Archive for the ‘Religion and Conceptual Muddle’ Category
Whatever happens, is Nature.
People talk about God, or miracle-workers, breaking the Laws of Nature. This is a foolishness that comes from a particularly ill-chosen metaphor. Nature has no laws, only habits. We would be much better advised to call regularities of phenomena by a different name, one that does not suggest cops and robbers. If someone were to [...]
A miracle, a miracle!
The word ‘miracle’ is actually a synonym for ‘wonder’, but in Latin: mirare, to wonder, also the root of words like admirable, mirror and so forth. Now, when ‘wonder’ is used to describe an occurrence, as in Signs and Wonders, this is actually an elision for ‘an event at which people wonder’. It is not [...]
Oh Lord, you are so absolutely huge!
Theologians tell us that God has all the perfections, probably because an imperfect God is such a scary prospect that no one wants to think about it. (Unintelligent Design, anyone?) Among His attributes is also placed being ‘infinite’, despite the fact that this logically excludes His being the Creator. (If God has created a physical [...]
A religious choice?
One of the commonest Christian rhetorical tricks is to claim that it is essentially a religious choice to posit the non-existence of God. If that is so, then it must be a communistic choice to posit the falsity of Communism.
Who is angry?
Listen – really listen – to the preacher shouting ‘The Lord is angry!’ then ask yourself how likely it is that he is saying something about the world beyond his own endocrine organs. No, it is all just too transparent. The wires running behind the Wizard’s curtain lie in plain sight. We might as well [...]
Slaves to metaphor
Christianity rests entirely on two overlapping social metaphors, namely salvation and redemption. The former term, which means ‘rescue’, is more transparent than the latter, which means ‘repurchase’, e.g. of a slave or an insurance policy. Consequently, evangelicals ask if you are ‘saved’ but not whether you have been ‘repurchased’. The reply that one ‘does not [...]
The unimaginability of death
When Descartes said that it is logically impossible to doubt that you are thinking, he meant that it was logically impossible to doubt that you are thinking at the same time at the same time as you are thinking. For I can quite easily doubt today that I was thinking yesterday. However, while there may [...]
Immortality as syntax error
The ‘mind’ is not an inhabitant of part of the body, but is one particular way of describing certain behaviours of that body; consciousness is a pattern of standing waves across the entire brain, an emergent function of the complexity of electrical phenomena; emotions are the subjective experience of changes in neurochemistry; and decisions to [...]
More on the natural language of death
The misprogramming of our minds by natural language is by no means confined to the treatment of ‘exists’ and ‘dead’ as predicates. When, for example, we say, ‘He has left us’, we are willy-nilly affirming that life and death are places and that mortality is a matter not of condition but geography. Do all users [...]
Having and being
As well as describing ourselves in noun-driven language, which forces us to think of our future deceased selves as the persisting subjects of the predicate ‘dead’, we make further trouble for ourselves with the verb ‘to have’. For whenever we say that we ‘have’ a body, we are implying that we are not our body; [...]
