Deon Barnard

Religion is a mystical, manipulative and brain deadening system designed to control the weak and gullible majority for the benefit of a few hypocritical ‘leaders’ who decide all the rules. Yes, I am very passionate about this topic! Organized religion has been responsible for more carnage, hatred, war and bloodshed in the last 6000 years of our history that any other causes or motivation. Sure, it could be argued that some religious wars were really about money, territory or power; but ultimately those are the benefits of religion anyway, so the causes are interchangeable. The ‘macro’ evidence of wars, crusades and inquisitions speak for themselves, but often we overlook the ‘micro’ consequences that occur in the lives of individual adherents of organised religions; billions of hapless individuals who have had, to some degree, their free will replaced with unquestioning submission to a set of rules and regulations stipulated by a holy man or holy book; their time wasted with meaningless activities aimed at keeping the sheep in line; and their money and personal resources milked for a ridiculous cause that nobody is allowed to question.

I, like millions of others in my country was raised on church. ‘Christened’ in an Anglican church, ‘confirmed’ in a Methodist church and ‘baptised’ in the middle of Africa somewhere. I went to ‘Sunday School’ where I learned all the biblical stories and was told “it’s all true”. If I questioned anything I got some lame explanation like, “the bible says so” or, “don’t worry about that now – one day you’ll understand” or, “just pray about and the Holy Spirit will reveal the answer”. I started to believe, like so many others, that the less logical a thing was and the more I just believed what I was told ‘by faith’ and not evidence, the more I pleased God and the greater my ‘chances of getting into heaven’. I was so taken by the whole concept that I joined a mission organisation and spent the next few years travelling the globe preaching and teaching with the goal to get people everywhere ’saved’. With each new ‘convert’ I felt I was pleasing God more and securing my position in the church and in heaven. I then joined the staff of a church as a pastor and finally even led a church of my own.

A few years into all this my brain started to rebel. On one hand I was a Christian mercenary trying to get everyone to agree with my view; but the thinking, rational, free part of me was saying “whoah – stop – look – think! What the hell are you doing? This is not what people need.” I started to become aware of what was really taking place in churches all over the world – and not just churches but temples and mosques and synagogues and all the other centres for religious brainwashing. Even more frightening was the fact that I was one of the brainwashers. I was using my public speaking ability and motivational skill to perpetuate a system of control and fear. It took a few years to separate myself from the system, so strong was its hold on me, that when I finally broke free entirely I literally wept for all the damage I had done to people’s lives. Now that I am free to think and be who I really am I am growing as a spiritual being and not stagnating as a blind shepherd. I am growing in love, in joy, in peace, in intimacy, in tolerance and in my awareness of the real truths that operate in the world and the universe at large. I don’t need to know that God (or my pastor) loves me, to love myself. I don’t have to attend arbitrary meetings to feel like I am making good use of my time. I don’t have to ‘go to church’ to feel like I am connecting with God. Nobody can use the threat of hell to convince me to obey anything unquestioningly. I don’t use ‘faith’ as a replacement for logical thought. I have no fear of being rejected by any particular community anymore. The world is my oyster – I’m fearless – I’m free.

Here are some things people need to understand about religion:

1. Religion is based on fear and manipulation

How do you take a bunch of potentially intelligent individuals and get them to believe… mmm… that the Bible is a book written by God over thousands of years using the hands and pens of various human beings, and that its all literally 100% true in every detail, despite the fact that there are multitudes of versions, some which include more chapters than others. Or that currently it is God’s will that one man marry one woman and that he ‘changed his mind’ from the days when he was cool with David and Solomon marrying hundreds of woman. Or that God was cool with slavery in 50AD but he agrees with us now that it’s not so cool anymore. Or that God cares about what you wear to church or how many minutes of ‘quiet time’ you spend with him each day. Or that God can speak to some guy leading a church in… Winklesfontein… but not to directly to you. Oh, the list is endless. Millions of illogical, contradictory superstitions are happily entertained by thinking people everywhere. How? Through fear and manipulation.

Think about it. What would happen if you were to tell your leader that you doubt God’s existence? Either he would laugh and roll his eyes, implying that you must be stupid to think that way (i.e. playing on your low self esteem and need to be accepted); or he would frown and accuse you of blasphemy and warn you not to question God (i.e. playing on your fear of hell or getting into ‘trouble’). Either way there’s little chance of having a rational conversation that involves empirical proof. The church, like any other organisation or business requires finances to thrive. How do they get their finances? They scare people into giving or manipulate them into thinking that tithing is a personal get rich quick scheme. People are told that if they don’t give, the money they keep will be cursed anyway… oh hell, then we’d better give like crazy. How do you get a bunch of people to keep giving and submitting? You gather them together every week for a brain alignment and fear casting session – it’s called church. But no one would willingly attend such insanity if they understood what was happening to them, so the religion uses fear and manipulation to coerce attendance. “If you don’t attend church you will displease God (a really dumb thing to do)”. “Why weren’t you at church on Sunday? God can only help you if you stay warm in the fire of fellowship”. “You know, if you stay away from church you’re really out in the wilderness where the ‘Devil’ can have his way with you”… and so on.

In fact, the “Fear of God” is the foundation of most religions. When your brain is bombarded with a tidal wave of contradictory and improbable notions the best thing you can do (if you want to remain acceptable and included in society) is to stop thinking and just bow down in fear and submission… aaaah, now doesn’t that feel better? Everything will be just fine. See you on Sunday. Don’t forget to smile and bring your bible. We really love you… just don’t disagree with us.

2. Religion kills

As I said earlier, on a macro scale this is easy to see. Millions of Christians and Muslims died in the crusades. Millions of innocent people died at the hands of Roman Catholic inquisitors and Christian emperors and kings. Thousands of Irish and English people died in the cross fire between Protestants and Catholics in Ireland. Many innocent Arabs we’re killed by an expanding Muslim nation under Mohammed. How many have died in India from Hindu/Islamic violence? The closed and fearful doctrines of religion can only lead to intolerance and conflict on a frightening scale. The killing I refer to in the title however is that of the individual human spirit. Religion has for years slowed down the progress of science and human creativity. When Galileo claimed that the earth was not at the centre of the universe, but instead revolved around the sun, he was incarcerated by the church and held prisoner for the rest of his life (they probably would have burned him alive had he not been as well known). Copernicus came up with the ideas before him but didn’t do much with it for fear of being killed for his ideas. The same was true for many mathematicians and scientists of the dark ages. It seems that only when an idea has enough critical mass acceptance does the church start wondering what to do with it – and then someone works out how to take the “new idea” and incorporate it into the current doctrine in such a way that it seems it was always there to begin with.

I have seen hundreds, if not thousands of people desperately trying to gain acceptance from their religious leaders and looking for a platform to be recognised for their unique gifts and talents, only to be turned away, put on the shelf or remoulded into the image of the church until the gift is dead and useless. I have seen capable, strong, talented individuals reduced to mindless cattle obeying every whim and fancy of the system – no longer capable of open, philosophical conversation or common sense. Religion replaces free will with mindless obedience; honesty and openness with fake smiles and insincere intentions; real love with sacrificial duty; passion with subservience; life with paralysis; truth with dogma and mysticism; facts with fiction; stewardship with religious stealing; inspiration with manipulation; joy with fear. I am embarrassed to have ever been part of it, but I am also thankful that I can relate to those who are in it and hopeful that I can point them to freedom. Religion does not make a man greater, it makes him weak. It does not make a man wiser, it makes him dull. It does not point to the truth; it keeps us from pursuing the truth. Religion kills our spirit, weakens our mind and steals our freedom.

3. Religion makes no sense

There are so many contradictory and changing doctrines in the church it’s really quite difficult to keep up. In fact it’s impossible to keep up, which is why the average Christian can turn their brains off and just accept everything they hear as truth. If we don’t actually process anything it’s fairly easy to go with the “God knows everything, I’ll just trust him…Keep it simple,” theory. Why is it that we take some scriptures literally (tithe 10%, fellowship regularly, homosexuals are going to hell) and others we pass off as being ‘historical’ or ‘contextual’ (cover your heads, men and women must sit separately in church, don’t eat unclean animals). The reality is that the leadership of the church will justify whatever it suits them to justify and the people will accept whatever justification is fed to them. If the logic is challenged then people resort to the old classics, “Don’t question God!” or “God told me to do it” or “If you spend more time in prayer God will reveal this truth to you” or “You’re not spiritual enough”. Yowzers! Well if that’s the case then full sail ahead – no more questions from me – no-sir-ee sir – whatever you say.

There are elements of macro evolutionary theory that I don’t buy because there’s no substantial evidence. There are also core foundations of religion that are nothing more than elaborate children stories based on imagination with no substantial evidence. Telling me that I should believe that God exists because there’s a story in a book about someone who chatted to God… just doesn’t cut it. Telling me that the world was created in 7 days about 6000 years ago is insane. We may as well believe that Smurfs exist in the centre of the earth – there’s about as much evidence. Telling me that the world was populated by Adam’s kids inbreeding with each other and then that it was all wiped out to start again with four couples and a boatload of animals in Turkey… do you think I’m retarded? Are you really going to try and convince me that an intelligent being called GOD sits in a place we can’t see or find called HEAVEN? And this God who has the power to create everything that exists, is worrying about whether or not I have sex before marriage and drink too much and has an eternal war going on with an entirely evil angel called the DEVIL whom God himself created?! And the irony of it all is that Christians think that their religion is somehow more ‘advanced’ or ‘civilized’ than the pagan religions of old or the Greek pantheon of Olympian Gods who slept and argued with each other. It’s all the same: Hindu, Jew, Christian, Muslim, Buddhist, Baptist, Catholic, and Charismatic – it makes no difference. If you’re in a religion then you’re accepting a bunch of arbitrary rules, doctrines and bedtime stories as ultimate truth; you’re blindly following a group of leaders; and you’re living in fear of hell. On one hand you accept that the earth is round and that the square of the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the squares of the other two sides, because it can be proven, yet on the other hand you you’re convinced about heaven and hell for which there is no proof, logic or reasonable argument except that someone wrote about it in a book thousands of years ago.

Conclusion

I love people, even religious people. Many of my good friends are religious people and they have no doubt about my positive feelings for them. I hate religion, because it corrupts and weakens and manipulates and controls, but most of all it’s plain rubbish. Yes, there are many religious organisations that do humanitarian work and help feed and clothe and house people – but I believe that the people doing this work would be doing so regardless of their religion because they’re generous and loving people. I believe the world would be a more loving, tolerant, peaceful and happy place if there were no religions at all.

I’ll be posting a lot more on this topic in days to come.

Tags: belief, Christianity, philosophy, preaching, religion, truth

This entry was posted on Monday, October 12th, 2009 at 14:00 and is filed under about Deon, happiness & health, philosophy & religion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.