What a Difference 30,000 Years Makes!

 

by William Harwood

(Published in the American Rationalist)

 

With the human race entering the final 300 years of its existence, this might be a good time to scrutinize the uneven evolution that has produced one population determined to maintain practices that will cause humankind’s inevitable extinction, and another population willing to recognize the danger and try to avert it.

      The difference between the two populations is 30,000 years of evolution.  The segment whose evolution has been static for 30,000 years are called, variously, Republicans, Conservatives, Reactionaries, theists, militants, dogmatists, fundamentalists, “born again,” and other names that have no more defining meaning than “James” or “Jennifer.”  The description that does explain their inability to recognize even the existence of their crime against humanity, let alone its extent, is theofascists.  The theofascists believe they can safely poison the air all humans have to breathe and the water all have to drink, and overpopulate until the human race is incapable of feeding itself, because a deus ex machina has promised to intervene in the last act to prevent their attempted anthropocide from succeeding.

The population who recognize that the theofascists are committing the most unspeakable crime against humanity conceivable, the extermination of the human race, are called Democrats, Liberals, Humanists, Moderates, and various other terms that all mean “sane, intelligent, and educated.”

 

The difference between a theofascist and a humanist is 30,000 years of evolution.

The difference between the Republicanazi Gestapo and the ACLU is 30,000 years of evolution.

The difference between the Bushes and the Kennedys is 30,000 years of evolution.

The difference between Stockwell Day and Pierre Trudeau is 30,000 years of evolution.

The difference between a televangelist and a rationalist is 30,000 years of evolution.

The difference between an incurable theist (as opposed to one who has simply never encountered the falsifying evidence) and a nontheist is 30,000 years of evolution.

The difference between someone who can read a Tanakh, Bible, or Koran and see its paramount deity as admirable, and someone who can read the same Tanakh, Bible, or Koran and see its paramount deity as the most sadistic, evil, insane serial killer in all fiction, is 30,000 years of evolution.

The difference between someone who believes he is the domesticated livestock of a petmaster in the sky, and one who recognizes that all claims of such an entity revealing its existence have been traced to the same bible that assures its readers in fourteen places that the earth is flat, is 30,000 years of evolution.

The difference between a person who, on reading biblical myths that could be true only if the earth is flat, can believe that the book containing such myths is revealed truth, and a person who can recognize the bible’s flat-earth endorsements as proof that it is fiction, is 30,000 years of evolution.

The difference between a person who believes that sin is whatever a capricious lawgiver says it is, and one who recognizes that sin means the unnecessary hurting of a nonconsenting victim—no victim, no sin—is 30,000 years of evolution.

The difference between William Jennings Bryan and Clarence Darrow is 30,000 years of evolution.

The difference between any creationist and any evolutionist is 30,000 years of evolution.

The difference between a supporter of capital punishment and a person who recognizes state-sanctioned ritualistic revenge murder as a subhuman abomination is 30,000 years of evolution.

The difference between a person who equates tadpolecide with homicide, and one who recognizes that a pre-human tadpole is not a self-aware sentient being, is 30,000 years of evolution.

The difference between a person who supports a sky sadist’s right to get its orgasm substitute by savoring the agonies of the dying, and Dr Kevorkian, is 30,000 years of evolution.

The difference between the corrupt, lying, thieving, tinpot Hitler egomaniac Mother Teresa, who robbed the starving to enrich the Catholic Church, and Bob Geldof, is 30,000 years of evolution.

The difference between Phyllis Schlafly and Hugh Hefner is 30,000 years of evolution.

The difference between Fred Phelps and Gore Vidal is 30,000 years of evolution.

The difference between Ann Coulter and Michael Moore is 30,000 years of evolution.

The difference between Rush Limbaugh and Al Franken is 30,000 years of evolution.

The difference between James Dobsen and Emmanuelle (the author or the character—take your pick) is 30,000 years of evolution.

The difference between Charlton Heston and James Brady is 30,000 years of evolution.

The difference between L. Ron Hubbard, who disguised science fiction as religion, and Robert A. Heinlein, who disguised moral philosophy as science fiction, is 30,000 years of evolution.

The difference between Tom Cruise, whose neanderthal intellect was manipulated to make him a shill for the confidence swindlers who suckered him, and James Randi, is 30,000 years of evolution.

The difference between Hitler’s holocaust partner, Pope Pius XII, and Oskar Schindler, is 30,000 years of evolution.

The difference between Pope John Paul II, who suppressed disease prevention, and Jonas Salk, who devoted his life to disease prevention, is 30,000 years of evolution.

The difference between a person who argues that Intelligent Design is science, and one who recognizes it as religion, is 30,000 years of evolution.

The difference between someone who can believe that urine, excrement, menstruation, AIDS, cancer, and even death, were intelligently designed by a benevolent Sky Führer, and someone who can recognize that a benevolent designer capable of such atrocities is an oxymoron, a morally retarded higher lifeform, is 30,000 years of evolution.

The difference between an Administration that refuses to recognize global warming as a threat to the continued existence of the human species, and proponents of the Kyoto Accord, is 30,000 years of evolution.

The difference between Mary Hart who, for the sake of ratings, contributes to the dumbing of the human race and therefore its eventual extinction by encouraging viewers to believe that practitioners of deception such as mediums and psychics have magical powers, and Penn Jillette, who contributes to the education of the human race by acknowledging that the magical powers he appears to demonstrate are accomplished by deception, is 30,000 years of evolution.

 

Can the evolutionary retards be stopped before their lack of 30,000 years of evolution wipes us all out?  Norman Spinrad wrote in Greenhouse Summer, “Greater than the courage to do right in the face of danger or adversity was the courage to commit a lesser evil to prevent a greater.

 

 

Why I Am not a Godworshipper

By William Harwood

  (reprinted from Australian Humanist, Autumn 2007)

 

I was not raised in an overtly religious household, even though my grandfather was sufficiently religion-addicted to name his second daughter Aimee in response to Aimee Semple McPherson’s tour of Australia.  And despite my grandmother’s insistence that he was a Methodist, he persisted in identifying himself as a Pentecostal on census forms, simply because he regularly listened to a weekly radio sermon by the pastor of what may have been the only “Pentecostal” church in Melbourne, perhaps the only one in Australia.  He did not, however, ever enter a church except for weddings and funerals, and did not include “grace” at meals, as some of my other relatives did.

Nonetheless, sometime after my sixth birthday my grandfather insisted that I start attending Sunday School at the local Church of Christ, since it was the nearest church to where we lived.  Having already put in two years of school attendance, I was not a big fan of such institutions, but my objection to turning one of my free days into another school day fell on deaf ears.  I was bundled off to Sunday School.

On my first day there, one of the lay instructors told a story about how Jesus informed a penitent that his sins were forgiven, and how the Pharisees were shocked because they believed that only God could forgive sins.  The concept of sin could not have been unknown to me, because my immediate thought was that the only person who could forgive a sin was the victim, the person sinned against.  So I asked, “Who’s God?”

I cannot remember the precise answer I received on that occasion, but in the course of my childhood I was gradually brainwashed into believing in a god that differed little from the god of most Australian Protestants.  The indoctrination eventually wore off, so that when I was about fifteen my grandfather asked me, “Do you believe in a supreme being?”  Recognizing the possible economic consequences of a wrong answer, I responded, “It’s possible,” even though my recollection is that that was a calculated lie.  Fortunately, he was not sufficiently fanatic to raise the issue again.

Before I was twenty-one I became re-infected with the religion virus.  Why or how, I do not recall.  I am certain that it was not a consequence of any personal experience or reaction to a specific item in the news media.  It may well have been a personal formulation of Pascal’s Wager:  something to gain; nothing to lose.  And because a cousin I admired enough to have unsuccessfully invited her to copulate, when I was ten and she was twelve, attended weekly services at the nearby Church of England, I made a practice of accompanying her.  But when that incentive became geographically unfeasible, my church attendance ceased, even though my belief remained.

At twenty-two I joined an audience-participation touring stage show, and found myself attracted to a girl who regularly came on stage.  Since she was a Catholic, I looked into that religion, and was shown the passage in the Protestant bible that repudiated Protestantism, Matthew 16:18-19, a passage I now know to be a fourth-century interpolation.  Even though the romance fizzled, I could not get past the reality that Protestantism is wrong, and became a Catholic.

I remained Catholic until, having meanwhile moved to Canada with the same touring show, I took my first ancient history course at the University of Calgary.  In doing the research for an essay on the similarity of Christianity and concurrent mystery religions in the Roman Empire, I made the discovery that fifty other virgin-born savior gods had risen from the dead on the third day centuries and even millennia before Jesus.  Given the cultural environment in which I was now immersed, that discovery might easily have convinced me to turn Jewish.  What prevented that from happening was the “once bitten” syndrome.  When a thorough investigation of the origin and evolution of religion revealed that the bible on which Christianity and Judaism stand or fall endorsed a flat earth, a solid skydome, stars small enough to become detached from the skydome and fall to earth, and a geocentric universe, as well as authenticating the real existence of the Egyptian and Babylonian gods and, in the Catholic bible’s books written by Sadducees, repudiated the concept of life after death, I was intellectually cured.

Nonetheless, I remained emotionally addicted for a further three years.  Then on a Sunday morning at Cambridge, England, I had breakfast, got dressed to go to mass and got as far as the front door, when it suddenly hit me:  If I participate in this Egyptian god-eating ritual even once more, I will throw up.  At that point I was cured, totally, permanently, irreversibly.  I accepted the reality that gods do not exist, have never existed in the past, and will not exist in the future.  And since I realized that religion’s millions of mindslaves were still being victimized by what I now recognized as a contagious form of insanity that destroys the ability to tell right from wrong, I put my findings into a book titled Mythology’s Last Gods, and it was published by Prometheus Books.  While it will not cure the stupid, the incurably insane or the intestinally challenged, there is no reason to doubt that it can do for all teachables what the discovery of the same information did for me.  Whether I and other public benefactors can wipe out religion before religion wipes out the human race remains to be seen.  At this time, the anthropocidists (persons whose behavior will, if continued, exterminate the human race) are winning.

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Of all AR contributing editors, William Harwood is, I think, probably the most uncompromising in his critique of religious, political, and whatever other superstition and nonsense—and this is a remarkable accomplishment considering the uncompromising critiques of the same offered by Marge Mignacca, Bernard Katz, A.J. Mattill, Jr., G. Richard Bozarth, and many other AR editors and contributors.

      Although my policy has always been no censorship of any kind and as minimal editorial intervention as possible, I must admit that on a couple of occasions I felt I needed to tone down some of the statements Bill has made about religious nonsense and religious morons. (Frankly, I was concerned a little bit not only about Bill's safety but my own as well.  There are no morons more enraged and dangerous than religious fanatics whose subhuman stupidity and hypocrisy have been exposed for all to see.) And in both cases I ended up regretting having made such interventions.

      William Harwood, who holds an M.Litt from Cambridge, has written 34 books. Of those Mythology's Last Gods and A Humanist in the Bible Belt are to be recommended in particular. He is editor/translator of the two-volume The Fully Translated Bible, available from Amazon.

 

Below a flavor of Bill's mighty pen:  “What a Difference 30,000 Years Makes!” and “Why I Am not a Godworshipper.”

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Kaz Dziamka, Editor

William Harwood