Basics Of Religion example essay topic

When I had begun creating this research paper the question that was intriguing me was why did the human society in the last couple of hundreds years suddenly (relatively) changed the foundations of it's thought. This being evident in the way people started to interpret certain incidents, these being the appearance of Unidentified Flying Objects. Now whether these objects are really aliens, is a very good question, but I would have you believe that why is it that people have started to interpret these flying objects as aliens in the last sixty years or so is a more important one. Some people as the counter argument would have you believe though that these craft have only been around for the last couple of hundreds of years, but this being completely incorrect and they not even realizing it, is something that must be corrected. Actually these things have been in a different name here from the beginning of human civilization and have even perhaps begun it, as they were called gods. Notice that I am a true believer in aliens and not through faith but basically through the simple principle, that no matter how disturbing something is, if so many people believe in it and not gaining anything from that belief, it must be true.

Yet this is only something I wish to deal with in order that I could compare the situation today with that of two thousand years ago and more, much more, since there are people who have already proposed and practically proved these ideas, and much better than I ever could by the way. Yet in order to even begin answering my original question, which although seemingly easy, is much deeper than one might imagine, I must express and explain and support these ideas. The appearance of Homo sapiens 200,000 years ago defies all the principles of evolutionary theory, while the Biblical account of divine creation defies the laws of physics. And yet we are here and although that fact must be explained it isn't completely relevant to the argument that I am trying to make. When I say that the appearance of Homo sapiens defies all the principles of evolution I am perhaps exaggerating a bit.

It simply stretches the theory up to its breaking point and just a little bit beyond it. The theory is perfectly valid for the rest of the animal kingdom, but when it encounters the question of man, a lot of inventiveness is required to get rid of some of the inconsistencies and some are actually unexplainable. The basics of the evolutionary theory are that through random mutations, which just happen to suit the environment, the mutation is given an advantage over the rest of his species and therefore is statistically more likely to survive and propagate, and therefore spread the specific trait. So basically our evolution must be a series of 'successful mistakes'.

Because this process is extremely random and the rate of mutation really slow, it is a fact that approximately 100,000 years is very sudden for a species to split off another one. On the other extreme though one might consider the horseshoe crab remaining virtually unchanged for the last 200 million years. As stated by the famous biologist Thomas Huxley: Large changes [in species] occur over tens of millions of years, while really major ones [macro changes] take a hundred million years or so. 1 This is really the main problem of evolutionary theory when applied to us. There wasn't enough time, as the best contenders for the missing link between humans and anything like chimpanzees date to only 1.5 to 2 million years ago, while apparently there are several macro-changes that separate us from these Homo erectus. The divine creation, as accounted in the Bible is illogical, yet it does have some amazing similarities with other more ancient, and less edited, texts which combined can give a bit clearer picture of what is it that occurred there.

Yet the first and perhaps most important hint lies in the Bible itself: Then God [Elohim] said "Let us make man in our image, in our likeness, and let them rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air, over the livestock, over all the earth, and over all the creatures that move along the ground. 2 The most important hint, which can be seen by anyone, is that either God refers to himself in plural form or that there are other gods around him. One point being that that is exactly the way it is worded in the original Hebrew texts, in plural form, and that the Hebrew language does not have a royal-we. Another point that is missed even by some people who know Hebrew is that "Elohim' in literal translation means "gods', supporting the initial observation. And another point that also supports this is that in some parts of the Old Testament God refers to himself in plural form while in others in singular form, in which case he is called "Yehave' (in Hebrew) or the adopted "Yahwe'. Older Mesopotamian texts also have their versions of Genesis, which bear an amazing amount of similarity to the Genesis in the Bible.

And all of them, including the Bible if taken literally agree that there was more than one god there. Also one must accept that the Hebrews at the time were not monotheistic, although they were threatened and punished for that constantly by God, according to the Bible. Why am I trying to explain that there might have been more than one god there? It is to at least give a hint that they were not talking about a spiritual god, but flesh and something like blood gods. It is possible to give more evidence but it is pointless for my argument.

The whole point is though that if it is even doubtful that aliens exist now, they sure as hell existed on earth millennia ago, have perhaps made us, and have definitely guided us by use of religion until only lately. In case some kind of proof is needed all one must do is consider the Great Pyramid in Giza, and the structures that served as temples, or holy places, in Baalbek (Lebanon), or the megalithic stonework of Ollantaytambo (Peru), and Machu Picchu, None of which even modern technology can achieve without great difficulty. One of course can also consider the apparent Sumerian knowledge of the last planet in our Solar System, which was "discovered' only a couple of years ago, which was named "Nibiru' by the Sumerians, which actually means "the planet the gods came from'. Yes, the aliens have been the ones that gave us religion, making sure we worship them, and eventually when they left (200-187 BC) they left us to create the spiritual god, or if you wish to discover Him. Now this does seem to be completely pointless, except for the point that they were here since 270,183 BC, and that therefore the Christianity is only something relatively new, and still carries some of the basic ancient religions. And now two thousand years later we are faced with something we have not seen in a while.

And Unidentified Flying Objects are suddenly aliens and not gods. Returning me to the original question – why? To answer this apparently simple question, it is required to understand that the impact of religion on our society is absolutely huge, which in turn was greatly impacted by these aliens, as I have explained above. To understand the true impact of religion, one must consider it's impact on our history, society, technology and even the way it affects our way of perceiving space or to use the appropriate term- the Heavens. Of course when I speak of our religion, I speak of the great monotheistic religions of the world – Christianity, Islam and the Jewish religion.

In my opinion the most important factor in governing the history of the people of earth are the conflicts between peoples and countries. These conflicts being what causes the creation of ethnic groups, nationalities and empires, and of course their destruction. Now, when I speak of conflict, I am not referring only to armed conflict, in which people are killed, and civilizations literally destroyed, but also to simple competition between people and countries that causes some kind of hate, fear and / or envy, basically healthy competition. Conflict therefore acts in human society, and therefore history, just like natural selection in nature. Advancing the technology of countries, as well as their culture. To prove this, one only has to look at the Space Race, between Russia and the US, and the impact it has created on the US specifically and the world in general.

In the beginning of the Space Race, The countries of the world were still disheveled because of World War II, which is too long a story to describe, Communism was a threat in the States which the US government wasn't afraid to surgically remove, or at least they said. And remove they did anyone they didn't like, creating scenes that might have been taken straight out of the Inquisition "trials' during the dark ages. Then the US, having acquired the German rocket scientists, decided to take a step out of earth and prove the supremacy of Democracy over the Communist regime, surprised to see that Russia, having acquired all the German technical plans on rocket design, has set the same goal. Several years later, a man is walking on the moon while saying hello to the people at home, when several years before, space was for the average citizen just sci-fi. Only several years later, satellites are making communication, not to mention entertainment, available all over the world. And all this happened because of little unfriendly competition.

Now is the right time to mention that more people fought and died and were slaughtered because of religion, than all the other reasons combined. It is a sad thought really, but none the less it gives promise of a better future. Religion was also the most debated subject in the history of humanity, and has been the cause for more than one brilliant advance in philosophy, biology, astronomy, mathematics, chemistry and physics, although most of the time it was against every one and each of those advancements. Its impact on society cannot be denied in any way or form therefore, although whether it was a positive impact or a negative one, is a matter of controversy. The most important impact of the religion to the matter at hand though, is the way it affected the way in which we see the universe. One of the main points of our religion from the beginning was that we were created by our God, who will never abandon us, and who constantly looks over our shoulder to see that we behave.

This giving a definite sense that we are alone in the universe, and the arrogance to think that the whole world revolves around us. So the response to the possibility that not only life, but actually more intelligent life than us, was quite expected. Especially since we already learnt through history that those who have opposing thoughts to those of the church, have a knack of getting dead a lot. But that doesn't matter though since the ideas of the religion, whether you " re Christian, Muslim or Jewish, were perpetuated in us hourly daily or only on a weekly basis. So why is it that religion is no longer in control? A very important reason would be exactly the above one.

Because we have had something ingrained in us, which later proved wrong, that we started seeing religion as merely spiritual, and not something to compare and encompass with every aspect of life. And when we started getting exposed to more ideas because of increased communication, and when we started to pick only the basics of religion as we see them, in order to fit our busy lives. And when we started seeing that religion is simply constraining us, because the idea of heaven and hell doesn't seem to be appealing to the people on the fringe, which is basically almost everyone, we saw that we don't want to believe any more. Now at this point I must return to my initial and pointless sounding point, we were not the ones who invented religion. Therefore it is logical that at some point without supervision we would shed it, and apparently it has begun to occur. Now one might argue that religion is still very strong and some of them are still expanding, but in arguing that one must consider that in the more enlightened part of the world, which is also way richer, more people believe in UFO's now than in Jesus, at least not in the role of the Son of God.

By the way did you ever notice how similar that notion of a Son of God is to almost every pagan myth about gods? Now I must mention another two correct reasons, although not sufficient reason, for our sudden belief in aliens, these being our technological advancement in the field of communication and space exploration. They are both very important seeming to the everyday person, but they are not all consuming as one might imagine. The communication has basically given people the capability to earn money on account of other peoples curiosity, using the TV, radio or other ways to create commercials. Through the enlargement of global entertainment, the concept of sensationalism has been put forth, stating basically that in order to get the attention of someone in a crowd, one must yell, and aliens resonate quite nicely. We are also therefore statistically more susceptible to new ideas and / or new crazes.

The second factor I wanted to mention is the space exploration program created basically in order to get ratings for the military from the population, but opening new avenues of thought and imagination for any kind of new series or movie or book or anything, because detail is everything. A phenomenon that goes hand in hand though with space exploration, and the above-discussed Space Race, is the conspiracy theory. This is the fact that the government of the US, and probably other countries as well, has been hiding it's knowledge of UFO's, and perhaps even conclusive proof of their existence. The purpose of this established during the space race, as in order to not create a general panic that might brake down the communications and give an edge to the evil communists in a nuclear attack. As well as the point that Russians at the time were working on saucer like flying machines and the US government knew it and would not allow a welcome-aliens parade to get out of hand with a Russian invasion.

For this purpose the US government created a series of projects 3 which were specifically designed to "debunk' the existence of UFO's no matter what. Of course this when found out by the population, gave rise to cries of anger towards the US government, which in turn made them look like fools. This is because, even if they had not had any evidence of any sort, the population had still assumed they do, and now would not believe them anyway. So all in all, what is it that I want to say?

There are several reasons why people are more prone now to believe in aliens than gods. The first is because of the deterioration of religion in the modern world, which in turn has reasons of it own. These are that religion was not originally our concept, but of the gods themselves, that it no longer plays a strong enough motif in our culture in order to stay strong, and that the incorrectness of the monotheistic religions has brought about an unwillingness to keep believing in it. The second reason for the human belief in UFO's is that our currently advanced communication technology leaves us open to every new idea that comes along, especially if one considers the lately arrived internet. And the last but not least reason for belief in UFO's is our exploration of space, no matter how slow it has been progressing lately, giving rise to speculation and imagination.

Bibliography

1. Alford, F. Alan, Gods of the new Millenium 2. Dean, Jodi, Aliens in America 3. The Holy Bible 4. The texts of Atra-Has is 5. The Dead sea scrolls 1 T. Huxley, cited in N. Macbeth, Darwin Retried, p. 141.2 Genesis 1: 26 3 The major projects involved were projects "Grudge' and "Bluebook'.