Religion and the Future

Having thought about the issue, I've decided that the biggest threat to the future of the world is religion. This is not to say that I think all religion is bad - it does have it's place. However, religion does cause many problems.

In particular, religious beliefs which substitute faith for reason are dangerous. That is, beliefs in which are to be held despite potentially overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

For example, belief in creationism that is used as a reason for not studying evolution. When and how the Earth was created irrelevant, however, when this is used to force children to avoid learning that life forms can change to accommodate the environment. For example, germs can and do evolve relatively quickly to develop immunities to antibiotics, and sometimes to form new diseases. Plants and animals can be breed to emphasis traits that we want, etc.

But this is not the only belief. There is, in some circles, a belief that birth control is a sin. If this belief is traced back, it will be found that it originated when the human population was only a few million, if that high. Also, infant mortality was quite high, as well as death for other causes. Therefore, a high birth rate was required both to increase and expand the territory the human race covered, as well as to make up for the high death rate.

In today's world of more than six billion people, this belief is stupid.

Belief in an afterlife is also somewhat questionable. In the movie On a Clear Day you can see Forever there is a statement (talking about reincarnation) which says, "it kills ambition, perpetuate human misery, and propagates false hopes." This logic can be applied to any life after death scenario. That is, why try to improve life on this Earth, since the only important life is that that occurs after death. Or, being a suicide bomber is a guaranteed ticket to some sort of paradise after death. How much human misery is caused because the victims have been snowed into believing there is some great reward waiting for them after they die.

Even the belief in a god can be questioned. How long was investigation into the cause of disease suppressed because people called disease the "punishment" of God on some people.

Yet I don't want it to be said that I think all religion is problematic. Religion can, correctly, give people a feeling that they can to something that matters. It can show people how to live together with the sense of a common purpose. It can give people the incentive to try to improve their conditions when it seems hopeless.

Along these lines, I can point to Gandhi in India, or Martin Luther King in the United States. In both cases there were legal obstacles to doing what was right. They both confronted the obstacles and overcame them because of their belief in God. That is, the belief was not used as a means to incapacitate the people, but was used as a means of motivation to accomplish noble goals.

Religion can help people deal with things they would not otherwise be able to deal with, either because as humans we still don't understand what's going on, or because they as people don't. Examples might relate to some dietary beliefs, which, when given were not understood (although we understand at least some of them today). Similarly, laws dealing with cleanliness.

(I have to admit that sometimes the borderline between the beliefs in the latter paragraphs, and those in the former, is pretty fuzzy.)

With this in mind, what should the relationship between religion and the future be? Will religions manage to transform themselves to put their emphasis on beliefs that will improve the lives of the people, or will they insist on beliefs which are deadly? Or will the people need to reject current religions in favor of something new? Or will it be something in the middle?

In any event, religion as a whole cannot remain where it is, since so much of the religious world have the seeds of their own destruction built into them. For example, overpopulation, particularly once oil starts running out, will be a major problem in those areas of the world where oil revenue has been used to increase human population beyond what the area will sustain. Nor do we need to look to the places where there is oil. In the United States there are many people who believe that the population must be allowed to expand at the rate appropriate for an unpopulated region in areas where the land cannot support the resulting populations.

Religion is used to support political beliefs that are stupid. For example, the belief that the United States is omnipotent. That the current attitudes toward debt can continue forever (they cannot), etc. This has to change, or the people believing this will be in for a very rude awakening when the truth catches up with them.

("You can fool some of the people all of the time, or all of the people some of the time, but not all the people all of the time." Ignoring the truth is possible, but eventually the truth will come back to bite you.)

In short, religion can be a force for good in people's lives, but all too often it is used as a means of perpetuating human misery, or, worse yet, of perpetuating human bondage to totalitarian governments, and peoples. One must remember the good, and forget that bad, even if that requires changing beliefs long held.