Vail Daily letter: Blind faith
Astronomers have calculated the universe to be about 15 billion years old, and planet Earth first started to coalesce into its present form approximately 4.5 billion years ago. The oldest remains of our ancient human ancestors that have been discovered thus far date back some 4.4 million years to Ardipithecus ramidus in Africa; Homo erectus lived about 1.8 million years ago and modern man, Homo sapiens, began to evolve just 250,000 years ago.
During the course of our evolution to date, the evidence is overwhelming that the tribes, societies, city states, nations and regions that held the strongest belief in a single tutelary deity stood a far greater chance of surviving their enemies and thus advancing to the next level of evolution than those who did not embrace such a unifying belief.
Until very recently, science had been unable to produce and document solid answers to questions about many aspects of the world around us, and it was a simple matter for would-be rulers who wished to control others to ascribe the unknown as the work of some sort of deity. Ancient witch-doctors, shamans and priests knew this to be so and used illiteracy, the fear of the unknown and the hollow promise of a glorious afterlife to lay the foundations of religious cults around the world.
Over time, two of these cults have proved to be dominate; and today Christianity has 2.1 billion followers while Islam has about 1.6 billion adherents and the gap is rapidly closing. The difference between these two cults/religions could not be more different, and the developed, civilized world ignores the differences at its extreme peril.
“Muslims have been poor, illiterate, war mongering savages for 1,400 years because they are kept hostage by Islam, a medieval hate ideology perpetrated by a criminal and lunatic who suffered depression, raped, murdered and robbed other people, flew around on a ‘winged donkey,’ and had no control of his bestial urges, desires and distorted ego” — Dr. Farrukh Salem.
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Today, approximately 78 percent of Christendom knows how to read and write, while only 40 percent of the followers of Islam are literate. As religion tends to flourish wherever poverty, ignorance and illiteracy prevail; it is no wonder that the Muslim faith is now growing at a rate of twice that of Christianity and why rulers in the Muslim world continue to deny their followers access to a science-based education in order to keep them under their thumb and living in a third-world state of backwardness, squalor and despair.
Blind faith in different deities has been among the root causes of warfare throughout the history of mankind; and the ongoing struggle between Christians and Muslims, given the destructive power of modern weapons of mass destruction, if not soon brought to a halt will one day likely result in the deaths of many millions of human beings, and could very well threaten the survival of all life on the planet.
Peter Bergh
Edwards