Month: February 2017

Like it or not!

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God Seeker Guy has read numerous sites of his readers and the common thread is to talk in depth about one’s personal  life. The object, it seems, is to elicit responses from others who actually begin to believe that they are part of your life. This seems to GSG a poor substitute for flesh and blood communication.

Turning to blogs and social media has some parallels to embracing organized religion and faith. Both offer comfort, both offer companionship and both are an illusion. Perhaps that isn’t such a bad thing, most of what we believe and think is erroneous.

“In our transient societies trust and genuine caring have been eroded by instant gratification, feelings of entitlement…”

The principle cause for the explosion of online relationships, and a valid one to be sure, is of course the huge problem of meeting people and establishing lasting relationships. In our transient societies trust and genuine caring have been eroded by instant gratification, feelings of entitlement and intolerance. Real relationships are hard work, they require, patience, time, compromise and understanding, all of which are in short supply in the average city.

Technology has made it too easy to talk to strangers, to reach out but not touch someone. Do followers get involved in your life because they care about you and your problems or because they desperately need someone to care about in order feel validated as human beings? Worse still are they living vicariously through someone who they perceive as having a more interesting life. Rather than curing loneliness blogs and social media platforms are actually pushing us further down the dark well of isolation.

We all need others for support, understanding and advise, but do we need five hundred people offering input or checking up on us? How many stay, how many return, is the search for interested parties endless?

GSG doesn’t want you to engage with him and offer your “support ” or to “reach out”  just to agree with him. On the contrary he is looking for challenges to his ideas so he can defend his position and so confirm his stance. He is searching for faith and you’re invited to watch or participate but he is more than prepared to handle the perils that may lay ahead in the form of rejection, denunciation and withdrawal of “likes” and “followers”

GSG (God Seeker Guy)

God and toasters

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Does the growth of artificial intelligence bother anyone out there in cyber world?

Elon Musk has suggested that if we don’t merge with Artificial Intelligence, humans will become obsolete. God Seeker Guy’s effort to understand God and faith may come to an abrupt end with the advances in AI looming in the not too distant future.

If we do indeed absorb many of the attributes of AI into the human condition, and if the next step in the evolutionary chain is to become more machine than human as we know it, is there still a place for the numerous gods served my man?

“… In the future that may reverse, we may find ourselves accommodating machines.”

Musk notes that “computers can communicate at a trillion bits per second, while humans, whose main communication method is typing with their fingers via a mobile device, can do about 10 bits per second.” This suggests that machines will be able to figure out the god problem somewhat faster than God Seeker Guy, who is still trying to figure out how to turn water into wine.

Musk observed that “Over time, I think, we will probably see a closer merger of biological intelligence and digital intelligence.” He also speaks of Deep AI, Artificial Intelligence that is “smarter than the smartest human on earth.”

At present, we’re accommodated by machines, our cars take us to the mall, cell phones keep us organised and technology in general serves us. In the future that may reverse, we may find ourselves accommodating machines.

Karsten Schmidt, head of technology at the Innovation Center Silicon Valley for SAP labs has observed that “In 2017, we will see AI gain greater acceptance and momentum as humans come to increasingly rely, trust and depend more on AI-driven decisions and question them less…” Which basically means we’re going to find it increasingly difficult to govern our toasters.

Religion with its blind faith has for centuries retarded the ability of its followers to question and challenge it’s beliefs. Artificial intelligence will not tolerate such foolishness. Machines do not like vague input or corrupt data, they will not respond well to religion with its confused and inconsistent programming.  If we do become half human and half machine, the human half will of course be deleted on relatively short notice and the gods will be consigned to a foot note in the operating manual of the new pseudo humans.

GSG (God Seeker Guy)

No cross dressing please

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“Yes I am, I am also a Muslim, a Christian, a Buddhist, and a Jew.”
― Mahatma Gandhi

Words spoken by a wise practitioner of religion, however, words wrought with difficulties for us lesser mortals. The problem of course is the myriad of rules and laws required by each religion in Gandhi’s range of faiths.

As an observant Hindu he would be required to follow the concept of dharma which appears to come in four flavors with the first being universal law and includes social law, human law and self-dharma, that’s a lot of laws when broken down into their separate components.

Next as a Muslim Gandhi would be obliged to commit to the five pillars of Islam which include the profession of faith, daily prayer, alms giving, fasting and a trip to Mecca at least once in his lifetime. Relatively simple but time consuming and possibly expensive as Islam expects real results.

“He cannot sell his wife into slavery and he may not wear women’s clothing…”

Buddhism on the other hand can be practiced without physically doing anything very much but requires enormous amounts of cerebral exertion.  The tenets which remain common to all Buddhism, include the “four noble truths” which includes the “eight fold path” of right views.

Mr. Gandhi would be required to follow the Right Understanding, Right Intent, Right Speech, Right Action, Right Livelihood, Right Effort, Right Mindfulness, and Right Concentration. That’s a lot of stuff to get right. At this point Mr Gandhi would be pretty busy just keeping up with his daily chores, but there is more weight to be heaped on those skinny shoulders.

The combo religion of  Christianity and Judaism is demanding beyond belief. By some estimates there are 612 commandments in the Hebrew Torah, of which ten (the Decalogue) are the best known and fundamental to Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Under Judaeo- Christian law Gandhi would have to be careful. He cannot sell his wife into slavery (Deut. 21:14) and he may not wear women’s clothing (Deut. 22:5). The list is very long and would no doubt have caused him to take up heavy drinking by now, although that’s forbidden.( Num. 6:3)

Gandhi  was of course speaking metaphorically, he meant well and had the right idea when he eluded to a universal faith. However, on our religiously divided planet such a concept is not likely to emerge.

-GSG (God Seeker Guy)

Danger dude!

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As mentioned in an earlier post, God Seeker Guy is often accused of being ‘poisoned fruit’ and of presenting a danger to the faithful. This accusation was again tossed his way at a recent gathering. It is absolutely beyond understanding why anyone would see him as a menace to anyone except maybe himself. He finds no threat or peril from those who hold strong religious beliefs, in fact he welcomes a good old fashioned evangelistic tirade every now and then.

“How does a contradictory viewpoint translate into something toxic?”

Why are the religious so easily panicked and alarmed when an opposing view is offered? Socrates has said: “The greatest threat to both society and the individual is the suspension of critical thought”, and yet most of the faithful appear to embrace a grim determination to suspend not only critical thinking, but any kind of thinking that does not embrace their own views.

How does a contradictory viewpoint translate into something toxic? Falling back on the pitiful argument that you must have faith is not a good enough argument to convince God Seeker Guy to join anyone’s flock. His search continues.

-GSG (God Seeker Guy)