Essay 1.

 

I don’t think I will be saying anything new or creative in this essay. I can only repeat what I have read and have experienced in my lifetime.

 

Religions.

 

There are presently quite a number of religions, I don’t know how many. There may be hundreds. On the Internet, one source said there is over 4000. Most of them say they are the TRUE religion and accuse others of having the wrong religion and for that reason they are surely going to Hell. Countless lives have been destroyed because of this idea. There have been killings, burnings, knifings, hangings, bombings, and persecutions of all sorts because of religion. One can not read the paper, listen to radio or TV daily with out hearing about some atrocity committed by religious peoples who think their religion is the right one and the other person’s religion is wrong. The Protestants hate the Catholics, Muslims hate the Christians, Christians hate the Jews, and Hindus hate the Sikhs and so on ad infinitum. Each group hates the other because their religion is not of the right sort.

 

Lying.

 

When a person says that he believes in a philosophy but doesn’t, that person is lying. This causes problems. It caused me problems. I said that I believed in God, Jesus, and the bible when I didn’t. This came about because of pressure from my wife and other members of the Church of Christ. They said I was surely going to hell if I didn’t become a member of the Church of Christ. This is terrorism in its worst form.

 

Now when you take someone as gullible as I am and heap on a lot of preaching and threats of eternal damnation, what is that person to do? I accepted Christ because of this constant pressure and became a Christian many years ago. I went about pretending to be a Christian and really disliked it all the time.  There are things that the religion of the Church of Christ, and other religions for that matter, requires you to do. Many things I did not like to do. I’d like to tell you how I feel about some of them.

 

 

 

 

 

Everyone Get One.

 

The Christian religion requires that everyone should “go into the all the world and preach the gospel.” In other words, if you’re a Christian, you are obliged to get someone else converted to the Christian religion (or else, you’re going to hell). In order to fulfill this requirement while I was posing as a Christian, I managed to alienate both my brother and my sister, and most everyone I came in contact with. I made a lot of enemies with my proselytizing. I have subsequently asked their forgiveness.

 

Church Attendance.

 

I do not like to attend church and take part in rituals. In years past when I lived in France and Germany I enjoyed sitting in various cathedrals and listen to the music, study the architecture, and admire the statuary in these magnificent buildings.  But I have heard just about all the preaching I can stand from the Christian churches. I hear nothing new. The sermons are repetitive, boring and usually designed to threaten you with eternal damnation.  I despise the theory of hell. That’s one of the principal themes of the Church of Christ sermons. If heaven is like church, I don’t want to participate. As Mark Twain said “Most people can’t stand much church, an hour a week is more than enough.” (I don’t subscribe to the heaven and hell and the afterlife business either. It is my belief that once you’re dead, that’s it. More later in this essay.)

 

 

 

 

Prayer.

 

I can’t think of anything more worthless than praying. You might as well talk to a brick wall. Oh, it might make some people feel better but it doesn’t do anything for me. If you are going to pray, pray for something that you know will have a positive outcome. For example, pray that the sun will come up tomorrow, or that the traffic light will soon change to green. You won’t be disappointed. Don’t bother to pray for a favorable outcome from a sickness or escape from some horrible situation. I often asked myself, when I toured Dachau concentration camp near Munich, Germany, what must have been the feelings of all those Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals, and crippled and mentally defective people that were systemically put to death at the hands of Christians. I’m sure they must have prayed to their God for an escape from this horror. The Catholic Christians just stood by and did nothing to stop that horror; maybe they even abetted in those crimes against humanity.

 

Carl Sagan, terribly sick with cancer, in an interview with Parade Magazine on March 10, 1996, said the following: “Five thousand people prayed for me at an Easter service at the cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City, the largest church in Christendom. A Hindu priest describes a large prayer vigil for me held on the banks of the Ganges. The Imam of North America told me about his prayers for my recovery. Many Christians and Jews wrote to tell me about theirs. While I do not think that, if there is a god, his plan for me will be altered by prayer, I’m more grateful than I can say to those, including so many I have not met, who have pulled for me during my illness.” Carl died of the cancer.

 

I can not believe that this Supreme Being can be pleased with the continual pleading of religious folks. I have listened to the prayers of the faithful nigh on to 60 years and I am bored to tears with them. I would hope to hear something new, fresh, and meaningful from a  “prayer’s” prayers. Most of the men I know that have said prayers say the same thing hundreds of others have said over and over again. Most participate in prayer because they were obliged to by someone that was getting a roster of men together to organize a church service.

 

Miracles.

 

I do not believe in miracles. I like what Thomas Paine said about miracles. I must paraphrase it because I do not have a copy of his works in front of me at this time. He said that when you hear of a person reporting that they saw a miracle happen or saw something happen that was contrary to nature, something that caused nature to go out of its course, one should ask two questions. First, when have we ever seen nature go contrary to its course (Never)? Secondly, how many reporters have turned out to be liars? (Billions of times because people lie every day, all day long.) So it is more likely that the reporter of the miracle was lying and no such thing as a miracle occurred. It’s like the reports of UFOs. People claim all sorts of sightings, but no one ever presented any creditable evidence of the existence of a UFO or aliens from outer space. These people are lying or they have been duped or had too much to drink.

 

I’ll believe in miracles when the person who says they do happen can bring a dead person back to life instantly, one who has been dead for years, perhaps my dear daughter, Gwen, not one who just a few moments ago seemed to have died. Or cause a full-grown oak tree to appear in my computer room right now as I work on this essay. To that person I’ll do homage. I think you can understand that’ll never happen.

 

The bible talks of many miracles happening. We never saw any of them happen. Someone said they saw a “miracle” and we are asked to take their word for it. It wasn’t the person that saw the miracle that reported it but someone years later said that the first person told them about it.  That is hearsay evidence upon hearsay and I am not obliged to believe it. Some of the so-called miracles that are mentioned in the bible only strengthen my feelings against miracles and the veracity of the bible. It is through these fabulous tales (fables) that, in my mind, destroys the validity of scripture. They are like fairy tales.

 

In classical antiquity Cicero asserted that “nothing happens without a cause, and nothing happens unless it can happen. When that which can happen does in fact happen, it can not be considered a miracle. Hence there are no miracles." Cicero qualified this statement, however, by saying that miracle stories may be necessary for the piety of ignorant folk.

 

The Afterlife.

 

As I mentioned previously, I do not believe in life after death. My feelings on this subject agree with Carl Sagan’s. He said, in the aforementioned article, “I would love to believe that when I die I will live again, that some thinking, feeling, and remembering part of me will continue. But as much as I want to believe that, and despite the ancient and worldwide cultural traditions that assert an afterlife, I know of nothing to suggest that it is more than wishful thinking.”

 

No one knows what it is like to be dead. We have never in our experience talked to one that was dead for years, came back to life, and told us what it was like. I have been under anesthesia several times in my life during surgery and when I awoke from that condition I had no memory of what went on. It is as if there is a blank space in my stream of consciousness, a notch, so to speak, in my awareness. I think that death will be like that. I will know nothing then. This is one of the reasons that I like to avoid unnecessary sleep. During that time I am unconscious and I am not aware of anything except when I dream. As Morrie Schwartz said in the book “Tuesdays with Morrie,” when you’re in bed, you’re dead.