The One We've All Been Waiting For: Religion and Why I Don't Play
But before we get into the why, first a little back ground. I grew up in a lax Seventh Day Adventist home. From what I have heard from talking to some of the many people I have come across in my travels as a soldier, a "lax Seventh Day Adventist home" is basically the same as a strict (insert any other mainstream flavor of Christianity) one. Our family wasn't as big on all of the ins and outs of the SDA church as many that I knew growing up, but we followed enough of it that I had a pretty different outlook on church as most kids my age. If you don't believe me, I didn't know that the term "bacon" traditionally meant pork meat and not turkey or beef. I bought into that religion right up until the day that I swore off religion completely. My journey away from the church started because of the work of fiction The Da Vinici Code. I couldn't believe the claims the book made about the origins of the church. The problem was that when I started doing the research to defend my faith, I couldn't find proof to support it. I went through a very angry period where my primary goal in life was to destroy the faith of as many people as I could. I got out of that due to some personally enlightening reading material given to me by Leland Dyer, as well as many long conversations about that material. I have become much more tolerant of others beliefs now, but as a blogger, I am here to give out my own opinions. This being one of my strongest opinions, I couldn't simply not give it.
There is not a particularly good way of organizing all of the reasoning behind my lack of belief. Many of the reasons feed into each other, I will attempt to keep the rambling to a minimum.
My primary argument against religion is that I cannot accept the most basic doctrinal concept of nearly all major religions. The term "faith" means "Strong belief in God or in the doctrines of a religion, based on spiritual apprehension rather than proof." The most core concept of religion is that it must be accepted without proof. In this age of science, when over the last 500 years we have unraveled COUNTLESS mysteries of the nature of our existence, you have to accept without proof the set of information that you will use to make the single most important question of your life. Remember, what is at stake here (if you accept some religious doctrine as truth) is some sort of unimaginable reward vs some unimaginable punishment. That makes the question of "Do you follow X religion?" the most important question of your life, and by very definition you have to make that decision without the ability to prove you were making it correctly.
Now lets look at the numbers. http://www.religionfacts.com/big_religion_chart.htm puts the number of Major Religious groupings at 43, but a look at the list shows that it doesn't even being to break those down into denominations. There are realistically too many variations of those 43 to get an accurate idea of how many different sets of belief there are. Especially among the Christian and Wiccan major groups you have HUNDREDS of sub-sets of belief that have very significant differences. As we've shown that you can't prove that you are choosing the right one, the statistical likelihood that you grew up, or converted into the "correct" religion is slim. That is of course if the "correct" one even exists as an established religion at this time. There are many belief systems which no longer have a significant following, and there is no way to know if the "correct" religion has even been created yet. So not only are you forced to go in to the game blind, but the odds are pretty heavily stacked against you.
The "opium of the people" concept also cannot be ignored. "The foundation of irreligious criticism is: Man makes religion, religion does not make man. Religion is, indeed, the self-consciousness and self-esteem of man who has either not yet won through to himself, or has already lost himself again. But man is no abstract being squatting outside the world. Man is the world of man – state, society. This state and this society produce religion, which is an inverted consciousness of the world, because they are an inverted world. Religion is the general theory of this world, its encyclopedic compendium, its logic in popular form, its spiritual point d’honneur, its enthusiasm, its moral sanction, its solemn complement, and its universal basis of consolation and justification. It is the fantastic realization of the human essence since the human essence has not acquired any true reality. The struggle against religion is, therefore, indirectly the struggle against that world whose spiritual aroma is religion. Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people. The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. To call on them to give up their illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions. The criticism of religion is, therefore, in embryo, the criticism of that vale of tears of which religion is the halo. Criticism has plucked the imaginary flowers on the chain not in order that man shall continue to bear that chain without fantasy or consolation, but so that he shall throw off the chain and pluck the living flower." For those who are unfamiliar with this text, that's from Karl Marx, better known as the guy who came up with Communism. Put more plainly, religion is a product of our society attempting to regulate those who fall outside of the bounds of accepted norms, and to provide hope to those in situations that would otherwise be considered unbearable. The regulation to keep people within norms is why there are so many rules in all religion. It was societies way to shun those they disagreed with. In today's world where acceptable behavior is constantly changing, religion has no way to keep up because it is rooted in the distant past.
Too much suffering has come at the hands of religion. Sure, I'll admit that to the "faithful" it can be a comfort in a time of hardship, but look at all the violence that is still happening to this day to the "unfaithful". Europe went to war in the Middle East for basically 200 years in the name of Christianity. Muslims, Christians, and Jews are fighting right now in the Middle East over access to "Holy Sites". And I'm sure those of you who don't want to feel guilty will spout the same drivel that always shows up about "fanatics", or "unfaithful using religion to justify political reasoning". That is a load of crap and you all know it. You cannot defend religion by saying that idiots used it as a shield. If it didn't exist the idiots would have to answer for their idiocy, but by allowing religion to exist, you allow idiots to use it to champion their cause.
Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny exist as fictional characters to get children interested in holidays that make no sense without those characters to muddy the water, and the characters themselves were added to make those holidays acceptable to people who didn't understand the holiday in the first place. Easter is a holiday to celebrate the supposed resurrection of Christ, yet the Christian church decided to to use all the same symbolism for the holiday as the Pagan fertility festival that happens at basically the same exact time every year. Oh yeah, the Christian's also can't agree on when it's supposed to be every year too. Christmas is a holiday that is meant to celebrate the supposed birth of Christ, yet the holiday happens at a time very unlikely to be when Christ was supposedly born. That entire story from the bible is present in dozens of other religions outside of what anyone could call Christianity, but once Rome made it THE religion of "the world" everyone forgot about all that stuff. Except, once again, they needed a way to get all the pagans on board, so the put it around the winter solstice and stole most of the pagan traditions for that and called it Christmas. So where does the fat guy in the red suit come from? At this point does it even matter? Seriously, the idea that one guy can get to every house with children in all the places that believe in him in one night is hardly any more absurd than the story that the holiday is based on in the first place.
Being "religious" does not make you a good person. I have known some individuals who were truly loving, caring, and self-sacrificing that were as atheist as I am, just as I have known religious people who were angry, self-absorbed, judgmental pricks. Your beliefs do not define who you are as a person any more than you astrological sign does. The sheer number of people born on March 11, 1990 cannot all have basically the same personality as I have. Astrology is based on giving people very vague information and letting their mind fill in the details. Religion does this to people by having enough varieties that you can just follow the religion that holds you to an ideal that you are comfortable striving towards. Ever wonder why religions have denominations? It happens when a large group of people decide that the status quo isn't right for them, so they break away to establish a version of that religion that they are more comfortable with.
As always, please feel free to challenge anything that I have said. The joy of being an Agnostic/Atheist is that I am constantly able to re-evaluate my position based on the information available. Be aware though, that if you quote the bible at me, I will laugh at your message. It is not a historical text, you can tell, because it doesn't get updated when new information about its events is uncovered. It's a religious text, designed to support a single mindset, yet interpreted into many different ones.
There is not a particularly good way of organizing all of the reasoning behind my lack of belief. Many of the reasons feed into each other, I will attempt to keep the rambling to a minimum.
My primary argument against religion is that I cannot accept the most basic doctrinal concept of nearly all major religions. The term "faith" means "Strong belief in God or in the doctrines of a religion, based on spiritual apprehension rather than proof." The most core concept of religion is that it must be accepted without proof. In this age of science, when over the last 500 years we have unraveled COUNTLESS mysteries of the nature of our existence, you have to accept without proof the set of information that you will use to make the single most important question of your life. Remember, what is at stake here (if you accept some religious doctrine as truth) is some sort of unimaginable reward vs some unimaginable punishment. That makes the question of "Do you follow X religion?" the most important question of your life, and by very definition you have to make that decision without the ability to prove you were making it correctly.
Now lets look at the numbers. http://www.religionfacts.com/big_religion_chart.htm puts the number of Major Religious groupings at 43, but a look at the list shows that it doesn't even being to break those down into denominations. There are realistically too many variations of those 43 to get an accurate idea of how many different sets of belief there are. Especially among the Christian and Wiccan major groups you have HUNDREDS of sub-sets of belief that have very significant differences. As we've shown that you can't prove that you are choosing the right one, the statistical likelihood that you grew up, or converted into the "correct" religion is slim. That is of course if the "correct" one even exists as an established religion at this time. There are many belief systems which no longer have a significant following, and there is no way to know if the "correct" religion has even been created yet. So not only are you forced to go in to the game blind, but the odds are pretty heavily stacked against you.
The "opium of the people" concept also cannot be ignored. "The foundation of irreligious criticism is: Man makes religion, religion does not make man. Religion is, indeed, the self-consciousness and self-esteem of man who has either not yet won through to himself, or has already lost himself again. But man is no abstract being squatting outside the world. Man is the world of man – state, society. This state and this society produce religion, which is an inverted consciousness of the world, because they are an inverted world. Religion is the general theory of this world, its encyclopedic compendium, its logic in popular form, its spiritual point d’honneur, its enthusiasm, its moral sanction, its solemn complement, and its universal basis of consolation and justification. It is the fantastic realization of the human essence since the human essence has not acquired any true reality. The struggle against religion is, therefore, indirectly the struggle against that world whose spiritual aroma is religion. Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people. The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. To call on them to give up their illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions. The criticism of religion is, therefore, in embryo, the criticism of that vale of tears of which religion is the halo. Criticism has plucked the imaginary flowers on the chain not in order that man shall continue to bear that chain without fantasy or consolation, but so that he shall throw off the chain and pluck the living flower." For those who are unfamiliar with this text, that's from Karl Marx, better known as the guy who came up with Communism. Put more plainly, religion is a product of our society attempting to regulate those who fall outside of the bounds of accepted norms, and to provide hope to those in situations that would otherwise be considered unbearable. The regulation to keep people within norms is why there are so many rules in all religion. It was societies way to shun those they disagreed with. In today's world where acceptable behavior is constantly changing, religion has no way to keep up because it is rooted in the distant past.
Too much suffering has come at the hands of religion. Sure, I'll admit that to the "faithful" it can be a comfort in a time of hardship, but look at all the violence that is still happening to this day to the "unfaithful". Europe went to war in the Middle East for basically 200 years in the name of Christianity. Muslims, Christians, and Jews are fighting right now in the Middle East over access to "Holy Sites". And I'm sure those of you who don't want to feel guilty will spout the same drivel that always shows up about "fanatics", or "unfaithful using religion to justify political reasoning". That is a load of crap and you all know it. You cannot defend religion by saying that idiots used it as a shield. If it didn't exist the idiots would have to answer for their idiocy, but by allowing religion to exist, you allow idiots to use it to champion their cause.
Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny exist as fictional characters to get children interested in holidays that make no sense without those characters to muddy the water, and the characters themselves were added to make those holidays acceptable to people who didn't understand the holiday in the first place. Easter is a holiday to celebrate the supposed resurrection of Christ, yet the Christian church decided to to use all the same symbolism for the holiday as the Pagan fertility festival that happens at basically the same exact time every year. Oh yeah, the Christian's also can't agree on when it's supposed to be every year too. Christmas is a holiday that is meant to celebrate the supposed birth of Christ, yet the holiday happens at a time very unlikely to be when Christ was supposedly born. That entire story from the bible is present in dozens of other religions outside of what anyone could call Christianity, but once Rome made it THE religion of "the world" everyone forgot about all that stuff. Except, once again, they needed a way to get all the pagans on board, so the put it around the winter solstice and stole most of the pagan traditions for that and called it Christmas. So where does the fat guy in the red suit come from? At this point does it even matter? Seriously, the idea that one guy can get to every house with children in all the places that believe in him in one night is hardly any more absurd than the story that the holiday is based on in the first place.
Being "religious" does not make you a good person. I have known some individuals who were truly loving, caring, and self-sacrificing that were as atheist as I am, just as I have known religious people who were angry, self-absorbed, judgmental pricks. Your beliefs do not define who you are as a person any more than you astrological sign does. The sheer number of people born on March 11, 1990 cannot all have basically the same personality as I have. Astrology is based on giving people very vague information and letting their mind fill in the details. Religion does this to people by having enough varieties that you can just follow the religion that holds you to an ideal that you are comfortable striving towards. Ever wonder why religions have denominations? It happens when a large group of people decide that the status quo isn't right for them, so they break away to establish a version of that religion that they are more comfortable with.
As always, please feel free to challenge anything that I have said. The joy of being an Agnostic/Atheist is that I am constantly able to re-evaluate my position based on the information available. Be aware though, that if you quote the bible at me, I will laugh at your message. It is not a historical text, you can tell, because it doesn't get updated when new information about its events is uncovered. It's a religious text, designed to support a single mindset, yet interpreted into many different ones.
The bible has been supported by historians and archeologists in a few instances so it should not be totally scorned as having no historical significance. A short while ago stones were found that had a reference to the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah. For centuries people insisted the cities never existed but then came the stones. The style of writing and word usage in the book of Daniel have been verified as coming from the Babylonian era. Daniel told of the kingdoms and empires that would succeed that of Babylonia. Medo-Persia, Greece, and the Romans. Surely that was not something a mere human could accurately predict.
ReplyDeleteFor many years I lived on faith alone. But as I began to see prayers answered I no longer needed to live on just faith, I had physical evidence of God's existence. That is something a non believer will never comprehend because you have to have faith to see a prayer answered.
A 70 year old man in our church was diagnosed with a fast growing type of cancer. Stage four prostate. They expected him to live only six more months. We gathered around him in a circle and prayed for a healing. This man had been a central figure in the church since I joined in 1969. Two weeks later he returned to the doctor for a follow up exam. The PSA test came back negative. The doctor "knew" that was impossible. He ordered another test, then another. They all came back negative. Some might argue the body healed itself, it had nothing to do with God. But there is not one case on record of advanced prostate cancer doing a reversal on its own. Now six years later the man is receiving a variety of hormone treatments at the advice of his doctor who is still dumbfounded over the reversal of the cancer.
First off, I would like to thank you for both taking the time to read this, as well as taking the time to respond.
ReplyDeleteTo address your first point I will provide a similar situation as I see it. I'm going to make 5 statements, 1) Julius Caesar was an emperor of Rome, 2)The Green Bay Packers are the best football team in the NFL, 3) England is part of the United Kingdom, 4) Aaron Rogers is the best quarterback in the NFL, 5) Pizza is the most nutritionally complete food item you can eat. What you'll notice about those 5 statements is that 2 of them are verifiable facts, and 3 of them are essentially baseless claims or opinions. While I may not have made it clear that I do recognize that there are many parts of the bible that are verifiable, that does not legitimize the rest of it just like my 2 factual statements to justify the other 3. Another thing worth pointing out is that the verifiable parts of the bible are also parts of the Muslim Koran and the Jewish Torah. If those stories having accuracy legitimize the rest of the bible, it also legitimizes the Torah and Koran.
Your next to points are difficult to separate and respond to on their own, but I will try.
As an ex-believer, I fully comprehend what you are talking about. The logical loophole in that argument is quite simple though. My Seventh Day Adventist upbringing taught me that God always answers prayers, even if what we asked for in prayer wasn't what we got it was because God had some greater plan in mind. The problem with using prayer as evidence is that to a believer, all possible outcomes after prayer are still evidence.
Now for the Medical Miracle as proof. I could spend thousands of words explaining why the nature of so-called miracles don't really serve as proof of anything other than humanities incomplete knowledge. However, I will simply leave you with a question to ponder. If prayer (and the God you are praying to) are powerful enough to heal someone of an impossible to heal ailment, why has God never chosen to heal amputees?
Again, I thank you for taking the time to stop by my blog, and I look forward to hearing from you.
The similarities between the Torah, the Koran, and the Christian bible are the result of the Christian bible having its roots from the Torah as in "Old Testament".
ReplyDeleteThe Koran however is a Knock off of the Torah. Many scholars have come to the conclusion that Satan was furious with the spread of Christianity so he devised an alternate religion in the hope it would serve to usurp Christianity. Just because the Koran has a story about Noah doesn't make it as reliable as the Torah. Nor does that imply it has the same foundation. Islam is still stuck in about the 6th century in the way it treats women, children, and its neighbors. Just look at the hell holes where Islam is the dominant religion. You can tell a tree by the fruit it produces.
Muhammed claimed to have received the first of the Koran in the year 610. By 636 he was already beginning the bloodshed to claim as much of the middle east as possible. Christians were treated like dogs and forced to pay fees in order to live in conquered lands. They were often butchered for being unbelievers. They still are, just read the news to see how Christians are treated by Muslims. This is not opinion, it is fact.
AS regarding the multitude of "Christian" denominations, look at what happens if there is a bank robbery or other such incidence. One witness will say the robber was 6'2", another will say 5'10". One will say black jacket another dark blue. People are imperfect, sometimes they have trouble remembering what they saw. So it should be no wonder that people who read the bible come to differing opinions of what they read. Firstly it has to do with their education. Secondly it has to do with their ability to mentally digest the information. Just because a person has a college degree doesn't mean they have the best judgment.
Where I worked we had "engineers" come in and suggest changes that would make the job more "efficient". We would explain why it looked good on paper but would not work in real application. Guess what? We came to work after a three day weekend and the "perfect solution" had been implemented. It was a bumpy start, but we tried to make it work because we knew it was not going to be easy to get the changes removed. We worked up a sweat trying to do it the way the engineer laid out but we frequently fell behind. He screamed at our boss that we were sabotaging his work. The boss could tell we were not sandbagging it, hell our clothes were soaked with sweat. After three weeks of tweeking and losing production, the "changes" were removed. Perception. How a person perceives something is the truth to them.
Had to post in two parts, the whole thing had too many characters.
ReplyDeleteThere is enough accuracy concerning historical events in the bible that people can see it if they wish to.
Someone once said, "That Christian thing sure is a strange one. They have a great coach, but the team is pretty shaky."
No one should judge God by the way his children behave. After all, according to the writings in the book they follow, they are flawed and imperfect creatures.
As for the amputees, good question. I can only guess it is one of those issues that God feels best left alone. IF there is a God, and IF he created humans, then he has the right to test us. Failing to heal an amputee might be a test. FACT. I have seen religion change people from hell raising drunkards into good citizens who contribute something valuable to society, so there IS something good that comes from it.
I sure don't have all the answers but I HAVE seen enough events that defy the laws of physics to know there IS a God. Some Christians cringe when I say this; There ARE restraints on what God can do. Why, because God must be fair in all instances. He cannot cheat, or bend rules. Read the story of Job (for meaning, not defects) and you will grasp that God was accused of being a cheater, always protecting Job. Satan said, Let me mess with him and he will curse your name. So God had to sit back and let Satan totally mess up Jobs life. That is a lesson intended to explain why God does not always fix everything the way we want. we humans can be terribly self centered little weasels.
This much I know for certain. If Satan had not messed with our Adam and Eve, there would be no amputees to heal.
"This much I know for certain. If Satan had not messed with our Adam and Eve, there would be no amputees to heal."
ReplyDeleteI know this for certain, their is no proof that either of those three "people" ever existed. Their is however proof that amputees exist, and while "Failing to heal an amputee might be a test." Failing to heal any of them means that either your god doesn't want them healed (this goes against the "Loving God" concept), or that he lacks the ability to (which goes against the all powerful deity concept).
Pointing me to the story of Job to explain the nature of God would be like if I told you to go buy a telescope to understand the big bang theory. I've already rejected the Bible as having any significant meaning other than justification for something that I disagree with.
"No one should judge God by the way his children behave. After all, according to the writings in the book they follow, they are flawed and imperfect creatures." This is a cop-out, and it doesn't even address my point. I am not judging God. As an Athiest/Agnostic, I do not recognize that their is a God to judge. I am judging religion, and a religion should absolutely be judged by the actions of its followers. Assuming that all of the people in a religion chose to be their, their collective actions reflect on the collective.
To put this into a light that is more cut and dry. Not all members of the KKK have physically tortured and killed racial minorities. But when the violence is done in the name of the KKK, we all tend to agree that the KKK is an evil organization.
I know this for certain, the entire time I was a "Christian", my mind was never at ease with my life. There were always questions about was I following the Bible the right way, was I doing enough to support the church, am I really letting God direct my life, have I really accepted him as my savior?
I am now happy and content with my life. I go to work every day to better the lives of my family, I teach my children morals that will help them become productive members of society that I can be proud of. It's simple, and it makes me happy.