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| Major religious groups (Photo credit: Wikipedia) |
Last week, I wrote a post titled, ‘Work
Hard and You’ll Succeed: the Biggest Lie?’ Today, I want to explore, with
you, another blatant lie.
We’re told, frequently and with much volume, that we get what we deserve.
I think this is an attempt by some to encourage the first lie in the minds of
those as yet unschooled in reality. It’s also, of course, a saying completely
founded in the religious concepts that underpin the Abrahamic religions of
Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Their sacred texts explicitly tell followers
that their rewards will follow from their actions.
But is it true? Do we, or indeed anyone else, get what we deserve?
Does the innocent child deserve to starve to death by an accident of
geographical location? Does the winner of millions on a lottery actually
deserve this piece of great fortune? Does the drug baron deserve a life of
luxury and ease at the expense of those who suffer and die through his activities?
Does the Chairman of a business empire deserve the exorbitant income he awards
himself?
There are millions more examples of people receiving things they don’t
deserve. In fact, I’d say that more people get what they don’t deserve than get
what they do. In fact, I can think of very few people I know who have actually been
given what they deserved.
I hear those of a religious mind-set yelling that we get our real rewards
in heaven, paradise, or whatever other presumed afterlife they believe in. But
such destinations are pure speculation. There’s no way of knowing whether they
even exist except by taking that final step to enter them. By then it’s too
late to discover that all your effort, good, bad or indifferent, has, in fact,
resulted in you reaching the same end as all living things on death: i.e. the
recycling of your components. If there is an afterlife, and it’s something we
can never know since no one has ever returned with a reliable report, then
surely the creator of such a splendid reward system would want us to be
certain?
There’s little point in any deity permitting us to have doubts about such
things, since these are supposed to be the very motivations that make us do the
bidding of that deity. Yet the tales that are sold by the various religions are
so different and contradictory. Surely any deity worthy of the name would at
least remove the elements of doubt and dispute and provide a means whereby we could
actually experience such rich rewards? Nothing else makes sense.
Of course, I understand that many are now yelling at me that I have to
have faith. I’m sorry, but faith in something for which there is no evidence,
let alone proof, strikes me as little short of imbecility. Does anybody
seriously believe in fairies, a flat Earth, that Mars is inhabited by little
green men or any one of thousands of such tales? We’ve dismissed the myths of
ancient times, the tales of Zeus and his clan, Odin and his cohorts, Ra and his
comrades, as early attempts to explain what was then inexplicable. A similar
fate is already undermining current deities as reason and rational thought supersede
superstition and folklore.
It isn’t that I deny absolutely the possibility of religious dogma having
a basis in truth; it’s that I see such division in interpretation and I don’t
believe it can be proven. The very existence of God is a matter we, as humans,
will probably never be able to determine one way or another. If such a power
actually exists, it must, by its very nature, be so far outside our experience
and knowledge as to be incomprehensible. Any attempt to define such a power
must inevitably diminish any reality it might possess. So, I take the only sane
and reasonable attitude possible: I can’t know, which is why I style myself
agnostic.
I’d like to say, ‘religious considerations aside’ and give examples of my
argument on that basis but, unfortunately, the world in which we live is so
deeply imbued in religious foundation that it’s impossible to escape its
influence.
But I will set a challenge.
Can anyone, without citing religious concepts, please provide more
examples of people actually getting what they deserve than those who most
clearly do not deserve what they get? I’m open-minded enough to be converted to
a different view, if I can be given evidence that ‘just deserts’ is something
more than a meaningless lie disguised as truth by those with vested interest in
maintaining the status quo. Go ahead; change my mind.
