Having finished Dawkins' The God Delusion yesterday, I have some further thoughts on the book and its general premise.
Dawkins proves himself to be a remarkably enlightened individual who has an incredible level of frustration with the current state of international psyches. He just doesn't understand how so many people could be confronted with the same universe as the one in which he finds himself and not come to the same conclusions he does.
I sympathize.
I do understand how someone might wish to believe in god or in the supernatural. I even understand how they can believe in it. I've seen enough strange and unexplainable things in my life to have my own moments of doubt, though I must confess that I consider the supernatural to simply be things-we-can't-explain-yet-but-someday-will. Even if that means finding a scientific explanation for hauntings, etc. that includes the dead. Great. Fine by me.
What I - and Dawkins - do not understand is the type of mentality that allows a person to believe something even when confronted with evidence to the contrary. Creationism, for instance. Like Dawkins, I tend to cringe at the phrase "intelligent design," though I do understand the thought that maybe god got the whole ball rolling. But then, like the proverbial ball, it rolled along its evolutionary way.
I'm sorry, but the earth is NOT 6000 years old. It just isn't. It's millions of years old, and that - as Dawkins points out - is just so much cooler than if it were a mere 6000. But this wasn't meant to be a post on creationism versus evolution.
It's a post on religion itself. I tend to harbor what may be an irrational animosity toward organized religion. It all started - as I said in an earlier post - with a pink button. Funny how so small a thing can be a life-changing, mind-altering thing. The proverbial straw.
But once my eyes were open to the idiocy going on around me - at the tender age of six, mind you, things began to make more sense. Grow more infuriating, too. All of the things a child must do in Catholic school seemed more and more ridiculous the older I got, and the very notion of god slipped away into the shadows as I began to realize that the people around me were more interested in themselves than in the god in which they professed to believe. It wasn't simply that they were children. It was that the god - the "little god" - in which they had faith would damn me for any number of insignificant things.
God, in my rapidly expanding world, was a thing of rules. A thing of limitations and condemnations. A thing that tried to stifle my voice, my creativity, my self. And I decided - very early - that I was having none of it. God was, insofar as I could tell, an excuse for people to tell me what to do. Dawkins agrees:
Martin Luther was well aware that reason was religion's arch-enemy, and he frequently warned of its dangers: 'Reason is the greatest enemy that faith has; it never comes to the aid of spiritual things, but more frequently than not struggles against the divine Word, treating with contempt all that emanates from God.' Again: 'Whoever wants to be a Christian should tear the eyes out of his reason.' And again: 'Reason should be destroyed in all Christians.' (221)
The elimination of reason would be the elimination of one of the fundamental things that makes us human and sentient. I suppose it would disprove evolution - if we abandon reason, then we all devolve into monkeys. We're already slinging metaphorical feces at one another; why not make it real feces? It can't possibly smell any more of bullsh*t than the Creationist Museum.
Did you know, for instance, that dinosaurs didn't come with name tags? And did you know that the T-rex ate fruit because in Eden there was no death and therefore he couldn't have eaten animals? Well, then. I guess T-rex got to the Tree first and the reason dinosaurs got wiped out is because of a stupid animal with too-short front arms that got hungry and made itself as god. *BLAM!* Enter falling sky-bits. Good-bye T-rex. Adam and Eve were really the second expulsion. (Please note that the Creationists' assertions end with the last question mark. If you couldn't tell that, it may be a sign of just how stupid their logic *cough* really is.)
Finally, though, my biggest complaint about religion is another mentioned by Dawkins. The fact that people do things in the name of religion that are otherwise entirely unsanctionable. The Crusades, for instance. Under what other auspices could an entire continent send droves of children off to die? Again, to quote Dawkins:
As the Nobel Prize-winning American physicist Steven Weinberg said, 'Religion is an insult to human dignity. With or without it, you'd have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, it takes religion.' Blaise Pascal (he of the wager) said something similar: 'Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction.' (283)
I'm sure we can all run through a laundry-list of atrocities committed in the name of one god or another. The wars, the deaths, the destruction. Only patriotism can convince people as wholeheartedly to commit themselves to death and slaughter... but at least patriotism has a tangible result. The safety of a nation makes infinitely more sense than... than what?
What do we get from killing for religion? Sent to a magical land which has what? Puffy clouds and wings? What if you're afraid of heights? Virgins? Not for long. A table of mead and women and war? I hope they've got cures for hangovers and syphillis. Any conception of the afterlife that we've managed to concoct (with the exception of the reincarnationists, who actually make some sense) is based on a flawed, human understanding of the universe. The things we get are the very same things we're warned away from during our lives as being sinful (with the exception of the very nice Norse - drunken sex and battle are good things in both worlds).
What is most pathetic - in all senses of the word - about religious devotion is the idea that a person can willfully discard the wonders of the world in favor of imagined wonders of equal or less splendor. I can think of no greater tragedy for the human mind than to be consoled by a weak shadow of this world, to look forward to the promise of something so much the inferior of the universe around them that they cannot see what it is they have.
And if there is a god - particularly a benevolent one - how can it possibly find value in a race of creatures whose motives are all directed at selfish self-promotion? I will be good so that I get to heaven. How is that goodness? It's self-serving and vile. Be good because you wish to be good. Be good because you believe it is good. Don't be good just to get a pat on the head from a great invisible power that could squish you like a bug.
If there is a god, then I hope that it judges us not by our religion or our devotion, but by the quality and content of our characters. It does not need us to believe in it in order to exist. And if it demands worship and devotion, well, then I'm going to blaspheme and say that I agree with Milton's Satan: "Better to reign in Hell than serve in heaven." But I tend to find myself agreeing most with Epicurus:
Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able?
Then he is not omnipotent.
Is he able, but not willing?
Then he is malevolent.
Is he both able, and willing?
Then whence cometh evil?
Is he neither able nor willing?
Then why call him God?
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