Tag Archives: God

Oregon – 1 step forward & 2 steps back

Oregon is considering adding 2 items to the ballot this year.  1 is to allow non-heterosexual couples to marry, and the other is to allow bakers, florists, caterers, or any other business to discriminate against them under religious exemptions, in effect by stating that since their religious beliefs forbid gay & lesbian marriage, then they shouldn’t be forced to do business with them due to their religious beliefs.

If I were a retailer, couldn’t I use the same law to say that I don’t want gays & lesbians in my business?  If I were a developer or landlord, couldn’t I keep them out of my properties & neighborhoods?  And could a doctor refuse to treat them if they need emergency medical services?  What about keeping slaves, since the Bible, and therefore their religion condones slavery?  Acceptance of slavery is all over the Old Testaments & appears more than once in the New Testament as well.

If slavery is an antiquated Biblical idea that we’ve overcome, how about our negativity & discrimination toward gays & lesbians?

We can’t make laws to require everyone to come together as one in our society & care at least as much for each other as we do ourselves.  Besides being a hippie Utopian dream, we raise our young to be warlike, animalistic, reptilian-brained creatures who seem to have no compassion for anything but their own needs & desires, and we look at those ideas as being non-rewarding socialism unless we give it of our own volition in dribs & drabs of charity to make ourselves feel good, but we shouldn’t be making laws that continue to separate us from each other using standards applied unequally to segments within our society.  That is the definition of discrimination in a nutshell.

It’s hard to believe that in 2014, we’re still fighting that battle.  Besides, I’ve always said that gays & lesbians have the right to get married & be as miserable as the rest of us married people.

Losing my religion

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Most Gen-Xers know the song “Losing My Religion” by R.E.M., and many thought it actually had something to do with religion & an individual parting from it.  However, it’s merely an old Southern term for a person about to get really angry, but in this case, I’d like to use it literally . . .

To believe in things like ghosts, angels & divine miracles, you’d have to believe in an afterlife in which we flourish, or at least exist on some level other than as worm food or ashes, and I (and many other intelligent people) don’t believe this as it’s a totally ridiculous premise not backed by the facts as we know them, and to believe in something (to “have faith”) against known facts is foolish.

There’s absolutely no empirical evidence that an afterlife exists, which is why you have to have “faith” that it does contrary to all the known evidence & facts we have. If there were a God who was all-knowing and all-powerful, surely he (or she — I doubt it’s a woman as I’m not the first to point out that a woman all-mighty deity wouldn’t screw things up this badly) would not leave us guessing as to whether he (or she) exists and would let us know in no uncertain terms.

Of course, other than the fact that He hasn’t shown his cards to us ( or not yet as the faithful will say), you could argue we don’t know if there’s an afterlife or not, which would fall into the realm of Agnostics, who you might say are those that are too scared to admit that there is no afterlife and prefer to sit on the fence for various reasons (fear, doubt & theory all come to mind) rather than take a position and be Atheists.

Most people want to find a reason to blame things and not take responsibility for their own fate and pawn it off to some unknown deity who controls it, like if He (or She) exists, our alleged supreme being has time to deal with every picayune issue on this planet considering that we have many billions of galaxies full of many billions of planets out there, all of which he allegedly created, and keep in mind that some people don’t even believe the Earth is more than 6,000 years old!  

Religion is for the weak, the ignorant, and those who make money from it.

Paranoia or not?

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Humor me for a minute . . .

What if I told you that I believe there’s a man who’s watching me all the time, no matter what I do.  I can’t shake him out of my mind as I’m always thinking about him & what he’s doing, and I’m sure he’s infatuated with what I’m doing & sees my every move.  He doesn’t show his face, he doesn’t call me or give me any overt signs that he’s doing this, though sometimes I feel he is & I sometimes see signs of his trying to communicate with me non-verbally (though sometimes I hear his voice), but I feel and I see the results of his stalking, subconscious personality in my own eyes and deep within my psyche.  I have no proof that he’s doing this and I don’t even know who he really is and I can’t even proof that he even exists with any physical evidence of it, but I’m telling you, this guy is watching me and I have faith in it, and what’s more, I’m absolutely certain that he’s guiding my thoughts & actions & heaping sorrow or joy upon me in seemingly random fashion like he has a voodoo doll of me, strictly based upon whether he feels like doing it or not; you might say at his will & whim.  I’ve whispered & even yelled at him & I get no physical or verbal response from him, and sometimes I feel like he’s gone, then sometimes I feel he’s not, that’s he’s there & in total control of me, protecting & guiding me, and I feel he will always be there even after I die, that he will control me & my thoughts throughout eternity.

Sounds like I’ve lost my mind, right?  What if I told you I thought it was an old white man — would that help or hurt?  You’d think I’m really nuts, right.

But if I tell you that this person is God, all of sudden, it seems rational to you.  But why?

My question is, if you had not ever been exposed to religion & had grown up to rationalize your existence & your fate on your own, wouldn’t you think this was nuts?

For a moment there, you weren’t thinking of religion, and in the context of this story, your “religious brain” didn’t exist for a little while & you used your rational thought to try and figure out why I seemed to be “insane”.

That’s what I’m thinking with all the people who say they are religious — they are totally insane, or they fail to use the brain that their God gave them.  Surely their mind knows that there is no evidence that there’s an afterlife or a supreme being/spirit, and if there is, there’s no way to obtain proof of it.  As George Carlin once said, the results we have here on earth are not worthy of the work of a supreme being who is all-wise, all-knowing & has mercy.

If there is a God who made us & all this, he surely simply doesn’t care to get involved except at random, at best.  Surely with all the billions and billions of planets out there to tend to, God has to be busy elsewhere most, if not all of the time.  Maybe this was just a science project of his that has continued to flourish unattended.  All you have to do is look at all the suffering & hate that permeates this world to know that if God does exist, it’s a hands-off approach at best.

“Miracles” are nothing more than fate/chance & have plenty of physical explanation behind them; at least they have no otherworldly explanation that they came true due to it.  Case in point — my wife’s purse fell off her closet shelf & somehow the strap caught the doorknob next to it & that’s where she found it hanging.  That probably wouldn’t happen again if she sat it up there & knocked off herself 1,000 more times trying to get it to catch the doorknob.  A miracle?  No — just luck, coincidence, nothing at all actually — it just simply happened.

And if there is a God, you won’t know until you die, and nobody has ever came back to tell us what it’s like.  If you’re thinking about the Jesus “story”, know that there are plenty of other religions that came before and after Jesus that purported to tell of a messiah sent to save everyone, and the first reports of Jesus came only some 40 years after his alleged death from someone who didn’t know him. When I found that out, I became extremely curious as to why the life or death of someone so great wasn’t even noted in his own lifetime/era?

Note that we have plenty of contemporary writings of other people who lived in that time, so people were writing things down then, although they didn’t have a ballpoint pen (or blog), and there are no writings about Jesus during his lifetime or in anybody else’s stories, at least those that were written during Jesus’ alleged lifetime.  There’s more evidence that Shakespeare exists & wrote all those plays than Jesus existed, and I highly doubt that as well (yes, I’m an Oxfordian).

We are all born atheists. It’s the stories we are told to believe as children that shape our beliefs and make us religious. We would have no need or desire for religion if it weren’t foisted upon us by our elders & the religious powers that be. We don’t need religion to be good to one another or show compassion. Being atheist helps you to understand what’s going on, that there are people & organizations who use religion to control and separate us. Atheists are smart people who use logic & common sense & are willing to take responsibility for their own actions and their own fate here on earth & don’t need to know or believe that there’s a higher power that’s doing that for them. They are brave people in that they don’t need the palliative psyche care that death is not the end, as they know that all we have is this life and we need to do better now.

When you get to the crossroads and find yourself choosing between theology & atheism, the facts & logic are all on the atheists’ side.  Being atheist, agnostic or non-religious doesn’t mean you aren’t a good person — it simply means that you don’t believe in the religious dogma of our existence or an afterlife.  A person can be kind, compassionate, trustworthy, righteous, charitable, loving, nurturing, happy — all things that are good — without religion.  The fact that religion has sold the opposite upon people is the travesty and why I’m so against it, that and that theology flies in the face of facts as we know them.

People ask why are we here and why does what we see exist, and refute any scientific reasoning of it. Scientists know based on factual study that the universe is expanding, which means that the universe we know began billions of years ago in what scientists term as the “big bang”. Yes, that’s a theory based on scientific evidence, but it beats a universe created by a white man in the sky somewhere. What created the white man? What happened before him, or before time & space began? These are questions we may never definitively answer, but throwing logic & science out the window and believing in something that makes no logical or scientific sense is an irrational 7 ignorant as it gets.

I prefer to believe that we all should help one another and I believe more in the faith of the goodness that is inherent in most of mankind that we can find love, happiness and help from our fellow travelers here on earth without a need to believe in stories written by people from 2,000 years ago who were ignorant to the basic principles & facts that we know today & who lived like many animals do now.

We don’t hold much of what people said as being relevant today only a generation or two ago — why should we believe & follow the words of people from 2,000 years ago?