Think

To Be Or Not To Be ... Part 1

If thoughts could be the base of a reality such as our Universe, whose thoughts might those be?

For the religious believers there is no doubt about it.

"God" or "gods" would be the obvious answer.

It may sound strange but, after millennia of progress, when it comes to rationalise the inexplicable, the incomprehensible or the incommensurable, our religious or non-religious minds could not have come up with a replacement for the divinity.

Our every attempt to find answers to what or who is behind the scenes of our reality, results in yet another definition of divinity.

Since the dawn of the human kind, it has been our human nature, something within ourselves, which has made us feel more secure knowing that somewhere, someone has everything under control.

Though our inquisitiveness made us acquire unimaginable volume of knowledge, many, many generations after the first human, the riddle of divine existence is as impenetrable as it has ever been.

Existence is classically defined as objective persistence in reality. Through this perspective, after thousands of years of coexistence with divinity, there is not a single shred of unequivocal evidence that our gods are real.

Humans are a species who has always made its way up on the power chain. It is our dominating traits, which drive our desire to subdue or eliminate our competition within our real world. Intriguingly enough, we never seem to have wanted to shake away our imaginary overlords. The way the divinity appears may have changed over time, but never, ever, since the first cavemen, has divinity ceased to exist in our consciousness.

All this successful maintaining of a divine fictitious presence in our lives must have been a great job done by religions.

Nevertheless, even today, after eons of human evolution and astonishing achievements, religious dogmas are not even one bit more sophisticated than the first ancestral cults. Religions today may have better setup, aligned with the modern world. Doctrine wise, though, they are as oblivious to logic and reason as they have ever been.

"Religion and, therefore, Gods..." Most of us consider Gods interchangeable with the related religions.

Religions have always fundamentally relied on being undoubtedly seen as the appointed divine representatives on earth. Like their divine heroes who can produce miracles at their discretion, religions have become masters of their own kind of miracles such as creating "undeniable truths" out of nothing.

Though credited to several historic figures the saying "if you repeat a lie often enough, it becomes the truth" must have been the key communication strategy for any religion of the world.

Without holding one single proof for their claims, religions bounced their philosophies exclusively from pure fantasy.
To inhibit any rational dispute, religions have forced ignorance as a mandatory trait of true believers. For asserting their so-called truths, religion and religious doctrines have systematically undermined logical models to support the lack of any undisputed objective evidence for their claims.

However, religions' circular argumentations, misleading mind games, moral ambiguity, violent history or subjective justice, have never convinced everyone.

Did God create man, or it was the other way around, man created God?

This is a question mostly enjoyed by atheists whose answer will always be: of course man created religion and, therefore, God! They consider that for any logical, educated person this question cannot be else than rhetorical. Divine existence can only be a mere fairy-tale created by ignorant minds.

Although perceived as a modern movement, atheist thoughts are documented to have appeared throughout the world back as the sixth century BC. Confined to a non-belief-related sense towards divinity, atheists centre their entire philosophy exclusively on denial of divinity. In fact, every religion of the world has always catalysed the appearance of an atheistic counter-reaction.

Atheism has always portrayed itself as a philosophy relying on logic, facts and science these being important reasons why it gained traction within intellectual circles. And considering the educated thinking powering it as opposed to the irrational ideology behind the religions, the natural conclusion would have been that atheism should have proven its point easily.

However, over the many centuries atheism is as far from denying divinity, as the religions are to prove it. Strangely though, the atheists have centred their entire tactic for denial of divinity exclusively on proving wrong the theist interpretation of their doctrine.

And so convinced are the atheists of their tactics' rightfulness that they sincerely believe that if religions would eventually disappear then atheism will prevail.

Just like their opponents, the theists, they have repeated until it became axiomatic that a world without religion would have to be prevalently atheistic.

However, there is one disturbing truth about atheism. Their philosophy is entirely dependent on religions. Unlike their claims, the reality is that if religions' association with divinity were somehow revoked, the whole atheism philosophy as they outlined it, would be rendered totally void.

And religion failure is closer than we think. According to the latest researches, the percentage of religious people is steadily declining. As the regression varies between 0.5 to 1.5% a year then it is certain that, within a foreseeable future, the current religions will disappear.

Leading psychologist, Nigel Barber in his book "Will religion ever disappear?" explains that the mechanism of societies moving towards a more secular majority is based on the increasing quality of life, including length of life, decline of infectious diseases, education, the rise of the welfare state, and more equal distribution of income. The bad news for atheism is that neither Nigel Barber nor other researchers listed scientific breakthroughs proving the rightfulness of atheism as the causes for the religious downfall.

If above studies are correct, the future humans, will grow less convinced of religions which will simply have a lesser role in the life and thoughts of our descendants.

So, failure of religions in the future societies will have nothing to do with denial of gods, therefore the atheism.

On the contrary, in a future where religion will be ignored, chances are the atheism in the current form, entirely based on religion, will have the same fate.

If that were true, what would happen with our perception of divinity?

End of To Be Or Not To Be ... Part 1