Quotes by "Brian Goedken"

Achieving a state of peaceful bliss is much sought after, though the attainment of such should never be conflated with accessing “Higher Truth.” ​The difference between Truth & Bliss can be felt viscerally. Bliss is the willful choice to disengage from inner conflict. The revelation of verities is the harmony obtained after mental strife has yielded a valid verdict.

When it comes to the Big Questions in Life, the preponderance of credible evidence is the best advisor to inform our beliefs. The companion enterprise are the methods by which one interprets the evidence which demand unwavering intellectual honesty.

[On the Human Soul] While the Bible offers a clear distinction that the soul is separate from the body and discusses the idea of eternal life in a general context, it may come as a surprise that the Bible does not specifically indicate that the human soul is immortal. The postulation that we have an immortal soul is an extrapolation or ‘a reading between the lines ’ made by the Church Fathers. Even though the Bible itself cannot affirm the eternal soul, this has been the prevailing thought for billions of people.

When we look at the frailties of the human mind and the apparent disinterest by the multitude to do the very hard work of consistently thinking deeply to actively and carefully construct well-hewn models of reality, it is only a small wonder why major leaps in societal progress remain elusive. Rather, we are afflicted with our biases that lead naturally to the development and enduring sustainment of irrational beliefs. It is partly due to the profusion of differing irrational beliefs that it is so difficult to find common ground to confront major social issues which include how God’s existence and nature might be best represented.

When it comes to our embedded beliefs, our relative intolerance to ambiguous and contrary information leads us in many instances to ignore or less thoroughly process incoming data for its actual truth value. It is for this reason that society at large is so prone to religiosity because taking a skeptical stance is the difficult path; it is the path of greatest cognitive load. The cognitive load is high because we have to conscientiously work to continually question the information we receive and often re-program our subconscious for a subject matter that is both complex and abstract. More simply stated, it is cognitively easy for people to attribute perplexing phenomena to an abstract, all-powerful deity than it is to engage in a rigorous examination to discern potential explanatory data.

One of the things that I find especially worrisome is the propensity for people to perceive reality as dyadic, comprised of two oppositional elements. Some prominent examples are our assignment of good–evil, right–wrong, just–unjust, heaven–hell, conservative–liberal, rich–poor, us–them. I also refer to this as compartmental minimalism because of our tendency to force our understanding of reality into as few categories as possible. Essentially, by perceiving reality in this way, we intentionally and unintentionally, reduce the cognitive load. We do not want the hassle of too many details or abstractions; however, this convenience comes at a cost that goes unacknowledged. We essentially build a false reality bit-by-bit.

To challenge the verity of one’s own beliefs is to be courageous. To separate the truth from falsity is to be wise. To take action against the headwinds of the status quo is to be a pioneer. The troika of courage, wisdom, and a pioneering spirit [elevates our enlightenment to the construct and elegance of true reality].

Because the brain does not possess robust ‘fault detectors’, the brain will just as easily encode irrational thoughts and beliefs just as it will rational ones.

We also have to be particularly wary of imaginative thought processes for we can very easily create things and ideas in our minds that are outright impossible or highly improbable to be manifested in the world-universe which we then deceive ourselves into thinking that they are either certain or probable likelihoods. We often take several different pieces of information or instilled beliefs and loosely wed them together to bestow some greater meaning which falsely represents reality.

Nowhere in the definition of Religion is there a mandate for religions to self-challenge or revamp their theological positions based on new enlightenment. Rather, a religion adopts a central orthodoxy and perpetuates it.