forest light

Sunday, April 30, 2006

God is an outdated concept and Rationality is humanity's salvation

I am intrigued about the existentialist thing. (Existentialism = chaos.) The dictionary says existentialism means that there is no coherent criteria that serves as man’s basis of free choice, and that individual essence determines existence, and the universe is absurd. As a practical matter existentialism is chaos and therefore needs to be balanced with a belief in God, so I see how that makes yin yang sense. So in the beginning, God was a concept by which to structure a chaotic civilization. The concept of God gave form to the void, and it balanced life’s chaos. But the concept of God is no longer useful because humans are too knowledgeable for that now. Rationality is humanity’s new salvation. If we continue to believe in the buggy-whip of God, our society will fall into chaos and here’s why: Believing in God defines something that can’t be defined yet. Every religious teacher acknowledges that certainty in God comes down to faith. Faith is a belief that is not based on proof. By accepting concepts that are not based on proof, there’s no standard for what is real. Is Allah real? Are the forty virgins in heaven real? As a believer in God are you telling me that the thing you can’t prove is real, but the thing they can’t prove is false? That’s chaos! Belief in God is leading us to chaos. Maybe God is real, we can’t say for sure. But by pretending (aka having faith) that something that cannot be proven is real, we are tolerating a huge disconnect. The concept of God no longer fills the void with something that makes sense like it used to. The concept of God now creates a void by substituting the un-provable for truth. The good news is that Rationality (Reason) acknowledges that there are still wonderful and amazing things out there to discover – maybe that a God created the universe in six days. Reason seeks to discover the unknown and understand it. Most importantly, Reason provides a universal framework on which to build the rest of humanity. If we could get rid of faith, we’d all have something in common and that sounds… heavenly.