Dear Editor,

Concerning the December 2 column “Who killed God?” by the Rev Mervin Stoddart, he went through severe mental contortions but came out without an answer. Well, no one killed God because there is really no God.

In the 15th Century Renaissance when eminent scientists like Leonardo Da Vinci and others discovered that man’s brain, not his heart, does all his thinking and constitutes his mind, his soul, his spirit and his ability to empathise (the heart only pumps blood), the Christian church was very upset with this revisionism and it burnt many at the stake for articulating this scientific discovery. To this day Christians, the Bible and their hymn books adhere to this fallacy in a most serious and stubborn way.

Everyone’s concept of God differs because God is a product of the individual’s mind and therefore there is no universal God who, by flawed use of cause-and-effect reasoning, is supposed to have created the universe. We should not enter this debate before first doing a definition of “God”. And God is not the big white man with the copious grey beard which Michelangelo painted on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Not long ago my fundamentalist Church of God great-grandmother swore that the River Jordan, Jerusalem, Babylon (Iraq), etc, were locations in heaven. She missed the eureka that heaven was in her own mind.

The theocratic rulers of Israel prescribed the God of Abraham to rule his people and not to be God of any other land. But the Bible’s theology so strongly endorsed the wicked institution of slavery as ordained by the Christian God in both the Old and New Testaments that King Ferdinand of Spain and the other cunning rulers of Europe prescribed the King James version as the ideal theology to be peddled by European missionaries to the New World.

Auspiciously the same Europe, which tricked the Americas and Africa into passive slavery using the Bible, is now a peaceful, wiser, secular society, obeying tenets 2000 years older than Christ: Do unto others as you wish them to do for you. Our civilisation may yet survive the hazards of religious myths, intrigues and shameful exploits.

W W Wood

PO Box 760, Kingston

florissano1@hotmail.com