To explain life, we have turned to two disciplines that are diametrically opposed, science and religion.
- Science is very formal, rigid, and evidenced-based in the determination of its principles and theories.
The key words are “evidenced-based.”
A scientific theory must survive a regimen of objective testing and re-testing by any scientists, observers, or testers at any place and produce identical results time after time before it is accepted as fact.
Science is almost perverse in its methodology of testing in attempts to get its theories to break.
A scientific theory is not to be confused with a non-scientific theory where someone casually theorizes about something.
A scientific theory is based on evidence and facts.
Science is a very open process that welcomes and celebrates change when new discoveries are made.
- Religion, on the other hand, is an untested collection of dogmatic principles referred to as “dogma.”
What is dogma?
Dogma is an arrogant assertion that one’s ideas and opinions are factual without evidence.
Dogma is derived typically from supernatural sources and that which is referred to as “divine revelation.”
What is divine revelation?
Divine revelation means communicating with gods and other supernatural entities.
Unlike science, religion need not concern itself with objective reality.
Verification is dependent upon faith.
Religion is a phenomenon that was born when “priests” and “priestesses” invented themselves, which they continue to do today.
Religion does not like challenges or changes to its dogma.
The alteration of a few words of so-called “revealed religion” can unravel and splinter religions into smaller groups.
These in turn unravel and splinter into even smaller groups.
Christianity, for example, the religion in which I was raised, has in excess of forty-five thousand denominations.
Evidence of religion, art, and recorded events dates back thirty to forty thousand years back into the Stone Age.
There have been an estimated one hundred thousand religions.
Today, there exists more than four-thousand religions.
Some of the better-known religions include Hinduism, which originated six thousand years ago; Judaism, four thousand years ago; Buddhism (and Confucianism and Taoism), twenty-six hundred ago; Christianity, two thousand years ago; and Islam, fourteen hundred years ago.
We’ve worshipped everything from the sun to the moon, to Egyptian pharaohs and Roman emperors.
Then, we created mythological gods in our own image.Throughout history, we’ve worshipped many gods of countless polytheistic religions (religions with multiple gods).
About four thousand years ago, in the Middle East, someone came up with the idea that there is just one God.
Keep in mind that this was just someone’s idea.
Someone like you or me.
This idea marked the beginning of the western concept of what we refer to as monotheism, one God.
The first significant religion to practice monotheism was Judaism and the God Yahweh, misspelled Jehovah in the King James Version of the Bible.
About fourteen hundred years later, 2,600 years ago, Buddhism in India, and Confucianism and Taoism in China, emerged as powerful religious movements in the East.
These are belief systems with no gods.
In the last forty years of the first century A.D., in the approximate years 60 to 100, no one knows for sure, and long after the events that were claimed to have occurred, the New Testament gospels Mark, Matthew, Luke, and John were written decades apart.
It’s estimated that these stories were written in the 60s, 70s, 80s, and 90s of our first century.
They were written 30, 40, 50, and 60 years after the events they were writing about were supposed to have taken place.
Who wrote these stories?
People theorize about the authors, but no one knows who wrote these gospels.
They were written anonymously by early Church teachers.
It is thought that in the second century — to bestow legitimacy — the authorships were assigned to four Christian evangelists, Mark, Matthew, Luke, and John.
What were these writers doing?
Theologians agree that they each had their own bias and emphasis.
Albert Einstein observed that we can’t solve our problems from the same level of thinking from which they originated.
These writers went to the next level of thinking.
The Jewish laws had been around for about a thousand years.
It was time to move on, advance, and evolve.
The writers were radical, progressive, and inclusive.
They reached out to the gentiles.
They sought to help the poor.
Their followers congregated in homes.
Churches — congregations — formed.
Theologians agree that the gospel authors, each with their own agenda and bias, created stories to match the prophecy of the Old Testament written two thousand years earlier.
To embellish their stories, the writers employed the practice, common at the time, of incorporating fictional elements drawn from ancient writings of heroes and gods from pagan, generally rural and polytheistic, religions.
Today, we call this practice plagiarism.
In particular, they “borrowed” heavily from a rival and major religion in the Roman Empire, Mithraism, which had existed for hundreds of years.
It originated in Persia, which is now Iran.
Mithraism was based on a fictional character named Mithra,
The carving shown above was found in 260 Mithraic temples.
It depicts Mithra, with a knife in his hand, slaying a bull.
It was thought that from the strength and fertility of the bull came renewed life — rebirth — for Mithra adherents.
Mithraism, based on a fictional character, was popular in the first century with Roman soldiers and civil servants and was a competitor to Christianity for the first four centuries.
The storyline of Mithraism, not surprisingly, was strikingly similar to Christianity.
A kind of formula for these types of stories existed back then.
Because there was no such thing as plagiarism, one used what one liked from earlier stories.
So, as the story goes, Mithra was born of a virgin.
Some versions of the story have Mithra being born from a rock.
At his birth were adoring shepherds and magi kings.
Kings were inserted into these stories commonly to represent royalty, to signify that the birth was important.
Mithra’s birth, like numerous other supernatural heroes and gods, was celebrated on December 25, the same day the Christians adopted.
What’s so special about December 25?
It’s four days after the winter solstice, December 21, when in the Northern hemisphere the sun is at its lowest point.
By December 25, it was evident to the ancients that the sun was rising again.
It was a time for celebration and an auspicious day to be born as the sun, worshipped as a god, was rising.
The rising sun provided the idea for ascension.
In the tale of Mithra were stories of miracles, resurrection, and ascension.
Mithra, considered the Way, the Truth, and the Light, was revered as the Good Shepherd, the Savior, and the Messiah.
The similarity in story lines made possible the easy conversion of Mithraism’s followers to Christianity.
Out of all of this, a new story was created which most learned theologians agree is fictitious and a new religion born, Christianity.
With it came another god, Christ, from the Greek word Christos, an interpretation of the Hebrew word for messiah, mashiach, meaning the anointed one as prophesied in the Old Testament.
At some point, someone, somewhere, declared that these contrived stories were the divinely inspired and infallible words of God.
In other words, people were led to believe that the same God that they created in their stories was responsible for the stories they created.
Many scholars and countless and growing numbers of people have concluded that Jesus is a fictional character created by the early Christian community.
These scholars base their arguments on several key points:
- There is no mention of a miracle-working Jesus in 1st century secular (non-religious) sources. While there were reputable historians and writers at that time, no one recorded these remarkable events that were supposed to have taken place.
- The epistles (letters), written earlier than the gospels, provide no evidence of a recent historical Jesus.
- The Jesus narrative is paralleled in earlier Middle Eastern myths, going back 2,000 to 3,000 years, about dying and rising gods like Baal, Osiris, Attis, Adonis and Dumuzi/Tammuz, all of which survived into the Hellenistic and Roman periods and influenced early Christianity.
About fourteen hundred years ago in Mecca, the leading city of Arabia, another prophet, Mohammed (570-633), appeared.
He, too, heard the inerrant and infallible words of God.
As he could not read or write, Mohammed had a scribe make notes of what he heard.
These notes, recorded in small segments over a twenty-three-year period, were compiled into a book known as the Koran (Qur’an).
Four-fifths the length of the New Testament, the Koran is considered by Muslims to be the final and infallible revelation of God’s will.
Born was another religion, Islam, meaning peace and surrender or submission to God.
And, we got another god, Allah, meaning literally “The God.”
The one true God.
We have given these gods great powers.
We say they are omnipotent, meaning that they are all-powerful; omnipresent, meaning that they exist everywhere; and omniscient, meaning that they have all learning and knowledge.
These stories, and the religions and belief systems formed around them, have caused great worldwide confusion, conflict, suffering, and wars.
Many wars have been fought over these stories.
We kill each other over these stories.
It is the ultimate irony and a complete absurdity that we create these stories to establish examples of exemplary behavior and proper rules for living, then we kill each other over these stories.
One does not have to be a genius to conclude that there is something not only absurd but fundamentally wrong.
What is fundamentally wrong is that our mental infrastructure — that is responsible for our primitive behavior and antiquated, divisive, and dysfunctional religious beliefs — is outdated for the world we live in today.
Our dated behavior and beliefs don’t work; they will not sustain humanity.
The way to think about this is to think of our physical infrastructure, i.e., our roads, bridges, water, and wastewater systems.
The infrastructure (roads, bridges, water systems) of thousands of years ago, when our behavior and beliefs originated, could not sustain humanity today.
Similarly, our behavior and beliefs of thousands of years ago cannot sustain humanity today.
There are simply too many people on a tiny planet that has fragile ecosystems and finite resources for us to behave as we do.
Our social and political attitudes, behaviors, and beliefs must advance to a higher level.
If we are to sustain humanity, advance our civilization, and succeed as a species, this is not optional.
It’s imperative.