My email is overthinker@rationalbeliefs.com

Where I'm coming from...a summary

• This site is written largely as if it were addressing a Christian. I realize that isn't always accurate.

• One of my like-minded friends said that we generally only change direction in life when we think nobody's watching. Maybe we need to take fewer cues from our larger social context. One article I read talked about the influence we give to social groups over our opinions. It's a way of signalling belonging, and of course there can be social consequences or gains tied to rejecting or supporting the larger group beliefs. This is scary because of the large groups of ignorant people out there. What's more, when it comes to our opinions, we tend to think like a lawyer instead of an impartial scientist. We start with the belief or conclusion we want and then try to find supporting evidence for it. The facts often don't inform our opinions; instead, our opinions determine which facts we look at or how we weigh the facts we encounter. It's called motivated reasoning, and the world would be a much better place if we could stop doing that. Also, we're much better at seeing that in others than in ourselves. ...If your beliefs are counter to mine, I hope you'll give my view a chance and that you will refute my opinions with facts instead of motivated reasoning. Keep in mind that whatever you believe, that is just one fact about who you are.

• I was raised Lutheran, a rather moderate sect of Christianity. I never felt a need for faith or religion and wanted nothing to do with it, but the threat of going to hell would keep me awake at night. I was at my happiest (and best) when I could forget about religion, but periodically waves of mortal fear would wash over me. I always felt I had to defend myself against it to function well, and I became quite cynical and resentful towards it even while I still was in it's sickly grasp. To me, religion is like a crudely grafted extra appendix that well-intentioned people saw fit to add to me when I was too young to choose otherwise. Well, I've been in organ rejection mode for decades now...for an organ I never had ANY need for in the first place. That's why I (and many others like me) come after religion with such zeal. If I had my first exposure of religion later in life, I would've simply shrugged it off. The REAL problem is the indoctrination of children. As Richard Dawkins puts it, there should be no labels like “Christian child” or “Muslim child”. A child can't choose what they believe and should be allowed to choose instead of having it decided for them (a point I'll add to later).

• I didn't fully put these Christianity demons to rest until I read An Atheists Critique of the Bible, by Brian Shuty. That really drove it home how insane and transparent all of this is and how easily it can all be dismissed. It was akin to being afraid of a bully for years, finally giving him a tentative retaliatory push, and then having him immediately offer up his lunch money. ...I want to help free as many minds as I can and save children from indoctrination. The goal is to help light the way for people to see a happier, less conflicted, less fearful way of being. The indoctrination of children is picking on the defenseless...and it's the only way religion can continue in what is largely an age of reason.

• You know exactly what it's like to be an atheist. You dismiss all other faiths without losing any sleep. You feel no need to investigate those rival faiths regardless of how many followers they have, how historically accurate they are or what their basis is. That's how I feel about your faith, too. Everyone else is completely off their rockers, right? Well, so are you...and in exactly the same way.

• I believe we're all one on some fundamental level, and all the world's peoples should be looking out for each other and cooperating. I want artificial differences removed and for each of us to simply label ourselves as "human" or "earthling". I feel religion has to take a back seat to everything else or go away entirely before we have a shot at this. Haven't we learned enough about the divisiveness of religion and the damage it does to progress?

  • The world's religions make contradictory claims that cannot be reconciled by any known form of discourse. To put it another way, there's NO way to reconcile religious claims because they're not based on factual information that can be compared or validated. Such claims can only be accepted or rejected. Because of this, religious arguments can never be put to rest. Religion also distracts much of humanity from the issues at hand in THIS life that only humanity can solve. God isn't coming to help us OR to destroy us. It really is up to us.

  • If one has to pick a religion, why can't it be something eastern? Those religions are MUCH better suited to a harmonious life with others and don't have as many violent or implausible teachings. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jainism would be a very wise choice.

• I want to see religion purged from any position of authority. I want to see it pushed out of the mainstream and into the fringes of society. I want it to be seen as the irrationality and weakness it is. Yes, I have a personal vendetta against it, but it's more about wanting humanity to move forward. Religion is nothing without the faith of its followers. I want those followers to realize fully what an untenable and unproductive viewpoint they have on the world. We all pay a price for large numbers of people holding irrational and unsupported beliefs, especially when different groups hold different irrational and unsupported beliefs that conflict with each other. Where dogma conflicts, people also conflict...murderously so. Religion is routinely used to justify the very ugliest and most immoral actions our species is capable of.

• The material I've compiled in taking aim at religion is from my own musings and the writings of a number of authors including Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, Brian Shuty, Peter Boghossian and Jim Hall, among others. Obviously, I feel my ideas and how I integrate the works of others form a message that I think will do some good. If anyone who's like-minded sees issues or potential improvements with my handling of these topics, please let me know. Anyone who is not like-minded and wants to comment, well, you should just take your medicine. Even if I turn out to be wrong on a point or 2 (or even 49.99% of my points), the preponderance of the evidence should make you rethink things. Religion and the absurdities therein have gotten the kid-glove treatment too long already, and we're all paying the price. This compilation is me trying to dish out some tough love to my fellow people.

• I write all of this in spite of feeling somehow watched over or protected during my life. I don't know if that feeling is accurate, and I also have a distinct feeling that the Christian God is NOT it. Reading the bible bears that out. This is not a work inspired by a loving, personal God.

• Criticizing an idea is not the same as criticizing a person. I should be able to argue against your beliefs but still respect or even love you as a person. Ideas don't deserve dignity, people do. If I criticize your religion, well, it's not like you came up with it yourself. It's also not like I'm restricting or harming you like the religious have done to dissenters so many times.

• We need emphasis on how to think critically. This would help with both religion and politics. Look up logical fallacies; here's a link to start with: http://www.nizkor.org/features/fallacies/.

• As an Atheist and a Humanist, I feel the self-deprecation inherent to faith-based religion is an evil. It's a way of denying one's own power. We need people who can be all they can be (to borrow an old army slogan). I see anything that detracts from human potential (what the religious tout when talking about embryos) or from a focus on the present just leaves us weakened. We need strong, whole people for the battles ahead to save the world and ourselves from ourselves. Religion can retard and cripple cognitive, emotional AND moral development (I'll cover that moral angle A LOT later). It teaches us to be dependent on something else and keep looking for it to solve our issues instead of taking responsibility and acknowledging that it's all up to us.

• The idea is to live a life that doesn't leave you wanting for more or needing to focus on another stage of life (or an afterlife) to give meaning to the present. A life spent looking to the future, while better than a life spent looking at the past, still isn't optimal. Only a life rooted in the present can allow you to fully take advantage of what's available and not leave you yearning for something more, which may or may not come.

• I've tried to split this into different sections, but a lot of my points overlap sections, so they end up repeated. I'm just trying to avoid repeating much within the same section.

Quotes

• Mark Twain: “It isn't the parts of the bible that I can't understand that bother me, it is the parts that I do understand.”

• Albert Einstein: “The word God is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weaknesses, the Bible a collection of honorable but still primitive legends which are nevertheless pretty childish.”

• Charlie Chaplin: “Religion. It's given people hope in a world torn apart by religion.”

• Sam Harris: “By failing to live by the letter of the texts, while tolerating the irrationality of those who do, religious moderates betray faith and reason equally.”

• Christopher Hitchens: “What can be asserted without proof can be dismissed without proof.”

• Anonymous: “Atheists are like parents breaking it to their kids that there is no Santa.”

• Anonymous: “Blind faith is an ironic gift to return to the creator of human intelligence.”

• Richard Dawkins: “The god of the old testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction; jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.”

• Thomas Jefferson: “I have recently been examining all the known superstitions of the world, and do not find in our particular superstition one redeeming feature. They are all alike, founded upon fables and mythologies.”

• John Adams: “Let the human mind loose. It must be loose. It will be loose. Superstition and dogmatism cannot confine it.”

• Ben Franklin: “The way to see by faith is to shut the eye of reason.”

• Epicurus: “Is got willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent. Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil? Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him god?”

• Sigmund Freud: “[Religion] is so patently infantile, so foreign to reality, that to anyone with a friendly attitude to humanity it is painful to think that the great majority of mortals will never be able to rise above this view of life.”

• Robert Burns: “All religions are auld wives fables, but an honest man has nothing to fear, either in this world or the one to come.”

• Soren Kierkegaard: “Christianity demands the crucifixion of the intellect.”

• Sir Francis Bacon: “...atheism leads a man to sense, to philosophy, to natural piety, to laws, to reputation: all of which may be guides to an outward moral virtue...”

• Havelock Ellis: “The whole religious complexion of the modern world is due to the absence from Jerusalem of a lunatic asylum.”

• Jim Hall: “If Jesus got his Y chromosome from god, I'd love to study a hair sample!”

• More to come! Many others have already paved this path and developed powerful insights.