Why religion won´t go away

By Anonymous

Why hasn´t religion faded away in the face of enormous scientific evidence that its claims are impossible? Every major religion was founded before science was invented. We now know that life after death is not possible, and that there is no heaven or hell (imagine how crowded they would be by now!). The conclusions of most contemporary astrophysicists and microbiologists is that it is highly unlikely that there is a god, at least not in the way it is conceived of in religions, or that there is life after death. It is impossible to walk on water, convert water into wine, die and come back to life. A woman cannot be impregnated by an ethereal spirit.

Every civilization in history (and probably before) has created a religion. A belief in a god and an afterlife are artifacts of the limitations of the human brain. We crave an explanation for how the universe (and we) were created, and since we can’t understand it in its complexity, we make up a simple explanation. Thomas Edison rather indelicately said, “Religion is a lazy and ignorant man´s way of explaining what he can´t understand.” Further, we can’t conceive of our own nonexistence, or that we will never see loved ones again, so virtually every religion has invented some form of life after death. Many people can’t comprehend a totally material world where the only values and purpose are those that we create. They don’t believe that humans will act morally without commandments from above and fear of punishment if we err.

Christian evangelicals worship in Brazil.

Most well-educated religious people sense that traditional religion is a house of cards; therefore, they feel it must be protected from scrutiny lest it collapse on itself. At least one religion posits that “heretics” should be killed. This is a form of cognitive dissonance; that is, an uncomfortable state of mind that occurs when a person holds several different beliefs that are not mutually possible. It usually causes people to change one of their beliefs to restore balance, regardless of evidence to the contrary.

An interesting point is that there have been thousands of religions throughout history, and religious people have convinced themselves that all of them are false except for their own. Atheists just go one god further. They put the Judeo-Christian god in the same category as Zeus, Thor, and Vishnu – as mythology.

No rational person today believes that Noah saved every species of animal from floods covering the entire earth by putting two of each on a big boat. Or that god told Abraham to kill his son to prove his faith. We have been into outer space and there is no heaven up there. So, we dance around these inconvenient facts by calling scriptures “metaphors,” or a “different dimension from the physical.” Some claim that god does not exist in space and time – but that is the definition of something that doesn´t exist. And we choose the parts of scriptures that we want to believe and ignore or rationalize the rest.

Some people, when moving away from religion, aren´t quite ready to go the whole way. They stop somewhere in the middle by saying, “I´m spiritual, but not religious.” The trouble with this is that there is also no evidence for spirits, or soul for that matter. It is more honest to name that feeling with descriptive words, such as compassion, connectedness, even euphoria or expansiveness.

Many studies have reached the conclusion that religiosity is inversely correlated with intelligence; that is, on average, the more religious someone is, the lower their IQ is likely to be.

Zuckerman et al. published an updated meta-analysis in 2019 with 83 studies finding “strong evidence” of a negative correlation between religiosity and intelligence (-.20 to -.23). https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religiosity_and_intelligence#:~:text=Zuckerman%20et%20al.,23

Richard E. Daws and Adam Hampshire concluded in 2017 that “it is well established that religiosity correlates inversely with intelligence.” https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5742220/

Instead of believing myths that have been handed down by ancient societies, a simpler, alternative philosophy is “think for yourself and act the way you wish everyone would act.” Base your opinions on real world observations and logic. (Logic is based on prior observations.)
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Anonymous is a Cuenca resident.