Saturday, February 25, 2006
It is so easy to believe in nothing, the origin of faith
Humans need to have hope. It springs from optimism about the future. A bright optimistic future is what makes life interesting and worth living.
If life is only the same old future as the same old past, why would we want to live? We would have a life no better than our parents and our kids would have a life no better than ours. Life reduces only to exist.
Nations and cultures that are oppressed either by the government or their culture have little to no optimism for the future. Their lives are reduced to just existing.
This is especially true when they have never lived under freedom. They have no reference point to know that true basic freedom opens up the vast possibilities of unbridled human potential. Human potential provides for a brighter happier future than our parents had, and it assures that our kids will have an incrementally better brighter happier future than we had. Free people have optimism because they reap the rewards of their hard work, their creativity, and their risk taking.
When a human being is bound by its culture or government it only has its existence. His life is reduced to the same existence as an animal. Your dog only exists. But your dog has no capacity to reason, he has no capacity to think about a brighter happier fulfilling future so he is content just existing. The dog is shackled by its lack of reason. Humans are different. Humans have the capacity to think, so they can reason. Reason about their future. What happens when humans reason that they are only existing? They are not happy.
Presto, religion! Religion provides a means of contemplating an optimistic future even when they are just existing. It provides this by inventing the notion of an afterlife! Because it is invented, anything is possible in an afterlife. Now, every person has a reason to live provided they become subservient to faith. Their reward is in the afterlife. They can now just exist and be happy. So now the vast hordes of humanity who are only living to exist, with no hope for a brighter future, only have to submit themselves to the religions that require them only to accept an afterlife on faith. Presto, there lives have meaning. It has any meaning that the religion wants to define it as. Faith is so easy when you are only existing!
But is it real?
I contend that it is not real. If it is, it means that your current real life has no meaning. The only way life has meaning is to be free. Free to reason, to create, to work, to take pride in what you do, to smile about your accomplishments. Free to make life better tomorrow than it is today. Excess human potential will spill over to the neighbors and the neighbors excess spills back over on each other and, makes the collection of individual lives more optimistic, and so on. Free, Free, Freedom! If only all of humanity understood this!
JS
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
Oh how this notion has gotten bastardized and forgotten! Notice this doesn’t speak to the unalienable rights of a group, state, race, religion, nation, the poor, the rich, the middle class, or any aggregate of people. It only speaks about an individual! This is the precise reason that it worked so well in the beginning.
