God is only love in the sense that God is also a Cheese Sandwich

A bit of biography to answer a couple of questions. I have noticed that these posts tend to go uncommented and I have wondered why this is, it may well be that they are just too long. Please try and read this one since it may make you better disposed to the others.

Which questions?

1. Why don't I believe in Gods, religions and religious teaching?
2. Why do I keep going on about it?
3. Why am I actively Anti-Theistic and don't just live and let live?

Time for a revelation (heh) that may shock some of you - when I was a child, I wanted to believe in God. I really did. I remember that jolt of realisation that I was, one day, going to die and become nothing more than fertiliser and I was terribly afraid.. Indeed, my family may remember the tantrum in question - I was about 5 or 6 at the time.

Now, as I have also said before, all the schools I went to treated the COE faith as pretty much the foundations of everything, so assemblies were led by the lord's prayer, we sang religious songs and learnt parables, not with any fire and brimstone, but in the same way we learnt about anything, slightly apologetically. I don't think any of my teachers or headmasters were machivellian brainwashing types who after assemblies would sit in their office stroking a white cat and feeling good about poisoning the minds of children. No, this approach is pretty much how they were brought up and if it was good enough for them, why not go on doing it now?

So there's little 6 year old Algo (isn't he cute?) looking for direction and hoping that God would be the answer. Thing is - despite all my wanting and need for comfort against the fear of death that had suddenly overcome me, I cannot remember EVER, for ONE MOMENT actually believing in God. Not for a second.

See, the fact is, wanting to believe does not necessarily lead to belief. I was, I am told, a pretty clever little guy (Joint 35th in the 11+ my year.. in the country! Woot!) and I came up fairly quickly with the proto-arguments I have developed and still refine to this day. Back then i was in the mistaken knowledge that these questions would have the answers I wanted and I could believe in God and be happy clappy and all that. I may even now have been in a Christian rock band now singing "Headbanging For Jesus" if the answers I got from Sunday School (where we went, not because we were sent but, perversely, asked to go to) were any good at overcoming my doubts.

Now the theists amongst you may be thinking now, maybe it was just a poor Sunday School teacher that couldn't answer these questions. This wouldn't be giving me enough credit I'm afraid. As the years went past I have always sought out new arguments on both sides of the debate - at least until recently, when moving to London I actually had to start paying for books I wanted to read for a long time, rather than checking them out of the University library for months. Now I tend to read books that I want to spend the time on, and they tend to be ones that give me more depth to my own arguments.

For example - a neo-religious comeback to atheists such as myself is that Atheism is itself a religion of sorts. Until I read Bertrand Russell, Dawkins and even Derren Brown on the subject I would never have had the guts to come back with my now usual answer - "Atheism is a religion only in the same way that religion is a form of Atheism". This isn't just a pseudo-amusing retort, it can be summarised as "by choosing one religion you are atheistic regarding all the others" and also a-atheistic if you want to be really over the top.

So I know most of the accepted Christian counter arguments. I know that there is no way to overcome someone in a mature argument when they believe "faith" to be a trump card when in fact it may well be just a symptom of fear and ignorance.

So why bother? Why do I consistently talk about these subjects? Why don't I just shut up?

It's not, as my mum thinks, I am just a fanatic. I'm really not.

Time to hit up Dictionary.com again.

Fanatic - a person with an extreme and uncritical enthusiasm or zeal, as in religion or politics.

I think in this day and age, non-belief (whether you choose to call it atheism or agnosticism) is pretty much the norm whether people admit that or not so I wouldn't call my views "extreme". They are also not "uncritical". I have examined, re-examined, honed and developed my arguments and have at every opportunity been open to counter arguments.

I am also not prejudiced (even against Keira Knightley, Gary).

1. an unfavorable opinion or feeling formed beforehand or without knowledge, thought, or reason.
2. any preconceived opinion or feeling, either favorable or unfavorable.
3. unreasonable feelings, opinions, or attitudes, esp. of a hostile nature, regarding a racial, religious, or national group.

I hope looking at these you will follow that only in number 3 is it even possible I am prejudiced, but I'm not - because my feelings, opinions and attitudes about religion (which I presume you are referring to) are not unreasonable, in fact they are very well reasoned over the last twenty years of my life and I am happy to take you through every single reason again whenever you like. (from my response to Gary on the Knightley post)

Religion is not necessarily evil.

There, I said it. May people will say that it is, they are wrong. Evil certainly exists, but it is PEOPLE who are capable of evil and who desire to do evil things. To back this up - James Bulgers murder was horrific. Truly an act of evil. Was it the horror movie's fault as the papers claimed? No. It was two evil children's fault.

Don't even get me started on right and wrong !

Like the horror movie though, religion gives people ideas - it also gives certain people LICENSE to be evil. What religion is guilty of is giving people excuses, for placing a thick "veneer of bullshit" over the real problems. Why is this? Because being evil makes you uncomfortable.

For example, if you took a machine gun and shot twenty Germans dead for no reason you'd be a mass murderer - do it during a war and you get a medal. Well, maybe not if they were still civilians, but you get my point. Context is EVERYTHING when acting in a usually unacceptable manner.

So religion is ideal for despots, monarchs, Ayatollahs and dictators - if they can find someone respected in religious circles to declare them ruler by divine right (hey, you can always find someone willing to do that if you threaten to burn their family alive) then you have the excuse to do absolutely anything you want.

So why do I think religion should be allowed to die? Because it would take away this thick layer of bullshit and make people admit responsibility for all their actions.

That being said, many people will argue that religion has led to more wars and disharmony than any other factor, and I agree. This is because the people who went to war would not be prepared to do so without the excuse religion provides.

Now, even if you subscribe to the "let religion remain a comfort to those who want it", this "excuse for evil" of things more than outweighs any good this supposed comfort may bring.

The other thing is, to paraphrase Richard Dawkins; "just because something is comforting doesn't make it true".

And this goes back to my early years too. I realised that there wasn;t a God fairly early on. I have nuanced my argument a bit since then to accept that under scientific priciples it is impossible to prove that God doesn't exist, since it is semantically impossible to "prove" anything for absolute certainty, since to do so would need an infinite experiment using the entire universe, which is impossible. SO I must accept the miniscule possibility that I am wrong. And I do.

I don't think personally that the acceptance of this miniscule fraction of a likelihood makes me "agnostic" rather than "atheistic" but that's so fine a distinction at this point it scarcely matters.

My very first blog post was on the subject of this possibility (though still under the effects of SSRIs and slightly less focussed than this as it was). The short point of that post is that even if I am wrong and God exists, I woul not deem him worthy of love and worship. In the end he would be just a very advanced alien creature and one with the arrogance and desire to control and punish an entire species based on bizarre rules.

Of course, he may be, as one supposedly enlightened Christian once told me by a bus stop in London (Jesus Army if you asked, by leicester square) simply be a nebulous conglomeration of feelings - "why not just think of love, and call that God?" or "you accept that something caused the big bang that you don't understand, why not call that God?". My counter argument to this is why not call a cheese sandwich, God? Or a walnut whip? Or Algo?

The counter argument to every point I made was - "yes, but the bible says..." and the fact that its in their book was considered enough to overcome all biological, physical and logical arguments to the contrary.

The same Christian asked me if I believed in the teachings of Jesus (big mistake, bozo!) and upon hearing me say no, immediately asked "is it because you had a bad experience at Church?" with all the implication being - "did the reverend touch you?" I was flabbergasted, and not a little confused. Does this idiot (female by the way) really believe that the only reason I don't believe in her God is because I was molested? I'm guessing no, and she was trying to be funny. Anyway, my bus arrived shortly after this, and as it pulled away I saw her try and convert a Hindu. good luck with that.

So by all means have your nebulous god, your "God is Love" if you want. I'll stick with Science.

Oooh. Another interesting question. Why do I trust Science? Isn't Science just a "faith", too?

Well, frankly no. And the person who first thought of that argument is a fool.

Faith whether you are for it or against it, is the acceptance of things that can't be true with no hard evidence to back them up. Science is the exact opposite. Science is the questioning of ANY accepted truth and testing it and finding hard evidence to support or refute a hypothesis. It is impossible for me to think of anything less like faith than Science.

I remember watching Christopher Hitchens being interveiwed on The Daily Show and he stated that Faith is the most overrated "virtue" in the world. I absolutely agree with that. The next president of the United States is unable to be an Atheist - he must be a man of faith in order to even be nominated for the presidency.

Think about that. The most powerful man on the planet has to be someone who as a matter of everyday life, believes in things 100% without any evidence to back them up. So the president has to be at least a little bit out of touch with reality.

This is why I willdo my bit in exposing the idiocy and madness of allowing religion into our lives. When the man in charge of the largest nuclear arsenal in the world believes in the same book that helped lead to the crusades, I start getting a twitch in my brain.

Anyway, I hope this has at least been interesting and explained why I believe what I do and wasn't too dull.

I haven't gone into detail on each individual anti-theistic argument since that's what all my other religion posts cover, so if you are interested in further reading on this subject even to present me with counter arguments (I'd love to hear some good ones, I've been waiting twenty years) then you can find a keyword link that will sort al of the religion articles together in the top right of the main blog pages.

Thanks for reading.

A