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Humanism: Silence=Death Too!
Why should we be humanists? Why should we care? What does it matter? And what exactly is at stake? In my opinion, the ongoing armed conflict (and I do mean ARMED) involving science vs. superstition is not only the most consequential combat raging on our planet today, but the one that effects virtually everyone, directly and personally. It is not some erudite intellectual battle of the separation of church and state being fought by some group in a distant city somewhere. It is in fact, a battle that touches all of us personally and on a daily basis.
To what do I allude? I believe that virtually everyone that grows up under religious rigmarole has his or her humanness immeasurably stilted. About age two we start hearing things like, you are weak, sinning, ugly, unsaved, fallen, and that's the short list. This is the way to engender confidence and strength in people? We are also told that this life is only some sort of dress rehearsal, that the real one is coming after this and it lasts forever.
Now what do these things do to people? It leaves them with the following mindsets. I am ugly, sinning, and diseased, in need of some type of salvation from supernatural beings. Look to the supernatural instead of science, reason and mankind for answers. But I don't really need to worry anyway, because this life doesn't really count, it's only a test to get into the afterlife. If I mess up, it doesn't matter, there's always a safety net of other and eternal lives waiting for me.
Underpinning much of our misery are these religious supernatural mystical beliefs. From these types of mindsets we unwittingly become the architects of our own miseries. From this primary source, this bountiful wellspring, all else flows and is essentially set in motion.
So what happens? People believing these myths disempower and infantilize themselves. They obfuscate the potential power of their reason, their intellect. Then like terrible-twos' tyros, invent imaginary friends to assuage the misery they just got done inventing for themselves. Just the opposite of the kind of people we could be producing. How is a fallen, sinning, weak man supposed to behave? Subservient, down on his bony little knees, trembling, the epitome of weakness itself. A master/slave relationship with man as the underling. I believe this is the primary reason that scientists tell us that we are only using 5-10% of our mental capacity. Much of it is self-imposed.
So what does this weakness, this learned behavior of looking outside of yourself for answers set in motion in human beings? What types of thoughts and behaviors does this sire? You are weak, but if you'll just believe (the power of positive thinking) you can achieve anything. I would say that the power of positive thinking movement is simply an attempt to mitigate the power of negative thinking (religion). Or we invent pop psychology for ourselves (talking cures) that attempt to assuage the power of negative thinking we are infused with. Oh, and by the way it's just more nonsense, as power of positive thinking and pop psychology are about as empty as religion itself.
Why do people behave so recklessly in their personal lives? There are a number of reasons certainly, but doesn't the underpinning of religious belief set the whole game in motion? We don't feel good about ourselves so we attempt to alter our brain chemistries. Alcohol, tobacco, drugs, food, sex, religion itself and many other behaviors actually alter the neurochemical balance in our brains (serotonin, noradrenaline etc.) Tell people these things might harm or kill them, what does that matter, this life doesn't matter anyway does it? It's just a dress rehearsal for the big show up in the stratosphere. What does this do for people? It breeds reckless insanity in our lives because we always have a big safety net under us to catch us. This thinking is at the heart of drug, alcohol, food, sex abuse and tobacco consumption.
Want to get your girl back from her current boyfriend and relatives? Easy, kill her and then yourself and you'll have her all to yourself, up in the land of milk and honey, pretty sweet deal, ey? Happens all the time. Or you're Texas mother Andrea Yates and you think your five children will burn in hell if they live so you hold them under water in your tub. Or your neighbor is an infidel so you invade his country, steal his land, and murder him because, well, you're only sending him on to his maker where he will be properly trained in the one "true" religion. Hey, maybe you're actually doing the poor slob a favor! The more we kill, the more infidels god gets to straighten out. Fly planes into buildings; blow people to smithereens, why not, your just sending them to god, so you're doing the right thing!
Are the vicissitudes of life too vexing for you? Let's get lost in UFO's, psychics, astrology, and the paranormal of dozens of shapes and varieties. When you start out as a child believing in imaginary friends (religion), this is the consequence, for it sets in motion armies of people who will believe anything simply because they have been told that evidence is not required, only faith. Because of these ways of thinking, they have never been introduced to scientific inquiry, empiricism, trial and error and essentially being grounded in reality. We have a people that have been encouraged to create imaginary friends and fantasy worlds in their heads. This, in my view is why the paranormal flourishes. It's simply the logical extension of earlier religiously held ways of interpreting the world.
One could literally go into virtually every area and aspect of our lives and find the fingerprints of religious thinking slowly rising all over the crime scene. Our religious worldview becomes our thinking, our reasoning mechanism and carries over into virtually all of our decisions.
Or, feeling impoverished and small, we chase illusions we think will bring us happiness. We jump on the endless treadmill of materialism, or we seek out relationships, any relationship, many sex partners, marry the wrong people, have children we don't want. Now there is nothing wrong with these things per se, but when they are done in efforts to assuage our inner feelings of misery, they are almost always destined to fail. How many of these endless and in many cases, unhealthy pursuits are underpinned in our essential self-loathing that is inbred in us at a very young age?
These are the reasons that humanism matters. These are the reasons that religion must be seen for what it is. We must realize that in virtually all aspects of our lives, from family relations to school to workplace to entertainment, religious thinking and supernatural thinking underpins and helps form people's world views and behaviors. How can a people ever be expected to live rationally when they believe that this life is merely a paltry dress rehearsal for the real one? How much untold and unfathomable human behavior is directly underpinned in these notions? This is why our efforts must be strong and true, because it's so much more than just fighting for separation of church and state. It is, in a very real sense, fighting for our very lives. AIDS activists use the phrase, SILENCE=DEATH. Is it really that far a jump to say that in the case of religious thinking, that the very same is true?
C. Volkay
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