Read an interesting article on what is being coined Misotheism.
http://religion.blogs.cnn.com/2011/03/0 ... od/?hpt=C2
I'm curious if anyone here is a Misotheist.
What makes you hate God?
Why believe in something that you hate?
Just curious as this this specific world view perplexes me...
Do you hate God?
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sleepyhead
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Post #2
Hello board,
There was a while when I did. I refused to do any more meditation. It came at a time when I was converting over from a belief that God was going to do all sorts of wonderful things for me, to the realization that he wasn't.
There was a while when I did. I refused to do any more meditation. It came at a time when I was converting over from a belief that God was going to do all sorts of wonderful things for me, to the realization that he wasn't.
May all your naps be joyous occasions.
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Furrowed Brow
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Post #4
Believing in G-d but hating G-d and/or being really, really angry with G-d seems a common place in Judaism. Partly, I think, that's due to a long-standing tradition of arguing with G-d, and partly it's due to anger for the Shoah (Holocaust) coupled with a more general anger for other atrocities and for the fact that the world is imperfect.Furrowed Brow wrote:There may well be many theists who fail to distinguish misotheism from atheism. However I suspect misotheists will prove rarer than ignostic believers.
(In my experience, Judaism tends to want this here-and-now world to be perfect rather than waiting for a perfect afterlife. Personally, I like that--so I'm ok with the idea of believing in G-d but shaking your fist at Him. What the heck is He doing? Doesn't he know what kind of suffering goes on down here? Must we humans fix everything on our own? A little help here, please.
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Filthy Tugboat
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Re: Do you hate God?
Post #5I think the second question is a little odd. I know this guy who's a massive wanker, but at no point have I questioned his existence.Board wrote:Read an interesting article on what is being coined Misotheism.
http://religion.blogs.cnn.com/2011/03/0 ... od/?hpt=C2
I'm curious if anyone here is a Misotheist.
What makes you hate God?
Why believe in something that you hate?
Just curious as this this specific world view perplexes me...
Religion feels to me a little like a Nigerian Prince scam. The "offer" is illegitimate, the "request" is unreasonable and the source is dubious, in fact, Nigeria doesn't even have a royal family.
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I Wear White Socks
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Confessions of a Former Misotheist
Post #6Until recently, I was a Misotheist. I despised and hated god. That disembodied Judeo-Christian mind with moral concerns was still hiding somewhere in an epistemological gap, watching, judging, waiting just at the periphery like a scratch on my psychological lens. I recognized it to be what Hegel called the oppressive god of objectivity. To quote Feuerbach, "The object of any subject is nothing else than the subject's own nature taken objectively. Such as are a man's thoughts and dispositions, such is his God."
I knew I had to be taking my own subjectivity as an object. I was mistaking the reflexivity of subjectivity and self-awareness for an awareness of a wholly transcendental other. But, I couldn’t stop. I don’t know what I hated or resented the most; the ideological abstraction that would not go away, my own self for not being able to exorcise it or the ventriloquists who first waved around their invisible hand puppet and hijacked my childlike willingness to suspend disbelief before I had any defensive critical thinking skills.
Then I studied how mirror neurons give rise to a "theory of mind" along with the human instinct to believe in other minds as agents with intentionality. God is born with mirror neurons but he stays alive in language. Recursion in linguistics enables "discrete infinity" by embedding phrases within phrases of the same type in a hierarchical structure. Without recursion, language does not have 'discrete infinity' and cannot embed sentences into infinity. Recursion is also described as the process which a procedure goes through when one of the steps of the procedure involves invoking the procedure itself. That’s why, when the evidentialist challenge backs it into a corner, Christian apologetics always falls back on Presuppositionalism and circular reasoning. I really never had faith in anything that corresponded to empirical fact. What I had was faith in faith in faith for faith’s sake. I had been trained to believe by recursive process of believing that invoked the idea of belief itself. In other words, I believed in beliefs. God doesn't die because he exists as a subroutine of mirror neurons and recursion. Every time I swatted at him with facts, he would retreat back into discrete infinity.
Anthropological linguist Daniel Everett tried to evangelize the Pirahã tribe and wrote a book about their grammar which lacks recursion. He was unable to convert them and even de-converted himself after witnessing their happy lives without the need of an eternal voyeur in the sky that promises another life after this one. When reading about Dr. Everett and the Pirahãs it reminds me of what Nietzsche said, “I fear that we will not lose God because we still believe in grammar." Nietzsche held that a belief in God stems from our reliance on the grammatical convention that every sentence has a subject; we cannot look at the world without thinking, “Who did this?� And that takes me back to mirror neurons, theory of mind, agency-detection and intentionality.
Finally, the god concept can no longer hide just at the limits of my understanding. It is clearly a combination of mirror neurons, reflexive subjectivity and self- awareness, all wrapped up in predicates of human consciousness, linguistic recursion, and cultural conditioning. Like all humans who develop a healthy theory of mind, I can still haunt myself with unseen agents and theorize what hypothetical minds might be thinking. At least now, knowing how capable humans are of abstracting, reifying, ideologically fixing, objectifying, and projecting, I no longer feel the need to hate the disembodied mind with moral concerns that is theoretically call god.
I knew I had to be taking my own subjectivity as an object. I was mistaking the reflexivity of subjectivity and self-awareness for an awareness of a wholly transcendental other. But, I couldn’t stop. I don’t know what I hated or resented the most; the ideological abstraction that would not go away, my own self for not being able to exorcise it or the ventriloquists who first waved around their invisible hand puppet and hijacked my childlike willingness to suspend disbelief before I had any defensive critical thinking skills.
Then I studied how mirror neurons give rise to a "theory of mind" along with the human instinct to believe in other minds as agents with intentionality. God is born with mirror neurons but he stays alive in language. Recursion in linguistics enables "discrete infinity" by embedding phrases within phrases of the same type in a hierarchical structure. Without recursion, language does not have 'discrete infinity' and cannot embed sentences into infinity. Recursion is also described as the process which a procedure goes through when one of the steps of the procedure involves invoking the procedure itself. That’s why, when the evidentialist challenge backs it into a corner, Christian apologetics always falls back on Presuppositionalism and circular reasoning. I really never had faith in anything that corresponded to empirical fact. What I had was faith in faith in faith for faith’s sake. I had been trained to believe by recursive process of believing that invoked the idea of belief itself. In other words, I believed in beliefs. God doesn't die because he exists as a subroutine of mirror neurons and recursion. Every time I swatted at him with facts, he would retreat back into discrete infinity.
Anthropological linguist Daniel Everett tried to evangelize the Pirahã tribe and wrote a book about their grammar which lacks recursion. He was unable to convert them and even de-converted himself after witnessing their happy lives without the need of an eternal voyeur in the sky that promises another life after this one. When reading about Dr. Everett and the Pirahãs it reminds me of what Nietzsche said, “I fear that we will not lose God because we still believe in grammar." Nietzsche held that a belief in God stems from our reliance on the grammatical convention that every sentence has a subject; we cannot look at the world without thinking, “Who did this?� And that takes me back to mirror neurons, theory of mind, agency-detection and intentionality.
Finally, the god concept can no longer hide just at the limits of my understanding. It is clearly a combination of mirror neurons, reflexive subjectivity and self- awareness, all wrapped up in predicates of human consciousness, linguistic recursion, and cultural conditioning. Like all humans who develop a healthy theory of mind, I can still haunt myself with unseen agents and theorize what hypothetical minds might be thinking. At least now, knowing how capable humans are of abstracting, reifying, ideologically fixing, objectifying, and projecting, I no longer feel the need to hate the disembodied mind with moral concerns that is theoretically call god.
