[/img]There are many more reasons not to believe in the doctrines of organized religion. These are ten of my favorites, not necessarily in the order listed. You can probably think of many more.

1. If God is all-knowing, he knows the future before an event happens. So before a baby is born, God knows if it’s going to hell or not. If the baby is predestined to go “there” and God allows it to happen, we have to question if the Divine One knew what He was doing. I mean, this is a pretty rotten thing to do to somebody. I wonder if anyone ever cries up from the pits of damnation, after all the condemned are still cognizant and feeling (otherwise it wouldn’t make any sense to sense them in the fiery inferno in the fist place) “Geez, God, what the heck do you get out of watching your own creation suffer in eternal agony? Especially when you didn’t have to do it. You’re not exactly Mr. Nice Guy.”

2. The Paradox of Voltaire. But allow me to paraphrase it a bit. Think of the horror of WWII: people marched into ovens, atomic bombs dropped on cities, Dr. Joseph Menegele. Enough said. If God could have prevented this horror from happening and didn’t, he can’t be all-good. Christian apologists argue that God didn’t do it, humans did. Free will and all that. Bull. God let it happen, pure and simple. It happened on His eternal invigilation, you might say.

Now if God couldn’t have prevented the holocaust, and it certainly appears He couldn’t, then He can’t be all-powerful, omnipotent. To my mind, and to Voltaire’s, it’s got to be one or the other.

3. The Inquisitors made the Nazis look like boy scouts. I never even looked at the Malleus Maleficarum (Hammer of Witches) but a couple of friends told me it makes your blood curl, (not my thing; I don’t even like vampire movies). The level of venom and hatred, the relish with which torture is described, the whacky reasoning offered as proof of witchcraft (from blasphemy, a mole on the body as a sign of the devil, to sex with a demon) all suggest that religion has brought mankind during this time around 1487 to the lowest levels of human lust, greed, depravity and sadism.

In an attempt to defend the indefensible, theologians have denied the Church’s involvement claiming it was the product of a fanatical fringe group, but the Malleus carried the imprimatur of Pope Innocent VII who endorsed the book as the word of God. He happened to be infallible at the time.

4. Religion cheapens life. Life is just a temporary condition as we wait our eternal reward. How valuable is life when you have young fanatics blowing themselves up to make a political and religious point? If someone believes that Paradise awaits, with reunion with deceased relatives, seventy-two horis (sex angels) or the beatific vision, the fear of death is diminished. (Beliefs help determine behavior: if you believe it’s going to rain, you carry an umbrella.) One becomes more willing to risk life, especially when called upon to take up arms by leaders of the nation. Just think, WWI caused the death of 35 million who sacrificed their lives for the benefit of the economic interests of the ruling classes.

I believe that there would have been a lot less war in history if more people were non-believers. If young draft-age persons believe this life is all there is, they are much more apt to say, “Hell no, I won’t go.”

There’re many other examples of how religion cheapens life. One that comes immediately to mind is the lives of many sisters and monks. Sixty Minutes had an interesting program last year about the Monks of Mount Attila in the northern Aegean Sea. The monks spent most of their time praying and chanting in a communal trance. They did the same thing, every day, day after day for their entire lives at the monastery. No laughing, no visitors, no women, just constant supplication to Christ. Some monks were praying even while eating or doing routine activities of daily living. They literally spent their entire life waiting and wanting to die so they can be with their Jesus.

5. The Holy Scriptures are chock full of inconsistencies, fallacious statements and illogical conclusions. Why would Moses, the supposed author of the Pentateuch, refer to himself in the third person? If God is just, why would He kill everybody in the world during the Great Deluge? In the same chapter of Exodus that God decrees, “Thou shalt not kill,” he orders the massacre of thousands of people.

Then there are statements that are just plain WRONG. I always got a kick out of how wrong people can be. Like the record studio manager who told Elvis Presley to go back to Tennessee and drive a truck. Or Neville Chamberlain when he got off the plane from the Treaty of Munich waving a signed piece of paper and declared, “There shall be peace in our time.” Wrong!

How about Lincoln declaring in the Gettysburg Address that “the world will little note, nor long remember what we say here”? Now that’s gotta be one of the wrongest statements I ever heard.

Giuseppe Verdi was rejected from the Conservatory of Milan because he was a country bumpkin and didn’t have good posture on the piano stool. Sophie Tucker was told she was too fat to make it on Broadway. The Boston Red Sox traded Babe Ruth. Now this stuff is Wrong!

What’s this all leading up to? Well, the New Testament has the wrongest statement I ever heard. Totally wrong, totally naïve, totally off the mark: “The meek shall inherit the Earth.” Two thousand years is long enough to wait for something. If it doesn’t happen in two thousand years what’s the sense of making the prediction in the first place? And even if it does happen in this Darwinian world, that’s just what the meek shall inherit: dirt.

6. Religion has impeded and stultified human progress. In fact, during the Dark Ages, progress was brought to a standstill for centuries until the Age of Enlightenment. In the City of God, church leader St. Augustine of Hippo told acolytes not to question the dictates of their superiors. Just accept and obey. Don’t even talk about religion and ‘til this day people still have an aversion to discussing religion with friends and relatives. The paternal saint sitting at the right hand of God did more than anyone to stifle and obtund the human spirit, the quality of the human raison d’etre that has driven and guided our travel through time: curiosity.

It’s absolutely dreadful how many great scientists were persecuted and even immolated for telling the truth. After Copernicus, scientists were afraid to open their mouth until Galileo finally came along a half century after the Revolution of Orbs in 1550. In Mirror Reversal, I tell the heartbreaking story of Lucilio Vanini, who was the first man since Anaximander of the Ionian School (c. 800 BC) to theorize that mankind might have evolved from earlier life forms. Vanini wrote 250 years before Darwin and is barely remembered by even the most erudite scholars.

The history of medicine is filled with atrocious abuses by the Fathers of the Church. Until Sigmund Freud mental illness was considered demonic possession. Until Louis Pasteur, common illnesses like the flu were considered the work of the devil. Sadly, even tragically for humanity, ether and other anesthetics were neglected because Church leaders thought pain and sacrifice were pleasing to God and men shouldn’t interfere with God’s will. Ether was discovered by alchemists as early as the 1250s, but not used in surgery until the 1850s. That’s six hundred years of pain and suffering, especially for women in childbirth, all unnecessary because of eccentric religious beliefs.

7. To me, by far the worse crime against humanity engendered by religious belief is the separation and divorce of humanity from nature. From Mirror Reversal:

“That’s why I’m disgruntled with religion,“ she went on, “The world’s religions are meme complexes that make victims care more about a world that doesn’t exist than about the real world. Carriers of the Christianity memeplex care more about a Virgin Mother made of wood or plastic, and throw garbage and chemicals in Tethys, the real mother of life. They can experience Tethys, drink water, smell salubrious seawater, dazzle in her wonderful properties, swim in her, even enjoy euphoric pleasure just looking at her in the moonlight of summery dusk. And as religion separates people from nature, it encourages and rewards people for making babies in a dangerously overpopulated world. The leaders of the church hierarchy don’t give a damn—‘cause they believe the world is going to be destroyed anyway.

In other words, the Mother Ocean has been so wonderful to us and we reward her with garbage, poison, filth and radioactivity. Because of religious superstition we don’t appreciate nor even acknowledge that Tethys is the mother of all live over four billion years ago. Instead people pay adoration to a sexless Virgin Mother who insults humanity by refusing to accept even our most basic human characteristics: we our viviparous mammals. The Immaculate Conception is an insult, a miracle thought up by self-alienated prudes.

Consider the shocking and monstrous photo below. At first sight it looks like some sort of grotesque disease—a skin tumor or an abscessed boil of some sort. What freak of nature could have caused it?

Clearly it has to be the work of some cruel opportunist that has no feeling or empathy for the host that nourishes it. To me, it looks like the work of the scalp ringworm, Tinea capitis. This ugliness couldn’t possibly be the work of a creature that can think and has positive feeling for the mother that gave it life.

YOU ARE LOOKING AT THE VALE MINE IN THE CENTER OF THE AMAZON RAIN FOREST, THE MOST BIODIVERSE PARADISE OF OUR BEAUTIFUL PLANET.



8. Humans have to learn to live in harmony with nature or we’re going to go extinct. Religion prevents us from doing so because worshippers believe we were put here by patriarchal God and the planet is going to be destroyed anyway with the second coming of the Messiah or the Holy Prophet. The Holy Scriptures, especially the Book of Revelation, has deadened Earth Consciousness such most people never heard of the Vale Mine. But it goes right to the jugular and is as ugly as what remained of Hiroshima after the atomic bomb.

On the other hand, science teaches us that we grew out of the planet: the atoms of our bodies are the stuff of the Earth—even in the same proportions of carbon, oxygen and hydrogen by weight. Ammonia that seeped out of deep oceanic vents was the key ingredient that supplied nitrogen that provided the chemical stability to the primal RNA molecules. Science convincingly accounts for how we got here; Big Bang theory gives us a good idea how the universe got here. We don’t need these myths anymore.

We share the identical genetic code as every other creature on the planet, plant or animal. No matter what creature you can think of, from a unctuous jellyfish in the middle of the Indian Ocean, to a tiny polyp on the Great Barrier Reef, to a lackadaisical hippo in the Central Congo, we share the same genetic code. Each of the 64 codons translates to a specific amino acid along the ribosome. In humans, the codon CCU translates to Proline, in vampire bats CCU calls up Proline. In humans AAG translates to Lysine, in Tasmanian devils AAG calls for Lysine. In humans GUC translates Valine, in the grungy Mekong catfish, GUC calls for Valine.

There’s a line in Mirror Reversal, “We’re all human beans.” It appears to be a malapropism or a typo, but it’s exactly what the character what’s to convey. Just like beans, we are bundles of protein. That’s what genes do: perform an action or synthesize a specific protein. They program the assembly of amino acids.

On and on it goes 64 times for any creature you can think of. Each codon translates a specific amino acid in exactly the same way. We are connected to every living creature on the planet at the molecular level. Religion conditions worshippers to believe we have a soul (whatever that is) and all other life on the planet does not. Of our 30,000 genes, many are exactly equivalent, letter for letter thousands of times, as those of the lowly and humble fruit fly, the gene that separates and develops the head from torso, for example. I remember talking to a fundamentalist that had a hard time accepting that we “evolved from apes.” I got news for him: If goes back in time a lot further than that. We evolved from viruses and most of the genetic material we pass on to our offspring is non-coding, parasitic DNA junk.

It’s this divorce from nature that results in the tragedy of the Vale Mine in the photo above. If we had a worldview, and religion, based on the revelations of science, the Vale Mine and other outrageous atrocities against nature wouldn’t be tolerated. The degradation and desecration (making un-sacred) of nature is crime against ourselves—it’s masochism. I’d say it stems from the Church’s belief that we’re born evil. Masochism is, after all, often a consequence of guilt.

I recently saw a shocking Science Channel documentary about the six massive rings of non-biodegradable garbage floating aimlessly in immeasurable, Gargantuan tonnage deep in the world’s oceans, just deep enough as not to be seen by ships passing by. The garbage mostly comes from the run-off of river banks and beaches, garbage dumps and deltas where it all collects waiting for a storm or heavy rain to carry it out to the mother ocean. Would this tragedy be happening if worshippers accepted that Tethys was the mother of life? Treating her like a cesspool is how we repay her!

9. From the King James Version: 1:28 And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.

How could this be the command of a sane deity that cared about the health and welfare of the planet and the life on it? What bronze-age goat herder or fisherman cursed humanity so malevolently? It’s so sad that one stupid line of Holy Scripture could have such a devastating effect on the entire planet. The owners of the Vale Mine in Brazil could point to this line and feel justified at this wanton atrocity and insult to nature. The Bible said to “subdue” the Earth, didn’t it?

Ever since high school human population growth has been the cause célèbre of my life.
Just as Mitt Romney journeyed to France to convert people to the wondrous tenets of Mormonism, I felt it was my calling to warn people about the danger and folly of overpopulation.

Just think, when New Year’s Eve 2013 arrives in a few months, we can look back a century and consider what the celebrants of 1913 were thinking. They had no idea what the rest of the century held in store for them. In a little more than a year WWI broke out, 35 million dead. A year after that the Great Flu of 1919, 50 to 100 million dead, a tenth of all humanity. Just ten years after that the forced starvation of eight millions Ukrainian farmers who refused to collectivize. Ten years after that, WWII with over 50 million dead, 20 million in Russia alone. Then in quick secession the Korean War, Viet Nam, Cambodia, AIDS, and Yugoslavia. HIV alone is estimated to have killed 25 million with 35 ceropositives (infected with HIV) still alive. In addition, the United Nations World Food Program estimates that 900 million are living in life-threatening hunger and 15 million children are staring to death every year.

Take a guess at the population of the world in 1913. In spite of these horrible calamities and immeasurable loss of life, the population growth curve has barely flickered. It’s a relentless multiplicative growth curve that keeps accelerating faster and faster. The world recently hit the 7 billion mark a few months ago. In 1913, the world was composed of 1.5 billion people. World population has quadrupled in a hundred years, and that’s in spite of the horrendous calamities mentioned above.

An important point about Paul Ehrlich and The Population Bomb. Written in 1968, the work was way ahead of its time. He came under a lot of criticism for dire predictions that never came true. A friend of a friend told me that the Stanford professor was disappointed and dejected about the efficacy of his life’s work. He predicted that the population of India, for instance, would never reach 200 million before famine set in. (Professor Ehrlich could be listed on my WRONG list above.) But he had no way of knowing about the work of Norman Borlaug who revolutionized agricultural output per acre. Using new genetic techniques, like back crossing, he doubled and trebled the amount of food that a farm could produce. Just as The Population Bomb was listed on the Times Best Seller list, Borlaug was winning the Nobel Peace Prize for bringing on the “green revolution.”

The concept of eutrophy in biology refers to one species, usually a primary producer, taking over an entire ecosystem. You’ve probably seen it many times when passing a pond covered with “algal bloom.” Similar to a supersaturated solution, the condition is extremely unstable. Any invader, a mating pair of fish that feeds off the algae, can upset the entire eutrophic system. A pesticide-resistant pair of greenbugs, a type of aphid, could destroy an entire industrial mega-farm in a matter of weeks.

In other words, biodiversity results in environmental stability; eutrophy results in perilous instability. Why doesn’t the Bible mention that when it’s so important to our survival and the survival of all our planet’s passengers?

10. So that brings us to Reason #10. Where the heck is the pope and other religious leaders when it comes to intervening on behalf of suffering humanity and our unconscionably violated oceans, forests and mountains? Benedict must think we must have faith in God’s divine plan. But the universe is indifferent to us and God Almighty has never intervened in the affairs of mankind except when He appeared to his dozen friends—as if that’s proof enough that He exists.

Reason #10 is the strongest of all not to believe. Religion is endangering four billion years of evolution and all life on the planet, and as far as we know, perhaps the known universe!

*Old Hag is singing along to Johnny Nash*

There are more questions than answers
Pictures in my mind that will not show
There are more questions than answers
And the more I find out the less I know
Yeah, the more I find out the less I know

I've asked the question time and time again
Why is there so little of a moment
Oh, what is life, how do we live
What should we take and how much should we give

There are more questions than answers
Pictures in my mind that will not show
There are more questions than answers
And the more I find out the less I know
Yeah, the more I find out the less I know

Oh, yeah

Oh, what is life, how do we live
What should we take and how much should we give

There are more questions than answers
Pictures in my mind that will not show
There are more questions than answers
And the more I find out the less I know
Yeah, the more I find out the less I know

The less I know
So little, so
The less I know

Ten reasons I contrarily believe

(1) God knows the futures. This means he knows what will happen, given any of the paths you follow in your own decision tree of freewill. He doesn't force you or confine you. The choice is yours but when you make it, the end is certain. One cannot walk blindfolded across a busy express-road and expect to pass unscathed. We don't all begin [/i]from the same [i]starting point in life, but we are to make the best of the opportunites each of us relatively have. One only gets what is coming to them, based on what they chose given their own chances.

(2) I don't believe God couldn't have prevented the holocaust. Rather, he didn't. Do you know how many other things God may be preventing each day? No idea. Let's imagine he prevents every single possible instance of human wrongdoing. Will he thus not be taking away from us the very thing that makes us human: our agency of freewill? Then we would as well be like the trees and flowers, responding to sunlight, to nutrients and to rain. Besides, even though some may disagree, the presence of wrongdoing in this world is one of the reasons why human beings continue to increase in innovation, knowledge and wisdom. They grow against it.

(3) The Inquisitors were a group of humans with an agenda, and they used religion as a cover for their evil acts. We can't blame God for every wrong act done in his name.

(4) It works both ways. Just as religious fanaticism can lead one to lose focus of reality, a denial of religion may also cheapen life because it can lead to anarchy, despondency and a general lack of meaning and purpose in life. Getting a grip or getting brainwashed is all subjective in the end. One size doesn't fit all, and humans will always do as they please (or as they have been led to believe they'll be pleased by).

(5) "The meek shall inherit the earth" might also be a lesson in diplomacy. The world's richest men may have one or two things to tell you about that.

(6) On the contrary, religion has by far advanced human development. Many inventions and innovations that modern science is built upon, was built upon the solid foundations of Muslim clerics (Islam), Christians (Christianity), Freemasons and Alchemists (magick). History is rife with examples so I will not indulge us here. As for the errors of men as humanity grew in knowledge of science, I don't see how this has to do with religion. Rather it has to do with man's frailty. We can hardly see beyond our noses.

(7) The divorce of humanity from nature is a human problem and not a problem of religion. We have Theists as well as non-religionists, agnostics and atheists who are wicked to nature and/or do not take care of the earth they live on; as well as we have people of these multiple beliefs (or without them) who are conscious of taking care of the same and practise it diligently. Once again, you commit a fallacy of generalization. One size never fits all.

[8] See (7) above

(9) Genesis 1:28 was in relation to the cradle of humanity. I see nothing wrong with the statement at a time when there were only two people on earth.

(10) That's a human problem, once again. Has nothing to do with God.

My 2 cents.

InesQor:
(2) I don't believe God couldn't have prevented the holocaust. Rather, he didn't. Do you know how many other things God may be preventing each day? No idea. Let's imagine he prevents every single possible instance of human wrongdoing. Will he thus not be taking away from us the very thing that makes us human: our agency of freewill? Then we would as well be like the trees and flowers, responding to sunlight, to nutrients and to rain. Besides, even though some may disagree, the presence of wrongdoing in this world is one of the reasons why human beings continue to increase in innovation, knowledge and wisdom. They grow against it.

Do you pray to God when travelling to avoid accidents?

Do you pray to God to keep your family alive?


Why shouldnt God stop the holocaust but prevent your own downfall. When bad things happen to others, its God will. God didnt prevent it. But when a christian gets Aids or his family dies, it is the working of Satan.


Bunch of hypocrites

MacDaddy01:

Do you pray to God when travelling to avoid accidents?

Do you pray to God to keep your family alive?


Why shouldnt God stop the holocaust but prevent your own downfall. When bad things happen to others, its God will. God didnt prevent it. But when a christian gets Aids or his family dies, it is the working of Satan.


Bunch of hypocrites

Yes I pray, entreating God to keep me from harming myself, and to keep others from harming me

The truth is that God is not the purveyor of evil. According to true Christian beliefs, it is never God's will for any bad thing to happen to anyone. Sometimes one only gets what they have laid up for themselves.

James 1:16-18
So, my very dear friends, don't get thrown off course. Every desirable and beneficial gift comes out of heaven. The gifts are rivers of light cascading down from the Father of Light. There is nothing deceitful in God, nothing two-faced, nothing fickle.

Cheers.

InesQor:

Yes I pray, entreating God to keep me from harming myself, and to keep others from harming me

The truth is that God is not the purveyor of evil. According to true Christian beliefs, it is never God's will for any bad thing to happen to anyone. Sometimes one only gets what they have laid up for themselves.

James 1:16-18
So, my very dear friends, don't get thrown off course. Every desirable and beneficial gift comes out of heaven. The gifts are rivers of light cascading down from the Father of Light. There is nothing deceitful in God, nothing two-faced, nothing fickle.[/b]

Cheers.

So our Nigerian foreefathers that were taken as slaves deserved to be slaves?


This child deserved to die of hunger?

[img]http://tcdh.files./2011/09/vulture_waiting_for_the_child_to_die.jpg[/img]

MacDaddy01:
So our Nigerian foreefathers that were taken as slaves deserved to be slaves?

This child deserved to die of hunger?

I said "sometimes". One doesn't always deserve what they get. Sometimes the choices of someone else also affects you. e.g. the holocaust. Or the forefathers were sold/ handed-over by their rulers and the rich, were they not? Also, the slave-traders were business-men who made choices to purchase human lives that are equal to theirs, at a penny a piece. And also the child that suffers because a parent, a family, a society, a nation failed in their choices.

In the end, it all comes down to you and me, and the power beneath our choices.

Everything is connected to everything.

InesQor:


In the end, it all comes down to you and me, and the power beneath our choices.

Everything is connected to everything.

Thanks for acknowledging that it doesnt come down to an invisible God.

MacDaddy01:

Thanks for acknowledging that it doesnt come down to an invisible God.

Not until you wonder who's keeping (unbiased) scores and how it's all holding up together...

InesQor:

Not until you wonder who's keeping (unbiased) scores and how it's all holding up together...

What is holding up together? The earth that is suffering irrairable amount of damage? You god is a real faulty maker

@MacDaddy01

Ah, I forgot you're only trolling as is your regular wont on Nairaland

Hasta la vista. I'll see you on yet another thread.

InesQor: @MacDaddy01

Ah, I forgot you're only trolling as is your regular wont on Nairaland

Hasta la vista. I'll see you on yet another thread.

Adios