Religion - for Better or Worse

There is a new fad in atheism today. Of course there have always been atheists, and around the time of the Enlightment they really became outspoken, criticizing the religion from scientific and philosophical perspectives. But newer writers like Christopher Hitchens take a different tack: they criticize religion from a moral perspective. One of his newer books, god is not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, details atrocity after atrocity committed in the name of religion. To summarize, Hitches believes that these two factors make religious ultimately evil: (1) it requires faith, which prevents people from being rational or makes them unwilling to compromise and (2) it is oriented toward conquest: religious people are not content to live life by themselves but must spread their beliefs - by whatever means necessary - upon others. And he brings compelling evidence: stories of Christians killing each other, of Hindu governments sending out thugs and murders, of Muslims thwarting world peace efforts, and on and on.

But Hitchens has one major problem: he doesn't realize how fundamental being religious is to being human. Or, I should say, he doesn't recognize how religious he is.

I would like to talk about different religions in this blog, but not by discussing Christianity, Hinduism, Islam, Jainism, Buddhism, Confucianism, etc. I think that all of this discussion misses the mark, and many people spend too much time looking at the particulars and missing the bigger themes. Instead, I propose a question: "What is religion?" Well, here are my thoughts. As humans, we recognize that there are problems associated with being alive - problems such as excessive pain, injustice, failure, mortality, boredom, purposelessness, unhappiness, etc. Religion tries to identify the root cause of these problems and offers "a solution". Now, I put solution in quotation marks because the word may give the wrong idea. The solution of religion is never just an activity you can perform, a prayer you can say, a belief you can affirm, or any other singular act. Instead, religion offers a way to view the world and tools for dealing with all of its problems. Whenever we are hurt, frustrated, depressed, or discontent with life, it is our religious perspective that tells us how to appease the pain. And so religion can mask itself as psychology, biology, politics, economics, or philosophy when really - upon close examination - it is religious.

And that is what I would like to do here. I would like to get behind particulars and jargon and reveal what the real - and fundamentally different - religions are in our world. And so, my project should reveal that different kinds of Christians may share the same title but be of completely different religions; that fundamentalist Jewish and Muslim terrorists set out to kill each other, but ultimately they share the same religion; and that many of us unconsciously subscribe to multiple religions, which causes us to question our beliefs frequently, live hypocritically, and unable to cope with major problems. I confess that the religion I preach and proclaim is probably not always - perhaps not even usually - the religion that drives me. Hopefully, this process with be helpful to me as much as to anyone else.

To conclude, I respond once again to Hitchens. Yes, atheism is free from blemishes because is a negation. It declares that certain solutions to the human problems are wrong. But it doesn't necessarily offer others. Unfortunately, humans HAVE TO believe in some solutions, and so we must be religious. Yes, we all hold certain faiths (which may be or may not be open-minded) and we all have a tendency to impose our beliefs on others. But atheists are as guilty of this as anyone else because they too must believe in something. In fact, in terms of numbers, the greatest mass murder in modern history was under an atheistic regime: the Soviet Union.