PUBLIC SERVICE ESSAY
BREAKING FREE OF RELIGION, A RATIONAL INVITATION
“You’ve Got to be Carefully Taught”
Joseph W. Ferrara, EdD
www.soundmentalhealth.com
In May, 2015, the Pew Research Center reported 70% of Americans “believe in some type or kind of Christianity”. If the only life-giving choice were between any one of the religions and “atheism”, a person with both unbridled and unchained common, uninhabited intelligence would most likely choose the later. These two desperate alternatives do not exhaust our choices. Our earlier evaluations of clerics and their legally threatening, slandering/condemnatory and extorting religions would be incomplete if we simply point out the life-threatening dangers of their spurious “origin, doctrines and path”. We have shown a rational and just way, for scientific evaluations are always affirmative and do not stop with mere critique. We demonstrated a far more liberating, non-threatening, non-condemnatory, non-torturing and meaningful, worthwhile and fulfilling way of life than what the clerics proclaim night and day, i.e., the scientific method is both rational and life-giving.
The life-threatening doctrines masquerading clerics preach have been widely taught and believed because of the incorrigible need of human’s susceptible personality and its mystifying imagination to believe in something. Most people can endure great pain and suffering and privation but few can tolerate a sense of boring meaninglessness and unfulfillment. As the Nazi movement revealed, the need for a fulfilling commitment, regardless of its pathology, is so great that humans cannot remain empty; in time they will turn to anything. Hitler got his chance because of a vacuum and the great danger of a vacuum is that it is an invitation to adopt irrational, unjust and unworthy values and beliefs as perilous direction-setters for both individual and collective action. The most compelling implication of the fanatical success the exploitive clerics, terrorists and racists are having is that it accurately measures the susceptibility of the human personality and the intellectual emptiness of our time.
Just as Hitler and the aggrandizing Nazi party attempted to establish a “master race”, ostentatious clerics and their threatened, intimidated members are deliberately trying to establish a “master religion”. Each cleric militantly declares their religion orthodox, i.e. “not all religions are equal” and others as secular. Anyone refusing conversion can be treated with “righteous indignation” to the point of bloodshed and war. Essentially, menacing clerics with opulent treasuries declare the existence of a mysterious, supernatural world having a cast of foreboding, spiritual characters performing incredulous miracles, mandating obsessive-compulsive scripted rules, rights and rituals, issuing veiled but grave threats of shocking condemnation and looming, endless tormenting punishment with them having divine, supreme authority on earth telling us all what to think, feel, say and do. Such false, illegitimate authority is unjust and life-threatening causing acute anxiety, guilt, lethargy, somatization, agitation, sadness, anger, insomnia, fatigue, feelings of worthlessness and suicidality/homicidality, i.e., post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Clerics’ claim that “religion is a matter of faith and science is nothing but a theory” is under the just standards and ethical requirements of the null hypothesis in the scientific method which states “any claim or belief is false, untrue unless one can publicly demonstrate by testing, retesting and cross-validating the claim at the .01 level of confidence or greater by using the axis of the scientific method”. If it exists, it can be tested. If it can be tested, it exists.
We kindly invite anyone to disprove the just null hypothesis by performing the trustworthy axis of the validating scientific method in public as policed by the National Academy of Sciences in support of clerics’ claims. Should anyone publicly conduct such a study proving the existence of a verifiable supernatural world, we would then cheerfully debate and nominate them for the Oscar, Noble Prize and Copley Medal. Meanwhile, actualize: the scientific method is life-giving, life is good, we are good, don’t worry, be happy, live rationally free for all of us and pass it on.