Doubt the deity

Now that I established some ideas about where our sense of spiritual belief comes from and how it translates into religion, I want to move on and start to shake the religious tree. I'm well aware that, as a result of this, some nuts may fall out. So let's hope none of them land on my head!

First thing I'd like to tackle is the existence of multiple monotheism's. I limit myself to the three monotheism's most familiar to me: Christianity, Judaism and Islam. All three of these exclude the other by saying that they are the only true religion. As each religion excludes the other two religions, each of the three religions are excluded by the two others. It's always two against one. In other words, none of them can be true!
There is a simple and amusing analogy to this. Many of us believed in Santa Claus at some stage of our lives. Now if you place yourself back in that stage of life and imagine you meet 3 men perfectly dressed up as Santa Claus. All three are telling you that they are the only real Santa Claus and the other two are just fakes. They start arguing about who is the real Santa and pulling at each others beards, which inevitably come off and unmask the Santa's as fake. For any small child that believes in Santa Claus this would be a disaster, for all those Santa clauses are obviously fake!





So who will bring the presents? Oh yes, the presents, how could I forget? As many children live through the year they try to behave so at Christmas they are getting presents from Santa Claus. Adults (religious ones) live through their years hoping that at the end of their lives they get the ultimate present from their deity: life after death. Oh, and absolution from their sins of course. To reach this ultimate goal, they let their deity rule their lives by means of an authoritative system of theology: religion. Religious leaders are the self-appointed ground-personnel of their deity and repent (did I say repent? sorry, I meant represent) him on earth. The catholics took this the farthest with their hierarchical structure on top of which they have the pope: a true godfather of religion. The line between organised crime (mafia) and organised belief (religion) is indeed very thin. Both have an insatiable hunger for money and power. Both are strictly organized to manipulate and dominate their subjects. And neither hesitate to kill for a 'higher cause'. We saw this in the crusades of the middle ages, and now we see it again in the 'war against terror'. It seems to me that the more fanatic one lives to the rules made up and imposed by religion, the further he is actually away from his deity!

If there really is an 'intelligent creator' then this is such a complex being, or concept of being, that we humans would not be able to understand it. Think about the ant heap. It's a little micro-cosmos within the world, full of ants doing their thing. They don't care about us humans, our technology, our culture or economics, because they are too simple for this. They might be aware of a human species when one of them destroys their ant heap, and how knows how they explain such a phenomenon among themselves. They probably don't, but instead try to rebuild their micro-cosmos as soon as they can. And once they did, they continue living their ant life without bothering anyone else. They have their very own purpose in the universe, of which they probably aren't aware, and fullfill this purpose perfectly.

Of course us humans are a lot more complex than ants, but so is the world we live in. As a result of our intelligence and awareness, we seek to understand the complexity of this world. Maybe if we connect all human brains together (like a clustered supercomputer) we will eventually unravel this mystery. Or maybe we need another phase of evolution before our brains have enough capacity for this? With the help of science, we have answered a lot of questions that religious institutions claimed to have a patented answer to. Hopefully there will be more and more of our questions answered in a scientific way which is acceptable to all religions and all people. As long as we don't understand it, we have to be satisfied with a more or less educated guess. It would be sad if we as a human species destroy ourselves and the world we live in because we make war against people who make that educated guess in a slightly different way.

Maybe if we would see the purpose of the human species to unravel the mystery it actually is, and if we could somehow work together to achieve this goal, we would actually get somewhere. Maybe not to heaven, or to hell, but to a state of one-ness with ourselves and the world around us. As long as we haven't achieved this, let's take an example from the ants and lead our lives without bothering each other in the progress.