God, The Afterlife, and Original Sin

Recently, the thought came to me about how "if" the god of Christianity messed up this world according the doctrine of original sin, in which he put mankind into a situation where in his omniscience he knew he was going to fall and the suffering it entailed, then I can only imagine how he messed up the afterlife. Think about it....

I Love Lucy

Lucy (Australopithecus afarensis) lived 3.2 million years ago in Ethiopia although she wasn't the first hominid, a recent fossil of Ardi (Ardipithecus Ramidus) pushes hominid evolution back to 4.4 million years ago. Probaby due to climate change they walked on two feet, which took courage. Being bipedal in an environment where the ancestors of lions, leopards, cheetahs, and hyenas where looking for their next meal was a tremendous risk, but Lucy, Ardi, and our hominid ancestors took those steps, which lead to higher development and evolution of the hominid brain, which eventually gave us an advantage on the East African plains. I often wonder if the first hominids did not get out of the tree and stand on their two feet, there probably would not be Homo Sapiens, but a band of primates did, survived long enough to allow evolution to do its work and now their distant offspring is writing about it. I love Lucy because her kind made the steps that eventually lead to humanity. Think about it... We are all Africans..

The sky is Falling Harold Camping the Modern day Chicken Little

Here we are two days after the rapture supposed to have happened. As I read Harold Camping's May 11th interview in Nymag.com : " Interviewer: What will you be doing on that day? Are you just waiting for the earthquake, are you having some kind of ceremony?
Harold Camping: "There’ll be no gatherings of any kind that I have anything to do with. There'll be no — it’ll just be simply waiting, and the likelihood is that I'll be doing what everybody else will be doing, which is listening to the radio or watching TV, seeing what is happening as it begins on the other side of the world."
When I read this my skeptical antenna's went up, because why would he be watching TV or listening to a radio if the "believers" where going to be raptured away,they wouldn't be here to watch TV or listen to a radio, unless heaven or wherever the raptured are going will have TVs and radios.
Most Christians did not buy into this specific nonsense but they still believe that the rapture is going to happen. For example, Tim LaHaye famous for his Left Behind books and movies is your typical Christian response for he states in Huffington Post: "Instead, Lahaye sticks to the oft-cited passage from the Gospel of Matthew that is interpreted to mean the apocalypse will not be predicted:
But about that day or hour no one knows, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father (Matthew 24:36).
Lahaye points out that Camping has been wrong about the date of the end times before, and he goes on to explain:
You can be sure the rapture will not occur when anyone sets a date because God wants us all to live every day as though Christ could come today. A great motto for daily living is PERHAPS TODAY. For one day it will happen and we don't know when, but we don't want you to be left behind!"
This opens a can of worms for the belief in the Trinity (that the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit or Ghost are One Divine Being), for how can the Father and Son be one and they don't know what the other is thinking or knows.
This whole rapture fiasco should wake up people to even the prophecies in the bible, for they could have been just as wrong as Harold Camping and the other Henny Penny/ Chicken Little, who can't wait for the sky to fall. Think about it...
Black Socrates

Part 1: The African-American a Conservative: Christianity Still Enslaves the Mind Today

Hubert Harrison's essay: The Negro a Conservative: Christianity Still Enslaves the Mind of Those Whose Bodies It Has Long Held Bound which he published in the Truth Seeker, September 12, 1914 is still true today (97 years later). In the essay Harrison analyze and identify three areas as to why African-Americans are Conservative and why their minds are still enslaved by Christianity. The areas he discusses are education inequity, the affects of slavery and Christianity's role in Slavery, and the lack of economic freedom of circumstances, especially in leaders of thought.

Harrison opens the essay with the reflection that African Americans has taken part in every line of intellectual endeavor that Caucasians have, except for radical ideas like "theological criticism, religious dissent, social and political heresies such as Single Tax, Socialism, Anarchism; in other words, African-Americans are Theologically and for the most part Socially Conservative. For example, according to a Pew Forum on "A Religious Portrait of African-Americans" published July 30, 2009: "While the U.S. is generally considered a highly religious nation, African-Americans are markedly more religious on a variety of measures than the U.S. population as a whole, including level of affiliation with a religion, attendance at religious services, frequency of prayer and religion's importance in life. Compared with other racial and ethnic groups, African-Americans are among the most likely to report a formal religious affiliation, with fully 87% of African-Americans describing themselves as belonging to one religious group or another...The Landscape Survey also finds that nearly eight-in-ten African-Americans (79%) say religion is very important in their lives... Additionally, several measures illustrate the distinctiveness of the black community when it comes to religious practices and beliefs. More than half of African-Americans (53%) report attending religious services at least once a week, more than three-in-four (76%) say they pray on at least a daily basis and nearly nine-in-ten (88%) indicate they are absolutely certain that God exists. On each of these measures, African-Americans stand out as the most religiously committed racial or ethnic group in the nation...The Landscape Survey also shows that the link between religion and some social and political attitudes in the African-American community is very similar to that seen among the population overall. For instance, just as in the general public, African-Americans who are more religiously observant (as defined by frequency of worship service attendance and the importance of religion in their lives) are more likely to oppose abortion and homosexuality and more likely to report higher levels of conservative ideology. " Therefore, Harrison's assessment was correct that the African American is a Conservative was true in his time and they are today. The only area which African Americans are not socially conservative comes from economical reasons due to racism and discrimination, African-Americans believe in government involvement in social issues to protect civil rights, voting rights, and to open equal opportunities as well as create a social safety nets like Social Security, Medicaid, and Social Ware fare programs to offset the lack of economic equity in the United States. As a result, when African-Americans voted against prop 8 in significant numbers they were being true to their conservatism.

Part 2: The African-American a Conservative: Christianity Still Enslaves the Mind Today

The first reason Harrison highlights is the inequity in education, for example he states "when we consider that in certain southern counties the munificent sum of 58 cents is spent for the annual education of a Negro child" and the difficult task of even making it to college "we will cease to wonder at the dearth of thinkers who are radical on other than racial matters." Although this may not mean a reduction in African-Americans religiosity, according a 2002 Gallop poll concluded "that those with a lower level of education are more likely to "talk the talk" when it comes to religion -- that is, they're more likely to say they believe in God, place religion prominently in their lives, and recognize religion's importance in the world. But those with a higher level of education are as likely as those with less education to "walk the walk" -- by belonging to a congregation and attending services regularly. These results may point to a failure on the part of organized religion to attract and connect with those with a lower education level, perhaps reflecting the trend in the last century toward more highly educated clergy.
However, even though they do not belong in as great a number or attend as frequently as their more highly educated counterparts, those on the lower end of the educational scale have much more faith in religious institutions, perhaps reflecting a broader tendency to rely on institutions in other areas of their lives -- unions, HMOs, government agencies, etc. Those in this group have far less faith in the individuals at the head of their religious institutions -- the clergy -- than in the institutions themselves." In other words, The United States does not have a strong social safety net and so the poor have to reach out to religious institutions for assistents.

Part 3: The African-American a Conservative: Christianity Still Enslaves the Mind Today

In discussing Christianity's role in slavery, I too wonder with Harrison's assertion that "it would seem that the Negroes of all Americans, would be found in the Freethought fold, since they have suffered more than any other class of Americans from the dubious blessing of Christianity". For as Harrison illustrates the "dubious blessing" of Christianity, were 1. Christianity was used to justify the enslavement of Africans by using the bible for divine sanction of this "peculiar institution", with text such as "Cursed be Canaan", "Servants obey Your Masters" and 2. Christianity stressed "servile virtues of subservience and content" and as we can see "these things have bitten deeply into the souls of black folk." In other words, the very book they call the word of god and the Christian religion the Black folk follow was the very thing used to enslave them and it still does. The Christian Slaveholder knew the Christianity was an effective tool that could be used for subjugation, for they saw how it subdued the Roman Empire and the subsequent European tribes that came into contact with it. In fact, Harrison shows us how it was used in Africa to subdue and create colonialism through missionaries. For when the African closed their eyes the African had the bible and the Europeans had the land. He shows how B. L. Putnam Weale's book the Conflict of Color, naively advised the Lords of Empire (The Imperialist) not to civilize but Christianized Africa in the caption "The Black Sampson and White Delilah", so that "Delilah's work may well be done. Here in America her work has been well done and I fear that many years must pass before the leaders of thought among my people contribute many representatives to the cause of Freethought". 97 years later and still African-American leaders of thought among my people hasn't contributed much for the cause, for example, intellectuals like Cornell West and Michael Dyson, who is a Baptist minister, they both teach or have taught at Ivy League schools and proudly calls themselves Christians. Instead, of becoming theological critics or religious dissidents using historical or higher criticism or other methods that could help deliver their people from the mental bondage of their ancestor's slave-master religion (Christianity); they advocate and proclaim it! As Harrison states " the church among the Negroes exerts a more powerful influence than anything else in the sphere of ideas. Why is this? Harrison contends and I agree that "Nietzsche's contention that the ethics of Christianity are the slave ethics... Show me a population that is deeply religious and I will show you a servile population, content with whips and chains, content to eat the bread of sorrow and drink the waters of affliction. And he concludes that "Here in America the spirit of the Negro has been transformed by three centuries of subjection, physical and mental, so they have even glorified the fact of subjection and subservience. I think this "forbearance" was used during the civil rights movement that advocated "non-violence" and "is found in the fact that their spirits had been completely crushed by the system of slavery". For example, a lot of those who participated in the Civil Rights movement glorify and praise how African-Americans allow dogs to bite them and water through fire hoses to knock them down.

Part 4: The African-American a Conservative: Christianity Still Enslaves the Mind Today

Finally, he see economics playing a role in the enslavement of the mind, especially in African-Americans leaders of thought as he concludes "until Black Leaders are free by their circumstances, is when they will have freedom of thought," because if you make your living by the masses then you need to proclaim what the masses believe, in other words, he who pays the piper calls the tune. This is why a lot of the so-called African-American leaders are ministers.

Harrison essay explains how enslaved Africans adopt their Slaveholders religion and continues to, but I think there's an evolutionary and underlying reason too, it was for group cohesion and survival, especially after the end of slavery when over 4 million slaves found themselves free. For example, Nicholas Wade's book the Faith Instinct How Religion Evolved and Why it Endures argues how religion is key to our survival. Wade hold that natural selection can operate on groups, and that religion is a key tool for group survival, for groups that are cohesive will out compete groups that are less and thus will leave more offspring. In other words, belief in the supernatural was selected by evolution because it enhances our group cohesion by regulating our fertility, trade, warfare, social and national unity. As a result, African-Americans adopted Christianity because it is a slave ethic religion that was the dominant religion in the West and so it was easy for a group of people who had been transformed by three hundred years of subjection, physical and mental, to adopt a religion that had the slave mentality and ethic build into it and so African-Americans used religion through the Black Church to create group cohesion and bind themselves together in order to survive and pass on their genes. I think the way to break the chains of Christianity and other religions are through 1). Equal opportunity in Education and work will open opportunities for economic empowerment, 2) Strong Social Safety nets (countries with strong Social Welfare programs are less religious) and these two will lead to 3) Freedom of circumstances, which leads to freedom of thought. Think About It...

John Doe Socrates