“All churches accuse the other of unbelief. For my own part, I disbelieve them all.”

Thomas Paine

A Religion of Puzzlement 4

Holy Book
Christ or Anti-Christ?
Truth and Dogma

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.

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!

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Last uploaded: 19 April, 2008.