Excerpt #52 from my book, Religion, An Obstacle to Human Progress
Sometimes when people hear that I have a Master of Divinity degree from Harvard and also studied at Yale Divinity School, they express their curiosity about religion.
They probe.
They want to know the “secrets”.
“What have I learned in my study of the world of religion?” they ask.
I recently attended a Harvard alumni reception at the tony Polo Club in Sarasota, Florida.
An elderly woman with a Harvard Ph.D. who taught at Harvard said she was nearing the end of her life.
She wondered what she could look forward to after death.
I told her that I wished that I could help her, but no one has the answer to her question, neither scientists or theologians.
I believe that when I die I shall rot, and nothing of my ego will survive. I am not young, and I love life. But I should scorn to shiver with terror at the thought of annihilation. Happiness is none the less true happiness because it must come to an end, nor do thought and love lose their value because they are not everlasting. – Bertrand Russell
I do not believe in the immortality of the individual, and I consider ethics to be an exclusively human concern with no superhuman authority behind it. – Albert Einstein
The “secret” is . . . that the world of religion is largely a sham.
It’s a lot of old stuff (stories and claims) created in the infancy of our intelligence — before the Age of Science — by people profoundly ignorant of the world as we know it today.
Most of the stories were plagiarized from and built upon earlier stories that originated in even more primitive times.
Religion is about people, with very little knowledge, trying to figure out life; it’s about people joining together for security and survival (and camaraderie) under the umbrella of fictional belief systems.