Religion

"...and if I do something wrong or say something wrong to you, God will judge me and my karma will be affected...", she says to the atheist - as if this is to mean something to someone who truly doesn't believe in God, religions and their ilk.

It is the individual only who is timeless. Societies, cultures, and civilizations — past and present — are often incomprehensible to outsiders, but the individual's hunger, anxieties, dreams, and preoccupations have remained unchanged through the millennia. Thus, we are up against the paradox that the individual who is more complex, unpredictable, and mysterious than any communal entity is the one nearest to our understanding; so near that even the interval of millennia cannot weaken our feeling of kinship. If in some manner the voice of an individual reaches us from the remotest distance of time, it is a timeless voice speaking about ourselves. - Eric Hoffer, Reflections on the Human Condition (1973)

During the Axial Age, the world changed without an obvious transmission of ideas between various parts of the world where, as Karl Jaspers (Origin and Goal of History) wrote of, there was parallel development of certain aspects of religion and philosophy. Maybe it was a response to society's size that allowed a continued growth within the boundaries of isolated societies around the world - where it became apparent that a society could not grow within the confines of previously tolerated behavior within a society. Or maybe a superior being smacked a few foreheads. Whatever you may think, it is apparent that the axial age was pretty important to humanity.

A few nights ago, I accidentally stumbled upon the November 26th, 2010 debate between Tony Blair and Christopher Hitchens on C-SPAN. I'm not one for such debates because they almost always demonstrate the divide between the religious and we atheists, but I'll admit to being tired and curious as to what Tony Blair would say in his debate for religion. Further, I've heard Hitchens name a few times in the atheist circles but haven't read his books or heard him speak. You can catch the debate on YouTube, in order, with the following videos: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8 and Part 9.

In all, it was something good to watch before bed because it was pretty much the same boring points brought up on either side about religion that are typically brought up by people who don't agree with organized religion, from agnostics to atheists. And the defense that religions have done good as well as bad does parallel (as Hitchens indicated) a defense of communism because some communists have done good. And while Blair erred in saying that religious are working against religious divides in some instances, Hitchens caught that and set the 'Who caused the religious divides in the first place?' trap.

While having breakfast with some people close to me yesterday, an agnostic and I were ended up talking about the issue of teaching science and religion in schools to children. My own perspective is pretty clear on the science aspects; I believe not teaching evolution will be bad. Her perspective is that all should be taught and the children should make up their own minds. Arguments for or against her perspective are dangerous - not because she's crazy (she's not, or she's as crazy as I am at most). I don't disagree with her. I also don't agree with her. She and I can have conversations like that because of mutual respect - something that seems to be lacking in most of these discussions.

For one, it's a mistake that some religions - not all - simply haven't incorporated into their systems yet. It took about 367 years for Galileo to be admonished for his work as an example. Organized religion is a bureaucracy and as such resists change vehemently.

While I'm an atheist, though, I'm not an anti-theist. A plausible case could be made that societies with organized religion have done better during the last centuries, where mankind ran across moral and ethical dilemmas. A plausible case can also be made that organized religion has helped create a lot of the problems faced in the last centuries as well as the present. A deity, by its very nature, cannot be proven or disproven - it is accepted on Faith. Thus the discussions of whether there is a deity or not are wonderful diversions for people looking for arguments and seem to me to be a matter of using energy on something that cannot be solved instead of on things that can be solved.