Excerpt #51 from my book, Religion, An Obstacle to Human Progress
We are all atheists, some of us just believe in fewer gods than others. When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours. – Stephen F. Roberts
Worship of gods is diversionary and distracting.
Our attention gets focused out there somewhere, worshipping something we have been programmed to believe exists, is sacred, and by which we are going to be “saved”.
We are going to be saved while at the same time we live horribly unhealthy lives, go to war with our neighbors literally and figuratively, and destroy our environment and deplete our resources.
Yet, we are going to be saved.
Unfortunately, life does not work that way.
We have given these gods great powers.
We say they are omnipotent, meaning they are all-powerful; omnipresent, meaning they exist everywhere; and omniscient, meaning they have all learning and knowledge.
These stories have caused great worldwide confusion, conflict, suffering, and wars.
Many of our wars have been fought over these tales.
We kill each other over this fiction.
It is the ultimate irony and a complete absurdity that we create these narratives to establish examples of exemplary behavior and proper rules for living then kill each other over them.
One does not have to be a genius to conclude there is something absurd and fundamentally wrong.
FAITH DOES NOT JUSTIFY IRRATIONALITY.
What is fundamentally wrong is that our mental infrastructure, responsible for our primitive behavior and antiquated, divisive, and dysfunctional religious belief systems, is outdated for the world in which we live today.
Our primitive behavior and antiquated beliefs don’t work with so many people, especially with a human population increasing rapidly, on a tiny planet, with a fragile ecosystem.
The way to think about this is to think about our physical infrastructure like our roads, bridges, and water systems.
The roads, bridges, and water systems of thousands of years ago when our primitive behavior and supernatural religious beliefs originated could not sustain humanity today.
Similarly, our primitive behavior and antiquated religious beliefs cannot sustain humanity today.
Humanity must rise to a higher level.
To sustain humanity, advance our civilization, and succeed as a species, this is not optional.
It is imperative.
The churches used to win their arguments against atheism, agnosticism, and other burning issues by burning the ismists, which is fine proof that there is a devil but hardly evidence that there is a god. – Ben N. Lindsey and Wainwright Evans, The Revolt of Modern Youth