Frivology

So today is Darwin Day, and I’ve been mulling over in my head for the past couple of weeks just what I wanted to say in this post.  I’m not a scientist by any means, and my understanding of Darwin goes as far back as high school, wich is around 15 years ago.  I’m reading ‘Why Evolution is True‘, but I don’t have a whole lot of time to read these days, being busy with work and a few other hobbies.  So, I stumbled along with idea after idea until something finally dawned on me… it’s something I’m sort of working slowly up to in my Losing My Religion series here at Frivology.  The series is about all of the different religions I hopped in and out of before I finally found peace in no religion and no belief, but the underlying theme to it is a personal bit of anecdotal evidence that there are certain people in this world who are hard-wired to be atheists.  Natural born atheists, so to speak… and I have to wonder, are human beings evolving into disbelief? 

About a year ago, I listened to Julia Sweeney’s ‘Letting Go of God’.  It moved me because Julia described all of the different beliefs she went through before she allowed herself to stop believing.  I did much the same thing.  Also like her, I wanted desperately to be a part of the moving ritual and beauty that religion can offer the world.  I, however, was cognitive enough of my own disbelief that I spent a great deal of time lying about what I felt.  I lied and said that I was wounded and needed Christianity to heal me.  I lied and said that I felt the warmth of God.  I lied and said that I felt the love of the Goddess… so on and so forth.  Some part of me knew I was lying, yet I craved the companionship, warmth and peace that so many “believers” seemed to have.  For me, though, I didn’t get that peace until I finally completely let go and admitted that I didn’t believe.  From the beginning, I never believed - couldn’t believe.  I was always meant to be an atheist.  It dawned on me, then, that I probably wasn’t alone.  Whatever made other people believe just wasn’t part of me. 

There has, indeed, been work done to identify what it is that makes people religious.  There are a number of theories and observations ranging from religion as a mechanism for survival by creating communities and relieving some amount of stress to religion as a sort of ‘drug’ acting on Dopamine centers in the brain.  So, it’s quite feasible, even understandable, that some people - like me - might be born without whatever it is that makes certain people feel so warm, comfortable and loved in religion.  

I’m certainly no scientist and I’m not anywhere near equipped to answer that particular question, but it seems clear to me that if the one has to exist, then the other has to exist in inverse… and if that’s true, then we could very well be seeing a time where we are beginning, at least, to evolve out of the need for religion.  Religion is dangerous.  I would be hard-pressed to come up with exact numbers, but in America, where religious freedom is king, hundreds if not thousands, die at the hands of religion every year.  There are Pentecostal snake-handlers who refuse medical help when they’re bitten.  Parents who’s children die because they didn’t get medical help and, instead, prayed.  Adults who insist that praying will cure their diseases and who also don’t get medical help.  Then, there are the less tangible deaths still attributed to religion.  Homosexuals who are hunted down and killed, cults who take their whole group with them into a suicide pact, churches who’s ideology has evolved into racism.  The KKK, for example, claims that they are very religious, so every black death enacted by a KKK member can, too, be attributed to religion.  I’m sure at the end of the day when you stack all of that up, you’re into the thousands - and that’s just America.  The number of religious deaths in places like the Middle East are much, much higher.  Religion, as a result, has become dangerous to the human species.  It’s only natural for it to begin to evolve out. 

Of course, evolution takes a very long time and if I’m right, it will be quite some time before we start showing, in numbers, a lack of whatever makes us religious.  Still, from a science fiction perspective, I have to wonder - what would it be like if religion were truly on the run?  

I’d like to think that it’d be a lot safer of a place to live in.  If religions knew that every time violence was committed in their name they lost followers, they’d absolutely have to clean up their acts.  Hate speech would become a thing of the past and ‘unconditional love’ would have to return.  James Dobson and many others would be completely out of work, ostracized by religions that want to continue to survive in a climate where more people disbelieve than believe.  Rather than hearing Pat Robertson condemn every natural and man-made disaster to gays, homosexuals and whoever else the church hates this week, he’d have to be content with praying for peace.  Considering religious fervor could still be attributed to some violence, major religions would have to hire scores of scientists and psychologists to refute that it was religion that caused someone to become violent, but instead deep, psychologically-rooted problems.  Could you imagine? 

I can, and I’d love to live in that world right now rather than waiting for the slow roll of natural selection and evolution to take their toll.  In the meantime, though, I have a little bit of advice for the churches: Stop attacking evolution.  The study of evolution isn’t what makes atheists.  It’s the study of religion.

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