The Problem with Religion

I must admit I have trouble understanding the appeal of religions. When I was a child, I was told the tales of Hindu religion. The stories were enormously entertaining.  Hindu Gods were like the Avengers or the X-Men. Different Gods had different superpowers. Ram and Arjun were great shots with the bow and arrow. Bhim was like ' The Thing' from the Fantastic Four, immensely strong but not very intelligent.  Hanuman was like Superman, he could fly and lift mountains and swallow the sun accidentally. However, it soon became evident that the world of the Gods was a fantasy world. In the real world, people were good or bad on a spectrum and there were not necessarily consequences to either being good or being bad. Good people and even children not yet old enough to decide whether to be good or bad could suffer and die. Bad people could prosper and enjoy the fruits of their evil through long luxurious lives and nothing supernatural ever happened. Prayer, no matter how sincere, (and there is no prayer more sincere than that of a child who has not prepared for the exam), seemed to make no difference to anything.

I left Hinduism when I was probably around 12. It just wasn't convincing. I know people will say Hinduism is a way of life, not a religion and that Hinduism is tolerant and even accepts atheism but try telling a devout Hindu that Ram was probably a normal human being if he ever existed and you will soon discover that the so called tolerance is paper thin.

Christianity seemed quite a bit less mature than Hinduism. The stories in the Bible seemed really childish compared to Hindu mythology with none of the philosophical subtleties and nuance. This was a vengeful,  insecure and childish deity which would punish it's own creations in the most hideous manner for things like not being subservient enough or merely being curious about the world or trying to understand ethics (knowledge of good and evil). The most civilized character in the lexicon seemed to be Lucifer who at least took a stand against authority as a matter of principle and who, despite the bad rap, had a negligible body count in comparison with the deity he rebelled against.

I did make a sincere attempt to read the Koran as well but it seemed most like a tribal code of conduct with little relevance to the modern world. It was sufficiently boring to become one of the very few books that I picked up and did not finish. Note that I recently and finally finished War and Peace and that I read the Complete Works of Shakespeare, including the sonnets when I was in medical school.

Norse, Roman and Greek mythology was similar to Hinduism if somewhat less sophisticated. They do have the Percy Jackson and Aquaman kind of appeal.

So what is it a about religions that makes them so popular? I think one thing common to all religions, including those like Buddhism that have no actual deities is the concept of the soul. They all state that our essence comprises of a soul which occupies the body. This soul is conscious, intelligent and persists indefinitely after death. It can then be punished, rewarded or reincarnated by the deity or by the balance of its Karma. There is, of course, nothing in our knowledge of Biology, Chemistry or Physics which suggests that such a thing is possible. It seems to be a story made up to avoid accepting our own inevitable mortality.

All religions seem to have  version of  a creation myth. The myths vary in sophistication but display a remarkable incompatibility with common sense or science. It is true that we do not understand how the universe came into existence but we're finding out more and more about it using the methods of science. However religions would have us not try at all by accepting the essentially meaningless idea that 'God did it.'

Let us explore the concept of a created universe in more detail. It is certainly possible that the universe we're aware of is a simulation or a model created by an intelligent entity in a larger universe. Presumably it's quite likely that there may be many such entities building one or more simulations or universes for their own entertainment and possibly competition or display but the hypothesis does not really solve any problems. After all, we must then consider the problem of how that larger universe came into existence. In fact, it makes no sense to stop at that level. If there are universes within universes then the process could presumably be infinite. Anyway, the hypothesis does not appear to be testable, does not explain anything and is not a useful way of looking at our own universe.

I am a pragmatic sort of entity. I would tend to accept that things are as they seem until we figure out the underlying rules of how and why they are the way they are. Any explanation must be logical and verifiable. Any untestable hypothesis does not deserve further consideration.