Category: Religion

Christopher Hitchens – An Atheist Responds – washingtonpost.com

Name one ethical statement made, or one ethical action performed, by a believer that could not have been uttered or done by a nonbeliever. And here is my second challenge. Can any reader of this column think of a wicked statement made, or an evil action performed, precisely because of religious faith?

I heard this a while ago and thought it was worth repeating and pointing out to anyone who reads this. There appears to be less and less reason to be religions as the centuries have turned up to the point where its now, if looking at it with fresh perspective, more of a mental illness than anything else.

Bearing in mind that many ‘think that god talks to them’ (hallucinations) and ‘believes in creation’ (delusions) thats two symptoms and thats whats required to be considered schizophrenic (via the international DSM IV-TR standard).

Creation Museum/Creation Museum

I don’t quite know how to respond to this place. If you think its 6000 years old of 65Million, We still have lost many species. Being very very conservative  there were at least 300 species per cubic meter on that ark.

Obviously, they haven’t read the bible or much science. It always amazes me when people tell me the bible and science (eg evolution) can both be right. It clearly means that these people (like most christians) have not actually read enough on either topic. The bible mentions unicorns at least 9 times (from memory)  so its not really on a good footing.

I recently had a discussion with an ‘uber christian’  (not my words) and was told that the bible consists of 3 styles of information

1. Historical
2. Descriptive
3. Prescriptive

Well Anyone who has read it (seriously) can tell you that the Historical text is very often wrong. Actually its about as accurate as you would expect from under educated people documenting hearsay. (eg, lookup Herod and when he actually lived)

The descriptive test is also very wrong (eg PI = 3.0) so thats really not the inerrant word of god either. Lets now look at the prescriptive text, Things like its your responsability to kill both men if you see homosexuals. (Lev 20:13). Most people would not do that today as we have essentially moved on. The zeitgeist changes and we now know that this is wrong. How much of the other text can we trust ? It would appear that most people today read the bible and like the sensible bits and dislike the ridiculous bits. Its almost as if we have our own ethical standards that are independent of a sky pixie which we use to judge things with. Now, if thats true, why do we need a god anymore anyway ?

Greta Christina’s Blog: Atheists and Anger

I’m angry that so many parents and religious leaders terrorize children — who (a) have brains that are hard-wired to trust adults and believe what they’re told, and (b) are very literal-minded — with vivid, traumatizing stories of eternal burning and torture to ensure that they’ll be too frightened to even question religion.

I don’t know quite where to start with this article. Obviously Greta is correct on almost everything but I doubt it will help anything.

It makes me angry reading this. Strangely I am normally angry reading things that I disagree with but definitely not in this case.

Richard Dawkins seems to have done it again. “The enemies of reason” has just been shown on BBC 4 and having just finished watching it, I can tell you that his approach to science is still simple, elegant and correct.

If I were to tell someone that its raining elephants outside, they would probably not believe me and seek evidence for themselves (probably by looking) yet when people are told things about the dead talking to them, virgins floating on clouds, 1 million species fitting on a wooden boat etc, they are willing to believe without evidence.

People are indeed strange. I can understand faith, I have faith in a number of things but Faith doesn’t necessarily make something true.

Systematic, repeatable and incorruptable research is the only way to determine the truth or falsity of anything.