Why
Religious Faith is Insincere
Faith without evidence or with bad evidence is not faith at all. It is just a guess. It is about what you want to believe not what you believe. It is about feeling something is true. That is not faith or belief. If you agree with the marvellous philosopher Spinoza that belief and comprehension are the same thing (page 61, THE END OF FAITH, RELIGION, TERROR AND THE FUTURE OF REASON, Sam Harris, Free Press, London, 2005) then belief requires evidence to be real belief and the more evidence it has the stronger it is. You cannot have understanding without evidence guiding you and without you looking at it.
It is undeniable that people care about what they feel is true more than what reason says is possible or probably true. If people had a weaker tendency to copy one another, religion would have less power. It thrives on people going to Church and getting their babies baptised for their friends and family do it. The Roman Catholic Church for example would not have so many followers if these followers were not motivated more by factors that have nothing to do with the Church being true or false. If your family and community and friends are Roman Catholic you are more likely to follow the Church in imitation of them. To go to Church and believe because others around you seem to believe and you want to fit in and not be the odd one out indicates that you are only using the Church. You are deluding yourself if you think you believe.
The Bible, to be fair, does allow reasonable faith but more often it
forbids it. It totally contradicts
itself. A book that errs in the most
elementary thing, belief, cannot be God’s word in any sense at all.
Hebrews 11:2 says that faith alone can guarantee the blessings we hope
for or give evidence for the existence of realities in the invisible world.
This means belief and not belief and repentance together as the word
faith usually means to Christians. The
following verses tell us that. For
example, they say that it was by faith that Abraham obeyed God. If faith did not mean mere belief but also
avoidance of sin this revelation would make no sense. You don’t say it was by obedience to God that
Abraham obeyed.
A bit later we read that Sarah conceived in her old age because of her
confidence that God would keep his promise to give her a child.
Hebrews tells us to bend all evidence in favour of faith and that is an
invitation to fraud. It also says that
mere belief alone is necessary for salvation (Hebrews 11:6) which is blackmail.
Jesus said that he was his own witness and the Father was his witness to
that he was from God. He said this
fulfilled the requirement of the law that the evidence of two witnesses was
needed for a person to be believed (John 8).
But Jesus did the speaking for God and the speaking for himself. God was not much of a witness in that case
and we know what is wrong with Jesus being his own witness. Jesus did not prove that the Devil could not
do miracles which looked good but which were meant to do secret harm so his
miracles were not evidence. Jesus was
commanding faith based on insufficient evidence. He accused himself then of lying when he said
his works proved his mission and of sin when he did his so-called miracles and
rose from the dead. They must be the
Devil’s works after all!
A teaching you
are not allowed to wilfully doubt or deny is called a dogma. Humanism does not have any dogmas for it does
not tell anybody what to believe but just asks people to think for themselves
and gives them the chance to receive the truth.
People must see the truth on their own and
giving orders does not help a person to believe.
When religion and
the Bible make dogmas out of many different ideas but do not make dogmas out of
the evidence for these dogmas it shows they are practicing blind faith. They are saying the evidence can be wrong and
is only a fluid changeable source and we can scrap it and look for new evidence
if we can find it and that anything will do as evidence for faith. This really means that faith matters and
evidence doesn’t which is a nonsensical and dangerous attitude. It is really bending the facts to fit the
theories and is wildly dishonest.
Evidence is supposed to make dogmas not dogmas evidence. Both the Catholic Church and the Bible say we
can rationally show that God exists but they are not dogmatic regarding any of
the proofs for God and everybody disagrees with everybody else on the evidence
but not the dogma. Does this not show
that their faith is caused by emotional need and not evidence or love of truth?
Religion recognises the importance of evidence. It will not let you jail a person who has not
had a fair and thorough trial.
It will accuse you of sin if you say something bad about somebody just
because you have some suspicions.
Religion says that religion is the most important thing in the
world. It is supposed to be better to be
in jail over a miscarriage of justice than to be wrong in religion. It would seem that religion would treat
evidence with the supreme respect which it says it is entitled to.
Alas! Religion has no evidence for
the veracity of its dogmatised and outrageous fantasies. The evidence it offers is counterfeit. The Catholic Church uses miracles as evidence
and many of these are dubious and more believable ones have been rejected
because they didn’t slot into the Catholic doctrine. They are manipulating the evidence so that it
becomes illogical to accept any of the Catholic faith. They expect strong faith and conviction which
is totally unfair and can only be managed by self-deception.
Reason is not much help when religion is full of mystery. Every religionist believes this because all
are warned to subject faith to reason.
When reason contradicts faith it is ignored.
When they denounce doubt as sinful it is plain that they are being
anti-truth. You cannot reach truth or
honesty unless you doubt. You cannot
have evidence. Religionists know they
ought to doubt but they won’t do it.
Reason alone is no good to the religionists. They admit this. They stand for the position that it must be
supplemented by faith. But if reason is
supplemented by faith in God or faith in atheism then it gives a different
result, it brings you to different conclusions.
Such reason is irrational because you are pretending to be objective but
you are not. It is like using a
dictionary together with a system that changes the meaning. The book is rendered useless.
Miracles prove nothing because you only take them as evidence for God when
you already believe in him. That is
circular reasoning. God exists because
miracles happen and miracles happen because God exists.
The Mormons say that they have a testimony that Joseph Smith was a
prophet of God and that the Book of Mormon is the word of God. The Book of Mormon tells us that if we ask
God if it is his word that our bosoms will be miraculously made to burn within
us by the power of God producing the feeling that it is true. This is deception. It is ignoring reason to exalt feelings. All who use the Mormon test
know fine well that feeling something is true is no use. All religionists often feel that their
religion is true.
People with different gods claim to have experienced the presence of
their gods. Some think they experience
that God is without mercy while others think the opposite. Such experiences are really just
feelings. Religious experience is good
for nothing. When you are a child you
feel that you have a personal relationship with Santa Claus and experience his
love.
It is bigotry to claim that God exists because you have experienced him
because that means you are accusing atheists who claim to experience the
absence or the non-existence of God of being wrong or lying. If experience makes God true then different
ones make different gods true. The
result is contradiction and confusion.
Religionists must know that when they say they have evidence for their
faith which makes it worth following that this is not true. When they ask you to believe in their gospel
they are asking you to keep away from the truth and serve them as a liar.
The Case Against Christ which seeks to prove that Jesus was what
Christianity wants him to be says that in 1971 45% of members of British Mensa were involved in a Church. This is supposed to prove that Christianity
is not for the unintelligent (page 30).
This overlooks the fact that members of Mensa
are interested in thinking about their work and their brainteasers and not
about religion. Like everybody else,
they will not be experts in theology and will have their own rational
interpretation of Christian dogma.
Belief that is without evidence is not belief at all. And so is belief that decides to ignore the
evidence against it. If religion wasn’t
into that religion would not exist.
You cannot really believe or think that something is probably true when
you have no decent evidence for it. You
just feel that it is true and you know that feelings are not evidence. Feeling that God exists does not mean that he
does. Blind faith does not exist – it is
just feelings.
Religion says that faith is superior to reason. That means for Catholics, for example, reason
and experience must be told to go to Hell when the Church tells you what to
believe when the voice of the Church is at variance with the other two. They start off with faith (this faith is
really an assumption and is not real faith) not reason or experience. You cannot prove the faith unless you start
off with the latter pair so they are really people who don’t believe in
anything. They do not believe in the
pair when instead of being willing to hear them they just twist them. Even if they have evidence it does them no
good.
Religion offers you counterfeit faith.
That is what religion makes the world suffer for. Artificial faith. What could be more evil than religion?
Few people examine their faith to see if it is true. And those who do not do a
very good or thorough job. Christianity
is a complicated religion and hard to defend.
Roman Catholicism especially so. You can believe that A never committed the
murder of B and still study and test the evidence that A murdered B. If you are confident that A didn’t murder B
you will not be afraid to research.
Fearing the truth means you suspect that your belief is wrong. Yet many are led to feel that thinking
critically about their religion is traitorous.
The hatred Christians spew against those who think critically about Christianity
proves how they don’t want anybody else saying what the Christians know or
suspect but won’t dare admit. If you
won’t think then you don’t believe in your religion at all. If you thought it was true you would not be
afraid.
McGrath told us that the Catholic Church used to use reason to get to
faith and then reason was dumped once that goal was achieved. The Catholics would have said it was like
throwing away the ladder when it was climbed.
McGrath says it is like sawing off the branch one is sitting on. So this is claiming that faith does not
conflict with reason and needs reason to exist.
But if that is true then it is unlawful to throw away the ladder or cut
off the branch. The faith cannot be
reasonable any more when it dispenses with reason and chooses to forget
it. It shuts out reason which is
shutting out the possibility of discovering that what one believes is wrong and
must cease being believed. When faith is
seen as God speaking to me now to help me believe and have a relationship with
him then there is no need for that kind of faith for it is just worried about
doctrinal information rather than the relationship. McGrath said the problem was that few people
reasoned their way to faith properly or carefully so this understanding of
faith condemns the faith of the majority though right as irrational for it is
not based on the right reasons.
A bit of examination is no use. We
all know that every group has its answers for our question which shows that we
need to go into theological matters until we can go no further. What if we have no time for sufficient money? Spiritual matters come first. God told us to suffer and maybe even die for
the truth. The fact that we would need a
lot of time or money just proves that the clergy do not like you thinking too
much. They could make it easy but do
not. They want to stand between you and
real belief.
Incidentally, religion forbids doubt which does not prevent you from
seeing the evidence for or against your religion but which seeks to stop you
from seeing what it implies so that it is looked at with one eye closed and the
other open.
Religions like Christianity which make Gnosis or knowledge of faith make
you tell yourself a lie that you know your beliefs to be true. How can God or faith be trusted when it is a
lie? The result is not even belief much
less knowledge.
Every religion is based on what it calls faith.
Every religion forbids doubt. They allow doubt as part of the journey
towards faith but if you attain faith and doubt afterwards it’s a sin. However
if it is not deliberate doubt then, its not a sin but
something that has to be resolved. So
religion takes it for granted that for believers to doubt it deliberately, is a
sin.
The Roman Catholic Church teaches that it is infallible and irrevocable
doctrine that faith is infused by God’s miracle power at baptism. This means that the child that is baptised is
not allowed to doubt any information about faith and morals coming from the
Church at all. At least pagans are
better off for the Church says they can doubt all they want before they are
ready for the gift of faith. Infant
baptism is vicious and an assault on human rights when it is claimed that it
turns a person into a believer and member of the Church, the body of believers.
In A Catechism
of Christian Doctrine, Question 177, we read, “The sins against Faith are
all false religions, wilful doubt, disbelief, or denial of any article of
Faith, and also culpable ignorance of any of the doctrines of the Church”. Apologetics and Catholic Doctrine,
Part 1, tells us that God never suffers anybody to lose their faith and that it
is lost only through a mortal sin of refusing to believe any more and is lost
by the laziness of not reading Catholic books and reading what has not been
permitted by the Church and by talking religion with others of a different
religion or marrying one of them or ceasing to believe on account of scandals
in the Church or by pride that wants to prove everything by reason and won’t be
satisfied by faith or by neglecting prayer and the sacraments (pages
224-226). Thoughts that question the
faith are to be thrust out of our minds like impure temptations (page
227).
Jesus condemned doubt as a sin. He
said that God will only do you the favour of answering prayer if your faith is
unwavering.
Jesus claimed to be
the way, truth and the life (John 14:6)- that is he
gives us the life of God and we experience God living inside us. It follows then that he came to be truth and
life for us. It follows then that once you believe in him and experience his
life-giving power you have no excuse for departing from the faith or any part
of it. The New Testament claims to be
the truth and that those who believe have the truth (2 Timothy 6:3,4). So it is
forbidden for the Christian to say, “I believe I have the truth”. The Christian must say, “I have the
truth.” There is no doubt that
Christianity advocates stubborn arrogance. Truth is naturally intolerant of error so if
you have the truth then tolerating those who differ or their views would be
wrong.
To be a doubt, a doubt has to be sincere.
If one tricks oneself in order to doubt that does not make the doubt a
sin for it is not real doubt. It is the
trickery that is the sin. A doubt can be
evil in the sense that it keeps you from the truth but it can never be sinful
or intentionally evil. Anybody who
doubts knows that it is not a sin.
Religion is making something sincere and which is a search for the facts
a sin which is slanderous and impossible.
They are opposed to doubt because it takes you out of their
control. They want your mind.
If God or Jesus made doubt a sin like the Bible says they did then they
were dreadful people.
To condemn doubt as sinful is to say that it should be punished. Catholicism considers doubt to be a mortal
sin, a sin that cuts you off God unlike venial sin, which is to say that it
will lead to everlasting punishment in Hell.
It is so serious because it strikes at the most important thing a
Christian has, the faith. If it is a
mortal sin, that is a great intolerable evil, to
commit adultery and if you doubt that it is then you are approving of a serious
evil. It would be the same with murder
if you only believe it is wrong because of your religion. If doubt is a sin then it is a mortal sin for
it approves, whether you like it or not or admit it or not, of this mortal
sin. Doubt is always mortally sinful
unless it cannot be helped. The doctrine
of Jesus that we must love God with all our heart and this is the greatest
commandment and looking after yourself and your neighbour has only secondary
importance implies that authority is the basis of morality. You avoid certain actions
because God says so. Even if we have
rational reasons for believing that murder is wrong we use them to prove to
ourselves that God is right. We believe
then not because of the reasons but because of God. Because he has decreed it.
If I believe murder is bad because it hurts and for no other reason then
I am not submitting to God but to my thinking.
If I believe murder is bad because God says so and though I see that it
is bad for it hurts, my motive is to believe what God wants me to believe God
will be happy. This is what Jesus
wanted. See the point?
The fact that your thinking makes you believe in God in the first place hasn’t
occurred to Jesus and Co so people are only pretending that they can obey God
out of sheer respect for his authority.
It is still all about you. To
realise this truth is the greatest possible sin according to Jesus’ injunction
that loving God totally is the one thing you must do no matter what.
Faith is the foundation without which a religion cannot be so the claim
that doubt is always malicious and evil and sinful IS religion. Everything that a religionist does for their a blind and defaming faith is evil for it is done for
the love of evil.
You may think, “The unbeliever can decide that he was wrong and start to
believe in religion. But the religious
believer does not have freedom. He
cannot claim he has the right to change his mind and maybe lose the faith. This does not make the faith of the religious
person illogical or irrational or silly.
A secular liberal must hold that it would be wrong for him to become a
narrow Nazi.”
Who is the most open to reason then?
It is the unbeliever. Who is the
most humble then? It is the unbeliever. The religious person IS irrational and
arrogant. A secular liberal would indeed
be very anti-Nazi. But if he changed and
became a Nazi he would then have to be very anti-secular-liberal. When we adopt positions whether we care to
admit it or not we are rejecting and therefore hindering the power of a party
or school of thought. To say, “I am a
Protestant but not anti-Catholic is a contradiction. If you really think you are right you want
other people to believe what you believe.
And if you don’t think you are right then you are not a true Protestant
but a fake.”
The liberal refuses
to become a Nazi because he sees Nazism as evil. As long as he is liberal he will hold
that. But he will keep his mind
open. If you believe something you have
to be in some way against other ideas. But that doesn’t mean you are closed
minded.
The religious person
has to be against other ideas that are incompatible with his or her faith and
cannot keep the mind open. They cannot
say they are wrong in matters of religious dogma. That is the difference.
Every religion is opposed to you finding out that it is wrong.
When you really believe someone you are saying that they are not lying to
you now. If they would lie for no reason
you cannot really believe for you don’t know if they are being honest. You may only act as if you do because a
feeling tells you they are not lying but that is not
believing them.
Religion claims to be a revelation from another world or plane of
reality. If you deny one thing that that
revelation says you are ceasing to believe in the rest of its doctrines. You are not denying the rest but you are
saying that they can neither be believed or
disbelieved. Similarly, if you doubt one
doctrine you automatically cast doubt on everything else.
Newman said that a thousand difficulties do not add up to one doubt. That is totally wrong. The more difficulties you have with a dogma
the harder it is to believe it. To say
the difficulties do not affect your faith is to lie. The degree to which you
find it hard to believe is the degree to which you doubt. If the difficulties do not affect your faith
then they are not real difficulties and you are only pretending that they
are. Your faith then is obviously
opposed to the evidence whatever the evidence might be meaning that it is not
faith at all for real faith does not hide from the truth and from
evidence.
Newman’s comments underline what Christianity and most religion hopes to
achieve. When something comes up that
refutes your faith they want you to remain true to the faith and hope and wait
for the refutation to fall on its face.
The corrupting and harmfulness of this outlook is shown plainly by an
example of the same kind of faith that religion demands. Here it is.
If you believe that all homosexuals are gay by choice because they want
to be promiscuous you will believe it despite the huge number of celibate
gays. You will say you need further
light before you can even consider thinking that the celibates prove you wrong
and that the light might not be given to the world until after you are in your
grave. But how can you see if you are
wrong when you have that attitude? It is
extremely dangerous not to mention insulting.
If Catholics have the right to this nasty attitude so does the person
who wants to believe that coloured people are inferior beings and to be
enslaved and the Catholic would be most nasty and hypocritical to try and
restrain that person and his pen. Muslim
fanatics use the same excuse for believing that God though merciful wants them
to kill heretics. They say it is a
mystery that is not yet solved in this world and which may be only explained
after death in Heaven. This stubbornness
arises from the desire for security and can result in well-concealed arrogance
and contempt for truth. Whatever it
gives you is not entitled to be called faith.
It is not faith it is about but working for enslavement to a religious
system. How could you have faith when
you repose in the hope of a solution when you know people who have nothing in
common with you religiously are doing the same thing? I mean how could you have faith when you do
something that so plainly blinds you to evidence that contradicts
you? Real faith is not scared of the
truth. If there is a true religion it
has to be solidly rational and have excellent evidences. In this the architects of the French
Revolution were correct that religion should be kept within the limits of
reason alone and that the credo of the Roman Church would have to be disposed
of.
Christianity likes to say the prayer of Peter, “Lord, I believe. Help me overcome my unbelief”. This denies that if you disbelieve some
elements in Jesus’ doctrine that you automatically cast doubt on the rest. Jesus did not tell Peter that. Presumably, Jesus’ famous honesty had had a
lapse. Anyway, the prayer expresses the
Christian notion that if you cannot believe, that is God’s will, not that you
are resisting in which case you could not say the prayer. For some reason, he cannot let you believe
either not at all or fully though he wants all to believe. In that case you should try to believe, pray
to believe and live what you should believe.
It is supposed to be the effort that counts. All that sounds very nice. But if you don’t believe at all or fully then
you have beliefs that conflict with the faith.
You are being asked to refuse to be true to your beliefs and live out
what you reject and that is evil. And
religion still tells us to be true to ourselves! The world cannot progress if non-beliefs are
put before beliefs. It is not even an
honest way to live.
All religionists admit that they have doubts. Doubt rejects authority so it is rejecting
the authority. Yet we don’t hear of
priests taking time off to resolve their unbelief. They feign belief to deceive us all. We don’t hear people being told to stay away
from the Church if they have faith problems.
We don’t see the clergy making an effort to help lay doubts to rest as
fast as possible. God wants all to
believe so he would want us to cast them out fast. We don’t see a queue outside their houses which
would be the case if they and their devotees were honest.
If you ask God to strengthen your faith like religion recommends you must
mean that you want God to deepen your intellectual acceptance of it. That acceptance would only be weak if you had
doubts. You are evilly asking God to
increase a faith that you don’t have.
Religion is hypocrisy for all have doubts.
Grace is God planting feelings
and thoughts in you in the hope of getting you to behave in a holy way and think
what he wants you to think. It is a wholly evil doctrine for grace means free
gift and implies that we don’t deserve to be assisted in becoming holy. Whoever
believes with the Christian Church that grace is necessary for faith cannot
really have faith in such an evil God.
When religion has a lot of
mysteries – apparent contradictions – it is taught that you need grace to
believe them for you cannot understand them with your own intellect (page 66,
What is Faith?). So, a religion that teaches that faith is caused by grace
must have a faith full of mysteries and a religion of mystery must have a
doctrine of faith being behind grace! Otherwise there is no need to be helped
to believe by God.
This leads only to absurdity.
It means that you have to use reason to get to faith and then you eschew the
reasons you believe as if they were wrong. But that is dropping faith and
replacing it with so-called faith or a pretence. And the reasons must be far
from sufficient and satisfactory when grace is required. The reasons can’t
cause faith.
You cannot believe in nonsense
or in what you perceive to be unintelligible and religious mystery is a prime
example of incoherence. If you need grace to believe you are trying to believe
what is unintelligible to you but how could you get the grace when you adhere to
the sin of trying to insult your intelligence? God can’t give grace to a person
who does not really want it when he won’t do God’s will if God’s will is not to
denigrate your intelligence. To refuse to love God in anything is to refuse to
love him at all. One sin defiles all you do.
If grace makes the Catholic
believe then what makes the Hindu monist accept doctrines like pantheism which
are just as ludicrous as Catholicism? Catholics want to say that God enables
you to believe them and deny that God enables Hindus to believe even though they
say we can’t believe mysteries without God. The lies would sicken any decent
person.
Paul said that the grace that is
faith saves for it is humble and good. We see that it is really a pride-filled
deceptive form of opposition to God and true decency.
You cannot attain to the grace
so it is madness that is wrong with you if you believe and can’t believe without
the grace.
The unholy Bible teaches the
doctrine that faith is a supernatural gift from God. This doctrine gets the
most treatment from St Paul who needed treatment himself of the psychiatric kind
or he knew his converts did! He was certainly a liar. Ephesians 2 says that
grace saves us through faith and that none of this is of ourselves but is the
gift of God.
You need total proof before you
can consider obeying God’s command to die for the spread of the faith or to
avoid abjuring it. This proof does not exist so it is clear that faith is
considered to be magical knowledge. That means that nobody can lose their faith
without malevolently departing from divinely given knowledge. To accuse them of
insincerity and heresy would be to condone suspicion and sectarianism.
Many religions teach that faith
is knowledge or that though you say you believe you should treat and think of
this belief as one hundred per cent certain for you even you it is not in the
sight of correct reason. They say that it is certain for you and only a miracle
by God could make it that way. Where are the psychiatrists and psychologists
who can’t explain such religious faith? Nowhere. Wouldn’t it be an attempt to
become insane? It isn’t faith so why is it called that? The promise of real
faith is used as a bait for believers to work on their transformation into
insane people. The Church wants people that way to mould and shape them into
her distorted idea of perfection.
Jesus was as bad when he said we
must love God totally, that is alone, and to love ourselves and others for him
which is not really loving them at all. You can’t do that if faith is just what
is probable for that leaves a part that is not sure. Jesus specifically said
that God has to be loved with all the mind and not just with the heart or will.
He did not say as much as we could do or was the ideal. God does not command
the impossible. He did not refer to proofs for God and indeed the Jews had none
but their allegedly miraculous scriptures so we can’t make the excuse for him
that he thought God should be put first for he can be proved. Even if he can be
I am still more sure I exist than God does or even that reason is correct if it
leads to God for perhaps our reasons is only what we think is reason.
God commanded the same via
Moses.
You need total proof before you
can consider obeying God’s command to die for the spread of the faith or to
avoid abjuring it. This proof does not exist so it is clear that faith is
considered to be magical knowledge. That means that nobody can lose their faith
without malevolently departing from divinely given knowledge. To accuse them of
insincerity and heresy would be to condone suspicion and sectarianism.
Jesus said that it was eternal
life to know him and God in John 17:3. There is no hint that he meant know to
be likely to be true so it was know in the full sense. See 1 John 5:20.
Chapter 2 speaks of the early Gnostics who sinned freely but claimed to know God
and John says only a person who is obedient could say that. The Gnostics said
that knowledge was superior to belief so John is not denying that there is such
a thing as such knowledge but is saying that they do not possess it.
Such a doctrine proves that
those Christians who say that an unfair bias necessarily exists in those who say
that Jesus never rose or worked miracles are wrong. The sceptics are or should
be biased towards the truth but the early Church was a fruitcake cult biased
towards false doctrine and therefore unworthy of trust.
When faith is intended to be
experienced as knowledge it might as well be real knowledge. God could implant
the necessary education and proofs into our mind like you put files on a
computer program. And yet there are excuses for why God can’t give real
knowledge miraculously like, “Oh God would rather we were not completely sure
for it is more sacrificial to sacrifice for things that you are not sure of,”
and, “God would be forcing us to stay believing if it was knowledge and others
would be forced by our knowledge to start believing.”
The doctrine of faith being caused by grace or God's miraculous power clearly opens the door to fundamentalism. Islamic terrorists don't go that far with faith. They would be worse if they did.
It is sectarianism to teach, “My Church is right and everybody else’s is
wrong”, when you have little or nothing to support this contention with. Religion will say the same but it tolerates
and nurtures the very blind faith it condemns.
It is bigotry to enter your child into a religion when you don’t have any
evidence that you should and it is not old enough to see the evidence if it
exists. You are putting conformity and
the convenience of not upsetting the family or neighbours before your child’s
welfare. It does not bother you that you
may be sending your child into a life of error and self-deceit with possible
hellfire at the end for having been enrolled in the wrong faith.
The average religionist cannot defend her or his faith in any convincing
way. The vast majority of Christians do
not understand Christian doctrine. They
learn it in a catechism at school and a few months later it is forgotten. These people have a merely blind faith. What good is evidence for belief when you
don’t know what your cult teaches? They
know that a God would want them to be wise in the ways of religion. You need to know God and what his principles
are. They do not care and then they call
themselves good Christians. How could
they be really good with an attitude like that?
Their good works are really bad when they are done with a sense of
loyalty to evil.
Wilful ignorance means you are bent on doing as you wish and do not care
what harm you do with your errors.
Anybody who is truly godly would be trying to become a religious expert
or would be one already.
The clergy complain about the ignorance of the reluctance of the people
to learn more. But all the learning
tools that are provided are just vague dogmatic books which are not much good
and have no great intellectual depths and which only demolish the criticisms
they can handle and ignore the rest as though they never existed. There is no productive effort made to eradicate
the disease of blind faith. Blind faith
is really fostered by them.
The Church condemns you if you repeat an accusation against a person that
has little or no evidence in its favour.
But then it turns around and praises you for accusing other religions of
being wrong when you cannot defend your beliefs. It wants to be reckless with everything
except itself. Exploitation is its
game. It is bigoted towards you when it
does that. It treats you as an inferior
because it wants to think of you as one.
Young children are taken to Church to pray and be indoctrinated. Wafers said to be the flesh of Christ are
thrust into the mouths of seven-year-olds in Catholicism. Children like this treatment and are expected
despite their naivety and inexperience to believe and are treated as true
believers. This is a prime example of
manipulation on the part of the Church.
The evil of blind faith and blind obedience is demanded of the children,
degrading them, debasing them, abusing them.
The evil is applauded. Blind
faith is treacherous and the priests and other clergy know it so don’t believe
their explanation that their having taken advantage of children is about
instilling good habits. You don’t need
to instil blind faith in a child to instil good habits. Childlike faith through praised by Christ is
harmful and gives the clergy an unfair advantage. Children may believe lots of things on blind
faith but that is necessary unlike religious belief. There is nothing we can do but tell them that
the sea exists even if they have never seen the sea or pictures of it. But that is nothing like telling them that
their parents’ religion is true for when there are so many different religions
it follows that all you can do is tell them what different ones teach and guide
them to make their own choice when they grow up. We have to tell what is proven but it is
wrong to tell them what is not proven.
Nobody can prove their religion and it is very hard work therefore
nobody has their right to indoctrinate their children.
The clergy don’t give the people any decent evidence for living the way
they tell them to live. They manipulate
them to get their blind faith and then they tell them to oppose other religions which is bigotry.
To enter your child into the Catholic Faith instead of letting the child
find her own path is opposing other religions and it is unfair. It is bigotry to be against other religions
when you don’t know if your own is true.
Belief is only an excuse when it is solidity based on evidence.
Suppose you believe in Jesus Christ and have evidence for it and it is
true that your faith is caused by grace.
Suppose that Jesus is inspiring you to believe the evidence. If you have made a mistake and believe
something that contradicts the message of Jesus Christ though you think it is a
part of it then you think the evidence, which here is the divine testimony, is
telling you that it is true. It is
impossible to believe that Jesus would help you to believe error by opening
your mind to false evidence. He would be
telling you that the lie is true and your reason will tell you that he was
wrong and cannot be trusted when you find out.
What use are miracles as credentials for the true religion if faith,
God’s magic gift, is so often wrong and misleads?
If you believe one error then you believe in a God who is not really good
without knowing it. God is goodness so it
follows that a mistake means that you don’t believe in God but in a mockery of
God.
If the solution offered is that error arises from false faith and the
rest from true faith the whole faith package is spoiled for the error is taken
for a part of the true faith. All
believe they may have erred in the evidence so nobody can trust their Jesus.
Religious beliefs are really a belief, a single belief. For example, to believe that the Virgin never
sinned and that priests pardon sins is to say that the Roman Church is inspired
by God. Everything is able to imply
everything else directly or indirectly.
The individual doctrines are just part of the one belief and that belief
is that the Church speaks for God and is authorised by him and doesn’t err.
It would be a sign that you believe not because of grace but because of
something else.
If you believed by the grace of God you would be infallible.
It follows then that only infallible Christians, that would mean at most
one in every hundred million, can be saved according to the Bible for only they
have opened themselves up to the saving faith that is necessary according to
the Bible. The Churches then are largely
scams for money and power.
The Catholic Church sees faith as a virtue.
This leads to the persecution and slander of unbelievers.
The Lord offers
the grace of faith to all. If good he
must. It is often taught that we are
free to accept or reject this offer. But
how can we unless we believe in the first place for you cannot sincerely accept
or refuse what you do not understand?
All must first believe in it to reject it. God has forced all to believe. All our thoughts are forced on us anyway so
it makes no difference. We can’t help
what we believe or know so it doesn’t matter if it is forced on us. In the present moment, I am unable to change
the things in the past that make me believe.
McGrath declared in his Believing in God that we cannot decide what
we are going to believe (page 131). So
how could faith be a virtue?
Even some unbelievers hold that the two major objections to faith or
belief being a moral issue which are that belief is involuntary and that it is
the individual’s own business do not do away with the objection that the
terrible things that people like Torquemada do are
not to be praised even if they sincerely believed they were doing right
therefore you can be condemned for your harmful beliefs (page 408, Reason
and Belief). What I like
about this is that it forbids evil beliefs like that God is right to torment
people in Hell forever or that to use birth control deserves eternal punishment
or that the brother you can see and touch comes second to the God you can’t see
or touch The Christian who supports
those tenets cannot use the excuse that it is good of God to do that for Torquemada would have said the same about his belief that
heretics should be cruelly destroyed for the glory of the Catholic Church. Even those who do evil are doing good as they
see it. If they don’t mean to do evil
that is very true. And it is still true
if they consciously do evil for they see the evil as attractive and therefore good. This shows that faith and trust and belief
have nothing to do with moral intent which is the only thing that counts in
morality. This shows that the legal
system should be centred on opposing dangerous beliefs with truth and even the
rigours of the penal system for when error is a threat to morality or belief in
right and wrong there is no alternative.
Religion should drop harmful fanatical doctrines and has nobody but itself to blame if it gets on the wrong side of the
law. It shows that religion’s fanaticism
should have no hearing when it comes to governments deciding what the law
should do. If religion wants unbelief to
be a sin then it gives others the right to condemn itself
and despise it for its beliefs. Even if unbelief
is not a sin religion still consents to this treatment for when it demands it
for others it must expect such treatment in return. No wonder it gets defensive and no wonder
sectarianism is a poison that goes hand in hand with religion. It gives sectarianism the status quo in legitimacy. Jesus regarded lack of faith and belief as a
sin which shows he hadn’t the slightest clue what he was talking about. He was anything but a Son of God for he could
not manage even to be a prophet. If
anybody raised him from the dead it was Satan.
So Jesus as good as confessed that it was evil to teach doctrines like
eternal punishing and still taught it showing that the doctrine is nothing more
than spiteful wishful thinking. There is
no hate worse than cold hate like this. He
wanted those who displeased him to rot in Hell forever. Nobody could in justice hold such a belief as
eternal punishing lightly. If you want
to believe in it and call yourself holy you would have to go and do heroic good
works. That might lessen the cloud over
you for believing such a doctrine but the cloud can never go away. You are still admitting you want to believe that
sinners deserve such a harsh fate.
It has been observed that Christians do not say one has faith that there
is no God and that there is faith in things we do not see for we believe in
Mars though we have not seen it so faith, in their view, must mean tricking
yourself into ignoring the evidence and telling yourself that you believe until
you really believe. Religion says that
it is reasonable to trust God. This is
true if he exists and you can prove it.
But believing that God exists though there is no evidence or proof is
made a part of this trust for God does not lead you discreetly to see that he
exists and then reveal himself to you. So trust in God forbids you to see any
contrary evidence.
Newman wrote that we will never do anything if we keep looking for proof
in life so we have to assume that a person or God is trustworthy and to assume
is to have faith. That is advocating
discrimination for God allows a lot of suffering and makes killer viruses and
sends sinners to Hell forever and a tyrant does less evil and is vilified for
it. You see how a tyrant could use religious
approbation for the evil of God to persuade people to afford him the same
privilege. He could tell people that he
is authorised by God to do what he does and God has it all in control. He could tell people that it is not fair of
them to judge a being they don’t really know as good while they know he exists
and call him an evil tyrant. It is very
easy to believe that if your trials come from God and God is using them to
better you that you should feel a disinclination to stand up for yourself. Tyrants would love you to be like that.
But we should always look for some evidence. Assuming is bad news unless it is something
unimportant or an emergency. If we are
unable to get evidence that does not mean we should close our minds to what the
evidence against an assumption says and religion commands us to shut them
firmly.
To call faith a virtue and then to bring others to that faith is a
serious crime. It invites Muslim
fanatics and all to follow suit with the result that the hold their dangerous
faith has on them gets too strong so that they become willing to do terrible
things for it. Even if this faith does
not include murder and the abuse of women, it is still out to give people who
disagree with you a lot of trouble and a hard time. So much then for faith being a virtue!
Religious
faith is insincere for you can’t have faith where doubt is forbidden, where
reason is silenced in order to stay orthodox, where the evidence is not real
evidence, where faith is thought to be a revelation from God to you that you
cannot question.
BOOKS CONSULTED
A Catechism of Christian Doctrine, Catholic Truth Society,
A Common Faith, John Dewey,
A Primer of Necessary Belief, Dawson Jackson
,Victor Gollancz Ltd,
Apologetics and Catholic Doctrine, M H Gill and Son Ltd,
Faith and Ambiguity, Stewart R Sutherland, SCM Press,
God and Philosophy,
In Defence of the Faith, Dave Hunt, Harvest House, Eugene Oregon, 1996
On Being a Christian, Hans Kung, Collins/Fount Paperbacks,
Reason and Belief, Bland Blanschard,
Reason and Religion, Anthony Kenny, Basil Blackwell Ltd,
The Balance of Truth, EI Watkin, Hollis & Carter,
The Case Against Christ, John
Young, Falcon Books,
The End of Faith,
Religion, Terror And The Future Of Reason, Sam Harris,
Free Press,
The Faith of a Subaltern, Alec de Candole, Cambridge University Press, 1919
The Fundamental Questions of Philosophy, A.C.
Ewing, Routledge and Kegan
Paul,
The Future of Belief Debate, Ed Gregory Baum, Herder and
Herder,
The Student’s Catholic Doctrine, Rev Charles Hart BA, Burns
& Oates,
Unblind Faith, Michael J Langford, SCM,
What is Christianity?
Very Rev W Moran DD, Catholic Truth Society of
What is Faith?
Anthony Kenny,