Should religion be banished?

It is just after midnight on the morning of Christmas Eve, 2008, as I write this.  I have just finished installing WordPress (an open source blogging package) on this new website, http://www.atheistjourney.com.  It has been bitterly cold throughout the U.S., and even here in Austin, Texas.  Nevertheless, I’m thinking about whether I might attend midnight mass tonight.

Religion is on the wane in the western world.  According to Evan Harris Walker, author of the book “The Physics of Consciousness”, religion has been on the wane since the time of Isaac Newton.  Though Newton was a devout Christian, one of the unintended consequences of his laws of motion, and his whole programme of classical mechanics, was the banishment of God from the cosmos.  The banishment was immediate, from the first utterence of his laws stating the relationship between force and motion, essentially between cause and effect, but it took the fabulous success of his programme, over the past three hundred years, for the banishment to be absorbed into the culture.  In another generation or two, at least in western culture, the banishment will be complete: God will be relegated to the history books.

As an atheist, a battle-tested, hard-core, life-long atheist, it has taken me many years to get to this point in my life where I might utter such a thought: I’m not sure that banishing God from the cosmos is a good thing.

This blog will be devoted to exploring why we might need God after all, and in what sense a God might exist.  I’m on a journey, whose end I can’t yet see.  I remain open to all reasonable ideas, and even unreasonable ones.  I am interested in exploring the nature and evolution of consciousness, and their relationship to conceptions of God.  I will look at how storytelling can define a culture, and how a culture can affect its storytelling, and how these things have to do with our understanding of God.  I have resisted those who have said that God exists in the quantum universe, even though I am a physicist, but now I am willing to take a look at that seemingly ridiculous idea.  I will look at logic, its strengths and limitations, and how it might still have something to say about this subject.

But mostly I will tell a story about how I have come to this point in my life, how I was raised in a strongly Catholic family, how I revolted at an early age, how I am now a member of a non-denominational church known as Journey, and how this church is affecting me emotionally, spiritually, and intellectually.

I don’t know where this journey will lead me.  But I invite you to join me.

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