The Nullities Of
Organized Religion
Steve Branks
From: "Steve Branks"
To: "Positive Atheism" <editor@positiveatheism.org>
Subject: Positive_Atheism_Letters_Section
Date: September 15, 2001 10:14 PM
Dear Cliff,
As tragic as it is, the events of September 11 are the outworkings of the nullities of organized religion.
There is no believer who does not speak of God as though with his finger to his lips, nothing sacred that does not stem from fear, nothing fearful that does not lead to hypocrisy, nothing hypocritical that is not found in the religious mind.
Religions never have any relationship with the powers they support (and sometimes found). Mohammed was innocent of the jihads, the Gospels counted for nothing during the Inquisition, St. Dominic burnt the Albigenses but not on purpose. Calvin tortured Servetus inadvertently, the Russian Orthodox hierarchy was not responsible for the Tsars, whose feet they kissed. The Hindus have nothing to do with the caste system, the sacred cows, or the famines; eyes turned devoutly towards the sun, how could these love-filled men be responsible for the corpses beneath their sandals? The Brahmanic Laws of Manu, which sanctions the most abject social system in History, was contemporary with the highest Indian mystical theology. Sages who have known the truth of Shiva, Krishna, and Vishnu have learned a supplementary certainty as to the excellence of a political organization that condemned the Untouchables to an existence as beastial as that of the Spartan helots -- the hierarchy of castes being merely the reflection of a hierarchy of souls.
Medieval mysticism reached its peak in a world crackling with the funeral pyres of witches. The Synods that celebrated the hierarchy of angels had no interest in the condition of the serf. The great poems of Sufism rose above a universe of seraglios, castration, impalements, murder, and legalized theft that pious souls disdained to notice.
The world is vanity; that God should have created this vanity is a mystery.
Cheers,
Steve Branks
"When we have nobody to grope towards,
no devil to blame, no personal God to
carry our burdens.
When we alone are responsible;
then we shall rise to our highest
and best."
-- Vivekananda
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