I shall begin with a statement: belief in a guiding god is moronic and, moreover, organised religions represent the nadir of thought.

Why do I write this?  Isn’t it offensive?

Admittedly, this is a provocation; but one with a legitimate point.  Religion may be a balm to many people; but it is also responsible for many many ills, from the Spanish Inquisition to modern terrorist atrocities.  And, most importantly, god is obviously a fiction; and so people are believing in lies, dumb animals that we are.

There are reasons people choose to believe, of course, but these are not conscious (to which religious people will object and claim that the spirit entered into them).  Underpinning religious belief are the abstract processes of human psychology and projection of thought, i.e. the standard auto-workings of the mind, the way we think without actually thinking about it.  And so religion feeds on the subconscious, the unconscious, and the default genetic codes in mankind.  Which is not surprising, as religion is a construct of man and made in his image.

PROJECTION

Mental projection beyond ourselves to envisage things outside our immediate situation can be a valuable trait in negotiating the vicissitudes of life, to foresee the unseen or to draw on past experience and thus negotiate the obstacles of the present or theorise about what else may exist based on our current information.  But mental projection also enables the imposition of flights of fancy and/or desired fantasy onto the unknown and unreal, i.e. it can be the ability to envisage that which does not exist, often perverted into belief in the fictional (like a god).

I cannot prove the inexistence of a god but neither can anyone prove that there is one, or two, or three (etc).  It seems as though belief relies on a remarkable double-negative, i.e. because it’s not there, it can’t be proved it’s not there.  The absurdity of this line of reasoning is self-evident: for example, you can’t prove elves/fairies/unicorns/hobbits don’t exist because you haven’t seen them.  And when it comes to The Big Guy – I struggle for an example where He is not a man: even where there is a multiplicity of gods, the chief god appears to be inevitably male – I see no guiding hand of a god in things, and it is a tenet of logical thought that evidence is required.

Of course, evidence can be interpreted and misinterpreted.  But, upon analysis, there is no evidence of a god at all, nothing to be interpreted bar texts; so god should be consigned to fiction.  Burden of proof should lie in positive recognition, i.e. evidence that something exists, not a vacuum of information; which is why we have seen the creation of saints, relics and holy sites over the centuries to validate the reality of one god or the other, except saints and relics were and are fraudulent (caveat: some saints clearly existed and were good people).

God-fiends in times past have also given the mysteries of the world as evidence of a god’s hand, which can be most accurately seen through the prism of a naïve attempt to understand why there is an existence.  That is, religion is a hangover from various simplistic attempts to understand the world and imagine its workings through projection when people’s experience of said world was herding sheep or similar, some millennia ago; and modern religion is most interesting in that it shows how slowly mankind develops and moves away from primitive superstition.  Personally, I have no answer for why there is an existence, which is the greatest mystery; but I do not ascribe it to an omnipotent being.  We are beyond herding sheep and seeing glittering objects as magical.  Almost.

PSYCHOLOGY OF COMFORT

Religion goes further than mental projection into the human psyche though, and pushes deep-seated buttons that have nothing to do with a god.  This button-pressing is effective, albeit clumsy and inaccurate.

In our earliest days as babies, we lack coherence in both seeing the world and interacting with it, vulnerable to the mercies of life.  Thus, we cling to the repetitive and familiar, cling to a mother whom we recognise through her face on which we have imprinted, and gain a love of comfort as we snuggle under blankets or take our food from the teat.  We try to make sense of the chaos of colours, noises and physicality of the world, imperfectly and overwhelmed.  The world is big and scary; but there is always the warmth of mother and home to turn back to (assuming you had a standard upbringing: those with mental disorders inevitably trace their issues to dysfunctional early years, which simply adds to the proof of what is being said).

A god provides a symbolic uber-mother: someone to turn to when life is too much and confusing, a person/place of comfort.  A god also provides a symbolic uber-father, stern and strict: a discipliner, to provide the steel to confront a life that is not always comfortable but a struggle to survive, where things don’t always go your way.  God is, symbolically, your parents; and belief is the metaphorical equivalent of going back to live with your parents after failing to maintain a place of your own.

WISH FULFILMENT

If mental projection is layered on top of the primal psychological programming of the early years, god can be seen naked, as He really is: a wish fulfilment.

Projection in the religious field fills in gaps of knowledge with vague mysticism and imposes a desired order on the natural chaos of life: it gives people a (misleading) sense of sense, a security blanket under which they hide from the real world where there is no reason or sense in conventional terms.  It is, in psychoanalytical terms, a return to the womb, to childhood, to safety and comfort, e.g. the self-confirming assuredness of the idea that the elect will go to heaven is a ‘comfort’.  And so there are the numerous psychologically damaged people that are hoovered up by religion, who find a harbour for their issues in a church and often vent their pent-up problems in extreme acts of violence in the name of one god or other, or there are the placid do-as-mother-tells-you religious conformists, etc.  I would suggest that less damaged people should grow up and lose their gods, except that would involve a dogmatic idea of what ‘grown up’ is.

SCIENCE

But it is not just religion that exhibits the errors of psychological imprinting and projection as these are universal human traits, the way the mind works: let us also consider the modern religions of science, for example.

At least science is supposed to rely on investigation and interpretation of a universe that we know exists.  However, because of the vast scale of existence involved, in space-time, scientific exploration is always limited by perspective, small and blinkered in the face of the whole; and, as a result, all kinds of nonsense is proposed via projection, with hypotheses masked as theories and theories as fact.  And I shall go further: supposedly rational or atheistic thinkers cannot help trying to impose meaning on life or positing creationist hypotheses, trying to find comfort by ordering the chaos.

For example, with or without a god, no one can explain existence: where did the big bang come from? what came before god?  The big bang theory is just another creation myth, except for scientists and with a smidgen of evidence that will, no doubt, be interpreted differently in time.  The big bang is a guess, based on best estimates using current knowledge, filtered through human psychology and the learning of embedded social history (in which the concepts that led to notions of a god play a large part and influence modern scientific thinking).  Odds are, the big bang theory is wrong: a scientific religion.

Or, by way of a practical example, I witnessed a scientist on television saying that time travel was possible because they fired a neutron faster than the speed of light.  To me, this was clearly someone who grew up reading HG Wells rather than getting to grips with Einstein.  To explain, time is a measurement of space: like height, breadth and depth.  All are sub-divisions of space, one and the same.  Time measures the growth and decay of space, in the now.  There is only now (space-time, not space and time).  If a person sends a signal to another person that will take an hour to be received, they are both in the same moment when it is sent and when it is received: the passage of an hour measures the signal wave’s passage through space from one location to another, and it is always moving through space in the now.  Appropriately, time travel in literature has been used as a way to say things about the world in which the writer has lived, the now: HG Wells was talking about industrialisation and the class system of late Victorian society in The Time Machine.  And if you fire a neutron faster than light it will run into photons rather than the usual vice versa (although light comes from all directions, so it will be both).  There is no mystery in this, just centuries of misunderstanding, learned and embedded, still with us and peeping through the scientific veneer and jargon of the person I saw on television.

And there is the medical belief still held by many practitioners that you can cure mental illness by physical means.  I have two things to say to them: learn the lessons of Freud and Lacan, and lobotomy.

There are many such tropes of scientific thought that are presented as fact, like god often is, that should be put under more rigorous scrutiny, and I hope the examples above give a flavour and inspire the reader to think more about what the men in white coats tell them.

CONCLUSION

In the end, existence is too large to get a holistic picture in our limited human brains; so, as Sartre invokes, focus on what you know.  I do this, but I do not ascribe a big X to the unknown: I like to think of the universe as a great big oil field, and black holes are where massive creatures from the next dimension are drilling and syphoning the field, with stars as internal sparks, combustion or fire-fighting.  It’s as good as any theory or hypothesis I have come across, and passably poetic.

But, and here’s the rub, there is a role for the kind of thinking outlined above.  We must think about the way the universe works and theorise and project about it in order to understand better.  And we all want to be comfortable, safe and secure.  The problem arises when people hold onto beliefs that are disproven or become fixed in their ideology: everything is always open to question.

And then there are the institutions that have a vested interest in perpetuating the lies.  Although there is a case for a reformed ‘church’.  This would be a ‘moral’ institution that is a voice for people’s primal needs for warmth and safety in society, that tries to understand the world and life.  But it should be rational and non-religious.

God does not exist.

Even if an omniscient god exists, which I dispute, logic dictates that humans would be as quantum particles to an entity whose being is the extent of the universe (and beyond) and we are insignificant.  “As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods” says Shakespeare in King Lear, a play that would have been shocking for its non-conformist attitudes in its day.