Religion is charlatanry, a play on emotions

Human creature is curious and curiosity is bold.

What on earth makes us think that the worship of a deity in our own age is far removed from the worship of an idol by our ancestors! Our ancestor prayed to his idol, that is, he begged. He begged the idol to watch over his flock or his fields. The modern prays, that is he begs of his idol, his deity, to prosper his business, to guard his life.

The ancestor voiced his incantations; the modern sings hymns, that is he flatters. There is still a great deal of the charlatanry of the magician in the construction of the houses of prayer, with the sunlight shut out and only filtering through the leaded and multi-colored panes, the semidarkness, the solemnity, the rise and swell of the organ; all things combined to overcome the senses, to play upon the emotions, and to subdue the reason.

The savage made sacrifices to his idols, that is, he paid tribute, chiefly out of fear, but partly in the hope of getting something better in return. The modern does not offer human or animal sacrifice, it is true; but it must be borne in mind that the wealth of the savage consisted of his sheep, oxen, oils, and wines, not money. Today, the devout offer a sacrifice of money to the Deity. We are all familiar with the requests of religious institutions for gifts, which nearly always finish with the phrase, "AND THE LORD WILL REPAY YOU MANY FOLD." In other words, sacrifice part of your worldly goods to the idol, and he will repay with high interest. He will give in return long life and much riches.

For 1400 years now, we have progressed with no new prophet, and no new divine revelation is perturbing us, well there are a few; the old ones, however, are causing quite enough disturbance.

When, long ago, there was a rift among the Jews, and the sectarians were defeated and expelled, the sectarians cast aside the laws of Moses and offered the Hebrew religion without the Hebrew ceremonies to the Greek and Roman world. JESUS was the man who prepared the way for this remarkable event.

When Mohammed conceived the divine conception that he would follow in the footsteps of his brother-prophets, Moses and Jesus, the latest of the major religions was revealed. I have to stop here for failure to do so might invite wrath of a brother with explosives wired to his tits and who has been promised virgins elsewhere if only he can violently dispatch people like us.

Feelings are allright if one does not get drunk on them

Last Sunday I was in some church in Ngong and noticed, unsurprisingly, the devotion of men and women to pastors and preachers who imagine themselves patented to think truth, and never to be wrong in the enunciation of it.

The conclusion one makes is that Religion is not the product of civilized person. For sure it made some contributions to civilization in early days to fix the calendar but what else. Feelings are all right, if one does not get drunk on them.

We did not discover gods, we invented them. Our ancestors invented them in the light of their experiences and endowed them with capacities that indicated the stage of their mental development. It is not strange, therefore, that there has not been advanced a new major religious belief in the last 1300 years or so. All modern religions, no matter how disguised, find their origin in the fear-stricken ignorance of the primitive ancestor.

Most religions date from a time when men were crueler than they are now, and therefore tend to perpetuate inhumanities which the moral conscience of the present age has outgrown. The degrading picture of womankind, for example, as depicted in the Old Testament is well known to anyone who has read that storehouse of mythology. In Deuteronomy we find the right of divorce given entirely to the husband. The discarded wife must acquiesce to "divine justice." In the twenty second chapter of the same book is enacted the law for Test of Virginity, which empowers gynecological elders to go into a peeping Tom's conference and if the damsel is found not a virgin, then she is to be stoned to death.

A Christian will admit that the gods of others are man-made, and that they worship like a primitive ancestor. The christian looks at the gods of others with the vision of a civilized person; but when he looks at his own god, he forgets his civilization, he relapses centuries of time, and his mental viewpoint is that of the primitive ancestor. There never was a religionist who believed his or her own religion mere superstition. All shrink indignantly from the charge of being superstitious; while all raise churches and mosques and temples to, and bow down before, thingless names.

Religion arose as a means of explaining things at a time when no other explanation of the origin of things had been ascertained. God is always the asylum of ignorance. When causes are unknown, God is brought forward; when causes are known, God retires into the background. In an age of ignorance, God is active; in an age of science, he is impotent.

Indeed the word God retains its influence with many people today because of the imprecise manner in which it is used. It is just one of those blessed words where the comfort felt in their use is proportionate to the lack of definite meaning that accompanies them.

People rarely confess ignorance and so where problems are persistent and seemingly unsolvable what most people are in search of is a narcotic and God is a popular narcotic. When not used as a narcotic, God is brought into an argument as though it stood for a term which carried a well defined and well understood meaning.

The oft-repeated question still admits of no answer, who created the creator. It is an absurd answer to reply that the creator created himself. Yet even if this is granted, may not the universe have created itself. If God has always existed, why can we not say that the universe has always existed.