The Enlightenment

Religion has never been a big part of my life. In fact, I tend to take every reasonable effort possible to avoid structured religious services, but regardless of my aversion of the church scene, I like to believe that have own type of spirituality, based on the quaint parables that have inspired me the most. However, my very vague notion of religion was put on trial this weekend by a surprising new acquaintance of mine. I have never met someone so passionate about believing in nothing. I thought the whole point of being an atheist was not to get riled up about anything religious, but this guy takes proving religion wrong very seriously. After nearly three hours of listening to him rant and rave about the evils of religion, I got a pretty good understanding of where he was coming from and will share a taste of his dissertation here, solely to understand and reflect on why I both agree and disagree with his theories.

He says that religion is merely a complex fiction used to control people and motivate them to do ridiculous things they would not do if they were thinking rationally. Regardless of whether you choose Christianity, Islam, Judaism, or Hinduism, in his eyes, all religions are based on the same ideas of magic and folklore that are just as baseless as Greek gods and goddesses that we now classify in the category of mythology today. At this I could see his point because when I separate myself from everything that I grew up believing, I can see the absurdity of all those Sunday school lessons I was taught to believe as true. However, just because a story is improbable doesn’t mean that it’s impossible, and just because we can’t prove the degree to which the supernatural exists doesn’t mean that the possibility is not there.

He also believes that the source of every conflict and war that we are faced with today is due to the fictions of religion. He has painted himself a beautiful utopia where everyone becomes “enlightened” and sees the evils of their religion and how those holy falsehoods have caused more suffering than good. He suggests that we banished all religious practice and watch as all humanity unites in peace and harmony. I’m all for a peaceful utopia, but I don’t believe that his method could ever work. We will still have cultural and language barriers to separate us, and greed to motivate the powerful to take advantage of the weak. We have a long list of issues to sort through in order to reach a peaceful existence, so why so abruptly try to take away a belief system that is such an integral part of so many people’s lives and has helped so many people better themselves and their communities. I can hardly consider a world without religion an enlightened one. Denying religion feels like denying a major part of what it is to be human. I don’t know why I feel this way, but it seems that there is something in all of us that wants to look toward the sky, that wants there to be something more meaningful out there, that wants to know that magic is possible. Maybe it’s naïve at my age to believe in magical supernatural beings in the sky, but that belief has given me confront for a lot of years, and I don’t see how giving that up now will bring enlightenment any nearer.