Yes, what about that?

Does religion do any good? Sure! Here’s the bottom line of the good that religion does for the world: It gives people a sense of value that is bigger than themselves and their community. Religion imparts a sense of purpose, however artificial, and a sense of self-importance (YOU, after all were personally chosen by GOD!).

Religion also helps people feel good about themselves for their moral superiority – people who otherwise might have a hard time looking at themselves in the mirror in the morning … which may help explain why con men, politicians and mass murderers are almost universally ultra-religious.

In broader terms, religion may provide some sort of framework for society. This is somewhat arguable and often overstated: The claim of religionists is that every good and moral law flows from THEIR particular religion. This fails to observe that the laws to which they refer seem more likely to flow from the common structure of society and can be found in diverse places that have nothing to do with the particular faith espoused by the religionist.

Even the oft-touted Christian “Golden Rule” comes not from Jesus but from Confucious… who lived hundreds of years before the name Jesus was ever uttered. Nevertheless, religion often provides a common set of code words that help societies with a common religious base talk to each other and in that sense religion does provide us with some sort of common framework.

Last but not least, members of all kinds of religions perform “good works” according to what they believe the super guy in the sky demands. These things should not be discounted and might even be proof of the generic goodness of religion if you are viewing the subject in a purely pragmatic way; like a ‘features and benefits’ comparison that isn’t really interested in factual underpinnings. In this view, any means that achieves a desired end is “right,” acceptable and good.

To those concerned with achieving knowledge of reality, however, the big problem with any religion – Christianity, Islam or what have you – is not its balance sheet of good deeds versus evil, but the fact that it simply isn’t true.

Despite sensitivities on this issue, it is not unfair to say that – to the serious unbiased investigator – formal organized religion appears to be an artificial construct and ultimately nothing more than a collection of fantasy fiction stories misconstrued as fact, regardless of the brand name put on it. So it doesn’t matter if a person performs good deeds in the name of Jesus, Allah or Star Wars’ “The Force,” it’s still FICTION.

I can tell you from personal experience, however, that there are many MANY Christian Bible scholars and theologians who’s vast knowledge of the history and origins of Scripture have made them quite aware of the mythical basis for their religion — yet they still attend services, deliver sermons and generally devote themselves to their faith. This fact should be considered as strong evidence for the power of religion in people’s lives.

So perhaps evidence and facts really don’t matter? Every religion, after all, is the TRUE religion for its believers. Some people say the earth is a ball, some say it’s flat…and they back it up with Biblical authority. They are so sure that they are right that maybe they ARE right. I mean, as long as actual testable information doesn’t matter, the only test we have left for truth is the strength of ones beliefs. In the world of religion, you see, whoever has the strongest faith wins. And if all that matters to you is what you BELIEVE, then the discussion must end there.

We haven’t talked about the down side of religion, of course: Christianity has had its witch hunts, killing thousands and thousands of innocent women in the most horrible ways imaginable. Islam still has its public stonings for many crimes. Christianity has had its Crusades, killing hundreds of thousands of people in the name of God. Islam has had its Jihad. The cruel and vicious acts in the name of religion are too numerous to mention. And the excuses and explanations of why these things don’t matter are equally numerous.

The potential of great evil is always present in religion because one can always say “God told me to do it” or “it isn’t ME who has declared ‘THOSE PEOPLE’ to be enemies of God and worthy of death, but GOD HIMSELF.. I am just carrying out His will.” And once again, we cannot agree: The rationalists would say that this is proof of the evil of religion and the need to eliminate it; the person of faith will declare those things to be in the past (for now) and will consider himself to be persecuted just because you brought it up.

So where does this all leave us? On one side we have the rationalists, who demand evidence and proof – and having found none, have declared all religions to be bogus.

On the other side, we have true believers, for whom faith is all that matters. In the closest thing to common ground with rationalists, they too have declared all religions to be bogus and fairy tales…. well except THEIRS, of course! They have also gone on to declare the rationalists to be enemies of god, and “fools” for not believing.

In the end, then, it seems that agreement between rationalists and religionists is not possible because they each start from a different – and completely irreconcilable – point of reference. The rationalists starts with what he can know based on testable evidence while the religionist starts with what he believes.

With this in mind, perhaps rationalists need to follow their own advice and bend to reality: Religion will never be eliminated because it is too much of a drug to the human ego. Therefore, the best that one could hope for would be to encourage the least harmful variations of religion with the hope that it will eventually become dominant over the currently more wide-spread, fear-based religions that produce so much violence and bigotry. It might not work but it is worth a try – in my opinion.

If you are thinking about starting your own religion, you might want to read my article on the birthing of religion.

The subject of death terrifies most clear-thinking people – which also allows death to be used as a big nasty club, a weapon against those who would ask too many questions and possibly demand actual evidence as part of the answers. Thus, all you have to do is listen to some sincere religious person trying to convert you to realize that mortality is the driving force behind religious conversion.

People are scared to death of death; they can’t handle the thought that they will cease to exist as a conscious entity. That great terror is what drives people to religion. As the centerpiece for the reason religion exists, one would expect to find many lurid descriptions of death and dying religionist tomes such as The Bible, and you won’t be disappointed.

Succinctly stated: “Since the children have flesh and blood, he too shared in their humanity so that by his death he might destroy him who holds the power of death-that is, the devil- and free those who all their lives were held in slavery by their fear of death.” (Hebrews 2:14,15)

An honest statement from the author of Hebrews: It is all about the fear of death. That’s the hammer that religion always has against reason. Fear is also used as a club to promote the other purpose of religion; its purported social control. i.e., without religion, they say, people would go wild and do all kinds of crazy things like commit incest and genocide.

Now, the amount of social control exerted by the Judeo-Christian-Islamic tradition is somewhat limited and even rather dubious due to the fact that these faiths hold to a rather extreme form of moral relativism, but nonetheless this fear works to some degree for social cohesion and control. Perhaps I will deal with the moral relativism of Christianity in some future post but let’s stay on track for now…

The fear of death is both the club and the carrot, simultaneously wooing the believer with the promise of overcoming death while threatening him/her with the same if they depart from nominal compliance. Death is natural and inevitable and religion has done nothing to change that, nor is this ever likely to change.

Fear is also natural and can be a good thing at least SOME of the time: That panicky flight-or-fight reaction is often the only thing that saves a person caught in a life or death situation. Of course, if you are having a heart attack, fear doesn’t really help. But nature is not working according to a plan – it is just working.

So we need to remember that fear is a lifesaver sometimes, and is perfectly natural and even good as long as you don’t become so obsessed with fear that you are driven to irrational acts.

Now I want to talk about reality of death and dying, and this will probably send a few of you running to church. Every religion has some beautiful stories about the greatness of dying in order to be with God in Paradise/Heaven. You’ve heard those stories a thousand times, though, so I am only going to stick with what we actually KNOW about death and dying.

THE EPISTEMOLOGY OF DEATH

The first thing you should realize is that you’ve been practicing for death all of your life. We don’t usually call it practice; we just call it “sleep.” And so does the Bible…

“You sweep men away in the sleep of death.” (Psalm 90.5) Jesus calls death “sleep” in John 11. In 1 Cor. 15:51 Paul claims “We will not all sleep, but we will all be changed.” Here, Paul clearly means sleep to be understood as synonymous with death, and he is thinking that some readers in his own time would still be around at the Second Coming. He was wrong about that, but he apparently believed it.

People who have had near death experiences often describe the feeling of “needing” to sleep and of going to sleep. It isn’t just a metaphor. Sleep is very much like death. It is so much like death, experientially, that there are really only two differences:

1. When you sleep, you have periodic episodes of dreaming. You don’t remember most of most of your dreams, but they happen nonetheless. Dreams are how the brain reinforces memory pathways. During the dying process, you may well have some vivid, emotionally-charged dreams about meeting dead relatives, or living ones, or God(s) or experiencing unconditional love. Thank you, dopamine! Some people have even reported dreams of going shopping. If you are really dying, however, the dreams will eventually stop.
2. When you sleep, you eventually wake up.

THINK DIFFERENT

If you aren’t afraid to go to sleep… I want you to question your fear of death. We can think of death as a natural and even liberating process if we choose. For those of us who enjoy a good sleep, death is the biggest nap of them all, and just as free of fear, suffering and pain (as The Bible promises).

Still, I’m not asking you to embrace your death, but to consider it in a different light. For readers who haven’t already left for church in a panic, I will make you the same offer that the churchies will make you: everlasting life.

But my offer isn’t based on fantasy fiction.

People at church will tell you that you won’t really die – a Super Guy in the Sky will instead transform you with his magic power over death. It’s really a very comforting story, isn’t it? And you can see why the terror of death would drive otherwise sane people to embrace these stories as reality, no matter how silly they sound if you bother to pick them apart.

Of course, that’s why religionists get so angry when you start pointing out contradictions in their beliefs, or otherwise expressing your doubts: You aren’t just pointing out factual errors, as you might think, instead you are assaulting the only thing that keeps them from going insane with terror.

As I have pointed out in the past, the violent anger that any expression of doubt generates in believers is strong evidence suggesting that they too have their own, higly-repressed doubts, and MAY in fact know (or fear) that their espoused beliefs are partially or entirely false. Clearly we must do more to disarm fear without resorting to fairy tales.

You don’t need an invisible magic friend to save you…

Consider instead that the universe springs forth from a unified, connected state; the Cosmic Membrane. If you need a more familiar handle, you can call it The Force. Those of you who have enough interest can investigate quantum physics for a better understanding of how all things are connected, and I’ll throw in a couple of links for good measure.

For the still-timid among you, I grant you permission to rename the Cosmic Membrane “God,” although such a name gives the force much too much credit for having purpose and direction, in my opinion, unless you can wrap your brain around the idea of a God who doesn’t know or care about anything.

The membrane, as far as anyone can tell, is an active force but not an active intelligence. Nevertheless, if all things are connected in this manner, then you must be connected as well. In fact, every part of your being is a manifestation of the Cosmic Membrane.

Therefore, the essence of all that you are cannot die, because the membrane is not a force that is expended. It does not have any beginning or ending point that we can determine. Now, this does not imply a conscious existence, but it is very much analogous to dreamless sleep. You are still there, all of you, as part of the Force that connects and manifests everything – the source and essence of all that is.

You are just sleeping…

How did this happen?

Recent studies have suggested that there is a biological component to religion. This religiosity seems to lie in the temporal lobes. The more active a person’s temporal lobes are, the more religious they will be. But this does not explain how any particular religion – with all its rituals, rules and complexities – can develop apparently from nothing.

I began wondering about the many varieties in religion about the time I received my first Bible Studies diploma – around age 11. I couldn’t answer the question then, but I certainly found it to be perplexing. Over the years I continued to poke and prod at this issue.

Religion clearly flows from the nature of humans, as suggested, but the form of each particular faith is created initially by one person (the founder) and then taken in new directions by his/her disciples (the Inspired ones). So what we now see is that religion is created from two components: One socio-psychological and the other neuro-psychological. In this article, we will concentrate on the sociological process for the creation of a religion.

It has taken a lifetime of study for me to discover that a religion typically happens/arises/becomes “reality” in one of two ways. When you read about this process, you will immediately see just how natural it is.

Method One: Time Fog – Stories become real. Humans love to invent tales to entertain themselves and others. Go shopping at any bookstore and you will see this. This propensity to invent certainly isn’t new. For as long as we’ve had writing, people have written stories. And before there was writing, oral tales entertained and enthralled us for thousands of years.

Of all ancient stories, a tiny fraction became popular enough to have a devoted multi-generational following. Early storytellers surely understood that they were sharing fiction for entertainment purposes, but later tale tellers – and the hearers of those tales – may not have been so sure.

With the old-line religions (Judaism, Christianity) it took a long time for people to start believing that those stories were anything more than interesting tales. At a minimum, a generation passed (in other words, everyone knowing the real history was DEAD) before the seed of fiction germinated to become the Tree Of Knowledge and people began saying, “It really happened.” I call this pathway to religion-birthing, the Time Fog Method. (For a discussion of how this relates to the Christian Bible, visit The Bible And Christianity, Historical Origins.

Anything old has a certain amount of Time Fog. A good contemporary example is that of the tales of King Arthur and The Knights of The Round table. Here, we have stories that were labeled as fiction in the past but today are increasingly presumed to be fact (or fact-based) because just enough time has passed so that people aren’t sure anymore.

The argument you hear after Time Fog begins to kick-in goes something like this: “Well, it was a long time ago and you weren’t there. I wasn’t there, either, but the stories are written as if they actually happened and they even mention some places we know existed. Many people TODAY believe that those things actually happened, and there is no surviving work from the same time period that says those stories didn’t happen. So… they MUST be true!”

Now ask yourself, was fiction just invented last week? Silly question – but why do we automatically think that Harry Potter is a fictional character yet Jesus and Moses are real? People will make a lot of excuses for this double standard, mostly amounting to “well a lot of OTHER people believe they are real.” Yet we wouldn’t consider taking a popular vote to determine the reality of a Stephen King novel. This is Time Fog.

Time Fog makes people think, “if it is old, it must have really happened,” even though there is no more evidence for this assumption than one would have for believing that there is truth behind The Lord of The Rings. Oh, and all those “other people” who believe in old stories have no more information than you do about ancient tales: They too believe because others have believed – and it happened a long time ago, so that “you can’t prove it isn’t true.”

You see then how time gives life to all stories …just keep repeating and wait…

Method Two: Sharing Delusion – if you have brass balls, anyone can do it. Mormonism and Islam come from this category of religion formation, what I call the Brass-balls Method. In this religion-hatching scheme, instead of stories that were gradually mistaken for reality due to Time Fog, you have a con man/fabulist who simply declared himself to be a Prophet of God and demanded that others believe in him. In each case, the vast majority of his contemporaries did not believe. Instead, they recognized the self-proclaimed prophet for what he was; a delusional egomaniac.

Human nature is imperfect at best, however, so you always have a percentage of “true believers” out there – sometimes referred to as sycophants – ready to follow anyone who looks like a spiritual leader. If only one person in a hundred – or even ONE PERSON IN A THOUSAND – is sufficiently gullible, you still get a good-sized cult out of it. And the fact that most people see these new beliefs as crazy and irrational only increases their attractiveness to certain people because so many of us thrive on group identity – which is only enhanced by a sense of persecution. If you want to form a religion from which you may immediately profit, this is the way to go.

And finally, given enough time, any cult can become an accepted religion. Here is where we get a confluence of religion-forming methods: The cult of today eventually turns into a respectable religion over a generation or two via Time Fog as long as the cult leader attracts a sufficient number of followers during his/her lifetime.

The Reverend Sun Myung Moon’s Unification Church and L. Ron Hubbard’s Church of Scientology are contemporary examples of the “Brass-Balls” path: Both were originally seen as fringe cults built by lunatics and now they sit on the edge of general acceptance. Eventually they – as Islam has done and as Mormonism is doing – will also become respectable and possibly even dominant religions as Time Fog turns them into “reality.”

After all, it/they “happened” a long time ago and other people believed them at the time, so it MUST be true!