I don't think there's any difference between the pope wearing a large hat and parading around with a smoking purse and an African painting his face white and praying to a rock. --Howard Stern
(Disclaimer: not a big Howard Stern fan.)
Stern could just as well have said "I don't think there's any difference between [an Orthodox Jew waving a lulav and esrog | a Mormon wearing special underwear | a Pentacostal speaking in tongues | a Baptist dunking a baby underwater | a Muslim kneeling on a praying rug] and an African painting his face white and praying to a rock."
On this blog, we often debate creationism vs. evolution, divine revelation vs. the documentary hypothesis, and absolute vs. relative morality, but sometimes I have to just marvel in the sheer wackiness of religion.
Sometimes I just want to throw out all the arguments and just point and say, "Look how ludicrous this stuff is!" But everybody thinks their religion's unique and true. It's just everybody else who's crazy.
There's a more substantive point here, though, and that is this: religious ritual is theater. It's designed to produce an emotional reaction in the observer/audience. In and of itself, it's meaningless. Turn on your television one Sunday morning and watch a televangelist with his fire and brimstone and sing-song voice and emotional arguments disguising logical fallacies. It's simply a tool for the leader/entertainer to manipulate his/her audience.
How many people would believe in religion if their emotions weren't manipulated by calculated showiness? What if you had to sit down each potential convert (or ba'al teshuva) and explain logically what your religion was all about without any singing or kugels or fancy garments? How many people would become religious? People fall in love first with the rituals and the lofty promises; they accept the rationalizations later.
Children, too are raised into religion more by emotions than by reason. Some of this is unavoidable, of course. Children simply don't have the capacity to reason at an adult level. But look how much effort is put into directed emotional manipulation for religion. There's ritual and Bible stories and Left Beind movies and Santa for Christians and Elijah for Jews. ("Look! Can't you see the wine receding!") And how much is put into emotionally manipulating children into believing in the Big Bang or evolution or relativity? Basically none.
Perhaps we skeptics should fight fire with fire. Maybe we should make up a bunch of stories about science and skepticism to tell our children at night. We could a write a skeptic's Bible with stories loosely based on the destruction of the library at Alexandria and Marie Curie's discovery of radium. We should tell them that Einstein was ten feet tall and Newton lived until 200. Galileo could move the planets just by whispering some magical equations. Once, Mendel created a bean pod that was four hundred feet long!
It would be ironic, for sure, to teach science by manipulating their emotions, but maybe we need to look at the ends instead of the means. Maybe we should create rituals involving altars to Darwin and giant turtles as his priests. We should make bracelets in the form of the double helix and tell our children that Watson and Crick will protect them from evil. (Or maybe they'd say "WWW&CD?") Perhaps we should have a day of rememberence every year for the dinosaurs who went extinct. We can celebrate the equinoxes by wearing elliptical hats and tilting ourselves a little to the left for the day.
It's always just facts and skepticism, facts and skepticism, with us skeptics. It's boring and anyway you'd need to live in an ivory tower to believe in that stuff. We need to get with the program.
(**extracts tongue from cheek**)