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Welcome to Let Them Talk, I'm Paul DeRienzo
Joan Moossy isn't with us, she wishes us all a happy Thanksgiving.
She'll be back in a couple of weeks.
and we'll be back to full strength.
In the meantime, I'm here on Let Them Talk with our guest.
Sunsara Taylor
Welcome Sunsara, to the show.
Hi, thanks so much.
Sunsara is a writer for Revolution newspaper
She'll explain exactly what that is.
She's been on a speaking tour promoting a book...
called "Away With All Gods!"
A pretty controversial name.
And it's a pretty controversial book.
And that's why I had you on, because I wanted to have a controversial guest.
Especially at this time of the year, Thanksgiving, Christmas, this is the god part of the year.
Although our President-elect has been skipping church.
Oh, did you hear that?
Yes, I read it, he was skipping church.
He maybe skipping church, but he's definitely uttering his God Bless Americas, and all his other key lines.
Great, you're getting controversial right away.
Okay, tell us a little about what you do and yourself for our audience.
I've been on a tour recently promoting the book "Away With All Gods!"
"Unchaining the Mind and Radically Changing the World."
It's written by Bob Avakian, he's the chairman of the Revolutionary Communist Party.
It's actually struggling with people to confront the fact that gods don't exist.
But, the illusion of gods and the role of religion has been extremely harmful.
Throughout history and in the present, today.
He gets into it quite deeply and I've been speaking to a wide variety of audiences.
Mainly on college campuses.
It's very relevant to the holiday season.
That was a message from god.
Well, I think it's precisely there a deeply held ancient belief.
Religion and belief in God was born in the periods of human ignorance.
In early societies people just didn't have the tools of science, didn't know how to explain...
why things happened in the real world so they made up myths.
And this made sense, myths at different times and different eras...
reflected the world in which they lived.
If you read the Bible its filled with stories of butchering your neighbors tribe...
taking their cattle, taking their women, taking them as slaves.
Because they lived in an agrarian, slave owning society.
Or they *** women to death and disobedient children.
So those are the narratives written into the Christian bible.
You look at the Koran, there are narratives that reflect a society in the midst of those times in which they were written.
Every era reinterprets their myths.
One of the revealing things today...
You have something like the 10 Commandments
That the Christian fascists like Judge Roy Moore
want to post in the courtroom.
And they edit there own commandments
He left off when he wrote the 10th Commandment "thou shall not covet."
When really in the Bible it says, "thou shall not covet thay neighbors slaves, wife, oxen..." slaves, yeah.
Beacause it was written by slave owners, so it gets reinterpreted in this era.
People don't own slaves, so even the Christian fundamentalists reinterpret their own bible.
People make up myths and they reinterpret myths, but there has never been any evidence of the existence of God.
There has been plenty of evidence that shows that different societies make up different gods
to serve the different purposes
Some of them probably happened and some of them probably didn't.
Certainly there was no flood that covered the whole Earth.
Geology and everything we've learned since then show there is no sign of a flood that covered the whole Earth.
Were there plagues, were there famines sometimes or deaths that happened that people couldn't understand that they made up?
There probably were some earthly events that got reflected in the Bible.
awaywithallgods.com
First of all there are millions of millions, literally billions of people on this planet whose lives are made miserable
by the workings of imperialism and capitalism, globalization, mass hunger, mass exploitation.
Children who make the clothes many of us wear.
And there are a lot of people precisely their lives are made miserable in this country as well.
They've been denied any access to science.
And then real education
A lot of people cling to religion and seek solace in it whose lives are very miserable
and they don't have much else? Yes.
That's what's unique about this book and Bob Avakian the author of it is...
he's a revolutionary and answers the question that the masses do not need consolation, they need emancipation.
And to emancipate themselves, which is what communist revolution is about...
millions of the most oppressed and exploited, themselves being consciousÊof revolution and forging a new society
and emancipating all of humanity.
They need to understand the real world
You can't do that just on a committed belief.
If it was that easy we would have had a revolution in the sixties.
You need science, you need strategy, you need as many people thinking scientifically as possible.
It doesn't mean everybody in a revolutionary movement will break with belief in God
but you need more and more people letting go of make believe.
And that's what God is.
Prayer extending life?
There are some calming effects that have been associated with meditation
or other forms of prayer to a degree.
You can do breathing exercises, you can do many things that are demystified
but the reality is there are millions of people, including in this country
Every Sunday you can turn on the TV and hear TD Jakes or Crefelo Dollar
talking about, Joe Olsteen, "don't let the word cancer cross our lips
because if you utter it then your conceding that your not having faith in God
If the doctor tells you you have cancer you...
There are many people who believe that prayer is going to stop a physical ailment
And they are dead wrong
And often people's lives are shortened
If you pull back the lens on the history of religion
Its caused more bloodshed and more butchering and more wars and more loss of life
including illness, including people who are ill and then concept entrenched in the Bible including in Jesus himself
that illness is caused by sinfullnes.
This is obviously a very big topic and it's dealt with quite thoroughly in the book
Away With All Gods!
There are a couple of chapters that deal with the rise of Islamic fundamentalism
You have to understand it rooted, like you were referencing, in the context of a world system of imperialism
Religion is the ideology a lot of people are mobilized to fight behind, but the forces at work that have shaped that...