The faith of a rationalist

In the past days I have been going through some of the texts of Bertrand Russel. Among them, I would like to suggest you his paper entitled "Why I am not a Christian and the faith of a rationalist". It outlines in a well-written way the main arguments for why religion and, in particular, Christianity are flawed and should not be taken as seriously as one does. Besides the well-known arguments against religion, such as the lack of evidence supporting god, he makes the following two points which are most interesting:

1) If you think that there is a difference between right and wrong, then you are faced with the following problem: if you think that this distinction was designed by god, then it is meaningless to say that god is good because he himself designed the rules for saying that something is good. Now, if you think that god is good, then you must admit that the rules defining right and wrong come from somewhere else. So, why do you need god?

2) Was Christ as described in the Gospels a wise man? In some aspects yes, but in many others no. There were much wiser men than Christ, for instance, Bertrand Russel himself is much wiser than Christ. Chirst for instance believed on hell. To believe on the idea that someone will be punished with the worst tortures for the rest of time just because he/she disagrees with some values does not seem to be very wise.

From my personal background, I could pose a similar question w.r.t. Krishna: was Krishna a wise man? It does not seem wise to believe that a person's duty (dharma) comes from the fact that he/she was born within a social class. In particular, Krishna tells Arjuna, the warrior prince that was in doubt to fight against his kin, that he should fight because he is a warrior, that is his duty. In that sense, Buddha seems a bit better since at least he acknowledges the problems of the caste system. Moreover, to my knowledge, Krishna did not say anything about the fact that the war would involve millions of "innocent" soldiers that served both armies.

New Capital Sins

This week the Christian Church released a new, longer, list of the capital sins, by augmenting the original list, composed of the seven original capital sins, with the following six acts:

1. Perform a genetic modification;
2. Pollute the environment;
3. Cause social injustice;
4. Cause poverty;
5. Be extremely rich;
6. Use drugs.

What I found ironic in this list is that the church itself committed at least three of the sins above. First, cause social injustice: the church was directly involved in the holocaust, and other social injustices to the Jews throughout history; second, cause poverty: the church accumulated money by obliging Christians to pay royalties to the church, even though many could not afford it; what leads to the third point, be extremely rich: the church owns the best lands in almost every European city, where churches are placed with golden statues and ornaments. A fourth point could be the use of drugs, since some would say that religion is a drug.

Religion

In the past months, I have been reading Richard Dawkins' recent book, The God Delusion, and it really made me think about how people are so deeply brainwashed by religion, usually with the most ridiculous ideas, that they become blind to common sense and, in some extreme cases, intolerant to other beliefs.

One good example of how religious beliefs can instigate, not only a person but an entire society, to ignore reason is the battle between the conflicting theories of Creation and Evolution. Creationism states that all living beings exist as they are because of an inherent "intelligent design" that is present in the DNA. While Evolution explains the existence of living beings by the process of Natural Selection, where beings more adaptable to its environment are selected from the beings less adaptable. Though there is a enormous amount of evidence supporting evolution and no evidence supporting Creationism, some states in the US have adopted Creationism in the educational curricula because of the pressure of religious groups that can't accept the Evolution theory, since it contradicts directly with Christian beliefs of how the world was created, but accept Creationism that supports these religious beliefs.

But why do people still believe in some Religious dogmas, despite the overwhelming amount of evidence against it? This is one question that Dawkins tries to answer in his book, for which I try to summarize. One problem with the Abrahamic Religions: Christianity, Islam, and Judaism, is that all of them preach that faith is the greatest virtue. This is why a religious person still believes in dogmas that are proved wrong because it would require of him more faith to believe on it, and hence he would be regarded as more virtuous.

Dawkins uses the examples of Abrahamic Religions because both the autor and to the target western readers are more familiar with them. But one can't generalize this explanation to other religions, such as Hinduism, since they don't have a set of dogmas, and therefore, faith is not a cornerstone for the existence of Religion. And yet, Hindus often disregard evidence, for example, in India there is a generalized belief in astrology.

Dawkins, as an evolutionary biologist, gives a more satisfying explanation to another question, why are there so many religious people in the first place. His answer has to do with a misfiring of the following Darwinian characteristic: Children that believe and obey blindly to there parents have a higher probability to survive and hence, to give continuity to the species. This is simply because children do not have the time to verify the things said by parents; if for instance, a parent tells a child not to jump a cliff and this child does not obey, the result would be disastrous. Even though there is no Darwinian advantage for believing in Religion, a misfiring of this characteristic happens that results in children adopting the religious beliefs of their parents.

There are many other interesting issues discussed by Dawkins; for instance, he tries to argue why there is not a God; why religion can be bad, for which some reasons I commented here; where do our morals come from (perhaps I will discuss more about this topic later); and the conscious raising to not label a child with the religion of his/her parents.