Tuesday, June 18, 2013

Is all Religion Man-made?

Are all 'religions' man made?

That's actually a difficult question to answer since it depends so much on both what you are actually asking and what you define things as. Short answer: both 'yes' and 'no'. (That's totally unhelpful, isn't it?) I guess I'll start with clarifying some definitions.

First, I need to define what I think you are asking. You could be asking (1) Are the rituals and ceremonies used today to honor God 'man-made'  (2) Is there any evidence that there is a spiritual reality? (3) How can a person believe that Christianity is different from, say, the myths of the Greek gods? 

If I define 'religion' as a set of rituals or ceremonies that reflect man-kind's efforts to reach up to God, then I would say that pretty much everything you think of as religion is man-made. People have created sets of procedures (like the order of a church service) which they've found assists them in somehow honoring God or knowing Him, but these things aren't required by God. Take prayer as an example. The Bible says we should do it and it tells us not to do it in a 'showy fashion' (don't pray so that you can be told what a great person you are by other people). Although we have multiple examples of people talking to God in the Bible, there are no other commandments about it. God doesn't require eyes closed, hands folded, kneeling on the floor or head bowed. None of the 'ceremony' of prayer is necessary. However, many people find closing the eyes helps them focus and not be distracted by other things, so that's become the traditional way to do it. Traditions happen because they work!

Religion, in this sense, has come about because of people wanting to express their love to God or their fear of God or otherwise want some way to show Him honor in some way. When someone finds something that works, other people do the same thing (sometimes finding it works for them too...and sometimes not). That's why we have the church services set up the way we do. Someone found that it worked, a bunch of other people agreed and ta-da!

BUT this isn't true for everything. First, I freely admit that I am biased in this. If I didn't deep-down honestly trust that Christianity was more than just a fairy-tale, I wouldn't be a Christian. In fact, my story of becoming a Christian was due to researching and discovering the uncomfortable fact that I found it took more faith to believe that it wasn't true than faith to believe that it was! This is one of those things that sets Christianity apart, in my opinion, from other belief systems. You can dig down into its history, its philosophy, its logic, and find a very sold foundation that holds up to scrutiny.

I'm digressing - I don't think your question was about Christianity in particular, so I'll skip that for now.

We've dealt with the ritualized parts of 'religion'. That is the 'yes' part of the answer I gave you. Now we'll move onto the 'no' part - and this will be tricky. In fact, tricky might not even cover it, this is going to be down right complicated, but I can't think of how to simplify it, so I'm sorry for that. This gets into serious philosophy.

Alright, if I take your question and re-phrase it, what this seems to actually be asking is whether or not there are 'truths' about reality which reach beyond pure science or not. The question asks whether some spiritual reality exists or not independent of whether anyone believes it or not. Another way to ask this would be to ask if moral truths are real or not. If religion is completely man-made, then morality (right and wrong) is also completely made up - it is arbitrary. If religion is completely man-made, then absolutely nothing about life can ever be meaningful, have impact. Justice does not exist, neither does the idea of fairness or goodness or even love.

Why do I say this? Because if God does not exist, then there is nothing that can say if something is good or not. Without a 'higher authority' to set a standard, then the concept of right and wrong is just a preference and an opinion. Take murder, since it is an easy one to grasp. Is it wrong to kill your baby sister? I would hope that your first thought would be that yes, it is wrong. Why do you think that? Is is just because the people around you are telling you that it is wrong? Okay, let's eliminate that. Let's say that your teachers at school tell you that she's a distraction at home so you should get rid of her. Dan and Angela also let you know that it would be okay with them and there would be no consequences if you killed her. You can do so and get away with it. Is it now okay to kill her? Again, you'll probably say that no, it's not suddenly okay. Why? Why should it be a 'truth' that killing you little sister is wrong when there would be no bad consequences for doing so? From an evolutionary stance, it could probably improve your odds of being successful (your parents would spend less of their time and attention and resources on someone else!). But this isn't a preference where you prefer not to kill her in the same way that you prefer to eat chocolate over broccoli - you know it is wrong just because deep down you know it and whether you could get away with it or even benefit from it doesn't change that fact.

Why? Why is this true?

This is a problem for a strictly evolutionary idea of humans. Scientists have posed all sorts of ideas of why we have morals, why we think certain things are wrong. Everything from weird pack-mentality to instincts, but no one has ever been able to point to anything 'physical' for this. There is no 'do not murder' gene or a 'this is fair' chemical combination. From a strictly evolutionary view, the only thing 'good' is that which furthers an individual's chances of passing its genes on to another generation. And that's it. From that standpoint, rape should be the highest good! So why isn't it? The only answer scientists can seem to come up with is "We are this way, therefore, we must have evolved this way, therefore it must be evolutionarily favored." Sounds like flawed reasoning to me.
 
Humans all have an inate sense of what is right. None of us completely live up to that standard, but we all know it exists. Where does that standard come from?

If you include back in the idea of God, then the problem is solved. We have morality because God is moral. He declares that certain things are good and right and that standard is there whether a person believes in it or not, or whether a person acts like it is there or not. Murder then is wrong even if a person kills another person, no matter what excuse they have for it or whether anyone else on the planet thinks it is wrong or not. (We could discuss 'special circumstances' for this, if you wish in a separate topic - for now, just look at the big picture).

The problem with this whole thing comes down to the fact that these ideas are not nice, neat, tidy 'facts' like Gravity. How do you measure justice? People have been trying to do that for centuries! It's why we have law enforcement and courts and such. I cannot 'prove' with a tidy scientific formula that justice is a 'real' concept, but we both know it is still real.

You can stand up and say that spiritual and moral 'truths' exist separate from whatever any human has to say about them and, as such, are definitely NOT man-made (because if they were man-made, then we could re-define what is right and wrong whenever we wanted). So, in this sense, the answer to your question is 'no', not all religions are man-made because in Christianity, the foundational 'truths' about reality are simply declarations that, like gravity, are true whether a person believes in them or not.

Okay, I'm not sure I wrote this out in a fashion that is very clear, but I'll try to summarize. First, the 'ritualized' parts of religions are mostly man-made (but not necessarily bad things). The non-ritualized ideas behind religion - that there is truth in reality that originates outside of human opinion- is not man-made, because, like science, it holds up to investigation, even if, unlike science, it his hard to measure and put in nice little boxes.

Did that even get close to answering what you were asking?


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