Why should 'i' be an atheist?

In the truest sense, I feel obliged to try and convince everyone on this entire planet to be an atheist. That is, indeed, an impossible task, as humans are by nature very stubborn and selfish. They are also very cocky. Most importantly, though, humans are fearful. That is the biggest setback in creating a realistic view of our planet's history. How do I make believers in religion change their mind? Is it ultimately impossible because of the reasons listed above? Why in the fuck do so many people believe in the same thing? These are questions that must be understood to change the path on which our world is walking.

Humans are stubborn and selfish.
I am not attempting to claim that atheists are not stubborn or selfish. Humans, as a whole, are both. It doesn't matter what you believe, it is in our minds to be very placed in our ways and to hold dearly onto what we love. There are some people who grow up still unable to let go of that security blanket they held as a baby. Linus, from Peanuts, is a good example. He is of course fictional, but his obsession with a blanket is relevant in most humans' lives. In some form or fashion, every human has a grown attachment to a personally owned item. It does not change with religion. If your parents raised you to believe in God and that Jesus Christ was his son born from a fucking VIRGIN, you're going to continue to believe it. I was raised this way. I went to church every Sunday. I prayed as a child, although I had no clue what I was really doing. I walked into the church and smiled a million smiles at all the other phony people who claim they never have doubt...
There are instances of humans teaching their children to write with their right hand even though they kept wanting to pick up the pencil with their left... Eventually, these children were SHAPED into using their right hands. Were they really left handed people? Absolutely. It was INCORRECT to use your left hand, so parents desperately worked to teach their kids to use their right hand. Minds are very easily shaped. If you grow up with the assumption, "if you don't believe in this 'story', you are going to go to a very painful, HOT place called hell", then you are going to believe it. You trust your parents. You're going to believe in their make believe hell and god and etc.
So what's the problem? Like I said, people are STUBBORN. They will not give up the beliefs their parents taught them, even though they may secretly know that their ridiculous religion holds no reasonable ground. The same people are selfish. They don't want to give up their euphoric, yet retarded, belief in eternal life. "I am so important, I want to live forever. Wait, what?? God from the Bible promises these things? Excellent, I'm so in."

Humans are cocky.
I already touched on this in the previous rant. This goes side by side with the fact that every member of our species is selfish. There's a twist though. We've all unfortunately met the douchebag at a party with his collar popped and an undignified sense of security in his demeanor. This son of a bitch is cocky as fuck, and we want to kill him. Thankfully our human instincts of "killing is bad" kick in and we don't (we don't need religion to be 'good'). However, this guy believes in some baloney god and wants to spread it across the whole world because IT'S THE COOL THING TO DO!!! FUCK YEAH!!! If he is shot down by an atheist (or even a christian who is just tired of his dumbass behavior), he cannot accept it. It becomes even MORE important that he is right. "FUCK YOU BITCH! GOD CREATED THIS SANDWICH!!"

Humans are fearful.
Fear [feer] -noun
1.)a distressing emotion aroused by impending danger, evil, pain, etc., whether the threat
is real or imagined; the feeling or condition of being afraid.
Imagined....interesting....
Humans are afraid of the unknown. What is the biggest unknown in our existence?? The answer is...Existence. Why are we here? What happens when we die? There is no way to possibly answer these questions yet. So people find anything to answer these questions without proof. For fucking AGES (i'm talking since humans were first on the earth), people have tried to come up with ideas as to why we are here on this "Earth". The bible is one of these ideas. It is a collection of stories from people who really have no idea. They were just as human as we are now. They did not possess special powers that allow them to see into the secrets of our existence. Ultimately, Jesus is an equal alongside the likes of David Koresh and Anne Heche. Jesus may have been a fucking psycho. Before you jump down my throat, why the fuck are you so willing to believe people you DON'T know about a man named Jesus, but you can't believe that David Koresh might be the second coming of christ? Or to believe in whatever else he preached? Anne Heche admitted she was crazy after hearing voices from 'god' telling her to do shit. It's called a mental disorder. Moses had a mental disorder if he even existed. The rest...is history. Humans are ultimately afraid of death. Our minds cannot fathom what lies beyond death. So our imaginations do the rest of the work. It does not mean it's true.

The rest will be continued in Part II of "Why should 'i' be an atheist?"

Maybe One Day

And So It Continues

Meet creationist Don McLeroy. He is the Chairman of the Texas State Board of Education. And this is what he wants to teach your kids:



Someone has to stand up to experts? This guy is insane and needs to be removed from his position before he ruins children! You must realize how ridiculous this shit is.

Dear Creationists:

What's Outside the Universe?

What's outside the universe? This is a question that is undoubtedly on most if not every intellectual's mind. The answer isn't easy, and it's not conclusive. It is impossible at this time to answer that question based on fact. However, I came across what may be the greatest explanation ever for this question. What the author says is nothing new, but the way he elegantly explains it almost gives a peace of mind behind the worry revolved around this perplexing question.

Bailey,
When we were in Albuquerque you asked me what was beyond the edge of the Universe, and I didn't have a very good answer. To be honest, I felt like a baseball player that had practiced and practiced (I've read a lot of books and thought a lot about the same question myself), but suddenly I was standing in the outfield and a high fly ball was headed my way (your question)...and I dropped the ball.

Your question is a really good one and a very hard one to answer because the ideas aren't simple and they aren't easy to understand--even for me.

But I've been thinking about what you asked, and I'm really, really glad you did becuase it made me think hard about the question again too.

Next time we see each other, maybe we can talk about this more, but here's my answer: think about the earth. It's a big ball, and when you look toward the horizon it looks like you can see where the earth stops. But you know from driving and flying that there's no edge. You travel for awhile and you see past the horizon. And what do you see? More dirt, more trees, more roads, more mountains. There really isn't an edge at all. What's over the horizon? More of the same. That's the way it is when you look out into space. If you traveled a billion miles (which would only get you to about Saturn, still in our solar system) what would you see? More space, more stars and galaxies.

But now think of this . . . you're a bug inside a balloon. You can't crawl outside because you can only live inside. A giant is blowing the balloon up, bigger and bigger. As the bug, you can see the inside of the balloon and, smart little bug that you are, you say to yourself, "I wonder what's outside?" Same idea as wondering what's outside the Unvierse, right?

We're kinda like bugs too, really smart ones. We have satellites and instruments and scientists that have done experiments that show the universe (which is kinda like our balloon) is expanding, and there's nothing outside it. As far as we know there's nothing there. But we can wonder.

Another way to think about this, and I know it's silly, is to ask, "What color is your name?" It doesn't make sense for a name to be a color in the same way it doesn't make sense for there to be something outside the universe. The universe is everything there is, and the idea that there's anything outside it just doesn't make sense.

Mind you, that doesn't mean it's not a good thing to think about and to ask questions about, because it makes us ask other questions. "What if I wrote my name with a red crayon? Wouldn't my name be red?" It sure would! So now we know that there are other ways to look at a question that might let us to learn something new.

Think about flying straight north, over Canada, still north past the Arctic Circle, north more to the North Pole. Now ask yourself, can I go further north from here? No, there's no such thing as north of the North Pole. "Ah," you say, "but what if I go straight up?" Brilliant! That's not north, of course, but it does add an interesting new dimension to the problem, if you'll pardon the pun.

A question about the universe, for example, might be, "Could there be other universes?" Maybe it doesn't make sense to ask what's outside our universe, but maybe it does make sense to ask if there could be other universes. Instead of North let's go up!

In fact, some people today think there are other universes. One idea is that there are an infinite number of other universes. Every time you do something there might be a universe where you don't do it. Did you drop your cookie and the dog got it? Don't worry, in an other universe you didn't drop it. And in an other universe you dropped it, but the dog didn't get it so you could eat it anyway. And in an other universe the dog got it, but he gave it back to you. In another universe Dr. Schrodinger's cat gobbled it up . . . or not.

WEIRD STUFF, HUH?

Even though we may not know the answer to all this yet, the important thing is that we keep asking questions and we keep looking for answers and we keep doing experiments to see if our ideas make sense. If someone tells you they have the answer to something, anything (sorry Mom and Dad) ask, "Why?" If they can't give you evidence, if they say it's just because they said so—or just because someone else said so—don't accept the answer until you, yourself, are satisfied the answer is right. And be prepared, be willing, to change what you think if new answers come along that show what you used to think is true isn't any more. That's what learning is all about.

But be careful. There are some people that say we should always consider every answer to every question--but that would be a huge waste of time. There are some things such as gravity, and electromagnetism and evolution that are so well understood that it's simply a waste of time to argue that they aren't accurate descriptions of reality. It wouldn't make much sense to study the idea that the Earth is held up by turtles instead of gravity, now would it?

I know this isn't a simple (or a short) answer. But you'll find there are very few of those in life.

Grandpa Tom

SOURCE

Open-Mindedness

A wonderful little animation about the true differences between open-minded individuals, and those that are close-minded. Pay close attention please.

Open-mindedness
by totocacapouet

I am embarassed to live in Texas

Knowing that Texas governor Rick Perry appointed a CREATIONIST onto the state's Board of Education should be humiliating enough. But no, it goes further than that. A creationist cunt on Texas' BoE has decided to present a legislation or whatever that allows a 'broader' analysis and representation of the universe's age. What does that mean for her and other fundamentalist christians? They can squeeze in their nonsensical bullshit about the Earth only being 6000 or so years old. Guess what? The bill passed 11-3. It's sickening and makes me want to gtfo this part of the world. Read the whole article and see the video HERE.

UPDATE (5/11/09) - After rummaging through the article's comments, I came across one from Richard Drumm that really said it like it needs to be said. I'll share it with you:

"OK, I’m back. I feel a little better now… Only a little.

The YECs are right to be anti-scientific. Science is their belief system’s enemy.
They should be failing, but they’re succeeding instead. I don’t know why. Ignorance is easy and the electorate is taking the easy path.

Maybe it’s the sheer size of the coursework one needs to carry nowadays to become a scientist that’s the problem. In the early part of the last century it was easy enough for the lay person to follow and mostly understand science (with the possible exception of Quantum Mechanics) so science was accessible. Now maybe science isn’t so accessible and the masses turn their backs on it and seek out the easy, comforting rituals of yesteryear, that “Old time religion” from the song.

Outreach is more important than ever…

I have an old friend who I used to work with back in the mid ’80s who was never religious back then. Now he goes to church and said “It’s good to have a friend in the man upstairs.” the other day. I didn’t say anything, just smiled… What can you say to such a deluded person? It’s a comforting delusion, I’m sure, but a delusion nonetheless. I wish I had an answer to all this but I don’t. Clearly he was looking for me to agree with him and maybe then he’d invite me to join his church. I’m sure this would raise his stature in his church and make him feel powerful. He has no idea I’m an atheist.

Clearly, too, the schools are the new battleground and we are in the fight of our lives!"

The Dick in a Box Dudes Are Back!

Such a lovely Mother's Day sentiment.

Bill Maher on the Swine Flu and Evolution

"You can’t crap all over Darwin and stem cell research and global warming, then come crawling back to science when you want Tamiflu."