Independence, Objectivity & My Inability to Become an Expert on Anything

I like my religious experts like I like my x-variables: Independent.

And that's where I've got a problem.

I don't have enough time to watch Family Guy, so I definitely don't have enough time to become an expert historian, astrophysicist, philosopher, evolutionary biologist, and everything else that seems necessary to come to a solid, well-researched, conclusive position on the truth regarding the possible existence of God.

However, I can't trust anybody, including historians, astrophysicists, philosophers, evolutionary biologists, and everybody else who seems to know the information I need for a solid, well-researched, conclusive position on the truth regarding God's existence. 

I can't trust them because nobody's independent when it comes to religion, and if you're not independent of a thing, I have to assume you're not objective when you give public support for that thing.

You know how we're not supposed to talk about religion in polite company? That's because (1) no one's independent when it comes to religion, (2) people who aren't independent get pissed off, and (3) it's not nice to piss off polite people (no matter how much fun it is to watch them).

Independence is HUGE in the accounting profession because a financial statement audit is worthless if the CPA firm performing the audit is biased. We'd say the firm is "independence impaired." It's more politically correct.

Independence is like pasties for accountants. Without it we may not be allowed to work.

When I say that no one is independent when it comes to religion, I'm not saying that no one can be objective. What I am saying is that everyone's objectivity is suspect because nobody's independent.

CPAs are required to be independent "in fact and appearance." Independence "in fact" means not being affected by influences that may compromise one's professional judgment. It means having a mind set that allows "an individual to act with integrity and exercise objectivity and professional skepticism."

Most religions — either implicitly or explicitly — do not make room for professional skepticism, let alone amateur skepticism. And a lot of atheists will applaud their fellow atheists for doubting all religious belief, but pounce on them for doubting their atheism. 

Independence in appearance means that you conduct yourself in such a way that a reasonable and informed third party would conclude that your integrity, objectivity, and professional skepticism had not been compromised. 

CPAs have identified several threats to independence. I've restated them as they relate to religious belief. Although these threats may not actually impair your independence, they all impair the appearance of independence.

Advocacy threat — If you actively promote or defend a specific position regarding religious truth, your independence may be impaired.

Familiarity threat — If you have a close, longstanding relationship with a religious (or atheistic) community, your independence may be impaired.

Undue influence threat — If a religious (or atheistic) leader attempts to coerce you or exercise excessive influence over you, your independence may be impaired.

Self-interest threat — If you benefit from a set of religious (or atheistic) beliefs being true, your independence may be impaired. 

This independence crap applies to me, too. I can't trust myself to be objective because — just like everybody else — I'm not independent when it comes to religion. 

I get pissed off about religion sometimes. How does that make sense? I'm an agnostic. How can anyone piss me off about religion? If someone says I'm full of shit about God, I believe I'm obligated to say they're probably right. But sometimes I find myself getting defensive which belies my independence.

A material aspect of why I stayed in Christianity as long as I did was because the switching costs were so high. Everybody's religious switching costs are incredibly high. Whatever your worldview is, it's why-adjacent.* When your worldview changes, everything in your life is subject to change. Everything. 

Changing worldviews is possibly the ultimate of self-interest threats. Therefore, no one is independent. No one can be trusted. Not me. Not you. Not Deepak Chopra.

*I'm talking about your Simon Sinek "why": your nearly-impossible-to-verbalize core purpose.

My School Was Not Haunted: How Instincts and Reason Can Mess with Your Brain

Before my career change to accounting, I taught eighth-grade math for eight years at Dixon Middle School in Provo, Utah. The school was crazy old. While I was there, it celebrated it's 70th anniversary. That means lots of dead people suffered the universally traumatic experience of seventh grade on that campus.

Regardless, my school was not haunted.

First off, let's be clear. Any self-respecting ghost wouldn't haunt a middle school. It's too easy. Thirteen-year-olds are tormented enough by each other. A ghost would just be one more in a long line of people telling particularly sensitive seventh grade girls to "get out."

Plus middle-schoolers believe anything. Haunt the faculty restroom at the MIT Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, and I'd be impressed. Get an eighth-grader to think they saw a ghost standing behind them in the mirror, and you're more of an underachiever of a ghost than the eighth-grader is as an eighth-grader.

As a teacher, every now and then, I would have to go back to school at night to get some work done. The janitors were usually the last ones to leave the building, and they would turn off the hall lights with a breaker switch or one of those weird light switch keys. So if I came back late enough, the lights would be off, and I had no idea how to turn them back on. 

My classroom was about three-quarters of the way down a long hall, and if the lights were off, I would quickly become engulfed in darkness to the point where I would have to run my hand along the wall of lockers, counting the classroom doors to find my room. I would fumble with my keys in the dark to unlock the door, and then slap the wall inside my classroom until I located the light switch.

And every time I had to do it, it freaked the hell out of me.

I mean, I kept it together. But it would freak the hell out of me. I'd get real panicky, and I didn't know why.

Late at night, that school scared the crap out of me. It scared the crap out of me when I was a believer, and it scared the crap out of me when I was an agnostic.

I've never believed in ghosts. When I was a Christian, I believed in the Bible, which meant I believed in demons, but I never believed their level of influence or activity was inversely proportional to a room's lighting. 

So I knew I shouldn't be scared. But I was, and I couldn't help it.

But the school WASN'T HAUNTED. 

I realized through that experience that it may be possible that the human perception of a supernatural realm could be completely explained as a collision of instincts and logic.

My instincts were telling me that I was walking down the hallway of death. Makes sense. In prehistory, I would've had a better chance of surviving if I had an overriding visceral repulsion to places where I couldn't see that bear. The one that wanted to eat my face.

Our incessant determination to find causal relationships also aided our survival. If we were able to determine a cause-and-effect relationship, we could leverage it for survival. But if we misinterpreted mere correlation as causation, we were (generally) not any worse off for it. 

So in the hallway, my feeling of dread was real. I knew there was nothing in my physical environment to cause the feeling of dread, but my brain wanted to create a narrative to arrive at a cause-and-effect relationship. 

It's easy to see how early civilizations could arrive at the conclusion of a non-physical universe that coexisted alongside the physical. This would give rise to superstition which would lead to belief in the supernatural which could eventually be codified into religious belief.

Despite my first-hand experience of how spooky it feels at night, there are no ghosts at Dixon Middle School. Similarly, 2004 was the only year in the history of the school that the teachers lost the faculty-versus-student basketball game. Many students thought that was evidence of God's existence. But since that was the only year I ever played, it's merely proof that my basketball skills can ruin a 70-year winning streak.

Personal Revelation & Minor Miracles: I Should Probably Be Mormon

My big brother, Bob, liked to tell me what he learned in youth group. He also like to tell me how he was going to change his life based on what he learned. That was how he would witness to me.

So one night he declared, "I'm gonna stop fighting you." (We fought a lot.) "I might try to defend myself if you start coming after me, but I won't fight back. Instead, I'll let the Holy Spirit thump you."

And at that moment, it was on.

I'd never won a fight, I'm two years younger than him, and he just green lit an ass whoopin'. Please realize, I wasn't mad, and I had no reason to fight him. My heart wasn't in it, but he just wrote a check with his face, and my fist was going to cash it.

Figuratively. We didn't punch too much. We wrestled to submission. So after a few seconds, I was sitting on his chest, pinning his arms with my knees, and slowly lowering a loogie towards his face.

After the loogie-lowering ritual and an extended period of sternum-jabbing, I went through the kabuki theater of repeating, "I'm calling a truce, and I'm gonna let you up now. Are you gonna be cool?" You have to say it about ten times before you confirm to yourself that you have no idea what's going to happen once you release your humiliated, loogie-faced, torture survivor.

Eventually I let him up, and he didn't jump me. As a matter of fact, he did exactly what he said he would do. And as I walked away from this decisive victory, my brother's voice echoed in the back of my mind: "I'll let the Holy Spirit thump you ... I'll let the Holy Spirit thump you ... " 

And I realized at that moment that I was getting thumped by the Holy Spirit. 

Personal revelation: Evangelical Christianity is true.

Six years later, I was a freshman at the University of Washington. I was getting ready to transfer to Brigham Young University. God had called me to be a missionary to Mormons. In preparation for my new ministry, I was meeting with Mormon missionaries for hours on end and attending a class called "Philosophies and Doctrines for Non-Members" at the Mormon Institute of Religion. I had dropped all but two of my classes that quarter. I was spending so much time analyzing Mormonism for weaknesses that I only had time for linear algebra and vector calculus. (That's a ten on the 1 to 10 humble brag scale.)

One afternoon, I was sitting in my dorm room, and started to pray. My prayer - as best I can remember it - went something like this: "God, I've been so focused on all this Mormon stuff. It seems like it's been a long time since I've just said, 'I love you.' Well, I love you." 

Without missing a beat, a voice in my head immediately said, "Then why don't you join my church?"

Personal revelation: the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints is true. 

There are Mormons who would punch their moms during sacrament meeting to have a testimony that good. If I converted to Mormonism, I would have been a rock star with that testimony. I would have been the Kurt Cobain of the LDS Church, mostly because I had voices in my head.

Fall quarter of my sophomore year was pretty amazing, spiritually. I got thrown together with a random roommate who would end up being the best man in my wedding. He's a fantastic guy with a big heart. And he was a Christian just like me.

One morning, he told me about the role I played in a miracle. The night before, he was having a hard time falling asleep. A girl from Bible study was on his mind. He felt like he should go to her dorm room to check on her. But he's such a quality guy, he was worried about his motivations. Maybe he was fabricating some fake prompting of the Holy Spirit just because she was cute. So he was stuck, unable to sleep and unwilling to act because of his doubts about the veracity of this spiritual prompting.

So he prayed for God to show him a sign if He indeed wanted him to go talk to the hottie. And immediately, in my sleep, I said, "Praise be to God! Glory to Jesus!" This was at least the second time God performed a miracle using a talking jackass.

My roommate found her awake in the lounge. He delivered a message of God's love that she really needed to hear that night.

He wasn't lying to me about my ecstatic unconscious utterance. He's one of the most honest, solid guys I know. I didn't consciously experience the miracle, but I have no reason to doubt that it happened.

Minor miracle: Evangelical Christianity is true.

One year earlier, I was attending one of the best classes I took in college: Comparative Western Religions. One day the professor (who was clearly not Muslim) told us a story about a trip he took to the Middle East. The final leg of his flight was filled with passengers who were openly Muslim. In the middle of the flight, the plane hit some pretty strong turbulence.

Turbulence is scary shit. Yeah, you play it cool on the outside, but sometimes you hit a patch of rough air that makes you realize that when a baby bangs a can of Pringles on her stroller, it's pretty fucking scary for the Pringles.

My professor ascertained that the majority of the passengers were quite poor, and this was very likely one of two flights they would take in their entire lives. Bad turbulence is even worse for inexperienced fliers because they're confident that they're going to die.

At this point, a Muslim lady stood up (breaking the fasten seat belt commandment) and prayed a prayer. Immediately the turbulence stopped, and the remainder of the flight was as smooth as a freshly ironed burqa.

My professor had nothing to gain from relaying this story, so I have no reason to believe he was lying.

Minor miracle: Islam is true.

Truth isn't discerned via Holy Spirit thumpings, auditory phantasms, ecstatic somniloquies, or well-timed mini-miracles. Otherwise, I'd be an Evangelical Muslim of Latter-Day Saints.

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.