On Religion (Yes, Again)

While conducting personal research regarding religions, I recently read in The Dominion of War by Fred Anderson and Andrew Cayton that the Aztec religious system demanded the blood of human beings to maintain the balance of the cosmos and insure that the sun would rise each day. By 1500 approximately 50,000 prisoners of war had to be taken annually to serve as sacrificial victims.

Now that, to me, is hard to believe -- that the entire populace of a 'civilization' could be taken in and their lives guided by such nonsense. Of course, it is just as hard for me to believe that a few men could be so immersed in their own set of religious beliefs that they would actually conspire to fly airplanes into public buildings and kill thousands of innocent people. Or that a group of nomadic shepherds could proclaim themselves as The Chosen People of The One True God, in effect branding all other peoples as dogs... thereby fomenting unrest, violence, and brutal hatred of their race and religion by millions of other human beings throughout history.

Serious study of the history of religions can make your head spin. People, it seems, will believe anything no matter how fantastic if it is presented to them convincingly and is something they want to believe.

One of Lewis Carroll's characters said, "If you set to work to believe everything, you will tire out the believing-muscles of your mind, and then you'll be so weak you won't be able to believe the simplest true things."

Despite Lewis Carroll's warning, I'm afraid that after seven decades I have tired out the believing-muscles of my mind,

But I am not an atheist. I do not blather from a soapbox (or a blog) and shout out that "There is no God and all religions should be abolished." Those who do so are (in my estimation) no different in their narrow-minded thinking than are the religionists or the theists that these science worshiping naysayers preach against with such scorn.

The modern militant atheist pooh-poohs the recently proposed idea of 'Intelligent Design.'

It seems to me that Intelligent Design could be the method by which human beings on the Earth came about... but not by any of the simplistic personal gods proposed by organized religions. To say, as do the atheists, that some kind of race or entity could not have set in motion human kind is even more an example of vanity than is religious 'faith' itself. How can one declare so definitely that some being or non-human race of beings exist that are absolutely undetectable by human senses and totally unimaginable to human cognition could not be powerful enough to have 'created' thinking man from a previous prehistoric animal state?

After all... as of now, there are more than 500 million Facebook users worldwide, and the company is valued at more than $43 billion. Who would have believed that?

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