Kill Religion!: The Deserved Death of Faith

By Ranty McRanterson

Have you ever wondered why people have faith? Why don't they choose not to have faith? How does it help you to believe things for which no reasons or evidence can be provided? Is faith pure wish fulfillment? Is it social conditioning, brainwashing, mind control? Imagine a world where no one had ever heard of Moses, the Buddha, Jesus, and Mohammed, but everyone had heard of Pythagoras, Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. Would our world be better or worse? Imagine that not a single person believed in anything. Imagine that no one placed any faith in anything. Imagine that everyone was rational, logical, and committed to evidence and proof. Imagine that everything was rejected that didn't involve reason, logic, evidence and proof. How would that lead to a worse world? Wouldn't humans be much smarter? Wouldn't they evolve much faster?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Feb 7, 2018
• ISBN: 9780244667092

Ranty McRanterson

Ranty McRanterson is a polemicist. Everyone needs a good rant, right?

Book preview

Introduction

How many prayers does it take to change a light bulb? Prayers don’t, and never can, change a single thing. Humanity spends a staggering amount of time praying to the adult equivalent of a child’s imaginary friend. Prayer accomplishes nothing, is a total waste of time, does not improve humanity in any way, and is a vast brake on human progress. There will come a day when not a single human prays, and they will wonder that people once engaged in this maddest of all undertakings … talking to a hypothetical, fantastical, all-powerful super being living in a different dimension, which has never once spoken back. You might as well speak to the vacuum. You might as well worship the symbols for zero and infinity.

Praying humans are always stupid humans. Praying humans know nothing about science, engineering, mathematics, technology, and philosophy. If they spent of all their praying time on something useful – on learning things and gaining knowledge – the human race would take an enormous leap forward. What’s to be done about the problem, the catastrophe, of faith and prayer?

Prayerful, faithful people are always those whose minds are just as primitive as the ignoramuses of thousands of years, who first believed the spectacular lies of demented, bearded prophets. It’s as if the Enlightenment never happened. These people are as endarkened as they can possibly be. They have rejected modern knowledge in order to worship ancient superstitions. They are retards. They are the force of anti-evolution. These people choose to think about reality in the least productive, most lunatic way.

There are four ways of thinking about the fundamental nature of things: 1) religiously, 2) philosophically, 3) scientifically, and 4) mathematically.

Pagans, Abrahamists and Karmists consider reality in terms of religion. The great philosophers have put forward philosophical rather than religious systems to describe reality. Scientists – advocates of the philosophy of materialism and empiricism – think about reality in terms of their senses, experiments, sensory evidence, and (inconsistently) non-sensory, rationalist mathematics. Pythagoras – the first great mathematician – said that, despite appearances, all things are actually numbers, i.e. mathematics is the true basis of reality.

The great philosophical genius Plato, who was heavily influenced by Pythagoreanism, developed a metaphysics that was highly mathematical in character. Plato, unlike scientists, was dismissive of the human senses, and found them inherently unreliable and prone to misinterpretation and error. They generated doxa (opinion) rather than episteme (knowledge). Science, for example, is an ever-changing opinion; theories come and go, whole new paradigms come and go; how would anyone know they had ever reached the end of science? A mathematical proof, by contrast, is true forever, hence constitutes a wholly different kind of knowledge, a wholly different kind of certainty, objectiveness and absoluteness.

Mathematics places no reliance on the human senses, yet science, to which mathematics is indispensable, is wholly dependent on the human senses. No scientist has ever explained why non-sensory, rationalist mathematics is so essential to sensory, empiricist science, and how mathematics can even be compatible with science given that it has the opposite attributes from science. Science bases itself on ideas of falsification and verification. True mathematical statements can never be falsified, and a mathematical proof is never in any need of experimental, sensory verification.

Religious thinking is based on stories, feelings, mystical intuitions, superstitions, wishful thinking, and faith. This type of thinking is called Mythos thinking. A classic example is the Bible. Genesis 1, 1:1-5 says, In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters. And God said, ‘Let there be light,’ and there was light. God saw that the light was good, and he separated the light from the darkness. God called the light ‘day,’ and the darkness he called ‘night.’ And there was evening, and there was morning – the first day.

This is self-evidently just a rather absurd manmade story, yet religion requires it to be treated as a set of definite facts, communicated to humanity via divine revelation. In order to take the Bible seriously, you have to believe that Genesis is true. Otherwise, you are sure to regard the Bible as a colorful set of stories about ancient tribes, the bizarre gods they worshipped, and the crazy stories they invented to explain reality.

Philosophical thinking is based on logical, rational and critical arguments. Take the example of the philosophical syllogism. Wikipedia says, "A syllogism (‘conclusion, inference’) is a kind of logical argument that applies deductive reasoning to arrive at a conclusion based on two or more propositions that are asserted or assumed to be true.

"In its earliest form, defined by Aristotle, from the combination of a general statement (the major premise) and a specific statement (the minor premise), a conclusion is deduced. For example, knowing that all men are mortal (major premise) and that Socrates is a man (minor premise), we may validly conclude that Socrates is mortal. Syllogistic arguments are usually represented in a three-line form (without sentence-terminating periods):

"All men are mortal.

"Socrates is a man.

Therefore Socrates is mortal.

This is manifestly an entirely different way of thinking from that of religious Mythos. The conclusion is airtight if the premises are true. No belief is required. No divinely inspired prophets are needed. Anyone can think logically if they are intelligent enough. People of faith never are. They unfailingly reject logic and reason, and cling to whatever resonates emotionally with them.

Science, arguably, began with the ancient Greek Atomists. The great Atomist Democritus said, Nothing exists except atoms and empty space; everything else is just opinion. This was itself just a kind of Mythos story, and an opinion, since no Atomist had ever seen an atom, and what on earth was meant by empty space? However, Atomism plainly wasn’t a religious Mythos, and, with Isaac Newton, it was given a mathematical makeover that gave birth to modern science, full of quasi-mathematical formulae. Science can be strictly regarded as a Mythos based on the human senses (rather than gods and spirits), subjected to non-sensory mathematics.

What would happen if you dispensed with the obvious contradiction inherent in science (mixing the sensory and non-sensory)? You would be left with something called ontological mathematics.

Scientists regard mathematics as an abstraction, and matter as real and concrete. But what happens if you regard mathematics as real and concrete, and matter and mind as abstract terms applied to mathematical systems … as manmade, Mythos labels?

Mathematical philosopher Mike Hockney claims that all of reality can be derived from Euler’s Formula: eix = cos x + i sin x. He calls this the God Equation, and says it defines ontological mathematics, i.e. the mathematics of existence, of true reality. This mathematical type of thinking, which gets rid of the human senses, human beliefs, human mysticism, human experiences, human feelings, human opinions, and human stories, is called Logos thinking, and revolves around analytic numbers and formulae rather than emotive words and stories.

How you define reality is dependent on which of the four types of thinking you apply to it. The four types are radically different, and lead to radically different conclusions. Therefore, if we wish to correctly define ultimate reality, the first thing we must do is to reach a definitive conclusion on which is the correct way of thinking. Only one can be true, hence the others will definitely be false, and lead us to erroneous beliefs and opinions. Religion believes it’s right, philosophy is sure it’s the way to the truth, science is convinced nothing can beat its method, and mathematics knows for a fact that nothing can rival an eternal mathematical proof.

Ontological mathematics rubbishes the scientific way of thinking, attacking the very thing on which science is predicated, namely the observations performed via the unreliable, limited, flawed human senses.

Imagine the set of perfect scientific experiments, which satisfy the human senses in every way, and leave nothing to the imagination. Now imagine this perfect experimental science without mathematics to organize it, make sense of it, and convert it into formulae and laws. It would have no value at all! It would be equivalent to astrology, alchemy, or divination … all of which concerned sensory experiments and interpretations conducted in the absence of mathematics.

It is mathematics, not experiments, that gives science all of its power. Mathematics has nothing to do with the human senses, so who needs the human senses at all? The senses give rise to a sensory Mythos added to non-sensory Logos mathematics. Science is simply mathematics subjected to the bogus, fallacious, sensory philosophy of materialism and empiricism.

Descartes rightly pointed out that we could doubt the existence of physical bodies – i.e. we could be systematically deluded about all material, sensory things (as we are in our dreams) – but we could not doubt our doubts, i.e. the fact that we are thinking. That thinking – mental activity – exists is 100% certain. By contrast, there is not, and never has been, any evidence whatsoever that matter exists. Everything that people call matter could be reinterpreted as mind, as thoughts in minds. If the human senses cannot even determine whether matter is real or not, of what value are they?

No scientist has ever proved what it is that the human senses are supposedly revealing to us. Are they showing us a physical world, or are they actually interpreting a universe of mathematical information in which we are all immersed? Scientists can’t explain mind, the unconscious, consciousness, free will, the origin of life, the origin of existence, the origin of the Big Bang Universe. In other words, science leaves all of the fundamental questions of existence completely untouched.

Science is Mythos, mathematics is Logos. Religion is Mythos. Much of philosophy is Mythos. If we live in an intelligible, explicable, rational universe, it must be a Logos universe. Mythos always concerns beliefs and opinions, and no belief or opinion can be regarded as authentic knowledge.

Billions of humans are being taught the wrong ways to think about reality, with disastrous consequences for human evolution and progress. Religious people do not question their religious beliefs. Scientists, for all their bluster, never subject the scientific way of thinking to any criticism. They question scientific theories, but not the scientific method itself, not the scientific way of thinking about and analyzing the world. All scientific theories result from this scientific modus operandi. If this modus operandi is wrong, so, therefore, is every scientific theory!

Mike Hockney has shown how you can take any scientific theory and turn it into an ontological mathematical theory, which has entirely different consequences for the nature of reality.

The apparent success of a scientific theory never makes it a true theory. As Nietzsche said, Success has always been the greatest liar. A scientific theory is always based on interpretation. The only part of science that works is in fact the mathematical part.

There are something like twenty different ways of interpreting science’s crown jewel – quantum mechanics – all of which imply radically different things about reality. The mathematics of quantum mechanics has proven very robust. The interpretation of the mathematics of quantum mechanics has, by contrast, descended to the level of comedy and absurdity, culminating in cats that are supposedly simultaneously dead and alive, a God who does nothing but play dice, and so on. Scientists, with a straight face, tell you things that are as ridiculous and impossible as the claims of the maddest religions, claims that defy