My Views of Religion

I am a man on science. I believe in what I can see, what can be verified in a lab and that there are laws that govern the Universe. I was not taught to accept this as a child, my parents were neutral on this subject, allowing me to decide for myself what to believe. I didn’t really think much about religion until freshman year of high school, when I saw an episode of the Simpsons in one of my classes (where the school starts teaching creationism instead of Darwinism). Even though this was only a mere cartoon that I was watching, the effects on my life have been profound. In the cartoon, the students take a test about creationism, with questions such as “where do people come from?” and “where did dinosaurs come from?” It was appalling to me that the answers to all of these were ‘God’. I know that this is a dramatization of what creationists think (or at least I hope) as a mechanism to evoke laughter from the audience, but this comes from a very real place. This is what creationists think is true, even when there is overwhelming evidence of the contrary. I then came up with a scenario, that two people are holding a blue book, one is a deeply religious person, and the other is a regular person you found on the street. The religious person opens up the bible to gain knowledge about the blue book, while the normal person looks in the blue book itself. The religious person then finds somewhere in the bible that there cannot possibly be any blue books in the world, so he comes to the conclusion that his eyes are wrong, that perhaps it is a red book and he just discovered that he was in fact color blind. He shows this passage to the normal person, but the normal person does not believe him. He says “I hold in my hands what you claim does not exist. You say that your eyes deceive you when you look upon this book, as well as the rest of all living creatures on this earth. If your eyes deceive you here, why do they not deceive you while you are reading your bible? I know that the book I hold is blue; if I ask anyone else they shall agree with me that my book is blue. I trust my own eyes to gain knowledge of the truth, rather than a single line from a book that has been repeatedly translated over the past several thousand years.” Even though there is no such line in the bible, this scenario proved a point for me. It proved that people believe in what they can see, and what they can feel. We are not so keen on only believing what we have been told. This has been demonstrated over the past several thousand years (primarily in the U.S. where we recently have branched into hundreds of denominations) where various religions form, in which its followers are brainwashed to follow their leader into allowing him to have 10 of your children. These people may believe that this person is ‘The One True God’ (or whatever his title may be), but that is only because they have rejected reality and substituted nonsense in its place. But then, when you take away the father of 86 from this equation, you realize that what you have are the dominant religions of the world. In my opinion (with great emphasis on ‘my opinion’ here), this is brainwashing on a global scale; people being told to believe something that they cannot verify is the ultimate truth of the Universe.
I can understand a need for organized religion in the past, as a way to quench the thirst of (at the time) unattainable knowledge. It was once established fact that the Earth was created in 7 days. Now, we have rocks dated to billions of years ago, and that’s just here on earth. By doing a very simply calculation, we can find that the Universe is about 13.7 billion years old, much older than the 6000 years old proposed by the bible. I have seen for myself how the universe follows rules, I have done the experiment where I have to guess exactly where the ball will land after I shoot it off the ramp, and my equations did not fail me. I factored in the initial velocity, the angles of the ramp, and the height, and the friction of the ramp in order to get the answer that I did. There is no God constant in Newton’s laws. It was not God that put the ball on the X; it was the gravitational attraction of the Earth on the ball. But then I ask myself, “Where did all of these equations come from?” I know that Newton discovered these truths, but he did not create them. Nobody here on Earth created these equations that govern all of nature. For now, the only explanation that we have is that some overseeing force created them, perhaps a God. I am fairly certain, however, that one day people will look back at our time and say “Ha! They actually thought that God created the Universe?!” Just like we look back and say “Ha! They actually thought humans were made out of clay?!” I often call myself an Agnostic Deist, as I don’t believe that we can prove if a God does or does not exist. I have been taught by science to not overlook an idea just because it hasn’t been proven, as it hasn’t been disproven yet either. That is the Agnostic part of me talking. The Deist part, however, has a bit more to say regarding the existence of a God. I will pretty much say that even if a God does exist, s/he does not care about us anymore, if s/he is even aware that we exist. (I use the term God loosely here as ‘the creator’, and nothing more). Even if they are aware of our existence, they can either do nothing to aid us, or have decided to remove themselves from the Universe in order to ensure the laws that govern nature always remain the same.

I would have continued here, but then I realized that I was over the limit of my essay as it was. I may or may not continue this at a later time.