De una discusión teológica en curso, en inglés

I'm having a long and slow religions discussion through chat with absorto because aparently he is becoming somehow religious and I guess he needs to convert some of his friends to religiousness, or maybe he just needs approval, or maybe he just needs to demonstrate his point, his reasonable point, I mean. As a matter of fact I don't really know why we are discussing about this, but it does get sometimes fun, and we normally perform it in english, so I can practice my still very low skills on this beautiful language.

One of his arguments is that religions are just frameworks with pre-conceived metaphors that are easy to learn and use, so people don't have to think all (again) by themselves, they can just use the fragments given to them by religion to explain and resist their fears, their needs, their morality (or lack of), etc. Well, that's an elegant way of saying that it's ok not to think. There's a comparison made at this point with programming languages: they are just frameworks, right?, why would you learn assembler syntax if there is this friendlier comprehensive abstraction layer that you can use? In the same way, why would you do philosophy instead of accepting the beautiful truths to which a mistic arrived at two thousand years ago and have been improved by generations of smart people all around the globe? Errr, no, religion is not code, you don't normally improve religion with your comments and work so in time it gets better, because religion is conservation of some words said by someone, and rejection of any modification (unless you are an approved member of the highest rank of whatever religious community you choose). Besides, as a coder, I can use in the same program some php, some javascript, some html and some shell scripting, to get at the end specific results. In religion though there are absolute truths and falsehoods. Maybe the old polyteistic religions were syncretic and adopted other culture's gods without lots of trouble, but our contemporary mostly monotheistic religions are exclusive, and they don't get along very well.

Then comes another argument: yeah, religions are terribly imperfect and flawed frameworks, but great people, smarter and much more productive than you or me have used them, or made the choice to believe in them, wich means that being incredibly intelligent will not always lead you away from religion, and also, that you(I) might be wrong when dismissing religious people. Ok, aparently being very smart is a general feature, so I must be intelligent in every area of my life, and if I am a genius in let's say calculus I must be a great diplomat, politician, and philosopher too. ¿Is my reasoning right? On the other hand, I don't dismiss religious people, except when they start speaking about religion.

About a month ago, absorto sent me a link to a document written by a Krishna guru, that I didn't like and when I tried to discuss the contents, my friend refused to, and instead attacked my style and my cursing and my "anger". I rejected their using of great philosopher's phrases, taken literally, for their own krishna purposes, and a lot of ambiguities and stupidities said by the author (like comparing atheists to Nero, Caligula or Stalin, even if, he said, we are not all like that).

The last url I received on this topic from absorto, is a link to a very likeable blog post that talks about the "truth" in an old german phrase: "Weltliche Weisheit ohne Gott, ist die größte thorheit". I would gladly accept that there is a "truth" in that phrase, if the author (or absorto) would accept that there is a truth in the next one: "Weltliche Weisheit mit Gott, ist die größte thorheit", so yes, all worldly truths with or without god are major foolishnesses, because we are small, we are weak, we are all fool, etc. but the fact that both phrases have some truth in them, means that there's an excess with the God part, you could say for instance "Weltliche Weisheit ist die größte thorheit" and its truth would shine brighter. Using the God part, saying that without God things are stupid, has an opposed side where you could infer that for instance with God, things aren't stupid, and that's totally false. I can see that plainly saying that "things are stupid", independently of its truthfulness, is stupid. But I see, too, that things are stupid even if there is a God in them, so saying that "truths without god are stupid" is stupid too.

However there's another way of putting it: "things are stupid" is true when the world is seen through a framework where we are insignificant short-lived nano-dots in an eternal and huge universe. If you put things on another scale, if you take an individual human life scale, for example, and restrict the time of our framework to a week or a month, some things will be stupid and some will be important; some will be banal and some will be great, etc. Which means that if you enlarge the framework, the "things are stupid" phrase gets truer, but if you reduce it the same phrase gets falser.

And this brings me back to the beginning. Why would I want to put masks on stupidity accepting variable "truths" as fixed and absolute ones? Why would I want God in my life? Why would I even want to hear about God when there are other, much more interesting topics to talk about (even if they are as stupid as God's)?