Tag Archives: religion

A Diabolic God

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There is a conundrum that many believers wrestle with: the existence of evil in the face of a benevolent god. When looked at from a different perspective findphonebase.ca , though, it’s not a conundrum at all.

Let us for a moment assume that believers have it right – a god exists. How then can we reconcile the evil that we see in the world with the assertion that god is benevolent?

We can’t. Does that mean that God doesn’t exist? Almost – but not necessarily. Another possibility remains, one that makes a whole lot more sense than what is commonly believed. Again, we are working under the assumption that God does exist. Now let us extend this assumption to Satan. Called the ‘Prince of Lies’, his character is described as evil, craving worship, and eternally envious of God’s glory.

Behold: Al-Shabaab, Boko Haram, IS(IS), Taliban and all the other barbaric murderers in the name of god, including the christian murderous savages called Lord’s Resistance Army. It is inconceivable that they are fighting for a benevolent supreme being. Yet they would have you believe that they are fighting for the ‘religion of peace’ or spreading the ‘gospel of love’.

Now let us turn our gaze to North Korea. Here we have a whole people living under the harshest of conditions, who are forced to worship a hateful, self-centered egomaniac who craves the adulation of the people he tortures and enslaves. He has his country believe that he is their savior, that all the countries around them are the enemy, and that everyone but himself is evil.

In light of this example we have undeniable proof that you can make people believe anything if you are brutal and ruthless enough. This allows for a far more likely explanation for the evil we see in religion every day, one that makes sense:

If Satan exist today, it is far more likely that the religious people in truth are worshipping him; Satan, who like North Korea’s Kim, has you believe he is the benevolent supreme being.

But if this were true, why wouldn’t the benevolent God intervene? Because, like in Korea, Satan is the only supreme being. There is no benevolent god.

Just Satan. They are the same – he is God.

Now, it all makes sense. Scripture and organized religion are a tool to force people to worship him. Intense worship of this God, due to his nature, allows evil to spread. Evil in this world goes unchecked not because it is ‘natural’, but because it is part of the decidedly un-benevolent God, who occasionally hides his true face because he wants to be adored, and who sends his brutal savages to force you into his religion.

So, if you truly want to reconcile all the evil in this world with an existing God, it leaves this depressing conclusion as the most likely one.

And that’s probably one of the biggest complaints I have with faith: I think it says a lot about religion when a crazy conspiracy theory is more sane than what people actually believe.

Sex Ed Fail

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The US (and some other developed countries) don’t have sex education at school. Rather, they have ‘abstinence education’: the only viable method to prevent unwanted pregnancy, they teach, is sexual abstinence. You don’t have to be too bright to foresee that this isn’t going to work. So why not teach safer, more robust ways to prevent young women becoming pregnant? Because religious, uptight idiots believe that teaching safe sex methods may make teenagers promiscuous. Yeah, that’s why teenagers have so much sex: good Sex Ed.

In a similar vein it would seem that the reason why they don’t teach first aid nor CPR to aspiring drivers in the US is this: it may make drivers think it’s a good idea to run over people. I’m astonished to find that they buckle up at all over there; after all I could argue that buckling up could lead people to believe it’s OK to drive into other cars.

Well, correctly attributing cause and effect has been a constant challenge for the religious majority. It’s a wonder they’ve managed to connect the dots between sex and pregnancy at all. Except for one prominent case involving Joseph.

See what happens when you teach being stupid?

Moral Midget

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Turkish deputy PM Bülent Arınç has shown that the qualifications for his current job do not include intelligence. In a public speech during an Eid el-Fitr celebration, he said:

Chastity is of critical importance.

Why? No reason, except that Arınç thinks chastity is an ornament. Why are ornaments of critical importance? Apparently, they just are.

Then he goes completely off the rails

[A woman] will know what is haram and not haram. She will not laugh in public.

Am I the only one who thinks that it does not bode well for your country if your own Number Two Official thinks that half of your country should not be laughing in public? This guy really needs to lighten up.

Now cue the world’s tiniest violin as Arınç continues

Where are our girls, who slightly blush, lower their heads and turn their eyes away when we look at their face, becoming the symbol of chastity

They never existed except in your backward, misogynistic fantasy, Number Two. If women flinch when you look at them it is because they are afraid you’ll hurt them. If that’s what gets your juices flowing, book the next professional submissive who is willing to take you; let women express their joy in any way they damn well please, and expect them to meet your gaze levelly. Anything else is a sign that something is wrong.

Another sign that morals are decaying is, according to moral expert Arinç the fact that

Women give each other meal recipes while speaking on the mobile phone.

Well, I agree that I feel inconvenienced when someone in a tram next to me exchanges a recipe. Truth be told, though, I much prefer that to the average guy who gives a point-by-point account of his latest (and completely made up) conquest. Yet Arınç seems to be OK with that – it’s women who should shut up in public.

When do moral ignoramuses get it that sex, appearance, public expression, and, of all things, open displays of happiness have nothing to do with morals? What is wrong with you?

And this guy was elected?

Good God…?

The Internet destroys God!

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A few days ago, headlines around the world screamed ‘Internet is killing God’! Well, Nietzsche’s knickers in a twist, Batman! Now, it is a slow news week, and click bait is easier to come by than real news. The study the news articles reference speaks a more measured language, and confirms what everyone knows: Increase someone’s knowledge and that will decrease their likelihood to believe stupid things. Phrasing that more carefully, the researchers say that

Internet use is associated with decreased probability of religious affiliation.

This is not at all surprising. Before the internet connected the homes of sparsely-populated regions (for example the US ‘Heartland’ a.k.a. ‘Hick Central’) to civilization, people had no choice but to believe their priests – they had no viable means of independent confirmation. In Palinland, the Bible was the definite authority on law, moral code and science. This has changed.

The internet works as a catalyst for the mind; it’s not the cause for a pandemic of unbelief. We now have vast resources of scientific knowledge, indexed, fully searchable versions of Bible, Quran and other religious texts, and, admittedly, even vaster resources of cat pictures available at our fingertips. Inquisitive minds use this to confirm or, increasingly, disprove millennia-old hate-filled myths. But it still requires an inquisitive mind.

So the headlines have it wrong. It’s not the Internet that destroys God. It’s knowledge that destroys silly superstitions. If, on the other hand, you want to keep your people religious, you must do as the Taliban and Boko Haram do: forbid education and do your worst to subvert knowledge.

That’s where faith-based schools come in.

Trojan Hoax

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A great brouhaha has erupted about the fact that faith-based schools are teaching outrageous lies to children.

Really?

I mean – come on! What else do you expect? Did anyone really think that the lies would be limited to scripture? What kind of hypocrite thinks that one lie is different from another? What mental contortions do you have to make to think ‘God hates homosexuals’ and ‘you are lucky to be Muslims and not ignorant like Christians and Jews’ are somehow different?

This is no ‘Trojan Horse‘. Read the Odyssey. If you are morally backward or stupid enough to support faith based schools, don’t feign surprise when the teachers lie to your children. That’s what you pay them for.

Christian Rights

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A few days ago, I stupidly wrote in Militant Stupidity that

Most importantly, though, there are no longer religious rights – i.e. special rights attained only through adherence to a particular religion – in the UK.

And boy, was I wrong. Not in that it shouldn’t be that way, but wrong because I failed to see that obviously, in the UK, as in most other european countries, this unfortunately is not true.

In the UK there actually are some religious rights. For the sake of clarity, with religious rights I mean special rights that you can only claim when you say that you have a certain religious belief. In addition to the fact that it breaks the ‘one law for all’ principle, religious laws have another peculiar property: There is no actual way to prove that you are a believer – you can fake belief as easily as a religion can fake their god. There is no way to prove a negative. This alone should be grounds to immediately deep-six those paragraphs, but I digress.

Anyway, there are two important religious laws in the UK that apply only to self-proclaimed religious people, and they are:

  • you must be a Christian (rather: Church of England-brand Christian) or you cannot become King/Queen of England. Since you must also have a direct blood line to the throne, few people will ever come in conflict with this silly law.
  • Members of the Roman Catholic Christian Belief, and more to point, their Organization, are exempt from a lot of important laws: The non-discrimination acts against women, gays, and people of certain marital status.

Therefore, being a Christian in the UK does indeed engender special privileges; some privileges even allow you to act in ways that would immediately land you in hot water if you weren’t religious – without adding any new responsibilities. How nice is that!

So yes, the UK does have religious rights. How silly of me to have gotten this wrong. Seeing how the US have just screwed their women over the same issue, my oversight is doubly embarrassing.

For the record, I should have said:

Most importantly, though, there should never be religious rights – special rights that apply only to people who claim to adhere to a particular religion – in the UK.

Sorry about that.

SCOTUS schmotus

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The issue is simple, they solution obvious. Then religion enters the playing field, and old men make a silly choice. As a result women are placed at a disadvantage.

That about sums up what just happened at SCOTUS – the Supreme Court of the United States.

The issue: should a privately held company be forced to comply with the law, even if it conflicts with the religious beliefs of their owners?

Obviously, this is a non-issue: When your religious beliefs conflict with the law, you better abide by law, or place yourself in harm’s way. In the civilized world, Law trumps Religion, right?

Well, not so fast. SCOTUS has actually managed to shoot itself in the foot on a very, very simple, clear-cut case.

The Affordable Care Act in the US states that companies must provide contraception coverage in their insurance packages. As it should be common knowledge, ‘contraceptives’ prevent pregnancies from happening, they do not terminate them. Contraceptives include IUD (‘Coil’ or ‘Spiral’) and ECP (‘morning after pill’).

An evangelical Christian-owned company in the US now refuses to cover for IUD and ECP. On the grounds that their religious beliefs prohibits this kind of contraception, they sued the US administration. Today SCOTUS ruled in favor of the company.

There are a number of remarkable items here:

  • A company is a juridical person and, along with some other traits like skin color or sex, can’t have a religion. So even if the owners all adhere to the same religion, this is not true for their company. SCOTUS, it seems, has now ruled against a very simple principle – a ruling that leads to head-scratching and raised eyebrows around the world. How can you screw up something that simple?
  • The complaint against the administration falsely claims that using IUD and ECP are abortions. This is factually untrue. That supreme judges can’t get something right that most female European teen-agers know may have something to do with the composition of the panel; it is definitely not a testament to their knowledge or level of preparedness to rule on such an important issue

SOTUS’ ruling is disquieting because it opens the door to religious discrimination against employees. Here it allows the company’s owners to withhold rights to their employees based on religious beliefs. That is a bad precedent. Even worse, the US uses case law – which is based on precedents. This ruling thus has far greater reach than a boneheaded decision like this would have in a country built on code law.

So women in the US again get to be told by religious people what they may, or may not do.

God bless America – her judges surely don’t.

Big numbers, small minds

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A few years ago I stood outside my tent, at night, in the painted desert. Being a city-dweller, I had never before seen a starry sky like that. It was big. It was unspeakably beautiful. And a bit scary. Although I wasn’t alone that night on the Colorado Plateau, staring at the immense sky I felt lonely, and a bit vulnerable.

I was reminded of this moment by a great article on the fermi paradox. Isn’t it incredible that the awe-inspiring panorama we can see at night, the thousands of visible stars represent only a tiny fraction – much less than a millionth – of the stars of our milky way? And that the milky way is only one in billions of galaxies in the universe?

At the dawn of humanity, our ancestors must have looked up, and realized not just how beautiful the world, but also just how small humans were. Being intelligent, they looked to explain the immensity. Looking for comfort, they invented benevolent gods that sheltered them. People had big minds, but their knowledge was small. It was a natural conclusion that super-human phenomena require super-human explanations.

Today we have immeasurably more knowledge, and we can draw much better conclusions about the world around us. One of the astonishing facts about our universe is that, at a conservative estimate, the universe contains at least 100 earth-like planets for each grain of sand in this world.

For. Each. Grain. Of. Sand.

There is only little scientific controversy about this number – some say it’s a lot higher, some say it’s only half of that. Let’s be even more conservative and say it’s only one. Now go down to the beach, and imagine that for each grain of sand you see there’s an earth-like planet out there.

And now try to reconcile this with the notion that a god made our world – and only this world – special, that after creating earth (and the rest) he now hangs around this one tiny world; to listen to all our thoughts and to judge us based on what we eat, and how and whom we sleep with.

People back then believed it out of necessity: they had big minds, but small knowledge.

People who believe something like that today have small minds, but, unfortunately, big numbers.

The Athorcist

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It’s a strange thing. There are many reports of people having become possessed by demons. Yet, when looking into these possessions, a couple of striking coincidences emerge:

1) all who have become ‘possessed’ are religious; or rather, all who report someone as being possessed, are religious.

2) the ‘demon’ or ‘spirit’ in question is always part of the mythology of the ‘soul’ that is possessed. Although we regularly hear reports of the devil possessing a Christian, it has never been reported, for example, that a demon of the Vishnu mythology has possessed a Christian.

3) There have never been reports of an atheist being possessed by a demon. There have – of course – been accusations that atheists are possessed by the devil; but these accusations were always made by religious people, usually with dire consequences to the atheist – as probably intended; see 1).

So, what can we conclude from this? Statistically, these observations are significant. Let us assume demons exist. If there really were demons, they should affect everyone, not just one particular group of people. Possessions only happening within the sphere of one belief, with no cross-over to other beliefs is statistically unlikely to the extreme. Furthermore, attaining complete immunity to possession through not believing in demons should be impossible. You can’t, for example, become immune to influenza simply by not believing in germs. Something is off here.

Well, you do the math.

In related news, the Vatican is increasing the size for their exorcism department, citing high demand. It’s a successful business model, I hear.

May I suggest an easier, much cheaper vaccination against demons?

Angry Atheists

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Increasingly, atheists are being asked: “Why are you so angry?”

It’s not that difficult to explain. A few days ago, I read the heart-breaking report of adorable little 3-years-old Victoria Wilcher, who a few weeks ago was attacked by three pitbulls. The attack broke her upper and lower jaws, nose, cheek bones, and right eye socket. Victoria completely lost her right eye. Last week, on the way back from a doctor’s appointment, Victoria and her grandmother stopped at a KFC to eat.

They were asked to leave because Victoria’s injuries upset the other customers.

Victoria square 100

Image Credit: Facebook

If you now feel shock and anger, you are not alone. Few people would not get angry when learning about such cruel, hurtful treatment. Rightly so. Little Victoria deserves better, and that is obvious to most.

So why am I telling you this? Because that is exactly how atheists feel about a lot of other things that are happening around the world. Yes, many atheists are angry. But we are not angry at how we are being treated – in most countries, we now can take care of ourselves. Nor are we angry because some god or fairy betrayed us. We are angry at the cruel, hurtful way religious people treat other (mostly) religious people: When women are treated as if they were dreck; when homosexuals are humiliated and killed for being what they are; when religious people callously deny help, or feel they are entitled to tell others what they may, or may not do; when religious people intentionally injure or kill other people.

Unlike the perpetrators and their religious peers, we feel the hurt, anguish and pain inflicted upon helpless individuals, and we are angry at those who inflict it; we are outraged at the ‘justifications’ that believers proffer for their actions: that a god wants it so.

So yes, many atheists are angry. At religious people. But, unlike religious people who feel offended and are angry at us for telling them off, we have legitimate reasons.