Anyway, I decided to write a response to 20-year-old self, sharing the way I've come to understand things now. Thought I would share both with you all - the response and the original writing - below. Scroll down to read the original first if you'd like.---------------------------
RESPONSE: Dear 20-year-old self…
I remember how incredibly certain you were when you wrote this, that you were right. I remember you secretly scoffing at the limited perspective of all those people around you who “blindly” believed in God, and your arrogant certainty that religion was really no more than a set of old-school myths that people were clinging to, in order to avoid facing “reality” – the “reality” of atheism.
Well, my former self, you’ve had five years full of life experience since then. And I would like to take this moment to point out the many ways in which it was, in fact, your perspective that was limited; your belief that was blind.
First of all, you speak as though prayer could only ever be evaluated by its pragmatic value; you make prayer into an exercise with results or no results, an act of “winning” or “losing” that inevitably has some kind of personal motive behind it.
But someone wise once said that “praying is not about asking…it’s about listening”. Prayer, meditation, or whatever the spiritual practice may be, is not about achieving a goal – it’s about coming to realize that the value of our life is not dependent on achieving goals, or acquiring more things, or gaining status, or having an “advantage” over others. Those things are all transient – they come and then, inevitably, they go, which means they cannot be the essence of who we are. Prayer is realizing that – and then going beyond them, to know deeply the dimension of life which underlies all of those things, which makes all of those transient “things” possible. Some call that dimension “God”, some call it “Life”, some call it “Consciousness” - but a word is just a word, and it’s the meaning behind the word that really matters.
You speak as though it’s possible to deny the existence or the importance of this “Consciousness” or “God”, or whatever you call it, through logical argumentation with words. But your words, your body and mind, the computer you type on, and everything around you is living proof of its existence; and its importance. How can it not be important - it makes possible the existence of every“thing”, and there is no thing without it! Its existence does not depend on your words –it is your words that are made possible by its existence.
You did however have one thing quite right, 20 year old self (whether you understood its significance at the time or not.) You concluded that “not praying, not going to church or synagogue or temple, not recognizing God as an existing entity - these things will not make or break you.” You are right about that, at least speaking as a human being - because you will be made and then broken no matter what you do in this life. That is the fate of all things, of all forms - we are born, and then we die. Things were never meant to last forever – which seems sad, cruel and tragic when you don’t see the eternal nature of the consciousness, the god that makes all of the things possible, that is behind all things. However, things are just the appearance that this one life, one consciousness, one god, which does last forever, is currently taking – and the cycle of birth and death is not so cruel anymore, once you realize that.
Essentially, the truth is nothing but eternal, infinite existence, and everything that arises and passes away within that existence is just a manifestation of it – made purely for enjoyment, creativity, and beauty, because that is the inherent nature of ‘life’, or ‘god’, or ‘consciousness’.
You only need to look outside your window as the sun rises one morning to know that to be true.
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ORIGINAL PIECE: Whether He exists or not, God is irrelevant.
Many speak of the presence of absence of a belief in God as their most fundamental conviction. However, my own most important question is not “is there or is there not a God”, but “is it relevant to how we go about living our lives?” That is to say, does a belief in God give us some sort of advantage? Is there a point in either strongly believing or not believing in God?
It was the ancient Greek philosopher Epicurus who initially questioned the relevance of God using logical argumentation. I find it most helpful to illustrate his point using a thought experiment. Say you take two people, each of whom possesses equally good intentions, on the whole. Person A is religious; she believes in a God and prays regularly. Suppose you get Person A to write down every single prayer that she offers up throughout her entire life, and how many of her prayers are answered. Now, Person B is not religious and does not pray. Say you get Person B to record all of the hopes or wishes that she has throughout her life, and how many of those hopes turn out in her favour. Now, suppose that at the end of each of their lives, you compare their relative success rates. I suspect that you would find them to be about equal, or at least if you averaged out many Person A’s and Person Bs, the averages would be on par with one another.
This has several deep implications. First of all, it means that prayer, in its most pragmatic sense, doesn’t seem to provide one with any actual real-world advantage. The person who believes in God must admit that at least superficially, it appears God does not favour those who pray over those who do not.
Now, the religious person may say that it is in the afterlife that the true benefits are reaped. But to at least some extent, we must go by the evidence that we have from this life, for it is all that we’ve really got to use. And the evidence shows that if there is a God, He appears to play no favourites, or to provide those who pray and believe, with greater rewards than those who do not. So why should we assume that he would do so with regards to the afterlife? All of the evidence we’ve got suggests quite the contrary: that he would not.
Now let’s say that by some chance, this is exactly what he does. He treats everyone equally and gives no indication of favouritism throughout our lives, which is the only state of existence we can be absolutely sure of, but then all of a sudden all of the well-intentioned folks who were non-believers but did their best to do good find themselves at the bottom of the totem pole in an afterlife they did not know existed. Could we honestly claim this God to be fair and just? Let’s say you were taking a class, and you and another student regularly handed in your assignments, but received no marks or feedback from your teacher whatsoever. All of a sudden, on the last day of class, your teacher informs you that you’ve received a 60% and the other student has earned a 90%, and thus the other student wins the subject award. Most would not consider this teacher to be very ‘fair’; he/she did not indicate the ways in which you must improve, or even that you needed to improve at all, until it was too late for you to do so. It would seem to me that much like this teacher, God favouring those who prayed and believed over those who didn’t in the afterlife alone would be a rather tricky, unfair way of handling things.
Now, if you are Christian you are likely going to point out to me that God DID offer up an example to follow, and in fact it was the ultimate example: His son, Jesus Christ. That is based on your own belief in Jesus as the Messiah. But if we ask a Muslim, they will say with equal conviction that God (Allah) gave us the prophet Mohammed as the supreme example to follow. And if we ask a Buddhist, they will tell you something different altogether, in fact, they will echo the crux of my own argument: God is irrelevant to their philosophy, insofar as having or not having a belief in God is not central to their teachings.
The point is that each of these groups make up a very sizeable portion of the world’s population. All of them first and foremost strive to follow the example which they deeply believe to be ‘correct’: Jesus Christ, Mohammed, Siddhartha Gautama. The trouble is that these model beings themselves believed and practiced quite different things from one another. It would be a rather mean trick for God to play: to send us one Messiah and allow it to be open for interpretation whether He is or is not in fact the true Messiah, insofar as a sizeable portion of the world’s population ends up following and modeling some other figure, essentially some imposter. It would be a cruel trick to allow this to happen and then to say that if someone does not happen to end up following the right example, that he/she will be punished, or rewarded less amply, than another who happened to follow the right example. This unfairness is only compounded by the fact that many people are born into a particular religion. If a person is born in Pakistan, the chances of him/her following Jesus over Mohammed are markedly slimmer than if he/she is born in, say, Ireland. And if a person is born in Tibet, the chances of him/her following the Buddha is much greater than Jesus or Mohammed.
So, any religious person must agree that a fair God would not do such a thing: He would not punish someone for circumstances that may lie beyond their control, or else He is not the least bit fair or just at all. Now the good news is that while Jesus, Mohammed, Siddhartha Gautama, Confucious, and all of the other religious leaders have significant differences between them, they all share one fundamental teaching: to do good. The majority of the world’s population may not believe in, say, Jesus as the Messiah, but most of the world’s population DOES believe in doing good; this is a common value that mostly all of us share. So a fair and just God could not possibly punish someone for not believing in Jesus or even in God himself, but only make known this punishment in the afterlife when it is too late to do anything about it. But He could, theoretically, judge people based on the presence or absence of positive intent and good action.
And this, you see, is why belief in God is irrelevant. A belief in God does not practically benefit a person during their life on earth, as we have shown, and it cannot in all fairness provide one with an afterlife advantage either, if we assume that such a thing exists. So not praying, not going to church or synagogue or temple, not recognizing God as an existing entity - these things will not make or break you whether there is a God or not, provided that God is fair (and if He is not, who wants to follow such a God anyway?)
Doing good – this is the bottom line. This is the life philosophy that we should all adopt, regardless of what we believe about God. Because if a fair God does end up existing, He will reward you for this effort, and this effort alone, since it is the only thing that he can fairly judge you on. And if there is no God, it does not matter, because there is a reason why doing good is inherently rewarding. It enriches the lives of those who consider it a priority. It makes life seem more meaningful, more valuable, more worth living. And if there is no God and this life is all we’ve got, why wouldn’t we want to make the absolute best of it?
-Janine Farragher-
Now let’s say that by some chance, this is exactly what he does. He treats everyone equally and gives no indication of favouritism throughout our lives, which is the only state of existence we can be absolutely sure of, but then all of a sudden all of the well-intentioned folks who were non-believers but did their best to do good find themselves at the bottom of the totem pole in an afterlife they did not know existed. Could we honestly claim this God to be fair and just? Let’s say you were taking a class, and you and another student regularly handed in your assignments, but received no marks or feedback from your teacher whatsoever. All of a sudden, on the last day of class, your teacher informs you that you’ve received a 60% and the other student has earned a 90%, and thus the other student wins the subject award. Most would not consider this teacher to be very ‘fair’; he/she did not indicate the ways in which you must improve, or even that you needed to improve at all, until it was too late for you to do so. It would seem to me that much like this teacher, God favouring those who prayed and believed over those who didn’t in the afterlife alone would be a rather tricky, unfair way of handling things.
Now, if you are Christian you are likely going to point out to me that God DID offer up an example to follow, and in fact it was the ultimate example: His son, Jesus Christ. That is based on your own belief in Jesus as the Messiah. But if we ask a Muslim, they will say with equal conviction that God (Allah) gave us the prophet Mohammed as the supreme example to follow. And if we ask a Buddhist, they will tell you something different altogether, in fact, they will echo the crux of my own argument: God is irrelevant to their philosophy, insofar as having or not having a belief in God is not central to their teachings.
The point is that each of these groups make up a very sizeable portion of the world’s population. All of them first and foremost strive to follow the example which they deeply believe to be ‘correct’: Jesus Christ, Mohammed, Siddhartha Gautama. The trouble is that these model beings themselves believed and practiced quite different things from one another. It would be a rather mean trick for God to play: to send us one Messiah and allow it to be open for interpretation whether He is or is not in fact the true Messiah, insofar as a sizeable portion of the world’s population ends up following and modeling some other figure, essentially some imposter. It would be a cruel trick to allow this to happen and then to say that if someone does not happen to end up following the right example, that he/she will be punished, or rewarded less amply, than another who happened to follow the right example. This unfairness is only compounded by the fact that many people are born into a particular religion. If a person is born in Pakistan, the chances of him/her following Jesus over Mohammed are markedly slimmer than if he/she is born in, say, Ireland. And if a person is born in Tibet, the chances of him/her following the Buddha is much greater than Jesus or Mohammed.
So, any religious person must agree that a fair God would not do such a thing: He would not punish someone for circumstances that may lie beyond their control, or else He is not the least bit fair or just at all. Now the good news is that while Jesus, Mohammed, Siddhartha Gautama, Confucious, and all of the other religious leaders have significant differences between them, they all share one fundamental teaching: to do good. The majority of the world’s population may not believe in, say, Jesus as the Messiah, but most of the world’s population DOES believe in doing good; this is a common value that mostly all of us share. So a fair and just God could not possibly punish someone for not believing in Jesus or even in God himself, but only make known this punishment in the afterlife when it is too late to do anything about it. But He could, theoretically, judge people based on the presence or absence of positive intent and good action.
And this, you see, is why belief in God is irrelevant. A belief in God does not practically benefit a person during their life on earth, as we have shown, and it cannot in all fairness provide one with an afterlife advantage either, if we assume that such a thing exists. So not praying, not going to church or synagogue or temple, not recognizing God as an existing entity - these things will not make or break you whether there is a God or not, provided that God is fair (and if He is not, who wants to follow such a God anyway?)
Doing good – this is the bottom line. This is the life philosophy that we should all adopt, regardless of what we believe about God. Because if a fair God does end up existing, He will reward you for this effort, and this effort alone, since it is the only thing that he can fairly judge you on. And if there is no God, it does not matter, because there is a reason why doing good is inherently rewarding. It enriches the lives of those who consider it a priority. It makes life seem more meaningful, more valuable, more worth living. And if there is no God and this life is all we’ve got, why wouldn’t we want to make the absolute best of it?
-Janine Farragher-
