The Problem of Religion

The Problem of Religion

Suns of God: Krishna, Buddha and Christ Unveiled

Dr Raven Dolick MsD

Feb 12, 2016

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“The reproaching cry of heretic, infidel, atheist, etc., will be raised against the author of these lectures, by every fiery intolerant bigot into whose hand they may fall. But he alone is the true infidel who forsakes the laws of his nature, and gives up his mind to a belief in fabulous and demoralizing legends, which contradict all experience, and stand in opposition to the testimony of his own sense and reason."

Christian Mythology Unveiled, 1842

While the Western world begins its new millennium, little has changed in terms of religious understanding, and the world in general continues to be divided largely along the lines of faith. The proselytizers, proponents and propagandists of these various faiths persist in fighting over bodies and souls, in an endless religious tug-of-war that has ruined culture, wrecked minds and wreaked havoc. It also invades privacy and stomps all over individual rights. Religion is motivated by fear and insecurity: People want to believe, in God, Jesus, Krishna, Buddha—something, anything, so as not to feel so alone, helpless and forgotten. Life is a cruel, sadistic torment in countless places around the globe. This fact should create more questions than it does about whether or not there is any good god in charge of everything and whether or not religion has any value in the first place. Yet, in the face of tragedy, rationality and logic fail to win out over powerlessness that desperately needs to believe in the Other, somewhere "out there." What this insight reveals is that God is a popular concept not because people have reasoned it through and proved it true, but because humans are terrified of the opposite notion: If God is not, all is for naught.

The concepts of God and religion have varied greatly over the millennia, in the sense that they have been developed within cultural contexts, with odd details and interpretations based chiefly on race, gender, language and environment. Thus, goddess worship rather than god worship dominated in a variety of places globally for thousands of years, and gods and goddesses often have been of the same color and mentality, and speaking the same language, as the culture in which they are developed. These variances have led to a horrendous amount of suffering and terror, as fanatics of sundry religions, sects, cults, etc., have believed themselves superior to all the rest, and have attempted to force themselves upon everyone else. This aggressive behavior also is out of insecurity, as beliefs are flimsy things, and it is imagined that the more people who believe, the more these beliefs will be real. Not so, unless as a phantasmagoria, a nightmare....

The Intolerance of Religion

In this day and age, when the world becomes smaller than ever before, there is an increasing need for investigation and education in religion, as it is one of the most important and volatile of all human issues. Save for the few enlightened periods and places, throughout history people of faiths different from the ruling religion have been persecuted mercilessly. Oddly enough, the Roman Empire, which was notorious for hardship and horror, nevertheless exercised religious tolerance to an extreme degree; yet, cultures with the pretense of being more civilized than Rome terrorize and kill those who do not follow the prescribed path and preferred god. Thankfully, some nations have achieved a standard of not persecuting and prosecuting members of minority religions and non-religious freethinkers for "blasphemy" and "heresy." However, in many countries freethinkers, secularists, agnostics and atheists remain pariahs and outcastes, even though many of the world's greatest thinkers have been of this inclination.

Among the countless atrocities committed in the name of God and religion over the millennia looms large the practice of human sacrifice. This bloody and common ritual allowed for marauding Christian armies to justify the cultural destruction and genocide perpetrated in so many nations globally, including in the Americas, as a prime example. In other words, in order to stop human sacrifice, Christian armies sacrificed millions of humans. Moreover, the god of the Old Testament was hardly a paragon of peace and love, and the list of atrocities gleefully boasted about in the Bible is long indeed. As British royal physician Dr. Thomas Inman states in Ancient Faiths and Modern:

"…Is there any human king who ever promulgated a more bloody order than did Jehovah Sabaoth, the God which, amongst the Hebrews, corresponded to the Mexican god of war, when he commissioned Samuel to say to Saul (1 Sam. 15:3), 'Now go and smite Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have; slay both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass!' After such a destruction of the Midianites as is narrated in Numb. 31, the fearful slaughter, effected by Crusaders, of Jews, Turks, and heretics, is scarcely worth mentioning.

"…and surely, when our Bible, which is treasured by so many as the only rule of faith amongst us, details such horrible religious slaughters as are to be found in its pages, and abounds with persecuting precepts, we had better not talk too much about Mexican sacrifice. Was there any Aztec minister so brutal in his religious fury as Samuel was (1 Sam. 15:33), who hewed Agag into pieces? The Mexican was merciful to his victim; the Hebrew was like a modern Chinese executioner, who kills the criminal by degrees….

"Surely the Christians have too much sin amongst themselves to cast a stone at the inhabitants of Mexico.

"We find a very strong offset to the horror of Aztec cruelty in the very Bible, which we regard as the mainstay of our religious world. What, for example, is the essential difference between a Mexican monarch sacrificing one or ten thousand men taken in battle, and Moses commanding the extermination of the inhabitants of Canaan, and only saving, out of Midian, thirty-two thousand virgins, that they might minister to the lust of Hebrew followers? What, again, are we to say of David's God, who would not turn away from his anger from Judah until seven sons of the preceding king had been offered up as victims? And lastly--thought still more awful! what must we say of the fundamental doctrines of Christianity, that Jehovah Himself sacrificed His own Son by a cruel death; and not only so, but that He had intercourse with an earthly woman, and had thus a son by her, for the sole purpose of bringing about his murder?"

Furthermore, while there certainly was a tremendous amount of barbarity perpetrated by Mexicans, the Spanish propagandists have been accused of exaggerating the brutality in order to justify committing atrocities of their own, at which they were well skilled, per their own chroniclers.

Does Martyrdom Make a Religion True?

In another specious argument it is claimed that a religion is determined to be "superior" and "genuine" based on "miracles" and the number of people who have been willing to die for it. Concerning the "martyrdom" argument often used by Christians, Walter Cassels remarks:

"Every religion has had its martyrs, every error its devoted victims. Does the marvelous endurance of the Hindu, whose limbs wither after years of painful persistence in vows to his Deity, prove the truth of Brahmanism? Or do the fanatical believers who cast themselves under the wheels of the car of Jagganath establish the soundness of their creed? Do the Jews, who for centuries bore the fiercest contumelies [insults] of the world, and were persecuted, hunted and done to death by every conceivable torture for persisting in their denial of the truth of the Incarnation, Resurrection and Ascension, and in their rejection of Jesus Christ, do they thus furnish a convincing argument for the truth of their belief and the falsity of Christianity?… History is full of the records of men who have honestly believed every kind of error and heresy, and have been steadfast to the death, through persecution and torture, in their mistaken belief. There is nothing so inflexible as superstitious fanaticism, and persecution, instead of extinguishing it, has invariably been the most certain means of its propagation. The sufferings of the Apostles, therefore, cannot prove anything beyond their own belief and the question what it was they really did believe and suffered for is by no means as simple as it sounds."

Even in ancient times rational critics found the idea of martyrdom appalling. As Porphyry, the Pagan writer of the third century, remarked, "…it is not befitting the will of God--nor even the wishes of a good man—that thousands should be tortured for their beliefs…"

Moreover, Muslims have regularly martyred themselves—would a Christian then agree that Islam is the "truth faith?" Since millions of so-called Pagans have been willing to die for their faith, by this faulty martyrdom logic Paganism must be the "true faith!" In the final analysis, martyrdom proves nothing, except the fervor of the believer. Also, it should be kept in mind that, for many of us, those "Pagan" people who were tortured, killed and had their property stolen and cultures destroyed in the name of God, by whatever religious mania, were our ancestors. When Christians, for example, rant about "heathens" and "pagans," they are talking about our ancestors and, in many cases, their own. This "ancestor-hatred" is in exact opposition to practices found in many places around the world, dating back thousands of years, and has led to a tremendous amount of disrespect for ancient traditions, as well as for our own family members....

The Past Destroyed

When it comes to religion, alternative perspectives are considered highly suspect and are subject to intense scrutiny, held up to impossible standards of proof, while the accepted paradigm is lightly handled and can pass with little or no evidence at all. Those who step outside the box are dunned with requests for credentials and bibliographies, while believers in the mainstream ideology require no credentials except belief and seem not to need to read much at all, including the very "sacred scriptures" they defend. In any case, when one is doing investigative research, dating back thousands of years, one must use a variety of sources, ancient and modern. If one uses works too modern, the hue and cry is for "primary sources!" If one uses material "too old," the criticism is that it is "outdated." Hence, the scholar is put in a double bind, while the critic is never satisfied. In such a picky environment, it is a wonder anything important ever gets written or read.

The "outdated" argument becomes specious when it is understood that the work of more "modern" authors is nonetheless based on those who proceeded. To become a scholar one must study as much as is possible; obviously, whatever one is studying must have come before. The current studies are based on the past studies. No modern writer can possibly be called a scholar if he or she has not studied the works of the past; hence, he or she is using what detractors will call "outdated" material. Since true scholarship is founded upon the studies of the centuries and millennia past, it could all be deemed "outdated" by these illogical and impossible standards. It should not be necessary to point out this fact, but it often seems as if sense were not common at all, and every little detail, every meaning between the lines, must be clearly spelled out or else misrepresentation, misconstruing and misunderstanding will follow. In any case, the date of a book is frequently irrelevant, as truth is timeless.

Moreover, the so-called outdated scholarship on the origins of religion in general, and Christianity in particular, that arose in the past few centuries is actually superior not only in depth but also in perspective to what is often produced today. Furthermore, these various authorities preserved information regarding literature and iconography since destroyed—and there has been a great deal of destruction during the past three centuries, including two World Wars. Indeed, the reconstruction of the ancient world and its religion has been difficult to determine because of the passage of time and the vast desolation of cultures worldwide. The eradication of evidence has been so rampant and thorough that it is amazing anything can be said with any certainty at all. However, enough does survive, in bits and pieces that we can gain a good idea of what was going on, at least in the past few thousand years. When critics clamor for "primary sources," the din actually serves to rise up the fact of this criminal and shameful cultural destruction, the purpose of which frequently was to cover the tracks of conspirators gleefully plagiarizing others' religions and falsely presenting their own as "divine revelation." The "primary source" argument can be used in response by asking, where are the primary sources that prove Christianity and the existence of Jesus Christ? Where are the precious originals of the gospels, written by the very hands of the apostles and other witnesses to Jesus’ alleged advent? The earliest New Testament manuscripts in existence can be dated only to the third or fourth century. Not only are there no primary sources proving Christian claims, but what texts we do possess have been altered tens of thousands of times.

Dr Raven Dolick MsD  Feb 12, 2016

After my last column someone wrote: “Love your articles about the awful Catholic Church, but isn’t it a bit like shooting fish in a barrel?’

He’s right. With the exception of most (but not all) practicing Catholics, people love to hate The Church. It’s not just the mind-boggling atrocities of the Crusades and the Inquisition; not simply the pedophile priests; not even the excesses of adulterous and murderous popes. It’s also that The Church has proclaimed herself THE one holy representative of God, then dressed her priests up in clothes that would embarrass Lady Gaga. Furthermore, they have amassed more money than God while doing these awful things then told their adherents: ‘Do as I say not as I do.’

So Protestantism looks good by comparison. However, harder to dig up as it may be, when you look closely their history reveals that the various Protestant religions are guilty of the same hypocrisy, the same unscriptural beliefs, the same perversions, and the same (though better hidden) ill-gotten wealth.

Thanks to Catholicism, on the whole people tend to think less badly of Protestants. Let’s see whether we can shake up that complacency.

It’s been said that timing is everything. 60 years after Gutenberg’s printing method began moving Europe into the communication age, Martin Luther nailed his 95 ‘theses’ to the church door in Wittenburg, Germany, demanding that The Church stop selling indulgences. Without the press, his protest might have passed unnoticed. But his complaints got printed and copies were passed out. Within two months the protest had spread across Europe. The Lutheran Church began.

Some protestors are heroes. Luther, not so much. While he supported some Bible teachings, he also advocated attacking Jews, destroying their homes, synagogues and businesses and - of course - confiscating their wealth. His anti-Semitism influenced Germans clear down to Hitler’s day. 20th century German bishop Martin Sasse published a collection of Luther's anti-Semitic rhetoric shortly after Kristallnacht, that infamous night when the glass of Jewish shop windows spread across German streets like crystals. He gleefully applauded how, "on November 10, 1938, on Luther's birthday, the synagogues are burning in Germany...”

In addition to his attacks on Jews, however, Luther turned his back on the revolution he had started. When the common people, fired by his writings, revolted against the aristocracy and began destroying churches and monasteries, he was livid. How dare these peasants rise up against their betters?

He wrote:

““Let everyone who can, smite, slay, and stab, secretly or openly, remembering that nothing can be more poisonous, hurtful, or devilish than a rebel.””

Luther’s protest inspired other protesters.

A Zurich reformer named Zwingli agreed with much that Luther taught, but disagreed on the subject of trans-substantiation - Luther claimed that the communion wafer turned into the actual flesh of Christ in a person's mouth, Zwingli didn't. Zwingli and Luther agreed on the (unscriptural) Catholic doctrine of infant baptism. A new group of protestants, who came to be called Anabaptists (today called Baptists) believed, correctly, that the Bible did not condone infant baptism, and that baptism was a sign of repentance that should only be carried out on consenting individuals.

That may seem like a minor disagreement.

However, as Leonard Robbins wrote:

“How a minority,

Reaching majority,

Seizing authority,

Hates a minority!”

Luther and Zwingli, having successfully rebelled against Catholicism, were not going to allow anyone to rebel against them! Zwingli had a baptist, Balthasar Hubmaier, stretched on the rack until he recanted his beliefs. After that, Zwingli issued a decree that, if baptists were all that fond of water, they should be executed by drowning. He made good on his threat: In 1527 he arranged the execution by drowning of three men for their refusal to recant their belief in adult baptism. A Baptist pastor had his tongue cut out by followers of Luther for speaking against infant baptism.

Another rebel against the Catholic Church was John Calvin. He founded a Protestant version of Christianity based on his belief that people needed strict moral policing to behave. He is praised to this day for creating the "protestant work ethic." However, he also set up mandatory Church attendance in Geneva, banned musical instruments and taverns, and he tolerated no dissent. When Michael Servetus, a Spanish theologian, fled to Geneva to avoid persecution by Catholics for his anti-Trinitarian teachings, Calvin, instead of protecting him, had him arrested and burned at the stake. Others were also put to death at Calvin’s orders. At the council of Geneva in 1632, Nicholas Anthoine was condemned to be first hanged and then burned for opposing the doctrine of the Trinity.

Some other Calvinists came up with the idea that God had decided before the World's creation on a chosen few who would be saved, and everyone else was to be abandoned to their fate. In Holland Calvinists beheaded a man for preaching against predestination.

And the Reformation was just getting warmed up:

•In 1535 in England, fourteen Hollanders were burned to death by order of the Church of England for the ‘crime’ of denying that Christ was both God and man. That same year, 19 others were executed in England for being Baptists.

•In 1546 the Church of England tortured on the rack a Baptist woman named Anne Askew. When she refused to recant, she and three of her friends were burned alive.

•In 1575 two Dutch Baptists were burned alive at the orders of Queen Elizabeth I in her role as head of the Church of England.

•In 1612, barely a year after the publication of the King James Bible, Bartholomew Legate was charged with “arianism,” that is, denying that Christ is God. Another man was also burned alive for being a Baptist. The burning alive stopped after that, but not the persecution. Hundreds more were arrested and most spent the rest of their lives in prison, simply for disagreeing with the Church of England.

In every case, those who fell out with the state religion had their property confiscated. When Lutheranism and Calvinism began, Sweden, Switzerland, and Germany became extremely wealthy confiscating Catholic properties and treasure. By the time James was king of England, few of the persecuted had much in the way of wealth or property; but what they had was grabbed and distributed to supporters of the King and the Church of England.

The Puritans, those early Americans famous for founding Massachusetts and Turkey Day, originally fled England because they disagreed with the Church of England’s adoption of so many Catholic traditions. What they are less well known for but were nevertheless guilty of was intolerance of other points of view.

The pilgrims cut off the noses and ears of Quakers who refused to become puritans. They considered Indians as godless heathens and squashed between gigantic stones Indians they found guilty of any crime. They executed in horrible fashion people they deemed to be witches, many of whom were guilty of nothing more than disagreeing with the Puritans way of worshiping God.

Roger Williams, an Anglican minister who read Greek and Hebrew disagreed with the Puritans watchdog ethic of combining Church and State. He wasn’t executed; he was simply banished… kicked out of his home, and Massachusetts, in the dead of winter, forced to travel over 100 miles through a snowstorm. Fortunately for Williams he - unlike the puritans – had treated the Indians with respect, so they took care of him. He founded Rhode Island on freedom of thought and worship and separation of Church and State.

A good guy, right?

Well… two years later, in 1637, he helped persuade those same Indians to join an attack on the defenseless women and children of another Indian tribe in Mystic, Connecticut. The puritan captain in charge of the massacre and his sidekick, the ‘reverend’ Cotton Mather, called it – big surprise – ‘The Lord’s judgment on the heathen,’and the governor of Massachusetts instituted the actual first Thanksgiving feast to thank God for annihilating those 700 pesky Pequot Indians.

I know, I know, it’s all ancient history, right? Easy to throw stones, we weren’t there; we don’t know how we would have behaved in the same circumstances… BUT: These folks were the forerunners of the modern day Episcopalians, Lutherans, Presbyterians, and Baptists. We’ll look next at what those early Protestant movements have grown into.