save humanity. It’s an open and shut case: no empirical evidence = no permission to believe and no further rational thought allowed to weigh in.

How much better it is to abandon a rigid belief system and be open to possibility! Not only better, but how much more rational. To consider possibilities and probabilities, to look deeply into the implications of things, to theorise based on imagination. Ultimately, to have permission to believe in something, not on the burden of proof, but because it makes sense. Not so long ago, I used to say things like, “I don’t believe in extraterrestrial life, because the Bible says that man is unique and made in the image of God, and that doesn’t leave room for ET.” I ignored the sheer volume of the universe, and allowed my rigid belief system to dictate what is painfully apparent by reason of staggering probability: We are not alone. I looked out at everything through a closed mind, through a view of reality that I had already set in stone, shut off from possibility. See, I’m as guilty as anyone.

But just recently a light has switched on in my head, exposing subtle ways that my mind has been conditioned all my life. My thinking has now become both sharpened and opened up to possibility. Everything is possible, and nothing is exempt from being called into question – not the athiesm of others, not my own belief in God, nor my belief in Christianity. And it’s not sacriligious to suggest such a thing. Whatever is true should have no fear of scrutiny. I refuse to look at the universe from inside a mental prison, whether that prison is the narrow path of modern science or religious doctrine. This revelation in my thinking has made me feel more excited and inspired than I’ve felt in a long time.

We have all been conditioned

My previous post provoked an excellent debate. What I want to do now is amplify something I mentioned as little more than a closing remark in the post, because it’s really this remark that lies at the heart of the matter of why I’m so convinced there’s life after death and why athiests are so convinced there isn’t.

It’s the issue of conditioning. We have all been conditioned. Sometimes it’s as overt and obvious as those kids on the Jesus Camp documentary, indoctrinated by their teachers to believe the craziest ideas. And sometimes it’s so subtle that you carry it from the moment you learn it till the moment you die, without ever realising you were imprisoned by it. And the way to escape from it is to question everything, especially why you believe what you believe. Conditioning happens through every means the world throws at us to learn something, be it the media, education, religion, etc. These things are not evil in and of themselves, but we are conditioned every time we take in information and fail to question that information. Every time we get lazy in our thinking.

I’ve been waking up gradually in recent years, and I’m probably nowhere near fully woken up. A while back I wrote a post called “A Christian perspective on Jericho” (the TV series, not the Biblical city), which is an example of how I had started, at that time, to question the idea of Capitalism, something that we in the West are entrenched in. I never questioned Capitalism before, because we’re all Capitalists – so it must be the right way to live, right? Rubbish! That’s like living in 1940s Germany and saying, “The Nazis must be right, because everyone around me is one.” Capitalism is all about the ownership of things and the accumulation of wealth to the detriment of all else, including the welfare of the planet. School is shaped around the idea that the greatest course of action is for a student to stay in education as long as possible, so he can be as qualified as possible, so he can get the best possible job, and make the most money. We are encouraged to spend our lives pursuing the vacuuous quest of the accumulation of wealth. Nine years ago, I was faced with a crossroads. On the one hand there was a low-income job that I knew I would enjoy greatly, and on the other was a more stressful and problematic job that offered more money and status. Thank goodness I chose the former, but the choice was not easy, because I had been conditioned to think that the latter was what I was supposed to pursue and that not choosing it would have been some kind of personal failure. Conditioning! It’s bloody everywhere, and it’s tricky stuff to see!

Now, I’m going to bring into sharp focus what I think is one of the most subtle forms of conditioning. Science has taught us to think like this: “If you want me to believe something, show me verifiable proof. Without proof, I will not believe.” It sounds correct, doesn’t it? Deny it and you might as well start believing in flying pigs, eh? Oh, if only it were that simple, but it’s not, as I will demonstrate …

A man starts off by contemplating his death. He says, “There’s no evidence of an afterlife, so I won’t believe it. Death is the end.” So far, we are agreed. Then he considers the implications of his belief. He realises, ultimately, that his life will be robbed of meaning by his death. It will be as if he never lived, all his memories and experiences lost. He takes it further, and realises that one day, billions of years in the future, the same fate will befall the sun, and it will be as if the human race never existed, all our great achievements and knowledge forgotten. So what does he do? He shrugs and says, “That must be the way it is. Wishing otherwise doesn’t make it so.” Maybe he tries again, and asks himself, “Is there life after death?” And he answers, “There is no evidence, so I cannot believe it. No.”

Here’s where I differ. I give my mind permission to see the absurdity of the idea that the human race is meaningless, to contemplate the mockery this makes of our every achievement. And I allow this new information become a factor in the question. So, I ask it a second time: “Is there life after death?” Yes! When the alternative turns the human race into the greatest cosmic joke of all time, of course there must be life after death. The alternative is absurd beyond imaginging.

We have been conditioned not to allow the full range of our rationality to determine our view of reality. This is the inadequacy of the scientific method. It says that while a thing may be true, the human being has no right to believe it unless he arrives at that belief through an examination of observable evidence.

If you think the only road to truth is through observable evidence, you are thinking from inside a prison of your own making. Learn to see the wider picture of human rationality and break free. Don’t blind yourself with the idea that it’s evidence versus flying pigs, when there’s a hell of a lot more that goes into good clear-headed thinking.

The lie of the joyful atheist

This post was prompted by an essay on athiesm. Please read or listen to “There Is No God” by Penn Jillette, before continuing.

What I want to draw attention to is the joyful manner in which he describes the most spiritually empty and depressing belief. He argues that it is unnecessary for the athiest to disprove the existence of God, and his logic is sound, but once he grasps this belief in nothingness and hangs on to it, he then gives the impression that it is the most joyful and liberating philosophy of life. This simply is not true.

I can’t quote you the findings of research, but what I can do is speak from experience. My initial experience of athiesm (or to be fair, athiesm’s close cousin agnosticism, which, for all practical purposes is the same thing) was one of liberation. I was escaping the clutches of a form of Christianity that didn’t work for me, a legalistic way of living that twisted my mind and consumed me with guilt. Naturally, I felt liberated. But the feeling was shortlived. I had to face the reality that death was the end, that every experience I ever had was insignificant, every achievement meaningless, and that after my death it would be as if I had never been born. This, folks, is seriously depressing news.

I’ve heard athiests try to wrangle their way out of this reality; I’ve even tried to wrangle my way out of it myself. I defined the meaning in my life from the good I was able to do for others, my loving deeds touching lives in ways that would remain, even after my own death. This is a wonderful way to live, no doubt, but still reality comes crashing in, as you face the fact that even the lives you have touched are doomed to non-existence. Jump billions of years into the future and the human race is gone due to the death of our planet’s sun. The sum total of mankind’s knowledge, and our every achievement since the dawn of human history, is obliterated. It will be as if the human race never existed. Not even the memory of it will remain, because there isn’t a mind left to house it.

This is the athiest’s reality. Face it. But someone will say something like (and I’ve said it to myself), “It doesn’t matter. We humans have an inflated view of our own importance in the universe. Mortal is what we are, what we’re supposed to be, and all we’ll ever be. And mortality is enough.” But is it enough? Why then do I find my most pleasurable experiences tainted with sorrow. When I go out on my bicycle and enjoy the beauty of the Irish countryside, why is there always a feeling of emptiness nagging at me? It’s because I’ve faced reality. None of my experiences means a damn thing; all of life is just an expression of futility.

I’ve heard it argued that it’s our very mortality that gives meaning to our actions. I’ve tried to see some kind of sense in that idea, but I can’t. If someone can explain it to me, please do, because it just reads like a pretentious, vacuuous notion to me. What I know is that I possess a hunger for significance. It is not enough to die and cease to exist. There must be something more. This life has to matter, and to matter it has to go on. Athiesm does not lead to joy. It is the philosophy of no hope. It says that human life means nothing, degrading what it means to be human (ever wonder why the general consensus of athiests are for abortion while Christians are against?). It promotes feelings of worthlessness (because you are ultimately without value). Who knows how many people have spiralled down the road to suicide because they held this belief. Oh, I’m not talking about some intellectual athiest who’s got it all worked out. I’m talking about the average joe who has unwittingly imbibed the athiest way of thinking through culture and media and education. I would even dare to say that an athiest who commits suicide is making a perfectly reasonable choice, in light of his own view of his place in the universe.

Am I allowing my heart to rule my head here? Well, here’s some food for thought. Let’s assume that athiesm truly is the enlightened view. By implication, then, the enlightened man is the depressed man. Does it seem rational that man, in his most enlightened state, should be depressed by his own existence? Is it not more likely that these feelings of depression are pointing to the notion: “Hey, maybe we’re thinking about this all wrong!” In this vibrant world (and universe) teeming with life and vitality, were we really supposed to spend our days battling sorrow over our mortality? I think not.

I have great respect for science, but what I just can’t stand is the way we’ve all been conditioned to disbelieve in anything that cannot be measured and quantified, no matter what the cost to ourselves. Travel back in time and talk to a fifteenth century scientist about radio waves beaming messages across the planet, and he won’t believe you, nor can he create and measure such things with his primitive equipment. That doesn’t mean that radio waves don’t exist.

It alarms me the amount of my life I wasted with an agnostic mindset, never at peace with myself, and unable to see the preconceptions that held me to such an irrational and depressing belief. But that’s the conditioning of this messed up society at work. It can be very hard to see the claws that are embedded in your mind.

The particular claw I’m talking about here is the scientific idea that you must have proof before you allow yourself to believe a thing. How on earth did science ever lose its imagination in this way? And how did we end up giving it permission to define our entire sense of ourselves, without regard for what it may not be able to detect about reality?

Bottom line: Don’t confuse what doesn’t exist with what is merely undiscovered. I expect to discover plenty right after I die, and I’m living my life now with that anticipation.

(And the simple pleasure of riding my bike through the countryside is now a truly joyful experience.)