Questioning my faith, flirting with atheism and falling for Richard Dawkins
After two years and one failed attempt, I managed to read The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins. I’m shook.
The premise is simple. While we all would like to believe in God, if we had a gun to our head, none of us would say “Shoot” fully confident that we’ll be saved. It would be a massacre.
Religion and science don’t go together
People who think the world was created in 7 days fight to make sure evolution isn’t taught in schools. Science is chipping away at all of religion’s tall claims as we learn more about the world we live in.
“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic” — Clarke’s Third Law
Imagine your great great grandfather traveling to the present to see you talk to Alexa. If he doesn’t die of a heart attack, he’s going to think it’s magic (possibly black). In the times that we live in, it’s tempting to assume that given enough time, we can explain any phenomenon that passes off as supernatural behavior.
Hinduism — a personal tangent
The religion I grew up in is a tolerant polytheistic pluralistic one with roughly 33 million deities each with rich individual backstories. They make great reading material for a kid. It’s far less rigid than any of the other major religions. Sins aren’t an act of God, rather they’re an act against Dharma, which is the moral order of things. Blasphemy isn’t a concept in Hinduism. We do believe in Karma, which is the original third law of Newton. I’ve always felt a twinge of pride in the lack of absolutism in my religion. All of these played a definite part in cementing my faith.
Ancient India was scientifically advanced and it was interwoven with religion. A lot of our knowledge was shared through shlokas. Baudhayana’s theorem preceded the Pythagoras theorem by almost 200 years. Tulasidas casually inserted the distance between the earth and the sun in his work Hanuman Chalisa two centuries before modern scientists did. Acharya Kanad discovered atomic theory 2600 years before John Dalton. There is also an alarming parallel between Vishnu's ten avatars and Darwin’s theory of evolution.
This can be a post in itself, let me not digress. While interesting on their own, I’m using these examples to prove that religion and science weren’t incompatible. Hinduism is famous for its elaborate rituals and eccentric practices but a lot of them stem from scientific roots. A practice, no matter how small is fully effective only when you understand why you’re doing it. Over time, we’ve swindled most of our rich heritage into mindless rituals exacerbated by nationalist propaganda trying to pass off bigotry and pseudoscience under the ‘Indian culture’ trope. My dad says its a marketing problem.
Childhood indoctrination
One undisputable point Dawkins brings up is labeling children based on the theologian preferences of their parents. It’s the child of Muslim parents and not a Muslim child, says Dawkins. A child is too young to decide his views on religion, and if we wait for a kid to form his own opinions, I doubt a whole lot of them would opt to believe. If the same were applied to any other preference, say you label a child as an agnostic child or a secular humanist child, it would be super weird.
Religion is overly vulnerable to offense, always treated with over-padded kid gloves and goes largely unquestioned in polite society. We grow up in layers of indoctrination honed to perfection over the ages to make us subconsciously place religion on the pedestal that it's on. Childhood conditioning can be very hard to unlearn, this gets carried over to the next generation and so on.
This is possibly the biggest reason for the sustenance of religion.
Is religion an accidental by-product?
According to evolution, only useful things get passed onto the next generation. So does this mean religion is useful to us from an evolutionary perspective?
I always thought religion first began to unite people under a common umbrella. The advantage Homo sapiens had over other human species is our ability to cooperate in large numbers, and agreement on local beliefs and practices helped this cause. Fiction helps a great deal. Most successful people are good orators and nothing sells better than a good story.
I can imagine how one cute but ordinary five-year-old boy might have chased a snake away on a riverbank, and years later after several retellings, he’s now the God Krishna who danced on top of the venomous twelve-headed snake Kalinga while playing his flute and saved the village people from poisoned water and snake terrorism. It’s now called Kalinga Narthanam, it's a legit side story.
Something that we can all believe in gives us a purpose, makes our life more meaningful. And its value increases when more people believe in it. But, Dawkins proposes an intriguing alternative — that religion is an accidental by-product of evolution. Here’s the analogy.
When we see a moth fly into a flame, the act by itself is incredibly stupid. So how did natural selection encourage such suicidal behavior? Before artificial light, moths only had moonlight and starlight to guide them. Since they’re so far away, their rays are parallel when they reach and moths used them as a compass to steer themselves in a straight line. Their nervous system sets up a rule of thumb along the lines of ‘Steer a course so that light rays hit your angle at 30 degrees’.
Now when this rule is applied to a candle flame close enough, I’ll skip the geometry (you can look it up if you want to) and say that the moth is steered directly at the candle. Since candle encounters are rare for moths compared to moon sightings, and millions of moths still effectively find their way using the moon, this is still useful from a Darwinian perspective albeit with an unfortunate by-product.
Dawkins finds a parallel behavior in children. We survive by passing the accumulated knowledge of past generations onto our children. A child can find out by himself that he shouldn‘t put his finger in a fire or he can listen to his parents. “..there will be a selective advantage to child brains which possess the rule of thumb: believe, without question, whatever your grownups tell you. Obey your elders especially when they adopt a solemn tone. ..This is generally a valuable rule for a child”.
While this is crucial for Darwinian survival, a child’s brain can’t distinguish between good advice and religious beliefs and believes them both with equal conviction. A child’s brain is gullible and highly impressionable. I still can’t go to the temple when I’m on my period. Along with information from a source of authority, a kid sees time and resources being spent on said beliefs, adding to its credibility. Consequently, the kid passes on the same mixture to the next generation.
I was honestly a little thrown off by how plausible this sounds.
The dark side of religion
Two things I’ve always hated about religion are conmen posing as God people and how intricately politics is laced with religion. Politicians shamelessly use religion to propagate divisive agendas. Maybe what I really hate is their ability to use religion in that way.
“Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false and by the rulers as useful “— Seneca the Younger
Religion explicitly disseminates prejudices but is always protected under ‘religious liberty’. Dawkins gives an example to demonstrate the overexaggerated respect reserved for religion in our society, which I thought was worth quoting here.
…Little did I know something similar would come to pass in the twenty-first century. The Los Angeles Times (10 April 2006) reported that numerous Christian groups on campuses around the United States were suing their universities for enforcing anti-discrimination rules, including prohibitions against harassing or abusing homosexuals. As a typical example, in 2004 James Nixon, a twelve-year-old boy in Ohio, won the right in court to wear a T-shirt to school bearing the words ‘Homosexuality is a sin, Islam is a lie, abortion is murder. Some issues are just black and white!’ The school told him not to wear the t-shirt — and the boy’s parents sued the school. The parents might have had a conscionable case if they had based it on the First Amendment’s guarantee of freedom of speech. But they didn’t. Instead the Nixons’ lawyers appealed to the constitutional right to freedom of religion. Their victorious lawsuit was supported by the Alliance Defense Fund of Arizona, whose business it is to ‘press the legal battle for religious freedom’.
We’ve all seen examples of religion inciting enormous groups to turn into frenzied mobs and do crazy things. No one can deny that religion is one of the main causes of terrorism and one of the highest contributors to our global death toll over the years.
Why moderation is not the solution
My family and most of the people I know in my life are religious but I can safely claim they’re moderate. All religions’ scriptures were written at a very different time and most of us pick and choose what we want to practice. My dad has traveled outside India but until two generations ago, it was believed that you lose your caste once you cross the sea. My grandma still thinks temples work better than pills.
In a sense, how moderate you are is an indicator of social-class and intellectual privilege and it’s important to recognize it. It’s tempting to think a moderate version of religion could work but the problem is moderation is always relative. Like a lot of things in life, this is also a spectrum. As long as there’s a spectrum, there will be some people on the wrong side of it.
In the twenty-first century, there are still people who take scriptures literally. There are people who treat people of other religions differently. Imagine the amount of conviction it takes for teenage boys to become suicide bombers. They GENUINELY believe they’re dying for a greater cause and are going straight up to heaven. I cannot stress how much this agitates me.
Does religion somehow dehumanize people? Make it okay to cut down another person because he doesn’t believe in the same thing you do? It’s funny because religion is supposed to make you a better person.
Religion and morality have nothing to do with each other
One argument I’ve heard my family use multiple times is that religion acts as your moral compass. That people would go wild if we didn’t believe that someone was watching us constantly taking meticulous notes which will determine where we’ll go when we die. Sounds almost sad.
Abraham tried to sacrifice (read kill) his own son and Krishna had 16,108 wives. Obviously, we pick and choose our moral lessons from the scriptures and pass off the more disturbing ones as allegories. Using what criterion do we decide if something can’t be taken literally? We decide based on traits valued by our society and common grounds of decency agreed upon by all of humanity. We’ve retired practices that we’ve come to realize are misogynistic or inapplicable. These can and will change over generations and cultures. So that criterion is clearly not coming from our scriptures.
Is it that far-fetched to believe that we can be a civilized species without a babysitter watching over us?
Are you questioning your faith yet?
I fell for Dawkins as he patiently took apart every possible theory for the existence of God in his thoroughly researched book. I have a weakness for merciless rationalism and coherently expressed thoughts. He seduced me with a vision of our world devoid of religious violence, discrimination, and bigotry.
I would be remiss if I don’t talk about religions like Sikhism, Buddhism, and Jainism in this blog. I have a lot of respect for religions that are chill and peace-loving and just go about their business. That’s precisely why they aren’t major religions in the world. They aren’t aggressive enough to propagate it and from a Darwinian angle, they’re less likely to survive. Strong convictions lead mankind better. In some perverse way, I think we’re set up to ruin ourselves as a species.
Religion is an enormous part of humanity. It systematically and subconsciously inculcates prejudices and intolerance. Whether you’re religious, an atheist or anything in between, give The God Delusion a shot. I was a believer and I think a part of me still is, but it’s made me want to read more about world religions. I’m processing, starting with this super elaborate book review/personal contemplation piece.
Confronting your faith is a very sobering thing to do because for a lot of us belief is comforting. It definitely is, for me. For some of us, believing in belief is comforting. It’s a mark of intelligence to acknowledge views that you don’t completely agree with. If you’re an educated rational person, you’ve questioned your faith at some point. You’ve read brutal reports of religious violence from around the world and wondered what everyone is fighting for.
Religion, like money was created to unite people. But sometimes we get so caught up in it, we forget that they’re merely fiction, and lose touch with reality. You’re starting wars, killing people and forgetting that there are real humans getting hurt along the way.
The world isn’t going to turn perfect once we get rid of religion, there’s still racism, nationalism, oh so many things that are wrong with this world. Let’s change it one -ism at a time!
EDIT: I haven’t magically transformed into an atheist because I read Richard Dawkins, I’m not even close. Atheism is when you can look at someone dead in their eye and unflinchingly declare that there is no God of any kind. Belief is a spectrum and atheism is at the end of it. Reaching that extreme is not an easy thing.
I had a lot of interesting conversations with my friends after I published this. One of the more interesting ones came up with this analogy. Blaming religion for violence is like using the clothes of a victim as an excuse for raping them. People like to dominate and exert power over one another. If not religion, people would have found another excuse to hurt one another. Maybe so. A couple of others said I needed more guidance in my spiritual journey and that I should learn a lot more about it before I denounce it. Maybe so. One friend very honestly admitted (and what I suspect a lot of my other friends didn't want to is) that they were turned off when they read ‘atheism’ in my title. And if that doesn’t sum up my article :D
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