It is not known how to distinguish, with complete accuracy, memories based on true events from those derived from other sources.

American Psychiatric Association (1993)

A Religion of Puzzlement 1

A Religion of Puzzlement
Criticising Christianity

Abstract

Occasionally, religious people feel the awe everyone used to feel, 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. A belief in God is not necessary for people to be religious. Are Buddhism and Confucianism religions? They are so described, 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.

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 its early stages, religion did not have this broad meaning.

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.

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Last uploaded: 19 April, 2008.