The smartest thing anyone ever told me about their religion was “I don’t actually believe any of that stuff, I just like going to church.”

She was a Unitarian.

There are mysteries. Nature abhors a vacuum. The human mind abhors a mystery, like nature abhors a vacuum. And we love a good narrative. An entire Hollywood and novel-publishing and theater industry attests to it. We have to fill in the blanks of the mystery with a narrative.

There is truth in Descartes. I directly sense that I exist. And that sensation is something inaccessible to science.

Consider Eddington’s ichtyologist:

Let us suppose that an ichthyologist is exploring the life of the ocean. He casts a net into the water and brings up a fishy assortment. Surveying his catch, he proceeds in the usual manner of a scientist to systematise what it reveals. He arrives at two generalisations :

(1) No sea-creature is less than two inches long. (2) All sea-creatures have gills.

These are both true of his catch, and he assumes tentatively that they will remain true however often he repeats it.

In applying this analogy, the catch stands for the body of knowledge which constitutes physical science, and the net for the sensory and intellectual equipment which we use in obtaining it. The casting of the net corresponds to observation; for knowledge which has not been or could not be obtained by observation is not admitted into physical science.

An onlooker may object that the first generalisation is wrong. “There are plenty of sea-creatures under two inches long, only your net is not adapted to catch them.”

The ichthyologist dismisses this objection contemptuously. “Anything uncatchable by my net is ipso facto outside the scope of ichthyological knowledge, and is not part ot the kingdom of fishes which has been defined as the theme of ichthyological knowledge. In short, what my net can’t catch isn’t fish.”

Or— to translate the analogy— If you are not simply guessing, you are claiming a knowledge ot the physical universe discovered in some other way than by the methods of physical science, and admittedly unvenfiablc by such methods. You are a metaphysician. Bah !”

A scientist can say consciousness is just an illusion. But it sure doesn’t feel like an illusion. Even the scientist doesn’t act as if it is an illusion, but tells themself some story that motivates them to do science. If it’s all an illusion creating more illusions, why bother? It’s hard out there for a reasoning creature. The first reality you experience defies reason.

Some metaphysics must exist? It’s just not all that clear whether it’s a benevolent God or Descartes’s evil demon deceiving us, or a fully indifferent one.

Whereof we cannot speak, we must pass over in silence - Ludwig Wittgenstein

We should probably just shut up, but we can’t. We are born crying. We must be comforted. Demand for bullshit must be supplied.

Why does it always has to be such a stupid bullshit though? Burning bushes and whatnot? Stuff that makes people hate each other?

David Hume said, on miracles:

No testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle unless it is of such a kind that its falsehood would be more miraculous than the fact that it tries to establish.

We can’t reasonably believe in miracles just because some dude, or some ancient primitive book told us. But we are miracles. Our existence is a miracle. Nature is a miracle. Everything is a miracle.

Even if there is only one possible unified theory, it is just a set of rules and equations. What is it that breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to describe? - Stephen Hawking

And everything is endogenous. You create your world with your thoughts.

When life itself seems lunatic, who knows where madness lies? Perhaps to be too practical is madness. To surrender dreams — this may be madness. Too much sanity may be madness — and maddest of all: to see life as it is, and not as it should be! - Miguel de Cervantes

All we are is stories in the end, so why not at least try to make it a good one? I’m not going to judge you if you make up a story to get you through the night. If you have to believe in something, if it makes you a better, happier person, more power to you.

But why does it always have to be as story that demands judging and othering and harming people? God gave us this strip of land and the right to kill people who think otherwise. But we are good people by definition! An avatar of Western Civilization! Not the world’s greatest example of main character syndrome!

Gandhi was asked what he thought about Western civilization, he said he thought it would be a very good idea.

We have just enough religion to make us hate, but not enough to make us love one another. - Jonathan Swift

I’m not religious but I’m not against religion. I’m against stupid religions. And religions are for the most part stupid, because people are for the most part stupid.

Inside every human there’s a John Lennon ‘Imagine all the people living life in peace’ and a Steely Dan ‘Everybody on the street has murder in their eyes’.

When you are dealing with effed-up people, say Hitler for example, you just have to fight and defeat them. There is no alternative, except a one-way trip to the showers. But when you run around thinking everyone is Hitler, and you have to do horrible stuff or it’s the end of ‘Western civilization’, you turn into the thing you swore was the ultimate evil.