A Believer's Thoughts on Faith

[Brian37]

My thoughts on faith is that such serves the emotional, psychological, social and sexual needs of individuals, and the anthropological, political and economic needs of societies.  Of course, because a particular meme serves the needs of individuals & groups does not cause such to become true.

The evolutionary social desire to have safety in numbers is a very real thing, and that does lead to more opportunity at resources and more offspring. But that desire in evolutionary history, started in absolute scientific darkness long before the first cities and first languages and especially religion ever existed. So people ended up making bad guesses, just like  an animal like a cat or dog or bird or deer can mistake it's reflection in glass or a mirror and come to the false conclusion that the reflection was a real separate entity. With humans we can and still do base our religious groupings on very false beliefs, just like the ancient Egyptians were successful for several thousand years, yet all that success and belief in Horus Osiris and Ra real gods didn't make them real scientifically provable.

Dawkins in his book "The God Delusion" equates this ability to make false conclusions to a impala in the tall grass in the African plains doesn't always have time to stop and confirm if the tall grass swaying is mere wind, or a lioness stalking it. It can make a very split second mistake in judgement and end up running right into the pride's trap. 

Early gods were more earthy, like the desire to find food, so they would carve images into rock or wood or use animal pigment to paint their food source animal like a fish or bear or deer as their "god". If it were a storm or a volcano they would falsely guess the storm or volcano was angry at them. 

It really wasn't much before 10,000 years ago that the majority of spirits or deities started taking on more human forms. Even then as we know, worldwide in every religion, superstitions would have their gods be able to take on multiple roles and outward looks mixing human features with animal features. Zoroaster was one of the earliest attempts at monotheism, but it never really split off into monotheism. The other attempt I can think of was that of Akhenaten the Egyptian Pharaoh. But his concept he pushed his entire rule was not popular, so when he was replaced the next Pharaoh saw that it wasn't popular and the entire society tried to erase any mention of his attempted legacy.

There really is nothing original about any one religion, not even Buddhism. Buddhism in reality is a spin off of Hinduism, which is why we see motifs of overlap in things like Karma and the repetition of new lives in reincarnation in both. In Hinduism the repeating has you get rewarded with a better human life in the next if you are good in this one, and punished with becoming a lower life form if you are bad in this one. In Buddhism it doesn't have that anthropomorphism, but it still has that repetition, but the goal there is Nirvana, which means ultimate peace and ultimate wisdom. But even the earliest mythologies of the first Buddha had him of royal linage and also a divine spirit telling his mother Queen Maya she was going to give birth to a boy who would grow up to bring wisdom to the world.

Not even the early Hebrews were monotheists. They were in reality, polytheists who simply got tired of all the fighting and confusion as to which Canaanite lesser god as part of a "divine family" under the top god "El" was the one everyone should value the most. So they elevated Yahweh to replacing the top God "El" to Yahweh being the only one true God. Then the early Christians were merely Jews who got tired of waiting for their hero to save them, and concocted the Jesus character because they wanted their hero to come within their lifetimes. Then of course there is Islam and the Koran which is supposed to be the final and corrected word of the God of Abraham named Allah. 

But even more modern religions like Rasta are also not original. Rasta stems from African Christian and African Jewish motifs. Not to mention it is really easier than you think to start a religion, and si fi writer L Ron Hubbard literally told people he could start a religion and people did in reality stupidly buy it. That religion is called Scientology.

Point is, humans want a false sense of comfort to cope with the reality that they are not eternal and they are finite. It really all just steams from a primal drive to continue.

But to the OP, the good news is, there is no heaven or hell or need to worry about what happens to you after you die, just like you don't worry what your life was like a billion years ago before you were born. You can still be compassionate, and care for others and enjoy life even with all its ups and downs. Just like you've seen an action movie, or a drama, or a comedy movie knowing it ends, but still enjoy it. Just like you can go to a music concert knowing it plays a last song, and still enjoy it. Just like you can go to a sporting event where one team wins and one team loses, and still enjoy it even though the game ends.

The two most amazing scientific facts that when the light bulb went off and I visualized the concepts, were the following. Being told the sun and our solar system is the product of the death and explosion of a prior star or stars sending all the elements into a gas cloud millions of light years across to then collect and condense like snow does in a storm and drift, creating a sun causing a dent in space/time causing gravity that keeps the planets in a continual orbit, which is more like a freefall than tugging but it still is gravity. And that keeps our solar system in tact until our sun runs out of fuel.

The other jaw dropping amazing scientific fact I learned was that the atoms in me now, are not the same atoms that were in the sperm and egg that lead to my birth. Your body is constantly recycling atoms, through digestion, processing, exchanging, expelling. You can think of it as a subway in which passengers are constantly getting on and off, and that also applies to your bones. And even after you die, while your bones will have a longer shelf life if buried under the right conditions, even that will decay over millions and millions of years. Fossils exist because they end up in conditions that are more favorable to preservation than if they were not in those certain conditions.

The truth is far more amazing and wonderful to me, in all of nature and the universe's both constructive and destructive aspects than the mythologies antiquity people made up because they didn't know any better.

The most ultimate fact currently known, until new data updates it, is that all the atoms in the universe that make up everything, started in the same infinitely dense and infinitely tiny point that lead to a quantum twitch that lead to our Big Bang that over googles and googles and googles and googles of quantum possible combinations lead to the universe and galaxy and solar system and sun and earth we know today. That is extremely humbling and awe inspiring without inserting a sky puppeteer into it.