Of religious nuts and Dodo birds

Cong Corrales

“I was a Catholic until I reached the age of reason.”–George Carlin

MY beef with religion and blind faith is that these stop human beings from being critical with the world around them. It makes them accept things that aren’t really there. It is manipulative.

Having the power to question things around us is why our species is still here. When things go bump in the night, cavemen before would check it out and protect the “herd.”

I was saddened at how the mass media covered the San Bernardino shooting in the US. Couldn’t they have been just delusional or psychotic Americans? Do they have to be “Radicalized Muslims?” When a Christian starts shooting people in a mall, do you report that the perpetrator did so because Jesus Christ somehow whispered into his ears that shooting people would be a good idea?

Our desk editor Dave Achondo aptly posted on my wall over the weekend: “When a person talks to a god, that person is religious. But when ‘god’ talks back to them, that person is psychotic or delusional.”

When we stop questioning things because an invisible guy up in the sky has predetermined your life, then we, as a species, stop evolving and are resigning our fate to the elements of nature. Religious people would say things like, “God sent this rain today so we have to be grateful for his ‘majesty.’” But when a thousand people die in a train wreck, do we exalt god’s name because he sent the angel of death to collect all those innocent people? When I use the pronoun “he” for god, it is simply because no woman would f@#$ up the world and its people this bad. I borrowed that line from humorist George Carlin, by the way.

Who do you think brought you your warm bath, irrigation of farmlands, and vaccines? Certainly not the religious nuts. They were too busy burning scientists at the stake. It was the scientists that brought us all out from the dark ages.

As I have said before, religion does not have the monopoly of morality. Religious people would argue that distinguishing good from bad is inherent with religion. No, it most certainly does not. Religion labels people. It divides us into groups when we actually belong to the same species.

If you examine world history carefully, you will see that religion is the foremost cause of genocides and ethnic cleansing.

Many would argue that the crusades don’t count because it happened hundreds of years ago. The religious killings that is happening now–conveniently labeled by the US as “terrorism without borders”–is a direct retaliation of what the Christians did to Muslims before. That’s the danger with religious bias because it has no expiration date. It is passed from one generation to another. It is simply physics at work: For every action there is an equal amount of reaction.

I could almost hear my relatives say that it is easy for me to say such things because I’m an “atheist.” I say, there goes another label. We are all, simply, human beings. Why the compulsion to label people into groups is beyond me.

If we stop being critical then we lose that edge to evolve as a species, we will simply go extinct like the Dodo bird. So I call on people not to lose that evolutionary edge and start questioning things around us lest we become complicit to the extinction of human beings.

The genius of all of these is that you can choose to agree or disagree with me. That is not the “freewill” that a god bestowed among human beings. That is the human genome’s imperative to be inquisitive, curious, and critical. That, by the way, is the self-preservation imperative at work imprinted in our genes through millions of years of evolution–not by an invisible guy in the sky.