Dawkins a Dick around Ahmed’s Clock

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Late last week a young boy by the name of Ahmed Mohammed brought a clock/suitcase hybrid into his school to show off to his teacher at his Texas school. He was arrested and interrogated by police for over an hour without the presence of a lawyer or his parents because his teacher felt “intimidated” as the clock resembled that of a suitcase bomb in her eyes – not considering the fact that a 14 year old has no frame of reference for such a thing, nor the very apparent lack of C4.

That’s the old news.

Richard Dawkins, living up to his name and reputation of late, along with a few bloggers over at Skepchick (who I won’t bother to name or link to) have a beef with Mohammed:

The 14 year old child used the word “invention” for his contraption while being placed in front of national TV cameras, and it’s got them in an uproar.

What Ahmed did and didn’t do

A homemade clock made by Ahmed Mohamed, 14, is seen in an undated picture released by the Irving Texas Police Department September 16, 2015. Mohamed was taken away from school in handcuffs after he brought the clock to his Dallas-area school this week and the staff mistook it for a bomb, police said on Wednesday. REUTERS/Irving Texas Police Department/Handout via Reuters

Irving Texas Police Department

A homemade clock made by Ahmed Mohamed, 14, is seen in an undated picture released by the Irving Texas Police Department September 16, 2015. Mohamed was taken away from school in handcuffs after he brought the clock to his Dallas-area school this week and the staff mistook it for a bomb, police said on Wednesday. REUTERS/Irving Texas Police Department/Handout via Reuters 

Ahmed Mohammed didn’t invent a damn thing. Clearly. He took two things that already existed – took one of them apart – and stuck it inside the other. Ahmed’s clock is a clock + a suitcase.

What he did requires no special brilliance or insight into electronics and fails to make him special. It is not indicative of genius and wouldn’t win the science fair even if EVERYONE else in the school made those lame volcanoes.

Ahmed misspoke, and perhaps he’s not mature enough to know the difference between inventing and …er…Frankenstein-ing things together and a Professor Emeritus at Oxford with a PhD in biology took the time to correct him on twitter so that his name could be part of the media frenzy taking place over this, even going so far as to suggest a conspiracy on Ahmed’s part:

“…Ahmed didn’t build a clock. He simply took one out of its casing. Did he deliberately want to be suspected of making a bomb? Did he want to be arrested, to be seen as a victim of ‘Islamophobia’?”

““He disassembled & reassembled a clock (which is fine) & then claimed it was his ‘invention’ (which is fraud)” and asserted, “True, Johnny Smith would not have been arrested & Ahmed should NOT have been. But his motives remain questionable.”

Well, I don’t have  a PhD, and here I am stating the clearly obvious as well minus any insanity. Can I have a brownie now? Where’s my book deal?  Oh, there’s more to the story?
You mean we’re focusing on the wrong thing?

Ahmed Mohammed and Me

Here I am a 29 year old IT professional writing about a young man that took apart a clock, who – like me – started taking things apart at a young age out of a sense of curiosity for how they work.  I started disassembling things as soon as I could hold a screwdriver and growing up there probably wasn’t a piece of electronic equipment or complex mechanics that I hadn’t taken apart and put back together hoping it worked by the time mom got home from work.

That’s the beautiful spark of curiosity that got kids like me interested in a lifelong passion, and like Ahmed there were things that I slammed together and called inventions – one – an alarm clock with speakers that I replaced with bigger, louder speakers.  Is that anything special?  Nope.  But it was cool to me, and when I was 14 it was something I did that no one else had done, not to mention that I had the loudest alarm clock for miles.

This is the birth of the tinkerer, and that’s really cool to see from my perspective. I love seeing kids tear crap apart and put it back together. I don’t expect every kid to know how to use a breadboard and soldering iron at 14, because we all start somewhere – and THIS is where we start, and sometimes we call the crap we do an invention because we aren’t adults and because we haven’t been tainted by the trouble of filing a patent yet.

My curiosity and love for tinkering never got me arrested though.

That’s the point, that’s why media attention to this is OK, not because he called his traveling clock an invention or because the President had an invite to the White House for him. That’s also why it’s OK for tech companies to jump on the bandwagon of free advertising and send the kid all kinds of free stuff that may foster this interest, because a kid did something he thought was cool and because of his skin color and last name he was arrested for it – detained without warrant – and questioned, at 14, without the presence of his parents or a lawyer. Ahmed’s clock is supposed to be his introduction to my world, instead it was a crash course in Islamophobia and racial profiling.

Dawkins – aka white privilege personified, is meanwhile convinced that Ahmed Mohammed was an inside job.

Can we stop taking him seriously now, once and for all?

Introducing Southern Discomfort

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The past couple of months I’ve been working with my friend Jordy on a new Podcast project called Southern Discomfort and after quite a lot of work we have our first episode up.  This, of course, is a growing process – but I’m pretty damn proud of it and I think that if you like what I do here you’ll appreciate the podcast.  You can subscribe via RSS here.

 

So, check it out please!

 

Welcome to Episode 1 of the Southern Discomfort Show – in this show we introduce the show, ourselves and our religious and political backgrounds, plus we prove how nerdy we are. In addition to all that we get into a long talk about same sex relationships, how your grandpappy’s idea of “race mixing” was probably wrong and why Christians aren’t actually being persecuted here in the USA.

PLUS  we talk about Black Lives Matter and whether or not that means that police are all terrible people.

 

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Direct Download

The Pastors on Ashley Madison

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If you’ve been living under a rock then you may not know that the popular infidelity site known as Ashley Madison was recently hacked by a group of moralist hackers with the intention of exposing those who were using the site to find people to have affairs with.   So far over 400 of the exposed have been Christian pastors on Ashley Madison – many with paid accounts (paid accounts allow a person to send messages to others).

This news comes as no surprise to any of us, Christian and unbeliever alike – we all expect hypocrisy from the Christian elite. Josh Duggar – stanchion of fundamentalist morality, vitriolic anti-lgbt hate, and former spokesman for the Family Research Council had multiple accounts, affairs, and participated in both prostitution and had a past littered with child molestation cover-ups is a shining example of what that hypocrisy looks like in one of it’s most dangerous and vile forms. This post isn’t about Josh Duggar though, it’s about better people.

We know that Christianity is full of hypocrites. Christians know it. I know it. This is reality.

 

How then should we respond?

 

I, obviously, am not in the position to prescribe to my atheist friends the best approach for this but I do think I have a Humanist approach and I think that’s how we should look at this whole thing. I know many of you are reveling in this revelation as if it’s some beautiful day, “we’ve finally exposed the Christians!”  But I don’t think that’s a fair assessment, I don’t think that Christianity needed any more exposure than it already had and I don’t revel in the fact that hundreds of men were deceptive to their wives and congregations. I can’t find joy in that, I can’t find joy in seeing people who want to be one thing fail at that thing and be altogether another. I think that’s what these pastors represent in large part is a desire to earn god’s favor and an utter inability to do so. They represent the futility of Christianity, and the pain of it’s failure.

This is not a good time for these men, many of whom have spit fire from their pulpits about what marriage is and isn’t. I’m saddened for the pain they and their families will endure because it isn’t so unlike the pain they’ve been in large part responsible for among the LGBT community for decades and it is grievous. They will be judged, hated, mocked, and invalidated – and that’s not good for anyone.

On August 24th, 2015, John Gibson, a 56-year-old pastor who taught at the New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary was found dead by his own hand. He was exposed in the Ashley Madison hack and his suicide note contained a great deal of shame and remorse.

I don’t know if Gibson was a bigot, I don’t know if he was the sort of man to preach hate and condemnation or if he truly believed in grace and lived his life in a way that made that evident. I cannot know and I don’t care – but I do know that he was a human being with a life and a family and that he experienced the depths of depression to the point that he was willing to take his own life.  As one who has been there, as one who has held a gun in his mouth pleading for the end – I don’t think anyone deserves that. I’m therefore, saddened, deeply.

We cannot be happy that these men have been exposed. That mankind is likely to pursue sexual urges is no surprise, that pastors are humans is no surprise.

We cannot be happy that Josh Duggar has a trail of victims in his wake, including his poor brainwashed wife Anna and 3 of his sisters.

We cannot be happy that a man killed himself and left his family to pick up the pieces, either because he didn’t know how to handle the pressure of guilt and exposure or because he didn’t feel like he would receive love and grace from the church.

This is a time for Christianity to come to terms with the reality that it is not the shining white tower it so often portrays itself as; in the wake of the exposure of these pastors on Ashley Madison and of bigots like Kim Davis the church has an opportunity to self examine and to recognize that the perfection  is a guise for inadequate people who are failing to reach the standards they use their pulpits to preach about. This is an opportunity for the Church to show grace to those inside it’s walls, and maybe apply that lesson to those outside – where it has so often failed.

So, I’m asking for us not to revel in the pain of others – simply. Let’s be better than that.

 

 

 

Honkie flag

Dear Honkie,

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A letter to crackers, from a cracker.

That’s right. I started this post with a pejorative word for white people in hopes that it would get your attention and that it might mean that you’d read it. Unfortunately, my recent experience with my fellow Caucasians has been that — once threatened or humiliated in the slightest by the chance of an inconvenience or disruption of the status quo all willingness to pursue an intelligent discourse is immediately shut down, so please — don’t shut down. Keep reading, listen and receive the words one of your own has to say about this race thing.

A while back, during yet another tragic event that took the life of an innocent African American — I wrote a piece about recognizing my own white privilege and a lot of you were…well…livid about it.

The comments on Facebook that resulted from that post were incredible, and were evidence that very few were interested in the point I was trying to make but were instead interested in defending the idea that they — in all their whiteness — worked to get where they are, and that nothing has ever been handed to them.

I guess somewhere about halfway through the first comment I started reading through the lines of “I worked for everything I have” and began understanding it to mean “unlike the welfare queens that have never worked a day” — let’s be honest, that’s what you mean when you can’t acknowledge that life is even the slightest bit easier for you as a white person and want to put your hardships on display.

A lot of of grew up poor, I sure as hell did — and I work incessantly to make sure I’m not poor the rest of my life.

Still, being white is making that process — and has made my life, just a little bit easier for me than for my black counterparts.

In all this, it’s also been made clear that my marshmallow friends feel like they are being told to feel guilty for being white. There is, of course, nothing in the post I wrote previously that should indicate that I feel that way — and of all the articles and opinion pieces I’ve read from authors (regardless of their ethnicity) it’s become clear to me that almost no one, save a few extremists, wants you to feel guilty for being born white. You don’t even have to feel guilty if your great-great-great grand-pappy was a racist slave owner, just — maybe — instead of feeling guilty you could say, “I could see how 450 years of slavery and oppression might put the balance of power in my court and in the court of people that look like me and make life more difficult for black people.”

Acknowledging that truth goes a long way in the black community, in fact — it goes a hell of a lot farther than having a black best friend that no one has ever met and you don’t even have to feel bad about it any more than you feel bad about water being wet. Some things just are, and you were born white while other people weren’t. There’s no bad guy in that scenario.

“So, you are telling me that I don’t have to feel bad about systematic racism that has been unfair to an entire culture of people?”

That’s a great question Honkie, I’m glad you asked.

Look, I know — You didn’t own slaves, your family has always been poor white trash and you never had anything to do with slavery or any sort of oppression of black people at all. Slavery, racism, Jim Crow laws, the KKK , etc. , etc. — those are all things that you had nothing to do with and that no one wants to pin on you. You benefit from being white. That’s it.

So.

No, you don’t have to feel bad about it at all, but I suspect that once you’ve acknowledged that this experience is a real one for you (privilege) and your black counterparts (prejudice) that you’ll automagically feel bad. I have a feeling that you’ll just feel icky, like I do, for being part of a society that allows that to happen — and that’s not guilt, that’s something much stronger than guilt and more powerful for introducing someone to the desire to see a change.

Empathy.

That’s what you guys are afraid of too, at least — that’s what I think it is that you are afraid of. You are afraid that you’ll feel bad for someone who has it worse than you, and that you’ll have to acknowledge that your life isn’t as miserable as you want to pretend it is. You’ll be forced to give a shit, and that’s scary because you aren’t familiar with the lives of these other people and because you’ve been led to believe that they’ve brought it upon themselves because all you really know about black people is a caricature of extremes.

Empathy would mean that you’d have to look at a black man, woman, or child just like you look at a white man, woman, or child — rather than with the biases we’ve been raised with. It means you have to acknowledge that sometimes people end up in situations that aren’t their fault, and sometimes it’s incredibly difficult to dig yourself out, furthermore that sometimes it’s just impossible to get ahead when you start out so behind.

Empathy doesn’t mean guilt, but it does mean that you want things to be better for someone else. Even if you don’t know how to make that happen, it’s sure as hell a good place to start.

On that flag.

I’m as white and Southern as the day is long, and I’m proud of it too.

I’m proud of the way we generally treat one another around here; we nod in acknowledgement of nearly every person that passes our way, we hold doors open for the people behind us at restaurants, we eat the meat we kill (I’m not a hunter, but if you don’t eat the meat you kill people look down on you, and they should), and we tend to be independent — but when tragedy strikes a family you wouldn’t know it because we make sure they don’t go without. That’s, to me, my heritage as a Southerner.

For some people — maybe you, that heritage proudly includes a historical connection to the “War of Northern Aggression” because someone in your family fought and died to defend an ideal that, like most that die in war today, doesn’t really protect his interests as much as it protects the wealthy and disenfranchises the poor.

You, like most, are simply proud of that background and want to pretend like slavery wasn’t the root purpose of the war and you may even believe that to be true because you’ve been taught it by historical revisionists your whole life. That’s what I was told, and it’s bullshit.

What all that pride means for you war half-historians is proudly displaying the Confederate Battle Flag of Virginia in one of the many popular iterations on your person, on your unreasonably large truck, or in front of your home. I see at least 20 a day. The one I hate most though is displayed on a tiny plot of land in front of the county courthouse where I live, mocking those who it pains every time they pass by.

That flag, all the muck aside — is a symbol of white supremacy and control. It’s a symbol of preserving one races’ power over another, of ripping families apart, and of all the labor that provided free wealth for aristocratic Southern families who needed to keep the status quo going in order to continue building wealth in the ways that they were. That’s why the KKK used it as their banner in the 50’s and why other skinhead organizations use it today. Even if it has been kidnapped from it’s original purpose, and it hasn’t, it’s time to relegate it to history and to extremists who hurt people.

In a part of the country built on the labor of scarred black backs, that flag is a symbol of gloriously returning to those days.

If you can be proud of that part of our heritage you’ve got a stronger stomach than I. I’m not, I can’t be. I can’t ask black people to pass by it every day at government buildings when I know their taxes pay for it too. If you must display it on your property, by all means — but now would be a good time to revisit that part about empathy a few paragraphs above.

And while we’re at it….

So, you’ve folded up ole Dixie and recognized that maybe some folks do have it harder than you based solely on the circumstances of their parentage all in the course of a single post…shit…I’m doing pretty damn good, what else can I get your pasty white behind to do?

I’ll end this monologue with the Good Ole’ Boy’s by telling you how I try to move my dialogue with the black community, a community that I know I’m not a part of — but that I care about:

Don’t pretend to be colorblind, that doesn’t mean anything. Recognize, appreciate, and celebrate our differences all while loving the things that unify us. Saying, “I don’t see color” is to rip that part of someone’s identity away from them when instead we should be saying, “I see beauty and history in your color”.

Race is real, it’s been part of the historical narrative of this country and the world ever since we started forming tribes around language and skin-tone. We don’t have to pretend like race doesn’t exist or even be ashamed of the race we share, we can acknowledge race without placing the people who’s race differs from ours in a subclass or fearing them.

Just treat people like people ya peckerwoods.

Sincerely,

Your Honkie Neighbor

Franklin Graham asks us Where Would Jesus Bank?

Where Would Jesus Bank | Why Franklin Graham doesn’t understand Jesus

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The Story

Franklin Graham – who rode the coat tails of his famous preacher daddy Billy Graham into Christian fame as the head of Billy Graham Evangelistic Association ever since the elder fell ill, recently announced that the ministry and churches associated with BGM would be pulling all accounts from Wells Fargo (and boycotting Tiffany & Co.) .  Why?

This ad:

(Warning, grab a tissue)

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Is Christianity Dying?

Is Christianity Dying?

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Is Christianity Dying? – Russell D Moore asks rhetorically in an article sent to me by a friend who serves in the ministry, wanting my commentary or insight as Dr. Moore explores the results of the latest Pew Religious Landscape study and what those results mean for the Christian church.

Dr. Moore and others would have you believe that a 6.8% increase in people who don’t identify with any religious group and a combined decrease of people claiming affiliation with Christianity, between mainline and evangelical Protestants plus their Catholic counterparts, of 7.4% is largely due to atheism being in vogue enough for the people that have long sat in the pews without actually maintaining religious belief has given them license to speak up about their lack of faith…as if answering an anonymous poll is risque.

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Unbreaking the Broken Self (pt 1)

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On my way home to work last night I was listening to fellow Southern apostate Neil Carter’s guest appearance on The Humanist Hour and I heard him talk about  being less judgmental toward other people since leaving the faith and diving into humanism and atheism.  After that he talked about being less judgmental toward himself, something many who have never been Christians will actually understand – because they’ll lack the context for understanding it. Most atheist activists understand how Christianity and religion in general harm those outside it’s walls – but because so few have a perspective on Christian philosophy  as devoted insiders they’ll struggle to understand how it’s doctrines lead to a broken self.

 

How the children of Christianity become broken.

I was six years old when I first learned to hate something about myself.

At six years old I had already attended three separate churches, exposing me to different types of preaching, but the one I had attended the longest at the time was a fairly small Pentecostal church in the town of Chester, Georgia. It’s the church where I was “saved” – which meant that someone had convinced me that I was a sinner and that I needed to believe in Jesus in order to be saved from the punishment I so rightly deserved.

This doctrine of depravity, which teaches that all human beings are born into sin as a result of the fall of Adam in the Garden of Eden, permeates all major denominations of Christianity in one form or another. It is a foundational and cardinal doctrine of the Christian faith as a prerequisite need for the sacrifice of Jesus as an atonement for mankind’s sins.

Jesus had to die because of me.

Believing that I, singularly or as a part of the human collective, was responsible for Jesus death on the cross was a heavy burden as I understood it. It was something I received with sincere pangs of long enduring guilt and my young mind didn’t know how to turn that guilt into a simple understanding of the Gospel message – it had to be, and demands to be a Gospel that destroys the self.

A Broken Self Image

As a child that grew up in an unrelenting culture of fear based preaching and sermons focused on how depraved humanity inherently was I was never able to find much self worth at a young age. All of my value was stored up in Heaven and in the refuge of Jesus’ love for me as displayed by his death, for me. Those of us who grow up believing in this way have a difficult time seeing past our own flaws to find a decent human being – every sin is picked apart and over analyzed, we beat ourselves up over every aspect of our lives that doesn’t align with what we believe – and because what we believe as our goal is so incredibly in-acheivable there’s an awful lot of self deprecation that happens.

By the time I was 13 I had no recognizable self-esteem.

All I knew how to do at such a young age was hate the things that characterized normal and natural adolescence. It was my belief that those things separated me from God and separation from God was separation from the only consistent and worthy part of my life. There’s nothing healthy and nothing good about growing up with those ideas in your head, for those lucky enough to escape that sort of religion; I envy you.

Proof-texting our inadequacy

Growing up fundamentalist meant that finding the answers to practically any question began and ended with a piece of scripture. It was an ignorant belief, sure – but one held dear and practiced on a nearly daily basis for me – and I was not only able to remember how the pastors, past abusers (which is a different story for a different time), and other adults had drilled into me the fact that I was a sinner – I was able to “prove” it against the Biblical standard of truth.

Romans 3:23 told us that each and every individual was a sinner that had fallen short of God’s glory.

Psalms 51:5 tells us that we are born in sin.

Mark 7:21 tells us that men’s hearts are full of evil thoughts and even murder.

Jeremiah 17:9 tells us that our hearts are deceitful and sick.

Ecclesiastes 7:20 tells us that there are no righteous men on all of the earth, there are none who live without sinning.

Titus 1: 15-16 tells us that those professing to know god often deny him in their disobedience. That purity is witness only to pure acts.

Galatians 5:21 says that if we do as the flesh desires (sin) we will not inherit God’s kingdom.  Verse 24 says that we must crucify our flesh in order to belong to Christ.

If you believe the words in this book to be true then it’s hard not to come to the conclusion that you are born as filthy rags that must be washed clean – and that you must continually fight against all the evil desires you hold.

It’s no wonder the people who leave this faith often struggle with feelings of inadequacy for years after the fact, suffer nightmares of Hell, and find it difficult to adjust to the idea that – in fact, they aren’t quite as bad as they’ve been conditioned to believe.

 

 

In my next post I’m going to talk about overcoming the psychological effects of the broken self, how I’ve managed to feel whole again after leaving the Christian faith and the doctrine of depravity – and why I believe society could improve wholly by rejecting this idea outright.  Please, share this post on social media if you’ve found something of value in it.

 

Source: http://all-len-all.com/duck-dynasty-star-let-everyone-at-cpac-know-stds-are-the-revenge-of-the-hippies-video/

The Phil Robertson Rape Fantasy

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Phil Robertson, patriarch of the Robertson clan of Duck Dynasty fame, is a diamond of the neoconservative right wing’s eye; he’s independently wealthy, loves to shoot guns, and believes that America is a Christian nation – and if you don’t like that you should get the hell out. Recently, when Phil Robertson was speaking at the Vero beach Prayer Breakfast, he shared – in Pentecostal pulpit style – what I’m calling the Phil Robertson Rape Fantasy, complete with murder and a beheading.

I’m going to attempt to break down Robertson’s insanity into chunks  and analyze what I think he’s really trying to say – right after I share this disturbing audio.

Note: This is disturbing stuff, not for the faint of heart or easily offended. Don’t listen if you don’t want to hear about murder, rape, and decapitation spoken in one of the most hateful tones possible.

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Is Christianity Dying?

Why this generation is really leaving Christianity

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Christians on social media sites like Facebook and Twitter have been sharing a deluge of recent articles from “hip pastors” about how young people are leaving the church and leaving Christianity. Each of these articles posit a number of reasons why they think this diaspora is occurring, and I’m sure there’s a nugget of truth in each of them – but the one thing I’ve noticed among the articles I’ve read is that they lack any real experience in the matter, and none of them seem to be asking the people who are leaving Christianity why it is that they are doing so.

I’m a real life apostate who left the church and eventually the faith and some might say I know more about why people actually do leave as opposed to some pastor who’s trying to sell a book, but no one is knocking on my door to ask me or any of my apostate cohorts – and nearly every time I try to inject some experience into the conversation these believers are having about us I’m met with negative remarks and accusations about the likelihood that I’m possibly attempting to quell some hidden belief in god with a rage against him.

So, I’ll do what others on the inside have failed to do – I’ll give the outsiders view of why we are becoming outsiders of the church and Christianity, I’ll try to give my own reasons for leaving the church and leaving the faith (two separate things), and I’ll try to do my best not to pigeonhole those that have left by assuming the reasons I’m listing here are theirs – but I’m hoping I’m going to be in the ball park for a lot of you based on my own experiences and my interactions with the ex-christian community.

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The Three Great Dangers of Religion

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I’m the type of person that can sit across the table from a person of any religious background, no matter how fundamentalist they may be, and find a common humanity to build a relationship from – that’s a personal trait I’ve worked hard to hone and that I’m actually quite proud of. Often in doing so I’m asked the question, “so what if it’s not true, what’s the harm in believing?” While the answer to this question can’t be summarily truncated into a single list, I thought it might be a good idea to present the 3 greatest dangers of religion in the more generic sense for the purpose of quick reference and in a way that can be applied to most situations and conversations – so that if you are asked this question in your conversations with the religious you’ll have something to refer back to.  These three examples of the dangers of religion aren’t examples of fundamentalism in and of themselves – but they are fundamental tenets of every major religion alive in the world today, and so they are a constant part of the way the world is viewed by the religious.

1. Religion teaches us to be satisfied with easy answers

How often have you been told that “Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen” in your life?

Giordano Bruno

Giordano Bruno – Burned at the stake by the Catholic Church for proposing a heliocentric model of the universe and claiming that stars were actually distant “suns” in 1600 .

Giordano Bruno – Burned at the stake by the Catholic Church for proposing a heliocentric model of the universe and claiming that stars were actually distant “suns” in 1600 – Source

 

This principle is fairly common among most of the major religions in the world in that they all, generally, require us to have faith rather than to seek out evidence for that which we believe.  This is dangerous to humanity on a number of levels, in the largest part because it generates a complacency for our curiosity and our yearning to know more.  The religious often confuse their faith with knowledge and believe that their faith satisfies the human need for real understanding of the world and universe around us – but without curious minds, unhindered by this complacency, asking the questions of “what, when, where, and why” modern science wouldn’t exist as we know it today and we’d still be plagued by diseases that have long been cured, we’d still believe that Earth was the center of The Universe, and we’d have never made it to the Moon.

While some of the most brilliant scientific minds of the last 500 years may have indeed been people with faith, they didn’t allow their faith to keep them from asking uncomfortable questions – and letting the answers speak for themselves when the answers were contrary to their faith. They were, ultimately, not satisfied with easy answers.

2. Religion teaches us that we are evil

The fulcrum of nearly every religion that has survived to this day has been that humanity is irrevocably flawed (evil, fallen, or

Albrecht Durer's Fall of Man

Fall of Man by Albrecht Durer, Engraving 1504. Shared among a number of ancient mythologies, man fell after eating a forbidden fruit – the female is depicted giving the fruit to the male figure. This has long solidified the woman’s place in religion as the lesser.

sinful ) and that religion X, Y, or Z has the cure.

A modern equivalent to this is having a vacuum cleaner salesman come to your door, show you how dirty your carpet is, and then explain to you how their vacuum (and only their vacuum) can clean it properly with a demonstration of it’s amazing sucking power!  Had you never met this salesman you would have kept using your old vacuum cleaner, never knowing that it was inadequate or that your carpet was a breeding ground for dust mites – and so you would have been happy, but ignorant.  While this technique of identifying a problem you didn’t know you had and selling you the solution works great for vacuums and other demonstrable devices – it’s absolutely terrible for religion, wherein there are no adequate demonstrations as to the veracity of the claims being made.

The sales aspect aside, how terrible is it that we allow men from stages to tell us that we are vile creatures – destined for one form of punishment or another if we don’t abide by a given set of principles? What terror could this perform on our individual and collective psyche as we, generation after generation, continue to believe that we have something wrong with us that needs to be fixed by god?

“If all this isn’t true, what harm is there?” – well, you should be overjoyed if it isn’t true and you aren’t the scum of the Earth!

3. Religion promises us eternity

Scarcity increases value – we all remember that from our high school economics class right? If you don’t, it’s one of the driving factors behind capitalism and it’s the basic premise that the less of something you have the more valuable that something is. Markets  and commodity prices are driven on the premise of scarcity and demand.

The one thing we all know is that we have a limited number of is days to live, however, nearly every religion in the world promises some extension of life into eternity.  When life is no longer 70-100 years long and is instead infinity long days are no longer scarce – this translates into a lack of value for your own life, the lives of others, and the future of the planet.

Those convinced that they are going to live for eternity or that a great apocalypse is soon to come are far less likely to believe that it’s important to preserve the planet, seek out cures for disease, or spend their limited time on earth doing good for people that don’t believe like they do – instead, they’ll spend their time trying to convince others that they must believe like they do, or else.

 

The Dangers of Religion – Fundamentalism

When we take these three things and combine them into a single person – a person who believes he’s been given all the answers to life’s difficult questions , who believes that although he may be a sinner he’s been saved and sanctified – maybe even chosen by god, and who believes that he’s been promised eternity in exchange for a life devoted to his religion’s message – we get a person who is more than likely to be detached from reality.  The mere existence of religion and the fact that these fundamental elements are necessary in order for religion to exist and to spread make fundamentalism a trait that is frighteningly common in our modern world.

While many good, reasonable, intelligent, and loving Christians and Muslims may exist who are moderates in our society, and while they may even be in the majority of their respective faiths – their respect of these basic fundamentals gives credence to them, which paves the way for more dangerous and more viral forms.

A better society, a truly secular society, must be compelled by evidence to believe, must embrace it’s goodness, and must act today to save tomorrow.

The dangers of religion are many and I’ve only scratched the surface here – what would you say are the most poignant dangers of religion as you’ve experienced them?