Seven-year-old Joshua 'JJ' Vallow and sister 17-year-old Rylee Ryan, murdered due to religion/superstition.
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All of the Abrahamic religions are man-made "revealed" religions. That is, they claim that their religion, whether Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Mormonism or Baha'i, is based on Divine revelations the founders and clergy of these religions have received. Members of these "revealed" religions must believe the claims of Divine revelation. In order to do that, they must suppress their gift from God of innate reason and rely on what the clergy call faith, for our God-given reason tells us a Divine revelation can only be a Divine revelation in the first case. Once the person who received the Divine revelation tells it to someone else, it ceases to be a Divine revelation and is mere hearsay.
Suppressing our God-given reason in order to believe in the "revelations" of any religion sets a dangerous precedent to further suppress our innate God-given reason. This is what was an essential element in the murder of seven-year-old Joshua "JJ" Vallow and his sister, 17-year-old Rylee Ryan (pictured above).
The children's mother and stepfather, Lori Vallow Daybell and Chad Daybell, were raised in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Mormon). In order to accept the nonsense of Mormonism, they had to suppress their gift from God of innate reason. Mormonism teaches, as does mainline Christianity, that Jesus is the Son of God who was crucified for our sins and who rose from the dead. You cannot accept these basic Christian claims if you use your God-given reason. The Daybells, like all Christians and Mormons, suppressed their God-given reason to believe this nonsense. They traded their gift from God for myths from men, as do all followers of the "revealed" religions.
As Mormons, the Daybells also accepted the false belief that the founder of Mormonism, Joseph Smith, received Divine revelations in the form of Divine visitations, when, according to Smith, God and Jesus appeared to him and gave him Divine revelations, and, shortly after that, an angel allegedly showed him the location of where golden plates with the Book of Mormon written on them were located. This is all irrational nonsense. It cannot be believed while you are allowing your reason to function. (For an in-depth look at Mormonism written by a former Mormon high priest who left Mormonism for Deism, click here.)
As Bible and Book of Mormon believers, the Daybells believed that Jesus will return to Earth. They believe Jesus will return on July 22, 2020.
In order to prepare for the return of Jesus, the Daybells believe God wants them to gather the 144,000 people mentioned three time in the Book of Revelation (Revelation 7:3-8; 14:1; 14:3-4) in order to form the Church of the Firstborn. They also believe that people have past lives lived on Earth and on other planets. Chad Daybell believes he was Jesus' brother, James the Just.
The Daybells also believe that evil spirits can push someone's spirit out of their body, and take over that person's body. When this happens, that person, according to the belief of the Daybells and their followers, becomes a zombie. They believe God wants them to kill zombies in order to prepare for the return of Jesus. The Daybells said Lori's children, JJ and Rylee, had become zombies. These innocent children were then murdered, based on this superstition. Police located their remains in the backyard of Chad Daybell's home.
The Daybells are people of faith. They have suppressed their gift from The Supreme Intelligence/God of innate reason in order to believe and accept on faith the nonsense in the Bible and in the Book of Mormon. They then started to believe in other nonsensical superstitions derived from the Bible and Book of Mormon. Their value of faith over God-given innate reason caused the irreversible, and very real, tragic deaths of JJ and Rylee.
The Deist Thomas Jefferson pointed out the danger of faith in his letter to James Smith in 1822. Jefferson wrote:
. . . man, once surrendering his reason, has no remaining guard against absurdities the most monstrous, and like a ship without rudder, is the sport of every wind. With such person, gullibility which they call faith, takes the helm from the hand of reason, and the mind becomes a wreck.
Jefferson also pointed out that the Bible's Book of Revelation, which is of great importance to the Daybells and to many other faith-based people, was written by a "maniac" and that:
I do not consider them as revelations of the Supreme Being, whom I would not so far blaspheme as to impute to Him a pretension of revelation, couched at the same time in terms which, He would know, were never to be understood by those whom they were addressed.
If people dealt with the "revealed" religions in the honest and straightforward way in which Thomas Jefferson wrote about the Book of Revelation, and in which Thomas Paine, Ethan Allen and Elihu Palmer wrote about the "revealed" religions, the "revealed" religions would have much fewer members and much less power than they currently do. Thomas Paine summed it up well when he wrote in The Age of Reason, The Complete Edition:
Nonsense ought to be treated as nonsense, wherever it be found; and had this been done in the rational manner it ought to be done, instead of intimating and mincing the matter, as has been too much the case, the nonsense and false doctrine of the Bible, with all the aid that priestcraft can give, could never have stood their ground against the divine reason that God has given to man.
We, as Deists, have the knowledge about the "revealed" religions required to defang them. This knowledge is the recognition of the fact that God gave us reason and not any of the "revealed" religions. Deism is the very best means to render the "revealed" religions/superstitions powerless because, not only do we demonstrate to people currently in a "revealed" religion that God is not the source of their "holy" books and religion, but that The Supreme Intelligence/God did give us a true Word of God which is the intelligence-based Universe we are all a part of. In The Age of Reason, Thomas Paine did a beautiful job of expressing this when he wrote:
I believe it is only in the CREATION that all our ideas and conceptions of a Word of God can unite. The Creation speaks a universal language, independently of human speech or human language, multiplied and various as they may be. It is an ever existing original, which every man can read. It cannot be forged; it cannot be counterfeited; it cannot be lost; it cannot be altered; it cannot be suppressed. It does not depend upon the will of man whether it shall be published or not; it publishes itself from one end of the earth to the other. It preaches to all nations and to all worlds; and this Word of God reveals to man all that is necessary for man to know of God
The more we do all we possibly can to promote God-given reason and Deism, the more we make a better and safer world for the children and for everyone.
