Please join me in welcoming one of the newest members of the Atheist Blogroll, Why God Isn’t Necessary.
As an atheist, one is often challenged by the theists to prove there is no God.
It’s a question cleverly designed to elicit the only possible response, which is “No, I can’t”.
All intelligent people realize that you cannot disprove a negative. There is no known way for me to prove that fairies or unicorns don’t exist either.
However, the now famous “flying spaghetti monster” argument, is too easily dismissed by the theists who desperately cling to the “You can’t prove God doesn't exist” line.
So, I thought about the problem another way.Theists are clearly choosing to believe in a God, and not flying spaghetti monsters (in the main). This implies that they’ve made some sort of discriminating decision in favor of their silent and invisible God.
They have in fact decided it is necessary for their God to exist and be a part of their lives.
So rather than try and argue whether God does or doesn’t exist, I have decided to attempt to prove that a decision to have a God in your life is simply of no benefit, and hence completely unnecessary. As unnecessary as believing in a flying spaghetti monster or fairies.
My blog "Why God is not necessary" is my comprehensive argument of this position. I'd like as many atheists and theists as possible to post comments here to fully debate my proposition in order that it can ultimately be forged into a credible platform for intelligent reasoning against the spreading of belief in mythical Middle Eastern fairy tales.
Are you interested in becoming a member? Visit the Atheist Blogroll resource blog for more information.
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Bryan Scandrett · 752 weeks ago
I understand that it's an atheist ( fuck I hate that word) past-time to argue with the superstitious as to whether supertitions are 'real' or not. Is it just me or blah, blah, blah.
I notice my christian relatives enjoy a similiar recreation in that they engage the door to door god botherers of alternate persuasions on which superstition is 'real'.
Seems a vast waste of energy to me. Superstition vs No superstition. Is anyone going to change a thing? I doubt it. Finding 'better' ways to argue with them is just a further waste of energy.
May I suggest a more rational, (in my tiny mind) approach and attack the mechanism by which religion promelgates itself. Child indoctrination. Which is ironically, a sort of genetic reproduction. (Darwinian smirks all round.)
The underlying premise is that:- 1. religion is bad, offensive and causes incalculable harm to society by interfering in advances to understanding of the human condition in the same way sorcery, occults, etc., do, and therfore 'better' ways to live, interact, cohabitate.
2. Religion can be sent into remission in the same way sorcery, occults, etc., have by the rise of sciences, humanities, technologies, etc.
The reasoning of the attack goes something like this.
A. A fundamental rule of religions is "Gett'em while they're young." I remember hearing this rule while still a child myself. Seems this is a global 'truism'. They know full well that if you don't acustom humans to accepting the entirely implausa-bible at an early age, they simply won't swallow it past the age of 18. The brain has changed. The frontal lobe has finished developing and the neural pathways for reason and logic have been conditioned.
(I understand the primate brain is a soup of chemically based emotions and not rational at all, but for the purposes of this discourse, you get the point I'm making. BY the end of the teenage years, most of us have learned to think for ourselves to some extent in a far more 'advanced' way compared to preteenagers.)
This is central to the strategies of the catholic church, sunday schools, the Taliban and many other cults. They are after the children. They are child predators.
B. They seek to protect their 'right' to go after children in freedom of religious expression laws and anti-discrimination laws. These must be overturned.
I know, that's a big ask. But you gotta admit, a windmill just asking for it!
C. The definition of a pedophile is some one who uses a minor for they own sexual gratification. When a child is indoctrinated, the reasoning is to save their soul from hell. A supposedly entirely selfless act on the part of the indoctrinator. It's not that hard to establish there's no such thing as an entirely selfless act. The indoctrinator is doing it for any of a number of reasons. To curry favour with their god, to gett'em while they're young, to war holy war on the infidel, what the fuck ever. Essentially to gratify themselves. Everything we do is to gratify ourselves. Which is why I'm writng this. Which is why we'll all do the next thing we do.
To coin a new word: Pedo-indoctrinator.
Doesn't really roll of the tounge does it? Got any better ideas. We need something that can be spat out like 'pedophile' and really play on the fears and predjudices of our fellow primates.
D. Once apon atime in a land far far away, smoking was cool. Sexy. Sophisticated. Glamourous even.
Sccrreeeech! Fast forwad to the present. NOT ANY MORE DUDE! Uncouth, foul, stinky, expensive & stupid. Mores and values can and do change when we take the long view. Non- theists who think religion can't be stopped or believe it's OK for others to believe what they want in the privacy of their own homes need to question those ideas. No-one believes that it's OK for consenting adults to include their own children in their sexual activities. All notions of consent are based on the stabilisation of the frontal cortex. That was established long before we understood the existance of the frontal cortex.
Sex, alchol, voting, driving, military service, are all reserved til the age of 16, 18 and over.
Religion must be based on the consent of an adult. Praying (sic) on children for indoctrination is equivilent to and as base as child soldiering. It's as intellectualy, socially, emotionally and mentally damaging as child abuse.
It is child abuse.
E. Once it can be established in a court that those who supported the doctrination of children can be either civily or criminally held accountable 10 to 20 yrs down the track with large damages claims, organised religion will withdraw their support for the practise as potentially too damaging and expensive. Should we, the anti-theists reach that happy place in the next decade (or seven times seventy-seven), through solardarity, organisation, teamwork, of actually hurting the hip pocket of the beast, we just might be able to push this wooly thinking mammoth over the precipice and into the irrelevance of the horoscope.
Who's in?
Mojoey 107p · 752 weeks ago