The Perniciousness

I'd like to take a moment to talk about a subject that has been on my mind for most of my life.

I was raised Presbyterian, with a relaxed view of God and religion, a God that was a kindly father figure, someone I could turn to in times of crisis and need. God was not a tyrant to be feared, but someone who cared about me, personally.

He was just strangely quiet. Well, he did speak from time to time, offering advice when I focused on a problem.

At ten, the first chink in my faith was forged when I could control the "gifts of the spirit" my church was practicing.

At eleven, I had a friend who was a Satanist. I told her I would pray for her, and she just laughed.

At seventeen, I met a woman who did not worship my god. I didn't quite get it, but it opened a door in my mind.

At twenty, I found myself on the streets of Seattle. I went to a church, and felt like I was in the wrong place. It was the last time I went to church at my own choice. I began to look for something else.

At thirty, after spending a few years as a pagan priest, I began to seriously examine my beliefs, ejecting all that I could not back up with evidence or logic. So, I found I had become an atheist.

I spent several years very angry at religion and the religious. But, after a year as an admin on a "Atheist Versus Theist" debate group, I decided to really think about the nature of religion. Starting from the position that religion was from Man, I began to ask the big question, "Why?

Why religion? Where did it come from? Sure, there was the explanation that it was true, but what if it wasn't?

The easiest thing was to try and explain the origin of the idea of God. One thing I learned in examining human constructs is to look at it as if I was observing a single human, and in humans, our behavior is governed by a variety of things.

Part of the evolution of humans is an ancient drive within our branch of life that causes the young to trust their parents. Tell a three year old that you have their nose and they will believe you, even though the evidence directly contradicts it. We look upon out parents when we are between three and seven as if they are divine, supermen and women who can do no wrong. It takes quite a bit for this drive to be defeated. Even those who have been sexually abused by a parent have to fight against their natures to testify.

As adults, we begin to see that our parents are fallible, they are human. But that deep desire remains, the desire to have an infallible super-parent looking out for us. Combine that with the evolved trait of finding patterns and the human drive to anthropomorphize the world in order to understand it, and you have the basis of religion.

Add to that the big black wall we are all hurtling towards called death, and our fear drives us to try and build something in that dark unknown. We don't know what is beyond death, and probably cannot know, and therefore it is the ultimate fear. What better way to deal with this than to attach it to our created super-parent? They can save us from the darkness, so that is where we put them.

We hate being out of control, and the world is inherently out of control. The super-parent can handle that, too.

Other people are mean. Our super-parent can punish them for us. Oh, but if we are bad, the super-parent will punish us, too. Someone, thousands of years ago, realized that, and so figured there must be an escape clause. Enter the concept of forgiveness., of sacrifice for atonement, of the need for someone to save us from our super-parent. Well, why can't our super-parent save us from our super-parent?

So, we are left with a clear chain of reasoning and human nature pointing at the human source of religion. Every time religion has been challenged by internal issues, it has evolved into something that seems to fit better. However, like any misconception, the longer it is used, the more footwork is required to keep it from falling over. The more patches, the more solutions to the issue appear. There are close to 40,000 versions of Christianity, for example. Islam claims to only have a few, but I would hazard a guess that even within the various branches are wide divisions between various philosophies.

In the end, what makes more sense? That we fill in the gaps of what we don't understand or that we fear with the spackle we call God, or that all of the inconsistencies within the various religions are just misconceptions?