OK – it can’t go uncovered. What about some form of Christianity or other faith like Islam as a path to self awareness?
Alright, hands held up in honesty position, I come from a very anti-religious direction which is not to say that I do not believe, or perhaps suspect. Contradiction? Not really. I’ll explain.
In 20 Arguments for God’s Existence Dr Peter Kreeft lays out in great detail well thought out arguments for believing there is something beyond us and the physical universe.
Now if you define God as a thing that exists beyond time, the thing which caused the universe and the thing that will end but that existed before it and that will exist afterwords. If you say God is the bit we do not understand and quite possibly cannot comprehend then that’s OK. We can have a common word for a phenomena.
But humans don’t use the word God like this. They have needed to hang all sorts of bells and whistles on the concept. They’ve written books about what they think this concept said and did, how this concept operates (mainly around providing an afterlife) and how this concept expects us to live our lives.
Now a philosophical concept has taken on all sorts of shapes and meanings that were purely the results of the imagination of mankind.
It is like, to borrow a De Mello example, the man who is born blind and wants to understand the colour green. He can be fairly sure it exists because others tell him and he can create a mental fantasy of what it is based on what he can comprehend … but he would more than likely be wrong.
Kreefe’s writing points us to signs that something exists. Something that has yet to be proven or something that is beyond our comprehension. Our colour green.
In other words, in Anthony De Mello’s words (and he was a Jesuit Catholic), “To know God is to know he is unknowable”. With that understanding the Bible or Koran or other similar texts go straight out the window. They are merely mankind’s attempts to understand what cannot be understood.
In fact there are plenty of reasons to believe the phenomena is not a god (or goddess) as many imagine Him/Her/Them. The Cosmologist Sean Carroll puts it best:
“If God existed … I would expect a book that I knew exactly what it said, it was clear that it was right and I would be able to follow it. If God did not exist I would expect all sorts of different books which would contradict each other … they would be edited collections, they would be personal memoirs, they would all disagree with each other.”
Its really just another sign alongside our knowledge that there have been so many religions before as well. All attempts with varying degrees of popularity. When new ones came up that sounded better people switched over but they remain merely attempts at the colour green and attempts where we have no idea how close or far we are from reality.
This would all not matter at all if it didn’t have such an impact on our society and the most negative aspect is the collective blindness to logic that so many believers attain. The most basic is when they make the point that “you cannot prove God does not exist” as a way of proving that he does.
Better put in Hitchens Razor – What can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence. Not being able to prove something does not exist does not prove it exists.
I’ve always seen such main stream religions as serving three roles. One – a way to explain away what we don’t know. Two – a social control system. Three – a mental crutch for those who cannot cope alone.
I also see those who believe in God based religions (Christians and Muslims especially) as some of the most frightened and fragile people in society and I really don’t want to live a life where I’m frightened. Let me explain that.
A great many comments I read on the internet are from Christians and these comments are often the strongest in their attack. Take this comment on a YouTube video about Witchcraft:
Revelation 21:8 “But cowards, unbelievers, the corrupt, murderers, the immoral, those who practice witchcraft, idol worshipers, and all liars–their fate is in the fiery lake of burning sulfur. This is the second death.”
Now there is some debate about whether or not ‘Witchcraft’ was actually even translated correctly from the original biblical texts but even so many Christians take to the internet in a shouty way. “Don’t do that”, “God is almighty”, “Jesus will drive the demons out of you”, etc, etc.
Now I’ll go back to the principle I believe – aggression is fear. So what are these Christians scared of if they are so certain in their beliefs?
First off, they probably aren’t that certain. God based religions have had a hard time of it in the past few centuries. They thought they had got the story straight and then science came along and kept messing it up.
This fractured the church in numerous ways. There are still parts of it that don’t believe in evolution and dinosaurs while other bits have worked hard to stitch them in and reinterpret the Bible, Koran or other text their belief system is based on..
Jehovah’s Witnesses, for example, came up with a concept called New Light which allows them to accept changes in the ‘story’ based on new messages from God (that sort of square up with the latest scientific or social advances).
Religion was usually the plug that closed the knowledge gap. A plague was cause by demons. Ooops bacteria and viruses have been discovered, “forget the demon thing in that particular case but there are still definitely demons though”.
By trying to provide all the answers they did very well for a few hundred years but now they are increasingly feeling the erosion. What they said before didn’t stack up before, what if what they are saying now turns out not to stack up as well?
Most God based religions have sort of ended up in the same marsh. They are defending something that seems increasingly hard to believe, especially over the past few decades. They must fear that the entire house of cards could come crashing down at any moment like a nasty game of Jenga.
Every extra non-believer in the world is another piece of wood pulled from the Jenga tower and their fury is aimed at getting that but back into place.
I don’t think religions like Christianity or Islam are anywhere near collapse but if you have invested so much in defending a religion you must certainly live in fear of it turning out to be no more than a story. Of having to return to the drawing board and completely rethink Keefe’s text.
That fear, I believe, manifests itself in many a believer not really being able to square the circle in their own minds. God, for example, flooded the world to rid it of evil. Noah did alright and he made sure all of the species would survive in his big old boat.
But hang on. God killed every single lion, bar two. God drowned every single elephant bar two. What on earth had these creatures to do with man’s evil? That’s just not nice.
Then there is the slightly more slippery question at the beginning. God made Adam and Eve and they had Cain and Abel. Cain murdered Abel (not a good start) and then got married – but to who?
The argument goes he must have married a sister and that wasn’t a problem back then because Adam and Eve were genetically pure. Its all papering over the cracks for something which really doesn’t hang together as well as it used to.
But if you lose your religion where do you go from there? That is truly frightening to some but I don’t see why. The only thing you lose is the social control element – the boundaries by which the religion says you must live and act.
The rest remains, you can still suspect there are other powers at play and know that you do not know, but that does not mean they do not exist. Or would mankind just come up with a new fantasy for their colour green.
The second type of fear is that of the God itself. I’m not so up to speed with Islam but the Christian God certainly had a bad temper in the Old Testament. Plenty there to say what would happen to you if you weren’t good.
So fear is the over arching umbrella of God based religions and I can truly see where their fear lies on both fronts. Like the nationalist protestors I mentioned way back who looked angry many Christians put forward an image of ‘joy’ but in their eyes I have only seen fear.
My second reservation on religion is the group ideology. I know there are off springs but the main stream is very much about group control. You troop into the church or mosque with everyone else, someone tells you how you should be and how things should be, and you troop out.
Its not very individual. Self awareness is about the individual and these types of religion trample on that. They also attempt to answer all the questions instead of encouraging you to question (the Catholic church is a particular ‘devil’ in this respect)
Again, I’m not actually against them even if they have “caused more and bloodier wars than anything else in the history of creation”. They have also, it needs to be said, provided the framework and support many have needed in order to make their way through life.
Some people need the boundaries that these religions impose to give their lives definition. What they should and should not do, how they should react to certain situations, etc. I wouldn’t want to take this crutch away.
Yes, it is annoying that this fear manifests itself in aggression so often but so long as that aggression is not causing harm I let it go and understand it as fear.
Obviously the issue arises when this aggression turns violent but this is not religions fault. Religion is the excuse, the vehicle used by the aggressor. If I don’t get the bus I get the tram. If there had never been any religions that does not mean there would be fewer wars and genocides – those parts of mankind that caused them would have found another reason.