To tell honestly, I was not confident about the topic of this essay, since enormous amount of literature was written about it, including Bible, Koran and Torah. My lack of confidence arises from the shameful fact that I have not read any of the writings in this area; being myself an engineer, I was primarily concerned with reading technical scientific literature. Nevertheless, I am laying my hand on writing about it, in spite of possible lack of objectiveness and in spite of offering too simplistic, even cynic, arguments. So be prepared for an utterly subjective point of view, my dear reader.
This essay is about classical religion (theism) and atheism, about belief and non-belief in God. In a general scheme, religion proposes existence of the almighty God, and atheism tends to rely on purely materialistic explanation of the world, without divine beings and divine occurrences. Hereby I shall offer my arguments as to why both theism and atheism are profoundly right in their views, and why at the same time both of these philosophies are quintessentially wrong.
Let us begin with consideration of the atheistic notion. Apart from God, atheists do not accept the legend of the chosen-by-God people (prophets) who are said to be exceptional holy individuals with supernatural abilities such as of resurrection, walking on water or of transforming soil figures into living creatures etc. It is quite difficult not to agree with atheists in this aspect: without solid recorded evidence except telltale stories, how could we, modern people, believe that prophets possessed such supernatural abilities?
Of course, prophets did exist physically and they used to spread their enlightening teaching to the masses. Undoubtedly they were people with enormous inner strength and great charisma. But I believe they were ordinary people, without supernatural abilities. Such ascription of supernatural abilities arises from mere distortion of the original information when it is passed among people. Known to many is the popular chill-out game when a certain sentence whispered from the first person to the second one within the group of, say fifteen people, sounds astoundingly different when it is uttered by the last participating person. Undoubtedly the original information can have been distorted during several centuries of history. Whereas God and prophets in the atheistic world might be considered as too abstract to comprehend, there is something that is far more concrete to contemplate: miracles of everyday life. And atheists do not believe in miracles.
In order not to sound dissonant by naming miracles “something concrete”, I should clarify what I define as miracles. These are events of everyday life which can be considered as incredible coincidences, events having happened so unusually that as if some invisible powerful hand arranged everything in this particular way. Religious people do believe in such miracles; I myself believe in miracles. Undoubtedly the majority of religious people, even considerable number of atheists, experienced miracles. However, atheists either pay little or no attention to them, or refer to them as pure coincidence within general mathematical probability. Granted, miraculous coincidences can happen according to mathematical probability: in the end, probability is not zero. But could miracles be really attributed to probability if they occur repeatedly? Moreover, if repeated occurrences can well be correlated with the strength of the wish or praying of any particular human…? Having contemplated numerous examples of miraculous “coincidences”, and having given fair credit to mathematical probability, I cannot say that miracles are simple coincidences. I presume that not God itself, but this conflict between belief and non-belief in miracles is the core of clash between religion and atheism.
Religious people recognized miracles of everyday life centuries ago, and quite rightly presented them as manifestations of belief. Belief per se is born out of desire that reality should proceed in a particular way. Desire in turn is preceded by imagination of the preferred reality at some time-point in future. On this account, it is apparent why people become religious: imaginations, personal dreams or aspirations which become true obviously point out to powerful nature of belief. And here comes the main principle of religious people: they link power of belief with a certain God (Allah, Jehovah etc.). The latter is supposed to be an omnipresent being which exists outside of human body.
Thus, a classical religion offers a system of views in which God is separated from human being. Of course, religion always insists that God resides in your heart and is an inherent part of your soul. But the fact is still there: God is an external being, since “God created the Earth and all the living creatures on it within 6 days”, as Genesis states. My question is: why should miraculous power of belief be associated with an invisible external God? In this regard, if I allow myself to make a reference to Albert Einstein’s famous explanation of light, or more specifically, of photons. He proved that photons can behave both as a wave and as a particle, i.e., wave-particle dualism is the constitutional property of photons. Furthermore, one does not assign wave properties of photons to some separate matter; both wave and particle properties are within any single photon. For this reason, assignment of power of belief to some God seems to me at least bizarre.
At the same time, “existence” of God can be well explained through the prism of the self-preservation instinct – the strongest of the four unconditional instincts engraved in all species of fauna. Existence of an infinitely potent God which is always ready to protect and be beneficial to you, provided your code of conduct imposed by religion is decent, fully satisfies demands of the self-preservation instinct. At any rate, if God is an abstract, seen-by-none being, could it be that humans themselves are Gods?
To answer this question considering religious and atheistic concepts, a theo-atheistic theory can be put forward. The main postulate of the theo-atheistic theory is that human being themselves are Gods. You are the God, surrounding people are Gods, even animals which can feel and think, regardless of how primitive animal thinking is, are Gods. In a nutshell, God cannot exist outside of human body and God cannot exist if belief ceases to exist. “Power of the mind” is an equivalent term to “belief” in theo-atheism. Akin to the example of wave-particle dualism of photons, the particulate, i.e., material, component of human being is the body, whereas the wavy component is the energy of the mind which spreads throughout the Universe and is entangled with mind energies of the other humans.
As described above, belief is a complex word embracing desire, imagination, love, hatred, envy etc. However, hatred, envy, oppression, torturing etc. – though not pleasant to be faced with – is as vital part of life as love, help for your fellow-men, compassion etc. This is the objective reality which a classical religion ignores, obviously because focusing on “positive” components of belief (love, compassion, mutual help etc.) is favourable for business purposes of religion (donation from the devoted, obligatory taxation for church), since people usually need portions of inspirational, cheerful and hope-bringing speech. Suppose if everyone follows recommendations from a classical religion – what would happen in this case? Obviously the planet would be over-crowded by humans beyond imagination, and global environmental catastrophes would be inevitable. In this aspect, as terrible non-religious an event as a war on any scale is vital for demographic balancing and, as a result, for survival of humanity.
Having so far read about the concept of theo-atheism, some of my readers undoubtedly compared theo-atheism with agnosticism. The latter is defined in Wikipedia as...”Agnosticism is the view that, the truth values of certain claims – especially metaphysical religious claims such as whether God, the divine or the supernatural exist – are unknown and perhaps unknowable.”…In other words, a follower of agnosticism believes and at the same time disbelieves in the existence of God. But agnosticism could well be misleading in the realm of theo-atheism! If agnosticism admits existence of God, then it would be admission of an external divine God; theo-atheism denies existence of an external divine God. On the contrary, denial of God in agnosticism does not comply with firm belief in God (in the sense of God-like power of the mind) in theo-atheism. Nor does theo-atheism offer principal ideological ties to solipsism – the philosophical idea that only one’s mind is definite to exist, and other minds cannot or do not exist. As discussed above, theo-atheism does not undermine mind energy of another person outside of one’s own mind. Besides, theo-atheism does not assume dominance of the mind over the body and vice versa.
The closest content to theo-atheism I can refer to out of my humble literature baggage is the book “The Alchemist” by Paulo Coelho, “The Secret” by Rhonda Byrne and “The Lost Symbol” by Dan Brown. The essence of “The Alchemist” and “The Secret” is that as soon as you strongly desire to obtain or become someone, the whole Universe is set in motion in order to realize your desire. In my personal opinion, Mr. Coelho or Ms. Byrne can be regarded as contemporary prophets. In the plot of “The Lost Symbol” one of the main personages practises Noetic Science, making conclusions based on the doctrine of Divine Intellect and laboratory experimentation that human beings themselves are Gods.
It goes without saying that in theo-atheism visiting religious institutions (church, mosque etc.) and performing within their walls certain designed rituals (reciting texts in Arabic, Latin, Hebrew etc.) is absolutely unnecessary in order to fully use the power of belief. At the same time, by performing such rituals in religious institutions one can also effectively “tune”, or activate, the power of belief. Moreover, it is well probable that if considerable number of people gathers in one place and activates the power of belief, as on a Sunday mess in a Catholic church, for instance, then the combined effect of belief can be synergistic. That is to say, any religious institution is a source of concentrated mind energy which directly influences physical reality. Perhaps for this reason some Catholic churches miraculously were the only survivors after carpet-bombings, as we know from examples of war history.
However, believing in an external God brings with it tremendous amount of unnecessary restrictions and prejudices imposed by religious institutions, such as which postures for sexual intercourse are acceptable and which are sinful; people being ostracized for not knowing Arabic/Latin/Hebrew chanting; classification of certain animal species as dirty, with such classification being not unanimous among various religions. At the same time, any easing of these rules formed by religious institutions is deemed as a significant, thrilling reform towards adaptation to modern realities. If a classical religion were a representation of absolute truth, would such reforms be at all necessary? In this regard, it becomes clear that the restrictions, both material and behavioural, in religion are used primarily as an element of intimidation and thus an effective tool for political influence. For example, in Islam there is the widespread motto: “if your parents are satisfied, then Allah himself is satisfied”. I do not need to stress that this motto would be zealously promoted virtually by all Islamic people as a means to manipulate children’s behaviour.
It should be mentioned that I am not trying to shed only negative light on a classical religion. Certainly its innermost teachings are important for self-reflection and psychotherapeutic purposes. For example, the idea of giving or sharing something with someone instead of taking – an action widely advocated by religion. Indeed, this action, which even contradicts to Darwin’s principle of survival of the fittest, brings with itself joy and relief from depressive state of the mind. But salvational effect of the act of giving is not due to its divine nature because it was prescribed by God, but rather owing to intrinsic features of basic human psychology which responds in this particular way to this particular act of giving. Or take, for instance, an empirical observation of having good or bad experience as a result of having done respective good or bad action to another person – known as the concept of Karma in Buddhism, Hinduism, Jainism, Sikhism and Taoism. Entanglement of humans’ mind energy-fields quite persuasively explains karmic connections. Whether it is a concrete action which brings salvation or whether it is a system of societal moral values – religion should not associate it with an external deity.
Albeit I may have persuaded some of my readers with my reasoning, religious people are likely to object to all my arguments by offering the following scenario with the question. Suppose a person commits a crime (e.g., a theft) and no one else is aware of his or her crime. Furthermore, this person is confident and fully believes in successful outcome of the crime, i.e., no negative mind energy was “issued” from any of the parties. But still, this person receives personal punishment via a chain of events which are inexplicably related to the committed crime. Often such personal punishment consists of helplessly contemplating suffering of own children. “Then should not it be existence of an all-seeing God who must have observed the crime of this person and have sent a proper punishment?” a classical religion would ask.
For such cases theo-atheism proposes involvement of the energy of deceased people, often referred to as the “soul without body”. Numerous accounts from people around the globe who reported seeing or palpably feeling ghosts, which are presumably physical appearance of the souls of dead people, is an irrefutable proof that not only mind energies of living people are involved in the overall picture. The famous Bulgarian clairvoyant Baba Vanga, when being asked on one of her interviews about how exactly she saw into the past and future, said that she communicated with the souls of dead people and asked them about past and future events, having also mentioned that the souls of deceased people are all over among living people, and are normally not visible to the latter.
To sum up, religion was mature enough to realize and apply the power of the mind (of belief), having also wrongly ascribed it to an external God. Science up to this moment was not sufficiently advanced to either detect or measure the mind power. After all, at the time of writing this essay the world was still using primitive low-efficient internal combustion engines for transportation. Contrary to the definition of agnosticism of not being able to know whether God, the divine or the supernatural exists, theo-atheism foresees ultimate development of science to rationally explain power of belief, leading to simultaneous “apotheosis” of science and thereby eliminating the fundamental conflict between religion and atheism.
SSB
Berlin, 2013
the graves of a catholic woman and a protestant man. They were not allowed to be together during lifetime because of their religious beliefs. The Netherlands, 1881.
