No religion represents God

The bliss of faith and the curse of skepticism

I separate the existence of God from organised religions. I “believe” (not “know”) there is a higher plane of existence - a Creator of this reality. But what I do know is that all religions are arbitrary and false interpretations of this “God” because they can’t be otherwise. This is why I call myself areligious and not an atheist. Perhaps also because many atheists tend to be the most devout fanatics of the religious cult of statism; the faith in and worship of an all-knowing, all-powerful, all-benevolent, and non-existent entity known as “the state.”

Blasphemy

All religions are manmade sets of claims and dictates - and arbitrary interpretations of those dictates. Anything you think you know about God through your religion is something you were told by someone who had no way of knowing - and he was also told by someone else who again had no way of knowing. It’s a telephone game spanning centuries, “knowledge” by proxy, and blind trust in groupthink. We take our religion of choice at face value, crossing our fingers hoping it’s true.

Whatever a self-appointed representative of religion claims that he knows about the nature of God he cannot possibly know. No one making claims of God has the means of actually knowing. And even if he does claim to have supernatural powers, it’s always convenient that we have to take his word for it. So, he is lying, either consciously or unconsciously.

Some will say that religion is a matter of belief, not knowledge. Fair enough. But leprechauns and pink flying elephants are also a matter of belief. Do we grant them the same credence?

All religions are lies for the simple fact that humans do not possess the means to know what the religious claim to know about God. Granted, I can’t think of anything within human capacity that can prove the existence of God nor comprehend God’s nature. I can’t think of anything within the scope of our senses and mental capacities that can detect and perceive divinity - nothing that can’t be dismissed as misinterpretation, illusion, or deception. This is why visions, dreams, supposed “miracles,” voices in someone’s head, and conveniently selective manifestations of God are not proofs of anything.

All the sources of “information” we have - all we think we know about the version of God our religion tells us to commit our whole worldview on - are just visions, dreams, or “divine revelations” supposedly experienced by illiterates thousands of years ago. Is that it? Is this what we base our entire sanity on? Hearsay, lore, and appeals to tradition?

Note that the ancient illiterates who made religious claims would chew on and smoke anything, without any understanding of the effects of hallucinogenics on human cognition. Then they expect - demand! - to be believed simply by claiming it… and by threatening you with eternal damnation for remaining unconvinced. Is this the foundation of our understanding of reality: unfounded claims and threats? Do we respect ourselves so little as to allow this for ourselves? Why do we mistreat ourselves with such low standards and such little dignity?

Why do we allow scammers, schizophrenics, and victims of opioid-induced hallucinations to tell us what God is?

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Religions

Abraham heard voices in his head claiming they were the words of God. How do we know this wasn’t a case of schizophrenia? If you have to make the grand claim of “talking to God,” then you have to disprove all other possibilities that could explain this experience, as is the process of deductive reasoning. Yet no such attempt is ever made in the archaic Abrahamic religions.

Instead, all religions are based on inductive generalisations, circular reasoning, and a sheer lack of basic skepticism. It is no wonder then that religions have been used to exploit, manipulate, and make good people commit atrocities - all in the name of “good.” If only we were a bit more skeptical.

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Jesus Christ healed a man possessed by spirits. How do we know the guy wasn’t just suffering from epilepsy? If tricks and “street healing” are proof of divinity, I’ve known gypsies and “magicians” who can do just that.

The Bible describes someone who regularly had seizures with frothing in the mouth. People back then didn’t know what epilepsy was. This indicates that the Bible was written by people who had no understanding of basic human physiology let alone having been inspired by an omniscient deity. If demonic possession resembled epilepsy so much, then the Bible should have educated us on what epilepsy was, and then made the argument that demonic possession was something that appeared similar but wasn’t the same thing. Instead, it describes the symptoms of epilepsy and assumes by default that it’s demonic possession. Are we to base our entire worldview on the writings of ancients who demonised a medical condition they couldn’t understand?

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Mohamed was supposedly the only one chosen to receive the word of God; very convenient for a warlord with aspirations of conquest and pedophilia. We are expected to believe that Mohamed was visited by an Archangel in a cave somewhere alone… no witnesses. But when you promise sex-obsessed incels a paradise of sex slaves, who needs logic?

How do we know that Mohamed wasn’t an opportunist who was simply lying for personal gain, or that he wasn’t batshit insane? With schizophrenia, it is common for the afflicted to see things that aren’t there and hear things that aren’t real. And it is extremely common for the imaginary creations of schizophrenics to delve into themes of divinity, religiosity, magic, demonology, and legend.

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Choice

Can we know that prophets and soothsayers weren’t insane or deceptive or both? Can we dismiss these possibilities, as deductive reasoning requires?

So how do we know if any religious claim is true?

We don’t.

But we do know that we don’t know. We know what we can’t know. We know we have no means of proving any religious claim made since forever. We know we can’t test the validity of such claims. And since we know this, then anyone who pretends to know is either lying or is insane or both. Anyone who claims something without the means to prove it, and then expects us to blindly believe it, is lying.

We know that no claim of knowing God can be true.

It’s funny how we base our entire worldview on completely unfounded religious claims predicated only on hearsay, yet we require overwhelming and irrefutable evidence and facts about whether our tuna was fished in a dolphin-safe manner.

And then we fall for appeals to tradition and popularity to sustain our cherished religious beliefs. The truth is that we want to believe in the religion we choose to believe. It was the religion we were born into or the religion we conveniently converted to when we opportunistically found a community (a support network) that saved us from our crippling loneliness. We choose the religion that promises us eternal, unearned, and meaningless hedonism in an afterlife, and all we have to do is suspend reason and skepticism for as long as we live.

The religion we choose gives us purpose, meaning, and a sense of understanding of this absurd reality in which we find ourselves - a painful existence that denies us the mercy of knowledge about our nature and purpose.

Religion is a pretty sweet deal. Of course, most people in the world want to believe in a rendition of religion they find most convenient. Of course, people without faith in an arbitrary version of God feel alone in an absurd reality without true purpose. It’s better to choose to believe in a false purpose and a sky-daddy protector who chooses us, loves us, and in the end, makes us gods too. Why would anyone not want to believe?

People who value truth more than convenience are skeptical of all religions because all religions are unprovable and unfalsifiable. We don’t claim to know what truth is - we can’t know what truth is. But we can know what is not true. I don’t know what the nature of reality is. I “believe” there is a Creator, but I don’t “know” there is one. What I do know is that anyone claiming to know about the nature of God has no way of knowing - he is either lying, he is gullible, or he is insane.

And notice how the only way to prove whether your religion is true is to die and witness for yourself after death. Suspiciously convenient, like a scam’s no-refunds policy. All religious claims are unprovable and unfalsifiable: the telltale signs of every confidence scam in history.

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Know-Trust

There is only one truth we can know without a doubt, as Socrates said. The only thing we can know for a fact, without any doubt, is that we can’t know (almost) anything. We rely on pattern recognition, our treacherous senses, our biased interpretations, and our trust in our sanity to make sense of the world around us. Sure, we can know that 1+1=2, but this may also depend on us trusting and believing in our grasp of logic and sanity. Even pure logic depends on how we perceive it… if we can perceive it at all.

Who knows, we could all be insane. We believe that, for the vast majority of human history, the vast majority of humans have believed in ideas we now find totally insane.

And even language, which is supposed to be universal and objective, almost never is. Otherwise, it would have been easy to communicate. Communicating effectively is extremely hard because we each have different interpretations of words and different loaded meanings for each, even though their definitions are supposed to be objective. And that’s not even accounting for implied and perceived storytelling involving combinations of words.

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Heaven & Hell

It appears to be in our best interest to believe in unprovable and unfalsifiable things. It is the only way to make sense of this absurd reality, a cruel existence that denies us the courtesy of truth. Thus, believing falsehoods is the only way to mitigate the pain of being stranded in this reality without having any way of knowing what the hell this is all about.

Religion is the norm. Religion is our coping mechanism. The lie is our salvation. Those cursed to seek truth will forever be damned. Isn’t that a metaphor for hell? Isn’t hell reserved for the skeptics and unbelievers? Isn’t heaven promised to the meek, the poor in spirit, and the gullible? Hell and heaven are experienced now here on earth.

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