Religion -- Strings Attached:
God -- Theological Legerdemain
Gopi Santhanam
From: "Santhanam, Gopi"
To: "Positive Atheism" <editor@positiveatheism.org>
Subject: Religion -- Strings attached
Date: Friday, November 19, 1999 5:35 PM
Religion -- Strings Attached
God -- Theological Legerdemain
This subject is a cliché with a different flavor to it. I have, on innumerable occasions, encountered the run of the mill theist in excellent demagoguery trying to convince me that there is a god and religion is his contrivance to preach.
On this occasion, this theist uttered "Religion is nothing but philosophy; a set of guidelines, protocols; god is something above religion; god is you; you are god; you follow religion to attain the supreme you (implying that all that we want is to enhance oneself using religious dogma)".
While I turned nihilistic towards this balderdash, I realized that this could be the next opiate that is on its way to lure us mortals. I ruminated over the cause and effect of this approach. I can only come to the conclusion that freethinkers are growing in numbers theologians have realized that they need to dissociate God and religion in order to make the sceptics accept their theory.
Let us disregard the "God is you and you are God" part for we know that it contradicts the theory of theists; for if you are God and God is me, the only ceremony that mortals should celebrate are their own birthdays (egocentric activities that god is very much against). But as you know the birth of Christ, Krishna, Shiva, Allah -- are all celebrated and their purported teachings are followed . When you get down to the brass tacks this guy is accepting atheistic claim that there is no god and that mortals are gods. Great! That is what we want but then he doesn't let go at that; he shrouds that acceptance with the claim that religion is just a set of principles, statements, guidelines: a specious Quid pro Quo!
Let us analyze the religion part of the argument You might, down the road , see the Bible, Gita, Koran marketed as pristine philosophy that formulates a set of guidelines for living. Should we give in, unless they go to the extent of obviating all the metaphysical gibberish and condense it to just a set of morals and pragmatic aphorisms, it is still old wine in a new bottle.
But this can never happen because if you remove the chimerical element from religious beliefs; you cannot hold man in the metaphysical web forever; pragmatics leads to reasoning and the cessation of fear eventually leads to the demise of God. Rest assured that this man just wants to attire religion in a different garb to entice.
So what is religion? It is an evolution of an escapist's ramblings, an inchoate at work with the fundamental idea of instilling fear to rule. It is interpretation at its best. Conjured up fables, fossilised fantasies get appended to it over aeons to deprive man of his sixth sense. It is nothing but man trying to prove his imaginative superiority over another man. He invents God to make it enticing. Don't you see the pattern. Every religion has a God and its ludicrous fables, every religion tends makes it a point to undermine science.
So beware! You might see religion and God in an act of obeisance when truly the rug under your feet is going to be pulled again. Religion never comes without any strings attached and God needs to be this magical fantasy of an indiligent human being.
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