It's OK To Be An Agnostic

Just so everyone reading my blogs will know the mindset from which I write, I’ve composed this article:

IT’S OK TO BE AN AGNOSTIC

by Allen C. Dexter

I get all kinds of reactions when I reveal the fact that I am an agnostic. A lot of horrified people think I’m headed straight to that divine Dachau and theological Treblinka they call Hell. They express sorrow and say they’ll “pray” for poor me.

Interesting concept of “god.” He’s supposedly so thin skinned that if I don’t believe in him, he’ll get even by making me burn for all eternity. At least, Herbert Armstrong’s teaching had him only burning me to ashes, like in the Nazi crematoriums.

If Eichmann was a war criminal, what is their Jehovah?

Often, they will ask me, “What if you’re wrong?”

My answer: “What if you’re wrong?”

A lot of people have an attitude that reminds me of General Patton. Hedge your bets and take advantage of the possible benefits of any faith, such as when he was in the hospital, in traction and staring death in the face. Any minister or priest who offered last rights or any kind of intercession was welcomed.

Patton didn’t get deeply into theology. He just read “the book,” took it somewhat seriously, went on cussing up a blue streak when the occasion called for it with an absolute conviction he’d been here in several other lives (all military, apparently) and would probably be here again. Right or wrong, it gave him a purpose and goal in life. I like him. Whatever might be said about him, he was always genuine.

Some atheists seem to have the attitude that being an agnostic is tantamount to being weak kneed and wishy-washy. They are so convinced of their atheistic approach that it becomes a non-believer’s dogma.

I’ve flirted with outright atheism, largely because I know the Bible and the Christian God is a totally concocted farce. All the myths surrounding the biblical Jesus didn’t come into anything close to their present form until the fourth century after the composite Jesus the Western world was tricked into believing in supposedly walked the earth.

That’s a period longer than our nation has existed!

Who would want to write a history of the Revolutionary War with no authoritative written records penned by those who were there to use as sources? How accurate and authoritative do you think it could be after three hundred years? All this is made plain in The Forged Origins of the New Testament which is available via the link on this site.

After my experiences with dogmatism under Armstrongism, I resist flopping to the exact opposite side of dogmatism by being dogmatic that there can’t possibly be any force or entity that could be called “god.” I frankly doubt that there is, but I’d rather take the approach of science and leave the subject open to inquiry. If such a “god” wants to condemn me for that approach, while he steadfastly refuses to reveal himself in an open and tangible way so there can be no question of authenticity, then I’ll just have to accept condemnation.

I’m not at all worried.

Concocted scripture tells me I have no excuse for not believing. I reject that haughty pronouncement out of hand. I will not be talked down to in such a manner. Nobody, past or present, gets to judge me in such an attitude of superiority.

Not any more.

I’m not a deist, but I do respect their thinking a whole lot more than the thinking of religionists.

Deism is a close cousin to agnosticism. I’m just not prepared to state that there really was a god who started it all and then took a hands off policy. It does make a whole lot more sense than belief in an interventionist god who never seems to intervene when he is needed most, such as during the holocaust. Most of the “miracles” I’ve heard people prate about are several steps down the line hearsay and misinterpretations of totally plausible natural happenstances.

The word “miracle” has really been cheapened, especially by people with a religious bent. My wife chided me once for washing a pattern of dark dirt off our cement block wall because it was in the shape of a cross. She opined we might have been able to make some serious money by drawing the gullible public’s attention to it and then charging admission to see it.

She was also chagrined once when she was sure she saw the figure of the Virgin Mary on a tortilla. Before she could make a fortune on E bay, her son came home, loaded it with re-fried beans and ate it.

What really happened at the “big bang?” Was there any kind of intelligence behind it? Some scientists have concluded that the universe arose from thought. Are they right? Or, are they succumbing to the same kind of delusions that drive religions?

I don’t know and scientists have only theories and speculation at this point – nothing that can be nailed down to absolute specifics. Quantum Physics presents us with some interesting and puzzling facts and theories. Some of them border on the religious.

Religions insist on having a set god, a set revelation and set dogmas. These all originated in human minds, and some of those minds were definitely deranged. The present world is filled with the same kind of people who are absolutely certain that they are one of the “two witnesses,” a reincarnation of Jesus, a prophet or apostle, etc.

As in the past, all such deluded, unbalanced or power mad individuals hark back to the use of fear to keep any adherents they might garner in line. Their first goal is to stop the poor sucker from thinking anything contrary to what they set forth as “the truth.” If it is said to come from whatever “revelation” they champion, it is absolute truth and to reject that “truth” is the same as rejecting god because it came, they staunchly maintain, from that god.

That god, being very sensitive, can’t brook any such rejection and reacts by condemning the offending ingrate to either total destruction or an eternity of unimaginable suffering. In the meantime, the hapless individual is assured he will be cursed in all daily affairs and relationships. If he or she is really convinced, they become paralyzed mentally, maybe even physically.

Sound familiar? If you were caught up in Armstrongism, it should.

So, after long and careful analysis, I’ve concluded that I can’t be absolutely sure about a great many things because there are a lot of things I don’t and cannot know. That makes me an agnostic, which simply means “don’t know for sure.”

I suspect the atheists are right. I have no empirical evidence that they are not. Nor have they been able to present totally irrefutable proof that they are. It’s a big can’t know for absolutely sure situation right now.

What I do know for sure is that none of the religions, their revelations and their gods currently extant on this earth make sense when examined critically and logically. Therefore, I now believe and follow none of them.

I’m an agnostic. That’s an OK position to be in.

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Greetings from Al Dexter

Hi, old friends, associates, fellow exs, etc.

For the month of March, I will be editor on this blog. I will post my first material tomorrow and hope to maybe hear from some old friends and fellow refugees.

Allen C. Dexter

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Finally!

Al will be taking over the guest editor spot Monday, I am told, and like the devil, I know I have a little time left. Now I get to shoot and snipe!

James, the PT editor, has suggested a post that I find rather attractive for this last one. James sent me two quotes:

“America is like a healthy body, and its resistance is threefold: its patriotism, its morality, and its spiritual life. If we can undermine these three areas, America will collapse from within”
__Joseph Stalin

“To achieve world government, it is necessary to remove from the minds of men their individualism, loyalty to family traditions, national patriotism and religious dogma”
__Brock Chisholm, Former Director, World health Organization

And James concludes with a statement of his own:

“It seems this is a fence i wish not to climb over and escape from. Loyalty is the undermining concept of these(above) two quotes. They are reinforced by religion; religion that demands just that: traditional values”.

My basic thrust in the past humongous number of essays is to point out that all forms of human government ultimately breaks down to algorithms, or decision procedures by which we function.

The US Constitution was not designed as a system of algorithms by which people would be governed, but was actually designed as a limitation of the federal government, so that people could be reasonably free to live by their own decisions. James Madison well understood the difficulty in relating any set of laws to “God”:

“When the Almighty himself condescends to address mankind in their own language, his meaning, luminous as it must be, is rendered dim and doubtful by the cloudy medium through which it is communicated”.

Madison hit on an interesting concept here, because a man named Claude Shannon would develop a mathematical process known as information theory. The basic idea of information theory is that the more probable a message is, the less information it contains. We could state it another way: the more a message is repeated, the less information it contains.

Based on Madison’s observation, if God actually DID speak to men, his message would have a high information content, so much so that it could never be reduced to a fixed set of principles recognized as law. If God did speak to men, “His” language would have to be translated into the medium of their language, and that, said Madison, would render it dim and doubtful. We “see through a glass darkly”.

I presented a parallel to that earlier, by pointing out that we cannot program a computer such that it represents God. If it could, it would have to also represent the various differences we would perceive between a physical “brain” like a computer, and what we recognize as God.

If we have over 38,000 versions of God within Christianity alone, and another uncountable number of versions outside Christianity, it is most likely we will never have a computer that can even come close to representation of God, and therefore we can have no human government that will come any closer, either church or state, and that is summed up convincingly in Godel’s theorem.

So what is religion for, in terms of James’ assessment, above? It can obviously have only one purpose, and that is to block the efforts described by both Stalin and Chisholm, in the above quotes. In short, humans cannot ever find the “answers” within themselves. Does that prove God’s existence? No, but it does show that there is always “something” that will forever lie just outside of and representing a completeness just beyond human understanding.

How do I know this? Godel’s theorem: In any consistent axiomatic formulation of number theory(or any formal theory of sufficient complexity) there exists an infinity of undecidable propositions.

How does this break down to Constitutional theory? The founders, especially the “Anti-Federalists”, argued repeatedly that no system of laws could ever be answerable only to itself. If the Supreme Court was the final arbiter of all law, the natural tendency would be for the Supreme Court to decide all cases in a light that extended the power of its own decisions, or as one Supreme Court Justice put it, “We do not have the last word because we are infallible. We are infallible because we have the last word”.

In fact, that is one aspect of Godel’s theorem. There exists no such system that prove its own consistency from within itself. It must look “outside” itself to determine truth and justice. That, basically, is why the founders decided on a confederacy of states.

Karl Marx, in his earlier writings, however, realized that if you can change the economic system of any government, you can change the government itself. It is not necessary to attack the content of people’s beliefs, but to by-pass those beliefs by establishing a decision procedure or algorithm that rendered their beliefs and traditions unenforceable.

Marx, conclusions were basically simple: If you can establish a form of currency that is a “universal equivalent” of all value, then everyone is ultimately forced to operate completely within the power of that “universal equivalent” no matter what their beliefs or opinions.

If money becomes the universal equivalent, said Marx, then everything is ultimately exchangeable for money. But a thing can only be exchanged for money, said Marx, if the owner has divested himself of its intrinsic worth, or if the owner has been “alienated” from that thing.
The so-called inalienable rights, and the fixed property relationships corresponding to them, said Marx, break down before money.

As the first Baron Rothschild is alleged to have said, “Give me control of the issuance of money, and I care not who makes the laws”.

The decision procedures, the algorithms once driven by the de-centralist values of human traditions, are now completely subject to the algorithms controlled by the ones who control money issuance, or to put it in more ancient terms, “The love of money is the root of all evil”.

Not money itself, but the love of money, that is, the use and control of issuance of money, to determine how a society must live. Money itself becomes the centralized “information” that completely controls a society, regardless of what they believe!

In contradiction to that idea, people will seek for a truth that allows them personal freedom, but in seeking that personal freedom, they will likely seek also to establish a “higher” authority which they will refer to as God.

One problem: you can’t prove the existence of God. There is no way that God can ever be represented in any single human system of government or religion.

BINGO!

That is what our founding fathers referred to as “inalienable human rights”. There exists NO collective human system, by any name, that can ever rise above the rights of a single human being!

How can a central government ever recognize and define the rights belonging to humans? It can’t! That’s why we have this little thing in the US Constitution called the Ninth Amendment.
The rights enumerated in the Constitution cannot be construed to deny or disparage other rights retained by the people.

First Amendment: Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.

In fact, congress cannot authoritatively make such a law, since it has no ability to define “God”.

The fact that there is no proof of a defined God is the best insurance of freedom that we can ever know. If there were such proof, imagine one world government, one neck ready for one leash. The freedom of a single mind reduced to a collective. Shades of Ayn Rand!

Just as Chaos science seems to show that chaos is necessary for order, it seems that an uncontrollable power called “God” is supremely necessary to offset the absolute power of law.

The “inalienable rights of man” demands always that there exists something beyond the range of human thought, human conceptions, and collective human power.

I choose to call that “something” God.

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