Write-ups

Spinoza wrote in 1667: "...I have made a ceaseless effort not to ridicule, not to bewail, not to scorn human actions, but to understand them". Spinoza was a key figure in the development of the naturalistic view of the world, that rules out the supernatural, so his advice is to be taken seriously. You might be right...yet don't need to be rude.

This courtesy has not been given to atheists by organized religions. When Catholicism was strong in Europe, those who dared to say such heresies as "the Earth revolves around the Sun", where burned or thrown in jail. Even today, in countries where organized religions are still strong, such as the United States or Iran, there are laws against atheism. In Texas, a Christian stronghold, a (rarely used) law says that people an official may be "excluded from holding office" if she/he does not "acknowledge the existence of a Supreme Being". In Iran, an Islamic Republic, irreligious people have technically no right to live.

Christopher Hitchens says: "... religious belief is ineradicable as long as we remain this stupid, poorly evolved mammalian species ... our prefrontal lobes are too small. And our adrenaline glands are too big. And our thumb finger opposition isn't all what it might be. And we're afraid of the dark, and we're afraid to die and we belief in the truths of holy books that are so stupid and so fabricated that a child can – and all children do, as you can tell by their questions – actually see through them."

Religion comes from a time in which we knew even less about how the natural world works than what we know today. It is based on not questioning the authority, in suspending critical thinking, in not confronting doubts, in quietly accepting dogma. It is, in synthesis, a force from the past that drags mankind. But this is not the main reason why religious authorities do not deserve our respect.

Religious education is damaging for children. In Catholic or Protestant schools, children are given a ton of rules that are impossible to comply, and then they are told to feel guilty, dirty, by not being able to abide to those impossible rules. And how can they be taught sciences, biology, language, maths, history, if at the same time they are taught not to question religious dogma? Both things are incompatible.

A child is underage for voting, is underage for drinking alcohol, is underage for registering in a political party, and is underage for deciding his/her religion, and is not given the opportunity to do so either. In an open society, as Daniel Dennet suggests, children should learn more about religion, not less. As part of their education, they should learn the creeds, customs, prohibitions and rituals of the major religions, the history of those religions and their geographic distribution. In this way, they would be able of taking a more informed decision about what to believe.

There are other ways in which organized religions do harm. For instance, there are patients that reject medical treatments on religious grounds, or that are convinced by pastors and other community leaders that only prayer can save them. A recent case is a typical example: "Their pastor had told them that praying and fasting are much better remedies against the AIDS virus than the hospital treatment. However, they didn’t work at all. After two months, the virus was still there and these people no longer believed the pastor.".

Catholicism collides frontally with medicine in countries of Africa or Latin America in which AIDS is killing scores of people. The use of condom lessens significantly the risk of acquiring AIDS, and experts in public health unanimously support policies that ease the access to condom. But the Catholic church asks Catholics not to use condoms: the sixth commandment has as a consequence that "every action which, whether in anticipation of the conjugal act, or in its accomplishment, or in the development of its natural consequences, proposes, whether as an end or as a means, to render procreation impossible, is intrinsically evil". Sex, for Catholic authorities, is only a mean to reproduction. There are over 33 million people with AIDS in the world, 2.1 million people died of AIDS in 2007, among them 330.000 children. And the Catholic church continues pointing their flock in the wrong direction.

When churches had power, we saw what they were capable of. Now that they still have some power, they still do harm. Organized religions have not earned the respect of the public. We can give it to them, but it is not because they have earned it; and we have the right to criticize religions, as well all of the other human creations.

Sources: Michael Shermer, particularly his article in SciAm in September 2007, Christopher Hitchens, Nathan Bond, Newsweek, De Staandard via DigitalJournal, US catholic bishops, Bandali.no.

"Agnus Dei" means "Lamb of God". Jesus is considered by Christians as the "lamb of God". ¿What does it mean?

One of the central concepts of many moral systems is what some authors describe as "moral accounting". This is a moral metaphor indicating that every time we do something bad, we accumulate debt, and that by doing good things, we can pay that debt back.

To be sure, the idea is not that every one of us carries a book for keeping record of his/her moral debt, but that in our conception of morality it is deeply rooted that bad deeds have to be paid (as debts are paid).

Certain forms of self-punishment can balance our accounts and increase our "moral credit". This is the reason why the sacrifice of animals (valuable possessions) was, and still is, a prevalent religious practice. Muslims during their pilgrimage to Mecca sacrifice a goat, or other animal, to commemorate when Abraham was asked by God to kill his only son -- but in this case God does not appear in the last minute to cancel his order. Jews sacrificed animals in ancient times, and the idea that Jesus is the "lamb of God" is precisely that God offers something much very valuable to be sacrificed.

George Lakoff in "Moral Politics" explains very well how a large number of Christians (those with a "strict father" moral view) understand this story:

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"Being made of flesh, human beings are morally weak. This inherent moral weakness is called Original Sin, as exemplified by the moral weakness of Adam and Eve, which resulted in God's taking everlasting life away from human beings. Because of their moral weakness, everybody starts off with a large moral debit-big enough to guarantee that ordinary people would go to hell.

But God loved human beings so much, he wanted to offer them a way out of this horrible fate which arose from their inherently sinful bodily nature. So he made his only son a human being who was free of sin, and hence had no moral debits. Then God allowed his son to be crucified, and in so doing had him suffer more than the total possible suffering of all mankind forever. Through all this suffering, Jesus built up a huge amount of moral credit, much more than enough to pay for the Original Sin of all mankind. Through his crucifixion, Jesus paid off mankind's Original Sin debit. This made it possible for human beings to go to heaven if they were righteous enough.

But there were those human beings who, over the course of their lives, had sinned so much and run up such a moral debit that they were destined for hell no matter what they did for the rest of their lives. But Jesus loved all people so much, including those sinners, that he suffered on the cross enough to pay off their moral debts too. This was an enormous act of love, but not unconditional love. There had to be a condition. It would have been wrong to let wrongdoers get into heaven without doing anything at all to get there. That would have undone the whole point of the moral accounting system, which is to get people to follow God's commandments.

So Jesus offered sinners a deal. If they would truly repent, accept him as their lord, join his church, and follow his teachings for the rest of their lives, he would pay off their moral debts with the moral credit from his crucifixion and wipe their slate clean. It would be as if they were born again, with no moral debits. That way he would save them from hell; he would be their savior. The contract was made available to all sinners at any time.

As their part of the deal, the former sinners would have to accept the authority of God and follow his commandments for the rest of their lives. This would be hard. It would require a character one did not have before being born again, a new moral essence-not being rotten to the core, but being rock solid.

To acquire this moral essence, you have to take Jesus into your heart. The heart is the metaphorical locus of moral essence. You have to take the essence of Jesus into you and make it your essence. That is not as easy as it may sound.

It requires building up moral strength through self-discipline and self-denial. It requires obeying moral authority, the moral authority of God, as revealed through the Bible and his church. It requires staying within moral boundaries and not deviating from the path of righteousness. And it requires remaining pure and upright. Jesus' offer was one of love-not unconditional love, but tough love.

Unfortunately, there is a large loophole in this contract. Allowing people to repent at any time and still go to heaven is an incentive to keep sinning as long as possible. Then, at the last minute, you can repent and go to heaven. That's not an incentive to be good; it makes sinning pay off up until you're about to die.

This loophole is closed by the last judgment, the idea that, at some time which human beings cannot predict, the world will come to an end and the moral books will be closed. At that instant, you will be judged, and if you are a sinner-if you have more debits than credits at that instant you will be forever damned to hell. Because the last judgment could happen at any time, the only way to guarantee that you will be able to take advantage of the deal Jesus has offered is to accept it immediately."

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¿Can this fable be the guide to a moral behavior? ¿Can we build a free and happy society based on a fairy tale like this? Absolutely not. This idea of Jesus sacrificed by God for God to pay a debt with God is stupid, cruel, and harmful.

It is wrong to teach children to behave based on this tale. Catholic priests harm kids by teaching a moral based on guilt. Protestant pastors harm by snaring the poor and the desperate with this absurd story.

Atheists and freethinkers are always asked ¿where do you get moral from? Francis Bacon gave an excellent answer 400 years ago:

Atheism leaves a man to sense, to philosophy, to natural piety, to laws, to reputation; all which may be guides to an outward moral virtue, though religion were not; but superstition dismounts all these, and erecteth an absolute monarchy in the minds of men.

Photos: UniversalProject, ChaTo, Henribergius, Patrick Denker.

I am writing to you, that, the last time they asked you about your religion, you said that you were Christian. I have something I want to say to you. I have an invitation for you. But I need to explain you first why this invitation.

Catholics, Protestants, Anglicans, Orthodoxes and other minor denominations, constitute together the Christian faith, that groups roughly 1/3 of the population of the world. This chart shows the major religious (or irreligious) groups in the world, and the fraction of the population belonging to each one. Notice that none of them has the absolute majority.



These groups are not homogeneous. Not all Christians believe the same things, for instance Mormons believe that in general sins should be confessed directly to God, while Catholics and Orthodoxes think that all sins should be confessed to a priest. Shiite Muslims think that the direct successor of Mohamed is his son-in-law and cousin Ali. Sunni Muslims, which are the majority, think that the direct successor of Muhammad is caliph Muawiya, who defeated Ali in the battle for the succession. Anyways, even if they differ in the details, these religions agree in fundamental things, which is the reason why they can be grouped as shown in the chart above.

Only one of these groups is right, or at least only one of these groups is right in the fundamental issues. Either Mohamed is the prophet sent by god, or he is not. Both things cannot be true simultaneously. Either Jesus was born of a virgin woman, or he was born from a woman who had sex before with someone, possibly with his husband. Either Buddha was enlightened, or he was not. Again, we are speaking about issues that are central to each religion, not accessory.

Hence, main religions are mutually incompatible. Even when they all sound quite emphatic, at most one of them got things right. Of course they all admit some limited exceptions, for instance the Catholic Church teaches that exceptionally someone outside the church can be saved, as a person can travel a street without knowing its name. But salvation outside the Church is reserved for very rare occasions. If Christians are right, and if judgment day is tomorrow, 2 billion people on Earth will be saved, and the vast majority of the other 4 billions will go to hell.

The main problem of this division between salvation and hell is that the religion of a person is almost completely determined by its place of birth. In America (the continent, not the country), people are mainly Catholic or Protestant depending on whether they where born on an English, Dutch, Portuguese, or Spanish ex-colony. In Russia and Eastern Europe, believers are mostly Orthodox, and in the Middle Eastern and in the north of Africa, religious people are mostly Muslim. If you are Christian, it is most probably that it is because you were born in a country with a Christian majority, and not because you have had a personal revelation about the truth of god.

Moderate Christians

Perhaps you consider yourself a moderate Christian. This has many different meanings, but it usually boils down to two things. First, you do not go every Sunday to mass, neither you observe "religiously" all the obligations of a Christian. Second, you do not believe in all the teachings of your church. Most catholics and many Christians are like that, and there is nothing wrong with it. With respect to the first, there are things much more interesting to do on a Sunday morning. With respect to the second, the teachings of most churches are too many and to diverse to believe in all of them.

A typical example in the Catholic teachings is the assumption of Mary, after her death by natural causes. The flesh and bones of the mother of Jesus, according to the Catholic Church, did not rot as the flesh and bones of his husband Joseph and the rest of the mortals. As Jesus (and only they two, not John, not Peter, none of the others), Mary ascended to heaven when she died. This is not in the bible. It was established by the tradition as years went by, and was declared an ineffable dogma in 1950 by Pious XII. It is part of the "mysteries of faith" (read: "things that not even we believe") more difficult to swallow.

I guess you do not blindly believe the full book of Catholic or Christian teachings. As the rest of believers, you choose in what to believe. There are passages in the Bible that are meant to be taken in a figurative (or metaphorical) sense, and others that should be taken literally. For instance, "Married women, submit to your own husbands as if to the Lord" (Ephesians 5:22) is meant to be read in a figurative sense (¿which?), while others as "thou shall not kill", or "honor thy father and thy mother", are meant to be taken literally. Other passages of the bible, such as "go and sell your possessions and give to the poor" (Matthew 19:21) have an interpretation that can be figurative or literal depending on how many possessions you have.

Besides, there may be things in which you believe that are not Christian.Rebirth is a very attractive idea that has adepts in all religions. Rebirth or Reincarnation traditionally is the belief that after death we can born again in an animal or another human being, depending on our actions. The western adaptation of rebirth, heavily influenced by the Christian teaching that non-human animals lack a soul, only admits rebirth as a human. Anyways it is an idea that brings consolation and has many adepts.

The problem of declaring yourself as Catholic, Christian, Muslim, etc. without really being so, or baptizing kids into a religion without letting them decide about it, is that it gives power to very dangerous people. I am speaking of people that use these statistics to speak in your name to presidents, senators, military men, lawyers, economists, etc. People that take that statement you do of "being Christian" and turns it into "obeying the church".

Dangerous people

When you say you are, for instance, Catholic, you give base, power and ammunition to people that are very different from you, that believe in thousands of things in which you do not believe, that possibly has never experienced the love of a man or a woman in freedom and without guilt. When you say you are Catholic, you are giving more power to people that are really crazy, that should be in an asylum, looking at the birds and remembering better times in the Nazi Youth.

History has repeated itself over and over. A few hundred years ago the Catholic Church had more power than now. When they had more power, they used it to burn those who were different. They authorized and practiced torture. They locked Galileo when he was almost 70 years old, and they kept him under house arrest until his death 9 years later for telling that the Earth revolved around the Sun. But that was 400 years ago, and it can be argued that church now is much more modern. In part, at least the Catholic church has changed. After a disastrous and long history of always aligning with the looser in scientific ideas, now the Vatican does not condemn Darwin's evolution. A big leap forward.

The Catholic Church during its whole history has condoned massive killings. It has never reconciled with its intellectual father which is Judaism (half of the Catholic bible, the Old Testament, is from the Jewish Bible), and they spoke very late against the Nazis, looking aside while Jews where killed. They also found a big enemy in communist Marxism, and applied the thesis that "the enemy of my enemy is my friend", aligning themselves with the enemies of Marxism despite their methods. The Catholic church has always sided with the powerful, and very few times with the poor.

Personal Christianity

An option for a person who is born in a Christian country, but that do not believe all what the churches say, is to have a form of personal Christianity, or declaring him/herself "sympathizer" of a religion. One can "sympathize" with the Democrats without being a member of the Democratic Party. In fact, in principle you can "sympathize" with several political parties at the same time, taking the best from each one of them and synthesizing your own idea of what is the best way of distributing power and governing a country, in this case.

However, this analogy is not valid. The situation is more similar to basketball, in which you cannot "sympathize" (I guess) with the LA Lakers and the Sacramento Kings simultaneously, specially if you live in California, because there is a strong, deep, rivalry. At the same time, you can not "sympathize" with both Catholicism and Buddhism and live on planet Earth. Perhaps you could if you lived in Mars.

Another option is to invent a completely new religion for oneself, and in the case of Christianity, relate to Jesus in a direct way. Unfortunately this is not possible either. Jesus did not write anything. He did not draw a picture, he did not do an engraving. Possibly he spoke Aramaic, but the Bible was written in Greek, several years after the death of Jesus, and using only a few Aramaic expressions here and there. The pictures of Jesus vary with cultures, for Nazis he was probably Aryan, for Europeans, Caucasian, and in some parts of Africa, perhaps black ¿why not?

But if you have your own Christianity, ¿what do you do with central dogmas?. For instance, Jesus was the lamb of God. Jews sacrificed lambs to god. Jesus was the lamb that god sacrificed to himself. He did so, because otherwise mankind was lost. All humans sin, and adding the original sin, they have a huge moral debt, so large that a normal person will almost certainly go to hell. But the sacrifice of Jesus was so big that we can receive part of his moral credit (if we accept it) and enter heaven. This moral accounting is central to Christianity, it is the reason why Jesus came to the Earth, to improve the moral accounts of mankind. It is impossible to have a "home made" Christianity without including this and other main aspects of standard Christianity.

Invitation

Having said all this, the invitation is to consider the possibility of this being a natural world. A natural world is a world where there are no supernatural things. Above us we have the sky, a place of air and birds, not angels. Below the ground there are rocks, not demons. The living are alive, and the deceased, death. This is a naturalistic view of the universe, in which all there is are natural phenomena.

It is important now to say a couple of things that are not part of a naturalistic view. First, the fact that the universe is natural does not mean that everything that exists can be seen and touched. There are things that cannot be seen, such as friendship or love, and that certainly exist. Second, the fact that the universe is natural does not mean that all can be understood or explained. There are things that cannot be understood, there are things that cannot be proven.

All the gods: Zeus, Allah, Thor, Yahweh, etc. come from the same place: from the mind of the men and women who created them. Mankind have existed for a few hundred thousand years, but has organized religions only in the last few thousand years. Religion is also a natural phenomenon, the product of a phase in the evolution of men. Churches have a lot of importance in developing countries, but in developed countries (except in the US) they loose importance. This is also a natural phenomenon.

Imagine a world without religion. Without religion, good people do good things, and bad people do bad things; religion is needed for good people to do bad things. Once someone makes you believe something absurd, he can make you do something terrible. In the last 20 years suicide attacks against civilians have increased. Behind them there is religious Islamic fundamentalism, to which we can not respond with religious Christian fundamentalism.

A vision of the universe as something natural opens many doors and closes no one except superstition. People no longer believe in most of the gods they used to believe in ancient times. The invitation is to go one god further.

Sources: Encyclopedia Britannica, Pew research, Boston Globe, Vatican, Marcus Brigstocke, JSCyL, Wikipedia: Fanon, Cogulus, ChaTo.cl, The Root of all Evil.

Madalyn Murray O'Hair wrote in 1978 "Did you know all gods come from the same place?" a storybook for children illustrated by Joe Kirby. It begins with:

"Upon a time people were like kids. They could not read or write. They never went to school. They did not even know how to build houses such as the one you live in. They did not know what caused the rain, or the thunder, or the lighning. If they caught a cold or were ill, they did not know why, or how to help themselves."

But they had a great power. They could think, they could imagine. They used their mind to solve many of these problems, and when thought alone was not enough, they used their imagination. They imagined gods that were similar to them, omnipotent being moving the threads of thinks that they could not explain. Our ancestors also suffered, and were afraid of the unknown and afraid to die, so they invented complex fantasies that gave them the hope of living forever. The best of those fantasies have lasted, and they form the canon of established religions.

Christopher Hitchens says:

"... we’re afraid of the dark and we’re afraid to die, and we believe in the truth of holy books that are so stupid, and so fabricated, that a child can, and all children do (as you can tell by their questions) actually see through them."

But we no longer need these fantasies, least that a few make money with them offering false hopes to the weak. As children that leave their toys behind when they grow, we can abandon the false comfort of childish fantasies, and seek a path of happiness leading to the cultural evolution of our species.

Video with the reading of the book for children:

“We live in a world in which there are equal opportunities for everyone. Everybody starts at the bottom of the ladder and then goes up by his/her own merits or by the power of fate. Everybody can get to the top of the ladder, and poor people are poor because they do not make the effort. There are rich countries because their people work, and poor countries in which people only sing and dance. And if there is inequality, it is because fate has decided to favor more to some than to the others.”

We dissent. We know that a just world is yet to come. We have been moving towards it for thousands of years, step by step. First the slaves. Then workers. Then women.

But those who have many privileges want to keep them, and make us drag our feet.

We want to stop dragging our feet>>.

We are not saying to take the powerful people out of their homes and hang them in the street. And it is not that some of them do not deserve it. It is because we are no longer stupid.

We will not stop receiving their money. Because that wealth was the fruit of our work, and we cannot live without it.

But we will no longer believe in their lies. Nor in their ghost enemies. Nor in the moral hierarchy of cultures. Nor in good versus the demon. Nor in a thousands threats that claim for their protection.

We will no longer support their wars. Because these are their wars, not ours. Let them go. Let them put their children forward.

We will no longer believe in their lies. We know that in the ladder not all of us start equal. We see this every day. We are not stupid. And that is not the hand of god dividing the goods of the world. It is the abuse committed by those who can abuse and tip the field against everyone else.

The wealth of the world is the fruit of our work. We want our share. A big one. A just one.

We want to create more wealth and to stop misery, but we do not want to let ourselves be blackmailed for those who ask our blood and privileges in exchange of generating wealth with our work.

We want to receive better education. That will make us less dependent. So we will be able to negotiate our share better. So we will not have to give so much to those who organize us, who give orders to us.

That's why the privileged fear universities: because we are teaching people to organize themselves.

We will not let ourselves be used to exploit and make others suffer, not even in exchange for money, not even if that's the usual thing. We will not be one against the other. We have grown.

We are going to be happy. Illegitimate authority makes us suffer. Seeing privileges unfairly earned make us suffer. Misery makes us suffer. Absurd prohibitions make us suffer. Pollution makes us suffer. Fear and war make us suffer.

We have been selling out in exchange of order and security. We are learning to organize ourselves. We can do it. And we will not pay for protection. We will not repeat the stupidity of a war between continents, between cultures. We will not accept it.

They believe that without fear we will not work. This is not true. We work because we want to be more, because everyone wants to be more. Otherwise, there would not be so many students.

They believe that without prohibitions our pleasures will entrap us. Do not worry for us. We have grown.

We will not allow power to keep on concentrating. And we are not only speaking of official leaders. We know they are there just to attract the bullets in case something goes wrong. We are speaking about those who have the money.

We will not allow the power to keep on concentrating, and to do so, we are going to create knowledge and art for everyone. We will grow by creating abundance, not by creating scarcity for the benefit of a few.

Every one of the things we need, will carry more knowledge and art, and less land and money. The freer the knowledge and art, the less valuable money will be, and the more abundant things will be.

And we will grow together until we no longer need to accept the blackmail of a few.

And we will grow together until we can enjoy that wealth.

And we will do it, we are doing it, in a few generations. We will do it fast, because we can not keep on waiting. We will not drag our feet anymore. We will not let the past prevent us from going to the future.

In a few more years our species will reach a population peak and then it will return to a population level that will be more appropriate to the size and resources of our planet.

In the meantime, we will not let our wealth in the hands of a few. We will do it by sharing with others what we have learned. We will do it without pause, without delay, without dragging our feet.

We will move on together learning how to organize ourselves, demanding what is ours and making ourselves freer. As we are doing now. As we have always do.

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Photos: Kris, Caliope, MTSTrading, Fifila: Flickr // Creative Commons.