Ronald Reagan's oft-quoted maxim, "Trust, but verify," actually works in the real world. There is a place for trust, and there is a place for seeking verification. A phone call out of the blue from someone who purports to be a representative of your car company, warning you that your warranty is about to expire, and pressing you to pay (by credit card, over the phone) one thousand dollars to renew it, should not be taken at face value. Although thousands apparently do just that.

Trusting your spouse or loved one is good, but such trust has been earned over a period of time during which they have demonstrated trustworthyness. Trusting that your medical practitioner knows her business is based on a set of regulations that are meant to separate the wheat from the chaff.

And so on.

So why is it that we give religion a pass?

Religions inoculate themselves against such demands quite handily, to whit:

A wicked and adulterous generation seeks after a sign. And there shall no sign be given to it, except the sign of the prophet Jonah. And He left them and went away (Matthew 16:4).


And he said, I beg you therefore, father, that you would send him to my father's house, for I have five brothers, so that he may testify to them, lest they also come into this place of torment. Abraham said to him, They have Moses and the Prophets, let them hear them. And he said, No, father Abraham, but if one should go to them from the dead, they would repent. And he said to him, If they do not hear Moses and the Prophets, they will not be persuaded, even though one rose from the dead (Luke 16:27-31).

Asking for some scrap of proof before I go and commit my life to a set of beliefs is, to my mind, a reasonable request. But religions not only provide no proof of their veracity, they tend to slap you down for even asking.

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Ever noticed the kind of music favored by various radio talk-show hosts? You have the religiously-based hosts like Bill Bennett and Dr. Laura (even though these shows are not overtly religious, the hosts make no secret of their religious biases), whose music tends to be selected from the past. And then there are hosts like Michael Savage, whose music is pretty much cutting edge.

My theory is that religion tends to clutch the past, while atheism tends to fix its eyes on the future. This is similar to the difference between parents and children. The parent has been around for a while and bases his or her understanding of the world on experience. The child, who has no experience to speak of, will generally want to know, "Why?" Both views have merit.

Experience has great value, but is not always a useful guide. Experience that's based on unchanging truths about the world, we ignore at our peril. On the other hand, past experience, the way we've always done it, can be evil and destructive. Hence the great value in the youthful question, "Why." If no one ever challenged the values of the past, we would never move forward.

While religion tends to decry what it sees as the loss of values in the modern world (as when Bob Jones University grudgingly relinquishes its prohibition against interracial dating and Mormons battle against same-sex-marriage) and cling toa 2,000-year-old book as the "unchanging Word of God," atheism demands to know, "Why?"

I propose that we value the past without becoming slaves to it. That we glean from religious valuable insights while maintaining the right to ask, "Why?"

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While both science and religion can be called "world views," science is as different from religion as day is from night. I just posted over on Singularity & Futurism an article called "Memristors - The pathway to artificial intelligence?" that reminded me of one of the most important differences between the two.

Science actually discovers truth about the universe in which we live. This truth, when discovered and applied, is demonstrably accurate, as all truth should be, as evidenced by how it works in the real world. Science is real. It works in the real world, and the undiscovered country of things science does not yet know continues to grow smaller.

Certainly the religious adherent may say at this point that religion does the same. But I ask you: What has religion ever discovered? What has religion ever revealed about how our world works?

Religion, at least in its non-supernatural aspects, describes the human condition and what humans have learned about themselves by long, sometimes painful, experience. All well and good, but in doing so it is no different or better than philosophy.

Religion tends to be about coveting the past, while science tends to be about reaching for the future. Listening to Dr. Vernon McGee on one of his Bible broadcasts, I was struck by the irony of his deriding "all this newfangled technology," whilst making excellent use of it to promote his worldview. I daresay no religious individual would want to do without the advantages of technological progress (even the Amish use the wheel), while millions do without religion quite nicely.

What say you?

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It's so common it's become a cliché. Someone close to you dies, so you're angry with God. You lose your job, you blame God. The crops fail, God has it in for you. "Why did God let this happen?" "God and I aren't on very good terms right now." And so on. Seems pretty silly to me. Wouldn't it be more rational and reasonable to conclude  that what happened was not the doing of a spiteful deity, but rather the result of earthly causes?

When people suffer, they tend to seek a "reason." They want to have an explanation. But people die. Bad things happen. What makes anyone so special they should be exempt from the harshness of a disinterested universe?

Since I've admitted to myself and others that I'm an atheist I've been accused of being angry with God. How can one be angry with a being one has no reason to believe even exists? When bad or unpleasant things happen to me, it seems I'm much more capable of dealing with these events when I focus on real causes. Is there something I can do to rectify the situation? Is there a way I can prevent this sort of thing from happening again? If not, what's to be gained by dwelling on it? Like that.

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