Flirting With Relevance

There seems to be some confusion between the concepts of belief, faith and religion.

Belief is just that. It’s what we believe, politically, religiously and otherwise philosophically. Faith is what allows you to believe that which cannot be proven. Again, it is not necessarily a matter of any god or gods.

Religion is a system of beliefs, usually but not necessarily taken on faith. More than that, a religion is a codified version of such beliefs that has been agreed upon by more than one person, as well as the body of people who agree upon those beliefs. A religion is not the god or gods that the believers worship. It is only the collective agreement of those who believe in a common thing.

The purpose of these subtle distinctions is to drive home the point that religion is a very human, earthly institution that is entirely separate from the god or gods that it claims to be the true god or gods. No matter how all-powerful or all-knowing their deity might be, the people with authority in any religion are still as fallible, and as likely to wrong about something as any of us.

That is probably the fundamental contradiction about religion. For something that makes claims on matters of the absolute and the infallible, it is remarkably human and limited institution, as subject to politics and prejudice as any earthly endeavor.

To paraphrase an old saying, a monotheist disbelieves in all of the hundreds of gods worshiped by people all over the world, save one. An atheist merely disbelieves in one additional god. Another way to look at it, if any one concept of god is correct, then by definition, all others are wrong. Depending on your level of religious fervor, those others are either misguided or damned to hell.

But, if only one concept of god can be correct, and all others, by definition, must be wrong, then the odds of any single human being, out of the billions on earth, holding the correct view of god in his or her head is vanishingly. Despite the claims of fundamentalists, if you quizzed a thousand different believers, even members of the same hellfire and damnation congregation, about their concept of god, you would get a thousand different answers. Odds are that all of them would be wrong, assuming there is a “correct” view of god, simply because there are an infinite number of possible versions of god and only one, by definition, can be correct.

In other words, your religion is not the same as your god. Religion is a collective opinion on the subject of god, an opinion as fallible and subject to criticism as any other. Just because exercising this opinion involves getting down on your knees and declaring yourself unworthy doesn’t make it off limit for me to say I think it’s silly.

More importantly, any opinion that I may hold, religious or not, that contradicts your religious opinion does not threaten that opinion. For example, my belief that the theory of evolution is the fundamental basis of the modern life sciences doesn’t take away your fundamental right to reject 150 years of scientific progress on whim.