Truth vs Happiness pt2 of 2

This is the conclusion of the previous article.

Imagine if you will you are in Greece, during the fall of the Roman Empire in the 4^th century. You are a slave. You have not eaten in two days. You work day and night to please your master at your own expense. There is no hope for the future. You are uneducated and your lifespan is typically not going past thirty five years if you’re lucky. You don’t know if the earth is flat, if the earth is the center of the universe. You have no family. They were either sold off, dead, and even worse. You have no explanation of why you are here, let alone the constant threat of death. You stare up at the stars, the clear black skies and yearn for a reason for being.

You are told of Christianity, told you mean something, told there is a place for you after death. You are promised everything. Imagine you are in a world where nothing good happens and finally, something good happens. A man bearing a cross around his neck hands you a loaf of bread. Christianity seems to hold a lot more merit now. You give Jesus and god credit for these good deeds. You feel happier now in this place. You never once question it as just the will of those men. You never think that they get something out of it. So it was that Christianity won the hearts of the peasants that greatly outnumbered the elite and wealthy.

Christians like to point out all the good they do now. When in this time if you were as I am or if you were a pagan the argument was “Oh you don’t agree with me?” Then they kill you. The fact they do not have this power now, this means that one day even they will die out as superstition or as all the other false gods that rule us. I dream that one day man will not be so hubris to think him so special, a day that we rise up from the chains that we do shackle ourselves with.

I like Christopher Hitchens and many others think that some people have this desire to be controlled. To have the burden of choice removed, that there is a desire to have this. You have to completely think this through. A presence that is capable of reading every one of your thoughts, observing your actions, and interfering in your life. Then there is a question of how many of them are there and which is which? Questions like why would a god favor one race, why would he damn woman, homosexuals, and everyone else in this book written not by him but man. Why appear after roughly ninety thousand years. Why abandon everyone during the dark ages. Until you finally get to a point where all the evidence is pointing to there being no god. You hold on to shreds as if you lost them from your hands you would die.

Then a depression sets in as you realize that you have spent years of your life shouting at nothing. Your brain makes the illusion come alive, so the body may survive. You come to terms with the fact that the universe is ultimately vast beyond the measure of our brains. You come to live your life to its fullest. You give up your fear of death, thinking it didn’t bother me the fourteen billion years I was dead why would it bother me after? You figure out that matter can be made from nothing. You observe that science can explain these things much better than this first attempt. With all this in mind you are one of the many who have freed their mind. For man has fought a long time for this one idea.