Ages Pass

So it appears that I unintentionally gave up blogging during Lent. Oops. I have good reasons why this happened, but regardless, I have been remiss.

At present, I'm reading Daniel C. Dennett's Breaking the Spell, which attempts to rationalize with "believers" that "brights" (his adopted term for atheists and agnostics) are not out of their minds and that "believers" should feel obligated to investigate and question their beliefs.

Given that it is the night before Easter Sunday, I feel obliged to comment.

I think what Dennett is attempting to do is a good thing; there are far too many people out there who blindly accept whatever they are told - whether in regards to religion, government, or American history. My father did me a favor as a child and told me blatant lies on a fairly regular basis, leading me to never take him at his word and investigate everything he ever told me.

Sometimes he was telling me the truth. Sometimes he wasn't. But I did the work and found out.

In twenty-first century America, our society retains the childlike tendency to simply accept whatever we are told - by anyone in a position of ostensibly trustworthy authority. Unfortunately, for some people, this category does not include scientists. Certainly, science has been wrong (something Dennett is more than willing to admit). However, science has also done a very good job of showing when it is wrong and fixing the issue.

Religion... not so much. Not only is religion very hesitant to admit its wrongs, but it is even more hesitant to correct them, instead claiming the all-encompassing net of "faith" or "doctrine" or - better yet - "tradition." I'm sorry, folks, but if "tradition" states that I'm not allowed to be educated simply because I lack a particular piece of genitalia... I don't think so. And yet, this is one of the things that religion does insist upon: Catholicism insists that women cannot be priests; Islam insists on the inherent weakness and inferiority of women; for that matter, all Judeo-Christian-derived religions blame women for the fall of the human race, so we must be bad.

Dennett's problem with religion is not that it insists upon "tradition," per se, but that it ignores factual information in favor of it. For example, the Bible states that the world is 6,000 years old. Science has proven it is not. Believers in the literal truth of the Biblical text insist that science is wrong, despite the evidence that confronts them otherwise.

But my biggest problem with religion - organized or not - is that it fundamentally interferes with personal and social freedom and egalitarianism. Religion insists upon a hierarchy in which all people are subordinated to something somewhere. But at the same time, they insist that they are the "chosen," the most superior [race, species, creed, gender, etc.]. They must submit themselves to a set of rules created by "god" (through the mediating power of generations of very privileged and wealthy clergymen whose personal authority and status was coincidentally increased by these rules) while gleefully condemning everyone else for not wishing to be subject to those same rules.

Religion cannot bring peace and harmony so long as there is more than one, and humanity is incapable of agreeing on a creed. (This is not to say that if the world were atheist, we would all get along. Of course we wouldn't. But we wouldn't be fighting about religion, that's for damn sure.)

Ultimately, this is a subject about which I am pessimistic (uncharacteristic for me). I cannot imagine the people who adhere so desperately to their faith giving it up, since they are clearly unwilling to consider reason at all and therefore will not be swayed by it, no matter how hard people like Dennett try. Those who are reasonable people will cherry-pick: "Okay, I'll concede this point, but you just don't have faith. You have to have faith."

And it all comes down to that: faith. You're right, folks. I don't have faith. I have logic. I have reason. I have ethics. I have a deep respect for human life and the human condition. I have insatiable curiosity and a highly active imagination. I have compassion and love and joy and sorrow and anger and boredom. I have a desire to be more than I am, but also to make a positive difference in the world. I have a passion for life. But I do not have faith. Not in god. Not in religion. Some days, not in the humanity that devotes itself to a creed (which ever it may be) that demands the subjugation and destruction of those with whom it disagrees.

What do I have?

Hope that someday, people will stop using religion as a scapegoat and an excuse. Hope that people will confront one another in terms of ethics and reason, rather than myth. Hope that logic will allow us to move forward scientifically, rationally, and technologically when we are no longer held back by the desire to waste our time and energy devoting ourselves to a fiction that we have deluded ourselves into believing is real.

I do not have faith. I have hope.