This morning I was listening to a
BBC News account of the life of Danish cartoonist Kurt Westergaard. Kurt was the guy who produced
several cartoons mocking the prophet Mohammed. For the crime of free expression he has been convicted of blasphemy by the orthodox islamic bosses and his execution has been ordered. Now Kurt has to live in constant fear and cannot go anywhere without fearing for his life. He must always be accompanied by bodyguards.
Moreover, with the recent rise of Muslim immigrants to his native Denmark, this recently very open and tolerant society must now address the core issues of free speech. Now it must make a place for intolerance and division, where there was once none. The liberating virtues of free speech are now suddenly in question since they might inflame the feelings of a growing Muslim minority.
I really have to feel bad for these poor defenseless Muslims who must read the Daily Papers searching for something or anything that will hurt their feelings and compel them to attack with threat of death those people who hurt their feelings. It must be hard being a Muslim now-a-days. Actually, it’s harder being a reasonable human being, just enjoying life, knowing that such intolerant zealots grow more numerous as we cower in their medieval shadow.
This is why I hate religion - all religion. This is why I would never call myself a Buddhist or, no longer, a Jew. Why should I ever minimize myself to a mere category, particular one as divisive and unnecessary as a religion? How dehumanizing is that?
At the very least, any belief we hold onto without seeking real evidence for its validity, is a form of self-blinding. And even when I’m able to find some scraps of ‘potential’ evidence for some religious belief, I must be brave enough to be willing to hold this evidence to the most rigorous scrutiny. If I do anything less, then I have chosen the false over the truth. Worse yet, I have become a slave to a belief that I must now defend.
Some person, that we now unfairly name a religion after, said that the truth will set you free. That is really the only truth we will ever need. To grow, to evolve, to be a human being in the most integral sense of the word, our purpose in this life is to be true to life. Belief is, purely, a consequence of self-contempt.
But religion demands that we do otherwise. Religion tells us what and how we must think and must do. It bases its authority on the perfect source: god - an entity which can neither be proven or disproven. But, at the very least there is one thing we can say about god and that is this: there is no evidence in support of its reality. Thus it is nothing more than a psychological projection. Normally, when there is no evidence for something, other than hear-say, we wouldn’t give it a second thought. We would ignore it as nonsense. But such is not the case with god. Rather we invest this ’thing’ with more authority than anything else in this life. If we were brutally honest with ourselves, we would need to concede that anytime we invest something with such awesome power over our own lives, this must come from a place where we must fail to trust our own experience. It must come from a place of the darkest self-contempt. It is obvious that we are so pathetic and so stupid, that we need a concept, for which there is not the slightest bit of evidence for, for which the most brutal wars have been fought over, and for which we absorb an identity that is, clearly, not our own. This is insanity - pure and simple. It is the triumph of ignorance over awareness. It is a monster in our midst. If, as Jesus said, the truth will set us free, then conventional religion is the anti-christ! Cast out the ignorance and start getting free. The clock is ticking.
Unquestioned belief get us to believe that the observed world is “imperfect”. To correct this dilemma phony religious truths are handed down from one ignorant person to the next naive and vulnerable person. And so it goes. And then real ugliness, like the poor
un-life of Kurt Westergaard, becomes a “normative” product of beliefs that are so smugly self-approving that they compel, otherwise decent people, to do indecent things; like murder people for the crime of free expression. Such would-be killers are depraved cowards and really need a dose of reality to wake up from the nightmare of religious belief.
What is true? That is the only question ever worth asking. Life is always changing and what is true is fluid as well. But there are levels of truth. The over-arching levels are best described by science and please know that this history of science is one of stumbling forward, making errors, but then making corrections. This is the best approach to the larger truths of our time. But of the truths of your and my life, this is really more of a personal matter, but, for me, the best rule is just one of simple openness of the heart and the mind.
For this truth to be real and alive, I don’t need any books. I don’t need to quote some dead “saint”. I certainly don’t need the Quran or the Bible or the Diamond Sutra or the Vedas. I just need an open heart and mind, uncontaminated with second-hand observations that are not my own. If I wish to learn of the beauty of evolution, I will use the texts and voices of scientists who have dedicated their lives to this vast school of knowledge and living observation. But if I want to relate to my wife or daughter, I will be guided by my own open heart and mind. That is all.
And after all of these years, the greatest and most over-arching truth is that of our connections with everything in our world. That when a group of orthodox religious zealots get together and concentrate their hate because someone brought to light the cruel, narrow-minded, and ultimately ridiculous qualities of some of their beliefs, that they cannot tolerate such free expression and must condemn that person to death.
It’s time to place all belief systems into the waste bin of history. Human beings have lived on this planet for nearly 200,000 years. For about 10,000 (less than 5%) of those years there have been institutions of religion. Did you know that, although we like to think of Native Americans as “religious” that no North American Indian language as a word for religion? Like so many elements of planet killing civilization, let’s start living in true wisdom and abandon all religion. It would really be a great start to creating the new world of love, appreciation, and caring - without unnecessary divisions.
This blog is dedicated to the ending of all religion for the emancipation of truth.
