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I've been doing an awful lot of thinking about god of late, pondering how such a fundamentally irrational concept can be so persuasive.
In the pursuit of this mental exercise, I have tried to avoid the usual intellectual arrogance that agnostics and atheists sometimes direct toward "believers."
I want to know, specifically, if there is some basic part of the human experience that leads one toward belief in a god or gods.
What is it that seems to have led every single early society to create and follow some sort of religious system?
The answer (in my opinion) was nicely summed up by the late Douglas Adams during a speech entitled Is there an Artificial God?
given at Digital Biota 2 conference in 1998.
Here is an excerpt:
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...early man has a moment to reflect and he thinks to himself, 'well, this is an interesting world that I find myself in' and then he asks himself a very treacherous question,
a question which is totally meaningless and fallacious, but only comes about because of the nature of the sort of person he is, the sort of person he has evolved into and the
sort of person who has thrived because he thinks this particular way. Man the maker looks at his world and says 'So who made this then?' Who made this? -- you can
see why it's a treacherous question. Early man thinks, 'Well, because there's only one sort of being I know about who makes things, whoever made all this must therefore
be a much bigger, much more powerful and necessarily invisible, one of me and because I tend to be the strong one who does all the stuff, he's probably male'. And so we
have the idea of a god. Then, because when we make things we do it with the intention of doing something with them, early man asks himself , 'If he made it, what did he
make it for?' Now the real trap springs, because early man is thinking, 'This world fits me very well. Here are all these things that support me and feed me and
look after me; yes, this world fits me nicely' and he reaches the inescapable conclusion that whoever made it, made it for him.
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| - Douglas Adams |
In other words, it makes perfect sense that purposeful, tool-making creatures such as ourselves would visualize a creator who 'made' everything around us with explicit purpose.
God is a projection of our own psyche onto the universe around us.
Now that I've actually written that down, it seems a bit obvious...
I highly recommend taking a few minutes to read the entire speech.
Regardless of where you stand on the issues of god, it is an entertaining and thought-provoking piece by one of the more interesting minds of the 20th century.
And now, some not-so-random quotes:
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| We have just enough religion to make us hate, but not enough to make us love one another. |
| - Jonathan Swift |
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| I distrust those people who know so well what God wants them to do because I notice it always coincides with their own desires. |
| - Susan B. Anthony |
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| It is only the savage, whether of the African bush or the American gospel tent, who pretends to know the will and intent of God exactly and completely. |
| - H.L. Mencken |
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| I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use. |
| - Galileo Galilei |
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| No man treats a motor car as foolishly as he treats another human being. When the car will not go, he does not attribute its annoying behavior to sin, he does not say, "You are a wicked motorcar, and I shall not give you any more petrol until you go." He attempts to find out what is wrong and set it right. |
| - Bertrand Russell |
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| An Inuit hunter asked the local missionary priest: "If I did not know about God and sin, would I go to hell?" "No," said the priest, "not if you did not know." "Then why," asked the Inuit earnestly, "did you tell me?" |
| - Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek |
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| - Lars |
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