There was some talk last week on Facebook about Humanism versus Christian Fundamentalism. I admit, I had never thought about Humanism, but after reading the description of it and its fundamental beliefs, it got me to thinking, especially when my wife asked me if I knew anyone named Jonah. I said I only knew about the guy who was swallowed by a whale and survived.
Now tell the truth. Do you believe that story, or the one
about a guy who parted the Red Sea, or the one who built an ark big enough to
carry two of every animal, or someone who lived to be 969 years old, like Methuselah?
And of course, there’s Adam and Eve who were the first people created and
supposedly lived alone on the earth until they somehow found a way to create an
entire family of sons and their wives that spawned all the rest of us. How did
they do that, I wonder?
If you believe there are good angels who live in heaven and
bad angels who descended into hell, tell me this: Where exactly are these
places? If I fly high enough in an airplane will I get to heaven, because we’ve
sent rockets into space and they didn’t find it. If I drill deep enough into
the earth will I find hell, or just the molten core of the planet?
I’m pretty sure that people don’t go to these places after
death, because 117 billion people have inhabited the earth for all time.
Assuming that only 10% of them were good enough to make the grade, that’s a lot
of people bumping around in heaven, wherever it is, and even more crowding into
hell. Even if it’s just their souls, they must need a place to go, right?
Don’t get me wrong. I was brought up to be a Christian – a
Baptist, in fact – until one day when I was in high school I asked our minister
a question he couldn’t answer: If Baptists and Methodists and Catholics are all
Christians but have different beliefs, who’s right and who’s wrong? He didn’t
know what to say.
So I drifted away from the Baptist Church and its belief
that committing a sin automatically condemns you to hell. Instead, I believe my
life is governed by an unseen power within myself that guides me to be a decent
human being, one who obeys the law, treats all people with dignity, respects
the earth, acknowledges cultural differences and accepts reason and science
over superstition and fantasy. Sometimes when I ask for help, I call that “praying
to the universe.”
That said, I think I could create a religion that teaches its
believers how to live good, clean, respectful lives, choosing good over evil,
right over wrong, morality over immorality, empathy over apathy and hatred over
love, without burdening them with a litany of supernatural stories that mainly
serve as warnings about the consequences of sin. Choosing the right path
shouldn’t be that hard.
My religion wouldn’t have whales eating humans and coughing
them back up. It wouldn’t rely on fantasy and superstition to frighten its
followers into being good people or else face the fires of hell for all eternity.
It would just teach that being good is better than being bad, and if everybody
believed that, the world would be a much better place to live.
Of course, I’d have to give my new religion a name. Maybe
“Humanism” would work.
