50 Popular Beliefs That People Think Are True

by Harrison, Guy P.

  What we can conclude from the multitude of claims for very different gods is that, at the very least, most believers must be wrong. This is just the way it sorts out and there is no getting around it. Do the math, either polytheists are wrong or monotheists are wrong, for example. The fact is, the majority of people today are missing the mark when it comes to gods and most people in the past got it wrong too. If Christianity is correct and Jesus/God the Father/The Holy Spirit are real, then that would mean the majority of people alive today and the vast majority of people who have ever lived were wrong. If Islam is true and Mohammed was correct about the Koran and Allah, then it would mean that the majority of people alive today and a majority of the people who have ever lived were wrong on the god issue. The same is true for every religion and every god claim. If somebody's hell turns out to be real, it's going to be awfully full. And it will be filled mostly with religious people who got in line behind the wrong god.

  Many people mistakenly believe that the popularity of god belief in general somehow validates their belief. Not so. In fact, the conflicting claims of so many beliefs casts suspicion on all of them. If my neighbor can be wrong, perhaps I can be wrong. Christianity, for example, is currently the world's most popular religion. That sounds impressive, but some 70 percent of the world's people are non-Christians. Muslims are a minority, too, at 21 percent. Hinduism is a major world religion, but only 14 percent of all people are Hindus. These conflicting minority belief systems do not validate or support one another.

  In my book 50 Reasons People Give for Believing in a God, I analyzed the most common justifications for belief that I heard from people in various religions around the world. I found it interesting that people defending very different belief systems would almost always rely on the same handful of justifications. For example, I have been told that answered prayers, miracles, divine healings, and feelings of joy “prove” the existence of a god. I have been told these things by Christians in Europe and the Americas; Muslims in Syria, Jordan, and Egypt; and Hindus in India and Nepal. Once again, somebody has to be wrong here. If a Hindu who successfully prays for a favor from Ganesha proves that Hindu gods are real, then why aren't the answered prayers of a Muslim proof that there is only one god? If a Christian and a Sikh pray for better jobs and then both get better jobs, whose prayer should we consider to be proof that Jesus is or is not the only way to salvation? Meanwhile, we have to consider why the past prayers of ancient peoples such as the Greeks and Romans are not compelling evidence for the existence of their long list of gods. They said prayer worked too.

  It is the same with faith healing. I have spoken with a variety of believers in a variety of unique religions who assured me that their god or gods must be real because of some supernatural recovery from illness or injury that they experienced or witnessed. But I have attended faith healing services and was not impressed. When you consider the global/historical context and recognize that claims for divine healings have been taking place for thousands of years within numerous contradictory religions, it becomes clear that this is not good evidence for the existence of a god or gods.

  No one claim for a god or gods holds a decisive advantage over all the others. Sure, many people within each belief system will say that theirs is true and all others false, but they are in a poor position to judge. It must be difficult to observe the religious landscape as it really is while standing inside the high walls of just one of them. From the nonbeliever's vantage point outside the walls, however, it easily comes into sharp focus. The great number of gods that we humans have confidently believed in since the dawn of history and probably deep into prehistory, suggest only one thing: we are a god-inventing species. We see divine beings everywhere and then imagine that we know their desires. The fact that there has never been agreement on who the real gods are and what they want of us hints to the likely source of our tales. The gods have not spoken to us. Most likely it is we who are simply speaking to one another, in their name.

  GO DEEPER…

  Books

  Chaline, Eric. The Book of Gods and Goddesses: A Visual Dictionary of Ancient and Modern Deities. New York: It Books, 2004.

  Harrison, Guy P. 50 Reasons People Give for Believing in a God. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2008.

  Hemenway, Priya. Hindu Gods. San Francisco, CA: Chronicle Books, 2002.

  Jordan, Michael. Dictionary of Gods and Goddesses. New York: Facts on File, 2004.

  Kurtz, Paul. The Transcendental Temptation: A Critique of Religion and the Paranormal. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 1991.

  Mills, David. Atheist Universe. Berkeley: Ulysses Press, 2006.

  Sagan, Carl. The Varieties of Scientific Experience: A Personal View of the Search for God. New York: Penguin, 2007.

  Thompson, J. Anderson, and Clare Aukofer. Why We Believe in God(s): A Concise Guide to the Science of Faith. Charlottesville, VA: Pitchstone Publishing, 2011.

  Other Sources

  The Atheist Experience, www.atheist-experience.com/archive/.

  Letting Go of God (DVD), Julia Sweeney and Indefatigable, 2008.

  Modern science is beginning to understand the neurological mechanisms that give rise to the religious experience of the believer. Given these results, the skeptic may present the believer with a simple question: How do you know that your religious experience is not a simple trick of your brain—the unfolding of a perfectly natural temporal lobe transient? How can you trust such an experience when, through science, we can convincingly mimic the face of God?

  —David C. Noelle

  One of the world's most common and enduring beliefs is that one particular religion is true while all the many thousands of others are wrong. Of course, those who hold this view are always sure that it's their religion that happens to be the one that is correct. This is another belief that can be difficult to address due to a force field of traditional respect, legal protection, and the outright threat of violence that often surrounds it. Reaction varies by religion, context, time period, and society, but one might be considered rude for challenging the concept of religious favoritism, arrested or even killed for it. It is usually considered good manners, and safer, to simply duck this one while repeating the live-and-let-live cliché. Unfortunately, however, total confidence in one religion over all others encourages many bad things, from the Crusades to discrimination to suicide bombers. This makes religions fair game for all those who care about such things as peace and human rights.

  So what is wrong with the claim that one religion is true and all others false? Three points reveal the problem with religious isolationism. First, we need to look at how people come to follow one religion over thousands of others. Second, we must explore the religious landscape as it really is, not as people tend to imagine it is. Finally, we need to address the problem of religious illiteracy. How can people judge their religion to be the most sensible and accurate of all when they know virtually nothing about any others?

  RELIGIOUS INHERITANCE

  How do people choose a religion? They don't! The dirty little secret about religious belief is that it's imposed, not chosen, in almost every case. Very few believers voluntarily and consciously select their particular religion. The religion usually is introduced to a child by family members—without debate, questions, or consent—and then reinforced by the immediate social setting. This is clearly the case because we can look at the geography and family patterns of religious belief and see that the best predictors of a person's religious belief are what their parents believe and where they live. So if a person was born to Muslim parents and raised in Egypt or Syria, for example, the odds are very high that she or he will be a Muslim in adulthood. If a child has Buddhist parents and grows up in Thailand, it's likely that he or she will end up a Buddhist. It's nearly certain that a person raised by Christian parents in Mississippi will be a Christian. If one is born in a small village in Papua New Guinea, most likely she will not be a Scientologist or Raelian. If one is born and raised in Pakistan, chances ar
e not good for becoming a Baptist. What this shows is that very few of the world's people are doing much thinking, if any, when they first become tied to a religion. There is virtually no comparison shopping going on when it comes to the adoption of religions throughout the global population. There is no weighing of evidence and assessing of arguments. There is no time given for fair hearings of alternative beliefs or counter explanations for religious claims. In almost every case religion is a family and social inheritance that the individual has little say in. For typical believers, religious loyalties develop early in life and within the context of trusting authority figures. These beliefs are able to grow deep roots in relative isolation, safe from challenge. Then the confirmation bias protects the imposed belief, as observations and arguments that seem to support their religion are embraced while everything that supports rival religions or casts doubt upon all religion is ignored or trivialized. There may be movement within religions by individuals, from Catholic to Protestant or from fundamentalist Muslim to casual Muslim, for example. But allegiance to the original primary religion does not change for most people.

  This religious enculturation, some call it indoctrination, should concern those who grew up within the psychological cocoon of one particular belief system and now find themselves confident that this religion happens to be the one that is true above all others. Let's not forget that Muslims, Christians, Jews, Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists, and all other believers are humans first. And as humans, they are vulnerable to the same errors in reasoning. For example, it is not difficult for me to imagine what likely would have happened if I grew up in India, was raised by loving Hindu parents who taught me all about the gods, lore, and rituals of that particular belief system. By the time I reached adulthood, it is very likely that I would have a strong bias favoring belief in Hinduism. I probably would view Hinduism as the best religion, even if I knew little about all the others that exist today and existed in the past. Maybe I would one day embrace skepticism and begin to have doubts. If that happened, however, my struggle likely would be between Hinduism and atheism with little or no thought given to Christianity, Islam, or any other religion.

  I believe that it would be constructive for all believers with total confidence in their religions to imagine what their mind-sets might be if they had been born into different societies, with different parents, and raised to be loyal to a different religion. Hopefully people can recognize that simply being taught one religion and no others early in life is not a of the world's people reasonable justification for believing that your religion is best and makes more sense than all the others. The logic is not so different from a sports fan loving a hometown football team he or she grew up with and supporting it through the years, no matter what happens on the field each season. Such feelings and actions are more about geography and childhood loyalties than any rational or logical decision making.

  THE REAL RELIGIOUS LANDSCAPE

  A second key reason that many people believe their religion is the right one is the failure to see religions as they are and not how they are imagined to be. I am convinced that if people were aware of the basic numbers, structure, and history of contemporary religions, they would find it much more difficult to dismiss or look down on rival belief systems. I have interviewed and had conversations with a variety of believers around the world who are under the false impression that the general popularity of belief in gods somehow gives credibility to their particular religion over all others. “Most people are religious, therefore my religion must be true,” is the popular idea. But this makes no sense. First of all, reality and truth are not determined by popularity contests. Even if every human who ever lived believed in fairies, it would not mean they are necessarily real. To know if something is real, we can't rely on a show of hands. We have to assess the evidence. An abundance of believers in a god or gods does not mean any gods necessarily exist. Yes, religion has been near universal throughout history. Humans have created hundreds of thousands of religions and claimed the existence of hundreds of millions of unique gods. But no proof for gods is to be found in these numbers. If anything, it is a compelling argument for the likelihood that all gods were invented. More to the point, key contradictions between those hundreds of thousands of religions do not help make the case for any single belief system being correct. One billion Hindus believing in millions of gods does not reinforce the claims of 1.5 billion monotheistic Muslims, for example. The disharmony among believers today and throughout the past suggests just one thing: we look very much like a species that loves to make up gods and invent religions.

  WHY DO RELIGIOUS PEOPLE KNOW SO LITTLE ABOUT RELIGION?

  Ignorance is the greatest reason so many people are able to confidently declare that their religion is true while all others fall short. What could be easier than to feel superior about your belief system when you know little or nothing about all other belief systems? It would be easy to believe hamburgers were the best food in the world if you had never tasted any other food. To be clear, this is not about anyone's intelligence. This is about curiosity, awareness, and educational opportunities. We may live in a world teeming with religion, but most people do not know basic facts about the world's current most popular religions, and even their own religion in many cases. Strangely, religion is hailed by billions of people as something very important and necessary in our lives. Believers say it has profound implications for life, death, and even eternity—yet almost no one understands it.

  Boston University religion professor Stephen Prothero addresses the problem in his book Religious Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know—And Doesn't:

  Today religious illiteracy is at least as pervasive as cultural illiteracy, and certainly more dangerous. Religious illiteracy is more dangerous because religion is the most volatile constituent of culture, because religion has been, in addition to being one of the greatest forces for good in world history, one of the greatest forces for evil. Whereas ignorance of the term Achilles' heel may cause us to be confused about the outcome of the Super Bowl or a statewide election, ignorance about Christian Crusades and Muslim martyrdom can be literally lethal.1

  Former president George W. Bush demonstrated the dangers that can come from religious ignorance in a religious world. Bush said shortly after the 9/11 attacks that he would respond to the terrorists by launching a “crusade.” Apparently he was unaware of the religion-based ill-will and suspicions that come when a Christian leader uses the term crusade when talking about Muslims. Bush then ordered the invasion of Iraq without knowing anything about the historic tensions between Sunni and Shia Muslims. In fact, he did not seem to have ever heard of Sunni and Shia Muslims. Even the most basic superficial knowledge about Islam and its history might have meant better planning and fewer lives lost in postinvasion Iraq.

  So just how bad is the problem of religious ignorance? In 2010, the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life conducted a survey of Americans' knowledge of religion. Here is some of what was revealed:2

  About half of Protestants (53 percent) cannot correctly identify Martin Luther as the person whose writings and actions inspired the Protestant Reformation, which made their religion a separate branch of Christianity.

  More than four in ten Catholics in the United States (45 percent) do not know that their church teaches that the bread and wine used in Communion do not merely symbolize but actually become the body and blood of Christ.

  Roughly four in ten Jews (43 percent) do not recognize that Maimonides, one of the most venerated rabbis in history, was Jewish.

  Fewer than half of Americans (47 percent) know that the Dalai Lama is Buddhist.

  Fewer than four in ten (38 percent) correctly associate Vishnu and Shiva with Hinduism.

  Atheists and agnostics scored the highest on a general religion knowledge quiz, outperforming believers.

  Only about a quarter of all Americans (27 percent) correctly answer that most people in Indonesia—the country with the world's largest Muslim population—are
Muslims.

  A disturbing picture to be sure, and not exclusively an American problem. During my travels I encountered stunning religious ignorance in virtually every society I visited. The problem is global, and the cause of it seems obvious to me. There is an arrogant confidence that seems inevitable when a person is immersed in one religion from childhood and constantly assured by authority figures that it is the true one. This process likely discourages investigation and curiosity toward other belief systems and nonbelief. There also is far too little competent religious education for young students in most schools. Rare is the school that presents even the basic facts and history of a variety of religions. In most societies such classes are usually limited to more sophisticated high schools or offered as university electives. The world's children need to be taught early on about religions in an unbiased and academically competent manner. They should get some exposure to the scholarly history of today's more popular religions as well as some religions of the past. This is vital to having a chance of a clear and sensible worldview. One can never really understand world history or current events very well without a minimal understanding of religions given their impact on the world.