News flash: feelings and facts are NOT the same thing. The earth is round (roundISH actually). That’s a fact. It just “is”. That I however insist, all evidence to the contrary, the earth is flat — that’s a feeling. Same goes for the sun rising in the east. I may, for some reason, get it in my head that I hate the sun rising in the east. That changes nothing: the sun will rise in the east regardless of whether I keep hating it for doing that or even if I adapt — and come to love the fact. My feelings and the facts are entirely unrelated to each other. Like most sensible people, I despise daylight savings time but, it remains a fact that, twice a year, we subject ourselves to a kind of jet lag when we move all our clocks forward and backwards for reasons we cannot tell you. It’s a fact that we adjust all our clocks. WHY we do that, ISN’T based on a fact, it’s based on a feeling someone once had — that someone else related to. The next thing you know, someone’s feeling becomes a “fact” in the sense that they went and forced everyone else to experience specifically what they were feeling.
Religion relies almost entirely on feelings, facts being inconvenient if not entirely detrimental. The scientific method is a way of thinking that tries to remove all feelings from the process. It wants only facts — both facts that are obvious and facts that must be inferred. Circumstantial evidence may be inferred evidence but it’s still evidence.
Another important facet of the scientific method is its refusal to ever grant anyone “final prophet” status. Islam’s neat trick was to proclaim Muhammed not just a prophet, but the last prophet — the final and ultimate word on what God wants. So what if it contradicts everything that went before it, it’s true now because the Koran says so. Only an infidel would question it. From a marketing point of view, it’s brilliant! You can’t contradict a teaching if it’s God’s final word on the subject. If Muhammed said or taught it, it simply “is”.
No scientist — Einstein, Dawkins and Hawking included — would ever declare themselves the final word on anything. That would contradict the scientific method itself. One is always obligated to show one’s work and accept it if someone can definitely prove us wrong. We are obligated to use new information and incorporate it into the larger narrative — to try our hardest to discern facts from feelings so as to get the truest picture of what is. How that true picture makes us feel — that’s something else entirely.
Christianity wants us to accept that knowledge isn’t something a human being can acquire, it must be “revealed” to us. The command is clear: stop thinking because thinking will get you nothing; everything you need to know will be GIVEN to you on a silver platter and all you have to do is insist as a matter of faith that it’s true. Show one’s work? No. “Trust me” is the final answer.
White supremacy isn’t based on any facts despite how strongly white people feel about their “supremacy” over everyone else. By the same token, a person who insists that God speaks to them and through them isn’t any closer to universal truth about anything. Unless they’ve got texts and emails between them and God, we’re going to assume all that happened in the believer’s mind. The reason no actual texts or emails passed back and forth is because they weren’t needed. The person speaking for God was the same person receiving God’s word. If you honestly think you’re special enough for the creator of everything in existence to use YOU as their mouthpiece, that’s not because you’re actually that special, it’s because YOU think YOU’RE “God”.
That’s the feeling most theists struggle with. On the one hand, they tell themselves that a great and powerful force wants them to do its bidding. On the other hand, there’s them — staring at themselves in a bathroom mirror — God looking into his own eyes and wondering why he keeps drinking so much when he always hates waking up like this.