God and His Demons

As much of this book suggests, perhaps we should not blame God for the endless religious turmoil but his creators, those self-appointed holy hucksters who deign to speak on his behalf. God himself is remote, removed, invisible, inaudible, and unknowable. He does nothing to us, nothing for or against us, because he probably does not exist, neither in the way he has been fashioned by his shills nor in any way that allows us to comprehend him (or her or it)

To win our unswerving devotion why doesn't God communicate with us directly? The holy writings of the Hebrew, Christian, and Muslim faiths reveal that God is obsessed with getting us to believe in him. Why then does he do so little to make his presence known? How can we believe in his existence unless we have evidence of it? The “evidence” we do have comes from only the select few to whom he purportedly speaks: prophets, preachers, priests, pastors, popes, and patriarchs. He, who has a matchless capacity to transmit his message instantaneously and simultaneously to everyone in the world, has chosen a sadly piecemeal and unsure mode of communication.

Religious commentator Adrian Reddy notes,

In addition to being extremely slow and inefficient, the use of prophets suffers from the drawback that each prophet has to establish his own credibility. In ancient times, as now, there [has been] no way…for a person to distinguish reliably between a real prophet and a false one and, as a result, false prophets confuse the picture even more. So the question is: why would God risk the rejection of His words by choosing a method of revelation which lacks credibility because it is so obviously open to fakery and self-delusion?

Those who profit most from the ongoing social order will propagate an idealized image of the dominant culture, passing over its murky aspects. Culture often operates as a cover for a host of grim realities and grave injustices, benefiting a privileged portion of society

It is said that we denizens of the modern secular world cannot grasp the customary equations of happiness and pain that characterize more traditionally “spiritual” societies. This is probably true, and it may explain why some of us idealize such societies. But still, a gouged eye is a gouged eye, a flogging is a flogging, a raped child is a raped child, and the grinding exploitation of serfs and slaves is a brutal injustice whatever its legitimating cultural wrapping. There is a difference between a human bond and human bondage.

“The Lamaist monk does not spend his time in ministering to the people or educating them…. The beggar beside the road is nothing to the monk. Knowledge is the jealously guarded prerogative of the monasteries and is used to increase their influence and wealth.

The theocratic extremists within Christianity, Islam, and various other religions today sing much the same refrain as did the absolutists of yore. It goes something like this:

We embrace our religion because we know in our hearts and minds it is true. Were it not true, we would not hold to it. Since ours is the one true faith, it follows that all other faiths are false.

False beliefs about the most important questions of one's life and one's soul are not only wrong but wrongful, an offense to God. Therefore, inflicting sanctions upon recalcitrant heretics and infidels is a laudable service to the Almighty.

In addition, as St. Paul warns, those of little faith are most likely to succumb to degrading immoral passions. The nonbelievers and false believers are the fornicators, adulterers, self-abusers, and the “effeminate ones” given over to “vile affections

In the mind of the theocrats, “religious freedom” means the right to roll back secular culture and impose a monochromatic belief system upon everyone. Right-wing fundamentalist leader Randall Terry told an audience of the like-minded faithful: “I want you to just let a wave of intolerance wash over you…. Our goal is a Christian nation…. We are called by God to conquer this country. We don't want equal time. We don't want pluralism

One is often told that it is a very wrong thing to attack religion because religion makes men virtuous. So I am told; I have not noticed it.

—BERTRAND RUSSELL

For years church leaders clung to the “few bad apples” argument, treating the charges as hysterical exaggeration. Courageous priests who called for investigations of the problem sometimes had their careers blocked. Some church officials hid pedophilic fugitives from the law, arguing in court that criminal investigations of church affairs violated the free practice of religion as guaranteed by the US Constitution—as if pedophilia were a sacrosanct religious practice

Today's right-wing religionists fashion a god wedded to their moralistic and political agendas. As already mentioned, their definitions of sin and virtue are seldom associated with the inequities of socioeconomic reality. Thus a worker who filches something from the business firm is a thief and has thereby sinned. But the corporate owners—who plunder the environment, market unsafe commodities, impose cuts in wages and benefits, and expropriate workers’ pension funds—are not likely to be considered culpable by any luminaries of the religious Right.