If All The World Forgot Your God He Would Not Be Remembered

This religion thing really holds us back and the older I get the harder it is to see religion as a positive influence in any way. It really is a shame because religion provides people with a sense of community, of greater identity and destiny and can also help prompt people to give to charitable causes and get more involved with their fellow human beings. However religion also tends to hi-jack your identity and establish itself as an indispensable cornerstone not just of your individual life but of human civilization and society as a whole.


Religion takes certain functions that a normal secular community organization might perform. It feeds the hungry, gives money to causes, organizes community wide events, etc etc. So when it is pointed out that the ideas at the heart of religion, the doctrines and claims made about supernatural phenomenon, are actually false or at the very least unfalsifiable, people use the positive functions that religion has adopted as a shield.


And it works both ways. For when churches and sects of Christianity fail to properly execute these borrowed parts of society people will claim that religion isn't really ABOUT ALL THAT and is really about the message of Jesus' love. For example let's say a Mega Church Televangelist asks his congregation for money and uses that money on opulent hotel suites, private jets and high end prostitutes. When the transgressing Televangelist is at last discovered in his sin the excuse is that “not all churches are like that” and that “no true Christian behaves that way. This person is just in it for the money!”


Thus religion can shield itself from any ugly truth by being a chameleon, or more accurately a Chimera. This is why there are so many thousands of differing views, sects and denominations of the Christian faith, because over the years Christianity has developed a flavor for almost anyone. Hell there are even Christian Atheists, a term that seems an oxymoron at first glance.


The Catholic Church is a great example of religion hiding behind just how fiercely it is embedded into society and the collective consciousness.


The Catholic Church was once the authority on what people were allowed to believe. As many nations had officially adopted Catholicism there were times in European history where questioning and speaking against the Orthodoxy of the Church was punishable by death. Galileo, whose famous observations definitively overturned centuries of false geocentric dogma, was a victim of this very tyranny. The Christian faith, as a whole, not just in regards to the Catholics, made it quite clear that the average believer was not allowed to engage in free thinking when it came to their beliefs. While theologians often questioned and decided in committee various points of doctrine questioning whatever they ordained orthodox was not allowed.


Religion established that to question the truths it put forth was taboo, forbidden, and might get you killed or at the very least run out of town and cast out of society. Religion is thus made an intimate part of people's lives and their base of knowledge, so that questioning its truths was seen as more perverse and foolish than even questioning mathematics or logic. Whatever you believe, the truths of religion were above that, they were sacred.


I personally take offense to the idea that any idea can be sacred. In point of fact I hold that the only sacred truth is that no truth is sacred. Sacred here meaning above reproach or above disposal. We should be ready, at all times, to throw out utterly any truth shown to be false and to only adopt new truths tentatively and with an understanding that they might be temporary.


So when people say that we cannot or should not tear down the Catholic Church for their organized and merciless cover-up of institutionalized child molestation I can only assume that they are operating from the point of view that the Catholic Church represents core sacred truths that must be defended. But I find it insulting that those in power at the Vatican hide behind the centuries of mind-control they have instilled in the poor folks of Europe and the Americas to get away with their sinister criminal enterprise.


Make no mistake about it that the Catholic Church is, and always has been, a Criminal Organization designed to procure opulence, wealth, and influence. That last piece may seem like a rather minor one, influence, but it is actually the main currency that the Catholic Church uses to buy its immunity from both public scrutiny and international outrage.


By embedding itself so deeply in people's identities and lives religion assures that although the ideas at its core are untrue and often rotten that it will be defended and believed in for centuries to come. And yes despite moderate announcements to the contrary religious truths are often rotten to the core. If the Bible were not widely believed before being read, that is to say if an ordinary morally decent person were able to mature first and then encounter the Bible and read it, there would be no one on planet Earth defending the Bible as some source of truth, moral or otherwise.


The older I get the more it disgusts me to have to be discussing this stuff in the twenty-first century when our thinking should have gone far beyond the minor desert god El/Yahweh about whom ancient peoples in the Middle East wrote legends and stories. Allegories and fables with lessons and morals long outdated and lacking in use for modern humans as anything other than literary curiosities and mythological vestiges of when people were foolish enough to hold things as sacred or self-evident.


We are better than this as a species and as a culture. We will not move forward until we strip away the respect and protection that has been given to religious ideas under the guise of protecting people's feelings. Hell Churches are often exempt from TAXES! Although it is an uphill battle that will likely see little progress in any of our lifetimes I think it is necessary if the human race is to have any hope of moving on from this planet and making our destiny a positive one. We must emphasize that while it is your right and your “choice” to believe whatever you want that you live in a society of other beings who must interact with you and if your beliefs and superstitions continue to get in the way of normal progress, of scientific inquiry, of education, of social equality like gay marriage and LGBT rights you will not be unopposed.


Far from sacred religious ideas are often the most suspect, most superstitious and most often disproved. Just as the geocentric model was overturned by Galileo. Just as the idea that disease was caused by evil spirits was replaced by Germ Theory. Just as the magical spoken incantation that created life in Genesis has been overturned. We should not defend or leave un-assailed ideas that assert themselves as sacred. All ideas are open to scrutiny, and the fact that religious ideas resist this openness is a telling sign that those that laid the framework of religion and those that maintain that framework, the Apologists, Popes and Preachers, in some way know that it's all bullshit.



We will stop you, one day, from poisoning the minds of generation after generation and helping to squander the hopes of the entire human race. And this goes for all fundamental and supposedly sacred truths of politics as well, for politics is just as damaging and is holding us back just as much as religion is, if not more... but that is a discussion for another time and perhaps a different blog entirely...

Authors Note:

Okay so I haven't done a post here in a few years but I plan to start doing them semi-regularly, whenever I have something to say about Christianity or atheism that doesn't really fit for a hub on hubpages. By the way that's where I've been for anyone reading this or discovering this blog today I do most of my writing about atheism/theism on http://titen-sxull.hubpages.com/

Also I didn't draw any fun MS Paint stuff for this one, which used to be my MO on this blog way back in the day. So here's one I did recently for hubpages, just threw it together, it has no correlation to the post above:

Stay tuned for more ramblings in the future...

The Doctrine of a Literal Hell

The Doctrine of a Literal Fiery Hell

There are a great deal of modern day Christians who reject the doctrine we are going to discuss today. Most Christians do not believe that Hell is a literal place of fiery torment where little satyr pan-demons poke you with a fork. The cartoonish depictions often ascribed to Hell come, mainly, from Greek ideas of the Underworld.

You might have noticed that Hell doesn't get mentioned much in the Old Testament, only a few very loosely interpreted scriptures even make reference to such a place. It isn't until the New Testament, much of which was transcribed by Greeks, that Hell becomes the Lake of Fire we all know and love. This borrowed from Hades, the Greek Underworld guarded by another thing we all know and love, the three headed hellhound Cerberus.

But the Doctrine of the literal ETERNAL hellfire is one of the hallmarks of fundamentalist literalist Christianity and it will be the subject of today's tirade.

By far the idea of Hell is one of the most frustratingly stupid scare tactics ever fabricated by religion. The idea that a God can both love you unconditionally and be willing to punish you continuously for eternity is as paradoxical as can be. When I was a Christian I didn't see that big of a deal about it, mainly because I was afraid to voice the gnawing concern that the idea of Hell was bullshit - because I didn't want to go there.

Why would a loving God send you to eternal Hell for some simple sins?

Apologists will say things like:

Because sin must be separate from God

or

You have freewill, he's given you the right to choose him or Hell.

Well what kind of a God gives you freewill and sends you into a world crammed full of sin and populated by dozens of other religions and expects you to navigate that minefield in one lifetime or else you get an eternity of flesh-melting teeth-gnashing blood-boiling Hellfire? So God has granted us freewill but he demands, under penalty of eternal hellfire, that we exercise that freewill by accepting Jesus and serving him. How is that freedom of choice? There are only two choices in that system, obey or burn.

Another reason for Hell that is brought up by Christians is the idea that God is Just and must punish sin. The idea is that God cannot simply forgive all the sin in the world, someone needs to be punished for it. Who do CHRISTians think carried their sin? The hint is in the name.

So God impregnates a virgin with one third of himself who is also his own son. This Son-God in a human body then dies for the sins of the world. But wait, SIN is meant to carry an ETERNAL punishment - it doesn't just carry a death sentence (although the wages of sin IS Death) it also carries an eternal after-life sentence. So does Jesus's death really cover the sin? And how is it Justice to send an innocent man to die on my behalf? That wouldn't hold up in any court of law. It's the equivalent of a murderer getting acquitted even after he confesses and the judge sending his own son to be punished on the murderer's behalf. Christians seem to love this idea, the idea that they are scum who don't deserve God's love or Jesus's sacrifice. That's how Christianity works, it destroys the self-esteem and self-reliance of the individual and replaces it with the desperate need for this imaginary friend (Jesus).

And what's worse is that the whole Jesus ordeal shows once again how bad of a Father Yahweh truly is. Rather than find another, more effective way, to forgive sins Yahweh decides to sacrifice his own Son. Everyone knows John 3:16 starts

God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son....

This is the same planet he had FLOODED, the same people he had DROWNED are now more valuable to him than his own child (Jesus).

Revelation 21:8 is probably my favorite verse for illustrating the bullshit of the doctrine of Hell. It records all of the sorts of people who will get tossed in with the devil and his angels to endure eternal torment.



The truth is that a being, in order to punish anyone for all eternity, would HAVE to be evil or at the very least be capable of evil. Even I, as a flawed human being, could never think of an offense for which an eternity of punishment was deserved. Even Hitler, for all his evil, might only deserve eleven million lifetimes worth of punishment, one lifetime for each person he sent to their death in the Holocaust. Even Hitler, for all his evil, does not deserve infinite punishment. Infinite punishment for a finite list of sins can never justice, especially when that punishment isn't merely rotting in a prison cell, but is being tortured in a Lake of Fire continuously.



An All-Powerful being, in order to allow something to happen, must also WANT that something to happen. For instance if I watch someone get hit by a car and do not act in time to push them out of the way there are numerous reasons why I might have failed to save them. But an all-powerful being stands aside and allows tragedy to happen purposefully. If an all-powerful being exists nothing, not even measly human freewill, could ever trump the power and divine Will of THE GOD of the UNIVERSE.



So why would any being ever be sent to Hell? Once again Yahweh fails miserably, his best laid plan, to send Jesus, will fail. According to Revelations only 144,000 will make it into Heaven and if you look at how simple some of the sins that God can damn you for are it starts to make sense why the Heavenly City will be such an exclusive club.

The Doctrine of Hell is one of the most morally disturbing ideas in religion and I feel that even most believers understand that. That, of course, does not stop them from using the threat of hell as a scare tactic to keep you in the pew feeding from the mouth of madness.

I leave you with a verse from 2nd Peter Chapter 3 verse 9

"The Lord is not slow in keeping his promise, as some understand slowness. He is patient with you, not wanting anyone to perish, but everyone to come to repentance."

If God doesn't want anyone to perish. If he doesn't want anyone in Hell. Than why is he willing to send them there at all? And why is the best plan he could come up with to send Jesus, leave no evidence behind and demand we be gullible enough to believe in Christ sans any evidence at all? Doesn't God know that his plan isn't working?

The best laid plans of Yahweh and Yeshua...

America is NOT a Christian Nation

America is not a Christian Nation

Being an American there is an easily detectable conspiracy amidst believers to spread a myth about America's origins. According to right-wing Christians America is a Christian nation founded on Judeo-Christian principles.

The first part of this myth I want to put to bed is the idea that America is a Christian nation. This can be killed off by a simple Google Search to find the Treaty of Tripoli. Signed by President John Adams the treaty destroys any notion that we were established as a specifically Christian nation.

The following text is from Article Eleven of the Treaty of Tripoli:

"Art. 11. As the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion,—as it has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion, or tranquility, of Mussulmen,—and as the said States never entered into any war or act of hostility against any Mahometan nation, it is declared by the parties that no pretext arising from religious opinions shall ever produce an interruption of the harmony existing between the two countries."

I want to further show, however, to these fundamentalist morons, that the Bible has had almost NO influence over our laws OR our Constitution.



As you can see from the above photo the Bill of Rights says nothing about America being a Christian nation and appears more AGAINST Judeo-Christian values than for them. Rather than shoving religion down the throat of all godless heathens and sinister idol worshipping pagans the Bill of Rights establishes free religion. Notice that nowhere does it say that:

People who work on the Sabbath should be killed. (Exodus 31:12-15)

Women who are not virgins on their wedding night should be stoned. This is in the wonderfully rich chapter Deuteronomy 22 where the following other gems can be found:

- The penalty for adultery is death for both the cheater and the woman he cheated with

- A virgin pledged to be married who is raped before her wedding night inside a city BUT fails to cry out is to be STONED TO DEATH with her attacker.




Notice that in the verse about a virgin who is raped the man is put to death ONLY for having sex with "another man's wife" NOT for the crime of RAPE. Women are apparently possessions to these people. Is this truly the gold standard of morality that theists want us to believe it is? Has the Christian right even sat down and read their Bibles?

As for the claim that our LAWS are based on Judeo-Christian values I submit to you the very simple story of the wise King Solomon and the baby he demands be sawn in half. I can hear the theists reading this screaming already "BUT THE BABY ISN'T KILLED, HE DOES THIS TO BLAH BLAH BLAH" - I KNOW but the story is still absurd and would never slide in an American court. Could you imagine how outrageous it would be? The Judge would be disbarred immediately!

The story, for those who don't know, is about two women who come before King Solomon both claiming ownership of the same infant. Solomon sees no way to determine who truly is the Mother and rightful guardian so he suggests the infant be cut in half so each woman could have a half of the baby. Amazingly only ONE woman immediately cries out that this is a terrible idea. Why did the other one want the baby if she was okay with it being cut in half?

Many Christians claim that it is the NEW testament we base our laws on but this is not true. In this they may have a point, after all the Apostle Paul tells Slaves or Obey their masters in Colossians 3:22 and slavery was, unfortunately, a part of this country's laws. So on that point they can claim they are right but then again its not exactly good to want slavery is it? More on that in my next post (which will be about, you guessed it, slavery in the Bible).

Another repugnant claim made is that we are one nation Under God and that In God We Trust should be our motto. Many folks believe those words with as much conviction as they believe in Jesus himself or that the sun will rise tomorrow. Little do they know that it wasn't added to our coins until a surge of religiosity during the Civil War and it wasn't added to paper money until another surge during the anti-Communist era (in 1957). Three years before that, in 1954, was when the words UNDER GOD were added to the pledge in order to set us apart from the "godless" communists. Neither motto or idea are originally American and neither reflect the Freedom of Religion that forms a corner-stone of our society.

America is NOT a Christian nation...

I present you with the words of Thomas Paine, one of the free thinkers that led to the American Revolution and his thoughts on the Bible:

"Whenever we read the obscene stories, the voluptuous debaucheries, the cruel and tortuous executions, the unrelenting vindictiveness with which more than half the Bible is filled, it would be more consistent that we call it the word of a demon than the word of God. It is a history of wickedness that has served to corrupt and brutalize mankind; and, for my part, I sincerely detest it, as I detest everything that is cruel." - From Thomas Paine's the Age of Reason

That's exactly what we are still in need of Thomas, an Age of Reason, we didn't see it in your lifetime and I'm still waiting for it in mine. We still live in a world guided by the superstitious and fearful, the indoctrinated sheep who grow old believing in fairy tales. But I digress...

Yahweh is a Baby Killer

Today I'd like to talk about Yahweh, the God of the Old Testament, also sometimes referred to as El, Elohim, the big G, the alpha the omega, you get the idea. In particular I want to focus on the peculiar tendency of Yahweh to either kill, or command his people to kill, innocent children. I think that first its important to establish that according to most current Christian theology a child below a certain age cannot be held accountable for their sins. In the old testament however it seems the sins of the father really are passed onto the sons and Yahweh doesn't even shed a tear as he visits horrible punishment against innocent children.

If any one of us decided to kill a kid, for whatever reason, you can bet we'd end up in prison for the rest of our lives. Yahweh, on the other hand, abides by an apparently different set of rules. What would constitute a sin of the highest order if a mortal committed it is apparently not a sin when a Holy and Loving God commits it. There in lies the conundrum as far as I'm concerned, exactly how does killing a child become LESS sinful when the being committing it is MORE Holy? Shouldn't it be the other way around? Should Yahweh really be allowed to breach his own commandments with impunity (and command the Israelites to do the same)?

Let's take a look at case number 1 from Samuel 15 Verse 1-3:
1 Samuel said to Saul, "I am the one the LORD sent to anoint you king over his people Israel; so listen now to the message from the LORD. 2 This is what the LORD Almighty says: 'I will punish the Amalekites for what they did to Israel when they waylaid them as they came up from Egypt. 3 Now go, attack the Amalekites and totally destroy everything that belongs to them. Do not spare them; put to death men and women, children and infants, cattle and sheep, camels and donkeys.' "

Here is God commanding that the Israelites go out and slaughter and once again God must appoint a metatron, a prophet, to speak for him. Apparently Yahweh had laryngitis that week and had to hire a helper. Apologists will likely be quick to scream "Wait, the Amalekites deserved to be punished, the verse even says they came against the Israelites". On some level they are right, if the Amalekites were being bad maybe some of them do deserve punishment but what God is commanding here is total genocide. Surely the animals and infants the Amalekites possessed were not evil or deserving of death. And why is God, supposedly loving and merciful, not drawing up plans to form an alliance with the Amalekites. Yahweh could have found a way to cause repentance amongst the Amalekites, making them give up their idols to serve Him. Instead of finding a way to achieve peace or punishing ONLY those who can be held morally responsible for what happened to the Israelites God decides the best bet is to slaughter babies.

This time God doesn't get involved in the baby killing himself, I guess Yahweh doesn't want to get his hands dirty now that he has a posse of powerful warriors to do his infanticidal work for him. But here is the iconic example that is brought up nearly every time a non-theist or non-christian gets into a debate with a fundamentalist... that's right ladies and gents, EXODUS.

The book is filled with God's injustice against the Egyptians. I think its an ultimate testament to Yahweh's outstanding hypocrisy that he frees the Hebrews and adopts them as his people only to turn around and allow them to keep slaves (Leviticus 25:44-46). Right in Exodus 21 there is even talk of keeping HEBREW SLAVES for a few years at a time. So apparently God's people don't have an issue enslaving themselves. I have to mention that slavery was not the Pharaoh's only sin by far, he also went on a baby slaughtering campaign against the Hebrews to prevent an eventual uprising as the slaves grew too numerous. So when Pharaoh does it baby killing is evil (let's see how that plays out).

God decides to speak to Moses, formerly an adoptive part of the Egyptian royalty, in the form of a burning bush. Moses is meant to free his people and so he heads into town thinking that I am that I am guy is crazy for picking him. God begins unleashing plagues on Egypt when Pharaoh refuses to let his work force go free.

There are several opportunities for Pharaoh to let the Hebrews go and each time he nearly goes through with it, but Yahweh, as if just dying to bathe in baby blood, keeps hardening Pharaoh's heart. Seriously read Exodus, God repeatedly hardens Pharaoh's heart to stop the man from letting the Hebrews go! Rather than bringing Pharaoh to repentance God is consumed with desire for petty vengeance against the would-be God-King of Egypt. How loving and merciful is this guy, sending boils, frogs, flies and fire from the heavens upon the Egyptian citizens who, for the most part, are entirely innocent. The majority of Egyptians can't afford slaves, what did they do to incur the wrath of Yahweh? About as much as their children did... And yet Yahweh decides to punish the children with the ultimate price instead of punishing the man responsible for Pharaoh's stubbornness - HIMSELF.

Yahweh heads out at night and kills the firstborn of Egypt. When God does it believers view it as an act of divine justice, when Pharaoh did it it was just plain evil. So when a loving God sheds the blood of the innocent its okay, as long as he has petty revenge as an excuse.

You might think that Exodus is the first time Yahweh has dipped his deviant hands in the blood of the innocent, you'd be wrong. Remember that Noah guy, you know the one who built the boat? Well Noah and his family survived the Flood right? What about everyone else?




So what have we learned today? Well today we learned that Yahweh, the God of the Bible, doesn't mind the killing of children when either he is the one doing it or he is the one commanding it. So keep your Bible close but your babies closer.