How Moral Perfection Makes us Perfectly Evil

Maybe the only thing infinite about religion is the number of lies it is willing to tell to enslave people with ever more lies. Take the lie of "moral perfection," for example. This lie convinces people that religion will help make them "moral" by curing them of the moral infection they are born with - original sin.  This flaw of "original sin" leads us to think in terms of spiritual inequality in the same way that a belief that some races of people are less evolved than others leads them to think in terms of racial inequality.  And the whole quest for spiritual perfection or "spiritual purity," works the exact same way, and has the exact same effects on us all, as a "final solution" had in achieving racial perfection or "purity." One works to purify the soul of a "chosen people, while the other seeks to purify the bloodline. That's why some people see racism as simply a secular religion based on race.  

Somehow, religious believers are so in love with being afraid of our differences, that they actually believe that we are born broken, morally speaking, and need to fix ourselves through magical incantations and ceremonies, so that a "holy" spirit will enter our bodies and cure us of the diseased moral compass - our stained glass soul, in other words - that we are born with.  But such a medieval superstition only seeks to make us all cookie cutter replicas of each other in our beliefs. But without all of our differences, we are no longer human beings. We are simply machines.    

But evil is not something we are born with, it is something we are taught to believe in, the same way we are taught to be afraid (John B. Watson, for example, pointed out that children have no fear of the dark in 1920), through conditioning.

What happens when you START with the premise that we are all born suffering from a moral defect, however called "original sin," we start to believe we are therefore all touched by evil and need to be "saved" and "baptized" (i.e. healed of our desire to be evil). Otherwise, we would all be raping and killing each other in the street. How such “believers” becomes so convinced that starting with such a completely unprovable premise, and then propagating such a lie by teaching it to children in the form of religion (which is something they are supposed to trust the most of all) is beyond belief!

How does starting with such an idea seem like a GOOD way to start thinking about people? Indeed, how could anyone ever prove that such a “belief” was ANYTHING but just a self- fulfilling prophecy? And since Watson proved in 1920 that the behavior of human beings is predictable, and therefore controllable, how could such a “belief” ever prove that it is NOT simply a means of controlling people? Indeed, such “beliefs” have even used blasphemy laws to prevent people from questioning it!

In this way, religion contributes to so many problems in the world, while at the same time claiming to be the only thing that can save us. That is the very definition of snake oil salesmanship. And what’s really ironic, is the throngs of people who feel their politicians are guilty of doing just that, who actually believe that their priests are NOT doing the exact same thing. That they are able to do this and NOT see the glaring double standard they are using is what atheists really find so unbelievable about religious believers.  

 In short, religion ONLY encourages people to lie by convincing them they must live up to an impossible, inhuman standard of perfection they can never achieve, because we are all born with the stain of original sin, which prevents us from every achieving it. Some then say, “but Jesus was perfectly human and also morally perfect,.” Sure, except Jesus was born WITHOUT the stain of original sin. Hell, Mother Mary had never even had sex, ferchrissake! And even she was born via “the immaculate conception s

 So if you want to see what an endless pursuit of “perfection” does to people, especially when achieving such perfection is necessary to avoid being thrown into the ovens of God’s own little Auschwitz he calls Hell, just look at what Photoshop, selfies, media, and plastic surgery have done to us, in our endless pursuit of perfect beauty and a perfect body, or what our consumption driven economy has done to us in our endless pursuit of ever more money and success, regardless of the consequences on others or the environment.  Look at all of this and more, and you will see just a fraction of what we do in our endless pursuit of a moral perfection that is as infinite as god.