It's not so much that I don't believe there is such a thing as a god as it is I can't believe others believe there is such a thing as a god.
Next couple of paragraphs provide a little background and insight into my beliefs. But it's not terribly important you can skip the background.
I was raised as a catholic in a religious family, I believed in god for the longest time. I went to catholic school, Sunday school, was an Altar Boy at my church and a member of a prayer group. I attended a couple of classes on parapsychology and was fascinated by life after death, NDEs, OBEs and such. So I lived my life with religion all around me, it never made much sense but oh well everyone else believes it how could they all be wrong?
Then in high school I find out about the neurochemical nature of love in a science magazine. I then made the big mistake of trying to prove it to myself, picked the girl I was least attracted to forsaking another I was already attracted to and made a conscious effort to fall in love. Basically I just told myself I loved her, pretended to be in love with her, then eventually (over the summer) it became true. Well I basically became obsessed, had I not been aware it was just an experiment I'm sure it would have been much worse. It was still pretty bad as I skipped many classes just to be near her, but I always kept far enough not to be noticed but close enough to be near her. Sure I proved to myself I could fall in love at will, I also found out you cannot fall out of love at will. It became an addiction, and a powerful one. Unfortunately I did not have the presence of mind to fall in love with something about my perception of her I could change later. I assumed I could fall out of love as easily as falling in. Well that was my first run-in with cognitive science, it left me scarred (literally, apparently true love throws a 14yr old's neurochemistry into a world it's just not ready for and causes a hormonal imbalance resulting in terrible, scarring acne. Man why didn't I try experimenting with infatuation) and expelled (skipped too many classes). After three weeks in a regular school I decided to just take a high school equiv test. I passed it and moved on.
Anyway, after reading James Randi's book about parapsychological fraud, Morton Hunt's book on cognitive science, and a few dozen NOVA shows, Discovery Channel documentaries and a bit of soul searching (Tee hee!) I came to the conclusion that there is no such thing as a soul.
In order for a soul to do what is claimed, and that is survive us, the individual, it would need to be a working copy of our neural networks, still able to take in sensory information and process it. When you see someone who's mentally challenged, is their soul going to survive their damaged or abnormal brain? What about people who are perfectly normal but lose their minds, if their soul was a copy of their mind, how could they have lost the ability to reason? Why when the human brain ceases to function doesn't the soul's brain kick in? Watching people who have lost their minds has left me with the clear impression that there is no backup system.
There are many people like my parapsychology teacher who claim to have been near death at one point, been out of their bodies, seen a tunnel, and a light at the end, and when they reach this light they feel an overwhelming sense of love. NOVA has done a very good job of explaining all aspects of this experience. The loss of oxygen to the brain, the resulting tunnel vision, the feeling of euphoria, the feeling of leaving one's body. They all have perfectly reasonable explanations.
One thing about the Bible is that everyone seems to find different meanings in it to suit their needs. It's especially annoying how Christians, whenever confronted by the impossibility of the stories in the Bible, will generalize the story till it can coexist with it's scientific contradiction, or simply say it was not meant to be taken literally. Well I could point out a million and one verses which prove the Bible to be not only fiction, but dated fiction, such as Gen 1:5 and Gen 1:16. God made night and day, then sometime later he made the sun. This is consistent with the ignorance of the time that this work of fiction was written in and obviously wrong. But I have had some of the more silly Christians come up to me and say it is God's light that caused night and day.
Then there's the idea that blood, human or otherwise, is required by the gods for forgiveness or to appease them. I really have no clue where humans came up with this idea but it seems to come up in every if not most cultures. There is simply no logic to that. Why would an omnipotent being care whether humans killed animals or people in his name? The Aztecs believed that when the sun went down it went to a netherworld where it had to fight battles, and in order for the sun to be able to return a human must be slaughtered and their blood offered to the sun god. Silly beliefs based on superstitions and ignorance. The same with the belief that "Jesus' blood washed away all our sins" what kind of ridiculous nonsense is that? That never made sense to me growing up and it baffles me how people can walk around repeating something that makes no sense. They may as well walk around saying "The banjo gets angry at midnight" it would at least be a nice change of pace from the usual meaningless rhetoric.
I often hear christians argue that without a belief in God, without religion, we would be in a perpetual state of anarchy. Everyone would become a criminal and we'd all basically kill each other. I could not disagree more! In fact it has been my experience that christians are in fact more evil than the evils they try and scare each other with. They believe they can get away wth it if they ask for forgiveness from God.
I would suggest society provide criminals with proper motivation for respecting others' individual rights. For more on how I feel this could be accomplished check out my poltics page.
The following are logical arguments that should help any agnostics clear up their confusion about whether to believe or not, and hopefully provide christians with some food for thought that might lead them to a glimpse of reality.
This is a fun argument! It's fun to use it in response to christians who say god can do anything. Of course there can be no such thing as a square circle. But if even God has to abide by the rules of logic, that means there's a higher power than him. Where did these rules of logic come from?
Christians often use the argument "If you (atheist) are right and there is no God, then nothing is lost by those who believe in God since we will all be dead anyway. But if I (Christian) am right and there is a God, you shall burn in the fires of hell for all eternity. Therefore it is safe to worship God either way, and it's better to be safe than sorry." If you're reading this and that's your only reason for believing in this myth, congratulations, you're about to crossover into reality.. just read on...
Ok, first of all worshiping God just in case he's real so you won't go to hell is wrong in that you're assuming that if it's true, going through the motions but not really believing would fool an omnipotent being into believing you're a devoted follower.
Then you have to ask yourself. What God do I want to pretend to believe in? Well if you want to be fashionably obscure you can believe in the "goddess" and become a wiccan. If you like being judgemental you can be a christian. There are many religions you can belong to out there, many possible Gods. But then how is it safe to believe in a God? How do you know which God to believe in? Buddha, Allah, Tori Amos, Jesus, Krishna, The great spirit? There are many more than those, and nearly every one of them has laws against believing in any other. So how is it safe to believe in God? Lets say you pick a God and you are wrong (And odds are stacked against you when you can only pick one out of hundreds) the real God will be angry with you for believing in a fake God. And if you picked a christian God, and that turns out not to be the right one, then in the light of all the cruel and evil things christians have done to so many other religions, I would not want to be in your shoes. Odds are the real God will hate you especially for being one of the tormenters of his people. So in fact, it would be "safer" to not believe in a God if there was such a thing because if you did, and picked the wrong one, you'd be in a world of hurt!
If God is omniscient and omnipotent, then before he even creates a person he knows whether they will go to hell or not. After all he knows everything, and even though he creates us with free will he knows what the end result will be. So if he goes ahead and creates a person, knowing that they will go to hell, then he is a sadistic bastard. Not to mention the severity of the punishment... "An eternity of torment and suffering" that's hardly fair for something so benign and decidedly un-malicious as asking for so much as a shred of empirical evidence before dedicating one's entire existence to a dated, childish concept such as a supreme being.
The Bible contends that God made the earth and the universe for the benefit of us, humans. He did so in 7 days. Where did the dinosaurs come in? (I have actually had someone suggest to me that dinosaur bones were planted by the devil in order to mislead christians) It has been said that if one were to compress the entire lifetime of our planet to date (not the universe, just the planet) into one 24 hour period, humans would have only existed for the last two seconds of that 24 hour period. 23 hours, 59 minutes and 58 seconds is a large investment of time to get a 2 second usage out of something.
I have come to regard religion, christianity in particular, as such utter nonsense that I find myself rolling my eyes everytime someone expresses a belief in God, souls or an afterlife. I know that's a bit obnoxious but I cannot help but feel contempt for anyone who can continue to believe such tripe in this modern world. I too once believed but I was a child, and to borrow from the bible Corinthians 1 Chapter 13 verse 11; When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things. Won't you show a little self respect, and do the same?
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