Restive

\RES-tiv\, adjective:
1. Impatient under restriction, delay, coercion, or opposition; resisting control.
2. Unwilling to go on; obstinate in refusing to move forward; stubborn.

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More on the alienating functions of society, the religious one catches me rather intriguingly. Religion retains a certain amount of comfort, in that it settles some of the more profound difficulties in living a balanced life. But by doing so with the weapon of faith (which is, in several circumstances, employed specifically to defend an un-provable/false claim), religion has the tendency and ability to alienate us from a meaningful human experience.

Most religions carry with them a set of identifiable, divinely-backed morals. This alone is as much a comfort as it is abstruse. The way I figure it (and surely, others will differ) is that god (or gods) does not update his rule book very often. The morality of the people was set several thousand years ago, and often is found insufficient (though surprisingly malleable and applicable, due to their vague and overarching principles) to guide our emerging (rather than legendary, but those too) moral concerns. Thus, god’s law or not, we end up determining morals for ourselves, but with the added burden of trying to fit the deity’s (infallible) concerns into the mix. Comfort in religion’s morality is an often times obdurate affair.

Similarly effectual is our knowledge of an afterlife. This a question no human faculty is designed to expatiate. If there is an afterlife, we won’t likely know for certain until we’re dead. Religion often offers exactly what our hopes might dictate—that there most definitely is an afterlife, and that, should we follow the rules set above (even though the criteria is constantly mutable), it will be a happy afterlife. In the niche where the human mind cannot reach, religion preys (and I use that word not intending a negative connotation, as I do not think religion so malicious) on our greatest fear—that this life is all we have. Being persistently assured otherwise robs of us autonomous investigation of the scenario, demanding, rather than careful thought, evidence-less belief in which our hopes are likely (and rightfully so) to side with the more appealing thought of life after death.

This is not to say that just because we hope it’s true, it’s not, but rather that it is interesting to note religion’s comfortable space between what we fear and what we cannot know—in order to alienate us from what emotional difficulties we may have to face: morally, as humans or even as sentient biological creatures.

The list goes on, of that which religion supposedly frees us from fearing. But in that freedom, I think, we are alienated from the reality of our situation by constantly (but never empirically) being ensured of an afterlife, by persistently escaping from experiencing our own, internal, more powerful self-judgment by leaving that up to an infallible entity, and even, in some cases, the pursuit of knowledge—as sooner or later we’ll meet every single human’s greatest dream: an entity that not only loves us, but knows everything. What greater gift could we hope for than an eternally reappearing and prolific father character with all the answers. When we were children, we wanted to know everything about the world. Becoming an adult, for me at least, was learning that your parents don’t know as much as you thought, and neither does any adult. We’re all in the same boat, seeking the same answers. Being alienated in that search by religion is just about the last thing we should do.

But I could not envision the world any different—after all, religion is just another one of those opinion matters that separate humans from one another, albeit in a peculiar way. It would be wondrous if there was an infallible pillar of truth that would take all of this difficult soul searching from us, but from all I have learned, each of these pillars have crumbled under our investigation. Perhaps if there were error bars in religion (as faith itself exists against a sliding scale against evidence rather than toward), then perhaps it would not be so alienating to believe that an entity in the sky is setting one’s prerogatives. But as, by most meanings of the word, god/gods are alien, this is a difficult concept to defend.