benefits and drawbacks of different religions biblical analogies of god

Benefits and Drawbacks of Different Religions — Biblical Analogies of God

Examining the benefits and drawbacks of different religions helps us understand different beliefs.   Navigating uncertainty in religious beliefs is an emotional journey.  We’ll start by looking at the danger of make-believe in the Bible and the biblical analogies of God.

Almost half of the world follows a religion of the Abrahamic tree.  These are the religions of Islam, Judaism, and Christianity.  (1)  They have a membership of about 4 billion.  Hinduism is perhaps ten times older but only has 1 billion followers.  So, the Abrahamic religions are relatively new to the religion game.  But they have four times so many followers, so they must be doing something right.

Our focus will be on the benefits and drawbacks of different religions.  But first, we want to look at the origins of the most popular religions, those of the Abrahamic family.  Understanding the mechanism that makes them so popular and dangerous simultaneously is important.

Danger of Make-Believe in the Bible

Our beliefs have consequences.  Sometimes, the negative consequences are unintentional, but sometimes, they are intentional.  Religions cover up their intentions with lies and misdirection.  You would think people would want evidence to support their beliefs.  But, the lack of evidence supporting religious beliefs is not a problem for believers.

The Abrahamic Family of Religions and Biblical Analogies of God

Religion is a system of artificial boundaries that perpetuate mythology and superstition.  The three most popular religions are the rebranding of fables known as “The Ancient Mystery Religions.” They are cults from the Mediterranean region and contain dogma from Persia, Egypt, Babylonia, Assyrian, and Greece.  The lack of evidence supporting religious beliefs isn’t a concern.  It hasn’t deterred their ability to grow and retain power.

These systems are built on the same foundation.  They depend upon faith and belief in “divine agency” for their authority.  Superstition gives weight to their cultural programming.  So, releasing yourself from these burdens frees your mind.  Navigating uncertainty in religious beliefs can be a challenge.

The Abrahamic traditions of Judaism, Islam, and Christianity assimilated the ancient mystery religions.   They also adopted some powerful social programming techniques, along with ancient folklore.  Self-hypnosis and group hypnosis are age-old propaganda tactics.  The ancient mystery religions protected their effectiveness and are just as effective today.

The goal of superstition is to control thought, values, and behavior.  This tactic isn’t new.  It’s the creation of Hammurabi, (2) the sixth King of the First Babylonian Dynasty circa 1790 BCE.  Western religion indoctrinates the most vulnerable in the culture.

Using Faith and Make-Believe to Overcome Facts

Abrahamic religions use groupthink manipulation tactics.  They didn’t invent them; they borrowed them from the ancient mystery religions they assimilated.   What you need to know is that these age-old mind controls are effective at making you a customer and protecting their cash flow.  The first thing they do is program you to protest their beliefs.   All opposing viewpoints are a threat.  In this way, people learn to reject new ideas.  That’s how they keep you a customer.  This kind of mind-control programming is harmful.  It affects you and everyone in your circle of influence.

The Semitic traditions contain a variety of negative social biases and prejudices.  They provide believers justification to hate.  Anyone or anything that doesn’t support their skewed worldview is an enemy.

Why does one become a believer?  Most believers were brainwashed by their family or the culture.  Some become believers because they are having a crisis and are seeking help.  How does one become a believer?  Faith and make-believe are tools that enable you to substitute rational thinking for myths and superstition.

The superstitions and prejudices of these systems result in harmful social outcomes.  It is responsible for everything from genocide and public torture to genital mutilation.  It’s a history they would like people to overlook, but they rely on it to maintain their prejudice.  The consequences of organized religion are enough for the rational person to see the danger of make-believe in God.

Lack of Evidence Supporting Religious Beliefs

danger of make-believe in the bible danger of make-believe in god lack of evidence supporting religious beliefs

Evidence and facts are on the opposite end of faith and belief.  But, religious believers want some way of proving their beliefs are real.   One of the tools believers use to substantiate their beliefs is their divinely inspired sacred texts.  So, let’s look at the danger of make-believe in the Bible.

Divine Inspiration

Divine inspiration is the belief that a supernatural force spoke to or through a person and told them what to write.  Because God inspires it, it has divine authority.  This scheme is used to support the validity of these texts despite their many contradictions.  Believers overlook the lack of evidence supporting religious beliefs.

The Book of Morman takes first place for the most revised modern holy book.  This holly book has had over 4000 corrections since 1830.  The “other” holy text, the Bible, has undergone over 30,000 changes since the King James version arrived in 1611.

The early books of the Bible come from fragments of documents from the earlier cults of mystery religions.  There are no proof texts for the books of the New Testament.  It was created from the myths of the dying-god religions in the Medditrainian region circa 1000 BCE.  The Quoran took about 50 years to be written.  The writing of the Quoran started around 610 CE.

The Bible, Torah, and the Quran are the texts these religions use to support their beliefs.  They each claim their texts were divinely inspired by God.  That is to say, God has given different versions of holy texts.  Many other splinter sects also claim God inspired their sacred texts.

Proving Divine Inspiration

One stumbling block in proving the divine inspiration of holy texts is the inherently subjective nature of faith.  Religious doctrine and beliefs are interpreted differently.  So, using logic and science to verify or disprove divine inspiration becomes challenging.  Belief systems often transcend empirical evidence.  Let’s use an analogy to explain this subjectivity.

You could say birds inspired the airplane.  When we say this, we don’t mean the birds spoke to someone and told them how to build an airplane.  Now, it is true that some birds can mimic the words of language.  However, they don’t possess the ability to articulate complex mechanics of aerodynamics.

What we mean is the observation of birds flying gave us the desire to fly.  And so, we figured out to build a machine that could fly.  The mechanics of air flight involve four forces: weight, lift, thrust, and drag.  The birds did not tell the engineers they needed to understand these forces to fly like a bird.

Still, we can say that birds inspired airplanes despite any proof that a bird articulated the mechanics of air flight.  It’s the same issue for all inspired holy texts.

The Danger of Make-Believe in God

When discussing sacred texts, you must address what made them divine.  We have an additional element called God, which is the lynchpin concept of religion on which divine inspiration is based.  God is not like a physical bird.  God is either a metaphorical concept or something real.

Can you prove God exists?  No.  Can you prove God doesn’t exist?  No.  You cannot prove that something that has no physical form doesn’t exist.  Rather, the burden of proof is on the person claiming that God does exist.  You can pretend God exists, but that doesn’t mean it does.  This dilemma underscores the danger of make-believe in God.  Even if you don’t consider make-believe a mental disorder, the outcomes of this kind of thinking are hard to overlook.  Religious beliefs are the root cause of all the ongoing religious conflicts.

All the benefits and drawbacks of different religions depend upon pretending.  You must make believe something exists that lacks any empirical evidence.  The lack of evidence supporting religious beliefs is a deal-breaker for rational thinkers.

How, then, can you prove something you can’t prove existed was able to speak or inspire someone to write?   You can’t.  You must believe an imaginary entity possessed someone’s mind and told them to write.

Hearing voices is what psychologists call auditory hallucinations.  (3) A hallucination is something you see, taste, smell, or hear that others cannot.  If you hear voices, this means you hear something that other people cannot.  Yet, people do this all the time in public.  Turn to any religious programming, and you’ll hear people telling you God told them this or that.

All the biblical analogies of God are attributes contradicted by his actions.  There are hundreds of these contradictions.  However, instead of this being a problem, Western religion has learned to use these inconsistencies.   If questioned directly, they always argue that God’s ways are above human understanding.  Here are some of these contradictions.

Navigating Uncertainty in Religious Beliefs

navigating uncertainty in religious beliefs

Many religious traditions have evolved over thousands of years.  The result is countless versions, interpretations, and translations of holy texts.   It is this wide array of interpretations that leads to contradictory claims.

It becomes impossible to pinpoint a single, universally accepted proof of divine inspiration.  The open-endedness of interpretation becomes a double-edged sword.  You can believe something is true, but you can’t provide proof of why you think it is true.  Despite these contradictions, the biblical analogies of God are a foundation of Western society.

Human beings have played a crucial role in the writing and preservation of holy texts.  Religious leaders argue these divine texts are “inspired” by a higher power.  Yet, historical analysis does not support this conclusion.  It reveals the texts have been changed multiple times.  History is replete with instances of human intervention.  Cultural biases become new translations.  These factors can muddy the waters and raise doubts about the divine nature of these texts.

The defining characteristic of scientific theories is the principle of falsifiability.  This is where a claim can be specifically disproven through empirical evidence.  But, with divine inspiration, falsifiability is impossible.  Translations of religious texts include elements that are subjectively interpreted.  There are additions to the text to clarify doctrinal points.

Consequently, claims of divine inspiration cannot be proven.  But neither can they be disproven using scientific methods.  Here, religion leverages the lack of scientific proof as a way of justifying their belief.  The argument seems preposterous, but it works for believers.  It goes like this.  You can’t use evidence to prove my make-believe isn’t real, so it must be true.

An interesting aspect of holy texts is the multitude of religions that have them.  Every religion claims its texts are divinely inspired.  If all texts are divinely inspired, it makes navigating uncertainty in religious belief even harder.  Each religious tradition holds beliefs that conflict with the others.  Believing in the divine inspiration of one text casts doubt on others.  This endless cycle of contradictory claims gives rise to further skepticism.  So, there exists an unbridgeable gap in proving divine inspiration.

The question of divine inspiration will continue to ignite passionate debates.  We must acknowledge the limitations involved in proving or disproving the divine origin of holy texts.  The elusive nature of faith and the multitude of interpretations make it impossible to single out one as authoritative.  Human influence, subjective translations, and the absence of falsifiability only compound the problems.  The sheer number of conflicting claims and lack of proof texts contribute to the dilemma of divine inspiration.

Benefits and Drawbacks of Different Religions

Religion has been a part of human civilization for centuries.  It served as a guide for spirituality, ethics, and community.  With so many religions, it’s crucial to understand the contrasting drawbacks and benefits they bring.  One way to unravel the good and the bad is to look at the pros and cons, what they claim, and what happens.  (4)

1.  Religions Provide Community Belonging

The major religions tell us belonging to them to provide a sense of belonging and meaning.  It gives people a purpose, but at what cost?  Religious suicide bombers have a sense of belonging to a cause and are willing to die and kill others for it.  Mega-church pastors live in massive mansions.  At the same time, they deny using their sanctuaries for sheltering people during hurricanes or the pandemic.  How do these actions provide a sense of belonging?

2.  Provides False Hope

People say their religious beliefs give them a sense of hope.  But is hope in the existence of an imaginary friend not just delusions and a way of ignoring problems?  Many philosophers, critical thinkers, and clinicians see religion as a mental illness.  (3) It is used as a social programming tool to control people’s thoughts.

All Religions are artificial rather than divinely inspired because there is no valid proof of God’s existence.  The first step in brainwashing is accepting the illusion of God.  It is not just escapism but a dangerous slippery slope that can lead to more unhealthy thinking.

3.  Provide Tangible Contributions to the Community

People say religious charities help those overlooked by society.  Religions sponsor orphanages, schools, and hospitals.  And in this sense, they are a positive influence.  However, they use these outlets to leverage their hold on the culture.  Religions take in far more than they provide services to the community.

Here is where the pros and cons of religion show they can do the right thing but only do it to the extent it provides an excuse for their larger abuses.  It’s a bate-and-switch tactic.  For example, the Catholic Church says, look at all the good we do.  All while accumulating more wealth than most nations.  They could end world hunger instead of hoarding most of the world’s precious metals and art.

4.  The Catalyst for Social Stability

Religions can be the basis of social coherence and stability.  The biblical analogies of God are held as the standard for a healthy society.  However,  if this stability results in violence, the coherence is cancerous.  Groupthink manipulation tactics are a slippery slope to extreme ideologies.  They program people with sectarian values containing harmful bias and prejudice.

Live in any society dominated by religion, and you must adhere to the dictates of the religion.  If you don’t, you suffer consequences up to and including public torture and death.  We see this in Islamic cultures run by the Taliban.  They punish anyone who opposes their Draconian practices.  It’s the same for other Arabic countries like Saudi Arabia.

So, social coherence is extortion.  The cost is the loss of freethinking.  It often also comes with a caste system.  Most caste systems are patriarchal, which provide preferential treatment to the male gender.

5.  The Storehouse of Wisdom

The divinely inspired texts, like the Bible, contain great wisdom.  The wisdom in these texts is a collection of works from other cultures.  They plagiarized these works as their own when they conquered and absorbed them.  Virtually everything in the Bible is wisdom from another culture.  Their doctrines are plagiarism sold under the banner of their new religion.

Western religions try to cover up the plagiarism of other systems by destroying the original works.  We can now read the Cuneiform language developed by the Sumerians in Mesopotamia at least 3200 BCE.  So, we know where the Abrahamic religions obtained their doctrines.   In the Old Testament or Tanak, we find Hammurbi’s Babyloinain laws repeated word for word.  They appear in Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy.  But this is only one example.  All of the holy texts of the Abrahamic religions are plagiarized.

6.  Builders of Beautiful Architecture

The proponents of religious tradition say they bring value to society because of the architecture and art they have created.  However, these are monuments to the abuse of religion.  The resources wasted on these projects could have been used in many socially responsible ways.  It could provide food, clothing, medical care, and shelter.  Instead, these resources become golden crowns and precious stones.  It shows the dangers of organized religion as they attempt to white-wash the misuse of resources to justify their existence.

7.  Encouraging Love and Suppresses Hate

Some people say that religion suppresses the harmful excesses of human nature.  But is this assertion supported by the evidence?  History and recent scientific studies (5) show that religious beliefs are harmful.  They provide excuses for the atrocities that include wars and genocide.  Rather than suppress the negative, they increase it.

Religions tell us temples, churches, ashrams, and synagogues provide a place for the community to come together.  This is only true if you join their cults.  Instead, they provide the opportunity for religious indoctrination.  They are used to brainwash and make lifelong paying customers.

In reality, religions are the source of war, the conflict between people.  It continues to this day on every continent.  Everyone believes their religion is correct, and everyone else is wrong.  Some claim their beliefs give them the authority to protect and kill anyone who threatens or offends their imaginary friend.  This kind of thinking demonstrates the danger of make-believe in God.

Religion is based on mythology and superstition.  It uses anecdotal stories to substantiate the validity of their beliefs.  Western religion promotes bias, bigotry, and discrimination of many social classes.  It starts with the hate of other religions and expands to include race, gender, and lifestyle choices.

That religion encourages love and not hate is one of the religion’s most glaring contradictions.  It is astonishing that more don’t see the inconsistencies between what they say and what they promote.

8.  Encourage Learning

Rather than encourage learning, organized religions discourage new ideas.  It bans access to anything that contradicts their ideas.  They think it’s okay to buy guns but not to read books.  They only encourage the reading and memorization of their dogma.

The fact is, religions don’t ask.  They demand loyalty.  And they use violence against anyone who opposes their twisted ideologies.   Belief in their imaginary friend absolves them of any crime.  In fact, they believe their imaginary friend rewards those who kill unbelievers.  These beliefs are remnants of the Dark Ages.

Belief in their imaginary friend absolves them of any crime.  In fact, they believe their imaginary friend even rewards those who kill unbelievers and infidels.  These beliefs are remnants of the Dark Ages.

The “Dark Ages” were a time when the Church was in firm control of society.  It burned books, imprisoned, and persecuted anyone who questioned its rules.  This kind of medieval culture exists in the extremist elements of the Abrahamic tree.  Believers want us to revert to this type of religious rule.

Organized, it’s not above using any threat to keep people in line.  What they call salvation is really extortion.  When the same entity threatening you with eternal torture also offers you a solution, that is not salvation; it’s extortion.

The afterlife and other methods of “the carrot and stick” keep people in poverty.  People sacrifice much to prop up religion.  They hope that all their hard-earned cash will secure them a place in Heaven.

9.  The Source of Morality

Western religious leaders point to their high standards of morals.  At the same time, many of them get caught fleecing the flock.  Christianity, in particular, has a track record of leaders caught in various schemes.

In Conclusion

The benefits and drawbacks of different religions underscore the problems with Western theology.  The lack of evidence supporting religious beliefs is not a concern for most believers.  They live by faith, not by facts.  The danger of make-believe in the Bible is clear in their outcomes.  Not all religions install harmful values like the Abrahamic traditions.

The danger of make-believe in God is also evident in the rise of alt-right or far-right extremism.  This kind of thinking highlights the dangers of organized religion.

REFERENCES

(1) Abrahamic Religions.  Wikipedia
(2) Hammurabi.  Wikipedia
(3) Belief in God and Psychological Distress: Is It the Belief or Certainty of the Belief?  MDPI
(4) 9 Pros (and 11 Cons) of Religion.  Soapboxie.com
(5) On the Intersection of Science and Religion.  The Pew Research Center