God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything
Shri Mataji: “We have to know that a great war is taking place between the satanic forces and the Divine Forces. And all these satanic forces, symbolized by the word"evil"; in Sanskrit"rakshasas, asuras"have taken birth to destroy the Kingdom of God. Imagine what an ambition! They want to ruin your hearts. The Kingdom exists, It will exist and It is Eternal. It has created universes and universes, created the human being out of the amoeba, to lead you to your today's position. It brought you here to get what is your ultimate goal. This is what's has been done.”Religion Poison Everything - 1
There are four irreducible objections to religious faith: that it
wholly misrepresents the origins of man and the cosmos, that because
of this original error it manages to combine the maximum of
servility with the maximum of solipsism, that it is both the result
and the cause of dangerous sexual repression, and that it is
ultimately grounded on wish-thinking.
I do not think it is arrogant of me to claim that I had already
discovered these four objections (as well as noticed the more vulgar
and obvious fact that religion is used by those in temporal charge
to invest themselves with authority) before my boyish voice had
broken. I am morally certain that millions of other people came to
very similar conclusions in very much the same way, and I have since
met such people in hundreds of places, and in dozens of different
countries. Many of them never believed, and many of them abandoned
faith after a difficult struggle. Some of them had blinding moments
of un-conviction that were every bit as instantaneous, though
perhaps less epileptic and apocalyptic (and later more rationally
and more morally justified) than Saul of Tarsus on the Damascene
road. And here is the point, about myself and my co-thinkers. Our
belief is not a belief. Our principles are not a faith. We do not
rely solely upon science and reason, because these are necessary
rather than sufficient factors, but we distrust anything that
contradicts science or outrages reason. We may differ on many
things, but what we respect is free inquiry, openmindedness, and the
pursuit of ideas for their own sake. We do not hold our convictions
dogmatically: the disagreement between Professor Stephen Jay Gould
and Professor Richard Dawkins, concerning"punctuated evolution"And
the unfilled gaps in post-Darwinian theory, is quite wide as well as
quite deep, but we shall resolve it by evidence and reasoning and
not by mutual excommunication. (My own annoyance at Professor
Dawkins and Daniel Dennett, for their cringe-making proposal that
atheists should conceitedly nominate themselves to be
called"brights," is a part of a continuous argument.) We are not
immune to the lure of wonder and mystery and awe: we have music and
art and literature, and find that the serious ethical dilemmas are
better handled by Shakespeare and Tolstoy and Schiller and
Dostoyevsky and George Eliot than in the mythical morality tales of
the holy books. Literature, not scripture, sustains the mind and—
since there is no other metaphor—also the soul. We do not believe in
heaven or hell, yet no statistic will ever find that without these
blandishments and threats we commit more crimes of greed or violence
than the faithful. (In fact, if a proper statistical inquiry could
ever be made, I am sure the evidence would be the other way.) We are
reconciled to living only once, except through our children, for
whom we are perfectly happy to notice that we must make way, and
room. We speculate that it is at least possible that, once people
accepted the fact of their short and struggling lives, they might
behave better toward each other and not worse. We believe with
certainty that an ethical life can be lived without religion. And we
know for a fact that the corollary holds true—that religion has
caused innumerable people not just to conduct themselves no better
than others, but to award themselves permission to behave in ways
that would make a brothel-keeper or an ethnic cleanser raise an
eyebrow.
Most important of all, perhaps, we infidels do not need any
machinery of reinforcement. We are those who Blaise Pascal took into
account when he wrote to the one who says," I am so made that I
cannot believe.”
There is no need for us to gather every day, or every seven days, or
on any high and auspicious day, to proclaim our rectitude or to
grovel and wallow in our unworthiness. We atheists do not require
any priests, or any hierarchy above them, to police our doctrine.
Sacrifices and ceremonies are abhorrent to us, as are relics and the
worship of any images or objects (even including objects in the form
of one of man's most useful innovations: the bound book). To us no
spot on earth is or could be"holier"than another: to the
ostentatious absurdity of the pilgrimage, or the plain horror of
killing civilians in the name of some sacred wall or cave or shrine
or rock, we can counterpose a leisurely or urgent walk from one side
of the library or the gallery to another, or to lunch with an
agreeable friend, in pursuit of truth or beauty. Some of these
excursions to the bookshelf or the lunch or the gallery will
obviously, if they are serious, bring us into contact with belief
and believers, from the great devotional painters and composers to
the works of Augustine, Aquinas, Maimonides, and Newman. These
mighty scholars may have written many evil things or many foolish
things, and been laughably ignorant of the germ theory of disease or
the place of the terrestrial globe in the solar system, let alone
the universe, and this is the plain reason why there are no more of
them today, and why there will be no more of them tomorrow. Religion
spoke its last intelligible or noble or inspiring words a long time
ago: either that or it mutated into an admirable but nebulous
humanism, as did, say, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a brave Lutheran pastor
hanged by the Nazis for his refusal to collude with them. We shall
have no more prophets or sages from the ancient quarter, which is
why the devotions of today are only the echoing repetitions of
yesterday, sometimes ratcheted up to screaming point so as to ward
off the terrible emptiness.
While some religious apology is magnificent in its limited way—one
might cite Pascal—and some of it is dreary and absurd—here one
cannot avoid naming C. S. Lewis—both styles have something in
common, namely the appalling load of strain that they have to bear.
How much effort it takes to affirm the incredible! The Aztecs had to
tear open a human chest cavity every day just to make sure that the
sun would rise. Monotheists are supposed to pester their deity more
times than that, perhaps, lest he be deaf. How much vanity must be
concealed—not too effectively at that—in order to pretend that one
is the personal object of a divine plan? How much self-respect must
be sacrificed in order that one may squirm continually in an
awareness of one's own sin? How many needless assumptions must be
made, and how much contortion is required, to receive every new
insight of science and manipulate it so as to"fit"With the
revealed words of ancient man-made deities? How many saints and
miracles and councils and conclaves are required in order first to
be able to establish a dogma and then—after infinite pain and loss
and absurdity and cruelty—to be forced to rescind one of those
dogmas? God did not create man in his own image. Evidently, it was
the other way about, which is the painless explanation for the
profusion of gods and religions, and the fratricide both between and
among faiths, that we see all about us and that has so retarded the
development of civilization.
The mildest criticism of religion is also the most radical and the
most devastating one. Religion is man-made. Even the men who made it
cannot agree on what their prophets or redeemers or gurus actually
said or did. Still less can they hope to tell us the"meaning"of
later discoveries and developments which were, when they began,
either obstructed by their religions or denounced by them. And yet—
the believers still claim to know! Not just to know, but to know
everything. Not just to know that god exists, and that he created
and supervised the whole enterprise, but also to know what"he"
demands of us—from our diet to our observances to our sexual
morality. In other words, in a vast and complicated discussion where
we know more and more about less and less, yet can still hope for
some enlightenment as we proceed, one faction—itself composed of
mutually warring factions—has the sheer arrogance to tell us that we
already have all the essential information we need. Such stupidity,
combined with such pride, should be enough on its own to
exclude"belief"from the debate. The person who is certain, and who
claims divine warrant for his certainty, belongs now to the infancy
of our species. It may be a long farewell, but it has begun and,
like all farewells, should not be protracted.
The argument with faith is the foundation and origin of all
arguments, because it is the beginning—but not the end—of all
arguments about philosophy, science, history, and human nature. It
is also the beginning—but by no means the end—of all disputes about
the good life and the just city. Religious faith is, precisely
because we are still-evolving creatures, ineradicable. It will never
die out, or at least not until we get over our fear of death, and of
the dark, and of the unknown, and of each other. For this reason, I
would not prohibit it even if I thought I could. Very generous of
me, you may say. But will the religious grant me the same
indulgence? I ask because there is a real and serious difference
between me and my religious friends, and the real and serious
friends are sufficiently honest to admit it. I would be quite
content to go to their children's bar mitzvahs, to marvel at their
Gothic cathedrals, to"respect"Their belief that the Koran was
dictated, though exclusively in Arabic, to an illiterate merchant,
or to interest myself in Wicca and Hindu and Jain consolations. And
as it happens, I will continue to do this without insisting on the
polite reciprocal condition—which is that they in turn leave me
alone. But this, religion is ultimately incapable of doing. As I
write these words, and as you read them, people of faith are in
their different ways planning your and my destruction, and the
destruction of all the hard-won human attainments that I have
touched upon. Religion poisons everything.
Religion Poison Everything - 1
from: Christopher Hitchens
Posted Wednesday, April 25, 2007, at 1:31 PM ET
www.slate.com/id/2165033?nav=tap3
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