pinkfloydpsw's Blog

On Belief

In the beginning a very astute and devious humanoid looked up to the sky in wonder at a giant ball of burning hydrogen. It occurred to this primitive man who if he could convince his fellow humanoids that the hydrogen ball was in charge, had a voice that spoke to him only and that he could also talk back to it that his position in the tribe could be a very rewarding one. Thus religion is born….

I am not a fundamentalist atheist because fundamentalism requires a doctrine to follow, I am a devout humanist because the only requirement of that is to recognise that love of one’s fellow-man comes not from the fear of punishment if that love is absent but from the primal need to work together to survive and develop as a species. Moral behaviour is intrinsic in humans; the accusation that we would be amoral without a divinely sanctioned set of confusingly contradictory revealed texts that appeared at least 97,000 years after our species developed into its latest incarnation is, and should be, an insult to the higher primate. To support the oppression of the inquisitive human mind by those that would contend that biblical and prophetic scriptures hold all the scientific and moral knowledge that has ever been or will ever be needed is to impose voluntary retardation on the very pinnacle of known evolution – the human brain. Those that seek to state that the revealed word of their deity is truly infallible, but also may be conceptualised so as to be a more comfortable fit with modernity, appear to be disgustingly and hilariously unaware that these are opposing propositions. The modernisation of religion is not the result of further revelation from above, which itself would indicate that god is indeed a fallible entity, but the product of scientific discoveries that are incompatible with the origin stories that date from the time before we had the means to form evidence based conclusion. Quoting Christopher Hitchens “Religion is our first attempt at explaining the world, our first attempt at philosophy, our first attempt at medicine, our first attempt at science; and because it is our first it is also our worst”.

The discoveries we have made since these first attempts have all yielded better reasons for the terror of natural disasters, disease, stars in the night sky, illness and medicine. The offer of the reward of immortality in the afterlife where you are reassembled in your perfect form will appeal to the primal fear of dying that resides within all of us and if the price of this immortality is only to live a moral and decent life then the kingdom of heaven will be filled with humanists and scientists, not with the preachers, kings and politicians who have supported organised religion’s involvement in  slavery, murder, oppression of women, genital mutilation, seeing primal sexual instinct as a sin and its persecution of homosexuality, polyamory, birth control, learning etc etc etc… Conversely the ability of the scientific community to pursue an open-source policy on research material and throw forward all theory and postulation to peer review and critical thinking in an effort to find the truth of the universe however vacuous to our own feelings of self-importance those findings may appear is its most admirable trait. Although we are all the centre of our own universe the universe itself no more relies on our continued existence for its own existence than we rely on chewing bubblegum for ours. Science does not live in fear of being proven wrong, it celebrates the idea that we may know far more tomorrow than we know today, it realises that there is much yet to be known and it exposes all things to critical examination. The need for religion to fiercely defend its outdated traditions and teachings through the promotion of ignorance and the harnessing of primal fears should be indication enough of its increasingly shaky foundations and as Nietzsche once wrote “Whatever is shaky should be pushed over”.

More sickening than the fundamentalist who at least has the courage of his convictions and represents by his very fundamentalist ideals a true opportunity for even the slightest doubt to crumble the entire structure of his belief, are the liberals who need not have a solid understanding of their belief but only a Freudian wishful perspective that allows for excuse making in the face of contrary evidence. The position of defending another faith’s set of rules for life (which you likely have not read) on the grounds that all religions are created equal is a slap in the face to critical thinking and shows a deep misunderstanding of the difference between fairness and objectivity. It really is about time the inheritors of post-enlightenment Christology Got a copy of the Koran and fucking read it. The Mohammed they seek to defend from secular critique is a blood thirsty, sex obsessed, misogynistic paedophile. A strange phenomenon of the agnostic is to leap to vigorous defence of the religious, why am I well within my rights to question the media, the NHS, education, hold a politician to account for his policies, criticise a television program or evaluate a product but I am branded as evil for pointing out that the three most prominent mainstream faiths in the world today are incompatible with each other’s doctrine and cannot ever be tolerant of each other without violating their own fundamental teachings.

It is true that religion feeds on ignorance; it is no accident that the churches of the world are swelling their numbers with recruiting campaigns in the poor and badly educated communities of central Africa and South America. These churches rely on inability to access information that may argue with their teachings. It is in the information that is omitted from the teaching that we find the possibility of the antithesis and the realisation of synthesis, from this perspective it becomes even more necessary to highlight what is not being said from the pulpit or over the loudspeaker. Church leaders seek the removal of scientific textbooks from schools, Christianity up until the last century opposed the printing of the bible in any language spoken by the common man and Islamic imams contend that the Koran and the Ahadith can only be understood in Arabic. This is nonsensical if the premise of their faith is that all men are created equal before god and that the meek, the poor and the suffering are the closest to the deity.

There are those who may ask why would I care? What does it matter if my neighbour is a believer – the answer is it wouldn’t, unless my neighbour is a politician or a school governor or a policeman or a soldier or occupying any position of influence or power where his beliefs should have to play second fiddle to the processes of reason and impartiality but subsequently don’t. The problem with my neighbour is that being faithful to a religious dogma may lead him to make bad choices for others. Your personal belief system is not that personal, it cannot be simply turned off and it invades every part of who you are and what you do. The suicide bomber community is 100% religious as is the genital mutilation community; these are not choices that we are lead to by autonomous rationality rather than laws are forced upon us by being members of a tribe of heteronomous barbarians.

You must ask yourself, when religions begin, are they farcical to the populous? Not to be taken seriously apart from by those that are a bit loopy? If this were the case then would Christianity or Islam have been viewed with any less humour in their infancy than we look at Scientology or Mormonism now? It is important to remember that Christianity was virtually ignored in the pagan empire of Rome until Constantine found a use for it and that that use was not for the wellbeing of the people rather the wellbeing of the Empirical wallet. An idea or ideal of Judaism, Islam or Christianity seems to be granted legitimacy just by virtue of the fact that it is old and has not changed whereas science is excited by the notions of building upon the ideas of the past or even disproving them when they do not fit with the world. Little by little scientific method has eroded away spiritualism, exposing it as nonsense, the more spiritualist practices are tested the more they are found wanting but the more science and theory is tested the more usable knowledge it yields.

Humans have resisted belief in the supernatural to pursue investigative research, as evidence is found theology must change but since the speed at which knowledge can be found and the speed at which it can be proliferated around the globe is constantly rising the forces that would fight against it have had to change their approach to combating reason. This gives rise to the new age pseudo-scientific practice of hijacking ideas and trying to make them more confusing and cloudy to the common man, abstruseness and obscurantism abound. Richard Feynman once described scientific process as… Forming a theory, asking how that theory manifests itself and then comparing the resultant to the world we see around us. If it does not match it is discarded – very simple and necessary to prevent wishful thinking from entering the laboratory. Let’s imagine the devoutly religious scientist standing in his lab who has made a discovery that proves a biblical claim to be paradoxical; he has a few choices….

1- Discard the result and pretend that the research yielded no conclusion – deception.

2- Attempt to fit the conclusion with Bronze Age mythological canons – pseudo–pluralism.

3- Make the excuse that the meaning of the text can be taken in many ways and is not literal therefore creating a justification for continued belief – interpretation.

4- Belligerently continue to belief what he now knows to be untrue – cognitive dissonance.

The right choice is to allow discovery to change knowledge. To allow ourselves to be swayed by the primitive nonsense of, the supposedly, revealed knowledge of delusional power-seekers is proof only that we are still on the trajectory of evolution and not at its finish line. Science only creates the ways we have for interpreting those functions of reality that already exist. The principal of leverage needs not the creation of a lever to prove itself to be a truth, leverage precedes the lever just as physics precedes the physicist.

If you find anything wrong with what I have said please feel free to point it out. But bear in mind that first you must become familiar with the Old Testament (Jews), the New Testament (Christians) and the Koran and Ahadith (Muslims) as I have, then read Dawkins, Dennett, Harris, Hitchens, Freud, Marx and Nietzsche as I have also. And please don’t start with ‘I believe’. These words can be easily replaced in any sentence with ‘I have no real evidence but if I could have it the way it suited me best then it would be just like this….’

I welcome your response…

Paul Simon Wilson