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Kenn Thomas

January 1, 1999

Beginning the last year of the second Common-Era millennium

Introduction

Believe not because some old manuscripts are produced, believe not because it is your national belief, believe not because you have been made to believe from your childhood, but reason truth out, and after you have analyzed it, then if you find it will do good to one and all, believe it, live up to it and help others live up to it.

"Buddha"

The history of religious belief on Earth is long and varied, with concepts, doctrines and rituals of all sorts designed to propitiate and beseech any number of gods and goddesses. Although many people believe religion to be a good and necessary thing, no ideology is more divisive than religion, which rends humanity in a number of ways through extreme racism, sexism and even speciesism. Religion, in fact, is dependent on division, because it requires an enemy, whether it be earthly or in another dimension. Religion dictates that some people are special or chosen while others are immoral and evil, and it too often insists that it is the duty of the "chosen" to destroy the others. And organized religion puts a face on the divine itself that is sectarian, sexist and racist, portraying a male god of a particular ethnicity, for example. The result is that, over the centuries, humankind has become utterly divided among itself and disconnected from nature and life around it, such that it stands on the verge of chaos.

More horrors have been caused in the name of God and religion than can be chronicled, but some examples can be provided, as well as an assessment of how religions function:

The fires of Moloch in Syria, the harsh mutilations in the name of Astarte, Cybele, Jehovah; the barbarities of imperial Pagan Torturers; the still grosser torments which Roman-Gothic Christians in Italy and Spain heaped on their brother-men; the fiendish cruelties to which Switzerland, France, the Netherlands, England, Scotland, Ireland, America, have been witnesses, are none too powerful to warn man of the unspeakable evils which follow from mistakes and errors in the matter of religion, and especially from investing the God of Love with the cruel and vindictive passions of erring humanity, and making blood to have a sweet savor in his nostrils, and groans of agony to be delicious to his ears. Man never had the right to usurp the unexercised prerogative of God, and condemn and punish another for his belief. Born in a Protestant land, we are of that faith. If we had opened our eyes to the light under the shadows of St. Peter's in Rome, we should have been devout Catholics; born in the Jewish quarter of Alepp, we should have condemned Christ as an impostor; in Constantinople, we should have cried "Allah it Allah, God is great and Mahomet is his prophet!" Birth, place and education give us our faith. Few believe in any religion because they have examined the evidences of its authenticity, and made up a formal judgment, upon weighing the testimony. Not one man in ten thousand knows anything about the proofs of his faith. We believe what we are taught; and those are most fanatical who know least of the evidences on which their creed is based. I

Even today, when humankind likes to pretend it has evolved, battles go on around the world over whose god is bigger and better, and religious fanatics of any number of faiths repeatedly call for and receive the blood of "unbelievers" and "infidels." Few religions of any antiquity have escaped unscathed by innumerable bloodbaths, and, while Islam is currently the source of much fear in the world today, Christianity is far and away the bloodiest in history:

... the briefest glance at the history of the Christian churchesthe horrible rancours and revenges of the clergy and the sects against each other in the fourth and fifth centuries A.D., the heresy-hunting crusades at Beziers and other places and the massacres of the Albigenses in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the witch-findings and burnings of the