Excerpt #16 from my book, Religion, An Obstacle to Human Progress
Noah’s Big Job
Judith Hayes wrote in her book, In God We Trust; But Which One?: “The biblical account of Noah’s Ark and the Flood is perhaps the most implausible story for fundamentalists to defend. Where, for example, while loading his ark, did Noah find penguins and polar bears in Palestine?”
EXAMINE INHERITED BELIEFS.
The Bible said that Noah loaded the entire Ark with two (or seven) from each species within a 24-hour day.
This would have required him to have taken into the vessel, classified and stored 480 species per second.
Noah took his wife, three sons, and three daughters-in-law into the ark.
Each person would have had to sort, house, look after, feed and remove the excrement from about 5 million animals each day.
IT’S IRRATIONAL TO DISCUSS LOGIC WITH THE IRRATIONAL.
Let Go of Dated Ideas
There comes a time to let go of dated ideas and advance as life demands just as we do in every other field of endeavor.
And that is what is happening in the Information Age in which we live as we understand more and more about ancient religions and the myths and superstitions from which they evolved.
“I do not believe in the creed professed by the Jewish church, by the Roman church, by the Greek church, by the Turkish church, by the Protestant church, nor by any church that I know of. My own mind is my own church. All national institutions of churches . . . appear to me no other than human inventions set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolize power and profit.” – Thomas Paine, The Age of Reason
“In the long run, nothing can withstand reason and experience, and the contradiction religion offers to both is palpable.”- Sigmund Freud
“Reason should be destroyed in all Christians.” – Martin Luther
The time for religion, as we have known it for thousands of years, has come and gone.
It’s on its way out.
Slowly but surely.
In its day, it has caused — and continues to cause — enormous confusion, conflict, suffering, and wars.
Many of our seemingly intractable political, economic, and environmental problems can be traced to outdated religious beliefs systems that distance us from the real-life behavioral demands of the reality in which we exist.
DOGMA DIES.
“Faith cannot move mountains (though generations of children are solemnly told the contrary and believe it). But it is capable of driving people to such dangerous folly that faith seems to me to qualify as a mental illness. It leads people to believe in whatever it is so strongly that in extreme cases they are prepared to kill and to die for it without the need for further justification.” – Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene
TO DEATH, WE DEFEND OUR IGNORANCE.
“The fact is that far more crime and child abuse has been committed by zealots in the name of God, Jesus, and Mohammed than has ever been committed in the name of Satan. Many people don’t like that statement, but few can argue with it.” – Kenneth V. Lanning, Supervisory Special Agent at the Behavioral Science Institution and Research Unit of the FBI Academy (from
Carl Sagan’s, The Demon Haunted World).
Since the year 2000, for example, abundance evidence has emerged of widespread child sexual abuse within the Roman Catholic Church, and of subsequent payoffs and cover-ups by the church.