PUBLISHED
IN THE FREETHINKER DECEMBER 1997
The
bishops here in Ireland have been meeting to discuss the vocations crisis,
among other things.
As an atheist,
I am certain that for anybody to encourage vocations to the priesthood is a
terrible mistake – for it is asking young men to become slaves to a religion
that is neither believable nor truly good.
The
Catholic Church demands huge sacrifices and even martyrdom for her sake, she
has no right to do this for she has no honest evidence for her doctrines. Her using of miracles as evidence is clearly
fallacious. When she says we cannot
understand why evil exists, it is clear
that she is only guessing; she says that miracles are done to support her
teaching, but it may be that we cannot understand their purpose either.
When God’s
ways are so mystifying, why shouldn’t Satan’s be the same? Why can’t Satan do good miracles for an evil
purpose that we will never be able to discover?
An
all-good God would not ask you to suffer for a religion that has no evidence.
Catholicism
following Christ condemns doubt as sinful.
You cannot help what you sincerely think, so, though doubt can be evil,
it can never be sinful.
The
Catholic Church praises the good works of venial sinners, though they are
simply informing God that they will do good when it suits them. The good is just a pretence. The prayers of sinners are insults. Catholicism is an immoral religion.
Anybody
who supports the Catholic Church by giving her money or going to Mass is to
blame for the suffering of those who have been abused by her priests. The Church must hold that the priests should
not be exposed and be punished, for it does grave spiritual damage to her and
she believes the soul comes before the body.
by assisting her, you are assisting a cult that would have abuse covered up for her sake, which is detestable
for has no evidence that she is the right religion.
Now you will
see that the fall in vocations is a cause for celebration!
PUBLISHED IN THE FREETHINKER JULY 2002
Has anyone
noticed that belief in God makes a person worse morally despite outward
appearances? If I hit my brother
without believing in God I am hurting the brother and not God. If I believe in God my act is even more
malicious because I am intending to affront a being of infinite goodness who
therefore must hate sin infinitely meaning as far as intent goes there is no
limit to my evil. I mean it is an
infinite insult. Those who propagate
belief in God are soldiers of evil.
Religion will answer it makes the good we do infinitely valuable as well
and that redress the problem but the trouble is that only a handful reach
sainthood level early in life and the Church says anybody can become a saint so
we are more sinful than good when we fall short. All sin must be equally bad when it is all infinitely offensive
to God for infinite means cannot be any greater and is unlimitedly great.
The doctrine
of God implies that since God is the law and is not subject to the law that
people must agree with him for to honour God because he is God is not really to
honour God but to honour goodness but God wants us to honour him in reality and
as Jesus put it with all our hearts and souls and minds. They must not divorce goodness from God but
fuse the two. Since God is supreme
there can be no law over him to punish him or reward him for what he does which
raises the problem of how we know we can trust him. Christianity says just trust him. But it is immoral and downright bigoted and arrogant to just
trust a being that makes such serious demands on us: love me with all your
heart and do what I say and condemn what I condemn even if my rules make no
sense to anybody. It is like marrying
somebody within seconds of meeting them.
The god concept then is inherently violent and intolerant and
bloody. Believers insist that we
atheists have no business judging God and finding him guilty of abusing the
human race if he exists for we are not above God in order to sit over him in
judgement.
The
Catholic priest, Anthony de Mello, wrote in his famous book Awareness
that to need anybody is not to love them because if they won't give you what
you need then you refuse to be happy so it is manipulation. He says we should be detached from all
things to be happy and to be really capable of love. I say to work, this advice requires that we should not need
God. Yet Jesus said we should prefer
him even to the parents who made us and love God with all not some of our
faculties. That makes Jesus one of
God's biggest enemies and the craftiest purveyors of misery that ever
lived. The frightful unnatural ness of
what he asked is plain for you cannot put God first when you are more sure you
exist and that others do that you are that he exists. If Jesus rose from the dead the Satan was responsible and perhaps
Satan hypnotised the soldiers to take Jesus out of the tomb and dump him and
forget about him while he pretended to be the risen Jesus. Jesus was the one who said you know the
Devil's disciples by their fruits. God
and Jesus make mental health a sin.
Religion
says that God is all-good even though he allows evil to bring good out of
it. It follows then that evil is
necessary for good or at least certain kinds of good to happen. Good is just good and it is unintelligible
to say that good is better when evil has produced it. God destroys the desire to make human life pleasurable and long.
How the
God-cultists with their dark implications can expect to make a lasting
contribution to world peace is beyond me.
PUBLISHED
IN THE FREETHINKER FEB 2003
With
regard to the Catholic priesthood claiming that they are not all bad in the
wake of the clerical child sexual abuse revelations I have this to say.
Child
abuse is a part of Roman Catholic doctrine which they support and promote. They want children to honour a man whose
historical existence is not as certain as say that of Adolph Hitler as God, who
is to be loved with all our powers to their entirety, himself. They are even to die for that man rather
than blaspheme him like the apostles allegedly did. The Bible tells them that a being some old men says exists has to
be put before themselves and their parents and all love must be given to him
and a depraved old book commanding murder and hatred and hypocrisy in the name
of love must be accepted as the word of God.
It is
child abuse to tell children that it is God's business what they do. So they are left to worry more about what
God wants than what they feel they should do.
That is no way to teach a child responsibility and imbue self-esteem.
The Bible
commands child-abuse for it says that anybody who does not know that their sins
murdered Jesus who had to atone for them by his death and rise so that we could
rise too will be damned forever in the agony of Hell. These are awful things to tell a child. It is the kind of stuff that would make some children kill when
they grow up on the basis that they have committed murder anyway and when it is
committed once it is easier to do it again.
The Church
likes to keep the fact that the Torah, the Law that God dictated to the evil
Moses, did nothing about the Hebrew tradition of marriages being arranged
between men and girls who were just children under the mitre. The Law railed murderous venom against
adultery and homosexuality but it's God turned a blind eye to this
perversion. He did not even have the
decency to lay down a minimum age.
There is no
end to the self-destructive conditioning that the Church pumps into
children. The Bible is a palliative for
the conscience of the paedophile. The
priest claims to be giving you the most important thing there is, faith in God
and in his true Church. But the priest
takes no responsibility for what harm this does. He will not compensate you for that or if you can prove you were
misled by his Church. If giving him
money is not letting him steal off you then nothing is stealing. That is the kind of respect the priests have
for you! Tell them where to stick their
apologies.
PUBLISHED
IN THE FREETHINKER MAY 2003
Steuart
Campbell (Freethinker, March 2003) justly objected to a letter of mine
that said that the existence of Jesus was uncertain by saying that the same was
true of most historical characters.
However, the point I was trying to make was lost in the editing. What I originally wrote was that the
Catholic priesthood disrespect children by trying to condition them in their
impressionable state "to honour a man whose historical existence is not as
certain as say that of Adolph Hitler as God ... himself. They are even to die for that man rather
than blaspheme him like the apostles allegedly did".
There can
be no doubt that if Jesus claimed to be God or the Son of God he was claiming
that he should be trusted and obeyed for as a supernatural all-knowing being he
knows what is best for us and we should put our reservations aside. All I meant was that it is crazy to make
Jesus an authority on morality and to put him before yourself and your own
thinking when his existence is not capable of absolute proof. Christianity says that there would be no
room for faith if we could prove beyond a doubt that Jesus was the Son of
God. But there is still room for faith
if Jesus could be proved to have existed for his existing does not mean he was
what he claimed to be. But to make such
serious claims for Jesus that he was God or the Son of God would mean you would
have to be totally sure that Jesus existed otherwise you are insulting
God. We can't be sure enough so the
Church is guilty of that gross blasphemy.
Jesus was certainly a false prophet (and therefore condemned by the Law
of Moses as a fraud at Deuteronomy 18 which he regarded as God's inerrant word)
for when he made his claims he was promising that the evidence for his
existence would be of the highest calibre and it is not. Personally I am certain that Jesus never
existed. Read my site, www.angelfire.com/rebellion/wasthereajesus/index.html.
PUBLISHED
OCTOBER 2003 FREETHINKER
Keith
Porteous Wood in his article Religious Fundamentalism Rules the Roost (Freethinker,
August 2003) has frightening insights into the strength and growth of
fundamentalist religions.
I believe
that the Christians are right that prayer develops their faith and makes them
take it more seriously and that people fall away from the faith when they stop
praying. That is why I think it is very
important that prayer be exposed for the superstitious uncharitable activity
that it really is. If people get
ashamed of praying it will lead to a downslide in religious influence.
It is certain that human life is absolutely valuable. The biggest essential for human life is consciousness. Consciousness is more important then than free will or memory or virtue. This means that nothing ever justifies suffering for consciousness is hurt by suffering. Yes, we have to cause some suffering for a greater good but it would mean that a God would have no justification for making suffering possible for he has the power to prevent all suffering unlike us. For example, he should not have made viruses to cause agonising diseases. Prayer implies that God needs to make us suffer for a good reason which is therefore a total insult against the dignity of human beings.
Everything
we get in life comes about as the result of a worldwide process for all events
effect each other. When you are praying
you intend that a lot of things will happen both bad and good in the world to
make the forces of chance give you what you ask for. Is it not fanaticism and criminal then to ask for the gift of
patience when so many terrible events and deaths had to happen before you could
get it? Is it not fanaticism to ask
(indirectly) a God you only believe in but do not know to kill people to give
you what you want? You are trying to
get people killed over a belief because that is all that God is. God makes life cheap when you can try to
kill just for the sake of a belief when you need proof.
If prayer
does any good it does it in spite of itself.
Access my website: www.carmel-campaign.freeservers.com for a more complete exposure of the
egotistic nastiness that lurks behind the sweetness that prayer is plastered
in.
AUGUST
2003 UNPUBLISHED LETTER TO THE SUNDAY INDEPENDENT RELATING TO MS EMER O’KELLY’S
ARTICLE SAYING THAT CATHOLICS WHO DID NOT LEAVE THE CHURCH OVER CLERICAL
SEX-ABUSE WERE ACCESSORIES TO ITS CRIMES
I wish
Emer O’ Kelly’s article saying the faithful are accessories to Church
corruption had stated that the main way to become as bad as the Church
hierarchy is to pay the weekly contribution to the Church. Had the faithful all withheld funds much of
the evil in the Church would have been corrected. The good works of the Church are no excuse for paying it for all
corrupt organisations cynically need to do some good to get support.
Christians
agree with Jesus that God sends many children to everlasting torment which
shows that cruelty to children is a part of the faith they embrace. And they cover this up by saying God is not
to blame as if the Almighty couldn’t wait until the children were ready for
heaven before taking them out of this world.
It is inhuman to accept a belief like that when there are so many nicer
things you could believe and nicer religions you could join. To say that God and what he has revealed
comes first really means that what men say about God and what he has done comes
first so it puts dogma before people, before children. I’ll get to the point, child-abuse is
supported despite its being condemned by Christian doctrine.
Hurting
people with dogma, eg that heresy is a sin, is fanatical for you are surer that
people bleed and suffer than that the dogmas are true. Live without religion for spirituality and
religion are not the same.
SENT TO
FREETHINKER FOR DECEMBER 2003
LETTER EMAILED TO DERRY JOURNAL, Tuesday, 13th April, 2004
Dear Editor
I was alarmed at Patrick Clarke’s letter in Tuesday’s Derry Journal regarding The Passion of the Christ which defended the film for being anti-Semitic and said that we should have bad feelings towards Christ’s killers.
It is totally certain that it is most unjust to the Jews to have
their ancestors accused of the crime of killing the Son of God even if the
gospels do it. Accusations like that
are very serious and we need proof before we can make them but we have none. Nobody can prove who wrote the gospels which
are anonymous. And it is not fair to
condemn the Jews without having their side of the story.
The Jews, according to the gospels, arrested Jesus secretly for
they feared the people. Then why didn’t
they dispose of him themselves? If they
were so corrupt this should not have been a problem. The Romans alone were to blame.
The gospels shifted the blame on to the Jews because they wanted to be
attractive to Romans.
The film takes more from the stories of alleged visionaries than
it does the gospels. The gospels say
that Pilate had Jesus scourged in the hope that the Jews would see their former
idol in a degraded state and relent. If
so the scourging could not have been as extreme as depicted in the film. Would Pilate have a man scourged to within
an inch of his life to save his life?
Of course not.
Jesus himself plainly said that the Sabbath was made for man and
not man for the Sabbath meaning that true Christianity does not advocate
harming others in the name of faith.
The gospels and the film are very offensive for implying that he
consciously refused to avoid his own execution thereby putting faith before
himself and his mother and friends.
The Jews are a decent minority in our society and society tends to
despise them and anything that encourages that should be opposed.
PATRICK
GORMLEY
15 April
2004
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