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In his recent book, WHY DO HUMANS WORSHIP GODS?, he proposed daunting questions and exposed uncomfortable truths about Christianity – its role in colonialism, capitalism, slavery, and Jim Crow.
In his book, MY JAMAICAN EXPERIENCE, he documented, mainly for the younger generation, what it was like to grow up in rural Jamaica in the 60s and 70s.
Books
by Wilberforce Reid
3 thoughts on “Books<br>by Wilberforce Reid”
I enjoyed reading this book. Although I don’t agree with your perspective on God, I was enlightened about the use made of early Christianity to abuse and enslave others who believed differently. It’s a good read.
The author’s perspective on God may have been misconstrued. The author has no opinion on the existence or nonexistence of God. What the author is advocating is that there is no material or scientific evidence that the God that theists worship is feeding, protecting, healing and answering their prayers as they claim. It is evident that prayers have the ability to heal one’s emotional or physical illness, but this healing comes from the fact that one’s emotion can cause their body to produce hormones and neurotransmitters to effect or inhibit healing. There is no evidence that this healing or affliction is handed down from a divine deity. I have seen people pray to God to heal sick loved ones, if the loved ones get better, God is given the glory for invoking the miracle. If the loved one dies, God is still giving the glory because it is said that he knows best and whatever he does is the right thing. If no one prays for God to heal those loved ones, their chance of survival is no less than if they were prayed for. I have seen people pray for God to stop hurricane, flood, starvation in Yemen, and even the ravages of Covid -19, yet the Holy Father ignored all the supplications.
If a group of people choose to worship a rock in someone’s backyard as their god and start praying to that rock to provide their daily bread and heal their sickness, who am I to say that they do not have a god that they are worshiping? However, I can say that I do not see any evidence of their prayers being answered by their god, just as I am saying that I do not see any evidence of the prayers of the Christian/Jewish/Muslim God being answered. The rock-worshiper or the Cristian can claim that their God is providing every morsel for them to eat, or every breath they take, yet if they do not go to work for that daily bread, or beg, or steal, they will surely die from starvation.
Religion has been the arbiter that has defined our perception of everything in the universe ever since humans acquired the ability to think. This was necessarily so because our ability to prove, or at least to logically rationalize what we imagined, was still infantile. Science was not in existence at that time. Our primordial minds imagined that everything happened because a god commanded it to happen, and that the gods had the mental and physical attributes of human beings, but were infinitely more powerful. Then science gradually made its way into the human experience and found that there is a natural law that governs the existence of everything. The only problem is that this natural law is completely neutral to human sensibilities, it does not respond to what humans wish or pray for.
The primordial human mindset is static, it does not change as new knowledge is acquired. Because of this mindset, the Roman Catholic Church, which was the de facto ruler of what used to be the Roman Empire, convicted Galileo Galilei, and sentenced him to house arrest for the rest of his life for daring to write that the Earth is not the center of the universe. This same mindset is denying Darwinian evolution and is impeding research into the mutation and treatment of pathogens. This same mindset is denying that human activities are increasing the average temperature of the earth which is causing devastating climate changes. This mindset is generally anti-science because the advocates are generally pro-religion.
To contemplate what role God plays in this scheme of things, one will first have to define his or her concept of God. It is scary for anyone to be subservient to the doctrine of a deity that can only be experienced by blind faith in what an ancient guru postulated, or an ancient Pope decreed; where people believe something even though it is totally illogical, just because an old guru or an old pope said so; where the only intrinsic tool one has to determine what is true from what is fake is his or her own imperfect mind. It is necessary for humans to use backup tools such as logic and established facts.
On the other hand, there are those who believe strongly that God (or whatever you name your divine deity) is one and the same as Mother Nature, that there are natural, physical, not supernatural, forces that cause rain to fall or flowers to bloom, lightning to flash and thunder to blast, that causes people to get sick and die or recover from illness. They may believe strongly that these forces are the forces that dictate the laws of physics and chemistry. They know that they are yet to learn what these mysterious forces are. They know that they are yet to understand what caused life to happen, but they also know that to imagine how it happened and then assume that what they imagine is reality, is borderline insanity. They believe that love and hate, bigotry and tolerance, passion and passivity, anger and happiness are the consequences of their actions, their culture, and their genetics, not a curse or blessing from God.