I have nothing against god, it’s his followers that I can’t stand.

A Religion of Puzzlement 3

Christian History
Religious Instinct

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.

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”? 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.

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Last uploaded: 19 April, 2008.