The Heavy Yoke of Religion

For 39 years I had the so called "HOPE" David describes above. I understand where he comes from. He thinks that if he loses this "HOPE" then all of a sudden life will mean nothing.

I am here to tell you that this is just the opposite of what I have found out. I am no longer a Christian. My life, my spouse, my family mean more to me than ever. Being a good moral person means more to me than ever. Being honest with myself and having integrity with my beliefs and with other people means more than ever.

I just can't keep clinging to a false hope, when that hope is based upon a book which is so full of error, contradiction, moral problems, false prophecies and fairy tale stories. I could have "HOPE" that Santa Clause is real, but does a life spent in dillusion really bring happiness? Maybe it can short term for some, because even many a mental patient in institutions seem to have some measure of happiness, as long as the medications hold out. However we simply cannot do what is right by the rest of mankind and make this world a better place for all people as long as we live in our dillusions. It is time we face reality.

There is freedom in awakening from the dillusions of fairy tale beliefs. Is it frightening, yes it is. Especially if you were in the cult for as long as I was. However, once you begin to step out into the light of the freedom of thought a lot of the old fears simply fade away.

Trade in your so-called HOPE, and your Fears of hell or damnation, for freedom.

Maybe this is what the REAL Jesus person tried to do, to break everyone away from religion, from fear, from the bondage of doctrines, dogmas and blind faith. Jesus didn't even start a new religion, nor write anything down, that was done by the people who started writing the books of the NT many years after he died. They made up stuff, even about what Jesus said and did, just like the OT writers did about the OT miracles.

I could blindly keep some "HOPE" that one day Peter Pan is going to come back and take us all to a better place, where we could live like innocent children forever, but is that really going to help us humans deal with other humans here on the real earth and help us solve real world problems. NO, pretty much like the Bible.

It is time we all came out of our fairy tale induced stupors and start dealing with each other one human to another.

Those who think they have "the answer" in reality know less than anyone.

Lets get back to Hitchens...want to see this slimeball get his ass kicked in a debate on the Iraq war:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zH_BULU2vcM

Great stuff!

I bet he came up with this new book to divert from his stance on the Iraq war.

What a NEOCON, what a piece of TROTSKYITE scum!!!!!

Permanant revolution, eh? How is it going, Hitch???

The finding of the works of Tillich reminds me of the old Zen saying: "When the student is ready, the teacher will come."

Although Jesus did free us from the yoke of religion, His purpose was much greater than this. For Christ came to free us from the bondage of sin and even the ultimate oppression: death itself. If the Son sets you free, you are free indeed.

John 8:34-36 Jesus answered them, "Truly, truly, I say to you, every one who commits sin is a slave to sin. The slave does not continue in the house for ever; the son continues for ever. So if the Son makes you free, you will be free indeed.

I'm glad you have found YOUR "truth" Analyst. I found mine in the Bible. I guess we can have our own "truths" and the same outcome can occur.....happiness. I think we both can be good moral outstanding citizens in this society of ours. I know we can both be happy in our "truths" and that's great. I have to say though that my "truth" consists of salvation as well. I hope that's ok with you since this is not a part of your "truth". Your "truth" takes you to an end of existence, to a nothingness. My "truth" gives me hope for a continued life, a spiritual life if you may, once this body of mine shuts off. My "truth" gives me HOPE for the future. Does your "truth" do that? Or does your "truth" stop at death? I'm just curious, because we can all come up with our own "truths" according to atheists, but can your "truth" consist of an afterlife if you do not believe in God? I am really curious about this because I really do not know for certain if atheists think life stops at death or are they uncertain? I do not mean to sound critical whatsoever, but I do have an urge to know what atheists really believe. Or not believe as well, and why? Thanks

My goodness, some of the comments are longer than the column. When I think about a "a dreary, gloomy, mournful outlook" it is unfortunately the institutional church which comes to mind. His column suggests that Rev. Anderson may be one of those who can go beyond the content-less "Jesus loves you" and the threatening guilt trips....

Thank you, Analyst -- I'm saving your post.

Correction: The last quotation above came from George Mikes (not Asimov). Here is his complete quote:

Some people may think: what a dreary, gloomy, mournful outlook mine is compared with the happy, bright and exhilarating promises of the Church. But, in fact, it is the other way round...Is it really so wonderful or virtuous to mislead yourself and others with childish and implausible promises and hopes? Is it not more courageous to face reality, particularly when reality seems to me more pleasant than the promised bliss? ..."

"How many millions have been cheated, fooled, bullied into a miserable existence, condemned to poverty, slavery and injustice because they were forced to believe...in Never-Never Land. People gave up the joys of life, the pleasure and beauty of sex and family life, soldiers eagerly rushed to their deaths for rewards that never came."

"The morbid preoccupation with cemeteries, tombs, graves, POMPES FUNEBRES is just another expression of fear. We do not even mourn the dead; we mourn ourselves. Every funeral is our own funeral; every grave is our own grave."

"You carry in yourself the immortality of your forebears and you too will survive in your children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren.
You keep erecting monuments to yourself; not only in so-called works of art, but a garden here, an originally furnished room there, a few remarks you made, a few good deeds you did... If you have written, painted, built something or created something in any way you will live on in your creation for ten, a hundred or a thousand years.

It does not really matter how long, the difference between ten and a thousand is much smaller than it looks from where we are sitting."

'But, even a thousand years is not forever', you may object, you greedy thing. No, it isn't. but, believe me, even eternity does not last forever...There is no such thing as THE world. We all look at it from behind our own eyes; THE world is OUR world, different from the many millions of worlds belonging to the people.

When our consciousness ceases, whatever happens to us, our world dies--and dies forever. It will never be resurrected. Many thousands of worlds die every day, but our smiles, our modest good deeds, our small kindnesses, our few and limited achievements make US immortal. Not VERY immortal; but a bit immortal."

(George Mikes, "On Real Immortality", HOW TO BE GOD (Penguin Books, 1988,pp.104-7)

"The more I studied the clearer to me were the outlines of the man-made edifice of doctrinal law, fixed tradition, religious dogmatism and grubby church politics which seemed about to surround and enslave me."

Yes. That is what atheists see in religion too.

It is "enslaving" because the faithful are being told that are serving God -- but it is really a smokescreen and they are following Mammon. That's what I see with Islamic fundamentalist followers. That's what I see many Christian Evangelists/Baptists doing following Dubya's policies in Iraq.

Why do you think you've seen the big spate of atheist books out there recently? I know I'd be quiet if I didn't such evil done in the "name of God" going on.

So now you talk about religion as being a "heavy yoke". Throw it off my friend. If there was really a God, you would not be suffering this inner turmoil.

Yes, you would have to confront being a mortal -- that's what this is really all about, isn't it?

Christians accuse atheists of being arrogant and wanting to set themselves up as gods. Nothing is further from the truth. It is believers that desperately cling onto religion in hopes of gaining access to great powers – including the powers of not being harmed in this life, and going to a heaven in a next life. The reason why skeptics cannot be tolerated is because, deep down, most of the faithful suspect – indeed FEAR—that there is no real sound basis for their beliefs. It is really just a hope – and even a whisper of this cannot be tolerated.

This is why you see it is the faithful who are usually the most hysterical about dying. Need examples? The US attacked an innocent country – Iraq – because George Bush drummed up a hysterical fear that the terrorists were going to kill people –where panic ensued without people wanting to think through his real “evidence. Look how fundi religious groups did not want Terri Schiavo, a brain-dead comatose patients, to have her feeding tube removed.

I see fear on the faces of my religious friends and relatives when they are on their deathbeds – religion does not mask or bring solace to the underlying fear of dying.

Atheists must come up with their own system of coping – of facing their own mortality head on. When I threw off my childhood religions, I knew I had dedicated myself towards the search for truth wherever it took me – but I needed help with moral philosophers in how to accept my new found understanding of my mortality. Rationally I knew everyone was going to die, whether they believed or not – but I needed help to accept it. I wanted the truth – how was I going to live solely with the truth?

Here are some of the philosophers I read that aided me

The ancient Greek philosopher Epicurus taught, that "Death is nothing to us, since when we are, death has not come, and when death has come, we are not." and in his LETTER TO MENOECEUS:

"Become accustomed to the belief that death is nothing to us. For all good and evil consists in sensation, but death is deprivation of sensation. And therefore a right understanding that death is nothing to us makes the mortality of life enjoyable, not because it adds to an infinite span of time, but because it takes away the craving for immortality. For there is nothing terrible in life for the man who has truly comprehended that there is nothing terrible in not living."

Mark Twain, was more irreverent on the subject: "I was dead for millions of years before I was born and it never
inconvenienced me a bit."

*Bertrand Russell wrote that those who view themselves as part of a river of life (a view similar to Buddhism), will not fear death, as the things they care for most will continue:

"An individual human existence should be like a river -- small at first, narrowly contained within its banks, and rushing passionately past boulders and over waterfalls. Gradually the river grows wider, the banks recede, the waters flow more quietly, and -- in the end – without any visible break, they become merged in the sea, and painlessly lose their individual being. The man or woman who, in old age, can see his or her life in this way, will not suffer from the fear of death, since the things they care for will continue."

*According to Clarence Darrow, the fact that, as we grow older, we
lose our memories of earlier events and old friends and acquaintances,
convinced him that some of his "consciousness" was already dead. Because of this, he posed the following question regarding the belief in the resurrection of the body:

"if I am to be resurrected, what particular 'I' shall be called from the grave, from the animals and plants and the bodies of other men who shall inherit this body I now call my own? My body has been made over and over, piece by piece, as the days went by, and will continue to be so made until the end. It has changed so slowly that each new cell is fitted into the living part, and will go on changing until the final crisis comes. Is it the child in the mother's womb or the tottering frame of the old man that shall be brought back? The mere thought of such a resurrection beggers reason, ignores facts, and enthrones blind faith, wild dreams, hopeless hopes, and cowardly fears as sovereign of the human mind."

According to Darrow, the fact people "hesitate to ask questions about
life and death" shows that, deep down, they fear that "only silence comes out of the eternal darkness of endless space." For "[I]f people really believed in a beautiful, happy glorious land waiting to receive them when they died; if they believed that their friends would be waiting to meet them; if they believed that all pain and suffering would be left behind: why should they live through weeks, months, and even years of pain and torture while a cancer eats its way to the vital parts of the body? Why should one fight off death? Because he does NOT believe in any real sense: he only hopes."

"Everyone knows that there is no real evidence of any such state of bliss; so we are told not to search for proof. We are to accept through faith alone. But every thinking person knows that faith can only come through belief. Belief implies a condition of mind that accepts a certain idea. This condition can be brought about by evidence. True, the evidence may be simply the unsupported statement of your grandmother; it may be wholy insufficient for reasoning men; but, good or bad, it must be enough for the believer or he could not believe. Upon what evidence, then, are we asked to believe in immortality? There is no evidence. One is told to rely on faith, and no doubt this serves the purpose so long as one can believe blindly whatever he is told."

*According to George Santayana, we should accept that nothing we do lasts forever: "That the end of life should be death may sound sad: yet what other end can anything have? The end of an evening party is to go to bed; but its use is to gather congenial people together, that they may pass the time pleasantly. An invitation to the dance is not rendered ironical because the dance cannot last forever."

*Robert G. Ingersoll rationalized how we can still FEEL immortal, even though we are not: "I am immortal in that I cannot recollect when I did not exist, and there will never be a time when I shall remember that I do not exist."

*According to the agnostic, Thomas Huxley in a famous letter to Charles Kingsley, it is the religious that mask their own fears of death, as opposed to honestly dealing with them. Huxley recalled the scene from his son's funeral:

"As I stood beside the coffin of my little son the other day, with my mind bent on anything but disputation, the officiating minister read, as a part of his duty, the words, 'If the dead rise not again, let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die.'I can not tell you how inexpressibly [these words] shocked me... I could have laughed with scorn. What! because I am face to face with irreparable loss, because I have given back to the source from whence it came the cause of a great happiness, still retaining through all my life the blessings which have sprung and will spring from that cause, I am to renounce my manhood, and, howling, grovel in bestiality? Why the very apes know better, and if you shoot their young, the poor brutes grieve their grief out and do not immediately seek distraction in a gorge."

* According to Kurt Baier, the Christian view of the universe has conditioned us to believe that our current life is unimportant, so as to raise our expectations that ONLY eternal life has any "real" meaning: "The Christian evaluation of early lives is misguided because it adopts a quite unjustifiably high standard. Christianity singles out the major shortcomings of our earthly existence: there is not enough happiness; there is too much suffering...the underprivileged and under endowed do not get adequate compensation; it lasts only a short time. It then quite accurately depicts the perfect or ideal life as that which does not have any of these shortcomings. Its next step is to promise the believer that he will be able to enjoy this perfect life later on. And then it adopts as its standard of judgment the perfect life, dismissing as inadequate anything that falls short of it. Having dismissed earthly life as miserable, it further damns it by characterizing most of the pleasures of which earthly existence allows as bestial, gross, vile, and sinful, or alternatively as not really pleasurable."

"This procedure is ... illegitimate... Even if it were true that there is available to us an afterlife which is flawless and perfect, it would still not be legitimate to judge earthly lives by this standard. We do not fail every candidate who is not an Einstein. And if we do not believe in an afterlife, we must of course use ordinary earthly standards. I have so far only spoken of ... what a person can get out of life. There are other kinds of appraisal... We judge a life more significant if the person had contributed to the happiness of others, whether directly by what he did for others, or by the plans, discoveries, inventions, and work he performed. Many lives that hold little in the way of pleasure or happiness for their owners are highly significant and valuable, deserving admiration and respect on account of the contributions made."

"It is now quite clear that death is simply irrelevant. If life can
be worthwhile at all, then it can be so even though it be short.
And if it is not worthwhile at all, then an eternity is simply a
nightmare. It may be sad that we have to leave this beautiful world,
but it is so only if and because it is beautiful. And it is no less
beautiful for coming to an end. I rather suspect that an eternity
of it might make us less appreciative, and in the end it would be
tedious." (Kurt Baier, "The Meaning of Life",

* According to the popular science writer, Isaac Asimov:

"...There's a certain comfort, I suppose, in thinking that you will be with all of your loved ones after death, that death is not the end, that you'll live in some kind of never-never land with great happiness. Maybe some people even get a great deal of comfort out of knowing that all the people they don't like are going to go straight to hell. These are all comforts. Personally, they don't comfort me. I'm not interested in having anyone suffer eternally in hell, because I don't believe that any crime is so nearly infinite in magnitude as to deserve infinite punishment. I fell that I couldn't bring myself to condemn anyone to eternal punishment...

"I feel if I can't do it, then God, who presumably is a much more noble being than I am, could certainly not do it. Furthermore, I can't help but believe that eternal happiness would eventually be boring. I cannot grasp the notion of eternal anything. My own way of thinking is that after death there is nothingness. Nothingness is the only thing that I think is worth accepting."

And,

"How many millions have been cheated, fooled, bullied into a miserable existence, condemned to poverty, slavery and injustice because they were forced to believe...in Never-Never Land. People gave up the joys oflife, the pleasure and beauty of sex and family life, soldiers eagerly rushed to their deaths for rewards that never came."

I have found great happiness since dedicating myself for the truth. I can't imagine choosing any other path now.

Rev. Anderson - Of course you had serious doubts during seminary. You were learning for the first time about the house of cards that Christianity is built on. You’re an intelligent, thoughtful man, so of course you saw the “outlines of the man-made edifice of doctrinal law, fixed tradition, religious dogmatism and grubby church politics which seemed about to surround and enslave me.” The question is how one sermon from Tillich could convince you that you could avoid becoming enslaved.

Do you lead parishioners in saying the creed – not dissuading them from the notion the miracles they’re saying they believe really happened?

Do you serve parishioners the body and blood of Christ, with you knowing the Hellenistic blood-cult precedents of that tradition, while they do not?

Do you teach lessons from bible stories during your sermons without clarifying that you know the stories are myth?

Are you a master at circumlocution and evasiveness, answering sticky questions without lying but without being completely candid, either, so people will hear what you think they want to hear or what they can handle?

If so, then I’m afraid you’ve become just want you wanted to avoid – enslaved. Worse, you’ve deceived yourself to thinking that you’re not enslaved.

I know I’m being harsh. I wouldn’t speak to you this way in person. I wouldn’t have the nerve. Besides, it’s possible that what I’m saying doesn’t apply so neatly to you. I hope it doesn’t. But I know it applies to a lot of other well-meaning clergy. I don’t know what happens in seminary that allows clergy to rationalize being dishonest and deceptive with parishioners, but I know that is happens and I feel sure that unless it’s rectified soon, it will be the downfall of the church. Deservedly so.

"The failure of this attempt to achieve perfection and to find victory over death and disorganization does not subdue the expression of the need."

Are you even a Christian? Are you saying that Christ did not bring victory over death.

Perhaps Judaism is the religion for you....

Christianity is the end of Old Test. tribalism and fear...

Jesus told Peter that he was to be the foundation of his Church/message and that he would have the keys to the kingdom. He also sent the 12 across the land to preach the word.

In this age of strong competing messages of consumerism, nationalism, greed, sex et all, people need to be reminded of the message of Christ and the sanctity of life and have the support of fellow Christians ----THIS is what church is for.

Your problem Mr. Anderson is that you have strayed from His true universal Catholic Church. Perhaps it was pride, perhaps it was ego

Mr. (Father?) Anderson states well the doubt that must be felt by many religious believers at some point. The doubt seems to go well beyond the uncertainties that are a part of the unseen - something that must be accepted through faith, not reason.

The biggest issue to me is not one that is addressed very often: Why would God create a universe of unfathomable size just for human beings on a tiny planet? Why would He have created this universe 13.7 billion years ago and only have created humans in the last 200,000 years? Why was Jesus known for only one percent of that 200,000 years?

If Jesus is the true embodiment of God, it is certain that any other intelligent life in this huge expanse we occupy is unfamiliar with the one true physical presence offered by God. To focus all our religious energy - if one is a Christian - on a man/God who has only enlightened a relatively few creatures for only a relatively few years seems not to make sense.

Has God created a universe with no other intelligent life? If so, why? Are there other Jesus Christs on other planets? The Bible does not say that there is any other Son of God in existence.

These questions are only easy for those who believe without questioning. My final question would be this: Did God design this universe only for those who think without questioning what is placed before them?