Just some thoughts

Terry finally convinced me that I want to be a raytractor. Seems as if I’m one of you evil atheists anyway. Strangely enough I never considered myself to be an evolutionist before I saw Ray’s blog. Evolution is so commonly accepted among biologists, that it is hardly a thing you identify with. I always found it fascinating and a very complex and convincing explanation for the diversity of Life, but as a neurobiologist I’m much more interested in the mind. In perception, consciousness, learning, memory and (yes, it is important everywhere in biology) the evolution of the nervous system.

I am an atheist but I believe in a lot of things even though I know that some of them are incorrect. I believe in color, even though the colors I see are nothing but a construct of my brain, I believe that the sun is rising every morning even though I know it would be better to say that the Earth is turning towards the sun, I believe that I can trust my senses even though I know that they only show me a tiny little part of the world. And I believe that GOD is just a construct of the human brain to comfort us when we realize our limitations. So I believe that some people really feel their holy lord, even though I’m sure that he/she/it doesn’t exist outside their brains. But that’s ok. If we can’t trust our own feelings, we’ll get lost.

I happen to feel that there is no such thing as a deity out there and that nothing has to be supernatural just because I can’t perceive it. That’s my subjective truth. I can talk about it, I even can try to convince people but what I absolutely can’t do is expecting everybody else to feel exactly what I feel.

It really annoys me, when Ray or some of his cronies insist, that everybody feels somewhere deep down that god (and to make it even more foolish: explicitly the Christian God) exists. Maybe that part of my brain just isn’t developed, but then, maybe I use it for other things that make me survive as a tiny little dot in an endless universe. Logic for example. Or Empathy.