Read the book “Liberated from Religion”
by Paulo Bitencourt
Preface
Imagine, dear reader, someone telling you a fantastic story, saying that, if you believe it, you’ll be criticized for believing what the world considers madness, but that this should make you happy, because you’ll be victim of persecution, which proves that that story is true and that you are part of a select group of privileged people. As soon as you believe that story and feel chosen, you are warned that, just like those who consider it madness, you’ll suffer severe consequences, in case you doubt it.
Quite a cunning way to make you block out all critical thinking and reject whatever might induce you to subject that story to rational scrutiny, isn’t it?
That, dear reader, is called religion. In countries where for centuries that story has been passed down from generation to generation as sacred, it’s so deeply rooted that it’s part of their tradition and culture. Thus, it’s not surprising that, from the cradle up, millions of people are taught to see it as incontestable universal truth, which causes conditioning of the mind and results in a religious automatism that prevents the majority of them from stopping to ask themselves whether that story makes sense and believing it is sensible and necessary.
Paradoxically, at the same time they take criticism of their beliefs as offense, these believers find it natural to criticize other people’s beliefs. All religious people reject tens of thousands of religions as absurd, over which they don’t lose a single minute of sleep. The difference between believers and me is, then, tiny: I reject only one religion more than they do.
If Christianity is the belief I most dissect, this is due to the simple fact that I was a Christian and that it’s not only the largest religion in the world but also the most followed by Occidentals. It doesn’t make much sense to write books about the irrationalities, for example, of Islam where this religion is practiced by a tiny minority. Actually, it’s not even necessary, because all religions boil down to this: believing in the existence of things of which one has no evidence. By the way, since they are related religions, an analysis of Christianity is almost an analysis of Islam.
Where there is no reflection, there is manipulation. It’s evident that religions make use of fear as an instrument of domination, first to deceive, then to prevent reflection and consequent deconversion of their adherents. In fact, any ideology that threatens with punishment those who reject it is perverse and deserves to be rejected. Those who are afraid of Hell are on the same intellectual level as those who are afraid of the Bogeyman.
One of the principal objectives of this book is to show that there are no reasons whatsoever to follow religions and that there are plenty of reasons to be a freethinker.