GEORGE BERNARD SHAW on Religion

SHAW, GEORGE BERNARD

English dramatist, critic

(1856-1950)

• "All great truths begin as blasphemies."

• “Beware of the man whose god is in the skies.” (Jon Winokur, The Portable Curmudgeon)

• “Bourgeois morality is largely a system of making cheap virtues a cloak for expensive vices.” (Jon Winokur, The Portable Curmudgeon)

• “The conversion of a savage to Christianity is the conversion of Christianity to savagery.”

• “Cruelty must be whitewashed by a moral excuse, and pretense of reluctance.”

• “Do not do unto others as you would that they should do unto you. Their tastes may not be the same.”

• “The fact that a believer is happier than a skeptic is no more to the point than the fact that a drunken man is happier than a sober one.”

• “The golden rule is that there are no golden rules.” (Jon Winokur, The Portable Curmudgeon)

• “Heaven, as conventionally conceived, is a place so inane, so dull, so useless, so miserable, that nobody has ever ventured to describe a whole day in heaven, though plenty of people have described a day at the seaside.” (Jon Winokur, The Portable Curmudgeon)

• “A lifetime of happiness! No man alive could bear it: it would be hell on earth.”

• “Man is the only animal of which I am thoroughly and cravenly afraid...There is no harm in a well-fed lion. It has no ideals, no sect, no party.”

• “Morality consists in suspecting other people of not being legally married.” (Jon Winokur, The Portable Curmudgeon)

• “No man ever believes that the Bible means what it says: He is always convinced that it says what he means.”

• "Old men are dangerous; it doesn't matter to them what is going to happen to the world."

• “A pessimist thinks everybody is as nasty as himself, and hates them for it.” (Jon Winokur, The Portable Curmudgeon)

• “There are scores of thousands of human insects who are ready at a moment’s notice to reveal the Will of God on every possible subject.” (Jon Winokur, The Portable Curmudgeon)

• “There is only one religion, though there are a hundred versions of it.”

• “Why should we take advice on sex from the pope? If he knows anything about it, he shouldn't.”

Today is George Bernard Shaw's Birthday.

He was born 153 years ago on July 26, 1856.

TEN-WORD MOVIE REVIEW - Religulous

Film: Religulous

Skeptic Bill Maher asks amusing, thought-provoking questions about religion.

(From a writing prompt suggested on One Minute Writer to write a movie review in ten words or fewer. There are always many responses from religious people, so occasionally I submit responses from a freethought point of view.)

WHY I AM AN ATHEIST: The Bible - Part 1

In a previous post (Why Are There Atheists?) I noted that atheists say reading the Bible started them on the road to religious skepticism more than anything else.

I came from a highly religious home. Although we always belonged to one denomination or other of a mainstream Protestant church, at heart my father was an evangelical. However, he repeatedly told me it didn’t matter if I were a Lutheran, Presbyterian, Baptist or Methodist, just so I was a Christian. He didn’t mention the Catholic church, but I assume he wouldn’t have been pleased if I’d become a Papist.

I’m sure everyone has heard someone say, “I believe what I see,” but actually the reverse is true: we see what we believe. If one believes the Bible is full of inspiration, one will see and believe those passages that support that belief and ignore the rest. Instead of finding the Bible beautiful and uplifting, I found much of it rather appalling. Thus, reading the Bible was one of the triggers that started my doubts.

As George Bernard Shaw said: “No man ever believes that the Bible means what it says: He is always convinced that it says what he means.”

For as long as I can remember, my family read a chapter of the Bible before dinner each night. At first, my parents took turns reading a verse at a time. As we became old enough, the children helped with the reading. I joined in when I was about 8. We didn’t pick a chapter at random, but rather started at Chapter One of Genesis and continued to the end of Revelation, then started over. Even taking into consideration an occasional dinner elsewhere, calculating the number of years I read along before I left home for college, I read the entire Bible at least 3 times, maybe 4.
As a 10 or 12 year old, reading that children who disobey their parents should be stoned was very scary. People who work on the Sabbath should also be stoned. (I wondered if that included ministers.) Eating pork or lobster was an abomination. I was horrified that God wiped out populations of entire cities because one or a few individuals displeased him and that dashing babies heads was perfectly okay.
Because we read the King James Version, for a while I assumed that I just wasn't understanding what was written. If I questioned anything in the Bible, my parents looked upon me with horror and fed me the usual drivel, "God works in mysterious ways."
Around the age of 12, when we were reading Judges, two stories, in particular, hit me like bolts of lightning.

Judges 11: 30-40 and Judges 19: 22-29

I was reading these passages long before the women’s movement, but as a teenaged girl, I was horrified that the women in these Biblical stories were expendable. They had been treated worse than most people would treat animals. How could God allow these horrible events?

If God was all-knowing, then he would know that Jephthah was sincere in his intent to follow through on his vow. But how could an all-loving God allow Jephthah to kill his daughter? Why wouldn't God have let him off the hook on that promise?

How could a father offer his daughter to rapists, then cut up her dead body?

These passages bothered me for months. In the solitude of my bedroom, I read them over and over, sure that I had misunderstood the verses. Surely, if I read them often enough, I would see them in a new light. I wanted to believe in an all-knowing, all-loving God.
As we continued reading the Bible, I learned that women who are not virgins when they marry should be stoned. Women should be silent in church, that a woman was worth half a male, that if a virgin is raped, her rapist must marry her and never divorce her, that 32 virgins were given to a priest as “the Lord’s tribute” when the Israelites conquered the Midianites.

Thus, I developed serious doubts about the veracity of the Bible. And if I doubted the foundation of my religion, I also had to doubt Christianity. I probably hadn't heard of atheism at that time, but at the age of 12, I started on the path to become a nonbeliever.

Of course, I continued to attend church, Sunday school, choir practice, youth group, vacation Bible school, and church camp. I had no choice. I read along with my parents as we plowed through the Bible, but instead of blind acceptance, I was looking at everything I read in the Bible with the eye of a skeptic.

copyright 2008 by C. Woods

Look for a future post:

WHY I AM AN ATHEIST: The Bible - Part 2