Pedro Lilienfeld

In Chapter 8 of my autobiography, entitled The Making of an Atheist, among other subjects, I discussed the pervasive misogyny of the Abrahamic religions. I failed to mention the most egregious manifestation of that trait in the Christian tradition. It is embodied in the all encompassing Virgin Mary mythology. Ostensibly, an homage to a divine motherhood it hides, in my view, a hideously misogynistic message: only a virgin birth can be pure and unsoiled. It implies that human sexual reproduction is inherently sinful and impure and that, by extension, all normal women who become mothers are sinful. I find this narrative horrendous and insulting to all women. I also find that the blind acceptance of such hogwash by a billion or more souls today is one more symptom of the collective irrationality that permeates humanity.

The Immaculate Conception mythology carries that absurdity to its ultimate consequence: all other forms of conception are therefore “Maculate”. And where does this misogyny originate? Undoubtedly in the fable of the “original sin” of the Hebrew bible. Women shall pay forever for the sinfulness of temptress Eve. But she committed another biblical infraction: she dared to pluck an apple from the Tree of Knowledge. How could she? Knowledge and religious mythology are incompatible. Knowledge and religion have forever been sworn enemies; remember Galileo vs. the Church? Eve committed the ultimate crime of wanting to know!

That leads me to one more indictment of religion, its inerrant role in the obstruction of the acquisition of knowledge or, at worst, its role in the propagation of irrationality. Enough has been written about the nefarious proceedings of the Catholic Church in the Galileo affair and its subsequent rejection of Copernicanism up to the very end of the 18th century.

Here I want to mention an often overlooked intellectual idiosyncrasy of another religion: Judaism. During the biblical era, say the millennium BCE, during which the altogether brilliant Greek intellectual blooming took place, the Hebrew culture produced the bible; no art, no science, only mythology. Then, during most of the subsequent two millennia, up to about the last two centuries, the Jewish contribution to culture was restricted mainly to philosophy and poetry, principally within the Iberian realm (e.g., Maimonides) with no visual art or scientific work of any significance. The intellectual activities of Jews during most of the Diaspora were restricted to religious studies, i.e., analyzing and dissecting the Torah and the Talmud. It is hard for me to attribute that restriction to the physically constricted life of the Jewish communities in Europe and the Middle East during that period. That intellectual limitation came from the dictates of religiosity which proscribed other endeavors of the mind.

It was only after the opening of the Jewish society, starting in the early 19th century, that a sudden and indeed, stunning secular intellectual flourishing occurred. It may be argued that that opening coincided with the breakup of the Jewish Ghettos freeing its “inmates” to integrate into the surrounding Gentile society. I submit that it was the concurrent liberation from the religious shackles that allowed the Jews to start on their subsequent intellectual explosion. A new type of Jew emerged during the 19th century, the secular Jew, free to think outside the intellectual walls of religion and able to thus contribute to literature, the visual arts, music and, most remarkably, to the sciences. Where were those luminaries during all those previous centuries as Heine, Mendelssohn, Mahler, Modigliani, Chagall, Kafka, Proust, etc., and the magnificent roster of scientists, mainly since the end of the 19th century, physicists like Einstein, Oppenheimer, Michelson, Bohr, Pauli, Landau, Feynman, Weinberg, etc., etc.? Remarkably, more than 20% of all Nobel laureates, in all of its six types of awards, were Jews. By far, most of these intellectual giants were not religiously practicing Jews, rather secular, agnostic, and atheistic. Various explanations have been postulated for that prevalence of “superior” intellects among Jews of the 20th century. None is either obvious or acceptable (genes, traditional studiousness, etc.). To me, it was the byproduct of the cosmopolitanism permeating the “liberated” Jew that opened the doors to religiously free intellectual pursuits.

I will conclude the subject of religious induced ignorance with these two relevant citations:

“Mystics exult in mystery and want it to stay mysterious. Scientists exult in mystery for a different reason: it gives them something to do. More generally, one of the truly bad effects of religion is that it teaches us that it is a virtue to be satisfied with not understanding.” Richard Dawkins (b. 1941).

“The source of man’s unhappiness is his ignorance of Nature. The pertinacity with which he clings to blind opinions imbibed in his infancy, which interweave themselves with his existence, the consequent prejudice that warps his mind, that prevents its expansion, that renders him the slave of fiction, appears to doom him to continual error.” Paul-Henri Thiry, Baron d’Holbach (1723 – 1789).

In conclusion, religion is the enemy of knowledge and, in fact, it has never contributed an iota of knowledge about anything.

And here is another religion-related conundrum: theodicy. To me that concept embodies the absurdity of the belief in an omnipotent, omniscient, infinitely benign and compassionate divinity. The definition of theodicy is: “the vindication of divine goodness and providence in view of the existence of evil”. To which I would add “…and the existence of suffering”. Philosophers such as Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646 – 1716) struggled mightily with that contradiction which was duly noted as far back as the Greek Antiquity, by the Athenian philosopher Epicurus (341 BC – 270 BC) who stated with extraordinary perceptiveness: “Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then He is not omnipotent. Is He able, but not willing? Then He is malevolent. Is He both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil? Is He neither able nor willing? Then why call Him God?”.

Christian apologists usually invoke both free will and/or divine inscrutability as escape clauses. In my view, neither holds water. Free will, in my humble view, is a non-starter. First of all, it is a theological fiction since our actions are conditioned by our genes and our life’s experiences. Furthermore, if such fiction actually were to exist, it would have been created by the Creator who, therefore, would be ultimately the responsible agent for its consequences. Thus, if free will is to account for evil (and suffering), God is the ultimate cause of that evil. Then, escaping into “divine inscrutability” to exculpate both evil and suffering is, at best, ridiculous if not disingenuous. To me, the very existence of evil and suffering negates the existence of a God as defined above, either of the deist or the theist variety. Primo Levi (1919-1987): Italian chemist, partisan, writer and Jewish Holocaust survivor has stated: “C’è Auschwitz, quindi non può esserci Dio. Non trovo una soluzione al dilemma. La cerco ma non la trovo.” (“There is Auschwitz, and so there cannot be God. I don’t find a solution to this dilemma. I keep looking, but I don’t find it.”). That quote, had been unbeknown to me and, years before, I had coined a similar but more aggressive take than Primo Levi’s: “After the Holocaust, God – if it ever was – forfeited any right to its very existence”. It is no coincidence that “theodicy” rhymes with idiocy.

Beyond the usual arguments against the existence of God, of any god: the insurmountable problem of theodicy, the fiction of free will, etc., I can adduce a multitude of reasons for the disbelief in a divinity. Here are some: a) most people can not even agree on what this thing is, from an old man with a beard, dressed with a long white tunic, to an abstract diffuse entity permeating the universe; b) the universe is far too complex to have been constructed by some divine watchmaker; c) if there were such a watchmaker, why would it have created the universe at all?; d) who or what created this mythical watchmaker?; e) what is possibly the role of a god if there is an infinite multiverse?; f) if there is no afterlife, as nobody has been able to prove its existence, what is the function of a god?; g) why is it that among those who have the most insight in the making of our universe, there are the most nonbelievers?; h) the more one thinks about a god the more absurd this concept becomes: it does not obey the laws of physics, it is unnecessary, it is basically a rather childish imaginary entity, it has never been detected, humanity can not even agree whether this divine agency intervenes in human affairs or not, etc., etc.; i) if we are made in God’s image, as the Abrahamic religions claim, is this god made of DNA molecules, as we are?; j) if evolution applies to all living species, does God belong to an evolving species? I could go on ad infinitum with this line of reasoning.

I frequently come across friends – scientists among them – as well as writings of physicists and of other thinkers who shy away from being “atheists” and label themselves as “agnostics”. I will address the subject of atheism further on. But first, let me deal with agnosticism, and here is a generally accepted definition of that term: It is the belief that existence of God, of the divine or the supernatural is unknown or unknowable. A recent case in point: the Brazilian astrophysicist Marcelo Gleiser. An agnostic, he doesn’t believe in God—but refuses to write off the possibility of God’s existence completely. He states: “Atheism is inconsistent with the scientific method, atheism is a belief in non-belief. So you categorically deny something you have no evidence against. I’ll keep an open mind because I understand that human knowledge is limited”. There are two problems with Gleiser’s statement. First of all, if he does not believe in God he is denying its existence and cannot, at the same time refuse “to write off God’s existence completely”. Either, or, no waffling. Secondly, atheism is not inconsistent with the scientific method. The scientific method requires proof of existence and will reject anything whose existence is purely imaginary. There is no need to have evidence against any contrived idea in order to deny that idea. The burden is on proof of its existence, not on its non-existence.

This brings me back to agnosticism. To me it is a cowardly escapist approach. The question has to be raised: is an agnostic on the question of the existence of God also an agnostic on the question of the existence of the Devil, of angels, of ghosts, of heaven and hell, of reincarnation, of witchcraft, etc., etc.? There is as much justification in leaving the door open to any of those irrational beliefs as it is for the existence of God. Is a scientist, like Gleiser, ready to be agnostic about his reincarnation, for example, into a toad after his human death? How far do you carry this nonsense?

But where I agree, is that the very label of ‘atheist’ is questionable. The American philosopher and neuroscientist Sam Harris appropriately states:

“In fact, ‘atheism’ is a term that should not even exist. No one ever needs to identify himself as a ‘non-astrologer’ or a ‘non-alchemist’. We do not have words for people who doubt that Elvis is still alive or that aliens have traversed the galaxy only to molest ranchers and their cattle. Atheism is nothing more than the noises reasonable people make in the presence of unjustified religious beliefs.”

To which I would add that the term atheist has as much validity – similarly to the above beliefs applied to agnosticism – as non-devil-worshiper, non-angelist, non-ghost-believer, non-incarnationalist, non-astrologer, etc.

On the subject of the fraught relationship between religion and knowledge, there is another nefarious effect that world religions have had and often continue to have on the emotional wellbeing of its adherents. One speaks frequently about the psychological benefits of religious belief through reassurance, purported answers to prayers, beliefs in the alleged support of divine agency, etc. Little or nothing is mentioned about the horrendous psychological burden that religious orthodoxy imposes, for example, on those who deviate from heterosexual behavior.

The Catholic church, Christian evangelicals, mormons, orthodox Jews, Moslems and assorted other religious groups have considered homosexuals as deviant and abominable people often deserving of the death penalty. Gays and lesbians have been stigmatized as abominations. This absurd religious intolerance is based on the distorted view that sexual orientation is chosen by the individual, i.e., another case of fictitious “free will”. Again, knowledge about the actual causes of homosexuality has been and continues to be ignored by the above mentioned religious groups which disregard the scientific evidence of its genetic origin. This willful disregard for the evidence is symptomatic of religious thought, however, in this case that irrationality carries with it disastrous emotional effects, especially if forced “conversion therapy” attempts are applied to the affected individual. I, for one, consider homosexuality akin to left-handedness in its genetic origin.

On the subject of homosexuality and its root causes, I’m a prime example supporting its genetic origin. It is precisely because homosexuality is not an acquired, or chosen, or externally induced trait that I did not become gay. All elements were there to induce me to grow up gay during my childhood, if such were possible. I have mentioned in my autobiography how my mother made strenuous efforts, probably subconsciously, to transform me into a girl: my long girlish air, the use of hairpins to control it, her pervasive preference for girls, etc. In addition, I grew up during my first six formative years in a pampered and coddled environment far removed from typical boyhood. All these factors had no influence on my eventual sexual development. I never felt any physical attraction to other boys. My first sexual stirrings that I can recall were directed at a five or six year old girl I met occasionally on our walks in El Escorial in Spain to which I have referred in my prior writings.

Other nefarious byproducts of religion are being reenacted at this very moment (June, 2022): the obliteration, by the Supreme Court in the U.S., of the right to an abortion, and even its, almost simultaneous, ruling blocking the prohibition of carrying guns in public. The first of these arbitrary decisions was driven by the Catholic fanaticism of Justice Alito, seconded by the religiously conservative majority of the Court. The gun legislation was inspired by the absurd invocation of the 2nd Amendment which, in turn has been justified as a “God-given right to bear arms” as one right-wing legislator has stated. These decisions suggest a more than surreptitious form of theocratic undermining of democracy in this country. The curse of religion. It brings to mind the perspicacious words of Nicolas de Caritas, Marquis de Condorcet (1743 – 1794), who stated:

“No class of our citizens should ever be led to regard either the French Constitution or even the Declaration of Rights as Tables of the Law sent down from Heaven, and to be treated only with adoration and unquestioning belief”.

That brings me to the general question of the interaction of science and religion which for many a thinker is a complicated issue. A case in point is Stephen Jay Gould, the brilliant American evolutionary biologist. He coined the now iconic expression “non-overlapping magisteria”which was the title of an article he published in the magazine Smithsonian in 1997. Therein he advocated the position that science and religion occupy two separate and distinct fields of human cognition, i.e., magisteria, that do not have any commonality, should be kept separate, and thus do not compete with each other.

As much as I admire Gould as a scientist and as a thinker, I fully disagree with his thesis. First of all, I cannot accept that science and religion can be compared as equals and mutually complementary facets of human thought. Science is based on facts. Religion is based on irrationality. And what is not even being considered is that there is not a religion but a plethora of religions which often disagree and joust with each other. So, how can one speak about a magisterium when referring to religion. Science, on the other hand is not one of many sciences, there is only one science. Secondly, religion has traditionally infringed on science’s turf. In fact, religion has frequently been in opposition to science claiming to “know better”, examples of which are altogether too numerous. That interference by religion continues to date. Examples of extant “overlaps” by religion, among many others, are: a) the catholic and evangelical position about the beginning of human life at conception; b) the denial by Islam of the evolutionary origin of humans; c) the denial of the genetic origin of homosexuality by the Catholic church as mentioned above; d) the very belief in a soul – which is not a moral issue – by Christian churches is in disagreement with scientific thought. Gould’s dictum is therefore utterly utopian, perhaps a reflection of his ivory tower naiveté.

To my surprise, after having written the above thoughts, I discovered that those ideas had already been penned – much more cogently, as expected – by non other than the inimitable Richard Dawkins, in an article published in Free Inquiry, back in 1998. He completely demolishes the idea of the purported separation between the turfs of religion and science. In fact there is a continual meddling by the former into the realm of science. Dawkins states, among several other arguments:

“It is completely unrealistic to claim, as Gould and many others do, that religion keeps itself away from science’s turf, restricting itself to morals and values. A universe with a supernatural presence would be a fundamentally and qualitatively different kind of universe from one without. The difference is, inescapably, a scientific difference. Religions make existence claims, and this means scientific claims.”

The intrusion of religion into the realm of science has been even more extreme in the past. The centuries long opposition to the heliocentric planetary system by the Catholic church is, of course, just but one example of this meddling.

It is worth pondering whether the pretensions of the Templeton Foundation, an otherwise worthy philanthropic organization, to bring together science and religion should be taken seriously. Expectedly, a renowned agnostic scientist, Marcelo Gleiser, whom I have cited above, received the Templeton prize in 2019 for his advocacy of a coexistence of science and religion.

This time, the recognized physicist and philosopher Sean M. Carroll comes to the rescue. He penned an article in Slate in 2013 that fully expresses my views about this controversy. It is entitled Science and Religion Can’t Be Reconciled, Why I won’t take money from the Templeton Foundation. Carroll states:

“Due to the efforts of many smart people over the course of many years, scholars who are experts in the fundamental nature of reality have by a wide majority concluded that God does not exist. We have better explanations for how things work. The shift in perspective from theism to atheism is arguably the single most important bit of progress in fundamental ontology over the last 500 years.”

There is often an underlying veneer of respect for religion even by those who claim not to be “religious”, more specifically by those who claim to be agnostics. I for one — in the good company of Dawkins — do not suffer from that respectfulness.

Since I’m on the subject of religion, let me indulge in mentioning another of my pet peeves: praying. Prayers in favor of someone else are naive but harmless, at best. However, prayers to obtain special divine favors for oneself I consider exercises in utter selfishness. Far worse are those orations in gratitude for having been spared a catastrophic fate that, however, befell others. I find such prayers horrendous; they imply that certain individuals are deserving of divine favors while others do not. For instance, a survivor of an earthquake who thanks God for not having died while others around him/her perished, is unforgivable; it is, to me, nothing short of despicable.

The very notion of obtaining favors, of thanking, of attracting the attention of a divine agency — God, Jesus, the Virgin Mary, a saint, Allah, the Prophet Mohammed, etc. — is, to me, nothing less than absurd: another manifestation of collective irrationality. Who are you, the supplicant, to deserve the attention among billions of others, perhaps more deserving than you and more in need than you? And which of these divinities will listen to your entreaties? In my view, the beliefs in such prayers have as much justification and validity as do astrology, witchcraft, superstition, etc., but can be morally far more objectionable.

 The spectacle of, for instance, an entire sports team praying before a game against a competing team is, to me, utterly ludicrous and self-serving.

Religion belongs to one of the most deadly and destructive of all human pursuits. Killings in the name of religion have been perpetrated since biblical times. Holy wars have been fought ferociously over the centuries and to some extent are still being fought. Such wars of religion can be open warfare, genocide, or insidious persecutions and harassment perpetrated of one group, tribe, party or sect against another. A historical review of these outrages would occupy an entire treatise, well beyond the scope of a few paragraphs to be added here to my overall indictment of religion.

One particular religious war stands out in my memory: the crusade against the Cathars (or Albigensians) in southern France from 1209 to 1229, ordered by Pope Innocent III, a true Catholic Church instigated genocide that resulted in the killing of 200,000 to one million Cathars. These were members of a reform movement advocating a return to the Christian message of perfection, poverty and preaching combined with a rejection of the physical. One instance of this campaign is uniquely noteworthy. Papal legate Arnaud Amalric, Abbot of the Cistercian monastery of Citaux, who assumed command of the enterprise, besieged the city of Beziers, calling on the Catholics to come out, and demanding that the Cathars surrender. Neither group did as commanded. The crusaders attacked and when asked how to distinguish Cathars from Catholics, Amalric responded “Kill them all! God will know his own”. Nearly every man, woman, and child in the town was slain.

To complete my list of accusations against religion, I submit that our present, and past, culture wars being waged in the United States are, ultimately, caused by religion. It is the deus ex machina hiding behind the stone age attitude of politicians and their followers attacking abortion rights, contraception, sex education, LGBTQ rights, teaching of evolution and deep time geology, among other worthy causes and sciences. In other words, religions, especially Catholic and evangelical as well as ultra-orthodox Judaism, have become the ultimate weapon and motivator for the dissemination of unworthy ideas, politics, laws, writings, social media postings, etc., etc. So much for the liberal separation of church and state. So much for the utopian separation of Gould’s magisteria.The meddling by religious denominations and their tenets in all aspects of life in this country has become pervasive. These nefarious effects now even extend to irrational opposition to vaccination against the Covid-19 virus.

To be fair, there is one aspect of religion which I consider a positive contribution to humanity, namely religiously inspired art: painting, sculpture, architecture and music. This extends to several of the great extant religious groups: Christianity, Mohammedanism, Buddhism and Hinduism, as well as some pagan religions of the past. I will first address architecture. One reasonable starting point could be the magnificent temples of the ancient Greek world, not only in Greece itself – e.g., the Parthenon – but throughout Magna Graecia and Anatolia, sites like the temple complex of Agrigento and Segesta in Sicily, Paestum in southern Italy, Pergamum and Aphrodisias in Turkey, etc. These were all dedicated to specific Greek gods and goddesses. In the Moslem world we have the great mosques of past and present, from the unique Mezquita of Córdoba in Spain to those in North Africa, the Middle East and all the way to India. Buddhist and Hindu temples in India, Japan, and southeast Asia are noteworthy. Finally, monasteries, churches and cathedrals throughout the Christian world are far too numerous to be mentioned, ranging from the magnificent romanesque churches and gothic cathedrals of western Europe to the Byzantine churches in Italy and the East, and the colonial churches of Latin America. I have been fortunate to visit many of these marvels of religious architecture on all continents (with the exception of Australia and Antarctica, of course).

Religious painting and sculpture, especially Catholic, is represented by an enormous oeuvre, that I will only allude to. In my view, it ranges from the magnificent to the excessive, from the sublime to the repetitive. It may have all started with the Paleolithic cave paintings, such as the 64,000 years old cave art in Spain, probably created by Neanderthals and may have had an early religious motivation.

Numerous musical compositions have religious themes, in fact, much of non-popular music composed and performed before the 18th century was religiously inspired. Obviously, J. S. Bach’s famous oratorios, organ compositions and cantatas stand out, but much magnificent religious music had been composed earlier by Flemish, French, Spanish and Italian composers, too numerous to cite here. Earliest recorded religious music were Gregorian chants which developed mainly in western and central Europe possibly as far back as the 9th century. To listen to those chants in the nave of a large Romanesque cathedral is an overwhelmingly beautiful experience.

Finally, some thoughts about the possible origins of religion. In other words, Whence human religion?

Considering the incredible pervasiveness of religion and the belief in a divinity (or divinities), the question has been raised by many a thinker in the past as to the origins of such beliefs. Dawkins speaks about an evolutionary origin. I will endeavor to build on that idea in that my hypothesis is that early humans, perhaps 100,000 years ago, or even farther back, became acutely aware of death and its inevitability. At the same time, the terrors inflicted by the incomprehensible forces of nature, such as thunderstorms, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, floods, etc. elicited a need to conjure protecting spirits by various means. This need perhaps inspired our forefathers and foremothers to invoke the presence of animals that were both a threat and a boon to their existence. Hence the cave drawings and paintings of early mankind.

Years ago I visited one of the most impressive of those Cro-Magnon caves: Niaux, in southwestern France. We had to trek, somewhat precariously, more than half mile deep into the cave to reach one of the main chambers on whose walls were the magnificent depictions of a variety of animals. There was no fixed illumination and each of the visitors had to carry an electric lantern. The total darkness was, as we were walking ever deeper into the cave, rather unsettling at times. I had to think of the prehistoric “artists” with their paint material, painting utensils and smoky torches marching into these depths and then painting in that, to them, frighteningly dark and unaccustomed environment. This effort could not possibly have been justified except if it was driven by a need to propitiate nature and its creatures for the benefit of the cohort of the artist or artists. The very act of painting, under such demanding conditions, must have been, in my humble view, an early religious ritual performed some 15,000 years ago. This must have been the case in so many other prehistoric caves, some of them even older, of southern France, Spain and other European sites. Maybe there were early pilgrimages into these painted caves to perform propitiatory rituals. It may well be that the invention of divinities, imaginary protective beings, followed later on to complement the imagery of the caves.

In any case, I believe that the pervasive fear of death played a central role in the appearance and evolution of supernatural beliefs. All of the ancient religions of which we have written information of one kind or other, Egyptian, Sumerian, Chinese, etc. revolved around death and the fate of the dead.

In this context, extant religions present a more complex and nuanced picture, perhaps as a result of an intellectual evolutionary process. Of the Abrahamic religions, Judaism is perhaps the one that is less obsessed with the fear of death and with the prospect of an afterlife. Christianity and, in particular, Catholicism is truly permeated with the dread of death and its sequels. The Muslim religion concerns itself principally with the rewards that the afterlife offers the “true’ believers, especially if they are male. Oriental religions, Hinduism and Buddhism, are less obsessed with the dread of death but are more concerned with esoteric and elaborate concepts such as the immortality of the soul, rebirth and reincarnation in order to comfort the believer to accept death as a continuation and not as a termination.

In one of my periods of sleeplessness I pondered about the contrived concept of the soul, a human invention whose origin must be traced back to pre-biblical times. As I mentioned above, the driving force for this invention must have been the awareness of the inevitability of death and the adjunct fear of it. Now, I’m going to prove the in-existence of God from a quasi-syllogism based on the fact that the soul can not exist. I had come to that conclusion within my autobiography but I will take the liberty to restate it here. The sine qua non premise is the acceptance of Darwinian evolution with which the concept of a soul is totally incompatible. Why? Because the soul is purported to exist only in humans, and since humans descend from microbes, one would have to accept either that these first bacteria already had a soul or that the soul was, somehow, injected into a protohuman. The latter solution would require that a soulless couple of Adamopitecus and wife Evapitecus would have engendered, by dint of magic, the first souled Adam and Eve. Never mind the fanciful biblical account involving Adam’s rib and other nonsense. Ergo, if we accept evolution, the soul does not make sense, it is gone. Period. The same logic applies to the free will fiction. Since it is assumed that it is a uniquely human trait, At what evolutionary stage did free will make its sudden appearance? And here is Baruch Spinoza in his Ethics:

“Experience teaches us no less clearly than reason, that men believe themselves free, simply because they are conscious of their actions, and unconscious of the causes whereby those actions are determined.”

Now, if souls do not exist, what is the point of heaven and hell? These would be empty soulless abodes. Ergo, where is God?, where is the Devil? Ergo, there is no place for either. In fact — if they ever existed — both died on an autumn day, November 24, 1859, when an English naturalist, called Charles Robert Darwin, published On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection. And, on the subject of Darwin, here is what he wrote in his autobiography:

“I can indeed hardly see how anyone ought to wish Christianity to be true; for if so the plain language of the text seems to show that the men who do not believe, and this would include my Father, Brother and almost all my best friends, will be everlastingly punished. And this is a damnable doctrine.”

To conclude, I would like to cite the words of an immensely rational and well known scientist, Carl Sagan, warning us about the inroads of irrationality:

“Science is more than a body of knowledge; it is a way of thinking. I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time—when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the key manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness.”

As a final indictment of the religious rejection of knowledge, Here are the infamous words of one of the most revered fathers of Christianity, Saint Augustine (354 – 430 AD), a true distillation of the horrendous dicta of religion:

“There is another form of temptation, even more fraught with danger. This is the disease of curiosity … It is this which drives us to try and discover the secrets of nature, those secrets which are beyond our understanding, which can avail us nothing and which man should not wish to learn”.