Religion is the main deception of Mankind

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

Faith is just a license to deny reason, a dogma that followers of religions give themselves out. The incompatibility of reason and faith has been an obvious fact of human knowledge and social life for centuries …

Somewhere on our planet, a man has just kidnapped a little girl. Soon he would rape her, torture her and then kill her. If this heinous crime is not happening right now, it will happen in a few hours, at most days. Statistical laws governing the lives of 6 billion people allow us to say this with confidence. The same statistics claim that right at this moment, the girl's parents believe that an almighty and loving God takes care of them.

Do they have any reason to believe this? Is it good that they believe this? No.

The whole essence of atheism lies in this answer. Atheism- this is not philosophy; it's not even a worldview; it's just unwillingness to deny the obvious … Unfortunately, we live in a world where denying the obvious is a matter of principle. The obvious has to be stated over and over again. The obvious has to be defended. This is a thankless task. It entails accusations of selfishness and callousness. Moreover, it is a task that an atheist does not need.

It is worth noting that no one has to declare themselves as a non-astrologer or non-alchemist. As a consequence, we have no words for people who deny the validity of these pseudosciences. Based on the same principle, atheism is a term that simply shouldn't be. Atheism is a natural reaction of a reasonable personon religious dogmas.

An atheist is anyone who believes that 260 million Americans (87% of the population), who, according to polls, never doubt the existence of God, must provide evidence of his existence and especially his mercy - given the incessant death of innocent people. which we witness every day. Only an atheist can appreciate the absurdity of our situation. Most of us believe in a god who is as believable as the gods of ancient Greek Olympus.

No person, regardless of their merit, can qualify for an elective office in the United States unless they publicly declare their confidence in the existence of such a god. Much of what is called "public policy" in our country is subject to taboos and prejudices worthy of a medieval theocracy. The situation in which we find ourselves is deplorable, unforgivable and terrible. It would be funny if there weren't so many at stake.

We live in a world where everything changes and everything - both good and bad - sooner or later comes to an end. Parents are losing children; children lose their parents. Husbands and wives suddenly separate, never to meet again. Friends say goodbye in a hurry, not suspecting that they saw each other for the last time. Our life, as far as the eye can see, is one great drama of loss.

Most people, however, think that there is a remedy for any loss. If we live righteously - not necessarily in accordance with ethical norms, but within the framework of certain ancient beliefs and codified behavior - we will get everything we want - after death … When our bodies are no longer able to serve us, we simply throw them off as unnecessary ballast and go to the land, where we will be reunited with everyone we loved during our lifetime.

Of course, too rational people and other rabble will remain outside the threshold of this happy haven; but on the other hand, those who, during their lifetime, stifled skepticism in themselves, will be able to fully enjoy eternal bliss.

We live in a world of hard to imagine, amazing things - from the energy of thermonuclear fusion, which gives light to our sun, to the genetic and evolutionary consequences of this light, which have been unfolding on Earth for billions of years - and with all this, Paradise meets our most petty desires with the thoroughness of a Caribbean cruise. Truly, this is amazing. Someone gullible might even think that Humanfearing to lose everything that is dear to him, created both paradise and its guardian - god in his own image and likeness.

Think of Hurricane Katrina that devastated New Orleans. More than a thousand people died, tens of thousands lost all their property, and more than a million were forced to flee their homes. It is safe to say that at the very moment the hurricane hit the city, almost every resident of New Orleans believed in an omnipotent, omniscient and merciful God.

But what was god doingwhile the hurricane destroyed their city? He could not help but hear the prayers of the old people who were looking for salvation from the water in the attics and eventually drowned. All these people were believers. All these good men and women have prayed throughout their lives. Only an atheist has the courage to admit the obvious: these unfortunate people died talking to imaginary friend.

Of course, that a storm of biblical proportions was about to hit New Orleans was warned more than once, and the measures taken in response to the catastrophe that broke out were tragically inadequate. But they were inadequate only from the point of view of science. Thanks to meteorological calculations and satellite images, scientists made the dumb nature speak and predicted the direction of Katrina's strike.

God did not tell anyone about his plans. If the inhabitants of New Orlen had completely relied only on the mercy of the Lord, they would have learned about the approach of a deadly hurricane only with the first gusts of wind. However, according to a poll conducted by the Washington Post, 80% hurricane survivors claim he only strengthened their faith in God.

While Katrina devoured New Orleans, nearly a thousand Shiite pilgrims were trampled to death on a bridge in Iraq. There is no doubt that these pilgrims fervently believed in the god described in the Qur'an: their whole life was subordinated to the indisputable fact of his existence; their women hid their faces from his gaze; their brothers in faith regularly killed each other, insisting on their interpretation of his teachings. It would be surprising if any of the survivors of this tragedy lost their faith. Most likely, the survivors imagine that they were saved by God's grace.

Only an atheist fully sees limitless narcissism and self-deception of believers … Only an atheist understands how immoral it is to believe that the same merciful God saved you from disaster and drowned babies in their cradles. Refusing to hide the reality of human suffering behind a sweet fantasy of eternal bliss, the atheist keenly senses how precious human life is - and how regrettable that millions of people suffer each other and abandon happiness at the whim of their own imaginations.

It is difficult to imagine the scale of a catastrophe that could shake religious faith. The Holocaust was not enough. The genocide in Rwanda was not enough - even though among the killersarmed with a machete there were priests … At least 300 million people, including many children, died from smallpox in the 20th century. Truly, the ways of the Lord are inscrutable. It seems that even the most egregious contradictions are not a hindrance to religious faith. In matters of faith, we are completely off the ground.

Of course, believers never tire of assuring each other that God is not responsible for human suffering. However, how else should we understand the statement that God is omnipresent and omnipotent? There is no other answer, and it's time to stop dodging it. Theodicy problem (excuses god) is as old as the world, and we must consider it solved. If God exists, he either cannot prevent terrible calamities, or he does not want to. Therefore, God is either powerless or cruel.

At this point, pious readers will resort to the following pirouette: you cannot approach God with human standards of morality. But what are the yardsticks that believers use to prove the Lord's goodness? Of course, human. Moreover, any god who cares about little things like same-sex marriage or the name that worshipers call him is not at all so mysterious. If the god of Abraham exists, he is unworthy not only of the grandeur of the universe. He is not even worthy of a man.

There is, of course, another answer - the most reasonable and least controversial at the same time: biblical god is a figment of human imagination.

As Richard Dawkins pointed out, we are all atheists towards Zeus and Thor. Only an atheist understands that the biblical god is no different from them. As a consequence, only an atheist can have enough compassion to see the depth and meaning of human pain. The terrible thing is that we are doomed to die and lose everything that is dear to us; it is doubly awful that millions of people needlessly suffer throughout their lives.

The fact that religion is directly to blame for much of this suffering - religious intolerance, religious wars, religious fantasies, and the waste of already scarce resources on religious needs - makes atheism a moral and intellectual necessity. This necessity, however, places the atheist on the fringes of society. Refusing to lose touch with reality, the atheist is cut off from the illusory world of his neighbors.

The nature of religious belief

According to the latest polls, 22% of Americans are absolutely sure that Jesus will return to Earth no later than 50 years from now. Another 22% believe that this is quite likely. Apparently, these 44% are the same people who attend church at least once a week, who believe that God literally bequeathed the land of Israel to the Jews, and who want our children not to be taught the scientific fact of evolution.

President Bush is well aware that such believers represent the most monolithic and active layer of the American electorate. As a consequence, their views and prejudices influence almost any decision of national importance. It is obvious that the liberals drew the wrong conclusions from this and are now frantically leafing through the Scriptures, puzzling over how best to butter up the legions of those who votes on the basis of religious dogma.

More than 50% of Americans have a "negative" or "extremely negative" attitude towards those who do not believe in God; 70% believe that presidential candidates should be “deeply religious”. Obscurantism in the United States Gains Strength - in our schools, in our courts and in all branches of the federal government. Only 28% of Americans believe in evolution; 68% believe in Satan. Ignorance of this degree, permeating the entire body of an awkward superpower, is a problem for the whole world.

Although any intelligent person can easily criticize religious fundamentalism, the so-called "moderate religiosity" still retains a prestigious position in our society, including academia. There is a certain amount of irony in this, since even fundamentalists use their brains more consistently than "moderate" ones.

Fundamentalists justify their religious beliefs with ridiculous evidence and flawed logic, but at least they are trying to find at least some rational justification.

Moderate believerson the contrary, they usually limit themselves to enumerating the beneficial consequences of religious belief. They do not say they believe in God because Bible prophecies have been fulfilled; they simply claim to believe in God because faith "gives meaning to their lives." When the tsunami killed several hundred thousand people the day after Christmas, fundamentalists immediately interpreted it as evidence of God's wrath.

It turns out that God sent humanity another vague warning about the sinfulness of abortion, idolatry and homosexuality. Even if it is monstrous from a moral point of view, such an interpretation is logical if we proceed from certain (absurd) premises.

Moderate believers, on the other hand, refuse to draw any conclusions from the Lord's actions. God remains a secret of secrets, a source of consolation, easily compatible with the most dreadful atrocities. In the face of catastrophes such as the Asian tsunami, the liberal religious community readily carries corny and mind-numbing nonsense.

Yet people of goodwill quite naturally prefer such truisms to the odious moralizing and prophecies of true believers. In between disasters, the emphasis on mercy (rather than anger) is certainly to the credit of liberal theology. However, it is worth noting that when the bloated bodies of the dead are pulled out of the sea, we observe human, not divine, mercy.

In the days when the elements snatch thousands of children from their mothers' hands and indifferently drown them in the ocean, we see with the utmost clarity that liberal theology is the most blatantly absurd of human illusions. Even the theology of God's wrath is intellectually more solid. If God exists, his will is not a mystery. The only thing that remains a mystery during such terrible events is the willingness of millions of mentally healthy people to believe in the incredible and consider it the pinnacle of moral wisdom.

Moderate theists argue that a reasonable person can believe in God simply because such belief makes him happier, helps him overcome the fear of death, or gives meaning to his life. This statement is pure absurdity.… Its absurdity becomes obvious as soon as we replace the concept of "god" with some other comforting assumption: suppose, for example, that someone wants to believe that somewhere in his garden there is buried a diamond the size of a refrigerator.

Without a doubt, it is very pleasant to believe in such a thing. Now imagine what would happen if someone followed the example of moderate theists and began to defend their faith in the following way: when asked why he thinks that a diamond is buried in his garden, thousands of times larger than any of the hitherto known, he gives answers like “This belief is the meaning of my life,” or “on Sundays my family loves to arm themselves with shovels and look for it,” or “I wouldn't want to live in a universe without a refrigerator the size of a refrigerator in my garden.”

It is clear that these answers are inadequate. Worse, either a madman or an idiot can answer that way.

Neither Pascal's wager, nor Kierkegaard's "leap of faith", nor the other tricks that theists use are worth a damn. Believing in the existence of God means believing that his existence is in some way related to yours, that his existence is the immediate cause of belief. There must be some causal relationship or the appearance of such a relationship between the fact and its acceptance.

Thus, we see that religious statementsif they claim to describe the world, they must be evidentiary in nature - like any other assertion. For all their sins against reason, religious fundamentalists understand this; moderate believers - almost by definition - are not.

The incompatibility of reason and faith for centuries it has been an obvious fact of human knowledge and social life. Either you have good reasons to hold certain views, or you don’t have such reasons. People of all persuasions naturally recognize supremacy of reason and resort to his help as soon as possible.

If a rational approach allows you to find arguments in favor of the doctrine, it will certainly be adopted; if the rational approach threatens the teaching, it is ridiculed. Sometimes it happens in one sentence. Only if the rational evidence for a religious doctrine is inconclusive or completely absent, or if everything is against it, do the adherents of the doctrine resort to "faith."

Otherwise, they simply give reasons for their beliefs (eg, “The New Testament confirms the prophecies of the Old Testament,” “I saw the face of Jesus in the window,” “We prayed and our daughter's tumor stopped growing”). As a rule, these grounds are insufficient, but they are still better than no grounds at all.

Faith is just a license to deny reason, which the followers of religions give themselves out. In a world that continues to be shaken by the squabble of incompatible beliefs, in a country held hostage to medieval concepts, "god", "end of history" and "immortality of the soul", the irresponsible division of public life into questions of reason and questions of faith is no longer acceptable.

Faith and the public good

Believers regularly claim that atheism is responsible for some of the most atrocious crimes of the 20th century. However, although the regimes of Hitler, Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot were indeed anti-religious to varying degrees, they were not overly rational. Their official propaganda was an eerie jumble of misconceptions - misconceptions about the nature of race, economy, nationality, historical progress, and the danger of intellectuals.

IN many respects, religion was the direct culprit even in these cases. Take the Holocaust: the anti-Semitism that built Nazi crematoria and gas chambers was directly inherited from medieval Christianity. For centuries, believing Germans viewed Jews as the most terrible heretics and attributed any social evil to their presence among the faithful. And although in Germany, hatred of the Jews found a predominantly secular expression, the religious demonization of Jews in the rest of Europe never stopped. (Even the Vatican, up until 1914, regularly accused Jews of drinking the blood of Christian babies.)

Auschwitz, the Gulag, and Cambodia's deathfields are not examples of what happens when people become overly critical of irrational beliefs. On the contrary, these horrors illustrate the dangers of being uncritical towards certain secular ideologies. Needless to say, rational arguments against religious belief are not arguments for blindly accepting some atheistic dogma.

The problem that atheism points to is problem of dogmatic thinking in general, but in any religion it is this kind of thinking that dominates. No society in history has ever suffered from an excess of rationality.

While most Americans see ridding themselves of religion as an unattainable goal, much of the developed world has already achieved this goal. Perhaps research on the "religious gene" that makes Americans meekly subordinate their lives to deep religious fantasies will help explain why so many people in the developed world seem to be missing this gene.

The level of atheism in the vast majority of developed countries completely refutes any claim that religion is a moral necessity. Norway, Iceland, Australia, Canada, Sweden, Switzerland, Belgium, Japan, the Netherlands, Denmark and the United Kingdom are all some of the least religious countries on the planet.

These countries are also the healthiest countries in 2005, based on indicators such as life expectancy, universal literacy, annual per capita income, educational attainment, gender equality, homicide and infant mortality rates. In contrast, the 50 least developed countries on the planet are highly religious - every single one of them. Other studies paint the same picture.

Among wealthy democracies, the United States is unique in its level of religious fundamentalism and rejection of the theory of evolution. USA are also unique in their high rates of homicide, abortion, teenage pregnancies, sexually transmitted diseases and infant mortality.

The same relationship can be traced in the United States itself: the states of the South and Midwest, where religious prejudice and hostility to evolutionary theory are strongest, are characterized by the highest rates of the problems listed above; while the relatively secular states of the Northeast are closer to European norms.

Of course, statistical dependences of this kind do not solve the problem of cause and effect. Perhaps belief in God leads to social problems; perhaps social problems reinforce faith in God; it is possible that both are a consequence of another, deeper problem. But even leaving the issue of cause and effect aside, these facts provide compelling evidence that atheism is fully compatible with the basic requirements that we place on civil society. They also prove - without any qualifications - that religious belief does not provide any health benefits to society.

Most notably, states with a high level of atheism show the greatest generosity in aid to developing countries. The questionable link between the literal interpretation of Christianity and "Christian values" is refuted by other indicators of philanthropy. Compare the pay gap between the top management of companies and the bulk of their subordinates: 24 to 1 in the UK; 15 to 1 in France; 13 to 1 in Sweden; v USAwhere 83% of the population believe that Jesus literally rose from the dead - 475 to 1 … There seem to be many camels hoping to squeeze through the eye of a needle with ease.

Religion as a source of violence

One of the main tasks facing our civilization in the 21st century is to learn to speak about the most intimate - ethics, spiritual experience and the inevitability of human suffering - in a language free from blatant irrationality. Nothing hinders the achievement of this goal more than the respect with which we treat religious faith. Incompatible religious teachings have split our world into several communities - Christians, Muslims, Jews, Hindus, etc. - and this split has become an inexhaustible source of conflict.

To this day, religion relentlessly engenders violence. Conflicts in Palestine (Jews against Muslims), in the Balkans (Orthodox Serbs against Croatian Catholics; Orthodox Serbs against Bosnian and Albanian Muslims), in Northern Ireland (Protestants against Catholics), in Kashmir (Muslims against Hindus), in Sudan (Muslims against Christians and adherents of traditional cults), in Nigeria (Muslims versus Christians), Ethiopia and Eritrea (Muslims versus Christians), Sri Lanka (Sinhalese Buddhists versus Tamil Hindus), Indonesia (Muslims versus Christians of Timor), Iran and Iraq (Shia Muslims versus Sunni Muslims), in the Caucasus (Orthodox Russians versus Chechen Muslims; Azeri Muslims versus Armenian Catholics and Orthodox Christians) are just a few of the many examples.

In each of these regions religion was either the only one, or one of the main reasons for the death of millions of people in recent decades.

In a world ruled by ignorance, only the atheist refuses to deny the obvious: religious faith lends human violence to a staggering scope. Religion drives violence in at least two ways:

1) People often kill other people, because they believe that this is what the creator of the universe wants from them (an inevitable element of such psychopathic logic is the belief that after death the murderer is guaranteed eternal bliss). Examples of this behavior are countless; suicide bombers are the most striking.

2) Large communities of people are ready to enter into a religious conflict just because religion is an important part of their self-awareness. One of the persistent pathologies of human culture is the tendency of people to instill in their children fear and hatred of other people on a religious basis. Many religious conflicts, caused by, at first glance, worldly reasons, in fact, have religious roots … (If you don’t believe it, ask the Irish.)

Despite these facts, moderate theists tend to imagine that any human conflict can be reduced to lack of education, poverty and political division. This is one of the many fallacies of the liberal righteous.

To dispel it, we just need to remember that the people who hijacked the planes on September 11, 2001, had higher education, came from wealthy families and did not suffer from any political oppression. At the same time, they spent a lot of time in the local mosque, talking about the depravity of the infidels and about the pleasures that await the martyrs in paradise.

How many more architects and engineers have to hit a wall at 400 miles per hour before we finally understand that jihad warriors are not spawned by bad education, poverty, or politics? The truth, no matter how shocking it sounds, is this: a person can be so well educated that he can build an atomic bomb, without ceasing to believe that 72 virgins are waiting for him in paradise.

Such is the ease with which religious faith splits the human consciousness, and such is the degree of tolerance with which our intellectual circles treat religious nonsense. Only an atheist understood what should already be obvious to any thinking person: if we want to eliminate the causes of religious violence, we must strike a blow at the false truths of world religions.

Why is religion such a dangerous source of violence?

- Our religions are fundamentally mutually exclusive. Either Jesus rose from the dead and sooner or later will return to Earth in the guise of a superhero, or not; either the Qur'an is the infallible testament of the Lord, or it is not. Every religion contains unambiguous statements about the world, and the abundance of such mutually exclusive statements alone creates the basis for conflict.

- In no other area of human activity do people postulate their difference from others with such maximalism - and do not tie these differences to eternal torment or eternal bliss. Religion is the only area in which the we-they opposition takes on a transcendental meaning.

If you truly believe that only using the correct name for God can save you from eternal torment, then cruel treatment of heretics can be considered a perfectly reasonable measure. It might be even wiser to kill them right away.

If you believe that another person can, just by saying something to your children, doom their souls to eternal damnation, then a heretic neighbor is much more dangerous than a pedophile rapist. In a religious conflict, the stakes of the parties are much higher than in the case of inter-tribal, racial or political enmity.

- Religious belief is a taboo in any conversation. Religion is the only area of our activity in which people are consistently protected from the need to support their deepest convictions with any kind of arguments. At the same time, these beliefs often determine what a person lives for, for which he is willing to die and - too often - for what he ready to kill.

This is an extremely serious problem, because at too high stakes people have to choose between dialogue and violence. Only a fundamental willingness to use your intelligence - that is, adjusting your beliefs in accordance with new facts and new arguments - can guarantee the choice in favor of dialogue.

Conviction without proof necessarily entails discord and cruelty. It cannot be said with certainty that rational people will always agree with each other. But you can be absolutely sure that irrational people will always be divided by their dogmas.

The likelihood that we will overcome the fragmentation of our world, creating new opportunities for interfaith dialogue, is vanishingly small. Tolerance of written irrationality cannot be the ultimate goal of civilization. Despite the fact that members of the liberal religious community have agreed to turn a blind eye to the mutually exclusive elements of their faiths, these elements remain a source of permanent conflict for their fellow believers.

Thus, political correctness is not a reliable basis for human coexistence. If we want religious war to become as unimaginable to us as cannibalism, there is only one way to achieve this - getting rid of dogmatic faith.

If our beliefs are based on sound reasoning, we don't need faith; if we have no arguments or they are useless, it means that we have lost touch with reality and with each other.

Atheism Is just adherence to the most basic yardstick of intellectual honesty: your conviction should be in direct proportion to your evidence.

Belief in the absence of evidence - and especially belief in something that simply cannot be proven - is flawed both intellectually and morally. Only an atheist understands this.

Atheist Is just a person who saw falsity of religion and refused to live by her laws.