Christianism in the World
In this article, I will address Christianism’s inability to satisfy me. But why focus on Christianism specifically? Who guarantees that Christianism should be better or more worthy of criticism than Buddhism, atheism, or any other worldview? Just because I was born into a Christian family does not give me the right to favor Christianism over other religions in any way. One should never make the mistake of assuming that what one was born into is automatically the most important and then limit oneself to defending or attacking only that. Yet this is exactly what most representatives of Christianism do. No Western defender of the religion I know seriously engages with all world religions in an appropriate and fair way, explaining why they focus solely or predominantly on Christianism. Yet Christians make up only about a quarter of the world’s population. Can such a majority be easily ignored? Christianism, with its claim of exclusivity, does just that.
When Karl Jaspers says in The Philosophical Faith in the Face of Revelation: True believers reach out to one another across all denominations,
this tolerance, which appears progressive at first glance, is limited to Christians alone. Lessing goes a step further when he presents Judaism, Islam, and Christianism as equal and indistinguishable in the Ring Parable. Yet even he captures less than half of humanity, ignoring the diverse existence of other religions and worldviews.
The most important realization when considering the phenomenon of religion is that religion is always restricted to a temporal, geographical, and cultural space. There is no all-encompassing, universal religion. Christianism is strong in the European cultural sphere and in all areas once suppressed by Europeans. A majority professes Christianism only where Europeans have actually gone and zealously proselytized. In large parts of Australia, for example, the Aborigines, despite belonging to the Commonwealth, are still followers of their indigenous natural religions.
Christianism is often merged with local religions, which is why pagan festivals and customs have survived among Europeans to this day, such as Christmas celebrating the winter solstice with the veneration of the evergreen tree as a symbol of the return of summer, or Easter, where eggs and hares celebrate fertility and the return of spring. When Catholics imposed Christianism on Philipinos, they only managed to replace images and statues of gods with pictures and statues of Catholic saints. The basic polytheistic mindset of the people has hardly changed. However, as another symptom of this ‘disease,’ one can mention the Philipino practice of being crucified on Good Friday.
Religion is temporally and spatially restricted, and even members of the same religion practice their faith differently at different places and times. Unlike Philipinos, no European would allow themselves to be crucified on Good Friday. If every religion is dependent on time and place, there is no reason to prefer one religion over another a priori. Any religion with a claim to exclusivity must be regarded as particularly dubious and must present particularly good arguments to avoid being dismissed.
The Need to Criticize Christianism
There are several reasons for me to attack Christianism before any other religion. I fundamentally regard Christianism, Islam, and Judaism as equally inferior because all three religions are built on the same foundation—the Jewish mythology—and are very similar in their nature, particularly in their conception of God. I focus on Christianism because it is, on the one hand, the religion of my relatives, on the other hand, it still has strong roots in the West, and finally because I know it better through personal engagement than the other two Semitic religions. I also address Christianism because it spreads like a cancer in underdeveloped, poor countries, thanks to intense missionary work.
This missionary work is often casually financed by so-called Christian aid organizations, businesses like third-world shops, thrift stores, clothing collectors that secretly operate for the churches. Another abundant source of money for missionary work is church taxes paid by non-believers, whose membership in a church is based on forced baptism believers, whose membership in a church is based on forced baptism as an infant, and foas an infant, and for which the state handles the collection free of charge. In the rarest cases is missionary work funded by explicitly intended donations.
Unfortunately, many people, despite their skepticism toward the institutionalized church and their unbelief, do not take the decisive step of leaving the church, whether out of laziness, fear of society, or the naive belief that churches occasionally do good. The study of church crimes up to the present day, for example, the cooperative collaboration with Nazi Germany, however, paints a very different picture. No one would assume that the much gold and the immeasurable wealth, especially of the Catholic Church, was gathered in an honest manner or fell from heaven. Those who have not yet left the church should do so as quickly as possible. It is better to use the saved money specifically for aid organizations of one’s own choice than to blindly feed it to the churches and their aid organizations.
My Background
Most of my relatives, including my parents and my younger brother, are devout Christians and members of the New Apostolic sect, regularly attending church services. Most likely, they even believe what is served to them there three to four times a week. As a child, I was constantly confronted with these absurd ideas and was very devout myself. Over time, the contradictions and hostility toward life outweighed the faith for me. Even earlier, I found the actual church service dreadfully boring. For a long time, the only thing that kept me was the Sunday school, which I found amusing because it was interactive. When it was said that I was too old for Sunday school and should henceforth attend the service three times a week, it was time for me to break with religion. This was followed by a sometimes very intense confrontation with my parents, who tried every means to keep me in the faith, whether through coercion, mediation by religious playmates, or targeted contact with those priests who I found most sympathetic at the time. At the age of 13, I told my parents one Sunday morning on the way home from church that I no longer believed and would no longer attend church. After that, I fought for at least one or two more years before I was finally free. This conflict forced me to engage intensely with the Christian religion, so that today I reject it all the more vehemently and justifiably. At the age of 26, the religion of my parents is for me nothing more than a ridiculous theater, and nothing can make me attend a church service again—not a wedding, not a funeral. I have nothing to do with this idiocy anymore and fight fiercely to free myself from the last remaining shackles that still indirectly affect me through the state and society.
There were many reasons for my detachment. As a child, it was a great mental burden to believe that all my friends and playmates would have to stay on earth when I would move into the thousand-year kingdom of peace with the other children of God because they did not belong to the only true sect. No wonder I fervently proselytized even as a toddler—fortunately without success. My parents still consider the scientifically undisputed theory of evolution to be utter nonsense, especially my mother, who mocks the idea of descending from apes
in the crudest way (if only she knew that she descends from bacteria). As a child, I long denied the existence of dinosaurs as a lie and believed scientific children’s books less than the children’s Bible. The climate in our family was very otherworldly and oriented toward the hereafter. Movies were taboo, the fair not for us, nor was the carnival. We didn’t have a television; it would have had a bad influence on us. As a primary school student, I was able to sneak my first visit to the cinema by joining the scouts for a day, knowing that they planned to go to the cinema. It was a Goofy cartoon. The second time I went to the cinema was when I was 14, after I had already turned my back on religion. My mother’s only visit to the carnival with me only served to show me that I wouldn’t like such things, so I wasn’t allowed to enjoy it, not even dressed up. It was similar with the only visit to the fair, which we didn’t repeat, even though I enthusiastically drew the ride I was allowed to go on in my drawing book in kindergarten. The world we live in was unimportant, worldly, and merely preparation for death; the whole life was absurd, unnatural, and hostile to life. However, the early indoctrination was so deep that even some time after my church exit, I was plagued by nightmares in which my parents had all suddenly disappeared into the kingdom of heaven, and I was left behind here, alone and desperate. All the talk about God and the Holy Spirit became increasingly unrealistic for me, the longer I heard about it and the less I found confirmation of their effects in real life. In addition to these conscious reasons for my rejection of the Christian faith, there are probably other reasons I wasn’t aware of at the time and have since forgotten.
The Good Deeds of the Churches
The so-called good deeds of the churches are usually based on fundamental church interests. Aid in allegedly poor, underdeveloped countries is always a good cover for missionary work and Christianization. However, the biggest problem of these countries is overpopulation, which is exacerbated by more efficient hospitals, food deliveries, lower infant mortality, the prohibition of abortion and contraception. The superficial aid, on closer inspection, is a contributing cause of the problems. Forms of traditional development aid create dependency on the wealthy industrial nations, their aid organizations, and their ideologies. It is telling that the poorest countries in Africa, Central and South America are often very Catholic, often more Catholic than the Pope. Development aid must always be carried out neutrally and must never be misused for religious indoctrination.
Even in Europe, churches provide aid to the poor with the same ulterior motives. The hungry needy are sometimes urged to say the Lord’s prayer or gaze upon the rotting corpse on the cross before being served the soup for the poor. One could argue that it’s more convenient to pray under supervision than to starve, but I believe that help must be given unconditionally and without self-interest if it is to be considered a good deed. The pastor who visits his elderly parishioners is probably only after their inheritance. A considerable part of the church’s wealth comes from old, sick people who, after a pastor’s visit, still on their deathbed, transferred their land and assets to the church. Youth work, in turn, aims to attract or retain young adults who are about to start families, so that three to four new paying members can be registered after the birth of children. Perhaps the Christians, in their good deeds and attempts to convert others, are simply trying to earn points for their evaluation before God in heaven. The allegedly altruistic actions may be a form of pure selfishness.
The Deification of Jesus
Nothing about Christianism was new; everything was copied, adopted, or appropriated. Jesus was not God’s son from the beginning, nor was he a god himself; he was systematically made into one. In the ancient world, divine sons who visited the world were common, with a pre-Christian example being the Greek Hercules. Healers appeared in large numbers, especially in Jewish territories, as the Jews expected a prophesied Messiah. Accordingly, people were gullible back then. Pre-existence (existence before birth), incarnation (the birth of a god as a human), virgin birth, martyrdom, death (of a god), resurrection, descent into hell and ascent to heaven were already present in pre-Christian myths and legends. Christian doctrine was in no way new; it merely consolidated all existing stories and transferred them to their integrating figure, Jesus.
Buddha had already lived as a spirit being in heaven before his descent to earth. Eduard Norden cites a pre-Christian text in The Birth of the Child: The end times have come […] Apollo has already taken up his kingship […] A son of the highest god is born.
Buddha was born of a virgin, just as the Egyptian sun god impregnated the virgin wife of the king in the minus third millennium. Zoroaster in Persia and Hera’s son Hephaestus are further examples of virgin births. The liturgical formula of pagan believers for the winter solstice festival, the night of December 24 to 25, was: The virgin has given birth; the light increases.
The Indian queen Maya was told of Buddha’s birth by angels. Like the divine child of Isis, many virgin-born sons were born while traveling or in flight. Zeus, Hermes, and Dionysus were depicted lying in a basket or manger, swaddled. Hera learned that Hercules was to become king and pursued the child.
Hercules retreated into solitude before his public ministry. There he was tempted by being taken to a high mountain and shown the realm of the king and tyrant. The one who began his teaching activities at around thirty years of age with two brothers as followers, later with twelve main disciples, including a beloved disciple and a traitor, wandered around in voluntary poverty, conveying himself in sayings, images, and parables, forbidding killing, stealing, lying, unlawful intercourse, demanding reverence for parents, praising the peaceful, teaching to overcome evil with good, preaching love for enemies, rejecting the useless accumulation of treasures, favoring mercy over sacrifice, healing the sick, blind, deaf, and crippled, walking on water, whose disciple, when he followed him on the water, sank, only to be saved by awakening from his meditative state and thinking of his master in faith—this was Buddha.
Asclepius healed with an outstretched or placed hand, by inserting the finger into a diseased body part. Often, but not always, healing and faith were closely connected with him. Even regarding specific cases, Jesus seems to have learned his healing art from Asclepius. A healed blind man saw trees first in both stories. Both healed from a distance. Both had the healed immediately take away their stretcher themselves. Neither made social distinctions; they healed young and old, rich and poor. The details of Asclepius’ six raisings of the dead are identical to those of Jesus’ two: Many witnesses are present, unbelievers suspect a semblance of death, the resurrected are given food.
The greatest miracle, the resurrection, was so widespread in antiquity that the Christian theologian Origen said, This miracle brings nothing new to the pagans and cannot offend them.
In fact, Dionysus, Hercules, the Babylonian Tammuz, the Syrian Adonis, the Phrygian Attis, and the Egyptian Osiris died and rose again. The gods Prometheus, Lycurgus, Marsyas, and Dionysus were crucified. Even before the alleged birth of Christ, Dionysus was worshipped on an altar table with wine vessels on a cross. The Babylonian god Bel Marduk, the good shepherd, was captured, interrogated, sentenced to death, scourged, and executed with a criminal while a second was freed. The people of Athens worshipped Caesar as a savior, and in Rome, it was believed that he had ascended to heaven. At his death, it was said that the sun covered itself, an eclipse occurred, the earth split, and the dead returned to the world above.
The deification of Christ occurred long after the death of the historical Jesus, if he actually lived. The Gospel of Mark, the oldest of the gospels, was written fifty years after Jesus’ death. Considering that before this, the story of Jesus’ life and work was passed on only by word of mouth and taking into account how quickly rumors and stories change and take on the most absurd forms in retelling, one will not believe a word of Mark, especially in light of the credulity of antiquity. The subsequent evangelists successively tried to enhance and improve Mark’s narrative until the story became mere fiction with the youngest evangelist, John.
Critique of the Christian Image of God
A God, as depicted in the Bible, cannot exist. The Bible describes God in several places as omnipotent (Genesis 17:1), as good (Psalms 36:6), and frequently refers to the existence of evil (Deuteronomy 13:6), for instance, in the form of demons or Satan. For mere survival, animals, humans, and plants must harm, kill, and consume one another. Predators cannot survive without killing other animals, including humans. Even plants kill other living beings through toxins. Humans kill animals and plants for food and comfort. In extreme situations, it may even become necessary for humans to kill others to ensure their own survival, or for them to sacrifice their own lives for others. According to the Bible, God is also the creator of evil (Isaiah 45:7) and death (Genesis 2:17). A good God, who possesses omnipotence and the ability to prevent suffering, must do so. He must always do good and cannot defer it to a future kingdom of God
.
Can the promised kingdom of heaven be better than the paradise of the past? Hardly. So why did God destroy paradise? The omniscient God had no right to punish the ignorant humans for their inexperience and cast them out of paradise into perdition. Can an omnipotent being who wishes good for humanity allow the existence of evil? Perhaps as a test? Would you let another person suffer, even though you could help them, just to see how they react in pain? Would you refuse someone the cure for a serious illness to let them learn from the physical and emotional suffering? Even the free will of people to commit evil does not justify the existence of suffering. Whose free will would it be when a small child is run over on the street?
Pain does not have to exist. An illness or injury would not need to cause physical pain. Evolution produced pain because it ensures that sick body parts are treated gently. A God could arrange it so that humans perceive and protect sick body parts without pain and that even the most severe injuries would heal in seconds without lasting disability. A mother who knows that her dead child is waiting for her in the afterlife wouldn’t need to cry; she should rejoice in the child’s happiness of coming to God. Instead, even a devout Christian mother feels unspeakable emotional pain at the loss of her child—why? All this proves that if there is a God, he must either be a fool or a sadist. These facts, incomprehensible in light of a God, explain themselves when one denies God and attributes them to the survival struggle of evolution.
God in Philosophy
In Western philosophy, there have been countless attempts to prove the existence of God. Attempts have been made to prove or at least postulate the existence of a God using all conceivable tricks. If even one of these attempts had been successful, you wouldn’t be reading this text now. Philosophy and sciences have become so strong in Christian Europe precisely because Christianism, with its absurd myths, does not come close to satisfying human curiosity, and the explanations of the Bible about the world are so obviously wrong. Let’s face it: God cannot be proven because something that does not exist can never be proven, even after 2,000 years of attempts.
Unfortunately, God’s non-existence cannot be proven either, because one can only prove that something exists, but never that something does not exist. One can make statements about possible and impossible properties of a God, as I do, but one cannot prove the absolute non-existence of everything divine. The discussion about the existence or non-existence of God is equivalent to the discussion about the existence or non-existence of Santa Claus. Yet, no one seriously believes in Santa Claus. So why believe in God?
All these famous philosophers who attempt to perceive God beyond reason, who conjure up a supreme being of goodness, who insist on justice, and use God to bolster their morality—all of whom are anchored in Christianism, these Kants, Kierkegaards, Anselms, Descartes, and whatever their names may be—have they not read the Bible? Did they look away when God demanded that pregnant women be ripped open
and their little children dashed to pieces
(Hosea 13:16, Isaiah 13:16, Psalms 137:9)? Where were they when God, in his childish, uncontrolled anger, wiped out entire cities? Did they not listen when God repeatedly demanded intolerance towards non-believers or dissenters, when God ordered: You shall break down their altars, smash their sacred stones, cut down their sacred poles, and burn their idols in the fire
(Deuteronomy 7:5)? What does this have to do with love or even love for enemies? Is this thing called God really something than which nothing greater can be conceived
(Anselm, Proslogion), which, in a sadistic fit of cruelty, murdered all the firstborn children, from the firstborn son of Pharaoh, who sat on the throne, to the firstborn son of the prisoner in the dungeon, and all the firstborn of the livestock
(Exodus 12:29), this after God had intentionally hardened Pharaoh’s heart so that Pharaoh could not let the Jewish people go (Exodus 9:12)? It is certainly not the biblical God that the philosophers rave about. Even if they orient their beliefs around the Bible and repeatedly refer to Christianism, their image of God is an abstract, highly idealized notion that has little to do with the real existing Christianism and its scriptures. Unfortunately, they all seem not to notice that the God they conjure up is not the same as the God they believe in.
The Old and New Testament
I understand that many Christians make a strict distinction between the Old and New Testament. The most obviously brutal excesses are undoubtedly found in the Old Testament, but the New Testament is also highly questionable and sick. Just read the Revelations carefully and think about what is really meant by what is said and threatened there. Hitler’s Third Reich was a fairytale castle compared to the sadistic ideas that the Bible propagates even in the New Testament. It is hardly surprising that even today, Christians seriously claim that AIDS is a punishment from God (Pirmin Zurbriggen, former Swiss skier). The New Testament never condemns the Old Testament God and his cruel acts, nor does it dissociate itself from him. The New Testament can only be understood if one knows and assumes the Old Testament. No one would come up with the absolutely nonsensical idea that the sins
of humanity had to be atoned for by the sacrificial blood of a divine human sacrifice unless they knew the Old Testament with its fall of man
and the recurring ritual killings. In the Old Testament, it was clear that sin could only be cleansed with blood.
Christian Love of Neighbor
The highly praised love of neighbor applies only to other Christians and to those people who can still be helped
according to Christian ideology. Towards people like me, who have known Christianism, have renounced it, and even fight against it, the commandment of love is denied. On the contrary, according to most Christian contemporaries, people like me will burn in the eternal fire of hell,
one of the most perverse ideas of the New Testament, which could only have been conceived by a sick, sadistic mind. Note here, too, that in the Old Testament, self-assured people who stood up against God were mostly slaughtered, while for the same offense in the New Testament, eternal psychological and physical torments of hell are threatened. If this punishment is indeed implemented, it goes far beyond the simple murdering of the Old Testament in its cruelty and inhumanity. Even if the smashing of children before their mothers’ eyes is among the most emotionally cruel things one can imagine, this suffering is at least finite and has been forgotten over the millennia. An eternal punishment for a finite offense is an extremely cruel and inappropriate threat, which in the past has already led to psychological damage in devout Christians (Franz Buggle, Denn sie wissen nicht, was sie glauben: Oder warum man redlicherweise nicht mehr Christ sein kann. Eine Streitschrift, Because they don’t know what they believe: Or why you can no longer honestly be a Christian. A polemic
).
The Salvation of Humanity
Jesus, the great savior—don’t make me laugh! Savior of what, exactly? From earthly evil and injustice? Instead of waiting for a savior, it would be much wiser to actively participate in life and fight injustices ourselves. Humanity does not need to be saved, neither by Christ nor by little green Martians.
First, the Bible had to put humanity into a state of dependence through the Fall and the myth of original sin to be able to save it in the first place. The whole thing is framed with a few stories that are supposed to underline the wickedness and sinfulness of humanity, like the cruel destruction of women, children, and the elderly in Sodom and Gomorrah or the destruction of almost all life through the flood. To show the alleged goodness and divine will to help, it is garnished with various fables in which God helps his people to wage wars, including offensive wars, and in which the actual or imagined enemies of God’s people are cruelly slaughtered (in the previous century, this method was also adopted by Josef Stalin). As an additional strengthening of faith, only a few demonstrations of power were missing, such as the stubbornness—or rather, stupidity—of Job.
Thus, the discussion of the Old Testament is completed, and we have already made the connection to the idea of salvation in the New Testament, which begins with the appearance of the biblical Hercules, the God-man. Now someone comes along and preaches forgiveness of guilt between God and man, as well as among humans. The forgiveness of a guilt that never existed but was artificially constructed. This demigod, who knew exactly that after a short earthly and physical suffering he would once again take his place at the right hand of his God-father, while the suffering of the people of this world would only get worse, even had the nerve to ask his father to take the cup from him, not to save humanity (Matthew 26:39). Truly, a spoiled, pampered little son who deserves to have his trousers pulled tight.
Has the world become better because of this savior? Is there now peace, joy, and harmony? Is the atom used to maintain peace? By no means! Without the absurd moral concepts of the Bible, many great crimes of humanity would have gone undone, from the crusades to the witch trials, the oppression of the colonies, slavery, to the Third Reich, where biblical anti-Semitism flourished again, which was also advocated by the well-known German reformer and Bible translator Martin Luther in his book On the Jews and Their Lies.
Modern Christianism
Criticism of christian religion always begins with criticism of the Bible. Since Christians have not yet renounced this unholy, deadly work, the topic of Christianism
is actually already dealt with. The Bible is the best anti-Christian book ever written, because anyone who reads it in its entirety without sugarcoating cannot remain a Christian. Quite obviously, the content of the Bible no longer matches the beliefs of today’s Christians. When I discuss with Christians, they often float in an ivory tower, far away from the cruel reality of the Bible and everyday life. Anyone who knows and believes in the patriarchical, absolutist Bible will never demand equality, neither among men nor even between the sexes, for it is written right at the beginning that God gave the woman to the man as a helper (Genesis 2:18, Luther, 1984 Revision) and after the fall
the man is appointed as the lord over the woman (Genesis 3:16).
Equality is an idea of the Enlightenment, which demands understanding instead of mysticism and knowledge instead of belief. A Bible-believing person can never demand that church offices be elective, for in the Bible decisions are always made from top down without the right to participate. Today’s Christians seem to suppress the Bible. They are not actually Christians but rather general theists with biblical roots and biblical superstition. They believe in a God because they would like to have a kind, good dad who would be there when needed, who could be called upon for help, and who would somehow set everything right. In the already widespread Christian religion, strongly abstracted, one finds a common denominator under which one can gather.
If one emphasizes the good qualities of the biblical God, especially his stepson Jesus, and quietly brushes his cruel, inhuman, and archaic qualities under the table, the modern image of God is born, to which even a (pseudo) humanist dares to confess. In this separation of divine omnipotence and childlike love, the Trinity and the fact, that the existence of a being above humans is in deep contradiction to the demand for equality, are forgotten, for as long as there are people who have contact with God and proclaim his truth, there can be no equality among people. Belief in God, one must necessarily conclude, violates the most elementary human right of equality.
On Sin
I have no sins. Of course, I am not perfect and have my flaws. As much as I strive to do what I consider right, and as much as I strive to determine an objective righteousness, I always know that I am not infallible and that I handle many things incorrectly. Nevertheless, I have no sins. My mistakes are part of my human nature; they are inherent to me and cannot be completely eradicated. Sin is a religious invention for intimidation and humiliation, which does not exist in reality. There certainly is no such thing as original sin. Surely it is sometimes appropriate to assume and mitigate a guilt caused by ancestors and predecessors. It is right to seek reconciliation and reparation, but moral guilt can never be inherited. There is no sin.
The Image of Human
Unfortunately, the question of the right religion is never approached from the ground up; instead, there is always an attempt to justify an existing religion without explaining how one arrived at this particular religion. The atheism, on the other hand, is the consistent result of a long confrontation and comparison between countless religions and worldviews, which also harmonizes perfectly with any scientific knowledge. It is not humans who are made in the image of God, but God is the image of humans in their imagination. The nice old man with a gray beard and his emaciated, suffering, ailing son are as much an image of the people of their time as the thundering lightning-thrower of the Greeks or the likeable, fat, content, child-rich, money-bringing Buddha of the Chinese. If horses prayed, their god would be a horse.
Religion is a mirror of its society. The Greek and Roman polytheism reflected the first attempts at democracy, in which decisions were made by a privileged council. Monotheism is the symbol of an absolutist system. This was true in ancient Egypt, where the Pharaoh was both secular ruler and supreme god, as well as in ancient China and Japan, where the same applied. Even Chairman Mao, who was supposed to lead the Chinese people into freedom, fell back into the old feudal god-emperor ideology. In the late, absolutist Roman Empire, monotheistic Christianism was able to assert itself as a guarantee of the emperor’s divinity. Far into the European Enlightenment, Christianism was a welcome support for a cruel, absolutist regime. But with the Enlightenment, its position of power began to crumble, so that to this day the churches have been forced into adjustments and closer cooperation with the state in order to at least retain part of their age-old power. After all, they have managed to keep ritual ceremonies such as marriage or death largely in their hands despite widespread unbelief and have additionally taken over a large part of the state’s welfare business.
Religion is a tool of the rulers for oppression and justification of their power. For the believer, religion is a form of mental self-mutilation. The religious system of the Enlightenment, the worldview of humanism, equality, and true democracy, however, is atheism, the denial of being at the mercy of others, the denial of dependence. Only if there is no God can people truly be free, make free decisions. We do not need prophets; we need enlighteners. The task of education should be to lead people to independent, free thinking.
Atheism as the Common Element
The only common element among the religions of all cultures that I can identify is atheism. There are often only isolated atheists, as there is hardly any atheistic religion except Buddhism, but there have always been alert thinkers in all peoples at all times who denied the existence of gods or questioned their power.
In the Sumerian-Akkadian Gilgamesh epic (around -2700), the gods are described as errant and subordinate to nature. From ancient Egypt, the popular saying has been handed down: If I knew where God is, I would sacrifice to him.
Pharaoh Akhenaten (around -1365 to -1347), husband of Nefertiti, deposed the priesthood and introduced instead the this-worldly sun god Aten, who bore pantheistic traits and symbolized natural knowledge.
From ancient India, materialistic and atheistic thought has been handed down since the -6th century. This includes the materialistic philosopher Uddalaka Aruni (around -650). Around this time, the schools of materialism and idealism had already separated in India. Around -300, the Lokayatasastra, a textbook of materialistic philosophy, was created. God, it was said, was an invention of the rich to deceive the poor, the only source for understanding natural phenomena being our senses, and nothing exists beyond our world. There are further examples of critical, atheistic thinkers from India.
Mozi (-479 to -381), an opponent of Confucius’ teachings (Confucius, -552 to -479), founded a materialistic school in ancient China. Yang Zhu (-4th century) denied the existence of supernatural forces and disputed any afterlife. Further examples from the Middle Kingdom are numerous and need not be listed here.
The literary figure of Prometheus in ancient Greece was not only a friend of mankind but also an enemy of the cruel and jealous gods. Homer spoke mockingly of the bad qualities of the gods. Thales of Miletus (around -624 to -546) no longer wanted to believe in the gods and sought explanations for natural phenomena in astronomy and science. Xenophanes (around -570 to -480) refused to worship images of gods, arguing: If oxen, horses, and lions could draw, they would depict their gods as oxen, horses, and lions.
Heraclitus of Ephesus (around -544 to -483) was an atheist philosopher and taught, like Buddha in India, that everything is in constant flux and change. Anaxagoras was convicted of blasphemy for his statement, The sun is a simple mass of fire and stone.
In our culture, materialism has been represented by such significant philosophers as Feuerbach, Marx, and Nietzsche. At all times and in all cultures, there have been materialistic, atheistic thinkers whose ideas have largely retained their validity to this day. No other religion but atheism can claim this for itself. The difference between theistic religions and atheism lies in the fact that atheism is not spread through tradition but through independent thinking. Most atheists do not have the same beliefs as their parents, according to my non-representative internet survey, while Christians believe the same as their parents. From this, I conclude that being a Christian can often be equated with not thinking critically enough. Anyone who examines the existing religions, their shortcomings, their impact on society, and in history will come to the conclusion that they were created by humans for a very specific purpose. Often, this purpose is the maintenance of power or the provision of comfort. Only atheism can be found anytime, anywhere, independently, and self-sufficiently.
I Do Not Need a God
Why would I need a god? I have everything I need and am happy with it. I explain events through their natural causes and humanity through its evolution. I can question a first cause as little as if it were God
, and I can just as well exclude this question. It is better to admit having no answer than to pretend to have one. I have long since defined the meaning of life for myself. My goal is to leave traces in the sands of infinity through my actions and my efforts, to take care of my family, and later to rise again in my children. When my body is gone, I do not need to strive for a deceitful afterlife. Instead, I will die knowing that the memory of me will outlive my mortal shell in friends and family.
I base my ethics on evolution, convinced that humanity could only survive through community spirit and self-sacrifice, in the knowledge of the value of human reason in its intellectual development. I demand equality because only nature alone in its ruthlessness can decide which life is better suited. It has been shown that in catastrophes, it is not the standardized, average individuals that prevailed but those with minor genetic defects who were better adapted to the new environment than the previous one. If every person has the same opportunities, nature can optimally work in its selection. When I want to do good, I do it without God, but also without fanaticism. I advocate for my ideas with full conviction because they are more than mere divine promises. Here and now, I enjoy life to the fullest, without hoping for an eternity or longing for a paradise.
What is not just, I oppose, knowing full well that there will be no corrective justice and that what is right and good will only happen if you and I do it. I will not calm down, not wait for my fate, not leave morality to God. I want to stir up, unsettle, criticize, annoy, provoke thought, and bring about change. The thoughts of every person are valuable as long as they are not just howling with the wolves, more than a follower. This world needs thinkers, not prayer-makers, people who are ready to subject their insights and experiences to constant criticism, who never miss an opportunity to be scolded. Only constructive confrontation can bring redemption.
I Do Not Want a God
Throughout human history, countless people have lived without believing in a god, or they have believed in a diversity of gods. In their lives, all heathens and atheists were just as good or bad, just as happy and unhappy, as Christians. It makes no fundamental difference in a person’s life whether they believe in a god or not, as long as they personally do not mind the loss of godless freedom. The question is not whether there is a god or, more precisely, gods, but whether we want to believe in them. The existence of a god is of no relevance to our lives. The claim of Christianism that unbelievers will one day be punished for their disbelief is touchingly naive and utterly absurd, given the diversity of religions. I cannot believe in a religion that wants to convince me that I will go to heaven, while my best friends would not be there, no matter how good people they were, just because they did not belong to the right sect.
True Religiosity
Suppose there existed a god; one could say, God is.
Thus, God would not be the highest principle, but existence. A God, in its existence, would be subordinate to existence itself, just like the universe, the world, nature, and humans. Existence itself is the highest, the greatest, and the most worthy of reverence. It is the fact of existence that makes me sink into deep awe. I deeply admire the presence of dimensionality, its interaction in the laws of nature, which accomplishes such great things as space and time, matter, whose interplay creates life and spirit.
Albert Einstein divides religiosity into three levels. The first and most primitive level he calls the religion of fear. It arises from the fear of hunger, wild animals, disease, and death. Since the insight into natural relationships is still very limited at this level, the human mind imagines beings who act in a human-like manner and can thus cause pain. These beings, spirits, demons, and gods, must be appeased through ritual actions, prayers, and sacrifices. The Old Testament of the Christian Bible is a classic example of such a religion of fear.
Already in the New Testament of the same Bible, a transformation to the second level is recognizable, the moral religion. It is characterized by a longing for love, support, and guidance and emphasizes social feelings. All modern high religions have largely detached themselves from their roots in the religion of fear and have developed into moral religions. Most religions, however, are still mixed forms of the first two levels. All these religions share the idea of human-like deities whose favor one hopes for and whose punishment one fears. They are mostly the basis for maintaining unjustified worldly power and sovereignty, whether through a theocracy, privileging the priesthood, or church institutions.
The third and most exalted level of religiosity, according to Einstein, is cosmic religiosity. It is characterized by admiration for the sublimity and order of nature and the absence of any dogmas or deities. It embodies what remains when one strips away the superstition and mythology of contemporary religions—a godless admiration of existence. An early stage of this form can already be found, according to Einstein, in the Psalms of David and some prophets of the Bible, but much more so in Buddhism. This cosmic religiosity is the strongest and noblest driving force of scientific research in the quest for an insight into the great, wonderful truth that surrounds us every day.
Demands
Since religion is nothing unique and unequivocal, the right to religious freedom, as promised by most constitutions, must be consistently implemented. This necessarily requires the complete and profound separation of state, economy, and church. A company whose employees belong to different religions must not pay money to religious institutes or favor any religion. In Switzerland, however, companies are even forced to pay church taxes. This is a clear violation of human rights and the constitutionally guaranteed religious freedom since it forces an atheist person to support private institutions that they usually despise. This contradicts their deepest religious conviction. It is equally unacceptable that in many countries some religious communities are preferred over others. It is intolerable when the state handles the collection of church membership fees through taxation. This is solely the business of the respective churches.
Furthermore, existing religions should fully renounce their origins in the religion of fear and transition from moral religion to cosmic religion. Priests should be abolished just as much as all church institutions and revelations. The positive, pacifist-humanistic spirit that lies in many old religions should be integrated into the essence of the cosmic religion. Cosmic religiosity is nourished by enlightenment, knowledge, and understanding—understanding not only of but also for nature. Understanding also for fellow human beings and their often compulsive situation should lead to great tolerance, empathy, and assistance. As humanism has demanded for centuries, all people should finally be recognized as equal and having equal rights. No one should rule, no one should reveal, no one should have more significance without their own merits than others. There are no gods and no one who could have received special legitimations from them.
This article first appeared in the book Kreuzschmerzen – Standpunkte und Bekenntnisse von Heiden und Ketzern Cross pain – viewpoints and confessions of pagans and heretics
published by Claus Nordbruch.