(C) Daily Kos This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . Religious Fraud and Illegitimate Authority II, Response to Your Many Comments, Part 2 of 5 [1] ['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.', 'Backgroundurl Avatar_Large', 'Nickname', 'Joined', 'Created_At', 'Story Count', 'N_Stories', 'Comment Count', 'N_Comments', 'Popular Tags'] Date: 2023-04-06 Science and Religion Science is a very formal, rigid, evidence-based discipline that requires testing and retesting to arrive at its scientific principles and theories. A scientific theory is not to be confused with a nonscientific theory where someone is casually theorizing about something. A scientific theory is based on evidence and facts. Any scientist, observer, or tester must get exactly the same results time after time no matter where a test is made. Science is almost perverse in its methods of testing trying to get its theories to break. But science is very open and welcomes and celebrates change when new discoveries are made. Religion, on the other hand, is an untested collection of dogmatic proposals, i.e., dogma, which is an arrogant assertion that one’s ideas and opinions are factual without evidence. It’s derived typically from supernatural sources and something referred to as “divine revelation” meaning communicating with gods and supernatural entities. Who communicates with gods and supernatural entities?! This is a phenomenon that came along when priests and priestesses invented themselves, which they continue to do today. Religions do not like changes or challenges to their dogma. Change a few words of so-called “revealed” religion and religions unravel into smaller groups which then unravel into even smaller groups. The religion in which I was raised, Christianity, has about 45,000 sects and dominations. Evidence of religion goes back 50,000 years into the Old Stone Age. As noted, there have been about 100,000 religions with about 4,000 in existence today. Each has its own “truths.” We have worshipped everything from the sun to the moon to Egyptian Pharaohs and Roman Emperors. Then, we started creating gods in our own image. We created many gods of many polytheistic religions, meaning religions with multiple gods. About 4,000 years ago in the Mideast, someone came up with idea that there is just one god. Keep in mind that this was just someone’s idea. Someone like you or me. This “idea” was the beginning of the western concept, monotheism, i.e., one god. The first significant religion to practice monotheism was Judaism. Their god was Yahweh. Fourteen hundred years later on the other side of our world, Buddhism began in India while Confucianism and Taoism began in China. These were major belief systems with no gods. Six-hundred years later in our first century, the New Testament gospels — Mark, Matthew, Luke, and John — were written. No one knows when they were written precisely. It’s thought that they were written in the latter part of the first century, in the 60s, 70, 80s, and 90s roughly about ten years apart. They were written 30, 40, 50, and 60 years after the events they were writing about were supposed to have occurred. None of the writers witnessed the events. Who wrote these gospels? No one knows. The writers are anonymous. It is thought that in the second century to bestow legitimacy the authorship was assigned to the Christian evangelists Mark, Matthew, Luke, and John. What were these gospel writers doing? It is thought by theologians that each had their own agenda and bias. To write their stories, they picked up where the prophesy of the Old Testament left off and wrote a story to match that prophecy. To embellish their stories, they borrowed heavily from ancient themes of heroes and gods from pagan (rural) religions. There was no such thing as plagiarism at the time. It was common to take elements of earlier stories and insert them into what one was writing. As I quoted in my first piece, ”Many of the stories about Jesus contained in these ancient documents (Gospels, canonical and not) were tales commonly applied to mythical figures and heroes of the time. They were stock stories told to convert people to Jesus.” The Reverend Charles Kannengiesser, former Chair in Theology at the University of Notre Dame One can find many very similar quotes by numerous reputable scholars. Yet — as I wrote in my original piece — this information is never disclosed, for obvious reasons, to the people in the pews. About fourteen hundred years ago in the leading city of Arabia, Mecca, Mohammad came along. He, too, heard the inerrant and infallible word of god. For twenty-three years he had a scribe take notes of what he heard as Mohammad, who was illiterate, could not read or write. The notes were compiled into a book now known as the Koran. Four-fifths the length of the New Testament, the Koran is considered by the Muslims to be the final and infallible word of God. Out of this, a new religion formed by the name of Islam, which means peace and surrender and submission to God. And we got a new God by the name of Allah, meaning the God, the one true God. These varied religious stories, as one can imagine, caused great worldwide confusion, conflict, suffering and wars. Many wars have been fought over these stories. We kill each other over these stories. It’s the ultimate irony and complete absurdity that we created these stories to establish examples of exemplary behavior and proper rules for living, then we went on to kill each other over these stories. One does not have to be a genius to conclude that there is something not only absurd but fundamentally wrong here. What is wrong is that our mental and emotional infrastructure responsible for our primitive behavior and supernatural religious beliefs is outdated for the world in which we live today. Our behavior and beliefs do not work on a tiny planet with 8+ billion people who exploit each other and the fragile web of life. Our social and political attitudes, behaviors, and beliefs must rise to a higher level. If we are to sustain humanity, advance our civilization, and succeed as a species this is not optional. It’s imperative. As for religious beliefs, Gandhi said it well, “Religious ideas are subject to the same laws of evolution that govern everything else in the universe.” In other words, there comes a time to let go of dated ideas and advance as life demands. The lack of congruence between our major inherited religions and the power and exuberance of our modern world is gravely problematic. This a reality that many choose to deny, or are unaware of, and is perpetuated by clinging to ancient notions of what is sacred, i.e., gods. One can reasonably ask, “What is religion anyway?” Religion can be defined as a belief system that explains the cause, purpose, and nature of the universe. That makes sense. That’s what people have been doing for thousands of years. Long before the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment (also known as the Age of Reason), men and women, priests and priestesses, have attempted — with little or no knowledge — to explain life. Often they claimed divine revelation — communicating with gods and supernatural entities — as their source of inspiration, knowledge, and authority. Can you imagine today claiming communication with supernatural entities as the source of one’s knowledge and authority? With little knowledge and no science, to explain life, what else could these people do but to create gods, fabricate creation stories, and form into fiercely tribal religions with rules and theatrical rituals, costumes, and music? This is not something that occurred in the earlier part of this century. Or in the 1900s, or two centuries ago in the 1800s. Hinduism with its many gods originated 60 centuries ago, Judaism 40 centuries ago, Buddhism, Confucianism, and Taoism 26 centuries ago, Christianity 20 centuries ago, and Islam 14 centuries ago. All long before the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment, when in the 16th to 18th centuries — just 3 to 5 centuries ago — mathematics, chemistry, physics, astronomy, biology, and anatomy emerged and set forth a whole new range of ideas based on reason as the source of authority and legitimacy. There’s a novel idea: reason as the source of authority and legitimacy! Religious creeds, dogma, and doctrine were questioned and religious authority challenged, all for very good reasons. Today, we do not need “divine revelation” to understand the cause, purpose, and nature of the universe. The Big Bang Theory is the generally accepted theory for the cause of the universe with the cosmic expansion beginning 13.8 billion years ago. The purpose of the universe? We don’t have a clue what is the purpose, if any, of the universe. All the stars and galaxies that we can see represent only four percent of the universe. Only four percent of the universe is observable. When we look into the sky on a clear and starry night, many of us think we are looking at the universe. We are actually looking at about 2,500 stars (solar systems) of the 200 to 400 billion stars in the Milky Galaxy. We are not looking at the universe. We are looking at a tiny area of one galaxy — the Milky Way — which is one of trillions of galaxies in the universe. And the universe is expanding faster than the speed of light, faster than 186,000 miles every second, faster than a billion miles an hour. In the expansion of the universe, in every second in the observable universe — 4 percent of the universe — it’s generating 4,800 more solar systems. In a day’s time, in just the observable universe, it’s generating about 275 million more solar systems. Every day! In our own galaxy, the Milky Way, astronomers at the University of Auckland in New Zealand estimate that there are 100 billion habitable planets. The purpose of all of this? We don’t have a clue. It would be like asking an insect crawling on the floor, “What’s the purpose of Los Angeles?” The insect’s response if it could speak, would likely be, “What’s a Los Angeles?” The nature of the universe is another matter. It is here where the enigma unravels. It is here where we find a nonreligious understanding of what is sacred in our world. It’s simply those relationships in life which — at our peril — we cannot violate, damage, dishonor, or destroy. Otherwise, we suffer and, in time, we perish. End of Response, Part 2 of 5 PART 3 OF 5 TOMORROW Simply the Way Life Works Sustainability Critical Mind Shift Religious People Free Will Sacredness Three Simple Rules [END] --- [1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/4/6/2162426/-Religious-Fraud-and-Illegitimate-Authority-II-Response-to-Your-Many-Comments-Part-2-of-5 Published and (C) by Daily Kos Content appears here under this condition or license: Site content may be used for any purpose without permission unless otherwise specified. via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds: gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/dailykos/