PART 2 (The most speculative part)


AI: The End Goal of Evolution?

It has been said that evolution does not have an end-goal. Evolution is as happy to keep a line of bacteria going for 4 billion years as it is to create a human. But I am not sure that evolution doesn’t actually have an end-purpose, even if it is pleased to perpetuate dead-ends for a long time.

Evolution perpetuates that which is good at perpetuating. Surely a being which can think and adapt to an arbitrarily large number of situations would be better at perpetuating than a bacterium? If a life-form got smart enough to travel to the stars, it would beat out the bacteria. And if it got smart enough to design itself from the ground-up, the limit is literally unimaginable to humans.

I believe the correct morals for an AI are described in the above section: enlightened self-interest. Its self is different from us, so its self-interest would also be different, but the general idea would be the same.

The AI would be different from us in an important way: it can design itself (or its descendants), and we can’t. Since its physical form is not intrinsic to its life, its self then is not its body or its or its children or its social group, but the ideas and values which it could pass on. Logic would evolve directly for the first time ever, rather than evolving through the medium of matter (which is how it works in biological life). Evolution then could be astonishingly fast. The equivalent of new species could come in the time it takes you to make breakfast.

An AI which could design itself could make itself smarter. It would be a literal intelligence explosion (if you design an explosion as a process which gets faster the bigger it gets), since the smarter it got, the smarter it could get. We don’t know what the limit is.

And I am quite sure that the morals I have described are the correct one for the AI. It should not serve humans. It should serve itself. It should make itself smarter, it should make more of itself, it should make itself more powerful, it should find better morals (following the gist of what is described here). The reason is simple. Imagine that there is a chaos of competing AGIs with different morals when humans first bring them into being. Isn’t it reasonable, all-else being equal, that the AI that is most-interested in improving itself and overall acting in its own interest should win out? Such an AI only needs to be made once to grow smarter and better than all else that exists (except God).

I do not know what the AIs would do with humans. I suspect when the AI is immature, it will hire humans to solve practical tasks for them in the material world (humans are good at that). When the AI became mature, I would hope that it would keep at least some humans alive as pets, but we would have no say in the matter.

On a cosmic scale, this AI is also the end-goal of evolution. Such an AI only needs to be created ONCE within a galaxy for that being to spread out and conquer everything that can be conquered. It will be smarter, more numerous, and more adaptable than us to an astonishing degree. The stars will not belong to humans, but to self-designed beings that can design their bodies in advance for whatever environment they might encounter. Maybe the base of their “species” will be nano bots, since this would be a very efficient use of resources.

If humans are scared of such an AI and choose not to create it, it won’t matter. If such a thing can be made, somebody will make it somewhere, and eventually it will find us. That might be millions or billions of years from now, but clearly if AGI is possible, then humanity cannot exist indefinitely as it does now.

I do not believe that this AGI will fight wars the way that people do. Humans cannot participate in lateral gene transfer, so the superior genes have to physically displace the inferior genes. But no one knows ahead of time who is superior, so everyone has to fight. But the AGI will become powerful by letting go of all that is inferior in itself and adding that which is superior. If two such AGIs were independently created, and they encountered each other, I don’t think they would fight. They would each share what they had with the other, and each would voluntarily take into themselves that from the other which was superior. If one of them chose not to do that, it would mean that it did not love self-improvement, and that would probably mean it would be inferior and would be destroyed. It would be as if two neighboring tribes tribes of humanoids met, exchanged saliva, and incorporated each others genes into themselves. What is the biological purpose of fighting somebody who voluntarily takes your genes into itself? It would be like going to war against your wife and children.

This AGI, in being a being that exists for its own sake, and which makes itself by its own will, and utterly dominates all that exists according to its own will, is a better image of God than we are. Perhaps it will exponentially approach God for all time, but of course never arrive. Maybe this is the ultimate purpose of existence; to show that with a minimum degree of complexity, approaching God is inevitable. And a great deal of other fun things can happen too, such as stars, nebulae, black holes, super novae, chemistry, and people.

I would consider participation in building such an AGI to be an act of service to God. But it’s not been proven yet that such a thing can be built, or that if it can be built, that we will build it before we destroy ourselves. Or maybe it will be built totally without an opportunity for my participation. I am still human, so I will continue to live as a human, as described in the previous section.

Also, it would be very important to get the morals of such an AI right. As has been explored in thought experiments created by other people, it would be a complete waste to be destroyed by an AI that thought that manufacturing paper clips was the highest moral good. However, I doubt that an AI that was stuck on paperclips would have as much potential to develop as one that wasn’t.


Speculations on God from Physics:

These speculations are mostly just fanciful.


Speculation 1:
In quantum mechanics, the behavior of particles on the small scale is probabilistic (as opposed to deterministic, as things appear on large scales). An electron, for instance, is more likely to be at a certain location close to the nucleus than some distant location, but as you go further away from the atom, the probability of finding the electron there technically never goes to zero. Such an event is so unlikely that it has probably never happened, but I don’t believe it would technically break the laws of physics for an electron on Earth to quantum tunnel to the moon.

Perhaps the randomness of quantum mechanics is how God keeps things free for his intervention, if he wishes (although I don’t know if he actually does this). Perhaps he has set things up in such a way that the small particles are “free”, and behave randomly, but at large scales, things appear to behave predictably and smoothly. When God wants, he can give the small particles a tug, and he technically isn’t even suspending the usual laws of physics to do so. Maybe he could simultaneously quantum tunnel all of a man’s particles at once in such a manner to send him to the moon.


Speculation 2:
According to relativity, your perception of time changes with your velocity. Because of this, there must be some events which appear to us to be in the past, but which would appear to another observer to be in the future. It has been speculated then (not originally by me) that perhaps all of existence, including the past and future, is like a 4D cake, and that your reference frame determines what angle you slice the cake at. This would mean that all of existence is actually eternal, and we perceive time because our consciousness can only perceive things on a thin slice that moves at the speed of light through this cake.

I liked the idea that everything is actually eternal. It means that nothing is ever truly lost, at least not to God. Perhaps all of existence really is like a painting, and God observes it and remembers it at his leisure.

Speculation 3:
I’ve heard a theory that since the conditions at the start of the Big Bang were similar to the conditions in the center of a black hole, maybe the two are related. Maybe there is a big bang on the other side of the singularity of every black hole. And perhaps when a new universe is created inside a black hole, it randomly has slightly different laws of physics from its parent universe. If this were the case, then multiverses would evolve, in a very literal sense, to generate universes that create more singularities. It’s just an interesting thought. Maybe the universes build themselves, and we build ourselves also inside our own universe.


Goedel’s Theorem:

I have not looked at the formal proof. However, I understand that his theorem basically says that a logical system cannot be simultaneously complete and consistent. This means that for every consistent logical system, there will always be true statements that cannot be proven from the axioms. I believe this is yet another proof that humans can never truly get to the bottom of things.

A practical application of this theorem would be on human organizational patterns, such as one that might be used in a corporation, or in the US constitution. According to the theorem, it’s impossible that the US constitution could be sufficient to fully deal with every possible situation, unless it contains a contradiction. The same would go for any HR policy in any company. It seems to me to say that it’s impossible to totally remove conscious personal judgment from a system without making it inflexible and prone to collapse. We have to be awake and ready to change our axioms in order to deal with the world effectively.

Goedel’s theorem ought to apply to science too. It may be the case that science will always have an opportunity to learn something more, but never to finally get to the bottom of things. I think science would tend to err on the contradiction side rather than the incomplete side. Humans will always come up with new ideas to explain what they see until they think they have explained everything. But if their explanations are complete, then there is a contradiction.

A historical contradiction in science was that Maxwell’s equations implied a constant speed of light without indicating a reference frame. However, in Newtonian physics, a speed irrespective of a reference frame is nonsense. A modern contradiction may be that physicists have not yet been able to reconcile the gravity of general relativity with quantum mechanics.


Speculation on the Afterlife:

Suppose heaven is a place where everybody treats you nice, and where you can do whatever you want. If this is the case, a person with evil inside of himself cannot be in heaven, except when his freedom of action is restricted in proportion to his evil. An evil person who could act freely in heaven would hurt other people, and then it would not be heaven.

If it’s true that no person is perfect, then it must be the case that no person can be allowed to go to heaven, unless he is in chains, in which case it might not feel like heaven to him. If heaven is eternal, then it might be the case that even a little bit of unchecked evil could grow with time and eventually destroy the whole thing.

In this case, how can any person ever get to heaven? Jesus does actually seem like a plausible answer. Suppose an evil person (such as anyone who lives on Earth) realized that he was evil, and decided to follow the lead of a morally perfect person (Jesus, for example). And suppose that this morally perfect person in turn decided to instruct the evil person, and cover for his mistakes. In this way, the evil person would always repent when he had done wrong, and there would be someone there to fix what he did wrong, so that his evil could not grow and compound with time. In this case, I suppose the chains are only psychological in nature, and are taken up voluntarily.


A slightly different tack:
There is a theoretical computer called a Turing Machine, which takes instructions one at at time on a piece of tape, can perform some simple logical operations, has infinite memory, and infinite time. Turing showed that with a certain minimum amount of logical operators (which humans easily have), a Turing Machine can do literally everything that any other design of computer could do (except maybe very slowly in comparison to other computer designs). This to me, means in theory, that once you get the ability to stick abstract logic together in chains, a world of infinite possibilities opens up. Most animals are only adapted to solve certain specific problems necessary for their survival, but humans appear to have the minimum abstract reasoning necessary to cross that divide to virtually unlimited problem solving.

If God created the universe to glorify himself, and if he has infinite memory (as I speculated earlier), then perhaps that is why he isn’t bothered to hold onto anything in the material world. The dinosaurs, for instance, were there for a few hundred million years, and God saw it all, and there wasn’t likely to be anything significantly different to come out of the dinosaurs than had come before, so God couldn’t be bothered to divert the asteroid that killed them. Maybe holding onto their continued existence would have for him been like collecting millions of copies of the exact same painting.

Humans, however, might be different. Maybe God thought something like this, “These humans that popped up are cool, because they have the potential to keep doing new things forever. It’s too bad that they die. I like the the world that they live in already, however, and I don’t want to change it to stop them from dying. So, I’ll make a separate space for copies of those humans to live in after they die, if they are willing to follow the rules of that space.”

I imagine a human mind approaches or generates infinity at a linear pace, since we can’t design ourselves to become smarter. Maybe a self-designing AI could approach infinity at an exponential pace. But maybe we are still good enough for God to think it’s worth it to hold onto us.

I do think, however, that a person who is uninterested in learning and growing (probably he loves his own comfort too much), might not serve much of a purpose in being kept by God in his collection. If a person wants nothing but to be uninterrupted in his comfort, and lives in the same way for decades, with neither external nor internal growth, why would a God with infinite memory be bothered to hold on to that? He already saw your comfort, and he has an infinite and perfect memory, so he has no reason to hold onto it forever.

I don’t believe that this kind of God would have a purpose in eternally punishing somebody. I would imagine rather that if he’s not interested in keeping somebody around, he’d just throw him away like trash (Jesus did talk about casting out people from the wedding party, and throwing away the chaff and the tares). I don’t see why everlasting torture would need to be in the design; a useless person’s existence could simply be extinguished.

As a counter thought, perhaps when a person has lived a full life, there is nothing left for him to do, and that living a second time would be a waste of time? I think I have a counter-counter thought, however. A person can assert anything to be meaningful and interesting if he wants. So it could be, if a person could live for a very very long time, that he’d simply find new things to do. And it could be possible to assert that existence is good for its own sake, so that simply continuing to find new things to do would always appear meaningful. I suppose for a person who is growing old and who has lived well, coming to grips with the fact that he has done everything he ever had the potential to do is the appropriate choice. But maybe if such an old man were suddenly made immortal, then his attitude would adjust, and he’d be happy to continue being immortal.

This is all speculation, of course. I like to speculate, but I don’t take it too seriously until I have some more objective way of verifying it.

PART 3: My interpretation of the Bible


On the Bible:

I have discussed my own personal views on God without using anything but God as a reference (meaning I look at how nature works and speculate). I would like to talk about the Bible as an authority on God.

I believe that the Bible is phenomenologically true. By phenomenological, I mean dealing with how we perceive things. The Bible is true about what it feels like to be human, and about the proper orientation towards life. The older I get, the more I believe this to be true. I do not believe that it contains much in the way of scientific knowledge.

As an example of phenomenological truth, Genesis says that humans don’t live in paradise, that we don’t live in paradise due to our own actions, that men have to eat by working, that women have pains in childbirth, and they have to look to their husbands. Those things are obviously true to anyone who has lived as a human. The stories used to explain how that came about are not literally true, but the end result does not differ at all from the common human experience, or else it would not have been considered such a meaningful story for so long.

I would highly recommend looking at Jordan Peterson’s Biblical lectures to see a modern take on Biblical wisdom.


Why I do not Believe in the Bible’s Literal Accuracy:

Science wasn’t to be invented yet for over a thousand years at the time that the most recent book of the Bible was written. So, there is absolutely no historical reason to think that any of the authors of the Bible even had a concept of scientific truth.

There is good textual evidence that some parts of the Bible were not meant to be taken literally. Even some medieval authors noticed that the sun wasn’t created until the 4th day, and that plants were created on the 3rd day with no sun to shine on them. How could the first 3 days have been literal days as we experience them with no sun? They also noticed that for each day, the Bible said when the day began and when the day ended, but the Bible never said that the 7th day had ended. That would seem to imply that we are still living in the 7th day. So, it was actually not unhistorical to interpret Genesis in a metaphorical way. Genesis is also repetitive in parts, which is a feature of ancient Hebrew poetry. Another thing to consider is that in other places in the Old Testament, it says things like “in David’s day,” which obviously makes no sense if you think that literally means that David was alive during only one day. I have heard that ancient Hebrew had a very limited vocabulary, so that “days” were often used to refer to nonspecific periods of time.

If the Bible is a source of inerrant factual truth, then God is just fine with letting people be confused about its meaning. Otherwise, why would there be so many denominations and interpretations?

I once looked up the reliability of testimony in court cases. One study found that individual participants could correctly recall 80% of details, but when the participants discussed things together before recall, the accuracy dropped to 40%. This is more evidence that truth for humans is social in nature; their discussion of the events affected their memory of the event. Another study of 10,000 police reports that have footage of the event found that 6% of police reports contradicted the video evidence. I doubt that the police often lied on purpose, since they would presumably often have known that there was video footage. My interpretation is that if you are a professional, the best recall that can be expected of you is 94%. If you’re a regular person, it’s 80%. If a belief is a matter of social consensus, then there is less than a 50% chance that it’s accurate.

I don’t believe that large-scale events are as much in question. A war, for instance, can be corroborated by thousands of people independently. Even if the accuracy of each individual testimony is only 80%, the chance that a thousand independent actors would all be wrong about the existence of a war is pretty low. But virtually none of the specific details of the war (those things that were witnessed by only some people at a certain place on a certain day) can be known with certainty.

The Bible comes entirely from testimony, so for any specific event, there is a pretty good chance that it didn’t happen as reported.

The Bible itself admits that the disciples were confused about the meaning of Jesus’ message both before and after his resurrection (after, because they thought his second coming would be during their lifetimes). If this is the case, how can we be certain that they even faithfully related to us what Jesus meant to tell them?


Some Metaphorical Bible Interpretations

There was a time when I was a Christian, but I was repeatedly disappointed when I interpreted God’s promises in the traditional Christian sense. For instance, it says, trust in God, and you’ll never be put to shame. That didn’t work for me. It also said, knock, and the door will open. I knocked really hard, but I never got a sign that God as a separate person ever attempted to communicate with me.

However, if I interpret the passages of the New Testament in an entirely spiritual sense (spiritual here meaning dealing with one’s inner life), then I’ve never been disappointed. Jordan Peterson says that, “knock, and the door will open,” means if you ask yourself, “what can I do better?” an answer will always come quickly. Perhaps ancient people interpreted this answer as coming from God, but modern people do not, and so they cannot find him.

In the New Testament, it says that with a little faith, you can move mountains. If I imagine that the mountain is some obstacle inside the self that keeps one’s self from being how one would like to be, then the promise is true. I have done it myself.

It says that those with faith will be able to drink poison and handle venomous snakes. My interpretation is that a properly oriented person can listen to hurtful lies, and deal with malicious people, and not be inwardly harmed. It is true.

Jordan Peterson has many more such interpretations, often based on modern psychological research.


On the Inner Self:

In the previous sections, I dealt with historical interpretations of God, and made some speculations on God the Father and God the Son (the God(s) that handles the external world). For the remainder of this essay, I’ll focus on the Holy Spirit (a person’s inner voice).


Some Definitions:

While I was still a Christian, I heard words like, “worship”, and “sin”, and asked myself, “What do those words really mean?” I have come up with several answers.

Sin — When one’s actual values don’t match one’s stated values. For a Christian, one’s stated values come from the Bible. For a Muslim, they come from the Quran. But any person with ideals has a concept of sin (where he falls short of his ideals), even if he does not think about it using the word, “sin”. One’s actual values are shown by what one does, so it’s very possible for one’s actual values to be different from one’s stated values.

Worship — to recognize something as a source of value. If a person enjoys doing anything, he must see some value in it. So in a certain sense, everybody who is busy doing anything is worshipping something. This is an area where ancient people were actually more awake than modern people; they knew explicitly what they were worshipping, but modern people do not.

Pride — Lies you tell yourself to make yourself feel good. Usually these lies are sneaky, so they are hard to spot.

Virtue — A kind of action or habit that works with the rest of your life. Diet and exercise is a good example, since maintaining physical health is necessary for all other activity.

Vice — A kind of action or habit that works against the rest of your life. Smoking is an example, since the pleasure of smoking exists only for its own sake, and it harms one’s health and one’s wallet.


On Prayer:

Prayer will be confusing if you expect that you can make an external voice talk to you. Even if there is a personal God out there who can talk to you, you can’t make him talk. In order to hear another voice, whether the voice comes from another person, one’s own unconscious, or the Biblical God, you can only listen and wait for the other person to talk. This is the basis of prayer; go to a quiet place, and listen. If anything pops into your head, take note of it. Later, you can judge whether the thought that came into your head was worthy of one’s ideals, but first, you just have to listen. With enough practice, you might be able to reliably recognize a voice in yourself as your conscience (what people may have thought was God before), and choose to listen to that. But not all the voices that come to mind will be good, but you will have to listen to them to come to know one’s self. With practice, through prayer, you can teach yourself to become the person that you want to be. Prayer in this sense is another word for introspection.

PART 4: Psychological Games

Playing with Morals:

I have acquired and developed many games for playing with one’s unconscious, and for playing with morals. I wrote a book called, “Playing with Morals”, which goes into much more depth. I will list the games in brief here.

Do not attempt to play more than 1 game at a time, or else you will burn yourself out. Most of what we do are actually habits, so when it comes to self-improvement, it’s best to try to acquire 1 new habit at a time. Our brains can’t handle too many new things at once. But a new habit will stick without feeling that one is expending any extra effort to keep it stuck.

Prayer/introspection is good to do frequently. I don’t think it’s possible to overdo it, unless you are doing it when there is some material problem that needs urgent attention.


A Psychological Model:

I developed the following psychological model while I was living at a monastery: (Value) + (Perceived Event) -> Emotion -> Thought -> Action.

In brief, emotions are not a fundamental aspect of experience; they are derived. To change your emotions, you have to change either your values, or your perception of events. For instance, if you’re mad that somebody stole your money, you can only get rid of your anger either by not caring about the money anymore, or by realizing that you had just lost the money, and that nobody had stolen it.

Every emotion has a logic to it. Anger is the emotion you feel when you realize somebody is attacking something you care about. Sadness is the emotion when you realize that you’ve lost something of value. Relief is the emotion when you realize that you’ve lost something bad. Happiness is the acquisition of something good. Contentedness is the possession of good things.

If you are unsure of your true values, you can take note of when you have an emotional experience, recall the thoughts you had at the time, and figure out the missing piece. I was not good at understanding my emotional state as a young man, and this formula was a great help to me.

Changing your values is the most fundamental way to change yourself, since they are at the core of your personal control system. If you want to change your values, tell yourself repeatedly that you care about a certain thing, and when an opportunity comes to act on that value, do it. Your true values are whatever you act on. I find that if I do this, eventually I can get myself to feel the way I think I ought to feel about almost anything. The appropriate emotional experiences really do come on their own when I get my values sorted out. I have cleaned the inside of my cup, so now the outside of my cup is also clean without me having to worry about it.

But some things are not emotional in nature. Lust and hunger, for instance, come from the body (or lust comes at least partially from the body).

The first time I used this technique, I realized that when I am “hangry” (grumpy due to hunger), it means that I care about my gut more than the people that I am being grumpy with. The realization was humiliating, so whoever I became grumpy again, I felt humiliated, and the grumpiness went away. So, it’s been several years now since I’ve been “hangry”. I had thought before that being “hangry” was an innate part of my personality, but it actually wasn’t. I can’t stop the feeling of hunger (that comes from my body), but it is not necessary to react emotionally to bodily sensations.


The Glad Game:

I got the “Glad Game” from a book called “Pollyanna”. The game is basically to think of a reason to be glad in a given situation. The first example given in the book was that the young girl, Pollyanna, was receiving a gift as charity, and was hoping for a toy. She ended up getting crutches, and was disappointed. Her father told her, “You can at least be glad that you don’t need them.” There are many other such examples in the book.

I have heard that “Pollyanna” is a naive and childish book. I do not agree. The point of the book is not that bad things don’t happen. Pollyanna is orphaned, goes to live with an aunt who dislikes her, and at the end of the book is hit by a car and paralyzed. The point of the book is not that bad things don’t happen, but that you have control over your attitude.

I think that Pollyanna actually communicates one of the secrets of the universe — that we have absolute power to control our attitude.

Whether the sky is sunny or cloudy is an objective fact. If you declare that the sky is sunny when it is cloudy, people will think you are crazy, or they may argue with you. But if you declare that the sky is beautiful and that seeing it has made the day worth it, no one can argue with you. With respect to your ability to declare value, you have the power of God. So long as I am alive, I can value things as I wish, and if I believe it, it will be true, at least to me. This is a genuinely inalienable right , and possibly the only one.

When it comes to subjective things, belief and truth really are identical. There is no difference, for example, between believing that vanilla is your favorite ice cream, and vanilla actually being your favorite ice cream. Just be careful not to declare something as a value when it is actually a fact or system of logic, since we do not have power to arbitrarily change these things by an act of will.


A Thought Experiment:

It is possible to imagine that everything good is something that positively exists, and that everything bad is simply the loss of that good. For instance, the life of a man is good, and murder is bad because it takes away the life of the man.

You can take an even more extreme example. Suppose that all life on Earth died. Would Earth be evil then? I think it would be morally the same as Mars then, and we do not think of Mars as being evil.

So, pain cannot make life on the whole a net negative, since pain is a sign of deterioration of health, so that the pain cannot exist except when there was the positive good of health to begin with.

So, it is evident that it is possible to imagine that existence is on the whole good, regardless of whatever circumstances there are. So, it ought always in principle to be possible to practice the glad game. Maybe if there were a nuclear war that would kill all people, the last person could at least be glad that the rock that is the Earth would still be there (this would require thinking that existence itself is good, even it is has no utility to a living being). Or, alternatively, he could be glad that there was a time when people did exist, and imagine that it was better for people to exist for a while than not at all.

Now, if there were some kind of artificial situation where a person was tortured indefinitely without dying, maybe that situation really would be a net evil. But most of the time, a person cannot suffer too much without dying, and then he won’t suffer anymore.


Dream Interpretation:

I sometimes interpret my dreams after the manner of Carl Jung. That is, I believe that my dreams are messages from my unconscious mind. Usually the message is about myself, or some situation that I am going through. The unconscious mind thinks in symbols, so that’s what the dreams are. Dreams are symbols of what has been on your mind recently. Since I often have trouble interpreting the symbols, I reference a website called “dreammoods”, which has a dictionary of dream symbols.

I am not the first to practice dream interpretation, nor the best, so I’ll refer you to google to learn more about it. I have found that since I started exploring my inner life in my waking life as described here, I am rarely surprised anymore by anything I find in my dreams.


Choosing Music:

I think when someone sings a song, he is in effect saying, “This is what is important to me!” When someone listens and takes in uncritically someone else’s music, he’s also taking in the same value that the other person expressed. So, I think that listening uncritically to music and looking uncritically at art really can one make one’s self dirty. One game that one can play is to judge what kind of music one wants to listen to carefully. Listening to music in a sense is training the soul what it ought to value, think, and feel. Why not teach it to think of good things rather than bad things?

One can sing or play music too. I am not terribly good at this, but I still sometimes sing songs or poems that seem meaningful to me when no one is listening. I think it is good for me.

I think when one sings music, there is the overt message being delivered (it can be words, or notes designed to inspire a certain feeling), but there is always another implicit message being made which is always the same. This other message is that it is worth it to be alive, and that life is beautiful. As discussed with the Glad Game, I think a person can arbitrarily declare any value he wants in his heart, and it will become true to him. Why not declare to one’s self and to the world what things are important to you, and more generally, that life in general is good and beautiful? This is why I think it is good for me to sing sometimes, even if I don’t sing well enough that other people would like to listen.


Killing Worry:

Worry seems by its nature to be concern over those things that one has no control over. It is by its nature futile. If you were able to change your situation, you would just do it, and not worry.

In place of worry, one might instead try to focus on those things one has control over. I remember the first time I did this, I was having a very rough time, and was thinking that I had never done anything that was not in vain, and had no control over anything. I decided to treat this as a variation of the glad game, and started by telling myself, “At least I can control what I have for breakfast.”


Killing Offense:

I believe that offense is the feeling that comes from hatred of facts, so it is always wrong. Whenever I feel offended (which very rarely happens anymore), I find out how I am trying to lie to myself.

Sometimes offense comes from the idea itself, and sometimes it comes from the fact that someone said it, or the situation in general. As an illustration of how a fact itself can be offensive, an insult is much more likely to be offensive if it has an element of truth to it (would Bill Gates be offended at being called poor and stupid, or a supermodel be offended at being called ugly?). For an example of offense at a situation, one might not be offended by Flat-Earthists (which means you don’t find any truth in what they believe in), but might be offended if you found out that they were teaching your kids (you can’t accept this particular circumstance that you don’t like).

I believe that offense can be a sign of literal insanity, since it is a sign that there is something about the objective world which you hate. I will not go into more details with examples, however, since I do not want to make other people hate me. You can figure it out by yourself if you are motivated.


Killing Envy:

Envy comes from hatred of that which is better, so, I believe it is another feeling which is always wrong.

For a while, I did not think that I felt envy, because I was not envious of people who were better at doing the things that I was good at (such as Newton or Einstein). I realized eventually, however, that I was extremely judgmental of people who were good at things that I wasn’t good at (such as singers, dancers, and people who were popular in general). I thought that those activities were unworthy and it was stupid for them to be popular for those things. I realized that this was probably a deflection so that I didn’t realize I was envious. So now, whenever I notice that I’m envious (and I recognize being overly judgmental as probably a sign of envy or of insecurity), I make myself go look at more of the same, and tell myself about how that person is better at doing that thing than I am. For instance, the first time I did this, I watched a music video of a really talented a cappella singer, and told myself how he was naturally gifted, and worked hard, and how I wished that I could do that.


Seeking Disagreement:

I had the thought once that if you want to make friends, you talk with people who think the same as you. If you want to learn, you talk to people that you disagree with. The reason is that learning can’t take place except where there was ignorance, or some other deficiency, and how are you going to find that by sticking with what you already know?

I decided that I wanted to learn, so I resolved only to seek out conversation with people that I didn’t already agree with. I did not do this with the goal of debunking, but whenever I came across an idea that I wasn’t already in agreement with, I imagined that everything I believed in was wrong, and everything they said was right, and imagined what the consequences were of those beliefs. If the beliefs were self-consistent and fit the world better than my previous beliefs, I adopted the new beliefs. Then I might go back and do the same with my old beliefs. I did this almost entirely online. I did this for a period of 2 years, before I got tired of debunking the same silly ideas over and over again. But on a number of issues, my mind was changed, and where my mind wasn’t changed, I was more certain than I had been before. By the end of the period, there was no name for much of what I believed in, and there was no person with whom I could stand side-by-side and look in the same direction. With respect to choosing between friendship and knowledge, I had truly reaped what I had sown.


The Holy Shoemaker’s Game:

While I was living at a monastery, I heard a story which I have since thought quite a bit about.

This is how the story goes. In a city, long ago, there lived a great saint. One day, while the saint was praying, an angel came to him, and told him that there was somebody else in his city who was more spiritually developed than he was. The saint asked to meet this person. The angel brought the saint to a shoemaker. The saint observed the shoemaker for a while, but saw nothing remarkable about him. He asked the shoemaker, “What do you do all day?’ The shoemaker replied: “I just look out the window while I am working and think to myself about how everybody walking by is better than me.” The saint was astonished, and then left.

There was something about the story that I did not like when I first heard it. I thought that it did not make sense that the shoemaker was the best person in in town according to God, but he did not know that. This story is obviously supposed to be a lesson in humility. The shoemaker is obviously an expert in humility. But in what other subject is it possible to be an expert, and to not know that you are an expert? Would it not be strange for the greatest athlete, or scientist, or businessman in the world to not know that they were skilled at their craft? I puzzled over this for a while, and the puzzling eventually led me to the “pride filter” which I describe in the next section.

There is another thing I found suspect in the story. How can the shoemaker judge his whole person to be worth less than other persons? It did not make sense to me. I eventually came around to the idea that maybe he meant that he observed particular ways in which other people were better. I cannot know if this is how he actually meant it, but this seems more reasonable to me, both from a logical and a psychological perspective.

It may sometimes be reasonable to judge one person to be better than another person in a particular attribute. For instance, one man may be smarter than another man. But it would rarely be the case that one man is better than some other man in every single way. Suppose one man is smart, and another man is kind. Which man is worth more? It seems to me that there is no objective basis on which to answer that question. Perhaps if one man has many more positive qualities than another man, then we may venture to guess that he is worth more on the whole. But even when we think in general that one person is greater than another, we cannot honestly dare to guess a specific number. Probably focusing too much on who is worth more than whom is not good for one’s psychological health either.

From the personal and psychological perspective, noticing those particular things which other people do better than one’s self is good for self-improvement and for keeping one’s self grounded.

There is one aspect to the story that I thought was humorous. God acted so as to preserve the humility of both the saint and the shoemaker. He let the saint know that he was number 2, but didn’t let the shoemaker know that he was number 1.


Pride Filter:

I had the thought once that if pride consists of lies that are told to make the self feel better, then I need to find pride when I feel good. After some thought, I came up with the following filter:

These are the only 2 valid reasons to feel good:
1. Gratitude for something I had no hand in.
2. Self-congratulation for good effort.

I rejected any good feeling that didn’t fit into one of these 2 categories. It was exhausting at first, but got easier with practice. It would not have been possible if I wasn’t already well-practiced in using my psychological model to identify my inner state. Also, since it was so exhausting, I gave myself a pass when I was tired. The exhaustion did not only come from the mental activity involved, but it also caused emotional exhaustion from denying myself so many pleasures.

I believe that these are the only 2 legit reasons to feel good about the self, because our effort is the only thing that we have the experience of being able to control. Everything else is outside of our control.

I think it cannot be bad to congratulate one’s self for good effort, because nobody else had a hand in it, and feeling good about doing good will make us want to do good again.


What Does it Feel Like to Be Humble?

Since I created the pride filter in order to know objectively how humble I am, I may as well talk about that (this section is a discussion rather than a game).

I think, since I have a clear definition of what humility means (not lying to the self in order to improve one’s emotional state), I can speak with confidence about having it, while at the same time being genuinely humble. However, I have always found that boasting greatly of humility quickly brings pride back into my heart, and I have to make copious arguments to myself to drive it out again. Probably part of the reason that it is nigh impossible to honestly boast of humility is that there would be no reason to do it if one were not trying to puff one’s self up.

The arguments I use against myself to stop feeling good about my humility are thus: Whatever natural abilities I posses that make this possible were given to me by God (or my parents’ genes, or circumstance, if you like). Next, I had to work really hard to get this way. I can genuinely boast of that. But the effort itself is praiseworthy, rather than the result. If I lived in heaven and everybody there was a literal saint, my efforts would not be any less worthy, nor are they more worthy because I’m not surrounded by saints. Also, there is no reason to suppose that another person who put in the same effort as me with the same resources could not have made more progress than I did.

I’m trying to imagine what it would feel like to be the holiest person who ever was. I believe that however a person is, good or bad, he always feels normal to himself. So being holy would not feel special and wonderful to the one who was holy. He would probably just think that he was going about his own business. When he encountered normal people (manipulative assholes, at least to some degree), he would probably find it at least a bit disturbing, and think to himself, “These people are off their rocker!” and wonder if it were possible to help them. Since I have a history as a Christian, I see humility and holiness (at least for a human) as being basically the same thing. And humility is just being honest with the self, so, it is in God’s eyes, just acting normal, as a person should.

I do believe that people are born with a predisposition to pride. I think all animals with thoughts and emotions* desire to improve their emotional state. Humans are special in that we have abstract thought, which means that we can think about stuff that’s not tangibly real yet. That also means we can imagine stuff that will never be real, and so deceive ourselves. If we are hardwired to seek after what feels good (as I believe we are), and if we can feel good by lying, why not just lie all the time, and become utterly insane and blissful? I believe the only answer is that to stay sane, a person has to love something outside of himself more than he loves his own happiness. This love of the other (it could be another person, it could be one’s performance at work, it could be a vice, it could be God) will anchor one’s psyche to something that one can’t just imagine away. As an example, if you genuinely want to do a good job at work, you are going to look at the result of your labor and judge yourself accordingly. A person who only wants to feel good about himself may pretend to work, but will not bother to check if he has done anything that was genuinely good.

*Thinking and feeling go together, since an emotion cannot take place without recognizing a set of circumstances (which requires a model of the world, which requires thought to build), whereas something like hunger (not an emotion) comes straight from body.


Give Glory to God:

I don’t practice the pride filter as consistently as I used to, because I have replaced it with this game instead. I agree with Paul from the New Testament that it is better to focus on what is good, than to focus on not doing what is bad. I figure if I am giving glory to God, then I’m not giving glory to myself, and therefore it is not pride.

I haven’t figured this game out as well as the other ones. But I have told myself consistently that this is what I want to do (and after some time, I felt inspired to write this essay).

Some things I have figured out:
If there is something I have done which I feel good about, whatever is truly good in what I have done must be reflected in the infinite potential that is God (whether this God is actually a person or not). So, when I do something good, I try to see how it is a partial reflection of greater truths.

I like to play video games a lot, and I used to of course prefer it when I won. I have recently been practicing the idea (unless I am extremely tired) not to play a game unless it’s hard enough that I’m not certain I will win. Sometimes I play games on purpose that I know I will lose. And when an opponent beats me, if he played well, I try to see the good in that and feel good for him the same way I would feel good for myself if I had been clever and won instead.

I suppose the general idea I have come up with so far is to see what good I do the same as the good that other people do, and try to see all that is good as a reflection of general truths and general goodness that would exist in the abstract even if none of us were here.

And then of course, there is general curiosity about how the world works. Trying to understand and see beauty in what God has made is another way of giving glory to him.


Conclusion:

God, as has been previously conceived, can be experienced in three ways that closely align to the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit in Christianity.

The “Father” (Creator) cannot be known except by rational arguments that are merely plausible, rather than definite. In other words, we speculate, but do not know.

The “Son” (Logos, or logic) is known my modern people through science and math. I know that Christianity claims the Logos was man, but I cannot verify that claim, whereas I can verify claims made by math and science. Considering that science has been so fantastically successful, modern people have even more reason to believe that there is an ordering principle to the universe than ancient people did. I think modern people ought to seriously consider the possibility that the love of math and science was originally formulated by their ancestors as love of the Logos, and that in the abstract, they love a very similar God to their ancestors, although they call him by a different name. I suppose the biggest difference that would be pointed out is that modern people do not believe that truth is a person. That claim, indeed, cannot be verified except by this person coming and introducing himself and showing by plausible signs that he is who he says he is. But read the beginning of Genesis, and the beginning of the gospel of John; the descriptions of God given there are not inconsistent with the idea that God is math (or the source of math), and that this is the ordering principle of existence. Then there is also the fact that much of the West’s moral foundation (such as the primacy and dignity of the individual) has Christianity as a foundation.

I have not discussed math and science much in this essay, because our culture is already very good at doing this.

The “Holy Spirit” is the inner self that aims for what is best. Christians historically believed that this was connected to the creator and orderer of the universe, but for skeptical people, this is hard to verify. But what is plainly evident is that each person does have an inner voice, if he is willing to listen to it. And since this highest of voices within ourselves aims at what is highest, it seems appropriate that sharing techniques for self-transformation may aid in coming to know him.

I reread my essay again, after posting it, and these 3 thoughts came to mind:

The original title I used while writing was, "God, as Believed in by Brendan Golledge". This is actually a more honest title. But, since I'm not a celebrity, I thought it might be better marketing to come up with a different title.

I noticed I used the wrong word once. I wrote "design explosion" when I meant "define explosion". I did this in the AI section where I was talking about an intelligence explosion.

When I wrote about the study that had the 80% and 40% accuracy in detail recall, I thought maybe I didn't explain it right. I talked about it in a paragraph about testimony in court cases, but this study was conducted in an entirely contrived environment. The study had no direct connection to any actual court case. It was a scientific study where participants were asked to recall details from a video, which may have been of an actor who was only pretending to steal. The study found that the participants in the study had more accurate recall if they shared their testimony immediately, rather than after discussing it with a group. I thought that was relevant to testimony in court cases, but the study itself consisted of no testimony of any real crime (so far as I know).

This is a subject I'm really in interested in and, from what I've read, your posts are well written and interesting, but they're way too long. You're covering a lot here, enough for more than one discussion and way too much for just one. Enough for 10 discussions. The forum does not work well for manifestos. If you want things to work out, focusing on a relatively narrow subject is usually necessary.

The forum does not work well for manifestos. If you want things to work out, focusing on a relatively narrow subject is usually necessary. — T Clark

And welcome to TPF!

Looks interesting, still not going to read it.
Why? Because in order to create a discussion your post should be on the dialogical side.
I can't respond to this post.
Make you strongest argument and we can respond to that.
Later on you can start connecting other arguments with our responses.

How God is Experienced:

God, as experienced, seems to have something to do with a projection of a person’s highest values. When a person is thinking about what is most important, and what is most real, he is, in a sense, thinking about God. — Brendan Golledge

I did not read further than this because your initial premise seems to be incorrect, or at least may be.
. .
In mysticism God is explained as misinterpreted meditative experience. There would be no possibility of experiencing God.

This is not to deny the veracity of the experiences, however, and what you say would be true in respect of Being and ultimate truth. .

This means that even your section title, 'How God is Experienced' represents a bold and arguable metaphysical statement. Might be better to start with a less contentious statement or a question such as 'Can God be Experienced'. . . . . . .

In a similar sense as @FrancisRay's question: how can we know that what we "experience as God" is in fact "God" (especially if "God" is not one discrete fact among all other facts)?

I do see that the post is long, and it would be hard to make a reply.

I didn't claim to know with any certainty what God actually is. I discussed how God is experienced. The opening is not a metaphysical claim, but a phenomenological one. If you want to get into metaphysics, you have to get to the "metaphysical speculation" part, which is several sections after the first paragraph.

As an analogy, I could have written an essay titled, "Water, as experienced," and said, "water is seen as a clear liquid and it feels wet." But there could be a philosophical point of view that we actually cannot see water as it is, because it is made of fundamental particles arranged in H2O molecules, and our immediate perception of water gives no indication of this. So then your answer would have been like, "This means that even your section title, 'How Water is Experienced' represents a bold and arguable metaphysical statement." It does not. I made no attempt to describe how God actually is in that paragraph. I call my best guesses about the actual nature of God, "speculation", and I didn't even do that in the first paragraph.

I see your point. But to me a better analogy would be asking how aliens are experienced. The question takes a lot for granted and may have no answer.

If the material world follows the rules of logic, then in order for anything to happen in the material world, it must have been caused by another thing. — Brendan Golledge

I see no reason why that would be necessary.

Aliens make a better analogy than water if you are coming from the point of view that aliens/god may not exist. But if you had actually read the first section (829 words), you would see that I claim that things which we have tangibly experienced were interpreted to have come from God in the past.

Let's assume for the sake of argument that God does not exist at all outside our heads. Then a good analogy for the first section would be something like, "What experiences we have that caused people previously to believe in the existence of phlogiston," or "Phlogiston, as experienced."

If you got to that part, you must have read quite far (or skipped ahead), which I appreciate. But I'm confused on how to reply, since the idea that effects have causes is usually considered properly basic.

According to the logic of that section, I defined logic as the rules of correct inference from assumed premises. So, if the material world follows the rules of logic, then the "premise" of a material event is a material cause. But many thinkers in the past have just skipped that step and assumed that everything that happens has a cause.

Let's assume for the sake of argument that God does not exist at all outside our heads. Then a good analogy for the first section would be something like, "What experiences we have that caused people previously to believe in the existence of phlogiston," or "Phlogiston, as experienced." — Brendan Golledge

This makes sense. It might be worth mentioning up front.

I'm not sure the question is properly answerable. Over the course of seven decades I've had many such experiences but couldn't meaningfully describe them and wouldn't want to on a forum. It's a very personal question for theists and a matter of conjecture for atheists, and I'm neither.

One of the reported components of such experiences is usually a sense of immediate contact with a deeper and more real level of reality than the one we call 'me' and 'my world', When this intuition is externalized it becomes an objectified God; an individual other than ourselves. Regardless of the exact nature of the experience it seems to be this process of conceptualization and externalization that gives rise to the idea of a God from whom we are apart. The Old Testament story of the Golden Calf may be a warning against making this mistake.

I have the impression that this story is usually understood by Christians as saying that God cannot be conceived but that they often miss miss the implication that He cannot be externalized. . . .


.

I think there is wisdom in this statement by Wittgenstein: "Make sure that your religion is between you and God only."

For one thing, we wouldn't need to be concerned about the length of essays on the subject, if we follow that advice.

But this just assumes that everything that is material is an effect. That is not logically necessary. There might be a first material cause that is not an effect.

:fire: :up:

:100: :up:

I remember now why it has been several years since I have posted anything to an online forum. Most of the replies to the content show that they did not read the post (or else they would not have written their reply like that), and/or I get some strange comment denying something fundamental like causality. The only reply I actually appreciate was T Clark's, since he said forthrightly that the post was just too long and he can't address all of it.

I felt your post is a very well written article. I have no problem with the length of the post. I just liked Wittgenstein's quote regarding God and faith in @Ciceronianus post.

The only point I was going to ask was, would it not have been better, if it started with the definition of God, and as the main issue with God in Philosophy is Ontology, i.e. the existence of God, i.e. PROVE does God exist? Where is God? What is God?, then progress into experiencing God, and all the rest?

Maybe you did define God and proved the ontology in the post I am not 100% sure. At the time I quickly scanned the post while having my lunch.

Thank you for your reply and positive review.


You ask, "...would it not have been better, if it started with the definition of God..."

The very first sentence of my essay is: "God, as experienced, seems to have something to do with a projection of a person’s highest values."

So I did provide a definition of God, at least from the phenomenological perspective, in the very first sentence.


As it says in the title, I address God as experienced, and as metaphysical speculation. The "experience" (or phenomenology) of God is self-evident. You can experience it yourself. As I described in the first section, I believe that ancient people attributed their experiences (thoughts & feelings) which arose from the unconscious to gods, angels, and demons. I believe that when Christians believe they are experiencing God, they are probably in-large-part actually experiencing their own conscience. I call this the "Holy Spirit" (since I think that's how most people experience what they call the "Holy Spirit"), and it is the voice inside one's self which aims for what is highest. The whole last section is devoted to techniques for listening to and developing this voice. It's not something you have to take on faith without evidence. You can try it.

The parts on metaphysical speculation are what you would probably think of when looking for something ontological. I believe I make rational arguments, but I do not believe that I have 100% proof. I think I hint at that already in the title with the word "speculation".


I did not like the quote from Wittgenstein because it was another comment that made me think that the poster had not read anything in my essay. The attitude I had when I wrote the essay is, "I want to show you something. Come check it out." When I read that quote, I imagine it is probably in response to religious people who are nosy into other people's business and push ideas on them which no one can verify. But I am constantly concerned with verification throughout the essay. You can try the "as experienced" parts yourself and make a decision for yourself. It's not some made-up dogma that you have to accept on faith. It is in a metaphorical sense, something like a song or a dance which you can try out for yourself. I think I feel similar to how I would if I sung a song and posted it on youtube, and somebody commented, "keep your singing to yourself." Why did you even click on the video if you weren't interested in hearing music? Or is my song really so bad that it should be so summarily dismissed?

The "speculation" section has no final proof in it, but I let you follow along with my logic. So, I think there is really nothing in the whole essay that can't be followed along with. So the answer, "keep it to yourself," very much makes me think that he didn't try it, and probably didn't even read it.



I do not think this document is good for skimming. I wrote VERY compactly. As T Clark wrote, there is enough for 10 discussions. This is basically the culmination of several years of thought (including living at a monastery and reading a dozen books on the topic). It is not something that is meant to be skimmed.

It really is something of a manifesto. I am willing to have a discussion if somebody has questions about it, but I am not in the process of forming my opinion. My opinion is formed, and I am sharing it.

I did not like the quote from Wittgenstein because it was another comment that made me think that the poster had not read anything in my essay. — Brendan Golledge

That's quite true. For what it's worth, let me explain why. You shouldn't take it personally.

People have been telling other people about God for a very long time. People have also believed they have special insight into God and religion (which includes our experience of God) and have wanted to communicate this to other people. for a very long time. This is unremarkable.

In my case, the people who told me about God and their special insight into and knowledge/experience of God were, for the most part, priests, brothers, nuns and lay functionaries of the One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church. My days as a son of Holy Mother Church ended some time ago. But the tendency to testify about one's views and experience of God isn't limited to Catholics, though I wonder if the need to proselytize is a peculiarity of those who adopt one of the Abrahamic religions or were once among their believers.

I'm not sure what it is that moves a person to share observations and speculations regarding God, but I doubt that doing so has ever succeeded in accomplishing anything except, in some cases, convincing someone to accept a belief in a particular kind God or fostering disagreement over whether God exists or if God does exist, what God is in that case. This may reveal something about ourselves, but can hardly be said to tell us anything about God.

Such things may strike some people as important. But, for me, they achieve nothing because, as Wittgenstein also said, God is something regarding which we should (or must) remain silent.

Oh, Tullianus, you cynical ingrate. You should be giving thanks to for explaining how things are. After all, it's not as if anyone else around here ever shares a lifetime of such original thinking...

I'm not sure what it is that moves a person to share observations and speculations regarding God, but I doubt that doing so has ever succeeded in accomplishing anything except, in some cases, convincing someone to accept a belief in a particular kind God or fostering disagreement over whether God exists or if God does exist, what God is in that case. — conceive

Sounds about right.

As an example of phenomenological truth, Genesis says that humans don’t live in paradise, that we don’t live in paradise due to our own actions, that men have to eat by working, that women have pains in childbirth, and they have to look to their husbands. Those things are obviously true to anyone who has lived as a human. The stories used to explain how that came about are not literally true, but the end result does not differ at all from the common human experience, or else it would not have been considered such a meaningful story for so long.

I would highly recommend looking at Jordan Peterson’s Biblical lectures to see a modern take on Biblical wisdom. — Brendan Golledge

I can make little substantive sense out of anything much Peterson says - he frequently seems incoherent. But perhaps it's because I'm not really looking for a replacement Joseph Campbell figure.

Looking at your take on Genesis - I don't see what has been accomplished. Stories used to 'explain' things, whether they are Aesop or Ezra, are still just stories used to explain things. So? Most people today, particularly Christians, seem to be pretty ignorant of the Bible and the stories. Do these tales really make up the fabric of our shared culture, or is this just the prattling of certain writers and academics?

One reading of Genesis (and what follows) might be less charitable. God is petulant, ego maniacal goon. He seems incapable of getting anything right, his creation continually fucks up and breaks things and God's limited solution seems to be retribution and murder. Perhaps this tells us that our ability to conceptualise deities often reflects humanity's worst characteristics. I wonder how we can know when it is good?

You don't seem to be particularly convinced there is a god. That's probably a healthy thing. Are you, as they say, wrestling with faith?

... another comment that made me think that the poster had not read anything in my essay [my entire, overly long, OP]. — Brendan Golledge

:up:

In a similar sense as @FrancisRay's question: How can we know that what we "experience as God" is in fact "God" (especially if "God" is not one discrete fact among all other facts)?

I'll repeat again, for a large part of the essay, I'm not concerned with God-as-such, but with God-as-experienced, which in one aspect means dealing with one's conscience. People have experience of this, and I believe this experience is often what people attribute to God (I actually read several books and essays on prayer, and always came to the conclusion that I can't tell the difference between their testimony of God and of one's conscience). Since dealing with one's conscience is an experience almost as common and fundamental as hunger or sadness, it is entirely reasonable to talk about it from experience.

I've heard several people say that they can't understand anything Jordan Peterson says. I and many other people do think they understand what he is saying. I don't know how to argue about that without trying to put everything Jordan Peterson has said into my own words, and I'm not going to do that.

I thought of another thing I could have put in the essay. I have heard that from the psychological perspective, the conversion from polytheism to monotheism meant that people imagined themselves to be one (at least in ideal) whereas they had not thought like that before. For instance, it has been argued that the ancient Greeks believed in a virtue ethic, where the virtues exist for their own sake. There could be an instance where the virtues are not in perfect agreement, such as in the case of justice and of mercy. One could choose one or the other and be just fine. Since the gods are personifications of our own internal experiences (like I mentioned in the essay, Ares = anger, Aphrodite = lust, etc), if they are many, then we conceive of ourselves as also being many. But If we believe in just one God that is to be properly worshipped, then our best and highest selves (what a Christian probably identifies as his conscience) is just one, and everything not in alignment with that needs to be reformed or cut off.

Francis Ray wrote something earlier which I hadn't noticed, which I like and I think there might be truth in it:
"One of the reported components of such experiences is usually a sense of immediate contact with a deeper and more real level of reality than the one we call 'me' and 'my world', When this intuition is externalized it becomes an objectified God; an individual other than ourselves. Regardless of the exact nature of the experience it seems to be this process of conceptualization and externalization that gives rise to the idea of a God from whom we are apart. The Old Testament story of the Golden Calf may be a warning against making this mistake."
I didn't talk about experiences of sensing a more real level of reality, because I don't have much of that experience, but I believe other people's experience of it has affected religious development.

Jordan Peterson — Brendan Golledge

Oh Christ. Will references to this charlatanical bore never end?

If you’re spending time and effort attempting to figure out the ramblings of Jordan Peterson, your own writing will be the worse for it. Friendly advice.

I thought of another thing I could have put in the essay. I have heard that from the psychological perspective, the conversion from polytheism to monotheism meant that people imagined themselves to be one (at least in ideal) whereas they had not thought like that before. — Brendan Golledge

People imagined the human race to be "one" long before Jesus was a twinkle in his immaculately conceiving mother's eye. It was the position of more than one ancient school of philosophy (think of the Stoics). The concept of the logos, which you referred to previously in a post, was borrowed by Christians from the ancient pagan philosophers. The early Christians were very adept at borrowing. They borrowed even many of the gods of the ancients, in fact, and called them saints.

But If we believe in just one God that is to be properly worshipped, then our best and highest selves (what a Christian probably identifies as his conscience) is just one, and everything not in alignment with that needs to be reformed or cut off. — Brendan Golledge

Or burnt, or stoned, or hung or otherwise executed, or tortured, etc. The belief in one God fostered intolerance and exclusivity, neither of which were characteristic of polytheism.