Many of you have heard the expression that someone or some thing ‘hates …. like the devil hated Holy Water’. I firmly suspect that nowhere in history has that dictum been more applicable than in the relationship between religion and science. So, we are free to apply it here—Religion hates science like the devil hates Holy Water.
From an historical perspective, we are aware that all religion was generated in the pseudoscience of astrology, combined with mythology, superstition, and imagination. That was all they had to rely on. It started for western-world religions some twenty-four hundred years ago with the Egyptians recognizing the ‘Zodiac’ and assigning certain influences to it. From there, it evolved through a myriad of gods and goddesses who exerted specific controls and virtues. Eventually, the Hebrews recognized a singular God who created and controlled everything in their universe which amounted to what they could see—sun, moon, stars, comets, and planets. They had no idea about the real universe they lived in—trillions of galaxies containing trillions and trillions of stars and other celestial bodies.
Simultaneously, the Far-easterners, and inhabitants of the Western world recognized the presence of eternal being(s) which existed in everything as well as in some faraway places in the sky—whatever their collective imaginations dictated. In turn, each group developed its own set of understandings of their god(s) and, furthermore, most devised methods of honoring and/or appeasing their god(s).
As far as I can determine, the Hebrews were the only group who developed a God patterned exactly after their own nature—He could be loving or hateful, merciful or vengeful, accepting or rejecting. More importantly, He could be bargaining. Even though He was all-powerful, the Hebrews believed they were obliged to create contracts with their God and ‘hold his toes to the fire’. By their own admission, they ‘got their tail feathers singed’ when God reneged on the first contract. But they were persistent and ‘made God’ honor the second one—such was their imagination and audacity.
We are familiar with ‘the rest of the story—Jesus. The Jews had Jesus killed for teaching heresy—love of God and neighbor. In fact, I am convinced that the Jewish Christians who formed the Holy Roman Catholic Church in the year 325 AD, having already experienced the bonanza of power, control, and lucre, were not the least bit inclined to honor Jesus’ teachings of humility and love. Instead, in direct defiance of Jesus, they formulated a church patterned exactly after Jewish sacrificial ritual with them as the controller and dispenser of Divine graces. Mind you, at that point in time, there still was no scientific information available—the earth was flat; the earth was the center of the universe; the celestial bodies exerted supernatural powers over them, ala astrology; the earth was supported on five crooked, wobbly legs and was always in danger of falling into the netherworld below. They knew no truth, but they did know how to put and keep themselves in total control while milking the hard-earned resources of their subjects—the very thing which Jesus railed against that got him killed.
Things went well as long as Constantine and his son who followed him as Emperor of the Roman Empire were alive. However, with the fall of the Roman Empire, their powerbase was destroyed and, to put it mildly, all hell broke loose. There was a parade of bad Popes; priests and popes alike became sexual predators; squandering popes depleted the Vatican coffers prompting the sale of indulgences to rich people who aspired to have a glimmer of hope of getting to heaven — an indulgence is vehicle by which a certain amount of time in Purgatory can be reduced. Not all popes were bad, but many turned to ascetics such as Jerome and Augustine for answers to philosophical questions such as original sin and the role and/or value of women in the church. Women became so deprecated that it was determined that women represented sin—were it not for women, men wouldn’t sin.
In the meantime, because of power struggles between Rome and the Eastern Church generated mainly by disagreements about married priests and sexual matters in general, plus a lingering argument about the Holy Spirit, a complete split occurred beginning in 1054. In 1095, the Pope instigated the Crusades to win back the Holy Land which had been conquered and occupied by the Mohammedans. The Crusades lasted intermittently until 1396.
Two hundred years earlier, the inquisitions were instituted to eliminate witches and to protect the earth from falling into the netherworld by unlawful sexual activity—sexual intercourse was prohibited on any elevated structure and violators were burned at the stake. That prohibition was generated by the superstitious idea that the shaking caused by sexual activity on an elevated structure would cause the earth to topple from its wobbly legs into the netherworld below. The Church seemed to be in near-total shambles. There still was no science.
In the year 1497 Vasco da Gama sailed to the Far East and back proving the earth was round but three years passed before the Pope ceased burning people at the stake for denying it was flat. Then, in the early 1600’s, Galileo discovered the sun to be the center of our solar system. He escaped burning at the stake by making a public recantation of his findings before the Inquisition. However, he spent the last nine years of his life under house arrest.
Science was beginning. The word science comes from the Latin word Scientia which means knowledge. Knowledge, of course, is truth. Prior to Vasco da Gama and Galileo there was little if any pure truth known. The great Greek and Roman philosophers based all their premises on astrology and mythology. Therefore, all their conclusions were false. Thomas Aquinas, whose philosophy the Catholic Church adopted, also based his methodology on Aristotelian philosophy. Aquinas, for purposes of staying in line with biblical and Church teaching, developed a dualistic philosophy which puts God in one place and his creation in another–not only two different places but also two different natures.
Shortly after taking office, Pope Francis is said to have stated that there is no such place as hell — that idea had been dreamed up by the Church to scare people into submission. In addition, in response to the conservative outcry at his apparent liberalism, the Pope said: ‘None of the rules have changed. We just got to stop talking about them’ (paraphrased). It seems obvious to me that statement was intended to infer that with the passage of time, the Church could pretend the rules never existed in the first place add purge them from the system — all that designed to stem the tide of people dropping out of the Church.
Many great thinkers, among whom I disclaim membership, throughout the centuries, have recognized the presence of God ‘in’ all his creation. That is, in fact, what Jesus taught us— ‘split a piece of wood, and I’ll be there; lift a rock and find me there’ (paraphrased).
Since I have irrefutably defined the Essence of God as; God is A Perfect Rational Being, and since the understanding of Quantum Mechanics (particle physics) clearly demonstrates that everything in this universe is ‘perfect’ in both form and function, it is not only logical, but I believe mandatory, to accept the premise that nothing in existence can be unless the Holy Spirit (Will of God) resides within it. That understanding means that God is certainly in everything as Jesus, Saint Francis of Assisi, Meister Eckart and many others have proclaimed That understanding also brings God and science into ‘perfect unity’. God is science. God is Perfect Truth. There can be no truth outside God’s Perfect Truth System which is demonstrated conclusively by the perfection of every basic particle of energy (quantum) in existence.
So, where does that leave us? I do not know about you, but I do know about me— it left me ‘crying out for truth’ from a wilderness of mythology, astrology, witchcraft, superstition, ignorance and deceit.
What I have observed during the last seventy years is a continuous ‘squirming’ by the Church to gradually bringing itself into some scientific alignment without losing credibility. Its plan is a subtle long-term acceptance of scientific principles and an equally subtle ‘sweeping under the carpet’ of archaic and erroneous ideas as the generations go by, knowing that those who remember will soon be gone, and those remaining have little or no interest in studying history. So, the Church pretends — ‘it’s always been that way’.
It truly breaks my heart to say this, but I know of no religion, now or ever, which teaches anything remotely similar to God’s truth — I know of no legitimate religion.
I have elucidated these findings and many, many more in my books, Wilderness Cry, Peace in Spirituality, and Provocative Catholic. In addition, I have published a semi-autobiography, Growing Up in fancy Farm Kentucky. All are available Amazon-Kindle.
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WILDERNESS CRY by Hilary L Hunt MD 