Reducing your own bubble requires determination, effort, and courage
It’s inevitable actually: when we are born, we know nothing about the cosmos, and as we grow up, we get so many signals from adults around us about what to believe: about what is true. Religion especially relies on massive ignorance to maintain its position and status in the world. Christianity probably deserves a Gold Medal for its Bubble of Ignorance.
Major features of the Christian Bubble
Number 1: Devout Christians don’t know the origins of their faith.
They tend to believe what they’re taught in Sunday School or catechism. I recall vividly what an elderly Catholic woman told me not too long ago: “The priests told us not to think about what we learned in catechism.” Nor are they willing to research exactly how belief in Jesus arose in the first century. What was the context? What were the beliefs of other religions and cults at the time? So many of them promised eternal life, and embraced the idea of dying-and-rising savior gods. Why were the gospels—those now included in the New Testament—written decades after the death of Jesus? How were they composed? What sources did the authors use to create their accounts of Jesus, indeed just how did they come up with the Jesus-script we find in the gospels? —so much of which (even Christians would acknowledge) is bad, mediocre, and alarming.
Moreover, the gospel authors had differing theologies: the gospel of John presents a Jesus who is very different from the one found in the gospel of Mark. The authors of Matthew and Luke also set out to correct the deficiencies of Mark. Mark has little ethical teaching, so Matthew created the Sermon on the Mount; apparently Luke wasn’t satisfied with it, so he shortened it and changed the wording.
This is also a part of the vast bubble of ignorance of Christian laity: they have no clue that many thousands of books, journals, articles, and doctoral dissertations have been written trying to make sense of the confusion that the New Testament presents. The laity are naïve: “What our clergy tell us must be true!” To escape this bubble of ignorance they would have to be willing, indeed, determined, to dig much deeper than that. But alas, that could mean a major disruption of the faith in Jesus they hold so dear. Not grasping that their faith in Jesus is delusional. “I feel Jesus in my heart” is evidence for what they’re feeling—nothing more.
Number 2: Devout Christians don’t seem to grasp our place in the cosmos.
So many of the faithful continue to settle for the view of the cosmos presented in the Bible. Their god resides in the sky above, and the Bible authors had no clue that earth is a planet, let alone a planet among billions of others in the Milky Way galaxy. Thus it is no surprise that Jesus was presented as ascending to heaven by simply defying gravity to disappear above the clouds, and take his place beside god’s throne way up above.
Most humans I suspect—and not just Christians—are not aware of the cosmos as revealed by astronomers in the last couple of hundred years. What percentage of humans—1 percent, 2 percent? —could explain Edwin Hubble’s 1923 discovery? This was one of the most important discoveries in all of human history. Hubble proved that the swirl of stars, now known as the Andromeda Galaxy, is indeed a galaxy far beyond our own, some 2.5 million light years away. At the time, many astronomers believed that our galaxy was the whole universe, and that the Andromeda swirl of stars was part of our galaxy. We now know that there are billions, maybe even trillions, of galaxies.
So the Bible concept of the cosmos has been obliterated, and—along with it—the confident belief that there is a god who pays close attention to everything that every human on our planet does and thinks. It would take a lot of evidence to show that such a god knows that the human race is even here. But there is plenty of evidence that he/she/it doesn’t know. Indeed, was there a creator focused on creating a cosmos brimming with life?
Richard Carrier has pointed out that this doesn’t seem to be the case—at all:
“Almost the entire universe is lethal to life—in fact, if we put all the lethal vacuum of outer space swamped with lethal radiation into an area the size of a house, we would never find the submicroscopic speck of area that sustains life. It would be smaller than a single proton. Would you conclude that the house was built to serve and benefit that subatomic speck? Hardly. Yet that is the house we live in. The Christian theory completely fails to predict this. But atheism predicts precisely this.” (p. 66, Why I Am Not a Christian)
When I was in seminary—on my way, ironically enough, to becoming an atheist—I was stunned that Christian theologians, totally isolated on our small planet, were so confident in their “knowledge” of god. Might there be thinking beings elsewhere in the cosmos who have been investigating reality far longer than humans have been? What had they discovered about gods? Without access to such knowledge, Christian theology—based as it is on ancient superstitions and magical thinking—cannot be taken seriously at all.
Even if there are other civilizations out there, scattered across the light years, Carrier’s point about “that subatomic speck” still holds. In our own solar system, there are 293 moons orbiting the planets, yet so far life has not been detected on any of them. There may be life on many other planets in other galaxies—but it may be at the microbiology level. Humans have fantasies about alien creatures visiting earth, which means that our imaginations have run wild (and thus countless religions have been invented as well).
It's unlikely that the universe was created to sustain life—and on our own planet, life and wellbeing are in constant jeopardy.
Number 3: Devout Christians don’t realize that horrendous human and animal suffering cancels their concept of god.
A few weeks ago here I mentioned the favorite hymn, He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands. It has proved to be a sentimental favorite—no doubt because it reinforces Jesus-script about his god knowing everything about us, including the number of hairs on our heads. But He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands is banal, sentimental nonsense; it encourages people not to think about the realities of our world, which include suffering and brutalities that should not exist if a caring, loving, all-powerful god is in charge and watching over us. The real world, as we experience it every day, would suggest such a god does not exist, and in any case, is not in control of anything.
How can it be claimed that a god has humanity in his hands when there is so much ongoing suffering? Here are a few examples, starting with afflictions, shall we say, on the personal level:
· School shooting, in which dozens of young lives are destroyed.
· On 10 June 1944, 445 women and children were murdered by German soldiers inside the church at Oradour-sur-Glane, a village in rural France. The victims had been forced into the church by the soldiers, then fire-bombed and machine-gunned.
· On 17 September 1940, the British steamship, SS City of Benares, carrying 123 children, was torpedoed and sunk by a German U-Boat. Most of the children were being sent to Canada, to be safely away from the war. Of the 123 children, 98 lost their lives.
Then we can move on to massive numbers of deaths:
· 1965-1966: Genocide in Indonesia, resulting in more than 500,000 people killed.
· The December 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami that killed 225,000 people.
· The Holocaust during World War II: the intentional murder by the Nazis of millions of Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, as well as those deemed physically or mentally deformed.
· In 1945, at least 90,000 people were incinerated when the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima; at least 60,000 died when Nagasaki was bombed a few days later.
· The 1918 pandemic that killed more than fifty million people worldwide.
· The Black Plague in the 14th century killed a quarter to a third of the human population between India and England; it was a horrible way to die. The church claimed it was punishment for sin. Truly, if a god has the whole world in his hands, he/she/it could have whispered in a few thousand ears, “It’s the fleas!”
For people who are aware of these tragedies—and the list could go on and on—the vast Christian Bubble of Ignorance, which thrives on unawareness of so much human suffering, is itself an enormous, inexcusable scandal. I saw this quote recently on Facebook: “Many believers doubt their faith deep down—but fear, habit, and identity keep them from facing it.”
Facing and dismantling the vast Christian Bubble of Ignorance requires the faithful to summon and maintain determined curiosity and courage.
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