Religions

I feel like I write about religion too much, but then Christopher Hitchens published at least a book on it. He published a book defacing religion, or rather exposing it for what it is.

He was capable of outlining a phalanx of attacks to religion, and the concept of a god. Here I would just like to reflect on one or two of those that strike me the most. Before that however, I would like to state that there shouldn’t be any attacks, just like we see no need to attack the superstitious belief that a turtle is holding up the world.

The need of religion in the dawn of civilization is, I would say, inevitable. There were many observations that our predecessors just cannot explain. I don’t blame them at all for not being able to explain phenomena such as why the sun comes up, why sometimes it floods. These “super”natural forces often left us powerless and fearful of when they happen again. So as soon as we can correlate something (such as the accidental death of a cow) that we can control to disasters not happening, we tend to want to repeat these something. Soon enough they turn into rituals, which are then elaborated and reinforced.

As modern day horoscopes show, it is really not that hard to “predict” the future if the prediction is sufficiently general (e.g. you will have a nice day tomorrow, and a friend will appear). So leaders of these ancient civilization correlate the control “killing of a cow” to the abatement of a disaster “flood”. He can’t lose either way, if the flood is abated, he would keep killing cows. If the flood happens, he would claim the number of cows killed wasn’t enough, and more should be offered to appease the flood god. There would always be a sufficient number of “miracle” that one can tie together with the actions causing them (i.e. the horoscope principle).

At some point, the leaders realize how easy it is to whip up his followers in a frenzy towards a certain cause that they all believe would result in, essentially, their salvation. This is when, when the time is good (e.g. new kingdom of ancient Egypt when most large pyramids were built), the leader ascend to the status of god. It is almost as if he accumulated enough credit to upgrade himself to a new level. After all, if the leader is seen as godlike, then not following his order would be not just foolish but blasphemous. At some point, a monotheist god emerges and scriptures were written. I don’t really question that the leaders actually believe that 1) they are god, 2) there is a god, however 1) arrogant 2) ignorant, that seem.

Scientific inquires have shown that many observations can be explained, but more importantly, science has shown that it is capable of explaining the previously unexplained.

The second thing he mentioned was memorable. Religion’s last defense was always, “look at all of these good deeds! Why would you take all that away, just so you can be honest.” In essence, the defense is that religion amounts to a white lie that has benefits. We ignore for the moment the hypocrisy of such an argument, and think about the necessary negative consequence of such belief.

If a religious man is good only because he has faith, what would happen if he loses it, or momentarily take a pause? (This can and does happen, and usually the penalty is just a wholehearted confession and penance.) Then it is as if the flood gate of pent up rage and desire opens. Any resemblance of reason and morality is gone.