Revealed' Religion: Making the World Safe for Government

Exclusive to STR

May 30, 2007

"As an activated national guardsman, I work for the president. I believe that the people that make the decisions and put me into that position have the education and experience to know exactly what they're doing."

The above quote is from Iowa National Guardsman Sean Rohret, who was severely wounded in the unnecessary war in Iraq that Bush started to protect Israel while protecting and promoting his own meaningless political career. Little Bush knew that his daddy lost his election to Clinton after he refused to give Israel an additional 10 BILLION DOLLARS to resettle Russian Jews on Palestinian land. When Little Bush first met with Ariel Sharon--the butcher of Sabra and Shatila Palestinian refugee camps--in early 2001, Bush openly told him that he'd 'use force to protect Israel.' I don't think protecting Israel is what most US soldiers and Marines signed up for!

The faithful statement by the wounded soldier demonstrates his total faith in the US government and in the cowardly, self-serving political whores who operate it. This faith of the soldier, which is found in thousands of military personnel, is learned. It's not normal or natural for people to have such blind faith. It has to be inculcated from a very early innocent and impressionable age. This is the progress-retarding and deadly work of 'revealed' religion.

Christianity is one of the world's primary 'revealed' religions. It is a revealed religion because those who promote it claim that God revealed certain truths to certain people between two and three thousand years ago that are currently being taught to its adherents. Of course, this claim to divinely revealed truths amounts to nothing more than hearsay, for even if God did reveal a truth to Moses or to Paul or to Muhammad, it becomes mere hearsay once they tell it to anyone else. It can only be a divine revelation in the first case; after that, it's meaningless hearsay.

One cornerstone hearsay of Christianity is the 'immaculate conception' of Jesus. To quote Thomas Paine in his outstanding book, The Age of Reason, "Were any girl that is now with child to say, and even to swear it, that she was gotten with child by a ghost, and that an angel told her so, would she be believed? Certainly she would not. Why, then, are we to believe the same thing of another girl, whom we never saw, told by nobody knows who, nor when, nor where?" In order to believe this ludicrous lie/myth, we must throw our brains into reverse! We must, as the priests and clergy always exhort us to do, take it on faith. This accepting ridiculous claims on faith in religious matters only sets up a precedent for us to abandon our God-given reason in other things as well, such as in matters of government.

It takes a lot of faith for someone to put their life on the line in the military, knowing that their Commander in Chief, the one Rohret says he works for, got out of combat duty by joining the Air National Guard in a very sneaky way, and that the previous Commander in Chief got out of combat duty by having strings pulled for him in high places.

The main reason there is such violence in the Middle East is because of ancient Jewish mythology, which teaches that (1) the Jews are 'above all people that are upon the face of the earth,' and (2) God gave the Jews a gift of real estate in the Middle East a few thousand years ago to which they enjoy an eternal right. It takes a lot of faith to believe these two Biblical lies! But if you can suspend your God-given reason enough to accept them as true, you can also suspend your God-given reason enough to believe that Iraq was a serious threat to the US, that Israel is the victim of unwarranted Islamic violence, and that voting really matters.

To demonstrate just how powerful religious dogma is in scaring people to accept lies as truths, many Christians now accept the lie that Jesus was arrested by the Romans and not by the Jews, even though all four Gospels state it was the Jewish priests who arrested him. In the early 1960s, the Roman Catholic Church changed some of its dogmas, and this was one of them. Not even the Jews believe the new Christian dogma. In fact, the Jews teach through their Talmud that they not only arrested Jesus, they also killed him! In a new book by Peter Schafer, the Ronald O. Perelman Professor of Judaic Studies and Director of the Program in Judaic Studies at Princeton University, Jesus in the Talmud, the Jewish priests had Jesus arrested for idolatry and for being a sorcerer. According to Jewish law, they stoned him to death and then hung his dead body on a tree. If people are so frightened they won't openly question blatant discrepancies in their religious life, why would they not carry that shortcoming over into their political life?

The real definition of faith as promoted by the 'revealed' religions and governments is the suspension of an individual's God-given reason in order to accept, or at least to tolerate, an unreasonable claim made by a religion or government. Faith is vital to both institutions and can only lead to very negative consequences. Interestingly, faith is not required for natural religion/philosophy, as opposed to 'revealed' religion, as the following quote from the Deist Voltaire makes clear: 'What is faith? Is it to believe that which is evident? No. It is perfectly evident to my mind that there exists a necessary, eternal, supreme, and intelligent being. This is no matter of faith, but of reason.'

Independent thinkers and Root Strikers need to encourage the questioning of everything and everyone. The more we do this, the closer we get to a much better world.

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Robert L. Johnson's picture
Columns on STR: 94

Robert Johnson is a paralegal and a freelance writer in Florida. He was raised Roman Catholic, but after reading Thomas Paine's The Age of Reason, he became a Deist. In 1993 he founded the World Union of Deists and in 1996 he launched the first web site devoted to Deism, www.deism.com.  He is listed in Who's Who in Hell and is the author of Deism: A Revolution in Religion, A Revolution in You and An Answer to C.S. Lewis' Mere Christianity.  He wrote the introduction to The Age of Reason, The Complete Edition and also writes for Examiner.com.