Sam Harris is Right

If I have learned anything in my life, it is that people are fundamentally the same everywhere, no matter what they like to believe. Death remains mysterious to
all and so there has been a great deal of effort at concocting stories so people will feel better.

Growing up, I used to hear about Hinduism and how we Brahmins are the learned group and all that, while ignoring the decades of cruelty we have inflicted on what the "upper class" consider the "lower class" because of who their parents were. In their own small world, each group goes on living with their secure knowledge that somehow they are superior and the world is wrong.

Sam Harris has written a book titled "Letter to a Chrisian Nation" - it is an eye opener. His earlier book was titled "The End of Faith". He lambasts Christians, Jews, Muslims for their blind belief in ancient texts and what they seem willing to
ignore and for their cherry picking parts of the Bible or the Koran for words that they somehow like or are willing to accept.

The Christians have perhaps the simplest of philosophies - do whatever you want for however long you want as long you accept Christ and you will go to heaven. The killers of 9/11 who flew airplanes into buildings and kill thousands of innocent civilians believed that they were martyrs and will go to heaven since they were killing infidels. Hindus believe that once you are born into some family, it means something had happened to you in some previous life and so you are doomed unless you do this, that, whatever and however you are told - and you may achieve nirvana or whatever. Rubbish. The fear of what happens after we die is so strong that we humans are conditioned to believe anything someone years ago has said. There is absolutely no difference in what Hindus, Muslims, Jews, Christians, add-anything-here believe - though each group would want everyone else to
believe that they know the answer and they are the world's holiest, best people. Absolute Rubbish.

The Muslims go on a rampage because a Dutch Cartoonist lampoons the Prophet Muhammad. This came after the flying into buildings and the killing of thousands of innocent people to teach the United States a lesson - or something. The Hindus are on a rampage in India now, upset at the depiction of Goddess India without her clothes on by a Muslim painter. A Judge in India issued an arrest warrant for Richard Gere for kissing an Indian Actress. The Catholics and the Protestants waged a war against each other for hundreds of years. The Jews and the Muslims
continue to slaughter each other in the middle east for what each consider their holy land - killing in the name of everything that is holy, is supposedly fine with each
group, I guess I am too naive to understand that.

I see billboards in Huntsville, AL that rail against violations of sabbath or some such and how we will all go to hell unless we do what (I am guessing) they tell
us to do, I can understand where their thirst for blood comes from, the old testament.

The world will indeed end not from a nuclear weapon but from the paroxysms of rage caused by intolerant people who are convinced that they, and they alone know the way to the truth.

Religion, is indeed the true weapon of mass destruction.