Why can’t people give up on their prejudices? Why can’t humanity work together as one? A blog entitled Rum-Punch Drunk, that I follow very closely asked a question that make me fully ponder that question. We got into a debate in the comments of a particular post, and I just couldn’t seem to get across in just a few words what I was feeling.
No matter how you cut it, or slice it, or look at it, religion is tearing this world apart. Science and technology is heading in so many amazing directions, taking us not only into the future, but also more into a global community. But noone will let go of things they can’t back up without faith long enough to see how great humanity can actually be....
Jeremy Rifkin did a YouTube video for the Royal Society of the Arts, the video is after this paragraph, and you can watch it. In it, he hits on the idea for tribal mentality, and how outsiders are seen as aliens. He also uses a great term for things such as countries and other things that help everyone differentiate from other people, he called these things ‘fictions.’ And they truly are just that, for the only way we can point out the United States is to show you the boundaries on a map which someone just drew lines on....
So many religion people I know deny so many things that have proven true. I once knew a person that said, “Why couldn’t everything have been formed in 7 days, and why couldn’t the dinosaurs have not existed at all?” Paraphrasing there, but in the end, she would argue that because dinosaurs are not mentioned in the bible, then there is decent proof they didn’t exist in the first place....
That is the kind of thing that will truly hold everyone back. Everyone looks to the Dalai Lama as a great person to quote. Even if you do not believe in Buddhism, you have to have some respect for the man himself. One of my favorite quotes by him is:
“If scientific analysis were conclusively to demonstrate certain claims in Buddhism to be false, then we must accept the findings of science and abandon those claims.”
How can one not love that quote? It doesn’t say, “Abandon the religion,” it says to abandon the ‘claims.’ Just because I believe differently than you, doesn’t mean you’re religion is null and void, it means you were wrong about certain things, but the overall premise is still valid. Is there any proof of God out there anywhere? No, but that doesn’t mean he doesn’t exist. Knowledge will not kill your religion, it can only help it if you let it....
I admire people of vision and of creativity. Yet its still hard to bring Gene Roddenberry, the creator of Star Trek into a discussion about religion, science, and the future of the human race without a smile, but I am going to. In his vision of Star Trek, he had a premise that the discovery of an alien race, namely the Vulcans, united the entire globe, stopped all wars, and started a global community that would lead the human race into the stars, and beyond.
I wish it wouldn’t take that, I wish we could just do such a thing. But I know deep down, we can’t. People hold on to their religion and their ignorance as tight as they do their skin. I feel sad in ending this article this way, because I have no hope for humanity, I have no faith that people can accept anything besides some invisible thing they can’t prove. Yet I have all the faith in the world that people will be led astray by words, written by someone with an agenda, that claim to be from a higher power. Words are words, and beliefs can be reshaped by the truth, if only people would accept them.
–Dan
