An Incredible Accomplishment Of Religion
Belief in God is a central tenet of religion. Indeed, the word that identifies a member of many religious sects is “believer.”
That’s not all that remarkable.
What is remarkable is that religion has the rest of humanity, the non-religious folks, accepting that God is part of religion; that if you reject religion you reject God.
Don’t believe me? Tune in to all the online arguments about belief in God, and you’ll find that an overwhelming portion of them equate belief in God with belief in religion.
What an accomplishment!
It means that religion has somehow banished animism.
Animism, as you’ll be reminded if you consult those dusty old encyclopedia volumes in your attic, is the belief by members of indigenous tribes that a Great Spirit is behind the creation of everything, and that the Great Spirit manifests himself itself in the incredible observable processes and patterns in life forms. No need for priests and bishops, or for that matter shamans, to reveal the origin of the miracle of life.
You can observe the Great Spirit at work when two organisms, e.g. human beings, produce a new incredibly complex organism without having a clue how they did it, other than, as the old song goes, “doing what comes naturally.”
The very best example of the conflation of religion and God is in the series of videos in the John 10:10 Project. Those videos beautifully illustrate a sampling of the amazing work of the Great Spirit – and then, in a literal leap of faith so huge it puts to shame Bob Beamon’s performance in the 1968 Olympics, asks the viewer to accept that what has been shown is irrefutable evidence of the claims in the four gospels of the Christian bible.
Like… what?!
Watch the videos. They don’t refute evolutionary theory, and they certainly don’t support the notion that evolution is the whole story. They will simply leave you amazed at the work of the Great Spirit, that is, God’s creation…
…that is, your next heartbeat.
But Wait, There’s More…
https://www.youarenotanatheist.com/
About the author
In 1981 Wes Kussmaul, working with friends at the MIT Joint Computer Facility, created the world’s first online encyclopedia, implemented using what he calls “the world’s worst business model.” Over the the next year the addition of social features transformed the encyclopedia into the more sustainable Delphi social network, which in 1993 was sold to Rupert Murdoch’s News America Corp.
Wes is the author of four books about bringing accountability with privacy back to social networks. One of those books caught the attention of a group at the ITU, a United Nations agency, while it was building a global PKI-based source of trust that resembled what the book advocated. Wes announced its re-launch as The City of Osmio in a 2008 presentation to the United Nations World Summit on Information Society. Wes is also the creator of Stoanova, an approach to Stoicism as it applies to problem solving.
Wes is the founder of The Authenticity Institute, a provider of a PKI platform to licensed Authenticity Enterprises, which may be seen here. The outcome of the work of those Authenticity Enterprises may be seen at Authentiverse.
It's amazing what science has sorted out. Yet it has no idea how the universe came into being, or how life began on earth. The western world has become very rational, and it has benefitted us greatly. But I do believe we have left something behind.