WHY DO HUMANS WORSHIP GODS?: Daunting Questions Proposed Uncomfortable Truths Exposed

By Wilberforce Reid

According to United Nations statistics, 25,000 men, women, and innocent children worldwide die from starvation each day, yet the majority of us give praises and thanks to God every day for providing us with our daily bread. We do know (or should know) that millions of people were killed, including being burned at the stakes, because they did not conform to the official doctrine of the Christian Church. In spite of this, each day we sing about how loving and merciful God is to mankind. In the creation of our conscious mind, are we more susceptible to indoctrination than to logical and objective analysis of a subject? By exposing stories swept under the rug because of our unconscious bias, this book will uncover many uncomfortable truths.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Feb 12, 2024
• ISBN: 9798369415467

Wilberforce Reid

Wilberforce Reid grew up in rural Jamaica and experienced the natural simplicity of rural community life. His work experience was mainly in the bauxite/alumina industry in Jamaica where he started as an instrument/electrical technician and was later promoted to a supervisory position. Later, he pursued his bachelor's degree in electronics and subsequently became an instrument/electrical engineer in the bauxite/alumina industry. During this time, he was very active in Jamaican politics and leadership roles in social and community work. Wilberforce also lived for a period of time in the United States, where he worked as an unlimited electrical contractor, licensed in the State of Connecticut. He also pursued the following occupations while there: journeyman electrician for the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW) and electrician with the Long Island Rail Road. This comprehensive experience in Jamaican politics, Jamaican culture, and the experience of working across the labor spectrum in the United States has given Wilberforce the unique perspective to evaluate the Jamaican situation.

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Copyright © 2024 by Wilberforce Reid.

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Rev. date: 02/07/2024

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CONTENTS

Notes On Revised Edition

This Book

Preview

Chapter 1 The God Gene

Religions and Their Gods

The Desire To Worship Gods

Does God Answer Our Prayers?

Does God Interfere with the Laws of Physics?

Microphysics and Metaphysics

How Is Intelligence Defined?

Chapter 2 Religion Versus Science

The Galileo Story

Onward Christian Soldiers

Material Dating Versus Intelligent Design

Human And Artificial Intelligence

No Evidence of Intelligent Design

Seeing Hearing and Believing

The Malaria Malady

When Daniel’s God Did Not Deliver

Chapter 3 Is The God Gene A Good Gene?

Religion and the Roman Empire

How African Moors Enlightened Europe

The Dark Ages of Europe

Ancient Civilized Cultures

Colonial Atrocities

The Greed for Africa’s Treasures

The Feeding Frenzy for African Resources

The Transatlantic Slave Trade

Slavery in America

Jim crow in America

Lynching in America

Red Lines and Black Barriers

Chapter 4 Bias, Bigotry, and Religion

Activism For Good Or Evil

People Are Not Born With Bigotry

NOTES ON REVISED EDITION

After writing the original version of WHY DO HUMANS WORSHIP GODS? I got even more interested in the study of religions and their effects on human societies. I started to read more and consequently learned more about this phenomenon. In the revised edition I have made changes such that the reader will find this edition more informative and more readable. Common topics are grouped together to provide a smooth flow of information.

I am anticipating that you will find this revised edition of WHY DO HUMANS WORSHIP GODS even more informative than the previous edition. There are lots of historical facts in this book that are suppressed in our culture to maintain the status quo. This book will be a source of enlightenment to its readers.

THIS BOOK

is dedicated to everyone who recognizes the wisdom of evaluating what he or she sees, hears, or reads. To everyone who does not allow myths, dogmas, or indoctrination to take the place of absolute and objective truths, welcome!

PREVIEW

This book is not about the existence or non-existence of an omnipotent and omniscient God who creates everything in the universe, it is about the improbable things people claim that God is doing for them. According to statistics from the United Nations, 25,000 people worldwide, including innocent children, die each day from hunger. Yet most of us in blind obedience to our religious indoctrination, give thanks to God each day for providing us with our daily bread, quite oblivious of the fact that 25,000 people die from hunger each day. After emerging from our prayers of thanks to God for providing our daily bread, we rush off to work, because if we do not work we will end up begging for our daily bread. If you cannot leave your house and no one is aware of your situation, you will certainly die from hunger or whatever else is afflicting you, because God will not show up to help.

Devout Christians pray to God for protection every day. On one particular occasion, a Christian family prayed to God for divine protection before they went on a road trip. They were involved in an accident and several of them were killed. The survivors who were severely injured simply convinced themselves that it was God’s will why their relatives were killed. If it were God’s will, why waste time praying to God to protect them from accidents, injuries, agonizing pain, and death? Does it make any sense for people to pray to change the will of God if he knows what is best and will do the best of everything for us?

The foregoing is not practiced by just a fringe element of the religious community, it is the basic characteristic of religion. Another characteristic of religion is the willingness to fight, kill and die to defend one’s religion. Countless millions of people have died in religious wars. Religion has been used to justify atrocities such as slavery and bigotry. This book will explore these situations, ask daunting questions, and expose uncomfortable truths.

Most people on this planet refuse to even entertain the idea that in spite of our consciousness and intelligence, we may just be a freak of biology, with no life before birth, no supernatural component to our being, and no life after death. The basic elements of our bodies – carbon, oxygen, calcium, etc. – will be recycled into other material things after we die, but not as a replica of the person who died. Theists find it difficult to believe that this could be the only life we will ever know, that this could be the only consciousness we will ever have, and that our consciousness and intelligence are constructs of our biology. Our memory and our concept of logical reasoning are functions of our brains. We, like the oak tree or the grass, the lion, the ant, the chicken we ate for dinner last night, the lowly worm, or the invisible microbes that live in our guts, have no unique importance to mother nature or to any god that we have created or believe to exist. We find it impossible to believe that whatever created us has no favor or preference for any particular race of people, any particular religion, or any particular form of life.

Our consciousness and intelligence are unique and powerful and should be used to create a model world with reverence and kinship to other creatures that inhabit the planet, rather than depending on a god to do this for us. How much more edifying it would be for the human species to build a civilization on the premise that we have evolved into creatures with self-awareness and superior intelligence, and that we should use these attributes to create a civilization that is consistent with our superior intelligence and empathy for others. Instead, most of us choose to degrade ourselves to the belief that we are pawns or toys of some mysterious unknowable god who created humans to worship him. A god with such egotistical mentality deserves no respect from humans.

Religions are based entirely on faith or the personal experience of believers – no proof or no credible hypothesis is needed. Religious holy books are put together from the revelations (dreams) of ancient and not so ancient men. In the case of Christianity, these revelations are merged with manuscripts that were in circulation long before the advent of the Bible. Even so, the Bible is referred to as the Word of God. Given the millions of people who have died in the name of religion, and the distortion by religion of our ability to have logical and rational discourse, does it not behoove us as human beings to be wary of the prominence we give to religion in our society?

Not all human beings are subservient to religion. There are people who believe that life on earth, and indeed the universe and all its contents, did not necessarily come into being by a creator God. They believe that the physical forces of nature create all that there is, which makes more sense than the blind belief that it is the work of a creator God. They know that they are yet to learn what these mysterious forces are. They know that they are yet to understand what caused life to happen, but they also know that to imagine how it happened and then assume that what they imagine is reality, is indeed a manifestation of insanity. The intelligent thinker knows that hurricanes, earthquakes, tornadoes, famines, and epidemics cannot be the works of an omnipotent and loving God. The intelligent thinkers believe that love and hate, bigotry and tolerance, passion and passivity, anger and happiness are the consequences of their actions, their culture, and their genetics, not a curse or blessing from God.

CHAPTER 1

THE GOD GENE

Religions and Their Gods

When I was just a little girl, I asked my mother, what will I be? You will recognize this as the first line from the ever-popular song by Doris Day. Parents have been asked Why is this? or Why is that? since children and parents were able to communicate. I, like every other child, had questions for my parents or anyone else who I thought knew the answer. But in the words of another song by Johnny Nash, There are more questions than answers, but the more I find out, the less I know.

Here are some of the questions that I had for my parents: Why does rain fall in the ocean? Isn’t that a waste of water? Water was a scarce commodity in the district where I grew up. Most people had a catchment system to collect rainwater. Nevertheless, when rain fell, more than 90 percent of the rainwater went to waste. The answer I got was that God knows everything and knows what is best for us. I could not see the logic in that answer. Some of my questions got somewhat more difficult for my parents. I asked, If God made the world (universe) and everything in it, where was he before this creation? Was he in another universe? Where did he come from? The answer I got was that God will punish me for asking these questions. You must not question God, I was told.

More recently, I was visiting a family. Rain had fallen earlier in the day, and a small amount of rainwater had collected on a metal table in the yard. After some time, the water had evaporated. A little girl, who was about five years old, asked her mother, What happened to all the water that was on the table? Where has it gone? Her mother thought for a moment and responded, God made it disappear.

That was it; she did not say why or how God chose to make it disappear. I found it hard to keep my mouth shut, so I interjected, The water has evaporated. We say it evaporates when the sun and the air cause very small drops of water to separate from the rest and rise into the air. This continues until no water is left on the table. These drops of water are so small and so widely separated from each other that we cannot see them rising.

So is it these small drops of water that become clouds in the sky? she inquired.

Yes, I responded. The wind blows these clouds around in the sky, and sometimes these small drops collect back together to form bigger drops. They now become too heavy to remain as clouds, so they fall back to the earth as rain. I then added, I admire your inquiring mind. You are an intelligent girl.

I told this story to a friend of mine recently; her response was, But it’s God that made the water turn into small particles and evaporate!

Now I am back to square one, I said to myself. Can the physical changes that water goes through be explained without invoking some miracle performed by God? Should I just accept that everything that happens is a miracle performed by God, that the law of physics does not exist? Are the laws of physics just a manifestation of God working his miracles? If that is the case, are we to believe that natural disasters, famine, and diseases that kill hundreds of thousands of people each year with severe pain and grief, are the work of a kind and loving God?

Does God make the rain fall, then he sucks up the unused portion back into the sky? He nourishes our crops with life-giving water from the sky, yet sometimes when the crops are withering and drying, he withholds the rain, and even though we pray, God does not cause the rain to fall. At other times, does he cause (or at least does nothing to prevent) the destructive hurricanes from reigning terror and destruction from the sky? Is it true, as some people claim, that when these disasters happen, God is punishing us for our wickedness? There seem to be a lot of questions to be asked here, but we are told that we must not question the actions of God. To do so is sacrilegious, it is blasphemous, and no one must ever question the will of God. God is said to be all-knowing; he is omniscient. It is said that everything he does is the correct thing because he cannot make a mistake. Is it that we mere mortal humans are incapable of comprehending the intricacies of his method of doing things?

Every culture, from the primitive ones to the modern space-age ones, worships some form of a deity. Western civilization, that is, people who are influenced by European culture, overwhelmingly practice an Abrahamic form of religion which includes Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. A lot of the religious practices and beliefs of the Jews were adopted by Christians and have become interwoven into what is now referred to as the Judeo-Christian culture. In the Judeo-Christian culture, the supreme deity is referred to as God, the Almighty (All Mighty), Lord, Yahweh, Jehovah, and other references to a supreme being. Islam, a religion practiced in the Muslim diaspora, is also related to the Judeo-Christian faith. All three religions—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—believe that Abraham was the progenitor of their religious experience. The God of Abraham is also the God of the Jews, the Christians, and the Muslims. Allah is the name that is equivalent to God in the Muslim diaspora.

I am arbitrarily referring to the Abrahamic God as he because this is how he is referred to in the Bible and by most Christians. It is not that I am attributing a male gender to God. Every reference to God in the Bible implies that this deity is a male and is referred to as he, so I am following this custom, rather than referring to God as he/she/it/they. In some Christian denominations, it has become customary to refer to God as he/she, which is a rather awkward expression.

Probably all religious teachings explicitly or implicitly attribute human-like characteristics (anthropomorphism) to their deities even though, physically, some may appear as animals or even lifeless objects. These human-like attributes are usually amplified to an infinite order of magnitude. They only have to make a wish, and their wish becomes real material situations. They can wish to start or stop a hurricane, or make your cancer go away miraculously. In the context of the Judeo-Christian religion, God is omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent, merciful, and kind. In other words, he is infinitely powerful, he knows everything – the past, present and future of every person and everything, he knows your thoughts and your aspirations, also he is present everywhere at the same time. God is portrayed as merciful and kind, but he is also portrayed in the Bible as vengeful and jealous. He punishes or even kills people when they do not serve or obey him.

When a group of people who share the same belief comes together to worship or revere a god, this collective action is said to be their religion. In most cultures, especially the ancient ones, different gods were responsible for different things. There was a god of the underworld, whatever this underworld is; hello Hades! There was a god that controlled the weather; hello Thor! There was a god that controlled erotic love; hello Cupid! There was a god that controlled the heavens; hello Zeus! There was the African supreme god Olorun, who, in the native religion, was considered the supreme god in many regions of Africa.

The activities of the gods in some religions are like the government of a country where you may have a Department of Education or a Department of Defense. The difference though, is that there is no central government, even though some gods may even be higher in authority than others. Hello Brahma! Hello Vishnu! Hello Olorun! Hello Zeus! A lot of these ancient religions, along with their gods, have faded into the realm of mythology. On the other hand, many religions, along with their various gods, are still alive and well in various parts of the world.

It is not the purpose of this book to do an inventory and analysis of religions and their gods, they are too numerous and obscure for the limited scope of this book. However, we will take a cursory look at a few religions which are pertinent to this discussion.

Burial practices, clay tablets, and cave drawings seem to suggest that ancient humans had religious beliefs. It is difficult to have any meaningful history of their religious practices before humans started to record their activities on clay tablets or other media. As these methods of recording cultural practices evolved, the role of gods in people’s lives became more evident. To these ancient civilizations, a god was not this celestial and obscure being that most people imagine it to be, Gods for them walked and talked with them. Gods and angels had sexual intercourse with humans and produced offspring with humans called demigods. Gods controlled their lives in a very personal way. The Bible has many of these dubious interactions with God, angels, and humans.

In ancient Greek culture, Hercules was a demigod, born a mortal but was the son of the god Zeus. (Jesus was not unique in this respect.) Other Greek demigods were Achilles, Perseus and Aereas. The story of Philemon and Baucis tells of an elderly couple who were rewarded for their kindness toward the gods Zeus and Hermes. The ancient Egyptians worshipped over 1,400 different gods and goddesses in their shrines, temples, and homes.

Psychologists have a way of flipping the idiom, seeing is believing to say believing is seeing. If you believe something strongly enough, you may visualize it literally as if it is real. Obviously, there were no gods interacting or interbreeding with people, but since this was the general belief in the culture that they were born in and lived in every day, then believing that their gods were having these kinds of interaction with them became their reality. There appears to be a mechanism in our minds (our brains) that decides for us what stimuli are real from what are imaginary or virtual. That mechanism breaks down or is overwhelmed in situations like overdose of hallucinogenic drugs, mental illness, or overexposure to imaginary stimuli.

Mesopotamia is considered to be the cradle of Western civilization. The gods they worshipped were more human in form and characteristics than those theists worship in today’s society. Although all powerful, the gods behaved much like humans—they fought, ate, drank, married and had children.

Let us first take a look at the Abrahamic religions. We will start by looking at the religious practices of the early Mesopotamians, who scholars believe heavily influenced the Abrahamic religions. Scholars of anthropology believe that Mesopotamia was the birthplace of the Western civilization. Many of its ancient cultural practices are inherited by modern Western culture. The Mesopotamians were people from the region of West Asia within the Tigris/Euphrates river system, home to the ancient civilizations of Sumer, Assyria, and Babylonia. Modern Iran, Iraq and Syria are parts of this region. The religion of the Mesopotamians, which was Zoroastrianism, predates and strongly influenced the founding of Judaism. Clay tablets of the Enuma Elisha (The Seven Tablets of Creation), which is a Mesopotamian creation myth was excavated in this region and is dated at 1200 BC (before the birth of Jesus). More on the Emuna Elisha will be discussed later in this book. Clay tablets recording Mesopotamian religious myths, (myths to us now, reality to them at that time), were recorded long before there was any record of the Biblical creation or flood myth.

Zoroastrianism emerged in Mesopotamia about the 6th century BC. This religion was founded by Zoroaster, a Mesopotamian priest, who proclaimed that the god Ahura Mazda spoke to him and gave him new spiritual guidelines for the people. The Zoroastrians believe in Heaven and Hell. They believe that there is an eternal afterlife, and the choices made by each person determine his or her destiny in the afterlife. If a person’s good choices and deeds outweighed the bad, he or she would go to Heaven. If a person made more bad decisions or did evil deeds, that person would go to one of the several levels of Hell, depending on his or her degree of sinfulness.

Zoroastrians believe in a monotheistic god, Ahura Mazda, who created the universe, who is all-powerful, all knowing, and everywhere at the same time – much like the Abrahamic god. They believe that Ahura Mazda has an adversary, Angra Mainyu, who is the originator of death and all evil in the world. They believe in angels and demons. It is generally accepted that in the Abrahamic religions, the concepts of Heaven and Hell, as well as the Devil, were heavily influenced by Zoroastrian belief. Zoroastrians use the Avesta as their sacred text similar to Christians using the Bible.

Abraham, the progenitor of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, was a citizen of Ur, Mesopotamia (present day Iraq). This region was the cultural, economic, and religious hub of greater Mesopotamia. Its religion was Zoroastrianism. According to the Bible, Abraham was called by God to leave Ur and occupy a new territory, the Promised Land. According to the Bible, he was blessed by God, he prospered and became the father of a nation of people and the founder of a religion – Judaism. Judaism is practiced in the modern era by the Jews.

As Judaism is heavily influenced by Zoroastrianism, Christianity is heavily influenced by Judaism. Jesus was a Jewish preacher around whom Christianity was founded. Jesus is usually referred to as Jesus Christ as if Christ is a surname, but Christ is a Greek word meaning the anointed one, added as a suffix to Jesus. His pursuit as observed in the Bible was not to be the founder of a religion, but to speak against harsh and primitive Jewish laws which he often criticized, about which he often had confrontation with the Jews.

According to the Bible and other writings, different people thought differently about who Jesus was. About the time of his ministry, the Jewish people were fervently expecting a messiah who would free them from the oppression of the Roman empire. Some of these Jews believed that Jesus was this messiah who would free them. Others believed that he was the son of God that would be their advocates in getting to Heaven. The rest believed that he was a danger to the Jewish status quo and should not be allowed to continue his mission. The Bible has Jesus as saying that his kingdom is not of this world. Meaning that he did not come to be a military savior of the Jews, but a moral and spiritual one. He also advocated that he was born to fulfill the prophecy of the Jewish prophets that a Messiah would come to free the Jewish people. These statements which sound contradictory make things somewhat ambiguous.

According to the Bible, what Jesus was preaching did not go down well with the majority of the Jews, nor did he provide any relief from the Roman oppression. The apparent result was that the Jews collaborated with the Roman authority to have him crucified. This was not the end of Jesus’ influence on society, however. The mystique of Jesus grew after his death. His followers claimed that he arose from the dead and ascended into Heaven, and indeed he was the son of God. They believed that at the time appointed by God he would return to earth to judge the "quick and the dead’’ to determine who will live forever in paradise in Heaven, and who will be condemned to eternal damnation in Hell. The apostles of Jesus expanded this religion outside the Jewish Diaspora to incorporate gentiles (non-Jewish people). Generally, the Jews still do not accept that Jesus was their messiah to save them from the Romans, or the savior that they must worship to get to Heaven.

About 610 AD, (Anno Domini, meaning, in the year of the Lord referring to time after the birth of Jesus) a businessman whose name was Muhammad from Mecca in the geographic region that is now called Saudi Arabia, said that he was getting revelations from his god Allah. These revelations became the basis for the Koran and the foundation of the religion known as Islam. People who practice Islam are called Muslims. Islam has five basic pillars – the declaration of faith, prayer, charity, fasting, and pilgrimage. Muslim borrowed heavily from both Judaism and Christianity. Like Jews and Christian, Muslims believe in a monotheistic deity (one god). In general, Muslims like Christians, believe the Hebrew creation story. Muslims accept the Hebrew prophets as their prophets. They accept Jesus as a prophet and the Messiah who will return to earth in the last days to destroy evil, but they do not worship Jesus as a god or the son of God.

Hinduism is believed to be the oldest religion that is still practiced, and is the third largest after Christianity and Islam. It originated in Central Asia and the Indus Valley. Hinduism is practiced by more than a billion people. The overwhelming majority of Hindus live in India.

Hinduism is a religion with various Gods and Goddesses. It has no specific founder and is more a way of life rather than a religion. Most forms of Hinduism are henotheistic, which means that they worship a single supreme deity known as Brahma, but still recognize other gods and goddesses. Followers believe there are multiple paths to reaching their god. According to Hinduism, three Gods rule the world. Brahma: the creator; Vishnu: the preserver and Shiva: the destroyer. Vishnu does his job of preserving the world by incarnating himself in different forms at times of crisis.

Hindus believe in the doctrines of samsara (the continuous cycle of life, death, and reincarnation), and karma, (the sum of a person’s actions in this and previous states of existence determines their fate in future existences).

One of the key thoughts of Hinduism is atman, or the belief in soul. This philosophy holds that all living creatures have souls, and they are all part of the supreme soul. The goal is to achieve moksha, or salvation, which ends the cycle of rebirths to become part of the absolute soul.

Buddhism is one of the world’s largest and oldest religions. It originated 2,500 years ago in India. Its founder, Siddhartha Gautama, was a rich prince who was protected from the outside world of poverty and suffering. One day he took a stroll outside his palace. He was shocked to see the level of poverty and suffering in the society. He renounced his wealth and spent time as a poor beggar, meditating and traveling but ultimately, remaining unsatisfied, settling on something called the Middle Way. This idea meant that neither extreme poverty nor extreme wealth was the path to enlightenment, but rather, a way of life between the two extremes was the correct path to enlightenment. Eventually, in a state of deep meditation, he achieved enlightenment, or nirvana, underneath the Bodhi tree (the tree of awakening). This made Siddhartha Gautama the first Buddha. The Buddha taught that human life is one of suffering; and that meditation, spiritual and physical labor, and good behavior are the ways to achieve enlightenment, or nirvana.

Buddhism is a non-theistic religion; it rejects the notion of a Creator God that provides divine values for the world. There are 400 million people around the world who practice Buddhism, which means that people who practice this religion do not believe that there is an all-powerful God who protects them from harm, taking into consideration all the tragedies that happen to people every day. They do not believe that there is a god providing daily sustenance for people since millions of people die from starvation every year, and they do not believe that this all-powerful God makes people get better if you pray to him when you get sick.

Isese is the religion of the native Yoruba people who are mainly from Nigeria, Benin and Togo in Africa. In the traditional Isese religion there is a supreme god called Olorun. There are also hundreds of junior gods called orishas. Many of these orishas are believed to be the spirits of real people who were elevated to this higher calling after they died because of important deeds they accomplished in their lives. Shamans who are believed to have