The Case Against Religion There is absolutely no scientific evidence that any God exists or has ever existed. There is absolutely no scientific evidence that Heaven, Hell, angels, daemons (except maybe for Democrats) exist. Our current crop of Gods do not have any more basis in reality than the Aztec, Mayan, Inca, Anastasi, Egyptian, Roman and Greek gods. Now, we have The Father, The Son, and The Holy Ghost, Elohim, Yahweh, Jehovah and Allah as the more powerful clan of Gods. Not a single member of the Framingham clergy can provide me with a itsy-bitsy teeny-weenie microscopic scintilla or shred of hard evidence of their imaginary one headed or three headed god outside the bible/torah. There is absolutely no scientific evidence that there is a transition to another life after death. You do indeed become worm food if you do not get cremated. Game over! Your religion almost invariably comes from your parents. The religion you have is not based on your need to find truth. With 90% certainty, you inherited your religion from your parents. Face it, you were brainwashed as a kid. It is a fundamental part of human nature that we trust authority figures. The very first authority figure in our lives is our mother and father. We are strongly inclined to believe an authority figure, sometimes even over common sense. This is the primary path to religion. This is why children will almost invariably have the same religion as their parents. It is a mental inheritance. Religion is and always has been a major force in stifling scientific progress. It only took 390 years for the Vatican to forgive Galileo for his heretic assertion that the Earth revolved around the sun in 1615. Giordano Bruno was a real heretic in comparison and has yet to be forgiven. On Ash Wednesday, 17 February 1600, in the Campo de' Fiori (a central Roman market square), with his "tongue imprisoned because of his wicked words", Giordano Bruno was hung upside down naked before finally being burned at the stake. Do you think they'll ever forgive Charles Darwin for The Origin of Species? Religious policies causes the unneccesary death and suffering of millions of people. Simply by not endorsing condom use, millions of people will acquire sexually transmitted diseases like AIDS. Religion is the major force for intolerance. The Bible is repeatedly used to assert religious and racial hatred. Each religion is intolerant of any other religion and the Bible states clearly that the non-believers should be killed (Luke 19:27). The Mormons finally accept blacks as real people in 1973 after a Divine Revelation, just before being dragged into the Supreme Court and losing their tax exempt status. Morality has nothing whatsover to do with religion. The Bible is pushed as a way to lead a moral life. You should read it very carefully before adopting it. Religion suppresses equal rights for women. Do you see women priests in the Catholic church? Do you want your wife to wear a burqa?. The Bible clearly states that women are property. ( Corinthian 11:8-9, Tim 2:12 ) In early Christianity, women often are shunted aside. Early theology insisted that women did not possess souls and are inherently evil, because of Eve's original sin of getting Adam to munch on a forbidden apple in the Garden of Eden. It has been said that any culture that denies women equality denies the society half of its dynamic force and creativity. The Holy Inquisition and the Crusades were both faith based initiatives. Both the Inquisition and the Crusades allowed religions to kill, slaughter and torture 1.5 million of their opponents in the name of their loving and compassionate God. The 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington DC were also faith based initiatives. There is no actual evidence or records that Jesus ever existed. All biblical references to Jesus were written 40-300 years later as hearsay. There are no contemporaneous writings about Jesus. There is no actual archeological evidence of The Exodus. There is no archeological evidence of Noah's Ark. There are some 30,000 Christian sects alone. None can agree with each other over one Bible. Can't we all just get along? Religion teaches children that the most important role in their current life is simply to audition for their next life. The religious zealots are killing themselves and us over the issue of who has a more powerful imaginary friend sky fairy . The religious zealots expect us, the rationalists (a.k.a. atheists) to prove that God does not exist. It is they, the religious zealots, that have made the biblical assertion that their God does exist. Such an extraordinary claim must come with extraordinary evidence. They have had 3,000 years to develop such evidence and have yet to uncover a shred or scintila of evidence, but they question evolution, even as evolution has become a secure fact of science over the last 150 years. We atheists are not going to bomb anybody, behead them, stone them, burn them at the stake, crucify them, or fly planes into their skyscrapers, just because of a theological disagreement. Imagine No Religion Nothing to kill or die for. The concept of Jews, Muslims, Catholics, Protestants disappear. Scientific advancement would accelerate significantly. We could focus on science to solve our problems as we remain stuck on The Pale Blue Dot. All the time, money and effort spent on superstitious beliefs could be focused on building a better world for yourself. No more supernatural fearmongering. No more morbid fixation on what happens after death. So why are we losing our religion? The global economic collapse certainly seems to have triggered a collective loss of faith in figures of authority in every sector of society, and the process of globalization also sped up the process of ‘atheisisation’. If atheists were a homgeneous group, the collapse of religion would accelerate. The proliferation of the world wide web has exacerbated the process eroding religious faith in the west. Religions have depended on the relative isolation and ignorance of their flocks, forever, and this is all breaking down. Churches evolved in a low information environment, where it was easy to keep the members ignorant both of the existence of other creeds and the actual tenents of their own. The internet is eroding this isolation and the churches are having difficulty adapting. There is some truth in the adage that the internet is where religion goes to die. Mark Twain's view of religion We deal in a curious and laughable confusion of notions concerning God. We divide Him in two, bring half of Him down to an obscure and infinitesimal corner of the world to confer salvation upon a little colony of Jews—and only Jews, no one else—and leave the other half of Him throned in heaven and looking down and eagerly and anxiously watching for results. We reverently study the history of the earthly half, and deduce from it the conviction that the earthly half has reformed, is equipped with morals and virtues, and in no way resembles the abandoned, malignant half that abides upon the throne. We conceive that the earthly half is just, merciful, charitable, benevolent, forgiving, and full of sympathy for the sufferings of mankind and anxious to remove them. Apparently we deduce this character not by examining facts, but by diligently declining to search them, measure them, and weigh them. The earthly half requires us to be merciful, and sets us an example by inventing a lake of fire and brimstone in which all of us who fail to recognize and worship Him as God are to be burned through all eternity. And not only we, who are offered these terms, are to be thus burned if we neglect them, but also the earlier billions of human beings are to suffer this awful fate, although they all lived and died without ever having heard of Him or the terms at all. This exhibition of mercifulness may be called gorgeous. We have nothing approaching it among human savages, nor among the wild beasts of the jungle.

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