Words such as Infidel, heathen and heretic are continually invoked to convince the flock that non-believers are to be shunned (and worse, feared and persecuted). Religion divides “insiders” from “outsiders”.
Words such as Infidel, heathen and heretic are continually invoked to convince the flock that non-believers are to be shunned (and worse, feared and persecuted). Religion divides “insiders” from “outsiders”. Rather than assuming good intentions, adherents often are taught to treat outsiders with suspicion. “Be ye not unequally yoked with unbelievers,” says the buy-bull.
At best, teachings like these discourage or even forbid the kinds of friendship and intermarriage that help clans and tribes become part of a larger whole. At worst, outsiders are seen as enemies of that particular gawd. Do the words, “Divide and Conquer” resonate?
2. Religion anchors believers to the Iron Age
The Iron Age was a time of rampant superstition, ignorance, inequality, racism, bigotry, misogyny, and violence. Slavery had gawd’s sanction. Women and children were literally possessions of men. Warlords practiced scorched earth warfare.
The Iron Age was a time of rampant superstition, ignorance, inequality, racism, bigotry, misogyny, and violence. Slavery had gawd’s sanction. Women and children were literally possessions of men. Warlords practiced scorched earth warfare. Desperate people sacrificed animals, agricultural products, and enemy soldiers as burnt offerings intended to appease angry, vengeful gods.
Religious texts including the Bible, Torah and Koran all preserve and protect fragments of Iron Age culture, putting a gawd’s name and endorsement on some of the very worst human impulses. Any believer looking to excuse his own temper, sense of superiority, warmongering, bigotry, or planetary destruction can find validation in writings that claim to be authored by gawd. Consider the current attacks on transexuals, a group that poses no threat whatsoever to society while priests have molested hundreds of thousands of children over centuries (and don’t they look sexy in the dresses they wear)?
3. Religion makes a virtue out of faith
As science eats away at territory once held by religion, traditional religious beliefs require greater and greater mental defenses against threatening information. To stay strong, religion trains believers to practice self-deception
As science eats away at territory once held by religion, traditional religious beliefs require greater and greater mental defenses against threatening information. To stay strong, religion trains believers to practice self-deception, shut out contradictory evidence, and trust to authorities rather than their own capacity to think. This approach seeps into other parts of life. Government, in particular, becomes a fight between competing ideologies rather than a quest to figure out practical, evidence-based solutions that promote wellbeing.
4. Religions have an insatiable need to gain, and to maintain control
Religions are man-made institutions, just like for-profit corporations. And like any corporation, to survive and grow a religion must find a way to build power and wealth and compete for market share. Hinduism, Buddhism
Religions are man-made institutions, just like for-profit corporations. And like any corporation, to survive and grow a religion must find a way to build power and wealth and compete for market share. Hinduism, Buddhism, Christianity—any large enduring religious institution is as expert at this as are public companies like Chevron, Walmart, Chase Bank. And just like for-profit behemoths, they are willing to wield their power and wealth to maintain prominence.
Child sexual abuse is as heinous a crime as one can commit. Unfortunately, it is a ubiquitous crime that is committed by parents, relatives and strangers. Child molestation has permeated every type of organization on earth. Regardless, an organization that pretends to exist to provide moral and spiritual guidance should be the last to allow (and actively cover up) centuries of pederasty by its representatives. Let’s consider just a few examples:
French clergy found to have sexually abused over 200,000 children since 1950
In Australia, 7 percent of the cath-lick priests were found to have committed child molestation between 1950 and 2010
In Canada, cath-lick bishops “apologized unequivocally” for physical, psychological, emotional, spiritual, cultural and sexual abuses committed at schools for indigenous children.
The US leads the way! Cases of abuse, with legal settlements exceeding over $1 billion, have occurred in Boston, Chicago, Honolulu, Orange County, Philadelphia, Portland and Toledo to name a few.
The archdiocese of Los Angeles recently reached a settlement for $880 million for homosexual pederasty.
Our belief is not a belief
Our belief is not a belief. Our principles are not a faith. We do not rely solely upon science and reason, because these are necessary rather than sufficient factors, but we distrust anything that contradicts science or outrages reason. We may differ on many things but what we respect is free inquiry, open-mindedness and the pursuit of ideas for their own sake. We do not hold our convictions dogmatically. We are not immune to the lure of wonder and mystery and awe. We have music and art and literature. Literature, not scripture, sustains the mind and (for lack of another metaphor) soul.
Our principles are not a faith. We do not rely solely upon science and reason, because these are necessary rather than sufficient factors, but we distrust anything that contradicts science or outrages reason. We may differ on many things but what we respect is free inquiry, open-mindedness and the pursuit of ideas for their own sake. We do not hold our convictions dogmatically. We are not immune to the lure of wonder and mystery and awe. We have music and art and literature. Literature, not scripture, sustains the mind and (for lack of another metaphor) soul.
We are reconciled to living only once, except through our children, for whom we are perfectly happy to notice that we must make way, and room.
We accept that it is at least possible that, once people accepted the fact of their short and struggling lives, they might behave better toward each other and not worse.
We believe that an ethical life can be lived without religion. And we know for a fact that the corollary holds true – that religion has caused innumerable people not just to conduct themselves no better than others, but to award themselves permission to behave in ways that would make a brothel-keeper or an ethnic cleanser raise an eyebrow.
There is no need for atheists to gather every day, or every seven days, or on any high and auspicious day, to proclaim our rectitude or to grovel and wallow in our unworthiness. We atheists do not require any priests, or any hierarchy above them, to police our doctrine. Sacrifices and ceremonies are abhorrent to us, as are relics and the worship of any images or objects. To us no spot on earth is or could be “holier” than another. To the ostentatious absurdity of the pilgrimage, or the plain horror of killing civilians in the name of some sacred wall or cave or shrine or rock, we can counterpose a leisurely or urgent walk from one side of the library to another.
Religion spoke its last intelligible or noble or inspiring words a long time ago. Either that or it mutated into an admirable but nebulous humanism. We shall have no more prophets or sages from the ancient quarter, which is why the devotions of today are only the echoing repetitions of yesterday, sometimes ratcheted up to screaming point so as to ward off the terrible emptiness.
How much vanity must be concealed – not too effectively at that – in order to pretend that one is the personal object of a divine plan?
How much self-respect must be sacrificed in order that one may squirm continually in an awareness of one’s own “sin”?
How many needless assumptions must be made, and how much contortion is required, to receive every new insight of science and manipulate it so as to “fit” with the revealed words of ancient man-made deities?
How many saints and miracles and councils and conclaves are required in order first to be able to establish a dogma and then – after infinite pain and loss and absurdity and cruelty – to be forced to rescind one of those dogmas?
God did not create man in his own image! Evidently it was the other way around, which is the painless explanation for the profusion of gods and religions, and the fratricide both between and among faiths, that we see all about us and that has so retarded the development of civilization.
If you read Hawking on the “event horizon”, that theoretical lip of the black hole over which one could in theory plunge and see the past and the future, I shall be surprised if you can still go on gaping at Moses and his unimpressive “burning bush”.
As I write these words people of faith are in their different ways planning your and my destruction, and the destruction of all the hard-won human attainments that have been achieved. Religion poisons everything.
Why does the prospect of eternal life and happiness not make adherents happy? Superficially it does sometimes seem to be the case. Services in both black and white communities appear as if the entire event was only long whoop of exaltation at being saved, loved and so forth. Many services in all denominations and among almost all pagans, are exactly designed to evoke celebration and communal fiesta, which is precisely why they are suspect.
The level of intensity fluctuates according to time and place but it can be stated as a truth that religion does not, and in the long run cannot, be content with its own marvelous claims and sublime assurances. It must seek to interfere with the lives of nonbelievers, or heretics. It may speak about the bliss of the next world but it wants power and control in this world. It is after all man-made and lacks confidence in its own preachings even to allow coexistence between different faiths.
The attitude of religion to medicine, like the attitude of religion to science, is always necessarily problematic and very often necessarily hostile. The awkward fact will always be that both things have a tendency to break religion’s monopoly and have often been fiercely resisted for that reason. What happens to the faith healer and the shaman when any poor citizen can see the full effect of drugs and surgeries, administered without ceremonies or mystifications?
Plaques of antiquity were held to be punishment from the gods, which did much to strengthen the hold of the priesthood and much to encourage the burning of infidels and heretics who were thought to be spreading disease by witchcraft or else poisoning the wells.
We may make allowances for the orgies of stupidity and cruelty that were indulged in before humanity had a clear concept of the germ theory of disease. Most of the “miracles” of the New Testament have to do with healing, which was of great importance in a time when even minor illness was often the end.
