| The God Debacle
(January 2005) By Jim Correale As far as we can tell, human beings have always recited, traded, and held dear myths, legends, folk tales, creation stories, and heroic epics. For thousands of years hominids gathered in caves and around campfires telling, acting out, and embellishing these traditional accounts to strengthen family and community bonds and to assign some type of order to the frightening world that existed just beyond the cave entrance or just outside the fire�s warm, glowing circle. It may well be that such behaviors�communication, a shared narrative, an ability to process events and ideas into a common and uniting thread�are the first signs of what we might call �culture� among our evolutionary predecessors. This practice of presenting and reaffirming a people�s cultural heritage in the form of stories, beliefs based on those stories, and rules based on those beliefs continued throughout history in all societies. Today, some of those stories are categorized as legends or myths; some are even dismissed as silly superstitions. Others, however, are celebrated, even venerated, as the unquestionable truth. Despite the vast array of knowledge gathered via the scientific method, codified, analyzed, and applied�all of which has been able to explain the natural world to some degree of precision, as well as the psychological world of the human mind and how it operates�there are billions of people on this planet who still refuse to apply rational thought to life and the universe and who insist on propagating the idea that some type of divine being or force created everything and spends his, her or its days tinkering with what happens here, penalizing or rewarding the behavior of individuals, battling an equally active evil force, and waiting until such time as seen fit to flood, freeze, burn, or otherwise end the existence of earth, with all of those who have pledged their allegiance to him, her or it assumed into some paradisical state. We don�t live in caves any more. In fact, we�ve been to the moon, and we�ve landed a probe on Saturn. We have a firm understanding of such profound topics as evolution, gravity, germ theory, and how the universe began. We have emerged from the era where most of the world�s people lived in lands governed by a monarch who claimed divine power and who passed this power to his offspring. Why, oh why, do most people still believe that there is a god? I ask this question with such urgency not only because I am deeply perplexed that time has not wrought more progress on a question where I consider the choices and conclusions obvious�as I might when asking, for example, �How can anybody listen to mainstream country music?��but because the belief in god has caused, and is causing today, much pain, devastation, and death in the world, and I want it to cease immediately. There are things that I believe in�the optimism of a new day, the beauty of freshly fallen snow, the innocence of children, the fallibility of human beings, the power of forgiveness, the fleeting nature of life, the love of family and friends, the joys of a thoughtful discussion, the healing effects of time, the serenity of a hot cup of tea and a good book�but often those who believe in god use that belief to trump all others and refuse to actually think about the ingredients of that belief and the recipe that it has left us. Blinded by their fealty to these unproven and unprovable beliefs, and armed with a desire to dictate the behavior of others according to rules that are, quite often, interpreted differently by various �experts� and often contradict the word, and certainly the spirit, of the ancient texts they purport to hold sacred, those who subscribe to the adoration of a divinity are guilty of working as a negative force in the world, and I take this opportunity to ask them to stop, examine closely their beliefs in the context of reality, invite honest discussion and debate on the fundamental aspects of those beliefs, investigate seriously the origins and mutations of those beliefs through history, listen to and weigh earnestly the thoughts of others, and then�though it may be against everything that they have been taught�to reach their own conclusions. Until that time, I beseech believers to stop tampering with public policy in any way. This debacle�the perpetuation of myths in the modern world under the guise of �religion��may at times comfort some, but in the grand scheme of history and of human beings, the belief in god has done more damage to our world than almost any other thought. |