Flash Card Video

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Hello! My name is Wali Mir and today I will be re-visiting the topics we discussed in the first week of world religions. I will start with why people believe in god.

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Religion is usually higher in developing or poor countries. The majority of people in a developing country are in the lower class and thus might not have basic necessities and/or rights. This would cause a reason to believe in god or believe in some superior power in order to grant wishes or needs.

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As a country develops and becomes more wealthy, the amount of individuals in the middle and upper class rises. This would put aside the need for basic necessities or human rights and anything materialistic could be obtained through hard work. So as for as I know, the reason people believe in god is because they are cannot or are unable to help themselves and thus need a higher power to do so.

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The next topic is religious impulse where people believe that our faith to god has been embedded into our systems through history. Abrahamic religions such as Islam, Christianity and Judaism are relatively old and have lived throughout hundreds of years. The ones who followed these religions had given their faith to their children and thus, those children would give their faith to their children.

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The cycle would continue and the idea of religious impulse states that throughout all our ancestors believing in religion, we would have a natural instinct towards it. I do not believe in this idea because a religious person can have non-religious children and would then make modern society have people who cannot be faithful.

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The god gene is our next topic. The theory of the god gene states that there is a gene inside our bodies(VMAT2) that makes us want to believe in god and experience religion. This is supposed to have been in humans since the beginning of human existence and makes us willingly follow God and be spiritual.

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I feel that this is just another hypothesis to prove the existence of God but instead, this hypothesis is less rational than it is mystical. Carl Zimmer stated that VMATZ accounts for less than one percent of believing in religious ideas and can signify things like belonging to a political party. Therefore, the god gene is simply a flawed hypothesis and has yet to be proven.

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After the god gene, we discussed rationality verses mysticism. Rationality is the idea that you must be reasonable with your ideas and they have to be based on facts or justified reason. For an individual to believe in something like God, there must be reason behind it and facts in order for it to be rational.

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Mysticism on the other hand, is the belief in something without actual evidence or proof and is entirely based on an individuals own intuition or instinct. For example, the belief in god is often characterized as mysticism because it has yet to be proven. There are those who try to prove the existence of god through rationalism and do experiments or create theories but those theories are often still based on that persons own instinct.

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Rationality is more based off realism and exists in our world rather than another spiritual world. For example, when the theory that atoms can be broken down further into something smaller, it was proven by scientists. The scientists used a linear accelerator and broke down atoms into quarks. They used rationality and proved their theory with evidence and experiments.

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In short, rationality is more logical and seems to be the more useful approach towards things rather than just believing in something blindly.

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Finally, we discussed religion verses science. Religion and science are often thought of as opposing sides and contradictory to each other. Those who believe in religion are thought to be limited to what is composed in their holy book or scripture. Those who believe in science are thought to be those still seeking knowledge and not limited to what they already know.

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Religion and science are actually not opposing at all but have overlapped in history. A good example is how some of the most famous scientists in history were believers in god. Kepler, who invented the laws of planetary motion about the sun, was a firm believer in god and never once stated that his discoveries contradicted Christianity.

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Some scientists, such as Issac Newton, stated that, not only did god exist but, his research proved the existence of god. Issac Newton stated that the laws and forces present in the universe are all fixed and could not have naturally formed thus, it must have been created by a superior power. In short, religion and science may seem as opposing but I believe they can overlap and prove each other.

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In conclusion, religion can be proven to be real but people must get past the traditions and norms set by their own religion. Science and religion can work together in order to make new discoveries and I believe that they are not different at all.

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