Is Religion at the Root of Mankind’s Problems? by
Rango 2019/05/28 11:08
"WHEN religion is not encouraging strife it is acting as a drug which numbs the human conscience and fills the human brain with escapist fantasies. . . . [It] causes human beings to be narrow, superstitious, full of hatred and fear.†The former Methodist missionary who wrote that added: “These charges are true. There is bad and good religion.â€â€”Start Your Own Religion.
'Surely that is unfair criticism,’ some may say. Yet, who can deny the facts of history? To a large extent, religion—defined as “the service and worship of God or the supernaturalâ€â€”has a shocking record. It should enlighten and inspire us. More often than not, however, what it does is engender strife, intolerance, and hatred. Why is that?
A Misleading “Angel of Lightâ€
According to the Bible, there is a very simple answer. Posing as “an angel of light,†Satan the Devil has misled millions into following his teachings rather than God’s. (2 Corinthians 11:14) The apostle John showed that Satan’s influence is so extensive that “the whole world is lying in the power of the wicked one.†(1 John 5:19) John knew that Satan was “misleading the entire inhabited earth.â€â€”Revelation 12:9.
What have been the consequences of this? Satan has promoted religious systems that on the surface appear to be holy. They have “a façade of ‘religion,’†but their true condition is exposed by the evil fruitage they produce. (2 Timothy 3:5, J. B. Phillips; Matthew 7:15-20) Instead of helping to solve mankind’s problems, religion actually becomes part of the problem.
Do not quickly dismiss that idea as being farfetched or unreasonable. Remember, the very nature of deception is that the one being deceived is unaware of it. The apostle Paul gave an example of this when he wrote: “The things which the nations sacrifice they sacrifice to demons, and not to God.†(1 Corinthians 10:20) Those people would likely have been shocked to think that they were worshiping demons. They thought that they were worshiping a good god, or gods, of some kind. Yet, in reality they had been deceived by “wicked spirit forces in the heavenly places,†who support Satan in his efforts to mislead mankind.—Ephesians 6:12.Let us consider, for example, how Satan managed to deceive and mislead many professed Christians who chose to ignore the apostle John’s warning about that evil influence.—1 Corinthians 10:12
What Jesus Taught Came From God
“What I teach,†said Jesus Christ, “is not mine, but belongs to him that sent me.†(John 7:16) Yes, what he taught was from Almighty God. So Jesus’ teachings had a powerful, uplifting effect on those who listened to him. They did not ‘numb the human conscience or fill the human brain with escapist fantasies.’ On the contrary, Jesus’ teachings set people free from religious error and human philosophies produced by a world that was “in darkness mentally†because of the Devil’s deception.—Ephesians 4:18; Matthew 15:14; John 8:31, 32.
True Christians were identified, not by a mere profession of piety, but by a faith that reflected the beautiful qualities produced by God’s holy spirit. (Galatians 5:22, 23; James 1:22; 2:26) Outstanding among these qualities—and the identifying mark of genuine Christianity—is the sublime quality of love.—John 13:34, 35.Note this crucial point, however: Neither Jesus nor his apostles expected the Christian congregation to continue in the form in which it was originally established. They knew that apostasy would develop and that the true religion would be overshadowed for a time