Spencer's Page

Relationship Status

Single

Values: What is most important to you in life? What is your purpose? Who are you, really? What do you value?

My happiness and the happiness of others.

Beliefs: What do you believe in? Do you believe in God(s)? Karma? Saints? Why or why not?

I try to limit my beliefs to those things that I have managed to discover a lot of supporting evidence for, which unfortunately does not include karma, saints, fairies, angels, the devil, ghosts, aliens on earth, faith healing or levitation.

Do you consider yourself spiritual? Do you identify yourself with a religion? Why or why not?

I do not consider myself spiritual nor do I identify with any religion. My fundamental reason for not believing is because I have not found sufficient evidence to believe from a logical point of view, and I am dissatisfied with the concept of faith because of its inescapable arbitrariness. How can a person choose to have faith in one thing rather than another? If there is evidence to favor one choice of faith over another then you are outside the realm of faith and instead employing reason. If there is no evidence causing you to support one faith over another then you have made a blind and arbitrary choice. Why have christian faith when so many people in the world prefer to have muslim faith claiming that christianity is untrue? Why have muslim faith when so many prefer to have hindu faith claiming that islam is untrue? Why have hindu faith when so many prefer christian faith claiming that hinduism is untrue? The difficulty is that most of the religions of the world are inherently incompatible at their core (especially when it comes to deciding what specific rules humans should follow in order to be rewarded, and also what this reward consists of). If religions are incompatible with each other then they cannot all be true, which means that most people (because no religion represents much more than a third of the world's population) are believing in falsehood, in large part because of their faith. What sort of tool is that which leads most people to falsehood?

Many modern believers like to think that the different religions of the world can be mutually compatible. But beyond the conflicting rules and rewards that the religions provide us, most of the major religious texts specifically deny the legitimacy of all other religions and gods. For example, in Acts 4 of the New Testament of the Bible (new international version) it states:

Then Peter, filled with the Holy Spirit, said to them: "Rulers and elders of the people! If we are being called to account today for an act of kindness shown to a cripple and are asked how he was healed, then know this, you and all the people of Israel: It is by the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, whom you crucified but whom God raised from the dead, that this man stands before you healed. He is " 'the stone you builders rejected, which has become the capstone. Salvation is found in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given to men by which we must be saved."

There is of course also the ten commandments which state "you shall have no other gods before me."

Do you believe in after-life, heaven, reincarnation, a parallel universe, fate or destiny?

I do not believe in an afterlife or reincarnation because it is well known that the brain dies when you die, and that the brain contains your memories, experiences, personality and decision making facilities. Evidence of this is very clear from at least a hundred years of experimentation with animals as well as studies done on accident victims. If you were to somehow survive death, then it would not actually be "you" in any reasonable sense of the word since you would no longer have any memories or knowledge or personality. It seems to me much more likely that the post-death is just like your (non-existant) experience during those billions of years before you were conceived. That is to say, death probably feels like nothing, which, when all things are considered, isn't so bad at all. That sort of death is a whole lot better than you'd get if you picked the wrong religion and Christianity or Islam were true.

I don't believe in fate or destiny in the sense that most people use the words.

Why are we here on this earth? What is the meaning of life? What are your lifelong aspirations?

We are here on this earth because of the astoundingly powerful process of extraordinarily gradual evolution. Over billions of years the chance collisions among the billions of molecules in the billions of drops of liquid on (what may well have been) millions of planets in billions of galaxies created the first replicating molecule, which, though without life in the usual sense, was able to copy itself using other molecules and therefore spread. A very small percentage of these replicators were granted slightly stronger powers of replication or stability by the mutations that necessarily occurred due to imperfections in the replication process. As resources (that is, useful molecules) grew scarce from an over abundance of replicators, the more powerful replicators survived at the expense of the weaker, leading to chemical and molecular battles of ever increasing complexity, and hence natural selection took over. After a very long time, through an enormous sequence of tiny changes, the replicator on our planet developed into what is now known as DNA.

The meaning of life for me is to achieve happiness and to help others do the same. Ultimately, those are my only aspirations.

Background / Spiritual Path

I consider myself, primarily, a mathematician. I find it to be of the utmost importance to separate truth from the hydra of falsehood and delusion.

Inspiration (People, Places, Things)

While of course I don't agree with all of what they do or say: James "The Amazing" Randi
Richard Dawkins
Peter Singer