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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Creationism and Science and Change

Science and Religion have…until recently, publicly fought over two issues.  Once, in the early 1600’s when Galileo Galilei dared to contest the Catholic Churches belief that the Sun revolved around the Earth.  The Church of course lost that battle, although it took hundreds of years before they admitted it, and they imprisoned the poor man for challenging their authority.

The second confrontation was on the subject of Evolution. When Darwin published his book On the Origins of Species, in 1859, I think every church in the world went bonkers in denial, and of course the Catholics were at the forefront of the condemnation.  This lasted until about 1950 when Pope Pius XII in his Encyclical Humani generas declared that evolution and faith were not in conflict. That was followed, in 1996, by Pope John Paul II, in his message to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, explicitly endorsed the findings of evolutionary theory.  So in essence what happened here is the Church just gave up, and in, because once again the preponderance of Real World evidence supported the side of science.

Now unfortunately the Catholic Church, although the largest, is not the only Christian congregation out there, and there are hundreds, if not thousands, of evangelical fundamentalist gnats flying around the bones of religion.

They are scrambling for dominance in the Protestant world and they are gathering souls and helping the best and brightest of their ilk to earn PhD’s and to write papers for their creationist journals where they argue that magic and the supernatural are true and ‘scientific.’ They want magic to be accepted in our school systems, all the way through college level, as how our world and universe was brought about.

They want to teach our children, our future generation, that the earth was created 6,000 years ago, and that dinosaurs walked the earth with Adam and Eve and Noah.  They want to teach that Neanderthals never existed and there was an ice-age after ‘The Flood.’  They propose to take the accumulated scientific knowledge of the human race and deny it’s truth, they want to tell our children that the scientist don’t know what they are doing…and are lying about their findings, and are probably in cahoots with Satan.

One cannot just listen to their rhetoric and say, “Well, maybe there’s something to it.”  You have to follow through with their assertions and question their motives.  They want nothing less than completely gutting our educational system, and by extension, our secular form of government. They literally want the Bible to be the ‘LAW’ of the land. They want their Christian Protestant church to rule over ALL of us.  They want their worldview to be controlling our destiny.  Even if you don’t believe their version of religion, they think they are right and should rule over you. They want an end to secular government and for theism to control all.

That’s damn scary.

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God, Religion, and Republicans

“I am now convinced that children should not be subjected to the frightfulness of the Christian religion…. If the concept of a father who plots to have his own son put to death is presented to children as beautiful and as worthy of society’s admiration, what types of human behavior can be presented to them as reprehensible?” — Ruth Hurmence Green

I might add; a God that from time to time asks the faithful to kill their own offspring to prove their faithfulness, or allows torture of the faithful to prove a point to His evil (who’s the more evil here?) opponent. This Christian/Hebrew God is not a ‘God of Love’ as Christians like to say, he is a God of Murder, Torture, Genocide, and Jealousy. One only needs to read the Old Testament to prove that. The people running around preaching that ‘God is Love’ are brainwashed, and they are trying to do the same to you.

The people of an evangelical fundamentalist bent are raising their own children to be ignorant in a world of constantly advancing science and understanding. They are teaching their offspring to ignore the stuff that makes our world livable and possible in times of high population pressure and diminishing resources. They will have no clue when they are adults…much as some fundies are today.

Their wish from what I can understand from hundreds of websites readings and live conversations is to take over the secular governments of the world and establish religious rule…just like the Muslims essentially want to do. And they keep hoping the world will end soon, or predicting it’s imminent demise. That’s really creepy.

They will be happy to pass laws to outlaw homosexuals, heretics, blasphemers, religion that does not conform to their commandments, pre-marital sex, to allow censorship in what we read and speak about, how we dress, what, or who, we can worship, what movies can depict, who we can associate with; in short they want to legislate yours and mine morality and conduct. Kinda like Hitler.

The Republican Party is already controlled by these subversives, at least according to Bill Moyer on PBS
I have a quote from him on one of my other blog posts which I will duplicate here.

“True, people of faith have always tried to bring their interpretation of the Bible to bear on American laws and morals … it’s the American way, encouraged and protected by the First Amendment. But what is unique today is that the radical religious right has succeeded in taking over one of America’s great political parties. The country is not yet a theocracy but the Republican Party is, and they are driving American politics, using God as a battering ram on almost every issue: crime and punishment, foreign policy, health care, taxation, energy, regulation, social services and so on.”-Bill Moyer

Now I don’t know about you, but I don’t go around breaking the 10 commandments or any civil laws…Now…but I do read books that would be considered heretical under theist rule. I also speak out about how crazy Christian theology and Bible is. That alone that would get me put in jail if the religious right (evangelical fundamentalists) gets their way. In times long past I have broken numbers 3, 4, 7, and 10 of those Christian commandments, and (well, actually I keep breaking 2 of them) although I regret them, I do not think people should go to jail for some of them…murder, theft, and false witness…yea, go to jail for them, but not for coveting your neighbor’s wife, or cussing, or not going to church. 🙂

Anyway, the Christian rights stated ambition is to take over secular rule of the world and have religion guide our future…and they have already succeeded in taking over the Republican Party.
I wonder what’s next.

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Sunday Sermon for Evolutionists

In May of 2007 the Gallup poll ask Americans this question: “Do you, personally, believe in evolution or not.” This was probably not the correct way to word this question, since there are actually two different beliefs in evolution. There is Theistic Evolution, where believers think that Evolution was started by God and then left alone. Then there is Natural Evolution, where Evolution was purely natural without outside forces (God) aiding the process.
Now this had the actual effect of combining non-believers and partial-believers together. The way the question was asked did not separate the Theists from the non-Theists, and the basic outcome was a statistical dead heat.

• 49% believe in “Evolution.”
  48% do not believe in “Evolution.”
  2% had no opinion
  I don’t know what happened to the other 1%

  Level of education had an effect on what beliefs were; to no ones surprise.

  74% of people with masters or higher degrees believe in Evolution
  48% of people with college degrees believe in Evolution
  50% of adults with some college believe in Evolution
  41% of adults with High School or less believe in Evolution

To kind of bring this together, one can go back to November of 1997, for another poll conducted by Gallup where it was found (thru using better questions) that those believers in Evolution could be broken down thusly:

• 40% believe a God Started Evolution
  9% believe in a purely natural evolution

I haven’t seen any more recent surveys, using good questions, but past data suggests that the numbers don’t significantly change from year to year.

So, in the USA at least, the non-believers are a “Big Minority” 🙂 We people that call ourselves non-believers, atheists, agnostics, or whatever, are a really small group-in the USA. But, it is nice to know that whether one is right or wrong in this matter is not decided by polling the public. We come from the place of believing in the logic and proofs of science. We look at physical proofs that can be empirically tested, not mythical tales that involve magic.

We can look at evidence from dozens and dozens of sciences that are unanimously saying that most of what religion teaches and believes is not true. Even the “soft sciences” such as world history, biblical scholarship and linguistics, are disputing biblical tales that have been believed for nearly two thousand years. I mean, do you seriously think that the humans that were spread over almost every continent on earth 12,000 years ago were speaking the same language?

We have a growing tide of knowledge coming our way…every day. I don’t think many Christians yet realize how far gone their “truths” are. Some of the things now known are able to debunk religion by proving parts of the Bible wrong. If one, or two, or three parts are wrong…how about others?

Sidebar: Newsweek magazine in 1987 (yea…I know) said; “By one count there are some 700 scientists with respectable academic credentials (out of a total of 480,000 U.S. earth and life scientists) who give credence to creation-science…” That means that less than one half of one percent of scientists support the biblical creation of earth and man.

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