God - the placebo effect

We are sometimes told, even by non-religious people, that religious people are better people than non-religious people. What? The Pope, Tony Blair, Mullah Omar? I don’t think so. However, when extensive and well set-up studies indicate that members of an organised religion, any organised religion, tend to be healthier, happier, longer lived and richer than we poor atheistical sods, then we may have to accept that that is true. But what to do about it? It’s another of those placebo effect problems. Suppose I have a searing pain in my left leg. I go to the doctor and she prescribes a new wonder drug specifically designed to remove not only the symptom but the cause of a searing pain precisely and only, by lucky chance, in the left leg. I take the capsules and my ill is, OK not cured, but considerably alleviated. I ring the doctor and say, “That worked,” because I believe in scientific medicine and the necessity of feedback. She says, “Interesting... because in fact that was just saline solution in a brightly coloured capsule.”
Next week the pain returns. What do I do? I now know that the contents of the capsules cannot physically connect to my pain. They may have gone some way towards curing it when I believed they were the newest wonder drug, but now I know they’re salt and water, they’re not going to work. I may half believe that they’re half going to work this time because they worked the last time, but this will be a very attenuated placebo effect, and will probably be extinguished by scepticism and a growing sensation not unlike agony in the left leg.
The placebo problem applies equally to religion. Suppose, with the aim of upping the health, wealth and longevity counts by a significant factor, I decide to turn a blind eye to the woman-murdering, child abusing and genocidal tendencies, and join an organised religion. There is still the problem of belief. In practice I’m enough of a sceptic to know that you only have to fake the belief to get the benefits of social networking and support which a religion provides, but that’s not enough. I want the whole package. I want the the buoyant sense of self-worth and well-being that can be derived from the knowledge that I am truly and eternally significant in the great scheme of things; and this requires true, not feigned belief.
How do people do that, believe truly and sincerely?
It is a commonly held view among Muslims that the fatwa was put upon Salman Rushdie’s *Satanic Verses* because the novel suggests that the Prophet went with prostitutes. But that is only a blind, a safe explanation for the unlettered rabble. What was really troubling about Satanic Verses was that in it the Prophet’s amanuensis started making little changes as he wrote down the Revealed Word; first just like changing an “a” to a “the”, but a little more adventurous each time as he established that the Prophet didn’t notice the errors when he read it back.
This suggestion was Rushdie’s crime. All great religions are finally dependent on the word of God, as revealed by his prophets (and the occasional angel), and if the word is corrupt in a detail, then it is corrupt in all, for God cannot be Wrong (Clerics try to get round this by saying it’s not God who’s wrong, it’s human understanding of his intentions, but that’s a hopeless fallback position, because then they personally have to claim exemption from this faulty understanding, and if they’re talking the same old bollocks, we’re unlikely to believe them). In the first centuries of Christianity men and women of faith fought out at great length, by burning each other at the stake, what the Word of God had been, precisely and exactly, and they had a finalising ratification (oh, the vanity of human aspirations) at the Conference of Nicea in the year 325 of the Christian calendar. Thence the Creed.
Maker of Heaven and Earth?
Bollocks is a strong word with which to characterise all religious belief, but really! If anybody ever reads this post, and they are religious, let them give me an example of a religious belief that is not claptrap and tommyrot - that is, something about God and His sphere of operations, not about humanity; “Thou shalt not kill” is not a religious belief.
See, it’s a weakness of God (He’s like Tony Blair in this, unsurprisingly) that He has powerful notions about everything, and thinks He has the moral and political authority to impose his notions upon everybody else. At the moment He’s very interested in prawns (God, not Blair). He’s still thinking about it, but He’s more or less decided that Muslims can eat prawns if they are coastal dwellers, where prawns are fish; but not if the live far from the sea, where prawns are insects. There are two worrying things about this. The obvious is that with all the ills of humanity God should be working on the ethics of prawn consumption. But the other is that the Muslim clerics who discuss this weighty topic don’t recognise that there is something slightly odd, given the well-inland provenance of their Prophet, about devoting so much time to the dietary laws of a people who dwelt near the coast of Palestine some way to the north and several thousand years ago.
And this burst of activity among those who became the Jews, the Christians and the Muslims in Western Asia raises other questions about God. There’s a cracking review of *God: An Itinerary* by Régie Debray in the London Review of Books 17/02/2005, and I quote Brian Rotman the reviewer:

“But first, He who started it all: why did the Eternal One arrive so late? What was He doing during the 1.4 million years since the Acheulean carvings in Africa? Or the half million years since humans harnessed fire? Or the stretch of time since the cave paintings? Or more immediately, why didn’t he appear earlier in the four thousand years of human religious practices - of burying the dead and believing in an afterlife? Why did he wait for Abraham to make His covenant with (a portion of) mankind?”

Rotnam finishes his review with an assessment of the present state of play of the most lethal Religion of the Book:

“In thrall to the Bible and convinced once again of its Manifest Destiny, American exceptionalism continues to remake the world in its own image. The Jewish claim to be chosen by Yaweh, appropriated by the Puritan founders, ends up as America’s inevitable - God-ordained - global mission.”

Life, with added health, wealth and longevity? Not worth the price.