Thoughts for March 6, 2010

I wrote this nice long schpeil while sitting on my porch at 11 AM, amazed that such a feat could be comfortably done this early in March in Michigan.
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So, I decided to start thinking about the world and things in it. It seems a majority of the people in my community refuse to, or it just hasn't occurred to them to do it. Most likely it's out of protection for their easily shattered world view, and that's a large part of why I'm no longer a religious person. I'm inquisitive, I like to think and I find logic a major delight of our reality. Once logic is worked into religion it just doesn't hold together, but this discovery was very gradual for me. Logic slowly weaseled its way into my constricted mind, breaking to bits all the pious mold that had gathered over the years. This easing in to atheism made it much easier to accept, the alternative of a sudden realization is much too damaging. Imagine a flash of lightening, and all of a sudden it becomes apparent that every facet of this belief system is nothing but an elaborate lie perpetuated by centuries of scare tactics.

That's an excellent reason why religion is so persistent. It had far humbler beginnings, of course. So many years ago, and still today, we as humans were trying to grasp and comprehend the world around us. Before modern science all that was available was speculation. God began as a hypothesis. It rains, so something has to cause it (I love that here we still have logic, even though the conclusion isn't the best ancient man's mind was in the right place.) A generally accepted consensus was the existence of beings like ourselves, but more powerful and out of our reach. Back in the days of the Sumerian Ziggurats in what is now modern day Iran that was a perfectly viable explanation. Now it's just a shame that years upon years of scientific progression was not enough to disprove the God Hypothesis.

Can you really expect people to kill God so easily? Charles Darwin's contemporaries thought he had. His theory of evolution took out the need for a creator and replaced it with a series of minute changes that occurred over millions of years, generations, mutations and failures. I find it odd that something so provable is still referred to as a theory while something that completely lacks any trace of physical evidence is considered nigh-universal fact. It seems to me that this problem stems from the people who think God is the truth. They don't entirely comprehend evolution, which brings me back to the beginning paragraph. It isn't a difficult concept, but once they begin to understand it God begins to die. They'd rather cling to this ancient security blanket than open their minds to the possibility that maybe God is wrong.

But God, or at least the guys the Christian God roped into writing the 2nd best selling book after the Ikea catalog, has this marvelous little loophole going for him. He can't really be definitively proven or disproven. Even lacking hard evidence, there's still a chance that after death we are greeted by St. Peter, God and some guy called John Smith (really, Mormons?) And lacking solid evidence is even better for God, it turns out. Religion hinges entirely on a person's willingness to cease thinking about anything else and blindly follow it. This practice is called "faith," and without it, I've been told, God is nothing. So, God refuses to be proven by his very essence and we just kind of have to, ahem, take it on faith that He's waiting for us after we kick the bucket. A lot of people believe in God out of pure selfish desire- if you don't believe in God and he turns out to exist, you end up in Hell. Incidentally, even if you do believe in God and forget to repent for a sin before you die, you go to Hell anyway (so much for being a forgiving God.) Of course, nobody at all knows what happens after we die. Because we are self aware (and self-centered) creatures, we don't think "nothing," is an adequate answer. God can't be proven, though, until he decides to make it egregiously obvious, and by doing so he eliminates all need for faith, thus voiding his own existence. If you liked that last sentence I suggest you go read Douglas Adams' The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy, from which I loosely paraphrased (Mr. Adams wrote it far more eloquently and humorously.)

In summary, God is like the fairies in the movie "Hook," Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny and the Boogey Man. Once you stop believing in them they no longer exist, and no one older than seven years should think they're real.