"Why We Believe" and "Why We Should Ditch Religion"

Q: "For your inaugural blog read the article "Why We Believe" on Moodle and then watch the short video clip by Sam Harris on ditching religion. Write your own reflection on whether or not religion is something that should be ditched by people. Does the article "Why We Believe" contradict the notion of ditching religion? Is there an alternative way of thinking about how we should respond to religion?"


A: Religion is something that’s had an interesting place in my life, in that it was often not there, and yet I gave a lot of thought to it. What’s most interesting is that the attitude towards most religions in the city I was raised in is not entirely positive; many people are so liberal that they become narrow-minded and start filing biases against certain religions, namely Christianity. I’ve gone from agnostic to atheist, to Beatles-ist to a true-blue spiritual person with my own brewing pot of labels and titles that I like to tack onto myself. Coming from this background, reading this article and watching the clip were very interesting. I really enjoyed the article because it seemed well-balanced, without to much of a leaning in one direction or another, and a lot of thoughtful observations. I thought that their proposal of researching why we, as humans, believe in any sort of divinity, rather than “whether or not a god exists,” is a wonderful perspective to explore. There is no way to scientifically prove whether a god exists or not, but we can certainly look at the ways that spirituality and religion affect us now, and how they’ve come to be such a natural part of our behaviour.

That being said, I was not so fond of the clip. It wasn’t that Mr. Harris didn’t have important points, as he most certainly did, but it seems to me that there are plenty of people in the world who are both religious and moral without being so simply because “God told them so.” Not to mention the people who are religious without being spiritual. Without any sort of religiosity, I think it would be incredibly difficult to make huge social and political movements work; community, devotion, faith in the cause are absolutely key. I do feel like the clip was a contradiction of the article because the article simply seemed to be saying that there may be natural causes for being and feeling religious, whereas Mr. Harris seemed to want to disregard this perspective entirely and throw these normal behaviours.

Personally, I’d rather see people work with the good-will of religious people rather than try and change their mindset so that their good-will and work is coming from a different vein of thought. Yes, many awful things have happened in the name of a religion, but most of the horrible events in the world have happened under a group mindset of any kind. I simply wish that people would realise that everyone is religious about something, and it affects their lives immensely, whether spirituality is involved or not, and that is not a bad thing.