In quasi-real countries, myths spread, and books about witchcraft sell more than theories of evolution, relativity and the big bang.
People of such countries believe that they are superior and that everybody else is conspiring against them. They talk much and work little. They take pride in the distant past, not the near future. If knowledge is an important weapon, it is one that will kill them once they know the truth.
They would be surprised to know that a fly does not carry a disease on one wing and its cure on the other. And if the fly falls in their drink and they still drink it, it means that they are disgusting people who fell victim to a heritage that made religion a thing to brag about but not believe in from the heart.
A country like Germany never conducted any research about the scientific secrets of the Quran. Nor did NASA ever say that the earth will darken for two days or that the moon was split one day. And there are no theories arguing that men lived for centuries and were sixty feet tall. The only thing I know that is sixty feet tall is a storage refrigerator.
Those people will get a heart attack when they find out that all they have been taught was nothing but hoax.
Jean-Paul Sartre did not just say that "hell is other people," he said hell is other people who make of themselves judges of my actions. And Darwin never said that man was originally a monkey, he said man came from a less sophisticated creatures resembling apes. As to Karl Marx, he did not say that religion is the opium of the people only to ridicule religion, he said religion is the cry of the oppressed, the heart of a heartless world and the soul of soulless social conditions.
Religion for Marx is the hope of the oppressed in a colonial world, just as opium relieves patients of pain. Also, he did not mean the people of the whole world, he meant the German people specifically, but it was taken against him to get back at him.
Religion is the magic means for quasi-real people to reject or accept anything.
Edited translation from Al-Masry Al-Youm
