One Astronomer's Noise

So I was thinking this morning about religion, I’m not sure why I was thinking so such about it. It may have to do with the fact that I was at a covenant ceremony (read: non-wedding) at a church yesterday, but it was a fun, open, fantastic ceremony in a Unitarian Universalist church… so a far cry from my stodgy religious upbringing. I was thinking about my education in the Catholic school system in New York, and how most of that education was secular, and tried to make nice with science. Biological evolution was not a problem, except for this one 90-year-old nun who refused to believe that man came from ape. In fact, I was assigned to read “Origin of the Species” as summer reading as an entering freshman in high school for the science program. Oh yeah, and there WAS a special science program! The only time there was a conflict between science and religion was when our AP biology teacher wanted to have a frank discussion about birth control, so he shut the classroom door in order to do that, lest a nun walk by. And that was less science and more his personally felt moral obligation to properly educate a group of intelligent young women about safe sex, so it seemed to me. (Looking back, I think he’s a hero.) But really, I was spoiled. Science and religion were taught as if they got along perfectly, it was only later in life that I questioned that.

But what intrigues me is a secular look at my religion classes. Those I took for granted. The historical accuracy of the Bible, I took for granted. Teachings got only slightly more critical as we got older. After all, Adam and Eve and the creation in seven days bit doesn’t fit with science, but that’s okay since it’s just a myth told by ancient peoples to explain what they didn’t understood. Sorry kids! But it *does* communicate some basic moral, theological truths, so goes my Catholic teaching. But Jesus and the disciples and the Virgin Mary and all that, that was real. That was historical. There was never any questioning of that. I now can’t quite remember where in the Bible chronologically they myth became history, but it did, whether it was gradually throughout the Old Testament or suddenly with the New Testament. (Probably the former, now that I reflect on it again.) It was only recently that I was introduced to the notion, even after being an atheist for years now, that Jesus may have never existed, that even his life was all a myth. It gives me a jolt to think that such things were just accepted by me, by virtue of the fact that it was taught since I was a child*. Note, this happens with non-theological “facts,” too. I can’t call them to mind now, but sometimes a random thought will hit hit me where some fundamental assumption about the world that I held is clearly and rationally wrong. It makes you wonder what else is floating about our own heads from childhood.

Anywho, I don’t know whether or not Jesus was a historical figure. But I know that there is doubt. Maybe there is some vague truth hidden there, some preacher that got real famous, and the mythology was tacked on. Or maybe good-old Paul did make it all up. I don’t know.

I think that the belief system I just described, my early belief system, describes more or less the type of religion that is followed by the majority of people in the modern society. It’s a topic for another day how harmful even that is, but I want to stop and focus for a moment on the fact that most religious people are not out to undermine science and reason in the way that a small minority of fundamentalists are. (No, I don’t know the actual number of “small.”) It may even be fair to say that if given the fullest explanations and reasons possible, most Americans who now say that they reject evolution might be swayed. It just may be that positive.

Hmmm… this whole thing sounded more coherent in my head, so I apologize for the rambling!

* Okay, I thought of one finally. When you hold a seashell to your ear, it makes a whooshing noise like the ocean. Someone told me, I don’t remember who, when I was a child that, of course you couldn’t hear the ocean, but it’s the blood circulating in your ears! Being a small child fascinated by science, I ate up that “scientific” explanation. And one day not long ago, I put a seashell to my ear and fondly remembered the explanation… and realized how utterly nonsensical it was! Here comes the science…