Religion

“Religious institutions that use government power in support of themselves and force their views on persons of other faiths, or of no faith, undermine all our civil rights. Moreover, state support of an established religion tends to make the clergy unresponsive to their own people, and leads to corruption within religion itself. Erecting the ‘wall of separation between church and state,’ therefore, is absolutely essential in a free society.” ― Thomas Jefferson


I have spent most of my life trying to decide what I think about religion as it pertains to my own life.   I spent most of my youth in the Southern Baptist Church.   As soon as I could drive, I took our family's old beater second car and starting attending the Methodist Church down the road.    I think that was more a matter of the personalities of the ministers and congregations than any great epiphany on my part.   When I got to college, I took a class in the Philosophy department on Empirical Logic.   Enjoying that class, I ended up with a minor in Philosophy to go with my major in Economics.    All those philosophy classes made me think more about the greater questions of life, including religion.   At this point, after a lifetime of consideration of the subject, I'm not really sure that I believe.    Assuming that there is in fact a Creator up there somewhere, I am for sure shaky on Christianity.   Part of that is that very few professed Christians really seem to take the teachings seriously.   They go to church regularly, tender their offerings, and talk about being Christians.   But they don't seem to really live the teachings as far as I can tell.   Part of my doubt is that my reading and research demonstrates that there is a very sketchy historical record that a person named Jesus really even existed.   If he did exist, and there is no contemporaneous historical documentation that he did, whoever he was has been "enhanced" by mythology to the point that it would be hard to sort the real person from the imagined.   I read a book recently titled "The World's Sixteen Crucified Saviors," an 1875 book by a man named Kersey Graves.   It seems that the basic  story of Jesus has been told many times before.   If you are curious, look up the name Chrisna (Krishna) and count up the many common elements in the story of Chrisna and the story of Jesus as told in the New Testament.   And Chrisna's story was known a thousand years before the date given for the birth of Jesus.    At this point, I think that I am basically a free thinker, perhaps a secular humanist.

Putting my own personal questions about religion aside, I have no quarrel with religion to the extent that it makes the lives of particular people more livable.   If religion, in whatever form, eases the burdens of a person and gives them hope of a better life in the hereafter, then that is certainly a good thing as far as I'm concerned.   It seems to me that the problem created by religion comes in with organized religion.   As we are all well aware, many if not most of history's wars and conflicts have religious differences at their center.   The world today is absolutely chocked full of conflict caused by differences in how different groups view concepts of a deity and religion.    In our country, I have no quarrel with religion or organized religion except to the extent that believers attempt to force their personal religious beliefs on others.   Prayer in the schools is a good example.    Why should my children or my grandchildren be forced to participate in a public exercise of religion such as prayer in the schools?    I believe that the principle point of our Founders was that Americans should be free to worship as they choose and to be free from having the religious ideas of others imposed on them.    In addition, I think that religious doctrine should play no part in our national policy.   For instance, in the idea that a shared Judeo-Christian heritage mandates that the United States continue to put the best interests of the state of Israel above the best interests of the United States of America.   It appears to me that half of our international problems stem in one way or another from our government's blind support of whatever government policies the current government of Israel seeks to implement.    Another example, of course, is the determination of the Evangelical right to dumb down the teaching of science in the public schools.    Creationism or Intelligent Design ought to be taught in the home or in Sunday School.   It is a legitimate theory, but it is not a scientific theory.   Public school science classes ought to be based on consensus scientific thought and not some particular brand of religious doctrine.    Many who believe in the literal truth of the Bible apparently believe that the Earth is 6,000 years old, despite tons of scientific evidence that the Earth is billions of years old.    Many of those same people apparently believe that dinosaurs did not actually exist and that God put fake dinosaur bones in the ground "to test our faith."   Others believe that dinosaurs are a conspiracy of scientists to support the theory of Evolution and that scientists have buried fake dinosaur bones all over the world in support of the conspiracy.   If you want to believe such nonsense, then that is your prerogative.   If you want to teach that to your children, then that is your right to do so.   However, don't tell me that you have a right to have such a theory taught in my grandson's 6th grade science
class.



An even scarier example to me is the idea of some religious people that there is something wrong with birth control.   I guess because some "prophet" wrote down "Go forth and multiply" thousands of years ago, we are stuck with that as "God's will."   When I was a boy, there were two billion people on Earth.   We studied about the potentially disastrous problems to be caused in the future by overpopulation.   Well, it's now the future.   We have done nothing substantial about overpopulation and now the Earth holds seven billion people, three-and-a-half times as many people as existed on Earth when I was a boy.   One can easily imagine all of the problems that are going to arise if the population of the Earth keeps on growing at even the present rate.   The Earth at some point will simply not be able to support all the people who are alive.   Not enough food for one thing.   It seems to me that we should have long been exporting birth control information and supplies as fast as we could go.   But, oh no, some consider birth control "wrong" for some reason.    So we sit and do nothing and there is a baby born in Africa every 20 seconds who may not get enough food to eat or clean water to drink.   If the Earth is going to survive we have to push through the objections of the religious people and act on the basis of the realities of the 21st Century, not the superstitions of 3,000 B.C..

If you are a Christian, a Muslim, or a Buddhist, please, please cherish your own personal religious beliefs.   But don't try to force them on me and mine.    And please keep them out of government policy.