The Debate

While living in California I was only dimly aware of the reach and extent that religion has in vast swathes of America. I knew that its influence extended from the midwest to the deep south cutting through the very heart of the great plains. However, I was aware of this fact only in a very theoretical sense. I had a few friends in SD who were practicing Christians but only after moving to Chicago did I really realize how much of a sway religion has here. This experience has more or less affected me in a positive sense, making me more intimately aware of what I had always suspected, that religious people tend to be rather friendly and helpful, in contrast to what the raucous atheists would have us believe. I am an atheist myself (or agnostic with an asymptotic expansion to atheism) but I prefer to look at the debate from a different view point and through a more muted discourse.

I see the debate between religion and atheism as one which is lost as soon as it is begun. The arguments may appear new to the debaters but they have been essentially the same through at least a 100 years. What has happened over these 100 years is that either side has honed up their arguments by supplying more of what they see as irrefutable evidences and have roped in larger and larger armies to shout in ever higher volumes. None of those arguments matter and they have never amounted to anything. The debate is absolutely futile in convincing people from the other camp. The people who do end up changing their belief systems never do it because they have been convinced by good arguments in this debate but because there was some desire from within them to do so. Even though the debate is futile, it is still interesting to understand why it doesn't work. The most important reason it doesn't work is because the two sides approach it from the only directions they have at their disposal. The religious people, at the very very heart of their argument, make an appeal through emotion whereas atheists try to present their arguments in the light of reason. Religious people get away with appealing to emotion because reason hasn't yet provided all the answers that emotion and personal revelation supposedly has. Problem that atheists have is that reason, in all likelihood, will never provide convincing answers to the questions which are most important to human beings (purpose, meaning etc.) However, what religious people never seem to understand is that no explanation is better than a bad explanation. On the other hand, all too often I find atheists trying to convince themselves that there are believable humanistic and evolutionary explanations to all these questions. Just goes on to show that there are feeble minded people in either camps.

So is there a form of this debate which is still worth having? I think there is but not many people seem to be interested in having it in that form. I think it would be rather fun to converse with someone who isn't simply somebody else. Let's begin by assuming that everything that we cherish is wrong and that absolutely nothing is sacrosanct. Let's begin by throwing away what our teachers, parents, friends, religion, society, and idols have told us. Let's not pollute the discussion with dim-witted and medieval passages from scriptures. Let's also not just regurgitate thoughts, ideas, and dictum from the "leading lights" of the field. Let's especially not use them to hide our own imperfect understandings. I think it would be rather nice to have a discussion with someone who can begin from such a point. Someone who is completely alone and utterly fresh in this intellectual sense.