Paying for the priesthood

A bargain

I read this story by Joe Luca. He talks about his own resources, and he talks about organised religion. Some pretty deep concepts are uncovered, and I think one measure of a person’s soul is how deeply those concepts are examined.

Turn them over in your mind and contemplate how they work?

Or trust that your church or mosque or temple has all the answers and there’s no need to worry?

An organisation means people and property and rules and someone has to pay for the training and retirement of the priests.

With Christianity and Islam, the priests promise an expensive and lavish afterlife that they don’t personally have to provide or pay for. It’s a freebie reward for supporting the priesthood.

I personally don’t see this thing as a credible basis for understanding the universe. Understanding the church, sure.

I have no problems with the notion of a causative entity. Here we are in a well-ordered cosmos, with planets whizzing along, the sun coming up every morning, and all the rest of it. Whether it’s some bearded gent in the sky or the Big Bang what set the thing going, I dunno. Something did.

Likewise all the rules and stuff. How gravity works. Geometry. The speed of light. How chemistry and electricity make my brain go. That wasn’t something I personally thought up. I can maybe understand some of it, but gravity works whether I believe it or not.

Having an entity that can do things like what it says in the Bible in response to inputs, like sending a whale to swallow up Jonah or turning Lot’s wife into a pillar of salt if she looked back, or making the sun go backwards without reducing the planet to a big ball of lava from the energy transfer, well that stuff doesn’t add up for me.

I can have a conversation with myself or any other entity in the physical world, but if I try to communicate with a rock by praying at it, I’m not going to get anything back in return.

So the power of prayer works with me most of all, and anyone else who can hear it, but the cosmos gives no shits.

The interesting part is when something clicks into place in my understanding. Aha, so that’s how calculus works. Of course, light gets split up when pushed through a prism. Geez, a rainbow is beautiful.

Am I to believe that all that stuff is in my head and when one bit of my brain puzzles it out, another bit says, good, you’re correct, I knew that stuff all along?

I think that when examined, Aristotle’s notion of a purely physical universe doesn’t hold up. Plato discusses this in The Sophist. Some of the things that are cannot be held in the hand or touched or perceived directly. Nevertheless, they are.

Change or equality, for example. They exist, but we cannot do anything with them but see their effects.

The value of pi. The fact that if you find three points, draw lines between them, and add up the size of the interior angles it works out to exactly two right angles.

I think that it is evident that whatever it is that I am, it is part of the universe, not something that is different. There is the universe, here am I and they are two different things? Eight billion different things if I count everybody else?

I don’t think that I am capable of decoding the whole thing with the bits of brain I have, but I think that it is relatively easy to poke holes in the models of existence put forward by the various religions that depend on people giving food to the priesthood.

But if you have a different opinion, I’d be glad to discuss it. Who knows, I could be wrong like I have been wrong about so many other things in my life.

Britni