Religion and Freedom

Religion and Freedom
Published in Cape May County Herald.

"It was her religion to make the best of everything." - Lyndall Gordon.

Do you see any evidence of a natural or supernatural world? If you don’t trust your eyes, augment them with the most powerful microscopes and search inside and outside the human body, as many people have done.

These existing worlds, containing heavens, purgatories, gods, spirits, angels, saints, devils, witches, dragons, goblins, martians, leprechauns, etc., together with their activities, exist in one place and one place only – the human mind and life. To think otherwise is a delusion.

The above argument is premised on the commonsense notion that human senses, particularly sight, “seeing is believing,” are the best means of determining what exists from what does not. This is consistent with the human method that uses evidence.

Philosophical argument, i.e., drawing logically deductive conclusions from premises, the method found in the billions of theist and atheist publications, is useful to separate reality from unreality.

The premises in philosophical argument are rarely defined operationally and seldom based on fact, and therefore the conclusions are proven. Science has nothing directly to say about religious claims because they are not testable, they lack unambiguous definitions, try getting a clear, precise definition of “God” from theists, and their statements are capable of being corroborated by experimental evidence.

Indirectly, however, scientific explanations of events as natural occurrences have continuously replaced supernatural explanations. The pivotal men who inadvertently undermined supernatural explanations were Nicolai Copernicus and Charles Darwin.

Copernicus shattered the idea that the earth and its humans were the divinely created center of the universe by demonstrating that the earth revolved around the sun.

Later, astronomers would later find billions of suns and planets in billions of galaxies.

Charles Darwin demonstrated that humans were not divine creations in the image of God, but descendants from other animals. How else to explain their obvious anatomical and genetic similarities?

Scientists around the world continue to demonstrate that we live in a natural world, thereby reducing the scope of non-natural explanations. Their advocates often kill to promote their versions and they shun resources from more humane pursuits. Think about the Middle Eastern money spent to expel the infidels rather than to feed its poor.

Religion and worship are instinctive, being universal, but they are beliefs from the primitive mind that continue to influence the modern mind and thereby modern events for freedom. The world will be a much better place in which to live when education finally eliminates the pernicious effects of religious myths, i.e., extremist religious groups in the Middle East.