Why sane people follow Christianity? (updated)

(Read this post before? Skip to the bottom for the update)

-- posted April 2

I was pondering this question. There's a lot that doesn't make sense and is very arbitrary about Christianity. If Christianity made sense, why is Jesus a white guy? There are more Indians and Chinese in this world than white folks. Why did the christian god only show up to this subset of people in the world if he created all men and women. Why allow billions to struggle without his message. Not very compassionate. Why was god a man and not a woman? Arbitrary? Sure god isn't fair. Jesus the prophet had to be one of the races and sexes. But certainly it shows kind of a favoritism, maybe even racism and sexism. From a logical and scientific perspective, religion does not stand up to scrutiny. Why 10 commandments? The convenient coincidence between the absolute rules for human behavior and the number of human fingers is rather disturbing. Did god think man could only track as many rules as he had fingers? Anyway, if it's not already apparent, it seems a whole lot of bulls**t to me.

My question is why do people today still believe in it, and invest in this. Perhaps it's a cultural tradition. If one were to look at the religions of the world as viral entities, one would say that the ones which succeeded did have something special in them. There might have been something beneficial to society in them, even though they might have some bad elements in them as well.

Key elements to survival of Christianity: (1) It is programmed to spread. Somewhere ingrained in many religions is the idea that other religions are wrong and that others in the world -- any place in the world -- need to be converted or sometimes killed, (2) there are actually some benevolent and beneficial elements of all religions which provide stability to society: compassion, help others, do not do bad things: murder, adultery, and (3) a good story about what happens after death.

In fact in Christianity, 2 and 3 are linked. In other words, if one is good the reward is a nice afterlife story. In a way, one might want a lot of people to believe in Christianity even if one doesn't believe in it oneself. I mean, it provides this law and order element which says if you do bad things in life you will be punished after you are dead, even if you aren't punished in life. Even (and especially) bad stuff no one else knows about will be punished.

Let me just say, the current scientifically supported end-of-life story -- which I believe by the way -- is that after you are dead there is nothing. Another option for some scientists is to say that one doesn't know what happens after death to 'spirit' if they think something like a spirit exists. A Christian heaven or hell is rather too arbitrary to scientists, I think. No reason to believe heaven or hell exists. Still it's pretty tough to support a spirit as separate from body. Consciousness and even unconsciousness have been tied to portions of the brain. Once the brain is not functional (massive cell-death), it's difficult to say that 'spirit' would live on. Most probably it's gone, too.

Anyway, I think the simple but useful tying together of good behavior to a good afterlife story seems to be key to survival of Christianity. Most people tend to be afraid of death. I read a study in Men's Health where huge numbers of people believe in heaven even beyond the numbers of strongly religious. I think people are just chicken-shit. It's a nice idea that there is a heaven; it means you can avoid thinking really about death as an end. So, instead of facing reality, people will take the trouble to go to church on Sunday and get the exhortations to be good and compassionate or not, depending on the church. And maybe I agree it's something people need to be taught in a simple way. If one had to teach morality to children without the support of web of religious belief, it might be hard. You'd need to set up something like: treat others as you would like others to treat you. It's simple, but would children understand that? Who's going to police something so simple? Maybe better not to rely on that. Simpler and better to set out real prohibitions which would be punishable upon death or in life. Plus, Christianity certainly has a nice afterlife story. Nice to think that grandma is up there looking down upon me instead of being eaten by worms.

I read somewhere that Europeans -- the place where Christianity took hold first -- do not attend church very much, far less than Americans anyway, and this is a reflection of how much they believe. I take it to mean that the Europeans have figured out they don't need Christianity to prevent people from doing bad things. The Americans are just too afraid of their neighbors and other people. No way we Americans can trust anyone to be good. And then I think it indicates Americans are probably the more scared of death than the Europeans. Americans are just the most scared people on the planet I guess.

-- updated June 19, 2006

So, here's another conspiracy theory... Why do some Christian sects proscribe usage of contraceptives? They need as many children of Christians as possible to spread the religion. Priests know it's difficult to get the rhythm method perfectly, but if on average every Christian has say 5-6 children before getting wise that this anti-contraception stance is rubbish, the church has just proliferated the faith that much more. It's an early Chinese idea -- and now well known RTS gaming strategy -- of overwhelming your enemy through birthrate. People are going to say they knew this was the strategy already, and I'm pointing out the obvious. Well, it wasn't obvious to me until I thought about it.