Religion
Created | Updated Apr 14, 2002
There is no god, there is only energy and life. A lot of people seem to have a problem with this statement.
"But look around you" they cry, "Look at the evidence for a God before your very eyes!". Well, the notion that
the beauty and complexity of our world somehow suggests the existence of a God is completely unacceptable to
me and here's why: in an unlimited multiverse (meaning all parallel universes) there is no reason why a
universe as complex as ours shouldn't come about, god is just not necessary to explain it. God on the other
hand is supposed to be an omnipotent, omnipresent being who for some reason takes an interest in us. That's
OMNIPOTENT, that's a very big word and I don't believe that it can apply to anything. (aside- can god create a
stone which he cannot lift?) Then there's the question of the bible and any other religious book that you care
to throw at me. Almost all religions have in their past an oral tradition. Oral tradition lends itself to
half-truth, exaggeration and outright myth. Also when you consider that a given religion is usually propping
up the powerful in a given society, it is always in danger of being altered for the benefit of those who
profess it. There is another point to be made about the specific case of the bible: here you had a bunch of
guys who left their jobs, families and friends to join a reactionary leader. After three years, when they had
well and truly burned their bridges with society and monetary security, their leader gets killed. What were
they supposed to do, go back to their villages, to the scorn of their people, to live without dignity? They
did what many would have done in their circumstances, they exaggerated their story a little so that instead of
going back to die an ignoble and young death as a result of poverty, they traveled from place to place trading
their message for some food, a place to sleep and most important: respect. And besides, their message was
actually quite a good one: "let's all be civil to one another for a change!". When you look behind the scenes
of all religions there are three driving forces at work: a) the will to change the world for the better, b)
the will to better the personal situation of the person who starts it and c) the simple human need for
something "out there" to explain the inexplicable. These three factors can account for all the worlds major
religions. So here I reiterate my point, there is no god. The more we humans move on, the more we see of the
big picture, the smaller our part of it seems to be. Nature, as we understand it, for better or for worse is
beginning to imitate our gods: There is no certainty, everything is somehow connected to everything else
(witness the massively complex means of chaotic interaction or the even more nasty means of quantum
entanglement). The more we look at the quantum theory and chaos, the more we realise that we don't have a rats
what's going on. This is extremely unsettling. It's literally a brave new world opening up before us. This
realisation rubbishes most of the pompous nonsense that many of the "reasonable" people of this world have
been expounding since the enlightenment. The thinking has gone as follows: "If we cannot observe an event
scientifically, or if we do not predict it using derivation from scientifically accepted axioms, then it does
not happen." And if it does happen, it can bloody well be ignored 'cos I don't want to see it. The limitations
of this thinking are being uncovered in the vast fields of knowledge that have only recently been discovered.
If we are only now seeing the impact of such huge realities as these, then there must almost certainly be
other massively influential fields out there which we can only imagine. A prime example of this thinking is
the way in which many western doctors rubbish out of hand the practice of acupuncture. They assume that
because it's tenets are essentially different from their own scientifically valid world view, it must have no
value in the treating or prevention of illness. However this reasoning is bogus because, in accordance with a
corollary of the laws of evolution, surely a method of illness prevention and cure would not have survived and
even thrived for the last five millennia by a population so huge if it did not possess some pretty potent
value for the practitioners and the patients. This is just one example of the shortcomings of our arrogant
scientific thought. I'm not saying that there is anything inherently wrong with arrogance, it's often great
when you want to combat a competitor or deliver a scalding put-down, but there is something very wrong with
intellectual arrogance amongst the ignorant. We may not like hearing it, but we as a race don't have much of a
clue when it comes to knowledge of the world around us. Of course we know lots, but when compared to what is
there to know, we're not at the races. We can't even make sense of the small lump of grey matter in our heads
or predict the weather more than three days hence (well, not in my little corner of Ireland anyway!). It is
time that we of the western world owned up to our shortcomings in the sphere of knowledge. When we do, we will
finally treat all evidence as worthy of at least consideration, no matter how strange it appears at first
sight. All will be thrown into the melting pot and then maybe we can make some real progress. I still don't
believe that there is a god, but I do think that when we change our view-point in this way, we will come a
step closer to becoming small gods ourselves.
"But look around you" they cry, "Look at the evidence for a God before your very eyes!". Well, the notion that
the beauty and complexity of our world somehow suggests the existence of a God is completely unacceptable to
me and here's why: in an unlimited multiverse (meaning all parallel universes) there is no reason why a
universe as complex as ours shouldn't come about, god is just not necessary to explain it. God on the other
hand is supposed to be an omnipotent, omnipresent being who for some reason takes an interest in us. That's
OMNIPOTENT, that's a very big word and I don't believe that it can apply to anything. (aside- can god create a
stone which he cannot lift?) Then there's the question of the bible and any other religious book that you care
to throw at me. Almost all religions have in their past an oral tradition. Oral tradition lends itself to
half-truth, exaggeration and outright myth. Also when you consider that a given religion is usually propping
up the powerful in a given society, it is always in danger of being altered for the benefit of those who
profess it. There is another point to be made about the specific case of the bible: here you had a bunch of
guys who left their jobs, families and friends to join a reactionary leader. After three years, when they had
well and truly burned their bridges with society and monetary security, their leader gets killed. What were
they supposed to do, go back to their villages, to the scorn of their people, to live without dignity? They
did what many would have done in their circumstances, they exaggerated their story a little so that instead of
going back to die an ignoble and young death as a result of poverty, they traveled from place to place trading
their message for some food, a place to sleep and most important: respect. And besides, their message was
actually quite a good one: "let's all be civil to one another for a change!". When you look behind the scenes
of all religions there are three driving forces at work: a) the will to change the world for the better, b)
the will to better the personal situation of the person who starts it and c) the simple human need for
something "out there" to explain the inexplicable. These three factors can account for all the worlds major
religions. So here I reiterate my point, there is no god. The more we humans move on, the more we see of the
big picture, the smaller our part of it seems to be. Nature, as we understand it, for better or for worse is
beginning to imitate our gods: There is no certainty, everything is somehow connected to everything else
(witness the massively complex means of chaotic interaction or the even more nasty means of quantum
entanglement). The more we look at the quantum theory and chaos, the more we realise that we don't have a rats
what's going on. This is extremely unsettling. It's literally a brave new world opening up before us. This
realisation rubbishes most of the pompous nonsense that many of the "reasonable" people of this world have
been expounding since the enlightenment. The thinking has gone as follows: "If we cannot observe an event
scientifically, or if we do not predict it using derivation from scientifically accepted axioms, then it does
not happen." And if it does happen, it can bloody well be ignored 'cos I don't want to see it. The limitations
of this thinking are being uncovered in the vast fields of knowledge that have only recently been discovered.
If we are only now seeing the impact of such huge realities as these, then there must almost certainly be
other massively influential fields out there which we can only imagine. A prime example of this thinking is
the way in which many western doctors rubbish out of hand the practice of acupuncture. They assume that
because it's tenets are essentially different from their own scientifically valid world view, it must have no
value in the treating or prevention of illness. However this reasoning is bogus because, in accordance with a
corollary of the laws of evolution, surely a method of illness prevention and cure would not have survived and
even thrived for the last five millennia by a population so huge if it did not possess some pretty potent
value for the practitioners and the patients. This is just one example of the shortcomings of our arrogant
scientific thought. I'm not saying that there is anything inherently wrong with arrogance, it's often great
when you want to combat a competitor or deliver a scalding put-down, but there is something very wrong with
intellectual arrogance amongst the ignorant. We may not like hearing it, but we as a race don't have much of a
clue when it comes to knowledge of the world around us. Of course we know lots, but when compared to what is
there to know, we're not at the races. We can't even make sense of the small lump of grey matter in our heads
or predict the weather more than three days hence (well, not in my little corner of Ireland anyway!). It is
time that we of the western world owned up to our shortcomings in the sphere of knowledge. When we do, we will
finally treat all evidence as worthy of at least consideration, no matter how strange it appears at first
sight. All will be thrown into the melting pot and then maybe we can make some real progress. I still don't
believe that there is a god, but I do think that when we change our view-point in this way, we will come a
step closer to becoming small gods ourselves.
