Open Letter to the United Nations

OPEN LETTER TO THE UNITED NATIONS

Our world is wracked with malevolence and embroiled in violence not because of too little, but because of too much religion. Indeed, religion has always been and still is in the business of multiplying hate rather than be with the efforts of dividing peace and love and grace for the human race.

The Christians do not understand their own Bible. The Muslims do not understand their own Koran. In fact, if both believers took the trouble to read and understand each other’s holy book, they would learn that their scriptures are based upon older sources written by primitives who were more at home with horoscope but not the telescope or the microscope. Sacred books should be about dignity of the human community, and not about contrary beliefs that inspires enmity or hostility.

To those of us who have no religion, it is frightening to visualize that the Christians, the Muslims and the Jews can now, with nuclear weapons at their disposal, reduce our planet into a lunar landscape. A civilized way, no doubt, to solve at the same time, the problem of human population explosion with a bigger and wider and higher explosion.

Bertrand Russell wrote: “More than half of the population of the world is under-nourished, not because it need be, but because richer nations prefer killing each other than keeping poorer nations alive and helping them to achieve a higher standard of living.”

I said it before, I say it again: if we were all atheists we could learn to live together in peace with all men. I am myself proud of atheism because in the history of the mankind, there never was a war declared by atheists against other atheists. Indeed, as atheists, we know that humans are no different from the animals, except only by a little. We atheists, however, do not want to throw that little away. We hold on to our sense of common humanity. In the meantime, the preparations for religious war are only making poor people in poor countries become poorer.

It is time for religious believers to stop making a mockery of what human life should be. It is time to stop wasting precious resources against each other in purposeless hate and futile violence. Bertrand Russell said: “There lies before us, if we choose, continual progress in happiness, knowledge, and wisdom. Shall we, instead, choose death, because we cannot forget our quarrels? I appeal, as a human being to human beings: remember your humanity, and forget the rest. If you can do so, the way lies open to a new paradise; if you cannot, nothing lies before you but universal death.”

Far worthier than the Muslim family or the Christian family or Jewish family or Hindu family or Buddhist family is, in fact, the precious human family whose continued existence is in doubt. It is time to love and appreciate the one and only real purpose to life, and that is, for the sake of our children and grandchildren, we must leave this world a little better than we found it, at least in the humanitarian sense, or there is little reason for our having lived.
Sincerely,
POCH SUZARA
Bertrand Russell Society, Philippines
Feb. 26, 2006