Upsetting the Witnesses

SORRY MICKY, BUT I CAN'T JOIN YOU IN BEING A BELIEVER

We've all had them on the front step.  You have to admire their persistence, despite so many doors slammed in faces.  The Jehovah's Witnesses just keep on turning up, or hanging around street corners, hoping to find someone desperate/vulnerable enough to take on board their strange beliefs.  My usual response is "sorry, but I try not to be superstitious at all", and see what happens from there.  The superstition bit sometimes throws them, so it can get quite interesting.  They haven't converted me yet.  Sadly, I haven't managed to convert one of them either, but that's no reason to give up....

I was brought up 'in' the Church of Scotland, but on a very low gas.  I'm not sure if my father believed in anything at all, and probably just went along with it to placate my mother.  She 'believed' because that's what you were supposed to do, and the greatest possible sin in her eyes was the flouting of social conventions.  I can vaguely recall attending Sunday School at the local church, and there was the usual half-hearted attempts at religious indoctrination in school.  Did I ever believe any of this stuff?  Maybe as a small child, but by my early teens I was pretty certain it was all nonsense.

In my twenties I called myself an agnostic, because I thought it would be fairer to acknowledge the existence of doubt.  As I got older that seemed too lukewarm so I took to saying I was an atheist.  And now, older and (possibly) wiser, I can no longer see the point in these labels.  Why should I have to define myself by my non-belief in something that seems clearly made up in the first place?

A view I should perhaps justify, so here's what I discussed with one of those tenacious door knockers.

How many religions are there in the world?  I doubt anyone knows the real number, but I did see a figure of around 4,500 quoted once, and that sounds entirely believable.  As far as I'm aware every human society developed some form of supernatural belief system as part of their development.  Deeply held tenets, often codified, that made some effort to understand the world around them and, often, provide guidance on how to behave in life.  And ascribing an ability to influence human affairs to some form of supernatural power.  The latter might be embodied in the sun, or the moon, a wide river or high mountain, a volcano or forest, perhaps the local major carnivorous predator.  Some thing which could be worshipped, prayed to, act as a focal point for the belief system.

Greater sophistication brought greater imagination, and the powers were attributed to imaginary beings.  Sometimes in human form, sometimes animal, even curious hybrids between the two.  Eventually one religion came up with the notion of there being a single being, a god, which was omnipotent, and this would go on to spawn two descendants, Christianity and Islam, which have become amongst the most successful in spreading around the world.

Why did these emergent feel the need to develop such beliefs?  Given how universal they are, and how varied, I can see two possible broad conclusions which might be drawn.  The most likely explanation is the desire to know how you fit into the universe.  The need to have an explanation for why you are here and what purpose is there to your existence.  The answer to what has come to be know as The Human Condition.

And in world without science, where the physical world was vast, confusing and often unintelligible, there was a need to seek out explanations for the inexplicable.  If you can't see any rational reason for your life, then an irrational one will do instead.

Or.  Possibly there is some form of supernatural power out there, but thus far beyond the understanding of human knowledge, and religions are the efforts we have made to attempt to fill in that gap.  Although, if that were really the case, wouldn't there be a greater convergence of thinking?

One fact strikes me as critical to this line of thought.  There has never been (do correct me if I'm wrong) an occasion where two societies came into contact for the first time and, on finding out more about one another's culture, suddenly went "heh, that's what we believe too!".  You might have expected, if one of these belief systems had actually got it 'right', something similar might have developed at some other point on the globe as well....

Not that there has tended to be much discussion when two societies meet, with brutal subjugation being the norm.  It's notable that the two biggies I mentioned above, Christianity and Islam, have been spread around as much by military conquest as any form of persuasive art.

All of which means that, unlike Micky Dolenz of The Monkees, there's no chance of me ever becoming a believer.