I’ve had something of a revelation this morning, related to the old stand by question, “do you believe in God?”<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Historically, I thought that this question was about belief in God. On reflection – I don’t think that it is. I think that it’s more akin to “how’s it going?” Perhaps a bit more serious and intimate – but not much. When someone asks “how’s it going,” the appropriate answer is “not bad – yourself?” or a similar platitude. This is just a drop of the social grease that lets us get through our days and years without killing (too many of) each other.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I think that people who ask “do you believe in God,” are really asking “do you agree with me?” “are you one of us?” or maybe “do you think I’m a good person?”<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This would explain a lot about how freaked out people get when I answer “no,” and also explains a lot about their total inability to explain this “god” or “belief” thing they’re interrogating me about.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This goes double for people who ask about a relationship with “Jesus.” They seem unable to quantify to any extent exactly what that means besides “we’re all cool – right?”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I’ve had something of a revelation this morning, related to the old stand by question, “do you believe in God?” Historically, I thought that this question was about belief in God. On reflection – I don’t think that it is. I think that it’s more…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[60],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1710","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-philosophy"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dwan.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1710","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dwan.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dwan.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dwan.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dwan.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1710"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/dwan.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1710\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1711,"href":"https:\/\/dwan.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1710\/revisions\/1711"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dwan.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1710"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dwan.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1710"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dwan.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1710"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}