I thought I’d write a little about my feelings on religion. It’s a driving force in the lives of most human beings. It’s a source of wonderment, awe, and good feeling. It brings many people together. It also casts people apart, and is the cause of much social unrest, racial bigotry, and even war. I’ll have no part in it.

When I was seven years old, my parents attended the local Lutheran church, while my brother and I went to Sunday School in the trailer in the parking lot. We learned a lot of cool stories. One day the trailer wasn't there, and we had to go inside the main building with the grownups. There I was apalled to discover they believed all those fairy tales we'd been learning in Sunday School were real. I never went back.

Today I am an atheist.

What is an atheist? Thank you for asking. Most people have their own definition pre-programmed by years of religious indoctrination. I’ve been called the "antichrist", a minion of Satan, an evil demon, well, you get the idea. The simple truth is atheist means A-THEIST, or non-god-believer. An atheist does not believe in the supernatural. This includes ghosts, poltergeist, magic, and psychics. It also includes gods, devils, demons, angels, etc. Face it, folks, these things are not real. Take a look around you, what do you see? I’m looking at a computer screen as I type this document. I know my computer is real, I can reach out and touch it, hear the CD it is playing, even smell it burning when it gets too hot. Try doing that with a god. Gods cannot be sensed with any of the five senses.

Science is real. Science can be proven, science is fact. Facts do not require belief or faith. Religion, on the other hand, survives on faith alone. If the stories were true, there would be observable evidence, wouldn’t there? If God were real, and omnipresent, wouldn’t someone actually see him? (The truth is, most of us discount people who make the claim they've seen God as loony.) And if the stories were true, we also would have no reason to prescribe a ridiculously awful punishment for thinking on our own, would we?

I’ve been told atheism is not logical, that I should put my money on God. That way if I’m wrong I have nothing to lose, and if I am right I have everything to gain. This is known as Pascal’s Wager, posed many years ago by one Blaise Pascal. On the surface it seems to be a plausible 50-50 bet, doesn’t it? Unfortunately, most Christians don’t think beyond the surface when it comes to their religion. Let’s say I decide to accept the wager and put my money on God. OK, which one? There are thousands. OK, many of those have been dismissed as mythology, but there are still quite a few that are worshipped actively today, and if I don’t pick the right one I stand a very good chance of roasting in the right one’s hot spot. So I’ll go with the most popular one, the Christian God. OK, which church is the right one? Baptist? Presbyterian? Catholic? Mormon? Lutheran? Episcopalian? Quaker?

It’s no longer a 50-50 bet, is it? In fact, the chances of winning are about the same as winning the California Lottery – not really a good thing to bet your life on.

When facing the rebuttal to Pascal's Wager above, most Christians will ask, "Whaddya mean 'which God'? There's only one true God." The combination of childhood indoctrination, dogma, fear, ingnorance and bigotry close their minds to all other possibilities. Out of sheer arrogance they claim their religion is the one true religion.

This is true of the Baptists.

This is true of the Catholics.

This is true of the Mormons.

This is true of the Protestants.

This is true of the Muslims.

This is true of all garden-variety born-again Fundamentalists.

How can they all be right? It's not possible because their beliefs all contradict one-another. But they CAN all be wrong.

In the mid 1800s a man named Charles Darwin published a theory called Evolution. Much of it today is proven, observable fact. Evolution shows how a species, through minute hereditary gene changes over long periods of time, change. It proves that our species, Homo Sapiens, evolved from lower species over a period of time that could be as long as 100,000 years.

But the bible says our species was created out of a handful of dirt by a god some 6,000 years ago. Religion and science cannot co-exist with two such different ideals concerning the origin of our species. As a child, this created a paradox in my thinking. However, I quickly dismissed the god creation story when I learned about the speed of light in a science class. If the universe is only 6,000 years old, why can we see light from stars that have been measured at millions of light years distant from Earth? And with the Hubble telescope, scientists have observed light that has traveled over 14 billion years to get here.

Astronomy debunks the biblical timeline, doesn’t it? And Evolution proves we were not created – we evolved. It doesn’t take much further thought to come to the conclusion that science kicks the foundation out from under religion. If there was no creation, then there was no Adam and Eve, no Garden of Eden. Therefore, there was no Original Sin, and since there were no original sinners, there is no need for a Savior, is there? The whole edifice topples.

Saviors have been around for many millennia. A little digging into the history of religion will show us that there were sixteen savior myths that pre-dated Christianity by a few thousand years. Most of these saviors had the exact same attributes given to Christianity's Jesus Christ. Most were born of a virgin impregnated by some kind of god. Most were highly charismatic, some had earthly fathers that were carpenters, most were crucified, some between two theives, and most were resurrected after three days. All were born on or around the Winter Solstice (late December), some including a visit by three wise men (or kings) who were guided by a star, and all were executed around the Spring Equinox (Christianity's Easter). This knowledge was pretty much the icing on the cake for me. If these stories have been dismissed as mythology, why on earth do we hold on to the Jesus myth? I mean, doesn't it sound a little fishy to you? Heh - pun intended, of course...

See the Inquisitive Atheists website for more details on the above.

Of course, the threat of eternal agony in the fire of Hell shuts most people's minds down. Folks, this is the 21^st century. When considering Christianity, one must accept the idea that a Middle-Eastern virgin was impregnated by a ghost, and gave birth to a man who could walk on water, feed multitudes from one basket of bread, heal the terminally ill with a touch, and raise the dead. Do you see people like this today? Hmmmm, have you ever wondered why? Or does the threat of eternal torture prevent you from thinking along these lines? What place would such a story have next to summarizations of nuclear physics, quantum mechanics or modern medical science?

Furthermore, one is asked to believe an ocean was magically parted to facilitate the moving of an entire population of people, and that the sun actually stood still one day.

Let’s consider that for a moment. If the sun stood still, what would happen to us? Well, probably nothing, right? Don’t forget, the bible was written back when people thought the sun rotated around the Earth. Of course, what they meant was that the Earth stopped rotating for a day, which of course would have thrown everything not nailed down skyward.

One of the most insulting stories, of course, is that of Noah’s Ark. Here one is asked to believe some 30 million species of animal, insect, reptile, bird and fish fit aboard a wooden boat that was not only thousands of times too small for such an inventory, but considering biblical construction technique, would have broken in half had they ever sailed it out of dry dock. One is also asked to believe that penguins survived out of their habitats for a year in a temperate climate, and existed next to lions and cougars, predators that would have, under these conditions, caused many species to cease to exist. And of course, one is asked to believe the earth was completely repopulated by Noah and his family, including Blacks, Asians, Hispanics and American Indians, just to name a few – in just a few thousand years. See the Talk Origins website for a complete debunking of this bald-faced lie.

The religious constantly babble about Man’s eternal soul. I ask of them, where is it? The fact is no doctor has ever surgically removed a soul, or even found one for that matter. They don't show up on x-rays. Religious people babble on about the soul being a spiritual being that controls your life and is responsible for your consciousness. If this was true, I ask them, why is it possible to alter your consciousness with drugs or alcohol? And why is it possible to lose your consciousness with a blow to the brain? The fact is consciousness is a result of electro-chemical reactions in the brain. When the brain dies, so does consciousness. Moments after brain death, the tissue begins to rot. Electrical activity ceases, and the chemicals that store memories break down.

One of my favorite questions to ask religious people is along this very line of reasoning. I’ve been told that the brain and the soul are quite separate entities. If, when you die, your eternal soul proceeds to heaven, what kind of existence is it without a brain with which to think and to retain memories? Would you actually know you were in heaven without a brain to know with? Would you be "you"?

Some of the more fundamental Christians insist the body is resurrected intact, and some even insist that new "heavenly" bodies are assigned. If you dig up a dead Christian, you'll have proof this is crapola, the body is still there. And if a new body is assigned, where do the earthly memories come from? Once again, would you be "you"?

The truth is, that most of these wonderous stories that make up the world's religions can only be explained with magic or miracles. We know magic today is nothing but entertainment, nothing but a show of "tricks". And I ask of the religious, how do miracles differ from random events?

The Pope recently lead a group of the world's religious leaders in a prayer to end some faminous hot weather in Europe and spare those who would otherwise die. Did it work? Did their god(s) answer the prayer? Or did nature run its course? I'll let you decide, but I'll add my two cents. Nothing fails like prayer. Proof? OK. Christians say God is omniscient, or "All-knowing", past present and future. According to them, this god knows what we have done, what we are doing, and what we will do in the future. If this is true, can anyone explain to me how prayer is not futile?

Religion cannot co-exist with logic. Most fallacies of logical argument can be applied to arguments for religion. For example, the biggest fallacy in religious argument is that of Circular Reasoning, or Begging the Question. When asked to prove the existence of his god, the religious man will quote the bible. Of course, he cannot understand that he is using the bible to prove the bible, and that I could do the same thing to prove the existence of Harry Potter.

Consider for a moment these three verses from the bible.

1 John 4:8 - "God is love."
1 Corinthians 13:4 - "Love is not jealous."
Exodus 20:5 - "I, the Lord thy God am a jealous God."

Most Christians are taught to believe in the truth and correctness of the entire bible, and when giving equal weight to each of these three verses, either God cannot logically exist, or the bible is incorrect.

There is also a dilemma known as The Problem with Evil. Christians are taught their god is omnipotent (all-powerful), omniscient (all-knowing), and omnibenevolent (all-loving). This cannot logically be so, because we have evil in the world. If the god is all-loving, there would be no evil in the world because he is all-powerful and could terminate evil. But evil does exist in this world, which shows that the god is either not all-loving (and will not terminate evil), or he is not all-powerful (and can not terminate evil). Christians (ad nauseum) blame this problem on the free will the god gave us. Of course, they are unable to understand that if the god was all-knowing (and knows what will happen – past, present and future) there can be no free will. They posit that the god has a plan, and we are all actors in this unalterable plan, yet somehow we possess the ability to change our minds through free will. Does this make any sense to you?

It doesn’t to me. It's like asking a train engineer to turn left when the tracks veer to the right.

So, then, what happens when you die? The religious seem to know all the answers, when the truth is, nobody has ever come back to tell us. I look at it this way. If you want to know what happens when you die, go to the morgue and look at a dead guy.

Seriously folks, do any of you remember the period of time before you were born? Did you exist then? I didn’t. It wasn’t so bad, non-existence. I don’t look forward to dying, but I don’t fear being dead.

Realizing that this is it, this is the only life there is puts an endearment on it that is unfounded in any religious community. Many religious people will happily march off to war for their country, confident in the belief that if they die in battle, their soul will be saved and they will go off to heaven for all of eternity. This type of belief is responsible for the actions of the fanatically religious Muslims that destroyed the World Trade Center 9/11/01. And it is responsible for the actions of our own fanatically religious President, who has deemed it necessary to over-run entire populations in search of evil, a President who thinks nothing of the collateral waste of human life.

Atheism gives life a new outlook, which is why so many of us are anti-war and anti-violent. It also persuades us to live our lives to the fullest. It’s the reason I compose music, with the hope that I will achieve the only kind of "immortality" there is, human memory.

Of course, atheists are a definite minority in this sadly fucked-up country called America. But we are not alone. One of my favorite atheists in the world is George Carlin. Check out his views here.

Christians, when you die, what will you do for the first 16,439,819,266,721 years of eternity?

Carleton Sheets

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