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Suffer Little Children
Being born to Catholic, Jewish, Mormon or Muslim family does not mean you have to follow. If you have the freedom to read this you are free to make up your own mind. Use it.
All religions lie to people, the big lie is that those who do not follow the religion are not good people. open your eyes. There are good people everywhere. No religion has any monopoly on virtue. Christians and Muslims run charities that proclaim their faith, but atheists do charitable work too. Bill Gates runs a huge charity that has nothing to do with belief in God because he hasn't got any such beliefs. Doing good does not require a belief in life after death. Good people do good because they want to, and feel better for doing so. What more reasons need there be? |
Bill and Melinda Gates with Warren Buffett, the three biggest charitable donors in history and not a religious thought between them. Nobody needs a religion to do good. |
Charitable atheists are truly altruistic. Where is the altruism in kissing the sores of lepers or wearing scratchy underwear? Such displays of piety are nauseating self indulgence. Many of the religious right want to remove the activities of the state and replace them with voluntary action. Why? Because the state is getting credit for good work they feel belongs to their god. Only good Muslims/Catholics/Baptists or whatever can be seen to be doing good works. Having a secular state doing it is a kind of blasphemy because it weakens the big lie. Of course that isn't how they present it, either to themselves or to others, but that is the explanation. Good work can never be seen to be done except in the name of their sectarian hateful god who they love and loves them, when they do what he insists they do. Democratically accountable good work done in the name of a secular state they find offensive. Of course they express it as a reluctance to pay tax and a willingness to pay a tithe instead. Taken to is logical conclusion the state will be left no functions except violence and coercion and all attempts to make life better will be done in the name of their God, and so secularists appear hateful and the religious appear full of love and compassion. Render unto Caesar that which is Caesar's and he will do the violent stuff and the nasty stuff and the people will see the state as Satan and everything good and peaceful and loving will be done in the name of the Christian (or the Muslim) god.
Nobody is born Catholic, or Muslim or Mormon. Babies have no understanding and no faith. What they have is an openness and a willingness to learn. This is cynically manipulated to impart stories of gods, the afterlife, rewards and punishments. Unlike fairy stories of dragons, princesses, swords in stones and happily ever afters these are not ideas that are left defenceless, to evaporate slowly as children grow up. Active steps are taken to ensure that these stories are immune to the usual level of scepticism and rationalisation. The children are told that people who do not believe the stories are evil people who will contaminate them with their ignorance, doubt or wrong belief. Disparaging terms are used for outsiders and those who do not believe the stories: heathen, kafirs, infidels, barbarians. People have developed ways to make socialising with those who don't believe difficult, arbitrary kosher and halal standards ensure that sharing food with strangers is difficult or impossible. The real ten commandments included the forbidding of seething a kid in its mothers milk simply because this was the traditional feast food of the Hebrews' neighbours. The effect would be very similar if the English were told haggis, olive oil, Irish stout and garlic was forbidden food or the Texans were forbidden from eating chilies or liberals were lead to believe that eating wedding cake would send them to hell. Of course arbitrary food laws survive because they are almost rational. Perhaps you can catch certain diseases from raw pork and the less you think about what shellfish eat the happier you will be.
Would you be happy to have your parents determine who you will marry, who you will work for, who you will vote for, where you will live, what you will believe and what you will kill or die for?
Religion is forced into children before they are old enough to think rationally for themselves, before they develop efficient bullshit detectors. Often children are asked to commit to a religion before they have reached the age of criminal responsibility: the law determines that they are too young to know the difference between right and wrong but they have been forced to accept the religious beliefs of their parents and absorb the inherent threats. How can this be justified? The only justification seems to be the fact that this has always gone on, it is one of those precious freedoms (the parent's right to indoctrinate while their children are too young to resist or deploy logic or before they have been taught the tools of rational analysis and debate). What of the child's right not to be filled with fear, nonsense explanations and superstition? Isn't a religious education a form of child abuse?
Another reason for it is the religious people's need to believe that it is only their beliefs in superstitious entities and unprovble repercussions after death that allows people to behave morally and obey any law. That suggestion is risible. It is perfectly possible to construct a moral framework simply on our innate desire to be seen as good and reliable people. Reciprocal altruism makes sense. Being moral makes sense. Doing the right thing is rewarding in itself. Helping people feels good, harming people (except perhaps those who have harmed us) feels bad. We don't need to have the great surveillance camera in the sky watching us, we know when we are doing wrong. Doing the wrong thing punishes us directly by damaging our self-esteem. Believing in a god in the sky with supreme power enables people to do joyfully what is against our nature. By educating children without morals, which is what religion does because it teaches children that they don't know what is right and wrong and they have to look it up in a book, a person can become amoral just by using their brain and deciding they don't believe in the bogeyman in the sky. The person who has been brought up that the only reason to be good is to avoid a cosmic spanking in the afterlife and that to go to heaven is the only thing that makes life worthwhile has been brought up extremely badly and in an extremely anti-social way. If they reject their religious indoctrination they are left without any functional morality or conscience and a belief that to be good is to be a hypocrite because only religious people are good. Selfish nihilism is the only apparently rational course once a person throws off one of these all-or-nothing religious upbringings.
It is essential for the health of our societies that we teach secular morality in schools, a system of morality and justifying rules, norms and laws that does not depend on any faith in the unseen, ineffable or supernatural. Like it or not rationalism, agnosticism and atheism will spread. If the religious have inoculated their children against rationalism to the extent that they have to choose between staying with family, tradition, god and morality all as one package or reject it all there will be problems when some wayward children do reject it all, as they inevitably will.
Your parents don't own you. They have no right to determine what you will believe, what you become or how you in turn bring up your children. Using love or family wealth and connections as a weapon to make children follow their will is evil. Cutting off a child who rejects the parents' religion is one of the nastiest things a human being can do. Anybody who suggests otherwise is an accessory to this barbarism. Any parent who finds a religion coming between them and their own children should ask themselves some very searching questions. Is faith, the unquestioning belief regardless of evidence, more important to you than the love you have for your own children? If so ask yourself the Abrahamic question: is there nothing you wouldn't sacrifice for this invisible thing you want to believe is real? If so then in what way are you anything other than a memeoid, a person who has been taken over completely by an idea to the point that nothing else really matters. If the supreme power in the universe demands this of you in what way would they be worthy of obeying or worshipping? Neither god nor Abraham comes out of that story well. A god who could make such a demand would not ever be worthy of worship. As for fear then yes, a god who could be such a complete bastard is to be feared, if he exists. But merely fearing the existence of anything does not make it any more or less likely to exist in reality.
Rebelling against parents is essential for the survival of our species. New ideas do not become widespread because they conquer and convince everybody. Ideas replace older ideas in two ways, some people convert and other people die without converting others. This happens time and time again in religion, science and politics. Old ideas are not swept away in a single wave, old ideas die with those who are too old, stubborn or stupid to be converted and who are too old, stupid or stubborn to convince the young to follow them.
For the good of yourself, your future and humanity question everything your parents have taught you and equally be prepared to accept that huge parts of what has been regarded as conventional wisdom probably is actually wise. Rejecting everything because it comes from your parents, "the West", capitalism, "The Man", your country or somebody else's country is wrong. Reserve judgment. Challenge all views and attitudes. But do it properly. Questioning everything at the same time is a very bad strategy. Find your own new position like a rock climber, don't let go with both hands and both feet at the same time and don't let go of everything secure and put your trust in something new and untested.