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A Belief in Human Values and Love, Not Religion or God

News of eminent atheist Christopher Hitchens death triggered a revisit to days when my life was simple, believed that the bible was the word of God, and when religious faith was a part of my life. The passing of Christopher Hitchens, who recently died of pneumonia, a complication of esophageal cancer, triggered a revisit to those days when life was so simple. It was a time when I attended church, believed that the bible was the word of God, and a time when religion was very much a part of my life. Christopher Hitchens was an intellectual, author, a provocative essayist, and formidable polemicist. Like Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins, he too was an avowed atheist and champion of the New Atheism movement. Like Hitchens, Harris, and Dawkins, now, I too believe time has come to cast out religious ideology. I no longer believe in an anthropomorphic Personal God, God of the Abrahamic religions, Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, who are and have been the reason for so much suffering and misery in this world. The transformation from youthful credulity to who I am today has been a long and difficult journey. The journey included reading Hitchens, and, so, his death brought that internal struggle to the fore once again. That struggle with religion and God began by experiencing the inhumanity of whites against people of color in the segregated South; the inhumanity displayed by the United States government, the self-proclaimed one nation under God, and its armed forces in Vietnam; and the fiery, violent death of 3 or 4-year-old Jonathon and 16-year-old Gayle Noise just before Christmas 1973 were the primary impetus for sea changes in my views of religion and the biblical God. Of course, other events contributed to this transformation, but, for some reason, these three events culminated eventually to become the straw that broke the camel's back. I never owned a bible until 1960, when a friend while at an engagement at Naval Air Station, Pensacola, Fla., who thought it might be a good idea that I read the bible, gave one to me. When I returned to my home in Massachusetts, I married Kathy. Today we have been married fortyeight years and have five outstanding children. The pursuing years were busy and full with

family and career, and so I never read that bible until sometime in the mid-80s. When I did, despite my blessings in life, those earlier experiences relentlessly stayed with me; reading the bible only reinforced my belief in a cruel biblical God. There is hardly a day that goes by that I dont reflect on the tragedy that so horrifically took the lives of Jonathon and Gayle, and so it will be until I die. My view of God can just as well be described by the writings of Thomas Paine, who in a letter he sent to a friend regarding his book, the Age of Reason, wrote, "Whenever we read the obscene stories, the voluptuous debaucheries, the cruel and torturous executions, the unrelenting vindictiveness, with which more than half the Bible is filled, it would be more consistent that we called it the word of a demon than the Word of God. It is a history of wickedness that has served to corrupt and brutalize mankind. ` It is from the Bible that man has learned cruelty, rapine, and murder; for the belief of a cruel God makes a cruel man. That bloodthirsty man, called the prophet Samuel, makes God to say, (I Sam. xv. 3) `Now go and smite Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have, and spare them not, but slay both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass.' No matter how religious types spin their bible to suit their needs, the fact is that our world has been replete with famine, plagues and horrifying suffering. Today, one has to look nowhere else but at 9/11, our two wars, and the horrific atrocities in Africa for evidence of a vindictive and cruel God, not a benevolent God. But there are many other places on earth, too, where such suffering begs the question: Could a loving, caring, omnipotent God allow such things to happen? Over the years, there have been many journeys to the Dark Night of the Soul, as I only can describe it, but a union with God never occurred. Logically, there is only one answer to the previous question: if there is a God at all, He certainly is not a benevolent God. Atheisms arch-critic and Hitchens nemesis Chris Hedges believes, as I have come to believe, that the true danger lies in the human heart and its capacity for evil, and that is what is responsible for the ills of the world, that empowerment of individual conscience is the starting point of the great ethical systems of our civilization, that faith does not necessarily need a church, a mosque or a synagogue, and that the greatest force in life is not power or reason but love.

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