When people with an addictive personality “turn to Jesus” the rest of us have to be a little skeptical. Can Jesus, or any religion, simply replace one addiction for another? And if it does, is it really any better for a person’s brain than other drugs? Does a person’s ability to think cognitively for him or herself improve with religion? The answer is NO!
In War on Drugs/ War on People, I looked at the uselessness of treatment programs that only trade religion as a substitute for drugs:
“The addict must “give his /her life over to God” and vow to live by strict standards imposed by the church “to be saved“ What is wrong about this concept and happening is that not all addicts can or desire to develop deep religious convictions that are demanded if this program is to work.”
And:
“Psychologically it is a darkening of their reasoning faculties: religion hasn’t become their hand maiden, but is an escape from reality.”[1]
People obsessed with religion often put Jesus before their own family. They throw away old records and CDs. They throw away their old friends and associate only with people who share their new enthusiasm for their religion.
So why should the rest of us care about this? Our present day courts routinely put people in treatment, as a diversion from all types of crime, not just for drug use. It allows conservative religions to infiltrate our public court system and use it as a recruiting ground. And this is not just about religion. These churches have a tight relationship with the Republican Party and religion is a tool of control.
Karl Marx had argued that religion was a tool of the state and if there has been doubt about that in Amarikkka’s past, one only has to look at Kansas today, to see how affective a tool fundamentalist religion is to the Republican Party. Thomas Frank’s What’s The Matter With Kansas? documents the relationship between fundamentalist religion and greedy corporations and their handpicked politicians.
And yet people in Kansas dare to compare religion with evolution, stating that it is based on faith, just as religion is. They conveniently ignore the mountains of scientific evidence that proves that evolution is a science and not just a belief. On the other hand, there is no physical evidence that god exists or that such a being created the universe. Many Kansas clearly cannot see a difference between science and mythology in their perception of reality.
Although there are members of the religious left, they are a minority and do not promote their beliefs as much as evangelical conservatives.
It is helpful for the majority of us to recognize the “Jesus cult of personality.“ From ancient times men have believed in Godheads, or divine people who are both God and man. One of the earliest of the divine god persons was Gilgamesh. According to the story:
“When the gods created Gilgamesh they gave him a perfect body. Shamash the glorious sun endowed him with beauty, Adad the god of the storm endowed him with courage, the great gods made his beauty perfect, surpassing all others, terrifying like a great wild bull. Two third they made him god and once third man.”[2]
It is a ridiculous idea that Jesus, or anyone else, would become a human to enlighten mankind. Can a human become an ameba? Can an ameba understand the complexity of a human mind? The difference between our species must be the closest we can come to comparing ourselves to an omnipotent being such as a god. The idea that any human can be God in whole or part is ridiculous.
A lot of famous people have seriously questioned the divinity of Jesus. Thomas Jefferson said:
“It is in the history of a personage called Jesus. Keep in your eye the opposite pretensions: 1, of those who say he was begotten by God, born of a virgin, suspended and reversed the laws of nature at will and ascended bodily into heaven; and 2, of those who say he was a man of illegitimate birth, of a benevolent heart, enthusiastic mind, who set out without pretensions to divinity, ended in believing them, and was punished capitally fore sedition, by being gibbeted, according to the Roma Law.”[3]
He went on to say that it didn’t matter if a person found belief in God in order to attain a sense of virtue.
Earlier religions, such as that of the Egyptians, saw gods differently. They were more like humans and divided up various tasks. The afterlife was completely different, almost an exact replica of this world. Their religion was typical of what people believed at the time. Yet Osiris, Ra and Horus were as real to them as Jesus is to modern Christians. Unlike Jesus, Muhammad, is believed to be only a messenger of God, not a god-form, according to Islam. In this way, Islam also rejects the idea that man and God can be one. The intense belief in religions only proves that mankind creates both religion and what seems to be a rational view of human environment. In other words, we create our own reality. The view of gods and god change over time, yet the belief in them remains constant. Jesus is reality to a Christian. Allah is the absolute reality of the Muslim religion.
Since God’s existence cannot be proven scientifically, it is an abstract idea. Religion is also. We know that some gods of earlier religion do not exist. Belief in the gods of Ancient Egypt are extinct. No one believes that Zeus still lives on Mount Olympus. That demonstrates that religion has been forced to change in order to fit into modern ideas of science and reality. Religion is purely a product of mankind, not the other way around- a product of God.
Religion is not necessary for a happy life. Doubt about the supernatural came as early as the Ancient Greeks. It was Protagoras who wrote:
"As to the gods, I have no means of knowing either that they exist or that they do not exist. Form many are the obstacles that impede knowledge, both the obscurity of the question and the shortness of human life."[4]
Marx came up with the philosophy of Dialectic Materialism in direct response to religion. It was "The question of the relation of thinking to being, the relation of spirit to nature is the paramount question of the whole of philosophy.... The answers, which the philosophers gave to this question, split them into two great camps. Those who asserted the primacy of spirit to nature ... comprised the camp of idealism. The others, who regarded nature as primary, belong to the various schools of materialism.”
And further:
"The material, sensuously perceptible world to which we ourselves belong is the only reality.... Our consciousness and thinking, however supra-sensuous they may seem, are the product of a material, bodily organ, the brain. Matter is not a product of mind, but mind itself is merely the highest product of matter."[5]
Friedrich Nietzsche also wrote against religion.
Those of us who are not Christians must defend ourselves and if necessary, expose the superstition and absurd beliefs of fundamentalist Christianity. It is not just a question of protecting tolerance of our personal beliefs, it includes protecting us from a Theocracy that is being constructed by the Republican Party. It will effect way more than simply our religious beliefs.
Notes:
[1] Steve Otto, War on Drugs/ War on People, (Ide House, Los Colinas, TX, 1995), p. 182.
[2] The Epic of Gilgamesh, English version, introduction, N.K. Sandars, (Penguin Books, London, 1972) p. 61.
[3] Thomas Jefferson : Writings : Autobiography / Notes on the State of Virginia / Public and Private Papers / Addresses / Letters, (Library of America, August 1, 1984), pp. 399 – 400.
[4] Diogenes Laertius, Lives of the Eminent Philosophers, Vol. II, (Loeb Classical Library, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2000) p. 463.
[5] Marx, Selected Works, Vol. I, p. 329 and p. 332, Quoted by J. V. Stalin, Dialectical and Historical Materialism, 1938; Transcribed by M, http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1938/09.htm
No comments:
Post a Comment