It must be so that you know someone who calls themself religious, urging others to embrace their own religious views. That kind of person usually wants to present themself as someone who has high, let’s call it - RQ (religious quotient). Here, I would like to emphasize only one aspect of common religious belief, namely the concept of afterlife. By definition, believer is convinced that they’ll go to heaven after death, where they’ll continue to exist in form of pure soul. That’s exactly what concept of afterlife makes so attractive, right?
However, I wonder what makes religious person so firmly convinced about afterlife concept? What they know and I don’t? What kind of divine intervention enlightened them with that knowledge?
How I sent some believers straight into hell
To investigate this, I made a simple test in order to check out real RQ of so-called believers. For that specific purpose, I talked to some of them and faced them with following hypothetical situation. Imagine scenario in which technology is so advanced to provide immortality. It could be some breakthrough in nanotechnology with nanobots that maintain our body in perfect condition. Or maybe Ray Kurzweil realized his crazy idea to download human consciousness into silicon . Whatever.
Results of my tests were devastating. Most of my respondents were ready to forget everything about heaven, willing to accept immortality in this physical world. They implicitly gave up on their religious convictions, embracing technology as their salvation.
It turned out that RQ of so-called believers was pretty low. Their faith was not as strong as they claimed. They failed my test; in fact, they are real religidiots.
Why is that so? Is religion just prosthetic tool ready to be abandoned as soon as we find better one?
Will religion step back before technology due to examples like this? Does religion need some really fundamental changes in order to survive? What’s your prediction?
You can conduct this RQ test with religious people in your surrounding and share your results with us!