Our president has made some fascinating comments in the recent past regarding “false religion,” referring to the Islamic faith.

What should our response be to all those false religions scurrying around out there? You can’t cluster-bomb mass deception, or shoot a patriot missile into a bogus belief. The only effective weapon of change the human race has over ignorance is very slow, and does not go “boom!”

Ideally, we are taught truthful ideas that have proven worth, handed down from elders to their children. A key element is filtering out that which is untrue or does not work, and refining the lessons to replace those items with that which is true.
People are not born Christian or Muslim, or any other religion. They are taught these ideas from early childhood, and surprisingly few have the individuality to question their training.

Religions that focus on an afterlife evoke very powerful emotions, because the thought of death is very frightening.
There is no shame in this fear. We all share it, and to deny it is to deny a part of our humanity. Sadly, many have used this fear to advance their own causes, and afterlife theologies have bloomed fruitfully through the centuries.

As the world grows ever smaller we face the formidable task of dealing with religious differences, and we have conflicting ideas about just whose god is real and whose is fantasy.

It is high time all theologies are held up to the warm light of reason. These ancient beliefs carry with them the emotional power to invoke deeds of great passion from their proponents, such as the crashing of planes into buildings, suicide bombings, witch burnings, abortion clinic shootings and relegating women to servitude. Every religion needs to be thoroughly analyzed for its underlying truth or falsehood.

In simpler times a man could claim he had spoken with god and been bestowed with divine wisdom, and people might be amazed and name that man a prophet. When men today claim to speak directly with god, we know them by different names.

Nevertheless, it is not all that strange that people can believe in things we have not experienced ourselves. We are trained from childhood to believe everything our parents tell us, because this significantly streamlines the learning process.
The process of believing your elders is completely natural, and works very well in most cases. However, when an untruth is delivered to the child’s unquestioning mind as a fact, it can be very hard to shake later on.

With some abrupt changes in what we teach our young (and some time) we could rise above our past negative training, and go far into the distant future as an enlightened race, but we need to have parents and leaders with the courage to teach that vision and bring it into reality, instead of furthering the same “my god is better than your god” childishness that once brought us a dark age that lasted a thousand years and now could bring one that lasts forever.

The article above was found on Google and was published originally on arbiter online.com