God's Children
Today I met Elder Chung and Elder Howard, two members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. They approached me in the street and usually I would've ignored them, but I didn't immediately realise that their true intention, instead thinking they would just ask me an innocent question and be on their way.
We ended up talking for 10 minutes or so. They were nice people, and clearly not unintelligent, although I didn't exactly feel intimidated by their intellectual prowess either. We talked a little about life, the problems we all face, a search for answers, a desire for happiness that is common to each and every human being on the planet. They had a sense of altruism - they found joy in what they were doing and wanted to share that with other people, that they might find similar joy. In a lot of ways, I was completely on board.
Until they told me they believed in a very literal (and specific) God - the specificity really bothers me. If you take 'does a Christian God exist?' as a Bayesian hypothesis, the starting probability is so staggeringly, infinitesimally small that I can't even theorize what kind of evidence would lead me to consider the hypothesis as having a meanginful probability of truth. Which is kind of a shame, because if they are truly happy, and I am not, then really the joke is on me, regardless of what I think about how they derive said happiness. Naturally I cannot overcome my existing thoughts and feelings about the nature of reality in order to share their viewpoint, so I do not think I will be joining the Church of Latter-Day Saints, but it did make me think if there is more to the whole spirituality thing than I've ever really given it credit it for. My God will not have created the Earth in 7 days, or sent their offspring to Earth (ironically, surely the realm of us mere mortals must be hell for a celestial being?), but that doesn't necessarily mean she doesn't exist, in one form or another.
They also gave me a free book, which I thought was a pretty neat marketing trick. Startups, take note.