Messages From A Militant Moderate: September 2004

Introduction

The purpose of this blog is to bring maturity to the human spirit. Since time immemorial, mankind has been held in the thrall of the superstitions he created to help him answer certain universal question. Those questions are:

1) Where did we come from?
2) What is our purpose in life?
3) Is there life after death?
4) Is this all there is?

The essential nature of humanity, what we all have in common, is that we’re human. In this commonality, we share a multitude of physiological traits, emotional motivations and similar experiences regardless of culture, ethnicity, race and religion. In attempting to answer the basic questions of existence, we have come up with hundreds of thousands of often contradictory ideas to answer them. With few exceptions, none of these ideas stand up to the light of rational thought and logical scrutiny. In other words, we believe something because it seems to fit what we observe and fulfills a perceived need. Or we believe it because others have believed it for thousands of years. Or we believe it because we want to believe it. We don’t believe it because it’s actually true. We believe it because we think it’s true.

I call this the “Eat Lamb, a million coyotes can’t be wrong” philosophy of life. I also sometimes refer to it as the Lemming Syndrome. You believe it because everyone else does, and you follow it’s rules because that’s what you’ve been told is the right thing to do in order to be among those who believe the same thing. Of course, nothing in all this means you, or your fellow believers, follow a credo in anything that actually exists. Any illusion of reality has been given depth and substance by group consensus, repetition and tradition, not by factual content.

Therefore, this blog’s purpose is to logically, rationally and factually destroy the superstitions of all thesiestically-oriented religions. Or, to be blunt, to kill all Gods and brand all prophets as, at best, compassionate con men. Allah, Jehovah, Yaweah, Shiva or even just plain God, the list is endless and, in the end, pointless. Their pitch-men, Jesus, Mohammad, Moses and all the other mouth-pieces of these so-called deities had their own agendas and reasons for promoting their viewpoints the way they did. The warm blanket of spiritual comfort these religions allegedly bring has all the nurturing and benign influence of the small-pox infested blankets soldiers and settlers handed out to the Native Americans during the settlement of the western United States. They foster ignorance, prejudice and hate. They retard the natural growth of the Human spirit. They keep us from ever becoming a spiritually mature species. This blog will show how any religion demanding worship of any kind of God or Gods is inherently damaging to us and, in the end, may destroy us.

This blog will then answer all of the questions that have troubled mankind since the first time he looked up from his tree and wondered at the true nature of things. It will offer, instead of the infected blanket of ignorance, the cold, harsh truth of reality. It will test a person’s spiritual maturity as to whether they can face the cold hard truth without denying it or prefer to seek comfort in the easy and familiar fallacies of a mind-set that given any other circumstance would be considered a psychosis. The simple truth is not nice, sweet, endearing or necessarily comforting for those who can’t see beyond their own selfish desires. The simple truth, for those spiritually mature enough to come to grips with it, is the most empowering aspect of spiritual reality a person can experience.

This blog is going to piss off a lot of people because it will call into question everything in which they believe. But when dealing with a concept as all encompassing as religion, once must start by questioning everything.

Chapter 1
In the Beginning...

What IS religion? Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary defines is as “belief in a divine or superhuman power or powers to be obeyed and worshiped as the creator(s) and ruler(s) of the universe.” 1 Admittedly, there are several other sub-definitions, but they harken back to the primary definition. None if them, however, says anything about truth, or what is, in fact, real. It says “belief”.

Strange as it may seem, some people have been known to believe in things that are not true. Whole populations have believed in concepts and morals that would turn your stomach. Believers in Nazi Germany, for one, believed in their own ethnic superiority and their God-given right to persecute others who were not racially ‘pure’. Those who did not believe went along with it because the Nazi’s seemed so powerful and fanatical in their devotion to this absurd notion. It took a world war and 20 million or more dead to prove them wrong.

The Spanish inquisition, as an arm of the Catholic faith, believed they were doing the morally right thing by converting non-believers to the faith, or eliminating them altogether. You were either a believer or an enemy of the faith. As if there was only one faith. The falsehood was the belief that those who weren’t Catholics should renounce and convert or be killed. Though some have said the Inquisition was a tool of the secular government, the fact is that it was religiously based and gave an all too convenient method of dealing with the population. Had the excuse of religion not been available as a tool of repression, the people may have revolted.

In the early 20th century, spiritualism became the rage, with seances and mediums sprouting like weeds across a gullible landscape. Harry Houdini, the well known illusionist and escape artist, became involved in Spiritualism after the death of his mother. He discovered that every medium he visited were frauds and promised that upon his death, if there was life after death, he’d come back and tell everyone. He died, and we’re still waiting to hear from him. Spiritualism eventually evolved into humanism, but vast numbers of people confessed to being believers.

Finally, Roswell New Mexico is the rallying cry for huge numbers of dedicated ‘UFO’-ologists, who profess to believe in little gray men. Without a shred of concrete evidence, they have provided their ‘proof’ through anecdotal retelling of memories from alleged witnesses whose reliability is suspect at best. But because the ‘possibility’ of little gray men exists like an urban legend in their minds, there is no telling true believers that it was probably a combination of a weather balloon and faulty memories as to when and where events happened.

These are just a few of the most glaring examples of the ability of people in general to believe in things that are untrue and or unprovable. History is full of accounts of whole populations who believed or had faith in an idea that later turned out to be untrue. It is not a unique feature to any single culture or race. It is a universal human trait. We’re a really gullible species.

For the sake of clarity, and so everyone will be on the same page, I’ll use Webster’s definition of believe as “to accept as the truth, to take as true or real...” and belief as “an acceptance as something as true...”. 2 Finally, faith will be defined as “unquestioning belief”. 3 This means, that people see something, or hear something and begin to believe it. They accept it as truth or true. Once they stop looking at it, wondering about it, thinking about it or in any other way examining it, it becomes faith. It is no longer being questioned.

With this as a basis from which to proceed, we already know that people can have unquestioning acceptance of things as true or the truth (or faith as defined) in things that are not true. People can be wrong. This is another essential part of being human; people make mistakes all the time.

The term ‘essential nature’ refers to things that all humans (or the overwhelming majority of them) have in common: We are all born in one method or another and are raised by an authority figure. We all share the same basic physiology in that we generally all process information and perceive our world in basically the same way. We are all capable of thought and are self-aware. This means we know we are thinking. We all share certain basic experiences: birth, life, death.

With the essential nature of people in mind, we can begin to explore at the actual roots of religion. One of the things that all religions regardless of doctrine, origins or practice, have in common is people. Us humans. It’s unique to our species. The religions themselves may be as different as night and grapefruit (in other words, have nothing in common at all), save for the single binding factor of people. All of them require people to bring them into existence in whatever form those religions take.

One might think that this is an insignificant factor. One would be wrong if they thought that way. Some use the idea that mankind is somehow special, therefore of course religions would apply only to humans. This is equally incorrect, however for different reasons.

Another thing all religions have in common is that they each supposedly answer the four eternal questions:

1) Where did we come from?
2) What is our purpose in life?
3) Is there life after death?
4) Is this all there is?

Some people think it coincidental that all religions address the eternal questions. It isn’t coincidence. It’s the fact that people want answers to these questions which gives religion it’s power. And when the answers aren’t provided by science or experience, they look elsewhere for them. The trouble is that in the seeking, the answers that have been “found” are usually subjective at best and deliberately deceptive at worst. Not to mention that many of the answers are contradictory, self-serving, indecipherable or even total nonsense. It’s also telling that if the four eternal questions had actually been answered, NO ONE WOULD STILL BE ASKING THEM.

Stripping away all of the hyperbole and hype and nonsense, and pomp and circumstance, we get to the basics of all religions - people seeking answers to the four eternal questions. Taking this a step further, by examining cultures of the past, we discover that all of them, in one form or another, have created a means of answering those questions. Almost all of those ‘answers’ have been proven out to be nonsense. This doesn’t mean that the answers that are being given today are any less nonsensical. The things that used to be called religions and now are curiosities we call myths. The only difference between a myth and a religion is that we have a different perspective on the universe and more accurate means of investigating it. Who’s to say what scientific or philosophical insights tomorrow will bring? All religions provide some type of explanation for creation and the rise of Man. Some major examples are interesting in their similarities.

The focus of ancient Egyptian religion was centered on nature and the average person’s place in it. A not unreasonable religion considering the Nile, an essential and major player in the religion’s focus, flooded annually and the silt that it left behind was essential to the survival of the Egyptian culture. If Nature didn’t cooperate by bringing the silt of the floods, the people starved. Droughts were catastrophic.

In overview of the origins of Man and the world, the ancient Egyptians believed that the beginning of time began with Nu. Described mostly as watery chaos, Nu represented what the world was like before the formation of land, with the flood receding and land appearing. Atum (a suspiciously similar word to Adam) was the first to emerge from this chaos. There are also references to Atum defining the land for the first time and being the first to walk on it. Adam, according to the Bible, was formed out of clay - probably an allusion to river clay which was used to make pottery for millennia.

Unlike Adam however, Atum was considered a god and the creator of the land of the world. Being alone, he mated with his shadow, and brought forth two children, Shu (a son, representing the air element and principals of life) and Tefnut (a daughter, representing rain and order). Since Nu was all there was at first, Atum became separated in the chaos from his children. When the land appeared and provided some order, Atum was reunited with his children and wept tears of joy, which turned into man.

The ancient Greeks also started with the idea of chaos as the beginning of time. Their religion believed that chaos was always there and events transpired from it. As with Egyptian mythology, no attempt is made to explain what came before chaos. The first thing to appear from the void was Erebus - more a place than a person but having attributes of both. It was unknowable and represented the night and the place where death lived. Then somehow, love was born. No explanation for it, it just happened. From Love came the beginning of order splitting the night and creating light and day. Again, this has familiar roots in Christian creation mythology where in the beginning there was darkness and God said, Let there be light, and there was light. For the Greeks, once light and was created, then came the earth, embodied by Gaea. This also follows the mythological chronology of Christian creationism in that after day and night was established, then came the Earth.

After a lot of battling among the Greek gods to establish dominance and leadership by Zeus ( son of Cronus, the youngest Titan who was the son of Gaea and Uranus - also the son of Gaea), Man was created by Prometheus ( technically a Titan, who predated the archetypal Greek Gods but wasn’t as powerful). Crafted out of clay and brought to life by Athena, who breathed life into the figurines, man wasn’t considered all that important by the classically known Greek Gods. This also shows a more direct reference to the clay and breathing life into Man origins.

Both Egyptian and Greek mythologies give reference to fraternal and parental incest, bi-sexualism and other concepts that were, at the time, generally accepted by the cultures who worshiped those gods. This also illustrates the fact that vast numbers of people have believed things in the past that are unacceptable in most societies today.

Norse religions also begin with a form of chaos call the Abyss (Ginnungagapet) north of which was the world of cold and darkness (Nifelheim) and south of which was the hotness of Muspelheim. Rising from the frozen mists of the cold well of Hvergelmer in Nifelheim, the frozen steam called Elivagor filled Ginnungagapet with ice. When flares from Muspelheim hit the ice, droplets formed creating two beings: a cow named Audhumbla and a giant called Ymer. From the breath of Audhumbla came a ‘man’ called Bure, who in turn, managed to find a wife (much like how Cain found a wife without an explanation as to how she came into being). From Bure and his wife came the Asa dynasty, a collection of man-gods chief of whom was Odin. Trials of intelligence, endurance and bravery were overcome by Odin (among a lot of other things to create the whole of Norse cosmology, but for the sake of brevity, we will move on to the creation of man). One day Odin and his brothers came across two trees named Ask and Embla. Odin and his brothers freed them from their earthly confines, allowing them to move about and gave them intelligence, blood, spirit, imagination and free will. They were also formed in the image of Odin and his brothers. From these two tree-creatures mankind came about.

Again, there are many similarities to Christian creation mythologies. Each mythology served the society which held it in esteem. They all seem to agree that there was chaos or void before time, that something happened to create light and darkness and that mankind was brought forth by powerful beings. The details differ only for the sake of the societies from which they came. Most of the details interrelate based on chronology. Egyptian religion predated Greek religion which predated Norse religion which pre-dated Christianity (at least regionally). Without saying the word ‘plagiarism’, it appears that in many details, religions tended to borrow from each other’s creation mythologies. It’s known that virtually every culture has a flood myth of some kind. Biblical scholars point to this as proof of the Bible’s Noah myth. The facts seem to indicate the formation of the Black Sea as the source of the flood myth, but that theory has yet to be borne out.

But the interrelation between these mythologies aside, few take these myths seriously as a viable religion today. Those who do tend to be greater in numbers in inverse proportion to the age of the religion. The older the religion, the fewer who believe it today. At the time, however, they served a vital social purpose. All of them answered the four eternal questions. All of them served the needs of their individual and unique societies. (This is an important factor later on). Few take them seriously any more except as examples of mankind’s march toward enlightenment. The fact that religions serve their cultures and societies appear to be the reason for the perpetuation of a religion more than a proliferation of faith. Once a religion no longer serves the needs of a society, it was abandoned in favor of one which does. Just because the Christian and Islamic faiths are the most popular in the world today doesn’t mean they’ll be around a thousand years from now. Egyptian mythology was sustained six times longer than either of the two currently most popular religions have existed. Further, just because a religion replaces a religion doesn’t prove the existence of a god or gods. It has its roots in the structure of society and civilization. This is an aspect of religion that will be explored later.

Going even further back, we still have Humans asking the four eternal questions. When they weren’t out bashing mastodons and slaying giant sloths, they sat around their fire and wondered at the nature of things. Cave art seems to indicate that there were ceremonies of some kind performed by primitive Humans. Graves with tools and food and other necessities and even luxuries of life buried with the body indicate that early Humans probably believed that the dead had use of such things and therefore probably believed that there was some kind of afterlife. It is obvious that mankind has been pondering the eternal questions for as far back as the archeological records of such artifacts go.

It does not take a huge leap of imagination to conclude that early humans had some kind of system of beliefs. Given the struggle to survive from day to day in a hunter-gatherer group, this system had to have been both practical and functional. Early humans used everything from a hunt - from the meat and skin to the sinew, entrails and bones of the animal - and nothing was left to waste. It took too much effort to get the animal in the first place to let anything go to waste. In the never ending search for game, practices or beliefs that brought no results or caused problems for the tribe were quickly revised or starvation quickly set in. Any system of beliefs had to be practical and effective, or the early tribes of man would have died out either because they didn’t work or they took too long. Given the perverse nature of man, it’s entirely possible that many tribes DID die out because of impractical or lengthy belief practices. Those who survived passed on their more survivable system of beliefs.

It isn’t necessary to determine exactly what they were. They simply had to serve the needs of the ‘society’ in order for the tribe to survive. As an example, painting themselves in mud may have had ceremonial reasons and a ritualistic manner of application but served the need of camouflage in hunting. Ceremony would dictate why, when and what kind of mud to don before the hunt while ritual would determine where and how and to apply the mud. This ensured that the mud was properly applied for maximum results in the hunt. It probably started with something as simple as someone falling into a mud hole and found they could sneak up on the animals better while covered in mud. Trial and error would refine the method. Once an acceptable balance between the time spent donning the mud and the time spent chasing the animals was achieved, a pattern would begin to develop as to when, what and how. Eventually, given that most people fall into familiar habits, the donning of the mud would become something of a ritual. With the importance of the hunt to the survival of the tribe, the ceremony of donning the mud was almost certainly accompanied with the hope that the hunt would be a good one.

In this manner came the genesis of religion. Ceremony and ritual were memorable and effective methods of teaching necessary skills to the next generation. Without writing, oral tradition was the only way to pass on knowledge. Cadence in speech allowed the words to be the same from telling to telling. Information passed on in different ways often gets garbled. Mankind has apparently been musical as far back as records go and much of the important information to be passed on may have been sung or chanted, so as to be sure to pass on the information accurately.

Try a well-known party game. Get ten people together and whispers a short phrase once into the ear of the first person. The phrase can’t be repeated nor said aloud. The first person then whispers it once into the ear of the next person and so on until the phrase has been passed by whispering from person to person until it gets to the last person. Once the phrase has reached the last person, they have to say it aloud. If you’ve never played this party game, you’ll be surprised by the result. It almost never comes out as anything like the original phrase.

Cadence in speech, chanting or singing ensured the repetition of important words as exactly as human memory could recreate. Ritual adds a physical component to the occasion, reenforcing the oral lessons. Thus, the history of a tribe, their living skills, methods of hunting, means of maintaining their lives could be preserved and passed on to the next generation with a minimum of distortion. If you don’t believe this is effective, create a set of instructions, then set them to rhyme. Read aloud to two groups of kids. One gets the rhyming instructions, the other the regular ones. You’ll find that the kids who were read the rhyming instructions will be able to follow them better than those who only had the written instructions read aloud.

This is all pure human nature. Nothing supernatural about it.

Oral tradition ensures survival through repetition of important information. In repetition, cadence or rhyme is introduced to ensure the accuracy of the information being relayed. Given the importance of the information, it’s only natural to assume that some kind of ceremony or tradition would be associated with it. It could be as simple as a time around the fire every night to relate information regarding an event of the day or as elaborate as a whole day, say around the time of a regular celestial event like the full moon, devoted to a particular lesson involving all members of the tribe. It could vary from tribe to tribe. And in every tribe, there would probably be someone who was better at remembering the ceremonies than most of the others. It is not unreasonable to assume that person would lead the lessons. It wasn’t necessarily the leader of the tribe, but could have been. It wasn’t necessarily the same person all the time. The point is that one person would be recognized by the majority of the tribe as being best at recalling a particular ceremony. It naturally fell to that person to lead the ceremony when the time came. After all, not everyone can teach well enough to place the survival of a tribe in their hands and since survival is the name of the game, the best person would be put in charge of that particular ceremony. Mankind may be perverse in nature, but he is generally not suicidal.

Again, what these ceremonies were isn’t important. Nor is it important how they were conducted, who attended, what information was imparted, etc. Information was passed in a fashion that the members of the tribe recognized as being important by a person the members of the tribe recognized as being the best at passing that information along. The tribe was motivated to learn the information for the sake of survival.

This is a very simplistic explanation but it cuts to the heart of the matter in that religions were intended to answer the eternal questions asked by people. Unless people are well fed and have leisure time to really explore their environment, the eternal questions take a back seat to the more burning issues of an empty stomach and frostbitten toes. So it’s not an unreasonable assumption to believe that early Man had little or no religion per se. He had life or death rules to follow in order to survive. Sin - or breaking the rules - brought swift and usually deadly retribution. So early man was programmed to follow the rules of the teacher of the rules. For thousands of years, the most successful Humans were those who learned and followed the rules of survival. If it was a religion, it was based on the most basic need - survival.

But sometimes even those who followed the rules ended up hurt or dead. These ‘exceptions’ in the way life was supposed to work (according to those who imparted the information) would perplex the rest of the tribe. Ulk the Great Hunter properly donned the mud of the bank of the third river in the crescent of the third moon after the snows at dawn and he didn’t get the giant sloth like the teacher said he would. Or worse, some kind of natural disaster would strike - fire, flood, earthquake, storm - and bring destitution to the tribe. The tribe would want to know why it happened and, more importantly, how to avoid these awful things from happening again.

When faced with situations and circumstances beyond a person’s immediate control, people will try to find a reason why these things happen. When reasons aren’t immediately apparent, or even if the actual reason is beyond the current comprehension of a person, that person will continue to look for a more gratifying or comprehensible explanation. This may seem to be an unreasonable assumption however it happens all the time. The survivors of a tornado - a random atmospheric phenomenon the occurrences of which we are getting better and better at predicting - often remark that it was ‘God’s will’ or some such nonsense. This implies that God wanted them to face hardship, injury or death. The simple truth is that they were in the right place at the wrong time and got caught in a random atmospheric phenomenon. How the tornado formed, and why it did, can be explained in general terms. It may not be gratifying, or comprehensible, to many people, but the truth is often difficult to understand and rarely comforting.

Another tendency of people is to ‘humanize’ or ‘animize’ things. The technical term for humanizing something is ’anthropomorphize’. This means taking an object lacking any kind of humanity and assigning it human characteristics, traits or behaviors. To animize something is to do the same kind of thing and assign animal traits or behaviors to things that aren’t animals. We all talk to our computers, cars, televisions and other inanimate objects, convinced that they are possessed of some kind of comprehension of our mood if not our words. This trait helps us cope with the impersonal nature of the world. People would rather believe that things having no ability to express or display human traits actually hate, like or in some other way reflect some kind of emotion toward a person. People find a perverse comfort in believing that a storm was ‘out to get them’ rather than face the harsh truth that the storm had no feeling about it at all and indeed was incapable of feeling anything in the first place. The ancient Egyptians tended to animize their gods, representing them as animals like the hyaena, ibis, asp, cobra or a combination of human/animal traits like the Sphinx.

Given these two virtually universal traits, it becomes easy to see how early humans could begin to give various natural forces - storms, earthquakes, volcanos and such - different human or animal characteristics in an attempt to explain the why’s of a situation or circumstance. They lacked the technical insight behind most natural events and, lacking understanding, felt compelled to find some way of explaining it. They began to compare the behavior of the natural forces to animals or people and tried to draw conclusions about those forces. The wind is playful, or rough, like a tiger. The land moves like a rearing bear. The rain falls like the tears of a weeping woman. Once an item has been given this label in the minds of people, it’s easier to begin to assign personalities and whole histories to a force that has neither. In doing so, it gives a person a sense of control. By understanding the characteristics of a natural phenomenon by animization, it forms a familiar association in the minds of a person. The bear is understandable, even killable. Even though the ground isn’t killable, by sacrificing the bear to the ground, it may be the ground would stop shaking. Once a few bears are sacrificed, and the ground stays quiescent, early man is given an indication of how to control his environment. Or so he assumes. As has been mentioned, man is a very gullible species. Especially when he is blinded by his own assumptions.

Another factor that may have had an impact on the genesis of religion is that a hunter-gatherer tribe has little time to devote to anything except survival. Finding easy, quick explanations for circumstances or events, explanations that can be readily understood and relayed, tended to be favored over those explanations that took time to prove. Time was a valuable resource best spent in sustaining the tribe. It didn’t do to delve too deeply into the more esoteric whys of things when there were furs to cure, tools to make, babies to feed and animals to hunt. In-depth research into the ways and means of the world was not a luxury they could afford.

Finally, the last major foundation in the genesis of religions is politics. Strange as it may seem, man is a political animal. There are always leaders, always followers, always those lusting for power. In a hunter-gatherer tribe, the most powerful or successful hunter was likely the leader of the tribe. It’s also probable that the person with the best knowledge of hunting - who could teach the methods to the others - was also well regarded. But when it comes to the eternal questions, those who could answer them were most likely to be very well regarded as well. It follows that if knowing the whys of things - coming up with the best explanation for why things happen and answering the eternal questions to the satisfaction, comfort and comprehension of the majority of the tribe - brought the good regard of the Tribe, then learning such things was also a means to achieving power or influence within the tribe. Thus, the ceremony leader, if he was not the actual leader of the tribe, probably maintained a defacto co-leadership role within the tribe.

With an oral history, even with cadence, ceremony and multiple repetition, over time things get distorted or embellished. As time goes on, and life style and the ways of communicating improves, the need for the skills that the ceremonies taught diminish, but the ceremonies remain. Because the explanations of the whys seemed to cover the known facts, no one bothered to delve deeper. For a person in the well regarded position of power that being the ceremony leader brought, they may have actually dissuaded others from delving into the explanations too deeply. After all, those explanations kept them well regarded and in a position of power. If someone else came up with a more acceptable or better explanation, then the ceremonial leader’s power and influence would be diminished or even supplanted. Therefore, the seeds of ‘faith’ - unquestioned belief - were most likely planted even before civilization rose.

Back then, life was a struggle that is hard for us to comprehend today. Even as techniques improved and life became easier, those humans who survived were the products of thousands of years of ancestors who survived. Those ancestors passed on their traits - the urge to know, the traits that allowed their ancestors to live and thrive. They may have started having more time to learn about their world, but by then they were adapted to follow the traditions of the tribe. They got on with life and didn’t often bother to attempt to find out more about the explainable events around them. Ceremonies told them all they needed to know about how and why the world worked and answered the eternal questions to the satisfaction of the majority of the population. Those who wanted power or influence or even the good regard of the tribe who were not themselves well suited to the tasks that brought such regard could rise to power by learning or discovering the answers the tribe most often asked or wondered about. Much of what is traditional today is left-over ceremony that at one time fulfilled a purpose but is no longer vitally necessary to the survival or functioning of a society. Much of it is actually harmful.

But early humans sowed the seeds of religion by the regular teachings of necessary survival skills that, over time, took on the significance of ceremony and ritual. Also, they sought explanation of the natural events in their lives and, failing to find a cause and effect within practical time limits, their own natural inclination to rationalize a reason that made sense to them caused them to come up with explanations that were understandable and in some way comforting but were not in general factual or true. Finally, the desire to continue to be accepted by the tribe caused those who were thought to understand the answers to the eternal questions to dissuade others from trying to discover the truth behind the way the world worked, thus insuring their stature in the tribe and reducing the possible social disaster of being proven wrong.

While it is agreed that the latter statement is a supposition, it is a supposition based on human nature. It is certainly not uncommon for someone IN power to do everything possible, including lie, cheat, steal and kill, to stay in power. This is not a trait found strictly in people today, but has shown up repeatedly in history. It is, therefore, reasonable to assume that this trait was found in those who wanted power in the first place. Having the necessary answers to achieve power within a tribe did not ensure the continued possession of that power - especially if someone came up with a better explanation of why the ground shook. Because of this, it is not unreasonable to assume that a person in power would do what was necessary to stay in power, whether it was to incorporate the new explanation into what was known about the world, give credit and hang onto power, kill the person who came up with the new explanation or debunk the explanation or some other means. It is extremely unlikely that a person in the position of power would simply step aside and give up that power and influence to someone else who possessed better information. In a society with few laws and no forensic science to speak of, it’s not unreasonable to believe that a violent or nefarious act was the method of choice for dealing with a bright, insightful upstart.

Chapter 2
Proliferation

After tens of thousands of years surviving in a hunter-gatherer venue, Mankind finally developed something called agriculture. Concurrently with the rise of agriculture came the use of herding or shepherding. These involved planting and sowing at regular intervals according to the natural cycle of the seasons and raising and watching the animals which provided food and clothing. Researchers tend to agree that these development came about due in large part to the ice age. Adequate game was no longer available year round to sustain a growing number of tribes. As to whether or not agriculture was originally created to provide fodder for the herd animals or as a food source in its own right is still debated in some circles, but the simple fact is that about 8,000-10,000 years ago in many places Mankind stopped wandering around looking for food and started growing it. It provided a food surplus to be used during the regular times of famine we now call Winter. It also provided a survival cushion against the adverse effects of occasional natural disasters ensuring greater survivability for all.

Up until that time, tribes probably numbered no more than 60 individuals each, and probably less. Everyone knew everyone else and the ‘community’ was insular and exclusive. Inbreeding was probably very common, but it eventually threatened survival, so as was often the case, available females were frequently brought in or kicked out to help mix the genetic pool and allow growth without deformity or infirmity. Agriculture changed all that.

The nature of agriculture is that instead of wandering around, meeting other tribes, bartering for supplies or people and exchanging skills (or fighting the other tribe for whatever reason), the population is rooted to a particular spot for at least as long as it took to get the crops in. By that time, it’s too late to move very far before winter made wandering off too dangerous, so the individuals were forced to remain in one place. It became easier to simply make a permanent camp than tear up everything to move a couple of times a year.

These two factors - the abundance of food and the permanence of residence - gave rise to ‘civilization’. It was now possible to support many more than 60 individuals in a tribe and as the benefits of agriculture became evident to other tribes, it began to catch on. The size of the tribe, unfettered by the population restraints imposed by Nature on a hunter-gatherer society, began to rise. With rising population and the permanence of residence, simply packing up and leaving becomes harder and harder to do. People had to have rules of conduct so that everyone could get along, or civilization would have died before it really ever took hold.

It was relatively easy, at first. The tribe simply bred more of themselves. Everyone in the tribe understood the rules through ceremony and ritual, although the purpose of those ceremonies and rituals had changed to reenforce the current agricultural and shepherding life-style. While survival wasn’t as precarious, the rules required compliance for peace and prosperity. Toward that end, the tribal leaders and shamans or priests - or whatever titular term was used for the leaders of the ceremony and ritual in the tribe - started coming up with ways and means of settling disputes that allowed the majority of individuals to live in peace but more importantly ensured the survival of the tribe. Since divisiveness within a tribe was as lethal as a flood, it was necessary to minimize it or contain it so that it couldn’t affect the tribes survival. These rules became the foundation of law but before law came into existence, the rules were the yardstick by which interpersonal relationships were handled, work was allocated and done and other business was conducted. If someone was to join the tribe, they would have to agree to abide by and learn these rules. Having a stranger join the tribe was probably a very grave matter to the tribal leaders - at least at first. After all, if the leader didn’t know the measure of a person, the leader couldn’t use them effectively to the benefit of the tribe. When human nature is thrown into the pot, any new stranger was also a potential rival for the leadership and a possible source of strange, new ideas that may prove detrimental to the tribe or the leadership of the tribe.

But it only took a few instances of one tribe getting their collective butts kicked by the much bigger tribe because the smaller tribe had occupied some choice real-estate, or for whatever reason would motivate one small village to attack another, to show that with numbers and effective leadership, power could be projected beyond the confines of the fields. So the more forward-looking leaders of the tribes adjusted, learning to delegate tasks and the ways of choosing subordinate co-leaders who could supervise the more menial tasks. Bureaucracy was created to cope with the fact that one person can’t handle all the details of running a decent sized village all by himself. Still, in order to maintain control over a growing population, there was only one thing that did it: Power.

But power comes in many different forms. In many cases, power came from military might. The ability to attack and destroy a rival’s city, absorb their material goods, lay claim to their lands and use their people to achieve another military objective is a repeating theme throughout human history. Yet within all cities of the times lay other powerful infrastructures - one that was well established and one that was just emerging. The emerging power base was commerce. The flow of goods and services in an increasingly complex city became more and more important to the survival of the city. If the goods didn’t get to market, people couldn’t buy the goods and would starve or succumb to the elements. Whoever controlled the flow of goods and services was powerful indeed. The other power-base were the ritual leaders.

Taking after the military organization of the city governments, there was usually one leader of the city’s rituals, but the rituals were performed by underlings who were trained in the art of leading the rituals. Their influence in the city was undercut by the overt displays of power regularly presented to the population by the ruling leaders. In order to maintain leadership parity in the eyes of the population, the ritual leaders had to come up with something as strong as power to wield influence among the people. They came up with the same kind of trick used to make a donkey move - the carrot and the stick. The stick was fear, the carrot was the promise of a better life. In the simplest terms possible, they said it you don’t follow these rules, you will be punished. But if you do follow these rules, you will be rewarded.

Strangely, this appealed to the population more than the displays of power. After all, at best, the use of power tended to disrupt lives and the most anyone could hope for was to avoid the attention of the powerful when they were flexing their military muscles. Fields got trampled, livestock was slaughtered or stolen, cities were pillaged and burned, and men and women were raped or killed or both. It was all very bad for the average city dweller when the powerful got a wild hair. Most of the time, the average city dweller just wanted to live their lives without worrying about whether tomorrow would bring the horrors of warfare.
On the other hand, if all they had to do was follow the rules of the priests, they would be rewarded. Not just ignored, but rewarded. This was actually more than the leaders of the cities promised. The rewards of a successful military campaign for the average city dweller were meager - perhaps a better price for food or luxuries. The majority of the benefits went to the leaders (and the soldiers) who waged the war in the first place. This made soldiering a very popular avocation and was a useful tool for ensuring the loyalty of the troops on a campaign of conquest.

But lacking material wealth to distribute to the population, and the military means of subduing and instilling fear in a population, the ritual leaders were forced to come up with a different tack. They didn’t have to go far to find it. They had been in charge of two things up to then. The first was the imparting of necessary skills to ensure the survival of the tribe. That aspect of their purpose was mostly taken over by the merchants and craftsmen and others who were better suited to teaching the increasingly specialized skills necessary to keep a city running. Instead, they returned to the task of informing people on how the world worked.

City life grew increasingly complex. Compared to the relatively simple and easy to understand rhythms of the hunter-gatherer, city life was often confusing, fraught with conflicts with other people and dealing with an increasingly remote and unreachable leadership. The world was turning into a more complex place than what most people at the time were able to deal with in their day to day lives. Further, the threat of annihilation by warring city-chiefs added another threat that was previously less of a consideration. Finally, the tribe always ensured that the individuals were taken care of, more or less. There was community and support for just about everyone. In the cities, such things became delegated to the mid-level administrators who had more important things to deal with than any single individuals’ sense of increasing isolation and impoverishment.

Into the breach stepped the ritual leaders. Instead of grand armies parading their loot after a successful campaign, the ritual leaders came up with elaborate ceremonial displays to awe and entertain the masses. They provided comfort to the desperate, provided shelter to the destitute and gave new answers to the Eternal Questions. They supported these answers with parables and tales, basing their conclusions on the desired answer to a particular question or part of a question. As city life grew more complex, the answers to the Eternal Questions grew more subtle and sophisticated. There arose a need to interpret and reiterate the lessons and parables into order to help the people understand the sometimes convoluted logic of the rules. The rules changed to help people get along with one another, to help avoid disease and sickness and to ensure the continued power and influence of the ritual leaders in the lives of the population.

This trend can be seen in the evolution of modern religions as well. As the sophistication of the population increases, and the available knowledge base expands, along with the advent of a written - and hence unalterable - record, religions had to transform into something that provided the kind of rationale that supported the prevailing social needs. Without the proper supporting principles at its foundation, a religion collapsed. If the religion didn’t transform as the society evolved, either the society collapsed or the religion died. In many cases, it was the former, rather than the latter that occurred. Thus proving the perverse nature of Man in that he would rather die for an outdated hypothesis he believed in than substitute it for one of greater social value. It may more likely illustrate how resistant people are to change.

In general, however, one stronger society would end up supplanting another, forcing the religion of the victors upon the conquered. This made sense from both a social and religious point of view. Obviously, the gods behind the victors are stronger than the gods of the vanquished. This kind of theme is repeated over and over again in the Bible. Still, religions had to adapt one way or another or be forced into obscurity.

In order to assure the continuing power of the ritual leadership, Religious leaders made sure their rules would be followed by promising dire consequences for ‘sin’ or behavior that was contrary to the teachings and huge rewards for faith, or unquestioning adherence to the teachings, upon death. This was a convenient ploy since no one ever came back from the dead to explain how it really was - either good or bad. Toward this end, the use of worship was geared almost exclusively toward reenforcing the rules. It was used to constantly drive home the message that obedience was a virtue and anything less than obedience would, at best, reduce the promised posthumous reward and, at worst, bring on the dreaded eternal torment.

The concept of worship in itself is relatively simple. It’s the attempt by regular people to influence a deity. It probably had its roots in the simple ploy of using the carcase of a dead animal to lure a cave bear out of the cave and to hold it off long enough to set up camp. It was very dangerous work that had a good reward. With the natural human tendency to anthropomorphize elemental and natural forces, it doesn’t take a great leap of imagination to think that leaving offerings and talking to natural forces like earthquakes, storms, volcanos and such would somehow mitigate their adverse impact. Not all volcanic eruptions result in wide-spread devastation and it’s likely that the people leaving the offerings to the spirits of the volcano thought the offerings had some influence on the volcano’s “decision” not to blow its top. The same kind of logic can be applied to leaving offerings to any natural force. If the natural force happened in spite of the offering, it was obvious that the offerings were of insufficient quality, quantity, etc. to appease the force. The fault was firmly placed on fallible Humans who knew deep down that they didn’t really understand the natural force in the first place.

This is why so many of the older religions had icons of some kind to worship. They were simply physical representations of what were once ill-defined natural forces that had been intentionally evolved into something else to suit the natural human need of the ritual leaders to stay in power. The Egyptians had the traditional four elements: Air, Fire, Water and Earth. From these came the other Egyptian gods who, in turn, were often represented as animals who displayed some of the characteristics of the god they represented. From there, it was easy to ascribe to a particular image the powers of the deity which in turn gave rise to iconism.

The icons offered two vital things to the population. The first is a physical manifestation of a concept that was hard enough to explain by parable: what a ‘god’ is. All worshiped deities have human traits - or can relate to humanity on several fundamental levels. Trying to explain why Hun’gar, the God of the Earth was a cow with the head of man and the tail of a lion was hard enough. Showing him in all his glory was another matter. Giving the population an item to which they could relate and direct their ‘worship’ was only prudent policy. The second thing was that it brought a focus for worship of the deity’s power and influence. By placing the icons in a grand temple, creating elaborate rituals to pacify or influence the deity, creating huge celebrations and days devoted to the deity, the priesthood displays its power, and by extension, the deity’s power, over and to the people.

Finally, to prove that the deity or deities had true power, using natural forces as proof of the deity’s power was common. Earthquakes and floods and disease and other natural phenomenon happen with enough regularity that the priesthood could point to an occurrence and say that it was caused by or made less intense by a particular deity or deities. A nice day could be explained by a deity that was happy or satisfied with the worship. A simple rainbow could be interpreted in many different ways. It was all in the rationalizations created by the imaginative priesthood. Lacking any real power themselves, they used the world around them and their own imagination to prove that they spoke for something which they appeared to show had more power than even the leaders of the cities.

While the evolution of the means of doing this was probably slow - over centuries, certainly - the methods were already in place. Certainly the desire to maintain the good regard of the people and power over the population were motives as powerful then as they are today. When their power was moving away from their hands to the hands of the more earthly powerful leadership, the ritual leaders came up with a new use for themselves by reinventing their role in society.

The bottom line is that it didn’t matter if they were correct or actually believed in their assertions about the consequences of sin or faith. It was an effective and efficient tool to be used to maintain power and influence over a population in a bureaucracy that had no inherent power or influence in the first place - except what power and influence the people gave them. And it was a very effective technique. So effective, in fact, that many different schools of thought arose. After all, what one man (or group) can rationalize, another man (or group) can come up with an equally compelling and plausible but opposing rationalization. This created sects and factions within a particular belief system and even entirely new and competing belief systems. What one belief system espoused may have worked for the majority of one society yet may not work at all for another society.

Since city-states were as insular and exclusive as the tribes that preceded them, it was easy to have one set of beliefs in one city-state and an entirely, sometimes, exclusively different set of beliefs in another. Social order was based on the manner in which the society was organized. That is to say that a society originally created in a cold climate may not survive if suddenly transplanted to a hot, dry climate. Societies built in the tropics would perish in climates that had well differentiated seasons. A society mostly dependent on agriculture would be robbed blind by a society mostly dependent on trade. So there were many factors that shaped society and many factors that shaped the rules by which that society would best function. Because the environment, the social and economic structure and the traditions of every city-state were slightly different, each managed to come up with a slightly different set of rules - both secular and religious. The further apart two city-states were, the farther apart their belief systems generally became. There was no unifying influence to merge these belief systems into a coherent single one.

But as city-states became empires through military conquest, the influence of the deities of the more militarily successful conquerors spread further and further outward, absorbing, eliminating or remodeling the belief systems of the conquered. Another means of spreading the influence of a belief system was through trade. Merchants, while not as powerful as the military, could move from city-state to city-state to ply their wares. They enjoyed a certain immunity from the usual human hazards of the road since they could afford to retain the services of the military or paramilitary for protection on the journeys they undertook. They took with them the icons of their home deities, and often times could relate the rules for their belief systems well enough to be understood.

These were the two main paths of ‘spreading the word’ about a particular belief system. It even brought the concept of a belief system that was separate from the belief in the leaders. Some secular leaders went one further and declared themselves as deities, giving the priesthood a great deal of power and influence. Or possibly vice versa, in that the priesthood grew so powerful they became a threat to the secular leader and a compromise was reached whereby the secular leader would be touted as a God to the people as long as the priesthood could retain a certain amount of power. It’s a chicken and egg argument but the results were the same in that a powerful priesthood promoted a powerful God-king and the rule was split pretty much down the middle.

Several universal needs were addressed by these religions. First of all, a code of conduct was needed to micro-manage the individual behavior in a large, diverse group of people to maintain relative peace. Secular laws lagged behind religious laws simply for the fact that the ritual leaders normally settled interpersonal matters and day to day conduct in society was the venue of the ritual leaders. It was only when the conduct of an individual threatened the tribe (or society) that the secular leader would step in and settle the matter. There is a big difference, at least to the secular leaders, between whether a person eats ‘forbidden’ foods or steals food from others.. All religiously-based codes of conduct tended to reenforce the religious order’s power in one way or another, but it also provided guidelines for hygiene and ways to settle petty strife as well as a means of answering the Eternal Questions and tending to a new need - that of dealing with the impoverished and disenfranchised that inevitably happen in any complex society. If the religious side of society didn’t fulfil some kind of tangible need of the society, it would not have been tolerated for long. Also, to say that religion was always a blindly cynical manipulation of the minds of the population would be equally untrue. Just as there were despotic leaders in the secular and non-secular halls of power, so were there good and true leaders in both areas.

But as in all things, the majority prevails. No religious leader ever rose to a position of influence and power based on piety or faith alone. Whether with cynicism or with the best of intentions, all of them understood that they wielded power and influence over substantial numbers of people. Some bore the responsibility with honor. Others didn’t. Sometimes the leader was a figurehead, useful to the true power behind the throne but carrying little or no influence himself on the inner workings of the religion. The fact of the matter was that no matter who held the reins of power, they never had it without the knowledge that they had it. And in that knowledge, great harm could be done.

Power, being what it is and as has been pointed out several times, tends to make people who have it not want to ever give it up. Toward this end, when one religion encountered another, the usual outcome was war. After all, two belief systems tended to confuse people and only one could be the ‘right’ one. Usually, the ‘right’ one was the one with the most or best soldiers. Due to the general isolation of most city-states, religions began popping up like flowers in a mountain field. Some would be quite similar - almost indistinguishable, in fact - simply because the societies which gave them rise were economically, structurally and environmentally similar. Most, however, had glaring differences that, while satisfying the needs of the immediate society, clashed with the views or needs of another society. This led to friction, strife and, eventually, war. Two religious viewpoints couldn’t share power in a particular society and any attempt to impose an unwanted viewpoint, or bring in a more popular belief system to replace one that was more rigid, tended to have devastating results among the population. Not only was their social comfort and support system in turmoil, the very issue as to how they would spend eternity was called into question. Not to mention the fact that warfare was hardest on the lowest parts of society - or the very people most religions were supposedly created to aid.

While ‘holy wars’ weren’t terribly frequent, at least not in name, the use of the “their belief system is contrary to ours and we must destroy it to appease our deity” argument went a long way to getting conscripts to do the will of the power pushing for the war. Secular leaders found this argument compelling enough to use it when drumming up support for a war and getting normally non-combative people to fight like demons. Religious leaders used it for the same reason - sometimes even because they believed their own argument. The result was the same - one belief system being forced down the throats of those who didn’t want it while at the same time having their city burned, their men and women raped or killed or both and losing everything they had worked so hard to build. Using religion to justify wars of conquest or domination is not a new or even recent phenomenon.

But as this third leg of a triumvirate of powers gained in strength, it began to move into the influence of the secular leadership, taking over in many cases as the defacto leader of the society, relegating the secular leadership to the role of puppet or maintaining it for the sake of legitimacy in the face of opposition to losing a popular secular leader. There were instances where the opposite was also true. In many cases, the secular leadership would take over the titular role of religious leader in order to maintain power. In both cases, religion was corrupted and perverted to maintain the power of one branch of leadership.

But when the power of the religion was threatened, it’s influence never was. In fact, without its influence, the use of religion as a means to power in the first place would have become moot. With this in mind, it became common for the priesthood to give it’s blessing to a leader before he could assume the mantle of leadership. This gave a subtle but strong impression that the religion was more powerful than the secular leader. And to the population in general, that seemed true. After all, the secular leader could only kill you. The religious leader had some say about where you went after you were dead and you were going to be deal a lot longer than you were ever going to be alive. So while the secular leader tended to the mundane tasks of administering an empire or kingdom, many religious leaders became enmeshed in politics, demanding action on the part of the secular leader for imagined or real slights of religious doctrine. By and large, these were rare at first, but became increasingly common as the infiltration of the religious leg undermined the power of the secular leaders. Many secular leaders were content with the trappings of power without the responsibility of true leadership. With the creation of the heredity kingdom - where one family ruled by right of succession from generation to generation - religious influences almost always won out over secular decisions. The idea of a religion was firmly entrenched and only drastic action could uproot it.

The but one example of a secular leader successfully challenging the power of a religion was in England in 1480. King Henry VIII, dissatisfied with the sexual restrictions of the Catholic Church in England and wanting a divorce from Jayne to marry Anne Bollyn, banned Catholicism and founded the Protestant Church of England shortly after Martin Luther precipitated the schism in the Catholic faith by protesting catholic restrictions in a letter to Pope Pious I. But rather than eliminating the catholic faith (a move that was extremely unpopular among the people of England at the time), King Henry VIII simply replaced it with one whose rules were less restrictive about sex and marriage. The people would have rioted (and some did) if another religion wouldn’t replace the one that was banned. Religions created their own niche and removing it from that niche was as appealing to the people as having their teeth pulled. They demanded their answers to the Eternal Questions and if they couldn’t get them from the Catholic faith, they could get them from someplace else. King Henry VIII understood the need for religion in society and wisely allowed another to gain ascendency over Catholicism instead of leaving a social vacuum in its place.

It’s obvious, however, that the influence of religion - the amount of non-military power and the respect for the concept - was at least as great, if not greater among the people than the power and esteem of the secular leadership. Were this not the case, Henry could have simply told Rome to go away, not bothered coming up with something else in its place and declared England an non-religious kingdom. So it’s safe to assume that religion has had at least as much influence over the people of Earth as secular power ever had. This influence equated to power for the religious leadership, one that was often abused in the name of that religion.

Of course, this power of religion over the secular leadership had nothing to do with truth. It was merely a matter of what people were told to believe by the dogma of the faith and the means by which religion had integrated itself into society at the time.

More often than not, however, the religious leaders were the defacto rulers of their countries if not in actual power, then in influence over the leadership. Some ruled by appointed title, others ruled as self-proclaimed gods. All of the rulers had adequate earthly power to enforce their proclamations within their borders - either militarily, religiously or both.

The Romans tended to leave religion out of the equation when it came to conquest. Unless a religious practice was especially bad for the Romans, they opted for a hands off method of dealing with religion. This was in keeping with Roman society in that only a man born into the society, who owned property, could be a citizen and vote or run for elected office. In other words, the only people who counted in Roman society were Citizens. Everyone else, females, serfs, slaves and subjugated people were generally considered beneath the potential for citizenship. Whatever kept these disenfranchised non-people happy and not requiring the services of expensive armies to maintain order was fine with the leadership of Rome. But Rome had it’s own religion. Every Roman household paid homage to a plethora of Gods (imported from Greece due to the Roman idealization of Grecian values and society) and to slight one was to risk hardship or worse. There were many holidays (a word derived from a shortening of “holy days”) paying tribute to the Roman gods. Religion played a strong role in Roman society although because of its persecution of what was to become known as the Christians, it’s not a well understood religion among western societies today and the majority of people, when asked, will assume the Roman Empire either had no religion or had one that wasn’t very influential.

It needn’t be pointed out that Christianity supplanted Roman gods when Emperor Constantine declared Christianity the official Roman religion in about 450 C.E. (For those of you who’ve seen the C.E. and B.C.E. abbreviations and not understood them, they stand for the Common Era and Before the Common Era. Among the academic community, BC and AD have been replaced as being insensitive to the religions of most of the rest of the world.)

And so Religions began out of a combined need to address certain lapses in the creation of civilization and the desire of those in power not to give up their power. Religions grew and evolved, addressing the requirements of their respective societies while all the time making sure to maintain its position of power and/or influence over the people. As civilization grew, and influences - secular or not - spread, religions and their influences spread as well. Religions became more and more powerful while remaining, for the most part, in equal or higher power than the secular leadership. Whether founded by true believers or cynically molded to bolster purely mundane human ambitions, the results were the same - Religion became an occasionally beneficial, organized effort to maintain power and influence over a population by using the threat of eternal torment or eternal reward to coerce obedience from a population seeking the answers to the Eternal Questions.

Chapter 3
Consequences

Up until the time of Rome, religion held a large sway over the people, but it was not usually the method by which they were governed. With certain exceptions (mostly the Egyptian Kingdoms and the bloody practices of the Aztecs and Inca where the governmental leader was also considered a god), the people in general were led by war chiefs, strongmen and kings. Religious figures and practitioners or priests held a high, but in all cases a secondary, role in leadership. Without known exception, they played primarily the role of advisor to the secular leader. Guidance may have been sought, but policy was never actually set by the priests, nor did they rule in the absence of a secular leader.

The Pharisees of ancient Judea were not the rulers of the Jews per se. They did not rule in name but advised the King who ruled. While such things as priests advising rulers were increasingly common, secular leadership was still firmly in control. During this time, empires great and vast were created. The Arabian empires produced some of the greatest thinkers of the ages, gave us a numeric system and came up with the concept of the zero. First the Minoans, then the Greeks and finally Rome spread its influence over vast regions of Asia and Europe. The Chinese developed some of the firsts that we take for granted - paper, bureaucracy (which may not seem to be a plus, but it made for more efficient government at the time) the magnetic compass and other leaps of imagination and innovation. India produced magnificent works of art and science in its own right.

Under secular leadership, the world seemed to prosper. But then came the rise of Christianity and Islam and with it an increasing influence of religion in the governing of the day to day lives of the people all over the world.

The reason for this increase in the influence of religious dogma in leadership is not easy to pin down. It could be said that if the people didn’t want it, it never would have happened. That’s an easy assumption to make when people know of alternative lifestyles. But for most of the world, the vast majority of people in the world were born, lived and died all within a fifty mile area. Those who traveled tended to stay within the same social groups, bringing the ‘society’ they were used to with them and minimizing the impact of culture shock when encountering societies that were not governed or structured the same way. Because of this, and because there was a general lack of mass communication, most people got their ‘news’ or information through rumor, town criers or, more and more often, through the lessons to the masses that religion took upon itself to maintain in the face of a certain social need.

It could also be said that religions were at fault for infiltrating itself into the day to day lives of the people. In some cases, this is not necessarily a negative thing. Through religion, certain practical methods of hygiene and ways and means of getting along with one another were imparted. This allowed civilization to grow without imploding under the weight of mass disorder or distrust of strangers. Additionally, religions tended to be seen as beneficial by the societies to which they ministered, feeding the sick, healing the ill and tending to the strata of society that was usually ignored by the secular leadership.

However, for whatever reason, the message was not necessarily entirely beneficial. Most religions preach exclusivity - especially Christianity and Islam. All Western religions and several other religions, whether intentional or not, teach a subtle (and sometimes not subtle at all) ‘Us versus them’ way of looking at the world. Since each religion was supposed to answer the four Eternal Questions, they each preached that their answers were the Truth. Since people seem to believe that there can only be one Truth (because the religious leadership says there is only one truth) then all the other Truths preached by other religions must be false truths. Blatant oxymorons aside, and whether intentional or not, the result of this preaching was that those who ‘believed’ were to be trusted and those who didn’t believe, or didn’t believe the same way, were to be distrusted at best. Motives and intentions are non-factors in this. It may have been to benefit a few power-hungry priests. It equally may have been to benefit society in a purely altruistic fashion. It may have even been the perverse nature of man rearing its ugly head again, with people being incapable or unwilling to subscribe to the notion that there MAY be more than one truth. For whatever reason, it served every society poorly due to the simple fact that it made strangers out of neighbors and sowed the seeds of a mass dislike of strangers inside and outside of a given community.

While the communities of the times were generally insular and not given to mixing with other communities, it was relatively easy to stir up the population by saying that their beliefs were under attack by outsiders and something needed to be done about it. It was easy to maintain order among a population whose belief system differed not at all from everyone else’s. It provided security, continuity and comfort to know that everyone in that community was the same as everyone else. But because man resists change, any threat to the status quo would naturally be looked upon as suspect at best. Stirring a conservative, unchanging, unquestioning society to action took only the threat of change. Not to mention the fact that they had been indoctrinated from birth to believe that if they didn’t worship and follow the rules of THEIR belief system, they would suffer eternally for it after death. Both are powerful motivators that result in a change that was probably far more drastic than the imposition of an alternate belief system.

It doesn’t matter what the underlying motivation for this set of events to transpire was in the first place. Religion causes people to subscribe to a set belief system from which change is ardently, and often times violently, resisted. It matters not whether this is exploited for nefarious purposes by a crafty leadership. It is inherent in the belief system itself.

Thus the foundation for today’s religious practices were laid. Over a hundred generations, religion has been insinuated into the very fabric of most societies today. Professing peace and benevolence, all Western religions advocate peace and benevolence only among those who ‘believe’. For everyone else, under all doctrines and varieties of religion, if they do not believe and have faith in the particular brand of Truth as told by the individual religion’s leaders, then the non-believers are suspect at best. They are to be looked upon with pity or fear or compassion - but they are to be looked upon differently than those who believe. And no Western religion advocates a live and let live attitude. All of them require intervention in to the lives of those who are not believers in the same dogma so that the dogma can be related, promoted and passed on. If this intrusion was left to the individuals welcoming it, then there wouldn’t be as much as a problem as it actually creates. Keeping a religion to one’s self may actually help solve the problems the religion creates by it’s own existence. It would avoid forcing the religion on others and avoid that particular motivational process. But the impact on the individual a religion imposes - the experiences the individual must endure or exclude in their lives because of the tenants of their faith - is still a tragedy of unimaginable proportions. One does not need a religion in order to lead a life that is in keeping with actions consistent with maintaining a harmonious society. A religion is not required in order to instill a moral code, a sense of responsibility or the concept of self discipline. It is merely the imperfect means to a desirable ends. And within that imperfection lies all of the problems inherent in the world today.

Islam is not exempt from this criticism, either. While they were more often the targets of Christian religious fanaticism in the Middle Ages, they did not prosper that much because the religion is uniquely suited to the society from which it came and did not appeal to the Christian mind-set - which was the predominant religious rival at the time. The believers of Islam came about later than Christianity (by about 400 years) and started in modern-day Saudi Arabia with the appearance of the Prophet Muhammad. It swept the Arabic nations by appealing to the inherent distrust of strangers that Arabic culture tends to enforce. Unfortunately, Islam managed to tear down and weaken all the great Arabian Empires. Instead of preaching kindness and benevolence, it teaches contempt and suspicion for those who are not believers in Allah. If nothing else, at least it practices what it preaches, but it preaches a particularly virulent form of hatred of things not the same. When it was just a small religion of the Desert, it had little impact. Today, with the billions of dollars of oil behind it, it has become far more active in it’s attempts to eradicate all things not of Allah. Christians at least pay lip service to peace as the preferred method of the settlement of disagreements. Christian forms of “spread the word” are less violent but just as insidious. Islam’s more overt message is that if they are not believers, they are not truly Human, and therefore can be killed without incurring Allah’s wrath. Among other Muslims, however, violence is to be avoided. This applies, of course, only if the other Muslim believe in the same sect of Islam. For those Muslims who don’t believe the same way as other Muslims, they aren’t Human and can be exterminated without punishment.

So while Islam is more overt and destructive in its teachings of interpersonal relationships with those who do not believe the same way, Christianity does the same thing albeit in a less overt, and more hypocritical, manner. Christianity was established by the Apostle Peter, an individual who was interpreting the ‘teachings’ of his “messiah” - the historical existence of whom has never been established. His messiah preached goodness and light, peace and brotherhood and having a one-on-one relationship with the Almighty. The people to whom this Messiah preached were not used to hearing this since the religious leadership of the time didn’t preach this particular Truth. It was becoming something of an embarrassment, especially in light of the fact that the country in which this Messiah was preaching was, in fact, occupied by a conquering superpower and didn’t want any local troublemakers stirring things up. The leaders (both secular and religious) had things good and dissent in the masses would undermine their positions and prerogatives. Dissent in the form of an “overly popular” preacher was seen as a threat to the powers that be, so the messiah was crucified basically for not preaching the company policy. (Going into the fact that no Roman records exist detailing the crucifixion of a prophet as depicted in the Christian book of fairy tales called the Bible would be moot and unnecessary. Whether it actually happened or not doesn’t change the fact that billions of people believe it did.).

The apostle Peter, who much later established Christianity, was a far more militant individual and advocated many more things than what his Messiah probably ever intended - if he, in fact, ever existed. Benevolence and peace were fine doctrines to live by, when one doesn’t live in a country militarily occupied by a foreign Power with foreign Gods. This political situation, along with the fact that Christianity was a cult for hundreds of years, forced underground and persecuted by the prevailing powers that be - both religious and secular - probably accounts for many of the militant positions taken by later preachers of Christianity and could well have led up to the Crusades several hundred years later.

The upshot of it is that while it preached benevolence and peace, by and large the practitioners of Christianity advocate an us versus them attitude that is divisive and frequently violent in it’s expression.

Another thing which most Western religions have in common is an inherent lack of respect for the living. This may sound strange, however, the major focus of Western religion is on the state of the individual’s soul when they die. This gives the impression that as long as the soul is ‘good with God’ then nothing else matters. From this point, things disintegrate into so many fine points of doctrine that it’s impossible to refute them all in a limited about of space, but the upshot of this preoccupation with souls is that the body suffers. People fast, flagellate, endure hardships that no sane individual would willing do - except for the religiously devout (which is considered insane only if they hurt others). The idea of self denial is entrenched in western religions, sacrificing the body for the sake of the soul.

When one sees the human body only as a vessel, and an imperfect one at that, to be vilified, denied and cast aside, it becomes easier to imaging that everyone else’s bodies are the same. This perpetuates the idea that harming the body to protect the soul is a good thing and that the body has no relevance or true value. Further, if one sees the body as imperfect, and if perfection can’t be achieved by mortal man, then there comes the subliminal message that man is only good for God’s work and nothing more. This would be fine if everyone agreed that:
1. What God wanted them to do in the first place.
2. Which God was saying it.
3. Whether there was even a God in the first place.

What it all boils down to is a huge mish-mash of religions, doctrines, dogmas, pronouncement and proclamations that add up to a lot of pain and suffering for people. If God or Allah or Mugwump of the Rocks is all powerful and wants us to be happy and live in peace and harmony, they sure have an odd way of arranging things for that to happen. Religious leaders would say that the fault lies with Humans and our imperfections. We aren’t good enough. We are weak. We are insignificant.

People who think this are called neurotics when not referring to Religion. Whatever good religions did in societies where resources were scarce and the marginalized citizens of the society were left out in the cold has been more than offset by the intra-social dissension, strife and violence multiple religious sects of one religion generate as well as the inter-social war, terror and violence different religions create. Humans need their Eternal Questions answered, but they need it answered so that they can live in peace instead of pieces.

The religions advocating differences in belief, viewpoint, Gods or practice and who claim to have the one, whole, indisputable TRUTH do far more harm than good and should be abolished.

Chapter 4
Foundations
(Why we are the way we are.)

The simple truth of life is that there is no reason to be fighting over various Gods or beliefs. There are no Gods. The beliefs are simply unquestioned assumptions that those who are supposed to know better are right. They are not the truth.

Mankind tends to think that there is a higher power than himself. It is reflected in every religion in one form or another. This assumption on the part of multiple cultures and societies can be explained by examining the similarities between all of us. The foundations of religion lie within the essential nature of Mankind.

The first essential nature of mankind is that virtually all humans were born.

This may not sound like much of thing to point out as a similarity, but studies have shown that infants, even newborns, are amazingly perceptive of their environments. Further studies have indicated that mental and emotional development are greatly affected by interaction with care givers in infancy. These discoveries are relatively recent, although everyone knows that if you don’t interact with an infant, it may not thrive physically. Now the mental and emotional effects are coming to light as well. What ths indicates is that our early experiences help shape our mental and emotional selves. Since we all share this universal experience, it’s likely that it has affected us all in a similar manner. The experience of birth is much like the NDE’s described by those who experienced them. The long, warm tunnel with light at the end, the feeling of well-being and peace. The NDE may be nothing more than the brain recalling the experience of birth when it is put into a chemically similar state. But whether this is the case or not, having this experience is universal for humans.

Going one step further, we are also biologically similar to each other. From a physiological point of view, we are far more similar than dissimilar. We agree on what we perceive most of the time. We are self-aware, our brains work basically the same way. We all have the same basic needs of food, clothing and shelter. We all dislike pain and seek pleasure. We all want to be liked. We share the same instincts and the same general reflexes responses.

Any idea or concept impinging upon the physiological status of the body will have a profound impact on the individual. All religions have some impact on the physiological status of the body. Since our brains all work basically the same way, we can contemplate complex concepts, such as punishment and reward, without having experienced that punishment or reward first-hand.

Another commonality is that virtually all humans are raised around some kind of authority figure, be it parents, guardians or something else. The exact person doing the raising isn’t that important. What is important is that all humans have very early indoctrination to the concept of a powerful authority figure. To a child, adults are these powerful, mysterious beings who make their own rules, and run the small piece of their world as if they owned it. To a child, their voice is the voice of authority and absolutism. They also provide the food, the clothing, the shelter, the toys, the comforts. They remove the responsibility of living and ease the burdens of life when hardships are encountered. They feel their love, fear their anger and try to obey their commands, though they occasionally stray. After they are dutifully punished for infractions, they still know they are loved. Adults protect them, nurture them, help them and guide them. As has been said, this experience is a universal one. It indoctrinates the young so that they are comfortable with the idea of an all-powerful authority figure in their lives. It may well be that this common experience is the original genesis for the concept of gods. Once we’re adults, we know that other people aren’t all-knowing or all powerful. But we still crave the idea that there is some influence controlling our destiny.

Whoever thinks this kind of infant and childhood experience doesn’t leave a deep and lasting impression are wrong. As we grew up into adults, we learned how to stand on our own and to live in the extended family known as society. We were on our own, without the safety net of the family and the comforts of home. We had to guide ourselves, to make our own decisions and to rely on our own resources when things went bad. But our childhood memories, overt and subliminal, recalled a time when we didn’t feel insecure or lonely or afraid. We needed the salve of comfort the family brings to make it through the rough times life tends to throw at most people.

It therefore comes as no surprise that as one goes back looking at the Gods of old, once sees deities that differ from humans only in power. They were generally like humans but with special powers or influences over one or more aspect of life. The relationships, interactions and motivations of the Gods all seemed to have a purely human twist to them however. As people grew more sophisticated and society grew more complex the power and sophistication of the gods being worshiped reflected the increasing sophistication. In general, the older the God is, the more animalistic it is, but it also is endowed with very human traits and foibles. As the religions get younger and younger, their genesis was in a society that was increasingly complex. These younger religions have gods that are more and more like regular people, only with powers that ordinary people lack. Finally, we get the monotheistic religions which borrowed much of the creationism mythologies from the older religions, but cast a single, all powerful entity as the source of creation. This is the ultimate single, paternalistic authority figure.

While it may seem to be an illogical leap of concept from a somewhat powerful collection of godlets to one all powerful god, it is not that great a difference in concept as one would think. A single, all powerful entity was necessary to offset the powers of the human entity who held the slaves in thrall. The human entity was Ramses II and the slave nation were the Israelites. Whether the actual genesis of God was before or after the Exodus (an event with historical problems of its own) is really irrelevant. In one way or another the god of the Israelites had to prove itself more powerful than the single-most powerful manifestation of Earthly authority of the times - the Pharaoh of Egypt. If the exodus happened before the genesis of God, then a little revisionist history was written to prove God’s power. If the concept was created before the Exodus, which is possible as well, then it may have simply been a rallying point for an oppressed society.

In any case, it was the creation of an authority figure, a god more powerful than any human, that holds with the concept of an authority over an individual much like a parent over a child. That it was created in the image of man isn’t unusual. After all, the Pharaoh was a man and the society was generally paternalistic. Even if it wasn’t a man, the authority and power of a being who held his creations in esteem, punishing them like a parent when they did wrong and defending them from enemies is not a stretch of imagination at all.

To call God a parental substitute for the juvenilely inclined would be simplistic and cruel, but apt. God is a male (because men ruled and the father was the head of the household) and all things relating to the idea of theistic religions (monotheistic or polytheistic) tend to track back to the childhood impressions of adults. The angry, jealous and domineering God of the old testament points to the father figure and disciplinarian in the family unit while the New Testament gives way to a kinder, gentler God, reminiscent of the mother figure. (And this also explains a lot of the Islamic faith, which has no kinder, gentler side of the Koran and why the Arabic tradition of the subjugation of women and all things female tends to run stronger there than in the West). The transformation of the spirits of the sky when humanity was fighting with cave bears for living accommodations into the all powerful, all knowing, Almighty (by whatever name) was simply an extension of a basic human need. To not be alone in the universe and to have some guidance in a world that seemed increasingly chaotic and uncaring.

This can also explain why kids today seem so lost, spiritually. Innocence is a casualty of the information age and they discover at an ever earlier age that adults aren’t the all-powerful entities they seemed to be. This discovery tends to make a person more acutely feel the lack of comfort such an insight brings. To fill the void, they turn to all sorts of cults and non-traditional faiths that have sprung up in the last few decades to fulfil this inherent human need. They want and need guidance and structure and the comfort of knowing someone is in charge. Instead, they see the world turning on its ear, see that their parents, and the authority figures their parents look up to as well, fail to deal with the trials and tribulations life throws at them. If the parents are fallible, then their whole methodology for dealing with the world is equally fallible since it so obviously doesn’t work. Without that comfort, the children look elsewhere, beyond the tenants of whatever faith the parents adhere to.

Or, worse, the rationale of the religion changes to explain the bad things in such a way as to provide a scapegoat.

A scapegoat is a simplistic concept to used distract attention away from the fundamental flaws of a religion. It assigns fault for things that are considered undesirable. In Christianity, the most common scapegoat is Satan - a character that, until the New Testament, only had a bit part in the beginning and wasn’t even called Satan. Calling all things bad the work of Satan, or evil, is convenient. It makes a tangible enemy out of a concept. In this case, the ideas of good and evil - both concepts which have no validity in reality except those which we give them - are diametrically opposed. In the Bible, God is supposed to be so purely good that He can’t even SEE evil. And Satan is supposed to be so evil that he shrinks from good. Thus a convenient us versus them dichotomy is established as a framework from which everything in the world can be explained. No shades of gray. It’s good or evil. Theological scholars spend endless years arguing the merits of what would normally be a definite shade of gray in deciding whether it’s good or evil. Anything that happens that’s bad is evil and is the work of Satan. Anyone doing bad things is in league with Satan, which makes them evil. All things good derive from God.

In a world of increasing sophistication and complexity, shades of gray abound and no one can explain the events and motivations entirely in black and white terms. To attempt to do so creates the kind of confusion and dissent that religions are supposed to avoid. When too many members of a congregation start asking, “What’s it all about, Alfie?” and simplistic, unsatisfactory answers are coming back, the congregation is going to look elsewhere for those answers.

But religions today have one major Achilles heel: They can not change.

It’s not a matter of adapting to the social needs so much as the fact they have pretty much staked out an area and said, “All this and no more”. It’s the ‘no more’ part that has religions in a Catch-22 situation. In absolutist terms, the rules can’t change. If an absolute rule changes, then the validity of all rules might be questioned. If the rules are questioned, faith is lost and the entire house of cards that today’s religions have built up come crashing down. But the more society changes, the more pressure is put on religions to adapt or be left behind. The powers that be in the religions, in turn, begin delineating their lines in the shifting sands of social change ever more desperately as more and more people abandon the tenants of the religion for more practical means of living in today’s society.

Yet in doing this, the basic questions go unanswered, leaving people feeling as lost and alone and uncertain as they were before they began questioning their faith.

No one wants to be alone in a cold, cruel, complex and uncertain world, however the way religions are practiced today, loneliness and exclusivity are inherent beyond the immediate group and the religion is beginning to have difficulty properly serving the needs of the whole of society. A local center of worship is an extension of the family unit to which the adult really shouldn’t return if they are to shed their childish tendencies. While the longing for that familiar comfort is compelling, it is only the cry of the child within wanting Mommy and Daddy. So if the adult can’t have it in fact they try to recreate it in fantasy.

The problems is that children need guidance. Adults are supposed to be self-guiding. We have laws and ways and means of getting along (or not, as the case may be) that generally work for most people. We have ways to resolve conflict, to come together, to enjoy life without the heavy-handed overly dogmatic intrusions of a faith, the central figure of which never existed in the first place. There is no reason to seek beyond our own lives for a ‘higher’ power or greater purpose. We have enough to take care of on our own without worrying about pissing God off in the process. We do not need the parental, paternal figure of a God to guide us. We know how to do it on our own. We only want the comfort brought by having a parent who loves us unconditionally.

We also seek the answers to the four Eternal Questions. Religions make this attempt by building up a complex but undefendable rationale based entirely on a single source of information that is unabashedly biased and opinionated. Instead of seeking the Truth in the Bible, there are other answers to those four Eternal Questions not dependent upon the ravings of the delusional. It requires a mature and adult spirit to embrace those answers, the kind of spirit that can not endure those answers if that spirit is constantly clinging to its invisible, imaginary friend. Like so many adult things in life, the truth behind the answers to the Eternal Questions are not comforting. But they are so self evident, the truth of them should be blindingly obvious to those mature enough to accept the truth.

Imagine, if you will, that there is no God and never was. What would that imply about human behavior? Is there an explanation for things being the way they are if there was no God? How would human spirituality work without the influence of a fictional creation imagined to fulfil a desire for companionship? Without higher guidance, how does humanity grow?

Welcome to the adult view of things. The simple truth is that we’re it. What you see is what you get and frankly, what we get isn’t anywhere near our potential as a species.

But it’s lonely.

Yes, it is. On the other hand, you don’t have to be lonely. There are a lot of people out there and if you lack companionship, you can get a pet. A pet will teach you more about how to interact with other people than most people can.

What about human spirituality, miracles and God’s hand in things?

There is a power of the living human spirit. It’s not stronger than us, however. It takes a lot of us to make it work. Prayer has been shown to be beneficial for a statistically significant number of medically ill people. But one need not look further than ourselves for the source of this power. It is inherent in us while we are alive. One person can’t make a miracle, but one person may be able to direct the power of the human spirit to the benefit of others.

It may seem more like science fiction than spirituality, but if someone removed all the words God from the bible and substituted “Giant Pink Bunny” instead, one has a book of delusion of schizophrenic proportions instead of a religion.

So let’s return to the basics. There is no God. There never was. In the world, God seems to exist as a cipher - a mysterious non-entity of questionable and dubious need. There is no corollary to God in Nature and Nature does not come up with anything that doesn’t fulfil an ecological niche somewhere. Nature, by the way, is not intended to be presented as a separate entity. It is not a personification of a guiding force. It is merely the way life works. To say that life must be guided by something is to ignore about a billion years of evolution. There was no guidance. It just happened by the natural, physical and unguided forces acting on this planet. It can also all un-happen at any time by natural disaster.

Mankind managed to evolve intelligence (probably the first species on this planet to do it and it was a near thing more often than not) and then the Gods began popping up all over so that Mankind could explain how the world worked and to answer the four eternal questions. Lacking the insight or technology or time needed to discover the true reasons behind the workings of Nature and desperately needing those answers, Mankind made them up. But because nothing’s perfect, least of all the imaginations of men, the made-up answers to the Eternal Questions and all of it’s ‘supporting facts’ not only do not agree on the answers to the questions, many of them are blatantly contradictory and most of them are exclusionary to the point of paranoia. Instead of fostering togetherness and unity, it sows divisiveness, dissension, strife and war. If there was ever any one thing standing in the way of Human progress, it is religion.

Instead, what is really out there watching us, guiding us, nurturing us and killing off those of us who don’t worship it is... Nothing.

A void. The remote vastness of the cosmos. It is not capable of caring because it does not exist. We persist in using names and traditions and other methods of blighting our own enlightenment because our ancestors thought it was the Truth, sanctified it, wrapped it up in ceremony and tradition and marked it ‘Holy, do not touch!’. Almost no one ever enters a traditional religion by first examining the beliefs and questioning it’s basic assumptions. A practitioner of any religion is supposed to swallow the whole line of bilge by taking it on Faith - as defined in chapter one.

Instead of ridiculing a person for leaping into something as mind-altering and potentially dangerous as a religion, it’s encouraged. We indoctrinate our children with cutsie tales about murder, deception, rape and abuse - and that’s from the side that was doing ‘God’s Work’! The moralistic cant to the tales may have a place in society for teaching our young how to get along with others, but they do equal harm by differentiating others who do not practice the same belief system. The moral lessons can be learned without the smug righteousness and arrogant attitudes inherent in the religious stories we tell our kids.

So what is the alternative? We have nothing, there is nothing but us, we have no guidance, no path... We are utterly alone.

Yes, but we have us.

It bears repeating. We have US.

This is an amazingly simple, obvious and ultimately the most important fact and truth that is out there. We have us. We have the power. We have the glory. We have the responsibility. We have the blame. Until the vast majority of the Human Race understands this truth, and what it implies, we will continue to be an immature species.

The implications of this simple truth are indeed profound. There is no God, no Heaven, no Hell. The good is not God’s doing. The Bad is not Satan’s work. We did not create the universe, we are simply the products of it. Random, unplanned, unguided. We are here because we evolved into intelligence and became able to wonder about why we’re here.

Taking this into perspective, the implications of the essential nature of our existence are then quite obvious. We humans are the masters of our fate. If a leader says they are doing something for God or by his direction, then they are the blind leading the blinded. How many millions have died because a leader said they would do something for the sake of a God? The simple truth is that there is no God to do things for. And it is not, contrary to the popular saying, necessary for us to make him up. What is necessary is for us as a species to open our eyes and see what we have wrought. We’re not going to be forgiven for our sins. There is no one to forgive us except us. There is no punishment for the sinful after death. Death is the great equalizer and once life has fled, the unique consciousness and self realization of that individual is utterly gone forever. We can only do according to the way life IS.

We must respect each person as an utterly unique, fleeting accident of the universe. We are each unique because even if we share the exact same genetic material with an identical twin, our experiences set us apart from everyone and everything in the universe. We are fleeting because based on geological time, our life spans are so short than they barely have any impact at all. We are accidental because to say otherwise implies a purpose behind our evolution and Nature has no purpose - only natural responses to physical circumstances. We are the end product, of natural physical forces and the consequences of our own actions.

This is the simple truth for everybody. It cuts across cultural, moral ethical, religious and social groups. It is the single unifying factor beneath all other things in life. Whether one has faith in it or not is moot. It is true, proven, obvious and needs no faith or belief. It is a fact and no matter how many allegedly beautiful truths are destroyed by this allegedly ugly fact, it is moot. It only takes courage to face this simple, adult truth. Courage is not one of the things any religion requires. Faith, unquestioned obedience and such are all they demand. But an adult must face things that may not be pleasant to them and face it willingly, even eagerly. Why should that be different for a spiritual adult as well as a physical and emotional adult? Religions make you give up part of what you have earned, your efforts and mind, plus your infinitely valuable and short time in life, in order to prove you’re worthy. The truth is that all people have equal worthiness and how they spend their time, efforts and lives it is up to them.

But before anyone goes off thinking that this means there’s no responsibility to anyone for anything, think again. We have us. That means we are responsible to each other for our own actions. To protect us, we will do without those who do not respect us. If this means caging some of us up or killing some of us off, so be it. Adults generally learn to get along without grievously harming each other. Without getting into the nuances of the definition of ‘harm’, suffice it to say that adults, acting in an adult and mature fashion, aren’t likely to be causing anyone unnecessary pain or suffering.

The part that actually takes courage isn’t the nothingness that is death, but the knowledge that good is not better than evil, that there is no right and wrong except how we define them and that if we screw up (and we will) there is nothing to save us from the consequences of our own actions - except us. God isn’t going to reach down and give you unexpected strength to get out of a life-threatening situation. Four billion years of evolution are going to handle that just fine. But like anything in Nature, if you zig when you should have zagged, you pay the price. And that price may be more than you expected. But if there is any ‘salvation’ for you getting your butt in a bind, it is the good will of those around you because all there is to save your sorry ass is us. And when I say us, that means YOU, too. A person who relies on him or herself to get his or herself out of a jam is going to take less time away from folks who would otherwise respond to the need. But because we DO have us, it is a comfort to know that instead of wondering if God heard your prayer, almost all of the time, someone got the 911 call instead.

Another aspect of the courage necessary for this life is the fact that we are truly adults. There is no benign, loving parental figure watching over us. We stand on the precipice looking over the eternal darkness of death and have no comforting figure telling us that it won’t be that way. We have no one to forgive us when everyone else won’t. We must face the responsibility of our lives and make the most of them or fess up to whatever perceived lack exists in them. The ultimate courage is necessary to face the realization that:

Life is not fair.

There is no cosmic referee, no vindictive judgement, no paradise, no purgatory, no scales to balance. Life is simply what we make it and that is an awesome responsibility. Atlas with the weight of the world on his shoulders never carried a burden so great as the potential Human future. THAT, folks, takes Courage. With a capital C.

But we have us to ease the burden. Atlas was one mythological being. There are six billion of us, each shouldering our shares of the burden - some more than others. It can not be denied that everyone wishes to have a better world. We may not all agree on what better means, but at least we have common ground for discussion. Since God isn’t going to decide who’s right or wrong, we have to learn to cooperate together, find our common ground and build from there. Otherwise our devotion to figments of our ignorant imaginations are going to divide and destroy everything that mankind has worked for tens of thousands of years to build up. Does anyone have the slightest notion that the universe will care about the passing of the human race, let alone mourn it? I think not.

But think for a moment what our future would be like if we did find that common ground. What would things be like if we could put aside our petty differences and concentrate on what we have in common? We are each responsible for ourselves and everyone else. We would each promote the commonality we all share, helping our unique fellows. We may not like them - we’re not required to like anything - but our responsibility in life is to help others. And to receive the help of others when and only when it’s necessary to sustain the future of all. We would each have the responsibility to keep ourselves from becoming a burden to others but if we can not fulfil that responsibility by circumstance, then others share the responsibility of sustaining us until we can resume the burden again. It then becomes our responsibility to work toward resuming the responsibility to ourselves we have temporarily been unable to carry out. Call it mutual beneficence. The purpose of it is to make things lighter for everyone. If you are carrying your own weight, you may be able to carry a little bit more for those temporarily unable to do it themselves. A burden shared is lighter than one assumed alone.

Because we have us to rely on.

If one considers how far we have come because of strife, war, pain and misery, imagine how much further we could have gone through cooperation and mutual support based on the underlying truth that we all share the same basic needs and must accommodate them together. The only thing holding us back is our basic immaturity. The vast majority of the human race is not only not willing to embrace the reality of life, they are incapable of it. Like asking a first grader to do a triple integral, it is beyond the totality of life most people have thus far experienced. Before humanity is ready to accept the simple truth, they must first be prepared to abandon the supposed truths that have come before. In short, they must change - radically. Attitudes, customs, mores and traditions are all to be discarded. Given the resistance of most people to change, it is unlikely that the simple truth will evoke any radical revolution of thought, let alone action.

Change is uncomfortable, after all. Like a child staying in bed, the inertia of a society from a comfortable but ultimately unproductive and wasted effort to a mutually cooperative and beneficial, albeit much less comfortable endeavor will take decades if not centuries. Some parts of the world may never accept the truth. Denial is a human trait in that intelligence can lead us astray and tell us to believe something because it is uncomfortable to do otherwise. But if the rabbit believed the coyote would leave it alone because it thought that running was too much effort and uncomfortable then you have a dead rabbit and a full coyote. You also have a rabbit, a creature built for detecting predators and out-maneuvering them, denying the truth of its existence - that it can run and although uncomfortable, will die if it doesn’t - when otherwise it would live.

But the rabbit can’t deny its nature and will run when threatened and running is the only thing it can do.

Unlike the rabbit, not burdened with a mind capable of questioning its existence, mankind has built up so many ‘safe’ and ‘comfortable’ and damaging traditions that dismantling them will be a prodigious effort. There are aspects to religion that are beneficial. The helping of others in need. The comforting of those who are suffering. The instilling of some kind of a moral code. Providing a sense of community and family to the population at large. Providing a place to meet with a mutual understanding among the participants. After all, if religion did nothing but bad things, people wouldn’t long put up with it.

On the other hand, the long-term damage religion has done to the human condition can’t be denied. Like radiation, in small doses over a period of time, a person is likely to suffer little harm. But in massive doses over the short term, or larger doses over the long term, a sickness develops that may lead to misery, pain and even death. One chest x-ray may help find a problem and correct it. Ten thousand such examinations of the condition of the inner person is going to cause the insides to melt and the inner person to scar, mutate and die along with the outer person.

There is no need to deal with a spiritual side of humanity as if it was a hidden and mysterious thing. The answers are right there before us. Our commonality in essential nature unite us in body, mind and spirit far more than some theoretical supreme being. It is through mutual cooperation and benefit that we can find the path to a future unencumbered by the guilt, apartheid and shame religion imposes on us.

Chapter 5
Arguments

Without a ‘god’ in our lives, how do we deal with our spiritual sides? How do we define ourselves? Are we not special and unique? Is there nothing guiding us?

The questions of life beyond the four eternal questions are legion. The important thing to remember is that while there is no ‘god’ per se, there is a spiritual side to humanity. The question as to whether there is life after death is unsolved. While the anecdotal evidence is compelling, it is not conclusive by any stretch of the imagination. No documented experience of ‘life after death’ has ever proven the case one way or another. We have never had a note from the ‘other side’ detailing what happens beyond the threshold of death.

So assuming for the moment that there is no life after death, how then are the phenomenon which we use to ‘prove’ the existence of life after death explained?

The suggestion that hundreds of similar ‘experiences’ adds up to proof belies several erroneous conclusions. The first error is assuming these common experiences is ‘life’. While it appears that the people who have undergone near death experiences have remarkably similar stories regardless of culture, they all have another thing in common: They’re all human. Biologically, we’re all the same. A near death experience may very well be the human brain’s method of shielding the human psyche from its own demise - an experience with which no culture feels comfortable. It could also simply be the brains way of interpreting the signals of dying. The hypoxia and chemical imbalances created during times of high stress and trauma (as would be found in a dying person who does not want to die) could easily manifest itself as the proverbial ‘tunnel of light’ so commonly described by those who have come back from the brink.

Another common error is assuming that having some kind of an experience near death foretells what actually comes once death is completed. One does not necessarily follow the other.

While seemingly not relevant to this subject, an interesting experiment was conducted regarding ‘alien abduction’ cases. It was determined that exposing volunteers to a certain kind of magnetic field - one which can occur naturally, though rarely - can create the whole stereotypical ‘alien abduction’ experience. It was not a universal occurrence, however. Only a few volunteers had the experience. What this indicates is that many people can experience the same thing under the same stimulus. Since not all individuals who come close to death report a ‘near death’ experience, it may well be that those individuals who report a NDE are predisposed to the experience given the same stimulus. Assigning a mystical or paranormal explanation to what may well be a simple biological mechanism is the final common error found in NDE’s. People are predisposed to believing their senses. Even when their senses are, to say the least, unreliable.

This brings up another seeming non-sequitur in the argument of life after death, however helps support the case that what people think they have experienced may not be what really happened. In law, few things are more compelling than the ‘eye-witness’ on the stand testifying that the accused ‘did it’. Very dramatic, yes, but it’s often wrong. As with the regression hypnosis scandals of the 80's, used to bring out fine details not consciously ‘remembered’ and resulting in many charges of child molestation that never really happened, the human brain is only capable of interpreting what it experiences. As a storage device for perfectly recalling details, it is, at best, unreliable. This is because it can only remember what it interprets. If stimuli impinges on the brain, the brain attempts to interpret it in terms that can be understood. Once the stimuli has been interpreted, it is relegated to memory. It is the interpretation that is often in error. In the face of unexpected or unusual stimuli, the brain often misinterprets the stimulus, thus storing the memories as something that did not actually happen the way it is recalled later.

In short, the collective sum of our memories is based on how our brain has chosen to interpret the stimuli we have received. This does not mean our memories are perfect or that the events we recall happened the way we recall them. So it is not a stretch to say that a near death experience can be misinterpreted by a dying and hypoxic brain.

What about ghosts?

Putting aside for the moment that in virtually all theological doctrines, the existence of souls wandering around in the world is supposed to be impossible, the existence (or not) of ghosts falls into the same subjective category as near death experiences. Anecdotal evidence is compelling but is not proof. Stimuli is given, the brain interprets the stimuli and ghosts are the result because that’s the only thing the brain can come up with given the stimuli. The best documented cases of ghostly phenomenon - or paranormal activity - does not rule out the possibility that some other mechanism is at work. A mechanism that is less rooted in the ‘other side’ and more likely based on something more tangible than ectoplasm.

While this author does not wish to explore the metaphysical side of existence for the simple reason that it does not need to exist in nature and therefore probably does not exist at all, there have been documented cases of phenomenon for which no obvious scientific explanation exists. This does not mean that a scientific explanation doesn’t exist. There are aspects of our physical universe that have yet to be explored in depth and science as a discipline of the mind has only been around for a relatively short time. Despite this, it’s tainted with the almost indelible stain of religious viewpoints causing the unintentional and misleading tendency of labeling unusual phenomenon in religious terms: Demonic possession, hauntings, miracles, visions, etc. Rather than being a heaven or hell-sent experience, it may simply be that some individuals are better at sensing one of the 26 (and counting) dimensions postulated or proven by science in the last 50 years, but not yet explored.

And before anyone argues that one of these dimensions could be the home of God or Satan -or both - remember that if the existence of God could be proven, there would be no faith. Proving whether or not God exists would negate the very purpose of our existence based on theological teachings. Once we discover the means of tapping into some of these dimensions - bringing about travel to other stars and galaxies, exploring the possibility of other universes besides or own, finding a virtually limitless supply of ‘free’ energy or maybe just finding a better way to build a mousetrap - the matter will be settled regarding whether or not one of those dimensions contains deities we call ‘God’. The upshot of all this is that the argument against God’s existence can eventually be proven while the argument in favor of his existence can never be proven. What is proof? Truth.

Do any of these arguments actually negate the possibility of life after death? In a word, no. The jury’s still out on that. But adding the whole theological burden to the idea of life after death (heaven and hell, limbo and such), is all unnecessary. It’s a religiously induced spin put on an aspect of life for which no one has conclusive answers. It is the only way that religion can answer the Eternal Question: Is there life after death.

As a carrot and stick method of compelling obedience, religious dogma about life after death effective. After all, the concept of heaven and hell are compelling to most people. Human nature says that when someone hits you, you hit them back. Retribution is a very human concept. Any animal that loses a fight recognizes the dominance of the animal who won and peace is restored. With humans, peace is about the last thing that happens. Just look at the situation in the Middle East. But if there was punishment for bad behavior and reward for good behavior and it all happened for eternity, wouldn’t that be more effective in controlling the unruly in society? Since the religions define what is bad behavior and good behavior, it’s easy to label actions according to the prevailing needs of the powers in the religion. What started out as sensible admonishments (don’t eat pork since pork often contains trichinosis which can be fatal unless the pork is prepared just right ) became bad behaviors since it’s easier to simply say that God says pigs are unclean and you can’t eat them than it is to lay out detailed guidelines on how to cook pork. Other religions say as long as you prepare some things just right, you can eat them. This interjects the religious ritual into daily activities, reenforcing the power of the religion over the people.

Stating that there is a life after death, and then defining exactly what it is and what it’s like and what to expect is a wonderful way of answering one of the Eternal Questions, but it’s also completely unproven. It’s like an urban legend. The outcomes are so satisfying - that the righteous are rewarded and the bad guys all roast forever even if it doesn’t happen in life, they get it in the end - and the promise of untold reward is so compelling to a population that, until recently, thought that riches meant a good blanket, food on the table and a roof over their heads, is it any wonder that people did as they were told? It fits with people’s desire for revenge and personal greed. But just because a lot of people believe something, or have faith in something, for a long time does not mean it exists. The length of time a particular notion has been kicked around doesn’t give it validity when being illuminated by the light of truth.

On the other hand, since no one has ever come back and said yea or nay about what’s on the ‘other side’, it’s better to be safe than sorry, right? Better to kowtow to the religious cant than be caught for eternity roasting in the fires of Hell, huh? Hardly. Since the effects of myriad religions on the human experience is, for the most part, negative, it’s better to be knowledgeable than gullible. It might be fine for the individual to have their own beliefs, but when those beliefs are spread to others, and no one believes exactly the same, the natural tendency in human nature is to compel compliance. In compelling compliance, it forces those who don’t believe the same way to act to defend themselves or be forced to give up their own beliefs or life. The disadvantages of religious practices on humanity as a species far outweigh the benefits of religion to an individual. Besides, since there is no God, God isn’t needed in death. There are other more plausible possibilities to explain what is experienced at the threshold of death. While there may be some kind of awareness after death, available evidence tends to indicate that there is not. So while there may or may not be life after death, it’s certain from a natural point of view that there is no supreme being involved in the process. This means that all of the carrot and stick religious reasons - good and bad - for toeing the religious line are invalid.

What about prayer?

Medical studies have proven that those for whom others have prayed have gotten better than those for whom no one prayed. And this is surprising? Not at all. The error is in the assumption is that the prayer is ‘answered’ and another ‘power’ intervenes. The more plausible explanation is that there is a power in the living human spirit that does not require a ‘God’ to use. Why do we feel better when we have the good regard of our fellows? That’s not God’s grace. It’s simple human nature. Whether there is a metaphysical component to prayer or not, it can not be denied that there is a power in prayer - focused concentration. The Fakers of Tibet have exhibited remarkable powers of concentration. This exercising of a natural process is only a manifestation of the power within all of us. Given enough time and training, every one of us could do the same kinds of things. But it all begins with concentration, and prayer is focused concentration.

It may come as something of a shock to those who are not familiar with ‘religions’ older than the big three Western religions, virtually all major practices within these religions were stolen in one form or another from then-current religious practices. Holidays are a major example, but the practice of prayer (or focused concentration) predates the big three religions by millennia. It’s very possible that this focused concentration works to direct energy toward the goal upon which the concentration is focused. It does not require a guiding hand or divine intervention to reach the goal.

Further, how often do people pray for something and how often do they get it? Chance alone can dictate success or failure. Does the fact that someone prayed to win the lottery and then won it mean that God had anything to do with it? Given the number of people praying that they win and the eventual number of winners, it’s certain to happen to one of them sooner than later. The same rationale can be applied to all event-answered prayers. Someone, somewhere will be praying for virtually anything and that someone, somewhere will eventually get what they prayed for. Does this mean that everyone will have a prayer answered? Almost certainly. It won’t always be the same prayer, but the simple laws of chance dictate that if you ask for enough things, you eventually get one.

In the case of prayer, people naturally believe that God handed them a gift - or they end up rationalizing the lack of action as a test, or some other such palliative balm to soothe the bitterness of disappointment. After all, for the true believer, it doesn’t do to be pissed with the Almighty.

So the disappointments - which happen far and away more often than the successes - in prayer are rationalized away and the successes are touted. This method of promoting an idea is the same one used by ‘fortune tellers’ to promote their careers. They highlight their successes and bury their far more numerous failures. Of course, it helps if they call their ‘gift’ a god-given privilege, or some other such nonsense. The point is enough monkeys banging on enough typewriters for long enough will eventually produce a Shakespear play. It’s not divine. It’s statistics.

In the case of so-called miraculous healing, to say that it is the result of divine intervention is like saying the Easter Bunny causes the sun to rise. A natural occurrence is given a supernatural explanation. Given the number of people who attend religious services to find a ‘cure’ and the number of spontaneous remissions there actually are, it’s statistically inevitable that many of those who were ill will spontaneously heal. By whatever natural mechanism it occurred, it does not require divine intervention to happen. The power of concentration may have something to do with it as well, but it does not require a god in any way, shape or form.

It could also be as simple as knowing that when other people care, the knowledge alone can give the sick and injured the will to fight for life. (And in an aside, if heaven is so wonderful, why do people pray to live longer?) What ‘power’ there is may only reside within us and is not transferable. The bottom line is that in neither case - metaphysical or not - does the existence of a god have anything to do with anything. Whether the result of prayer is a projection of part of the living human spirit, or simply an enhanced need on the part of a naturally gregarious and community-oriented species to know that others care about them, the ‘miracles’ of prayer do not require divine intervention to be explained.

What about the visions?

What about them? Visions have rarely ever proven true and it’s like the alien abduction theory. Many different medical conditions can produce hallucinations which seem to be of divine influence. Also, in virtually every case of religious visions, the individual undergoing the vision was strongly indoctrinated in a religion, whether they believed or not. A predisposition toward the religious culture tends to set the brain into interpreting unusual stimuli in a familiar if not believed pattern. It may very well be that for whatever reason, these individuals plug into the ‘cosmic consciousness’ and can ‘see’ a future. That’s not to say that the future they see is the one we ultimately end up with, however even if they are getting a straight, true and real vision of what is to come, it does NOT necessarily mean that it’s actually from a divine source. It’s simply being interpreted that way due to the predisposition to believe in it as such. It raises the question as to what the angels would look like if everyone believed the Easter Bunny was God.

What about history?

There is no historical evidence that a Jesus of Nazareth was ever crucified as described in the bible. Mass hallucination is an easy, more probable and likely explanation of the witnessed ‘miracles’ of other prophets. A mob put together takes on a life of its own, acting and believing according to the rules of the mob. Ask any police officer this, or any innocent bystander who got caught up in the moment of a mob of people and did something so completely out of character for them that they do not consciously recall doing it later. It happens all the time and there is nothing miraculous or divine about it. Historical evidence of biblical events is not terribly supportive and what little there is in evidence tends toward other, more earthly explanations of the events. Given time, erroneous repetition and the sanctity of religion, it’s no wonder that most of the miracles of the bible were never closely examined. Despite the predilection of many religious practitioners to say that the bible is the literal, true word of God, virtually all historical events as described in the bible can most likely be explained by purely natural and not infrequent phenomenon. It is the interpretation of how and why these events occurred that is called into question. It must also be remembered that many of the events described the bible (whether they actually happened or not) were used to highlight and illustrate desirable and (more often and not) undesirable behavior to keep the masses in line. The righteous always won. This isn’t surprising since the victors always write the history books and the victors always think they’re right.

It often happens when serendipity hands someone an opportunity that the fortunate someone ends up saying ‘I meant to do that’. It is most likely that the intervention of the divine as well as the overall motives as described for the events in the bible were written into the script after the events happened so that the righteousness of the victors could be justified. Considering some of the heinous things done in the name of God in the bible, it’s understandable why folks would want to put a religious spin on things to vindicate the tactics or the outcome of the event. This is entirely in keeping with human nature and does not require the existence of God to explain.

Do we have to get rid of religion?

Frankly, yes. The damage that god-based, theocratic, organized religions do to the overall of human society far outweighs the benefits. However it can not be denied that these religions do good for many people in the short term. So the actual question should be, do we have to throw out the good with the bad and the answer is no. Having the physical structures, the congregations and the wealth that churches collected can be changed instead toward better social assistance to those who need it.

Remember, by the tenants of the philosophy of no-God, every person is responsible to himself and for himself and to others equally. If a person requires assistance, it should be given. Assistance is just that - assistance. It’s not supposed to be a lifestyle. A person can not survive on assistance alone for an indefinite period of time. And assistance isn’t only supposed to be financial. Assistance is defined as short term aid to put a person back on their feet. This includes education, shelter, food, clothing - whatever is necessary, at a minimum, to assist a person. A person being responsible to himself and others will do all he can to get back on his feet as quickly as possible so as to ease the burden on the part of others for assisting him. It’s a very rational approach to life. Since religions tend to reenforce the notion that everything is in God’s control, a lot of people seem to let God guide them and if God doesn’t happen to be directing things that day, they settle for just getting by on the generosity of others - forever.

The warm fuzzies that a lot of folks get at worship can be replaced by community service. Instead of paying lip service to a religion, people who are so inclined will give their time once a week to help others directly, instead of indirectly. Regular church-goers are a small percentage of most religions. This small percentage, however, represents a volunteer force of unprecedented size. Instead of everyone gathering on a regular basis at a pre-set date and time, schedule folks to come in when their physical presence is needed, or to contact them when their insights are needed more than their physical skills. Such an effort on the part of a ‘congregation’ would make the community services performed by today’s churches look like rank amateurs and probably help more people in the long run. All this without the stigma, guilt and brainwashing that accompanies today’s church-based efforts at community assistance. Since the effort, ideally, would be universal, there would be no competition for funding between different philosophies to provide the same services in the same area. It would make community aid more efficient and reach more people who would need it.

The sense of community could be created by sponsoring get-togethers, events and such entertainment as is already offered by many places of worship. While it has never been the policy of most churches to exclude non-church members from these events, the reason these get-togethers are sponsored is to both entertain the congregation as well as attract new members.

Won’t morality suffer and vice and sin increase?

In short, no and no. First of all, people who are responsible to and for themselves and others are the most moral individuals on the planet. It’s the tendency on the part of today’s people to say ‘my past made me do it’ or ‘I ate a Twinkie and couldn’t control myself’ that gives rise to the trend of casting responsibility for one’s actions on someone or something else. These spurious and lame excuses don’t wash with the self-responsible. The self responsible may do things that are considered ‘sinful’ in the eyes of the church, but since the church is interested in controlling virtually every aspect of a person’s life, there are a lot of behaviors that the church considers sinful but for which there is no special social stigma unless the behavior adversely effects another person. Sin, as such, wouldn’t exist since it is a concept and extension of morality. Morality is defined as the limits of acceptable behavior on the part of an INDIVIDUAL. If we’re talking about the limits of acceptable behavior within a society, then it’s ethics about which we speak. The group (society) must, by definition, have a broader range of acceptable behavior than the individual, unless all people within the group individually agree without reservation for every behavior known to mankind on whether each behavior is acceptable or not. Since this is clearly impossible for any group of significant size, then morality remains the domain of the individual and is not preached except to say that any behavior is allowed provided it does not cause direct, intentional physical or emotional harm to another person. Any unintentional harm caused must be addressed to the mutual satisfaction of the affected parties.

There are going to be other questions, of course. After all, coming out and stating that there is no god tends to make people nervous. Most people are so rooted in blind obedience that they will never investigate the truth, let alone believe it - despite the far more provable and less imaginative evidence in support of it. So it comes down to how well the Eternal Questions are answered by this change in social viewpoint.

Chapter 6
Answers

As promised, here are the short answers to the four Eternal Questions:

1) Where did we come from?

We evolved over eons, developed intelligence through natural processes and wound up dominating the planet.

2) What is our purpose in life?

What we make it.

3) Is there life after death?

Probably not

4) Is this all there is?

We have the whole universe. Isn’t it enough?

The answers to the Eternal Questions are:

1. Where did we come from?

This is pretty simple. We evolved. Some ardent believers in the poor fiction that is the Bible’s version of ‘creation’ would have you believe that evolution is a theory. They want you to believe that evolution is not morally based and because it is a theory is, in fact, false. The simple truth is that though the mechanism of evolution is somewhat disputed, evolution happens. How it happens is the only theory. Some say it’s survival of the fittest, some say it’s mutation, some say it’s adaptation to the environmental changes, some say a combination of some or all of these influences. The simple truth is that it happens, by whatever means.

Some would argue that the world exists and it had to come from somewhere and therefore it came from God. Nature has shown us that aggregation of space debris will create planetary objects and stars. The physics of planetary creation are pretty well understood. In fact, the Big Bang theory is now an accepted viewpoint in the overt ‘creation’ of the universe. That said, many religious leaders have conceded the theories of creation as delineated by science, but added that they were ‘guided’ by God. This is like saying the sun coming up is guided by God. It just happens. Guidance is not needed. We are simply the products of about 25 million years of evolutionary influences. Had an asteroid not hit the Earth 65 million years ago, Mankind would probably never have arisen and we may have become a planet of saurian carnivores. And asteroid impacts are random events rather than divinely guided miracles. Just because we developed the ability to realize we’re thinking doesn’t mean anyone had anything to do with it.

The adult point of view is that we are basically a bunch of shaved apes. If you don’t believe we’re descended from apes, take a tape recorder to any amusement park or horror house and capture the sounds people make when frightened or disturbed. Next, take the tape recorder to any jungle with apes who are frightened or disturbed. Try to explain the difference.

And some of the questions are unanswered here. Where did life come from on earth? Did it develop naturally in the nitrogen-rich ooze of our planet? Or was it brought by comets in the form of amino acids? The jury is still out on this and may end up staying out forever. An experiment was conducted about fifteen years ago where scientists lanced electricity through a mixture of hydrogen, oxygen, carbon and nitrogen and actually formed primitive amino acids - the precursors of life. The theory is sound. It’s merely the mechanism that’s in question. We didn’t come from anywhere. We’ve been here all along.

2) What is our purpose in life?

This one is entirely up to us. As adults, we must be self-motivated. Many of us find parental substitutes to motivate us to do as we should. A real adult needs no such external motivation. They are able to set a goal, make a plan and stick to it, or adapt as needed until the goal is reached. So our purpose in life is what we as individuals make of it. However, there are responsibilities that can’t be denied.

Some might argue that our purpose is the perpetuation of the species, or to pay homage to the God that created us. Well, we have already dispensed with the notion of God creating us and have moved on from there. Perpetuating the species doesn’t necessarily mean procreation. It simply means making our environment as conducive to the continued health and well-being of the species as we can. That alone gives us plenty of purpose. Our planet is pretty messed up, thanks to the idea that God gave us dominion over it. Unfortunately, we don’t have God to make us clean up our room. We only have ourselves. And we had damn sure better get a move on, or we will end up being the only known species in the history of the universe to commit suicide by filth.

Beyond that, and environmental concerns, big as they are, aside, we have a responsibility to each other to make our lives as fulfilling as possible. Moderation here is the key. Excesses only waste things and when something is wasted, it is deprived from something else. In the case of our lives, is it necessary for one person to wolf down a 12 course meal when others are starving? Religion tells us to be kind to others. It also tells us that when we die, we will be in a better place. In this two-faced manner, we can contain the hypocrisy of conspicuous consumption and egotistical behavior. After all, we can send a few dollars over there thus fulfilling our religious obligation to help others and then eat all we want, knowing that we’ve helped and that when they die, they will be in a better place. Rather than indulging our appetites, if we instead indulged our fellows in their needs and wants as much as possible, learning to give and take as adults instead of children, our world would begin to heal most of the scars of divisiveness that religions have caused. Most religions have a ‘season’ where the message of peace and goodwill is supposed to predominate. Why only for that season? Why not year round peace on earth, goodwill to mankind and the world? Our purpose here is what we make of it. As adults, we have the responsibility to make that purpose a good one. Beyond that, it’s entirely up to us how we do that.

3) Is there life after death?

The short answer: no.
The longer answer is: there’s no reason to believe life after death exists, but no one can prove it one way or another.
The comforting answer: It doesn’t matter.

These are going to require explanation. First of all, the necessity of life after death does not exist in Nature. Because nature rarely turns out an ability not needed in a creature’s survival, the concept of a ‘soul’ that transcends death is not utterly necessary to the survival of the species, namely good old Mankind. This makes the existence of the soul as explained in biblical terms utterly impossible. So the odds are overwhelming in favor of there being no heaven, no hell, no nothing after death.

The facts thus far is that though there’s no reason to believe life after death exists, no one knows. This is not an answer to the question, per se, but a statement of fact. No one can prove it one way or another. Religions have used this uncertainty as part of the carrot and stick approach to social behavior modification. They play on the fears of death with the promise of hell for sinners and heaven for those special enough to make it there. But take away God, and the whole heaven and hell issue goes away, too, leaving us with what we know to be true.

All the evidence for life after death is entirely anecdotal. Stories of ghosts and apparitions and hauntings have been told and retold world-wide. Does this mean that the spirits of long-deal people can roam the Earth? Not too likely. One thing all of the ghost stories and legends have in common is PEOPLE. As a sentient species, we can conceive of many things, except our own extinction. We find it difficult or impossible to think of a time or circumstance where cognition ceases completely and there is a night we do not perceive because there is no ‘we’ to perceive it any more. Instead of the blackness of oblivion, we prefer to speculate on the possibilities. After all, no one REALLY KNOWS what happens when life stops. Those who think they know have only belief and no way to prove it. It’s possible that proof of life after death HAS been discovered - and it doesn’t jibe with the established religious hypotheses so has been suppressed by the religious leaders of our time. Such a thing would be in keeping with the leader’s desire to stay in power. After all, if they would protect child predators, why not keep the knowledge that their whole set-up is a fraud secret?

It would be nice to think that because we CAN think, we’re somehow special from the animals. Our behavior says we’re an awful lot more dangerous than any other predator on the planet, but that doesn’t necessarily translate to an energy that survives the death of the body.

Is it possible? Perhaps. There have been documented cases of people who had no brain activity accurately describing events that transpired around them, sometimes in rooms to which they never had access, during the time of no brain activity. According to medical science, this is not supposed to be possible. But in all such cases, the individual SURVIVED the experience to relate what they had experienced. Death, such as it is defined currently by medical science, was not permanent. It was only a death-like state. Therefore, since the body is capable of things beyond current medical understanding, it’s possible that some form of energy is connected to the body to provide an’ extra sensory perception’ or ESP. In the case of near-death experiences (NDE’s), the brain may undergo a chemical response to the stress and trauma, resulting in the kinds of phenomenon that have been described by such individuals. A chemical response to traumas and stresses would NOT show up on an EEG. A person may be electrically flat, but chemically active during a death-like state. What happens when the brains’s chemical activity is reduced to zero as well? Again, no one knows.

4) Is this all there is?

And now, the long-winded explanations:

At the heart of the matter is essentially two viewpoints. The current, religiously dominated and established viewpoint is paternalistic, male centered, comforting and essentially that of a child. It caters to the individual, and supports the immediate group. Its doctrines tend to make enemies out of those who do not believe the same and causes strife between groups who do not share their viewpoints exactly. It is controlling of all aspects of a persons life by threat and reward, causing untold guilt for those who aspire to live up to near impossible standards.

The viewpoint delineated by this book is an essentially adult outlook. It’s non-gender related and is based on what is already known about the way the world works. It caters to both the individual’s and society’s needs, but lacks the comfort of easy answers. It does not depend on individual guilt, threats or intimidation to compel beneficial behavior, relying instead on reasonable social expectations on the part of everyone to help benefit everyone. It is unifying instead of divisive in nature because it addresses what we have in common with everyone rather than what sets us apart from everyone else.

The answers to the Eternal Questions are hard, cold and factual - such as life often is. It takes a mature, adult point of view to accept them, not because we want to, but because that’s the way it really is. We could delude ourselves with pleasantries and fairy tales and mythologies until we’re buffered from the harsh truth with a comfortable padding of illusion, but the illusions we have created for ourselves blind us to our potential and act to bring us down. As an intelligent species, it falls to us to derive our own goals and destiny beyond mere survival and to put aside that which hampers us from achieving the goals we set out for ourselves.

Of the four Eternal Questions, only one really matters. What is our purpose in life? The question of life after death will be settled by everyone on an individual basis eventually. Evidence tends to indicate that there is no continuation of awareness. But we’ll all find out eventually. So the issue is truly moot. As to where we came from, that is germane only to the extent that we shouldn’t forget our ties to the planet upon which we evolved and upon which the products of our intelligence can wreck so much havoc. We’ve claimed it as our house therefore we have a responsibility to keep it in order. Finally, when asking about whether or not this is all there is, what of it? Most people have enough trouble coping with what we already have. If there’s more, it should be planned for, but if there isn’t, wouldn’t you agree that our plates are pretty full as it is?

The future must be planned for and that is where the only truly important Eternal Question comes in. Why are we here? What is our purpose in life?

As mentioned, if there is a God and if God has a plan, but we can’t know the plan, then we are driving blind, trusting to a deity in which no three societies believe with total agreement. Every religion has a different bus driver and every passenger believes in their driver, but every bus is going a different way and the passengers disagree as to the destination. This is not the way to run a planet and if we are to survive as a species, we must come to some kind of agreement in principal about basic goals and destinies.

Amazingly, we already have. It’s just been overlooked in the rush to condemn everyone else for their different customs and unusual beliefs.

The main theme in this book, aside from disputing the existence of theological deities and pointing out the overwhelming pitfalls believing in such things causes, is the commonalities we share among us all. Our collective, shared experiences - life, death, parents, attitudes, basic desires and natures - the things that make us human. Those are the things upon which we must concentrate if we are to survive as a species. We are not to be united under one God to fight for a ‘good’ the definition of which no two religions entirely agree, but under one naked truth: survival.

But survival isn’t merely existing. It is thriving and growing. Mere existence, merely continuing the species for the sake of survival alone, is simply stagnation. Stagnation has its place in nature but that place is usually found on the threshold of death. In order to thrive, we must rise above the near-death of mere existence and learn how to cooperatively achieve our common goals. We all want to be happy in our lives. That much we can all probably agree upon. But instead of achieving happiness by the old, childish, self-centered way of me, me, me, it must be tempered by a mature, adult perspective. The goals of religions in general are good medicine - to get along and help others. The trouble is that the side effects of religion are poisonous to future survival. Many religious doctrines demand deprivation for the sake of theological rules and for no other apparent purpose. In obeying an edict from a non-existent being, people end up suffering guilt, deprivation and unhappiness.

Unfortunately, mankind seems to require reasons for doing things to help others. A rationale for behaving civilized, as it were. It isn’t enough to know that they’re helping their fellow man. With religion, the rationale is that the reward in heaven that awaits a person who helps others or ‘does god’s work’, is far greater than for those who do not. It’s not altruism, it’s greed. Even when those who say they help others in the name of whatever deity they worship just because it gives them a good feeling, then in heaven when the rewards are handed out, do they give the treasures back? Finally, there is always that little bit of self promotion religions always include when it comes to handing out aid. They’re always looking for converts to their belief system, after all. How many religious charities give out their aid anonymously with no strings or propaganda? None.

With a system devoted to aiding those less fortunate than one’s self because having one person lower brings everyone down a little, the same basic appeal to greed can be used, although in a less base manner. Instead of appealing to a person’s good nature, they know that when they help others, it puts more people at their own disposal for when THEY need help. And we ALL need help at one time or another. If the good feeling of assisting a person in need isn’t enough reward, it will alleviate the guilty feelings one might have when seeking the assistance of others. Further, the rewards of assisting those in need are realized in LIFE, where it may actually do someone some good, rather than in death when aid to the living is impossible. Converting to the cause isn’t necessary because it’s the basic responsibility of every human to help. It’s not because some deity or priest said so with the promise of a posthumous reward. It’s because we all have the same things in common and those necessities should be met. We all have just one life and making life better for everyone makes life better for you as well. Finally, everyone wants to have the good regard of their fellows. By going above and beyond in helping those who are in need of aid, those who do more than the minimum of what is expected will earn the good regard of those who recognize a truly altruistic motive, not to mention the gratitude of those they help.

So in order to support a different rationale for doing the same kinds of things without relying on heavenly reward or hellish punishment, and without the divisiveness different religious viewpoints inherently engender, we answer the question of the purpose of our existence with far greater potential for fulfillment than anything religion has ever offered.

If one assumes there is a God and that God has a plan, but the plan is unknowable, how does that differ from saying the future is unknowable? The illusion of guidance may come as a comfort to some folks, but it’s like having a bus with an inflatable dummy at the wheel. Wouldn’t it be better if we took control and actively guided our own destiny as a species and as individuals?

That’s what we have. Our future isn’t in the hands of God, or Allah or Jehovah or any other deity of any religion. Our future is firmly in the hands of the same thing it’s always been in the hands of: us. There is no comfortable image of a wise and powerful being benevolently paving our way to paradise. There is only us, with our foibles, our pettiness, our irrationalities, stumbling blindly along, trusting to the nonexistent to get us to where we believe it plans to go. Our saving grace is that for the most part, religions aren’t inherently self destructive. That’s why we progress instead of regress. But imagine what our progress would be if we realized some basic truths about ourselves and strove to make realizing those truths our priority.

Everyone wants to live unencumbered by hunger, disease, thirst, the elements and fear. For most, being free of these few things is enough to lead a happy, productive life. If we make it the responsibility of every living person to help others in some way fulfil these basic needs, then the world will be a much better place than it is now. Religions have tried to address these problems, but they come with their own baggage that tends to sow more strife and grief than ease it. If we make it the responsibility of every person to tend to their own needs as best as they can as well, then we become a far more self-reliant, resilient and harmonious species than we are now.

An adult perspective means dealing with what is real, what is vital and taking responsibility for and acting upon that which must be dealt with in order to assure survival and prosperity. Concurrent with that is the realization that every life is unique and precious and must be preserved within reasonable limitations. Everyone is responsible for himself as well as to aid others, but also to never intentionally adversely intrude on the lives of others, except when those others have proven themselves incapable of civilized behavior and have cause intentional or thoughtless harm to others.

Of course, thinking before acting tends to place the bar impossibly high for most people. The simple fact is that most people are incapable of achieving an adult perspective on life. As a species, we humans are still very immature. However as we approach late childhood and contemplate adolescence, we begin to have glimmerings of what it may be like to have an adult perspective on existence. The bickering that has highlighted the day to day existence of individuals and societies since the dawn of civilization has, with the advances in technology, brought our world to the brink of self-annihilation. We can’t get along because we have no incentive to do so. Our childish mind-set has us fighting in a burning house and ignoring the flames. If we persist in this mindlessness, we risk the destruction of our species.

But if we can find the incentive, the rationale, to strive toward a future through cooperation, the future will be more assured than it is now. It’s time we put away our childish views with impressive-sounding names and put aside our childish and differing philosophies to favor the advancement of our fellows. Because, by advancing each other, by acknowledging and mutually supporting our common needs, we only advance ourselves as a whole.

Chapter 7
Conclusions

Our future is in our hands. What we become is up to us. We have no road map, no guiding light, no benevolent spirit to save us at the last minute. We are on our own, adults in an adult existence, and it is our responsibility for what happens next. If we blow ourselves into radioactive ash, infect ourselves with biological weapons, poison our air and world or descend into chaos over petty arguments about who’s right, it’s not because God thought us unworthy. We have no one to blame but ourselves. If we transcend our differences, build trust, friendship, cooperation, peace and prosperity, it isn’t because we’re following God’s pre-ordained path. It’s because we finally grew up and put away the petty childishness of youth and, as a species, matured into adulthood. The credit goes entirely to us for achieving a worthy goal

Such a transformation doesn’t rely on the lack of religion, but it does rely on the recognition and the dominance in our thinking of what we have in common. We must want to preserve our species, to nurture it and help it prosper, more than trying to settle who’s right or wrong or going on and on and on about differences that are entirely figments of our imagination.

Just remember, if one took out all the ‘sacred words’ from any religious writing, words such as God, or Jehovah or Allah and replaced them with ‘giant, pink bunny rabbit’, instead, a person espousing such a religion would be considered delusional at best and probably psychotic. Don’t let a couple of millennium of repetition and belief create a sacredness about a philosophy where none existed before. People thought the earth was flat for far longer than they knew it was round. It is in our nature to make mistakes. It is also within our capacity to learn from them. Religions were easy answers to tough questions. They soothed and mollified a species that had yet to come to terms with the consequences and responsibilities of intelligence. But as we grow, as the knowledge of how our universe works and in the ways and means of dealing with each other in an increasingly crowded world become more important in our day to day lives, we require more than easy platitudes and lock-step behavioral demands. We can put aside the inherently divisive fairy tales and mythologies of our past and begin to explore the wondrous possibilities and face the frightening challenges of our future with the strength of true unity and brotherhood. If the future is in our hands, as it’s always been, then it’s time we step up and take the reins of destiny in our hands without the delusion of some otherworldly guidance blinding us to our fate. At the risk of mixing metaphors, let us be the captains of our spaceship Earth with all the awesome responsibility and power that implies. We are not being led like sheep but are setting our own course. It is up to us to show the universe that we are worthy of taking our place in it or that we were not up to the challenges of intelligence and will remain forever locked in a self-destructive, self-defeating psychosis of our own making. Individuals may gain fame or infamy, but a species attains greatness or anonymity, survival or extinction.

By whatever method, we must throw out that which blinds us and holds us back from greatness. Gods and devils allowed us to live to adolescence, but we have very deadly, very adult toys now, and those toys can destroy those who do not acknowledge the adult responsibilities that come with their creation. For the time that we as a species are incapable of acting like adults in thought, word and deed, we will be vulnerable to the ignobleness of extinction. And for the time that we continue to pray to gods and fear devils, we will always be stuck in childish thoughts and words and deeds. Intentions do not offer survival. Platitudes will not bring back the dead. Prayers can not bring wisdom. Only the truth can set us free and the truth is hard and cold and without comfort - but it is the truth. Adults know how to face the truth, take it into their hearts, realize the power behind the truth of our existence and the unlimited potential for greatness that it brings to us. Being adult in thought and word and deed gives us the resolve necessary to make the tough decisions, to face the awful responsibilities because doing so together assures us of the potential to achieve what we all desire - peace, harmony, and prosperity.

Children need a parent and we can no longer afford to think of ourselves as children. If a parent is supportive and open-minded, they can be of great assistance. But if a parent is jealous, petty and suffocating, they can be a detriment. The gods of most religions are as petty as they come and can only suffocate its children and by doing so, suffocate all of us in our bid for greatness. It’s time we stopped crawling in the slime of our own jealousies, cut the umbilical cord and ceased suckling at the teat of ignorance. It’s time we learned to be on our own, face the cold, bitter winds of time and destiny and stand naked in the harsh light of the truth of the universe. It’s time we felt the power of our destiny as we realize that alone we are nothing but together, we are a force that can realize any potential we set our infinite minds to achieving. We may stand alone in the harshness of reality, but we have each other to rely on, to depend on, to support and to comfort. We needn’t stand alone with a non-existent deity shielding us from reality with delusion and empty promises. Instead, we stand with billions of our fellows, offering real support, delivering tangible evidence of our collective ambitions and goals. We need not travel anywhere and be afraid, for everywhere we go, we would have the support of those who know we all have needs and they must be met. We would be free of the yoke of guilt and shame and pettiness and enjoy life while supporting, revering and preserving life.

How wonderful and exciting would be a world where we can look at a person who is not the same and see what we have in common instead of that which sets us apart. The simple truth is that, aside from some minor things which make each of us unique, we are all basically the same. And in the face of that simple truth, gods and devils and philosophies of life are utterly meaningless if they do anything to in any way violate that one, simple truth. Some philosophies call others different things because of what they believe. The simple truth is that we can only call ourselves Human because that is what we ARE. Regardless of our beliefs, our appearances, our minds and our hearts, we are all HUMAN. And until we start relying on that one, simple truth, we will never achieve the greatness that could be ours.

References
1) Websters Deluxe Unabridged Dictionary, Second Edition, pp. 1527, Simon and Schuster, 1979, 2) pp. 169, 3) pp. 658

Messages From A Militant Moderate

Monday, September 27, 2004

Time for Democracy - 9/27/04

Wednesday, September 15, 2004

The Pros and cons of a conservative government - 9/15/04

Sunday, September 12, 2004

Step 1: The Simple Truth - 9/12/04