To the Devil With Religion

By Michael Kreps

WOULD the world be better off without religion? That’s the question author Michael Kreps asks in this irreverant but utterly fascinating new book. He boldly argues that the Jewish, Christian and Muslim faiths are all founded on worship of a savage and loveless God who promotes misery, misogyny and violence. Drawing on meticulous research, Kreps also suggests that while each faith wages war on the others, all modern religions are actually just a distortion or rehash of ancient superstitions and beliefs. Is the virgin birth of Jesus just a retelling of the legends of Mithras and others? Was Allah originally a pagan moon god? And was the ‘miracle’ parting of the Red Sea by Moses actually just a tsunami triggered by a volcano hundreds of miles away? Agree or disagree with Kreps, you will still be utterly hooked by this powerful new look at why we believe… and why it’s so bad for us.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Jan 2, 2020
• ISBN: 9780244834227

Book preview

To the Devil With Religion

To the Devil with Religion!

Contents

Prologue

Prelude 

Introduction

Commanding the People 

Judaism 

The Old Testament of the Bible

Christianity & the New Testament

Islam

Hinduism

Buddhism 

Messiahs

Violence and intolerance

Women’s place in religion

Religion and Sex

Convents and Virginity

Talk of the Devil

Saints and Angels

Epilogue

Prologue

Thus saith the Lord: ‘...I am the Lord which exercise loving kindness, judgment, and righteousness in the earth: for in these things I delight’ saith the Lord. Jeremiah 9:24.

Well, that’s God’s opinion of himself: the kindly grey-bearded old man in the sky looking benevolently down on His creatures. Somehow though, it just doesn’t line up with His activities as recounted, in particular, in the Old Testament of the Judeo-Christian Bible. This Abrahamic God is prayed to by His Jewish, Christian and Muslim followers who see him as a loving deity concerned for the welfare of His creatures. Yet this is the same God whose savagery in threats and deeds is instanced multiple times in the Old Testament of the Bible. This is the same God in whose name some of the worst acts of violence in recorded history have been carried out by followers who, professing to know His mind, have replicated those horrific early biblical examples.

Although born into and brought up within an orthodox Jewish family, I cannot accept the Judaic version of this God; I have come to see him, through the portrayals in the Old Testament in particular, as a monster, a concept not worthy of even an iota of love or respect. And as far as my views of both Christianity and Islam are concerned, this rejection is additionally also a result of their followers ludicrously rigid insistence on the absolute ‘correctness’ of their own particular beliefs. Their blanket refusals to accept any disagreement with these beliefs also make them objectionable. And as for the original Judaic version, this God who features so prominently in the Old Testament appears to me to be an irrational, sometimes monstrous divinity who seems to take more satisfaction in threats to kill, or in actual killings of the creatures He supposedly made ‘in His own image’ than in any other activity. This Old Testament God prefers to be respected and obeyed – feared rather than loved - through the exercise of supposed awesome punitive power rather than earning respect by any other means; this, to me is just as unacceptable and unpleasant as the Christian and Islamic versions.

Christian theology is here demonstrated to be a self-justifying structure of fictitious invention having very little originality. Almost all its essentials, particularly and specifically including those surrounding its founder, have demonstrably (see the ‘Christianity’ chapter) been copied or absorbed from earlier religions denigrated by Christianity itself as pagan.

And since much in the Qur’an rests on Biblical foundations, so the Islamic tales of personal revelation to their Prophet are similarly suspect; for instance, the Qur’an’s story of the Archangel’s visit to and conversation with Mary about her future son is the same as the biblical one, almost down to the language. And I find the whole idea of the Archangel Gabriel dictating the Qur’an to an initially illiterate Muhammed just as silly as that of God himself dictating the Torah to Moses, or personally hand-writing the Ten Commandments.

The two primary reference sources here in discussing these religions are the King James Bible, and the ‘Pickthall’ translation of the Qur’an which is available online from The Islamic Computing Centre, London; other sources are referenced as they arise in the text.

There are many English language versions of The Bible, but no definitive one, although the King James Version (KJV) has almost become the de facto one. It was commissioned by King James I to bring the words of the Bible to the five to six million people of Britain in English, not in the traditional Latin; from its first edition in 1611 it has succeeded way beyond its original mission to an astonishing extent. It even survived early problems such as a printing error which omitted the word ‘not’ from the Commandment ‘Thou shalt not commit adultery’. James’s son King Charles I had ordered 1,000 Bibles from his printers, Messrs. Barker and Lewis, but only after the Bibles were delivered did anyone notice the mistake. The King was not amused by the ‘Wicked Bible’, as the product of this mistake became known; ordering the entire printing to be recalled and destroyed, he took away from Messrs. Barker & Lewis their license to print Bibles, fined them three hundred pounds (a huge sum), and suddenly their printing business was out of business. Only a handful of copies are believed to have survived.

Part of the success of the KJV was the appeal of its language which had the effect of providing a very acceptable format in English, a language that was then and still is now very fluid. In the great majority of English homes it was often the only book to be found, and children learned to read from it. It went abroad with the expansion of British power around the world, to North America (where in the USA it is also known as the Authorised Version), to Australasia, to India, and to parts of Africa; it has incidentally helped to make English the lingua franca of hundreds of millions of people. The combined effects of British empire-building and this Bible suggest that the KJV is quite possibly the most widely circulated version of the Bible (in any language) in existence.

By contrast there is only one Qur’an, and that is the definitive one based on the writings by the Prophet Muhammed as dictated to him by Gabriel.  All of the books of the Holy Qur’an available for purchase anywhere are regarded as simply translations from classical into modern Arabic – or other languages. Muslims insist that to study The Qur’an properly it is necessary to learn classical Arabic and then to read from a copy – not a translation – of the ‘authorised’ edited version produced by Caliph Uthman, one of Muhammed’s early successors, from his original notes. This is the practice in the Madrassas, the Islamic religious schools.

The first native English speaker to translate this Qur’an into English was Marmaduke Pickthall, a middle-class Victorian gentleman who was the son of a clergyman and (at Harrow School) a contemporary and friend of Winston Churchill. A widely travelled man who converted to Islam, he said of his work, which was first published in 1930: ...The Qur’an cannot be translated. ...The book is here rendered almost literally and every effort has been made to choose befitting language. But the result is not the Glorious Qur’an, that inimitable symphony, the very sounds of which move men to tears and ecstasy. It is only an attempt to present the meaning of the Qur’an—and peradventure something of the charm in English. It can never take the place of the Qur’an in Arabic, nor is it meant to do so...

The Bible and the Qur’an have a common quality in that neither of them is supported by any external evidence concerning the truths of their stories. Supporters of the Bible like to refer, for instance, to Old Testament prophecies concerning the arrival of a Messiah as ‘proof’ of the Messianic claims of Jesus, ie they use the Bible to ‘prove’ itself ignoring its multitude of inconsistencies. Insofar as The Qur’an and its associated ‘hadith’ (recorded sayings of Muhammed) are concerned, there is of course evidence that Muhammed said the things that are in these hadith since they were recorded by his comrades and colleagues at the time; yet for his overwhelmingly more significant encounters with the Archangel Gabriel there were neither witnesses nor any other evidence. However, if you believe in him, you’re a Muslim; if you don’t, you’re not. It’s as simple as that. Early belief in his claims about these encounters must have been based solely on his persuasive powers derived from a passionate sincerity - his third wife, Aisha, commented fulsomely on his speaking voice.

The stories in both the Old and New Testaments are almost all subject to the same criticisms, not only concerning the lack of objective external evidence, but also on the nature of the claims made there. For instance, there is doubt over the Pre-Noahic Flood men, who are said to have lived for several hundreds of years – Methuselah was supposedly only thirty-one years short of being one thousand years old when he died. Then there was the tribe of some two million Jews who apparently wandered for forty years in a wilderness that could probably have been crossed in a few weeks, yet leaving hardly a trace that they had ever been there. Or the appearance of a Saviour (Jesus) whose claims of divine origin were seemingly completely ignored by the only source that could have supported them – His supposed divine Father - and who at least could have left lasting evidence of what had occurred. Those who later asked questions concerning these and other matters, had either to be satisfied by answers concerning ’revealed truths’ or face the near certainties of torture and death for their dangerous questions. Not until the mid-19th century was anyone able to mount a successful challenge to these belief systems, when Charles Darwin published his ‘Origin of Species’, and he attracted a hail of scorn to himself.

Now, things have improved to the point where, at least in the Christian world, sceptics can openly challenge the system without putting themselves in mortal danger; instead, Christianity is being forced to defend itself. Perhaps this may lead to the discovery of some of that missing evidence.

Prelude

The Book of Life begins with a man and a woman in a Garden..... (and) it ends with Revelations. Oscar Wilde – ‘A Woman of no Importance’.

The Old Testament part of the Bible, the ‘Holy Book’ which provides a great part of the essential belief system for a substantial proportion of the world’s population, also provides the basis of a reasoned calculation to show that Planet Earth is just over six thousand years old.

Dr. James Ussher (1580-1655), Archbishop of Armagh, Primate of All Ireland, and Vice-Chancellor of Trinity College, Dublin was an eminent scholar. Of his collected works, totalling seventeen volumes, the most famous is his "Annals of the Old and New Testament" published in 1650, which contains a detailed chronology of biblical history. Ussher calculated that God had created the world on Sunday October 23, 4004 BCE, and created Adam on October 28th, which was the sixth day of Creation.

He arrived at these dates in part by adding the ages of Adam and his descendants found in Genesis, Chapters 5,11. He assumed that the Old Testament genealogies did not omit any names and that the periods of time in the texts were all consecutive. Similar Jewish calculations of the date of the Creation had placed it at 3761 BCE, which was pretty close to Ussher’s 4004 result given the nature and range of the assumptions that had to be made.

Ussher’s result however was even more closely supported by Dr John Lightfoot, of Cambridge University, who in 1644 had by a similar calculation arrived at a figure of 3922 years from Creation to Christ; and was closer still to that of the Venerable Bede who early in the 8th century had arrived at a figure of 3952 years. These results agreed so closely because they all used the same data source (the Bible) and the same method of calculation, though changes in the various calendars in use over time accounted for many of the differences in results. It happened that early in the 1700’s Ussher’s ‘4004’ sequence of dates and events was incorporated as margin notes into a printing of the King James Bible, a move which proved to be very popular and was repeated in various later printings right into the early 20th century. At one period these dates came to be regarded with almost as much authority as the Bible itself, and the Ussher chronology thus became the ‘established’ one.

This chronology gives precise dates for many early biblical events, such as that Adam and Eve were driven from Paradise on Monday 10th November 4004 BCE (this means that they lived in the Garden of Eden for less than two weeks, since Adam was not created until the sixth day, which Ussher had calculated was October 28th). Other dates in the chronology include:

2348 BCE - The Great Flood

1921 BCE - God’s call to Abraham

1491 BCE - The Exodus from Egypt

1012 BCE - The founding of the Temple in Jerusalem

586 BCE - The destruction of Jerusalem by Babylon 
and the start of the Babylonian captivity)

4 BCE - The birth of Jesus (ie he was born 4 years earlier than is currently assumed.)

Then in 1859 Charles Darwin published his own thoughts and revelations in his Origin of Species, and the religious world has never been quite the same.

Introduction

"From the beginning man used God to justify the unjustifiable."

(Salman Rushdie: ‘The Satanic Verses’)

Religion – and in particular the three Abrahamic religions of (in order of appearance) Judaism, Christianity and Islam – has been, and still is, the single greatest force of mass murder, death, destruction, violence and disunity in human history. Collectively, for instance, these followers of Abraham have been directly responsible for some three and a half thousand years of wars which have destroyed whole civilisations, countries, cities and cultures and have led to not just hundreds of thousands, but tens (possibly hundreds) of millions of deaths that can be directly attributed to their beliefs and behaviour over the millennia. It is probable that there have been more violent deaths in history due to these faiths than to any other single cause, and equally probable too that a substantial proportion of these have been due to their mutual antipathies and the inter-religious killings carried out against each other in the name of their common God.

Aside from the killings, the Old Testament alone contains possibly more accounts of brutal sexual violence and rape than perhaps any other book in (or out of) print; there is a good case waiting to be made demonstrating that the Bible and the Qur’an - the books that our religious authorities would have more than half the world’s population study every week on Fridays, Saturdays or Sundays – each contain more actual violence (including rape) or threats of violence between their covers than any other books ever written.

Together these three religions do not