What If It's Just Not True ?
Ok, so it's angry controversy time.
What if god doesn't exist, and Jesus was just some guy ?
After watching some of the stuff that David Blaine does, turning water into wine or walking on water just doesn't seem that impressive.
But, of course, the real question is: What if, seriously, god just DOESN'T EXIST !!!
Think of the things that have been done due to religious belief--wars, executions, torture, not to mention billions of people that have lived their lives a certain way because they just believed that they were headed somewhere that simply doesn't exist ?
For the most part, the world is the way it is because of belief in one god or another (or different ways of worshipping the same god--but I won't even get started on that one).
I guess that what bothers me the most is that belief in god is legitimized only by the fact that so many people believe (in case you can't tell, I'm not one of them). If a billion people believed in unicorns or dragons does that mean that they must exist ? Of course not. There are plenty of stories written in the past about those creatures.
I just can't wrap my head around that fact that people can still blindly believe in something based on a book written thousands of years ago by PEOPLE--it's not like the Bible descended from the heavens on tablets of some material that to this day can't be identified--it is a collection of stories written by people, the motives of which can never be known. Period.
Many people that believe in god are often the same people who ridicule others for believing in aliens or ESP--uhh...at least those seem possible, however unlikely.
Ok, I'm done offending 80% of the world's population now.
2 Comments:
It's a good question Chris...
Personally, I think that God and belief in God is legitimized by more than just 80% of the world believing, or the bible, or even Jesus turning water into wine.
What legitimizes, for me, the belief in a higher power of some sort, is just the general belief in good and evil. The belief that in some way good is rewarded by something, be it heaven, god, karma, or whatever. The belief that it actually matters how you behave in your existence because of something internal.
I mean, really, morals are just a made up concept, yet we believe in those too. I've never seen a moral. Society decides what is "right" and what is "dangerous"... and religion seems to just codify that into a text... be it the Bible, the Qua'aran, or whichever text you adhere to.
Who's to say that what's "moral" isn't running around naked shooting one another to death while sleeping around and stealing everything in sight?
There are plenty of things that we believe in that we can't see, it doesn't make them any less real. You can't see pain. You can't eat a big bowl of justice. You can't pick up some grief and put it in a bag. Until someone has felt the power of an addiction they can't always understand it, or really believe it exists.
The problem with God, which is sort of the same problem as is experienced with chronic pain, is you can't prove or disprove his (or its) existence. Dragons and Unicorns you can do a little more certainly.
And I think most people who believe in God don't just believe it blindly based on the Bible. I'm not the most religious, but I know for me believing there is a higher power is more than some book written, which may or may not have gotten it right. It's more a feeling of purpose. A feeling that
there are certain things that just aren't explained, and so I hold out the possibility that there must be something out there responsible for our world, and some of the mysteries we've all seen.
Call it God, call it Buddha, call it Allah, call it an alien... I'm a skeptic at heart, so really I'm not sure any one religion or person even has it "right". But, the thought that we don't just rot in a box and that there's something we're striving to achieve at the end of this keeps me going...
Otherwise what's the point.
The difference between belief in god and adherence to a moral code is that we all accept that morality and ethics and the like are human creations with a purpose.
Those who believe in god don't say that it is a device invented my people for the purpose of dictating a certain code of conduct--quite the opposite, in that apparently the "device" created the morality--god is seen as a fact of nature. It's all backwards.
It's all fine and dandy to believe that something will happen after this life. I certainly could never say that isn't true, and I'm not convinced either way about this, but to be so certain of exactly what that is and what you need to do in this life in order to get there, based on a book written thousands of years ago seems extremely presumptuous at best.
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