This page includes some of my thoughts about religion and links to other sites, both religious and anti-religious.
My writings are in black. Plagiarized text is in maroon, sometimes highlighted by me in red.
See also the page Holy Blood, Holy Grail.
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"Religion is based ... mainly upon fear ... fear of the mysterious, fear of defeat, fear of death. Fear is the parent of cruelty, and therefore it is no wonder if cruelty and religion have gone hand in hand . . . . My own view on religion is that of Lucretius. I regard it as a disease born of fear and as a source of untold misery to the human race." . . . Bertrand Russell
Every religion has for its foundation a miracle -- that is to say, a violation of nature -- that is to say, a falsehood. . . . . Robert G. Ingersoll
"Civilisation will not attain to its perfection until the last stone from the last church falls on the last priest" . . . Emile Zola
Articles by Wayne (Page 10) (Page numbers such as this are for the conveneience of site maintenance. They are not needed by the reader.)
. . . Blasphemy and satire (Blsfmy01) ___ Clone the Messiah
. . . The Bible and Christianity are barbaric (Page MyRel010)
. . . Islam ___ The Koran and Islam are barbaric (Page MyRel010)
. . . Letters to editors about religion (Page LetRel10)
. . . My religious beliefs (Page MyRel010), which lincludes a link to Some of my beliefs, including: (Page 10, 13 p)
. . . Proof that the God of Christianity cannot exist (Page 10)
. . . Has Christianity been of net benefit to mankind? (Page 10)
. . . Christianity's endorsement of slavery (Relig10)
. . . Tough Questions for the Christian Church (Relig20)
. . . Quotes (Page 30, 11 p)
. . . Letter "Evolving belief" (Page 40, 15 p)
. . . Letter "Rational belief in the irrational?" (Page 40)
. . . Was Hitler a Christian? (Page 40) (Added 19 Dec 00.)
. . . Can Science Prove that Prayer Works? (Page 40.)
. . . Is a cult more irrational or dangerous than a mainline religion? (Page 410) (Added 29 Jan 01.)
. . . Apologia: my apology for not having praised good deeds motivated by faith (Page 415) (Added 11 Feb 01.)
. . . Colorado children's deaths caused by religion (Page 415) (Added 22 Feb 01.)
. . . George W. Bush's Faith-Based Initiative: a very regressive idea (Page 417)
. . . Founding fathers and early presidents were not pro-Christian, contrary to popular belief (Page 417)
. . . Religious terrorism (Page RelTer10) (Updated 20 Sep 01.)
. . . America, America, whose dagger has pierced your heart? A poem by Wayne Paulson (Page RelTer20) (Added 21 Sep 01.)
Articles from the Web (Page 50, 22 p, 85 s)
. . . VATICAN ASKS COURT, U.S. GOVERNMENT TO DISMISS LAWSUIT OVER NAZI GOLD Church Evades Responsibility For Clerical Fascism (Page 50)
. . . Abortion: Why the Religious Right is Wrong (Page 50) (Added 20 Dec 00.)
. . . A Tribute to Steve Allen (Page 50)
. . . Imagine, by John Lennon (Page 50)
. . . Nietzsche's Labyrinth: The writings of Friederich Nietzsche: http://www.inquiria.com/nz/index.html
. . . Women Without Superstition: "No Gods - No Masters": http://www.ffrf.org/wws/index.html
. . . Emma Goldman: Homepage and writings, including The Failure of Christianity
. . . Religious Movements Homepage Raelians
. . . Religion is selfish, blinkered and immoral (Page 510, 4 p. 42 s) (Added 4 Jan 01.)
. . . Saskatoon schools may teach Christianity
. . . Pakistani Journalists May Face Death for Publishing Letter (Page 515) (Added 19 Feb 01.) More religious madness!
. . . Christianity paved way for Holocaust
. . . More Jews have been affected, hurt or killed, in the name of Christ and his church than those massacred by the Nazis (Added 24 Feb 01.)
. . . Theological Support of Stem Cell Research (Page 95) (Added 1 Sep 01.)
Links to other sites (Page 60, 9 p, 52 s)
. . . Anti-secularism page ___ The case against Catholicism(FreRel20)
. . . Catholic Church opposes freedom of religion (FreRel20)
. . . Clerical Fascism (FreRel20) ___ Crime and law (p. 90) ___ Current abuses by religions (p. 80)
. . . Freedom from religion page (FreRel10) ___ Horrors (p. 70)
. . . How to get excommunicated (Blsfmy01) ___ Islam page (Islam10)
. . . Links, My religious beliefs (MyRel020) ___ More current abuses (p. 95)
. . . Religion is a threat to national security and sanity (FreRel20) ___ Ten Commandments page
The following is a message that I sent to a friend on the Web on 30 Oct 00.
It is interesting that you mention the Unitarian Church. When I was at Queen's I attended off and on a Unitarian discussion group. I am not aware that I felt that I was somehow part of an oddball group in the sense that you mention; however, there definitely was a sense of being somewhat heretical. The people, perhaps ten or so, seemed to have a genuine religious instinct (one that I perhaps had to some extent, but was trying to deny, and still am!); however, they could not abide by the beliefs and rituals of Christianity. My parents were both Protestants, having migrated from a Lutheran Church of their early years in an isolated part of Ontario -- Rainy River, in the Lake of the Woods area, where I was born. All of my relatives there were of Norwegian descent. They later switched to the United Church on moving to Thunder Bay, and later to Niagara Falls and Cornwall. My Mother, who is now about 81, still goes to church north of Victoria, BC, of a bent that is somewhat more fundamentalist than the United Church. My somewhat sardonic characterization of the United Church is that it is a kind of the Velveeta Cheese of churches -- not too piquant to offend the taste of most people! The Great Compromiser, perhaps!
From an early age it was my mother primarily that "forced" me to go to Sunday school and later church. I think that I must have been about ten years old when I first started seriously questioning the whole basis of Christianity. Some of my misgivings went as follows. God is supposed to be all powerful, all knowing, and all loving. In the Garden of Eden, man sinned by virtue of either (a) disobeying God's edict to not learn anything new, or (b) by disobeying an arbitrary and unreasonable edict. Which would have been the greater sin? Apparently to disobey an arbitrary, if not downright anti-intellectual, dictate from God, regardless of what that dictate was. In essence then, although God had created man, man was imperfect. Why had a perfect God created man as being imperfect? By virtue of this initial disobedience of an order by this Dictator God, man acquired Original Sin. In my current parlance, man had, by virtue of this disobedience, acquired what was to become a sexually transmitted disease of sin (STDS). STDS was now to be transmitted by means of sexual reproduction throughout all of humanity down through all generations. So man, even from birth, was to acquire an infection called Original Sin. One major misgiving of mine was why would this loving God create a mankind having such a built-in imperfection right from the beginning? Was it His first try at it? Had this first experiment failed? Are there other universes out there in which He did a better job of it? Or, did God purposely create a mankind that would suffer immensely throughout history because of this disease (created by God) called Original Sin? Man, how far hast thou fallen, who once was like the angels?
So, man was now doomed to not only a life of some misery on earth because of his fall from grace, but, if he did not believe the right things, he was also doomed to an afterlife in which he could be tortured forever by God in this "loving" God's torture chamber called Hell. When a religious teacher objected to this characterization, my reply was that I assumed from the teachings of Christianity that God had created all things in Heaven and on earth. Did that also not mean that he had created sin, misery, cancer, AIDS, the Devil, and Hell, and the justification for using torture? Not necessarily, was the reply. He created free will for man. It was the Devil and free will that had led man astray. So, to patch up this sorry state of affairs, God impregnates a virgin without her permission. Would we now call it rape or artificial insemination? Why does he do this? To allow a Son to be born who will teach man a lesson about His loving Father. The lesson was that, if man believed in Jesus, he might suffer a miserable life on earth, but that after death he would be "saved" and enter Heaven and an eternal afterlife of bliss. "Saved"? Saved from what? Saved from being tortured forever by this loving Father of His, God, in a place called Hell. Does it make sense so far? We have not even arrived at Easter yet!
So, how is it that man will be "saved"? He will be saved by an arrangement wherein a reluctant Pontius Pilate, the local Roman dictator, is persuaded by one of several factions of Jews, to crucify this rebel upstart named Jesus. Now we have Jesus nailed to a cross and bleeding to death while His loving Father watches over Him, doing nothing to save Him. If you watched your son being nailed to a cross in your front yard and did not even phone 911 for help, would you not be accused of child abuse? It gets even worse. Now, this Jesus fellow cries out "My God, why hast thou forsaken me?". It seems that even Jesus has had last-minute doubts. Doubts about what? About his own divinity? About whether His Father cares a whit for him? Whether His Father is powerful enough to save Him, even if He wanted to? About His own sanity? About the sanity of His Father? Who knows? If a Christian worships God, how can he be sure that he is not worshipping a psychopath? Although we might think that the desire of a human being, such as the dictator emperor Constantine to be worsipped to be a character defect, why would Christians believe that God wishes to be worshipped? Why is worship of the Divine considered to be a virtue? I would consider it to be a vice.
So what have we ended up with, without even getting to Easter yet? A "loving" God watching, apparently either helplessly or uncaringly, as His Son bleeds to death on an old rugged Cross, complaining all the while! This is supposed to save mankind? From what?
Finally comes the "good" news -- the Gospel of the resurrection of the Appointed One. Although Jesus appears to have died, He comes up smelling like roses, literally (I kid you not, its in the Bible!), meets one or two people, and ascends into Heaven. Glory be! That whole drama of human sacrifice, in which the father of the victim was a collaborator and witness, represents the greatest news that mankind will ever receive! Isn't that something to look forward to, indeed! So, by virtue of this barbarity, mankind is to be saved from being tortured by God forever. But, of course, only a select few are to be saved. Only those who believe in this story, and reject the pursuit of worldly knowledge. The Bible says many things. One thing that it does not do, or even hint at anywhere, is to praise the pursuit of knowledge and learning.
Is it of any comfort to an atheist to realize that, according to this bizarre Christianity, a man can arrive on the scene, murder the atheist, get sent to prison where he repents and accepts Jesus as his savior, dies, goes to Heaven, where (the Bible assures us) he has a ringside seat from which he can watch the atheist that he murdered be tortured in Hell by his loving God forever? But what about all of the good works that the atheist did (except for stealing that apple from his neighbor's fruit tree as a boy)? Christianity would say that those works cannot be "good". "Good" is a concept arising only from a belief in God. The works of the atheist might not have been "bad"; however, by definition, they cannot be "good". Even if these works were "good", they count for naught. The only thing that counts is belief in God through His proxy, Jesus, the Man-God incarnate -- the One stained with the dripping fresh blood on the Old Rugged Cross that is our only means of salvation from everlasting torture by a "loving" God. Perhaps in the churches these days this version of Christianity as set out in the Bible and still taught by many churches today is being gradually replaced by a kinder, gentler form of Christianity that I cannot resist calling the Wonderful World of Disneyland Christianity. It is most readily found in Mr. Roger's Neighborhood, boys and girls.
Can you imagine a religion more obscene and bizarre than Christianity? Please criticize me as severely as you wish if I have misrepresented anything that Christianity and the Bible teaches us. I might be misinformed, but I hope that I am not being dishonest. Actually, I have left out the most obscene parts of the story. The parts, for example, in which God commits genocide. Oh, you say, but that's in the Old Testament! Yes, that's Judaism, but it's also part of Christianity. Jesus states that he supports all of the teachings of the Old Testament. So, to sum up, Christianity consists of all of the barbaric teachings of the Old Testament (alias Judaism) added to which is the even more cruel human-sacrifice story of the New Testament. What a wonderful font of family values this is!
That, according to some, constitutes the so-called Judeo-Christian tradition upon which those on the religious right claim that our Western society is based, and the values that we should reaffirm and revert to, with the help of such luminaries as the Pope, Stockwell Day, Pat Robertson, Billy Graham, Bill Clinton, Preston Manning, and a host of other born-again Christians. Somehow, they fail to mention the fact that the Constitution of the USA was drafted by its founders to very specifically exclude any religious considerations as forming a basis for morality or law, and to exclude the state from in any way supporting or promoting religious ideas or institutions. They fail to mention the fact that the first six presidents of the USA were not Christians (or Jews,either)! They fail to point out that, at the time of its founding, only about 5% of the people of the USA went to church, or that the USA was founded by people who were trying to escape the horrors that Christianity had been imposing for centuries upon the Europe from which they had fled to try to set up a new life of freedom in the New World. -- a New World, they hoped, that would be free of the ravages and misery and cruelty of Christianity.
Now, we all know that one cannot prove that God exists or not. But, perhaps we can prove that the God of Christianity does not exist. Why? Because that god is supposed to be different than some others, such as Odin, Mars, and 30,000 others. Why is it that most religions today believe that there is only one god? Why not 13 gods? Why not believe that God himself worships a higher god,and that the God that Christians worship was created by another god? All of these conjectures or possibilities are equally valid within a religious system of logic. In other words, all of these possibilities are irrational ideas, none of which is any more irrational than any other.
Proof that the God of Christianity cannot exist
First, someone beat me to the proof (by 2,300 years!) -- and with more brevity too!
"The gods can either take away evil from the world and will not, or, being willing to do so, cannot; or they neither can nor will, or lastly, they are both able and willing. If they have the will to remove evil and cannot, then they are not omnipotent. If they can, but will not, then they are not benevolent. If they are neither able nor willing, then they are neither omnipotent nor benevolent. Lastly, if they are both able and willing to annihilate evil, how does it exist?"
..........Epicures, 300 B.C.
=========================================
Theorem:
If the God of Christianity is supposed to be all-powerful and all-knowing and all-loving, then that God cannot exist..
Proof:
1. If God is all-knowing and all-powerful, then:
If God is all-knowing, then
God must have known of plans to murder Jesus, then
since God is all-powerful, and
since God allowed Jesus to be murdered, then,
God is an accessory to murder, and therefore,
God is not all-loving.
2. If God is all-powerful and all-loving, then:
If God is all-powerful, then,
if God knew of plans to murder Jesus, then
if God is all-loving, then
God would have prevented the murder of Jesus, and
since God did not prevent the murder of Jesus, then
God did not know of such plans to murder Jesus, so therefore
God is not all-knowing.
3. If God is all-knowing and all-loving, then:
If God is all-knowing and all-loving, then
God would know of plans to murder Jesus, then
since God did not prevent the murder of Jesus, then
God could not prevent the murder of Jesus, so therefore
God is not all-powerful.
Conclusion:
Therefore, God is either: (1) not all-powerful or not all-knowing or not all-loving, or (2) God is not all-powerful and not all-knowing and not all-loving.
God cannot be all-powerful and all-knowing and all-loving.
QED.
Comment:
If the God of Christianity is all-powerful and all-knowing and all-loving, then that God cannot exist.
In a secular society, God would be charged with racial and religious discrimination, upholding and justifying slavery as an instiution, genocide, child abuse, infanticide, and possibly rape and adultery.
Although the article continues on below, you could go to Page contents near top.
Has Christianity been of net benefit to mankind?
Christianity's endorsement of slavery
In the USA, although black and white clergy were among the marchers against segregation, a large number of white clergy were defenders of segregation. Segregation itself was a continuation of slavery, both being the product of racism, which in turn was a product of Christianity, as is fully supported in the Bible.
It was a fundamental Christian belief, expressed in the Scriptures and repeated by later Christians, that all pagans serve Satan and that Christians had a right to protect themselves against corruption by pagans and a duty to save the pagans if possible from eternal damnation and torture (by a "loving" God). These beliefs led them to slaughter or enslave millions of European pagans in centuries of crusades, until all of Europe was Christianized.
We know this today because Christian clergymen proudly wrote lengthy chronicles describing in nauseating detail the atrocities Christians committed in forcing pagan conversions.
When 15th-century Christians discovered new lands full of pagans, they did to Africans and American Indians exactly what they did to European pagans, only with one difference. For centuries, Christian artwork had depicted Satan and his demons as black. In Christian literature, Satan was described as black, even specifically as an African, such as in Athanasius' Life of Saint Anthony and the medieval best-seller Voyage of Brendan. Not surprisingly, Christians decided that Africans and Indians were a lot closer to Satan than white-skinned Europeans and acted accordingly to protect themselves from the "pollution" of contact with dark-skinned peoples. Read historian Forrest G. Wood's The Arrogance of Faith for an in-depth exploration of the Christian origin of racism, slavery and segregation.
That's why defenders of slavery in the antebellum South repeatedly use the Bible and refer to Christian concepts in their arguments. Read The Ideology of Slavery, which reprints slavery defenses, edited by Drew Gilpin Faust, to see how devoutly Christian the defenders were. Defenders correctly note that the Bible repeatedly condones slavery, even commands it at times, and never condemns it. Even the Tenth Commandment condones slavery; so much for the Commandments as a source of moral virtue. Also read Proslavery, by Larry E. Tise, pages 116-120, for surveys showing the overwhelmingly Christian character of slavery defenses. In one survey of pro-slavery tracts, clergymen wrote more than half.
In the aftermath of the Civil War, it's no surprise that Sunday morning became the most segregated time of the week. Nor is it surprising that it was agnostics and atheists in various liberal movements who spoke out first against segregation and racism. That's one reason that white segregationists--clergy included--labeled the civil-rights workers "communists," a word they considered synonymous with atheism.
Germany before Hitler's rise was a Christian nation. The majority of its citizens were Christians, mostly Protestants. Hitler came to power only through the support of millions of German Christians, including many Protestant and Catholic clergy and key political supporters. He was reared as a Christian himself, was baptized as a Roman Catholic, and invoked God, Jesus and Christianity in his speeches and in Mein Kampf. You can question whether he was still really a Christian in the 1930s, but his hatred of Jews--like the anti-Semitism of millions of his supporters--was based solely in Christianity. He was never excommunicated by the Catholic church.
It was Christianity, beginning with the Scriptures, that preached that the Jews were servants of Satan, just like pagans. It was Christians who tortured and killed countless Jews over the centuries. While Jews were tolerated at times and places in Christian Europe, their position was always precarious. They were forcibly converted by the Byzantines, Visigoths and the victorious Spanish and Portuguese Christians of 1492. They were driven from England and France at various times. Christians slaughtered Jews out of sheer hatred in the First Crusade, during the Black Death, and many times simply because a "blood libel" or a host-nailing accusation put Christians in the mood for a pogrom. In the 19th century, Christian political parties in Germany, Austria, Hungary and other countries fought ferociously against granting equal civil rights to Jews. In France, the Jewish officer Alfred Dreyfus was framed as a spy by conservative Christians, some of whom never acknowledged his innocence; a few later collaborated with the Nazis.
Whatever the other sources of Nazism may be, its racism and anti-Semitism are solely the product of Christian beliefs and Christian history. Christianity bears sole guilt for the Holocaust. The few liberal Christians who opposed Hitler -- among whom the theologian Dietrich Bonhoffer, who suffered for his opposition to the Nazis, is often cited. -- cannot reduce the massive guilt of Christianity as a whole for its role in Nazi crimes, which included destroying freethought and atheist organizations in Germany because they opposed Hitler. As part of the Concordat between Hitler and the Vatican in 1933, the Vatican agreed to cut its support of the Freedom Party, the only major opposition to Hitler during his rise to power. In return, the Vatican gained increased control over its bishops in Germany.
One could pose the following question. Were Augustine, Aquinas, Luther and Calvin "weak-minded"?
In one sense, certainly not. They were ruthless religious fanatics who supported the repression of all dissent against Christianity--specifically, the version that they and their supporters believed in. Repression began as soon as the Christians gained control of the Roman Empire; Constantine jailed or suppressed Christian bishops who supported Arius. In 385 C.E., the dissident (i.e., "heretic") Priscillian and his followers were executed for heresy. In the 5th century Augustine provided the Church with an ideological foundation for repression. Augustine gave the Church a fig leaf of arguments to cover its naked crimes. In his Summa Theologica, Aquinas supported the execution of heretics. Luther rails against his opponents in numerous works and supported killing , book burning, and the destruction of Jewish places of worship and their writings. Calvin let his deeds speak for themselves, instituting a theocracy in Geneva and sending the theologian Michael Servetus to the stake, among other victims.
It's true that Mother Teresa helped people in the slums of India. But much of her reputation is simply Christian propaganda and the kind of shameless celebrity-mongering that the modern media are all too fond of. As Christopher Hitchens documents, Mother Teresa collected millions of dollars under the pretense of helping the poor, but actually spent only pennies on the dollar of her income, saving the rest for her movement. Poor people dying of lingering, agonizing illnesses got aspirin and a cot to die on, when her movement could easily have afforded good medicine, powerful painkillers and modern facilities. Mother Teresa also didn't care where her money came from; she hobnobbed with dictators who squeezed money from their desperate subjects and bought her good name for their benefit. And Charles Keating's victims never recovered the money he gave her.
More importantly, the biggest cause of India's problem is the size of its population. Population control through family planning and contraceptives is urgent there, yet Mother Teresa fought against these vital programs. Indian humanists despised her.
The alleged benefits of Catholic education are often cited. The Catholic school system in tthe USA was founded in part because of the bigotry of the Protestant majority, who made many public schools into Protestant-propaganda organs. Catholics who protested were brutalized in various ways--an antiCatholic riot in 1843 in Philadelphia, stirred by the school dispute, left 13 people dead; a teacher whipped a boy in 1859 for refusing to recite the Protestant version of the Ten Commandments--a Christian jury acquitted the teacher of criminal charges.
For centuries, Christianity required that all education conform to official Christian doctrine. The Christian Byzantine Emperor Justinian closed the Neoplatonist Academy of Athens in 532, seized its endowment for the benefit of Christians and prohibited the teaching of anything except Christian doctrines in schools. That ban was copied in every Christian-controlled society and was not lifted until the passage of the First Amendment to the Constitution of the USA. Small wonder the Religious Reich hates the First Amendment and has tried repeatedly, through its congressional puppets, to run it through a shredder.
Christian apologists in the USA often note that "we are one of the most religiously observant countries in the world." Yes, and we're one of the most violent societies as well. The most Christian region of the country, the South, has the worst record of criminal violence, not to mention the highest regional rates of poverty, illiteracy, out-of-wedlock births and sexually transmitted diseases. If Christianity were beneficial to society, the South would be a far better place. If Christianity is as influential as some claim, then Christianity has to share in the blame for these problems.
By contrast, non-Christian Japan is one of the least violent societies today. In Western Europe, where atheism is much stronger, the level of violence also is much lower. Massacres in schools, churches and office buildings are far fewer.
One exception in Europe is Yugoslavia, where devout Roman Catholics in Croatia and Orthodox Catholics in Serbia have been slaughtering each other--and a lot of Muslims in between them--for much of the decade.
Another European exception is Northern Ireland, where Protestants and Roman Catholics have slaughtered each other by the thousands for centuries, ever since two 12th-century popes supported King Henry II of England in his invasion of Ireland because the Irish were not the right kind of Christians.
An education by nuns and monks simply leaves one ignorant or deceived about the history and nature of Christianity. A proper, secular education would teach that Christianity has been a source of bigotry, discrimination, repression and endless violence because Christians did indeed consider it their duty "to go out and stick their noses in other people's business."
Tough-minded people, such as freethinkers, are willing to live with the doubts and uncertainties of life, particularly as represented in the probing skepticism of science and philosophy, and feel no need to kill anyone for disagreeing with them or challenging their ideas.
It would take many more pages to even summarize the contradictions inherent within the Bible and Christianity. For such information, refer to the following very detailed source, from which only some extracts have been copied, some highlighted by me.
This article continues on Page 20.
End of part 10 of 60 of Religion Page.
Go Home. Go to Page contents or Articles by Wayne near top of this Page 10.
You can e-mail me at waynerp@sympatico.ca