Spinoza just taught me how the brain works?

I have based my religion, Religious Humanism, a Pantheism, on Spinoza's idea of God or Nature. There is only one substance. This was a development from the little earlier appearing Descartes who claimed there are two substances. One thinking and one material.

What Spinoza did already in the 1650s was to say that thoughts must emanate from one substance. They must be material. But thoughts do not come from a substance but rather from the behavior of a substance. It occurred to me that since the brain generates a frequency function, nerves fire all over the place, it would be possible to continuously generate images or words from this frequency function that would give us consciousness. Two aspects of the same phenomenon.

Such a mathematical transformation process exists and is called Fourier transformation. It is used for molecular structural determination in chemistry where a sample containing a substance is magnetically shocked, to excitate it, and the resulting relaxation generates a frequency function that can be transformed into an nuclear magnetic resonance spectrum. Frequency to image.

Now, the frequency function generated by the brain is much more complicated but it is conceivable that the brain actually generates a continuous transformation that in essence is a movie formed by images transformed. This is then what happened in evolution of consciousness. The brain started a similar process like Fourier transformation. Words must be formed in the same manner. The evolution of language being when this started to happen separate from images.

It is interesting to note that Benjamin Libet discovered that there is a delay in the appearance of consciousness of a stimulus. This would be the time necessary for the brain to perform the transformation and consciousness would be a monitoring process taking place after events. We might not then think with the images but rather by the nerve reactions. Our motivation somehow drives the brain.

Spirituality or Religious Humanism

Bosse är troende fast utan Gud Existentiellt SvD: "Enligt Antoon Geels handlar spiritualitet om en förändring i kulturen, en rörelse i tiden. Begreppet har förstås sitt ­ursprung i engelskspråkiga länder. Där säger många: ”I am spiritual, not religious.” De tror på något ”högre”, ”en kraft”, ”kärleken” – exakt vad är inte fastslaget, fast vad det än är finns det nära, närmare än den egna halspuls­ådern, och det är inneboende i naturen."

Is this a development of religion, of Judeo-Christianism, or is it something distinct? Considering the psychology of religion God is created in our minds and therefore exists as part of Nature. "God is love" says the Pope, actually, so this is nothing new. For me it is very straight forward to imagine love as a force of Nature. However, I have preferred to consider only that which is yet unknown as a replacement of supernatural forces. I call it scientific discipline. It fuses science and religion.

Bo Ahrenfelt is a little fuzzier than myself on the third existence, what Ahrenfelt call "medvetandet". What he discusses can easily be called divine inspiration. After some study of the Philosophy of Mind it became clear to me that people seem to think that thoughts cannot be reduced fully onto physiology. Philosophy thus leaves a supernatural touch to consciousness. I have called it the third existence in my blog as a hypothesis where the first existence in materia and the second existence is life as biological tissues. The third existence is consciousness or human life. I have speculated that further human development will occur from the third existence into a fourth existence.

In summary, if you prefer to talk about something "higher", "a force", or "love" which is inherent in Nature without calling it God is a matter of preference. However, I see my non-personal, materialistic pantheism as a development of the Judeo-Christian God concept. I am fully aware that this might get me killed in Mecca and that it might irritate people of the Book in general. It follows from the biology of religion though.

How large a proportion of mankind believe in God?

Myt att kristendomen byggt Sverige Brännpunkt SvD: "Många tror att en majoritet av svenska folket är kristna. Det stämmer inte. Samtliga undersökningar visar att så inte är fallet. Sverige är ett av världens mest sekulära länder där mindre än 20 procent tror på någon eller några gudar. En överväldigande majoritet av de svenska med- borgarna är således ickereligiösa."

I want to investigate this further but from a preliminary survey it does seem to be a false statement to say that all investigations demonstrate that a majority of Swedes aren't Christian. It is important for Christer Stumark and the Humanists to claim that is possible to eradicate religion which I firmly believe is not possible due to the natural interest of the Divine among the majority of people.

First of all, Dagen published a Gallup study where it was asked if religion is important in your life and only around 20% claimed this in Scandinavia. However, this question is not the same as if one ask if people believe in God. In a genetically fairly similar country like the United States almost 50% go to Church once a week, the Pew Forum lists answers on the question if religion is important in your life and the national average is 56%.

Wikipedia gives information that 46%-85% of the Swedish population does not believe in God. Difficult to get a firm answer on this question in other words. However, as many as 65% baptise their child in Sweden and it is very difficult to believe that they would do this and not believe in God. Furthermore, as many as 84% bury their dead via the Church, also indicating that people become a little more religious at older age, or admit it more willingly, and that quite a few in actuality have a belief in God.

It is also interesting to speculate in the possibility that spirituality is a genetic trait and that the predilection for religiosity might vary on Earth. The Chinese, for example, managed to eradicate religion totally during their Maoistic era but it is coming back currently. The question is to what degree?

What is good for Religious Humanism?

Kristendomens ställning i skolan - P1-morgon - sr.se: "Det nya förslaget till kursplan i religionskunskap har väckt starka protester- eftersom texter om kristendomens betydelse tagits bort. Debatt mellan Jan Björklund, utbildningsminister (FP) och Lars Ohly (V) om kristendomen i skolan."

Jan Björklund has the feeling that there should be more stress on Christianity than on other religions because in our part of the world is immersed by Christianity and has been for a thousand years. Lars Ohly argues that we are entering a secular era and that our schools should be a protected area for children where they are equally inspired by all religions and also other life philosophies.

Religious Humanism is thought of as a relatively tradition-free religion based on science and humanism. As such, during the next 100 or 200 years, many will gradually reorient themselves to a materialistic God concept that is fully compatible with science as the importance of scientific results become more and more valued. God is Nature. The supernatural is replaced by yet unknown discoveries by science. It is important to realize that most people want to believe and that secularity might not be the answer for more than some 25% of the population. In this sense we are not globally entering a secular era. However, the state and the churches must be separated. In a multicultural environment religion is more private.

Teaching all religions equally must then be considered the best way. Because it will lead to an understanding of religion in terms of human psychology. Common denominators become evident and the subject Psychology of Religion is the forerunner to Religious Humanism. The Christian heritage is also learned from studies of literature and movie art and is reaching the students in other ways.

The take of Religious Humanism is to some extent dependent on if science will continue to be a guiding light, a beacon for society. Health care and social institutions have replaced Christianity to a large extent, at least in Sweden, and psychology is a popular subject even among priests these days.

One important subject in this respect is a product of science, namely, nuclear weapons. On the one hand we have entered a relatively more peaceful era with these weapons. On the other hand they have become a risk in terms of nuclear proliferation into unwanted hands. There are also other developments that can lead to negative feelings of science development.

On the positive side is continuous development of scientific results that hopefully will yield solutions to climate change, yield larger crops, improve health care, and solutions to other problems we face. It is therefore my hope that people more and more will regard Nature as our God, environmentalism might aid in this development, and that science will be the ritual by which we become closer to God.

What is a multicultural society?

Lena Andersson writes today in DN about the man who didn't want to take the hand of a woman prospective boss. He did not "ta seden dit man kommer" in other words he did not put important regional customs before his own rather extreme religious rules.

I have heard different versions about what actually happened and it apparently was one of these word against word affairs. Because it would of course be different if the man actually in some polite way greeted his prospective boss other than shaking his hand an looking her in her eyes.

A multicultural society can of course not be equivalent with people coming to a region and expecting to be able to live exactly like they did where they came from. That would be equivalent to an invasion. Some adaptation is of course necessary.

Religious Humanism, a religion that I am trying to develop, has the advantage of having removed itself of all these traditions that often is what cause problems with other religions. It is of course highly crippling in the Western society to not be able to shake the hand of a fellow human being and not being able to look them straight in the eyes. Belief in God and an ethical living should be possible without such anti-liberal manners as hiding in a burka.

Pantheism?

Pantheism controversy - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia: "Jacobi claimed that Spinoza's doctrine was pure materialism, because all Nature and God are said to be nothing but extended substance. This, for Jacobi, was the result of Enlightenment rationalism and it would finally end in absolute atheism. Moses Mendelssohn disagreed with Jacobi, saying that there is no actual difference between theism and pantheism."

People have argued about what Baruch Spinoza meant with his pantheist philosophy before, namely at the end of the 18th century. The pantheist God concept in Religious Humanism anticipates an intermediate existence to a pure materialistic state and a personal being. There is no old man with a white beard but rather a force of some kind. There is hope that we, as we move along with science, will find out more about this existence. A pure materialistic concept is quite barren. It does not inspire creativity. There is no frontier for discovery. It does not deal with the unknown as it can be scientifically anticipated today based on our progress in science so far.

Furthermore, Religious Humanism sees Grace, Resurrection of Christ, Annunciation of Virgin Mary etc. as irrelevant symbols, as are Angels. Also there is no heaven or hell. There is, however, a sense that it would be nice to think that our life has a meaning of sorts, apart from being just another brick in evolution, that there is some sort of life after death, that our experience is being taken into consideration. The explanation for such a scheme remains of course unknown at present.

Spirituality--does it need a supernatural God?

Speaking of getting pointers. I have recently gotten emails from Svenska Evangeliska Alliansen--SEA. The latest has a title reading "Sortering av människor i ateismens kölvatten", or Sorting of people in the wake of atheism.

I do not need much imagination to understand that I might be considered worse than atheists with my religion Religious Humanism by SEA? The only way I can imagine that they can argue this is by saying this is by requiring that spirituality needs a supernatural God of the preferably Christian variety.

During the first year of my blog I went through various aspects of science and religion and I discussed this matter to some degree. I did not manage to combine a scientific stance with the traditional Christian stance. It is also related to the serious spiritual feeling I encounter in a church building, as house built by spiritual people. When I began blogging I considered myself a spiritual person that had never been an atheist--I still do.

I consider my God the same as that of the Abrahamitic religions. Nature is grand, unlimited, of eternal wisdom and knowledge it is love. It is easy today with our 500 years of scientific revolution to know that we will be able to find anything in Nature, should we just care to look carefully enough. The supernatural can, if you wish, be incorporated into a non-personal materialistic God concept. The prize is that no conflict remains with science. This is important when for example more than half of Americans believe literally in the Bible. Looking a few hundred years down the line, this might improve matters considerably.

Love, for example, or agape, is reasonable to describe as a natural phenomenon that fits easily into Religious Humanism. Scientifically I don't think it is completely elucidated yet. I spent some time on this topic as well.

I believe that spirituality is a state of mind when a person contemplates important matters. Matters that has to do with the future of mankind and similar ideas. Listening to music itself is not spiritual but it is often combined with a spiritual mindset and might enhance it.

I would not be surprised if I encounter people that don't think I should call myself religious but I don't think they are correct in their opinion.

If you consider yourself having the same view on God, please join the Facebook group Religious Humanism.

By the way, TTDE has been used many times in order to prevent me from being religious--in churches, before church visits etc. I don't know who these people are that break the law of religious freedom in this way but I have nothing to do with them personally.

Nonpersonal God vs Personal God

Forskare: Gudstro är det enda vetenskapliga « Dagen.se: "Det betyder, menar Allan Emrén, att Gud verkligen bryr sig om människor. Och att människan gör väl i att söka Gud och lyssna till Hans ord."

I have never been an atheist so I don't know how that feels. However, when you believe in a nonpersonal God, it will not be possible to form that personal relationship which is so important for many religious persons. Setting up Religious Humanism to compete with Judeo-Christianism and Islam in order to reform Churches eventually requires the practitioner to compensate in some fashion for this lack of compassion which probably is best performed by substituting with human contacts when needed. I have seen figures that, if I remember correctly, showed that about 20% of people that believe in a God don't believe in a personal God. For these people and myself this is not a problem.

I am convinced that eventually the benefits from science and the belief in Nature providing the answers of tomorrow would mean that more people would accept Religious Humanism as an alternative to traditional monotheism. In a relatively equal country like Sweden people are distinctly secular. The need for comfort would be less than in a country with larger gaps between ruling classes and people in general. Social Projects and Health Care substitute for the traditional job of the priest and religion if not science and Nature. Given the choice many people would want to enrich their lives with a life philosophy such as Religious Humanism.

Emrén discusses the role of the creation in his life and I'm also fascinated by the similarity of the tale in Genesis and what we know today. However, the person that wrote it was not constrained by earlier dogma that would prevent him to figure out what was most likely to have occurred. Soil came from rock, Plants came from soil. Animals came from plants and we from animals and plants. This common sense order of events was probably there even 2500 and 2000 years ago. However, if God is Nature, God wrote the Bible. I don't think following it literally is a good idea though.

Einstein's Religiosity?

I got an interesting email yesterday that can be linked with my discussion of an image of God that is equal to Nature. I just want to say that I understand very well that the catholic church does not appreciate my idea.

However, even if I'm not pretending that I can be compared with Spinoza and Einstein, it is interesting that some people gravitate to a religiosity with a God concept that can be compared with Nature. I decided on my view before I realized that the above gentlemen had similar views. Einstein actually said:

"It is of course a lie, what you read about my religiosity, a lie that is repeated systematically. I don't believe in a personal God which I never denied and discussed outright. If I have inside anything that can be described as religious, it is a boundless admiration for the structure of the world, as far as our science can elucidate it."

The notion, which seems to exist according to Richard Dawkin's book The God Delusion, that very intelligent people can have an idea about God is interesting. A lesser person like myself is not taken seriously when he arrive at an own image but when a serious intellect does so it becomes almost a proof of God's existence.

What the Pope apparently does not like is that I suggest that it is actually possible to replace the Christian image of God with mine without changing anything on top. It is like with Obama's health plan: "if you like what you have, you can keep it".

The Birth of the World Religions

On Labour Day I thought I'd rest a little so I went to the local bookstore and found an interesting title. Världsreligionernas Födelse by Karen Armstrong from 2006.

I had realized a few years ago when I studied the advent of various civilizations that the important events in the birth of religions took place at approximately the same time. At the time I drew the conclusion that God probably acted at the same time to inspire people in various civilizations to various images of God and eternity. An atheist would of course just say that it is evident that civilizations matured and developed these thoughts and customs at about the same time.

The book seemed highly relevant for me to read since Armstrong performs this study to elaborate on this question. She compares the development of Judaism, Daoism in China, the Old Greeks, and India between 900-200 BCE. However, she does not discuss the matter God at all. She just seems to be interested in the behavioral aspects. All civilizations developed the concepts of the importance of compassion and love, in this order. She puts weight on India and China and thus plays down the aspect of God.

Another aspect she brings to the discussion is that the spirituality that was born through, what she calls, the Axial Age came out of extreme violent environments. We just remembered the initiation of a slaughter of 60m people but we live in an age were we focus a lot on technology. In fact the technology perhaps created the World Wars. "There is profit in confusion". Great disturbances were seen after the iron ages also. Armstrong mean that we should perhaps take the opportunity to develop our spirituality and morals as well.

I'm not convinced that it is appropriate to play down the role of Christianity and Judaism as the World Religions that formed our present situation on Earth, which I am proud of having achieved, even if environmental pessimists tend to harass me for this. Russia and China developed Communism and as I pointed out earlier the translation of the Bible was late in arrival in Russia and never made it to China. India also flirted with Communism. Well, since Armstrong left Catholicism, I might add that my conviction is that Protestantism was important.

Armstrong makes what seems to be an interesting point and that it was the Abrahamitic Religions which developed a monotheistic transcendent God concept where as India and especially China stayed in the material world. Could the fact that we here developed a spiritual realm have been important for the development of our civilization? It promotes the unknown and might have led to the development of science and technology and a liberated mind. My question is if it is time now to fuse science and spirituality as I have suggested earlier. Bring God into our material world when we move into the third millennium of the common era.

A Personal God?

Victor Hugo, the national poet of France who lived most of the 19th century, have according to Richard Dawkins said:

"Every village has a torch--the teacher, and someone who extinguishes it--the priest"

One senses a problem between the poet and the Catholic Church. Today in Sweden the teacher has the upper hand but as I have indicated there might be a new problem that turns flame into ember for clandestine purposes. It seems these people think they are gods, not priests, a new polytheism.

Dawkins also gives an interesting piece of information. Only 7% of the members of the prestigious National Academy of Sciences in the USA claim they believe in a personal God. And this is in a country where 50% of the population goes to church each Sunday. Dawkins tries to make the point, smart people are atheists. He goes on to quote Bertrand Russell:

"The majority of successful intellectual people don't believe in Christianity, but they don't admit this officially, because they are afraid of losing their daily bread."

As seen by the numbers from the NAS of the USA times have moved on since Russell. For a scientist, as myself, it boils down to the probability for certain miracles as described by a literary text called the Bible, but I know there is a non-personal God. Dawkins calls my Spinoza-inspired pantheism an atheism with a make-up but I don't agree. I know he is wrong.

Dawkins then talks about unsophisticated Christians, which I think is wrong. Non-scientists that are believers are not necessarily unsophisticated. They are just created in a fashion where they put faith over science and live perfectly happy as such. At the same time they accept paying taxes for scientists to do what they do. People are differently made and it is intolerant to call a creationist a sick person. It is a problem but we have to get along.