You cannot wake up some day and decide that you are not black, Asian, Chinese, European, left handed, homosexual, or the hair colour you were born with. You can decide not to follow the mumbo jumbo contained in textbooks that all just happen to have been written in and around a small region of the middle east by people who didn’t know much about the world. Texts that are obvious plagiarisms of already old stone age stories that were themselves likely handed down from even older mythical stories spread by travelling merchants. There seems to be a real problem with comparing the will to have a rational discourse on the unlikely truth and origin of these myths, and whether they should have the same validity as real measurable human traits, interactions, and stories being used to impose certain conditions or hold certain beliefs about people because of their presence. In truth the difference is that you choose to follow your religion, it is not a trait of your physicality but a cultural affect imposed upon you by parents or community, an accident of birth and geography. Your genetic makeup is unchangeable by your desire, you are that, it is not chosen. I realise that is a simplification, most often people will struggle to cast off the conditioning that they have been subjected to in their early years.
The biblical flood story echoes stories of the Indus valley and the flooding of the river Nile in Egyptian myth. The supposed ten commandments (there are more, and many versions) presented by Moses, and conveniently broken before anyone else could verify them (isn’t this always so, that verification is not possible?), are awfully like the edicts of a Syrian king called Mises, and very like the Babylonian code of Hammurabi. Mises was also secretly smuggled in a reed basket out of danger, and apparently parted the seas. The exodus from Egypt has no supporting evidence in any regional writings or the stories of other cultures even though Egypt recorded many happenings including the defeat of its enemies. Jesus was not the only person to have had twelve disciples, or performed miracles, or be claimed by his followers to have been resurrected. The forty year journey of the Jews in the desert is a seven day walk according to google maps, and the Egyptian god Horus came to be via a virgin birth. Jews are social descendants of a particular sect of the Canaanites that occupied this region in the bronze age period where it was separated into various kingdoms based on religious schisms, none of those religions other that Judaism survive to this day so cannot lay claim to those lands or dispute the claims made. The Jewish claim to all of the land is based on a passage in a book that their ruling classes wrote and edited, where their god Yahweh, promised a man they name as Abraham, and his descendants, in perpetuity, all the land he could view from a certain mountain in the region. So if we had among us a follower of Bal or El, or a Babylonian, or an ancient Egyptian that worshipped one of their gods, then they likely might dispute the narrative of this land claim quite a lot. Otherwise the claim to own the property is based on one writer of a book narrating the story of a conversation between one believed in deity, who’s existence as a single god (monotheism) was disputed at the time, and has not been in any way successfully verified in the interim, and a human figure that is not proven to have existed in any way other than in this one story book and its derivatives, a book written by those that claim to own the land. I find this all a bit suspect.
I put no stock in anything that any one person claims regarding the validity of religious stories, ten minutes on Wikipedia and you can find out where the previous version of each of these incredible stories was told, and even if you cannot not identify the source you can pretty much know for sure that it’s a lot older than it pretends to be. There have been, according to Sam Harris and others, more than 3500 known deities that have been worshipped by humans, and that’s only the ones we know about because they were recorded in some way, and that’s only in the few millennia that we have a partial record of (humans have been around somewhere between 100,000 years and 200,000 years). The oral tradition will of course suffer from plagiarism, embellishment, and exaggeration in a much more striking way than Chinese whispers ever does, and if you’ve ever played that game you’ll know that a phrase can change in entirety just going through a room, never mind down through centuries and subjected to powerful motivations. By implication each person who is a believer in a particular deity is an atheist concerning every other known and unknown religious head figure, and believes that their teachings, writings, and traditions (the ones in those other books) are in fact utterly false. I like what Ricky Gervase says about it “you’re an atheist just like me, there are many many gods that you do not believe in, I just believe in one less”.
David Baddiel describes himself as an atheist but a Jewish atheist, Dara O’Brien describes himself as an atheist but a catholic atheist, these are funny descriptions, kind of like when a person on a gameshow says that they are a retired school teacher… You’re not Mavis, you’re a retired person who used to be a school teacher. I have been a tyre fitter, a cloth cutter, a soldier, a computer technician, a communications engineer, and I’ve worked as a baggage handler at an airport, if I were to retire then what would I be, a retired ……… ? Maybe I get to choose do I? Nonsense, you cannot both be what you are and not what you are, when you have retired you do not get to represent yourself as still being a shadow copy of the thing you were once, and since this is a representation of the thing for the purpose of informing others so they may look upon you with favour in some way, it is bullshit for praise and validation. A person cannot be a Christian and yet identify as not believing in a deity (Atheist, no god/s). What Baddiel and O’Brien are nodding to is a cultural thread that runs from the way a society acts through multiple generations, invading the every day practices of the people. It stems from religion but becomes cultural, it then has only the power of tradition, and we should not get caught out making moral laws to protect certain land claims just for the sake of tradition.
Why have I written all this? As a reaction to the suspension of Diane Abbot from the Labour Party in April 2023. This is a woman who has fought for campaign groups, including Jewish ones, who faces discrimination for her ethnicity, yet she is accused of Racism for simply putting a blunt point on an otherwise easy to make argument, that religious groups are not races, and the prejudice they face is not comparable to a person being badly treated because of their inane traits or nature, it is of a different type. I would have thought that this was apparent, since you cannot choose to exit your genetic nature, but you could wake up tomorrow morning and say “fuck it, this religious stuff is all nonsense, I’m gonna throw that book I’ve never really read properly in the trash and go to the book store to buy Immanuel Kant’s metaphysics”.
pinkfloydpsw's Blog 
Leave a comment