Is There a God?

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I contend that we are both atheists. I just believe in one fewer god than you do. When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours.
~ Stephen F. Roberts (born: 1967 age: 42)

Christians have a special word for people who don’t believe in Jesus, “ atheists” or sometimes “pagans”. Muslims have a special word for people who don’t believe in Allah, “infidels”. Jews have a special word for those who don’t believe in Jahweh, “gentiles”. Every religion has a word for deniers of the faith. To describe me then you need a giant list, atheist, infidel, gentile, Zeus-denier… Those are your epithets for me, not mine. I almost never think to myself “I am an infidel” any more that I think to myself “I am a faggot”. That is some bigot’s term for me. I simply reject all the 10,000 religions, not just 9,999 of them as you do. We are in 99.99% agreement on the bogosity of the world’s religions. It is just that I don’t see yours as any more plausible than all the rest.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)

General ideas, especially moral ones, impressed on us at an early age, often become deeply embedded in your brains. It can be very difficult to change them. This may help to explain why religious beliefs persist from generation to generation. But how did ideas originate in the first place? And why do they so often turn out to be incorrect? The very nature of our brains evolved to guess the most plausible interpretation of the limited evidence available makes it almost inevitable that without the discipline of scientific research we shall often jump to the wrong conclusions especially about rather abstract matters.
~ Francis Crick (born: 1916-06-08 died: 2004-07-28 at age: 88), co-discoverer of the structure of DNA.

But we all recognise the primary foible of frail humanity — our propensity for embracing hope and shunning logic, our tendency to believe what we desire rather than what we observe.
~ Dr. Stephen Jay Gould (born: 1941-09-10 died: 2002-05-02 at age: 60), Rocks of Ages

Religion: a set of beliefs, unsupported by facts, that are obviously false, fanciful and absurd to everyone but those who have been immersed in them from birth.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)

Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by the rulers as useful.
~ Lucius Annaeus Seneca (born: 4 BC died: 65 AD at age: 68)

Are you afraid of death? You have already “experienced” being dead for billions of years. It is exactly the same as before you were conceived. If you are afraid, it because you tremble before the monster god under the bed that somebody made up to scare you to control or con you out of your money. The religionists, like drug pushers, offer even more of this poisonous belief to cure your fear of death. It is not the cure; it is the cause!
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)

Introduction

1. Is there a God? a creator of the universe, even perhaps completely different from the descriptions in any holy book.
2. If so, is He anything like the descriptions in Christian or Islamic scripture?

What do I mean my the term God?

The word God has become empty of meaning through thousands of years of misuse. I use it sometimes, but I so sparingly. By misuse I mean that people who have never even glimpsed the realm of the sacred, the infinite vastness behind that word, use it with great conviction as if they knew what they were talking about. Or, they argue against it, as if they knew what it is that they are denying.
~ Eckhart Tolle (born: 1948-02-16 age: 61) The Power Of Now

What I primarily mean in this essay by God is:

• a conscious designer of the universe.
• The judge and punisher. The creator of after death torment.

Arguments For The Existence of God

1. The most convincing evidence I have found lies in the fundamental universal physical constants. If the charge on the electron had been different by an almost infinitesimally small amount, the universe would never have developed the structure it did. The expansion and contraction forces of the universe are almost precisely balanced. You could imagine some intelligence calculating the various fundamental constants of the universe to find a set that would create an interesting universe. An alternate explanation is that we just fluked out. There are/were other worlds with the constants set differently, but they just generated boring masses of goo, and intelligent life did not develop in them. Because these worlds would have to be totally isolated from ours, mathematicians dismiss their existence as irrelevant. Physicist Stephen Hawking said that it may also turn out, that for some mathematical reason, the charge on the electron was compelled to be the precise value it was. It was not an arbitrary choice, in which case invoking God to set it would be unnecessary.

   Ree’s Six Universal Constants Essential To Life
   Symbol	What it Measures	Comments
   	force that binds atomic nuclei together.	The difficulties if it were too weak are pretty obvious, but I do not know how it being a little stronger would have affected the universe.
   	binding strength of forces that hold atoms together divided by gravitational attraction.	If gravity were not much much weaker than the other forces, only short-lived miniature universes could exist.
   	density of matter in the universe.	If it were larger, the universe would have collapsed long ago. If it were smaller, no galaxies and stars could have formed.
   	the strength of the cosmic antigravity that controls the expansion of the universe.	If it were stronger, no stars could have formed.
   	the size of the ripples in the expanding universe.	If it were smaller, the universe would be a mass of cold gas. If it were larger, great gobs of matter would have collapsed into black holes.
   	the number of dimensions in our spacial universe, i.e. 3.	If this were different, our universe would be very different from the one we are familiar with, but I see no reason it could not support life or something else equally interesting. This same argument applies in a lesser degree to the other constants.

2. The laws of the physical universe are simple, elegant and beautiful. The Spartan simplicity of quantum mechanics leads inevitably to the periodic table of elements and from there to chemistry and biology. It can be considered a masterful piece of mathematics/art. We are used to viewing the universe at a macroscopic level where it is very untidy. To discover this underlying order astounds us. We imagine that tidiness could not possibly be an inherent property of existence, and postulate a designer. I wonder if somewhere there are a race of microscopic beings, discovering the macroscopic untidiness of the universe for the first time, and deciding the universe needs a designer to possibly explain this mysterious chaos, so unlike the natural ordered microscopic universe they are used to.
3. People have near death experiences. They report meeting the dead and a variety of religious figures consistent with their religious expectations, and generally experiencing love and bliss. Surely this is a foretaste of life after death. We have discovered you can also create these experiences by starving the brain of oxygen using a centrifuge. Various drugs such as nitrous oxide, cocaine and heroin also stimulate ecstatic states. These experiences are part of dying, not of life after death. I have gone under anaesthesia several times. I just disappeared. I watched myself fade away. I have no problem with the notion that when I die I have no consciousness at all since I have already experienced total lack of consciousness while alive. On the planet earth, billions of animals die every day and billions of tons of vegetable matter dies. What are some possibilities?
   1. Consciousnesses are recycled at the soul level and reincarnate.
   2. Consciousness hang around at the soul level for a while before allowing themselves to be decomposed and recycled in a process analogous to leaves rotting.
   3. Consciousness just stops and disappears.
   4. Consciousness is broken down and reused.
   5. Consciousness is protected for eternity from further change living happily ever after in heaven or in hell in eternal torment.
4. Jesus could heal people and Jesus said there was a God. Unfortunately Christian con artists like Peter Popoff and Ernest Angley in our day have convinced people God healed through them. Does this make their pronouncements infallible? We don’t even know for sure if Jesus was as actual person. There were no written records about him created until 130 years after his death. God could easily have provided more solid evidence for His existence for us to examine in this day, but for some reason He elected not to.
5. On the 100 Huntley Street TV show, people come on daily and tell a story how "God told them" to do such and such a thing. It turns out what they meant is they heard a quiet voice inside that urged them to action. They are so puffed with pride they imagine their own internal voices are the Creator of the Universe taking time out to give them special guidance. They ignore John 5:37 which claims God does not talk to people. Oddly, not once did one of these voices reveal the chemical formula for a cure for cancer. Oddly, this same quiet voice counsels others to murder, such as the demented Abraham.

6. What makes fantastic declarations believable is, in part, the vehemence with which they’re proffered. Again, in the world of spirituality as well as of pop psychology, intensity of personal belief is evidence of truth. It is considered very bad form — even abuse — to challenge the veracity of any personal testimony that might be offered in a twelve-step group or on a talk show, unless the testimony itself is equivocal… Whatever sells, whatever many people believe strongly, must be true.
   ~ Wendy Kaminer (born: 1950 age: 59)

   Some people just know in their bones that God exists. They can’t imagine life without that comfort. Obviously, a belief in God is comforting. Your enemies will eventually be punished, you will eventually be exonerated, your pain will eventually be replaced with joy and you will be reunited with those you love who have died. Quite a package! Yet what has comfort to do with truth? The truth often hurts. People who have been conned often refuse to recognize the signs of betrayal simply because they want so badly for the con to be true. Wishful thinking clouds the mind. Just what evidence is there that any of this Christian mumbo jumbo is true? The only "evidence" is repeated assertion. Repeated assertion when a child is very young creates rock-like faith in any arrant nonsense. Just look at the children of cult members. We don’t recognise this as a con even though the believer hands over money and unquestioning obedience to another in the promise of a reward which, so far as we can tell, is never delivered.

   I am satisfied, and sufficiently occupied with the things which are, without tormenting or troubling myself about those which may indeed be, but of which I have no evidence.
   ~ Thomas Jefferson (born: 1743-04-13 died: 1826-07-04 at age: 83), in a letter to John Adams, 1820-08-15

7. Father George Coyne, the former Vatican astronomer, defines God as the Prime Mover. He argues that nothing moves unless someone moves it. That means there must have been someone who moved that mover, all the way back to the Prime Mover who started it all. But this is obviously nonsense. Rivers flow all by themselves without anyone frantically paddling the water. Further, an astronomer such as Father Coyne surely knows that his argument presumes a very naive view of time, that ignores what Einstein learned, and ignores the discovery that time itself has a beginning. In other words, he is fully aware his argument is scientifically bogus, but presents it anyway hoping it will convince the naive.

   Using a slightly more sophisticated Newtonian view of his logic, you might imagine inanimate objects move either because they were already moving or because something bumped into them. I would expect a lay person should have no difficulty at all with the Hindu view that this moving process has been going on indefinitely into the past. If it going for 5 billion years does not bother you, then surely it could go for 5 billion years and one day without needing a magic jump-start.

   Postulating that previous to some point, nothing existed, then shazam, the entire universe appeared fully formed, all moving in complex patterns, as if it had just woken from a dream, strikes me as too bizarre for words. Why would god do nothing for that infinite time prior to the creation? Surely the fact of the universe is mind-boggling enough without making up even more mind-boggling god-based creation myths for which there is no evidence.

   Father Coyne is fully aware of the mathematics and astronomical observation that can look back in time to see the birth of the universe, because light travels so slowly, and because the universe is expanding, some of the light that left at time of the creation is just arriving on earth now. Scientists, including Father Coyne, know how this moving process started and evolved in considerable detail. However, he continues to try to bamboozle others with his Prime Mover argument for motives that must remain a mystery.

8. In times of trouble, some people talk to God, some to themselves, some to their pets. They would feel exceedingly lost and alone without that habit. However, this is not evidence for the existence in God, just in the comfort that comes from pretending there is. This may be the main power the god delusion has for people. They feel unsafe without pretending their is a powerful figure looking out for them in tough times. This is god as an invisible teddy bear for adults. A teddy bear is a comforter, not a protector. Instead of talking to god, try talking to yourself, telling yourself reassuring and encouraging messages. This will get you a lot further than passively waiting for God to rescue you.
9. That gut feeling there has to be a God is just a measure of the depth of your existential pain. Do something practical to reduce that pain:
   • Meditate.
   • Read self help books.
   • Get counselling.
   • Learn how to reduce you addictive load using the Keyes techniques.
   • Start your plan to save the world.
10. Many people, myself included, have had OOBEs Out Of Body Experiences. This suggests life may be possible without a body. Mind you, eveyone who has ever reported an OOBE had a living brain at the time, even if it were so quiet that it appeared dead. In my experiments with dreaming, I have discovered that dreams can be equally vivid in detail as real life. Most OOBEs can be considered like dreams or hallucinations that weave information gleaned from various sources. My brain is perfectly capable of computing what my eyes would see from the rafters of a theater, where I was floating in my own OOBE. Yet some OOBEs glean information by inexplicable means. Buddhist reincarnationist theology is just as compatible with OOBEs as Christian. Questions on ESP and OOBEs could be settled either way, quite independent of the truth of Christian theology or the existence of God.
11. People who are seriously ill sometimes spontaneously recover. Whenever this happens, God is usually given credit for special intervention. Nobody asks why God let all the others die with similar diseases many of whom appeared to be even more deserving. It is a bit like giving God credit when someone wins the lottery, rather than as the natural outcome of the laws of probability. If the odds are 1 in 1000 of surviving, there will be natural survivors from time to time. If there were not, it would be cause for note.
12. People who believe in God have lower blood pressure and they live longer. Some have argued that man’s brain is wired to believe in God — any God. This may well be true, but if anything it just shows we humans are so biased we cannot study the problem objectively. Scientists have even found a God spot in the brain, that when stimulated creates feelings of religious ecstasy and the presence of God, using whatever religious symbolism the subject is familiar with. Bertrand Russell pointed out that the Muggletonians (Flat Earth Society members) are among the happiest people on earth. Their happiness however, has nothing whatsoever to do with the accuracy of their beliefs.

    The fact that a believer is happier than a skeptic is no more to the point than the fact that a drunken man is happier than a sober one.
    ~ George Bernard Shaw (born: 1856-07-26 died: 1950-11-02 at age: 94)

13. Jesus said there is a god named Jehovah. Jesus healed people; therefore everything he says must be true, goes the logic. However, Jesus himself said that people healed themselves through faith. Ernest Angley heals people on TV by the power of faith; therefore everything Mr. Angley says must be true. Really?
14. Mohammed said there is but one god and his name is Allah. Mohammed was the greatest Arabic poet of all time; therefore everything he says must be true, goes the logic. Shakespear was the greatest English language poet; therefore everything Shakespear says must be true. Really?
15. The Bible reports various spectacular divine interventions, such as the parting of the Red Sea, and Lot’s wife being turned into a pillar of salt. However, for some reason God does not act like that anymore. The authorship of these tales is not established. Further, these stories had long periods of oral transmission, in which they would be embellished. It sounds to me like they are apocryphal.
16. Monks who fast, pray and meditate for very long hours report states of extreme bliss, deep peace or profound clarity. Some consider this consciousness of God. Obviously, something happens that the monk finds astounding.
17. Sondra Ray. Hanging out with this woman is like entering an alternate reality.
18. Ken Keyes.
19. The incredible life of Captain Paul Watson, head of the Sea Shepherd Society, who scoffs at religions, but who lives a life more charmed than a Star Trek character. He miraculously escapes from predicament after hopeless predicament. He hints that perhaps it is the whales warping the probabilities in his favour.
20. Co-incidences. I have had one in a billion coincidences in my life. One possible explanation is that they are orchestrated by God. I tend to think the explanation will be more mundane, but still astounding. I suspect we humans have some way of warping reality that unconsciously creates these mind-blowing co-incidences. It may be a form of ESP or perhaps some quantum effect. New agers have recently been making reference to the Quantum Field as a new name for God.
21. The argument that Wayne Dyer finds most convincing is the explosion in a print shop. To him looking around at the universe of living things interacting in such complex ways without conscious design is like expecting an explosion in a print shop to spell out the works of Shakespear. How could this possibly happen by pure chance? His is a fallacious argument based on a misunderstanding of the theory of evolution and natural selection. Natural selection is not pure chance. Only the mutations are pure chance. Natural selection is intelligent, though not very intelligent, with roughly an IQ of only 1, but when you let it refine and refine its designs over 4 billions years of winnowing out those that don’t work and keeping the best, it can come up with some pretty amazing stuff. If you study the fossil record, it is dithering, inept and meandering, with no hint of foresight or planning. Animals and plants work, but they are far from elegantly designed. Scientists use genetic algorithms to simulate this mindless, but powerful, winnowing process in computers for solving difficult mathematical problems. Imagine asking your child to create 100,000 paintings and then having a panel of the world’s greatest artists select the best one. Your child, judged solely on that winnowed painting, would look like an artistic genius.
22. Long before Darwin, philosopher David Hume pointed out the inconsistency in the God-must-exist-because-man-superficially-looks-designed argument. God is much more complicated than man, so where did God come from? If man is too complicated to accept coming into being without a designer, surely God requires a designer even more. Conversely, if you can accept something as complicated as God existing without a designer, surely something as simple as humanity does not need one either.
23. When you study the evolution of life, you discover all kinds of mistakes, ugliness and ham-fisted bungling. This is not the work of an intelligent infinitely careful designer. Evolution proceeds by making do with what already exists without any planning. If God is in charge of the details of this process, he exhibits an IQ less than 1. That is quite insulting to God. There is no more need for a god to direct evolution than to conduct the trajectory of every raindrop. It all works on automatic.
24. The bible is the account we have of biblical times. It has been revered a long time. Therefore it must be 100% true. Yet we have tens of thousands of times more evidence for the miracles of the living Sai Baba and he does not even get an honourable mention. Every night TV evangelists “heal” people (who were not sick in the first place) using the same con-man tricks that have been used by shamans since the beginning of time, and only a few of us are suckered in. We have tens of thousands of times more evidence for visitors from outer space, yet most of us remain highly skeptical. The gospels were not even written until Jesus had been dead for decades. The only reason people are so willing to presume the bible is perfectly true, with no corroboration, is they have been told since birth it is the word of god, and they have not actually read it cover to cover. All you have to do is read the bible cover to cover to discover it is false (e.g. the earth is flat), silly, erroneous, vicious and no possible basis for a cooperative society. Under Jehovah’s command, his followers commit genocide and pretty well every other conceivable crime. You would be utterly astounded at the goofiness in there. It advocates owning slaves and beating them, for heaven sake. What sort of moral guidance is that? It advocates treating women much as they are treated in modern day Afghanistan, e.g. stoning them to death for not being virgins on their wedding night. I have debated with Jehovah’s Witnesses who put OJ’s lawyers to shame in their fancy footwork to excuse the bible’s errors, inconsistencies and outright insanity. The work of the creator of the universe should surely be much higher quality than that. It should be divinely clear, beautiful and perfect. It should not require lawyerly defence. It should be better written than any human could compose. But it isn’t, far from it. You want proof? Open a page at random and read any unfamiliar passage.
25. It is necessary for god to exist and for punishment after death or else people would run amok. This argument has nothing to do with the existence of god. It is an argument for lying that he exists when he does not. The atheistic Swedes, Norwegians and Danes behave much better than the Christian nations such as the USA. They have less violence and are more generous to each other and to the third world. It seems holding up a violent, cruel, selfish, intolerant, vain god as a role model creates violent, cruel, selfish, intolerant, vain people. There is thus no point in lying.

    What harm would it do, if a man told a good strong lie for the sake of the good and for the Christian church… a lie out of necessity, a useful lie, a helpful lie, such lies would not be against God, he would accept them.
    ~ Martin Luther (born: 1483-11-10 died: 1546-02-18 at age: 62)

    If you watch Nanny 9/11 you will discover parents who threaten their children with grievous bodily harm raise little monsters. The children beat and punch their siblings, using the same tactics god suppedly uses on them. That sort of violent threat has the exact opposite effect of that desired.
26. One of the silliest arguments I have heard came from a TV Evangelist on the Armor of God Show. He was discussing the rapture, a nutty belief that people will float into the air to do lunch with Jesus. He was chastising people for believing mere books written on the subject. Just what does he think the bible is? It is just a book too, of uncertain human authorship, reputedly written long after the alleged events based on second hand accounts. It does not even claim to be God’s handiwork like Moses’s lost tablets. The bible has been proven wrong on almost every point that can be checked. There was no 40 years in the desert. There was no King David. There was no call to taxation in Bethlehem. Why has this book of myths any credibility left at all, other than as metaphor?

Arguments Against the Existence of God

1. Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe has not been hit by lightning. He is possibly the most evil man to ever walk the planet.
2. The Norse took Wotan seriously, the Romans worshipped Jupiter and killed those who failed to show sufficient respect. How is it that every society’s ideas of God but our own are preposterous? What a strange co-incidence! I explored the Roman ruins an Bath England. In particular, when I saw a bronze mask of Minerva Sulis, I felt an even greater sense of dignity and religious awe than I felt in the nearby Christian Cathedrals. I was quite convinced these ancient peoples took these Gods even more seriously than we take the Christian god today.

   Nearly 300 years after the Age of Reason was prematurely announced, most people, in most nations, most of the time, are mentally in total bondage to religious leader who operate on sheer bluff, i.e. on the basis of claims that cannot be proven and appear clearly insane to everybody who hasn’t been raised within their frameworks.
   ~ Robert Anton Wilson (born: 1932-01-18 died: 2007-01-11 at age: 74)

3. An A&E special on Scientology asked "Is Scientology a legitimate religion?" I find the question absurd. No religion is legitimate! All religions depend on belief in some unsubstantiated silly story. All use that story to take power over others to convince them to behave a certain way. (Granted, in many cases this way is more moral than the people would have naturally chosen, but it is all still based on a lie.) All use that story to convince others to give money to some special priest class in return for special favour from the deity. The story is obviously preposterous to everyone but those who belong to that particular cult/religion. There is no essential difference between a cult and a religion other than vintage and popularity. We put up with the most blatant of con games the instant the con men throw in bit of religious hocus pocus into the mix. The con men may even seriously believe their own malarkey. That is why they are so convincing.
4. Had Joseph Smith, the founder of Mormonism, tried to pass off his cock and bull story today, he would be diagnosed with schizophrenia or dismissed as a charlatan. His followers are considered sane even though they believe the same delusions. They enjoy this status simply because there are so many of them. All religions are based on stories just as outlandish. They don’t seem so to the believers because of familiarity.
5. Various scriptures of the world were purportedly written by God. If anyone should know how the universe is constructed, it should be God. How come then these scriptures show no understanding of medicine, chemistry or even basic physics? However, this does not show there is no God, only that God did not write the scripture.
6. Some people are astounded at the complexity of the universe and thus insist it must not have been self creating. They imagine that postulating a God simplifies things. It just muddies them further. You now have an even more mysterious, sourceless God plus a complicated universe. An astounding universe by itself is quite sufficiently amazing to swallow all on its own. It is intellectual laziness to claim whatever you don’t know is unknowable. Hiding the mystery of the universe behind an unknowable God is like sweeping dirt under the rug that you are too lazy to deal with. Why is an amazing invisible God more palatable than an amazing visible/invisible universe? The universe is by definition e v e r y  t h i n g, so surely that should include God — the creator of the universe (whatever/whoever that is). So by definition, the universe is self-creating. Q.E.D.

7. futilty of prayer

   Christians often go their whole lives without doubting the childhood stories of Santa Claus or his older brother Jesus, despite ample empirical evidence that praying for a pony does not work.
   ~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)

   From a practical point of view, what people are really interested in when they talk about the existence of God, is can He be persuaded to bend the normal rules of the universe to provide special beneficence for ourselves and special punishment for our enemies. Despite all the wild claims to the contrary, there is no statistical evidence that God plays any favourites. He rains on the just and unjust equally. Christians die in plane crashes the same as anyone else. Little boys with cancer die whether the congregation prays or not. He pays absolutely no attention to prayers. Whether you pray or not, both unexpected good and bad things happen to people. Prayer may give people courage to do what needs to be done. It may encourage others to help. However, it won’t bend God’s ear. That is the Big Lie that churches have repeated so often that most people believe it.

   Praying is like a rocking chair — it’ll give you something to do, but it won’t get you anywhere.
   ~ Gypsy Rose Lee (born: 1911-01-08 died: 1970-04-26 at age: 59)

   Two hands working can do more than a thousand clasped in prayer.
   ~ Anonymous

   Here are two exceptions:
   1. When an alcoholic prays for deliverance, by submitting to any "higher power" the prayer sometimes changes him.
   2. Quantum Miracles.
   (1) may be a special case of (2).
8. Keep in mind that if you pray and a Good Thing™ happens, that is not evidence that God answered your prayer. If you put a cherry pit up your nose and a Good Thing™ happened, that is not evidence putting the cherry pit you your nose in any way caused the Good Thing™ to happen. If you put a cherry pit up your nose four times a day and nice things continue to happen to you, it is still no evidence. You must keep track of all the nice and bad things that happen, and when and when you do not put a cherry pit up your nose, and look for correlations. Further, you must get hundreds of other people to keep track as well before you can scientifically claim cherry pits/prayer works. Much as we would like it to, prayer does not pass this test any better than poking a cherry pit up your nose. Though we have had thousands of years to accumulate such evidence, we still don’t have anything but anecdotes of the occasional fluke success.
9. Gautama Buddha observed the first noble truth, all is suffering. Why would a kind loving god create a universe where all its inhabitants continuously suffer? Even birth implies old age and decay. Our lives begin in screaming agony.
10. Prayer simply does not work. Consider how many millions of people prayed desperately for President Kennedy, Lady Diana and Mother Theresa. Nothing out the ordinary happened at all. If prayer had power, well known public figures would all live forever in perfect health and happiness. God either has a heart of stone or simply does not or cannot make exceptions.
11. God is supposedly unchanging, however, He has not done anything to show himself for two thousand years. He sat on His thumbs through two world wars and atrocities in Germany, Viet Nam, Uganda, Cambodia, Kosovo, 9/11, Afghanistan, Iraq… Where did He go? It makes you wonder if those stories handed down from years past where God actively intervened in human history were fables, not actual accounts. Sadly, God must live in the hearts of the people or there can be no Quantum Miracles.
12. Women who win music awards invariably thank God for their trophies. Similarly football players give credit to God when their team wins. I find this blasphemous, as if God were so petty as to take sides in such unimportant contests.
13. Despite the condemnation of armed conflict in most of the world’s scripture, leaders of armies confidently proclaim that the Almighty has taken their side, and therefore they cannot lose. Even in the case of Adolf Hitler, God made not even a token appearance nor made any overt attempt to protect the devout from the Nazis. If God refuses to ever act, for all practical purposes, He does not exist. Napoléon observed that God always seemed to be on the side of the biggest army, hardly a ringing endorsement of His moral character.
14. Buddhists and Hindus claim that after death, instead of resting for eternity in an excruciatingly dull heaven or hell, you reincarnate back on earth. There are many stories of young children reporting details of their former lives, and often these check out with reality. The children mysteriously know intimate details of lives of people who have died. The 14th Dalai Lama’s web page describes the process by which he was selected as the reincarnation of the previous Dalai Lama. There is no similar evidence to back up the Christian theology. I have a friend who went to a renaissance town in Italy and had a very strong feeling of deja vu. He recalled events that occurred in the town hundreds of years ago, and was able to check some of them out, such as the location of his favourite pub which was still standing but had been converted to some other use. Buddhists claim that if you meditate and release your attachments sufficiently, you will be able to recall details of your previous lives, just as did the Buddha at his enlightenment under the Bodhi tree. Christian theology is so constructed no conceivable test could check if it were true. Usually in science we automatically discard any such untestable theories as bogus. Only those that could potentially be disproved are considered potentially legit.
15. The best behaved political/religious leader on the planet is the Dalai Lama. He makes no claims about the existence of a God. If you are supposed to judge a tree by its fruit, Christianity does not rank very well. Christians carve Christians in Ireland. Christians and Muslims kill each other in Indonesia, Afghanistan and Iraq. Racism and sexism flourish under the banner of Christianity in the USA.
16. The Gödel argument argument probably won’t be very convincing to Christians, but it may alleviate some deep seated doubts in non-believers. The universe seems so incredibly complex. Surely some intelligence must have designed it, then created it, argue the theists. Not necessarily. There is a mathematical theorem called the Gödel incompleteness theorem that very roughly says a tiny part of a system can’t possibly understand the whole. Analogously, man is such a tiny tiny fraction of the universe that it is preposterous to imagine his relatively nanoscopic brain could glimpse but even a inkling of the totality or the inate intelligence of the totality. So naturally the universe seems incredible and miraculous to him. The universe necessarily appears that way because we humans are such a tiny tiny part of it. It appears that way because we compare the entire universe with our own mundane little limited existences. We don’t have an absolute yardstick for how wonderful our universe is. We have only have one to admire. If there are parallel universes, perhaps ours may turn out to be comparatively shabby, obviously lacking the ultra-intelligent design of the usual universe, (where all the women are beautiful, all the men are strong and all the children are above average) proving a true God had nothing to do with ours.

17. I can understand ignorant people believing in a god, but certainly not a loving caring god.
    ~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)

    People tell me they could not bear it if there were no God. I think this is rubbish. If there is a God, he is clearly a rather cruel or uncaring or ineffective bastard. There is not much hope. God made things the way they are. He must want them that way despite his protestations. How can things change with a great lunk like that in charge? There is no hope. So it is less pessimistic to assume their is no one in charge. It means things could get better. You are merely fighting chaos, not a deity, to improve man’s lot. For the atheist, knowing you definitely won’t be tortured for eternity after death for minor infractions of holy rules is extremely reassuring. I don’t know why Christian choose to dangle this sword of Damocles over their entire lives, and lie to themselves this obnoxious bastard is a great comfort.

    The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous, proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.
    ~ Dr. Richard Dawkins (born: 1941-03-26 age: 68), The God Delusion chapter 2

Holy Blackmail

Humans are such cowards that they willingly allow themselves to be conned by those claiming death is not real and claiming to know the precise details of how the afterlife works.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)

Let’s assume that it is very unlikely that God exists, say 1%. You should still believe in Him anyway and follow Christian dogma for purely practical reasons. There are four cases:

1. If you believe in Him and He does not exist, what do you lose? You just die and nothing happens.
2. If you believe in Him and He does exist, you have eternity in Heaven.
3. If you don’t believe in Him and He does not exist, you just die and nothing happens.
4. If you don’t believe in Him and He does exist, you will rot in Hell for eternity.

I counter this argument by saying:

1. I am interested in the truth, not toadying to some imaginary despot. This argument is roughly the moral equivalent of a scientist falsifying his findings in hopes of receiving a bribe from a tobacco company. It is intellectual dishonesty.

   He who begins by loving Christianity better than truth, will proceed by loving his own sect or church better than Christianity, and end in loving himself better than all.
   ~ Samuel Taylor Coleridge (born: 1772 died: 1834 at age: 62) poet in his Aids To Reflection

2. If the following argument persuades you, then you should become a Muslim. Islam offers far greater after death rewards to the faithful and far more terrifying tortures for the non-believer than Christianity does. Jehovah is a wimp compared with Allah. Read the Qur’an if you are skeptical. I did and had nightmares for months.

3. Why should I fear death? If I am, death is not. If death is, I am not. Why should I fear that which cannot exist when I do?
   ~ Epicurus (born: 341 BC died: 270 BC at age: 71) Greek philosopher.

4. Every religion offers punishments and rewards to its rejectors and adherents, including the worship of Wotan and Zeus and the religions of the Indians of the Amazon. How do you decide which is the true religion? They all sound equally improbable, bogus and silly.

5. Faith is believing what you know isn’t so.
   ~ Mark Twain (born: 1835-11-30 died: 1910-04-21 at age: 74)

   If you follow the tenets of Christianity as it is practiced you would probably lead a more evil life than you would otherwise. You would be judgemental. You would discriminate against gays and probably blacks. You would lie to people about the best ways to cure disease. You would spread superstition and lies that are part of the Christian faith. You would indirectly kill children by blocking sex education about AIDS and birth control. For a more detailed list of the evils of Christianity, see the essay on why Christianity should be combatted. As an extreme example, Jeff Dahmer said grace before consuming his murder victims.
6. If you believe in God, you life will actually be more miserable than if you do not. Why? If you believe in God, you will tend to mope around praying — wondering why God is ignoring you. You will waste time waiting for God to do things only you can do for yourself. If you don’t believe in God, you will be much more practical and self reliant. You won’t be saddled with an unrealistic sense of entitlement. You cannot very well be angry with God for disappointing you if you don’t believe in Him. You don’t project unrealistic expectations on the universe that it was created for your convenience. You take it as it is. Holding unrealistically high expections is a major cause of suffering.

Preferences

We long to situate ourselves on a benevolent, warm, furry, encompassing planet, created to provide our material needs, and constructed for our dominion and delectation. Unfortunately, this pipedream of succor from the realm of meaning (and therefore the magisterium of religion), imposes definite and unrealistic demands upon the factual construction of nature (under the magisterium of science). But nature, who is as she is, and who existed in earthly form for 4.5 billion years before we arrived to impose our interpretations upon her, greets us with sublime indifference and no preference for accommodating our yearnings.
~ Dr. Stephen Jay Gould (born: 1941-09-10 died: 2002-05-02 at age: 60), Rocks of Ages

In Isaiah 45:7 God admits he creates the evil in the world. God then gave your father a brain tumor, fanned the hatred that boiled over into a gang rape of an eight year old Albanian girl, etc. If this is true, you are dealing with an immensely powerful, evil, cruel, heartless, arbitrary adversary. What hope do you have? In the story of Job, it is clear God does not even spare the just from his sadistic torments.

Would you not prefer to deal instead with nature? These negative happenings are essentially random events, but with some pattern behind them. There are laws physical or psychological. Eventually they may be understood and the evils averted. I certainly would prefer to deal with nature than a quixotic, slippery, tyrant God.

What Is God Like?

Beware the man of one book.
~ St. Thomas Aquinas (born: 1225 died: 1274-03-07 at age: 49)

The God of scripture is petty, cruel, jealous, inconsistent, prudish, partisan and foolish. He is fanatically concerned with controlling every thought and action of humans with a set of insanely arbitrary rules. He desperately wants to be loved. He is willing to bribe his subjects with unimaginable largess or torment after death, but refuses to offer even the tiniest foretaste to prove he is not bluffing. Earth and man are the center of His existence. He is oddly partial to the Jewish people at the expense of all others.

To me, that description sounds like a Roman Caesar — how a human behaves when given absolute power. The Old Testament was composed by people imagining what they thought God would say if He spoke. Unfortunately, they projected their failings onto Him. They described how they would behave if given absolute power. Power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely should not not apply to God, only to people.

In contrast, look at the universe. See the stupendous variety and stupendous quantity. Earth is just a tiny backwater planet on the edge of a backwater galaxy. There are trillions of stars and trillions of planets. Even on earth, the variety of animal and plant life is utterly amazing.

No prude created the sexually-daisy-chaining periwinkle.

The lust of the goat is the glory of God
~ William Blake (born: 1757 died: 1827-08-12 at age: 70)

If there is a creator, He is the consumate mathematician, physicist and biologist. He is not some narrow cleric afraid to look at the earth as it is.

The world is full of beauty and cruelty. Birds and fish are dazzling colours and patterns for no apparent reason other than exuberant beauty. The whole web of life is built on the principle that animals eat plants and kill and eat each other. This is the fundamental cruelty of our existence. A frog may have a million young, yet only two on average will survive to adulthood. This is true of all species, including humans. Does that seriously sound like the handiwork of an infinitely merciful deity?

God likes using small simple building blocks to construct a bewildering variety of forms. Consider atoms, DNA and cells, in particular brain cells.

If there is a God, He looks after the big picture. He has no more interest in individual humans than a child would have in the individual ants in his ant farm. He works with general principles and allows their consequences to work out logically.

God likes subtle asymmetry.

The bewildering intricate beauty of the Mandelbrot set springs forth from the simplest of mathematical equations. Even these lowly equations can help themselves from strutting like peacocks.

Life After Death

1. No god. no afterlife, (materialist)
2. No god, with afterlife (Buddhist)
3. God, no afterlife (hippy)
4. God, with afterlife (Christian, Muslim)

Arguments For Life After Death

• Almost every culture has some sort of life-after-death myth. The details of what actually happens vary considerably. There is usually some form of adjudication of how well you did in your life, and some form of punishment or reward. If the myth is so common, maybe there is something to it other than just wishful thinking.
• People who die on the operating table and are later revived report very similar stories about traveling down a tunnel toward a bright light, often meeting dead relatives, and often meeting some loving religious figure. These experiences can also be induced using a centrifuge to reduce the flow of blood to the brain. This may well just be the standard hallucination the brain kicks into when blood flow is reduced. It explains the origin of the belief in life after death. The extreme euphoria is caused by an excess of nitrous oxide, (a natural brain transmitter) in the brain. Yet people don’t just dream of tunnels, they dream specifically of death. If the after death experience is in some other dimension, people will inevitably map this unfamiliar experience back onto their ordinary world with its expectations, created by religious conditioning. If the cause were simply an oxygen-starved brain, I would expect much greater variety in the hallucinations. It also seems odd that people rarely have ordinary dreams of after-death experiences. In near death experiences, people often report rapidly reviewing their whole life, only with the ability to sense the emotions of others around them. It seems strange man would evolve to reserve this very useful review only for the last minutes of life.
• People have hellish near death experiences. People are typically reluctant to talk about them. I had an operation requiring general anaesthesia to remove an impacted wisdom tooth. I partially woke up in the middle of the operation. Several people had to be called in to restrain me and put me back under. From my point of view, I was in hell, falling endlessly through a gray fog in excruciating pain. I assumed I was dead and this was indeed hell. The experience was much more vivid than a dream. Ironically, fundamentalists (who in theory should have the least to fear from hellfire) have these experiences much more frequently than other people. Most people have entirely positive near death experiences. In the middle ages people typically reported a negative experience that transformed into a positive one.
• In Buddhist countries children reportedly remember their previous lives and the people in them. I don’t know the care to which the children are shielded from hearing stories of their supposed previous lives, or just how accurate the descriptions the children provide actually are. I saw one documentary where a child simply reached out to play with various objects belonging to a dead person, and the onlookers read a great deal into this.
• Anecdotal ghost stories. If even one ghost story is true, that would be evidence for some sort of existence after death.
• I have had an out of body experience, OOBE, as have many other people. It appears your consciousness is floating outside your body able to look down on it. This sounds very similar to what is supposed to happen to you after death. However, with an OOBE your brain is still functioning, so perhaps it is a hallucination where you project what the world would look like from up on the ceiling.
• Australian aborigines have a form of consciousness they call "dream time". From the little I can find out about it, it appears to be as different from ordinary consciousness as death.
• One day I was sitting under a tree at the University of BC. A group of Hare Krishna devotees were chanting nearby. A little girl from the group walked over and gave me a small bag of nuts. I experienced the event in a miraculous way. It was as if I were everything at once, not just confined to my limited body. Perhaps it is just an illusion that I am Roedy Green. In actuality I may be the whole ball of wax. As such, it seems unlikely I would disappear when Roedy Green’s body dies.
• In a very mundane sense, there is only one being living on planet earth. Consider the amoeba. They reproduce by splitting in two. If you look at any amoeba today it is billions of years old. You might in theory trace all the amoebae alive in the world today to a single ancestor. Thus in one sense there is only one amoeba, living in many bodies. If an amoeba dies, has the amoeba died? no. It is much like single blood cell in a human dying. If you follow back further you would probably find that other one celled animals all share a common ancestor with the amoeba too. There is only one "life" living in many bodies. Multicelled humans too are part of this single life tree. Our cells too grow only by splitting, but in more specialised ways, going through a minimalist stage periodically as sperm and egg cells. However, each of a human’s cells is similarly billions of years old, with an unbroken chain of cell divisions going all the way back through the generations of humanity. Oddly, even though the cells are billions of years old, the cells die within 100 years of birth, if they stay part of human’s body i.e. if they don’t leave it as sperm or as a completed baby. They have a built-in death count-down mechanism called telomeres. If there is only one life, living in many bodies in many forms, you, the primordial life, lives on even if your little human body dies.

Arguments Against Life After Death

• If a person sustains brain damage, his mental capacities are correspondingly impaired. If the mind were separate from the brain, it should remain undamaged. Similarly for the effects of diseases such as Alzheimer and schizophrenia. It thus appears if a brain is totally damaged, so is the corresponding mind. Thus it appears a mind (consciousness) dies when the corresponding brain dies. There is now evidence that consciousness is brain activity. You are only conscious of something once a certain threshold of neurons start firing.
• I have experienced anaesthesia several times in my life. I felt myself totally disappear. I awoke with the sensation no time had passed. It appeared my consciousness did not exist for the duration of the operation. Consciousness does not thus have to go somewhere when you die. It can just stop.
• Nobody can give reasonable explanation for how anyone would know if the after-death myth of their culture could be true. Usually some shaman figure (e.g. Buddha, Jesus, Mohammad) simply announces it is, and people take his word for it based on his reputation as a moral figure. He just knows by some mysterious process not available to ordinary humans.
• The after-death myths are very man-centred. I have a rough time imagining a God that did not value dolphins, whales and many other species as equally important to man.
• When the Spanish came to America, the indigenous peoples mistook them for Gods. If beings from other parts of the galaxy ever send their technology to earth, surely the technology gap would be even greater. We would mistake it for magic or acts of God. The universe is an unimaginably huge place. We have just begun to explore just one tiny solar system. If life could happen once, surely it would happen over and over. It is mind boggling to contemplate the possibility that there is other intelligent life in the cosmos, but even more mind boggling to contemplate the possibility there is not, and we are utterly alone and utterly unique.

• The misfortunes of human beings may be divided into two classes: First, those inflicted by the non-human environment and, second, those inflicted by other people. As mankind have progressed in knowledge and technique, the second class has become a continually increasing percentage of the total. In old times, famine, for example, was due to natural causes, and although people did their best to combat it, large numbers of them died of starvation. At the present moment large parts of the world are faced with the threat of famine, but although natural causes have contributed to the situation, the principal causes are human. For six years the civilized nations of the world devoted all their best energies to killing each other, and they find it difficult suddenly to switch over to keeping each other alive. Having destroyed harvests, dismantled agricultural machinery, and disorganized shipping, they find it no easy matter to relieve the shortage of crops in one place by means of a superabundance in another, as would easily be done if the economic system were in normal working order. As this illustration shows, it is now man that is man’s worst enemy. Nature, it is true, still sees to it that we are mortal, but with the progress in medicine it will become more and more common for people to live until they have had their fill of life. We are supposed to wish to live for ever and to look forward to the unending joys of heaven, of which, by miracle, the monotony will never grow stale. But in fact, if you question any candid person who is no longer young, he is very likely to tell you that, having tasted life in this world, he has no wish to begin again as a 'new boy' in another. For the future, therefore, it may be taken that much the most important evils that mankind have to consider are those which they inflict upon each other through stupidity or malevolence or both.
  ~ Bertrand Russell (born: 1872-05-18 died: 1970-02-02 at age: 97) Ideas That Have Harmed Mankind, from Unpopular Essays

  	recommend book⇒Unpopular Essays
  		paperback	hardcover
  	ISBN13:	978-0-415-11963-4	978-0-671-77600-8
  	publisher:	Routledge
  	published:	1996-10-11
  	by:	Bertrand Russell
  Common sense essays condening war and Christian superstition. Russell was a stuffy old Englishman, and he had so much fun with it.
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Omnipotence

Clearly toothaches, bad breath and fungus infections exist. How to explain that?

We presume that God created a Devil who then created these things. God gets off the hook by one level of indirection. That makes about as much sense as a Mafia don claiming innocence because he hired a hitman.

Perhaps it would be simpler to just say God created the best universe he could at the time. Perhaps it is impossible to create a logically consistent universe any better than this. This may be the best of all possible worlds.

We keep imagining the universe was created for the personal pleasure of man. We may well prove to be one of the least important species in the galaxy. From God’s point of view, we may well be a cancer on planet earth, destroying its carefully planned biological diversity, about as well-loved as rose blight.

The one thing we have discovered is the creation is logically consistent. Scripture is anything but. If there is a creator, the best way to understand Him is to study His creation.

Christians mean “Do you believe the Bible to be literally true?” when they ask “Do you believe in God?”. The questions are only loosely related. If a God did exist, there is almost no chance he would be anything like the one described in the bible.

Advantages of Believing in God

• You can console yourself when a loved one dies with the thought you will see them again.
• If it turns out my some fluke you picked the one true religion (if there indeed is one), and the one true sect within that religion, this gives you brownie points rewarding you in the afterlife for your acuity. You go to the head of the heavenly chow line. Lot’s of luck picking the right one from this list.
• It can give you hope in a hopeless situation, such as a fatal illness. God might set aside the usual rules of the universe or arrange some co-incidences to rescue you.
• It can give you fellowship.
• It can help you feel superior to others.
• It can erase doubt and let you stop thinking. You can relax. Others will spoon feed you all the answers to life’s problems. The answers might not make any sense, but you know they must be valid since they came direct from God.
• If you are addicted to drugs, it may help you become unaddicted.
• If you tend to spend much of your time worrying, it can train you to take your mind off your troubles and think more optimistically. Emmet Fox suggests that casting your troubles on God, then contemplating the nature of God instead will change your consciousness, and hence your reality will improve. This technique could work whether or not God actually exists.
• It gives you extra motivation to treat others well and to avoid criminal activity.
• It can let you fearlessly tackle dangerous activities. The worst that can happen is you will end up in heaven early.

Disadvantages of Believing in God

Believing in God is like believing in imaginary seat belts. It gives you a false sense of security.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)

• A delusion that encourages belief where there is no evidence is asking for trouble. Disagreements between incompatible beliefs cannot be settled by reasoned argument because reasoned argument is drummed out of those trained in religion from the cradle. Instead, disagreements are settled by other means which, in extreme cases, inevitably become violent. Scientists disagree among themselves but they never fight over their disagreements. They argue about evidence or go out and seek new evidence. Much the same is true of philosophers, historians and literary critics.
  ~ Dr. Richard Dawkins (born: 1941-03-26 age: 68), 2005-04-25, Salon

• You tend to sit twiddling your thumbs praying rather than doing something useful about a problem.
• You fall in the ditch or run out of money because you expect God to look out for you.
• You look like an idiot with your rigid illogical opinions to those studying how nature actually works.
• Other people will avoid you socially because of your utterly predictable endless babblings about God.
• You have to worry about eternal punishment. The Bible and Qur’an imply only a tiny fraction of people make the grade.
• It makes you an intolerant pain in the ass since you are under the delusion you are in exclusive possession of the word of God on every matter.
• You may kill your children (by refusing medical attention), ignore facts right under your nose, and justify all manner of wickedness (such as tormenting homosexuals) using your holy book for justification.
• Because your Bible is purportedly the word of God, you don’t worry if the advice it gives is inconsistent, illogical or wicked.
• You must play lawyer to defend your holy books which were written by men thousands of years ago. Of course they are not consistent with what we know now. You have to disingenuously twist words to pretend they do.
• You can’t use compassion and logic to determine you ethical choices. You must use rigid rules composed thousands of years ago when women were treated as slaves, it was considered proper to own slaves, and people believed disease was caused by unclean spirits.

How To Find God

	recommend book⇒Around The Year With Emmet Fox
		paperback	hardcover
	ISBN13:	978-0-06-250408-1	978-0-06-062870-3
	publisher:	HarperOne
	published:	1992-04-10
	by:	Emmet Fox
abe books.co.uk abe books.ca amazon.co.uk amazon.ca abe books.de chapters.indigo.ca amazon.de abe books.com abe books.fr amazon.com amazon.fr barnes and noble.com abe books.it powells.com iberlibro.com sony e-books abe books anz

• Forgive everyone including yourself.
• For a period of a month, every time you have a trouble, no matter how personal, embarrassing, unholy or trifling, instead of worrying about it, give the problem to God to deal with. Then spend the time you would have spent worrying contemplating God, e.g. unbounded power, unbounded intelligence, unbounded love, unbounded wisdom, perfect humour, omnipresence (Don’t you think it a bit rude of humanity to create garbage dumps, which God because of his omnipresence must inhabit.), joy, truth, spirit, principle etc. You are on a fast from negative thoughts.
• Here is the hard part. Have faith that God will actually take care of all these problems in a much more intelligent and pleasing way than you could ever come up with yourself. If you don’t have faith, you are at least supposed to act as if you did. This should suffice.
• Don’t dictate to God how to solve the problem. God may come up with some very indirect solution that you may not even recognise as a solution.
• Don’t look for results. They may come at the 13th hour.
• Don’t tell anyone during the month about your experiment. You can talk about it afterward.
• If it does not work, according to Fox, chances are you failed to be 100% unconditionally loving to everyone. Since no one can attain that perfection, there is always an excuse why this won’t work. It requires God’s reputed mercy to have any hope of working.

To me it would seem prudent to act normally during your experiment. Pay your bills. Look both ways before crossing the street. You don’t want to get yourself in too much trouble if God decides to ignore you for not having enough faith. On the other hand, you want to go at it seriously. After a failure, you will have even more evidence that God will ignore your pleas, and so it will be even harder to whip up the requisite faith for a second attempt.

I’d be interested in hearing from people who have performed this experiment. Tell me what happened and how you interpreted it.

I tried the experiment for the month of 2000-06. I spent three weeks taking ganciclovir IVs to clear up my nausea where nearly everything went wrong. At first, it looked like the treatment did not work. I met a strikingly handsome young guy who came over twice for massages. I worried less than usual, and it became clear that worry does little to improve most situations. There was nothing sufficiently out of the ordinary to require divine explanation. However, the following month something unusual did happen. A long standing friend asked if she could become my lover, and I accepted, even though she was of the "wrong " sex. Life has been unusually pleasant and eventful ever since.

How Can You Tell When You Have Found God?

I once heard the voice of God. It said "Vrrrrmmmmm." Unless it was just a lawn mower.
~ Age 11

Nearly everyone claims to have found God when they feel something inside intensely pleasant and very different from anything they have felt before. There are three problems relying totally on this approach.

1. When my friend Phil was a child he shinnied up a pole and had an orgasm. He assumed the pleasant sensations were caused by being "closer to God" near the top of the pole. We laugh at Phil, but grown people act just as foolishly.
2. These intense feelings can be created on cue. Preachers have been perfecting the techniques for centuries. In modern days there is a whole new arsenal of ways of fooling people into thinking they have truly found God. See Dick Sutphen’s article on how it is done.
3. People who rely on pleasant sensations for their spiritual barometer can find themselves bound to the gods of cocaine or heroin.

I think more reliable signs would be how you had changed for the better or how your life had turned around. These effects may take years to become apparent. Other people would probably tell you they thought your life was touched by God.

Alternate Definitions of God

• God as cosmic body guard: God protects you from harm and disease. Actually the top banana is not really necessary, a guardian angel or a friendly alien would suffice.
• God as cosmic Santa Claus: God is that which answers prayers. You can petition God to grant you exciting sexual partners, good health, material goods, and the esteem of your fellow man, all without effort. God could be considered as a sort of Star Trek replicator.
• God as sadistic Master: God gives you cancer or makes you lose your lover to teach you some mysterious spiritual lesson so you will grow. The curriculum is never explained.
• God as cosmic snake oil: God is good for whatever ails you. God is the solution to every problem. Just join my religion and you can have all the God you want, for a small monthly fee.
• God as cosmic teddy bear: God is a companion with you all the time. He says nothing, but he is a Good Listener.
• God as cosmic hit man: If anyone ever does you wrong, you can rest assured God will torment him for eternity in the afterlife. Unfortunately, we all have done somebody wrong, so we will all have to console ourselves as we are tortured knowing everyone else is being tormented too.
• I am God: This is not quite a whacko as is first sounds. Usually people mean by this there is some common spirit or consciousness that inhabits all humans that we experience as the sense of I amness.
• God as ideal lover: God looks absolutely fabulous, and for some reason he thinks you too look absolutely fabulous, even if you are overweight with bad breath.
• God as cosmic tripper: God sees everything as perfect. Even suffering is beautiful. Even a dead fish in a polluted river has a deep mysterious perfection. Even Microsoft Windows is perfect. God is completely out of touch with how the rest of us experience reality.
• God is Love: This definition has Biblical support.I John 4:8 He that loveth not knoweth not God; for God is love.
• God as the creator of the universe: Even atheists can believe in God with this sort of definition.
• God as the thing you most fear that won’t hurt you: That puts extra meaning into the no other gods before me clause.

Pascal’s Wager

And if there were a God, I think it very unlikely that He would have such an uneasy vanity as to be offended by those who doubt His existence.
~ Bertrand Russell (born: 1872-05-18 died: 1970-02-02 at age: 97)

1. If you don’t believe in God and you are wrong, after you die, you are in deep trouble.
2. If you believe in God and you are wrong, nothing too terrible will happen, other than the consequences of silly superstitious actions you may have engaged in as a result, e.g. wasted time praying, or failing to take appropriate action expecting God to bail you out.
3. If you don’t believe in God and you are right nothing special happens, other than living a fearless life.
4. If you believe in God and you are right, you hit the jackpot.

Calling Atheism a religion is like calling bald a hair color.
~ Don Hirschberg

The immense majority of intellectually eminent men disbelieve in the Christian religion, but they conceal the fact in public, because they are afraid of losing their incomes.
~ Bertrand Russell (born: 1872-05-18 died: 1970-02-02 at age: 97)

Pascal presumes you can’t settle the matter though reason. We now know far more about the question than did Pascal, and I think we know the probability of a God anything like the one in the Christian Bible is extremely remote. Almost nothing in the bible that can be tested has proved true. Further the consequences of believing in the bogus Christian God are far more serious than Pascal imagined. For example, if you trust in this Christian God, you are not capable of biology or geology. You will be a bigot. Think of how difficult life would be for a medieval peasant, believing in goblins, witches and devils teleported to modern day. Every nutty incorrect idea you hold hampers your ability to function.

Pascal also presumes God is terribly interested in whether you believe, not how you behave. A fair God would be far more concerned with your behaviour than your belief in some far fetched myth. What is so wicked about rejecting what appears to be false?

Bedford’s Wager

The Riddle of Epicurus
Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent.
Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent.
Is he both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil?
Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God?
~ Epicurus (born: 341 BC died: 270 BC at age: 71)

My friend Darwin Bedford, the atheist messiah, at atheists.net looks at it this way:

1. If you don’t believe in God and you are wrong, after you die, so long as you have lead a moral life you should have nothing to fear. A compassionate god would not punish you for guessing which religion had an exclusive handle on the truth.
2. If you believe in God and you are wrong, you will have done foolish things such as wasting time praying when you should have taken effective action. You will have lived your life as if it did not matter because you erroneously thought it was merely a trial, preparatory to your real life after death. You would have lived an overly safe conventional life, keeping your nose clean and avoiding all adventure. You would have let evil thrive, because you felt dealing with that was God’s responsibility, not yours. You would have done irrational things just because some hoary old book tricked you into it, like mistreating blacks or gays. You would have wasted much of your life in fear of the imaginary divine meat axe.
3. If you don’t believe in God and you are right, you live a zestful life. Every second counts. It is all you have got. You don’t fritter your time in ritualistic activities. You take responsibility for the planet. You make a difference. You made your decisions rationally, not based on fear of some lunatic bogeyman in the sky. You behave well not because you fear punishment, but because you know that such behaviour is globally and locally optimal, good for everyone and also for you. You are a blessing to the planet.
4. If you believe in God and you are right, you are more likely than not to be an insufferably smug hypocrite, looking down your nose at others and judging incessantly just as Jesus told you not to do. God judges your actions, not your beliefs. In Luke 13:25, Jesus warned you that mere praying would not get you into heaven; only good deeds would. You get punished doubly since you ought to have known better.

Suicide

Does It Matter?

Why Do People Believe in God?

From a biological point of view, there are lots of different theories about why we have this extraordinary predisposition to believe in supernatural things. One suggestion is that the child mind is, for very good Darwinian reasons, susceptible to infection the same way a computer is. In order to be useful, a computer has to be programmable, to obey whatever it’s told to do. That automatically makes it vulnerable to computer viruses, which are programs that say, “Spread me, copy me, pass me on.” Once a viral program gets started, there is nothing to stop it.

Similarly, the child brain is preprogrammed by natural selection to obey and believe what parents and other adults tell it. In general, it’s a good thing that child brains should be susceptible to being taught what to do and what to believe by adults. But this necessarily carries the down side that bad ideas, useless ideas, waste of time ideas like rain dances and other religious customs, will also be passed down the generations. The child brain is very susceptible to this kind of infection. And it also spreads sideways by cross infection when a charismatic preacher goes around infecting new minds that were previously uninfected.
~ Dr. Richard Dawkins (born: 1941-03-26 age: 68), 2005-04-25, Salon

Probability

Man is certainly stark mad; he cannot make a flea, and yet he will be making gods by dozens.
~ Michel Eyquem de Montaigne (born: 1533 died: 1592 at age: 59)

Believing would be easier if God would show himself by depositing a million dollars in a Swiss bank account in my name.
~ Woody Allen (born: 1935-12-01 age: 73)

Disproving the Existence of God

The old misconceptions that people mistook as evidence for the existence of God no longer hold. We have discovered the universe is quite capable of functioning without the constant tinkering of a deity. We have discovered even complex creatures like elephants arise by natural processes of chemistry and biology. They don’t require an intelligent designer. They came into being by a mindless laborious genetic process of trial and error carried out by busy little DNA molecules.

Why You Know There Is No God

I cannot believe God created parasites to torture small children.
~ Sir David Attenborough (born: 1926-05-08 age: 83)

• If you define god as the entity that answers prayer, you know there is no god, because every experiment to test the efficacy of prayer shows it has no effect.
• If you define god as the all knowing entity that wrote the bible, you know there is no god because the bible is full of error and inconsistency.
• If you define god as the entity that designed and created all the species, you know there is no god, because there is no evidence of design to the trained eye. Granted, there is an illusion of design to the layman. Animals evolved gradually in bungling hamfisted ways, with no foresight. Consider the painful way humans are born pushed through the female pelvis. Consider the panda’s inept thumb. Consider the human eye with the light sensitive cells on the wrong side of the retina. Consider the human eye with a blind spot right in the middle of the visual field. That is not intelligent design!
• If you define god as the entity that tortures people after death, recall you have no evidence anyone has ever been tortured after death. Some influential members of the priestly class merely asserted it was so, and convinced others by dramatics and repeated assertion. Taking somebody’s say so without any reason or evidence at all is a very weak argument for the existence of god. If you believe the tales that Allah will torture you after death, why are you ignoring the warnings that Kali and Jehovah will too?
• If you define god as Jehovah, consider there are 10,000+ other gods. Which god you worship depends mainly on where you were born, not on the attractiveness of the god. At most one of these 10,000+ gods could be correct since they all disagree and all claim other gods are false. There is nothing special about Jehovah. He is as likely as any other to be bogus. He started out as a purely local tribal god of the Jews. Any particular god has at best a 1 in 10,000 chance of being the true god.

Stephen F. Roberts’ Objection

I contend that we are both atheists. I just believe in one fewer god than you do. When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours.
~ Stephen F. Roberts (born: 1967 age: 42)

I dismiss Ganesh and Jehovah for the same reason: there is no evidence for either. Christians hold Jehovah in such high esteem, they think I must be kidding. They can’t conceive of me deciding Jehovah is preposterous with the same lack of angst that I decided Ganesh is preposterous. It is difficult only if you have been conned during infancy that Jehovah (or Ganesh) will get you if you are naughty.

[I was lucky. The BS I was fed was that elves were spying on me, and were I naughty, I would get a lump of coal in my stocking at Christmas. I scoured every hiding place in my house for elves and decided my mother was putting me on. Happily, my mother did not beat me for my refusal to believe her story.]

The main reason Christians believe their twaddle is they can’t escape the fear they just might be hideously punished for failing to do so. It has almost nothing to do with logical probability. It has to do with the severity of the punishment. The feared punishment is so hideous, it is not worth the risk no matter how unlikely. This primal fear of the bogey-man god is dressed up for philosophers as Pascal’s Wager.

Islam is thus even more entrapping than Christianity. It promises even more frightening punishments. I had nightmares for months after reading the Qur’an.

Those who reject
Our Signs, We shall soon
Cast into the Fire;
As often as their skins
Are roasted through,
We shall change them
For fresh skins,
That they may taste
The Penalty: for Allah
Is Exalted in Power: Wise.
~ The Qur’an (born: 610 AD age: 1399) Surah Al Nisa 4:56

Parting Thought

DVDs

	recommend DVD⇒The God Who Wasn’t There
	DVD
	by: Brian Flemming
This movie debunks Christianity by showing how all parts of the Jesus legend were borrowed from earlier religions, and that even the church fathers admitted that. It also shows how early Christian writers were not talking about a literal historical person. Finally it shows how the Bible is at odds in many crucial places with established history. See the TheGodMovie.com website for a variety of clips.
amazon.ca amazon.com chapters.indigo.ca powells.com amazon.fr barnesandnoble.com amazon.de amazon.co.uk

Books

	recommend book⇒The Secular Bible: Why Nonbelievers Must Take Religion Seriously
		paperback
	ISBN13:	978-0-521-61824-3
	publisher:	Cambridge University Press
	published:	2005-09-05
	by:	Jacques Berlinerblau
An introduction to biblical scholarship for nonbelievers.
abe books.co.uk abe books.ca amazon.co.uk amazon.ca abe books.de chapters.indigo.ca amazon.de abe books.com abe books.fr amazon.com amazon.fr barnes and noble.com abe books.it powells.com iberlibro.com sony e-books abe books anz

	recommend book⇒The Making of the Fittest
		hardcover
	ISBN13:	978-0-393-06163-5
	publisher:	W. W. Norton
	published:	2006-10-09
	by:	Sean B. Carroll
We now have DNA analysis to track the history over millions of years of how species evolved. This book explains this new tool. If somebody wants to debunk evolution, they should at least know what it is, and why today’s scientists have such strong confidence it in.
abe books.co.uk abe books.ca amazon.co.uk amazon.ca abe books.de chapters.indigo.ca amazon.de abe books.com abe books.fr amazon.com amazon.fr barnes and noble.com abe books.it powells.com iberlibro.com sony e-books abe books anz

	recommend book⇒Why Evolution is True
		hardcover	kindle
	ISBN13:	978-0-670-02053-9	B001QEQRJW
	publisher:	Viking Adult
	published:	2009-01-22
	by:	Jerry A. Coyne
The book gets glowing reviews from famous scientists such as E.O. Wilson and Richard Dawkins. It reviews the evidence for evolution and explains the dishonesty in phrases such as “evolution is only a theory”.
abe books.co.uk abe books.ca amazon.co.uk amazon.ca abe books.de chapters.indigo.ca amazon.de abe books.com abe books.fr amazon.com amazon.fr barnes and noble.com abe books.it powells.com iberlibro.com sony e-books abe books anz

	recommend book⇒Astonishing Hypothesis: The Scientific Search for the Soul
		paperback
	ISBN13:	978-0-684-80158-2
	publisher:	Scribner
	published:	1995-07-01
	by:	Francis Crick
Crick won the Nobel prize as co-discoverer with James Watson for the discovery of DNA. In this book, Crick tackles the intractable question, “what is consciousness”.
abe books.co.uk abe books.ca amazon.co.uk amazon.ca abe books.de chapters.indigo.ca amazon.de abe books.com abe books.fr amazon.com amazon.fr barnes and noble.com abe books.it powells.com iberlibro.com sony e-books abe books anz

	recommend book⇒The Ancestor’s Tale: A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Evolution
		hardcover
	ISBN13:	978-0-618-00583-3
	publisher:	Houghton Mifflin
	published:	2004-10-27
	by:	Richard Dawkins
Tracing your ancestry all the way back to the origin of life. Read the first chapter.
abe books.co.uk abe books.ca amazon.co.uk amazon.ca abe books.de chapters.indigo.ca amazon.de abe books.com abe books.fr amazon.com amazon.fr barnes and noble.com abe books.it powells.com iberlibro.com sony e-books abe books anz

	recommend book⇒The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe Without Design
		paperback
	ISBN13:	978-0-393-31570-7
	publisher:	W. W. Norton
	published:	1996-09-19
	by:	Richard Dawkins
The title refers to the Rev. William Paley’s 1802 work, Natural Theology, which argued that just as finding a watch would lead you to conclude that a watchmaker must exist, the complexity of living organisms proves that a Creator exists. Dawkins argues that all appearances to the contrary, the only watchmakers in nature are the blind forces of physics, albeit deployed in a very special way. Natural selection is an anti-chance process, which gradually builds up complexity, step by tiny step. The end product of this ratcheting process is an eye, or a heart, or a brain — a device whose improbable complexity is utterly baffling until you spot the gentle ramp that leads up to it. Read the first chapter.
abe books.co.uk abe books.ca amazon.co.uk amazon.ca abe books.de chapters.indigo.ca amazon.de abe books.com abe books.fr amazon.com amazon.fr barnes and noble.com abe books.it powells.com iberlibro.com sony e-books abe books anz

	recommend book⇒Climbing Mount Improbable
		hardcover
	ISBN13:	978-0-393-03930-6
	publisher:	W. W. Norton
	published:	1996-09
	by:	Richard Dawkins
Explains how complex structures such as the eye can evolve without intelligent design. Read the first chapter.
abe books.co.uk abe books.ca amazon.co.uk amazon.ca abe books.de chapters.indigo.ca amazon.de abe books.com abe books.fr amazon.com amazon.fr barnes and noble.com abe books.it powells.com iberlibro.com sony e-books abe books anz

	recommend book⇒Devil’s Chaplain: Reflections on Hope, Lies, Science, and Love
		paperback
	ISBN13:	978-0-618-48539-0
	publisher:	Mariner
	published:	2004-10-27
	by:	Richard Dawkins
A miscellaneous collection of essays.
abe books.co.uk abe books.ca amazon.co.uk amazon.ca abe books.de chapters.indigo.ca amazon.de abe books.com abe books.fr amazon.com amazon.fr barnes and noble.com abe books.it powells.com iberlibro.com sony e-books abe books anz

	recommend book⇒The God Delusion
		paperback	hardcover	kindle
	ISBN13:	978-0-618-91824-9	978-0-618-68000-9	B000SEHG5U
	publisher:	Houghton Mifflin
	published:	2006-09-18
	by:	Richard Dawkins
This might be looked on as the founding document for the atheists’ lib movement. This is a gloves-off attack on religion and fanaticism. It ridicules Christianity and Islam. He argues that atheism provides a sounder foundation for morality. “The God Delusion is smart, compassionate, and true… If this book doesn’t change the world, we’re all screwed.” ~ Penn & Teller. Read the first chapter.
abe books.co.uk abe books.ca amazon.co.uk amazon.ca abe books.de chapters.indigo.ca amazon.de abe books.com abe books.fr amazon.com amazon.fr barnes and noble.com abe books.it powells.com iberlibro.com sony e-books abe books anz

	recommend book⇒The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution
		hardcover
	ISBN13:	978-1-4165-9478-9
	publisher:	Free Press Mifflin
	published:	2009-09-22
	by:	Richard Dawkins
This not only covers the evidence for evolution, he takes aims at the bogus claims of the religious fundamentalists that evolution is flawed. The evidence includes fossils, the genetic code of various species and the distribution of animals on the planet.
abe books.co.uk abe books.ca amazon.co.uk amazon.ca abe books.de chapters.indigo.ca amazon.de abe books.com abe books.fr amazon.com amazon.fr barnes and noble.com abe books.it powells.com iberlibro.com sony e-books abe books anz

	recommend book⇒The Selfish Gene
		paperback	hardcover
	ISBN13:	978-0-19-286092-7	978-0-19-929114-4
	publisher:	Oxford University Press
	published:	1990-10-25
	by:	Richard Dawkins
Explanation of how individual genes compete for survival, giving rise to the great complexity you see in plants and animals. Read first chapter.
abe books.co.uk abe books.ca amazon.co.uk amazon.ca abe books.de chapters.indigo.ca amazon.de abe books.com abe books.fr amazon.com amazon.fr barnes and noble.com abe books.it powells.com iberlibro.com sony e-books abe books anz

	recommend book⇒Unweaving the Rainbow: Science, Delusion and the Appetite for Wonder
		paperback
	ISBN13:	978-0-618-05673-6
	publisher:	Mariner
	published:	2000-04-05
	by:	Richard Dawkins
He shows that science has even more poetry and appreciation for the universe than religion. Read the first chapter.
abe books.co.uk abe books.ca amazon.co.uk amazon.ca abe books.de chapters.indigo.ca amazon.de abe books.com abe books.fr amazon.com amazon.fr barnes and noble.com abe books.it powells.com iberlibro.com sony e-books abe books anz

	recommend book⇒Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon
		paperback	hardcover
	ISBN13:	978-0-14-303833-7	978-0-670-03472-7
	publisher:	Viking
	published:	2006-02-02
	by:	Daniel C. Dennett
He studies why humans have evolved religion, and its maleficent role. He explores how ideas from prehistoric times have been passed down through the generations to haunt us today.
abe books.co.uk abe books.ca amazon.co.uk amazon.ca abe books.de chapters.indigo.ca amazon.de abe books.com abe books.fr amazon.com amazon.fr barnes and noble.com abe books.it powells.com iberlibro.com sony e-books abe books anz

	recommend book⇒Consciousness Explained
		paperback
	ISBN13:	978-0-14-012867-3
	publisher:	Penguin
	published:	1993-06-24
	by:	Daniel C. Dennett
An explanation that consciousness is like cultural software running on the parallel computing power of the brain.
abe books.co.uk abe books.ca amazon.co.uk amazon.ca abe books.de chapters.indigo.ca amazon.de abe books.com abe books.fr amazon.com amazon.fr barnes and noble.com abe books.it powells.com iberlibro.com sony e-books abe books anz

	recommend book⇒Darwin’s Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life
		paperback
	ISBN13:	978-0-684-82471-0
	publisher:	Simon & Schuster
	published:	1996-06-12
	by:	Daniel C. Dennett
A layman’s description of Darwin’s theory of evolution, and defense against the common attacks on it.
abe books.co.uk abe books.ca amazon.co.uk amazon.ca abe books.de chapters.indigo.ca amazon.de abe books.com abe books.fr amazon.com amazon.fr barnes and noble.com abe books.it powells.com iberlibro.com sony e-books abe books anz

	recommend book⇒Freedom Evolves
		paperback
	ISBN13:	978-0-14-028389-1
	publisher:	Penguin
	published:	2004-02-26
	by:	Daniel C. Dennett
In this book he tackles the problem of the soul and free will. He argues that there is indeed such a thing as free will, but it “is not a preexisting feature of our existence, like the law of gravity.”
abe books.co.uk abe books.ca amazon.co.uk amazon.ca abe books.de chapters.indigo.ca amazon.de abe books.com abe books.fr amazon.com amazon.fr barnes and noble.com abe books.it powells.com iberlibro.com sony e-books abe books anz

	recommend book⇒Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why
		hardcover
	ISBN13:	978-0-06-073817-4
	publisher:	HarperOne
	published:	2005-11-01
	by:	Bart D. Ehrman
Ehrman started out as a biblical literalist, and through scholarship became a skeptic. He documents the ample evidence of human fallibility and ecclesiastical politics in holy writ. To assess how ignorant or theologically manipulative scribes may have changed the biblical text, modern scholars have developed procedures for comparing diverging texts. And in language accessible to nonspecialists, Ehrman explains these procedures and their results.
abe books.co.uk abe books.ca amazon.co.uk amazon.ca abe books.de chapters.indigo.ca amazon.de abe books.com abe books.fr amazon.com amazon.fr barnes and noble.com abe books.it powells.com iberlibro.com sony e-books abe books anz

	recommend book⇒Creationism’s Trojan Horse: The Wedge of Intelligent Design
		hardcover
	ISBN13:	978-0-19-515742-0
	publisher:	Oxford University Press
	published:	2003-12-12
	by:	Barbara Forrest, Paul R. Gross
The authors explain why they wrote the book this way. Religious interference in American science and science education is an old story. But intelligent design proponents’ cultivation of support for efforts to eliminate evolution from public school science, or to disparage it, and to secure recognition of creationists’ claims of scientific legitimacy, are today enjoying unprecedented, nationwide success. For the first time, such claims seem to many lay observers to have become respectable. In fact, however, they are no more respectable as scholarly inquiry, or specifically as biological science, than were their discredited “creation science” predecessors. Unfortunately, this is not widely understood. Nor is the seamless continuity of “Intelligent Design Theory” with other recognized forms of creationism. Having examined in detail claims made by members of the “Wedge” we saw it as our professional and civic obligation to scholarship and science to prepare a fully documented account of their anti-evolution agenda. We came to understand that, for the well-being of science and science education, the seamless continuity of intelligent design and traditional creationism must be demonstrated for our colleagues and the knowledgeable public. The narrowness of Wedge strategists’ religious aims, which do not reflect the values of the broader, more tolerant religious community, must be exposed, as must Intelligent Design’s pervasively sham methods of inquiry. People who value science and the benefits of life in an enlightened society must be alerted to the Wedge’s political, cultural, and religious ambitions.
abe books.co.uk abe books.ca amazon.co.uk amazon.ca abe books.de chapters.indigo.ca amazon.de abe books.com abe books.fr amazon.com amazon.fr barnes and noble.com abe books.it powells.com iberlibro.com sony e-books abe books anz

	recommend book⇒Unauthorized Version: Truth and Fiction in the Bible
		paperback
	ISBN13:	978-0-679-74406-1
	publisher:	Vintage
	published:	1993-06-01
	by:	Robin Lane Fox
Fox explores the bible as a historian, explaining what is known to be true and false.
abe books.co.uk abe books.ca amazon.co.uk amazon.ca abe books.de chapters.indigo.ca amazon.de abe books.com abe books.fr amazon.com amazon.fr barnes and noble.com abe books.it powells.com iberlibro.com sony e-books abe books anz

	recommend book⇒The Scandalous Gospel of Jesus: What’s So Good About the Good News?
		hardcover	kindle
	ISBN13:	978-0-06-000073-8	B000W914NG
	publisher:	HarperOne
	published:	2007-11-06
	by:	Peter J. Gomes
Written by a Christian preacher who berates the church for teaching the worship of Jesus, rather than teaching his message. Jesus was far more concerned about his message than himself. He suggests if Jesus were to come back, he would want to hang out with society’s outcasts, just as he did back then, including gays.
abe books.co.uk abe books.ca amazon.co.uk amazon.ca abe books.de chapters.indigo.ca amazon.de abe books.com abe books.fr amazon.com amazon.fr barnes and noble.com abe books.it powells.com iberlibro.com sony e-books abe books anz

	recommend book⇒The Panda’s Thumb: More Reflections in Natural History
		paperback
	ISBN13:	978-0-393-30819-8
	publisher:	W. W. Norton
	published:	1992-08
	by:	Stephen Jay Gould
Gould points out all manner of utterly inept designs in nature. Unlike a celestial designer, natural selection always has to work by gently modifying the “previous model”. This leads to some clumsy bailingwire solutions. One of the examples is the light sensitive cells in your eye are or the wrong side of the retina, away from the light. Seriously, do you think an reputedly infinitely intelligent designer would make a blunder that profound? Other species got it right, and as a result have vastly superior vision to us.
abe books.co.uk abe books.ca amazon.co.uk amazon.ca abe books.de chapters.indigo.ca amazon.de abe books.com abe books.fr amazon.com amazon.fr barnes and noble.com abe books.it powells.com iberlibro.com sony e-books abe books anz

	recommend book⇒Rocks of Ages : Science and Religion in the Fullness of Life
		paperback
	ISBN13:	978-0-345-45040-1
	publisher:	Ballantine
	published:	2002-02-26
	by:	Stephen Jay Gould
I don’t recommend this book, though I recommend Mr. Gould’s other books on the topic of evolution. This book consists of a rather limp suggestion that the conflict between religion and science can be avoided if religion will butt out of matters of fact and science butts out of matters of ethics. I find this a foolish truce. Religion should not be left to deal with ethics. It has only inept tools — magic, myth, superstition and tradition. The study of ethics would do much better if augmented with comparative religion, anthropology, law, psychology, Darwinian evolution and experiment.
abe books.co.uk abe books.ca amazon.co.uk amazon.ca abe books.de chapters.indigo.ca amazon.de abe books.com abe books.fr amazon.com amazon.fr barnes and noble.com abe books.it powells.com iberlibro.com sony e-books abe books anz

	recommend book⇒The Pagan Christ: recovering the lost light
		hardcover
	ISBN13:	978-0-88762-145-1
	publisher:	Thomas Allen Publishers
	published:	2004
	by:	Tom Harpur
Tom Harpur is an Anglican theologian. He presents the evidence that Christianity is plagiarized from earlier religions and has no historical basis. The Jesus story is intended to be taken as allegory, not literally. The Jesus cult developed over time, starting with a set of aphorisms, and gradually adding details of Jesus’ life, much the way the story of Superman was elaborated. This suggests there was no historical Jesus. amazon.ca is the site mostly likely to have the book in stock since Harpur is a well-known Canadian theologian. You can see a summary on DVD
abe books.co.uk abe books.ca amazon.co.uk amazon.ca abe books.de chapters.indigo.ca amazon.de abe books.com abe books.fr amazon.com amazon.fr barnes and noble.com abe books.it powells.com iberlibro.com sony e-books abe books anz

	recommend book⇒Letter to a Christian Nation
		hardcover
	ISBN13:	978-0-307-26577-7
	publisher:	Knopf
	published:	2006-09-19
	by:	Sam Harris
This is a passionate argument for separation of church and state. Sam Harris fearlessly describes a moral and intellectual emergency precipitated by religious fantasies — misguided beliefs that create suffering, that rationalize violence, that have endangered our nation and our future. His argument for the morality, the honesty, and the humility of atheism is galvanizing. It is a relief that someone has spoken so frankly, with such passion yet such rationality
abe books.co.uk abe books.ca amazon.co.uk amazon.ca abe books.de chapters.indigo.ca amazon.de abe books.com abe books.fr amazon.com amazon.fr barnes and noble.com abe books.it powells.com iberlibro.com sony e-books abe books anz

	recommend book⇒The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason
		paperback
	ISBN13:	978-0-393-32765-6
	publisher:	W. W. Norton
	published:	2005-10-10
	by:	Sam Harris
Harris argues that in the presence of weapons of mass destruction, we can no longer expect to survive our religious differences indefinitely. Moderation in religion poses considerable dangers of its own: as the accommodation we have made to religious faith in our society now blinds us to the role that faith plays in perpetuating human conflict. Read more about the book at the SamHarris.org website.
abe books.co.uk abe books.ca amazon.co.uk amazon.ca abe books.de chapters.indigo.ca amazon.de abe books.com abe books.fr amazon.com amazon.fr barnes and noble.com abe books.it powells.com iberlibro.com sony e-books abe books anz

	recommend book⇒Mythology’s Last Gods, Yahweh and Jesus
		hardcover
	ISBN13:	978-0-87975-742-7
	publisher:	Prometheus
	published:	1992-06
	by:	William Harwood
Bible scholars have discovered all manner of interesting things over the centuries, but they immediately hid most of it away from the lay people on the grounds it would harm their faith. Harwood brings all this interesting material to light.
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	recommend book⇒American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War On America
		hardcover
	ISBN13:	978-0-7432-8443-1
	publisher:	Free Press
	published:	2007-01-09
	by:	Chris Hedges
This about how Dominionists are trying to destroy scientific debate by insisting opinions like Creationism be treated equally with facts like evolution. They twist the bible to support bigotry, homophobia and persecution of intellectuals. The movement’s call to dismantle the wall between church and state and the intolerance it preaches against all who do not conform to its warped vision of a Christian America are pumped into tens of millions of American homes through Christian television and radio stations, as well as reinforced through the curriculum in Christian schools. They lie about their ability to “cure” same sex attraction.
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	recommend book⇒God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything
		paperback	hardcover	kindle
	ISBN13:	978-0-446-69796-5	978-0-446-57980-3	B000QUCO4Y
	publisher:	Twelve Books
	published:	2007-05-01
	by:	Christopher Hitchens
This is a historical look at Christianity and Islam. Hitchens shows why he believes religion to be a consequence of our evolutionary childhood, why he believes it should not be considered a source of morality and all the ways in which it has demonstrated its tendency to foster totalitarian malevolence. Hitchens is a great wit, however he is over the top in his fear of Islam. He is a Bush-supporting right winger who believes the Bush conspiracy theory of 9/11 and who thinks the solution is to kill all the Muslims. Other than that bit of nuttiness, he is entertaining and intelligent. It is fun to watch one so gullible accuse Christians of gullibility. Read the first chapter.
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	recommend book⇒Christianity: The Ultimate Urban Legend
		paperback
	ISBN13:	978-1-4120-8012-5
	publisher:	Trafford Publishing
	published:	2006-06-30
	by:	Paul John
This is a self-published Trafford book about inconsistencies in the bible. It is book 2 in a trilogy. This book covers the time period from Herod the Great’s death through the early 2nd century. He goes into the discrepancies between Paul’s and Jesus’s teachings. Paul John was raised as a Christian then came to examine his faith in adulthood.
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	recommend book⇒The Genesis of Misconception
		paperback
	ISBN13:	978-1-4120-3481-4
	publisher:	Trafford Publishing
	published:	2006-07-06
	by:	Paul John
This is a self-published Trafford book about inconsistencies in the bible, in particular references to technologies that had not been invented at the time the story allegedly took place. It is book 1 in a trilogy. One of his assertions is that much of the history described in the Bible was actually about Judah, not Israel. Paul John was raised as a Christian then came to examine his faith in adulthood.
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	recommend book⇒The Plausibility of Life: Resolving Darwin’s Dilemma
		hardcover
	ISBN13:	978-0-300-10865-1
	publisher:	Yale University Press
	published:	2005-10-19
	by:	Marc W. Kirschner and John C. Gerhart
This is a book that takes pot shots at the crack pot “theory” of intelligent design, pointing out how when you look clearly at the creationist arguments, such as “irreducible complexity” they actually argue for evolution. They explain how the metabolic building blocks of life functions can be rearranged and linked in novel ways with less chance of fatal variations than random mutation of DNA would allow. They explain why there are periods of deep conservation with almost no change following an evolutionary ferment.
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	recommend book⇒Atheist Manifesto: The Case Against Christianity, Judaism, and Islam
		hardcover
	ISBN13:	978-1-55970-820-3
	publisher:	Arcade Publishing
	published:	2007-01-10
	by:	Michel Onfray
This is not a book aimed at Christians, but at fellow atheists. He deconstructs the myth of Jesus and how Christianity came to be the world’s biggest religion and how some of it’s teachings (especially those of Paul) may have come to be. Without Emperor Constantine, Christianity would have died or been an obscure sect. It explains the evils of monotheism. It is not so much about why there is no god as what evil people get up to in the name of god.
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{The God Virus by Darrel Ray}

	recommend book⇒The God Virus: How religion infects our lives and culture
		paperback
	ISBN13:	978-0-9709505-1-2
	publisher:	IPC Press
	published:	2009-01-06
	by:	Darrel W. Ray
Once infected, the individual [infected with a god virus] cannot detect major contradictions in his beliefs and behavior. Belief systems become self-evident to him, and no amount of logical discourse will move him from his belief. If a Mormon and Catholic were to debate the merits of their respective religions, neither could see his own inconsistencies and logical fallacies, but would see the other’s quite clearly. ~ Darrel Ray The God Virus goes beyond analogy, offering a fascinating and detailed look at the wiggling, maddening virus itself how it moves, how it survives, and how and why it continues to thrive. One of the interesting discussions in the book is using the virus metaphor to explain why fundamentalists are as resistant to other religions as they are to atheism. Like a virus, a religion ruthlessly manipulates its hosts for its own ends. There is a website for the book. You can read the first two chapters on-line. The God Virus: How religion infects our lives and culture The God Virus: part 2 The God Virus: part 3 hypnosis The God Virus: part 4 the guilt cycle Darrel Ray holds a BA in sociology, an MA in religion, and an Ed.D. in psychology. Ed.D. means Doctor of Education. It is a doctorate in psychology equal to a Ph.D. or an Psy.D. degree from Vanderbilt University.
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	recommend book⇒Battle For the Mind, A Physiology of Conversion and Brainwashing
		paperback
	ISBN13:	978-1-883536-06-0
	publisher:	Malor Books
	published:	1997-08
	by:	William Walters Sargant
I first read this book as a teenager. It explains how brainwashing works and how various groups use it. I was shocked back then to discover how close the techniques of the POW camps and the religious cults were to the socially acceptable practice of boot camp to rebuild army recruits into obedient soldiers.
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	recommend book⇒Why People Believe Weird Things: Pseudoscience, Superstition, and Other Confusions of Our Time
		paperback	hardcover
	ISBN13:	978-0-8050-7089-7	978-1-56731-359-8
	publisher:	Holt
	published:	2002-09-01
	by:	Michael Shermer
The title is a bit of a misnomer. It is mostly about the kooky things people believe and why those beliefs are not true, not why people beleve them. People believe in quantum mechanics and relativity, which are far weirder than any alien abduction or holocoust denial. That is not what the book is about. It about people believing in things for which there is almost no evidence and for which there is a ton of counter-evidence. It covers Holocaust denial and creationism in considerable detail, and has chapters on abductions, Satanism, Afrocentrism, near-death experiences, Ayn Randian positivism, and psychics. His five reasons people hold crank beliefs are: for consolation for immediate gratification for simplicity for moral meaning because hope springs eternal As a former fundamentalist Christian, he has first hand knowledge. He is also founder of the Skeptics Society.
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	recommend book⇒Why Darwin Matters : The Case Against Intelligent Design
		paperback	hardcover	kindle
	ISBN13:	978-0-8050-8306-4	978-0-8050-8121-3	B001J2Y0VI
	publisher:	Holt
	published:	2007-07-25
	by:	Michael Shermer
It explains why intelligent design is both bad science and poor religion. Read the first chapter.
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	recommend book⇒Your Inner Fish: A Journey into the 3.5-Billion-Year History of the Human Body
		paperback	hardcover	kindle
	ISBN13:	978-0-307-27745-9	978-0-375-42447-2	B0010SKTRA
	publisher:	Vintage
	published:	2009-01-06
	by:	Neil Shubin
Preorder, not yet published. Recommended by Richard Dawkins.
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	recommend book⇒God, the Failed Hypothesis: How Science Shows That God Does Not Exist
		hardcover
	ISBN13:	978-1-59102-481-1
	publisher:	Prometheus Books
	published:	2007-01-25
	by:	Victor J. Stenger
This is not just evidence that details in various holy books are wrong. This evidence that none of the proposed 10,000 gods exist, either creators, supervisors or interveners. Physicist Victor J. Stenger contends that, if God exists, some evidence for this existence should be detectable by scientific means, especially considering the central role that God is alleged to play in the operation of the universe and the lives of humans. Treating the traditional God concept, as conventionally presented in the Judeo-Christian and Islamic traditions, like any other scientific hypothesis, Stenger examines all of the claims made for God’s existence. He considers the latest Intelligent Design arguments as evidence of God’s influence in biology. He looks at human behaviour for evidence of immaterial souls and the possible effects of prayer. He discusses the findings of physics and astronomy in weighing the suggestions that the universe is the work of a creator and that humans are God’s special creation. After evaluating all the scientific evidence, Stenger concludes that beyond a reasonable doubt the universe and life appear exactly as we might expect if there were no God.
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	recommend book⇒The Jesus Sayings: A Quest for the Authentic Teachings
		hardcover
	ISBN13:	978-0-88784-212-2
	publisher:	Anansi
	published:	2008-02-28
	by:	Rex Weyler
In the early days of Christianity there were dozens of gospels. The church selected which versions it wanted to promote and burned the rest. However, some of these documents survived over a thousand years hidden in caves, graves or buried in the sand. Archaelogists have uncovered many of these documents which give a quite different picture of early Christianity from the official church history. Jesus never claimed divinity, and neither did his followers claim it for him. There was no resurrection. Jesus taught that if his followers were compassionate it would generate the spirit of his presence. There was nothing at all about his physical return. These embellishments were added much later.
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	recommend book⇒The Evolution of God
		hardcover	kindle
	ISBN13:	978-0-316-73491-2	B002AKPEHW
	publisher:	Little, Brown
	published:	2009-06-08
	by:	Robert Wright
Wright grew up as a born-again Christian and creationist, then gradually relaxed some of his fundamentalist thinking to study the history of how the notions of God evolved. He discovered that Christianity was not formed all of a piece, but borrowed from other religions over time. He came to the conclusion that what we call God is actually a human construction. He likens this to a crude approximation to the truth that a diagram of spinning electrons has to the mind-boggling mathematics of quantum mechanics, a necessary fiction given the limitations of the human mind. Wright is a bit a sucky apologist for religion, and tries to wrap his fundamentalist notions of rigid morality in scientific objective dress.
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Links

• Dr. J. Anderson-Thomson explains the mechanisms how human brains evolved to be susceptible to hijacking by supernatural and religious beliefs.
• Mindprod Blog To Discuss Religion and Atheism
• List of Famous Atheists
• Hillybilly Atheist explains his position.
• Richard Dawkins Website
• Richard Dawkins interview in Salon, 2005-04-25.
• Richard Dawkin’s Documentary The Root of Evil?   The God Delusion part 1 : part 2 : He discusses why faith is not only erroneous but dangerous.
• Combating Kristianity. Also many links to atheist organisations.
• Quotations About Religion.
• suicide.
• The Nature of the Real God.
• Quantum Miracles
• reader feedback on this essay.
• The Spandrel Theory of why humans evolved religion, even though it is counter-survival.
• Positive Atheism
• American Atheists
• American Humanist Association
• Atheist Alliance International
• The Brights
• Center For Inquiry
• Freedom From Religion Foundation
• Institute for Humanist Studies