RELIGIOUS MYTHS AND THE PARADOX

A friend wrote a thoughtful comment concerning on one of my blogs that had to do with religion.  He made the point that as a small boy he had trouble believing religion mythology. I had a similar experience. As a child, my mother took me to church and I listened to the stories about Jonah and the Whale. I was certain I could not go home and tell my father what I had heard in church because he would punish me for lying—even to small boys the stories we were told were obviously not true.

All I know is what I have been exposed to, which is the Abrahamic Religions: Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. There is one central theme in each one, which is that the stories the Sunday school teachers told us were true and that they are the “true” religion meaning is that the only way to get to heaven is by believing in “their” God. Heaven is a myth: a matter of faith. Heaven is the reward part of the B.F Skinner reward and punishment psychology of child nurture. Church leaders use “moral punishment” to maintain church membership; members conform or they are ostracized. Either I believe in the story of Jonah and the Whale or I will not go to heaven; if I cannot go to heaven I will “burn for eternity in a lake of fire”.

At the next level, either I believe in the Judeo/Christian or the Islamic doctrine or I will suffer moral punishment; the believers will ostracize me. I will be condemned to die and rot, which is the only truth in religious myth. The point of this post is that both Islam and Judeo/Christianity are myths detectable by children yet believed by adults to the point where they as leaders of nations have led people in massive wars and the deaths of more people than we can count. I believe the answer as to where these myths originated has to be from deep within us and we maintain and modify this deep sense of belief by learning—that sense is survival. I feel that biologists base their understanding of evolution on survival of the fittest, the strongest innate sense we have and share with all other biota. The paradox of religious mythology is that it so often leads to non-survival of believers, which counters the fundamental biological belief on which humankind bases their religious mythology.      

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