I have been against religions and the religious feeling in my life
and I shall now detail why it should be excluded in your life.
but a bit of personal history to tell you where I am coming from…
my family was not religious, and we didn’t go to church, I knew
at a fairly early age, by 4th grade, that I didn’t believe in god…
but what was missing, was the why… why believe or not believe in god?
Here as it is true in most of our lives, the why is very important aspect of life…
why is there existence, instead of non-existence… and the why have
believe in god, instead of why we shouldn’t hold believe in god…
the yes and no questions of our lives… why should we or why shouldn’t we,
hold to some position of belief or to no belief?
my own search for god, began in high school and lasted for decades…
one of my favorite authors is NIkos Kazantzakis…who was described
as a “God intoxicated Man”… I have engaged in some sort of search for
the divine and the religious most of my life…despite my own personal
bias against religion and being religious…
I shall make the argument against religions and the religious beliefs,
and I shall leave it to others to make the argument for the religious beliefs…
among the many arguments against the religious and religious beliefs lies
in the very nature of religious belief…in seeking the god almighty, we forget
and ignore the ground we walk upon… by focusing on god and heaven, we forget
that we still live on planet earth… we are biological beings who have biological
needs and desires… when we focus on god and heaven, we neglect that we are
of the body, for the body, by the body…one might say, what about our soul?
I have often written about the need to better ourselves, to give concern to
our inner needs, but we cannot, cannot make our inner needs, our soul as it were,
to be the primary concern of human existence…and that shall be my first
argument against the religious… the concern for the soul outweighs the
concern for our bodily needs, both physical, emotional and psychological…
we must hold equally for body and soul…
the religious temptation to the negation of body and the bodily desires,
leads to damaging both soul and body…the religious need to fast, to
engage in bodily negation, has no positive value…it turns the body into
the enemy which the body is not… the “soul” and the body are equal
partners in this existence…we cannot neglect either side of this
equation, we need the body as much as we need the soul…
we must engage with both parts, body and soul, with equal passion
and awareness of their respective needs…
the religious focus too much on soul, and the secular focus too much
on body… we need equal focus on both…
to make point of existence, as the religious do, the primary goal of
existence to get into heaven, is to deny the body its due…
the religious wonder how many angels can dance on a pinhead,
and I ask, why does that matter? The real question is, what can
I do about the millions who suffer from scarcity of food, water, shelter,
the basics which is the right of all, ALL, living beings.
This focus on one’s personal soul allow us to neglect or forget the
millions of our fellow human beings who are suffering…
Now one might say, I have no control over those millions who are
without the basics that most in the industrial west take for granted…
what can I do for them?
The problem has been your focus on making the worthless trinkets of
existence, making money, fame, seeking titles, getting material goods like
cars, TV sets, couches…that focus on the material wealth we have is just
as bad is the focus on reaching heaven at all cost…
balance and moderation in our pursuits is the key to a worthwhile life…
a focus on the religious exclusively or on bodily needs exclusively, takes away from
our balance or the pursuit of moderation…
so this focus on the religious takes away from the balance we need in our
lives…the search for god must exist within the balance we create
in our lives…both bodily and our soul needs must be delt with in
moderation and balance…
the focus on either soul or body takes away from the moderation/
balance we must have to have a real engagement with what it
means to be human…and that real engagement requires
us to have both bodily needs and soul needs to be met equally…
Kropotkin