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OP-ED: Faith casts a shadow over humanity
by Tom Charging Hawk
Op-Ed | 2/5/08
Posted online at 1:58 AM EST on 2/5/08
As an atheist, even I'll admit that faith has an appeal. Faith is a virtue, a strength, a comfort and a staple of the human life. Faith is a big thing. It casts, however, a long shadow.
How many scientific discoveries have churches suppressed? Not as many as the church has cultivated but with all due respect, too many. There is a price we pay for faith, from our ability to relate to humans to our ability to make scientific headway.
We've all been watching creationism. It comes, loses in a Supreme Court case, goes away for a while and then comes back in a new guise. It wasn't always creationism; in the past, it was a geocentric solar system. Before that, it was the flatness of the earth. Next it'll be ex nihilo, the idea that God created the universe from nothing, rejecting the Big Bang theory.
Faith for a long time has stood on top of science, stifling its advances despite the fact that science is the most practical and empirical truth we have. Truth, fortunately, does not compromise; creationism and other faith-based explanations have found their way to the recycling bin and will continue to do so.
But is this what we wait for then, for theology to slowly recede from the thickening of science textbooks? Perhaps not; faith has other frailties. Consider the dilemma that results from having multiple world religions. Religion tends to trump truth because it's transcendent. God is always beyond us no matter how high we go.
But what makes the Abrahamic God, a transcendent being with a beard surrounded by winged people, more real than the Hindu Ganesha, a transcendent being with four arms and the head of an elephant? To be able to choose among religions shows that faith is really more arbitrary than spiritual. Testaments to this include the growing credence of Scientology and the continual and unsettling operation of religious cults. There is an entire spectrum of colorful, extraordinary gods humanity has harbored over the eons, and despite their differences, they are all attached to a sense of belief within us. Is it better to argue that they created that belief or that the belief created them? Evidence stemming from recently created religions like the Cargo cults of the Pacific Ocean indicates that the latter is more accurate.
How many scientific discoveries have churches suppressed? Not as many as the church has cultivated but with all due respect, too many. There is a price we pay for faith, from our ability to relate to humans to our ability to make scientific headway.
We've all been watching creationism. It comes, loses in a Supreme Court case, goes away for a while and then comes back in a new guise. It wasn't always creationism; in the past, it was a geocentric solar system. Before that, it was the flatness of the earth. Next it'll be ex nihilo, the idea that God created the universe from nothing, rejecting the Big Bang theory.
Faith for a long time has stood on top of science, stifling its advances despite the fact that science is the most practical and empirical truth we have. Truth, fortunately, does not compromise; creationism and other faith-based explanations have found their way to the recycling bin and will continue to do so.
But is this what we wait for then, for theology to slowly recede from the thickening of science textbooks? Perhaps not; faith has other frailties. Consider the dilemma that results from having multiple world religions. Religion tends to trump truth because it's transcendent. God is always beyond us no matter how high we go.
But what makes the Abrahamic God, a transcendent being with a beard surrounded by winged people, more real than the Hindu Ganesha, a transcendent being with four arms and the head of an elephant? To be able to choose among religions shows that faith is really more arbitrary than spiritual. Testaments to this include the growing credence of Scientology and the continual and unsettling operation of religious cults. There is an entire spectrum of colorful, extraordinary gods humanity has harbored over the eons, and despite their differences, they are all attached to a sense of belief within us. Is it better to argue that they created that belief or that the belief created them? Evidence stemming from recently created religions like the Cargo cults of the Pacific Ocean indicates that the latter is more accurate.
Viewing Comments 1 - 3 of 3
Danny Haszard
posted 2/05/08 @ 10:50 AM EST
Jehovah's Witnesses are a cult:
A) They are at your door to recruit you for enslavement to their watchtower corporation,they will say that "we are just here to share a message from the Bible" this is deception right off. (Continued…)
JoeU
posted 2/05/08 @ 10:57 AM EST
The article mentions:
"the flatness of the earth"
"Neither history nor modern scholarship supports the claim that Christians ever widely believed that the Earth was flat. (Continued…)
JoeU
JoeU
posted 2/05/08 @ 11:10 AM EST
Correction:
Three "?" marks in the previous comment were computer
generated by the spell check feature and were NOT intended to be part of the comment. (Continued…)
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