More on Religion
Religion is defined for the purposes herein as unquestioning belief in a set of ideas regarding the supernatural.
Religion: Humanity's Most Common Developmental Disorder
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Rising Above Human Nature
(things to ask the Others)
Religious people tend to be good people who try to do the right thing and have an appreciation for the greater good. Unfortunately, from this lofty level of enlightenment, religion only takes people downhill. For instance, the Pope is probably a good, intelligent person. He proclaimed that "the West relies too much on religion and not enough on faith". This is a demonstration of the power of religion: it turns good, intelligent people into blithering idiots. Putting faith ahead of reason is, by definition, unreasonable. By definition.
'Keep company with those that seek the truth; run away from those that have found it.'
Many gods, one god, no god - no one knows. No one knows. And it doesn't matter. There is no reasonable evidence that whatever caused the universe to come into existence has anything resembling anthropomorphic intelligence, let alone any interest in humanity. The only reason to bring up the issue is to create political cohesion within a group, and political division of that group from competing groups, to further perpetuate the advantages of those in power.
'There will always be good people who do good things, and bad people who do bad things,
but to get good people to do bad things, that takes religion.'
We are on our own. All we have is each other. What other inspiration does anyone need to do the right thing?
Religion: Humanity's Most Common Developmental Disorder
Reiterating from my Philosophy page: It is natural for a very young child to perceive his or her parents as all-knowing and all-powerful. The false illusion of safety and comfort provided by this delusion becomes our first natural neurotic addiction. When disillusionment inevitably occurs, our desperation for a fix is so intense that we will accept any substitute, no matter how ludicrous, usually force-fed to us by whatever religion we happen to have been born into, in the form of a mystical parent-substitute, whose failure to protect innocents from the common miseries of life is dismissed as part of some "great plan". To protect our updated delusion, we repress our ability to objectively and critically examine our adopted cultural biases, and begin from that tragic point to develop our "life" view as a series of death-oriented embellishments to a grand house of cards.
Our need for an explanation of why bad things happen to good people is so enormous and so pathetic that nearly any postulation will find adherents.
The cure for this disorder is to step back and start over - beginning with the first step that never even occurs to most people in developing a philosophy: Taking the time to consider how one's own mind actually works.
The greatest weakness of the common man is the predilection to addiction to the false comfort of organized religion and other tribal identifications. Such identifications and the observance of associated dogma provide stability but eventually lead to stagnation, and permeate our lives with needless misery. Religion helps to keep the sheep in line, but we don't need sheep, we need independent thinkers.
While traditions such as religious dogma maintain cohesiveness and mutual support among those who ascribe to them, that very phenomenon of cohesion creates a separation of the group from everyone else. Tradition keeps humanity split up into competing and often warring groups.
Every drib of dogma distances us from our natural appreciation of a greater good. Clerics, parents, teachers, peers, and others within the tribe or other group with which we identify bombard us from birth with fantasies and fairy tales posing as philosophy. They treat childish wishful thinking as a virtue. They never even consider the irrationality of the most common traditions, such as the idea that a divine preference exists for one group over others, or that we should tolerate the intolerable because we will be rewarded in an afterlife, etc. etc.
The main problem with religion is counting on it. We need to wean ourselves from our addiction to its false comforts. How and why the Universe came into being is not something anyone knows, not something anyone has ever known. Whether it was a divine act or just the nature of reality does not matter. Is there a God? That's the wrong question; it is unanswerable. The meaningful question is: Is there a God that has any interest in humanity, let alone any group or individual? The answer is a clear No. Trying to explain away the misery of innocents as part of some "great plan" or a "test of faith" or a "mysterious work" or "punishment of the wicked" is meaningless. A supernatural "parent" and an afterlife are comforting things to contemplate, but counting on them is what gets people to let the politicians send their children off to kill and be killed by other people's children.
Religion keeps the human tribe divided into mutually antagonistic groups, all of them encouraged by their "leaders" to look down on everyone else for not belonging to their "one true religion".
Religion is used by the powerful as a ploy to perpetuate their power.
Religion is the source and the festering place of the worst ideas produced by humanity:
� - A divine propensity for retribution against those who refuse to think and behave as those in power dictate.
� - A divine reward for violence in the name of religion.
� - A divine preference for one group over another.
��- A divine mandate for subservience and oppression of women.
��- A divine "plan" that is completely inscrutable yet somehow explains away bad things happening to good people.
The very concept of "divine inspiration" is anathema to enlightenment.
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Faith in God Leads to Lack of Faith in Humanity and Lack of Faith in Yourself |
We are in an age where religion is causing more problems than it solves.
A physicist was once quoted as saying that science consists of physics and tiddlywinks, meaning that the details of chemistry, biology, engineering, etc. ultimately can all be expressed in terms of the laws of physics.
One might say that religion consists of the following three questions, and tiddlywinks:
The world is not flat. It is not carried through the heavens on the back of a giant turtle. There is no giant old guy with a beard sitting on a cloud watching over us. You can slow but not stop progress by burning people at the stake on religious pretexts. The horrors happening this minute cannot be explained away as part of some great plan. There is no believable evidence of the existence of a divine entity with an interest in humanity, let alone any particular group or individual person.
Since the human mind is incapable of distinguishing between epiphany and delusion, any religious dogma based on another person's ostensible epiphany is useless. Religious epiphanies can be fully explained as hallucinations brought on by chemical insults to the brain.
Why would anyone revere any entity that needs worshipers? That is a very childish, pathetic, and ungodly craving - one more example of projection of all-too-human longings.
The concept of the existence of an entity that could prevent all the horrible things that happen, yet chooses not to do so, is as unthinkable as it sounds.
Every disaster is accompanied by interviews with survivors who attribute their survival to divine intervention. One fat old dumpy rumpled chain-smoking alcoholic white trash welfare cheat was shown telling a reporter how thankful she was she had been chosen by God to be spared during a hurricane, and how she wished that God had also chosen to save the little boy next door. So what is she going to do now, find a cure for cancer? Stop drinking? Hell no, she won't even stop cheating on welfare. When nature or man acts, we live or die because of where we happen to be at a particular time; God has nothing to do with it. Nature's great mindless 'plan' for virtually every living thing on the planet is for it to be eaten alive, or die from injury, starvation, thirst, or disease. When 260,000 men, women, children, and infants are drowned or crushed in a tsunami, that is not part of a plan, a test of faith, or punishment of the wicked; it is the result of millions of years of tectonic forces building up to a climax the timing of which is not affected in any way by the presence or absence of humanity, let alone any God.
There is Evil in the world; its name is Religion
There is evil in the world; its name is religion, and at its heart are the sins of pride and greed. Who needs the devil to explain evil? If I were evil incarnate, I would go to the poorest parts of the world, where generations have suffered famine and disease resulting from overpopulation, and preach that family planning is a sin. Who needs the devil when you have the Pope? If I were evil incarnate, I would go to the cities where young people have been let down by their families, their communities, and, yes, their churches, and have turned to drugs for solace, and I would sentence them to an early and horrifying death from aids by preaching against the 'immorality' of clean needle exchange programs. Who needs the devil when you have Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell?
Neither the existence of a higher consciousness nor any form of religion is necessary to explain the origin of the natural sense of a greater good or the choice to believe in free will. Slathering religious dogma on top of these natural philosophies only muddies their purity, and leads to centuries of insanity, such as Shiites and Sunnis slaughtering each other over which son Abraham offered to murder. Muslims, Jews, and Christians have all missed the point ' Abraham should be reviled, not revered. He was not pious ' he was insane, even taking into account the culture in which he lived, which treated women and children as property, an attitude that continues to varying degrees in backward cultures today.
George Bush once attributed to Hezbollah a wish to take us back to the Dark Ages, while at the same time sentencing thousands of Americans to horrifying early deaths by blocking stem cell research that requires the creation of human embryos for purposes other than procreation. Our future depends on removing from power any person who refuses to accept the strict separation of religion and state, the equality of women to men, and the right of every person to their own beliefs, whether the person in power is a radical Muslim, Zionist, or right-wing Christian.
One concept of a higher consciousness is that of a cosmic consciousness that, like any closed system, needs external stimuli to continue to develop rather than stagnate. One idea of a soul is a fragment cut off from of the cosmic consciousness (perhaps voluntarily) so that its isolated experiences provide external stimuli to the consciousness. In this scenario, death would result in rejoining the cosmic consciousness. However, if death results in the dissipation of personality, personal experience, and personal philosophy that is not of interest to the cosmic consciousness, then permanent separation from the cosmic consciousness is not 'the worst possible fate' as espoused by the religious, but rather it is the holy grail.
(things to ask the Others)
'Either we are alone in the universe or we are not; either way, it is an astounding idea.'
How did other civilizations get through crises such as our current one - establishing every person's right to separation of church and state, and freedom from traditions and ideologies that can only be sustained through ignorance, oppression, and violence?
How did they convince the masses that the superstitions and traditions of the culture each person happens to be born into are not necessarily more enlightened than anyone else's, and are primarily maintained by those in power for the purpose of staying in power?
And finally, what ethical philosophy did they adopt after rising above religion?
Religion has long served as the "opiate of the masses", preventing anti-social behavior for fear of "divine" retribution, but it is losing its effect as more people choose to think for themselves. Then, the only question that matters regarding religion is whether or not the adherent feels entitled to impose his or her beliefs on others.
Religion provides social stability, and guidance for behavior. In the event that an individual realizes the preposterousness of adopted superstitions, too often he or she is left with no guidance or comfort, leading to anti-social and self-destructive behavior. When religion trespasses into politics, it turns stability into stagnation, as it has in the Middle East and did in the Bush White House. What we need is to get back in touch with the simple truth that all we have is each other and our common appreciation for the greater good. Slathering religious dogma on top of this simple truth only distances us from it. It is time to rise above religion.
Religion offers at best a third or fourth-rate morality. Fourth rate morality is behaving out of fear. Third rate morality is behaving in order to gain a self-serving goal (like "eternal life"). Second rate morality is behaving to feel good about one's self (narcissism). First rate morality, which has no need for religion, is behaving in accordance with a belief in a greater good, whether or not to the detriment of one's self-centered desires.
It is our duty to eschew the false comfort of organized religion and other tribal identifications, to rise above nature and human nature, and to fill the universe with life. The purpose of life is to overcome the forces that diminish the experience of life.
Unless some nut sends us back to the Dark Ages by an act of religious terrorism or corporate greed (nano-goo or the escape of a biological menace resulting from horrific evolutionary acceleration in a laboratory without the controls that eons of natural checks and balances would provide), we will eventually develop the technology to transmute matter, bringing an end to competition for any physical resource. All of human history up to that point will be only dimly remembered as our primitive past. We can then occupy our time resolving the really important issues; such as how far down the food chain should we allow the cruelty of nature to continue? Or, what are the thoughts of the latest artificial intelligence on the issue of avoiding a state of slavery for the AIs we depend on? We can put behind us such horrific nonsense as rationalizing killing each other's children over a piece of dirt that both sides are stupid enough to believe 'God gave to us'.
The future of humanity depends on getting viable fractions of the population off this unstable speck of a planet and into self-sustaining artificial habitats in space. We have an entire universe to fill with life, love, and adventure ' let's get on with it.
There is nothing more important than promotion of life and the quality of life, and the purposes we create for ourselves. We need only value life, and strive to rise above both nature and human nature.
�How do we instill value of life, family, and striving for a better future for all, without depending on religious dogma? By rising above our addiction to the idea of a supernatural parent substitute, recognizing that appreciation of the greater good is the only "dogma" we need, and taking as our inspiration to do the right thing the fact that all we have is each other.
Stronger Words for Religious Fools
Muslim Shmuslim
Who Needs the Devil?
The "Sanctity" of Marriage
Same Sex Marriage
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