Beyond the Yoke of Religion
Thank you for your interest in and for your many comments about my piece, “Religious Fraud and Illegitimate Authority.” Let me respond.
Some of you raised legitimate concerns that exposing the fraud and illegitimate authority in religion could alienate religious progressives. What do we say to these people? You asked.
Tell them the objective truth. It can withstand scrutiny. Progressives can handle it. Let them decide for themselves. Isn’t that what progressives do?
Progressives, by definition, are out front on the right side of history.
As for religion, the “right side of history” is obvious. People, the younger generations in particular, are abandoning it in droves for very good reasons.
Religion is pervasive and pernicious in our politics. It is not a benign phenomenon by any means. It’s a power grab into every aspect of our lives.
For example, people who believe they will be “saved” are not concerned about issues like climate change and its extraordinary and life-threatening ramifications.
Another profound example is our current heavily right-leaning Supreme Court and their recent decision to overturn Roe v. Wade. Religion did that.
Is not religion that is fraudulent a form of slavery that once understood by the vulnerable, uneducated, and oppressed — classic and predictable missionary targets — will be justifiably rejected?
It’s our youth who are leading the charge on this today as so often they have done throughout history.
I’ve gone to some length in what follows. There are five parts to my response.
I did this to respond to your comments, bring clarity to the origins of ancient belief systems, the origins of the phenomenon of religion itself, and to explain to where one goes once free from these dinosaurs of belief systems, i.e., beyond the yoke of religion.
It is my firm belief that for humanity to survive and advance — to rise to a higher level — it must move beyond primitive instincts and behavior, and beyond antiquated, divisive, and dysfunctional supernatural religious beliefs.
As many of you know, humanity — on a collision course with reality — is in need of a paradigmatic shift. Hopefully one caused by some measure of enlightenment. Not by painful crises and suffering which has been and is our pattern.
Humanity Has Always Had Problems
Well-informed progressives are aware that humanity has always had problems. Today, their scale, complexity, and severity are unprecedented and growing as we add more than a million and half people to our population weekly.
Not understanding the dynamic interdependencies of Earth’s complex systems, we are dismantling the web of life that gave birth to us and enables us to live.
Further and ominous, we are not as a species adapted to recognize far-reaching threats beyond our immediate surroundings.
We advance technologically easily but not so socially, politically, or intellectually. Why is that?
We don’t use ancient tools to do our work.
We don’t drive around in vehicles that are thousands of years old. We don’t see chariots running down our streets.
Yet, many of us — an ever declining but still significantly problematical number — cling to antiquated, divisive, and dysfunctional supernatural religious beliefs that are thousands of years old; products of the infancy of our intelligence.
As a consequence, many people live in a world of fiction and fantasy. They do not understand our reality and the behavior required to sustain life, advance our civilization, and for us to succeed as a species.
As these people believe — it is their “faith” — that they will be “saved,” many of them are not driven to take care of themselves, each other, other living things, and our biosphere (the sum of all ecosystems).
How did we get to this point, why is it so dangerous, and why are our ancient religions an obstacle to human progress?
Politics and religion are ponderous and volatile subjects. Both result in opposition, conflict, and strife up to and including wars.
The very predictability of a fairly even progressive-conservative political split — upset and aggravated by gerrymandering — results in life’s unpredictability, instability, and uncertainties.
Our diverse and divisive religions have resulted in a similar problematical equation. There have been an estimated 100,000 religions that have claimed their version of the “truth.” Today, we have in excess of 4,000.
To unpack all of this and the current state of our world — and the human condition — requires some minimal context, perspective, and time frames. Please bear with me.
A Little Cosmology – Our Place in the Universe
Earth, a very tiny planet — only 7,926 miles wide, 24,000 miles in circumference, and three-millionths the size of the sun — formed 4.56 billion years ago, in a galaxy (Milky Way) 13.2 billion years old, in a universe 13.8 billion years old.
A mere speck on the blueprint of existence, Earth is one of eight planets in a solar system that is one of 200 to 400 billion solar systems in a galaxy that is one of trillions of galaxies in a universe which may be, as some astrophysicists believe, one universe of countless universes in a multiverse.
As an aside, to get to the nearest large galaxy, Andromeda, from our galaxy, we would have to travel 186,000 miles per second — the speed of light — for 2,500,000 years. Incidentally, at the speed of light, we could circumnavigate Earth more than seven times in one second.
If travelling at 186,000 miles a second for 2,500,000 years equates to an incomprehensible distance — as it should — in terms of the scale of the universe, while hard to believe, the distance is insignificant. It’s a tiny hop as the universe is incomprehensively vast.
Let’s move on.
A Little Evolutionary Biology – how long the planet, life, and we have been here, and what it took to get this far . . .
Life — primitive single-cell micro-organisms — on Earth began about 3.8 billion years ago. It took more than three billion years to go from single-cell micro-organisms to multi-cellular plants and animals, which showed up about 670 million years ago.
The Age of Vertebrates and Invertebrates began about 525 million years ago. After nearly several hundred million years of evolution, that Age yielded insects, and the beginning of fish and reptiles.
The Age of Reptiles began about 245 million years ago. This was the time the dinosaurs lived and ruled the world. It lasted for about 180 million years. Compare that to how long the family of humans known as the hominids have been here: about 6 million years. We, Homo Sapiens, have been here for about 300,000 years.
About 65 million years ago, a flaming asteroid the size of a city — seven to fifty miles in diameter — struck Earth. The explosion, estimated to be ten billion times the energy of the atom bomb dropped on Hiroshima, set the planet on fire, caused mile-high tsunamis, covered the planet with debris, blocked out sunlight for years, destroyed all plant material, and killed off all the dinosaurs, giant marine reptiles, and 75 to 80% of life on Earth.
It ended the Age of the Reptiles and marked the beginning of the Age of Mammals, although some mammals had already been on Earth for about 200 million years.
Mammals are hairy creatures that feed their young from mammary glands. A mammal can be as small as shrew — a quarter of an ounce — or as large as a whale, 140 tons. We are one of about 5,500 species of mammals.
Reptiles typically hatched from eggs in unattended nests and fought their way into the world. That resulted in the reptilian brain.
Mammals behavior is dramatically different. Mammals hold their young close to their bodies for extended periods of time, nurture, protect, and feed their young. That caring behavior resulted in the brain evolving from the reptilian-dinosaur-instinctual brain to the limbic system — emotions and feelings — of the brain, to the neocortex’s rational and thinking areas of the brain. And a new way of relating began.
As noted, hominids evolved about six million years ago. There were numerous hominid genuses — beginning with Sahelanthropus tchadensis — before our genus, homo evolved about 2.3 million years ago.
There were numerous homo species — beginning with homo habilis —before our species, homo sapiens, evolved about 300,000 years ago in southeast Africa. We remained there for about 200,000 years before we began our migration north reaching Asia about 50,000 years ago, Europe about 35,000 to 40,000 years ago, Australia about 40,000 years ago, and the Americas about 12,000 years ago.
For the six million years that the family of humans existed, it was mostly as Stone Age hunter- gatherers. For most of the 300,000 years we Homo Sapiens existed, we were Stone Age hunter-gatherers.
It was about 10,000 to 12,000 years ago, with the domestication of plants and animals in various locations, our Agrarian Age began. It wasn’t until very recently — a little over 200 years ago — when our Industrial Age began in England. By 1850, it spread to Belgium, Germany, France, the United States and eventually to other industrialized countries.
About the middle of last century, we began our transition from the Industrial Age to the Post-Industrial High Tech Digital Information and Communication Age in which we live today. An Age — growing exponentially — that allows us to transmit information almost anywhere instantly,
Population Growth and Behavior
2023 years ago, in the year one A.D., human population was at about 200 million. By 1000, it had climbed to about 275 million people. In a thousand years, we added a lot of people, about 75 million.
Compare that to population growth today. Every year in the last fifty years, we’ve added in excess of 75 million people. That’s more than a million and a half every week.
In 1800, we reached our first billion. The Industrial Age kicked in. By 1960, we were at three billion. It took us about 300,000 years to get to three billion people. In 39 years, we doubled that reaching 6 billion in 1999. Today, we have in excess of 8 billion and add in excess of 1.5 million humans every week.
From United Nations’ population projections, by 2030 population is expected to be at 8.5 billion; by 2050 at 9.7 billion; and level off in the 2080s at 10.4 billion.
If we take a survey of the social and political attitudes, behaviors, and beliefs of the 8+ billion people on this planet, we typically come up with a “bell curve” normal distribution. In the center of this curve lies the “normal range” of behavior where people get along with each other. There is common ground, agreement.
But there are “standard deviations” from this normal range, i.e., as we move down the curve, left and right, behavior becomes increasingly abnormal and deviant. This, as noted above, results in opposition, conflict, and strife up to and including wars and results in life’s unpredictability, instability, and uncertainty.
Also contributing to life’s unpredictability, instability, and uncertainty is the fickleness of nature. When one lives on one of these things we call planets, one has to deal with natural disasters. On this planet, we have earthquakes, hurricanes (also known as typhoons and cyclones), volcanoes, tornadoes, tsunamis, forest fires, floods, droughts and other severe weather conditions. All are normal and destructive but we are altering their frequency and intensity.
Also contributing to life’s unpredictability, instability, and uncertainty are the extraordinary number of illnesses we contract and from which we suffer; countless accidents and injuries that occur regularly; all manner of addictions and substance abuse; and all kinds of criminal activity going on every day, everywhere, in every way imaginable.
If all of the above is not way more than enough to deal with — and it is — on top of it all, because there are so many of us now and we do not understand our reality and its ecological behavioral demands, we have created an interrelated web of life-threatening environmental problems:
- We are depleting our resources: forests, fisheries, rangelands, croplands, plant and animal species.
- We are destroying our biological diversity on which evolution thrives. The Sixth Great Extinction is ongoing. It’s the first caused by other than a natural event like an asteroid striking the planet or climate change. Of the five great extinctions we have had, four were caused by climate change. The current great extinction is caused by something unique: us, i.e., humanity.
- With powerful electrical and diesel pumping techniques, we are draining our aquifers and lowering our water tables.
- We are systemically polluting our air, water, and soil and consequently our food chain. We now have microplastic contaminants — plastic! — in our food and water. That’s a result of dumping an estimated fourteen million tons of plastic garbage into our oceans annually.
- We are experiencing symptoms of global warming and climate change: e.g., heat waves, devastating droughts, destruction of croplands, dying forests, accelerated species extinction, destruction of coral reefs, melting glaciers, rising sea levels, more frequent and intense storms, coastal flooding, more rapid spread of diseases, acidification and poisoning of the oceans, famine and starvation, human migration, heat deaths, economic collapse, social conflict and potential wars, and more.
- All of the above symptoms are a consequence of global warming and climate change which many people deny even exists. Even more people deny that humanity is responsible for it with the greenhouse gases, like methane and carbon dioxide, we send into our atmosphere from the burning of the remains of dead plants and animals to produce gas-emitting fossil fuels coal, oil, and natural gas.
It is estimated that we are sending 2.6 million pounds — and it’s still on the rise — of carbon dioxide into our atmosphere every second.
The above isn’t an exhaustive list of environmental problems. What is more, problems at these scales are obviously going to interact with each other resulting in ominous, unpredictable, and unprecedented problems known as “multi hazards.” They are the synergistic compounding effects when normal weather events become disasters. We are seeing and experiencing increasing evidence of this.
Life is fragile and perilous. It’s up and down like a seesaw. We are sitting on that seesaw.
It’s not an accident in our theatres where we have been telling the stories of our lives for thousands of years, we have for symbols the masks of comedy and tragedy, joy and sorrow.
For answers, we have turned to two diametrically opposite disciplines: science and religion.
End of Response, Part 1 of 5
Part 2 of 5 tomorrow
Science and Religion
One can reasonably ask, “What is religion anyway?”