Hating Religion

One Man’s Search for Reality

10 December 2008

Introduction

I have hated religion all my life. Hating religion is my great passion. I am an atheist.
I was visiting a website yesterday, called The Victorian Web : An Overview, hosted by an
American professor from Brown University, and I accessed a link entitled Atheism, from
which the following is taken.

Although many scholars trace atheism, the disbelief in God or denial of his
existence, back to eighteenth-century philosopher and historian David Hume or to
Thomas Hobbes of the previous century, avowed atheism begins in 1782, the year that
Matthew Turner, a physician from Liverpool, published his Answer to Dr. Priestley’s
Letters to a Philosophical Unbeliever. Until Turner, atheists concealed their disbelief
in God by pretending to be deists or by stating such disbelief in some esoteric form
comprehended only by the initiate.

(Taken on 9/12/2008)

I am not an academic, I am a loose canon, a loner, a philosopher serving one end only,
the end of philosophy. For me the nineteenth century is the great age of atheism, the great
age of knowledge indeed. I was delighted to find the Victorian Web yesterday, I did not find
too much of interest, the host is a professor of art history and English, not science. He is
obliged to cover my area of interest because the conflict between science and religion was a
paramount feature of the century. What is interesting about professor George Landow’s
views is that he expressly warns against these outdated ideas being taken as valid 1 . Also,
while he invites contributions, he asks other academics and students to consider certain
points, which implicitly indicates that a lone worker such as myself is barred from having a
voice on his site. These are interesting points, full of significance for me, if not for the
innocent reader who is oblivious to the true nature of the age in which we live today.

I want to try and introduce people to an idea that is not to be found anywhere in
society, the idea that we live in an absolute theocracy of a most extraordinary kind, one in
which the trick is to make us believe we live in a scientific age, a secular age, an age of
intellectual freedom.

We can take the suggestion that Atheism came into being, as an overt expression, in
1782,as a starting point for our argument. This change is followed by what Landow calls a
great age of doubt :

In religion the Victorians experienced a great age of doubt, the first that called into
question institutional Christianity on such a large scale.

(Taken on 10/12/2008)

On the site that led me to The Victorian Web, when I searched for Holyoake, it is
possible to obtain a copy of an account of the last trial for blasphemy in England, occurring at
the beginning of the Victorian era, indicating that there was a war waging here. All the
indications are that the war was being won by science, and being lost by religion. Nothing
could be farther from the truth.
Today we live in a world where all science has been eradicated, where religion reigns
supreme, where war is waged across the globe in the name of religion, and where hating
religion, in the freest land on the planet, in England, is a serious criminal offence (unless of
course you keep it to yourself ! ), just as it use to be a century and a half ago.

I want to try and explain how this transition has come about : the shift from an
absolute theocracy of an overt kind, to an absolutely theocracy of a covert kind.

Chapter One

The Plain and Simple Facts

I was born in 1955, a decade after the Second World War ended, a war which had
brought my parents together, while serving abroad. This was also a decade before the
cultural revolution we call ‘The 60’s’. The war, and the cultural revolution that followed,
were tightly interwoven phenomena, the purpose of the war was to fragment society so that it
could be remade, and the 60’s were the face of its initial remaking, which has now settled
down into the new appearance, of traditional form, which can be typified by the phrase
‘Multiculturalism’, because that is the key phrase the religious authorities that rule our world
wish us to know ourselves by.

This period is the anvil upon which my personality was forged. More intimately were
the hammer strokes of family circumstances,which fine tune the way we react to the wider
conditions in which we find ourselves. As to these circumstances, my parents were
reasonably typical, they were not religious in an effusive way, but they conformed to the
demands of religious etiquette. They were married, we were Christened, and I went to church
on Sundays, followed by Sunday school.

How I became a rabid atheist I do not really know, for the events that made me thus
are beyond the reach of my memory. I have long treasured some vague notion of saying my
prayers one night before bed,and being struck by the stupidity of the idea that there is a God,
perhaps I was seven, maybe six, or even eight or nine. What I can say with certainty is that
by the time I was a young teenager I was consumed with atheism. In more recent years I
have developed a more substantial idea of why I might of developed my passionate hatred of
religion, to do with the dynamics of family life, whereby the idea might of been sown in my
head by one of my older siblings, just to be malicious, I am afraid that such was, and such has
been, the story of our family.
But however my character was made, there it is, and for me has always been ;I am
content with myself. But it is relevant to ask where one derives ones personality from when
one stands against the society in which one lives, and when we come to the subject of this
work this need to know ones own place in the wider setting becomes critical to the exercise,
because here we call into question the whole of society’s idea of its own existence, and offer
a radically different account. Hence we say that despite living in a scientific age, we actually
live in a world where there is no science whatsoever. Which is a curious claim, to say the
least. How can I, one person, claim to know everything, while no one else knows anything ?
In many ways this is the real adventure on this road to genuine scientific knowledge, the
actual science itself is old hat, and perfectly obvious.

And so we come to the plain and simple facts of the matter, those facts that have
always struck me, and which form the bedrock of my reasoning. We live in a scientific age,
an age in which science has revealed that everything can be known, where the most
staggering things can be known. And yet we also live in an age in which religion exists, and
religion also tells us what reality is, just as science does. Yet the two ways of knowing are
entirely different, and entirely contradictory. So what on earth is going on ? This question
rattled around in my brain from childhood into manhood. It rattles no more.

Chapter 2

The Solution

The solution to this question, How can I know what no one else knows ? came to me
some ten years ago. This began with an initial moment of inspiration, as an idea occurred to
me that seemed to make sense of an otherwise exasperatingly inexplicable situation. The
problem concerned why people in my local community were not prepared to defend an aspect
of their social community that was under threat from corporate development, a local pub at
the centre of the community was about to be destroyed, for no reason, just a corporate policy,
and with it our whole social lifewas doomed to be destroyed. This was a decade ago, all that
was foreseen has come to pass, there is now no community here at all. Why did people fight
me tooth and nail to protect the right of the developers,against their own right to exist ? It
made no sense.
A solution gradually formed in my anguished mind. People were not really
individuals, they were drawn into a social collective which overruled their interests as
individuals. In effect I had discovered the idea that humans were actually a kind of organism,
that was composed of individuals.

I spent a little time, a couple of months,working out the implications of this idea in
terms of the many basic questions that I was aware of as being important in anthropology,
ideas about how humans evolved from animals to be as we are today. Various simple, blunt
questions, like why humans have a massive brain or why homosexuality was normal amongst
humans, were readily explained once it was assumed that there was no such thing as an
individual human being, in the sense of the person.
So I knew the idea was correct, then the real mystery began. How was it possible for
me to discover what no one else knew ? I needed to see what there was in the wider world
that related to my ideas.

It took me two years to discover a thread which eventually led me back into a past in
which I have been immersed ever since. Principles of Social and Political Theory, Ernest
Barker, 1951, somewhere, discusses ideas bearing on the idea that had inspired me. On page
fifty two, of my 1965 paperback edition, Political Theories of the Middle Age by Gierke is
mentioned, and this is where I went first, in my great exploration of the true science of
humanity, now dead,and long gone. I cannot now recall the exact route that I took, but
gradually a whole world opened up to me, a lost world, an amazing world. Here it was, my
idea, this is how I was able to discover the true science of humanity, that so many people had
devoted their lives to for so many generations, all to no avail, because the truth was that what
people were really devoting their lives to,was religion, not science, to the imposition of
religion upon science. Wow ! amazing, who would of thought of such a thing ? And so the
whole image of reality as presented to us began to unravel, and is now laid as bare as a new
born baby’s arse.

Chapter 3

Why Would They Need to

Control Knowledge ?

In 1782 atheists came out of the closet, Why had they not done so before ? The
answer to this question may seem irrelevant to today’s conditions, where atheism is rampant,
but the title of this chapter still has an answer that will amaze all who are not cowed by the
oppressive regime that smothers us.
 Religion and science areirreconcilable. This is obvious and undeniable. Yesterday I
viewed a page on the internet which quoted a passage from Einstein,that asked precisely this
question, and Einstein was shown to of indicated that this was not true. Who does it serve to
say something like this ? How could science exist if it were in conflict with religion ? Is this
what the question implies ? No. When we ask if science and religion can coexist,we have
only one thought in mind, and that is whether religion can exist in a world of science. So
when we ask a scientist whether he sees any impossibility in the coexistence of science and
religion we know we are getting the opinion of one who is unbiased, for he would not
compromise science for religion, he is a scientist !

Herein lies the core of the great deception, science does not exist, science is corrupted
by religion, so that science isreligion. Hence there is no science in the world today.
How and why, not to say who, has brought us to where we are now ? These are the
kind of questions that come to mind, if we take this proposition seriously. And where do we
find ourselves when we ask such questions ? In the realms of conspiracy. Which is not
where we want to be.

We need to backtrack a little. After ten years relentless searching for knowledge on
the idea that humans are a form of superorganic species,I could write a number of lengthy
books on the subject, I have already. But this item is intended to overcome some difficulties
in the communication of this idea in the contemporary world. I am an atheist,and I only want
to communicate with other atheists. Having said that I just this minute found a site that
invites document sharing, called Scribd, I signed up and found an invitation, from ‘Trip’,to be
a friend. I checked out Trip’slink and found a document about the conflict between religion
and science, written by someone else, and frankly pathetic, just the same old religious
twaddle. So I accepted Trip as a friend, but to what end ?
The thing about me is that I am entirely unique, and quite unlike any atheist I have
ever heard of, for I am a positive atheist. Lets snatch a patch from the article I just got
courtesy of Trip :

Religion itself is a way of explaining that which is inherently unexplainable.

That is not just the nature of religion, but its definition and reason for existence.
Religion and science do not conflict, except where religion attempts to
explain “how” rather than sticking to its main purpose, which is "why." Science is
better positioned to explain how, even though it is often mistaken in its
interpretation of facts. For example, the six-day-creation story approximately
4000 years ago, as proposed in the bible of the Abrahamic religions, is easily
shown to be false by provable evidence uncovered by science.
However, science has no way to explain the whys of natural mysteries
because it has no purpose along those lines. When science attempts to explain
the mysteries of "why" things happened, it fails because it does not have the tools
to do so.
To put it simply, when science claims to show how something happens or
happened in the past, religion may simply say that it is or was the way God
wanted it to be. Does that sound like an easy way out of the debate of science
versus religion ?
It's not really. Science has no way to comprehend or to even make sense in
a
general way of the immense complexity of the world and the universe around us.
"Evolution" and "natural selection" are terms that some scientists and science
lovers use to explain how everything happened. But they don't. Religion can
simply say that "evolution" and "natural selection" are God's way of improving on
what he made. Both evolution and natural selection have major flaws which their
supporters fail to address.
 (Downloaded from Scribd, via ‘Trip’, 10/12/2008)

So this indicates that my new friend Trip is a devoted admirer of religion ; which is
not much use to me. But as he happens to have a document of direct and immediate
relevance to what I am writing now, I thought I would accept the request to be a friend.

Lets try and say something about the argument in the above quote.
OK, I have decided how to respond to this passage. I said I was unique as an atheist
because I am a positive atheist, this means that I do not simply reject the idea that there is a
God, I know how to prove that there is no God.
Taking this further, I will say that while it is easy to prove that God does not exist, it
is not possibleto prove that God does not exist. This sounds like a contradiction, a blatant
absurdity, or else some form of artful word game. But what does it mean to claim to prove
anything ?
If we look at the section I have just taken from Trip’s offering, we find that much of
his argument against the idea of a conflict between science and religion relies very much
upon verbal defences. The passage says that if science discovers some universal principle to
account for things that religion claims to account for, then all religion need do is claim that
God made it so. This is akin to the logic that was used in the early nineteenth century to
dismiss the significance that geologists gave to the appearance of fossils,when dating the
earth. The essay Trip gives us freely accepts that science can easily prove that the earth is
more than 4,000 years old, as had been claimed in the Bible, but when this scientific
knowledge first emerged its challenge caused one author to say that the fossils were put there
by God to make it look as if the earth was older than it was !

So, what am I driving at ? I am indicating that the act of proving something has
nothing to do with demonstrating that something is true, but rather proof consists of one act
only, the act of consent. And come hell or high water no religious person is going to consent
to the simple proof that God does not exist, that science is more than capable of providing if
we lived in a free society, where knowledge was not controlled by an absolute theocracy, via
a process of subversion, inherent in the universities, which are, as they always have been, the
servants of the theocracy.

I was thinking of making this into a little book, when I began writing this morning,
but as I have just found an outlet, plus a friend, I think Iwill upload now. The idea for this
work arose because, having written a book focused on proving that God did not exist, and
having found a character to take a copy, the only response I got back indicated that I could
not take the aggressive line against religion that I had done. He was not a friendly reviewer,
where does one find an intellectually inclined atheist ? So, I decided to see if I could develop
an argument based on this reaction to my work, that would use the experience to make sense
of how religion was defended from the modern expression of atheism, as effectively today, as
ever it was in any society in the past.
The most interesting thing about trying to communicate atheist ideas to others, is that
only religious people are interested, this is because part of their mantra is the control of
knowledge, so they are always keen to see what arguments need to be opposed. If only there
were some people,somewhere, who actually just want real knowledge. Please, where are you
!!!!!! I cannot be alone, I know I am strange, but for pities sake.
1
I need to check this rejection of the validity of Victorian ideas, it might of been on the site
about Holyoake that led me to Victorian Web, it can be tricky to find sentences read on a web site ; I
had a brief look, but no joy.