False Religion?
The End is Nigh?

by Lloyd Harrison Whitling

Sure, they always stop when you're the busiest. Sure, they demand your attention or you're going to Hell (or some equivalent). And, sure, they always insist on handing you their tract and taking up enough of your time to keep you from dealing with your own real task at hand. (Don't complain, or they will bow their heads and start praying loudly for God to help you out. You are powerless to stop them.)

The End of False Religion is Near! the tract's title claims. A World-Wide Message that promises to answer: What is False Religion? How Will It End? How Will You Be Affected? The church I was raised in taught with some ferocity that Jehovah's Witnesses belonged to the category of False Religion. I also attended the United Brethren Church (which is now a car museum) and, yes, that same message agreed.

No argument there, so who are these people to issue proclamations and pass out tracts on the subject? Curiosity inspired me to turn it over and read the back.

How to identify true religion

What good fruit should religion produce?— Matthew 7:17

True Religion… (it continues with a bulleted list)

• Practices Love (It reads): True worshippers are "no part of the world", are not divided by race or culture, and display "love among themselves".
  (All that complete with biblical references).

• Trusts God's Word (It continues): Instead of teaching "tradition" and "commands of men as doctrines," true religion bases its doctrine on God's Word, the Bible. It claims, "all scripture is inspired of God and beneficial for teaching, for reproving, for setting things straight," and gives 2 Timothy 3:16 for a reference.

• Strengthens Families and Upholds High Moral Standards:
  True religion trains husbands to 'love their wives as their own bodies,' helps wives develop 'deep respect for their husbands' and teaches children 'to be obedient to their parents.' As if an afterthought, it states that those entrusted with positions of authority must have exemplary morals with 1 Timothy 3:1-10  as a reference.

Let's deal with the foregoing before we open it up to the inner materials. We should establish our own footing before we lose our way by letting them take control of the message. We can't know people's thoughts while they read something foreign to them like this, but I can expose my own to you and let you see how I am looking at this as a natural creature and a product of Nature.

I ready informed you of my churchly experience. During those days I learned that most Xian sects claim similar sets of biblical references to show themselves as the harbingers of love, trusting faith and high family-oriented morality. In fact, even the Islamics and Jews point to similar edicts in their own cults to make the same kinds of claims. It would seem that would make all of their sects brethren under their particular variations of the Arabian God inherited from Persia through the Abraham of the Jewish Old Testament, wherein they took roots in this world. If "all scripture is inspired of God and beneficial for teaching, for reproving, for setting things straight," as the pamphlet claims, why do they so violate the "practices love" part of the pamphlet?

Ah, but here: The back page goes on to proclaim "The book Holocaust Politics, published in 2001, says, 'If more people practiced versions of what the Jehovah's Witnesses preach and practice, the Holocaust could have been prevented and genocide would scourge the world no more." How laudable can we be about ourselves? How many more would that take to accomplish. Are we going by percentages here, or by whole numbers? If by the numbers is what 'more' means, there are surely more Witnesses in the world today than 60-some years ago, but genocide is rampant in Africa, and we have our own kind of holocaust going on in Iraq, supposedly in response to the genocide Hussein practiced there. Ah, but that is not Jehovah's Witnesses, that Is Xians versus Muslims. Sorry, that is not what you made a claim about.

If it's about percentages, maybe you can stake a legitimate claim. Genocide is about the crimes of murder, hatred being acted out, and of course all the robbery, sexual crimes and other nasty destruction that goes on along with it. According to statistics from 1997 (the last year I can find) only about 0.890% of prison inmates are Jehovah's Witnesses. If only we could discover for what kinds of crimes they had become incarcerated, comparing that to the other sects would document the legitimacy of your claim, at least in the USA. Also, documenting the total portion of the USA population to proclaim Jehovah's Witnesses as their sect would show whether your proportion to the whole was then higher or lower than the other sects.

Depending upon whom you ask, atheists represent anywhere from 3 to 15% of the American population. By those same statistics, we represented .21% incarcerated population at that same time. The religionists make up all kinds of apologia to show why atheism's representation among evildoers is so low, but they can show no numbers to back themselves up. It is just that we don't live down to our unearned reputations.

Still, the question unanswered is this: If a large portion of the world's humanity worships the same God, use the same basis as the foundation for their religious beliefs, and back them up with the same source materials (it says 'scriptures' not 'Bibles'), and they all recognize each other as "false religions", how can anyone declare anything else about them than that they are all "false religions"?

And, if you follow the edicts of the New Testament Paul, that "by their works shall ye know them," then it is apparent that atheists, while in denial of it, are living according to the only true religion. No matter which of your headlines you want to reference, statistics will show that atheists are far ahead of you there (even though it's a part of your religion to believe otherwise).

Now, shall we turn to page 2? Let's. I'm on a roll here.

What is false religion? we are asked, and so we will assume we will soon know.

From the bulleted list: False Religion…

• 'Meddles in War and Politics: 'Across Asia and beyond," says the journal Asiaweek, "power-hungry leaders are cynically manipulating people's religious sentiments for their own needs."'

• 'Spreads False Doctrine:  Most religions teach that the soul or
  spirit is some invisible part of a human that survives the death of a human body. By means of this teaching, many of these religions exploit their members, charging money to pray for departed souls … Does your religion teach that the soul does not die?'

• 'Tolerates Immoral Sex: In Western lands, church groups ordain gay and lesbian members of the clergy…. Even churches that condemn immorality have tolerated religious leaders who have sexually abused children… (and it goes on to quote from 1 Corinthians 6:9, 10).

Morality in religion is set by each of the cults and the sects that sprang from them. If sex is immoral, it is so only because religion has said it. While sex itself has naught to do with morality (their reference books says the god named God declared it "good"), some elements of the events people will go through in its pursuit are immoral whether or not religion has anything to say about them. Homosexuality is immoral only by religious decree. If homosexuality proves to be a natural phenomenon, then those religious decrees are themselves immoral for the injustice they perpetuate against their victims.

Morality has to do with the intentional harm people can do to others. That can be measured, assessed, evaluated by scientific  methods that religion denies being of value. But, that doesn't apply only to sex, it applies to all aspects of human interaction. Sex itself is immoral only by religious decree. If catering to those religious decrees causes some people to harm others or themselves, physically or psychologically, then those religious decrees are themselves immoral and must be abandoned.

Page 3, How will false religion end? goes on to talk about the book of Revelations, a source of supposed prophecy that many claim to be the ravings of a madman named John.

Let's make sure we are aware of something here: The Xian Bible was, itself, assembled by a group of human beings from one of the False Religions, this specific one being that which harbors the pedophiles of a few sentences ago. The Bible itself came from a proclaimed False Religion, one abandoned centuries back by a new cult that called themselves 'Protestants'. That was a group of people who freed themselves from everything but the shackles when they escaped the False Religion, and so have dragged the restraining weights of it with them every place they have ever been. Because of that fault, all Xians have been manipulated by the influence of this religion they long ago proclaimed false. They have backed up their creeds with scriptures assembled by those with other beliefs who had their own agendas to serve. They have abandoned their own senses to serve the credos of a religion they had long ago, they said, turned their back toward. That is exactly one of the purposes for which the book was originally cherry-picked together, while literature of equal value was cast aside and either condemned or destroyed.

So, if you can open your eyes to the facts and acknowledge truth as being whatever is true, then you must now know that you cannot go to that book for anything more than what your common sense has already proclaimed to you. You cannot trust that which was created by False Religion to manipulate your mind. If you have truly turned your back on False Religion and abandoned it, you must also abandon all its artifacts. The Xian Bible is just such an artifact. The cross, also a symbol adopted for that same False Religion, is another such artifact, which was originally used to represent a stylized sword.

When you pass out a tract to tell me about false religions, remember you came to my house and stood on my front porch. I did not go to yours. Like I told you here, I do not feel driven to spread my beliefs among people who have no interest in them. I believe that truth will spread itself, even if it should take generations. I do, however, feel driven to defend what I think is true and to reply to lies that get told about me and those who share my understanding of the world.

To people like me, religion itself is false and attempts to explain it or advance it work against the better interests of humankind. We have ways of testing information we receive and ideas that might inspire us. When those do not lend themselves to testing, we realize they are not about reality. They are about imagined things and, even though those things might have stayed with us for generations, they were still imagined at their start. They might have served some bully's purpose in prehistory that still beguiles the weak-willed and outplayed of today. They might serve those bullies' heirs in our own times.

Why don't you think about that for a while?

 

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"To deny a right to the experience of pleasure is immoral unless that denial can be justified by a valid presentation of how pain will result from that experience in an amount that would render the expected pleasure regrettable; or, if it can be shown that pain will be induced in others innocent of any involvement. The role of science in moral issues should be to test that, predict that, and find harmless ways to demonstrate that."

— L. H. Whitling in the eBook, Secular Morality —