| Vertigo-X said: Thoughts? |
I've long had a theory, one that makes sense whether or not there is any form of benevolent deity. I may or may not have already posted about this on this site, but it's worth talking about here.
For the sake of this post, I'll use the religious form (because the argument is really intended to be food for thought for religious people), but you can pretty much replace references to "god" with "creators of the religion".
Religion can be considered the set of rules that a parent sets down for their children. Early religion was primarily about discovery - look at the pagan religions, where each deity represented some aspect of the world, an aspect that was to be explored, but also protected from. This aspect can also be seen more strongly in the pre-Noah portion of the bible. One could even draw the "fruit of knowledge" as a parallel to the point at which a child reaches self-awareness.
The next stage of religions tended to be strict, with a lot of rules and conditions, many of which were somewhat arbitrary, but served to create a rigid structure that prevented people from acting up too badly, and punishing them if they did. This is what one does once a child has reached an age where they start to understand the basic concept of rules. "Don't play with fire". Judaism bears strong resemblance to this. Note that "Kosher", for instance, is rooted in the same idea - don't eat pig because it's "unclean" (meaning you'll get sick from eating it - pork was a major source of disease back then, before they had things like refrigeration and antibiotics).
As the child approaches their teenage years, you begin to relax a lot of the rules, turning them into more recommendations than anything else. For many teenagers, this is quite acceptable. This is the next stage of religions, and is best seen in Christianity. The teenager is capable of truly understanding concepts like right and wrong, and thus are more able to police their own behaviour. They're also better able to understand reasoning - so it's not "Don't play with fire", it's "If you play with fire, you risk being burned". And if the teenager is decently well-behaved, this is the last stage before the child becomes an adult. It's also why the bible suggests that there would be nobody after Jesus, until "his return".
But sometimes, the teenager ends up acting out, and becomes rather unruly. This is what happened in the Middle East, and this led to the formation of Islam. Islam has strict rules, not unlike Judaism, but is much heavier in the reward and punishment angle than Judaism was. It is an attempt to control the unruly teenager, until they've matured enough to overcome the problem. It's also why Islam says that Mohammed is the last prophet - because once the teenager has completed this stage, they're an adult, so there's no further need for modifications to the rules.
However, the end desire of the parent is for their child to be capable of reasoning for themselves, and for them to be ready to create their own rules based not on the parent, but on reason.
So if the Christian god really is "the father", then it seems reasonable to argue that that god's desire for humanity is for them to no longer need the god, just as a parent wants their child to eventually become self-reliant. This doesn't require that the child shouldn't still recognise the parent, but rationality should take priority over the rules set out by the parent (in this case, the rules laid out in the bible, etc). It is hoped that the rules and suggestions would influence the resulting rational thought (things like the golden rule).
And heaven and hell all plays right into this. Reward and punishment is a standard way to enforce rules. 2000 years ago, humanity as a whole wasn't "mature" enough to actually do things because they're the right thing to do, and so heaven and hell are there to provide further motivation.
I honestly think that, within about 100 years, christianity will become a personal religion and a social thing, and within 200 years, it will become nothing more than a belief in the christian god as creator, with the bible serving only as a bygone historical artifact that provides hints to the nature of the christian god. Why so relatively soon? Because I see the transition of the world community towards "maturity" - that is to say, secularism and rationality, even from religious sources. Even the vatican recognises, for instance evolution. It will take a little while for it to propagate through the holdouts, hence the 100 years.
