[NekoNinja]

[A note of caution: This will be long. However, I am dividing it into several different posts for convenience.]

Introduction

THE GODS.
By Robert Ingersoll
(lecture in public domain)


EACH nation has created a god, and the god
has always resembled his creators. He
hated and loved what they hated and loved, and
he was invariably found on the side of those in
power. Each god was intensely patriotic, and
detested all nations but his own. All these gods
demanded praise, flattery, and worship. Most of
them were pleased with sacrifice, and the smell
of innocent blood has ever been considered a
divine perfume. All these gods have insisted
upon having a vast number of priests, and the
priests have always insisted upon being supported
by the people, and the principal business of these
priests has been to boast about their god, and to
insist that he could easily vanquish all the other
gods put together.

These gods have been manufactured after
numberless models, and according to the most
grotesque fashions. Some have a thousand arms,
some a hundred heads, some are adorned with
necklaces of living snakes, some are armed with
clubs, some with sword and shield, some with
bucklers, and some have wings as a cherub ; some
were invisible, some would show themselves entire,
and some would only show their backs; some
were jealous, some were foolish, some turned
themselves into men, some into swans, some into
bulls, some into doves, and some into Holy Ghosts,
and made love to the beautiful daughters of men.
Some were married — all ought to have been —
and some were considered as old bachelors from
all eternity. Some had children, and the children
were turned into gods and worshiped as their
fathers had been. Most of these gods were
revengeful, savage, lustful, and ignorant. As they
generally depended upon their priests for infor-
mation, their ignorance can hardly excite our
astonishment.

These gods did not even know the shape of
the worlds they had created, but supposed them
perfectly flat. Some thought the day could be
lengthened by stopping the sun, that the blowing
of horns could throw down the walls of a city,
and all knew so little of the real nature of the
people they had created, that they commanded
the people to love them. Some were so ignorant
as to suppose that man could believe just as he
might desire, or as they might command, and that
to be governed by observation, reason, and experi-
ence was a most foul and damning sin. None of
these gods could give a true account of the crea-
tion of this little earth. All were wofully deficient
in geology and astronomy. As a rule, they were
most miserable legislators, and as executives, they
were far inferior to the average of American
presidents.

These deities have demanded the most abject
and degrading obedience. In order to please
them, man must lay his very face in the dust.
Of course, they have always been partial to the
people who created them, and have generally
shown their partiality by assisting those people
to rob and destroy others, and to ravish their
wives and daughters.

Nothing is so pleasing to these gods as the
butchery of unbelievers. Nothing so enrages
them, even now, as to have someone deny their
existence.

Few nations have been so poor as to have but
one god. Gods were made so easily, and the raw
material cost so little, that generally the god mar-
ket was fairly glutted, and heaven crammed with
these phantoms. These gods not only attended to
the skies, but were supposed to interfere in all the
affairs of men. They presided over everybody and
everything. They attended to every department.
All was supposed to be under their immediate con-
trol. Nothing was too small — nothing too large ;
the falling of sparrows and the motions of the
planets were alike attended to by these industrious
and observing deities. From their starry thrones
they frequently came to the earth for the purpose
of imparting information to man. It is related of
one that he came amid thunderings and lightnings
in order to tell the people that they should not
cook a kid in its mother's milk. Some left their
shining abodes to tell women that they should, or
should not, have children, to inform a priest how
to cut and wear his apron, and to give directions
as to the proper manner of cleaning the intestines
of a bird.

When the people failed to worship one of these
gods, or failed to feed and clothe his priests, (which
was much the same thing,) he generally visited
them with pestilence and famine. Sometimes he
allowed some other nation to drag them into slav-
ery — to sell their wives and children ; but gen-
erally he glutted his vengeance by murdering their
first-born. The priests always did their whole
duty, not only in predicting these calamities, but in
proving, when they did happen, that they were
brought upon the people because they had not
given quite enough to them.

These gods differed just as the nations differed ;
the greatest and most powerful had the most pow-
erful gods, while the weaker ones were obliged to
content themselves with the very off-scourings of the
heavens. Each of these gods promised happiness
here and hereafter to all his slaves, and threatened
to eternally punish all who either disbelieved in his
existence or suspected that some other god might
be his superior ; but to deny the existence of all
gods was, and is, the crime of crimes. Redden
your hands with human blood ; blast by slander the
fair fame of the innocent ; strangle the smiling
child upon its mother's knees ; deceive, ruin and
desert the beautiful girl who loves and trusts you,
and your case is not hopeless. For all this, and for
all these you may be forgiven. For all this, and for
all these, that bankrupt court established by the
gospel, will give you a discharge ; but deny the ex-
istence of these divine ghosts, of these gods, and
the sweet and tearful face of Mercy becomes livid
with eternal hate. Heavens golden gates are shut,
and you, with an infinite curse ringing in your ears,
with the brand of infamy upon your brow, com-
mence your endless wanderings in the lurid gloom
of hell — an immortal vagrant — an eternal outcast
— a deathless convict.

One of these gods, and one who demands our
love, our admiration and our worship, and one who
is worshiped, if mere heartless ceremony is worship,
gave to his chosen people for their guidance, the
following laws of war : " When thou comest nigh
unto a city to fight against it, then proclaim peace
unto it. And it shall be if it make thee answer
of peace, and open unto thee, then it shall be
that all the people that is found therein shall be
tributaries unto thee, and they shall serve thee.
And if it will make no peace with thee, but will
make war against thee, then thou shalt besiege it.
And when the Lord thy God hath delivered it into
thy hands, thou shalt smite every male thereof with
the edge of the sword. But the women and the
little ones, and the cattle, and all that is in the city,
even all the spoil thereof, shalt thou take unto thy-
self, and thou shalt eat the spoil of thine enemies
which the Lord thy God hath given thee. Thus
shalt thou do unto all the cities which are very far
off from thee, which are not of the cities of these
nations. But of the cities of these people which
the Lord thy God doth give thee for an inheritance,
thou shalt save alive nothing that breatheth"

Is it possible for man to conceive of anything
more perfectly infamous ? Can you believe that
such directions were given by any being except an
infinite fiend ? Remember that the army receiving
these instructions was one of invasion. Peace was
offered upon condition that the people submitting
should be the slaves of the invader; but if any
should have the courage to defend their homes,
to fight for the love of wife and child, then the
sword was to spare none — not even the prattling,
dimpled babe.

And we are called upon to worship such a
god; to get upon our knees and tell him that he
is good, that he is merciful, that he is just, that
he is love. We are asked to stifle every noble
sentiment of the soul, and to trample under foot
all the sweet charities of the heart. Because we
refuse to stultify ourselves — refuse to become
liars — we are denounced, hated, traduced and os-
tracized here, and this same god threatens to tor-
ment us in eternal fire the moment death allows
him to fiercely clutch our naked helpless souls.
Let the people hate, let the god threaten — we
will educate them, and we will despise and defy
him.

The book, called the bible, is filled with pas-
sages equally horrible, unjust and atrocious. This
is the book to be read in schools in order to make
our children loving, kind and gentle ! This is the
book to be recognized in our Constitution as the
source of all authority and justice !

Strange ! that no one has ever been persecuted
by the church for believing God bad, while hun-
dreds of millions have been destroyed for thinking
him good. The orthodox church never will forgive
th<- Universalist for saying " God is love." It has
always been considered as one of the very highest
evidences of true and undefiled religion to insist
that all men, women and children deserve eternal
damnation. It has always been heresy to say,
" God will at last save all."

We are asked to justify these frightful passages,
these infamous laws of war, because the bible is
the word of God. As a matter of fact, there never
was, and there never can be, an argument, even
tending to prove the inspiration of any book what-
ever. In the absence of positive evidence, analogy
and experience, argument is simply impossible, and
at the very best, can amount only to a useless agita-
tion of the air. The instant we admit that a book
is too sacred to be doubted, or even reasoned about,
we are mental serfs. It is infinitely absurd to sup-
pose that a god would address a communication to
intelligent beings, and yet make it a crime, to be
punished in eternal flames, for them to use their
intelligence for the purpose of understanding his
communication. If we have the right to use our
reason, we certainly have the right to act in accord-
ance with it, and no god can have the right to
punish us for such action.

The doctrine that future happiness depends
upon belief is monstrous. It is the infamy of
infamies. The notion that faith in Christ is to
be rewarded by an eternity of bliss, while a de-
pendence upon reason, observation, and expe-
rience merits everlasting pain, is too absurd for
refutation, and can be relieved only by that un-
happy mixture of insanity and ignorance, called
" faith." What man, who ever thinks, can believe
that blood can appease God ? And yet, our entire
system of religion is based upon that belief. The
Jews pacified Jehovah with the blood of animals,
and according to the Christian system, the blood
of Jesus softened the heart of God a little, and
rendered possible the salvation of a fortunate few.
It is hard to conceive how the human mind can
give assent to such terrible ideas, or how any
sane man can read the bible and still believe in
the doctrine of inspiration.

Whether the bible is true or false, is of no
consequence in comparison with the mental free-
dom of the race.

Salvation through slavery is worthless. Salva-
tion from slavery is inestimable.

As long as man believes the bible to be infalli-
ble, that book is his master. The civilization
of this century is not the child of faith, but of
unbelief — the result of free thought.

All that is necessary, as it seems to me, to
convince any reasonable person that the bible is
simply and purely of human invention — of bar-
barian invention — is to read it. Read it as you
would any other book ; think of it as you would
of any other ; get the bandage of reverence from
your eyes ; drive from your heart the phantom
of fear ; push from the throne of your brain the
cowled form of superstition — then read the holy
bible, and you will be amazed that you ever, for
one moment, supposed a being of infinite wisdom,
goodness and purity, to be the author of such
ignorance and of such atrocity.

Our ancestors not only had their god-factories,
but they made devils as well. These devils were
generally disgraced and fallen gods. Some had
headed unsuccessful revolts ; some had been caught
sweetly reclining in the shadowy folds of some
fleecy cloud, kissing the wife of the god of gods.
These devils generally sympathized with man.
There is in regard to them a most wonderful
fact: In nearly all the theologies, mythologies
and religions, the devils have been much more
humane and merciful than the gods. No devil
ever gave one of his generals an order to kill
children and to rip open the bodies of pregnant
women. Such barbarities were always ordered by
the good gods. The pestilences were sent by the
most merciful gods. The frightful famine, during
which the dying child with pallid lips sucked the
withered bosom of a dead mother, was sent by
the loving gods. No devil was ever charged with
such fiendish brutality.

One of these gods, according to the account,
drowned an entire world, with the exception of
eight persons. The old, the young, the beautiful
and the helpless were remorsely devoured by the
shoreless sea. This, the most fearful tragedy
that the imagination of ignorant priests ever con-
ceived, was the act, not of a devil, but of a god,
so-called, whom men ignorantly worship unto this
day. What a stain such an act would leave upon
the character of a devil ! One of the prophets
of one of these gods, having in his power a cap-
tured king, hewed him in pieces in the sight of
all the people. Was ever any imp of any devil
guilty of such savagery?

One of these gods is reported to have given
the following directions concerning human slavery:
"If thou buy a Hebrew servant, six years shall
he serve, and in the seventh he shall go out free
for nothing. If he came in by himself, he shall
go out by himself; if he were married, then his
wife shall go out with him. If his master have
given him a wife, and she have borne him sons
or daughters, the wife and her children shall be
her master's, and he shall go out by himself. And
if the servant shall plainly say, I love my master,
my wife and my children ; I will not go out free.
Then his master shall bring him unto the judges ;
he shall also bring him unto the door, or unto
the door-post ; and his master shall bore his eai
through with an awl ; and he shall serve him for-
ever."

According to this, a man was given liberty upon
condition that he would desert forever his wife and
children. Did any devil ever force upon a hus-
band, upon a father, so cruel and so heartless an
alternative ? Who can worship such a god ? Who
can bend the knee to such a monster ? Who can
pray to such a fiend ?

All these gods threatened to torment forever
the souls of their enemies. Did any devil ever
make so infamous a threat? The basest thing re-
corded of the devil, is what he did concerning Job
and his family, and that was done by the express
permission of one of these gods, and to decide a
little difference of opinion between their serene
highnesses as to the character of" my servant Job."
The first account we have of the devil is found
in that purely scientific book called Genesis, and is
as follows: "Now the serpent was more subtile
than any beast of the field which the Lord God
had made, and he said unto the woman, Yea, hath
God said, Ye shall not eat of the fruit of the trees
of the garden ? And the woman said unto the ser-
pent, We may eat of the fruit of the trees of the
garden ; but of the fruit of the tree which is in the
midst of the garden God hath said, Ye shall not
eat of it, neither shall ye touch it, lest ye die.
And the serpent said unto the woman, Ye shall
not surely die. For God doth know that in the
day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened
and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil.
And when the woman saw that the tree was good
for food, and that it was pleasant to the eyes, and
a tree to be desired to make one wise, she took
of the fruit thereof and did eat, and gave also
unto her husband with her, and he did* eat. * *
And the Lord God said, Behold the man is be-
come as one of us, to know good and evil ; and
now, lest he put forth his hand, and take also of
the tree of life and eat, and live forever. There-
fore the Lord God sent him forth from the garden
of Eden to till the ground from which he was
taken. So he drove out the man, and he placed
at the east of the garden of Eden cherubim and
a flaming sword, which turned every way to keep
the way of the tree of life."

^According to this account the promise of the
devil was fulfilled to the very letter. Adam and
Eve did not die, and they did become as gods, know-
ing good and evil.

The account shows, however, that the gods
dreaded education and knowledge then just as they
do now. The church still faithfully guards the
dangerous tree of knowledge, and has exerted in
all ages her utmost power to keep mankind from
eating the fruit thereof. The priests have never
ceased repeating the old falsehood and the old
threat: "Ye shall not eat of it, neither shall ye
touch it, lest ye die." From every pulpit comes the
same cry, born of the same fear : " Lest they eat
and become as gods, knowing good and evil." For
this reason, religion hates science, faith detests rea-
son, theology is the sworn enemy of philosophy,
and the church with its flaming sword still guards
the hated tree, and like its supposed founder, curses
to the lowest depths the brave thinkers who eat
and become as gods.

If the account given in Genesis is really true,
ought we not, after all, to thank this serpent? He
was the first schoolmaster, the first advocate of
learning, the first enemy of ignorance, the first to
whisper in human ears the sacred word liberty, the
creator of ambition, the author of modesty, of in-
quiry, of doubt, of investigation, of progress and
of civilization.

Give me the storm and tempest of thought and
action, rather than the dead calm of ignorance and
faith ! Banish me from Eden when you will ; but
first let me eat of the fruit of the tree of knowledge !

Some nations have borrowed their gods ; of
this number, we are compelled to say, is our own.
The Jews having ceased to exist as a nation, and
having no further use for a god, our ancestors
appropriated him and adopted their devil at the
same time. This borrowed god is still an object
of some adoration, and this adopted devil still ex-
cites the apprehensions of our people. He is still
supposed to be setting his traps and snares for the
purpose of catching our unwary souls, and is still,
with reasonable success, waging the old war against
our god.

To me, it seems easy to account for these ideas
concerning gods and devils. They are a perfectly
natural production. Man has created them all,
and under the same circumstances would create
them again. Man has not only created all these
gods, but he has created them out of the materials
by which he has been surrounded. Generally he
has modeled them after himself, and has given
them hands, heads, feet, eyes, ears and organs of
speech. Each nation made its gods and devils
speak its language not only, but put in their
mouths the same mistakes in history, geography,
astronomy, and in all matters of fact, generally
made by the people. No god was ever in advance
of the nation that created him. The negroes rep-
resented their deities with black skins and curly
hair. The Mongolian gave to his a yellow com-
plexion and dark almond-shaped eyes. The Jews
were not allowed to paint theirs, or we should
have seen Jehovah with a full beard, an oval face,
and an aquiline nose. Zeus was a perfect Greek,
and Jove looked as though a member of the
Roman senate. The gods of Egypt had the
patient face and placid look of the loving people
who made them. The gods of northern countries
were represented warmly clad in robes of fur ;
those of the tropics were naked. The gods of
India were often mounted upon elephants; those
of some islanders were great swimmers, and the
deities of the Arctic zone were passionately fond
of whale's blubber. Nearly all people have carved
or painted representations of their gods, and
these representations were, by the lower classes,
generally treated as the real gods, and to these
images and idols they addressed prayers and
offered sacrifice.

 

[NekoNinja]

The Thinking Atheist:

"Sometimes the headlines and history books make my head ache. I shudder at the idea of so many dictators and powerful leaders who committed monstrous acts against their fellow men and women.

Like Taliban leader and terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarquawi, who once had a woman stoned to death for gathering sticks to make a fire on a cold day.

Or Ugandan President Idi Amin, who sent his soldiers into cities with orders to kill all of the men (including male children) and take for themselves the virgin women.

Pol Pot, Prime Minister of Cambodia in the 1970s, threatened to punish disobedience by making parents eat the flesh of their children.

King Leopold II of Belgium, in the 19th Century, ordered his soldiers not only to kill the opposition, but to cut the hamstrings all the horses, cruelly crippling the animals.

Japanese dictator Emperor Hirohito plundered a local village, decapitated the leaders and had the severed heads delivered to his general as a trophy.

Russian Czar Nicholas II had his general kill 185,000 men who opposed him.

Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein threatened the crime of adultery with stoning, impalement, the execution of relatives, and the burning of their homes.

And here’s the most shocking thing:

The atrocities mentioned above? They weren’t actually perpetrated by the dictators mentioned.

The one responsible for each of these horrible acts was…Jehovah-The God of the Old Testament.

Stoning for firewood: Numbers 15:32-36
Kidnapping the virgin women: Numbers 31:17-18
Threatening to make parents eat the flesh of offspring: Deuteronomy 28:53
Hamstringing the horses: Joshua 11
Severed heads delivered: Judges 7:19-25
185,000 killed: 2 Kings 10:7
Stoning, execution and burning for adultery: Hosea 13:16

Now…consider how horrified and appalled you were when you felt men were responsible, and ask yourself why you wouldn’t be horrified and appalled that your God was."


I encourage you to go look up the above passages yourself. The quote was from an online blog and podcast by a man named Seth, a free thinker and known as The Thinking Atheist.

The simple fact is that I do not believe in the God of the Old Testament, and the above atrocities are most certainly not the only reason. In fact, those atrocities simply deny the existence of a kind and loving god, which is typically what is portrayed by Christians.

I don’t think anyone put it better than when Richard Dawkins said, "The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully."

This is most certainly some extreme accusations to make, even with the first quote on various different atrocities. But you may come to see, as I have, that this quote is not at all an exaggeration. So let us start with the topic of morality.

[NekoNinja]

Morality

Often non-believers are said to be immoral due to the fact that they don’t have the moral compass of God. But have the people making this accusation really taken the time to seriously look at their own scriptures that they are referencing? Often, I suspect not. The supposed morality of the Bible is by far an illusion, and it makes me sometimes chuckle when I hear people saying it is a moral book. In fact, I can easily provide a list of many of these atrocities, provided again by Seth. You are most certainly free to look any of these up to verify them, don’t take my or his word on it.

The Thinking Atheist - Bible Atrocities

If you will take the time to read the above link, I don’t feel as if I need to go into supposed morality of the Bible, and I most certainly won’t waste any more time on it other than to refute some of the common arguments often given in God’s defense or in the defense of their belief in this God.

One of the more common arguments is that “you can’t take many of the things in the Bible literally. Obviously it has many metaphors.” But we must ask how someone comes to figure out which passages are intended to be metaphors or not. Indeed, Christians themselves aren’t sure of this, as you have everything from picking and choosing, to either extreme of everything is metaphor or everything is literal. I will discuss this in greater detail when I go into the scriptures, and why the argument is essentially nonsense made up in an attempt at justification.

Another common argument goes along the lines of “Well that is the Old Testament, which is before Jesus came and changed all that.” Even if we were to give them benefit of the doubt that what they say is true, it doesn’t change the fact that it all supposedly happened anyways. Sure God ordered and committed a few genocides, murders, etc, but it’s ok, because that is all in the Old Testament and now Jesus has forgiven us… wait what? Utterly ridiculous argument indeed. Not only this but the idea that Jesus changed anything such as what the old prophets and God may have said about slavery, rape, etc, is entirely false. Let’s see exactly what the man himself has to say on the subject.

“Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them. For truly I tell you, until heaven and earth disappear, not the smallest letter, not the least stroke of a pen, will by any means disappear from the Law until everything is accomplished.” Matthew 5:17-18

Yet another argument is that “we cannot understand the ways of God.” Or more commonly, “God works in mysterious ways.” Clearly there must be some perfectly good moral reason for raping children and committing genocide? I am indeed still waiting on this reason to be shown to me.

One of the more terrible arguments is that the people God attacked apparently deserved the death they received for opposing him. Of course, not only is this argument utterly ridiculous, as it doesn’t at all justify the absolutely horrific acts mentioned, but it ignores the Bible itself. "For it was the LORD himself who hardened their hearts to wage war against Israel, so that he might destroy them totally, exterminating them without mercy, as the LORD had commanded Moses." Joshua 11:20

In reality I must simply state that it certainly doesn’t appear that God is really all that moral of a being. In fact He appears to most certainly have the morality of primitive, Bronze Age, violent and nomadic groups. So, if we don’t have morals given to us by God, then where do they come from? To many people, the answer is quite obvious. Evolution. How then does evolution go on explaining morality? To put it simply, altruistic behavior, or behavior that benefits others at the possible cost to you, is essential for more social species. For a large group to survive together, as our ancestors did in tribes, there has to be a sense of altruism beyond that of kinship. The simple fact is that for our species, the bigger the tribe, the better chance of survival, but the more altruistic behavior necessary to hold it. This essentially causes it to be selected for, along with being more social and intelligent. I have heard people in the past argue that when we are altruistic, we are only thinking of ourselves, and are not truly altruistic. For example, being nice to a girl or boy might cause them to like you more, in contrast to being nice just to be nice. However, no one exactly thinks this way, and often, morality isn’t something that you sit there and cognitively weigh the benefits or negatives of. So then where does it really come from? Why would someone dive in front of a train to push a stranger out of the way, and essentially sacrificing their self? Or as I heard in somewhat recent news, why would someone fight off a shark to save someone, but then refuse to give their name, leaving them anonymous? Rather than making us to where we will fake altruism so as to benefit ourselves, evolution has actually given us a general sense of morality instead, so that we actually feel good when we are kind to others, or feel bad when we hurt someone’s feelings. We actually want to do good things, not because it will help us in the future, but because we enjoy doing good things. This type of structure is a much more efficient and often overall more beneficial to us as a whole. One example would be how it would improve society as a whole much more. People simply wanting to give charity for example, will give to the poor, which both helps them and the economy. There would certainly be a sexual preference for real altruism, considering that women would want men who are actually nice to people (and thus nicer to them and their children,) rather than pretending to be nice for some future gain, and the same for men selecting women.

Of course where there is altruism there has to be the opposite. This is the basics of tit for tat, a game theory that is popular due to the fact that it is so widely found in nature. Essentially the strategy is that you cooperate with someone, until they try to cheat you, in which case you start to cheat them back until they try cooperating again. An easy real life example would be someone stealing something from you. While altruism will benefit everyone, and thus you as well, often cheating this system will provide you more rewards, if you can get away with it. For example the overall cooperation of society that has now eventually led to things like the production of the television, can be said to be beneficial for obvious reasons. But it is quite more beneficial after the fact to steal a TV, because you don’t have to work and gain money to get one. Overall, people will be altruistic, however when people can get away with it, some will always try and cheat it to get ahead. This can quite easily be shown best through the corruptness of governments, especially totalitarian ones. For those who try to cheat, we have established a sense of justice and punishment to prevent this cheating.

There is much more to morality than these simple demonstrations, but it does at least vaguely go over the basics.

Overall, it can be said that the Abrahamic God may likely be quite immoral, but this does nothing to show that this God is not real. God could quite easily be simple a cruel God. So then, why don’t we move further onto the scriptures.

[NekoNinja]

Scripture

A closer look at the immoral acts in the Bible show that they were not perceived so in their time. For example, in Bronze Age Canaan, where the Old Testament stories are born, we can see that things considered immoral today, like slavery, were not so back then. So was God simply going along with the times? I find this doubtful. I would think that any real God would abolish such immoral atrocities, no matter how they were perceived by the people. He certainly does abolish many other things which He considers sinful and is often shown to kill those who do not follow these laws, so we can conclude that God probably didn’t perceive them as sin, and thus by modern standards, would have to be quite immoral.

A more likely explanation is that the Bible was not divinely inspired, but rather simply written by man. As we look further we see much evidence for this explanation, and the idea that it is all the word of God becomes quite unlikely.

One such evidence is that it is filled with contradictions. Many of them may be trivial, and thus not really noteworthy since, divinely inspired or not, they are ultimately written by man and thus prone to error. However some of them are seemingly inexcusable. Such as the story of creation –

“Genesis 1:11-12 and 1:26-27 Trees came before Adam.
Genesis 2:4-9 Trees came after Adam.

Genesis 1:20-21 and 26-27 Birds were created before Adam.
Genesis 2:7 and 2:19 Birds were created after Adam.

Genesis 1:24-27 Animals were created before Adam.
Genesis 2:7 and 2:19 Animals were created after Adam.

Genesis 1:26-27 Adam and Eve were created at the same time.
Genesis 2:7 and 2:21-22 Adam was created first, woman sometime later.”

You would think that something like this might be somewhat important, and that God would do something to correct it. If we can’t trust the account of creation, then how can we really trust any of the Bible? Of course the entire story of creation is utterly ridiculous regardless. All it does to show is the primitive knowledge of the cosmos of Bronze Age men. We now know that the Earth is not flat, rain doesn’t fall from the heavens, and the creation of the universe, planet and life most certainly didn’t happen in 6 days.

Another example would be where Jesus was born, which is gone over by different accounts in the New Testament. You would think the people writing these stories would at least know where their Messiah was born –

Matthew 2:11 On coming to the house, they saw the child with his mother Mary, and they bowed down and worshiped him. Then they opened their treasures and presented him with gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh.
In a house.

Luke 2:7 and she gave birth to her firstborn, a son. She wrapped him in cloths and placed him in a manger, because there was no room for them in the inn.
In a manger. There was no room in the inn.

But of course they seem to not know. In fact, the entire story of Jesus being born in Bethlehem was made up to fulfill a Jewish prophecy. If anywhere, Jesus was more likely born in Nazareth, and there isn’t much known historically about Nazareth during this time. Some even go as far as to argue that it didn’t even exist at all. But such is most certainly debatable. I find the idea that he didn't exist to be a bit extreme and quite unsupported.

The simple fact is that the contradictions are rampant in the Bible, and it would take far too long to go through all of them. This is probably due to various different things. For one thing, the stories were written mostly by unverifiable authors, of which we know nothing about. These authors could have easily made up the stories or changed the stories to serve their own purpose.

Another would be that many of the stories are myths, which often change due to that they are exchanged by word of mouth. Myths are not perceived as myths in their time. For example, the ancient Greeks certainly believed in the stories of various gods, while we obviously see their stories as ridiculous now. We can guess that many of the stories were likely myths because of the fact that many are not supported at all by history, and this is especially true of all the supernatural claims in them. There are many things in the Bible that have no historical basis at all. For example, Moses taking the Jews from the Pharaoh in Egypt is often said to of not actually happened historically.

One of my favorite examples is the story of Noah and the Ark. There are many many issues with this story. To start with, we seriously must find out how exactly Noah managed to live so long. The Bible states that Noah, his wife, and sons were all each a few hundred years old, Noah making it to over 900 years old. Of course, during the time period, Noah would have been lucky to make it to age 30. Then of course we must ask how all the species managed to travel to the boat, and how they all managed fit in it. There are for example over 8000 different species of ants alone. Of course, some have come up with the excuse that they all didn’t get on the boat, only a certain ‘type’ of animal each, and then apparently there somehow had to of been some serious rapid evolution to morph from one species to over 8000 in just a few thousand years, and that is just for ants. Beetles on the other hand have 400,000 different species. Then we must ask how he still manages to get all these species on the boat, even if we assume that there was only one of each, it would be quite impossible to fit the over 4000 species of different mammals, and nearly 7000 species of reptiles on the boat. How did penguins travel through the desert and how about animals traveling over oceans? How did they eat? No animal can survive for 40 days without food. Did the predators have meat? And how did they keep the predators from killing the other animals? And what about plants? Did Noah manage to fit all the plants of the world on his small boat as well? They surely wouldn’t have managed to survive underwater for 40 days, and Noah’s boat most certainly wouldn’t have been able to fit them all on. Did God decide to bring all of them back after the flood? Then why go through all of this type of trouble in the first place? What about the fish? With the amount of rain it would take for such a flood, all of the sea water would have been mixed with the fresh water from the rain, killing most of the animals in the sea. And of course, potentially killing the fresh water creatures as well, due to the mixing of salt and fresh water. Strangely after the flood Noah, the only man who was apparently worth saving according to God, became an alcoholic for the rest of his days.

It can be said that it is quite obvious that the entire story is nonsense. Unless God decided to put everything back the way it was afterwards, which leaves us with the question of why he told Noah to build an ark and gather all the animals in the first place. Another issue with this story is that fact that it left absolutely no geological evidence, which is strange considering that you would assume that a giant flood would be quite obvious geologically. There is no evidence at all to support a worldwide flood. Lastly the story was likely stolen from another myth around that time call the Epic of Gilgamesh, which contained a similar flood story, as did many flood myths around the time.

Another source to these contradictions in the Bible would be forgery. Studies into the origin of the scriptures have revealed that many passages are likely just forgery. It is often said by some that much of the New Testament is forgery. Some of the people who were supposedly said to of written books in the Bible were said to be illiterate, and various books of the Bible did not have the names of their supposed authors on them originally. This type of thing is not surprising. Many people throughout history, and still today would like to change historical accounts of things to serve their own purpose, and this is certainly true of religion. Take for example Mormonism. The story of the rise of Mormonism goes something like this, for those who don’t know it. It was founded by a guy named Joseph Smith, who claims that two angels came to him and gave him Golden Tablets. The writing on the tablets was written in “Reformed Egyptian,” and Joseph had to translate it into the now “Book of Mormon.” In this book, there are various ridiculously false claims, one of the most prominent being that Native Americans somehow originated from Israel. According to the book, during around 600 BC Israelites came to America by ship. However, there is absolutely nothing to support this at all. In fact, historically Native Americans came from Asia. They are said to of came across a land bridge between Alaska and Siberia around 20,000 years ago, and this is backed by archeological findings and genetics. Did Joseph actually believe these things, or did he simply make them up? Either way it can give us some insight to how religious documents, especially those containing historically false information and stories of miracles, can be so false and yet so largely believed.

Lastly is that Biblical stories are written long after the supposed time of these events. Jesus is said to of probably died around 26 AD to 36 AD, during the time of Pontius Pilate. According to some the first gospel isn’t said to of been written until around 70 AD, and the rest following that. The actual dates of when they were written is debated, however, historians generally agree that they were written within 15 to 70 years after Jesus’s death, presuming that any description or date of his birth is at all accurate.

To wrap this up, the stories presented in the Bible are, as we can see, not reliable. There most probably was a figure such as Jesus, however there is little known historically about him. We know that the Romans considered Christianity a cult, which during that time it was. Of course every cult also has its leader, and I find this reason enough to find it likely that a figure like Jesus was real. What he was really like, though, and what he did is still up to question. The Bible cannot be used as something to be historically accurate, and certainly not divinely inspired. Jesus for example is said to of done exorcisms. The reality is that now we know people believed in exorcisms during that time because they didn’t know what things like epilepsy or schizophrenia were, thus the person was perceived as possessed by a demon or evil spirit. Various exorcisms are mentioned throughout Mathew, Luke and Mark. From this we can conclude one of two things. Either, Jesus was probably not a messiah and the story is true, as you would think the son of God would know exorcisms weren’t real, or the stories are false. Either way, we have no proof that Jesus was a messiah at all, unless of course you actually believe in exorcisms, but that is an issue of its own.

I am not here to say that there are no truths in the Bible. Rather, I am saying that while there may indeed be some truths, we need other evidence to confirm such, as the stories in the Bible are not confirmed by themselves. There are various stories based on real historical events, but are often distorted. Many supposed wars by the Israelites, for example, when looked at were not actually their wars. The Bible is no more reliable, especially not the supernatural claims in it, than any other mythical or religious doctrines that often like to make similar claims.

An argument that I have heard from debater and theologian William Lane Craig, was that the Christian God must be real, because historians and scholars widely accept the story of Jesus being resurrected. This is blatantly false. There may be various theologians who accept this, but they do so based solely on the Bible. In reality historians do not accept the Bible as a reliable source of factual history. There is very little evidence outside of scripture to support even the existence of Jesus, much less the contents of his life. In fact many say that the story is probably completely false, since the Romans would not have put Jesus in a tomb at all. At best, he would have simply been buried in a grave. Criminals were certainly not put in tombs. The idea that Jesus was in a tomb was probably instilled by Christians to fulfill Jewish prophecy, and most likely came about during the 4th century.

In conclusion, we cannot take the bible stories as factually accurate and most certainly not the divine word of God any more than any other mythical text, such as the Iliad.

There are various arguments that people use against mine, most prominently that the Bible can’t be taken this literally. “Many of the writings are metaphorical or parables.” Of course, what we may find as strange is that up until more recently, the Bible had always been taken completely literally, and still is by many Christians. Not only this but no one seems to agree upon what sections should be taken literally and what not. Indeed there are many different interpretations of passages, and ultimately, passages are used solely to promote what an individual thinks. They are picked at and chosen, often out of context, to serve the purpose of the person quoting them. If we want to know the truth about the Bible, then we must not pick at various different passages, but look at the Bible as a whole and in context. There is no evidence that the Bible was ever meant to be taken metaphorically, except in cases where specific and obvious metaphors were said. Not only this but what messages are we supposed to be getting from the book if it is metaphor? When God makes a flood, are we supposed to get the message that killing our children if we aren’t pleased with them is apparently ok? Or when children are raped or sold into slavery, what lesson exactly are we supposed to derive from this? What of all the horrid laws given? How can laws be said to be metaphor? The argument that the Bible isn’t meant to be taken literally is ultimately ridiculous, especially when considering that it all reflects the beliefs morality of their time.

Of course it will probably be noticed that this is simply against one religion, Christianity, and I most certainly acknowledge this. However, it would take far too long to go through all the various religions, and this would be especially useless considering that they all end up failing with the same problems. I was most familiar with this specific religion, and thus used it as the example for the reasons all religions are ultimately man-made. Even my look at Christian scripture isn’t very in depth, as it would take potentially several books to look into all of it. I am therefor not going to waste the time going into the others, especially considering there are over 10,000 religions in existence.

[Longdove]

Is this list only on the gods of Israel? *If you're not done yet, sorry, didn't mean to interrupt*

[NekoNinja]

Evolution

Before continuing, I want to get this subject out of the way. I have already mentioned it once, and before I do it again, it needs to be discussed, as there are many people who say they don’t believe in evolution.



Every now and then when discussing this topic, I hear things like “I didn’t come from a monkey,” or “evolution is just a theory.” I of course must partially agree with statements like these, despite that they represent an ignorant view on both scientific theories and evolution. You indeed did not come from a monkey, and no evolutionary scientist will ever tell you that you did. What you will see is that monkeys, humans and apes are all primates that came from a similar ancestor. Also I must note that evolution is “a theory” but it is also a fact. Looking at the fossil record it is most certainly intellectually irresponsible that someone would deny evolution. It would be like saying that there is no gravity while watching a ball fall to the ground. There is enough fossil evidence alone, that no rational person could ever look at it and say that it’s false, not to mention that there is plenty of evidence in many other fields. As I said evolution is also a theory, but so is gravity. In fact, there has been much dispute about which theory on gravity is right, but there is no dispute about the fact that gravity exists. Similarly there is no dispute about whether or not evolution exists. To show evolution we really only have to look at the fossil record. To say that evolution is “just a theory” is essentially showing your ignorance about scientific theories, as if these people just make them up drunk one morning after a party. Theories are simply the analysis of a set of facts and their relation to each other. To have a theory, you have to have evidence and a factual basis to support it. This is one reason why creationism or intelligent design is not a theory.

Of course many creationists do their best to try and “disprove” evolution, mostly by misrepresenting it, or making up things based on their ignorance of it. For example I have often heard of the creationist concept of irreducible complexity. This is basically the argument that some things are so complex that they could have certainly not come about gradually in evolution. One example of this, they say, would be the eye. They like to claim that the eye could not have come about gradually, and that half an eye simply doesn’t work. Of course this is utterly ridiculous, and only goes to show their ignorance on the topic. Half an eye is indeed better than no eye, and it most certainly works, but even if it didn’t evolution doesn’t necessitate the idea that something must come from “half” of that thing as it could have evolved from something completely different with a completely different use. In fact, through evolution we can see exactly how the eye was formed. The below diagram gives us a view of mollusk eyes.



Believe it or not but eyes have evolved independently over 40 times throughout evolution, and there are various species that can be found today which are on various different “stages” of eye evolution. The simple fact is that the idea of irreducible complexity is completely false, and there has never been anything found which when looked at, was ever something that couldn’t occur naturally. Even bird wings and feathers went through a process of evolution. One interesting fact about the human eye is that it is nowhere near perfect, which flies in the face of the creationist bogus theory of “intelligent design.” In fact, if anything we are certainly products of unintelligent design. Our eyes have a blind spot, and is nowhere as good of an eye as some other species, such as the octopus, due to various faults in them, such as how blood vessels sit on top of the light sensitive layer of the eye.

Another common creationist idea is that the Earth is only around 6000 years old. Of course they say this by denying science’s methods of dating rocks, and base their entire assumption on the myths in the Bible. It can most certainly be said that the people spouting this out either don’t know anything about radiometric dating, or they are purposefully making things up about it to make it look bad to the public. As per usual, it is essentially a biased and ignorant scheme to simply deny anything that doesn’t go along with their religion. Not only this, but by saying the Earth is only 6000 years old, they are even denying the existence of the Sumerian civilization, which was around before 6000 years ago. Another thing they have to account for, and often make up nonsense theories about, is the fact that if the Universe was made such a short time ago, how can we see stars so far away? In fact we have been finding galaxies billions of light years away from Earth, meaning that it took billions of years for the light to reach us. One such idea that I have heard used to explain this is the idea that light was traveling faster before, and has since slowed down. Of course, they don’t have any real evidence that light can actually travel faster, or why exactly it was supposedly traveling faster. Not to mention that such an idea would probably destroy modern physics. Thankfully we now know thanks to real science that the Earth is around 4.5 billion years old, and the universe around 14 billion. Not surprisingly, but those who believe in a 6 thousand year old universe also tend to believe in the myth of Noah’s Ark.

Yet another claim by creationists is that we have no transitional fossils, which is completely false. One question that I would like to ask creationists is why do whales have hip bones and sometimes old remnants of legs? It would be ridiculous to assume that God just decided to give them ones, simply because they are completely useless. Of course evolution has a perfectly good explanation for it. Whales are mammals, which would mean that they evolved from land animals. We even have the transitional fossils to prove it, which the below diagram gives a quick presentation of.



Around this time creationists will simply be saying “Well, what about the gaps in-between these species?” Often scientists joke about this question saying “When you give a creationist a transitional fossil, they then make the claim that there are now two gaps instead of one.” This simply shows creationists need to hang on to their beliefs, despite the evidence to the contrary. Often creationists expect there to be an abundance of fossils, and they will often ask why we don’t have transitions to fill in every single little gap. Of course this argument is utterly ridiculous, simply because fossilization is a very rare occurrence that requires special conditions. In fact I have often heard that we are lucky that we have the fossils now that we do. Of course even if we didn’t have any fossils, evolution would still be an obvious fact to us through many other fields such as biology and genetics. We don’t even really at all need the fossil record to prove evolution; I simply enjoy using it.

There are many terrible arguments creations try to use against evolution. Anything from the Cambrian Explosion, which they like to say “almost happened over night,” but really took about 20 million years, to something like denying gene duplication. It would take far far too long to go over all of these, so I will end with one last one, which is the idea that this is all done “by chance” as creationists say.

Often the argument goes something like “how could something as big and complicating as the human brain or even a squirrel simply come about by chance?” Of course, evolution never claims that it is done by chance; it is designed by a process known as natural selection. Natural selection is the process by which evolution generally runs. It consists of various different types of genetic mutations. For example, let’s say that a species was being attacked by a new predator to the area. This species has a very long tail, thus making it easy for the predator to catch. Of course through genetic mutations, some in this species would have slightly smaller tails than the others, making it harder to catch and thus more likely to survive and reproduce. It then follows that gradually, the species tail will get smaller and smaller due to the mutations and selective pressure on the tail. Eventually, a species that may have originally had a tail might end up with no tail at all, be able to climb trees well to escape ground predators and even have the ability to run much faster. This would be all due natural selection taking its course, which may eventually lead this species to become an entirely different one. The idea that evolution is simply “chance” is utter nonsense, and simply propaganda to support creationism.

This is all of course a very short example to show evolution, and many creationists may even have some ridiculous nonsense to try and dispute my claims since I haven’t gone into much detail here, however, there are many books and educational materials out there that goes over evolution much better than this. In fact you can even take various different classes on evolution, either in college or online. I therefor won’t waste any more time on this, and will leave it to the individual to find out about all the wonders of evolution.

Here is one video series going over creationism:
Foundational Falsehoods of Creationism - YouTube

And another that goes over evolution:
Facts Of Evolution (Cassiopeia Project) - YouTube

Mechanisms Of Evolution - YouTube

I of course will end with encouraging you to not buy into the nonsense that science is atheistic, and that they “believe” in evolution because they are rebelling against religion. This is obviously completely ludicrous, but surprisingly I’ve actually heard this argument before. In fact, many scientists would absolutely love to find some evidence that goes against evolution, simply because it would probably make him more famous than Darwin himself. No such evidence has ever been found. All the evidence that creations try to claim have always been torn apart when looked at under scrutiny. The entire idea that science is having some mass belief to deny religion is simply a ridiculous and quite laughable conspiracy theory. In fact science generally does just the opposite. Scientists will gladly tear apart any nonsense claims or faulty evidence given for any claim. Really, they do this type of thing all the time, and anyone in a scientific feild can tell you this. I find this quite apparent myself when looking into psychology and other social sciences. When studies are done and have holes in them, they are not taken seriously at all and peer review will tear them apart. Science may acknowledge that the results may be potentially somewhat accurate, but certainly better studies would need to be done to prove anything. So when creationists, who generally have no knowledge or experience in the field they are commenting on, try to make bogus claims about things in science that any real scientist would have trashed out a long time ago if it were wrong, they are quite rightfully laughed at. In fact scientists are often quite skeptical about their own claims among themselves and often have a hard time coming to the reality of the evidence. The problem with creationism is that while they are rightfully ignored in the scientific and academic communities, they are quite prominent in convincing the mass public who are often quite uneducated on these things.

Eventually, evolution will probably become more accepted, especially now that we are more in the age of information, where things can be obtained much easier now that ever due to the internet. Even the Catholic Church has had to recognize evolution as true.

[NekoNinja]

Belief

One important question we must ask is simply why do we believe? Indeed it is quite the important topic. Many theists will of course say that we were designed by God himself to believe in him. Rather than going against the design argument, here I will propose a different origin to beliefs. And in this origin we only have to look to ourselves, and not to the sky.

So then why do we believe? Let’s go in and look into the origins of religion. Imagine that you are among a group of individuals during the Stone Age. All around you there is the unknown and an often violent world. It is up to you and your tribe to figure out this world. From what little knowledge and potential philosophical thought there was back then, there could be only one real conclusion. Human beings, animals, lightning, storms, plants, land, the stars, the sun, etc, etc, it all has to come from something. This idea is still even quite prominent today. Not only this, but this something had to be able to create such things. In fact, the creator of these things appeared to be quite intelligent, and most of all, powerful. How could such complexity come from something not intelligent and powerful? This is the mentality of all religion. Now the question is how did we go from something intelligent creating the world, to Zeus throwing down lightning bolts and making sacrifices to the gods? The answer isn’t that hard to come up with, and in fact, we see this type of thing today with modern cults. It simply takes one person to have a vision or some sort of experience, and suddenly hundreds of people believe you. If there is something intelligent enough to be able to create the world, then doesn’t it logically follow that they could also communicate with us? And what reason did anyone have to believe that such visions and signs of this being were false? This is pattern seeking at its best, and is often known as patternicity.

The simple fact is that the human brain is adept at finding patterns where there are actually patterns, along with where there aren’t. We only have to look at things like modern conspiracy theories to show this. Why is the human brain like this? The answer can be explained quite easily evolutionarily. Imagine again that you are back in the Stone Age, and you hear a rustle in a bush. You can either think that it was a predator, or the wind. If you think it was a predator, but was just the wind, then there are no serious consequences. However, if you mistake it as simply the wind and it’s a predator, it will probably mean your life, thus exiting you out of the gene pool. In fact we do similar things all the time. You hear something go bump in the night, and immediately you mind begins to panic. Is it a stranger? Did someone break in? When in reality it is probably just something like your cat. The likelihood that someone actually broke in compared to your cat jumping around the house is quite the big difference, but you are still fearful and on edge regardless. Our brains are adept at making patterns whether they are actually there or not. We see animals in the clouds, and can find designs or figures in random noise. The trouble is that we are nowhere near as good at detecting false patterns as we are at finding them.

Not only is this a problem, but we tend to form our beliefs first and then afterwards find reasons to support them. Forming our beliefs is often much more of an emotional experience than it is a logical one. Sure we do find reasons to support our beliefs, but this comes after initially going through the emotional process of forming the belief. This is what gets people into religion, and even into destructive cults.

To get a neuroscientific viewpoint on this, we only have to look at the schizophrenic spectrum. For a long while scientists wondered why schizophrenia was so prominent today if it was a genetic disorder. The genes should have been selected out of the gene pool long ago, and this is certainly true because we know tribal groups don’t exactly like psychotics. The reason the disease has lasted is because of its relative, schizotypal personality disorder (SPD), which is prominent in families with schizophrenia. Why would this disorder keep schizophrenia from being selected out? SPD is associated with strange beliefs along with other possible symptoms. Really, all we need to get a grasp at why is a look at dopamine. Dopamine is a neurotransmitter in the brain and plays a prominent role in schizophrenia along with creating beliefs as studies show. Schizophrenics have much higher levels of dopamine that others, and this disorder causes them to have often very serious problems, such as hallucinations and delusions. So what exactly does this mean? Dopamine plays a serious role in causing hallucination, and causing patternicity to go wild, being that delusions are essentially patternicity but to an extreme. Schizophrenics see patterns in basically everything, and they often fail to detect the false patterns. This often leaves them to believe things like that there are government conspiracies against them, that God literally is talking to them, or that someone is stalking them, among various other and often more bizarre delusions. SPD is essentially a lighter case of schizophrenia, so while they may not be delusional, they will still find patterns in things where none really exist, and are prone to having strange experiences, even potentially hallucinations.

So then where am I going with this? Today’s SPD is the past’s shamanism. These were the people who were the witch doctors of the ancient past or the people who spoke in tongues to the gods. This observation is most certainly not from me. It has been observed in the past by many and by many still today. It is verified mostly by the fact that shamans today in various isolated cultures have been said to have the symptoms of SPD. In fact it is even quite speculated that many if not most even modern cults were started by people with SPD or similar disorders. And this has been supported by one cult leader not too long ago being diagnosed with schizophrenia. It is people on the schizophrenic spectrum and similar illnesses like temporal lobe epilepsy whom are prone to delusions, hallucinations, and strange beliefs that are most probably the source of various myths and prophets of the past.

So we have a decent idea of where religions come from, but we haven’t really gone over very well why so many people believe in them. We know that things like volcanoes and stars are natural, and not godly, so why do we still have the beliefs? Are we “designed” by God to believe in him? Well, one part of this explanation goes simply to patternicity. We see the patterns in the world, and often attribute them to a higher being because they appear to be intelligently designed or caused. People still believe that the universe is created by God, and often that life was as well. (I will go over whether such is justified or not later.) What this type of thing is often referred to as is agenticity, but this isn’t the whole story. The other factor here is the emotional aspect to belief and how we form beliefs often irrationally. Any believer can tell you that their experience with God is personal, and loving. They can feel the love of God in them, and know from this that he is real.

We can see a little bit of why this is by simply looking at schizophrenia. The issue with delusions in schizophrenia is that even when they are shown evidence to the contrary of their belief or delusion, they still believe it regardless no matter how irrational it may seem to others. This is often the case for regular beliefs as well, especially when it comes to such personal topics as religion. Religion is by far an emotional experience. When people go to church or pray, they can feel God’s presence, and his love. When you engage someone with the topic of their religion, they often feel personally threatened and go on the defensive. This has a lot to do with the fact that generally their entire world view is based on the idea of a divine and loving being that is looking out for them. To see it otherwise is simply quite the scary thought. The simple problem with this is that what you feel to be true doesn’t make it so. Just like the person that believes in UFOs and thinks they were abducted by aliens, the religious don’t often see reason even when it is placed right there in front of them. I not too long ago read one study on a flying saucer group that was discussing just this type of phenomena. They had made a prediction based on supposed signals they were getting from space, and said that the aliens were going to land on Earth on a certain date. When the aliens did not come, you would think any rational person would see that it is all nonsense. However, all this false prediction did was actually increase their faith. They came up with some excuse as to why it didn’t happen, and kept believing.

I hear similar excuses all the time from religious groups about their beliefs. Often you will hear things like “Who are you to question God?” and “How do you know what God thinks?” Of course when you are on the other side of the argument you can see how simply ridiculous these accusations are. The best way to show it is to simply put it from the UFO perspective and their prediction. “Just because the UFOs didn’t come, doesn’t give you any right to think you know what they are thinking or to question them.”

What people often don’t understand is that what they personally think has no bearing on reality. You can say that you believe in God or UFOs or whatever else, but none of that does anything to the fact that it either exists or it doesn’t. Our beliefs don’t always equate to reality, and the best we can do is to look at the evidence.

The sad fact is that most of the decisions and beliefs we make are largely influenced by our limbic system or the emotion center of the brain. We often decide on things based entirely on what they “feel” like to us, not on any logical process or looking at any real evidence. To show such emotional influence on belief we only have to look at people like Derren Brown, who can walk into a room full people who lack belief, and convert them not through logic, but through emotional and psychological manipulation. The guy is simply an atheist magician with good tricks, but he can make other people believe in what he wants them too. To know that we are so prone to delusion, not only explains how people can follow such bizarre cults, but is something to be seriously worried about. Sure we do often look at the evidence in terms of our beliefs, but we tend to have a filter that blocks all things that don’t agree with out preconceived opinion. We so often are prone to confirmation bias, and most people don’t realize it. Our brains are not adept at looking at information objectively and without bias, and we so often fail at doing it. This is largely why science is the way it is today, as we have to have something that looks at things more objectively. Science is by far the only tool that has been able to get past even the biases of scientists and find real truth. There is plenty of philosophical thought on the matter of the scientific method, but I won’t go into it here.

We must come to not believe in things just because it feels true, or because we claim to “feel the love of God,” which as it happens can also be experienced in a lab and with what’s called the “God Helmet,” and as it happens is also claimed by nearly all religions. It is becoming clearer and clearer that the only path to truth is by looking at all the arguments out there and weighing up all the evidence. Not just the evidence that you may happen to know now or the evidence that happens to support your already existent opinion, but we all must look at the evidence to things that don’t support our opinions. We are nowhere near a perfect species, and we are most certainly not always right when it comes to beliefs. Personally, I am a skeptic of these beliefs. I do not take things given to me to simply be true. I look at all the evidence I encounter, and try to see things from other perspectives besides my own, because I do not expect to be always right. I propose that we must be skeptical of everything, and we must try to leave our biases behind when searching for truth.

[NekoNinja]

Argument of Design

This is quite the common argument that theists make in favor of a God, and I mentioned it briefly in my last section. Simply put they say that there must be a God simply because the Universe and life seem to be designed by something, and often this argument is simply referred to as intelligent design. Of course, I must argue how poor such an argument is.

Firstly we should look at the idea behind intelligently designed life to get it out of the way. I could simply dismiss the argument behind this creationist idea by simply by saying there is utterly no evidence to support it, and by far it is quite obvious the complexity of life has come about through evolution, not an intelligent designer. But let’s take another look at this through the perspective of creation. Unlike evolutionists, they generally don’t have to argue why this species is this certain way or does this or that. They don’t have figure out why we have things like kin selection, or whatever the creationist equivalent might possibly be. Essentially the argument falls on “it’s the way it is because God made it that way.” And that is their entire argument. Of course with this, we must also assume that all the cruelty which comes with it was created by this God, and all the faults and things that don’t make sense (but make perfect sense evolutionarily) are also a result of this God. I have already given one example when going over evolution, which is the question of why God has given whale’s hip bones? Or how about why God did such a poor job on our eyes, does he favor other species such as the octopus better? Why has he made us to be such a warring species? In fact there are many species that don’t have such a tribal mentality and the us/them dichotomy. Essentially such a mentality causes us to hate other groups that aren’t like us. This is a huge cause of countless wars and disagreements among us.

In fact if anything, I think the argument should be changed to unintelligent design rather than intelligent. Why all the genetic disorders, and diseases? Why do gorillas and lions commit infanticide? Why do chimpanzees have violent territory wars, and then eat the carcasses of any dead babies? Why do certain wasps lay their eggs inside other insects, so that the babies will eat them from the inside out, leaving the insect alive until they reach the vital organs?

And with all of these questions, along with thousands more that could be come up with, all that creationists can do is say, “that is the way God made them, and us.” Of course some will try to argue in respect to humans that it is our own fault that we are this way, because we “committed the first sin in the garden.” As if it is somehow justified by the idea that some mythical humans a long time ago did the horrific sin of disobeying God and eating fruit, and now hundreds of generations later, we still apparently have to pay for it. Yes, that completely justifies all if the above mentioned (note the sarcasm.)

The simple fact is that the intelligent design argument has no positive evidence, or evidence of any kind for that matter, to support it. All they simply do is attempt to provide failed attempts at attacking evolution, due to their biased need to have God be the sole creator. Despite what anyone may say, something is not true just because they want it to be so. The intelligent design argument essentially just comes down to the fallacious argument from ignorance. With this, I don’t intend to acknowledge the creationist idea of an intelligent designer of life any further. I will go with the evidence, and the evidence overwhelmingly and clearly points to evolution, and to no other.

There is another argument that people often fall back on instead of the creationist idea of the Garden of Eden. Often they accept evolution as true, but simply say instead that the process of evolution began and was started by God. Ultimately this is essentially the same argument as the above argument, and as we will see, the same as all the design arguments.

Similarly people often go to the same route in terms of the universe. This is so often shown with the idea of a “fine-tuned” universe, and through the idea that God was the origin of the Big Bang. All of these arguments are essentially the same. We can’t explain X, or X is seems too complex or too improbable to occur naturally, thus we assume that an intelligent being did it.

To answer why these are faulty arguments, we only have to look back in time. During the dawn of man, everything essentially seemed to be designed by something. The clouds appeared designed, the moutains, the storms, the earthquakes, the stars, everything. And of course they attributed all this to an intelligent being. For its time, it was a very decent idea. We didn’t know much about anything, and from human experience, anything that seemed designed probably was. But of course as we went along and began to learn some scientific facts about our world, we began to realize the clouds are not designed by a creator, they are naturally that way; the tides do not come in and out due to God, they are that way from the moon; the floods and diseases are not divine punishments, they are natural occurrences; and most recently life wasn’t designed by God, it is totally and completely natural.

The simple fact is that everything, while it may seem designed by some ultimate creator, is so often proven to be simply natural. This is why we have science. Science does not make assumptions based on the lack of evidence in front of them. It did not ever say that because we don’t know where animals come from that it must be designed simply because it appears to be. In fact, more in more in life we are often learning that these appearances are not often what they seem to be. We cannot base what we think to be true on just observations of appearances. The only way to actually learn anything about the universe and our planet is to not make assumptions but to actually do the research and look at the evidence.

What we are seeing here is pattern seeking. We see the world around us, and if we don’t have an explanation for it we attribute it to what it seems to be from, a designer. This is most certainly patternicity at its best. You see, if you look at all these ideas that the intelligent design arguments use, you will find that they all fall to the same problem, they have no real evidence to support them, and they all are based on assumptions. They are all based on ignorance. I will most certainly admit that with the very limited amount of information we have about the universe, it seems on the surface quite improbable indeed that it could be this way without being designed. In fact I often hear people argue that the probability that the universe could be the way it is and able to support life is quite astronomically improbable. If evolution has shown us anything, it is that no matter the appearances, something cannot be assumed to be true simply because of appearances. Before the discovery of evolution, the argument was all essentially the same as it is now for the universe. “We don’t know how such complex animals as ourselves and other species could exist, and to think that it happened simply by chance would be intellectually absurd.”

Ultimately we have learned throughout time that we cannot take assumptions at face value. If that were the case we would certainly still be believing that lighting was thrown down from the heavens by a god in anger. It is ultimately dishonest of us to make such assumptions as the ones intelligent design proposes. To ever find any truth about anything in this world, we must look to the positive evidence to support it. And there simply is no evidence for any gods. Everything points to them being just manmade and with the human desire to be the center of the universe in mind.

[NekoNinja]

There are a few other arguments which I have failed to go over, namely the argument from personal experience. I may eventually get to it. If not, possibly someone else can handle it.

[NekoNinja]

Is this list only on the gods of Israel? *If you're not done yet, sorry, didn't mean to interrupt*

It is primarily so, yes. However I go over things that apply to all gods, like belief, and the design argument. To go over scriptures and such of all 10,000 religions would take a lifetime, so when discussing it I simply went over the one I was most familiar with.