Since the moment I was born until this time now I have never experienced anything that I would class as ‘religious’. When I was a teenager I was quite interested in finding out some kind of truth to our lives. Desperate to find some cohesive meaning to our existence I read various religious texts and explored all kinds of esoteric ideas. Even though some texts have idealistic and interesting takes on our reality the end result was that I was left feeling that there was no evidence or solid truth in anything I read. In fact the majority was confusing, bizarre, esoteric and impossible to apply in any meaningfull way. Some religions, Christianity for example has a fundemental philisophical flaw. I could never understand why God created Satan:

‘Now the serpent was more crafty than any of the wild animals the LORD God had made.’

If God is meant to be ‘pure’, a perfection, and Satan is his antithesis then how do you explain that Satan is a product of God? God then must be corrupt himself in some way to produce Satan. If Satan reflects absolutely every evil in our world and in human beings and he is a product of God then God himself is worse than Satan as he knowingly unleashes this evil onto the world and corrupts his own creations (Adam and Eve). By default every evil in the world is Gods doing while you could say Satan is a victim of his own creation, God made him evil. This for me is a fundemantal flaw in the Christian philosophy. Using very basic logic the Bible even in its very early stages is flawed and God is nothing more than a selfish thug, killing without mercy and punishing those who love him in an attempt to test their faith. God does not practice what he preaches.

Christianity is not the only religion that has flaws, but I am not writing this to list the many examples of the relationship between religion and the illogical. My simple example is symptomatic of almost all religious texts that I have read, the interesting thing for me in all of these texts is that central to their stories are that beings with supernatural powers entwined with miraculous events play a huge role in defining believers real world. I am not talking metaphore here, lets not let modernisms let religion off by explaining away ridiculous stories as some kind of metaphore or purely as some kind of fable. They were never intended that way, and people have been killed and still are killed over not accepting that religious texts are literally the ‘truth’.

Religion accepts and promotes a form of madness. A fear of nothing except the demons they create. The emphasis rather than on life is actually on death. It is as though death and the ‘afterlife’ have more importance than life itself. I have often considered that religion is a focus for people who refuse to accept the most obvious and self validating reality that life is what you can measure and nothing more. I won’t even entertain a Solopsist argument and David Deutsche sums up the problem of that perspective very well in the Fabric of Reality (a must read). I could rant all day about religion but you would get bored and so would I. I think I have made my point.