Abstract

© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Saturday, 14 April 2007

Graham Leman on Mind over Matter

Supernaturalists tell us “naturalist theories postulate an impossibility—that matter generates mind”. Well, they might think it is impossible but Grahame Leman begs to differ.

Stoic philosophers showed that this purported impossibility is a mystification of nature which in no way obstructs a naturalistic account of mind. Hold your open hand in front of you, then close it into a fist, then open it again. Where was the fist before you closed your hand? Then where did the fist go when you opened your hand again? Surely the fist is immaterial and so cannot be the product of a material hand! Can it? For the Stoics an idea (lekton) was in the head as a fist is in the hand. It has always given naturalists a comprehendable parallel of how matter can produce mind. If your material hand can make a fist then make it vanish again in an instant, your material brain can make a thought with similar “immaterial” properties!

Roland Martin on Taking Back the Faith

Roland Martin, a talk-show host and CNN writer, says most people think Christians are preoccupied with two main issues—abortion and homosexuality. The issues that preoccupied Christ, love of enemies, poverty, destitution, the gap between rich and poor, divorce, all scarcely dent the focus of modern Christians. He says Christians are being hypocritical, and he’s a Christian himself! So he is urging Christians to take back the faith from the extreme right that has taken it over and set the US Christian agenda over the last century.

Christians need to think about the meaning of the resurrection of Christ. Christianity means living like Jesus, not basking in a feeling of self-righteousness that they are saved. Did Jesus spend his time focusing on all that he didn’t like, or did Jesus raise the consciousness of the people to understand love, compassion and teach them about following the will of God?

It’s troubling to listen to “Christian radio” and hear the kind of hate spewing out

Concerned Women for America were angry that Democrats were blocking some judges put up by President Bush for the federal bench, claiming Democrats wanted to keep Christians off the bench. Yet they had no praise for Clinton when he appointed Christian judges to the same court. They were not interested in having Christians on the bench but only Republican Christians, an oxymoron if there ever was one. Martin says these people are “pimping” God. They are holy, holy, holy, sing hallelujah, brag how much they love the Lord, but their holy spirit evaporates when they are invited to walk the walk with Christ. Martin relates that a black minister in the Midwest was asked by mostly white clergy to walk with them on an anti-abortion rally. It was fine by him as long as they promised to support him in a campaign against crack houses in black neigbourhoods. It was not their problem he was told. Crack was not their moral problem but abortion was.

For Falwell, Robertson, Meyer, Dobson, Perkins, Kennedy, Parsley, Patriot Pastors and Warren to sit down with Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, Cynthia Hale, Eddie L Long, James Meek, Fred Price, Emmanuel Cleaver and Floyd Flake to fight racism, AIDS, police brutality, a national health care policy, and education is in your dreams but all profess to be Christians. It is not too hard to note, by comparison with what Jesus actually preached and did himself, to see which group corresponds with Christianity. Yet Christians who try to emulate the God they worship will not put the finger on right wing manipulators interested in spreading hatred as a way of getting and staying rich. The Religious Right does not even understand the teaching of Jesus, let alone represent it. Needless to say, most of the the right prove through their response that they just do not get it. Faith not works for them is an excuse for doing nothing on a whole swathe of issues that they wished were not a bit Christian, and they manage it only through the ignorance of many Christians and the desire of the rest not to rock the boat. Martin thinks it is time to rock the boat to tip out the hypocrites and freeloaders to stop the boat being taken over by Satan.

The right have picked on the issue of alleged murdering of babies as one that few people Christian or otherwise would disagree with posed in isolation. But issues are never isolated. The Catholic Church stopped abortion and child murder, but the result was abject poverty for most Christians in the world for two thousand years. If a family of four are already on the breadline, they had to keep any child that came along whether they wanted the child or not. They and their family got progressively poorer and the children were progressively starved and unloved. Yet an abortion hurts no one except the parents who have to have it for the welfare of their existing children. Christianity is not, or ought not to be, about making people poor and miserable.

The religious right see socialism in many of the proposals of liberal and left Christians, apparently utterly blind to the simple fact that what Christ taught had much more in common with socialism than the brand of right wing egalitarianism that they prefer. Christ never preached “blessed are the rich”, but most right wing Christians seem to think he did. Ordinary Christians ought to reject the phonies in their faith like Robertson, Falwell, and co, and actually do what Christ quite plainly recommended for people to be saved. The rich could not be, and the obvious reason why is that the rich are never fair and rarely honest, otherwise they would do what Christ said they had to do to be saved—give everything to the poor.

Edward O Wilson on Why Humans are Religious

Truth is not a matter of belief. Scientists do not accept their hypotheses about reality on the basis of belief but on whether they represent the world when we test it. The physical theories and laws of science have been corroborated by our experiments and observations. They are not matters of belief but are matters of fact, within the limits defined by testing. Whatever does not explain the world, does it inadequately, or cannot be properly tested, ought not to be acceptable to scientists. Yet, even some trained scientists lapse into irrationality to defend their religion. Biologist, Edward O Wilson of Harvard University, wondered why humans cling so fiercely to their religion, when it is plain that religion is used as a cover for hideous wars and unspeakable atrocities against believers in some other faith. Sadly, it seems that religion has been perpetuated by selection—natural and human. It is found in every human culture, each of which has an “origin” myth explaining where they came from. It serves as an identity to separate “us” from “them”, thus providing a force that binds the tribe, suppressing divisive criticism, and so helping preserve the tribe through unity. It is evolutionarily favourable, and so selected. Humans have been selected for millions of years to accept irrational but once unifying beliefs in religion. Now, in the age of worldwide communication and massively destructive weaponry, it has become maladaptive. It might once have united tribes but now it divides the world. It is time we realized it and chose something less dangerous.

Joan Smith on the Evil of the Return of Religion

When I was growing up, I was hardly aware of other people’s religions. Religion was rarely discussed on the council estates where I lived, even among my parents’ Irish friends who went to Mass. For many years, when I met people who had come to Britain from the Indian subcontinent, I had no idea whether they were Hindus, Muslims or Parsees, any more than I knew for certain which of my schoolfriends had parents who were practising Christians. The exception was when earnest young men with cropped hair and American accents appeared on the doorstep, proselytising on behalf of the Mormons, whereupon we invited them in and had a no holds-barred exchange on the malign effects (as we saw it) of religion. I enjoyed these debates—more, probably, than the Mormons or Jehovah’s Witnesses on whom I practised my teenage debating skills—but then they had broken the unwritten rule that religion was a private matter.

This may seem, from the standpoint of the 21st century, a backward state of affairs. There was no Muslim Council of Britain and therefore—some Muslims would argue—no one to represent the interests of their minority faith in a predominantly Christian country. I never thought of the UK in that way, given that most churches were more than half-empty on Sundays, and I still don’t. I like living in a secular society, but now I see the disasters attendant on privileging religious identity above everything else—nationality, politics, gender, family, friendship unfolding around us.

Muslim leaders and representatives of other faiths are regularly consulted by Government ministers, who are also lobbied extensively by the Anglican, Catholic and evangelical Christian churches. One consequence is a huge increase in the number of faith schools, those institutions which did such a splendid job of perpetuating sectarian divisions in Northern Ireland. Another is a sustained attack on freedom of expression, with frequent attempts to censor anything religious leaders, notoriously touchy, deem offensive.

Something similar has happened in the US, where an alliance between evangelical Christian politicians and neocon ideologues has given faith-based organisations privileged access to government funding and enormous power over the lives of poor Americans. The President mentions God in his speeches as frequently as I talk about my cats, wilfully undermining the separation between Church and State and fostering divisions on religious lines.

This is one of many ways in which the rhetoric of George Bush and Tony Blair does all of us a disservice. The President’s “axis of evil” and the Prime Minister’s “arc of extremism” don’t merely expose their Manichean world view. What’s even worse is the way in which their dogmatic insistence on the centrality of faith contributes to the problem. Will these guys never learn? If they go around encouraging people to define themselves as Christians, Muslims, Jews, Hindus and so on, it is hardly surprising if society begins to fracture.

Indeed you might easily imagine, listening to the ill-tempered debate following the disruption of an alleged plot to blow up transatlantic flights from British airports, that the sole reason why the Government’s foreign policy has been wrong in recent months is that it offends British Muslims. This is dangerous nonsense. Imagine the chaos that would ensue if every religious organisation in the country was given a crack at deciding Britain’s policy on the Middle East or China—Falun Gong, next week it’s your turn. The Prime Minister’s failure to call for an immediate ceasefire in Lebanon was wrong not because it favoured Jews over Muslims, but because it allowed thousands of Lebanese civilians to be bombed and driven from their homes. Lebanon is an Arab country, not a Muslim one, a crucial distinction that is ignored almost as often as the difference between Jews and Israelis. My Lebanese friends include Christians, Muslims and people who are wholly secular, and I have been entertained with lavish hospitality in Druze villages.

It’s true that Iraq is predominantly Muslim, but the principal objection to the Anglo-American invasion is the fact that our leaders took us to war on a false prospectus. By launching an attack for the wrong reasons, Bush and Blair pre-empted a difficult but unavoidable debate about when it is right to intervene in a sovereign state where human rights abuses are taking place on a massive scale.

At some point, the democratic nations of the world will have to confront that question. In the meantime, the God-bothering habits of Blair and Bush have allowed the ghastly aftermath of the Iraq war to be hijacked in the service of a lazy rhetoric in which Muslims worldwide are portrayed as victims of Western imperialism. In fact, Muslim, Christian and secular Iraqis alike are being murdered daily by Muslim paramilitaries who owe their allegiance to rival clerics or Osama bin Laden, confirming that the resurgence of sectarianism is the single greatest obstruction to Iraq’s emergence as a secular, democratic state.

In this country, people are now so scared of being accused of Islamophobia that they don’t acknowedge something that should be glaringly obvious. It is the insistence of some young Muslim men and women on an in-your-face Islamic identity, which claims superiority over “decadent” Western values, that (along with terrorism) is creating ever greater hostility among non-Muslims. In that sense, the politics of religious identity is producing the very outcome that everyone, with the exception of extreme Islamists, claims not to want.

Even the writers’ organisation English PEN is making this mistake, turning what was originally intended as a celebration of Middle Eastern literature into a Muslim event. An evening at a London theatre entitled Writing Muslim Worlds, scheduled for October, has caused controversy within the organisation, where some members believe that talking about “Muslim literature” is as ill-judged and divisive as lumping together Julian Barnes, Margaret Atwood and Ian McEwan and describing them as “Christian”.

The last thing any of us needs at this febrile and insecure moment is a proliferation of religious labels. There is no denying either that religion has made a comeback or that the cost is a horrible atmosphere in which its role in the formation of personal identity has begun to threaten the existence of secular culture. We allow this at our peril. Only secular culture, in the form of respect for the rule of law, can offer a stable political solution in countries where people have so many different faiths or none at all.

George Eliot on Evangelism and Truth

Where is that Goshen of mediocrity in which a smattering of science and learning will pass for profound instruction, where platitudes will be accepted as wisdom, bigoted narrowness as holy zeal, unctuous egoism as God-given piety?

Minds fettered by this doctrine no longer inquire concerning a proposition whether it is attested by sufficient evidence, but whether it accords with scripture. They do not search for facts as such, but for facts that will bear out their doctrine. It is easy to see that this mental habit blunts not only the perception of truth, but the sense of truthfulness, and that the man whose faith drives him into fallacies treads close upon the precipice of falsehood… So long as a belief in propositions is regarded as indispensable to salvation, the pursuit of truth as such is not possible.

George Eliot, Westminster Review, on Dr John Cumming, evangelist

Albert Schweitzer

Albert Schweitzer, on Renan’s Life of Jesus, wrote:

It is Christian art in the worst sense of the term—the out of the wax image. The gentle Jesus, the beautiful Mary, the fair Galileans who formed the retinue of the “amiable carpenter,” might have been taken over in a body from the shop window of an ecclesiastical art emporium.

Ernst Renan

Oddly enough, Renan, described Jesus thus:

It cannot be denied that Jesus is portrayed in this gospel not as a meek moralist worthy of our affection, but as a dreadful magician.

Tom Paine

Tom Paine wrote in the Age of Reason in the eighteenth century that he had never found anywhere “so many and such glaring absurdities, contradictions and falsehoods as are these books”—he meant the New Testament!

Voltaire

Voltaire described Christianity as an “absurd and sanguinary creed, supported by executions and surrounded by fiery faggots.”

William Neil’s Christian Admissions

William Neil was a well known figure in Christian circles in the middle of the twentieth century. A Scot, born in Glasgow and educated at Glasgow university and Heidelberg before the war, he became a professor of biblical studies and a Christian writer, perhaps popularly remembered for his One Volume Bible Commentary. Unlike many Christians, he was occasionally honest enough to make admissions about Christianity’s record.

Not long ago some people were shocked when John Lennon said that the Beatles were more popular than Jesus Christ. He was right.

William Neil, The Truth about Jesus

The record of the Christian Church contains chapters of which no self-respecting secular institutions could be proud, far less a religious one. Ghastly deeds of cruelty, violence and oppression, injustice and intimidation have been perpetrated in the name of Christ by Popes and Puritans alike. The Roman Church before the Reformation has a spectacular history of corruption and crime, but since then the Protestant Churches have shown themselves to be equally indictable. Religious wars, anti-Semitism, exploitation of the poor—all of this is too well known to need elaboration.

William Neil, The Truth about Jesus

The Romans were uninterested in the religious beliefs of their subject peoples so long as there was no disturbance of law and order.

William Neil, The Truth about Jesus

When the Church became a part of the establishment, it… became an institution caught up in the mechanics of power, demanding conformity to prescribed beliefs, and an umbrella which sheltered vast numbers who were Christians only in name.

William Neil, The Truth about Jesus

William Neil speaks of the Church’s “accumulated record of blindness, superstition, ignorance, obscurantism, bigotry and inhumanity.” Despite this damning record, the fact that Christianity still survives is taken by Christians as proof of divine and not Satanic guidance!!

It was impossible to exterminate a movement whose members welcomed persecution and death because they believed they were sharing in the sufferings of Christ.

William Neil, The Truth about Jesus

Robert Nairn on Religious Hatred

As the British Home Secretary plans to bring in an effectively extended blasphemy law supposedly to curb religious hatred following the 11 September 2001 atrocity in New York, correspondence in the press grows about what it will mean. Here is a letter published in the London Independent, of 28 November, by Robert Nairn that it is difficult for any rational and sensitive person to disagree with.

Sir, I am an atheist and have a great hatred of religion, particularly the Judeo-Christian-Islamist monotheism with which we are so cursed.

Its murderous and depraved ferocity, is in all probability, unequaled in history. Its believers are superstitious and irrational people clutching at the straw of immortality. Its prophets are either ludicrous phantasms for which there is not a shred of historical contemporaneous evidence—for example Moses, Abraham or Jesus Christ—or they are real historical figures who were probably insane. Mohammed saw a vision of the Archangel Gabriel and heard the voice of his god. If he were here now and made such claims he would be heavily medicated and taken into care.

I wish to know if the passage of the anti-terrorist bill now before Parliament will make me liable to arrest and prosecution for the incitement of religious hatred. And perhaps you too, Sir, for publishing this letter.

Christianity and Islam have a history of proselytizing and even forced conversion. As far as I know, we have no legal protection against this activity. I may deplore their beliefs but I would not wish to force them into disbelief as long as they do not attempt tp thrust theirs down my throat, or those of my children. Can I ask the government to include a clause to this effect? If I cannot tell them that they are hateful then please will they be unable to force themselves upon me through the media or the religiosity of politicians? This seems fair.

Indeed it does, Robert, but we can be sure that it will not happen. The key point is not terrorism, all terrorists depend upon governments restricting freedom to win the hearts and minds of those who feel oppressed by the undemocratic laws thus introduced, but in the UK we have a pseudo-Catholic evangelist in charge of the country, whose megalomania extends to his wanting to act as a gopher for George Dubya in defeating the evil empire. Criminals should be punished but even serious crimes in liberal Blighty are not punished, so the sudden enthusiasm for international punishment looks like pious crusading and not any desire for justice in general. Now those who despise religion for its monstrous deeds are the ones who will be punished.

The Christian god, whose history is one of blood and burnt flesh, has impelled his adherents to act once more to bring the world into darkness. Since he is the same god as the god of the Moslems and the god of Abraham, he continues to incite one set of his worshippers against another set. The supporters all think he is on their side. Doubtless their god cannot stop laughing.

Professor G Carsaniga adds a footnote in the same newspaer.

There is no logical basis in Darwinism for Nazi eugenics, or in atheism for Gulags. There is, on the contrary, plenty in the so-called sacred texts expressly justifying and promoting the persecution of unbelievers, the slaughter of infidels and the damnation of sinners to the torments of hell.

This is the damnation that Christian bishops for much of their history took upon themselves to begin, by roasting heretics or unbelievers on a pile of faggots soaked in pitch. It is hard to understand why anyone should think that any such religion is good, but it is the opponents of it that are being shut up. Is it the perversion of humanity or the power of god? Either way, sensible people will reject it as insane.

Robert Price on Salvation

That dissident priest, Robert M Price, tells us Christianity created the problem to be able to peddle the solution. He adds another metaphor that it is like a vulture, circling unil it spies a victim stumbling, then it pounces to take advantage of their weakness. Or Christianity is like a quack doctor making the healthy believe they are sick so they will buy the medicine the churches sell. The sickness is not to realize we must be saved!

Price says salvation only makes sense by not expecting it to make sense! It is not an inference inductively arrived at, but an after-the-fact rationalization. Paul had the solution but had to work back from it to the problem it solved. He concluded that Christ offered salvation, so the problem was the lack of it in the world. Since Christ came to save all, all needed saving. Evangelists still believe it has to be the way for everybody without exception.

For Calvinists, God predestines the elect to be saved. Calvin thought predestination should be a source of great reassurance, but not everybody was among the elect, so no one could be sure they were, giving them more reason to worry than before! This is the same anxiety that Christian evangelists try to fend off by insisting that everyone needs their gospel, too, whether they like it or not. If it is not for everyone without exception, it may not be for them either. And the fundamentalist wants nothing so much as security.

Those hanging on to worn out Christianity will seize upon any expedient to preserve the tatters of their faith. They like to argue, “if it worked for me, it can work for anybody,” but really they hope, “if it works for everybody, then it must work for me.” They could not be sure whether they were included or not, if it was only for some people. Their salvation is the certainty of it! To be sure the gospel will redeem them, they have to believe that everyone else needs it, too. They can therefore only be satisfied by missionary activity to prove they are right.

Robert M Price says the theological options for those keen on conditions for salvation are:

1. You are saved by good works, regardless of your beliefs. God overlooks error in belief, but not immoral actions.
2. You are saved by orthodox beliefs, regardless of your works. God overlooks immoral actions but not errors in belief.
3. Everyone is saved by the grace of God, regardless of their beliefs or works.
4. You are saved by a combination of faith and works, each being necessary but neither being sufficient by itself.

The popular view is the last one, leaving God with little to do other than to judge the sufficiency of faith and works. Ultimately the correct Christian position is the third—they are saved only through the grace of God irrespective of what they do or believe—but most Christians think it is the second. You are saved by right belief. A sinner is simply an infidel. Unbelief is the depraved state from which the infidel must be extricated. Non-believers are not saved however moral they might be. Yet, to make salvation depend on believing in the doctrine of the atonement, is contradictory because it means salvation is by works, works of the mind—not necessarily doing what is right, but believing what is right—throwing into confusion Paul’s preaching.

Many modern Christians like to say that Christianity, to them, is the personality of Jesus, but such Christianity is nothing more than selfish and sentimental fan-worship, no different from adoring Elvis or Russell Crowe. Do these sort of Christians value truth—truth not God’s truth? Socrates admonished his disciples to “think not of Socrates, but think of the truth.” Can any Christian do this? Raising any idol to the same level as truth can only destroy the truth. Christianity has done that with its idol Jesus Christ. Christians would do better to put their faith in truth rather than in religion. If truth and love are the true essence of all religions their peculiarities had better be dropped, leaving us with one religion of truth and love. It is called Nature worship.

Sir John Eccles and A J Ayer

Rosalind Heywood, some sort of psychic, tried to persuade us a few decades ago that there was such a thing as life after death, citing Out-of-Body experiences and the views of certain doctors and scientists. She was impressed by Sir John Eccles, the prominent brain specialist, speaking in the 1963 Eddington Memorial Lecture:

Contrary to the physicalist creed, I believe that the prime reality of my experiencing self cannot with propriety be identified with brains, neurones, nerve impulses or spatial temporal patterns of impulses… I cannot believe that the gift of conscious experience has no further future, no possibility of another existence under some other intangible conditions. At least I would maintain that this possibility of a future existence cannot be denied on scientific grounds.

The discerning reader will note that Eccles does not share with us anything that his work on brains has offered him in the way of proof of beliefs—he disparages the “neurones, nerve impulses or spatial temporal patterns of impulses” he evidently studies—for he says twice that he is merely expressing beliefs, and the fact that he is a brain specialist makes his beliefs no better than anyone else’s. What is more his language suggests that he has an additional deep seated belief that there is a supernatural and eternal God, for who else could give us the “gift” (of conscious experience) to which he refers. And what scientist would call science “the physicalist creed.” Eccles shows in these few sentences that he is not a scientist and indeed ignores scientific methodology in favour of his own “beliefs.” It means that his conclusion has no basis except in his own psychology (evidently religiously conditioned) and should be ignored. A psychic might be impressed but no one sane or honest should be.

Rosalind Heywood wants the brain to be an instrument restricting consciousness, without which we would perceive and know everything—the idea of Henri Bergson who called the brain the organ of attention a la vie. It restricts because by so doing it enables us to concentrate on what matters in the here-and-now that are important to survival, but sometimes, through trauma, drugs, training or unusual ability, the guardian allows more to be seen. A J Ayer, the philosopher, had this to say in reply:

The mystic, so far from producing propositions which are empirically verified, is unable to produce any intelligible propositions at all. And therefore we say to him that his intuition has not revealed to him any facts. It is no use saying he has appreciated facts but is unable to express them. For we know that had he acquired any information, he would be able to express it… In describing his vision, the mystic does not give any information about the external world. He merely gives us indirect information about the state of his own mind.

The London Observer

The end of Christianity is no bad thing

We can be moral without religion

Cardinal Murphy O’Connor, the Archbishop of Westminster, admitted last week that Christianity is being ’vanquished’ from government and people’s lives in Britain. The Archbishop of Canterbury says he agrees with his Roman Catholic counterpart. We congratulate both men on their candour. And while we fully respect the Christianity that many Britons still practise today, we welcome the dramatic change that clerics are belatedly acknowledging.

For far too long, religion has been supposed to be a pre-condition of morality. Too often, elites have bemoaned the decline in religious faith without being able to summon up any great conviction themselves. It has been thought vitally important for the credulous ’lower orders’ to believe in heaven and hell if they were to have any moral compass.

It is hardly surprising that younger people are ever less interested in organised religion with its often intransigent positions on issues such as women’s rights, contraception and gays. Taught to challenge deference to shibboleths, they are simply unprepared to wait the customary couple of hundred years that some bishops admit privately it will take to execute a change in approach. But if new generations are abandoning the churches, it does not mean for one moment that they are abandoning spirituality. There is, as we know, a plethora of spiritual beliefs shared by Britons today.

All societies, from the most primitive, have had rules that bind them together, rules, for example, of ownership and partnership. The whole cannot function without a reciprocity of obligation. Christianity once performed that role, too, but no longer. The watershed acknowledged by the archbishops is an opportunity to consider what sort of morality is appropriate for Britain in the twentyfirst century.

A child brought up without religion can certainly be a moral human being. And in a multicultural society, we need to develop a secular morality of equality, honesty, fairness—which can unify, rather than divide, as religions have done so often in the past and still do, as last week’s nauseating events outside a Northern Ireland school have shown [Protestants swearing and spitting at Catholic girls and their parents taking them to school]. But championing this secular morality requires confidence and bravery. It will mean that faith will become a wholly priyate matter, not subject to either state interference or sponsorship.

It is regrettable that, just as society recognises this, politicians are showing themselves as keen as ever to kowtow to some religious groups. It is ludicrous that ministers should be considering more, not fewer, faith based schools. It is similarly ridiculous that they should be contemplating the introduction of more, not fewer, clerics to our legislature. But this is hardly the first time that politics has dragged far behind public reality.

Sigmund Freud

Ernest Jones, the biographer of Sigmund Freud, the effective founder of psychoanalysis, tells us that Freud “grew up devoid of any belief in God or immortality, and does not appear ever to have felt any need of it.”

Sir James Frazer

Greek and Roman society was built on the conception of the subordination of the individual to the community, of the citizen to the state; it set the safety of the commonwealth, as the supreme aim of conduct, above the safety of the individual whether in this world or in a world to come. Trained from infancy in this unselfish ideal, the citizens devoted their lives to the public service and were ready to lay them down for the common good; or, if they shrank from the supreme sacrifice, it never occured to them that they acted otherwise than basely in preferring their personal existence to the interests of their country.

All this was changed by the spread of Oriental religions which inculcated the communion of the soul with God and its eternal salvation as the only objects worth living for, objects in comparison with which the prosperity and even the existence of the state sank into insignificance. The inevitable result of this selfish and immoral doctrine was to withdraw the devotee more and more, to concentrate his thoughts on his own spiritual emotions, and to breed in him a contempt for the present life, which he regarded merely as a probation for a better and eternal.

The saint and the recluse, disdainful of earth and rapt in ecstatic contemplation of heaven, became in popular opinion the highest ideal of humanity, displacing the old ideal of the patriot and hero who, forgetful of self, lives and is ready to die for the good of his country. The earthly city seemed poor and contemptible to men whose eyes beheld the City of God coming in the clouds of heaven. Thus the centre of gravity, so to say, was shifted from the present to a future life, and, however much the other world may have gained, there can be little doubt that this one lost heavily by the change.

A general disintegration of the body politic set in. The ties of the state and the family were loosened: the structure of society tended to resolve itself into its individual elements and thereby to relapse into barbarism, for civilization is only possible through the active co-operation of the citizens and their willingness to subordinate their private interests to the common good. Men refused to defend their country and even to continue their kind. In their anxiety to save their own souls and the souls of others, they were content to leave the material world, which they identified with the principle of evil, to perish around them.

This obsession lasted for a thousand years. The revival of Roman law, of the Aristotelian philosophy, of ancient art and literature at the close of the Middle Ages, marked the return of Europe to native ideals of life and condusct, to saner, manlier views of the world, The long halt in the march of civilization was over. The tide of Oriental invasion had turned at last. It is ebbing still.

The Golden Bough, 4, ’Adonis, Attis, Osiris’

Ahmad Deedat

Ahmad Deedat, the South African Moslem writer, had been assailed in a bookshop by an evangelical vicar. After patiently hearing quotations from the bible meant to overwhelm the Moslem with the irrefutable power of Christian truth, he said:

“I agree with all that you have read to me, but I have a couple of problems with your Bible.” “What problems have you got?” he asked. I said, “Please open the Gospel of Luke, Chapter 3 Verse 23.” This he did and read: “And Jesus himself began to be about thirty years of age, being (as was supposed) the son of Joseph, which was the son of Heli (Luke 3:23).”

I drew the Reverend’s attention to the words “(as was supposed).” “Do you see that the words ‘as was supposed’ are written within brackets?” He said that he saw that. I asked him, “Why are the brackets there?” He humbly acknowledged, “I don’t know, but I could find out for you.” I said, “If you do not know, then let me tell you what the brackets are doing there in this verse.”

I explained that in the most ancient manuscripts of Luke, the words ’(as was supposed)’ are not there. “Your translators felt that without this interpolation the little lambs not well grounded in faith, might slip and fall into the error of believing that Joseph the Carpenter was the actual physical father of Jesus. So they took the precaution of adding their own comment in brackets to avoid any misunderstanding.” I knew that in all translations of the Bible in the African and Eastern languages the brackets had been removed!

I said again, “You see, sir, you read your Holy Scripture in your mother tongue but understand the facts, opposite to what you are reading. Do you remember when Jesus returned to that upper room after his alleged crucifixion ’and saith unto them, (his disciples), Peace be unto you (Luke 24:36)’ and his disciples were terrified on recognising him?” He answered that he remembered that incident. I enquired, “Why should they be terrified? When one recognises one’s long-lost friend or one’s beloved, the natural reaction is to feel overjoyed, elated, and one wants to embrace and kiss the hands and feet of the beloved. Why did they get terrified?”

The Reverend replied that the disciples thought that they were seeing a ghost. I asked, “Did Jesus look like a ghost?” He said, “No.” “Then why did they think that they were seeing a ghost when he did not look like a ghost?” I said, “Please allow me to explain.”

“You see, sir, the disciples of Jesus were not eyewitnessess to the happenings of the previous three days, as vouched for by Mark who says that at the most critical juncture in the life of Jesus, “they all forsook him and fled (Mk 14:50).” All the knowledge of the disciples regarding their Master was thereafter from hearsay. They had heard that their master was hanged on the cross; they had heard that he had given up the ghost; they had heard that he was dead and buried for three days. The conclusion is inescapable—they must be seeing a ghost. Little wonder these men were petrified.”

“To disabuse their minds from the fear that gripped them, Jesus reasoned with them. He said, ’Behold my hands and my feet, that it is I myself. Why do doubts enter your minds? Handle me and see, for a spirit has no flesh and bones as you see me have (Lk 24:39).’ He is telling them: If I have flesh and bones, then I am not a ghost, not a spook and not a spirit!” “Is that right?” I asked. “Yes,” he replied.

I continued that, Jesus is telling them, as recorded in this verse, in Basic English, that what the disciples were asked to handle and see was not a translated body, not a metamorphosed body and not a resurrected body, because a resurrected body is a spiritualised body. He is telling them in the clearest language humanly possible that he is NOT what they were thinking. They were thinking that he was a spirit, a resurrected body, one having been brought back from the dead. He is most emphatic that he is not!”

“But how can you be so sure that the resurrected body cannot materialise physically as Jesus had done?” asked the Reverend. I replied: “Because Jesus had himself pronounced that resurrected bodies are spiritualised.” “When did he say any such thing?” enquired the Reverend.

I answered, “The learned men of the Jews, ’the chief priests and the scribes with the elders,’ had come to him with questions, and among them was one about a Jewess who had seven husbands in turn, one after another according to a Jewish custom, and in time all seven husbands and the woman too died?” The Reverend remembered. I continued: “Since at the resurrection all seven will be brought to life simultaneously, there will be strife in heaven because all seven would want her at the same time (Mk 12:18-25). Jesus debunked their false notion of the resurrection, by saying that at the resurrection ’they are equal unto the angels,’ that is, that they will be spirits.”

After this interruption, I returned to the point saying, “To assure them further after having offered his hands and feet for inspection and verification that his was a material, physical body, and that all their bewilderment and disbelief was unjustified, he asked his disciples: ’Have you here any meat?’ ’And they gave him a piece of broiled fish and of a honeycomb, and he took it, and did eat before them.’ (Luke 24:41-43)”

“What was Jesus trying to prove by all his demonstrations of wanting his hands and feet to be handled and chewing and masticating broiled fish and honeycomb? Was all this a pretence? Christian scholars over a hundred years ago doubted the death of Jesus on the cross as recorded by Albert Schweitzer (Quest of the Historial Jesus). Said Schliermacher in 1819, ’If christ had only eaten to show that he could eat, while he really had no need of nourishment, it would have been a pretence—something docetic.’”

“What is wrong with you Christian folk? Jesus is telling you in the most unambiguous language that he is not a spirit, not spiritualised, not resurrected, and yet the whole Christian world believes that he was resurrected and therefore spiritualised. Who is lying, you or him? How is it possible that each and every Christian is reading their Holy Bible in their own mother tongue and yet understand the exact opposite of what they are reading? Christians read the book and are trained to understand the opposite of what is written. How have you been brainwashed, or rather, how have you been “Programmed,” as the Americans would put it.”

“Please tell me as to who is lying? Is it Jesus or a thousand million Christians of the world? Jesus says, “NO!” to his being resurrected, and all of you say “YES!” Whom are we Moslems to believe, Jesus or his so-called disciples? We Moslems would rather believe the Master. Did he not say, “The desciple is not greater than the Master (Mt 10:24).”

The Reverend politely excused himself and left!

There are more works of Ahmad Deedat, on the web in text form, which well worth reading for his gentle style of showing Christian interpretation to be dishonest. Of course, it does not make Islam right.

Ralph Estling

Ralph Estling, from the USA but now a fellow Somerset man, wrote to the New Scientist in the following vein:

Correspondence on God and science has moved me to writing an anthem for scientists whose dedication to logic, rationality, and the scientific methology of empirical analysis and deductive reasoning is only equalled by their devout unquestioning, burning and unquenchionable belief in the existence of supernatural beings who possess what can only be described as an inordinate fondness for human beings.

Actually, he said a book but a song would be jolier. The anthem, Yes, We have No Hosannas, to be sung pointedly to the tune of the Cockney costermonger’s anthem, “Yes, We have no Bananas,” would be sent, music and words free of charge, to all scientists who insist there is no contradiction or hypocrisy, in their devotion to science and God. Perhaps they should be obliged to sing it gustily before they presented any scientific paper, so that real scientists can at least be entertained by their hypocrisy.

Robert Wray

Given the accepted scientific ideal, Occam’s razor, that “it is vain to do with more what can be done with fewer” or “where explanations exist, the simplest is to be preferred,” then, faced with the choice of explanations:

1. the universe just exists,
2. God exists and he then created the universe,

the good scientist would choose the former. As Kierkegaard said:

Faith is holding a belief in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary

Kierkegaard, On Absurdity

Surely this is incompatible with the notion of scientific evidence.

Thomas Jefferson

The Christian god can be easily pictured as virtually the same as the many ancient gods of past civilizations. The Christian god is a three headed monster; cruel, vengeful and capricious. If one wishes to know more of this raging, three headed beast-like god, one only needs to look at the caliber of the people who say they serve him. They are always of two classes: fools and hypocrites.

I do not find in orthodox Christianity one redeeming feature.

Christianity is the most perverted system that ever shone on man.

We discover [in the gospels] a groundwork of vulgar ignorance, of things impossible, of superstition, fanaticism and fabrication.

Thomas Jefferson

C A Coulson on God in Nature

C A Coulson, a well known British theoretical chemist of a few years ago, and a devout Christian, considered it untenable for Christians to try to carve out parts of nature that are God’s while admitting that the rest is explicable by science. This is the “God of the Gaps”.

Even Newton, finding that he could not find an explanation for the daily rotation of the earth from his law of gravity, felt God must be responsible for it. But as soon as a source of the earth’s angular momentum was found, this gap was filled and this God lost another function. So, the trouble for the Christian is that this God is permanently on the retreat before the discoveries of science.

Coulson concluded:

Either God is in the whole of nature with no gaps, or He’s not there at all.

We can be sure that the devout professor came down on the side of the first of the choices, but that was his decision as a Christian. As a scientist, he should have cut God out with a sharp slash of Occam’s razor.

Earlier, the Maquis of Laplace, another practising Christian, had written a famous treatise on celestial mechanics. Napolean came to him to commend him on the work but also to rebuke him for not mentioning God. Laplace replied:

Sire, I have no need of that hypothesis.

Which of the two is the better scientist, and which of the two would win a poll of Christian ministers and priests as the better Christian?

Robert Funk on the Cultic Jesus

Robert Funk has stated, regarding the Jesus of History and the Christ of Faith:

The only Jesus most people want is the mythic one. They don’t want the real Jesus. They want the one they can worship. The cultic Jesus.

The plain inference from this is that they do not care that Jesus is historical and the myth of Jesus will do. Paul, the apostle, realised this and concentrated on the risen Christ, virtually ignoring his human lifespan and teaching. Paul turned the brand of Judaism that Jesus taught into a new religion: Christianity. Once Jesus is accepted as divine, his former presence on earth ceases to matter.

It shows that Christians could be persuaded to worship Santa Claus. They are truly sheep and their leaders of old were spot on in using the analogy. They were actually mocking their own gullible followers.

Nowadays we are told that, from “a literary point of view,” attempting to use gospel texts as windows through which we can look back 30-50 years to the historical Jesus is to misuse the texts because they are their own reality, and in themselves contain a world where we meet the Christian Jesus, the Jesus of faith. From a literary point of view, the books of Catherine Cookson also should not be misused as historical sources rather than containing their own reality—because they profess only to be fiction—but Christians have always told us that the gospels were truly historical records by eyewitnesses. Why then should we consider them only from a literary point of view?

Jonathan Went, a British theologian, can claim that Christianity is based upon a historical figure for whom more evidence exists than for Julius Caesar! This is plainly nonsense. Is Jesus attested by a variety of uncommitted contemporaries? Caesar was. Did Jesus write a book? Caesar did, and this alone is sufficiently greater evidence.

What Went cannot understand from his besotted viewpoint is that Jesus was the basis of a religion and constitutes the myth, or rather the legend, that justifies it. Religions have to have mythologies. Mythologies are fictional or exaggerated fact (legend), which is why they are true from “a literary point of view.” It is well known among anthropologists and sociologists that mythologies are invented to explain customs that have been adopted into general practice, not the other way round! Inventors of religions therefore have good reason for inventing the myths that justify them. History does not have the same motive. The intellectual Went even believes that the gospel writers were eyewitnesses and wrote down what they saw, a belief that even most Christian scholars have been obliged to abandon in the face of the evidence.

Father A James Bernstein, a Jew converted to Christianity, confesses:

I would decide for myself what the Scriptures meant. I became so enthusiastic about knowing Jesus as my close and personal friend that I thought my own awareness of Him was all I needed… “I believe in the Bible. If it’s not in the Bible I don’t believe it,” became my war cry. What I did not realize was that everyone else was saying the same thing! It was not the Bible, but each one’s private interpretation of it, that became our ultimate authority.

Bernstein came to realize that this is lollipop Christianity, but it is typical even of sophisticated Christians to take any stance that suits them when it suits them. Arguing with a historian, they will claim the gospels are true as literature and against anyone who is not a historian, they will claim they are true as history. Ever since Paul, they have picked whatever suited them to con people into being fleeced by priests and preachers. As Funk says, they want only their own cultic, personal image of Jesus, yet often claim that their image is the historical one. They are liars who pretend to be blameless—making them hypocrites too. They are latter-day Pharisees.

Christian Bishops on Christianity

Writing as early as 1736, Joseph Butler who finished as Bishop of Durham, and is buried in Bristol Cathedral, wrote in The Analogy of Religion, that everyone took it for granted that:

Christianity is not so much a subject of inquiry, but that it is now, at length, discovered to be fictitious.

Yet, Christians like to cling to what they regard as old certainties. Faced with the new idea of evolution put forward by Darwin, Bishop Wilberforce declared:

The principle of natural selection is absolutely incompatible with the word of God… evolution was an attempt to dethrone God.

Why? Because it makes Genesis into a lie and consequently:

The revelation of God to man, as we Christians know it, is a delusion and a snare.

Quite so. It is a delusion and a snare because it is fictitious, as Bishop Butler noticed people thought 150 years before. Today, with 130 years of compulsory education since, it seems people are not as skeptical as they were then. Whereas people thought Christianity fictitious then, today the church has fought back and imposed an unwarranted sense of “respect” for religion—in the UK that means Christianity—so that no one today dares utter a word against the Queen’s religion. The reason is that the Church took control of the education of young children, imposing compulsory morning services and religious instruction in Christianity on children even in state schools. It is remarkable that the UK is not as bad as the US, where it is de rigeur for the middle classes to indoctrinate their kids to believe in their “buddy Jesus."

In the UK, probably only 5 percent of people attend church, yet every time there is a disaster at sea, a road accident or some other catastrophe, the broadcast media cynically fill a slot with images of the grieving relatives attending church. Most people attending or watching do not care a fig for the church or its mumbo-jumbo but everyone cares for their friends and relations, and when they die tragically, they have no better way of showing their own sense of grief, and their respect for a sadly curtailed life. It is time that alternative rites of passage were more freely available.

Maulana Maududi on mouthpieces of God

Maulana Maududi has been described as the leading Islamic scholar to come out of India in the twentieth century:

Constituting themselves the mouthpieces of God they start dictating to others what is lawful (halal) and what is not (haram). In this way their word becomes law and they force people to obey their own commands instead of those of God. This is the source of that Brahmanism and Popery which has prevailed under various names and in diverse forms in all parts of the world from time immemorial down to the present day, and in consequence of which certain families, races and classes have imposed their dominion over large masses of men and women.

Rather like the Arabs following Mohammed, eh? It is curious how even clever men can exclude their own beliefs from their criticisms—but Maududi was right, even if too selective in those that he criticises. It is hard to understand how anyone can believe the pronouncements of anyone claiming to speak for God. If God is omnipotent, as all believers in one god think, then why should he want to subject humanity to possible temptation by imposters by only revealing himself in a way that is transparently subject to fraudsters, lunatics and demagogues. All real prophets would say just what Maududi says, but not one believer would listen. They’ll find some evangelical type raging on another soapbox and give him ten percent of their income in exchange for salvation after death.

Emmett F Fields on Science and Religion

Emmett F Fields states resoundingly:

Science has nothing to do with religion. Science and religion are different species of things, they neither mate nor live in the same house. If a modern religion finds that science has the best answers to certain questions of religious importance, and adapts those scientific truths as part of its religious outlook, that does not, in the least, entangle science and religion. Science goes on its merry way of finding facts and cares nothing about those religions that agree, or disagree, with its empirical findings.

How then can we have a religion which adequately honours science and gives it its proper head to determine what we need to know about nature? Indeed, is this possible? Ideally, as Fields says, science should not have anything to do with religion in the sense of its practice. However in its application we have quite a different question.

The application of science rarely has anything to do with its practitioners. Technicians, engineers, entrepreneurs and politicians take over where the scientist left off. This is precisely where we should have a religion of science—its ethical application. Furthermore, when it is clear that some scientific line of enquiry requires a methodology that leads to suffering or is going to lead to discoveries that can only bring more suffering to the world, an ethical religion of science will have something to say.

However science can easily becomes corrupted by religion when it presumes to criticise science with dogmatic religious assumptions. One example of such religious perversion of science is "Scientific Creationism" Such corrupted science is not science at all, but simply dishonest religion.

The accepted religions are so powerful that the facts of history, science or philosophy that disprove, or seem to disprove, their fundamental assumptions are simply not taught, or taught in such a way that they seem not to contradict the ancient mistakes. We need a religion that is scientific and can criticise scientists and their paymasters, the exploiters of science, with scientific knowledge but from the moral high ground.

Bertrand Russell on Soul and Mind

Bertrand Russell (1928) says modern science gives no indication of the existence of the soul or mind as an entity:

The world consists of events, not of things that endure for a long time and have changing properties. Events can be collected into groups by their causal relations. If the causal relations are of one sort, the resulting group of events may be called a physical object, and if the causal relations are of another sort, the resulting group may be called a mind.

Thus both mind and matter are merely convenient ways of organizing events. There can be no reason for supposing that either a piece of mind or a piece of matter is immortal.

The most essential characteristic of mind is memory, and there is no reason whatever to suppose that the memory associated with a given person survives that person’s death. Indeed there is every reason to think the opposite, for memory is clearly connected with a certain kind of brain structure, and since this structure decays at death, there is every reason to suppose that memory also must cease.

Believers have two main desires: to prove the mind is immortal, and to prove the ultimate power in the universe is mental not physical. Materialists are right about both. There is no reason to think that anywhere except on the earth’s surface anything happens through mental causes. If there is any truth in physics, particularly the second law of thermodynamics, the human race will not continue for ever. Science diminishes our cosmic pretensions but generally increases our terrestrial comfort.

That is why, in spite of the horror of the theologians, science has on the whole been tolerated.

Russell wrote all this long almost a century ago, and could hardly have imagined that the entropy accumulating on earth from human commercial activity would lead so soon to the prospect of our premature extinction. Yet, that is what we now face.

Lucretius on Religion

A disease born of fear and a source of untold misery to the human race.

Miscellany

If fear of imaginary judges, imaginary rewards, imaginary punishments were effective sanctions, then crime rates would be lower in devout countries than in sceptical and secular ones. Yet crime rates are many times higher in Catholic Latin America, where belief in judgement in the afterlife is strong, than in Japan, where it is virtually absent.

Countless studies show higher rates of religious affiliation among criminals and juvenile delinquents than among the rest of the population. In addition, the three countries with the highest religious attendance in the world (USA, Ireland and South Africa) have an extremely high violence rate, whereas the three countries with the lowest religious attendance (Denmark, Sweden and Japan) have an unusually low rate of violence.

Richard Posner, Sex and Reason

Conventional religion is not an effective force for moral behavior or against criminal activity. Studies show higher rates of religious affiliation among criminals and juvenile delinquents than among the rest of the population.

Bernard Spilka, Ralph W Hood Jr and Richard Gorsuch,
The Psychology of Religion

Jews were found to be the least criminal, by far, and Catholics the most. But the group with a crime rate equal to or lower than Jews was of people claiming no religious affiliation. So religion is not only bad for the individual, it is bad for society.

Lee Ellis, University of North Dakota

Only 22% of non-religious people have had abortions compared to 32% for Protestants and 29% for Catholics.

Janus Report

To believe, for example, that God literally came down on Sinai and literally spoke to our ancestors is to commit the sin of idolatry, which, in its purest form, reduces God to a natural/human phenomenon. People descend and speak, God does not—except in a mythic way.

Neil Gillman

Whenever we read the obscene stories, the voluptuous debaucheries, the cruel and torturous executions, the unrelenting vindictiveness with which more than half the bible is filled, it would be more consistent that we called it the word of a demon than the word of God. It is a history of wickedness, that has served to corrupt and brutalize mankind; and, for my own part, I sincerely detest it, as I detest everything that is cruel.

Thomas Paine (1737-1809), The Age of Reason

If the above has you wanting more in the same vein, be sure to visit Patrick C Ryan’s Proto-Religion pages

Skeptical Resources—Internet infidels | Jesus Never Existed | Steven Carr’s Website | Christianism | Early Christian Writings | God is Imaginary | “Religion Detoxification” | Our Judaio-Christian Heritage | Archaeoastronomy | No Deity | No Beliefs | Evil Bible | Bible God | ex-Christians | Jesus Police | Islamic Faith Freedom | Atheist Experience | American Atheists | Jovial Atheist | Askwhy! books
Other Resources—Early Christian Docs | Resources for Study | Traditional Bible-History | Traditional Bible World History | Traditional Bible History | about.com biblical history | Apologetics web sites | Advent Ch Fathers | Orion center links | Wikipedia | Traditional Jewish History