BY: Edwin de Leon
If you talk to rank and file catholic and tell him/her that there are only 1.2 B (16% ) Roman Catholics around the world out of a population of 7.5 B, he will probably be skeptical about the figure. At 86%, the Philippines’ population is nearly homogenously catholic. ( China has 0.41% Catholics ) The average Filipino is not cognizant of the minority status of his religious affiliation.
Our belief is an accident of birth and history. We were born into a faith, and one path is laid before us for the rest of our lives. It’s all about “intersubjectivity and imagined reality ” says historian and author Yuval Harari. It’s only real as long as we continue talking about it. ( a rock, as an objective reality, remains a rock, whether anybody talks about it or not.)
When people stopped venerating Zeus, Athena, Aphrodite, and other Polytheistic gods, they were eventually replaced by Monotheism. Now it’s Jesus, Allah, Shiva, Buddha, and others depending on which religion one belongs.
Following historical precedent, one day,( if not already ) people will stop talking and venerating the ones we worship today in favour of, who knows? Indeed, if you ask young millennials, they will tell you all about “Crossfire” ( a popular video game with over 600 million followers ) or “Fortnite” (250 M followers ) before he can tell you anything about Jesus.
All that is needed is another Constantine. Just as he did with Jesus, he can tip the balance from a hero into a God. A lifetime is too short to see Carl Sagan, Bill Gates and Stephen Hawking turn into the new Holy Trinity. No one should underestimate how young people think today and in the future. “Dataism” as Harari envisions will become the dominant religion. Between AI (Artificial Intelligence ) and the creation of more algorithms, the cognitive capacity of humans soon will not leave anything for superstitious nonsense. Humanity will eventually find comfort and purpose in progressive pursuits that challenge our creative potential; all in keeping with our higher level of intelligence.
If you think it is far fetched, just stop for a moment and think about what we have today. For starters, we are venerating an imaginary deity, a myth created by ignorant shepherds to conquer what must have been boredom to the inth degree! The origins of belief were nothing more than man’s inability to understand nature as it unfolded. Omar and Ibrahim could not make any sense of thunder and lightning; they had to invent a god. Man’s imaginative and inventive mind concocts the rest. Science was not conceived yet.
Survival is at the heart of our vulnerability.
We are the only creature who is aware of our mortality.
Every religion has taken advantage of this fact.
My catholic friend says, “we have been around 2000 years and we will be a force for another 2000 more “. Yes bro, but there was no science then. The Enlightenment (the “age of reason”) is less than 300 years, Evolution (the theory) a scant 160 years, and what have we got since? A post-Christian Europe, Israel at 30% religious, Atheist Scandinavia, the Vatican reduced to a caricature of a pontiff going through the motions of saying mass to zero audiences while still claiming a direct line to an “all-powerful deity”, etc. etc.
In 1918, during the dark reign of the Spanish Flu which killed between 50 and 100 million people worldwide, a little known city of Zamora in Spain was a witness to now a historical footnote. A local bishop defied the authorities by ordering a novena for 9 consecutive days in which people lined up to kiss the relic of St. Rocco, the patron saint of plague and pestilence. Result? Zamora recorded the highest death rates of any city in Spain and one of the highest death rates in all of Europe.
Fast forward to the Asian Flu ( 1957 ), Hongkong Flu (1968 ) both of which had recorded 3 M deaths worldwide, and in 2009, H1N1 ( Swine ) Flu took an estimated 600,000 deaths. In succeeding pandemics, with more science ( understanding transmission ) and less superstition (praying) death rates have steadily gone down. Now in 2020, science is front and center and religion has decidedly taken a back seat: masses being canceled, holy water dips drained and replaced by alcohol, the Pope withholding audiences, Friday prayers canceled, etc. etc. There is not a single serious invocation of God by any religious leader even in worst-hit countries of the world; not in Italy nor Spain, the twin bastion of Catholicism in the world.
Where the holdouts were, such as Shincheonji Church of Jesus, a South Korean church ( half of S. Korean cases originated from this church ), Canada’s Hasidic ( Jewish ) Community and in Iran’s city of Qom where Fatima Masumeh was being venerated by licking, recorded the highest clusters of COVID19. Several Christian churches in the US South held conventional Easter services in defiance of “social distancing”. Have we learned our lesson? Apparently not. Virginia Pentecostal Pastor Bishop Gerald Glen, firm in his belief ” that God is larger than this virus” died from the COVID 19, after ignoring holding open church services. Politicians, as usual, are too cowed to say what needs to be said: No amount of “Our Father” will shoo the virus away. Get over it!
Ironies aplenty for sure, but just in case you missed the point, these are just more examples of the triumph of science over myth and superstition. Independent and critical thinking reminds us of what is real and consequential. Eventually, we won’t need any external God, we will be our (own) god! Either the papacy is headed to irrelevance or extinction. If you think not, you are not paying enough attention. The theological stage of civilization is ending. We are entering Enlightenment 2.0.
Today, we kneel, pray, hyperventilate, obey, submit, misogynate, hate, kill, maim, start wars, mutilate, lie on behalf of an imaginary God. But how do you explain superstition that attracts billions? Sigmund Freud called religion an ” obsessional neuroses” for which he was widely condemned. This reminds me of how the Catholic church excommunicated Galileo for promoting Heliocentrism, the idea that it is the Sun and not the Earth that was the center of the solar system, for which Pope John Paul II apologized in 1992, some 350 years later. We have to understand our evolutionary prerogative to fully comprehend how our brain works. Until evolution can work its way out of this conundrum, (which may take hundreds of thousands of years or more ), humans will continue to be susceptible to a squanderous use of cerebral energy.
We are a collective product of 200,000 years (3.5 B years including our pre-human origins ) of gradual accumulation of memes, mutations, and conditioning processes that stick to our brain like a very deep rut. Survival is at the heart of our vulnerability. We are the only creature who is aware of our mortality. Every religion has taken advantage of this fact.
First, we are softened by the constant drumbeat of fear (of God, sin, hell, death ) but then, religion preaches a new life after death. It’s a lie of course, but when you have this rut in your grey matter, man’s conditioned brain will succumb to his own biases. That explains why, despite the imbecilities of a Koresh, Tilton, Roberts, Grant, Pell, Lea, Bakker, Swaggart, and hundreds more out there, our DNA continues taking the bait. Every country has dozens of these shysters peddling snake oil. The common thread with all of them? They are all singing and laughing… all the way to the bank!
Natural selection will eventually rid humanity of regressive pursuits. Slowly but surely, conventional standards and thinking will evolve contingent with scientific progress along with the demise of myth and superstition.
Postscript: Swaggart ( and family )is making a comeback and is now again worth an estimated $150 M. Jim Bakker ( of the PTL fame with Tammy Faye ) is being sued by the state of Missouri for selling fake COVID19 cure. So there you have it. Our genes for stupidity are very much intact. Evolution is way too slow to rid ourselves of this genetic baggage.
Edwin de Leon, M.Ed. (edwingdeleon@gmail.com) is a retired science teacher, senior high school principal, and secular humanist. He is an occasional contributor to the Philippine Daily Inquirer.