"Religions are fraudulent dogmatic ideologies, just scams to make money", "they are illogical and contradict scientific findings", "they enslave people, are tools of oppression by unaccountable elites" and similar platitudes I read constantly on most social media sites, including here on steemit.
Do I believe it?
Call me a dupe, call me a sheep, call me whatever you like, but I still don't believe in the above.
Sure, not all religions are made equal, in my opinion. There are religious gurus whose only aim is indeed to scam their followers. And then there are other religions with doctrines justifying inequality and oppression of other people. These religions will tell their followers that they are special and that their leaders are super-special and the rest of humanity is trash, destined for hell, outcast or profane.
But these are minority religions, they will disappear in time as such religions always have.
Lasting religions are the universal and egalitarian ones, and they have vital functions in human survival.
If those religions would ever disappear humanity would destroy itself.
Some might call this destruction Armageddon, I just call it Transhumanism, the highway to hell or a post-human world, which probably will also mean a post-humanoid world. For whatever kind of cyborgs will be created in this transhumanist utopia, after having destroyed the remnants of humanity they will go on to destroy each other.
Why?
Because they will have no ethical restrictions built into their programs and no natural conscience or feelings of guilt or remorse.
In a potential future age when a partially artificial humanoid species has become the dominant life form these human attributes will have been bred out of the cyborg population. They then will have no way from stopping themselves from killing each other for whatever short-time gain they might achieve by it.
Animals are led by their instincts to act according to what will best secure the survival of not only the individual animal but also its whole species.
As humans were are social beings. Our best survival chances lie in the preservation of well-functional communities and the avoidance of anything that would destroy those communities. If we were animals our instincts would tell us so.
But as humans we are no longer bound by our instincts. We are capable of acting in the most socially destructive way, which in the long-term would also be the most self-destructive. And still, we can easily rationalize ourselves out of this realization with some complex mathematical or science-fiction gobbledigoo.
Universal and egalitarian religions like Christianity, Islam and to a certain degree Buddhism are the only rational forces countering this human weakness.
When you believe in a loving, caring Divine Power who has created you for a purpose you will be able to see a high value of other human beings and accept the sanctity of human life per se -and in this day and age- of the human genome.
On the other hand all atheists I've met recently have been some kind of transhumanists (or in other words turbo-eugenicists) breathlessly awaiting the age of the cyborgs (or shall we rather call them the "Borg" against whom "Resistance is Futile"?), hoping themselves to be connected to the great "Cloud" in cyberspace (or shall we call it "the Matrix").
While imagining themselves to be Neo, the chosen ones, they or their decedents would in reality become the cyber-soldiers of the future whose every thought and feeling would be remote-controlled by their military command center via the brain-implants they are readily accept for the promise of getting an increase in their "powers" and their life-span.
However, people believing in life after death will accept their human limitations as well as their own mortality, allowing eventually new generations of human beings to take their place on this planet instead of striving for earthly immortality and "progress" at any cost, be this cost a genocidal mass-murder or even total humanicide. the end of the human race.
Important functions of universal and egalitarian religions are to diminish the fear of death as well as to curb human megalomania, to formulate ethical principles and to give meaning to ordinary human existence. A lack of these kind of religions in the whole population would inevitably lead to the nightmare of transhumanism endangering the survival of the human species.
As for logic and science:
If you accept the reality of an intelligent creator, you will not need to make up the scientifically totally unsupported string-theory, which assumes that every time there is a new possibility of an even slightly different outcome of whatever circumstances, all of a sudden out of nothing a whole new universe comes into existence.
And the whole theory exists just to account for the fact that our own wonderful universe is so optimally fine tuned that even a slight variation of numeric values would have made it impossible to exist at all, while at the same time even the smallest cell is so utterly complex and well functional in all its many parts that the accidental development of cellular life had a zero chance of occurrence.
The way I see it is that the religious assumption of the intelligent design of our universe by a conscious creator seems by far more logical than the atheistic assumption of an infinite number of accidentally occurring parallel universes.
The religious assumption seems also more functional than the atheistic one since in a single universe all individual actions have definite consequences and are therefor important, while in constantly new universes all individual actions become irrelevant and unimportant.
Wide-spread faith in such an pseudo-scientific ideology would lead to either total inactivity or totally irresponsible behavior, since whatever you decide to do, it doesn't matter since in an alternate universe some alternate you would decide differently. In the long term this belief system would also endanger human survival.
Yes, I do admit, that religious people over the ages have done a lot of bad things, some have even killed in the name of their religion. We religious people are like everyone else inflicted by the weaknesses of human nature: anger, jealousy, pride, greed and the occasional cruelty, as well as a whole lot of stupidity so we can be easily manipulated. And still, I'm fully convinced that without religion the world would be a lot worse off.
So call me a dupe, a sheep, an idiot or whatever you like but I believe in God and in organized religion.
And on a personal note: all the people I've met in the ordinary Catholic parishes where I have attended mass have been kind, tolerant, helpful, compassionate and peace-minded, all the attributes needed to lay the foundation for a decent future for the next generation.
Thank you for this very well written article. I am also convinced, that human beings are religious and that they need religion to survive, even if they do not like the idea. If people do not believe in what we might call "traditional" religions, they put their religious energy into manmade religions (libertarianism, socialism etc.) or into new spiritual movements. For me, it is as easy as that. The rest is rhetorics. I prefer to see people being connected to the "traditional" religions, since they have been doing a good job for thousands of years, but it is not my choice :-)
Thank you for reading and your good comment. I agree many modern political movements and philosophies end up as strict doctrinaire para-religions.
Traditional religions on the other hand have gone over the centuries through learning processes which make them today often less doctrinaire than those movements.
I believe that both Christian fundamentalism (as in some American churches) as well as Islamic fundamentalism (as in the Wahhabi-Salafist movements) will eventually totally discredit themselves and will be overcome by the peaceful movements within the two religions, just as I aspect that Hinduism will eventually align itself more with the ideas of Mahatma Ghandi, overcoming the caste-system once created by the Brahmins and later eagerly supported by the British while India was still a part of their empire.
But you are right, it's not our choice to tell people what to believe :)