In one of them GraphicsThe dual comedy is a key and a journey on the road. They decide to listen to some music, and Jordan, Bell, accidentally photograph some special recordings. “This is an audio magazine for my experiences of my human condition,” his voice tells, above the car’s stereo. Despite Pelee’s objections, Kegan-Michael Key insists on continuing-“I want to hear your thoughts about things!” Scream – and the magazine becomes strangest as it continues. “I started seeing myself the reptiles,” said Billy, at some point. Later, the input consists mainly of Bell’s screaming. “Why?!” He cries. “Ahhhhhhh!”
Sometimes, familiar people turn into strange ideas of imagination. This seems to be the case with Ross Diatat, Times The column writer, his new book,Believe: Why should everyone be religious“He goes to unexpected places. Diatat, which Isaac Chotner described as” the preferred conservative commentator in liberal America “in A. Introduction account For this magazine, it is known as a specific level. He specializes in presenting progressive readers with ideas that they temporarily reject, and in expressing questions that tend to disturb conservatives – have America become degraded? Do we need new sexual “ethics”?-In ways that make it available to left-wing thinkers. It is not easy for the governor to destroy the liberal party; The guard at the gate will raise it away. But Dothtas wanders through a side door, mixed slightly, and leaves an interesting book on the kitchen table, highlighting several clips.
He has Times The column, Doththat dedicates a lot of space for religion, which he usually studies through a social or political lens. (Earlier this year, for example, is to request Whether the current “wave of secularism” and its contracts are contracts that may be directed, which gives way to religious recovery). His intended readers are not skeptical in the wool wool of Richard Dukens group, who find a ridiculous religious religious. Its main goal is to reach people who feel curious about faith, or “spiritual” but they are not religious. (According to some investigative studies, up to a third of Americans see themselves in this way.) If you are in this camp, you may have a general feeling of the inability of existence, or you think there is more than what science can describe. You may not know, or even an atheist, while you also feel that the rituals of religion, rhythms and situations can enrich life and connect it to others; Its practices drew our attention to what really matters. At the same time, you may not be able to accept the idea that Jesus has actually rose again on the third day.
If this is you, Dothtios want you to move positively in the direction of concrete belief and official ideological commitment. “This is not a book on how religious stories are useful psychological, whatever the content of the truth,” he writes, “or how to embrace the mystery of existence to make you happy a day.” Diasat argues that you should be religious because the religion, as it was traditionally perceived, is correct; In fact, this is not only true, but despite the rise of science. The most surprising confirmation, and perhaps reckless is that scientific progress has increased the chances of “religious perspectives closer to the truth than the purely secular views of the world.”
At least the nineteenth century, the theologians have complained of the “god of gaps” – a modern version of God, which only occupies those parts of reality. Darwin specifies one of this gap: before he discovered development by natural selection, God had created all life on Earth in a literal way; Today, our understanding of development has fallen into the divine influence, if you believe in it, for some time before Darwini, perhaps even before the Earth (or before the Big Bang). The problem of believing in the god of gaps is that the gaps shrink with the progress of science.
One of the solutions is believing in a more abstract type than God. The writer Karen Armstrong argued, for example, that, for most history, God was experienced as something “bypassed our thoughts and concepts.” Therefore, religion was not a set of beliefs that could be proven or refuted but a group of practices, which are often characterized by “silence, retaining, and dread”, which could bring us closer to divinity that we could not really described. From this perspective, it seems that the problem of the god of the gap can be avoided; It may actually be better to see God more abstract, as something that does not fit easily with the material world. In her book “The issue of God“Armstrong The Theological Ball Telic, who suggested that the concept of God who is able to” interfere in natural events “was defeating himself: by making God in” a natural being next to others, an object among others “, brought the divine on earth, and created conditions” Any meaningful idea from God. “
In “belief”, the rebels are Disatat against these attempts to control the scale of God; Each of the approach of the god of the gap is resisting to a minimum and increased abstraction suggested by thinkers such as Armstrong and Tlleich. First of all, it confirms that the gaps actually expand: from a survey study of speculative ideas in physics, neuroscience and biology, it concludes that “the convergence of different forms of evidence” indicates an activity towards the existence of a traditional deity. Second, he argues that, even in our supposed secular world, it is still reasonable to believe in a supernatural god that reaches Earth and affects our lives. David Hume, a philosopher in the eighteenth century known as his experimental endeavor, expected that with the growth of the world more rational and scientific, people will stop the existence of supernatural experiences, which is believed to be more common between “ignorant and barbaric countries”. Dothtat notes that this did not happen. About a third of the Americans “claim that they have suffered or saw a miracle healing,” as noted, and ordinary people still have internal experiences of different types. (A. 2023 survey Douthat found that nearly four out of ten answers believe that the dead can communicate with living.) Religious experience is a “brutal truth”, as Diasat writes, shared between billions of people, and “its secrets are crying constantly for the sake of interpretation” just as they have always.
Dosthat devotes a large part of “faith” by confirming the validity of supernatural experiences – barriers, ghosts, mysterious confrontations, divine recovery, and even demonic visits. It assumes “a world of supernatural minds above and around the world of matter.” In his profile, Chotiner explains that Diasat’s mother, who suffered from chronic illness, sought relief not only from alternative doctors but in the church services in which people fell on the ground and spoke in tongues. Diasat wrote: “The openness was on the tigers and the extraordinary that I urged it to secular readers in these pages, in some sense, organizing my childhood.” He had never had extensive and unreasonable experiences himself, but he became sure that what others saw were “not just a trick of mental persuasion, the madness of crowds, or any other disciplined interpretation you might look for.”
He wants us, in short, to believe, just as he did. But does he say that everything is true-retired saints, separation of the Red Sea, “What is called the sun’s miracle in Phantima, Portugal”, in 1917, when “the sun appeared dancing in front of tens of thousands of witnesses”? What about inspired acid trips, “magic and magic, fairies or religion”? Diasat answer is yes, to some extent; In his opinion, these types of experiences should be considered possible, even if the methods in which weird bees are revealed. His theory is that when he penetrates the super world to the real world, our perceptions also collapse; We end up with the experience of God as much as we can, using any ideas we have on hand. (In his novel, one of the reasons for adhering to the traditional religion is that he organizes the ideas through which we face the divine.) With Tyler, and “and to request Diasat said that his views on foreign bodies could include actual foreigners in the actual spacecraft. But “direct reading of data,” continued, you can completely lead to “to be more than normal, and he says that there are creatures – pardon my language – sex with us.” (“I am trying to be openly open,” he added. This means that you can believe in the big picture without believing in small things – or believe in small things as well, if you want. Reasonable for living experiences of your human colleagues.
Full disclosure: I am skeptical in wool wool-Maadi, with a scientific vision mainly for things-so I am not the reader intended in the book of Disat. I found myself objected to almost all his arguments, especially scientific arguments. Diasat calls for “precise control”: the idea that if the physical laws and constants in the universe are slightly different, then life will be on the ground and its existence itself is impossible. This may be true: we may not be here if gravity works differently, or if the speed of light is faster or slower. But some people take the matter further, on the pretext that the accurate control of the universe indicates that God has designed it for our benefit. Dosthat presents this friendly opinion as if it was the discovery of modern science. However, it is far from the perspective of consensus – the vast majority of physicists who do not embrace it – and has no meaning like the logical issue. Even if you are thinking that humanity has won the kind of the lottery of physics, winning the share does not mean that you are aimed at winning it. You may feel that you won “some reason”, but the fact that the random process has a result that does not make it less random. “The reason” comes from you.
Diasters raises what some philosophers call “the problem of difficult awareness” – a question about how to raise the physical issue of the brain into self -experiences that we have as conscious organisms. (How to become a Gloopy network of nerve cells is an individual that can say “I”? How does the motivation of the visual cortex create a sense of red color?) According to contaminations, there was no objective progress in the difficult problem, and its ability to the door opens supernatural interpretations of a mental life (among them The idea that “the mind may precede the article”). It is completely true that some philosophers believe in the existence of the difficult problem; Some neuroscientists also recognize this. But even among those who adopted the term, there is no consensus that “difficult” means completely impossible, which requires a completely different view of reality. Diasat simply goes beyond the ideas that can Provide alternatives To the most extreme descriptions of the issue. Likewise, it escalates a short journey to quantum physics, which requires the aspects based on the observer for quantum reality. (Remember the Schrödinger, which is alive and death until you look at the box?) It confirms that this line of thinking requires that someone or something has seen the universe since its inception. But the idea that the observer should be a conscious entity – as it is against a tool, such as the Jejir counter, or just another material system – is a speculative idea, which will not be supported by most physicists.
