Be your own God

The denial of rational logic drives me mad. The fact that there are people out there who will deny plain observable truths is just baffling. I believe we can attribute this to the fact that those that reject facts are those that just reject thinking. You don’t have to be a scholar to think, a lot of the time you just need common sense. Some things are just givens. When I look at American politicians mindlessly shouting “freedom” to the masses and religious fundamentalists rejecting evolution it makes one wonder whether than an actual rejection of the thing that differentiates human being’s from animals (a higher degree of thinking) could reverse that process and create devolution. I recently read an article in the new scientist which said that because of human accelerated change there are species that are evolving at rates of thousands of years in the period of you or I’s lifetime, as well as those that are devolving at the same rate. It’s incredible to think that through the machines and mechanisms that we’ve created since we first learned to use tools that we now realm the earth like unmerciful Gods against everything that has sustained us on this planet. If anything is proven by these facts it is that our capacity to radically change everything is unprecedented. We have literally transformed the things that once caused us to cower and wonder. We can now identify our dramatic impacts on the weather, obliterate animals that threaten our survival, and amazingly create elaborate social, scientific and cultural systems that fill the vacuum created by our needs and desires. All of the conditions of everything we have ever created – the city of New York, the concept of Communism, the parched lands of ancient over farming in Africa... have been the result of a large network of people creating that as the world’s reality.


With that astonishing creative power in mind, knowing that we can act literally like that of a God when we form together for collective change, it makes me mournful that there are billions upon billions of human beings that are willing to completely reject their god-like power by shirking themselves of responsibility. I feel like we as a species are either too terrified or too in the dark to realise and utilise the pure power and potential we have at our fingertips. So when Harold Camping and his network of followers used millions of dollars to educate people about the rapture and had to change their entire way of life to accommodate it, I thought about the millions of people who would have been affected by this. After some research I found a statistic that indicated that 11% of the world’s people are Evangelical Christians. That’s 648 million people! Evangelical Christians reject Evolution. Something that has been so heavily measured, argued and proven with overwhelming evidence, all on the basis that it contradicts an old mythical story. Fundamentalist Christians (such as Evangelicals) believe in Creationism and claim the world is 6000 years old. This denies the existence of the Archaic period of Ancient Greece, a period of human history we can so undeniably prove actually happened that it would be about as pointless trying to argue that Dinosaurs lived at the same time as feckin' humans. That is until you realise that yes, in fact in Kentucky they have actually built a museum showing Dinosaurs and humans chilling out side by side quite happily. As if many of these particularly brutal predatory creatures were actually closer to Barney the big bloody purple dinosaur.

I think the fact that there are billions of people on this earth who see living as just a testing ground for the main event – heaven, is one of the biggest barriers to genuine progress for the human race. It becomes increasingly more worrying when you realise that some of the most powerful people in the world hold that viewpoint. If your fundamental beliefs are that we are perpetually on the edge of an apocalypse that is going to wipe out all life on earth then it would be understandable if you didn’t think too much about your long term decisions. Have a look at both Bush Presidents for a shining example of how such beliefs influence both environmental and foreign policy. Now I should probably say that although I do get frustrated with what I think are misguided points of view by the fundamentally religious I can empathise why they’ve gotten to that point. Whether you’ve thought about it or not humans have always aspired to know. It’s what makes us so remarkable! Without that desire I wouldn’t be able to use this laptop, get everything I need from the supermarket or use a toilet. All of these things exist because of our need to ask questions and understand how things work and why. But this quality is not just important for comfort and necessity. It is one of the most wonderful attributes we have because it helps us on a journey towards the ultimate destination that links me, you and everyone in this world together – truth.

Which is why it is so important that the means we use to arrive at the answer to the question “what is the truth” is one that we can trust. The endless conflicts that cause so much pain and suffering in this world don’t happen (as some people believe) “because it is just in human nature” We are not all inherently prepositioned to cause harm to others, if we were then society would be in a complete state of Mad Max style anarchy. We form together and get on and in doing so become so much greater than the sum of our parts and achieve so much more together than we could ever hope to achieve on our own. All the conflicts in the world today exist as a result of people disagreeing over truths. Bin Laden’s followers attacked the United States because they believe that God’s ordained truth of how we should live on this earth contradicts the aggressive individualism of America. Whilst the Nazis believed that the truth of why the human race is being held back was because of the Jewish. So if we’ve learned anything it’s that people will be quite happy to cherry-pick their truth even if there is no real evidence to back it up. With so many different truths on this earth it can be hard to know which one to choose; most people have that decision made for them by the environment they’re bought up in. It can be difficult to understand what it’s like to not be a Nazi if all your friends and family are Nazis themselves. To give a more universal example: it can be difficult to imagine a blue sky outside a box if you’ve only ever lived within the confines of it.

Evidence is the best method we have for determining if you are “right” about anything on this earth. If Sally nicks my pencil and I want to prove it, I need only show the CCTV footage that recorded it. If the Bible indicated that pencils were impossible to steal and Sally read that book as being literally true then we would probably end up in conflict. This is exactly how the kind of mind bending logic of religious fundamentalists works. As a neutral outsider, who was on their own pursuit of “truth”, which account of our truth would you accept if you had to make the decision? The moment we start choosing what is truth through what we can prove and measure over some words in a religious text (that has often been heavily edited anyway!), the moment we can start envisaging the real progress towards the big questions that we’re all fighting over anyway: Why are we here? What is the correct way to live our lives? What do we think is important? But perhaps most importantly let’s stop giving away all the credit of the way the world is to a bleedin’ book. The way the world is today is not as a result of “God’s will”; it’s as a result of all the decisions we have made as human beings. But don’t take the words of this article as scripture on this, as this truth as much as anything is something we can measure...