In a seminal work, “Religion vs Man” Dr. Ridpath laid out the story of all religions and how they stand in opposition to life.

“Religion in it’s fundamental essence and in it’s essential practices is totally opposed to human life. It is in fact the deepest of all possible oppositions to the requirements of human life…. Religion is a set of supernatural principles based on a mystical view of reality and what that means for human life.”

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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.”

“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. It’s 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 it’s 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 persom 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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