RepTIDE

Here is part two of my series about atheism.  If you remember from my introductory post I am exploring my ideas of atheism and how best to state my position.  I figure one good place to start is to figure out why people are religious.  Here is my take.

Basically I see two reasons people become (or are) religious:

• Childhood Indoctrination
• Life Events

I will look at each of these in turn.

While I am unsure who to credit it is often stated that “All children are born atheists.”  I tend to agree with that assumption.  A child is not born with an innate or instinctual knowledge of a god or higher power.  In fact babies, it could be said, know nothing beyond eating, sleeping, and shitting.  While many Christians will claim that all children are born with Jesus in their heart but that claim is easily disproved.  If Christians’ claims are true then what is the explanation for “other” religions?  For surely if all children are born with a knowledge of god eventually they would come to know and understand that knowledge and there would not be any reason for Islam, Hinduism, the Greek and Roman pantheons, or any other type of god.  The very fact that there are multiple religions (I am not speaking of different off shoots of the same religion like Catholicism vs. Lutheranism) should lead anyone to believe that you are not born with any knowledge of a specific god and that the god you eventually come to believe in is taught to you.

We could take this a step further and actually test this hypothesis.  We could take a just born child and sequester him/her from any knowledge of any type of religion or religious information and see if at some point in that child’s life they “found god”.  Surely if all children are born with Jesus in their heart they would eventually “just know” right?  Of course we have no need of performing such a horrible experiment on a child to prove my point.  It is simple enough to look to the many recently converted tribes in deepest, darkest Africa, or heretofore unknown peoples in the deeps of the Amazon rain forest.  Until they were introduced to Christianity none of them (and absolutely none at that) had any idea of the Christian, Muslim, Hindu, Greek, etc. god(s).  It more than proves the point that without someone indoctrinating a child (or a whole people) there would be no knowledge of the Christian god.  (NOTE: I will, generally speaking, be talking about the Christian god since I am from the US and that is most prevalent here, though I believe my ideas apply unilaterally to all religions that believe in a super natural being.)

So the first reason people are religious is childhood indoctrination.  Children are taught to believe what their parent teach them.  If you teach your child to believe in the Christian god then it will.  If you don’t then it won’t.  I am not going to say “never” will as we will explore when talking about my second point from above, but as a general rule people are Christian because, since before they were even old enough and mentally developed enough to know what it is they are being taught to believe, that is what their parents have told them to believe.  I find it odd that in a time where roughly half of all of America was up in arms that President Obama had the audacity to “indoctrinate” our country’s youth by telling them to stay in school that no one seems to have a problem with the daily cases of indoctrination at the hands of religious parents.

The second reason for religiosity is “life events”.  I use that term rather broadly.  We hear stories all the time about someone “finding Jesus” or being “born again”.  More often than not these things take places after some sort of “happening” in a person’s life.  They mange to walk away from a car wreck they never should have.  They win the lottery.  They witness an immense act of kindness.  They find their soul mate (who happens to be religious).  The feel lonely, unloved, or think themselves an outcast.  The reason these types of people turn to religion is because, at some psychological level, it satisfies something.

There is a common expression called the “god of the gaps”.  The idea is that throughout history religious ideals and explanations have been applied to things that were unexplainable.  Prior to Sir Isaac Newton people couldn’t explain why an apple fell from a tree.  To them the obvious explanation was that god made the apple fall to the ground.  There was simply no other explanation.  Once Newton discovered the theory of gravity “god” was no longer needed to explain that phenomenon.  Throughout history you will find similar instances, both large and small, where something unknown and inexplicable was attributed to a higher power.  Many cases were explained through science eventually and no longer attributed to god.

Humans feel the need to be able to explain everything their senses tell them is happening and because of this need it is this same god of the gaps principal that drives some adults to (or back to) religion.  For someone who can’t explain how they survived the crash (many times that is not explainable, not because it is impossible, but because we don’t have ALL of the information and variables to precisely recreate the scenario) it is easy to attribute the unknowable to god.  For someone who beat impossible odds to win a large sum of money in the lottery it may seem that only an act of god could have shined such fortune on them.  They are using god to fill in the gaps.

For others is is simply the need for companionship and acceptance.  Someone who doesn’t feel a part of a group will find welcoming arms in the religious.  This need for and extension of companionship is not a bad thing.  It is all of the other dogmatic baggage that comes a long with it that I find harmful. People want to be accepted, loved, and cherished and religion provides a “path of least resistance” for someone looking for someone to “fit in”.

Children (and adults) believe in all sorts of imaginary creatures.  Leprechauns, unicorns, monsters in the closet, the troll under the bridge, the tooth fairy, Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, the man in the moon, etc.  We allow all of those beliefs to get kicked to the curb eventually once they are old enough to realize the absurdity of such beliefs.  For some reason though the equally bankrupt idea of a personal god, some super natural being, is not just allowed to continue to exist but is reinforced, fostered, proclaimed (against all reason) as truth.

Most religious will point out at this time the idea of “faith”.  And I will get to that in a later post but for now I think I have fairly squarely offered up my ideas on the reasons for religiousness in people.  Feel free to discuss the merits and demerits of my ideas.  This is a journey after all and a pretty lonely one at that.

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