Owen Massey > No gods here
Owen Massey > No gods here
In the beginning Eru, the One, who in the Elvish tongue is named Ilúvatar, made the Ainur of his thought; and they made a great Music before him. In this Music the World was begun; for Ilúvatar made visible the song of the Ainur, and they beheld it as a light in the darkness.
It's easy to scoff and sneer at religions, and well worth doing. The word 'religions' itself is something of a giveaway, but I'm getting ahead of myself. My chosen objections are cumulative and threefold:
Thanks to the wonderful epistemological method we call science, much that could previously be explained only by positing a god or gods can be explained in worldly terms. A god may exist, but Occam's razor advises us to discard it as a superfluous hypothesis: (universe + god) is harder to explain than the universe alone. Not cast-iron, but I feel it moves the burden of proof on to the believer.
(A frequent bleat is that there are things science cannot explain, principally why there should be Something rather than Nothing. Perhaps, but religion cannot explain them either. To blame the universe on the whim of gods is an assertion, not an explanation.)
Isn't agnosticism the only truly defensible stance, given the impossibility of proving the non-existence of gods? Certainly. The same applies to solipsism. However, for the sake of convenience, I will continue to pretend that you exist.
It is conceivable that a supernatural being exists 'outside' the perceptible world and could neither be detected nor inferred, not even in principle. See for instance http://www.simulation-argument.com/, a sophisticated version of The Truman Show.
So... well, so what? By hypothesis, my actions are irrelevant to this being (else its presence could be inferred). I may as well carry on ignoring it, in a no-loss reversal of Pascal's wager. Remember, you can't get from an 'is' to an 'ought'.
Discrimination, of course, being the art of making good judgments. The claims of religions should be subject to the same competition as political or scientific arguments. I don't get offended if someone labels my socialist nihilist libertarianism an incoherent philosophy: I argue. Given the mutual incompatibility of most religions, the most offensive stance to take is to believe in a different one.
The contradictions of religions are not just a philosophical but a practical problem. Suppose, for the sake of argument, that I am looking to adopt a religion. How do I judge which to follow? The Universal Life Church, whose only doctrine is to have no doctrine, acts as a thought experiment in what makes a valid religion. The common factor in all religions, like art and other human creations, is contingency. Had Leibniz not lived, Newton would still have discovered the calculus. Had Joseph Smith or Mary Baker Eddy not lived, there would merely be one fewer sect.
Consider the relative validity of the major world religions, monotheist or pantheist; all their squabbling sects; religions invented just in the last millennium (hello, Mormons!); the religions of fictional worlds (the epigraph is from Tolkien's The Silmarillion); and religions made up as a joke (Discordianism). If I invent a religion and get some friends to collude as my followers, how will you prove it doesn't qualify? Then there are the many, unlamented dead religions of the ancient world described in H.L. Mencken's trenchant Where is the graveyard of dead gods? or Tim Kreider's cartoon Science vs. Norse mythology. May Zeus strike me down for this blasphemy.
Perhaps you should ensure fair and equal treatment for each of these beliefs. I look forward to seeing the Church of Satan in a coalition with the followers of Osiris on the next Royal Commission. On the other hand, if you believe there is a distinction to be made: when you have determined why you reject all gods but yours, you will understand how small a step it is to reject yours as well.
Wave hands... myths to live by... metaphorical... wave hands... different kinds of truth... psychological wossname... That's not a definition of 'truth' I would care to defend about my arithmetic homework. I hope you'll feel foolish demanding the sacrifice of your son's foreskin for the sake of a metaphor. And while the principal worth of self-help manuals may be as metaphors, they seldom dare describe the creation of the universe, its eschatology, and why you must wear orange in the intervening period.
So does gin.
One should hate the sin, but love the sinner. Naturally, the enormity of the evils committed in the name of religion are not a reason to deny religion's truth, although they should give some pause for thought as to its desirability. (The Hobbesian war of all against all suggested by sociobiologists may well be undesirable, but that is irrelevant to its truth.) Unfortunately, by the same argument no good deed committed by a religionist can be chalked up to the credit of their religion. The same good is done in a secular context by secular organisations. How mundane.
None (surprisingly). Never believed, never felt the need to, never felt the lack of something 'spiritual'. Never been buggered by a priest. Just find it a shame that decent people waste their Sundays, miss out on casual sex or can't enjoy the taste of bacon.