No More Mr. Nice Guy!

God is brain-dead

Walk around any large city and you will see mentally disturbed street people hanging around, picking fights with imaginary companions, and what not. Suppose I told you of a man who spends hours every day standing at a wall, rocking back and forth repetitively, droning on and on in a monotone directed at some invisible person that no-one else can see. You would probably conclude that the man is deluded, at the very least obsessive-compulsive, and in need of treatment lest he harm himself and possibly others.

But suppose I tell you that the wall in question is the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem. Suddenly the man's conduct is not only normal and understandable, but praiseworthy. He is a holy man, and his piety and devotion should be an example to us all.

Likewise, think of the religious festivals in the Philippines or in Shia Muslim countries where hundreds of men whip their bodies to piles of bleeding mangled flesh while working themselves up into a frenzy of ecstasy and/or grief over something that supposedly happened centuries ago. Stripped of the religious context, the event could only be explained as an outbreak of mass insanity.

Religion, it would seem, is socially sanctioned lunacy. Of course there is a spectrum of religious beliefs and practices, from the most knuckle-dragging fundamentalism to the most refined and ethereal obfuscations and semantic masturbation of the theologians. But at the heart of religion of any stripe is an irreducible core of irrationality. What is theology but an elaborate attempt to rationalize the beliefs that the theologians start from, and take for granted as unquestionable? And the more fundamentalist and dogmatic the religion, the more it can be identified with mental illness.

Religion - at least of the infantile type that the vast majority of believers never move beyond - is little more than a projection of one's own inadequacies and hang-ups onto an all-powerful parent figure in the sky. If you were lucky enough to have loving, caring parents, then it's easy to believe in a loving god who will answer your prayers like Santa Claus dispensing presents. If you're a rigid, judgmental person, then you worship a vengeful god who will cast all who displease you into the Lake of Fire to scream forever in infinite agony.

God is in fact a kind of cosmic Terri Schiavo. We look at his artificially-kept-alive body for a sign. We delude ourselves that his random twitches and involuntary grunts bespeak profound wisdom and love. Our obsession with him keeps us in an infantile state of dependency and prevents us from moving on, from connecting with the only people who can make our lives meaningful: ourselves.

It's time to pull the plug on God!