CelticBear’s Musings

A couple of days ago a discussion off one of my posts:

Apologetic Revisionism

ended with Mark from Sojourner blog unable to meet the very pointed challenges to faith, religion, Christianity in specific, that I posted. My challenges were personal, (although not meant to insult or ridicule directly, or him personally, as I think Mark is a fine, upstanding, heck of a guy!) but they challenge the very illogical and unreasonable foundation of faith in a religious belief. With all attempts at using pseudo-intellectualism and twisted logic failed, all that is left is emotion. And while I remained completely within the realm of reason, rational thinking, and freethinking (although with a little attitude which is par for the course with me,) Mark became upset and projected his lack of “control” upon me as well.

I bring this up not to embarass Mark, but to preface my observation on the emotional nature of religious belief with example. That emotion is the only thing that can sustain a belief. That attempts to rationalize and “prove” the validity of religion ultimately fails.

Ironic considering half of the origin of religions and myth comes from intellectual pursuit!

Religions generally (except for newer ones like Wicca and Scientology (gag!),) were developed by pre-scientific cultures who sought to explain the mysteries of life, the best way they knew how. Deadly weather, weather in general, death, disease, mental illness, desires to commit social crimes and harm others, the phenomena of love and passion, earthquakes, rainbows, poisonous plants, childbirth, stars, our very existance, all called out to be explained by we curious and intelligent and imaginative humans. And so people used what they knew to try to explain all these things. Without telescopes, microscopes, concepts of control groups and double-blind testing, the scientific method, chemical spectrographs, etc etc, all people knew to apply is humanism.

And of course, humans are emotional. We feel joy, passion, lust, hate, jealousy, devotion. Intellectual curiosity and emotion mixed, makes for pretty powerful religious foundations. Thousands of years ago.

Today, we don’t have to rely on myth to explain the mysteries of existence. We know how life developed on earth. Why stars shine and the sun travels across the sky. Why people get sick. How to treat mental illness. Why weather devastates. Science has taken away some of the mystery of living, and will continue to do so. Half the need for religion has been replaced. What’s left is the emotional component.

If a faith, a religious faith, or belief, is “true” and real and valid, then it should transcend emotion, no? Human emotion, human psychology shouldn’t be able to overpower the power of god(s), right?

A couple of days ago that discussion thread ended in emotion, and then interestingly, I cam upon a blog entry yesterday that seemed to validate what I had been contemplating the day before:

Religious Off Switch
It’s a submission by a contributing author for Debunking Christianity, that tells the story of a man who was at one time quite faithful. Very religious and filled with the joy of Christ.

Until he suffered a stroke. And from that moment of brain damage on, he could no longer feel emotion. The portion of his brain that registered emotion was oxygen deprived and has since become unable to feel joy, exaltation, wonder. Deprived of the emotional center, all he had to validate his religious faith with was reason and rational thought unclouded by emotional bias. And he found religion wanting. His religion was in essence turned off by a stroke. And he’s not the only one. Many stroke and brain damage victims have found previous religious belief absurd if their emotional processing in their brain becomes damaged.
Should that even be possible? If faith, if a Personal God’s love, messianic salvation were supernatural in nature, should these cases even be possible? Not unless our beliefs in religious concepts are indeed rooted in psychology and biochemistry.

I’ve discussed my own experiences with emotion and religion before, such as in the post “This I Believe – On God and Spirituality,” and I’ve come to terms with the fact that when I was very Christian, it was because of experiences that played very strongly upon my emotions. Fear, joy, the desire to be loved and cared for and protected, the need to feel in control while at the same time the desire to be told the answers. I was swayed by highly emotional experiences like personal testimonies and impassional spiritual stories and the shared mod joy of fellowship. I was, am, a very emotional person. But I’m also very skeptical. And too often I was told to accept questions and problems and issues on faith, and not to think about them too much.

And so, both from a desire to know my religion and understand God better, and a desire to try to make sense of some of the problems in my religion, I turned to the source, the Bible. From which all questions should be answered. And that began the end of my religion.