SPIRITUAL ARSENIC OF FAITH AND WHEN RELIGION POISONS THE HEART

Religion is an ingredient of bloodshed

Arsenic takes hold bit by bit.  Then you are on the verge of destruction without knowing how it happened.  Spiritual or religious arsenic is as bad.  Just because some evil happens all at once in some dramatic fashion does not make it more evil than some craftier and more hidden and slow-working alternative.  The bit by bit evil is the worst for it protects itself better.  It is harder to root out.

Any religion that claims to possess the truth and to be the only faith authorised by God and that the others are wrong or unauthorised has to persecute and trample down the members of other religions who pronounce it to be nonsense. If truth is no big deal, then there is no need for persecuting. The fundamental problem is that religion claims to have got its teaching from a being who knows things we don't so we naturally must trust that being if it asks us to do what is evil. Not only does that take away the reality check and leave us wide open to putting faith in lying opportunistic prophets but it leaves us with no way of seeing through our leaders. An atheist regime claiming to be infallible would only raise screams of laughter. A religious one can pull it off and only a religious one.
 
If my religious group claims to be sure that its doctrines are all objectively true, then what if yours disagrees? Clearly religion has to undermine tolerance. If it acts tolerant it is being hypocritical. It may act tolerant but that does not change the fact that it is in essence intolerant. A dog that is trained to sing like a bird is still essentially a barker even if he never barks. It is his nature. Anything that can be done without such as religion that embodies intrinsic intolerance is bad no matter how inconsistent it is with its intolerant nature.
 
Religion says that God has the right to destroy anybody who does not fit in with his plan for we are the property of God. So anybody who refuses to submit to God is stealing from God and since it is worse to steal from God than people it follows the person should be persecuted as thieves are persecuted if not more. A religion has to argue that it is right and that as the law of the land should be right to it must take orders from the religion. Getting the law of the lad to conform to truth and real justice is the most important part of legal and social morality and if religion is about morality at all it has to rule the state or try to.
 
Every religion claims that it has the right to preserve its flock from religious error. Each one says it thinks it is the best religion.
 
God is supposed to be the same thing as goodness itself. This creates a sharp difference between good and evil. It makes them look opposite. Such a strong and stark view of the division never fails to encourage hatred and religious warmongering. Why? Because if you see what is called good as the best evil or evil as the worst good it is harder to get really angry and hate people who are categorised as bad because you see the truth that good and evil are actually quite close and are not really opposites in most ways. Good depends on some evil and evil depends on some good. They co-depend. Good embodies some evil and some evil embodies good. Belief in the terms good and evil do enough to cause hatred but fusing God and good makes it ten times worse.

Religion insists on altruism and makes it a duty. Altruism is an assault on the individual. It tells the individual that only God or others matter. Violence leads to violence even if the violence is kept inside and the desire to see the misery and degradation of godliness afflicted on other people as well as oneself will manifest. Altruism is evil and can lead to neurosis and instil a liking for persecuting others especially those who know how to enjoy themselves for the altruist feels guilty about anything that is good for him or her and can’t stand anybody being free from that prison. Altruism is “morality” persecuting the individual so it is the logical justification for persecution.
 
Even if religionists believe that an amalgamation of Church and state is not ideal they have to encourage it for other reasons. For example, a state that discourages people from going to Hell is better than one that does not. A state that encourages baptism is better than one that does not for babies cannot be saved without baptism.
  
When we only do wrong because we think it is right or believe that it is right then it follows that God is against freedom of thought for he made things this way. He wants dissenters persecuted for he says all sin is to be punished and that is a disgrace. Religion says that real love does not entail forcing a person not to sin. They have to say that for they claim that God loves us. If love is respect for free will then the more we understand that we are doing right in serving God and following his commandments the better for then the more free we are. Then why is the evidence for religion so flimsy and non-existent to the totally rational mind? God is anti-freedom. He stands for the idea that furthering freedom is not love. Religion has to claim it has evidence so each religion is saying that dissenters take away from people the illusionary sense of certainty they have about its claims and so dissent should be crushed. It is between the dissenter’s freedom and the religionist’s freedom and since religion claims to be of first importance it follows that the formers’ rights can be consigned to Hell.
 
If I live according to my belief that I may harm others that is against my freedom for evil is not freedom. So the law may stop me and people have the right to control me.
 
Some say this is “only a load of tripe though the Bible likes to see sin as the loss of freedom and speaks in terms of sinning being enslavement to sin for the important thing to me is not that my mind be free from error but that I be happy in what I do be it right or wrong within limits set not by reason but by my preferences. Error removes the freedom to be right but it is not right I am worried about at all. So the law opposes my real freedom. If there is a God and a Hell the law has to be stricter and motivated by religion and so it must be restrictive and persecuting.” But we are better off living by our rational nature. There has to be something defective in a person who is happy and irrational so it is not what it should be.
 
The state does not consider the abuse of freedom as something to be censored and restricted all the time but only when it does serious harm. But with God everything is serious harm and Christians are to care about how he feels about sin and not about what harm sin does to others. God has to go. The myth is conducive to fanaticism.
 
Religion teaches that selfishness is evil and we are all selfish and our entire lives are a battle that is often lost against this evil. If we are so bad, and the Bible says we are, then we should not have religion for we have enough to fight over without another system, namely religion, being set up to give us more reasons to wreak havoc. The only way religion can avoid this logic is by declaring that it has the right to absolute world dictatorship and domination. From this it follows that religion cannot allow other religions to thrive. It has to be survival of the fittest religion. The less religions to cause trouble the better. This problem could be solved by religion being honest and admitting that its doctrines are only guesses so we should live and let live. It should be made to do that when it results in strife and heartbreak. The only justification a religion can have if the cynicism is justified is to enforce its principles on the people.
 
Each religion is against anyone teaching what it considers to be error. Many people are forced to keep silent instead of protesting against the tyranny of religion. Their conscience is not cared about so why care about anybody else’s?
 
All the beliefs of world religions are blind irrational ones. If faith had to be gained by considering the evidence then persecution of unbelievers would be wrong for they can’t help what they think. But when it is just an act of will like unwrapping a sweet it is a different thing. Not to make the act of will is a sin (Mark 16:16) so they who won’t believe deserve to be punished. They are insincere for they refuse to do what is right. They are making trouble for the true believers and are leading souls into sin. So when they preach things contrary to the faith they were asked to accept they should be persecuted and have their tongues and hands cut off or be thrown into a dungeon to prevent their fraudulent activity. The Roman Church teaches that faith is a decision and a virtue or an act.

Faiths like Roman Catholicism that teach that concurring with their teaching matters more than life itself would use force to prevent other faiths from getting their intended victims. They imply the principle of persecution is correct even if they do not persecute.
 
An officially approved Catholic book states that justice is not treating everyone equally but treating equals equally and unequals differently (page 89, Ecumenical Jihad). How could anybody the Church hopes to engage in religious instruction classes be an equal when they refuse though there is no harm in learning and only good in it no matter what kind of learning it is? Humanists solve this dilemma by denying free will. We will not look upon anybody who refuses to examine us as a second-rate person for we are all controlled by nature.
 
Christianity claims to believe in equality but like everybody else, it does not really mean it. The heroically humanitarian pagan who regards Hercules as God will never become pope for being pope is not about being a good person but being a Catholic believer. Goodness is devalued. Religion is dangerous as is anything else that does not really honour equality even if it pays lip-service to it.
 
Religion will not tolerate anybody who denies free will. It will not tolerate anybody who knows that their doctrine of hate the sin and love the sinner is just a cover to avoid legal charges for incitement to hatred. Religion claims that these ideas are necessary to the order of society so execution or jail would be in store for those who dare to challenge religion on this. There are several other doctrines that I could have added to this list.
  
Religion does, whether it means to or not, encourage people to persecute those who disagree with it. The persecution might be subtle but it is there. The seed is there. To allow any persecution or to encourage it is endorsing persecution in principle and thus opening the way for it to get worse.
 
Some say, "There is a risk of violence and sectarianism with religion. But religion can do good and further cohesion in society." You cannot point to a few good results and argue that shows religion is fine or even great. The picture has to be bigger than that. You would need to be a god and know exactly how many people are made happy by religion and how many are wracked with guilt and fear because of it. Every evil organisation needs charm and to do some good. Also, religious cohesion only happens if people agree to avoid a theological and doctrinal free for all. They have to let somebody do the thinking for them like a Messiah or a prophet or a pope or a Bible basher. If a liberal religion seems united that unity is social not religious and the religion is setting itself up for splintering into sects some of which will become extremist. So religion needs to endorse and represent and justify intolerance to be a religion.
 
When a religion does evil and murders, people enable the problem by denying that it is a religion or by saying that the evil people are hijacking religion and pretending to be its servants when they are not. If religion or much religion is man-made, you must expect some religions to be violent.
 
What speaks loudest about the nature of religion?
 
Is it the alleged unity it creates? If it is this then religion is more good than bad.
 
Is it the trouble and violence it causes? If it is this then religion is more bad than good.
 
Commitment to the religion is strongest when people will kill or hurt for it. Religion is about commitment and what it calls "righteous anger" thus religion is more bad than good.

Religion does lead to war and suffering and intolerance. Atheism that seeks to help people in their self-development must take its place.