TOK: Religious beliefs

We seem to emit too much respect towards the faithful; after-all, is it not the belief in a book claiming imaginable things about the nature of the universe that is a demonstration of virtue? Put this way no. Claiming that the Bible is a resource of ignorance and unending drivel in general or more specifically about the beauty in which our world is to end6 is not only repressed, but also reinterpreted by apologists, who in the light of their error, can now turn a passage requiring one to kill into a passage preaching love.

Religious beliefs are in no way as holy as they claim and their unchallengeable status, only challenged by few, is not seemingly worthy of such. Many also seem to miss the point when they claim that religious belief is private and personal, for it is certainly not, as it is as private as any other action. After all, any major action one does is in no doubt based on a belief.

For example the belief that it is going to snow assures one to dress warmly. The belief that your God can heal is after all an incentive to pray instead of going to hospital.

Going to hospital is the rejection, at least temporarily, of this belief, and it is rejection of beliefs about the nature of one’s God, or the doubt of them that seems to save one’s life. What is it to be said of the moderate believing in an all powerful god, but in virtue of his rationality dismisses his faith for many matters of utmost importance.

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One of the many cases where the moderate’s beliefs come into conflict with the world are, for purpose of argument, ethical issues.

Religion’s values and ethics that it claims to inspire are the product of extinct cultures whose knowledge of the world was as simply put limited. For these cultures a windmill would have been a devastating feat of technology. Why then does religion rally us to return to fourteenth century ethics? Should our values really be inspired from books issued of such cultures? Is it not our belief that blastocysts have souls that have restrained our advancement of stem cell research, where if left to the scientists would have probably saved the lives of many7?

Is it not time for devout mothers to understand that contraception is and should no longer be a taboo in certain cultures? Additionally, a belief in the afterlife will invariably affect the way one treats the death punishment. If death is not the end, then is the death penalty not more justifiable? One has to realize that the core tenet of religion requiring the belief in an afterlife, in which no-one has a proof of even being remotely true, is maybe comforting for us, but certainly not for the many others whose life is at the mercy of afterlife believing hands.

Religious belief and faith seems to indeed be a problem once they have hijacked one’s head. For any basic observation of the world would lead one to understand that we are often unwilling to change our minds. If humanity is to one day destroy itself – in a nuclear war for example- one can invariably attribute the motivational belief behind such action to be a religious one. If religion is to stay and hopefully for it thrive, then one has to be aware that it will not be such as long as religious beliefs support untested facts about the world that affect our behavior.

One should especially be aware that living an untestable hypothesis only to be confirmed on the day one dies is not as harmful as it may seem if one attributes the possibility of a life beyond the grave to a demanding deity. 1 1 Samuel 18:10, 2 kings 6:33 and many other passages actively encourage superstition about the nature of illness. 2 Pascal’s wager is the argument in which Blaise Pascal argued that a belief in God was the correct attitude to such claim as it leads to the possibility of eternal life.

3 Swap the proposition of God’s existence to any other less preposterous comforting claim about the nature of the universe. 4 Deuteronomy 13:7-11 calls for the eradication of all believers in foreign gods. It may be the Old Testament but it is explicit. On another note, moderates no longer wish to kill in the name of God but still actively encourage the use of the word God as if it were not anything like talking gibberish. 5 Consider the hygienic belief of not washing self; would it a positive demonstration of diversity? Would it enrich humanity?

Or would it at the least be a possibly dangerous idea which one should seek to discard? 6See the book of Revelation 7 Indeed the U. S. removing its ban on stem cell research funding is but only the product of secular values. Another comment can be said about moderate religion, it is but only the product of secular values too.