The Meaning of Life

When I was a Christian, one of the biggest comforts was having a well defined purpose to life. The greatest thing was to glorify God. That's easy to do on Sunday, but I figured that if God was as incredible as Christianity claimed, it was worth honoring God every day of my life. After thinking about this for a while, I decided God must care an awful lot about humanity, and seeking the advancement and peace of human civilization was the primary method of bringing God glory on a daily basis. This kind of thinking is supported by Bible texts such as "If you love me, feed my lambs", the parable of the talents, and the parable of the sheep and goats.

Psychologically, losing meaning in life was one of the three hardest parts about converting from Christianity to Atheism. However, I soon realized that removing God from the equation didn't have to change anything. I could still find meaning through the advancement of human civilization.

As a result, I've become interested in the origin and destiny of civilization. I consider a group of people to be a "civilization" when there exists a caste of the population that spends a large portion of time in activities other than the acquisition of food and reproduction. So a group of hunters living in caves wouldn't be a civilization until there is some kind of a chieftain or shaman who is supported through food from the other villagers. Civilization can't advance until people have leisure time to spend on art and science, so the beginning of civilization is when some people first have this free time.

Humans have made three major discoveries that were necessary for civilization to begin. They are language, fire, and agriculture. Language is required to share the complex, learned concepts that are the basis of civilization. Fire is required for cooking, which increases the nutritional value of food, thereby increasing the lifespan and health of the population. And farming is the most crucial of all. Through farming, a group of people can produce more food than they can consume. This both provides a buffer against years of famine and allows a segment of the population to spend time on things other than food production.

Once those three things were in place, the stage was set for the rapid advancement of technology, resulting in a far higher standard of living and population than humans had ever seen. The past 10,000 years of life on Earth have put the previous millions to shame. Of the many things humans have invented and discovered, however, I'd like to list what I consider the most important discoveries. All of these you use on a daily basis, probably without even thinking about it. They are:

Writing:

Creating a writing system is not as easy as most people would think. There's an excellent discussion of why this is hard in the book Guns, Gems and Steel. The basic issue is that pictorial systems (like the Chinese alphabet) require memorizing a different symbol for each word, so learning the system difficult. And phonetic systems require a stronger understanding of phonetic units than most people have, to the extent that most people learn English spelling without even understanding the phonetic backing.

The Wheel and Roads:

These two inventions together are necessary to move large quantities of goods over long distances, and is a crucial part of trade with other cultures. Trade is the mechanism by which different cultures share their discoveries.

Currency:

In trade and barter systems, it's easy for a baker who wants meat and a butcher who wants bread to work out a deal. But what happens when the butcher instead wants a knife, the blacksmith wants a table, and its the carpenter who wants bread? Now you have to orchestrate a four way trade. When you expand this problem even to a town of just 1000 people, its complexity as an NP complete problem becomes apparent. Money provides a linear time solution. Every trades what they have for money, then trades the money for what they want.

Mathematics:

Most of the time, having directions or instructions is meaningless unless they are precise. Understanding the relationships between numbers is required for measurements, trades, and general mechanics.

Plumbing:

Once you have even 10,000 people living in the same general area, getting fresh water and removing sewage becomes a genuine problem. Without a good system of moving water, the population is much more likely to contract and spread diseases. Sewers make cities less susceptible to plagues.

The Printing Press:

Even if you have a written language, the production of written documents is time consuming without a printing press. The press allows for mass production of books, which in turn puts written materials in the hands of the common person. That makes it the precursor of widespread education. Historically, the printing press was also one predecessor of the Protestant Reformation, as it enabled the Bible to be translated out of Latin and into a language the average person understood (at least if it were read to them).

Electricity:

Fire is a powerful source of energy, but it's difficult to use. Contrast this with electricity, a power source that can be transmitted over large distances and even stored for later use. Among its many uses, electricity provided more efficient means of lighting buildings. This in turn meant humans could be productive for more hours in the day. It also created more efficient climate control systems for buildings, which allowed humans to live in harsher climates. And it enabled the creation of more efficient factories using the assembly line for production.

Radio Communication:

Three thousand years ago, kings were happy that their exact instructions could be written down and sent to another place in the kingdom within a month or less. But due to the discovery of radio waves, encoded messages can be broadcast across thousands of miles in mere seconds. With radio communication, decisions require crucial information can be made in minutes rather than weeks or even months.

The Internet:

I am convinced that the internet is by far the greatest invention of our generation. While radio and television allowed rich corporations and governments to communicate quickly and easily, the internet has put that power in the hands of the everyone. Massive amounts of data can be send anywhere on the entire planet in a matter of seconds due to the power of the internet. It has brought about an era in which anyone with access to a computer can express their thoughts. And if Twitter is any indication, almost none of it is worth reading. But I hope that this blog can be one corner of the internet where the information is worthwhile.

When I see how far humans have come, I'm excited for the future. Some other week I'll write about some options for what The Next Big Thing(tm) might be. But given the increasingly rapid pace of technology development, it could be something we see in our lifetime. You might notice that everything on this list has to do with more efficient movement of ideas, matter, or energy, so that's a clue for what kinds of technology this next century could bring.

Love Thy Neighbor

Earlier this week, a reader made an interesting comment on my God of Stone post. Bryan analyzed the logic in the post and pointed out that it seemed to argue both in favor of and against revisionism in religion. My argument is actually progressive in nature. I favor revision religion when it's an improvement for humanity and I'm against revisions that are not. For example, removing the moral restrictions on eating pork is a good revision. Praying to a statue of the infant Jesus is not.

As a reminder to newer readers, I am not a Christian anymore, although I was a highly devout one for thirty years. For an explanation of why I left my religion behind, you can read the posts In The Cleft of the Rock, The Man Behind The Curtain, and The Emperor's New God. I am now a humanitarian agnostic. In other words, I'm not sure if God exists, but I believe morality and ethics have meaning even outside the context of God.

While I don't agree with everything the Bible says, I certainly understand the perspective of those that do. Having studied the Bible for decades, I'm convinced that the biblical authors had a similar perspective-- that the true measure of morality and immorality is whether an action helps or hurts humanity. Furthermore, religious authorities in the Bible had no problems revising laws when the new law provided a greater benefit to humanity.

The clearest statement of this philosophy comes from Jeremiah 7. Jeremiah has received a message from God for the people is Israel and soundly chastised them for their idolatry and other immoralities. Then in verse 19, it says:

"But am I the one they are provoking?" declares the Lord. "Are they not rather harming themselves, to their own shame?"

In other words, no amount of immorality can possibly harm God. The whole reason things like idolatry are sinful is that they harm the sinner, by pushing them away from a God that loves them and will bless them with his presence.

This is a crucial argument. Given the premises of the Christian religion, it is absolutely impossible to harm God. Because God loves humanity, he wants them to prosper. Therefore, the only things that God considers sin are those things that work against the humans he loves. So if something doesn't harm any portion of humanity, it cannot be a sin.

Things are only sinful if they harm humanity.

I encourage Christians to stop thinking about God as a random set of likes and dislikes. "God liked Jews and hated pigs. Then later he decided pigs were alright, but homosexuality was still bad." That's just irrational. If you believe in intelligent design as most Christians do, then you need to accept that your God is rational and work from there. God likes stuff that helps humanity and hates stuff that hurts humanity. He might have a better understanding of what "help" and "hurt" mean, but that's as simple as it gets.

When you view the evolution of religion as a gradual improvement on rules that benefit humanity, many stories in the Bible make more sense. For example, in Genesis 9:3-4, Noah has just survived the Ark, and God changes the law of what food humans are allowed to eat. Before the flood, humanity was supposed to be strictly vegetarian, but now God says it's okay to eat animals. Why did God revise his law? Animals were no different than they were before the flood, and now there are fewer of them. Either you think this story is factually true, in which case God must have changed his mind. Or you think this is just a story, so at least the Bible's author has revised the religious law. In either case though, the reason for the revision is clear-- the new law benefits humanity more than the old law did.

God isn't the only important religious figure who revised the Judaeo-Christian religion. Jesus did too, in his Sermon on the Mount. Starting at Matthew 5:17, Jesus says:

Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them.

He then proceeds to give nearly a dozen different examples of things people should do different from what the Torah (the law from Moses) instructs or permits. Here are some of these:

• Insulting people is sinful
• Looking at a woman lustfully is as bad as adultery
• Divorcing a woman who has not been unfaithful is sinful
• You should not seek retribution on people who have offended you
• Love your enemies

The entire Sermon on the Mount was a revision of the Torah, or at least a reinterpretation. If Jesus said he didn't come to abolish the law and then proceeded to contradict the Torah, then the Torah must not be the law he was talking about. The simplest explanation is that the Torah is merely one interpretation of the laws "Love your God" and "Love your neighbor as yourself". This interpretation can be improved, and that's exactly what Jesus set out to do in his Sermon on the Mount.

If God was willing to revise his own law and Jesus could revise the law God gave to Moses, then everyone who believes the stories in the Bible must logically conclude that revising religious laws can be a good thing, as long as the new law does a better job of loving your God and neighbor. Sometimes the Bible got it wrong and needs to be improved with a good dose of common sense. If Jesus did it and Christians are supposed to act like Jesus, they should not be afraid to apply common sense to their religious text either.

And while I'm not a Christian anymore, this is the reason I believe that every Christian should be pro-gay. There is nothing about homosexuality that is inherently harmful to any human. It makes the couple happy, so logically there's no reason it should offend God. If there are rules against it in the Bible, then maybe those authors just didn't hear from God correctly and people should reconsider whether a ban on homosexuality actually embodies "love your neighbor". It's not at all loving to telling two consenting adults that they cannot marry each other just because they are of the same gender.

God of Stone

A few weeks ago, I found a Catholic religious pamphlet in a subway car extolling The Infant Jesus of Prague. According to the pamphlet, praying devotions to the statue will cause God to intervene on your behalf and bless you with prosperity. Most non-religious people would regard such claims with mild amusement and derision, but I found myself deeply offended. My issue was not with the mystical claims, but the encouragement to pray to a statue. It goes directly against one of the Ten Commandments, something all Christian denominations (including Catholics) uphold to this day.

The second command says, in abridged form, "do not make or worship any idol". This command was ostensibly from God himself. It doesn't say, "do not worship idols unless they are of me or my messiah". The text is very clear. So when the Catholic church simultaneously says "don't worship any statues" and "give reverence to the Infant Jesus of Prague", they are being logically inconsistent. More than anything, I am offended at the irrationality of the claims. The Catholic church cannot have it both ways. I'm sure they would claim that this is not really idolatry because the statue is of Jesus, the true God. But the actual text in the ten commandments is clear that no physical object should be worshiped, even ones that represent God.

When I went to church as a child, I was taught that the Bible's warnings against idolatry were really a warning against making other things more important than God. In other words, if you value your friends or your grades higher than God, then you've made those things into an idol. While this explanation makes logical sense given the premise that nothing is more important than God, it is fundamentally reinterpretive. When the authors of the Bible warned against idolatry, they really were warning against worshiping stone statues. Now some of the post-exilic writings contain threads reminiscent of the modern reinterpretation, such as the Book of Haggai.

But I wonder how much reinterpretation is too much. Is it really fair to say that the Torah really meant to say, "idolatry is making anything more important than God?" If that statement is true, why does it matter whether the Torah said it or not? The source of a statement doesn't matter as much as the content. It is better to let the ancient writings say what they say, and be honest about our revision. "We allow people to eat pork because there's no good reason to disallow it, even though the Torah says otherwise."

Ancient religions depend on modern reinterpretation to remain relevant today. Or put another way, religions that fail to remain relevant lose followers. I believe this is why there are so many different religions and sects. The religions that have survived for millenniums are those that are most tolerant of revision. Christians and even many liberal Jews have no problems eating pork or letting women wear pants, something that would have shocked Moses. Even one hundred years ago, interracial marriage was outlawed nearly every Christian church in America. I suspect that in another hundred years, the majority of Christian churches will marry gay couples. When a religious law no longer has practical benefits, the religion always revises itself, even if it's a century too late.

This makes me wonder, however, why religions are so willing to revise their laws but so hesitant to revise their gods. The status of legendary religious figures does change slowly over time though. For example, in pre-exilic writings, Satan is portrayed as a henchman of God whose job is to test humanity. After the Babyblonian exile, Satan becomes the adversary of God whose job is to destroy humanity. The clear concept of the messiah doesn't appear in Jewish writings until this time either, although post-exilic rabbis began to interpret the Torah as if it subtly implied a messiah. And the Christian church didn't official decide Jesus was actually God (not just the son of God) until a few centuries after his crucifixion. But in the grand scheme of things, the identity of a religious figure changes much slower than the interpretation of a religious law.

Perhaps the application of ancient laws to modern life produces a stronger discorde than imagining diefic powers operating in Manhattan. The revision of religious figures only seems to occur after the religion's followers as a whole face extreme persecution-- the Babylonian captivity, or Christian oppression under Roman emperors.

From my perspective though, I don't see much of the use of these religious figures. There's a lot of good philosophy in Christianity, and that is worth keeping. But the concepts of God, Jesus, and Satan don't have any real impact on my life. I used to imagine they did in the same way early Jews worshiped idols of Baal. God was my idol of stone, and I realized the good Christian philosophy didn't have anything to do with praying to Jesus. Revising my concept of God might shock modern Christians, but to me it's no different from revising prohibitions on pork. In the end, all religious philosophies evolve to become a set of rules that benefit society as a whole. Dieties aren't required.

A Change of Perspective

This past Thursday was the American holiday of Thanksgiving. President Abraham Lincoln instituted the holiday as an annual occurrence, although the story hearkens to a tale in 1621 of how the native American ("Indians") welcomed the British colonists ("Pilgrims") to American, and how the Pilgrims gave thanks to God for the safety of the Atlantic voyage. Over the centuries, the religious factor was de-emphasized and the holiday was rewritten as a story of the Indians greeting the Pilgrims with a feast, and the Pilgrims thanking the Indians for their hospitality.

It's a fabricated holiday in that the actual feast probably didn't occur, but instead captures the spirit of thankfulness the Pilgrims had. These days, Thanksgiving is a holiday to get together with family and (hopefully) be thankful for the good things in your life. So for most people that means travel, a big meal, and the stress of being with people you might not get along with. But you still have the opportunity for thankfulness if you want to take it.

There's a lot of value in thinking positively. I'm not talking about pretending bad things are good, or completely ignoring things that are obviously issues. Rather I'm referring to appreciating the good things, and not letting problems get in the way of that appreciation. When nine things go well and one thing goes wrong, it's easy to focus on the negative-- it's the part that needs your attention. Everyone sees their current set of problems as the biggest mountain in the world, even if it's really just a molehill in the grand scheme of things.

I've written a lot about the importance accepting that things can't be perfect, even though it's good to strive for it. But that's different from being happy. When you work hard on something and some parts work out while others don't, you can accept this fact with a depressed attitude or with a joyful one. The attitude you pick won't change the world at all, so you might as well pick what makes you happiest. Focusing on the positive things can be hard, but it's a simple thing that makes your entire life better.

So with that in mind, I'm taking this opportunity to remember the successful portions of BrainWorks:

• Highly realistic aiming
• Intelligent item pickup selection
• Context dependent weapon selection
• Awareness and scanning that lets players try to outsmart bots
• Dynamic feedback systems that let bots learn as they play

If you've read this blog for a while, you'll know there's a few things I'm not happy with. But to me at least, the project was overall a big success. I met or exceeded the objectives I set and I'm very happy with the results of the AI.

Last, working on this project provided an enormous amount of personal growth which I am also thankful for:

• Increased self-confidence
• More self-responsibility
• Freedom from the burdens of Christianity
• Less perfectionistic
  
• More optimistic
• Greater joy in life

Working on BrainWorks forced me to take an enormous amount of responsibility. I thought my God would come through for me, but things only came together when I took responsibility for myself. I'm sure the Christian readers will say that this was just God's way of building me up in strength. My perspective is that I finally realized there was no Christian God. But if what really happened was God gave me strength by teaching me not to believe or trust in him anymore, then praise God for that, and I'll continue following his instructions of relying on my own strength.

In short, I feel like I've won at life. This isn't the hardest project I'll ever work on, and not everything in my life is perfect. But working on BrainWorks gave me so much joy and freedom that I know I can handle whatever else life has in store for me. I'm still relatively young (barely into my thirtys) and I figured out the purpose of my life. I love making awesome things, and I plan on doing that as long as I'm alive.

Ignorance Is Bliss

Having written twice about the dangers of believing everything you are told, I'd like to give some face time to the opposing argument:

Ignorance is bliss.

It's all well and good to say, "You should understand things, not just follow blindly." But to be pragmatic, there is only one time this is a serious improvement: when the blind belief is wrong. What about the times that blind belief is right? Humans survived for centuries without understanding how gravity truly worked and that didn't stop them from creating some awesome things. They were even able to use the fact that "things fall towards the ground" to great effect, such as building water clocks, without ever learning Kepler's laws of motion.

Even if someone did want to totally understand the world today, it wouldn't be possible. There is such a vast corpus of information that learning even 1% of it is literally impossible in the span of a human life. Mathematicians who are experts in their field rarely have the chance to keep up on other branches of mathematics, to say nothing of physics, chemistry, or medicine.

The fact of the matter is that most of the information we've been told is correct. If I get a bus that says "Downtown" as its destination, it really is going there. The driver could take it anywhere but I'm very certain that the destination is downtown. When I order a meal at a restaurant, I take it for granted that the cook can actually make the things on the menu and that I'll be served food that's reasonable close to the description provided. The waitress serves me food assuming that I will pay the price listed. I suspect that less than 1 in 10,000 people really understands what a computer does when you turn it on, but hundreds of millions of people use a computer every day. Understanding is a luxury, not a necessity.

Like it or not, our lives as humans are anchored in faith, not reason and understanding, and this is the cornerstone of the religion well all share: Causality. If we do something ten times in a row and got the same result, we expect that the eleventh time will produce the same result. And it does, even though we rarely know why. Understanding everything is impossible, and the whole purpose of culture is to provide structure so that everyone can use the discoveries other people made.

If that's the case, why bother thinking about anything at all? Why not let someone else do your thinking for you? The primary purpose of education isn't to give people information, but to teach them how to think. And most importantly, to teach them when to think. Thinking is really important in uncharted waters. In any situation that doesn't match your typical life experience, thinking will give you a much better idea of what to do than trying something at random.

Unsurprisingly, the same problem comes up in artificial intelligence. There's only so much processor time to go around. So if seven bots all need the same piece of information and they will all come to roughly the same conclusion, it's much faster to do a rough computation once and let them all use those results. This leads to an information dichotomy, where there's general "AI Information" and "Bot specific information". Each bot has its own specific information, but shares from the same pool of general information. In BrainWorks, all bots share things like physics predictions and the basic estimation of an item's value. If a player has jumped off a ledge, there's no reason for every bot to figure out when that player will hit the bottom. It's much faster to work it out once (the first time a bot needs to know) and if another bot needs to know, it can share the result.

These are the kinds of optimizations that can create massive speed improvements, making an otherwise difficult computation fast. If you think about it, it's not that different from one person researching the effects of some new medicine and then sharing the results with the entire world.

Social Mentality

I cannot help but comment on the results of the recent American presidential election, in which Barack Obama became the first non-white to be elected president. As a jaded American, I recognize that America has its share of both wonders and problems. But I have never been more proud of America than I was on this past election night. To me, the election of Barack Obama is symbolically a major victory in America's war against racism. And were Obama the Republican candidate and McCain the Democratic one, I would be no less overjoyed. Some things in life are more important than what percent of a candidate's positions we agree with.

I want to stress that this election is a victory over racism, not slavery. Most cultures in pre-modern times practiced slavery, but it was enslavement of people from the same ethnic background. Slavery in America and the Caribbean isles differed from other forms in slavery in that the belief was also coupled with a sentiment of racial superiority. So even after the abolition of slavery in 1863, the underlying tone of racism permeated much of American life. In contrast, the Britain empire outlawed slavery in 1833, but their enslavement wasn't particularly racially biased, so their past two centuries haven't been filled with racial tension. Abraham Lincoln won the war on slavery in 1865, but completely decimating the southern American states couldn't change the racist opinions that much of the country still retained. The election of Barack Obama to the office of President is proof that a large percent of America is now racially blind-- the ethnic background of a candidate is not a reason to select against them.

Of course, not all of America feels that way. That's why this election is a sign of major progress on the issue of racial discrimination, but it doesn't represent the end of it. Looking at the final electoral vote distribution, this election was heavily slanted towards Barack Obama but unanimous. For example, Alabama and Mississippi again voted for the conservative candidate as they've done for decades. But Virginia and North Carolina both voted for Barack Obama, two states that split away from America during the American Civil War because they wanted the right to keep slavery legal (among other things).

This might seem like a trite point, but each major population center in America has its own local way of thinking. People in Los Angeles are more liberal than people in Salt Lake City, for example. The southern states tend to be more conservative than New England states. And the way they vote is a reflection of their local societal beliefs. If this were not the case, every city and state would vote exactly the same way. There's nothing magical about the geography that makes people think in certain ways. The social mentality is a purely contained in the minds of all people in that local society, and if you think about it, that is an incredible thing.

For North Carolina to vote for a black man 147 years after it tried to secede from the United States, the entire cultural mentality had to change. It does not change quickly either. It wasn't until all the adults of that generation died, along their children and grandchildren, that the majority of the state decided that maybe blacks and whites were equals. That should be a sign of how easy it is to believe the first thing you're told and how hard it is to consider outside opinions.

More often than not, people belong to the political party and religion of their parents, quite apart from the actual merits of those positions. Over 90% of America is Christian and well under 10% of India is Christian, despite extensive missionary work. Even if there were strong, logical reasons to believe in the Christian religion, it's clear that those reasons are not why America is a Christian nation. If those reasons were so logically compelling, then India would be a Christian nation too.

Like it or not, if your political and religious views closely match your family's and city's views, the odds are high that you haven't thought very hard about them. That doesn't mean your beliefs are wrong, but if they are right, you probably don't know why they are. It means you accept the basic beliefs of society's "hive mind", and you've ceded some of your thinking.

While this can be dangerous, accepting society's beliefs without too many questions can be really helpful. I'm not advocating, "question everything", but, "question everything important". You might be wondering why that is, and what this has to do with Artificial Intelligence. Next week I'll explain what I mean.

The Emperor's New God

Last week, I ended by explaining how I came to realize I didn't have a relationship with God. In short, I empirically tested whether or not God was speaking his words into my mind and I concluded that at least some of the time, things that "felt" like they were from God were not. Specific things I thought God had promised me didn't happen, so that must not have been from God. Moreover, even simple thoughts that were no more specific than a horoscope were also no more accurate. In short, I realized I had no evidence to conclude I had ever communicated with a higher power. And lacking a relationship with God, I realized I was not a Christian.

That is not the same thing as giving up my faith.

Indeed, for a few months I desperately wanted "back in". There is a categorical difference between not having a relationship with God and being unable to have that relationship. Even to this day, if it turns out God exists, then I really want a relationship with that God. Who wouldn't want to be friends with the creator of the universe?

So having lost the evidence supporting my religious faith, I started from first principles, to see if the tenets of Christianity logically made sense. In other words, I wanted to logically test whether Christianity was truth but modern Christians had pursued the faith in the wrong manner, or if the religion just didn't make sense and I should give up on it altogether.

For those of you who aren't that familiar with Christianity, here is the core doctrine:

God loves people, but God is perfect and righteous, and therefore cannot allow sin to exist in his presence. Because all humans are innately sinful and God loves them in spite of this, God devised a plan that would allow him to have a close relationship with humans on an individual level. God sent Jesus, who is himself fully God and fully human, to live a perfect, sinless life and then become a penitence sacrifice for all of humanity. Jesus suffered the penalty of death instead of me so that I could live and have a relationship with God. And Jesus.

When I broke the dogma down to this description, there were three potential logical issues that I spotted. If any one of these things is false, the religion doesn't make logical sense. Here are the issues:

• Why can't God let sin exist in his presence?
• Why is the penalty for sin death?
• Why is someone else dieing for my sin considered justice?

According to the Bible, Jesus spent a lot of time with prostitutes, drunkards, and other "sinners", expressly because these were the people who needed ministering the most. If Jesus is fully God, why wasn't Jesus bothered being around sin? That sounds like a strong logical contradiction.

I don't have a problem accepting that everyone is a "sinner", meaning that no one lives a perfectly righteous life, never mistreating or hurting other humans, or taking advantage of them. But why is it fair that living unrighteously should be met by death? Jesus himself talks about how some sins are worthy of greater punishments than others, and a spiritual death in hell is clearly the worst punishment someone could earn. By and large, most people never do anything so disruptive to society that death is a just punishment for them. It doesn't make logical sense that all kinds of unrighteousness should be worthy of the same death sentence.

Last, there's the question of why, if I'm guilty and deserving a death, it's fair for someone else to die on my behalf. This kind of thing goes against the basic philosophy of penal systems. If I'm sentenced to serve 10 years in prison, the courts don't consider it fair if someone else chooses to serve 10 years instead, or even 30 years. That option is simply not allowed because it doesn't even relate to the issue at hand. The Bible supports this opinion as well, according to Ezekiel 18:20:

The soul that sins shall die. The son shall not bear the iniquity of the father, neither shall the father bear the iniquity of the son.

Historically there have been some penal systems that allowed, by consent, some people to receive the punishment intended for others. The result has always been that rich people pay poor people to serve sentences for them, and in most cases the systems were changed to disallow this abuse. So if I really am worthy of death for my sins, I don't logically understand why it would be okay for Jesus to die instead of me. That simply doesn't make sense.

I sent this list of questions four Christians whose opinions I respected. All of them were pastors at the time or had been in the past, and two of them had served time as missionaries in the third world as well. Of them, one actually tried to answer the questions. Two said they would think about it and get back to me, which never happened. The last didn't even respond. And all the answers I received boiled down to, "God knows better than you. It makes sense to God and that's what matters."

I'm sorry, but that's not a strong enough argument for me to base my life around a religion. The overall silence spoke louder than words and confirmed what I had suspected all along: the Christian religion is fundamentally flawed. A God might exist, and I certainly hope he does. But he is not the Christian God. A sentient being that could create the beautiful physics behind our universe can create a religion that doesn't have glaring logical holes in the core of its doctrine.

Now all that said, I'm still a big supporter of many Christian ideals as they relate to society. "Love your neighbor as yourself" is a good general rule for life, and creates a society that's better for everyone as a whole. Just because I've given up religion doesn't mean I've given up ethics.

At any rate, thanks for taking the time to hear my story. Next week I promise I'll be back with more AI themed discussion.

The Man Behind the Curtain

Last week I wrote about the Christian philosophy I had. The basic conclusion was that if someone has sufficiently strong reason to believe in a religion, nothing external from that religion can ever make them lose faith. Rather you will see them modify the fringes of their beliefs to fit whatever counter-evidence they encounter, without changing the core beliefs.

For example, a Christian may start claiming that God created the world in seven days. When presented with scientific data demonstrating the world is older than 6000 years, they might claim Satan just planted the dinosaur bones so deceive people into believing God doesn't exist. (Yes, I've heard someone present argument in all seriousness.) The more rational believers can apply Occam's Razor to this situation and conclude that maybe "day" isn't the right translation, and perhaps end at the conclusion that God used evolution to create humans. But no amount of external (scientific) evidence will convince a believer that their religion is wrong. I was familiar with all of those arguments and they didn't make me lose my faith in God. Only an internal inconsistency could fracture my faith.

I moved to California in the middle of 2000, a year and a half before I started work on BrainWorks. I started the project by programming on evenings and weekends, but after almost a year I realized that writing truly good AI would take more time than that. My wife and I talked about the options, and after a lot of time spent in prayer, we came to a rather dangerous conclusion. I decided to quit my day job and work on BrainWorks full time as a way of building my portfolio, live off savings, and then look for a job in the game industry. Even though this was a crazy idea, we felt assured by God in our prayers of four things:

• God would provide for us
• God would vindicate this audacious decision to others upon completion
  
• I would truly meet God through the work I did
• I would finish the project before we left the state of California

In the years following, we would return in prayer during difficult times, and also ask for the prayers from others, and we were continually encouraged when we heard these promises repeated, both in our minds and from the words of others.

Concurrently, there were other issues we had lifted up in prayer. Most notably I had back problems for over a decade. Having tried multiple chiropractors, doctors, physical therapists, exercises, and received countless prayer on the issue, I was at a loss. Nothing seemed to work. But I believed in a God that could do real miracles, and healing my back was certainly not the hardest of them. After years of prayer, I kept hearing that God really was going to heal my back, at the proper time, and that receiving healing was about more than just freedom from physical pain. It was about encountering God in a deeper way, which is why the timing mattered and why God didn't just heal me immediately. We felt like God spoke to us that he would give me full healing for my back before we left California. In some sense, our sojourn in California was an opportunity to witness the miraculous works of God, in my work and in my life, and to encounter God.

So what happened? In case there is any doubt about the story's outcome, let me set the record straight. While we did have enough to live while I was unemployed, I did not "encounter God" through the work. I received a job offer in Boston in January of 2007, which my wife and I prayed about and decided I should take. I did not complete BrainWorks before I left California, nor were my back problems healed. In our cross country drive from Los Angeles to Boston, the two of us were faced with a rather uncomfortable situation. Several things we thought we heard from God, including the prayers of others, all agreed with each other, but they were all wrong. That's really not supposed to happen. At the end of that drive, we came to one undeniable conclusion:

We are not very good at hearing from God.

Maybe the reason is that there is no God, or maybe just no Christian God. Or maybe the Christian God exists, and the problem is with us. When we arrived in Boston, we set aside one month for God, each day praying, "God, if you're real, undeniably reveal yourself to us." Since we are very bad at hearing from God, if we are to have a relationship with God, the effort must be his. After one last month, we still experienced nothing. And at that point I came across one truth, written in the Bible, that forever shattered my faith.

If you're not familiar with the Old Testament, one of the most common themes is the warning against idolatry, the worship of false gods through graven images rather than the one, true God, the "I am". The Hebrew scriptures are littered with hundreds of these warnings, but the best story is from 1 Kings 18, where Elijah confronts the prophets if Baal. Here is an excerpt:

Elijah went before the people and said, "How long will you waver between two opinions? If the Lord is God, follow him; but if Baal is God, follow him." But the people said nothing. Then Elijah said to them, "I am the only one of the Lord's prophets left, but Baal has four hundred and fifty prophets. Get two bulls for us. Let them choose one for themselves, and let them cut it into pieces and put it on the wood but not set fire to it. I will prepare the other bull and put it on the wood but not set fire to it. Then you call on the name of your god, and I will call on the name of the Lord. The god who answers by fire—he is God."

Naturally the prophets of the false god Baal have no success, but Elijah has success:

At the time of sacrifice, the prophet Elijah stepped forward and prayed: "O Lord, God of Abraham, Isaac and Israel, let it be known today that you are God in Israel and that I am your servant and have done all these things at your command. Answer me, O Lord, answer me, so these people will know that you, O Lord, are God, and that you are turning their hearts back again." Then the fire of the Lord fell and burned up the sacrifice, the wood, the stones and the soil, and also licked up the water in the trench.

The basic argument is always the same. What separates idols from God was the success rate. You should worship God because God is real and will provide for you. A true God produces results and a false God does not. After all, what purpose does God have if he can't make an impact on you? When I remembered this, I could not escape its conclusion in my life:

God is my idol.

I could not deny the promises that hadn't come to pass, and those promises that had were easily explained by things other than God. At the very least, the Bible I believed in condemned my God as an idol, since it also did not produce results. I had peeked behind the curtain, expecting to see the magnificence of God, and instead encountered a mirror. All this time, I was the man behind the curtain. The things I thought I heard from God in prayers were just my own desires and fears. I am not good at being God.

To continue worshiping this God would be worshiping an idol, something the religion condemns as an obviously pointless and worthless activity, but it was the only God I had ever known. From that point on, I knew I could no longer be a Christian. I realized Christianity did not have practical applications in my life. But that's different from saying Christianity is ideologically false. Next week I'll explain how I concluded the core ideology of Christianity was flawed, and how I went from an outcast of Christianity to living in the freedom of heathenism.

In the Cleft of the Rock

As I mentioned earlier, I was a devout Christian when I started programming BrainWorks, and now that I've finished, I am an agnostic with no particular religious leaning. My work in artificial intelligence was not the only reason I gave up my religious faith, but it is part of the reason. Moreover, it is a story worth telling, and I hope it will help both Christians and non-Christians gain a greater understanding of each other, something that is sorely lacking in this world where rational justification often takes a back seat to dogmatic conclusions.

To understand the process of giving up my faith, however, you must understand the faith I had. Many people who call themselves Christians, perhaps most, don't have much to do with the actual tenets of the religion. To the average Christian, being a Christian means that God and Jesus love you, and Jesus died for your sins so you that when you die, you go to Heaven instead of Hell. In other words, Christianity is a nice feeling in your heart and your insurance policy for when you die. It has little impact on your actual life, except for a general imperative to "do good things", which many Christians ignore, or act as if it only applies to other Christians.

I was never this kind of Christian.

My core belief has always been in causality, and by extension rationality. I have always believed that if something is true, you can trust in its consequences to be true as well. So I believed in the core tenet of Christianity, which is:

Jesus died to pay for my sins and rose from the dead so that I could receive God's spirit and thereby have a loving, personal relationship with the God in this life, and be with God in heaven after I die.

And I believed everything that logically follows if this is true. So yes, I believed that God can and does do miracles, even in this day and age. Real miracles too, not "I saw the face of Jesus in my pop tart". Stuff like "I was born blind and now I can see". I believed that people can and did hear from God, and that if you pray to God, he hears you as well.

Note that this is fundamentally different from saying that the Bible is the 100% true, infallible word of God. There are some clear logical inconsistencies, and I just wrote that off as "I guess they didn't hear correctly from God about that part", or "someone corrupted this text for their own purposes". The most glaring example is the book of Daniel, which purports to be written during the Babylonian captivity. However, the book contains words whose linguistic roots trace back to Persian empire, a culture the Israelites didn't encounter until well after Daniel died.

There were also some religious statements that don't logically make sense. The traditional explanation for these things, such as "don't eat pork", is that they apply to older cultures for some reason but don't apply to the culture of today. However, I took the stance that maybe people just didn't hear correctly from God and the Bible's authors recorded the wrong thing.

For example, even as a Christian I did not think homosexuality was immoral. There is no logical reason that consenting sex between people of the same gender would be wrong but between opposite genders would be okay. "God hates it for some reason" isn't a good argument. According to the book of Jeremiah (Jeremiah 7:19), things that are wrong because they are detrimental to humans. There is certainly nothing humans can do to injure God! Our actions can only harm humans, so if an action does not hurt anyone, it cannot be immoral. Consensual sex falls into this category regardless of gender.

So as a Christian I had no problem admitting that the Bible flawed and even wrong about some things. I disagreed with some very popular Christian opinions, and not just regarding homosexuality. But I still considered myself a Christian, because you can still believe the Bible is wrong about some things (bacon, homosexuality) and right about other things (Jesus died so God can have a relationship with me). I still believed that I could hear from God, talk to God, and witness the supernatural miracles of God.

But around one year ago everything changed, for two very different reasons. One reason convinced the pragmatist in me and the other convinced the idealist, and the two arguments together made me undeniably admit that I had been very, very wrong for the past 30 years of my life.

Please believe me when I say that I was not looking for a reason to leave my religious faith. As a Christian, I felt totally in love with God. To this day, I have never felt more joy in my life than during a Sunday worship service, singing hymns and praises. Being confronted with the irrefutable reality that I was wrong about God was agonizing and heart wrenching, and met with many tears. For months I felt devastated, and I still wonder if I will ever find something that brings me as much joy. But I had no other choice. I do not worship God; I worship truth, and by extension reality. If the truth is that there is no God, or at least no Christian God, then my only option is to act on that truth.

I am confident that most atheists and agnostics do not have the faintest idea how much safety and security a devout Christian gets from their religion. From the agnostic point of view, it's easy to think of Christians as weak minded for taking so much on faith and so little on reason. If a Christian doesn't change their mind when presented with solid reason, the conclusion seems natural. But it's difficult to comprehend the amount of mental and emotional security that even a religion brings, even a false one. The sheer fear of being wrong is enough to make most religious people flat out ignore solid arguments to the contrary.

I'm glad I took the red pill, but the blue pill would undoubtedly have been less painful. It is my hope that godless people would have compassion on those who still have religion, and understand that even though many may fear they are wrong, they lack the emotional strength to take the large steps that seem easy for us.