Shawn Answers The Survey: "Why Aren't You Religious?"

Why aren't you religious?
I suppose this question could just as easily be answered either constructively, deductively, logically, or intuitively, but maybe I can provide a general answer. Perhaps my most simple response is the thought that to be religious, it means you accept your particular religion as right, and reject the other thousands of world religions as false. This wouldn't be so bad if there was any form of proof for correctness in any of them, but each of the thousands of religions claim to offer this on no proof and also to make equally exclusive claims at their correctness. There is a clear contradiction - not all of the religious traditions can be right at the same time.

It behooves us to try to read into what these religions say about their correctness to try to discern which is the most likely to actually be correct, because they use completely arbitrary language about things no one can conclusively say anything about, which are entirely contextual to a certain geographic area and time range of peoples. What is consciousness? what happens when we die? I don't know the answer to either, no living person ever has, and it doesn't bother me in the slightest.

A much easier approach to the contradiction at hand, and the approach that we apply in science and in the rest of most normal life, is to treat all of the different traditions as false until new information presents itself that warrants re-evaluation of a religion.


How do you think we got here?
Evolutionary biology, which traces man as just another leaf node in the interconnected tree of life which has its root in single-cell organisms and DNA, is not really a theory or a hypothesis, it is really just the way it is. Anyone who is still calling this into question in 2007 is basically throwing away the last 300 years of brilliant science with mountains of mutually verifiable and repeatable evidence in the garbage.

Additionally, we know much more about cosmic evolution than is popularly guessed... as of about 2003 scientists launched the WMAP microwave satellite which graphed signals of radiation that took so long to reach the satellite that it was seeing these rays shortly after their creation - which always happened to be in a very small date range - confirming that as a fact, the current universe that we know is 13.5 billion years old. this is not a question that is up for debate anymore, this is a fact. Christians who stick hard to the claim that the universe is 6,000 years old are astoundingly ignorant. We have sophisticated sanskrit writings that predate this time, and advanced sumerian civilizations.
 
What do you think the meaning of life is?
To accept death


What gives you reason to act morally? Why should you be moral if you don't want to be?
I'm not convinced that there is something called morality. How are our notions of what is moral different from any other thought process we have? Thought process is arbitrary. Certainly much of thought process on what is 'moral' stems from very hardcoded evolutionary pathways in our brains since we observe the same behaviors in nearly ever species of animals that humans have concerning morality: tribal units of animals do not randomly attack and kill one another within their own tribe because they will be ostracized by the group, greatly limiting their chance of survival. I believe our so called moral sense stems from nothing more than the fact that we are hardwired to ensure our biological success in living long and reproducing. If I randomly walk into a bar and stab someone, that is probably greatly going to limit those goals for me. The notion that you need to read of the Golden Rule in a sacred text in order to realize it's benefits is absurd.

Do you think science is the only route to truth? Or do you think they are completely different paths?
Again, the word 'truth' in this context has very little meaning to me. Is a computer simulation any more true than reality? Questions like this are arbitrary. Everything we think to be true in life may turn out to be false one day, so why do we spend so much time talking about things that cannot be known? Quantum physics has shown that single physical particles of matter, electrons, can occupy two different positions in space at the same time. What implications does that have for what we know is true?


How do you explain things like consciousness? (Because science doesn't really offer any explanations for something like awareness.)
While I suppose sorts of consciousness could exist that we cannot yet comprehend or describe, in this application I would define consciousness as the sum total of the electrical impulses that take place within a living brain - human, animal, and artificial brains.


What is reality to you?
The collection of everything my mind has conceptualized. There may be more to reality than my reality, but I will not be aware of it until I have a way of experiencing it or parsing it into a new concept in my brain.

Do you think that all thought is brain activity? And if so, how do you suppose we can trust our cognitive abilities?
All thought is brain activity. In fact I cannot even grasp how anyone else could possibly answer this question differently.
I do not understand the second half of the question... what is trusting your cognitive abilities? Of course we cannot trust them. Some people have brain damage and are cognitively impaired. Should their trust their ability to walk down the street unassisted? Of course not. Similarly, all of humanity may possibly be cognitively impaired with respect to things that no one can comprehend yet. In this sense, perhaps all of us should not trust our cognitive abilities in certain regards.