Excerpt #24 from my book, Religion, An Obstacle to Human Progress
At an Islamic school in Peshawar, Pakistan, a teacher exhorts 3,500 students at morning assembly to continue their father’s struggle to abolish the Jewish state of Israel and establish a Muslim nation stretching from the Mediterranean to the Pacific.
He does not explain why, nor the enormous costs and suffering associated with his message.
Instead, he, the school chancellor, says, “Like the Prophet, (the late) Sheik bin Laden and our Taliban brothers, you are to fight a battle that began centuries ago.”
Students at the Dar-ul-Uloom Haqquania madrassa shout in response, Allahu Akbar, God is great. “We accept our calling.”
WE DO WHAT WE DO BECAUSE WE BELIEVE WHAT WE BELIEVE.
Disputes that are tinged with religious fervor and fueled by religious grievances often involve more horrific violence — from mass graves to suicide bombers to the airborne attacks of September 11 — than other conflicts. – Susan Page and Jack Kelley, USA Today
RELIGIOUS DOGMA IS JUNKFOOD FOR THE MIND.
“Those who are looking to change the status quo see religion as a very powerful mobilizer of human emotion,” says Jim Lindsay, who studies post-Cold War foreign policy at the Brookings Institute. “You can mobilize people to do things they wouldn’t do on the basis of class, they wouldn’t do on the basis of ethnicity, but they will do on the basis of religion.”
Religion stills a thinking mind. – Greg Erwin
“The doctrine that future happiness depends upon belief is monstrous. It is the infamy of infamies. The notion that faith in Christ is to be rewarded by an eternity of bliss, while a dependence upon reason, observation and experience merits everlasting pain, is too absurd for refutation, and can be relieved only by that unhappy mixture of insanity and ignorance, called ‘faith’.
“What man, who ever thinks, can believe that blood can appease God? And yet, our entire system of religion is based upon that belief. The Jews pacified Jehovah with the blood of animals, and according to the Christian system, the blood of Jesus softened the heart of God a little, and rendered possible the salvation of a fortunate few. It is hard to conceive how the human mind can give assent to such terrible ideas, or how any sane man can read the Bible and still believe in the doctrine of inspiration.” – Robert G. Ingersoll, The Gods, 1872
FAITH, n. Belief without evidence in what is told by one who speaks without knowledge, of things without parallel. – Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary