On religion

I'm probably not the best person to critique religion because, frankly, I don't understand it. Why do people believe in manifest absurdities? Sure, they were indoctrinated as children. So was I. As I've noted here many times, my uncle was a preacher, my mother was a Sunday school teacher, I went to Sunday school and I sang in the choir. Then, at the age of thirteen, when I was just old enough to think for myself, I realized that it was all bullshit. 

This was so glaringly obvious that I didn't really trouble to construct arguments for it. It seemed unnecessary because all arguments for religion are transparent nonsense. By interrogating reality, we've established beyond any doubt that the creation myths and histories of all religions are false.* We have also established that the mind -- conscious experience, sensation, thought, memory, everything we think of as constituting our selves -- depends entirely on the physical substrate of the brain. Damage the brain, and we lose one or more capacities, be it language or the left visual field, the ability to form new memories, or retention of old ones. When the whole brain dies, it's all gone.

Sure, there's a lot we don't know about the universe. Maybe there is some unimaginably powerful sentient entity out there, maybe it even created this universe on purpose. But there's no particular reason to believe that and if it does exist, it most certainly does not give a shit about us. Just making stuff up to explain what is unknown is foolish. If you don't know, you don't know.

So if anyone wants to chime in with an argument for religious belief, any religious belief, I'll entertain it. But good luck with that.

 

*Some institutions classified as religion, such as Buddhism and Confucianism, don't have creation myths. Neither of these in its classical form has a concept of God either, so I wouldn't call them religions. That's a separate matter. By religion, I mean a belief system that includes one or more gods.