trying not to throw the baby with the bathwater

or in defence of religion!

the problem with religion isn't really a problem with religion, it is a problem with fanaticism and to a limited degree ritualism and then, of course, there is the reality of the human mind.

religion is a set of values to guide our decision making, when life is uncertain and we are emotionally hurt, it is because we have made gods out of things in the world and these things have turned out to be unreliable. we have rested in their comfort and they have eventually failed us. instead of living in fear, we make our gods more powerful. 

there is this quite excellent article by Devdutt Pattanaik about when Shiva told a story:  (http://devdutt.com/articles/when-shiva-told-a-story.html). it talks about how when other creatures feel hungry, they feel hungry; but when we feel hungry, we have to wonder why. religions are some of those stories, science are others. our gods are our stories, on how things work and why, on how to become and stay happy. it is vital we get these stories right, because we act on them. we cannot escape the imaginations of our minds, we have to constantly reconcile the stories and our experiences; to make being human a bit more fun, we mould our experiences as much as our stories; or maybe we mould our experiences a whole lot more than our stories. (Read the excellent Mistakes Were Made: But Not By Me on cognitive dissonance.) There is more to us than what we are conscious of, but that part of us still impacts us (imagine living in a world before gravity was discovered) stories somehow manage to reach that deeper part of us, hence there are very few of us that can live without stories.    

We need to get these stories right; religion is one of these stories. Is it the best one? Well, that takes me to a very interesting presentation at work about communicating science: it has been found that while the whole dataset shows a certain trend, it is commonly observed that cyclic trends exist within it that show an exactly opposite trend. for example, while temperature is increasing from august to december; if looked at temperature from an afternoon in september till the next morning, the temperature is quite distinctly decreasing. and that is called fooling yourself, i believe it is common to religion as well as science. Sometimes it is a product of genuine error and sometimes because we have become fixed and complacent. 

throwing the whole thing out - well that is just throwing the baby with the bathwater!