A lot of people are complaining about the 'God' concept introduced in the latter half of the post. I think a lot of this is that people are pattern-matching 'God' with the huge amount of baggage that the term has rightfully accumulated.
I started reading the article in full (having read the criticism first), and soon realised that the god notion described doesn't really match anything in traditional religion, or anything that one would typically criticise. The god introduced doesn't seem to require anything tangible from the reader or anyone who believes in such a god. It requires no submission, suffering, organisation or decrees. It simply makes an offer. (and it very expressly makes that offer within a fable, not a description of reality)
The end paragraph is pretty hard to deny. You just needs to be careful not to associate your cached thoughts with the word 'God'. Essentially what the story concludes with is: love is a good thing; we should share it; and we should offer it to ourselves too[1].
This kind of love is most noticeable by its absence I think. After a couple of hard years, I recently looked back on the things that had been troubling me, and noticed that throughout it I had been very hard on myself, and very hard on others.
I think the god analogy as a source of love is one that is only useful to some people.
I'm sure that making physical world predictions based on the existence of any higher power is sure to result in predictions that aren't useful.
Regardless, the general point about love, suffering, loss, forgiveness and learning can be taken without changing personal beliefs, and without god. Equally, a very personal god who offers and requires only what Paul describes gives identical results.
As such I argue that the god described has no need to be excluded from this essay, or Hacker News. I urge those criticising it to read it again with strict mental effort on avoiding the 'god = bad' association that one leaps to out of past experience.
[1] (and it says this in an excellent way, and with more nuance than I describe, I know)
Perhaps I needed to manage the transition between the parts a little more smoothly to avoid losing people who have an allergic reaction to the g-word.
When things are difficult, talk of God inevitably arises from many good and well meaning people. The difficulty of course is that the God concept has so much ugly baggage attached to it. You can reject it outright, as so many here are eager to do, or you can embrace and nurture the good in it.
Alas, it's very tricky to navigate the waters between the dogmatic believers and the dogmatic unbelievers, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't try.
The problem about your post is that, due probably, yes, to a lack of transition between the two parts, the reader feels they have been played. We are incredibly moved by the first story, and when we are all soft with emotion and empathy, here comes a lecture about "false gods" and "true God".
What's worse, the second part rests on a mountain of assumptions that are never articulated, let alone justified: that God is good, that there is only one God (not zero, not many: exactly One), that there is absolute good and absolute evil in the world and that there is an ongoing fight between the two, etc.
But thanks for sharing anyway.
- - -
PS: "dogmatic believers" vs "dogmatic unbelievers" puts superstition and reason on the same level; they are not.
If you can't consider that you might be wrong, its dogma, regardless of whether you believe in God, Allah, Einstein or the Flying Spaghetti Monster.
The issue is that so many crazy people use religious teachings as an excuse for their craziness and it hurts the whole thing, as it were. Mind you, crazy people use almost everything as a justification (and we're all a little crazy).
Personally, I liked his definition of religion and God, but then i subscribe to a religion which explicitly forbids talking about itself (which is probably the best part of it). When I say subscribe, I suppose that I mean take meaning and solace from.
Bear in mind that the actuality of a particular belief has little or nothing to do with its usefulness for living a life, so even if I (or the author, or you) are completely mistaken about our spiritual beliefs, then it makes no goddamn difference to our lives.
The only real difficulty is when one attempts to force said beliefs on someone else, and that's where all of the badness and evil that is rightfully associated with religion(s) seems to come from.
Incidentally, could you provide definitions of superstition and reason? Two very tricky concepts I find. Reason once said that of course the earth is flat, now it says of course it must be round, so which was superstition and which was reason?
To carry this analogy a little further, which of your beliefs (rational of course, like all human beliefs) are factually incorrect? I would bet that within 100 years, many of them will be proven to be so. Does that mean that you will be retconned into superstitiousness?
Incidentally, i think that you may have misinterpreted what the author meant with the false and true gods analogy (or at least you constructed a different meaning to mine) so I would humbly suggest that you perhaps try to read that part of the piece again (as will I).
> To carry this analogy a little further, which of your beliefs (rational of course, like all human beliefs) are factually incorrect? I would bet that within 100 years, many of them will be proven to be so. Does that mean that you will be retconned into superstitiousness?
The difference between superstition and science/reason is not that one is true and the other is false. It's that only one claims to know absolute truth - superstition. Reason, in the context of science anyways, demands to be challenged and is open to change (it may take a long time, but it happens).
Thus, whereas reason allows for us to evolve our understanding about the world being flat, superstition in it's most extreme forms, demands that we limit our understanding to what's already written. For example, believing that the earth is 6000 years old.
Some atheists deliberately choose the meaning of "God" that makes people look like idiots and conspicuously ignore meanings of "God" that are internally consistent and reasonable.
If by "god" the author means "the general goodness within most humans, which inspired them to act to save my daughter's life", then the author should say so more directly.
If the author didn't want to tie his concept of "deity-as-avatar-for-goodness" to a religion with so much baggage, he should have chosen a different word.
I started reading the article in full (having read the criticism first), and soon realised that the god notion described doesn't really match anything in traditional religion, or anything that one would typically criticise. The god introduced doesn't seem to require anything tangible from the reader or anyone who believes in such a god. It requires no submission, suffering, organisation or decrees. It simply makes an offer. (and it very expressly makes that offer within a fable, not a description of reality)
The end paragraph is pretty hard to deny. You just needs to be careful not to associate your cached thoughts with the word 'God'. Essentially what the story concludes with is: love is a good thing; we should share it; and we should offer it to ourselves too[1].
This kind of love is most noticeable by its absence I think. After a couple of hard years, I recently looked back on the things that had been troubling me, and noticed that throughout it I had been very hard on myself, and very hard on others.
I think the god analogy as a source of love is one that is only useful to some people.
I'm sure that making physical world predictions based on the existence of any higher power is sure to result in predictions that aren't useful.
Regardless, the general point about love, suffering, loss, forgiveness and learning can be taken without changing personal beliefs, and without god. Equally, a very personal god who offers and requires only what Paul describes gives identical results.
As such I argue that the god described has no need to be excluded from this essay, or Hacker News. I urge those criticising it to read it again with strict mental effort on avoiding the 'god = bad' association that one leaps to out of past experience.
[1] (and it says this in an excellent way, and with more nuance than I describe, I know)