Religion Is Ignorance
When someone sees a rainbow, do they say, "I am seeing a physical reaction, that can be produced in laboratories with the right conditions," or do they say, "I am seeing the omen from god, that the world will not be flooded."? When someone sees fire, do they say, "I am seeing the gift of Prometheus," or do they say, "I am seeing the vibration of atoms."? The question here is: is this person irreligious or religious, scientific or un-scientific?
Thousands of years ago, our ancestors could not explain these things. What is fire? What is the sky? How did we get here? They became ignorant in their claims and created gods and spirits to answer their questions. "How did we get here? God made humans from the dust." -- "Where does lightning come from? Lightning is Allah trying to strike and kill people." -- "Where does wind come from? The god Purusa blew the wind out of his mouth." -- "Why does the Sun go across the sky? The god Apollo pulls it across on his chariot."
So, you see, man formed his ignorance and conjured ghosts to his aid. Tyranny and vice would reign over the numerous theocracies that developed over the globe. Galileo would question what the religious men claimed; as would Giordano Bruno who gave his life for his beliefs, burned at the stake for questioning authority. Magellan's voyage would make it all the way around the world. These men proved incalculable times that the church, the Bible, and religion is indeed fallible! Lightning is not the work of Allah -- it is the work of positive and negative electrons. There are occurences in this Universe and they are natural and explainable.
Religion is ignorance. It makes spirits to explain phenomenon and then burns those who disagree with the spirits -- the ghosts, the magic, the supernatural, the gods, the daemons, the sucubi, the incubi, the serpents, the devils. Men of science will not have this crutch of superstition and dogma. If you believe that the rainbow is a physical reaction that can be produced in a laboratory, then you have come one step ahead of your ancestors. If you believe that the rainbow is an actual, living sign of god, then you are looking to the past, of the times when men were barbarians and uncivilized in every respect.
I understand that I am placing this message on a Bulletin Board that is largely Christian. In the same way that Galileo asked of the Inquisition, I only ask that
everyone keep an open mind. Magellan proved that the Bible and that Christianity were both fallible. (Isaiah 40:22 clearly calls the world a circle; a circle is flat -- a sphere is round.) By what construct were men and women asked to believe in these dogmas? What linked believer to belief of religion? The answer is faith. By faith people believed the world was flat, that the rainbow was a sign of god, that fire was brought to us by the god Prometheus!
But religion provides no real answers. It will excuse the existence of the Universe with "God made it, because everything must be made." If this is true, then who made god? It would be much simpler to say that no god made us, than to postulate that one god made the Universe, and then one god made him, and then a god to him, assigning an infinite number of gods, all creating each other.
What can be said of today's religious questions? People are still asking, "Where did the Universe come from?" and preachers are still saying, "God made it." Without any validity or evidence or reasoning, a few select will still purport that man was actually made from a rib bone, that the world is truly only 6,000 years old, that the creation of the Universe took only 6 days. As people still believe that -- in some way -- we got here by the powers of a god, of the unseen, scientist labor in observatories and laboratories, searching for the causes of our existence, the reasons that we really exist today. They study the quarks, the fission of atoms, the plasma, the background microwave radiation, the Red Shift, among other things. In their shadows are the images of Magellan and Copernicus, and in the shadows of the priests and reverends are the images of the Pope and the Inquisition, as they belittled and attacked science.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Punkerslut (or Andy Carloff) has been writing essays and poetry on social issues which have caught his attention for several years. His website www.punkerslut.com provides a complete list of all of these writings. His life experience includes homelessness, squating in New Orleans and LA, dropping out of high school, getting expelled from college for "subversive activities," and a myriad of other revolutionary actions.
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