Religious And Secular Beliefs Come In Many Forms

By Donald A. Collins | 26 December 2024
Church and State

(Image by Kar3nt from Pixabay)

On Christmas Day many US non-Christians also celebrate it as a sectarian holiday for being with family, trimming a pine tree or giving gifts.

Coming together seems to describe its best multi-religious outcome.

Such religious neutrality hardly survives the rest of the year or in the rest of this world.

Humans so often demand and obtain if they can the power to make non believers subscribe to their beliefs.

This of course also applies to sectarian regimes whose beliefs are not religious but can be dictatorial.

In short worldwide biased demands for human behavior are really not based on religion but on a highly universal set of principles for human behavior which George Carlin’s editing of the Christian ten commandments so humorously and definitively presents!

Here are a few comments from George Carlin’s POV which you can read in full below:

I have a problem with the Ten Commandments. Here it is: Why are there ten? We don’t need that many. I think the list of commandments was deliberately and artificially inflated to get it up to ten. It’s clearly a padded list.

Here’s how it happened: About five thousand years ago, a bunch of reli­gious and political hustlers got together to figure out how they could control people and keep them in line. They knew people were basically stupid and would believe anything they were told, so these guys announced that God— God personally—had given one of them a list of Ten Commandments that he wanted everyone to follow. They claimed the whole thing took place on a mountaintop, when no one else was around.

But let me ask you something: When these guys were sittin’ around the tent makin’ all this up, why did they pick ten? Why ten? Why not nine, or eleven? I’ll tell you why. Because ten sounds important. Ten sounds official. They knew if they tried eleven, people wouldn’t take them seriously. People would say, “What’re you kiddin’ me? The Eleven Commandments? Get the fuck outta here!”

But ten! Ten sounds important. Ten is the basis for the decimal system; it’s a decade. It’s a psychologically satisfying number: the top ten; the ten most wanted; the ten best-dressed. So deciding on Ten Commandments was clearly a marketing decision. And it’s obviously a bullshit list. In truth, it’s a politic document, artificially inflated to sell better.

I’m going to show you how you can reduce the number of commandments and come up with a list that’s a bit more logical and realistic. We’ll start with the first three, and I’ll use the Roman Catholic version because those are the ones I was fed as a little boy.

• I AM THE LORD THY GOD, THOU SHALT NOT HAVE STRANGE GODS BEFORE ME.

• THOU SHALT NOT TAKE THE NAME OF THE LORD THY GOD IN VAIN.

• THOU SHALT KEEP HOLY THE SABBATH.

Okay, right off the bat, the first three commandments—pure bullshit “Sabbath day,” “Lord’s name,” “strange gods.” Spooky language. Spooky language is designed to scare and control primitive people. In no way does superstitious mumbo jumbo like this apply to the lives of intelligent, civilized humans in the twenty-first century. You throw out the first three commandments, am you’re down to seven.”

“Murder. The Fifth Commandment. But, if you give it a little thought, you realize that religion has never really had a problem with murder. Not really. More people have been killed in the name of God than for any other reason.

To cite a few examples, just think about Northern Ireland, the Middle East, the Crusades, the Inquisition, our own abortion-doctor killings and, yes, the World Trade Center to see how seriously religious people take Thou Shalt Not Kill. Apparently, to religious folks—especially the truly devout—murder is ne­gotiable. It just depends on who’s doing the killing and who’s getting killed.

And so, with all of this in mind, folks, I offer you my revised list of the Two Commandments:

First:

• THOU SHALT ALWAYS BE HONEST AND FAITHFUL, ESPECIALLY TO THE PROVIDER OF THY NOOKIE.

And second:

• THOU SHALT TRY REAL HARD NOT TO KILL ANYONE, UNLESS, OF COURSE, THEY PRAY TO A DIFFERENT INVISIBLE MAN THAN THE ONE YOU PRAY TO.

Two is all you need, folks. Moses could have carried them down the hill in his pocket. And if we had a list like that, I wouldn’t mind that brilliant judge in Alabama displaying it prominently in the courthouse wall.

Read in full here.

My principal comments: That all religions are basically fantastical which seems to me like asking people to believe in Santa Claus all their lives! Okay to believe but almost impossible not to be used to control people in secular non-religious matters.

In short, a workable religion states how humans could all do better without their individual beliefs that they insist others adopt. And I hope your holiday season was merry and bright!

Former US Navy officer, banker and venture capitalist, Donald A. Collins, a free lance writer living in Washington, DC, has spent over 50 years working for women’s reproductive health as a board member and/or officer of numerous family planning organizations including Planned Parenthood Federation of America, Guttmacher Institute, Family Health International and Ipas. Yale under graduate, NYU MBA. He is the author of “From the Dissident Left: A Collection of Essays 2004-2013”, “Trump Becoming Macbeth: Will our democracy survive?”, “We Humans Overwhelm Our Earth: 11 or 2 Billion by 2100?”, “What Can Be Done Now to Save Habitable Life on Planet Earth?”, “Vote”, “Can Homo Sapiens Survive?”, “Will Choice and Democracy Win?”, “Can Our U.S. Survive 8 Plus Billion of Us”, “Economic Growth: A Cancer on all Earthly Life”, “On the Precipice of Political Disaster in 2024”, “Democracy at Red State Risk”, “Does Trump Go to Jail or to The Oval Office?” and “Trump: Pardon or Punish?: The Nixon Precedence Was Not A Trump Coup Denied!”.

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