All Religions Blaspheme Each Other

 

“. . .because all the major religions in fact blaspheme one another, and ought by their principles to engage in crusade or jihad each against the others – a profoundly disturbing thought. They blaspheme each other in numerous ways. All non-Christians blaspheme Christianity by their refusal to accept the divinity of Christ, because in so doing they reject the Holy Ghost, doing which is described as the most serious of all blasphemies. The New Testament has Christ say “I am the way, the truth and the life; no one comes to the Father but by me”.

This places members of other faiths beyond redemption; they are damned if they know this claim but do not heed it. By an unlucky twist of theology, Protestants have to regard Catholics as blasphemers too, because the latter regard Mary as co-redemptorix with Christ, in violation of the utterance just quoted. All non-Muslims blaspheme Islam because they insult Mohammed by not accepting him as the true Prophet, and by ignoring the teachings of the Koran.

Jews seem the least philosophically troubled by what people of other faiths think about their own – but Orthodox Jews regard themselves as religiously superior to others because others fail in the proper observances, for example by not respecting kosher constraints. All the religions blaspheme each other by regarding the others’ teachings, metaphysics and much of their ethics as false, and their own religion as the only true one.”—A C Grayling

http://www.acgrayling.com/the-secular-and-the-sacred

 

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The Fall of Man

The Fall of Man as seen by Thomas Paine

“The Christian Mythologists, after having confined Satan in a pit, were obliged to let him out again to bring on the sequel of the fable. He is then introduced into the Garden of Eden, in the shape of a snake or a serpent, and in that shape he enters into familiar conversation with Eve, who is no way surprised to hear a snake talk; and the issue of this tête-à-tête is that he persuades her to eat an apple, and the eating of that apple damns all mankind.

After giving Satan this triumph over the whole creation, one would have supposed that the Church Mythologists would have been kind enough to send him back again to the pit: or, if they had not done this, that they would have put a mountain upon him (for they say that their faith can remove a mountain), or have put him under a mountain, as the former mythologists had done, to prevent his getting again among the women and doing more mischief.

But instead of this they leave him at large, without even obliging him to give his parole—the secret of which is that they could not do without him; and after being at the trouble of making him, they bribed him to stay. They promised him ALL the Jews, ALL the Turks by anticipation, nine-tenths of the world beside, and Mahomet into the bargain. After this, who can doubt the bountifulness of the Christian Mythology?

Having thus made an insurrection and a battle in heaven, in which none of the combatants could be either killed or wounded—put Satan into the pit—let him out again—gave him a triumph over the whole creation—damned all mankind by the eating of an apple, these Christian Mythologists bring the two ends of their fable together. They represent this virtuous and amiable man, Jesus Christ, to be at once both God and Man, and also the Son of God, celestially begotten, on purpose to be sacrificed, because they say that Eve in her longing had eaten an apple. Thomas Paine, The Age of Reason, Authors emphasis 

Create Universe

Morality Does Not Require God

The often repeated theme that atheists have no reason to be moral without a god is probably the most popular and repeated myth made about atheism.  The claims come in a variety of forms but they are all based on the assumption that the ONLY source of morality is from a God on high, a religion…and preferably only the Christian one.  Therefore, without Christianity humans cannot live moral lives.  This of course automatically deprecates all other religions on this planet.

The thing I find most amazing is that Christians, Muslims, Jews, Hindu’s, and the myriad other denominations, sects, and cults in the world have been trying for maybe three plus millennia to prove that there IS a God…and they have ALL totally, completely, entirely failed. They all have stories that depend on magic…that envisions demons, devils, ghosts, angels, etc., and they all were formed a few thousand years ago when mankind was going through a huge god-making period in our history…conveniently forgetting that humans have been roaming around  the earth for 200,000 years or so without a need for really invasive gods.

So anyway, there is no god or gods, therefore all this morality the Christians talk about is just made up by some goat herder desert dwellers a few thousand years ago.  In other words morals come from mankind.  Wars and kindness comes from man.  Good and evil comes from man.  We are ultimately responsible for ALL that goes on in our history, culture, and civilizations…a non-existent god cannot be blamed for our shortcomings or our triumphs.
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Did A Historical Jesus Really Exist

Did the Jesus who was supposed to be a God also really exist, or was he a mythical construct of people trying to get a religion off the ground?  The Christian religion arose in a time when people were inventing religions one after another.  There were hundreds of competing gods roaming around in the ancient times which Jesus was supposed to be born into.

The war of words and wildly different world-views between Christians and non-believers has been going on for nearly two millennia now, and may finally be coming to an end in our modern scientific age where the stories can be subjected to real investigation.

There is not the slightest bit of physical evidence to support a historical Jesus; no manuscripts written by him, no artifacts or works of carpentry, no surviving dwelling, nothing that is directly attributable to a man that was supposed to work magic and speak to hundreds or thousands of people, in a golden age of writing and recording the ancient world.

All the claims of a historical Jesus are derived from 2^nd. Hand writings—that is non-eyewitnesses to the events.  All writings about Jesus come well after he was supposedly crucified and the ones that made it into the Bible are purposely mis-identified in the Bible as Apostles, when in fact we don’t know who wrote them. There are no Roman records that detail Pontius Pilate executing a man called Jesus.  All source material about Jesus is derived from hearsay accounts and come well after his death.

Laying the Gospel accounts of Matthew, Mark, Like, and John side by side we can see there are tremendous differences in the story.  These are not just “eyewitness” differences one would expect from different people seeing the same scene at the same time, they are fundamental differences that are not compatible.  What did Jesus say at the end? Did the women tell the Apostles that he was arisen–or not?  Who was at the tomb when the women came? Did the earth tremble and the sun go dark for three hours and graves spit out dead zombies?

We know the Gospels were written by anonymous authors and they were written from 35 to 70 years after his death.  We know they were originally written in Koine Greek, instead of  Aramaic, and that we only have copies of copies of copies instead of originals and we don’t even know for sure if we have the real words of the man—if he really existed.  We don’t have any secular writing that mentions Jesus…supposedly God Himself…that is contemporary to his (mythical) life.

All we have is hearsay…courts of  law do not allow hearsay as evidence, neither does modern scholarship, and we should not recognize the biblical writings as real evidence.  I don’t think an honest scholar can take any of the books from the New Testament as absolute ‘God breathed’ truth.

Now on top of all the above mentioned evidence is strong scientific circumstantial data that bears on the myth of Jesus.  As mentioned below in my blog post “Adam and Eve Are Dead…Finally” There is conclusive proof that Adam and Eve is nothing more than Biblical myth, and with no Adam and Eve around to commit “Original Sin” there is no need for Jesus to save us from their/our sin.  With no Adam and Eve, and no Jesus, we can just call the Bible what it really is…a book of fiction.  You know I’m right.  🙂

Lying for Jesus:
“What harm would it do, if a man told a good strong lie for the sake of the good and for the Christian church … a lie out of necessity, a useful lie, a helpful lie, such lies would not be against God, he would accept them.”  Martin Luther
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Did a Divine Jesus Really Exist or Was He Just Human

The following list is of the historians and writers who lived in the same area and within Christ’s alleged lifetime or within a hundred years after his death

Apollonius         Persius
Appian                Petronius
Arrian                 Phaedrus
Aulus Gellius    Philo-Judaeus
Columella           Phlegon
Damis                  Pliny the Elder
Dio Chrysostom     Pliny the Younger
Dion Pruseus       Plutarch
Epictetus              Pompon Mela
Favorinus             Ptolemy
Florus Lucius       Quintilian
Hermogones         Quintius Curtius
Josephus                Seneca
Justus of Tiberius     Silius Italicus
Juvenal                    Statius
Lucanus                   Suetonius
Lucian                      Tacitus
Lysias                       Theon of Smyran
Martial                     Valerius Flaccus
Paterculus              Valerius Maximus
Pausanias

However, aside from two passages in the works of a Jewish writer mentioned above and two heavily disputed passages in the works of Roman writers, there just isn’t any contemporary–or soon after his death, mention of Jesus Christ in the writing of scholars and historians.

Philo (20 BC-50 AD) was born before the beginning of the Christian era, and lived well after the reputed death of Christ.

Philo was the one who developed the doctrine of the Logos, or Word, and although this Word incarnate (Jesus himself) supposedly dwelt in that land, and in the presence of multitudes he revealed himself and demonstrated his divine powers–Philo apparently never knew it.

His writings include an account of the Jews covering the entire time that Christ was said to exist on earth.  He lived in or near Jerusalem when Christ was supposedly born and when the Herod massacre occurred. Philo was there when Christ made his triumphal entry into Jerusalem; he was there when the crucifixion and reputed earthquake, supernatural darkness, and the resurrection of the dead zombies in the graveyard took place. – He never wrote about it.

Had these events really taken place you would think the word would spread all over the Middle East and Mediterranean world which at the time was teaming with religious fervor and many many stories going around about a Messiah.  Here was a man who would be the Messiah, who raised the dead and cured incurable diseases and yet no one wrote of him.

Justus of Tiberius was a Jewish author and historian who lived in the second half of the 1st century AD and was a native of Christ’s own country, Galilee. He wrote a history covering this time of Christ’s reputed existence. Sadly the original work has perished, but Photius, a Christian scholar and critic of the ninth century who was acquainted with it says: “He (Justus) makes not the least mention of the appearances of Christ, of what things happened to him, or of the wonderful works that he did” (Photius’ Bibliotheca, code 33).

“Josephus:  (37 – c.100 AD) Late in the first century, Josephus wrote his celebrated work, “The Antiquities of the Jews”, giving a history of his race from the earliest ages down to his own time. Modern versions of this work contain the following passage:

“‘Now there was about this time, Jesus, a wise man, if it be lawful to call him a man, for he was a doer of wonderful works; a teacher of such men as received the truth with pleasure. He drew over to him both many of the Jews, and many of the Gentiles. He was (the) Christ; and when Pilate, at the suggestion of the principal men amongst us, had condemned him to the cross, those that loved him at the first did not forsake him; for he appeared to them alive again the third day, as the divine prophets had foretold these and ten thousand other wonderful things concerning him; and the tribe of Christians, so named from him, are not extinct at this day. (Book XVIII, Chapter iii, Section 3)

For sixteen hundred years or so Christians have been citing this passage as a testimonial, to the historical existence, and the divine character of Jesus Christ. However most all Biblical scholars agree that the sentence is probably a pious forgery written by a scribe or zealous Christian many years after Josephus.

Consider:

“Its brevity disproves its authenticity. Josephus’ work is voluminous and exhaustive. It comprises twenty books. Whole pages are devoted to petty robbers and obscure seditious leaders. Nearly forty chapters are devoted to the life of a single king. Yet this remarkable being, the greatest product of his race, a being of whom the prophets foretold ten thousand wonderful things, a being greater than any earthly king, is dismissed with a dozen lines.”– The Christ, John E. Remsburg, reprinted by Prometheus Books, New York, 1994, pages 171-3.

I’m divided on this…the man may have existed, but I really doubt he was the Messiah or divine in any way.  Just myths like the Old Testament.  Too much stuff just doesn’t add up…the whole story is incoherent and flawed…not a sign of a God inspired work.

“The world has been for a long time engaged in writing lives of Jesus… The library of such books has grown since then. But when we come to examine them, one startling fact confronts us: all of these books relate to a personage concerning whom there does not exist a single scrap of contemporary information — not one! By accepted tradition he was born in the reign of Augustus, the great literary age of the nation of which he was a subject. In the Augustan age historians flourished; poets, orators, critics and travelers abounded. Yet not one mentions the name of Jesus Christ, much less any incident in his life”…Moncure D. Conway, Modern Thought

 YEAH!!!…I just heard that bastard  Osama bin Laden is dead 
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Jesus, Paul, and the Gospels

The Christian religion has had a few thousand years now to make a case for the fundamental concepts it pushes upon our world.  It has failed spectacularly to show ANY evidence for supernatural or magical forces, the existence of angels or demons or Satan, the efficacy of any ones prayers, the infallibility of heavens emissaries on earth (the Popes). It has failed horribly, and has never done what it claims it can do.

Of course I am not, by any means, the only person to understand this and note the inconsistencies and illogic that runs rampant throughout their beliefs.  Despite this several thousand years of apologetics and trying to clean up their Bible of the many mistakes it continues to be an unproven hypothesis.

“Many people– then and now– have assumed that these letters [of Paul] are genuine, and five of them were in fact incorporated into the New Testament as “letters of Paul.” Even today, scholars dispute which are authentic and which are not. Most scholars, however, agree that Paul actually wrote only eight of the thirteen “Pauline” letters now included in the New Testament collection: Romans, 1 and 2 Corinthians, Galatians, Philippians, 1 Thessalonians, and Philemon. Virtually all scholars agree that Paul himself did not write 1 or 2 Timothy or Titus– letters written in a style different from Paul’s and reflecting situations and viewpoints in a style different from those in Paul’s own letters. About the authorship of Ephesians, Colossians, and 2 Thessalonians, debate continues; but the majority of scholars include these, too, among the “deutero-Pauline”– literally, secondarily Pauline– letters.”
Elaine Pagels, Professor of Religion at Princeton University

“When the Church mythologists established their system, they collected all the writings they could find and managed them as they pleased. It is a matter altogether of uncertainty to us whether such of the writings as now appear under the name of the Old and New Testaments are in the same state in which those collectors say they found them, or whether they added, altered, abridged or dressed them up”.   Thomas Paine (The Age of Reason)

“All four gospels are anonymous texts. The familiar attributions of the Gospels to Matthew, Mark, Luke and John come from the mid-second century and later and we have no good historical reason to accept these attributions.”
Steve Mason, professor of religious studies, York University,  Toronto

“A generation after Jesus’ death, when the Gospels were written, the Romans had destroyed the Jerusalem Temple (in 70 C.E.); the most influential centers of Christianity were cities of the Mediterranean world such as Alexandria, Antioch, Corinth, Damascus, Ephesus and Rome. Although large numbers of Jews were also followers of Jesus, non-Jews came to predominate in the early Church. They controlled how the Gospels were written after 70 C.E.”
Bruce Chilton, Bell Professor of Religion at Bard College

“Other scholars have concluded that the Bible is the product of a purely human endeavor, that the identity of the authors is forever lost and that their work has been largely obliterated by centuries of translation and editing.”
Jeffery L. Sheler,“ Who Wrote the Bible,” (U.S. News & World Report, Dec. 10, 1990)

“The clerical confessions of lies and frauds in the ponderous volumes of the Catholic Encyclopedia alone suffice …to wreck the Church and to destroy utterly the Christian religion…. The Church exists mostly for wealth and self-aggrandizement; to quit paying money to the priests would kill the whole scheme in a couple of years. This is the sovereign remedy.” Joseph Wheless, Forgery in Christianity

“Enterprising spirits responded to this natural craving by pretended gospels full of romantic fables, and fantastic and striking details; their fabrications were eagerly read and accepted as true by common folk who were devoid of any critical faculty and who were predisposed to believe what so luxuriously fed their pious curiosity. Both Catholics and Gnostics were concerned in writing these fictions. The former had no motive other than that of a Pious Fraud.”  Catholic Encyclopedia

“The Christian Fathers deemed it a pious act to employ deception and fraud.” “The greatest and most pious teachers were nearly all of them infected with this leprosy.” Johann Lorenz von Mosheim, “Ecclesiastical History”, Vol. I, p. 347

Many scholars think that Eusebius interpolated his writings. In Ecclesiastical History, he writes, “We shall introduce into this history in general only those events which may be useful first to ourselves and afterwords to posterity.” (Vol. 8, chapter 2). In his Praeparatio Evangelica, he includes a chapter titled, “How it may be Lawful and Fitting to use Falsehood as a Medicine, and for the Benefit of those who Want to be Deceived” (Vol. 12, chapter 32).

There is not the slightest bit of physical evidence that supports a historical Jesus; there are no artifacts or dwellings, no works of carpentry, no written manuscripts (by Jesus), nothing.  All we have are writings from other people and there is no contemporary recording of the man/God nothing written while he was alive.  All documents about Jesus came well after his supposed life on earth from people who had never even met him, from unknown authors, or from fraudulent mythical /allegorical writings.  There are no Roman Records that show Pontius Pilate executed a man named Jesus.

“The gospels are all priestly forgeries over a century after their pretended dates.” Those who concocted some of the hundreds of “alternative” gospels and epistles that were being kicked about during the first several centuries C.E. have even admitted that they had forged the documents.”  Joseph Wheless, Forgery in Christianity

“Pauline/Roman Christians: When the Roman-backed instance of Christianity went in search of the ancient centers of Christianity, they discovered to their horror that the Ebionites and Gnostics pre-dated them. Their un-Christian answer was to edit verses, burn books, arrest and harass the other poverty-stricken Christians until no opposition was left. The form of Christianity that we have inherited from the Roman Empire is far from what Christianity originally was.”  Vexen Crabtree, Types of Christianity: Who were the original Christians? (2006)

According to the Gospels several things happened around the time that Jesus died on the cross.
His death was supposedly accompanied by a three hour blackout of the sun, earthquakes, and the rising of the dead. No record of these events can be found anywhere outside the Bible.

So what is a person to do? It seems to me that  anyone searching for something greater than oneself, a belief to offer hope and help, a God who’s always there to comfort and relieve stress is out of luck.  There are a little over 2.2 billion believers in the Christian God and only 1.1 billion non-believers, but those non-believers actually took the time to research their position and beliefs.  They didn’t come to that conclusion as a result of what they were born into. Of the 2.2 billion Christians in the world the vast majority have never researched one little bit of religion.  Their fathers and mothers were Christians…so they are too. They believe in some nebulous creator God who made the world 6,000 or so years ago and listens to their prayers and somehow watches over all of them.

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Jesus Was/Is A Myth

If one follows the many earth sciences closely enough you are presented with facts that if followed deeply enough and cogitated about long enough, reveals to you that all is not as it seems.

For example, science tells us that actual humans (Homo-sapiens…us), have walked the earth for near 200,000+-  years. Among scientists this is pretty much an un-disputed fact, Other, almost humans, walked the earth for several million years…some modern day European and Asian people have actual DNA from some of these ancient ancestors, meaning there was inter-breeding and viable, fertile offspring.

DNA and the old bones are telling this story…this is indisputable, non-judgmental,   unbiased science that is narrating the story of our ancestors life, not a book written by goat-herders–millions of years after the real beginning of the tale.

All of the above, and more, leads us to the necessity to re-examine and measure many old tall tales that have been passed off as truth to billions of people…namely the Biblical myths of our earthly Genesis.  Moses nowadays is thought to be pretty much a mythical figure.  His “contribution” to the Bible (The Pentateuch) is probably a product of earnest Jewish scholars of the sixth or seventh century BC …long after the reputed time of Moses…trying to keep a tribe together

We know that the essential stories of Genesis…Adam/Eve, Noah, dispersion of language, slavery of the Hebrews in Egypt, Exodus, exploits of Joshua, etc. are mythical or allegorical tales.  Some people may think this is not a big deal, but some cogitation on the subject proves otherwise.  In fact if these stories are not true, the consequences ricochet through time…to the story of Jesus, and then go even greater lengths to prove the whole chapter–maybe the whole book–is only myth.

Follow this: there was no Adam/Eve as portrayed in the Bible. The Bible gives clues that much of civilization and early technology was miraculously “there” almost as soon as the story got going. This irrevocably puts the stories into the fifth or sixth millennia BC…a time that is extremely well researched and known about by our earth sciences.  The bone evidence and DNA evidence agree in their respective branches that there was never a time when our ancestors only numbered 2 in the case of Adam/Eve, and further out, the 6 mythical procreating members of the mythical Noah’s Ark.

As stated above man/womankind has walked the earth for 200,000 +- years…there was never an Adam/Eve couple six or eight or ten or fifty thousand years ago.  No Adam and Eve mean no “Original Sin” which irrevocably means there was no need for a Jesus to die as “blood atonement” for non-existent sins.  If you think about it God said, before Paul invented Original Sin, that children are not guilty of the sins of the father. Also the blood atonement think is kind of stupid…it’s nothing but theater, a contrivance to batten up a weak plot line.

With that thought in mind we go to some thoughts of people who are, or were, in the front lines of scholarship in matters of the Christian religion.

“It is important to recognize the obvious: The gospel story of Jesus is itself apparently mythic from first to last”…Robert M. Price, professor of biblical criticism at the Center for Inquiry Institute

“We can recreate dimensions of the world in which he lived, but outside of the Christian scriptures, we cannot locate him historically within that world”…Gerald A. Larue, The Book Your Church Doesn’t Want You to Read.

“The question must also be raised as to whether we have the actual words of Jesus in any Gospel” …Bishop John Shelby Spong.

“According to the declaration of the Second Vatican Council, a faithful account of the actions and words of Jesus is to be found in the Gospels; but it is impossible to reconcile this with the existence in the text of contradictions, improbabilities, things which are materially impossible or statements which run contrary to firmly established reality”…Maurice Bucaille, The Bible The Quran And Science

“Jesus is a mythical figure in the tradition of pagan mythology and almost nothing in all of ancient literature would lead one to believe otherwise. Anyone wanting to believe Jesus lived and walked as a real live human being must do so despite the evidence, not because of it”…C. Dennis McKinsey, Bible critic, The Encyclopedia of Biblical Errancy

“Even if there was a historical Jesus lying back of the gospel Christ, he can never be recovered. If there ever was a historical Jesus, there isn’t one anymore. All attempts to recover him turn out to be just modern re-mythologizing of Jesus. Every “historical Jesus” is a Christ of faith, of somebody’s faith. So the “historical Jesus” of modern scholarship is no less a fiction”…Robert M. Price, Jesus: Fact or Fiction

“So unreliable were the Gospel accounts that “we can now know almost nothing concerning the life and personality of Jesus”…Rudolf Bultmann, University of Marburg

So Prof. Bultmann is saying that the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John are unreliable, so bad that we can’t be sure about Jesus. Just how much faith can we put in the Gospels?  Let’s see what some other scholars believe…

“We know virtually nothing about the persons who wrote the gospels we call Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John”…Elaine Pagels, Professor of Religion at Princeton University, The Gnostic Gospels.

“All four gospels are anonymous texts. The familiar attributions of the Gospels to Matthew, Mark, Luke and John come from the mid-second century and later and we have no good historical reason to accept these attributions”…Steve Mason, professor of classics, history and religious studies at York University.

“The gospels are so anonymous that their titles, all second-century guesses, are all four wrong”…Randel M. Helms, Who Wrote the Gospels?

“But even if it could be proved that John’s Gospel had been the first of the four to be written down, there would still be considerable confusion as to who “John” was. For the various styles of the New Testament texts ascribed to John- The Gospel, the letters, and the Book of Revelations– are each so different in their style that it is extremely unlikely that they had been written by one person”…John Romer, archeologist & Bible scholar, Testament.

“Paul did not write the letters to Timothy to Titus or several others published under his name; and it is unlikely that the apostles Matthew, James, Jude, Peter and John had anything to do with the canonical books ascribed to them”…Michael D. Coogan, Professor of religious studies at Stonehill College.

“Yet today, there are few Biblical scholars– from liberal skeptics to conservative evangelicals- who believe that Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John actually wrote the Gospels. Nowhere do the writers of the texts identify themselves by name or claim unambiguously to have known or traveled with Jesus”… Jeffery L. Sheler, The Four Gospels

“The bottom line is we really don’t know for sure who wrote the Gospels”…Jerome Neyrey, Weston School of Theology, Cambridge, Mass.

“The world has been for a long time engaged in writing lives of Jesus… The library of such books has grown since then. But when we come to examine them, one startling fact confronts us: all of these books relate to a personage concerning whom there does not exist a single scrap of contemporary information — not one! By accepted tradition he was born in the reign of Augustus, the great literary age of the nation of which he was a subject. In the Augustan age historians flourished; poets, orators, critics and travelers abounded. Yet not one mentions the name of Jesus Christ, much less any incident in his life”…Moncure D. Conway, Modern Thought

Some really bad press for a few people from the Christian religion. They keep saying there is all this evidence that their religion is the true one.  I’m wondering where it is.

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Atheists are Smart :-)

A new Pew Forum poll on religion in America has found that Atheists/agnostics, Jews, and Mormons…in that order…know the most about religion. We out-did Protestants and Roman Catholics in knowledge about major religions and the basic knowledge and tenets of their own religion.

Forty five percent of Catholics did not know that their church teaches that the bread and wine used in Holy Communion becomes the actual body and blood of Jesus. Catholics call it transubstantiation.  If this were a real phenomenon it would be magic.  We should all know by now…there is no magic…never was.

Less than fifty percent of Protestants knew that the Catholic priest and theologian, Martin Luther, was the person who started the Protestants Reformation which led to their own faith.

You can read all about it HERE

They could have just asked me or the hundreds (maybe thousands) of other atheists who have sites on the internet and we could have told them this. Although I do get many very smart religious folks commenting here, the majority do not know much about their own religions.  Most Christians who reply are using very outdated apologetics; the same refuted, many times over, answers put forth as proofs of their sects.
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Is God The Basis For Our Morality

A correspondent writes the following to me”

“In regards to atheism, if you show me how something can come out of nothing I will convert to!”

Sure I can show you something that came out of nothing…the myth about gods…any god.  There was never any proof for any god…still isn’t, and yet some people swear that a god somehow controls who they are and what they do…what happened to free-will?
He then continues:

“Moreover my question in regards to killing was not why you wouldnt do it, its more of what instills that ideology or law in your persona. Why are we born with this mentality, who instilled it in us at birth?” <sic>

When early man was roaming the earth hundreds of thousands of years ago the evidence seems to show that humans hunted and killed each other with abandon. This went on for a looong time and probably reached its climax in early Biblical times and up until the Catholic Church was usurped as a political power over humans.  Nowadays there are so many of us and we have the ability to choose who rules over us (mostly), and it’s politically incorrect to kill citizens with abandon. Humans have the innate desire for self preservation and the smart ones realize that they must act with compassion towards others if they expect the same back to them.

Of course there are some religions that continue to kill with seemingly no consequences.  They do this by targeting enemies and citizens alike…scaring everyone to death.  Christianity’s last big fling at this process was Hitler’s time; who along with the explicit help of the Catholic Church (which was violently against Jews at the time) and eventually the Lutheran’s and such…contrived to wipe Jews off the face of the earth.  Of course we know they also went after the mentally deficient, the homosexuals, the Jehovah’s witnesses, some other small sects, and of course anybody who disagreed with them.

Muslims are pretty much stuck in the 7^th Century, where they will probably stay as long as the religion is allowed to continue.  In the Middle East and some other parts of the third world they (Muslim’s) continue to kill with impunity, and of course the leaders are fanatically trying to bring this practice to America.  The Muslim Allah is supposed to be the same as the Christian and Jewish God…is He (God/Allah/Yahweh) also instilling the same innate reverence for life and morality in the Muslim’s as Christianity is supposed to have.

I’m sorry, but I don’t believe that the argument that God/Allah/Yahweh provides humans with their basis for morals or reverence for life stands up.  It’s only the last few years that these things and the concurrent arguments have started to appear and that more or less seems to be simultaneous with higher civilization.

Early Christianity may have spouted morality, but the record shows that it is responsible for millions of deaths, what with all the many religious wars, which, by the way, continue today in many places in the world.

Also for your consideration is the Catholic/Spanish Inquisitions and the witch hunts of the Dark Ages in which as many as three million innocent people were put to death by “Christianity.”

We should also remember that the Spanish Christian’s of the 15^th and 16^th Century and the later European Christians killed or enslaved as many as 100,000,000 indigenous people of the North, Central, and South America, and all the Caribbean Islands.

I wonder where their God given morals and reverence for life was.

Don’t forget that the early Hebrews were killing men, women, and children, whole tribes and all their animals.  And their “God” was telling them to do this…

Religion/God/Allah/Yahweh has never been a sound basis for morality, and it’s certainly not instilled in us from birth by some non-existent spirit floating in the sky.

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