January | 2015

I do not believe in religion, I do not think it helps anyone, I do not think it’s a good thing, actually I do not think anyone has committed more crimes than religious people. The vast majority of religious people believe that humanity could not advance without chains because they do not trust humans, perhaps would have to apply here the saying, “the thief believes that everybody is on your condition,” but sayings are a shit, there’s always another that contradicts it. Comedian Bill Hicks said something like that the last thing Jesus would want, if he returns (apparently one of four residents of any Western country, believes that this will happen during his own lifetime, at least is what a survey says) is to see his fans causing wars and adorning themselves with chains with crosses of gold and silver and I agree, I do not think he could understand this at all. But yes, Christians have delegated their responsibility as true followers of Jesus Christ in the hands of institutions of power like the Church and state, long ago the lambs of god became simple sheeps in the best of the cases or at worst, hypocritical.

I’m not Buddhist, Buddhism technically it is not a religion, but a good bunch of people who call themselves Buddhists, they think Buddha was a divine being, a thing which he considered a solemn stupidity. The philosophies and religions are cleaved easily, for the simple reason that they are mental creations and as such are very malleable. Others would say pejoratively inventions, rather than mental creations, but the truth is that they arise, because of real circumstantial needs: Christianity ended the bullshit of animal sacrifices that the Jews still practiced; those who at one given moment dismissed the human sacrifices from the religions of antiquity, but unfortunately as Jean Cocteau watched : “revolutions remain pure no more than fifteen minutes” (and then stagnates, maybe it lacks to say).

So carefree, I liked to think about myself that was agnostic, agnostic pantheistic specifically, because it sounds great, as intrepid rationalist or so, but after reading on Wikipedia about the guy who coined the term, Thomas Huxley, I decided abandon any label at the moment, because this man was in favor of the Bible be taught in schools. In fact, what I proposed when I began writing this, it was making a defense of agnosticism against attacks received forever and from all angles: the religious labeled them as atheists, and atheists as opportunistic traitors, however I have no choice but to let it be, atheists are right, agnostics are somewhat inconsistent.
But it is not true that atheists do not believe in anything, I believe in humans, which science can satisfy our spiritual or intellectual needs, whatever you want to call them. I think some at some point we reach an understanding of the workings of what we call reality and we will know the purpose of life. Some on the contrary, sorry for the brave and admirable Bertrand Russell, are from my point of view, pessimists and they believe that after death there is nothing more; because they want to be logical and consistent, faithful to the purely empirical, restricting themselves any speculation about it. It is very respectable.

I do not think there is any inconsistency in what I say, I do not know everything and besides it is something that humans do quite well. Sometimes I speculate on that kind of intuitive knowledge, which is in the nature of the whole people, that sort of vague certainness that drives people to discover and wanting to make sense of everything. We know that our brain works as a filtering system, at all times it receives all the information that is available to us, but only consider useful in our everyday life a little part of these data, we tend therefore to reduce our world to that handful of information and we come to believe that is all there is, however sometimes the filters suffer a mismatch and a lightning, reality manifests itself spontaneously with a strange purity. Carl Sagan was saying that “we should pay attention to our subconscious, because it is often wiser than our conscious being.”

Atheists we have always been a minority, although there has been throughout the history of mankind: atheism apparently arise first in India, although the Western comes from the school of Cyrene, founded in North Africa by followers of Socrates, logically far away from Athens. The school was divided quickly, said in some way, in optimistic and pessimistic, which are the ways in which it remains today. Moreover atheism has never been, neither it is, a doctrine. Which those Greeks will found a school, does not mean theydid apostolate, nor any Jihad: to think was a discipline in the field and the era of Hellenism, it was thought and taught about many things, astronomy, physics, philosophy, all things were for discover and people wanted to know. Today we just want football. So some comedians like Bill Maher have dared to resume the torch of Bill Hicks, because we are at a critical moment: the disenchantment, apathy and comfort are giving free rein to new messianism which inevitably lead us to new humanitarian disasters.

The Story of Mankind behaves somewhat like the life of an individual, as he grows and acquiring knowledge, leave some interests and cares about others, just as humanity has abandoned irrational customs and continuing progress toward the adult state. But there is this thing, religion, is like a childishness, an insufferable remora, based on this irrational and inexplicable principle that his followers called dogma of faith. Religious faith is a mystery to me, as the Sumerians me, is a tool of power and certainly not a virtue as hope, much more humble (even the laws of physics are not a dogma).
Muhammad was not a peaceful man, the Qur’an is rife with incitement to violence and threats, so that Islam is not a religion of peace, not even a religion, it is a mixture of Arab nationalism (imperialism in the case of non-Arab countries) and cult of authority and power, as I think I said sometime. It is the last redoubt of the irrationality of other times and places. Nevertheless, I am convinced that Charlie Hebdo would have caricatured those miserable that exploit the situation in order to attack mosques and Arab shops.