Denaturing Faith—A Return to Civility

“A stupid man’s report of what a clever man says can never be accurate, because he unconsciously translates what he hears into something he can understand“—Bertrand Russell

Isn’t it amusing that so many faithful cannot connect a line of simple dots outside their own beliefs, but think they’re smart enough to know the Christian conundrums are the true gospel of god?

They act like we have never read the material—but if we only hear it enough ways (their interpretation of the clever mans intent) finally, we’ll understand. I don’t believe Christianity because I don’t understand it, I don’t believe it because I do understand it.

By appealing first to faith, anything is possible in the world of religion and decent men have risen to horrible because of it. It demands no scrutiny nor reason, and is simply true because they want it to be, especially when the merciless belief pandemics have had their strongest hold.

“We should all be wicked if we did not hold to the Christian religion. It seems to me that the people who have held to it have been for the most part extremely wicked. You find this curious fact, that the more intense has been the religion of any period and the more profound has been the dogmatic belief, the greater has been the cruelty and the worse has been the state of affairs. In the so-called ages of faith, when men really did believe the Christian religion in all its completeness, there was the Inquisition, with all its tortures; there were millions of unfortunate women burned as witches; and there was every kind of cruelty practiced upon all sorts of people in the name of religion.

You find as you look around the world that every single bit of progress in humane feeling, every improvement in the criminal law, every step toward the diminution of war, every step toward better treatment of the colored races, or every mitigation of slavery, every moral progress that there has been in the world, has been consistently opposed by the organized churches of the world. I say quite deliberately that the Christian religion, as organized in its churches, has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world”—Bertrand Russell

Who now is left to resist the principle of faith that has proven time and again to be the catalyst for ordinary men to be horrible. Fortunately the religion is now so watered down it has proven incapable of enforcement, but that doesn’t keep them from trying to get us back to where we were. The dark ages were not torturous because of unfaithfulness, but because people really believed it.

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