Civilization, Enlightenment, and the Ever-Present Religious Lie

To not believe in the divine is to know that it falls to us to make the world a better place. We have barely emerged from centuries of barbarism. It is not a surprise that there are shocking inequities in this world. It is hard work to climb down out of the trees, walk upright, and build a viable, global civilization when you start with technology that is made of rocks and sticks and fur. This is the largest project ever undertaken, and progress is difficult.

Just picture going back 50 generations within your own family. I don't care how cultured you are or how well-educated your family - you could be a Kennedy or a Vanderbilt - but if you go back far enough you will eventually come across someone who thinks that sacrificing their first-born child just might be a good way to control the weather.

These ideas, or what we call religion, have been handed down from generation to generation with no real discernible difference until the dawn of the Renaissance and the Scientific Revolution. Enlightenment principles, movable type, and the translation/demystification  of the Bible from Latin into many different languages absolutely devastated the power and influence of religion in the west.

Enlightenment thinkers, hundreds of years ago now, easily spotted the absurdity of religious claims, and vehemently attacked organized religion and a theistic worldview. That an educated person today can hold that any religion is true, let alone that an all-knowing god intervenes in human affairs, is the very definition of delusional.

But religion (enforced ignorance of the masses) did not just roll over. It has continually reinvented itself in order to make itself more palatable to our modern, secular values. Why? Largely for the same reason any tyrant wishes to rule as an absolute dictator: wealth, power, and control.

You have been lied to, brainwashed, bamboozled, and - here's the kicker - this has been done to you by people who don't even realize that it has been done to them. We never get to see or hear what gets said behind closed doors at the Vatican or any other secret gathering of religious leaders. In the rare cases that we do, it is almost always a scandal of unconscionable proportions as in the case of the systemic rape of children by Catholic clergymen.

I don't doubt that many of your Rabbis, Imams, and Ministers are all convinced of their faith and believe they are doing God's work; but a lie based on ignorance is still a lie. If you go far enough up the hierarchical ladder in any faith, you will eventually come across the person or persons who know(s) that it's all bullshit, and will keep feeding it to you for as long as you are willing not to think for yourselves.

The exception to my point about religion reinventing itself in order to keep up with modernity is, of course, Islam. Islam remains the only major religion where the vast majority of its leaders and adherents still hold every word of their book to be literally true. How is anyone surprised at the violence and the barbarism and the rampant misogyny we see throughout Muslim societies? This is exactly what you would expect when you try (and often succeed) to impose 7th century values onto our modern civilization.