Dogma is Merely a Perpetuation of Myth

The earliest known existence of ceremonial rites dates back more than 300,000 years ago to burial practices of Hominids walking the earth at that time.

In fact, the more righteous religions of today would have you believe that the world is no more than five or maybe six thousand years old. There has been overwhelming scientific evidence to dispel that notion over the past few centuries.

So why do religions such as Christianity and Islam cling so tightly to the mythologies and superstitions that compel them to believe in a variance that spans hundreds of thousands of years?

It’s simple, really. Religions are a construct of man, and have been altered by man over the course of hundreds and even thousands of years. Furthermore, when you’ve got a niche that brings you unquestioning obedience and extraordinary wealth, why ruin a good thing?

Make no mistake, gods were invented by humans out of very logical, primitive fears. Most of these fears were due to the misunderstanding of the incredible forces of nature that could not yet be explained in scientific terms. “Making the Break” by Dr. Reginald Exton puts this in very reasonable perspective.

In nearly every case, whether the teachings of Ra, The Book of the Dead, Judaism, the Papyrus of Ani, Confucianism, Christianity or Islam, the stories and myths were most often handed down orally, and then written down years (often centuries) later.

That alone should provide enough evidence for the existence of error and inaccuracy in these ancient beliefs. Imagine standing up in a room of 50 people and whispering, “I just saw a small fly” to the person next to you. Have them repeat this until it reaches the 50^th person and see just how much that simple sentence has changed. Now, imagine entire belief systems, ones that take up volumes of books, being passed down among millions of people over hundreds of years before a decided documentation is accepted. (The First Counsel of Nicea is just one example). The overt perversion to the origin of these fear-based faiths is head spinning.

Ancient peoples (particularly sided to dogmatic faith) lacked the tools or systems of knowledge to understand the seismic causes for earthquakes, the atmospheric conditions for extreme weather, or even the premise of space rocks burning up in our atmosphere (shooting stars, or more accurately, meteors). It was merely a fear of nature and a deep lack of understanding of the sky that perpetuated the need for a belief system for personal comfort.

Today’s more organized religions are merely sophisticated extensions of ancient fears. Those who continue to live in fear according to the origins of those religions remain in denial of the advances of not only scientific evidence, but the evolution of human thought that has allowed us the ability to be able to now reason with what were once fears, but are now very well understood causes for natural phenomenon.

Among the dogmatic followers of today’s religions, their conscious choice to avert knowledge and free will perpetuates their religious rhetoric that is persuasive enough to keep them happy. Very often, because of these misunderstood and inaccurate, ancient beliefs, their dogmata interferes with politics and finds more modern ways to oppress those who refuse to fall victim to their same inability to grasp reason.

It’s worth mentioning that there is a difference between spirituality and religious dogma, just as there is a difference between those who live their lives according to the compassionate principles of their chosen religion and those who follow ancient texts as a guideline for their life and everyone else’s.

Even objectively, I struggle to understand the reason for one to associate in any way to a belief system that has parallel teachings of evil and righteous oppression, but it seems that in the fight to rid the world of the extreme danger of dogma, our greatest allies are perhaps those who follow the more peaceful and understanding premises of their chosen religion, regardless of what that religion may be. – So long as that following does not impede on the free will of those who do not believe in those particular ideologies. Religious persecution stemming from any theological system reverts right back to those loose, ancient fears.

We have evolved to be smarter, more adaptable creatures with amazing resources and technological advances available to us in order to logically understand the fears that once led our ancestral human beings to create gods and myths as the only reason to explain the world around us. We’re wiser now, we don’t need myths to explain what we have testable means to prove or disprove.  We need to negate fear-based dogma that is not falsifiable and only creates more fear and judgment at the hands of the religiously detached extremists among any sect.