One time, I’d had a few drinks and I was sitting with a group of acquaintances and they asked if I believed in God. I tried not to answer, but they kept pushing me.
Without me answering, they detected wavering and assumed the worst. They asked “what would you have to see to to believe!?!?” I thought this was actually quite a good question. In philosophy, business and science, we often say, “what data would you need to see to prove/disprove a thesis?”
I thought deeply, and realized it wasn’t what I’d need to see, but… I can’t quite find the words. It’s the lack of which, the truency of, the omission of, the vacancy of, the privation of what I *do* see which I’d require. When I carefully collect the pieces of data that have rattled my faith, it’s painful.
Here are three examples of the types of things I’d need to *not* see. Warning, these stories are brutal and gut wrenching. Most of them brought me to tears:
1. One time, in one of my Anthropology classes, the professor described a story. A troop of Baboons was mixed in with some deer. They were all peacefully eating grass and berries and such. One of the Baboons took notice of a baby deer, reached over, grabbed it and started eating it alive, crotch first. The mother deer stood by helpless, listening to her baby cry.
2. Russia Today once had a documentary about kids in Gaza, about 10 years before the war in Ukraine or Gaza. It wasn’t particularly political at the time. There was a scene where all of these little kids, ranging from 4-7 years old, were playing in rubble, poking at a kitten’s head which had been blown off in some kind of bombing.
3. In WWII, in the Balkans, the Donauschwaben (a Germanic people who no longer live there) received the worst treatment from Hitler, the Hungarians, the Serbians, and the Russians. During the war, they dressed their teenage boys as girls to hide them from Hitler. He would take them and put them in the meat grinder on the Eastern front because they understood German commands. By the end of the war, they dressed their teenage girls as boys to hide them from the Russians, and Serbian Partisans who’d rape them.
The stories go on and on. They’re horrible to think about, and I don’t like thinking about them. But, when I’m honest with myself, there are just so many terrible stories. Children, women, men, pets, property, all dstroyed in horrible ways, for no good reason other than mother nature. Not to mention the wars in Ukraine and Gaza, the war in Iraq which killed a lot of children, the Holocaust, the 27M Russians who died in WWII, the front lines in WWI a la Céline, Journey to The End of The Night.
Mind you, I am a humanist, and I do believe religion is something humans have evolved to need. I think yanking away from people to seek “truth” is a dangerous experiment to play. An entire faithless society is likely a very miserable one. I understand the need for individual prayer, I even do it sometimes, but I don’t believe it can affect the existential.
Humans, and human behavior, are one and the same with mother nature, not apart from it. That much is clear to me…
