Why God?

I may or may not publish this comment. I know there are people who will regard any negative comments about religion as a personal assault. I know that there is no arguing with religious convictions since they are not rational thoughts but rather irrational beliefs. Clearly you can't dispute a belief with a rational position. They occupy non-interacting worlds.

Religious believers tend to want to equalize the playing field by treating genuine rational theories by simply asserting their beliefs, as if it should be self-evident that their position has logical merit. In fact, there is simply no logical merit to any religious belief system, and there cannot be, since belief systems are not based on rational assumptions in the first place.

Secondly, theories, such as evolution or quantum theory, are not belief systems. We should not "believe" in a theory. By definition, a theory is a working set of logical hypotheses that can be tested in the real world, at least in principle. I was asked recently if I "believed in evolution", as if I were a member of an antagonistic religion. The question itself is a contradiction in terms and can't be answered as asked. That fact alone should tell you something about the nature of the thinking process that gave rise to it. When a religious person wants to debate "theories", they do not have a right to assert their religious belief as a theory.

Nothing about any religion allows it to be considered as if it were a theory. I can and will change my theories about anything when contradictory facts of sufficient validity appear. But what religious person changes their belief system when such facts occur? A theory is not a tentative belief. It is an ongoing testable set of hypotheses. What religion has such things?

Besides the absurdity of attempting to place religion on the same level as science, I find myself wondering, as I get older and less afraid, why people need religion at all? And here I am speaking of the mythos of religion, not the ethos. Many religions have very good prescriptions for behavior; some of them work better than others, of course, but as guidelines they are certainly useful to society and help hold it together. But the mythos of any religion is basically absurd. Do we need to posit the creation of the earth via supernatural means when we can readily account for it by natural ones? Do we have to believe in the supernatural before we can adhere to a moral/ethical position? Do we have to posit an afterlife that makes up for the manifold injustices in this world, or should we better try to improve the world we live in?

It seems to me that when people talk about or debate religion, they focus on the supernatural aspects of it, and ignore the only part of religion that has any possible utility: the prescriptions for behavior. Perhaps some people are comforted by their belief in the "afterlife", but not all of us need to believe in fantasies and supernatural events, and perhaps their irrational beliefs in magic interfere with their apprehension of the real world. Why should we need irrational comfort to deal with the world as it is? It is difficult for all of us. We all have pain and loss of all kinds to deal with; believing in a fantasy afterlife doesn't return the dead to us, and funerals, even with all the trappings of religion, are not happy places with smiling people.

I certainly don't believe that we are rewarded or punished for our behavior in this world. We have only to read the daily paper to be disillusioned about the fairness of the universe. So what do I need a Big Daddy In The Sky for? Even for the believers, it must be horribly obvious that he or she isn't doing much of anything.