Religion And Human Nature

1.
Whenever someone has asked me what my religious views are I tell them that my religious belief lies somewhere in between Agnostic and Atheist. The Agnostic in me wants to believe that this world was created by an all-powerful, loving deity that wants nothing but the best afterlife for the followers who spread the word and do great things. The Atheist in me knows that the afterlife is probably a lie and that when you die you are simply dead. There is no soul that travels upward; rather, our bodies become the last part of a natural cycle in which the ground is enriched and provides for that underground ecology. The Agnostic in me has seen religious art, read religious texts, and heard speeches and interviews by people inspired by a religious upbringing and thinks, “This can’t be all a ruse, right?” The Atheist in me cannot escape the gravity of its counterpoint—”How much of this is nothing more than propaganda?”

I believe that it is human nature to believe that Heaven exists. It also seems reasonable to advance the idea that people’s belief in Heaven and God is a direct projection of how they see life in general. If you believe that Heaven is a place where you can visit deceased loved ones and family members, it is probably fair to assume that you hold family to be very important. If you believe that Heaven is not so much a place but rather an additional mission, it is probably fair to assume that you are more pious than most and that you hold the ideas of your church to be very important. Conversely, if you lived a life wherein one or both of your parents have died while you were young, or were sexually abused, or witnessed one or more loved ones succumb to a terminal illness, your view of what Heaven is would most likely be altered because your life will have taken on a darker or more complex trajectory than most people. In the latter example, you may see all of that pain and death as a tipping point to following a religion or as a tipping point to believing that no God could exist in a world in which so much agony is allowed. Either way, you would be much more inclined to follow an extreme trajectory, regardless of what path is chosen.

I have lived a life in which both of my parents are alive and I have not watched a loved one die a long, drawn out death. I was never abused when I was a child and I have never been addicted to drugs. I have never committed nor witnessed a violent crime. I have never lived in poverty and have never gone a day without eating. One could say I have lived an overall good life so far. The question is: did God play a hand in the unfolding of my life? Will my life ultimately be rendered useless if I question the validity of God until I die? I do not know but half of my mind says no and it does so because of cavemen, rain and sandboxes.

2.
Imagine you are a caveman (or a cavewoman) and you live somewhere in the world that would be comparable to where New Mexico is, or some place in the world wherein it is pretty dry yet you would still have access to animals to feed on and there would be some vegetation to speak of. You and your parents can only communicate in the simplest of terms and you are pretty much driven by the strongest biological force known to man: searching for food. One day, you are alone and are hunting for food and you eventually kill some form of animal.

On the way back home, it starts to rain. Then it starts to pour. Then lightning strikes occur with an intensity and quickness unlike anything you have ever seen in your short life, followed by a series of incredible, thunderous booms that are wholly unknown to you. How could you possibly explain this series of events? Rain. Downpour. Lightning. Thunder.

Today, we are equipped with the knowledge that severe weather (especially storms that bring about heavy rains, lightning and thunder) is caused more times than not because of high pressure systems colliding with low pressure systems and jet streams and barometric pressure and other factors such as proximity to large lakes and oceans. We know this today because we have grown up watching weather reports on the television and read weather reports in the newspaper. While the meteorologists certainly have their work cut out for them (hurricane, tornado, and earthquake prediction is still in a nascent stage), most of us can say with confidence that we can believe at least seventy percent of a daily forecast. Between the Doppler radar and satellite imagery, we as humans have done a pretty good job at conquering weather prediction and weather-related data mining. But what about one hundred years ago? One thousand years ago? Ten thousand years ago?

Every time something brand new affects us or we as humans are introduced to something brand new, countless theories abound about this new thing’s existence and most of these theories revolve around God. The history of mankind is riddled with events, diseases, and inventions that are initially believed to be intertwined with God: the Black Plague (a punishment by God), the concept of space and gravity (used to be referred to as ether, which also means heavens), countless wars (fighting in God’s name), the practice of medicine (“playing God”) as well as most art produced in the last two millenia which usually involved a subject matter of heavy religious tones.

I am not suggesting that this line of thinking was short-sighted or stupid; it actually made perfect sense at a time when no one knew any better. In fact, people are doing the exact same thing with science right now and will continue to do so for many, many generations. Believing that gravity is the dynamic work of an unseen deity and believing that science will one day answer every question about our bodies and be able to conquer all diseases falls into the same category: Things That Will Ultimately Be Dispelled By Future Generations. But it makes sense at the time because how can you know something that you do not know anything about?

Further to this point is the idea of children playing in a sandbox. If you were to put two children of the same age—say three years old—into a large sandbox you might see that the children will play with the sand by themselves and not find any reason to venture over near one another. Then again, the two children may scrap what they are doing and befriend each other. However, if you keep adding more children of varying ages to the sandbox you will almost always see that sides will be taken and lines will be drawn. Rumors will be hatched, sand will be thrown, and the younger kids will most certainly be made to cry. This is not to suggest that all kids are inherently evil but older kids picking on littler kids seems to be ingrained in all of us. Some kids do it out of sheer boredom while others do it out of delight.

The point is this: When adults, like kids, find themselves within large groups of people in which they do not personally know anyone they are more prone to believe in rumor, hyperbole, or even blind loyalty. To be sure, I do not believe that crowds are always a negative—for every one Salem witch trial there are billions of instances wherein people live peacefully—but it is important to be cognizant of the fact that people will rarely spring into passionate protest or name-calling while in isolation.

If you were to picture yourself living during the Dark Ages or during the time of Jesus, you would learn pretty quickly that it was in your best interest to believe in religion because to engage in an argument against it would probably not be to your benefit. People somehow learned that the easiest way to govern and control others was by word-of-mouth religious dogma. Again, I am not saying that all crowds are gullible or that some Golden Compass-like evil spread religion in hopes of destroying Man but it is reasonable to assume that a group of people who desired control were able to get it by shouting doom and convincing others that bad behavior equaled a visit to Purgatory. Just as it is reasonable to assume that a twelve year-old, under no parental supervision, will be mean to a seven year-old.

Getting back to the example of the caveman who first witnesses lightning and thunder. For someone who has no empirical knowledge of what lightning and thunder is or what causes it, what would you deduce to be the cause? The only thing you know for certain is that originated from the sky. Did it happen because of the sky? Is there something beyond the sky from which it came? Is someone or something in the sky doing it? Did it happen as a punishment that was handed down because you had killed an animal? How can you, as a caveman, reconcile what you just saw?

3.
We may not know anything definitive yet about what drives us as humans to constantly search for life’s meaning but it sure seems to, for the most part, stem from a fear of death. If you were to break down all of our actions to its most basic foundation it would most likely resemble something like: “If I do this, will it harm me?” This seems ludicrous to think about now because every continent besides Antarctica is controlled by states and countries who (mostly) provide insurance, police protection, and a high quality of life but, again, think of yourself as a caveman or an eighth century peasant—someone who has no capacity to write and is probably illiterate.

Only until very recently have humans been able to even crack the surface of what really takes up residence beyond our atmosphere. We know that there are a lot of other universes in existence and we know a lot about the other planets and such but we are certainly unsure about a lot of it, no matter how many ultra-expensive satellites we shoot into orbit. To look at it another way, though, would be to summarize it like this: Our current knowledge of everything beyond the skies only represents 1% (maybe even less) of what all of genus Homo knows. What this means is that 99% of genus Homo knew absolutely nothing of what happened beyond the clouds and this lack of knowledge (not because early humans were inherently stupid but because survival trumped any curiosity of things like what causes rain or the concept of light years) provided fertile ground for such dogma that God created everything and that beyond the clouds was Heaven. Again, I am not saying that believing in this made the human race stupid; I am merely trying to point out building blocks that our collective minds adhered to. It would be no different than if people one hundred generations into the future discovered that drilling into the center of the Earth was feasible and, in hindsight, were shocked that our current generation had not figured it out yet. Drilling into the center of the Earth is of no importance to us right now compared to advances in space, medicine, flight, and oil reduction.

But I digress. What I am ultimately trying to say is that without any empirical knowledge of anything beyond how to hunt, cook, and build simple things, the common people who lived centuries ago were basically at the will of the upper class, the politicians, and the clergy (the three predominant groups who were literate and could write). Therefore, it was quite easy to be wrangled into believing certain religious dogmas when all three classes wanted the same message spread.

Everything has two sides and religion and human nature are not immune from dual scrutiny.

4.
If you live your life observing its results with scales that use as its measurements grief, agony, destruction, and pity you will never have a healthy worldview. There will always be parts of the world that are invaded by hunger, armies, and slavery and to choose to magnify those actions of the invaders (or the grief of the victims) into something that tries to summarize all of human nature’s struggles is grossly unfair. For one thing, it is a form of propaganda that is no different from when absolute power is held over a nation—you are told what is right in the latter whereas in the former you are trying to convince others that they are wrong for not caring like you do. Additionally, to oversimplify life as a constant battle between good and evil, Little Guy and Big Business, or savages and intellects is to be blind to the beauty that life offers us on a daily basis. To be sure, there are legitimately heinous things that occur on a daily basis—women are raped, men murder other men, groups of men consciously decide to kill others without remorse, wars are waged, people are killed because of political or religious beliefs—but there are always more counteractions to these. Women give birth to children, men and women fall in love and take care of each other, small groups of men and women vow to protect other larger groups of men and women, killers are brought to justice, a lab makes progress towards creating vaccines, the global proliferation of democratic governments, and people being rescued from death are just some of the myriad examples of why life is beautiful and worth living.

For the last few centuries, intellectuals, writers, and philosophers have made a comfortable living extolling the idea that life is random and hopeless. Recently, they have taken the extra step in promoting the idea that God and religion are utterly useless and even try to go to painstaking steps to disprove things that are written in the Bible, which leads me to my last point about human nature: Sometimes, we simply like to go against the majority if for no other reason than we simply can.

5.
Life is about balance and in a Utopian society religion would be about balance as well, using a scale that measures in ethics, morality, tolerance, and philosophy that were allowed to be freely dispersed in an unrestricted manner instead of hubris, arrogance, dogma, and division. Does religion have a checkered past with wars and controlling people? You bet your ass it does. Do some organized religions swindle their followers into believing in things that any ounce of common logic could disprove in ten minutes? Sure.

But that is not really the point.

The point is that it is in our human nature to believe in and propagate these thoughts, to believe in the Divine, to believe in miracles… and it almost always comes back to children. I believe, at some point, it became in genus Homo‘s best interest of adaptation to teach our children that Heaven exists; that if you follow the Word of God you will be rewarded and watched over; that if you make sacrifice a virtue it will harden your character; that you should put others before you. The rational egotist in me sees this as an impractical option (mostly, that sacrifice should be held as a high virtue—obviously, I have no problem with sharing or teaching character and morals) but, like it or not, societies progress when children have something to look forward to and can live a full life.

One of the quandaries of being an adult that has children is that you know how messed up the world is, yet you cannot let your child be afraid of the world. By the time your kid has arrived in this world you have already met plenty of loathesome people; read about or seen footage regarding rape and murder; had to deal with the death of someone close; started to think about your own parents’ inevitable death; been screwed over by people you thought you could trust. How do you reconcile the human nature that resides in all of us to imbibe in the pessimism of the world when you have a child? A lot of it, not surprisingly, revolves around religious metaphors and allegories. The ideas behind an angel on one shoulder and the Devil on the other and eating the forbidden fruit are much easier to explain to a child when it comes time to talk about doing the right thing than, say, trying to summarize the writings of Immanuel Kant or trying to put a real-world spin on things. (“Now do you see why it’s wrong to steal toys from the other kids? Not only is it impulsive and vain—I mean, really, are you that starved for attention?—but it’s wrong too. If you keep this up you’ll be a regular drug dealer or something. Did you know that 73% of kids who start stealing by the age of 16 spend at least six months in a juvenile detention facility? Do you want to be one of those 73% kids?” At which point your four year-old vacantly nods no.)

And it is because children are at the heart of religion (remember, one of the best ideas that the Catholic Church came up with to try and convert Jewish families was to severely delimit how much studying time a Catholic child was required to perform versus how much a Jewish child was required to perform) that no matter how many copies of the His Dark Materials series, Atlas Shrugged, or today’s Atheistic books are sold, religion should be seen for what it really is: something that guides people. Even if your age is above fifteen on that indefinite, always-expanding linear arrow that is Life you will always long for your youth in some capacity, whether it be to redo high school if given the chance or to feel as safe as you thought you were when you were growing up.

This is what I think most mainstream Atheistic writers and commentators miss when building a case against religion, that it is in our human nature to believe that there is always something—literally, metaphorically, and/or spiritually—above us. Each camp has their bull-headed zealots (the Bible-disproving, everything-God-related-is-hurtful, orthodox Atheists as well as the if-you-don’t-follow-God’s-message-you-will-burn, orthodox Followers) and they are both equally ignorant. Even if they have followers who subscribe to them they will most likely peter out as they get older. (Well, unless, of course, they can continue to get young people hooked on their message–again, see why kids are vital to this cycle?)

6.
At the end of the day, how your religious views are shaped runs parallel with your upbringing. This is probably why Religion deteriorates into such a heated mess when strangers try to discuss their beliefs. The homophobic Christian will continue to be forced into the fray as more and more people grow up around homosexual men and women, which is why both parties are so vocal. Both groups know that a fundamental change is coming, except one does not want to give in any time soon. It is easy to look at this example (to use just one example out of a veritable plethora) from a distance and say, “The anti-gay religious establishment is a bunch of nutjobs. Why do they care if men want to marry men? It’s not any of their business.” But, fundamentally, it is their business.

If you grew up in a household that followed the Bible strictly (however flawed that line of logic may be to you) it would seem perfectly rational to interpret parts of it to mean that homosexuality is not only morally reprehensible, but also something worth fighting against.

Religion, like politics, exposes the most exploitable aspect of human nature: the need to group and compartmentalize people socially, intellectually, and demographically.

—> Common stereotypes associated with our own public and private compartmentalizations: If you are against gay marriage you are a hard core right-winger, most likely a Roman Catholic or Southern Baptist; if you are for gay marriage you are helpless, hopeless, and God-less; Scientology is not a real religion, unless you are a celebrity; the Islamic religion breeds terrorists; all Pagans believe(d) in human and/or animal sacrifice; the Jews killed Jesus; the Jews control everything; the Vatican controls everything; Christian mega-churches are a sign of the coming apocalypse and the people who go to them are mindless, mouth-breathing hicks. <---

This, more than anything, is why I am somewhere in between Agnostic and Atheist: it is human nature to want to control others, but it is also human nature to believe in the best of people. Because it plays hard on sacrifice, death, brotherhood amongst strangers, Spreading The Word---things that, by the way, are socially uncool nowadays to just pick up and preach about---religion will always be misunderstood and molded into things and associated with things that it is not, and celebrated and exaggerated for credit it may not deserve. Or, to put it another way: religion and spirituality means more when you find it and not when it finds you. A lot of people cannot wrap their heads around that. I simply have not found it and I suppose you would be both wrong and right for judging me for not having found it yet. (Although, truth be told, the ending of Anna Karenina made a considerable dent in the “Atheist” side of my mind.) Human nature will always and forever be entangled in contradictions. The key is trying to sort them out on our own and without pressure from external forces (and by external forces I mean outside of our families and trusted friends). Because religion acts as a pretty heavy-handed external force, not unlike a large group of kids becoming unruly in a sandbox, it should surprise no one that it sometimes feeds into our worst fears and actions.