In pharmacology drugs are classified by their potential for abuse and addiction. Substances that show evidence that they can harm the user, are either highly restricted or eliminated completely. The benefit of any drug must be evaluated carefully against it’s “side effects” before it gets approved by the FDA.
We as humans seem to have an innate desire to invent tools and products to serve our needs. Medicine, technology are tools we invent to improve our quality of life and satisfy the needs of many. What happens when one of these tools become subject to abuse and malfunction. We recall, we re-engineer or we eliminate the product because it does more harm than good.
Some humans throughout time have obviously felt the need to invent religion. We looked around and had questions without answers. Suffering, disease, death, effects with no known causes. So people began to organize themselves in religious groups, supplicate themselves to a deity, find comfort and answers in their particular beliefs. This invention of religion, was a process of taking one set of unknown variables and repackaging itself as a more palatable idea. These “ideas of religion,” themselves unknowable, work so well because we all love stories with happy endings.
When stories and fables are elevated to the level of true ideology, the potential for abuse becomes enormous. Snow White and Cinderella are harmless, because we all know it’s not real. Adherents to religion believe completely that their “stories” are real. They believe that their religious leaders are representatives of gods word on earth and their ideology is the only true path. Adherents are rewarded with ego gratification that they are walking hand in hand with the creator. Terminology has been created to identify the rest of us. Infidels, unholy, epicures, goyim, damned, certainly not very complimentary.
The great ego of the religious adherent has a need to lift himself higher by diminishing others. With Judaism and Christianity today it’s mostly a matter of smug superiority, others in the Muslim world can justify murder to satisfy their religious ego.
I submit that religion is and has always been used as a tool to harm others. In our western world where science and technology is providing more answers to the unknowable, religion is clearly loosing it’s foothold. In many impoverished areas of our planet holy wars are still being fought so that few can control and enslave many.
The harm and abuse of religion certainly outweighs any benefit. No deity who is representative of loving kindness would bestow upon creation a set of values and ideologies that are so prone to human abuses. It is clear that we are all imbued with an intelligence that is used to improve the quality of life through tested and proven means.
When we us humans understand the intelligence, and the nurturing nature of our universe that we are all part of, the need to separate ourselves from others through fictional means will disappear. Big Brother Burt hopes and predicts that the day will come when the stories of all our great religions will be just that. Religious ideologies and their proponents will be forgotten.
Big Brother Burt