[QUOTE=mrrealtime]
If I understand you correctly, you are saying that religiousness is the eqivalent of ignorance “historically”, but then, how does it not remain so today?
[/QUOTE]
I believe (and this is just my belief, based on many, many years of formal and informal education, and having read everything I can get my hands on concerning the subject of religion) that gods and, by distillation, God, were invented to explain the unexplainable. Why does the earth quake? Why does the river flood? Why do children mysteriously die? Where did we come from? Why are we here? We didn’t know the answers to those questions, so we made one up: God.
In the past three centuries, we’ve found a lot of scientifically proven answers to those questions: Tectonic plates, ground saturation and overabundant rainfall, underdeveloped immune systems, etc.
But having God around is just so damn comfortable, we can’t give him up. So while we accept that he doesn’t actually cause individual earthquakes and floods and deaths, we believe he’s sorta’ responsible because he created the universe in which these things happen.
Now, imagine that there is a vertical spectrum of belief in this God. At the top are people who fervently believe God is intimately involved in their every moment and has a detailed plan for each of us; the Bible is literally true, every word; and maintaining one’s faith requires constant diligence and hard work. These people have a deathgrip on their faith. At the bottom, just barely hanging onto the faith thing, are those who believe there’s a God, but not the kind described in any Bible, and frankly they’re a little skeptical about the whole Jesus thing, too. Below them are those of us who have slipped completely off of the religion thing and landed on our feet on solid ground and are making our way around the world quite nicely, thank you.
So, as scientific knowledge increases and people try to assimilate the provable knowledge with their belief system, their grip loosens on the belief spectrum and they slip lower and lower on the spectrum, with those at the bottom falling off as they find the last bit of knowledge they need to just let go.
But it’s a slow process. New people are being added at the top all the time, and not everyone slips down – many maintain their grip all their lives, leaving behind offspring with similar grips on faith.
I’m certainly not the first to propose that knowledge = enlightenment = loss of faith (or, inversely, that ignorance = religion.) Read Thomas Carlyle’s “Sartor Resartus” – all those little minnows swimming in their quiet streams believe fervently in God.
