Believing in the Belief Rejects Belief in the Believing
Portrayal:
As muddled as the title portrays, believing in any certain religion that cannot be partially proven, much less wholly, while existing only in the human mind nurtured from the brought-up comforts of faith in a belief…is confusing.
What does religion express in one’s life, much less mean? Why are we drawn to follow in footsteps of manmade religions that otherwise would be considered made-up mythologies to anyone else outside a particular religious hold over its followers? Take for instance the worldly three biggest religions revolving around the same single deity…Judaism, Christianity and Islam.
Here, we have three religions all based solely on the one old Jewish god, but with differing prophets or redeemers to guide their varying dictates away from one another. The Jews have Moses, the Christians got Jesus while the Moslems only accept final conditions as interpreted by Mohammed.
Underneath the shredded veil of these three religions lies countless scores of further segregation in worship to this one god in the guise of denominations, affiliates, sects and cults. This one particular god must surely feel that he/she/it has been put asunder, wouldn’t one think? As these three religions with their host of splintered camps chastise the others while promoting themselves as the one and only righteous path, surely the godhead must be getting confused. For if none of them are wrong in accordance to their edicts, then assuredly none of them can be right in claiming to be the one and only path to the final throne.
From the Start:
It is in the anima of mankind to seek ground higher than what he/she presently stands on. To devote total confidence into one’s self is not an option. There is a security void that needs filling. To stand alone, a human indeed feels vulnerable.
During man’s earliest primal events, when a leader of a small clan died, it opened up a security void, much like the insecurity a child feels when witnessing a heated argument by it parents. To comfort, to soothe the insecurity, humans with a developed imagination began to reason that the chief was not dead, but still present in emotional form (spiritual). From that point onward, deities, whether physical or placated imagined beings, were implanted into man’s reckoning of his worldly worth and from there, religions arose explaining to and maintaining the fold. The scenario goes pretty much like this:
Humanity arising with a developed imagination in a physical world, could not explain nature and its course.
With no understanding of life, nor the conception of birth with the cloaked fear of death, gods or a spiritual self began to develop to explain order out of physical chaos, which in turn gave purpose to life and comfort for death.
Religion then evolved to explain the intricate complexities of an unrevealing spiritual realm admixed in an already perplexed reality and confused physical presence.
Next, the written word came to pass to setup a particular religion’s core emphasis on laws and governance for adherence to the belief.
The ‘word’ though was not enough, so clergies arose to interpret the religions’ dictates.
Finally, those who dared to question the authority of any particular religion enveloping the invented deity or spirit came about, hence the innumerable secular denominations.
Debates now ensue but are significantly pointless, for to argue an entrenched belief with real-world logic only brings argument to a boil. Belief is not functional under analytical parameters, so to try and influence congruently, discrepancies of an ingrained religious belief is defeat even before the attempt. There is no compromise, much less reasoning.
If I am to truly believe in and worship Shl’bonceqounces residing heavenly on Pluto, cognitive argument in reasoning will not sway me away from believing it, nor shake my comfort in that belief.
Anti Reason:
To be religious, one must be a traditionalist and as time consumes space, to remain religious, one must hold onto those revealed traditional values that squarely conflict with uncovered gained knowledge. This is not reason; it is not even rationale, it is merely belief. That is fine to a point until a need is prodded to fill others with the ignorance entrenched in the religion. Replacing truth with ignorance is not progress; it is primal isolation, or simply put…primitivism.
Any religious ol’ soul will admit in a heartbeat that dear old Mother Goose is nothing but a fairy tale and yet Jews, Christians and Muslims alike will profess to all that a donkey did indeed speak to Balaam in the Torah’s Numbers, in the Bible’s Numbers 22:28 and 2 Peter 2:16 and referenced in the Qur’an in the 7th Sura.
In all three of the religions’ ordained scripture, Jonah is swallowed by some kind of great fish in the Tanakh (Jonah 2:1), Old Testament (Jonah 4:9-11) and Qur’an (Q 37:141). Heck even in the Christian’s New Testament, there is contradiction to the ‘believed’ story, in that it wasn’t a fish after all, but a whale (Matthew 12:39-41).
Surely a one omnipresent and eternal god recognizes the difference between a fish and a whale. It only goes to show that these writings were indeed scribed in ink to parchment by mortal humans in varying time frames. A god of creation would not be so ignorant during the day, or any day in describing a fish as a whale or a whale as a fish.
There were according to the Bible, two starts for mankind’s prodigy; one with Adam and Eve, then the second, once all humans were wiped out in the Great flood, with Noah’s immediate family. Cousins, once the flood subsided, had to repopulate the earth with humans. This though, doesn’t explain the current fifty-nine human allele genomes grouped in us all. Since Noah had only three sons and no daughters, three couples had to repopulate the Earth, even though one may be discounted in the fact that once Ham witnessed his drunken dad, Noah butt-naked without a shred of cloth wrapped around him, Ham, along with his progeny were to be cursed for all time (Genesis9:18-27).
No, there is no mention of Noah having daughters nor son-in-laws on board the Ark; only his three sons and their wives. With this cousinly incest in restarting human’s reign on Earth from just the three couples’ offspring, there should be only twelve allele groups, not the current fifty-nine.
To add further to the Great Flood story, which will lead us into the next subtitle; with all the freshwater and saltwater fish swimming around today, if the Great Flood was reasonable, there would only be one or the other fish left, for saltwater fish would have all died off if the flood inundated the earth with freshwater or the freshwater fish would have perished if all the floodwaters turned into salty water.
Of course back then, men who were writing flood verses were ignorant of this and did not have an inkling of this fact in mind. Back then it was ignorantly reasoned a fish swam in water whether it was salt or fresh. But of course a creator god should have known the difference and accounted for it. Nowhere though in the bible, does it explain this, much less all the microscopic life that exists today. With some not able to withstand freshwater, others not able to acclimate to saltwater and the rest not able to subsist in any watery environment, they too had to be collected and herded into the Ark. Could you just imagine Noah as tasked in collecting all the microscopic life? No sir/ma’am you couldn’t. Religious writers back then didn’t even know microscopic life existed, much less assign Noah to collecting them into the Ark so as to keep them from all perishing.
Bullfrogs & Butterflies:
In the above three religions’ genealogy, Earth was created somewhere around six thousand years ago. Based on biblical scripture analysis, Archbishop James Ussher in 1654 ushered forth in proclaiming Earth was created in 4004 B.C. Still further, John Lightfoot, a rabbinical scholar concluded that man was created by the Trinity at precisely 9:00 in the AM.
Of course these guys were totally ignorant in their reasoning. Once radiation was discovered, and the antiquity found in the orogenies of mountain building and canyon carving, man realized religious scripture did not quite get the age of the earth right.
Radiometric dating is a technique utilizing the observed parent (original) material’s abundance of naturally occurring isotopes as decay products versus the relative quantities of the decay rates into daughter (transformed material) products, which are always half of the original material from which they decayed from. Half-life is simply the time allotted to reduce half of the original parent’s volume into the daughter product.
By knowing the rate of transfer (decay) and the ratio of material transferred (daughter) against the remaining amount of the original material (parent), calculations can determine how long the disintegration process has been going.
Radioactive decay bears out a much older age of Earth at 4.4 billion years. Earth’s truly oldest crustal material is long gone, for it has been consumed due to the dynamic earth’s ability in recycling material. We know the earth is a bit older than the 4.4 billion years due to corroborating data from other sources. By comparing radiometric dating of lunar (moon) material and the oldest known solar system constituents of melded calcium/aluminum inclusions in meteorites, along with the mass and luminosity of the sun as compared to other stars, Earth calculates to be 4.54 billion years old.
To contend that bullfrogs and butterflies were created on the same day is accepting blindness to the truth.
Brachiopods, bivalve marine animals first appeared during Cambrian times 550 mya and they are still currently hanging around, but barely and as a different species of brachiopod as opposed to the former. Found in oceanic stratification, brachiopods are a consummate asset in revealing evolutionary trends. Not common today or when they first appeared in the Cambrian, they did enjoy population explosions in between the Cambrian time scale and the present. In the older layers, species of brachiopods became extinct, only to evolve into other new brachiopod species witnessed in the younger layers. The layers are like a page-by-page history book. But since around 100 million years ago, no matter what species, brachiopod populations have been declining. The brachiopod’s heyday has subsided, but what a lengthy journey.
Extinct animals found in tar pits, a lot of the time, have preserved soft tissue left with the remains. Though the species is long gone, this tissue nonetheless contains viable DNA that shows the animal’s gene pool still carries on in present day related animals. This is a classic example of evolution with natural selection utilized as its mechanism during environmental change.
Once upon a time the Antarctic riding atop convectional currents like a hitchhiker, was once positioned geographically in a more life-friendly latitude and longitude. Even dinosaurs were able to have once roamed its lands. Today, positioned at the bottom of Earth, those same land dinosaurs that once chased each other are now buried in parts under ice more than 2 miles/3.22km thick. Underneath that ice rest fossils. How could all this have been created in one instance? How could those animals and plants have lived, then died under two miles of ice? They could not have and surely to a logical mind, it takes far more conditions and time for snow to pack into two miles of thick ice than what is religiously professed.
Religion is Its Own Turmoil:
Religions tend to be the bashers of religion. If you don’t belong to my belief system, then you are wrong and need converting. And so it goes…
Wars, wars, wars! Behind most wars has been a religious theme in promoting them. From the war gods of old lore to the present, mankind has been using his religion to compensate his bias and greed. Even the old Jewish god was a warlord. Directly or indirectly, that god had around 2,826,455 living human beings, man, woman, child and infant put to death.
Actually of the three big religions, I prefer their offshoots, for they are more of the heart than devotion to a structured and stale orthodoxy. Kabbalists, branched from Judaism adds a little more fun to their worship by not just studying the divine, but adding to learning…personal experience. Sufism, branched from Islam, also is more heart rendering. One would be hard pressed to bump into a Sufi worshipper that is hung up on liturgical religion. A Sufi’s favorite phrase is, “He who tastes knows.” As far as Christians go, the wrath of fear is exempt in the teachings of Franciscan Catholics. They only concentrate on the forgiving portion of the divine and social action towards the poor. To be Christian means to be Christ-like and they are about as close to that as it comes in the Christianity field.
There are religions like Hinduism and Wicca that have multiple gods, while there are those as Buddhism, Confucianism and Taoism that are atheistic. They have no gods to answer to, or even be bound to liturgy. Instead, with no concept of original sin or sinning wracking a follower with guilt, they strive for nirvana (internal, therefore eternal peace) in how well one’s morals treat another person.
Jainism though, is the icing on my cake. As an offshoot of Buddhism, Jainists not only strive for individual enlightenment through reverence to all life, but where other religious works teach compassion only in portions as subdivided with non-acceptance and conquering, Jainists live their whole life fully devoted to respecting all life in all its myriad forms. They even take great care not to step on a bug. Do not think that they are merely pushovers, for their nonviolent behavior has led them to be the greatest thinkers of India and are the ones responsible for the country’s oldest libraries.
Repetition:
So it goes, over and over to gain more members and to hold onto the ones already in place. Castigating other religions to gain authority over all; that is the usefulness in deifying a religion.
It would have made sense if the monotheistic god would have revealed himself to all his created humankind that populated the earth in geographically different regions. It just doesn’t make sense for a god to be known in an isolated region only from the exposure of conquering hordes coming from another region bringing their god to be indoctrinated into the vanquished.
The TV evangelist, who belches out words of condemnation concerning scientific research and accolades, conveniently forgets he’s using the very same scientific principles that allow his ranting from the pulpit to reach the multitudes, via the microphone and television. He utilizes science when it benefits him, but attempts to deride and assail it when it is in conflict with him and his delimited rhetoric. The world is wide, don’t use such a narrow lens when viewing it, or you’ll miss the periphery; the completion of its whole picture.
Definitely in argumentation, doubt is necessary or no one would be arguing, but as the sole agenda it’s insufficient. Hanging onto doubt in believing just because, leads to ignorant behavior. Ignorance is what God attempted to keep Adam & Eve and therefore mankind in. How could Eve have known it was truly wrong to eat the fruit of knowledge if she was kept in gullible ignorance and not afforded the chance or opportunity to make either an informed prudent or baneful decision beforehand?
The tried but tired argument that scientific research and facts are dangerous to faith and as well, cognitive approaches to reason from an atheist to a faithful believer...will never merit brownie points and can drive both sides to anger. Let all believe they feel most comforted in. It may not be real, but imagination is a key element in what makes us human. For some folks, all they have is their faith, so why would one want to take that from them?
Go ahead, as long as it is not a negative impact to others, believe anything conjured up you want. Believe in your gods, for I certainly intend to continue on believing in my Shl’bonceqounces.
With Yuletide Cheer,
Merry Christmas to All
BJA
12/24/2011
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