Praise Jesus and Pass the Cool Aid

For some reason I was thinking of the tragedy at Jonestown today. In November, 1978, over 900 people killed themselves, were murdered by guards or killed by their parents in one of the major horrors of the decade.

Bottom line is that religion can be and often is a death cult. This is an observation discussed recently by Sam Harris, who keeps coming back to the fact that crazy ideas lead to crazy behavour and are therefore not to be given the tolerance that liberal philosophy so often grants them.

I lament the centuries that philosophers spent in the swamps of Christian "theology", When Christianity married itself to political power, two millennia of religious wars were born. First heretics were stamped out to produce what is now considered to be "orthodox"mythical nonsense like the trinity. Then we had a few centuries of the Crusades to "save" the Holy lands.

With the "Reformation", the death cult of religion married itself to the lust for power of local princes to produce centuries of "religious" wars. Europeans did not let this distract them from genocide in the Americas  Millions of souls were "saved" by the grave right up to the 20th century.

Religion is not neutral. It is harmful. This harm is not offset by the good that religious people do. I'd say that people do good things because such things come naturally to humans. Killing your children to send them to Heaven is not natural. This needs powerful persuasion and surrender to insane authority -- also human tendencies but hopefully tendencies that can be resisted.

Recently, we have seen the dying days of ISIS as they maximize the deaths of innocent civilians as they are driven to their ultimate exit from this world. Of course none of these lunatics will come back to tell the others that it was all a hoax. That's what keeps the scam working. That, and the dangerous connection between religion and death itself.

A serious study of history will reveal that religion is not necessarily the foundation of brutal atrocity. The Huns slaughtered entire civilizations with no remorse because they regarded non-Huns as less than human, like cattle. You see this attitude in modern warfare where the enemy is dehumanized and his bodies not counted. Similar thinking justified the fire bombing of Dresden and the vaporization of Nagasaki. Again and again, we see soldiers coming to the profound realization that the enemy is "just like us" - a realization that doesn't seem to prevent them from "doing their duty". If there is a fine distinction it is this: humans are prone to violence but religion doesn't prevent them from killing inconvenient people - it actively encourages it.