religion.
this is a topic that i used to discuss all the time back at college, but now rarely give much though. that being said, i thought it would be fun to jot down my thoughts about it.
first of all, i'm not religious, assuming that being religious means that you believe in some kind of omnipresent super-being. i definitely believe that there are other beings in the universe that are more advanced than we are, but i doubt that they care/know anything about us or are as powerful as gods are typically made out to be.
second, i think it would be great to be religious, since it would imply that your essence would survive beyond our physical lifespan and you'd get to do more stuff. but for me to become religious, i'd need a strong first-hand experience that would convince me that we are more than the latest-version-animal in a line of evolution that began billions of years ago.
i've never had a supernatural experience, although i've always been fascinated by the subject. as a child, i would often hope for such a thing. as i got older, i'd hear lots of anecdotal second- or third- hand stories about strange and unexplained events, but the more i read articles by people like james randi of the skeptical enquirer, the easier it was to explain the events in non-supernatural terms. and don't ever underestimate the cunningness of the most innocent-sounding people! for example, there was the famous story of an english schoolgirl who claimed she had taken a picture of some fairies in her garden. so-called experts examined the pictures and said they could not have been faked. the girl stood by her story until she was an old woman, at which point she confessed that the whole thing was made up and that the fairies were simply cut out of cardboard and stuck to rocks in her garden. who would have thought such a sweet young girl would mislead folks intentionally? i think it's great that she did that; it must have been a good laugh to hoodwink all those experts so easily.
another argument for religion is that since so many people believe it, it must be true, at least at its core. well, there's plenty of counter evidence to this line of thinking. most of the world's population used to think that thunderstorms were the wrath of god, or that the world was flat, or that the world was 5,000 years old, but that didn't make them true. however, what is certainly true is that 99.99999 percent of people don't want to die, and that religion provides a comforting possibility that death of our body doesn't mean death of our mind. so the deepest motivation for some sort of religious belief is very strong.
another proof point that it's not hard for hundreds of millions of people to be off-target is the existence of several religions with very specific and incompatible beliefs. christianity doesn't say "hey, what we're really all about is loving each other and worshipping an abstract god", they say "the bible is the word of god and it's all correct". ditto for many other religions. since the texts of these various books are in conflict, they can't all be right. so someone, or everyone, is wrong about some pretty important stuff.
if i compare my lifestyle, my happiness, my goals and my actions against those who are religious, they seem to be very similar. caring for others and being a generally nice human being doesn't have anything to do with religion - it's just common sense. not being religious doesn't detract whatsoever from my feeling of awe when i look into a clear night sky, swim with the fish in my scuba gear, or ponder life when standing in a cathedral. and i don't think it will lessen my tremendous appreciation for what it means to be alive when i'm in my dying hours.
it is interesting to wonder what the religious landscape will look like in the next 1000 years. but that's a topic for a future weblog.
1:02:39 AM 
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