Religion in the modern era happens when reason fails logical intelligent people. Anyone who does not believe in a god knows there are consequences for saying you don’t believe in a god. In fact there are graver consequences for saying you don’t believe in God, than saying you follow the works of “The Devil”. Saying you don’t believe means you deny the existence of God, saying you are a follower of “The Satan” means you acknowledge the existence of God and therefore can be saved. No matter what heinous acts “The Satan” worshipers might partake in, Christians are prepared to forgive them, so they might come to know the power, glory and love they believe is their God. By that same token, not even the most humble upstanding among those that believe in no god are shown anything but utter contempt and disdain, because they lack faith. This is where the first failure of reason happens, those who claim to believe in God, don’t believe, they have faith. Faith is the suspension of what you can see with your own eyes or prove with science and then accept that which cannot been seen or proven. Faith has no basis in reason and therefore cannot be argued against with even with the simplest reasoning. Simply put, if you have faith God made the sky blue no matter how many colors you can witness the sky turn, those colors are false colors because God made the sky blue.
The second failure of reason springs from the first. Reasonable people understand how badly people who do not believe in the God of Abraham much less any religion at all are treated. They reason it is better to say they believe no matter how silly the story sounds to them or what they know to be true rather than risk being an outcast. Historically those who didn’t believe were right to be afraid. Non-belief in every religion on Earth is seen as some form of heresy which often carries a death sentence. Hate crimes against non-believers and heretics didn’t begin with modern radicals or even the Inquisition or the Romans killing Jews and Christians. If you believe the Jesus story, he was killed for not preaching the locally branded form of Judaism. In other religions there is evidence that goes even further back. Being marked as a non-believer and heretic then and now has its risks. While modern religionists seldom kill those who don’t believe, at least in most modern industrialized nations, there are definite social, political, and economic actions taken against non-believers.
With those sanctions in mind people often times lie and say they believe to fit in with the group. You never know when you might need a job and the guy interviewing you knows you don’t believe what he believes or as a politician or business man you might need the backing of a religious group to stay afloat. People lie about having faith in God to get ahead and ensure their kids future. People also often reason they can tell this lie publicly and hold their real beliefs in private. The problem with this sort of reasoning is the more you lie, the easier it is to believe your own lie. You eventually forget your original doubts and belief system, because the lie you tell every day becomes more real to you every time you tell it. The psycho babble term for this phenomenon is self delusion. To paraphrase Hitler and exemplify the Bush administration, “the bigger the lie (and more of them) you tell, the easier it is to pass off them as the truth to otherwise reasonable people.”
The third failure of reason is when intelligent logical people try and reason away the parts of a religion they don’t agree with. This might seem harmless or even a win for the non-believer, but it is the worst failure of reason. When one looks at a religion as a whole system of beliefs and says, “this just doesn’t seem right”, logic dictates you discard the system in its entirety and begin anew much as you would a scientific theorem. This is where reason separates out those that become non-believers, from those who want to believe in a certain quantity of religious ideals. Those who stick with reason go back to the beginning which says, “In the beginning, when God created the heavens and the earth”, and ask the question, “what is God” and come back with what amounts to a circular logic that always fails the test of reason.
When reason fails, the otherwise logical intelligent person skips that question and begins with, “In the beginning, when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless wasteland,” and says this this is an allegory for God created the primordial soup from which all life on this planet began. This type of psuedo-scientific reasoning allows for scriptural interpretation and accepts God as the undefinable term , much like X in an algebra equation. This loosely based formulaic system also fails the equation breaks if you factor god(s) in multiples or as a null value. Those that accept this formula refuse to solve for X, they simply plot God on the graph in relation to what ever other variables they want to interpret for.
When the failure of reason allows otherwise logical intelligent people to start tossing out sections of a religion they don’t agree with and can’t abide by under the guise of this is where the Bible should be interpreted rather than taken literally, it justifies the stupid, hateful, and prejudicial who do the same. When one group argues Genesis is meant to be interpreted, but Mark is to be taken literally, it justifies those who eat shellfish and pork, but scream they hate fagots, or scream abortion is wrong but disregard thou shalt not kill when it is convenient for their purposes. This system of floating interpretation fails all simple straightforward logic tests making it the biggest of failures of reason.
In the modern era religion still exists for three reasons. Religion exists because logical intelligent people failed the test of reason. Religion exists because logical intelligent people let fear or greed trump reason. Religion exists because faith can’t be argued against, and faith is the bastion of the unintelligent and illogical who believe actual thinking is too much effort and wrong for mere mortals to do. In the end religion continues to exist and will likely exist until it causes us to exterminate ourselves. With any luck that won’t be until long after my existence has ended.
