Religion is a virus

Religion is a Virus (Y2K?)

December 27, 1999

According to the recent polls in the United States:
95 percent of Americans believe in God.
59 percent say that religion is very important in their lives.
Only 4 percent identify themselves as agnostics or atheists.

Another survey on why people believe in God:
The number one reason (29 percent of respondents) given was the good design of nature or universe.
The number two reason was a feeling of God being present in everyday life (21 percent).
The third reason (10 percent) was that belief in God is comforting, consoling or relieving.
The fourth place answer (another 10 percent) was that the Bible says so.

It is an intriguing phenomenon in this post-Enlightenment age to find why religion has such a powerful hold in human life and flourished with no end in sight, even though religion is directly responsible for more death, war, murder, destruction and misery through the ages than any other human activities.
Another peculiarity in this survey is that not many people (only 10 percent) seek for psychological comfort in religion such as a big brother like God would take care about them when they croak.
One transparency that could not escape from the analysis is that the social programming for Christianity like Christmas, In God We Trust, pontiff’s power on Purgatory and other manufactured myths has kept the 10 percent of thumb-sucking dittoheads and nincompoops under the inerrancy of the Bible.

Some scholars try to find an answer that we have become too educated and sophisticated to be primed with the childish searches for consolation in the face of death and life’s injustice (belief in eternal hell-fire was a must in Christianity until recent times), and that people are fascinated by the design and beauty of nature…its diversity, complexity, elegance, etc,..it all adds up to the colossal mystery.
The arguments that are used for the existence of God change their character as time goes on, because the perception of the deity can not survive in its efficacy to persuade people with a tooth fairy like Old Testament.
Others ague that it is not an intellectual argument at all what moves people to believe in God, since the main reason is they were taught from early infancy to do it. When child is young, for good Darwinian reasons, it would be valuable if the child believed everything it is told. A child needs to learn a language, it needs to learn the social customs of its people, it needs to learn all sorts of rules for good survival reasons.
But any rule that “Believe everything you are told” is automatically going to be vulnerable to parasitization and consequently the minds of young are stunted and filled with fanatical hostility to those who have either other belief engine or object to all fanaticism.
Computers, for example, are vulnerable to parasitization because they believe all they are told in the right programming language: “Duplicate me and, while you are at it, erase this entire disk.”
A professor from Oxford University points out that the survival mechanism that makes children’s brains believe what they are told for good reasons is automatically vulnerable to parasitic codes such as “You must believe in the great juju in the sky” or “You must kneel down and face east and pray five times a day.” These codes are then passed down through generations and there is no obvious reason why it should stop.
There is another factor in the theory that the child does not have open mind and heart to understand the strangers who have other belief system or no system at all. We have witnessed such an ample cases of sexism, racism, intolerance of difference and destruction of environment.
It boils down to the question whether religions do harm the people, as Y2K virus would disrupt the whole shebang in global scale. I would like to quote Karl Marx “Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature…the opium of the people, which made this suffering bearable.”
As far as I am concerned, I am not uncomfortable not to belong to the majority group of the society, and I believe that human life on this planet will die out eventually in due course without the divine intervention or ‘Second Coming of Son of God’.

Finally, it is the season of holiday and many South Koreans, both the affluent and the homeless, would pray on their knees for their happiness for coming Millennium.
The following is what Abraham Lincoln addressed during his second inauguration ceremony for his presidency in which some unanswered prayers may find a home.

Both read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and each invoked His aid against the other.
It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God’s assistance in wringing his bread from the sweat of other men’s faces, but let us judge not, that we be not judged.
The prayers of both could not be answered.
That of neither has been answered fully.
The Almighty has His own purposes.