A Lesson in Logic

How convenient when we have a "profound" religious experience, it's almost always in the religion we grew up with or that is practiced in our community. Has anyone ever heard of a Missouri resident having a religious experience involving a blue god with a head shaped like an elephant's? I certainly haven't. But in India, the experience is quite common. Its name is Ganesha. Hindus have a plethora of gods and Ganesha is one of the best-known and most widely worshipped. Devotion to Ganesha can be seen throughout India and beyond, extending to Buddhists and to the Jains system of belief. He/it looks ridiculous.

Like me, Christians scoff at the very notion of a blue god with an elephant head. How, they ask, could anyone believe anything so silly and absurd as that? The answer is simple. When the young are indoctrinated at an early age to believe something without evidence, and the belief is reinforced constantly, before their brain has developed critical thinking skills and logic, there is practically no limit to the amount of garbage that can be stuffed into a young head and pawned off as true. In fact this is exactly what the philosopher, Eric Hoffer referred to when he said, "An empty head is not really empty; it is stuffed with rubbish. Hence the difficulty of forcing anything into an empty head."

Teaching youngsters to believe propositions not based on evidence can have devastating consequences. No doubt the first thing that pops into the readers head after reading the last sentence is the tragedy of 911. But that's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about the literally billions of hours wasted every year in pursuit of ephemeral propositions that have no basis in reality. And the millions of man and woman hours spent each day praying and then having the unmitigated arrogance to think you have actually done some good! The idea that thanking God does any good needs to be thrown out with the rest of the trash in your heads.

I quote from the philosopher, Daniel Dennett. "If you insist on keeping the myth of the effectiveness of prayer alive, you owe the rest of us a justification in the face of the evidence. Pending such a justification, I will excuse you for indulging in your tradition; I know how comforting tradition can be. But I want you to recognize that what you are doing is morally problematic at best. If you would even consider filing a malpractice suit against a doctor who made a mistake in treating you, or suing a pharmaceutical company that didn't conduct all the proper tests before selling you a drug that harmed you, you must acknowledge your tacit appreciation of the high standards of rational inquiry to which the medical world holds itself, and yet you continue to indulge in a practice for which there is no known rational justification at all, and take yourself to be actually making a contribution. Try to imagine your outrage if a pharmaceutical company responded to your suit by blithely replying, "But we prayed good and hard for the success of the drug!. What more do you want?

Evolution long ago swept away the very foundation of the Christian religion. Turns out there was no Adam and Eve. "Oh", the apologists say, "The story of Adam and Eve was only symbolic." Symbolic!! So, Jesus had himself tortured and executed, in vicarious punishment for a symbolic sin committed by a non-existent individual? The reason so many people believe this foolishness is because they were taught it by their elders who had it passed down from their elders. If Christians had been brought up in India, instead of say, Missouri, they would believe in a blue god with an elephant's head, all because that was taught to them by their elders. And they would believe another god from their grab bag of gods (Rama in this case) built a 30 mile long bridge across a body of water using rocks carried by an army of monkeys.

We attained our present brain size approximately 200,000 years ago. Since that time the so called "benevolent" god watched while humans suffered unimaginably from starvation, cold, heat, exhaustion, disease, and fear of wild animals. Few of our ancestors even reached, much less lived, past the age of 30. One out of four women died during childbirth. Meanwhile, this "malevolent and loving" Christian God watched all this misery take place, as he stood by and twiddled his thumbs for 198,000 years doing nothing. Then in a moment of magnificent prescience, he popped his "son" out of a virgin in one of the most remote places on earth, among the most ignorant people on earth, where the news wouldn't filter out for another 300 years. There! That oughta do the trick! Meanwhile after 2000 years of effort by Christians, fully two thirds of the earths population of 6.7 billion totally reject Jesus as their personal savior. And of the over 1500 denominations and sects that do buy into this deluded notion, they all think the other 1499 are going to hell because they don't possess the real truth. For example all Baptists think all 1,140,000 Catholics are going to hell and all Catholics think all Baptists are going to hell. Christians think Muslims are deluded because Muslims claim their prophet rode a white horse to heaven and back. (With one stop in Jerusalem) Muslims think Jesus was a prophet but not a savior and that all Christians are going to hell. And both of them will swear Mormons are deluded because of their claim that their prophet, Joseph Smith, dug up some golden plates with a "lost" language that could only be interpreted by peering through some magic reading stones, conveniently buried with the plates. If you are a Hindu you believe in a god with a blue color sporting an elephant's head which you call Ganesha. The reason all of you believe in all this nonsense is because you were indoctrinated as a child before your brain had developed enough to attain critical thinking and reasoning skills. Once this is implanted in your brain and reinforced week after week after week, it becomes virtually impossible to rid yourselves of it. The philosopher Eric Hoffer said' An empty head is not really empty; it is stuffed with rubbish. Hence the difficulty of forcing anything into an empty head."

This delusional thinking is why religious people reserve their most scathing criticism for people like myself who would do them the favor of releasing them from their mental prison. There are drugs available for psychotics, but so far, no cure has been found for delusion. So keep your blue elephant gods, your golden plates, your flying white horses, your pregnant virgins, dead men walking, and talking snakes close to your heart. I know they give you comfort. But don't offer your prayers for me. I wouldn't want to see a friend or relative waste time on praying when they could be doing something productive.

Charles Templeton, a contributor to Christopher Hitchen's book, "The Portable Atheist" asks the following questions in his book. I offer them here. The only answer I will not accept to any of the questions is, "it's just a mystery." That response immediately identifies you as an idiot. So here goes. Give it your best shot.

1. If there is a loving God, why does he permit...much less create...earthquakes, droughts, floods, tornadoes, and other natural disasters which kill thousands of innocent men, women and children every year?

2. How can a loving omnipotent God permit, much less create...encephalitis, cerebral palsy, brain cancer, leprosy, Alzheimer's, and other incurable illnesses to afflict millions of men, women and children, most of whom are decent people?

3. How could a loving Heavenly Father create an endless Hell and, over the centuries, consign billions of people to it because they co not or cannot or will not accept certain religious beliefs? And having done so, how could he torment them forever?

4.Why are there literally hundreds of Christian denominations and independent congregations, all of them basing their beliefs on the Bible, and most of them convinced that all the others are, in some ways, wrong?

4. If all Christians worship the same God, why can they not put aside their theological differences and co-operate actively with one another?

5. If God is a loving Father, why does he so seldom answer his needy children's prayers?

6. How can one believe the biblical account of the creation of the world in six days when every prominent scientist agrees that all living species have evolved over millions of years from primitive beginnings?

7. Is it possible for an intelligent man or woman to believe that God fashioned the first male from a handful of dust and the first woman from one of the man's ribs?

8. Is it possible to believe that the Creator of the universe would personally impregnate a Palestinian virgin in order to facilitate getting his Son into the world as a man?

9. The Bible says that " the Lord thy God is a jealous God." But if your are omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent, eternal and the creator of all that exists, of whom could you possibly be jealous?

10. Why, in a world filled with suffering and starvation, do Christians spend billions on cathedrals and sanctuaries and relatively little on aid to the poor and needy? (Think of the Vatican and it's million dollar paintings and artifacts and the two billion spent on defending their predator priests)

11. Why does the omnipotent God, knowing that there are millions starving to death in a parched land, simply let them waste away and die when all that is needed is rain?

12. Why would the Father of all mankind have a Chosen People and favor them over the other nations on earth?

13. Why would a God who is "no respecter of persons" prohibit adultery and then bless, honour, and allow to prosper a king who had seven hundred wives and three hundred concubines?

14.Why is the largest Christian church controlled entirely by men, with no woman....no matter how pious or gifted, permitted to become a priest, monsignor, bishop, archbishop, cardinal or pope?

15. Jesus's last words to his followers were, "Go ye into all the world and preach the Gospel to every creature. And lo, I am with you always." But after two thousand years, billions of people have never so much as heard the Christian Gospel. Why?

Actually there is a good answer to questions 7 and 8:

7. Is it possible for an intelligent man or woman to believe that God fashioned the first male from a handful of dust and the first woman from one of the man's ribs?

8. Is it possible to believe that the Creator of the universe would personally impregnate a Palestinian virgin in order to facilitate getting his Son into the world as a man?

As I explained above, it is possible because these intelligent men and women were indoctrinated as youngsters. That explains why some of our most prominent politicians in both the House and Senate believe Joseph Smith, a renowned con artist in his day, actually dug up some golden plates and magic reading stones. They were taught this as children and had it reinforced constantly. It explains why six out of nine of our Supreme Court Justices, believe that a little cracker and grape juice is actually.... not symbolically....actually, the body of a long dead delusional religious leader. They were taught this as children and had it reinforced constantly.

Think about it. What are you teaching your children and grandchildren? Are you teaching them things based on evidence, or are you teaching them things that were "revealed" to certain people in secret.