Dr. David Wilbur: Power and Illusion: Summary – Personal Postscript. Part 16, Chapter 15

To function in the world we need goals and values and we like to have an explanation for our goals and values. This explanation may be thought of as our personal ideology. For the last few thousand years a religion has been the most common way of providing this ideology. For most people religious indoctrination comes through their family and culture and is largely set in place while they are very young and impressionable; usually less than ten years old. For the majority this is then set for life.

Varieties of Need for Religious Belief

Some have thought that the most important benefit of religion is to re-enforce our natural optimism in the face of uncertainty or catastrophe. People do vary greatly in their need for and appreciation of religious support. There will probably never be a universal ideology or religious program that satisfies all human needs. The most desirable human society may be one that nurtures and protects a wide variety of ideologies without letting any one of them become dominant and controlling. Intolerance would be that society’s great “sin.”

Emotion and Reason

Religious loyalties are usually enmeshed with powerful emotions. They do not spring from some rational analysis of the world. The religious claim that reason and faith are both ways to knowledge but faith is clearly used to support a variety of conflicting religious claims while rational analysis only supports one system of scientific understanding. Theology attempts rational explanations for specific religious traditions but is probably irrelevant for the majority of lay members.

The Price of Refuge

The religious refuge has many kinds of costs. The financial cost includes at least that of clergy, missions, schools and memorial architecture. An emotional cost for some religious people is that of separating from an evil world: losing friends and family who won’t share their belief system. There also may be the cost of guilt over breaking victimless rules.

Nihilism about the world may mean giving up on attempts to find happiness in this world as one urgently seeks salvation in another world. Seeking escape through a monastic life may also lead to an emotional life impoverished by the absence of the struggles and rewards of sexuality and family.

Certainty

She believed in nothing; only her skepticism kept her from being an atheist.

Jean Paul Sartre, The Words

Ideological beliefs that are held with confidence or certainty contain within that confidence a demand to control others, so as to make them do what is in their own best long-term interest. Such certainties have justified innumerable human evils. Our only certainty should probably be that our understandings are conditional and evolving.

Religious history itself is a long argument against religious certainty. Some religions however depend on confident claims that they know the mind of God, to justify their calls for contributions and control of the believer’s life.

The Supernatural

Belief in some form of alternate reality or supernatural realm seems common to all religions. None offers a description of a method for a living human to use in validating this belief. Alternatively we have no method of disproving the existence of this realm. Over many years one may look at the day-to-day operation of the world and find there no evidence that any supernatural power is concerned with human experiences of good or evil.

Origins

Confident claims about ultimate origins are most reasonably judged to be faith statements, whether they are religious or scientific. The Intelligent Design movement has offered some interesting talking points but none seems as compelling as the success of evolutionary models in helping us understand the relationships in the living world. We will never have enough information to be sure of every detail of everything that happened in the past.

Religion as a Political and Practical Tool

Religions may be seen as practical ideological tools useable to encourage or discourage various behaviors that leaders find useful. With confident belief one can justify persecution or destruction of the enemies of the faith or of God, especially when those are thought identical. Religion may also be used to encourage charity and concern for the weak and downtrodden. In any durable and important conflict, religion is usually found on both sides—see, for instance, the American Civil War and Nazi Germany.

Thoughts for Life Regardless of Religion

These are a few thoughts about a satisfying life with or without religion.

Happiness is now.

Respect all life.

One route to happiness is to make another life happy.

There is much beauty, if you look.

Most people are doing the best they can.

The most rewarding thing is to create.

Life has the meaning we give it.

Humor about our life brings perspective and humility.

A better God than those offered is imaginable.