Dear internet: Shut up about God, already

No, really. Shut up.

Look, if you’re trying to argue about God or religion on the internet, you’re fighting a losing battle, no matter what you do. Everyone’s far too deeply entrenched in their respective positions to ever change, no matter how keen your wit or how lengthy your barrage of rhetorical artillery.

This isn’t a matter of “atheists versus theists” or “Christians vs. Muslims” or any such dichotomy you wish to propose. There are infinite arguments for or against the most minuscule facets of any particular theology — or lack thereof — and the internet being what it is, most of them are going to be represented. (For the math geeks in the audience, that means the cardinality of the set of viewpoints on religion represented on the internet is something like $\aleph_1$ .) You are not going to win. You are not even going to break even.

In fact, after so much histrionic argument, the whole question has become profoundly uninteresting. “Is there a God, and does he want women to cover their heads?” I don’t care! It’s a question beyond evidence, beyond experimental reasoning, beyond the capacity of ZFC set theory to answer — and therefore, beyond temporal meaning or interest. All you’re doing is shouting about opinions of things that, de dicto, you can never hope to understand in a way that will let you convince others of your rectitude.

Shut up and read Kierkegaard, and look to your own faith rather than trying to convince me that I should (or shouldn’t) believe in your particular version of the Divine.

1 Response to “Dear internet: Shut up about God, already”

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1 Reid
February 22, 2007 at 04:47

Noteworthy observation:

1) The set of all religious viewpoints is uncountably infinite, ie $\aleph_0$ .
2) The set of all pairs of religious viewpoints is the Cartesian product of this set with itself.
3) Every element of this set of pairs is, itself, a set of all the possible ways in which these two viewpoints can duke it out, which is uncountably infinite.

It follows that the set of possible arguments on religion is, in fact, of cardinality $\aleph_2$ .

It follows further that arguments about religion on the internet are about the same as shooting fish in an infinite continuum of parallel universes throughout all time, but less meaningful.