Why Adam and Eve Created GOD

We are not always right.  There are times when our minds play tricks on us, causing what some call “a religious experience”.  We can be certain something happened, but yet it never did.  We know what we saw, but yet we find out it really wasn’t quite like we remembered.  We tend to place a lot of weight on “eye witness” accounts, but time and again it is proven that eye-witnesses are often very wrong.  False memories, delusions, and hallucinations can cloud our recollections.  Most of the time, these have little direct impact on our lives.  They annoy us when we can’t remember something correctly and startle us as we fall asleep, but for the most part, they are harmless.  Other times, the consequences of these experiences are a bit more troubling.  For example, Ronald Reagan, while he was President of the United States, sometimes had difficulty in differentiating reality from memories of films in which he had acted.

This is only a short summary of this fascinating topic.  To find out more, please get Why Adam and Eve Created God.

Silly mind tricks are part of being human.  They can be silly, embarrassing, or dangerous.  Find out why we all experience them, and how they have been used by religions the world around to trick people into thinking God had something to do with their life.  Briefly, here is a list of silly mind tricks that most all people experience.  Read more about the here.   These are normal parts of being human, and make many people think that God is contacting them:

1. Auditory Hallucination (Hearing Voices).  Sometimes this happens as we are falling asleep or awakening.  Sometimes when a loved one passes away, we’ll hear their voice as if they were in the room.
2. Visual Hallucination (Hearing Voices).  Again, sometimes this happens as we are falling asleep or awakening. Visual hallucinations are less common than auditory ones, but they do happen to many people.
3. False Memories.  When our brain recalls a past event, the memory it brings up can be inaccurate, exaggerated, and missing information.   Our mind may have filled in some missing gaps on its own or a memory mayhave been implanted there by someone else.

If all was well and good in the world, there would be no religion as we know it.  If life were fair and just, if death did not await us all, if bigotry and hatred did not exist, there would be no religion as we know it because there would be no need for it.  But life is not that rosy.  Facing it is a daily battle—an effort many do not have the willpower to win.  Millions of people no longer go to church or pray to a god, but when crisis strikes, many of these same people plead for divine help.  The conflicts and problems in our lives are complex, with no easy answers.  Caught between the fabled “rock and a hard place,” a miracle may be all that can help.  Good doesn’t always prevail over evil.  This is the hard fact of life.  Nice people lose everything in floods.  Children of loving parents get killed by drunk drivers.  We watch our parents get old and die.  We grow older and our friends and loved ones begin to pass away.  This emotional havoc can be too much stress for people to take.  It is at these times we start pondering why we are here.  We think about the meaning of our lives.  We need purpose to our lives and all people need hope.  For those who cast off religion without a substitute, the search for a meaning to life can be disappointing.  People often find the comfort of religion is a welcome tilt in the balance of life, particularly if the scales are loaded against them. 

This is only a short summary of this topic.  To find out more, please get Why Adam and Eve Created God.

Being right feels good.  When actions match our beliefs, we feel good and say with some excitement “I knew it all along!” or “I told you so!”   When we think we are correct, we tend to value that position more than others.  Likewise, an intense feeling of goodness can invoke a strong belief in its correctness.  Psychologists call it cognitive consonance.  Sports fans feed on such emotions.  When the team is winning, the fan feels good and is convinced his team is the best.  It makes him think he is a better person.  The team didn’t win, the team and the fan won.  We’re #1 reads the banner, not The Team is #1.  When the side we choose wins, we win.  Associating good feelings with good choices is the underlying motive in so many areas of our lives, and there are a many feel-good motives that all of us possess.

Who we are is formed early on in our lives; some say even by the age of 3 or 4 and certainly a substantial part of our being is established by age 12.  Many of the psychological susceptibilities previously described are formed from events that take place when we are young.  There is another reason most people’s childhood plays an important life in their religion—their religion is handed to them at birth.  Most every person who is a believer in some faith has been so since birth, or at least as long back as they can remember.  People adopt the religion of their parents because children are raised to adhere to that religion.  And, because historically, religions have been less tolerant of outsiders, people with similar religions tend to live in the same geographical areas.  People are born into a faith, raised by their parents in it, and shielded from critical thinking by a community of supporters.  Religion is as much a communal experience as it is personal one. 

We don’t see Baptists inGeorgiaraising Hindu children.  Proud parents begin instilling their beliefs early on in their children.  The indoctrination into the faith usually starts within days after they return from the hospital.  Beginning with baptism and circumcision rituals, the childhood of the faithful is filled with spiritual rituals and religious programming.  By six years old, mom and dad probably broke the news about Santa Clause and the Easter Bunny.  Children get over this because their parents assure them it was done in good fun, but these same parent also assure them that they must still pray before meals, go to church, mass, or synagogue, perform numerous embarrassing and boring rituals, and quiver at the thought of the Almighty who everyone must some day answer to.  Telling a child that God is watching them, punished bad people, rewards good, and knows every thought they have is a very handy parental tool as well.  Children believe because mom and dad tell them to, because mom and dad’s friends do, because the people in their church do, and because their community supports such belief.  It all seems so natural to the child raised in this environment.  The rest of the world seems so lost and out-of-touch.

The subliminal influences that religions use on their faithful are as dangerous as any weapon of steel, if not more.  When one is attacked with a weapon that he can see, he can defend against it.  But the innocent are most often unaware of the manipulation of their minds and the theft of their spirits.  This applies to many areas of life, not just religion.  Politicians and business leaders are just as apt to exploit the weapons of influence as a priest or rabbi.  These weapons work by directing common human reactions into focused behaviors.  Their sweeping success comes from playing upon many universal psychological traits that span national, ethnic, cultural, and social boarders.

This is only a short summary of this topic.  To find out more, please get Why Adam and Eve Created God.

All people are believers.  Some rational beliefs are necessary and good.  But the willing acceptance of pure fiction should be avoided.  Both types of beliefs come from the same place, but education, social support, and critical thinking separate can make one person less prone to accept the unbelievable.  When we look back on our history, there is no race, no nation, no people, and no sex that is immune to blind faith, poor judgment, unbelievable opinions, and outright stupid logic.  It is informative to look back at past beliefs because they illustrate how gullible all people are, how dangerous unfounded faith is, how difficult it was for people to see the errors of their convictions, and how some of the worst ideas continue to attract followers long after they are discredited.

Being a trusting, believing person isn’t a disease.  It is natural, and everybody should realize they are human and they are prone to believing.  For example,  the brilliant inventor Thomas Edison had an outstand grasp of the sciences, but yet believed in telepathy.  Here was one of the most analytical minds of his day, but yet he believed people could read the minds of others.  This mental-telepathy fantasy has been around for thousands of years, and Edison fell for it hook-line-and sinker at the hands of a magician. There is not a shred of evidence to support telepathy and believers in it do not have the finely-tuned institutions like many religions.  There are no telepathic churches. There are no communities of telepaths.  And yet, Edison believed.  When a man this bright can be taken in by such a foolish notion, it is no wonder that well-organized religions attract so many.  Understanding that we have some type of “natural belief gene” can help us prepare defenses to make sure what we believe in is worthy of our trust.

This is only a short summary of this topic.  To find out more, please get Why Adam and Eve Created God.

Section 1 walked through 50,000 years of religious history, stopping to explore various religious views from around the world. We saw many common threads during this journey, but the most pronounced was that religious thought is a most universal human trait.  Humans are a race of believers.  Every culture and every people, no matter how ancient or modern, civilized or barbarian, wandered towards the spiritual.  The religions evolved as civilization advanced, and now billions still follow the passions of bygone cults whose foundations were laid thousands of years hence.  There are so many reasons people became religions, but not for supernatural reasons.  No unnatural cause has ever directed people to recognize any of the 2500+ deities they invented—not once in the history of this planet.  But there are many very real and natural reasons people embraced the gods of their parents.  Call it the Human Spirit, personality, or your soul, but whatever it is called, it is in all mankind and is an amazingly strong force. 

This is only a short summary of this topic.  To find out more, please get Why Adam and Eve Created God.

So has modern man lost his desire for religion?  The evidence does and doesn’t support this notion.  While many a preacher would like to convince his audience that the world should return to some “Godlier time” lost in the past, the truth is that the number of people professing to be religious is about as high as it has been for the last few hundred years.  The interest in religion is there, and the people are there participating, but the depth of the faith is missing.  Europe lost religion last century, but by-the-numbers, Americais still as religious as ever.  It was built with many religious beams in its framework, and long after these are replaced with secular substitutes, Americans don’t want to remove the old timber.  The next chapters will discuss why people cling to their faiths.  Religious attractions are able to withstand some powerful repelling social forces.  

This is only a short summary of this topic.  To find out more, please get Why Adam and Eve Created God.