Preface:
I debated internally about posting this at all, as religion is a hot
potato item that I nearly always avoid discussing unless I am absolutely
sure the other party will not take offense.
But I’m getting old and possibly a bit reckless.
These are J’s musings.
D is at least nominally religious and certainly believes in God.
Let
me start with television. I
worked for about 40 years in & around the television business.
Based on that experience my view of TV as it now exists is that while
it obviously fills various human needs or desires, and indeed there are good things
that have come from it, on balance our species would very possibly have been better off without
it. I place religion in the same category as television.
Lets
turn now to religion. One of the
deepest needs in our collective psyche is the need for order, for certainty.
This need has driven us to gradually create for ourselves a world where
a fairly high degree of order and control prevails. Yet as solid and
comfortable as our society is, just a question away chaos and uncertainty
always lurks. Where did it all come from?
Where is it going? Why
does it exist? Why do WE exist?
Howcome such-and-such happened?
Or didn't happen? And of course,
what will happen to "me" when my body dies?
Good
questions, all. Too bad there don't seem to be any immediately obvious (and/or
pleasing) answers. But not to
worry, organized religion answers them all for us, no thought needed.
Which organized religion?
Why, all of them, of course. Religions offer us a variety of frequently contradictory
answers for every question, yet each answer is absolutely and positively
guaranteed to be the one true one. When you find the one you like best, you
just switch off your brain and simply believe.
And right there is my personal problem.
I can't seem to find the "off" switch in my brain.
(Faith, the all purpose
fixer. CLICK HERE
for a side-trip on that)
Technically speaking
I don't consider myself an atheist, because to my
way of thinking atheism is a belief structure just like any other religion.
The committed atheist holds the absolute belief that no supernatural
deity/deities exist, but he bases this absolute belief upon the lack of
evidence presented by the natural world in which we live. Although our natural
world by definition offers no direct evidence for the existence of the
supernatural, only in this lack of evidence does it offer support of the
contrary. So the atheist’s
“religion”, just like all the others, requires one to hold an absolute belief
that is not truly supported by direct evidence.
Personally, I am more comfortable with the basic line of thought held by the
Agnostics. They did not reject
the possibility of supernatural beings (gods) out of hand, but they felt that
since such beings were defined as being outside our natural universe then we
"natural" beings could never know anything at all about them.
Having left myself a back door, I do admit my working hypothesis is
that there is no "supernatural", or at least none that impinges upon our
natural universe in any detectable way. And if it doesn’t impinge, then except
for the intellectual exercise the concept provides, there is no practical
difference between whether it does or does not exist. Could be wrong, of
course, but this working hypothesis is supported by a lifetime of observation,
during which I have never detected any hint of anything “beyond”.
As far as I can tell, everything is just as it seems.
No funny stuff.
How
do I “explain” the “mysteries” of our universe? First, I toss out all those
“If you don't believe, how do you explain all those people who were abducted
by aliens?” type questions which come from people who cite National
Alien Magazine articles as “evidence”. Or, to twist the knife a bit, ditto the
various miraculous tales contained in the Book of Scientology, the Quran, or
the Bible. Quite simply, I don’t feel the slightest need or desire to deal
with second (or ten-millionth) hand “documented mysteries” where the
documentation's actual basis in fact can
never be determined. I rest upon the
fact that in 75+ years I have never been presented directly and personally with any
happenings or
“mysteries” which appear to preclude explanation under natural laws.
A
lot of what people cite as mysteries, like how and why did life evolve as it
has (assuming you are not one of those who take the religious shortcut of
rejecting the very notion of evolving life), I do not consider mysterious at
all. We are rapidly learning how
non-life components are assembled to produce life, and within this century
(barring another religion-dictated dark age) we will almost certainly
understand the processes well enough to assemble life forms ourselves.
We have established that evolution of life is a factual process, and
that it favors reproductive advantage.
We have also established that stress in the environment (climate
change, etc.) triggers bursts of evolutionary selection leading to alleviation
or accommodation of that stress.
Mix in the natural randomness of our universe over a billion years of time and you have the biological
world we see around us. I am quite comfortable with this.
Certainly there are imponderables, like how did our universe and its natural
laws initially come to be, and what (if anything) lies before/beyond/underneath, but
I am pretty sure there are answers.
We just don’t know what these answers are….yet.
And of course it is possible we never will have these answers, as even
the clues that might lead to them could well lie outside our “natural” universe.
Agnosticism again.
I
have grown used to living in a world containing vast numbers of people that I
consider quite “normal” and even intelligent, yet who embrace what I view as
bizarre and totally unsupported…or worse…ideas.
I view these people as holding tight to what I consider a “comfort
belief structure”, and I don’t begrudge them their comfort as long as their
beliefs do not impinge negatively upon me or upon society.
Unfortunately, every day we see that too often negative effects do flow
from such beliefs.
I guess the net-net is that I am simply not one of those people who must have the certainty of belief at the expense of rational thought. I am quite content to say “gee, I guess we don’t really have the answer for that yet, do we?”
J.