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    Heading for the Light: Dispelling the Shadows of Religion
    Heading for the Light: Dispelling the Shadows of Religion
    Heading for the Light: Dispelling the Shadows of Religion
    Ebook167 pages2 hours

    Heading for the Light: Dispelling the Shadows of Religion

    By Brian Horn

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    About this ebook

    Motivated by a concern about the effects of religion, on individuals as well as on society as a whole, the author takes a rational and wide-ranging look at religious beliefs, behavior, and institutions. Whatever your current religious inclinations, you’ll find insightful and interesting viewpoints – and conclusions that are hard to refute.
    Anyone concerned or simply curious about the effects of religion on all of us will find insights on a wide range of subjects – faith, the nature of reality, moral authority, the Bible, intolerance, the purpose of religion – and perhaps also find a challenge to examine personal beliefs that may have never received much scrutiny.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBrian Horn
    Release dateJul 12, 2013
    ISBN9781301487356
    Heading for the Light: Dispelling the Shadows of Religion

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      Book preview

      Heading for the Light - Brian Horn

      Heading for the Light

      Dispelling the Shadows of Religion

      by Brian Horn

      Copyright 2013 Brian Horn

      Smashwords Edition

      17 Sep 2013

      Corrections and Minor Updates

      15 Oct 2014

      * * * * *

      Smashwords Edition, License Notes

      Although free, this e-book remains the copyrighted property of the author, and may not be copied or distributed for commercial or non-commercial purposes. If you enjoyed this book, please encourage your friends to download their own copy at Smashwords.com or from their favorite e-book retailer, where the latest version is available. Thank you for your support.

      Heading for the Light

      Dispelling the Shadows of Religion

      Table of Contents

      Preface

      Almighty and compassionate

      Room for improvement

      Rationalization

      When all else fails

      Everyday beliefs

      Afterlife

      Heaven

      The one true religion

      He watches over us

      The nature of reality, and vice versa

      Trickster

      Science

      Wrong again

      Moral compass

      Birth control

      Abortion

      Homosexuality

      Sexism

      Slavery

      Genocide

      Guidance

      The Word

      Keep them in their place

      Questionable messages

      Family values

      The cause of the problem

      Whose word

      Leading or lagging

      Not all bad

      Faith

      Early start

      Too much effort

      Change is painful

      Filling the void

      Explanation

      Behavior

      Comfort

      Fellowship

      Society’s troublemaker

      Intolerance

      Church and state

      Education

      Looking forward

      Afterword

      Version

      Nation builder

      Free will

      About the author

      Preface

      This book grew from a desire to understand why my views about religion differ from views held by many others. Why do people hold different religious beliefs? How can we choose wisely between conflicting beliefs? How do your religious beliefs affect me and how do mine affect you? As we shall see, these questions open the door to an honest look at the affect of religion on our society and therefore on all of us.

      My religious background is ordinary. My parents didn’t make a point of religion in their daily lives, but they were conscientious church members and enforced my attendance at Sunday school and church services. When I was young I accepted uncritically what was taught, to the extent of getting into a righteous discussion (at the ripe old age of eight) with a Jewish friend about the fact that he couldn’t go to heaven because he didn’t believe in Jesus. (His viewpoint was considerably different, along the lines that it was I who didn’t stand a chance because I was not of God’s chosen race.)

      Something changed during my pre-teen years; I have no idea why. I remember sitting through parentally mandated church services occupying my time by thinking about what struck me as the absurd arguments and illogic of the sermon. Similar skeptical opinions surfaced occasionally as the years passed when I happened to encounter religious ideas. But religious views didn’t seem to impact my daily life. I had my ideas, others had theirs, and that was fine.

      Now I’ve come to be more concerned about why many of my thoughts about the big questions – why the world is the way it is, how we got here, why we act the way we do, why we should care about the consequences of our actions, what path can be trusted to lead to the truth – differ considerably from the thoughts of many other people. At the heart of our different ways of thinking are religious beliefs. This book explores those beliefs and their consequences.

      Almighty and compassionate

      God, the centerpiece of the world’s big-three religions, is an impressive deity. He is almighty and omnipotent; he created the entire universe and made it subject to his authority. Equally important, he is compassionate, wise, and just. That is what religions teach. Which is curious, because it doesn’t take much observation to see the discrepancy between the world such a god would create and the world we actually experience.

      Somehow religious believers manage to gloss over this obvious disparity. But the question – why does an omnipotent and just god allow evil and suffering – is worth some thought if we’re trying to comprehend religious beliefs. We need to understand why humanity is saddled with all the problems that an all-powerful god could certainly have left out of his creation.

      Room for improvement

      If God is willing to prevent evil, but is not able to, then he is not omnipotent. If he is able, but not willing, then he is malevolent. If he is both able and willing, then whence cometh evil? If he is neither able nor willing, then why call him God?

      – Epicurus (341-270 BC)

      Not only are the woes of the world numerous, they come in an impressive variety. A few problems might be explained away, but their diversity casts serious doubts on God’s abilities.

      For example, we could well do without diseases, which apparently exist solely to cause indiscriminate suffering and death. Why did God create diseases? Or if he didn’t create them, who or what did, in a world created by God and under his control? If not created by God, why does he allow them to continue to exist?

      Another problem area is the makeup of our own bodies, with their built-in susceptibilities for malfunctions like cancer, diabetes, strokes, and heart attacks, to name a very few. Why would an all-knowing and omnipotent god create us with so many potential defects lying in wait to cause suffering?

      Then there are tribulations we inflict on each other, such as wars, rape, vendettas, hatred of those who are different, and driving drunk. Why would God create humans to be so prone to such harmful tendencies?

      And there are afflictions that are just a result of how the world works: many starve because we must have constant nutrition that is not always available, we are subject to numerous kinds of natural disasters that kill and maim, and we eventually die after some period of decline that is often long, degrading and painful. You would think an all-wise, compassionate god could have come up with a better system.

      Granted, the wonders of the world far outweigh its woes, and many of us are fortunate enough to get through life relatively unscathed. Nevertheless, it is unreasonable to claim that an omnipotent and compassionate entity would create a world with so many ways of unpredictably and indiscriminately striking the innocent along with the guilty. If God created the world, and he is omnipotent and therefore had ultimate power to do so in any manner, than he is certainly not kind, benevolent, or just. In fact, he would seem to be something of a sadist.

      But maybe it’s the other way around. Maybe God is, in fact, kind and benevolent, but not really omnipotent. Perhaps he’s quite powerful – after all, the universe he is said to have created is an awesome place – but possibly God has some limitations, and he gave it his best shot and hoped things would turn out well. That might explain why evil and affliction were able to mar his creation. But the problem with resorting to a not-completely-omnipotent deity is drawing the line between what he could and could not do. If a religion allows the concept of a deity with somewhat limited powers, then it is hard to avoid the conclusion that it may have no powers at all.

      Rationalization

      How do religions explain a world with woes that was created by a good God? The story of Job in the Old Testament is one attempt. In essence, Job is a good and just man who is wholly loyal to God, but God allows Satan to inflict Job with all manner of torments simply to test his loyalty. God is willing to see how far Job can be pushed before Job denounces him, so as Job continues to praise God after each new tribulation, God allows Satan to make the next one even worse.

      This story does indeed explain why bad things happen to good people – God is having us tested. But no matter how we might try to side step it, the story is really about inflicting steadily increasing anguish on a good and righteous person just to find that person’s breaking point. It’s hard to understand how people listen to the story of Job and accept it as some kind of worthwhile lesson even though it paints God as an abuser. Religions tell us that God created us in his image. Combine that with a religious story about God sanctioning torture to satisfy an insecure ego and you have a fine excuse for any of us to beat our spouse.

      The story of Adam and Eve is another attempt to explain why we are subject to life’s misfortunes. Initially everything was fine in the Garden of Eden – presumably there were no diseases, no crippling accidents, and the food chain didn’t exist (or at least humans were not part of it). Then Eve ate the fruit and God got angry and evicted Adam and Eve from the Garden. Evidently at that time he created diseases, bones that break, mean people, natural disasters, and the concept of killing in order to get food to survive. Oh yes, he also instituted painful childbirth, often resulting in the death of the mother and/or child, because, of course, it was all Eve’s fault, so why not punish every woman who will ever exist.

      The expulsion of humanity from the Garden of Eden into a cruel world does provide a reason for our troubles, but it demonstrates beyond a doubt that God is not in the least compassionate or just. Taking vengeance on all future generations is about as opposite to those qualities as you can get.

      God’s habit of taking vengeance on future generations of innocents also crops up in a number of other places in the Bible. Humans have this same unfortunate propensity for vengeance, which has caused much misery over history and still does today. It’s disheartening to see such a destructive character trait promoted in the Bible.

      * * * * *

      Religious commentators have made numerous attempts to resolve the good-God/bad-world contradiction. For example, there is a school of thought something along these lines: although God is all-wise and therefore could know everything we would do in advance and could even intervene when necessary, he chooses not to interfere and instead is content to have started things off and then observe how everything comes out. This picture of humanity and all its trials as a sort of diversion for a possibly bored God, with the universe as a spectacular but mostly irrelevant backdrop, is not particularly satisfying.

      Another approach to resolving the contradiction is the use of rhetoric that on the surface explains away the contradiction but in fact says nothing useful about it. Religious communicators use this technique often to explain a variety of questionable aspects of religion, so it’s worth looking at a simple example.

      This example is from a sermon titled Our Omnipotent God, on the Berean Bible Church web site. In it, the preacher acknowledges the problem we’ve been talking about: Some object to God's omnipotence saying that God cannot be all-powerful because of all the suffering in the world. He summarizes Rabbi Harold Kushner’s book Why Bad Things Happen to Good People, in which Kushner concludes that God is

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