It’s an interesting question.  If you are truly a believer in Christ, and in Christianity on the whole, then your answer must be a resounding YES!  And not just for Anne Frank, you must also include the 6 million slaughtered by the Nazi’s in WWII,  Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, Sammy Davis Jr., Howie Mandel, George Burns, The Beastie Boys, the list goes on and on.  Jews do not believe that Jesus was the Messiah and do not “accept Him as their Lord and Savior”.  Both of those points are the central to all of Christianity.  You could go as far, and it wouldn’t be a stretch, to say that without accepting those two points you can’t be a Christian and you can’t be saved.  Period.

Yet as Hermant points out, and you can verify for yourself in the comments to Ms. Evans’ post, most “Christians” completely sidestep the question.  Rather than standing up for what they have been taught, for what they claim they believe in, what they tell me personally when they find out I am an atheist, that yes, because Jews don’t accept JC as their Savior they will all be dining in the fire, they waffle and resort to vague statements about “I can’t say, God decides.”

How disingenuous is that?  I, as an atheist, am going to hell because I don’t believe in and worship Christ but if you are a Jew with the exact same belief you get some vague, politically correct, “don’t call me an anti-Semite”, BS response.  The fact of the matter is, if you are a Christian, a true Christian, if you believe in the Bible, it’s teachings, then you are, you must be, at least a little anti-Semitic.  At least if you class “knowing” all Jews are going to hell as anti-Semitic.

In the end, no matter how you look at it, Jews, Buddhists, Muslims, atheists, etc., are ALL equally damned in the eyes of Christians.  They do not, by definition, “accept Jesus Christ as their Lord and Savior” and do not believe he is, was, or ever will be, the Messiah.

So for everyone who worries about my “eternal soul” and wants me to “let Christ into my heart” I have only one response for you, assuming you are right, then just like the Jews, God decides who gets into heaven and apparently that is NOT based on the basic cornerstone of your religion.

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• TEA members have declared multiplication “bullshit”.  One board member said, “Times is obviously a liberal, commie plot to take the thunder away from plus”.  Another commented, “Why waste time learning multiplication tables we God gave us addition?  What is so hard about adding 3 to itself 1000 times to come up with 3000?  If the Lord had intended brevity we wouldn’t have to sit through chapter upon chapter of ‘Urgon begat Smideon who begat Lupus.’”
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Basically I see two reasons people become (or are) religious:

• Childhood Indoctrination
• Life Events

I will look at each of these in turn.

While I am unsure who to credit it is often stated that “All children are born atheists.”  I tend to agree with that assumption.  A child is not born with an innate or instinctual knowledge of a god or higher power.  In fact babies, it could be said, know nothing beyond eating, sleeping, and shitting.  While many Christians will claim that all children are born with Jesus in their heart but that claim is easily disproved.  If Christians’ claims are true then what is the explanation for “other” religions?  For surely if all children are born with a knowledge of god eventually they would come to know and understand that knowledge and there would not be any reason for Islam, Hinduism, the Greek and Roman pantheons, or any other type of god.  The very fact that there are multiple religions (I am not speaking of different off shoots of the same religion like Catholicism vs. Lutheranism) should lead anyone to believe that you are not born with any knowledge of a specific god and that the god you eventually come to believe in is taught to you.

We could take this a step further and actually test this hypothesis.  We could take a just born child and sequester him/her from any knowledge of any type of religion or religious information and see if at some point in that child’s life they “found god”.  Surely if all children are born with Jesus in their heart they would eventually “just know” right?  Of course we have no need of performing such a horrible experiment on a child to prove my point.  It is simple enough to look to the many recently converted tribes in deepest, darkest Africa, or heretofore unknown peoples in the deeps of the Amazon rain forest.  Until they were introduced to Christianity none of them (and absolutely none at that) had any idea of the Christian, Muslim, Hindu, Greek, etc. god(s).  It more than proves the point that without someone indoctrinating a child (or a whole people) there would be no knowledge of the Christian god.  (NOTE: I will, generally speaking, be talking about the Christian god since I am from the US and that is most prevalent here, though I believe my ideas apply unilaterally to all religions that believe in a super natural being.)

So the first reason people are religious is childhood indoctrination.  Children are taught to believe what their parent teach them.  If you teach your child to believe in the Christian god then it will.  If you don’t then it won’t.  I am not going to say “never” will as we will explore when talking about my second point from above, but as a general rule people are Christian because, since before they were even old enough and mentally developed enough to know what it is they are being taught to believe, that is what their parents have told them to believe.  I find it odd that in a time where roughly half of all of America was up in arms that President Obama had the audacity to “indoctrinate” our country’s youth by telling them to stay in school that no one seems to have a problem with the daily cases of indoctrination at the hands of religious parents.

The second reason for religiosity is “life events”.  I use that term rather broadly.  We hear stories all the time about someone “finding Jesus” or being “born again”.  More often than not these things take places after some sort of “happening” in a person’s life.  They mange to walk away from a car wreck they never should have.  They win the lottery.  They witness an immense act of kindness.  They find their soul mate (who happens to be religious).  The feel lonely, unloved, or think themselves an outcast.  The reason these types of people turn to religion is because, at some psychological level, it satisfies something.

There is a common expression called the “god of the gaps”.  The idea is that throughout history religious ideals and explanations have been applied to things that were unexplainable.  Prior to Sir Isaac Newton people couldn’t explain why an apple fell from a tree.  To them the obvious explanation was that god made the apple fall to the ground.  There was simply no other explanation.  Once Newton discovered the theory of gravity “god” was no longer needed to explain that phenomenon.  Throughout history you will find similar instances, both large and small, where something unknown and inexplicable was attributed to a higher power.  Many cases were explained through science eventually and no longer attributed to god.

Humans feel the need to be able to explain everything their senses tell them is happening and because of this need it is this same god of the gaps principal that drives some adults to (or back to) religion.  For someone who can’t explain how they survived the crash (many times that is not explainable, not because it is impossible, but because we don’t have ALL of the information and variables to precisely recreate the scenario) it is easy to attribute the unknowable to god.  For someone who beat impossible odds to win a large sum of money in the lottery it may seem that only an act of god could have shined such fortune on them.  They are using god to fill in the gaps.

For others is is simply the need for companionship and acceptance.  Someone who doesn’t feel a part of a group will find welcoming arms in the religious.  This need for and extension of companionship is not a bad thing.  It is all of the other dogmatic baggage that comes a long with it that I find harmful. People want to be accepted, loved, and cherished and religion provides a “path of least resistance” for someone looking for someone to “fit in”.

Children (and adults) believe in all sorts of imaginary creatures.  Leprechauns, unicorns, monsters in the closet, the troll under the bridge, the tooth fairy, Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, the man in the moon, etc.  We allow all of those beliefs to get kicked to the curb eventually once they are old enough to realize the absurdity of such beliefs.  For some reason though the equally bankrupt idea of a personal god, some super natural being, is not just allowed to continue to exist but is reinforced, fostered, proclaimed (against all reason) as truth.

Most religious will point out at this time the idea of “faith”.  And I will get to that in a later post but for now I think I have fairly squarely offered up my ideas on the reasons for religiousness in people.  Feel free to discuss the merits and demerits of my ideas.  This is a journey after all and a pretty lonely one at that.

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How do you know god doesn’t exist?

I usually have a pompous and snarky reply relating to “the incredible, edible egg”.  Usually my reply is enough to either lower their defences (or offences as you will) and allow a somewhat balanced discussion to follow or, more often than not, it ends the whole conversation with regards to that topic.

Recently more of my friends and family have been pushing back at my atheism.  Pushing may be the wrong choice of words.  Let’s just say they are becoming more inquisitive.  Their interest has gotten to the point where the egg excuse doesn’t cut it any more.  Because of this I have started reading more atheist (as well as theist, I actually picked up The Bible again for the first time in years) literature in order to hone my arguments into something more appropriate for discussion and debate.

I resisted atheist media in general for nearly all the time I have been an atheist.  I am perfectly content in my decision.  I don’t feel the need for external validation of my viewpoints.  The desire to “chum around” with like minded individuals has never seemed to matter to me.  I suppose the biggest reason I tended to avoid atheist media was because I saw it as no different than theistic media.  Although it is probably unfair to make this decision having not verified it for myself, the idea of someone telling me “why I shouldn’t believe in god” seemed nearly as distasteful as someone telling me why I should.

So here I am, content in my own mind with my decision and reasoning, but generally sounding like a dimwit when trying to explain it.  So, together with some books and lectures, and my captive blog audience (I still laugh at the thought I can call the occasional visitor here an “audience”), I am going to explore and sharpen my reasoning and arguments for believing the way I do.

So, “Why don’t I believe in god?”  Quite simple actually.  An all powerful, all knowing, loving, benevolent, intelligent designer would have, if he/she/it existed, created eggs with the Tabasco sauce already in them.  To do otherwise is simply a flaw and enough proof of non-existence for me.

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