1. People don’t change their minds. Only rarely. Transformation is not a desirable option to our brains. It seems to require trauma, the threat of imminent death, to provoke real change of mind and bring about true transformation. Is it possible to enter death and be transformed while we are alive?

2. The greatest enemy of community is fantasy… visionary and wishful thinking. The lack of gratitude for what is, the unwillingness to appreciate what is, or the disdain for what is, erodes the fabric of community. Can we love unconditionally without coercion?

3. Our gross naiveté about the principalities and powers and their persistent desire and ability to enslave groups and individuals perpetuates the abuses institutions, including the church, are notorious for. Can all people be free?

4. Avoid naysayers as well as yes-men. You can always find complainers to agree with you. You can always find encouragers to agree with you. Can we find the courage to form our own minds independently, wisely, and compassionately?

I thought, hey… I like him.  He’s is talking about deconversion in #1, because that’s what it was like for me to step away from faith.  Constant bombardment with strange teachings in the Baptist church forced me to reevaluate the world we live in.

THEN, in #2 he nails it with typical religious thinking about the fantasy of a higher power vs. just appreciating this temporal gift of life on Earth, not just mine, but the whole human experience.  We just got here (relatively speaking), and the Earth will be here long after we have faded to extinction. I already love unconditionally without coercion and don’t know how else you could.

#3… tell me about it.

And, regarding #4, don’t “seek approval” for your point of view.  Establish it intellectually, with reason, and knowledge of the world and your fellow man. You don’t need other people to tell you what you should believe.

Holy crap, this dude’s batting 1000 in my book so far… but then came #5:

5. Listen to what the atheists are saying about the unprovability of God; discern the Christ-Principle in all things; have compassion for all beings. Is it possible to see all things as being reconciled?

Wha?! I rarely discuss the “unprovability of god”, but since you brought it up, what exactly is the evidence for God?  If you look at the sum total of the things the Christian God gets credit for in the Bible, why would you WANT to believe in him?  He wasn’t a good or just god. Jesus tried to correct all that, but please… look at the “miracles” he performed.  His teachings were in line with to Mohammad, Confucius, Buddha, Plato, etc. (borrowed, ex post facto, by reasonable men writing down “history” many years later). Other than these writings, what evidence is there for god?  For everyone good work, “divine” occurrence, or saved soul you can conjure, I can cite a dozen horrific, sad, disgusting things about the world that a good and just god would not allow… even a passive creator (with any “heart”) would not have created such a chaotic place.

Also, how would I find the “Christ-Principles in all things”?” As I understand it, the Principles of Christ are roughly, first, Faith in the Jesus Christ; second, Repentance… it really doesn’t matter after that because I get hung up on the FIRST one. I have faith that the human race has been duped for several millenia, for sure.  With regard to “sin”, seriously, Catholics (et al), get a grip and just be good people… forget about all the EXTRA rules and regulations that the church has piled on. It’s not a “sin” to eat meat… ever. Weird.

How about we all just skip ahead to “have compassion for all beings”? I can get on board with that… why make it sound like I need belief as a crutch.  See “The Golden Rule“.

The last sentence is stupid… no, we can’t reconcile all things, particularly mystical belief with intellectual reason.  They are incompatible.  Even less likely, reconcile your Christian mythology with a Islamic stranger an ocean away. Good luck.

However, abandon your fantastical beliefs, and then living with your fellow man, particularly the ones not like you, becomes much easier.  I guess his thoughts were pretty random after all.

The other day I stepped into a Walgreens for some allergy medication (because I was pretty sure I was going to die), and during the 5 minutes I was inside on a Saturday night at 10pm in North Atlanta, some douche jammed a card into my door handle with this tease on the top:

Am I Going to Heaven?

It’s worth quoting from, if for no other reason than to make this easily searchable by web zealots bent on converting me (back).  I just don’t feel like typing it all, so here are some choice highlights:

The greatest book ever written was published in 1611. It’s name – The Holy Bible – authorized by King James. The reason for it’s greatness is that it is God speaking to us in English words.

Huh?  What a weird way to start a Christian track.  Who cares when it was published in English (words)? Authorized?  Well, thank goodness… then there’s no way it could be manipulated or untrustworthy, right?

The king gave the translators instructions designed to guarantee that the new version would conform to the ecclesiology and reflect the episcopal structure of the Church of England and its beliefs about an ordained clergy.
- Wikipedia

But I digress… it’s not terribly relevant when or how Christian mythology was further corrupted and usurped four centuries ago.  Several billion people don’t believe any of that crap.  Around a billion people actively do not believe in any god or gods, and you won’t be converting them because they have already been saved… by reason.

A couple of more highlights:

If you want to have joy in your heart under all circumstances…
If you want to be totally free from guilt…
If you want the power to overcome things you would like to change in your life…
If you would like to truly care about others, not for what they can do for you, but what you can do for them…
If you would like to never be alone again…

Hey!  That’s a lot like me!  I live that way, but I didn’t need God to make it happen. Getting rid of God, in fact, freed me to live that kind of life. I won’t address each one, but suffice it to say that you can realize these aspects of your life by being kind to others, living by the Golden Rule, getting an education, and generally not being an ass.  Things tend to fall in place when you live responsibly, god or no god.  People who naively cling to god as savior without squaring up the rest of their life are surely up for serious disappointment.  Examples of failures, misery, and hypocrisy are everywhere.

If I get the energy, I’ll type in the rest and say more about it… I’ve attached a scan of the entire thing if you are inclined to dissect it on your own.

Hey, and special thanks to Ken at:

Inprint, Inc.
P. O. Box 76147
Atlanta, GA 30358
inprintincorporated@yahoo.com

Stay away from my car.

This past Christmas a story swept the internet about a football coach at a Christian high school in Texas who inspired his team’s fans to root for the opposition: a team from the local juvenile correctional facility. Among the thousands of emails that the coach received in response to his actions, one stood out to him. Trisha Sebastian mentioned her loss of faith, and coach Hogan got a message from God that he was meant to bring her back. We eavesdrop on their phone calls.

Problem is, she sent him an e-mail.  She was not just moved, but moved to action.  She had a friend that had died of colon cancer a few years earlier and never could reconcile this with her Catholic faith (”very lapsed Catholic”).  She also made the mistake of saying that she is “borderline agnostic”… a big mistake.  After this admission, there was a protracted exchange where God “moved his spirit” repeatedly to witness to her about “the idea of God”.  His first e-mail response to her even included the admonishment “I expect to hear back from you, young lady”.

They spoke on the phone and with permission Trisha recorded the call.  It really went off the rails when Coach Hogan dragged Hitler into the conversation in the context of “objective good” and “objective evil”:

Hogan: If you say “Good” is only people’s opinion it stems from our own… [stammer]… you define true for you and I define true for me then how do you reconcile that with Hitler saying it is true that if we can eliminate Jews and other people on the planet then it will be a better planet because we are a superior race?  And he of course he gets his world view from Charles Darwin.

Sebastian: Right.. Wait. Wait Wait…

And that’s where he pretty much lost her.  I’m sure there was plenty of nonsense and weirdness before this, but she took a GIANT step away from him when he went there.  There are so many issues with that asinine statement, it’s difficult to know where to begin.

1. The concept of “race” to Darwin, Hilter, and modern science are very different.
2. Hilter was a Christian (aka, Hitler was not an Atheist)
3. Darwin was correct about Evolution (it’s a fact)

 
It’s a shame that we have to live with the legacy of Darwin’s relative ignorance about the similarities of men.  At the time (150 years ago), class, geographic isolation, religion, and extreme differences in culture and skin pigment contributed to the classification of people as coming from different races.  While evolution certainly was responsible for the genetic variations Darwin and others observed, we know now that there is common ancestry of ALL humans less than 8,000 generations ago.  It certainly wasn’t the Tower of Babel, The Great Flood, or some other cataclysm that caused our differences.

I wish I had more time, more energy, and more knowledge (I am only a laytheist, after all) with which to explain and debunk Christian bullshit, but there are so many angles… if you aren’t happy with scientific comparisons, just compare to other religions.  That should be enough to convince anyone that religion was made up solely by men at different, overlapping times all over the world.

Why would one be better than the next?

Trisha, I’m so sorry about your friend.  The truth is that she had a groups of cells in her colon malfunction and go bad.  In what sounds like a fairly serious cell breakdown, the cancer was virilent enough to cause the rest of her body to ultimately lose. Now, do you really think that this is a mechanism that God put in place to eliminate some people for reasons we can’t know? If so, why are there so goddammed many mysterious ways for the body to break down and die?  Wouldn’t two or three be adequate? Is suffering necessary?  Why have we been able to permanently eliminate some previously fatal diseases and maladies?  Doesn’t it make more sense that it’s a product of millions of years of evolution and change…?  And that sometimes the shit just breaks?

Religion is a tricky sale, but Hell is what a sales person would call the perfect closer. As soon as people want to turn away from religion, they pull out the Hell card, and you’re locked in. Another soul saved. Which is the ironic thing, they believe they are doing you a favor, they are saving your soul, and for that you need to give them money.

Having been in sales, and having attended a Southern Baptist church, he’s not kidding.  Basically a restatement of Pascal’s Wager.  It’s shameless and bizarre once you step outside of the circle and see it for what it really is… Control.

whygod.weebly.com

Thanks for coming out for non-belief. You are on my list of favorites already.

I’m just an average Joe. I do not believe in any dogma or any powerful being. I don’t like labels but I guess I’m an atheist, although I think of my self as just plain rational. I don’t claim to disprove God’s existence, I make no such claim because I cannot prove that God doesn’t exist. No religion can prove that he does either. It’s all faith. I know that I cannot compete against faith. I am just talking about having reasonable doubt.

I think that’s fantastic… if we took God to court, he would surely lose on that basis alone.

Update: Weebly sucks and Rafael’s site may be down.

2nd Update: Weebly still sucks but whygod is back up with minor damage.  Why would they have taken every weebly site down for several hours during peak US surfing hours?  Idiots.

The way to identify the beast is by counting. In ancient times, letters of the alphabet served as numbers. The first nine letters stood for the numbers one through nine, and the next nine for the numbers ten through ninety, and so on. In Greek, the current alphabet did not have enough letters, so certain obsolete letters and signs supplemented the system. Every name yielded a number.

However, the identity of the person represented by the number 666 should not be a subject of speculation until that person arrives on the earthly scene. The person to whom 666 applies must have been future to apostle John’s time, because John clearly meant the number to be recognizable to someone. If it was not discernible to his generation, the generation to whom it will be discernible must have lain in the future. If 666 is the number of a future individual, attempts to identify past entities through the number are futile.

This is just sad. There is an entire Bible Prophecy class if you are so inclined.  How about judging the Bible in its historical context versus establishing basic human rights for all:

Often Bible verses that seem unfair or discriminatory to us need to be viewed within their historical or cultural context. For instance the Bible does not condemn slavery and in fact the Bible actually codifies the rules for keeping slaves. Today we find slavery abhorrent and for some of us the idea that the Bible codifies how slaves are to be treated is very upsetting. But in its historic and cultural context that codification of how slaves are to be treated was in fact a hard thing for people of that time to live up to. In other words, that codification made the life for the slave in Israel better than the slaves life would be someplace else.

Jesus H. Christ in a hand basket… slavery has always been abhorrent.  You think that GOD – the creator of the universe, good, evil, etc. would have clued humanity in a couple of millenia ago if it slavery was bad, right? This alone should invalidate the Bible for any right-minded person.  And then there is Gordon Atkinson who successfully made it out of the muck, but then slid back:

I looked in the restroom mirror and said, “I do not believe in God.” I knew this was the truth and felt the need to say it out loud. I was on the other side now. I was an unbeliever. It was like waking up in Tokyo and noticing to your great surprise that you’ve become Japanese. You weren’t raised in Japan, and you have no idea how to use chopsticks. What the hell are you gonna do with yourself? [Huh?]

It wasn’t the experience with Jenny [a woman that died of breast cancer that could not be saved with prayer] that caused my break with God. It was the kids in Mexico, my difficulty in believing parts of the bible, the phony Christians I met along the way, and the hundreds of prayers that seemed unanswered. Jenny was just the last ping of a hammer that had been working on my foundation for a long time.

It breaks my heart.  Here is a man that “works his ass off” [his words] helping people and doing good works, and then he gives the credit to God.  What the hell?!  Dude… there are plenty of people doing good in the world that are not beholden to mythology.  I wish you would reconvert to your birth state (non-believer, pre-brainwashing) and join us without the distraction of God looking over your shoulder.  I think meditation (aka prayer) is wonderful, but don’t pretend someone is listening.

MONKEYS TALK ABOUT RELIGION

Monkey Son: Dad, today at school my teacher said we evolved from other animals. That’s not true, is it?
Monkey Dad: Of course not, Steven. We were created by Monkey God in His Monkey image.
Monkey Son: But how do we know for sure God’s a monkey?
Monkey Dad: Well, do you think God throws his own poop and enjoys jumping up and down in place?
Monkey Son: Yeah…?
Monkey Dad: And do you think when he’s eating bananas, he periodically stops chewing and looks around with an angry expression to make sure no one’s plotting to steal them?
Monkey Son: Yeah…?
Monkey Dad: And do you think his ass is slightly less hairy than the rest of his body?
Monkey Son: Yeah.
Monkey Dad: Then, there’s your answer, champ.
Monkey Son: OK… but how do we know God really loves us?
Monkey Dad: Because his Son died for our sins. Monkey Jesus could have ripped off the Roman’s arms and masturbated all over their bodies, but he chose love instead. And I think that makes Him pretty darn special.
Monkey Son: Cool! Thanks, Dad!
Monkey Mom: How’s our son doing?
Monkey Dad: He’s going to be OK, Paula. He’s going to be OK.

Anyway, I started thinking about it because of the bombing in Pakistan and the recent treatment of religious groups in China.  These events and other less notable happenings occur every day, but isn’t it interesting that so many people have a warped, and certainly different interpretation of their religion? I hope I live to see the day where the majority of us look at the remaining, shrinking minority of pious people left, and say –won’t it be nice when their eyes open and they stop killing, persecuting, and condemning in the name of a myth.