The Things We Worship

Exodus 20:
2 I am the Lord your God, who brought you up out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery;
3 Do not have any other gods before me.
4 You shall not make for yourself an idol, whether in the form of anything that is in heaven above, or that is on the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth.
5 You shall not bow down to them or worship them; for I the Lord your God am a jealous God, punishing children for the iniquity of parents, to the third and the fourth generation of those who reject me,
6 but showing steadfast love to the thousandth generation of those who love me and keep my commandments.

You shall not worship anything but God. If you sin by worshiping another god, then YHWH, I Am, will punish even your children for it.

What does worship really mean? To fling yourself at the feet of something? What if it has no feet, no form at all? If it is an idea, how do you worship it?

It is to hold something sacred, not to question it or challenge it. It is to enshrine within the mind the superior virtue of something beyond oneself... to become a vessel for an idea.

Can you worship the god of the Bible while still considering that he may not exist? Can you devote your life to something you doubt?

Why would God punish your children for your actions? Why not hold everyone to their own account? I posit that this is because the children follow the parents. They are taught, instructed and expected to follow and obey. To this day, many of us assume it only natural to take our children to our own church, to indoctrinate them to perform activities before they can even fathom the meaning or nature of these things they do.

If you falter, your children will falter. If you are strong, your children will be strong. What is the nature of this? Why is it that throughout history, so many cultures all across the world have raised their children up, with a strong likelihood that the child will conform to the religious views of the parents and of the community? If God loves all of us, and wants all of us to accept him through his son, why is the overwhelming trend for cultural exposure to determine our fate? Did Jesus really die for 50% of America and 1% of China?

Indeed, it would appear that the sins of the father shape the fate of the son. However, we all can infer the simple explanation for the stratified trends of religion: as you grow up exposed to something, you will inevitably have to accept or reject it. As I deal with Christianity in my American suburb, atheists in India have fought their intellectual and ideological battles with Hinduism.

As for why so many people accept that religion with which they are raised, it is a simple matter of social cohesion. That a child can be raised to embrace anything from grizzly human sacrifice to safeguarding the life of every insect is a testament to the malleability of the psyche in the hands of its native culture. Children are simply inclined to trust adults, to accept stories, to begin to erect the little idea shrines in the backs of their minds.

Look no further than Santa Claus, a rather recent invention with an easily traced history. As far as belief and mysticism go, it is the mental equivalent of a toy - a simple concept for the warmth and amusement it can bring to children. How naturally we are inclined to create such toys, to give them to our children, to think nothing of this odd, unnecessary process - and how little thought we give to the significance demonstrated by their acceptance. Think about it: if it weren't for all the overt clues like frantic holiday shopping, receipts, homes without chimneys, and for an eventual exhaustion with childish indulgences, or perhaps simply a desire for our children to appreciate the money we spend on them - if not for these things, if the myth were something more abstract, perhaps we could string them along and convince them of Santa for their whole lives.

Even if there is some type of "god" in this reality, the fact that children can so easily be made to believe these things still says much. It should tell a member of one religion why so many other religions are able to thrive, but it should also make them question that one religion of theirs. What do you have that a Hindu does not? And what do they have that you do not? Do you know? Do you care? What meaning is there to truth if you accept the first answer to the question, and never question that answer?

If someone handed you a keyring with 100,000 keys on it, what is the moral value of having faith in one key? And what is the intellectual value of that faith? Statistically, it is a terrible choice, and if opening the door is very important, refusing the other 99,999 keys makes you unlikely to help yourself, let alone anyone else.

To hold the key more sacred than the door is to misunderstand the purpose of the key and to throw away your chances for the door. How is this faith anything but a delusion? How is this faith good in any way? I have never seen or heard a good answer for this, but I have seen stubbornness, dogmatism, redoubling of efforts and the digging in of heels to hang onto the key; I have seen fear, desperation, avoidance and pain at the thought of losing the key. People love their key. People have forgotten the door.

This example doesn't even preclude that the key might open the door. It is common wisdom to consider that a key might open a door, but foolish beyond belief to insist that it must.

So what is the point regarding our worship of that which our parents worshiped? What does it say that we conform to the trends of our culture so frequently? I posit that humans worship human culture.

Christians, or those who have been Christian, consider the fear with which you may knowingly perform some sin, or in which you may avoid committing that sin altogether. When you slyly take that object for yourself, or hide the truth from someone, or think an angry thought - do you forget God in that moment? Do you feel free to follow your whim; free now but due to face the weight of guilt later? Truly, how can you ignore this god which you think is self-apparent and resides in your very heart, mind and soul?

Now, think of how a friend or loved one would react to a particular action on your part - even if you think there's no malice or shame in that action. You hesitate, don't you? You think you may never be able to confront your parents about a sticky issue - you'll let them do as they will. You may feel worse about forgetting to take your shoes off in someone's home than you do about lusting or lying. Respect, shame, and a desire to live up to expectations, these are guiding forces in our lives. When you don't know the answer, you'll seek out someone wise - specifically, someone whose standards of social conduct you are trying to conform to.

To accept the religion of your people without a second thought is to idealize your own culture, your own way of life. It is to create the shrine in your mind, not of your own will but of the will of those before you and around you. This is the nature of God as well as the nature of social cohesion. Is this a coincidence?

To accept the divine nature of a book handed to you, of songs sung to you, of a way of life laid out for you, and to not question these things, is to render them sacred, untouchable. It is in essence to worship these things, to worship the worship itself, to worship human culture and to worship one's own state of being human. If it is possible to worship God without worshiping worship, and to have faith in God without first putting faith in faith, I have not seen any evidence, any examples. I don't think it's possible to truly respect and appreciate the idea of God without fully knowing and investigating the history and complexity of the process itself. To do what everyone else has been doing without first carefully piecing together the nature of this process is not to worship God.

Now, what of atheists? I can't exempt my own from scrutiny. What do they worship, if anything? For some, the scientific method is sacred, or reason, or truth or pragmatism. This creates the amusing appearance of paradox: how can you scientifically verify that the scientific method is the best philosophy? The answer is intuitively simple and holds a greater truth: test the scientific method against other methods, and embrace that method which produces the best results. If one cannot accept this method, one is left in the position wherein they cannot say with integrity that one method of anything is better than any other by any means. Even flawed reasoning is still reasoning. The only other choice would be to make completely random choices. For humans, this is impossible, and even if it were, the word 'choice' would be inapplicable.

In this way, reason is self-verifying where spirituality is not. Spirituality may sometimes look and feel right, but without reason, there would be no ability for us to even correlate those appearances with any actual rightness. In this way, reason is not the shrine set aside in our mind, but the shrine's keeper.

This is why I find it unrealistic to consider the existence of a god who would wish for us to use faith over reason. Why we would be given such a fundamentally and universally sacred tool as reason, and use it, without giving it due respect, merely to serve the cause of such a sloppy, circumstantial tool as belief is beyond me. Where reason affirms itself, faith claims to do the same, but this only renders it less believable.

We are principally creatures of reason. Faith is both less useful and less fundamental to us. The only argument in its favor is that it feels or seems right, and even this isn't true of many people. Matters of faith cannot be adequately demonstrated - if they could, they would be matters of reason. Faith itself cannot even be justified without reason: that which we put faith in is simply that which we at some point arrived upon via reason, and no sensible argument for faith can be constructed by anything except reason. In this sense there is literally no argument as I can see it for faith. Faith is losing this fight, and I invite anyone to try to explain to me why that would be a bad thing.