The Brick Testament

The Brick Testament: The world's largest, most comprehensive illustrated Bible!

I especially like the rating (N, S, V, C described in the Content Notice near the bottom.)

I first read the Bible when I was about 17 when I went to a US high school which was a Catholic school. I called myself a Buddhist then, but I didn't know much about any religion, just what was osmotically absorbed into my brain from Thailand environment since my birth.

I went to a mass and tried wine and bread (the Eucharist) to see if I can feel any transubstantiation (In Roman Catholic theology, transubstantiation means the change of the substance of bread and wine into the Body and Blood of Christ occurring in the Eucharist while all that is accessible to the senses remains as before.) When I told the girl next to me that I didn't feel anything different, just wine and bread, she hissed at me with "BLASPHEMOUS!" I didn't know why she was so angry. I thought it was very reasonable to check.

Anyway, I found the stories in the Bible gruesome but exciting, especially in the Old Testament. I finished the whole Bible in a week.

Currently, I don't think any religion group would claim me as one of their own since I think large chunks of every religion I know are not true. I like the teachings of Gotama Buddha's though, especially the Kalama Sutta. (Note that this is very different from Kama Sutra, although that's interesting too.)

I'm pretty sure that when we upgrade our biology (or brain) so that we become hugely more advanced, religious beliefs will be very different. I suspect that religions were invented because humans don't like uncertainties, so any certainties, even made-up ones, are preferred. If our descendants can run a billion simulations of how the future might turn out in their head, they will feel very comfortable with uncertainties and probabilities and they don't need to believe anything without solid evidences.

Sometimes Experts Don't Know Much

The Rosenhan experiment showed that psychiatric hospital staff couldn't reliably distinguish between the sane and the insane in the hospital. The full paper can be found here.

According to another study at Cornell, you can implant false memories into preschool children to make them think the memories are true, and experts cannot distinguish, by interviewing the children, which memories are true and which are false.

So, when experts' claims conflict with reality, you should be careful in checking whether the claims are true or not. Most people (yes, including me) appear (or pretend) to know more than they actually know.

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P.S. How to believe anything? That's a hard question that cannot be completely solved. I think we can only hope to converge closer and closer to the truth. Gotama Buddha tried to teach the Kalamas people using the list we know as Kalama Sutra. Personally, I like the Bayesian approach of updating my belief on whether something is true or false as I gain more and more evidences. A short overview of Bayesian inference is here. A reading list can be found here.