I’ve been thinking a lot about how so many, otherwise normal people, are so far deep into this religion story and I’ve come up with 2 main reasons:
While I understand the human need for such emotions, I just can’t imagine why people would knowingly and willingly drink from this religious cup of pure BS. I mean, no matter which religion you follow, the underlying principle is still the same; there’s an invisible man in the sky and he created you and gave you a few set of rules to follow and if you don’t follow them, he’ll punish you even though he loves you. My argument here is simply that blindly believing in things like that is not only stupid, it’s actually dangerous too.
To prove this, let’s consider this scenario. Let’s say we manage to take a copy of the entire Star Wars books and send them off into space. Let’s say they land on a remote planet in another galaxy. Let’s say in a 1000 years, a new species, with human-like intelligence happens to evolve on that planet (I know my scenario includes the idea of evolution which is turning some of your stomachs, but stay with me for a bit longer!!) and also miraculously speaks English. If they were to find this “manuscript” or “bible” and they adopted this as the ultimate truth, we’d have a race that worshiped Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader would be Satan. It’s not that hard to believe it… there are lots of parallels between the bible and Star Wars. They both have good over evil, they both have the evil tempting good (“come to the dark side my son” – Star Wars vs. Satan tempting Jesus over 40 days), they both have incest (Luke kissing his sister Leia vs. the basis of creationism… come on guys, if you believe in creationism, you surely do believe in incest, right? I mean, after God created Adam and Eve, how do you suppose the family went on to procreate further if not for incestual activities??), etc. Anyway, so this new race would completely believe and worship Luke since they found their “bible” and it tells them so.
Does that mean they are right?
Now where does that put religion as we know it in our world? In the same category as Star Wars and Harry Potter… a fiction of someone’s imagination. Why one book is taken so seriously and the others are given the status of “story books” is beyond me, since, to most truly intelligent people, they are both the same.
Grow up, don’t let stories rule your life.
- Long and repeated brain-washing – if the only thing you’ve heard from birth till now is that there’s an invisible man in the sky, it takes a very strong mind to challenge it and change it; it’s the same reason why people love their mom’s cooking. It may be crappy, but if that’s all you knew as a kid growing up, you will love it no matter what!
- The need to believe in something – not everyone is strong enough to admit that we are responsible for our own actions and that even in the darkest times, we need to find inner strength than depend on “higher power”.
Does that mean they are right?
