My Thoughts on Religion
The study of theology, as it stands in the Christian churches, is the study
of nothing; it is founded on nothing; it rests on no principles; it
proceeds by no authority; it has no data; it can demonstrate nothing; and it
admits of no conclusion.
       Thomas Paine

Pray tell, just how does one have a personal relationship with an invisible,
intangible, weightless, soundless, and scentless critter devoid of any heat
signature detectable by NASA?

I've said it before and I'll say it again: Having a PhD in Theology is
like having a Doctorate of Teletubbie Anatomy or a Masters in
Warp-Core Engineering. It's a fancy title for knowing a lot of "facts"
about a subject that at its core is completely and utterly fictional.

If I were asked to swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but
the truth over a Holy Bible, I would immediately say "Yes, I will tell you
the same amount of truth as I found in the Holy Bible".

Religion is merely a neurological disorder and religious fanatics are 
just delusional psychotics and ignorant fools.!

Christianity:
    The belief that some cosmic Jewish zombie can make you live
    forever if you symbolically eat his flesh and telepathically tell him
    that you accept him as your master, so he can remove an evil force from
    your soul that is present in humanity because a rib-woman was convinced
    by a talking snake to eat from a magical tree.

    Makes perfect sense to me!

Ho! Ho! Ho! Religion must go.  
                    George Carlin
 
# The most important image ever taken
 
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mcBV-cXVWFw
 
# We're all just monkeys
 
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a15KgyXBX24
 
# Richard Dawkins: The God Delusion
 
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gWL1ZMH3-54
 
# Richard Dawkins: The Virus of Faith
 
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=teV4b6iB7P0
 
# Why do aetheists care about religion
 
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w4fQA9mt-Mg

Ricky Gervais on religion

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NaEj3g5GOYA&feature=related
 
# Atheists
 
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fdVucvo-kDU
 
http://booskovski.blogspot.com/2006/11/richard-dawkins-some-great-clips.html

# Dawkins and Lynchburg students

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qR_z85O0P2M&source=rss

Are you going to breathe the same air as atheists?
http://www.videosift.com/video/Don-t-let-your-kids-become-infected-with-the-atheism


# The Evil Bible

http://www.evilbible.com/  
http://www.evilbible.com/Top_Ten_List.htm

Humorous look at creationism
Did you know that God created the Heavens and the Earth in total darkness?
Only one talking snake throughout history.
http://www.atheistmind.com/atheist-humor-4-a-look-at-creationism

 
The idea and belief that there exists an unseen, cognitive, non-corporal
being that either intercedes in human affairs or abstains, is a neural
process which does not operate in my mind.

Properly read, the bible is the most potent force for atheism ever conceived
     Isaac Asinov
   
We live in a galaxy that has 500 billion stars.
Hubble's ultra-deep-field view shows us that there are billions
of such galaxies.  So why do God's creatures only live on the
"Third Rock from the Sun"?
 
If God created the Universe, he must be omnipotent.  If he reads
reads our thoughts, he must be omnipresent.  If light is carried by
photons and gravity by gravitons, is this thought reading done by
spiritons?
 
If God created the Universe, why is evidence of this creation so
scant.  He might have left Maxwell's equations in Egyptian hieroglyphs.
The Ten Commandments might have been engraved on the moon.
A hundred-kilometer crucifix could have been placed in Earth orbit.
Why can't God spell out my name in the starfields?
Why should God be so clear in the Bible and so obscure in the world?

#----------------------------------------------------------------------------

The following is supposedly an actual question given on a University of 
Washington chemistry mid-term. The answer by one student was so "profound"
that the professor shared it with colleagues, via the Internet, which is,
of course, why we now have the pleasure of enjoying it as well.
 
Bonus Question: Is Hell exothermic (gives off heat) or endothermic
                (absorbs heat)?
 
Most of the students wrote proofs of their beliefs using Boyle's Law
(gas cools when it expands and heats when it is compressed) or some variant.
 
One student, however, wrote the following:
------------
First, we need to know how the mass of Hell is changing in time. So
we need to know the rate at which souls are moving into Hell and the
rate at which they are leaving. I think that we can safely assume
that once a soul gets to Hell, it will not leave. Therefore, no
souls are leaving.
 
As for how many souls are entering Hell, let's look at the different
Religions that exist in the world today. Most of these religions state that
if you are not a member of their religion, you will go to Hell. Since
there is more than one of these religions and since people do not belong
to more than one religion, we can project that all souls go to Hell.
 
With birth and death rates as they are, we can expect the number of souls in
Hell to increase exponentially. Now, we look at the rate of change of
the volume in Hell because Boyle's Law states that in order for the
temperature and pressure in Hell to stay the same, the volume of Hell has
to expand proportionately as souls are added.
 
This gives two possibilities:
 
1. If Hell is expanding at a slower rate than the rate at
    which souls enter Hell, then the temperature and pressure in Hell
    will increase until all Hell breaks loose.
2. If Hell is expanding at a rate faster than the increase of souls in Hell,
   then the temperature and pressure will drop until Hell freezes over.
 
   So which is it?
 
   If we accept the postulate given to me by Teresa during my Freshman year
   that, "it will be a cold day in Hell before I sleep with you," and take
   into account the fact that I slept with her last night, then number 2
   must be true, and thus I am sure that Hell is exothermic and has
   already frozen over. The corollary of this theory is that since Hell
   has frozen over, it follows that it is not accepting any more souls
   and is therefore, extinct...leaving only Heaven thereby proving
   the existence of a divine being which explains why, last night, Teresa
   kept shouting "Oh my God."
 
   THIS STUDENT RECEIVED THE ONLY "A"

#---------------------------------------------------------------------------

Subject: Does the bible evolve?

Dr. Laura Schlessinger is a US radio personality who dispenses advice to
people who call in to her radio show. Recently, she said that, as an
observant Orthodox Jew, homosexuality is an abomination according to
Leviticus 18:22, and cannot be condoned under any circumstance.

The following is an open letter to Dr. Laura penned by a US resident, Jim,
which was posted on the Internet.  It's funny, as well as informative:

Dear Dr. Laura:

Thank you for doing so much to educate people regarding God's Law. I have
learned a great deal from your show, and try to share that knowledge with as
many people as I can. When someone tries to defend the homosexual lifestyle,
for example, I simply remind them that Leviticus 18:22 clearly states it to
be an abomination. End of debate.

I do need some advice from you, however, regarding some of the other
specific laws and how to follow them.

    When I burn a bull on the altar as a sacrifice, I know it creates a
    pleasing odor for the Lord - Lev.1:9. The problem is my neighbors. They
    claim the odor is not pleasing to them. Should I smite them?

    I would like to sell my daughter into slavery, as sanctioned in Exodus
    21:7. In this day and age, what do you think would be a fair price for her?

    I know that I am allowed no contact with a woman while she is in her
    period of menstrual cleanliness - Lev.15:19-24. The problem is, how do
    I tell? I have tried asking, but most women take offense.

    Lev. 25:44 states that I may indeed possess slaves, both male and female,
    provided they are purchased from neighboring nations. A friend
    of mine claims that this applies to Mexicans, but not Canadians. Can you
    clarify? Why can't I own Canadians?

    I have a neighbor who insists on working on the Sabbath. Exodus 35:2
    clearly states he should be put to death. Am I morally obligated to kill
    him myself?

    A friend of mine feels that even though eating shellfish is an
    abomination - Lev. 11:10, it is a lesser abomination than homosexuality.
    I don't agree. Can you settle this?

    Lev. 21:20 states that I may not approach the altar of God if I have a
    defect in my sight. I have to admit that I wear reading glasses. Does
    my vision have to be 20/20, or is there some wiggle room here?

    Most of my male friends get their hair trimmed, including the hair
    around their temples, even though this is expressly forbidden by
    Lev.19:27.  How should they die?

    I know from Lev. 11:6-8 that touching the skin of a dead pig makes me
    unclean, but may I still play football if I wear gloves?

    My uncle has a farm. He violates Lev. 19:19 by planting two different
    crops in the same field, as does his wife by wearing garments made of two
    different kinds of thread (cotton/polyester blend). He also tends to curse
    and blaspheme a lot. Is it really necessary that we go to all the trouble
    of getting the whole town together to stone them? Lev.24:10-16.
    Couldn't we just burn them to death at a private family affair like we
    do with people who sleep with their in-laws? (Lev. 20:14)

I know you have studied these things extensively, so I am confident you can
help. Thank you again for reminding us that God's word is eternal and
unchanging.

Your devoted fan,
Jim

#-----------------------------------------------------------------------------


Who created us? Don't ask
David Holahan
February 23, 2005

INTELLIGENT DESIGN, or creationism in sheep's clothing, goes something
like this: If you examine a finely crafted Swiss watch, you immediately
assume someone smart made it (presumably someone Swiss, but don't rule out
the Chinese). Now you apply this premise to human beings and the
known universe. How could entities so intricate and marvelous as you
and I -- and the other heavenly bodies -- have just happened along without
the deft hands of Intelligent Design, who shall henceforth be referred to
as Mr. ID?

I have been mulling over this wholly speculative hypothesis lately, and
the first thing that comes to mind is "American Idol." Have you caught
an episode of that hit television show, with its parade of grating contestants
and that repugnant trio of catty judges? Try to square those primetime
monkeyshines with intelligent anything -- or evolution, for that matter.

Next, my thoughts wandered wistfully to summer vacation and the "clothes
optional" beach that my family frequents. You can walk along the
shimmering sands for quite a spell without spying a body that you'd want
to take credit for creating. Sadly, several miles of sightseeing induce
this inescapable revelation: If human beings were automobiles, there'd be
one hell of a massive recall. I don't need to go into particulars, do I?

Of course, that's just on the surface. Once you slice us open, you'll
find as many design flaws as there are in a new Pentagon weapons system.
Take my appendix -- please! The atavistic organ is totally useless, as
its name connotes. It's an evolutionary time bomb waiting to rupture,
probably in the middle of my next vacation. Or what's up with
gallbladders, our superfluous repository of excess bile? It's as
necessary as heated car seats and SUVs the size of three-bedroom
 apartments. And why do we have two kidneys but only one liver? 
Perhaps our alleged creator, Mr. ID, is so elusive for fear of divine
litigation.

But enough about us. Let's move on to the virtually infinite universe,
our Manifest Interplanetary Destiny. It's humongous and getting bigger
every time we gaze skyward. Yet in all that unexplored, inaccessible
space, scientists can't identify, with their exquisitely sophisticated
telescopes, any planet near or far that is likely to support life forms
comparable to us. Even if intelligent beings exist out there in the
void thousands of light years away, it's unlikely we'll ever get to
palaver with our cosmic cousins.

Now I enjoy my personal space as much as the next person, but doesn't that
lifeless expanse -- with its black holes, supernovas, nebulae, pulsars
and white dwarfs -- strike you as over the top?

After infinite space, let's check the time. How long did it take
Mr. ID to "perfect" you and me, we darlings of the unfathomable ether?

Scientists estimate -- I know, what do scientists know, but let's humor
them, OK? -- that the universe is 15 billion years old. A mere 14
billion, 999 million, 500,000 years later along we come, homo sapiens,
staggering out of the jungles onto the African savannas.

Yikes, what took Mr. ID so long? Was it to make sure we didn't
take ourselves too seriously? If so, it didn't work.

We humans tend to think we're the bees' knees, the cat's pajamas.
It's all about us. The incalculable space and time of existence has
but one purpose. Religious fundamentalists will never forgive
Nicolaus Copernicus for pointing out five centuries ago that the Earth
wasn't the center of the universe, wasn't even close. And if it
had been left up to the zealots, the scientific discoveries of Galileo
and his ilk wouldn't have seen the light of day.

We need to gain some perspective as a species. Our thoroughly modest
planet revolves around a rather undistinguished star, of which there are
70 sextillion -- that's a 7 followed by 22 zeros, or about 10 times the
grains of sand in all the world's beaches and deserts.

We can trace our iffy evolutionary tree back 20 million years. The
cockroach, by comparison, has a pedigree of 250 million years and will
almost certainly survive us at the rate we're abusing our habitat.

Is this any way to design a universe?

#---------------------------------------------------------------------------
A devout Christian friend of mine says atheists have no hope because they
do not believe in life everlasting given by the Lord. I'd have to say the
opposite. Believers have no need to live good lives here, accomplish anything
or even care about others. I'm not saying they feel this way. I'm just
saying they have no NEED to. They can just pray for forgiveness, confess
their sins and pledge to the Lord and they'll get their reward.

It is well known that most atheists will eat their children.

#---------------------------------------------------------------------------

My Thoughts on Religion

Most of this material is from: http://www.dynopower.freeserve.co.uk/homepages/ 

Some of it has been modified...

Let's grant the general creationist assumptions (correct me if I'm
wrong): God is male; men are made "in [His] image" in only a general way
(maybe even Adam didn't look exactly like Him); and women were made with
necessary differences to enable reproduction. Still a load of embarrassing
questions arise. Much has been made of Adam's navel, and why he would have
one, having never been attached to a placenta. I want to know if God has
one. Does He have nipples?  What are they used for? 

I want to know if He has a digestive tract. If so, why? Does He eat?
If so, what, and why would He need to? Does He excrete? Where? What
happens to it? Does He have lungs? Why would He need them? Does He have
sweat glands? And naughty stuff: does He have genitals? Why would He need
those? Does He even have two legs, and feet, and toes? Why would He need
them, unless He's bound by gravity, as we are?

Lower Back Pain
Kate Harrop-Allin asks the perceptive question:

Why should this condition afflict such a huge percentage of the adult
population (I read somewhere that more working days were lost for this
than for almost any other reason) when we were supposedly "created" in our
present bipedal form?

Our Founding Fathers

...because they make creationists appear, shall we say, less than
intellectually competent when they toss out a howler like, "George
Washington and Thomas Jefferson were creationists!" It makes one want to
knock on their heads and call out derisively, "Helllooo! Anybody home in
there? In what year did Washington die? When was Origin of Species
published?" Old George didn't know about germs, either. (Even Charles
Darwin accepted the standard creation model of his day--until he learned
better.)

Fruit Flies

Many species, including fruit flies, have very short lives, and the
original pair would not have survived the trip, making it necessary for
reproduction while on the ark in order for the species to survive.  If you
have ever bred fruit flies (as I have for genetics class) you will know
that a fruit fly is sexually active within 5 hours of hatching.  Their
generation times are very short.  By the end of the 40 days and 40 nights
(not to mention the time waiting for the waters to recede), the ark would
have been filled from one end to the other with annoying fruit flies.
Therefore, either they routinely sprayed insecticide around the ark to
keep these, and other similar species, in control; put up fly paper; or
else these species evolved quickly after departure from the ark.

Cute Little Bunny Rabbits

... because they give the lie to the creationist "proof" that there
are just the number of people alive today that there would be if we had
started repopulating the Earth after the Flood.  The short answer is, if
you hold to the creationist logic, the whole visible universe would be one
squirming mass of rabbit flesh by now.

Ted Krapkat has improved upon my argument by applying the
creationist logic directly to the human population:

If we create a simple formula using today's (2001) population of ~6
billion, and figure in the starting population (8 individuals), and the
starting time (4360 YBP), we get an annual growth rate of about 0.0047.
Since that IS what happened, according to creationists, and it IS the only
possible explanation for today's human population then...

(a) At Christ's death there were only about half a million people in
    the whole world!

(b) At the time the Israelites entered Canaan, (about 1180 BCE) we
    get a world population of 2024! By the time you divide that up between
    Egypt, Canaan, the rest of the world, and Israel, that leaves maybe 6 or 7
    people for the Israelite army!

(c) If we go back to the time that the Jews were expelled from
    Egypt, in 1560 BCE, we get a world population of only 340 people!

(d) In 2300 BCE there were only about 10 people on Earth! How did
    fewer than a dozen people build the pyramids?

If there are multiple levels of hell, can it be said that there is a
temperature gradient between levels?  If so, heat pumps can be used to
air condition the lower levels.

If God is omnipotent and omnipresent, then why does he not reveal himself to
his minions, the people of Earth?  I have no problems revealing myself
(in my birthday suit) to ants.  What's his problem?

#-----------------------------------------------------------------------------

The God Delusion      Richard Dawkins
----------------
A picture of the Manhattan skyline with the twin towers having a caption...
Imagine the World Without Religion

Being an atheist is nothing to be apologetic about.  On the contrary, it
something to be proud of, standing tall to face the horizon, for atheism nearly
always indicates a healthy independence of mind, and indeed a healthy mind..

The lawyer Wendy Kaminer was exaggerating only slightly when she remarked that
making fun of religion is as risky as burning a flag in an American Legion
Hall.  The status of atheists in America today is on par with that of
homosexuals fifty years ago.

John Stuart Mill said "The world would be astonished if it knew how great a
proportion of its brightest ornaments, of those most distinguished even in
popular estimation for wisdom and virtue, are complete skeptics in religion.

Organizing atheists has been compared to herding cats, they tend to think
independently and will not conform to authority.  But a good first step would
be to build up a critical mass of those willing to "come out", thereby 
encouraging others to do so.  Even if they can't be herded, cats in sufficient
numbers can make a lot of noise and they cannot be ignored.
Such free spirits need only a little encouragment to break free of the vice
of religion.

When one person suffers from a delusion, it is called insanity.  When many
people suffer from a delusion, it is called Religion.

Einstein: I am a deeply religious non-believer.

The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in
all fiction; jealous and proud of it; a petty unjust unforgiving 
control-freak; a vindictive bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misognistic,
homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential,
megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.

The God Hypothesis
------------------
There exists a superhuman, supernatural intelligence who deliberately designed
and created the universe and everything in it, including us.

Alternative View
----------------
Any creative intelligence, of sufficient complexity to design anything,
comes to existence as the end product of an extended process of gradual
evolution.

Mystery of the Holy Trinity
---------------------------
Do we have one God in three parts, or three Gods in one.  The Catholic
Encyclopedia clears up the matter for us, in a masterpiece of theological
close reasoning.

In the unity of the Godhead, there are three Persons, the father, the Son,
and the Holy Spirit, these Three persons being truly distinct one from another.
Thus, in the words of the Athanasian Creed: 'the Father is God, the Son is
God, and the Holy Spirit is God, and yet there are not three Gods but one God.'

To cite the old cliches, science gets the age of rocks and religion gets the
rock of ages; science studies how the heavens go, religion how to go to heaven.

Science is but one form of rationalism, while religion is the most common
form of superstition.  Creationism is just a symptom of what they see as the
greater enemy: religion.  While religion can exist without creationism,
creationism cannot exist without religion.

The only difference between "The Da Vinci Code" and the gospels is that the
gospels are ancient fiction while "The Da Vinci Code" is modern fiction.

The immense majority of intellectuals eminent men disbelieve in Christian
religion, but they conceal the fact in public, because they are afraid of
losing their incomes.

The French mathematician reckoned that however long the odds against God's
existence might be, there is even a larger asymmetry in the penalty for 
guessing wrong.  You'd better believe in God, becaue if you're right, you stand
to gain eternal bliss and if you're wrong, it won't make any difference anyway.
On the other hand, if you don't believe in God and you turn out to be wrong,
you get eternal damnation, whereas if you're right, it makes no difference.
On the face of it, the decision is a no-brainer.  Believe in God.

The only problem with this argument is that believing and feigning belief
are two different things.  If God is omniscient, the feigning believers
will be picked off and sent to eternal damnation.

Admittedly, people of a theological bent are often chronically incapable of
distinguishing what is true from what they'd like to be true.

Fred Hoyle's said that the probability of life originating on Earth is no
greater than the chance that a hurricane sweeping through a scrap yard would
have the luck to assemble a Boeing 747.

The scientifically savvy philosopher Daniel Dennet pointed out that
evolution counters one of the oldest ideas we have: the idea that it takes
a big fancy smart thing to make a lesser thing.  Call it the "trickle down
theory" of creationism.  You'll never see a spear making a spear-maker, a
horse-shoe making a blacksmith or a pot making a potter.  Darwin's discovery
of a workable process that does that very counter-intuitive thing is what
makes his contribution to human thought so revolutionary, and so loaded with
the power to raise consciousness.

Creationists who attempt to deploy the argument from improbability in their
favour always assume that biological adaptation is a question of jackpot or
nothing.  Another name for the jackpot is "irreducible complexity".  Either
the eye sees or it doesn't.  Either the wing flies or it doesn't.
What is the use of half an eye or half a wing.

A functioning unit is said to be irreducibly complex if the removal of one
of its parts causes the whole to cease functioning.

A cataract patient whose eye lens has been removed can still see enough to
avoid bumping into a tree or falling over a cliff. Half a wing could save
your life by easing your fall from a tree.  In essence, there is a smooth
gradient of wing like structures in various animals

Darwin stated "If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed 
which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight
modifications, my theory would absolutely break down.  But I can find no such
case.  Many candidates for this holy grail of creationism have been proposed
but none have stood up to analysis.

Saint Augustine said "There is another form of temptation, even more fraught 
with danger.  This is the disease of curiousity.  It is this which drives us
to try and discover the secrets of nature, those secrets which are beyond our
understanding, which can avail us nothing and which man should not wish to
learn."

God is merely an unreachable, unknowable sky-fairy.

Around a typical star like our sun, there is a so-called Goldilocks zone -
not to hot, not too cold, but just right for planets with liquid water.
A thin band of orbits lies between those that are too far from the star, where
water freezes, and too close where it boils.

Presumable, a life friendly orbit has to be nearly circular.  A fiercely
elliptical orbit would only allow the planet ot whiz thru the Goldilocks
zone every few (Earth) decades or centuries.

The size of our moon and its rotation around the Earth helps to stabilize
the Earth's rotation around its own axis.  The moon's distance from the
Earth is another factor that provides for smaller tidal forces.

The massive gravitational vacuum cleaner of Jupiter is well placed to
intercept asteroids that would otherwise threaten us with a lethal collision.
Earth's single relatively large moon serves to stabilize our axis of rotation.

It has been estimated that there are between 1 billion and 30 billion planets
in our galaxy and 100 billion galaxies in the observable universe.  Knocking
off a few noughts for reasons of ordinary prodence, a bilion billion is a
conservative estimate of available planets in our universe.  Now, suppose
the origin of life, the spontaneous arising of something equivalent to DNA,
really was a quite staggering event.  Suppose it was so improbable as to
occur on only one in a billion planets.  And yet ... even with such absurdly
long odds, life will still have arisen on a billion planets -- of which Earth
of course is one.


1. One of the greatest challenges to the human intellect, over the centuries
   has been to explain how the complex, improbable appearance of design in
   the universe arises.

2. The natural temptation is to attribute the appearance of design to
   actual design itself.  In the case of a man-made artifact such as a watch,
   the designer really was an intelligent engineer.  It is tempting to apply
   the same logic to an eye, a spider or a person.

3. The temptation is a false one, because the designer hypothesis immediately
   raises the larger problem of who desigmed the designer.  The whole problem
   we started out with was the problem of explaining statistical improbability.
   It is obviously no solution to postulate something even more improbable.
   We need a crane, not a "skyhook", for only a crane can do the business of
   working up gradually and plausibly from simplicity to otherwise improbable
   complexity.

4. The most ingenious and powerful crane so far discovered is Darwinian
   evolution by natural selection.  Darwin and his successors have shown hows
   living creatures with their spectacular statistical improbability and
   appearance of design, have evolved by slow, gradual degrees from simple
   beginnings.  We can now safely say the the illusion of design in living
   creatures is just that - an illusion.

5. We don't yet have an equivalent crane for physics.  Some kind of multiverse
   theory could in principle do for physics the same explanatory work as
   Darwinisn does for biology.  This kind of explanation is superficially
   less satisfying than the biological version of Darwinism, because it makes
   heavier demands on luck.  But the anthropic principle entitles us to
   postilate far more luck than our limited human intuition is comfortable 
   with.

6. We should not give up hope of a better crane arising in physics, something
   as powerful as Darwinism is for biology.  But even in the absence of a
   stromgly satisfying crane to match the biological one, the relatively weak
   cranes we have at present are when abetted by the anthropic principle,
   self-evidently better the self-defeating shyhook hypothesis of an
   intelligent designer.


Everyone has their own pet theory of where religion comes from and why all
human cultures have it.  It gives consolation and comfort.  It fosters
togetherness in groups.  It satisfies our yearning to understand why we exist.

Is religion a placebo that prolongs life by reducing stress?

A tribe with a stirringly belligerent "god of battles" win wars against rival
tribes whose gods urge peace and harmony, or tribes with no gods at all.
Warriors who unshakeably believe that a martyr's death will send them straight
to paradise fight bravely and willingly give up their lives.  So tribes with
this kind of religion are more likely to survive in inter-tribal warfare,
steal the conquered tribes livestock and seize their women as concubines.

Assuming that the Cambridge theologian was a mainstream Christian, he probably
believed some combination of the following:

- In the time of the ancestors, a man was born to a virgin mother with no
  biological father being involved.

- The same fatherless man called out to a friend called Lazarus who had been
  dead long enough to stink, and Lazarus promptly came back to life.

- The fatherless man himself came alive after being dead and buried three days.

- Forty days later, the fatherless man went up to the top of a hill and
  disappeared bodily into the sky.

- If you murmur thought privately in your head, the fatherless man, and his
  "father" (who is also himself) will hear your thoughts and may act uopn them.
  He is simultaneously able to hear the thoughts of everybody else in the
  world.

- If you do something bad, or something good, the same fatherless man sees all,
  even if no one else does.  You may be punished accordingly, including after
  your death.

- The fatherless man's virgin mother never died but "ascended" bodily into
  heaven.

- Bread and wine, if blessed by a priest (who must have testicles), "become"
  the body and blood of the fatherless man.

Tit-for-Tat Retaliator and Recipricator

As a young teenager in proudly peaceable Canada during the romantic 1960s, I 
was a true believer in Bakunin's anarchism.  I laughed off my parents argument
that if the government ever laid down it's arms, all hell would break loose.
Our competing predictions were put to a test at 8:00 a.m. on October 17, 1969,
when the Montreal police went on strike.  By 11:20 a.m., the first bank was
robbed.  By noon, most downtown stores had closed because of looting.  Within
a few more hours, taxi drivers burned down the garage of a limousine service
that competed with them for airport customers, a rooftop sniper killed a
provincial police officer, rioters broke into several hotels and restaurants
and a doctor slew a burglar in his suburban home.  By the end of the day,
six banks had been robbed, a hundred shops had been looted, twelve fires
had been set, forty carloads of storefront glass had been broken, and three
million dollars in property damage had been inflicted, before city authorities
had to call in the army and of course the Mounties to restore order.  This
decisive empirical test left my politics in tatters.....


Yoctosecond - One septillionth (10-24) of a second
The American Taliban
A recovering Christian....
a sustained transgenerational vendetta.
Homogamy: marrying someone of the same religion.
Heterogamy: marrying someone of a different religion.
Apostasy: abandoning one's religion or faith

A God who is capable of sending intelligible signals to millions of people
simultaneously, and of receiving messages from all of them simultaneously
cannot be simple and is so statistically improbable.  Imagine the bandwidth
requirements.

To be fair, nuch of the Bible is not systematically evil, but just plain 
weird, as you would expect of a chaotically cobbled-together anthology of
disjointed documents, composed, revised, translated, distorted and "improved"
by hundreds of anonymous authors, editors and copyists, unknown to us and 
mostly unknown to each other, spanning nine centuries.  Yet, this book is
what most religious zealots hold up to us as the inerrant source of our morals
and rules for living.

The story of Noah is appalling.  God took a dim view of humans, so he (with
the exception of one family) drowned the lot of them including the children
and also for good measure, the rest of the (presumably blameless) animals as
well.

Why should a divine being, with creation and eternity in mind, care a fig
for petty human malefactions (crime).  We humans give ourselves such airs,
even aggrandizing our poky little sins to the levels of cosmic significance!

You'd think that an omnipotent God would adopt a slightly more targetted
approach to  zapping sinners, a judicious heart attack here perhaps, rather
than the wholesale destruction of an entire city.

Do those people who hold up the Bible as an inspiration to moral rectitude
have the slightest notion of what is actually written in it?

Nobel Prize winning physicist Steven Weinberg said 
"Religion is an insult to human dignity.  With or without it, you'd have good
people doing good things and evil people doing evil things."

Blaise Pascal said
"Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from
religious conviction".

The Bible is a blueprint of in-group morality, complete with instructions
for genocide, enslavement of out-groups and world domination.  But the Bible
is not evil by virtue of its objectives or even its glorification of murder,
cruelty and rape.  many ancient works do that - The Illiad, the Icelandic 
Sagas, the tales of the ancient Syrians and the inscriptions of the ancient
Mayans for example.  But no one is selling the Illiad as a foundation for
morality.  Therein lies the problem.  The Bible is sold and bought, as a
guide to how people should live their lives.  And it is, by far, the world's
all-time best seller.

The Moral Zeitgeist
-------------------
- Do not do to others what you would not want them to do to you.
- In all things, strive to cause no harm.
- Treat your fellow human beings, your fellow living things, and the world
  in general with love, honesty, faithfulness, and respect.
- Do not overlook evil or shrink from administering justice, but always
  be ready to forgive wrongdoing freely admitted and honestly regretted.
- Live life with a sense of joy and wonder.
- Always seek to be learning something new.
- Test all things; check your ideas against the facts, and be ready to discard
  even a cherished belief if it does not conform to them.
- Never seek to censor or cut yourself off from dissent; always respect the
  right of others to disagree with you.
- Form independent opinions on the basis of your own reason and experience;
  do not allow yourself to be led blindly by others.
- Question everything.
- Enjoy your sex life (so long as it damages nobody else) and leave others
  to enjoy theirs in private whatever their inclinations, which are none of
  your business.
- Do not discriminate or oppress on the basis of sex, race or (as far as
  possible) species.
- Do not indoctrinate your children.  Teach them how to think for themselves,
  how to evaluate evidence and how to disagree with you.


The danger of religious faith is that it allows otherwise normal human beings
to reap the fruits of madness and consider them holy.  Because each new
generation of children is taught that religious propositions need not be
justified in the way that all others must, civilization is still beseiged by
the armies of the preposterous.  We are now even killing ourselves over
ancient literature.  Who would have thought something so tragically absurd
could be possible.

George Carlin said:
"Religion has convinced people that there's an invisible man - living in the
sky - who watches everything you do every minute of every day.  And the
invisible man has a special list of ten things he does not want you to do.
And if you do any of these ten things, he has a special place, full of fire and 
smoke and burning and torture and anquish, where he will send you to live and
suffer and burn and choke and scream and cry forever and ever 'til the end of
time.... But he loves you!"

In 2006 in Afghanistan, Abdul Rahman was sentenced to death for converting
to Christianity.  Did he kill anyone, hurt anybody, steal anything or
damage anything?  No!  All he did was change his mind.  Internally, and
privately, he changed his mind.  He entertained certain thoughts which were
not to the the liking of the ruling party of the country.  And this, remember,
is not Afghanistan of the Taliban but the liberated Afghanistan of Hamid 
Karzai, set up by the American led coalition.  Mr. Rahman finally escaped
execution but only on a plea of insanity, and only after intense international
pressure.  He has sought asylum in Italy, to avoid being murdered by zealots
eager to do their Islamic duty.  It is still an article of the constitution
of "liberated" Afghanistan that the penalty of apostasy is death.  Apostasy,
remember doesn't mean actual harm to persons or property.  It is pure
thoughtcrime, to use George Orwell's 1984 terminology, and the official 
punishment for it under Islamic law is death.  On September 3, 1992, to take
one example, where it was actually carried out, Sadiq Abdul Karim Malallah
was publicly beheaded in Saudi Arabia after being lawfully convicted of 
apostasy and blasphemy.

The Vatican finally apologized to Galileo after only five hundred years
for his transgressions.

Any Muslim that denies terror is a part of Islam is kafir.  A kafir is n
unbeliever (i.e. a non-Muslim), a term of gross insult.

Victor Hugo said
"There is in every village a torch - the teacher: and an extinguisher - the
clergyman."

Amazingly for a rite that could have such monumental significance for a whole
extended family, the Catholic church allowed (and still allows) anybody to
baptize anyone else.  The baptizer doesn't have to be a priest.  Neither
the child, nor the parents, nor anyone else has to consent to the baptism. 
Nothing need be signed.  Nothing need be officially witnessed.  All that is
necessary is a splash of water, a few words, a helpless child, and a
superstitious and catechistically brainwashed babysitter.  Actually, only
the last of these is needed because assuming the child is too young to be
a witness, who is even to know.  An American colleage who was brought up
Catholic writes to me as follows:  We used to baptize our dolls.  I don't
remember any of us baptizing our little Protestant friends but no doubt that
has happened and happens today.  We made little Catholics of our dolls, taking
them to church, giving them Holy Communion, etc.  We were brainwashed to be
good Catholic mothers early on.

All three boarding schools I attended employed teachers whose affection for
small boys overstepped the bounds of propriety.  This was indeed reprehensible.
Nevertheless if, fifty years on, they had been hounded by vigilantes or
lawyers as no better than child murderers, I should have felt obliged to come
to their defence, even as the victim of one of the (an embarrassing but
otherwise harmless experience).

The Magdalene Asylums were run by sadastically cruel nuns who ran many of
Ireland's girls schools.  The Magdalene Sisters was a movie about these 
schools.

"Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words can never hurt me"
The adage is true as lomg as you don't really believe the words.  But if you're
whole upbringing, and everything you have ever been told by parents, teachers
and priests, has led you to believe, really believe, utterly and completely,
that sinners burn in hell (or some other obnoxious article of doctrine such as
that a woman is the property of her husband), it is entirely plausible that
words could have a more long-lasting and damaging effects than deeds.  I am
persuaded that the term "child abuse" is no exageration when used to describe
what teachers and priests are doing to children whom they encourage to believe
in something like the punishment of unshriven mortal sins in an eternal hell.

We stand firm upon the bare proposition that God has spoken authoritatively
and inerrantly in the pages of the holy Scripture.

Religion's power to console doesn't make it true.  Even if we make huge
concession; even if it were conclusively demonstrated that belief in God's
existence is completely essential to human psychological and emotional 
well being, even if all the atheists were despairing neurotics driven to 
suicide by relentless cosmic angst, none of this would contribute the tiniest
jot or title of evidence that religious belief is true.

Mark Twain dismissed death by saying:
"I do not fear my death.  I had been dead for billions and billions of years
before I was born, and had not suffered the slighest inconvenience from it."

The doctrine of purgatory offers a preposterous revelation of the way the
theological mind works.  Purgatory is a sort of divine Ellis Island, a Hadean
waiting room where dead souls go if their sins aren't bad enough to send them
to hell, but they still need a bit of remedial checking out and purifying 
before they can be admitted to the sin-free zone of heaven.  In medieval
times, the Church used to sell "indulgences" for money.  This amounted to
paying for some number of days remission from purgatory, and the Church
literally (and with breathtaking presumption) issued signed certificates
specifying the number of days off that had been purchased.  This selling
of indulgences was one of the greatest con tricks in history.

An Australian friend coined a wonderful phrase to describe the tendency
for religiousity to increase in old age: Cramming for the final.

What really fascinates me about the doctrine of purgatory is the evidence that
theologians have advanced for it: evidence so spectaularly weak that it renders
even more comical the airy confidence with which it was asserted.  The entry
on purgatory in the Catholic Encyclopedia has a section called "proofs".  The
essential evidence for the existence of purgatory is this.  If the dead
simply went to heaven or hell on the basis of their sins while on Earth,
there would be no point in praying for them.  "For why pray for the dead, if
there be no belief in the power of prayer to afford solace to those who as of
yet are excluded from the sight of God."  And we do pray for the dead, don't
we?  Therefore purgatory must exist, otherwise, our prayers would be 
pointless!  Q.E.D.  This is what passes for reasoning in the theological mind.

#-----------------------------------------------------------------------------

Richard Dawkins: Why There Almost Certainly Is No God
 
Richard Dawkins Mon Oct 23, 2:25 PM ET
 
America, founded in secularism as a beacon of eighteenth century 
enlightenment, is becoming the victim of religious politics, a circumstance
that would have horrified the Founding Fathers. The political ascendancy 
today values embryonic cells over adult people. It obsesses about gay
marriage, ahead of genuinely important issues that actually make a 
difference to the world. It gains crucial electoral support from a
religious constituency whose grip on reality is so tenuous that they
expect to be 'raptured' up to heaven, leaving their clothes as empty as
their minds. More extreme specimens actually long for a world war, which
they identify as the 'Armageddon' that is to presage the Second Coming.
Sam Harris, in his new short book, Letter to a Christian Nation, hits
the bull's-eye as usual: placed by a ball of fire, some significant
percentage of the American population would see a silver-lining in
the subsequent mushroom cloud, as it would suggest to them that the best
thing that is ever going to happen was about to happen: the return
of Christ . . .Imagine the consequences if any significant component of
the U.S. government actually believed that the world was about to
end and that its ending would be glorious. The fact that nearly half
of the American population apparently believes this, purely on the
basis of religious dogma, should be considered a moral and 
intellectual emergency. Does Bush check the Rapture Index daily,
as Reagan did his stars? We don't know, but would anyone be surprised?
 
My scientific colleagues have additional reasons to declare emergency.
Ignorant and absolutist attacks on stem cell research are just the tip
of an iceberg. What we have here is nothing less than a global assault
on rationality, and the Enlightenment values that inspired the founding
of this first and greatest of secular republics. Science education and
hence the whole future of science in this country - is under threat.
Temporarily beaten back in a Pennsylvania court, the 'breathtaking inanity'
(Judge John Jones's immortal phrase) of 'intelligent design' continually
flares up in local bush-fires. Dowsing them is a time-consuming but
important responsibility, and scientists are finally being jolted out of
their complacency. For years they quietly got on with their science,
lamentably underestimating the creationists who, being neither competent
nor interested in science, attended to the serious political business
of subverting local school boards. Scientists, and intellectuals 
generally, are now waking up to the threat from the American Taliban.
 
Scientists divide into two schools of thought over the best tactics
with which to face the threat. The Neville Chamberlain 'appeasement'
school focuses on the battle for evolution. Consequently, its members
identify fundamentalism as the enemy, and they bend over backwards to
appease 'moderate' or 'sensible' religion (not a difficult task, for
bishops and theologians despise fundamentalists as much as scientists do).
Scientists of the Winston Churchill school, by contrast, see the fight
for evolution as only one battle in a larger war: a looming war between
supernaturalism on the one side and rationality on the other. For
them, bishops and theologians belong with creationists in the supernatural
camp, and are not to be appeased.
 
The Chamberlain school accuses Churchillians of rocking the boat to
the point of muddying the waters. The philosopher of science Michael
Ruse wrote:
 
We who love science must realize that the enemy of our enemies is our
friend. Too often evolutionists spend time insulting would-be allies.
This is especially true of secular evolutionists. Atheists spend more time
running down sympathetic Christians than they do countering ¬creationists.
When John Paul II wrote a letter endorsing Darwinism, Richard Dawkins's
response was simply that the pope was a hypocrite, that he could not
be genuine about science and that Dawkins himself simply preferred an
honest fundamentalist.
 
A recent article in the New York Times by Cornelia Dean quotes the
astronomer Owen Gingerich as saying that, by simultaneously advocating 
evolution and atheism, 'Dr Dawkins "probably single-handedly makes more
converts to intelligent design than any of the leading intelligent
design theorists".' This is not the first, not the second, not even
the third time this plonkingly witless point has been made (and more
than one reply has aptly cited Uncle Remus: "Oh please please Brer Fox,
don't throw me in that awful briar patch").
 
Chamberlainites are apt to quote the late Stephen Jay Gould's 
'NOMA' - 'non-overlapping magisteria'. Gould claimed that science and
true religion never come into conflict because they exist in completely
separate dimensions of discourse:
 
To say it for all my colleagues and for the umpteenth millionth time
(from college bull sessions to learned treatises): science simply cannot
(by its legitimate methods) adjudicate the issue of God's possible
superintendence of nature. We neither affirm nor deny it; we simply
can't comment on it as scientists.
 
This sounds terrific, right up until you give it a moment's thought.
You then realize that the presence of a creative deity in the universe
is clearly a scientific hypothesis. Indeed, it is hard to imagine a
more momentous hypothesis in all of science. A universe with a god
would be a completely different kind of universe from one without,
and it would be a scientific difference. God could clinch the matter
in his favour at any moment by staging a spectacular demonstration of
his powers, one that would satisfy the exacting standards of science.
Even the infamous Templeton Foundation recognized that God is a
scientific hypothesis - by funding double-blind trials to test whether
remote prayer would speed the recovery of heart patients. It didn't,
of course, although a control group who knew they had been prayed for
tended to get worse (how about a class action suit against the
Templeton Foundation?) Despite such well-financed efforts, no evidence
for God's existence has yet appeared.
 
To see the disingenuous hypocrisy of religious people who embrace NOMA,
imagine that forensic archeologists, by some unlikely set of circumstances,
discovered DNA evidence demonstrating that Jesus was born of a virgin
mother and had no father. If NOMA enthusiasts were sincere, they should
dismiss the archeologists' DNA out of hand: "Irrelevant. Scientific
evidence has no bearing on theological questions. Wrong magisterium."
Does anyone seriously imagine that they would say anything remotely
like that? You can bet your boots that not just the fundamentalists but
every professor of theology and every bishop in the land would trumpet
the archeological evidence to the skies.
 
Either Jesus had a father or he didn't. The question is a scientific
one, and scientific evidence, if any were available, would be used
to settle it. The same is true of any miracle - and the deliberate
and intentional creation of the universe would have to have been the
mother and father of all miracles. Either it happened or it didn't.
It is a fact, one way or the other, and in our state of uncertainty we
can put a probability on it - an estimate that may change as more 
information comes in. Humanity's best estimate of the probability of
divine creation dropped steeply in 1859 when The Origin of Species 
was published, and it has declined steadily during the subsequent decades,
as evolution consolidated itself from plausible theory in the nineteenth
century to established fact today.
 
The Chamberlain tactic of snuggling up to 'sensible' religion, in order
to present a united front against ('intelligent design') creationists,
is fine if your central concern is the battle for evolution.  That is a
valid central concern, and I salute those who press it, such as Eugenie Scott
in Evolution versus Creationism. But if you are concerned with the
stupendous scientific question of whether the universe was created by
a supernatural intelligence or not, the lines are drawn completely
differently. On this larger issue, fundamentalists are united with 
'moderate' religion on one side, and I find myself on the other.
 
Of course, this all presupposes that the God we are talking about is a
personal intelligence such as Yahweh, Allah, Baal, Wotan, Zeus or
Lord Krishna. If, by 'God', you mean love, nature, goodness, the universe,
the laws of physics, the spirit of humanity, or Planck's constant, none
of the above applies. An American student asked her professor whether he
had a view about me. 'Sure,' he replied. 'He's positive science is
incompatible with religion, but he waxes ecstatic about nature and the
universe. To me, that is ¬religion!' Well, if that's what you choose
to mean by religion, fine, that makes me a religious man. But if your
God is a being who designs universes, listens to prayers, forgives sins,
wreaks miracles, reads your thoughts, cares about your welfare and raises
you from the dead, you are unlikely to be satisfied. As the distinguished
American physicist Steven Weinberg said, "If you want to say that 
'God is energy,' then you can find God in a lump of coal." But don't
expect congregations to flock to your church.
 
When Einstein said 'Did God have a choice in creating the Universe?' he
meant 'Could the universe have begun in more than one way?' 'God does
not play dice' was Einstein's poetic way of doubting Heisenberg's
indeterminacy principle. Einstein was famously irritated when theists 
misunderstood him to mean a personal God. But what did he expect? The
hunger to misunderstand should have been palpable to him. 'Religious'
physicists usually turn out to be so only in the Einsteinian sense: they
are atheists of a poetic disposition. So am I. But, given the widespread
yearning for that great misunderstanding, deliberately to confuse
Einsteinian pantheism with supernatural religion is an act of intellectual
high treason.
 
Accepting, then, that the God Hypothesis is a proper scientific hypothesis
whose truth or falsehood is hidden from us only by lack of evidence,
what should be our best estimate of the probability that God exists,
given the evidence now available? Pretty low I think, and here's why.
 
First, most of the traditional arguments for God's existence, from
Aquinas on, are easily demolished. Several of them, such as the First
Cause argument, work by setting up an infinite regress which God is
wheeled out to terminate. But we are never told why God is magically able
to terminate regresses while needing no explanation himself. To be sure,
we do need some kind of explanation for the origin of all things.
Physicists and cosmologists are hard at work on the problem. But whatever the
answer - a random quantum fluctuation or a Hawking/Penrose singularity
or whatever we end up calling it - it will be simple. Complex, statistically
improbable things, by definition, don't just happen; they demand an
explanation in their own right. They are impotent to terminate regresses,
in a way that simple things are not. The first cause cannot have been
an intelligence - let alone an intelligence that answers prayers and enjoys
being worshipped. Intelligent, creative, complex, statistically improbable
things come late into the universe, as the product of evolution or some
other process of gradual escalation from simple beginnings. They come
late into the universe and therefore cannot be responsible for designing it.
 
Another of Aquinas' efforts, the Argument from Degree, is worth spelling
out, for it epitomises the characteristic flabbiness of theological 
reasoning. We notice degrees of, say, goodness or temperature, and we
measure them, Aquinas said, by reference to a maximum:
 
Now the maximum in any genus is the cause of all in that genus, as
fire, which is the maximum of heat, is the cause of all hot things . . . 
Therefore, there must also be something which is to all beings the cause
of their being, goodness, and every other perfection; and this we call God.
 
That's an argument? You might as well say that people vary in smelliness
but we can make the judgment only by reference to a perfect maximum of
conceivable smelliness. Therefore there must exist a pre-eminently peerless
stinker, and we call him God. Or substitute any dimension of
comparison you like, and derive an equivalently fatuous conclusion.
That's theology.
 
The only one of the traditional arguments for God that is widely used
today is the teleological argument, sometimes called the Argument from
Design although - since the name begs the question of its validity - it
should better be called the Argument for Design. It is the familiar
'watchmaker' argument, which is surely one of the most superficially
plausible bad arguments ever discovered - and it is rediscovered by
just about everybody until they are taught the logical fallacy and 
Darwin's brilliant alternative.
 
In the familiar world of human artifacts, complicated things that
look designed are designed. To naïve observers, it seems to follow that
similarly complicated things in the natural world that look 
designed - things like eyes and hearts - are designed too. It isn't just
an argument by analogy. There is a semblance of statistical reasoning
here too - fallacious, but carrying an illusion of plausibility. If you
randomly scramble the fragments of an eye or a leg or a heart a million
times, you'd be lucky to hit even one combination that could see, walk
or pump. This demonstrates that such devices could not have been put
together by chance. And of course, no sensible scientist ever said they
could. Lamentably, the scientific education of most British and American 
students omits all mention of Darwinism, and therefore the only alternative
to chance that most people can imagine is design.
 
Even before Darwin's time, the illogicality was glaring: how could it
ever have been a good idea to postulate, in explanation for the existence
of improbable things, a designer who would have to be even more improbable?
The entire argument is a logical non-starter, as David Hume realized before
Darwin was born. What Hume didn't know was the supremely elegant
alternative to both chance and design that Darwin was to give us.
Natural selection is so stunningly powerful and elegant, it not only
explains the whole of life, it raises our consciousness and boosts our
confidence in science's future ability to explain everything else.
 
Natural selection is not just an alternative to chance. It is the only
ultimate alternative ever suggested. Design is a workable explanation
for organized complexity only in the short term. It is not an ultimate
explanation, because designers themselves demand an explanation. If,
as Francis Crick and Leslie Orgel once playfully speculated, life on this
planet was deliberately seeded by a payload of bacteria in the nose cone
of a rocket, we still need an explanation for the intelligent aliens who
dispatched the rocket. Ultimately they must have evolved by gradual degrees
from simpler beginnings. Only evolution, or some kind of gradualistic 
'crane' (to use Daniel Dennett's neat term), is capable of terminating
the regress. Natural selection is an anti-chance process, which gradually
builds up complexity, step by tiny step. The end product of this
ratcheting process is an eye, or a heart, or a brain - a device
whose improbable complexity is utterly baffling until you spot the
gentle ramp that leads up to it.
 
Whether my conjecture is right that evolution is the only explanation for
life in the universe, there is no doubt that it is the explanation for
life on this planet. Evolution is a fact, and it is among the more
secure facts known to science. But it had to get started somehow.
Natural selection cannot work its wonders until certain minimal conditions
are in place, of which the most important is an accurate system of
replication - DNA, or something that works like DNA.
 
The origin of life on this planet - which means the origin of the first
self-replicating molecule - is hard to study, because it (probably) only
happened once, 4 billion years ago and under very different conditions from
those with which we are familiar. We may never know how it happened.
Unlike the ordinary evolutionary events that followed, it must have been
a genuinely very improbable - in the sense of unpredictable - event:
too improbable, perhaps, for chemists to reproduce it in the laboratory or
even devise a plausible theory for what happened. This weirdly paradoxical
conclusion - that a chemical account of the origin of life, in order to
be plausible, has to be implausible - would follow if it were the
case that life is extremely rare in the universe. And indeed we have
never encountered any hint of extraterrestrial life, not even by radio -
the circumstance that prompted Enrico Fermi's cry: "Where is everybody?"
 
Suppose life's origin on a planet took place through a hugely improbable
stroke of luck, so improbable that it happens on only one in a
billion planets. The National Science Foundation would laugh at any chemist
whose proposed research had only a one in a hundred chance of succeeding,
let alone one in a billion. Yet, given that there are at least a billion
billion planets in the universe, even such absurdly low odds as these will
yield life on a billion planets. And - this is where the famous anthropic
principle comes in - Earth has to be one of them, because here we are.
 
If you set out in a spaceship to find the one planet in the galaxy that
has life, the odds against your finding it would be so great that the
task would be indistinguishable, in practice, from impossible. But
if you are alive (as you manifestly are if you are about to step
into a spaceship) you needn't bother to go looking for that one
planet because, by definition, you are already standing on it. The anthropic
principle really is rather elegant. By the way, I don't actually think
the origin of life was as improbable as all that. I think the galaxy
has plenty of islands of life dotted about, even if the islands are
too spaced out for any one to hope for a meeting with any other. My
point is only that, given the number of planets in the universe, the
origin of life could in theory be as lucky as a blindfolded golfer scoring
a hole in one. The beauty of the anthropic principle is that, even
in the teeth of such stupefying odds against, it still gives us a
perfectly satisfying explanation for life's presence on our own planet.
 
The anthropic principle is usually applied not to planets but to universes.
Physicists have suggested that the laws and constants of physics are
too good - as if the universe were set up to favour our eventual evolution.
It is as though there were, say, half a dozen dials representing the
major constants of physics. Each of the dials could in principle be tuned
to any of a wide range of values. Almost all of these knob-twiddlings
would yield a universe in which life would be impossible. Some universes
would fizzle out within the first picosecond. Others would contain no
elements heavier than hydrogen and helium. In yet others, matter
would never condense into stars (and you need stars in order to forge the
elements of chemistry and hence life). You can estimate the very low
odds against the six knobs all just happening to be correctly tuned, and
conclude that a divine knob-twiddler must have been at work. But, as
we have already seen, that explanation is vacuous because it begs the
biggest question of all. The divine knob twiddler would himself have to
have been at least as improbable as the settings of his knobs.
 
Again, the anthropic principle delivers its devastatingly neat solution.
Physicists already have reason to suspect that our universe - everything
we can see - is only one universe among perhaps billions. Some theorists
postulate a multiverse of foam, where the universe we know is just one
bubble. Each bubble has its own laws and constants. Our familiar laws
of physics are parochial bylaws. Of all the universes in the foam,
only a minority has what it takes to generate life. And, with anthropic
hindsight, we obviously have to be sitting in a member of that minority,
because, well, here we are, aren't we? As physicists have said, it is
no accident that we see stars in our sky, for a universe without stars would
also lack the chemical elements necessary for life. There may be
universes whose skies have no stars: but they also have no inhabitants to
notice the lack. Similarly, it is no accident that we see a rich
diversity of living species: for an evolutionary process that is capable
of yielding a species that can see things and reflect on them cannot
help producing lots of other species at the same time. The reflective
species must be surrounded by an ecosystem, as it must be surrounded by stars.
 
The anthropic principle entitles us to postulate a massive dose of
luck in accounting for the existence of life on our planet. But there
are limits. We are allowed one stroke of luck for the origin of evolution,
and perhaps for a couple of other unique events like the origin of
the eukaryotic cell and the origin of consciousness. But that's the end
of our entitlement to large-scale luck. We emphatically cannot invoke
major strokes of luck to account for the illusion of design that glows from
each of the billion species of living creature that have ever lived
on Earth. The evolution of life is a general and continuing process,
producing essentially the same result in all species, however different
the details.
 
Contrary to what is sometimes alleged, evolution is a predictive science.
If you pick any hitherto unstudied species and subject it to minute 
scrutiny, any evolutionist will confidently predict that each individual will
be observed to do everything in its power, in the particular way of the
species - plant, herbivore, carnivore, nectivore or whatever it is - to
survive and propagate the DNA that rides inside it. We won't be around
long enough to test the prediction but we can say, with great confidence,
that if a comet strikes Earth and wipes out the mammals, a new fauna
will rise to fill their shoes, just as the mammals filled those of the
dinosaurs 65 million years ago. And the range of parts played by the
new cast of life's drama will be similar in broad outline, though not
in detail, to the roles played by the mammals, and the dinosaurs before
them, and the mammal-like reptiles before the dinosaurs. The same rules
are predictably being followed, in millions of species all over the globe,
and for hundreds of millions of years. Such a general observation requires
an entirely different explanatory principle from the anthropic principle 
that explains one-off events like the origin of life, or the origin
of the universe, by luck. That entirely different principle is
natural selection.
 
We explain our existence by a combination of the anthropic principle and
Darwin's principle of natural selection. That combination provides a
complete and deeply satisfying explanation for everything that we see and
know. Not only is the god hypothesis unnecessary. It is spectacularly
unparsimonious. Not only do we need no God to explain the universe
and life. God stands out in the universe as the most glaring of all
superfluous sore thumbs. We cannot, of course, disprove God, just
as we can't disprove Thor, fairies, leprechauns and the Flying Spaghetti
Monster. But, like those other fantasies that we can't disprove,
we can say that God is very very improbable.
 
Richard Dawkins is the Charles Simonyi Professor of the Public Understanding
of Science at Oxford University. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society,
and the author of nine books, including The Selfish Gene, The Blind
Watchmaker and The Ancestor's Tale. His new book, The God Delusion,
published last week by Houghton Mifflin, is already a NEW YORK TIMES 
bestseller, and his Foundation for Reason and Science launched at the
same time (see RichardDawkins.net).
 
#----------------------------------------------------------------------------

Why I Am Hostile Toward Religion
I oppose fundamentalist religion because it is hell-bent on ruining the
scientific education of countless eager minds.

By Richard Dawkins
 

Despite my dislike of gladiatorial contests, I seem somehow to have acquired
a reputation for pugnacity toward religion. Colleagues who agree that there
is no God, who agree that we do not need religion to be moral, and agree
that we can explain the roots of religion and of morality in non-religious
terms, nevertheless come back at me in gentle puzzlement. Why are you so
hostile? What is actually wrong with religion? Does it really do so much
harm that we should actively fight against it? Why not live and let live,
as one does with Taurus and Scorpio, crystal energy and ley lines? Isn't it
all just harmless nonsense?

I might retort that such hostility as I or other atheists occasionally voice
toward religion is limited to words. I am not going to bomb anybody,
behead them, stone them, burn them at the stake, crucify them, or fly
planes into their skyscrapers, just because of a theological disagreement.
But my interlocutor usually doesn’t leave it at that. He may go on to say
something like this: "Doesn’t your hostility mark you out as a fundamentalist
atheist, just as fundamentalist in your own way as the wingnuts of the
Bible Belt in theirs?" I need to dispose of this accusation of 
fundamentalism, for it is distressingly common.

Holy Books vs. Evidence 

Fundamentalists know they are right because they have read the truth in
a holy book and they know, in advance, that nothing will budge them from
their belief. The truth of the holy book is an axiom, not the end product
of a process of reasoning. The book is true, and if the evidence seems to
contradict it, it is the evidence that must be thrown out, not the book.
By contrast, what I, as a scientist, believe (for example, evolution) I
believe not because of reading a holy book but because I have studied the
evidence. It really is a very different matter. Books about evolution are
believed not because they are holy. They are believed because they present
overwhelming quantities of mutually buttressed evidence. In principle, any 
reader can go and check that evidence. When a science book is wrong,
somebody eventually discovers the mistake and it is corrected in subsequent
books. That conspicuously doesn’t happen with holy books.

Philosophers, especially amateurs with a little philosophical learning,
and even more especially those infected with "cultural relativism," may
raise a tiresome red herring at this point a scientist’s belief in evidence
is itself a matter of fundamentalist faith. I have dealt with this elsewhere,
and will only briefly repeat myself here. All of us believe in evidence in
our own lives, whatever we may profess with our amateur philosophical hats 
on.

*******

I am no more fundamentalist when I say evolution is true than when I say
it is true that New Zealand is in the southern hemisphere. We believe in
evolution because the evidence supports it, and we would abandon it overnight
if new evidence arose to disprove it. No real fundamentalist would ever
say anything like that.

It is all too easy to confuse fundamentalism with passion. I may well appear
passionate when I defend evolution against a fundamentalist creationist,
but this is not because of a rival fundamentalism of my own. It is because
the evidence for evolution is overwhelmingly strong and I am passionately 
distressed that my opponent can’t see it--or, more usually, refuses to
look at it because it contradicts his holy book. My passion is increased
when I think about how much the poor fundamentalists, and those whom they
influence, are missing. The truths of evolution, along with many other
scientific truths, are so engrossingly fascinating and beautiful; how
truly tragic to die having missed out on all that! Of course that makes
me passionate. How could it not? But my belief in evolution is not
fundamentalism, and it is not faith, because I know what it would take
to change my mind, and I would gladly do so if the necessary evidence
were forthcoming.

It does happen. I have previously told the story of a respected elder
statesman of the Zoology Department at Oxford when I was an undergraduate.
For years he had passionately believed, and taught, that the Golgi
Apparatus (a microscopic feature of the interior of cells) was not real:
an artifact, an illusion. Every Monday afternoon it was the custom for
the whole department to listen to a research talk by a visiting lecturer.
One Monday, the visitor was an American cell biologist who presented 
completely convincing evidence that the Golgi Apparatus was real. At
the end of the lecture, the old man strode to the front of the hall, shook
the American by the hand and said--with passion--"My dear fellow, I
wish to thank you. I have been wrong these fifteen years." We clapped our
hands red. No fundamentalist would ever say that. In practice, not all
scientists would. But all scientists pay lip service to it as an ideal
-unlike, say, politicians who would probably condemn it as flip-flopping.
The memory of the incident I have described still brings a lump to my throat.

Fundamentalist Religion Saps the Intellect

As a scientist, I am hostile to fundamentalist religion because it actively
debauches the scientific enterprise. It teaches us not to change our minds,
and not to want to know exciting things that are available to be known.
It subverts science and saps the intellect. The saddest example I know
is that of the American geologist Kurt Wise, who now directs the Center
for Origins Research at Bryan College, Dayton, Tennessee. It is no
accident that Bryan College is named after William Jennings Bryan, prosecutor
of the science teacher John Scopes in the Dayton "Monkey Trial" of 1923.
Wise could have fulfilled his boyhood ambition to become a professor of
geology at a real university, a university whose motto might have been 
"Think critically" rather than the oxymoronic one displayed on the Bryan
website: "Think critically and biblically." Indeed, he obtained a real
degree in geology at the University of Chicago, followed by two higher
degrees in geology and paleontology at Harvard (no less) where he studied
under Stephen Jay Gould (no less). He was a highly qualified and genuinely
promising young scientist, well on his way to achieving his dream of
teaching science and doing research at a proper university.

Then tragedy struck. It came, not from outside but from within his own
mind, a mind fatally subverted and weakened by a fundamentalist religious
upbringing that required him to believe that the Earth--the subject of
his Chicago and Harvard geological education--was less than ten thousand
years old. He was too intelligent not to recognize the head-on collision 
between his religion and his science, and the conflict in his mind made
him increasingly uneasy. One day, he could hear the strain no more, and
he clinched the matter with a pair of scissors. He took a bible and went
right through it, literally cutting out every verse that would have to
go if the scientific world-view were true. At the end of this ruthlessly
honest labor-intensive exercise, there was so little left of his bible that

    try as I might, and even with the benefit of intact margins throughout
    the pages of Scripture, I found it impossible pick up the Bible without
    it being rent in two. I had to make a decision between evolution
    and Scripture. Either the Scripture was true and evolution was wrong
    or evolution was true and I must toss out the Bible . . . It was there
    that night that I accepted the Word of God and rejected all that would
    ever counter it, including evolution. With that, in great sorrow, I
    tossed into the fire all my dreams and hopes in science. 

I find that terribly sad; but whereas the Golgi Apparatus moved me to
tears of admiration and exultation, the Kurt Wise story is just
plain pathetic--pathetic and contemptible. The wound, to his career and
his life’s happiness, was self-inflicted, so unnecessary, so easy to
escape. All he had to do was toss out the bible. Or interpret it
symbolically, or allegorically, as the theologians do. Instead, he did
the fundamentalist thing and tossed out evidence and reason, along with all
his dreams and hopes.

Perhaps uniquely among fundamentalists, Kurt Wise is honest--devastatingly,
painfully, shockingly honest. Give him the Templeton Prize; he might be
the first really sincere recipient. Wise brings to the surface what is
secretly going on underneath, in the minds of fundamentalists generally,
when they encounter scientific evidence that contradicts their beliefs.

The Doublethink of Religious Faith

Poor Kurt Wise reminds me more of Winston Smith in ‘1984’--struggling
desperately to believe that two plus two equals five if Big Brother says
it does. Winston, however, was being tortured. Wise’s doublethink comes not
from the imperative of physical torture but from the imperative--apparently
just as undeniable to some people--of religious faith: arguably a form
of mental torture. I am hostile to religion because of what it did to
Kurt Wise. And if it did that to a Harvard-educated geologist, just
think what it can do to others less gifted and less well armed.
Fundamentalist religion is hell-bent on ruining the scientific education of
countless thousands of innocent, well-meaning, eager young minds. 
Non-fundamentalist, "sensible" religion may not be doing that. But it
is making the world safe for fundamentalism by teaching children, from
their earliest years, that unquestioning faith is a virtue.

The more faith you have, the less thinking you actually do.

poverty stricken arsenals of the religious imagination

Karl Marx state that "religion is the opiate of the masses".
Religion is an anesthetic that makes you immune to rational thought.


Religion turns people into hateful lemmings and should be banned.

Ho! Ho! Ho! Religion must go.

"Me, I'm examining the major Western religions.  I'm looking for
something that's very soft on morality, extremely generous with holidays,
and has a very short initiation period."


Religious zealots, fundamentalists and your average, everyday churchgoer
will flip out on you for questioning their faith and are completely
content in believing in something that can’t be understood or even proved.

Religion is detrimental to the progress of humanity and is a neurological
disorder.

I guess humanity was started through incest (Adam and Eve's children) or did
Eve have some of her grandchildren?

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
1. Thou shall have no other Gods before me.

Blatantly unconstitutional. The free exercise clause of the first amendment
guarantees that we each have the right to follow any God and any religious
belief system we wish.

2. Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any
   thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that
   is in the water under the earth: Thou shalt not bow down thyself to
   them, nor serve them: for I the Lord thy God am a jealous God,
   visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third
   and fourth generation of them that hate me.

Also unconstitutional on free exercise grounds. Americans can make any
graven image they wish to make, and bow down to whatever god or idol they wish.

3. Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain

Unconstitutional on both freedom of religion and free speech grounds.

4. Remember the sabbath day, to keep it holy

Again, unconstitutional on free exercise grounds.

5. Honour thy father and thy mother

A good idea, in most cases, but a law requiring it would be unconstitutional
and outside the purview of government. You can't legally enforce an
individual's feelings toward their parents.

6. Thou shalt not kill

This one is obviously constitutional, and is a part of our legal system.
But it's also found in EVERY legal system, even those that have nothing to
do with the bible or Christianity. No society can condone murder of each
other and survive, so this is simply a survival imperative.

7. Thou shalt not commit adultery

Another one that is a good idea, but not constitutional if legally enforced.
Adultery is a moral wrong, but it's a private matter between individuals.

8. Thou shalt not steal

This is the second one that is obviously constitutional, but also found in
every legal system regardless of the religious system that may have initially
spawned it. A universal imperative that would be part of the law even
if the bible never existed.

9. Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbour

Some have interpreted this to be analagous to our perjury laws, but nothing
in the text indicates that. It's talking about lying in general, not
in a legal sense during court proceedings. And while lying may be wrong,
it's not legally wrong except in specific circumstances - perjury and
libel/slander. Under our system, most instances of lying would be covered
by the first amendment free speech clause.

10. Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour's house, thou shalt not covet
    thy neighbour's wife, nor his manservant, nor his maidservant, nor his
    ox, nor his ass, nor any thing that is thy neighbour's

Not only unconstitutional, it would require the ability to read minds.
If coveting what your neighbor has was against the law in the US, there
would be no "keeping up with the Joneses". You cannot, under our system,
legislate against thoughts or feelings.

The "basis of most of our laws"? Not even close.
---------------------------------------------------------------------
If there are multiple levels of hell, can it be said that there is a
temperature gradient between levels?  If so, heat pumps can be used to
air condition the lower levels.


Religions
--------
polytheism
monotheism
olympianism (Greek gods)
Catholic
Methodists
Baptists
Presbyterian
Hindu
Sikh
Bhuddism
Islam/Muslim
  Sunni
  Shiite
  Wahibism
Lutherans
Mormon
Russian Orthodox
Greek Orthodox
Eastern Orthodox
Jewish
Episcopalian
  Anglican
Shakers
Quakers
Shinto
Scientology
Unitarian
Trinitarian
Paganisn
Satanism
Allah
God
Jesus
Mohammed
The Immaculate Conception
The Holy Trinity


Darwin will crush them all over time as we experience the slow
illumination of the human mind.  It took the Catholic church 500 years
to forgive Galileo.

Mithras
http://www.near-death.com/experiences/origen048.html
============================================================================
Schopenhauer contrasts the peaceable historical record of the Hindus and the
Buddhists with the wickedness and cruelty of the monotheists and then
concludes:

Indeed, intolerance is essential only to monotheism; an only God is by nature
a jealous God who will never allow another to live.  On the other hand,
polytheistic gods are naturally tolerant; they live and let live.  In the
first place, they gladly tolerate their colleagues, the gods of the same
religion, and this tolerance is afterwards extended even to foreign gods who
are accordingly, hospitably received and later admitted, in some cases, even
to an equality of rights.  An instance of this is seen in the Romans who
willingly admited and respected Phrygian, Egyptian and other foreign gods.
Thus it is only the monotheistic religions that furnish us with the spectacle
of religious wars, religious persecutions, courts for trying heretics, and
also with that of iconoclasm, the destruction of the images of foreign
gods, the demolition of Indian temples and Egyptian colossi that had looked
at the sun for three thousand years; all this because their jealous God has
said: "Thou shall make no graven image" and so on.

Monotheism has been criticized for suppressing human freedom.  Many
scholars have argued that it inevitably leads to totalitarianism whereas
more and mmore modern philosophers see polytheism as a  possible source
of pluralism, creeativity, and human freedom.  Feminists have also criticized
the monotheistic God as a male chauvinist who is unwilling to change and
is insensitive to "femininity"

The omnipotence of God is asserted everywhere in the Koran: man's will
is totally subordinate to God's will to the extent that man cannot be said
to have a free will of his own.  Even those who disbelieve in Him,
disbelieve because it is God who wills them to disbelieve.  This leads
to the Muslim doctrine of predestination that prevails over the doctrine
of man's free will.

Under the Koranic system of predestination, "men" are no more than automata
created by a capricious deity who amuses himself by watching his creations
burning in hell.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Religion should be treated as a neurological disorder.

http://uniformvelocity.com/2009/03/18/the-intellectual-dishonesty-is-astounding/

The simple fact that a seemingly intelligent and scientifically educated
person can parse their intellect into compartments and completely insulate
portions of their cognition from the same critical thought that science
demands is quite befuddling.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Let's look at some of the Gods mentioned in the Bible:

   Adrammelech     II Kings 17:31   Sepharvite God.
   Anammelech      II Kings 17:31   Sepharvite God.
   Ashima          II Kings 17:30   Samaritan Moon Goddess.
   Ashtoreth       I Kings 11:05    Canaanite Goddess.
   Baal            I Kings 18:19    Canaanite God ("Lord") of
                                      fertility, vegitation, and storms.
   Baal-berith     Judges 8:33      A regional variation/aspect of Baal.
   Baal-peor       Numbers 25:03    Moabite regional variation/aspect of
                                      Baal.
   Baal-zebub      Luke 11:19       Philistine/Ekronian regional
                                      variation/aspect of Baal.
   Baalim          I Kings 18:18    Canaanite Gods ("Lords"), a
                                      collective of the different
                                      aspects of Baa.
   Bel             Isiah 46:01      Assyrian/Babylonian/Sumerian God
                                      ("Lord").
   Chemosh         I Kings 11:07    Moabite war God.
   Dagon           I Samuel 05:02   Philistine/Ekronian/Babylonian God
                                      of agriculture.
   Diana of the
     Ephesians     Acts 19:35       Ephesian moon and nature Goddess,
                                      ("Divine/Brilliant").
   Jehovah         Exodus 6:03      Hebrew God
   Jupiter         Acts 14:12       Roman God (possibly derived from
                                      'Zeus-pater', Father Zeus).
   Lucifer         Isiah 14:12      ("Light-Bearer")
   Mercurius       Acts 14:12       Otherwise known as the Roman God
                                      Mercury, God of communication and
                                      travel, and messenger of the
                                      Gods...which is probably why Paul
                                      was called this at Lystra.
   Milcom          I Kings 11:05    Ammonite God
   Molech          I Kings 11:07    Ammonite God, also called Moloch,
                                      most probably Baal-Hammon of
                                      Carthage.
   Nebo            Isiah 46:01      Assyrian/Babylonian/Chaldean God of
                                      wisdom and writing, also called
                                      Nabu.
   Nergal          II Kings 17:30   Cuth/Assyrian/Babylonian war and
                                      underworld God, also called
                                      Meshlamthea.
   Nibhaz          II Kings 17:31   Avites God
   Nisroch         II Kings 19:37   Assyrian God
   Rimmon          II Kings 05:18   Babylonian/Syrian storm God
                                      involved (as Ramman) with the
                                      Deluge, according to Hebrew texts;
                                      also known as Ramman/Rammon.
   Succoth-benoth   II Kings 17:30  Babylonian fertility Goddess ("She
                                      Who Produces Seed"), also known as
                                      Zarpanitu/Zerpanitum.
   Tammuz          Ezekial 8:14     Assyrian/Babylonian God
   Tartak          II Kings 17:31   Avites God


CHAPTER 272. CRIMES AGAINST CHASTITY, MORALITY, DECENCY AND GOOD ORDER Chapter 272: Section 36. Blasphemy Section 36. Whoever wilfully blasphemes the holy name of God by denying, cursing or contumeliously reproaching God, his creation, government or final judging of the world, or by cursing or contumeliously reproaching Jesus Christ or the Holy Ghost, or by cursing or contumeliously reproaching or exposing to contempt and ridicule, the holy word of God contained in the holy scriptures shall be punished by imprisonment in jail for not more than one year or by a fine of not more than three hundred dollars, and may also be bound to good behavior. --------------------------------------------------------------------------- This is the money you'll be saving if you drop religion Intelligent design is an assumption without a scientific basis. For this assumption to be considered a hypothesis, there must be evidence. Where is the evidence of intelligent design, unless you consider evolution itself intelligent design. For a hypothesis to gain credibility, it must be testable. I do not see how intelligent design can be tested. For that same hypothesis to become a theory, the testing of it must be repeatable with the same results each time. It should also be open to all for meticulous scrutiny. Intelligent design can not be considered a hypothesis or a theory, but it can be considered as a nice fairy tale. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Schopenhauer contrasts the peaceable historical record of the Hindus and the Buddhists with the wickedness and cruelty of the monotheists and then concludes: Indeed, intolerance is essential only to monotheism; an only God is by nature a jealous God who will never allow another to live. On the other hand, polytheistic gods are naturally tolerant; they live and let live. In the first place, they gladly tolerate their colleagues, the gods of the same religion, and this tolerance is afterwards extended even to foreign gods who are accordingly, hospitably received and later admitted, in some cases, even to an equality of rights. An instance of this is seen in the Romans who willingly admited and respected Phrygian, Egyptian and other foreign gods. Thus it is only the monotheistic religions that furnish us with the spectacle of religious wars, religious persecutions, courts for trying heretics, and also with that of iconoclasm, the destruction of the images of foreign gods, the demolition of Indian temples and Egyptian colossi that had looked at the sun for three thousand years; all this because their jealous God has said: "Thou shall make no graven image" and so on. Monotheism has been criticized for suppressing human freedom. Many scholars have argued that it inevitably leads to totalitarianism whereas more and mmore modern philosophers see polytheism as a possible source of pluralism, creeativity, and human freedom. Feminists have also criticized the monotheistic God as a male chauvinist who is unwilling to change and is insensitive to "femininity" The omnipotence of God is asserted everywhere in the Koran: man's will is totally subordinate to God's will to the extent that man cannot be said to have a free will of his own. Even those who disbelieve in Him, disbelieve because it is God who wills them to disbelieve. This leads to the Muslim doctrine of predestination that prevails over the doctrine of man's free will. Under the Koranic system of predestination, "men" are no more than automata created by a capricious deity who amuses himself by watching his creations burning in hell. Leviticus http://www.dudeism.com/ordination.html When I die, I won't realize I'm dead, because I'm dead. God works in mysterious ways. God is an imaginary friend and a religious security blanket. Any religion that demands for earthly vengeance and retribution for any reason is not a religion at all, but a mental illness and should be treated as such. If you were a true believer, you wouldn't bother with health insurance. Imaginary sock friend. When private religion goes public, it stops being spiritual and becomes political and it runs on the moral hypocrisy ticket. Evidence contradicts faith. The clerical profession work tirelessly in misdirecting the human race. The clerics tell us to ignore the evidence we see before us, such as evolution.. Who benefits from your faith in the here and now. Who reaps http://www.youtube.com/user/patcondell?blend=2&ob=1#p/a/u/1/STlYN5KCiWg http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yjO4duhMRZk http://blip.tv/file/2904675 Text format of Pat Condell's videos You believe in a book that has talking animals, wizards, witches, demons, sticks turning into snakes, burning bushes, food falling from the sky, people walking on water, and all sorts of magical, absurd and primitive stories, and you say that we are the ones that need help?" -- Mark Twain Too lazy and stupid to think for yourself? Welcome to Jesus country. - healing the sick by touch - people are turned into a pillar of salt - death to all non-believers - death to all gays - the selling of daughters as slaves - Noah and wife's children having incest - Adam and Eve's children having incest - Burning bush that talks Under Islam, women are unclean. Any man who touches his wife (or any woman) before prayer, he is considered “unclean” for prayer. Approach not prayers… until after washing your whole body if ye are ill or on a journey or ye cometh from the wilderness, or ye have been in contact with a woman…” Sura 4:43 "Unbelievers are the worst of all beings." - Quran 98:6 "Kill unbelievers whereever you find them." - Quran 4:89 "Only evil people are unbelievers." - Quran 2:99 "Do not be friends with unbelievers." - Quran 3:28 "Unbelievers are liars." - Quran 9:107 "The Vilest of animals are unbelievers." - Quran 8:55 "Jews are the greediest of all." - Quran 2:96 How come God created the Heavens and the Earth, but always needs more money from you in church. It should bee triviall to create counterfeit money that easily passes Secret Service tests. The Catholic God is a menage-a-trois gay relationship between the father, the son and the Holy Ghost. I am presuming the Holy Ghost is a male as it was him who inseminated the virgin Mary. Was Mary married to Joseph? If so, was their relationship not consumated? Apparently, abstinence is not 100% effective Is the Holy Ghost an adulterer? Who certified Mary's virginity? The Holy Ghost raped Mary. Did Jesus ever have sex? Did Jesus ever have children? People who have no annoying vices always have annoying virtues. We stand firm upon the bare proposition that God has spoken authoritatively and inerrantly in the pages of the holy Scripture. God made the two great lights, the greater light to govern the day, and the lesser light to govern the night; He made the stars also. Genesis 1.16 If a man sells his daughter as a female slave, she is not to go free as the male slaves do. Exodus 21.7 Whosoever lieth with a beast shall surely be put to death Exodus 22.19 Six days shall work be done, but on the seventh day there shall be to you an holy day, a sabbath of rest to the LORD: whosoever doeth work therein shall be put to death. Exodus 35.2 Unto the woman he said, I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children; and thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee Genesis 3:16 Its entrails, however, and its legs he shall wash with water. And the priest shall offer up in smoke all of it on the altar for a burnt offering, an offering by fire of a soothing aroma to the LORD. (the creator of the universe likes the smell of burning goat meat). Leviticus 1.9 You shall not eat of their flesh nor touch their carcasses; they are unclean to you Leviticus 11.8 But whatever is in the seas and in the rivers that does not have fins and scales among all the teeming life of the water, and among all the living creatures that are in the water, they are detestable things to you Leviticus 11.10 When a woman has a discharge, if her discharge in her body is blood, she shall continue in her menstrual impurity for seven days; and whoever touches her shall be unclean until evening. Leviticus 15.19-24 Thou shalt not lie with mankind, as with womankind: it is abomination. Leviticus 18.22 And if a man lie with mankind, as with womankind, both of them have committed abomination: they shall surely be put to death; their blood shall be upon them. Leviticus 18.32 You are to keep My statutes. You shall not breed together two kinds of your cattle; you shall not sow your field with two kinds of seed, nor wear a garment upon you of two kinds of material mixed together Leviticus 19.19 You shall not round off the side-growth of your heads nor harm the edges of your beard Leviticus 19.27 And if a man lie with mankind, as with womankind, both of them have committed abomination: they shall surely be put to death; their blood shall be upon them Leviticus 20:13 Speak to Aaron, saying, 'No man of your offspring throughout their generations who has a defect shall approach to offer the food of his God. For no one who has a defect shall approach: a blind man, or a lame man, or he who has a disfigured face, or any deformed limb, or a man who has a broken foot or broken hand, or a hunchback or a dwarf, or one who has a defect in his eye or eczema or scabs or crushed testicles Leviticus 21.17-20 As for your male and female slaves whom you may have-- you may acquire male and female slaves from the pagan nations that are around you. Leviticus 25.44 Servants, be submissive to your masters with all respect, not only to those who are good and gentle, but also to those who are unreasonable. Peter 2.18 You shall not make any cuts in your body for the dead nor make any tattoo marks on yourselves: I am the LORD. Leviticus 19:28 He who has believed and has been baptized shall be saved; but he who has disbelieved shall be condemned. These signs will accompany those who have believed: in My name they will cast out demons, they will speak with new tongues; they will pick up serpents, and if they drink any deadly poison, it will not hurt them; they will lay hands on the sick, and they will recover. Mark 16:18 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- God made me such that I cannot believe. Who are you to question God's wisdom? Unknown Faith is a belief in the absence of evidence, and is hereditary. Unknown Atheism is a non-prophet organization. Unknown What can be asserted without proof can be dismissed without proof. Christopher Hitchens Man is certainly stark mad: he cannot make a worm, yet he will make gods by the dozen. Michel de Montaigne Men will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest. Denis Diderot The absence of evidence does not imply the evidence of absence. Unknown The ink of the scholar is holier than the blood of the martyr. Prophet Muhammad Humanity without religion is like a serial killer without a chainsaw. Unknown Could a being create the fifty billion galaxies, each with two hundred billion stars, then rejoice in the smell of burning goat flesh? Ron Patterson Ho! Ho! Ho! Religion must go. George Carlin You're basically killing each other to see who's got the better imaginary friend. Blaise Pascal Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away. Philip K. Dick Either God wants to abolish evil, and cannot; or he can, but does not want to. If he wants to, but cannot, he is impotent. If he can, but does not want to, he is wicked. If, as they say, God can abolish evil, and God really wants to do it, why is there evil in the world? Epicurus Isn't killing people in the name of God a pretty good definition of insanity? Arthur C. Clarke How many omnipotent, omniscient, immortal and omnipresent Gods have died throughtout the history of our species. Where lies the graveyard of past Gods. Who tends to their mounds? Unknown Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction. Blaise Pascal To argue with a person who has renounced the use of reason is like administering medicine to the dead. Thomas Paine We stand firm upon the bare proposition that God has spoken authoritatively and inerrantly in the pages of the Holy Scripture. Unknown I do not fear my death. I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born, and had not suffered the slighest inconvenience from it." Mark Twain If God created the Universe, why is evidence of this creation so scant. He might have left Maxwell's equations in Egyptian hieroglyphs. The Ten Commandments might have been engraved on the moon. A hundred-kilometer crucifix could have been placed in Earth orbit. Why can't God spell out my name in the starfields? Why should God be so clear in the Bible and so obscure in the world of reality? Unknown Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by the rulers as useful. Seneca the Younger The church says the earth is flat, but I know that it is round, for I have seen the shadow on the moon, and I have more faith in a shadow than in the church. Ferdinand Magellan Not only is there no god, but try getting a plumber on weekends. Woody Allen It's an incredible con job when you think about it, to believe something now in exchange for something after death. Even corporations with their reward systems don't try to make it posthumous. Gloria Steinem Lighthouses are more helpful then churches. Benjamin Franklin Everybody can be considered an atheist in the sense that they reject every God except their own God. The true atheist merely rejects one more God. Richard Dawkins Of all the tyrannies that affect mankind, tyranny in religion is the worst; every other species of tyranny is limited to the world we live in; but this attempts to stride beyond the grave, and seeks to pursue into eternity. Thomas Paine We can easily forgive a child who is afraid of the dark; the real tragedy of life is when men are afraid of the light. Plato Philosophy is questions that may never be answered. Religion is answers that may never be questioned. Anonymous To infer that you have greater morality because you believe in God and read the Bible is like an infering that you are more loving because you read Mein Kempt. Harold J. Wolfe, 2008 The evolution of the brain not only overshot the needs of prehistoric man, it is the only example of evolution providing a species with an organ which it does not know how to use Arthur Koestler (1905 - 1983) British columnist If I were an Arab leader, I would never sign an agreement with Israel. It is normal; we have taken their country. It is true God promised it to us, but how could that interest them? Our God is not theirs. There has been anti-Semitism, the Nazis, Hitler, Auschwitz, but was that their fault? They see but one thing: we have come and we have stolen their country. Why would they accept that? David Ben Gurion A preoccupation with the next world clearly shows an inability to cope credibly with this one. Richard K. Morgan Those who believe absurdities will commit atrocities. Voltaire What can be asserted without proof can be dismissed without proof. Christopher Hitchens The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike. Delos B. McKown Give a man a fish and he will eat for a day; teach a man to fish and he will eat for a lifetime; give a man religion and he will die praying for a fish. Unknown Flying planes into a building was a faith-based initiative. Bill Maher A church is a place in which gentlemen who have never been to heaven brag about it to persons who will never get there. H. L. Mencken Religion is the art of sugar coating a turd and selling it to you as doughnut. Pat Condell The study of theology, as it stands in the Christian churches, is the study of nothing; it is founded on nothing; it rests on no principles; it proceeds by no authority; it has no data; it can demonstrate nothing; and it admits of no conclusion. Thomas Paine Pray tell, just how does one have a personal relationship with an invisible, intangible, weightless, soundless, and scentless critter devoid of any heat signature detectable by NASA? I've said it before and I'll say it again: Having a PhD in Theology is like having a Doctorate of Teletubbie Anatomy or a Masters in Warp-Core Engineering. It's a fancy title for knowing a lot of "facts" about a subject that at its core is completely and utterly fictional. If I were asked to swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth over a Holy Bible, I would immediately say "Yes, I will tell you the same amount of truth as I found in the Holy Bible". Religion is merely a neurological disorder and religious fanatics are just delusional psychotics and ignorant fools.! Christianity: The belief that some cosmic Jewish zombie can make you live forever if you symbolically eat his flesh and telepathically tell him that you accept him as your master, so he can remove an evil force from your soul that is present in humanity because a rib-woman was convinced by a talking snake to eat from a magical tree. Makes perfect sense to me! Ho! Ho! Ho! Religion must go. George Carlin The idea and belief that there exists an unseen, cognitive, non-corporal being that either intercedes in human affairs or abstains, is a neural process which does not operate in my mind. Properly read, the bible is the most potent force for atheism ever conceived Isaac Asinov We live in a galaxy that has 500 billion stars. Hubble's ultra-deep-field view shows us that there are billions of such galaxies. So why do God's creatures only live on the "Third Rock from the Sun"? If God created the Universe, he must be omnipotent. If he reads reads our thoughts, he must be omnipresent. If light is carried by photons and gravity by gravitons, is this thought reading done by spiritons?

Send comments to: hjw2001@gmail.com