What leads us to extreme religious beliefs?
Some people would insist on conviction, others would say they are those who found the right way. Yet what is it that prompts us to find these convictions?
I think that we are most afraid of things that we do not know, and so we try to explain everything, even at the expense of reaching the extreme. People are most uncomfortable with the mysterious that we’d rather side with an absolute statement than suffer the vagueness of matters we can’t resolve.
We don’t like the abstract. And so goes the many beliefs we have now that seems to cast all other things aside-
Beliefs that unless we do this and that, we won’t be saved, and we won’t reach heaven.
Beliefs that since there are many things we can’t explain about God, then there must be no God at all.
Beliefs formed from the wonders we observed in nature, such beliefs that make us worship nature alone.
Beliefs saying that because having desires causes us so much frustration then we should have no desires at all and lose our personal identity altogether.
We cannot connect everything perfectly yet. And though this should not prevent us from seeking out the truth, uncertainties for the moment need not take us to extreme beliefs either. I am lead to belief that this line of thinking was what made Adam and Eve eat the forbidden fruit from the tree of knowledge. They wanted to know everything that they would do everything even if it is not yet time. Must we eat the forbidden fruit also? Can we not be comfortable with the mysterious for the moment and enjoy the wonderful revelations given us one moment at a time?
“The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of true art and true science. Whoever does not know it and can no longer wonder, no longer marvel, is as good as dead, and his eyes are dimmed. It was the experience of mystery – even if mixed with fear – that engendered religion. A knowledge of the existence of something we cannot penetrate, our perceptions of the profoundest reason and the most radiant beauty, which only in their most primitive forms are accessible to our minds: it is this knowledge and this emotion that constitute true religiosity. In this sense, and only this sense, I am a deeply religious man.” -Albert Einstein
