78. #hell&heaven #atheism #exCHRISTIAN #HEAVEN&HELL

77. A HISTORICAL EVENT WHICH DECIDED THE "FATE" OF JESUS

 

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Origen of Alexandria (184 –  253), also known as Origen Adamantius, was an early Christian scholar, ascetic  and theologian.  He was a prolific writer who wrote roughly 2,000 treatises in multiple branches of theology. He was one of the most influential figures in early Christian theology, apologetics, and asceticism. He has been described as "the greatest genius the early church ever produced".

Origen came into conflict with Demetrius, the bishop of Alexandria, in 231with his revolutionary view on the Holy Trinity. Origen taught that, before the creation of the material universe, God had created the souls of all the intelligent beings. These souls, at first fully devoted to God, fell away from him and were given physical bodies. The Christological debate could no longer be contained within the Alexandrian diocese. It had become a topic of discussion—and disturbance—for the entire Church. The Church was now a powerful force in the Roman world,

This debate continued even after Origen. It was a priest  Arius - 256–336 - believed that Jesus was divine but somewhat less so than God. This was in Alexandria in Egypt and Arius was tremendously popular, in part because he was also a poet and a singer. Arius’s basic premise was the uniqueness of God, who is alone self-existent (not dependent for its existence on anything else) and immutable; the Son, who is not self-existent, cannot therefore be the self-existent and immutable God. This was considered to be a form of Unitarian theology. 

There were endless religious debates, often leading to violence between partisans and riots in the street, were a source of significant annoyance to Constantine, the Roman Emperor. These disagreements divided the Church into two opposing theological factions for many years.  The Emperor Constantine viewed uniting the Christian Church as a way to strengthen and unify the Roman Empire and to bring order to the outlying areas. In 325 he convened a council at his summer residence at Nicaea, in what is now Turkey, insisting that the bishops agree on a creed that would bring unity to the church. Arius himself attended the council, as did his bishop, Alexander. The debate at the council became so heated that at one point, Nicholas struck Arius across the face. Arius appealed to Scripture, quoting verses such as John 14:28: "the Father is greater than I". And also Colossians 1:15: "the firstborn of all creation." Thus, Arius insisted that the Father's Divinity was greater than the Son's, and that the Son was under God the Father, and not co-equal or co-eternal with Him.

One purpose of the Council was to resolve disagreements arising from within the Church of Alexandria over the nature of the Son in his relationship to the Father: in particular, whether the Son had been 'begotten' by the Father from his own being, and therefore having no beginning, or else created out of nothing, and therefore having a beginning. St. Alexander of Alexandria and Athanasius took the first position; the popular  presbyter  Arius, from whom the term Arianism comes, took the second. The Council decided against the Arians overwhelmingly (of the estimated 250–318 attendees. Some 22 of the bishops at the Council, led by Eusebius of Nicomedia, came as supporters of Arius. But when some of the more shocking passages from his writings were read, they were almost universally seen as blasphemous. Of course, there was some language problem - the exact meaning of many of the words used in the debates at Nicaea were still unclear to speakers of other languages. Nevertheless, at the end, all but two agreed to sign the creed and these two -Theonas and Secundus - along with Arius, were banished to Illyria.

The edict by Emperor Constantine against the Arians: 

If any writing composed by Arius should be found, it should be handed over to the flames, so that not only will the wickedness of his teaching be obliterated, but nothing will be left even to remind anyone of him. And I hereby make a public order, that if someone should be discovered to have hidden a writing composed by Arius, and not to have immediately brought it forward and destroyed it by fire, his penalty shall be death. As soon as he is discovered in this offense, he shall be submitted for capital punishment....."

In Nicaea, questions regarding the Holy Spirit were left largely unaddressed until after the relationship between the Father and the Son was settled around the year 362. Constantine gradually became more lenient toward those whom the Council of Nicaea had exiled.

There are several contemporary Christian and Post-Christian denominations today that echo Arian thinking. Jehovah's Witnesses are often referred to as "modern-day Arians" or sometimes "Semi-Arians", usually by their opponents.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

76. EXCERPTS FROM THE BOOK - THE GOD DELUSION

2.2

 

THE GOD DELUSION

 

RICHARD DAWKINS

 

 

(Clinton) Richard Dawkins  (26 March 1941),  was born in  British Kenya and moved to England when he was 8 years old. Halfway through his Christian teenage years, he concluded that the theory of evolution alone was a better explanation for life's complexity, and ceased believing in a god. Dawkins states: "The main residual reason why I was religious was from being so impressed with the complexity of life and feeling that it had to have a designer, and I think it was when I realised that Darwinism was a far superior explanation that pulled the rug out from under the argument of design. And that left me with nothing".

 

As a biology researcher under Nobel Prize-winning ethologist Nikolaas Tinbergen, he received his MA and Doctor of Philosophy. He worked as a lecturer in zoology and became a great ethologist and an evolutionary biologist. He became a prolific writer bringing out books of repute one after another. Dawkins got his prominence with his first book The Selfish Gene in 1976.  In The Selfish Gene Dawkins argues that natural selection takes place at the genetic rather than the species or individual level, as is often assumed. Genes, he maintains, use the bodies of living things to further their own survival. He is the one who coined and introduced the term meme in this book, from  the Greek word mimeme, meaning “to imitate.” It later spawned an entire field of study called memetics. In his The God Delusion (2006), Dawkins contends that a supernatural creator almost certainly does not exist and that religious faith is only a delusion. Though many of his books are able to generate debates, asserting the supremacy of science over religion, nothing matched  The God Delusion in creating more disputes and controversies. The book relentlessly points out the logical fallacies in religious belief and ultimately concludes that the laws of probability preclude the existence of an omnipotent creator.

 

Dawkins argued, in his usual uncompromising fashion, that science and religion are incompatible. He set up the Richard Dawkins Foundation in 2006 to promote the cause of removing religion from science. He was elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1997 and a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 2001.

 

Dawkins is a ferocious polemicist, a defender of reason and enemy of superstition. He refused to accept religions on two aspects; one, religions are the birthplaces for all confusions; and two, believers hold on to their faith even without any basic proof for them.  He feels the greatest mistake is to believe something without any evidences or proofs. According to him, all atheists should keep their heads high without any trace of guilt since being anti-religious is because of a complete and free mind. Dawkins suggests that atheists should be proud, not apologetic, stressing that atheism is evidence of a healthy, independent mind. He is an outspoken atheist and a supporter of various atheist, secular, and humanistic organisations, including Humanists UK and the Brights movement of U.S.A.. 

 

Dawkins reiterates four aspects of awakening in his book. They are:

1. Non-believers always lead an intellectual life with discipline and utmost responsibility. Their minds are always filled with happiness.

2. 'Creation' as told in holy books is baseless; but evolutionary concepts and physical sciences and their concepts are more meaningful.

3. Children are forcefully brought into the religion of their parents. This makes the world for children narrow and parochial.

4. Atheism is the result of deep analytical thinking of the person. Hence non-believers should feel proud of themselves.

 

BOOKS WRITTEN DAWKINS:

1. The Selfish Gene (1976)

2. The Extended Phenotype (1982)

3. The Blind Watchmaker (186)

4. River out of Eden (1995)

5. Climbing Mount Improbable (1996)

6. Unweaving the Rainbow (1998)

7. A Devil's Chaplain (2003)

8. The Ancestor's Tale (2004)

9. THE GOD DELUTION (2006)

10. The Greater Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution (2009)

11. The Magic Reality: How We Know What's Really True (2011)

12. An Appetite for Wonder: The Making of a Scientist (2013)

13. Brief Candle in he Dark: My Life in Science (2015)

14. . Science in the Soul: Selected Writings of a Passionate Rationalist (2017)

 

 

 

 

 

CHAPTER 1

 

A DEEPLY RELIGIOUS NON-BELIEVER

 

Robert M. Pirsig, author of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, writes when one person suffers from a delusion, it is called insanity; when many people suffer from a delusion, it is called religion. (28)

 

I do not try to imagine a personal God; it suffices to stand in awe at the structure of the world, insofar as it allows our inadequate to appreciate it. -- Albert Einstein (31)

 

Some more quotes from Einstein: “I am a deeply religious non-believer. This is somewhat new kind of religion."

“The idea of a personal god is quite alien to me and even naive." (36)

 

Even in his life time Einstein was very crudely criticised. Like many common fables yarned after the death of famous people, it was rumoured that Einstein came back to Christian faith at the time of his death. Another baseless concoction!

 

Carl Sagan in his book Pale Blue Dot, wrote:  “How is it hardly any major religion has looked at science and concluded, “This is better than we thought! The universe is much bigger than our Prophet said,  grander,  more subtle,  more elegant?  Instead they say, “ No, no, no!  My god is a  little  God, and I want him to stay that way!” (33)

 

Douglas Adams says:  “Religion … has certain ideas at the heart of it which we call sacred or holy or whatever. What it means is, - “Here is an idea or a notion that you are not allowed to say anything bad about;  you are just not. …..  If somebody thinks taxes should go up or down you are free to have an argument about it.  But on the other hand if somebody says,’ I must not move a light switch on a Saturday’, you say, I respect that." … We are used to not challenging religious ideas but it is very interesting how much of a roar it creates." (42)

 

Dawkins elaborately gives the details of an incident that occurred in September 2005 in Denmark.  A newspaper Jyllands-Posten published twelve cartoons depicting the prophet Mohammad. In the next three months serious problems cropped up all the world over. News was spread that the newspaper was of a governmental organ and in many distant countries, the Danish flag was burnt. None knows how all those countries got the flags of Denmark.  A bounty of one million was placed on the  head of the Danish cartoonist by a Pakistani imam - by the say, where was that million going to come from?  Further in addition to the twelve cartoons another three more were added by zealous propagandists. Of these three, one was a bearded man wearing a fake pig's snout held on with elastic. Later this was turned out that this was an Associated Press photograph of a Frenchman entered for a pig-squealing contest at a country fair in France. Banners carried by protesters in Britain were saying: "Slay those who insult Islam", "Europe you will pay", and "Behead those who insult Islam."

 

Fortunately, our political leaders were on hand to remind us that Islam is a religion of peace and mercy. If people wish to love a 7th century preacher more than their own families, that's upto them, but nobody else is obliged to take it seriously …." (46-49)

 

 H.L.Mencken said: "We must respect the other fellow's religion, but only in the sense and to the extent that we respect his theory that his wife is beautiful and his children smart. (50)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

CHAPTER 2

 

THE GOD HYPOTHESIS 

 

The religion of one age is the literary

entertainment of the next.

                                                                       -  RALPH WALDO EMERSON

 

The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust,  unforgiving control freak;  a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic  cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic,  racist,  infanticidal, genocidal,  filicidal, pestilential,  megalomaniacal, sado-machistic, capriciously malevolent bully.

Thomas Jefferson was of a similar opinion, describing the God of Moses as “a being of terrific character - cruel, vindictive, capricious and unjust." (51)

 

Pope John Paul II created more Saints than all his predecessors of the past several centuries put together and he had a special affinity with the Virgin Mary. His polytheistic hankerings were  dramatically demonstrated in 1981 when he suffered an assassination attempt in Rome and attributed his survival to intervention Of Our Lady of Fatima: “A maternal hand guided the bullet." One cannot help wondering why she did not guide it to miss him altogether. (56)

 

The burden of proving the existence of a God falls on the believers. This was demonstrated by Bertrand Russel’s  parable of the celestial teapot. “If I have to suggest that between the Earth and Mars there is a China teapot revolving about the sun in an elliptical Orbit, nobody would be able to disprove my assertion. … But if I had to go on to say that since my assertion cannot be proved,  it is intolerable presumption on the part of human reason to doubt it. …  If however the existence of such a teapot where affirmed in ancient books, taught as a sacred truth every Sunday and instilled into the minds of children at school, hesitation to believe in its existence would become a mark of eccentricity and entitled the doubter to the attentions of the psychiatrist in an enlightened age or of the Inquisitor in an earlier time." (75)

 

How many liberalists have read enough of the Bible to know that the death penalty is prescribed for adultery, for gathering sticks on the Sabbath and for cheeking your parents?(81)

 

THE GREATER PRAYER EXPERIMENT

Darwin’s cousin Francis Galton was the first to analyse scientifically whether praying for people is efficacious … but he found no statistical difference.

Then Russell Stannard, one of Britain's 3 well known religious scientists  went on with an experiment with funding from Templeton Foundation to the tune of 2.4 million dollars. It was done on 3 batches of patients who underwent coronary bypass surgery. The results reported in the American Heart Journal of April 2006 very clear cut there was no difference between those patients who have prayed for and those who were not. Many funny interpretations were tried by the believers. Many theologians like Swinburne disowned the study, only after getting the negative results. (86-89)

 

 

 

 

 

CHAPTER 3

ARGUMENTS FOR GOD’S 

EXISTENCE

 

A professorship of theology should have

no place in our institution.

                                                                   -- THOMAS JEFFERSON

 

The 5 proofs asserted by Thomas Aquinas in the 13th century don't prove anything and are  easily exposed as vacuous.(101)

 

THE ARGUMENT FROM PERSONAL EXPERIENCE

Many people believe in God because they believe they have seen a vision of him or of an angel or a virgin in blue with their own eyes.

 

I too personally have such an experience. I lost my mother when I was just two or two and half years old. No memories of her. Her cemetery was in our village. It was in a small piece of land surrounded by tall palmyra trees and big and bushy tamarind trees. Even till my teens when I happen to cross that area I used to have  some odd feelings. Never dared to look straight at the cemetery. But at the same time I could not want to miss it. Some unknown feeling used to pervade me. Once, probably, I would have been when I was ten years old. I was coming with one of my relatives. There was the usual disturbance. Almost crossed the cemetery. Then without my own control, I looked back at mother's cemetery. What I "saw" then is still in my memory so fresh. There were two long white angels on the both the sides of amma's cemetery, as tall as the palmyra. They were in a kneeling posture - as we see in all catholic churches. It was for a fraction of a second. Even now  I get jitters thinking of it.

 

After becoming a non-believer I introspected  and found a very simple answer to that "apparition". It was the idea of heaven and angels, my mother being protected here by two angels. It should have been the picture I had in my deeper mind. So I saw what I wanted to see. The answer looked so simple and satisfying to me.

 

THE ARGUMENT FROM SCRIPTURE

When the gospels written many years after Jesus’ death nobody knew where he was born but the old Testament prophecy (Micah 5 : 2)has led Jews to expect the long awaited Messiah would be born in Bethlehem.(118) 

David, if he existed, lived nearly a thousand years before Mary and Joseph.  Why on earth would the Romans have required Joseph to go to the city where a remote ancestor had lived a Millennium earlier? Robert Gillooly shows how all essential features of the Jesus legend including the star in the East, the virgin birth, the veneration of the baby by kings, the miracles, the execution, the resurrection and the ascension are borrowed from other religions already in existence in the Mediterranean and near East region.(119)

Do the Christians never open the book that they believe is the literal truth? Why don't they notice those glaring contradictions?  Mathew traces Joseph’s descent from King David via 28 intermediate generations,  while Luke has 41 generations? (120) 

The only difference between The Da Vinci Code and the gospels is that the gospels are ancient fiction while The Da Vinci Code is modern fiction.

 Bertrand Russell  - The immense majority of intellectually eminent men disbelieve in Christian religion,  but they conceal the fact in public,  because they are afraid of losing their incomes.(123)

The only website I could find that claimed to list “Nobel Prize winning scientific Christians” came up with six out of a total of several hundred scientific Nobelists.  Of these 6, it turned out that four were not Nobel Prize winners at all and at least one to my certain knowledge is a non-believer who attends church for purely social reasons. A more systematic study by Benjamin Beit-Hallahmi 'found that among Nobel Prize laureates in the sciences, as well as those in literature, there was a remarkable degree of irreligiosity, as compared to the populations they came from'. (126)

American scientists are less religious than the American public generally and that the most distinguished scientists are the least religious of all.  What is remarkable is a polar opposition between the religiosity of the American public at large and atheism of the intellectual elite. (127)

 

CHAPTER 4

               WHY THERE  ALMOST

                CERTAINLY IS NO GOD

Creationists eagerly seek a gap in present-day knowledge or understanding.  If an apparent gap so found, it is assumed that God, by default, must fill it.(151)

This chapter has contained the central argument of my book and so I shall summarise them as a series of 6 numbered points’

1.            One of the greatest challenges to the human intellect has been to explain how the complex, improbable appearance of design in the universe arises.

2.            In a man-made artefact such as a watch, the designer really was an intelligent engineer. It is tempting to apply the same logic to an eye or wing, a spider or a person.

3.            The temptation is a false one, because the designer hypothesis immediately raises the larger problem of who designed the designer. … We need a ‘crane’, not a Skyhook’ for only a crane can do the business of working up gradually and plausibility from simplicity to otherwise improbable complexity.

4.            The most ingenious and powerful crane so far discovered is Darwinian evolution by natural selection.

5.            We don't have an equivalent crane for physics.

6.            But even in the absence of a strongly satisfying crane to match the biological one, the relatively weak cranes we have at present are, when abetted by the anthropic principle, self-evidently better than the self-defeating skyhook hypothesis of an intelligent designer.

If the argument of this chapter is accepted, the factual premise of religion -  The God Hypothesis -  is untenable.  God almost certainly does not exist. (189)

 

CHAPTER 5

THE ROOTS OF RELIGION

Universal features of a species demand a Darwinian explanation.  

There is little evidence that religious belief protects people from stress related diseases.(194)

Is religion a placebo that prolongs life by reducing stress?(195)

Religion is a tool used by the ruling class to subjugate the underclass. (197)

Biologists see religion as a by-product of something else. …  Religion does not have a direct survival value of its own, but it is by-product of something else that does. (Dawkins explains this with the example of animal behavior of moths.)(201)

“Don't paddle in the crocodile-infested Limpopo” is a good advice but ”you must sacrifice a goat at the time of the full moon, otherwise the rains will fail” is  at best a waste of time and goats. Both admonitions sound equally trustworthy. Both come from a respected source. … When the child grows up and has children of her own, she will naturally pass the whole lot onto her own children - nonsense as well as sense - using the same infectious gravitas of manner.(205)

The ethologist Robert Hinde, in Why Gods Persist,, and the anthropologists Pascal Boyer, in Religion Explained, and Scott Atran, in In Gods We Trust, have independently  promoted the general idea of religion as a by-product of normal psychological depositions.(206)

Martin Luther was well aware  that reason was religion’s arch-enemy and he frequently warned of its dangers: “Reason is the greatest enemy that faith has." … Whoever wants to be a Christian should tear the eyes out of his reason. And gain: Reason should be destroyed in all Christians."(221)

The Cargo cults of South Pacific suggest sour lessons about the origin of religions generally and I’ll set them out briefly here. First is the amazing speed with which a cult can spring up.. Second is the speed with which the origination process covers its tracks. … The third lesson springs from the independent emergence of similar cults on different islands … Fourth, the cargo cults are similar not just to each other but to older religions.(239)

 

CHAPTER 6

               THE ROOTS OF MORALITY:

            WHY ARE WE GOOD?

Strange is our situation here on Earth. Each of us comes for a short visit, not knowing why, yet  sometimes seeming to divine a purpose. From the standpoint of daily life, however, there is one thing we do know;  that man is here for the sake of other men - above all for those upon whose smiles and well-being of our own happiness depends. 

…        ALBERT EINSTEIN

Many religious people find it hard to imagine how, without religion, one can be good, or would even want to be good. (241)

What about the wrenching compassion we feel when we see an orphaned child weeping, an old widow in despair from loneliness, or an animal whimpering in pain?... Where does the Good Samaritan in us come from?(246)

Hauser and his colleagues adapted their moral experiments to the Kuna, a small Central American tribe with little contact with Westerners and no formal religion. Peter Singer, a moral philosopher also joined this work.    The main conclusion of Hauser and Singer’s study was that there is no statistically significant difference between atheist and religious believers in making their judgments.  This is compatible with the view,  which I had and many others hold,  that we do not need God in order to be a good - or evil.(258)

THERE IS NO GOD, WHY BE GOOD?

Einstein said, “If  people are good only because they fear punishment,  and hope for the award,  then we are a sorry lot indeed."(259)

Do we really need policing, weather by God or by each other -  in order to stop us from  behaving in a selfish and criminal manner?  … A police strike in Montreal was described in ‘The Blank Slate’ by Steven Pinker.  …  Majority of the population of Montreal presumably believed in God.  Why didn't the fear of God restrain the people when earthly policemen were temporarily removed from the scene? Wasn't the Montreal strike a pretty good natural experiment to test the hypothesis that belief in God makes us good? Or did the cynic H.L. Mencken get it right when he tartly observed: "People say we need religion when what they really mean is we need police."(261)

I am not necessarily claiming that atheism increases morality, although humanism - the ethical system that often goes with atheism - probably does. Another good possibility is that atheism is correlated with some third factor, such as higher education, intelligence or reflectiveness, which might counter-act criminal injustice.

The idea of Sam Harris in his Letter to Christian Nation is striking: Red (Republican) states' are primarily red due to the overwhelming political influence of conservative Christians. (Blue are the Democratic states.) Of the 25 cities with the lowest rates of violent crime, 62% are in blue states, and 38% are in red states. Of the 25 most dangerous cities, 76% are in red states, and 24% are in blue states.  In fact, three of 5 most dangerus cities in the U.S.  are in pious state of Texas.(262)

Gregory S.Paul, in the Journal of Religion and Society (2005) reached devastating conclusion that 'higher rates of belief in and worship of a creator correlate with higher rates of homicide, juvenile and early mortality, STD infection rates, teen pregnancy and abortion in the prosperous democracies'.

Comment of Dan Dennett on such of these studies in Breaking the Spell: "if there is a significant positive relationship between moral behavior and religious affiliation, practice or belief, it will soon be discovered, since so many religious organizations are eager to confirm their traditional beliefs about this scientifically."(263)

 

 

CHAPTER 7

THE 'GOOD' BOOK AND THE CHANGING

MORAL ZEITGEIST*

 

Politics has slain its thousands, but religion

has slain its tens of thousands.

                                                                        --  SEAN O'CASEY

 

(* zeitgeist = the spirit characteristic of an age or generation)

 

Those who wish to base their morality literally on the Bible have either not read it or not understood it, as Bishop John Shelby Spong, in The Sins of Scripture.(269)

 

The biblical story of destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah is discussed by Dawkins. Gen 19:5;

19: 7-8; 31-36. If this dysfunctional family was the best Sodom had to offer by way of morals, some might begin to feel a certain sympathy with God and his judicial brimstone.

The story of Lot and the Sodomites is eerily echoed in another chapter 19 of the book of Judges. Judges 19: 23,24; 19: 25,26.

Then the story of Abraham is discussed: Genesis 12: 18,19; 20: 2-5

 

Abraham, the "father" of all three monotheistic religions, stands as a role model for all the believers. But the way he 'handled' his wife Sarah was obnoxious. How he dealt with the Pharaoh and then the King of Gerar are very unpleasant even to read. In both the stories it was Abraham who was making continuously huge frauds; but his God punishes the kings and spares Abraham, the culprit. That is God of Abraham's  justice! I used to wonder how people even after reading the Bible, name their kids as Abraham or Sarah. And all these wicked stories and bad judgment were in the 'word of God'!

 

God ordered Abraham to make a burnt offering of his longed-for son. … His murdering knife was already in his hand when an angel dramatically intervened with the news of the "last-minute change of plan": God was only joking after all, 'tempting' Abraham, and testing his faith. A modern moralist cannot help but wonder how a child could ever recover from such psychological trauma. This legend is one of the great foundational myths of all three monotheistic religions. (275)

 

The book of Numbers tells how God incited Moses to attack the Midianites. Moses was not a great role model for modern moralists. (Numbers 31:18).  Chapter 25  in Numbers gives another 'beautiful' story - a story of cruelty, guided by the God!(278)

 

The Bible story of Joshua's destruction of Jericho and the invasion of the Promised Land in general, is morality indistinguishable from Hitler's invasion of Poland or Saddam Hussein's massacres of the Kurds and the Marsh Arabs. The Bible may be an arresting and poetic work of fiction, but is not the sort of book you could give your children to form their morals.(280)

Do the people who hold up the Bible as an inspiration to moral rectitude have the slightest notion of what is actually written in it? (Numbers 15)(281)

 

IS THE NEW TESTMENT ANY BETTER?

"If any man come to me and hate not his father and mother and wife, and children … and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple". Julia Sweeney, an American comedian, asks: "Isn't that what cults do|? Get you to reject your family in order to inculcate you?"

Christian focus is overwhelmingly on sin sin sin sin sin sin sin. (285)

 

I have described atonement, the central doctrine of Christianity, as vicious, sado-masochistic and repellent. We should also dismiss it as barking mad, but for its ubiquitous familiarity which had dulled our objectivity. If God wanted to forgive our sins, why not just forgive them, without having himself  tortured and executed in payment - thereby, incidentally, condemning remote future generations of Jews to pogroms and persecution as 'Christ-killers': did that hereditary sin pass down in the semen too? (287)

 

Religion is undoubtedly a divisive force, and this is one of the main accusations leveled against it.(294)

 

In India at the time of partition, more than a million people were massacred in religious riots between Hindus and Muslims (and fifteen million displaced from their homes). There was nothing to divide them but religion. Salman Rushdie was moved by a more recent bout of religious massacres in India to write an article called 'Religion, as ever, is the poison in India's blood'.

 

What is there to respect in any of this, or in any of the crimes now being committed almost daily around the world in religion's dreaded name? How well, with what fatal results, religion erects totems, and how willing we are to kill for them! And when we've done it often enough, the deadening of affect that results makes it easier to do it again.

 

So India's problem turns out to be the world's problem. What happened in India has happened in God's name.

 

The problem's name is God. (295)

 

Religion amplifies and exacerbates the damage in at least three ways:

Labelling of children - as catholic children or protestant children …….

Segregated schools - in group education separated from other religious children

Taboos against 'marrying out'.(296)

 

Even if religion did no other harm in itself, its wanton and carefully nurtured divisiveness  -  its deliberate and cultivated pandering to humanity's natural tendency to favour in groups and shun out-groups  -  would be enough to make it a significant force for evil in the world.(297)`

 

Zeitgeist progression is more than enough to undermine the claim that we need God in order to be good, or to decide what is good.(309)

Hitler and Stalin were atheists. What have you got to say about that? The question comes up after just about every public lecture. It was with 2 assumptions: both are atheists; they did their terrible things because they were atheists.  …  Even if we accept that Hitler and Stalin shared atheism in common, they both also had moustches, as does Saddam Hussein. So what?  … What matters is not whether Hitler and Stalin were atheists, but whether atheism systematically influences people to do bad things. There is not the smallest evidence that it does. (309)

 

Hitler was not really religious but just cynically exploiting the religiosity of his audience. He may have agreed with Napoleon, who said, 'Religion is excellent stuff for keeping common people quiet', and with Seneca the Younger: 'Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by the rulers as useful'.(313)

           

Religious wars really are fought in the name of religions and they have been  horribly frequent in histroy. I cannot think of any war that has been fought in the name of atheism

 

Sam Harrison hits the bullseye, in The End of Faith: The danger of religious faith is that it allows otherwise normal human beings to reap the fruits of madness and consider them holy. Because each new generation of children is taught that religious propositions need not be justified in the way that all others must, civilization is still besieged by the armies of the preposterous. We are, even now, killing ourselves over ancient literature. Who would have thought something so tragically absurd could be possible?(316)

 

 

CHAPTER 8

 

WHAT'S WRONG WITH RELIGIONS?

WHY BE SO HOSTILE?

 

Religion has actually convinced people that there's an invisible man - living in the sky - who watches everything you do, every minute of every day. And the invisible man has a special list of ten things he does not want you to do. And if you do any of those ten things, he has a special place, full of fire and smoke and burning and torture and anguish, where he will send you to live and suffer and burn and choke and scream and cry forever and ever 'til the end of time …. But He loves you!

                                                 … GEORGE  CARLIN

 

I, as a scientist, believe (for example, evolution). I believe not because of reading a holy book but because I have studied the evidence. It really is a very different matter. Books about evolution are believed not because they are holy. They are believed because they present overwhelming quantities of mutually buttressed evidence. (319)

 

We believe in evolution because the evidence supports it and we would abandon it overnight if new evidence arose to disprove it. No real fundamentalism would ever say anything like that?(320)

 

I am hostile to fundamentalist religion because it actively debauches the scientific enterprise. It teaches us not to change our minds, and not to want to know exciting things that are available to be known.(321)

 

One of the fiercest penalties in the Old Testament is the one exacted for blasphemy. It is still in force in certain countries. Section 295-C of the Pakistan penal code prescribes the death penalty for this 'crime'. (324)

 

It is still an article of the constitution of  'liberatred' Afghanistan that the penalty for apostasy is death.(325)

 

The cause of all this misery, mayhem, violence, terror and ignorance is of course religion itself and it seems ludicrous to have to state such an obvious reality, the fact is that the government and the media are doing a pretty good job of pretending that it isn't so.

 

They have been brought up from the cradle to have total and unquestioning faith.(344)

 

We accept the principle that religious faith must be respected simply because it is religious faith.(345)

 

Christianity, just as much as Islam, teaches children that unquestioned faith is a virtue.(346)

 

If children were taught to question and think through their belief, instead of being taught the superior virtue of faith without question, it is a good bet that there would be no suicide bombers.

 

Faith can be very very dangerous, and deliberately to implant it into the vulnerable mind of an innocent child is a grievous wrong. (348)

 

 

 

CHAPTER 9

 

CHILDHOOD ABUSE

 AND THE ESCAPE FROM RELIGION

 

There is in every village a torch - the teacher;

and an extinguisher - the clergyman.

                                                                                      …. VICTOR HUGO

 

Our society, including the non-religious sector has accepted the preposterous idea that it is normal and right to indoctrinate tiny children in the religion of their parents, and to slap religious labels on them - 'Catholic child', Protestant child', 'Muslim child' etc.(382)

 

 

 

CHAPTER 10

 

 A MUCH NEEDED GAP

 

Does religion fill a much needed gap? It is often said that there is God-shaped gap in the brain which needs to be filled; we have psychological need for God - imaginary friend, father, big brother, confessor, confidant - and the need has to be satisfied whether God really exists or not. But could it be that God clutters up a gap that we'd be better off filling with something else? Science, perhaps? Art? Human friendship? Humanism? Love of this life in the real world, giving no credence to other lives beyond the grave? A love of nature, or what the great entomologist E.O.Wilson has called Biophilia? (389)

 

Perhaps even better; imaginary friends - and imaginary gods - have the time and patience to devote all their attention to the sufferer. (391)

 

Religion's power to console doesn't make it true. (394)

 

Why don't religious people talk like that when in the presence of the dying?  Could it be that they don'r really believe all that stuff they pretend to believe?(399)