Religion is a disease

Religion is a disease
December 25 2001

“If God did not exist, it would be necessary for man to invent him.” Francois Voltaire

“Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.” John 8:32


Bertrand Russell, a Nobel laureate for literature in 1950 and a renowned English philosopher, once wrote that religion is a disease born of fear, primarily one of the social phenomena, and people accept religion on emotional ground, believing that it is thought virtuous to have faith and wishing to feel that you have a kind of elder brother who will stand by you in all your troubles and disputes—that is, what really moves people to believe in God is not any intellectual argument at all, as fear is the mother of the whole thing, fear of the mysterious, fear of punishment and fear of death, etc.

When the church argue in defense of Christianity, they do not give reasons for believing that God exists and the Bible is his words.
Instead, they argue that if people believe in this way, they act better than if they do not and a believer is happier than an unbeliever, therefore we should not to permit ourselves to speculate whether God exists. If any doubts raise its head, we must suppress it vigorously and historical records must be falsified if people cast doubt on the received wisdom of religion.

Because of fear, people refuse to accept the ordinary laws of science that human life and life in general on this planet will die out in due course.
People have come to entertain of immortality because it is pleasant and consolable to think that the invisible hand would somehow rescue us from our bodily death.
That’s why people invented God and immortality, central dogmas of the Christianity—in that Jesus Christ emphatically believed that his Second Coming would occur before the death of all the people who were living at that time, and he instilled the fear of everlasting punishment to the minds of people with vindictive fury, “Ye serpents, ye generation of vipers, how can ye escape the damnation of hell.”

However, faith eventually renders harm to people by stunting the growth of minds with a conviction that can not be shaken by contrary evidence or argument.
If contrary evidence might induce doubt, it is held that contrary evidence must be suppressed and met by fanatical hostility to both those who have other fanaticisms and those who object to all fanaticisms.
As people depend upon the absolute truth of faith contained in the saying of a certain man, like Jesus, Buddha, or Muhammad, a body of experts that interprets his saying, like church, synagogue, mosque, or temple, acquires the infallible power, dictate people’s minds, and becomes tyrannous obscurantist and cruel oppressor in high degree, where as in Inquisition that millions of people were burned as witches in the name of religion.

Because of religion, more people were murdered, tortured, maimed, hated and discriminated than any other reasons, political or economical, in the history of man. And today the only wars are religious wars no matter how they are named, the Gulf war, the Balkan war, or the Afghanistan War as George Bush termed-and-detracted it “A Crusade”, an ominous but true reminder of the Crusader of killing millions of Jewish and Muslim worshippers by the Christians.
In the affairs of all mankind, religion is the most crippling disease, among others, to the evolution of humankind, that people inflicted upon themselves by inventing a God and asking the churches mind their spiritual shop.

Religious life is a duologue between soul and God and a deeply personal matter rather than a collective behavior, and there can be no middleman in this relationship.
Not your parents, your pastor nor any other self-appointed deputy of God, such as the Pope or the Queen of England.
It is obscene at least to accept another human being as a representative or a mouthpiece of the Creator of Universe for people living on the same planet.
It is not Christianity itself that can be regarded as a dangerous bogeyman to people and its community, but the way in which its dogmas are held as sacred, infallible, and inviolable, and to doubt which is sin and deserves of severe punishment.

In an era of archeology that refutes the historical reliability of the Bible, the thumb-sucking people still gather in churches to pay tithe for the purchase of a happy meal at Heaven, heavily sedated with the social programming like “Merry Christmas” oo’la’la of a virgin birth of Jesus Christ and an overdose of Christmas hymns, tinsels, creches and stars, which present the gospel birth stories as historically real and accurate.
The Bible, our knowledge on God was derived from the human source that is mixed with an enchilada of errors, prejudices, dreams and hopes, not supernatural beyond the reach of our critique or logic but within the domain of human quest for knowledge.
A simple challenge that God is a man-made product gives a shiver down Pope’s spine, because it may put him on the unemployment list to line up for collecting the premium.

“Jesus loves me, this I know…For the Bible tells me so” is the popular children’s Sunday song. And when kids grow up with the same conviction without a query on its source because their parents, teachers, ministers or churches say so, they are warranted to suffer from the lifetime religious illiteracy that scares them a lot to keep up with millions of Christian Joneses.
In the present day in the Middle East, the Bible renders fancifully the political legitimacy of Israel and upgrades erroneously the Chosen status of Jewish people, under which conviction Jews kill their Semite brothers and sisters with no other apparent reasons than “Bible said we are superior than you”.
When the Bible, especially Old Testament, is used to forge the national identity of Israel, and gives a story how special Israel is, that legitimizes Jews killing Non-Jews, and if this Bible is a collection of legends that contains a plethora of fictitious, man-made, erroneous, and unethical bullshits, then, the truth will free people from the wrongful conviction of fear, prejudice, hatred, and retribution.
In this sense, religion is a dreadful disease that the Bible prescribes people an erroneous drugs to harm rather than love their fellow travelers on earth.