(This post, and the one on Abortion that I will follow up on... at some time, is dedicated to Madhuri Kumari from RRI. I will follow her advice and make it as complete as possible with all the thoughts that I have on the topic, despite it then leading to a VErrrrrrrrrY long post. If people are interested enough, they can read. Else... it doesn't matter.
Thank you for that discussion on the 7th of June. It helped me more than you'll probably know. The vodka did it's bit as well.. but not as much as you. I don't understand WHY it did work so well in "centering" me from then on, but I guess that has to do with that part of my mind which has avoided detection by its consciously and meticulously probing part.)
I was wondering how to write on this topic. I was wondering if using logic and truth like a sledgehammer would be appropriate. The sledgehammer is going to creep in.... there's no way around it, and there is no reason for there to be a way around it; I'll only be speaking the truth. But before I get into the nasty business of all this truth speaking (which will ironically be the tool required to bludgeon the thing that claims to be promoting "THE truth") a brief disclaimer. We're all religious to different extents, in the sense that we believe in things that are in a sense un-provable by reality in the present. For instance, I believe that I will be able to be a successful physicist, even though I have done nothing other than learn the theories of physicists that came before me. I've only acquired a sense of shallow mastery where I can manipulate the theory to solve certain problems, and not mastered things well enough to show why the theories are wrong. In this case however, the odds of my faith having some bearing with reality is perhaps a lot stronger than the faith that there is a daddy God in the sky interested in whether you picked your nose a particular way at 5 a.m. in the morning, when the moon was positioned a certain way with respect to the Earth. But in any case, what we all possess are bits of faith that drive our lives, and influence our actions... and which serve to define us and give us and our lives meaning, in both subtle and obvious ways. In this sense, we are all religious. It just so turns out that saying you're "religious" implies your affiliation to the most extreme, and universal, ridiculous and unsubstantiated belief that there is some supernatural force driving our lives. Alright, before I go further, I must also state that if you are religious, my problem in not necessarily with you. That was the point of the "we are all religious" start to this post. I don't care if you are religious. I have only two problems as far as religion is concerned -
1) The existence of organized religion, and more specifically, the authority they demand to have.
2) The use of religious arguments as valid realistic ones, so much so that they are used as the sole driving force against aspects of our reality that are demonstrably and evidently true, and scientific theories and ideas that have been shown to be true. These arguments are then used to dictate social and societal norms.
If you do subscribe and believe in either points 1) or 2) (or both) in their entirety, then yes, I will be attacking you.... thoroughly, in what follows. But if on the other hand, you have a certain faith, but also a certain humility enough to tolerate other peoples faith, and enough sense to identify that social and societal rules may sometimes have to violate what you personally believe in.... then no, you're fine with me. Without further ado, let's get started.
I don't see organized religion having a good ending for us as a global community. The reasoning behind this is quite simple. For one thing, it deals with "a very important topic", and too many people disagree on the central point of this topic. So conflict is going to result as a consequence, since it is probable that in any case there would be some religions that demand dominion over other "false ones". But why is this topic so important? Is it merely because as children, these people were indoctrinated and brainwashed into thinking our world has some deeper element to it that deals with them personally, that other people are blind to. Well, yes... but it's not so simple. It had to be something that also had a parental aspect to it, something I prefer to call "paternal" .. the father figure. Our brains seem to hook on to these things for some reason. It's part of our nature. Belligerent fanatics, and promoters of societally retarded policies seem to come exclusively from these "paternal" religions. You see Buddhist monks with intense fervour and belief, but you don't see them asking for banning homosexuality, or for destroying China, and so on. It's not that Christianity and Islam would lead to this consequence in all cases. Not at all. It's because of that element of "God is looking down at you" ,"He's judging you", "It is a sin, he say's so",etc being hammered away. It's because of this style of teaching/brainwashing... because of this form of promotion, that I think we have ourselves a problem. One could just as well just teach the message of Jesus Christ without getting into him being THE son of God, and then explaining who God is by going to the previous chapters of the "Good book" where it's mentioned how many atrocities are fine under the right circumstances - like murder, stoning, genocide,etc. Once the good judgmental daddy, and the nasty,wicked uncle theory gets into our head as children... I think it's hard to eliminate. Maternal religions of the past, promoting a love of nature, conservation and preservation... didn't lead to as much trouble as the paternal ones. Since the most dominant organized religions of the world are the monotheistic, Judeo-Christian ones, which lead to belligerent, oppressive, fanatical and psychotic fuckers... this is what gives me a slight cause for alarm about organized religion on a global stage in the 21st century, and beyond. Again, to reiterate, not all organized religions being taught in certain ways would lead to the present situations. As far as I can see it... you need these paternal ones. And it's perhaps easier to buy into one big daddy god, as opposed to a supergroup of Uncles like the Greek "myths". It doesn't demand so much authority does it? If you piss off one, you can always suck up to the other. Plus, the greek gods had limitations. They were horny like us, they didn't pay attention all the time, they made mistakes, and so on. In other words... they were all too human (and that was the intent I believe... the personification of human attributes in a higher and more extreme form). The reason I mention this here, is that I've noticed the argument that Christianity and Islam being so widespread, speaks of their "truth value". It doesn't. It just speaks of a war like nature of the dominant nations of the past that promoted them, the methods in which they bought subservience of the people they conquered, and the ease with which a paternal religion can demand authority with the right organized structure established to threaten you should you not follow. That's all that was required to ensure it being spread over time. That, in a nutshell, is the reason for its "success".
But all this is one thing. The thing that pisses me off is the blatant concealment of history by these religions. For an institution that demands such authority, and have for over a thousand years, they are painfully opaque about their origins. The scholars of these faith, the priests of Christianity for instance, are familiar with the all too human origins, both of their religion and of their institutions, but they keep them secret. If asked personally, they will probably tell. But on the podium, one only gets to hear the message, and the brainwashed sheeple are required to lap it up like golden chunks of truth. I'll focus only on the origins of the faith itself, and not on the institutions. It's more effective to get to the root, than deal with the superficial societal construct that followed.
The truth is that the Pentateuch, your Old Testament, were written by four "authors" (or rather author groups) between 950 BC and 550 BC - the Yahweists, the "Priestly"s, the Elohists, and the Deuteronomists. The Old testament is a clear copy paste of these not so ancient texts. There's a decent enough historical evidence to see what was being said is not true, either completely or partially. Well, you protest, who is to say any source of history is authoritative? No one says any one source IS, but when there are several independent sources saying one consistent thing, and one source contradicting the rest, chances are that the one source is full of shit. Imagine reading texts from a thousand years from now, where there is some dominant religion (after we have all blown ourselves up, or drowned ourselves) saying that there once was a land called North Korea, and it was the greatest nation of the world. The people following this ancient text will believe strongly in it, and will claim that there was a God that rose from the mountain and all that crap. But there will be evidence from all other nations claiming that this is not true, painting a picture of the 20th and 21st century that is more or less consistent save for this one contradictory bit of literature acquired from North Korea. Who would you believe, given this evidence? If the organized religion from the time of our demise till the thousand year later period worked well enough, you'd believe that they're both arbitrary, and you'll believe that North Korea is the place where God was born and there was heaven on Earth. You can believe that, but you'd be wrong, just like you'd be wrong in thinking the old Kingdom was actually a Kingdom as opposed to a bunch of scattered tribes ... which is what is evident from archaeological data and from the input of neighbouring nations and tribes. This mind you, is not data acquired by some determined atheists. This is what Israeli archaeologists... and all other ones surveying the region have come to know. Nothing controversial here. Neither was a Bethlehem found to have supported any colony around the time of the birth of Christ (and neither would it, since the nativity story was added afterwards in the "Matthew's Gospel", which essentially plagiarized the original one by Mark, the one by Mark being written some 30-40 years after the supposed death of Jesus). There were the Gnostics, who did promote the coming of a saviour, and spoke of a deeper truth. For all we know, there were hundreds of these prophets. It's possible one had more traction than the rest, but in any case, there is no historical data to support his birth. Some may claim, falsely at that, that since people made such a big deal of it, SOMEONE must have lived at that time for sure! Well, no. You're simply projecting the modern society's ability to promote information quickly via media into an ancient world, where I could have just walked to another city, made a bunch of shit up, and it would have spread like wildfire among a bunch of disgruntled people. It need not have had any truth value to it whatsoever. But that's besides the point. If we just stick to the New Testament, it is also very clear that Matthew, Luke and John, following up roughly a decade later in succession, essentially plagiarized the original by "Mark". That's all that we get from the historical data, and the point of it being plagiarized is the most probable explanation on account of the spacing in time between the different authors. You are free to disagree , since that point is not ironclad. What is though, is that it was written decades later. Following this (and here comes the part that is REALLY going to get me in trouble) five centuries later, a fellow comes up with Islam to bridge the tribes under one religion. Now, Muhammad almost certainly did exist, for there is clear evidence of the period before and after his time on Earth. There is no written evidence from this period, but someone like him probably did exist to form the uniform tribe that was spreading across the middle east. He probably did have very good intentions, and his message was indeed originally one of tolerating other religions. Indeed, when Islam was spreading till 1100-1200 AD, they didn't force their religion on the nations they conquered. People of different faiths (i.e. Christianity and Judaism), were allowed to follow their faith in most of the conquered parts. In Spain, they were the promoters of science and intellectualism.
I won't go into this further. All I wanted to do is present the history behind it. It's to show that these religions really came from an all too human source, from a time that was in no way uniquely special in terms of genies and dragons flying around. It was, as far as aspects of reality are concerned, "just like now". When presented with this, I should think it should make you feel a little humble about that faith you think is so divinely sourced. All too often, people just forget to question where those words in the text they use to proclaim the righteousness of something, or the wickedness of something else, really came from. They were written not too long ago, by people just like you. All you had to do was just take one step back and ask "where did this thing I value so highly, come from?" . You can obviously say that all that I said is bullshit. Well, go out there and get informed yourself. If you don't want to appreciate any bit of historical and scientific evidence, then there's nothing I want to say or can say. The programming as a child worked wonderfully on you. I'm assuming and hoping it happened as a child, because if you have consciously, as an adult, acquired such a strong affiliation, it makes it very hard for me to understand the extreme irrationality you possess.
Ok, so so far we've covered that organized religion is built on very human and earthly based constructs (and what I haven't covered is that the institutions were built with a whole lot of politics, suppression of information, and bloodshed) , and that should the religions they promote be taught in the way they presently are, there's going to be eventual conflict... which in the context of our modern and technologically advanced society where it gets increasingly easier to cause greater and wider scale harm with decreasing effort ... poses a bit of a problem.
But I haven't covered the God topic yet, have I? What if he/she/it really does exist?!! Well, maybe he/she/it does, but all that I'm saying is that you have as much access to he/she/it as did those people from a thousand years ago. Something spectacular might have happened, but there is no way to tell. The word of God you protest! You mean those bits of text that are scientifically and historically inaccurate, about the origins of ourselves and our universe? You mean those texts that put people of different nations and women on a lower platform, when we can understand full well that they are different but equal from a genetic standpoint? Is that the basis of the divinity argument? Because if it is , it only seals the man made point more than otherwise. It becomes increasingly more probable that we just came up with an imaginative way to make people follow rules and social norms that were considered appropriate at the time. I also don't think the same nativity story cropping up time and again is a sign of anything other than unintelligent plagiarism of an old tale that started in ancient Egypt. But still , lets give the God thing some thought... specifically that man is important or special, worthy almost of his/her/it's attention. Well, let's look at the facts. There are a 100 billion galaxies in our observable universe (there are many more that we simply DON'T observe). There are a 100 billion stars in each of these galaxies, and around each of these stars there's anywhere from 2-4 "goldilocks" planets , on average*. That's something in the order of 10^22 life sustainable planets out there. And here some of us have the audacity to think that we are the pinnacles of life, we... the end product of a bunch of meek miniscule mammals that were allowed to reproduce in the aftermath of the extinction of the dinosaurs, all that being permitted by the chance collision of our planet with a meteor. Just think about that. Just think about how ridiculous it is to think that if there is a God, he/she/it cares for us in any special way. That we in any way could be the most evolved life form in the Universe after a 64 million year experiment left to run, in a Universe that's almost 14 billion years old. It's either got to be equally important, or equally indifferent... but nothing special. Why would the events concerning us humans on Earth, based on an artificial,self-sustaining, man-made system designed to support a growing population, be of ANY interest to "the" God? This is all assuming "the" God exists. For if "the" God is just an evolved being in the Universe, there is no reason to buy into its rules any more than ants and other animals must cater to our rules (all of this assuming this "evolved being God" could communicate with us in some way, for which there is no evidence in the present or historically). We may find them a nuisance and squash them, or kill them, but that's just the exercise of our power to protest their hindrance to our plans, not because what they are doing is fundamentally wrong. A rat or cockroach does nothing fundamentally wrong... it is we that find it wrong from our perspective. In the same sense, this evolved being could very well be wrong about what is right for us.
I think that covers the God point.
Perhaps I ended up going far deeper than I planned on, but I just wanted to be as complete as I could be on this topic.
P.S: I wanted to cover the attack of religious institutions and religious people on science and social rights, but I think the fact that they don't have a leg to stand on is sufficient an argument. The idea of things being "just a theory" however, I will cover... in a separate (and much shorter) post. Yea, I'll use the title "Just a theory" for it.
*The goldilocks planets are those with the right distance from the star, such that the temperature is sufficient to have liquid water around. Since our universe is loaded with organic matter, it is very likely that these water laden planets will promote carbon based life. There could be life that is not carbon based (silicon for instance) , and it could function through something other than water. There may be alternatives to the carbon based energy cycles for life. So much for the sanctity behind the anthropic principle. All in all, the number for life arrived at is very conservative, but how much life is there in the Universe will have roughly the same order of magnitude, as an upper limit.
