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This was supposed to be a blog post of average length, and then it turned day by day into the pages and pages of text you see before you.

I should get this out of the way at the beginning. I’m an atheist. And while I appreciate everyone who reads my blog, I’m looking for religious people to read this post specifically because I don’t want to preach to the quire, I want instead to exchange ideas with people who disagree with me.

Some words of warning. I get pretty offensive about religion in the next paragraphs. And I hope that doesn’t make you stop reading. As an atheist because of familial obligations I’ve sat through many sermons whose every word I’ve disagreed with. But I’ve listened and I hope as a Christian or Muslim or whatever religion you are, you also listen. Please consider it a test of your faith to get through the hole thing. If you have strong convictions nothing I say in the next however many words should shake them, but its always important to understand the views of the opposition. That said, lets jump into it.

 

I’ll just say it. I think religion is a cancer that’s constantly doing damage to all aspects of our society. If everyone was an atheist, the republicans who are so popular today would have no traction. They are popular for denigrating homosexuals, abortion, premarital sex, post marital sex that is unorthodox,  evolution, stem sell research, and the reason they denigrate these things is there interpretation of the bible has shown them that the things I’ve just listed are counter to how Jesus wants them to live. Other reasons may contribute, but they are reasons that are supplemental to their religious beliefs. Rick Santorum, to use the most well known current example holds the views he does because of Christianity. I’m not putting words in his mouth, he’d be the first to admit this to be true.

All of the intrusive anti-utilitarian morality I hate has religion at its core in general and its representations in this country are caused by Christianity in particular. Peoples belief  in a giant alien in the sky who wrote a book and made a bunch of arbitrary pronouncements about when and how we’re supposed to have sex and how we’re supposed to treat each other and when we’re supposed to work and how many wives we can have.

It isn’t that the bible is evil, or lacks passages I consider to be moral, but as a hole when I read it what comes across to me strongly enough to blot out the rare instances of beautiful prose or moral sentiment I’m not against is that Gods a dick and is making moral judgments which  are not explained the way a philosopher would explain his own morality, the justification is that I’m god, this is what I want you to do and you should do it because I’m god and just told you to do it. Further when I read the bible as a moral document I’m angry for all it doesn’t mention. Thou shall not kill is a commandment, which everyone agrees is good,  but there isn’t anything about thou shall not own other men as slaves, or thou shall not rape or thou shall not touch little boys in my name.

One of the reasons I wanted to write this is because a few months ago some kid made a youtube video where he said religion was bullshit and then backed down as soon as a priest saw the video and yelled at him, and because I know I wouldn’t ever do that, I wanted to make up for his fecklessness. I was saddened by his lack of conviction, so I wanted to write to you and give you my thoughts on religion, which I wouldn’t disavow if I was lucky enough to get them noticed by a priest who took issue with them.

The bible is a book written by man, it was not written by god. The people who wrote the bible had no science worth the name and so they made up the things they had no way of understanding. The proof for this is that when reading the bible it is impossible to find passages that clearly indicate omnipotence, that is, nothing in the bible couldn’t have been written by a man living in the first century. If you are religious this should concern you.   and because so many Americans are raised Christian and because the idea that when you die there’s a heaven is such a comforting one, this truth is rarely acknowledged and religion persists. I hate this.

I got into a discussion with an acquaintance the other day and he started telling me all this crap about how the earths really six thousand years old and how dinosaurs and people lived at the same time and how before the great flood there was no rainfall, yet somehow there were still plants,  and how the reason for the flood was that humanity was interbreeding with demons the offspring of human demon hybrids being giants, and all I could think was that it sounded a lot like Buffy the Vampire Slayer. And then I wondered why we hadn’t found the bodies of giants if this were true, and then I wondered if the problem god saw with Man was that he was interbreeding with demons, why didn’t the demons come up from hell after the flood and start interbreeding with us once again?   I saw him the next day as he had a completely un ironic discussion with a friend about how the world was going to end soon which is what people have been saying in error since whenever the hell revelations started to get a lot of readers. He said that our technology  portents the world ending because it’ll make it possible for us to take pictures of the disciple whose supposed to lie in the gutter and send them to one another using our phones.

Every year or so somebody with more charisma than sense gets a group together and then they go onto the mountaintop to await the end and they’ve always been wrong. Always. Its always like, “the end is coming,” and they’re the latest in a string of groups who have been positive the world was going to end in fire and all the rest of the signs of the rapture, and so this latest group, ignoring how all previous groups were wrong, pick a nice spot, pray a lot, sit around until the sun sets, and then the stars come out, and then people feel disappointed that nothing’s happened and as the sun rises the leader of the group decides the bible actually meant the world would end next week, which is what every dumbass who has demonstrably been wrong about the world ending says when it fails to go up in smoke when he thought it would.

I used to laugh at these people because what it looks like when you don’t believe in god is stupid, but as I got older I started to feel sad. Because all I can think is that every single theologian who believes in a god or gods or some kind of pantheon of demons or angels or jinn or dragons or ancestors that really are still alive in some form or another got bogged down in false premaces at step one and thus spent all there mental energy trying to figure life out based on the equivalent of a bad fantasy novel that isn’t even internally consistent.

Every statement  is either true or false. As an atheist I’m either a hundred percent wrong or a hundred percent right. Right now either Gods watching me write this letter to you and thinking to himself, another one for hell, or there’s no god and the universe was created through some kind of random event like the big bang and we’re really smart chimps. There is a right answer to this question because that’s how the world works. Either there are aliens on far distant planets or our planet contains the only life in the universe. Objects can either travel no faster than the speed of light, or they can travel faster than the speed of light but we haven’t observed them doing so yet, these questions have answers which preclude any other answers being true. My dog has four paws, right now there is no possibility he has three or five. God is either in heaven at this exact moment stroking his beard and watching you pray for your cancer to remit and working in mysterious ways, or there is no god. Or all the Indian gods exist or ala exists, but the point is that all questions have a single answer even if we don’t know definitively what that answer is. An atheist and a Christian have different views about how the world works. One group is right, and the other is wrong. There is no way both are right. there is no middle ground and a false facade of mutual respect for each others opinion clouds the issue. I’m right or you are, its one or the other and in my opinion you are the twenty-six year old guy reading the Brothers Grim and waiting to wake up with the forty thieves. This does not mean I do not have respect for you as a person but it does mean I have no respect at all for your opinion because I’m almost sure its wrong and saying anything else to make you feel better would delude the message I’m trying to get across.

Its hard to know where to begin when trying to make a case for atheism, because its remarkable that people believe in all of this crap in the first place. If I told you that when the sun set it was because Apollo had parked his chariot in a stable somewhere on mount Olympus, you’d ignore me. You’d think I was crazy or misinformed because the idea that a big Greek guy pulling the sun through the sky on horses is obviously insane, but Christians believe that Moses took a staff and made the sea part for him so that he could get away from faro’s army. This is no more consistent with how the world behaves then a guy pulling the sun on a chariot they are both experiences that are equally against the laws of nature as scientists currently understand them. The difference between them is that Apollo pulling the sun comes from Greek mythology and Moses parting the red sea comes from the torah.  Catholics believe when they eat a piece of bred that that bred has literally become the body of Jesus and the wine they drink has literally transformed into his blood, which is crazy to me because I’ve eaten it and it still is bred, no different from any other bred I’ve ever had in my entire life and this should remain obvious to everyone while they eat it. The only reason you have for disagreeing with me is that someone has told you a thousand times that the bred turns into Jesus. And the catholic justification for this is that it tastes like bred, feels like bred in your mouth and is the body of Jesus despite the evidence of your senses.  You can tell me my socks are shoes all you want, but they will still be socks and bullshit described by any other name is still bullshit. If a priest told you fire was ice, insisted upon it, showed you biblical justification, you wouldn’t put on a coat when your house was burning, you’d run.

I have to go to church every once in a while when someone I know has just died and priests are all like, “he’s in a better place now so deaths not that big of a deal.” But in my opinion he’s not in a better place, he’s gone and all that’s happening now is that the dudes body is slowly rotting six feet deep. And this is when it becomes important to recall that as a Christian you are either right or wrong. Because if Christians are correct, death isn’t death in the way that term is commonly understood because there is an afterlife. Death is instead good for the person who has just died and should only be depressing because  you can’t see them until you die yourself. you should, as a Christian, be able to blow off your fathers funeral with a clear conscience because right now he’s sitting on a cloud watching you put on your suit  while you cry.

Meanwhile I know that when someone close to me dies they are dead and they aren’t watching me, they are rotting in the ground and soon there will be nothing left of them. That’s why I find death to be unbearably sad.  When you do not believe there to be an afterlife every moment of life becomes priceless because there’s nothing after  it ends and thus all we have is this earthly existence.

Note the difference, because your idea’s about what happen after death effect how you view life. I think the murder of a child is tragic, you, by definition and conviction should find it merely expeditious if you truly believe in heaven.

I think about Thomas Moore whenever I think about how there isn’t anything after this. Thomas Moore  was an adviser to Henry VIII. When Henry was creating the Church of England he made all of his subjects swear an oath that he was the head of the new Church of England. Thomas Moore tried to get out of having to swear the oath because he still believed that the pope was the head of the catholic church and probably thought what Henry had done was blasphemy and so because of conflicting loyalties  he said nothing one way or the other, and his refusal eventually got him beheaded. He was given many opportunities to reconsider and never did.  and I think, why the hell didn’t you just swear the oath and get on with your life. Instead he died for a lie. I’m not saying he  should have known better, he was a product of his time and was raised as a catholic and did not have the information or cultural context to conceive of a way out of that little box, but today people should know much better and yet we get these people from the south trying to discredit the theory of evolution because it discredits what the bible tells them about how the world was created and I think its the twenty-first century and in my own country people are acting like its the fifteenth. If your kid came home from school and told you her teacher said “mom, today they taught us that the earth is flat and that its the center of the universe,” you’d be pissed because you know that isn’t true. You have seen pictures of the earth from space and the solar system and the galaxy. The bible says the earth is the center of the universe, but the evidence to the contrary has simply become so colossally overwhelming that everyone now ignores that. But they shouldn’t because God wrote it. If god wrote the bible we should not have been able to prove even one line wrong. And if one line is proven wrong then what makes all the other lines in violet? Remember what I said earlier. Everything in the bible is consistent with what first century man knew and first century man did not know the sun was in fact the center of the solar system because we didn’t even realize we were in a solar system at that time.

Further, you would assume that God, having created the universe would know that the sun was in fact the center of the solar system and that the earth orbits it. Why he didn’t mention this in the bible I couldn’t say. Well, I actually can, its because he doesn’t exist, didn’t write it, and the desert savages that did right it thought it reasonable that because of how the sun looks from earth that we were at the center of things.

The difference between your hypothetical outrage if your daughter told you the earth was flat and your lack of outrage on the evolution question comes down to how easy something is to grasp. Its easy to google “earth from space,” “Solar system,” and see pictures of this stuff for yourself that make it quite clear, regardless of how long its been since you took earth science that yes, the earth is round and orbits the sun. However, evolution, being more complex is harder to understand by looking at pictures. As far as easy explanations go, “god created the earth in six days” is much easier for you to understand then, “well, first there was some primitive bacteria, then some more complicated bacteria, then some two sell organisms, then some little fish, ETC ETC.”

And I admit it has a comforting ring to it. God, I mean. It would be nice to believe there was a guy looking down right at you and loving you and helping you in all sorts of ways and waiting for you to die so he could pluck your soul from your hospital bed as you flat line and bring you up to heaven where all your dead relatives are waiting to greet you after so long apart… And admittedly as comforting as that concept is, the idea that life is sheer random chance and thus purposeless from a religious perspective is as uncomfortable to contemplate as the religious ideas you believe are comforting, and people generally believe what makes them happy.

Its true that everyone has the right to believe whatever they want to, it is untrue that there beliefs are automatically right. And wrongheaded beliefs are not valuable. They are wrong. If you want to believe that  sex before marriage will send you to hell, go right ahead. Shut up and don’t have any. I’ll believe you to be stupid and outmoded, you’ll believe me to be arrogant and secular, I’ll agree with you, and at some point we’ll both die and in our last moments we’ll have the thing settled one way or another. I don’t want to get all authoritarian and tell people they can’t believe certain things,however I profoundly  wish they wouldn’t. If you walked into your front yard and saw your best friend gutting a goat as an offering to all mighty Lord zoose, your first honest thought, before anything else like political correctness got in the way would be, “What the fuck is that guy gutting a goat in the front yard for?” And you’d be all confused and shocked and then you’d think, “Man, that’s crazy.” Please correct me if I’m wrong there.

A  dude in the sky with a staff that throws lightning is as crazy to my mind as people who believe that god turned a city to salt impregnated a woman without actually fucking her, had a kid, let him die for  all our sins, then brought him back from the dead. Its only a difference of mythology. Xoose used to turn into animals, fly down, fuck people, impregnate them with half god children and leave. But that’s nuts and didn’t happen, whereas Christianity is perfectly plausible and not at all fantastic.

If I had my way I’d never  have to think about this issue. I don’t spend much time in my daily life thinking about how there isn’t a god because its implicit in my thinking, its as strong of a belief of mine as is my belief in gravity, I finished the hard thinking on this issue like seven or eight years ago because it isn’t complicated to realize that there is most probably not a man in the sky listening to prayers and watching and who created us. Its not difficult to come to this conclusion, so I came to it and moved on.

If you are Christian, and are still reading at this point, first let me say, wow. Second, I want to say that I really didn’t want to write this post. Because I know how hard it is to get people to think about this stuff, let alone to get them to question any of it, and I didn’t want to waste words trying to convince people of things when there was, forgive me for the bad pun, less than a snowballs chance in hell of doing so. but  then I turn on the TV and some ass hole is sitting there saying gay people are going to go to hell because they’re having sex with one another and what sends tremmers up my spine is the guy looks like he really believes it. Like really! And his belief makes me feel such a contempt for him because he’s trapped in this myth of god and demons and his big problem with the world is sodomy when there are more important things to be worrying about such as starving children, a nuclear Iran, our national debt, our falling educational standards, our partisan gridlock in Washington, murder, rape and domestic violence, terrorism, the national healthcare debate, the rising price of Gas, the species of animals that are going extinct, the revolution going on in Syria, the high unemployment rate, cancer,  and on and on.

If I told you I spent half my life in another world where everyone was eleven feet tall and got around on giant fifty-six legged lizards  but I’d never let you see it, you wouldn’t take that on faith, you’d call a doctor. But my fifty-six legged lizards, who also can fly even though they are wingless and can speak to me through their mind melding abilities, in case you were interested, are outlandish, there is no proof for there existence, and thus in that way they are the same as God and Jesus and Mary and all the angels and demons and shit that people spend there time believing in. The day I convert to Christianity is the day you catch me an angel in a net and drag that bastard kicking and screaming onto my front porch. And in all seriousness, on that day, I’ll go with contrition to kiss the ring and go to mass and pray for forgiveness for all the porn I’ve watched, impure thoughts I’ve had, and all the rest of it.

I read a book about an atheist who went to  Liberty university pretending to be a southern Baptist so that he could describe to more secular people what it was like to attend a religious college. What I  remember from that book most is a chapter where he talks about going to some spring break spot where he and all his classmates tried to save peoples souls by asking if they knew Jesus Christ to be their personal savior. They did not and were not interested. Of course they weren’t interested, I would have the same luck trying to make Atheists by standing outside a Liberty University classroom and going, “you know your living a lie, right?”

As an atheist I think sex is important and intimate but not  anything “sacred.” sex between two or three people for that matter is between those people and as long as its consensual they can do whatever the hell they want to do because however weird others sex gets, if its something I don’t want to do myself, I’ll never have to.

As an atheist I’ve come to this conclusion about morality. Everyone has one life and when they die they are gone and will never come back or go on to some other place. Therefore every millisecond of life is priceless. Therefore murder is the worst thing that anyone can do to anyone else. Note that if heaven really does exist then murder shouldn’t really matter because its just expediting things, but if it doesn’t it matters a lot because it isn’t expediting its ripping someone right out of the universe forever. Everything else works backwards from this. Rape is wrong because it inflicts almost as much pain as death or like a year of torture. Punching someone in the face is wrong on a much smaller scale. I’m not talking about self-defense in this instance.

So these people spent a week trying to convert people who were having a good time  drinking and hooking up and partying. They converted no one.  And here’s my problem. Its perfectly valid to say to yourself, “I don’t think I’m going to spend time getting drunk and high every weekend for however long,” but what I really detest are people who want to tell other people they shouldn’t do it, and the reason they shouldn’t do it is that Jesus has a fucking problem with it.  As far as reasons not to do self-destructive things go, that doesn’t even register on my list.

Let us consider. I believe murder to be wrong because inflicting pain on others is wrong. I believe this because I have experienced pain before and have not liked it, and  would not want to be murdered and every other person I know has expressed the preference to me, either implicitly or explicitly, that they don’t want to be murdered. I’ve seen families devastated when someone is murdered and wouldn’t ever want to be the cause of that pain, and short of in defense of my life, my property or another’s life, I can’t think of a reason why I’d ever want to kill someone else because life is so glorious and depriving a person of life is evil. Even if I wanted to die this would not change my views on the question of killing other people. Because they don’t want to die.  I believe rape to be wrong because I would not want to be raped, and I do not want to cause pain to another, and I do not ever want to violate a persons free will like that, and couldn’t even imagine doing so.

You believe murder to be wrong because god said thou shall not kill. according to all Christian faiths, if you have other reasons for why you believe murder to be morally wrong they are secondary to god telling you murder is wrong. There are better reasons not to kill.

Let us say that tomorrow you woke up in a different world from this one. This different world is a world where god doesn’t exist, I say a different world because most Christians I talk to won’t even give me the hypothetical in ours. So in this different world, we’ve proven atheism through whatever means, its an established verifiable fact. Would you start killing people? Gods not around to either tell you its wrong or to send you to hell. I know I wouldn’t, because even if I’m wrong about gods existence, I haven’t killed anyone and have never wanted to kill anyone, and many people in this world who are not Christian go through life living morally, never raping or killing, many even avoid jealousy as much as humanly possible, and many nonchristians respect there parents and don’t give false testimony. And they have reasons for doing these things which have nothing to do with Jehovah. As evidence I sight all of the people who are not Christian and are also not murderers, rapists, thieves, etc.  My reason for not baring false witness would be that this government has given me stability, I admire its principals of equality and fairness, and while I have lied in my personal life, testifying at trial or under oath in some other capacity is more important than my personal feelings, its a duty as a citizen.

To get back to the folks from Liberty university who were trying to convert people partying at spring break. what also upsets me is not only do these people go and ruin someone’s night, but the concept of religion is also wasting time they’ll never get back if they’re wrong. If life is finite and there is no god an hour in church is like smoking ten cigarettes. And by trying to convert someone your wasting your time and her time and if you actually succeed in converting them and I’m right, its even more time you’ll waste.  If I’m wrong, I burn in hell. If they’re wrong, they will die and then will no longer exist but have sacrificed countless hours to an imaginary friend in the sky. And the other thing is that even though I’m an atheist, I’ll never tell you that  I’m one hundred percent positive I’m right. I’ll tell you I’m the smallest decimal place short of one hundred percent right, I concede  the infitesmil possibility that I might be wrong. Its not a large possibility at all, but its there and its being there makes me vastly different from all Christians, all of whom I’ve asked tell me that they are absolutely a hundred percent sure god exists. When I say to Christians, “your one hundred percent sure? Like absolutely positively, no doubt whatsoever sure that gods up there and that everything it says in the bible is true, no exceptions,” they all say yes like I’ve just asked something stupid!

But in the rest of life no ones a hundred percent sure of anything. I’m ninety-nine point nine percent sure I won’t die in the next day, but not a hundred percent sure. I’m almost positive the sun will come up tomorrow, but I am not completely  positive it will. I’m ninety-nine percent sure there is no god. There is no scientific evidence for his existence, when I read the bible it has lots in common with other holey books and it reads like a first century document written by man, there are logical inconsistencies in the conception of god and how he is alleged to act and in the morality he espouses that again lead me to think he was created by man, I have never experienced a miracle or talked with someone I trust who has experienced a miracle, (the definition of which is something science cannot explain,) and when I speak to Christians its clear to me they believe what comforts them, not what the evidence suggests, and so I am almost positive there is no god. I live my life as though there is no god because if your almost sure of something to the point that you’d bet your life on it, you might as well live like your sure of it and the possibility is so small I would bet the lives of everyone I hold dear against  its being true, but the possibility is there because everything after death is a mystery and there is strong scientific evidence that apposes supernatural forces extent in our world, which is why its clear to me that the x-files is fiction, but as of yet I haven’t come across evidence which is strong enough to eradicate all of my doubts that god exists. It is hypothetically possible that I’m wrong in the same way its hypothetically possible that there have been camouflaged aliens among us for centuries no one has spotted. Both could be true, but the burden of proof isn’t on me to disprove the existence of either god or secret alien invaders because the possibility is so small, the burden of proof is on those people who believe there are either secret alien invaders or god. and it is the complete lack of doubt intrinsic to faith which gets me angriest of all because to believe in anything else in the world with such dogmatic hard headedness would be easily seen as the supreme act of arrogance that it is. My atheism is as strong as my conviction that when I get on a plain it won’t crash. I’ll get on a plain any day of the week, sure enough that it won’t crash that I’ll have a dirty marteeny and go to sleep with no fear I’ll wake up with the plain in a nosedive. Similarly I’ll ignore religion as wrong and backward mostly sure that I won’t end up in hell when I die.

When I talk to Christians and try to discuss this stuff with them it always comes back to the bible. Its like the bible says this and that and blah blah blah. Its like they don’t even understand what I’m saying when I say I think the bible is the same as the Koran or the bhagavad gita  or whichever holey text you want to offer up in its place. They hear the words when I say them but this key point doesn’t seem to penetrate intellectually; the concept never registers because in the next breath they’ll say, “if you look at chapter four of Luke,” and my point is that will never convince me. Ever. I just said that four seconds ago and now your telling me about Luke again! That’s why I just said there is no difference in my mind between any holey book because to me they are all fiction! I just said it and now your telling me to look at Luke again! Did you not hear the words I said four seconds ago? If you want me to prove a scientific theory, I don’t need a science textbook to do it because science focuses on reproducible results, it isn’t enough to do one experiment, get one result, and tell everyone “this is how whatever works.” The idea is you do that experiment again and again and look at your results, so, for example if you and I were in an argument about the combustion point of paper I wouldn’t say “the combustion point of paper is four hundred and fifty-one degrees because my science book here says that’s what it is,” I could show you by getting a flame that we verified with some kind of industrial thermometer, putting a piece of paper over it, and watching it burn, and then I could do it again, and then I could show you that a flame of four-hundred and fifty degrees would not make paper burn. And if there really is a god up there, you should be able to put your bible down, and while never speaking of it prove to me through some kind of experiment or logic that he’s there. Because everything else in the world that we as people believe can be proven with evidence.

And what really gets me is that religion occupies this crazy area that nothing else does. If I tell you anything about my normal life that makes no sense you will call me on my bullshit, but when people talk about God all the normal rules we use to argue disappear and the religious folks will admit that they’ve disappeared because otherwise they couldn’t win the argument.

And people tell me these stories where they had a friend with cancer and they had lots of prayer meetings and the cancer went away and I say to them, “that’s one person who recovered from an aggressive cancer. Sometimes that happens. They got lucky.  Its not significant, because  for every person who recovers from some awful thing that the odds say they’ll die from, the other ninety-nine people do what the odds say they will and snuff it.

Even scientists who should know better will puss out and say religions above there pay grade. I’m looking at you, Stephen Gould. Man up.

And none of this would bother me if you people were content to be quietly religious, but you have to shove it at me all the time whether directly by talking about it in public or indirectly by trying to legislate crap that we should be spitting at.

I was a quiet atheist for so long. I saw other atheists trying to argue people out of religious beliefs and I’d watch and chuckle at the stupid atheist who was wasting her time. I’d mention my atheism if someone asked me in a bull session about religion or philosophy or if someone tried to convert me, or if it came up for some other reason where someone asked me about my religious beliefs,  but I didn’t feel like it was important for other people to know. I didn’t want to have them trying to convert me, and so I assumed that they didn’t want me to try and tell them why it was all a big mass delusion. But as I’ve gotten older I’ve realized that religion is the reason so much of our world is fucked up. It allows people to believe crazy things that atheists don’t have the framework to except. I don’t believe in ghosts or vampires or demons or angels or zombies or psychics or spirits or the laying on of hands or portals to other worlds or heaven or hell or wizards or witches or voodoo or genies. So I will never go somewhere isolated and wait for the rapture and I will never stake someone through the heart and I will never testify at a witchcraft trial and I will never pray. Because I believe in only the evidence of my senses and the evidence of those people who strike me as rational people. If you want to believe in supernatural things, either one of the things on my list or all of those things, feel free. Go nuts! But don’t pray in the public schools, don’t tie gay kids to fences and beat the fuck out of them, in fact, let gay people get married if they want to. You don’t have to be gay and you don’t have to get gay married, and that should be enough for you. If hell exists the retribution for atheists and homosexuals and Jews and Muslims and everyone else that end up in hell will be so much worse than you pointing it out to me right now, so let society go secular and let people burn for being wrong, if they’re wrong.  Don’t try and stop Mosques from getting built, because I think the dude praying to Ala is wasting as much of his time as you are and I don’t try and stop churches from being built, because its live and let live.  and worship how you want in your churches or homes, and because I can’t convince you your wrong and you will never convince me I’m wrong, I’ll not worship in my own home just as I don’t pray in public.  And I want to clarify as well I don’t think I’m better than these people, I just think they’re much much stupider than I am which isn’t the same thing as my thinking I’m better than they are. They just got some bad information really early in life whereas I was lucky enough to realize it was bullshit before I’d gotten the big cross tattooed on my back. And now your going, “Oh, there it is that liberal contempt for religion.” And it’s like if someone told you nine plus seven equaled forty six thousand and six you’d feel how I feel  when someone tells me that Jesus died began to decay because he was truly dead  and then came back from the dead three days later and started walking and talking and then disappeared in a flash and went up to heaven. I’d like to pause here because ok, yeah, technically that’s dying for other peoples sins, but he came back! He didn’t have to die, like if I decided to die to save someone else, I wouldn’t come back, I’d be gone. But he got back up. Three days of sleep and a day dying on a cross for all the iniquity of the world? Cheap tricks.

Not to mention that even if I’m wrong and god does exist I’d still be some kind of heathen because for one he’s not exactly Mr. Democracy and my own reading of the bible from a secular state of mind makes him look like a prick, an alien with a masia complex. I have friends and family members who are gay. Priests tell me and everyone else that those people will burn in hell, and if god does exist I fucking won’t condone that and I’d rather sin and burn with those people I know who are gay than repent and become the modern equivalent of Nazi collaborators during the Holocaust.  My parents are responsible for my creation but if they asked me to kill someone to show them I was grateful for being alive I wouldn’t even entertain the possibility. I’d laugh at them.

And it gets to the point where I just want to start shaking people and roar at them, “why don’t you freakin get it, man?” And what scares me is that they feel the same way about me, two people who are sure about something must get the same feeling of “oh, I’m right on this,” and it feels good and when I hear Jesus I’m as dismissive as a Christian is when he hears “hitchens,” but one of us must be wrong and I’m pretty sure its not me.

And I don’t know what I’m supposed to do because these kinds of arguments so rarely sway people. I could lay out a book of ten thousand volumes refuting every religious argument perfectly point by point and even if we forced our hundred thousand smartest into this project when refusal meant fifty years of slow torture the book would only convince six people.

And what I keep thinking goes like this. “people have cultural beliefs in this stuff they hold very dear and they see secular society as something attacking those beliefs and when they see secular society attacking them they are one hundred percent right. Whether the secularist means to or not by his very nature he’s bad for religious beliefs because of the way he thinks about them, any intellectual distance from biblical truth is detrimental to true religious life, the bible isn’t just some book to those who take it seriously, its like the constitution or Shakespeare but even more important in a way I can’t understand. So they fight back. The beginnings of this fight in modern times was Galileo’s trial and they’ve been losing ground ever since which is why today you get Christians who are friends with Muslims. Back in the bad old days we went on crusades to kill the infidel.  And I don’t know what to do because its a cycle of crap where the two sides don’t even except the same things as evidence so of course no one gets anywhere when they argue. I mean Williams Jennings Brian was made to look like a fool during the scopes trial and its not like that changed very many minds because faith trumps looking like a dumbass. every single time.

If I’d written this in the middle ages and if I’d been retarded enough to publish it do you know what would have happened? The thought police would have come to my house, arrested me, put me on trial, and as a heretic the trial would have been for show, it would have been performed so as to tell everyone else why I was being killed,  and then when I’d lost my trial, a certainty, they would have tied me to a steak, made a fire under it and roasted me alive. And then to insure my physical remains did not become any kind of rallying point they’d smash my bones with a hammer and scatter them, and the reason they would have done this because at that time everything which wasn’t Christianity was seen as poison that couldn’t be allowed to spread. And they felt justified because of the bible to burn people professing unorthodox views.

And the most common response at this point is that “well, they were superstitious, but things are different now, that would never happen in America today.” and I agree, they were superstitious, And I agree things are different now because we ignore the parts of the bible that say kill heretics and witches. That’s why those things are different. But every once in a great while someone decides to resurrect the passages, and that’s why you get things like the Matthew Shepard killing. If a Christian with a semi-auto went into an atheist rally or a Mosque and killed fifty people we’d say he was crazy. His being Christian would be the secondary thing. But all that seperates him from Christian sanity is five hundred years or so. in Africa today people are killed for being witches and warlocks. Muslims who are living in primitive countries, which are about as savage as Europe was in the middle ages are more religious than American Christians. They take there faith seriously enough to die for it, and that’s why things like 9/11 happen.  But I don’t believe witches exist, and so would never try and kill a witch. The idea that everyone has a right to their beliefs doesn’t come from the bible. That’s a modern idea and is counter to Moses’ example.

I see editorials from focus on the family and they are angry that someone just flashed a nip on TV or that CBS aired an episode of a sitcom where the main character says slut and some dude goes and rants about how its screwing children up when in the fifteenth century you had thirteen year old squires watching people get sliced up and trampled and speared and they turned out fine but when some eight year old hears some guy say bitch that’s it, he’s done and its crackpipes and hookers from there on out.

Whenever focus on the family starts to rant about all of this and calls for more censorship I get angry. Please be honest with yourself. By age ten  you’ve heard all the cursewords already. More than once. More than twice! Does reading the phrase huge dick and balls really offend you? You’ve heard it before, your going to hear it again, its a crude phrase for speaking about the genitals, if your kid hears huge dick and balls, (I told you you’d hear it again,)  on TV its nothing he hasn’t heard on the playground already, otherwise he’d not even know to be offended or titillated. You’ve probably said  every curse, even the bad ones. They’re words, not bullets, and the human body with no clothes on isn’t something you should   be forced to look at when you don’t want to, but if, for example Janet jaxons dress slips during the super bowl and you see a nipple, its a nipple, you’ve seen them before. Put your hand over your face in disgust and go “ah,” and then laugh and get over it and move on. Same thing if you see a mother nursing her kid as long as she’s not trying to make you see it. She has to do it somewhere and maybe she’s not at home and the kids crying like I’m hungry right now so despite everybody’s efforts you see a little baby sucking a nipple. It isn’t like your watching her get done doggy bent over, hands braced on the curb, its the healthiest way to feed a baby, studies show it gives little kids a stronger immune system and the best nutrition,  its natural, and although it might be fleetingly upsetting in the scheme of things you having seen it doesn’t really matter, in three weeks you won’t turn in bed to face your naked husband or wife and go, “man, I just can’t sleep. I just close my eyes and I keep thinking about that breastfeeding mother I saw the other day, and I just can’t sleep,” so put your hand over your face, go “ah,” then look away, chuckle to alleviate the awkwardness and then move on. Is that too much to ask? Here is the difference between me, an atheist, and you, a Christian. When you see an episode of family guy that either offends you or that your worried your kids might see you write a letter to the FCC and complain that they said “bitch” on television again. When I see an episode of seventh heaven that I don’t want to see, and make no mistake that piety on TV offends me just as much as family guy offends you because I think your religions a bad joke I’m sick of hearing, you know what I do? I change the channel! I don’t complain to whoever the hell aired seventh heaven or jone of Arcadia! I just pick up the goddamned remote! And I hit a button and as soon as I do I don’t have to see any more Jone of Arcadia! Its great! All the sudden I’m no longer bothered by programing I don’t want to watch! But I understand that there are people who like seventh heaven, just like they’re are people who like wizz califa. And I don’t get it either way but as with the people who have kinds of sex I don’t want to have, I don’t need to do what you do, so I don’t write to the FCC. If you don’t want your kids watching family guy, block the channel it airs on from your TV, tell them they shouldn’t watch it, run into there room and check to make sure they aren’t watching it, but respect the fact that some people who are not you want to watch things that are things you don’t want to watch and instead of calling the FCC about this, call your congressman when he votes for a bill that cuts money from the education budget or something. There are better things you can do with your time than worrying that someone on AMC just said “shit.”

The unadulterated truth is I think every religion that has supernatural elements is wrong, and I believe over all religion is the biggest obstacle to progress in the first world. I view it like the dead twin that is born inside of the living one. The child lives with a twin that’s managed to survive inside his body cavity and when he gets old enough to talk he reports feeling things moving around in his body and the doctors have to go in and cut it out. That’s what this culture war is.  That’s the truth. Metaphorically.  There are wonderful people I know who are religious, but they aren’t wonderful because they’re religious, they’re wonderful in spite of being religious. I refuse to believe all human kindness is motivated by fear of hell or hope of heaven.  The study of religion is only valuable because it offers us a method of understanding the actions of historical figures and the reasons Muslims strap bombs to themselves and kill people; and amidst the heaps and heaps and heaps and heaps  of bullshit there are commandments or rules which are moral, but they aren’t moral because they’re religious, they’re moral in spite of being found in religious texts. Like watch this. Rape is wrong. If you agree with no other statement of mine in this post you agree with that one. But you don’t agree with me that rape is wrong because I’m an atheist, you agree with me that rape is wrong in spite of my atheism. Oh, and by the way why doesn’t it say rape is wrong in the bible that could have saved us a lot…. Oh, never mind. . And its what every major issue in this country seems to come down to. Religion. It’d be a vastly different world if no one believed in anything science couldn’t prove.

And don’t start up the weird argument that suddenly we’d find ourselves in some 1984 kind of place. We’ve had moral atheists in this country before and will continue to have them.

I don’t believe in god. I haven’t gotten laid in a while. I mean, its actually getting sad. Remember I’m an atheist who laughs at god and other gods who are not your god and I haven’t wanted to rape anyone, and even though I want to have sex and don’t believe I’ll go to hell even if I raped a nun I don’t want to rape anyone. I couldn’t even begin to contemplate it, I think every rapist is complete irredeemable scum and the idea of raping someone horrifies me to the marrow of my bones. I’d never in a thousand years want to inflict that kind of pain on someone, I can’t even fathom how rape happens. All the screaming and crying and begging, it makes me sick to think about the depraved bastards who rape and murder.

But this entire birth control controversy that just went down last month wouldn’t have been an issue if there were no religious people. Christianity makes people say that you need to keep your rape baby, and I know I’m a guy and don’t get what its like being a woman but that’s like getting raped twice, isn’t it?  and when I think that the other side of the argument is “there’s this guy who made the world a while ago who says sex only exists so that we can be fruitful and multiply and so any sex which happens for a different reason is not what I intended even though if I’d wanted to I could have made a world where it was pharmacologically impossible to create this thing I don’t like but I let the pill get invented because I wanted people to be tempted into using it thus risk eternal damnation which I could have made into like a rehabilitation program instead,,” I don’t even know how to come at it. I’m not sure what to say to make someone at least spend five minutes in my head seeing it my way.

And I think about that guy who graduated with a doctorate in geology from Harvard and he said to himself after a long reading of the bible where he cut out every passage his PhD told him was false, I can either have science or the bible, and he chose the bible. And he’s the problem right there because he chose what made him happy over what he had a rigorous  intellectual framework for believing in;  he’s  the worlds religious  struggle personified in one dude.

and what gets me even angrier are people who take the bible and then decide I believe page three which talks about heaven but not page four which talks about hell because that’s some real harsh shit man and I don’t think god would do that to people… except for Hitler, when the fucking book says god will do that to people!

then its not like your believing in the bible, your believing in your own stretched and altered version of it, which is what people have been doing ever since it came out, and they just pick the shit that sounds good and throw away the shit that doesn’t like its a half rotten apple they’re trying to eat and every hundred years one more bite gets wormy with facts they can’t ignore so they chuck that. So the catholic church says no one can use birth control and between 95 and 98 percent of catholic couples use birth control, and churches say no premarital sex and there’s more premarital sex in this country than ever before. And its not guilty premarital sex, religious people have premarital sex all the time and lots of them don’t worry about it, understand gods against it, believe in god, and then go have more sex. I have premarital sex because I know god isn’t real and that there’ll be no opportunity for sex when I’m in a suit in a coffin, dead! But if you believe in god and your priest says no drinking no gambling no dancing and no sluts, (which is how they’d say it,) then you should either drop out of the church or you should listen! Fuck! You know what medieval Christians are gunna say when you go to heaven? “In my day we would have burned you all! Standards have really gone to hell in this place!”

In real life there aren’t very many institutions where we say, “Um, women, you can’t do this job. We don’t think your at all qualified, you can sit and watch.” But priests, oh, that’s different. God forbid we have women priests, so for the most part we don’t have women priests. and chicks are just like, “well, in all other aspects of life I’m a feminist, equal pay for equal work, I’m as good as a man, I want to be able to play sports in high school, I don’t think its cool if a dude grabs my ass at work, I’m not only glad I have the vote but see the times before I had it as barbaric because I believe the genders are equal. Well,  except when it comes to being able to talk about god. In that case, men are better at it. God says that’s how that works, otherwise they’d let me become a priest or minister or rabbi.  . but I won’t think about it very much because otherwise it would bother me so I’ll just deal with it because that’s easier.”

And if you look at the world there’s a spectrum. On the one hand there’s the dude whose a southern Baptist and is sinning up a storm, he’s gay and in the closet, he’s drinking and smoking coke blunts and he’s oh, I don’t know, getting into bar fights and watching breaking bad. On the other end of the spectrum are Thomas Moore and the 9/11 terrorists. Because there are Christians in this country, who, if there priest said, go to Kabul and blow up a Mosque, you’ll go to heaven, no matter how tight of a biblical case they made the person who they were trying to get to become a suicide bomber would never do it and not only that but would never even be on the fence, whereas you go to Afghanistan where some imam says the same thing and some dumbass straps himself up with nails and plasteaque and goes and kills a bunch of civilians because he believes now he gets to go have some fuckfest up in heaven  and its like the more seriously you take religion the crazier you act. Like the Indians who did a ghost dance and thought they were bullet proof. You know what I’ve never entertained? The possibility that any amount of praying would ever stop a slug from ripping my body apart. The only way you’d ever believe that is with a religious justification.  But if your religious in your moment of extremis you’ll pray when what you should be doing is anything else because it has a better chance of helping you live if your in a situation where you could die.

And what’s also odd is that when I speak to religious people as soon as we get clear of the topic their thinking magically pops back into something that makes sense again and they’ll talk learnedly on everything and then all of a sudden we get back into it and they’ll tell me that they have a guardian angel except he must have been taking an extra long lunch break the day the dudes house burned down or when he fell down and impaled himself on a broken bottle or whichever misfortune has obviously befallen the person talking to me because very few people have lives so perfect that I think to myself, oh, yeah, he has an angel watching out for him. So god always gets credit for the good things and no shit for the bad ones because those are all Satan’s fault unless the persons one of those people who only believes in god without believing in the devil, because the idea of the devils a little too scary and old school for them.

And the other strange part is people of my generation are religious by default. I live in New England and normally god does not come up in conversation. No one’s ever said to me “I can’t go out drinking tonight because God would have an issue with it,” but when it is brought up every nine months or so in a bull session people say they believe in god but its such an unexamined belief that I can tell they’ve adopted it through osmosis because there parents went to church and that churchgoing rubbed off on them.

And what I always wonder is why do religious people cry when someone dies? I’m upset when people I know die because that’s it they’re dead and will never be able to speak to me again as long as the universe exists because they have been snuffed out of all existence. But Christians cry at funerals. So your eighty and your husbands just died and your crying. But if you believe in god and you’ve been a good person, all you have to do is wait around for eighteen months for your heart to give out and you’ll die and go to heaven and you two will be together forever which is longer than you can even conceive of, but you cry and carry on. Why? Why cry if death’s a transition? Why is death even bad at all if there’s a big mansion in the sky where we all stand in ranks and listen to angels play the harpsichord? Why do we even bother with doctors? What’s the point? We should all want to go at twenty-four if god really exists, we should be waiting and hoping to get hit by a bus if god exists and we’ve been good. But people don’t treat it like that. People say they think gods real but when someone dies that isn’t how  the living react.

And one final point. I don’t like getting into questions of theology because I don’t really read the bible and there have been people filling in plotholes for two thousand years, but what’s with the “god works in mysterious ways”  argument. No one said that Hitler worked in mysterious ways but when there’s an earthquake that kills a hundred thousand or a baby with cancer, its all like, oh, god has this plan and part of that plan involved your kid getting leukemia sorry about that but he’s in heaven now, well, unless you forgot to get him baptized in which case your child is burning in hell.

Mysterious ways? Gods supposed to be a source of morality, but we don’t hold him to anything like a moral standard. God turned a city to salt because he didn’t like how the inhabitants were living. If we nuked the capital of Iran all we’d hear for the next ten years would be “Civilian deaths!! Children, women, hospitals, all glass!” but because god is god he’s judged not at all for all the things the bible said he did. If you have a child it isn’t ok for you to beat that kid just because you created him. But gods chosen people have gone through more crap than almost any other group on the planet. Look at the history of the Jews and  most of the time you won’t be reading with a smile, you know?

And Christians tell me that I have no morality because I’m an atheist. So they say that not only can I have no morality because all morality comes from god but that they don’t trust me because of this. And my response is if tomorrow morning I woke up and was god do you know how you’d know? Because the earthquakes, hurricanes and tsunami’s  would stop, no kids would die of childhood diseases because I felt like being mysterious, and we would all live forever and when there was no space on earth for all the people I’d make it bigger and I would give every child a puppy and no one would be hungry and anyone who raped and murdered I would smite and I would clean the streets with my magical god powers and I would bring back the dodo and grow the  forests and I’d get rid of all those little plastic bottle ring things that choke birds to death and I’d get all the oil we’ve spilled out of the oceans and the asbestos out of old houses so that construction workers didn’t have to do it and because I was god I’d simply snap my fingers and remove all poison from the world and I would tell everyone as long as they didn’t hurt each other they could do whatever they wanted and I would you know, protect all of you like little animals in a terrarium or something, not periodically kill a couple hundred thousand so I could watch and chuckle.

Some of the pyas Christians I’ve known have been wonderful people and its obvious to me there superstition has been the big fear for there being so nice, and then on the other hand I read in the news about those people who protest at military funerals with god hates fags signs. And yes I know there are only about fifteen of those people but half of this country is against gay marriage and that isn’t an atheistic position. That’s a position you take because god hates fags. and I try and walk in the shoes of the people who are concerned about keeping gays down. I try and view it from there perspective but whenever I try I just cannot understand how some guy sodomizing some other guy matters to anyone except for the two of them. I can’t fathom it.

There have been Christians for two millennia now and since the beginning of Christianity the moral code of Christians as a hole has undergone such change that a seventh century Christian would hardly recognize a twenty-first century Christian. If a seventh century Christian had seen two men having sex he would have pulled his sword from his sheath and hacked them to bloody bits. If a seventh century Christian wanted to rape someone he could take comfort in knowing that on the morning of battle priests absolved him and his fellow soldiers of all sins which were going to be committed that day, so he could rape away. If a seventh century Christian had this thing read to him, because he couldn’t read, he would stab me in the face and then perhaps he’d do something a little pagan because the faith hadn’t blotted all the old stuff out yet.   If a seventeenth century Christian saw a black guy running through a field with a chain on his foot he’d call the dogs, help catch him and then go home and run his thumb under all the passages the bible has about slavery. I would like to stop the moral comparison to say that if god is infallible and everything in the bible is infallible god would have said, “hey, don’t have slavery in your society, I think its wrong,” but he doesn’t, instead he talks about blood prices for slaves that your neighbors kill.

If a nineteenth century Christian saw a black guy drinking at a whites only water fountain in the south, he’d stop him, call the cops, be outraged. If a twenty-first century Christian saw a black guy running through a field with a chain on his foot he would run over to him and say something like, “Oh my god, what happened to you, why do you have a chain rapped around your leg is someone chasing you?”

But in all that time of moral evolution the bible hasn’t changed a word.  our society is not even remotely similar to the societies of a thousand years ago. Which means logically Christians are either becoming less or more Christian. If there’s a right way to live and a wrong way to live, the average member of society, who is Christian, is living differently than the average member of society not just of five hundred years ago, but even from a hundred years ago, and each century of time gone by brings its own distinct moral differences. Its not a path from the average person being a saint to the average person being a sinner. We have more sex but are less racist, can cure diseases that used to decimate our populations with no explanation but church attendance is down, believe the earth orbits the sun but these days more people are reading the bible on there own than ever before, because there was a time when no one in the church wanted it to be in any language except for Latin. There have been too many changes to label them, from a Christian perspective, all good or all bad.

But priests don’t say that the average Christian sucks now. And you don’t think as a Christian your worse off for not believing in slavery or women being stuck in the home as your great great grandparents did, when it was a common belief god was all for slavery, like nothing gave him more pleasure than the crack of a whip as it sliced through the skin of someone’s back. And thus we have a phenomenon of everyone saying they get there morality from the bible and at the same time that morality is constantly shifting. What gives? Its been two thousand years, why hasn’t the moral code stabilized if the bible has such a good one? It could say, “don’t hurt anyone, don’t take slaves, be kind to everyone, always pick up your trash, cigarettes kill, I am a jealous god,” but its not that clear cut. And wouldn’t cigarettes have been a great thing to mention? Not just cigarettes, maybe tobacco in general. How come that wasn’t mentioned? Or perhaps a little advanced warning like, “there’s a dude whose going to be born named Adolf Hitler. This one time I’m cool if you just take him as a kid and smash his head into a rock.” The reason is that the bible was written by first century man and the evidence for that is that there is nothing in it he couldn’t have known.

The reason Christians believe the bible is a source of morality has to do with how big it is. Any action you commit you can justify through sighting of a biblical passage, and therefore any action is permissible. The crusades were a series of attempts to conquer Jerusalem, because it held religious significant’s. Armies sent from Europe went to go kill Muslims and retake the city. Today if this were to happen, if some country went to war and gave a Christian justification and began the slaughter of another country and gave as the reason why directives from the bible the popular reaction in America would be outrage when, eight hundred years ago, when the crusades took place, the popular reaction was to scrape up the one copper coin you owned to help fund the war effort.

But our morality has gotten better, we aren’t savages anymore. We think religious based slaughter is wrong, and so now we ignore those bible passages which tell us that everyone who doesn’t believe in god should be put to the sword and read the bible passages which enforce our modern,  relatively tolerant ethos, such as the golden rule.

And the other thing I can’t fathom is how the Christians keep repping scientists that other scientists laugh at. If some scientist wrote a paper tomorrow about how the earth is actually flat we’d laugh because you can go on google earth right now and see a picture from space and you can know he’s wrong. But when some scientist says that god made us and we didn’t evolve from monkeys given that most of us are not scientists its harder for us to grasp that he’s talking out his ass because to really get how stupid he is we would need to have more scientific knowledge than we do. I believe in evolution because firstly it makes more logical sense to me than anything else, it seems more probable. Secondly I believe in evolution because I believe in science.

I do not put my faith in science, I look around me and see all this great stuff that science has done.

The reason people live into there eighties when three hundred years ago the average life span was about 40 is because of science. That’s why the average person doesn’t have smallpox scars, that’s why we brush our teeth. That’s why you can open a canne of food you bought a year ago and eat it. Its why you have  every single modern convenience that you enjoy from TV to the Internet to the radio to your car to your gun to your clean water to your indoor toilet to your phone to your vacuum cleaner. Its why you can know what’s happening in China right now rather than having to wait eight months for a letter bringing the newspapers by ship, its why there are newspapers because science, in its primitive form gave us the printing press. Its why your reading this blog and its how your comment flaming the shit out of me will be transmitted from your computer through a bunch of wires to an Internet server… etc.

These things were invented by people who understood scientific rules and laws. Someone didn’t just think, I’m gunna pound on this metal box and pray allot till it makes my food cold, they knew all sorts of things which I can’t even begin to accurately summarize which allowed them to invent a refrigerator. And that’s why I don’t understand how there can be poling done that asks people if they trust what science says and conservatives trust of science is down, but the survey was conducted over the phone which would not exist if we hadn’t had the scientific method and then a long progression of people who spent there lives being the opposite of theologians to invent things including the phone, and poling. And the reason today’s vacuum cleaner is better than the vacuums of fifty years ago is because we have better science. The reason you can now take every single piece of music you own and potentially shove it up your ass when thirty years ago if you owned ten thousand albums you’d have to build a music wing onto your house is because of science.

And what modern day religion says is “we have scientific laws and the proof for this is all the stuff science has given us, and those laws are unchanging except where the bible contradicts them and our evidence for that is the bible. And you should not question how it is that stories of the divine conform to nothing science has taught us, they simply do conform, but on the other hand scientists can treat them like they are certainties which is why its always going to be that gravity makes your cup of coffee fall off the table at a speed of 9.8 meters per second squared and it will not turn into wine halfway to the floor.”

If things such as bred being turned into a thousand times more bred could happen, science couldn’t work and wouldn’t be science. Scientists couldn’t have made all the discoveries they did if the rules governing our physical world were only laws nine hundred out of nine hundred and one times. Galileo was put under house arrest because he said the earth wasn’t the center of the universe. The Jesuits used to have a prayer that said “the world is not made up of atoms.” Now there’s intelligent design. You catching the gist of where I’m going with this yet? In case you aren’t, where I’m going is that religious people always attack the science that people who are not scientists are least certain about, eventually lose the battle, and move on to the next thing that people are uncertain about.

. To be a scientist, you have to get a degree, and then you have to go get a masters. So six years of studying and of course after that as a scientist your always learning and what most scientists believe is the theory of evolution which, phrased in non scientific terms could more aptly be called the idea we have which is supported by the most evidence and is consistent with all evidence we’ve found thus far of evolution.

And then what happens is two things. A Priest stands up in church and says that the secular agenda is to convince you that we came from monkeys, and that this is wrong because we were designed by god and any evidence that shows a different narrative is the devil at work. But because as a nation we are less stupid than we were a hundred years ago a guy with a bible impresses us less than it once did so the priest has to get a scientist to back him up. The priest finds a scientist who is so religious that he either sees what he wants to see or lies to himself and says he thinks the theory of evolution is wrong, and the religious people are mollified because they have a scientist who agrees with them.

But the thing is that the scientists these guys get are the ones the other scientists don’t take seriously. If nine hundred smart guys who study this one thing are laughing at the nine hundred and first, then he is probably wrong.

The titanic majority of scientists believe in evolution. This leaves two possible scenario’s for how the scientists who do not believe in evolution could be right. First, all other scientists are wrong. This is unlikely. Second, all scientists who postulate evolution as the way in which humanity arrived at its current state know they are wrong and are perpetuating the idea because they are part of a massive secular conspiracy which has given us lots of wonderful technology along with one huge lie that those who promote get tons of shit about. Which makes more sense?

The bible describes a history of this world involving a flood, so the religious scientist looks for evidence of a flood and doesn’t stop looking until he finds it because unlike secular scientists he isn’t thinking objectively he’s finding pieces to fit a narrative he believes must be true because god is infallible.

I’m so sick of this crap. I mean, Santa clause is somebody we all except as fictional once we reach a certain age. Partially this is because we buy all the Christmas presents, but it isn’t like if you found two extra labeled from Santa you’d start believing again, you wouldn’t be a born again eight year old you would come up with a logical explanation for how the extra gifts got there.

How did you decide that Santa didn’t exist? How do you know he doesn’t exist now? Its that old math problem you do when your about nine where you decide there are about a billion houses in the world and Santa has twenty-four hours to drop a present off so he’s running at somewhere past lightspeed to get all this crap done when you realize, that’s probably not possible, not to mention slays don’t fly, blah blah blah.

But you believe that there was a big boat where all the animals lived without ripping each other to shreds or swamping it in their own shit for forty days and then were let out again and made it back to their natural habitats, and because there is no evolution every freaking variation of Beatle had to be jarred and stored and released. And there are thousands of different Beatles. And all the salt water fish would have to have been kept in salt water tanks because rain is fresh water and it will delude the oceans and kill the salt water fish, so the arch had an aquarium the size of New York city in it to support all the fish life and Noah and his family had to somehow feed this huge number of animals and when you do the math you realize, just like with Santa, there wouldn’t be enough time in the day.

And you know Jonah probably wasn’t swallowed and then spat out by a wail, but I’m sure you can see how before people knew what a wails stomach looked like how they thought someone could be swallowed by a wail and survive, and again, this is another reason you can tell the bible was written by a bunch of Jews in the desert two thousand years ago, not by a god.

There are people who believe these biblical stories are supposed to be understood metaphorically. And that concession is so huge and cowardly that I’m not going to bother arguing with them. Well, aside from this. If Noah’s arc is a meta for, and the story of Jonah is a metaphor, and if the story of Adam and Eve is a meta for, and if Joshua knocking down the walls of Jericho is a meta for, and god is not a meta for, what you’ve done is taken the bible, given up most of it and drawn one arbitrary line to demarcate all the things you know are false from the one thing, God, you insist is true. Because you’d love it to be true.

If I’d written the bible and wanted to prove I was the God who wrote it, I wouldn’t be vague. I would say, “in the year two thousand and one I’m going to let two tall buildings be destroyed by plains. Plains? Verily plains are metal birds that humankind shall invent in the year nineteen hundred and eight and even though logically they will fly higher than the height of the tower of babble I will not fuck with your languages again because that’s now played out, and by the way I really don’t have a problem with women priests because men and women are basically equal, and I’m also not a fan of racism but I do think abortions wrong and I think war is never justified unless its to kill heathens, for I am a jealous God who spends my time making sure everyone prays to thank me for putting your asses on this planet that I did not put much time into designing, you can tell because of how tigers used to eat lots of you and how there isn’t enough food to go around and how people freeze to death in winter, and all the diseases, those were just for fun.oh yeah, build more churches. Free all the slaves. Slavery’s always wrong. And don’t kill anyone in my name. And ” It all could have been worded as clearly as that. Hell, if gods omnipotent then he could have written a different version for every generation just so nothing was lost to translation or cultural shift. The explanations that justify his refusal to do this never make as much sense as they should. He’s beyond human understanding, his plan’s so intricate we can’t comprehend it, its absolutely essential that a six year old is hit by a car, no way around it, mysterious ways,

And when I tell you the most likely probability is that there’s no god, when you die your worm food and will not be watching your kids from on high because you have no soul the idea depresses you and not only do you believe it isn’t true, you don’t want it to be true and to go back to that world where you knew that there was no god, you would force yourself to forget what you knew because the idea of living in a world with superhero’s and villains is essential to your identity. If I tell you god doesn’t exist and I’ve written one thing in here that’s made you contemplate the possibility I’m right, dealing with it would mean you’d have to make cultural adjustments you probably aren’t prepared to make, like telling all the people in your life who are Christian why you might not be anymore, and that’s probably too much to deal with. and the idea that heaven or hell is off the table, its only death depresses you which is why if your Christian your arguments will always be more compelling than mine. Because I say you get ninety years if your lucky and then you die never to be heard from or seen again. You say you get ninety years of life which is ok, but then for all eternity there’s heaven, which is great! And god loves you! He knows you and loves you even though your a really fucked up person. And then I say there is no god and your still a fucked up person in one way or another. Your thing sounds better. That’s why it attracts people. My things like, life’s still beautiful, natures marvelous and there’s lots of great stuff about life like food and friendship and nature, but your thing still sounds better.

And there’s no way to be an atheist without sounding like a dick. Not that I’ve tried at all to do that, but there’s no way to tell religious people “your completely wrong” that sounds good. No way. Because what every atheist is saying is “all religion is stupid.” What consistently baffles me is that religious people aren’t stupid when it comes to everything except for religion. So I can have a discussion with someone about things that have nothing to do with religion and I’ll be thinking, “shit, this person knows way more about this subject than I do.” Then religion gets brought up and its like, “yeah, Jesus really walked on water. Just got out of the boat and started strolling down the ocean. Peter did for a second but then he didn’t believe he could anymore so he couldn’t.”

You know, if I were a god and there was some atheist going on in a blog being as disrespectful as I’ve been over the last ten thousand words, I’d rip his lungs out through his ass and then hang him upside down from his guts somewhere and then I’d do something supernatural but that won’t happen to me as I write this. Could everyone just grow up already? So I don’t have to keep having this argument with people? Fucking fairytale hour at the goddamned  library ended when you were six, ok?