Date: November 2003
To: Readers of Pique

I read your publication with great interest. I especially liked the Lee Salisbury article, in which the author described praying to Zeus. I may have come upon the right place to present an art project I have in mind, for which I require one or more collaborators willing to take the atheist / humanist viewpoint and defend it in an e-mail correspondence which I intend to publish on the web.

I will be debating not as a theist, but as a pantheist. For most of my adult life I considered myself a devout atheist, but several years back I converted to a belief I describe as a variation on pantheism, not because of some mystical revelation, but for reasons I consider purely logical. The purpose of the debate is to test that logic against sharp minded atheists / humanists. I do not believe any of the ideas I will be expressing require resort to mysticism, the supernatural, etc. If the atheists / humanists can show that they do, I will concede the debate. I do not intend to go over the theists' ontological arguments, cosmological arguments, teleological arguments, etc. which I consider to already have been soundly refuted.

Rather, I will take the position that myth is the software of our neural network. A belief system to a human is like an operating system to a computer. It is not meaningful to ask if Windows or a Mac OS, or Linux is "true." It is more meaningful to ask if it useful. Similarly beliefs in Christ, Krishna, Buddha, Zeus, Anubis et al. can be judged by their utility. I will maintain that the gods do exist - as software running in the minds of believers. Thus the gods are no more "imaginary" than computer software is imaginary. Further, their existence as neural-software alone makes them immeasurably powerful and most certainly to feared: It was a version of the Allah myth running as neural-software in the minds of believers which struck down the World Trade Towers. Argue that Allah doesn't exist, and I'll reply that the towers don't exist, and we need to re-think how we cope with the cause.

I believe this philosophical approach may prove more fruitful than the more simplistic "denial of the gods' existence," or even "denial of the meaningfulness of the concept of gods," which has been the core of atheist / humanist arguments. This view, as far as I can see, does not require belief in mysticism or the supernatural. It does present a different approach to dealing with the threats those gods may pose to the first amendment, our liberties and our lives.

Peace,

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