If a person under hypnosis was given the post-hypnotic suggestion that upon awakening he will have a pain in his arm, is it a case of pain, hypnotically induced, or has the person been made to believe he has pain? If one answers that the hypnosis had induced real pain, what if the post-hypnotic suggestion had been: “Upon awakening you will believe you have a pain in the wrist.” If this suggestion is effective, is the circumstance just like the previous? Isn’t believing that you are in pain tantamount to being in pain?
The point I am leading up to is that despite what I think, God is real. When a person tells me that they can feel God watching over them I am inclined to take them as sincere. If the illusion of pain confers all the symptoms of genuine pain – increased cardiovascular activity, increased respiratory rate and even identical neural activation in the brain – the pain may as well be real, right?
And this is where it so often goes wrong. Despite the striking similarity between the authentic and illusory, we often settle for the latter and yet very few of us would ever knowingly take the artificial copy over the genuine article. If I offered to permanently hook you up to a machine that would simulate your ideal world and will even conveniently make you forget that you’re attached to the contraption, many of you would refuse me. We do this because there is such a concept as quality of happiness – better to be a cat dissatisfied than a fly satisfied, better to be a human miserable than a cat happy.
Let it be known now that I no longer personally believe in a god, and upon further reflection I never did unless it was facilitated through the faith of others. However to help you understand my position all you need to know is that my rejection of the idea that we are supernaturally created and supervised does not stem from anger or betrayal like so many horror stories spiritual leaders tell people, as if that is the only explanation for deconversion. To put it briefly, I never had to and throughout my upbringing I never needed to, and now I never want to. And for most believers, the had, want and needs are often the primary reasons to subscribe to one the many hundreds of thousands of religions out there.
We have to believe in god through our family and culture, we need god in order to behave or we want to believe that there is a god to mediate our souls to paradise after our bodies have expired. All of which may bring comfort and consolidation to the billions of followers throughout the world and yet very few people believe in god because there is one, let alone your one. This often leads to a debate about the metaphysical and there is little reason other than psychological comfort to believe that there are supernatural agencies. The basis of our knowledge of the universe is proportionate to the evidence that we have for it, and there is very little ground to think that there is anything other than what natural law reveals to us.
Many people believe that humans would be lost without the belief in a divine overseer, to which I can point to hundreds of thousands world wide who would tell you that their lives are satisfying in spite of a lack of god. A majority of atheists world wide use to be part of a religion, and for one reason or another they left their beliefs behind because they thought on very considered grounds that they were better off without it.
I understand the human drive to understand and find meaning in the world. The propensity to build order from random chaos, but if you’re allowing doctrine to tell you what to do and how to live, then you’re settling and not moving to meet the intelligence and dignity demanded by our species. As children we look to our parents to shape and guide us, but just because we had a parent as an infant does not mean we need one as adults. Your life is your own and if you believe that you are supernaturally supervised than nothing, good or bad, can ever possibly belong to you. Every waking moment, every memory, every revelation would only then exist on the whim of an invisible parent.
You don’t have to have a parent to tell you that you can love or how to love, you don’t need a priest to tell you what kind of person you are and you certainly wouldn’t want anyone to claim responsibility for your actions. And yet to be a theist you have to believe those things, otherwise why would you bind yourself to a relationship to a creator who demands conditional love?
To truly be happy, the genuine kind: is to accept that humanity in all its wonder and dreadfulness is our burden and gift alone. We shouldn’t believe in something because there should be a reason for it, we should only believe in something because there is a reason for it. And to claim otherwise is to accept that we could never rise above the illusion that illusions are conditional.
