Religion kills. Religion is the root of all evil. Religion
is a delusion, a fable, a fairy tale. Religion is a relic of a more primitive
time in human civilization, where we needed divine explanations to attempt to
understand the natural world. Nowadays, especially on the internet, we see more
and more people arguing to do away with superstitions that are holding us back
as a species and enter into a glorious golden age of science and reason.
But is this true? From a certain perspective
their logic seems to be unassailable. Science has brought us gifts in abundance;
no other discipline has brought as much benefit to the quality of life for the
entire human species. And what has religion gotten us? Persecutions, holy wars,
inquisitions, and violent acts of terrorism, not to mention unfair treatment of
women and LBGTQ communities. On the surface, it seems like an open and shut
case. Get rid of religion, and support science. Then the future will be bright.
However, we have a problem; we are unfairly categorizing all
religion into the same boat. Many atheists are guilty of this. Though often
highly educated about so-called mainstream religions like Christianity and
Islam, often to an even higher degree that the practitioners of the religion
themselves, they are not equally knowledgeable about other non-Abrahamic
traditions. Accordingly, they make the gross generalization that all religions
are the same, none are worse or better than any other. However, I find this
point shockingly inaccurate. In these essays, I will argue in favor of the
polytheistic world view as a legitimate logical and moral position, lacking
most of the negative characteristics that the secular world decries in
religion. I will be writing this from
the perspective of a Priest (or Kohan) of the Canaanite Polytheist tradition,
but one with reasonably good knowledge of History, Science, and other
religions.
Point one: Religion kills. This is unambiguously true.
Religion makes good people do bad things, and gives bad people a justification
to do bad things too. It is hard to imagine a world with suicide bombings
without Islam, or the horrors of the crusades without Christianity. But do all
religions provide a justification for such evil? Certainly the Abrahamic
religions do. The bible justifies the wholesale slaughter of men, women and
children of many cities during Joshua’s conquest of Canaan. In fact, the first
king of Israel, Saul, is shown to be punished not for killing, but for showing
mercy to the captured king of the Midianites, whom God had wanted exterminated.
Truly the biblical god is a god of Genocide. In Islam, we have the prophet
Muhammad’s example to justify murder as well. When Asma bint Marwan, a local
resident of Medina was criticizing the prophet in her poetry, Muhammad had his
blind follower kill her, even as she was holding her newborn baby. When he
began to feel pangs of conscience for what he had done, the so-called prophet
of peace told her, “No two goats will butt heads over her”.
But can we say the same thing for all other religions? Of
course not! Some are peaceful to a degree that is shocking in and of itself. In
India there exists a sect called the Jains, whose founder Mahavira taught them
the dogma of “Do no harm”. Observant Jains therefore eat no meat, because the
animal would have to be killed, wear masks and sweep the streets with brooms to
avoid harming insects, and some of them even avoid eating any plant food that
would require the plant to be killed. Needless to say, these people do not even
think of killing another human being, much less doing it for religious
purposes. On the contrary, their religion makes them peaceful and virtuous, and
as a consequence of their frugal eating habits and trustworthy ways, they have
become extremely successful and wealthy entrepreneurs in India, almost as if
they were shown divine grace.
As for
my religion, we do not advocate killing and violence. As our god Baal Hadad
says in his own epic, “Offer in the earth war, Place in the dust love; Pour peace
amid the earth, Tranquility amid the fields.” Even though Baal justly uses
violence against his enemy, Yam, the tyrant king of the gods, killing him, he
is not shown as celebrating or praising his action. On the contrary, the text
says, “Verily ashamed is Aliyan Baal”. He doesn’t find killing a moral act,
even it seems to be justified. Later, when he fights Mot, god of death, he does
not kill his enemy, but instead makes peace with his foe (who had in fact
killed him in the past). With Baal’s example, the Canaanites pursued more often
the peaceful path of being traders and scholars instead of warriors and conquerors.
Of course, this relative weakness lead them to being easy prey for less
enlightened powers, and were often enough put in the position of being written
about by the same people who committed acts of genocide against them, hence the
peculiar propaganda about such nonsense as temple orgies and child sacrifice,
which I shall write in depth about another time.
On a
whole, religion that seeks to spread by the sword, and conquer the world seems
to be an invention of the Abrahamics. Of course many polytheistic nations had
empires, but we do not see them use “God wills it” statements to justify
crushing their enemy and destroying their culture like the Abrahamic religions
do. Ultimately, this type of religion was a revolution in and of itself, a
revolution of evil. If we look at the case of the Roman Empire, we see a religiously
and culturally diverse Principate. As long as religion did not harm the state,
all religions were tolerated under the empire. Even the religion of the
Carthaginians, the people who gave Rome their worst defeats and were ultimately
massacred by the vengeful romans, was tolerated and even promoted. The Romans
even had a dynasty of Emperors descended from Carthaginian stock, the line of
Septimus Severus, that promoted the worship African goddess Tanit as a state
cult. However, the Romans were mistrustful
of mystery religions, especially ones with sinister sounding beliefs and
practices. Hence, we see the romans persecuting a suspicious, cannibalistic
(Which is how the romans perceived the Eucharist), arsonistic, women hating and
rabble rousing religion from the region of Galilee, known best today as Christianity.
The Romans, however, showed clemency to their scapegoat; all the Christian would
have to do is perform a sacrifice to the emperor and they would not be harmed.
Most captured Christians took this option, and modern estimates say that no more
than about 2000 Christians were killed in the whole history of the Roman
empire. Even this light persecution was
only performed by a few emperors. The vast majority of them tolerated all
religions and all gods. This situation continued until the rise of the Emperor
Constantinius, who was the first Christian emperor. Though later proclaimed a
saint by later Christians, he was anything but. He executed his own son, then
his own wife. During his reign Christianity became legal. Before long, it was
the only religion that was legal. Pagan sacrifices were banned, and temples
were looted, destroyed, or converted into churches. This policy continued under
his sons, who fought each other and back-stabbed until the roman empire was at
the brink of falling, until his nephew, Julian, called the Apostate took the reins
of state. He punished corruption, restored the temples and sacrifices (Which
would have included that of the Jews at Jerusalem), and won victories in the
east and west. He was a Philosopher; he promoted wisdom instead of the instead
of the dogmatic drivel the church called learning. He would have restored Rome
to glory, if it wasn’t for his untimely death (of which the modern and ancient scholarship
are at loggerheads over who was responsible). Rome after his death became more
corrupt, more chaotic, and Christian. Christianity would spread over the whole
world like a deadly plague (Not to mention spreading more than a few actual
plagues too) until it became the religion for 2 billion people. In that time we
see brutal atrocities throughout. The verdict of Verdun, where the Christian
Franks massacred 4500 pagan Saxons who refused to give up their religion. We
see the crusades, where millions of Jews, Muslims, and even other Christians
are massacred. We see the bloody conquest of the Americas, and the indoctrination
and cultural vandalism by Spanish, English and American colonizers. More
recently we see the atrocities of the Halocaust, which was both motivated and
justified by the Christian religion (Hitler was neither Atheist nor Pagan, but
a lifelong practicing and pope-endorsed Catholic). Similar atrocities in the
name of Christianity continue in Africa but get far less attention from our
biased media than the equally outrageous acts of Islamic terrorism and cultural
vandalism.
In
conclusion, the Abrahamic religions are uniquely violent and savage in the name of their
religion, a condition not present in Polytheistic religions. Next time, I will
argue for the logic of claiming a multiplicity of gods rather than none or just
one.
Religion kills. Religion is the root of all evil. Religion
is a delusion, a fable, a fairy tale. Religion is a relic of a more primitive
time in human civilization, where we needed divine explanations to attempt to
understand the natural world. Nowadays, especially on the internet, we see more
and more people arguing to do away with superstitions that are holding us back
as a species and enter into a glorious golden age of science and reason. But is this true? From a certain perspective
their logic seems to be unassailable. Science has brought us gifts in abundance;
no other discipline has brought as much benefit to the quality of life for the
entire human species. And what has religion gotten us? Persecutions, holy wars,
inquisitions, and violent acts of terrorism, not to mention unfair treatment of
women and LBGTQ communities. On the surface, it seems like an open and shut
case. Get rid of religion, and support science. Then the future will be bright.