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My experience may include something equivalent to what others call god, but whatever it is cannot be put into words – perhaps not at all, and certainly not with the certainty that most religions ascribe to their own very specific creeds and scriptures. Indeed, the conflict and hate that arises between these competing creeds is a source of much of the evil that we have experienced throughout human history. It strikes me that if a god does exist then it does not want us to talk about it, and if there is also a satanic force in the universe then it, not god, is the author of all scriptures. Perhaps god while allowing evil to exist and to tempt us towards the prideful sin of belief has given us a clue as to the reality by slipping into those scriptures items such as the sin of pride in our presumed knowledge of good and evil (embodied in judaeo-christian tradition by the story of the forbidden fruit  – but note carefully that it is not the knowledge of heliocentric astronomy, relativity, quantum mechanics, or technology that we are forbidden but very specifically the “knowledge of good and evil”), or the commandment delivered via Moses not to “take the name of the Lord in vain”, which perhaps should be interpreted in the strong sense – ie not to identify any words utterable by man as being divine. I call this latter the “strong law of blasphemy” and suggest that the world would be much better off if it were enforced strictly – ie no claim by voice or text to represent the word of god should be taken as other than the work of the devil.

How Can Smart People Believe in God?

is a blog entry at Stanford’s ‘Philosophy Talk’ about their Oct 22 show with Philip Clayton on ‘Believing in God’.

Commenter David Chilstrom revives the old saw that it takes as much faith to disbelieve than to believe – completely missing the point that not to believe in something is not the same as to believe in its negation.

Commenter Jody asserts that “Belief in a God is between God and oneself. Belief in a religion requires suspension of all doubts and questions that challange a religion’s writings and belief systems.” I agree.

In fact, personally, I suspect that if any God exists it cannot be described in words and that any attempt to do so amounts to blasphemy. This is particularly true of those scriptures which claim to be the word of god (ie all of them?). So if God and Devil exist then all religions are the work of the latter. But if a God does exist, perhaps it seeks to protect us from evil by inserting truth among lies and perhaps one of the truths of the Judaeo-Christian bible is the proscription against taking the name of the lord in vain which should be interpreted as condemning the very document which proclaims it.

This article by Gary Wolf in Wired.com considers various current opponents of religion and in the end decides to “refuse the call” to join in their crusade. But this raises the question of what he would say himself when asked the question that he posed quite “innocently” at the dinner table (in an anecdote in the article), but which often arises less benignly in courtrooms and political meetings. To stand up when asked “Who here is an atheist?” is not the same as declaring war on the beliefs of others, and to suggest that merely acknowledging that position amounts to offensive proselytizing (in a way that acknowledging other positions somehow does not) is itself offensive.

In a society that professes tolerance for all religious beliefs (at least for those that are relatively benign in their consequences) it is important also to challenge the intolerance of non-belief which is manifest throughout North American society – and to which the article contributed by implicitly identifying all who declare non-belief with something that many people find offensive.

In a subsequent blog posting (which, in 2012, appears to be no longer available) Wolf went some way towards correcting that, at least to the extent of clarifying his own position, but that cannot come close to undoing the damage done by the article.