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The Apocalypse Idea
By Garrett Fogerlie
People are pretentious. Most everyone I speak to believes that the world will end in their lifetime. That they are vastly superior to anyone that came before them. People manipulate any piece of data to make it fit into whatever they want. For thousands of years we have heard people say that such and such a battle or war was predicted in the bible and said that it will bring the beginning of the end. Even now there are thousands of people that think the world is going to end on December 21, 2012? This is based on an arbitrary date that was a result of the rolling over of an ancient and no longer existent numbering system of the Mayans.
People are pretentious. Most everyone I speak to believes that the world will end in their lifetime. That they are vastly superior to anyone that came before them. People manipulate any piece of data to make it fit into whatever they want. For thousands of years we have heard people say that such and such a battle or war was predicted in the bible and said that it will bring the beginning of the end. Even now there are thousands of people that think the world is going to end on December 21, 2012? This is based on an arbitrary date that was a result of the rolling over of an ancient and no longer existent numbering system of the Mayans.
Every
time one of these deadlines comes and goes you would think that it
would make people immune from being caught up in the next one, but this
is not the case. As an example, in 1822 there was a man named William
Miller who predicted that the second coming of Jesus Christ was going to
be on or before 1844. He attracted a large number of followers and when
the predicted day finally came and passed like every other day. Both
Millerite and his followers were left generally bewildered and
disillusioned. This was the end of it, right? No, he went back to the
drawing boards. Coming up with a new date, and once again attracted
followers, in fact he attracted more followers then before. This cycle
continued for some time. You may think that people would have been
smarter than that or perhaps it was just par for the course for that
era. However you would be wrong. This group is still around to this day,
they are called the Seven Day Adventists. |
The Cause of Life's Problems
By Garrett Fogerlie Religion easily has the best bullshit story of all time. Think about it. 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 list of ten specific things he doesn't want you to do. And if you do any of these things, he will send you to a special place, of burning and fire, smoke, torture and anguish for you to live forever, and suffer, burn, and scream until the end of time. But he loves you. He loves you. He loves you and he needs money. And by believing it's true is the only way you can get away unscathed. The idea of a personal God that looks after every human, is an concept which should not be take seriously. The idea of this supreme being that created everything and yet is so involved and overtaken with one small aspect of his work, humans, comes from the most selfish part of our minds. Many people think that we get our morality from religion and the concept of a all knowing 'god' is a security camera on everybody to keep them from being truly evil. Science has been charged with
undermining morality, but the charge is unjust. A man's ethical behavior should be based effectually on sympathy, education, and social
ties and needs; no religious basis is necessary. Man would indeed be in
a poor way if he had to be restrained by fear of punishment and hope of
reward after death. The
most heinous and the must cruel crimes of which history has record have
been committed under the cover of religion. We are afraid of the known
and afraid of the unknown. That is our daily life and in that there is
no hope, and therefore every form of philosophy, every form of
theological concept, is merely an escape from the actual reality of what
is. All outward forms of change brought about by wars, revolutions,
reformations, laws and ideologies have failed completely to change the
basic nature of man and therefore of society. What can be asserted
without proof can be dismissed without proof. Religion
is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world,
and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people. It
is an illusion and it derives its strength from the fact that it falls
in with our instinctual desires. The fact that a believer is happier
than a skeptic is no more to the point than the fact that a drunken man
is happier than a sober one. Our ignorance is God; but what we know is science! If we go back to the beginning, we shall find that ignorance and fear created the gods; that fancy, enthusiasm, or deceit adorned them; that weakness worships them; that credulity preserves them and that custom, respect and tyranny support them in order to make the blindness of men serve their own interests. Ignorance gave birth to gods, and knowledge is calculated to destroy them! Comments...
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Putting It Mildly
By Christopher Hitchens If the intended reader of this book should want to go beyond disagreement with its author and try to identify the sins and deformities that animated him to write it (and I have certainly noticed that those who publicly affirm charity and compassion and forgiveness are often inclined to take this course), then he or she will not just be quarreling with the unknowable and ineffable creator who–presumably–opted to make me this way. They will be defiling the memory of a good, sincere, simple woman, of stable and decent faith, named Mrs. Jean Watts. It was Mrs. Watts’s task, when I was a boy of about nine and attending a school on the edge of Dartmoor, in southwestern England, to instruct me in lessons about nature, and also about scripture. She would take me and my fellows on walks, in an especially lovely part of my beautiful country of birth, and teach us to tell the different birds, trees, and plants from one another. The amazing variety to be found in a hedgerow; the wonder of a clutch of eggs found in an intricate nest; the way that if the nettles stung your legs (we had to wear shorts) there would be a soothing dock leaf planted near to hand: all this has stayed in my mind, just like the “gamekeeper’s museum,” where the local peasantry would display the corpses of rats, weasels, and other vermin and predators, presumably supplied by some less kindly deity. If you read John Clare’s imperishable rural poems you will catch the music of what I mean to convey. At later lessons we would be given a printed slip of paper entitled “Search the Scriptures,” which was sent to the school by whatever national authority supervised the teaching of religion. (This, along with daily prayer services, was compulsory and enforced by the state.) The slip would contain a single verse from the Old or New Testament, and the assignment was to look up the verse and then to tell the class or the teacher, orally or in writing, what the story and the moral was. I used to love this exercise, and even to excel at it so that (like Bertie Wooster) I frequently passed “top” in scripture class. It was my first introduction to practical and textual criticism. I would read all the chapters that led up to the verse, and all the ones that followed it, to be sure that I had got the “point” of the original clue. I can still do this, greatly to the annoyance of some of my enemies, and still have respect for those whose style is sometimes dismissed as “merely” Talmudic, or Koranic, or “fundamentalist.” This is good and necessary mental and literary training. However, there came a day when poor, dear Mrs. Watts overreached herself. Seeking ambitiously to fuse her two roles as nature instructor and Bible teacher, she said, “So you see, children, how powerful and generous God is. He has made all the trees and grass to be green, which is exactly the color that is most restful to our eyes. Imagine if instead, the vegetation was all purple, or orange, how awful that would be.” And now behold what this pious old trout hath wrought. I liked Mrs. Watts: she was an affectionate and childless widow who had a friendly old sheepdog who really was named Rover, and she would invite us for sweets and treats after hours to her slightly ramshackle old house near the railway line. If Satan chose her to tempt me into error he was much more inventive than the subtle serpent in the Garden of Eden. She never raised her voice or offered violence–which couldn’t be said for all my teachers–and in general was one of those people, of the sort whose memorial is in Middlemarch, of whom it may be said that if “things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been,” this is “half-owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.” However, I was frankly appalled by what she said. My little ankle-strap sandals curled with embarrassment for her. At the age of nine I had not even a conception of the argument from design, or of Darwinian evolution as its rival, or of the relationship between photosynthesis and chlorophyll. The secrets of the genome were as hidden from me as they were, at that time, to everyone else. I had not then visited scenes of nature where almost everything was hideously indifferent or hostile to human life, if not life itself. I simply knew, almost as if I had privileged access to a higher authority, that my teacher had managed to get everything wrong in just two sentences. The eyes were adjusted to nature, and not the other way about. I must not pretend to remember everything perfectly, or in order, after this epiphany, but in a fairly short time I had also begun to notice other oddities. Why, if god was the creator of all things, were we supposed to “praise” him so incessantly for doing what came to him naturally? This seemed servile, apart from anything else. If Jesus could heal a blind person he happened to meet, then why not heal blindness? What was so wonderful about his casting out devils, so that the devils would enter a herd of pigs instead? That seemed sinister: more like black magic. With all this continual prayer, why no result? Why did I have to keep saying, in public, that I was a miserable sinner? Why was the subject of sex considered so toxic? These faltering and childish objections are, I have since discovered, extremely commonplace, partly because no religion can meet them with any satisfactory answer. But another, larger one also presented itself. (I say “presented itself” rather than “occurred to me” because these objections are, as well as insuperable, inescapable.) The headmaster, who led the daily services and prayers and held the Book, and was a bit of a sadist and a closeted homosexual (and whom I have long since forgiven because he ignited my interest in history and lent me my first copy of P. G. Wodehouse), was giving a no-nonsense talk to some of us one evening. “You may not see the point of all this faith now,” he said. “But you will one day, when you start to lose loved ones.” Again, I experienced a stab of sheer indignation as well as dis-belief. Why, that would be as much as saying that religion might not be true, but never mind that, since it can be relied upon for comfort. How contemptible. I was then nearing thirteen, and becoming quite the insufferable little intellectual. I had never heard of Sigmund Freud–though he would have been very useful to me in understanding the headmaster–but I had just been given a glimpse of his essay The Future of an Illusion. An excerpt from the book God is not Great, by Christopher Hitchens |
There Is No God
I believe that there is no God. I'm beyond atheism. Atheism is not believing in God. Not believing in God is easy — you can't prove a negative, so there's no work to do. You can't prove that there isn't an elephant inside the trunk of my car. You sure? How about now? Maybe he was just hiding before. Check again. Did I mention that my personal heartfelt definition of the word "elephant" includes mystery, order, goodness, love and a spare tire? So, anyone with a love for truth outside of herself has to start with no belief in God and then look for evidence of God. She needs to search for some objective evidence of a supernatural power. All the people I write e-mails to often are still stuck at this searching stage. The atheism part is easy. |
Morality Doesn't Come From Religion
By Garrett Fogerlie The thought that morality comes from religion is so very wrong. I am often confronted with someone that says, “Well if you don’t believe in Heaven and Hell, what’s to stop you from killing people?” This is an outrageous question! I sincerely hope that it is asked out of ignorance however every time I hear it I can’t help to wonder how little concern the person who asks it has for life. The thought that people are only good because they are afraid of burning in Hell for eternity is an incredibly scary thought! If
we look at the animal kingdom, we see animals risking their lives to
help other animals, elephants risk getting stuck while trying to get
others out of mud pits. Wolves, lions and other animals sharing food
with members of their pack so they don’t starve. Mothers sacrificing
themselves when predators attack so that their offspring can have a
chance to get away; these things are noble and they are hard coded in
these animals and in us. It’s rare to see animals killing other animals
when it’s not for food, security or mating. The idea that human beings
are less moral then far less intelligent animals is preposterous. And
then to go further the thought that if you don’t think you will be
caught or punished, then why not start murdering is inconceivable. Even
the bad apples that do end up being serial killers, it is usually
associated with a disease or/and a very traumatic childhood. None the less I hear this
question all the time. My number one rebuttal to this is that Atheists
make up around 18% of the American population, while they only make up
0.2% of the prison population. There are less Atheists in prison than
Scientologists. With any other religion (except possibly the Amish)
their ratio between population and prison population is pretty much a
dead match. That means that the percentage of Catholics is around 36%
and the percentage of Catholics in prison is also around 36%, as you
would think. I have heard many tries to
refute these stats but survey after survey confirms them. However I will
point out the more common ones. A standard one I hear is that the
actual Atheist population in America is not nearly 18% saying that it is
less and at the same time they say that people don’t want to admit to
being Atheists so they aren’t telling the truth. These two points
contradict each other; it would be like taking two different temperature
readings with the same thermometer and then saying the outside readings
seem too high, so it must be the thermometer and I’ll just lower those
readings manually while on the inside it is too low so I will raise
them. It’s poor logic and there have been many studies that have all
showed consistent results. The other idea I have come across, by a
pastor no less, was that Atheists tend be more intelligent and more
educated and this keeps them out of trouble. Perhaps this adds to it,
but I’m sure prison has as similar ratio of people with above average
intelligence as the standard population does. But this idea, actually
this fact, that people that are more intelligent and better educated are
more likely to be atheist has to make you think that maybe they are on
to something. We listen to scientists and doctors about tons of
important things; things that we may barley understand but we know that
since these people are more likely to know what they are talking about
then we should listen to them this applies to everything except
religion! Why? How can people be so ass backwards about this one thing? To be honest though the stats
amazed me when I first saw them, however since I know a lot of religious
people I see that the majority of them have little reverence for human
life, amongst other things. It’s similar to several police officers I
know that openly talk about wanting to kill drug users. I suppose if you
though that after you die you get another life, like it’s a video game,
you tend to be less careful with the one you have now. Not to diverge
here too much, but just in the possibility that there is no life or
world after this one, shouldn’t we do all we can to make this one
wonderful for us and our children? The worst case scenario in this idea
is that we work a bit harder and life is a bit better, and if by chance
there is another life then even better no harm was done. We should hope
for the best but plan for the worse. Doing good deeds because you
fear the consequences is not moral! Doing good for goodness sake is and
it has absolutely nothing to do with the bible. Do not belittle yourself
by thinking that you would be a crazy evil person if you didn’t have
religion. You are better than that. As Steven Weinberg says,
This is a very good point. The
extremist Muslim terrorists that have been responsible for so many
deaths as of late probably would have gone their whole lives without
killing anyone, without blowing up buildings and causing devastation all
around the world. Without religion there would have been far less wars
and far less death. But not even that extreme, without religion, stem
cell research could be much further along; the Dark Ages would have been
very different. There may not be a prevalence of Gay hate, and
picketing funerals and bombing doctors. This is why I believe that God
is mans biggest mistake, not the other way around. If there actually is a
god, the devastation that he has caused by his random fiddling with
peoples lives and civilizations shows that he at the least is not all
knowing and more likely he is not a good or amazing god, and does not
seem to care at all for the suffering that he has cursed onto this
world! Comments...
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Evolution as Fact and Theory
by Stephen Jay Gould
Sirtley Mather, who died last year at age ninety, was
a pillar of both science and Christian religion in America and one of
my dearest friends. The difference of a half-century in our ages
evaporated before our common interests. The most curious thing we shared
was a battle we each fought at the same age. For Kirtley had gone to
Tennessee with Clarence Darrow to testify for evolution at the Scopes
trial of 1925. When I think that we are enmeshed again in the same
struggle for one of the best documented, most compelling and exciting
concepts in all of science, I don't know whether to laugh or cry. |
Why I Am Not A Christian
an Examination of the God‐Idea & Christianity By Bertrand Russell March 6, 1927 The lecture that is here presented was delivered at the Battersea Town Hall under the auspices of the South London Branch of the National Secular Society, England. It should be added that the editor is willing to share full responsibility with the Hon. Bertrand Russell in that he is in accord with the political and other opinions expressed. As your chairman has told you, the subject about which I am going to speak to you tonight is "Why I Am Not a Christian." |
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