4.19.2010

How I see it (part 2)

[[This is a blog series - if something doesn't make sense, wait until the series is finished]]
Consider this: all the time the earth has existed before you were born, you have no recollection of. That is BILLIONS of years of things existing prior to your cognitive recognition that anything could exist.
Now consider this: our life span is merely 120 years tops...often less - far less.
Finally consider this: when you die, without religion in the picture, there is no more cognitive recognition of existence. There is no realization that you are dead...there is no realization that you were ever even alive. There is no realization period - everything in the world will go on without you, and you will not be the wiser. People will continue to be born, and die, and you will have spent your one blip of life doing things that were supposed to make you happy.
What a bleak picture that paints. Rationally thinking, though, it begs the questions - what if religion was put into place to help people cope with such a bleak result to life? What if people knew this was what happened, but in order to console others they conjured up a place of happiness and joy to give people something to look forward to when they died?

This happens to be the premise of a movie called "The Invention of Lying" but there was a time before that movie was even released that I was contemplating such a possibility.

Consider all the rules in the Old Testament that the people and priests had to follow. The long list of things that were unclean to eat (pigs, aquatic animals with out the combination of fins *and* scales, buzzards, rabbits, hawks, camels, etc) usually were carriers of disease or created health concerns. Sleeping with relatives and being gay produced genetic disorders and/or transmitted diseases. Disobeying elders, or authorities, created chaos for a civilization. Worshiping other gods and introducing other religions into the society undermined those which were put into place to maintain order and consistency.

If read from a worldly point of view, it appears that the rules of the Old Testament were to get people into some kind of civilized fashion after having just come out of an environment of slavery and thrust into complete freedom. Such freedom to do and be whatever you want requires constraint or the result is bad...like a teenager moving out on their own for the first time, and realizing they can stay up as late as they want, go out to eat as often they want, and buy whatever they want - only to find responsibility waiting for them in the morning, and when bills come due.

Consider the New Testament: it's mostly about loving each other and not focusing so much on the Law of the Old Testament. After generations of generations had dealt with the Law for so long, the ones who prided themselves on keeping the Law took it upon themselves to make sure others did as well as they had.

Jesus came, saying in Matthew 5:17-20 that he did not come to abolish the law but to fulfill it...that the law was still in place, but his role was to provide an example of how to live according to the law and what that kind of lifestyle should look like.

He spends much of his time teaching people how to love each other and how to forgive. He also spent a lot of time explaining that in order to get to heaven you have to believe in Him, and get others to believe, and also still live according to the rules. He doesn't go into what heaven is like all that much - and if the thought is followed that it's simply a reward-stimulus, it makes sense not to describe it any other way to that to say it's amazing beyond words. After all, I am not interested in going to heaven to spend all my time singing church hymns and being with my family...that sounds pretty boring and stressful to me. I'm also not interested in the proposed alternative either.

The reason I'm not interested in being around this stuff is the people that I've been around here on Earth. It's so often misconstrued that it is the Job of a Christian to go and recruit people into Christianity, no matter what it takes, and whether they want to or not. I've seen it attempted nicely, through guilt trips, and through insults. I've rarely seen it actually be successful though. Someone has to be looking for something else out of life to take on a religion and belief factor. As an academically-minded person, there are too many things that offer more realistic explanations to the very things people attribute to be Works of God. And as such, I have often tried to explain these kinds of things to people who attribute them so, and encounter a closed mind (of which I have been a victim of during my religious hay-day), and an unwillingness to even consider there may actually be a physical explanation for things.

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