11g Religion! What to do with it?

Physician's Notebooks 11 - http://physiciansnotebook.blogspot.com - See Homepage

11-g  Religion and the Problem of Faith  - Update 24 Septr 2021.

Thousands of years ago, belief in religion encountered few of the doubts of the modern person. Faith then was reasonable in absence of data. But, today, in face of data, faith may be a form of denial. And today, given the level of education, faith may involve denial of the truths that most people see in the reality of daily life. Worst case is denial of Darwinian evolution by millions of persons in U.S.A.  Faith in 2021 is mostly unreasonable. (But that is the nature of Faith!) And to teach children to rely on faith over data amounts to sustaining a lie, because most adults are aware of the contradictions between facts and truth with religious belief, yet they may persist in exposing children to religious teaching - in faith-based schools and houses of worship - where beliefs are put into minds that are weak to what religion teaches. Since belief of each religion conflicts with every other one, the particular believer in a religion must face the logic that the other religions are based on false beliefs. For the believer, that leaves a single religion and proclaims the religion the person is born into as the True Faith. Things are simpler for the atheist, who is not propagandized in favor of any religion. The atheist and the believer hold common ground in thinking that most religions except the one they believe in are false. So for an atheist, all that remains is to disbelieve the leading claimant-for-truth religion. Take Christianity? It depends on Old and New Testament with the chronologies disproved by geology and anthropology and historical record. None of the non historic personages—-Jesus, et al.—-are mentioned in historical records.  Christianity is a synthetic religion with elements from Judaism, Mithraism (type of sun worship popular in ancient Rome), and ancient Egyptian and Roman cults. The concept of heaven after death could be just wishful thinking. No one, of trillions of humans, who lived and died has ever sent a message back.  

Within Christianity are many sects. At its worst as with the fundamentalism of southeast U.S.A., and Seventh Day Adventists, Jehovah's Witnesses, Christian Scientists, and Mormons, it causes strange behavior, and at its least harmful, as in Unitarianism, it is irrelevant to one's life.  But religion remains a powerful force because of its huge membership and because its believers have been programmed from childhood and such early programming is very hard to rid from a mind.  

The really bad thing about religion is that it fosters a state of mind that has a set of regressive, dangerous beliefs —-like disbelief in human-caused climate change by some religious believers because it is based on a science-proven world-view that extends back millions of years and therefore clashes with some religious worldviews that involve god-creation. This extends into many areas of our lives and in worst cases religion is used to justify murder, torture and other bad practices such as genital mutilation. For that reason alone, the world will be a better place when religion has softened its rigid views. So the best hope is one benign religion from which all clashes with science have been removed. 

   We must always work in a quiet, helpful way to prevent excessive religious belief especially in child-raising. One good alternative is to promote harmless religious practices, like ancestor remembrance, such as one sees in Japan.

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