Rediff.com |  Feedback  
You are here: » Rediff Home » Discussion Boards » Permalink
  
View : Single Message | Complete Thread | Read complete Discussion
Curse of religion
by Imran on Sep 14, 2007 04:17 PM

Alone among the great nations of history we have got rid of religion as a serious scourge, and by the simple process of reducing it to a petty nuisance. For men become civilized, not in proportion to their willingness to believe, but in proportion to their readiness to doubt.
The more stupid the man, the larger his stock of adamantine assurances,
the heavier his load of faith. When Copernicus proved that the earth revolved around the sun, he did not simply prove that the earth revolved
around the sun, he also proved that the so-called revelation of God, as contained in the Old Testament, was rubbish. The first fact was
relatively trivial: it made no difference to the average man then, as it makes no difference to him today. But, the second fact was of stupendous importance, for it disposed at one stroke of a mass of bogus facts that
had been choking the intelligence and retarding the progress of humanity for a millennium and a half....
I believe that religion, generally speaking, has been a curse to mankind; that its modest and greatly overestimated services on the
ethical side have been more than overborne by the damage it has done to clear and honest thinking.

    Forward  |  Report abuse
The above message is part of the Discussion Board:
Govt withdraws affidavits in SC on SSCP