For those familiar with my writing on Sparrow Chat what I am about to write here today may seem rather strange. Suffice to say, life is a journey and it’s never static. It flows from birth to death and for all of us should be a constant search for its meaning and its truths.
I am now in what could be called the winter of my life, a time when the learning of past epochs is to be consolidated and conclusions drawn. One of those conclusions is that religion and all its offshoots has been, and continues to be, a curse on mankind.
I do not state that lightly. I was baptized into the Protestant faith too early to have any say in it, or even memory of the occasion. Some years later Sunday school introduced me to Jesus. He seemed a nice caring sort of guy and for a time I took to him, until it all became too fantastic for words. He was the son of a God, the only true God. He got nailed to a cross yet came back to life after three days. His followers watched as he rose up into the air until eventually disappearing through the clouds, ostensibly to join his father, the God who lived in a place called Heaven. This was long before even a hot air balloon was invented.
If we lived a good life and believed that God and Jesus existed we would eventually die and join them in Heaven and be eternal. If we lived a bad life and refused to ‘have faith’ then God would not allow us into Heaven. Instead, we’d be given to something very nasty called ‘the Devil’ and we’d be thrown into a lake of everlasting fire where our flesh would burn, but we’d not die, just suffer the pain and torment forever.
To a mind less than a decade from my mother’s womb it seemed a good idea to have the faith, live a good life, and end up with God and Jesus.
For the first seven or eight years of my life I’d believed totally in Santa Claus. It was a cataclysmic disappointment to learn one day it was all a hoax. Maybe this Jesus thing was also untrue? As I matured I began to seek solace in other religions. In fact, they all basically said similar things though their gods were slightly different. Often there were more of them, but they all had one thing in common – a nasty place to spend eternity if you didn’t do as the deity commanded while you were on earth. By the time I was approaching middle age I’d researched enough religious history to realize the truths in religion were so sparse and the mythology so great that ‘faith’ without any evidence or proof whatever, was all that held it together.
From the beginning there have always been power struggles between the various religious factions. The Catholic church of Rome, with a pope at it’s head, had held the reins of power throughout the western world for many hundreds of years, but during that time there was much slaughter of ‘pagan’ communities and nations who were conquered, all in the Christian God’s name.
It doesn’t take much research to reach the conclusion that the churches that arose from early history were no more than a means to keep the poor peasants in order and the landed gentry with a goodly supply of tithes. Life for the poor was so bad and lifetimes so short that the idea of a heavenly life, once dead on earth, must have seemed the only thing worth living for.
I hate pigeon-holes so I refuse to call myself an atheist. To me atheism is rather like a godless religion. Am I supposed to preach the doctrine of godlessness and a lack of any form of consciousness after death? After all, it’s what I believe. I refuse to do so. There’s been enough preaching and haranguing by the clergy down the ages: you must do this, or you can’t do that. “Thou shalt not kill,” quoted Pope Urban II as he sent a Christian army off to fight and slaughter Muslims in the First Crusade.
Science has now proved beyond any doubt that planet Earth formed four and a half billion years ago, but it was many more millions of years before it became habitable even to the simplest of living things. Hardly the ‘six days then rest’ that the Bible contends! This is the book that devout believers state is the ‘Word of God’. The first chapter, Genesis, has long been proved a load of untruths. If we picked up any book and found the first chapter so unbelievable would we have any hope that the remainder might be enlightening? No, we’d cast it aside in disgust and seek another, more acceptable tome. Yet there are many Christians who still believe that science has got it wrong and that Genesis must be correct because, after all, it’s God’s word and God would not lie.
Which surely begs the question as to why the human mind is so subject to believing the unbelievable. As a human being myself I’ve always been interested in what it is that makes us what we are. Living in the country in close contact with nature, I have learned that patterns of behaviour exhibited by animals, and to some extent plant life, have remarkable similarities to our own. We grow up taught that the world is a wonderful place, its beauty and form the inspiration of poets and artists the world over. To our eyes the colours of nature are a thing to wonder at. Every hue is embodied there, at least according to our brains.
If we look beyond the beauty and grandeur to examine nature more intimately it becomes painfully obvious that the colours and sights that we marvel at hide a more sinister fact. The world we inhabit runs on one rule only: to kill or to be killed. Without that rule the planet’s organisms could not exist. Each species lives off others. Only the more powerful survive to reproduce.
We like to think of ourselves as the pinnacle of life forms on Earth. Perhaps we are if we gauge it in our technological ability to destroy ourselves. We’ve overrun the planet, and continue to do so yet in terms of organism numbers we’re small fry. It’s estimated there are more organisms in an average garden than there are human beings on the planet, and that’s likely a conservative number.
Why are we so arrogant about ourselves? Remember that thing called an ego? Animals don’t have egos, they have a survival instinct. I believe it’s possible that as we lost the necessity as individuals to kill other animals to eat, our survival instinct evolved rather grotesquely into what we now know as our ego. The ego has not replaced the survival instinct of our forebears, we just modified it as a way to display our power. One-upmanship, doing better than the neighbours, climbing the ladder of success whether in business or just building friends and followers on Facebook, or Instagram.
As well as an ego we all have some degree of inferiority complex. The ego goes some way to balance this, but in certain individuals the ego takes over and an out-of-control lust for power creates the Putins, Trumps, and other human monsters of this world. For most of us, our sense of insecurity retains control over the ego but leaves us in need of comfort, love and compassion to assuage the deep-seated fear engendered. What easier way to achieve this than by joining with other like-minded human beings to form a group. Groups bring a sense of security, like birds or fish that flock or shoal together to deter predators, a sense of safety in numbers. Amongst the human animal the largest groups are the religions.
Can there be any greater sense of security than the knowledge of being loved and watched over by a caring Godhead who will take one to His bosom and keep one safe for eternity? Or, at least, that’s what they’ve been sermonizing at us for centuries. The only problem is it isn’t true.
Man has been seeking a divinity since he was able to think and wonder. The obvious contestants were the sun and the moon. We now know the sun is just a huge nuclear furnace, and the moon, well that’s just a very large rock and early humans would never have known it existed if it had nor been for the sun’s light rays illuminating it. Both sun and moon were up in the sky so that was an obvious place where divine creatures might exist. We now know that ancient man was wrong.
This famous photograph above, taken by the Voyager 2 spacecraft from beyond the planet Jupiter, some four billion miles (six billion kms) from Earth, reveals our planet in all its isolation, alone in a vast and empty cosmos, illuminated by a single stray sunbeam .
“Our posturing, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe…” our insistence that we are so important as to have our own personal God to watch over us, that we’ll live for eternity in His presence and that death is just a transition to a ‘Holy State’ of existence. How huge, how overblown can our egos become that we consider ourselves the ultimate product of a Creator who fashioned a Universe so enormous that our number systems cannot cope. But hey, it’s okay because this God fashioned us in HIS OWN IMAGE – Wow!
We are born, we live out are lives, then we die. Just like every other living creature in the sea, in the air, and on or under the surface of our planet. We are not special.
We just like to think we are.