08.31.07
Religion man-made?
Hitchens in God is Not Great says ‘human species is, biologically, only partly rational’
Two extravagancies: to exclude reason, to admit only reason. Pascal
Religion man-made? Yes, but… It’s not that simple. If we look at the question of religion in the context of the eonic effect, we see its connection to historical evolution, with a macro component a that.
Begin with that most popular misquotation of modern times, the assertion that Marx dismissed religion as “the opium of the people”. What he said in his Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right was this: “Religious distress is at the same time the expression of real distress and the protest against real distress. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, just as it is the spirit of a spiritless situation. It is the opium of the people.”
Hitchens says: “The famous misquotation is not so much as a ‘misquotation’ but rather a very crude attempt to misrepresent the philosophical case against religion … Religion is man-made. Even the men who made it cannot agree on what their prophets or redeemers or gurus actually said or did. Still less can they hope to tell us the ‘meaning’ of later discoveries and developments which were, when they began, either obstructed by their religions or denounced by them. And yet — the believers still claim to know. Not just to know but to know everything.”