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A Soul Man?
Do you need to fill a God-shaped hole?
Church of Ultimate Naked Truth
Atheist Prayer
“If God is love, why does he entrap and then wrongly punish innocent people?”
How many times have religious people talked about people having a God-shaped hole in their life? Have we ever paused to wonder whether or not they may be right?
Understand what faith is, it is a mental trick harnessing all the power of the will and the ego behind a single concept which usurps the central love of your life and therefore becomes more important than your own life. People have the capacity to put things above the value of their own life. Evolution ensured that we had this capacity for self-sacrifice because it serves the interests of our genes. Our genes use us a stepping stone into the future. They are quite content to build our bodies in such a way that we put the interests of them ahead of our own survival and happiness. We sacrifice our interests and safety for the interests and safety of our spouse, children, family and sometimes our group. Ever since we stopped living in bands of about 100 closely related people (about last Tuesday in evolutionary terms) the capacity to sacrifice ourselves for our group has become perverse not just for us but also for our genes. When Tommy Atkins goes over the top for King and Country there is no possible way for King and Country ever to repay him or to compensate for his lost genetic potential.
Our brains have the capacity to be taken over by ideas, memes, viruses of the mind, which subvert the brain to the ends of those memes. Just as computer viruses exploit capacities within operating systems designed to allow legitimate operations. It can be a good thing to sacrifice and put with hardship, without that how can men raise their families on the wages of a miner? Putting up with hardship is better than having a family starve. The brain allows itself to reward itself, with dollops of chemical reward that come from pride, shared struggle, the dignity of labour and the love of a family. This is, when you consider it objectively a form of cerebral masturbation, self-stimulation of the brain's own reward centres. The brain needs to have ways in which conscious thought can set in train sub-conscious and chemical rewards for the body, without such mechanisms we would never be able to do the right thing such as putting up with hardship, making dangerous or uncomfortable moves towards a distant goal and making sacrifices. Making sacrifices indeed. Religious ideas find it easy to colonize brains built with strategies necessary for family life, especially the hard grind and constant sacrifice with a mind set on distant rewards that is the life of a farmer. Heaven is the end of struggle and the end of want.
Our brains don't have a God-shaped hole, God has been fashioned to fit the shape of the holes that our brains have. God, as a meme, can evolve many orders of magnitude faster than our brains can. God is the skeleton key evolved over many years from pushing ideas into the minds of man and noting what makes them open up. If an idea doesn't help spread the central dogmas then it cannot be a good one, so other ideas are stressed instead. Fortunately all mature religions have plenty of material to work with and choose from.
The most successful religions have a huge variety of ways in which to appeal to people. Take Catholicism. You can serve the church by having a lot of children, or by having no sex at all. You can serve the church by being poor or by being rich and donating your wealth to the church. You can serve the church by being very clever indeed or by stressing simplicity and meek obedience. You can become a bride of Christ, a soldier of Christ or an accountant for mammon with a small crucifix people only see when you are on the beach. The church does not make the mistake of making a uniform demand on people because people are different.
The central concepts within the religion are fairly firmly fixed because most people no matter where or when they live or who they with are fundamentally similar. People want to believe they are good, respected and admired. Religions give people ways in which they can feel good by observing rituals, by being seen to do so, by belonging. Rituals of speech help: God willing, may God go with you, it is in the hands of God, if God wills it, the Lord be praised and so on. These help give the impression that belief in God is thoroughly normal and the opposite is deviant, suspect or immoral.
The ways that Muslims happen to dress become, when Muslims move elsewhere, “Muslim dress” and a mark of Muslim piety as if somehow the Koran was a style manual and wearing a certain piece of clothing actually changed the soul of the wearer. Before any Christians scoff be aware that similar things happened with Christian missionaries, the clothes Christians forced upon bare-breasted Africans was European dress, not the dress of Christ. How many Christian companies in the USA would have thrown out Jesus for being a long haired, straggle-bearded hippie who obviously didn't match the professional, striving, hungry and aspirational profile of their company?
Believing in a certain dogma doesn't make a person good any more than having a particular hairstyle or clothes makes people good. Neither does preaching it or giving it lip service. Faith, belief and dogma are worthless. What matters is what people do, how they act, the ethics by which people live by. Religious piety is the sizzle, it isn't the sausage and just as the sizzle from a sausage comes from its water content reacting with its fat content rather than signifying anything about meat so religious piety has nothing to do with ethics and morality. The parable of the Good Samaritan proclaims the same idea: being and doing good has got nothing at all to do with believing in the right sky pixie and making the right prayers.
God belief appeals to people because it allows them to feel part of something, to be superior to other people and to be worthy of respect. All you have to do is believe. How hard is that? Believe and then you too can have the satisfaction of belonging, the feeling of being in with the in-crowd, being better than those who don't believe and of having done something to be proud of. Just by believing. Believe and be happy, rightfully, without guilt. OK, if you are feeling a twinge of guilt for feeling better about yourself just by believing something you can if you want do some more to earn that feeling. If you want to. No pressure. You can spread the word. You can recruit new believers. You can make sure everybody knows you have got those precious beliefs. Still not enough? Go and have a word with the pastor or imam after the service and he will tell you about some special projects for those whose faith needs to be demonstrated in stronger terms. There will always be a way for you to dedicate yourself further to your god, should you choose to.
Filling the God-Shaped Hole
What can be put in to fill the God-shaped hole? Life. Real genuine satisfaction for things achieved by actually achieving something.
This is a great challenge. How can you give the recovering alcoholic something to aim for without God? Maybe you can set him a goal, such as running for President.
Religion mops up surplus talent and energy but it also diverts it from where it can really be put to some good use. They say the devil makes work for idle hands so how can we find work for the brains made idle by stripping them of irrational and damaging beliefs? There are still plenty of real mysteries out there to be solved, in science, but only a minority of people are smart enough to have any real aptitude for science.
Striving for ever greater material wealth is, for want of a better expression, soul destroying. It is fundamentally unfulfilling as is the scratching of any itch and the feeding of any hunger. Religion is often sold as being the only thing that can fill a person up. But that too is a lie. It does not satisfy, it rather makes it a sin to appear to be unsatisfied when one has embraced the True Religion. The job of a religion is to fill the hole, for there to be any hole remaining is a problem. Religion is the answer, if you are not feeling satisfied that is because you are a worthless irredeemable sinner clamouring for ever more satisfaction. You're greedy. And evil. Unworthy. Religion hasn't failed, you have. You obviously weren't trying hard enough, or you are irredeemably evil. God never fails, failure is a human condition.
Stop beating yourself up. The hole is normal. Life is not meant to be satisfying in the long term. Your brain has been carefully calibrated by evolution to never be happy. To spread your genes and maximize their chances in the future you need to have a brain which gives you a whole series of hungers and things to be unsatisfied about. Happy people stop making efforts. If you were supremely happy you would sit under the nearest tree with a smile on your face and waste away. A fat lot of good that would do your genes therefore it is highly unlikely that they would ever have built you, their robot, with a view to seeking and finding perfect happiness.
The quest for supreme happiness is not something your genes would ever like you be involved with because it involves ignoring their demands. So happiness is not something you should ever expect to attain as a normal state for exactly the same reason you should never expect an aeroplane to fly to space: it wasn't designed to do that. Satisfaction should only ever be expected as a passing thing, something to be reached for a brief moment. Happiness as a constant sensation is a ridiculous thing to expect. Forget about it. Happiness as a steady state cannot be achieved. What we can do is make sure we eliminate misery. People can live with misery, fear and squalor as their constant companion. We can work to remove misery, fear, pain and squalor from our lives and from the lives of others. That is doing good and adding to the sum of human happiness. That is something you can feel proud of doing without any guilt. We can't make ourselves or anybody else happy, but we can remove all the barriers to that happiness to allow them to achieve it for themselves, as happiness should be achieved as the fleeting reward for achieving an aim.