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This is my attempt to articular why I do not believe in any god or gods. This article "50 Reasons to Believe in God" is much better :)
When I was growing up God was painted as a warm-and-fuzzy father figure. God was the guy who was watching after Grandma when she passed away. God was there to give people that little helping hand when they needed it. God loved us all because, after all, we are his children.
I went to the United church which had all but given up on teaching about Hell. I was aware of the concept and it made me uncomfortable. But it wasn't until high-school, when one of my friends brought us to a "Hell House", that I really started to give it some serious thought.
The concept of a loving God just did not jive with Hell.
While this didn't turn me into an atheist it did make me uncomfortable with the religion I was being presented with. Something really didn't seem right.
I have since learned a lot more, thought a lot more, read a lot more, debated a lot more and my reasons for disbelief are now much more solid.
I do not believe in any god or gods because, to this point, I have not been presented with any compelling evidence to warrant such a belief.
That position, on its own, should suffice (see burden of proof - fallicy of demanding negative proof); however, when talking with theists it can be handy to have more specific reasons. Those follow.
I find the entire premise of Christianity unjust.
Why is the path to salvation through belief in Jesus and not through good acts (at least as far as Paul was concerned)? Could a loving and just God be so self absorbed that a humanitarian who gives her life to bettering society is sent to burn for eternity in Hell while a serial killer who has accepted Jesus is destined for heaven?!
How is infinite punishment a just punishment for a finite crime? Would we execute a child for stealing a candy from a 7-11? Where is the concept of a punishment befitting the crime commited?
How is it that people who have never had a chance to even be exposed to the message of Jesus are destined for Hellfire? How is it their fault that they were born isolated from Christianity?
How about the people who lived before Jesus?
How about the people who are born into a different religion and thoroughly brain washed before they are exposed to Christianity? What chance do they have to change their mind?
There is something very wrong with this system.
I tried to argue with a local street preacher that the idea of an infinite punishment for a finite crime is unjust. His response was that the crime was against God who is himself, infinite; therefore, the crime is infinite. He also argued that, because God created us, he is justified in any punishment he may choose to deal out. Wow... I'd hate to be that man's children!
KJV: Acts Chapter 16
31. And they said, Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shalt be saved, and thy house.
KJV: Ephesians Chapter 2
8. For by grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God:
9. Not of works, lest any man should boast.
Notice how salvation is through faith and not works.
KJV: John Chapter 3 (from the mouth of Jesus himself)
16.
For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.
17. For God sent not his Son into the world to condemn the world; but that the world through him might be saved.
18.
He that believeth on him is not condemned: but he that believeth not is condemned already, because he hath not believed in the name of the only begotten Son of God.
ESV: Revelation of John Chapter 14
11. And the smoke of their torment goes up forever and ever, and they have no rest, day or night, these worshipers of the beast and its image, and whoever receives the mark of its name.
To the Christians out there: My rejection of your God is NOT the same thing as worshiping the devil. I find the idea of both God and the devil ridiculous.
But he loves you...?
While this does not mean that God does not exist, it does, in my opinion, cast considerate doubt on the typical loving father-like God that many Christians worship.
The problem of suffering, or theodicy, has been around for ages.
Simply: "If there is a good, loving, and all powerful God, then why is there so much needless suffering in the world?"
Cancer, AIDS, plagues, the Holocaust, wars, genocides, famine, starvation, hurricanes, tsunamis (Indonesia), mudslides, etc. Why would a good and loving God allow/cause these things?
Why would a good and loving God let the Nazi regime systematically destroy over 10 million people?
Why would a good and loving God let a child starve to death every five seconds? (ref)
Why would a good and loving God let a child die every 15 seconds because they don't have access to clean water.(ref)
Why do over thirty children, through no fault of their own, every single hour because of AIDS? (ref)
Solutions vary:
I'm not sure how people "buy" these explainations. I don't. There is such an abundance of suffering in the world that I find it impossible to believe there is a God, with the attributes I had been taught in Sunday school and which most of the Christians I know accept, watching over us. It's absurd.
As Epicurus identified long ago:
I am struck by the fact that there are hundreds, possibly thousands, of religions being practiced today. Many of these religions are practiced by smart, well meaning, educated, and decent people who are honestly convinced that their religion is correct. This is to say nothing of the thousands of religions that are, for all intents, now extinct.
| Religion | Est # of Adherents |
|---|---|
| Christianity | 2.1B |
| Islam | 1.5B |
| Secular / Nonreligious / Agnostic / Atheist | 1.1B |
| Hinduism | 900M |
| Chinese traditional | 394M |
| Buddhism | 376M |
Notice how close the top three religions are? Christianity's lead is slim but think of how many different, and mutually exclusive, sects of Christianity there are. The Protestants are convinced the Catholics are practicing idolatry. The Catholics think the protestants are destined for hell fire because they don't follow the church. Within those groups things are divided even further (Protestant especially). Islam is similar with its adherents split between Sunni and Shiite. Religious people are, obviously, still a majority but no one religion has a clearly dominant position as far as I can see. If anything, I wonder if the non-religious might actually be the most common religious view point in the world.
Most of the religions that I am aware of are mutually exclusive; they can not all be true.
We can look at almost any religion, but our own, and say with certainty that they are wrong, that their religion isn't true, that their religion is made by man. Believers do this all the time.
Again, they can't all be right... But they can ALL be wrong.
I don't see anything that makes one religion stand out as correct. With the proliferation of religious ideas, but lacking in any sort of consistency amoung them, it seems most likely to me that there is something else at work. Perhaps we've just evolved to need/want religion.
Seriously...
I know that a lot of people read the Bible and find it a profound book. I've heard it described as the perfect, and inerrant, word of God. When I read it, however, I do not see that. I see a hodgepodge of stories that portray God in a light that is quite different from what I learned in church.
"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." -- Richard Dawkins
I once had a friend tell me that the Bible is true because it is the most accurately translated book in history. He insisted that it's been translated and retranslated for thousands of years and yet when they compare the current text to the original scripts there are no mistakes. Wow! There is so much wrong with this where do we start? First off we don't have the original texts. We have multiple multi-generation old copies of the original texts and they differ from each other. We have an idea what the original texts said but not what they said exactly (Misquoting Jesus by bible scholar Bart Ehrman describes this problem well). My friend was also completely unaware that there are dozens, if not hundreds, of differing Bible translations in use (Go to Bible Gateway and look in the "version" dropdown; they have 20 english versions!). All of these translations are different. Some of them differ in fairly major ways that have theological implications. Even if, however, I were to grant that the Bible was perfectly copied and translated over the years, which I absolutely do not, what would that mean? Wouldn't that just mean that the people responsible for copying it believed that this book was special and put that extra effort into doing it well?
I find the world beautiful. I really do. But there is also a lot about this world that is grotesque. There is too much pain, too much disease, too much suffering, too much killing (Asian Giant Hornet). You look at nature close enough and you realize that it's not just beautiful flowers and cute fuzzy animals. For every species that thrives another species is consumed. The beauty is superficial.
A cracked.com article (this one here) once humourously referred to the "sadistic bastard creator theory". While this was intended to be a humourous article I think there is a grain of truth. When I look at nature I do not see the work of a loving, perfect creator. What we see is the work of, at best, an incompetent bumbling kid (99% of all species that have ever existed are now), and at worse a sadistic bastard who designs a system to maximize suffering (which when you read the Bible is pretty much as we'd expect from him).
It seems to me that Jesus says a number of times that if you ask God for something in prayer, he will deliver. It's pretty clearly stated in the Bible (see below) and I know many Christians who actually believe that asking God for things will work (with weasel room left for God's inscrutable will, of course).
Matthew 7:7
"Ask, and it will be given you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you. For every one who asks receives, and he who seeks finds, and to him who knocks it will be opened. Or what man of you, if his son asks him for bread, will give him a stone? Or if he asks for a fish, will give him a serpent? If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father who is in heaven give good things to those who ask him!"
Matthew 17:20
And Jesus said unto them, Because of your unbelief: for verily I say unto you, If ye have faith as a grain of mustard seed, ye shall say unto this mountain, Remove hence to yonder place; and it shall remove; and nothing shall be impossible unto you.
The thing is that I don't see prayer working. We see children of Christian parents dying from cancer. We see Christian families living in poverty and starving to death. We see very high divorce rates among Christians. We see higher teen pregnancy in very religious regions of the United States. I have actually seen devout Christians with family problems praying for them to get better, instead of actually doing something, and, needless to say, the situation do not improve. In addition we have studies like this one that study the effect of intercessory prayer and, suprise, there isn't one. Christians spend an awful lot of time talking about prayer, trumping it up as a miracle, but I have yet to see anything that suggests it is any more than just delusion and wishful thinking.
ESV: II Kings Chapter 2
23. He went up from there to Bethel, and while he was going up on the way, some small boys came out of the city and jeered at him, saying, Go up, you baldhead! Go up, you baldhead!
24. And he turned around, and when he saw them, he cursed them in the name of the LORD. And two she-bears came out of the woods and tore forty-two of the boys.
God kills children for calling a guy names.
In Christianity we have God and Satan. God is supposed to be the good one who we worship and Satan is the bad one who tries to lead us away from God. Both of them seem to have at least some ability to interact in this world. So the question is, even if you decided that God and Satan are real, which is the really good one?
How do we know that the God, in the Bible, is actually the good one? Wouldn't Satan be just as likely to tell that he was the good one in an attempt to win souls.
If we accept the proposition that the Bible is our only source of morality (obviously I do not), and that we can not make a moral judgement on your own, then how are we to judge the actions of God and Satan and pick the right one?
God in the old testament was a nasty creature demanding strict adherence to hundreds of obscure laws, sacrifices, etc. All of a sudden we have this Jesus character show up and, apparently, he offers us an afterlife of bliss, and relaxes the rules God set for us. Doesn't this seem exactly like the sort of thing you would do if you were Satan and trying to pull souls away from God?
When Christians hear the voice of God telling them to do something how is it that they know it is God and not Satan?
While we're at it, if you add up the deaths commanded/performed by God and those by Satan we see 2,301,417 to 10. Now which one is the evil one?
This obviously isn't a reason not to believe in God but I think it is a good reason to think for one's self and not be so damn sure that the Bible is the infallible word of God.
Christian's themselves are wonderfully good evidence that maybe followers of their religion are not privileged. They are constantly trying to claim the moral high-ground on atheists because their morality if guided by God. If that were true wouldn't we see Christian's being the pillars of society? You'd think so.
Matthew 19-21
Then Jesus said to his disciples, "I tell you the truth, it is hard for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven. Again I tell you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God."
Now none of this is surprising. People are people. There are good people amoung us and bad people amoung us. If what the Christians were saying were true I would expect to see them stand out above the rest of us as model citizens. They don't, and that is the point.
I've spent a lot of time browsing forums, talking to people (Christians and atheists), watching Youtube videos (for both sides), attending debates, watching appologetic videos and I'm overwhelmed by just how completely underwhelming the theist arguments are. At every turn the theists are just completely outclassed by the scientists.
For example: In early 2009 I went to see PZ Myers debate Kirk Durston in Edmonton and it was eye opening. I'd read a lot of books by that point and was well aware of the argument from design...
Finally, I just don't see any evidence of any sort to suggest that there does exist any sort of God. I see a lot of believers making claims but I have yet to see any evidence. I hear Christians praising the power of prayer but their life doesn't seem any more charmed than mine.
Given all the things that Christian's claim to know about God
NIV:
John 6:44
No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him,...
If there really is a loving God who wants me to accept his son so that he can give me eternal salvation and he is trying to "draw" me to him... Well... I can only include that he could do a much better job of it.