RETHINKING RELIGIOSITY AND FUNDAMENTALISM

Family of the Heart - DIALOGUE & DISCUSSIONS 

I cannot agree more with with Dr. Sohail when he says that " I am of the opinion that human beings are primarily emotional beings and decide for emotional reasons…love or hate, affection or jealousy, war or peace. After their emotional motivation they find a rational reasoning to act of their wishes and use personal, social, religious or political ideology or philosophy to justify it." The reason is that when the brain receives any information from outside, it is coupled with emotions and then processed completely. I think humans should out grow religion as it has passed well beyond its shelf life. It was a thing of past and should remain in past. Its hard to make any sense of religion in the modern world. Humans should be brave enough to accept our limitations and  the fact that we don't have explanation of everything. The God hypothesis is a failed one and we should let it go now.

Many people have an image of God as a sort of  engineer lightning the blue touch-paper to ignite the big bang, and then sitting back to watch the show. Unfortunately, this simple picture, while highly compelling to some, makes little sense. A supernatural creation cannot be a causative act in time, for the coming into-being of time is part of what we are trying to explain. If God is invoked as an explanation for the physical universe, then this explanation cannot be in terms of familiar cause and effect. Unless we have other reasons to believe in God's existence then merely proclaiming " God created the universe" is totally ad hoc. It is no explanation at all. The statement is essentially devoid of meaning, for we are merely defining God to be that agency which creates the universe. Our understanding is no further advanced by this device. One mystery ( the origin of universe) is explained only in terms of another (God). According to Occam's razor God hypothesis should be rejected as an unnecessary complication. After all we are bound to ask, what created God?

If we take God's existence as necessary, then whatever whatever logic is used to justify God's necessary existence could equally well, and with advantage gained in simplicity, be applied to the universe.
Good theories provide a simplifying picture pf nature by establishing connections between disconnected phenomena. In addition, good theories suggest observation tests. They also provide detailed mechanistic accounts of precisely how the physical processes of interest happen in terms of the concepts of the theory. A good theory gives you precise mechanism of how things work. By contrast, a God theory is invoked only to explain the big bang fails in all three criteria. Far from simplifying our view of the world, a Creator introduces an additional complicating feature, itself without explanation. Second, these is no way we can test the hypothesis experimentally. Finally the bald statement "God created the universe" fails to provide any real explanation unless it is accompanied by a detailed mechanism. one wants to know, for example, what properties to assign this God, and precisely how he goes about creating the universe, why the universe has the form it does, and so on. 
Religion only creates divisions and hatred.

 

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