DO GOD(s) EXIST? Once clear-headed,probably best2think"No" KUGBEV

-2009.12.11pst1955: (~70% complete first-draft)
^.
KUGCFD:  DO GOD(s) EXIST?
* Once clear-headed, it's probably best to think "No";
* when not in that state, it's probably best to think "Yes"

1. ^KUH77Q:  Unless you fully agree with this conclusion especially the "No" part, PLEASE READ LINEARLY - Do NOT skip ahead.
2. ^KUGCWK:  And first, before reading reading further,
   
1. ^KUGD0Q:  it's important to ask you, If there was no God(s) nor divine benign spirit (as Jesus),  nor devil(s) either,
   
1. ^KUGD3V:  Would you stop really trying to do the right thing, even if no one was watching?
   
2. ^KUGD5F:  Would you feel life wasn't worth living, and kill yourself or let yourself die?
3. ^KUGD91:  Would you more hurt yourself and/or others, or more let yourself or others come to harm?
   What are your answers to each of these?
   
2. ^KUGDA0:  Until the answer to all 3 of these questions is sincerely "NO", just keep on believing as you're believing and read no further here.
   

   ---

3. ^KUGDHX:  And only when you can give a sincere "NO" to every one of these 3 questions, read on...
   
   
3. ^KUGCNP:  Maybe a good way to begin is to just quote my profile here on the topic of religion; as of now 2009.12.20 it reads:
1. "Religiously Im Unitarian Universalist (“Everyone has a part of the answer” -see the org I created UU Young Adults Intl.) and esp. Scientific (Ignostic w/ Atheistic leaning), Libertarian, Utilitarian, plus “love all” and “do right Always”. Socially & romantically I follow LoveRules.Info."
   
4. .^KUGDMA:  If you've heard of "Ignostic" you may infer or just-guess-from-the-name, and accurately, that I am agnostic (meaning I can't say for sure if god(s) exist), so have no fear about what I'm about to say as:
   
1. ^KUGEKZ:    I'm NOT going to be telling you if or not god(s) exist since obviously I just said I don't know myself (unless I wanted to be hypocrite, which I don't),
2. ^KUGEF5:  So instead I'm going to just to be neutrally talking about the likelihood of God(s) existing. 
   
3. ^KUGEP2:  Now you  my feel you know one way or the other, you may feel certain, but for the moment put yourself in my shoes and in my eyes of someone who doesn't know for certain.
   
5. ^KUGDSE:  But there IS a tiny thing I DO "know" about the subject (well something which really seems correct to me, and perhaps to you, too).  Notice my profile also claims indeed I'm Ignostic (meaning that I claim we don't even have a good enough definition of what god(s) is/are to be able to say scientifically if god(s) exist)
   
1. ^KUGEW9:  and if you think about it, that would sound a reasonable claim, too: the truth is we DON'T have a scientific definition of what god(s) is/are, and perhaps especially since god(s) come from religion (though I could think of other reasons).  Might you agree with that, too?  If not, please share why.
2. ^KUGFD6:  And since we can't scientifically define god(s), the agnostic point of view is the most accurate in that we can't scientifically say if god(s) exist.
   
6. ^KUGFUE:  But don't get me wrong, just because I'm not certain if god(s) exist does NOT automatically mean I don't feel the feelings you (else the majority of humans today) feel about believing in God.  As, just like you,  I am NOT walking around like an unemotional scientific robot;
   
1. ^KUGJRP:  rather, probably like you, My first experience is that it feels good to believe...
1. .^KUGG8I:  ...that Jesus always loves me and is watching over me.
2. .^KUGGBL:  ...that there is a God who loves me and everyone, and when I die it's not really as sad as it would appear because if I did good things in life then I will go in Heaven, and have happiness ever after.
3. ^KUGJ4S:  ...that if you don't know why things happen that way, just say "That's God plan"
   
2. ^KUGGHI:  But hopefully unlike you I had one really terrible thing which happened to me in childhood (starting as an infant), and which cause me to consciously shut down most all my emotions for most of my life (except where they were just decorations & entertainment), and instead depend on pure logic for all of my decisions (and even (mis)thought most people did the same, at least when they were being respectful).  Well this really hurt much of my life as you could imagine, but it has had some hidden benefits, too: like a super-hero empowered by some tragic accident long in the past, it has also enabled to, much more than most adults, to not allow my thoughts & decisions to be swayed by emotion; it has trained me, as if for the Olympics, to live every moment with Spock-like objectivity.
   
3. ^KUGGV4:  So while probably like everyone else I find these beliefs in god(s) and say Jesus feel good, I still can clearly see this doesn't prove they are true, just that they good, and so especially if they are not true, still so routinely believing them might actually be as bad as being loaded on cocaine: it feels great and so is very addictive, but isn't real.
   
7. ^KUGR3W:  Still, since we're talking about if God exists, even if we can't scientifically define god(s) in order to say so, we can still say a little about
   the properties generally ascribed to god(s) so at least we can kind-of know what we talking about (if this sounds fuzzy, it is: blame it on most religion being (conveniently) imprecise).
1. ^KUGR6X:  Well if talking about the leading talk of god(s) today, from the world's leading religions Christianity & Islam, the basics about gods they state include:
1. ^KUGR92:  the religion is monotheistic: that there is only one god (called God)
   
1. ^KUGXD4:  This keeps it maximally simple for everyone and has notable policing properties, and
   
2. ^KUGT8V:  markedly helping humans identify with this God entity,
   
1. ^KUGS9S:  that God thinks and feels and has values and a conscious similar as every human has 
2. ^KUGT4L:  that God is good and wants good and
   
1. ^KUGZII:  in particular loves & does what's best for all the humans (indeed the humans are often called "God's children")
3. but this is were the similarities to humans end, as
3. ^KUGSE2:  that God's values are perfect & the best for everyone and should never be questioned (most monarchies & police states think similarly)
1. ^KUGTK6:  Note if we allowed multiple Gods (pantheism instead if the monotheism), then almost certainly the gods would (like humans) get ascribed different values so there would be multiple systems of values and easy confusion over which god to follow, which works against a monarchy or police state (one might (and perhaps did) say "The Greeks tried it and it had problems").
   
4. ^KUGRHE:  that God is also all-knowing & sees everything all at once 
1. ^KUGXGF:  so even better than the most perfect "eye in the sky", as "No matter where you go, you can't hide from God"
   
5. .^KUGUW6:  that even if a person doesn't get caught for a bad deed while alive, after he dies God will still punish him and worse (indeed probably sending him "Forever to burn in Hell")
6. ^KUGXM0:  that (for all that are bad), there also exists Hell ruled by the Devil which is the opposite of God who is good.
7. ^KUGSJT:  that God existed always and never dies 
1. ^KUGTXA:  so, if you follow God, God will always be there for you, and if you don't, no matter how long you live you won't be able to wait out God and your Judgement Day)
   
8. ^KUGRJO:  that God is all-powerful (so "beware" religious texts repeatedly say) and in fact
1. ^KUGRBZ:  that God did and will do some terrible things to humans
   
2. ^KUGSX9:  that everything which happens is "an act of God" (controlled & determined by God exactly), including
1. ^KUGRB8:  that God created everything
9. ^KUGRM5: that we humans have free will including can & do do things against God's will
1. ^KUGU4D:  even though this God is-supposed-to-be deciding everything!; well, perhaps so we can't verify that and so much more...
   
10. ^KUGRF7:  that God is invisible, we can't see God (at least while we're alive), well not unless God chooses to reveal himself to us while we're alive
    
1. ^KUGSIU:  so (conveniently) we can't verify that God exists (well at least not until we're dead, and obviously at that point we can't tell anyone)
2. ^KUGUBD:  Well are you thinking what I'm thinking?  For in writing these basic attributes of the God character, I can't help but wonder "Have we just been given the design for "The Emperor's New Clothes"?  Specifically did some (very human) monarchy rulers just invent all this stuff as a super cheap way to police everyone, indeed even without a police force?"
1. ^KUGWDI:  "As given people are a little superstitious and unthinking as they were those thousands of years ago (and sadly many still are today), it would work (and did work) brilliantly!"
2. .^KUGWE9:  Indeed I could imagine if we could raise that monarch from the dead he would say, "Yeah, we did a pretty good job, didn't we!
   --A big improvement over the Ancient Greeks, too -- they screwed up with the polytheism, did you notice?
   Yes, with the Old Testament, including the Ten Commandments and such for the values part, it was working pretty great for a thousand years or so,
   until about 0 AD and then a number of people had broken so many rules that they didn't care anymore about our afterlife judgement day scare, indeed would argue no one ever saw this stuff anyway, so were just living it up and breaking even more rules, and there were just too many of these unruly people to kill;
   so we came up with this Jesus character to fix these folks: told 'em if they just confessed and asked for his forgiveness and started following, then they could get their afterlife back, and it worked! Yeah, we eventually had to kill a few sticklers, Jews (including some of them who saw our BS) who wouldn't switch over to our new plan, but then it overall worked  --We got everyone scared & policed again!
   But you guys aren't actually still believing this crap, are you?"
   
8. ^KUGEYS:  But still, even if we can't scientifically say god(s) exist,
   let's still look at some arguments & for & against god(s) existing, but since admittedly we can't do this scientifically then just just we generally ascribe god(s) as being:
   

   KUGF2X:  Arguments suggesting god(s) may exist: .KUGPJ0:  (This is a theory I came up with when studying neural nets in ~1988 summer where I got my first patent.)  From the the perspective of a fly, humans are probably like gods; sometimes they leave food and garbage bins out "for them" for the flies to feast & gorge; and other times humans slap the flies and smash them and poison them and fry them with electricity. Being of limited intelligence, flies probably have no idea which it's going to be, as Humans are "Lord of the flies": but on this note of quoting Shakespeare, the full reference is "As flies to wanton boys, are we to the gods, — They kill us for their sport".  And here Shakespeare was onto something. As while flies have tiny brains and limited intelligence, so humans intelligence is finite as well.  And simulating the brains neural nets show that size matters: patterns exist which smaller neural nets simply have no way to see.  And of course mathematics will show that there is no limit to the complexity of a pattern.  So there could be being(s) which are so advanced that our our human neural nets simply can never see; the best we may be able to do is is just have some vague awareness or sense they exist, just as the fly probably sees we humans and (mis)call us gods.  And we should not laugh at the flies if they did, because in several points in history thousands of humans have believed another human was instead a god or divine spirit (and still do: note Christians, the biggest religion in the world - Christians believe the human Jesus is instead divine).  Still if there are such beings out there which are simply beyond our full comprehension of the human brain, this real analogy to what we've seen like that suggests that these beings are NOT gods, including definitely not all knowing nor thinking much about our interests, nor are they just one. TBA

   KUGF3U:  Arguments suggesting god(s) don't exist: .KUGCV2:  If God created the universe, then who created God? Well many proponents of God typically reply, "God just existed already." To which I (and other skeptics have thought to ask), "But if God existed already, then why couldn't the universe have just existed already?" Proponent: "That's obvious.  The universe is amazing, it couldn't have just happened, someone had to create it: God did! --by His Intelligent Design." Skeptic: "Well if the universe is amazing, and God created it, then God is even more amazing, right?" Proponent: "Absolutely" Skeptic: "Well then you've gone backwards in explaining things.  Instead of figuring out a mystery (which takes time & hard work, by the way), you've instead "explained" it by claiming it's due to yet another even bigger mystery.  You've make it worse not better." Proponent: "Well I don't think it though that much, just because it feels good." Skeptic: "`Just because it feels good.' -my point exactly!" KUGX7C:  The properties of God sound like the story was made up in order to enforce a monarchy police state --where  they had a serious shortage of police. KUGXSV:  As humans have free free will and sometimes do things against God, then contrary to scripture, it is obviously NOT the case that God is determining every action and having humans do good. KUGYGD:  If indeed God created everything and God is good and wants good and does what's best for humans, and God wants and does what's best for humans (his "children") then God would NOT: KUGZBN: create Hell and the Devil, KUGZBZ:  create and allow humans to bad things, indeed even to where it sends them forever to hell; KUGZCS: have done and continue terrible things to the humans, "God's Children" KUGZQ5:  --or is "child" abuse somehow also part of God's plan? KUGYOC:  If God is all-powerful and all-encompassing (created-everything) and everywhere (sees everwhere) and always, then why haven't I actually seen God?  As could it be that, despite all this, God is also invisible because this God doesn't actually exist? TBA

1. .^KUGFRY:  So even though we can't scientifically say either way (indeed again for starters because we don't have a scientific definition), overall there would appear more suggestion that god(s) don't exist.
   
9. ^KUGJJQ:  IF belief in god(s) is not true, and even arguably very bad in some ways if not true, then why do the majority of humans today believe in god(s)?
   
1. ^KUGJJ3:  My guess is one reason is it's like asking "Why is a large percentage of humans addicted to illegal & high-power drugs when those are sometimes even more destructive & deadly than the religious wars and other problems with religion?"  Because even if we know it may not be true, it feels good to believe.  And, just as it is with drugs, it's hard and indeed sometimes impossible to get people to see reality if they're addicted (this article certainly works hard to do it!).
   
2. .^KUGJUD:  Ever hear of "God fearing"?  It helps us govern people even when we couldn't possibly ever police them.  If we tell them "God is watching your every move even when no one else is watch you, and will punish you after you die for any wrongs even if you never see the punishment while you're alive", getting people to believe that is a ton cheaper (and sometimes more effective) than a police force.
10. ^KUGLG7:  If there is no god(s), then what values/morals should one believe in?
1. ^KUH6RH:  This is a deep question. It seems highly desirable to have the basic guidance (mentioned at the start) about doing-the-right-thing and such which believing in god(s) usually provide.
   
2. ^KUH6S7:  Until I complete this section, please refer to Fixes below.
   
3. TBA
   
   
11. ^KUGFOY:  But Tony Robbins teaches effectively "It's no so much if a belief is true as it is [more] that constructive.".   So in this vein let's look the dangers & benefits of believing in god(s):
    

    KUGK6G:  Benefits in believing in god(s): KUGKN0:  It typically gives humans quick and often lasting hope even when they are not very intelligent and/or too stressed to be logical. KUGKOT:  It typically gives humans quick, good-sounding answers which calm them. KUGL24:  It polices humans incredibly well. This may be unavoidable, but when possible I'd much rather see more truthful & scientifically-credible stuff. KUGL3Q:  Because believing is done by the vast majority of humans, and is very important to many or most, believing buys you instant popular acceptance.  I have no easy fix for this important need, other than to say non-contradictory Unitarian Universalism has over 1000 congregations world-wide. KUGL8N:  It allows people, indeed entire countries, to be given a purpose of being, plus detailed moral guidance, which otherwise humans (like probably most creatures) don't know (as the genetic algorithm (which directs all life forms) doesn't remember why to do things, just directs what to be done); this need is perfectly valid but god(s) are likely not the best way to do it; instead see values and moralities if there is no god(s). KUH1ZY:  It gives one perspective from humility.  I feel humility is essential but it can seemingly be much better accomplished making Mother Nature your Higher Power and, second, the one-of-many humble view of Unitarian Universalism.

    KUGK71:  Dangers in believing in god(s): KUGKTH:  Most anything (god & bad) can be justified as an act of god(s), a huge danger; in fact look at the many contradictions within the very basic definition of God itself; KUGKUE:  It cuts the motivation to find out really "Why", instead explaining potentially anything mysterious with  mere "it's just God's plan", another huge danger KUH5X3:  Most seriously the average "it's just God's plan" person might then not be motivated to find out that sociobiology is determining most everything he/she does KUH64S:  note seemingly no scientists are creationists; and indeed most scientists seem turned off by religion, keenly aware the these conflicts and dangers and probably unaware of Unitarian Universalism. KUGL0K:   It typically shuts down pursuit of knowledge whenever it appears in conflict with or might accurately show untrue god(s) and religions. KUGOMK:  Probably most serious of all for the average person, belief in creationism and sometimes God & Intelligent Design regularly blinds people from seeing sociobiology. KUH5JW:  History is also full of famous examples where religion (especially the Catholic Church) was stopping science (Galileo, Columbus, etc) and still is today (Stem Cell research)

1. ^KUGKHX:  Hence the conclusion of this article, again "DO GOD(s) EXIST? Once clear-headed, it's probably best to think "No"; when not in that state, believing in god(s) is probably beneficial (why we humans then typically do it)."
   
   
12. ^KUH21I:  Fixes:
1. .^KUH2O6:  To get your humility & guidance, look to Nature, as "Mother" Nature (what I also do, BTW)
   
1. ^KUH29Y:  unlike god(s) this can be and easily is 100% scientifically accurate and is heavily if not entirely based on science.
2. ^KUH221:  If you think it would be good to have a Higher Power (and it generally is), then make your "Higher Power" Nature, as "Mother" Nature
   
3. ^KUH2AG:  While it's probably premature for me to say this, if you still want the spiritual & gods as well, you might want to consider paganism as I understand it has much higher focus and roots & appreciation of nature than Christianity & Islam  which I understand predates them as well.
2. .^KUH2LF:  Prefer the term "Higher Power" instead of "God(s)".
1. ^KUH2N1:  It's a term that both believers and God(s) and many non-believers & agnostic can agree on.
2. ^KUH2UJ:  And for those who have trouble agreeing, point out that  Nature, as "Mother" Nature is much more powerful than us, so could be considered our higher power.
3. ^KUH2Y5:  "Higher Power" is the term which Alcoholics Anonymous used to replace "God" in their now terribly-famous 12-step program in order to be more welcoming, and is where I get this idea.
3. .^KUH34L:  Get involved in Unitarian Universalism (UU),
   
1. ^KUH3C3:  which (rather uniquely) deliberately makes no statement as to if god(s) exist and is uniquely maximally open-minded while still being civil, 
2. ^KUH3CF:  yet still has the music, ceremony and community of typical religions, plus 
3. . ^KUH3GQ:  doesn't claim to have the official answer on anything but says everybody has a part of the answer and instead focuses on getting religions to appreciate each other & coexist
   
4. ^KUH3D9:  has over 1000 congregations world-wide!
   
   
13. ^KUGNEO:  Relevant articles include:
1. ^KUGNEZ:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Existence_of_God (which says foremost "A basic problem is that there is no universally accepted definition of God or existence.")
2. TBA

.

---

^KQ5ZAU:  Some Document History:

1. ^KUGBEV:  2009.12.10pst1128- 1st created in Writely source and posted to http://LoveRules.Info/2009/12/kugbev.html; wanted to title it quote[DO GOD(s) Exist? Once you're clear headed, probably best to think "No" KUGBEV] but was too long so named it quote[DO GOD(s) EXIST? Once clear-headed,probably best2think"No" KUGBEV] which was maximum other than trailing #s.  In first sitting, completed about 45%.  I am motivated to write this article (and especially with this title) to use cite it in scientific & especially sociobiology writing (as here where the idea came up) in order to quickly dismiss the "Could God be governing us" question which is mostly a distract-er as, for starters, God is so poorly defined.
   
2. KUGG2W:  Since this is a delicate subject, I'm working very hard to present this material tactfully with much concern for it to be in the right order, with the possibility that religious conservative could be reading it.
3. ^KUHAWI:  2009.12.11pst0015 1st published content at "(~70% complete first draft; read with that in mind.)"
   

Official URL: http://LoveRules.Info/2009/12/kugbev.html