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Aug. 18, 2007 It had become popular nowadays, at least in the west, to debunk religion by putting the belief in a supreme being or a higher power down as being so much superstition unacceptable in this day of the highly educated; we, modern man, now steeped in science and not tied to the outmoded incorrect beliefs of our fore fathers. In a word we are superior to all past generations. In the past education was only available to the aristocracy, who were however, according to those who study these matters, ten times more educated than the average university graduate of today. I know the science of today was unheard of in the past so how could they have been more educated? Well the students of today do not study as deeply rhetoric, philosophy, art, languages and of course religion as say did the Romans from the time of the founding of the empire right up to its dissolution with the fall of Constantinople; and although we are more able to interpret our perceptions of the physical and the metaphysical plane by following the teachings of Aristotle, putting them into viable conceptions using the available information, we are not necessarily more educated than those Artists, Scientists and Poets of Classical Greece. In fact we would never have reached our present day conclusions using other forms of reasoning so common throughout the world in the past (and even today); namely superstition, fortune telling, epistemology etc. Today we in the west and in China are at the forefront of a movement never before undertaken in the history of the world; the implementation of a civilization having no basis in religion. In China experiments have been going on for the last seventy five years of so, in North America and Western Europe such experimentation has been going of for, oh lets say the last twenty years or so although unofficially it has been going on for the last fifty years with its suspension from the school curriculum. What so far has been the result? In the west it is hard to see any positive result from the suspension of religious belief as in Europe only has their been a decline in religious belief while in America their has been an increase. Standards of living are said to be higher than in religious times but are they? One is twice as likely to get mugged in large cities as one would have been during the middle ages and in some cases relative poverty is on the rise, especially in the big cities. Insanity is now out of control and largely ignored. Whole segments of the populations of western countries, including large segments of their governments, have been overcome by this hazard so common to civilizations throughout the ages, (along with the dangers of disease), when beings live in close proximity to one another. Far from advancing the state of knowledge the abandonment of religion has led not only to new levels of ignorance, but also to the taking up of other religious beliefs: global warming, UFO-ology, and the various Hollywood drug cults to name a few. In fact the abandonment of religion has led to a war against knowledge. What rational civilization could demean all of its past achievements and great men as do large segments of the west with its constant harping upon such matters as: slavery; (common through out the world since the beginning of time and only made illegal by west in the nineteenth century); western prudery, (no country had ever had such a blatant display of sex as is available in the west); the refusal to give gays their rights;(no where has, as far as I can see, has any country past or present based its social model on gay and hetro- sexual marriage). To sum up we can say that there is one true atheistic country in the world today; China, which although officially non religious, does base its whole economy upon countries outside its borders which are either deeply religious, as in India and the US, or those not so deeply religious but still retaining somewhere in their constitution the precepts or religion, such as the UK and Canada, to those with hardly a trace of religion left, such as France and Italy.
It’s still too early to tell how the great experiment
is going but as GK Chesterton stated "the trouble with
not worshipping a single supreme being is that one
tends to worship every thing."
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