Politics III: State and Religion

One of the major absurdities of modern human societies are the concept of "Freedom of Religion" and "Separation of Church and State".

Religion is a term, which summarizes every kind of irrational human behavior. It is the antonym of education. When this relic of infantile behavior remains in adult human beings, it becomes a mental disorder.

How can a mental disorder claim freedom to be practiced? Freedom of Religion is essentially not different from "freedom of being schizophrenic" or "freedom to remain illiterate". Why should a state protect such aberrations or deficiencies of the human mind?

It is the duty of the state to encourage its citizens to seek education. This can be done by opening institutions of education like schools and universities to the public. Some states even provide free education to their citizens. But a school where religion is taught is not a school. Religion is the negation of everything education stands for. Students are supposed to acquire knowledge in schools and to learn methods of rational thinking. Religion does the opposite. It opposes and denies knowledge and discourages rational thinking. It is diametrically opposed to the efforts of a school.

The state therefore needs to protect children whose judgment can easily be influenced either in a positive or in a negative way from such harmful influences like religion, which could seriously threaten their mental health.

A school that permits the presence of religious teachings in its curriculum or religious symbols in its buildings and facilities is no school. And a state that permits them has failed its citizens and especially its future generation - its children.

Freedom of religion is no human right, because it is no individual right in its current definition. It is a violation of human rights, because it gives privileges to religious organizations so that they can break the laws and disrespect the individual rights of its members.

In the name of freedom of religion children are physically mutilated (circumcision) and coerced into boring and absurd rituals. Neither their human rights nor their dignity are respected. Therefore freedom of religion is not only no human right, but a gross violation of them. If privileges of religious organizations are protected by a constitution, it is a proof that the whole concept of human rights is not respected in this state.

Of course no citizen can be banned from believing whatever he wants and to practice whatever he wants in private. But this is not necessarily the case in public where it might become a nuisance for others (e.g. prayer in public places). When religions demand exceptions from laws, this is incompatible with the rule of law.

There are numerous examples where religious privileges are used to break laws and to undermine the principles of any legitimate state:

• Physical mutilation of the genitals of children
• Disrespect of animal protection laws by practicing ritual slaughter
• Noise pollution by church bells and loudspeakers from mosques
• Coercion to force certain dress codes on adolescents

Privileges like these violate the principle of equality before the law and are unacceptable. A state that grants privileges to religious organizations is illegitimate.

The separation of church and state is one example of such illegitimate privileges. There can be no separation or non-interference between church and state. This means there can be no separate realm for religious institutions to practice their unlawful traditions. The church, which is named here representatively for all religious institutions, must remain below the state authority and has to obey to the law like any other citizen.

A state has to be committed to rationalism and should therefore not recognize any religious institution.

Religion is a permanent cause of intolerance, violence and social disorder. It does not respect state authority and the rule of law. It should therefore have no place in a modern state.

Therefore the only right that might be granted to adult religious people is not to be reeducated by force. But tolerance towards religion should not go any further.

Politics II: Marriage

Recently the topic of same-sex marriages has become more and more popular. Many countries have changed their family laws in order to allow homosexual couples to be able to marry just like heterosexual couples. For some it is an advancement towards equality and against discrimination based on sexual orientation. For others it undermines the basic principles on which human society is built on.

This controversy is caused by the fact that marriage has a totally different meaning for people depending on their educational and cultural background.

Marriage as Partnership or Slavery?

In the Western society marriage means a kind of partnership between two people. It is historically derived from Hellenic/Roman and Germanic customs that paired one man and one woman together for reproduction purposes. Following the frequent contact among different civilizations, this European understanding of marriage has been paralleled with a completely different phenomenon in Middle Eastern and African societies. 

Such a concept of partnership between a man and a woman did not exist there. But the concept of slavery existed there. And women were considered natural slaves. They were purchased and became part of the household of their owner. Depending on personal wealth a master could have either one or many female slaves.

When Europeans made contact with these cultures, they misunderstood the nature of this relationship and mistranslated it as marriage. What was translated "wife" into English actually meant "female slave". This mistake in translation is first of all visible in the fact that for these cultures it was quite natural that a man could purchase as many women as his wealth allowed, while no female slave could of course have several masters. But even this observation did not make Europeans reconsidering their wrong translation, so up to the present day female slavery is totally legal in Arab and African countries, because it is not translated as such. However women are still exchanged against a certain amount of money or cattle and nobody considers this to be ethically wrong or thinks of human trafficking.

Even in the grammar of Bantu languages, we can still see how this misunderstanding is based on a wrong translation.

In Swaheli the sentence "Ali marries Sheila" means "Ali alimwoa Sheila".

So we should assume that "Sheila marries Ali" would mean "Sheila alimwoa Ali." But this is not the case.

The correct sentence is "Sheila aliolewa na Ali". "Aliolewa" is actually the passive form of "alimwoa" So the literal translation into English is "Sheila was married by Ali". It is grammatically impossible that a woman marries a man, she can only be married by a man.

The reason is that the verb "-oa" doesn'Ät mean "to marry" in the first place. It means "to purchase a slave girl".

Therefore the correct English translation for "Ali alimwoa Sheila" is "Ali purchases Sheila". And "Sheila aliolewa Ali" is "Sheila is purchased by Ali." It is quite logical that you cannot say Sheila purchases Ali, because Sheila is the slave, and a slave girl doesn't buy her master.

This is the actual understanding of "marriage" in many non-Western cultures. It is not a mutual relationship between two equal partners. It is the relationship between a master and a slave, two different roles that are not equal in any way.

This is why same-sex marriage is so radically opposed in those primitive patriarchal societies. It is unthinkable that two persons of the same gender could marry, because who would be the master and who would be the slave? A marriage has to be an unilateral relationship between two complementary social roles.

But even in Western countries there is a strong opposition against same-sex marriage, but mostly by religious conservative persons. The reason for it is obvious: Their understanding of marriage is based on the bible, which is a scripture of Middle Eastern, not European origin. Therefore the bible doesn't have the European concept of marriage as a partnership, but marriage as a master/servant-relationship.

Biological Concept of Marriage

Another argument against same-sex marriage is based on biology. Its main purpose is considered to be reproduction. Therefore it has to be between a man and a woman. The nuclear family is supposed to be the basic reproductive unit of the human society. This nuclear family is believed to consist of two parents (father and mother) and the children. This idea is based on the biological model that the father produces sperm cells and the mother produces egg cells. The fusion of the sperm cell and the egg cell becomes an embryo, which eventually develops into a child made of the two cells from both parents, mother and father.

Unfortunately this model is based on a misunderstanding of the fertilization process. The zygote (embryo cell) is not the result of the fusion of two cells (sperm and ovum). It is only the egg cell that develops into the embryo after the sperm cell injects its genetic data into it. The sperm cell itself dies after this process. The resulting embryo does not contain a single molecule from its father. All of its substance including all cell organelles are product of the mother. What remains from the original paternal chromosomes are only copies of their DNA sequence. The original DNA gets lost during the further development of the embryo, either metabolized or left in the placenta cells. There is no material link between the father and the child. They have only genetic information in common.

In other words the father only has the the copyright of a little less than 50% of the genetic information of the child. He makes no physical contribution to the child.

To fully understand what this means we have to take a closer look at the following situation:

If one of two monozygotic male twins impregnates a woman and she gives birth to a child, then both twins are equally fathers of the child. The one twin who had intercourse with the woman is not "more father" than his twin brother who might not even know the woman. The child has approx. 50% of the genetic information of these twins without any difference between them. There is no way to determine, which of the twins was the one who had sexual intercourse with the woman. There is in fact no biological distinction between these two fathers.

We have to understand that the term "father" is an abstract concept. It does not refer to a physical link between father and child. It only means that the father has provided about 50% of the genetic information of the child. He contributed information, not physical substance.

A child has actually only one parent - the mother.

Therefore in a biological sense the nuclear family only consists of mother and children, no father.

The single mother/child family therefore reflects much more the biological background than the father/mother/child family, which is only a cultural construct. And in many countries the single mother/child family becomes more and more the reality in the society.

This is the true basic unit of the human society.There is no biological justification to include a father in the nuclear family unit. The laws of our society should reflect this biological reality. Children belong to their mother, and their mother only. There is no biological justification to grant any privileges or authority to fathers. And therefore marriage between a father and the mother of a child is totally meaningless.

The relationship between a man and a woman should not be subject to any law. And it should not be allowed that anybody can claim any legal privileges from such an arrangement.

Why Marriage?

We have seen that marriage between a man and a woman has no biological justification. Furthermore we have seen that the concept of marriage has been abused to justify ethically questionable practices like female slavery. Marriage is therefore an immoral concept that is incompatible with human dignity and has been instrumental for the institutionalized oppression of women and children. It is the cause of many ills in our society. It should therefore be abolished.

It is unacceptable that our modern state recognizes this primitive and immoral practice.

Marriage should not be extended to same-sex couples. It should be outlawed even for heterosexual couples.

Politics I : No Victim - No Crime

There are many legal definitions of crimes depending on the different jurisdictions. Since these definitions are different, they are apparently arbitrary and invalid as universal definition or general principle.

In fact every human being knows quite well, what is a crime without the need of arbitrary codes of law that are only locally valid. 

Universal Definition of Crime:
Crime is the initiation of violence or the threat thereof.

Definition of Violence:
Violence is causing physical or material harm to somebody (victim) without his/her consent.

These definitions cannot be disputed even by a criminal. For example a thief would not dispute that theft constitutes a crime and argue that it should not be persecuted, because he trusts that the property that he acquires by his illegal act will later be protected as long as his illegal act is kept secret. If he did not trust that his illegally acquired property was protected, the theft itself would not make any sense, because the acquired property could be taken away from him at any time and he could not claim protection for it. The concept of protected property is a prerequisite of the action of theft. Without this concept, theft would make no sense. Therefore the universality of this definition of crime cannot be disputed even by persons who intend to break this rule, because if they dispute it, it would turn against themselves. This definition of crime is therefore a tautology.

However modern laws go far beyond this definition of crime. They have established so called "victimless crimes". Known examples are laws against drugs, the possession of weapons, prostitution etc.

These laws are a logical problem. They openly violate the definition of a crime as the initiation of violence. By disrespecting the principle of not initiating violence, they take away their own justification. If those who establish these concept of "victimless crimes" dispute the principle of non-initiation of violence, they have to accept that violence can be initiated against them on the same legal grounds. 

Persecution of anything that doesn't fulfill the above definition of crime constitutes a crime by itself.

If persons who possess drugs or weapons and have not harmed anybody are persecuted by the state, then the state itself has initiated violence and becomes a criminal. The victim would have the legitimate right of self-defense and to use violence against the unprovoked aggressor, which is the state in this case.

By disrespecting the principle of "not initiating violence", laws have lost any logical justification, because if the initiation of violence is legal, violence could even be initiated against state representatives without provocation. By disrespecting the universal definition of crime, a state deprives itself of any legitimacy and turned the rule of law into a reductio ad absurdum. A law that punishes victimless crimes is no law, because its premises are contradicting. Such a law is only an arbitrary act of aggression.

The Path of Logic

Manual for using logic and reason in daily life.

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The Spirit of Neo-Luddism

It was almost exactly 50 years ago on December14, 1962 that Mariner 2 reached Venus and sent radio signals back to Earth. But the space age shouldn't last for long. 10 years later NASA launched their last flight to the Moon. Today NASA is criticized for being"lost in space" and having no clear strategy for the future.

What happened with the space program is only the peak of the iceberg of the pathetic situation of mankind today in general. Since the beginning of the 70s there is an apparent decline in technology with only on exception: semi-conductors and computer technology. There can be no doubt that this technology has immensely advanced and continues to advance. But apart from that, there is nothing positive to report.

• Mankind is not able to get to the Moon anymore. A second attempt by the so called Constellation program utterly failed and had to be cancelled.
• The space shuttle was never able to fulfill its expectations (launch from any airport, cheap, fully reusable) and is now also cancelled.
• Long range travel with supersonic speed cannot be achieved anymore since the Concord has been grounded.
• At the beginning of the 70s mankind was just a small step away from commercial nuclear fusion reactors. No progress has been made since then and even nuclear fission reactors are shut down worldwide (Germany, Japan).
• Prototypes of sophisticated car engines were developed in the 60s and early 70s with electric fuel engines or pistonless rotary engines (Wankel engine). However we still drive cars with primitive combustion engines based on the design of Nikolaus Otto at the end of the 19th century.

An entire generation has obviously refused to do anything to advance mankind any further. And this phenomenon is not only visible when it comes to technology but also in the mindset of our current generation.

• Any technological progress is perceived primarily as negative.
• Any investment in a space program or new technologies (e.g. magnetic levitation trains) is considered to be a waste of money. However feeding unproductive masses in order to multiply their numbers is considered useful spending.
• Creationism has become a widely accepted and equally valid theory along with evolution.
• Religious superstition has returned and displaced humanism and reason (Evangelical christianity has become more and more influential in the US. Islam has resurged first in Persia 1979, then all over the Middle East.)
• Human rights have become undermined. Censorship has become more and more accepted to suppress whatever is considered offensive, blasphemous, immoral, or not politically correct.
• The state has been empowered to enact arbitrary laws in total disrespect of individual freedom as long as it can be claimed that it is for the common good (e.g. public health, security, etc.)
• Preindustrial tribal cultures have their primitive traditions equally valued as modern humanist philosophy.
• The gold standard was abolished in the beginning of the 70s creating the perfect means to accumulate wealth without producing anything and playing with virtual numbers, effectively establishing a financial aristocracy. Now even primitive tribal chieftains from the Arabian Peninsula can enjoy full respect of the international community by joining the financial aristocracy.
• Theoretical physics with its useless mathematical models without any practical application has superseded real science and engineering. Physics has become a matter of faith where we have to believe the revelations of this new academic clergy who alone have the authority to decree "scientific truth" (Big Bang, dark matter, singularities, n-dimensional string theory etc.).

All this is the result of the irrational neo-Luddite mindset of one generation: the so called "baby boomers". They have brought humanity to an effective standstill and led us on a path back into the medieval Dark Ages.

Why is it that old sci-fi  movies from the 60s look more futuristic than a sci-fi movie of today that only excels in unrealistic special effects that tell no story? This is the spirit of today. The generation of the last decades prefers impossible dream worlds over the real world. They don't care about what is possible or not, because they prefer thrilling entertainment in the safety of their homes. This is what led to the success of computer technology, which enables these impossible dream worlds to become true, even if it is only on a computer screen.The only important thing is that no risks are involved.

Even modern wars must not cause any harm anymore. They are fought remotely with drones controlled from 10,000 miles away on a screen by an employee with an 8-hours office shift. The military obviously very much enjoys playing war, much more than 40 or 50 years ago, when wars were actually dangerous and involved the threat of a nuclear holocaust. But today's wars should not be too real with real casualties on either side. It has become easy and fun to attack another country, since no real risk is involved and its outcome will not change any status quo. It just keeps the usual conflicts going on. Before one side can win, a cease-fire is declared, so both sides can keep their face and go on with their eternal conflict. This is where the generation of today prefers to spend money on, instead of funding space missions.

Humanity is definitely on the wrong track. There is no way that we will ever progress again, if we continue on this path. We have to go back to the way of thinking that was still prevalent in the 60s and start over. Whatever mankind has done since then should be discarded, because nothing good has come out of it.

We need a new positive way of thinking. We have to embrace progress and technology. We have to understand that the future of mankind is in space. We don't need to waste our efforts on Earth. Earth has already been colonized by man. There is nothing more that we can hope to achieve here on this planet.

We need better engines, better energy sources (nuclear fusion) and new visions for the future. We have to get rid of superstition and religion, tribalism, ethical indifference and a nanny state that promotes wrong values. We need to be willing to take risks, to open our minds up for new ideas. We need bravery and courage, not an urge of safety and social security. We have to understand that quality is more important than quantity. It is better to put effort in one expensive but really advanced invention than equipping the masses with cheap junk technology for their entertainment.

If mankind manages to build a colony on another planet, it will be remembered for all human history. But nobody will remember, if we manage to equip everybody on this planet with the latest model of the iPhone,r a flat screen TV with 3D capability or an economic car. We should make positive sci-fi movies about the future, not negative dystopias that are so fashionable these days. 

We need to put an end to the spirit of neo-Luddism of the baby boomer generation, or otherwise mankind will have no future. 

The "Big Bang" Cult

Astronomer at the California Institute of Technology have just corrected the supposed age of the oldest known galaxy to 13.3 billion years using photos by the Hubble telescope. This means that this galaxy already existed in the form as we see it today only 380 million years after the supposed beginning of the universe. 

Nevertheless they still stick to the obsolete Big Bang theory.

How would galaxies as they exist today have formed after just 380 million years and then continued unchanged for the next 13.4 billion years in a totally different environment? The universe was much smaller, hotter and denser in this time. It was shortly after its energy condensed into matter. There is no scenario imaginable how matter would have aggregated into galaxies with fully developed stars in such a short time. So if you apply common sense then the Big Bang theory has now been utterly disproved. There is no way that the Big Bang could have occurred 13.7 billion years ago, and an earlier date doesn't fit into current models of this theory. But theoretical physics simply refuses to accept the overwhelming evidence. 

Fact is that the Big Bang theory cannot hold anymore. We have to accept some kind of steady state theory as cosmological model. The steady state theories have their own problem too, but at least not such serious problems as the Big Bang theory, which is totally unable to explain the observations that we can make with our telescopes.

The universe has no beginning, at least not in form of a Big Bang. This is now certain beyond any doubt. The Big Bang theory is dead, so dead as any scientific theory can possibly be. And those who deny this fact can only have other motives than scientific reasoning. Theoretical physicists have become just as stubborn as creationists. They insist in a similar theory of a young universe in spite of plenty of evidence for the contrary.

This recently corrected age for the aforementioned galaxy is not the only example for objects that are simply too old for a universe created by a Big Bang. Globular clusters have also be suspected to be possibly older than the "Big Bang universe" due to their composition of stars. And objects, which are apparently too old for the universe, are not the only problem that the Big Bang theory has.

For today's theoretical physicists the Big Bang theory has become unfalsifiable. For this reason it ceases to be a scientific theory. It is a faith.

The Big Bang theory is part of a creationist cult, because without it there would be no place for a divine creator of the universe. But all observational evidence points in the same direction: The universe has no beginning, so it was not created, and therefore there cannot be a creator.

The Big Bang is no science anymore it is a cult, with a creation myth not different from the book of Genesis or Greek or Sumerian mythology.

Half-Knowledge

There are three distinct approaches of forming an opinion about a certain topic:

The first one is based on what I'd like to call "naivety". This means someone has little or know knowledge about a topic and forms his opinion based on his first impression and simple conclusions from his own direct observations.

The second one is based on what I'd like to call "knowledge". This means one has some kind of knowledge about a topic, but this is either incomplete or partially based on wrong data.

The third one would necessarily be based on "full knowledge" and would therefore be the optimal approach.

I'd like to explain this further by an example, which is quite fitting for our current season of the year.

Some years ago during Christmas time there was an article in newspaper somewhere in Latin America, which had conducted a survey among school children about the meaning of Christmas. The children were asked, why Christmas was celebrated. In Spanish Christmas is called "Navidad", so this allows no direct conclusion to a Christian background from its name.

One child answered that Christmas was a family holiday, where everybody comes together and has a big family dinner. Another one told the journalist that it is a holiday where children get a lot of gifts. A third child answered that it is a celebration of peace worldwide.

So the journalist who wrote the article was outraged that today's children were totally unaware of the original meaning of Christmas and that it had lost any spiritual meaning to the young generation. Of course he was convinced that the children were totally ignorant of the truth and that Christmas was the celebration of the birthday of Jesus Christ.

At least this was what  he had learned. And assuming that his education was so far superior than that of these children, he could only pity them for their lack of knowledge.

However he was wrong. There is no record about the date of the birth of Jesus of Nazareth. The church declared arbitrarily the 25th of December to be his birthday, because it was the date of a pagan festival (winter solstice, Saturnalia), which was very popular. In order to erase the pagan background of this festival, they gave it a Christian meaning. So they established the tradition to celebrate Jesus' birthday at this date. Although most other Christmas traditions had nothing to do with Christianity but with the original pagan meaning, e. g. the Christmas tree, the candles, the Christmas gifts etc.

Therefore the seemingly ignorant school children were far closer to the truth than the outraged journalist with his half-knowledge about the topic. In fact Christmas has far more to do with gifts, family and peace than with the birthday of Jesus of Nazareth, which is very unlikely to have occurred on  a 25th of December.

I this example the children based their opinion on naivety, while the journalist based it on half-knowledge that led him farther away from the truth.

Hardly anybody of us is free from that kind of half-knowledge. And many of us make the same mistake as this journalist. We assume us to be more educated than seemingly naive and ignorant people but we might ourselves have misguided opinions based on our education that is possibly incomplete or contains false data. 

The problem is that the one whose knowledge is incomplete or false is never aware of this fact and believes his knowledge to be complete and true. He simply cannot know that there is more necessary data to form a correct opinion. 

To demonstrate how ubiquitous this phenomenon is, I will give another example. 

A common cold is a viral infection of the upper respiratory tract.

Some naive people frequently try to treat this disease with antibiotics.

This behavior is vehemently criticized by physicians and scientists. Since a common cold is caused by a virus and antibiotics are only effective against bacteria, this treatment is totally useless and might even be harmful due to the negative side-effects of antibiotics... - according to their opinion, which is again based on half-knowledge.

The empirical fact is that antibiotics are indeed effective against a common cold. Some scientists try to explain this fact away by attributing it to the placebo effect of those antibiotic. However antibiotics are even then effective, when they are not expected to be so by the patient in cases when they are prescribed against a totally different disease stopping the respiratory infection only as a side-effect.

The reason is that the human body is a more complex system than the simplistic mechanical model of those physicians and scientists. The most severe symptoms of the common cold are not caused by the virus itself that is responsible for the initial infection but by opportunistic bacterial infections of the affected respiratory tissue. And against these opportunistic bacteria antibiotics are quite well effective. Once the opportunistic bacterial infection is suppressed, the immune system can deal with the remaining viral infection much faster and more efficient.

Again the half-knowledge of those scientists and physicians who learned that antibiotics don't work against a virus has misled them to an opinion, which is farther away from the truth than the naive opinion of those people who have no clue about the mechanisms of infections at all.

Half-knowledge is dangerous. It can lead to inferior decisions than even total ignorance of a subject. The problem is that we can never be sure, if we have really full knowledge about a topic or only half-knowledge. This is why we should always be skeptical about everything we believe to know. We should not right away discard any naive opinion of rather ignorant people who form their opinions just on personal observation and no education. We should always question ourselves and what we have learned from our education.

Book Authority

One major obstacle to rational thinking is a phenomenon, which has been called "book authority". It is a philosophical method in which an argument is proven by reference to a written source that enjoys ultimate authority over a topic.

The most obvious example are religious scriptures. They are supposed to be of divine origin and therefore enjoy a higher authority than any other form of human epistemology including rationalism or empiricism. This means a believer would rather trust a scripture than his own logical conclusions or personal experience. 

People with Western secular education usually believe to be free from such methodical fallacies, but this is unfortunately not the case.

I'd like to recount at this occasion a recent experience that I had during a discussion with a friend. This friend of mine is not particular religious and has a full Western school education, so he should actually have been familiar with the scientific method.

During a conversation about the tides of the sea level, he made the statement that the tides would shift daily for a length of 25 minutes. This means high tide would be every day 25 minutes later than the day before. I quickly calculated this number and came to the conclusion that the time shift had to be about double the time. However he insisted that it was 25 minutes, because he had read this number somewhere.

So I demonstrated him by an easy calculation that this could not be true:

The tides are caused by the moon. The moon orbits Earth in about 29 days and one day has 24 hours. Therefore the time shift had to be 24h/29 days = 50min/day. 

My friend did still not agree. 

He was fully aware that the tides are caused by the moon, that a moon cycle has 29 days and that every day has 24 hours, but he was still not willing to accept the validity of this simple calculation just because he had read a different value somewhere. This means he was willing to accept that 24h/29 days = 25min/day just because it was written in some unknown book and although it contradicts a simple mathematical calculation. that he could easily do himself. He had given "book authority" priority over his own ability to calculate.

His belief in "book authority" was even more obvious, when he later asked me to back up my claim by a link from the Internet. So he was willing to accept another "book authority", but unwilling to give up his false belief just based on logic and mathematics. 

Unfortunately we have a lot of people acting this way. They want a written proof, and be it an article from Wikipedia, in oder to believe something. Logical reasoning is not enough for them. 

I have also made similar experiences during discussions with other scientists. Even if somebody just makes a logical conclusion, they ask for a source for it. Providing references and sources has become an obsession. It is almost like scholastic theology in the Middle Ages. You need to back up everything with a quote from the bible. Famous scientists like Einstein or Hawkins are quoted as some kind of divine authority. If Einstein said so, it has to be true, even if it is beyond our understanding, because he is supposed to have had some sort of supernatural inspiration about how the universe works.

This way of thinking has nothing to do with the scientific method. It is not rational. It is some kind of outsourcing of thinking. For some reason, be it laziness or lack of self-confidence, people are unwilling to think for themselves. So they let others think for them, trusting fully in their authority on the subject.

Well, if you want to outsource your thinking, you better have some very competent authorities. Unfortunately this is often not the case because these authorities may have their own agenda, which might not be finding out the truth or letting you find out the truth. 

Our own ability to reason and logic should always be the highest authority, not some person or some books. 

But the most problematic issue is that most people are not even aware, when they put their trust in "book authority" instead of reason and logic. Observe yourself next time when you look up something in Wikipedia in order to decide an argument that you just had. Are you just putting all your trust into a guy, because he has an academic title, or a book from a respectable publisher or are you really able to understand what is told and is it in accordance with your own observations and rational conclusions?

Freedom of Religion

Freedom of religion is widely considered to be a human right. But by the very definition of a human right, it is the right of a human being, not the right of a deity. There can be no right for a deity to impose his or her rules over humans and call this a human right. It might be a divine right, but this is certainly not what human rights are supposed to be about.

Religions are a community of believers at best, and no human right protects the privileges of communities, human rights only protect individuals.

The term "freedom of religion" was actually based on the concept "freedom from religion". No individual should be forced by the state to obey certain religious doctrines. Every individual should be free to believe whatever he or she wanted, no matter what the predominant religion of his or her country was. This is what freedom of religion is about.

Unfortunately today religious community abuse the term "freedom of religion" to enforce their doctrines on others.

A recent example is Germany, where ritual circumcision of minors has been banned by a court decision. Now Jewish and Muslim organizations claim that their human rights, their "freedom of religion" has been violated. They fail to understand that their religion does not enjoy any freedom under the protection of human rights. Only individuals, in this case underage children, enjoy any protection of human rights. They are protected from physical mutilation by their parent,s before they are old enough to make such severe decisions on their own.

The whole issue of "freedom of religion" seems to be too complicated for religious people to understand. They don't understand that it only means that nobody can be told what to believe. It does not protect any faith or any religion.

The best solution would be to avoid further confusions and abolish the idea of "freedom of religion" at all. Religion should not be mentioned in the context of human rights. The right of everybody to hold any opinion he wants and not to be persecuted for it, is already protected by other human rights. There is no need to mention religious opinions separately.

Organized religions should not have a right to their existence. Religion is a mental disorder. To protect a religion is like protecting schizophrenia. It is time to strip religions from any kind of privileges or protection. We might not want to force religious people to undergo treatment for their mental disorder, but they should certainly not get any special acknowledgement for it.

Religion is no value, it is a erroneous method of thinking. It is a serious problem that affects the capacity of logic reasoning. Therefore measures should be taken to encourage people to overcome religion. Furthermore we cannot allow people that suffer from religion to make important decisions, which means their political rights need to me restricted, if it becomes obvious that they make decisions based on superstitious believes instead of reason.

It would be wrong to show tolerance towards religion, just as it is wrong to show tolerance towards any other mental disease. They are diseases and as such they are a problem.

If humanity wants to become a truly intelligent lifeform, we have to overcome religion and other forms of superstition. It is time to take decisive measures against religions. We need a zero-tolerance policy against any kind of public expressions of religion.

Nobody can be told what to think, but there can be limits to what he is allowed to do in order to prevent harm from others. And spreading a mental disease is certainly harmful for others. Making statements that you can't prove, is wrong, and it should be treated as such. Therefore religion needs to disappear from the public.

Religious people have been treated with too much leniency for far too long. We have to treat them as what they are - as some sick people.

Nudity

The odd relationship between nudity and modern religions defies any logic. For unknown reasons all of today's world religions abhor the the idea of not having the human, especially the female, body covered by some kind of clothes. The most extreme cases are the islamic dress codes that include covering the face. The influence of these religions has made most countries to enact laws effectively banning nudity even for people who don't belong to these superstitious cults. Even the guidelines of the provider of this blog has such restrictions in place banning me from adding a fitting illustration to this topic.

What might be the reason for such irrational restrictions?

Considering that nudity is the natural state of human beings and therefore inevitable during certain circumstitions like birth, body hygiene and replacement of clothes, it appears counterintuitive that there are legal restrictions against nudity instead against excessive clothing, which might sometimes be a security concern.

The restrictions against nudity are apparently related to religion. The more religious a country is, the more restrictive it is against nudity, which can be seen by comparing Europe with Saudi Arabia to name just two examples. Historically the origin of this taboo can be found in the so called Abrahamic religions, although modern India, which is predominantly Hindu, is very restrictive in this matter too. However this seems to be caused by many centuries of Islamic influence. Ancient India before its first contact with Islam seems not to have had this taboo as we can see by the depictions of ancient Hindu temples. Therefore the common denominator of the irrational taboo of nudity seems to be the Abrahamic faith. It might therefore be a good idea to look at the scriptures of these religions in order to find the reasoning behind it.

Since the quran is no original scripture but based on Christian and Jewish sources, we only need to look into these older scriptures. Considering that the Abrahamic faith believes that its deity is the creator of nature, it is quite ironical that the "Work of God" should need to be covered by a "Work of Man". The opposite would make more sense. There would be good reasons that Abrahamic religions should ban clothes and instead require humans to be nude with few exceptions. According to the book of Genesis, the first book of the bible, that includes the Jewish/Christian creation myth, the origin of wearing clothes is closely related to the Original Sin and man's expulsion from paradise.

Genesis 3:6 - 3:11:

And when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was pleasant to the eyes, and a tree to be desired to make one wise, she took of the fruit thereof, and did eat, and gave also unto her husband with her; and he did eat.

And the eyes of them both were opened, and they knew that they were naked; and they sewed fig leaves together, and made themselves aprons.

And they heard the voice of the Lord God walking in the garden in the cool of the day: and Adam and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the Lord God amongst the trees of the garden.

And the Lord God called unto Adam, and said unto him, Where art thou?

And he said, I heard thy voice in the garden, and I was afraid, because I was naked; and I hid myself.

And he said, Who told thee that thou wast naked? Hast thou eaten of the tree, whereof I commanded thee that thou shouldest not eat? 

From this chapter of the torah/bible it is quite clear that clothes are a serious offense to the Abrahamic god and therefore sinful. If we follow the religious logic, clothes are the work of Satan (the serpent) and should therefore be banned.

Nevertheless the opposite is the case. Religious people don't get tired settig up minimum requirements of how much clothes needs to be worn. The reason for it is obviously not a divine revelation as we have seen. It seems to have something to do with the general stance towards human sexuality. 

Nudity is associated with sexuality. This is why it is opposed with or without being based on the scriptures. The hatred of the Abrahamic religions against sexuality is also visible in the eagerness of these people to mutilate the genitals of their offspring. The Abrahamic religions have become a refuge for people with severe sexual disorders that enables them to justify their aberrant behavior. If somebody is for some reasons incapable of normal sexual relationships, he naturally seeks refuge in religion. This is how religions have become an asylum for people with all kind of sexual perversions. There are the pedophile Catholic priests; there is Islam with its sex-obsessed prophet raping captives and abusing a 7-years-old girl; and there is the overproportional ratio of homosexuality among Arabs and Catholic priests and monks.

These people have used the power of their religious institutions to influence the society according to their personal sexual aberrations.

This is why we have restrictions on nudity everywhere: in publications, broadcastings, public places. They can be found everywhere, in any country of the world, although they make no sense at all and defy any attempt to understand their reasoning. We have allowed pathologically aberrant people to dictate our laws. Perverted behavior has become so commonplace that we don't even dare to question it. And we have to live with insane laws that seem to be made in a madhouse.