Excerpt #6 from my book, Religion, An Obstacle to Human Progress
Looking at Our Belief Systems
When we see and experience great injustice, suffering, inequity, and violence daily, we want desperately to solve such problems.
But how?
How can we reduce ignorance and suffering and expand knowledge and justice?
Where do we begin?
We begin by looking at our belief systems.
“I soon reached the conviction [at 12 years old] that much in the stories of the Bible could not be true. The consequence was a positively fanatic orgy of freethinking coupled with the impression that youth is intentionally being deceived by the state through lies; it was a crushing impression.” – Einstein
As Albert Einstein observed, we can’t solve our problems from the same level of thinking from which they originated.
At what level of thinking are we?
What level must we achieve?
How do we get there?
The famed journalist Edward R. Morrow once said, “The obscure we see eventually, the completely apparent takes a little longer.”
Curious statement: “the completely apparent takes a little longer.”
Mark Twain, commenting about life, said similarly, “What tedious training day after day, year after year, never ending to learn common sense.”
“The completely apparent.”
“Common sense.”
As we grow older, we find that common sense is not that common.
It has been said that common sense to an uncommon degree is what the world calls wisdom.
Wisdom about what?
Wisdom about life, about the architecture of life.
“The persistence of erroneous beliefs exacerbates the widespread anachronistic failure to recognize the urgent problems that face humanity on this planet.” – Murray Gell-Mann, Quark and the Jaguar
We need not reach back more than 2000 years ago to eastern Mediterranean agricultural societies for solutions to our brutal behaviors, social violence, and environmental degradation.
With contemporary and expanding knowledge, if we open ourselves to it, we can structure a belief system that honors and sustains that which in our midst is sacred.
We can reduce ignorance and suffering and expand knowledge and justice.
It requires letting go of dated notions and advancing with the natural evolution of life.
Many have taken this very liberating and healthy step.
“Nothing is more dangerous than a dogmatic worldview – nothing more constraining, more blinding to innovation, more destructive of openness to novelty.” – Stephen Jay Gould, Dinosaur in a Haystack
“This ultimately comes down to the insanely supreme arrogance of religious thinking: that a carbon-based bag of mostly water on a speck of iron-silicate dust around a boring dwarf star in a minor galaxy in an underpopulated local group of galaxies in an unfashionable suburb of a supercluster would look up at the sky and declare ‘It was all made so that I could exist!” – Peter Walker
“One of the proofs of the immortality of the soul is that myriads have believed it – they also believed the world was flat.” – Mark Twain