Revelation, Monotheism, and the Chainsaw of Logical Empiricism
Revelation is the oldest trick in the human book. A man climbs a mountain, hides in a cave, or wanders into the desert and returns claiming to have heard the voice of God. He brings back no proof, no recording, no reproducible demonstration—only words. And those words are then elevated into law, into scripture, into entire civilizations. But what is revelation except hearsay? What is a prophet except a man who insists that his hallucinations bind the rest of humanity? No serious standard of evidence would accept this. In every other domain of life, from law courts to laboratories, we demand corroboration, replication, intersubjective verification. Revelation offers none of these. It is private and uncheckable, and therefore it is not knowledge. The very fact that revelations proliferate—the Torah, the Gospels, the Qur’an, the Guru Granth, the Book of Mormon, and countless others—shows their bankruptcy. If God truly spoke, would He contradict Himself so many times, in so many dialects, across so many tribes? If revelation were a genuine path to truth, its results would converge. Instead, they cancel one another out, each declaring itself absolute and the others fraudulent. This is not divine communication; this is the loud quarrel of human imagination. Revelation is a hoax canonized into theology.
Monotheism sharpened that hoax into a weapon. The move from many gods to one was not metaphysical progress but political centralization. One God, one prophet, one book, one law: the formula of Messianic Imperialism. Where polytheism allowed plurality, trade, and coexistence, monotheism demanded uniformity, conquest, and annihilation. The jealous God of Israel mirrored the jealous king of Jerusalem; the universal God of Christianity mirrored the universal empire of Rome; the Allah of Islam mirrored the tribal warlord of Arabia who needed a theological engine for expansion. Monotheism is not an innocent belief about the cosmos—it is a political program disguised as metaphysics. It delegitimizes rivals not as mistaken but as criminal, not as wrong but as blasphemous. And once dissent becomes blasphemy, the sword follows naturally. One truth, one community, one ruler: that is the logic of monotheism, and it has drenched the earth in blood for two millennia.
Muhammad stands as the clearest case. He was not a sage who transcended his age, but a man whose revelations coincided neatly with his battles, his marriages, his ambitions. The Qur’an contains no life story, no miracles but itself. The details we know—his night journey, his battles, his domestic arrangements—come from hadith and sira literature compiled decades and centuries later under caliphal patronage. Critical history dissolves the halo. What remains is a man who sacralized seventh-century Arabian norms—polygyny, slavery, raiding, jihad—and declared them divine. Revelation did not reveal eternity; it enshrined contingency. Yet those contingencies have been frozen into law, chaining entire peoples to the desert customs of a tribal chief fourteen centuries ago. Islam claimed to liberate pagans from superstition, but it shackled them to a harsher one.
The Qur’an itself, so often celebrated as the perfect word of God, collapses under scrutiny. Manuscript evidence shows multiple readings, canonical recitations, even acknowledged abrogations. A divine book should not require patches and edits. Its content is equally problematic. Angels and jinn add nothing to human knowledge; paradise and hellfire are mythical imagery, not verifiable claims; rules on inheritance, testimony, and punishment mirror the desert ecology of Muhammad’s Arabia rather than timeless law. And the famous claim of “inimitability”—that no one can produce a verse like it—is aesthetic, not epistemic. Homer and Dante could make the same boast. If the Qur’an is taken as literature, it belongs among world classics. Taken as law, it is an anachronism. Taken as revelation, it is an absurdity.
What, then, is the cure? Certainly not more prophets, more gurus, more metaphysical recycling. India need not export its own deadwood of Vedantic speculation or guru-worship to Muslim populations already suffocating under theirs. The only cure is to embrace Logical Empiricism. Spinoza pointed the way when he stripped revelation of its authority and identified God with Nature. Bertrand Russell deepened it when he mocked the cowardice of clinging to eternal reward and insisted on the nobility of clarity, skepticism, and compassion without cosmic guarantees. But the full weaponization of reason came with the Logical Empiricists of the Vienna Circle—Rudolf Carnap, Moritz Schlick, Otto Neurath, Hans Hahn, and their comrades.
And what did they say? That philosophy must be purged of metaphysics. That only two kinds of statements are meaningful: those analytically true by definition (like mathematics and logic), and those empirically verifiable by observation and prediction (like science). Everything else—revelations, prophecies, dogmas, metaphysical claims about the Absolute or the Hereafter—is meaningless noise. Logical Empiricism is not another religion; it is the refusal of religion. It is not another theology; it is the elimination of theology. It is not another metaphysics; it is the chainsaw that fells metaphysics itself. In private, you may dance with Krishna, you may pray to Allah, you may meditate with Buddha, you may sing hymns to Christ. On your own time, on your own dime, in your own house—do what you like. But the public square must belong to reason. No dancing gods on the streets, no muezzins demanding obedience from rooftops, no jihad waged in the name of revelation. Public life must be ruled by logic, evidence, and verification, or else it will be ruled by zealotry, superstition, and violence.
Indian Muslims and Indian Hindus alike are drowning in the cesspools of their theologies. Both have chained themselves to revelations, gurus, scriptures, and prophets. Both are suffocated by their metaphysical baggage. And yet the cure is simple, and it requires no new prophet, no new messiah, no new dogma. It requires only courage: the courage to eliminate theology from the public square, to relegate metaphysics to the private imagination, and to enthrone Logical Empiricism as the sole arbiter of public reason. This is not colonialism; this is liberation. Just as India imported the printing press, the telegraph, the railroads, and the internet, so it must import this intellectual technology: the refusal to bow before untested authority, the discipline of demanding evidence, the method of verification. Logical Empiricism is as universal as mathematics and as liberating as fire. It is the chainsaw that clears the deadwood of centuries, making space for science, technology, democracy, and dignity.
So let the call ring out: enough of revelations, enough of prophets, enough of scriptures. Let Hindus and Muslims both climb out of their cesspools of theology and breathe the clear air of reason. Let them take Carnap’s scalpel to metaphysics, Schlick’s demand for clarity to revelation, Neurath’s insistence on science as the ship of humanity. Let them build a public square where no theology rules, where no prophet commands, where no metaphysical fog clouds judgment. Logical Empiricism is not one dogma among others; it is the end of dogma, the refusal of dogma, the panacea for all theologies. For the future belongs not to those who kneel before invisible masters, but to those who dare to think with eyes wide open, ears attuned to evidence, and minds unshackled from superstition.
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