71102.pdf

(8) Some people can predict future events, though only about thirty
seconds in advance.
(9) There is only one God! However, He has no way of finding out
what goes on in the world.
(10) This statue is special because it vanishes whenever someone thinks
about it.
(11) There is only one God! He is omnipotent. But He exists only on
Wednesdays.
(12) The spirits will punish you if you do what they want.
(13) This statue is special because you see it here but actually it's
[52] everywhere in the world.

Obviously, it is always difficult to predict intuitions. However, it

seems to me and to various people with whom I tried this uncontrolled

experiment that the above sentences do not sound very promising. It

seems unlikely that such ideas could serve as the main tenet of some

new faith, would attract followers and inspire strong emotions. These

arebad candidates for a possible religion. They may be bad in different

ways that we will consider below. What matters, for the time being, is

that we have some intuition that there is something defective about

these ideas as religious ideas.

Perhaps you do not find that terribly obvious and you think that,

after all, there may be some distant places where these strange ideas

are the main source of religious belief. To make the difference more

salient consider a list of clearly better candidates:

(21) There is one God! He knows everything we do.

(22) Dead people's souls wander about and sometimes visit people.

(23) When people die, their souls sometimes come back in another body.

(24) Some people are dead but keep walking around. They cannot talk

any more, and they are not aware of what they are doing.

(25) Some people sometimes faint and start talking in a funny way.

That's because God is talking "through" them.

(26) We worship this woman because she was the only one ever to

conceive a child without having sex.

(27) We pray to this statue because it listens to our prayers and helps us

get what we want.

Compare this list with the first one. The new propositions sound

much better. We can easily imagine some prophet attracting followers

RELIGION EXPLAINED