Imagine one day that you're standing under a street lamp wishing for a
cigarette, when everything you know, everything you thought you knew,
had vanished from your mind.
No thunder roared. No lightning cracked. No missiles
rained from the sky. This was no sneak attack. Long centuries of slow, human
discovery about the world conspicuously vacant in every man, woman and
child's mind.There was just suddenly this awful lack. Medicine, science, humanities, religion - all gone. Even language. We have to go so far as to relearn that no means no, creating a new word to embody the concept. And we have to rename
ourselves. Me, I call myself Bob. It's weird being a Bob, but I'll get
used to it. I have to.
In the book End of Faith, Sam Harris, proposes such a thought-experiment.
"Imagine that six billion
of us wake up tomorrow morning in a state of utter ignorance and
confusion. Our books and computers are still here, but we can't make
heads or tails of their contents... What knowledge would we want to
reclaim first?"
Harris goes on to observe that after
we reclaim our language and communication skills, repair our machines,
establish food production and shelter ourselves, where does the
importance that Jesus was born a virgin, walked on water, or resurrected
from the dead take precedence? He asks what about other religions. Should we come to
know again that Isis is a goddess of fertility? Thor carries a hammer?
Or should we shelve the Koran and the Bible next to books like the
Poetic Edda, The Iliad and Odyssey, or the Egyptian Book of the Dead?
Would we want evidence? Or would we just believe in all the stories of all these books
unconditionally and without evidence? How would we pick and choose from the rags-n-bones of the past?
Instead of crying out the sky is falling and that we want our mommy, pretend that we form a committee to discuss the problem. Perhaps we discuss things like assured mutual destruction and emotional responsibility.
None of which we understand anyway. Harris points out,
that it our past which creates the conditions of belief in religious
necessities of today, but free of it - is there any
reason to continue anew? What knowledge do we select in this new world, unshackled from the past?
So let me ask you, from the graveyard of the gods which were so
important in humanity's past – like the Greek and Roman pantheon of
gods, why should we once again believe in the doctrines of
Christianity? Why should we choose one religion over another?