"Check Your Religion's Incentive Program"

I was reading Sam Harris’ book “A Letter to a Christian Nation” a few months back and came across the topic of embryonic stem cell research in the field of medical science. It's a great topic and I encourage you to read up on it if you haven't, but in a nutshell it’s the unexplored potential of saving human lives by literally employing the process of destroying 3 day old human embryos.

So as an atheist who no longer believes in the existence of a soul or the supposed immorality of any form of birth control, I was curious as to how people would react to the promise of stem cell research if it were hypothetically applied to a loved one.

It’s easy for Christians to admire biblical figures like Abraham who was koo koo enough to willingly sacrifice his own son just because God told him so (ok, ok... the sacrifice didn't push through, God was only kidding) . But then again what if that was your child, would you sacrifice without question?

I asked theist friends what if their loved one was suffering a crippling disease and the only way to save that person meant the destruction of a human blastocyst, would you go against your God’s instruction?

One of the responses that really stood out was that a friend was willing to forego a cure, not only because it goes against scriptures, but also because of the promise of eternal life (It's the notion that all suffering on earth is only temporary and that we are all supposedly working towards eventually being in heaven depending on our scriptural compliance rating).

The thought of pleasing God and the promise of eventually being reunited in the "afterlife" with the loved one was apparently good enough a reason to dismiss the potential improvement of the "present life".

While I can respect that opinion, it does personally scare me.

Faith is indeed a strange thing in that it does not require evidence. The idea that some people are able to wager a loved one’s life on the unverified promise of paradise is just too outrageous for my atheist brain to wrap around.

The ironic thing here is that, nobody in their right mind would apply the same flimsy logic in any other non-religious aspect of their lives.

Because if it were that easy, I can tell my employees to work their asses off to hit their scorecard numbers by the end of the quarter because if they do there will be a lavish performance awarding ceremony waiting for them in the afterlife. All the pizza you can eat, free flowing wine will be served (not sure if God allows beer in heaven, he did turn water into wine though) and there will be a live performance by Jimi Hendrix back to back with Michael Jackson following immediately after I call out the top performers in my team.

I don’t know, but I really think theists should check their God’s Incentive Program. I would personally require more than just a promise, but that's just me I guess.