Religion is Brilliant

Modern religion is a very well designed system that is quite brilliant.
It's been around a very long time and has been carefully crafted into a nearly perfect system that is:

• hard to refute because there's nothing tangible or verifiable, it's all "in your heart"
• comforting to believe in
• self perpetuating
• effectively supported by confirmation bias and many other logical fallacies

It's grown over a long time, and one religion spawns another. Probably as long as people have been around, there has been some form of religion.

It was probably as simple as someone answering questions about thunder and the tribe listen to him, he becomes a holy man, and it spreads.
The first gods were responsible for answering all the tough mysteries.
The priests were the go betweens, and they probably quickly realized they had power over the common people and could manipulate them easily.

So each priesthood  picked the best ways to perpetuate the religion and keep the priests in power. Most religions follow the same basic rules, probably created through trial and error, basically the evolution of religion based on how our "believing brain" works.

The way religion is set up:

• you can't question whether there is a god or not
• you can't argue against faith/god
• it works great for parents to indoctrinate their children because it's like a free babysitter, the fear of punishment by someone who sees everything
• it answers man's greatest fear: what happens when you die
• you get to live forever, which is great if you follow the rules
• it's a great motivator to be good because of eternal punishment
• you don't have to think for yourself (in fact you're encouraged not to). You're told all the rules that you need to follow. 
• it's easy. Your religion gives you your morals and rules to live by. 

Why it's hard to refute

• people are indoctrinated from birth
• it's cultural/societal, the majority in a given area follows the same religion
• it's part of peoples' basic beliefs. it's often their foundation
• we are by nature easily deluded when we like something. we easily use confirmation bias and all the other logical fallacies to back up what we already want to believe
• people can rationalize almost anything when they believe it. 
• the belief comes first, the rationalizations follow
• cognitive dissonance allows us to hold opposing ideas and information in our minds at the same time
• every good event is attributed to god favorably, but every bad event is the person's fault for breaking the rules.
• Satan is also easy to blame 
• all questions are answered with "god works in mysterious ways" and "god did it"
• it's easy, you don't have to question anything
• the fear of death is the biggest motivator. so it really drives people to comfortable answers. you get to live forever.
• god takes care of you and watches out for you. You have a father figure taking care of you all the time
• the flip side is that god keeps you in line by watching you all the time
• you don't have to take responsibility for anything

Please feel free to add to this. I know it's not complete.

My Pareidolia Has Produced a Miracle!

Recently, I shared my blessing with you of Jesus showing himself to me in a picture in my dining room of pond scum on a creek. I was amazed at your lack of Faith. No one else saw Jesus but me. But that did not deter me! I knew I had a Genuine Miracle in my presence. So I prayed and waited for the Blessings to start rolling in. (and by pray, I mean I sarcastically blogged about it and then promptly forgot about it)

Well here's a big one! My dear husband Butch got a job! He had one but he was offered a better one. Which means he was able to quit the old one that he hated. God always provides!

Of course, my confirmation bias sees the recent pareidolia from August 31 and Butch being offered a job a week later as being magically related. And of course, I have (conveniently) forgotten that Butch had just applied for the job (his mundane, human actions), that he had been looking for a job for quite a few months, and that he had the requisite skills gleaned over many years of hard work to attract the new employer.

In other words, Butch took all the boring, time consuming steps needed to get hired. But I don't have to think about his intelligence, technical skills, people skills and persistence. No, of course not. I just know that Jesus provided through my Faith and Devotion.

Ugh, I think I just threw up in my mouth a little. First, it's incredibly insulting to Butch to ignore all of  his efforts to pin all the accolades on Jesus, an invisible, evidence-free friend who gets all the glory when things go well, and never gets blamed when bad stuff happens.

That is really the evil genius of religion. Whoever first came up with that slick bit of mind-twisting psychology obviously skyrocketed to the top of the game. Heads Jesus wins; Tails you lose. But Jesus loves you and will give you rewards after you are dead. Of course, you'll be dead so you will never know if you wasted your life in servitude for a bucket of lies.  Oh, and don't forget, if you don't love Jesus, he will make you burn in hell forever and ever. How can you pass this deal up?

Oh, you need evidence. I see. That's against the rules. God says you have to have faith. See how I move the goalposts so it always goes my way? Pretty sneaky, aren't I? It's evil genius, playing off of our human weaknesses. Brilliant!

Preying on the Weak

Yesterday I was 'blessed' to receive the following letter. Lucky for me (and you!) I opened it.

Of note on the front of the envelope:

• Postage states this is a nonprophet organization (pun intended)


• A 'very old church' - ooh.. must be hundreds of years old, maybe even going all the way back to Jesus' time!


• Vague message. What does it mean to be blessed, anyway?


• My home first! I'm so blessed!


• Someone went super crazy with the red highlighter. Calm down and step away from the office supplies, Jesus Christ!

The back of the envelope is really trying to get my attention, if the front wasn't enough.

Of note on the back of the envelope:

• Very smart. They give me web addresses I can go to.


• More red underlining. Ok, Jesus. Calm the feck down.


• Oh! the letter is blessed! Awesome!


• Very vague

The two websites are similar. They have a lot of bible verses, text in bold, and text in red. They say if you send in your prayer to them, they will pray 5 times a day for you.

BiblicalPrayer.com offers a free gift, a Blessed Cross,  "one of the most beautiful crosses in the world" which looks cheap even in the pictures. It seems like you can get it for free. In the envelope they have for you to print out to send in your request, there's nothing in there about a donation. Even the postage is paid for you.

Apparently, this church started in 1951. That's not what I'd call "very old". They say on the one site that they used to have revivals where up to 20,000 church members would come. Now, for some reason instead of continuing with those, they are mainly by mail. The sentence sort of just ends at the bottom of the page so they don't explain.

Ok, on to the letter that came in the envelope!

The Great Prayer Experiment

I was told by a religious friend of mine recently that I had nothing to lose by reaching out to God and praying. If there's no God (which is my position, as you know), then saying a prayer does nothing but take up a minute or two of my time. But if God exists (and of course, she means her Abrahamic god), then I have everything to gain, because her god is a god of Love.

After thinking about it for awhile, I had to agree with her. There really is nothing to lose by praying. As a skeptic, sometimes you have to do research. So I thought I'd do an experiment with God.

Here is how I did it. First, she supplied me with a prayer by a former atheist who, once he said this, found God reaching out to him. So it (anecdotally) worked once already. Unfortunately his prayer would have been untrue for me.

Here it is as he said it originally:

Dear God,

I know (because I can prove it with the certainty that a geometer can prove opposite angles are equal) that you do not exist. Nevertheless, as a scholar I am forced to entertain the hypothetical possibility that I am mistaken. So just in case I am mistaken, please reveal yourself to me in some fashion that will prove your case.

If you do not answer, I can safely assume that either you do not care whether I believe in you or you have no power to produce evidence to persuade me. The former argues you are not beneficent, the latter not omnipotent - in either case, unworthy of worship. If you do not exist, this prayer is merely words in the air, and I lose nothing but a bit of my dignity. Thanking you in advance for your kind cooperation in this matter,

John Wright

First, in my view, John is wrong. As we just discussed in the comments of a previous article, there are atheists who feel we can "know" God doesn't exist. I'm not one of them. I come from the standpoint that you can't prove a negative (and the burden of proof lies on the person making the positive claim, so you don't have to)  Anyway, I can't say the first line. And I think he is weak in his request. He sets it up so that God can be any kind of confirmation bias (a pet peeve of mine). So I rewrote it a bit differently.

Some of his second paragraph is pretty good so I used it. Here is the prayer I came up with:

A Disconnect

I noticed something a few minutes ago that I'd like to share with you. Now I know this might seem extremely obvious, but I just got a real glimpse of the cavernous disconnect between how atheists and believers see God and the universe.

As you know, I am a skeptical atheist. I feel that science is the best way for us to understand the universe. It's not perfect but it's the best tool we have. And it's self-correcting, which is quite necessary since humans do science and we make mistakes and have biases, etc. One of the main reasons I am an atheist is that there is no evidence of any gods. In fact, there is zero evidence in all the universe of anything supernatural. It's that simple.

I have noticed in talking to religious people that they come at things from a very different perspective, worlds apart from where atheists are. From what I gather, they see God as Love. They rely heavily on Confirmation Bias so that everything that is good goes in the God column and everything that is bad goes into the Free Will/God works in mysterious ways column. It's very simplistic. And the system reinforces itself all the time. And it's based on emotions and feelings and faith, not on reason. So it feels good.

People who are religious and/or superstitious come from the worldview that there is a supernatural component to the world. Using confirmation bias as well as not understanding that improbable things happen every day all over the world (it's just statistics - not my strong point, so feel free to comment with more information on this), they believe they see evidence of the supernatural in their lives. Somehow they even extrapolate this to include something that there is also no evidence for, an afterlife, the continuation of consciousness after death. (at this point, we can't prove or disprove the afterlife since we can't test for it, but so far there's no good evidence for it) (edit: the burden of proof is on the believers to prove that there is an afterlife, since you can't prove a negative.)

Of course, this is faulty reasoning, but it's understandable how most people would fall into this trap.

Atheists read holy books in their entirety and see the god of these books as hateful, cruel, jealous and very much made in man's image.

Religious people read the parts of their holy books that give them the message they are looking for, then carefully interpret that into what they want it to say. This is classic Cherry-Picking.

When atheists and scientists don't understand something, we try to find a way to figure it out. We investigate, explore, observe, experiment. We understand our perceptions and memories are faulty so we look for answers to our questions through these methods.

When believers don't understand something they cop out and just say, "well then God did it." They aren't curious in this area. This is devastatingly limiting to the advancement of our species, science and our understanding of the world.

These are just a few glaring examples. What other ways do religious people and atheists have wildly opposing worldviews?