The Greatest Act of Human Hubris

Religion, as seen today, has undergone great changes over the ages of human civilization. To reflect these changes, even the word religion itself is highly unstable: the Oxford English Dictionary lays out a plethora of meanings to the word, with ripe variation among the emphases and ideas within the realm of what is known as religion. Moreover, these attempts to pinpoint exactly what religion is are based on the English interpretation of the word; religion is not an English invention, and further shares more meanings in each society which currently lays claim to it, or that has ever done so. So, religious beliefs vary, from the overarching themes of what religion even is, to the specific discrepancies on beliefs, values, traditions, merits, or any other thing of which religions are made. But just how much do they vary between each other, over time, or even today, at this very moment?

A 2005 study compiling the approximate adherents to the most popular religions yields 21 present day religions, from the biggest, Christianity, with around 2.1 billion members, to the smaller Rastafari movement, with around only 600,000 members. While there are yet many more religions currently in practice which are not listed within these 21, this is a sufficient place to start. Of all of these religions, the majority of religious people worldwide adhere to five distinct religions: Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Chinese Folk Religion, and Buddhism. These five form a combined total of 95% of the world's religious population, leaving the extra 5% spread out into the other categories of religious belief. So is this to say that Christians think that their beliefs supersede the validity of about 65% of the rest of the world? That Muslims find their beliefs more tenable than 80% of the world? A closer inspection of each of these religions places the percentages, in actuality, far lower. Being the most popular religion, let us first examine Christianity.

Christianity is divided up between the Protestant, Roman Catholic, and Eastern Orthodox religions. In 2005, there were around a billion baptized practitioners of Roman Catholicism (~15-16% of the world population), a bit more than 400 million Eastern Orthodox practitioners (6-7% of the world population), and around 700 million Protestants (10-11% of the world population). If one attests that the beliefs of Protestantism are true, she would be placing the confidence of her beliefs over her confidence in those beliefs of about 90% of the rest of the world. But, how many people who would associate themselves with Protestantism believe the same things? There are again many, many more divisions: Anglicans, Lutherans, Reformed/Presbyterians, Congregational/United Church of Christ, Evangelical, Charismatic, Baptists, Methodists, Nazarenes, Anabaptists, Seventh-day Adventists and Pentecostals.

These distinctions are apparent within all modern religion. Within the Eastern Orthodox practitioners, one finds a good 20 divisions, which I will now spare listing. There exist a good 30 or so divisions of Roman Catholicism. Islam is divided mainly into the two sects Sunni and Shi'a. Sunni are thought to encompass about 85% of Muslims, leaving about 15% belonging to Shi'a. While falling more easily than Protestantism into divisions, the national differences between practitioners of Islam has near-endless variation. Contemprary Hinduism is broken up by adherents into three primary denominations, though more exist. These are Vaishnavism, Śaivism, Shaktism, and Smartism. Each of these then varies within communities, the hundreds of which again hold separate belief systems. Rather than continue to hammer the point, suffice it to say that within each of the major religions there exist denominations which hold varying definitions of religion. Suddenly, a Protestant Christian of, say, the Evangelical denomination is contending with a lot more than 90% of the world. Recall, however, that this is just among current, present day religions. Let us now consider religion as it has changed over time.

The major religions discussed above have existed anywhere from around 3-4 thousand years ago, in the case of Hinduism, to only 500 years ago, in the case of Protestantism. But, was 15^th century BCE Hinduism like Hinduism today? Was Roman Catholicism, when formed a little over two thousand years ago, the same religion as it is today? Consider the latter example. Catholicism itself came into existence as an alteration of Judaism (which did not survive the test of time as it's adherents today only compose .2% of the world's population, though it once held as high a popularity as the gods of Mount Olympus once held in Greece). With the additions of the New Testament, various tampering between civilizations following the fall of the Roman Empire, the change in many policies during the Great Schism, the additions made during the two Vatican Councils, and the innumerable other variations in belief, tradition, and ritual accumulated over the ages, the present state of Catholicism is quite different from its young form 2000 years ago. The Old Testament was originally thought to comprise the accepted, literal word of the Roman Catholic god, a belief that surely was almost ubiquitous between the original writers of the bible, Jesus, priests, and common adherents. This core -- the original basis of the entire Roman Catholic religion -- has been since supplanted by the an allegorical interpretation of the New and Old Testaments. Though the exact percentages of Roman Catholics adhering to each particular belief are not available, it is irrelevant: many Roman Catholics now have divided belief on the literal validity of the New Testament and Old Testament (some say literally both are the word of god, some say one, some say neither). Accrued over the last 2,000 years of what was the alteration of one religion (Judaism, which itself is arguably an amalgam of many more pagan religions) is a massive compilation of changes to Roman Catholicism, each of which separate the religion into today's numerous denominations. It is apparent that there exist many religions, which are subdivided amongst themselves, and have now changed greatly across time. It is unlikely that the beliefs of an Evangelical Protestant Christian would go over very well with anyone living in the first 1500 years following the birth of Christ -- or even with Martin Luther for that matter -- further raising the magnitude of people's beliefs such a person opposes. But let us go even further: what about the beliefs between individuals of the same religion and denomination? Are they the same?

For this last bit I will ask for the use of the reader's imagination and cut the facts short, as this is not a lesson in history but rather a speculative inquiry into the contemporary state of religions. Consider a random Christian – let's call her Jill. Being a Protestant, which broke from Roman Catholicism, which broke from Judaism, she is part of a religion shared by about 10-11% of the modern world. As a Protestant, she specifically believes in a symbolic interpretation of some parts of the Old Testament, so imaginatively slice from that percentage those who believe that the Old Testament is the literal word of God. However, she still believes homosexuality is a sin, so slice from the new percentage the number of Christian Protestants who believe in a symbolic interpretation of parts of the Old Testament but who do not believe homosexuality is a sin. Next, she believes that of those homosexuals, those who do not repent in their lifetime to her concept of a god will go to hell – again, slice away. She believes Hell is presided over by Satan (snippy snippy), who tempts people in various ways (snip), such as with fossils (slice). She also believes that her god created the universe, that the bread and wine she eats is not the actual body of Jesus, that abortion is against the will of her god, that her god changes the fundamental laws of the universe in the form of answering people's prayers when they are sincere and in need (but not, say, the prayers of a football player asking to win a game), that all those who do not accept Jesus as their savior are doomed to an eternity of torment, that she will live on after death in a realm known as heaven, that she will be with her parents and friends in heaven when she died, that heaven is only for humans and not animals, that her god created humans in his image, that the swelling emotions she feels at church are the blessing of her god, that Jesus was born of a virgin, that he was resurrected after being killed, etc. etc. etc. Slice, slice, slice. Consider the sheer improbability of every single one of any one person's faith-based religious beliefs being held simultaneously by any other person, when so vast as are the possibilities, so vast the multitude of applications, that people have found for religion in the contemporary world. Yet this is precisely what anyone who claims faith in the believability of these types of ideas is doing. But Jill ought not just be compared to people still alive today who share her beliefs.

Throughout the 200,000 or so years of decidedly Homo sapiens history, Christianity did not exist prior to around 2,000 years ago, Protestantism specifically did not exist until around 500 years ago, Hinduism traces back to around 3-4 thousand years ago, and Buddhism around 2,500 years ago. For around 196,500 years of human civilization (~98 of human life), none of the basic, foundational religions practiced today existed. Even just considering recorded history (for those who devalue the significance of less-advanced civilizations), only the last about eight and a third percent has occurred since the advent of Protestantism. Given what these religions looked like in their original forms, the multitude of denominations, and the extreme personal division of each specific religious belief, it is quite possibly accurate to say that every single person alive today, following just about any religion at all, really follows their own religion; or, if not, their religion is confined to a infinitesimally small portion of the world's population, which is magnitudes lower still than those ever living who have held religious beliefs. Yet all of these people seem to have faith – untestable faith -- that they know many things: the nature of the universe; whether or not an afterlife exists; precisely what to expect from said afterlife; the origin of species; whether or not Zeus, Allah, or any supernatural beings exist; that certain people will burn in everlasting torment who do not believe what they do; and so forth, about anything and everything. All the while, the religious claim to be privy to the infallible word of an omnipotent being – often, in recent years, of the same omnipotent being , though not always – who they are absolutely positive mandates their – and often only their – beliefs, again often specifically decrying any alternative positions on the subject, even though these mandates change over time, across civilizations, between ages, from sect to sect, from group to group, from person to person. Could what we call religion be any more worthy of the title: The Greatest Act of Human Hubris?