Of all of those Big Questions central to philosophical concepts that surround life, the universe and everything, the realms of theology and religions and the nature of deities continue to fascinate. Opinions proliferate in books, articles, videos, conversations in bars and pubs, muylinux and in fact anywhere and everywhere two or more humans are in proximity. There’s the pro side; there’s the anti-side. There aren’t too many fence-sitters. I’m still in the anti-camp as the following bits and pieces illustrate.
Regarding Religion
*Christian theist: God is the answer!
Sceptic: So how do you KNOW that God is the answer instead of (fill in the blank)? The answer is you don’t KNOW and you can’t KNOW! If you don’t KNOW the answer, then your answer should be “I don’t know”, مكتب ترجمة not “God”. Further to that, just because you don’t KNOW the answer (if you stop to admit that to yourself) doesn’t mean that God is the answer by default. For example, I don’t know why archaeologists and historians can’t find any trace of The Exodus. Therefore God must have erased or covered up all of the evidence. Why? Because God works in mysterious ways, that’s why! Not a very satisfactory explanation now, is it.
*Religion is an illusion rooted in wishful thinking or in wish fulfilment; our need or desire to confront our inner fears and insecurities – paraphrasing from Sigmund Freud: “The Future of An Illusion” (1927). Spot on! People desperately cling on to their various religious faiths, tienda de adultos against all rationality because they are terrified of the brutality and hopelessness of daily life and the finality of death. As one saying goes, “life’s a bitch and then you die”. As philosopher Thomas Hobbes expressed it, life is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short. So people search for some sort of personal security, meaning and purposefulness in an indifferent, cold, uncaring and purposeless cosmos. If no one really cares about you (and everybody has got their own set of personal issues and problems to deal with) then you clutch at the straw that is that invisible magic man in the sky. You want a Big Brother to make everything come out all right just the way your parents did when you were a child when they sheltered and looked after you and kissed away the hurt and the tears when you cried in their lap and always comforted you.
*If you have to lie in order to promote your religion, then your religion is utter crap!
*You have to wonder how much of their religion Christians ACTUALLY believe vis-a-vis are they just going through the motions; going along with the crowd in order to be accepted by family, life adhd coaching friends and their society; in order to fit in with the majority.
*Religion first gives you the disease (the original sinning stick) then gives you the cure – the afterlife carrot.
Regarding Faith & Belief
*Faith is just wishful thinking.
*If you say you believe there is a God, there’s no comeback from Doubting Thomas’s other than to have you try to justify your belief. But if you claim to actually know that there is a God, then you have to go way, way, way beyond justification and start citing actual evidence that can be independently verified.
*Logic might be a pathway to what is true, but logic in and of itself is not actual evidence that what is logically postulated is actually true.
Regarding Morality
*Theists propose that there are just two kinds of evil. There’s natural ‘evil’ (i.e. – disease, earthquakes, drought, etc.) and then there is moral evil where humans harm humans and often innocent animals and the environment (i.e. – paedophilia, kidnapping, blackmail, rape, littering, etc.). However, theists conveniently forget two other categories of evil. Firstly, there’s religious evil – humans harming humans in the name of their god (be it God or Allah, etc.) and by god there’s been an awful lot of that sort of evil. Secondly, there is holy evil or God’s evil and you don’t have to read very far into the Bible to find examples, examples like The Flood, Sodom & Gomorrah, the 10 plagues, the sanctioning of slavery, genocide, animal and human sacrifice, cruel and unusual punishments like stoning to death children or letting loose bears on kids. Humans can be evil but by god, God is their role model.
*Why be good when you can just be forgiven?
*No matter what alleged moral absolutes you postulate (i.e. – murder is wrong), I’d wager the human intellect and imagination can come up with a scenario that justifies a violation of that alleged absolute. In the case of murder, there’s self-defense; war; capital punishment; abortion in certain circumstances; mercy killing / euthanasia and scenarios where the act of killing one innocent saves the lives of five other innocents (The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, or the one – Mr. Spock.)
