You Bet Your Life!
Trading the NOW for an unproven future state
No one actually knows what happens after we die. Oh, many say that they know but do they really? There is not any tangible, scientific proof of anything beyond our mortal existence. If there were, there would be only one religion... or no religion whatsoever in at least the kinds we are seeing today. Many religions are trying to prove to the rest of the world that they do know what happens after death. Oddly, many religions contradict the next as to what lies in the great beyond.
It could be wise to undertake a study of the genesis of the many hundreds of religions that have come and gone, some of which are now holding up with significant staying power among us. I have found that the more forcefully someone asserts that they "know" what happens after death and what I should do to attain their brand of heaven, the more reason I have to be skeptic and wary of their views. Usually, large sums of money, free time, and emotional distrainment are required to attain the promised future state.
For three cognizant decades of my life, I was asked to trade most of my free time, much of my money, and all of my ability to critically, rationally and logically think and respond to life as it presented itself to me for a hope of mansions in heaven. My promised future state involved the possibility of becoming a god with many wives governing many planets for eternity. I told this was the reward and for many years I believed it.
I bet my life on an improvable promise. The promises were given to me with much emotion, designed that I might also feel the weight of the promised currency. There were conditions predicated on the promised future state. I was required to prove myself worthy of such a grand prize. This required unquestioned loyalty to many strange and dogmatic tenets of faith.
Overall in religion, we see many with the best of intentions eager to sign the uninitiated up to their religious creeds of faith in exchange for loyalty paid out in ones spare time and money. These same practitioners of faith seem to cry out shrilly if one chooses to give a hard look at the problematic portions of their doctrine. Particularly if one's conclusions end up differing from theirs. Religions that hold imaginative exclusivity claims usually always also are the possessors of a fairly elaborate defense mechanism found in the field of apologetics.
Doom For All
Another odd observation about religion is how each of the hundreds of fundamental One and Only True Churches has their own specialized brand of eternal doom awaiting for the rejector. Isn't that odd to you? If not, why not?
Have you ever stopped to think about which doom you will suffer? After all, one cannot embrace every religion with the commitments each requires. So by default, one becomes atheistic towards every other religion except the religion he chooses to ascribe to. So then, how huge a decision is it to pick the true church, and how can you be sure yours is the right one? Which ideology does one follow? And what makes it more "true" than the others? By following any One and Only True Church, I automatically subject myself to suffer the doom spelled out by the others!
Unfortunately for most of us, we happen to believe that the religion our parents taught us is the truest religion available to us.
I have checked into this next bit, and I have found that not one religion can conclusively prove in any way that their religion is the religion God approves of. In fact, I also found that many of the world religions claim that "god" approves of theirs and has spoken out that the rest of the world religions are abominable, incorrect, wicked and incapable of saving a human soul in the next world to come. I found that most all of them rely on emotions as fuel for their faith. One of the main proofs for the veracity of any religion with an exclusivity claim is that the religion
1. feels good
2. causes "good" results (as defined by the group) to happen more often than not
And that is all.
The explanation of "This religion works for me" is the single most difficult type of proof to combat against.
Betting Your Life You Are Right
The reasons offered up for proof are little more than a hopeless cycle of frustration that ought not to be looked at too carefully if one really wants to be effective in following any one religion. What is more troubling are the lengths that humans go to in defending and promulgating each of the various religious beliefs. Many have lost their life defending their principles! This is how one bets their life that god approves of how they view him/it/her. Loss of life need not be actuated. Loss of life can also be calculated in the quality of life we allow ourselves to experience.
Consider how many religions expressly forbid divorce. Countless spouses have remained in an abusive or lackluster marriages only because they believe they will find disfavor with their god. Many women have founded large families when they are unable to emotionally sustain the grind required in caring for the children. In the latter scenario not only can the woman suffer greatly, but the children suffer too.
Hopefully, if you choose to take a critical look at the concept of betting your life for faithful declarations you might find such critical thought will help you place a more healthy balance in your life regarding the time, money and emotional currency you spend on this venture. I believe it is good to contribute ones precious commodities of time and money, but I believe it should be qualified and balanced properly.
It is up to the individual to practice sound rational judgement before leaping into any of the frackus. Like I have already mentioned, we are born into a religion and are that taught X or Y IS absolute Truth however, but Z is definitely NOT absolute Truth. This leaves us little room for personal growth. Amazingly, I am 36 at the time of writing this and this is the first time in my life I ever questioned the existence of God or ever sought out what lay at the roots of world religion!
Examining What You Inherited
I am troubled by how often we stay faithful to our religions on little more reason than it's the religion we were born into. We were born Catholic, or, we inherited Mormonism so Catholicism or Mormonism must be right. That type of reason begs for examination. But how to go about dissecting world religion? A good rule of thumb would be to use slightly more amounts of scrutiny than one does in buying a home before giving ones existence over to any religious institution.
Home buying is a process of accumulating facts to make a sound decision. Pest control reports, roof inspections, radon gas detections, is their lead based paint.
How odd would it be to buy a home based only on how one felt inside after reading what the realtor wanted you to read and hearing the testimony of the realtor? Slightly odd...even absurd?
Think about what little research most give to their religion!
Most religious practitioners are not interested in dissecting their religious world view. Why not, though? Maybe because humans do not know much for certain about the great beyond. So we trust what has appeared to work for our parents. We are a nervous species about things we know little or nothing about. We fear that which we do not understand.
Recall how you feel as you stand in an unfamiliar place, alone, in the dark. Spooked? Restless? Nervous? Flighty? Probably. These feelings result in our recognition that we are not in control of our environment. The darkness brings to us uncertainty. This uneasiness is at the root of the foundational core of world religion. Such uneasiness facilitated the genesis of speculations about the great beyond.
Earlier in history when humans crossed the mental Rubicon of cognitive self-awareness, we searched for answers and found none. I imagine it did not take long for the more enlightened minds to thirst after a reasonable explanation to life's tough questions. What happens to us after we die? Why am I even here? Who am I? Did I come from somewhere else?
Hence, the cultural and geographical religious differences found across the globe stemming from our ancestors migration out of Africa.
The First Leader
I'd like to ask you to consider at this point that if there were a god in control of this world, would he not choose to be a little more consistent in revealing his identity and instructions for living life here? Particularly since many millions claim him/her/it to be a vastly superior and unchanging perfect god. Don't you think that makes sense? Instead, we find a vast and confusing chaotic canyon of opinion miles wide and deep between the various cultures throughout the world time line and geography with respect to how a supreme being operates or reveals himself to us humans.
Today, we take for granted that our religious leaders who taught us from our childhood knew the answers... but they did not. They trusted their leaders... who, in turn, trusted the first leader. How much scrutiny is given to each religion's first leader? What type of evidence is there for his existence and personal character?
With the first leader, the ball of faith started rolling forward. Obviously, the more distance gained from this original first leader via subsequent generations, the less likely we were/are to question why we must keep this particular ball of faith rolling. Until today, generations later, we do not question the first leader hardly at all.
Is that not insanity?
We just.. dutifully do all that is required for us to do by those first leaders. And we roll right along... Betting our very lives that our first leader was, indeed, correct... or that he was more correct than the hundreds of other first leaders.
Who is to deny us of weighing the pros and cons for ourselves? Why shouldn't we question? Our lives are strung out in a spectacular Las Vegas card table, this life we are guaranteed but ONE roll of the dice. One chance. Would we not want to check that the dealer at our table was honestly dealing us a square and fair chance in this bet... The Bet of ALL Bets?
Back To The Ball Of Faith
Anyhow, back to the ball of faith... Making the ball roll along, requires our hands and our hearts, our money and our sacrifice. Some of us step aside for a time to see if the ball has enough inertia to go forward on its own... and find that it does not. It requires our investments to keep it rolling. But we who step aside are few and far between.
We who do step aside from this massive ball we have been so busy pushing see, globally, many hundreds of balls simultaneously rolling in a multitude of different directions. Behind our ball, we could not have seen these other balls rolling along because our view was obscured or distracted by the round mass in front of us. And the task to push it taxed us to the core so there was little time to look elsewhere. Oddly, the mass we pushed seemed to be created by us in the first place. Built from countless hours of our willing indoctrinations.
History shows us that all religious ideologies vary and contradict depending on culture, geography, and historical timeline. (See Karen Armstrong's, History of God). Many posited answers claim to be a One and Only True version as to what a God wants humans to do. That is fine. It is not, however, fine to proselytize.
The moment one steps out to proselytize she takes a definitive stand that she holds all truth in her hands while everyone else is in grievous error. Because in the end of it all, her version of The Truth is merely an opinion stacked up neatly against two or three hundred or so just as rational current explanations as to what happens when we achieve room temperature.
Sit, Dogma, Sit
The attempt to place one religious world view above another as the top pinnacle of Truth, (and they all try to do this dexterously), begets the need for dogma. For how shall we determine her version of Truth is THE True one? How does one prove it? Why do so many followers not require this hard proof?
As we discussed at the begriming, the only proof religion can offer for substance is an unsettling spectre of feelings and experiences. Yet, here again this standard of proof is found lacking. Many religions have significant religious experiences and epiphanies... folklore and other oral traditions. We humans evolved to be highly intuitive and emotionally responsive. Since many millions of variant theists "feel" that they belong to The One and Only true church via their significant spiritual events happening in their lives, that should tell you God is one confused being.
What is God doing leading all of these people to different religious waters?
Do they not all claim sovereign, exclusive, unique approval from God?
Yet doom awaits them all by default. Embracing Catholicism means you reject Islam and if you reject Islam, the Koran states you are doomed to wear a skin of molten lava for eternity.
If there really was one true God approved church, wouldn't we witness it growing by leaps and bounds? How would we measure such an indicator? Islam is the fastest growing religion today but consider how, in times past, Catholicism or Buddhism was the fastest growing religion.
So again, I ask,
1. if people are having powerful emotional epiphanies
2. in various religions
3. that solidify God is the author of their faith
4. and said epiphanies regularly produce a fealty to this faith up to and including the sacrifice of ones life in defense of this faith
why is God leading people to vastly different religious waters? The fact that we have a wide variety of differing "to the death" faiths on our planet is directly attributed to horrendous slaughter of millions of humans throughout recorded history. God is supposed to be omni-max which includes the highest form of benevolence, mercy, order, and goodness.
Death by religious faith steeped in dogmatic assertions must stop. I side with Mr. Sam Harris who in 2005 wrote a book called The End of Faith:
The End of Faith provides a harrowing glimpse of mankind’s willingness to suspend reason in favor of religious beliefs, even when these beliefs inspire the worst of human atrocities. Harris argues that in the presence of weapons of mass destruction, we can no longer expect to survive our religious differences indefinitely (page 1, TEOF)
Circular Logic
To soften the faulty standard of proof found in feeling that a religion is "True", most religions employ another faulty tactic. Circular logic. Circular logic is very useful because nearly anything can be "proved" with it, including things that are obviously false. In the end, circular logic proves nothing and is completely fallacious.
Demonstration of circular logic:
1. How do you know the bible is the infallible word of God?
2. Because when I read the bible, I see that it speaks profoundly of God
3. How do you know that those words are Gods words?
4. Because ... God inspired Moses and others to write down his word
5. How do you know that Moses and others wrote it down?
6. Because... ? The bible is infallible and it speaks profoundly of God!
Or.
1. How do you know the Book of Mormon is a factual historiography of ancient Semitic people in South America?
2. Because I prayed about it and God revealed to me that it was through personal revelation (feelings).
3. Will you pray about the Quran to see if it is true?
4. No.
5. Why won't you? You do know that 2 billion Muslims know that their Quran is the infallible word of God (Allah) through personal revelation. The Muslim faith rejects your Book of Mormon as the infallible word of God, why won't you pray about the Quran?.
6. Because. I don't need to do that. The Quran is irrelevant to my purpose in life. Besides, God already told me that the Book of Mormon is true.
7. But 2 billion people who read the Quran also know that God told them that Mohamed conversed with the Angel Gabriel and told him to write his revelations down. How can God tell Muslims that the Quran is His word and also tell you that your Book of Mormon is God's word... and both books are extremely different in ideology, yet neither of you will pray about each other's books?
8. Because... I know the Book of Mormon is true because God told me it was true!
Now. For me, the most troubling aspect about religion is the wide latitude religion will take in purporting that it does know the unknowables... and religion will do so to the point that religion will indoctrinate its youth so that they might never question the faulty premises they were taught.
(get the youth rolling their own big balls of faith early in life so that they have limited perspective from the get go)
Religion hardly recognizes that there is a tenuous gap between what we know for certain and what is presumed. If there is recognition, the problem is just another mystery we are not privy to understand with our limited human minds.
Using Faith To Bridge The Gap
Religion arguably operates as if there is no gap at all.
For religion to function, the gap is bridged with the faith concept. The bridging of this cavernous gap via faith is where religion has began throughout time. Faith equates to blind trust much of the time. Faith is the key element upon which religion is made to operate, but, faith must and should be qualified on all levels for realistic life meaning.
Just what should one place their faith in anyway? I propose that one should do as much research and education as possible, balance what is found with reason, logic and sound judgement and only then forge ahead. This is the only right way to stand, morally, on principle as it pertains to truth.
Should we stand on unquestioned or unchallenged foundations? The idea makes me shudder. To ignore and mentally compartmentalize or leave dubious parts of key religious elements unchallenged is to place one in a precarious state.
I believe that everything should be placed in the crucible of skepticism. After all, religion is quite demanding. Religion demands all of you in a whole soled commitment. Some religions even bind you up under strenuous, emotionally blockading death oaths and covenants.
What is wrong with taking your life back?
What is wrong with placing your existence back into a healthy perspective?
What is wrong with achieving a better balance where your family and your health and your time is not sacrificed for hollow, unproved promises?
If, in the end, your religion has a good chance at being nothing but a hollow promise, should you not be more careful how you practice it? At least by taking a closer look at the founding figurehead?
The next time your religion asks you to donate large chunks of time and money to it's cause, put it into perspective. Take care of yourself and your family first. That is, after all, what you know is for real in the most certain epistemological terms. All else requires the bridge of faith in a philosophy full of nebulous globally contradictory principles.
Why is it that many choose not to challenge the dogmatic chapter and verse of his or her faith? It is as if a devout religious person chooses to sit in the trenches, hunkered down from the artilleries of the scientific community blasting away at his faith. This person will not give an inch. I've seen it. I have debated it. I used to be it. All the while he "knows" that the science, logic and reason currently defying what he knows is "True" are wrong.
If he does give an inch, he might give an eternity. There isn't an inch to give! Admitting even one tenet of faith is wrong is dangerous territory. Consider Galileo who was locked up for life for his assertion that the sun does not orbit the earth.
Religions with heavy exclusivity claims are either 100% right, or they are 100% in error. Yet they all cannot be 100% right! So, do they know their god is right with such errant certainty that outside sources (even inside sources!) of proof mean nothing to them? The more factual "proof" shown to them that their faith is myth based or only another man's opinion... or the more unbelievable their faith's historicity is shown to be... The more miraculous and benevolent their god becomes to them.
Oddly, instead of waking up to obvious possibilities that their god is invented, the flawed oddities only feed their errant perceptions as to how great he/she/it must be.
Just a thought.
