If you ask someone what the scariest weapon humanity has invented is, the vast majority will say: nuclear, atomic or hydrogen. But in my view the scariest weapon humanity has invented is religion. If half of wars started over territorial disputes, the other half started over faith. I was a believer for a long time, if only a little — not least because almost all my relatives, including my parents, are believers in one way or another. But over more than 15 years of active interest in space and physics my faith grew weaker every year. And after I started applying critical thinking to religion — which many people completely lack — I became a complete non-believer. That said, I'm perfectly fine with religious people and respect their choice of faith equally, whatever it is.
This book isn't about religion, so we'll only touch on it in passing and look at one aspect: religious holidays. You've probably heard: "Today is such-and-such holiday, you can't work", "Today is such-and-such holiday, you can't work — even a bird doesn't build its nest" (though, to be honest, I've more than once seen birds do exactly that on the day I was told it was that holiday).
This is such a vast topic — never mind religion as a whole — and there are so many arguments for why it's not true, never worked and couldn't work, that it would probably be the longest chapter in the section. So we'll save your time and mine and describe just a couple of oddities and gaps in the logic.
If you ask the average believer why you can't work today — and, oddly enough, only physical work and only at home — nobody gives a clear answer. I've tried. My family and acquaintances didn't have an answer; at best they said: "That's what everyone has always said and done" (i.e. didn't work on that day). Remember, this applies only to physical chores at home — you can do intellectual work, and intellectual work can drain you just as much as physical. The absurdity is compounded by the fact that it doesn't apply to employers or state jobs that involve physical labour. I can just see a street sweeper or a factory worker telling their boss "Today's a big holiday, you can't work" and being fired within five minutes. And of course nothing bad happens to the person who went and did physical work, any more than to someone who decided to mop the floors at home on that holiday — whether they knew the holiday existed or not.
Where did the idea that you can't work on major church holidays even come from? To my mind one of the main reasons is historical. You have to understand that 300–400 years ago people worked very hard physically, and not for themselves but for some landowner or lord. The church, which in all ages up to the present day (in some countries) has had strong influence on society, including the wealthy. And although we've heard all sorts of strange stories about churches and even Roman popes (anyone interested can read, for example, about Pope Borgia and the norms of those times), I'm still inclined to believe that most clergy and people connected with the church sincerely want to help others. Yes, perhaps because of their outdated education, if they had any, and not knowing how the universe works, their advice and skills may seem to an intellectual at best simply silly and harmless, at worst harmful. But I still think they sincerely want to do people good and help in hard times. The situation of a peasant working physically for landowners all his life can hardly be called anything but hard. The church deliberately tried to "wrest" at least some legal rest days for such peasants, and it succeeded. It's like the superstition "Don't spill salt" — which came about historically only because salt used to be very hard to get for peasants and they valued it highly. These days there's no problem with salt, you can always buy it in the shop, and labour law already regulates people's work. And domestic physical work itself has become much easier thanks to vacuum cleaners, washing machines, cookers, chainsaws and lawn mowers.
So why does it still work today? Why does "You can't work today" still affect people? There are at least two answers. First — it's a good chance to procrastinate and put off important things till tomorrow while you lounge on the sofa or watch a series today. Second — fear of being punished "from above" for not following church rules: "Don't work today!" If in the first case the cause is procrastination, human laziness and self-deception, in the second it's fear of superstition and prejudice.
As I described above, this problem arose many centuries ago. Back then there was a real need for it — physical work almost every day was hard. Unfortunately these beliefs have come down to our day. Leave these prejudices behind, do the tasks you've set yourself and keep moving toward your goal.
Religion has much that is good: it brings people together for something good and important and helps them through hard times and to support each other. But there's a flip side where religion gets in people's way. First, it holds out hope of an afterlife in the form of paradise, so in this life you can live as if you're a cat with nine lives. You don't have to bother much about succeeding in this life; you can take it easy. Second, from the first point it follows that you needn't look after your health at all, since "God's will be done" and only He decides a person's health and how long they'll live. So if I die, it's not so bad. People think their fates and lives are predetermined by someone above. The scientist Stephen Hawking wrote very tellingly about this:
I have noticed that even people who claim that everything is predetermined and that we can do nothing to change it look both ways before crossing the road.
