I’m not alone in admitting my religious uncertainty and doubt. In the Renaissance of European thought during the sixteenth century, plenty of philosophers, thinkers and scientists had to hide their skepticism regarding the non-rational teachings of the Catholic church.
At that time the church ruled with the fear of god and relied on the ignorance of the masses. You could be killed just for disagreeing with the chruch doctrine. It was a time of ignorance. Empirical science was finding holes in the church doctrine, yet people had to keep their findings secret for fear of being burned at the stake or hanged, or other such absurd madness.
In other words, religion was nothing more than a political tool of control for the papacy in Rome. They practiced the most barbaric, inhumane and wrong philosophy just to keep the people in the dark, and under their control. The Catholic church obliged the people to give masses of land and money to them and they were the biggest land owners of the day.
It was cruel and it was wrong, despite proclaiming to represent a merciful god and to follow the teachings of a man called Jesus who taught mercy, compassion and love. They certainly did not practice what they preached. Christianity was a farce and a con. And it still is. So it Islam and Judaism and Hinduism.
Religion is a con where the priests proclaim power by threatening one with eternal hell if you don’t believe their myths that have no scientific logic and are lies. In the Renaissance times of Europe, the greatest scientists of their time were being imprisoned and killed. People like Galileo and Bruno, who brought us factual scientific observations on astronomy and thought, were killed for their intelligence. Much like Socrates perhaps. He too was killed by the ancient Greek powerful people of the day because he questioned their obviously illogical thoughts and beliefs.
Today we live in the most scientific and logical time in recorded history. We have human flight, space travel and all the rest. This is pure science and engineering at its best. No room for speculation. Not one inch. Yet we still have these most primitive and medieval or archaic philosophies and doctrines forced into our brains from infancy, like Islam and Christianity and Judaism and Hinduism, with their wrathful gods and despotic prophets. Do these priests and imams think we are stupid? Do these brahmana pundits think we are retarded? Who in their right mind believes that the piece of marble or wood carved with a nice human face is god? Who can make sense of the Hindu doctrine of idol worship? I can’t. All the mantras and incense in the world is not going to bring that piece of marble to life, even less become god. This is magical thinking at its worst. Yet a billion Hindus believe this illogical unscientific stupidity. I can’t swallow it any more.
Islam is just as bad. They demand that you pray to a rock. Wake me up when the stupidiy is over. This can’t be real, that humans are so gullible in the age of science and information, when we can fly to the moon (allegedly) or into outer space and return for tea. I can understand that the people of the middle ages were illiterate and had no other frame of reference, so when their imams and pundits and bishops told them something, they accepted it.
But that was centuries ago. We have moved on since the times of myth and magic and invisible gods in the sky and marble rock that watches us through the eyes carved by the sculptor. How can billions of people be so easily bewildered, like children? Perhaps that’s the problem. We are told these myths by our mothers during infancy and so they stick in our minds like the words of a hypnotist, even overriding our logic. We live with two paradoxically opposing frames of reference and reality in our one brain. It must be very uncomfortable.
Yet, what do I know? I have no idea how much of science works. It looks miraculous to me. Yet I know it is pure math and logic. I know that there is a law of nature operating that will always operate in that way due to logical action and reaction. There is gravity and the laws of thermodynmics and all that. I don’t know how the aircraft operates but I still get in and fly around the world. That is properly placed faith.
Believing in the religions of the world is faith in illusion and myth. It is faith at its worst. Blind faith, where the groomers lead the gullible, the blind lead the blind, into a ditch. No wonder China is eradicating relgion, the opium of the people. The leaders and politicians only proclaim relgion to maintain popular control. Back centuries ago, scientists like DaVinci and Galileo, were also obliged to walk in line with the church, if they wanted to keep their head.
How can we be so naive? Admittedly it took me almost 60 years to come to this conclusion, so I can’t blame anyone younger than me for their ignorance. I am just the same as any of them. Like the Renaissance thinkers, I have to hold my tongue in case a radical believer of any of these myths tries to burn me. I have to pretend externally that I still accept their myth, lest they stone me like an apostate heretic iconoclast that I am. A nation held under the control of priests, like those in sharia countries, are like medieval prisoners forced to adopt lies and myths that are contrary to science, just to keep their heads. Those sharia countries are prisons. The prison of the mind is hard to escape, much like the atheists in China who, in previous decades, had to pray to their god Mao and their religion of the state. It’s the same thing, just deifying a different prophet.
Yet we have scientists today who are still able to contain in their brains two opposing theories simultaneously, who are scientists as well as Christians. How do they live with this cognitive dissonance? They have to lie to themselves daily just to keep their mothers happy, that internal mother who told them the lie in the beginning, that they are too scared to abandon, lest their mother or the imaginary deity she fed them retracts their love and kindness. What children we are.
On the other hand, Buddhists are openly atheistic. They have a doctrine, or religion if you like, that does not require a god. Some Hindus are also atheist, like the Adwaita school of thought where the deities are seen as constructs of the mind, not literal gods to worship. So there is room for religion or practice in transcendence or growth of consciousness without myth and fable, just psycholgy and philosophy with technical meditation practice, and in pursuit of practical personal experience of consciousness.
Yet even Buddhists can be sentimentally devoted to some deity or another, or to their godman – Gautama Buddha – a human who became a god in his lifetime, if you can follow that type of logic. And new versions of religious gospel pop up all the time, based on the fertile imaginations of their prophets, usually with Christian roots. If you can believe the myth of Christianity, then it’s not a big stretch to shift that belief to some other myth, like Mormon or some other version of the earlier myth.
Most of the time these new fabrications emerge from some deranged man with messianic desires, like Mohammed for example, or John Smith, or Ron Hubbard the Scientologist. Make up a new religion, make up a new word to label it, and there you are. Convince the illiterate via your fanatical zeal and they will follow you like sheep. Threaten them with damnation or beheading, and you have a captive audience, literally. Make it state law and you can capture an entire nation, like the early Christian and Muslim priests did.
In other words these religions, even Buddhism, were fabricated and later adopted by state leaders and imposed upon their people since the beginning of recorded history. And we grew up in these indoctrinated political states and were spoon fed the myth from birth, so it sounds like truth to us. And even if it doesn’t, we are under emotional bondage to it, or fearful of the repercussions of denying it, so we cling to it like a cargo cult clinging to the hope that more food packages might fall from the sky gods like it did once before.
There is no proof at all that any of these relgious myths in the world are true. Show me any proof that your god exists. I’ll wait, take your time. I’ve waited almost 60 years already. Show me what I’m missing. I have never seen a god or an angel or anything like it. It’s all theory. Show me how there can be a loving merciful lord over us, who simultaneously allows such a torturous existence called life on earth, yet also loves us and is kind. It does not make any logical sense to my dying brain.
To me there is only consciousness, some great and some small, some perhaps bigger than any on our world, and so-called god-like compared to us, yet still part of the same universe that we inhabit. I can hold the belief in extra-terrestrial life that is superior to ours in certain ways, though I have no proof, because it is scientifically possible. It does not require me to defy logic. As for a merciful or wrathful god who watches us to reward or punish us – nonsense. We do it to ourselves. There is only us and our minds. There is only life in different expressions. There is only consciousness, embodied or disembodied. Prove me wrong.
The religions of the world are myths and legends and fabrications. Some allude to greater truths than my mind can comprehend perhaps, and so use parable and innuendo to describe them. Yet they are all from the minds of humans. All the writers of the gospels of earth were humans who had a bright idea, a revelation or a dream. That’s it, that’s all she wrote. It’s just you and me and our imagination and our empirical science. No god required. No need for lies. No need to stretch logic, pray to a piece of marble or wood for love and protection. That’s called a projection, anthropomorphism.
I may be wrong. What do I know? I’m just stating what I see and how it looks to me after a lifetime of trying to do the right thing, of trying to believe in something, anything, yet all of it failing me, all except science and what I have personally experienced. My brain can no longer live on faith and ideas that defy what my senses tell me, even though the mind and senses themselves are also faulty. I see a world that has no loving god looking after it, only a place of suffering and death, where every one of us, as much as we like to live and love, will be forced to suffer and die, one by one, each in our own turn. There is more pain than pleasure here, and there is no sign of a loving god anywhere. What kind of god would let their creation suffer like this? No god would would do that. Unless they are a sadist. And that contradicts the concept of a loving father or mother god.
It’s all just you and me. No god required. So please, stop the lies and the fabrications. Why do we even tell our children such lies. Like the fairytale of Santa Claus or Easter rabbit. Pure myth alluding to something we ourselves don’t even rememebr or know what we are saying, coming from earlier religions we don’t even know about. What kind of stupid Christian would tell their children these pagan legends disguised as Christianity? I’m tallking about Easter bunnies and gift-bearing Santa. Both are pagan or pre-Christian myths and legends that any true Christian should be horrified to tell their Christ-following children. Do you even know that these are anti-Christian myths that you are telling your children when you talk about the pagan rabbit and egg symbols of fertility?
Fortunately we have a whole world mapped now, we have all the doctrines of recorded history to study. We also live in a time of free speech, for now, for some. So we can make up our minds and not be afraid to think and speak as our conscience dictates and logic shows. We no longer need to fear the imaginary gods and their wrath, the fairy tales our mothers tell us so that we behave as they wish. It’s not cynicism if it is a philosophical conclusion based on observation. It’s a matter of fact. So get real or go home.
image: source