My aim, in these pages, is to arrive at
"The
meaning of life". Learning
"The
meaning of life" is like being
given the secret of how a stage magician performs
a magic trick. The magician's secret is diabolically
clever and yet, once the trick is explained,
the magic is gone. As adults we knew all along
there was no magic, yet sometimes, like an innocent
child, we wish the magics were real.
To find
"The meaning of life"
we can first nail down the idea of religion.
Religion attempts to explain life as created
by the Divine. But this Divine Creator is infinitely
harder to explain (i.e. impossible!) than the
life that He supposedly created.
An example of why much religious thinking
is defective: "LIFE was created by... LIFE!
(in the form of a god)."
Another example of the confused thinking
of the religious: "Life and the Universe
were designed and created. Conversely, the Designer/Creator
Himself was not designed and created."
Religionists believe that man must incessantly
sing praises to God and implore His indulgence.
The dogmas say the dogs must beg for mercy.
Christians even see themselves as lambs herded
by a shepherd; a
very strange aspiration.
Don't the Christians realise that lambs are
slaughtered, butchered, cooked and served piping
hot with mint sauce and chips? Christians call
their lord their "
Shepherd" and yet a
Shepherd's job is to see to it that the terrified
lambs arrive at the abattoir and have their
woolly throats slit by a menacing hairy bloke.
(I criticise Christianity, but speaking generally,
religion is a
bad thing. Many religions
are even less conducive to free thinking than
Christianity, especially the fundamentalist
religions such as Islam for example. There are
seven sinister enemies of freedom, free thought
and free speech. These are dictatorships, draconian
copyright/patent laws, political correctness, corruption, good men doing nothing, group think and
religion.)
People claim to know God largely due to powerful
sensations achieved when praying. Brain scan
experiments are showing that praying causes
parts of the brain that deal with the self to
become quiet. This gives the illusion of seeming
at one with the Universe, as the distinction
between self and non-self breaks down. Simultaneously,
another part of the brain, deep in the primitive
limbic system, becomes highly active. This part
of the brain is concerned with labelling things
as crucially important.
When people pray, after a period of time of
about an hour, they may experience these strange
sensations: they
feel at one with the
Universe (God?) and they become convinced that
this experience
must be phenomenally
revelatory. These extreme emotions are nothing
more than conscious manifestations of the firing
of neurones within the brain. Here
is the rub: identical sensations can be achieved
without prayer.
Non-religious meditation
affects the brain in the same way! God is artificially
added by the religious to explain these amazing
sensations. They see no other explanation, and
do not wish to find one.
Imagine if prayer made you feel these sensations,
then you would be tempted to think that the
praying was working, that you were in touch
with a God. But if, on the other hand, you were
meditating, you might have simply put it down
to the experience of meditation. Other meditators
invoke new age-like spiritual explanations,
such as the stimulation of so-called "Chakra
points" and entering Nirvana.
The brain is fooling these religious/spiritual
people. And none are more easily fooled than those that think they cannot be fooled.
A classic example is that the brain,
when appropriately stimulated, can produce the
optical illusion of bright light. People often
interpret this startling experience as a divine
intervention. It is purely an experience generated
internally by the brain, there is no need for
a supernatural explanation. The visual cortex
of the brain is huge. It does a lot of signal
processing to turn the 2D pattern of light falling
onto cells in the retina, which is converted via chemicals
in the retina into electric signals, which are in turn converted into into a 3D
representation of the world that we see. All we see is an illusion cooked up inside the brain. The
brain, remember, is only receiving electricity from the optic nerve.
The
same brain, under certain circumstances,
can produce a blinding light, even
when no light falls upon the eye. This can happen, for example, when the brain is stimulated by
hallucinogenic drugs. It can also happen
when the brain undergoes oxygen starvation. The fact that the brain generates images, like a computer display can,
negates the need for angels to explain the
light-at-the-end-of-the-tunnel-type experiences
reported by those having witnessed near-death
sensations.
No gods or other magics are required to explain these emotional
and visual illusions. The temptation to do so
comes from the same human temptation that caused
people to believe that Heaven existed just above
the sky. This belief was common at the time
of Christ and was no-doubt believed by Christ
(the
historical figure of Christ -
if he existed.)
These days we know better, thanks to science
and technology. At least in the civilised world, religion is being pushed back
by our deeper understanding of natural phenomena
occurring without resorting to the easy way out: the assistance of gods and
angels.
When you look closely at it, religion explains
absolutely nothing. It substitutes one profound
mystery - where did life (and we) come from
- with a yet more inexplicable mystery - where
did the Creator come from? Simply saying that
the Creator "has always existed" is no explanation,
it's merely an even more unfathomable mystery. How can
something have always been there? Why is the deity
there in the first place? Is there only one
god? If so, why? Why invoke a singleton god,
and not have a family or entire swarms of gods?
Why would a super-intelligent god create humans
who are so stupid, and then get all upset when the said
pesky humanoids don't believe in him based on
the rather eccentric, implausible and demonstrably
inaccurate bible (or other scriptures)? What
is the point of it all?
Religion has no answers
to these big questions. Religion claims to have
the answers but the only answer it really has
is this:
"
God moves in mysterious ways".
That says it all. The power of religion to explain
the mystery of life and existence is nil. Zilch.
Void. Any religion is basically wrong: so many
religions, so few facts. All religious people
claim that only they know the truth. They seem
unable or unwilling to place themselves in the
shoes of those of different religions (or atheists)
and marvel at how crazy and foolish their religious
beliefs appear to others.
To understand the real
"Meaning of
Life", we should start by examining
the
boundary conditions of life.
The boundaries of life are birth and death and
are examined next.
That's the article.
Now, for a bit of flippant fun. I'll publish some messages I have received from our mental-sounding religious friends. The messages seem mostly to be from christians. I wouldn't like to get too many messages from their equivalently mental muslim counterparts, they'd probably be even worse, like such and such deity won't be content until all non-beleivers of that deity have been murdered by religious nutcases. Some of our religious friends really do believe that a) their deity loves men and, simultaneously, they believe that their deity wants to kill men. Usually this wrath is based on the hypothetical vanity of that hypothetical deity: non-believers must die, and/or go to Hell, or whatever, for not believing in "Him". Anyway, prepare for the tirades of our religious friends :-)
Name: cynthia [has a muslim-sounding surname]
Feb 2009
Title: bless you child
Message
i am really so sorry for you i will pray for you and your family but i have a question. why does your web page show the devil if there is no god then there is no devil you know good vs evil it sounds to me like you are a sad and lost soul
[Eadon responds] Thanks for "blessing" me, pitying me and praying for me. Though perhaps your motives were beneficent, if I were a cynical fellow, then I would suspect that those activites gratified your needs more than mine. Thanks anyway :-) To answer the question, just because I draw gods and devils on the site does not mean that I belive they exist. I have no reason to suppose they do exist.
Name: Ryan
July 2010
Title: you are the scumbag
Message
get a life, or make a better website if you are going to slate everything good, ie Christians(xians to your lazy disrespectful ass) in the name of Satan,,,note....always spelled with a capital letter by you...wow, 22987 hits, is your soul worth that little to you??
[Eadon responds] My soul, barely used.
Soul'ed (geddit?) for 22987 hits. Bargain! (On a geeky whim, I checked to see if the value of my "soul", 22987, is a prime number. Actually it is equal to the product of two 3 digit prime numbers - 127 and 181).
Name: Ed W
Sept 2010
Title: ALMIGHTY GOD
God is all powerful but is not a fool.
Message
He uses His all powerfulness within the realm of what is logical.
It is not logical to to make 2 + 2 = 5 or some other number to confuse mathematics and mathematicians.
It is not logical for Him to go against his nature since He is holy and cannot be tempted, although it is logical for you to go against your sin nature since yours is out of control and you are tempting God to show himself powerful enough to judge you.
If you were Perfect like He is perfect, it would be illogical to use His Power to make himself disappear.
God is logical and wise in all He does, so His universe is orderly and you can thank God for it.
How would you like to live upon a planet that spins out of control?
[Eadon responds] This planet is spinning out of control, metaphorically. Here's a question for you, does your "God" tell you about his logic? Does he use voices in your head? Or just maybe you're making wild, unfounded guesses about the reasoning capabilities of your all mighty imaginary friend...
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