A World of Lunatics

On 3-17-08, I wrote this:

Imagine, for a moment, a world with no religion.

Now imagine, during a stroll in a park, you happened upon a man sitting on a park bench, eating crackers and drinking wine. In all earnestness the man tells you he is eating the body and drinking the blood of a long dead religious zealot, whose name is Jesus. He points out the crackers and wine do not merely represent his body and blood. They actually are his body and blood.

 In a world with no religion, any reasonable logical person, capable of intelligent thought, would immediately recognize the poor man was incoherent and in need of psychiatric care.  

But what if two men believed they could eat and drink Jesus? Or two hundred? Or two hundred million?  Today the number of Catholics on our planet number nearly 1.2 billion.  At what point in this sea of believers did this man’s belief actually become true? How many believers did it take to produce this miracle and for this man’s lunacy to become fact?

Yesterday, over four years after I wrote that, I came across a recent quote by Sam Harris.  Sam, who in my opinion, ranks among the most intelligent persons on the face of the earth, managed to say in a mere 23 words what it took me 172 words to say.

“Religion allows people by the billions to believe in things that only lunatics could believe on their own.”

How true.  How powerful!  Thanks Sam for taking Occam’s razor to my essay.  

http://religionrevealed.blogspot.com