Contra Religion: Excerpts from the Book Behind the Ritual Mask

This book is designed as a "shorter" explanation of the ideas presented in my larger book, "Behind the Ritual Mask" which seeks to define fundamental principles of religion. I'm hoping this book will serve as a primer for the original book and spur an interest in reading it. The following contains excerpts from the original Forward of the book.When an entrenched, anti-reason culture is presented with new ideas that challenge its fundamental premises, it relies on the power of what is taken as knowledge in the culture in order to defend itself. Indeed, when corrupt ideas are accepted as knowledge, as firm, people will not readily accept new, better ideas. In fact, those new ideas will be seen as false by many people because the entrenched ideas that are being challenged have a feeling of being obvious. Indeed, as I will show, when the prevailing culture is dominated by ideas such as rationalism, faith and collectivism, these ideas take on the power of a self-imposed cultural dictatorship, a non-reception system that blocks new ideas and prevents them from coming to the fore.