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Perfect Religion
 

Benefits of a life without religion are numerous: teaching morals is underwritten by action; we learn by example more than by theoretic paradigm; a phenomena like faith requiring little scientific proof produces a low threshold of belief. Magic and superstition are anathema to the modern mind – we must be poised against reason for them to reign supreme in us. However, if people are to embrace science over the unreasonable, then the role of religion has to be marginalized to a form of myth. Skipping those mind-numbing hours of prayers and sermons and the contemplation of  brain teasers like three men in one god or the body & blood transfiguration, frees a person to be creative about real problems in their lives.

In the book of fairy tales and myths, a big magical sky daddy delivers the populace his own flesh and blood to get horribly slain so that his resurrected son can become your imaginary bearded hippie-friend. The chip off the father’s block is sort of a young Santa Claus for idealists who bestows his gifts on his birthday and is otherwise an enforcer to his father’s backwater creed: a doctrine  which  threatens eternal hell and other hateful things if you don’t do what you’re told.

Religion often promotes unsavory outcomes. The frequency of unwanted children being brought into the world by religionists’ opposition to birth control is one of them. Modern self-management and sexual self-protection are rejected as religion hangs on tenaciously to the creepy idea of abstention. Over 5000 Catholic priests worldwide have now been implicated in pedophilia and the statistics for overall clergy sex-abuse is “significant” and “shocking” according to most figures. While alcoholism may be the most common factor in sexually abusive parents, conservative religious belief is the second most common. Even self-relief can be looked at as a form of abortion if you’re an idealistic enough religionist.

Overall, religion is an event in conformity and discourages independent thinking. It comes with a golden parachute: if you fail at life through mismanagement, and kneel and pray before sentencing begins, you receive a ‘get out of hell’ card and go to celestial eternity by cashing it in at the gate. In religion, wishful thinking has never been more naked; in cults, at no time, so inexplicably undisguised.

One of the things always pressed home in the media about Islam is that it’s the fastest growing religion in the world. It’s more likely the quickest shrinking one. Compare the perplexity of the claims of Marxists in the 60s. The swiftest growing movement/religion in the world back then was communism. With the Soviet Union, China and all the rest, they engulfed one third of the world’s population, often with brute force. How can you count individual choices in a closed society? If you’re living in Iran, you’re never going to meet an admitted atheist. Even in an open society, a religionist’s kids are  a statistic even though only an adult can make choices of belief. If 5 out of 8 children in a religionist’s clan chose as an adult not to believe, the column still counts 8 for religion. A third of the population of the world is Christian, but believe that to your own disgrace. They have far more power than their numbers represent, and all their institutions’ incomes are tax free. What a huge unfair advantage to other more preferable viewpoints in life.

There is another problem for religionists who speculate on numbers. Compared to religion, atheism has grown exponentially during the 20th century. According to the World Christian Encyclopedia, a respected source for religious demographics, the number of non-religionists  has skyrocketed from over 3 million in 1900 to over 900 million in 2000.  (The figure could be much larger than this).

Today, non-belief in religion is flourishing at the exceptional rate of over 8 million converts each year. The figure of a billion adherents is just  a small step away, and most of them, like me, have been  raised as religionists and by religionists. Christianity and Islam (and Hindus and Buddhism) have grown not through freedom,  education or witnessing miracles, but through unprotected sex. Non-belief has gone from 0% to 15% in less than a century. Magic is not winning the day. The sin of the moderate position in regards to faith is the claim that a lot of magic is irrational, yet a little bit of it is without harm. If the bin Laden family numbers 600 moderate millionaire Moslems and only one of them dreams of patriotic emirates and pure Sunni caliphates (and a repetition of the ancient Islamic empire of the east from Uzbekistan to Nairobi) and has fanaticism and WMDs, and kills, lord knows how many people, then that’s still unconditional failure. Would bin Laden create a closed empire like the one the Soviets had for 75 years? You bet he would.

Osama bin Laden, Ayman al Zawahiri and others of al-Qeada studied the tactics of Moa Dezong and Vladimir Lenin in Western universities. Iraq’s Ba’ath Party got its pointers from the Nazis. Al-Qaeda, Nazi, Ba’ath and Communists’ lust after power made them antepenultimate fascists. Their imperialistic goal is to rule the world; yet, like 9/11, they produce unintended results. It’s like a puzzle.

“I was responsible for entrusting the 19 brothers with the raids,” Osama bin Laden admitted after much denial. “. . . We – with God’s help – call on every Muslim who believes  and wishes to be rewarded to comply with God’s order to kill the Americans and plunder their money wherever and whenever they find it.”

“I am acting in accordance with the will of the Almighty Creator by defending myself against the Jew,” Adolph Hitler said in the 1930's. “I am fighting for the work of the Lord.”

The result of unexamined belief in the mystic is religion. Religionists may produce the most babies, but they also fill the most jails. Ultimately by their violence and buffoonery, they discredit magical belief over the world, which it so deserves. Inadvertently, and ironically, by some religionists’ cruelty and stupidity, they produce the most ardent atheists. No amount of charity can get them out of this mess.

Magic is ascended to without proof. People hold to their gods on emotional grounds. The vulgar believe that faith is a gift. Those crippled inside, the lame, weak at heart and injured have grievances against life and join together in the cold comfort that are their gods. The Jews, materialists and the wealthy are the easy scapegoats. It’s no wonder that the Christians, Marxists and Islamists have consistently used them over the decades as targets for their wrath.

Faith and religion have been a curse on humankind’s history, not just by weight of its overestimation of the impact on mankind’ moral-value but more so by the harm they do to belief itself. The religionists maintain that religion and faith are beyond reason, and thinking on the problem is a waste of time. They claim that rationalism cannot decide the issue, but in the long run, it is either reason or passion which decides.

Religionists criticize reason as hopeless and embrace faith. By doing so, they espouse herd mentality and preach against the lone rational materialist. Religion is a trick of the mind used to deny the most obvious realities: the mortal chaotic life . . . the evolving ever-changing organic universe. The beauty of religion’s explanation is the Absolute. Truth is supplied by the vendor. Logic and science can happily be disregarded by the buyer. To seller goes wealth and authority. To the purchaser, simplicity and conformity, and often, impoverishment.

And to the rational materialist?

When people choose the irrational, we are all losers, even the winners. Western Civilization depends on reason. Christian philosophers like Eric Voegelin believe contrarily that it depends on Christianity. They see the Dark Ages , which they called the Middle Ages, as a moral achievement, and in general, God, especially the Christian one, as an indisputable teleological fact. To think that we have to share the planet with them after all this time. Last century’s Fascism and Communism were bad enough. Now there’s a Christian whitewash: 21st Century Hermeticism. Will these Western political philosophers ever get over Plato? He’s the one to discover the hidden other-world of the gods and envision the first utopian closed society.

Martin Heidegger is the moral compass for the new ecumenical age. He’s the philosopher who sold-out Edmund Husserl to Nazism but called it something other than betrayal and iniquity. Voegelin professed that the rise of violent cult ideologies like Nazism was the world’s spiritual pathology. He couldn’t see the connection between Christianity and Marxism and  this makes him as foolish as Friedrich Nietzsche, last century’s moral guide for egocentricity and nihilism. Nietzsche’s school of thought helped produce all sorts of obnoxious beliefs, including Fascism and Nazism. But that’s the thing about religion and philosophy, they don’t take any responsibility for the ideas they spread. And if anything goes wrong, it’s never their fault.

Religion promotes the herd instinct and the herd instinct promotes religion

In The Little Book of Atheist Spirituality, André Comte-Sponville, asks the question, “What would the Western world be without Christianity?” He poses it as if to say we could have done worse.

Without Christianity the Western world  would be an exceedingly better place. It’s a Platonic sun-religion preoccupied with otherworldliness. Given their views on sex, there’s a chance that the world wouldn’t be so overpopulated, thus the threat of global warming would be lessened . . . a  good opportunity exists also that  there would have been no Dark Ages so the industrial revolution would have occurred much sooner . . . no anti-Semitism, so robbed of their scapegoat, no Nazism. There’s an  even better gamble that there  would have been no Marxism (since the two systems are based in the same marginal ethics of selflessness) and therefore no enormous figures of democide in the 19th century; no Joseph Smith, so no racist Evangelistic cults in America; no Catholic church, so imagine tens of thousands of educated young through the centuries unbroken by sexual predators; no forced conversion of native peoples; no Catholic Protestant wars of intolerance; no afterworld forgiveness-clause for life’s mismanagers . . . the list is seemingly endless, but most importantly, without Christianity there would have been no vehicle to carry Platonism and Neo-Platonism into the post-industrial centuries. Humankind could have embraced modernity without the psychological handicap of an altruistic anti-libertarian mentality.

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