- From the Department of Health and Social Behavior, Harvard School of Public Health: intimate relations exist between mathematics and material reality, that counting and categorizing are the currency of durable knowledge, and that empirical study of variegated humanity…can uncover universal truths.
- Incidence and prevalence are measures used to describe patterns in communities.
Incidence measures the number of new persons experiencing a condition within a population, during a given period of time.
Prevalence measures the total number of people within the total population experiencing a condition during a given period of time.
- From a research perspective, the place to start investigating the reality of a religious belief is the statistical evidence of
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- high incidence – consistently high numbers of new believers over time
- and high prevalence – consistently high numbers of adherents over time.
- Science and religion agree that in the beginning the cosmos moved from a state of nothingness to the existence of matter. But science has very little to say about this mysterious transition, all of it highly speculative.
- By contrast, there was remarkable unanimity among…the sacred texts of the world’s great religions.
- an all-powerful immaterial pre-existent Being
- expressed in four-dimensional constructs as a trinity of body, soul and spirit,
- who created other hyper-dimensional immortal beings, the material universe, and humans,
- and provided mortal beings with a means of attaining immortality,
- in a battle of good – the Creator’s productive force – against evil – the Enemy’s destructive force.
Religion has been a factor of the human experience since pre-historic to modern times. There is no culture recorded in human history which has not practiced some form of religion. This fact alone lends credibility to believing in religion.
Hinduism, considered by some to be the oldest religion still practiced today makes Hinduism our main contemporary witness in the search for ancient religious beliefs.
The end goal of Hinduism is restoring unity with the Creator. This theme is found in virtually all major subsequent religions.
~2000 BC Zoroastrianism is one of the oldest religions still in existence. Zoroaster’s / Zarathustra’s culture was likely polytheistic, one of the early forms of Hinduism. Like Moses and Muhammed, he led his people back to the worship of the One True God.
The first couple created by Ahura Mazda – Mashya and Mashynag – had lived in peace and harmony with all things in the paradise Ahura Mazda had created for them until they listened to the whisperings of Angra Mainyu who convinced them that Ahura Mazda was their enemy and a deceiver. For doubting their true lord and listening to lies, they were expelled from paradise and condemned to a world of difficulty and strife, but their descendants could still live meaningful and fulfilling lives by remaining loyal to Ahura Mazda.
Like the Apostle Paul, Zarathustra was rejected by the priests, his life was threatened, and he was forced to flee his home. He would not stop preaching the revealed truth, however, remaining constantly in prayer to receive guidance from Ahura Mazda in how he should proceed. His prayers and questions would later be committed to writing and form a central section of the Zoroastrian scriptures known as the Avesta…It rested on five principles:
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- The supreme god is the Bringer of Light and Darkness, Ahura Mazda with 101 names / attributes
- Ahura Mazda is all-good.
- His eternal opponent, Angra Mainyu, is all-evil.
- Goodness is apparent through good thoughts, good words, and good deeds.
- Each individual has free will to choose between good and evil.
Ahura Mazda was the uncreated, eternal, and only god, while the many other deities previously worshipped were merely spirits or emanations from the divine.
There is strong internal biblical evidence for dating the book of Job to this time frame. A Zoroastrian may be the young but wise Eli-hu / He is my God in Job’s account.
c. 563/480 – c. 483/400 BC
Gautama Buddha, founder of Buddhism, teaches that souls do not exist. Existence in this world is considered a suffering experience. The goal of Buddhism is to escape the cycle of rebirth by reaching Nirvana,
This just sounds to me like such a dark view of life with a diagnosable psychiatric condition of nihilism.
At this same period of time Confucius founded the similarly atheistic but completely opposite cheerful view of existence: “The philosophy is based on the belief that human beings are essentially good.
It is estimated that only 0.1% of the world’s population follows Confucianism. Perhaps it is due to widespread personal experience that human beings are not essentially good?
c. 4 BC – c. 30/33 AD
Jesus of Nazareth, the central figure of Christianity based all his claims on the Old Testament / Tanakh, which is all founded on Moses’ writings. Likewise, the authors of the New Testament validated everything they wrote about Jesus Christ by referencing the Old Testament writings.
c. 1 AD
Taoism / Daoism is usually translated as the Way. All things are unified and connected in a Chinese worldview. The Tao is the ultimate creative principle of the universe and all things are unified in the Tao. The pursuit of spiritual immortality is by self-development and being virtuous. This is consistent with Monotheism.
570–632
Prophet Muhammad of Islam. The Moslem’s Holy Book, the Koran, openly pulls its Monotheistic teachings from the writings that Jews call the Tanakh and Christians call the Old Testament, during a time of widespread paganization of Christianity.
1469
The Sikh faith, a monotheistic religion, is established in India by Guru Nanak, who taught that one must honor God by honoring others and the Earth, God’s creation. The three core pillars of Sikhism can be recognized as equivalent to Moses’ compilation of ancient Hebrew teachings.
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- Vaṇḍ Chakkō: A spirit of giving, sharing, and caring for one another is central to Sikhism.
- Kirat Karō: Earning/making a living honestly and speaking the truth at all times.
- Naam Japna: Meditating on God’s name / attributes to live a life of decency and humility.
The five qualities of ego, anger, greed, attachment and lust are known as the Five Thieves that rob a person of their ability to realize their oneness with God and creation. Sikhs believe that one’s form on Earth is only a temporary vessel for the eternal soul on its journey toward God.
- According to the following chart, after 6,000 years of recorded history, even after atheist Communism engulfed highly populous nations, only 8% of the world’s population does ot believe in some kind of a god.
One could take the perspective that the cruel humanism of Communism drove their populations to seek a Higher Power.
Currently there are 2.4 billion Christians basing their beliefs on the Bible, and 1.8 billion Moslems whose Quran drew its fundamental beliefs from the Bible. Judaism is of course rooted in the Bible. At least half of the world’s religions are openly rooted in the monotheistic God of the Bible. and there are other ancient religions which are rooted in the same beliefs although not named in the Bible.
By comparison, Hinduism, while the third largest religion, and this with tremendous diversity without consistency, has only 14% of believers.
- The article…cited a 1965 poll by Lou Harris finding that 97% of Americans still believed in God…in 2014, that number had fallen to 86%.
In other words, the prevalence – total number in the population – of people who don’t believe in God increased from 3% of the population to 14% of the population.
But, we have to take into consideration that the group of individuals being questioned had changed in the 49 years between the first and second polls.
So these figures don’t demonstrate that many of the original individuals being polled had changed their minds. Instead, it demonstrates that the incidence – number of new people who don’t believe in God, had increased.Incidence statistics support the emergence of a new condition, such as the COVID pandemic, but not for the facts behind the emergence.
We could frame the research question as What has changed in American society since 1965 to cause American adults to stop believing in God?
Without question, one major change in society has been the technological advances in what is purported to be a purely materialistic scientific methodology for discovering pure knowledge and developing applications for controlling our world.
As if human accomplishments alone prove that there is no God or gods. That’s not even logical. There can be both.
Kingdom Come 