Why I am against religion

I’m not an atheist, I’m an agnostic. I do not reject the existence of God, nor do I say there is one. I have never experienced the god that people usually define. If I do, I shall believe. However, I have experienced nature. It has its own behaviour. The purpose of science is to observe nature and put forward hypotheses to explain the behaviour of nature and predict events.

                As far as explaining and predicting nature goes, religion only looks like a mask to people’s ignorance to me. For example, take the rain, sun, wind, sea, etc.. In quite a lot of religions, each of these have a god associated with them. But now we know that each of these natural phenomena can be broken down in terms of atomic behaviour. If religion has to be updated to keep up with what we do know for sure, then all the above gods must be dumped in favour of an “atom god”. Some religions believe in a heaven and hell, spirituality, soul, etc. I prefer not to worry about things I cannot observe, like souls, the other worlds etc. You can tell me that they exist and I’m just ignorant of them, I prefer to keep things simple and believe in what I perceive. After all, I am what I can ‘feel’. Talk about heaven and hell, the belief was that heaven is up in the sky and hell is down in the earth. Now we do know for sure that there’s no “up in the sky”. Sky is but a vast vacuum and the earth is not special celestially. There are the stars and the planets and there doesn’t seem to be any room for heaven “up there”. And “down there”, we know that the earth has a crust, mantle and core, etc.. Then there is the idea that god created human beings and all. Each religion has its own version of the creation and all of them cannot be true. But we all now believe in fossils, dinosaurs, tectonic movements, micro organisms, etc.. none of which had any mention in any religious texts. Without going into too much detail, I’d just say that all the scientific facts we have point against the way in which religions say mankind came into existence (it could still be that some super power ,  a.k.a nature, “created” mankind).

                So, I just mentioned some reasons that point against religion. Now we’ll look at the one thing that tells me why I should believe in some religion. The first and most important thing- I’ll be rewarded (most probably in an after-life) if I follow what the religion says, or be punished if I don’t. It’s not very hard to see that for a society to survive, there must be some ground-rules. I find it very easy to believe that what religions preach are just some rules that make sure that people work together to make the concept of society work. This appeals more to me- you want the comfort of living in a society, live by the rules. And what better way to tell this to people than to tell them about rewards and punishments?

                Most people believe in religion because their elders told them about religion and that is the way it is. They are told that they must not question religion or god. I prefer to question a lot of things. I believe in something only if I find the argument convincing. Religion does not offer an argument at all and expects people to take it by faith. This is totally against the scientific way. And I guess I must remind everyone that it is because of the scientific way that we now have computers, satellites, internet, televisions, etc. We have them now because someone questioned things, someone did science. If someone wants to be religious, maybe they should give up everything science has offered through the endless work of all the great people who took the effort to question things rather than just take them on faith.

To summarize

1.       Religion must be viewed as a set of moral rules that help people live peacefully in a society.

2.       Religious notions have been advanced when science could not explain something. As our scientific knowledge expands, our understanding of things gets better and better and the domain of religion/god would be further reduced.

3.       Remember that computers and cell phones could not have been invented if everyone just prayed and worshipped. Someone had to do science.

4.       Thanks to the freedom taken by all the religious writers in glorifying the role of god, a wealth of knowledge from our ancestors has been lost when legends, myths and scriptures were passed over generations.