I myself don’t see a problem in religion itself, but more in the fanatic people, who say something like “My religion is the right one, yours sucks, so become one of us or I kill you”, but not everyone is that fanatic.
Believe what you want, as long as you let other people believe what they want.
Ah, but that is the crucial point. Religion will not allow for the peace which you describe. The reason Dr. Dawkins entitled his documentary
The Root of All Evil is that religion begins so harmlessly, yet inevitably brings destruction. It precludes peace on Earth, because, with religion, our best intentions invariably become our own worst enemies.
At the center of every religion is
faith, faith in one’s god. In the general sense, “faith” is to believe without proof that one knows the
truth about something. In religion, faith reaches its full potential: Faith in one’s god provides for that god’s moral authority, which in turn provides the believer with a ready system of morality. Voila! Already the believer has acquired the means
and the justification to pass judgment on all human behavior. All it took was faith in a god. You see, when someone tells you they have faith in their god, what they also mean is that they believe they know truths of the highest caliber—divine truths. But an obvious question arises: What is so special about faith that it gives someone the power to know the truth, simply because they
believe they know it?
If you asked me to build an airplane, I might be able to do it—because I am an aerospace engineer. But what if I weren’t? What if I were a church pastor instead, who specializes in giving sermons and knows nothing about the engineering involved in airplane design? What if I then proceeded to build my airplane anyway, haul it out to the runway, and put
you in the cockpit? Would you be nervous? Yes, if your brain is working correctly, you damn well should be nervous. But then suppose I told you that
God said my design would work, and that you would be able to fly that airplane above the clouds. Would that allay your fears? Would you try to fly my plane?
No, you wouldn’t. Or at least I should hope you wouldn’t, because my airplane would be a death trap. If you were lucky, you’d turn on the engine and nothing would happen. More likely, the plane would catch on fire, or fall apart and crush you in the wreckage. If the damn thing actually did manage to get into the air, you would almost certainly crash horribly just seconds later.
That’s why airplanes were not built until the twentieth century, despite humanity’s ageless wish to fly.
I can have all the faith I want in my airplane design...but, at the end of the day, either my airplane will fly or it won’t. When a claim can be proved or disproved like that, faith doesn’t matter. Unfortunately, the claims of religion are much harder to test…and faith abounds. But the fact of the matter is that faith does
not give us inside access to the truth. It may sometimes
appear to be able to do that, but when faith is put up against something concrete like an airplane design, its power vanishes. Faith has no connection with truth.
In fact, faith is an obstacle on the path to truth. When a person decides to shut down his or her critical brain and simply
believe in something, without evidence, that person’s mind becomes closed and rigid. Any
real truths that show up, which do not fit into that person’s beliefs, are likely to be discarded.
Now imagine the falsehoods of faith as acted out in the theater of
religion, where faith makes claims upon the very highest truths of all: existence, purpose, meaning, nature. Can you imagine the horrors that would ensue were people to claim they know such truths, without actually knowing them? But that is precisely what happens, and you needn’t imagine anything, because the horrors of religion are thriving around the Earth today. Let’s remember: Faith in one’s god means the believer has acquired the means
and the justification to pass judgment on all human behavior. That puts the rest of us at the mercy of that person’s morals. We can only hope that our way of life does not intrude upon their views.
But you know what? It never works out that way. Faith is all about
power. Our bodies are weak, but our minds are great, and with the power of the human intellect we have created a better world for ourselves. However, we still have disasters. We still have diseases. We still have car wrecks, and our ice cream still melts off the cone and falls into our laps. We still lose the lottery. We still have trouble with our bosses and friends. We still have unrequited love, and unsatisfied desires. And we still have death. We exist with these vulnerabilities every day, and we fear and despise them, because we are powerless to change them. If we were gods, we would snap our fingers and live in a paradise where all our wishes come true. But we’re not gods; we are mortal beings, frail and emotional. However, there is the next best thing: We can
create gods inside our imaginations…gods who will reassure us that, even though life is difficult and unpredictable, it is for the better. These gods teach us that the struggles of life are worthwhile, because there is a higher meaning to life itself. That “higher meaning” varies from religion to religion…from the sensual comforts of neo-paganism, to the pleasure-seeking of modern hedonism, to the eternal heaven of the Abrahamic religions. These beliefs give us power, not to change our lives but to accept them. That is a start.
But these are the comforts of a delusion.
And, worse, one person’s delusion intrudes upon another’s. The Baptist’s beliefs are in conflict with the Mormon’s, and
both of their beliefs are in conflict with the Shi’ite Muslim’s. All three would have a bone to pick with a Hasidic Jew, and the whole lot of them would sneer at a Wiccan.
So here we are, at that pivotal moment when all aggrieved parties can decide to either provoke a conflict, or live side by side in peace. Let history attest to the will of the devout!
Why? Why is it that, when given the choice of conflict or peace, religion will choose conflict every time? It is because faith is inherently adversarial. Your fantasy truth and my fantasy truth don’t match up in the real world. And that’s not good. Humans are very defensive of their opinions—when we feel safe in asserting ourselves—because having our authority acknowledged is an innate, evolved desire in all of us, and the secular materialism in which we live has afforded us a relative immunity in expressing ourselves freely. The Internet in particular promotes spectacular debates, because the people involved know they have little real popularity to lose, and much social validation to gain. Being agreed with is, after all, a form of social power. But beyond the Internet, one’s assertiveness can be backed up by anything from a mob, to strong laws, to the barrel of a gun. And when something as important as our
god is on the line, our need to be acknowledged can easily become a matter to die for, and to kill for. It gives me a sardonic chuckle when I see fundamentalist Christians suing in court to change the law to discriminate against somebody. These people don’t respect the rule of law…they simply have no power to overrule it. They’d shoot gays and women in the streets if we let them…because their god is that important to them.
Faith discourages critical thinking and reinforces an arbitrary authority that exists beyond the realm of fact. It drives a wedge between people, innately, because competing faiths are contradictory, and therefore people’s lifestyles come into conflict. Faith is adversarial. That is why religion precludes a lasting peace. Religions cannot live side by side—at least not under their own power.
All the instances both in history and today of religious harmony and interfaith unity are the result of religious devotees placing some other authority above that of their own religious faith. From the persecuted minority religions, to the spiritualistic Eastern religions, to the secularized Western religions, to the barbaric super-religions of Christianity and Islam, whenever people of different faith come together in a show of friendship, it is always,
always because they are willing or compelled to put their faith aside for the moment and strive toward a common goal—a goal borne in the world of reason. Even the most peaceful-looking religions are peaceful only inasmuch as they are willing to temporarily or partially suspend their own legitimacy. After all, who would join a religion that teaches
every religion is correct? (Actually, there are such people, but we’ll forgive them their ignorance as surely as we will forgive the fundamentalists theirs.)
It all begins so harmlessly. A lot of questions…damn few answers. Religious faith is our attempt to find wholeness in an incomplete world, and contentment in a land of woe. But the medicine is self-defeating, in the end. Open-mindedness is the most important personality trait of all, and faith snuffs it out, to whatever degree we let it. When our minds close, our guns open. That is the story of religion. That is why religious faith is the proverbial root of all evil. And that is why religions will never be able to live peacefully side by side. At most they can only be
forced to coexist, by some stronger power…which raises the question: Why bother?
