20 Reasons I Am godless

religious warHere are 20 reasons I have to be godless. Consider it a work in progress because I'm sure there are plenty of other great reasons I am not thinking of right now. I certainly welcome your suggestions for future lists and refinements.

  1. I understand that Zeus, Santa, the Easter Bunny, Odin, Osiris and all of their ilk are fairy tale characters, stories made up to explain things that weren't known at the time, or to get weak-minded people to do what someone wanted. They are all just stories to tell to children or sheep, to keep them in line or entertain them. Jesus, Yahweh, Allah and Jehovah are no different. I've studied world religions. They're all mythical and steal from each other. They are all about submission and control of simple people through fear and coercion.

  2. I'm curious and inquisitive. I am intelligent. I think for myself. I value logic, critical thinking and common sense. If I don't understand something, I research it. I look for experts to help me figure things out. In other words, if I don't understand something, I don't just say, well, some invisible man in the sky did it and consider it case closed.

  3. I get to sleep in on Sundays, I don't have to wear special, magical underwear or other clothes, I don't have to do weird rituals, I am not forced to give 10% to an organization that is less than ethical, I don't have to drink wine and eat stale crackers that are supposed to be the zombie flesh of a dead prophet, I don't have to kneel and pray to nothing instead of take personal responsibility, etc.

  4. I'm actually HAPPY thinking for myself and living for today. I am not afraid of the wrath of a supreme being who is fickle, has barbaric human emotions and reacts violently to the exertion of free will, which must have been instilled by said supreme being in the first place, if he existed, which he doesn't.

  5. A lot of god's spokesmen are greedy and hypocritical. I would venture to say a great many are unpalatable. I wouldn't want to be friends with them, never mind follow their orders.

  6. Everyone cherry picks from their holy books. If no one can follow the whole book in its entirety, that says something. Like how amazingly contradictory the texts are, not to mention violent, hypocritical and hateful and barbaric.

  7. While it's much harder to think for myself, it's much more rewarding. I get to make my own decisions and form my own beliefs based on evidence, reality, facts and experience.

  8. I am not a sheep. I have no need to follow a shepherd to the slaughter, to be whipped into line through fear and shame. I have no need to be led by a carrot dangling on a stick, an unattainable goal in a distant future, in fact, not until after I'm dead.

  9. I am capable of being moral just for the simple reason that being a good person is its own reward. Jesus did not invent the golden rule. It's much older than christianity. I also believe in the silver rule. They make sense. I don't need fear and shame to force me to make moral, healthy choices for myself and my behaviors. I take responsibility for my actions.

  10. I value the scientific method and am skeptical in nature. There is not one mustard seed of evidence that the supernatural world exists. In fact, by definition the supernatural cannot exist because if it did it would not be super. It would just be natural. Anyway, there's no evidence of gods, fairies, mermaids, leprechauns or ogres. Not one little teeny speck of evidence. Not a hint or a whiff. I value science. It works. It evolves and grows and learns. It's beautiful and awesome and amazing.

  11. Mohammad was a pedophile and so are many priests. All excused away and ignored. Any organization or person that makes excuses and allows the rape of innocent children is reprehensible and therefore has no right to teach morals to anyone. Also, the bible condones slavery. Again, unacceptable. They have no business preaching morals and forcing people to follow in their footsteps. The big 3 religions are all based on texts and stories from barbarians. Their gods were created by those barbarians and are flawed, angry, hateful and petty. If I HAD to choose gods to follow, I'd go for the Greek gods. At least the Greeks were intelligent and created gods that were openly flawed and interesting.

  12. I prefer not to live my life based on ignorance, fear and guilt.

  13. I am not willing to get my morals from a complete hypocrite. I don't want a two-faced greedy liar to tell me how to live my life. I choose to decide for myself.

  14. My decisions are not based on how they affect some all powerful being in the sky who has a notoriously bad temper. My decisions are based in reality.

  15. I don't need imaginary friends to hold my hand and tell me what to do or what to think. There's medication for that mental illness now. I hear it's quite effective. I have real friends who actually help me. No need of invisible ones who won't actually help me move or bring me soup when I'm sick.

  16. Math and science work. Prayer? Not so much. It's just a way to be helpless and pretend you're helping when you are not.

  17. Atheism never started a war. Religion has started so many wars... to kill other people who happened to believe in a different invisible man in the sky. There are wars right now over who's invisible friend is the best. It's the 21st freaking century. That's insane.

  18. I thank myself and my husband for every meal I have, because I cooked it and we paid for the groceries.  We made it happen through hard work. I thank the coach and the players on my team that won, because they are the ones that did the hard work, the people who actually won, not an invisible man in the sky who happens to like the same team as me.

  19. I don't have to strap a bomb on to go blow up a school bus. Being godless I am free of this kind of stupid insanity.

  20. I'm emotionally mature enough to be happy with one life. I don't need fear of eternal damnation, or promise of future reward in a boring heaven on my knees supplicating myself to a god for all eternity, to get me through the day. I understand that no one, not one single person, knows what happens when we die, but that it happens to all of us. It's a natural process, not supernatural.

15 comments:

  1. Very well done. I applaud you.

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  2. [...] I just found another fun blog, with yesterday’s post “20 Reasons I am godless”.   Good stuff there, if you review previous [...]

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  3. I wonder what you think about deism. I derive my beliefs from logic and am a huge fan of John Locke's Second Treatise. Deism, like atheism, is an individual religion, which entails no rituals or restrictions. I too am a huge supporter of the Silver Rule and never live my live based on fear.

    I have a feeling that what you should be ranting about is not the belief in a god but instead following an institutionalized religion that relies on fear and such to try and control people's lives. The two are not mutually inclusive.

    Sort of unrelated, what operating system do you use on your computer? Anyone that truly has the capability of logic will not use Windows or OSX. Just wondering; If it's not open-source, you are being controlled by fear, uncertainty, and doubt. You don't want that, do you?

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  4. Thanks, Dub, I appreciate it! :D

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  5. Hi Xv, thanks for commenting.
    What do I think about deism? Well, if you proved to me that there was a creator of the universe, deism would be the way to go, from what I know of it. Number 10 does address that issue though, in that I see no evidence of any god in any form. There simply is no proof of a supreme being, so I have no need to believe in one in any form.
    From my personal perspective I see deism as a way to feel less lonely in the universe. But I would be interested to know more about it. If you ever feel like submitting an article about deism, I'd be most interested to post it. I certainly like your style.
    You're right though, a lot of my reasons are about the formal religions, not so much about the god itself. I think that's because number 10 covers that for me. No evidence of god = no god.
    You cracked me up with the last bit. I lol'd when I read about the operating system analogy. I have to admit, I use microsuck windblows. I only have a lame excuse for it, too. I grew up on windows, and all my software is for this OS. So I'm heavily invested in it, financially. Plus, I'm a Photoshop Whore; been using it since 1993. I have tried a: the gimp and found it lacking, and b: ubuntu and found it incomprehensible and extremely buggy. With windows at least i know enough to be able to get it to work most of the time. with linux, it was so alien that i never got it working at all. That's not to say that I won't try it again, but I have yet to find a way out of windows. At least I've tried to escape the tyranny of microsuck, but so far no luck. Their gravitational pull sucks me back each time I try to escape.
    I need a linux geek who is willing to patiently convert me through education and understanding. (hint hint!)
    Thank you very much again for your comment, Xv. You stimulated my brain cells! :D

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  6. You are very right when you say the supernatural cannot exist because it would then simply be natural. First of all I want you to realize that my belief of some sort of underlying power is based on logic that in my opinion tips it just enough over for me to be deist instead of atheist. It probably doesn't affect how I live in any way, it simply is what I have found that seems the closest to the truth.

    I also want you to realize I have no need to convert anyone to deism. In my opinion religion should be an independent explanation of things to the best of anyone's abilities, and since we all see the universe differently, it will be different for everyone. This is natural and part of human nature. Blind ignorance, however, is not (but of course you already know this!)

    Personally I have theorized much about the natural state of man -- entirely free. Unfortunately history has shown us that men cannot simply coexist doing whatsoever they want without regard to consequence. Morality is important because it shows us how bad decisions may affect other people adversely, this matters as long as you believe all men are equal. One man is hungry, so he steals another's food. Is this moral? Is this just? Obviously not, but it's a tricky situation, really. When I read John Locke's second treatise on civil government, I saw he was going into the same sort of stuff I was thinking about -- the "state of nature", as Locke calls it, is the natural state men are in. He defined three "laws of nature" (I think he calls it that) that show what men cannot morally do. If men break one of these laws of nature, they have shown themselves irrational and other men may, using "executive power", do what is needed to stop the irrational behavior. John Locke derives all of this from logic very soundly, I advise you to read it if you haven't. He goes on to explain how just governments are created (through a social contract) and how and when governments should end. He explains how when entering a social contract, man gives up some of his executive power to benefit the whole. But the one thing he assumed out of all of this was the existence of a higher power of some sort that created man and that man derived his executive power from. He treated it like a logical axiom of sorts that worked together very perfectly. The laws of nature state that men cannot morally take the 1) life 2) liberty or 3) property away from another unwillingly. Locke said that these laws should be apparent to any man with logical reasoning. In a way, how a higher power fit so nicely with morality, it was the first time I really considered deism (being agnostic beforehand).

    I probably don't do it justice with my explanation, however. And if you're a moral relativist, it probably won't mean anything to you. Again, I'm not here to prove to you that there is a supernatural being, only to show you that there are circumstances (although how few they may be!) where a higher natural power makes logical sense.

    Back to the windows situation, if you don't mind :)
    I too stuck with it until late 2007; I found that was the turning point when things worked out for me. Maybe now is a good time to try again, when you have the time. Photoshop supposedly works great with a program called wine (check here: http://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=version&iId=2631 )

    I have lots of problems with Microsoft however; they try to tell you how to run your computer, they continually can get away with releasing crappy products, and making someone pay for lines of code you can copy in seconds seems silly to me. Again, not here to convert you to deism, but to convert you to Linux, I might try just that :P

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  7. Hey Xv :)
    I am wondering, is deism a religion at all? Perhaps it's just a belief? Do you have a church? Do you follow the bible? If you just have a belief with no dogma, no church, no worship, then I wouldn't really call it a religion.

    I'll look into John Locke, thanks for the reference. Morals have been around as long as people have been co-existing. The basics are universal, as Locke seemed to have figured out. But putting a god in the mix doesn't change anything and is definitely not needed in the recipe. I am proof of that because I am moral and I am godless, as is my husband and other atheists that I know.

    If you feel a higher power makes logical sense, that's ok with me, as long as you're not forcing your logic down my throat, which you don't seem to be doing at all. But I am not sure I follow that logic from what you have here. Like I said, in the case of morality, god is not needed at all, in fact when mixed with the major religions, god and morality are pretty much a recipe for disaster and cruelty to humans, animals and the planet, in my experience.

    Now, about linux. I tried wine and there was another one I tried too, I found out about it on Lifehacker. It was a program to run windows and any windows programs inside of linux. I can't remember the name. Neither worked no matter how hard I tried to figure them out and get them to run. When I was running linux, I felt like I had been dumped in the middle of Botswana with no translator and no language dictionary. All I had were my wits, and they were insufficient to overcome all of the problems and bugs and nonworking issues I had. Someday I'd like to try again though. But not any time soon, not till I have a geek who will talk me through it. Everyone should have a geek as a best friend. Would you like an application? LOL :P

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  8. Heheh, no problem really. If you want to contact me further, my email is xvedejas@gmail.com -- it seems like I've made this discussion a bit too long for just the comments section.

    I suppose I call it a religion just to show its an alternative to those cult religions. I really don't care what you call it in the end.

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  9. Ref. point 17 - what about Hitler , Stalin , Pol Pot ?

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  10. Love it. Those are pretty much the reasons I stand by also. There are more, but I love it. Well done!

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  11. Does Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot did what they did in the name of atheism? They were monsters who just happened to be atheist. They also had dark hair...

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  12. Oh they DID all have dark hair! And they were all MEN, too! OMI! But seriously, Stalin and Pol Pot didn't do what they did in the name of religion. And Hitler was a christian, not an atheist. He belongs to the religious monsters, not the atheists.

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  13. Thanks Eric. I'd love to know what you'd add. I would like to do a second list. If you have some good suggestions, I'm all ears!

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  14. "...zombie flesh of a dead prophet." Hahahahahaha. That's great. (still laughing).

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