Religion and I

                          I have never been a very religious person, if you want to know the truth. I mean, I respect people that are very strong in faith and all, but when they come to me trying to preach stuff, I turn the other way. It’s not that I have the devil in me (though, that’s probably what some believe), it is for other reasons that no matter how I explain it, they still do not understand. As a scientist, I want concrete evidence and facts for everything, not suppositions from a long time ago. All of my siblings were baptized in the Roman Catholic Church, I was not. Perhaps it was because my parents forgot or they just didn’t have the money, at the time, to throw a party, which is traditional in Mexico. When I finally reached maturity and greater awareness, I never looked toward any religion, as my mind was made up that the Bible (and the Koran and the other holy scriptures in the world) is just good literature, like the Iliad or Beowulf or Gilgamesh. Usually, people that I see who look towards religion as a way of life tend to be individuals that went through life traumas like drugs or death of a loved one, or the weak of mind that are easily manipulated. Nonetheless, I understand the circumstances and commend those people in achieving a degree of spiritual happiness. Who knows? Maybe I will achieve it someday.

                        Given my natural curiosity, I never take something that is hearsay for truth. I always do research on things I do not know about, before accepting it as fact. I firmly believe that people should never take something heard from another person (or the media) as complete truth and to find out first hand. I would spur even my children to challenge orthodox thinking and question most of the things in life, to question why things are the way they are. On the topic of religion, for example, I would ask myself something like: How did Mexico and most of Latin America become Catholic countries? Why is almost every Hispanic I know a Catholic? Surely, something happened along the way that brought about this present configuration. And it did. Hundreds of years ago, countless gold greedy Spanish Conquistadors came to the Americas to annihilate Indians and convert the survivors to Catholicism. They literally cut their heads off if they did not renounce their gods and take the one true God from the Bible as their new absolute Lord and savior. When threatened with decapitation, most people will definitely do a little change of religion and hence, where Spanish came, Catholics emerged. Many people do not even question this; they simply make it as tradition. Their great-grandmother was Catholic, their grandmother is Catholic, their mother is Catholic, and so they must also be Catholic. It’s an endless chain until the link comes to someone like me or someone who opts for another religion because Catholicism just isn’t cutting it for them. 

                    I chuckle at some of the things religious people say when attacking non-believers or men of science. Granted, science does not have all the answers and it never will, neither will religion, everything is imperfect in this blue sphere of mystery that is our planet. God as the answer for everything unknown is a bit of a cliché. When priests attack evolution, they will adamantly say that we were created in His holy image and that we do not come from monkeys. They say the mere idea that we came from primates is a ridiculous lie, and that evolution should not even be taught in school. Actually, they are partially right. Their hate for Darwin aside, we do not come from monkeys, we come from something else that evolved into monkeys and ourselves. Fossils do not lie, you can find vestigial structures indicating evolution from a common ancestor, all people have to do is a little digging, and more importantly, have an open mind. The evidence for evolution is staggering in magnitude, yet religious people still do not believe it, they’d much rather believe that women came from a single rib, which makes more sense to them than evolution. Does not an HIV virus evolve to be immune to drugs acting on its reverse transcriptase? Exploring the Bible even further, I run into complete mystery. For example, in the story of David and Goliath, Goliath was a giant and there was a whole army of them, whole armies of giants. Well, if there were armies of giants then where the heck are the fossils of these so giants? Surely, we must have found one by now, but here we are thousands of years later and we have not. I do not doubt for a second that Jesus was more than just a great man, that he was the Messiah, but mankind has a tendency to ruin things.

                   Priests and pastors usually know most of the Bible and interpret things the way they believe, given the ambiguity, but most cannot teach you anything else that is relevant in this life. Most of the preachers I have met have been very ignorant in subjects like philosophy, mathematics, literature, and of course, science. Imagine being in a world where only Bibles existed in every library of the world, no other books, just the Bible. We wouldn’t have medicine, technology, or engineering (there wouldn’t even be libraries), basically we would just be slaves to a system with no independent mind, and we would live in rubble, frozen in time. Like people living in caves in Afghanistan. Most of the greatest minds that have ever lived didn’t believe in the biblical God. Paul Dirac, Richard Feynman, and Albert Einstein were geniuses of the highest caliber and being at such pedestal, they were able to see the truth concerning religion. Take for instance, what Richard Feynman says about this subject: 

“It is a great adventure to contemplate the universe, beyond man, to contemplate the universe without man, as it was in a great part of its long history and as it is in a great majority of places. When this objective view is finally attained, and the mystery and majesty are fully appreciated to then turn the objective eye back on man viewed as matter, to see life as part of this universal mystery of greatest depth, is to sense an experience which is very rare and very exciting. It usually ends in laughter and a delight in the futility of trying to understand what this atom in the universe is, this thing—atoms with curiosity—that looks at itself and wonders why it wonders. Well, these scientific views end in awe and mystery, lost at the edge in uncertainty, but they appear to be so deep and so impressive that the theory that it was all arranged as a stage for God to watch man’s struggle for good and evil seems inadequate.“ 

Now, clearly the Bible does not talk about atoms and all, but Feynman brings out an important point: everything is made of atoms, albeit atoms usually arranged in a super complex way. What would be the point of making such a complicated universe with so many galaxies and comets and stardust if God only wanted to watch a battle between good and evil? What do the galaxies that are so far away and the supernovas exploding and the asteroids colliding with planets have to do with good and evil? What do the little ants making a colony near the edge of the freeway have to do with God’s interest in this battle between light and dark? The ants are going about their business making a colony for the queen and establishing the well being of their society while people are just driving by, oblivious. God wouldn’t have added all the extras if they weren’t to be part of something more deep and intricate than merely observing a battle of good and evil. God does play with dice. Let’s take a look at another excerpt by this Nobel Prize winner:

“God was invented to explain mystery. God is always invented to explain those things that you do not understand. Now, when you finally discover how something works, you get some laws which you’re taking away from God; you don’t need him anymore. But you need him for the other mysteries. So therefore you leave him to create the universe because we haven’t figured that out yet; you need him for understanding those things which you don’t believe the laws will explain, such as consciousness, or why you only live to a certain length of time — life and death — stuff like that. God is always associated with those things that you do not understand. Therefore I don’t think that the laws can be considered to be like God because they have been figured out.”

I totally agree with Dick Feynman on this. A long time ago, people would say apples fell from trees because God made them fall. It wasn’t until someone smart like Newton came and finally realized that apples fell due to the law of gravity, not because God flicked his invisible finger on them. After the law of gravity was confirmed, God wasn’t needed to explain why apples fell. The Aztecs, or more accurately, the Mejicas, sacrificed people to their gods because they could not explain the mystery of drought. They just figured the gods were angry and blood offered to them will bring rain again. We haven’t strayed too much from that premise. Our curiosity demands an answer, and if we do not have the answer, we assign the answer to be the will of God, at least the big, deep questions.

                   Albert Einstein once said, “Religion without science is blind, and science without religion is lame.” In other words, we need both branches to get somewhere, to advance the human race. Einstein viewed God as Nature. A God that is uninterested in the affairs of humankind. Call me crazy, but it sounds very appealing to me. At the end of the day, I do believe in God, but not the God that is so concerned with good versus evil and into the doings of every human being. The view evangelical Christians hold is that one must repent for all sins committed and accept Jesus Christ to gain entry into heaven. When in heaven all that must be done is glorify the Lord for an eternity. I seriously doubt that God created us to be mere zombies to glorify and sing to him and jump up and down for him for an eternity. That sounds more like a tyrant, the stuff of dictators, who repeatedly wants his subjects to show how great he is. I believe God created us for another purpose, what that purpose is no one knows. I tread without fear because I am a good person. In fact, I am more good and pure than some people that proclaim to be saved already. Don’t laugh! This isn’t reality TV.