A Father-Son Dialogue
In The XXIst Century’s Dawn

-Well, son, your mother said you’d have some important questions without answers, unsolved issues and therefore, a troubled soul. You won’t eat like before, you won’t sleep well and your words become irrational sometimes.
-…
-I’m waiting, I’m ready and I’m all ears!
-Welcome home, dad!
-Glad to see you too, son, I love you and I care about what’s happening to you these days.
-What’s happening, dad?
-Like I said, you’re not you anymore.
-Yes I am the same, only that I have to react, I have to do something and I have to change myself in order to change the world.
-React to what, do what, why change the world, a world that is changing anyhow, every day, continuously, with or without you.
-I mean to straight things out, to correct the faults, to make place for more happiness among people.
-All right, let’s be a little more specific here!
-For example, the religion. I’ve read in books how people use to consider it the most important thing in their lives, at the beginning, and their happiness had a complete fulfillment trough the religion, listening to the wisdom of the Holy Bible. Then I’ve read about the Cross Knights Wars, cruel, bloody and painful, about the Saint Bartholomew’s night, cruel, bloody and painful and lately about the September Eleven Attack, the deadliest and the most painful of all, in which people were killed several times if I may say so, by fire, by smoke and by crush. And all this in the name of a certain religion considered better than another certain religion by fanatical human beings. Do you think that if religion will be banned, all this bloody moments will disappear?
-…
-Well, dad, answer me!
-I will, I will, son, I was just thinking. This is a hard questions to answer, I myself had it in my mind when I was your age, but I had no father to answer to it, because he passed out killed three times by grief after my mother’s death, cirrhosis and hearth attack. My mother was religious, practicing Christian, going to church every time she was supposed to do so. But she didn’t say prayers before every meal, like my grandmother was doing once, as I remember. How is it with, how would be without religion? Good with it, better without it and the Better to be the enemy of the Good? My father wasn’t religious. He’s visited churches at weddings and funerals only. But neighbors and fellow coworkers was visiting him just to talk with him, they were looking for his companionship. And there were long visits; I can tell you that, being a small kid crawling around their legs and the table and chairs’ legs. I never remember him speaking about God or religion. I guess he respected it by silence. My religious mother lived 10 years less then father. She was too upset about my sister unorthodox behavior, and the repeated emotions about it gave her a blood pressure that cracked some blood vessels in her head. My unreligious father passed over my sister bad (in my mother opinion) behavior and helped her, with the bills and with the raising of his son. So who was better in the God’s eyes: my mother or my father? She was religious, but in her last moments she wasn’t seeking for God, but for me. To me was the last smile she gave, before falling in the abyss of the fatal coma. They say it doesn’t count how long you live but how happy you are and how many good things you accomplished. My both parents accomplished tons of good things, one being religious and the other one not. As a medical nurse, my mother took to heavens the gratitude of thousands of people healed by her. And as a teacher, my father had with him the thankfulness of thousands of pupils at the great inquest. So I think that before religion it comes the character, and the religion is a complex tool invented by mankind to shape this character so that happiness can be accomplished better and to diminish the pain of all kind. Bad with it, worse without it? Maybe…I’m shaping the answer to this question for decades now and I don’t think I have a final form for you, son. Like I said the religion is a tool and you can’t judge a tool, but the one who invented it and that would be the mankind itself. So if we suppose at one extend that the religion would be banned, the thinkers will come with something else with different name to do the same job: building positive characters.
-…This answer raises other questions, dad.
-Such as?
-If the religions are creations of mankind, is then God also a creation of ours?
-Which of them: Brahma, Amun-Ra, Uranus-Gaea, Zamolxis, God, Allah?
-What’s this?
-This is an incomplete chronological list of names given to supreme divinity by people around the world, in different historic times.
-Should I understand that the divinity is a creation of ours, though?
-Not at all, the divinity, or what we define by that is there, material and immaterial and we never end to be amazed by the various forms in which it unveils to us.
-How can you be so sure of that?
-I’m not, that’s the beauty of it and that’s keeping my spirit sharp, I’m ready every day – so to speak - to reconstruct my beliefs if I find a list of axioms that fit better my common sense.
-Now I’m floating. So how many times did you reconstruct your beliefs so far?
-Never yet, but I’m ready, like I said.
-I thought I’m the young and restless here!
-There is no need to jump the lunch to be like that!
-Still, you seem pretty convinced that there is God and the religion is by all means necessary. But how should I accept a certain religion without judging it, without making comparisons? Because you said that I couldn’t judge the religion because it’s a tool, I have to judge the creators of it.
-Of course you make up your mind by judging and comparing. But the facts you take into consideration are those of the believers, imperfect humans. Why people are switching from one religion to another? Mainly, because they feel better in the new community. The creators of a religion are not only the initial prophets. They only established a base of axioms, on which the inheritors build all the time conceptions and beliefs. So yes, indeed, you judge the creators, the humans.
-So how come the religion is involved in such many bloody events, especially these days, with the Muslim terrorist attacks all over the world. Why should these people declare a total war, a “saint war” they say, against other people of other religion, which they consider “infidels”, even though their basic beliefs are against the murder?
-Because of the priests establishment, the interpreters of Koran and supreme hierarchy in the Muslim world. They told repeatedly to their followers that nowadays the infidels – which would be the western world - became a lethal threat to the Muslim tradition and culture by spreading the advanced technology all over the world, and together with it, the Christian morale – which is not stainless yet - and the values of freedom – which can also be subject to criticism. And because in some Muslim countries there is no separation between the State and the Church, the interpreters have also the financial power to support the terrorist groups and to promise to suicidal fighters that their families will be taken care for generations. But how much money could replace a father or a son? For how long? Soon – and I’m talking months, years maybe, the Muslim people will realize that they’ve been used and cheated by these interpreters: I never heard about suicidal attacks to be performed by sheiks or priests themselves. On the other hand the western technology makes the life easier and more interesting. And searching for interesting things is in the human nature, which is what distanced him from the other animals. Perhaps it is time nowadays to replace the five times a day prayers with something funnier, because the air-conditioning systems allow this. But this will be the end of the absolute power of long beard priests. And of course they cannot accept that peacefully. So that’s why the religion became so involved in the present days bloody events.
-Still, how would be the world without religion?
-I told you, the religion would be reinvented under other names, but meanwhile the world will slip into chaos. People in Africa was eating each other before the religion was spread among them and in the pre-Columbian America people there had sacrifice rituals which covered the walls of the ritual rooms with a 2 inches thick dry human blood. Not to speak about how they used to torture to death their prisoners. And those men without religion had only knives, bows, arrows and spears. Imagine what would be today, with neutron bombs, suitcase-sized atomic bombs, chemical and biological weapons we can hardly imagine how deadly can be. So the world without religion will be in deep sufferance and decline, like a million islands without bridges.
-But it has to be something to do to stop the bloodshed and the extreme sufferance of so many people!
-What is “so many”. A million, ten, a hundred millions? The mathematics established that one tenth is a negligible quantity comparing to the whole. So 600 millions is negligible comparing to 6 billions people. Anyhow, this is no more a religious issue, but a political one. Or, more then that, it might be the God’s will for the things to be so, giving the fact that the planet is overcrowded with humans while dozens of other species disappear every year.
- So you do believe in God, even though you never show it.
-Son, you have a lot to learn yet, but let’s go to supper, mother is waiting for us.