Again, my apologies for the delay in posts. I've been incredibly busy with school, and I just picked up a part time job on the side, but winter break is fast approaching, so hopefully I will have plenty of time to catch up on some posts and keep this blog alive! Something I have been working over in my head these past few weeks has been the concept of god, and why it is so powerful. While not specific to any religion, I want to address the issue of belief in god without going into any in depth syllogisms or philosophical arguments.
What I have come to believe over the past few years of my life is that the number one reason that people believe in a god is emotion. While this may seem obvious, the reasons for this may not be so. Why do so many Christians continuously assail us with notions of "Jesus loves you" and "you can feel God in your heart"? This is because of the emotional connection these ideas imply. Love is the most powerful human emotion, (and more interestingly, most resemblant of insanity), so the idea that the most powerful, all knowing being in the universe loves you is very appealing to some people. Everyone wants to be loved, so why wouldn't you want to be loved by an all knowing, omnipresent deity who created the universe? The Christians love to tout their god as a loving god (directly contradicting much of the Bible, which many of them have not fully read anyways). Put yourself in the shoes of a young child attending Sunday school, or someone on the fence about the existence of god. When you repeatedly hear "God loves you" and "Jesus is love", these are very powerful appeals to your emotions, which, for better or worse, have the ability to overpower their counterpart: reason and rational thought.
Some religions take the opposite approach, using scare tactics to push people over the fence into their camp. Muslims have "the wrath of Allah" and even some Christians attempt to scare people with visions of the Rapture and other doomsday scenarios. But the important thing to realize here is that all of these arguments are relying on an appeal to emotions, with no use of logic, evidence, critical thinking, the scientific method, or the application of reason.
So why do so many religions use appeals to emotion as their primary recruiting tool? The answer is simple: it is their most effective method, because they do not have legitimate reasonable arguments. If they had real arguments, they would use them. The theists who do attempt this route call themselves apologists (Greek for defenders) and they come up with elaborate arguments such as Ontological Argument for God, the Transcendental Argument for God, and the First Cause Argument. Unfortunately for them, all of these arguments prove flawed upon closer inspection. This is the reason why theists come to rely upon emotion to keep themselves and others believing. The thing that adds to this problem is that emotional bonds are very difficult to break. When you spend 10 years of your life honestly believing that "Jesus loves you" and is with you every where you go, it will be very very hard to all of a sudden drop that belief, since you have become dependent upon your beliefs. This is what makes religions so self-perpetuating. There is no encouragement to rationally examine your beliefs, but they are merely reinforced day after day in a way that can become a self fulfilling prophecy.
Overall, the idea I am trying to get across is that religious arguments and appeals are dominated by emotion rather than reason. Even more troublesome is that when you actually confront these emotional arguments, theists often refuse to think rationally and logically because of their dependence on the emotional connection. Hopefully, with time and the continued efforts of atheists and freethinkers everywhere, this trend can be reversed.
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