How Does The Harmless Become Harmful? (Part One)

The title of this blog is that of a good question I’m often asked. While no religion is absolutely harmless, there are those out there that carry relatively positive messages, and one should be curious as to why I still loop those in with the larger and more destructive forces. There are also those out there that don’t actually even know about the negative side of what they believe, and just believe in private. There are also those who don’t even practice an organized faith, and merely practice whatever spiritual path they choose in the privacy of their own home, without affecting anyone around them.

I’ll start with a religion that I tend to give a lot of grief to, and keep in mind that nothing positive I am about to say was influenced in any way, although that may change if Viacom gets their hands on my work. Then it’ll have more black ink than a military document from 1941.

The truth, in my own heart, about Scientology, is that I truthfully have very little against them. After all, when you stack them up against the other major religions of our time, they don’t have a history of physical violence against dissenters (only courtroom drama). They don’t teach their members to harm others, nor do they officially say that their faith is the only right one and that something bad will happen to you if you don’t believe them. In fact, they are how many other religions should be. They’re quiet and secretive and tend to stay out of other people’s business unless it directly involves them.

Scientology teaches its followers to be healthy, refrain from psychotropic drugs as well as narcotics and excessive alcohol, and even uses physical exercise as part of some of its prayer programs. Truth be told, aside from their mythology and their willingness to sue people on a whim, I can’t think of anything bad to say about them.
The same goes for many of the Pagan religions as well. These religions, although some followers seem to become quite militant about their faith, have a great collection of ideas. Such as the Wiccans who believe in more of a bipolar deity that is both man and woman, who is not vengeful against people of other faiths. The religion teaches peace, love and harmony, which is why it was adopted so heavily among hippies and other peace movements in the sixties and seventies.

Even the practice of LaVeyan Satanism seems to have many positive messages. The message in the Satanic Bible—the beginning anyway—seems to be that there is no devil or god, or heaven or hell. Here and now is your time of torment and here and now is your time of bliss. Live your life while you’re on this Earth and live everyday as if it were your last, instead of spending your life building up to an afterlife that doesn’t exist. Although, the malfunction of the Satanic belief structure seems to crumble in the second half of the book, when Anton LaVey reveals the great secret of the Enochian Keys, which are the spoken invocations of the lord of the underworld. How is it that you can raise the lord of darkness, when as previously stated in the book, he does not exist?

Anton LaVey, as a person, was a great man. He was a man that I feel should be idolized for many reasons. He was laid back and spent most of his days unbathed, in dark rooms in black robes, playing with snakes and having sex with the chubbiest women he could find. He did whatever he wanted in life, and never went out of his way to hurt others, in fact, for the most part, did the opposite. This is far more than I can say about other religious “profits”, especially those in the 1960s, when LaVey came to power with the book, The Satanic Bible. He was charitable, and encouraged others to be as well. And for an old man—as is evident in his latter day teachings such as, the Satanic Verses, and Satan Speaks—he had an astounding sense of humor. In fact, he wrote extensively in his later years about the decline of physical comedy in the world, and how he felt it was contributing to the darkness that currently reigned over the world—he had a fetish for the whoopee cushion.

This was the Anton LaVey that I liked. However, the other Anton was a calculating opportunist who achieved his fame through nothing but shock value. This is the other half of the man, for which I have very little respect. And although he started an institution with the good ideas of peace against children and animals, and an understanding of the ambiguous nature of morality as a whole; he also wrote many musical pieces reciting hymns that resembled Christianity far too much. These were hymns about killing Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus and Christians because, he said, “We don’t need them anymore.” I guess as an example of how the seemingly harmless becomes harmful, this stands alone.

The Nordic teachings are another great example of the religious double standard. Whereas the stories of Odin and other deities teach peace and respect, with an overwhelming sense of family and unity, the Nordic beliefs also teach a great war-philosophy, where only those who die during war can truly enter the heavenly kingdom of Valhalla. This could pretty easily explain the war-like values of the Vikings and history’s other practitioners of the Nordic faiths.

Even the more primitive Middle Eastern religions practiced philosophies that were peaceable as well as realistic. They realized that violence could be necessary although, as a last ditch effort. Beliefs like the Sumerian structure were actually—scientifically—close to our current philosophy. Although written a bit more cryptically and abstractly, the Sumerians even believed in something very close to the big bang theory, as well as human evolution. The problem with the Sumerian belief is that eventually, the anti-war stance of the faith became a distant memory, as the people who practiced it started participating in slavery and honed the “conquer and convert” philosophy of the later Muslim beliefs.

The problem lies in the fact that these are mythologies, and practice forms of theology. The problems with theology are many. The major problems are that when you explain the mysteries of time and space, you absolve those to whom you preach it from the urge to try to answer them for themselves. Another issue is the God aspect. The truth in the matter is that there is no superior high being in the world hovering over us like we’re its children. Therefore, when you talk to it, or more dangerously, when it talks to you, it’s only telling you whatever you inwardly desire it to. Such as in cases where people think that God is talking to them, what they’re actually hearing are their inner desires and needs, therefore what they think is a higher power, because of their being brain washed, is actually parts of their own mind. This can be very dangerous, and in matters of the dangers of this kind of phenomenon, one must mention how this is caused by the lack of reasoning, logic and query that can be caused by religious teachings.


The Theo-Glitch

Another great issue is schizophrenia. Schizophrenia is so incredibly common among those from families who greatly influence religion. If you combine teachings of religion with an extraordinarily high Intelligence Quotient, you have two possible out-comes. One, the better of the two, the person rejects religion and follows his own path into the world of science or elsewhere. Two, the more dangerous of the two, you’ve got a person thinking that God is talking to him through his neighbor’s dog and telling him to hurt or even kill others. And if you take the stories of the bible literally, believing that God would tell you to do such things isn’t irrational to you, in fact, it’s pretty normal considering all of the people in the bible to which things like this happened.

The greatest danger is what I refer to as the Theo-glitch. Sigmund Freud talked extensively about this in one of his later books. He theorized that religion is actually a glitch in the brain, and it can be worsened with the more faith that is pounded down a person’s throat as they grow. You see, your brain isn’t truly fully developed until you are around your mid to late teens, therefore anything can be very impressionable onto a youth. Stories of things like Santa and the Easter Bunny can advance this glitch, however, nothing causes the glitch to accrue like religion. Santa and the Rabbit are only tales and parents take them lightly. They don’t preach them day in and day out, and they—most of the time—inform their children at a pretty young age that they don’t exist. This is not the way it is with religion. Although the stories are similar, and in many cases, stories of Rudolph and his shiny nose are more believable than certain stories of religious lore, parents never tell their children that God doesn’t exist.

As an example, I’ll use the Son of Sam. Although there were no religious claims of the Son of Sam, he did actually come from a heavily religious upbringing. You see, most people—people who all carry a light form of schizophrenia—would have a little switch in their brain that would say, “Wait a minute, dogs can’t talk. So, how can a dog tell me to kill people?”

The issue lies in the faith of religion. If you take literally the stories in the bible, then receiving orders to kill from a dog is not that far off from reality. After all, with stories of burning bushes talking to people, God telling people to kill their children, God smiting people to win a bet with Satan, and telling entire tribes of people to kill all men up to the first born and take the virgins for delight after all have been slaughtered; the belief in these stories are no more ridiculous than believing that a dog could tell you to kill people.

Therefore, the Summer of Sam began, and a summer where many lived in fear. And it’s not far off the truth to believe that this could have been easily avoided if it were not for his religious upbringing.

You must wonder what children must feel when their told stories of grown men walking on water, and tales of a great and devout heaven waiting for them when they die. One would have to wonder what the youth suicide rate is among heavily religious homes. Well, actually the statistic is quite astonishing. Seven in every twenty-five heavily Christian homes experienced a youth death that was self inflicted during 2008. While, one out of every seventeen experienced a non-self inflicted youth mortality. One would have to wonder how much the belief in an afterlife had to do with these lives being lost even before they had the chance to flourish and hear orders to kill from their neighbor’s dog.

The Theo-glitch is a great part of why impressionable people tend to join cults, whether peaceful but still scary like the Raelians, or violent ones like the Davidians. Many argue that it’s just a persons need to belong that carries them to the extent of buying into the religious rhetoric of these cult leaders. The truth of the matter is this: their minds are conditioned to believe in vast radical stories of gods and prophets, therefore have no logical reason to reject such people who may claim to be one or the other.

If you were conditioned from youth to believe that God spoke to all of these people just a couple millennia ago, and that a person was born into the world from a virgin to be the son of god, who would be martyred but later rise from the dead; what would your reasoning be to believe that this sort of thing couldn’t happen in our own time? What would your reasoning be to disbelieve in what you’re being told? You would have absolutely no reason to reject the radical claims of cult leaders solely on principle. Combine that with the common attribute of cult leaders, this being great charisma, and suddenly your brain has been reduced to that of a four year-old hearing biblical stories from your grandfather.

It takes great conditioning to wean yourself off of the destructive thought patterns that are laid into your mind by religious faith. It’s taken my whole life to let go of the same teachings. As a child, my grandfather taught me a lot of biblical stories and these stories scared the hell out of me when I was young. He was a devout Lutheran, and took the bible word for word. Even at my age, I tend to have irrational fears from time to time, at which point, I need to step back and repeat to myself that everything is alright, and that I have nothing to be afraid of. I need to retell myself that there is nothing rational to explain what I just saw out of the corner of my eye in the dark, and that it was just my mind trying to interpret what I was seeing with something familiar to me. That’s what happens when your eyes can’t interpret what you’re seeing, your brain starts making it up itself. It’s a life long process of weaning and convincing to get yourself into a rational thought process, when your childhood was filled with stories that made the Legend of Tarzan and Lord of the Rings seem like more viably fact related stories.

It is stories like these that I attribute to my Obsessive Compulsive Disorder as well. I have no reason to ascertain that if I don’t do everything in multiples of five that my life will suddenly begin wielding negative results. I have no reason to believe that my girlfriend won’t make it back from Florida next month if I don’t follow preordained and irrational patterns. But it is just that: irrational. And much like a phobia, it is hard to talk down with rational thought. It, in synopsis, is my brain acting irrationally and independent of logic.

This brings us to what else makes religion so dangerous. Religion teaches the dangerous pattern of blind faith. Now, it’s not like the bible is the only book in history to teach that things are blind. After all, according to history, Helen Keller was blind. According to Robert Frost, love is blind, and according to E. E. Cummings, so is lust. But these can all be positive things, except for the Helen Keller thing. It is not healthy to believe in blind faith and it is extremely destructive to teach it.

With the teaching of blind faith, you are teaching others not to question things in this world. There is nothing positive that can come from not questioning the values, principles, beliefs and/or actions of our world or nation. If nobody were to question anything, our federal government would be able to just do whatever they wanted without having to first pretend that we care. The time it takes to pretend often gives a head start to whatever democratically elected leader we’re trying to snuff out, or whatever third-world country we’re planning on blowing up next. I’m being a little facetious, but you get the point. The belief that we shouldn’t question anything is dangerous and can lead to a wasted life, a wasted land, nationalism, or even perestroika. I don’t think anybody wants these things, no matter how morally bankrupted because of religion. After all, these things lead to the end of free thought, free speech, and probably the end of the world as we know it. How could a person who questions authority actually believe in dragons, invisible men impregnating cosmic telekinetic Jewish zombies and lions with multiple heads rising from the sea? They wouldn’t.

When a person is taught blind faith, what’s to stop them from believing anything else that’s told to them? This is another effect of the Theo-glitch. What’s the incentive for people of blind faith to question the authority around them, when they’re taught at young ages to just believe and not question? If you’ll notice, we have a pretty shallow medical industry in this country. It is a medical industry where those in charge of the pharmaceutical companies are also in charge of approving drugs and creating new illnesses. An industry as well, that makes no money if people are healthy. Combine that with leaders and spokespersons who tell us that we have the best medical industry in the world, a clear lie when you look at health statistics, and you have a recipe for a complete lack of health. Why would a person who believes that it’s best to just believe because people tell you to, want to question this industry laden with conflicts of interests. It’s just one example of how religion has duped us into the control of those in power by teaching this principle, but there are many more. I know that this is starting to sound a bit Marxist, but in the matters of faith, I truly think that he—like the thousands who came before him with the very same observation—was onto something. It is truly the opiate of the mind.

The Theo-glitch affects of blind faith is what led the Soviet Union to fall. When people again and again believe blindly in their government that they’re going to get paid, even though they haven’t been paid in months and their government is going more and more bankrupt, they’re leading themselves into destruction. This is what happens when people don’t question authority, and the same happens when people are taught not to question anything else. This is precisely how religion and imperialism are one in the same in matters of virtue.

I’ve mentioned before just how defensive people can get whenever you bring up a point that might question their personal faith. This is probably because they’ve never questioned their own faith, therefore they have no answers. Because again, how could a person who questions anything believe in people living in the stomach of a whale, blazing talking bushes, and/or two of every species of animal living on a yacht, and that includes dinosaurs?

If you’ve ever wondered why the Christian right is indeed that, look at today’s right wing party. As they’ve completely strayed from the original ideals of the Republican Party, and even conservatives have abandoned the original beliefs of the party. After all, there was a time when they believed that government would stay out of the lives of its citizens, and that to legislate morality was wrong. Now they believe to the contrary, and the Christian right is aligned with them because of their current beliefs of overall control. One would have to be a complete nationalist who does not know their arm from their bay window when it comes to politics, to align himself with today’s right. Just like one would have to be oblivious to the differences between a history book and Alice in Wonderland to buy into religion. These two entities are perfect for one another and make perfect allies because of their similarities in the philosophy against any kind of questioning of leadership. In both beliefs, it is wrong to question authority.

Just like conservative talk show hosts like to say that it’s wrong to question the commander in chief, the bible says that it is better to be tied to stones and drowned in the seas, than to question the divinity or existence on God. These similarities are basically just accouterments to their other shared beliefs in homophobia, censorship and moral slavery.

The seemingly harmless becomes harmful in a personal scenario. I spoke earlier of the Theo-glitch and its harm to a person’s psyche, in the way that the overt school of religious thinking may make it hard for people to distinguish between reality and fiction. This is evident in a personal friend of mine who is later interviewed in this book. He’s a devout Catholic. He was raised that way, attends church every Sunday, and goes pretty far into the train of thought seniored by Christian Science. This is evident in him as no matter how far out there the things he reads are, he seemingly believes anything that is either put in a book or shown on YouTube. This, to me is dangerous and I’ll illustrate how. He has, as of recent, fallen under the David Icke school of thought. He’s been telling me for years about these secret prisons that the US is building for when it decides to institute the one world government and one world currency, because he listens to a late night talk show that meddles in these particular schools of thought (or lack of thought). I’m not going to say that all of this stuff is lies, but come on, most of it is so ridiculous that a normal and logical person would have no choice but to either change the station or just listen for the entertainment value. However, he believes everything he hears on this show, no matter how outrageous the claim. Just a year or so ago, David Icke was featured on this show, talking about his line of thought regarding the lizard men that are controlling the world and have been throughout history by interbreeding with man and creating a lineage to maintain power over earth. These lizard men consist of George W. Bush, The Pope, Adolf Hitler, Oscar Schindler, and many other prominent people in the world’s history. They either live in the cavernous and hollow Earth, or they live in the stars, but either way, they are from the fourth dimension, and can shape shift because of a special type of gold they develop that they inhale into their body for powers.

A logical person would read this and say, “What?” But to a religious mind, considering all of the stories in the bible that would make the same logical person give the same logical answer, he is unable to distinguish between reality and fiction. This has created a rampant paranoia in him that wouldn’t take a seasoned shrink to deem unhealthy. Because of this, he believes in these tales and even preaches about them quite heavily, especially after having a few. He is not a stupid person, in fact, his knowledge of human nutrition as well as human biology is pretty advanced. He commonly emits signs of very high IQ, but because of his religious upbringing, cannot seem to think to himself that Mr. Icke just might be either lying or just insane. Why would he be able to? Again, some of the biblical tales are just as outrageous as the stories Icke claims to be reality.

Now, this may seem like innocent belief and one might ask how it could harm anyone. Well, in truth, it is just an innocent belief. But let’s say he’s at the voting booth in three years, and there is one candidate that is very intelligent, ideological and qualified for the position he’s seeking, and another who is a bumbling fool such as the leader of our former administration. Let’s just say that he knows he should vote for the person who is more qualified, but in David Icke’s new book, that’s probably just another update of an old one, Icke claims to have seen said politician’s eyes glow bright and skin turn scaly, thus revealing him as a lizard man from the constellation Draco. Where do you think this highly paranoid and highly religious conspiracy theorist is going to lean? He’ll vote for the fool before he’ll vote for a lizard man who wants to hold the reigns of control over our world and everyone in it.

This is where it’s dangerous. I’ll mention later in the book how many people voted for Bush in 2004 just because of his religious beliefs, even though they had no idea where he stood on anything. And if you look at the rest of that statistic, everyone who was voting with the number one issue being economy, healthcare, terrorism, or Iraq, all voted for John Kerry. A person voting for someone just because he believes that an invisible man impregnated a virgin to give birth to his cosmic Jewish zombie of a son is no different than not voting for a person just because somebody wrote a book claiming he’s come kind of reptile man, sent here from the fourth dimension.

And other than voting, what’s to stop this friend of mine from going off the deep end one of these days? He already believes that our own government is plotting against us to kill us—a point that I won’t overtly argue—so what’s to stop him from going on a killing spree of government officials like some of the other nuts out there like the Michigan Militia? What’s to stop him from possibly walking into an office building in Oklahoma and pulling the switch? What’s to stop him from hijacking a plane and toppling a large skyscraper or three? Well, as the past has shown us when it relates to the last two questions, nothing is to stop him. Because wasn’t it religious nutcases from the Michigan Militia as well as zealots from the Middle-East, who were hoping for their forty virgins in Heaven who were responsible for the last two.

You see, something as seemingly harmless as faith would never make a normal person think twice about teaching it to their children. Most of them don’t even realize half of the stories in that book, it’s just become inherent. It seems like people think that religion is genetic. Just because your parents practiced something doesn’t mean you must as well. But they don’t think twice. These cases are usually not the ones that lead to the harm. Again, it’s the cases of overt teaching during the developmental stages of the mind. The overall lack of reason that is necessary to believe the stories in most bibles are true, can only be that of a child. And after these stories are taught, there is nothing to reaffirm a case of reality in the child as he/she becomes an adult. Overt religious teaching strips an innocent child of a very necessary survival component of the human brain: reason.

Reason and logic are pretty essential in a society like the one we have today. When one in thirty people are claiming to have spoken to god, what’s to stop a percentage of those people from whipping up a batch of Kool-Aid for a mass suicide? After all, I doubt God told them to do anything good. You need to have logic and reason on your side when you’re confronted in the airport by one of their cult-members who are trying to recruit you. Without logic, why would you not blindly follow? A person who’s right brain is dominant might actually listen to the people, but right brained people still retain a sense of logic from their left. However, in overtly religious people, there is usually a central (Temporal) lobe dominance, where it should be recessive to the frontal lobe. This is the common ground between conspiracy theorists and religionists also discussed later in the book. Feelings of helplessness, fear and paranoia are great triggers of such a disorder.


Final Summation

Religion becomes harmful on many grounds: whether it be violence to others, the coercion of children, sexual repression, sexism, bigotry, war, or even just the clear hostility displayed at acts of question or inquiry. But there are so many more ways that religion harms that aren’t often thought about. The Theo-glitch is one of those, in the way that it’s disguised so well with the veil of faith. After all, if one person thinks that a voice from another world is directing his actions, no matter what they are, and has mapped out a future that is unchangeable, it would surely be called dementia. However, if a few million people believe in the same concept, and even accept it as reality, it is then called religion. I guess what separates religion from madness is a mandate from the masses.

Either way, religion harms the psyche by allowing madness to exist independently of mental illness. There are even many states and countries that don’t separate “Jerusalem Syndrome” from basic dementia or schizophrenia. Why is that? It is separate, both in its effects, as well as in its foundation and cause. Ponder this: without the concept of God, would you have a bunch of nut-jobs walking around thinking that God is talking to them? Of course you wouldn’t, but don’t try to introduce that theory to a religionist. If you do, then you’re talking the words of Satan, who is supposed to be sent to earth around this time to talk people out of religion. Satan, you know that guy, the talking snake who tempted the rib-woman to eat from the magical tree that ended paradise, with whom she later had a child, who killed his brother, therefore is coursed to be a vampire. It’s funny what you can get people to buy, just by putting it into the right language, or making people believe it’s from an ancient text. However, when it’s worded like that, it suddenly sounds a little ridiculous doesn’t it? Well then, what of splashing magical water onto a baby’s head to protect him from a special baby hell for those who never received magical water treatment? Well, the Catholics believe in it.

When delusions exist independently of mental illness, they become much harder to incriminate. And when it comes from an introduced concept as opposed to a natural one, one would think that the natural answer would be to stop introducing the concept to children. After all, what you tell a child during the period of mental and emotional development is going to affect them for the rest of their lives. Therefore, can we be a little more careful about it? Can we maybe leave the fairy tales separate from what we teach them as reality? It makes about as much sense to teach a child that the stories in the bible are real, as it would to introduce philosophy or linguistics into the biology or home economics classroom. We just need to start thinking logically about what we’re inflicting on children and how it’s going to affect them in the future. However, if parents can’t stop this kind of abuse themselves, what do we do?

Why Religion and Science Cannot Co-Exist

Why Religion and Science Cannot Co-exist


We live in a world divided, most certainly, on so many aspects of culture. However, it’s not so much the right and the left, although it’s become a fight made by the centrists between them. This fight is a war of ideals. On one side, evidence based conclusions reign supreme, however, are under attack by the other side, where conclusion based evidence is the gold-standard.

Human progress has always and will always rely on the scientific ability to prove the laws of yesterday to be falsehoods. If it not for this rule, there would be no heliocentric universe, nor any knowledge of the laws of nature and the cosmos. It is because of this, that our future relies so heavily on the expulsion of Iron and Bronze age myths, which desire to simplify explanations through the tongue of lies, thus rendering science helpless when a scientist mutters the truth that, “We don’t know.”

Religion and science have been at odds with one another for some time, the only difference between today’s society and 17th-19th century Europe, is that religionists aren’t actually burning scientists for discovering evidence contrary to religion, although, some do threaten it. In some ways, religion and science are one in the same, however, as they do both thrive in the unexplained. The difference is this: Science sees the unexplained as a challenge, whereas religion sees it as an opportunity. We can clearly see the difference between a religionist and a scientist by making an observation regarding solitude (admittedly, reductio ad absurdum). When a religionist goes into solitude for a year, he orders planes to fly into skyscrapers; when a scientist goes into hiding for seventeen months, he discovers gravity and invents calculus. This, of course, is an extreme observation. However, one must make extreme arguments against extreme principles and ideals.

The main reason that secularism and sectarianism cannot co-exist in the same society, is because sectarians won’t allow it to. If you look at both sides, you’ll find one side that is fighting for equality between a diverse set of people, as well as autonomy, which was in itself was a remnant of the enlightenment movement.

You’ll see the same side fighting for a well informed and intelligent future for humanity. On the other side, you’ll see people (often violently) fighting for their beliefs (not facts) to be the only law and the only system of education in the country, much like the Middle East. This is what is usually called imperialism.
Take a moment to consider both sides. You certainly don’t see secularists bombing clinics that don’t practice abortion. You don’t see secularists attacking straight people and tying them to fences to die. You don’t see secularists pushing legislation to have children pray to Darwin in the class rooms. Yet, you see the opposite on the other side, as we’ve already talked about extensively. Therefore, it is not an overstatement, nor is it unfair, to say that secularism and sectarianism cannot coexist because sectarians won’t allow them to.

The Pot Calling the Kettle…a Pot

It is ever so ironic that creationists blame Darwinist, and Humanist, principles for the seemingly endless amounts of war and destruction that has happened since. It is first ironic because the terror and destruction that has happened since perils in comparison to that which came before the “evil” seculars “invaded.” It is otherwise ironic that today’s new world creationists use the same techniques as Hitler, Stalin and Pol Pot. They use pseudoscientific jargon, complicated figures and big words to make points that are unrealistic. Hitler did the same when creating his Nazi religion, just as Stalin did the same when creating the religion of fascist communism.

You see, just like the works of Hitler and Stalin, creationism is based on unproven and untested hypotheses which have no basis in reality, only to take advantage of simple minds who want something better and are willing to stoop to any end to achieve it. In both cases, what they think is better is entirely not. Also, in both cases, if the using the technique of reductio ad absurdum to put these works in common everyday words, they all sound like the rantings of mad men. Hitler thought that the world was being taken over by some grand Jewish conspiracy to eliminate non-handicapped people; Stalin said that people should hand all control over to him, as well as their money, and everything would be okay; creationists say that a strange rib woman ate from a magical tree, via orders from talking snakes, and since then, man was doomed. Later, Jesus, the son of a virgin, carried his testimony on the back of a dinosaur to the masses to save them from Eve’s sin and allow them eternal life in an unseen paradise, under the eyes of an invisible man who is watching and listening to everything that everybody does.

You see, when written in cryptic language, it all sounds well and good, but when put into everyday language, it sounds quite absurd. This is the goal of creationists though: they want their absurdity to be accepted as fact. They want to discredit science as much as possible, although, only the aspects of science that are in conflict to the constructs of their preordained beliefs. They want science to be seen as some grand conspiracy to rid the world of religion. Well, what would the point be? Why would the powers that be, who rely so heavily on a people’s ability to follow without question, want to rid the world of the very core of that ability? These are questions that these delusional conspiracy theorists can’t seem to answer. They can’t because they haven’t quite thought of the reason yet.

What they want is for scientific discovery to be halted and not to be taught, as to accommodate for Iron Age myths. My question is this: why should we compromise the discoveries and advances of mankind to accommodate for primitive belief structures? It makes no sense on any logical level. I understand that people will always want to hold on to tradition, but I think they confuse the meaning of tradition. In Europe and Japan, tradition means honoring those strange myths of the past, in the mean time, honoring those who practiced them. In the United States and the Middle East, tradition means to fear change and evolution, as well as to arrest the advancement of human intellect, by any means necessary, even through violence. Violence, of course, is obviously the foremost tradition of religion of all kinds, Abrahamic or otherwise, theological or otherwise.

But I think what they want more than anything is children. Why do you think they always accuse others in the world of wanting their children to indoctrinate them into their secular beliefs? This is the first place they go, because it’s part of their ultimate plan. This is why all of the arguments seem to surround education; this is why all of the arguments seem to pertain to children; this is the reason for the over all attack on the public education system. They know that if they can indoctrinate children early enough, they’ll go through life believing things that any person who were to be told these things at a later age, would find as the ravings of lunatics. This comes out in the recent fight against evolution in schools, and even those who can’t seem to argue against it scientifically, do so philosophically—and not very well, I might add—pandering to an audience who may believe their jargon.

They must indoctrinate early to achieve the future they require for their mythology to live on: a future of undereducated people with no grasp on reality, science, or legitimate philosophy. A future void of cures, as they seem to desire in the banning of stem-cell research, as well as a future of intolerance, for which, they couldn’t be more obvious in their fervor.

In this blog, we’re going to discuss only one of the many ways that the
religionists use lies to breed the world that they want so feverously: Young-Earth Creationism.

Young Earth Creationism, which has been repackaged as I.D., is a very new means of trying to discredit science all across the world. It uses pseudoscience to explain away the theory of evolution, namely by not realizing that evolution is called a theory not because it is just something someone dreamed up, as theory means something completely different in scientific terms—the fact that the earth revolves around the sun, in the scientific community, is still considered theory by the scientific meaning of the word. But I won’t bore you with the actual meanings of words and the ways in which creationists pervert them. I’m going to discuss the more technical aspect, which I’m sure will be far less boring to you.

Regardless of the purely scientific data, I think I feel the need to point out a couple of the fundamental flaws in creationism. The first was actually the first one I ever noticed at a very young age, while scrolling through one of my grandfather’s bibles. Genesis 1 says that God created light on the first day. Okay, well, no problem there, except he didn’t create the sun until the fourth day. Now, I’m trying to think of other light sources in the universe. There are stars, the moon, other planets shine in the night sky as well. However, all of these things shine because they are reflecting light from the sun. Therefore, what other light is there. If he created light before the sun, where is this other light source? There are two explanations to this from creationists. The first is definitely the lesser of the intellectual arguments, and that’s saying a lot. It was once argued to me that “the sun isn’t out at night, therefore, how could these other planets be reflecting the suns light at night? There must be another light source.” Now, I’m going to assume you know why that’s stupid and move on to the next. The second is an explanation from a very well known creationist “scientist” named John Whitcomb, who argued that God had “created a temporary source of light until he created the sun.” So, in other words, he created a sun to provide light until he created a sun. His reasoning is equally impressive. He explains that God only did this to “destroy the cult of the sun.” My question is this: if he made light on the first day as a temporary light source until he created sun on the fourth day, to abolish sun cults, how were there sun cults already if man wasn’t created until the sixth day?

Another initial flaw is the God created water and the earth on the same day. Now, I know creationists don’t like evidence much, but there is overwhelming evidence that the water didn’t start forming on the earth until long after the earth began to cool. But, there again, I’m using science to explain away the bible. Therefore, they are just going to say that this particular section of science is incorrect. So, I can’t really do that, now can I? You see, this is how it works. Science says, “Hey, that’s rather contradictory to our evidence.” Religion says, “Hey, that evidence is contradictory to our 2,000 year old superstition.”


Indoctrination against a Better World

It is certainly clear, as we discussed in The Evolution of the Attack on Public Education, that religion and science absolutely cannot co-exist on an intellectual level. But what I didn’t mention is how the ramifications of Political Correctness factor into this. It is not PC to criticize the way a parent raises their child these days. However, I feel that nothing of this sort should be above criticism, especially when the criticism is pertaining to matters of abuse. Richard Dawkins explored the matter of children being indoctrinated into religion at a young age, and how the kind of fear invoked by programs such as Hell Rooms, were heavily abusive to children and to their developing minds. What he didn’t explore, however, is the matter of intellectual crippling.

When a parent physically cripples a child, their rights as a parent are immediately removed. Well, what about mental abuse? After all, a husband can just as easily be taken to jail for mental and emotional abuse these days, so why can’t a parent. What I’m referring to is, as mentioned before, religious indoctrination.

When a child’s brain is developing, the child will believe anything it is told by an adult, especially in the early stages of development. What do you suppose you are doing to your child’s future when you teach him or her that someday God may ask of you to murder your parents or children, and when he does, you better do it? What do you suppose you’re doing when you teach that child that long ago, God led a tribe of people to genocide and encouraged them to slaughter all the men and rape all the women? What’s worse, however, is what you’re teaching them in the very core of the bible. The book of Genesis makes the claim that an invisible, single-father, sky-god, created the world in six short days, about 4,000 years after the agricultural revolution, and placed a man in a garden, from whose rib, he made a woman, who obeyed the orders from a talking snake to eat from a magical smart-tree, which ended all of paradise and caused the sky-ocean to fall to the earth. When you teach your child this, you are not only crippling him or her philosophically, by falsely answering the mysteries of life, but you are also intellectually crippling your child. What are you going to do when he or she fails out of school because he or she couldn’t pass a biology exam and is forced to become a construction worker? You have successfully nullified the very beauty of evolution, and you have crippled your child’s intellect forever. Is that what you want?

Children are a very complex organism, and need to be treated very gently, and it’s only when you realize this that you realize what this kind of teaching is doing to somebody. And to tell your child this, you’re creating yet another generation of people who deny science merely on principle, without evidence, and vote against stem-cell research because they believe that humans have some kind of magical soul organism inside their bodies. This is to create another generation who will sue their place of employment because they don’t have adequate prayer facilities or resources. This is to create another generation who feels that equality is only for those who follow their faith, and that secular society is the “devil,” along with foosball.

You see, somehow, we’ve carried the message to parents that their children are theirs to raise however they please. This is absolutely not true. Children are not property—they are a living breathing being who needs to develop in their own way and at their own pace, naturally. It is not a person’s right as a parent to cripple a child physically, just like it’s not a person’s right as a parent to cripple their child intellectually, emotionally, or spiritually. It is abusive and it needs to stop.


To Deny the Ape

Secular society is under attack, and it is partly because of PC (ness) but mostly because of religious power. It is because of this that evolution is still such a controversial topic. Why should evolution and natural selection be so controversial? Why must we bring truths into the light of such defaming criticism, not because of lack of evidence, but because of possible moral ramifications therein? I won’t go too into detail, as I already have done so on this subject earlier in the book. However, the sect of Christianity and Christian Science has gone too far with their feeble studies on species limitations. This is only to deny macro-evolution, while still regarding micro-evolution, which is even less refutable than macro. Richard Dawkins made a good illustration with the Chan Model. However, I feel that this one does a better job of illustrating the topic at hand. You cannot deny macro evolution, while accepting micro-evolution. You cannot argue species limitations, because there are none. You cannot use the argument of cyclic variation, because it doesn’t happen. Let’s think about this in terms of sugary goodness.

15,211,111,028,888,889. Wow! Big number, right? Do you know what that number is? That number represents how many genetic variations we would have from our original common ancestor who lived 3.7 billion years ago. And, only if each offspring had only one child at age thirty, with only one genetic difference from each of its parents.

If you haven't guessed by now, yes, this is an argument regarding small changes (micro-evolution) over time, becoming very large changes (macro-evolution). Now, I'm being very generous to the intelligent design crowd with this analogy, and here's how: the average person today has 2.5 children; teen pregnancy is at an alarming high in this country; in former ages of human existence, it was nothing to have three or four children by age twenty; the spawning age of chimps and apes (our ancestors) is around ten years-old; the spawning age, as well as numbers reproduced of smaller mammals (another ancestor) is far greater than that; the spawning age and amounts of fish is almost comparable to bacteria; and the generational time period for many forms of bacteria is around forty minutes or so.

Even after all that, let's just say that a person started putting one M&M into a jar for every generation for 3.7 billion years (keeping in mind the thirty year rule), representing only one genetic change from the original parent species, which is pretty preposterous, you would need a candy jar large enough for 123,333,334 M&Ms today. However, one must factor the genes of both parents, therefore, placing our candy jar on an exponential table, in relation to the original parent species. Then you would need a candy jar large enough for 15,211,111,028,888,889 M&Ms, and I don't care how much Martha Stewart you watch, nobody is creating a jar that large. I'm willing to guess the Grand Canyon to be far too small for that many tasty candy-coated delectables. This is how many genetic differences we could have from our parent species 3.7 billion years ago. The fact of the matter is that we actually share 98% of our DNA with even the lowest fungus—meaning we're only 2% different from it. That's not very much, and I'm willing to bet that it's far under 15 quadrillion. What this means is that to say that over time, small changes in the genetic makeup of offspring could very easily make a completely different species of life. Each and every M&M you put into that jar represents a slight difference, and when we're talking about billions of years, those differences add up, don't they?

A simple way that one must look at DNA is like a sentence. As Daniel Dennett illustrated in Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, one can easily change the entire meaning of a sentence simply by altering one word, or even just by moving a comma from one place to another. These changes can not only alter the meaning of words or sentences, but they can also destroy them by making them incoherent. DNA is like that too. While many of the proteins in our DNA are small minute factors like what your hair pattern will be or how big your toenails are going to be, others are quite large, such as how fast your metabolism will work or how resilient your heart will be. Others are even more complex, and these are genes that are usually the first to be either turned on or off. These are genes regarding gills, scales, feathers and other such things. Remember, again, that we share 98% of our DNA with every other life form on the planet, so we have genes for such things as well. All it would take is one little gene not turning on or off properly, and your average woman could give birth to Lucy, or even Ida.

Given these truths, it is absurd for anyone who has put even the smallest bit of thought into evolution and the origin of life to deny that evolution happened. Given what you’ve just read, it is nearly impossible to say it didn’t or couldn’t. Many call it improbable. Some of those even compare it to a blind watchmaker making a watch. Well, I assure you, if you give that watch maker about 3.7 billion years, he’ll make you something pretty amazing.


6,000 Years of Life on Earth?

Yet another way that science and religion cannot coexist with one another is through the basic study of archaeology. You know, if the bible were to be true, that would mean that everything that we know of human history, the history of the universe, genetic history as well as the history of all life on the planet would all be wrong? It’s true, and it all relates to this one factor of all three Abrahamic religions. The genealogy between Adam and Noah, and then onto David and Jesus, makes the clear claim that the world is 6,000 years old, and despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, this is believed. This is not only an over simplification of the history of the world, but it is a primitive Bronze Age myth that, for whatever reason, is impeding on scientific progress as well as the education of our children.

This belief is as foolish as the religious lack of thinking can truly get. One must realize that the agricultural revolution began about 10,000 years ago. This was the era when man stopped hunting as much and learned to tame the earth for food. This is the era when man first started to herd, and even domesticate, animals. This is the era in which man discovered he could harvest vegetation. Well, according to the bible, this never happened. According to the bible, man just always knew how to do these things, and man never lived as a hunter gatherer. According to the bible, man walked with dinosaurs as well, because they were still very much alive for more than just one day. Now, there are some who believe that dinosaur fossils were planted by the devil or by Jews, or even by crazy space overlords to fool us, but could we just keep the conspiracy theories out of this for a while?

The religionists claim that creation and the 6,000 year timeline are both impossible to deny. Well, why? Is it because of fossil record? Well, no, as the fossil record is an unwavering source of transitional fossils, thus making the argument for evolution. Is it because of some kind of celestial proof? Well, no, in fact, the universe stands as a melting pot of evidence for the big bang happening about 14 billion years ago. Well, what then? The “proof” is in the Chinese Astrology chart. That’s right—religion is trying to religiously prove something regarding religion with religion. Hmm.

The Chinese Astrology chart contains many animals including the cock, which I am, rats, snakes, pigs, cows, rabbits, horses, rams, monkeys. dogs, and tigers. The twelfth is the disturbing one: the dragon. That’s right, the dragon is the twelfth symbol of Chinese Astrology, and, according to Christian Science, the first evidence that man walked with dinosaurs.

Every culture in the world has had dragon legends. Now that may seem strange to some people, and maybe a little too coincidental. However, why wouldn’t all of the world have similar stories and fables? It’s not just dragons, it’s also vampires, werewolves and even ultrafast rabbits and gnomes. All of the world’s cultural legends are similar because all of the world’s cultures were stolen from one another. It’s the same reason that Christianity is about the 200th religion to come along regarding a man who was born of a virgin on December 25th, performed miracles, was martyred and then rose from the dead three days later on Easter. There is a simple explanation for this as well.

The legends of the messiahs come from the sun, actually. You see, there are so many other tales with the same basic story. The story of Horus is identical. He was born of a virgin on December 25th and his birth was marked by a large star appearing in the east and was adorned by three kings. He was a prodigal teacher at twelve and was baptized at the age of thirty, thus starting his ministry on earth. That’s not all though—he had twelve disciples who walked the country side with him as he performed miracles. These miracles also included walking on water and heeling the blind and def. After being betrayed by one of his disciples, Horus was crucified and then buried. Three days after his death, he was resurrected.

While that may sound incredibly familiar, it’s not the only one. There are hundreds. Why is this? It, like I said before, is about the sun. The sun is the basis of all of these messiah and god legends and is the oldest and most worshipped body in history, either worldly or celestial.

Let’s start with the birth sequence, as this is the most common of all the sun god stories. Sirius is the brightest star in the night sky, especially on December 24th, when it aligns with the three stars of Orion’s belt. The star in the east is Sirius, and when it aligns with the belt, once known as the three kings, the kings appear to follow the Eastern star (Sirius) especially on the morning of December 25th, when all four starts are in alignment with the sun. Hence, the birth of God’s SUN on the morning of the 25th, adorned by three kings who followed the brightest star in the sky to the place of birth. You see, on December 25th, the sun ceases to decline south, and the shortest day of the year is over. On the morning of December 22nd, the sun is directly aligned with the Southern Cross constellation, hence the SUN dying on the cross. It is, at this point, as far south as it will go and it remains there for three days. On the third day, December 25th, the sun moves one degree north, which is the forerunner of longer days. You see, the SUN is born again.

It is always said that the SUN is born of a virgin, this being the celestial constellation, Virgo, which in Latin means virgin. In the Christian faith, the virgin’s name is Mary, much like in the other stories of sun-gods, the mother’s name begins with the letter M. Maya was the mother of Buddha, who followed the same story, as well as another named Myrra (Mother Myrra), who was Adonis’ mother, also born of a virgin. The reason for the letter M in all of the stories is because of the ancient glyph for the astrological sign of Virgo, which is an M with a slightly curved tail on it. The origin of the name of Bethlehem is in the Virgo body as well, as Virgo is drawn as a woman holding a cart of wheat, hence the name, House of Bread. House of Bread is the literal translation of Bethlehem, thus making the birthplace in the stars, not on earth as many believe.

It is all a celestial story that was truly never meant to be anything other. Primitive people didn’t know why this stuff happened, they just knew it did every year, therefore, their “scientists” or “priests” had to explain it somehow. This headed us into the second stage of explanation.

So, now that we know why the world seems to have similar legends regarding Christ, let’s take another look at the dragons. The first problem that I have regarding this is that dragons in all myths breathe fire. This is a pretty big inconsistency, as we’ve not yet found a single dinosaur fossil that has been capable of breathing fire. This is only the first problem though. They also seem to fly in all myths. Well, yes there are flying dinosaurs, but they looked nothing like any of the illustrations of dragons. In fact, most of them had feathers in the later years.

One of the allegedly greatest finds came from a temple in Cambodia. What was found was a carving of a Stegosaurus on a far corner of the temple wall. A laymen might actually think this to be good evidence, however, it is anything but. The first inconsistency is this: the carving looks nothing like a Stegosaurus, in fact, it more resembles a hippopotamus standing in front of a large bush. The second inconsistency is this: Stegosauruses have never been exhumed in that part of the world. In fact, they’ve only been found in the NW United States. The third is this: the temple was built just over 800 years ago. This means that if this is proof of man walking with dinosaurs, then the Stegosaurus must have been walking the earth near Ta Prohm at the same time that the temple was being built. It must have been wandering around eating trees with its giant spiky tale around the same time the Ghaznavids dynasty was falling and Calabria was the victim of one of the worst earthquakes on record. It was the time of Henry the 8th. Funny, he never mentions dinosaurs in his writings. Unless they were just that normal, I would think they would be everywhere. At least a slight mention of, “Well, wrestled the king of France today just before decapitating my wife, and wouldn’t you know, on the way home, a giant lizard bit my leg off.”

You see, this carving is nothing more than an animal that was seen in those parts then and still is today: the hippo. And even if this were a dinosaur, one must ask how that proves they’ve seen one. The artist could have been copying someone else’s work, or maybe he was just making something up. You know, like we do in cartoons and drawings all the time. It’s funny that directly below the hippo carving is a man with a hairy and seemingly fiery head, who has large fangs and crazy large eyes. Does that mean they saw those too?

Look, religionists are a group of people who reject every aspect of science. They believe in God because their book tells them to. What’s their proof that the book is authentic and that it’s telling the truth? Well, it says so. These are not reasonable people. This again is what separates science and religion. Scientists research and then come to the conclusion. Religious science reaches conclusions, then, tries to prove it, and even though it fails, it won’t admit it. Let’s remember that religionists only don’t like the parts of science that impede on their parade of mythology and legend. They certainly like science quite a bit before getting on an airplane, or whenever receiving medical treatment, or even whenever eating dinner or drinking water. But when it comes to evolution and the 14 billion year universe, no, no, no, we can’t accept that. That means we would have to reevaluate our primitive myths.

Look, however life got here is not something that we can say for sure. And what makes science great is that it doesn’t claim to have all the answers. Anything that does is lying. We don’t know where life came from in the first place. A true scientist can’t rule out any reasonable explanation, whether it’s the lightning muck pool, or even Panspermia. These are both reasonable theories and have been seen to have evidence to support them both. And while scientists may be a bit divided on the issue of the exact origins, nobody on either side is giving up with the lazy answer, “Magic Man did it!”


Irreducible Complexity

Irreducible complexity is a term that is used in the creationist circles to describe the theory that everything must have had a designer as it is so complex. What I don’t understand is how the complexity of all life on earth is somehow proof of creationism. To me, it seems like a pretty undeniable argument for evolution.

Science, by means of complex study and complex experimentation, has shown us how small, less complex organisms, throughout the course of 3.7 billion years, evolved into the beautiful, undeniably complex organisms that we see today. Religion, on the other hand, reduces the complexity of every life-form on the planet by either saying, “It just always was,” or by saying, “Magic Man did it.” Religionists reduce the complexity of thousands of transitional fossils by saying, “They’re not transitional, they’re just extinct.” In fact, if you were to make a query to a religionist regarding the reasoning behind the color of leaves or water, I’m sure your answer would be, “Because God made it that way.” Now, let’s compare that answer to one given by a scientist.

Why is water blue? Water owes its intrinsic blueness to selective absorption in the red part of its visible spectrum. The absorbed photons promote transitions to high overtone and combination states of the nuclear motions of the molecule, i.e. to highly excited vibrations. To our knowledge the intrinsic blueness of water is the only example from nature in which color originates from vibrational transitions. Other materials owe their colors to the interaction of visible light with the electrons of the substances. Their colors may originate from resonant interactions between photons and matter such as absorption, emission, and selective reflection or from non-resonant processes such as Rayleigh scattering, interference, diffraction, or refraction, but in each case, the photons interact primarily or exclusively with electrons. The details of the mechanism by which water is vibrationally colored will be discussed in the paragraphs which follow.

Now let’s remember what the religious explanation for the color of water. I’m sure that you can see a difference.

Water is not the only factor of nature that religionists try to use in their favor to prove something absurd though. There is also a very old argument regarding the color green. “Was it not great of the lord to make all of our surroundings green? Green is the most appeasing color to the human eye!” Well, you see, that last part is right, but I think they’re confusing exactly what is the cause and what is the effect here. Could it be that green is the most appeasing color to our eyes for the same reason it is to an ape’s eye? And, for that matter, wouldn’t it be consistent? Wouldn’t green be the most appeasing color to a dog’s eye as well? But dogs don’t see colors, and neither do most insects. And to many insects who can and other creatures that can, green isn’t the most appeasing color to their eyes, the colors of their food and environment are.

Just like us, the ape’s eye is pleased by green. Just like us, a shark’s eye can see red from longer distances than other colors. That’s why stop signs and lights are red (just a little fun trivia for the folks out there). It’s also why red cars tend to get more tickets. You see, we’re omnivores. This means that we eat both vegetation and meat. Of course, some humans choose to be purely carnivores and others choose to be herbivores, but no matter the label on themselves, they will yearn for whatever is lacking, as they need it to properly survive. Therefore, we are all omnivores, and most of our food would be either red, or would be like other plants and vegetables and be green mixed with many vibrant colors. This is another reason we see colors more vibrantly than carnivores. Do you see the chain forming here? Green is the most appeasing color to man because we come from it. We were once a nature dwelling species. Green always surrounded us and our eyes merely adapted, and even though we’re no longer woods dwellers (except for some people in Georgia) there’s no real reason for the eye to change, as it doesn’t hinder us in any way to cause those with the mutation to die off in lieu of those without it.

We see red from farthest away partly because of our need to scavenge. We see vibrant colors partly because of our need to eat wild fruits and berries which were essential to our evolutionary survival. Our eyes like green because we lived in green. This is a very old trick of the religionists: twisting the cause and the effect around to prove a point based on misinterpretation.

This is yet another reason why can’t fathom why religion is deemed to be more spiritual than science. I would like to let it be known that the greatest argument, philosophically, against religion is that—as Nietzsche elaborated in Ecce Homo—it reduces the history of man, nullifies the meaning and essence of the history of the earth as well as the universe, and nullifies all that we, as humans, ought to be proud of in regards to our own species as well as the world in which we live.

A great example of this is comparing the history of the universe scientifically to the history of the earth biblically. I’ve broken the steps down on both sides, let’s compare:

1. About 14 billion years ago: The Big Bang.
2. About 13.2 billion years ago: The formation of the Milky Way Galaxy.
3. About 8 billion years ago: The formation of the Solar System.
4. About 4.57 billion years ago: The formation of the Earth.
5. About 3.7 billion years ago: The origin of life on Earth.
6. The formation of the oldest known fossils on Earth.
7. About 3.4 billion years ago, dates the oldest fossils (blue-green algae and bacteria).
8. The invention of sex by microorganisms.
9. The oldest known fossil of photosynthetic plants.
10. Eukaryotes flourish.
11. Significant oxygen atmosphere begins to develop on Earth.
12. Extensive volcanism and channel formation on Mars
13. Formation of the first worms.
14. About 542 million years ago, the Precambrian Era ends. Paleozoic Era and Cambrian Period begin, and Invertebrates flourish.
15. The first oceanic Plankton. Trilobites flourish.
16. About 492 million years ago, the Ordovician Period begins. We see the first fish and first vertebrates appear.
17. About 416 million years ago, the Silurian Period begins. The first vascular plants appear and plants begin colonizing the land.
18. About 397 million years ago, the Devonian Period begins. We see the first insects appear, and animals begin colonizing the land.
19. First winged insects and amphibians.
20. About 290 million years ago, the Permian Period begins. It is in this period that we see the first dinosaurs.
21. About 245 million years ago, the Paleozoic Era ends, and the Mesozoic Era begins.
22. About 245 million years ago, the Triassic Period begins. The first mammals and birds appear about 180 million years ago.
23. About 208 million years ago, the Jurassic Period begins. The first mammals and birds appear about 180 million years ago.
24. About 140 million years ago, the Cretaceous Period begins. The first flowers form and dinosaurs become extinct.
25. About 65 million years ago, the Mesozoic Era ends, and the Cenozoic Era and Tertiary Period begin. First cetaceans and primates appear.
26. Early evolution of frontal lobes in brains of primates. First humanoids appear. Giant mammals flourish.
27. End of the Pliocene Period. About 1.64 million years ago, the Quaternary (Pleistocene and Holocene epochs) Period begins. The first humans appear.

Let’s now compare this to how all of this is explained in the Holy Bible:

1. About 6,000 years ago, BAM! Magic guy in the sky did it!

I’m sure I don’t have to tell you which way is more complex, let alone more accurate and believable, or even spiritual. This is the first of many cases in which religion invalidates our universe, world and all of the plants, animals and organisms within it.


Complexity Reduced

Creationists like to use bad mathematics to prove bad science. What they did was calculate back about 6,000 years (imagine that) to "calculate" the likelihood that, through natural progression, we would have ended up how we are now. In other words, evolved. The number they came up with was a .0411091% chance of this happening naturally and without a "designer," therefore, it is impossible. The problem is this: you cannot reverse calculate any event. It's nothing more than bad science, as any calculation, when done in reverse, is going to produce an extremely low likelihood of happening. This is why this is not used in actual science. I passed a bus on my way to Byerly's the other day. However, if a person were to use reverse calculation as a means of calculating the likelihood of this happening, they could easily formulate an argument that I was lying.

The average school bus is roughly 36 feet by 8.5 feet. This makes it about 47,264 inches squared. Now, lest' take a look at the size of the earth. In feet, the world is about 5,490,383,247,360,000 square feet, therefore, it is about 65,884,598,968,320,000 square inches. Through very laymen mathematics, we can come to the calculation that the odds of ever being in the same vicinity as this particular bus at anytime during my life is exactly one in 1,393,970,018,794. Looking at those odds, it would be quite right to say it's pretty damn unlikely that I would ever see that bus in my entire life. Now, let's look at the odds that I would have come across that bus in that particular minute of my life. Since I'm almost 28 I'll round to give it a one in 14,676,480 chance that I would even be there at that particular moment. However to calculate that the bus would be there too, we need to calculate the odds of both the bus and myself being that that particular spot that that particular minute. Again, through pretty simple mathematics, we come to a one in 642,839,756,014,296. To convert into a percentage, it's actually .0000000000000155559% chance of this happening. You see, I've just convinced myself of two things: 1. I didn't pass a school bus and there must be something wrong with my memory, and 2. I had some pretty good math teachers in my "crappy public education system."

I'm sure you see my point though. Reverse calculation is inaccurate and is horribly bad science. It makes ANY action incredibly improbable. However, I just proved that evolution through natural selection is almost 97 times more likely than my passing a school bus on my way to the grocery store.

There is also a very traditional obstacle that Intelligent Design inflicts upon itself. Let's say, just for the sake of argument, that irreducible complexity were a viable scientific theory instead of nothing more than a scientific front for creationism and other ancient myths. The advocates of the Christian God find themselves in a very familiar, pseudo-scientific version of a very old religious argument: How do you know, with all of the options out there, that you're praying to the right one?

Religion has been in this predicament for some time, in fact, since it's inception. Every religion on the planet and throughout history claims to be the only real path to the only real deity. Therefore, how can you honestly discern your own god from the rest? What if you pick the wrong one? Do you go to hell? Is hell real? Many faiths don't think so. How do you know, for instance, the Zeus isn't the right one, and you won't be punished for believing in the wrong one. You know, there is no more evidence of the Abrahamic God than there is for Zeus or Marduk. The problem, again, with ID is that it puts itself in this position. After all, proving that there is a "creator" doesn't answer the question as to his identity. It could very well be any of the other millions of mythological beings that have been a part of superstition and religion throughout history. Proving that any given part of a flagellum is worthless by itself (which is a lie, by the way), only proves a designer, not God himself.

This could be proof of a supernatural creator. However, if nothing so complex as us could exist without a creator, then what or whom created the creator? After all, if we're so complex and God designed us, then God must be complex. And if nothing complex can exist without a creator, as the ID people would like us all to think, then something must have created God, right? It can't just stop somewhere at some ultimate beginning. And if it can, then that refutes their whole argument that complexity requires a designer, doesn't it? It seems that Intelligent Design only acts as scientific proof that Intelligent Design is BS. It could have been anything, if you believe in an ultimate beginning, but it doesn't have to be God. Maybe it's Goddess, or even aliens.

Yes, that's right. If you buy into ID, you have to, scientifically, allow for the possibility that aliens seeded us here, or even panspermia could be a possible origin. Now, those of us in the secular scientific community laugh at such claims, but if ID only proves a designer, it can't only look for supernatural explanations, it must revert to natural explanations as well. And to be objective, you CANNOT rule out seeding. So, ID stands just as much as a basis for proving Scientology as it does any other religion, including Christianity. If could even stand to prove the Raelians correct, you know, that crazy cult in New Hampshire, I think it is. So, when you put your faith into ID (and it does require faith as it's clearly not science), you better be sure you're promoting the right designer!

It seems that irreducible complexity has many flaws, but one fundamental flaw haunts its very foundation: when reduced, species function just fine. You see, Irreducible Complexity's entire foundation rests with a theory that since organisms are so complex, even the slightest part out of shape would render the entire organism incompetent, therefore, it could not have evolved and must have been that way all along. There are so many problems with this that I don't know where to start. The first is with a complete misunderstanding of evolution. You see, evolution happens with small, very small, gradual changes happening over a period of time. We've watched species evolve since the 1800s when Darwin first sailed the Beagle. So, to say that a lesser evolved form of a species would have something "out of place" shows a blatant misunderstanding of evolution in general. It's up there with, "Why are there still monkeys?" to which I respond, "Why are there still European?" But I'd rather talk about a more scientific flaw. Let's go with bacteria.

Bacteria is a much lesser complex organism that we, but it is still quite complex none the less. It is, after all, a distant relative of ours. Just like us, there are many different breeds of bacteria, and each one functions just fine. But what of antibiotic resistant strains? Bodies with infections are commonly prescribed antibiotics, and it's not rare for the bacteria in their body to develop a resistance to the antibiotic. This happens through natural evolution as the offspring strains with the resistance survive over the parent species which lacks the gene. Some offspring have it and some don't, needless to say, those who don't do not survive. Therefore, the duplicates or offspring of the resistant strain will carry the gene of resistance. The offspring with the resistance is slightly more complex than the offspring without it, but yet the parent species functioned just fine until a new factor was introduced into its environment. This is exactly how evolution happens, but again, the parent (slightly less complex species) survived just fine before the introduction of the new element. This is how complex species gradually come from less complex ones, thus disproving the entirety of the ID argument. As, according to Irreducible Complexity, this could not happen because complexity cannot be reduced. I'm rambling a bit, but you get the point.
Complexities are gradually adopted over generations, thus creating a more complex creature. Now, imagine this happening over about 5 billion years. I bet you'd have something that doesn't even resemble the original concestor, wouldn't you? Ooops, that's evolution.

To put it bluntly, IR and ID are anti-scientific. They don't account for the obviously transitional fossil record. Most often, those who profess to have all the answers answer nothing. Science doesn't profess to know the absolute origins of life, we just know how we got from point A to point Z. Obviously, anyone can just make something up, but that is not science, that is religion. And Intelligent Design is only religion with a publicly scientific face. Science is a study of observation and theories are put through rigorous tests and ideas change all the time as old theories become obsolete. However, Darwin's theory of evolution stands alone and fossil record clearly supports it. It also supports a 5 billion year old earth and a 14 billion year old universe, not a 6,000 year old both that was made in a week. The Discovery institute is nothing more than a pseudo-scientific church and it's premise and result answers nothing as to the origins of life. It is only speculation and doesn't have an observational backbone or leg to stand on.

The end, believe in God if you must, but don't expect the real world to compromise scientific accomplishments to accommodate for a book written thousands of years ago. It is just that: a book, and that's all. It's a book of spirituality, and not science. Children should not be taught the biblical creation story along side evolution as though there are actually two sides to the argument, because there aren't two sides. There's one side that is knowledge based on evidence and experimentation, and another side that is based on nothing but speculation and bad science. And if we start teaching the Christian version of creation in the science classrooms, we should probably teach the other million creation stories as well. I'm sure the Hindus would like children to be taught that the world doesn't orbit the sun, but instead, the world sits on the back of an elephant who stands on the back of a tortoise. I'm not kidding, it's in their theology.


Good Day, Sunshine

I mentioned earlier that somehow in the bible, there is another light source in the universe other than the sun and the stars. What I don’t understand is what it is. It is written clearly in the Holy bible that God created light on the first day, and the sun and the stars on the second. Well, does this mean that children in sectarian schools are learning that there is another light source in the universe? If so, what is it? I think we all have the right to know. The explanation, as I said, is that God created a first light source to act against sun worship. The obvious problem, of course, is that people hadn’t been created yet, therefore, how could there have been sun worshipers to protect against? I won’t be redundant, but I thought this deserved an honorable mention in this chapter.


Education, Sexual Education That Is

If I can think of one particular act of war, declared by the Catholic church, it would have been the act of telling poorly educated, and AIDS plagued, South African people that condoms cause AIDS. In 2003, a senior Vatican official said that condoms had tiny holes in them, through which HIV and AIDS could easily travel through. While this is simply not true, this came from the same Vatican church that claimed that condoms would only exasperate the problem, as the “lord” looked discouragingly upon birth control, and would punish them for the usage. Remember, this is from the same church, as well, which told us all that AIDS was a cure from God to exterminate homosexuals (this quote was cited earlier).

The lies continued from the Vatican Council, when Cardinal Alfonzo Trujillo claimed to an open audience, “The AIDS virus is roughly 450 times smaller than a spermatozoon. The spermatozoon can easily pass through the net that is formed by the condom. There are two statements here that are completely untrue, and this acts as a great example of how the Vatican will lie, using pseudo-science, even at the risk of human life, to force people to into a Catholic mindset. It is in this way that a life or death medical issue is being hijacked to push a “moral” agenda.
A sperm is about one micron across, whereas an 130 nm (nanometers) or 0.000130 mm. Therefore, yes, an AIDS cell is much smaller than a sperm. Certainly not as much as the good Cardinal quoted, but it is smaller. Now, the basis of the argument is that occasionally people get pregnant even with the use of condoms, therefore, why couldn’t AIDS pass through. Well, if the woman is getting pregnant after intercourse, when a condom is involved, obviously, the condom was misused. 99% of the time, a broken condom is the fault of the misuse thereof. This is less an argument for moral imperialism, and more an argument for proper and extensive sexual education. What the Cardinal claimed was that sperm just merely passes through the net of the condom, which it does not. Again, if a condom fails, it is usually because of misuse, not because the condom was faulty. Hold one in your hand once and try to rip it. Eventually, you will, however, one must remember the type of motion that is going on through intercourse. You cannot say that glass won’t withstand light winds just because you can punch a hole in it if you try enough times. Logic.

If the church is so willing to compromise human life for the benefit of their moral crusade (a point which has been proven time and again before as well), to what other depths will they stoop for their imperialist victory. If there’s one thing for certain, it’s that there is no science involved in a claim that AIDS is caused by condoms.

Well, we can look at what has been done in our own country. While we’ve seen crime rates steadily decrease since the ruling of Roe VS Wade, we’ve also seen a recent decline in sexual education as well as an increase in teen pregnancy. One would have to deny the obvious in order to fail to link the raise in teen pregnancy to Catholic Church’s antithetic views on both abortion and birth control.


The Great Divide

We’ve established earlier in the book the dangers of organized religion. However, we didn’t really establish why the danger is present. The answer is quite simple: religion is the most divisive force that has ever shown its face in this planet.
Of course, like with any other argument, there are those who would think antithetically to this claim. However, how can they with all of the evidence that supports it? I suppose in the same way they so fervently deny evolution and the big bang. Religion has proven itself to be a very divisive tool in many ways. Many would argue that politics is far more divisive. However, politics in the United States are divided down two party lines, causing a schism of two groups, with a very small remainder. Religion, on the other hand, divides people into a far greater number of groups. And politics is far less divisive in the sense that inter-religious marriages are adamantly frowned upon by the clergy in most religions, whereas, as far as politics goes, if Anne Coulter can share her home with a democrat, I think that speaks volumes.

Were American politics so divided fifty years ago? Of course not. The great divide in American politics didn’t come about until the 1990s when the fundamentalists transformed their group from mere psychotics in the fringe, into the mainstream of American politics. Therefore, there was a new argument to distract from policy, something that’s a matter of opinion most of the time, and to heed more attention to religious beliefs, which are just that, beliefs. And improvable beliefs as well. I don’t think I need to reiterate that superstition should not be the standard by which policies are decided upon. But it wasn’t so much about policy anymore, it was solely about religion, and the fundamentalists, who had just taken Washington by storm by electing one of their own, put down their guns momentarily and flocked to the voting polls again and again, voting perfectly down party lines now that the right had gotten the church on their side.

This marked the beginning of the great divide in America and it is still moving strong today. In fact, it’s my firm belief that had it not been for the democratic candidate being a minority, this would not have changed. Policy didn’t matter anymore. As I discussed earlier, a pretty great percentage of those who voted for Bush in 2000 were doing so based only on his faith, and this number only increased in 2004. Should whether or not a person believes in zombies and talking snakes stand as the basis of whether or not their fit to run the country? Of course not. This shouldn’t even be considered, let alone be the only basis of a person’s vote. It’s completely absurd. A person’s ability to run a country should be based on their experience and their policies, and not based on their supernatural or superstitious (one in the same really) beliefs.

But that’s just the problem. It is all about beliefs. The most divisive force in our world is a matter of belief that requires a leap of faith in something that cannot be proven or observed. This is the 21st century—there is no reason in this day and age for something as ridiculous as the matter of which invisible man a person believes in to stand is a driving force of discrimination or prejudice. Real life issues have taken a back seat to superstitious beliefs, and it is then no wonder that real life issues are not being solved. The radical right doesn’t honestly care what happens on this planet now, as they think they’re going to another one soon anyway, either through death or the rapture and over 70% of Americans believe will happen in their lifetimes. Is it any wonder that global warming has taken a back seat? No, the religious right believes God gave us this planet and that we’re too small to possibly affect it. Well, tell that to cancer cells, I’m sure they would be amused to hear that. But nothing is being done about global warming, nothing is being done to get stem-cell research legalized in our country, and furthermore, nothing is being done on a federal level to legalize gay marriage. It seems that policy and real life problems take a back seat to religion until the policy conflicts with books that were written 2,000 years ago, then they need to be acted upon immediately, which gay marriage certainly was.

Superstitious beliefs cannot be the basis of policy. Scientific studies and scientific resolutions are the only way to solve real life problems, as science is real life and superstition is not. But what of the rampant discrimination in our world today? Should religion be the source of that too? Should anything really be the source of discrimination or prejudice? I happen to believe that prejudice and discrimination on any level are negative, especially when the discrimination is over which invisible man a person believes in or doesn’t believe in. After all, when you were a child, did you discriminate against people who thought Mother Goose was better than Dr. Seuss? I’m sure you probably had a couple of arguments over it that went a little something like, “Goose is better!” “No, Seuss is better!” “Oh yeah, well I’m taking my ball home and I’m telling my mom on you!” But did you ever tell someone that they couldn’t play in your park over it? Did you ever tell anyone that they couldn’t be your neighbors over it? Did you ever kill another person over it? I’m guessing no. This is definitive proof that children are far more mature than religionists. Whether you like Seuss, Goose or God, it doesn’t actually matter in real life, as it is a matter of opinion, and it most certainly shouldn’t be the basis of judging somebody.

Let’s all do a little experiment. Talk to a Rabbi, priest, bishop, pasture or, for that matter, anyone from the Middle East and ask them what they would do if their son or daughter decided to marry a person of another religion. The response that I received was far more alarming than I thought it would be. Not a single one of them said they would approve. However, the response from the five Somalians that I talked to said they would disown their son or daughter for dating someone of another religion. Three of them said that they would disown their children for even having non-Muslim friends. Is it any wonder why all of the Muslims in any given city live in their own segregated areas? Is it a wonder that so many states are divided by religious majorities, and often people move to other states to be with their own? Their own what? They will actually move states to be around other people who believe it’s important to dance around a fire naked at night or else the rain won’t come? Is that anymore absurd than a separation between people who think a woman of the past, who may have never existed at all, was worthy of being tagged with the meaningless label of sainthood? It’s just a title. Nothing changes in your life from it. Nothing changes in a dead person’s life either. Is that really something you want to choose your friends based upon? Rather, is that something you would kill another person about? If your answer is no, then you really ought to talk to your fellow Catholics and non-Catholics in the Middle East, because they certainly think it’s perfectly alright, and even encouraged.

But There "Kant" be Morality without Religion.

“But without religion, there can be no morality!” This is something that I actually hear quite often, although it’s unbelievably naïve and ignorant. In fact, to say that there can be no morality without magical fairy-tales to back said morals, is not only an insult to those of us who reject religion for various reasons, but is also an insult to a person’s own system of reasoning. After all, what has religion given us by way of reality? It has given us a nationalistic thought pattern where it’s own personal value against scrutiny or judgment has won ultra right wing conservatives elections solely based on a religious title. It has caused people to give fanatical devotion to an entity with the highest real state holdings of any business or corporation in the world, yet it’s indigent members still remain poor. It has given us about four-thousand years of insufferable war and hostility, that we still live with today. It has given us justification for the relinquishment of civil liberties of many minorities in American and around the world. It has left our World Trade Center buildings in rubble. And it’s given racially discriminate people a biblical foundation for not only their beliefs in a racial hierarchy, but also a justification for slave trading.

Looking at this list, one might deduce that there cannot be morality where religion is present. However, I won’t play their game and make such a claim, although the facts seem to definitely point to one over the other. What I will say though, is that without religion, we would not have had many catastrophes of our past and of our present. And there are many who theorize an unbelievably grim future of this great country if religion maintains its power over our lands.
Morality is a very enigmatic thing. It is truly in the eye of the beholder, with few exceptions. However, the argument that religion makes that tends to justify murder, rape, and slavery, tend to lean toward those moralities that are anything but enigmatic. After all, can we not all agree that murder is wrong? I think we should be able to, but we can’t. Can we all agree that theft is wrong? Although I would love to say yes, the answer, as is evident in recent events, no we can’t. I think we could all agree that to rewrite history to improve the conditions of a current faith based agenda is wrong. Well, no we’re not all in agreement on that. In fact, the rewriting of history has seemingly become quite the lucrative industry of religious faithfuls. I.E. The New Lie.

What is it that religion offers us that we wouldn’t have in a world without it? I guess the better way to word that is this: What positive things that we have now, could we not have without the institution of religion? That question has been answered on many of occasions. John Locke argued that man would have no law or moral barriers without the institution of religion. My argument against that is that it seems Locke has absolutely no faith in the powerful mind of man. After all, is it only a religious circuit in our brains that turns on to tell us not to do things that we might think are wrong? Or is he trying to tell us that we wouldn’t know right form wrong if it not for religion? I really can’t tell. I read further in the writings of Locke and found that there were many things about him that I just couldn’t decipher. The main one is whether or not the he was condoning religion. This is because he mentioned so many things in his structure of the law of god that I personally thought were incredibly negative, but a theologian might think completely opposite in regards to.

I later found my answer, and it truly was that Locke was saying that we would have no idea of the difference between right and wrong without religion. Now, my problem with this is that there seems to be far less war in secular countries throughout the annals of time than there have been in heavily religious ones. It seems that most serial killers tend to come from Christian upbringings, with very few exceptions. Therefore, looking at these facts, one might argue that a person who is not taught religion, but just morality alone, would seem to have a better grasp on the difference between right and wrong. I’m not going to say that there have never been sociopaths who were not religious people, but there have been very few. And after all, sociopathy can effect anyone no matter what their upbringing because it is a legitimate chemical deficiency in the brain, that causes you to truly not feel, therefore not care what is wrong from right. Psychopaths, on the other hand, just don’t know the difference. But let’s keep in mind that not all serial killers suffer from either one of these, and that many only have the urge to kill because of an addiction or a hunger for power. And a hunger for power is something that religion seems very comfortable with.

The matter is, though, that most of these people who suffer from these afflictions seem to be either religious or form a religious upbringing. Why is that? Well, I stated earlier that it would be hard, due to the Theo-glitch, to separate fact from fiction when you’re taught stories of people living in whale’s bellies and you’re taught of the existence of magical water that washes your sins away, to be fact, and you’re told that DNA and dinosaurs are myths; it could be hard for the rest of your life to separate fact form fiction. Therefore, why would it not be hard to separate wrong from right. After all, these people believe that perception is reality.
It appears that Locke believed that we don’t have the power to distinguish wrong from right by only our parents telling us the difference, but that God is the only way to know. This is a pretty dangerous claim (especially from a man on whom so many liberal and secular ideals are based). Simply because it seems that secular countries who live widely without religion have less crime, less teen pregnancies, higher graduation rates, and completely trump us in technology. Therefore, what was the basis for his claim? I still have to figure that out. However, being the inquisitive person that I am, I sought the answer from other people who seem to believe in the same thing. I spoke with a youth pastor in my area simply through luck, as I happened across the catholic school on my way to visit some family on the very day I started writing this paragraph. And if you’re thinking I was only walking past the catholic school to look at the girls, you’re wrong. That was only part of the reason.

I opened up by telling him what the book and section were about and asked him if he feels the same way as most religionists, that the world would be basically void of morality without religion. “Actually, yes I do,” he responded. “How can you really have morality or know right from wrong, without a structure to distinguish from birth, the difference?” I responded by informing him that there are many more philosophies in the world that aren’t of a religious basis, and that don’t teach morality with all the bells and whistles of religion. His response, “Yes, there are, but even all of those philosophies stem from Christianity,” was, I thought, s circular diversion to avoid the question. My natural response was that they didn’t stem from Christianity, as they are actually much older than the dominant religion of our country. What I was referring to was more of the eastern schools of thought. He said, “Okay,” as if to claim to miss my point. So, I elaborated again that morality can be taught without religious stories and mythical beliefs. I elaborated that, “Many of those Eastern religions use folk lore and stories to teach their lessons, but they don’t try to pass these stories off as fact. They understand that the stories only exist as fictional tales.” He again responded as to miss my point by flat out asking me what my point was. “My point is very simple,” I retorted. “I need to know why you believe that without religion there can be no morality.” “Well, without God, how can you know if what you’re doing is right or wrong?” he responded, completely negating everything that I had just explained to him.

The circular reasoning continued as I asked him if he really thought that without religion, there can be no trigger inside of a person’s head letting them know that what they’re doing just might not be wrong. “Of course,” he responded again. “What would tell you that you’re committing wrong without God?”
“We seem to be moving in circles here,” I responded, getting a little flustered by trying to hide it, as I didn’t want this calm debate to turn into an angry argument. “I’ll jump to a hypothetical. Let’s say that I’m in my bedroom repeatedly stabbing a hooker. According to what you say, if it were not for religion, I would think that what I’m doing is okay. However, the fact of the matter is that I’m a devout atheist, and there would still be a trigger in my head saying, ‘Hey, that probably hurts, and you know she’s going to die eventually. Shouldn’t you probably not be doing that?’” his response was only that it would, because there was probably a religious influence growing up.” When I informed him that I really didn’t, aside from my grandfather’s negative religious opinions and racism based upon such views, he tried to turn my atheism into an aversion to religion based on bad examples of it. I expect this when talking to these people, as they always try to go there.

“Look around you in the state of this country today,” I responded. “Anyway, you can read my book when it’s done if you really want a comprehensive list. I’ll shoot you a free one. But I’m not here to debate religion, I just really want an intelligent answer to my question, because I need to know why you feel that mankind is not, in itself capable of making up its mind when it comes to morality.” His response was only that “I have no answer to that other than the one I’ve already given you.”
We continued to go in circles for a while. I informed him of the statistics of secular countries and their superiority from crime rates to obesity. He doubted the validity of the statement as I expected he would, in that very Hannity like way, even though I had the sources right in front of me and showed him. What I said next is that I believe that most of mankind, left to its own devices and without religion especially, would be easily able to come to an agreement on the basic morality of goodness. I also made it clear that I said the word most, because there will always be evil people who do evil things with or without faith, but there would be far less good people doing evil things without biblical justifications for doing so. The circles continued as he only asked why I didn’t see his point, and in a very nice way I said that he hadn’t really made a point, he had only been refuting any acknowledgment of my points. This was more apparent in his closing statement, “Alright, I see. But either way, I really don’t have another answer for you, and I’m sorry I couldn’t help.”

So, the fact of the matter remained and I still didn’t have an answer to my question. Aside from the fact that he just tried to run me in circles and didn’t actually give me an answer to my question, I can say nothing bad about the pastor. He was nice, polite, honest and respectful, and didn’t even wink an eye even though I was completely honest as to what my book was about. I still can’t help but to be irritated that these people don’t have an actual answer for their complete misjudgment of mankind. I just cannot fathom how they truly believe that without God, there can be no morality.

I’m just going to come out and say it: of course there can be morality without God. There is morality and there is no God, although, I attribute the lack of morality in about half of the world to the fact that man made up God. But let’s let the numbers speak. I’ve brought up Japan as a secular country that far surpasses religious countries such as our own by almost every means of study. But what about our own states? I recently read a study regarding the most religious state in the country, which is Alabama, and the least religious state in the union, that being Oregon. Alabama has the highest rate of admitted church going religionists in the country, whereas Oregon has the lowest at with twelve percent. One might call this specious reasoning, but when you see this same argument made over and over again, one must start to wonder if religion does have something to do with it. Alabama, again the most churchgoing and religious state in the union—the only one with religious texts outside of their court houses—ranks forty-first in per capita income. Almost half of Alabama’s incoming ninth-graders actually graduate high school and a fourth of its children live in poverty. This is only added to the second worst obesity rate in the country and one of the highest rates of uninsured citizens and smokers as well. This may seem bleak, but to add to that, the life expectancy over the last forty years has actually decreased.

When we turn the page and take a look at Oregon, again that least religious state in the union, what we see is a completely different story. What we see is a higher per capita income than Alabama, one of the best obesity rates in the country with under 1/5, less than 1/5 of its children live in poverty, and are better taken care of because of the more liberal and progressive assistance programs, more than seven out of every ten entering ninth-graders graduate high-school and it has one of the lowest on the job death rates in the country.

What is going on here? After looking at the crime, obesity, death, life expectancy rates, graduation, unemployment and so many other social aspects between secular versus religious countries, we’re seeing the same trend in secular versus religious states.

Let’s take a look at other states. We can establish a line where the religious population clearly ends and the secular population begins. This same line tends to separate red states and blue states.

o Minnesota leads the country in medical research, whereas Texas leads the country in executions.

o Connecticut leads the country in college education, whereas Mississippi leads the country in the rate of citizens with Gonorrhea per capita

o New York leads the country in literary publishing, whereas South Carolina led the country in 2006 for violent crimes.

o Massachusetts leads the United States in prenatal care, whereas Florida leads the US in women’s clinic shootings and ranks #4 in violent crimes throughout the country.

o Ohio ranks last in the country for illicit drug use and convictions, whereas Tennessee leads the country in disorders related inbreeding and is #2 in violent crimes in the country.

o North Carolina came in fourth in a rank of the highest unemployment rates in the country in March of 2009

o New Jersey is among the top ten in average per capita income, whereas Kentucky comes in at one of the lowest in the country for persons over twenty-five with a college bachelor’s degree or higher education. And its neighbor too the north, Missouri, is among the lowest in the country for businesses owned and operated by minorities.

o Vermont is the second safest state in the union in the case of gun-violence, whereas Oklahoma is among the worst in the country in its percentage of students rated above proficient in fourth-grade reading, writing and math. Oklahoma is also among the worst in the country in eighth-grade math, reading and science.

o Pennsylvania has the second lowest rate of illicit drug use in the nation, whereas West Virginia is among the lowest in per capita income.

o In the ’06-’07 Smartest State Award, Maine ranked fifth, whereas Louisiana ranked forty-fifth. Louisiana’s equally religious and even further right-wing partner Alaska scored an amazingly low -11.25 in the Best Educated Index of the same year, and leads the country in illicit drug and alcohol use and convictions

o New Hampshire scored a 5.90 in the Smartest State Award in 2008, whereas Utah scored in impressive -6.3

o Oregon leads the country in smoking cessation, whereas Alabama leads the country in high school drop-outs.

Let’s take a look at the education index for a moment. It is ranked by state with the best overall education results. At the number one spot, we see Vermont, a highly secular and liberal state. At the very bottom, we see Arizona, a highly religious and conservative state. The trends clearly follow the guidelines that I’ve previously set out with Vermont, Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Jersey, Maine and Minnesota at the top six spots on the list. Let’s look at the southern states that are heavily religious to see Arkansas at #37, Oklahoma at #39, Georgia at #40, Tennessee at #41, Alabama coming in slightly higher this year at #43, Louisiana at #45 and Mississippi at #49. Another state that ranked in their well is the conservative and newly religious state of Alaska at #44, and a state that used to come from a secular foundation until recently, Arizona at #50.

Again, we can see the same exact pattern forming between more right-wing Christian states and secular ones. Why is this? I’m not necessarily here to answer that question, I’m only providing evidence that seemingly always points in the direction of a better philosophical unity between citizens of secular sectors as opposed to more religious ones. I could bring countries into this where religion is a more prevalent part of government as opposed to secular ideals, but it just might be unfair to compare secular countries like Japan, Holland and France, to religious ones like Iran, Palestine, Pakistan, Israel and the United States. The statistics are almost too cruel to cite.

So, with this knowledge, let’s think for a second and contemplate just how it is that, without religion there can be no morals. I’m not going to say that just because a state’s educational system is better than another, means that their more moral than states whose education leaves quite a bit to be desired. What I will say is that these states obviously have their priorities straight. Much like the fact that whether prenatal funding is high or low doesn’t prove morals, it just proves priorities. Such as Ray Suarez wrote in his page turning non-fiction piece, The Holy Vote:

"All it demonstrates is that spending for prenatal and perinatal care is more likely to bring down the infant mortality rate than just praying about it."

But I will say that high crime rates, high women's clinic bombings and shootings and high teen pregnancy ratings would paint the picture of a low morality, and not just a lack of priorities. Within the statistics I just showed you, I’m sure it wouldn’t be hard to figure out what states I’m talking about. The fact of the matter is that the lack of morality seems to be taught by the religious foundation of the states. After all, teen pregnancy can easily be attributed to the Catholic Church’s teachings against birth control and abortion. The high rates of violence against abortion clinics are a clear specification of the religious view that murder is wrong unless it’s in the name of God. I assure you that it’s not seculars who are bombing women’s clinics. High racial turmoil, which is so apparently prevalent in the south, is certainly not the doing of seculars who fight harder and harder every year for racial equality. It may just be specious, but could it have anything to do with the story of The Tower of Babel and the splitting and confusion of the races? Truthfully, the racial turmoil of the south seems to be coming from somewhere, and the KKK sure loves its Neo-Lutheran Christian Identity faith.

Another interesting statistic that I have just found indicates a counter point to the argument that with or without religion, there would be an equal amount of crime, or, for that matter, less with more religion. I previously thought about the percentage of Americans in the penal system. Now, we have the highest amount of criminals in the penal system per capita, when compared to any other nation. In fact, the nation (America) that holds only five percent of the world’s population is home to almost twenty-five percent of its incarcerated. I wondered what the religious statistics would be in prison, and needless to say, I wasn’t shocked by the outcome, only by the severity of the outcome. According to the Federal Bureau of Prisons, the amount of religionists in prison is at 99.79%, a vast majority at 83.761% of them are Christian. Compare this to the obvious remainder of .21% that is atheist. Now compare that to the almost 16% of Americans who deny religious affiliation according to the census, and we’ve got a pretty lop sided statistic here. If there can be no correlation between religion and crime, then wouldn’t the amount of the incarcerated at least be close to the total percentage of the population? But it’s not. There is a clear spread, which I think clears up any specious accusations that will surely come from the right after this statistic is popularized.

One could formulate that the religious practice doesn’t directly correlate with the desire to commit crimes. Obviously, as all nation-wide statistics show, atheists have the highest percentage of highly educated people per capita. Well, criminals are, much more often than not, poor. Low incomes are usually the result of low education, little college, no college or not even graduating high school. So, we could formulate an argument that education is the culprit here, as atheism is the result of education and crime is the result of a lack thereof, and religion seems also to be the result of the lack of education. So we could just say, atheism is correlated to education and crime is correlated to education, therefore, why would there be a high amount of atheists in prisons? Why? Well, according to the religious wrong, without God, we would all be rioting in mass child molestation on the street, as Jerry Falwell so eloquently insinuated (a Freudian remark if I’ve ever heard one). I think Sam Harris cleared this up, although rather antagonistically, when he said at a live speech to the FFRF, “The truth is, to return to this notion of morality and its relationship to religion; the truth is we can find good reasons to treat other human beings well without believing anything preposterous. We can become sensitive to the suffering of other human beings and realize that our own happiness is in some sense dependent upon acting upon that sensitivity. One problem with religion is that it actually gives people bad reasons to be good where good reasons are actually available. It’s worth pointing out that it’s rather more noble to go to Sub Saharan Africa to help people merely out of concern for their suffering, than to go because you believe the creator of the universe wants you to go, or will reward you for going, or will punish you if you don’t go. But there are other problems with this linkage between religion and morality. This idea that we get our goodness out of faith should suggest that atheists will be profoundly misbehaved. If you take an organization like this, or something like The National Academy of Sciences, 93% of them who reject this idea of a personal god, we all and our Nobel Laureates on chemistry and physiology should be raping and killing and stealing with abandon. Now I don’t know of anyone who’s done a study on our behavior, but I think we can all be skeptical that we are now all in a room filled with distinguished criminals. What are the chances that our Nobel Laureates in chemistry and physiology are raping kids with the frequency of Catholic priests?”

So, if people like Locke and Kant are correct that there can be no morality without a book to differentiate right from wrong, and a religion to enforce other-worldly rewards for being a good person, then why is it that there is so much violence in the religious world and so little in the secular one? Could it have something to do with secular morality coming from experience, education and trial and error, as opposed to religious morality coming from demands made by ancient books? Well, I know where my morals come from and how I came to the rather complex system of values that I proudly hold true in life. Can a religionist say that without merely quoting bible verses? And if all a person does is quote bible verses as their moral system, aren’t they more likely to either question, confuse or misinterpret them, than would be a person who came to morals and values on their own?

In the end, we can look at secular societies and theocratic ones and it doesn't take very long to determine where the morality is high and where it is low. Sweden and Japan lead the world as the most irreligious countries and Iran, Jordan, Palestine, Israel and others in that region are the MOST religious. Now tell me which place a woman would less likely be stoned in a public square for doing nothing more than leaving your house without a man with her. Or better, which place are you likely to have your head cut off (an action condoned and even carried out by government officials) for being homosexual or starring in a pornographic film or having a tattoo? Better yet, compare the contributions of these countries to Sweden and Japan. Compare their infant mortality rates, rates of mental retardation, medical care, high school graduation rates, college graduation rates, crime rates, violent crime rates, murder rates. Seriously, Japan's violent crime rate sky-rocketed in 2009 to an astonishing 14 incidents of violent crime. There's more than that carried out in the "moral" state of Texas before noon on any given block!

So I'm going to end this with a smile. Since my country has abandoned secularism and all of its secular people, please, Japan, let me become a citizen of your country. Please! I don't have enough faith that Sarah Palin won't become elected in 2012, and I know that would never happen there. And if America were to get uppity with you again, just remember what you did to us last time. Look, I already changed my logo to accommodate your wonderfully colorful and vibrant culture. Won't you consider me? Don't make the Smiling Atheist frown :(

Thanks for reading and don't forget the people of Haiti are still in need. Just because it goes off the airwaves doesn't mean it's not still happening. Check the previous blog for sites and also visit I'm With Coco on Facebook where you can purchase a new I'm with Coco wristband with all of the proceeds going to Haiti.

Thank you again for Smiling and Profiling into hell with me, my lovely fellow sinners and heathens.

Sincerely yours,
The Smiling Atheist (The Smiling No-God Man as I'll be known in Japan)