I was in second grade when I first remember hearing something about the USSR. That was 1972 - well after the bomb drills of the 1950's but still before The Day After, the 1983 movie about the nuclear holocast that we grew up believing was absolutely inevitable. My generation had a kind of built-in pessimism, I think, a belief that there really wasn't much point.
But in the second grade they told me about how the Soviet government controlled all media - the newspapers, the tv, books and magazines. There was no internet then, and the government simply told the people what It wanted them to know. To attempt to publish anything outside their approval was to actually risk your life.
But something sparked in my seven-year-old mind. Somehow I knew, you can't keep people in the dark forever. Somehow, someday, they would realize that their information was being carefully controlled, and that knowledge would make them hungry to know more. It's just human nature. And what is true has a way of not just going away quietly, no matter how hard some people might work to make that happen.
That knowledge was a source of hope for me. I knew that it wouldn't be wars or weapons that would eventually free that nation, but the gradual erosion of propaganda and the human desire to know the truth about the world.
And I was right. As it turned out, it was only seventeen years later that the Berlin Wall came down, in the same decade that the internet began to deliver information to every corner of the world. It would have been like trying to hold back a waterfall with a handful of mud to try to keep people in the dark after that.
So what does that have to do with religion?
Once a person has a good working knowledge of history, and other cultures, and science, it's an easy step to see that man has always invoked the gods to explain the things he didn't understand or was afraid of. Every culture has its creation story to explain how the world and we came to be. In the days of subsitence farming, a drought must have been a scary thing, and it's easy to see how anybody claiming to know of a way to appeal to the gods to send rain would be the most popular guy in town - so popular that people would build temples and make sacrifices and give him a portion of their assets.
There were probably always skeptics too, but in those days when ruined crops might mean death you can see why it would have been much more comforting to think that you might have a way to affect that outcome. Even a skeptic might be tempted to throw a sacrifice on the fire, just in case.
If you look at today's culture I don't think you can underestimate the influence of the internet. This is the first time, ever, that any person in any country who can read can learn where thunder comes from, what our most brilliant scientists think about the origins of the universe, or how all life forms evolved from single-celled organisms. There is no longer a need to invoke gods to explain how the world works, or even how religion itself works.
Too much of what we can observe just doesn't fit with what religion has taught us. We're taught that homosexuality is a sin, but we see that there have always been gay people - whether we accept them or torture them doesn't seem to affect their numbers. We begin to see the humanity in religion. The authors of our faith were simple humans, vulnerable to the same prejudices that we are today.
What we get from this new perspective is that whatever religion we were raised with isn't really any different from any other group's religion, and when we understand the reasons why we reject belief in their gods we understand why others reject belief in ours.
All of this is good news. When we realize that it's our humanity that binds us to each other rather than our superstitions, we will be more motivated to look for solutions to the world's problems - solutions that don't depend so heavily on "us vs them."
Expect big changes and expect them soon. The cat is out of the bag. You can't keep people in the dark forever, and the light of truth is breaking all over the world. Expect the religious to make a lot of noise in the hopes that you will become confused. Expect them to appeal to emotions like fear to keep people faithful. They won't go quietly, but one day you'll wake up and realize that the world has kind of gone on without them.
You don't really need to do anything. Just wait for it.
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