March 30, 2002
As I'm falling asleep, my mind tends to wander. Tonight, it decided to tackle religion. I didn't want to lose it, so here I am at 1:00 in the morning, spending more time on this than I did most of my college essay assignments.
I am, as most of my friends and family know, an atheist. I believe that there is no supernatural being (or collection of supernatural beings) responsible for the creation of the world, the universe, or humanity. I do not believe that my destiny has been predetermined by some omniscient being. We are what we are, and no more.
Why? Because I look at religion (mostly Christianity, because it's what I'm most familiar with) and I see the same thing, over and over. We have the One True Answer, people say, and our god(s) tell us to live in peace with everyone ("love they neighbor"). But we must not allow these people to contaminate us, so they must be destroyed in the name of our loving deity(s).
Christianity had the Crusades, during which countless Jews and Muslims were killed, tortured, robbed, raped, imprisoned and mocked because their name for God was different. It was the exact same God, but some of the rules were different. Jews in Israel and their predominatly Muslim neighbors have been fighting in one form or another since the creation of the Israeli state after World War II (and to be quite honest, since long before even that). Both claim the right to an undivided Jerusalem, and both kill civilians. At least Israel makes an effort to hit military targets before they bulldoze cities. (And as an aside, if it matters, I do think that Israel is the aggrieved party in that conflict.)
Muslims kill Hindus, Hindus kill Muslims, Muslims bomb Jews, Jews bomb Muslims, Christians killed Jews and Muslims, entire American Indian civilizations were destroyed by conquistadors in the name of saving their pagan souls. And just about everyone's wiping out the gays with God's implied blessing.
But God loves all of you, right? Let's jump to the beginning of all this mess and see if we can find out what went wrong.
Thousands upon thousands of years ago, probably at the dawn of civilization circa 10,000 BCE, humans looked at the world around them and wondered: Where does all this come from? Why am I here? What happens when I (or someone I love) dies? And they couldn't answer those questions.
They didn't have the cosmological and quantum theories to explain the Big Bang; they knew nothing of stellar mechanics and gravity to explain how the shockwaves from supernovae compress matter to form protostars; they didn't know any biochemistry to explain how simple chemicals in water could form the amino acids leading to cells; and they didn't have the knowledge of genetics to explain how after billions of years, humanity came to evolve.
All they had was the world they saw and, if they were lucky, 60 years of memory from the oldest villagers. It wasn't enough; how could it be? The whole world was there, right? And something had to put it there, didn't it? A very powerful someone had to put it there, right?
And this is how paganism and polytheism were created. The gods in the trees and the animals and the sky came together to make the world. Later, in about 4000 BCE, another person put forth the idea that there weren't many gods, but one God. Creator and destroyer, savior and punisher, all rolled into one.
And Man created God in his own image.
Through the millennia, these groups of people came into conflict with one another. Over land, resources, interfamilial disputes. But how do you rally the troops? Convince them that they are on the side of Right, and that the enemies must be destroyed? Tell them God said to do it.
So for thousands of years, probably since the dawn of civilization itself, Man has used God to justify its fears, its prejudices and its hates. God endorses the conquests and turns a blind eye to the destruction wrought upon the enemy. Love your neighbor, yes, but these people aren't your neighbors -- they're Evil. They don't believe in your God. So it's OK to hate and kill.
As time wore on, these religions spawned new religions of their own. An obscure cult within Judaism believed that God had sent a part of himself to redeem humanity. Years later, they became Christians. A nomad in the Arabian peninsula saw the teachings of the Torah and the Bible and expanded on the works of these two "great prophets," making himself the third -- Islam was born. So we had three religions, sharing the same God, sharing the same basic tenets of right and wrong; three dynamic, open teachings about the way to live.
And then they stopped being dynamic. They became locked into their own dogma. Christianity, which had been open enough at its outset to move the birth of Christ to a convenient pagan festival, has two orthodox branches (Roman Catholicism and the Eastern Orthodoxy) frozen in the Dark Age. It took 400 years for a pope to publically recognize that Galileo Galilee was right; that the Earth isn't the center of the universe. Islam, which was responsible for the innovations that led Europe out of the Dark Age, has itself become frozen, even reverting to older teachings in some fundamentalist circles. The Jewish kosher, which simply prevented people from eating uncooked pork and dieing, has become a law that is upheld for no reason other than "it's always been this way."
And still we kill each other over God.
We know now, with reasonable reliability, how the universe began to within one one-hundredth of a second of the Big Bang. We know how supergiant stars went supernova, creating shockwaves light-years across, to compress stellar gas and dust into protostars and planetary disks. We know how the fusion reaction in the sun warmed the surface of a small, 7000-mile-diameter ball of iron and rock. We know how liquid water, combined with the outpourings from the planet's core reacted with radiation and lightning to form small organic molecules that became the precursors of Life. We know, courtesy of Darwin, how random selection by the simple means of what lives and dies determines which genes are passed to subsequent generations. We know how we evolved, from a single cell of algae into the creatures we are today.
Wonderful creatures: We have language, emotions, knowledge, minds. Horrible creatures: We have hate, war, murder of our own kind -- a claim only very few species on this planet could make. We know how we got here.
Yet still we cling to God, like a child gripping its mother's hand as it crosses the street. Is it so horrible that we are the result of a series of coincidences? That we have control over our own lives, without the interference of an all-powerful ghost? That when we die, the only way we continue to exist is in others' memories? After all, we already tell children at a funeral, This person will never truly die as long as we remember him. Isn't this just a logical extension of that idea?
What kind of arrogance must we have, to presume that this gigantic universe, infinite and finite at the same time, billions upon billions of light-years across, older than we can imagine, was put here simply for our amusement? Go outside tonight, and look at the stars. Don't just say, "ooh, pretty," look at them. Think of it: Light left those stars years ago, centuries ago, millenia ago. Some are so far away that our solar system didn't even exist when the light left them, and there is no way they are still there today. It boggles the mind.
We aren't that important. If some asteroid like the one that wiped out the dinosaurs came along and destroyed us tomorrow, the universe would continue, uncaring. The eons would tick away, as they always have, unheedful of our brief entry into the scene and our even more brief introspection about Why.
God didn't make us, we made him. And now, like a child growing up, it is time for us as a species to put him away on a shelf like a toy we've outgrown. For now, people who claim to be doing his work only hold us back from our true goal -- learning how the universe works. As long as people can put a spin on creation "science" and force it down children's throats, as long as people who deny evolution can wave their arms and ignore the evidence placed before them, we can never grow up. As long as we have no reason to explore the depths of knowledge that await us -- by just saying God did it all -- we will stagnate. And stagnating is as bad as death itself, for in just a few generations, we would forget how to learn.
And that is a crime I am unwilling to perpetrate against future generations.
