Reason

So I finished up The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins.  While I’ll admit that it absolutely needs to be read with a large grain or two of salt, he does make some excellent points.  It’s easy to get caught up in it and start agreeing with everything, but while reading it you have to step back and ask if he’s addressing deism in general or just lashing out at hard right religious conservatives.

One point that has most stuck out to me is this: all other human disciplines need to back up their claims with proof, except for religion.  In biology, if you claim to have discovered a new species, you have to have samples and data ready to prove it, or you can’t expect to be taken seriously.  In medicine, if you claim to have discovered a new cure, you have to have proof ready.  Hell, if you claim to create a new dish, you have to have a recipe, or at least show people you can prepare the thing.

Not so in religion.  Religion, for some strage reason, has been given a free pass by humanity to make all sorts of claims- some ridiculous, some not- without ever showing any kind of backing evidence, reason, or proof further devloped than “God said so”. 

The problem with religion is where it takes its authority from.  I’ll use Christianity as an example, as that is what I was raised with and what I know best, but this can be applied to most any religion, I feel.  Chrisitianity makes a lot of claims, most importantly, that Jesus Christ is the Son of God, and whoever believes in his death and resurrection shall not perish but have eternal life. 

Well, how do we know these claims? 
They’re written down in the Bible. 
Oh, the Bible.  Well, why are we believing the Bible?
Because the Bible is the Word of God.
I see.  How do we know that?
Because it says it is.
So why are we supposed to believe in whatever the Bible says?
Because God wrote it.  (Or inspired men thousands of years ago to write it.  Still his work.)
And how do we know God wrote the Bible?
Because the Bible says he did.

And that’s the problem.  We believe what we believe about Christianity because its book, the Bible, says we should, which we should follow because the Bible tells us to.  Believe in the Bible because the Bible tells you to believe in the Bible.

This, in my admittedly small amount of research, seems to be the biggest problem with most major religions: they do not try to back up what they’re saying is true, instead they tell us we have to have faith that it’s real.  And if faith isn’t good enough for us to entirely devote our lives to something, then we writhe in torment for eternity after we die.  Nice.

Wouldn’t God want a person who believed in Him because they knew it to be true, rather than someone who just took someone else’s word for it?  I feel that the first faith would be so much stronger and realer.