And Skeletons Won't Dance
Mankind’s first gods were rather basic creations, the wind, the sun, and the rain. Crop failures were blamed on the sun god, rain god, or some other kind of god. A woman’s infertility was blamed on a fertility god. After all, there was nothing wrong with a man’s or a woman’s reproduction organs. It had to be the fertility god’s doing or undoing. Man was not weak; it was god’s fault.
After man became more sophisticated his gods became more sophisticated. Most of them looked human, but had super powers, e.g., Thor, Mercury, Venus, Aphrodite, etc. These gods worked well for hundreds of years, but once again humans stepped up the ladder of sophistication. Humans wanted a god they could relate to on a more personal level. Hence, came the god of the Christians. A god that even the most poor of the poor could pray to and ask for help. To puncuate this idea, along came a fellow named Jesus who placed god on an even more personal level by telling everyone he (and only he) was the son of this Christian god. What a better way to bring god into your living room. Having Jesus walking the streets was like having Jerry Falwell living next door.
Then, since humans can rarely agree on anything, humankind couldn’t agree on Jesus’ place in the whole scheme of things. Hence, came all the splinter religious groups, some believed in the Nicene Creed, others ignored the creed, and still others created their own creeds. Today we have a whole passel of radical, conservative, and fundamentalist religionists walking around healing each other in the name of some form of this Christian god.
If you ask most religionists for some kind of proof that their god exists, they will read to you from a jigsaw puzzle book entitled the Bible, as if the hand of their God wrote the Bible. When, in fact, this book was written and translated by weak and prejudiced men. When a nonbeliever points this out to a Christian, a standard reply is given…faith. The truth must be believed through faith. Of course, this is what they say in public, but behind closed doors, Christians are just dying to get their hands on some real physical evidence that the man Jesus was god’s son. They examine ancient burial shrouds, they see the Virgin Mary in a cheese sandwich, and they see tears flowing from a piece of concrete that resembles Mary.
Humans are an insecure lot you see, and believe they should not die. Humans, down deep in their egos, can’t imagine that such sophisticated and bright creatures should die and decompose. How can that be? How could such marvelous creatures be no different then a dead squirrel? Religion was born out of insecurity and ignorance of the world around us. Humans must have hope for a hereafter; it’s innate, yet illogical. Most people require a god to explain their existence. It is indeed the silver bullet or explanation for this one-way trip through life.
Christians are afraid atheism is the real truth. They hate the non-believers (a form of fear) for this reason. Atheism is the wake-up call they don’t want. Atheism places humankind on the same level as all creatures. When they die, they decompose, there is no rainbow at the bottom of their grave, and skeletons won’t dance their way to the Pearly Gates.
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