Integrating New Beliefs

Respond to this Friday Faithfuls challenge by writing if you think that religious doctrines should evolve as man gets smarter, or why religions don’t seem to be receptive to change even when there seems to be a flaw in their belief, or write anything about the sunk cost fallacy, or you could write about whatever else that you think might fit.  Most of the major world religions were established centuries ago and the world has changed a lot since then, because of the incredible amounts of new information that we have learned.  Religious groups tend to cling to their beliefs even when what is written contradicts with scientific evidence.  When something is written in a holy text, that makes it inerrant, so it must literally be followed, as it came as a divine message of a prophet, or the direct word of God.  Every religious text has a point in time which it was composed and/or assembled.  This stands as a point in time where those who assembled said work thought it accurately reflected their religious views.  These holy books are simple products of humans living at various times in human history, but they can’t be updated or revised because they are seen as being sacred laws or doctrines that define the faith and changing viewpoints because of new thoughts that happen would destroy the religion by becoming a separation from God.  The Ten Commandments given to Moses were literally written in stone by the hand of God, so they could never be changed, but they didn’t last very long, as Moses got upset and smashed them.  I love reading the stories in the Bible, but many of them are historically inaccurate, so I view it as being like an instruction manual that can show you how you can lead a better life.

The sunk cost fallacy describes how religions have hitched their wagons to these holy texts and have become pigeon-holed in their beliefs because of it.  Religion is an investment, and people invest their faith in it, everything in Religion hinges on a person having faith and accepting that the religious texts don’t contain any errors.  The sunk cost fallacy is our tendency to follow through on something that we’ve already invested heavily in (be it time, money, effort, emotional energy, religious ideas, etc.), even when giving up is clearly a better idea.  Most people are reluctant to abandon a strategy or course of action, making them likely to continue an endeavor even after they realize that the drawbacks outweigh the benefits because they have already invested in it.

People prefer to keep things the way they are instead of being receptive to change.  The sunk cost fallacy allows us to fall prey to making irrational decisions that are against our best interest, essentially digging ourselves into a deeper hole.  People don’t want to lose resources that they have already invested, so they tempted to continue, instead of cutting their losses and getting out.  When people decide on a choice, it is easier to stubbornly stick to the path, even when they realize that it shows no promise and it isn’t working anymore.  Rather than weighing the costs and benefits objectively, we allow the money or time that we’ve already invested to distort our decision-making process, often resulting in a poor decision.  We persist with bad decisions because it allows us to delay the realization that we made a mistake.  Rather than admitting our mistakes, learning our lesson, and moving forward with wisdom, we double down on our bad decision, deny reality, and get punished for our stubbornness.

When religious texts conflict with history, or science, or analytical thinking, I think that we should just look for the good messages inside of them and not take them literally.  In my opinion religious texts were written by normal, fallible people instead of being the word of the perfect omniscient higher power.  They were probably divinely inspired and they felt that they were writing the truth, as there are many good and true things written in these holy books.  In any text, interpretations are subjective to the reader, but the people that wrote these texts probably had a better perspective on what should be contained in them then we do today, because they were there when this stuff happened.  We may have more information available to us than our ancestors did, but nobody is qualified to rewrite any of these texts and doing that would just create chaos.

As man becomes more enlightened due to scientific progress, will that progress become the death of religion, because people will no longer accept it as credible?  The vast majority of human beings are born with 24 ribs, 12 on each side of the body.  Contrary to a widely held misconception, men and women have the same number of ribs.  However, some people are born with more or less than the typical 24 ribs.  Supposedly God made Eve the first woman from Adam’s rib in Genesis 2:22, but this is a mistranslation, as the original Hebrew word was tsêlâ’, which meant to curve and since ribs are curved that made sense to a lot of people.  The DNA double helix has the same curvature for every species that ever lived, but when the Bible was written, nobody knew about DNA.