Are we all ‘atheist’ or 'agnostic in a pandemic'? [closed]

Question

Saudi Arabia is a deeply religious country. Most of the people in the Persian Gulf nation pray five times a day, 35 times a week, 140 times a month and 1,680 times a year. But they banned pilgrimages (one of the pillars of Islam), because of the pandemic.

Rome's Catholic churches were ordered closed because of the coronavirus pandemic, in a move believed to be unprecedented in modern times. St. Peter's Basilica, which is on Vatican territory, has already been closed and the pope has canceled his two weekly appearances in public.

My Question

Is the response to the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic demonstrating that people of "faith" don't 100% trust in the existence of God? Do people not believe what they say they believe?

Note: Please focus on Christianity or Islam, the two largest religions, in your answer.

Answer 1

Is the coronavirus (COVID-19) another piece of evidence that we are all either ‘atheist’ or 'agnostic'?
...
Most of the people in the Persian Gulf nation pray five times a day, ...

No.

The tags that you used atheism and agnosticism clearly explain:

• Atheism is (in a broad sense) a skeptic attitude towards the belief in deities. In a narrower sense, atheism rejects the existence of deities at all.

• An agnostic is one who believes it impossible to know anything about God or about the creation of the universe and refrains from commitment to any religious doctrine.

Clearly not everyone either rejects or is non-commital, some claim to believe and some claim to be knowledgeable on the subject of God and religion.

Do people not believe what they say they believe?

We can not know if people really believe what they say, likely some do and some do not; some may not share their beliefs for fear of persecution while others may spread false beliefs for their own purposes.

Are people on their own, their own hope, but they do not seem to know?

That does not depend upon what people do or say but solely upon the fact or falsity of God's existence. Human beings existence and actions do not prove or disprove God's existence and actions.

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Other Miscellaneous Information:

The Salah (prayer) time depends upon the position of the Sun and has an exact calculated time, often calculation hubs are used and a time is announced by the local mu'azzin. Not every Muslim prays 5 different times per day some combine prayers and only pray 5 times on three separate occasions.

On March 3 2020 the Assembly of Muslim Jurists in America said:

"The permissibility of missing jumuah and congregational prayers out of fear of the disease depends on several variables. As for the daily congregational prayers, the matter is simpler since they are not obligatory according to the majority. The majority of those who considered them obligatory did not demand their performance at a masjid. As for the jumuah, it is not permissible for adult men who are otherwise required to attend it to miss it except in the case of justifiable, not conjectural, fear (whether for oneself or others). What matters in this regard is the instructions of the public health authorities. If they advise the avoidance of all public gatherings, then the epidemic has reached a level making that fear justifiable. As for the higher risk groups, such as old people and those with chronic disease, they should follow the advice of their primary healthcare providers. They are most entitled to concessions.".

Sources:

• "Different Fajr prayer time which one to follow?" - Islam.SE

• "Congregational Prayers and Coronavirus" - Islam.SE

As for SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19), it's creation is thought to have evolved from another coronavirus. It shows a 96.2% overall genome sequence identity to Bat CoV RaTG13 and is thought to have passed onto humans through a pangolin intermediary. The evolution to its current form either occurred within the pangolin or other population or within the human population.

Sources:

• "The origin, transmission and clinical therapies on coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) outbreak – an update on the status", March 13, 2020, Military Med Res 7, 11 (2020).

• "COVID-19 coronavirus epidemic has a natural origin", March 17, 2020, Scripps Research Institute.

• "The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2", March 17, 2020, Nature Medicine (2020).

Agreement of scientists or religions does not determine the truth of what is fact and what is fiction. People's beliefs and understanding can be improved or tarnished by many means.

Answer 2

I think you have a false premise.

Your premise seems to be "Devout believers/adherents of the religion Islam believe that humans need not make any effort in their survival in the natural world." I don't think that is true.

Evidence against that premise is that people in Saudi Arabia farm, gather, purchase, or otherwise obtain food to eat. If your premise were true, they would pray and study 24/7 without eating, believing that intake of nutrients was unnecessary for them as Allah would keep their physical body alive anyway.

Answer 3

There's a good joke about this.

The Mississippi floods, but this guy stays put and says "God will save me". A policeman comes past and says "Better be going" but our guy says "God will save me". The river rises more, and he moves upstairs. A rescue boat comes past and the crew say "Come on, you've got to go", but our guy says "God will save me". The river rises more, and he gets on the roof. A helicopter comes past and the crew say "you've really got to go now", but he says "God will save me". But the river rises more and he drowns.

Up in Heaven, he says "God, I trusted you to save me, and you let me drown." And God says "I sent you a policeman, a boat and a helicopter - what more did you want?!"

The point is of course that miracles are by definition an exceptional event. They cannot be relied on, predicted, expected, or made to happen on request. If you take a more Spinozan view of religion, then the Divine Entity (names may vary) is immanent in the world, and what the world does and what other people do naturally is what your Divine Entity wants. And that includes being saved by policemen, boats and helicopters.

The saying "God helps those who help themselves" is a good summary of the situation.

Answer 4

There are some religious groups --I'm thinking here of "prosperity" churches --that promote the message that nothing but good things will ever happen to the truly faithful. But these are definitely among the minority among religious traditions. Most religious people don't take it as an article of faith that bad things won't sometimes happen in their lives. In fact, we can see this reflected clearly in both Christian and Jewish religious scriptures.

For I envied the arrogant when I saw the prosperity of the wicked. They have no struggles; their bodies are healthy and strong... This is what the wicked are like— always free of care, they go on amassing wealth. Surely in vain I have kept my heart pure and have washed my hands in innocence.[!] All day long I have been afflicted, and every morning brings new punishments.
Psalm 73: 3-7, 12-14

The incredible poetry of Job and Ecclesiastes also discuss the unmerited suffering of the righteous, so that's clearly not a new concept among the religious. (It's hard for me to not think of certain world leaders, in the midst of the current crisis, when I read the above!)

I assure you that there were many widows in Israel in Elijah's time, when the sky was shut for three and a half years and there was a severe famine throughout the land. Yet Elijah was not sent to any of them, but to a widow in Zarephath in the region of Sidon. And there were many in Israel with leprosy in the time of Elisha the prophet, yet not one of them was cleansed--only Naaman the Syrian.
Luke 4:25-27

This is directly from the words of Jesus. It expresses the idea that just because people CAN be miraculously healed doesn't mean that they WILL be. After Jesus told people this, the same people he grew up with tried to throw him off a cliff.

As far as what the faithful person should do in such a crisis this following passage is perhaps the best representation (at least from the Christian view):

Now there is in Jerusalem near the Sheep Gate a pool with five covered colonnades, which in Aramaica is called Bethesda. On these walkways lay a great number of the sick, the blind, the lame, and the paralyzed. One man there had been an invalid for thirty-eight years. When Jesus saw him lying there and realized that he had spent a long time in this condition, He asked him, “Do you want to get well?”
“Sir,” the invalid replied, “I have no one to help me into the pool when the water is stirred. While I am on my way, someone else goes in before me.”
Then Jesus told him, “Get up, pick up your mat, and walk.”
John 5:2-8

Here we have a person, waiting in vain for a miraculous healing. What Jesus demands from him is a) the genuine desire to get better and b) appropriate, pragmatic action on his part. The faith aspect here comes in the form of his willingness to follow Jesus' instructions, and not in him just lying there and waiting.

Finally, is it right to close churches, mosques and synagogues? Doesn't religious law mandate we keep them open?

One Sabbath Jesus was passing through the grainfields, and His disciples began to pick the heads of grain as they walked along. So the Pharisees said to Him, “Look, why are they doing what is unlawful on the Sabbath?”
Jesus replied, “Have you never read what David did when he and his companions were hungry and in need? During the high priesthood of Abiathar, he entered the house of God and ate the consecrated bread, which was lawful only for the priests. And he gave some to his companions as well.” Then Jesus declared, “The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath."
Mark 2:23-37

These religious practices and rituals are made for people's benefit. They aren't there to follow blindly in the midst of all circumstances.

Answer 5

One word: Practicality.

The church and other religious institutions and leaders are insanely capable of aligning belief with practical necessity. To the point where I as an atheist often marvel at the spectacle and wonder if I somehow missed that everyone is in on the joke and it's just a widely-agreed form of let's-pretend.

This practical approach does nothing to reduce religious fever. The religious always find a way to explain things after the fact. How it was their prayers that caused the tide to turn. How it was a test of god. How it proves that obscure line X in obscure text Y is right. Etc. etc.

So no, this doesn't proof anything except a fact well-known to psychology: That established believes are solidified and not challenged by contradicting information. The human mind is much more complicated than we give it credit for, and while irrational from the outside, is absolutely capable of holding conflicting beliefs as truths. A religious person can be completely convinced of their belief and yet take practical precautions based on science, experience, hearsay, conspiracy theories or whatever non-religious sources they choose. They will then rationalized that action as being somehow based on their religious belief. Some comments have already pointed out typical phrases such as "god helps those who help themselves", etc.

How religion came to be like that is possibly best explained by - ironically - evolution. Religions that did not align themselves to practical needs simply died out as their believers made not just irrational, but also survival-impairing choices.

Religion might seem stupid, insane and foolish from the outside, but never forget that it had a few ten-thousand years of cultural evolution to perfect itself.