Whence God?
TO SEEK TRUTH IN ALL THINGS; THAT “GOD”
WAS A POLITICALLY INSPIRED CHARACTER
IN AN ANCIENT KING’S TRIBAL PROPOGANDA;
THAT BECAME A LEGENDARY EPICAL FABLE,
AND WAS ADOPTED FOR THE BIBLE’S
FIRST TWELVE BOOKS
WELCOME. BE MY GUESTS AND EXPERIENCE FREEDOM FROM YOUR IMAGINATION’S TYRANNICAL DOGMATIC GOD.
THE POWERFUL SUCCESSES OF JUDAISM & CHRISTIANITY CONVINCED MOHAMMED THAT IF HIS PEOPLE WORSHIPPED AN IMAGINARY GOD, SUPPRESSED ALL KNOWLEDGE AND KILLED NONBELIEVERS,
THEY TOO COULD CREATE A WORLDWIDE DESPOTIC RELIGION.
SAMUEL TERRILL REDWINE SR.
Nonagenarian Secularist
THIS TREATISE SEEKS TRUTH IN ALL THINGS
INCLUDING THE FOIBLES OF MAN AND HIS RELIGION
Whence God?
GOD WAS A CHARACTER IN SOME POLITICALLY INSPIRED TRIBAL PROPAGANDA, WHICH BECAME THE BIBLE’S FIRST TWELVE BOOKS;
plus
Man’s Fascination with Mythological Gods;
His Disdain for Intellectualism; His Overt Militancy;
His Subjugation of Women; His Neglect of Planet Earth
and
Our Global Divisiveness
RING MY BELL
I HAVE NEW TALES TO TELL
THINGS TO SAY WHILE STILL HERE;
SO COGENT, COGNIZANT AND SINCERE;
WISDOM TO BESTOW BEFORE I MUST GO:
PUT MONEY ON MATTER, LET SPIRITS BE;
EARTH ISN’T FOREPLAY, ITS BRAGGADOCIO.
SPIRITURALISM IS NEVER OUR HEAVEN’S KEY.
ALTHOUGH EARTHLINGS THRIVE ON MYSTERY,
WE CAN RESIST WAGERING ON BELIEFS’ UNREAL,
AND ONLY BET ON WHAT WE PERCEIVE AND FEEL.
ONE’S IMAGINATION’S JUST AN EXPENDABLE ASIDE;
HOWEVER, PERCEPTION’S YOUR DEPENDABLE GUIDE
AND EVERYONE KNOWS, THAT A MIND THAT’S CLOSED,
“IS A WORRYSOME THING, THAT WILL LEAD YOU TO SING
THE BLUUES IN THE NIGHT”; CURIOSITY HAS AN OPEN MIND,
WHERE YOU’LL FIND LIFE’S EXPECTATIONS AND EXHILARATION
WILL MAKE ALL THAT IS REASONABLE, INDUBITUBALY, RIGHT.
OK?
DRINK MY WINE
SEEK TRUTH IN ALL THINGS
QUESTION EVERYTHING
BEGRUDGE NO ONE
CHECK ALL FACTS
AVOID TRIVIA
ACCEPT LIFE
BE DISCREET
DO NO HARM
BE DIPLOMATIC
AVOID THE UNREAL
REMAIN BONA FIDE
KEEP AN OPEN MIND
LOVE REASONABLENESS
OBSERVE THE GOLDEN RULE
FORM INDEPENDENT OPINIONS
DON’T BLINDLY FOLLOW OTHERS
BE HELPFUL; AVOID CONTRARINESS
LIVE WITH SENSE OF JOYOUS WONDER
RESPECT OTHERS; DO NOT CENSOR THEM
ALLOW INNATE REASON TO BE YOUR GUIDE
IGNORE THE INCONSIDERATION OF OTHERS
POLITENESS IS LIFE’S ESSENTIAL LUBRICANT
ALWAYS STRIVE TO LEARN SOMETHING NEW
CULTURAL HARMONY ASSURES WORLD PEACE
RELAXATION CONCEIVES POSITIVE THOUGHTS
BE SKEPTICAL OF IDEAS LACKING TANGIBILITY
FOR YOU I WISH GREAT LOVE AND PROSPERITY
TREAT LIVING THINGS WITH RESPECT AND HONESTY
VALUE THE FUTURE ON A TIMESCALE LONGER THAN YOUR OWN
LIFE’S AN ADVENTURE, STRESSING KNOWLEDGE AND ENDURANCE
MAY YOUR LIFE BE PERPETUALLY CONCEPTUALLY EXCEPTIONAL
THE PRIZE: TO LOVE AND BE LOVED, IT’S LIFE’S GREATEST GIFT
YOUR GOOD FORTUNE: THE SPERM THAT WAS YOU, SURVIVED
INTRODUCTION
Philosophy is the “use of reason and argument in seeking truth and knowledge of reality, especially of the causes and nature of things and of the principles governing existence”.
Controversially: religion “is the belief in a personal god or super-human controlling power to be obeyed and worshipped as the creators and rulers of the universe”; relying on blind-faith; avoiding reason, truth and knowledge.
Gods are “any of the various beings conceived of as supernatural, immortal, and having special powers over the lives and affairs of people and the course of nature. In a monotheistic religion, the single god is considered the creator and ruler of the universe, regarded as eternal, infinite, all powerful and all knowing”. Belief is defined as a blind faith that mythological gods control the universe and our daily lives. Supernatural is “that which exists or occurs outside the normal experience or knowledge of man; not explainable by the known forces or laws of nature”.
“The Enlightenment was an eighteenth century European philosophical movement characterized by rationalism, an impetus toward learning, and a spirit of skepticism, and empiricism in social and political thought”
Science: is “systematized knowledge derived from observation, study and experimentation carried on in order to determine the nature or principles of what is being studied”.
Secularism’s doctrine: “disregards or rejects any form of religious faith; especially that religion and ecclesiastical affairs should not enter into the functions of the state”. Secularists advocate tolerant worldly views. We believe it is ignorant and unfair to inculcate the minds of little children with the fallacies inherent in any religious indoctrination.
Greetings Dear Grandchildren; your grandmother, Marie’s, expiration nine days before my 90th birthday brought closure to our 66 years of marriage. Tho grief stricken, I cogitated, ruminated, searched and following my 91st birthday, composed and typed this therapeutic iconoclastic treatise. As my eventuality approaches, I wish to reveal why I am part of a trend since 1990 that’s doubled the United States’ nonbelievers. My remarks are not to proselytize, but knowledge, for your broadminded curiosity. Don’t allow fear of blasphemy or your ignorance of the Bible to intimidate you. Everyone knows “a mind that’s closed is a worrisome thing that’ll lead you to sing the blues in the night”, but curiosity has an open mind where you’ll always find everything reasonable is indubitably right.
Curiosity about believer’s blind-faith in the Bible’s insidious god led me to search for a reasonable explanation. I’m just one of innumerable dissenters who’ve pondered the absurdity of civilized humankind on their knees, groveling and worshipping, a vile, vengeful, jealous, mean-spirited, egomaniacal god known only via misguided clergy and their “Holy Books”. Maybe my treatise will remind believers of religion’s pusillanimous dastardly bloody history and help to enlighten the curious. Marvin A. Sweeny’s book: King Josiah of Judah, The Lost Messiah of Israel; and Israel Finkelstein’s and Neil Asher Silberman’s book: The Bible Unearthed; plus Islamic terrorism; inspired and prompted this treatise. Many postulate the Bible’s origin. Amalgamation of results from two centuries of explorations by archeologists and epigraphists, reveal the Bible’s early books evolved from King Josiah of Judah’s politically inspired, tribal propaganda, his epical fable, whose main character was a hard-nosed, death-dealing tribal god, which coerced his subjects away from polytheism and assured their allegiance by decreeing: apostates, blasphemers, nonbelievers and proponents of other gods must be killed. Josiah’s successful riddance of the disgruntled led subsequent aristocracy to adopt his tribal propaganda as their own, which briefly explains the historical success of the Abrahamic faiths. My treatise will expand on this thought and explain the origins of the Hebrew Bible, (Old Testament) and the Koran.
The universe’s infiniteness is crucial to what 93 years taught. The Hubble’s powerful telescope above the atmosphere enables astronomers to view the awesome cosmos billions of light-years away. It is incomprehensible and was not created for the exclusive convenience of Adam and Eve, or the progeny of Abraham Isaac and Jacob.
Life taught: humankind is obligated to treat Earth, with respectful affection and I am obligated to treat others respectfully, thoughtfully, politely and honestly. It taught: reason means “to think coherently and logically; to draw inferences or conclusions from facts whether known or assumed”, also that we are attracted to opposing poles; positively by developing our natural propensities for undiscriminating inclusiveness, creative initiative, inquiry and craving, for knowledge, or else negatively by foregoing inclusiveness, knowledge, etc.; depending upon the Bible’s vain, vile, vengeful, immoral, jealous and divisive ruthless “God”.
Sunday school impressed “God’s altruism” on me, but as an adult, I could not imagine an egomaniacal, genocidal tyrannical “God” commanding believers to kill nonbelievers, even if the victim is a family member; it was unbelievable! Why was “God” portrayed so very iniquitously? I’m swimming upstream against vast currents of believers who inherited their faith from ancient ancestors who had been forced to believe in aristocracy’s spurious god or die; their progeny taught children that “God” must be obeyed as He commands or they will be killed. Why do descendants worship the spurious god; why do Religion-Lites satiate them with righteous self-satisfaction; and why do Islamic regimes enforce King Josiah’s ossified vengeful dogma with totalitarianism? It’s all because the precepts of the Bible & Koran are from Josiah’s tribal propaganda, his famous fable; Christianity and Muslimism were both extrapolated from Judaism’s Holy Scriptures, whose origination I’ve deduced by correlating independent sources, including the Bible. My treatise is about Josiah’s self-aggrandizing fable, where he proclaims himself Yahweh’s ideal, most righteous king.
Once upon a time, 2,658 years ago, in 648 B.C.E., Prince Josiah was born in the small Israelite kingdom of Judah. When he was 8 years old his father was assassinated. Josiah inherited the kingdom, reigned for 31years, and inadvertently, created the Hebrew Bible’s first twelve books. Josiah didn’t author the Bible; but in order to survive, and to impress his people with their heroic uniqueness, his team of scholars composed a tract of tribal propaganda; a legendary epic, a fable, about his tribe’s mythical ancestors along with their tribal god. Divisiveness and misunderstandings, resulting from the worship of polytheism’s disparate mythological gods had brought down earlier Judahite kings; so, to comprehend and appreciate Josiah’s political precariousness, we must first explore Homo sapiens’ early experiences with primitive mythological gods.
IN THE BEGINNING
1. As life’s decisions are influenced by the consequences of our earlier experiences, I wish to begin this narrative at our primordial spark of life, about 2.4 billion years ago; probably in the shallows of some African lake with a single cell microorganism, which through eons of time, multiplied, mutated, and developed through innumerable biological stages via natural selection, when only the fittest survive to repeat the reproductive process, known as evolution. Thenceforth, we reached the developmental stage of genus Homo or primate, and after developing the ability to stand erect and walk on two legs, we became what we now know to have been the species Homo erectus. During the Pleistocene geological age, when continental ice sheets were spreading and receding, our brain’s development made us the sagacious, discerning, wise and knowledgeable species, Homo sapiens.
2. Mythological gods were important features of primitive humanity. It’s obvious that Homo erectus wasn’t interested in self-delusion; indulgence with gods awaited arrival of us Homo sapiens’ exuberant curiosity before we questioned the how or why of our existence. “You are probably aware that our first fearsome gods were the terrifying unpredictable forces of nature”. Natural phenomena, plus our slowly developing intellects and imagination led us to ponder god-ideas and how to use occult powers, politically, to organize, lead, and manipulate tribal groups.
3. The “female principle was worshipped as Nature’s life-giving, energizing power”. Our mother Earth provided our sustenance; our multi-millennial development sensitized us to our environment. The Earth’s mother was the Sun, which arose each morning as we did and traveled across the sky, keeping watch over her plant and animal life; nourishing us with warmth and rain. We eventually realized the Sun’s magnificent influence as the moving force that constituted the god-idea. The productive power in plants, animals and us emanated from the Sun, which we worshipped as nature’s great energizer; “god of light & life”, the source of creation; with the power to create life and to manipulate us with unanticipated goodness and rewards or punish us with nature’s fearsome outbursts.
4. This is the source of our god-idea, where we first assigned occult powers to the sun and poisoned our minds with its mythologies. In an effort to satisfy its seemingly fanciful churlish whims, we performed rituals and made human sacrifices to worship and to appease or appeal to Sun; also festivals celebrating Sun’s summer and winter solstices and its spring and autumn equinoxes. Sun could not be ignored. I’ve learned: Sun has never been wholly eliminated from the god-idea. It appears that early names of the gods were compounded or derived from words that originally meant the sun. We primitive ignorant males venerated fire and serpents; with no consideration for the lives of rival tribes. Vegetation was religiously significant, especially the Lotus and Fichus Religiosa or banyan trees; male and female designations were assigned to trees; most gods were considered as neither, but were thought to be androgynous.
5. We men worshiped women as our Sun’s dearest creation, part of Sun’s vital system; our source of new lives; we considered them androgynous; their regenerative powers requiring only the Sun-god’s consent. Female power was in ascendancy and they were the social and political leaders of our communal groups. Sun-god accounted for the children’s welfare and a mothers’ holy eminence was proportional to the new lives she had brought forth and to their wellbeing.
6. We males were satisfied with matriarchal arrangements; convinced that female leadership served our best interests, we never felt the pangs of unsatisfied sexual desire and Sun-god received credit for women’s ability to create new lives. If our community needed new sons, we appealed to the Sun-god. We were not a part of female families, but lived separately as the community’s guardian-hunters; at puberty, boys were sent to live with us. Our matriarchal communities tolerated and accommodated males without jealousy or vengeance. Women dominated, but they welcomed men; their maternal instincts blossomed throughout that protracted golden era, and communal life thrived, under their velvet yoke.
7. It was destined to implode when nature’s secret was revealed, as we thought Sun-god punished women who failed to regularly bring forth a new life, so the disclosure was slow to materialize. After we men realized the consequences of coition’s significance to our social position in our primitive community, our world changed, we lost our old equiponderance and saw women through a new lens. Without male cooperation, women were unable to create new lives; we men were not complicit, but denied their divinity. Stupidity poisoned our perspective, disposition, attitude and opportunities for congenial fornication; so we resorted to force, taking what we wanted and fought as we collected women for personal service.
8. We men were the gods required to produce the progeny necessary to satiate the sun-god. No longer the compliant gender; we were gods and we demanded women worship us. Our sacred religious symbol was no longer the yoni; we men worshipped our own genitals; our favorite symbol was the phallus. Places of worship obtained a tower, a spire or minarets. That same practice prevails today, for religious edifices, or when men wish to memorialize other men: witness the Washington Monument and New York City’s twin erections, the World Trade Center towers, destroyed by Islamic extremists. Significantly, today’s world’s tallest towers, i.e., symbolic phallic erections, are in Islamic countries.
9. After our awakening, when gender roles of the gods were reversed; female gods were out, and we male gods were in, depravity ruled; decency was the first casualty of our dominance; male vanity, ego, pride, jealousy and greed, in addition to our stupidity, limited our scope of influence. We fought for our needs and desires as we could no longer depend upon the cooperation of women, and our fellowmen were challenging competitors.
We were too obsessed with our importance to consider women’s point of view; they were no longer part of the religious hierarchy, but subdued and their progeny belonged to us males. Belief systems adopted gods with male prerogatives and divided into competitive sects. Women were prostituted by priests to support male religious organizations and male homosexuals formed religious groups under the guise of celibacy.
10. Since primitive matriarchy’s end, male testes have been man’s god. “After male reproductive power had become God, and when, through superstition and sensuality, the masses of the people had descended to the rank of slaves, monarchs, representing themselves to their ignorant subjects as the source of all blessings, even of life itself, appropriated the titles of the sun, and claimed for themselves the adoration which had formerly belonged to it”. Dictatorial political leaders adopted gods as fearsome occult powers which commanded death for disobedience. Religion’s pious hierarchy were essential actors in European history’s political tyranny; and United States’ Democracy was the first nation to be free of a state religion. Quotations are from Eliza Burt Gamble’s: God Ideas of the Ancients; which influenced this chapter.
KING JOSIAH’S MONO-GOD
1. After our matriarchal-age, during our long period of male dominance, legends tell of the Jews being particularly depraved; a time arrived when chauvinism reached its limits of credulity; natural disasters, e.g., the flood, were believed to be mythological gods’ response to man’s lasciviciousness, demanding reforms. In the late eighth and early seventh century B.C.E., a bit of history unfolded which affects today’s world.
2. We know that by the tenth century B.C.E. a number of Israelite tribes from Mesopotamia had gradually settled in Canaan near the southeastern end of the Mediterranean Sea and formed two small kingdoms, Israel in the northern agricultural area and Judah in the southern semi-desert region.
3. My story begins in 734 B.C.E., when Tiglathpileser 3, king of Assyria, (745-727 B.C.E.), marched against King Pekah of Israel and King Rezin of Syria, (2Kings 15:29 &16:7-9); they made war against his vassal, King Ahaz of Judah. He punished Israel by carrying some of its people into exile, (2Kings 17:1-6). In 722 B.C.E. Israel was destroyed and taken after a three year siege by Shalmaneser 4, king of Assyria (727-722 B.C.E.) who enslaved Israel’s skilled people, moved them to Assyrian territories, replacing them with deportees. Numerous political leaders, scholars, scribes and priests, with their Torah, eluded capture, making their way to Jerusalem in Judah, where King Hezekiah reigned over his scattered nomadic subjects. He died in 698 B.C.E; his 12 year old son, Manasseh, became king; reigned for 55 years. His son, Amon, became king at age 22; was assassinated in a palace coup when 24, (2Kings 20-23); and 8 year old son, Josiah, inherited the kingdom in 640 B.C.E. Concerned about survival, he sought sanctification for his reign and at age 26 he renovated the temple where a Torah scroll of tribal laws was found. In the intervening years, since Israel’s tragic loss, the migrants had developed a team of scholars seeking duties commensurate with their expertise; Bible scholars assume Josiah’s team composed and planted it there to support his idea for a monotheistic tribal god. The Torah scroll initiated his reform program; he corrected the “cultic transgressions of his predecessors”, removed pagan worship sites, prohibited polytheism with its horrific practice of “sacrificing small children on religious alters”, and dreamed of an influential Israelite community with exclusive culture. His scholarly team provided Josiah an opportunity to initiate his visions. He aspired to coalesce, invigorate, motivate and inspire his people with their tribal uniqueness. To assure their allegiance he strengthened his leadership by urging the composition of a legendary epical fable about a tribal god, whose fearsomeness would command righteous belief in Josiah as “God’s” ideal king and Earthly emissary or else death.
4. Through a protracted period of time his team of scholars composed an inspirational conspiratorial fable; a tract of “royal political and religious tribal propaganda, as they imagined a retrospective of their history should have been”. How mythological Yahweh created the universe with its first inhabitants, Adam & Eve, in the Garden of Eden, the sagas of sons Cain & Able and Noah & the flood. Yahweh chose Abraham to father a nation, through his son Isaac, whose own son Jacob’s twelve sons fathered the twelve tribes of Israel. While in Egypt, seeking succor from famine they multiplied, and were enslaved by the Pharaoh. It told of Moses’ birth of and that Yahweh promised them a land of their own, overcame the mighty Pharaoh, helped them escape, provided tribal laws and for forty years guided their search, throughout Sinai, for the Promised Land. Moses did not survive their extended trip but with the genocidal Yahweh’s intervention Joshua destroyed the cities and killed Canaanite fathers, mothers, children, etc. to allow David’s and Solomon’s vast empires to be centered in Jerusalem. Josiah’s fable tells of Solomon’s death when Yahweh divided the tribes; ten selected the leadership of Jeroboam and formed the nation of Israel; the two remaining tribes chose Reroboam, who reigned over Judah in the south, (1Kings 11-12). King Josiah’s fable was composed specifically to convince his people of mythical Yahweh’s personal relationship to Israeli tribes, but disagrees with the two kingdoms’ actual history.
5. In addition: Josiah’s fable was self-aggrandizing; Yahweh decreed Israelites his chosen people, Josiah the most righteous, ideal king and Jerusalem’s Temple the only legitimate place of worship. His fable also included Yahweh’s code of laws, (Deuteronomy); covering all aspects of tribal life, with threats of death for anyone who dared defy one of them; plus Yahweh promised King David that his progeny, including Josiah, would rule Judah forever.
6. The Egyptians developed dynastic empires as early as the forty fifth century B.C.E. and left a history carved in stone. Epigraphists have found no record of the Israelite’s Egyptian bondage, lengthy search, or of Solomon’s “vast and glorious, forty year empire” except in Josiah’s legendary epical theological fable, known as his tribal propaganda; falsely claiming Judah’s dominance over “Israel” and, events they imagined had happened more than a millennium earlier; its main themes were the righteous fidelity of the Judahites to Yahweh, the god’s disallowance of all other gods and prohibiting Israelites marrying foreign women; indicating Yahweh’s ireful reaction; destroying nations, communities, individuals, etc. that Josiah deemed undesirable. His fabulous tales included deceptive prophesies of more recent genealogical and political relationships, which weren’t miraculous revelations, but deceitful aggregations of mythological adventures, which Josiah used for his tribal propaganda; its success was two-fold; (1) Yahweh sanctified King Josiah’s reign of Judah. (2) Yahweh commanded believers to kill nonbelievers, which assured the compliant allegiance of Josiah’s subjects, who treasured his fable as their tribe’s legendary epic.
7. Josiah was 39 (609 B.C.E.) when Pharaoh, Necho’s army killed him at Megiddo (2Kings 23:29), and Egypt reclaimed Judah. Necho, (2Kings 23-24); consecutively appointed Josiah’s sons; Jehoahaz age 23; Eliakim age25, known as Jehoiakim, then his son Jehoiachin age 18; followed by a third son, Zedekiah age 21, as Kings of Judah. Crown prince Nebuchadnezzar, of Babylon, (Daniel 1:1-7); advanced to Jerusalem in 608, spared rebellious King Jehoiakim, but carried off several princes. Nebuchadnezzar was King of Babylon (608-562 B.C.E; 2Kings 24:1-16), conquered Jerusalem again. King Zedekiah (2Kings 24:20-25: 21) pledged allegiance to the Babylonian king, (Jeremiah 39:1-10); but proved disloyal, so Nebuchadnezzar besieged Jerusalem for nineteen months, ending in 586 B.C.E., executed community leaders, set fire to the city and took the survivors into exile; the scholarly team took their legendary epic into exile with them and reworked it. Bible scholars call them: Deuteronomistic Histories; DtrH1, Josianic edition and DtrH2, exilic edition which includes subsequent history plus convoluted solutions to Yahweh’s promises to David & Josiah in the Josianic edition, which could no longer be fulfilled. Bible scholars have known about the revisions for centuries. The Josianic edition was written in Hebrew; corrections and additions were in Aramaic.
8. Forty eight years after Jerusalem’s fall, Cyrus, Persia’s king, destroyed the Babylonian Empire in 538 B.C.E. and issued a decree permitting Jews to return to Judah (Ezra 1-10 & Nehemiah 1-2). They returned under aegis of Artaxerxes 1, king of Persia (464-424 B.C.E.). Furnished with royal power, Ezra, in 458 B.C.E. and Nehemiah in 444 B.C.E. brought back 30,000 exiles, rebuilt the wall, reestablished a Jewish community and with the exilic edition of King Josiah’s tribal propaganda for their Holy Scriptures, established monotheistic Judaism. Monotheism’s doctrine: “there is one God who rewards the righteous and punishes the wicked; everyone must worship God as He commands or be killed”. Monotheism’s Holy Scriptures were: “Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy. These narrate the story of the people of Israel from the creation of the world, through the period of the flood and the patriarchs, to the Exodus from Egypt, the wanderings in the desert, the giving of the law at Sinai”, also “The Former Prophets—Joshua, Judges, 1&2 Samuel and 1&2 Kings—tell the story of the people of Israel from their crossing of the river Jordan, conquest of Canaan, through the rise and fall of the Israelite kingdoms, to their defeat and exile by Assyrians and Babylonians”. Holy Scriptures, became the Hebrew Bible, and Old Testament: there followed the additional, “Writings, a collection of homilies, poems, prayers, proverbs and Psalms, apparently from the fifth to the second century B.C.E.—in the Persian and Hellenistic periods”.
9. Hebrew Bible was translated into the Greek Septuagint, about 250 B.C.E. More than 600 hundred years later, Saint Jerome, (340?-420 C.E.), translated much of Septuagint into the Latin Vulgate. He then translated the Hebrew Bible into Latin by complying with Catholicism’s doctrines, i.e., he deleted all references to Yahweh’s immorality, and it became the first part of Christianity’s canon. English versions are the Douay Bible.
10. Martin Luther, (1483-1546), translated the New Testament into German. More than 1100 years after Saint Jerome’s translation, Luther, with collaborators tailored their translation of the Old Testament to his doctrine and replaced references to godly immorality, which influenced William Tyndale’s English Bible, a precursor of the King James 1 Version for Protestants, published in 1611 C.E. as the Authorized Version. In late nineteenth century, it was redacted, revised; and known as the Revised Version. In 1901 the KJV was revised again and called the American Standard Version. In the mid twentieth century, it was revised and renamed the Revised Standard Version.
11. The King James Version, or Old Testament, purports to represent or describe the events of history for about two millenniums, from the twentieth century B.C.E., until the completion of the Hebrew Bible by edict of Rabbinical Council of Jamnia, 90 C.E. The Deuteronomistic History concocted by King Josiah was specious; it was contrived as a ruse to convince his tribes their ancient ancestors had a fatherly altruistic god, Yahweh, that would always guide and care for them as long as they remained righteous, and obeisantly worshipped only Yahweh and obeyed Josiah, the god’s Earthly emissary. He wanted his people to believe their ancestors were epically heroic, and that Josiah’s kingdom was assured an imposing future with its own exclusive tribal god. It was classic BS. We know how the Jews fared with Yahweh during their history of Christian, inquisitions, persecutions, executions, and the Holocaust; where six million Jewish mothers, fathers, children, etc. were vicariously murdered with the Vatican’s active complicity. (See CHRISTIAN ANTI-JUDAISM).
12. The Jewish King Josiah of Judah began this stupidity with his tribal propaganda which Ezra and Nehemiah adopted for Judaism’s Holy Scriptures, proclaiming ethnological superiority to rival kings, believing: Yahweh’s commands to kill nonbelievers, etc. assured their tribe’s future, but egomaniacal, Yahweh has been like a feverish boil on Israel’s bottom which erupts inadvertently and disadvantageously; Hebrew became the world’s most vilified people, blamed for killing Jesus; Christians persecuted and killed Jews unmercifully; multi-millions of “Yahweh’s chosen people” suffered hell on earth because of Christian hate. The immoral unmerciful Judaic god’s ineffectiveness disclaims a Christian legend touting Jesus’ Immaculate Conception with a virgin by the discredited Judaic god, Yahweh.
13. King Josiah‘s Israelite saga was a deceitful ruse whose deception as the Bible’s first twelve books, is the basis of the Abrahamic faiths: Judaism, Christianity and Muslimism. Josiah didn’t intend to mislead the world, but to entice his subjects away from polytheism’s disparate gods by proclaiming an exclusive tribal god for their psychological advantage; to unite, inspire and invigorate them; it also protected his personal security. Should he be held accountable for the despoliation and desecration caused by a belief in the god of his pernicious ruse? Josiah was not composing Holy Scriptures, but unholy propaganda, which he used to control and manage his kingdom. Others realized the practicality of killing nonbelievers.
14. The exclusivity commanded by Yahweh is stupid, and is opposed to the heterogeneity necessary to sustain our existence on Earth. Portrayal of Yahweh as jealous, vengeful, etc. is why zealous believers are intolerant, unable to compromise, but must defend their spurious faiths until death. Doubts about the Bible’s authenticity concerning the ancient Israelites vis-vis Josiah’s tract, have always been with us. A search of biblical regions by scholars, epigraphists, archaeologists, and others during the past two centuries uncovered a history much simpler than the Bible’s fables; which are the only reference found of the Patriarchs, the Exodus, the Conquest of Canaan, and the vast empires of David and Solomon.
15. The most egregious consequences of King Josiah’s self-aggrandizing pernicious ruse: is religion’s perpetration and perpetuation of his deception upon an ignorant gullible humanity for the past twenty six centuries. Why did the Israelites & progeny believe Josiah’s fables were Holy Scripture? What resulted, and why, after their ignominious history, is it considered sacred? It’s because semi-developed intellects follow paths of least resistance to resolve conundrums; and gods are simple solutions to unfathomable queries. Faith in a specious god does not require fully developed intellects, as ignorance, imagination, and emotion are sufficient; therefore: blind faith in mythological gods is inversely proportional to intelligence.
16. I offer this little parody: Once upon a time, King Josiah worried that his people didn’t love him, which saddened Josiah as he needed everyone’s love to be happy, so his Court Scribes composed a fable about an infamous fairy god who declared it kosher for the king to kill disgruntled subjects. The fable pleased Josiah so well that other kings adopted the fable and soon everyone left alive, loved their king, but were frightened of learning anymore and were fighting and killing each other, over whose king was loved the most. Children grew up and taught their children the stories of their kings’ fanciful powers, how he created the world and how none could speak ill of the king but must worship him and keep him happy or they will go to hell.
Quotations and pertinent information were gleaned from: King Josiah of Judah, the Lost Messiah of Israel, by Marvin A. Sweeny; and The Bible Unearthed, by Israel Finkelstein and Neil Asher Silberman.
CHRISTIANITY
1. Eight hundred years after the establishment of Judaism, and more than three hundred years after the Crucifixion, Saint Jerome founded Christianity with his four Gospels. Jesus was born around 8-4 B.C.E. His life is described in books composed in the late first and early second centuries of the new Common Era, whence the Gospels. Several authors thought him significantly noteworthy and describe a Rabbi going about the countryside teaching transcendent views of Judaism; for which he was crucified; others saw him godly and concocted his Immaculate Conception and resurrection. Much has been written about Jesus’ life; few facts are extant and some are contradictory. An unmarried man, Jesus was crucified about 29 C.E. He was probably literate but failed to leave a written message for his followers. The Gospels are filled with information as if gleaned from old newspaper files. His life was created from folktales, gossip, public records, etc. plus enhancements required to convince the ignorant and fearful of Jesus’ divinity.
2. Christianity’s exclusion of homosexuals within the Church hierarchy and discouragement within the congregation is ironical, as he is portrayed in the New Testament as a homophile; a single effeminate empathetic male without virility or libido; as the explicit opposite of Holy Scripture’s virile male god. He apparently lived for 33 years, without the benefit of intimate female companionship.
3. About a hundred years after Christianity’s founding, its religious fervor introduced the “European Dark Ages, (476-1000), responsible for wide spread ignorance pervasive poverty and cultural decline during a period of intellectual stagnation brought about when Christian regimes closed libraries, banned books, scientific inquiry, etc., impoverishing all human progress”.
4. Gullibility has been religion’s life-support system since nights of dancing and chanting around jungle fires, including submission to kings; and throughout the 14th-16th centuries of European Renaissance’s cathedrals, its religious art, etc.; much of it supported by members of the Medici family. Pope Clement VII, who excommunicated King Henry VIII, was a Medici.
5. Christian religions, according to a 1962 enumeration, encompassed 118 distinct divisions; including 47 distinct Christian Systems, and 71 distinct Christian sectaries. I question why so much diversity is necessary to worship “inerrant certainty”. My understanding: Jesus is a god because he was created by the Old Testament’s discredited immoral god in an act of “immaculate conception”, with “a virgin, at winter’s solstice, was put to death in his prime and then ascended into heaven at the time of the vernal equinox”. That is the biography of Buddha (563?-483 B.C.E.). Immaculate Conceptions, resurrections and ascensions into heaven, misrepresent our planet’s physical laws and have not been demonstrated, but are included in biographies of numerous gods; Christians should disclaim the first part of their canon, i.e., the Old Testament, because it proclaims the immoral god of King Josiah’s tribal propaganda to be creator of the universe.
6. One reason Saint Jerome adopted the Hebrew Bible, as a first part of Christianity’s canon, was the god’s sanctified killing of apostates, blasphemers, nonbelievers and proponents of other gods; which had been successful for Judaism. However when he translated the Hebrew Bible into the Latin Vulgate, he deleted verses that incriminated the god; but in the thirteenth century the Vatican and zealous Christian political regimes condescended and ordered general inquisitions, persecutions and death for heretics.
The following is quoted from Strobe Talbott’s wonderful book: The Great Experiment;
The Story of Ancient Empires, Modern Nations
“People have been butchering one another in the name of God for millennia, but it is when historians write about Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries that they capitalize “Wars of Religion”. In addition to the savagery and turmoil of the antagonism between Catholics and Protestants, rival Protestant sects went at each other with pikes, maces, muskets, and ropes. A series of conflicts between 1618 and 1648 was among the most destructive episodes in European history. What began as a religious struggle became increasingly political as various European powers, notably Sweden and France, asserted themselves against the Holy Roman Empire. By the end of the Thirty Years War, combat, along with disease, famine, and migration caused by marauding armies and the resulting devastation of economies, had reduced the population of central Europe by about a third. By 1644, the combatants were looking for a way to end the fighting.
The Peace of Westphalia—1648—established a pattern that would continue for the next three hundred years: increasingly destructive wars led to increasingly ambitious treaties—the peacemakers resolved that the religion of each state would be determined by its king or prince—Catholic, Lutheran, or Calvinist; if a ruler changed his religion, he would forfeit his lands. The Catholic proponents of this feature of the treaty intended it to discourage rulers from converting to Protestantism and accelerating the spread of the Reformation. They hoped in that fashion to preserve the European status quo and the Holy Roman Empire as its bulwark. The effect was the opposite. Westphalia enhanced the power of political leaders within their own domains and thereby further weakened the empire by creating a mélange of about three hundred largely autonomous polities—looking back on Westphalia and seeking to explain its result, nineteenth-century scholars came up with the term “nation-state”. The hyphen meant that nationality and statehood were closely aligned. It was a designation for a supposedly new non-ecumenical political construct—the cobbling together of “nation” and “state” into a single term lent credence to national distinctiveness as the basis of statehood”. National purity’s consanguinity inherently depletes. The U.S. is not a nation-state; we are a federation of states that thrive on racial diversity and I argue for intermixing the world’s races as DNA diversity improves humanity; intellectually as well as biologically. Ethnological sameness fosters reasonableness. Our long-term chore: create an idealistic real world free of religious intolerance.
German philosopher Immanuel Kant, (1724-1804), believed the individual to be sovereign; an ideal concept; it replaces an imaginary “god’s specious sovereignty; a license for religious tyranny without accountability”.
MUSLIMISM
1. Mohammed (570?-632 C.E.), realized that suppressing knowledge and killing nonbelievers, could work for Muslims just like it was doing for Judaism and Christianity. He claimed: Hebrew archangel Gabriel provided his Koran’s precepts. An adherent of Islam, Muslimism is an Abrahamic faith, subscribing to King Josiah’s infamous dogma; which can be embraced but if you ever renege, you are killed as an apostate; same as the Old Testament. Their goal: convert the world or destroy it, much like the Christians did during their 1,000 years of Dark Ages. Islam is a perfect example of how religions have governed nations. The crux of Abrahamic faiths is male superiority; during our evolutionary existence man instigated many perturbing decisions; the least exemplary; his niggardly, vainglorious domination of woman. The Middle East shows what subjugating women do to a society. Muslim’s male dominated culture is an extreme example of men’s attitude toward women; clergy represses women. Poorly educated, their virginity considered sacred, they experience a brutal surgical removal of the clitoris to circumvent pleasurable coition. Her husband is selected by her parents and premarital sexual experience or adultery is punished by beheading in the public square, or by her family as “honor killing”. Incited by clergy, ignorant males, filled with religious fervor and sexually deprived, sacrifice their lives to religious martyrdom, killing infidels to assure their promised lascivious eternal-life. Reconsider Islam’s aggressive vengeful male dominated culture; furthering ignorance by withholding knowledge and killing their more astute discerning citizens who complain. Is this what America’s Religious Right Coalition wants?
. 2. Islamic Muslims, engrossed in memorizing the Koran, murdering infidels, etc. are incapable of thinking, inventing or developing science. They did not participate in the industrial revolution and their fundamentalist concept of Abrahamic faiths are a perfect example of religion in action which we should avoid, but 86% of our nation’s semi-civilized society admits to being guided by an Abrahamic faith. Possibly their faith would prefer to return to a typical ecclesiastical dictator like Iran’s.
3. In Islam’s drive to rid the world of non-Muslims it is often reported that the last sound victims hear from suicide bombers or executioners, are the shouts of “Allahu Akhbar” or “God is great”. Don’t forget that Judaism and Christianity each spent a thousand years adhering to the spurious demands of King Josiah’s god: that blasphemers, apostates, nonbelievers, proponents of other gods, etc. should be killed by believers even when members of one’s own family; not an excuse for Muslims, but their claims of godliness are as false as those of Jews and Christians. In Islamic regimes, religion’s reigning clergy also govern and see opportunities to be humankind’s only religion and thereby rule a worldwide despotic theocracy. Demographics favor them, as their women’s birthrate averages three times that of U.S. women’s and five times that of European, Russian and Chinese women’s. European nations increasing Muslim migrants have not assimilated. In a few generations Western Europe will assimilate them by embracing Islam’s religious totalitarianism as Muslims follow King Josiah’s god’s commands to rid the world of infidels, which excludes only Muslim’s true believers. Similar to Judaism and Christianity, they’ve adopted Josiah’s propaganda. If we’re smart enough to understand ancient ignorance, we are smart enough to understand Religion-Lite’s vacuousness; and the Islamic regimes’ will-to-succeed, which is sucking us dry of will, blood and treasure fighting on their turf. Islam is betting that the U.S. won’t revert to Allah’s scorched-earth-revenge in order to stop their pursuit of nuclear bombs, etc. Islamic Mullahs view Muslims’ complaints as apostasy.
4. It is tragic that Islamic Muslims continue their literal interpretation of King Josiah’s fables; his tribal propaganda, i.e. the Bible’s first twelve books. Muslims missed the civilizing influence of Europe’s eighteenth century Enlightenment and should deny King Josiah’s vengeful dogma to avoid further self-destruction. Ignorance can’t expand civilizations; and blind faith in a god is inversely proportional to one’s knowledge.
SYNOPSIS
1. The Bible’s first twelve books divulge Josiah’s “theological hopes”. His imaginary Yahweh’s creation of the world and adventurous tales of its care for the ancient patriarchs, depicts Josiah’s grandiose visions. He composed a tribal code threatening death for all who dared investigate or criticize his monotheistic god-idea; he attributed the code to Yahweh, and intended the god’s death threats, and his own compliant killing, to convince his subjects of his divinity. He aspired to be divine, and portrayed himself in his tribal propaganda as “God’s” ideal, most righteous king and administrator of the god’s laws; which convinced his followers of his spurious divinity.
2. Josiah rid his kingdom of nonbelievers, and his fable served as Judah’s legendary epic for two centuries before Judaism adopted it for their Holy Scriptures, whose origin was not a miraculous revelation, but a youthful king’s insurance to protect himself from polytheism’s divisiveness. He was astute, prescient and insightful. Yahweh was effective propaganda, but has been a miserable failure, as our Bible’s “God”. All gods were concocted by ambitious men and are not holy. Supernatural is not responsible for our Moral Code and the Bible and Koran are not axiomatic, but only propaganda, i.e., “any systematic, widespread, dissemination or promotion of particular ideas, doctrines, practices, etc. to further one’s own cause or to damage an opposing one”.
3. Ezra & Nehemiah and subsequent aristocracy sought Josiah’s tribal god because it provided sanctified ways to kill nonbelievers but the Regimes, exploited their gullible manipulable subjects. Survivors’ progeny adopted the beliefs; which were abetted by ignorance and ambitious clergy. Believing in gods is an aberration requiring blind faith. Everything is possible, but blind faith in a god by billions caused innumerable conflicts which seriously divide us. Another truth: men determined holiness, composed fables, legends, songs, dance and established the eminence of spurious gods’. We are a restless people; a few seek knowledge; others remain devoid of knowledge, goals or beliefs; while the majority grovel on their knees, clinging to the Big-Lie of devils in a nether world, and righteous gods up in the sky.
4. King Josiah’s concept of the genesis of humanity, i.e., Creationism: is the doctrine that “ascribes the origin of matter, species, etc. to acts of creation by God”; it’s also the doctrine “that God creates a new soul for every human being born”: opposed to Traducianism, defined as “the theological doctrine that the soul is inherited from the parents”. Antinomianism: is a Christian theological doctrine decreeing: “faith alone, not obedience to the moral law, is necessary for salvation”. It is clear that this allowed clergy and believers to lie, steal, etc. as well as kill nonbelievers, with divine impunity, i.e., man’s godly doctrines are deemed indisputable; but are religious BS.
5. As I age, past experiences leads my mind to contemplate political and religious conundrums, e.g., humanity’s obeisance to King Josiah’s vengeful “God”, which for twenty six hundred years, prompted us to pusillanimously wallow in the self-deprecating, idea that Homo sapiens and other species were deposited on Earth, in full bloom, by a superhuman god, for a special purpose, which subjugates each of us forever. The tortuous ratiocinations necessary to justify Josiah’s tribal propaganda as divine revelation are not warranted. Abrahamic faiths’ success spread spurious beliefs worldwide. Religion’s ingenious incongruity, combined with imagination, ignorance and fear was unfathomable; we instinctively conceded to a god’s political promoters and saved our lives by acquiescing to specious beliefs, but our blind-faith has been our nemesis.
6. Our problems began when we condescended to worship the god, we’d recently created; we multiplied problems and complicated our lives by disagreeing and fighting over the god, dividing into multiple sects, attempting to settle questions for which there are no answers Unknowns scare us; we’re superstitious, our ignorant fears make us susceptibly gullible for conjecture, fables, parables and specious tales too good to be true. (See IGNORANCE).
7. I’ve explored man’s god-ideas and hasten to add: early Homo sapiens, i.e., modern man, ventured away from the equatorial jungles, followed the receding ice sheets and occupied the more temperate regions of the world. Evolution had improved the adventurous challengers’ brains and dexterity. In time, the exemplary, i.e., the astute, sagacious and discerning: those attracted to the positive pole, perceived of mathematics, astronomy, physics, chemistry, biology, etc.; they furthered knowledge, developed science beneficial for all humankind, e.g. plans, tools and machinery to cope progressively with prodigious problems in the agricultural, bronze, iron, industrial, electronics and space ages. Ten thousand years ago we became agriculturists. We continue our adventurous progress. Man’s ingenuity is undeniable his ability to think, to invent and resolve our realistic conundrums, provided life an easier more fruitful existence. But man’s calumnious efforts to exploit god-ideas, i.e., the development of his Judaic god have not been successful as his ignorance deluded him into killing nonbelievers. Comparing history’s few thinkers, who chose the positive pole, with those that chose the negative pole and followed a god, reveals religion’s tragic irrational beliefs which further ignorance and lack of initiative. Non-thinkers in the U.S. have been recorded; poll-takers find that 86% are believers; leaving 14% of 300million; about 42million discerning individuals that ”God’s” devotees prefer dead; how else could this be explained?
8. The Bible’s miracles have been discredited by the same scholars, epigraphists and archaeologists who were seeking proof of its credibility. Their two hundred year search of the biblical region included excavations and carbon-dating of each level of destruction, at each of the ancient ruins of destroyed centers of habitation, and all histories including those carved in stone, in all lands between the Nile River and the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers. The information has been amalgamated and conclusions published, authored by Bible scholars and archaeologists; I celebrate this revelation.
9. Abrahamic faiths succeeded because their gods commanded that nonbelievers, apostates and blasphemers must die. Blasphemy is “any remark deliberately mocking or contemptuous of God”. Believers fear views which challenge their Bible; unaware, Abrahamic faiths were extrapolated from King Josiah’s tribal propaganda, and are not holy. Judaism’s and Christianity’s first millenniums were Monarchal Theocracies which describes today’s Muslimism. Religion’s essence is male superiority; responsible for global divisions. Our world’s reservoir of empathetic, diplomatic and intelligent women will resolve our religious and racial distinctions. Besides generating new lives, women’s sensibilities and capabilities equal those of men, except for brute strength and male sperm. Free man of responsibility, provide adequate sex and a little sustenance and, like a stallion, he can be domesticated; males were intrigued with matriarchal life and with the idea of miraculous gods. When King Josiah required a monotheistic god to manage his subjects, it was important that it be like man; thus “God’s” jealousy, prejudice, ego, vanity, etc. It created a partnership; an unfortunate oversight as women weren’t included. The Bible’s god’s inconsideration of women was concocted by males. Man’s blind faith in a vain, vile, vengeful, and tyrannical, mythical male god, rather than in intelligent, empathetic, sensuously beautiful, real women, is inexplicably perverse and stupid.
10. The Abrahamic faiths’ history of inquisitions, persecutions, stonings, burnings, beheadings and religious wars, all in the name of their god, belies their claims of godliness. All three worship King Josiah’s despicable god; we can’t blame religion’s militancy on a fictional god character; the problems are men’s imaginations, testosterone and wandering minds. Religion’s perceived militancy is that of man; whose indifference to religion’s past and present death, suffering, degradation, etc. only adds to the confusion, amid questions about religion’s purpose? They hypocritically avoid references to their less than sacred past and present gods as Holy; supported by billions who inherited misguided beliefs without investigating the god vs. secularism situation. If there actually was a god with a heaven, it’s reasonable to assume we would be allowed a more sensible arrangement, as theories, concepts, etc. which can’t be substantiated, are invalid, even though they may have been conjured by the ancients. “Illusion and faith aren’t sensible substitutions for sound science”, that accepts the provable and advances knowledge, (See SCIENCE); but religion is an obstructive stagnant backward, waste land of hypocrisy; unable, for the past twenty six hundred years, to add to knowledge. Islamic fundamentalism remains in the seventh century when Mohammad claimed the Hebrew archangel; Gabriel revealed the Koran’s precepts. Earlier, the same people had developed civilizations, but Islamic regimes, today, are despotic theocracies enforcing sharai law and exporting sectarian terrorism. After its historic holy wars, Western Europe forewent religions’ illogical divisiveness and formed the European Union, but was reluctantly drawn into President G.W. Bush’s Middle East misadventures.
11. We are a plague that has infested the Earth’s skin, an infestation of organisms consuming our host, while we contemplate global agreements on ways to avoid self-destruction before our host collapses. Alternatively, we may be a malignancy, developing at the exponential rate of population multiplicity. When our host becomes uninhabitable, we will need to move onto another host and begin a new infestation. Globally, we haven’t considered mutually agreeable plans to further enhance our tolerance of each other’s ethnic peculiarities. Earth accepted the single cell microorganisms of life and nourished them for billions of years while they developed into our numerous species of animal life; the microscopic organisms, viries and bacteria, the aquatic, the avian, and mammals including us. All life depends upon global willingness to agree to stabilize and reverse our thoughtless destruction of the Earth’s natural benevolence. We’ve adapted and thrived beyond expectations and our infestation is beyond humane control. We’ve polluted two of life’s necessities, air and water, and must convince global nations to take emergency measures that require compliant agreements to eliminate elements contributing to global divisiveness or else all of humankind must contemplate: irreversible gradual extermination.
12. People believe because they don’t know any better. Our lexicon is rife with words meaning unreal or unknown, which may be used to describe a pseudo universe devoid of human knowledge, where organized religion’s alliance has staked its unholy claim and touts its worthless stock to gullible congregations. Religions allude to supernaturalism’s gods, ghosts, etc.; it’s unfamiliar territory and opens unlimited fields of thought just as extensive and complex as we will allow our imagination to develop. It’s a fertile field on which to grow fairytales, visions, claims of gods, etc. For instance: if you compose a fable of your grandparent’s adventures with a miracle working god and your ignorant friends believe it and teach it to their children, and they, teach it to their children ad finitum, believers will about double each generation. A millennium later, innumerable ones will support your fable as factual. If during that time, the believers are killing nonbelievers, a majority of humankind will have developed a blind faith and believe your fable actually happened; that a god exists because multitudes are religious; groveling and worshipping it.
13. Mankind gave credence to the fiction that their surest path to heaven was to kill nonbelievers, a practice continued for its first millennium by Judaism, Christianity and presently by Islamic Muslimism. The egregious practice rid the world of its most astute citizens, but left a residue of the least astute believers, to reproduce themselves; it explains why about 80% of our world’s population worships the god of King Josiah’s propaganda and about 20% are thinkers. Non-thinking believers may sin, as they are assured of repentant forgiveness, but thoughtful nonbelievers do not have the benefit of an imaginary god; so we must remain above and without sin.
14. A spiritual god does not control our lives or the physical laws of our planet. Our main concern is for each other. Our Moral Code and Golden Rule are ancient guides to a good life; they are a development of primitive empathy, an outgrowth and consequence of maternal feelings, mainly manifested in women. Religious conjectures proclaim answers where none exist and their contentious insistence upon diversity precludes our desire for sameness. Josiah inappropriately credited our beneficence to a god. Realistically, humankind’s primitive evolutionary convivial experiences were sufficient to develop our feelings of maternal love, empathy, kindness, etc., along with our Moral Code which evolved thousands of years before Josiah produced his god’s Ten Commandments in Exodus 20: 2-17; eleven verses, (2-12), relate to the god’s egomania, leaving five verses for killing, adultery, stealing, lying and coveting thy neighbor’s possessions.
15. Among our human masses, ignorance, misinformation and religions flourish; they worship supernatural gods, known only via conjecture, ruse, subterfuge, and lies. Their blind faith in the illogical reveals mortal fears of exclusion by Father, Son or Holy Ghost; similar to Brahma, Vishnu and Siva, Hindu’s supreme trinity. Brahma created the universe, Vishnu is Preserver and Siva is god of destruction and reproduction. Holy Ghost is undefined. Realistically, the unholy trinity I’ve gleaned from ninety three years and religion’s despicable history is “ignorance, dogma & despotism”.
16. Religion has no knowledgeable facts; just blind faith (See ILLUSORY FAITH); biblical fables reveal how King Josiah misled our ancestors into believing their salvation required them to torture and murder those unwilling to obey Josiah’s monotheistic god. Religion’s responsibility for millions killed by our ancestors, in “God’s” name, is an irreconcilable stain on our collective conscience. Life taught how god-ideas became imbedded in primitive minds amid vast ignorance, and developed religion’s brutal history. Delusions, concerning our purpose, began in primitive times when we explained non-comprehension by attributing occult powers to mythical gods; there’s no evidence supporting simple-minded solutions devised by primitive imaginations. As I became more familiar with Bible’s tyrannical god’s methods for dealing with nonbelievers, critics, etc., curiosity led me to search for why the god was portrayed as vain, vile, vicious, and vengeful and why was man so enthralled with the idea of an immoral god? I found that man had created all gods, and was especially enamored with the Bible’s god because man had created that particular god in his own exalted, self-image, the perfect male, mean spirited, ready to destroy all who failed to worship the god’s egomania; I learned of the Bible’s ungodliness; its contrived mythology, false prophesies and inherent fallacies. Hebrew Bible’s sanctified killing of all those unwilling to convert assured Judaism’s successful first millennium; the egregious error rid Jewish culture of its discerning astute citizens and left lesser informed to propagate new believers, which explains our plethora of believers and dearth of thinkers. Similar situations prevail for ancient Christians and modern Islam. The only goodness in our semi-civilized world comes from civilized fellow humans; let’s be good to each other; more tolerant and respectful; remember that Confucius said: “we are all the same except for our experiences”. If we did not have divisive religion’s stupid imaginary gods to fight over, it’s possible world’s people would be more tolerant and respect each other. The Bible’s “God’s” intolerance and impartiality was man’s ideal of holy behavior, including: glorifying the specious apparition by killing nonbelievers; imagining they could please it and be rewarded in heaven. There is no god. For its salvation humanity must realize religion’s incongruities, inherent fallacies and intention to deceive. Counsel has explained that a belief in “God’s” promise of eternal life, threats of hell, etc. are necessary to prevent chaos; or we would all become immoral, uncivilized and backward. I disagree; the most backward immoral, uncivilized chaotic, societies on Earth are the most religious; I refer to Islamic regimes which still kill apostates, blasphemers, nonbelievers and proponents of other gods.
17. Our only exposure to supernaturalism is the Holy Books and other fairytales. Supernaturalism is religion’s subterfuge; why do we worship supernatural gods and why do civilized societies choose to be guided by King Josiah’s vengeful dogma? Bible’s god is portrayed as an inconsiderate immoral tyrant; so why do believers attribute all that is good to the spurious “God”?
18. My reasoning is derived from the diametrically opposed positions of King Josiah of Judah, and Charles Robert Darwin, the nineteenth century English author of, On the Origin of Species and of, The Descent of Man. My remarks are unambiguous, uncomplicated by Deuteronomistic History’s convoluted meaninglessness and its consequential theological dogma. As blind-faith reveals more trust in our ignorance than our intellect, I’ll explain how religion’s irrationality came from man’s conspiratorial ruminations, wishful thinking and persistent search for propositions to exploit his fellow man. So when our political leaders promised us suckers eternal life; we didn’t challenge it. Since superstitions ruled the land; we have deceived our stupid selves about the god problem. Our imagination led us to follow leaders espousing a close personal relationship to a fearsome tho specious god. King Josiah’s unabashed desire to unify, inspire and motivate his war weary subjects, led him to deceive them with a legendary fable concerning their mythological ancestors’ relationship to their personal miracle working tribal god, ingeniously portrayed as Josiah’s scholars “retrospectively imagined it all should have been”.
19. Religion continues to preach faith in King Josiah’s mythological immoral god that commands death for nonbelievers; an immoral and unlawful act, yet congregations are encouraged to worship the unholy apparition. There is not a remote connection to a divine ever-present, all-knowing, all-powerful superhuman God. Religion’s misguidance stultifies believers; who are scared to consider “God’s” unavailability. Promoting the unknown under the guise of personal salvation has convinced humankind they must submit their will and initiative to a god, and refuse to heed anyone that could set them aright.
20. Ignorance and wishful thinking embraced religion’s fallacies. Our brains and our computers, both require rational, factual input to develop rational factual solutions; religion’s lack thereof forced it to rely upon conjecture, blind faith, and killing millions of nonbelievers, to obtain its illogical imposition upon the world’s trustful societies.
21. Ralph Waldo Emerson warned us not to follow the crowd; but to think and reason independently. I argue for a world managed by its perspicacious peace-loving women; dedicated to ethnological sameness, undiscriminating inclusiveness and global harmony. The idea of world-government was promoted “by eleven U.S. presidents from Franklin Roosevelt through Bill Clinton”. The possibility of a peaceful healthy world for humanity to enjoy should encourage the worlds astute and discerning to temper their contentious attitudes about ethnological disparities, and diplomatically and reasonably organize, socially, politically and otherwise to promote and work toward a more peaceful ecumenical world.
22. Dear Grandchildren, to understand the magnificent release that I experience, sensing freedom from gods, ghosts and other mythical delusions, see Ingersoll’s Vow in FINAL NOTES. Also please recognize the historical clues of religion’s deceptive fearsome tho inspirational illusions that misled our gullible ancient ancestors whose ignorance provided opportunities for religions’ bloody success. Everyone wants to live forever. Also, please realize what you can expect when religion gains its long sought opportunity to promulgate King Josiah’s literal Fundamentalist interpretation of the Bible, which will demote our Democracy into just another tyrannical theocracy.
23. Like history’s innumerable individuals; curious enough to leisurely devote time exploring religion’s devious quandary; I’m satisfied biblical faith is erroneous. I presume believers aren’t curious and regret their disinterest. There’s something mentally devastating in believing we are subjected to unconfirmed spiritual powers; although evidence is plentiful that gods were originally created and promoted by men to gain and maintain political control over other men. So, our Founding Fathers warned us to remain alert to religion’s threats and devious ruses to gain ecclesiastical control of our nation’s government.
24. Non-thinking men depended upon gods, thus it remains; now we consider ourselves informed and understand how our ancestors’ shortcomings were due to their lack of knowledge, which encouraged the worship of false gods, but how do we explain to progeny why we unthinkingly continue to worship mythology’s misbegotten gods?
25. Our Constitution guarantees us freedom from religion, as well as the separation of Church and State. Our Electorate’s enthusiasm for a mythological god is our nation’s nemesis: and will probably destroy the world’s first State to be free of a deceptive unreasonable fictitious god. Whatever vile deeds ancient clergy decreed, modern clergy’s misperception of its “holy” powers will tempt them to replicate.
I recall a fable about a people who were so awed by their king’s spurious divinity that when the king rode throughout his kingdom nude, no one saw him unclothed; that fable is analogous to “believers” concept of the Bible’s immoral specious god, and my treatise is analogous to the innocent kid who cried out: “The emperor is naked!”
OUR CHALLENGES
1. The challenge for religion is reconciling twenty six hundred years of false information to worldwide believers with more reasonable goals for their organizations, e.g., convincing believers that Earth and its life forms are worthy of survival. But religions will continue to exploit humanity’s fears of the unknown with the Bible’s and Koran’s vengeful, recriminating messages. The Holy Books’ precepts were adopted verbatim from King Josiah’s tribal propaganda, where the god was portrayed as a vengeful killer for the exclusive benefit of Josiah’s people, to resolve problems inherent within his little kingdom, and are not related to humanity’s present situation. How can the misguided miasmatic spell religious ignorance holds over humankind be broken?
2. The world suffers a shortage of potable and agricultural water, religious terrorism, pathogens that spread internationally and god problems. United States’ unfavorable trends, include increasing: public and private debt, bankruptcies, mortgage foreclosures; decreasing savings, an inflationary monetary system, population sprawl, failing infrastructure, imploding schools, overflowing prisons, increasing unemployment, plus dependence on imported oil and reduced national prestige.
3. Although we’ve made great progress in agriculture, industrialization, medical research, in the science of communication, development of travel and global trade; we face major problems, namely nuclear conflict, global warming, and global divisiveness; each could limit our progress. Nuclear problems demand surveillance to control proliferation of weapons and fissionable materials. We, the world’s people, finally realized that we cause global warming, and are considering ways to slow its progress by reducing our use of fuels which emit carbon dioxide.
4. Humans also cause global divisiveness; the main causes are religion, nationalism, race and language, which blind us to thoughts of inclusiveness, cultural harmony and world peace. I have pondered the problem of global divisiveness but wasn’t sure of its solution. After President George W. Bush proclaimed a higher-power had approved his plan to invade and renovate the Middle East, I followed his example, and resorted to divination, the method used by soothsayers for thousands of years to consult the occult. Like the president, I hope that the occult’s approval will add credence, prestige and traction to my solution. Shamans, Medicine-men, High-priests, and Aristocracy realized the subterfuge’s reassurance; helped them arrive at acceptable solutions for high risk problems by limiting responsibility, preserving prestigious positions and at critical times saving lives.
5. The ruse’s success depended upon a plethora of professed believers with their rituals; public display of exaggerated ceremonial cant, dances, etc. Ancient Egyptian, Grecian and Roman states had coteries of mythological gods. Israelites were polytheists before King Josiah’s tribal propaganda, i.e., his fable, introduced the illusion of a monotheistic god.
6. The god-idea is as old as our primitive cognition; based on fears and imagination, it explained and confirmed our relationship to all we failed to comprehend. Taught to children, it increased believers at the exponential rate of population multiplicity. Humanity’s history of despoliation, torture and malicious, killing in the name of their god, all of which today’s ignorant believers are unaware, belies reasons for berating us nonbelievers who are more sagacious, discerning and astute about : “God” than our protagonists, the misinformed proponents of “Creationism” and “Intelligent Design”.
7. Scholars, archaeologists and epigraphists found a history simpler than King Josiah’s biblical fable about the Patriarchs, the ancient Israelites, etc.; a good reason to reject the “Holy Books’ prophesies and miracles, which are the sole source of Abrahamic faiths’ relevant knowledge; it has always been in doubt. Disclosure, leaves large segments of our world’s population suffering from delusions and blind faith in stultifying beliefs that encourage Islam’s religious terrorism, but inhibits our proposal for a global program to reduce worldwide apprehensions.
8. Religion’s lack of information is tantamount to ignorance; thus, ignorance is responsible for our blind faith in mind warping ancient sorcery, confusing humankind with vacuous conjecture and mendacious spiritualism which reeks of charlatanism, (See ILLUSORY FAITH). Primitive ignorance of our beginning conjured our fears, ignited our imaginations, and produced superstitions with various creative conjectures and gods for all troubling occasions. Ancient ignorance along with malevolent dogma encouraged despotism which led more political leaders to embrace gods, which non-thinking humans endowed with powers over themselves.
9. Religion, contemplated with an inquisitive mind, reveals dissension and confusion about the unknown, which is presented with a foolhardy certainty that is incomprehensible. Answers to queries based on conjecture are not valid and is the crux of skepticism; we’ve divided into gullible and skeptics; such as agnostics, deists, free-thinkers, nonbelievers, infidels, secularists, and atheists; each doubting group claims an intrinsic definition.
10. Gods were produced by our imagination that deluded us into a self-inflicted impulse to be dominated by King Josiah’s, monotheistic god; and feel compelled to worship his perverse ideas. My reasoned argument is that all gods are mythical; we’ve created and manipulated them as per our aspirations. Wishful fantasies and ritualistic groveling cannot make them more than mental aberrations. Without tangible evidence of a god’s effectiveness it is unreasonable for believers to kill others because of a fanatical adherence to a particular version of an imaginary god; an irrational situation; incomprehensible to logical thought.
11. Since men first presumed their guise of self-righteous godliness, they have dreamed of eternal life and without evidence, believe they are above our planet’s natural laws and that an “omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent” mythological god will redeem their sins and save their souls, in spite of our failure to respect Earth’s myriad forms of life. We are inconsiderate, and insist upon both religious and ethnological competitive distinctions, but female sensibilities will outwit our conspiratorial schemes. Male guile promulgated religion’s B.S., developed large organizations and built grand buildings, but have under-estimated two essential Earthly challenges, i.e., advancing knowledge and living together peacefully.
12. Intellectualism’s doctrine is “that knowledge comes wholly from pure reason, without aid from the senses”. Our electorates’ majority insists that candidates for public office certify their anti-intellectualism plus a strong belief in biblical miracles; they prefer candidates like themselves. I prefer candidates much like me, free of religious constraints; without a need for miracles. Thomas Jefferson, our third president, opined: “our democracy’s success depends upon an informed electorate”. Our communication system is impressive and we are allowed the freedom of non-seditious speech, but it invites a plethora of political and religious misinformation, keeping our pot of ethnological political and religious distinctions boiling. Our government leaders have been slow to realize the benefits in banding together for anything other than war and religions’ leaders continue to prove they are part of the problem, without a clue how to become more tolerant and inclusive.
13. The U.S., occasionally experiences influxes of illegal workers, seeking employment, but much of our manufacturing and assembly work is out-sourced to less costly locations, (See U.S. ECONOMY). Poorly educated and discouraged male youth is one source of our less than astute electorate; they consider intellectualism unmanly, effeminate, and drop out of school with meager educations and low-skill opportunities. My solution: stabilize and invigorate middle and secondary schools with male professionals that must certify their qualifications and be licensed to practice, e.g., architects, lawyers, etc.; they will challenge our growing numbers of uninspired and discouraged young males who are taxing our schools, courts and prisons.
14. There are reasons for discouragement; uneducated parents often produce additional uneducated parents. If we could interrupt that cycle, and initiate a new pattern, we might educate an entire generation and get ahead of the climbing curve of population growth. Too many distractions confront middle and high school youth, producing an average drop-out rate of about 35%. Without benefit of parental restrictions, this age group isn’t wise enough to make meaningful decisions about their future. Elementary thru secondary education in the U.S. has been directed and managed like home-grown enterprises. Professionalization of management and teaching staffs will provide better educators than unionization. Communities’ ability to educate children should not be limited to a percentage of their real estate’s value. Children are a treasure and our nation’s future; equal opportunities for a comprehensive education are everyone’s obligation; state or national. (See UNINSPIRED MALE YOUTH) also (DETERRENCE VS. PRISONS). The curiosity of our very young will embrace natural phenomena, plus science, and research in the physical sciences. Indolence is intolerable. In order to divert children from worse pursuits, each child must become interested in investigating something new that’s attracted their attention. It’s important for them to explore new sources of information, where they will discover developments they will enjoy learning more about; curiosity expands with knowledge. Children can’t start too early; the pursuit will fill their lives with pleasure; exercising their brain; it’s the secret of successful lives supplanting a need to be constantly entertained.
16. We males, presume ourselves god-like, requiring adoration worship, obedience, etc. Although “God” assigned the management of women to us, they are no longer considered chattel, and civilized men no longer use force with women, so we must realize that women are the superior gender; their brains aren’t addled by a testis and men should value and emulate their sensibilities. I argue for female’s freedom from subservience and advocate their promotion to prominent leadership positions. Their extraordinary sensibilities are conducive to congeniality, inclusiveness, purposefulness, etc. Women’s new role is necessary; an emergency solution to help resolve our male world’s contentiously divisive political and religious problems.
17. A few legendary examples of matriarchal communities are said to have settled disagreements with everyone participating in communal sex, i.e., to relax, relieve tensions and reduce stress. I’m sure the practice would affect world peace, and it’s saner than sending our youth around the world to kill others in order to settle religion’s differences. Communal-sex is the ideal system for the Islamic Fundamentalists to embrace; it would dissolve their hang-ups and relieve the world’s many political & religious tensions.
18. Most people in Iceland, Denmark & Sweden believe in evolution. In all European countries, including Greece, believers exceeds those of the U.S., where a Gallup poll in 2008 found only 15% agreed with the proposition that humans developed over millions of years. This exposes our nation’s ignorance. Turkey has 25% believers, 25% not sure and 50% deny it. Most of our population unquestionably believe King Josiah’s biblical fables, and instinctively feel compelled to follow the majority’s acceptance of religion’s irrational absurdity rather than Secularism’s doctrine of truthful reason.
19. Human males are handicapped biologically by a testosterone’ induced inability to comprehend their fellow man, which leads them to challenge similar incomprehension of male competitors; it’s often why political and religious divisions developed into war, and why we expend our treasure and kill millions in revengeful retaliation. It is from this realization, at age 93, that I foresee an influential future role for our world’s wondrous females, presented in the following chapter.
OUR SAVIORS
1. The world’s women are our potential saviors. I called on my imaginary female god, who is more reasonable than King Josiah’s vengeful male god. Her sensitivity to nuance, undiscriminating inclusiveness and comprehension of humankind are essential to resolving global divisiveness. She is adamant about my recent inquiry regarding the problem of disparate ethnicities’ attitudes toward races, religions and languages; advising that we discontinue emphasizing distinctions and accentuate similarities; that divisiveness will take many generations to resolve; that a tolerant respect for others is essential for success; that we must integrate the world’s races by accepting miscegenation as common practice and cohabit until all children’s skin is the same color. She cautions us to develop a common language, and that worldwide systems of education, healthcare, pollution control, agriculture, and food distribution are needed; that violence is insane, and that we must accomplish her togetherness proposal without violence and, in time, ethnocentric divisions will dissolve. If global policies can be directed toward inclusiveness, all will benefit, but uniqueness is cherished; many fear losing their ethnicity. Socrates (470?-399 B.C.E.) claimed world citizenship, was judged guilty of treason and sentenced to death because he refused the Grecian state’s gods. Ethnic divisiveness discourages world citizenship and world peace. Male leaders of nations and religions will resist changes that might dilute their personal prestige, power, etc. Earth can provide us ideal lives if we will limit our indulgence and not squander resources; nature will restore forests, endangered species, sources of water, etc., but can’t support us if we kill all living things which displease us. Deforestation is frightening, as we need forests to absorb excess carbon dioxide; and to produce oxygen, essential for the survival of most all of Earthly life.
2. Our acceptance of Hebrew Bible’s immoral vengeful god as creator of the universe with Josiah’s tribal propaganda as the only basis for the god’s divinity piqued my interest in ethnological sameness and global harmony. Astute individuals cherish ideas about a world government and “value the future on a time-scale longer than their own. Their realistic and reasonable plans are less contentious than religion’s adherents. My interest in religion is a desire for global women to organize, design and control initiatives to bring people together, to reduce intolerance and save Earth. They are natural diplomats whose leadership is essential for international compromise. So I encourage world’s women to address the potential advantages inherent in togetherness, ethnological sameness and to inaugurate a world-wide campaign to accomplish the endeavor. This may be idealistic, but it’s our only way to eventually avoid humanity’s self-extermination as just another endangered species.
3. Women’s innate reason and sensibilities are essential capabilities required by a worldwide team to design and develop the proposed program. We seek a world free of xenophobia, where all children have the same color skin, speak a common language, have adequate food, housing, healthcare, education and a representative authority that encourages each to attain xenophilic self-confidence and provide equal opportunities for them to reach their level of incompetence; which is a step beyond one’s competence.
4. Women were not well represented in Josiah’s tribal propaganda, and televangelists’ “hot-lines to God” imply the same attitude prevails. If Josiah’s team had been female, “God” would be female, women would again be in ascendancy, world’s history would be less brutal, sexual repression unknown and matriarchy would be our authority mode. Men follow god, while women keep a peaceful home and serve as men’s source of relaxation, bearing and nurturing the next generation into adulthood. Women are our only hope, to pacify a contemptuous world. Men disdain intellectualism and resent competent individuals. Women admire scholarship and exceed men matriculating in college. Female sensibilities are essential for leadership in government and religious organizations; they’ll be superior national and international leaders. A woman will be a more discerning Pope and a much more appropriate, more reliable god figure. Their smiles domesticated man; although the Bible doesn’t consider women believers, their influence on humankind has been more valuable than man’s god-ideas, exploiting his insecurities with an immoral virile god to emulate; but a motherly nanny god to suckle and guide him would have been more appropriate as male believers with their fatuous egomaniacal male god, have cluttered human history with blood stained debris.
5. I’m not arguing for world acceptance of matriarchy, but advocate an unencumbered change in attitude that will bring global women out of the utility closet; into the forefront of human endeavors; leadership positions around the globe. Men’s insistence on leading was an expensive experiment in wasted money and lives, which leaves us where we began: fighting over religion’s vagaries, male vanity and national prestige. Women appreciate men for many reasons, such as their cleverness and its resulting largesse; women add tranquil togetherness to our existence; they have always supported men’s efforts to change world policies, even when we employed a god sanctioned: dividing, conquering and destroying. My hope: male condescension will support women’s efforts without proffering unsolicited interference as they spend a few hundred years untangling our world’s man-tied knots.
6. Women’s sensible capabilities provide the attributes required by all intellectually demanding professions. Questions arise concerning a proper division of labor. During their first 40 years, women are necessary to bear and nurture our next generation, whose maturity may determine their mother’s professional pursuit. There is work to do; women’s innate ability to compromise are essential to success; they ameliorate bad situations; their equiponderance intelligence and comprehension match and exceed those of men; in addition, women can be direct and tough with grace; I advocate that women be global decision makers. Suffering and discontent in our world can be diminished by returning to some semblance of matriarchal leadership.
7. When global predicaments produce additional religious wars over man-made problems, the few survivors will concede that men should not lead nations or religions. National and international problems have been settled by wars; men chose war instead of reasonable procedures. They are exemplary adventurers, engrossed in tactical schemes of attack, rather than the strategy necessary to avoid wars. Men cause wars; women are not involved. Men are enthralled with self-righteous abnegation but are not perturbed about women’s negated position in society, but women are indispensably more equal than men; and prove it daily by considerately serving men as I’ve noted above.
8. We’ve devoted time, money, and lives’ to improve world congeniality, but haven’t considered miscegenation as international policy to facilitate humankind’s need for ethnological integration, religious enlightenment and peaceful coexistence. New scientific development is not required; nor should miscegenation be considered compulsory; young people only need opportunities to study and work together; intimacy will solve our problem. In time, we will produce a conglomerate strain, which may be simpler than maintaining a viable, sustainable planet.
9. Religions have progressed unevenly along diverging paths, devoid of ideas to improve cultural harmony. It isn’t too late; everything is possible. God is possible but evidence points to its fancifulness; requiring blind faith in specious god-ideas. People have many talents; some have a talent for creating extraordinary things from ordinary stuff and extraordinary conditions from simple situations. The Abrahamic faiths conjured their spurious gods and belief systems from a young king’s deceptive tribal propaganda and deceived most of our world’s population with a vision and postulation of the gods’ propensity for killing nonbelievers.
10. Josiah’s biblical fables are revealed as tribal propaganda; religions should revise “God’s” goal by adding Cultural Harmony. His Plan-B should imply that “God” cannot return for “Mission Accomplished,” before our Earth is presentably sustainable. His new revelation should command the faithful believers to lead everyone rehabilitating planet Earth, in preparation for “God’s” anxiously anticipated return; Cultural Harmony is a realistic goal for “God” to pursue; it provides religion an honest purpose which humanity appreciates and understands. When religions are no longer burdened with supernaturalism’s quandary, they can contribute to our natural world’s knowledge simply by promoting world peace, which has greater potential for humankind’s common understanding, progress, etc., than a blind faith in supernaturalism’s unknowns.
11. Religion’s power and influence in the world is usually confined to the dubious proposition of: “saving souls”, its political power is often used to discourage progress. Religion’s potential for advancing human knowledge has been neglected and needs to be reexamined. This is an opportunity to add World Togetherness as part of their canon; it should be their divine purpose along with Family Planning, abandoning Compulsory Ignorance and their message should appeal to the intellect, instead of postulating a theocratic totalitarianism, the arch enemy of independent thought.
12. The Old Testament’s god is portrayed as a vengeful divider, not as a unifier; but if we are to be saved from self-destruction, the cooperation and complicity of the “Church” is essential. Our excruciatingly desperate need to restore Earth to a more pristine condition, and the probability that we can solve global-warming’s problems plus our water problems depends upon world governments reaching agreements and their willingness to work together. If nations are unable to agree before life on Earth becomes unbearable or religious idiots nuclearly achieve their long sought “End Times”; what are man’s ideas about imaginary gods worth?
13. Everyone should be excited with the idea of hybridizing the human race; since our beginning, the process has produced some very astute and beautiful people. Biological and psychological advantages inherent in D.N.A. diversity, makes it the universal path to removing racial prejudice and will reduce consanguinity’s consequences. To facilitate this effort we need to reorganize our worldwide programs of both secondary and college student-exchanges; with an ever expanding participation of countries and students, it will grow into a universal system of educational requirements. After several generations, our global situation will benefit from improved interracial and interfaith relationships.
14. The 19th chapter of Exodus has “God” explaining to Moses, that, under the threat of death, neither the people nor the priests shall be allowed on Mount Sinai, or see god while Moses is receiving the Ten Commandments. Andy Rooney said: “Those to whom His word was revealed were always alone in some remote place, like Moses. There wasn’t anyone around when Mohammad got the word either. Mormon Joseph Smith and Mary Baker Eddy had exclusive audiences with God. We must trust them as reporters----and you know reporters. They’ll do anything for a story”. Abraham Lincoln said: “You can fool all of the people, some of the time and some of the people all of the time, but you cannot fool all of the people, all of the time”. Lord Acton said: “All power tends to corrupt; absolute power corrupts absolutely”. King Josiah’s minions concocted a god with absolute power over Josiah’s people.
15. As a child, mother warned: the “boogey-man” would get me; later I was consigned to hell. I will not go to hell; I will return to oblivion, from whence I came prior to conception in a passionate act of conjugal pleasure. Biblical mythology’s imaginary gods have undue influence over the lives of millions of people; a mental aberration, accepted as normal by the mental health profession. The subterfuge of religion’s effusive inerrancy convinces the superstitious they must follow the crowd to the promised hereafter; thus, religion feeds and thrives on our fears. We are seeking a queue to join or a crowd to follow. I’m thankful for our skeptics. Skepticism is rational; Judge Learned Hand often said that he would like to see some particular words by Oliver Cromwell placed over portals of every church, courthouse and at every cross-road in our nation, which were: “I beseech ye, in the bowels of Christ, think ye may be mistaken”. Judge Hand thought that if we are to be saved, it must be through skepticism.
16. Since the end of our primitive matriarchal period when man became god, he has considered himself godly and with the promise of eternal life he is sure of his immortality. Man accepts his self-assigned, exalted position with equanimity, assured he is above all other Earthly life-forms including that of women. An obvious question: why do women worship Abrahamic faiths’ mythological gods, despite the gods’ biblical disregard for the female gender? The answer: men are natural promoters, that is, confidence-men, capable of selling snake oil, etcetera. Since the advent of male superiority, women have been relegated to religion’s fringe with limited involvement; few women are familiar with the Bible’s ridiculous egomaniacal god’s specious bloody commands. Apparently believers rationalize that “God’s” immorality and vengeful, demeanor is fundamental to their faith.
17. Biological & psychological distinctions in our genders can resolve our divisiveness. Men are greedier, more contentious, our ego and vanity are sacrosanct; and we compulsively dominate. Our predispositions might be needed to follow “God’s” precepts, i.e., to divide conquer and destroy nonbelievers; Nations and religions must find mutually beneficial ways to resolve divisions. Women’s sensibilities, predispositions, etc. are more suitable for our needs; they are more ameliorable, empathetic, sharing, and equally staunch, loyal, and steadfast; underestimated, they’re gracious winners, even when their successes are credited to men. I argue in favor of the proposition: that after multimillennia of male domination and our world’s has reached the stage where we have a compelling urgency to develop communal solutions for global problems; women’s predispositions make them more capable and apt than men, to detect common-ground for determining solutions for our impending international agreements.
18. As a youth, I “believed”, but questioned the unreasonableness of my belief. Religion’s illogical believers both fear and revere the Bible’s vengeful obnoxious god’s recrimination; which served King Josiah’s purpose; also religion’s, by instilling mortal fears that torment people into believing in the unknown. Because their beliefs differed from Josiah’s, and thus the Bible’s specious views, millions of dissenters were wrongfully tortured and put to death to please a spurious monotheistic god; that stupidity is why at age 93, and in hospice care, I’m a confirmed atheist, unafraid of death. Without a menacing god, what is there to fear?
19. U.S. was founded as a Secularist, not a Christian nation. Many early American colonists came to this country to escape the rigid freedom-limiting religious dogmas of Christian Europe. Puritans brought a more strict dogma with them, which prompts Australians’, wry comments, that they were lucky to get the convicts. The early thinkers in the Colonies were deeply suspicious of organized religion. Thomas Paine (1737-1809), American Revolutionary patriot, published, The Age Of Reason, an attack on the Bible and orthodox religious beliefs; eight editions sold out in the first year. Our astute founding fathers were determined that authoritarian religion wouldn’t disrupt democracy’s principles. Most signers of the Declaration of Independence in 1776 were deists. Benjamin Franklin & Thomas Jefferson were outspoken atheists. John Adams was opposed for our second president because he was a Congregationalist; it was thought: he favored a monarchal theocracy, much like Islam’s totalitarianism.
20. I respect Religion-Lite, the least disingenuous for a civilized society, but continuing growth and development of Islam’s religious extremists and America’s Protestant Fundamentalist movement will lead to upheaval as civilized societies will not abide compliance with Fundamentalism.
21. Our world’s thinkers advanced civilization’s philosophy and science in spite of religion’s appeal to a non-thinking majority. It’s most evident in secular nations; free from religion’s interference, i.e., believers’ insistence that a spurious god overrules all opposition. All theocratic regimes have burned books, suppressed scientific inquiry, freedom of speech and information. Believing in gods dulls reasoning power and clouds the mind with unrealistic ideas, e.g., believing that godly power exists, without the remotest evidence, indicates more faith in ignorance than knowledge, i.e., what one does not know is more credible than what one does know. This explains believers’ self-satisfaction and lack of curiosity to learn the historical facts about their omniscient fearsome imaginary god. Everyone needs to question their particular religion’s past performance; especially the Abrahamic faiths; responsible for killing millions of innocent nonbelievers; which continues in Islam.
22. Dear Grandchildren, a small percentage of our world understands that beliefs in god are male concocted subterfuges, and religion deserves ridicule; their absurdities are humorous, with vast numbers meeting regularly to exercise distinctive rituals of particular sects, hoping to influence specific deities and repeating the aberration ad finitum without meaningful results. Remember, you can depend upon reason and truth to sustain you through life and that the Abrahamic faiths propound unreasonable, less than truthful beliefs in the Big Lie.
23. Religion’s pitch attracted billions to the altar; it is difficult to ignore. A petitioner needs only: publically testify their beliefs, plus repentance for sins, and they’re promised eternal life with their god. Rewards are in the supernatural universe after one’s death; thus our blind-faith. My reason for dwelling on religion’s confidence game is: mounting evidence which shows the Bible’s early books: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy, Joshua, Judges, 1&2 Samuel and 1&2 Kings were adopted from a tract of royal tribal propaganda, devised by King Josiah of Judah about six centuries before the time of Jesus. God was fictional character contrived to deceive.
24. Women are more interested in having a real, free, peaceful, healthy, moral, progressive world for their family’s welfare than in being on their knees groveling to denigrating supernatural nonsense. Religious organizations keep female leadership at bay, allowing few hierarchal opportunities. The fatuous promotions of eternal life are nice fantasies, but they should not take precedence over rational ways to save Earth’s forms of life. Male leadership in government and religion has been costly. The intrinsic qualities of women favor them; they inspire congeniality and trust. We can’t trust pious male clergy who preach Josiah’s dogma as inerrant certainty. We are fortunate to have this world team of ambitious, well educated, perspicacious women, at this time, when men are in their descendancy, and should not procrastinate this opportunity to right an ancient wrong.
RELIGIOUS TYRANNY
1. Historically, political tyranny was enforced by specious gods portrayed as immoral, mean and fearsome, e.g., King Josiah’s propaganda’s, Yahweh, commanded death for everyone who failed to follow Josiah’s commands; its precepts were adopted by the Hebrew Bible, Old Testament and Koran. I’m concerned for the literalists or fundamentalist, who believe the Bible is the word of “God” and death the correct punishment for breaking one of “God’s” commandments. Fundamentalism is: “religious beliefs based on a literal interpretation of everything in the Bible and regarded as fundamental to Christian faith and morals; the twentieth century movement among some American Protestants, is based on those beliefs”.
2. During our sesquimillenniums of forced-belief or die, we inured unfounded beliefs and adopted blind-faith in aristocracy’s specious god in order to save our lives. Our world’s vast knowledge cannot provide facts about our imagination’s gods. Like other malicious rumors, God-ideas were eagerly swallowed, digested and promulgated, worldwide, by the ignorant for the ignorant, as creeds promising a reward of eternal life; but without facts it’s just a lot of BS.
3. I don’t contest facts; religion has no facts, only beliefs. I argue against using beliefs in a mythical god to determine governmental questions. My greatest fear is that our misguided electorate’s current full-throated religiosity will let their enthusiasm for a “God’s“ spurious “spiritual powers” lead them to glorify our authoritative bodies with creeds declaring belief in an all knowing, all powerful specious “God”; and that national and international questions will be deferred to clergy, the god’s representatives, (See UNITED STATES). Our Founding Fathers intended to prevent such a religious ruse’s unfortunate outcome for the world’s first democracy dedicated to the proposition that all humankind are equal and that our democracy remain free of ecclesiastical influence. Their intentions are noted in, The Federalist Papers, a set of 85 articles by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay, published in 1787 and 1788, analyzing the Constitution of the U.S. and urging its adoption.
4. The conservative Religious Right Coalition awaits an opportunity to void our constitution’s Separation of Church and State’s freedom of religion; then our nation will be their theocratic fiefdom; interpreting the Bible’s god literally; demanding that nonbelievers, blasphemers, apostates, proponents of other gods, etc. be put to death by believers. Please remember: much of our world is controlled by Islamic Muslimism’s totalitarian regimes; the same situation our founding fathers planned to avoid by separating ecclesiastical affairs from our governing apparatus.
5. The Coalition also plans for a majority of non-thinkers in our national electorate by proselytizing them as potential believers. Once believers submit their will to a god, they’ll learn just how the god’s proponents want them to vote; our most celebrated televangelists will control our government; not a democracy; an authoritarian theocracy. Religion is priesthood; the original form of totalitarianism. Historically, political leaders implicated followers in occult mysticism in order to gain their submission to a fearsome, threatening, spurious god that promised death for apostates, nonbelievers, etc. This idea was ingrained into our ancestors for twenty six hundred years; survivors, including all children, believed the Big Lie, and today it is very seldom questioned.
6. Believers, cognizant of Christianity’s familiar fantasies, but unfamiliar with their faith’s degenerative history, may be surprised to learn about the Religious Right’s Evangelicals’ preparations to subvert our democracy by packing our government with officials favoring a theocratic nation, where their version of the immoral Judaic god will replace our Supreme Court and clergy, like the Islamic regimes, will rule the land, disallowing other points of view;. This will set the stage for Evangelical’s, long awaited cataclysmic “End Times” with the Abrahamic faiths decimating each other, to determine which is eligible to welcome their god’s descendancy from heaven as believers ascend into heaven and we nonbelievers experience our gory end. This is my allegorical parody of humanity’s regressive ignorance and allegiance to an immoral, fearsome, tho imaginary god.
7. Supreme Court’s selection of George W. Bush as our president in 2000 was inopportune. Reliance on faith instead of reason changed our nation’s course to an irrational one. Political & religious militancy brought the U.S. to our degraded position in the world. Kevin Phillips’, book, American Theocracy, The Perils and Practice of Radical Religion, Oil and Borrowed Money, In The 21st Century, documents how we contrived to bring our democracy so near to its eventuality and the unfortunate assistance the Religious Right Coalition’s Republican Party provided in bringing our country to its knees. Their unilateral support of President Bush’s administration was expensive; a disaster and the Coalition is involved in the Dominionist movement’s promotion of theocratic totalitarianism for our U.S.
8. it’s presumptuous to assume a Christian dictatorship would be any less fundamentalist or totalitarian than all others. Belief in “God” led millions to kill nonbelievers, so It is unintelligible that individuals, so divorced from reality that they must be guided by a mythological god could be considered qualified to hold a high public office. The Old Testament’s “God”, which was King Josiah’s spurious tribal god, is portrayed as a death-dealing egomaniac commanding obeisant worship; devoid of impartial goodness or love; except for the Jews, who the god failed.
9. We’re free to choose a mythical god, but one’s god should be of good character. Belief in the noxious vengeful god of King Josiah’s tribal propaganda has proved detrimental to world peace. Josiah’s god set a bad example for man. Male leaders, with a mighty male god, challenge all who dare to differ. Women excel at peaceful leadership, with evolutionarily developed sensibilities that guide them toward amenable solutions. Men developed alertness for anything lurking out there and are contentious; King Josiah’s god commanded us to dominate the world. Men resist the idea of world-citizenship. I am not describing all men; fortunately, our world has produced innumerable exceptional men; nonbelievers who developed our fund of realistic knowledge.
10. Being a male for 93 years provides a fair appraisal of our limitations. I understand our predicament; our virility is essential to our self-esteem and influences our every thought, which distorts our equiponderance, disturbs contentious negotiations and amicable diplomacy. Men believe that King Josiah’s god provided women to service us, while we convert the world to the service of a spurious god by destroying all apostates, infidels etc.
11. Dear Grandchildren, don’t worry, just because “God” has been exposed as a fraud doesn’t change the facts because god has always been an illusion; I hope my information will prevent religious idiots from following the “Holy Book’s specious gods’ commands that: free- thought and nonbelievers must be destroyed.
MATTER VS SPIRIT
1. Matter is “whatever occupies space and is perceptible to the senses in some way”. Spirit is “the thinking, motivating, feeling part of man, often as distinguished from the body”. Spiritual is “supernatural or imaginary and is all that’s opposed to matter”.
2. Primitive humanity feared attacks from both animals and humans; somewhere in our early development we found reasons to believe that the nonphysical was part of our physical world, and vice versa. Our fear of the paranormal developed sensitivities to the presence of animate beings, and our imaginations presumed the possibility of earthly gods. At some point in our primitive or ancient times, we realized: the deities we had identified as being most important, were all of perceptible matter; things that we could see, feel, or hear. We imagined that gods had imperceptible powers over us which we call fanciful, imaginary and spiritual forces.
3. This is my view of the unresolved question of matter vs. spirit: our brain, the center of our nervous system is of matter; it receives sensory impulses from our senses and transmits motor impulses to our muscles. What we speak of as our mind, is actually a division of our brain which handles our memory, recollection, our intellect and intelligence; what we think, what we feel, will, etc., the seat of our conscious and unconscious.
4. Religion is an abstraction, dealing with our condescension, to obey and worship an abstruse mythological deity; something we can allow our minds to do, but our brains remind us that the concept is unfathomable; we are misleading our brain’s logic. Our mind accepts religion’s irrational concepts by giving our imagination the benefit of doubt while ignoring our brain’s logical interference.
5. I believe that our mind is free of our brain’s logic and free to wander, to wonder, to imagine, to suppose, to wish-for, to consider possibilities, and to either accept or reject them; our will is free and often not encumbered by our brain, a convenience for wishful thinking; our brain’s logic cannot consider details of the non-existent and our mind is unconcerned about the impossible or non-existent. We willingly accept conjecture or the spurious or prejudice, etc., without evidence for our brain to contemplate its probability. I’m aware: religions regard the mind as the “Soul, an entity which is the immortal or spiritual part of a person and having no physical or material reality is credited with the functions of thinking and willing hence determining behavior”; BS! My argument: religion’s forceful influence in our world is misdirected, that the idea of life after death, is impossible, that our mind (or soul) is not separate from our body, and is not spiritual, but is a part of our brain and is of matter. When our brain dies, our mind also dies and our essence is no more. Religion’s fatuous promises clouds reasoning and people accept unintelligent definitions without question.
6. Neuroscientists assure us: our minds do not exist independent of our body, but are mental; which is not possible after the brain is denied oxygen and dies. Our brain can mislead us; brain imaging shows that regions which become active when we only imagine we see or hear something are identical to those that become active when we actually do see or hear something. I think of the mind as integral to the brain but acts independently; if our mind doesn’t avail itself of our brain’s logic, it’s free to believe anything, even when no favorable evidence exists. Our mind’s freewill permits us to ignore the brain’s assistance in correcting fanciful unrealistic thoughts with more reasonable possibilities. So I’ll repeat the following: Ignorance and wishful thinking embraced religion’s fallacies. Our brain’s capability is like an electronic computer’s; both require rational, factual input to produce rational, factual answers. Religion’s lack thereof forced it to use conjecture, blind faith, and killing millions of nonbelievers, to gain its imposition upon our world’s ignorant unsuspecting societies.
ETCETERA
1. We humans should not consider ourselves above and beyond Earth’s natural physical laws which control all living things. Information indicates we are part of an orderly system. Every part consists of matter; I have no concept of the unreal or spiritual, despite religion’s allusion to it. We’ve not found anything considered supernatural. Evolution provides transparent answers about how life on Earth developed. We don’t know why we are here; is the answer worth killing others over hypothetical questions? The more we learn, the more we want to know; just because I can’t explain our unknowns, doesn’t mean that it would be beyond my comprehension when and if, the information becomes available. Without answers to universal unknowns, we can’t assume poetic license to publicly proclaim divine gods. Indeed the absence of verifiable information is not a reason for us to invent answers, which only confuse with misleading assumptions. Apprehension, ignorance and over-active imaginations brought about our undoing. World history reveals that civilizations falter wherever religion becomes a zealous consideration. Many in U.S.A. contemplate we’re on oblivion’s slippery slope and fear our Religion-Lite’s inundation by protestant fundamentalism’s Dominionists’ movement.
3. Israelis and Palestinians share racial characteristics and speak Semitic languages; both worship King Josiah’s fictitious god, but their Abrahamic faiths are distinctive. Israelis worship Judaism, but Palestinians worship Muslimism. Both cultures originated in the Holy land and have much in common, but religion is perceived as an important distinction; the basis of rivalry and inability to peacefully live together. The American Colonies welcomed Jewish immigrants; but not the Puritans in Rhode Island and Massachusetts, where they burned Salem’s witches, and forbade nonbelievers to own land. Jewish culture, in the United States is an intellectual stimulant but bigotry often exposes an ignorant simmering anti-Semitism.
4. Evolution’s process of natural selection provides Earth’s life many benefits, but it also accentuates the imperviousness of deleterious bacteria and the submicroscopic living organisms, viries. Medical research develops defenses against our diseases, but is often stymied, by dogmatic ignorance. Scientific experimentation advances knowledge, but religions denigrate scientific inquiry, preferring ignorance contemporaneous with the Bible. Recent examples of religion’s ludicrousness are Pope’s condemnation of condom distribution in Africa’s effort to thwart further H.I.V. development and President George W. Bush’s refusal to allow further research on lines of particular stem-cells.
5. Mark Twain, our nineteenth century satirist, said a lot about religion, but for obvious reasons none was published until after his death. Like Mark Twain and others who find mythological gods ridiculously unreasonable, I fear religious zealotry, such as Islamic regimes’ perversely perceived godly powers to rid the world of nonbelievers, etc.
6. Before Hebrew writing’s advent in the eleventh century B.C.E. all folktales, legends, gossip, and other information were communicated orally from one generation to the next; it was all burdened with temptations to enhance and embellish the impression the messages intended to convey. “Our primitive belief that a new sun was born at the winter solstice each year gave rise to our fable of the Virgin Mary, the mother of Jesus, which was adapted from a black mother and child deity of Egyptian mythology”. There is an ancient Persian legend of the sixth century B.C.E., (500 years before Jesus), that describes a god, born of a virgin, at the winter’s solstice; is put to death in his prime, and ascends into heaven at the vernal equinox. The biographical legends of numerous gods including those of Buddha, Krishna, Adonis and Jesus, closely follow the old legend’s pattern. It is assumed that each biography was created in compliance with the ancient Persian legend.
7. My pellucidity is inadequate therefore I offer this analogy. Religion is an imperative in many lives, and a complication for those burdened with feelings of inadequacy or guilt, to which they desperately cling with only blind faith and hope. I’m free from religion’s specious influence and regret that for masses of people, religion is tantamount to an infected feverish boil on humanity’s butt that continuous to threaten, while we remain reluctant to interfere or medicate for fear of another painfully destructive eruption.
8. The pert answer that: god works in mysterious ways, is unacceptably stupid. Many believers sense self-righteous satisfaction in promoting god-ideas which they consider too good to ignore regardless of authenticity. This wouldn’t be a problem if religion was not so divided and diverse; its lack of essential information creates uncertainties that disrupt its Systems and sectaries creating additional distinctive problematic, religious sects.
9. Author, Bernard Lewis, in his Crisis of Islam, mentions: “in the Middle Eastern Arab world the idea of Equality is very basic in Islamic belief; all true believers are equal, although nonbelievers and women are excluded and are not equal”. The political leaders are obsessed with a god-idea and kill all who disagree; their minds are closed; refusing opportunities to learn about the origin of the three Abrahamic faiths. However Kuwait, an Islamic country, permits women to vote and be members of Parliament.
10. I am reminded of the problems, Copernicus and Galileo had with the Church. Copernicus developed the Copernican system, the basis of modern Astronomy. He theorized the planets in our solar system revolved around the sun and the turning of the earth on its axis accounted for the rising and setting of the sun and stars. Galileo’s telescope demonstrated the truth of Copernicus’ theory and he was condemned for heresy by the Inquisition, the general tribunal established in the thirteenth century for the discovery and suppression of heresy and the punishment of heretics. Galileo spent seven years under house-arrest for questioning the Church’s position. When King Josiah’s minions composed his ruse of royal propaganda little was known about our solar system. Aristotle (384-322 B.C.E.), proclaimed the Earth to be at the center of the universe, encircled by the moon, sun and stars. Nicolaus Copernicus, (1473-1543), found inconsistencies with that theory and placed the sun at the center. Johannes Kepler (1571-1630), corrected Copernicus’s famous but incorrectly formulated description of the solar system and established the laws of planetary motion on which Isaac Newton (1642-1727), based his work.
11. Knowledge is power; religions wield great powers supported by ignorance; they resist knowledge and tout fear, deceit and a specious concept, i.e., supernaturalism; under the guise of personal salvation. Our concurrence will degenerate our Democracy into a tyrannical theocracy. Our view of history will determine our destiny; primitive political leaders, ancient and medieval kings depended upon the idea of imaginary gods to manipulate and control their masses of humanity; the history of Western Europe is replete with a plethora of Christian nations brought to ruin by zealous insistence that all citizens be persuaded to “believe” or else be classified as heretics, subject to inquisitions, persecutions, and extermination. Numerous religious wars by Protestants and Catholics are documented. The Holy Roman Empire’s militant principalities existed in Central Europe for a thousand years, (800-1806 C.E.); and organized the Teutonic Knights’ unsuccessful Crusade to retake the Holy Land.
12. After two centuries of divisive Christian wars, Western Europeans tempered their religious fervor in favor of old fashioned secularism and reason, while the U.S.A. has become religiously contentious, narrower minded, less understanding and more divisive; suffering self-imposed disillusionment; many think we are the international leader; others, more knowledgeable of history, are aware of Christianity’s militant influence on Europe. We are too religious. Skepticism and tolerance could help us a lot. Religion’s modus operandi is like nationalism’s, and their confluence produces debilitating tyrannical theocracies.
13. Our mid-nineteenth century Civil War, was a religious war. Pulpits on both sides found justification for it. Segregationist preachers defended the enslavement with the Old Testament’s god and abolitionist clergy defied slavery’s degradation with New Testament’s scripture. G. W. Bush’s Iraq and Afghanistan wars concern religion; World Trade Center’s towers were destroyed by Islamic religious fanatics, intent on goading the U.S. into an unwinnable war within their hot-bed of extremism; they succeeded; their announced goal is to rid the world of infidels, but it’s actually: worldwide sharai law; (See MIDDLE EAST FIASCO) and (REVENGE).
14. Religious organizations, when not partaking, usually accommodate wars. Presently, the Religious Right Coalition controls many electorate and political leaders who supported Pres. Bush’s Middle East misadventure and promote Israel’s effort to rid the Holy Lands of Palestinians in preparation for Evangelicals’ “End Times”. Mr. Phillips’ book, documents Christianity political influence in the implosion of: the Roman Empire—late 15th to 17th century; Spanish centered Hapsburg Empire—16th to 18th century; the Netherlands or Dutch Empire—17th to 18th century; Great Britain’s British Empire—18th to 20th century, and says that “Each of these countries, in its day, was the leading world economic power and principal naval or military power and each believed in their own exceptionalism, a wellspring of encouragement and reassurance for early and middle generations but a source of strategic blindness during the last years of illusion”.
15. Our nation is relegated to a less than exalted position in world affairs. We are considering ways to make the world more inclusive, the love and trust-thy-neighbor, philosophy propounded by Christianity; it’s difficult while disagreeing and dividing into 118 Systems and sectaries. If seriously considered religion’s irrationality defies common sense; its absurdity and diversity prevents it being religion’s intended fantasy. Several Christian Protestant sects in the U.S. are becoming more intense, fervid, feverish, charismatic, exclusive and intolerant; waiting expectantly for Armageddon. They won’t be disappointed; nations and empires have been destroyed when the people depended upon their political leader’s spurious god to save them from self-destruction.
16. Historically, our world has settled religious differences with mortal conflict. The only opportunity open to us, is compromise and understanding. Men are contentious; women have proven themselves the saner. Maybe, civilized human beings can agree that man’s god-idea has been a divisive, devastating ruse and rid ourselves of fictitious god-ideas. The Old Testament’s god is portrayed as a divider and a killer, unfit to guide a peace loving people. Believers should supplant their irrational beliefs with Reason and Truth. God delusions are international problems that require reconsideration. “Religion is especially liable to reflect the vagaries and weaknesses of human nature; and, as the forms and habits of thought connected with worship take a firmer hold on the mental constitution than do those belonging to any other department of human experience, religious conceptions should be subjected to frequent and careful examination in order to perceive the extent to which we are holding on to ideas which are unsuited to existing conditions. In an age when every branch of inquiry is being subjected to reasonable criticism, it would seem that the origin and growth of religion should be investigated from beneath the surface, and that all facts bearing upon it should be brought forward as a contribution to our fund of general information”; quoted from: God-Idea of the Ancients, by Liza Burt Gamble
17. The Bible, takes slavery and polygamy for granted; it was practiced throughout much of history. Slavery was abolished in civilized countries in the nineteenth century. But polygamy, banned in many parts of the world, is practiced surreptitiously in the U.S. and Canada. The Bible’s treatment of women as second class citizens convinces today’s religious leaders’ to do the same. . Civilized nations, presently accept that a woman’s vote, in an election or on a jury, is equal to a man’s vote. In enlightened societies, women are no longer regarded as property, as they clearly were in biblical times. They were granted the vote on the following dates: New Zealand 1893; Australia 1902; Finland 1906; Norway 1913; U.S. 1920; Britain 1928; France 1945; Belgium 1946; Switzerland 1971; Kuwait: 2006.
18. Racial purity is a national identification for many nations, but the U.S. has thrived by abandoning laws forbidding miscegenation. We are destined within the foreseeable future, via assimilation and intermarriage, to be a browner people. (See PARTY REVERSAL). Racial-centric nations, such as France and Japan overlook the obvious benefits of D.N.A. diversity and are reluctant to assimilate foreign immigrants. We would all benefit from a peaceful world, but it depends upon world’s willingness to forego ethnic uniqueness and encourage global inclusiveness and cultural harmony.
19. I don’t think governments should forbid the practice of religion as long as it forsakes hate, embraces tolerance, accepts new scientific knowledge, remains peaceful and does no harm. Karl Marx was correct: a large percentage of humanity has a desperate need for an onerous opiate of self-righteous self-satisfaction. Our U.S. government is woefully inept in providing religious organizations tax abatements, to encourage their proliferation. Our Constitution guarantees us freedom from religion, as well as freedom of religion so why a free ride? Nonbelievers consider tax supported “faith based” services unconstitutional.
20. Leaders of our world’s religions are oblique and disingenuous; many are unaware of the discord and distrust caused by their irrational claims. Self-righteous religious leaders’ claims of divinity, deserving of uncritical acclaim, have been blind to their responsibility to help keep peace in our world; a world that, historically, has been torn asunder by the strife of religious differences. Religion is obligated to consider the results of humanity’s overzealous reaction to its calumny.
21. If you’ve read my treatise, you know our primitive fears, ignorance and a longing for a better future, led us to believe our welfare depended upon imaginary gods. I have a female god and I’ve described how Yahweh, God and Allah became gods in the minds of billions of misguided, trusting unthinking hopeful people. Gods have always been just ideas. At no time in recorded history have we been aware of the supernatural. We men concocted all gods and practiced divination which secured our path to leadership; the control and manipulation of tribes, tribal councils and political and social groups, thenceforth our nations, and our empires.
22. One hundred & thirty seven years prior to America’s Independence an English clergyman in the American Colonies, John Harvard, endowed Harvard College, founded in 1639, as a religious school. Presently, there is not a department of religion at Harvard University. Religion is unfounded, based only upon ancient sorcery. Religion’s beliefs are unsubstantiated, but great portions of our world population anticipate an eternity with loved ones; who passionately respond to suggestions of its unavailability. False promises only bring disappointments and more bloodshed. I regret there is not a heavenly existence, as per fantasies; my understanding is: that only our “essence” would be affected. Believers have been led to believe that they and their god will be in human form.
23. Religion’s position is awkward & embarrassing, having spent twenty four hundred years promulgating unfounded doctrine; based upon young King Josiah’s tribal propaganda; it was adopted by Ezra and Nehemiah as Judaism’s Holy Scriptures. Groups or individuals that claim to speak for “God” are misinformed; not qualified to do so; the Judaic god was a vile character in Josiah’s political tribal propaganda; information about the god is in the “Holy Books”, which evolved from the propaganda. Let’s be honest: there has never been any evidence for a god; but humanity’s frailty opened the door to deceptive hopes for an eternity of glorious living with the god; all promised by overly ambitious political leaders and religion’s charlatans. I have no faith in a religion, which succeeded by killing nonbelievers for a millennium, but presently profess so much sanctity for human life that family-planning is a sin.
24. Author, Strobe Talbott duly warns: “In championing reason, science, and humanism against ignorance, dogma, and despotism, the great figures of the Enlightenment were waging, with their minds and their pens, what was often a losing battle against blunter instruments—In a world where disputes between individuals and states were so often resolved not by reason or merit or virtue but by force, the power of ideas alone did not stand much of a chance against the power of violence”. I am undeterred; I’ve shown that man credits “God” for leading him to desecrate humanity by slaughtering nonbelievers; and that his god was a fabrication, i.e., tribal propaganda devised by King Josiah of Judah in the seventh century B.C.E., composed to confound and maneuver his subjects with a sanctimonious tyranny. Upon that initial deceit believers constructed a religion industry that promises forgiveness of sins plus a heaven with eternal salvation for the righteous and hell for the wicked. Twenty six hundred years of religious inquisitions, persecutions, despoliation and wars prove the god of the Abrahamic faiths’ Judaism, Christianity and Muslimism was, as King Josiah intended it to be; a devious divider and a ruthless killer; but we also know that it is spurious.
RECAPITULATION
1. Religion is man’s inane, incomprehensible, competitive enterprise. It consists of numerous distinctive sects, each offering a pseudo insurance against risks of an imaginary hell plus forgiveness of sins and promise of eternal life in an imaginary heaven. It is supported by gifts, dispensations, special privileges, etc. Eligibility qualifications are defined by each sect. Fear of retaliation, by an imaginary god, brain-washes nonbelievers into unwitting servants. Insecurity prompts man to follow a strong leader. King Josiah and his successors exploited humanity’s weaknesses by proclaiming a god’s imaginary powers and killed those unwilling to believe.
2. Religion gradually developed in reaction to our primitive fears of the unknown; in addition to our ordinary real problems, our ignorance led us to believe aristocracy’s persuasive appeals to abide by the laws of their death-dealing fearsome god. Leadership positions in societal groups were derived from a few astute males who commanded a following of tough supporters. As groups grew, leadership problems multiplied and in time, specious gods were introduced as fearsome sources of occult power that leaders exploited in order to manipulate society; it is not the usual benign fantasy. Today, Protestant Christian religion wields great power in our U.S. Congress and Senate. A few law-makers who do not believe in the Old Testament’s fearsome god character, realize they must patronize our “born again” electorate.
3. The world is usually divided between “haves and have-nots”, i.e., thinkers and non-thinkers. About 80% are non-thinking have-nots. Don’t be one of them. Religion connotes intolerance and if anyone suggests that “God” can help you, thank them and run; don’t discuss impossibilities with organizations built on subterfuge, bigotry and the extermination of dissenters; new believers are attracted by creating fear of unknowns, and the Bible’s threatsof death for nonbelievers. Religion is a cult in disguise, awaiting opportunities for clergy to govern us with fundamentalism’s theocratic absolutism. A world problem has always been: aristocracy’s tyrannical promulgation of a specious god in order to enforce the political leader’s self-serving commands.
OUR FUTURE
1. Post, 2010’s national mid-term election: deteriorating conditions are expected, nationally, if the Religious Right continues its obduracy campaign in our legislative bodies. Internationally, as noted in chapter: MUSLIMISM. Conditions in Islamic regimes will control our destiny by solidifying their position as Western Europe’s fastest growing religion. When Iran attains nuclear bombs, Islam will control all nations reachable by their delivery system. Religious rivalry and propaganda about an imminent Armageddon indicate ominous prognoses for a semi-civilized world. Belief in spurious gods has disrupted many strong nations and I fear our “Founding Father’s” “freedoms” will be rescinded by our electorate’s religiosity and replaced with Islam’s biblical tyranny. My treatise indicates the tragedy of zealous godliness; how it thwarts intellect, robs us of natural progressive initiatives and belittles knowledge. Religion’s pusillanimous default position depends upon future humankind’s continuing fears and ignorance.
2. Only egocentrics expect “God” to be interested in their behavior; but with today’s vast knowledge, all aspects of religious beliefs are dismissed by our world’s few discerning people; if others can’t learn, their ignorance will destroy our world’s trove of knowledge. Where religion’s leaders control government, they’ve burned books, stifled scientific inquiry, and their critics by denying freedoms of speech and the press.
3. The future of our species depends on our world’s thinkers’ understanding of the reasons why man’s history took its recorded course; so we won’t repeat its bloodletting. My thoughts are less on our well documented ignoble past than on our future, I have no clues but great interest, postulating who we will become; will evolution have time to improve us physically or intellectually; will scientists develop more beneficial knowledge for humanity; will wisdom ever convince us to peacefully collaborate and develop a one-world government, or will nuclear weapons end up in the hands of religious idiots who imagine their specious god demands them to rid the world of nonbelievers, i.e., its thinkers?
EPILOGUE
1. Although I am old and enjoy each day with therapeutic projects that keep my brain entertained, similar to this venture, I fear that our nation is mistaken in supporting the elderly to their bitter end, at the expense of care for expectant mothers, their babies, and children in general, who are being short-changed by a lack of funds; why else is our infant mortality rate so high and why are millions of children without health-insurance?
2. Our present method of funding elementary and secondary education with local real estate taxes is archaic and inadequate. Children, a treasure and our nation’s future are everyone’s responsibility; we should be taxed, nationally or by the state to provide a system of professional classroom teachers, and management, with commensurate compensation.
3. A successfully completed high-school education, either academic or vocational must be a national requirement; military style if necessary. Sixteen year olds are not wise enough to decide otherwise. College must be available to all qualified high-school graduates. Our goal is to provide each young person an equal opportunity to fully attain his or her level of proven incompetence: no one should be engaged in work that is obviously beneath their level of competence.
4. I’ve experienced enough life to appraise it, and find that old-age is a miserable pain-in-the-ass; unworthy of its problems and expense. Serious consideration should be given to avoiding senility, dementia, etc. Our Social Security system in the U.S. is unsustainable as presently constituted. With an increasing, aging population; alternatives are necessary. Euthanasia is a sensible alternative. It’s a dire solution for a dire situation which involves patients with dire maladies who are bedridden, destitute, depressed, maybe feeling hopeless, that doctors consider beyond a survivable quality of life. It’s devastating to be alone, unable to care for one’s self and we must encourage the physical and emotional relief of the desperate and hurting with a glorified form of euthanasia. My body has been willed to a medical school for more than twenty years, but I fear premature institutionalization to rot in some nursing home while painfully waiting for bodily systems to shut down. I prefer to skip the preliminaries and go directly to college as a prize cadaver. Euthanasia avoids prolonged suffering, but is considered possible only in Oregon, although it would be welcome relief for many. The situation could develop into a memorial gathering with family, guests and patient, all in attendance, replacing the somber funeral as a memorial; the patient could see the flowers; if feasible, visit with guests and bid goodbye to everyone prior to an intravenous injected terminus. Everyone would know that the service is available for them if their medical situation ever qualifies with the restrictions.
5. The Perils of Aging: I don’t recall ever dwelling much on the subject of old-age, until, in my mid-seventies a young physician prefaced his verbal instructions with, “Due to your advanced age”----I assumed myself elderly and thence have worn the mantle and born the stigma. It’s not easy being old. While most individuals look forward to an enjoyable retirement, odds do not favor them. Poor health, fatigue and money problems, often reduce our options. Medicare’s support for the elderly is of immeasurable help.
6. A doctor recently explained my problem; he said: the reason I am outliving my savings is that I have had too good of medical care. I graciously accept the benefits. However when we consider the increasing number of seriously debilitated older citizens with the decreasing birthrate of the world’s developed countries, the obvious disparity is apparent: too few young people who must support too many elders.
7. This treatise on man’s contrived religion’s devastating influence on humankind is information for the consideration of my grandchildren and their descendants. I have often wished that my grandparents could have done something similar; how wonderful it would be to have a sense of their ideas and to know the truth about our situation, that: fortunately we are alone, free from the curse of an imaginary fearsome “God”; I rejoice! Smart believers retain active curiosities and open minds, cognizant they may be wrong. Closed minds will bring civilization to closure. Civilized segments of our world’s population must organize, in non-challenging, ways, free from today’s entrenched male dominated global leadership. We can preserve humanity and all beneficial species of plants, animals, etc., over time, naturally and simply, by promoting intermarriage of races and religious faiths, developing a common language, an unlimited student exchange and by recognizing that “God” was extrapolated from King Josiah’s tribal propaganda. Just don’t fight about it.
8. You had the foresight and fortitude to read my treatise; I thank you. If you consider me blasphemous, I will not understand, as religion is a man-made subterfuge and is not sacred, but was originally devised to lead and exploit others in order to develop political support for leaders. My life approaches its end and many may see an error in my ways, but I accept that I am part of Earth’s physical system and not outside its natural laws.
9. Humanity must organize a global effort to salvage our planet and in time restore all beneficial species including plants, animals and the very necessary microorganisms which sustain us, or else our position on the endangered species list will ever become more critical. I trust that internationally, everyone will recognize the benefits to all of us by no longer accentuating our differences, but gradually eliminating our distinctions while increasing our similarities and eventually becoming more the same except for our experiences, as per Confucius.
APPENDIX
BIBLE NOTES
The following is from the Authorized King James Version of the Holy Bible—1984
1. Assyrian Captivity: 734 B.C.E.-----2Kings 15:29; 16:7-9; Tiglath-pileser3 king of Assyria (745-727 B.C.E.) marched against King Pekah of Israel and King Rezin of Syria because they made war against his vassal, King Ahaz of Judah. He punished Israel by carrying some of its people into exile 2Kings 17:1-6; (722 B.C.E.) Israel was destroyed and taken after a three year siege by Shalmaneser4, king of Assyria (727-722 B.C.E.) Assyrian inscriptions say that 27,290 people were taken captive and deported.
2. Babylonian Captivity of Judah: 608 B.C.E.-----Daniel 1:1-7 After the battle of Carchemish, Nebuchadnezzar, as crown prince of Babylon, advanced to Jerusalem. He spared King Jehoiakim, who had rebelled against him, but carried off several of the princes of Judah, among them Daniel, Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego.
3. 597 B.C.E.-----2Kings 24:1-16; Nebuchadnezzar was now king of Babylon (608-562 B.C.E.) and again conquered Jerusalem. Among the captives taken in this battle was the prophet Ezekiel
4. 586 B.C.E.;-----2Kings 24;20-25; 21; Jeremiah 39:1-10; King Zedekiah took an oath of allegiance to the Babylonian monarch but soon became disloyal. So Nebuchadnezzar besieged the city from January 10- 587 to July 9- 586 B.C.E. Approximately eighty distinguished leaders of the community were executed. The royal palace and the city were set on fire, and the survivors (except the poorest of the land) were taken into captivity.
5. 581 B.C.E.;-----2Kings 25:22-26; Jeremiah 40-44; This part of the captivity was caused by the rebellion of the remaining Hebrews of strong anti-Babylonian feeling. They fled to Egypt, forcing Jeremiah, who had been given special consideration by Nebuchadnezzar, to accompany them. It is thought that 70,000 Jews were taken into captivity.
6. Judah’s Return from Exile 538 B.C.E.-----Ezra 1-6; Cyrus, the Persian king, destroyed the Babylonian Empire and in the same year issued a decree permitting the Jews to return to their native land. As many as wished to could return, and the temple could be rebuilt, partially financed by the royal treasury. The temple vessels also were returned. The number of those returning was 49,697. They were led by Zerubbabel.
7. 458 B.C.E.;----- Ezra 7-10; This return took place under Artaxerxes1, king of Persia (464-424 B.C.E.) and was led by Ezra. The royal treasury provided finances for the journey and the people were allowed to have their own judges. The group numbered about 5,500 men and women, besides 38 Levites and 220 servants of the temple.
8. 444 B.C.E.;-----Nehemiah 1-2; This group was led by Nehemiah, cupbearer to Artaxerxes and later governor of Judea. Ezra and Nehemiah, furnished with royal power, were able in spite of difficulties to establish the Jewish community. They were allowed to rebuild the wall, which was rebuilt in 52 days, despite opposition from Sanballat, Tobiah and Goshen. Nehemiah 7:66 tells us the whole Jewish community numbered 42,360 men or possibly 125,000 people.
9. The Persian Period (400-330 B.C.E.);-----For about 150 years after Nehemiah’s time, the Persians controlled Judea, but the Jews were allowed to carry on their religious observances and were not interfered with. During this time Judea was ruled by high priests who were responsible to the Jewish government.
10. The Greek Period (330-166 B.C.E.);-----In 333 B.C.E. the Persian armies stationed in Macedonia were defeated by Alexander the Great. He was convinced that Greek culture was the one force that could unify the world. Alexander permitted the Jews to observe their laws and even granted them exemption from tribute or tax during their sabbatical years. When he built Alexander in Egypt, he encouraged Jews to live there and gave them some of the same privileges he gave his Greek subjects. The Greek conquest prepared the way for the translation of the Holy Scriptures (Old Testament) into Greek (Septuagint version) about 250 B.C.E.
11. The Hasmonean Period (166-63 B.C.E.);-----When this historical period began, the Jews were being greatly oppressed. The Polemics had been tolerant of the Jews and their religious practices, but the Seleucid rulers were determined to force Hellenism on them. Copies of the Scriptures were ordered destroyed and laws were enforced with extreme cruelty. The oppressed Jews revolted, led by Judas the Maccabee. The Syrians were defeated in a series of battles, which secured the independence of the province of Judea and were the foundation of the Hasmonean dynasty. This time period was filled with many political struggles and posed many problems to the religiously-oriented Jews.
12. The Roman Period (63 B.C.E.-C.E. 37);-----In the year 63 B.C.E., Pompey, the Roman general, captured Jerusalem, and the provinces of Palestine became subject to Rome. The local government was entrusted part of the time to procurators who were appointed by the emperors. Herod the Great was ruler of all Palestine at the time of Christ’s birth.
HISTORICAL DATES
1. Stone Age: precedes the Bronze Age and constitutes the Paleolithic, Mesolithic and Neolithic periods; the period in human culture when stone implements were used.
2. Agriculture: developed in Mesopotamia during the Neolithic period about 8,000 B.C.E.
3. Egyptian Dynasties: began 4500 B.C.E., during the Stone Age, and continued through the Bronze Age and the Iron Age.
4. Bronze Age: 3500-1000 B.C.E., a phase of human culture characterized by the introduction of bronze tools and weapons.
5. Babylonian Empire: in the Tigris and Euphrates River valleys; was famous for its wickedness and flourished from 2100-500 B.C.E.
6. Biblical Period: about 2000 B.C.E.-90 C.E.
7. Ancient Israelites: King Josiah’s tribal propaganda put the Israelites in the Egyptian18th dynasty, about 1200 B.C.E., and King Solomon’s reign about 1000 B.C.E. Their actual history of the Israelites is known to be much simpler than King Josiah’s biblical fable.
8. Hebrew Writing: first dated between 1200-1100 B.C.E.
9. Iron Age: 1000 B.C.E.-100 C.E,
10. Ancient Greece: began 776 B.C.E., during the Iron Age.
11. Assyrian Empire: in the region of the upper Tigris River, extending from the head of the Persian Gulf to Egypt and Asia Minor and was at its height during 600 B.C.E.
12. King Josiah of Judah: authored a tract of political & religious tribal propaganda during his reign from 640-609 B.C.E. It was later adopted by Ezra & Nehemiah as Judaism’s Holy Scriptures and adapted by St. Jerome as Christianity’s first canon and by Mohammed for his Koran.
13. Persian Empire: founded by Cyrus the Great in 500 B.C.E.; it was the area now known as Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan and was conquered by Alexander the Great about 328 B.C.E.
14. Roman Republic: began 509 B.C.E.
15. Ezra and Nehemiah: in 444 B.C.E., adopted King Josiah’s propaganda as new Judaism’s Holy Scriptures, which included Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy, Joshua, Judges, 1&2 Samuel and 1&2Kings.
16. Roman Empire: established 27 B.C.E.; in 395 C.E. divided into Eastern & Western Roman Empires
17. Jesus: born about 4-8 B.C.E.; crucified about 29 C.E.
18. Old Testament’s: completion by edict of the Rabbinical Council of Jamnia 90 C.E.
19. End of Jewish State: 135 C.E.
20. Christianity Established: 300- 400 C.E.
21. Dark Ages: began 476-1000 C.E.; 500 years of European Christian fervor, intellectual stagnation, wide spread ignorance, poverty and cultural decline.
22. Middle Ages: the period of European history, between ancient and modern times, 476 to 1450 C.E.
23. The Enlightenment: an 18th century European philosophical movement characterized by rationalism, an impetus toward learning, and a spirit of skepticism and empiricism in social and political thought.
24. Independence of American Colonies: 1776
25. United States: today 2010; our nation is only 234 years old, however it has been 10,000 years since humankind first developed agriculture; 6,500 years since the first Egyptian dynasty; 2,600 years since King Josiah of Judah composed his tribal propaganda; 2,454 years since Judaism was established; about 1,650 years since Christianity was established and about 1,400 years since Mohammed received Angel Gabriel’s messages.
CHRISTIAN ANTI-JUDAISM
Regions controlled by the papacy have persistently tyrannized the Jews. Pope Innocent III, in early thirteenth century demanded they mark themselves as Jews with a particular type of headgear and in the seventeenth century, Pope Paul IV insisted that Jews be ostracized in special ghettos and wear yellow identification badges. They had not been allowed to own land, hold public office or work at most forms of trade. Church law forbade Christians to loan money at interest; Jews became licensed money lenders with interest rates defined by the Vatican.
During the European Middle Ages, (476 C.E.-1450 C.E.), Jews were persecuted unmercifully; the problem originated with the Christian accusation that the Jews had killed Jesus. “The Crusaders made it part of their mission to torment and kill Jews on their way to the Holy land”. The papacy’s repression of Jews persisted into nineteenth century Rome and during the reign of Pope Leo XIII more extreme forms of anti-Judaism erupted among Vatican clerics, alleging Jewish perfidy, obstinacy and worse which reinforced the Catholic view, “that the Jews were responsible for their own misfortune—a view that was to encourage Catholic Church officials in the 1930s to look the other way as Nazi anti-Semitism raged in Germany”, which had the world’s most powerful Catholic community.
In 1933, Eugenio Pacelli, a Vatican’s Assistant Secretary of State, successfully negotiated an agreement between Adolph Hitler and Pope Pius XI which allowed the Vatican to select the German bishops, clergy, etc. with the state paying their salaries. Hitler acquiesced to the Vatican’s retention of religious authority only after the pope conceded that Hitler should have complete political authority. The Vatican’s Pacelli persuaded the German Bishops to disband the Catholic’s powerful Center Political Party, which assured Nazism’s successful rise to power unopposed by Catholicism. The agreement “created an area of trust that was particularly significant in the developing struggle against international Jewry”. Eugenio Pacelli was elected Pope Pius XII in 1939 on the eve of the Second World War.
The above information and quotations were gleaned from John Cromwell’s book, Hitler’s Pope. All Christians would benefit by reading Mr. Cromwell’s book. He says: “I applied for access to crucial material in Rome, assuring those who had charge of the archives that I was on the side of my subject. By the middle of 1997, nearing the end of my research, I found myself in a state I can only describe as moral shock. The material I had gathered, taking the more extensive view of Pacelli’s life, amounted not to exoneration but to a wider indictment”.
Cromwell’s book relates the Vatican’s version of future pope, Eugenio Pacelli’s constant involvement with Hitler’s final resolution for Germany’s Jewish population, which was the midtwentyth century Holocaust, where Christians were instrumental in killing six million innocent Jews, all due to envisioned ancient hatreds, fostered by their crucifixion of Jesus. When these six million Jews are added to the innumerable nonbelievers who were persecuted and killed throughout Christianity’s history, it refutes any claim they have to represent a sacred religion. Ignorance is inexcusable.
I’ll also call attention to the Vatican’s midtwentyth century agreements with Italy’s Mussolini and Spain’s Franco; two other totalitarian dictators.
The following information and quotations are from the Holocaust Encyclopedia
“Since the night of ‘Broken Glass’ pogrom (Nov.9-10, 1938), the German government had sought to accelerate the pace of forced Jewish emigration—also hoping to exploit the unwillingness of other nations to admit large numbers of Jewish refugees to justify the Nazi regime’s anti-Jewish goals. On May 13, 1939, the German transatlantic liner, St. Louis, sailed from Hamburg, Germany, for Havana, Cuba with 937 refugees, most all were Jews fleeing from the Third Reich”. In addition, “two smaller ships, the French, Flandre, and the British, Orduna with a total of 176 Jewish refugees, sailed to Cuba in May 1939”; neither was allowed to dock in Cuba. The Flandre returned to France. “The Orduna proceeded to a series of Latin American ports; its 72 passengers finally disembarked in the U.S. controlled Canal Zone in Panama. The United States eventually admitted most of them”.
“The majority of the (St. Louis’) Jewish passengers had applied for U.S. visas, and had planned to stay in Cuba only until they could enter the United States.—When the St Louis arrived in Havana harbor on May 27, the Cuban government admitted 28 passengers: 22 of them were Jewish and had valid U.S. visas; (of) the remaining six, four Spanish citizens and two Cuban nationals had valid entry documents. One further passenger, after attempting to commit suicide, was evacuated to a hospital in Havana The remaining 908 passengers (one passenger had died of natural causes in route)---743 had been waiting to receive U.S. visas. The Cuban government refused to admit them or allow them to disembark from the ship”. On June 2, the ship was ordered out of Cuban waters after the U.S.-based Jewish Joint Distribution Committee refused to post a $453,500 bond.
“Sailing so close to Florida that they could see the lights of Miami, some passengers on the St Louis cabled President Franklin D. Roosevelt asking for refuge. Roosevelt never responded.---A State Department telegram sent to a passenger stated that the passengers must ‘await their turns on the waiting list and qualify for and obtain immigration visas before they may be admissible into the United States.---In 1939, the annual combined German-Austrian immigration quota was 27,370 and was quickly filled. In fact, there was a waiting list of at least several years.”
“Following the U.S. government’s refusal to permit the passengers to disembark, the St. Louis sailed back to Europe on June 6, 1939. The passengers did not return to Germany. However, Jewish organizations, (particularly the Jewish Joint Distribution Committee), negotiated with four European governments to secure entry visas for the passengers”: Great Britain took 288; the Netherlands admitted 181; Belgium took in 214 and 224 found at least temporary refuge in France. One of Great Britain’s passengers was killed during an air raid in 1940. “Of the 620 passengers who returned to continent, 87 managed to emigrate before the German invasion of Western Europe in May 1940. (And) 532 were trapped when Germany conquered Western Europe. Just over half, 278, survived the Holocaust; 254 died: 84 who had been in Belgium; 84 who had found refuge in Holland, and 86 who had been admitted to France”. Brotherhood of man is impossible; religion divides us.
ILLUSORY FAITH
Blind-faith is defined as “an unquestioning belief which does not require proof or evidence”. A Texan’s definition: “Blind-faith is ignorance dressed up in its Sunday clothes”. Ignorance is an unawareness of knowledge; whereas blind faith is avoiding and denying knowledge. Blind faith in the unknown demeans intelligence and indicates more faith in one’s ignorance than in one’s intellect. Indeed, why does faith in a fictitious god persist in the face of persistent evidence to the contrary? My answer: Fundamentalist clergy have tyrannical control over governments and people in Islamic regions; their prestige depends upon maintaining the status quo. In other more free-wheeling regions, faith in a religion serves as a pseudo anchor against impending insecurities; many are self-inflicted. One’s faith in an illusory god could be harmless if the god is a moral, impartial, peace-maker, but Christians, Jews and Muslims worship the specious immoral vengeful tribal tyrant that Josiah’s all-male team concocted. They portrayed the god as they saw themselves; inconsiderate of nonbelievers and women. However, the truth concerning King Josiah’s ancient ruse can set one free. Religion has proven its ability to convince the ignorant of farfetched ideas, leading to a more bountiful future. If religious organizations would adopt Earth’s plight and its restoration as a mission which their god wishes the faithful to accomplish, its success would be assured. I’m confident in their ability to lead people toward an elusive goal, so I unhesitatingly put my confidence in confirmed, confidence men.
REVENGE
Revenge is retaliatory hatred, resulting from unforgiving grudge, a dubious proposition, which often begets retaliatory revenge, possibly ad infinitum. The Israelites’ “God” depicted in King Josiah’s political and religious tract, manifested man’s most loathsome and fearsome proclivities The god was concocted by men, in their self-image, as a vain, vile, vengeful, unforgiving, tyrant, in order to bring attention to their self-appointed godliness and to assert their own fearsomeness. In MIDDLE EAST FIASCO, I discuss the cost in lives and treasure due to the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq, by the United States in an attempt to avenge the Sept., 11, 2001, attacks on New York City and Washington, D.C., by a group of 19 Islamic religious zealots, 15 of whom were Saudis; none were Iraqi. However Iraq’s proven oil-reserves appeared too attractive for President G. W. Bush’s administration to ignore as only Saddam Hussein, Iraq’s dictator, barred the way; the oil reserves appeared ripe for picking. The invasion was a huge policy blunder including strategy, tactics, etc. Bush’s invasion of Afghanistan to remove the Taliban insurgents has deteriorated into unwinnable confusion. The tribes inhabiting the land prefer their own type of death and incoherence to the West’s more organized style of interference and killing. After eight years of great loss, there is no end in sight.
IGNORANCE
Religion doesn’t add to our knowledge and often defies scientific facts. The god of the Bible and Koran command death for nonbelievers, etc. Believers fearful of the wrath of a mythological god and dare not learn information that compromises their blind beliefs. Islamic regimes do not translate foreign publications into their lingua franca. When one is unaware of what they don’t know, they are ignorant. Innumerable uncomprehending Westerners choose ignorance, insisting on no exposure to the blasphemy of their faith’s bloody history, maintaining a closed mind, refusing to consider others’ views. Truth and skepticism are necessary for success in all endeavors and religion is not immune, as knowledge helps one recognize personal weaknesses, but the ignorant remain clueless and fail to make amends; permitting ignorance to expand. A lack of knowledge prevents us from realizing our limitations or unlimited potential. Truth and knowledge can set us free or we can remain prisoners of ignorance forever.
UNINSPIRED MALE YOUTH
We U.S. citizens seldom view our nation as belligerently hegemonic but like to consider it an exemplary model for other governments to emulate, but a recent appraisal of our country’s foreign entanglements convinces me that we are anxious, paranoid, heavily-armed, trigger-happy, arrogant religious do-gooders. Our armed services fill their ranks without conscription. A lifetime’s observation of young American men has confirmed that many are imbued with a kick-ass type of mentality, which I ascribe to their virility, unrequited libido, a disinterest in intellectual pursuits and an obsession with challenging anyone different from themselves or who questions their patriotism. They feel a need for bold adventuresome experiences; being able to order other cultures around at the point of a gun is their choice of vocations. The same young men, at times evolve into culpable political and military leaders advancing their careers with a little military adventurism. However, if we had dropped out of school, disappointed, feeling ignored, neglected, abused, etc., but assured that providence supports our position; we might end up arrogant and thus reach our level of incompetence; but military leaders are well-educated, and so are most political leaders, except for an irrational blind faith in the supernatural, which highly is disturbing.
DETERRENCE VS. PRISON
It is interesting to contemplate the relationship of our schools to our churches and prisons which are popular and thriving while educational opportunities are stymied or ignored. Ancient leaders conceived of the hell versus heaven idea; wanted to convince followers of the benefits of moral behavior plus a possible heaven; otherwise they’d go to hell. That specious deterrent worked as long as King Josiah’s vengeful god persuaded believers to kill nonbelievers; but, after a thousand or so years, Christians gave up the practice and hell lost its fury. In addition to union restrictions, middle and secondary schools have too many uninspired students whose minds wander beyond classrooms, toward non-educational pursuits; they disrupt ambitious students and teachers, resulting in our nation’s high drop-out rate and in growing numbers of young men devoid of even a general idea of their self-worth or potential; and reciprocate the resentment they sense among more civilized community members, which bodes ill for our nation. Children’s care and feelings of self-worth deserve priority; their intrinsic value to our nation should be emphasized in order to fill our schools and universities with credible students and thereby empty our prisons; whose experience provides young inmates opportunities for advanced training and information about breaking the law with impunity. They’ve concluded: the low probability of apprehension is not an adequate deterrent and the ineffectiveness of delayed punishment is evident by increasing recidivism. Young children require guidance; community preschools provide formative early educational experiences and develop feelings of self-worth; which is especially important to the poor, and should be provided at public expense. We will save money on police, courts and prisons as well as fill our nation with inspired, better educated, thus motivated, adult citizens.
PARTY REVERSAL
President Abraham Lincoln, a Republican, Proclaimed his Emancipation, of Black slaves in September 1863,. President Lyndon B. Johnson convinced the U.S. Senate to approve the Civil Rights Act in 1965 and his Democratic party abandoned him. The decision reversed the positions of our two major political parties. Southern segregationist had resisted efforts toward racial integration and fought this eventuality since the Civil War; they had always voted solidly Democratic. Abraham Lincoln’s Republican Party sponsored the idea of integration, and when Blacks became eligible to vote and hold public offices, segregationist changed political party affiliations from Democrat to Republican. It was not limited to the South; ever since the Civil War, segregationists had migrated into the Midwest and far west; their movement into the Republican Party sufficiently controls the party’s platform. So the party that elected Abraham Lincoln and freed the slaves is now the Religious Right’s Segregationist party which fights integration.
The Democratic Party, now rid of the segregationist who voted against the Civil Rights Act is now controlled by moderate former Republicans who voted for the Act, but now fight Republican segregationists who voted against the Act, who now blame their old Democratic Party for opposing the Act, although they actually approved the Act. The reversal of political platforms in addition to Religious Right Coalition’s intrusion into politics during the past fifty years has seriously divided our electorate. Voting and legislating have deteriorated into confused contests controlled unilaterally; minus bipartisanship, creating excruciating awkward political situations.
MIDDLE EAST FIASCO
A news article many months ago explained: to that date, the total cost of the U.S’. Afghanistan-Iraq invasion exceeded one trillion dollars, which is 1000 billion dollars and a billion is equal to the number of seconds of time in 31.668 years, so a trillion equals the number of seconds in 31,668 years, an unimaginable treasure which could have provided 10 million students with a college education at 100,000 dollars each. In addition to the wasted wealth, 4000+, young Americans were killed and 20,000+, permanently crippled. So far, that’s what political and religious revenge has cost us. Had we not succumbed to the taunt of Islam’s extremists on 9/11 how costly might it have been?
President George W. Bush invaded Afghanistan and Iraq to bring order to the Middle East, with its oil and religious terrorism; it’s reminiscent of the Crusades’ failure in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Our failure has been much more destructive and with a greater loss of lives, treasure, etc. Apparently we have a tiger by the tail and are afraid to turn it loose. Islamic radicals wanted this war and hope to continue it indefinitely. Their goal: worldwide sharai law, as they believe “Allah” requires the war to rid the world of infidels. Their game: bankrupt secular nations with terrorism. Their method: goading and tempting secular nations into self-destruction by responding to their terrorism, which is proving successful and they are not apt to abandon the ploy. Our President’s eagerness to respond to their 9/11 bait has brought the Islamic regimes’ desired results. In addition to our cost in lives and treasure for religious revenge, it has broken the back of our Army’s ground forces, reduced any prestige we may have had in world affairs, stiffened the resolve of the terrorists and aggravated our god problem. Kevin Phillips, in his book, American Theocracy says: “In the months after 9-11 Washington could have shaped a multilateral response able to maintain much of the goodwill volunteered to the United States in the wake of the shocking attacks, instead the administration’s response was fundamentalist, unilateralist, and Manichean, trumpeting—briefly even termed a ‘crusade’—pitting good against evil. The invasion and occupation of Iraq, another poorly planned agenda, provided an environment that enabled overseas terrorism and radicalism to renew itself around a more acceptable anti-American cause. If terrorism remains center stage in a Middle Eastern war of attrition, that battle could last long enough—flaring into guerrilla wars and even civil wars—to wear the United States down militarily and economically. Osama bin Laden has hinted at exactly these hopes”.
UNITED STATES
We are fortunate; our founding fathers, a prudent rational group of deists, free of religion’s irrationality, managed to reorganize England’s thirteen American Colonies into the independent United States of America, with a constitution dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal, embracing the idea of an open society, welcoming immigrants of all races and religions while avoiding the tragic traps of a deadly state religion.
Adventuresome ambitious people come to the United States; immigration has benefitted us immeasurably. Our universities attract foreign students who, in turn, provide the world’s scientists, educators, business people, etc. We need more smart citizens and should welcome & encourage the world’s intellectuals to become U.S. citizens. One fourth of the members of the National Academy of Sciences are foreign born. At the present time we are at a disadvantage due to our continuing religious wars of revenge in Iraq and Afghanistan plus an electorate that is religious, anti-intellectual and misinformed by conservative radio talk shows. James Madison, our nation’s fourth president, warned, in the Federalist Papers, that religion’s control of government would destroy our democracy.
In a recent issue of ATLANTIC, James Fallows observes:“ The United States has in the past decade committed $1 trillion to the cause of entirely remaking a society. We know that such an investment could happen here—but we also know that it won’t. That is the American tragedy of the early 21st century: a vital and self-renewing culture that attracts the world’s talent and a governing system that increasingly looks like a joke. The most charitable statement of the problem is that the American government is a victim of its own success. It has survived in more or less recognizable form over more than two centuries—long enough to become mismatched to the real circumstances of the nation. Gradually but persistently, special interest groups nibble at our nation’s total wealth via tax breaks, special appropriations, etc. No single nibble is that dramatic or burdensome, but over time they threaten to convert any stable democracy into a big inefficient, favor ridden state”.
United States of America is a constitutional democracy, with a president, representative bicameral legislature, independent Judiciary and separation of powers. Congressional membership is proportional to our population. Each state has 2 Senate votes. “More than half of all Americans live in the 10 most populous states—which account for only 20 of the Senate’s 100 votes. California, our most populous state has 69 times as many people as Wyoming, our least populous; yet each has only 2 votes in the Senate. Since it takes 60 votes in the Senate to break a filibuster on controversial legislation, 41 votes is, in effect, a blocking minority”. This denies the benefits majority rule.
“Without a propensity for tolerating and managing differences, rival groups can easily reduce democracy to a ruthless struggle for power that ultimately wears down liberal institutions”.
U.S. ECONOMY
(Adapted from Kevin Phillips’ American Theocracy: The Perils and Politics of Radical Religion, Oil, and Borrowed Money In The 21st Century)
United States’ manufacturing economy created America’s middle class by employing some 17 million out of 68 million available workers. Since 1980 manufacturing has been out-sourced and our national leaders have kept interest rates low, encouraging us to borrow and spend. “Consumerism” and its complex of services; namely: Financial, Insurance and Real Estate, (known as FIRE) has displaced manufacturing as our major economy. Although the U.S. financial services economy provides a substantial income for the wealthiest segment of our society, in 2004 it only employed about 8 million out of the 131 million available workers. In 2000, the FIRE sector of our economy increased to 20% of gross domestic product, exceeding manufacturing. FIRE’s combined assets in 2004 were $45.3 trillion their earnings were 44% of all U.S. profits and an American filed for bankruptcy every 15 seconds. By year’s end consumer debt represented 85.7% of GDP; overall, the U.S. economy added $2.7 trillion in debt. The above transformation is the result of thirty years of federal regulatory dismantling that unleashed credit vendors to take advantage of humanity’s greed and gullibility. Consumer spending accounts for around 70% of our gross domestic product and borrowing to consume is at the heart of U.S’. current account deterioration The top one percent of Americans in 2000 had as much disposable (after tax) income as the bottom 35 percent. Our unemployment rate is accelerating and our self-evident income disparity is another historically proven problem that presently threatens our middle class, in addition to the loss of manufacturing jobs. This will lead to some kind of rebellion by the growing numbers of young people entering the job market in addition to the long-time unemployed, of whom many are filing for bankruptcy but may also lose their heavily mortgaged homes.
FIRE contributed $1.3 billion (1990-2000) to national elections: As debt became more important, lenders became more important, more powerful; and more influential over the policies chosen to regulate and control the financial services complex. It continues to feed on our downward spiral of religiosity and wars.
From 1980 to 2005, while the U.S’. economy was undergoing financialization, Germany, Switzerland and Japan, each had stronger growth rates than the U.S., due to their ability to manufacture and export very high quality merchandise.”
European history is replete with self-sufficient nations whose leaders became ambitious and wanted more; they challenged other nations, while embracing and accentuating their religiosity and accumulated debt; contemporaneously ignoring their diminishing capability to design and manufacture products that humanity needs. Instead of creating new wealth they invested in military adventurism.
The banking industry is a consequence of new wealth and prosperity which is created by agriculture, mining, manufacturing, etc. Banking can’t create new wealth, but only manages, packages, trades and accumulates it.
SCIENCE
“Knowledge is based upon innumerable experiments by world scientists. It has greatly benefitted humanity, and the vitality of scientific knowledge to society and culture, plus its role in shaping who we are and who we will become is invaluable.. Scientific exploitation began in medieval England when followers of Sir Francis Bacon met to hear a lecture by Christopher Wren, a young astronomer,(1660); the inauspicious beginning, culminated in Britain’s Royal Society and America’s Academy of Sciences”.
The ignorance embedded in religion’s ancient sorcery fights development of science although science is based upon proven facts while religion is free of facts; supported only by blind faith in spurious beliefs.
FINAL NOTES
Wisdom isn’t limited to experienced adults; a grandson, Samuel T. 3rd, at age five asked his parents if religion wasn’t make-believe.
A four year old granddaughter, Sidonie, was stumping me with numerous riddles, so I asked her: which came first, the chicken or the egg. After a few seconds of thought, she inquired if I knew the story about Noah’s ark. I allowed as how I did and she said, “You know how all the animals had to march on the ark two by two; well an egg can’t march”. To further questions she said, “Everybody knows an egg can’t march”.
Earlier I noted: this treatise is intended for the benefit of my grandchildren; I thought it might prove interesting because I’ve always wished that some of my grandparents had left an expression of their thoughts. However, after re-reading my effort, a realization has dawned: my iconoclastic views may be repugnant and unwelcome. If you perceive my views offensive, my most sincere apology,. I have attempted to treat religion seriously, and honestly; however I am convinced of religion’s absurdity; that caricature and ridicule are more appropriate responses. Please remember the following adages:
A word to the wise is sufficient; a fool and his money are soon parted; and greed is the root of all evil, not money, which is only greed’s temptress.
Other than my family, I’m acquainted with only a few and know no one who feels as I do about religion. As a free-thinking nonagenarian secularist living alone in H. L. Mencken’s, properly named, “Bible Belt”, I realize it is unwise to expound upon the foibles of my neighbors; but, such is life; they are a restless people who are convinced that nonbelievers are unreliable and should go to Hell----immediately!--Maybe some religious idiot will ring my doorbell and announce: “God sent me”!
Victor J. Stenger’s book: The New Atheism leads with Ingersoll’s Vow; which eloquently responds to the final realization that we do not have a “God”. I am repeating Mr. Ingersoll’s Vow as an expression of my feelings:
“When I became convinced that the Universe is natural—that all the ghosts and gods are myths, there entered into my brain, into my soul, into every drop of my blood, the sense, the feeling, the joy of freedom. The walls of my prison crumbled and fell, the dungeon was flooded with light, and all the bolts and bars, and manacles became dust. I was no longer a servant, a serf, or a slave. There was for me no master in all the wide world—not even in infinite space. I was free—free to think, to express my thoughts—free to live to my own ideal—free for myself and those I loved—free to use all my faculties, all my senses—free to spread imagination’s wings—free to investigate, to guess and dream and hope—free to judge and determine for myself—free to reject all ignorant and cruel creeds, all the “inspired” books that savages have produced, and all the barbarous legends of the past—free from popes and priests—free from all the “called” and “set apart”—free from the fear of eternal pain—free from the winged monsters of the night—free from devils, ghosts and gods. For the first time I was free. There were no prohibited places in all the realms of thought—no air or space where fancy could not spread its painted wings—no chains for my limbs—no lashes for my back—no fires for my flesh—no master’s frown or threat—no following another’s steps—no need to bow, cringe, or crawl, or utter lying words. I was free. I stood erect and fearlessly, joyously, faced all worlds”.
“And then my heart was filled with gratitude, with thankfulness, and went out in love to all the heros, the thinkers who gave their lives for the liberty of hand and brain—for the freedom of labor and thought—to those who died in dungeons bound with chains—to those who proudly mounted scaffold’s stairs—to those whose bones were crushed, whose flesh was scarred and torn—to those by fire consumed—to all the wise, the good, the brave of every land, whose thoughts and deeds have given freedom to the sons of man. And then I vowed to grasp the torch that they had held, and hold it high, that light might conquer darkness still”.
Robert Green Ingersoll (1833-1899)
An American lawyer and lecturer on agnosticism
Best wishes, much love and prosperity to you all. Your grandfather: Sam
BIBLIOGRAPHY
1. King Josiah of Judah, The Lost Messiah of Israel—by Marvin A. Sweeny--Oxford University Press; 2001
2. The Bible Unearthed-- by Israel Finkelstein and Neil Asher Silberman-- Free Press; 2001
3. The Crisis of Islam, Holy War and Unholy Terror—by Bernard Lewis—Modern Library; 2003
4. American Theocracy, The Perils and Politics of Radical Religion, Oil and Borrowed Money—by Kevin Phillips—Viking’s Penguin Group; 2006
5. The Looming Tower—by Lawrence Wright—Knoff; 2006
6. America Alone, The End of the World as We Know It—by Mark Steyn—Regney Publishing; 2006
7. The Great Experiment, The Story of Ancient Empires, Modern States and the Quest for a Global Nation—by Strobe Talbott—Simon & Shuster; 2008
8. The Caged Virgin, An Emancipation Proclamation for Women and Islam—by Ayaan Hirsi Ali—Free Press; 2004
9. The Infidel—by Ayaan Hirsi Ali—Free Press; 2007
10. The Legends of the Jews—by Louis Ginsberg and Henerietta Szold
11. God-Idea of the Ancients—by Eliza Burt Gamble
12. American Fascist: The Christian War on America—by Chris Hedges—Free Press; 2006
13. Hitler’s Pope—by John Cromwell—Penguin Group; 1999
14. The New Atheism—by Victor J. Stenger—Prometheus Books; 2009
