Skip to main content

The Emperor’s New Clothes

To believe in any one religion, one must do three things.

First, they must exercise an adequate degree of skepticism toward every other religion other than the one they wish to subscribe to. The level of skpeticism the "believer" must apply to every other brand of god and religion other than their own is, ironically enough, exactly the same level of skepticism an atheist applies to every religion. Only by doing so can the "believer" come to beleive they are right to reject all other brands of god and religion but their own special brand.

Second, the "believer" must then never ever apply to their own brand of religion the same degree of skepticism they are required to apply to disprove the claims of all of the other brands of religion, lest they discover that their own brand of religion is no more true than all of the other brands of religion that they have rejected as false. Hence, using their God given intelligence to see the fraud of other religions is a required virtue every "believer" must exercise, while using that same God given intellgience to see thir their own brand of religion is no different than those that have been rejected is a vice deserving of hell. How does the "believer" know then which brand to subscribe to? God picks for them.

And third, they must not only devote themselves to perpetually denying to themselves and everyone else that they are engaging in this double standard, but also feel like they are being attacked whenever anyone dares to point out that they so clearly are.

That everyone but the "believer" can see how the believer depends on doing these three things is what makes every believer no diffrent than a naked emperor who is convinced he is strutting around in his fabulous set of new clothes.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Why Are Republicans Pro Life?

Most people don't realize that the Supreme Court has been in the hands of the Republican party since at least 1970! In fact, even in the landmark case of Roe v Wade that legalized abortion, SCOTUS was inhabited by 6 Republicans and 3 Democrats, and the vote was 7 to 2. One of the reasons is that the Republican Party has absolutely ZERO desire to win on the abortion issue. And that's because abortion gives the GOP a clear focal point with potentially unlimited organizing power. And it's an even simpler message to sell than religion, since we are "pro-life." (if that was true, however, they wouldn't be actively trying to repeal healthcare for up to 30 million Americans, nor would they be so pro-gun, pro-war, pro-death penalty, pro welfare cuts, pro- social security cuts, pro- drone strikes, etc). The Republican party officially became "pro-life" in 1976, thanks to Jesse Helms (R-NC). The only reason no serious challenge was brought within the pa...
  The world changes according to the way people see it, and if you alter even by a millimeter the way people look at reality, then you can change it.” James Baldwin   

The Clash of Religious Beliefs with Reality: Over Simplicity in a Hyper Complex World

God is the anthropomorphism of  our hope that life has a "happily ever after" ending, where there is no such thing as death and suffering, which we anthropomorphize in the form of the devil. In a sense, we are taking ideas and turning them into phantom figures of our selves, with angles and demons being projections of our own souls and our penchant for good and evil.  We see this when we anthropomorphize the act of gift giving into Santa Clause and think in terms of "old man winter" and "father time." We even reverse this process by describing ourselves as living in the springtime of our youth or the autumn of our years.  Religion takes this habit to another level, however, and teaches people to "believe" that the personifications we rely on to describe our hopes and fears are actual "beings;" beings from whom all of the characteristics we tend to associate with ideas of life and death, good and evil, necessarily emanate. Thi...