Storytellers -
Typically, most of us follow religious beliefs based on what’s dictated
to us by storytellers. At times
it’s from our parents/grandparents, that most of our cognitive (or
otherwise) learning starts. They themselves have gotten their hearsay
(second-hand) beliefs from their parents/grandparents. This goes on… we
continue the cycle, and pass this dogma to our kids. It’s of course a
genuine urge from our loved ones who try to ingest into us morals and religious
values through those stories. Seldom do we realise that all the emotional investment is rather
induced religious indoctrination - something that we force on the feeble mind
of a very young child. In reality, anything like religion should not be
introduced until a child reaches a reasonable age, when our rational
thinking is developed and we are able to decipher and critically evaluate the
intrinsic meanings, if any, behind those stories. By virtue of being human, we have the ability to critically think, evaluate and analyse.
Children
trust their parents, after all, and seek their approval and look up to them for
guidance. Most of the time what parents impart to their children turns out to be
true - but not always. Once a ridiculously false belief takes hold (for some
reason or other), it is quite easy to imagine how it gets transmitted down
generation after generation; it’s belief without evidence - faith. Maybe this
is why they believe in what seems quite silly to a rational mind. Then there is
also the fear of abandoning a belief out of concern that it may hurt one's
parents' feelings, and there is often fear of ostracism from the family
and even the larger community to which one belongs. This is a very good example
of a very bad reason for holding a religious belief: because your parents hold
it. We fail to understand that ethics and morality are quite independent of
faith, and cannot be derived from it. Moral minds need not be developed from ignorant religious teachings.
Given
the obstinate nature of religious faith and the wilful ignorance it cultivates
in the mind of the believer, it’s carried on for ages from one generation to
the next, without most of us questioning the motives, reality and the truth. Religion was rooted in days when science was not developed. We believed the religious myths in the absence of a scientific mindset. People pacified rain-gods to get enough rain. Chickenpox used to be treated by worshiping some goddess (and it’s still being, done by people with a backward mentality). While wooing the gods never helped - the Varicella vaccine managed to eradicate the disease in a few years. As science progresses, religion recedes. We, as kids, read (or watch on TV/movies these days) the fairy tales, the magic, and
so on… our young brain believes these stories, and we perceive all that as if it’s real. As we grow, we realise and understand that there is/was nothing
called a unicorn, a mermaid, a fairy, Aladdin Genie, or a magic wand; we grow up and grow out of those faltering childish beliefs. But hold on, you will
find even adults who still believe all this is real. People
actually believe Santa Claus is real. Some of us don’t grow out of these urban legends - growing old is mandatory - growing up is optional. :)
Traditionally -
We have
been traditionally passed on wrong information, via stories and old traditions, sometimes in an authoritative manner and at times someone imposing their perplexed revelation, quite
vehemently. Tradition,
authority and revelation are very poor reasons for accepting something to be
true. We must teach our kids to think more objectively and think with reason.
Kids should be encouraged to ask questions, rather than being made complacent by
believing generic and static proclamations. We must question and look for evidence. Most of us
choose the easier route - follow-the-herd, taking authority or an epiphany
as the final word rather than being sceptic and critically examining the truth. Guess what, some religious books indicate and people believe, that the world is about 8 thousand years old, and that it was created in six days by
magic. In reality (as science
illustrates, with evidence) the world is 4.5 billion yrs. old, and the universe
is actually about 14+ billion yrs. old. Is there any match or slightest truth in
the fallacy presented by religious books? Imagine the scale of error - it’s like claiming Mount Everest
is 1 centimetre tall.
“We are
the product of 4.5 billion years of fortuitous, slow biological evolution.
There is no reason to think that the evolutionary process has stopped. Man is a
transitional animal. He is not the climax of creation.” - Dr. Carl Sagan
What's the evidence-
“You must believe in feelings deep inside”, a common expression we hear, “otherwise you’d never be confident of things like ‘My wife loves me’”. How good is that argument? There can be plenty of evidence that somebody loves you. When you are with somebody who loves you, you experience a lot of little titbits of evidence, and they all add up. It isn’t purely inside feeling, like the feeling that priests call revelation. There are outside things to back the inside feeling: looks in the eyes, tender notes in the voice, little favours and kindnesses; this is all real evidence. Sometimes people have a strong inside feeling that somebody loves them when it is not based upon any evidence, they are likely to be completely wrong, possibly ill in their mind. Inside feelings must be backed by evidence; otherwise we can’t trust them.
Inside
feelings are valuable in science too, but only for giving you ideas that you
later test by looking for evidence. A scientist can have a ‘hunch’ about an
idea that just ‘feels’ right. In itself, this is not a good reason for
believing something. But it can be a good reason for spending some time doing a
particular experiment or looking in a particular way for evidence. Scientists
use feelings all the time to get ideas. But they are not worth anything
until they are supported by evidence.
It's human nature -
Holding
certain beliefs makes some people feel better about something or other. For
example, it might make some anxious to think that they will be permanently
separated from their parents or other loved ones by death and so if the religion offers a belief in an eternal afterlife, as many religions do,
where you will be reunited with friends and family, it may make you feel
calmer. Or belonging to a religious faith might provide some people with a
feeling of solidarity and community and a pleasurable method of occasional
social interaction with others. Though, just because something makes you feel good, it is not a good reason to believe it is true. It would make me feel very good to
believe that I am the best-looking person or one of the richest in the world,
but that doesn't make it true and it would be quite foolish of me to have such
a belief without strong evidence that it actually is true. Besides, these beliefs and the propaganda around them invade public places, and they cease to remain personal, for most people, it's more show-off than anything else. Spiritual, religious or otherwise, keeping it a private matter restrains the evil it creates when it goes public.
Recently,
there has been a spur in trying to defend religious teachings with scientific
explanations, rooted in inherent psychological defence mechanisms. However,
something that in the very core of it is totally unscientific, cannot be
justified with science; it’s an attempt to square the circle, an
oxymoron - Scientific proof for a religious perspective!!
I bet
you heard of “God’s Pharmacy” - examples of how some of the foods we eat
resemble the vital organs in our body, and they provide nutrients that actually
help the organ in question function. Things like, "carrots’ core look like the iris
of the human eye"; "A tomato has four chambers, it is red and it resembles human heart that has four
chambers too"; "Kidney beans look like human kidneys"; "A walnut looks like
a human brain"... and so on.
While some
of the coincidental specifics, may sound brilliant and indeed portray a perfectly matched paradigm, albeit proclaimed source from divinity!! It’s
more of a comfortably accepted ignorant norm. If we carefully ponder further
and study, we will realise that:-
Tomatoes - even the most common variety of tomato has between three and five chambers, not
just four, other breeds have between two and ten. Carotene gives tomatoes and
carrots their health benefits and their colour. If god’s trying to draw us to
healthy foods by making them red or reddish, why are most poisonous berries
red?
What’s
suspicious about these claims, beyond the inaccuracies above, is the recurring
non-references to scientific research: “science shows…”, “research shows…” and
so on. No links/evidence to any actual research. Though much of what’s said is
likely to be correct, we’re expected to believe it from word-of-mouth
alone!! And unfortunately, most of us do, quite silly, isn’t it?
Science
is based on evidence, experiments, careful evaluation and repetition of the
results and establishing the reality; unlike religious beliefs - which are
based on age-old texts, and stories, with no evidence whatsoever. Science keeps
upgrading, correcting and updating itself with new observations, discoveries
and knowledge, unlike religion which is primitive and stuck to its core without
any tangible evidence. In religion ‘The Book’ is the evidence, in science the
books explain what the evidence is. ‘How’ to think – and not ‘what’ to
think!
There
are many questions that are unanswered and science cannot answer those in its
current advancement, may be in future it will. Who knew all the technological
advancements in the field of medical science a few hundred years ago that we
know with the help of science today. With religion, one can simply make it up;
you can attach it to the creation of god. It's easier to proclaim answers to
life's great mysteries if you're allowed to just make it up. We know less and
less about more and more, though accepting proclaimed answers of creationism
won’t help.
Some of
us are also in a confused state, somewhat in a state of dilemma - we call
ourselves spiritual, rather than religious.
You
cannot completely separate spirituality from religion, as it basically originates
from our religious beliefs. Traditionally, spirituality has been defined as a
process of personal transformation in accordance with religious ideals. Though
there cannot be a fixed definition of it, it tends to differ from person to
person and based on their perceptions and practices.
People
obviously hold wrong, even ridiculous beliefs, we can learn much more
about why they do so, by reading about the origins of religious beliefs
and what weaknesses are there in human psychology and emotional makeup that allow
such wrong notions to be held true by so many otherwise intelligent people. We can educate ourselves to value reason, facts and evidence, over the fallacies
perpetually flaunted by those who do not value the truth above their own egocentric
delusions. Delusions inspired by an unquenchable thirst for security, no matter
how frighteningly false the foundation is. You might be surprised to know how
many of the religious ideas which seem crazy to you, take advantage of
well-known problems in human cognition to perpetuate themselves from one
generation to the next. Some of these ideas are so weird, that if an individual
claims to believe in something absurd, we straightaway term him/her insane; but
when these beliefs are part of a larger group, and believed by a majority, it’s
all easily accepted and followed blindly as religious beliefs. Humans
everywhere seem to share the same mental flaws, just as they do physical ones,
like having a useless appendix, and psychologists have made a lot of progress
studying these phenomena. It’s our perplexed and ignorant mindset ploughing us
into believing Miracles! - at times at pitiful levels. A lone survivor from a
natural calamity is assumed to have been saved by the grace/miracles of the
god, straightaway terming it as the mercy of the god – forgetting the agony of the
grieving relatives of the deceased who lost their life in the same event. What
constrained the divine intervention to save others? Nothing, it’s simply our
stupidity and gullibility that make us believe such absurdities.
Our
religious beliefs tend to abuse our emotional sides, at times by threatening, luring or preaching what’s not true. We tend to attach many natural (or
man-made) events to the acts of god. Even in situations where there is an utter
absurdity, people think it’s the god’s divine plan. The god must be planning
something better. It’s a sick and ignorant mentality that has been developed
and passed on to us for generations, and it does not go away easily. It’s
mental inertia, that requires a great amount of emotional overcoming an
external force - the force of knowledge, to question everything and a genuine urge
to find reasons, to create rational thinking, and to look for evidence.
What
kind of divine plans do the 'all-mighty' gods have for a child whose parents die in an
accident? Newborns with congenital diseases, or life-threatening medical
conditions developed in growing years. The supposedly all-powerful gods fail to save inhuman deeds and crimes committed by people, at times by the very own custodians of these religions (the priests and babas). What kind of plan can a god have for all
that? For the young girl in Delhi who was raped brutally and died? There are
numerous such instances that will impel you to realise that, if any of this was planned by a human being, we would term that person very wicked, cunning and
term all that very immoral and unethical. How can someone, called god, be so wicked and
immoral? In reality, it’s not god, because there isn't any. If there was
one, with the kind of imaginative superpower that people believe the
gods hold, none of this would ever happen, what we witness happening in the world
- the simple reason why all that still happens is that there is no such
entity. Sometimes I wish, I wish there was such an entity in reality. No one has
ever proved its existence so far, and no one will ever do. There is no point
wasting our time in praying, even when we are emotional at the backdrop of our
experiences, such as the loss of our loved ones. Two hands working can do more
than a thousand clasped in prayer. Prayers have proved nothing, no evidence,
zilch.
The confusing terrane -
It’s
funny how the effectiveness, value and importance of these gods vary between – A. praying in a
particular shrine/church/temple, or B. following a particular deity; not only
that a particular deity has more importance (and powers) than others, but also various
incarnations (versions) of the same deity has different levels of
importance/divinity based on where it’s located. For example, Ashtavinayakas
have different values, Ganesh temple from a particular city/place has different
divine importance than the one at your home, or in your car, or those
worshipped during the festivals. And then there are millions of gods, spiritual
leaders and (supposedly) holy saints. That's true for even those who claim to be monolithic. Besides, why pray? Are you not satisfied with the divine/mysterious plans? The gods (if) are capable of resolving problems by listening to your prayers, though cannot totally avert the situation itself? Oh, perhaps they create the problems first and then wait to act based on your prayers, to prove their own worth and powers!!
Many of us believe that the world was created by god and that we are the creation of the god. Does that mean people of all faiths are created by one god, if that is true, why do these faiths differ to a great extent from each other? Not only do two faiths
differ, but their sub-sects differ too - Protestants Vs. Catholics, Shias Vs.
Sunnis and so on. They portray a great amount of absurdity, at times trying to
be meek, besides claiming superiority over other religions. These faithful
sects time and again have resorted to destroying each other, and they continue
to do so, lest in the name of their gods - quite ironic to their own beliefs
that everything is the creation of one supreme entity. It’s simply because these
faiths and beliefs are irrational and hollow. The slightest discomfort or disagreement hurts religious sentiments - hollow drums are most noisy, aren't they !! These are imaginary and inept
creations of human brains. Human beings are not creations of god; rather god is a
creation of human imagination.
The
great ancient philosopher Epicurus (341 -270 BC) said:
“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?”
Finally, it's up to you - YOLO
It’s
empathetic how so many people spend their lives thinking about the afterlife,
about the day-of-Judgement, the apocalypse, or armageddon and what happens when we die. It’s an individual choice, it’s our life, we have just one to
live, we must take full control of it, and be responsible for what we do. You Only Live Once; there is no afterlife and no reason to prepare for or to think of
the afterlife. We only live by our deeds and in the memories of people. Someone
said, we have two lives, and the second begins when we realise we have only
one!!
I would
like to suggest some books, you may want to check these:
-
Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon - by Daniel C. Dennett
- God
Delusion – by Richard Dawkins
- The
Magic of Reality – by Richard Dawkins (this is a book for kids, but equally apt
for elders too)
- How
the Mind Works – by Steven Pinker
… may
the good sense bless all of us !! :)