Excerpt #80 from my book, Religion, An Obstacle to Human Progress
He’d Never Stop Throwing Up
If Jesus Christ came back today and saw what was being done in his name, he’d never stop throwing up. – Woody Allen (from the film Hannah and Her Sisters)
The earth is flat. Whoever claims it is round is an atheist deserving of punishment. – Sheik Abdul-Aziz Ibn Baaz, supreme religious authority of Saudi Arabia, 1993
HARD FACTS CANNOT COMPETE WITH BLIND FAITH.
Frolicking Children and Elephants
An Associated Press article reported that one of India’s holiest rivers, the Yamuna, starts as pristine water coursing down from the Himalayas.
By the time it gets to India’s capital, New Delhi, it’s one of the world’s most polluted.
No wonder; it has become the dumping ground for dozens of hospitals, slaughterhouses, and dairies.
Raw sewage and trash float alongside frolicking children and elephants.
The riverbanks are littered with broken glass, cement blocks, and rotting fish.
Environmentalists have taken to calling it the “poison river”.
But thousands of Indians still flock there every day to plunge into filth foaming on water turned black by pesticides, trash, and other pollutants dumped from factories.
Many Hindus believe they can ward off death by bathing in the Yamuna, which is named after the sister of Yama, the Hindu god of death.
They also insist it helps cleanse them of their sins.
On any given day, hundreds of people plunge into the river at various spots, stretching their hands in prayer toward the sky.
LET US NOT BE TRAPPED BY TRADITION.
Faith may be defined briefly as an illogical belief in the occurrence of the improbable. – H. L. Mencken