His answer will be entirely DISHONEST! Count on it!! While you wait...I have sketched out a few thoughts...
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Let us have some fun! Let us pretend a humanoid has grown up in a world with no familial, tribal, or cultural prejudices or preconceptions. I know that in history there have been perhaps a hundred thousand religious sects claiming a supernatural basis for their knowledge and (generally speaking) for their favoured status. But let us leave out Superiority so we don’t complicate matters! We can even ignore the tennis players and the football players who make those strange signs over their hearts after a victory!
Let us merely hypothesise this strange culture where only ONE THOUSAND people exist. Again, we will ignore the 35,00 Christian Sects alone and the 6 BILLION religious people currently roaming our blue ball.
Now, all of these 1,000 people (standing in for GROUPS in our metaphor) persuade a different conception of an imagined world and each of them consider themselves as Chosen or Favoured or Saved or Obedient or Whatever or--if not the Chosen People…then--THE PEOPLE!
Each of them has a story. Sometimes he/she has put it in writing. Sometimes he/she just tells it.
You are citizen number 1001. You want to know which if any of these stories are true. The fact that only one can be true leads you immediately to the suspicion that NONE of them are. One of a thousand is a poor random shot out of infinite choice. So you try to find a fair way to analyze these strange claims. The first thing you notice is that they ARE very strange! Many of them talk of infinite power, being in all places at once, simultaneously processing and responding to an infinite number of events and tearful supplications attendant thereto..and other such supernatural powers only imagined but never evidenced.
You ask yourself…WELL...if there WAS such an entity to be chosen out of these thousand clambering people screaming, warring, and killing each other...what would suggest it? You think, well…starting from scratch and thus imagining such a being--I could imagine it as having ANY attributes. Of course, if it is evil or unapproachable there would be no value in pursuing my enquiry. But what if this imagined thing exists and wants to be found?
Well, then why is IT saying something different to ALL of these people whom claim it? Wait! My next step is to seek the sort of persuasion that such an entity would give to a GOOD person. I have (you see) assumed that this entity wants to attract those who are somewhat more than mice, chimpanzees, wasps, and giraffes. This is an irrational assumption but a practical approach for one of my species.
So I read through the poems and prose of each of the thousand claimants as I look for something that is morally superior to ALL of these claimants. I search for tales of compassion and love couched in the most Divine and Beautiful and Rational prose imaginable! I look for tales that entirely eschew violence, genocide, rape, racism, racial hatred, ugly parenting, ignorance, stupidity, incest praised as “Good” and “Just”--and all such barbaric and sub-human attributes that would make my search for Truth either irrelevant or destructive.
But of course I do not find it. When I do find any decency…I cannot locate the author because he/she is trying to avoid being tortured by someone with no scruples or morals. I read instead about somebody murdering 1000 men with the jawbone of an ass!? I read paragraphs and books from purported persons who (if alive today) would be confined for life in a Mental Institution or a Prison.
In some of the compassionate imaginings I may find some fairly decent sentiments. I will need to look for these people in caves on the outskirts because those valuing violence and force WILL have acquired the power to forcibly proselytize their belief system of Moral Superiority Justified Through Violence.
They all have their creation stories and they are all different and they are ALL reflective of infantile thinking characteristic of a pre-scientific era. They generally talk about maximum prescience, presence, power, knowledge, blah, blah, blah in accordance to how developed their imaginations have become! Fortunately I am not prejudiced toward any of them by virtue of where I was born and how I was socialized/indoctrinated.
What I CAN do is point out what ( in these horrific dogmas) is irrational, barbaric, and anathema to human progress and survival as civilized creatures.
Hell...I would not mind if a decent "god" walked out of the sky for supper and a hike in the woods! It is the ones invented by EEeek and his like in THEIR IMAGE whom I try to warn decent people from!! :-)
And make NO MISTAKE: ALL THESE TERRIBLE GODS/CHIEFTAINS are in the image of THEIR MAKERS!!
Indeed, we can trace civilization by following our gods across the planet!! |
