Stuff Happens

Let me tell you about something which just happened to me:

Yesterday I left my house, got in my car and drove away. I had no reason to do so. I had nowhere I needed to be. I just got in the car and got going; completely unconsciously, and without purpose. When I left my road I could of course have turned left or right, but my choice was automatic, and absolutley without any obvious reason. A few hundred yards further on I reach a crossroads with three possible choices. I just drove straight ahead. Again, for no reason I could fathom. At this point I was just out for a drive and no longer cared why, or where I went.

Moments later I watched John*, a man who suffers from Altzheimers', pitch backwards out of his Motability scooter onto the pavement. So, for reasons beyond my ken I found myself able to stop and help this man get back on the scooter and see him safely back home again.

Now... there are some readers who will state, without any possible evidence, that a deity saw what was about to happen, inform me of the need to get in my car and drive down that particular road and be on the spot to help this man, and that furthermore, his accident was designed to either teach him (or me) something, or prevent a further, more tragic occurrence later on.

This, they will argue is the result of "divine will", "divine interaction" or synchronicity. Being placed, for whatever mysterious purpose, at a specific location at a time where your help, guidance, or merely presence is required. Invariably the proponents of this idea point to incidents like mine, where a person with a certain set of skills (pre-hospital care in my case) is made to be on hand to use those skills... help an accident victim.

Synchronicity is the paranormal concept described by Carl Jung as "meaningful coincidences"; events which occur without any obvious causal relationship that are nonetheless meaningfully related. My sudden decision to leave the house, my decision to travel by car, my twice choosing a direction at a junction at random, and the accident occurring at a time when I could be there to witness it and help out. I did not cause myself to leave the house, nor did I choose for a sick man to leave his house, travel a quarter of a mile up the road and then accidentally pitch out of a motor scooter. However, both funnelled towards a single point in time.

Divine will is often given the credit for driving synchronicity, and it is very hard, when it happens to you, to deny that there is something else going on than mere coincidence. As an atheist I obviously don't believe in gods, or divine intervention, though events like these happen to me a lot. I have found myself at a few accident scenes where vehicle passengers require rescuing and/or treating... once I watched a man thrown from his motor-cycle on the motorway right in front of me because of a sudden mechanical malfunction, and in another case I was a few seconds behind a car which drove underneath an articulated lorry, killing the driver. I have also found myself in places where my experience of martial arts has been required to defend someone from an attack, or theft, or help a police officer who was struggling, and failing, to make an arrest.  After this event happened today I decided to attach a reason to my journey by going to the school uniform store to buy my son a new polo-shirt and arrived at the store to find that a shirt of his exact size was lying on the top of the pile. Clearly there MUST be a deity driving all this, right?

Of course... not!

With thousands of people in each town, with a multitude of talents between them, many with very similar training, experience, or skills, it is impossible to think that when an incident occurs there will be nobody there to help at all. I know many people of a variety of backgrounds who have taken first aid courses at work, or at school, or with care organizations. Roughly 60% of my close friends and associates could have been in my stead today to help this man. I just happened to be there. Though I wasn't alone. A local librarian also stopped to help, who by her own admission had no first aid skills to put into the pot, nor did she know how the scooter worked, or how to repair it. So, what purpose was served by sending her to the scene? To give her something to talk about during lunch?

People stop to help others out. I've never stopped at an incident and been the only person who did so. I've stopped to help at a few accidents where the next person who happened along was a doctor, a nurse, police officer, or paramedic. I had another incident where my own car caught fire underneath and my friend stepped out of his house to see it in time to tell me to get out, a few seconds later the car was engulfed by the fire, utterly destroying it; I had no clue what was about to happen and his fortuitous arrival on the scene probably saved my life.

On another more recent occasion I was parked at a roundabout in position to capture a minor fender-bender occur in sight of my dashcam. I have been able to send the victim a copy of the incident to help with his insurance claim. Of course this must be divine intervention, since I drive over 50,000 miles a year and my dashcam is on permanently when I'm operating the vehicle, over many hundreds of hours of driving time. If I didn't, at least once, capture an incident on film I would consider THAT to be bizarre!

Stuff happens! And it happens all the time.

It's not driven by anything. There are no guiding forces. These are just cognitive placeholders some people insert into the mess of things because it is too bizarre to believe that these incidents just randomly occur when they happen to be around to help, or to witness them.

If someone lacks the facility to explain an event, it is part of human programming to find a reason, or a rationale, and add it to the thing to help come to terms with it. There has to be a purpose for everything, otherwise we might have to face the reality that there is no purpose behind anything... especially not a divine one. Yet, that is exactly what's happening here. Stuff just rolls from event to event with no external guiding principles. For instance, there is a tale of a man who, upon surviving the Hiroshima bombing, went to stay with his friend in Nagasaki. Stuff most definitely happened to him! I know someone who was rescued from a cruise ship which sank, by a ship that also ran aground and sank with her still on board!

I bet every single one of us can reel off a number of incidents and events which have happened to them, or colleagues, or friends, which seem unusually connected, or synchronistic. 

As Jung wrote: "Acausal events may be expected most readily where, on closer reflection, a causal connection appears to be inconceivable." and "Therefore it cannot be a question of cause and effect, but of a falling together in time, a kind of simultaneity."

He's telling us that he believes an event is more likely to occur when there is no reason that we can perceive behind it, and that there is a funnelling of time and space which occurs in order to make two or more people coincide.

Or... Stuff happens, but for a reason!

Now, don't get me wrong, I love Carl Jung's work. I think his genius is obvious, and he is clearly one of the most vivid and dynamic thinkers of all time. He is the probably the other dreamer John Lennon speculated about. But, this whole idea of synchronicity is just baffling when you consider the truly magnificently gigantic number of minute instances which fill each moment of our lives. We focus heavily on each instance of coincidence whilst totally ignoring the billions of others which have zero interest to us. 

Just think of that time when you were thinking about someone and just happened to walk around a corner and bump into them. Now remember all the times you thought of someone and nothing of significance happened at all. It's harder than you think isn't it? You're programmed to recognise agency in your life. That's why god-belief is so prevalent. 

How many times have you thought: 'This thing happened because it was part of a greater plan' or 'my life is clearly being guided towards a greater purpose'? It's lovely to think like this isn't it? Yes, clearly the idea of a guiding force, or divine plan, or will, is hard to put to one side, but it has to be, because ultimately the same thinking which brings this innocuous belief of paranormal event-steering to mind is the exact same thinking which causes Islamic fundamentalists to blow themselves up in market places and schools.

You might not be able to join those dots, but it is exactly the same thing. Believing that you, the believer, the true believer, of the one true version of the religion which seeks to bring the truth to the world of the one true god, whose character and whims only your faith group is privy to, brings with it a great many bags of arrogance and elitism. Thinking that you are being guided, or led by the nose, to some glorious goal, or higher purpose, through instances of being in the right place, at the right time, to help, or advise, is ultimately dangerous. Stuff happens folks. No reason. No guiding forces. Just coincidence and happenstance.

Get used to it. 

What Is A God?

I've decided to update this post on 21st Feb 2017. I'm doing this because of a recent exchange I had on Twitter. My interlocutor's insistence on straw-manning my very simple question of "What is a god?" to "What is God?" is decidedly dishonest. He of course gleefully answered his version of my question, and is claiming it as a valid answer. It clearly isn't is it? I mean, if you ask me what a cat is, and I describe the character of Cat from Red Dwarf to you, my answer would be of no relevance whatsoever... I simply would not be answering your question at all! For starters, no feline has ever consistently walked on two legs or spoken English!

When you ask someone to define what a god is, and they answer honestly, you often get a list of things that a god must be, or some idea of how their god exemplifies their idea of what a god is, which isn't actually an answer to the original question, but if they explain that this is all they know, I'm OK with it.

Often they reference things like being humanoid, able to create the universe, being all-good, all-knowing and all that stuff. So, let's unpick that shall we? If a god must be all these things then we should be able to pin down exactly what a god is. Surely if a god doesn't fit the bill it can't be a god, right?

So let's take a look at the common features attributed to gods:

Anthropomorphic (human-like)

There are many gods and goddesses who aren't like us, for instance Kamadhenu of Hindu culture, who whilst having the face of a human woman and often her breasts, is a cow goddess. Ninsun, the Mesapotamian mother of the famous hero-god Gilgamesh, was also a cow.

Anansi is another example of a non-arthropomorphic god. Anansi is an African spider-god, a trickster.

Huntin is an African god of trees, and himself a tree. So not all gods are humanoid.

Creative

Not all gods, or goddesses, are able to create things... especially not universes. After all, if all the creative gods did create the universe they either did so in concert, or the whole idea is total nonsense.

An example of a non-creative god is Heitsi-Eibib, an African god of evolution. Though he himself didn't create any living beings, he reputedly convinced animals to take up more suitable habitats than the ones they previously had. For instance he made the fish leave the desert for the sea, which he deemed a more appropriate place for them to live. Seems obvious when you think about it.

So no, not all gods need to be creative.

Eternal/Invulnerable

Apedemak, a Sudanese war god, came late to the Egyptian pantheon and was gone soon after. How many gods can you name? The ones you can't are probably already dead... if you believe what Terry Pratchett said about them.

Balin, an Indian hero god actually got killed in a fight with his half-brother Sugriva.

So not all gods are eternal, or it would seem invulnerable.

Ethereal/Spirit-like

Most gods and goddesses of the ancient world appeared, or could appear, physically to humans at one point or another. Yahweh's very first real appearance was walking through the Garden of Eden looking for Adam.

Khuzwane is evidenced by the marks he left during his presence on Earth, the African god who purportedly made humans from clay (where have we heard that before?) left muddy footprints everywhere he went (which are apparently still visible today) and even uses Lake Fundudzi as a private pool from time to time.

So some gods are very physical indeed.

Judgemental

There are thousands of gods and goddesses who are seemingly non-judgemental, nor are they involved in any afterlife punishments, or trials of any sort. Take the Roman goddess named Cuba who appears to only be concerned with singing lullabies to children to get them off to sleep.

So not all gods judge our actions

Global/Universal

Um... this may seem fairly obvious to anyone who has spent any time reading about gods, but it appears that many cultures have some very specific gods who look after some very specialist and rather odd things. Anarkusuga, for instance, is a Native American/Inuit goddess who looks after the Arctic ice and its contents.

Mikula, the Slavic god, is in charge of heroics. Yup... just being heroic.

So, not all gods have a universal influence after all.

All-knowing, All-powerful, Ever-present

So far I've referenced a number of gods and goddesses, none of whom appear to be particularly all-knowing, all-powerful, or ever-present... except in their own fields of speciality perhaps. I guess tree spirits are always present in all trees, Arctic frost goddesses are to be found everywhere in the Arctic ice etc. etc.

By contrast, Buga is the supreme god of everything in the Slavic pantheon. Somewhat like the god of the Abrahamic cultures, but with the added advantage of having grown out of a more shamanic and nature-loving religion.

So not all gods are all things to all people.

All-loving

It stands to reason that a god exists which isn't all good. Yama, the Indian death lord, loves nothing more than sending your souls to Hell. Tezcatlipoca, the Aztec god of night and death, actually leads people into doing evil things, despite outwardly being handsome and friendly (at first.)

So not all gods are truly omnibenevolent. Some are downright evil.

Please check out my other musings on this subject at: http://ublasphemist.blogspot.co.uk/2015/05/the-impossible-god.html

Dealing with these "omnis", with regards the Christian version of "God", is unavoidable in any honest discourse on the subject. I would argue that my simple analysis in the above blog item destroys the main thrust of their arguments, but there is another point to be made.

Logic dictates that any entity able to be omnipresent must be present in all times, at all locations, future and past and present. So, he would in effect be at the farthest reaches of our expanding universe as well as watching you masturbate.

So, if this god were to watch as a hypothetical girl like Lucy (who is walking the mile home from her school after hockey practice, along the same route she always follows) gets mugged and hits her head hard enough for her to be placed in a persistent vegetative state? How does that not seem a bit evil to you? What lesson could this God possibly be trying to teach a girl who now has absolutely no way to interact with the world, her loved ones, or friends? What possible benefit could there be to her to make her entirely dependent on others for survival? If your answer is that she has been used as a pawn to teach someone else something you've just trodden on the bear-trap of telling me that your god is playing a game with us... and he cannot possibly be benevolent.This incident has robbed Lucy of any chance she has of leading the life on her own terms, nor "find Salvation" if she wasn't already a believer... think about it... isn't leading someone away from Yahweh a sin?

If this event could be foreseen, but not prevented, because it was the free will of Lucy's attacker to injure her, in order to take her purse and smart-phone, this god isn't all-powerful.

There are several logical inconsistencies wherever you look. Your god simply cannot be all-knowing, all-powerful, all-loving and ever-present.

Another point to consider is this, dear Christians:

If the Judeo-Christian god, Yahweh, was the only god, why does he even have a name? Why does the term Israel itself not point you in the direction that the original god of the Jews was El? Is-ra-EL. If the people were exclusively Yahweh worshippers their name would have been Is-ra-YAHU... but it isn't is it?

How's about you have a nice cup of tea and think about that for a while... or you can add a plate of biscuits to that and do some research of your own into how Yahweh went from being a Canaanite storm god to being the principle god of the Jews around 720BCE.

In Summary

If you're talking to Christians and ask them the question "What is a god?" they nearly always ignore the question altogether. Of the few who do answer, most just point you to a Bible passage, or come up with some deepity about their god Yahweh. Fewer still actually try to answer honestly.

I'm not sure if they are deliberately failing to engage with the question because it causes a great deal of cognitive dissonance, i.e. they're being intentionally dishonest, or they just don't understand the question. Christians get repeatedly told that Yahweh is the only god, despite their Bible referencing at least a dozen other gods, and Yahweh stating himself that we should put no other gods before him in that list of ten things he's supposed to have said.


What we've seen here is that the traditional view of what a god is according to the Abrahamics does not apply to all gods. So the question remains:

What IS a god?

Check out the source for these god ideas: http://www.godchecker.com
(this post might be updated as more suggestions about what a god is are offered to me)

Who is Mr. Maker?

The God posited by most Christians is one with ultimate, or infinite, power.

We see that term "maximally great" coming up from time to time.

However, if you think that a god exists and he is the creator of the universe, and everything in it, at which point do you make the leap from there to his power being greater than all other gods?

We have no idea, in god terms, how much power making this universe requires. For all we know this could all be a level one class at god school. 

"Great work Yahweh, I like what you've done with physics there. The gravity is really good, but that dark matter is... Class, look at Yah's universe for a second. Look at the way his dark matter flows through his space. That's really neat Yah... 'A+', but be careful not to over reach in your next assignment in Level Two's blended reality project."

How does anyone know that this god is maximally great? It's like bees thinking I'm some fantastic ethereal creature just because the hive I made for them was of perfect quality, by their standards.. The only difference being that occasionally a bee-keeper is going to pop along and make (at least) his existence known.

This brings me back to a point I made in an earlier post. Let's say God did make this universe, does it follow that He is in charge of it still? How can we be sure that the god in charge now is the same one who created it all? Did you make the car you drive?

All we have to go on is a rather simplistic view posited by ancient people's who were keen to move away from a polytheistic concept into a more monotheistic view which affords far better control of the flow of ideas and, ultimately, distribution of power.

Of course it could also be true, that the Elohim (plural) created the universe and everything in it for the LORD (God) who has since assumed control over a prefab universe. Elohim is a plural (essentially the distilled essence of all the gods) so why isn't it so that a group of gods made everything? This could account for Yahweh's inability to change anything dramatically, or intervene to stop tornadoes from tearing up houses in the US Bible-Belt! He just doesn't have that sort of juice!

Any of these scenarios could be true, so why is it that the standard Christian idea, that God rules the universe He created, so pervasive?

The church wants it to be this way and their "sheep" just lap it all up.

That's the only reason I can think of. 

The Impossible God

Many people I speak to just won't accept that a god who is both omnipotent and omniscient cannot exist.

So, I thought I'd lay out one simple 'proof' for you all.

An all-knowing god would know every emotion felt by humans. An all-powerful god would not know what it is like to be weak, he couldn't know regret, fear, worry, or grief.

An omnipotent god could not have true knowledge of any emotion such as self-doubt, self-criticism, or feel suicidal.

An omnipotent god could not feel pain either, since nothing could hurt him. Likewise, how could anything we do hurt him, or his feelings? Falling prey to that pain we feel when someone we love deeply does something we just know they're going to do just isn't possible for an all-powerful being. There's no way to experience pain and anguish without there being a physical component.

Also, a god who feels regret could not be said to be all-knowing, simply because knowing everything would yield no surprises, and no future left unknown. Even his own actions would already be laid out. He would be as a robot carrying out his own predestined actions. Any attempt to change path would already be built in to his knowledge of that path.

It really is that simple. If a god is omnipotent it could not be all-knowing, and if he's all-knowing he could not be all-powerful.