Today I have a guest post from James Smith. Recently he has been quite active in the comments on another post. His responses frequently featured smart rhetorics and great arguments. The post will be split up over two days as it is quite long, but well worth a read. If you like this, check his blog out.

Reading history, it is apparent that organized religion exists to make it easy for a small group of people to control a larger group.  Organized religion has been responsible for more human suffering, both physical and mental, and death than plagues, natural disasters, and wars. (many of which were about religion)

Consider that most religionists will not allow dissent or debate on their core issues.  If someone does dare disagree, they are invariably shouted down and condemned as “Godless Heathen”, “infidels”, “pagans”, shunned, or even killed.  Is this the command of a loving, protective god or the whim of an immature, vengeful deity?  “For I am a jealous god.”  “Thou shalt have no other gods before me.”  But isn’t there only supposed to be one god?

When your position will not allow argument or debate, the problem is not with the debate but with the position.  If you cannot defend your beliefs with facts, you should examine your beliefs and not mindlessly spout what you have been told.  A basic truth in life is that “Beliefs, no matter how sincerely held, do not alter facts.”

Religion does not encourage free speech or thought.  People thinking for themselves and discussing their thinking would be the destruction of organized religion.  Obviously, this cannot be permitted so they have priests, shaman, and clerics to tell us what to think and believe.  To quote H. L. Menken, “I believe that no discovery of fact, however trivial, can be wholly useless to the race, and that no trumpeting of falsehood, however virtuous in intent, can be anything but vicious.”

Even so, people will ignore the most obvious of facts to cling to their illusions.  Think about all the people who still smoke in spite of the often-repeated facts that they are killing themselves and others.  What about drug users?  People still start on drugs even when they have seen horrible examples of famous, wealthy people destroying themselves and even dying from drug use.  Most people believe and do what they want no matter what facts and evidence against it may be.  This one human characteristic can account for the existence of organized religion more than any other.  There is also the human tendency to want to believe there is something that will enable them to overcome their condition without any real effort on their part.  “God will save us if we only pray hard enough.”

Think about this.  If you knew of someone that was aware of a great evil being performed and that person could stop it with no danger or real effort to himself, yet does nothing.  Would you consider him to be as bad as those performing the evil acts?  More than likely, you would.  Yet, that is exactly what all deities do: nothing in the face of great evil and suffering.  Still, we are supposed to consider them to be loving, protective gods.  In human behavior, we call this being “an accessory after the fact” and you can go to prison for it in many countries.

The Christian/Jewish/Islamic tradition is of an omnipotent father figure taking care of each of us.  There is no evidence of this at all.  They all say you must “have faith.”  Does that mean believing in something we know can’t be true?  Then they say they have the torah/bible/koran.  These all were written by men, usually decades or centuries after the time they portray and have been translated many times from many languages.  Are no errors ever made?  Most languages use idioms and allegories that change over time.  Totally understanding these in a language not one’s own and that may no longer be spoken is not possible.  To attempt it is to invite errors of major proportions.  A good example is the English phrase, “putting on the dog” meaning to ostentatiously overdo something.  It is not universally used, even in English.  As a phrase, it makes no sense at all.  A translator, believing it to be the word of God, might assume we are to wear live dogs as part of a religious ceremony.  Admittedly, that makes as much sense as wearing gold robes and miters to “Glorify God.”  Ask yourself, “Would an omnipotent deity need or even desire any glorification from us?”  If there were a god, it appears that rather than being an omniscient, protective being we are seeing a juvenile, vindictive, cruel despot.

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