The Delusional World of Man Made Deities

Introduction

Religion: Imagining what an imaginary being imagines you should do.

Historically, psychiatrists such as Freud have suggested that all religious beliefs are delusional. "You talk to God; you're religious. God talks to you; you're psychotic." That's a line from the TV show House MD, delivered by the eponymous acerbic medic played by Hugh Laurie. In his book, The Future of an Illusion, Sigmund Freud writes...

Religious beliefs are illusions, fulfillments of the oldest, strongest, and most urgent wishes of mankind... As we already know, the terrifying impression of helplessness in childhood aroused the need for protection - for protection through love - which was provided by the father; and the recognition that this helplessness lasts throughout life made it necessary to cling to the existence of a father, but this time a more powerful one. Thus the benevolent rule of a divine Providence allays our fear of the dangers of life.

Main Item

Gods

We know there is no creator. Common sense and a functioning brain tell us so, the same way we know there is no Santa Claus, Easter Bunny, Tooth Fairy, or guardian angel. Suppose someone told you, in all seriousness, that they talk to invisible beings who control the universe. In that case, you'd probably back away slowly, nodding and smiling, while desperately looking for the nearest exit or escape route. If this person said they wanted to oversee your life, you'd most likely do the same, but more urgently, and find the nearest police officer.

Humans have been worshiping their imaginary gods for thousands of years. The Egyptians built the pyramids for their imaginary gods. The Romans worshiped Zeus and his imaginary friends in massive temples made of marble. The Aztecs sacrificed thousands of people on gigantic stone altars for their imaginary masters. It is obvious that God, Allah, and every other "god" are just as imaginary.

Christianity, Judaism, and Islam are all pointless. Belief in a God of any description is nothing but a silly superstition, which leads a significant portion of the population to be delusional. One of the signs of delusional beliefs is resistance to being challenged, no matter how inconsistent they are with reality. Because the brain isn't "working" as it should, logic and reason aren't as potent as they might otherwise be.

This is the 21st century, and these imaginary beings' followers are becoming more dangerous. We shouldn't let fictional beings from days long past influence our growth as a society or species.

"God is an ever-receding pocket of scientific ignorance that's getting smaller and smaller and smaller as time moves on." - Neil deGrasse Tyson

The Rapid Decline of Religious Beliefs

2011 figures show the number of people in England and Wales who say they have no religion nearly doubled in the ten years since 2001 to a quarter of England's population.

Barbaric Blasphemy Laws

Many countries worldwide have laws that punish expressions deemed blasphemous, defamatory of religion, or contemptuous or insulting to religion or religious symbols, figures, or feelings. The application of these laws has resulted in individuals being jailed for merely expressing a different religious belief or being falsely accused.

• As of 2012, 22% of the world's countries and territories STILL had anti-blasphemy laws or policies.
• One in ten (11%) STILL had laws or policies penalizing apostasy with various punishments ranging from fines to death.
• In the Americas, 31% of countries STILL had blasphemy laws. For instance, in the Bahamas, the publication or sale of blasphemous material can be punished with up to two years imprisonment.
• Death is mandatory in blasphemy cases for Muslim men and women. Shafi'i recognizes blasphemy as a separate offense from apostasy but accepts the repentance of blasphemers. If the blasphemer does not repent, the punishment is death.
• In 2014, Pakistani courts sentenced four people to death for violating Pakistan's blasphemy law, and another received a life sentence. They join at least 13 others on death row and 19 serving life sentences. The U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) has found that Pakistan has jailed more people for this "crime" than any other country.

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"Sometimes people hold a firm core belief. The new evidence cannot be accepted when presented with evidence that works against that belief. It would create an extremely uncomfortable feeling called cognitive dissonance. And because it is so important to protect that core belief, they will rationalize, ignore, and deny anything that doesn't fit it." - Frantz Fanon.

"Human rights law does not recognize a right to have one's religion or belief at all times exempted from criticism, ridicule or insult, or a right, in other words, to respect for one's religious feelings." - "Blasphemy, Defamation of Religions and Human Rights Law".

What are New Apologetics?

New Apologetics is a pseudo-intellectual movement invented by so-called Christian apologists in response to the increasing presence of free-thinking atheists. The New Apologetics attempt to defend their religious faiths and provide reasoning for their crazy religious ideas. However, instead of giving arguments in defense of their irrational beliefs, New Apologists know they are wrong, and their faith is rapidly eroded due to scientific and technological proof. They begin clutching at straws by resorting to smear tactics, defamation, and slander of atheist authors and activists, branding them as intolerant, racist, bigoted, and unsophisticated. The irony is New Apologetics are disregarding their faith to defend their faith... Slothful induction, also called an appeal to coincidence, is a fallacy in which an inductive argument is denied its proper conclusion, despite strong evidence for inference. Its opposite fallacy is called correlation and does not imply causation.

The God Delusion

Delusions are what happens when, due to illness or other disruption, the brain's logic system fails, and things we perceive that would usually be dismissed as innocuous or irrelevant end up being processed as far more significant, and our belief system alters to accommodate it - however wrongly.

The God Delusion is a 2006 book by British evolutionary biologist and ethologist Richard Dawkins, a professorial fellow at New College, Oxford, and, at the time of publication, the Charles Simonyi Chair for the Public Understanding of Science at the University of Oxford. In The God Delusion, Dawkins contends that a supernatural creator, God, almost certainly does not exist. That belief in a personal god qualifies as a delusion, which he defines as a persistent false belief held in the face of strong contradictory evidence.

Dawkins explains that The God Delusion contains four primary messages:

• Atheists can be happy, balanced, moral, and intellectually fulfilled.
• Atheists should be proud, not apologetic because atheism is evidence of a healthy, independent mind.
• Children should not be labeled by their parent's religion. Terms like "Catholic child" or "Muslim child" should make people cringe.
• Natural selection and similar scientific theories are superior to a "God hypothesis" (the illusion of intelligent design) in explaining the living world and the cosmos.

The God Delusion is not just a defense of atheism but also goes on the offensive against religion. Dawkins sees religion as subverting science, fostering fanaticism, encouraging bigotry against homosexuals, and influencing society negatively. Dawkins dedicates the book to Douglas Adams and quotes the novelist: "Isn't it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without believing that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?"

In clinical practice, no clear guidelines exist to distinguish between "normal" religious beliefs and "pathological" religious delusions. Historically, psychiatrists such as Freud have suggested that all religious beliefs are delusional. Religious beliefs and delusions alike can arise from neurologic lesions and anomalous experiences, proposing that at least some religious beliefs can be pathological. Religious beliefs exist outside the scientific domain; therefore, they can be easily labeled delusional from a rational perspective. However, a religious belief's dimensional characteristics, cultural influences, and impact on functioning may be more important considerations in clinical practice. Faith or delusion? At the crossroads of religion and psychosis.

Study of the Therapeutic Effects of Intercessory Prayer (STEP) in cardiac bypass patients: a multicenter randomized trial of uncertainty and certainty of receiving intercessory prayer concluded intercessory prayer itself had no effect on complication-free recovery from CABG, but the certainty of receiving intercessory prayer was associated with a higher incidence of complications.

Link Between Religious Fundamentalism and Brain Damage Established by Scientists:

A study published in the journal Neuropsychologia has shown that religious fundamentalism is, in part, the result of functional impairment in a brain region known as the prefrontal cortex. The findings suggest that damage to particular prefrontal cortex areas indirectly promotes religious fundamentalism by diminishing cognitive flexibility and openness. This psychological term describes a personality trait involving curiosity, creativity, and open-mindedness.

Freud, God, and Religion

Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis, regarded God as an illusion based on the infantile need for a powerful father figure. According to him, religion, necessary to help us restrain violent impulses earlier in the development of civilization, can now be set aside in favor of reason and science. In Freud's view, religion is an outshoot of the Oedipus complex. It represents man's helplessness in the world, facing the ultimate fate of death, the struggle of civilization, and the forces of nature. He views God as a manifestation of a childlike "longing for [a] father." (pg. 18).

Freud's description of religious belief as a form of illusion is based on the idea that it is derived from human wishes with no basis in reality. He says, "Thus we call a belief an illusion when a wish-fulfillment is a prominent factor in its motivation, and in doing so we disregard its relations to reality, just as the illusion itself sets no store by verification."

Freud considered religion as an illusion, consisting of "certain dogmas, assertions about facts and conditions of external and internal reality which tells one something that one has not discovered, and which claim that one should give them credence." Religious concepts are transmitted in three ways and thereby claim our belief. "Firstly, because our primal ancestors already believed them; secondly, because we possess proofs which have been handed down to us from antiquity; and thirdly, because it is forbidden to raise the question of their authenticity at all." Psychologically speaking, these beliefs present the phenomena of wish fulfillment, "fulfillments of the oldest, strongest, and most urgent wishes of mankind." (Ch. 6 pg.38).

The Bible

God is nothing more than the expression and product of human weakness. The Bible is a collection of honorable but still primitive legends that are nevertheless quite childish. The original Bible was written thousands of years ago by primitive Bronze Age men who didn't even know where the sun went at night. The Bible is a book that advocates senseless murder, slavery, oppression of women, and so much more. The Bible has no place in our society today. It is time to recognize this simple fact.

As Thomas Paine wrote in his classic book The Age of Reason:

"Any system of religion that has anything in it that shocks the mind of a child cannot be a true system." Paine also observed: "Whenever we read the obscene stories, the voluptuous debaucheries, the cruel and torturous executions, the unrelenting vindictiveness, with which more than half the Bible is filled, it would be more consistent that we call it the word of a demon than the word of God. A history of wickedness has served to corrupt and brutalize humankind."

Throughout history, the Bible is the single most weaponized piece of writing, responsible for unjust wars, genocide, anti-Semitism, violent extremism, subjugation of women, and pervasive racism. Throughout the Crusades, the Inquisition, the witch hunts, chattel slavery, the Holocaust, and the history of homophobia, the Bible looms large. As author Ruth Hurmence Green eloquently put it, "There was a time when religion ruled the world. It is known as the Dark Ages."

The Bible is nonsense in a thousand scientific ways. When you read the Bible, are you not left in awe? Why doesn't a book written by an omniscient being left you with a sense of wonder and amazement? If you are reading a book written by the all-powerful, all-knowing, all-loving creator of the universe, wouldn't you expect to be stunned by the author's brilliance, clarity, and wisdom? Would you not expect each new page to intoxicate you with its incredible prose and spectacular insight? Wouldn't you expect the author to tell us things that scientists have not been able to discover yet?

Yet, when we open the Bible and read it, we find nothing like that. Instead of leaving us in awe, it leaves us dumbfounded by all the nonsense and backwardness it contains. If you looked at the Bible fresh and read what it says, you will find that the Bible is ridiculous. If we are honest with ourselves, it is obvious that an "all-knowing" God had absolutely nothing to do with this book.

King James Version of the New Testament

The King James version of the New Testament was completed in 1611 by eight members of the Church of England. There were (and still are) no original texts to translate. The oldest manuscripts were written down hundreds of years after the last apostle died. There are over 8,000 of these old manuscripts, with no two alike. The King James translators used none of these, anyway. Instead, they edited previous translations to create a version their king and Parliament would approve.

So, 21st Century Christians believe the "Word of God" is a book edited in the 17th Century from 16th Century translations of 8,000 contradictory copies of 4th Century scrolls that claim to be copies of lost letters written in the 1st Century. That's not faith. That's insanity.

References:

• Dating the Oldest New Testament Manuscripts by Peter van Minnen (library.duke.edu).
• A Brief History of the King James Bible by Dr. Laurence M. Vance.

Prayer

Every "answered prayer" truly is a coincidence, nothing more. "God" doesn't "answer prayers" at all. The belief in prayer is pure superstition. Non-ambiguous prayers show us, conclusively, that the whole idea that "God answers prayers" is an illusion created by human imagination.

In fact, prayer alienates non-religious Americans who make up the fastest-growing segment of the U.S. population by religious identification - 35% of Americans are non-Christians, including more than one in four Americans who now identify as religiously unaffiliated.

An Open Letter from God

Enough with the Prayers: If you missed the memo, I've stopped listening!

"One hundred billion planets, yet somehow 99.9% of the presumptuous requests, insipid whining, and petulant demands come from your single decrepit hunk of clay three removed from your solar system's precious sun. A highly disproportionate number of those emanate from a solitary piece of stolen land in the Northern Hemisphere. Doesn't that seem just a tad self-indulgent to you?"

Why Won't God Heal Amputees?

If possible, get millions of people all over the planet to join the prayer circle and pray their most fervent prayers. Get millions of people praying in unison for a miracle for one deserving amputee. Then stand back and watch. What is going to happen? Jesus clearly says you will receive whatever you ask for in prayer if you believe. He does not say it once - he says it many times in many ways in the Bible. And yet, even with millions of people praying, nothing will happen.

No matter how many people pray. No matter how sincere those people are. No matter how much they believe. No matter how devout and deserving the recipient. Nothing will happen. The legs will not regenerate. Prayer does not restore the severed limbs of amputees. You can electronically search through all the medical journals ever written -- there is no documented case of an amputated leg being restored spontaneously. And we know that God ignores the prayers of amputees through our observations of the world around us. If God were answering the prayers of amputees to regenerate their lost limbs, we would see amputated legs growing back every day. (Why won't God heal amputees?)

For a person to say, "God answered my prayers today!" is just as silly as a person saying, "My lucky charm granted me my wishes today!" or "The planet Mars answered my prayers today!"

Gods are Imaginary!

The time has come for intelligent people to stop accepting or "tolerating" superstition and fraud and, instead, call it what it is. It is time to state clearly that God is imaginary. Religion is pure superstition, nothing more - It has been proven repeatedly with dozens of scientific experiments. It is time to eliminate superstition and fraud from public discourse because they harm society.

The way to change the world is to change people's minds. As more and more people openly discuss that "God" and "Allah" are completely imaginary, the world becomes a better place. The people who believe in "religion" look sillier and sillier. Eventually, religion becomes a meaningless fringe activity.

Certainty is not truth. Comfort is not truth. Faith is not truth. It's scarier to think that the universe doesn't care what happens to you. It doesn't. But some of your fellow humans do. They give life meaning. Do good. Love blindly. Practice empathy. Forgive readily. Create beauty. Learn with abandon. Challenge tradition and injustice everywhere. Above all, find something bigger than yourself to fight for. Please make a difference in this life and this world because they're the only ones that we get.

Famous Anti Religion Quotes

• "Lighthouses are more helpful than churches." - Benjamin Franklin.
• "The divinity of Jesus is made a convenient cover for absurdity." - John Adams.
• "Religions are all alike - founded upon fables and mythologies." - Thomas Jefferson.
• "In no instance have the churches been guardians of the liberties of the people." - James Madison.
• "I always find it very curious that when one is confronted with what one does not like, approve, or understand, one suddenly has 'sincerely held religious beliefs." - Jim Green.
• "I beg you be persuaded that no one would be more zealous than myself to establish effectual barriers against the horrors of spiritual tyranny and every species of religious persecution." - George Washington.

Related Information

• The Basis of Antiscience Beliefs
• God, Religion and the Socially Disconnected
• Conflict Between Science and Religion is All in Our Mind
• Neurological Link Between Religious Experiences and Epilepsy
• Religious Freedom Laws Linked to Poor Health in LGBT People
• Why We Believe in Gods: Religious Beliefs Not Linked to Intuition or Rational Thinking

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Cite This Page (APA): Opinion Piece. (2016, May 24 - Last revised: 2024, June 15). The Delusional World of Man Made Deities. Disabled World. Retrieved December 12, 2024 from www.disabled-world.com/communication/religion/delusional-deities.php

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