MOST weeks I read The Sunday Age's Faith column, out of professional duty. Most weeks I am left perplexed, unable to reconcile what I am reading with anything I see around me.
What I see is a world slowly tearing itself apart for the sake of one faith or another. A world where an extreme faction of Islam wishes to put me and mine to the sword for my unbelief, and to shackle half the world for the crime of being born female. A world where an extreme faction of Christianity wants to throw away science for the sake of millenniums-old superstitions, and is prepared to kill in the name of life. A world where an extreme faction of Hinduism wishes to religiously purify India. A world where people are unashamedly trying to fulfil the biblical conditions for Armageddon.
Moderates say that these factions are perversions of faith, but that too jars with what I know of the past: that it took until the 20th century for humans to devise a secular philosophy, in the form of communism, to rival faith's destructive power. From the Egyptians enslaving the Israelites to Nero lighting the streets with burning Christians, from the slaughter of the Crusades to the bloodbath of India's Partition, violence and religion have always gone hand in hand. And the record of societies governed by religious law, from the Aztecs to the Taliban, tells us that theocracy is a synonym for barbarity.
It's a puzzling thing about religion that its words, which generally urge us to bolster our better natures and remedy our faults, so rarely match its actions. It seems to me that while an individual's faith can be a profound personal journey that might even make them a better person, a society's faith is akin to mass psychosis. History suggests that the killers were always the truest believers, and that notions of tolerance, peace and enlightenment come from those who question the orthodoxy.
I also see a world where human beings have unlocked many, although by no means all, the secrets of reality. Secrets that allow the meanest of Westerners to enjoy a lifestyle beyond the imaginings of kings, that cure diseases that were once routinely fatal, that let us cross vast distances in comfort and safety.
That's the world that has produced the computer and the skyscraper, along with Michelangelo's David, the plays of Shakespeare, the first three Star Wars movies and the Rolling Stones. None of these things was made or discovered by a man on his knees gazing at the stars, but by men and women standing at a workbench looking down at the world. Many were undoubtedly men and women of faith, but it didn't cloud their essential genius, the ability to engage with what is. The great discoveries were not made by those agog at the wonders of the divine, but by those intrigued by the wonders of the mundane.
Because make no mistake, we live in a world of wonders. The sound of a wave breaking on a beach, the green of a forest, that we can see and hear and appreciate these things … these are all true marvels, and no less so for the fact we can now understand how it happens. As someone wise once said, the garden is quite good enough without having to invent fairies at the bottom of it.
The question I can't escape is why so many people clearly prefer the realm of faith, the realm of the Inquisition and of violent jihad, to the realm of thought. What does faith provide them with that reality does not? If it is the comfort of a benevolent power guiding and protecting them, how do they square that with the horror and squalor that still infest the world? Or if it's a desire for mystery, isn't the contemplation of the natural forces that conspired to put us here enough?
More and more, I suspect that I will never have a proper answer to these questions. If all that we now know and all the demonstrable benefits of secular thought are not enough to dissuade the faithful, then it's hard to see what shattering revelation or cogent argument ever will. Perhaps it's simply that the human brain is hardwired for belief, a theory bolstered by the number of people who spurn the churches only to take up one of faith's less organised offspring (see wicca, tarot, positive thinking, etc). It is a disturbing prospect.
And then, too, I wonder if I'm any better. It's become quite clear that I'm as guilty as anyone of clinging to an irrational belief in the face of all available evidence. It's just that my faith is that people will one day see the light, and realise it comes from earth, not from heaven.
by Michael Coulter
Michael Coulter is The Sunday Age's production editor.
reposted from:
http://www.theage.com.au/opinion/god-delusions-cloud-a-world-of-wonders-20090502-aqxa.html?page=-1
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