Christianity
What is religion? It is a puzzle
Abstract
© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Friday, May 14, 1999
A Religion of Puzzlement
What is religion? It is a puzzle. Henri Bergson wrote:
How is it that beliefs and practices that are anything but reasonable could have been, and still are, accepted by reasonable beings.
Quite! Today not everyone means the same thing by religion. Many people use the word as meaning any set of personal ideals or beliefs. Thus communism, though atheistic, is called a religion. In earlier stages, religion did not have this broad meaning, but, at the beginning of human society, religion was broader still—it was the culture of a tribe, any particular tribe’s own way of explaining things.
Religious thinking is the simplest kind of thinking. It is the thinking of puzzled people trying to comprehend things that they do not understand. Left to themselves, as they learnt more about the world and explained the puzzles of yore, religious thinking ought to disappear and be replaced, first by common sense or intuitive explanations, then by reasoned and ultimately scientific explanations of the world.
Unfortunately, people were not left to follow this natural development. Early in history a caste of them saw the value of puzzlement and set out to keep the others—the unsophisticated ones—puzzled. They called themselves priests and they invented gods so that they could control people’s lives. They are still with us doing the same things, and modern people still let them, though they have no proper excuse for doing so—they are mainly not now unsophisticated.
Today we are able to choose between facts and rhetoric, between history and mythology, between common sense and religion, between science and obfuscation, and between free thought and enslaving creeds. Unlike other animals we have the power of abstract thought. Why do most of us not use it on the religions which still exist in the West notably “our religion”, Christianity?
It is because people are normally brought up conditioned by some religious superstition imposed upon them by their parents through their sense of duty. For centuries, in the West, the superstition that has fettered the human mind has been that of the Christian priesthood. The priest historically claimed a person’s whole life. Scarcely had children entered the world than their will was made captive:
- they lost their freedom in the rite of baptism;
- they were taught incredible fairy stories to increase their gullibility;
- they were then taught that their personality lived independently of their body in something called the soul;
- this soul could live on after death, but only if they obeyed the priests.
And so, believing they were to be rewarded for it, they happily accepted the priest’s dogmas as being divine and revealed supernaturally. The majority of people in the western world in the last two thousand years have thus made themselves slaves to the clerics and the bogus authority of the church.
But nobody is forever committed to their parents’ prejudices. If this were so, humans would always have remained in ignorance. Knowledge progresses by each generation adding to the knowledge of the preceding one. Each of us must test our knowledge to determine what we must reject and what we should retain and to dispose of superstitions instilled into us from infancy.
Most believers hold to their Christian opinions without so much as an hour’s genuine reflexion on them. The reason is that they dare not. The priests have told them it shows lack of faith and the salvation of their soul depends upon them having faith. There could not be a better confidence trick. The tricked party dare not even start to think it has been tricked.
Well it has, and no Christian should worry that their God has forbidden them, on pain of everlasting death, from using the brain that evidently He gave them. Do facts, like natural facts and historical facts, mean anything at all? They do? Then we must apply them to Christianity as to the natural world. Christianity must stand or fall by the facts. Unless the Christian god is the Devil in disguise, no Christian could think God would trick them.
We treat Christianity differently from other matters of study in the world because the priests, who want to guard their sinecures, tell us Christianity is different. Christianity should be treated like any other subject—in a strictly realistic manner. We should weigh Christianity critically in the scales of knowledge and the priesthood in the scales of justice.
Criticising Christianity
A theist is not a deist. Theists believe in God for personal and quite irrational reasons, often an unproven belief in revelation. A Christian is a theist. A deist believes in something divine, but regards all religions as human constructs or frauds. Deists are often labelled infidels, unbelievers, skeptics or Rationalists because they are people who follow reason and good sense rather than tradition or some authority declaring the supernatural exists and effects us all daily.
In the last two hundred years, there has been an increasing body of people questioning this authority and its ethical basis, since it is manifestly untrue! A similar thing happened two and a half thousand years ago, in Asia, when beliefs in supernatural entities were getting so convoluted that Buddha in India and Confucius in China urged men to concentrate on human problems and “ignore spiritual beings, if there are any”. The mass of the people took no notice. It was the same in ancient Greece and Rome.
The poet Dante tells us that many intellectuals were skeptics at Florence in his day. But they were dangerous times. The stench of burning human flesh pervaded Europe. The Papacy could stand no opposition. The noble Giordano Bruno was burned alive as late as 1600 for teaching an enlightened philosophy of the universe.
How many in the seventeenth century knew of the work of Copernicus or Galileo? Few. After a thousand years of absolute domination of Christianity—”the greatest patron learning ever had”, Christians tell us—ninety per cent of the people of Europe were unable to read. Persistent attempts to stem the tide of disbelief by banning evolution from schools is only the latest example of how the church has forced ignorance upon the world. The old creed was based on a conception of the universe which was objectively wrong but right for the church.
Skepticism increases as knowledge grows because Christianity cannot be reconciled with recent discoveries. When only the clergy could read, no one was in a position to question their lies, and the few books available were full of clerical mendacity. The church’s lies were questioned in proportion to the degree of universality of education and of printed books. Today, there is again healthy skepticism toward religion.
Only charlatans today pronounce the most distinctive dogma of Christianity—eternal torment. Who but rogues or fools can accept God’s primitive curse on mankind and the necessity of the atoning death of Christ. Adelphiasophists deplore blood, bloody sacrifices and bells obliging people to make their due attendance at church. Adelphiasophists refuse to worship, because worship was the oriental flattery of potentates, sultans and czars.
Protestant Americans were among those who broke the tyranny of the Papacy and laughed at its divine claims. They maintained that the Church had lied about religion for a thousand years and the world had acquiesced in the deception. The proper human situation was the republic of of the pagan Greeks and Romans, so the Protestant Americans smashed the divine right of kings. They broke the chains of the slave, which the church had blessed since it began. They tore up all the ancient deceptions. Yet now many accept the same lies from their weeping, money-grubbing protestant ministers.
At the same time, largely in Germany, biblical criticism became more scientific—Higher Criticism—a careful study and analysis of original Hebrew and Greek texts. At once the Hebrew text of the Old Testament was shown to be a compilation of fragments of books of very different ages, all put together, and very considerably altered, by the Jewish priests a few centuries before Christ.
Just as we can easily tell the English of the tenth century from that of the fifteenth or the nineteenth, so we ought to see marked differences in the Hebrew text of the different biblical stories, if they were genuinely old books. The books are quite uniform in style, differences signifying only a few hundred years at the most in the different redactions. There is some genuine history in them, showing that the priestly editors used legends but the vast range of history the books purposrt to cover is not there. This is one of the very important points overlooked by the Fundamentalists. The authority of the Bible they accept evaporates without any assistance from evolution. Genesis is historically untrue as well as scientifically untrue.
Science and history are one. History is the scientific investigation of the story of man. Proper historical investigation requires as much skepticism as science to operate successfully. Species can be seen evolving, so how are they created by God? Modern history equally cuts out the hand of God from the human record and dispenses with the miraculous, and supernatural revelations.
One of the untruthful and unsound aspects of church propaganda was a contempt of all things Pagan. Every fine sentiment in the New Testament has a parallel in the words of Plato or the Stoics, yet the churches prescribed that all the world was in darkness until Christ, a myth so widely accepted that few people, even non-Christians today, would demur. Protestants took to this myth even more than the Roman church, which they regarded, quite rightly, as being largely pagan anyway. Dante recognized the greatness of ancient Greece and Rome, basing his famous Christian epic on the pagan poet Virgil.
The first scholars to decipher the Egyptian hieroglyphs were astonished to find that the ancient pagan kingdom had been deeply religious and proper in moral terms. Egypt’s many gods and goddesses had even evolved into ethical monotheism in which the god Aten or, later, Amun-Ra was thought of precisely as people today think of God.
In ancient Babylon, archaeologists found an immense literature and the Babylonians’ code of laws. They are not “mere hypotheses”, the typical Fundamentalist dismissal. They were biblical so-called revelations written in tablets of clay! And the rulers of this “primitive immoral pagan” country drowned people in the river for adultery and burned men alive for rape!
Their account of the origin of the universe and of man emerged from the mud and astonishingly showed that Genesis is a collection—altered to suit Jewish monotheism—of legends going back several thousand years. The story of creation, of the first human pair, of the garden and the fall, and of the deluge, correspond perfectly with the stories reproduced in Genesis.
No Fundamentalist admits to the dimmest notion of what scholars have long known about Babylonian stories being in Genesis. Many are not stupid. They know of these discoveries but pretend to their distinctly stupid followers that they do not exist. They are not concerned to preserve souls but to preserve the weight of their wallets. So, all of them speak about “the Word of God” as if ancient Babylon had never been uncovered, and the stories of creation, fall and deluge were not just ancient legends. Even if the evidence was dropped into their laps, most of these fundamentalist believers would stick to Genesis as God’s revelation.
Nothing was more damaging to biblical revelation than the discoveries of the same legends in pre-biblical Babylon. Yet the implications of evolutionary theory were greater. If people evolve from an earlier form, when does the soul evolve?
The tower of Babel and the confusion of tongues offered another ground for disputing the biblical explanation of things. One of the earliest branches of science in the nineteenth century was the science of languages, philology. Scientists found that the languages of widely different nations—such as most Europeans, Hindus and Persians—were related to each other. Before species were known to have evolved, language was known to have evolved. The biblical myth of the Tower of Babel was therefore... just a myth.
Experts on the science of comparative religion arranged all the religions of the world, including Christianity, in a series and realised that even Christianity evolved.
Modern Christians take the Bible as an inspired book or a revelation only in a dilute sense. The early chapters of the Old Testament consist of legends taken from the Babylonians. The history recorded in Deuteronomy, Kings, Judges, Chronicles and the prophets is full of errors. The Old Testament was compiled and conflated with pious fiction a few centuries before the birth of Christ. The prophecies were not prophecies, the miracles were not miracles, and the New Testament was written so many decades after the death of Christ that an historian would not regard it as a reliable biography. The reason is that the Bible is not a science or history book. It was written to make people believe in God.
A few preachers say that they surrender all these things. These men who tell us to be honest must be honest to us. They retain a book known to be full of pious forgeries—lies in truth—to make us believe in God. In so doing, they surrender Adam and Eve, the Garden of Eden, the fall and the flood. What then is original sin and the need for atonement?
Christianity is an ethic, they say, but it does not look much like old Christianity, so why keep the name? Not pure opportunism, surely! Because Christ remains as the prophet. Yet nothing in this ethical code seems originally and peculiarly Christian, and how can twentieth century society benefit from pasoral oracles of two thousand years ago? Why should anyone look for social guidance to a prophet who thought that the end of the world was at hand?
The third and chief element of the new Christianity is God, and it is the most disputed and disputable of the three. God is the most disputed element of all religion. Philosophers, the men who ought to know most about it, are hopelessly divided as to what kind of a God we may believe in and the reasons why we should believe. The majority of them refuse to believe in a personal God.
Some scientific men throw as much dust in the eyes of people as Fundamentalist preachers do. “Science is not opposed to religion”, they pronounce. When they say science is not opposed to religion, they mislead, because they use their authority as scientists to give what is no more than their personal belief that the facts brought to light by science are consistent with religious beliefs. On that they have no authority at all.
Science is not concerned with God and immortality. These are supernatural phenomena and science studies phenomena in nature. It is idle therefore to consider whether science is consistent with God. Instead of wasting their time asking fatuous questions about God, people should be asking sensible questions about how we are treating the world and its creatures, including ourselves.
Shallow thinkers, who mistake insincere sentimentality for natural love and concern, cling to traditional belief. Clear, inquisitive thinkers, who constantly ask why, demand proof and live in the real world not a fantasy world, inevitably reject Christianity. History, science, philosophy, common sense—all that we know and the best that we have thought—will tell us that priests have been lying for centuries.
Life after Death
Take the idea of immortality. The way of all life is toward death. Not so much as a pin-point of reproducible evidence in proof of any life after death has been presented. Supposed evidence is all anecdotal and invokes the most primitive ideas of superstition, ghosts and portents. If we concede for the sake of argument that this “evidence” can be weighed in the balance, it has to weigh heavily in the face of the remaining 95 percent of evidence that tells us that our personality ceases when we die. Death is the irrefragable ultimate fact.
There is no reason in nature for immortality, and indeed it becomes more unreasonable the more one reflects upon it. The wish for immortality is nothing more than the other vain wishes that men have. Can anyone figure out any form of immortality that might be plausible? The “soul” which is supposed to be immortal is itself nothing more than a myth.
Why do so many people stake their happiness on a transcendental future which might not exist instead of fulfilling the possibilities of this life which we know exists because we experience it daily?
Asked to reject future life—the idea of the extension of the personality into the future—some people find it hard to accept they will not meet again those they have loved in the present life. They assume too much and should think again. What happiness is there in the doubt that their departed lovers, children and friends—good as they seemed—might have finished up in the eternal fires of hell? Can they be happy to imagine their loved ones minute by minute burning in hell, having lapsed in the standards of the Almighty and incurred his displeasure, rather than enjoying the balmy plains of heaven where we hope to meet them again. We are entitled to wonder why, if God is good, merciful and omnipotent, he could not have made mankind incapable of sin, for, then, the necessity for a hell would not have arisen.
Why not accept that the personality dies with the body just as the original loss of the loved one when they died had to be accepted. Those who accept the belief in immortality do so simply on the word of others, who know no more about the mystery than they themselves. Should we believe in the supernatural because it gives us comfort in bereavement or because charlatans preying upon our grief assure us it is so?
The Existence of a God
By reason alone, one might find plausible arguments for the existence of a God— the need for a creator, design in nature, a legislator to decree the “laws of nature”, and the like. Anyone of a skeptical bent would still not be satisfied, however, because the creation of the god has then to be explained. Postulationg a creator only suggests a greater mystery. It is not parsimonious and it is not an explanation.
Science gives natural explanations of these things and supernatural explanations have become pointless except as moral tales. Naturally, unsolved questions remain but so far there is no need to imagine that the methods of natural investigation will not produce answers. But as we satisfy ourselves with nuggets from the goldmine of knowledge, we constantly reveal new lodes beyond, yet to be mined. Meanwhile, not one tenable argument for belief in God has yet been dug up.
If you ask a clergyman where this Almighty exists, you will get no meaningful answer, or rather you will get as many answers as people you ask. Yet we can see Nature all around us and marvel in awe at her beauty and complexity. Since the Renaissance, the growth of science has led to a new appreciation of Nature and a growing rejection of the view that a supernatural king, ensconced somewhere in a transcendent dimension can, willy-nilly alter her laws. No divine whim can change the local laws of mechanics.
Instead of wasting our time and energy in contemplating and appeasing a fictitious deity, and obeying the selfish motive of desire for future salvation in a transcendental heaven, let us dedicate our lives to the interests of this world, to the study of natural science so that we can understand how we are affecting our environment and preserve it, to social cooperation and cooperation with the other species which share the planet with us, to the development of the neglected intuitive and creative aspects of our being rather than only seeking knowledge through destruction, to the spread of knowledge of our situation that we might enjoy future happiness not misery or extinction.
We must transfer our allegiance from God to Goddess. We regard Nature as a goddess, not because we belief that she is a sentient giantess living somewhere in the sky or in another dimension, but because she gives birth and succours—her primary attributes are motherly. We can treasure her as the womb within which all living things are developing. We can resolve to preserve her for others and not neglect her as unimportant or even destroy her because she is derogated as a “Vale of Woe”, the only true life coming after death.
Only from a careful study of the Goddess in her many ramifications has a coherent, convincing picture of the universe and the evolution of life emerged. A mature, intelligible view of things has replaced theology, the infantile game of inventing whatever explanation is convenient, untramelled by having to root it in reality.
The defenders of Christianity have had to rely upon glaring falsifications of Pagan beliefs, and hold up their hands in sanctimonious horror at the worship of natural objects. But it is no more foolish to adore the glorious and beneficent sun than to adore a being who exists only in the human imagination. Is it more foolish to worship a tyrant of a father consciously judging and punishing, or Nature personified as a mother because she constantly gives birth to the beauty of our world and rewards us with all the joys of it?
To this day in familiar Christian rhetoric the term “Pagan” connotes immorality, impiety and a low, unblessed state of being. This false picture is innocently or, more truthfully, ignorantly stressed by some preachers but there is also a lot of deliberate misrepresentation.
Even a moderately intelligent priest must learn enough about the Classical and Hellenistic periods to briefly glimpse their art, philosophy, culture and orderly social life. Why then do they insist on libelling Paganism. Two of the loftiest ethical systems in history—the Stoic and the Epicurean—were Pagan. Morals were far higher in the Greek-Roman world than they were in Christian Europe for centuries after the fall of ancient civilization—as high as morals are today.
As for culture, and all the fine and interesting and orderly things that make a civilization, the Pagan world was brilliantly superior to Christian times throughout the weary, wretched rule of faith. By the middle of the nineteenth century the world had only reached once more the level of civilization at which the Pagan world stood when Christianity came, bringing not light but darkness.
Revelation
We want a comprehensible, realistic picture of the religious past, a knowledge of the genuine character and influence of institutions, an understanding of the way men lived and what their ideas meant to them. We want complete living history (as nearly complete as scholarship can make it) and not an imperfect skeleton made up partly of invisible bones called “spiritual”. We want the truth, even if it exposes Christianity in a bad light, shows it to have been an influence hostile to civilized aims and contradicts the false history with which Christianity has sought to justify itself. It does!
The simple idea of the average Christian is that Jesus gave the gospel truth to the world, that with speedy and singular unanimity the world accepted this truth, that it burst suddenly as a brilliant, beautiful light upon a world all in darkness, and that Christianity, as a system of doctrine, stems directly in an unbroken and uncorrupted line from these divinely inspired, self-evident and undisputed teachings of Jesus.
Is there any truth in Christian revelation? And, further, has any revelation of a supernatural character ever taken place? On examining the alleged revelation, we find that the Christian myth is based on no valid evidence. It rests only on the inspiration of the bible—a collection of Jewish legends. The divinity worshipped by the churches is an imaginary figure, an invisible fetish established for the benefit of the Jewish clerical caste returning from bondage in Babylon, and subsequently maintained by the Christian priesthood for the same ends—subtle control of people and the wealth it brings.
If a revelation had been made to the human race by a divine and almighty being, would it be expecting too much that it should be done in a sufficiently clear and unmistakable way that it would seriously challenge our disbelief? That has not happened. Instead of being furnished with proofs, we are required to accept whatever the priests say, however much it is opposed to reason, Nature, and science. We are bid to ask no questions because doubt is sin and so we must believe to be saved.
It is time to cast off the bondage so long imposed upon us, and snap the rod of hell so long laid across our backs. Faiths and dogma is not inspired. Nothing has been supernaturally revealed to Christian bishops. Miracles add as much to the wonder of nature as a plastic doll does to motherhood. No bad spirits make anyone ill or wicked and no pious appeals to good ones will make the least difference. Christianity was the work of men, and it was worked into something quite different from the Jewish message of Jesus. Moral ideas which Christians suppose to have been revealed through Jesus are of far greater antiquity than they suppose.
Some people fear lest, if the Christian myth were discarded, people would choose to do as they liked giving way to debauchery. But this fear suggests improper motives for goodness—people’s fear of offending a god who is cruel, vindictive, jealous and liable to cast them into the pains of hell, and their dread of losing heaven and life everlasting. Such purely selfish motives to right conduct ignores the welfare of our fellow creatures, the desire to please our fellow-men and make others happy, and the preservation of the beauty and diversity of our world.
The doctrines and practices of the old religions of the Roman world, in the first few centuries AD, were suppressed by law after the Christian victory in the time of Constantine. Christian writers do not tell us much about them except for Firmicus Maternus, a Father of the Church, who wrote down all he knew about the pagan religions in The Errors of the Profane Religions.
Christians would be upset if they read Firmicus’s book. Many of the pagan religions of the Roman world had saviours or redeemers, whose birth was celebrated every year, often in mid-winter, and every year, often about the time of our Easter, the death and resurrection of the gods were celebrated. “The devil has his Christs!” Fermicus pronounced.
In some of these religions, bread and wine were used at the altar, and candles, incense and sacred water were part of the ritual. Like other Christians, Firmicus concluded that the devil had inspired these things to pagans before Christ was born to show that Christianity was not unique, not revealed by God.
Until evolution was discovered in the nineteenth century, creation was divided between God and the devil. All good things, especially all true religion, came from God. All evil things, especially false beliefs, came from the devil. Firmicus gives us evidence otherwise destroyed by Christians, that creeds, religious myth and rituals evolved just as species, and indeed the whole cosmos, evolved.
There is a science of religion. Science is the accurate and critical study of anything that exists. Religion has for so many years commanded such a part of human life that it is a valid subject for scientific study, and some experts, like Frazer, have devoted their life to studying the origin and development of religion. Unfortunately Christian “scholars” all too often enter the field to create as much fog and obfuscation as they can in an attempt to preserve an illusion that evolution is mistaken and revelation is a fact.
Most writers on the science of religion, or comparative religion, are too timid. They apologize for applying the scientific spirit to so sacred a thing as religion! They beg us to understand that they have no opinion on the truth or value of religious beliefs, but merely study it dispassionately. They bend over backwards to placte the mullahs of the world whether they are Moslem or Christian.
It is ridiculous to say discoveries in religious history have no bearing on the truth of religion. Why should beliefs be considered independent of the reasons that they arose? If we discover that a belief is based on an error or a fraud, why should those, who continue, despite this knowledge, to propagate the error or fraud, command our respect? Our beliefs are worth no more than our reasons for believing them.
Christians will tell us that the scientist knows no more about God than a believer, but that is not true and shows that the believer hasn’t the least idea about science! Science happily begins with ignorance and demands proof. Priests and their acolytes begin with knowledge and demand that it should be falsified. It is the priest that is on firm ground to the ignorant observer, because a general philosophical principle is that it is impossible to prove a negative. Proofs have to be positive. Thus science can build up an edifice of knowledge but it is impossible to demolish a mirage or illusion.
Dealing with facts, the scientist can show that they are or are not consistent with certain beliefs, but if the reprobate is happy to believe despite the facts then science can do nothing more. Anyone coming freah to religion should be aware of these simplicities. though they might find emotional satisfaction on the thought that they have been saved by Jesus, or whatever, it is merely a form of hypnosis and the real benefactors are the evangelical sellers of this salvation, who always get rich faster than anyone else, despite their salvation.
Tens of thousands of years ago people began to carve figures, in ivory and stone, often of pregnant females, and these might have been religious in purpose. They buried their dead, sometimes with stone implements and ornaments round the body, suggesting that their friends and relatives thought they would have need of them or would appreciate them after death. The implication is that these people believed in an after life.
Evolution does not mean that every living thing continues to evolve. Animals or plants need to change only when their conditions change. That is true too of human beings. However, animals can change their own environment just by being there and that is what humans have done. Small numbers moving around large land masses hunting and gathering, lived in a stable and essentially unchanging environment. The hunter-gatherers also changed little. However, as populations slowly grew and seasonal patterns of living evolved, humans began to change the world in which they lived and they had to respond to that. Ultimately they had to respond to each other and history as opposed to natural history began.
it is not a question of intelligence because there is little or no evidence that the intelligence of humans has altered significantly in the few thousand years of history, or even in the few tens of thousands of years of pre-history. Physical evolution is not that fast. Knowledge was the key. Successive waves of conquerors were not superior human beings, in general, but were human beings with superior weaponry or better organisation. It often seems that conquered pwople are inferior because they finish up abject. But that is the psychological result of the conquest, not its cause. The South American Inca people seem abject today, yet 500 years ago they were a noble race of conquerors themselves.
And, it seems that this breed of Indians that entered America from Asia, pushed an earlier breed into marginal lands. It is common to call each conquering people superior because, we are the outcome and so we must be the top of the tree. We are flattering ourselves, but it is safe to say that we are superior only in technology not in mental power, and that simply because we are later and evolved in circumstances favourable to developing an aggressive and highly co-ordinated culture.
We can play games at categorising people according to the degree of development of their culture, but all we are doing really is arranging human cultures in relation to ourselves, presumed to be the best, and not on any objective grounds. The study of the evolution of moral ideas shows no particular progress. The development of weapons, from stone to bronze and iron, of art, of clothing, of houses, and so on is not particularly accompanied by any better practicing of rules forbidding murder, for example. Moralists freely condemn tribal cultures for being cruel and warlike, quite ignoring the scale, severity and barbarism of the wars that we wage.
Christian History
Has the Church been friendly or inimical to truth, justice and liberty? If investigation proved, or even suggested, it was not, does the Christian want to suppress it? No Christian in these liberal and liberated times will admit to wanting to suppress or alter history, yet the churches did and still do. Christianity has been at war with Nature and humanity throughout most of its history. Give us history truly and unsparingly and let Christians respond. They will say that the wolves came among the sheep, yet will learn no lessons and take no actions. No doubt, it is God’s will.
Mere argument offers the possibility of endless slippery evasions and distortions, but the facts of history are commanding and unanswerable. Not all the theological solemnity and dexterity in the world, not the best (and poor enough) arguments for God and faith and “the religious sense” of mankind, can stand defensibly against the actual record of the Church and the working of Christian policy. On its record, the Church is condemned. On its record, Christianity is the enemy of the Goddess. And the fine claims made of Christianity are false.
What has the church contributed to civilization? In what field of life does the church usefully instruct or guide us? The church is the enemy of knowledge. History vividly exposes the intellectual obscurantism and tyranny of the church. Church antagonism to knowledge operates still, especially in the USA where right wing churches still have political influence. It continues to attack the teaching of evolution, and still grafts for laws to be passed in its favour by governments. It shows that the church thinks knowledge is bad for religion! The church is the enemy of learning.
Knowledge has been gained through secular agencies—unsurprisingly because the church has never been concerned about discovering knowledge, but rather the opposite, regarding knowledge as having the potential to undermine its authority. The church is of no benefit to the educational life of humanity. Science, history, ethics, literature, politics—it obscures, corrupts and reduces to nonsense any subject it touches. The church promotes and shores up decadent, empty, and absurdly unscientific notions.
In morality, the church has supported every social evil—monarchy, slavery, racism, nationalism, the oppression of women and the exploitation of child labour. Some indeed have been the church’s own—the imposition of bigotry, and the burning of dissenters. Had it not been for the onerous influence of the church, humanity would today be farther advanced towards a civilised way of behaving. The church’s pronouncements on morality have always been weakened and made futile by its refusal to accept that morality is human—a worldly concern—not one of any supernatural father, obsessed with “sin”, which merely means whatever his priests decide is disadvantage to his worship—or rather theirs.
The church has contributed nothing except harm to civilization. If it has improved its own outlook compared with its worst days, it is through movements outside of the church, indeed usually facing the opposition of the church. The church has always resisted movements for freedom and consideration. Even today, it struggles to preserve the vestiges of primitive theology, with its harsh customs introduced for a long forgotten purpose.
Gains in culture, humanity, social law, scientific achievement—in almost anything that has improved living—have been the efforts of people who have been wise enough and strong enough to throw off the medieval yoke of the priesthood and their supernatural threats—priests like street corner beggars who demand money for supposedly cleaning your windscreen, but really for not trashing your car. The church has been a burden to humanity. It has negligible social use except for keeping some bigots wasting their time on ritual matters rather than torching people they do not like.
This record is not uncertain. Some, who have not studied extensively, know it but, knowing the truth only in outline, they shrug it off. Some, perhaps many, vaguely know that the history of the Church is superstitious, cruel and intolerant. The average man knows, vaguely, that monstrous crimes have flourished in the name of Christianity. That the struggle for freedom has been a struggle against Church and State is known vaguely. It is time the mythology about churches was exposed.
Yet omission, commision, polite excuses, evasive replies, and insincere apologies have obscured the force of the historical truth. Nothing could be more grotesque than the effort to make the Church appear today as liberal, humanizing and uplifting when in history the sharp and terrible contrary was the truth. Think of the astonishing effrontery of this claim when we commonly and correctly identify by the name “Dark Ages” the dismal, bloody and ignorant centuries of Christian supremacy!
If the Church ever tried to help progress, then it was strangely incompetent and ineffective, considering its enormous power. But we know that the Church was not progressive. Priests supported kings in keeping men bound to tyranny and superstition. Freedom of thought and life was incompatible with every dogma of the Church.
In recent centuries, with the growing strength of the merchants, the powers of kings have been taken from them, giving us democracy whereby the authority to make and execute laws proceeds from the will of the governed not from the king of kings in heaven. Liberation is not the reward of the humble. Though slaves were freely accepted into the congregations of the first gentile Christians, slaves in the mightiest country in the world were not freed until a hundred or so years ago and had no rights until only decades ago. Nor is prosperity the child of prayer. Only priests and evangelists ever got rich through worship of a supernatural being. If God has fed the hungry, again it is little more than a hundred years ago that millions died of starvation in the lesser but more Christian of the two British Isles while Christian bishops, eating bread made of flour exported by the starving Irish, resisted calls for poor relief in the House of Lords.
Modern Christians say this is only history—a reflexion of general ignorance. Protestants place the burden of guilt wholly upon Catholicism, believing the Reformation successfully distinguished sheep and wolves. Evidently it did not since some of the most represive and superstitious of churches now are Protestant. Protestantism is as illiberal, dogmatic and punitive as Catholicism and only arose because of a wide movement for liberty of which it was one of the effects. Such men as Calvin and Luther and Knox were not interested in liberty, they wanted to assert their own dogmas. It was dogma eat dogma until, eventually they settled on a truce and let bigots be bigots.
None of them believed in free thought, in free institutions or in free progress. Protestantism as a purely religious phenomenon would have disappeared but it was a reflexion of a much wider movement of trade, exploration, invention and the growth of secular life. Protestants were pawns in the easing of the bonds of Christianity. The Reformation of church ritual and livery was only the outward challenge to its bigotry and superstition that had held Europe in check for a millennium.
The Church today is reformed because it is weaker—it cannot compel belief, or even a judicious silence to give the appearance of belief. In a liberal world, the Church cannot enforce its dogmas with dire threats and penalties that were once all too common and deadly real. Yet, Christian fanaticism still has political power in moralistic legislation such as the illegal acts of opposition to abortion laws.
Christianity in the modern world has not reformed but has been restrained. The Church deserves few thanks for the brighter, freer, richer age we live in today compared with the height of ecclesiastical power in the Middle Ages. The struggle for human rights was fought by skeptics and liberals, against the bitter opposition of the Church, which allied itself stubbornly with the forces of reaction. Christianity is less evil today only because it has been hobbled.
The historical indictment of the Christian religion is clear and forcible. When Christianity flourished people were abject. As Christianity declined, the status of people improved in inverse proportion. Christianity in its heyday exceeded other religions in intolerance and psychological tyranny over society. It has been the most hostile to culture.
Hellenistic civilization was not dominated by an absolute religion as was medieval Europe by Christianity. Tolerance, avowed skepticism, humanistic culture and a power of free speculation flourished under Paganism that was only matched in the modern age. Pre-Christian Pagans were fortunate in having a number of gods instead of one terrible, dogmatic, jealous God manipulated by a single caste of priests. Better have many gods and many priesthoods all vying with each other, then poor humanity has a chance of seeing them all as the fakes they are.
Religious Instinct
We have outgrown every excuse for superstition, even the superstitions of classical Paganism that allowed such an astonishing civilisation to grow as that of the Greeks. Even so, Pagan culture has given us more useful things than “Christian culture”. During the long medieval night there was no “Christian culture” worthy of the name.
Progress was made in liberating the human mind from misty, confused dogmas when people began to examine the evolution of Christianity—the actual way religious policies worked, the true relations of Christianity and morality, Christianity and government and Christianity and culture. Intelligent examination of a subject can only begin by tracing how it evolved. Nature sets us in time and nothing can happen in an instance. All thought is a recollection of moments. Thinking can hardly begin without the history of an idea. How did man come to be religious? Was be always religious? What forms of religion have appealed to him and why?
There is nothing mystical about it. One sees that religion, like morals and government and war and industry, like all things good and bad, has been produced by natural conditions. It has evolved, and we should certainly expect that as humans grow in knowledge their ideas would, become less crude, more refined, and finally more enlightened. At one time humans had no religion. Religion is an abstract conception and early people had to begin thinking concretely before they began abstract thinking.
Do we have a “religious instinct”?
Even though we may agree that distinctively human kinds of behavior and thought may be based on innate drives, it is plainly very improbable that there should be a specific innate drive towards behavior which man shares with no animal. A more reasonable explanation of religion in terms of human instincts or propensities would be that the energy of primitive drives with various biological ends may be deflected into the religious channel.R H Thouless
From the beginning, religion grew by people drawing wrong inferences from observed facts—the shadow, the dream, the nightmare, disease, death, memory of ancestors, the movements of wind and river, the rain, the sun and moon, the annual birth and death of vegetation. As human beings developed their powers of observation and their ways of thinking, they longed to make sense of the world. From beginning to end religion is an explanation or interpretation of obscure and dark things. It was a form of primitive science until the priests got hold of it and set these naieve and fearful explanations on tablets of stone, to last forever, irrespective of whatever new is meanwhile discovered. That people still adhere to these simplistic ideas when they have plainly been long superseded only proves one thing—most humans are mentally still extremely primitive animals.
People have a natural awe of the world we live in, but is it a requirement of the religious? Spiritualists are religious but they are not in awe of the spirits they claim to contact. Awe is essential to “religious” people but not foremost in a Christians’ characterisation of religion. Ask most Christians what religion is, and they will answer, correct belief, occasional attendance at church, and a theoretical acceptance of certain moral obligations. For most Christians, religion is no longer an emotional reaction to the world or the phenomena of nature. They are not religious but have become time servers or pretenders.
Admittedly, the reduction of people to cogs in the social machine has taken away much of the awe we used to feel, but nevertheless it must be there for the truly religious, even if only incipiently. Occasionally they feel it and, because it is now so unusual, think it is supernatural. Yet, it is the exact opposite—it is entirely natural although it signals to us the superness of Nature. Certainly a belief in God is not necessary for people to be religious. Are Buddhism and Confucianism religions? They are described as such, but Buddha and Confucius were agnostics, and Confucianism has been faithful to its founder’s agnosticism. Was Stoicism, one of the greatest of moral systems, a religion? Stoics were indifferent to gods and were concerned only with the life of people here on earth.
Yet, from the earliest ages humans have believed in the supernatural. Though primitive people had more experience of Nature than do modern people, they did not understand it. Nevertheless they respected it and, hoping to win it over to their benefit, personified it as a variety of spirits guarding each feature that impressed them. Often these spirits were considered as female and ultimately the whole of Nature was conceived of as a goddess. This was when human societies were in awe at the wonder of childbirth and valued the contribution of women to society as gatherers, child rearers and a source of intuitive wisdom.
Nature itself was supernatural—in the sense that it was inexplicable—to primitive people, and humans were careful not to offend the goddess through their actions. When physical and mental bullies, called warriors and priests, realized that they could take what they wanted by force or superstition, the goddess was doomed. The new rulers wanted to justify their actions and introduced gods after their own image—warlike, cunning and vengeful. Morality was expressed as total obedience, not now to the requirements of Nature, but to the supposed commands of the absolute Lord, superior to Nature.
When warlords conquered other peoples they subjected their gods to their own, leading to pantheons and hierarchies and ultimately to the ideal god as an absolute monarch over lesser gods, angels, demons, men and Nature. Monotheism was never really that but the elevation of one god to the supreme throne accompanied by the relegation of rival gods to demons or angels or, nowadays, saints, as his royal court.
This inherent reaction to the wonder of life is praised by priests as the human “instinct” for religion, an instinct they used to lead us into emotional tarpits like the foolish and contradictory notions of Christianity. From this original feeling, humanity came to patriarchal religion, priestcraft and creed, through animism and ancestor worship, from the idea of many gods to the idea of one God.
Priests tell us that a virtue of Christianity, inspired from heaven, is that it gave monotheism to the world. Yet the Egyptians under Akhenaten, father or brother of king Tut, introduced monotheism 1500 years earlier. Indeed most ancient civilisations were effectively monotheistic because each race of people thought their own god was the God.
Holy Book
Defenders of Christianity have most cherished, as “proofs” of its divine origin and sanction, the Bible’s originality, singularity and virtue. Yet its originality is non-existent, a myth, along with the other myths, cribbed and fibbed to make the biblical melange. Nor is its divine origin attested by any reliable evidence and indeed its purely human development can be clearly traced in the older religions of Babylonia, Persia, Egypt and the mystery religions of the Roman Empire. The Christian Bible is largely a collection of conceptions, legends and moral codes, sometimes crude and sometimes poetic, assimilated from older religions.
The Old Testament is a work of “priestly forgery”. These may seem indelicate words but, if they do, then they prove how hidden the truth remains for far too many people, for few scholars would disagree. Knowledge that is commonplace among scholars hardly touches members of the Christian congregations, even educated ones. Even educated Christians consider ignorance as bliss when it comes to the sources of their beliefs. These “holy” books are spurious, they were meant to deceive and that is why they were fabricated.
If we received a message said to be divinely revealed which came in bits not as a unity, that was contradictory in its different parts, that was unscientific and that featured horrible people as role-models, could we believe that it was really divine? Yet these are just the characteristics of the Holy Bible.
Humanity has consistently found Christianity a dragging rather than a lifting and liberating force. The last and most stubborn claim of Christianity is that, whatever its errors of doctrine and its mistakes in this or that sphere of policy, it has been a great purifying, instructing and emancipating agency. Christianity supposedly brought relief for the workers, respect for women, and regard for education—precisely what it did not. The Church was indifferent when not actively opposed to such reforms.
The broad picture ought to be familiar to even a casual student of history. Medievalism is synonymous with ignorance, poverty and degradation. Sodden serfdom was the rule. Women had a lower status than in Greece and Rome—indeed, Christianity was reluctant to grant them the useless bauble that it peculiarly valued, a “soul”. To speak of Christianity and education in the same breath is risable, or, rather, it is in itself an indictment, when one reflects that illiteracy prevailed almost entirely during centuries of Christian power.
Today freedom, education and equality of sex in social life have all improved but, far from owing this to Christianity, the agencies of liberation responsible did it against the opposition of Christianity. To fight for freedom was—and to how great an extent it still is!—to fight against the Church.
Christ or Anti-Christ?
The Greeks, according to Plato, thought religion was invented to help rulers to rule by stabilising society. The rulers of a society enact laws, but laws depend upon people actively obeying them. People have to see that they are for everyone’s benefit or they will not obey them, but will find every possible way of evading them. Hoi polloi might not be too intelligent and so they need to have a simple reason to accept law as being unbreakable. It is gods or God.
Gods were supernatural spirits who floated around everywhere unseen by people, except unusually, but seeing everything that went on. Moreover, gods were immortal so whatever they saw could not be forgotten, and even if justice could not be done in this world, it would come in the next! When people were taught this myth from an early age, they were more predisposed to be lawful. Cardinal Dubois’s dictum was that God is a bogeyman uncaged to scare people into obedience.
The modern day neocons of the USA have the same philosophy, taken from their mentor Leo Strauss, a classicist and a philosopher who decided what was good enough for hoi polloi of Greece is good enough for hoi polloi redneck American believers in the great god Jarvay. The neocons think they will believe anything, and, accordingly, lying has become a Republican political norm. Lies told by Republican leaders are described as and serve as modern myths to keep the rednecks happy.
Modern Christians claim to have a personal relationship with their God but it is a relationship in which the God apparently wants the believer to pester everyone else in the world to believe too, and so it ceases to be personal. In classical times, attendance at and participation in religious ceremonies was a political act affirming loyalty to the state. The ceremony did not require and protocol did not expect those taking part to believe in the gods being honoured, let alone to worship them. People were truly personally responsible to their god and that relationship did not and could not involve anyone else. In the state religions of Greece and Rome, the disloyalty shown by refusing to participate was to the state not to the god. The god not the state would deal with anyone being personally offensive to the god, but the state demanded loyalty by its citizens for what it provided them.
The Christians brag in their own mythical history that they would not worship Pagan gods, preferring to be thrown to the lions, but the crime was not that of refusing to worship a god, but that of refusing their loyalty to the state and to serve it in return for its benefits. Christians were considerd as ingrates. They refused to offer even token service to the state. But, despite their supposed inalienable principles, before they ever came to power in Rome, Christians were serving the state in normal ways, as soldiers, consuls with their “Pagan” state duties, and so on. They obviously came to realise that being eaten by a lion was an unnecessary sacrifice, and they forgot about it. That would have been the sensible thing to do from the beginning, but Christians like their myths of ravished virgins just as much as heathens did. Nor was it a principle that was maintained in Britain when Christianity was at its most fervant. Scholars at Oxford and Cambridge had to swear to affirm the Church of England’s Thirty-Nine Articles, but for centuries, everyone knew many of the scholars did not accept them. The aim was not to please the Anglican god but, like the Roman required to burn incense to Caesar, it was to expose religious fanatics dogmatically attached to matters incapable of rational determination. In Rome, it exposed Christians.
When a god’s impotence is shown, he ceases to inspire awe and worship. When Christianity led by the Fathers of the Church acquired control over the Roman empire, Christian mobs began to plunder wealthy homes and to pillage the shrines of gods whom the Christians hated. Pagans thought, if their gods could not protect their own beautiful temples adorned by pious Pagans with the masterpieces of the Pagan world, their gods must have been displaced by the new and vulgar one. Symmachus blamed the disasters of the dying empire on to the impiety of the new believers to the old gods, but it was the bad example they offered in their refusal to defend Roman culture against the barbarians incursions. Though many Christians used their religion as an excuse not to serve in the military, before they had control of the state, afterwards they had no reservations about using the army to persecute the worshippers of the Pagan gods. That they were able to do it was proof that the Christian god approved!
Centuries of internecine Christian warfare at the end of the Middle Ages and in the first centuries of the modern era left many people in utter disbelief in the Christian gods—God Himself, His Son, His Holy Ghost, His ever virgin spouse, and His myriads of holy saints and angels. God had not come down unequivocally on either side in the centuries of warfare, and the people of Europe were exhausted by the mania of continuously brutal religious conflict. Many concluded there were no gods and religion was only a grand hoax. Atheism spread everywhere. The French led the reaction and swept away the ruling ancien régime, the coalition of church and nobility.
It was considered a democratic advance, and was taken up by modern states like the embryonic USA. The principle of the separation of church and state was one of the bases of the US Federal Constitution. These days it has been nullified by various states, and the Federal government itself, exempting religious organizations from taxation. The separation of church and state has proved temporary in practice in the United States now that Christian organizations have become privileged political parties engaged in subverting national cohesion. The Republican Party is now a political front for the evangelical movement which has succeeded in placing a worshipper of Mammon (disguised as Yehouah) in the White House. The USA is now a theocracy, with all the dangers it offers to liberal values, including democracy itself.
Seaparation of church and state is fundamental to democracy. Even intelligent people, subjected in their early years, before their rational faculties developed, to conditioning by teachers and parents to accept certain beliefs, can never throw them off. Children instinctively take pleasure in fairy stories, tales of the marvellous and impossible, but naturally outgrow serious belief in such things as they grow up. But if childish belief in some fairy tales is enforced, implanting a physical and mental habit, the psyche remains permanently disfigured by the habits forced upon it. So, some people might achieve academic distinction in non-religious, and even anti-religious subjects while hanging on to religious bad habits formed in childhood. “Give me the child until the age of seven, and I shall give you the man”, said Ignatius Loyola.
Psychologists reject religion unless they are Christian psychologists when they find Christianity in psychology! Psychology is the measurement of human behaviour, of the human psyche, and inevitably it leads to wondering why some people are susceptible to the orgnised superstition called religion. Psyche to the Greeks was the life-force that distinguished what was living. All living things had an appropriate psyche. But Aristotle had no thought that human psyche could live after death. Mortals could not be immortal. The psyche of any living thing dies when the organism dies because the psyche was a property of life. Indeed, it was the property of life, and death was the sign of its death.
Failure to accept the importance of science by most people, not least those who ought to, such as politicians, journalists and media moguls, is leading to increasing belief in impossible things. The people are being reduced to the level of giddy dolts interested only in trivia, and manipulable by fashions, fancy phrases, and faddiness. It might seem ideal for the neocon Evangelical Christian ruling class, but taken too far, people will be too idiotic to think, too ignorant to be useful in society, and too easily persuaded by demagogues to rule.
Truth and Dogma
Christianity is a backwards, selfish, exploitative religion which has condoned—indeed impressed—suffering. It is too late to be squemish. People must find their own salvation, that is true, but when that outlook leads, as it inevitably does, to an overwhelming selfishness that threatens to destroy the present world then critical words have to be blunt.
This sounds dogmatic, no doubt, but so it must be. All erudition, whether material or spiritual, fact or fiction, true or false does not have to be found anew by each generation. Otherwise why would we need an extended childhood? Nature would have thrown us in at the deep end to learn everything fresh from daily struggle just as our ancestors did. Humans have evolved to be taught and their long childhood offers the time for them to be taught. Teaching at all but the highest level demands facts, principles and methods to be asserted, but these must have been firmly established in truth.
Each generation benefits from receiving from its parents and elders the knowledge they have accumulated, but knowledge is not that which cannot be tested—like superstitions. Knowledge can be obtained in different ways, rational and intuitive, but whichever is used, it is not knowledge until it has been proved. Then it can be passed on dogmatically, though each successive generation will prove it by its own experience, or reject it.
Properly dogmatism is the assertion of “dogmas”, unverified or unverifiable beliefs which must not be questioned but be held on faith. It is not dogmatic, however assertive you might be, to insist that the sun will rise tomorrow. Not only have we our own long experience of this daily event, many others in history confirm it and we have a sound scientific explanation of why it happens. If dogmatism can bear examination, be proved by evidence and be explained by human reason, then it becomes truth.
It would not be true to imagine that the sun is a sentient being leaning towards us to hear our prayers. People might have once believed that but today few do because there is no evidence for it and it defies all human reason. Nevertheless people will happily believe that a similar being, though invisible, occupies the whole of the universe, hears our every prayer and answers them despite the fact that this is even more fanciful than a belief in the sun god.
But false doctrines cannot just be banned. In the place of false beliefs, we must offer true beliefs—a philosophy of life which is convincing and acceptable but sounder than the beliefs which are now held and which are blind to today’s crises.
Most devout Christians will be shocked and frightened by all this. Some will be offended and will refuse to read it. They will not want to submit to any chance that their faith might be undercut. Others will read it and emerge with unshaken faith. A few might be influenced. They are the ones who will look back and realise why we are so desparaging about Christianity and other patriarchal religions. It is always chastening to have to accept an error, but having accepted it, the magnitude of the task of saving the world for posterity faces them. This is a selfless task not like the “task” of saving one’s own soul. It is, for a start, a real task not a fancied one, and it has real rewards in that one can face death knowing that you have tried to make the world a better place—literally!
