The general perception that most of the world has about non-believers, apart from worshipping Satan, of course, is that we are some lowlife, indifferent people, just aimlessly living our lives with no goals, no plans, with the only task at hand is mocking religion; since we do not get “amazed” with Jesus appearing in the clouds time and time again, or Allah’s name appearing in some tomatoes, potatoes, or bread, or the Om sign appearing on goats and cows, or blood pouring out of Mother Mary’s statue in a church or some old painting hanging on the wall of some shrine at Karbala, or water turning into wine, some dork visiting the skies on a flying horse, a river or the moon splitting into half, and other insanities like those.
It is true in every sense of the word that we do not believe all that, because we are not supposed to believe. In fact, no human being is supposed to believe all that, but some are deluded into believing it because if they don’t, some most beneficent and the most merciful guy would make them burn in hell for eternity - height of legitimacy, one must say!
Theists use “miracles” for;
- Making their young ones get amazed and excited so that they become interested in the specific religion.
- Proving that their religion is the true one.
Use of Myths to Teach Children
Let’s face it, this all heaven and hell, Adam and Eve, Santa Claus, angels and demons stuff sounds pretty interesting when we are young, and then we tend to believe in these fairy tales as well since they sound so interesting. When you tell a child born in a Muslim family that Mohammad split the moon into half because he used to play with it when he was little, the child would most probably conclude, “Hmm… Must be the true prophet I guess.” When you tell a child born in a Jewish family about Moses splitting the river into half, the child would most probably conclude, “Wow! That’s a cool way of fishing.”
Jokes apart, this is a very sick, criminal practice; young minds are in fact brainwashed with such heights of absurdness to convince them that the one religion held by their family is the only true religion. This, to me, is the worst sort of mental torture because it demolishes the child’s ability to observe, wonder, and see reality. The child becomes trapped with praying and doing other useless or even harmful stuff due to the greed of virgins and rivers of milk and wine, and with the fear that if they don’t follow orders their loving, beneficent god will throw them face first into the scorching, unforgiving flames of hell – no observation, no thinking, no questioning, just believe what has been told or else face the punishment.
This is a crime against nature. Humans are unique in their capability to think and live out of the box and this capability is destroyed by such inane claims of religion. We are not the species that look at the sky and say, “Oh look, it is blue!” Instead, we look at the sky and ask, “Why is it blue? Why is it blue only when the lights are on?” And “because, god!” is definitely not an answer to those questions. Wondering about the sky, we now know that there is no such thing as a sky after all, while most of the people around us are still believing that the sky will one day fall over the earth.
People believe in fabricated miracle stories mentioned above because they sound to be the most amazing events ever, right? WRONG! The most ground-breaking, jaw-dropping, amazing miracles are the ones which occur in nature and are constantly occurring with each passing moment. And the best part about these miracles is that they are real and observable.
The Miracle of Reality
By the term “miracle” here, I do not mean something which is frightening, punishing, and unexplainable as religion defines it; but something that never ceases to boggle your mind no matter how much you know about it, something that is staggeringly beautiful and mysterious instead of frightening, something that can be observed and studied instead of offering a punishment, a scientific definition of miracles – real miracles, the miracles which astonish us, the non-believers. Real miracles like the continuous expansion of our universe; what or where is it expanding into? What generates the dark energy that expands it? Is the expansion of our universe resulting in the contraction of another universe with which we might be sharing a common boundary? Where did the pinpoint containing our universe exist? What caused it to explode?
These and a whole lot of other questions are the ones which flabbergast us more than any splitting of the moon or people walking on water; mainly because they refer to real events and observations, they refer to reality! The expansion of our universe is not the only one; black holes, the probability of wormholes and white holes, entropy, the list goes on. Not only space sciences, but every scientific field has its own set of amazing miracles and mind-boggling questions; evolution in biology, for example, is itself a mesmerizingly beautiful, elegant, and most importantly, evident process that tells us what we are.
You do not need to look for a tomato whose insides make a pattern that depicts “Allah” in Arabic script, you do not need to stare at the clouds until you finally find one that looks like Jesus extending his blessed hands over the world, you do not need to find blurred facial patterns in images and videos; you just need to look at the structure of those neurons in your brain and see how they transfer information between your nervous system and your muscles and glands. That would alone be enough to make all the “Holy patterns” seem lame and keep you from blinking your eyes for a considerable period of time, not out of fear, but because of immense astonishment! But sadly, people have blinded themselves too much to open their eyes to such beautiful real miracles, instead covering them up with lame, cooked up fairytales.
Those who observed these natural miracles, wondered upon, and studied them, changed the world and the way we look at it. Darwin observed the miracle of evolution and we can now seek how and where we originated; Crick and Watson observed the miracle of DNA and now we can know how we evolve; Faraday observed the miracle of lightening and we no longer have to sit in the dark at our homes or carry a candle with us every time we decide to take a walk; Newton observed the miracle of, well, the falling apple, and we now know what keeps us stuck to earth and how much force we have to apply to keep airplanes and artificial satellites from crashing down to earth; Einstein observed the miracles of time and space and transformed completely our ideas about the universe. These and a number of other brilliant and free minds have given us by observing the real, natural miracles what the ones believing in Mohammad’s flying horse or Jesus’ water-walking could have never even imagined, things that Mohammad and Jesus themselves couldn’t imagine!
If only we could amaze children with such elegant miracles of reality and keep them away from lame stories and fear, we could make this world a much better place to live and expand our knowledge and understanding about ourselves, our fellow species, and the universe(s). This is our goal and our plan: to observe the universe, discover the hidden, mysterious parts and aspects of it and understand our being. This is the aim of each new brain that is born in this world… The aim that is mostly hijacked by religion.
