WHY IS RELIGION BAD? II

THERE IS NO LICENSE, TEST OR TRAINING FOR PARENTHOOD

Bear with me, this isn’t really a change in subject. If you wish to sell paper clips (here in the U.S.), you will probably need a business license. Outsiders (and customers) may perceive that this means you have passed some test or been given special knowledge of business practices, but that’s not the case. You pay your fee, you get your license. This same strategy applies to parenting. Prospective parents are not required to pass any tests or given any special knowledge. They just mate. When a child is produced, several things happen, usually simultaneously.

At a loss for how to proceed, they parrot what their own parents taught them. Unless they are convinced their parents had the whole thing wrong, in which case they parrot the opposite of what they were taught. This is an insidious process of which the new parents are usually unaware. They just try to answer each situation or question as it comes up, with no clear plan on how to proceed, but very definite ideas about what the outcome should be. The child should respect their advice (a good strategy for young children, as it can save their lives) to the extent that they will enthusiastically embrace a career chosen by their parents regardless of their personal preferences. The child should respect their religion, again embracing it enthusiastically, again regardless of their personal preferences or reasoned thinking, because we say so.

At least we have schools to take over some of the burden. What if we had to teach our children math, physics, history, etc. ourselves?

Any parent whose best answer is “because I say so,” is in trouble. It’ll work for a while, but a bright child will begin to resent being left out of the reasoning process. If the lives of the parents aren’t particularly inspiring, “because I say so,” becomes a death-knell; the child makes a note to be nothing like his or her parents. Then you’ve lost the battle. Anything else you say will arrive at their ears filtered through distrust of your judgment and your choices, not to mention distrust of your ability to put forth a reasonable explanation.

For many of us, who saw firsthand that our parents certainly had no special knowledge or reasoning power, we may reject the entire package provided by our parents. But for all of us, there will come a time when, with hormones (whose influence we don’t understand at the time) raging, we will break away from the parental unit (whatever its form). This is the natural outcome of being an animal on planet Earth. Any mammalian mother nurtures her young in the wild, always at a great personal cost, sometimes to the point of hardship. She teaches them everything she knows, grooms them, protects them. Then one day her hormones and the hormones of her young are no longer in harmony. She drives them from the nest or from her territory. This is a survival necessity for both the mother and her young. The territory which supports her cannot support her plus her young once they are adults and their strain on resources is as great as her own. Mother bears drive their cubs up trees and leave them there, heading to new territory. Mother cats drive their young away, keeping their territory for themselves. In both cases, if the mother and young meet again, it will go very unpleasantly. The only time this behavior is not seen is in herd mammals, yet even they often drive pubescent males from the group.

Humans always seem surprised by the fact that we do the same. It doesn’t matter how good you are to your children, they will, regardless, be driven to either seek their own territory or challenge you for your own. There’s no need for all that screaming! When offspring begin to rebel, they are really only asserting their independence, which parents want them to do, eventually. In theory. But in practice it’s not so pretty. Here’s a being about as large as you are, questioning or spurning your authority. This being was once so helpless you had to teach it how to get food into its mouth, and the experience felt rewarding to you both. Now the same child you turned your life upside down to accommodate is no longer showing worshipful obedience. It can be hard for some parents to accept.

I propose that the need for religion is a leftover effect from the parent/child bonding process, which happens when we’re too young as yet to think in words. Parenting can be rewarding, but being the child is much more so. Consider this; when we are babies, we have parents around us who;

1. Have a comforting presence
2. Make irritants stop or go away
3. Will overlook our mistakes and/or fix them
4. Provide food, shelter, and companionship
5. Protect us from all harm
6. Advise us when we don’t know what to do
7. Can make the seemingly impossible happen (like the appearance of a new bike)
8. Make us feel better when we’re sick
9. Love us even when we’ve been bad
10. Warn us of dangers, sometimes to the extent of placing themselves in danger to save or help us.

In short, in childhood we had the experience of what seemed to be perfect love. Consider the parallels with religion. The ecstatic presence of God could be a return to feelings we felt long before we had speech to explain it. Therefore it rises up, wordless, from the heart, and we feel all these wonderful reward-feelings we felt as babies, and as adults, we wish to return to them. It’s not unlike romantic love in this way; we try to find for ourselves and provide for our mates these comforting conditions. If our parents were abusive, these feelings may be more than a little screwed up; reward may be confused with (or mixed into) punishment in that speechless part of the brain. But the desire to return to the conditions of babyhood, where the loving presence sensed our needs without our even being able to articulate them is powerful stuff. Powerful stuff that our brain remembers but can’t articulate.

It may be useful to mention pets here. In our relationships with our pets, we can get all the parenting-reward feelings without the danger that they’ll suddenly assert themselves as not needing us any more. People who love animals more than people are (perhaps wisely) averting the trauma of having someone for whom one has made sacrifices and whom one taught everything eventually reject us. If this is true, a small animal maybe the perfect gift for "empty-nesters."

There are hundreds of theories out there, and thousands of experts who have studied the fields of religious anthropology and psychology, and can give you their own theories. I urge you to make use of them. Gather some information, then form your own opinions. This has just been a sample from my personal set.