Monday, December 26, 2011

Holy books synonymous with fiction

Modern society requires and deserves a truly secular state, by which I do not mean state of atheism, as imposed by Arab countries, but state neutrality in all matters pertaining to religion.
A depressingly large number of intelligent and educated people, despite having outgrown religious faith, still vaguely presume without thinking about it that religious faith is somehow 'good' for other people, good for society, good for public order, good for instilling morals, good for the common people even if we chaps don't need it. What’s true of us is true of nature. If we are conscious, as our species seems to have become, then nature is conscious. Nature became conscious in us, perhaps in order to observe itself. It may be holding us out and turning us around like a crab does its victim. Whatever the reason, that thing out there, with the black holes and the nebulae and whatnot, is conscious.

One cannot look in the mirror and rationally deny this. It experiences love and desire, or thinks it does. The idea is enough to render the Judeo-Christian cosmos sort of quaint. . . Rafinesque perfected his variant of this honorable philosophy while botanizing in them in the literal backyards of his childhood, examining ruderal plants, and so psychology has appropriated it from him, with minor tweaks. It works perfectly as a religion. Others talk about God, and we feel we can sit together, that God is one of this thing’s masks, or that this thing is God. Faith schools (Madrassa’s) don’t so much teach about religion as indoctrinate in the particular region that runs the school. As Richard Dawkin’s stated “telling a child that he or she belongs to one particular faith "paves the way . . . for a lifetime of discrimination and prejudice". In the guise of moral science each religion tries to indoctrinate their own dogmas into the minds of innocent children.

They aren’t evil, really, and the impulse behind it is so close to camaraderie it almost smells right. We all need help, and we all want to help each other, which makes the nuances of the transaction murky.
We can’t say it’s honest since no work of religion is honest, since fiction is a synonym for holy books and scriptures, which is why they call it religion and not history. .
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