Superstition to be Banned

When we take rumours or hunches, though unproven, as facts and act upon them, when we take customs and rituals as natural laws and let us be ruled by them, we are superstitious wrecks. When, as is shown by all history and is demonstrable every day in our age (1985), a religion, a superstition, is a cause for fierce wars, heavy loss of life, indiscriminate slaughter, torture, rape, devastation, (Lebanon, India, Pakistan, Ireland, Sri Lanka, South-Africa (43), etc.) this is sufficient reason and very imperative indeed to ban out all religions here and now. With Lucretius, in regard to the butchery of Iphigenia:

Such are the heights of wickedness to which men are driven by superstition.

A second reason for this is that people are burdened, for life, with the misery of sin, and a fear for death (the hereafter). A deadly superstition, ruling and ending life indeed. The commonsensical philosophies of 2000 years ago, that showed us the perfect attitudes towards life and death, have been over shouted by stupid, stubborn, superstitions, for the greed of a few. One should have experienced it himself, as I did, this tremendous feeling of liberation, of relief, as is preciously described by Lucretius too, when one becomes able to think freely.
A third, yet also important reason is the impossibility to develop any sort of science (ethics especially) when one takes an influence into account (gods, mermaids, sperrits, etc.) that has never been demonstrated, is only a rumour, is totally unlikely to exist, and, should it exist, would be totally unpredictable. The most simple formulae like: half M times the square of V, or: velocity is the distance divided by the time, become un-usable when a never to be known, incalculable factor is introduced, nay, these formulae have only become usable just because they have proved to be correct in our reality without these mystical, mysterious factors (44). One is free to believe in sperrits (the term is from Long John Silver), gods, ghosts, mermaids, centaurs, nymphs, pseudo-analysis (45), flat earths, inhabited moons, ufo's, psycho kinesis, etc., but one has not the right to let society be ruled according to the (hypothetical) laws of these illusions. One cannot have rumours ruling life, nor have them ruling scientific facts. A rumour, an opinion, as everybody knows, becomes not truer by an increase of the number of believers. After all, we know that man is a cruel bastard, he has no human dignity at all. He does not shrink from throwing live animals in boiling water (crabs, lobster), and this cruelty combined with superstition, gives to the most ugly slaughtering. With regard to the fundamental rights and duties of man, (of every man), we have no right to induce (communicate, indoctrinate, etc.) misery producing ideas in our children. We have the duty, they have the right, to truth only (Russell, Spencer, Wells, etc.).

In this modern world, it is, I hold, second to murder to starve and cripple the mind of a child. Wells, Outlook.

When one wants to think crazy, it is his own right, but to propagate it as truth, is contradictory to the rights of others. Suppose a nuclear fanatic THINKS that some god has given him the task of destroying the whole god-less planet! After the flood, the book indeed promised the next destruction to be fire, nuclear fire. The creed is: You may think as crazy as you want, as long as you do not deviate from telling knowable truth, telling it to children, teach it. The same rule goes for the man who wants to sell coloured water in small bottles at the market place. He has the right to try to sell them, but not to state that they are powerful medicines. Knowable truth is not that gods and mermaids do not exist (an unwarranted statement of atheists), but it is that they have never been found to exist (46) In our daily life there are many superstitions that need only a scientific exposure and a will to draw conclusions from these exposures. They are the cause of stupidities, irrational and automatic behaviour (in ideas first) that must produce stupidity in our children, our whole life. They cause, as Wells put it: impromptu riot of cripples and deaf and blind minds, in our press and current discussions. What more reason does one need for a most strict censure on teachers, parents and the media? Democracy and freedom of the press, are violations of the rights of man. We only have to read the papers, follow a discussion or lecture on the radio or television to smack a total absence of the will to think superstition-free, and the absence of knowledge about fundamental ethics. We notice overall commerce, a thwarting of truth for the sake of selling, applause, and disinterest in any rights & duties. After all, that is already a most strict censure in itself, only a non-sensible one. Fascism, Communism, Socialism, etc. are as much superstitions, superstitious beliefs in an ordering for a better world, as is every religion. They are real illusions, i.e. totally void of any relation with reality, with man's nature. Says Warwick Deeping:

For Sorrell's sufferings and struggles had not led him towards the illusion of socialism. He had seen too much of human nature.

A beautiful example of an everyday superstition is: it is Sunday. Nobody would dream to realize that it is not, that we simply call it so, that it would give us tremendous gain (gratis) when we changed this stupidity for rationality (47). A child soon observes that the Sunday is precisely the same as any other day. There is the same lighting arrangement in the sky, there are as many rainy Sundays as rainy other days, etc. It will also wonder why we have to go and enjoy (!) ourselves on a crowded beach when tomorrow (Monday) it is empty. When grown up, it might wonder why all these precious buildings, factories, offices, power stations, shops, etc. are standing and doing nothing during 2 out of every 7 days, a 28 %. Thus the new earth citizen today, starts off with being forced to find stupidities the normal. It has to learn not to say 'tooth's' and 'foots' but teeth and feet. Then it learns the superstition of Sunday, of weekend. When it enters primary school, these stupidities are reinforced by the teacher, and it has to learn some more. Not only does one hear khet, but one has to write it as cat, with the sound-symbol of cate. It also learns the superstitions of their nation being the best, of the flag, their solely important language, of gods, sperrits and so on. No wonder it will grow up into an individual with a strong tendency for the superstitional (and for applause), to let superstition and applause prevail over basic rationality, over the rights of man. No wonder too, that it then finds it normal when historians write in the present tense (for silly applause) while realizing that the present can only report about all things that of necessity happens simultaneously, in the 'now', and that the past tense admits the possibility to have Plato putting on his clothes first and then going out, all that in a reality of 2500 years ago. (The present does not exist because it has no time factor, and all reality, physics and mind alike are time-structures. The present has no time, we can make it a knife-edge, as thin as we like (a limit).) The child has become an adult, even a scientist, though craziness is not foreign to it. In Wyndham's Chocky:

... if everybody goes around pretending to believe in things that aren't there, how on earth is a child going to distinguish what really is, from what really isn't?

Superstition, like all false ideas about our reality, costs lives and causes misery, stupidity and unhappiness in people. We find in Sinclair Lewis' The God Seekers:

Many pastors and thinkers believe that darkies (dark coloured humans) are like hosses and beef-critters: act real cute and knowing all right, but not got one speck of a soul to be saved or to be reprobated and to writhe in eternal fiery torment. May be they're lucky.

Indeed they should be when compared to a superstition-ruled man. Or, to show you something of the sad pollution of little minds, in the same book:

What a sanctified little miss she is! Had a strong conviction of sin at five (!!!), and used to go off and pray in a closet.

Happiness is synonymous with the absence of superstition. But we should not try to fight superstition by means of fire and the sword as Christianity, Islam, Fascism, Communism and others try to promote their creed. Instead, we should fight it by common sense and science, education, by example. This, however, will not always work. Epictetus remarked that it is very difficult to convince one who, in the teeth (tooth's) of facts, sticks to his false ideas, his superstitions, his wrong opinions (about reality). In such cases we must either join them in their silliness, and, clap our hands with the children or, when we want a new and better world, there is no other way than to use ridicule. Let them feel our contempt for self-imposed slavery, for silly superstitions, for journalists that demand freedom of speech, while happy under the most stupid censure of their own making. When reason does not work, and the sword is out of the question, ridicule is the next best thing. Ridicule is exactly the opposite of applause the ruler of insane life. Applause means control over the applauders, and contempt for what one controls. Ridicule shows our contempt, thus shows us to be in control (of reason). With Lewis, this time his Arrowsmith:

More terrible than their rage is the people's laughter.