Attention for the believers
Before you start reading texts in the chapter RELIGION, think carefully. Some content may offend your religious feelings.
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However, let me begin with a few words on myself. I am not an atheist. I was brought up in a Protestant family, but I have not been a Protestant for a long time now. I laid out my views on faith in detail in my book “Lost Trails of Polytheism”. Some of its fragments I have published on this web site.
In an ultra-Catholic country like Poland, Protestants belong to the minority. The communist system that prevailed during my childhood and youth, deceptively labelled as “socialism,” was to some extent beneficial for religious minorities, although religious freedoms were very limited to all believers. Religion was a domain that could not be advertised in workplaces, and public religious events were limited. Ironically, to organize them, you had to get permission from the atheistic authorities.
The Catholic Church was removed from power and barely tolerated by the communist authorities. It had to sit, so to speak, quietly. In the early 1960s, the communists removed religion from schools, therefore lessons of religion had to take place at parishes. Protestants were not persecuted by the Catholic majority, although some incidents like that happened occassionally, but they also did not have an easy life in a country where the influence of Catholicism and communism on social life was so strong.
The modern, now-free Poland is a secular country only by name. The constitutional record of the separation of religion and state is not respected there. The church enjoys great but undeserved authority and intrudes on many areas of life, just like the Communist Party once did. Priests have privileges unattainable for lay people, with the exception of a small group of businessmen and politicians. Leading Polish politicians regularly participate in the church masses and ceremonies. Radio “Maryja” is the political tube of the Church, and those who have the courage to speak or write about the abuse of the clergy, expose themselves to mockery and slander.
In addition, there are some Catholic apologists in the Internet (at least this is the way they try to present themselves), who in a pseudoscientific, philosophical manner try to undermine and discredit other worldviews.
So there are websites promoting aggressive clericalism and aggressive atheism. They want to defend or refute faith in God at all costs. They consider themselves extremely wise, but their arguments are generally vague, unwise, even deplorable. Human methodology in this field is unreliable. The existence or non-existence of God can not be proved scientifically.
I think that these people just lose their time. Instead, I try as skillfully as I can, with the help of certain sources, to demythologize the world of people excessively mythologized by religion. Morgan Freeman, the narrator of the film “The Story of God” is undoubtedly an enlightened, sober,
tolerant and spiritually healthy man. He says there are plenty of God’s definitions. “The word ‘God’ means so many different things for so many people” – says he.
So in order to abolish all faith in a god, one has to disprove hundreds, if not thousands, of his various definitions. Also, in order to defend faith in your god as the only true one, you have to refute hundreds, if not thousands, other definitions. The best position is therefore indirect, the assumption that there are many different gods. We should at least tolerate other gods if we do not know them, rather than fight them, as the aforementioned desperados do.
I noticed, moreover, that real scientists threw out of the window all sentiments and animosities to any religion. They wrote with cool scientific logic, but their arguments arouse healthy reflections, their works are the most valuable.