"The meaningless absurdity of life is the only incontestable knowledge accessible to man." (Leo Tolstoy)

Belief in Belief

There is no event which can be told with absolute certainty and nothing simply commences and finishes. History is a continuous process but there are parts of it which are unknown and will remain obscure. History is bloody. That can be stated with as much certainty as anything can be said with assured confidence. We do not even need to know all the constituent parts to know that it has been contiguous cruety, death and destruction.

While there is a lot more to history than the bible, Christians and Jews have referred to the New Testament and the Torah, respectively - as testaments of events which likely did not happen the way they have been told. The stories are most often simply literary apologetics for bad manners and immoral misbehavior.

The three major unity monotheistic religions which affect us the most in the West are Judaism, Christianity and Islam, but the real beginning of faith religions didn't start there; it started with many gods.

Some orthodox Christians believe in the literal creation myth that god created the world in 4004 B.C.. (Archbishop James Ussher/1630 - Annals of the Ancient and New Testament - cited also by Andrew Dickson White in A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom, Vol 1, (1896))

It would be too tedious to list all the biblical contradictions in these early documents here, besides which, you can search for them on the InterNUT easily enough so I won't bother if you don't mind except to mention there are numerous parallels in the bible stories to mythologies of the ancient peoples. Those comparisons too are numerous and repeating them here too tedious - and the examples are too easily found by Googling them for me to bother.

I will instead touch on that which is more familiar to most of you, the central theme of Jewish belief, being the "Chosen People" of this all-knowing, all-powerful, vengeful, and very jealous and cruel god and the "contract" entered into by Abram (Abraham) on behalf of the Jews - which you can find in the covenant in Genesis 15:18. wherein god, who is also obviously a thief is promising the land belonging to someone else, the Canaanites to the descendants of Abraham in perpetuity. Not only was he giving away the territory of Canaan, god gave the descendants of Abraham all of the land "from the river of Egypt unto the great river, the river Euphrates."

To enforce the contract, the Hebrews would slaughter tens of thousands of Canaanites who refused to be convinced of the arrangement (See book of Joshua). And the Hebrews in a scorched earth assault destroyed the town of Ali so no traces of it could ever be found.

As with everything else in the written record of those events they were recorded centuries after they were supposed to have happened. And the books which comprise the Old Testament stories (let's call them legends), were compiled in the 6th century B.C. after Jews were taken into captivity in Babylon, the likelihood being to serve as the catalyst for uniting an enslaved Hebrew people.

Not only the Hebrews claimed Abraham as its founder, so too, did Muhammad for the Muslim religion as it is written in the Koran.

Abram, who became Abraham when he accepted god's covenant, was from Ur, which was a very well-known city near the Chaldees - about 120 miles from the Persian Gulf, and a favored place for the gods, also where Hammurabi conquered Ur and introduced pagan theology unacceptable to the tradition writers of the Hebrew theology - and Ur was the center of worship of the moon god. Hammurabi also introduced sun worship to Ur. At Ur was the `House of Great Light,' where people would gather to perform ritual murder, including human sacrifice and killing the first born.

Some think that Abraham, if he existed at all, would have been a follower of the moon god and believed in sacrificing the first born (See Genesis 22). Perhaps it is where the admonition for Cain to kill Able comes from this view, but we don't really know but if they did it would better explain that passage.

When Abraham's father, Terah died, the family left Ur and went to the territory of Canaan and his followers were given the name of Habiru, which had both Hebrew and Greek meaning, "one who crosses - from place to place, to-wit: a nomad or transient." The term also implied and became known as "plunderers and brigands," sort of like gypsies and traders who lived by their wits and also as fighters and descendants of Abraham often hired themselves out as warriors - as mercenaries; biblical soldiers of fortune. But the real Hebrew tradition did not materialize until the Moses legend came into being - as written about in the Jewish bible in the 6th century B.C.

Islam claims lineage to Abraham through his slave wife Hagar and their son, Ishmael is the line claimed by Muhammad and Muslims. On their way to Canaan (according to the legend) they quarreled over water supplies and some of the followers split off from Abram. The group separated and Lot, another herdsman, went to the Jordan plains and Abram went to Hebron's fertile valley. They set up their tents there and dug their wells and all who "submitted" to Abram's authority as Patriarch - just as all who would eventually submit (submission is the meaning of Islam) to Muhammad would be his followers.

That is where Sarah gave birth to her own son, Isaac and that is when Abram was persuaded to send his concubine wife, Hagar and their son Ishmael away - some say becoming the first Palestinian refugees. Ishmael became a leader of a nomadic tribe - also the first Arabs - and most of you know the rest of the story. As much, that is, that you can believe. If there is any truth to it, then Jews and Arabs are indeed each other's cousins, just as Ishamael and Isaac were half brothers and sibling rivals.

Praying is like shouting "fuck you" in an empty room. Nobody hears it.

There is NO organized atheism. There never was. So there could not and can not be death and destruction in the name of atheism, but there has been untold carnage carried out in the name of various religions. Atheism is merely the non-belief in the supernatural. Atheism is reasonalbe.

Belief in God is likely a benefit to reproduction because it is a coping mechanism. That doesn't mean it is right or we can't do without it. It is my view that it was more important during prehistory and early human history than it is today. There are other coping mechanisms for death. There is truth and dealing with it can be a pleasant enough experience if there is a realization that we must make the best of it.

Religion on the other hand is unreason and belief in belief is delusional and it is pathological. Atheism is not immoral; people are. Non-believers are more moral than believers because they cherish life more than they do death, whereas religions promise a life after death and therefore this false promise of salvation and forgiveness for their sins in life. It is the excuse used by suicide bombers. Believers can't prove anything with the thesis that god is good. Their "mythical" god is cruel, uncaring, despicable and he is very dead.

Hank Roth