religion – Page 2 – Lost Planet

November 3, 2009

No More Crucifixes In Classrooms In Italy

crucifixion image — The Crucifixion of Christ

The European Court of Human Rights has ruled against the use of crucifixes in classrooms in Italy. It said the practice violated the right of parents to educate their children as they saw fit, and ran counter to the child’s right to freedom of religion.

As expected, the Vatican objected vigorously – no doubt seeing this as an encroachment on their corporate mandate – if not very lucrative business that continues to milk its customers with the promise they are able to save their sinful souls from being condemned and dragged off to hell. ( Where is that place, anyway?)

A Vatican spokesman told Italian TV: The crucifix has always been a sign of God’s love, unity and hospitality to all humanity.

Well, with respect to that particular statement – and in particular the reference to God’s love – one might well want to take a good look at a crucifix. It seems to me it seems to depict the horrible suffering and barbaric death of an individual nailed to a wooden cross.

How could anything so cruel and abhorrent be central to any religion where the subject in question is supposed to be the son of an all powerful deity, and “a loving God”? Obviously his love does no extend to his own son since what father would have allowed his own son to suffer such a savage and excruciatingly painful death while supposedly having the power to stop it at any time?

And so the real question is: how could God have allowed this to happen? The answer is – as Nietzsche put it once ” downright terrifying in it’s absurdity: God gave his Son for the forgiveness of sins, as a sacrifice. The guilt sacrifice, and that in its most repulsive and barbaric form, the sacrifice of the innocent man for the sins the guilty! What atrocious paganism!”

I guess for some folks the Dark Ages clearly aren’t over yet as they continue put their faith in this bizarre tale of human sacrifice and the baroque and antiquated institution that perpetuates this kind of barbaric pagan mythology.

September 13, 2009

The One And Only One?

I had some Jehovah’s Witnesses at the door the other day – and in the ensuing conversation I asked them how they knew that their God was the one and only true God out there. They couldn’t really answer that of course, other than referring to their bible and inferring that if he indicated that he was the one and only true God out there, we would have to take his word for it.

Not much you can do with an argument like that that – and I guess that is what the nature of religious faith is all about: acceptance without questioning. This is at the core of every religious train of thought – rationality has no place here – and as Nietzsche put it once: “Faith means not wanting to know the truth”

However, over the centuries people have attempted to put a rational basis to the foundation of religion, including the claim that God exists. The best known early attempt is perhaps the Ontological argument as presented by St. Anselm (1033-1109), and another version of it by St. Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274) – and represents the claim that God must necessarily exist because he is the greatest being imaginable.

One might think differently, but I can’t even begin to understand why this would have made any sense to anyone as it is clearly an unintelligible premise. But those were different times then.

Another and more sophisticated yet equally fallacious argument is the Argument from Design that has more recently surfaced as “Intelligent Design”. The world in all its complexity, so it is claimed, clearly shows evidence of having being designed by an advanced intelligence, therefore, it would be a reasonable hypothesis to assume the existence of a powerful being which possesses such intelligence, and that is God.

There is an attractive side to this line of reasoning given that it is true that – despite man’s efforts to flush this planet down the toilet one way or the other in the pursuit of more money and power – the world, with all its perceived complexities, appears to work remarkably well, and it would be difficult to accept the premise that this is merely the product of random and accidental interaction between atoms and molecules over billions of years.

Well, at most one might be able to conclude that it is within the nature of the material world to reach the functional state of equilibrium as evidenced here on earth, but it would be an unsubstantiated logical leap to conclude from it that there is or are metaphysical beings of some kind out there that can be said to be the designers or creators of this phenomenon. That would be nothing less than concluding a cause from an effect, and nothing more than to commit the most basic of all logical fallacies, and hence an unproven assumption by any other name.

July 23, 2009

What Will They Dream Up Next?

So there are folks in India and members of the Hindu religion, who – at the occasion of the recent solar eclipse – gathered by the thousands to take a bath in the filthy and polluted Ganges river near the city of Varanasi in an attempt to gain some form of salvation from the cycle of life and death.

Apparently, this is about reincarnation – and wanting to be released from it. And the solar eclipse has some kind of cause and effect connection to this chain. It seems to me it would have been a lot simpler to break the supposed chain of life and death by giving up your belief in reincarnation – and you don’t have to wait for a solar eclipse to just ditch that kind of metaphysical bamboozle – but clearly there is more to it than that.

These kinds of traditional and otherwise unsubstantiated beliefs are the mental opium of many generations, rendering their adherents vulnerable to mass manipulation by the proponents of institutionalized religion, including the pretenders to the throne of Christ, or false prophets by any other name.

The only notion of salvation that would make sense in the current context is to get clear of this pathetic streak of breathtaking gullibility running through the human race; a debilitating if not fatal flaw by any other name, but seemingly so deeply embedded in our DNA that I’m not sure how we will ever get rid of it. Likely, it will require an upgrade of our evolutionary path in the gray matter department, and until such time we’ll have to just keep limping along. Pity!