50 Reasons People Give for Believing in a God (25 page)

These lowlights from my travels are personal and a bit embarrassing but they are worth bringing up to demonstrate a point. When I
was in danger or emotional distress, I never called out to a god.
Believe me, I would have without hesitation if I thought there was any
likelihood that a god would have heard my pleas and helped. I could
have prayed to one or a hundred gods but in the end I knew that I
would be on my own to meet the challenges before me.

I am pretty sure that praying to gods for help and protection serves
no practical purpose. The gods are probably invisible and silent
because they are not there. One of the reasons their existence seems so
unlikely is because they don't protect their believers. Our world is a
place where suffering and loss are constant and indiscriminate. Good
people get hit by buses and lightning at about the same rate as bad
people do. Nothing could be more obvious than the complete absence
of a god's justice and protection in this world.

There certainly was no divine justice on the morning of December
26, 2004. The Indian Ocean seafloor convulsed for eight minutes to
launch a tsunami that killed more than two hundred thousand peoplemany of them babies and children. Of course, among its victims were
people who had prayed that morning and many times before. It didn't
help them. The massive surge of ocean water killed Hindus, Muslims,
Buddhists, Christians, and Jews. Drowning or being battered to death
in debris-filled water is a horrible way to die. It's likely that most if not
all of the believers who died that day screamed out for help from their
god as the waters consumed them. But they still died.

It's a tough challenge for believers to explain why their god kills
people who pray to live. But they do have answers. Some believers
will argue that a god does hear the prayers and comforts the victims as
they die. Or they might claim their god has to do what he has to do
because of some master plan. This is the "can't-bake-a-cake-withoutbreaking-some-eggs" theory. One of the more disturbing explanations
I have heard from believers is that we all "deserve" disasters like
tsunamis because we are all "sinful." This is what belief in gods does
to the minds of some people. It actually leads them to think that babies
are bad and deserve to be drowned in seawater.

According to a study by the World Bank and the Indonesian government, 37 percent of the people killed by the 2004 tsunami were
under the age of eighteen. Approximately 13 percent were infants.
More than seven thousand children lost both of their parents. Some
thirty-two thousand children lost one parent. It's hard for an atheist to
understand how children and babies deserved that. There is, of course,
another possibility that fits perfectly with these disturbing facts. Perhaps people die tragically, seemingly for no reason, because there are
no gods watching over us. Couldn't natural disasters such as tsunamis,
floods, earthquakes, hurricanes, droughts, and tornados be unintelligent and indifferent events that can strike down anyone anywhere,
regardless of which gods they pray to? This seems to be the most
likely explanation because it matches the reality we see in our world.

Many believers operate under the mistaken assumption that life is too difficult to go it alone without a god. They think that not believing
in a god would be reckless, like going through life with a death wish.
One must have a god to lean on during hard times, they say. One needs
a god for security. But this is not necessarily true. I believe that we all
possess a lot more inner strength than we give ourselves credit for.
Believers who say they must rely on their faith in a god to make it
through life may be selling themselves short. I see no reason to think
that the world's atheists are all psychologically stronger and more confident than the world's believers. Believers can do it alone. Most
likely, they have always been on their own anyway. They just have
never realized it or admitted it.

Too many believers refuse to admit the obvious: their god does not
protect them. Of the popular gods today, all of them appear to be either
unable or unwilling to keep people safe. For example, Christians who
claim that Jesus protects them might visit a nearby hospital and take
note of the Christians-including children and teenagers-who are
there suffering from painful diseases and injuries. Most of the people
in Darfur who have been facing forced relocation, rape, and murder
for years are Muslims or Christians. I am sure that they prayed to Jesus
or Allah for protection. But for tens of thousands of them, neither
Jesus nor Allah helped them when the Janjaweed attacked. Millions of
believers around the world are hit with everything from AIDS to abusive spouses, from house fires to hurricanes. If a god is keeping any
one group of believers safe from misfortune it is a mystery who these
protected people are.

More than one believer has told me that I will know their god is
real one day when something terrible happens to me. (They never consider the possibility that a bad event in my life might lead me to
someone else's god.) They suggest that I need a tragedy to bring me to
my knees and humble me so that I will turn to their god for help. Could
a personal tragedy or crisis force me to cry out for Allah, Jesus, or
Hanuman? Maybe. It might happen if I am at the end of my rope. But
so what? When humans reach out for gods in troubling times it does
not mean that gods are actually there. If people really do need gods to get through life, then that may say something about human psychology but it says nothing about the existence or nonexistence of
gods. Needing a god is not proof that the god is real.

The world we see around us seems to run precisely as one imagines it would without any gods involved. Haven't the last several thousand years of human history been pretty much what one would expect
from a species that has nothing to work with but its own talents and
flaws? Christians may say that life is too difficult to live without Jesus,
but more than a billion Muslims manage to do it somehow. Muslims
may say that life is impossible without Allah's guidance and protection, but some four hundred million Buddhists pull it off quite nicely.

I once worked as a live-in supervisor at a residential facility for
abused and neglected children. It was the worst job I ever had. It was
also the best job I ever had. Every day was an emotional rollercoaster
ride with very troubled kids who had been abandoned, beaten, or sexually abused. In most cases it was their parents or a close relative who
had abused or neglected them. They were let down by the very people
they trusted more than anyone else in the world. These kids, ranging
in age from about nine to thirteen, would have frequent destructive or
violent outbursts. Often I was the only thing standing between them
and serious injury to themselves or someone else. I was trained to use
a simple technique called "containing" in these situations. It was really
nothing more than holding a child in a bear hug until she or he
regained self-control. Although I had to do it many times, I never got
used to it. Holding a deeply wounded child and riding out the storm
with him or her was both physically and emotionally draining for me.
I could feel the waves of hurt, rage, and confusion inside of them as
they struggled against my grip. I walked away from those incidents
with tears in my eyes many times.

Some believers may argue otherwise but I am fairly certain that no
gods were watching over those children. It was just me and the kids in
the room, and I could never do enough to help them. Those children
had lived horror stories that were consistent with a world that has no
protective gods. If there really are invisible guardians around us, like so many believers claim, then why do they not do a better job of
helping children like the ones I had to stop from cutting themselves
and punching brick walls? If no god helps these little ones, then how
can believers be so sure that a god is there for them?

The Singularity will allow us to transcend these
limitations of our biological bodies and brains. We
will gain power over our fates. Our mortality will
be in our own hands. We will be able to live as long
as we want.

-Ray Kurzweil

e live in exciting times. We are the first generation of
humans ever that can sensibly discuss the possibility of
beating death without calling upon unproven supernatural claims or
pure science fiction. We may have a realistic chance of living extraordinarily long lives and this time we don't have to count on gods and
angels. This time it's nanotechnology, robotics, genetic engineering,
and computer power that some people are looking to for salvation. For
thousands of years immortality was the exclusive domain of religion.
Not any more. Science and technology have now progressed to the
point where serious, sober, and sane people are talking about the possibility that humans in the near future may live for many centuries,
maybe forever.

This is not as crazy as it sounds. There is a good chance that in this
century, science will change everything, and it all could happen virtually overnight. Cyborgs, cloned body parts, robots with artificial intelligence, and human minds networked with a global brain are no longer
wild fantasy. Today such things are viewed by many people as not only possible but inevitable. What makes it all credible is the astonishing pace of progress. Science and technology are not trudging along
in linear progression. The rate of progress is consistently accelerating.
For example, computer power is growing exponentially and where it
will allow us to go, no one is sure. Some people predict that this radical transformation, the Singularity, may come as soon as 2045. Live
long enough to catch that wave, they say, and you may be able to live
forever. Inventor Ray Kurzweil is a leading proponent of this view.
His fascinating book, The Singularity Is Near, details his case for the
rapid approach of this moment when computers and other technologies accelerate to a point where unpredictable changes may occur and
we are able to become something far beyond human. If the Singularity
does come, and if it delivers even a fraction of what Kurzweil imagines, life and death will never be the same.

Religious leaders have been selling the idea of an existence
beyond death for as long as there has been religion. It's a powerful lure
and serves as an effective way to pull people into a belief system and
keep them there. But it only works because very few people ever
bother to ask these religious leaders to prove their claims. The one
thing that all promises of heaven, hell, and reincarnation have in
common is that none of them have ever come up with compelling evidence or even a strong argument to support the claims. The best
believers can offer are stories in holy books or stories from people
who say they "died," experienced some kind of an "afterlife," and then
returned to tell about it. There are also stories of people who died and
then either returned in the body of someone else or returned as a ghost.
Unfortunately these are all stories, no more credible than Elvis sightings and alien abductions. Many near-death or life-after-death stories
probably can be explained as the hallucinations and sensations that are
naturally produced by a dying brain. Seeing a ghost is more likely to
be either a hallucination or the simple misinterpretation of something
real that one encountered. After all, ghost stories have been accumulating for centuries and there still is no concrete evidence that a single
ghost has ever existed. Heaven, hell, reincarnation, or some other supernatural after-death experience may be real but, despite many centuries of confident promises from believers, there has never been a
sensible reason to think that any of it is true.

Cryonics is an interesting nonreligious attempt at achieving a life
after death. This is the claim that dead humans can be safely stored in
extremely cold conditions until medical science advances sufficiently
to be able to revive and cure them of whatever killed them. Dismissed
by most people as impossible, cryonics is an intriguing idea nonetheless. Cryonics proponents say a slim chance is better than no chance.
Technically they are right about that. Cryonics really does offer a
better chance for reanimation in the future than, say, cremation. But is
it a good enough chance to be worth the money? And doesn't it sound
a little too much like ancient Egyptian religious beliefs? Don't cryonics customers seem like modern-day pharaohs? After dying they are
placed in canisters and servants watch over them. The only thing
missing is the pyramid. While the idea of cryonics is intriguing, I am
not convinced that we currently know how to preserve brains in a way
that would allow even unimaginably advanced technicians of the
future to salvage them with memories and personality intact. Something that no longer exists cannot be revived, no matter how capable
the available technology might be. For the moment, waiting on the
Singularity seems like the better option for those who need to dream
of beating death.