Opening Up to the Eternal

Why I Changed My Beliefs About Religion

I never believed in religion. Even though my family is devout Buddhist, I always thought that religion was for superstitious people, for those who lacked anchor in reality and have no better things to believe in the world. Some say that religion is a practice, a form of passion, but I think that for religious people, it’s a belief system by which they go about their daily lives. 

My mother tried to get me into Buddhism over the years but I was never convinced of its value. I went to a boarding school in Switzerland from a very young age, and there, my French education taught me about Descartes, Montesquieu, Rousseau and humanism. Even though I couldn’t understand what any of these thinkers were saying back then, it was still clear to me that the world was made up of science, political systems, and human intelligence. The way to earn one’s conviction was through a deductive reasoning, starting with an introduction, 3 pro-arguments, 3 counter-arguments, each with examples, and only then, could one finally draw a conclusion. Knowledge and logic was how you got to a superior point of view, not by some superstitious beliefs about spirits, ghosts and afterlife. If anything, societies organized around religion failed due to corruption, and countless wars happened because of religion, as I read in history books. 

To paint a better picture of my repulsion for religion, I’ll recount a memorable experience with a Christian friend. Sometime in my 20s, when I was working in NYC, I had a very sweet and trusted friend who was really into Christianity. She constantly preached to people around her, obliged prayers in gatherings (very awkward), and asked new acquaintances at dinners whether they had met Jesus Christ (I wanted to RUN from the restaurant). 

One day, she asked me to come to her church ceremony. Her congregation had just opened a new space and it would mean so much to her to have her friends there, she said. So I went, out of solidarity and friendship, but mostly because I didn’t know what I was getting myself into. In a small room in some run-down building in Korea town in New Jersey, around 40 people gathered to listen to a sermon that lasted for about an hour and a half. I have no recollection of what was said in the sermon, but I remember distinctly that every 5-10 minutes, the pastor would shout “HALLELUJAH!” into her microphone with an output of what sounded like 100 decibels, to which the congregation shouted back “HALLELUJAH!” just as loud. That’s a lot of ear-tearing Hallelujahs in 90 minutes, I can tell you. At the end of the sermon, people stood up and sang to their core, swaying their bodies in a side-to-side movement, with their hands up clapping in the air, totally ecstatic, while the pastor shouted “Jesus will save you! Help [she meant donate to] this church! Through this church you shall be saved!!!” on the microphone.  By that point, I expected a paralyzed person to appear on stage for the pastor to heal. To my relief, that didn’t happen. 

So disturbing was this first church experience to me that even some 15 years later, I still remember what outfit I was wearing that day. A black designer pencil skirt suit with stilettos, because I thought that churches were “civilized”.  But all I could think was how much I regretted wearing that fitted suit, because I couldn’t breathe in that small worn-out room with stagnant air, my ears ringing from all the shouting and singing, so loud that I was seeing white spots and hearing my pounding heart beats inside my head. Never again will I ever go to a church, never in my life will I be religious, I confirmed to myself.

Some scholars rationalize religion to be a fabricated story, a myth that was necessary to organize and band people together at times that lacked political or economic systems. A consensual hallucination to keep order, so to speak. And from where I stood, I couldn’t have agreed more. Religion may well have served its purpose in the past, but in this 21st century of advanced reason, science and technology, it seemed to have no other relevance than to instill some irrational beliefs in people. A cult. 

Or so I believed until Covid. 

Modern times tend to build a wall against the past, thinking that today’s men are smarter than ancient men because we know more about the brain activity and the sequence of the human genome than ever before. But in the process of reducing people essentially to DNAs and by-products of chemical interactions in the brain, we omit to reflect that human nature hasn’t changed much. We still go to war over territories (just under a different name than religion - for example, freedom, justice, democracy). We create art, write poetry, or produce Netflix shows. We express ourselves with aesthetic manifestations, like makeup and fashion. We also continue to fill the human spirit with something resembling a religion. Consider the current hyper-politicized Western world, where if you don’t think a certain way (DEI, CRT, ESG), if you don’t eat certain foods (vegan), if you don’t take certain scientific products (vaccination), or if you don’t drive certain cars (electric vehicles), you are deemed to be a bad person who doesn’t care about others, or worse, who doesn’t “believe in science”. 

Since Covid, we’ve all heard the slogans “Trust in Science”, “Believe in Science”. But what do “trust” and “believe” mean? It means to have faith in something to be true, even if it is not yet proven. And what is science? A system of knowledge and facts about the mechanisms of physical matters. A constitution of knowledge built through a process of having an assumption, collecting evidence and data, then debating them, in order to determine whether the initial assumption is true or not. And though it can take decades and even centuries, science becomes either fact or falsity - knowledge that doesn’t require an act of belief. So it seems to me that “Trust in Science” implies either that science is not an infallible system, thereby denying the factuality of science itself, or a call for society to worship the one magisterium of our time: the magisterium of Science. 

Reality is that in 2023, we can create and sustain life without the course of nature. Animals and foods can be created in labs, as can human babies be. Water can be made from human feces, and weather can be manipulated with chemicals. We can also fix anything we don’t like about our physical appearances, change genders, cheat death by freezing ourselves. And of course, create a new realm of intelligence. We can transcend nature and the state of being human with science and technology, and live one’s life as one desires it, ostensibly free from the interference of biology or natural agencies.

But I question, where is all this leading? And was there really no other way of improving access to water besides making it from shit, in this most scientifically advanced time of all? I assume that there probably were, but that shit water was the chosen solution. And, so here’s the caveat. Amidst quarrels about democracy and equality, treating people like machines and less than human is becoming the norm. For example, Covid measures were based on the assumption that humans are primarily incubators of a virus that can only produce one possible outcome: cause severe illness and death in others. Therefore, healthy people were thrown into quarantine jails, prohibited from living life, fired for not “updating” their immune system with new vaccines (hello natural immunity), and obligated to check-in everywhere we went with QR codes, like items being scanned at a payment counter. Even a sitting Supreme Court Justice of the USA, Sonia Sotomayor, asked “how are human beings different from a machine?” in making a case for vaccine mandates by comparing “human spewing a virus” to “machine spewing sparks”. And when I remind myself that at least 62% of Koreans contracted Covid despite strict restrictions, and that 99.9% of people survived Covid, I have to wonder what it was all for. I can tell you what it did to me. It led me to a state of mental resignation.  Because those who questioned these measures were considered to be heretics who don’t “trust in science”. 

Similarly, I’ve recently met a doctor from a renowned university hospital in the US, who removed both her breasts and ovaries as a preventative measure against cancer. She comes from a family of cancer patients, and since some research pin down cancer to be almost certainly a genetic disease, she decided to remove her organs to mitigate the risk, or rather, eradicate the risk. 

I am not by any means a doctor, but to anyone with some critical mind, such practice raises questions about the baseline philosophy of the scientific community. Because it assumes that human bodies are machines that act exactly as coded by our genes, incapable of escaping our genetic fate. But there must be hundreds of millions of interactions between proteins and other molecules in our bodies for cancer cells to develop. So by removing organs to eradicate a probability of getting ill, is the medical community excluding the possibility of random permutations of molecules in our bodies, just as there are in nature? And denying the possibility for human bodies to alter the course of their own genetic fate? If so, what’s all the fuss about a healthy diet, exercising, and avoiding toxic chemicals then?

For a secular person, it’s easy to take what we have for granted and believe that we were dropped on this planet, at this time, simply because humans have sex, give birth, get educated, to make money, in order to own stuff and have a good time before we die. Without any inherent meaning to life or purpose. I have lived most of my life believing that. But the totalitarian Covid measures and the tandem ideological indoctrination happening on a global level (DEI, ESG), not to mention artificial intelligence, left me questioning what could be left of human beings in an era where people are considered to be mere automata, obedient to the impulses of the central nervous system, with minds that can be “corrected and updated” with bundles of acronymous programs like DEI, CRT and ESG.

The answer I could come up with was religion. Because what survives of past civilizations is what is related to religion. The pyramids in Egypt, Pantheon in Rome, Hagia Sophia in Istanbul, Notre-Dame in Paris, the temples in Tokyo were all built to bring humans closer to a divine existence. And the traditions descending from religion still affect the ethos of people in respective cultures (also note that horoscope didn’t disappear even in this secular culture as we see in Vogue and Cosmopolitan magazines alike). We tend to forget about the innate human nature, but it is perhaps in our nature to venerate what is greater than ourselves, yearn to attain what transcends the materialistic existence, and worship something beyond this world.

“Lenin said that religion is the opium of the people… The truth is that irreligion is the opium of the people. Wherever the people do not believe in something beyond the world, they will worship the world. But, above all, they will worship the strongest thing in the world.” 

G.K. Chesterton

By the forces of nature - as best as I can describe it - I started reading the Bible during Covid. It took me over two years to read through the 66 books in the Bible with the help of YouTube and supplementary books to understand what I was reading. And even though I cannot fully grasp the depth of the scripture and the totality of its cosmology, the core of the Bible was nothing like the kind of fanaticism or ecstasy that my friend’s church was communicating. The Bible told stories about human beings, human nature and human relationships, unveiling the wisdom to navigate the world of people, not machines, that no amount of Transcendental Meditation could enlighten me on, and no amount of “how-to” books could teach me about. Connecting people across time with stories so profound to have outlasted several millenia so far. And even if I don’t believe all the stories in the Bible to be factual, and even if I do not have the affinity to belong to any church or denomination, it is with humility that I accept that while I was rejecting the religious faiths, I was actually worshipping the holy trinity of modernity: reason, science and technology.  And perhaps, my mother finds a similar kind of purpose in Buddhism. 

In the book of Genesis, the first book in the Bible, there is the story of the Tower of Babel. 

“Now the whole world had one language and a common speech. [...] Then they said, “Come, let us build ourselves a city, with a tower that reaches to the heavens, so that we may make a name for ourselves; otherwise we will be scattered over the face of the whole earth.” [...] The Lord said, “if as one people speaking the same language they have begun to do this, then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them. Come, let us go down and confuse their language so they will not understand each other.” So the Lord scattered them from there over all the earth.

Genesis 11:1-8

An apt description of our world, I find. One united by the common channel of the Internet and the media, where humans are building a digital tower of Science and Technology to become ourselves man-god, devoiding life of all natural courses, a world where nothing can be agreed on, nothing is sacred, nothing is real. 

I like us humans. Possessing emotions, warm blood, organic intelligence, personality and above all, free will. And as faulted and destructive as we may be, we exalt beautiful things, venerate great achievements, honor courage, sacrifice ourselves for what we value and love. We are inherently endowed with qualities that offer Possibility for the humankind, qualities belonging to a metaphysical realm that I can only consider to be divine. Qualities that our DNA and chemical interactions in our brains cannot sufficiently explain. “So [I] fix my eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen, since what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal” (2 Corinthians 4:18). And in a world where a few self-proclaimed messiahs of the science and tech industries seek to reduce humans to machines and data, I place my faith in the courage of people, in the Bible and in the existence of divinity, because that is what keeps me human.