Religion is Frightening
© Paulo Bittencourt
The only thing capable of making the brain shut down critical thinking completely is religion. How can anyone critically examine a book that they have accepted (or been led to accept) as sacred and which threatens them with punishment for rejecting what is written in it? If it were possible for Christians to read the Bible without fear, and if they studied History, they would consign Christianity to the depths of Hell!
In addition to the man being made from a mud doll; the woman, from the man’s rib, and snakes and donkeys talking, the Bible teaches that Humanity descends from incest. That’s right: In order to populate the Earth, the sons and daughters of Eve and Adam were forced to fornicate with each other. Oh, glory!
The Bible says that its god killed millions of children, for example in the Flood and in Egypt. When Yahweh, also known as Jehovah, commonly referred to as God, destroyed (or ordered the destruction of) cities, not only supposedly evil men went offline, but also women, the elderly, the sick and children. Because of a mere census ordered by David, Yahweh’s most beloved king, God sent a plague that killed more than 70,000 people, including the elderly, the sick and children.
God was in favor of slavery and polygamy (Yahweh’s most beloved king was blessed with — oh, glory! — nine wives). Apostle Paul blamed women for the world’s misery and ordered them to shut up in church.
Many biblical accounts considered essential have no archaeological support, such as the Exodus, which is considered mythology even by Israeli archaeologists.
There is no historical evidence even for Jesus, since the few texts that mention him, including the Gospels, were written decades after his supposed existence.
Because they are incapable of agreeing on what the Bible says, Christians fought countless religious wars, killing millions, such as the Thirty Years’ War. Catholicism and Protestantism persecuted, imprisoned, tortured and killed many thousands of Christians themselves.
Martin Luther insulted women, incited Christians to burn “witches” and even wrote a booklet instigating followers of Jesus to set fire to Jewish homes and even synagogues. Adolf Hitler had such admiration for the Father of the Protestant Reformation that he mentioned him in the Nazi bible, the book Mein Kampf, as one of his heroes.
French reformer John Calvin ordered Miguel Servet to be roasted on a bonfire, just because this Spanish scientist rejected the doctrine of the Trinity (which, as any child knows, is absurd). All the reformers congratulated Calvin for that.
At the behest of Swiss reformer Ulrich Zwingli, Felix Manz was drowned in a river. The sin of the Anabaptist leader? Being a pacifist and opposed to infant baptism.
In the Peasants’ War, German reformer Philip Melanchthon defended not the peasants, who had revolted because they were treated like trash, but their oppressors, the rich and powerful, instigating them to massacre the poor farmers.
Forced by Catholicism to accept Jesus as God, millions of Jews fled Portugal and Spain, for example to the Netherlands, which was less strict.
Christians invaded nations around the world, annihilated their cultures and religions, stole their wealth and massacred and enslaved their peoples. English Protestants confiscated the lands of Irish Catholics, banned their religion and forced them to attend Anglican Church services. There were cash rewards for the capture of priests, hundreds of whom were executed.
Catholicism and Protestantism colluded with Hitler and other dictators, such as Francisco Franco (creator of National Catholicism), António Salazar and Augusto Pinochet. In Brazil, Evangelical pastors worked as informants for the military dictatorship.
Many Christians find in the Bible support for racist theories. The prime example of that is the Ku Klux Klan, an Evangelical organization headed by a pastor.
Christianity teaches that some members of a family enjoy Paradise while others burn in Hell, simply for having followed a “wrong” religion or not having worshiped Jesus, even though they were good people and did good deeds.
Millions of Evangelicals fight against Science, teaching absurdities, such as the Universe being only 6,000 years old and millions of animals, including dinosaurs, having crossed continents, even oceans, to get on a boat.
Christians are intolerant of other religions (Evangelicals frequently vandalize Umbanda temples and even damage Catholic churches), have an aversion to nonbelievers and homosexuals and Christian denominations (of which there is a veritable pandemonium) ridicule and antagonize one another, each believing itself to be the true church of God.
Pastors abuse church pulpits to coerce their members into voting for certain candidates. (Here, I prove that Christians caring about politics is Satanism.)
Phew! Christians ignore these facts, which are just a few examples, because religious dogmatism causes aversion to research. On top of that, as I said at the beginning, Christianity threatens with torture in a lake of fire and brimstone those who doubt, as if one of the most natural things in the world — doubting — were evil.
My book Liberated from Religion (The Inestimable Pleasure of Being a Freethinker), exposes a whole host of absurdities, incoherences, contradictions and errors in the Judeo-Christian belief system, but which applies also to other religions, since the foundation of all of them is the same: turn off your brain and believe.
“Those who are not satisfied with anything less than being 100% intellectually honest are atheists, because Atheism is the only stance free of incoherences and contradictions.”