Religion vs. Man

“Religion in its fundamental essence and in its essential practices is totally opposed to human life. It is in fact the deepest of all possible oppositions to the requirements of human life.

by Dr. John Ridpath

June 21, 1633 will remain in any civilized and rational culture, to use Franklin Roosevelt’s saying: “A Date Which Will Live In Infamy.” I want to tell you why.

In the year 1632 Galileo Galilei published: “A dialog on the system of the world.”

He was presenting a view of the way the world works in Pythagorean and Copernican terms in the form of a dialog with a representative of the churches view of the way the world works and the way the solar system works.

Galileo had been warned in1616 by The Office of the Inquisition, not to put forward the heliocentric views as if they were true in any form. This dialog was meant to be presented as two hypothesis neither of which was being presented as true, in the dialog against each other.

The representative if the churches view in this dialog was “Simplicius” which is a view of the dialogs view of the churches view. Galileo had been encouraged in this part by his experience with the papacy and his longstanding friendship with Cardinal Bellarmine with Pope Urban VIII and it was in part of his becoming Pope that Urban had changed dramatically in his demeanor and in his ways. He made a transformation from a humble and devoted Cardinal to a very dominant personality with widespread plans to spreading the strength of the Papacy throughout the world, with the sword if necessary.

When this work came out Pope Urban VIII summoned The Inquisition to call Galileo to them with regards to this work. His office decreed that before the Inquisitors, quote: “said Galileo is to be interrogated on his intentions even with the threat of torture”, and it goes on: “if the Inquisitors are satisfied he is to be condemned to imprisonment at the pleasure of the holy congregation and ordered not to treat foreword in any manner whatsoever of the mobility of the earth and the stability of the sun.”

Galileo is summoned to Rome to meet with the Inquisition. He is ill. He is 70 years old. He pleads for time in order to prepare for the journey and this is denied. He is threatened with being forced to come to Rome in chains if necessary and he makes the journey which took him 23 days, in ill health and then waited two months before they heard him.

When he was summoned to his trial in April of 1633 in the Inquisitors Roman offices euphuistically know as The Casa de Santa, a building with cells and torture chambers in the basement, a building that allowed for the screams of those being tortured and the smell of burned flesh to rise up into the courtroom in order to make an impression on the people being charged. The chief inquisitor’s name who was conducting the case was Cardinal Bellarmine who reported to Pope Urban VIII.

Galileo is 70 years old, semi-blind; in poor health, was brought before the Inquisition and convicted of defying the Inquisition Order of 1616.

And on June 21, 1633 Galileo knelt before the Inquisitors which was led by Bellarmine and said the following; “I Galileo being in my 70^th year; being a prisoner and on my knees before your eminences and having before my eyes the holy gospel which I touch with my hand; abjure, curse and detest the error and the heresy of the movement of the earth.

He was made to swear that he would henceforth denounce anyone to the Inquisition that he knew who held these views. His books were banned. He was required to repeat the seven penitential psalms once a week for three years. He was threatened with torture and formal imprisonment if he wandered from what he was told to do. He was sent into house arrest in his little country farm and there were people paid to watch over him all of the time and censor his mail.

He spent the last ten years of his life away from his friends, family, employment, remaining silent as his colleges were enounced or denounced him.

In 1640; blind; he was denied permission to travel for medical help. He was told if he continued to ask for such favors he would be imprisoned. He was told this on the same day his daughter dies of melancholy over the fate of her father.

When Galileo died in January of 1642 Florence was denied permission to bury him in a notable place and for over 100 years his body lay unmarked, without epitaph in the basement of a church bell towe. The church had succeeded in Dante’s words “to render Galileo a lost soul imbedded forever in eternal life.”

And Cardinal Bellarmine instructed while alive that engraved over his tomb as a proud symbol of his life that he wished the following words to appear: “With Force I Have Subdued The Brains Of The Proud.”

The story of Galileo’ his trial; his conviction; his imprisonment is perhaps the most dramatic illustration of the history of the opposition of religion to human life. There are of course many other examples, many of them featuring mass hysteria or murder on an unbelievable scale but with Galileo we see not only the results of the opposition of religion to human life, the attack on the body but we see the cause: the attack on the mind.

This all illustrates what Ayn Rand said in 1934 in her philosophical notebook. At the age of 29 she wrote: “I believe the worst curse on mankind to consider ideals as something quite abstract and detached from one’s everyday life; the ability of living and thinking quite differently. In other words eliminating thinking from your actual life.”

This paper is designed to show you that religion is the worst curse on mankind by showing you what in essence it is. It will take you through the beginnings of religion both historically and epistemologically and through the essence of both Eastern and Western religions to show you what religion amounts to and why it opposes all the needs of human life.

The theme of this paper is the union of theory and practice, or, more narrowly that the false in theory destroys human life in practice.

Given the resurgence of religion around the world even in The United States, the most secular and rational culture in history, my lectures are unfortunately not a retrospective look at a world that we have transcended; they are in fact philosophical attacks on a world which we are considering for our future.

The place to begin is with a definition of religion. Now, I’ve worked on this for quite some time. I don’t feel my definition should be engraved in stone and in coming to this definition which is on the board. For those of you who can’t read it I’ve written: “A set of mystical views about the supernatural origin of; working of and purposes of reality and about what this implies for the living of life.”

The definition is not the concept, as we know. The concept refers to the whole thing. It refers to all aspects of the thing but a definition focuses on the fundamental essence and it is not possible to define something by referring to some fact of it which is not essential and that is what guided me in an attempt to define religion. For example it is not correct to focus on the fact that religion offers standards of the good against which people try to live. That’s true but that’s not getting to the fundamental characteristics of religion, the first being that it’s a set, that it’s an integrated view of metaphysics, epistemology, ethics and social theory.

Religion. The word itself comes from, I’m not sure but either from the word: “religio” meaning: “linking back” or also there’s a Latin word: “religare” which means: “being bound”.

The first component of religion is a systematic set of views and containing a metaphysical aspect that it’s views about the supernatural origins that it’s trying to explain transcend reality and if reality is the natural then the transcendent is in the supernatural. They are views that because of this cannot be rational. They are therefore mythical: “a set of mythical views about the supernatural origins of, workings of and purposes of this world and what that implies for the living of human life.”

We know at the outset that this opposes human life. That we live in an Aristotelian Universe where A is A; where everything is what it is; Life is Life. Life has definite characteristics. Life has definite needs. Life has Identity and for us, for human beings life involves essentially using the mind rationally in order to guide us in our actions; in out attempts to deal with the world in order to serve our own lives.

 That’s not a hypothesis. That’s not a competing view. That’s a fact. That’s omnipotent. And we know in addition to that, given that that is the case that what life is, is what it is. Aside from what we may think, aside from whether we’re correct or wrong about it that given that that is the case there are things that serve human life and they are the fundamental values of life.

Therefore it is no accidental thing. It is no mere hypothesis that reason, purpose, self-esteem; all of these things are fundamental values of human life. And it is no accident that the actions that will produce those values are: Rationality;  Independence;  Pride;  Integrity; Honesty; Justice; that is what the living of life is.

Recognizing these values and acting accordingly in the pursuit of life. That religion opposes. That the world is what it is; that A is A and that’s all there is, you will see that the world opposes that identity of human life and tries to turn us against that very thing. You will see that religion opposes all of those values and all these virtues is in essence that in fact religion is in opposition to human life.

I want to show you in detail and in what way and how profound that religion does do just that.

In looking to this subject matter in preparing these lectures I was interested in a wide number of things and out of my readings I eventually came to a view of how I was going to approach all of this because there is an enormous bibliography, a seemingly unlimited number of facts, a slightly less limited number of versions of religious cults and variations on general themes and one in a sense could get lost forever in all of that detail.

What I was interested in was to try and find out for myself what in essence is this all about? Why is it in history? What did it come from? What are the Eastern religions as a group? How are they different from the Western religions? All of that was what I was seeking.

It was quite a chore. I got totally inundated with information and it really got out of hand. I had huge files on every religion I was looking into. It was like concrete running wild, spilling over the desk and of course what I needed was an abstract of principles; something to organize it around and finally I realized what my real interest was in religion as an answer and so I started thinking about the question. When I started thinking about the question and started thinking about all the religions that it started to fall into place.

So this is my approach is to looking at religion in regards to questioning. The genesis of religious thought comes out of the fact that we live in a world and we have a need of coming to know that world. It comes out of the interactions of a world where things are what they are and the type of mind that with work can come to identify that with what it is faced.

So the inescapable constants are the world and what’s going on out there and the mind and what it is and what it’s techniques are in seeking to for example knowledge of certain facts, seek the cause of those facts; infer what the cause of those facts in telling us; generalizing, etc.

Religion comes out of this. Religion comes out of the conceptional mind groping with these questions. In the case of primitive people we have, if you like, they all have priorities, just as we do but they don’t know what they are; they don’t know how it makes it work and they are in possession of something they have no grasp of its workings. And they do their best to get around and it’s rather innocent as the first beginning questions are to get answers to puzzling things. It’s only later as we become quote more advanced that we actually turn against priorities and attack everything that’s involved in the human mind.

The early religions, the primitive religions, I spent a little time reading about their myth’s which are fascinating stories where they are coming up with these, .. some of them are rather quaint. There’s a nice side to some of these stories they come up with. The Gods are fighting and A slew B and C came down onto the earth and fell into the lake and all of these various explanations of which they have people crossing rivers and disappearing into the darkness and coming back a new man and teaching us truth.

All of these primitive stories that come from all of the primitive people there are common themes and it makes perfect sense actually what these people were doing.

They were faced with a tremendously puzzling situation. They open their eyes and they see out and they are looking for these interconnections. How do these things connect with each other; what are the deep causal explanations of what they see. What do they see? They see causality. They see sequence. They see natural rhythm. They see comings and goings. They see the animals coming in the spring and disappearing in the fall and they don’t know where they go. They don’t know why they come back and they don’t know what it is that makes them come back. They see further things that are puzzling to them. They see birth and death. They kill the plants in order to eat them and they are puzzled with the fact that life requires death. And without death there would be no life. So they are struck with these tremendous opposites that are all around us. And what is all this? And what explains it? How about inexplicable events? Lightning bolts for example. What is behind this world they live in?

And of course they suffer and they don’t know why they suffer and so they are basically led to ask four simple questions. They ask: what is this? Where did it come from? How do I know it? And What should I do?  And that’s what everybody has been asking ever since.

All religions are answers to these questions.

Religion in its genesis is the result of a conceptual mind innocently, and with no understanding at all about what the human mind is ant it’s powers and what ways it has to be used in order to succeed. It is the use of an innocent conceptual mind seeking those answers.

Religion is not what so many other people have interpreted it as a collective trans-generational unconscious, a Jungian view of some sort of mysterious generational passing of archetypical memories. It is not the opium of the masses; ideological views to keep the masses asleep while we exploit them which is what Marx’s interpretation would be of religion. It is not the progressive unveiling of God’s will or of God’s mind for example which Hegel would have. It is none of these things. It’s simpler than that. It’s quite simply, as Ayn Rand once put it, a primitive form of philosophy. Or the first attempts to explain the universe to give a coherent form of reference to man’s life and a code of human values.

Those are needs of human life: a coherent frame of reference and a code of values. And that’s what religion is.

The religious mind is seeking all of this is ultimately looking for, in the end, what is the causal explanation for what they are faced with.

What is the causal agent? That’s how they establish the answer to the question: what is it?

That’s how they get their coherent frame of reference.

And given what their answer for what the causal origination, given what they infer as that causal powers, desires or principles to be, everything else falls out of that and what they should do.

So religion finds its roots in these simple beginnings.

It doesn’t take very long before these questions lead to complications. The fascinating thing is the questions get answered. In the beginning there’s a logical sense and given a mind that doesn’t understand reason and doesn’t understand what limits one must place on the valid use of reason this kind of logical development of ideas and the answer comes and of course the answer causes another question. Then it gets a little more complicated and just a little more abstract and they struggle and they come up with an answer to that question and that answer raises another question and they’re on the march for the ultimate answer.

And in this the primitives of course their ultimate answers were primitive.

They had an anthropomorphic approach. The causal agents were like us. They were just like us but bigger and more powerful and lived higher. They were human beings writ large. They were Gods. They were spirits.

They included our ancestors who go up there and continue to govern in some ways.

The primitives had a very anthropomorphic view of what the answers to their questions and they saw these powers, these Gods, these deities as like us capable of being pleased or of being angry. That can explain a lot of things that are happening that we couldn’t understand before like lightning bolts foe example so one of the Gods could be kindly disposes or malevolently disposed which might have to do with whether they’re happy with what we’re doing or not.

The Gods could be creative or they could be destructive so out of this comes the initial view that there could be a connection between us and the gods so the Gods can be manipulated by us just as we are manipulated by them. If we can find out what they like and we can do it then they’ll be pleased and better things will follow.

Out of this comes some more sophisticated questions. These are questions primitive people needed answers to. Why do the Gods have us die? They don’t die. Why do we die? Why are we so distant from them? Why do we have to work so hard to have them come down and sit beside our fire to commune with us? Have we been expelled by them? Have we done something bad? Have we sinned?

Is there something we have to do to make up for some great cataclysmic sin which has been created?

Isn’t all of this less than them? And, if so, to transcend the suffering and the deficiencies the answer is to rejoin them.

And the question becomes: how do we rejoin them? What do they want us to do to re-purify ourselves so that we will no longer be cast out, that we will be welcomed back into their arms?

Those questions become more advanced. Over the Gods maybe there’s a God and that’s the ultimate explanation. That God is like us only more so and more powerful and is more than the lesser Gods. The answer is a single omnipotent, all-powerful God that he is like us; that he has intention; that what he has done has purpose. That we are related to his purposes somewhat and the message is trying to get through. Why he doesn’t give it to us straight we’ll see but there is something to be learned about a personal God who has designs; who has goals; who wants things to happen a certain way; who does not want things to happen in other ways; who punishes in various ways when we disobey; when we fall outside his design.

This view of the purposeful, powerful God who has these powers and to whom we are to be devoted is the basis of all of the Western religions.

All of the Western religions which I have in mind: Judaism; Christianity and Islam and it you’ve had your fill of Judaism, Christianity by and large but I’ll tell you a little about Islam. You can tie that in. All of the Western religions are like this.

In this respect they are in a very loose use of the word advanced. They are less advanced that the Eastern religions because the Eastern religions are all characterized by going another step, if you can imagine there is another step. By going one more step and asking: what is beyond God?

What is beyond this personal anthropomorphic power that we see people worshiping and the Eastern religions in their beginnings did this too. The characteristic of the Eastern religions is they went beyond all this. They sought to find the ultimate force beyond everything we claim to exist including God to find the source of existence in non-existence. And they have a lot to say about that. One of the things being: “There is nothing to say about that” and I will tell you that in summary all they have to say about that which there is nothing to say about.

We see then the search for Ultimate Answers.

The logical progression to greater and greater abstractions that in every question there is an answer there is raised another question so we are led to the search for ultimate answers.

One of the fundamental stories in the opposition of religion to human life is that in that search we are led to transcend the limits of the rational mind. We are led to undermine the rational mind and to oppose the most fundamental requirement to succeeding in the living of human life.

The question gets much more abstract with regards to the origins of reality for example. Where did it come from? Who or what is the originating power?

If there is an ultimate power, if there is nothing but it, it can’t be compared to anything and it is therefore by definition perfect. And if there is an ultimate originating power out of which this came this has to be imperfect and we get the basic Fall, cosmically of reality and matter itself. The perfection of the origin and the implications of that, that in the origin there must be pure. There is no change. Why would a perfect thing be changing?

There is no time. There is no birth. There is no death. There is just quiet changelessness. How then was this world brought into existence? What kind of act? What kind of process led to it?

If there is a personal God then it should be an act of will of that God. It could be a plan on the part of that God.

If we don’t have an active God; if we have just a force then it has to be something that was implicit in the beginning and birthed out in the creation of the world.

Why was reality brought into existence in the first place? If we have the first purposeful God in the Western view then reality was brought into existence for an understandable purpose. But if is not just the product of the cosmic process then it’s more purposeless. There are less implications about what is history is all about, what our lives are all about; what we should do.

These questions raised tremendously interesting further questions. What connections remain between the ultimate originator and the world? No connections? Then not so much follows.

But, perhaps some connections. The originator is still here in some way. Still desiring. Still present then there are many theories about what does the originating power mean in this world and the ultimate answer tthat Eastern religions come up with is that the originator is and is not here.. which is not a problem for the Eastern mind but this world looks for change. We want to explain the change. We want to understand the direction this place is taking change in and the answer come in the understanding of the ultimate creating force or power.

That once we set up the ultimate creating force or power then we have explanations for the natural order of things and when we discover the natural order it tells us of the originators plans and purposes. And if we come up with inexplicable interruptions in the natural order then that tells us even more about his power. It wipes out causality in order to send us messages. So all of this follows. We have the whole basis for the non-fundamentality of this order of the necessary insufficiency or imperfections or impurity of reality itself.

So we have the whole basis that his reality is in some way other than the originating power, this reality is an illusion. This reality in that is derivative that particularity, finiteness, concreteness, everything we know to be true, existence, all of that is ultimately an illusion which mis-leads us into thinking into what reality is all about and because this is so different than the originating power we are led away from the understanding of the originating power and the desire to return to that power.

This is all in Eastern terms. Maya. It’s all fallen. It’s all an illusion. That is the basis in the questions for examining the various religions of the world. Out of this come questions like: How do we know all of this? And if we have a personal God who has intentions and has powers and is trying to teach us lessons in various ways then how we know all of this would be related to his ways and he has various ways of sending the words he has unions that he tries to send us various things. There is history. Study history and you will see God’s plans in history. There are prophets that he speaks to. Special people and then they come and tell us. He uses them. There are revelations. There are tablets where his words are burned in stone and there are golden tablets in the case of the foundation of Mormonism and that’s how God the originator communicates to us. That’s how we know.

Or, we can go further and say all of this is illusion and if the human mind is really geared up to dealing with this and this is all it can take and ultimately the human mind is not the weapon through which we are going to know. The human mind is the enemy of the “Real Truth.”

From this comes the purposes of our lives and what we should do.

What we should do is whatever the big powers think we are and what they have in mind.

What we should do in the case of the Western religions is find out what this monotheistic, omnipresent God wants and obey.

In the case of the Eastern religions what we should do is given that we understand that there is no God that is purposely running everything but that ultimately we go beyond God to some kind of transcendent spirit then what we should do if we want to end the main problem of life in the Eastern view is suffering and what we should do is return to the womb to get back to the originating power and that’s basically what their view is: to get back to “the garden of timeless unity.” To get back to the garden, whether that’s the Garden of Eden or the Eastern people think Nirvana is. The garden of timeless unity where there is no death; where there is no change and unity means there is no conflict. There is no impurity. There is no struggle. It’s all bliss.

So let us turn to the first group of religions, the Eastern religions.

Let me tell you more briefly than I would have thought could be done or even more briefly that should try to be done what the Eastern religions are all about. That’s a big challenge for 15 or 20 minutes but I’m going to try. The essence of the Eastern view. Now I got this by looking at their answers to these questions so it’s in the frame of these four questions. What is it? Where did it come from? How do we know this and what should we do? That I embarked on my readings about each of these religions.

There are five Eastern religions that I encountered of which the main ones were Hinduism, Buddhism and Taoism. In addition to those there is Jainism and Confucianism of which I won’t have much to say about. I looked at all of these religions and out of the sea of concrete I started to see a theme.

Let us start with the two great Indian religions, Hinduism and Buddhism then comment on the Chinese religion which initially developed in isolation of these Indian religions then they all started mingling. Initially the Indian religions started developing doctrine around 700 or 800 BC where in the case of the Chinese religions they started developing around 500BC.

The origins of Hinduism and Buddhism which is a sort of outcropping of Hindus, are in the arrival in the Northwestern part of the Indian continent near the Indus river and the Indus civilization of the Indus valley of the Aryans meaning noble men and the Aryans who came in roughly from the Black Sea area. They also came down to the Mediterranean and had a tremendous impact on the Mediterranean civilization. They were war-like tribes and they enhanced and inundated the Northwestern Indian continent and it is out of their tribal hymns to their various deities. These are primitive people now that Hinduism initially finds its roots.

These hymns are known as Vedas and they were ultimately collected. There were 1,028 of them and these are hymns to their sky Gods and hymns to their ancestors and they are also instructions on the proper ways to treat the Gods and their ancestors and their preoccupation with sacrifice and particularly the use of holy fire. As an aside, because sacrifice is so common to religion it always puzzled me. This must be an example of Power Lust but it’s much more, much deeper than that. You wonder about the Aztecs who I discovered an Aztec sacrificial temple with 136 thousand skulls inside it which I guess is a high water mark for them. I read of one ceremony where they sacrificed 75 thousand human beings to death at one particular temple.

And you say: What are they doing? What is that? And the answer ultimately is that if you take the Eastern view of what this reality is: a fall away from the ultimate purity of the originating source and in a sense that there is an act that by some power of cosmic sacrifice, given up the primordial perfectness in order for all of this to come into existence therefore if we wish to please the gods or mimic the Gods we should sacrifice. That’s what they like. It’s the biggest thing they did therefore they sacrificed and they sacrificed their valuable things.

In the case of the Aryans they carried sacrificial fires. They were very concerned with this, about the proper use of sacrifice. They have sacrificial manuals and there were developed a certain group that became the devotee, the practitioners of the proper methods of sacrifice who became the priests. They were known as Brahmin and in the process of this developing their initial deities to include the ancestors, the fathers who became deified fathers who became celestial Gods who became God itself so in Hinduism that became the background for their theories with regards to what is the origins and what is this world and what is this life all about.

So far we covered five basic points.

The first was that in an Aristotelian universe where everything has a nature, the mind has a nature.

The mind therefore has certain requirements and that it functions in certain ways.

The second point was given this and specifically the need for the individual mind for a broader frame of reference and a code of values questions arise. Questions about what is it? Where did it come from? How do we know it and what should we do?

The third point was that when the questions led in apparently logical fashion to an answer the mind continued in its search and out of an answer arose another question, a more abstract question;  -more generalized,  a more broader frame of reference. And step by step the human mind was seeking the ultimate answer.

The fourth point was that without an understanding of reason, the human mind and how it works, in essence without Objectivism and more specifically without an understanding of Axioms, the conceptional hierarchy, stolen concepts etc. there was nothing to stop the mind in the logically deductive search for ultimate answers.

And the last point was that the mind because of this eventually left this planet and left this life and rose past the Gods and eventually even transcended God himself or herself and came to see in Eastern religion that even God was Maya, mega Maya if you like and the mind ended in the ultimate originating mystery and bliss.

Today we are going to do three things. First of all we are going to step back one step to God as the ultimate originating source and look at the three Western religions. Judaism, Christianity and Islam in that context. If you followed what I was saying yesterday about the supposed nature of the ultimately unfathomable you would see in the eastern view that this ultimate originating power, energy or source had no kind of personal characteristics, no kind of personal interests, no kinds of intentions that could be specified more narrowly within our lives and consequently it would be an impersonal force kind of oozing and doing its things…. Whatever.

The force would never bother to turn out the lights in the lecture hall. Today, however the gods we will be talking about, a different God would turn out the lights so be prepared for the possibilities of the ultimate repudiation of my two lectures.

In addition I want to take a look at religion in opposition to human life in a very dramatic form, the Catholic Inquisition and its opposition to the advance of scientific knowledge.

Finally I want to use the material in this paper to see more deeply than you have seen before just how it is that religion is the enemy of human life.

Let us begin with the Western religions. This has been covered in more detail by George Walsh so I will quickly get over the Judaist and Christian versions of this and tell you a little more about Islam so you will see the three Western religions are one tradition which they are. They are on unfolding tradition. They are the story of one God.

They are the story of one book of God that there is to read. All Western religions are seen as: “Readers of the Book.” It is the same God and he seems to appear, to continually call upon because of human failure and human sins to correct us, to punish us, to give us new guidance, to continually re-select who is people really are. This is the story of Western religion.

God, continuously burdened with the problem of what it is we’re all doing so we see with Adam’s sin that all mankind are rejected by God because of the sin of Adam wishing to know and wishing to be like God. So we are all out but God eventually comes to select his people for the purpose of demonstrating the plan of God of the wishes of God to others or to prepare to rejoin him, a lonely God.

The Jews are selected as his people. He sends Moses to guide them in the ways in which they are to behave and suffer in order to fulfill His mission and their overall role in His mission.

Book One of God’s book could be viewed as the Old Testament. It is captured in the Torah.

However in the views of others later the Jews sinned. God chooses a new people. God sends another message to us to tell us who his new people are. He sends Jesus to tell us who His people are, what His people must do and we have Book Two, The New Testament.

What eventually happens is they also sin. They also fall by the wayside and it is claimed God sends another messenger, the last of the messengers, the last reading of The Book via Muhammad and there is The Koran Book Three and they don’t say this is the end of the book. Muhammad is the seal of the prophet, the last one. The final story has been told. What God wishes to be done is clear and the Muslims get on about working out details as to how to proceed.

This is not the end of the story. There are people like Martin Luther who claim they have found out the Christians are sinning and some of their behavior is in the wrong way and we get into out time and with the epistemological disintegration of our time we find the drop in what leads to an increase in the variety of religious leaders and since people have no capacity to judge Christianity let alone American culture and a variety of Eastern religions making their incursion over 240 versions of Protestantism alone currently in the United States.

That’s the big story.

In the Western religions the unique characteristics of Western religions as opposed by the Eastern religions all come out of this and they are Monotheism, there is only one God and the insistence that this is the originator and that’s it. That God is the case of the early Judaic tribes worshipped a God named El. Or, sometimes Elohim and the people of El are Is Rak El. And that is their God and God then in a process I haven’t understood changes over to Yehweh that we all hear about and Yehweh who was initially a God of a volcanic mountain, a symbol of coming to the mountain Yehweh eventually got promoted to the one omniscient God and later the Christians worshipping the same power called God and the Muslims coming from early tribal usage Allah, the worship of one thing.

All of the Western religions have an anthropomorphic view of God even Islam that did the best job of denying that.

This is a purposeful, judgmental God. God has a plan. That plan relates to us. That God has a relationship to every individual, to every tribe. We are players in his drama. We have a role to play. If we don’t play it effectively, we displease God, we interrupt His drama. We get punished accordingly.

All of this is the Western outlook on the originating power and it’s implications for this world.

God’s will they believe is revealed in many ways. It is revealed in history; in personal revelation. It’s revealed through devotion; through faith. It is revealed by selected prophets who appear among us to deliver messages fron the book. It is in fact revealed in writings itself; tablets for example.

This God is the ultimate source of the creation of everything. The Western religions repudiate the notion that the soul is one aspect of the emanation of the originating stock. There were Inquisitional persecutions starting in Spain in vast ways killing people who held that view.

They reject that. The soul like everything else was created ex nihilo by God who planted it at the moment of conception then exists eternally after that. There is no reincarnation. There is no cycle. The Western religions all take the view therefore that this is it. You have this chance in this life; one chance to qualify to join the embrace of God.

The Western religions are characteristically different than the Eastern religions in the punishment that is in store for you if you fail to do this. Hellfire and brimstone forever. That is unique to the Western religions.

This world is created ex-nihilo out of nothing and there is a certain sense in the Western religions that is different than the Eastern religions that because of this there is no metaphysical pathway left between us and God. No metaphysical connection. The meaning of this is that you can’t get there through your own action. Ultimately in addition to what you do you have to be chosen by God, by His grace; by his approval; by something like this so all of the Western religions are devotional in this way and encourage a kind of obedience and devotional practices unlike the Eastern religions.

Finally, there is in Western religions that the way back to the originator is not through what you can do but more through faith and obedience.

Well.. All of these religions are characteristic of that. There is one further characteristic that is important and that is with the exception of the early tribal history on Judaism that as even Judaism developed into a set of ideas that even Christianity and Islam, all of these religions developed within the context of deeply inescapable phenomenon which was ancient Greece.

Ancient Greece was a spectacular accomplishment in its essence and nothing after ancient Greece could escape in every way the implications of that partial discovery if you like of the powers of the human mind and the demonstrations and the advances of science that took place because of that.

All of the Western religions show the impact of that in their attempt, unlike the Eastern religions to offer us a quasi-rational logical, ordered system of thought. It is not in a sense boiling down to do your own thing and float with the force. It is a much more structured thing.

George Walsh to make a quick comment about Judaism and Christianity, from George Walsh’s lectures, you see Judaism in more primitive in its beginnings and more tied to this world.

There is a dualistic contradiction through Judaism but the emphasis on this world or the other world of the body opposed to the mind however that dualism plays itself out. In the case of Judaism there is more secular content and so consequently they are tied up with their tribal perception; they are tied up with the problems of surviving; they’re being captured and chased and escaping and they have to hang together so there is this whole focus on the group in the substance and furtherance of the group that needs to be done and a lot of their focus was on living so consequently Judaism has this aspect to it and it is therefore the best of the Western religions.

They are more focused on what God is doing. Where is God doing it? He’s doing it here.

What God made? It is a good God must be good. Shared by Islam. This creation must be good so the Jews have more positive attitudes towards life; sex; work; all of the things of this earth.

Heaven is not a matter of us transcending this and going there. Heaven is coming here.

So all of this with no big philosophical underpinning, a sort of this and a sort of metaphysical propping up but no big structure. That is essence is what Judaism is.

Their mission is to teach others through their suffering to learn about the wishes of God.

In Christianity we saw a different thing; A more logically advanced and especially after the fourth century, after Constantine and Paul and Augustine, that we have a real theology in place here. That we have a system of thought if you read Augustine, it’s all laid out with arguments with major philosophical underpinnings to agree with regards to this dualistic contrast in more other worldly and things move from this secular earth out to the heavens. And therefore what is here including life is of a lower regard.

Christianity contrasts with Judaism in that way. Christianity and Augustine in particular and Augustine is the one who introduced Adam and sin into the whole perspective and in a sense castigated this earth and everyone in it is all a manifestation of this original sin.

The Christians after the first three centauries during which time they were heavily persecuted and their main interest was in being left alone and raising money for the poor and preparing for the end of the world. They were very pro-tolerant during that time but after the arrival of Augustine and the theology they turned into being intolerant and their mission was not to demonstrate by their suffering a lesson for others to learn but to argue with their book and fight with their sword to bring people to God and we get a different story in Christian history.

Islam is a later development in the Western religious tradition and I thought I’d quickly try to cover Islam and highlight it for you so you would have an understanding of their contribution to the whole tradition.

Islam… The word means a number of different things but the basic connotation is submission. It means surrender; acceptance; submission; commitment; surrendering one’s life to God; to Allah. The word Muslim means: “one who does this” or sometimes: “one who reads the book”, particularly chapter three. Islam is in some ways unique. It has in its literature an emphasis on the majesty and wrath in simplistic form of Allah. It has at present a single source of truth, the Koran which unifies it’s followers in a simplistic way in a mission of armed conquest in the name of Allah against the rest of the world. It is in this sense cohesive; primitive; simplistic and armed with a theology of violence.

The background of Islam is claimed genealogically by Muslims that the human race originally descended from Allah that during his time he lived in a very turbulent world. There were Judaic and Christian influences in the world and he was very much influenced by the Jewish perspective and accepted a lot of that until he got it all sorted out courtesy of messages from God; that they did take the view that the human race was descended from Adam in one  line down to Noah to one son, his name was Shem and the descendents of Shem are semantic people down to Abraham and his wife Sarah who was unable to give birth to a son and therefore Abraham took a servant girl named Hagar and she bore him a son whose name was Ishmael from whom the Muslims all believe they are all descended, the tribe. Sarah seeing this gave birth to a son Isaac from whom it is believed all of the Judaic tribe descended.

So the Islamic faith sees itself genealogically descended from this story.

Prior to Muhammad’s birth which was sometime in the decade between 570 and 580 AD, Arabia was in vast decay; inhabited by many tribes that were fighting with each other; had many Gods; celestial Gods; animalistic Gods and a vague superior deity they thought was the creator of the world who they referred to as Allah.

There was conflict. There was economic decay; there was tribal warfare; there were roaming monotheistic hermits. There was a group known as the Hammits who were characterized by a eeply religious attitude towards life andcla9med to be descendents of Abraham through Ishmael and Muhammad was a member of that group. Muhammad had been a tender of cattle of sheep a caravan leader married an older woman at the age of 25; was very successful in this endeavor. At the age of 40 two of his sons died and in a fit of depression he followed his normal practice which was a very understandable thing in the Arab tradition which was to go into the desert to mourn.

Turns out that while he was in the desert alone in a cave a voice came to him and said: read:. Muhammad couldn’t read so this was a very puzzling instruction and he was resistant to this but eventually a voice said: “recite” and the voice announced itself as Gods angel Gabriel. Gabriel started talking through Muhammad. Muhammad would be possessed by Gabriel. He would go into some people wondered if they were epileptic fits. He would go into this kind of state where words would come out of his mouth and it was accepted that this was the book of God being read to mankind through Gabriel bringing it to Muhammad’s mouth.

Various forms of recordings of this took place. Memory. Writing is seen on pieces of animal hide or on leaves of trees and various things. These were all scattered around and throughout his life, for 23 years Muhammad was spoken to by Gabriel and delivered his message. As a quick aside, the Satanic verses that we hear d so much about, the real story is that at one time when Muhammad was wishing to be successful in a city by the name of Median where he had gone because he had to flee Mecca which is at the center of the Arab power and he was preparing to return and take over and he needed the support of the tribes in the area but the tribes in the area had been worshipping other deities including some Goddesses and the leaders of the tribes had been explaining to Muhammad that if he wanted their support he would have to qualify his monotheism and give some respect for these local deities.

So it turns out, lo and behold that Gabriel appeared not too long thereafter and Muhammad had a revelation in which he spoke out in praise for these Goddesses. Well… That was very helpful and eventually Muhammad returned to Mecca and he was successful and all that and lo and behold, later Gabriel returned again and he told Muhammad that that particular revelation in regards to those particular Gods and Goddesses had not come from Gabriel. It had come from a very clever source that had mimicked Gabriel and had delivered this message instead. What was it? It was Satan you see. It was the Satanic Verses and they cut them out of the Koran after Gabriel straightened them out so that’s the title: Satanic Verses and that’s where it comes from.

Well… Muhammad saw himself as the seal of the prophet. He was delivering the final messages that were written in the book in order to correct what Judaic and Christian error in order to deliver all that was yet unrevealed from Gods book and to speak to the Arabs in their own tongues.

Given that there has to be some previous prophets and he named the prominent ones and he calculated there probably had been 240,000 prophets before him and he was the last one.

So that was his message and he continued for 23 years to get those messages. They were all collected much after his death and eventually his sayings w4re all collected and put together into the Koran in order by length. No chronological structure; no epistemologically sensible structure like metaphysical stuff here and epistemological stuff there, just by length. And that is what Islam is based on.

In addition to the Koran there were many things that the Koran didn’t cover and therefore they looked for guidance for more practical guidance and they looked to Muhammad’s practices.

Then they went around and they talked to everybody about what did Muhammad do and what did he decide here and learned from all this information and this is known as the Sunnah and was put together into a book which is called The Haddith Book and that is the second authority in addition to the Koran in the Islamic world.

Sunnah, the practices of Muhammad is related to the whole question of what happens when Muhammad dies.

When Muhammad dies there is a family that takes over to take over the leadership of this successful and rapidly growing religion and believe you me, this is a success story in the years after Muhammad dies and it wasn’t very long when this was a major force and was on the move throughout the world and as we know it’s once again on the move and it’s a vast religion and it’s the fastest growing religion.

The family that took possession of the leadership was known as the Caliph. There were three of them who took over after Muhammad dies, arguing that succession to Muhammad would be voted on by the tribes. Muhammad by his practices had shown his interest in consulting people and consequently this is the right way to choose leadership. In addition to that they took a heavy predestination view of the Koran that everything is ultimately predestined by Allah’s will that Allah was all powerful and the fact that they were destined to be, that this is the revealing of God’s law. Well, these are The Sunni’s. This is the major component of the Muslim world. Sunni, meaning in the tradition of the prophet.

There was opposition to this; opposition by another group that expected that on Muhammad’s death that his son-in-law, one of his favorite people would be the next leader whose mane was Alli Nebi AbinTally or Ali for short and they argued that succession would be by genetic lineage and that there was free will under and they played down the predestination side of it.

Why did they play up free will? Because it was proper to exert free will and oppose bad rulers, false Caliphs and there was a big opposition and eventually they killed Ali.

Well, this doesn’t end the devotion to Ali and the party of Ali known as Shia formed up around that and the Shiites are devotees of this view and the conflicts between the Shia and the Sunni’s has gone on to this time. Now you know what the name Muhammad Ali means.

The Shia Muslims which are more related to what has been happening in the world today are more mystical in some regards. They believe that in addition to the Koran that there was additional knowledge imparted to Muhammad to secretly pass on to him to selected others and this secret knowledge is what Shia believe they are in possession of.

There’s a divine spark in Muhammad. Muhammad actually reported that he had gone to paradise and visited with Allah and they therefore believe there is a hidden tradition, a secret tradition that Ali and his descendents bear, this divine knowledge and the people who get this message through their connection to Muhammad are known as Imams which are the bearers of these secret and important knowledge and they are hidden, they are not visible. They believe that when you meet with God you didn’t even need a body so it was very easy for them to be invisible. They existed and there were 12 of them but there is some debate over how many of these Imam’s there were but the main view is that there were 12 of them and the last one withdrew and in known as the Hidden Imam and they believe he’s been alive for all these hundreds of years and he’s waiting to come back when the apocalyptic war the Koran predicts will start.

A great attack will take place upon Muhammad and his followers. This will be the beginning of the last holy war and all the fighters in that war will go directly to paradise which is the ultimate goal.

So the hidden Imam is waiting and this hidden Imam is going to be the leader of the last days and that individual is known as the Imam Madi. So the whole question is where is that Imam who knows what he’s about through mystical insights etc.

Ayatollah Khomeini who is from the town of Humain in one of the people who believed he was in touch with, now he really is in touch with this. Ayatollah means: Sign of God, a religious leader. Khomeini was very much involved in the mystic side of Islam and early in his 20’s he was interested in reading one philosophers works. Any guesses?……  Plato.

The Islamic concept of God is simple, powerful, directive and a whole lot of adjectives describe God: holy, peaceful, faithful, shelterer, deliverer, friend, consoler, it goes on and on; passionate, merciful, the only God who controls the destiny of man, all powerful, so powerful he’s free o contradict himself, a unifier personal will and there’s some effort to de-anthropomorphize Allah to some extent and consequently in Islam there isn’t so much in the way of symbols of Allah. He is a unity; he is not a trinity for example. He is benevolent. He would never have allowed his son to die on the cross and they deny Jesus ever died on the cross and it’s a very simplistic view however there is another side to Allah, another side to his benevolence and him being a shelter and a healer and all that he demands acknowledgement of his sovereignty; he demands submission to his ordinance and he demands it of everybody. And he punishes with terrible terrors those who are unfaithful. The blasphemers who worship other Gods, in particular the apostate, those who were in Islam and got out of it, such as Salman Rushdie.

This is a terrible, vengeful God on the other side of his benevolence. There is a last judgment coming. Those who serve Allah by proper behavior will at this time go to paradise. Those who war and die on behalf f Allah prior to that last judgment will already be in paradise because they go there immediately upon death which of course makes it pretty hard to slow them down when they’re running across the desert with their primitive rifles.

Infidels must be converted to the worship of Allah.

The world is the platform for the holy pilgrimage against the infidels and the bringing of the world to the worship and devotion of Allah. There are therefore in contrast to the other religions vs. Christianity for example, there is no really prominent church structure. It is simple monotheism. There is little sacramentalism.  It emphasis much more dependency on God and predestination and therefore causes a detachment and an unconcerned, primitive, tribal togetherness a kind of notion of fated destiny by those people who aren’t worrying too much about what is happening to them in this life.

There is a much more explicit political side to it compared to Judaism on Christianity. It is international in its views as to who the pious brotherhood should be. It has a very ideological view of the tribe as opposed to genealogical and it has as its international goal the creation of a society which will be pleasing to Allah. A people worthy of paradise and in there it is necessary for then to oppose the disbelievers, to oppose what they refer to as the monster coming from the West or The Great Satan. I saw a cartoon when Khomeini dies and the devil was in his office and the announcer standing at Satan’s door said: The Great Satan will see you now so he was finding out who the Great Satan really was.

So that is Islam and hopefully you can see its connections with the Western tradition.

Now the essence of religion per se, given what I have covered is clear. In both Eastern and Western religions form, it is what my earlier definition captured. It is Supernatural. It is putting forward an explanation of something that is beyond this reality, a God or a mysterious fecundity. It is mystical. It is advocating there is or there are other means of knowing the truth other than reason. Faith. Revelation. Prophetic utterances. Or, it is repudiating knowing itself as in the case of the Eastern religions.

It is opposed to this world and it is opposed to this world as the standard of the good. It is opposed to itself. It is opposed to the rational mind. It is opposed to life. It is opposed to the body.

For what? To transcend to bliss. For what? The absence of the trials and pains of life that people who follow religious ideas experience. It is seeking reassurance of belonging again for some embrace. For those who give up this place, the earth and themselves and therefore deserve to suffer and for doing this religion is the place where the go.

At the end of the last lecture I asked you to give some thought to which is the worst of these religions, the east or the West. How about a show of hands that believe the West is the worst.

And how many are the opposite view? That’s the right answer.

My earlier thoughts were the West is the worst. And very interesting to me to think about this and go through this and I was very much helped by one friend. We were talking about it. He studied the Inquisition. He studied the Crusades. He quoted the words of the Crusaders who said we rode through the streets of Jerusalem with blood flowing up to our stirrups slaughtering large groups of people for opposing us. Slaughtering scientist’s trying to discover the nature of fossils. The meaning of meteors, slaughtering people who were asking Augustine’s view of the world and tying that in with Satan and tying that in with the age of Satan and demons and witches who were possesses by demons and not understanding natural phenomena, the expression of the absolutism of an Aristotelian reality and therefore san seeing events in the world as either expressions on a good God’s wrath or of a bad God’s malice and looking around and seeing the reason people are suffering is because either God wants them to suffer or because a demon has possessed them and that led to the incredible, over two centauries hunting down witches, people who didn’t know they were possessed by this demon but certainly confessed to that after the kinds of tortures they submitted them to and in order to do what? I order to save souls…

The Christian message is that God wants the soul to return to him at death and therefore then their mission on earth was the saving of those souls, to bring those souls to God so they discovered those who were outside the faith altogether who were the infidels, the Crusades to Constantinople, to Jerusalem, the slaughter of the Albigensians in the region of Southern France where they attacked the whole region because they had been influenced by an early form of Protestantism in the form of a religion known as Catharism and when they marched in there hundreds of thousands of people and they asked: how do we know the heretics? And they said: “Kill then all, God will know his own.”

To study the Inquisition is a hard task. All of this is to get back to what I was talking about and I was pretty impressed with this. Here’s all this (bold?) all over the place and people are burning at the stake and great heroic minds, Giordano Bruno, the first one who was burned at the stake for holding the heliocentric view of the universe, never recanted until the last moment when he said: “Perhaps you who pronounce my sentence are in greater fear than I who receive it.”

He died in the year 1500 and I was impressed trying to discover which was worse that seemed like a very obvious thing and the comment I got was: “what’s the big deal with murder?”

Pardon?

He said what’s the big deal with murder? This is not the ultimate standard to employ in assessing which is worse? I started thinking about that and eventually came to the strong view which I’d like to present to you now on behalf of the West because we have only to because we can only say only superficially that the Eastern religions are less scary with regards to death because after all you get a chance to come back. There’s no hell fire and brimstone forever. There’s less institutionalized force. They are more tolerant of different views. There are many paths to the top of a mountain. They are more pacifistic but more fundamentally Eastern religion is every fundamental regard is the deepest attack possible upon all the requirements of human life.

It is an attack on existence; consciousness and identity at the deepest level that is impossible to transcend. It is outside of everything that is a requirement for human life and by virtue of that is even worse than killing you, it makes human life impossible from the outset.

EASTERN RELIGION IS THE DEEP SLEEP.

It is a devoted life long struggle for the murder and transcendence of your own mind. It is an attempt to be dead while still alive like in the movie COMA.; to be dead which still alive is more horrible than to be dead while you are fighting to be alive and a decapitated corpse is not as horrifying a spectacle to me anymore than mindless blank days of the person who is thus gone but he’s in a box and he’s got a head attached and there’s nothing in there. That to me is the most horrifying possibility of all.

To remove every weapon that could be used in the future to combat death is like a lobotomization of an individuals and a culture out of which they can never recover and that is why the West recovered in some ways but the East never did because the West, because of the influence of ancient Greece did carry with it attempts to accommodate such things as logic – demonstration that did in some way keep alive the weapons that would eventually be needed to stand up and fight against religion and consequently, in my view, the West on its behalf can say thanks.

I don’t want you to hear me going overboard. I’m not about to announce that I’ve become a protestant preacher. You won’t be seeing me on television next Sunday, … my children.:-)

On behalf of the West we can say because of ancient Greece, in an Aristotelian world, reason has been discovered in some way and the Western religions had to incorporate it and this is to their benefit.

That the West sees in some way that this world has some goodness in it. There is that respect for nature and the basis for which science could proceed.

And science had.

The great library in Alexandria that had shown how much had been learned about knowledge on the march and all this was possible in part because of some aspects of Western thought contrasted with the East. There was a rationalized structure there and that is a value because the mind is ultimately seeking that kind of thing. That they are active as opposed to pacifists and this gets out there in force and sends them on a Crusade to Jerusalem but to be active as opposed to just quit is a virtue. The West is less tolerant than the East but unbounded tolerance is not a virtue. It is a vice and that the West has in its favor and finally, they have a mission. They are active and they have a mission and we can I think prefer Western religion over Eastern religion however we should not go too far.

Because if you take some of these points, that the church should act;- should not be passive, without tolerance, using this institution to pursue its holy mission of saving souls, out of that comes the Inquisition.

Had I time I would have told you about fourteen hundred years, starting in 400AD with Augustine and going right through the beginning of the nineteenth century of the churches opposition to scientific knowledge.

All of the great quotes that I had to show how bloodthirsty this opposition to the advancement of human knowledge was, if I had to pick one, which I do. I’m going to give you the following quote. Pick a symbol for the advance of human knowledge, the crux of living life in a person. Anybody want to come up with that?

Aristotle.

Here is Martin Luther on Aristotle who he referred to as truly a devil; a horrid calumniator; a wicked sycophant; a prince of darkness; a beast; a most horrid imposter of mankind; one in whom there is scarcely any philosophy; a public and professed liar; a goat; a complete epicure; twice execrable and his followers are locusts; caterpillars; sobs and whites. With that kind of spirit he set out to oppose any advance in science and they were successful for centauries under the threat of death, eternal damnation by using their minds to discover the nature of the world.

What is the meaning of all this? The meaning…. and you better believe it:

“Religion in its fundamental essence and in its essential practices is totally opposed to human life. It is in fact the deepest of all possible oppositions to the requirements of human life.”

The basic point here is an Aristotelian universe there are no disunities and inner penetrations of opposites; there are no fundamental dualisms; there are no metaphysical battlefields and it is we, as humans who are capable of reflecting this unity of connecting our minds with our bodies’ of connecting our theories with our practices.

The battlefields of life are the ones we create by trying to break this unity; by trying to transcend one part of this in favor of the other; by divorcing theory from practice; from turning the mind against life; against the body.

True theory leads to pro-life practice and false theory leads to the destruction of human life.

Religion, East or West, is false.

It is false on the grandest scale imaginable.

And it has destroyed on the grandest scale imaginable.

It cannot escape that because it has in fact abandoned first of all the means of life — reason, in order to transcend the place of life — this earth, for the purpose of denying the purpose of life — which is to be happy here and now. And given that, it cannot have failed to have accomplished what it did.

 It has pre-empted whole areas of thought which are concerned with the bringing of thought to the application of action, in particular the field of morality which it has pre-empted and turned against life itself.

Religion has taken the most glorious concepts of a rational morality such as for example exaltation, worship, reverence, sacred, and it has not only removed those concepts from our lives, but it has actually removed them from this earth, taken them up into the sky and turned them into moral thunderbolts to be launched back down at us and to incinerate us in our efforts to live life.

It has taken the concept of ultimate value beyond this earth and it has used it to diminish and demean everything that is here.

It has taken human life, which is potentially challenging, productive, successful, tall, joyous, proud, and it has turned it into an anxiety ridden torture.

It has turned it into a denial of ourselves in which we then crawl in obedience and fear and seek release from all of this by denouncing everything which we are and everything which we have.

Keeping man’s estimate of himself low by primarily for example advocating humility and selflessness and damning pride, which is the crown of all of the virtues, it has created a people who desire tyrants and it has created tyrants who desire to have the people. It has created power-lust, power-lust which has always flourished, as Ayn Rand once said, “as a weed that grows in the vacant lot of an abandoned mind.”

Religion is the abandonment of the mind. It is the damnation of this world and the damnation of this life in favor of what — ? It is not true that religion does this in favor of anything which is higher or greater or better. It is not in fact in favor of anything that is at all. It is in favor of that which in fact is not.

So, religion is not for anything — if you mean by that anything positive, anything in existence.

It is against everything. It is in this sense not the worship of something else; it is the worship of the beyond everything, which is the worship of nothing, which is the worship of death. And Albert North Whitehead is correct when he once wrote,

“History down to the present day is a melancholy record of the horrors which attend religion — human sacrifice, cannibalism, abject superstition, hatred as between races, the maintenance of degrading customs, hysteria, bigotry.

Religion is the last refuge of human savagery.”

http://www.objectivistliving.com/forums/index.php?/topic/13302-john-ridpath-on-religion

And this is true and I think that the scope of religions opposition to life and to this world can be seen in the religious myth of the fall. The myth of the fall has been applied to everything that exists. It has not just been applied to man as in the myth of the fall of Adam. It has been applied to the Gods and it has been applied to the cosmos itself in Eastern religions. Its myth is usually presented as a way to explain something; an attempt to explain apparent contradictions; An attempt to explain ultimate origins; an attempt to explain suffering.

That in truth is not what it is.

It’s not an explanation; it is a condemnation.

It is a condemnation of everything that is here.

And therefore Ayn Rand did say in Galt’s speech: “whatever he was, that robot in The Garden Of Eden: without existence; without mind; without values; without love;… he was not a man.”

And he wasn’t. I’ve thought about this. Who was Adam? Adam existed in the garden of timeless unity. God used to come down in the late afternoon; after it wasn’t so hot and walk with Adam.

Adam didn’t work; Adam didn’t love; Adam didn’t desire; Adam didn’t need; Adam didn’t die; Adam didn’t suffer. He lived before life and death. He lived before duality. He lived before opposites; He lived in the unity; He lived in joyful, effortless, painless, timeless bliss in communion with God.

Who is that? Adam was a Buddha. Adam had gone, if you like and unfortunately for all of us, through his failure we all came back.

This is a symbol for what religion is in the end, all of religion, all of what religion ultimately stands for: the hatred of this life; this earth; reality and the living in reality.

I would ask: why does religion persist?

Religion, in view of all of the advances we’ve made; in view of the discoveries we’ve made; the technological advances; the methods of science and all that. The answer is as you know, the reason religion persists is because the rational use of the human mind has never had a full and rational and widely accepted philosophical defense.

There is no philosophical antidote to the spread of religion.

And in the absence of that religion will come back when there are questions that do not seem to be answerable.

And who destroyed more than anyone else our ability to answer questions? Who ended The Enlightenment? ….. Immanuel Kant.

It is religion that made Immanuel Kant capable of not being laughed off the stage.

As The Enlightenment got rolling it is the religious context that gave Kant his influence.

It is religion that seems to give the mind what it requires.

We do ask questions. We do seek answers. We do seek broader frameworks. We do face death.

We do have to integrate these things into our own minds.

And we possess the power to find answers to these things. But we don’t necessarily possess the knowledge of how to use this power. And this is what the failure to offer a full philosophical defense of reason has accomplished.

It is in the pursuit of answers; of broader frameworks but unrestrained by a rational understanding of how to go about this that we are led beyond reason; beyond logic; beyond self; beyond life; beyond reality; running amok into rationalized super answers to questions.

 Ayn Rand in her philosophical journals in 1958 wrote: “Mankind as a whole seems to be caught in a trap of the nature of its own epistemology. Men cannot thing until they have acquires the power of abstractions and language but having done so they do not know how they got those and so they are vulnerable to any attack on their means of knowledge. They are also vulnerable to not knowing what the limits are to their means of knowledge. They are vulnerable because they don’t know The Identity of Consciousness.

So.. with an understanding of this,  primitive religion would have, after the ancient Greek philosophy led to mature philosophy. But without this, primitive religion led to advanced religion which is just more esoteric infancy.

Religion, as a person who is writing a book about popular myths said, is a second womb. And 3,500 years since the Aryans came down into Northwest India we are still living in immature fantasy.

A psychologically crippled child cannot grow up and find home which is this earth.

So Religion continues.

And it is a danger to our world.

And Kant has helped make this possible by dooming the Enlightenment.

Kant is a philosophical virus which has been inserted into our culture and the rampant increase of religion that we now see in various Balkanized forms and strange forms is like a fever that is starting to break out as a result of this even in the United States of America, the most secular culture in history.

There are new Oriental forms being entertained in the West. More breaking up, more increasingly subjectivist versions, more crazy things every day.

And this is part and parcel of what religion is.

Now I think you can see as a result of my lectures on religion and what it is that the defenders of a rational, free and prosperous, benevolent, human future has no common cause with advocates of religion whatsoever.

This is serious stuff.

This is not playing around and conservatives who think they can work in Capitalism and religion and Libertarians who think that well do what you want as far as basic logic, — these people are involving themselves in the deepest enemy of human life. They are not therefore our allies in any way.

They are our profound enemies.

The antidote to all of this of course is Objectivism. A rare thing. An honest philosophy. And those two terms have deep meaning.

Honest which means a serious lifelong attempt by a great mind to actually see the world and pay attention to it and be humble before the fact and come to an understanding of what the world is all about and how it works including what the living of life is all about. It’s a wonderful thing.

And I use the word philosophy here. This is a big, big thing. You have seen glimpses in Leonard Peikoff’s lectures and Harry Binswangers lectures in particular of those two lectures you can see how much there is that is coming to be understood about what the power of Ayn Rand’s mind was.

And this is a phenomenon of the most incredible and impressive dimensions of greatest importance. And that is of course the antidote of what we need to oppose the spread of religion in our culture.

We are involved in a struggle for life. And religion, any religion has to be condemned as the advocacy of death and hopefully will be condemned by Objectivism to death if Objectivism spreads.

If George Bush can say, and I’m shocked to hear: “atheists are not full citizens of the United States.” Given what I have said it will be no shock to hear that religious people would say atheists are not full citizens of the cosmos and I’ll say that religious people are not full citizens of the human race.

So if you want to be for freedom. If you want to be for prosperity, benevolence for a rational future; for happiness for men for life you’re not just in the right place, you’re in the only place.

Objectivism is the first fully developed philosophical repudiation of religion in human history.

Ayn Rand at the age of 29 in her philosophical notebook wrote: “I want to be known as the greatest champion of reason and the greatest enemy of religion.”

Now she has certainly succeeded almost beyond imagination in becoming the greatest champion of reason and the greatest enemy of religion that we know. And we can live outside of the clutches of religion because of her.

As Galileo said; “it is a great sweetness to go walking and discoursing together amid the truth.”

 

 

 

 

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