WHY RELIGION IS BAD FOR YOU
Religion is based on alleged revelations from the divine. If those revelations
which may take the form of scriptures, enable religious violence (eg by doing
nothing about it to challenge it), condone the violence by praising those
responsible, or command the violence in the name of God, then the religion is
calling you to essential fanaticism or essential extremism. The extremism might
be kept inside you but it is no less real. It is opening the door to accepting
those in your religion who will murder and persecute others in the name of
faith.
What makes it worse is that if God gives a revelation, it is only a revelation
as far as those who receive the revelation are concerned. The revelation is
given to a prophet. The prophet passes on a testimony that he got a revelation.
It is not a revelation to anybody but the prophet. God gives a revelation to the
prophet and the prophet gives a revelation that he got a revelation to you. It
is his revelation he gives you not God's for God can only reveal directly. So it
is the prophet you listen to not God even if God really spoke to the prophet.
You might say God has no other way to give the revelation to you but
second-hand. If so, then why do no prophets really prove their credentials? The
justification for listening to them is weak. The prophet makes hugely important
claims and gives no evidence that he should be believed. That is sick when it
involves commands allegedly from God to murder people. Even if God really gave
the commands, it does not get around the problem that men claiming to speak for
God are condoning evil or commanding it. Even if those men speak for God, it
does not follow that going against them means intentionally going against God.
No decent God would ever reveal a religion or faith that gets involved in war
even a just war. It contradicts God's own rule that we must prefer God to human
ideas.
The problems when man's word is taken for God's are:
-It is not God's word at all. Errors stop you being able to make your own
decisions properly and to be your own person.
-Man gets the honour of his word being taken for God's which is unfair.
-One religion has a different word of God to the others and this leads to errors
and danger and division.
-Even if the word is God's, you are still making an idol of what man says. The
problem is worse if God has not given this word.
-You are taking "God's" word for it that x and y and z are true - thus you will
pay no attention to anything that tells you it is wrong and you end up in a
vicious circle and draw others into it too.
-You fail to worship God as he is. You only care about feeling good about taking
man's word for it that God has spoken. This is about man not God and is about
inventing a God to suit yourself.
People are often persecuted or put to death because of what religion they are
thought to believe in. Usually the reason this happens is because the
persecutors feel that they are not going to change anyway. They won't abandon
their faith or consider a new one. If a religion is man-made, it is a terrible
thing to join it when it puts you in danger. The religion is to blame for it as
much as the persecutors. The religion is to blame because it is based on
deception and error. It is to blame for it makes you immune to any data or
evidence that the religion is nonsense or wrong or irresponsible or should be
forsaken for a new one. It does this by telling you that there is some authority
that tells you what to believe and do and this authority is right even if what
it says seems insane because it knows better and sees the bigger picture. People
who are not religious can be immune to data and truth too. But religion makes it
worse. At least if you embrace the law of cause and effect and keep magic and
divine revelations out of your thinking there is reasonable hope that you will
come to your senses.
Also religion talks about karma or God both of which threaten you with bad
things if you sin. When people are threatened with punishment, they tend to obey
outwardly but inwardly they would disobey if they would get away with it. But
surely if God wants you to obey willingly you will know that you can't please
him with mere outward compliance? But if you think you obey willingly you could
be fooling yourself. The threat of punishment makes such self-deception easier.
Our moral values never directly motivate us to do the right things. It is our
emotional attachment to those values that does that. Thus it is dangerous if we
help others because our hearts are on fire over Jesus. What is wrong with that?
What is wrong with it is that Jesus is not the dying baby on the street. Your
heart should be on fire for the baby not Jesus. If our feelings are so powerful,
it is wrong for anybody to urge us to direct them towards a God or religion
instead of the sufferer.
Why do even insincere people make huge effort to evangelise others? Because
there is a massive buzz when people accept your testimony to the truth of
absurdities and superstitions. People like to feel they have great control over
others. They get the best buzz when people believe and follow harmful doctrines
just because they influence them to. The worst religious charmers and charlatans
do not do it for money at all. People don't like knowing they are liars - so if
others seem to believe you it makes it easier for you to imagine that you
believe your own lies.
Religion is bad for you because:
1) It does not allow you to think freely. Religion is based on the idea of
dogma, teaching that you are obligated to accept and not deliberately question.
Some say that atheism is religious - if it is it is not always religious. For a
brand of atheism to be religion it would have to make a dogma of atheism. If
religion really encouraged you to think for yourself then the pattern would be
that each person moves from one religion to the other and religion would not be
saying that changing dogma when new light comes along showing up faults in it,
is wrong. Religion says you must forget your own mind and follow what God says
for God knows better. This attitude is pro-persecution and sanctions deception –
a thing religion is very good at.
Jesus condemned anyone who did not trust God. Offensively, he claimed that if
you have even a bit of faith it can move mountains to bring about good meaning
that the unbeliever cannot and is a blight on the planet. If you believe in God
you have to trust him because you believe he is an all-good and all-powerful
being. If Jesus had had any honesty he would have said that what such people are
doing is doubting not God but what they are told about God. That cannot be
wrong. Yet the Church and he make out that doubters or deniers are blasphemers
for accusing God of lying! We all doubt so we know from experience that doubt is
a part of the learning experience and there is no progress made without it so it
is good not bad. If you will not doubt you will not see if you are wrong. A
religion that forbids doubt is insincere and has stuff to hide.
Religion tends to take in new members and not inform them properly about what
they are doing. For example, the Catholic Church does not tell new converts that
the Bible is ridiculed by archaeologists and scientists and philosophers and
teaches many vicious doctrines. They are not told things they have a right to
know.
2) Religion sanctions persecution of those who disagree with it.
Religion says it is a sin not to believe in its doctrines. Jesus condemned those
who did not believe in what he said. He said that his miracles proved to the
people who knew him that he was telling the truth about speaking for what God
wanted his people to believe. But what right had he to do that for there could
have been people who they never heard of who were able to do better miracles?
Whatever he did his miracles for it was not in the interest of truth. Jesus was
certainly trying to persecute. He cannot complain then if his followers take up
arms to destroy “heretics”.
3) Religion advocates cold-blooded hatred and dresses it up so that it still
manages to come up smelling of roses. I am referring to its doctrine: “Hate the
sin but love the sinner”.
The husband who beats his wife to a pulp because of her adultery will say it
happened because he loves her. He will even believe that.
If you hate the sin you must hate the sinner for the sinner freely commits the
sin. Sin is a quality a person has and you are your qualities. To hate your sin
and wish evil on it is to wish evil on you and hate you. If a person hated your
kindness you would know that is only another way of saying they hate you. Sin
cannot be treated separately from the sinner for it reveals the sinner, it
reveals what kind of person the sinner is. If you hate the sin you are
inflicting pain on yourself because of somebody else’s sin and claiming that you
love the person. But if you separate the sin from the person like that you are
not loving the person for you are treating the person as if the person never
sinned so that is hardly loving the person when sin is regarded as an enemy.
They say that God makes loving the sinner possible by some sort of miracle but
that would be God doing the impossible – doing something contradictory. No other
miracle would have any value as evidence for his power if he can do that one for
his power would make no sense. Whatever miracles prove it is not God. When you
become a sinner, being a sinner becomes the core of your sense of self. When
somebody says they are gay they will argue that gay is them, their gayness is
one of the things that define them as a person. They did not make themselves
gay. So much more more does something you make yourself to be define you? To say
nurses are bad is to say the people who are nurses are bad. Love the sinner and
hate the sin is as silly as love the nurse and hate the woman who is the nurse.
Or as silly as hate the bark but love the barking dog as a barking dog. The
teaching that we must love the sinner and hate the sin because we are sinners
ourselves suggests that hating the sinner is good but only if you are not a
sinner! It involves wishing you were in a position to be able to hate the
sinner!
4) Religion degrades human dignity. It says without being able to prove it that
evil results in greater good because God makes sure of that. In fact it is
better for us all to be totally evil than for one person to die yet they say
death is good when it leads to a greater holiness which shows how totally
perverse it is to condone the ways of God. We do not need the God hypothesis and
it is pathologically barbaric to condone evil for it. To do that is to have no
grounds for being against anyone going out of their way to condone the cruelty
of some human tyrant.
FINALLY
A religion that is bad for you needs abandoning. If rather it is bad for others it is bad for you. You have to live with them.