Friday, July 28, 2006
My take on religion
My cousin in Israel sent me a link to a video that perfectly encapsulates my opinion about religion. I laughed, I cried, and I was so giddy with excitement to see it! The title is "DANCE, monkeys, DANCE!" It is the stuff of brilliance. Overall, my actual thought on religion resembles ignosticism. I do not believe humanity can ever understand the notion of "God," if God exists, and so it is pointless to try. I also fail to see what is so great about humanity. I honestly believe that if God does exist, he/she/it/etc does not care about any of us. Why would god care one way or another whether lowly humans believes in it? We are a cosmic blip on the radar screen, a fart in the history of time. What makes us so signficant that God really should care one crap whether we believe in it? And let me further ask that if God does care, then this is a very weak God. If God is so all-knowing and all-encompassing, then why does it matter if a peon believes in God or not? Why should it make any difference? If God does care, and really does have such an ego, isn't that a very weak God? How would such a God be capable of creating the universe? Paradoxically, a God that you pray to is a God that cannot possibly have created the universe, because any God that cares about prayer is too weak to have had the power to do so. And so, what is the purpose of praying, other than the psychological enjoyment of praying? How are prayers answered in an age of genocide? Why are one man's prayers somehow better than another? In a world with no rhyme or reason to it, how in any way have prayers been proven effective? And if prayers are not effective, then why should believing in God be effective, even in the "afterlife"? Assuming there is an afterlife (massive assumption), why is God so petty that it would say "this otherwise righteous person goes to hell solely because of a lack of belief in me." And which belief? Monotheism? Polytheism? Which version of monotheism? Why is one version right and another wrong? Why would God give a crap if one is believed in and another is not believed in? In short, I realize there is a need to want to believe that all of this matters. But where is there any indication that we are anything other than walking bags of flesh and bone, that dissolves into the earth upon death? And finally, believing in God has many external problems associated with it, so don't kid yourself. It means you do not engage in activities that the false moralists found in the religious texts say are bad. It means you go through life praying - spending precious hours out of the day PRAYING - when this accomplishes nothing other than waste time. (well, it can be an inner refuge, but we kid ourselves if we think it's anything more) It means living a life of fear - "I cannot do this because Angry God will get me in the afterlife." And it breeds division - "You are crap because you don't believe in what I believe." Humanity is unequipped to deal with such concepts as infinity and the great beyond. We are unequipped to ever truly grasp the notions of "forever." And so I wonder why we really bother. Who are we fooling? What makes mankind so special? Why is humanity so unique that God gives even half a crap about any of us?