Deconstructing religion: Part 1. Religion is a cage. Once you crush the cage, you are free- and once you hold the keys- you are the master.
This is a series where I deconstruct religious ideas.
I will be uncensored. I will not hedge, pad, or soften my words.
I also would like to add this is not about me. This is about you, whoever reading this- so that whenever someone tries to hurt you, make you upset, you tell them the science that OOPS wasn’t in their Bible. I am autistic, and was bullied relentlessly at school. That’s why I will write this.
Because I am angry at the abuse some of you faced at home when you were kids.
Had evolution gone differently, the monkeys might have had religion too. Good on them they don’t.
Let’s start with pride.
Pride is a sin in virtually all faiths. In Christianity, it is one of the “seven deadly sins”.
If you dare say “I did this”, “I got that A*”, “I am smart enough to go to XY University“, and do not repent, if you dare not honour God and honour yourself instead… faith generally teaches you will face consequence.
If you dare ascribe the I to your success…
Laughable.
The success is yours. You did the work, the hours, the studies, the understanding, whatever. You expressed your genetic potential.
Now onto the why. Why?
Why is pride a sin? Oops. This is the bit Christianity doesn’t like because it involves shaking up their beliefs a bit with some actual science. Who said science can’t disprove religion- only our lovely diplomatic sanitised ChatGPT that was programmed never to say what I am about to.
I know.
Don’t care.
Here is why.
Humans are higher primates with opposable thumbs and the use of a higher prefrontal cortex.
Humans organise ourselves into two main groups:
The in group, and the out group. The in-group are those “like us”- people who are of the same age, class, gender, occupation, subreddit. This is instinctive. It fosters group cohesion, a sense of belonging, and reinforces mutual safety.
The out-group is everyone else. Anyone who isn’t your group.
We preferentially favour the in-group, treat them with higher favour and higher respect, and in some, but not all, instances, we dehumanise, mistreat, alienate, the out-group.
In science, we refer to this as SII- Social Identity Theory. You study it in sociology, biology and in healthcare professions like Medicine and Optometry.
We are socially sensitive animals who react to status changes in the in-group, and threats to our own status, position, or rank in society.
All humans have a structure called the amygdala.
This is our threat centre. It responds to any perceived threat to the ego, be that physical or emotional or mental.
The amygdala sees someone boasting, or someone declaring “I am smart” as a threat to their own security, their own standing, their own self, their ego.
So, to terminate the source of their threat, to neuter the enemy, so to speak, what do we do?
We label the threat as sin. We build churches and huge institutions and tell the masses
Your pride is sin. If you dare attribute your actions to yourself and not to the Lord your God, consequences await you”
This counters the counter. It is the antibody to the antigen.
It speaks to the fragile human condition, more than anything.
So whenever we’ve heard
“Don’t be proud! God is watching”
Now we know the reason. And frankly once the reason is known- once any coherent anthropocentric (human centred) scientific argument can be made to explain why something exists, the something loses its power.
The weight of said thing collapses. It loses its power, its hold over you.
This is why critical analysis and deconstruction of religion is a sin.
Not just in Christianity. In Islam, to say the Quran is flawed, wrong, human made- is an insult to “God” and lands you in hell (Jannaham in Islam), where you are subjected to “horrific torture methods” I don’t want to discuss here for your sake.
Now why?
Here’s why.
Questioning the Bible, calling God’s word wrong, flawed, whatever, is sinful- calling God’s word “human” is sinful in Orthodox Christianity precisely because
… it reveals the flaws in the argument- and those who wrote it were clever enough to know that the identification of flaw takes away the seriousness.
Question - to question- is a “sin“ exactly because
it annuls the basic, primal human emotion religion runs on of its agency.
Fear.
“Fear sells” is my favourite quote from my favourite book- World War Z by Max Brooks.
It’s like economics. If the pound loses its value; the stock market will collapse. If fear, the currency of religion, loses its value
Religion collapses.
It’s like a test paper. In the US, you have something called the SAT. In India, we have NEET for admission into MBBS. Once coaching centres open and teach kids in their millions how to approach the questions, their fear of the exam mortifies.
Without fear, religion has no power over people. This is why Muslims who leave Islam begin drinking, eating pork, wearing dresses.
If I write an Optometry essay and submit it to my tutor and say “DON’T ANALYSE! THIS IS ALL CORRECT!!!!”
The basal reaction is:
”What? How insecure. This must be because they are scared of their essay being wrong.”
It’s basic psychology. Don’t hurt him means you have an aversion to hurt.
Don’t analyse - told to billions- means you have an aversion to analysis. 🧐
In the Bible, it is clear whoever wrote it was scared of knowledge acquisition. Wasn’t knowledge acquisition the “sin” that got them expelled from Eden?
Now we know why.
Was that blasphemy?
Good. Excellent. Outstanding.
It was meant to be.
Now onto the next part. The phenomenon of in group favouritism.
In group favouritism is where you treat your people - your in group- better or with more moral consideration- than outsiders, and in this case, the humans who wrote the social control script really outdid themselves.
We see it in the Bible.
The arrogant, narcissistic heartless Jesus
Giving the order for those who do not believe in him to be gathered up like twigs and thrown into the fire to be burned. This is the order that gave the Catholic Goan Inquisitors their claim to do what they did to my best friend’s ancestors in Goa.
My best friend, Vihaan, is South Goan. His ancestors were burned alive at the stake for practising Hinduism, in Goa, during the Inquisition by the Portuguese who from 1510 to the mid 1800’s annexed Goa as their crown overseas territory.
They stormed into homes and dragged children out by the hair and their limbs screaming. They dragged children into churches screaming.
They burned infants and toddlers to death. It was seen as merciful, “saving their soul”
They put children on the rack- as young as seven, and stretched and dislocated their limbs under the Papal decree from the God ordained authority
”Do not shed blood, but cause pain.”
For the source, read the Goan Inquisition by Anant Priolkar, and other Indian academic histories on the Inquisition.
St Francis and others who oversaw their God ordained tyranny were no illiterate. They had formal degrees. They had education in theology. They had titles from Portugal’s most esteemed universities.
Under the justification of Christianity, Goa was seized and it’s citizens raped, massacred, their land taken, women and children burned alive and hands severed:
The Hatkatro Khamb, or the “Pillar of Severed Hands,” located in Old Goa, stands as a stark and haunting testament to the horrors endured by Hindus who resisted forced conversions to Christianity. Thousands of Hindus were tied to this pillar and had their hands brutally severed for refusing to abandon their faith. This barbaric act, carried out under the orders of Francis Xavier…
To quote Simon Purchas, from 1625, during the British colonial expansions
”God is wise, he made these savage countries rich so they will be attractive to Christians.”
The country he was referring to was what we now know as the North American region, home to the Native Americans, who were eradicated, suffered immensely, displaced, starved to death, put in reservations, their children sexually abused and given forced soap enemas for wetting the bed.
Tasmania was home to a 10,000+ year old Stone Age civilisation. This exact logic was used to depopulate them from 10,000 to zero within a century of British arrival.
”God placed you here to die and suffer so we could come and conquer you and your land”
That does not sound like a kind, loving God.
That sounds like an egomaniacal, heartless, bloody, selfish, motherfucking tyrant who has zero empathy for the out-group.
A convenient foil.
It sounds much like how human society once was at the very top, not everyone, not everyone in society, but the top- the people in power-
brutal, heartless, and in a sad way shaped by the very faiths it created.
When slavery was ended by the British, to quote Boswell from 1839
“There have always been slaves, for God wanted it that way”
Interesting how I don’t see a single word of
“But wait you’re misinterpreting Christianity!”
in their dialogues and in their justification.
The arrogant, narcissistic heartless Jesus
dehumanising the Canaanite, making a woman beg at his feet and animalising her. She was the “dogs” - the outgroup. Jesus, being the mere mortal he was, thought it ok to make her suffer and plead for her child.
She’s the out-group. It’s okay.
That kind of behaviour is illegal in Medicine and indeed in my own field, Optometry. Jesus Christ represents the flawed morals of his time- not some divinely ordained morality.
The arrogant, narcissistic heartless God
ordering his followers to slaughter entire towns- babies, toddlers, men, women, down to the last animal, full of people whom “you know not, but God doth know” is an example- however exaggerated- of in group favouritism.
How silly of their writers, right? To give such a blatantly obvious example for people long after them to crush. Oops.
Slaughtering the babies and children of other countries is just so damn fucking moral.
God is really so fucking good.
Is that blasphemy?
Good. Awesome.
Don’t care either way.
Truth is truth and it deserves exposure.
I hope this post helped you, wherever you are.