On The Shoulders Of Giants

The questions is: is there a god or not? Is the universe composed of matter only or there is more to it than that? I have looked at the arguments of both sides and found neither of them convincing. In my view, by argument alone, you cannot prove or disprove god. What about evidence? Is there any evidence that points to the existence of god or otherwise? In my opinion there is only one convincing evidence: the enlightenment phenomenon. The enlightenment phenomenon is when someone through meditation, solitude, seeking of truth or otherwise experiences something unique and as a result becomes enlightened. Of course, there are degrees to enlightenment and the experiences vary greatly. But in some cases we can say with a good degree of certainty that a person has been enlightened: Buddha, Jesus, Mohammad, Ali, Rumi, Shams. These individuals and many like them have had unique experiences and became enlightened and transcended their backgrounds and rose to new dimensions. To me, that fact is miraculous and an evidence pointing to the existence of god. The rational mind would then want to know if religions came from god. My answer is most likely yes. The next question is if most religions came from god, how come they are tainted with misstatements, pandering and intolerance. In other words, for example why does god have a beef with homosexuals? I have thought about this question most of my life and I recently have arrived at an answer: the answer is that every religion was a political movement in a society that was far from Utopia, and in order for that political movement to succeed in such societies, it had to be tainted and it had to be brought down to the levels that people could swallow. I believe that homophobia in Islam doesn’t come from god but it is a left-over from the Arabian society of 1400 years ago. The reason that god said he created the world in six days, was that it was an easier sell back then than a scientific explanation of how the universe came about. The unfortunate thing is that religions are never honest about this fact because they can’t be. How can they criticize the same people that are going to carry the message to the future generations? It’s impossible. So we have to live with sketchy religions at best that are completely out of touch with the majority of us today. But not all hope is lost. If we look at religions as vectors, arrows that point from one social state to another social state, and put every religion in the context of the society that it was introduced in, I think the directions these arrows pointing are pretty clear.

This entry was posted on Friday, September 19th, 2008 at 11:21 pm and is filed under Future, Science, Society. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.