The God Delusion

First, aside from the subject matter, this post has nothing to do with the book by Dawkins, it just so happens that his title works for what I want to say, so, I'm borrowing it. Well, I should say, not having read his book, I may just be about to replicate his point precisely, but I doubt it.

Allow me to set the stage for our little story.

In this world, people who believe in a religion, they all live in a giant car specific to that religion. So the Christians all have their own giant car, and so do the Buddhists, Hindu, Muslim, etc, etc.

The cars spend their time roving around a large, sprawling valley.

Now, the athiests don't bother with the cars, but so as to not get squashed, they tend to keep to the highlands around the edges of the valley.

Occasionally a car will swing by the hillside to drop off a new athiest or pick up a new believer, and that's when the news reaches the hills: We're winning the race.

The new athiest will fill everyone else in on the news: the people in the car are racing against the other cars, but those other cars, they don't stay on the track, don't drive very politely, and they must be awful people for being that way. Oh, and the athiests, they aren't going anywhere at all, especially to whatever wonderful place awaits the winners of the race.

The strange thing is, from up on the hill the athiests can see that the cars are all just roaming around higgledy-piggledy and not doing anything even remotely resembling racing.

Oh, adds the new recruit, they're all following their own interpretation of where the race track is- of course, everyone is sure their track is right.

This scenario, to me, portrays the differing viewpoints of all parties properly.

The reason to point this out is to highlight the activities of those involved.

Those within any given car see everyone outside it as wrong, and needing to get into their car, and drive their race.

Those up on the hill see the folly of the disagreement over a race which does not exist.