> Heinlein once had a character remark that "one can bask in the
> warmth of religion, or stand in the cold light of reason." I'll
> take the cold light. It may not always comfort, but its dangers can
> be met and overcome. And it beats the daylights out of groveling
> around on my knees begging for some aloof being to be nice to me.
No! NO! This view so many rationalists and extropians and
people like you take is so infuriating to me. To me this is such a
lie and so many extropians and others are just playing into the
religious fundamentalist's hands by regurgitating it.
Just stop and think about it for a moment with open rational
eyes. It's very simple really, if you honestly try, with the mind of
a child that hasn't yet been polluted. Is it really true that the
"warmth of religion" is worth "basking in"? Is the "light of reason"
really so cold? I say absolutely not and ask how we could all be so
easily deluded into thinking something so clearly backwards. Just the
opposite is what is really true.
Look out at the natural heavens some clear night and reflect
back on the progress we've made during the last billion years.
Consider the slope at the point of the growth curve we have finally
arrived at (which is at least exponential and possibly asymptotic) and
then project this same rate of progress into the future and dream
about just a few of the things we are about (in another 1000 or even
10,000 years) to be able to do. "Cold reason" is obviously telling us
that this heavenly natural future is infinitely better than any
unnatural, ethereal neither world any religion has told us we must die
(and leave our descendents) to get to! Any heaven any religion has
ever described to me would be pure hell! Having faith that any such
thing exists isn't faith, but giving up in despair that there isn't
anything better. "Fearing God" isn't basking in any warmth and it
certainly isn't "comfortable"!
Take one simple example (of infinitely many) religious
teaching like "Christ died that we might live". Examine such an idea
thoroughly with open and innocent childlike eyes. Here we have some
kind of immortal deity that can't die claiming to have made "the
ultimate sacrifice" that we might live. The definition of this dieing
and sacrificing by the immortal is merely returning to his father in
heaven and escaping from this still sick imperfect world full of still
imperfect sinning mortals ofter only temporarily healing a few. The
definition of our "that we might live" is our dieing or leaving all of
our loved ones on earth and never again being able to help or interact
with anyone left ever again. What a twisted lying crock! You don't
die to get to heaven! You Live! Our minds are so polluted and
twisted with so much blatant irrationality! It is our mortal
ancestors that lived their short lives that we might live better and
longer ones! They are the ones that lived to gave us everything we
have including our lives. Soon, because of what our ancestors have
given us and by our living, we will be able to give to our children
immortal lives. We are the ones doing the work, making real
sacrifices, and creating heaven for our children! And the heaven we
are creating will eventually be a naturally real heaven unimaginably
better than all the contradictory, incomprehensible, neither world
heavens ever described and claimed by the many religions which are
really all hells at best.
If you honestly think about it, even in the "cold light of
reason" there can be the possibility or hope of a resurrection. How
can any truly rational person deny the possibility that after another
billion years of the continued progress which we have seen so far,
that our children will not eventually evolve to be true Gods that
finally discover some way to resurrect all people that have ever
lived? A way for them to eliminate all evil including repaying the
debt they owe to our ancestors for creating them, as immortal Gods,
and giving them this glorious true natural and real heaven?
One could go on forever showing how unnatural religious "after
life" neither worlds are really hell and how this living universe is
the most beautiful and naturally glorious place anything could
possibly be. Don't support the lying God fearing unreliable religions
fundamentalists and spout the irrational twisted lies they've planted
in your minds! Look out at the reliable and understandable stars and
realize that this is the true and best possible heaven! That there is
so much more that we can have faith in and hope and strive for! Don't
give up in hopeless despair and accept that this is the best an all
powerful being could do! Let's get busy and show how easy it is to
overcome all evil and prove the faithless, theodicizing, fearful,
justifying, backwards, fundamentalist completely wrong! Let's show
them what faith and hope really are, open our eyes and see what heaven
might really be, and never give or accept anything less until we get
there!
Well, anyway, that's my opinion! ;)
Brent Allsop
P.S. Could anyone give me a reference to where one of Heinlein's
characters makes this remark?