I love Eisenberg’s look at humanity as no different than a bacteria that has taken over the refrigerator during a temporary power outage. It rang very true to me that we aren’t a special organism that has been granted some power over the Earth. I don’t believe that God ever entrusted us with the Earth. Rather, I think we are animals that somehow evolved until our brains were able to think, to feel, to reason, and this led to our trying to understand the world around us, which in turn led to religion as we didn’t understand everything around us.
If science had existed as long as man has existed, I’m convinced that there would be no religion. We wouldn’t have ever explained a lightning bolt as being thrown by a god, but rather we could have discovered the truth behind it, as we know the truth behind lightning and weather today. But language, in those early days, opened up something intangible for us; we were feeling things and thinking things that couldn’t be described by these animals who previously only knew how to eat, sleep, and have sex. Once intangibles started showing up, people wanted answers; religion seems to be the block that they decided to fill the hole in with.
I don’t know how we should live today. Should we totally get rid of religion? It seems to me to be a huge flaw in culture, which I’m not totally sure is supposed to exist either, but we clearly can’t just rid ourselves of something that is absolutely hardwired within us from birth. But while culture can’t go, religion may be able to, if people could separate themselves from their fear of the unknown and come to believe as I do. Not to say I am right, of course, because I could be wrong, but it just doesn’t make sense that if there is one true religion, such as Christianity, then there would also be so many different religions, all created and shaped around their particular lifestyles. I love when Eisenberg looks at the Canaanites and then also looks at the Israelites, and says that they seemed to think they were special for some reason. It felt like a sweet smack in the face to religion, which certainly needs a sweet smack in the face. God only made them the chosen people in so much as every other god made every other religious people the chosen ones. These particular people just happened to take over half the world the last couple thousand years, and so they seem to be “more right” than everyone else. But where I’m standing, science doesn’t really seem to support this idea. While there may be things we don’t know through science yet, I don’t think that warrants a stubborn belief in religion, which of course can never be proven wrong (at least until we die, but at that point it’s too late).
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