I just had a revelation. One of those flashes of understanding.

[reprobate]

I was reading this thread:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=102&topic_id=1670435&mesg_id=1670435


And, as usual when reading about fundy cretinous logic, felt my stomach start to knot up. Suddenly I understood the reason for this.

Let me share my revelation. I was raised in a family that honored science and learning. Whatever religion we practiced was usually once or twice a year and left in the religious building. My entire world view was based on the idea that thru science we can learn of the universe and know about what surrounds us. This exercise is what allows us to make informed decisions about how we live our lives.

In other words, we know reality by investigating it and unwinding it in our minds. We, in my view, are the Universe's way of knowing itself. But that gets into philosophy and I didn't want to do that.

For me to accept the concept of the white bearded sky daddy and all that this means is to negate the last ten or twenty millenia of human learning and put myself back in the cave behind the safety of the fire and hope that the fearsome animals out there won't drag us all off to our deaths. It means that all we have learned in the great long struggle up from ignorance is meaningless. I refuse to accept that view.

To boil it all down to a few words, I guess it means this:

To accept religion is to reject reality.

More succinctly: RELIGION IS ANTI-REALITY.

[immoderate]

1. I forget who said it, but...

What's the opposit of faith-based? It's fact-based.

--IMM

[progressoid]

7. I like that...

concise and to the point.

[YankeyMCC]

2. Yup

"To accept religion is to reject reality." Is a phrase I have used myself.

[salvorhardin]

3. Like Epicurus, I feel a bit more harshly about religion

Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent.
Is he able, but not willing? then he is malevolent.
Is he both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil?
Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God?
-- Epicurus (341-270 BC)

[hel]

4. Religion is a coping mechanism people use to deal with the mortality

and the inherent injustice of being sentient and different from each other at the same time. Just think about the insane fascination all religions have with the idea of an afterlife. Or a next life. Karma. All tell believers that they won't be gone forever when they die, and if they are suffering at this time, they will be somehow compensated for it later.

[reprobate]

5. To me, hell woud be to live forever.

And the only concept of reincarnation I could accept would be if no memories would transfer forward.

Seems to me that was Heinlein's them when he invented Lazarus Long.

[dwckabal]

6. Tom Robbins said it best (WARNING-LONG!)

From Skinny Legs And All, this was one chapter:

Early religions were like muddy ponds with lots of foliage. Concealed there, the fish of the soul could splash and feed. Eventually, however, religions became aquariums. Then, hatcheries. From farm fingerling to frozen fish stick is a short swim.

The Reverend Buddy Winkler was correct about Spike Cohen and Roland Abu Hadee: they did not glide in numb circles inside a glass box of religion. In fact, they, Spike and Abu, wouldn't hesitate to directly attribute the success of their relationship to their lack of formal religion. Were either of them actively religious, it would have been impossible for them to be partners or pals. Dogma and tradition would have overruled any natural instinct for brotherhood.

It was as if had been granted a sneak preview behind the veil, a glimpse in which it was revealed that organized religion was a major obstacle to peace and understanding. If so, it was a gradual revelation, for it unfolded slowly and separately, a barely conscious outgrowth of each man's devotion to humanity and rejection of doctrine.

At best, perhaps, when the fourth veil does slip aside, will be better prepared than most to withstand the shock of this tough truth: religion is a paramount contributor to human misery. It is not merely the opium of the masses, it is the cyanide.

Of course, religion's omnipresent defenders are swift to point out the comfort it provides for the sick, the weary, and the disappointed. Yes, true enough. But the Deity does not dawdle in the comfort zone! If one yearns to see the face of the Divine, one must break out of the aquarium, escape the fish farm, to go swim up wild cataracts, dive in deep fjords. One must explore the labyrinth of the reef, the shadows of lily pads. How limiting, how insulting to think of God as a benevolent warden, an absentee hatchery manager who imprisons us in the "comfort" of artificial pools, where intermediaries sprinkle our restrictive waters with sanitized flakes of processed nutriment.

A longing for the Divine is intrinsic in Homo Sapiens. (For all we know, it is innate in squirrels, dandelions, and diamond rings, as well.) We approach the Divine by enlarging our souls and lighting up our brains. To expedite those two things may be the mission of our existence.

Well and good. But such activity runs counter to the aspirations of commerce and politics. Politics is the science of domination, and persons in the process of enlargement and illumination are notoriously difficult to control. Therefore, to protect its vested interests, politics usurped religion a very long time ago. Kings bought off priests with land and adornments. Together, they drained the shady ponds and replaced them with fish tanks. The walls of the tanks were constructed of ignorance and superstition, held together with fear. They called the tanks "synagogues" or "churches" or "mosques."

After the tanks were in place, nobody talked much about soul anymore. Instead, they talked about spirit. Soul is hot and heavy. Spirit is cool, abstract, detached. Soul is connected to the earth and its waters. Spirit is connected to the sky and its gases. Out of the gases springs fire. Firepower. It has been observed that the logical extension of all politics is war. Once religion became political, the exercise of it, too, could be said to lead sooner-or later to war. "War is hell." Thus, religious belief propels us straight to hell. History unwaveringly supports this view. (Each modern religion has boasted that it and it alone is on speaking terms with the Deity, and its adherents have been quite willing to die—or kill—to support its presumptuous claims.)

Not every silty bayou could be drained, of course. The soulfish that bubbled and snapped in the few remaining ponds were tagged "mystics." They were regarded as mavericks, exotic and inferior. If they splashed too high, they were thought to be threatening and in need of extermination. The fearful flounders in the tanks, now psychologically dependent upon addictive spirit flakes, had forgotten that once upon a time they, too, had been mystical.

Religion is nothing but institutionalized mysticism. The catch is, mysticism does not lend itself to institutionalization. The moment we attempt to organize mysticism, we destroy its essence. Religion, then, is mysticism in which the mystical has been killed. Or, at least diminished.

Those who witness the dropping of the fourth veil might see clearly what dimly suspected: that not only is religion divisive and oppressive, it is also a denial of all that is divine in people; it is a suffocation of the soul.

Regardless of Robbins' views on mystics and the soul, the thesis of this chapter is the sentence I've bolded and italicized: religion is a paramount contributor to human misery. It is not merely the opium of the masses, it is the cyanide.

So, whether your view on mysticism is extrovertive, introvertive, theistic or non-theistic, Robbins contention that religion is the destruction of the divine is spot-on. This is why (speaking from a non-theistic mystic point of view) I don't understand how anti-science people can claim that skeptics "worship" science. Science (and the Scientific Method) are proven tools that enhance, complement and strengthen a skeptics' mysticism, pointing out how little we really know, and how much more there is to discover. The universe is full of wonder and mystery, without injecting God (or Creator, or Cosmic Force for that matter) into it. As Michael Shermer says in How We Believe,

"discovering contingency was remarkably empowering and liberating. It gave me a sense of joy and freedom. Freedom to think for myself. Freedom to take responsibility for my own actions. Freedom to construct my own meanings and my own destinies...A world without monsters, ghosts, demons and gods unfetters the mind to soar to new heights, to think unthinkable thoughts, to imagine the unimaginable..If we are nothing more than star stuff and biomass, how special life becomes."