Agnostic Thanksgiving

Someone recently asked me who I give thanks to as an agnostic. I never answered him, and I think he was thankful.

Remember "The Secret" back in the mid-2000s? I thought it had some solid principles that were buried beneath a moderate layer of crap. One thing from The Secret that I started doing was carrying a small rock in my pocket. Every time I stuck my hand in my pocket and felt the rock - either on purpose or without thinking - I was supposed to think of something I was thankful for. Taking time throughout the day to be intentionally grateful made me marginally less of a brooding a-hole.

I'm thankful that I'm healthy.

I'm thankful that I live in a peaceful country.

I'm thankful for toilets and asthma medicine.

But in these cases, I have no object for my gratitude. I can't say, "I am grateful to [direct object] for my relatively hairless back." My agnosticism has robbed me of ultimate purpose and, from time to time, of an opportunity to use a noun as a predicate.

Does gratitude imply the existence of a benefactor?

When a human does something nice for me, I'm grateful to that person. It's a natural human response, and there are some interesting theories on how that response helped our species survive.

The human brain has an amazing capacity to create a back story that integrates disparate facts. We have a natural tendency to impute context, to create meaning. Our inclination is to reject randomness and look for cause-and-effect. In his book Impro for Storytellers, Keith Johnstone explains the neurology behind humans' justification reflex:

The verbal hemisphere of "split-brain" patients automatically justifies the decisions of the non-verbal part. Such justification is never-ending, effortless and automatic. When a projectionist mixed up the order of the reels of a movie, my mind accepted this as "flash-backs" or "art".

When we win the lottery, we want to know why we won it and not somebody else. I know because I won the California Lottery Mega Millions drawing. Got two numbers plus the "mega." I was swimming in $9.00 of gambling winnings, y'all! Barely missed the threshold for Form W-2G.

The human impulse to find a recipient for our thanks is a manifestation of the mind's rejection of randomness as an answer to the question of why. So when we feel thankful, we thank God rather than admit randomness because we're programmed that way. 

Living a life full of gratitude leads to a higher quality life, but my thanks does not necessarily need a recipient.

However, on Thanksgiving I want you to know that I'm grateful for everyone who has been reading this blog, especially those of you who have been kind enough to take the time to show me the ways that you think I'm full of shit. Seriously.

I Can't Be Sure About Anything

My daughter's taking ice skating lessons. In her first lesson they taught her about "safety knees." They told her that if she was going to fall, she should put the palms of her hands on her knees, and it would keep her from falling.

I analyzed the claim of my daughter's 18-year-old skating coach against the things that I've learned over the course of my life about physics and anatomy, and I came to the firm conclusion that safety knees is bullshit. I mean I guess there's a chance that it could work. But my experience and reasoning brought me to the conclusion that she was full of crap.

Putting your hands on your knees changes nothing about the fact that ice is slippery. It changes nothing about your speed or momentum. It changes nothing about the fact that two kinfe blades are your only points of contact with a frictionless sheet of pain. If you're about to fall, putting your hands on your knees should only change your ability to catch yourself because your hands are on your damn knees. 

But when you try it, it works. 

I don't know how, but it does. I've skated with Kylee, and she's reminded me about safety knees, and I've used safety knees, and it works. I don't get it, and I can't explain it. It runs contrary to how I thought the universe worked.

Speaking of ice skating, you know what I hate? Tax research. By which I mean I f***ing hate tax research. I haven't had to do it much for work, but I had to do some in school, and I F***ING HATED it. 

I would spend hours looking through tax cases and finally dig one up that was nearly identical to the case I was working on. The precedent set in that case determines the outcome of my case. So I'd write up what I found and turn it in, completely confident that I nailed it.

And I would be totally wrong.

There would be an appeal that I was unaware of; or the case I found was in a different circuit, and there was a similar case with a different ruling in the circuit that had jurisdiction over my case; or subsequent legislation was passed or IRS regulations were imposed that completely reversed the outcome of the case at hand.

There have been way too many times when something looked right on paper but didn't work out in the real world.

So I have to take that into consideration regarding my trilemma - the argument that led me to the conclusion that Christianity (and Islam and any religion with a hell) isn't true. I'm convinced that God can't be (1) good and (2) hidden and (3) send people to hell for wrong belief. He can be any two of the three, but he can't be all three. That looks real good on paper.

I don't know crap about physics or anatomy, but I know tons more about them than I know about what it's like to be God. I was wrong about safety knees until I experienced it first hand. There's a really good chance I'm wrong about my trilemma, but I won't know I'm wroing until I'm burning in a lake of fire.

I'm acutely aware of my intellectual limitations; however, this epistemological uncertainty is also further evidence against a God who wants us to have a relationship with him. 

If God exists, then he chose to create a world where he is not obvious - where his existence and identity are in doubt. He also chose to create a world where everyone is subject to epistemological uncertainty, where everyone has intellectual limitations, where everyone has thought things would turn out a certain way and were dead wrong.

The assertion of western religions (Judaism, Christianity, Islam) is that God wants a relationship with humans. But the way he's structured the world - his hiddenness, intellectual uncertainty, and even the existence of the devil - make it seem like he's not even interested in us knowing that he's there at all.

But there's a decent chance I'm totally wrong.

Satan Is a Material Weakness in God's Internal Controls

I hate Satan so damn much. The devil, Lucifer, Iblis – whatever he's called in whatever religion – he can suck my balls. And from what I understand, he's probably good at it.

The Islamic devil, Iblis, was sentenced to hell by Allah for disobedience and rebellion. However, his sentence was delayed until the Day of Judgment. Why? Because he asked for his sentence to be delayed until the Day of Judgment. It's a simple "don't ask, don't get" situation. And now, Iblis is using his stay of execution to lead all men and women astray to hell because he's a bitter motherfucker.

In Christianity, Satan is a "liar and the father of lies" who "disguises himself as an angel of light." Assuming he's read Simon Sinek's book (who hasn't?), Satan's "why" is to make not-true things seem true. 

I hate that. 

Maybe Satan turned me stupid enough to believe the evidence against God's existence? If Islam is true, then maybe Iblis tricked me into believing Christianity for 20 years? If you believe somebody's lies (including Satan's lies), the implication is that you're stupid – stupid enough to believe lies. 

Or possibly Satan is an overwhelmingly convincing liar. Maybe he got his acting chops by selling his soul to Meryl Streep. But then we have the epistemological problem that no one ever knows when they're in possession of the truth or a giant bag of bullshit sold to them by demon-Meryl-Streep.

As I attempt to stretch my ongoing accounting analogy significantly beyond its limits, it's clear that the devil commits fraud. But he's not like Andy Fastow. Fastow was doing exactly what the guys in charge wanted. Satan isn't like Bernie Madoff or Bernie Ebbers because he's not the head guy. He's subordinate to God. And he's not like someone who's just misappropriating assets. He's not getting rich by tricking humans. 

But he is convincing people of lies to make them change their behavior.

There's no analogy in business for Satan's role in God's creation. That's because any good CEO would shitcan a sociopathic liar immediately regardless of HR's best practices.

The one conclusion I can come to about the existence of Satan is that it seems to demonstrate that God sets a poor tone at the top. According to COSO, the control environment - the tone at the top - is the most important aspect of internal control.

If God is committed to the truth, and he knows that Satan is perpetrating fraud, and he can remove the source of the fraud, yet he permits the source of the fraud to remain and continue committing fraud, then either God is complicit in the fraud or he doesn't really care about us knowing the truth.

There Is No Materiality Threshold for Scripture. Maybe.

Infallibility is weird.

Catholics believe the Pope's infallible. That's why Hollywood won't let him on Jeopardy. "I'll take loaves and fishes for 7 billion." Hell yes, you will.

No company asserts that their financial statements are perfect. They assert that their financial statements contain no material errors. Religions are different. They assert that their scriptures are divinely inspired, inerrant, and infallible. They assert zero errors.

Muslims are totally blunt when it comes to this. They believe the Qur'an is the inerrant, perfect word of God.

Jews believe in the divine origin and immutability of the Torah. The Torah will not mutate no matter how much Stan Lee bombards it with gamma rays.

Mormon Article of Faith No. 8 says, "We believe the Bible to be the word of God as far as it is translated correctly; we also believe the Book of Mormon to be the word of God." Hopefully I translated Article of Faith No. 8 correctly.

In Hinduism, the Vedas are considered divinely inspired. That is, they are "not human compositions." The Hindu scriptures that are not considered to be divinely inspired are known collectively as the "Darth Vedas."

The Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy says, "Scripture in the original manuscripts does not affirm anything that is contrary to fact." It goes on to say that since there are no extant original manuscripts of the Bible, those which exist cannot be considered inerrant.

Regardless of any explicit claims, religious scriptures are obligated to be inerrant. Scriptures are supposed to tell us the truth about a God who decided to be hidden, intangible, and non-obvious. An error in scripture about something that's verifiable in the natural world would undermine its reliability regarding anything that's hidden, intangible, or non-verifiable, like God.

Therefore, all scriptural errors are material. Maybe.

In Statement on Financial Accounting Concepts No. 2, FASB defines a material error as "an omission or misstatement of accounting information that, in the light of surrounding circumstances, makes it probable that the judgment of a reasonable person relying on the information would have been changed or influenced by the omission or misstatement."

The Bible says that Elisha was bald. If he really had hair like Fabio, then, as a reasonable person, my judgment would be changed regarding the reliability of Revelation's report that the hair of the Son of Man is white like wool and/or snow. If the Jesus of Revelation doesn't have white hair, then how can I be sure of the doctrine of the trinity?

Fortunately for Judeo-Christians and Judeo-Jews throughout the world, Elisha's baldness is not in question.

But what about math?

1 Kings 7:23 describes a "sea of cast metal, circular in shape, measuring ten cubits from rim to rim ... It took a line of thirty cubits to measure around it." Unfortunately, this is contrary to the facts of Euclidean geometry and poses a problem to Biblical inerrancy. If 1 Kings 7:23 said that it took a line measuring 31.415926535 cubits to measure around the sea of cast metal, it would still be off by about nine-trillionths of a cubit.

So I guess the Bible does have a materiality threshold. I'd like to say its materiality threshold is at least nine-trillionths of a cubit. If the materiality threshold was zero, then 1 Kings 7:23 would have to contain all the digits of pi, and the only thing more boring that reading the digits of pi is reading the book of 1 Kings.

A cubit is the distance from your elbow to your fingertip. So maybe a really lanky guy measured the circumference and a little guy measured the diameter. Or it may have been customary in post-Davidic Israel to report all cast metal sea measurements in tens of cubits.

Here's where I'm going with this. All organized religions teach that God chose to reveal himself through scripture rather than by making his existence and identity unquestionable. The implication, then, is that the scripture through which he reveals himself is inerrant. However, the scriptures of every religion are at best unclear on certain important points, and at worst have glaring contradictions and/or errors.

I don't think anyone would care about 1 Kings 7:23, including me, if it said that the sea's circumference measured 31 cubits, so clearly, on some level, materiality applies to scripture. 

But since the verse says 30 cubits, I'm torn. I'd be a dick to reject the Bible for something as completely unimportant as the stats on a wash basin. But on the other hand, it's hard to believe the Bible got the mysteries of the universe right if it got a sixth-grade math problem wrong.