I found this article while looking through some old stuff I wrote and I decided to share it with you as it is (with only minor fixes made).
This article is not anti-religious. It does not speak against the faith of the heart that is the source of morality, compassion and courage. Rather, it aims to expose the deception that is at the base of the unholy trinity, religion + politics + money, and warn that it can never bring about any good, even when the original intentions are pure.
Let me start by saying that I can not honestly define myself as an atheist. On the other hand, I also can not say I am the follower of any institutional religion. I believe that there's something beyond, but I have no way to explain or illustrate what it is. All I can do, is to try to live my life according to my way - its way.
I have quite a few religious friends. Jews, Christians, Muslim and others, and I'm not saying that in an attempt to justify my position, but because I really have no problem being friendly with people whose beliefs differ, even very much, than my own as long as they do not stand for things I can not agree with completely. For example, I do not have (to my knowledge) any friends that are members of a devil worshiping cult (I've heard that they burn cats).
On the other hand I have some secular friends that still fall victim to fraud which I am about to reveal here. How? Well, they play Lotto.
Twice a week for almost seven years, I heared some of my friends at work say that tomorrow they are going to resign after they will surely win the first prize in the lottery. Twice a week I tried to explain to them that they are the victims of fraud.
Not only that the chance of winning the first prize in the Israeli lottery is extremely small (about one to 16 million) but the national lottery is not even fair in dividing the prize money. For example, the chance to guess five numbers is only 30 times smaller than the chance to guess 6 and win the grand prize, and still the second prize is one-thousandth of the first prize. But explaining all that to my friends did not help me to persuade them because they always had the same reply - “It's a fact that someone always wins!”
What does all this Lottery talk have to do with religion? Read on. I'll explain.
But before I explain, let's see what to do with the ultimate argument of my friends: “If someone always wins, so why not us?” Well the answer is that while the chances of a particular combination of six guesses to win is very small but remains constant, the prospect that some of the players will win is rapidly growing as the number lottery tickets sent increases.
Let's look at a simpler example of rolling a dice. Suppose a die is rolled again and again to get a certain result. Let's say 5. The chance of 5 coming out in a specific roll is 1 to 6, and that remains constant. But the chances of not ever getting 5 , decreases rapidly with the number of rolls because it is equal to five sixths to the power of the number of rolls. This means that after four tosses the chance that none of them gave 5, is about one half and after 10 throws it is only about one sixth. The same thing happens with the lottery. A specific combination has a very small chance to win, but because of the great number of tickets sent, the chance that someone will win is quite good. In this way it is very easy to entice people to participate in the lottery because they see that someone wins and ask, "Why wouldn't I?".
Wait, I will explain in a moment how this is related to priests, rabbis, and the like.
Another important thing to notice here is that the National Lottery itself is not taking any chances. From their point of view everything is completely deterministic - they make a lot of money. For sure. "Well," you might say, "but at least the money goes to good causes. Building schools, helping children in distress and the like". That may be true but let's call it by its real name: lotteries are nothing but a sophisticated form of tax. This is what we call it when establishments take our money and supposedly return it back to the public in the form of various services.
But that is still not really the problem. I'll be back to the real problem and the deception that is behind it in a moment, but before that I have to explain how is this related to religion and God, or the gods, before you stop reading...
Well, maybe you already understood. Isn't organized religion just like a form of a lottery. We are promised all kinds of benefits in this world and the afterworld, but what exactly we have to do in order to get them is something that no one really understands, sometimes it seems to be working tough (in which case we call it a miracle), and it always costs money - weather in the form of payments for various religious services or in the form of donations - and who would dare not to donate when God is looking... Yet I'm not satisfied with such an allegorical connection. I argue that institutionalized religion and the Lottery are exactly the same.
To understand why let's go about 5,000 years back to when the bloom big agricultural civilizations in Mesopotamia, Egypt, China and elsewhere started. The economic and cultural flowering of these cultures was made possible because they found out that in some cases they can predict the future. But in fact when I say "they" I mean of course only a small portion of the people of these cultures.
At just about the same time and probably in an independent manner, wise people in all sorts of places in the world learned about the relationship between the location of various celestial bodies in the sky and seasonal and climatic phenomena such as rainfall or the tidal of rivers. They found they could determine for example, when to sow and when to reap.
This ability has brought economical and cultural prosperity to the countries where the knowledge accumulated, and it became so crucial, that it was worth investing almost everything in its developing and maintenance. Among other things, we find in the relics of these cultures, impressive monuments that served as celestial calendars, or as other tools to improve predictability. Such are for example some of pyramids in Egypt and South America, the Stonehenge site in England and a site called Rujm Al Hiri in the Golan Heights. Of course these sites and the sages that predicted the future with their assistance, soon became sacred because of their importance and because of the mystery surrounding the prophetic ability.
Today we know that the connection between the movement of heavenly bodies in relation to the earth and weather phenomena is of course the Earth's rotation around the sun, but for people who did not know that, it was hard not to see here a kind of mysterious guiding hand. So basically this is how religion was born.
Something else also happened. People came to the priests and sages, asking them for predictions in all kind of domains - "Are we going to have a son born?", "Will we achieve wealth and longevity?", "Should we go to war?". The sages had a problem. They could not predict such things using astronomical means, but then they realized that it is enough that their predictions will be only sometimes correct, and that the likelihood of this happening grow rapidly as the flow of people seeking their advice increases. People that the prophecy made for them was fulfilled quickly told their friends in astonishment, and this led to an increase in the current of applicants. Soon the sages discovered that they can use simple and cheaper prediction tools like I Ching sticks, Tarot cards and coffee mud.
Years passed, beliefs and religions rose and fell, but the winner principle remained the same – and all the time money was involved too. Big Money. People that wanted to please the gods and increase the chances that they will listen to their requests showered gifts and bribes on the representatives of the gods on earth, leaders who realized the political potential inherent in religion invested all the money of their kingdoms, building huge temples and making the priests and other religious establishment workers filthy rich so that they will work for them, and this is how the unholy trinity religion + politics + money was born, and still you may ask, “what's wrong with that?”
You might argue that in the basis of everything there is still the simple faith in the heart of the people which shows the way to morality and act as a unifying factor in society, and that religious institutions were and still are those who care most for social justice and helping the weak, and are in many cases the driving force behind struggles for liberation. Well, my answer is that this only happens sometimes and according the same principle I explained above, is remembered more often than the much more common case in which monstrous religious establishments become a heavy burden on the shoulders of society at best and a force driving fanaticism, violence and enslavement at worst. Why? To understand this, let's return to the example of the National Lottery.
Most of the process that drives the mechanism behind the National Lottery is boring and tiresome. True, there is drama twice a week when the draw is aired on TV, and now and then there will be a celebration for the opening a new lottery funded youth center somewhere, but otherwise the National Lottery is just huge and boring tax collection mechanism. The thing is that under it all there is big money. Much bigger than you may think.
Pending funds are deposited into in various investment funds and accumulate interest, coupons are derived in a more or less legal manners, and everything depends on the large numbers principle and therefore must constantly rise, grow and attract more people. When this is how things work, the original goal and good intentions are abandoned because big money has a life of its own. The same thing happens to all religious beliefs. They begin in small, idealistic and good intended communities, seeking a way to express the faith in the heart of the community members. There's no denying to the essential and positive forces that exist in this process at the beginning. It is clear that Martin Luther King for example, owes at least some of his success to the fact that he could say, "If we are wrong, then Jesus was wrong" and that Jesus himself would not have become such a powerful symbol if he would not begin his career as the leader of the idealistic and somewhat naive cult in a remote edge of the Roman Empire.
However, once religion is successful and becomes an object of hope for many people, as soon as it strives to grow and reach large audiences (and who would not want that when they believe that truth is in their hands?), it must end up relying on the statistical phenomenon I described here, and thus the inevitable end is that it will become a distortion and deception.
So in conclusion, I did not write against the simple belief that there must be in the heart of every person. Rather, it is my conviction that the humble, truthful believers of all religions must stand up and fight this monster that turns on its creator and its victims are first and foremost those that it claims it represents and speaks for.