I was watching this video with Richard Dawkins and Ricky Gervais about religion, thoroughly enjoying being a preached-to choir, when Mr Gervais made a comment about agnosticism in regards to mythical creatures, as well as the existence of multiple different organised religions*. This gave me pause as I thought about how I really felt, and I ended up coming to some conclusions that I'd like to share here.
Maybe I'm wrong here, but this is how I generally interpret the word agnostic: "Since there's no way of gaining any evidence either way, and believing in it does no harm, it's just not worth discussing or debating. To each their own." The only thing I really feel this way about** is the idea of something spiritual existing somewhere in the universe that we couldn't ever really feasibly find out about, nor would it have anything to do with our little speck of dirt. Something I will always debate and argue against at every turn, however, is religion itself. Organised religions, I believe across the board, preach ideas of sacrality and worship that I feel ultimately result in nothing more valuable than violence and hate.
I was thinking about that Aussie radio DJ prank call involving the royal family that ended up driving the woman involved to suicide. I couldn't understand how being taken in by a harmless
prank could cause a person that much mental anguish, but then I had a thought: she let down the Queen. This is obviously just a theory and entirely speculation, but what if she was raised in an environment where everyone just revered the royal family and the ground they walk on? That isn't really a religious example, but it's the same idea, and I really feel strongly that conditioning people to hold something sacred (like a book, for example) or worship someone on a pedestal like they are somehow higher or more important than anyone else, on a basic human level, whether it be a god, the Queen, the Pope or Tom Hanks, is terribly counter-productive to humanity. People do terrible things in the name of their god.
And of course, this all starts at a criminally young age, or else it would have no staying power in the mind. Parents indoctrinate their children (and that is what it is) into whatever faith happens to be popular in the household when they're too young to even understand what thinking for one's self is, and by the time they've become rational, critically thinking adults, some people just never stop to look back questioningly on something that simply has been in their entire lives.
*To kind of respond to what Ricky Gervais said about agnostics, it's really just the one thing I mentioned that I feel that way about, and
I'm certainly not walking around saying "Well maybe some made-made
religions could be true I don't know!" (If you could read that last
sentence in that voice you use when you're telling a story and you want
someone to sound stupid, that would be great.) And I don't believe in
auras, psychics, ghosts, goblins or Santa Claus for two reasons. One:
they, too, were invented by people, and two: we can and have scoured the
Earth and found nothing substantial.
**I'm not
agnostic about Heaven, but I do think the basic idea is harmless and
even beneficial***. I have no doubt that the simple belief in being able to meet your deceased loved ones
again is what gets a lot of people through some of the tougher times. But even that can get
twisted into a tool for manipulation when you start subscribing to a
holy text. "Don't do this or you won't go to Heaven, blow up this and be
eternally rewarded," etc. Not good times.
***This is a thing I made up today about the idea of Heaven.
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