Thursday, December 1, 2011

REALITY:WHO GOT IT WRONG?

The physicist Richard Feynman once said that the easiest person to fool is yourself, and as a result he argued that as a scientist one has to be especially careful to try and find out not only what is right about one’s theories, but what might also be wrong with them. If we all followed this maxim of skepticism in everyday life, the world would probably be a better place. But we don’t. Human beings are not the rational beings Aristotle once claimed we are. A study of the world history will show that we are subjective species, narcissistic and sometimes as selfish as Thomas Hobbes claimed.
Ever since I became an atheist I have engaged in countless of debates with religious people, apart from the fact that many people are ignorant of most of the basic knowledge available in the twenty first century, people really believe in what they think is true irrespective of how absurd some of the notions in reality sound. They must also think the same about my disbelief in God, they must think that I am just confused and that my reality is flawed for whatever reason, adolescent confusion, misguidance from the literature I read, I am an agent of the devil, all these reasons have been used against me and my belief or lack of it. I have come to appreciate the fact that we form our beliefs for a variety of subjective, emotional and psychological reasons in the context of environments created by family, friends, colleagues, culture and society at large. After forming our beliefs, we then defend, justify and rationalize them with a host of intellectual reasons, cogent arguments and rational explanations. Beliefs come first; explanations for beliefs follow. So how do we know that we are right? What basis can we use to claim that our beliefs are correct while our opponents are mistaken? Once we form beliefs and make commitments to them, we maintain and reinforce them through a number of powerful cognitive biases that distort our percepts to fit belief concepts. Among them are:

Anchoring Bias. Relying too heavily on one reference anchor or piece of information when making decisions.
Authority Bias. Valuing the opinions of an authority, especially in the evaluation of something we know little about.
Belief Bias. Evaluating the strength of an argument based on the believability of its conclusion.
Confirmation Bias. Seeking and finding confirming evidence in support of already existing beliefs and ignoring or reinterpreting dis-confirming evidence.
How can we use logic or rationality to disprove people who don’t believe in neither, how much evidence do you need to convince a person who beliefs in blind faith? I have come to the conclusion that no amount will be enough, our biases reinforce our beliefs, this is the reason our beliefs are very hard to shake off, it’s especially hard if the beliefs we hold have been with us since childhood, they become a part of us, changing them entails admitting that we have been wrongt and that our reality has been flawed the whole time. The anxiety that comes with such realization can be too much for most people to take in; repression and denial become especially useful body defense mechanism whenever we are faced with such dilemmas.
To conclude, we can never have an entirely rational debate against people whose beliefs of the nature contradict our own, some people believe in science and empirical evidence before they believe in anything, they are known as skeptics, some people find this type of life to be full of uncertainties and anxiety, they would rather believe in something on the basis of faith, one fact is clear, one group must be wrong, either god is real or he/it is not, one group is definitely right and other wrong, this is however dependent on what reality one chooses to subscribe to, so what reality do you subscribe to? Whose right, whose wrong?....

Wednesday, November 2, 2011

My Journey Towards Atheism


I can’t remember when I decided that I was an atheist; I think I just never had the talent to believe. I was never abused as a child or exposed to any traumatic event that would cause me to stop believing in a god. My family has never been a close knit one and going to church has never been mandatory.  I remember in high school when I read Revelations I was terrified, literally, i am a skeptic and all I could think about was not making it in heaven, been ruled over for a thousand years by Lucifer. This is probably when I started questioning the bible and the idea of the Judeo-Christian god. I kept asking myself how a loving and merciful creator could allow all that suffering to his children, the details of the end of days and the apocalypse are enough to make several Hollywood horror movies. No self-respecting parent should even allow their kids to read that stuff! In high school we were forced to attend church otherwise I would have never set foot in church in the long hard years I was in high school. I never felt anything during church services; other students would cry during prayers, others would give testimonies of how god changed them etc. I always felt spiritually indifferent no matter how hard I tried to pray or worship in the church services. By then I was not even aware of the term atheism, I sort of believed in god but my definition was vague and not very well thought about. In campus it’s when I realized the bible couldn’t be the word of god, I was in a bible study group, whenever we read and tried to interpret the verses it occurred to me that people would read the bible and then try to make it fit into their world views, whatever could not was re-interpreted to do so. I decided to read the whole bible for myself, it was an epic  journey where discovered the ignorance, the threats and the inconsistencies that made up the bible, I am studying psychology and that has helped me to understand what would make one want to believe in such fairy tales as I like to call them. Freud’s “On the future of an illusion offers a brilliant explanation on the belief in god, on my journey in atheism I have come to encounter works of brilliant minds such as Daniel Dennet , Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens among others. Christopher Hitchens remains my favorite to date, his intellect, rhetoric, humor and wit never cease to amaze, I have made it a personal endeavor to collect and read all his works, he has recently been diagnosed with cancer of the esophagus, he might succumb to it anytime soon but his works forever immortalize him. Being an atheist in an overly religious state has not been without its challenges, I have lost many friends especially the religious ones, they seem to think that I am possessed and that the devil is misleading me, some have even deleted me as friends on Facebook ( you would think the religious would be tolerant towards the ‘lost sheep’). On the positive side I have met wonderful people who share my views on god and appreciation for rational thinking; I have met and engaged brilliant minds who refuse to be mentally confined by religion and wishful thinking. I have made it my lifelong task to attain enlightenment, to enjoy every moment of my passing life, to gain knowledge even for its own sake, to make bonds with those I cross paths with, that when I am gone the memories will immortalize me in their thoughts. Every day I make efforts to improve myself as a human being and to be a better person, isn’t that the whole point of existence?