Religion in the Light of a Free Thinker

Religion is comparable to an infantile neurosis

 – Sigmund Freud

Every Mason is a sincere seeker of light, of all light that allows him to advance in his search for truth.

A good Mason must be tolerant with the freedom of thought of all laymen, he must be tolerant with the beliefs and dogmas of the profane world.

However, being a tolerant Mason does not mean, under any circumstances, renouncing the duty that every Mason has of giving light to ignorance and religious fanaticism.

For a good Mason, religion is one of the great evils of humanity, it is the mother of ignorance, and the cause of a miserable condition of existence, since it has led to the obscurantism of reason through the imposition of the dogma that it has limited and conditioned the emergence and development of a thinking mind in human beings, all devised for the benefit of an elite in the shadows.

Crimes, wars, torture, pedophilia, amongst others, are part of this dark historical legacy.

Religion, along with myth, art, philosophy and science, is one of the great worldviews of humanity, that is, a conception of the human species in general, and of different societies in particular, created and developed on the immediately visible nature, and also on the existence of those spaces that could extend beyond the perception of the senses.

Religion as a worldview is a work of its own and particular to the human species, which arises primitively as an attempt by the human being to see and interpret the world that surrounds him; since before the phenomena of nature, man forms an image or figure general of the reality that he thinks he perceives, giving it conceptualizations – most basic units of all forms of human knowledge – and evaluations – importance that is given to a thing or person.

Thus, converting the religious worldview into a personal, social and cultural interpretation, of everything that exists in nature; all of which leads to the establishment of common notions about the existence, attributes and commandments of supposed divinities, which are then applied in the various spheres of life, whether in politics, in the economy, in art, in morals, and even in science, amongst others.

Religion can be understood as a religare [to re-bind] – following the etymology proposed by the Latin writer and apologist Lucio Cecilio Firmiano Lactancio, 245-325 AD.

That is, a relationship of dependency that ‘relies’ the human being with the higher divinities on which he feels he depends and considers himself obliged to pay them acts of worship for fear of divine punishment and eternal damnation of your soul or spirit.

 

Probable portrait of Lactantius, 4th century wall painting
De Desconocido
IMAGE LINKED:  wikimedia Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)

The truth of religion is that man invented God, or his gods, many times in his image and likeness, because of his ignorance in the absence of a rational explanation about the phenomena of nature and its environment, and also because of his lack of courage to assume his condition and animal nature that is the origin of human suffering and misery.

 

Bertrand Russell in 1957/h5>

 

IMAGE LINKED:  wikimedia Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)

The main weapon of religion is fear, since it is fear that prevents the human being from leaving the ignorance in which he was born out of fear of divine punishment, imposing through its teachings and educational methods the ignorance of dogma over religion. light of reason.

Nobel laureate and philosopher Bertrand Russell said:

‘Men are born ignorant not stupid, they become stupid by education.’

 

Albert Einstein [cropped] Photograph Credit: H. Manuel, 1922.
IMAGE LINKED:  Wellcome Collection Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)

It is by virtue of the words of Russell and Einstein, that it is possible to understand that all religious indoctrination is a crime to reason, since human beings tend to get a global idea of the world based on our particular experiences.

This is the crucial role – decisive or determining – that education plays as a way of exercising power to condition, manipulate and control the minds of a majority part of humanity.

The 2020 Global Survey by www.pewforum.org, reports that 84.4% of the world’s population consider themselves religious, and 15.6% consider themselves non-religious.

This statistic makes it possible to report 84.4% of minds in the world are conditioned by ignorance of dogma.

Currently, according to some estimates, there must be around 4,200 living religions around the world. Of these many religions there are two main subgroups:

Indian religions – Buddhism, Hinduism, Jainism, etc.,

Abrahamic religions – Christianity, Islam, Judaism, etc.,

Within these two main subgroups there are the five largest religions in the world which are:

Christianity (more than 2,200 million faithful),

Islam (more than 1,600 million faithful),

Hinduism (more than 1,050 million faithful),

Buddhism (more than 480 million faithful),

Shintoism (approx. 104 million followers).

By Zscout370 – Star of David Symbol ; Boris23 – Christian Cross Symbol ; Ttog – Allah Script Symbol ;Rursus – Hindu and Buddist Symbols – Various religous symbols found on Wikipedia Commons. (All open source, authors listed below)

 

IMAGE LINKED:  wikimedia Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)

As far as Western thought is concerned, it is ignorance of the dogma of the Judeo-Christian tradition that has marked with blood the history of the faith on this side of the world.

In the name and by order of the Judeo-Christian God, according to the Holy Bible, the following events took place, among others:

1) The Universal Flood. Scripture Reference: Genesis 7:23. Estimated number of murdered: 20,000,000.

2) Sodom and Gomorrah. Scripture Reference: Genesis 19:24. Estimated number of murdered: 2,000.

​The Burning of Sodom (formerly “The Destruction of Sodom”) Artist: Camille Corot (French, Paris 1796–1875 Paris) via Met Museum OA

3) Seventh year of God: 7 years of famine around the world. Scripture Reference: Genesis 41: 25-54. Estimated number of murdered: 70,000

4) God kills all the firstborn children of Egypt. Scripture Reference: Exodus 12: 29-30. Estimated number of murdered: 1,000,000.

The plague of insects. Coloured etching.
Image Credit:Wellcome Collection

5) Who is on the Lord’s side? Force friends and family to kill each other. Scripture Reference: Exodus 32: 27-28. Biblical number of murdered: 3,000.

6) God struck down the people because of Aaron’s calf. Scripture Reference: Exodus 32:35. Biblical number of murdered: 1,000.

7) God burns Aaron’s sons to death for ‘offering strange fire’. Scripture Reference: Leviticus 10: 1-3. Biblical number of murdered: 2.

8) Killed for complaining about God’s killings. Scripture Reference: Numbers 16:49. Biblical number of murdered: 14,700.

The walls of Jericho falling down. Doré, Gustave, 1832-1883 (Artist)
IMAGE LINKED: New York Public Library

9) As God commanded, Joshua totally destroys everything that breathes. Scripture Reference: Joshua 10: 28-42. Biblical number of murdered: 7.

10) The Lord gave up the Canaanites and the Perizzites. Scripture reference: Judges 1:04. Biblical number of murdered: 10,000.

11) The story of Gideon: The Lord set the sword of each man against his companion. Scripture reference: Judges 7:22. Biblical number of murdered: 120,000.

12) God killed Eli’s sons and 34,000 Israelite soldiers. Scripture Reference: 1 Samuel 2:25, 4: 1. Biblical number of murdered: 34,002.

13) God killed 50,070 for looking into the ark of the Lord (his own). Scripture Reference: 1 Samuel 6:19. Biblical number of murdered: 50,070.

14) The filicide of the new testament. The God of love gives a violent death to his only begotten son. Jesus addresses the Father saying: ‘Father, if you want, take this cup away from me; but not my will, but yours be done’ (Luke 22:42). And around the ninth hour, Jesus exclaimed with a loud voice, saying: ‘Eli, Eli! Sabactani motto?’, That is: ‘My father, my father! Why have you abandoned me?’ (Matthew 27:46).

15) The Crusades were a series of military campaigns promoted by the Pope and carried out by much of Christian Latin Europe, mainly by the France of the Capetians and the Holy Roman Empire, whose specific objective was to reestablish Roman apostolic control over the Holy Land, they were fought over a period of almost two hundred years, between 1096 and 1291.

The crusaders attack Jerusalem: Godfrey is wounded; an angel brings a medicinal herb to accomplish what the surgeon cannot. Etching by Antonio Tempesta, 16–.
Image Credit:Wellcome Collection.

The death toll from the crusades is estimated at around 9,000,000, according to John M. Robertson, in his work ‘A Brief History of Christianity.’

16) The Holy Inquisition refers to several institutions dedicated to the suppression of heresy, mainly within the Catholic Church. The medieval inquisition was founded in 1184 in the Languedoc area (in southern France) to combat the heresy of the Cathars or Albigenses. Later it spread to part of the rest of Europe and America.

‘Burning of Jews and others condemned by the Inquisition’, Alvarez de Colmenar, Juan. (Author)
IMAGE CREDIT: The New York Public Library Digital Collections. 1707.

Its victims were human beings, and even animals, accused of witchcraft, or homosexuality, for blaspheming, for practicing bestiality, for heresy and for accusations of secret Judaizing.

As for the number of deaths by the Holy Inquisition, it is estimated that in the 350 years of the court’s existence, it caused approximately 5,000 deaths, according to historian Geoffrey Parker.

According to calculations of the German historian Wolfgang Behringer, the persecution of the Holy Inquisition caused in all Europe (without considering the deaths in America) between 40,000 and 60,000 deaths.

The facts reflected in the scriptural references demonstrate criminal behavior and attitude on the part of the literary god of the Judeo-Christian bible.

The biblical god beyond being a god of morals, justice, love and wisdom, is a genocidal murderer who plays with humanity like a sick, barbaric and immoral sadist, a vain and merciless being, taken from the worst tale of nightmares.

The evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, in his work ‘The God Delusion’, tells us:

‘The God of the Old Testament; It can be argued, it is the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; closed-minded, unfair, severe, and obsessed with control; vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser, misogynist, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, purveyor of pestilence, megalomaniac, sadomasochistic, capricious, and a malevolent bully.

Those of us educated from childhood in their way of being, we can become insensitive – lose our capacity for wonder – to their horror.’

The so-called ‘Holy Bible’ is the darkest and most sinister of all the books on religious indoctrination that exists freely available to the general public.

The Bible is the best treatise that could have been written on the true essence of human nature.

The bible is, par excellence, the best anthropology manual that can exist.

Iñaki Berazaluce, masterfully wrote ‘50 Shades of Moses’ in the Strambotic electronic medium, describing what many religious fanatics refuse to see in the Old Testament books that contain incest, rape, pedophilia, exhibitionism, coprophagy and bestiality, among many others. abuses and crimes ordered by the Judeo-Christian god.

For the thought of this Mason, religion in general, and the Judeo-Christian tradition in particular, is the great whore of Babylon from the biblical book of Revelation, specifically it is ‘ignorance’, the greatest of all evils suffered by the humanity.

In the current times of an interconnected world, where all the knowledge and information that travels freely through cyberspace should be fulfilling a role of liberation from ignorance and dogma that has conditioned humanity so much, on the contrary, this fulfillment a role of mental numbing in the human being, thus fulfilling the words [attributed to*] Albert Einstein who said:

‘I fear the day when technology surpasses our humanity; the world will only have a generation of idiots.’

We are a blind species conditioned by dogmatic thinking, which makes us the species aptly described by the thinker Edgar Morin when he says that we are:

‘homo sapiens demens’; every time, we yearn to live in the light of reason, but at the moment we choose, we decide to exist and live in the madness of dogma.

This article is translated from the Spanish – it also appears on https://lapeste.org/2021/06/la-religion-un-mal-no-necesario/

*Editor’s Note: There is some contention as to whether Einstein himself used these words, although they certainly fit the narrative!  https://quoteinvestigator.com/2013/03/19/tech-surpass/

Article by: Carlos Francisco Ortiz

Carlos  was initiated in 2015 in Equality Lodge No. 88.  Joined Fraternal Action Lodge No. 42 in 2018. (under the regular Grand Lodge of Chile)

During his university life, and before receiving Masonic light, he participated in the reorganization and foundation of Clans of the Youth Fraternity. Alpha Pi Epsilon.

 

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