Special vs. Not: The Core of Our Religious Problem

(In an effort to branch out and connect with other like-minded individuals, I've invited Daniel Meilleur to write a guest-post. Meilleur is a teacher, humanist, free-thinker, and life-long student of world religions. He is currently working on his first book, The Atheist's Bible. You can contact him with your comments at danielmeilleur83@hotmail.com)

With the exception of Humanism, all recognized major world religions promote in an almost subliminal and unspoken manner the principal idea that humanity is special, chosen, and unique. In their estimation, a human life is worth more than any other. You, my fellow reader, are the most important person in all of the Cosmos.

High five, G.

In Judaism, God chose the Jews, vowed to protect them and smite their enemies, and gave them the Earth and all that exists upon it as their exploitable possession. In Christianity, God sacrificed his only son in order to save us from eternal death and gave us the opportunity to merit an infinite and blissful afterlife. So it goes in Islam, where Muhammad pleaded with the polytheistic Arabs to live righteous lives and honour Allah so that they might be saved from eternal sufferance and torment, because Allah cared about and recorded every human action.

But the Abrahamic religions are not the only ones to indulge in a self-centred view of the cosmos. The Buddha preached that the path to enlightenment could be found exclusively within us and in his pursuit of nirvana, he abandoned his young child and wife. In Hinduism, one must focus on the karmic ramification of their daily actions in order to climb the ladder of the caste system in their upcoming rebirth.

The egocentric nature of our world’s most followed faiths stems from their dates of origin. Until the invention of the telescope in the early 17th century, humanity assumed that our fair planet was of a significant size compared to the greater Universe. This, combined with the illusion that the celestial bodies revolve around us and not the other way around, led to a conviction that human life was of great importance. 

We now know this to be false. We cannot blame our forefathers for their faulty conclusions but we can blame ourselves for continuing to entertain them.

It is crucial that we come to terms with this stone-cold fact: that human life is no more important or intrinsically valuable than that of a kangaroo, a carrot, or a flea. Our sentience is different, yes, but our importance--our “special-ness”--is not.

Moreover, we must accept that the Universe will continue to exist without us, and more importantly, without the Earth. Compared to the size of the Cosmos, the Earth is smaller than a single grain of sand on all of the planet’s beaches combined. Our importance follows suit. The Cosmos will not care when you die. Our own galaxy will be, for all intents and purposes, unaffected when the Earth--and even our Sun--dies. 

How important are we?

Because our outdated religious beliefs have seeped into most aspects of our social order, we run our  lives as though we are special. Evidence of our perceived importance can be found all around us. It can be found in the rhetoric and promises our politicians spew to win votes and in the way corporations appeal to our outlandish egocentricity to sell us their products. 

Our society fails take adequate responsibility for its toxic behaviour due to this same belief. When we pollute the planet, fight wars, overpopulate, and put the Earth’s--and in turn our own--existence in peril, we seldom hear our leaders insist that we are the root cause of these problems. Introspection is never a solution in our God-given society. After all, when we die, all will be made right.

A Muslim acquaintance of mine once told me that Humanists are too arrogant to capture and comprehend God’s work in this life. From the years of research I have done, I have only encountered opposite proof of this claim. Humanists do not believe they are unique, special, or chosen. Moreover, they believe that they are extremely lucky to be alive in the first place. We appreciate what we have in this life and this disallows our capacity to take existence for granted. 

All will not be made right when we die. The only afterlife worth living for is the life of our children--the only life that will assuredly continue after our own. We must preserve the Earth; she is not only our creator but also our only home. 

We are all human. We are all equal. We are all in this together, if only for the simple reason that we have nowhere else to go. If we do not soon come to terms with some fundamental truths, our species will fade away like so many before it. The conviction that we are “special” creates a sub-current within us, informing us that humanity will be around forever. All evidence contradicts this sentiment. We will all die, eventually. The only goal conducive to humanity as a whole is the preservation of human life, first on Earth, and perhaps one day in the Cosmos. 

The first step in ensuring our success in this mission is to accept that we are not chosen or special: we just are.