My Religion - Part II

I’m now 32 years old and I realize that maybe my teenage questions weren't so dumb after all. Some people spend their lives trying to bring out the similarities between religion and science, while others spend their lives trying to tear the two apart. I simply won’t bother. My kids, if I ever have any, will be christened and they will have to go to church, at least on the holidays, at least up to maturing, just like I did. If not else, it’s my culture, my Home traditions.
One reason religion is unwilling to familiarize itself with science is because science offers simple, valid, indisputable and above all, logical explanations for some of the "miracles" described in holy books. The Nile, for example, is known to turn red when it is overgrown with bacteria. I guess Moses had other ideas, or, carbon dating of fossils tells us that there was life on this planet long before the estimated time of the creation of Adam and Eve. There are those, of course, who would argue that Adam and Eve are representative of all men and women etc. But should we apply the metaphorical translation to something which is so obviously meant literally? I’d say not.
Lastly, another difference which I have found between science and religion is the definition of "truth". To the scientist, who is more skeptical, truth is ever-changing - the more one sees of the world, the more observations one makes, the closer one comes to the truth. The theologian, on the other hand, defines truth as that which is printed in the Holy Texts, that which should not be analyzed any further.

Bottom line is, if you find that your faith in religion strengthens your hopes for genuineness, then believe in it. Otherwise keep on searching for the scientific truth.

My Religion - Part 1

Are you righteous? kind? do you call for religiousness? Does your confidence lie in this? Do you imagine your suffering would be less because you loved goodness? truth? God? Do you love others? Do you care about strangers? Are you loved by all? Weird huh… I’m sure that those (above) got you thinking!
How about, science? Do you value time? past? future? Do you grasp the value of atto (10 to the -18th)? Exa (10 to the 18th)? Are you analytical at all? would you like to travel in time? I would… certainly a good 2000 years back. Einstein theoretically proved it; maybe another Einstein could develop it.
Life on Earth has been traced through man and the primates, mammals, and vertebrates, and backward through ever lower life forms to the point, billions of years ago, at which life is presumed to have begun. But having reached these beginnings and having begun to contemplate the probabilities of life elsewhere in our solar system and beyond, don’t you feel uneasy about life on Earth. If all began through a series of chemical reactions, why does life on Earth has but a single source, and not a large number of other sources? And why does all living matter on Earth contain too little of the chemical elements that abound on Earth, and too much of those that are rare on our planet? Was life, then, imported to Earth from elsewhere?

You see, I grew up having a strong intuition that science and religion were simply incompatible. Maybe because I never received a direct reasonable answer from any of my religion class teachers throughout my school years. I must admit, I was always trying to be sarcastic when I asked things like, "If God is infallible, or whether the apostles were classmates? I do of course believe they existed, I cannot doubt the records. But why? why then? Life on this planet goes back billions of years. All those homo sapiens, the Neanderthals, while they were not taught of kindness I would presume that most probably none of them made it to Heaven? Yes, I did ask my teacher once about that and she answered "criteria was different then!" and told me to stop asking dumb questions and said we'd get into it later (which of course we never did).