Religion and I

=====I am often misunderstood in regards to what I feel and think about religion. I am not what one would call a staunch Atheist, nor do I "hate" religion. I have been told that my views, about a lot of things, are negative, spiteful and hateful. Granted, I see nothing wrong with the emotion of hate, as it was implanted in the mind of every creature by nature, and I believe that rational hate, as created by rational anger, has its place. However, I do not believe in any religion, and I think it's all ridiculous nonsense, but I don't hate it in and of itself. I hate what religion does.
=====Religion has no good side. Well, it has no good side that could not have existed without the religion. Kindness, compassion, love, and brotherliness predate religion -- probably humanity, too. Religion does not create these things, it doesn't make these things possible by existing, and it doesn't perpetuate these ideals by itself. It does, however, cause -- though not create -- prejudice, bloodshed, torture, murder, the retardation of all science, the retardation of social development, the waste of economical resources, the waste of land, the waste of building materials, the waste of time, and the waste of most general resources. All of the harmful situations it causes, merely by existing, outweigh whatever small and intangible good it may have done during its ten to twelve thousand year history.
=====The ways in which the existence and practice of religion has caused prejudice, bloodshed, torture, and murder are far too obvious, in my estimation, to waste time talking about in detail. Just look at the battles between the Irish Catholics and Protestants, the Indian Muslims and Hindus, or the Middle Eastern Jews and Muslims to learn more about that. If war for the sake of intangible nonsense doesn't satisfy you, read all you can about Gandhi's feelings toward the black population in South Africa, or how the Serfs were treated in Lama ruled Tibet-- religiously fueled caste systems are a nice example of these obvious pratfalls, too. I think, though, religion has done more damage to the planetary population, including all species, by purposefully retarding the development of science, technology, and rational thought.
=====War and hate predate religion, too. Don't get me wrong. But why do those two things exist? Well, there are a lot of reasons to fight a war. Most of those reasons have something to do with survival. For instance, if you are the leader of a tribe, or even a country, and you don't have enough land or food to take care of your subjects, you have to start trying to expand and attain means of survival. This might mean you have to try to take some of your neighbor's land. Maybe your neighbor has more fertile land, and you don't even have enough resources to last your people another year. In this case, you fight your neighbor for his soil, and possibly his horded resources. But, that neighbor might not have enough resource and land to share, and certainly isn't going to give up those hard earned assets without a conflict. These are rational reasons to fight -- it's base survival.
=====Base survival is why all creatures in the animal kingdom war. Religion has done little -- more like nothing -- to develop ways to prevent these kinds of situations from happening. Instead, religion makes it possible for the people of one tribe or country to justify their actions by deciding that they are the chosen people of God or gods, thus have a greater right to survival than the other tribe or country. It isn't hard to be the chosen people of a God or gods created within your own culture. With science and technology, forces of which religion stands in direct defiance, it is possible to develop ways to prevent these kinds of base survival confrontations from taking place. With different technologies in architecture, it is possible to develop and utilize new ways to efficiently distribute and use land; with different technologies in agriculture, it is possible to develop and utilize new methods to maximize crop harvests, selectively breed or alter plants so that they bear the optimum nutritional value while taking up the least amount of acreage; with different technologies in medicine, it is possible to develop and utilize new ways to heal illness, improve the quality and longevity of life, and learn more about nutrition and exercise. Technology cannot exist without science. In these, and many more, ways, science could help bring many rational and necessary human conflicts to an end, whereas religion can only mutate such conflicts into acts of emotional and cultural precedence.
=====Religion causes the retardation of scientific development in many ways. Throughout the years of all religions, not just Christianity, many scientific and medical fields of study have been randomly dubbed immoral or sacrilegious and consequently outlawed. This slowed the evolution and theoretical development of such fields to a crawl, or even a standstill, during many of the human races formative years. One can only speculate how much farther along, had the Dark Ages and the crusades not interfered with development for hundreds of successive years, our medical and scientific knowledge would be. It is possible to say that we could be at least two to three hundred years ahead of ourselves, had the world's greatest minds been allowed to come together and study all science during those times. Today, religion still makes it possible for people to want to fight against medical and scientific advance. Followers of religion have fought to make it illegal to develop many important fields: stem cell research, a potentially powerful tool that could be used to not only completely understand the human body and how it works, but to fight cancer and many other degenerative and genetic diseases; humane methods of euthanasia, which, for some people, is the only escape from a life of endless and hopeless agony; genetic engineering, a field that, again, could not only help us to understand the make up of all life on the planet, and thus help us to develop better medical techniques and medicines, but DOES allow us to grow crops, for the entire planet, that are more resilient, more bountiful, more manageable, and completely safe, which have already saved billions of lives across the globe. If the religious or otherwise fanatically idealistic minds of the world succeed, or would have succeeded in some cases, in stopping these fields of research, they would have been responsible, directly, for the murder of billions of people. Religion's ability to cause the retardation of scientific development is quite possibly its most dangerous liability.
=====The religious also seek to put an end to other fields of study, such as evolution. Evolution is the scientific model for the development of life on this planet. Some of the arguments against evolution are too ridiculous to go into with great detail, but if you'd still like to take a peek, look here and here. Amongst some of the arguments made by the religious against evolution are: "How can so much functional complexity exist in the world without an intelligent plan behind its creation and execution?"; "How can so many 'advanced (a word they love to misuse in an evolutionary context)' species have developed on our planet from just single celled organisms?"; "Evolution has no model for 'devolution (something they just decided exists),' so only religious Creationism can account for things like flightless birds, legless lizards, and unnecessary bodily organs, right?" The rebuttals to the arguments against evolution are all fairly simple or rationally simplistic.
=====The first argument, about how so much complexity can exist without an intelligent plan, comes from the religious Creationists' lack of understanding and study of evolutionary principal and theory. It is the understanding of these people that evolution is based on completely random variables. They don't understand, at all, the meaning of natural selection. Natural selection is the means by which some species survive over others and genetic differences develop in those species. Natural selection works very much the same was as selective breeding works in agriculture. However, in nature, the process is slowed a little. For example, if a farmer wants to make sure that he has a good herd every year, he will try to breed the biggest, strongest and healthiest animals he can to ensure that their offspring inherit these traits. Natural selection works the same way. Let's say that a species of animal, a pig perhaps, lives in an environment which is rapidly changing. The weather has gone from warmer weather to slightly colder weather, and new predators, with sharper teeth and claws than usual, have moved into the territory due to the climate changes. It will be the pigs of this species with the thicker layers of fat, predisposition for longer body hair, and thicker skin that will have the better chance of surviving into adult hood and mating with other members of its species that also had these tools of survival. Over as little as twenty generations, as it has been found, these slight genetic differences can become completely developed and perfected mutations. Over a few hundred generations, these mutations stabilize and the pig becomes a new species or subspecies. Other members of the species that did not have the predisposition for thicker blubber, longer hair, or thicker skin would have either been killed off or moved out of the area in search of a climate more like the one for which they are suited. Therefore, natural selection is not random at all, but simply a version of selective breeding brought on naturally by necessity and circumstance. In a sense, there is a plan, but there is no active intelligence behind it; the plan is for survival.
=====The second argument, about advanced forms of life coming from life forms that are but a single cell, is my personal favourite. Not only does it exhibit the Creationists' lack of study of the scientific theory that they are trying to disprove, but it exhibits their lack of perception of the world around them. Firstly, in this argument, Creationists ALWAYS misuse and misunderstand terms like "advanced" in an evolutionary context. "Advanced" is not something that is decided upon by a panel of human beings, scientists or clerics, and it is NOT relative to the genetic complexity of a species. "Advanced," as determined by the stand point of evolution, is based on the ability of a species to survive and to thrive. Secondly, the act of a complex organism evolving from a single celled organism is an event that happens all the time. In fact, we see the result of this event roughly two-hundred fifty thousand times a day, around the world. I am referencing, of course, to the conception, development, and birth of a child -- be it human or otherwise. If such a development can take place, over only nine months, inside the confined universe of an animal's body, why is it so difficult to understand how it could take place, over billions of years, inside the body of the true, infinite Universe? I don't understand that kind of reasoning; they just aren't trying to employ common sense.
=====The third argument is one invented entirely by the Creationists and has no bearing on anything remotely scientific -- evolution included. It is the concept of "devolution" within the context of the theory of evolution. This doesn't really exist, at least not in the way they think it does. An example of their argument can be found at the Answers in Genesis website, but I'll give a quick overview of it for the sake of this piece. According to the Creationists, if an animal has four legs, like a lizard, and at some point it "reverts" back to having no legs, similar to a snake, this is an instance of "devolution." In other words, they believe that the animal with four legs is "more advanced" than the animal with no legs. Again, as mentioned previously, that is not how one defines "advanced" in an evolutionary context. Most, if not all, snake species have "toes," located near the reproductive organs, that are used for various things. It is believed that these "toes" are the remnants of legs that have since evolved away. What the creationists are also missing in this example is the fact that all change in natural species is the result of adaptation and mutation. So, all change is considered "evolution," because whether the animal gains an organ or body part or loses one doesn't make any difference; it is adapting to a new environment in the most efficient way possible. It is quite possible that in a particular environment, or series of environments, that some species of lizard would find it easier to catch particular prey, move through particular terrains, escape particular predators, maintain body temperature, and/or swim without the use or need of legs, but, instead, with a stronger, larger body. So, over a few generations, the appendages get smaller and smaller, and their bodies get longer and stronger, as those are the generations that are most likely to survive and breed, until eventually the legs are gone and the body is a streamline, well articulated, powerful muscle. The loss of the legs is not "devolution," as the creationists believe, but evolution. In that particular environment, whatever it may be, that particular species of lizard is more apt to survive with no legs and a modified body, while other species of lizards may adapt in other ways that allow them to maintain their more lizard-like qualities in the same environment. Both resulting species are well adapted and evolved to survive and thrive in their environment, and neither is more "advanced" than the other, but they are both better suited to survive than was whatever animal from which they evolved. So, despite the Creationists' claims that a) devolution exists in the world, and b) the theory of evolution has no model for it, evolution does have a model for when a creature adapts to lose organs or appendages that have been rendered unnecessary by environmental change.
=====Such disregard for logic, science, and, as a result, humanity does tend to get me worked up. Not too much, though. I am in rare form when I am truly in a rage over anything. It does happen, though. It doesn't even have to be over something one might consider profound, and I am not ashamed or taken aback by my anger. I embrace it as one of the many gifts of emotion bestowed upon me by natural selection. But, despite my anger, to whatever degree I might experience it, I do not hate religion. I simply understand the lack of need for such a cultural device in this day in age. I also realize the hindrance that religion has become to the development of the world. I realize that, as long as people continue to give it the power, religion will continue to stall and retard the growth of science, culture and civilization, and I'd like to see that come to an end. I think its ok for people to practice, study, and appreciate religion -- as a belief structure -- in the privacy of their home or private club. I just don't think its ok for religion to be practiced, studied, or appreciated -- as a belief structure -- anywhere else.
=====I am not a staunch Atheist, because I have a few ideas about the origin of existence, and some of them do involve a "creator." However, I don't believe that such a creator would be particularly benevolent, omnipotent or supernatural. Instead, I think it would be intertwined with the very essence of nature and the cosmos. Perhaps, time, being necessary for any progress to take shape, would had to have been present before all other things; otherwise, all other things could not have progressed into being. So, perhaps time, being the first thing, created the means by which the rest of the universe came into formation. If something creates, it must be creative, and, in order to be creative, there must be some kind of intelligence at work. That is, of course, a very fanciful theory. It is less a theory, actually, and more a game of thought. I do not consider or label myself an Agnostic, because I think to do so would be to label myself indifferent. I can't fathom how someone could be wholly indifferent to the origins of the Universe, so I can't be an Agnostic; and, I do believe in the possibility of a natural, not supernatural or spirit-based, creator or god, so I am neither a true Atheist.