Truth
Bad Habits
Abstract
© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Wednesday, February 14, 2001
Saturday, 03 September 2005
Worship
Christians tell us that the whole purpose of life is to worship God, but does God know this? He could have arranged for us to do only this from the outset but has apparently made for us an extremely attractive world to live in to distract us from worshipping Him. Can this be right? Is God so perverse as to do this, and is He such a vainglorious megalomaniac that He insists on everyone bowing down before Him singing “Holy, Holy, Holy,” but gives us distractions to tempt us off so that He has a reason to cook us in hell fire? If it were so, it would explain why Christianity has such an evil history. It has an evil God, but the real point is that priests and prelates finds it suits them to have everybody worshipping God constantly, not God Himself. They want their platters full to get a good life for doing nothing useful. That is the purpose in life of a professional Christian. Everything in Christianity is better explained by the self-aggrandisement of the professional servants of God, not the wishes of any God that might exist.
Some Christians, however, claim that worshipping God really means doing everything in a manner he would approve of. So, the singing of hymns is optional not necessary and God does not expect it as long as whatever is done is good, and done well. That would allow many non-Christians and even atheists to be worshippers of God without even knowing it. Nevertheless, God would know it, and it sounds altogether the sort of thing an omniscient good God who is not a megalomaniac would want. As it is, evangelical types have been known to argue that applying poultices to the sores of the poor is time that could be better spent saving souls. Such Christianity is the enemy of morality, but it has been all too prevalent throughout the history of its many varieties.
Moreover, the whole idea of everything being done to glorify God again gives the wrong motive for being good, or desiring good ends. Christians show no overall desire to stop the practice of bombing civilians. Some object, but do little about it even when they have some authority in their churches. They do not pronounce an anathema on the Christian politicians, generals and airmen that do it. They do not declare it contrary to Christianity and refuse to have those who do it in their churches. It would cause too much dissension, and would send supposed Christians scurrying to the churches that consider bombing others an act of God. There are far more of those already.
Does it glorify God to drop bombs on civilians? Those Christians must think it does, and they will justify it on the grounds that the civilians being bombed are really devils. Yet, even if Christians believe that God disapproves of bombing innocents, is it moral not to do it merely to please God. The moral position is not to do it because it is wrong! Causing suffering unnecessarily is wrong in itself, and it is evil, irrepective of God. The religious motive for doing right is unnecessary. The moral motive alone is sufficient.
Consider too that, if our purpose is to glorify God and not to do so is to be punished in hell, then God has not given us free will at all. He has said, “You are free to do as you are told otherwise you will be punished for the rest of eternity.” The spurious argument for being Christian called Pascal’s Wager depends on this. It is a case of “Heads I win, tails you lose.” The Christian chooses Christianity and wins. The infidel does not choose it and loses. That is not free will, and God is a cheat. This God has an urge to command. He issues commandments that have to be obeyed. He is a bully.
A UK minister in the Conservative government commented that the stench of sycophancy around the Tory leader of the eighties, Margaret Thatcher, sickened him. Yet, he was one of her admirers. The worst tyrants always have to be publicly admired. Can we believe that God is like this? It should give us a clue about where the whole notion of God, as it is now understood, comes from. It came from the ancient near east of 2500 years ago when human leaders were exactly like this, expecting to be adulated and bowed down to. God is the Platonic ideal eastern potentate. If anything, worshipping such a God shows that many human beings are intrinsically disposed to be subject. Perhaps it is in their genes.
Adulation is also immature. Adolescents choose heroes to idolise. It is part of growing up—having role models. People are expected to grow out of it and to develop their own full personality, but the churches try to halt the proper development of personality and keep people immature and dependent. These people then need a model of behaviour even as adults when they should have developed their own through right examples and dispensed with the model. By having a figmentary supposed supernatural one, they can pick and choose the features they like and therefore finish up doing as they like while claiming they are acting godly.
Yet again, Christians will say they are not treating God as an object of childish adulation or as an eastern potentate but are simply thanking Him for all the wonderful things He does. It might be so that the worshipper is grateful for a good life or, if unusually devout, grateful for a life even that is not that good, for there are billions of billions of people who could genetically live, and those of us who do have reason to be grateful. If it is God who allowed us to live, we have to be grateful to Him.
But then we have to ask why He makes the lives He gives so difficult by filling them with suffering, uncertainty and sudden unnecessary death. Two ten year old girls have just been confirmed murdered by a school caretaker in the village of Soham in Cambridgeshire. The villagers attended an ecumenical church service for them. What was this service, conducted by God’s vicars on earth, celebrating? Are the villagers praying that the girls died without suffering? Are they praying that they are now in heaven with God? The whole concept of an all powerful God causing the deaths of two innocent girls and everyone thanking Him for it is grotesque and incoherent.
The Christians who want us to thank God want us to ignore that He causes evil in the world. We are not allowed to curse Him for that. Why does a good God create evil? How can anyone, even with cause to thank God, do it while they know that millions of others are suffering? It seems anything but moral to be grateful while others are suffering. It begins to look as though your gratitude is that you are not like them!
The reality is the various distribution curves that give the frequency at which something occurs. Lives can be anything from awful to wonderful but mostly they are somewhere in between. So gratitude for living towards the good end of this spectrum is translated into gratitude to God for favouring us. That does not seem moral, and it cannot be moral for God to make lives unpleasant when He could apparently make them all pleasant.
Believers are like those businessmen for whom success is their own foresight and shrewdness but failure is the fault of bad workers, bad partners or bad luck. They have dual standards. God is always praised for good fortune but it is not part of Christian etiquette to curse Him for bad fortune. A bus crashes a train is derailed, a child is murdered and the first thing that is reported in the aftermath is the service of remembrance. Clergymen thank God it was not worse!
This can best be explained theologically only if God is not responsible for evil—an evil spirit called by Christians, Satan, causes it. It requires, however, that God is not all powerful, since otherwise He would immediately eliminate the evil spirit and the evil he causes. All God can do is ameliorate evil in answer to prayer. If God is omnipotent then He has allowed the tragedy, so why should He be thanked?
Some Christians tell us that God is not causing evil but is doing people a good favour by taking them to heaven. It implies that hell was a Christian threat with no content—in short, a lie—and it scarcely relieves the anguish of the loved ones of the victims. It also implies that God acts impetuously. What is the point of creating a life that He intends to take away long before it is fulfilled or even mature? Why create a life to end it prematurely? To punish those who stay alive? To murder someone’s children to punish the parents is a dastardly act that is incompatible with God being good. It cannot be moral.
The problem of evil in the world is unanswerable on the premises that God is both omnipotent and good. The Zoroastrian belief in two almost equal gods, one good and one evil, explains these problems, and most Christians settle for this as the answer to evil in practice. Satan causes evil, and God cannot solve it because He cannot. If he simply will not then He is not good. Christians imagine they have squared this circle, but they simply ignore the incoherence of their beliefs.
Faith and Trust
Science and philosophy are based on doubt—systematic doubt—some would say systematic skepticism. Nothing should be accepted without question, and therefore everything must be questioned and tested. Religion is based on trust—systematic gullibility—acceptance of whatever someone with authority, however slight, says. Uncritical acceptance is impossible for scientists and philosophers, and so science is incompatible with religion.
Now it is plainly true that an infant has not the wherewithal to question its parents. It takes its parents on trust, and trusts them to do whatever it needs. So trust (faith, belief) precedes doubt in the process of growing up. Yet infants often distrust strangers. The child turns away from a stranger and even cries. The parent says the child is shy. Shyness is an instinct of distrust or doubt of what is unfamiliar. So, both are present in the child but the doubt is usually suppressed in the familiar surroundings of the child. Later, wise parents even have to remind their children not to trust strangers.
Children are not too discerning in their trust either. They do not set conditions on it. They assume that adults can do anything. Dad might be a financial adviser but a child will trust him to mend their bike. As people mature, the overall trust of adults changes through experience into a contextual trust. That means that doubt begins to take over from trust in all contexts where trust has not been proven from experience to be valid. This is the scientific outlook at work in everyday life. Sensible adults are generally lacking in trust, and seek to confirm the honesty and reliability of anyone they need to trust.
Again, Christians in some way suspend the process of maturing, by maintaining an infantile trust in God as if He were a perpetual parent. The people who act for this God, they also trust, just as they trusted people their parents trusted. There is nothing admirable in an adult thinking like a child, though it is an important tenet of Christianity that they should. The only people who could benefit from such childlike trust are the priests and prelates who act for the putatively utterly trustworthy God. Christianity sets believers up to be duped. Since God Himself does not exist He cannot dupe you. It is plain then who does.
For adults to maintain a child-like trust shows arrested development, especially as there is no way the trust can be shown to be misplaced. In the after-life, no one is in a position to complain about being sold a pig-in-a-poke. After death, it is too late to find there is no after-life or it is not what you expected. In life, it is a matter of fortune what happens, but however it turns out, it is for the best. God is thanked for it, not blamed. Putting your trust in God cannot lead to disappointment. The trust in God that seems so important to Christians can only be a psychological Zimmer frame to help the emotionally unsteady through life.
Christian beliefs take an aspect of the growth of the human personality out of context, petrify it and misuse it to extend gullibility and to prime innocents for exploitation. They cannot hear God themselves but are duped into believing others, who are specially trained for it, can. That they all tell different stories never gives such innocents pause for doubt, and they finish giving up their pay, and sometimes their lives, to the clerics.
Love
Christians love God and believe that God loves them, but what is this love? Christian parents explain to their children that God’s love for them is like their own love for their children. Again God is a supernatural parent, and the children often never get mature enough to dispense with it. Love is not just a feeling of warmth. The love of another human being is a sense of kindness and compassion towards them—a desire to protect, help and do things for them. The love of other living things is similar. You do not want an animal to to die, be injured or suffer, and you want to protect it from these things. The love of the countryside, a work of art or a building is essentially the same. It is a desire to protect it because you value it and want to preserve it.
How do these expressions of love transfer to God? God is a supreme everlasting being, so how can the affection one feels for mortal, feeble and ephemeral things be the same as a love of God? Love in the practical sense is wanting to care for the needs of the person or object loved. If God needs any such love, He is not all powerful. There can be no feeling of care for God because God needs no care, and so needs no love. Without any practical aspect love reduces to sentimentality.
The Christian might argue that loving God is not a matter of caring for God but of caring for others in God’s creation. That is effectively a love of Nature and why should Nature be loved through God? Why has it to be second hand love? Presumably, it is because this life is a vale of woe and is wicked and the life after death is the only one that matters. It is not the world that is intrinsically wicked but philosophies like this that reduce the world to a sentimental attachment to an imaginary father. It must always be better to love something directly and not because one ought to, to please God. God has become a cosmic sweetie to comfort noisome children.
The actual love of two people like husband and wife is a complicated relationship with many facets, but the Christian love of God is mainly so anodyne that it has no facets at all. God’s nature is notionally fixed and immutable, so, once you have converted, there is no need to adapt to Him over time because He remains the same, and He cannot adapt to you. That is why Christian love of God is a bland sentimentality with no relationship to actual love. It is not love but a sort of loyalty, like that of a pet Spaniel to its master.
If God wanted some sort of effort or commitment as proof of this love or loyalty, chastity, knee bending, pilgrimages, sitting on pillars, living in cells or starvation cannot have been in it. The best commitment there could be is the second hand love of God’s supposed creation as a proxy for loving Him. It is apparently second hand only because God is a false assumption, but no Christians do it anyway.
Christianity in the end is a set of rules for the behaviour of people who will not or cannot reach maturity. They are rules for perpetual children. Mature adults ought to know how to behave from knowing why we are what we are. Christians try to offer such a basis through the supposed loving principle but no one actually applies it. It is simpler to find specific rules to obey, even if they were not meant to be rules. Justifications for everything can be found in the holy scriptures. Empathy and symbiosis are the reasons why we should love.
Some Christians will disagree with their church on some moral issues but seem not to realize that it must be immoral to propagate a false or erroneous morality. The Catholic Church declares it immoral to use contraceptives, but millions of Catholics in practice declare their church wrong about this. They do not stop to think that the church must itself be morally wrong to pressurize people into doing what they do not accept as God’s will. It is not a moral option for the believers because the Church is adamant that it is wrong, yet they use it as a justification or defence of the Church.
In an overcrowded world, it cannot be morally wrong to use contraceptives, yet the Roman church declares it a moral evil. Any Catholic who uses contraceptives in defiance of the Church are told they are being evil. It is the churches and their professional practitioners who are evil. Even the Catholic wife of the British Prime Minister, a woman approaching fifty and a lawyer, is evidently scared to use contraceptives, and has twice been pregnant in her forties. Her Anglo-Catholic husband evidently does not consider chastity anything that he should have to bother about, even if his wife is in the change of life. So, an intelligent woman is tricked by rogues into taking unneccessary risks for some foolish dogma. These absurd dogmas have nothing to do with evil, and everything with the church exercising control over its flocks. The unnecessary anxiety and guilt that is created is the evil of the church.
Moreover, a basic reason for marriage according to Christianity is to allow people to have sex without sin. There could hardly be a worse reason for entering into a lifetime’s commitment, as the church insists it should be. It then tells us that sexual intercourse is only for procreation, ignoring the fact, presumably even in the Christian view, that God made it as enjoyable as eating and drinking. One can only deduce that God intended having children to be an enjoyable ecperience for the parents. Before anyone knew anything about anatomy, it was God’s way of inducing people to have children. How then can it be wrong when people have realised what it leads to and can be prevented whether by methods acceptable to the Catholoc Church or methods unacceptable to it?
To follow erroneous teaching, whether of the churches or of Adolf Hitler is wicked, but cannot be blamed on to individuals who are too stupid to know what they are being taught. The teachers that know and use this are the wicked ones. Many Christians, probably most, are ignorant innocents who believe that the problems of living can be solved by the rules and rituals of the church. They are not wicked but are deliberately misguided and come to relish their own wilful ignorance. The pastors, priests and prelates are the wicked ones.
Communion
The third, developed phase of sacrificial worship which, in the form of the Eucharist, Christians consider the epitome of an advanced religion, was already old at the time of Christ. The ancient Egyptians annually celebrated the death and resurrection of their god and saviour Osiris by eating the consecrated wafer which had become flesh of his flesh—the body of Osiris—symbolically eating their god as the Christians do. Bread and wine were brought to the temples as offerings.
The ancient Greeks from at least 600 BC had similar mysteries of their own, the Eleusinian mysteries, wherein they celebrated the death and resurrection of the goddess Kore and partook of certain sacraments. These were offered by the pagan Athenians in honour of Ceres, the goddess of corn. She was supposed to have given her flesh to eat, and Iacchus, the god of wine, his blood to drink.
The Essenes, or Therapeutae, whose Jewish God had many features of Mithras, the Persian Sun-god, yielding the characteristics of the second person in the Trinity, took into the Christian church the idea of the Eucharist along with baptism and other pagan rites. Introduced into Rome separately by the Persian magi, Mithraic eucharistic mysteries were celebrated in a cave. According to the Rev R Taylor:
Many of the forms of expression in the Christian solemnity are precisely the same as those that appertained to the pagan rite.
The pagan priest dismissed his congregation with the blessing: “The Lord be with you”—which was retained by the medieval Catholic church as the Latin “Dominus vobiscum” and is still sufficiently universally familiar today that it could be mocked in the film Star Wars as “The Force be with you”.
Surely though we have now moved beyond the stage of having to offer sacrifice, however stylised, to a selfish god for selfish reasons. Once the idea of an anthropomorphic god is rejected the need for lip-worship disappears—there is no longer any jealousy or vindictiveness to placate because anything of a cosmic scale must be far beyond such petty emotions.
Instead, let us behold the magnificence of the universe, contemplate the beauty and marvels of Nature, inspect the harmony of her laws, consider the miracle of life and our own existence and we are rightly filled with wonder and awe. Our devotion to Nature is the only worship that can be offered to a power that is greater than ourselves. As far as we know it is not sentient but it lives, it evolves, it nurtures, it dies. It deserves our respect and it is our own best interests to harvest the resources it provides us with care. H Spencer wrote:
Worship is not a mere respect, but a respect proved by the sacrifice of time, thought, and labour… not a mere lip homage, but a homage expressed in actions.
Time, thought, labour and actions have to be sacrificed not to tear the world apart in seeking a precious jewel, but to ensure that the world is preserved while the jewel is being sought.
Surely we can now see that the Christian religion has deluded us into thinking we are akin to gods when we are simply sophisticated beasts, simply another of Nature’s creations and a parasitic one. We can destroy this little corner of the universe if we wish and ourselves with it, but Nature can replace us. Time is no object. Let us reject the old god which dehumanises us with symbolic human sacrifice and cannibalism and embrace Nature in a symbiosis which might allow us to build heaven on earth truly.
Baptism
Baptism by immersion or sprinkling, for the remission of sin, is found in widely separated countries on the face of the earth and was yet another pagan rite adopted by Christians. With both pagans and Christians, the ordinance gave full expiation from original sin, restoring the initiate instantly to original purity.
Baptism was practised by the Brahmans, Buddhists, the Egyptians, the Greeks and Romans. The Zoroastrians and Mithraists of Persia and, it seems, the Essenes marked the sign of the cross on the forehead of their initiates. Adults, initiated in the sacred rites of Bacchus, were regenerated by baptism. Fire was used in many instances as well as water, the Romans using both, and baptism by fire is still practised in the East. This might be the implication of Matthew 3:11, where John says:
I baptize you with water, but he shall baptize you with the Holy Ghost and with fire.
Prayer
If we lack something in our daily lives which we cannot provide by the means available to us, we have no reason to believe, and no right to expect, that the laws of Nature will, or can, be upset in our favour, to the possible detriment and inconvenience of others. All supposed response to prayer can be traced to happenstance or probability and the inner strength that we can find within ourselves when it becomes essential to tap it. Nevertheless, this seems to have been enough to make prayer a superstitious practice which has survived from ancient times.
Prayer to a superior power, requires the belief that it possesses the human attributes of hearing, love and compassion, in short, in it having a personality. The planets were thought to influence events and it was natural that primitive people should appeal to them to solve their problems. Consequently the planets became gods with different personalities of their own, and different traits to command. Chief of all the planets were the sun and the moon and in most mythologies the sun became the material face of the chief god and the moon the material face of the chief goddess.
Later the idea of monotheism was preferred, god becoming the absolute God with no material face, inscrutable, omniscient and infinite. Unfortunately since human beings are finite creatures it follows that whatever we do is infinitesimal to an infinite being. The truth is that an infinite God simply would not notice what humans were doing. It seems, no relations can exist between the finite and the infinite.
Furthermore, though Christians have immense belief in the power of praying to their invisible God, their bible refutes it:
All the inhabitants of the earth are reputed as nothing, and that He doeth according to His will among them, and none can stay His hand,Daniel 4:35
For I the Lord change notMalachi 3:6
The bible says God does just as he likes and nothing can change him. Like the laws of Nature, He is immutable. What then can possibly be the use praying to Him? Nothing except to strengthen the power of the priesthood over their flocks. Though Christians seem to believe that God can hear their own private prayers, they believe also that He can hear better if prayers are metaphorically shouted by being said en masse, and that He can hear better still when the prayer comes from or is conducted by one of His vicars on earth, the priests.
Yet, deliberately trying to attract almighty God’s attention through prayer should be unnecessary. An infinitely aware being already knows your needs as the bible confirms:
God knows the secrets of the heart.Psalms 44:21
So the Christian holy book, the word of God himself, tells us clearly that your needs and woes are already known to God and if He has already inflicted them on you, nothing you do can change His mind. So, why pray to Him? If you are praying, you are praying to try to change God’s mind about something He has already decided, otherwise he will have already responded and there would have been no need for prayer.
Those who are prayed for most are people in the public eye, sovereigns and other heads of states, nobility and clergy who are prayed for publicly. Are our nobility and statesmen endowed with greater divine grace, wisdom, or understanding for the prayers that go up to this effect? Are the clergy of the state church, who are supposed to be called to the ministry by the Holy Ghost, protected more than anyone else against temptation, immorality, infectious diseases, sickness, pollution or drowning? Any benefits they have come from better medical attention procured by their status and wealth not from the sunday prayers of the congregations.
Does prayer protect us from calamitous floods? Did the victims in New Orleans of hurricane Katrina benefit from President Bush publicly saying, “May God bless you”? Is it not proverbial that prayers for rain, in seasons of drought, have no effect? Were the lives of Presidents Lincoln or Kennedy, saved because of the national prayers that went up for them? No, they died because they had been pierced by bullets.
Does the history of earthquakes and other misfortunes due to natural phenomena, show that praying people are saved from danger, while the non-praying ones suffer? When earthquakes occur are churches less likely to be flattened than whorehouses because lots of good people prayed from them often?
When people pray for a sick loved one who recovers, they thank God for answering their prayers. When the sick person does not recover but dies, the relatives and friends pray for solace and again find comfort in God answering their prayers. There are only two possible outcomes, recovery or death and in each case Christians see the beneficent hand of god. No wonder the priests have always enjoyed such power!
Furthermore, this life is to Christians a vale of woe, from which people are glad to depart and see the face of God at death. What then is the purpose of praying to God that anyone should be prevented from joining their maker when they are ill? Prayer for sick people to recover from illness when the bliss of paradise awaits them is hard to comprehend.
