Teach the Controversy: Question Belief!
Religion: The Wish of Feeling Morally Good Through Miracle.
Abstract
© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Friday, July 30, 1999
September 2004
A Mental Lingam
Judaism, Christianity and Islam are no less idolatrous religions than those whose believers dress a lingam. Their idol is simply a mental one. It is therefore all the more dangerous, because it can mean anything to the believer. Each of these religions with their transcendent gods, and their subsects and even their individual worshippers have their own particular image of God—and that is the correct one. Each has the only acceptable interpretation of God and all others are misled by the Devil. None of them think there is anything peculiar about this. None of them wonder why God has chosen them, and not the others to know the “Truth”. None of them stop to think that perhaps they are the ones being fooled by the Devil. Ludwig Feuerbach wrote:
Man is the beginning, the middle and the end of religion.
Not only is there no objective way of knowing what God wants, there is no objective God at all—God is simply whatever people want most. Anyone has only to look at the barbarous redneck sects of the USA that call God “Jarvay” and are ready to murder the rest of the world as devils to realise that the whole idea of God is insanity. The only conclusion for reasonable people is that they are all wrong and are therefore deluded however nice their concept of God might be. Christianity in particular of the modern mega-religions absolves all believers of all responsibility in life. Belief in their Redeemer is all that is required of them whatever crimes they have committed. Feuerbach also had words to say on this:
The miraculous Redeemer is nothing else than the realised wish of feeling free of the laws of morality, of becoming morally free and good through miracle.
So the figmentary lingam of the mind notionally rewards gross criminals for merely professing a belief. What more stupid and unproductive religion is it possible to invent? How is anyone meant to have a sense of duty knowing that belief is sufficient? When there is no sense of duty, there can be no desire for social improvement, no need to work, no respect for others, nothing lost by hedonism, nothing to inhibit criminal behaviour. Duty is the cement of society, but the only duty of the Christian is to believe. Without a sense of duty to others, empires decay and civilizations crumble. The history of Christianity illustrates everthing in this short paragraph.
C G Jung tried to warn us that worship and dogmas do not constitute religion, and John Dewey says that the supernatural dogmas of religion have weakened and sapped human religious feeling. In short, patriarchal religions are not religious. “Identification with creeds and cults must be dissolved” for true religious feeling to be found. Erich Fromm wrote that idolatry is deification of “partial aspects of the world and man’s submission to such things”. How does this differ from Christianity, Judaism or Islam? They are mutually at loggerheads because they are all partial. Only the whole of the world—Nature itself—deserves deification.
