In order for the other thread on the Bible not to get too cluttered with tangential remarks, I thought I would make a separate thread discussing the issue of faith vs reason. Rather than start off with abstractions and generalizations, I thought I would first start off with the faith I was in raised in, at home, at school, and at church: Bible, Nicene creed, weird theology and all.
Here is a list of axioms I was taught to accept whole-heartedly and unquestioningly on zero evidence.
1. An imaginary rib-woman in an allegorical story from the creation myth of an Iron Age middle-eastern desert tribe ate from the fruit of an imaginary tree.
2. In that allegorical story, God, creator of the universe, had warned said imaginary rib-woman not to eat from that imaginary tree.
3. Therefore, God decided that all humans are guilty of "original sin." We are born guilty, created sick, through no fault of our own.
(Incidentally, am I the only one who ever wonders what God thought of other species of man? Was neanderthal man also guilty of original sin?
Did homo erectus also have a 'soul' that will stand before God on Judgement day? Was Homo Habilis also created in God's image? Or is it only we Homo Sapiens who have to bear these burdens? What about the millions of Homo Sapiens who lived in the past 100 or so thousand years before Yahweh made his appearance on the stage of human history... In the 6-million year history of the hominids, notions of God, original sin, souls and damnation come in very, very late. At what point in the history of this ape species did its members become inhabited with souls, and become guilty of "original sin"?)
4. God picked that desert tribe to be his "chosen people," to the exclusion of all others.
5. God, creator of a universe with billions of billions of massive planets and stars, is very concerned with the tribal squabbles of Iron Age people over the course of a few centuries in one small desert region of a tiny speck of a planet that is 4.5 billion years old.
6. God also has a very fragile ego, and cares very much that one species, out of millions of species on that tiny speck of a planet, should "believe" in him and "worship" him.
7. God has a change of heart. He goes from being the God of just one tribe, to wanting to save all homo sapiens from the "sin" which he himself had made them guilty of by default.
8. God didn't want to just go ahead and "forgive," so he decided to arrange a little play of a death foretold starring himself as judge and innocent execution victim.
9. We discover that God has a Son who has been there all along since the beginning of time. What on earth does that mean? The notion of "son" is only defined as a male impregnating a female to produce male offspring. Does that mean God is male and had some female there with him at the beginning of time to impregnate? What else can it mean for someone to be someone else's son? If that didn't complicate matters enough, we also learn that God's Son is also God himself, whatever that means.
10. In staging previously-mentioned play of a death foretold, God's son has to take on human form, so God picks a young virgin and impregnates her without the "contribution" of a man. The child is innocent of all sin, but he is to be brutally murdered so that his heavenly father (also himself) will forgive us.
11. Said virgin remains a virgin after delivering the baby, and for her whole natural life. (How, then, does she produce "brothers" for Jesus?) At the end of her natural life, she shoots off into the sky to become the "Queen of Heaven." She is still a virgin to this day. She answers prayers, has intercessory powers, and makes apparitions to impressionable young peasant girls to deliver prophecy.
12. Back to the baby she delivered, he grew up to preach some wonderful things and perform magic. Especially impressive was his ability to bring two people back from the dead.
(Presuming this is true, did they "die" again later? Or are they still alive somewhere? If they did die, perhaps his magical powers weren't all that impressive.)
13. He was betrayed and brutally executed, in the same manner that tens of thousands of others were executed in the Roman world. Unlike the rest of them, his execution was different in that it "washed away" our "sins," both those we actually committed and those that God made us guilty of by default.
14. He rose from the dead and shot off into heaven to sit at the right hand of his father, also himself.
15. He will return one day to see who's been good and who's been naughty. He will throw the naughty ones into the fire and take the good ones to be with him forever.
16. He told us to eat his body and drink his blood every sunday. Saying magic words over wafers and wine transforms them into his body and blood, respectively, making them available for consumption.
17. He, his father, his mother, and their minions (the Saints) listen to our prayers, and sometimes intervene in the world in our favor, even to the point of suspending the physical laws of the universe.
18. Even though they don't seem to answer the prayers of starving children in Africa, I should keep cluttering their airwaves with mundane requests for help with homework, tests, and soccer games...
(As a ten year old boy, I realized I would be terribly embarrassed if God were to answer my prayers for winning soccer games, but ignore the pleas for food from some starving child in the Congo. He should help all of them first, I thought, before concerning himself with helping me on the soccer field.)
Here, in a nutshell, is the faith in which I was raised: a series of unsubstantiated claims, with no evidence whatsoever, that I am demanded to accept unconditionally, on pain of eternal damnation.
One bizarre non sequitur after another, I was taught that accepting these unquestioningly is the highest conceivable virtue.
And the only reason I could think of that I was told to accept this set of claims and not another, is that my parents believed these ones.
After years of struggle, I arrived at a simple response: extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
(PS: Sorry for the very long post.)
