Religion is a Weapon of Mass Destruction
Religion by itself is neither scientific nor logical. In its current form, religion has more detriment than value in modern society. It is a tool to control, to fleece and indenture those that believe. Not only is there is no proof that God exists but indeed there seems to be a preponderance of evidence against such folly. Then why do a large swath of people still employ such fallacies, even going so far as to teach our kids, that against our better understanding of things, that Santa really does exist? I suspect because, ‘that’s the way it’s always been done’ is the thought most people secretly have, and that complacency of thought and complicity of inaction has led to our current time on the Doomsday Clock of one-hundred-seconds-to-midnight. (https://thebulletin.org/doomsday-clock/current-time/
The atheist A.B. Potts once said, “I have no problem with God — it’s his fan club that scares me.” Indeed, many people use God as their personal justification for performing evil acts. Just this year, Samuel Paty, a 47-year old French middle-school teacher was beheaded near the school he taught at, by an 18-year old Russian refugee. Never mind that France had accepted the refugee into their country, where the freedom of expression and speech are revered, but consider further that seven people were charged with assisting the killer including a parent of one of the students that Samuel Paty taught. The audacity of such acts is shocking, but not without mass historical precedent. In 2011, 2015, and 2020 the French satirical magazine, Charlie Hebdo was the subject of such religious-based attacks by people that were “offended” by the magazine’s publications. The 2015 attack on the magazine resulted in the shooting deaths of twelve journalists by two religious zealots shouting, ‘God is great!’ and ‘the Prophet is avenged!’. Je suis Charlie.
These are of course, isolated incidents of small proportions considering the impact of Christianity and other religions on the world as a whole. Consider the Christian-Muslim Crusades that occurred between 1096 and 1291. The conflicts left hundreds of thousands dead with one of the most telling segments being the Children’s Crusade led by a young man who claimed he had received divine instructions to march into war and was followed by children, adolescents, women and elderly straight to their deaths. Is this really what God would order? Why would anyone believe this man’s lies? Why would anyone today continue to believe that anyone else could hear God’s voice, alone? If God wanted followers for someone, wouldn’t He tell the followers to follow the person Himself? There is mounting evidence that suggests that there are two types of views (in general). One view is that life represents an ‘us against them’ mentality, a tribal mentality, and that only the few are entitled to a clarity of knowledge that can be bestowed to the rest. I refer to this as a follower mentality, where critical thought and scientific rigor are shunned in favor of tribalism and the feeling of belonging. It is deep-seated and familial-taught, but most importantly it is accepted. There is another view that is tantamount to always being critical of what is being said, to approach things with a critical eye and to insist on the details of the outcome and the process to get there, a more scientific approach if you will. To some, things are much simpler and yet to others, it’s always much more complicated. If you trust nothing else I say, trust me when I say: it’s ALWAYS more complicated than you think. There are no simple things in life. None. Not one. Not ever.
In the Middle East, the Jews and the Palestinians have fought over land for decades, all based on religious beliefs. Is this really what God wants? He wants people to fight over land? He wants people to kill each other, governments to shoot missiles at civilians, to kill children and the helpless? I challenge this way of thinking. Let me be clear that religion is a disease. It is a scourge on America and the world. It enables us to peacefully sleep at night after doing the most God-awful things imaginable. We justify the worst behavior under no other authority than God and we believe we are good people because God blesses us with the riches of a nation that claims to be Christian.
It is time to wake up to a new world. A world where we follow the best tenants of the Bible without attributing them to God, which only enables others to justify their evil deeds. We must do things that are good for all, because ultimately, they are good for us individually. We must do things based on science and evidence and not allow our ‘beliefs’ to pervade our progress. We must be able to admit when we’re wrong and to recognize that we don’t have the answers but that we must seek them in the most empirical way we have available to us, not through prayer, but through rigorous scientific practices and peer-reviewed research. It is only when we give up our pride and realize that religion is the leading cause of our destruction, that morality is indeed the most subjective thing in all of human existence, that we will begin to make progress toward something better, something more sustainable and something our kids will be proud of. Let Friedrich Nietzsche’s prophecy be our salvation: “God is dead.”
