Memories of the 28th Century

Religion is seldom held up as the highest and best example of rational thought, but we often ignore the irrationality of religion, especially organized religion. The starting point is the difference between objectivity and subjectivity. Legal proceedings, academic arguments, and other arguments that are public require evidence that can be observed by anyone, or could have been, if anyone had been there. Visions of angels or other supernatural characters are not admissible, unless there are photographs.

That doesn’t amount to an assertion that ghosts, angels, demons, Gods, and Goddesses do not exist. My opinion is that they do exist, but they are not necessarily part of this universe, and they do not have objective existence, well, some of the Gods have objective existence but not all, so I can’t use them as evidence of anything, but you can’t either. Religious prophets and such weren’t as careful with recognition of objectivity. It is quite possible that Jesus had that discussion with Satan, when he was offered the whole world, and Mohammed might have travelled to wherever he claimed to go overnight, but in both cases there were claims that were not objectively possible, and no evidence was offered, so those matters cannot be believed. I don’t know whether those men really asserted that they had taken part in impossible events; they might have meant things allegorically, or they might have hallucinated the whole things and really believed that it happened, or they might have been joking.

One of the problems with the founders of religions is that they acted as if they were insane. That isn’t universally true, but it is generally true. It appears that Mormonism was started as a con, and the Baha'i Faith was devised a combination of several religions and was not presented as anything new. Based on what is in the Koran, it appears that Mohammed may have been quite mad, but is difficult to tell for sure from this point, and it is possible that he consciously concocted some things to make it easier to conquer the Arabian Peninsula, but the teachings in the Koran suggest that he had some peculiarities. Jesus, who is given credit for starting Christianity, seems to have been a mystic, so he might have been utterly mad, or he might have been rather ordinary. It is a pity that the earlier founders of religions have become mythical figures, so we can’t tell how mad they were.

If we look only at the founders of recent religions, then we might learn something about such people in general. Amy Semple MacPherson of Christian Science infamy had some rather strange ideas, and she may have taken all of her religion seriously, which would put her into the insane category; although she wasn’t all that bad off. L. Ron Hubbard of Scientology infamy was a science fiction writer who had planned to start a religion long before he did so; there are no reasons to think that he was anything other than a con-artist. And Joseph Smith of Mormonism was a professional con-artist. Looking at the sample that we have, it appears that people who start religions have mostly been con-artists, but some weren’t playing with a full deck. We probably should consider the tenets of any and all religions in light of this factor, and that means that we probably should not accept any religion as true or based on facts.

And then there was Zarathustra, the Persian mystic who wrote the holy book of Zarathustrianism, the Zend Avesta. In his time, a few thousand years ago, the beliefs were disorganized, so he went into a drug induced trance for a few days, and when he recovered he dictated or wrote the rules of the religion. It would be nice to know also how Yezidism started, because it is like Zarathustrianism, except that the Yezidis worship the agent of Ahura Mazda, or Ormuzd, the chief God of Zarathustrianism (It is complicates, so you would be better off reading the articles on yeziditruth.com). They happen to have the oldest counting of years that I have been able to find “According to the Yezidi calendar, April 2012 marked the beginning of their year 6,762 (thereby year 1 would have been in 4,750 BC in the Gregorian calendar).” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yazidis. It would be nice to know the circumstances of the origin, but that is shrouded in the mists of the past. This is all very interesting, but the only evidence for the tenets of this quite ancient religion is a collection of songs and stories. The matters that are covered by this, and most other religions, are not visible to any, except some people with mental illness or who have taken certain drugs, but it is possible that it will all become clear after we die. If the predictions of judgement and so on are true, then there probably will be a little education also, but that is part of is forgotten when one drinks from the Lethe.

There is evidence that religions were derived one from another over the millennia, but Yezidi was of the second generation, just one step from the original, or maybe even part of the original. Since then things have deteriorated, as later derivative religions took less and less from the original. The Sumerian Gods and Goddesses were the next generation, and then came the Egyptian and Assyrian generation, followed by the Babylonian and Canaanite generation. The God of Abraham was born either during the Assyrian period or during the Canaanite period, several generations after the beginning. There has been so much distortion of things since then that it's hard to tell what actually happened. For that reason we should heed the Yezidis and their religion, which seems to have more of the original facts than do later derivations.

Here we are thousands of years later trying to figure out who has it right, but most people are just taking one side or another, rather than trying to figure whether there is any objective evidence and what that evidence may say. It's just a lot of "He said;" "She said;" "They Say;" and so on. Most of them don't even bother looking at whether the internal logic agrees with whatever is being presented as truth. When we do that search for internal logic in scriptures we are left with a jumbled mess of inconsistent assertions, until we go back to the Yezidis and the Zarathushtrianists.

If we don’t want to go back to the origin of religion, then maybe we should build a new and better one by boiling together all of the present day religions until they become a uniform sticky mess, much like making glue. And while we're boiling it down, we can pull out all of the illogical parts. Then we can see what's left. I would suggest that we could simply go with a nature worshipping religion and save the trouble; something like the Ancient Greek religion would work well, but Yezidi makes a lot of sense.


http://www.yeziditruth.org/

http://www.avesta.org/