Why Do Humans Worship Gods?

In this book Wilberforce proposed daunting questions and exposed uncomfortable truths about religion, particularly Christianity – its role in colonialism, capitalism, slavery, and Jim Crow.

The human instinct to worship a superior being and the consequence of this attribute are evaluated by the author. Ever since humans have evolved to the level of consciousness where we started to ask ourselves the question, “Who am I?” we conceptualized a God who made it all happen.

These existential concepts that we have correctly or erroneously adopted come with confusion and contradictions. Does an anthropomorphic God who is loving and caring allow or cause a tsunami or pandemic to kill millions of people? Would the same loving and caring God allow one group of people to use his name to facilitate the dehumanization and pillaging of another group of people? The answers to these questions are usually not objectively explored because of religious and cultural biases. ,

Why do humans worship gods? Humans seem to have an innate desire to have a sense of fulfillment in our lives. Psychologist Abraham Maslow called this “self-actualization.” This desire for self-actualization comes in different forms and may either be benign or malignant. Thus we have the “Mother Theresas” of the world and the “Jim Joneses” of the world, all trying to be self-actualized in their own way. We also have the “Habitat for Humanity” type of politicians and the “Thousand Years Reich” type of politicians. Some of us aspire to go out in a blaze of glory by massacring as many people as possible at a school or other large gatherings, using high caliber rifles; all for the sake of self-actualization. Most of us are just satisfied with being a part of a clique.

This book, WHY DO HUMANS WORSHIP GODS? aims to tease out  verifiable truth from among folklores and myths that religions have spawned over the millennia. The book also exposes the use of religion as a tool to justify colonial atrocities and pacify the victims. It also exposes the wanton rape and ravaging of Africa’s vast wealth by Europeans. Religion was used to justify slavery and Jim Crow.

This book dares to ask questions that are usually avoided for social and political reasons. It also exposes historical facts that are traditionally “swept under the rug” for religious and political expediency. Was the Bible written by “inspired men of God?” Did the Roman Empire hijack and corrupt the Christian religion to serve its own nefarious schemes? Why is it not generally known that Christian crusaders slaughtered tens of thousands of Jews and Muslims in Jerusalem in the first Christian crusade, and millions of people were killed by the Roman Catholics to enforce the Roman Catholic version of Christianity? Why is it not generally known that Pope Nicholas the 5th issued a papal decree sanctioning Europeans (initially Spanish and Portuguese) to “search out and capture all Saracans and pagans (mainly people from Africa,) and to reduce their persons to perpetual slavery.” Why is it not generally known that Christians in Europe and the United States were generally complicit with slavery and colonialism? It is also not generally known that abolitionists and freedom fighters including white people of conscience fought along with blacks to end slavery and Jim Crow. These things are generally not known because, in our culture, it is expedient not to expose these negative historical facts.

In addition to the reign of terror by Christian zealots for over a thousand years, is the indoctrination of people in their sphere of influence that there is a “Heavenly Father” who resides in a palatial mansion called Heaven somewhere in the sky or incognito on earth, who controls every breath that every living creature takes, who is the provider of every morsel we eat. This “Heavenly Father” causes everything to happen and can stop everything from happening if we pray to him hard enough — from our personal wellbeing to hurricanes, tornados, and earthquakes, to the Covid-19 pandemic. Most of us believe and practice this unquestioningly, even though it is blatantly obvious that all these acts of “Divine Providence” do not happen in the real world.

To purchase a copy of this book just do an internet search for:

Why Do Humans Worship Gods? by Wilberforce Reid,

then buy from the bookstore of your choice.

You can also search by using the ISBN number                     
Hard cover:  ISBN number 979-8-3694-1548-1
Soft cover:  ISBN number 979-8-3694-1547-4
e-Book:  ISBN number 979-8-3694-1546-7

EXCERPTS

Preview: This book is not about the existence or non-existence of an omnipotent and omniscient God who creates everything in the universe, it is about the improbable things people claim that God is doing for them. According to statistics from the United Nations, 25,000 people worldwide, including innocent children, die each day from hunger. Yet most of us in blind obedience to our religious indoctrination, give thanks to God each day for providing humanity with our daily bread, quite oblivious of the fact that 25,000 people die from hunger each day. After emerging from our prayers of thanks to God for providing our daily bread, we rush off to work, because if we do not work we will end up begging for our daily bread. If you cannot leave your house and no one is aware of your situation, you will certainly die from hunger or whatever else is afflicting you, because God will not show up to help……

Page 24: The meeting of people in churches, mosques and synagogues plays a very important part in our society and the personal lives of people. These are the places that the majority of people go to express themselves in various ways. These are the places where people who have the talent to sing go to make their voices heard, where people who think that they have the gift of a public speaker practice their skills. Places of worship provide more than just a place where individuals worship their gods; it is a place where souls come together like long lost cogs that belong together in a virtual machine. This virtual machine provides the “cluck-cluck” stimulation, the members respond with the “pee-pee” dedication…… [See “pee-pee cluck-cluck” personality preceding this excerpt].

Page 38:  If a god provides our daily sustenance, which god? Was it the god of the Christians and Jews? Was it Zeus the Greek god? Was it Vishnu the Hindu god? Was it Ahura Mazda the Mesopotamian god? Was it Olorun the African god? These are not facetious questions; it is right and proper to question every issue until absolute and universal truth emerges. The concept that the Earth was flat was held as the truth for a very long time, but that belief was not an absolute and universal truth…..

Page 159: This is the nature of evolution; the mutations that cause the mutant to be more viable in a particular environment would give the mutant a better chance of survival, and the mutations that do not, would inhibit the survival of the unimproved mutants. If this process continues over millions of years, these gradual changes can make an organism take on a completely different appearance from what it looked like in the beginning…..

Page 189: If anyone really thinks that it is God who makes the plant produce food and not energy from the sun, for a couple of weeks, cover the plant with an opaque box so that the plant is in darkness. Not only will it stop producing food, but it will also die. Could God not get through the box to sustain the plant and make it continue producing food?…..

Page 277: Slavery in America. In 1993, historian Clarence J. Munford estimated the value of the labor performed by black slaves in the United States between 1619 and 1865, compounded with 6 percent interest, to be US$97.1 trillion. In today’s dollars, without further compound interest added, that would be US$172 trillion. As for the continent of Africa, thousands of trillions of dollars valued  in current United States currency was expropriated, stolen or confiscated in raw gold and diamonds alone……  

Page 299: Lynching in America. This was the state of the Christianity practiced in America. The same people who lynched a black man for walking behind a white woman, and those who hung the woman upside down for denouncing her husband’s lynching, set her on fire, and then disemboweled her so that the unborn baby in her womb fell out of her gut to the ground were the same people who, more than likely put on their Sunday best on Sunday morning and went to church to praise God for the privilege and satisfaction of killing other human beings without consequence. They must have convinced themselves that God had given them the supreme authority to do so. What of the loving and merciful God we serve? The people who committed or condoned these wanton atrocities considered themselves Christians and were convinced that they were such because they suffered no consequence for their evil deeds. It is logical to assume that they had concluded that if they were doing something wrong, God would have punished them. They must have believed that their atrocities were in the ambit of God’s moral law, otherwise, how come they were still so prosperous and “superior” to black people, whereas God had done nothing to protect other races of people? ……