This is a subject matter which I haven’t ever written before either here on in the Newton website, in fact I don’t normally even get drawn into discussion about religion (or politics) but somehow it came up in conversation earlier today, and I found myself thinking about it, so what the hell, here’s a few lines
I’ve never been a religious person, I wouldn’t call myself an atheist or an agnostic, I suppose I am more a Humanist, someone who thinks you should be able to live a decent life without having it ruled or controlled by religious or superstitious beliefs.
I think everything known about human history supports the humanist view more than any other, man’s existed on the earth for hundreds of thousands if not millions of years, and I would argue that at no time did any of the different societies not have some sort of Gods to which they prayed, and each one would have citizens utterly convinced their Gods were the one and only true Gods.
Every different religion cannot possibly be correct, many, one, or all of them must be praying to a false deity, unless there all correct and that wouldn’t make sense to the one God scenario which most religions follow, so I think the presumption should be, that they are all equally wrong, and following on from that, that if the many historical world societies and their many millions of people of all races, for thousands of years, were praying to their own now long forgotten Gods, then why should the same not be true for current religions, are they correct or just the latest religion in a continuous cycle that revolves and recycles into a newer version every few thousand years.
I wonder how many of the religions that ever existed, were no more than some king, pharaoh or governments pre-calculated way to keep their populations controlled, having a book or chiseled tablet with the ruleset required to keep the order in that society, it seems to me that religion would be (is) a "most excellent" medium for control of citizens.
Each successful society seems to have rolled over the previous religions into their own, Its like a code project forking, part going stale getting forgotten and a new better code coming forth and attracting newer brighter coders, the Romans and everyone else just wrapped earlier religious beliefs around and into their own Gods, then Christianity etc have done the same to the old Roman Gods, so that I do not think any of the religions have any real historical merit, I mean, whats 2000 years when judged against 100,000 years of mankind walking the earth, some people would have us believe that for the first 98,000 years no-one prayed, yet were finding archaeological sites in places like Turkey’s 1963 discovery of the stunning Gobekli Tepe estimated to be 11,000 years old, it predates Stonehenge by upto 6000 years, and noone knows to which Gods the Stone Henge builders prayed, so you can pretty much bet the choice of deity at Gobekii Tepe had little to do with any of our current religious options.
New religions and idea’s popup all the time, and gain massive followings, Scientology has been around now for about 60 years, and although its been named in parliament as a cult, its just been allowed by the Courts to hold its first in church wedding, its now by this court ruling recognised as a religion equal to any other, with Scientology being based on the belief that trillions of aliens got stranded on Earth by a dictator from another world millions of years ago I do wonder if any of our current religions could ever roll that into a future all encompassing religious model. There-again, we might find that in the future people move away from faith based religions, to some form of Tech based system, kids may well praise console companies and see games releases as preachings, with historically classic console versions and game levels changing hands at some future Sothebys auction like a Rembrandt painting or a 12th century Latin bible might sell today.
So, having laid out my own humanist belief, you might ask why the hell I agreed to look at building a website for Christian news and Prayer requests, well there isn’t really an answer to that, other than I’m just edging my bets.
I could be as wrong as the rest of the humanists, agnostics or atheists, who knows, like David Bowie says in one of his songs "Knowledge comes with deaths release".. How true,, so I am betting on both teams 🙂
Anyway, here’s a link to the unfinished tester for a Christian Prayers website that I am building