Unabashedly Doubtful.

Plain speaking is necessary in any discussion of religion. We have monkey Godparents. We ARE descendants ape-like progenitiors.

Recently in Kenya, we have witnessed the spectacle of some church people praying, unsuccessfully, for the resurrection of their two late pastors who had died in a road accident. BTW when it was obvious the prayers would not work, the church leaders informed the congregation that the deceased were still sleeping so burial arrangements would proceed. That is as far as I will dwell on that unique brand of insanity.

With the development of the mind of man throughout the ages there was conceived also his self-made religious systems, based on a subjective interpretation of the universe and full of emotional bias. Primitive man did not understand the natural cause of shadows, night, the birth and death of vegetable and animals. Of this ignorance religion was born, and theology was evolved as its art of expression.

My story takes us back some twelve thousand years to neolithic man. Squatting in his rude hut or gloomy cave, he listens to the sounds of a storm. The howling of the wind, the flashes of lightning, and crashing of thunder give rise to that elemental emotion—fear. Fear was always with him, as he thought of the huge stones that fell and crushed him, and the beasts which were so eager to devour him. All things about him seemed to conspire for his death: the wind, lightning, thunder, rain and storm, as well as the beasts and falling trees; for in his mind he did not differentiate animate from inanimate objects.

Slowly, through his groping mind there evolved the thought, due to past experience, that he could not contend with these things by physical force, but must subdue them with magic; his magic consisted of the beating of crude drum-like instruments, dances, and the mumbling of words.

Upon falling asleep he dreams, and awakening, he finds that he is still in the same place where he had lain the night before. Yet, he is certain that during the night he had traveled to his favorite wood and killed an animal whose tender flesh he was still savoring. Since the conception of a dream was as yet foreign to him, the logical conclusion he arrived at was that he had both a body and a spirit. If he possessed a body and a spirit, then all things about him, he reasoned, must likewise possess a similar spirit. Some spirits, he felt, were friendly; some, hostile to him. Slowly, slowly, down through the ages, as the mind of man progressed, his self-made religious conceptions would advance. He would worship idols, and these idols would be his gods.

Religious reasons/biblical statements are nothing more than secular reasons, most of which were merely thought up hundreds or thousands of years ago in different cultural contexts, by less informed people. Some of the biblical statements make sense and are still valid today. Some were valid once, but no longer are, and some were never valid in the first place.

VALID THEN & STILL VALID NOW: The truth is that the commandment not to steal wasn't passed on to Moses by God, it was common sense arrived at through secular thought and given religious weight by a priestly ruling class.

VALID THEN BUT NOLONGER VALID: The laws against eating pork made sense millenias ago in the desert where food spoiled quickly, but today with modern refrigeration it no longer makes sense. In reality the reason for the rule in the first place was almost certainly "empirical observation", by the society noticing that there was a higher incidence of disease associated with pork. So 'do not eat pork' was simply a product of empirical observation which was then codified by a priestly class.

THOSE THAT WERE NEVER VALID TO BEGIN WITH: The Bible tells us that the earth is surrounded by water, that god walks on the clouds, that the sun at one time stood still, that a donkey spoke once, that Jesus ascended into the heavens, and that the famines, wars, diseases, and other troubles faced by the Jews over the centuries were a product of god's wrath against the Jews for not loving him enough or obeying him properly and for members of the group worshiping false gods again and again.

The reality is that WATER IS ON EARTH NOT AROUND IT.
The reality is that NO ONE HAS SEEN GOD ON THE CLOUDS. HAVE YOU?
The reality is that A DONKEY LACKS THE ANATOMICAL CAPACITY TO UTTER A WORD.

The reality is that the Jews didn't suffer famines, wars, plagues, and slavery because their god was punishing them, the reality is that those things are simply natural forces that afflict everyone, and the Jews just happened to be a relatively small and poor group of people surrounded by powerful empires who frequently dominated them.

So MOST "biblical truths" can well be understood as simply ideas of an ancient and uninformed people trying to make sense of the world. They are simply based on human guesses about how the world works.

BTW it is recorded that what Jesus said and did on earth wetre siom many that not even all the books in the world would be enough to record them.
SHEESH!! Where are the flashdisks!

We will get our constitution and still break stones

“Parnell came down the road, he said to a cheering man; Ireland shall get her freedom and you (will) still break stone.”

When a nation allows its institutions to be formed by its weaknesses of character rather than by its strength it creates, in deeper ways than commonly imagined, an influence to increase weakness at the expense of strength. A society that clatters along with its rusty habits of prejudices unquestioned; political predilections uncritiqued will find itself faithfully mirrored in public affairs.

While it is commendable that we are ever closer to new constitutional plan, the mistaken habit of tailoring laws to fix perceived political competitors or groups breeds the habit of the constituted government itself creating laws, as might happen, to fix anything that comes in its way.

We have rejected absolutism and so have we aristocracy. Absolutism is served better when the people accept their ideas as authoritative and religiously sacrifice humanity to a non-human purpose. Aristocracy flourishes where the people find a sensational enjoyment in admiring the successes of the ruling class. No doubt Napoleon was well content with the philosophy of those guardsmen who drank his health before he executed them. But those excellent soldiers would make dismal citizens.

We make a dismal citizenry. A view of life in which one obediently allows oneself to be made grist for somebody else's mill is the poorest kind of preparation for the work of self-government. There is where our problem lies. We deceive ourselves mightily in changing the constitution without reforming our habits. Demolatry is not democracy.

It is destructive to government that it is formed merely by counting of heads during polls in total disregard of what is contained in those heads. That method has blessed us, for years, with presidents who routinely misunderstand the nature of their office. What happens during polls is that the parties appoint a presidential candidate to be our ruler and all that we, the unconscious puppets dancing to unseen music and moved by hidden wires, do is to, in a muddled angry way, strike off the names of those other selected candidates.

That method has given us an executive limited only by the popular will and which cannot be held to responsibility against its own will, since, having possession of all the powers, it can prevent any free and genuine expression adverse to itself. Unless it yields voluntarily, overturning it would be always bloody and deadly even.

In borrowing from the Americans we must remember that their constitution was shaped, adjusted and adapted to political and socio economic errors very different from ours. It worked well for them. It might not necessarily for us.

At a time when selfishness has grown less intelligent, may we remember that each constitutional guarantee we put in place has a history. Each of them stop a way through which the overwhelming power of government has oppressed the weak individual citizen, and may do so again if the way is opened.

Our choice, in these times of collapsed and collapsing institutions, lies between a blind push for constitutional reforms and a wise leadership in constitutional reforms, between thwarting misgovernance until it masters us, and implementing reforms and reforming reforms until we are answered without trembling too much over the result.