Zen of Zero...

Closing Comments – 4 – Rejection of the God Lie

2011-01-13T07:41:00.000-08:00

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This is the 39th and final post in a series dealing with what I call “the God Lie”. For this final post, my goal is to add some closing comments on the rejection of the God Lie. When convenient, I’ll illustrate my comments with insights entertainingly created between 1985 and 1995 by Bill Watterson in his Calvin and Hobbes comic strips (which, I remind readers, are still copyrighted and can’t be used for commercial purposes without the approval of Universal Press Syndicate).

Many times in earlier posts of this series, I provided examples of people rejecting both the God Lie and the clerics who promoted it. The first documented example of rejecting the God Lie seems to be the Sumerian statement from approximately 4500 years ago:

A man without a god – for a strong man it is no loss.

As for rejecting associated clerical con games, it seems that the first documented example resulted in “the world’s first political revolution” led by Urukagina in the Sumerian city of Lagash (modern-day Tell al-Hiba in Iraq) in about 2350 BCE. Prior to the revolution, Urukagina described clerical excesses as follows:

In the garden of a humble person a priest could cut a tree or carry away its fruit. When a dead man was placed in the tomb, it was necessary to deliver in his name seven jars of beer and 420 loaves of bread… uh-mush priest received one-half gur {about fourteen gallons} of barley, one garment, one turban, and one bed… priest’s assistant received one-fourth gur of barley…

After his reforms, according to Urukagina:

When a dead man was placed in the tomb, (only) three jars of beer and eighty loaves of bread were delivered in his name. The uh-mush priest received one bed and one turban. The priest’s assistant received one-eighth gur of barley… The youth was not required to work in the a-zar-la; the workingman was not forced to beg for his bread. The priest no longer invaded the garden of a humble person.

Thus, Urukagina managed to curtail some excesses of the ancient Sumerian priests, but as humans have again and again relearned during the subsequent 4350 years, it’s damn hard to totally eliminate clerical parasites.

Similar occurred in ancient Egypt approximately two centuries later, in what’s called “the world’s second political revolution”. Prior to this revolution, the Egyptian priests (of course in collusion with political leaders) had promoted the scam that the leaders, buried in their pyramids, would live forever. After the revolution, the priests (wanting to stay in power) permitted people to believe that they, too, could live forever – provided (of course) that they followed the rules prescribed by the priests. What a con game – which continues to this day, e.g., in Christianity and Islam.

In Chapter XIII of his 1791 book The Ruins (Les Ruines, ou méditations sur les révolutions des empires), Volney (Constantin François de Chassebœuf, 1757–1820) outlined how similar revolutions, rejecting the God Lie and curtailing clerical excesses, occurred during the subsequent ~4,000 years:

Now, if you take a review of the whole history of the spirit of all religion, you will see that in its origin it has had no other author than the sensations and wants of man; that the idea of God has had no other type and model than those of physical powers, material beings, producing either good or evil, by impressions of pleasure or pain on sensitive beings; that followed the same course, and been uniform in its proceedings; that in all of them the dogma has never failed to represent, under the name of gods, the operations of nature, and passions and prejudices of men; that the moral of them all has had for its object the desire of happiness and the aversion to pain; but that the people, and the greater part of legislators, not knowing the route to be pursued, have formed false and therefore discordant ideas of virtue and vice of good and evil, that is to say, of what renders man happy or miserable; that in every instance, the means and the causes of propagating and establishing systems have exhibited the same scenes of passion and the same events; everywhere disputes about words, pretexts for zeal, revolutions and wars excited by the ambition of princes, the knavery of apostles, the credulity of proselytes, the ignorance of the vulgar, the exclusive cupidity and intolerant arrogance of all. Indeed, you will see that the whole history of the spirit of religion is only the history of the errors of the human mind, which, placed in a world that it does not comprehend, endeavors nevertheless to solve the enigma; and which, beholding with astonishment this mysterious and visible prodigy, imagines causes, supposes reasons, builds systems; then, finding one defective, destroys it for another not less so; hates the error that it abandons, misconceives the one that it embraces, rejects the truth that it is seeking, composes chimeras of discordant beings; and thus, while always dreaming of wisdom and happiness, wanders blindly in a labyrinth of illusion and doubt.

Similar continued during the American, French, and Russian revolutions, which in large measure were revolts against clerical hegemony, the claimed “divine right of kings”, and similar nonsense claimed to be “revelations” from God. For enlightened Americans, the Civil War was a death knell for Christianity: many in the South used the Bible to justify slavery; many in the North were convinced that slavery couldn’t be justified. For enlightened Europeans, WWII horrors perpetrated by the Nazis was a death knell of religions based on the Bible: after 2,000 years of Christian persecution of Jews, the Holocaust finally convinced a significant fraction of all Jews that there was no Yahweh to protect them – and convinced a significant fraction of all Christians that the Bible’s Gospels contained not “Good News” but evil.

In particular, the Nuremberg trials revealed to both Christians and Jews the evils contained in the Bible’s “revelations”: Moses allegedly came down from the mountain with “revealed” laws from God and proceeded to order the slaughter of those who didn’t believe him (similar to “revelations” claimed by Muhammad); the Levites who allegedly did the slaughtering followed his orders; but at Nuremberg, the judgment of the world was that “I was only following orders” didn’t absolve people from their “crimes against humanity”, such as those that Moses, Muhammad, and Hitler allegedly ordered. The Nuremberg trials established that, not some god or some “revelation”, but “we the people” will judge morality – a lesson yet to be learned by the vast majority of Muslims.

And for many enlightened people throughout the modern world, September 11, 2001 was a death knell for the concept of ‘faith’. Sam Harris’ book The End of Faith, which he started writing the day after 9/11, was seminal. But even the lesser-known author Graham Lawrence (whose book, The Fallible Gospels, seems unfortunately to have disappeared from the web) wrote compellingly:

What I am against is stupid religion, not necessarily the idea of religion itself: religion that is not philosophical or sophisticated, but that can only survive by sacrificing common sense and keeping people in the dark. I am against the idea of an educational system without the courage to teach its own children the complexities of a truth that is big enough to stand up to archaeology and psychology and textual analysis.

Truth is not found through ‘faith’. Confusing it with ‘trust’ and making faith into a virtue was one of the biggest mistakes the human race ever made. Having ‘faith’ means uncritically trusting the word of another person absolutely, accepting his or her pronouncements, whatever their nature, as beyond argument. Anything that is beyond discussion, anything that cannot be disproved, can by definition be used by the unscrupulous. Your faith could be in someone inhumane, misguided, greedy, dangerous, or just deluded. Unquestioning faith flings wide the doors of exploitation of the gullible and persecution of the heretic who disagrees.

If faith is its own justification, there is absolutely no reason that can be given to justify why faith in the words of Saint Paul is superior as an alternative to faith in the words of Muhammad, or Joseph Smith of the Mormons, or the Reverend Sun Myung Moon, or the people who in living memory have been the motivators for gun-battle sieges in Texas and mass suicides in Jonestown and nerve gas in Tokyo subways. Faith provides no defense, no protection against error, and no possibility for development. Faith does not just give us charity and pilgrimages. It gives us holy wars, death sentences and book burnings, and Islamic suicide bombers who have the obscene belief that they go to Paradise on slaughtering a bus-full of innocents, just because somebody told them this was so…

In this final post of this series, however, I don’t want to again review the historical development and rejection of the God Lie; instead, I’d like to add a few closing comments on why and how it’s being rejected by modern people. In general and in contrast to the bloody revolutions of the past, the current revolution is relatively peaceful and personal – save for bloody reactions by backward Muslims.

1. The Nonsense about Heaven and Hell
For example, it’s rather fun to see that many people are rejecting even the lie of eternal life in paradise, simply because it doesn’t make sense. Elsewhere, I’ve already addressed the obvious problem that eternal happiness would be psychologically impossible (because we’re happy only when we think we’re making progress, overcoming obstacles, toward achieving our goals – whereas, in paradise, there would be no obstacles!), but I admit that I rather enjoy the illogic of the concept of heaven illustrated by Bill Watterson:

[1. Calvin (C): “Do you think tigers go to the same heaven that people go to?” 2. C: “I mean, in heaven, everyone is supposed to be happy, right? But people wouldn’t be happy if they were always in danger of being eaten by tigers!” 3. C: “On the other hand, heaven wouldn’t be a very nice without tigers, either. I wouldn’t be happy if there weren’t any tigers. I’d miss them.” 4. C: “Maybe tigers don’t eat people in heaven.” Hobbes (H): “But then we wouldn’t be happy.”]

And that’s not the only problem with the silly idea of heaven:

[1. C: “If heaven is good and I like to be bad, how am I supposed to be happy there?” 2. H: “How will you get to heaven if you like to be bad?” C: “Let’s say I didn’t do what I wanted to do.” 3. C: “Suppose I led a blameless life! Suppose I denied my true dark nature!” 4. H: “I’m not sure I have that much imagination.” C: “Maybe heaven is a place where you’re allowed to be bad!”]

But although many people have rejected the idea of heaven, because of its silliness, many more people have rejected the idea of hell, because of its hideousness. The damnable clerics of the Abrahamic religions (Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Mormonism, etc.) chose to try to rule the people through fear and injustice, threatening people with torture for an infinite time, not only for finite crimes but even for fictitious crimes (such as failing to believe in clerical balderdash). As Robert Ingersoll (a colonel in the American Civil War and later governor of Illinois) wrote more than a century ago:

If there is a God who will damn his children forever, I would rather go to hell than to go to heaven and keep the society of such an infamous tyrant. I make my choice now. I despise that doctrine. It has covered the cheeks of this world with tears. It has polluted the hearts of children, and poisoned the imaginations of men. It has been a constant pain, a perpetual terror to every good man and woman and child. It has filled the good with horror and with fear; but it has had no effect upon the infamous and base. It has wrung the hearts of the tender; it has furrowed the cheeks of the good. This doctrine never should be preached again. What right have you, sir, Mr. clergyman… to stand at the portals of the tomb, at the vestibule of eternity, and fill the future with horror and with fear? I do not believe this doctrine, neither do you. If you did, you could not sleep one moment. Any man who believes it, and has within his breast a decent, throbbing heart, will go insane. A man who believes that doctrine and does not go insane has the heart of a snake and the conscience of a hyena…

More recently, Robert Anton Wilson wrote in his 1999 book Cheerful Reflections on Death and Dying:

An idea, which has terrified millions, claims that some of us will go to a place called Hell, where we will suffer eternal torture. This does not scare me, because when I try to imagine a Mind behind this universe, I cannot conceive that Mind, usually called 'God', as totally mad. I mean, guys, compare that 'God' with the worst monsters you can think of – Adolph Hitler, Joe Stalin, that sort of guy. None of them ever inflicted more than finite pain on their victims. Even de Sade, in his sado-masochistic fantasy novels, never devised an unlimited torture. The idea that the Mind of Creation (if such exists) wants to torture some of its critters for endless infinities of infinities seems too absurd to take seriously…

Unfortunately, though, a huge number of brain-damaged people still do take such nonsense “seriously”. For example, a 2007 survey of 35,000 Americans by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life found that 74% of those surveyed believe in heaven [84% of all Protestants, 82% of all Catholics, 95% of all Mormons, and 85% of all (American) Muslims – but probably close to 100% of all Muslims living in Islamic countries]. The survey also found that 59% of all Americans believe in hell [73% of Protestants, 60% of all Catholics, 59% of all Mormons, and 80% of all (American) Muslims, although again, probably close to 100% of all Muslims living in Islamic countries]. Such people obviously pay no attention to Nietzsche’s plea in his book Thus Spoke Zarathustra:

I beseech you, my brothers, remain faithful to the earth and do not believe those who speak to you of extraterrestrial hopes! They are mixers of poisons whether they know it or not. They are despisers of life, dying off and self-poisoned, of whom the earth is weary; so, let them fade away! Once the sacrilege against God was the greatest sacrilege, but God died…

But looking on the bright side of the above-referenced data, approximately 25% of Americans have rejected the silly idea of heaven and 40% have rejected the hideous idea of hell. Probably similar percentages are applicable in Canada and Australia. And although most Muslims throughout the world are still mired in such mindless ideas (as are most Christians in Africa and Central and South America), the percentages of Europeans and Asians who believe in such ideas are almost certainly smaller than for Americans.

So, save for the case of the poor Muslim people, some progress is being made – and probably much more will be made during the coming decades. Who knows, it may not be much longer before all the damn clerics promoting the silly idea of heaven and the hideous idea of hell will find themselves in jail, which is where they belong: they’re terrorists; they terrorize, especially, children and adults with childish minds.

In fact, progress is being made rejecting the entire God idea, especially among young people living in democracies. For example, a 2010 Pew Forum poll found:

Compared with their elders today, young people [in the U.S.] are much less likely to affiliate with any religious tradition or to identify themselves as part of a Christian denomination. Fully one-in-four adults under age 30 (25%) are unaffiliated, describing their religion as "atheist," "agnostic" or "nothing in particular". This compares with less than one-fifth of people in their 30s (19%), 15% of those in their 40s, 14% of those in their 50s, and 10% or less among those 60 and older.

Thanks to such youngsters, things are looking up (!) – even in the religiously backward U.S. (where by “religiously backward”, I mean compared with Europeans and most Asians – not compared with Muslims, who are the most religiously retarded people in the world).

But even though progress is being made, yet still today, perhaps 10% of the economies of Western societies (and more in Muslim societies) is consumed by clerical quacks promoting lies. Yet to be fair, quite likely the vast majority of today’s clerical quacks don’t purposefully lie. Instead, they are so poorly educated, so thoroughly indoctrinated, or so mentally deficient that they “think” that what they promote is “true”, without knowing even what “truth” means.

2. More Mythical Nonsense
But the myths about heaven and hell are just part of the silliness of the Abrahamic religions. In total, the myths of all religions have been and continue to be the foundations of all clerical con games. As Joseph Wheless wrote in his 1930 book Forgery in Christianity:

Mythology has well been called the Theology of dead religions. The world is a vast cemetery of deceased gods and teeming scrap-heap of decayed and discarded priest-imposed religious beliefs – superstitions. All the dead gods and religions of Paganism, all the yet surviving but fast moribund deities and faiths of the XXth Century world, all (except, the Jews and Christians [and Muslims] say, their own) all were admittedly the fraudulent handiwork of priests and professional god-and-mythmakers. In a word, short and ugly, but true – every priest of every god and religion (saving, for the nonce, the Jewish-Christian[-Muslim] ones) was a conscious and unconscionable falsifier and impostor – a common liar for his god. All plied their artful, unholy priestcraft in the name of gods, for power and pelf…

More and more, though, people are rejecting the clerics’ con games, basically because people are seeing that religious ideas just don’t make sense. They’re all based on mythical nonsense, similar to the Santa Claus myth, as Watterson illustrated:

[1. C: “This whole Santa Claus thing just doesn’t make sense.” 2. C: “Why all the secrecy? Why all the mystery? If the guy exists, why doesn’t he ever show himself and prove it?” 3. C: “And if he doesn’t exist, what’s the meaning of all this?” 4. H: “I dunno… Isn’t this a religious holiday?” C: “Yeah, but actually, I’ve got the same questions about God.”]

The main myths of all organized religions are wild speculations about how the universe came into existence, what controls nature, how humans came to be, what our purpose is, what happens to us when we die, etc. The fundamental myth deals with creation. Given that, upon encountering some complex device (a watch, a car, a computer), most people normally assume that something intelligent and therefore even-more complicated (e.g., a human) created it, religious people accepted (and still accept) the myth that something even-more complicated (God) created the universe (or, originally, the world, which was thought to be the center of creation) and created humans.

Such an argument (by analogy) has, however, at least three major inadequacies. One is that, as the philosopher David Hume demonstrated, no “argument by analogy” is logically sound: analogies can serve to illuminate an argument, but never to prove one. A second inadequacy with the argument is that it leads to the obvious (but unanswered) question: how was the creator god created? I’ll address this inadequacy in a later paragraph. And the third inadequacy of this “argument-from-design analogy” is that, it’s now known that such is not how nature operates: in nature, complexity arises not from even greater complexity, but from simplicity.

There are innumerable examples. Something as complicated as a tree is created by a seed, something as complicated as a seed is created from a sequence of molecules in a genetic code, something as complicated as a molecule is created by arrangements of atoms, something as complicated as an atom is created by arrangements of elementary particles, and something as complicated as elementary particles is created by arrangements of packets of energy – and the first appearance of energy seems to have been created by a single, symmetry-breaking quantum-like fluctuation in the original “total nothingness”, not from total nothingness suddenly popping a unbelievable complex god into existence, capable of creating trees, humans, and everything else!

Yet, the silly creation myths persist. Illustrative is Calvin’s creation story, which is similar to Zarathustra’s seven-period creation myth (which was subsequently adopted by Persians, Jews, Christians, Muslims, et al.):

[1. First there was nothing… 2. …then there was Calvin! 3. Calvin, the mighty god created the universe with pure will! 4. From utter nothingness comes swirling form! Life begins where once was void! 5. But Calvin is no kind and loving god! He’s one of the old gods! He demands sacrifice! 6. Yes, Calvin is a god of the underworld! And the puny inhabitants of Earth displease him! 7. The great Calvin ignores their pleas for mercy and the doomed writhe in agony! 8. Calvin’s Dad: “Have you seen how absorbed Calvin is with those tinkertoys? He’s creating whole worlds over there!” Calvin’s Mom: “I’ll bet he grows up to be an architect.” {or more likely, a cleric!}]

It’s sad to see that so many people still believe such silliness. Their concepts of the universe and their place with in it are childish. But of course, even a child asks: “Where did the creator god come from?” And if the response is that god always existed, then why don’t they just assume that the universe always existed? Or if they claim that their god was created, then how? The probability that a creator god (the grand architect!) would pop into existence from total nothingness is vanishingly smaller than the probability that a symmetry-breaking, quantum-like fluctuation in total nothingness created the first separation of energy into positive and negative components, leading to the Big Bang, elementary particles, atoms, stars, their remnants (subsequently forming planets), and eventually life, including humans. But religious people aren’t to think about such things; they’re to have faith; they’re to believe – in the dogma promoted by lame-brain clerics with the collection plates.

As for life on Earth starting possibly via autocatalytic reactions of complex hydrocarbon molecules becoming encased in semi-permeable membranes, then storing information about their environment, reproducing, and eventually leading to “evolutionarily perfect” humans – well, Hobbes had something to say about that:

[1. C: “When you look at me, it’s clear that my genes contain the evolutionary perfection of earthly DNA.” 2. C: “I am the culmination of creation.” 3. H: “With no tail?! I don’t think so!” C: “ Stop that! My butt doesn’t need aesthetic enhancement!”]

Actually, upon thinking more about evolution, even Calvin was perplexed:

[1. C: “Isn’t it strange that evolution would give us a sense of humor?” 2. C: “When you think about it, it’s weird that we have a physiological response to absurdity. We laugh at nonsense. We like it. We think it’s funny.” 3. C: “Don’t you think it’s odd that we appreciate absurdity? Why would we develop that way? How does it benefit us?” 4. H: “I suppose if we couldn’t laugh at things that don’t make sense, we couldn’t react to a lot of life.” 5. {Calvin is dumbfounded.} 6. C: “I can’t tell if that’s funny or really scary.”]

Talking about absurdities, consider this. All organized religions are remnants of the biggest blunders science ever made! Religions are the remnants of ancient “reasons” or “explanations” for creation, astronomy, biology, geology… nature’s violence and benevolence, life and death, illnesses and infirmities, social organizations and moralities, people’s purposes, and so on. Yet, during the most recent few hundred years, competent scientists in the many responsible scientific disciplines have debunked every single one of such wild speculations. As Sam Harris recently wrote in an article for the Los Angeles Times entitled “God’s Dupes”:

Indeed, it is time we broke this spell en masse. Every one of the world’s “great” religions utterly trivializes the immensity and beauty of the cosmos. Books like the Bible and the Koran get almost every significant fact about us and our world wrong. Every scientific domain – from cosmology to psychology to economics – has superseded and surpassed the wisdom of Scripture. Everything of value that people get from religion can be had more honestly, without presuming anything on insufficient evidence. The rest is self-deception, set to music.

But because clerics tell people what they want to hear (e.g., that they’ll live forever in paradise if they just do what the clerics say), people adopt the debunked religious myths and reject the best explanations that science has been able to provide. It’s absurd – but understandable.

3. Clerical Dogma
It’s understandable, also, why clerical con artists and colluding politicians promote their nonsense, namely, to gain and maintain power over the people. As the Greek historian Polybius (c.200–118 BCE) wrote, writing about even more ancient clerics and politicians:

Since the masses of the people are inconsistent, full of unruly desires, passionate, and reckless of consequences, they must be filled with fears to keep them in order. The ancients did well, therefore, to invent gods and the belief in punishment after death.

For Polybius, “the ancients” to whom he referred (who had “invent[ed] gods and the belief in punishment after death”) were probably the ancient Egyptian clerics, from ~2,000 years earlier. Later, ~2,000 years after Polybius, d’Holbach wrote similar in his 1761 book Christianity Unveiled:

Religion is the art of inspiring mankind with an enthusiasm, which is designed to divert their attention from the evils with which they are overwhelmed by those who govern them. By means of the invisible powers with which they are threatened, they are forced to suffer in silence the miseries with which they are afflicted by visible ones. They are taught to hope that, if they consent to become miserable in this world, they will for that reason be happy in the next.

But now, more than 4,000 years since such ideas were “invent[ed]” to control the people, a significant percentage of all people in the non-Muslim world are beginning to question clerical dogma, finally realizing that clerics (and brainwashed parents) don’t know what they’re talking about:

[1. C: “Hey Dad, how does a carburetor work?” 2. Calvin’s Dad (CD): “I can’t tell you.” 3. C: “Why not?” 4. CD: “It’s a secret.” C: “No it isn’t! You just don’t know!”]

For example, more people are seriously questioning the clerical dogma that any god dictated morality – as well as other crazy concepts, such as the Jewish/ Persian/ ancient Mesopotamian and Egyptian silliness about the first two people, the Islamic silliness that we’re being tested, and the Christian silliness of original sin:

[1. C: “Do you think babies are born sinful? That they come into the world as sinners?” 2. H: “No, I think they’re just quick studies.” 3. C: “Whenever you discuss certain things with animals, you get insulted.”]

More people are also questioning all the so-called “signs” and “revelations”, especially upon finding that science provides better explanations:

[1. C: “I saw a cloud that looked just like me!” 2. H: “Really?” C: “There was my head, huge and white, floating in the ethereal blue! Obviously it’s a sign!” 3. H: “Of what?” C: “Very peculiar high altitude winds, I guess.” 4. C: “You know, some sort of cumulonimbal thing.” H: “Science kind of takes the fun out of the portent business.”]

And more people are beginning to develop more realistic expectations of how the future can be predicted and influenced – well, at least, some people are:

[1. C: “I’ve been thinking about this astrology stuff.” 2. C: “Everyone want to know what the future holds, but you just have to wait ‘til it happens.” 3. H: “So really, the best preparation for the future is take the present and… {Calvin trips: “Whoop! Aaughh!”} 4. {Hobbes continues} “… think about what you’re doing?” C: “No. Get yourself a good luck charm. Man, here comes another bath!”]

In fact, the doubts of an increasing percentage of all people have emboldened them to challenge god:

[1. {Calvin, dejected, with his sled on grass rather than snow} 2. C {disgruntled}: “If I was in charge, we’d never see grass between October and May.” 3. C {shouting at the sky}: “On ‘Three’, ready? One… two; three!” 4. “Snow!” 5. {Calvin frustrated} 6. “I said ‘Snow!’ C’mon! Snow!” 7. {An angry Calvin} “SNOW!” 8. {A belligerent Calvin} “OK, then, don’t snow! See what I care! I like this weather! Let’s have it forever!” 9. {Calvin on his knees}: “Pleeaase snow! Please?? Just a foot! OK, eight inches! That’s all! C’mon! Six inches, even! How about just six??” 10. {Calvin, frustrated} “I’m waaiiiting…” 11. {Calvin, furious} “RRRRGGHHH” 12. {Calvin, exhausted} 13. “Do you want me to become an atheist?”]

Undoubtedly, substantial doubt is appropriate. As Volney also wrote in his book The Ruins:

And what is doubt… that it should be a crime? Can man feel otherwise than as he is affected? If a truth be palpable, and of importance in practice, let us pity him that misconceives it. His punishment will arise from his blindness. If it be uncertain or equivocal, how is he to find in it what it has not? To believe without evidence or proof, is an act of ignorance and folly. The credulous man loses himself in a labyrinth of contradictions; the man of sense examines and discusses, that he may be consistent in his opinions. The honest man will bear contradiction, because it gives rise to evidence. Violence is the argument of falsehood; and to impose a creed by authority is the act and indication of a tyrant.

As more people become more aware of more aspects of the mountainous God Lie, as more people realize that they’ve been duped by clerical quackery, as more people withdraw their trust in clerics, I suspect that all the organized religions will collapse. I expect that this collapse will occur amazingly rapidly, as rapidly as Catholics are now abandoning their religion, because of the way their priests have raped children. Trust takes years to build and yet can be lost almost instantaneously. As science expands, religion contracts. I expect that, perhaps within a few decades in the U.S. and within a century in Muslim countries, all ideas about all gods will be confined to those who are mentally ill or “mentally challenged” (viz., imbeciles).

4. Connecting the Dots Differently
Doubting the existence of any god and angry at how clerics had manipulated them, people have started to search for ways to “connect the dots” by themselves:

[1. C: “This connect-the-dots book really makes me mad! Look at this.” 2. H: “It’s a duck.” C: “I know! Who wants to draw a duck?! I sure didn’t! They made me!” 3. C: “I’ve been manipulated! My natural artistic talent has been used against my will to create some corporate entity’s crude idea of waterfowl! It’s outrageous!” 4. H: “Another blow to creative integrity.” C: “From now on, I’ll connect the dots my own way.”]

Although it has taken thousands of years, people have slowly begun to connect the dots themselves, developing more realistic worldviews – but not without some lingering (and sometimes, rather dangerous) doubts:

[1. C: “What if there’s no afterlife? Suppose this is all we get.” 2. {Hobbes looks around and thinks about it.} 3. H: “Oh, what the heck. I’ll take it anyway.” C: “Yeah, but if I’m not going to be eternally rewarded for my behavior, I’d sure like to know now.”]

In fact, realism can lead not only to doubts but a dour outlook on life:

[1. C: “The problem with people is they don’t look at the big picture.” 2. C: “Eventually, we’re each going to die, our species will go extinct, the Sun will explode, and the Universe will collapse.” 3. C: “Existence is not only temporary, it’s pointless! We’re all doomed, and worse, nothing matters!” 4. H: “I see why people don’t like to look at the big picture.” C: “Well, it puts a bad day in perspective.”]

5. Some New Religions
Without doubt, many people have rejected the old religions, but in many cases, when previously accepted worldviews begin to collapse, the ruins can be hazardous. For example, a significant fraction of all people have replaced organized religion with other distractions from reality, such as watching TV:

[1. C: “I can’t sleep, Hobbes. I’ve been thinking.” H: “What about?” 2. C: “Well, suppose there’s no afterlife. That would mean this life is all you get.” 3. C: “And that would mean I’m sitting here in bed as precious moments of my all-too-short life disappear forever.” 4. Calvin’s Mom {shaking Calvin’s sleeping Dad }: “Honey, wake up. Do you hear the television on?”]

For some people, “religiously” watching TV can become obsessive:

[1. C: “Oh greatest of the mass media, thank you for elevating emotion, reducing thought, and stifling imagination.” 2. C: “Thank you for the artificiality of quick solutions and for the insidious manipulation of human desires for commercial purposes.” 3. C: “This bowl of lukewarm tapioca represents my brain. I offer it in humble sacrifice. Bestow thy flickering light forever.” 4. {A sleepy Calvin’s mother can’t make sense of the scene.}]

Yet, unless a child is mentally abused with religious indoctrination, organized religions can’t compete in the modern world: they can’t capture children’s imaginations so completely as can cartoons, sitcoms, movies, etc. available on TVs, DVDs, the big screen, the internet, etc. Unfortunately, though, the myths of these “new religions” can become as mind numbing as the old, even for Hobbes:

[1. C: “It says here that ‘Religion is the opiate of the masses.’ What do you suppose that means?” 2. {A sarcastic comment from an apparently sentient TV}: “It means Karl Marx hadn’t seen anything yet.” 3. H: “What are you watching?” 4. C: “Garbage. This show would insult a 6-year-old! And I should know.” 5. H: “So why watch it?” C: “All the other shows are even worse!” 6. H: “Why watch TV at all then?” C: “There’s nothing to do.” 7. H: “Nothing to do?! You could read a book! or write a letter! or take a walk!” 8. H: “When you’re old, you’ll wish you had more than memories of this tripe to look back on.” C: “Undoubtedly.” 9. {What’s on TV intrigues Hobbes} 10. {Hobbes also succumbs}]

Recalling the truism that half of the people have below-average intelligence, we then shouldn’t be surprised that, along with mindless TV (and “escapism” movies, internet porn, etc.), a large fraction of all people in “wealthy” countries have also succumbed to TV’s conquering ally, unthinking consumerism:

[(1) C: “The Christmas season is always a time for personal reflection.” (2) C: “Too often we don’t examine our lives. This is a time to take stock and think about what’s important.” (3) C: “It’s a time to rededicate oneself to frenzied acquisition… A time to spread the joy of material wealth… A time to glorify personal excess of every kind!” (4) C: “…a time to atone for one’s frugality!” H: “Earthly rewards make consumerism a popular religion.”]

And along with addictions to mind-numbing entertainment and frenzied consumerism, a large fraction of all people throughout the world are placated as spectators of professional sports, such as baseball, basketball, football, and so on. In contrast, Calvin wasn’t just a spectator but engaged in his favorite sport, Calvinball! In fact, he invented it:

[1. C: “So what’s the game I get to play if I’m good?” Calvin’s babysitter, Rosalyn (R): “You can decide. Pick your favorite game.” 2. C: “Is this a trick? Can we really play my favorite game??” R: “Sure, why not? What is it?” 3. C: Calvinball!!” R: “Calvinball?” 4. C: “Get out the time-fracture wickets, Hobbes! We’re gonna play Calvinball!” R: “What the heck is Calvinball?”]

[1. Calvin dancing and singing: “Other kids’ games are all such a bore! They’ve gotta have rules and they gotta keep score! Calvinball is better by far! It’s never the same! It’s always bizarre! You don’t need a team or a referee! You know that it’s great, ‘cause it’s named after me! If you wanna…” 2. C (to Rosalyn): “Uh, feel free to harmonize on the Rumma Tum Tums.” R: “This was a mistake.”]

[1. C: “I’ve got the Calvinball! Everybody has go in slow motion now!” 2. R: “Wait a minute, Calvin, I don’t…” C (interrupting Rosalyn): “You have to talk in slow motion too. Liiike thisss.” 3. R: “Thiisss gaaaame maaakes noooo sennnse! It’ssss aasss iffff you’rrrre maaakinnnggg iiiiit uuuup aaas youuu gooo.” 4. C (to plush-toy Hobbes, not full-size Hobbes, since another person is present): “Hobbes! She stumbled into the perimeter of wisdom! Run!!” R: “Oh…”]

[1. R: “If I’m in the perimeter of wisdom, then I get to make a decree.” C: “A decree? Um… OK.” 2. R: “I decree you have to catch a water balloon that I throw high in the air.” C: “Oh no!” 3. C (to Hobbes): “Man, she picked up the nuances of this game fast!” 4. R: “Ha! This is fun!”]

[1. R: “OK Calvin, you have to catch the water balloon!” C: “Aaa!” 2. C: “Ha! I’m in the corollary zone! If I catch the balloon, the thrower has to bend over and hold still!” R: “What?!” 3. C: “I caught it!! Ha ha ha ha!” 4. C: “Oh this is going to be sweet!” Rosalyn (protecting her backside with Hobbes): “I’m taking Hobbes prisoner!”]

[1. C: “Hobbes! Don’t guard Rosalyn! I’m going to get her with this balloon!” R: “The tiger is my prisoner!” 2. C: “I guess I’ll just have to soak you both then! Ha ha ha!” R: “Sorry, Calvin, I touched you with the baby sitter flag.” 3. C: “The baby sitter flag?? What’s that?” R: “It means you must obey the baby sitter.” 4. R “… who says it’s a half-hour past your bedtime now. Let’s go in.” C: “Awwwwww! Darn baby sitter flag.”]

[1. Calvin’s Dad (CD) returning home: “Our house is still standing. That’s a good sign.” 2. Calvin’s Mom (CM): “We’re home! Is everything OK?” R: “Fine.” 3. R: “Calvin did his homework, then we played a game, and Calvin went to bed.” CD: “It’s awfully late for jokes, Rosalyn.” 4. C: “I’ve noticed that when we play games with girls, you get captured a lot.” H: “Some of us are just irresistible.”]

6. The Painfully Slow Process of Civilizing Males
Actually, there’s a lot more to the story that Watterson illustrated in the above strips (and which he also illustrated in still other strips). In total, it’s the long tale of the painfully slow process of civilizing males. To civilize males requires that their two primary instinctive drives be channeled into enterprises less destructive for themselves and more productive for their communities. Those two primary instinctive drives are sex and power, with the latter instinctively codified in males via the law of the jungle, might makes right.

Correspondingly, all organized religions have undertaken two primary functions. The first has been to manipulate and try to control the sex drive of especially men. Details range from the idiocy of Christian abstinence (which hasn’t worked, even in their own clergy; as Voltaire said, “It is one of the superstitions of the human mind to have imagined that virginity is a virtue”) to Islam’s licentiousness (which includes abominable treatment of women, treating them essentially as cattle). The result is that no other animal is as sexually confused as are religious fundamentalists, and with their perfectly normal and natural sexual urges frustrated by clerical stupidity, testosterone-sodden men have then sought relief by raping children, by treating the women in their lives as subhuman, and even by going on murderous and suicidal rampages, e.g., to finally gain sexual satisfaction from the promised 72 perpetual virgins awaiting them in Islam’s fictitious version of paradise.

And the second primary function of all organized religions has been to claim superior force, i.e., that their omnipotent (“all powerful”) god is in control (e.g., not only judging people’s sex lives but also their fate in a fictitious “afterlife”). If people would reject the oxymoronic idea of “life after death” (do words no longer need meaning?) and would adopt the mantra “make love not war” (relieving natural concupiscence using contraceptives, essentially as soon as teenagers reach sexual and psychological maturity), then rather than continue to drive their youth and their communities crazy, all organized religions (and especially fundamentalist Christianity, Islam, and Mormonism) would immediately collapse, literally overnight.

Meanwhile, though, progress civilizing males has been made (and can still be made) by women: of course they can satisfy men’s sexual drives (customs willing), but they can also channel male’s desire for power, e.g., into gaining power over that which threaten women (such as threats from poverty, the environment, or other people). In total, the history of how women have been able to defang men (and the clerics’ omnipotent god) is a very long story (yet to unfold in Muslim countries). Here, I’ll mention just a few points illustrated by Bill Watterson.

For example, with the above Calvinball sequence, Watterson cleverly illustrated how Calvin’s babysitter Rosalyn outsmarted, constrained, defeated, redirected and generally civilized Calvin’s excesses. As I illustrated in earlier posts, Watterson similarly illustrated that the women in Calvin’s life (his mother, his neighbor Suzie, and his teacher Miss Wormwood) were able to civilize him. As an additional example, notice in the following strip not only Calvin’s craziness but also his mother’s careful rebuke of his repugnant forecasts, referring instead to the pleasure of spring flowers.

[{Signs held by grotesque snowmen: “Repent Sinners”, “The End is Near”, “Spring is Coming”}, C: “They’re snowmen prophets of doom.” CM: “You certainly take the pleasure out of waiting for daffodils.”]

That Calvin’s excesses were constrained by the women in his life is, I think, especially relevant for the rejection of the brutality and misogyny of all the Abrahamic religions, now especially prevalent in Islam but still present in Judaism, Christianity, Mormonism, etc. As I’ve written extensively elsewhere (e.g., here and here), I’m certain that the key to freeing the world from religious balderdash (especially Islamic balderdash) is realization of basic human rights by women – so they can then civilize men!

That’s not to suggest that an unfortunately large percentage of all religious women don’t display even more irrational attraction to their imagined heroic “prophets” and gods than do similarly emotional men. Yet, in general, women are typically more willing than men to cooperate (rather than compete) and to show love (rather than hate) for fellow humans; they are generally quicker to include than exclude; they seem more willing to provide than demand services. After all, after all supernatural silliness is subtracted, all religions are basically just organizations of communities, at which women generally excel. And fortunately for humanity, women have been able to civilize some males:

[1. C: “Mom says death is as natural as birth, and it’s all part of the life cycle.” 2. C: “She says we don’t really understand it, but there are many things we don’t understand, and we just have to do the best we can with the knowledge we have.” 3. C: “I guess that makes sense.” 4. C: “…but don’t you go anywhere.” H: “Don’t worry.”]

Actually, Watterson went even further in his comic strips, illustrating his apparent view that, in the end, secular philosophers will be victorious even in all the silly games that the clerics of the world have concocted, out of thin air. Recall that he named Calvin after the theologian John Calvin (1509–64), who concocted his own Calvinball, making it up as he went along. That is, similar to the founders of all religions (Zarathustra, Hilkiah, Ezra, Paul, Muhammad, Joseph Smith, et al.), Calvin simply pulled his religious dogma out of thin air (to put it politely) – or actually, out of thick air, polluted with clerical avarice and the people’s ignorance. But as Watterson illustrated (e.g., in the Calvinball strip that I used two posts ago), Hobbes invariably outsmarted Calvin even at his own game. Recall that Hobbes was named after the secular philosopher Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679), creator of the concept of “the social contract”, i.e., the idea that the bases of interpersonal morality are simply rules that help us live together productively in our societies.

In contrast, the Abrahamic religions promote atrocious immoralities. Of course, moralities have meaning only relative to some objectives, but rather than choosing the personal objective of thriving by using one’s brain as best one can and the interpersonal objective of living together productively in society, the Abrahamic religions are based on absurd objectives, such as placating a fictitious, tyrannical god, gaining entrance to a fictitious, illogical heaven, and avoiding an equally fictitious hell. Consequently, most of the moralities promoted in the Abrahamic religions are absurd. True (as I tried to show in early posts of this series), some of the interpersonal moralities (such as not to steal, lie, kill, etc.) are simply restatements of prehistoric cultural norms (finally recorded by the ancient Sumerians, Egyptians and Indians more than a thousand years before the earliest books of the Bible), but more significantly and damningly, the Abrahamic religions require people to replace their reasoning power with authoritarian power of numbskull clerics. Yet, abandoning one’s reasoning to anyone, abandoning one’s own ability to evaluate the evidence, is the depth of personal immorality, resulting in atrocious interpersonal immoralities. Therefore, at their bases, all the Abrahamic religions are deeply immoral.

7. Rejecting “Holy Books”
In sum, an increasing percentage of all people have applied their most important personal moral imperative (to use their brains as best they can) to reject the God Lie promoted in the world’s “holy books”. Robert Ingersoll lamented:

How long, O how long will mankind worship a book? How long will they grovel in the dust before the ignorant legends of the barbaric past? How long, O how long will they pursue phantoms in a darkness deeper than death?

Illustrative is the idiocy that has raged during my entire life between the Israelis and the Arabs. If their DNA codes are read, the people are found to be close cousins, but they proceed to kill each other, because they have different covetous clerical hierarchies reading and preaching from different “holy books”. Maybe the end of such stupidity could be hastened if all such “holy books” carried warnings on their covers, something similar to:

WARNING:

This “holy book” is bad.

It will mess with your mind.

It should never be taken seriously.

If taken seriously, severe mental damage will occur.

Keep this book out of reach of children and those who are childish.

As antidotes, require extensive study in logic, science, and critical thinking.

But the chances, anytime soon, of having such a warning on all the world’s “holy books” are slim, because the world’s clerics are powerfully entrenched. They’ve captured the imagination of more than half of all people in the world, convincing them that they’re special, because they believe what the clerics say (despite the total lack of evidence to support the clerics’ crazy claims) and convincing them to abandon their minds to their clerics’ whims, in large measure because, most unfortunately, a substantial fraction of all humans are wild dreamers and schemers, similar to Calvin:

[1. C {addressing Hobbes}: “If you could have anything in the world right now, what would it be?” 2. H {contemplating}: “…Hmm…” C: “Anything at all! Whatever you want!” 3. H: “A sandwich.” C: “A sandwich?!? What kind of a stupid wish is that?!” 4. C: “Talk about a failure of imagination! I’d ask for a trillion billion dollars, my own Space Shuttle, and a private continent!” 5. H {eating a sandwich}: “I got my wish.”]

Wild dreamers and schemers that they are, clerics claim that the universe didn’t create itself (e.g., by a quantum-like symmetry-breaking fluctuation in the original total void) but was created by a giant magic-man in the sky, and if only the people will follow the policies promoted by the con-artist clerics (policies that of course include paying the parasite clerics to keep preaching their nonsense), then the people will live forever in paradise with their fictitious god in the sky. What a racket! What evil!

In a recent article in Scientific American, John Horgan relayed an appropriate term to describe such people that was coined by the biologist Peter Medawar in his 1984 book The Limits of Science: they're “bunkrapt”, i.e., such people are raptured by bunk! In contrast, as Confucius (or K’ung fu-tzu, 551–479 BCE) said,

When you know a thing, to hold that you know it; and when you do not know a thing, to allow that you do not know it – this is the beginning of wisdom.

At about the same time in China, Lao Tzu (who documented Daoism in Dao De Ching) stated the concept more forcefully:

To pretend to know when you do not know is a disease.

Socrates (469–399 BCE) reportedly said similar:

… the most reprehensible form of ignorance [is] that of thinking one knows what one does not know…”

That one concept (expressed by Confucius, LaoTzu, or Socrates) is worth more than all the statements in all the “holy books” of the world!

8. Dangers of Believing Balderdash
In this series of posts, I’ve tried to show that, in the main, the “holy books” of all the Abrahamic religions were all derived from Zarathustra’s wild speculations (which, in turn, were probably derived from even earlier speculations by ancient Egyptians and Indians) that some god created the universe, the alleged role of people in “the scheme of things”, and their assumed rewards or punishment in a nonexistent afterlife. Therefore, all the “Abrahamic religions” (or more accurately, all the “Zarathustric religions”) were and still are based on ignorance: balderdash based on totally arbitrary dogma, i.e., assumptions “pulled out of the air”, with none based on principles derived from data and whose predictions have been (or even “can be”) tested. Consequently, as people slowly become reliant on their own brains, as people slowly become more educated in critical thinking and in science, and as more men are civilized by women, all the Abrahamic religions (and all religions built on similar balderdash) will collapse into a rubble of primitive speculations that they are, just as other religions collapsed when their adherents learned that gods weren’t responsible for earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, thunder and lightning, etc.

As ignorance decreases, so does worship of any god. Thus, when people understood the nature of volcanoes, the Sun and Moon, winds, thunderstorms, etc., people no longer worshiped such “gods”. And when people understand how the universe began (possibly from a quantum-like, symmetry-breaking fluctuation in a total void), how life might have begun and seems to have evolved, and even that the “post-modern” religious, existential philosophers’ “ground of being” is probably total nothingness – that is, once people’s ignorance is dispelled – then all the gods of all organized religions will vanish. All were just mental aberrations derived from ignorance. As Lemuel Washburn rhetorically asked a century ago:

Where are the sons of gods that loved the daughters of men? Where are the nymphs, the goddesses of the winds and waters? Where are the gnomes that lived inside the earth? Where are the goblins that used to play tricks on mortals? Where are the fairies that could blight or bless the human heart? Where are the ghosts that haunted this globe? Where are the witches that flew in and out of the homes of men? Where is the devil that once roamed over the earth? Where are they? Gone with the ignorance that believed in them.

In his Letters from the Earth, Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens, 1835–1910) said it well:

Man is a marvelous curiosity. When he is at his very very best he is a sort of low grade nickel-plated angel; at his worst he is unspeakable… Yet, he blandly and in all sincerity calls himself the "noblest work of God." This is the truth I am telling you. And this is not a new idea with him, he has talked it through all the ages, and believed it. Believed it, and found nobody among all his race to laugh at it!

Moreover – if I may put another strain upon you – he thinks he is the Creator's pet! He believes the Creator is proud of him; he even believes the Creator loves him; has a passion for him; sits up nights to admire him; yes, and watch over him and keep him out of trouble. He prays to Him, and thinks He listens. Isn't it a quaint idea?

In reality, though, it’s not just a “quaint idea”: the universal weakness of basing beliefs on balderdash is the reason why every organized religion has led to dissension, division, and bloodshed. People who are conned or forced into adopting pure, unadulterated balderdash (usually when they are still children) divorce themselves from basing decisions on evidence and reason. Their opinions are irrational, based on some dictator’s fiat. And from such silly speculations, their actions are irrational, emotional, and usually based on some dictator’s fiat. The result is a plague of irrationality and therefore immorality: “kill the infidels”, “burn the witches”, “abortion is murder”, “Allahu akbar.” As Voltaire said:

Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.

Thereby, it’s a fair assessment to say that all clerics, missionaries, and their religious followers are not only bonkers but dangerous. Not only do they claim to know what’s unknown, but again and again, they’ve promoted open hostility toward those who debunk their claims to knowledge – or toward those who just say they’re bonkers.

In contrast, people with a naturalistic worldviews (such as the ancient Greek philosophers Democrates and Epicurus) offered the not-so-appealing prospect that when you die, you’re dead. The naturalistic worldview, however, did (and does!) provide liberation from fear of death and from clerical parasites. Yet, because science didn’t develop sufficient strength and because the vast majority of the people remained uneducated and superstitious, then as the Greeks fell to the Romans and the Romans succumbed to Christianity, the supernaturalists won the battle, plunging Europe into centuries of Dark Ages, similar to the Dark Ages maintained by supernaturalists in today’s Muslim countries. And even after the Enlightenment in the West, the war between naturalists (e.g., the Brights) and the supernaturalists continues – although in most of Europe today, the supernaturalists have finally and thankfully lost the high ground.

9. Religion Without Gods
The myths of organized religions are slowly being rejected and replaced with scientific ideas, but every step of the way, clerics have fought the advancement of science. As Thomas Jefferson wrote in his 11 April 1820 letter to Correa de Serra:

Priests... dread the advance of science as witches do the approach of daylight and scowl on the fatal harbinger announcing the subversions of the duperies on which they live.

But although many of us have rejected “the ignorant legends of the barbaric past” and the “revelations” in all “holy books”, we haven’t rejected (and don’t intend to reject) religion – in the broadest sense of the word.

The narrow sense of the word ‘religion’ is as given in the first three of four definitions in the New Oxford American Dictionary:

• the belief in and worship of a superhuman controlling power…

• details of belief as taught or discussed…

• a particular system of faith and worship…

With such meanings for ‘religion’ it’s easy to agree with Robert Ingersoll:

Religion makes enemies instead of friends. That one word, ‘religion’, covers all the horizon of memory with visions of war, of outrage, of persecution, of tyranny, and death. That one word brings to the mind every instrument with which man has tortured man. In that one word are all the fagots and flames and dungeons of the past, and in that word is the infinite and eternal hell of the future…

It’s similarly easy to agree with Joseph Lewis:

Let me tell you that religion is the cruelest fraud ever perpetrated upon the human race. It is the last of the great scheme of thievery that man must legally prohibit so as to protect himself from the charlatans who prey upon the ignorance and fears of the people. The penalty for this type of extortion should be as severe as it is of other forms of dishonesty.

But meanwhile, in the process of rejecting the old religions, the word ‘religion’ has come to mean, in its broadest sense, what’s given by the fourth definition in the same dictionary:

• a pursuit or interest to which someone ascribes supreme importance…

Thus, when humans reject god-based religions but are still religious, it means that individuals select and try to adhere to a set of principles and behaviors the each individual considers to be important – though not necessarily of “supreme importance”, because few people who reject ideas about any god are fanatics.

Most of us who reject “the god idea” (because insufficient evidence supports it) protect our individuality, but we’re pleased to engage in cooperative activities. Individually, we religiously pursue a huge number of activities (from sports to star gazing); collectively, too, the range of our activities is enormous (from politics to participating in the production of goods and services). Generally in our view, communities of believers are just too myopic, “thinking” that they’re special, confining their cooperative activities to those who think similarly, following some living or long-dead leader as if he (or, in some cases, she) knows (or knew) how to live any better than we can evaluate by ourselves.

In particular, we reject basing our beliefs on fear of hell and greed for heaven; instead, we hold religiously to the concept that all beliefs should be held only as strongly as relevant evidence justifies. We reject the concept that morality has anything to do with any gods; instead, we religiously adhere to the personal moral code of always using our brains as best we can (which of course includes evaluating evidence) and to interpersonal moral codes that promote human progress toward less violence and more sustainable development. And because of lack of evidence to support the idea of the existence of any god and the vast evidence that supports the indictment that belief in any god curtails human progress (e.g., stimulating violence among humans and destruction of the natural environment), we reject all god ideas; yet, we’re thankful for opportunities to participate in our economies, we’re especially thankful for the progress that a few brilliant humans have already accomplished, and we’re in awe of our great good-fortune to have had a chance to participate in this glorious natural experiment called life. As Robert Ingersoll wrote in his 1872 book The Gods:

We are not endeavoring to chain the future, but to free the present. We are not forging fetters for our children, but we are breaking those our fathers made for us. We are the advocates of inquiry, of investigation and thought. This of itself, is an admission that we are not perfectly satisfied with all our conclusions…

Nature, so long as we can discern, without passion and without intention, forms, transforms, and retransforms forever. She neither weeps nor rejoices. She produces man without purpose, and obliterates him without regret. She knows no distinction between the beneficial and the hurtful. Poison and nutrition, pain and joy, life and death, smiles and tears are alike to her. She is neither merciful nor cruel. She cannot be flattered by worship nor melted by tears. She does not know even the attitude of prayer. She appreciates no difference between poison in the fangs of snakes and mercy in the hearts of men. Only through man does nature take cognizance of the good, the true, and the beautiful; and, so far as we know, man is the highest intelligence…

Philosophy has not the egotism of faith. While superstition builds walls and creates obstructions, science opens all the highways of thought. We do not pretend to have circumnavigated everything, and to have solved all difficulties, but we do believe that it is better to love men than to fear gods; that it is grander and nobler to think and investigate for yourself than to repeat a creed. We are satisfied that there can be but little liberty on earth while men worship a tyrant in heaven. We do not expect to accomplish everything in our day; but we want to do what good we can, and to render all the service possible in the holy cause of human progress. We know that doing away with gods and supernatural persons and powers is not an end. It is a means to an end, the real end being the happiness of man…

If abuses are destroyed, man must destroy them. If slaves are freed, man must free them. If new truths are discovered, man must discover them. If the naked are clothed; if the hungry are fed; if justice is done; if labor is rewarded; if superstition is driven from the mind; if the defenseless are protected and if the right finally triumphs, all must be the work of man. The grand victories of the future must be won by man, and by man alone.

10. Back to the Beginning
As I’ve tried to convey in all these posts, I’m opposed to all organized religions – because all are just organized ignorance, claiming to know what isn’t known. And although no one can know with certainty whether any god exists or not, yet based on the evidence (or rather, the lack thereof) it’s clear that the most certain knowledge that humans possess (even more certain than the assumption that we exist) is that no god exists or has ever existed and, further, that this life is the only life that each one of us will experience. In contrast, organized religions posit wild speculations that gods and after-lives exist, and as a result, propose a variety of personal and social policies that have zero scientific bases, relying only on personal whims of clerical con artists.

In his book The World As I See It, Einstein provided an apt summary for this entire series of posts:

Everything that the human race has done and thought is concerned with the satisfaction of felt needs and the assuagement of pain. One has to keep this constantly in mind if one wishes to understand spiritual movements and their development. Feeling and desire are the motive forces behind all human endeavor and human creation, in however exalted a guise the latter may present itself to us.

Now, what are the feelings and needs that have led men to religious thought and belief in the widest sense of the words? A little consideration will suffice to show us that the most varying emotions preside over the birth of religious thought and experience. With primitive man it is above all fear that evokes religious notions – fear of hunger, wild beasts, sickness, death. Since at this stage of existence understanding of causal connections is usually poorly developed, the human mind creates for itself more or less analogous beings on whose wills and actions these fearful happenings depend. One's object now is to secure the favor of these beings by carrying out actions and offering sacrifices which, according to the tradition handed down from generation to generation, propitiate them or make them well disposed towards a mortal. I am speaking now of the religion of fear.

This, though not created, is in an important degree stabilized by the formation of a special priestly caste, which sets up as a mediator between the people and the beings they fear and erects a hegemony on this basis. In many cases the leader or ruler whose position depends on other factors, or a privileged class, combines priestly functions with its secular authority in order to make the latter more secure; or the political rulers and the priestly caste make common cause in their own interests.

The social feelings are another source of the crystallization of religion. Fathers and mothers and the leaders of larger human communities are mortal and fallible. The desire for guidance, love, and support prompts men to form the social or moral conception of God. This is the God of Providence who protects, disposes, rewards, and punishes, the God who, according to the width of the believer's outlook, loves and cherishes the life of the tribe or of the human race, or even life as such, the comforter in sorrow and unsatisfied longing, who preserves the souls of the dead. This is the social or moral conception of God.

The Jewish scriptures admirably illustrate the development from the religion of fear to moral religion, which is continued in the New Testament. The religions of all civilized peoples, especially the peoples of the Orient, are primarily moral religions. The development from a religion of fear to moral religion is a great step in a nation's life. That primitive religions are based entirely on fear and the religions of civilized peoples purely on morality is a prejudice against which we must be on our guard. The truth is that they are all intermediate types, with this reservation, that on the higher levels of social life, the religion of morality predominates.

Common to all these types is the anthropomorphic character of their conception of God. Only individuals of exceptional endowments and exceptionally high-minded communities, as a general rule, get in any real sense beyond this level. But there is a third state of religious experience which belongs to all of them, even though it is rarely found in a pure form, and which I will call “cosmic religious feeling”.

It is very difficult to explain this feeling to anyone who is entirely without it, especially as there is no anthropomorphic conception of God corresponding to it. The individual feels the nothingness of human desires and aims and the sublimity and marvelous order which reveal themselves both in nature and in the world of thought. He looks upon individual existence as a sort of prison and wants to experience the universe as a single significant whole.

The beginnings of cosmic religious feeling already appear in earlier stages of development, e.g., in many of the Psalms of David and in some of the Prophets. Buddhism, as we have learned from the wonderful writings of Schopenhauer especially, contains a much stronger element of it. The religious geniuses of all ages have been distinguished by this kind of religious feeling, which knows no dogma and no God conceived in man's image; so that there can be no Church whose central teachings are based on it. Hence it is precisely among the heretics of every age that we find men who were filled with the highest kind of religious feeling and were in many cases regarded by their contemporaries as Atheists, sometimes also as saints. Looked at in this light, men like Democritus, Francis of Assisi, and Spinoza are closely akin to one another.

How can cosmic religious feeling be communicated from one person to another, if it can give rise to no definite notion of a God and no theology? In my view, it is the most important function of art and science to awaken this feeling and keep it alive in those who are capable of it.

We thus arrive at a conception of the relation of science to religion very different from the usual one. When one views the matter historically one is inclined to look upon science and religion as irreconcilable antagonists, and for a very obvious reason. The man who is thoroughly convinced of the universal operation of the law of causation cannot for a moment entertain the idea of a being who interferes in the course of events – that is, if he takes the hypothesis of causality really seriously. He has no use for the religion of fear and equally little for social or moral religion. A God who rewards and punishes is inconceivable to him for the simple reason that a man's actions are determined by necessity, external and internal, so that in God's eyes he cannot be responsible, any more than an inanimate object is responsible for the motions it goes through. Hence science has been charged with undermining morality, but the charge is unjust.

A man's ethical behavior should be based effectually on sympathy, education, and social ties; no religious basis is necessary. Man would indeed be in a poor way if he had to be restrained by fear and punishment and hope of reward after death. It is therefore easy to see why the Churches have always fought science and persecuted its devotees.

On the other hand, I maintain that cosmic religious feeling is the strongest and noblest incitement to scientific research. Only those who realize the immense efforts and, above all, the devotion which pioneer work in theoretical science demands, can grasp the strength of the emotion out of which alone such work, remote as it is from the immediate realities of life, can issue. What a deep conviction of the rationality of the universe and what a yearning to understand, were it but a feeble reflection of the mind revealed in this world, Kepler and Newton must have had to enable them to spend years of solitary labor in disentangling the principles of celestial mechanics!

Those whose acquaintance with scientific research is derived chiefly from its practical results easily develop a completely false notion of the mentality of the men who, surrounded by a skeptical world, have shown the way to those like-minded with themselves, scattered through the earth and the centuries. Only one who has devoted his life to similar ends can have a vivid realization of what has inspired these men and given them the strength to remain true to their purpose in spite of countless failures. It is cosmic religious feeling that gives a man strength of this sort. A contemporary has said, not unjustly, that in this materialistic age of ours the serious scientific workers are the only profoundly religious people.

You will hardly find one among the profounder sort of scientific minds without a peculiar religious feeling of his own. But it is different from the religion of the naive man. For the latter, God is a being from whose care one hopes to benefit and whose punishment one fears; a sublimation of a feeling similar to that of a child for its father, a being to whom one stands to some extent in a personal relation, however deeply it may be tinged with awe.

But the scientist is possessed by the sense of universal causation. The future, to him, is every whit as necessary and determined as the past. There is nothing divine about morality, it is a purely human affair. His religious feeling takes the form of a rapturous amazement at the harmony of natural law, which reveals an intelligence of such superiority that, compared with it, all the systematic thinking and acting of human beings is an utterly insignificant reflection. This feeling is the guiding principle of his life and work, insofar as he succeeds in keeping himself from the shackles of selfish desire. It is beyond question closely akin to that which has possessed the religious geniuses of all ages.

Which then brings me back to concept of awe that I addressed in the first chapter (entitled Awareness) of my on-line book. As referenced in that chapter, Rolf Edberg summarized the concept beautifully:

On a little speck in the universe, there is a species in which billions of years of evolution have led up to a mind through which the cosmos can experience itself, and nature can investigate her own nature.

Stated differently, as also addressed in that chapter, Alan Watts’ succinct summary is not only sufficient and scientifically accurate, it’s inspiring: Each of us is the Universe “I’ing”.

Which then seem to be a fitting place to end this Appendix – save to again relay thoughts conveyed by Bill Watterson in his 1990 Commencement Address at his Alma Mater, Kenyon College:

Your preparation for the real world is not in the answers you’ve learned, but in the questions you’ve learned how to ask yourself… Reading those turgid philosophers here in these remote stone buildings may not get you a job, but if those books have forced you to ask yourself questions about what makes life truthful, purposeful, meaningful, and redeeming, you have the Swiss Army Knife of mental tools, and it’s going to come in handy all the time… Selling out is usually more a matter of buying in. Sell out, and you’re really buying into someone else’s system of values, rules, and rewards… To invent your own life’s meaning is not easy, but it’s still allowed, and I think you’ll be happier for the trouble…

Postface
This is the end of “Act Two” for this Blog. Two-and-a-half years ago, I described the purpose of this Act Two in a post at the end of Act One. In that post, I suggested that, in the posts of Act Two, I might also include comments on topics in the news, but instead, I posted such comments at my other blog, Means and Ends, which has had disappointingly few visitors. As for what to do now, I’m not sure.

For sure, I’m going to take a break from posting at either blog, to write the final (“Z”) chapter of my book. But I’m not sure that it’s worth my effort to write an appendix for the Z-chapter. As mentioned in the earlier post, the purpose of the Z-appendix would be to describe some simple math and physics useful for understanding how the universe might have been created by a symmetry-breaking quantum-like fluctuation in total nothingness.

When I started writing the book in earnest (16 years ago!), writing such an appendix seemed to be a good idea, but with the video by the physicist Lawrence M. Krauss entitled “A Universe from Nothing”, with the new book co-authored by the physicist Stephen Hawking entitled The Grand Design, with books and articles by the physicist Victor Stenger such as God: The Failed Hypothesis, and with other analyses readily available, I now question if it would be wise to invest two-or-more years of my life in the proposed undertaking. Instead, I’m thinking it would be better if I tried not only to clean up the writing in my book (which will be a substantial effort) but also to write a “condensed version” of the book, because I’m painfully aware that the length of what’s posted over at www.zenofzero.net is intimidating, especially for the young readers for whom it was written.

In a few months, I’ll decide what to do next. A possibility is that, for Act III, I’ll post the “condensed version” of my book. Who knows, after such an Act III, I may still have enough energy and interest to return to the promised simple math and physics, which would then be Act IV. As for my other blog, I might abandon it: apparently it hasn’t even reached the level of being “background noise”!

www.zenofzero.net
••••

Closing Comments – 3 – Adoption of the God Lie

2010-12-11T05:35:00.000-08:00

••••
This is the 38th in a series of posts dealing with the history (and even some prehistory) of what I call “the God Lie”, and it’s the third of four posts containing some closing comments on the 1) Origins, 2) Promotion, 3) Adoption, and 4) Rejection of the God Lie. My goal for this post is to provide some closing comments on what appear to be the most important reasons why people adopted (and still adopt) the God Lie. When convenient, I’ll illustrate those reasons with the insights entertainingly created between 1985 and 1995 by Bill Watterson in his Calvin and Hobbes comic strips (which, I remind readers, are still copyrighted and can’t be used for commercial purposes without the approval of Universal Press Syndicate).

In the previous two posts, I tried to convey some closing comments on apparent origins of the God Lie and how it was promoted. In his amazing 1921 book The Story of Religious Controversy, the ex-Catholic priest Joseph McCabe (1867–1955) provided the following summary (to which I’ve added the italics):

The clue to the evolution of gods is… the rise of man to tribal organizations under chiefs. When men become hunters and fighters, the strong or cunning man gets chosen as leader. He becomes a chief. The leadership becomes hereditary. And, as the spirit-world is a duplicate of the living world, there are more powerful spirits in the world beyond the grave. Famous ancestors or former members of the tribe rise in the memory above all the ordinary spirits, who are individually forgotten. They are on the way to become gods. But it is a very gradual process, with all sorts of shades of belief, all degrees of “godness”, so to say.

We see the rise from a crowd of spirits to a few outstanding spirits which, under the fostering influences of the priests, became what we may call gods. We see the nature-gods gradually… rising to importance above deified ancestors. We see rude huts over chief’s remains or fetishes growing into carved temples. We see priesthoods gaining in power, wealth, and organization. We see the departed spirits gradually acquiring a home, at first in the forest or beyond the hills or in some other vague place, then underground, then with the great spirits in the sky. We see, in fine, a strong tendency everywhere for one great spirit, and it is very commonly the sky-god, to predominate. The whole story of man’s religious evolution lies before us, not in a dead and speculative chronicle, but in living remnants of the various ages through which the [human] race has passed…

The facts give no indication whatever of a religious instinct, an inner sense or urge, or whatever new name one invented. From beginning to end it is a question “of drawing wrong inferences from observed facts” – the shadow, the dream, the nightmare, disease, death, the movements of wind and river, the rain, the sun and moon, the annual birth and death of vegetation. The only urge beyond the subtle urge of priesthoods [to gain power]… is the curiosity of man. He itches to explain things. From beginning to end religion is an explanation or interpretation of obscure and dark things.

With respect to the power grab by priests (and other clerics), maybe in the beginning it was (as McCabe wrote) “the subtle urge of priesthoods [to gain power]…” but as they gained power, the subtlety certainly subsided! As Rudolf Rocker (1873–1958) wrote in his 1937 book Nationalism and Culture:

Although the priest is the [claimed] mediator between man and this higher power on which the subject feels himself dependent and which, therefore, becomes fate to him, Volney’s contention that religion is the invention of the priest shoots wide of the mark; for there were religious concepts long before there was a priestly caste. It can also be safely assumed that the priest himself was originally convinced of the correctness of his understanding. But gradually there dawned on him the idea of what unlimited power the blind belief and gloomy fear of his fellowmen had put into his hands, and what benefit could accrue to him from this. Thus awoke in the priest the consciousness of power, and with this the lust for power, which grew constantly greater as the priesthood became more and more definitely a separate caste in society. Out of the lust for power there developed the “will to power”, and with that there evolved in the priesthood a peculiar need. Impelled by this, they tried to direct the religious feelings of believers into definite courses and so to shape the impulses of their faith as to make them serve the priestly quest for power.

It’s easy to agree with Rocker that the people’s “blind belief and gloomy fears” provided clerics with opportunities to gain power over the people. In turn, Rocker was apparently agreeing with Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900), since Rocker put “will to power” in quotation marks and Nietzsche’s (posthumous) 1901 book is entitled Will to Power. In his 1886 book Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche wrote:

[Anything which] is a living and not a dying body… will have to be an incarnate will to power, it will strive to grow, spread, seize, become predominant – not from any morality or immorality but because it is living and because life simply is will to power...

It would be a misreading of Nietzsche, however (and a misreading of anthropology and psychology), to conclude that man’s “will to power” is confined to power over other people: ever since descending from the trees, humans have sought power over their environments, food supplies, modes of travel, etc. Such people were (and are), as Nietzsche wrote in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, “the creators, the harvesters, the celebrators… the victor[s], the self conqueror[s], the master[s] of [their] senses, the ruler[s] of [their] virtues.” Thus, for the vast majority of humans, our “will to power” is our “will power” (!) to understand, grow, and prosper. It’s only for certain pathetic humans (such as pimps, misogynist patriarchs, politicians, priests and other clerical parasites) that their “will to power” degenerates to seeking power over other people.

In their will to gain power over people and yet with no capabilities other than mouthing meaningless words (such as ‘god’, ‘sin’, ‘afterlife’, and so on), ancient priests and subsequent clerics concocted various religious confidence schemes, as I outlined in the previous post. But of course, for their con games to prosper, then as in any con game, clerics needed (and still need) to appear to provide people with relief from their fears – and more. Therefore, to “hook their marks” clerics provided a variety of “come-ons” with the exact “hook” that ensnared (and still ensnares) each “mark” depending on specific psychological weaknesses of each “mark”.

Stated differently, there are a mind-boggling number of reasons why people adopted (and still adopt) the God Lie. In earlier chapters (starting here), I reviewed some of those reasons, which I (somewhat jokingly) listed alphabetically as follows:

Addiction, Animal-training, (seeking) Answers, (out of) Arrogance, (wanting) Assurance, (feeling) Awe, (feeling) Betrayed, (desiring to) Belittle (others), (seeking) Career-advancement, (seeking) Certainty, Childhood Conditioning, (seeking) Comfort, (seeking) Company, (seeking) Control, Cowardice, Credulity, (seeking) Customers, (fearing) Death, (lost in) Dreams, Egomania, Epilepsy, (seeking) Eternal Life, (out of) Fear, Following (leaders), Foolishness, (seeking) Friends, (out of) Frustration, (desiring) Goals, (out of) Greed, (seeking) Guidance, (out of) Guilt, (to get out of the) Gutter, (seeking) Happiness, Herd instinct, Hero worship, (seeking) Hope, Hypnosis, (unconstrained) Imagination, Ignorance, Indoctrination, (out of) Inquisitiveness, (lacking) Judgment, (seeking) Kinship, (desiring) Kindness, (seeking) Knowledge, (intellectual) Laziness, (out of) Loneliness, (searching for) Love, Megalomania, (seeking a) Mate, (searching for) Meaning, (out of) Misery, Narcissism, (fear of) Ostracism, (an) Opiate, Pack instinct, Parental pressure, (seeking) Peace, Political (purposes), (some other) Psychosis, (seeking) Purpose, (unanswered) Questions, (sheer) Rationalization, Revelation, Savagery, Schizophrenia, (seeking) Security, Selfishness, Selflessness, Socialization, (seeking) Support, (following) Tradition, (simply) Training, Tribalism, (unease caused by) Uncertainty, (to relieve) Unhappiness, (because of) Visions, (marriage or other) Vows, (out of) Weakness, (seeking) Wisdom, (living on) Wishes, Xenophobia, Yearnings (for assurance, brotherhood, comfort, development, empathy, friends, guidance, heaven, insight, justice, kindness, love…), Zonked out (on drugs).

In this post, I certainly don’t want to repeat details about those reasons or how different people seem to combine different reasons to “justify their faith” (to themselves). Instead, here my goal is “simply” to provide some summary comments on what seem to have been the predominant reasons why the God Lie started – and continues to this day! In the process, I’ll try to illustrate that each “positive” reason (i.e., one that had some “upside potential”) also contains “downside” or “negative” consequences. I’ll emphasize this dual nature of some of the principal reasons for adopting the God Lie by displaying the dichotomy even in the section titles that follow.

1. Satisfying / Frustrating Quests for Understanding

Undoubtedly, the deep roots of all organized religion are buried in ignorance, feeding on fears (e.g., of death and of powerful, natural forces, which still today are commonly, ignorantly, and ridiculously called “supernatural forces”). More than 350 years ago, Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679, after whom Bill Watterson named Calvin’s plush-toy-tiger Hobbes, and who, in his 1660 book Leviathan, was the first “to advance a secular, scientific account of moral and political life”) summarized the origin of religions as follows:

Fear of things invisible is the natural seed of that which everyone in himself calleth religion.

But describing the same reason more positively, then rather than saying that all religions are based on ignorance, we can acknowledge that a reason why people adopted (and still adopt) the God Lie is to try to satisfy their desire for knowledge and understanding. This was expressed by McCabe (in the quotation at the start of this post) as “[man] itches to explain things.” Approximately 2300 years earlier, Aristotle expressed the same idea as: “Man by nature desires to know”. As far as I recall, however, Aristotle neglected to add two obvious and important points: 1) that we desire knowledge because it usually helps us to survive (and prosper), and 2) that most unfortunately, far too many people fail to evaluate if answers they are provided actually contain any knowledge, let alone understanding.

As a result in the case of organized religions, the people’s positive attribute of seeking knowledge is overwhelmed by the negative consequences of clerics’ providing the people with, not understanding, but balderdash. In his Calvin & Hobbes comic strip, Bill Watterson aptly illustrated the concept:

[Panel (1) Calvin (C), named after the theologian John Calvin (1509–1564): “How do bank machines work?” (2) Calvin’s Dad (CD): “Well, let’s say you want 25 dollars. You punch in the amount…” (3) CD: “…and behind the machine there’s a guy with a printing press who makes the money and sticks it out this slot.” (4) C: “Sort of like the guy who lives up in our garage and opens the door?” CD: “Exactly.”]

Yet, supplied with similar balderdash, religious people claim that they then have understanding! For example, Islam’s ludicrous “holy book” (the Koran or spelled Qur’an) conveys the following nonsense:

And one of His signs is that He [Allah] shows you the lightning for fear and for hope, and sends down water from the clouds then gives life therewith to the earth after its death; most surely there are signs in this for a people who understand. (30.24)

In reality, the cause of thunder and lightning has (of course) absolutely nothing to do with people’s fears and hopes; instead, the causes of people’s fears and hopes when they encounter lightning storms are the storms, themselves! Similarly, the claim that Allah “sends down water from the clouds then gives life therewith to the earth after its death” is (of course) more nonsense: life on Earth has continued for two or three billion years, not only not dying for lack of rain during dry seasons, but much of life is well-supplied with water in the oceans! Further and similar to all religious people, the poor Muslim people have had (and continue to have) great difficulty interpreting the alleged “signs”, as Watterson illustrated:

[(1) {Calvin sees a strange-looking cloud}, (2) {The cloud seems to portray a menacing face, startling Calvin}, (3) {The cloud changes shape and “the sign” puzzles Calvin}, (4) C: “Boy, there’s nothing worse than an inscrutable omen.”]

To the rescue, all clerics have always been available to provide the people with interpretations of such “signs” and “inscrutable omens” – for a price! And most unfortunately, the vast majority of humans have been (and continue to be) satisfied with superficial, erroneous claims to understanding, e.g., the pathetic, pompous, pious claims to “understanding” peddled by clerics that gods exist and are in control – of course adding that they (the clerics) are in communication with the controlling gods. Silly people!

Similarly, many silly people are amazingly susceptible to “conspiracy theories”, e.g., probably the majority of Muslims accept the “theory” that the “Jews control… [whatever, from the media to the world]” and probably the majority of the members of the American Tea Party movement accept the “theory” that anthropogenic global warming is “nothing but a hoax promoted by liberal lefties.” The commonality seems to be that, yes, people desire to know, but even more so, they just want “explanations”!

Of course, most people would probably prefer if the supplied explanations were correct (i.e., if the alleged understanding has a high probability of being correct), but many people are apparently satisfied if they are given some reasonable sounding (and preferably simple) explanation, even if the “explanation” is some cockamamie conspiracy theory or some equally cockamamie explanation containing the word ‘God’ – which is simply an abbreviation for “I don’t know” (or, as Americans usually slur it, “I dunno”).

For example, consider the following illustrations (which I already used in an earlier chapter):

•    Why is there so much evil in the world? To which the clerics respond: “God works in mysterious ways.” (Translation: “I dunno.”)

•    Why do bad things happen to good people? Response by clerics: “God works in mysterious ways.” (Translation: “I dunno.”)

•    Why doesn’t God defeat the devil? Response by clerics: “God works in mysterious ways.” (Translation: “I dunno.”)

•    Who made the universe? Response by clerics: “God did.” (Translation: “I dunno.”)

•    What existed before “the beginning” and what did God use to make the universe? Response by clerics: “God only knows.” (Translation: “I dunno.”)

•    Who created God? Response by clerics: “God always existed” or “God created himself.” (Translation: “I dunno.”)

•    Why doesn’t God eliminate all the confusion about his existence? Response by the clerics: “God works in mysterious ways.” (Translation: “I dunno.”)

As Nietzsche had his Zarathustra say in Thus Spoke Zarathustra:

… into every gap they [the prophets and priests] had plugged a delusion, their stopgap, whom they named God.

The result in religious people is an amazing combination of ignorance and arrogance, as Robert Ingersoll (1833–1899) outlined:

Only the very ignorant are perfectly satisfied that they know. To the common man the great problems are easy. He has no trouble in accounting for the universe. He can tell you the origin and destiny of man and the why and wherefore of things. As a rule, he is a believer in special providence, and is egotistic enough to suppose that everything that happens in the universe happens in reference to him… Think of the egotism of a man who believes that an infinite being wants his praise!

Such people, it would seem, fail to appreciate the wisdom expressed by Pharaoh Akhenaten (who reigned from about 1353 to about 1336 BCE):

The wise man doubteth often, and changeth his mind; the fool is obstinate, and doubteth not; he knoweth all things but his own ignorance.

And so, religious people looked (and still look) for guidance from their gods:

[(1) C: {Filling a balloon with water} “Fwooshh” (2) C: “In order to determine if there is any universal moral law beyond human convention {e.g., as I’ve described in earlier posts, the ancient Egyptians’ Ma’at, the ancient Hindus’ Ritam, the ancient Persians’ Asha, the Ancient Greeks’ Logos, the Ancient Jews’ Wisdom, the Gnostics’ Sophia, and the Christians’ Word}, I have devised the following test.” (3) C: “I will throw this water balloon at Susie Derkins unless I receive some sign with the next 30 seconds that this wrong.” (4) C: “It is in the universe’s power to stop me. I’ll accept any remarkable physical happenstance as a sign that I shouldn’t do this.” (5) C: “Ready?… Go! Tum te tum doo doo.” (6) C: “…Nothing’s happeninngg… Five seconds to go!” (7) C: Time’s up! That proves it! There’s no moral law! WHEEE! Ha ha!” (8) C: “Hey Susie!!” {SPLOOSH} (9) {Susie chasing Calvin, and Calvin yelling} “HELP! HELP! HEL…” (10) C {Clobbered}: “Why does the universe always give you the sign after you do it??”]

Actually, with the above strip, Watterson provided some lessons also for irreligious people, including: 1) Experimental results can easily be misinterpreted. 2) In your experiments, ensure that all variables are controlled (and realize that few women can be controlled – claims of all the Abrahamic religions to the contrary notwithstanding). 3) In particular, ensure that all sentient beings allegedly involved in your experiments are present (after, of course, confirming that they exist!). 4) Be very circumspect of proposed hypotheses that violate already well-established principles, e.g., as Ayn Rand wrote in her book Philosophy: Who Needs It?

Are you in a universe which is ruled by natural laws and, therefore, is stable, firm, absolute – and knowable? Or are you in an incomprehensible chaos, a realm of inexplicable miracles, an unpredictable, unknowable flux, which your mind is impotent to grasp? The nature of your actions – and of your ambition – will be different, according to which set of answers you come to accept.

5) Thereby, realize that some theories aren’t worth testing, e.g., as Richard Feynman relayed:

Some years ago I had a conversation with a layman about flying saucers – because I am scientific, I know all about flying saucers! I said, “I don’t think there are flying saucers.” So my antagonist said, “Is it impossible that there are flying saucers? Can you prove that it’s impossible?” “No”, I said, “I can’t prove it’s impossible. It’s just very unlikely.” At that he said, “You aren’t very scientific. If you can’t prove it’s impossible, then how can you say what’s more likely and what’s less likely?” But that’s the way that IS scientific. It’s scientific only to say what’s more likely and what’s less likely, and not to be proving all the time the possible and impossible. To define what I mean, I might have said to him, “Listen, I mean that from my knowledge of the world that I see around me, I think that it’s much more likely that the reports of flying saucers are the results of the known irrational characteristics of terrestrial intelligence than of the unknown rational efforts of extra-terrestrial intelligence.” It’s just more likely; that’s all.

2. Satisfying / Manipulating Basic Instinctive Needs

As Rocker wrote, clerics built their power on “the blind belief and gloomy fear of his fellowmen”. People’s primary fear (“programmed” into our DNA) is fear of death; therefore, in their “blind belief”, people eagerly adopted (and still adopt) the untestable idea of “life after death” – too blinded by fear (and greed) to notice that “life after death” is an oxymoron. But stated more positively, people adopt religions seeking security. As Episcopalian Bishop John Shelby Spong recently said (for which he has received continuing criticism from Christian fundamentalists):

People don’t realize religion is never a search for truth. Religion is a search for security. Now [i.e., currently], we have theological enterprises that try to shape truth. But the bedrock of our religion is a search for security. And that comes out of the very dawning of self-consciousness… [We] started out by naming every tree and rock and shrub and bush and river and ocean – it had a spirit. And we worked out a way of accommodating that spirit. That’s where religion starts – in a search for security in a radically insecure world.

When people first adopted the (silly) idea that they would be immune from death is unknown. As mentioned in the previous post, archeological data suggest that such a belief existed even 100,000 years ago! If the beliefs of Native Americans a few centuries ago are indicative of beliefs of earlier hunter-gatherers, then belief in a “happy hunting ground” after death was widespread tens of thousands of years ago. As mentioned in earlier posts in this series, by the time the pyramids were constructed (~4,500 years ago), Egyptians were obsessed with the idea of life-after-death, just as fundamental Christians are, today, as well as the vast majority of “modern” Muslims.

I expect that few people would deny that there are positive aspects to belief in an afterlife. Undoubtedly, overcoming fear of death is desirable, but it should be done rationally. For example, in contrast to the irrationality of religious people, the Greek philosopher Epicurus (341–271 BCE) reasoned:

…death is nothing to us. For all good and evil consists in sensation, but death is deprivation of sensation. And therefore a right understanding that death is nothing to us makes the mortality of life enjoyable, not because it adds to it an infinite span of time, but because it takes away the craving for immortality. For there is nothing terrible in life for the man who has truly comprehended that there is nothing terrible in not living.

More succinctly: one can't be aware of a lack of awareness.

But although there may be benefits from religious methods for avoiding fear of death, there are also many negative aspects of especially Christian and Muslim speculations about the oxymoronic idea of “life after death”. (Do words no longer need meaning?!) Later in this post, I’ll briefly mention more of those negative aspects, including denying reality and engaging in corrupting, greedy quests for unearned rewards. In this section, though, I want to focus “just” on the negative consequence that, unfortunately for humanity, people coupled (and still couple) their fear of death and their wishful belief in an afterlife with the concepts of good and evil. Watterson illustrated the concept in a strip that I already used two posts ago, but I think it’s so insightful that I hope readers will consider it again:

[(1) Calvin (C): “I wonder where we go when we die.” (3) Hobbes (H): “Pittsburgh?” (4) C: “You mean if we’re good or if we’re bad?”]

Linking people’s fate in an imagined afterlife to their behavior in this (our only!) life was (and continues to be) not only the primary “meal ticket” of all Christian and Muslim clerics but also has resulted in an absolutely horrible corruption of the concept of morality. As I’ve described in earlier chapters (e.g., start here) and earlier posts in this series (e.g., start here), moral values (as with any values) have meaning only relative to some objective. For social animals (such as humans) a set of “moral behaviors” slowly evolved (with experience) to assist individuals to live productively with others in families, clans, tribes, and communities. Such are the real-life bases of morality. In contrast, if an individual’s prime goal is to live eternally in paradise, then he or she will adopt whatever moral principles the con-artist clerics claim are necessary to attain that goal, out to an including crashing hijacked airliners into civilian skyscrapers, murdering thousands of innocent people.

Thereby, the clerics of all organized religions hijacked morality. In conflict with the reality that moral activities are those that evolution and experiences have revealed to be beneficial for people and their communities, clerics promote the silly idea that moral principles are rules of conduct declared, once-and-for-all by their (fictitious) gods! Consequently, if the clerics tell the people that birth control is evil, masturbation and homosexuality are “abominations before the Lord”, Jews killed Jesus or are “pigs”, girls can be sold like cattle, women are less intelligent than men (and are to be obedient to them – and can be killed by them for “dishonoring” their families), wives can be raped at will (or be beaten), thieves should have appendages cut off, adulterers should be stoned to death, and similar rules that barbarians established a thousand-and-more years ago, then foolish, “modern” people abandon their natural and developed understanding of morality in a greedy grab for eternal life in paradise.

Yet, it’s clear that clerics were (and continue to be) clever con artists, having learned how to capitalize on the people’s fears and greed and knowing that “you can never cheat an honest man.” As I reviewed in earlier posts in this series, the assumed linkage between morality in this life and fate in an imagined afterlife is abundantly clear in ancient Egypt’s Book of the Dead and in Zarathustra’s speculations. Such wild speculations then came to dominate first Jewish, then Christian, and especially Muslim “holy scripture”. And in what one must admit was a competent “bait and switch”, clerics managed to transfer people’s fear of death, first to fear of the god who “judged the dead” and then to fear of the clerics (who claimed to be spokesmen for their gods). As all clerics learned, fear is a powerful motivating force.

For example, the Jewish Bible (the Tanakh) frequently repeats the hideous message (e.g., at Job 28, 28, Psalm 111, and Proverbs 9, 10):

The fear of the Lord is [the beginning of] wisdom…

What the Jewish clerics undoubtedly meant (similar to all clerics before and since) was: “Fear us clerics!” Then, following Zarathustra, subsequent Jewish, Christian, and Muslim clerics “upped the ante”, coupling people’s fear of death with fear of punishment after death. For example, the New Testament (e.g. at Luke 12, 5) promotes the hideous idea:

But I will show you whom you should fear: Fear him who, after the killing of the body, has power to throw you into Hell. Yes, I tell you, fear him.

That same hideousness is repeated again and again (and again!) in the Koran:

Me [Allah] alone should you fear (2.41) …fear me if you are believers (3.175) … fear Me [Allah]. (5.3; 5.44)… call on Him [Allah] fearing and hoping… (7.56) … remember your Lord within yourself humbly and fearing (7.205) … fear him [Allah] (9.13) …surely I fear, if I disobey my Lord, the punishment of a mighty day (10.15) Most surely there is a sign in this for him who fears the chastisement of the hereafter… (11.103) They fear their Lord above them and do what they are commanded. (16.50) Say: I fear, if I disobey my Lord, the chastisement of a grievous day… (39.13) We [Allah] know best what they say, and you are not one to compel them; therefore remind him by means of the Quran who fears My threat. (50.45)… And We left therein a sign for those who fear the painful punishment (51.37)… He who fears will mind… (87.10)

In addition, the Koran contains some of the most hideous descriptions of a fictitious Hell that have ever (unfortunately) been recorded. I won’t illustrate them; interested readers may want to start at the webpage of the Shariah Program, which contains approximately 200 quotations (I can’t be bothered even to count them all) from Islamic “holy scripture” describing the Hell imagined by macabre Muslim maniacs.

In happy contrast, Hindu clerics at least had the decency to promote (in The Upanishads):

He who knows the joy of Brahman (i.e., God)… is free from fear.

But even in this case, it’s a crazy case of freedom from fear – it’s a delusion generated by denial, similar to what Watterson illustrated:

[(1) C: “I say a day without denial is a day you’ve got to face.” (2) C: “From now on, I’m not going to think about anything that’s unpleasant.” H: “Isn’t that a pretty self-deceiving way to go through life?” (3) {Calvin, seemingly perplexed} (4) C: “I’m not going to think about that.”]

Thereby, one can clearly see a major “downside” of belief in an afterlife: living in the delusion of an afterlife, people lose control to the clerics of the one life they have. As Robert Ingersoll wrote:

The priest pretended to stand between the wrath of the gods and the helplessness of man. He was man’s attorney at the court of heaven. He carried to the invisible world a flag of truce, a protest and a request. He came back with a command, with authority and with power. Man fell upon his knees before his own servant, and the priest, taking advantage of the awe inspired by his supposed influence with the gods, made of his fellowman a cringing hypocrite and slave.

It’s no wonder that, since so many humans fear death and therefore hold fast to the delusion that they’ll live forever, people who believe such nonsense develop so little wisdom. As Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) said:

Fear is the main source of superstition, and one of the main sources of cruelty. To conquer fear is the beginning of wisdom.

In addition to fear, greed can be a powerful motivating force, as ancient Egyptian and Zoroastrian clerics learned. Following them, Christian and Muslim clerics added (to the stick of a fearful hell) a carrot of greed for perpetual paradise, to get their donkey believers to obey them. And the people bought into the con games, obviously “thinking” that the risk (in losing control of their lives to the clerics) was worth the potential reward (of eternal bliss in paradise).

I put the word ‘thinking’ in quotation marks, because such a conclusion is mind boggling in its egotistic stupidity: do such people really “think” that their blind beliefs in clerical fairytales sufficiently justifies their gaining eternal life in paradise? Wouldn’t someone who dismisses such fairytales and concentrates on helping humanity (e.g., by inventing labor-saving devices from wheels to the internet, by developing vaccines against killer viruses, by stopping annihilating asteroids, or “just” by saving ecosystems, defusing the population bomb, or making progress in reducing violence) be more likely to receive such a reward? But then, as Watterson illustrated, many people are happy to gain unearned rewards:

[(1) C: “Susie, can I copy your answers?” S: “Heck no!” (2) C: “Why not?” S: “Because you’d get a good grade without doing any work.” (3) C: “So?” S: “So it’s wrong to get rewards you haven’t earned.” (4) C: “I’ve never heard of anyone who couldn’t live with that.”]

Christian clerics, however (probably because they decried pleasures of the flesh as “sinful”), were never able to construct a very appealing picture of Heaven: everything they proposed would eventually become “boring as hell”! The madman Muhammad, in contrast, was able to construct an appealing picture of Paradise (at least for men): he made it an eternal whorehouse, each man “blessed” with 72 “perpetual virgins” (hurs). Watterson, however, saw more. I mean, even a mujahideen would probably get bored with his 72 hurs (probably more correctly translated as “white raisins”) after the first few hundred thousand years or so in paradise. In contrast, Watterson saw the need for people to be creative:

[(1) C: “Hobbes, what do you think happens to us when we die?” (2) {Hobbes thinks about it.} (3) H: “I think we play saxophone for an all-girl cabaret in New Orleans.” (4) C: “So you believe in heaven?” H: “Call it what you like.”]

Calvin, though, wondered even about the need for creativity:

[(1) C: “Why does man create?” (2) C: "Is it man’s purpose on Earth to express himself, to bring form to thought, and to discover meaning in experience?" (3) {Calving pondering the question} (4) C: “Or is it just something to do when he’s bored?”]

As another option, probably the theologian John Calvin imagined that we want to create because we were allegedly created in the image of a creator god:

[C: “Made in God’s own image, yes sir!” H: “God must have a goofy sense of humor.”]

Agreed: God must have had “a goofy sense of humor”! For example, how else can one explain the Biblical story about God's destruction of the Tower of Babel, destruction that God allegedly “justified” as follows (Genesis 11, 6):

Here they are, one people with a single language, and now they have started to do this [build the tower]; henceforward nothing they have a mind to do will be beyond their reach.

I would certainly hope so! Aren’t we to be creators in the image of a creator god?! Further, as Nietzsche had his Zarathustra say:

Creating – that is the great redemption from suffering, and life’s becoming light… Away from God and gods this Will lured me: what would there be to create, after all, if there were gods?

But maybe Watterson again saw it better, this time relayed in a response from Hobbes to another of Calvin’s curiosities:

[(1) C: “Look how your tail flips around!” (2) C: “I wonder which muscles control that. I can sort of clench my butt, but I don’t think it could wiggle a tail. Hmmm, how strange!” (3) C: “I’ve never really thought about butt muscles before.” (4) H: “Some things don’t need the thought people give them.”]

I would certainly agree that gods and afterlives, for example, “don’t need the thought people give them.” In fact, I’d go so far as to say that thinking about such things is a total waste of time – save for time spent considering how to rid the world of such ignorance and associated fear and greed.

It’s all sooooo… Stupid! Christianity, for example, promises to satisfy demands from nonproducers to get something for nothing – and not get some measly “something”, but the most astounding benefit imaginable for absolute pittance, i.e., eternal life in heaven (while enjoying watching your enemies’ unending agony in hell), as a “reward” for simply saying you believe such balderdash. Of course, to gain such rewards, Christians are also required “to love one another” and to love God, but as Ingersoll saw:

Human love is generous and noble. The love of God is selfish, because man does not love God for God’s sake, but for his own…

Similar applies to Christian love of others: it’s not done out of generosity but greed (for eternal life in paradise). Nonetheless, some defense of Christianity can be mounted, in that (at least now, after being “humanized” by Humanists) it’s not quite so depraved as Islam: Islam promises eternal life in paradise not for just believing in its silliness but for killing those who don’t! Thus, although Christianity is bad, Islam is evil.

3. Additional Psychological Manipulations / Guidance

As I suggested earlier in this post with my alphabetized list, there are many reasons why people adopted (and still adopt) the God Lie. Many of these reasons are consistent with “codes” programmed into our DNA. These include our instinct to continue living, our herd and pack instincts (which manifest in our tendencies to join tribes or communities and to follow charismatic leaders), and our instincts as social animals (e.g., seeking companions, being altruistic, punishing “cheaters”, etc.). In this section, I’ll address a few such reasons (dealing with seeking purposes, friends, and companions) that have both positive and negative consequences. In the final two sections of this post, I’ll address other reasons and methods that have predominantly negative consequences, both for individuals and their societies.

It’s of course correct that positive attributes of religion dealing with forming communities and acting purposefully are available in many other venues (including families, civic organizations, and communities of Humanists, Brights, etc.), but being the first of such organizations by thousands of years – except of course for families and clans – religions certainly are much better established, organized, and funded. In fact, one can see that most religions are modeled after interactions in families and clans, as recent anthropological studies have investigated:

[Craig T.] Palmer [associate professor of anthropology, Univ. of Missouri] and Lyle B. Steadman, emeritus professor of human evolution and social change at Arizona State University, explored the supernatural claims in different forms of religion, including ancestor worship, totemism (the claim of kinship between people and a species or other object that serves as the emblem of a common ancestor), and shamanism (the claim that traditional religious leaders in kinship-based societies could communicate with their dead ancestors). They found that the clearest identifiable effect of religious behavior is the promotion of cooperative family-like social relationships, which include parent/child-like relationships between the individuals making and accepting the supernatural claims and sibling-like relationships among co-acceptors of those claims.

“Almost every religion in the world, including all tribal religions, use family kinship terms such as father, mother, brother, sister and child for fellow members,” Steadman said. “They do this to encourage the kind of behavior found normally in families – where the most intense social relationships occur. Once people realize that observing the behavior of people communicating acceptance of supernatural claims is how we actually identify religious behavior and religion, we can then propose explanations and hypotheses to account for why people have engaged in religious behavior in all known cultures.”

At the Richard Dawkins Forum, in a thread foolishly deleted by an incompetent administrator, "bobalu49" added:

Basically, they [the anthropologist mentioned in the above-quoted news release] observe that religious talk facilitates social cooperation in family and kinship relationship groups. Religion serves a fundamental social organizational purpose (establishing authority and cooperation) and for that reason has survived. “Man” invented “God” in his own image, and invented religion to help keep the family and tribe together. Religion is such a successful invention it doesn’t depend on whether there is any truth behind any of the claims of a supernatural being or not.

It’s not so much that God is a delusion as it is a metaphor used to get little children to behave. Unfortunately some folks never grow up and take responsibility for their own actions. Thus we hear people telling us it’s “God’s Plan” to invade other countries and kill thousands of people including innocent children.

Come to think of it, this sort of religion requires that there not be a god or else they couldn’t get away with the atrocities they commit in the name of their god.

In addition, many people apparently are unable to discern their purpose in life (e.g., to help all types of intelligence to prosper). As a result of their inabilities to identify their purpose in life, such people are susceptible to suggestion made by others, because as Watterson illustrated, living one’s life without a conceived purpose can be depressing:

[(1) C: “Susie, do you want to trade Captain Napalm bubble gum cards?” (2) C: “After chewing almost $20 worth of gum, I’ve collected all the cards except numbers 8 and 34. I’ll trade you any duplicate for either of those.” (3) S: “I don’t collect Captain Napalm bubble gum cards.” (4) C: “It must be depressing to go through life with no purpose.”]

As well, people (being social animals) seek friends:

[(1) S: “Sniff. That stupid Calvin. Why does he call me names for no reason? It’s just mean.” (2) S: “I wish I had a hundred friends. Then I wouldn’t care. I’d say, 'Who needs you, Calvin? I’ve got a hundred other friends'!" (3) S: “Then my hundred friends and I would go do something fun, and leave Calvin all alone! Ha!” (4) S: “…and as long as I’m dreaming, I’d like a pony.”]

Meanwhile, Calvin had an ideal, imaginary friend (Hobbes), always much more agreeable and reliable than any real person – just as religious people have their ideal, imaginary friends (e.g., Jesus and Muhammad):

[(1) C: “True friends are hard to come by.” (2) C: “I need more money.” {!} (3) C: “I wish people were more like animals.” (4) C: “Animals don’t try to change you or make you fit in. They just enjoy the pleasure of your company.” (5) C: “Animals aren’t conditional about friendships. Animals like you just the way you are.” (6) C: “They listen to your problems. They comfort you when you’re sad. And all they ask in return is a little kindness.” (7) H: “Whooonk *Sob* It’s so… so true! Hoot! THBPBTPTH!” (8) H: “…and speaking of ‘a little kindness’, I’d have a tuna fish sandwich any time soon that you happen to make one…” (8) C: “Of course, some animals get on your nerves once in a while.”]

Actually, speaking about “a little kindness" and “get[ing] on your nerves”, there’s more to having Yahweh, Jesus, Muhammad, or Allah as one’s “friend”. It was illustrated by someone else’s perceptive removal of one letter in a line familiar in Christian and formerly Christian countries: “You’ve got a f_iend in Jesus.” That is, in all the Abrahamic religions (and in all, similar, political tyrannies), fear and love of God (or similar, tyrannical leaders) are weirdly intertwined in a “paradoxical psychological phenomenon” now called the Stockholm Syndrome

…wherein hostages express adulation and have positive feelings towards their captors that appear irrational in light of the danger or risk endured by the victims, essentially mistaking a lack of abuse from their captors as an act of kindness.

Maybe readers remember the Patty Hearst case. The psychological diagnosis seems to be that people (e.g., battered wives) can begin to love those who don’t mistreat them quite so badly as they might, “mistaking a lack of abuse from their captors as an act of kindness.” As stated in the referenced Wikipedia article:

Psychiatrist Frank Ochberg, widely credited with Stockholm Syndrome’s psychiatric definition, describes it as “a primitive gratitude for the gift of life,” not unlike that felt by an infant.

It’s probably why people could proclaim their love for brutal tyrants (Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Saddam Hussein, and other tyrants, such as those now ruling most Muslim countries). I can imagine such people thinking:

“The glorious ruler hasn’t yet unleashed his fury on me. Isn’t he wonderful?!”

Although the sickness is now called the Stockholm Syndrome (because psychiatrists first recognized it in hostages during a 1973 bank robbery in Stockholm), yet given the number of sufferers inflicted, it would be more appropriate to call it something similar to “the Abrahamic-Religion Syndrome”. That is, clerics of all the Abrahamic religions require followers to simultaneously love and fear their (fictitious) god.

Thousands of years ago, clerics apparently stumbled upon the value (to them!) of inducing the Stockholm Syndrome in their followers, probably by seeing (and possibly experiencing) similar psychoses induced by political tyrants. For example, as I sketched in earlier posts in this series (e.g., start here), the clerical authors of the Pentateuch (whom I refer to as Ezra and co-conspirators) probably modeled the behavior of their “mythical Moses monster” after such historically verified, tyrannical monsters as the Egyptian pharaoh Thothmes III (c.1480–1425 BCE) and the Assyrian king Tiglath-Pileser (c.1115–1076 BCE). Moreover, ruling by fear was probably the norm for most mid-eastern tribal groups, providing a template for the subsequent ruling by fear, while demanding love, promoted in Christianity and Islam, respectively established by (the “butcher emperor”) Constantine and (the madman) Muhammad.

Thus, still another reason why people adopted (and still adopt) the God Lie is that they suffered (and still suffer) from the Stockholm Syndrome, saying to themselves, in effect:

“Isn’t God wonderful? He hasn’t yet destroyed me, like He did Job. And if I just do exactly what the clerics say, then maybe He won’t torture me for eternity in Hell.”

Yet, even if their imaginary “friends” (Yahweh, Jesus, Muhammad, Allah…) are the worst-imaginable terrorists, for some people their only friends are imaginary or animals – or as in the case of Calvin, an imaginary animal:

[(1) Calvin’s Uncle (CU): “Boy, Calvin takes that stuffed tiger everywhere he goes.” Calvin’s Mother (CM): “Yeah, they’re inseparable.” (2) CU: “Do you worry about that? I mean, shouldn’t he be playing with real friends?” (3) CM: “Oh, I think he will when he’s ready. Didn’t you ever have an imaginary friend?” (4) CU: “Sometimes I think all my friends have been imaginary.”]

But as Richard Dawkins asked:

Wouldn’t it be lovely to believe in an imaginary friend who listens to your thoughts, listens to your prayers, comforts you, consoles you, gives you life after death, can give you advice? Of course it’s satisfying, if you can believe it. But who wants to believe a lie?

Unfortunately for the rest of us, obviously a significant fraction of all humans do believe such a lie: it’s called the God Lie. Whether or not they “truly believe” the lie is known only to them, but what does seem obvious is that they WANT to believe it’s “the Truth”.

4. Guiding / Corrupting Societies

Additional negative aspects of the methods used by clerics to control communities then become apparent. Certainly it’s the case, as Calvin saw, that there’s a lot of lying going on: civilized life sometimes recommends that we lie, e.g., to disguise our greed:

[(1) C: “I want the last piece of pie! Don’t divide it up! Give it to me!” CM: “Don’t be selfish Calvin.” (2) C: “So the real message here is ‘be dishonest’?” (3) {Calvin gets the pie!}]

But even so, civilized life doesn’t require that we lie to ourselves:

[(1) H: “Aren’t you supposed to be doing your homework?” (2) C: “I’m pretty sure the assignment was optional.” (3) H: “Denial springs eternal.” C: “It’s not denial. I’m just very selective about the reality I accept.”]

Yet, such is a requirement of all organized religions: denial of reality. And once people begin to lie to themselves (e.g., that they “truly believe” that their protecting/threatening god exists and that they’ll get eternal bliss in paradise just for obeying lame-brain but conniving clerics), then lying to others becomes progressively easier:

[(1) C: “Any monsters under my bed tonight?!” (2) Monsters: “Nope!” “No!” “Uh-uh” (3) C: “Well, there’d better not be! I’d hate to have to torch one with my fame thrower!” (4) H: “You have a flame thrower??” C: “They lie. I lie.”]

Thereby, Christians and Muslims (for example) become slaves to their delusions, controlled by clerics in power (just as Calvin was controlled by his parents):

[(1) C: “Do you believe our destinies are controlled by the stars?” (2) H: “No, I think we can do whatever we want with our lives.” (3) {Calvin wondering} (4) C: “Not to hear Mom and Dad tell it.”]

Especially in the case for Muslims (as I addressed in an earlier post), they also become astoundingly fatalistic, regardless of how evidence contradicts their fatalism. As a result, nothing (so they claim) is their fault:

[(1) C: “I’ve decided to be a fatalist.” (2) C: “All events are preordained and unalterable. Whatever will be will be. That way, if anything bad happens, it’s not my fault. It’s fate.” {The theologian John Calvin called it ‘predestination’} (3) {Hobbes trips Calvin, who hollers} “WAUGH!” (4) H: “Too bad you were fated to do that.” C: “That wasn’t fate!”]

In their resulting stupor, religious people live in their lies, delusions, denials, and deceptions, seeking happiness:

[(1) C: “You know what I’ve noticed, Hobbes? Things don’t bug you if you don’t think about them.” (2) C: “So from now on, I simply won’t think about anything I don’t like, and I’ll be happy all the time!” (3) H: “Don’t you think that’s a pretty silly and irresponsible way to live?” (4) C: “What a pretty afternoon.”]

And yes, religious people can thereby seem to gain happiness, but as George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950) said:

The fact that a believer is happier than a skeptic is no more to the point than the fact than a drunken man is happier than a sober one.

What’s “more to the point” is that, by denying reality, all organized religions corrupt both real happiness (making progress toward real goals) and the real bases of morality (which, again, aren’t proclamations from some god but are simply ways found through experience to be useful for social animals to interact). The corruption starts with lying to oneself, as Thomas Paine (1737–1809) saw:

It is necessary to the happiness of man that he be mentally faithful to himself. Infidelity does not consist in believing, or in disbelieving; it consists in professing to believe what one does not believe. It is impossible to calculate the moral mischief, if I may so express it, that mental lying has produced in society. When man has so far corrupted and prostituted the chastity of his mind, as to subscribe his professional belief to things he does not believe, he has prepared himself for the commission of every other crime.

And to top it off, after denying reality, lying to themselves, living in delusions, refusing to learn, and blaming others, religious people amazingly develop ignorant arrogance:

[(1) C {working on a homework assignment}: “This is hopeless! How am I supposed to create a desert scene in this shoe box when I don’t even know what a desert looks like?!” (2) C: “I’ve never been to a desert! Mom and Dad never take me anywhere fun on vacations! If they’d taken me to a desert sometime, I’d know this stuff!” (3) H: “Why don’t you get out a book?” C: “And go to all that trouble?! Yeah, sure! Look, I’m a busy guy! I’ve got other things to do with my life besides this, you know!” (4) H: “Right. Why waste time learning, when ignorance is instantaneous?” C: “My TV show starts in 20 minutes. Are you going to help me or not?”]

As Robert Ingersoll saw, such ignorant arrogance is the death knell of social cooperation:

When a man really believes that it is necessary to do a certain thing to be happy forever, or that a certain belief is necessary to ensure eternal joy, there is in that man no spirit of concession. He divides the whole world into saints and sinners, into believers and unbelievers, into God’s sheep and Devil’s goats, into people who will be glorified and people who are damned… He has not the modesty born of the imperfections of human nature; he has the arrogance of theological certainty and the tyranny born of ignorant assurance…

Thereby, adopting the lie of an afterlife in heaven has managed to turn life on Earth into hell. As D.M. Brooks wrote in his 1933 book The Necessity of Atheism:

There are embodied in all creeds three human impulses: fear, conceit, and hatred; and religion has given an air of respectability to these passions. Religion is a malignant disease born of fear, a cancer which has been eating into the vitals of everything that is worthwhile in our civilization; and by its growth obstructing those advances which make for a more healthful life… religion has provided the shackles and securely and jealously enslaved the mind. With the aid of his religious beliefs man has been ensnared into a mental prison in which he has been an all too willing captive. Surely it is easier to believe than to think.

Religious philosophy is slave philosophy; it teaches of a God who is personally interested in the individual and who will reward present misery with future bliss. The demoralizing effect of this infamous fraud is apparent everywhere. If a worker is constantly assailed with this nonsense from the pulpit, the result is the production in him of a mental as well as a physical slavery; it aggravates his mental inertia, and the force of repetition achieving its effects, he soon resigns himself to his present miserable state drugged with the delusion of a better life in the hereafter. He believes that his destiny is predetermined by God and that he will be rewarded in heaven for his sufferings on earth.

And the basic cause is that religious people abandon common sense:

[(1) CM: “Calvin. How did you break this dish?!” C: “I was carrying too much and it dropped.” (2) CM: “Your problem is you’ve got no common sense.” (3) C: “I’ve got plenty of common sense!” (4) C: “I just choose to ignore it.”]

Choosing to ignore common sense is one of the dumbest and most irresponsible thing that religious people do: they don’t apply common sense to judge what does and what doesn’t qualify as ‘evidence’ and they don’t apply common sense to hold beliefs only as strongly as relevant, reliable evidence warrants. Such foolishness is called ‘faith’, and audaciously, clerical con artists of the world describe such faith as a “moral good”, instead of the evil it obviously is. The consequences of such evil (to individuals and to societies) have been horrible. Some such consequences were described well more than 200 years ago by Paul Henri d’Holbach (1723–1789) in the Preface to his 1772 book Good Sense:

When we examine the opinions of men, we find that nothing is more uncommon than common sense, or in other words, they lack judgment to discover plain truths or to reject absurdities and palpable contradictions. We have an example of this in Theology, a system revered in all countries by a great number of men; an object regarded by them as most important, and indispensable to happiness. An examination of the principles upon which this pretended system is founded forces us to acknowledge that these principles are only suppositions, imagined by ignorance, propagated by enthusiasm or knavery, adopted by timid credulity, preserved by custom which never reasons, and revered solely because not understood.

In a word, whoever uses common sense upon religious opinions, and will bestow on this inquiry the attention that is commonly given to most subjects, will easily perceive that Religion is a mere castle in the air. Theology is ignorance of natural causes, a tissue of fallacies and contradictions. In every country, it presents romances void of probability, the hero of which is composed of impossible qualities. His name, exciting fear in all minds, is only a vague word to which men affix ideas or qualities, which are either contradicted by facts or inconsistent.

Notions of this being, or rather, the word by which he is designated, would be a matter of indifference, if it did not cause innumerable ravages in the world. But men, prepossessed with the opinion that this phantom is a reality of the greatest interest, instead of concluding wisely from its incomprehensibility that they are not bound to regard it, infer on the contrary that they must contemplate it, without ceasing, and never lose sight of it. Their invincible ignorance upon this subject irritates their curiosity; instead of putting them upon guard against their imagination, this ignorance renders them decisive, dogmatic, imperious, and even exasperates them against all who oppose doubts to the reveries which they have begotten.

What perplexity arises when it is required to solve an insolvable problem; unceasing meditation upon an object, impossible to understand, but in which however he thinks himself much concerned, cannot but excite man and produce a fever in his brain. Let interest, vanity, and ambition co-operate ever so little with this unfortunate turn of mind, and society must necessarily be disturbed. This is the reason that so many nations have often been the scene of extravagances of senseless visionaries, who, believing their empty speculations to be eternal truths and publishing them as such, have kindled the zeal of princes and their subjects and made them take up arms for opinions, represented to them as essential to the glory of the Deity. In all parts of our globe, fanatics have cut each other’s throats, publicly burnt each other, committed without a scruple and even as a duty, the greatest crimes, and shed torrents of blood. For what? To strengthen, support, or propagate the impertinent conjectures of some enthusiasts or to give validity to the cheats of impostors, in the name of a being who exists only in their imagination and who has made himself known only by the ravages, disputes, and follies he has caused.

Savage and furious nations, perpetually at war, adore, under divers names, some God, conformable to their ideas, that is to say, cruel, carnivorous, selfish, bloodthirsty. We find in all the religions “a God of armies,” a “jealous God,” an “avenging God,” a “destroying God,” a “God,” who is pleased with carnage, and whom his worshipers consider it a duty to serve. Lambs, bulls, children, men, and women are sacrificed to him. Zealous servants of this barbarous God think themselves obliged even to offer up themselves as a sacrifice to him. Madmen may everywhere be seen who, after meditating upon their terrible God, imagine that to please him they must inflict on themselves the most exquisite torments. The gloomy ideas formed of the deity, far from consoling them, have everywhere disquieted their minds and prejudiced follies destructive to happiness.

How could the human mind progress while tormented with frightful phantoms and guided by men interested in perpetuating its ignorance and fears? Man has been forced to vegetate in his primitive stupidity: he has been taught stories about invisible powers upon whom his happiness was supposed to depend. Occupied solely by his fears and by unintelligible reveries, he has always been at the mercy of priests, who have reserved to themselves the right of thinking for him and of directing his actions.

Thus, man has remained a slave without courage, fearing to reason, and unable to extricate himself from the labyrinth in which he has been wandering. He believes himself forced under the yoke of his gods, known to him only by the fabulous accounts given by his ministers, who, after binding each unhappy mortal in the chains of prejudice, remain his masters or else abandon him defenseless to the absolute power of tyrants, no less terrible than the gods, of whom they are the representatives.

Oppressed by the double yoke of spiritual and temporal power, it has been impossible for the people to be happy. Religion became sacred, and men have had no other morality than what their legislators and priests brought from the unknown regions of heaven. The human mind, confused by theological opinions, ceased to know its own powers, mistrusted experience, feared truth and disdained reason, in order to follow authority. Man has been a mere machine in the hands of tyrants and priests. Always treated as a slave, man has contracted the vices of slavery.

Such are the true causes of the corruption of morals. Ignorance and servitude are calculated to make men wicked and unhappy. Knowledge, Reason, and Liberty can alone reform and make men happier. But everything conspires to blind them and to confirm their errors. Priests cheat them, tyrants corrupt and enslave them. Tyranny ever was, and ever will be, the true cause of man’s depravity, and also of his calamities. Almost always fascinated by religious fiction, poor mortals turn not their eyes to the natural and obvious causes of their misery, but attribute their vices to the imperfection of their natures and their unhappiness to the anger of the gods. They offer to heaven vows, sacrifices, and presents to obtain the end of sufferings, which in reality, are attributable only to the negligence, ignorance, and perversity of their guides, to the folly of their customs, and above all, to the general want of knowledge. Let men’s minds be filled with true ideas, let their reason be cultivated, and there will be no need of opposing to the passions such a feeble barrier as the fear of gods. Men will be good when they are well instructed – and when they are despised for evil, or justly rewarded for good, which they do to their fellow citizens.

In vain should we attempt to cure men of their vices, unless we begin by curing them of their prejudices. It is only by showing them the truth that they will perceive their true interests and the real motives that ought to incline them to do good. Instructors have long enough fixed men’s eyes upon heaven; let them now turn them upon earth. An incomprehensible theology, ridiculous fables, impenetrable mysteries, puerile ceremonies are to be no longer endured. Let the human mind apply itself to what is natural, to intelligible objects, truth, and useful knowledge.

Does it not suffice to annihilate religious prejudice to show that, what is inconceivable to man, cannot be good for him? Does it require anything but plain common sense, to perceive that a being, incompatible with the most evident notions – that a cause continually opposed to the effects which we attribute to it – that a being of whom we can say nothing without falling into contradiction – that a being who, far from explaining the enigmas of the universe, only makes them more inexplicable – that a being, whom for so many ages men have vainly addressed to obtain their happiness and the end of sufferings – does it require, I say, anything but plain, common sense, to perceive that the idea of such a being is an idea without model and that he himself is merely a phantom of the imagination? Is anything necessary but common sense to perceive, at least, that it is folly and madness for men to hate and damn one another about unintelligible opinions concerning a being of this kind? In short, does not everything prove that morality and virtue are totally incompatible with the notions of a God, whom his ministers and interpreters have described, in every country, as the most capricious, unjust, and cruel of tyrants, whose pretended will, however, must serve as law and rule the inhabitants of the earth?

To discover the true principles of morality, men have no need of theology, of revelation, or of gods: they have need only of common sense. They have only to commune with themselves, to reflect upon their own nature, to consider the objects of society and of the individuals who compose it, and they will easily perceive that virtue is advantageous and vice disadvantageous to themselves. Let us persuade men to be just, beneficent, moderate, sociable, not because such conduct is demanded by the gods, but because it is pleasant to men. Let us advise them to abstain from vice and crime, not because they will be punished in another world, but because they will suffer for it in this. These are, says Montesquieu, means to prevent crimes – these are punishments; these reform manners – these are good examples.

The way of truth is straight; that of imposture is crooked and dark. Truth, ever necessary to man, must necessarily be felt by all upright minds; the lessons of reason are to be followed by all honest men. Men are unhappy only because they are ignorant; they are ignorant, only because everything conspires to prevent their being enlightened; they are wicked only because their reason is not sufficiently developed.

By what fatality, then, have the first founders of all sects given to their gods ferocious characters, at which nature revolts? Can we imagine a conduct more abominable than that which Moses tells us his God showed towards the Egyptians, where that assassin proceeds boldly to declare, in the name and by the order of his God, that Egypt shall be afflicted with the greatest calamities that can happen to man? Of all the different ideas, which they give us of a supreme being, of a God, creator and preserver of mankind, there are none more horrible than those of the impostors, who represented themselves as inspired by a divine spirit, and “Thus saith the Lord.”

Why, O theologians! do you presume to inquire into the impenetrable mysteries of a being whom you consider inconceivable to the human mind? You are the blasphemers, when you imagine that a being, perfect according to you, could be guilty of such cruelty towards creatures whom he has made out of nothing. Confess, your ignorance of a creating God and cease meddling with mysteries, which are repugnant to Common Sense.

5. Educating / Brainwashing Children

The prime reason why religious people show such little common sense is, of course, childhood indoctrination in supercilious, supernatural nonsense. In turn, a critical component of such brainwashing is parental indoctrination of their children, by parents who were similarly brainwashed when they were children. And in turn, the reason why childhood indoctrination is so effective is because the survival advantage of trusting our parents is “programmed” into our DNA. As Richard Dawkins wrote in his book Unweaving the Rainbow:

Children are naturally credulous. Of course they are, what else would you expect? They arrive in the world knowing nothing, surrounded by adults who know, by comparison, everything. It is earnestly true that fire burns, that snakes bite, that if you walk unprotected in the noon sun you will bake red, raw and, as we now know, cancerous. Moreover, the other and apparently more scientific way to gain useful knowledge, learning by trial and error, is often a bad idea because the errors are too costly. If your mother tells you never to paddle in the lake because of the crocodiles, it is no good coming over all skeptical and scientific and ‘adult’ and saying, “Thank you mother, but I prefer to put it to the experimental test.” Too often, such experiments would be terminal. It is easy to see why natural selection – the survival of the fittest – might penalize an experimental and skeptical turn of mind and favor simple credulity in children.

But this has an unfortunate by-product which can’t be helped. If your parents tell you something that isn’t true, you must believe that, too. How could you not? Children are not equipped to know the difference between a true warning about genuine dangers and a false warning about going blind, say, or going to hell, if you ‘sin’. If they were so equipped, they wouldn’t need warnings at all. Credulity, as a survival device, comes as a package. You believe what you are told, the false with the true. Parents and elders know so much, it is natural to assume that they know everything and natural to believe them. So when they tell you about Father Christmas coming down the chimney and about faith ‘moving mountains’, of course you believe that, too.

Children are gullible because they need to be if they are to fulfill their ‘caterpillar’ role in life. Butterflies have wings because their role is to locate members of the opposite sex and spread their offspring to new food plants. They have modest appetites satisfied by occasional sips of nectar. They eat little protein by comparison with caterpillars, which constitute the growing stage in the life history. Juvenile animals in general have the role of preparing to become successfully reproducing adults. Caterpillars are there to feed as rapidly as possible in order to chrysalize into flying, reproducing, dispersing adults. To this end they have no wings but instead have stout munching jaws and voracious, single-minded appetites.

Human children need to be credulous for a similar reason. They are information caterpillars. They are there to become reproducing adults, in a sophisticated, knowledge-based society. And by far the most important source of their information diet is their elders, above all their parents. For the same kind of reason as caterpillars have chumbling, hoovering jaws for sucking up cabbage flesh, human children have wide open ears and eyes, and gaping, trusting minds for sucking up language and other knowledge. They are suckers for adult knowledge. Tidal waves of data, gigabytes of wisdom flood through the portals of the infant skull, and most of it originates in the culture built up by parents and generations of ancestors.

Not to grow up properly is to retain our ‘caterpillar’ quality from childhood (where it is a virtue) into adulthood (where it becomes a vice). In childhood our credulity serves us well. It helps us to pack, with extraordinary rapidity, our skulls full of the wisdom of our parents and our ancestors. But if we don’t grow out of it in the fullness of time, our caterpillar nature makes us a sitting target for astrologers, mediums, gurus, evangelists and quacks. The genius of the human child, mental caterpillar extraordinary, is for soaking up information and ideas, not for criticizing them. If critical faculties later grow it will be in spite of, not because of, the inclinations of childhood. The blotting paper of the child’s brain is the unpromising seedbed, the base upon which later the skeptical attitude, like a struggling mustard plant, may possibly grow. We need to replace the automatic credulity of childhood with the constructive skepticism of adult science…

Of course, skepticism can develop not only from scientific studies but also from receiving conflicting “information”, e.g., from different parents, as Bill Watterson suggested:

[(1) C: “How do they know the load limit on bridges Dad?” {Sign near bridge: “Load Limit 10 Tons”} (2) CD: “They drive bigger and bigger trucks over the bridge until it breaks.” (3) CD: “Then, they weigh the last truck and rebuild the bridge.” (4) C: “Oh. I should’ve guessed.” Calvin’s Mom (CM): “Dear, if you don’t now the answer, just tell him!”]

Sometimes, however, a child’s intelligence and experiences provoke revulsion at some indoctrination:

[(1) C: “Dad, how do people make babies?” (2) CD: “Most people just go to Sears, buy the kit, and follow the assembly instructions.” (3) C: “I came from Sears??” CD: No, you were a Blue Light Special at K-Mart. Almost as good, and a lot cheaper.” (4) C: “AAUUGHHH!” CM: “Dear, what are you telling Calvin now?!”]

Richard Dawkins continues:

On their own, then, the words ‘gullible’ and ‘credulous’ are not quite right for children. Truly credulous people believe whatever they have most recently been told, even if this contradicts what others have told them before. The quality of childhood that I am trying to pin down is not pure gullibility but a complex combination of gullibility coupled with its opposite – stubborn persistence in a belief, once acquired. The full recipe, then, is extreme early gullibility followed by equally obstinate subsequent unshakeability. You can see what a devastating combination this could be. Those old Jesuits knew what they were about: “Give me the child for his first seven years, and I’ll give you the man.”

The efficacy of childhood indoctrination has been known for thousands of years and has been utilized by all tyrants, not just by religious leaders, as the following quotations illustrate:

•    Shall we, then, thus lightly suffer our children to listen to any chance stories fashioned by any chance teachers and so to take into their minds opinions for the most part contrary to those that we shall think it desirable for them to hold when they are grown up? By no manner of means will we allow it. [Plato]

•    Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old, he will not depart from it. [Bible, Proverbs 22, 6]

•    Give me a child until he is seven and he is mine for life. [Ignatius of Loyola, 1491–1556, principal founder and first Superior General of the Jesuits]

•    Give me four years to teach the children, and the seed I have sown will never be uprooted. [Vladimir Lenin]

•    Education is a weapon, whose effect depends on who holds it in his hands and at whom it is aimed. [Joseph Stalin]

•    At every hour of every day, I can tell you on which page of which book each schoolchild in Italy is studying. [Benito Mussolini]

•    By educating the young generation along the right lines, the People’s State will have to see to it that a generation of mankind is formed which will be adequate to this supreme combat that will decide the destinies of the world… I will have no intellectual training. Knowledge is ruin for my young men. [Adolph Hitler]

And the poor kids grow up without knowing how their minds have been warped by their indoctrination:

[(1) C: “You know what’s weird? I don’t remember much of anything until I was three years old.” (2) C: “Half of my life is a complete blank! I must’ve been brainwashed!” (3) C: “Good heavens, what kind of sicko would brainwash an infant?! And what did I know that someone wanted me to forget??” (4) C: “Boy, am I mysterious.” H: “I seem to recall you spend most of the time burping up.”]

Meanwhile, the answer to Calvin’s question, “What kind of sicko would brainwash [kids]?” is obvious: tyrants, such as clerics! It’s immoral – and should be a crime.

Indoctrination of children explains why the probability is high (I expect it’s greater than 90%) that people who are religious profess the religion of their parents. In his 1980 communication “The Freedom of Conscience and of Religion”, the damnable Pope John Paul II put the following spin on such brainwashing of children, arguing for

…freedom for parents to educate their children in the religious convictions that inspire their own life, and to have them attend catechetical and religious instruction as provided by their faith community…

What about freedom for children not to be brainwashed in religious balderdash?! Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860) clearly saw both the problem and its solution:

We know that man is in general superior to all other animals, and this is also the case in his capacity for being trained. Mohammedans [Muslims] are trained to pray with their faces turned towards Mecca, five times a day; and they never fail to do it. Christians are trained to cross themselves on certain occasions, to bow, and so on. Indeed, it may be said that religion is the chef d’oeuvre [viz., ‘masterpiece’] of the art of training, because it trains people in the way they shall think – and, as is well known, you cannot begin the process too early. There is no absurdity so palpable but that it may be firmly planted in the human head if you only begin to inculcate it before the age of five, by constantly repeating it with an air of great solemnity…

The human intellect is said to be so constituted that “general ideas” arise by abstraction from “particular observations”, and therefore come after them in point of time. If this is what actually occurs, as happens in the case of a man who has to depend solely upon his own experience for what he learns – who has no teacher and no book – such a man knows quite well which of his particular observations belong to and are represented by each of his general ideas. He has a perfect acquaintance with both sides of his experience, and accordingly, he treats everything that comes in his way from a right standpoint. This might be called the “natural” method of education.

Contrarily, the “artificial” method is to hear what other people say, to learn and to read, and so to get your head crammed full of general ideas before you have any sort of extended acquaintance with the world as it is, and as you may see it for yourself. You will be told that the particular observations, which go to make these general ideas, will come to you later on in the course of experience; but until that time arrives, you apply your general ideas wrongly, you judge men and things from a wrong standpoint, you see them in a wrong light, and treat them in a wrong way. So it is that education perverts the mind.

This explains why it so frequently happens that, after a long course of learning and reading, we enter upon the world in our youth, partly with an artless ignorance of things, partly with wrong notions about them; so that our demeanor savors at one moment of a nervous anxiety, at another of a mistaken confidence. The reason of this is simply that our head is full of general ideas which we are now trying to turn to some use, but which we hardly ever apply rightly. This is the result of acting in direct opposition to the natural development of the mind by obtaining general ideas first, and particular observations last: it is putting the cart before the horse.

Instead of developing the child’s own faculties of discernment, and teaching it to judge and think for itself, the teacher uses all his energies to stuff its head full of the ready-made thoughts of other people. The mistaken views of life, which spring from a false application of general ideas, have afterwards to be corrected by long years of experience; and it is seldom that they are wholly corrected. This is why so few men of learning are possessed of common sense, such as is often to be met with in people who have had no instruction at all.

To acquire a knowledge of the world might be defined as the aim of all education; and it follows from what I have said that special stress should be laid upon beginning to acquire this knowledge “at the right end”. As I have shown, this means, in the main, that the particular observation of a thing shall precede the general idea of it; further, that narrow and circumscribed ideas shall come before ideas of a wide range.

It means, therefore, that the whole system of education shall follow in the steps that must have been taken by the ideas themselves in the course of their formation. But whenever any of these steps are skipped or left out, the instruction is defective, and the ideas obtained are false; and finally, a distorted view of the world arises, peculiar to the individual himself – a view such as almost everyone entertains for some time, and most men for as long as they live.

No one can look into his own mind without seeing that it was only after reaching a very mature age, and in some cases when he least expected it, that he came to a right understanding or a clear view of many matters in his life, that, after all, were not very difficult or complicated. Up till then, they were points in his knowledge of the world which were still obscure, due to his having skipped some particular lesson in those early days of his education, whatever it may have been like – whether artificial and conventional, or of that natural kind which is based upon individual experience.

It follows that an attempt should be made to find out the strictly natural course of knowledge, so that education may proceed methodically by keeping to it; and that children may become acquainted with the ways of the world, without getting wrong ideas into their heads, which very often cannot be got out again. If this plan were adopted, special care would have to be taken to prevent children from using words without clearly understanding their meaning and application. The fatal tendency to be satisfied with words instead of trying to understand things – to learn phrases by heart, so that they may prove a refuge in time of need, exists, as a rule, even in children; and the tendency lasts on into manhood, making the knowledge of many learned persons to consist in mere verbiage.

However, the main endeavor must always be to let particular observations precede general ideas, and not vice versa, as is usually and unfortunately the case; as though a child should come feet foremost into the world, or a verse be begun by writing down the rhyme! The ordinary method is to imprint ideas and opinions, in the strict sense of the word, “prejudices”, on the mind of the child, before it has had any but a very few particular observations. It is thus that he afterwards comes to view the world and gather experience through the medium of those ready-made ideas, rather than to let his ideas be formed for him out of his own experience of life, as they ought to be.

A man sees a great many things when he looks at the world for himself, and he sees them from many sides; but this method of learning is not nearly so short or so quick as the method which employs abstract ideas and makes hasty generalizations about everything. Experience, therefore, will be a long time in correcting preconceived ideas, or perhaps never bring its task to an end; for wherever a man finds that the aspect of things seems to contradict the general ideas he has formed, he will begin by rejecting the evidence it offers as partial and one-sided; nay, he will shut his eyes to it altogether and deny that it stands in any contradiction at all with his preconceived notions, in order that he may thus preserve them uninjured.

So it is that many a man carries about a burden of wrong notions all his life long – crotchets, whims, fancies, prejudices, which at last become fixed ideas. The fact is that he has never tried to form his fundamental ideas for himself out of his own experience of life, his own way of looking at the world, because he has taken over his ideas ready-made from other people; and this it is that makes him – as it makes how many others! – so shallow and superficial.

Instead of that method of instruction, care should be taken to educate children on the natural lines. No idea should ever be established in a child’s mind otherwise than by what the child can see for itself, or at any rate it should be verified by the same means; and the result of this would be that the child’s ideas, if few, would be well grounded and accurate. It would learn how to measure things by its own standard rather than by another’s; and so it would escape a thousand strange fancies and prejudices, and not need to have them eradicated by the lessons it will subsequently be taught in the school of life. The child would, in this way, have its mind once for all habituated to clear views and thoroughgoing knowledge; it would use its own judgment and take an unbiased estimate of things.

And, in general, children should not form their notions of what life is like from the copy before they have learned it from the original, to whatever aspect of it their attention may be directed. Instead, therefore, of hastening to place “books”, and books alone, in their hands, let them be made acquainted, step-by-step, with “things” – with the actual circumstances of human life. And above all let care be taken to bring them to a clear and objective view of the world as it is, to educate them always to derive their ideas directly from real life, and to shape them in conformity with it – not to fetch them from other sources, such as books, fairy tales, or what people say – then to apply them ready-made to real life. For this will mean that their heads are full of wrong notions, and that they will either see things in a false light or try in vain to “remodel the world” to suit their views, and so enter upon false paths; and that, too, whether they are only constructing theories of life or engaged in the actual business of it.

It is incredible how much harm is done when the seeds of wrong notions are laid in the mind in those early years, later on to bear a crop of prejudice; for the subsequent lessons, which are learned from real life in the world have to be devoted mainly to their extirpation. “To unlearn the evil” was the answer, according to Diogenes Laërtius, Antisthenes gave, when he was asked what branch of knowledge was most necessary; and we can see what he meant.

No child under the age of fifteen should receive instruction in subjects which may possibly be the vehicle of serious error, such as philosophy, religion, or any other branch of knowledge where it is necessary to take large views; because wrong notions imbibed early can seldom be rooted out, and of all the intellectual faculties, judgment is the last to arrive at maturity. The child should give its attention either to subjects where no error is possible at all, such as mathematics, or to those in which there is no particular danger in making a mistake, such as languages, natural science, history, and so on. And in general, the branches of knowledge which are to be studied at any period of life should be such as the mind is equal to at that period and can perfectly understand.

In his book The Necessity of Atheism, Brooks summarized well the evils of indoctrinating children in religious balderdash:

I execrate the enslavement of the mind of our young children by the ecclesiastics. Is anything so pitiful to behold as the firm grasp that the Church places on the mind of the youngest of children? Children at play, children of four and five years of age, will be heard to mention with fearful tones various religious rites, such as baptism and confirmation, and to perform in their manner these rites with their dolls. Fear! Fear! instilled into the minds of the impressionable children!

Think of the degradation that the ecclesiastics practice when they insist that from the time a child is out of its infancy its instruction shall be placed in their hands. They take the most precious possession of man, his mind, and mould it to their desire. The mind of a child is plastic, it is like a moist piece of clay and they mould it and form it to their desire. Warped and poured into the ecclesiastic mould of fear, the mind of the child becomes set and fixed with the years.

Then it is too late for rational thinking, as far as religious matters go, the mind of the adult is firmly set in the form that the ecclesiastic has fashioned for him in his youth. It is impossible for the adult so taught to reason clearly and rationally concerning his religion; the mould is too strong, the clay has set, reason cannot penetrate into that hardened form. That is why it is almost impossible for the adult who has been exposed to this mental molding from his infancy to break away from the fears and superstitions learned on his mother’s knee.

If Christianity, Hebrewism [Judaism], Mohammedanism [Islam], or any other creed is true, its truth must be more apparent at the age of twenty-five than it is at the age of five. Why does the ecclesiastic not leave off his advances until the child reaches a mature age, an age when he can reason? Then, if theism is true, he can accept it with a reasoning mind, not a blindly faithful mind. The theist realizes, however, that belief is at one pole, reason at the other. Belief, creed, religion, are ideations of the primitive mind and the mind of the child; reason is the product of mature thought. Schopenhauer remarked that, “The power of religious dogma when inculcated early is such as to stifle conscience, compassion, and finally every feeling of humanity.”

The ecclesiastic has from earliest times taken the standpoint that the masses of people are of crude susceptibility and clumsy intelligence, “sordid in their pursuits and sunk in drudgery; and religion provides the only means of proclaiming and making them feel the high import of life.” [Schopenhauer] Thus the theist is led to the conclusion that the end justifies the means.

Indoctrinating children in any religion is the depth of immorality; it’s evil; it should be prosecuted not only as a crime against individual children but as a crime against humanity. Thankfully, clerics are now in jail and their organizations have been sued for raping children’s bodies. Surely it won’t be much longer until similar legal actions are taken against clerics for raping children’s minds – and as Watterson suggested, maybe people should take legal actions against their religious parents, holding them liable for damages:

[1) C: “Here, Dad, I’d like you to sign this form and have it notarized.” 2) D {reading the form}: “I, the undersigned Dad, attest that I have never parented before, and insofar as I have no experience in the job… 3) D {continuing to read}: I am liable for my mistakes and I agree to pay for any counseling, in perpetuity, Calvin may require as a result of my parental ineptitude.” 4) C {mad, sent to his room}: “I don’t see how you’re allowed to have a kid without signing one of those.”]

Suing parents for indoctrinating their children in religious balderdash is one possible way to try to exterminate the god meme. Earlier in my book (starting here), I already devoted 20 chapters (!) to investigating other possible ways. In the next post, I’ll provide some closing comments on progress already made rejecting the God Lie.

[To be concluded…]

www.zenofzero.net
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Closing Comments – 2 – Promotion of the God Lie

2010-11-21T04:49:00.000-08:00

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This is the 37th in a series of posts dealing with what I call “the God Lie” and the 2nd of four posts containing some closing comments on the 1) Origins, 2) Promotion, 3) Adoption, and 4) Rejection of the God Lie. For these final four posts I’ve decided to have a little fun (☺) by illustrating ideas with some Calvin and Hobbes comic strips, which were created during 1985 to 1995 by Bill Watterson and which (I remind readers) are still copyrighted, requiring permission from Universal Press Syndicate before being used for commercial purposes.

As I briefly reviewed in the previous post, the origins of the God Lie seem to have been a series of mistaken ideas by primitive people, mistakes that clerics later manipulated into lies. These mistakes can be organized into two broad categories. One category includes misinterpretations of experiences and misunderstandings of natural phenomena, including:

1) The people’s mistaken idea (probably derived from speculations about their own shadows, images, dreams, and hallucinations) that they possessed a “second self”, “spirit”, or “soul”,

2) Their mistaken idea that “the spirits of the dead” were still present (since such “spirits” appeared in their dreams and hallucinations),

3) Their mistake that they, too, would experience an “afterlife”,

4) Their mistake that everything (animals, streams, mountains, storms, etc.) possessed spirits,

5) Their mistake that the spirits of especially powerful natural forces (thunder storms, floods, earthquakes, etc.) could be placated, similar to how powerful tribal leader could be swayed by showing deference, and

6) Their mistake of permitting certain members of their tribes to intervene with powerful spirits on their behalf – probably members who could guide the people’s “entrance to the spirit world”, for example by dispensing hallucinogens or by inducing group hypnosis (e.g., by leading rhythmic chants, similar to the those heard in temples, synagogues, churches, and mosques to this day).

This sixth mistake (listed above) was potentially the most serious, because ancient people thereby permitted their “doctors” or shamans (forerunners of today’s clerics) to gain substantial power over the people (by controlling their imaginations), and as the people eventually learned, power usually corrupts.

A second category of mistakes (illustrated in the previous post) dealt with the purpose of life and how to achieve that purpose, mistakes that are still being made by more than half of all people living today (courtesy clerical lies). Correctly seen, the purpose of life is obvious and was obviously well known (before clerics confused people), namely, for life to continue. Such knowledge is “programmed” into our DNA; life that wasn’t so programmed is now extinct; a major part of that programming governs reproduction and then (after offspring have matured) discarding aged, temporary hosts of the still-living, billion-year-old DNA in favor of the new hosts, more capable of surviving in ever-changing physical and biological environments.

Perplexing questions for humans, however, have persisted: not whether to keep our DNA alive, but how? In fact, deciding how to ensure that our genes continue is what gives our lives meaning, to ourselves and to others. During our temporary hosting of our DNA, secular humanists do what we can to find intelligent, scientifically defensible solutions to human problems, to try to help the human DNA continue. In contrast, essentially all religious people (misled by clerical lies) foolishly and selfishly seek their own survival – for eternity! As Einstein summarized:

I cannot imagine a God who rewards and punishes the objects of his creation, whose purposes are modeled after our own – a God, in short, who is but a reflection of human frailty. Neither can I believe that the individual survives the death of his body, although feeble souls harbor such thoughts through fear or ridiculous egotism.

Yet, in their “ridiculous egotism” (promoted by clerics) more than half of all people living today believe that they can continue to host their own DNA forever, in an imagined paradise, provided they do exactly what their clerics say – out to and including crashing hijacked airlines into building, incinerating their own DNA. It’s not only criminally insane; it’s immoral.

Such is the wicked control that clerics can gain over imaginations when people immorally hold beliefs more strongly than is justified by relevant evidence. Instead of evaluating evidence, religious people “listen to their hearts”, they emotionally “do what feels right”, they “let their imaginations run wild”, they “rely on logic rather than reality”; thereby, they permit their clerics to gain authority over their lives. Such mistakes have caused (and continue to cause) humanity major harm. Below is an example of how Bill Watterson illustrated such errors:

[For some reason (unknown to me) the quality of these strips has deteriorated; therefore, I'll retype the text in captions. Here, in the first panel (1), Calvin (C) states: "Mom wants me to try an experiment tonight", (2) C: "She says that the monsters under my bed may need me to THINK about them to exist, (3) C: "Her theory is that if I just don't think about them, they'll go away." (4) Hobbes (H): "…Of course, that idea of being dragged under the bed and devoured by monsters has a way of gripping the mind." C: "And it's not like Mom and Dad go away when I stop thinking about THEM."]

[Comment on some 2011/02/07 Editing: The cause of the mentioned deterioration in the quality of Watterson's comic strips was apparently my mistaken assumption that their quality would be preserved in the transformation from the original GIF figures, to figures in a Microsoft Word document, and then to figures for a blogpost. Upon returning to the original GIF figures, the quality has been improved. Nonetheless, I've decided to keep these captions, in part because the Google translator of course doesn't translate text within figures, and in part because the text in some of the GIF figures (especially of Watterson's color, Sunday strips) is still difficult to decipher. Besides, readers can skip these captions relatively easily, especially if their browser displays the smaller font size of the captions.]

When people first made such errors is, of course, unknown. In general, it’s extremely difficult to establish pre-historic human chronology, especially since different tribes adopted different activities at different times. Further, not only are the time durations enormous (measured in tens of thousands of years!) but archeological evidence of prehistoric religions is notoriously difficult (and contentious) to interpret: it’s always difficult to determine what someone else is (or was) thinking; it’s almost impossible to do so when the only available data are from a few trinkets, skeletons, grave sites, and paintings on cave walls.

Nonetheless, evidence suggests that what’s now called ‘religion’ started during the early phase of the Stone Age (i.e., the Paleolithic or Old Stone Age). For example, evidence for symbolic thought has been found at the Blombos Cave in South Africa and evidence for belief in an afterlife has been found at the Qafzeh Cave in Israel, with both sets of evidence dated to be from about 100,000 years ago. Cave paintings, dating from about 30,000 years ago, have been interpreted as evidence of shamanism and animism.

As far as I know, the first evidence that shamans may have started to abuse their power is from the hilltop sanctuary in southern Turkey called Göbekli Tepe (Turkish for “hill with a potbelly”), dated to be from the start of the Neolithic (New Stone) Age. It was erected about 11,500 years ago. As summarized in the referenced Wikipedia article:

At present, Göbekli Tepe raises more questions for archaeology and prehistory than it answers. We do not know how a force large enough to construct, augment, and maintain such a substantial complex was mobilized and paid or fed in the conditions of pre-Neolithic society. We cannot “read” the pictograms, and do not know for certain what meaning the animal reliefs had for visitors to the site; the variety of fauna depicted, from lions and boars to birds and insects, makes any single explanation problematic. As there seems to be little or no evidence of habitation, and the animals depicted on the stones are mainly predators, the stones may have been intended to stave off evils through some form of magic representation. Alternatively, they may have served as totems… It is also apparent that the animal and other images give no indication of organized violence, i.e., there are no depictions of hunting raids or wounded animals, and the pillar carvings ignore game on which the society mainly subsisted, like deer, in favor of formidable creatures such as lions, snakes, spiders, and scorpions.

During similar times at other places in the world, however, primitive economies were probably too weak to support a cadre of shamans, who therefore probably couldn’t gain substantial power. I expect, instead, that most primitive people’s ideas about animism and their shamans were similar to the following opinions expressed by Native Americans during the most recent few centuries:

All things share the same breath – the beast, the tree, the man, the air shares its spirit with all the life it supports. [Chief Seattle (1786–1866), leader of the Suquamish and Duwamish tribes]

The Great Spirit is in all things. He is in the air we breathe. The Great Spirit is our Father, but the Earth is our Mother. She nourishes us… That which we put into the ground she returns to us… Great Spirit, whose gifts to us are being lost in selfishness and corruption, help us to find the way to restore our humanity. [Big Thunder (Bedagi), late 19th Century, Wabanaki Algonquin]

In the beginning of all things, wisdom and knowledge were with the animals, for Tirawa, the One Above, did not speak directly to man. He sent certain animals to tell men that he showed himself through the beasts, and that from them, and from the stars and the sun and moon should man learn… [Eagle Chief (Letakos-Lesa), c. 1904, Chief of the Pawnee]

We learned to be patient observers like the owl. We learned cleverness from the crow, and courage from the jay, who will attack an owl ten times its size to drive it off its territory. But above all of them ranked the chickadee because of its indomitable spirit. [Tom Brown, Jr., The Tracker, b.1950, student of Stalking Wolf, Apache]

The traditions of our people are handed down from father to son. The Chief is considered to be the most learned, and the leader of the tribe. The Doctor, however, is thought to have more inspiration. He is supposed to be in communion with spirits… He cures the sick by the laying of hands, and payers and incantations, and heavenly songs. He infuses new life into the patient and performs most wonderful feats of skill in his practice… He clothes himself in the skins of young innocent animals, such as the fawn, and decorates himself with the plumage of harmless birds, such as the dove and hummingbird… [Sarah Winnemucca, c.1841–1891, Paiute]

From Wakan-Tanka, the Great Mystery, comes all power. It is from Wakan-Tanka that the holy man has wisdom and the power to heal and make holy charms. Man knows that all healing plants are given by Wakan-Tanka; therefore, they are holy. So too is the buffalo holy, because it is the gift of Wakan-Tanka. [Flat-Iron (Maza Blaska), late 19th Century, Oglala Sioux Chief]

A wee child toddling in a wonder world, I prefer to their [Christian] dogma my excursions into the natural gardens where the voice of the Great Spirit is heard in the twittering of birds, the rippling of mighty waters, and the sweet breathing of flowers. If this is Paganism, then at present, at least, I am a Pagan. [Zitkala-Sa, 1876–1938, Sioux]

If readers gain the impression that animism and paganism seem a lot more sensible (and provide much more pleasant and uplifting feelings) than the blood, gore, mental slavery, and war of the Abrahamic religions, then welcome to the club!

But in any event, the Göbekli Tepe site seems to be the first site yet found where the power of “priests” (shamans) started to corrupt. Not incidentally, as stated in the referenced Wikipedia article:

Recent DNA analysis of modern domesticated wheat compared with wild wheat has shown that its DNA is closest in structure to wild wheat found on Mount Karaca Dağ 20 miles away from the site, leading one to believe that this is where modern wheat was first domesticated.

It suggests that the long, slow, Agricultural (or Neolithic) Revolution (which started at different times in different locations and possibly started in Turkey near the Göbekli Tepe site) led not only to more secure food supplies but also to more clerical parasites. Later, by the time that writing was developed sufficiently to convey ideas (in about 3,000 BCE), the parasitic priests essentially controlled their societies, as illustrated by such “monuments to folly” as the pyramids in Egypt and both stone shrines and brick sanctuaries in Mesopotamia. Still later (during the subsequent 5,000 years!), such monuments to folly were followed by all the foolish temples, cathedrals, mosques, etc. that have drained and continue to drain human and economic resources.

All of which is consistent with the assessment by evolutionary biologist Tom Ray that “successful systems attract parasites”. Ray's concept was illustrated by Matt Ridley in his 2010 book The Rational Optimist (as reported in a book review by John Tierney) with some examples of parasites subsequent to the first human parasites, i.e., the priests of the Neolithic Age:

Empires bought stability at the price of creating a parasitic court; monotheistic religions bought social cohesion at the expense of a parasitic priestly class; nationalism bought power at the expense of a parasitic military; socialism bought equality at the price of a parasitic bureaucracy; capitalism bought efficiency at the price of parasitic financiers.

But returning to the Agricultural or Neolithic Revolution, it appears to have been a “mixed blessing”, similar to all subsequent revolutions. As stated in the referenced Wikipedia article,

… the Neolithic Revolution involved far more than the adoption of a limited set of food-producing techniques… it would transform the small and mobile groups of hunter-gatherers that had hitherto dominated human history, into sedentary societies based in built-up villages and towns, which radically modified their natural environment by means of specialized food-crop cultivation (e.g., irrigation and food storage technologies) that allowed extensive surplus food production. These developments provided the basis for concentrated high population densities settlements, specialized and complex labor diversification, trading economies, the development of non-portable art, architecture, and culture, centralized administrations and political structures, hierarchical ideologies and depersonalized systems of knowledge (e.g., property regimes and writing). The first full-blown manifestation of the entire Neolithic complex is seen in the Middle Eastern Sumerian cities (ca. 3,500 BCE), whose emergence also inaugurates the end of the prehistoric Neolithic period.

What such a summary doesn’t address (but it’s addressed later in the same Wikipedia article) are the many new problems faced by the people: not only the problems caused by the priests with their “hierarchical ideologies and depersonalized systems of knowledge” but also overpopulation, pollution (e.g., of water supplies) with associated diseases, and diseases spread from domesticated animals to humans (including influenza, smallpox, and measles), diseases that subsequently decimated, for example, Native Americans who were inadvertently infected by European carriers. As stated in the referenced Wikipedia article:

It is often argued that agriculture gave humans more control over their food supply, but this has been disputed by the finding that nutritional standards of Neolithic populations were generally inferior to that of hunter gatherers, and life expectancy may in fact have been shorter, in part due to diseases. Average height, for example, went down from 5' 10" (178 cm) for men and 5' 6" (168 cm) for women to 5' 3" (165 cm) and 5' 1" (155 cm), respectively and it took until the twentieth century for average human height to come back to the pre-Neolithic Revolution levels.

In sum, it seems that, the further the agricultural revolution progressed, the more the people’s troubles increased, apparently consistent with the ecological principle that the population of any species grows to meet and then exceed natural carrying capacities, a process that’s subsequently corrected with starvation, disease, and (in the case of people) wars.

Simultaneously, what seems to have happened (and continues to this day!) is that the people mistakenly thought that “the gods” controlled not only natural phenomena but also the fates of individuals and their societies. From those faulty premisses (that gods exist and that they were in control), the people apparently concluded (using sound logic but from faulty premisses!) that their instinctively known prime goal (their genetic survival) could be best achieved if they could gain favor of the controlling gods. The essence of that error was well illustrated by Bill Watterson in a comic strip that I also used in the previous post:

[(2) H: "Do you think there's a god?" (4) C: "Well somebody's out to get me."]

The people then made the enormously grievous mistake that “the gods” were “out to get me” because the people had (somehow or other) offended the gods, which to this day, clerics call “sins”. Unfortunately, though, the people didn’t know what they might have done to offend the gods – although, if they had (at some time and in some manner) violated cultural norms, they probably did feel some guilt, since the DNA of humans (and monkeys, dolphins, whales, etc.) also contains the “programming” to be social animals. And as Bill Watterson illustrated, the resulting guilt probably made the people feel even worse:

[(1) C: "Mom! Mom! A big dog knocked me down and he stole Hobbes!" (2) C: "I tried to catch him, but I couldn't, and now I've lost my best friend." (3) Calvin's Mom (CM): "Well Calvin, if you wouldn't drag that tiger everywhere, things like this wouldn't happen." (4) C: "There's no problem so awful that you can't add some guilt to it and make it even worse!"]

Worse still, the people were then “ripe for the picking” by con artists whom we now call clerics: for the price of freeloading on producers, the con artists were more than willing to tell the people not only how they had “sinned against the gods” but also what “goodies” the people should give to the gods to appease them. Further, being the self-proclaimed, altruistic spokesmen for the gods, the clerics assigned themselves the “onerous task” of “collecting the goodies” for the gods – and what the gods didn’t consume, the clerics did. It’s the most widespread, longest running, and most-lucrative con game the world has ever known – and it continues to this day!

It’s a con game – based on lies (as are all con games) – because in fact, no cleric (or anyone else, for that matter) “knows” what any god wants. Perhaps surprising to more than half of all people in the world today, that fact is amazingly consistent with the most certain knowledge that humans have been able to gain, namely, that there are no gods (and never were any). Yet, all con-artist clerics (to this day) have claimed that they know what their gods want – which turns out to be amazingly similar to what the clerics want: a free ride on the backs of producers. As Robert Ingersoll wrote:

Religion supports nobody. It has to be supported. It produces no wheat, no corn; it ploughs no land; it fells no forests. It is a perpetual mendicant. It lives on the labors of others, and then has the arrogance to pretend that it supports the giver… Ministers say that they teach charity. That is natural. They live on alms. All beggars teach that others should give…

In addition, by the way, the ideas of all clerics are also ridiculous: an omnipotent, omniscient god (for example) can’t have an unfulfilled want. Consequently (I want to add), the collapse of all such clerical con games could be expedited if all religious people would inform their clerics that they no longer want to deal with any god (such as Yahweh, Jesus, or Allah) who is so pitiful as to have an unfulfilled want!

Anyway, as far as I know the first clear evidence of the con games run by all clerics (claiming to know what their gods want) is contained in the written version of the Mesopotamian genesis myth entitled Enuma Elish or Enûma Eliš, the title of which is the first two words of the myth, translated to be: “When on high”. The available version of this myth (written on clay tablets) is from the time of ancient Babylon (about 1800 BCE, more than a 1,000 years before the oldest writings in the Bible), since it describes how the patron god of Babylon (Marduk) rose to preeminence among the gods, becoming “lord of lords”, “leader of the gods”, and “reviver of the dead”. The oral form of the original myth is of course lost in antiquity, but it’s presumably derived from Sumerian mythology (probably from before 3,000 BCE).

The existing written version of the Enuma Elish contains the following “explanation” of the purpose of man, as promoted by parasitic priests:

Now that Marduk [the chief god, who had conquered the original “saltwater mother”, Tiamat] has heard what the [other] gods are saying, he is moved with desire to create a work of consummate art…
Blood to blood I join,
Blood to bone I form an original thing;
Its name is Man,
Aboriginal man is mine in making.

All his occupations are faithful service,
the gods that fell have rest,
I will subtly alter their operations,
divided companies equally blest…

That is, according to the clerics who concocted this myth, man’s purpose was to serve the gods: “all [man’s] occupations are faithful service, [so] the gods that fell have rest…” Similarly, Calvin decided (as did Muhammad) that his purpose in life was to have others serve him:

[(1) C: "I'm at peace with the world. I'm completely serene." H: "Why is that?" (2) C: "I've discovered my purpose in life. I know why I was put here and why everything exists." (3) H: "Oh really?" C: "Yes, I am here so everybody can do what I want." (4) H: "It's nice to have that cleared up." C: "Once everyone accepts it, they'll be serene too."]

But even the tyrant Calvin encountered limits (just as parasitic clerics sometimes experience constraints from superiors, e.g., the people):

[(1) C: "As I, the maniacal tyrant, look down upon my pathetic subjects…" (2) C: "…I reflect on how their puny lives mean nothing to me except as the brute labor necessary to execute my mad desires! My lunatic whims are their laws! Ha Ha Ha!" (3) CM: "I thought I told you to gather the trash." (4) C: "Being a parent must be nice."]

Thereby, the alleged statement by Jesus, both in the synoptic gospels (e.g., at Luke 14, 25) and in the (Gnostic’s) Gospel of Thomas (at 55), “Whoever does not hate father and mother cannot be my disciple…” becomes more understandable. Yet, despite his mother’s guidance, Calvin (similar to Jesus) found ways to continue to rule, behaving as if he were god (similar to the depicted madmen Moses and Muhammad):

[(1) C: "As I have created you, so can I destroy you!" (2) C: "Therefore, in recognition of my supreme power, you must worship me!" (3) C: "Yes, bow before mighty Calvin and tremble, for I am the eternal, all knowing…" (4) PAFF ]

Fortunately, though, as illustrated in the above strip’s final panel, some people didn’t buy into the clerics’ claims. In particular, it’s relevant to mention that the source of the snowball in the final panel (above) is Calvin’s archenemy, his next-door neighbor Susie – a dreaded female! Similarly, at least since the time of the ancient Babylonians, the vast majority of the clerics of all the Abrahamic religions have been misogynists:

[(1) C: "Do you hate being a girl?" Susie (S): "It's gotta be better than the alternative." (2) C: "What's it like? Is it like being a bug?" S: "Like a what?" (3) C: "I imagine bugs and girls have a dim perception that nature played a cruel trick on them, but they lack the intelligence to really comprehend the magnitude of it." (4) C: "I must've put my finger on it."]

In reality, though, the misogyny of clerics of the Abrahamic religions seems to have been derived from goals of earlier clerics. Thus, in Mesopotamia (from which the Abrahamic religions evolved) another major goal of the earlier Akkadian and Sumerian clerics (besides avoiding working for a living) was apparently to eradicate the still-earlier, more-peaceful, matriarchal (or at least matrilineal) culture, with its goddesses, when the Earth was considered to be the mother of all life and when “Mother Nature” was treated with loving respect. As I suggested in an earlier, speculative chapter, during the first phase of the agricultural revolution, living conditions in these areas were probably quite idyllic – especially for males! Probably similar conditions are described as follows in a proverb of the Native American Cherokee tribe:

When the white man discovered this country, [we] were running it. No taxes, no debt, women did all the work. White man thought he could improve on a system like this!

Later during the Neolithic Revolution in the Middle East, population pressures and agricultural methods apparently strained natural resources. An example of the straining of natural resources seems to have been the salinization of Mesopotamian soil caused by irrigation. The salinization may be the meaning of the metaphor in the Enuma Elish of Marduk killing the saltwater mother Tiamat. As another example, perhaps readers of this series of posts recall that the moral of the original Atrahasis Epic (which later Jewish priests plagiarized to form the Noah myth) was that the gods flooded the earth in response to the population explosion.

In any event, the method used by the Mesopotamian misogynist clerics seems to have been to promote an unwritten, secret law (subsequently adopted by clerics of all Abrahamic religions) that basically said: if you men will obey us clerics, then we’ll approve your ruling your women. Thereby the misogynist little boys (the clerics) started up their various, secret clubs:

[(1) C: "Good new, Hobbes! I'm starting a secret club, and you can be in it!" H: "Oh boy!" (2) C: "It'll be great! We'll think of secret names for ourselves, secret codes for our secret correspondence, a secret handshake…" (3) C: "We'll have a secret club house with a secret knock to get in, and we'll do big, secretive things!" H: "Why all the secrecy?" (4) C: "People pay more attention to you when they think you're up to something."]

Currently, similar “secrecy” seems to be a prime attraction of Islam to poorly educated Westerners, who revel in “secret”, Arabic “code words”, “secret names”, and so on. Maybe Pope Benedict is catching on: there are suggestions that he will permit Catholic masses to again be performed in Latin. But in addition to secrecy, to define themselves any “in group” of course needs an “out group”, and the most appropriate “out group” for male clerics was obviously females:

[(1) S: "Hi, Calvin! What are you doing, making paper hats? Can I make one too?" (2) C: "Don't be ridiculous. This is the official chapeau of our top secret club, GROSS – Get Rid Of Slimy GirlS!" (3) S: "Slimy girls?!" C: "I know that's redundant, but otherwise it doesn't spell anything. Now go away." (4) S: "Girls aren't slimy!" C: "Don't get gunk on me, I took a bath last Saturday and I'm all clean."]

To this day, similar continues in Judaism, Christianity, Islam, etc., although once their con games were up and running (raking in the gold), they could afford more elaborate chapeaux and regalia, e.g., see the following photo taken this week by Giuseppe Giglia, ANSA (and posted here via European Pressphoto Agency and the 2010/11/20 issue of The New York Times) showing Pope Benedict XVI in his golden chapeau, on his way to pass out red hats to his 24 new cardinals:

But getting back to Calvin and Hobbes (whose hats were made from paper rather than gold), Watterson proceeded to illustrate how misogynist religions were (and are) concocted and promoted (by maniacs such as Ezra, Constantine, Muhammad, and all subsequent chief rabbis, popes, ayatollahs, and grand muftis):

[(1) C: "Attention! All rise! This meeting of GROSS is now called to order by the great grandiose dictator-for-life, the ruler supreme, the fearless, the brave, the held-high-in-esteem, Calvin the Bold! Yes, stand up and hail his humbleness now! May his wisdom prevail!" (2) H: "Three cheers for first tiger and El Presidente, Hobbes, the delight of all cognoscenti! He's savvy! He has a prodigious IQ, and lots of panache, as all tigers do! In his fancy chapeau, he's a leader with taste! May his orders be heeded and his views be embraced!" (3) C: "You can tell this is a great club by the way we start our meeting."]

They claimed (and still claim) authority to define principles:

[(1) C: "Some people are pragmatists, taking things as they come and making the best of the choices available." (2) C: "Some people are idealists, standing for principle and refusing to compromise." (3) C: "And some people just act on any whim that enters their heads." (4) H: "I wonder which you are." C: "I pragmatically turn my whims into principles!"]

Principles that are claimed can protect people (better known as “protection rackets”):

[(1) The sign: "Insurance 50¢" (2) S: "Insurance?? What a dumb idea!" (3) S: "Why would anyone buy insurance from you?!" (4) THWPING!]

They manipulate the concepts of morality and virtue to serve themselves (so the people will serve them):

[(1) H: "How are you doing on your New Year's resolutions?" C: "I didn't make any." (2) C: "See, in order to improve oneself, one must have some idea of what's 'good'. That implies certain values." (3) C: "But as we all know, values are relative. Every system of belief is equally valid, and we need to tolerate diversity. Virtue isn't 'better' than vice. It's just different." (4) H: "I don't know if I can tolerate that much tolerance." C: "I refuse to be victimized by notions of virtuous behavior."]

Starting from the people’s understanding of “the spirit of the law”, which humans learned (and still learn) the same way that all social animals learn about justice and empathy, the clerics claimed (and still claim) authority to define “the letter of the law” – while avoiding the spirit of the law:

[(1) CM: "Goodness, you're filthy. Into the tub with you." (2) C: "I obey the letter of the law, if not the spirit." (3) CM: "Let's hear some water running!" (4) C: "Nuts."]

They define what’s “sacred” and “divine”:

[(1) C: "Oh lovely snowball, packed with care, smack a head that's unaware!" (2) C: "Then with freezing ice to spare, melt and soak through underwear!" (3) C: "Fly straight and true, hit hard and square! This, oh snowball, is my prayer." (4) C: "I only throw consecrated snowballs."]

And, of course, they bundle it all in rituals:

[(1) C: "I think rituals are important." (2) C: "My favorite ritual is eating three bowls of 'Chocolate Frosted Sugar Bombs' and watching TV cartoons all Saturday morning." (3) C: "After a few hours, I'm so overstimulated I can't sit still or even think straight." (4) H: "Sort of a transcendental experience, huh?" C: "Yeah, I achieve a lower consciousness."]

Perhaps no culture has ever succumbed so completely to priestly rituals as Ancient Egypt. An illustration is the following quotation (to which I’ve added the italics and some notes in brackets) from Bob Brier’s book entitled Ancient Egyptian Magic.

The House of Life [in Ancient Egypt] was a building, or perhaps a small group of buildings, where the library of the temple was kept and where the custodians of the knowledge of the temple studied [what a insult to the word ‘knowledge’!]. Here the layman would come it he had a problem and needed a magic spell or charm. The priests could interpret dreams, supply incantations to make someone fall in love, cure an illness, dispense magic amulets, or counteract malevolent influences. To maintain their powers, the priests kept their books away from the few laymen who could read. Indeed secrecy was an important part of their business. In the Book of the Dead prepared for the priest Nebseni, one of his titles is given as “presiding over the secrets of the temple.”

Their treasure papyri were kept in a secluded section of the House of Life, often in niches dug into the walls of the temple. There was an important House of Life at Edfu, a great temple dedicated to Horus [the mythical son of the god Osiris and the goddess Isis]. Edfu is the best preserved temple in all of Egypt, as it was covered in sand until recent times. On one of the walls of the temple is engraved a list of the sacred books kept in the House of Life. Along with the books on rules of the temple, inventories of the temple holdings, and religious calendars, there were numerous books on magic. These give us an idea of the powers supposedly possessed by priest-magicians of ancient Egypt:

• The Book of Appeasing Sekhmet [the goddess of healing, whose name means “she who is powerful”, and who is usually portrayed as a women with the head of a lioness – opposite from the Sphinx!]
• The Book of Magical Protection of the King in His Palace
• Spell for Warding Off the Evil Eye
• The Book of Repelling Crocodiles
• The Book of Knowledge of the Secrets of the Laboratory
• The Book of Knowing the Secret Forms of the God.

If readers sometime have a few hours (or days or…) with little else to do, they might want to explore on the internet using such search words as “Ancient Egyptian Magic”, “Medicine in Ancient Egypt”, “the gods of Ancient Egypt”, and similar. And if the enormous amount of information found should cause headaches, then maybe inflicted readers would want to try an Ancient Egyptian cure for headaches (here taken from the web page “Sekhmet & Ancient Egyptian Medicine”, which unfortunately now seems to be unavailable):

This is the remedy which Auset (Isis) prepared for her father [the sun god] Ra [apparently even gods get headaches!]. Take equal parts of each of these: berry of the coriander, berry of the poppy plant, wormwood, berry of the sames-plant, berry of the juniper plant, and honey. Mix the ingredients together, and a paste will form. Smear the afflicted person with the paste, and he will instantly become well.

Who knows, that treatment might even work! Yet, I recommend against readers using the following “remedy” (obtained from the same internet source) for curing skin lesions:

After the scab has fallen off, put on it a scribe’s excrement. Mix in fresh milk, and apply it as a poultice.

Imagine it: even the feces of the lowest-level priests (the scribes) were promoted (by the priests) as being of value to the people! Talk about arrogance! Talk about ignorance! The hallmark of all clerics: arrogant ignorance.

Similar to all clerics, the real understanding of the priests of ancient Egypt (buried beneath their secrecy and rituals) was extremely meager. Yes, there are at least 42 aspects of how to live “morally”, but there never were 42 gods (each of whom allegedly represented one of those principles). And yes, the Nile River did flood every year when the star Sirius (the goddess Isis) appeared, but Isis’s appearance identified the time – she didn’t cause the flood! The little that the priests knew had engendered in the people some confidence in the priests’ abilities. Subsequently, over centuries, the priests exuded confidence that they could interpret dreams, cure illnesses, and so on – even to the extreme that the lowest priest’s excrement had medicinal value! And thus, the con game continued.

The range, variation, and mutually contradictory nature of such ritualized “esoteric knowledge” concocted (out of thin air!) by clerics of the world are mind-boggling. In one case, it was the names of the 42 Egyptian gods; in another, it was “knowledge” of the multiple name of the single god (e.g., Marduk’s 50 names); in another, it was “knowledge” of the names of the 1600 (!) Aztec gods; in still another, it was “knowledge” of the purpose of the gods; and in still another, it was “knowledge” of how the “one true god” chose to populate America. But looked at differently, all such “knowledge” is identical: none of it is knowledge; none of it is has a scientific base; none of it has sufficient data to support its being called even a hypothesis; all of it is mere speculation; none of it is “true”; it’s a mountain of lies; in fact, it’s not just a mountain of lies, it’s mountain range after mountain range of lies – sold for profit (for themselves), as Watterson saw:

[(1) C: "Look at that kid's snowman! What a pathetic cliche!" (2) C: "Am I supposed to identify with this complacent moron and his shovel?? This snowman says nothing about the human condition! Is this all the kid has to say about contemporary suburban life?!" (3) C: "The souless banality of this snowman is a sad comment on today's art world." (4) C: "Now come look at my snowman." (5) C: "I call it, 'The Torment of Existence Weighed Against the Horror of Nonbeing'." (6) C: "As he melts, the sculpture becomes even more poignant." (7) H: "I admire your willingness to put artistic integrity before marketability." (7) {Questioning look} (8) {Questioning thought} (9) {Revised plan!}]

That such stupidity and craven cupidity continue was recently illustrated in the 2010/11/13 report in The New York Times by Laurie Goodstein that the Roman Catholic Church in the U.S. held a conference this month to “prepare more priests and bishops to respond to the demand… for exorcists.” According to Bishop Thomas J. Paprocki of Springfield, Ill., who organized the conference:

Not everyone who thinks they need an exorcism actually does need one… It’s only used in those cases where the Devil is involved in an extraordinary sort of way in terms of actually being in possession of the person… The ordinary work of the Devil is temptation… and the ordinary response is a good spiritual life, observing the sacraments and praying. The Devil doesn’t normally possess someone who is leading a good spiritual life.

Bizarre! Simultaneously, I expect that those “possessed” Catholics and their clerics would be adamant in criticizing the “foolish” 2.8 million Muslims who this week are circumambulating the Kaaba, “Islam’s holiest site”, casting stones at Satan. But as Watterson saw, treading on what others imagine to be sacred is a “touchy subject”:

[(1) Calvin's Teacher: "Yes Calvin?" C: "Miss Wormwood, I'm a fierce advocate of the separation of Church and State." (2) C: "Nevertheless, I feel the need for spiritual guidance and comfort as I face the day's struggles." (3) C: "So, I was wondering if I could strip down, smear myself with paste, and set fire to this little effigy of you in a non-denominational sort of way." (4) C {approaching the Principal's office}: "Boy, what a touchy subject!"]

Yet, not only most people but also most priests (past and present) are probably too poorly educated to realize that they’re involved in con games: they’re just pawns in some high priest’s game. Some junior priests, however, probably eventually saw (and see) through the con game, realizing that the claimed “knowledge” is mere speculation. But rather than “ex-communicate the dissidents”, senior priests learned how to use the demonstrated intelligence of a few junior priests to strengthen their (Egyptian-style) “pyramid scheme”: senior priests provided (and still provide) junior priests who see through the silliness the opportunity to “move-up in the hierarchy”, to the next level of the conspiracy. In this next level, the more intelligent priests were (and still are) told that they’re right about their assessments of the claimed “knowledge” incorporated in their rituals – and so, they’re “initiated” to “deeper knowledge”. And so on it goes, layer after layer: in every religion a hierarchy of clerics develops, with not only power increasing at each successive “inner layer” but also the hilarity, laughing all the way to the bank.

More than two centuries ago, in his book The Ruins, Volney summarized it well:

… among all nations the spirit of the priesthood, their system of conduct, their actions their morals, were absolutely the same:

• That they had everywhere formed secret associations and corporations at enmity with the rest of society; [Footnote #1]

• That they had everywhere attributed to themselves prerogatives and immunities, by means of which they lived exempt from the burdens of other classes;

• That they everywhere avoided the toils of the laborer, the dangers of the soldier, and the disappointments of the merchant…

• That, under the cloak of poverty, they found everywhere the secret of procuring wealth and all sorts of enjoyments;

• That under the name of mendicity they raised taxes to a greater amount than princes;

• That in the form of gifts and offerings they had established fixed and certain revenues exempt from charges;

• That under pretence of retirement and devotion they lived in idleness and licentiousness;

• That they had made a virtue of alms-giving, to live quietly on the labors of others;

• That they had invented the ceremonies of worship, as a means of attracting the reverence of the people, while they were playing the parts of gods, of whom they styled themselves the interpreters and mediators, to assume all their powers; that, with this design, they had (according to the degree of ignorance or information of their people) assumed by turns the character of astrologers, drawers of horoscopes, fortune-tellers, magicians [Footnote #2], necromancers, quacks, physicians, courtiers, confessors of princes, always aiming at the great object to govern for their own advantage;

• That sometimes they had exalted the power of kings and consecrated their persons, to monopolize their favors, or participate their sway;

• That sometimes they had preached up the murder of tyrants (reserving it to themselves to define tyranny), to avenge themselves of their contempt or their disobedience;

• And that they always stigmatized with impiety whatever crossed their interests;

• That they hindered all public instruction, to exercise the monopoly of science;

• That finally, at all times and in all places, they had found the secret of living in peace in the midst of the anarchy they created, in safety under the despotism that they favored, in idleness amidst the industry they preached, and in abundance while surrounded with scarcity; and all this by carrying on the singular trade of selling words and gestures to credulous people, who purchase them as commodities of the greatest value.

Footnotes [emphasizing the lies in Christianity, but similar could be written about all religions]:

#1: That we may understand the general feelings of priests respecting the rest of mankind, whom they always call by the name of the people, let us hear one of the doctors of the church. “The people,” says Bishop Synnesius, in Calvit, p. 315, “are desirous of being deceived, we cannot act otherwise respecting them. The case was similar with the ancient priests of Egypt, and for this reason they shut themselves up in their temples, and there composed their mysteries, out of the reach of the eye of the people.” And forgetting what he has before just said, he adds: “for had the people been in the secret they might have been offended at the deception played upon them. In the meantime how is it possible to conduct one’s self otherwise with the people so long as they are people? For my own part, to myself I shall always be a philosopher, but in dealing with the mass of mankind, I shall be a priest.”

“A little jargon,” says Geogory Nazianzen to St. Jerome (Hieron. ad. Nep.) “is all that is necessary to impose on the people. The less they comprehend, the more they admire. Our forefathers and doctors of the church have often said, not what they thought, but what circumstances and necessity dictated to them.”

“We endeavor,” says Sanchoniaton, “to excite admiration by means of the marvelous.” (Proep. Evang. lib. 3)

Such was the conduct of all the priests of antiquity, and is still that of the Bramins and Lamas who are the exact counterpart of the Egyptian priests. Such was the practice of the Jesuits, who marched with hasty strides in the same career. It is useless to point out the whole depravity of such a doctrine. In general every association which has mystery for its basis, or an oath of secrecy, is a league of robbers against society, a league divided in its very bosom into knaves and dupes, or in other words, agents and instruments. It is thus we ought to judge of those modern clubs, which, under the name of Illuminatists, Martinists, Cagliostronists, and Mesmerites, infest Europe. These societies are the follies and deceptions of the ancient Cabalists, Magicians, Orphies, etc., “who,” says Plutarch, “led into errors of considerable magnitude, not only individuals, but kings and nations.”

#2: What is a magician, in the sense in which people understand the word? A man who by words and gestures pretends to act on supernatural beings, and compels them to descend at his call and obey his orders. Such was the conduct of the ancient priests, and such is still that of all priests in idolatrous nations; for which reason we have given them the denomination of Magicians.

And when a Christian priest pretends to make God descend from heaven, to fix him to a morsel of leaven, and render, by means of this talisman, souls pure and in a state of grace, what is this but a trick of magic? And where is the difference between a Chaman of Tartary who invokes the Genii, or an Indian Bramin, who makes Vichenou descend in a vessel of water to drive away evil spirits? Yes, the identity of the spirit of priests in every age and country is fully established! Everywhere it is the assumption of an exclusive privilege, the pretended faculty of moving at will the powers of nature; and this assumption is so direct a violation of the right of equality, that whenever the people shall regain their importance, they will forever abolish this sacrilegious kind of nobility, which has been the type and parent stock of the other species of nobility.

Of course, all priests and most religious people would probably object to the above descriptions. But from my perspective, anyone is either lying or insane who claims to know the names of the 42 or 1600 different gods, or claims to be aware of the purpose of the “one-and-only true god”, or claims to have been instructed by an angel, or in some way or other has perpetuated his (or sometimes her) version of the God Lie. All are claims to “fake knowledge” – and for at least the past 5,000 years, clerics have grabbed power based on nothing but fake knowledge. But the people “bought it”, which is what the clerics wanted – while audaciously claiming to serve the people, rather than themselves:

[(1) C: "I like people. I'm interested in people." (2) H: "You??" (3) C: "As an audience, I mean." H: "Oh."]

“But”, defenders may object, “the end justifies the means: clerics use their power not for personal gain but to help the people – to guide them spiritually and morally. Even if there aren’t 42 gods, promoting them is a way to promote the people to observe 42 principles of morality.”

No, the end doesn’t justify the means. Looked at one way, there are no ends: never yet has there been an end; all previously claimed “ends” have merely been additional means. Or looked at another way, the means are ends in themselves – and the question that must be addressed is: which end is most important? That is, it’s a question of values. In turn, any question of values is a question of objectives, because values can be measured only with respect to some objective. And if one’s objectives include the foolish notion of placating some god, then since gods don’t exist, one can do what one pleases, including raping little boys and girls, treating bigger girls like dirt, and sending older boys off to fight in “holy wars”. Looked at still another way, there’s the assessment by Socrates, “There is only one good, knowledge, and one evil, ignorance”, and what all clerics do is promote ignorance – and therefore, evil.

Further, since all religions (similar to Calvin’s) were and still are based on whims and wild speculations, completely divorced from data, then disagreements among clerical con artists inevitably occur, leading to animosities and turf wars:

[(1) C: "This meeting of the Get Rid Of Slimy GirlS club is now in session! First tiger Hobbes will present our financial report." (2) H: "Wait, we didn't sing the GROSS anthem." C: "We sing that at the end of the meeting." (3) H: "I want to sing it now." C: "We can't. We have to follow proper protocol! See? It says on the agenda that we sing the anthem last!" (4) H {singing}: "Ohhohhh GROHOSS, Best Club in the Cosmos…" C: "Stop that, you anarchist!"]

[(1) C: "You get two demerits for singing the club anthem before it was on the agenda!" H: "Well, you get five demerits for not taking off your hat during its hallowed refrain!" (2) C: "You can't give me demerits! I outrank you." H: "Ha! You're just a figurehead! Your duties are ceremonial! I have all the real responsibilities!" (3) C: "What?! I'm dictator-for-life! I have ten times the importance of a lowly first tiger! A hundred times! A million times!" (4) H: "If you're so important, how come you sing the soprano part of our anthem?" C: "That's just till my voice changes!"]

[(1) C: "By golly, I won't stand for this insubordination! You are hereby demoted to 'Club Mascot'!" H: "Oh yeah?! Well you can be 'Club Chowder Head', because I quit!" (2) H: "I'm forming my own club, and it's going to be a lot better than this one!" C: "Ha! Your sorry club won't have a cool acronym for a name, I'll bet!" (3) H: "It will too! My club is called CAD." C: "CAD? What's that supposed to stand for?" (4) H: "Calvin's A Dope!" C: "That's not a name for a club!']

It would be hilarious if it weren’t for the horrors that have occurred (and are still occurring) with crazy members of childish, religious clubs killing and being killed by crazy members of other, childish, religious clubs. Each club promotes the lies that their way is the only way, that their god is the “true” god, and that dying for their god (to keep their club’s clerics in power) guarantees instant access to paradise.

Such craziness isn’t new. For example, the following illustrates how Hindu priests manipulated soldiers to fight in their “holy war” by trying to convince a soldier (Arjuna, who didn’t want to engage in war) that he had an “indestructible soul”. The quotation is from the “sacred” Hindu scripture The Bhagavad Gītā (“the song of god”), composed sometime between 300 BCE and 300 CE. It was allegedly written by Lord Krishna (who, similar to claims about Jesus, is claimed to be a manifestation of God):

There is no existence for that which is unreal; there is no non-existence for that which is real. And the correct conclusion about both is perceived by those who perceive the truth. Know that to be indestructible which pervades all this; the destruction of that inexhaustible principle none can bring about. These bodies that pertain to the embodied self which is eternal, indestructible, and indefinable, are said to be perishable; therefore do engage in battle, O descendant of Bharata! He who thinks it to be the killer and he who thinks it to be killed, both know nothing. The self kills not, and the self is not killed. It is not born, nor does it ever die, nor, having existed, does it exist no more. Unborn, everlasting, unchangeable, and primeval, the self is not killed when the body is killed.

O son of Pritha, how can that man who knows the self to be indestructible, everlasting, unborn, and inexhaustible, how and whom can he kill, whom can he cause to be killed? As a man, casting off old clothes, puts on others and new ones, so the embodied self, casting off old bodies, goes to others and new ones. Weapons do not divide the self into pieces; fire does not burn it; waters do not moisten it; the wind does not dry it up. It is not divisible; it is not combustible; it is not to be moistened; it is not to be dried up. It is everlasting, all-pervading, stable, firm, and eternal. It is said to be unperceived, to be unthinkable, to be unchangeable. Therefore, knowing it to be such, you ought not to grieve.

But even if you think that the self is constantly born, and constantly dies, still, Arjuna, you ought not to grieve like this. For to one that is born, death is certain; and to one that dies, birth is certain. Therefore, you should not grieve about things that are unavoidable. The source of things, Arjuna, is unperceived; their middle state is perceived; and their end again is unperceived. Why lament over them? One looks upon it as a wonder; another similarly speaks of it as a wonder; another, too, hears of it as a wonder; and even after having heard of it, no one does really know it. This embodied self, Arjuna, within every one’s body is always indestructible. Therefore you ought not to grieve for any being.

Having regard to your own duty also, you ought not to falter, for there is nothing better for a Kshatriya than a righteous battle. Happy those Kshatriyas, O son of Pritha, who can find such a battle to fight – an open door to heaven! But if you will not fight this righteous battle, then you will have abandoned your own duty and your fame, and you will incur sin. All beings, too, will tell of your everlasting infamy; and to one who has been honored, infamy is a greater evil than death. Warriors who are masters of great chariots will think that you abstained from the battle through fear, and having been highly thought of by them, you will fall down to littleness. Your enemies, too, decrying your power, will speak much about you that should not be spoken. And what, indeed, is more lamentable than that? Killed, you will obtain heaven; victorious, you will enjoy the earth. Therefore arise, O son of Kunti, resolved to engage in battle. Looking alike on pleasure and pain, on gain and loss, on victory and defeat, then prepare for battle, and thus you will not incur sin.

Clerics have used similar jabberwocky about “indestructible souls” to manipulate people for thousands of years, including the Christian clerics who manipulated followers to fight in their “holy war” against the Muslims during the Crusades and the Islamic clerics who (still today!) manipulate Muslims to become mujahideen (“holy warriors”), dying for the jihad (“holy war”) to gain instant entrance to a fictitious paradise. All are just modified versions of CALVINBALL:

[(1) C: "I got a goal!" (2) H: "OK, the score is oogy to boogy." C: "I already had oogy!" (3) H: "Your just ran into the invisible sector! You have to cover your eyes now, because everything is invisible to you!" C: "Invisible sector?? I didn't know we had an invisible sector! Where is it?" (4) H: "You can't see it. It's invisible." C: "How do I know I went in it then?" (5) H: "You can't see anything, right?" C: "OK, so how do I get out?" (6) H: "Somebody bonks you with the Calvinball! I get another point!" C: "Hey! Ow! Why you…!" (7) C: "That was a rotten rule! I decree no more invisible sectors! …In fact, I'll show you! You just ran into a vortex spot! You have to spin around until you fall down!" (8) H: "Sorry. This vortex spot is in the boomerang zone, so the vortex returns to whoever calls it! You spin!" C: "That's not fair!" (9) H: "You know the Calvinball rules." C: "Yeah, yeah. Anything we make up. Well, you'll pay for this." (10) C: "This game lends itself to certain abuses." H: "Guess how you get out of the boomerang zone!"]

A particular result is the trouble Muslim terrorists cause the rest of us today. To be sure, a significant part of that trouble is to defeat the terrorists without causing ourselves even more problems, similar to the problems Calvin created, fighting his terrorists:

[(1) CM: "Whooo! It smells awful in here! Why does your room stink?" (2) C: "It's because of the darn monsters under my bed!" (3) CM: "Calvin, I don't believe for a minute that your nighttime 'monsters' are causing the smell." C: "But it's true." (4) C: "See? They don't eat all the garbage we throw down there to keep 'em quiet."]

Which, of course, leads to new schemes to promote “homeland security”:

[(1) C: "As soon as we turn the lights off, the monsters will come back out form under the bed." (2) C: "They're not going to go away, so I guess we need to find some way to live with them." (3) H: "It's hard to co-exist with things that want to kill you." C: "Well we've got to do something." (4) H: "We are. We're staying awake all night with the lights on." C: "I wonder if we could set fire to the bed without burning the house down."]

In the next post, I plan to add some summary comments on why people adopted (and still adopt) the crazy idea that gods exist, when the most certain knowledge that humans have been able to gain (even more certain than the knowledge that we exist) is that there are no gods (and never were any). Then, for the final post, I plan to add a few closing comments on the possibility that we may yet be able to get religious people to smarten up, to get them to turn on their own lights – without our burning down our own houses in the process.

[To be continued…]

www.zenofzero.net

••••

Closing Comments - 1 - Origins of the God Lie

2010-10-28T06:06:00.000-07:00

••••
This is the 36th in a series of posts dealing with what I call “the God Lie”. For the final four posts of this series, I want to add some closing comments dealing with 1) the Origins, 2) the Promotion, 3) the Adoption, and 4) the Rejection of the God Lie. In the first post, I defined the God Lie as follows.

The Mountainous God Lie – Lingering social evils from initial misunderstandings and then subsequent deliberate falsification of the records, plus manipulation of ignorant people by stupid or poorly educated or power mongering priests and politicians:

• That gods exist,
• That people have immortal souls imbued by the gods,
• That birth of children is controlled the gods,
• That the dead are ruled by the gods,
• That people have souls, which are judged by the gods,
• That stars and their constellations are signs from the gods,
• That movements of stars tell stories of gods,
• That dreams contain messages from the gods,
• That magic displays the mystery of the gods,
• That mysteries conceal the secrets of the gods,
• That sacrifices are needed to placate the gods,
• That rituals reveal knowledge of the gods,
• That mistakes are ‘sins’ against the gods,
• That sins offend and are punished by the gods,
• That clerics can forgive sins on behalf of the gods,
• That clerics are in contact with the gods,
• That clerics exercise authority on behalf of the gods,
• That clerics are spokesmen for the gods,
• That clerics preach the wills of the gods,
• That clerical “knowledge” is direct from the gods,
• That clerical hierarchies are established by the gods,
• That rather than serving themselves, the clerics serve the gods,
• That paying the clerics placates the gods,
• That prayers have power to persuade the gods,
• That tithes are collected on behalf of the gods,
• That “oracles” and “prophets” speak for the gods,
• That “truth” is told about prophets and gods,
• That a “race” of people was chosen by the gods,
• That oaths are binding when sworn to the gods,
• That covenants can be established with the gods,
• That morality is defined by the gods,
• That customs are created by the gods
• That laws are dictated by the gods,
• That leaders are chosen by the gods,
• That rulers know right by the grace of the gods,
• That justice is the jurisdiction of the gods,
• That order is ordained by the gods,
• That punishment is performed by the gods,
• That judges are judged by gods,
• That leaders rule by the grace of the gods,
• That kingdoms are established by the gods,
• That the fate of societies is controlled by the gods,
• That human rights are endowed by the gods,
• That people should put their trust in the gods,
• That believers gain grace as a gift of the gods,
• That wars are waged on behalf of the gods…

If the reader wonders why the number of lies listed (I think 46 are listed above) exceeds the number of posts “completed” (i.e., 34), I can offer two major reasons / excuses: 1) some posts outlined the historical development of more than one lie (e.g., the lies dealing with “sin”), and 2) I already addressed some of the lies earlier in my book (e.g., the faulty logic and misinterpreted evidence that led to the mistaken ideas that souls and gods exist, the nonsense that led to the myths “that stars and their constellations are signs from the gods” and “that movements of stars tell stories of gods”, and the unjustified speculations that justice and morality have anything to do with any gods). Yet, I admit that I didn’t address some of the lies in appropriate detail – my excuse for which is the following.

1. Less than I wanted, but more than I expected
Originally, I had planned on reviewing the most recent 2,000 years of the history of the God Lie more completely. I came to realize, however, that the task would require at least another 36 posts – and the return on the investment of at least two more years of my life was insufficient to impel me, especially when so many excellent reports written by competent historians are readily available. If I (trained as a physical scientist, not as a historian) were to write more about the most recent 2,000 years, I could have provided more recent examples of the lies “that kingdoms are established by the gods” and “that wars are waged on behalf of the gods” (I already did provide examples of those lies in ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia) and, importantly, the lie “that human rights are endowed by the gods” (which is still promoted to this day). In the case of human rights, some examples are briefly illustrated below.

An ignominious illustration of the lie “that human rights are endowed by the gods” (rather than the more realistic appraisal that people have had to wrestle what they consider to be their rights from clerics and politicians, who have colluded to rule the people) is the response by Pope Innocent III (1161–1216) to the Magna Carta, by which British land owners forced King John to admit that he was constrained by law, unable to arrest and punish a free man without judgment “by judges ruled by the law of the land or by one’s peers in a trial by combat.” Thus, claiming to be God’s representative on Earth, the despicable Pope Innocent proclaimed:

Consequently, in the name of God Almighty, by the authority of the Apostles Saints Peter and Paul, and by our Own, We reprove and condemn this Charter [the Magna Carta]; under pain of anathema We forbid the King to observe it or the barons to demand its execution. We declare the Charter null and of no effect, as well as all the obligations contracted to confirm it. It is Our wish that in no case should it have any effect.

In contrast to this pope’s claim of “authority” (from “God Almighty” and the “Apostles”) to withhold elementary judicial rights from the people, in reality, the only authority he possessed (and similarly, the only authority possessed by any religious leader who has ever lived) is that he and his henchmen had captured, hoodwinked, and controlled the imagination (the delusions) of the people. As George Carlin put it:

I have as much authority as the Pope; I just don't have as many people who believe it.

As another example, more than 700 years later the damnable Pope Gregory XVI (1765–1846) made the following proclamation about rights won by the people as a result of the American and French Revolutions:

The unrestrained freedom of thinking and of openly making known one’s thoughts is not inherent in the rights of citizens and is by no means worthy of favor and support.

In his 17 March 1814 letter to Horatio Spafford, Thomas Jefferson summarized it well:

In every country and in every age, the priest has been hostile to liberty. He is always in alliance with the despot, abetting his abuses in return for protection to his own.

For an illuminating description of how, as late as 1860, the pope (Pius IX) attempted to thwart democracy, I encourage readers to study the ex-priest Joseph McCabe’s Rome’s Syllabus Of Condemned Opinions – The Last Blast Of The Catholic Church’s Medieval Trumpet. Unfortunately for Muslims (and for the world), Islamic clerics are still “trumpeting” such anti-human lies, claiming to speak for their fictitious god.

Additional examples dealing with human rights for women and minorities are readily available – at least in the non-Muslim world (since little progress attaining such rights has yet been made by Muslims). For example, as McCabe wrote in his 1929 book The Story of Religious Controversy:

This is the stark truth about the redemption of woman from all the injustices which Christianity had brought upon her. Not one single Christian clergyman the world over raised a finger in the work until it had so far succeeded that the clergy had to save their faces by joining it. No amount of pulpit rhetoric, no amount of strained apology from Christian feminist writers, can lessen the significance of that fact. And to it you must add another of equal significance: The men and women who started the revolt against the injustice and carried it to the stage of invincibility were non-Christian in the proportion of at least five to one.

Even as recently as the 1960s, in his Letter from a Birmingham Jail, Martin Luther King (MLK) responded to clerics advising him to “go slow”:

Perhaps I have once again been too optimistic. Is organized religion too inextricably bound to the status quo to save our nation and the world? Perhaps I must turn my faith to the inner spiritual church, the church within the church, as the true ekklesia and the hope of the world.

Thereby, MLK acknowledged (perhaps unwittingly) that, similar to other social animals, humans possess inherent, instinctive understanding (“inner spiritual… ekklesia”) of justice, which leaders of organized religions have commonly subverted (“inextricably bound to the status quo”) to keep their con games going, protecting their own parasitic existences.

Additional illustrations of how parasitic leeches known as clerics sucked the lifeblood of the people during the Dark Ages of Europe were given by William J. Robinson, quoted here from The Necessity of Atheism by D.M. Brooks:

We are told by the Church apologists that during the Middle Ages the priests and monks kept up the torch of learning, that, being the only literate people, they brought back the study of the classics. Historically speaking, this is about the most impudent statement that one could imagine. It was the Church that retarded human progress at least one thousand years, it is the Church that put a thick, impenetrable pall over the sun of learning and science, so that humanity was enveloped in utter darkness, and if the priests and monks later learned to read and write (from the Arabs, Jews, and Greeks exiled from Constantinople after 1453), it is because they wanted to keep the power in their hands; the people they did not permit to learn either to read or write. (Even the reading of the Bible, bear in mind, was considered a crime.)

We are told that the priests and monks built hospitals and gave alms to the poor. Having gotten enormous tracts of the best land into their hands, so that the people were starving, they were willing to throw a bone occasionally to the latter. It cost them nothing and it gave them a reputation for charity. They built enormous monasteries with well-filled cellars, and lived on the fat of the land, while the people lived in wretched hovels, working their lives away for a crust of bread. The beasts, the domestic animals lived a more comfortable life than did the men, women, and children of the people. And the Church never, never raised a finger to ameliorate their condition. It kept them in superstitious darkness and helped the temporal lords – for a long period the spiritual were also the temporal lords – to keep them in fear, subjection and slavery.

Similarly, to this day, parasitic Islamic clerics live in relative luxury by leeching the lifeblood of the poor Muslim people, who live in “fear, subjection and slavery” because the clerics have captured, hoodwinked, and control the people’s imaginations / delusions.

Originally, also, I had planned to provide more details about the lies in Mormonism, even though I covered some of the lies in earlier chapters (starting here). In earlier posts of this series, I did address Joseph Smith’s lie that he could translate anything with his “peep stone”, a lie that became the Book of Abraham, but I was planning to provide more evidence in support of the assessment that Sidney Rigdon wrote the Book of Mormon. Subsequently, however, I found that, in his on-line book, Craig Criddle has done a great job marshalling relevant evidence, and I encourage interested readers to peruse his contribution to exposing still another foundational lie of Mormonism.

In sum, although this series of posts has been less than I wanted, it’s also more than I expected – in that, innumerable times during the past more-than-two years of reading and writing, I was on the verge of quitting, with thoughts such as: “Why am I trying to do this? Leave it to the historians! Look at what tremendous reports are already available!” In that regard, if readers desire further details about the God Lie (including lies in addition to those that I’ve addressed), I encourage them to explore the tremendous resources available at the library and kiosk of the Secular Web – and if you’re so inclined, financially contribute to the non-profit sponsoring organization (the Internet Infidels Inc.), “dedicated to promoting and defending a naturalistic worldview…”

2. Mistakes of the “supernatural” worldview that led to the God Lie
As I mentioned both in the introduction to the above list of lies and several times in these posts, the God Lie almost certainly wasn’t originally a lie but a series of mistakes by primitive people. They didn’t realize (and still today, more than half of all people in the world don’t realize) that there is no such thing as “the supernatural”: if something exists, perforce it’s natural; therefore, supernatural things such as gods don’t exist.

As a result (i.e., because the resulting God Lie is based on the mistaken idea that anything supernatural exists), many times during the writing of these posts, I wrestled with the question: Should I call it “the Mountainous God Lie” or “the Mountainous God Mistake”? Eventually I chose the term “God Lie”, because clerics deliberately manipulated the mistakes into lies. For the rest of this post, my goal is to briefly review some of the mistakes made by primitive people; in the next post, I’ll emphasize how clerics (for their own parasitic and power-mongering benefits) morphed the mistakes into lies.

In an earlier chapter, I provided a brief review of how the god idea probably began. My review relied on the analysis by the ex-priest Joseph McCabe, given in his excellent 1929 book The Story of Religious Controversy. In outline, anthropological studies suggest that primitive people first adopted the idea of “spirits” from trying to understand their own shadows, their images (e.g., in pools of water), their dreams (in which one’s “other self” seemed capable of leaving one’s body to engage in various activities), and their hallucinations (stimulated by starvation and/or by ingesting various hallucinogens). Such experiences and their interpretations seemed to have led primitive people to assume that each person possessed a second self (a “spirit”) and to acknowledge (and eventually revere) alleged spirits of their dead ancestors (whose spirits seemed to visit the people in their dreams) and alleged spirits in the natural world (i.e., the idea, known as animism, that animals, streams, forests, mountains, etc. had spirits). Such mistakes led people to fear and to associated worship of the most powerful spirits, thereby “deifying” their most famous ancestors (e.g., probably Osiris, Isis, Horus, and Thoth in ancient Egypt) and those “spirits” that were assumed to control the most powerful natural forces, such as volcanoes, thunder and lightning, etc.

The essence of such mistakes can be seen in the following Calvin and Hobbes comic strip produced by the brilliant Bill Watterson. [NB: all comics in these posts are copyrighted and cannot be used for commercial purposes without the approval of Universal Press Syndicate.] Watterson named Calvin after the (fanatical, Christian) 16th-century theologian John Calvin; Calvin’s plush-toy tiger, Hobbes – whom Calvin (alone) saw as an intelligent, full-sized tiger – was named after the (atheistic) 17th-century political philosopher Thomas Hobbes; in the strip below, Calvin is (once again) in a confrontation with his father.

Similarly, it’s easy to imagine that primitive people living near volcanoes, for example, worshiped “the volcano god”, worshiping ignorance, “thinking” that they could propitiate the powerful volcano god, similar to how they would try to win favors from powerful tribal leaders by showing deference. A tragic example of such ignorance occurred the other day, during the eruption of Indonesia’s Mount Merapi, as reported in a 2010/10/27 Associated Press article by Slamet Riyadi entitled “Indonesia volcano kills 30 including spirit keeper”:

Among the dead was Maridjan, an 83-year-old man who had been entrusted by a highly respected late king to watch over the volcano’s spirits. “We found his body,” said Suseno, a rescue worker, amid reports that the old man was found in the position of praying, kneeling face-down on the floor. Maridjan, who for years led ceremonies in which rice and flowers were thrown into the crater to appease spirits, has angered officials in the past by refusing to evacuate even during eruptions. They accused him of setting a wrong example, stopping other villagers from leaving, but Maridjan always said he would only go if he got a sign from the long-dead king who appointed him.

Likewise, ancient northern Europeans (and ancient Mesopotamians) worshiped the wind god, among other gods, worshiping ignorance, convinced that the wind represented the rushing of souls through the air – and it was “thought” to be wise to be in good favor of the god who controlled the souls of the dead. Calvin’s father similarly confused Calvin:

The ancient Greeks (and similarly, the ancient Mesopotamians and northern Europeans) worshiped the god of thunder and lightning, worshiping ignorance, for surely it was “wise” to display obeisance to the god who controlled such powerful storms. The ancient Egyptians (and many others, including ancient Americans and Babylonians) worshiped the Sun, worshiping ignorance, because it seemed to control the crops; so, the people tried to win favor from the Sun god through bribery. The ancient Arabs (and other desert nomads) didn’t worship the Sun (the Sun was a daily enemy); they worshiped the Moon, worshiping ignorance, because it seemed to govern the blessed, cool nights; so, the people tried to gain control over their environment by bribing the Moon god (Allah).

As their thoughts expanded with their empires, the ancient Egyptians, Mesopotamians, Persians, and Indians worshiped – and following them to this day, religious Jews, Christians, Muslims, Mormons, etc. still worship – the creator of the universe and of life, worshiping ignorance, because they “thought” and still “think” it wise to be in the good favor of such a powerful god. And if recent data interpretations are found to be valid, leading to the suggestion that the universe actually created itself (perhaps by a quantum-like symmetry-breaking fluctuation in a total void) then religious people will finally be able to worship what, in their ignorance, they’ve actually been worshiping all along, namely, total nothingness!

3. Mistakes about life that exacerbated the God Lie
Even more egregious (than the mistakes that morphed into lies about forces governing nature) were the mistakes made by our ancient ancestors about the forces and factors governing life. For example, although it was a personal evil to believe that some volcano was controlled by a volcano god (i.e., the personal evil of holding beliefs more strongly than relevant evidence warrants), yet it was a more serious mistake (an interpersonal evil) to assume that the volcano god would be placated by pushing a virgin girl into the volcano’s crater (i.e., the evil of not acknowledging that everyone has an equal right to claim one’s own existence). In turn, such evils were derived from ignorance, consistent with the assessment by Socrates: “There is only one good, knowledge, and one evil, ignorance.”

In turn, the fundamental ignorance was (and, for the majority of people living today, continues to be) failure to identify sensible answers to the question: What’s the purpose of life? In a number of strips, Bill Watterson brilliantly illustrated this fundamental quandary as follows.

In addition, Watterson provided at least hints for the solution to the fundamental quandary:

Calvin was obviously dissatisfied with Hobbes’ answers. His answers, however, at least contained humor and common sense. In contrast, it’s sad to realize that more than half of all people living today “think” (usually as a result of childhood indoctrination) that their purpose in life is to placate some “creator god” – rather than realize that the fundamental purpose of all life is "just" to live. Those of us who have rejected the God Lie are then free to choose additional purposes, including enjoying a good lunch.

Dismissing Hobbes’ answers, Calvin compounded his confusion by considering other factors that influence one’s choices about how to live, such as the following:

Nature’s indifference,

Life’s injustices,

Tyrants of various types,

Including those who are immediate threats to one's survival,

Such factors led (and still lead) people to additional quandaries, such as those illustrated by Watterson as follows:

About death,

About the reason for death,

And about what happens after we die, either good,

Or not so good,

About the existence of any god,

And about the source of evil,

As a result of so many unanswered questions about the natural world and our place within it, primitive people concocted myths, and as President John F. Kennedy said:

The great enemy of the truth is very often not the lie – deliberate, contrived and dishonest, but the myth – persistent, persuasive and unrealistic. Belief in myths allows the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought.

Additionally, Watterson provided insight into why humans find the “explanations” contained in myths to be attractive. Among the reasons, maybe foremost is that myths are almost invariably simplistic – similar to much on TV and talk-radio (e.g., in the U.S., the “shows” put on by Glen Beck and Rush Limbaugh, “heroes” of the current, mindless, American “Tea Party Movement”):

In addition, people mesmerized by myths are typically pugnacious:

And more generally (and in more ways than one) myths “are made” for those who don’t (or can’t) think for themselves; they want all concepts simple:

Thereby, myths attract those who “justify” avoiding new ideas:

Those who take refuge in their religions:

And those who find comfort in their ignorance (a fundamental American right, held tenaciously by members of the Tea Party Movement):

They even revel in their ignorant ideas:

Ignorant ideas and useless information that lead to ignorant actions:

And yet, they’re convinced that they should be running the world:

Even though they refuse to accept responsibility for their actions:

All of which is unfortunately now being illustrated as part of the mid-term elections to be held in the U.S. in the next few days. In this election, the influence of America’s Tea Party threatens to be significant. In a recent New York Times “opinionater” column entitled “Building a Nation of Know-Nothings”, Timothy Egan described the situation well:

Take a look at Tuesday night’s box score in the baseball game between New York and Toronto. The Yankees won, 11-5. Now look at the weather summary, showing a high of 71 for New York. The score and temperature are not subject to debate.

Yet a president’s birthday or whether he was even in the White House on the day TARP [the Troubled Asset Relief Program] was passed are apparently open questions. A growing segment of the party poised to take control of Congress has bought into denial of the basic truths of Barack Obama’s life. What’s more, this astonishing level of willful ignorance has come about largely by design, and has been aided by a press afraid to call out the primary architects of the lies…

Climate-change denial [a fundamental “plank” of the Tea Party’s “platform”] is a special category all its own. Once on the fringe, dismissal of scientific consensus is now an article of faith among leading Republicans, again taking their cue from [Rush] Limbaugh and Fox [Network TV, e.g., host of the Glen Beck farce].

It would be nice to dismiss the stupid things that Americans believe as harmless, the price of having such a large, messy democracy. Plenty of hate-filled partisans swore that Abraham Lincoln was a Catholic and Franklin Roosevelt was a Jew. So what if one-in-five believe the sun revolves around the earth, or aren’t sure from which country the United States gained its independence?

But false belief in weapons of mass-destruction led the United States to a trillion-dollar war. And trust in rising home value as a truism as reliable as a sunrise was a major contributor to the catastrophic collapse of the economy. At its worst extreme, a culture of misinformation can produce something like Iran, which is run by a Holocaust denier.

It’s one thing to forget the past, with predictable consequences, as the favorite aphorism goes. But what about those who refuse to comprehend the present?

The above is also an appropriate summary for all religious people: they both ignore the past and refuse to comprehend the present.

In sum, during the past 5,000-and-more years and continuing to this day, mistaken answers to questions about the nature of the universe and about the purpose of life led to a host of simplistic myths. Subsequently, as I’ll briefly review in the next post, such mistakes provided con artists (commonly called “clerics”) opportunities to profit from the people’s ignorance, fear and greed, by promoting the God Lie.

[To be continued…]

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