Apropos Dr Robert
Buckman's "scientific" explanation of human
beliefs concerning God
as the cause of untold human suffering,
I would like to offer my own personal explanation for
what it is worth.
Let
us understand Buckner's hard-wired genetic coding simply
as conditioning.
We are conditioned
human beings; yes, conditioned as genetically coded,
conditioned as social animals fighting for survival,
conditioned to believe or act in a certain way (or
perish), conditioned by society, culture, tradition,
history and geography.
We are conditioned,
first, in the home by mum and dad, in the madrassa
or kindergarten of life by the conditioned mullahs and
other conditioned idiots, and so on, and we continue all
through life parroting what we've been taught (or
conditioned) to parrot.
The fact that we 'see'
visions when we pray via rituals is delusional. It is an
illusion (what, at a deeper level of understanding, the
Hindu school of philosophy calls 'maya'); our
manifestations are hallucinations from our own brain.
That is why I think St Augustine noted that
experiencing God (even
by way of mysticism) is not proof of God's
existence.
The Koran, for
example, tells us Allah has put a purdah on our eyes so
that we have sight but can see not the things that exist
behind the purdah in the realm that Ghalib calls 'ghaib'
(or the Unknown). What we see is our own projection, our
own illusory hallucination, and brain's delusion, if you
like, and we think it is reality. It's all part of our
conditioning and we do not know how to transcend our
limitations in the Known to get to the Unknown about
which religionists argue so strongly as if it were the
Known, and as if they were right and the rest of the
world wrong.
This conditioning is
the cause
of untold human suffering;
for example, in the past three thousand years of
recorded history an estimated 72,000 wars have been
fought in the Name of God or Religion. That is two
wars each month -- which means that Man the Animal has
never known peace, with or without Islam.
We delude ourselves
with our religiosity as we do with our phoney
mysticism.
Rashid
Mughal
_________________________________________________________
