Combatting Kristianity

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“Religion is all bunk.
~ Thomas Alva Edison (born: 1847-02-11 died: 1931-10-18 at age: 84)
born 1847-02-11 in Milan, Ohio, USA
died 1931-10-18 in West Orange, New Jersey, USA.

“The great unmentionable evil at the centre of our culture is monotheism. From a barbaric Bronze Age text known as the Old Testament, three anti-human religions have evolved — Judaism, Christianity and Islam. These are sky-god religions. They are literally patriarchal, — God the Omnipotent Father — hence the loathing of women for 2000 years in those countries afflicted by the sky-god and his earthly male delegates.
~ Gore Vidal (born: 1925-10-03 age: 84)

“Christianity is the most ridiculous, the most absurd and bloody religion that has ever infected the world.
~ Voltaire (born: 1694-11-21 died: 1778-05-30 at age: 83) [François Marie d’Arouet Voltaire]
born 1694-11-21 in Paris, France
died 1778-05-30 in Paris, France

Kristian Quotations

“I want you to just let a wave of intolerance wash over you. I want you to let a wave of hatred wash over you. Yes, hate is good… Our goal is a Christian nation. We have a Biblical duty, we are called by God, to conquer this country. We don’t want equal time. We don’t want pluralism.
~ Randall Terry (born: 1959 age: 50), Founder of Operation Rescue
The News-Sentinel, Fort Wayne, Indiana. 1993-08-16

“I want to say to all you Scribes, Pharisees, heresy hunters, all of you that are going around pickin' little bits of doctrinal error out of everybody’s eyes and dividin' the Body of Christ… get out of God’s way, stop blockin' God’s bridges, or God’s goin' to shoot you if I don’t… let Him sort out all this doctrinal doodoo!… I refuse to argue any longer with any of you out there! Don’t even call me if you want to argue… Get out of my life! I don’t want to talk to you… I don’t want to see your ugly face!
~ Paul Crouch (born: 1934-03-29 age: 75) President, Trinity Broadcasting Network

“One of the problems with sex education… is that it also strips kids — especially girls — of their modesty to have every detail of anatomy, physiology and condom usage made explicit.
~ James Dobson (born: 1936-04-21 age: 73), Focus on the Family

“Homosexuals are not monogamous. They want to destroy the institution of marriage. It will destroy marriage. It will destroy the Earth.
~ James Dobson (born: 1936-04-21 age: 73), Focus on the Family

“In every classroom in the state [of California, students are] being taught homosexual propaganda and these other politically correct, postmodern views.
~ James Dobson (born: 1936-04-21 age: 73), Focus on the Family, recommending that parents remove their children from California’s public schools.

“State Universities are breeding grounds, quite literally, for sexually transmitted diseases (including HIV), homosexual behavior, unwanted pregnancies, abortions, alcoholism, and drug abuse.
~ James Dobson (born: 1936-04-21 age: 73), Focus on the Family

“In winning a nation to the gospel, the sword as well as the pen must be used. Democracy is a heresy against God!
~ Rousas John Rushdoony (born: 1916-04-25 died: 2001-02-08 at age: 84) Director of the Rutherford Institute, founder of the Christian Reconstructionists

Jerry Falwell, evangelist

“Homosexuality is Satan’s diabolical attack upon the family that will not only have a corrupting influence upon our next generation, but it will also bring down the wrath of God upon America.
~ Jerry Falwell (born: 1933-08-11 died: 2007-05-15 at age: 73)

“AIDS is not just God’s punishment for homosexuals; it is God’s punishment for the society that tolerates homosexuals.
~ Jerry Falwell (born: 1933-08-11 died: 2007-05-15 at age: 73)

“I do not believe the homosexual community deserves minority status. One’s misbehavior does not qualify him or her for minority status. Blacks, Hispanics, women, etc., are God-ordained minorities who do indeed deserve minority status.
~ Jerry Falwell (born: 1933-08-11 died: 2007-05-15 at age: 73), USA Today Chat, quoted from The Religious Freedom Coalition, “The Two faces of Jerry Falwell”

“AIDS is the wrath of a just God against homosexuals. To oppose it would be like an Israelite jumping in the Red Sea to save one of Pharaoh’s chariotters .
~ Jerry Falwell (born: 1933-08-11 died: 2007-05-15 at age: 73)

“If you’re not a born-again Christian, you’re a failure as a human being.
~ Jerry Falwell (born: 1933-08-11 died: 2007-05-15 at age: 73)

“The Bible is the inerrant… word of the living God. It is absolutely infallible, without error in all matters pertaining to faith and practice, as well as in areas such as geography, science, history, etc.
~ Jerry Falwell (born: 1933-08-11 died: 2007-05-15 at age: 73), Finding Inner Peace and Strength More Jerry Falwell

“Let us pray it is not so, or if it is, that it will not become widely known.
~ Wife of the Bishop of Exeter on hearing of Darwin’s theory of the common descent of humans and apes.

Pat Robertson, evangelist

“We have enough votes to run the country. And when the people say, ‘We’ve had enough’, we are going to take over.
~ Pat Robertson (born: 1930-03-22 age: 79), speech given to the 1980-04 “Washington for Jesus” rally, quoted from Robert Boston, The Most Dangerous Man in America, p. 29.

“There is no such thing as separation of church and state in the Constitution. It is a lie of the Left and we are not going to take it anymore.
~ Pat Robertson (born: 1930-03-22 age: 79), address to his American Center for Law and Justice, November, 1993. Let’s see, now: 'Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.' How could the prohibition against Congress making laws respecting an establishment of religion be anything but the separation of church and state?

“Individual Christians are the only ones really — and Jewish people, those who trust God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob — are the only ones that are qualified to have the reign, because hopefully, they will be governed by God and submit to Him.
~ Pat Robertson (born: 1930-03-22 age: 79), The 700 Club television program, 1985-01-11, defending his stance that only Christians and Jews are fit to hold public office.

“You say you’re supposed to be nice to the Episcopalians and the Presbyterians and the Methodists and this, that, and the other thing. Nonsense. I don’t have to be nice to the spirit of the Antichrist. I can love the people who hold false opinions but I don’t have to be nice to them.
~ Pat Robertson (born: 1930-03-22 age: 79), The 700 Club television program, 1991-01-14.

“The feminist agenda is not about equal rights for women. It is about a socialist, anti-family political movement that encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism, and become lesbians.
~ Pat Robertson (born: 1930-03-22 age: 79), fundraising letter, 1992

“Many of those people involved with Adolf Hitler were Satanists, many of them were homosexuals — the two things seem to go together.
~ Pat Robertson (born: 1930-03-22 age: 79), The 700 Club television program, 1993-01-21, ignoring the facts that the Nazis killed homosexuals as ruthlessly as they did Jews and that Satanism emerged with Anton Szandor LaVey.

“I think 'one man, one vote,' just unrestricted democracy, would not be wise. There needs to be some kind of protection for the minority which the white people represent now, a minority, and they need and have a right to demand a protection of their rights.
~ Pat Robertson (born: 1930-03-22 age: 79), The 700 Club television program, 1992-04-18, suggesting that South African white people’s votes ought to count more than other votes because they are in the minority. More Pat Robertson

“There once was a time when all people believed in God and the church ruled. This time was called the Dark Ages.
~ Richard Lederer (born: 1938-05-26 age: 71)

Martin Luther, founder of protestantism

“Stab, smite, throttle, slay these rabid mad dogs without mercy, with a good conscience to the last ounce of strength, for nothing can be more poisonous, hurtful or devilish than a rebel. He that shall be slain on the side of law and order is a true martyr before God, earning eternal bliss; he that perishes on the side of rebellion is doomed eternally to hell. Such times are these that a prince shall win heaven by bloodshed sooner than others by prayer…
~ Martin Luther (born: 1483-11-10 died: 1546-02-18 at age: 62) (not all Kristians are modern)

“Faith must trample under foot all reason, sense, and understanding.
~ Martin Luther (born: 1483-11-10 died: 1546-02-18 at age: 62)

“Reason is a whore, the greatest enemy that faith has.
~ Martin Luther (born: 1483-11-10 died: 1546-02-18 at age: 62)

“Reason is the enemy of faith.
~ Martin Luther (born: 1483-11-10 died: 1546-02-18 at age: 62)

“Be on your guard against the Jews, knowing that wherever they have their synagogues, nothing is found but a den of devils… they know they are steeped in manifest vices mently, just as the devils themselves do. And where you see or hear a Jew teaching, remember that you are hearing nothing but a venomous basilisk who poisons and kills people… The devil with all his angels has taken possession of this people… Jews, Turks, papists, radicals abound everywhere. All of them claim to be the church and God’s people in accord with their conceit and boast, regardless of the one true faith…
~ Martin Luther (born: 1483-11-10 died: 1546-02-18 at age: 62)

“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 (born: 1483-11-10 died: 1546-02-18 at age: 62)

“Doubt is truth’s best friend; faith its worst enemy.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 61)

What Is This Essay Up To

1. To stop the killing based on religious intolerance.
2. To stop economic exploitation based on religious bamboozlement.
3. To discourage superstition.
4. To encourage speculation to be labelled as such. Religion should have to live up to the same standards of truth in advertising as any anything else. It should demonstrate what it claims on the material plane. Otherwise, how are you to tell it from wishful imagining?
5. To stop people from people from tormenting each other in the name of religion.
6. To stop Christians from voting themselves special status above other religions.
7. To keep purely Christian notions from being enacted into law. Freedom of religion also means freedom from religion.

1. That you should treat others as you yourself would want to be treated.
2. The importance of love, truth, kindness and non-violence.
3. Ritual. People like music, candles, incense, ceremonies, history, costumes and special foods. Ideally everyone would be permitted to share in the rich traditions of everyone else.
4. Community.
5. Techniques to motivate you to get along with your fellow humans.
6. Hints at how to apprehend the great unspeakable mysteries of life.

1. In John 14:12 Jesus told his followers they would do works even greater than his. He did not put himself on a pedestal. He asked people to look to God, not to him.
2. In Matthew 16:27 he explained that you will be judged on your works, not your faith.
3. Jesus mocked elaborate priestly garb in Matthew 23:5.
4. In Matthew 21:12 Jesus chased those selling doves from the temple.
5. In Matthew 25:40 he warned that the way you treated the least of your brothers would be way you would be judged.

“I am surrounded by priests who repeat incessantly that their kingdom is not of this world, and yet they lay their hands on everything they can get.
~ Napoléon Bonaparte (born: 1769-08-15 died: 1821-05-05 at age: 51)

“The Puritans left England for America not because they couldn’t be Puritans in their mother country, but because they were not allowed to force others to become Puritans; in the New World, of course, they could and did.
~ Gore Vidal (born: 1925-10-03 age: 84)

There is only one truth and a million falsehoods. The only thing mankind can unify around are the common truths. That means everything else will have to go.

Most of what I say also applies to other fundamentalist religions such as Islam. However, I focus on Christianity, since the reader is more likely to be Christian than Muslim, and it is best to focus on one’s own flaws that those of another. Islam has already been over-vilified, mostly with false accusations.

Why Combat Kristianity?

Dear Jesus
Please save me from your followers.
~ Anonymous

When I say “combat Kristianity” I primarily mean combat the narrow-mindedness, intolerance and cruelty done in the name of Christ. But I also mean, combat the phony magic and superstition. I don’t mean combat Jesus’s love-everyone philosophy. My complaint is not with Christ, it is with those of his followers who are intolerant. Christians are non-judgemental and Kristians are judgemental. You can fight schizophrenia because you love schizophrenics. You can fight Kristianity because you love Kristians and want to seem them freed from their nightmare and introduced to true Christianity. My goal is to convert Kristians to either ethical atheism or, failing that, to true Christianity.

Jesus said “You are your brothers’ keeper.“ He urged people to live a simple lifestyle that puts minimal stress on the environment. I fully agree. I don’t want to promote selfish or Satanic behaviour. Whether we should discourage Kristianity has nothing whatever to do with whether God exists. I tackle that in an essays on god and the real god. The Kristian description of God is bogus. It is a composite of the wishful thinking of a motley collection of old men, with nothing divine about it at all. It is a con, possibly motivated with good intentions, but nevertheless a con. There many unkind things about Kristians in this essay. Obviously these remarks don’t apply to Christians, but they do apply to the many Kristians, the ones who meddle in the affairs of non-Kristians. However, all Christians deliberately believe an improbable story, mainly, because doing so makes them feel warm and fuzzy, not because there is much evidence for it. That is not particularly noble.

People are often quite puzzled why I would combat Kristianity. I lead a relatively ethical life. I spend a lot of time writing about ethics. Why would I so vehemently oppose Kristianity?

1. Christian faith healers get away with bullshit that would make a snake oil salesman blush. Holy olive oil soap, magic blood of Jesus anointing oil, magic prayer shawls, miracle spring water , green prosperity prayer handkerchiefs, all-healing magic manna bread … Christianity excuses any humbug or lie as far as the law is concerned. The FDA swoop on companies that dare to make even the mildest health claim for a vitamin, but turn a blind eye to these phony holy cancer cures used to bilk the faithful afflicted out of their life savings. Even the “respectable” churches are pulling the same cons, just with more subtlety and taste. They make promises they do not keep in return for donations. At least the Jewish televangelists make no phony claims for the $100.00 USD pillow covers with bible scene quiltings made by apartheid slaves.
2. When a con artist tricks a mark with a phony penis enlargement cure, a phony weight loss pill or even a phony investment, he usually only manages to rip each victim off only once. Christian con artists, particularly the TV evangelists and faith healers, on the other hand, take their marks over and over throughout their lives. Further they prey on the weakest and poorest members of society.
3. An secular con artist merely relieves his marks of money. Christian con artists do that and also every imaginable form of evil, including suppressing scientific truth, destruction of the environment, justifying genocide, justifying economic exploitation, justifying war, persecuting gays, motivating theft…
4. What does a body do when someone they love dies? They indulge in wishful thinking. They make up a pathetic story that they are not really dead, then try to sell it to others, to shore up the fantasy. It does not matter they have not a stick of evidence for this fantasy. What does a body do when they wants to kill someone and steal their land? They indulge in a grandiose fantasy, that they are God’s chosen one, and as such they have a right to take anyone else’s life and property. What does an body do when he wants to plunder, rape and kill wantonly? He indulges in wishful thinking that God wants him to do this for his country, so that makes it all ok. He convinces himself his victims are not really dead, so that too makes it even more ok. What does a body do when he notices he is aging and those around him are dying. He indulges in fantasy that a God will severely punish anyone who checks out early. So he happily tortures those terminally ill, forcing them to live on and on and on no matter how bad the pain, congratulating himself like some medieval inquistor for his mercy. He indulges in wishful thinking that something indescribably wonderful awaits only him, and a few of kind, after death. The push to eliminate religion is the attempt to release the world from wishful thinking. It is one of the many forms of untruth.

   An error does not become truth by reason of multiplied propagation, nor does truth become error because nobody sees it.
   ~ Mahatma Gandhi (born: 1869-10-02 died: 1948-01-30 at age: 78)

5. Kristians in the US military use harassment and violence to force Kristianity on non-Christian soldiers. Further, these hypocrites use forced group Kristian prayer to salve the consciences of military serial killers to persuade them their atrocities are morally justified.
6. A vitamin A capsule, costing $0.02, will overnight cure a child in the third world of blindness. Another, every six months, will keep it at bay and also give substantial protection against other diseases. Even the poorest Christian could single-handedly afford to bring sight to more people than Jesus reputedly healed, but instead they choose to send these blind children useless bibles.
7. Kristianity is essentially a lie used to trick others into behaving a certain way. I object to this on three grounds:
   1. It is not only untrue, it is a lie.
   2. It leads people to behave even worse than if they did not believe the lie. In other words, the lie is poorly crafted and maintained and used for all manner of ulterior motives, such as persuading people to wage war or persuading people to allow sexual access to their children.

      It’s not that religious people choose to do bad things more often — indeed, they are probably more likely to get involved in charitable activities. Maybe it’s just that when they talk about transforming people’s lives, they don’t think in terms of big state-run systems — and if you don’t, lots of people fall through the cracks. Whereas the godless, all alone under the empty sky, decide that they must band together and help one another through large amounts of social spending, because nobody else is going to do it for them. Or maybe there is some other reason entirely, but the numbers don’t lie: The more religious a country is, the worse people behave in their private lives. Thank God they didn’t do a survey on the correlation between strong religious belief and war.
      ~ Gwynne Dyer (born: 1943-03-17 age: 66) Does Religion do More Harm Than Good?

   3. It morally cripples people. They don’t learn the real reasons why you should behave well. It builds moral principles on sand.
8. Kristianity was a parochial, jingoistic, petty religion created by a backward desert tribe who were so bloated with pride, that they imagined themselves God’s chosen people with right to steal, rape, plunder and murder people of other peoples. Only through the bizarre auspices of Emperor Constantine, did this intensely regional religion get foist on the entire planet. It is not a world class religion.
9. According to CTV news 2008-04-15 the Catholic Church priests have sexually abused more than 5 million children, and the bishops collectively helped in the coverup. That does not even count the children molested by protestant clergy. Priests abuse their power of fear of after death punishment to coerce adults and children into sexual acts and to extort money.

10. I don’t care about the pollitics, the fact of the matter is, these crazy fuckin terriosts think they have to kill us to go to heaven and get their virgin’s. We need to bury all these asshose’s in pigskin!! And for that pussy that made that comment about the christians, I am a christian, and I will kick your ass if you threaten my family, how do you like me now you fuckin pussy!! God Bless America and to Hell with terriosts!!
    ~ Tony Joe, proudly ignorant American Kristian, posting on the Blog To Discuss The Iraq War.

    American Kristians use their religion to justify killing any Muslim, man, woman or child. This is a virtue in their eyes. Yet when a Muslim kills an American soldier who illegally invaded their country unprovoked, it is the ultimate crime. Kristianity teaches contempt for logic. No wonder, because even the god they worship behaves partially, irrationally and abominably.
11. Kristians are encroaching on the airwaves. They used to confine themselves to Sunday broadcasts, now they buy up time 24/7 so there are nearly always at least three Kristian broadcasts going on at once. They lie repeatedly as Kristians do, and con money out of the viewers. This lets them buy up still more air time. They masquerade their shows as talk shows, unsolved mystery shows, counselling shows, science shows, news broadcasts, medical shows and pretty well every genre. The gullible public hear the Kristian lies repeated so many times, never questioned, and they fall for the con. What is even worse, the stations become corrupt from all that ad money and allow Kristian propaganda to permeate legitimate news shows. Because they are Kristians they can make any false advertising claims they want, say slanderous outrageous crap and no one dares say boo. What really galls me is part of my cable bill each month goes to support this crap. I have no option to cut that funding off.
12. Pastor Robbin Leeroy Harper was eventually convicted of multiple child rapes and molestations after many years of his flock looking the other way because they were intimidated by the bogus moral authority of the Christian church. For years, he used his religious authority to bully and terrify his flock, even meddling to the agree of arranging their marriages.
13. Kristians are so presumptuous. The refuse to see that “making your peace with God” has nothing at all to do with Kristianity. They mean “submitting to the authority of meddling, fallible, human, Kristian con men”. Kristianity is only one of 10,000 possible religions. They worship a malevolent, petty spirit, hardly worthy of the title god.
14. Kristianity is based on myth and lies. It is a giant con. If you are a Kristian, this is not likely how you currently see your religion. In my series of essays, I will explain how you can know with complete certainty that this is so. Over the centuries, the Kristian con has been kept alive by three sorts of people:
    1. Outright charlatans who enriched themselves by conning people with the lie that giving them money would curry favour with god.
    2. Ignorant people who unquestioning accepted whatever they were told by their “betters”.
    3. Patronising people who felt it was OK to lie to people to make them behave.
15. Imagine living with a primitive tribe of people who worshipped an evil sky god. They impose terrible suffering on each other thinking this is necessary to placate the sky god. They are completely superstitious with no appreciation of logic, science, reason or common sense. Living with Kristians is little different. They mindlessly torment homosexuals to please their god. They torment the terminally ill, forcing them to stay alive to suffer as long and deeply as possible. They do all in their power to hurt young women who get pregnant. Instead of helping people out of drug addiction, they spend billions to keep them trapped. They spit on the homeless and torment them by confiscating even their meager belongings. They make war on tiny harmless nations stealing their resources and imagine their god not only approves but commanded this piracy. What is perhaps most infuriating is the they feel profoundly virtuous about their evil deeds and look down their noses at everyone else. They are not only ignorant fools, they are proud of it. There is nothing to recommend either evil sky god except that believers will treat you better if you pretend to believe too. Religion thus becomes the ultimate hypocrisy.
16. Kristians teach a silly and primitive form of morality, namely that you should treat your fellows well only to avoid being tortured eternally after death by devils. When a Kristian realises what utter BS this is, suddenly there is no reason to behave well. It is much better to tell children the truth.
17. Kristians love to brag that “God spoke to me” or “Jesus spoke to me”. How the hell would they know what God or Jesus sounds like? All they heard was a weird voice in their head. How do they know they were not just talking to themselves? People can easily imagine the voices of parents or loved ones, and what they would say, so why not a stranger? How do they know that voice was not Satan himself tempting them to puff themselves up with pride that God would single them out like some prophet of old? 5:37 makes it clear God does not talk to people. Normally we put people in mental hospitals when they obey voices only they can hear. But when they label the voice God or Jesus, we give them a get-out-of-hospital-free card since the delusion is so common. Hearing voices is a sign of mental illness, not a holy annointing. However, most of the time all they are doing is bluffing — you had better do as I say because God told me this personally. It is just another trick in the con man’s bag.
18. I have such contempt for Kristian athletes who thank God for helping them or their team to defeat a rival, as if God would be so petty and so partial to interfere in something so trivial as a football game. I feel the same way about ditzy women who win singing or beauty contests, claiming somehow God rigged the contest in their favour. The ego behind such a claim is mind boggling.

19. Benny Hinn, evangelist

    There is a huge of amount of good will in the world. This naturally would go toward such activities as helping those less fortunate both at home and abroad, visiting the sick, caring for the elderly, helping those hurt in natural disasters, funding research on disease, adult education, caring for the environment… The list is endless. However, Kristians hijack this good will. The money goes instead to fund the lavish lifestyles of the televangelists like Benny Hinn. Kristians trick people into imagining that feel-good activities like praying, singing, testifying and prosletysing are actually doing somebody a service. Kristianity seduces people into substituting these sham virtues for the real thing, and imagining themselves superior to those who actually do feed the hungry and clothe the naked as Jesus commanded.

    “Not eveyone that saith unto me, Lord, Lord, shall enter into the kingdom of heaven; but he that doeth the will of my Father which is in heaven.
    ~ Matthew 7:21

    “Behold, this was the iniquity of thy sister Sodom, pride, fullness of bread, and abundance of idleness was in her and in her daughters, neither did she strengthen the hand of the poor and needy.
    ~ Ezekiel 16:49

20. Local churches provide services to the community. The church hall might be used for the Boy Scouts. They might feed or house the homeless at certain times of year. They may do domestic counselling. They provide a safe place to socialise. The congregation sometimes gets together to help out members of the community stricken by tragedy. They sometimes advocate for those too weak or poor to advocate for themselves. They help the people organise around community issues. They organise people on issues such as abortion, gay rights, black rights, ending hunger… They also do many negative things that I have outlined elsewhere. However, televangelists, in contrast, are purely parasitical. All they do is con the public into sending them money, falsely promising healing, abundance, after death luxury accomodation etc. They give back nothing other than a bit of spectacle and musical entertainment. They use all manner of trickery to con the gullible out of their meagre savings. Televangelists are partly responosible for the declining attendance at local churches. People are lazy, and stay home and watch TV, and imagine they have done their duty. The TV con men are willing to promote that illusion.
21. Kristians always shout to give the illusion of conviction and to disguise the fact their words are either unimportant, tedious, untrue or nonsensical. Hitler did the same thing.
22. I have no problem with Kristian science fiction, such as Heaven Can Wait, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Twice in a Lifetime, It’s a Wonderful Life, Defending Your Life or Bedazzled. These are usually morality tales tolid in an entertaining way. They don’t pretend to be literal truth. In contrast, preachers pretend every word they utter is incontestible truth, even patently whacko things like utter certainty God will strike with lightning, or send category 6 hurricanes if the congregation don’t part with sufficient funds or pass some law to harrass gay people. They perform fake “healings” on shills and silly old women desperate for attention who have little wrong with them. They fake messages direct from the almighty. You wonder who would be stupid enough to fall for such transparent and ancient cons, cons that were obvious even to the audiences of the snake oil salesmen. The illusions involved are nowhere near the quality of today’s stage magicians like David Copperfield, and Criss Angel. Yet there are hundreds of millions desperate enough or brainwashed enough to fall for them. These preachers are literally mind parasites, who prey on the vulnerable. In the animal kingdom, the Polyergus red queen ant invades a colony of another ant species and tricks them into treating her as the true queen. Through clever manipulation of pheromones (scent communication chemicals) she tricks the entire colony into slavery, raising her brood and caring for them. Her own brood are degenerate and cannot even care for themselves. That is not that outrageous a metaphor for how a preacher sponges off the body politic.
23. Kristians are bloody liars, endlessly repeating their lies on TV and radio and from the pulpit, as if by repeating the lies often enough they might become true. Every study has shown prayer is utterly ineffective, but they keep lying that it is absolutely fail proof. Nearly every scientific assertion in the bible turned out to be false, but Kristians pretend it is 100% reliable. Kristians promise riches, healing and whatever else they think will sell, if you but give them money. These lies need to be combatted like any other false information does, e.g. that tobacco is harmless or that garlic will cure AIDS. We won’t put up with this sort of chicanery and false claims from drug makers. Why do we tolerate it from Kristians? Some of them raise money to helping starving Africans, and keep most of it for themselves, and they are never prosecuted for fraud. Freedom of religion as been abused to permit flagrant con games to be perpetrated on the public without any constraint.
24. Kristians, realising there is no evidence for their beliefs and plenty to disprove them, resort to an infuriatingly dishonest argument. They not only move the goalposts, they invert them. They assert atheists are cold and unfeeling (without evidence, as usual). They claim Kristian gullibility as a virtue, that the Kristian “ability” to believe nonsense is a special skill. Of course this “skill” would also let them believe urban legends, superstitions, paranoid delusions, myths, rumours, not to mention the risen Elvis.
25. When Christians argue, they try to claim any evidence that the scientific view is not 100% accurate or complete, is absolute proof of their cockeyed grumpy grandfather god for which they present no evidence whatsoever. That is like saying because you can’t account for every gift under every tree, that means there is thus absolute proof that an obese Santa Claus shimmies down every nominally Christian chimney on the planet on Christmas eve leaving gifts proportional to the wealth of the parents.
26. In I John 2:7-12 and again in II John 1:5 Jesus gives the new old commandment: Love everyone unconditionally. Kristians give the Old Testament precedence over Jesus’s prime directive.
27. The arrogance of Christians galls me. They freely admit that every one of the 10,000 plus religions but theirs is arrant nonsense. On what grounds to they imagine only they got it right, even though their religion is even more preposterous than average and even though their religion borrows brazenly from a dozen others? They are so outrageously conceited and without any evidence to justify it. They back their claims with nothing but repeated assertion and double talk. What makes their claim of unique superiority even more outrageous, is they pride themselves in not studying any of the alternatives.
28. Christians maliciously try to claim that natural selection is pure chance. Most are willfully ignorant. But even the ones who do understand the difference still try to bamboozle others with that monstrous straw man lie e.g. equating natural selection with a hurricane in a junkyard producing a Boeing 707.
29. 

    In interests of fairness, the stork theory of baby creation will be taught alongside Christian creationism in American science classes.

30. There is a tribe in the Philipines that torture pigs by sticking wooden spears into them. The more the pig squeals supposedly the more spirits enter the pig and bring good fortune on the village. The longer the pig squeals before it dies, supposedly the more good fortune. Why on earth would spirits want to enter a suffering pig? What evidence is there that this sacrificial magic works? What evidence is there than any sacrificial magic works? The only example I can think of is painlessly sacrificing the best seeds to the “gods” to bring benefit. Sacrifice is usually an excuse for sadism. Kristiantity focuses on of pointless sacrifice and pain.

    “I think it’s interesting how people act on their beliefs. A lot of Christians, for instance, wear crosses around their necks. Nice sentiment, but do you think when Jesus comes back, he’s really going to want to look at a cross?
    ~ Bill Hicks (born: 1961-12-16 died: 1994-02-26 at age: 32)

31. Kristianity is an S&M/guilt trip. Christianity is a love trip.
32. Deuteronomy 23:19 and many other places forbid usury — accepting interest on a loan. This is an unusual commandment to follow in the modern age, though it was strictly adhered to in the middle ages. Only non-Christians could offer interest-style loans. Why is usury so bad? It creates an instability. The rich get richer and the poor get poorer. Kristians ignore this important commandment.
33. No one in their right mind would counsel solving your personal and ethical problems by consulting an Afghan sheep herder who augured by examining the entrails of a dead goat. Yet Kristians demand we do something even sillier, namely consult the myths of illiterate shepherds who have been dead for 4000 years, who knew utterly nothing of modern life.
34. Kristians care more about the dead than the living. They are far more concerned about what happens to corpses than living people. They feel duty bound to obey the dead, even though the dead do not care or create consequences.
35. Kristians miss the entire point of Christianity. It is a metaphor to guide you in spiritual growth. Kristians ignore the deep meaning. The wisdom Christianity contains was borrowed from dozens of predecessor religions. Kristians use Christianity to keep themselves in a state of spiritual stupor.
36. Kristians claim to know with absolute certainty when in actuality they are utterly clueless. They pretend to have solid evidence when in fact they have nothing to back them up at all, just a gut feeling based on childhood indoctrination and an ancient book of myths, no different from any other ancient book of fanciful myths. They made it all up, the same as every other religion. They have no evidence and they are willfully ignorant of the mountains of evidence that debunks their preposterous claims. Further they dishonestly distort the evidence against their claims. Kristians claim their religion is absolute truth when in fact it in founded on a work of fiction and defended with lies and deception. It is just preposterous as the founding a religion on the science fiction novels of L. Ron Hubbard.
37. The Bible conflicts with what we know to be true in medicine, astronomy, psychiatry, physics, chemistry, biology, parasitology, criminology, geology… Even if you give the Bible extreme latitude as only metaphorical, it is still wrong. It represented the best thinking of people two millenia ago. Precious little of what it had to say is still relevant. Ironically, a book designed to guide people to a more moral life is now leading them to hatred, intolerance and foolishness. People confuse God and the Bible. God is a truth that lives in your heart. The Bible is just a book to help you find that truth.
38. The central ceremony of Christianity involves ritual cannibalism, It is done very daintily on white linen, but still the idea is barbaric.
39. Catholic and Southern Baptists continue to encourage prejudice against women. They refuse to allow women to take part in the leadership of the church. Women were chattels in Biblical times, and Kristians want to return to those times.
40. Enough of this silliness! Kristians are like bratty children who make some silly assertion then stick to it no matter what, just to annoy you. Kristian assertions are so absurd, they must be pulling your leg, but they never give up and never admit they were just trying to piss you off.
41. When the King James Bible was written, it was written in deliberately archaic language, even for the time, in order to trick people into thinking these were truly the words of an ancient God.
42. Kristianity is a camouflage that criminals of every description use to fool people into trusting them. Kristianity is at its very core a giant con. Priests since time immemorial have tricked and extorted people into tithing to them, and handing over political power.
43. Kristians take great pleasure in tormenting gays, treating them as second class citizens. In the past they did the same with blacks, using the bible to justify their petty snobbery. What is so galling is the hypocrisy. They pretend to do this in the name of love and good will. They hate fun, love and kindness. They despise people who enjoy their lives. They want everyone to lead lives as cramped and miserable as theirs. Think of John Ashcroft and his clothing the statues and refusal to dance. Kristian argue that not only should homosexuals be forced to be celibate as punishment for being born gay, but that Kristians should treat gays as second class citizens and make their lives miserable whether they are celibate or not. Yet they hypocritically claim this stance is consistent with the Gandhian notion of hate the sin and love the sinner. They enjoy using gays as scapegoats to vent their petty venality.
44. There may be a God, but the Kristian description of the creator of the universe is not correct. See the two essays The Real God and Is there A God?. Kristians are spreading slander about the creator of the universe. The Old Testament depicts Him as a petty, incompetent buffoon. The Qur’an has a somewhat better description, but no mere words can possibly do God justice.
45. My essential beef with Kristianity is its dishonesty. It presents as absolute fact statements that are mere speculation backed by nothing more substantial that a deep gut feeling that they must be true. Kristianity bandies the word truth around as if it had an exclusive hold on it, but it is utterly careless about the usual rules of evidence. There is far more evidence for alien abduction than for even the existence of Jesus, much less the claimed resurrection from the dead. if Jesus really were so amazing, how come nobody bothered to write down anything he said while he was alive? If three Kings proclaimed him the Messiah at birth, why was he raised has a humble carpenter? How come his followers did not even bother to protect his birth, death and resurrection places as holy shrines? How come there is no secular record of him? It sounds like the story was ahem, enhanced considerably after his death for better sales appeal. Christians have only the flimsiest evidence for their beliefs, so they bluster and bluff, claiming infallilibily and absolute truth. They have been shown time and time again to be simply wrong. Being wrong is forgivable; claiming exclusive access to absolute truth is delusional.
46. The debating tactics of Kristians are based on lying and deception. One of the frequent tricks they use is falsely claiming famous people like Einstein believed in their God. Yet Einstein made in very clear he did not. He suffered great opprobrium in his time for expressing his atheism.

    “It was of course a lie what you read about my religious convictions, a lie which is being systematically repeated. I do not believe in a personal god, and I have never denied this, but have expressed it clearly. If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it.
    ~ Albert Einstein (born: 1879-03-14 died: 1955-04-18 at age: 76)

47. Jesus harped on three themes:
    1. Don’t chase wealth.
    2. Look after the poor.
    3. Don’t judge or seek revenge.
    Yet consider a Kristian like George W. Bush. He totally ignores Jesus’s three biggies, yet considers himself pious man. Exposure to Kristianity seems to make people immune to Jesus’s message. They imagine they have already heard and absorbed it, when they are the ones most in need of it.
48. Here is just one example of scientific dishonesty Kristians resort to in order to sell their Bible stories. To demonstrate the feasibility of the story that 7 trumpets brought down the 20 foot thick walls of the city of Jericho, they built a wall of bricks and subjected it to over 20,000 watts of acoustic bombardment. Since the wall had not even set, predictably it collapsed. Of course the containing room of 15.24 cm (6 in) of concrete did not. However, the makers of Mysteries of The Bible failed to point that out. Even that level of sound will kill people.
49. We don’t mind an arrogant genius like Pierre Trudeau who won’t suffer fools gladly, however, an arrogant twit is insufferable. Fundamentalist Kristians infuriating. Why? They make the assertion that the Bible is the literal word of God. Then they insult everyone’s intelligence by offering not a shred of evidence to support such a fantastic claim. As Carl Sagan said: Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proofs. Since they are the ones making such an extraordinary claim, the burden of proof should be on them. Yet fundamentalists think they are exempt from the customary rules of evidence. They don’t have even the most rudimentary understanding of what evidence is. They attempt to circularly prove the truth of the Bible by quoting parts of it that proclaim its truth. Even when you show them over and over how the Bible could not possibly the literal word of God, (e.g. my Noah essay), they refuse to see and make up the silliest excuses to hold onto their delusion. They want it to be true so it is true.

    Beware the man of one book.
    ~ Roman proverb

50. Fundamentalist Kristians make the assertion that the Bible is the literal word of God. Then they demand others accept that unlikely notion as Absolute Truth, purely on blind faith. That God is the author of the Bible is unlikely because surely God would have written a much better book than the Bible with its factual errors, inconsistencies, vagueness, rambling, psychotic advice and irrelevancy. Labelling it 100% God’s work is blasphemy. With the faith non-argument, (just have faith it is the 100% word of God), you could equally well assert that Dr. Seuss’s The Cat In The Hat was the literal word of God. In contrast, Islam offers some weak proof that the Qur’an is the literal word of God, namely that the poetry of the Qur’an is the best ever written in Arabic, ostensibly beyond all possible human skill. The Qur’an too blasphemes Allah. No written words could do otherwise.

    Reading books everyone died, none became any wise.
    One who reads the word of Love, only becomes wise.
    ~ Kabir, mystic Hindi poet.

51. Kristians such as Jerry Falwell knowingly misrepresent the theory of evolution to the public. Their lies have approximately half the population of the US rejecting the theory. Even after being repeatedly corrected, Falwell continues to assert that evolution is a random process akin to throwing the parts of watch in the air and having them assemble themselves into a watch. Natural selection, the force that does the shaping, is not in the least random. Its mindless, relentless push to perfection is what gives the illusion of a designer. Random mutation just provides raw fodder of the selection process. You could think of the process of the natural selection as like a primitive spell checker a child might use. It points out the mistakes but does not correct them. It is up to the child to randomly try new spellings until they get it right. Out of this process, with sufficient patience, can come perfectly spelt papers, far beyond the powers of an unaided child.

    “Mutation is utterly random, but selection is extremely choosy!
    ~ Ursula Goodenough (born: 1943-03-16 age: 66), Mind and Life conference 2002

52. The majority of Americans believe a god will reward them after death with eternal infinite bliss, and reunion with loved ones including pets. There is not a stick of evidence to support this. Americans swallow this crap from endlessly repeating it to each other and absurdly optimistic wishful thinking. What makes this belief even more preposterous is these Americans are the greediest, most callous people on earth. According to their own bible, they are doomed, certainly not the apple of their god’s eye.

    “Behold, this was the iniquity of thy sister Sodom, pride, fulness of bread, and abundance of idleness was in her and in her daughters, neither did she strengthen the hand of the poor and needy.”
    Ezekiel 16:49

53. The world is so warped by the insane logic of Kristians that people can avoid mandatory vaccination only for irrational religious objections, but not for rational medical concerns.
54. Kristians such as Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson con people into handing over control of their lives and income to them, by claiming God speaks specifically to them, and hence that they should be treated with almost as much respect as the Bible itself.

    “The secret is surrender. Commitment to Christ involves surrender of the intellect, the emotions and the will — the total person.
    ~ Bill Bright (born: 1921-10-19 died: 2003-07-19 at age: 81), Jesus and the Intellectual

55. So the religious leaders of the planet pander to this hunger, knowingly offering false certainty. Each group claims an exclusive hold on absolute truth. Yet at most one can be correct. This means at least 99.99% of them are offering bullshit. Why do we offer such reverence to a pack of liars?

    “The world longs for authority, finality and conclusiveness. It is weary of theological floundering and uncertainty. Belief exhilarates the human spirit; doubt depresses.
    ~ Billy Graham (born: 1918-11-07 age: 90)

56. Kristians are so utterly sure their particular sect is the very best possible, even though they deliberately shield themselves from exposure to anything else. It is intellectually dishonest to pretend you know more than you really do.
57. Kristianity causes a form of brain damage that affects taste. Kristians become attracted to the tackiest imaginable music, decoration, books, TV, greeting cards and inspirational messages. Watching someone go Kristian is like losing them to Alzheimers’.
58. Kristians have effectively brainwashed everyone into thinking that almost anything if done with a religious motivation must not be interfered with. This includes child abuse, self mutilation, exposing children to poisonous snakes, brainwashing, disrupting the funerals of homosexuals, and of course income tax evasion (which they have made legal for them alone, not for groups of atheists). Freedom of religion means Kristians have a perfect right to make fools of themselves. However, they should be prevented from harming others, including their children, in the process.
59. The Vatican during WW II lifted not a finger to help the Jews. They could have threatened to excommunicate Catholics who engaged in those murders. After the war, they helped Nazi war criminals to escape. Then they got into the business of laundering money for the Mafia. The Vatican cons poor peasants in the third world to pay for the extravagance and opulence of St. Peter’s Basilica.
60. Kristians are obviously aware that not everyone agrees with them and that they can’t provide much evidence for their beliefs. In other words, they know they are basing their lives on speculation and gut instinct. Obviously, even Kristians have plenty of experimental evidence that loving your enemies and treating others kindly does work. God’s creation speaks to man in a million ways besides books. These are much easier to read that ancient texts. Why do Kristians insist on closing their eyes to God’s clearest messages? Why do they refuse to see the awe in Quantum Physics? The physicist at least tries to learn how God thinks. I suspect the reason is the Kristians, too suspect their security blanket is a sham, and want to shore up their belief in its magic by talking others in to believing in it.
61. Childhood brainwashing makes Kristians so dense they cannot for the life of them see the difference between rejecting the divinity and rejecting the Kristian description of the divinity. It never even occurs to them their description is largely wrong.
62. Christianity teaches gullibility as a virtue. There were not even any first hand witnesses to any of Jesus’s so-called miracles. Can you imagine someone today making wild claims like that with only hearsay as evidence, e.g. someone insisting that you believe a spacecraft landed making a crop circle with the only evidence that some unnamed person told him it happened 130 years ago. It is utterly absurd. What is even more infuriating is Christians don’t seem to notice it is absurd, or sometimes that believing the absurd is a virtue. Once people are softened up to pretend to believe the idiotic, they can be lead about like pigs with rings in their noses. They are then easy to con and fleece, the true purpose of Christianity.

    Consider what it would take to get you to believe in the existence of the Loch Ness monster or sasquatches. Would a single second hand account do it? And Loch Ness monsters and sasquatches would not even be miraculous, just surprising. Why he gaping inconsistency in standards of evidence?

63. Have you even tried to debate with a Kristian on anything, e.g. software piracy? They have only a very limited repertoire of ancient ideas they use as the answer to any question, like one of those dolls you pull the string on that parrots a pat phrase. Further, like the Church lady, Kristians see evil everywhere. Kristianity destroys the ability to have or appreciate a new idea. Ironically, the people who seem to have an inkling of what Christ was actually trying to say are not even Christians.
64. On 2008-11-02, a 13-year old Muslim girl reported she had been raped. Instead of confronting the alleged culprits, the girl was lead into a stadium where she was stoned to death for adultery by 50 men. The justification for that was a book, the Old Testament, claimed, without evidence, to be absolute truth by Jews, Christians and Muslims. This violent, cruel book of superstition does not deserve deference, especially among non-believers.
65. I went to see a lecture by Dr. Charles Taylor cmt@philo.mcgill.ca the eminent Canadian philosopher and theologian. Even though he was obviously a respected academic, I decided even he was a Kristian. He skirted the issue of science as a factor in the decline of Christianity in his lecture on the rise of secularism over Christianity. He tried to paint scientists as closed minded in comparison with Kristians. Consider the source of radical new ideas over the last hundred years. He attacked a straw man accusing evolutionists of claiming to have a complete handle on the causes of evolution. He has it backwards, Kristians are the ones claiming absolute and complete truth. Science is always provisional — the best truth so far. He talked of “religious knowledge” when there is no such thing, only religious speculation. If it were knowledge it would be agreed upon fact, not religion. He was willing to jump through hoops to read the Bible in such a way it did not conflict with observed fact, e.g. to conform to Galileo’s observation that the earth is not the centre of the universe. He told several stories of people losing their faith. The tragedy was the pain of disillusionment. He seemed to imply that religion was a balm for that pain and that avoiding that pain was what was important. Whether the beliefs were true seemed completely immaterial.
66. The United States is the richest country on earth and the most Christian. How does America help the rest of the world when it comes to the AIDS epidemic? It could save millions of lives by providing sufficient medicine. This would come out to about $5 a citizen. Do they do it? No. Instead they sue the South African government for providing its citizens with low cost generic AIDS drugs. Yet Kristians are almost infinitely smug about their virtue. See Mécedcins Sans Frontières for details. They did not go to the aid of many other countries beset by terrorists, but threatened every country on earth unless they came to America’s aid.
67. Kristians don’t understand that their values are not universal. They insist that all children, both Kristian and non-Kristian alike be indoctrinated with Kristian values. For example, instead of giving teens factual information about the risks of various activities for passing various sexual diseases and for pregnancy, or the consequences of either, they want to hide this information from them. Instead they want all children inculcated with religious opinions such as “all sex outside marriage, even masturbation, is wicked” and “abstinence and marriage are the only acceptable approaches to preventing venereal diseases”. The African experience has proved the futility of this approach, yet the Kristians are slaughtering a generation of children on the altar of Kristian virtue.
68. Kristianity is humbug. It is based on untruths. I oppose all untruth even supposedly harmless ones. I oppose Kristianity on the same grounds that I oppose people who tell me professional wrestling is real, horoscopes can predict the future, that $9.00 a minute TV psychics have access to supernatural information and that the earth is flat. Kristianity makes claims that are demonstrably not true (as well as other outlandish ones that cannot be either proved or disproved). The best known miracle, the loaves and the fishes is a lie. The fishes were added later, to incorporate the fish symbol. The fundamental miracle, Christ rising from the dead, is even contradicted by the Bible, which states that the people seeing the supposed risen Christ did not recognise him. There are more people who claim to have seen the risen Elvis than the risen Christ. Kristianity is built on sand. True religion does not need magic tricks. The Truth is true.
69. Kristianity encourages intolerance, particularly toward gays and people of other faiths.

    “Of all religions the Christian is without doubt the one which should inspire tolerance most, although up to now the Christians have been the most intolerant of all men.
    ~ Voltaire (born: 1694-11-21 died: 1778-05-30 at age: 83) [François Marie d’Arouet Voltaire]

70. Kristianity is the number one cause of teenage suicides. Most teen suicides are gays tormented by Kristian lies about homosexuality or tormented by fellow teens egged on by their Kristian inspired intolerance for homosexuals.
71. If an adult tells you about their conversations with an imaginary magic friend, you might tactfully lead them to seek psychiatric treatment. Yet if a Kristian does the same thing, we leave them stew in their delusion. Kristianity masks all manner of mental illness. It is a socially acceptable form of insanity. We look the other way, afraid to deal with the organised wrath of the Kristian delusionals. Kristians mistakenly mistake any random internal voice as the voice of God.
72. Kristianity encourages a careless disregard for the environment. God will clean up after us (or destroy it all soon). Kristians believe there is no need to limit our population growth. According to the Kristians we have “dominion” over all other species — only man has any value. True Christian consider themselves the good stewards of Planet Earth. Kristianity believes that God created the entire universe for man’s pleasure alone. No other species has any value other than to serve man. This is toxic conceit. They treat the universe is like cosmic toilet paper.
73. Kristians are not only misinformed about science and physics they lie about them and insist on teaching those lies to children. If they will lie about something where they can so easily be caught, how can you trust them with matters you can’t check up on? Kristianity is just a synonym for insincerity and hypocrisy. Christ repeatedly asked people to be truthful, yet Kristianity is fundamentally the art of telling beautiful lies, supposedly for the good of others.

    “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 (born: 1483-11-10 died: 1546-02-18 at age: 62)

74. Jesus warned people it was unwise to make material goods the center of your life. See Matthew 6:19. ???? 6:29 However, the Kristian charismatic movement urges centering your life around an expectation of abundant earthly wealth caused by gaining special favour with God. Even Christians are alarmed about this heresy.
75. Kristianity is anti-scientific. It treats gullibility as a virtue. The Bible would have you believe volcanoes are caused by God’s wrath, nothing whatever to do with plate tectonics. People still believe this nonsense in the third millennium. There is almost no evidence to back up Kristianity’s claims so they make it a virtue to have faith without evidence! There are more people who claim to have been abducted by an alien, to have seen the risen Elvis or to have seen a sasquatch than ever claimed to have seen the risen Jesus. This does not bother the Kristians. Who needs evidence? They want it to be true, so it is true. End of argument. Kristianity is self-deceptive, pathetic, childish, wishful thinking. If Kristians would grow up and get over their fear of death they could let go of these outlandish fairy tales. I find it so disgusting when otherwise sane people furiously try to convince themselves that Santa Claus really does live at the North Pole, despite all evidence to the contrary.

    “So far as I can remember, there is not one word in the Gospels in praise of intelligence.
    ~ Bertrand Russell (born: 1872-05-18 died: 1970-02-02 at age: 97)

76. Miss America went on TV and says that her “faith” in God is what helped her to persevere — not God, her “faith” in God. That is no more a demonstration of the existence in God than would her attestation to her faith in a lucky rabbit’s foot. Making yourself believe something you don’t truly believe is true, in the hopes of some gain, is ignoble.
77. Kristianity is intellectually dishonest. For example, Kristian “scientists” put out a seeming objective scientific documentary on the Shroud of Turin, trying to make people believe it was the shroud of Christ. However, they left out one key detail — the cloth was carbon dated to the middle ages. They also claimed the red stains were real blood, not mentioning other scientists concluded they were iron pyrites. These creationists make snake oil salesmen look honest. They are not simply misguided, they are out and out liars. What is worse they have the political power to have their nonsense replace the truth in schools. This is just carrying on the long standing tradition of deception. Saints’ bodies “miraculously” did not decay. The church never let on they mummified them.
78. The Kristian church is hypocritical. It preaches poverty while its leaders live in opulence.
79. Kristianity is paternalistic and meddling. Kristians presume they know better than everyone else how others should run their lives. They keep trying to enforce their religious beliefs into law to force everyone to worship in the Kristian way. They suffer under the delusion, that as Kristians, they have some special divine authority to tell everyone else what to do, using force if necessary. Moslem fanatics are even worse in other countries, but in my part of the world, Muslims tend to leave others alone. Further, Kristians think they have the right to choose everyone else’s reading material both in print and on the Internet.
80. Kristian fundamentalists don’t accept the notion of separation of church and state. They are so sure their particular sect has an exclusive handle on the truth, they want the state to enforce it on everyone else. They want their prayers said in schools. They want their religious rules posted in public buildings. They want their religious restrictions on marriage burned into law. They want tax dollars to go to Christian organisations. There want their illogical religion-based rules on abortion and euthanasia legally enforced on everyone. They argue that historically the church and state were once one, and that is how it should be again.
81. Though Jesus was keen on the rich helping the poor, the Kristian line is that the poor deserve their plight, and to help the flow of wealth from the lazy poor to the industrious already wealthy, taxes should be increased for the poor and decreased for the rich. This is the agenda of the “religious” right.
82. Kristians see no possibility of any difference between their book and God’s eternal commandment. If anyone disagrees with them they are obviously disagreeing with God. It never occurs to them that their view of God is mostly wrong, or even that they could be wrong.
83. Of all the religions I have explored, the ancient Roman temple of Minerva Sulis in Bath England was by far the most awe-inspiring. Christian churches are tacky as a dollar store in comparision. How dare Christians claim superiority over every other religion when the have not even looked at anything other than their native-born one?
84. Imagine that I started a new religion, the Whackites. Imagine that I managed to con 10,000 people into signing up and tithing. We Whackites are recognised as a religion under the income tax act. We whackites have some holy rites. One is, when dining in public, stripping to our underwear, and squirting Dairyland™ Aerosol Whipping Cream on each others’ heads and on the heads of any other people present as a holy blessing. It is the holy semen of the Divine One. Refusing to accept it is rejecting God. If anyone objects, or ridicules us, we file assault or discrimination charges under the hate crimes act. We demand others respect our religion.

    Religion is just superstition with a strong emotional attachment. Religious freedom is the right to do silly things, even self-destructive things, without requiring a logical reason. However, religious freedom should not give one the right to enforce silly behaviour on others who don’t want to play. Kristians imagine non-believers must also conform to their supersitions.

85. Consider the Whackites again. We Whackites believe it is incredibly immoral to carry any form of ID. We sue in the supreme court for our religious freedom. The supreme count humours us by ordering all id be banned for all Canadians and replaced by digital photographs and electronic image identification. If society can humour a religious nuttiness with minimal accomodation, e.g. Sikh RCMP officers wearing turbans, then fine, but if it inconveniences others or endangers them, or costs them significant amounts of money, then I say piss on them. They have no right to do things that effectively impose their nutty beliefs on others. Religious freedom should only cover actions that don’t unduly impose on non-believers. Kristians imagine non-believers should also conform to their supersitions. I find outrageously silly that I have a better chance arguing in court based on an irrational religious belief than on a rational one.

    I think it is wrong to treat religion as different from any other superstitious or irrational behaviour. Religion deserves derision and disrepect. Feigning respect helps hold these erroneous and often cruel or harmful beliefs in place. If a mental patient told you he liked drinking cups of human blood, you would not encourage this delusion. Yet when a Christian tells you the same nonsense, most people feign hushed respect. If a mental patient told you his pet cat tells him what do you, most people would try to talk him out of this delusion. When a Christian tells you a snake had a seductive conversation with one of his ancestors, most people listen respectfully trying hard to disguise their incredulity.

86. Kristians can’t seem to understand that the only reason they are Kristian is because their parents spoon fed it into them when they were too young to resist, or when some evangelist pushed it into them they were under extreme emotional stress. To people without that experience, Kristianity seems just as silly as the Roman gods. If Kristianity had some inherent truth, appeal or logic, it would not require brainwashing to install it.
87. Sometimes Christian faith exquisitely enhances compassion. Consider Albert Schweitzer and Mother Theresa. However, Kristianity tends to bleed people dry of natural mercy and compassion. Kristians want everyone to live by the same mindless rigid rules agrarian villagers used thousands of years ago. They demand that people die hideous, painful and degrading deaths from terminal illnesses. They self-righteously meddle in other people’s lives without understanding. In the name of virtue they demand that the terminally ill have no recourse to physician assisted suicide no matter how unbearable life becomes. It is none of their business. They are not the ones doing the suffering. See the essay on euthanasia for more details and also the essay on medical marijuana. Ironically, Christ railed against this rule-based judgementalness more than any other sin. Still the Kristians block their ears to his words.
88. The religious right are a political force. They are dangerous when given the reigns of government. In an age threatened by global warming and overpopulation, it is folly to entrust handling such problems to people who think the best way to deal with them is wishful thinking (i.e. prayer), pseudoscience (i.e. creationism) and consulting experts who lived thousands of years ago before these problems even surfaced (the Bible). These people are seriously addled by their religious beliefs. The most famous was Interior Secretary (analogous to the Canadian Environment Minister) James Gaius Watt of the Reagan era. He said that there was no need to protect the forests because God was going to restore them in a few years anyway. He resigned in 1983. As of today, God still has not magically restored the forests. He will guide us to do the work, but he won’t do all our work for us. James Gaius Watt cited Genesis as justification for schemes to “subdue” the Grand Canyon and the national forests.
89. Man has been an unmitigated disaster on the planet, causing more species to go extinct than the asteroid that ended the age of the dinosaurs. You would think Kristians, who scrupulously torment homosexuals to please God, would have some compunction about vandalising His handiwork, but they do not. American Kristians are the cheerleaders of global habitat destruction.
90. Kristians force Kristmas down everyone else’s throat. It has degenerated to a festival to celebrate gluttony and greed. Kristians admit this, yet they get huffy when a Jew, atheist or pagan says perhaps public tax money should not be spent setting up Kristmas decorations. They seem to think the state is not supposed to promote any one particular religion over the others, unless that religion is Kristianity. This Kristian assumption of superiority, deserving of special privilege, is so galling to people of other faiths. Kristians can’t even see they are doing it. They just assume they are morally superior to everyone else. They never stop to rethink whether that is really true. They think the modern world is anti-Christian when in reality it reeks of Kristianity. Like a bad perfume, you can’t get away from it.
91. Church Kristianity distracts people away from becoming true Christians. Christ himself warned against this. A modern Church Kristian prides himself on irrelevancies like church attendance, taking communion, singing in the choir, donating to TV evangelists, believing the doctrines of some sect, affluence and heterosexuality. At the same time he votes to tell his government to make life as comfy as possible for the rich and as miserable as possible for the poor and sick. He spends his time and income only on himself and his family. Like Dana Carvey’s Church Lady, he gloats over the sins of others. He forgets the message to the churchgoers in Luke 13:26-27.
92. Kristianity is stuck in the past. Even though most modern Kristians have never even smelled a sheep, Kristians persist in using metaphors designed for illiterate shepherds. Much has changed in the last 5000 years — cities, medicine, science, international travel, global warming, the WTO, the population explosion, the energy crunch, global pollution… Kristians try to pretend nothing has changed since the fabled days of Moses. They avoid confronting the problems of today by hiding in the past.
93. Judaiism, Christianity, Islam and Bahai are founded on the notion of sacrifice. If somebody does a foolish or wrong-headed thing, by some inexplicable magic, supposedly the effects will be erased by killing a pigeon, destroying some perfectly good food, or by deliberately creating suffering for yourself, e.g. deliberately getting yourself crucified. What sacrifice really means is “doing that which is hard and which helps everyone”. Creating misery that helps no one, then labelling it sacrifice is just sado-masochism.
94. Kristian prudery kills. A right wing religious zealot, Bill van der Zaalm gained power in British Columbia in the early 1980s. As premier, he banned all education materials on HIV for both children and adults alike. I, like many others, laboured under the delusion AIDS was just more hysteria — like the rumoured killer gonorrhea from Viet Nam. I contracted HIV in ignorance as did many other people at that time. Van der Zaalm later called for concentration camps for HIV+ people. The courts blocked him. The churches have consistently blocked teaching safe sex and birth control to the young. I spent many hours of my life trying to convince young people to take safe sex precautions. Without official backup, that was almost an impossible job. The young were convinced they were immortal. Kristian prudery kills kids. Yet these hypocrites consider themselves more moral than everyone else! They gloat when the young contract HIV, claiming it is God’s punishment for not remaining virgins. Kristian prudery is cruel. In the name of Kristian virtue, fathers and mothers have disowned their daughters. Kristians are slaughtering a generation of children on the altar of Kristian virtue.
95. The fundamental value, the core Kristian family value, is persecuting homosexuals. That puts them in the same category as Nazis, whose core value is hating Jews. Kristians started out with a superior morality, and degenerated into a hate group.
96. Kristians consider themselves more moral than anyone else, yet they meddle in everyone else’s affairs that are no concern of theirs. They don’t see anything wrong in that behaviour. They imagine they have the right to dictate the reading and viewing material for other fellow adults. They think their religion gives them the right to treat everyone else as children.
97. Kristianity encourages passivity. Instead of doing something about the evils of the world, Kristians sit at home and twiddle their thumbs, all the while imagining they are doing something highly virtuous and useful. They call this inactivity “praying”. We heard a Muslim pilot of an airliner in serious trouble idiotically repeating a prayer “I put my fate in God’s hands.” instead of attending to the problems at hand.
98. Kristianity is so crass. Kristians can’t even donate to help a child in Africa without contanimating that simple act of compassion with religion and the implied after-death rewards.
99. Most modern religious music, except for Gospel, is cloying and insincere. It is an insult to offer such drivel to the Creator of the Universe.
100. The celibate priesthood is a medieval idea that should be dropped. It leads to pathologically repressed individuals who take out their sexual and sadistic feelings on helpless children in their care. There has been scandal after scandal in Canada about priests and nuns abusing children both sexually and physically.
101. Whenever there is a death, Kristians swoop down and start feeding their dogma to the bereaved. The bereaved are upset and susceptible to childish stories of false hope. Even my aunt Edith’s funeral was turned into a 30 minute informercial for Kristianity, even though my aunt and most of the guests were atheists.
102. Kristians are unwilling to leave others in peace who don’t believe their myths. Even the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are fueled by the popular will to punish the Muslims for rejecting Christianity and the divinity of Jesus. The Muslims revere him only as prophet.

     Thomas Jefferson, US president

     “The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others. But it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods, or no God. It neither breaks my leg, nor picks my pocket.
     ~ Thomas Jefferson (born: 1743-04-13 died: 1826-07-04 at age: 83)

     It seems to me though when Kristians act vigilante style to punish people for religious sins, then the government should step in to curtail them.
103. The US constitution forbids any sort of religious test for holding office. Kristians violate this flagrantly by grilling candidates on details of their religious faith. Candidates flout their faith in violation of Matthew 6:5.
104. Nearly all the hateful email I receive is from nominal Kristians. Non-Kristians simply disagree. Kristianity makes people insanely self-righteous. I years past I received thousands of death threats from Kristians due to my gay lib stance. Some even send Trojans and viruses piggybacked on their email. Some have attempted to censor my newsgroup posts with forged cancels. If Kristianity had a salutary effect on people, should it not be the reverse?

     The attempt to silence a man is the greatest honour you can bestow on him. It means that you recognise his superiority to yourself.
     ~ Joseph Sobran (born: 1946-02-23 age: 63)

105. Kristianity is silly. Consider the recent agreement between the Catholics and Protestants over the centuries old rift over the definition of “justification”. The crux of the disagreement was Martin Luther’s belief that the process of forgiveness of sin came through faith alone, and was an act of God, while the Catholic church taught that justification required Man’s cooperation with God. How could anyone tell if God had forgiven? How could anyone even know if God cared if people sinned? Pretending to know, with absolute certainty, such unknowable matters is dishonest. Kristianity is speculation, based on wishful thinking, masquerading as truth.
106. Kristianity is juvenile. Kristians are like children who believe in teddy bear magic to protect them from harm. Continually petitioning the deity for special favours reminds me of a 2-year old pestering his mom for cookies.
107. Kristianity destroys the mind’s ability to reason. Kristians are incapable of noticing when they are being illogical. They are so sure in their guts they are right that they will resort to any dishonest tactic to promote their views.
108. Kristians greatly exaggerate the seriousness of consenting sexual activity between teens and adults, even when there is little danger of pregnancy or disease transmission. They will happily hound the older member of the couple to suicide, and do their best to persuade the younger that they have been ruined for life, creating a self-fulfilling prophesy.
109. Kristian prudery and their belief in their divine right to meddle in others' lives, gets in the way of finding workable solutions to the problems of prostitution and drug abuse.
110. A Kristian zealot noticed a 10 year old boy engaging in sex play with his sister. She had the boy hand cuffed and arrested and held without bail, and charged with incest. She cared not a whit that she was permanently traumatising both the boy and girl by convincing them both they had done something unspeakably evil.
111. Kristians are so disgustingly obsequious in their relationship with God. It is as if He were Genghis Khan, and they were afraid to utter any criticism no matter how justified. They dishonestly pretend God is infinitely kind, when it is patently obvious, that the Kristian God is far more cruel and uncaring than any human. The good news is the real God is nothing like the depiction in the Old Testament. God even has a sense of humour.

     Richard Dawkins, geneticist

     “The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous, proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.
     ~ Dr. Richard Dawkins (born: 1941-03-26 age: 68), The God Delusion chapter 2

112. If people have no regard for truth and evidence, and simply make up myths and proclaim them as literal truth, there is no way they will ever be able to agree. These lies will be an eternal excuse for killing each other. People who love truth and respect evidence don’t have this problem. They can resolve disagreements with debate, experiment and observation. Two people seeking the real truth will necessarily home in on the same thing if their minds have not been contaminated by religion or similar brainwashing.
113. The whole idea of Kristian Triumphalism is that everyone has to believe and follow the same rules for it to “work”. Kristianity was thoroughly tried. Life under Kristian tyranny in the middle ages proved utterly unbearable. We refer to those times of deep superstition as the “dark ages”. In modern times we have Islamic states like Saudi Arabia and Iran. These countries have to pay huge premiums to get skilled workers to go there. Very few people can stomach such repressive regimes. Theocracies are anti-democratic. Yet still we have right wing fundamamentalists trying to subvert our modern democracies back in to Kristian dominated theocracies.
114. My complaint is not just with Kristians, but with religious fundamentalists of all stripes. The Muslims and Jews in the Middle East are at each other’s throats because each believes they have an exclusive handle on the truth and that all others are worthless infidels. We had a Jewish rabbi offering public prayers to God to destroy all Arabs. It is time everyone learned that their sacred texts are just the best-effort conjecture of dead people. Ancient texts have even less validity than modern day conjecture about the big questions and about how a society should be organised. They are just books to help you find God. The books are not God. If God spoke to you directly, you might be scared silly, thinking you were losing your mind. If you open such a book “at random” and read the message, you are giving God a channel to communicate to you. The channel is limited by what is available in that particular book.
115. Kristians draw others into their delusion, not with argument, but with emotion and wishful thinking. They don’t care if their tales are true. They are enamored with how wonderful it would be if they were. Music, ritual and awesome architecture give Kristianity an authority, reverence and solidity that it does not really have. Kristianity is like a cloud. From a distance it looks substantial, but when you get up close, you discover there is nothing to it.
116. What a ludicrous notion, that the world needs still more breeding when it already bursting at the seams and there are unwanted children parked in foster homes!
117. Kristians ruin the political process. They park their brains and fall under the spell of evil preacher/con men who command them to vote for corrupt candidates who support war, persecution of gays, discrimination against minorities, destruction of civil liberties, unconditional support for Israeli apartheid, economic imperialism, abandoning the poor… All the crooked candidate needs to do is utter a few magic pass phrases such as “born again” or “partial birth abortion”. Kristians consider it wicked to think for themselves. They vote without understanding and in droves thus foisting these evil candidates on the entire body politic.
118. Channel surf. You can always tell the Christian shows even when the people are not talking about God. How can you tell? They blather. They just talk off the top of their heads telling you what they think ought to be so, but speak with authority and conviction. They never give specific verifiable information. They dumb down every issue. They take pride in their ignorance. They repeat pat phrases. They shout, even when describing the mind-numbingly obvious.
119. Kristians exploit children to sell their lies for them. The children are more convincing than their con men handlers because they are too young to understand they are saying things that are not true.
120. Kristians claim superiority over everyone else. They claim to have the one true religion and the only path to God. This may seem like innocuous boosterism, but it is a dangerous attitude. When someone is utterly convinced that God sanctions all their actions, no matter how much they fly in the face of common sense, they will do some pretty horrendous things, believing the end justifies the means. Kristianity was at the root of Naziism. I am not saying that all Kristians are Nazis, but that the belief in Kristian superiority got out of hand in Nazi Germany, and lead to killing Jews and gays on a massive scale. In a similar way, the KKK is a perverse outgrowth of a belief in Kristian superiority. To this day, Kristians feel perfectly justified in persecuting members of “pagan” religions, because in their eyes they are blasphemous. Kristians have no compunctions about forcing children of other faiths to participate in Kristian festivals at schools, yet they are totally unwilling to let their children experience the festivals and rituals of other faiths.
121. Sado-masochism is a sexual perversion. Kristians have elevated it to the highest virtue. Kristians have a morbid fascination with the gory details of the crucifixion. Perhaps Jesus’s suffering helped elicit some compassion, but the suffering in itself was pointless. It helped no one. It just added to the universal load of suffering. Further, all that hand wringing and crying over it helps no one. That too just adds to the load of universal suffering. Weeping over the long dead Jesus just distracts from doing something useful about the suffering going on now. Suffering for the sake of suffering is just masochism.
122. I feel fury whenever I see Kristians milking the public with pathetic images and violin music for funds ostensibly to help starving children in Africa. They spend the money on bibles and tracts. They hold out dribbles of water and food if the kids renounce their current religion. Doing so guarantees social ostracism. What these kids need is food, shelter and medicine, given unconditionally. What Kristians do is as absurd as forcing the kids to pretend to worship the great pumpkin in return for a few handfuls of jelly beans.
123. Kristians sometimes encourage people to avoid medical treatment. My young friend Damon is now dead because of his Kristian beliefs. He refused medical treatment trusting that God would heal him. His Kristian friends killed him by lying to him about the efficacy of prayer.
124. Kristians have zero regard for the environment. Not once have I ever heard one preach on the protecting the environment or treating other species well.
125. In Moslem countries, five times a day the call to prayer blares out over loudspeakers. In Christian countries, churches toll their bells monontonously for hours at a time. Neither shows any consideration for those who might not want to hear the cacophony. Their religion is so all-fired important it overrides any normal consideration about annoying others with the noise.
126. Kristians confuse God with the bible. The bible is a book written by ancient men about God. Whether it is correct or not means bugger all about the nature of God or whether he exists. Kristians seem to imagine that rejecting the biblical description of God is the same as rejecting God. To me, the bible is a calumny. The bible depicts the creator of the universe as a petty buffoon. Those who accept the bible are rejecting the real god, the true creator of the universe, if there is one.
127. On 2000-12-17, I heard a televised sermon by a plump, bespectacled fundamentalist preacher with an accent like Trent Lot’s, speaking to an enormous auditorium of followers. He called for:
     • increased discrimination against homosexuals.
     • blocking access to pornography on the Internet. He knew better than other adults what was suitable reading material for them.
     • beating children with sticks to make them fear God. He said that children should be “trained” using the same techniques used for training animals. Perhaps someone should hand him a modern animal training book. Beating does not work. Rewards do.
     • He taught that all rebellion against authority was wrong, and that Hollywood should not encourage it.
     • He said that children need to be brainwashed constantly “over and over and over” to force the “word of God” into their minds for a lifetime.
     • He said that women should attempt to get pregnant, even when they did not like children or when they felt they could not provide a suitable environment to raise the child.
     • He taught that the state should not help the elderly.
     • He explicitly called for the abolishment of the separation of church and state.
     • All the problems in today’s schools can be traced to the removal enforced recitation of the Lord’s Prayer.
     I find those opinions wrong-headed. We did agree on a few matters, however:
     • Children have an obligation to look after their parents.
     • Principles are more important than making a fast buck.
     • Charles Manson’s abusive childhood contributed to his murderous behaviour.
     • The problems of assault with a deadly weapon, rape and drugs facing today’s schools are more serious than those of 1948, talking, running in the halls, and gum chewing.
128. What passes for modern Kristianity has nothing whatsoever to do with Christ’s message from his Sermon on the Mount. Instead it has been known to preach child beating, laissez faire capitalism, old testament retribution, persecution of homosexuals, abandonment of the poor especially in the third world, pseudoscience, racial stereotyping, overbreeding, religious intolerance, deliberate ignorance, magical beliefs about the causes of prosperity, gun ownership, heavy military spending and morbid preoccupation with other people’s sex lives.
129. Kristians claim that without their dogma there would be no morality. That is not true. Science has found that morality is hard wired into the human brain, and starts to appear even in infants. Kristianity warps this natural sense of fair play, teaching people bigotry and cruelty also focussing on petty arbitrary behaviours that don’t matter.
130. Kristians don’t even believe the their own BS. They tell you that when they die, they will go to live with Jesus in bliss and eat off golden plates. Yet they are so afraid of death, they will not only demand expensive, painful medical procedures to prolong their own lives by a few weeks, they also insist everyone else, including non-believers, suffer any amount of pain to procrastinate death. If they truly believed their stories, they would rejoice when an elderly person died.
131. Kristian con men saturate the air waves with lies endlessly repeated. They have been successful in persuading the majority of Americans to abandon science, and embrace a blood-thirsty ancient cult. Most Americans claim the earth is only a few thousand years old, and that evolution is bunk. Science means simply studying reality carefully and objectively to find out what is actually true. Science means carefully having others cross check every claim with experiments before it is accepted. Kristianity is the hubris to imagine you already know everything without looking. As a result, America has fallen way behind other nations in the mastery of science and technology. Americans are headed back to the extreme superstition of the middle ages lead by ignorant Kristians. Why are Kristians leading the population back to such ignorant times? The more ignorant and superstitious people are, the easier they are to con.
132. Kristians have a perverted, racist and sexist sense of values. American Kristians believe it is perfectly ok to maim, murder and torture Iraqi children. In fact they cheer it on and funded it to the tune of $40,000.00 USD per family. They believe sex is evil and should only be permitted in church-sanctioned unions between two people with differing numbers of X chromosomes. In their view, lifetime monogamy is mandatory. If anyone violates their religious code they hound them for years, forcing them from office, making the lose their jobs and attempting to drive them into exile or suicide. They don’t believe in freedom of religion for anyone but themselves. Other people’s sex lives are none of their bloody business. They are outrageous busybodies and prudes.

1. No other group but Kristians actively attack me or try to deprive me of my civil rights. They are my only personal enemies. They do this simply because the people I fall in love with are usually male. They are the ones who threaten to kill me.
2. Kristianity is widespread and widely respected. In contrast, only a very few people torture children, and when they do, we soundly condemn them. People don’t yet realise that Kristianity is not just misguided and foolish, but also actively evil.
3. Kristians destroy the wonder of the universe. They want to replace the sparkling reality with a pedestrian myth. Kristians refuse to let themselves know which was the first flower ever to grace the planet.

Archaeology

Tom Harpur, theologian

“There is not one iota of history as we know it in the entire Bible!
~ Alvin Boyd Kuhn (born: 1880-09-22 died: 1963-09-14 at age: 82) Biblical scholar

Modern archaeology has shocked Christians by showing that Abraham, King Saul, and King David never existed. The conquest of Caanan never happened. There was no escape from Egypt or 40 years wandering in the wilderness. There were no camels in the holy land at the times claimed in the Bible. Further nearly every Biblical story was plagarised from the earlier cult of Horus, sometimes word for word. The Gospel of John was not written until 130 years after Jesus’s death and the others not until 170 years after. Other Gospels were burned. There is no secular record of any of the astounding things Jesus purportedly did, e.g. raising Lazarus from the dead or the saints rising from the graves at his resurrection. What is most shocking of all is the preponderance of evidence leads scholars to conclude Jesus is a fictional character. See jesuspuzzle.org for a summary of some of the evidence. It took hundreds of years for the details of his life to jell. For a real person, most detail is known during his lifetime, and gradually the halos are added after death.

Because there was no historic Jesus, then all the rest is bunk too. The entire religion industry is founded on a lie the insiders have known about for 200 years.

For the complete story, see The Pagan Christ: Recovering the Lost Light by Canadian Anglican theologian Tom Harpur.

	recommend book⇒Tom Harpur
		hardcover
	ISBN13:	978-0-88762-145-1
	publisher:	Thomas Allen Publishers
	published:	2004
	by:	The Pagan Christ: recovering the lost light
Tom Harpur is an Anglican theologian. He presents the evidence that Christianity is plagiarized from earlier religions and has no historical basis. The Jesus story is intended to be taken as allegory, not literally. The Jesus cult developed over time, starting with a set of aphorisms, and gradually adding details of Jesus’ life, much the way the story of Superman was elaborated. This suggests there was no historical Jesus. amazon.ca is the site mostly likely to have the book in stock since Harpur is a well-known Canadian theologian.
abe books.co.uk abe books.ca amazon.co.uk amazon.ca abe books.de chapters.indigo.ca amazon.de abe books.com abe books.fr amazon.com amazon.fr barnes and noble.com abe books.it powells.com iberlibro.com sony e-books abe books anz

The Core of Jesus’s Message

Ye have heard that it hath been said, An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth:

But I say unto you, That ye resist not evil: but whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also.

And if any man will sue thee at the law, and take away thy coat, let him have thy cloak also.

And whosoever shall compel thee to go a mile, go with him twain. Give to him that asketh thee, and from him that would borrow of thee turn not thou away.

Ye have heard that it hath been said, Thou shalt love thy neighbour, and hate thine enemy.

But I say unto you, Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you;

That ye may be the children of your Father which is in heaven: for he maketh his sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust.

For if ye love them which love you, what reward have ye? do not even the publicans the same?

And if ye salute your brethren only, what do ye more than others? do not even the publicans so?

Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect.

Can you see even the vaguest resemblance between this message and modern Christianity?

Why Not Leave Well Enough Alone?

“The fact that an opinion has been widely held is no evidence whatever that it is not entirely absurd; indeed in view of the silliness of the majority of mankind, a widespread belief is more likely to be foolish than sensible.
~ Bertrand Russell (born: 1872-05-18 died: 1970-02-02 at age: 97)

Obviously not all Christians fit with the extremely negative portrait I just painted of Kristians. Though I have used the terms fundamentalist and Kristian with great contempt, my disdain applies mainly to the meddlers. Not all fundamentalists and Kristians are meddlers. True Christians are easy to get along with. They may be deluded, but they are well-intentioned and relatively harmless.

Mother Theresa did her great works motivated by a desire to please God and the Pope. Martin Luther King found the courage to risk his life in combating racism, under the delusion that God would protect him. Bach wrote the world’s most beautiful music inspired by his protestant faith. My friend Joyce Cousins on Quadra Island helped all kinds of people free themselves from alcohol. Her constant inspiration is “What would Jesus do?” There seems to be no cure for alcoholism or drug addiction other than handing the problem over to a higher power. There are religiously motivated charities who pitched in to help out the Kosovo refugees. Maya Angelou would not have her charisma without her deep faith. Christianity must be given credit for taming the Roman brutal life philosophy. The Christian group World Vision ensures North Americans cannot ignore the grinding poverty in other parts of the world, even if they do spend most of the money they collect on things other that food for the children. The Bible is a collection of the best wisdom of a thousand years. It may not be perfect or perfectly relevant, but it still has great value.

You have to judge a religion not only on its ideals, but how it affects most of its adherents. The Old Testament is full of intolerance and hate. The hate it brings into the world spawned acts like the crucifixion of Matthew Shepard. The white supremacist church that Buford Furrow (the man attacked a Jewish community center killing three little boys) belonged to and Westboro Baptist Church would be extreme examples. The Old Testament has acted for centuries as the moral underpinning for both slavery and racism. TV evangelists are the main source of intolerance in the world. They teach smugness. Judaiism and Islam similarly cause their adherents to become narrow-minded and intolerant, even though the Qur’an itself stresses tolerance. The Old Testament teaches retribution. In other parts of the world, particularly the middle east, Judaiism and Islam cause even more trouble than Christianity, though they behave themselves reasonably well in North America.

24 hours a day there are Kristian infomercials on TV, usually several at any one time. The makers of these commercials make unsubstantiated claims for Kristianity, most commonly that accepting it will cure you of fatal diseases or make you prosperous. If any other product were making such claims, they would be pulled off the air if the advertisers could not prove the claims.

The advertisers solicit funds for “God”. This is preposterous. The creator of the universe does not need human money. He is ostensibly the creator and owner of the entire universe. If he had need of anything he could just manifest it. The money is for the advertisers to spend on earthly goods for themselves and to finance more infomercials. For some reason, Kristianity is excused of the same requirement for truth telling we require of secular broadcasters. Further, these infomercials preach hatred and intolerance of gays. What is really galling is they don’t even have to pay income and property taxes the way other hate groups do. They are not required to offer equal time for rebuttal the way a political group would have to do. I as a tax payer unwillingly subsidize their dishonest activities. Non-religious advocacy groups don’t get a tax break.

Most Kristians would be shocked to discover they are members of a hate group, not that much better than card carrying Aryan nation or KKK members. The only difference is the KKK teaches hatred of blacks and gays. The Kristian church teaches discrimination against gays and women. Most have dropped their historic anti-black teaching. Most churches will deny they teach hate, it is just that homosexuals are sinners and as such are second class citizens deserving of discrimination and ill treatment. Oddly they don’t call for less than full citizenship for adulterers, the greedy, the envious or the slothful. The Kristian churches always are the main force blocking equal civil rights for gays. If you are gay, what’s the difference between a Kristian and a member of the KKK? KKK members consider themselves paragons of virtue, just as Kristians do.

“We must make sure we eliminate them [gays and lesbians] from the face of Namibia. [The] constitution does not guarantee rights for gays and lesbians. Even if gays and lesbians had a gay dog they would murder it.
~ Jerry Ekandjo (born: 1947-03-17 age: 62), Namibia’s home affairs minister, told police officers on 2000-10-01 to eliminate homosexuals. Speaking to 700 new graduates of the police academy in northern Ondangwa

““Homosexuality is forbidden in Islam. It is a crime worse than murder.
~ Abdul Kadir Che Kob , the Kuala Lumpur head of education and research, Time Asia.

Nine young men in Saudi Arabia were sentenced to 2,600 lashes followed by six years in prison, simply for having “deviant sexual acts” Deviant for whom? For these young men homosexuality is natural; it is heterosexual acts that would be unnatural. Demanding that gay men enjoy sex with females is much like demanding they enjoy only sex with dogs. It could be done under exceptional circumstances, but it certainly does not not come naturally. In Muslim countries gay men are routinely whipped or castrated. Lesbians are publicly stoned. People will only torment their fellows this way when they are convinced beyond a shadow of a doubt they are right. Religion gives people this false conviction.

Our grandparents used the Bible to justify slavery.

Svend Foyn perfected the whale harpoon with a bomb in its head. He received the patent on Christmas Eve and wrote in his journal “Thank thee oh Lord. Thou hast done it all.” This invention lead to the extinction or near extinction of most whale species.

In modern day, the Christian Identity Churches make no bones about preaching hate and racism.

Of course there are moral lessons in the Bible, but these are nearly always ignored by modern preachers. They focus on raising money, increasing hate for gays and feeling holier than thou toward sinners particularly adulterers who have been unmasked.

Superstition

• That a black cat walking across your path will bring you bad luck.
• You must avoid the number 13.
• If you arrange to have many 8s in important numbers associated with you, you will become wealthy.
• If someone is sick, you can heal them by praying for them.
• God will answer any prayer asked by two or more people in Jesus’s name.
• If you had enough faith, you could fly. (LSD takers jumping off buildings surely had sufficient faith.)
• That you can erase the bad effects of some foolish action by killing an animal or by bringing suffering on yourself. The notion of sacrifice is central to Kristianity. They assert the absurd notion that Christ’s suffering on the cross was a good and necessary thing. This superstition grew out of the cave man habit of offering seeds, dead animals or virgin boys and girls to appease the gods. Forgiveness requires no further suffering.

  The problem with relying on sacrifice to right wrongs in that no one tells you when you have sacrificed enough goats.
  ~ Phil Laut

• Holy water will give you special protection.
• Sticking pins in a doll made to look like someone will cause them physical pain.
• A St. Christopher’s medal will protect you from harm when travelling.
• Mental illnesses are caused by unclean spirits.
• You can become wealthy by giving away large amounts of money.
• You can become wealthy by thinking wealth thoughts, without doing anything practical to earn the money.
• If the Pope touches you, good fortune is sure to follow.

What Are The Big Lies?

“On the perfection of Jesus:
Yes, Jesus masturbated, but he didn’t come.
~ N. Errantiste (born: 1897 died: 1911 at age: 14)

1. I have no idea if there is a God or not, but I do know that God pays no attention to prayer. Even when entire congregations pray for someone’s health it has no effect. This has been shown in various experiments, yet still the myth persists that God will somehow set aside the normal laws of the universe if you pray. There are spontaneous healings, but these happen just as often to people who are not prayed over. There may be a few people with the knack, but in general nothing happens.
2. “God is 100% reliable. You can count on God.” Given that prayer has no measurable effect, it would seem more truthful to say God is not amenable to human persuasion. If He exists, he clearly prefers not to intervene in the petty troubles of humans, or he has already decided what is best.
3. Christ predicted that the Kingdom of Heaven would come before his generation passed away. It did not.
4. Christ promised to answer any prayer made by two or more people gathered together in his name. Clearly almost none of those prayers are answered, yet still Kristians pretend these high sounding, but hollow, promises are Great Truths.
5. God has no particular fondness for Christians, or any other sect. They are killed just as often in earthquakes and floods as anyone else. They die slowly and painfully of cancer just like anyone else. They die in the same percentages in plane crashes as anyone else. Yet this foolish myth persists that God will specially protect Christians from all harm. That is a lie.
6. Some Fundamentalists claim the entire Bible is God’s direct word. It is so inaccurate, self contradictory, and incompetently written it could not possibly be. See my Noah essay for an elaboration of that argument.
7. Kristianity or any fundamentalist religion is an excuse to stop thinking. Any action can be excused as God’s will. For example, some Kristian cults will sexually molest children. Others aid and abet the murder of doctors who perform abortions. Kristians routinely torment homosexuals. Obviously not all Kristians are that badly behaved, but Kristianity still stops them from thinking clearly about the morality of what they are doing. The irony is nominal Christians are less likely to behave like Christ than anyone else.
8. Scientists who are Christian will lie to protect the Big Lie of Christianity. For example, consider Sir Fred Hoyle, the emminent astrophysicist who compared evolution creating higher organisms to the odds that a “tornado sweeping through a junkyard might assemble a Boeing 747”. He knew perfectly well his analogy was completely bogus. Natural selection is ruthless. It anything but random. Modern day scientist know that computers solve complex problems using genetic algorithms that alternate random mutations with non-random selection of the best mutations. It is a standard tool. It is the basis of agricultural science as well. Evolution works in nature. It works is the lab. Christian scientists deliberately mislead the public into misunderstanding how it works because they know in their hearts if the public knew the truth, they would discard the Christian fairy stories in favour of hard facts.
9. Kristians imagine themselves morally superior to everyone else. They are the exact opposite, even by Christ’s standard of measure. They are hypocrites who study the motes in the their brothers’ eyes. They are the most insufferable people on the planet next to the Muslim fundamentalists in their cloying self-righteousness. Look at the fruit of the modern Kristianity tree — Jerry Falwell, Fred Phelps of the Westboro Baptist Church, Hal Turner, the Pope disrupting the United Nations conference on population control, the endless scandals of the Canadian Mount Cashel Christian brothers sexually and physically abusing the children in their care, the white supremacist movement, the KKK, Robert Schuler and his opulent Crystal Cathedral, the crucifiers of Matthew Shepard, the phony faith healers Ernest Angley, Benny Hinn, Paul Lewis, Don Stewart (the guy who sells green prosperity prayer handkerchiefs redeemable for one genuine merkle from God) and Peter Popoff (the guy who sells plastic packets of merkle healing spring water, and fakes clairvoyant messages from God with an earpiece) and those holy warriors in Ireland and Yugoslavia. On the 700 Club Pat Robertson claimed he raised a dead person but in an interview he stated he couldn’t remember where or when. I think Christ would be furious if he saw how his teachings have been twisted. As Ilka Chase put it, “It is usually when men are at their most religious that they behave with the least sense and the greatest cruelty.” Search google to see what people have to say about these phonies.

   “In order that the happiness of the saints may be more delightful and that they may give to God more copious thanks for it, they are permitted perfectly to behold the sufferings of the damned… The saints will rejoice in the punishment of the damned.
   ~ St. Thomas Aquinas (born: 1225 died: 1274-03-07 at age: 49)

10. The Pope recently “updated” the medieval exorcism rituals. Even in this day, he still wants people to believe mental disorders are caused by unclean spirits. It is time to rid the world of superstition.
11. There is no evidence at all that Jesus rose from the dead. Even the Bible says that Jesus’s friends did not recognize the person claiming to be the risen Christ. There is no mention of any of his miracles in the historical records. It takes a great leap of gullibility to believe such stories with so little evidence. There is even serious doubt that the historic Jesus ever existed.
12. Kristianity is full of outright con men. The head of the Canadian Kristian TV Network, Dick Dewert, repeatedly claimed that God had mysteriously installed a new gold tooth in his mouth. Skeptics talked with his dentist, Jack Sherman, who said that the story was a crock. He had installed the gold tooth ten years earlier in a perfectly normal way. Kristians seem to have never heard of the proverb “Once bitten, twice shy.” Priests were caught faking weeping Virgin Mary statues. The Mother Theresa “miracle” of the photographs where there was not enough light turned out to be nothing more exotic than using a new high speed film. Even after the truth was revealed, believers such as Malcolm Muggeridge kept repeating the lie. Since the “miracles “ so frequently turn out to be fraud, it would seem that fraud should be the presumption until definitely shown otherwise. To her credit, after she died, Mother Theresa confessed she did not believe in all the Kristian miracle crap and had strong doubts that God existed.
13. Some Kristian sects say that you can contact the voice of God within. This voice will then be an utterly infallible source of truth on any matter, and will invariably counsel the wisest possible action. Did not the Son of Sam contact this voice and it told him to kill people? People are so willing to deceive themselves. They so wish the Deity would single them out for special conversation. Wishful thinking leads people to completely irrational acts. Psychotic Abraham just about murdered his son Isaac, imagining God had ordered him to do so in Genesis 22:10.
14. Kristianity causes terminal stupidity. Most Kristians cannot understand the difference between:
    1. Rejecting their particular sect of Kristianity.
    2. Rejecting the notion there is God.
    3. Rejecting Christ’s teachings.
    4. Rejecting morality.
15. Kristians believe God will protect the earth from harm, that we humans can tear down the forests, strip the topsoil, use the oceans as a toilet, and God will fix it for us if it finally breaks. God will not let us perish, even if we are foolish enough to have a nuclear war. If we don’t destroy it ourselves, God will soon do it. The imagine god as cosmic janitor.
16. Humans are God’s chosen species. Humans have a Nazi-superior-race right to lord it over all other species and use them for whatever purposes they choose. There are no negative consequences for any of this behaviour, even including complete extinction of other species.
17. Sid Roth broadcasts racist propaganda that Jews are the master race and God’s chosen people with special privilege. He aims this at Christians who are soft in the head. He uses God as a bogeyman to persuade Christians that Israel is incapable of error or wrongdoing, and that even questioning Israel or asking them to make peace with the Palestinians or their neighbours will bring divine retribution in the form of hurricanes.
18. I don’t like Kristians. Kristianity is clearly wrong and evil. I think their civil rights should be curtailed. Kristians should not be allowed to be teachers. All references to the existence of Kristians should be removed from literature available to children. Kristians should not be allowed to marry. Kristians should not be allowed near children, far less adopt them, since nearly all of them are child molesters. As a precaution, all children should be taken away from Kristian parents. An employer should be free to fire any employee he suspects of being a Kristian. Kristians should not be permitted to talk to any anyone under 21 about Kristianity. Kristians should be forced to do their disgusting Kristian things behind closed doors with no more than two people present. Kristians should be forced to look at surahs from the Qur’an in all public buildings. Kristian children should be forced every morning to chant the Lotus Sutra. Kristians should be forced to swear oaths on the Bagavad Gita in court. Oops. I got it backwards. You might erroneously think from the Christian principle of do unto others, that this is how the Kristians wanted us to treat them.
19. Kristians come across to me like carnival barkers or used car salesmen. They make extravagant claims in grandiose vague language and offer no evidence to back them up. Instead they say “just trust me…” Why would I trust someone who is so obviously preoccupied with conning me into giving him money “for God” then using it to buy himself a new car. Why would I trust someone with such a callous disregard for objective truth? If God existed and the Bible were truly his instruction book, everyone in their right mind would be eager for instruction. The Kristians constantly sweep under the rug that they have absolutely no evidence that the Bible is the word of God. They refuse to acknowledge the errors and inconsistences in the Bible, indicative of human rather than divine authorship. Like slimy politicians, they argue using the tactics of repeated assertion and feigned indignation at dissent. Without evidence, the bible deserves no more reverence than any other social rule book written by ancient men. However, what is most galling, is these Kristians who shamelessly lie and ignore evidence imagine themselves morally superior to everyone else.

Tenets of Kristianity

1. Thou shalt persecute homosexuals. This is the most holy, the prime belief.
2. Thou shalt spit upon the poor and take advantage of them. They are weak and deserve their fate.
3. Thou shalt take pride over all others in your exalted status, based on nothing more than your belief. You are beloved of God for no reason other than your belief.
4. Thou shalt persecute or ideally kill others who worship other gods or no gods since they are doomed anyway. You have every right to confiscate their property since they are non-persons.
5. Women are inferior beings and should take orders from men.
6. Be like God as described in the Old Testament — arbitrary, cruel and irrational.

Child Abuse

I debate religious issues with Kristians. Something very odd happens when you point out to one of these people how their beliefs are not only inconsistent with observed reality but inconsistent with each other. They act like stunned goldfish, gaping. Yet nothing sinks in. They come up with some totally irrelevant statement, usually a personal attack.

As children, their parents brainwashed them. No matter what evidence they receive to the contrary, the childhood fairy stories must be believed at all cost. Bertrand Russell talked about how it was almost impossible to rid oneself of irrational beliefs learned at “nursemaid’s knee”, even when intellectually you realise they are poppycock.

Children are defenseless against lies burned into them using terror and violence. Even if as adults they intellectually see that the ideas are likely false, they can’t discard them, because the child inside is still quaking in terror. Inculcating Kristianity with terror is a form of child abuse. It should be illegal.

“Cruel persecution and intolerance are not accidents, but grow out of the very essense of religion, namely, its absolute claims.
~ Morris Raphael Cohen (born: 1880-07-25 died: 1947-01-28 at age: 66)

Kristians are so pleasure-denying and controlling with themselves, no wonder they are so mean spirited with others. Attorney General Ashcroft refused to dance on religious grounds. He even had clothes made for government statues to make sure no one might feel a twinge of sexual pleasure contemplating their beauty. Kristians punish and guilt trip children over masturbation, about as harmless an activity as there ever was. They want to impose the normal behaviour for burned-out octogenarians on everyone.

Creationism

“Creation science has not entered the curriculum for a reason so simple and so basic that we often forget to mention it: because it is false, and because good teachers understand exactly why it is false. What could be more destructive of that most fragile yet most precious commodity in our entire intellectual heritage — good teaching — than a bill forcing honorable teachers to sully their sacred trust by granting equal treatment to a doctrine not only known to be false, but calculated to undermine any general understanding of science as an enterprise?
~ Dr. Stephen Jay Gould (born: 1941-09-10 died: 2002-05-02 at age: 60)

“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 (born: 1483-11-10 died: 1546-02-18 at age: 62)

Fundamentalist Kristians, including Republican house leader Tom Delay, want the Genesis Noah story taught to all school children, not in anthropology class studying the creation myths of various cultures, but as a scientific theory on par with evolution. The story is so obviously false it has no standing as a scientific theory. Oddly they don’t want any mention of the creation myths of any other religion but Kristianity. So much for separation of church and state.

“Is it not better to place a question mark upon a problem while seeking an answer than to put the label God there and consider the matter closed?
~ Joseph Lewis (born: 1889-06-11 died: 1968 at age: 78)

Kristianity appears to behave like a virus that gradually erodes the mind’s ability to reason. It is most apparent when you study cases of advanced Kristianity such as creationists and inerrantists. You can see examples of their crazed thinking in some of the emails they sent me.

The Interrantists tell me outlandish things they believe counter to common sense and observation. I ask “why do you believe this?” They respond, “because it is in the Bible”. Yet they seem to have no problem when I remind them that the Bible was written by ordinary, fallible men. They agree that what went into the Bible was also decided by ordinary fallible men. It does not phase them that these men derived their “knowledge” from visions, dreams and hallucinations. Today, we have very little trust in people who have visions. In fact we usually send such people off for psychiatric treatment. What makes the ravings of today’s lunatics irrelevant yet the ravings of yesterday’s lunatics 100% truth? They trust the Bible because they believe it is the word of God, failing to notice they have no evidence whatsoever that it is. There is nothing special about the Bible to justify so grandiose a claim. Surely God could compose a document more internally consistent with itself and consistent with reality. As holy books go, the Bible is one of the least accurate. Yet Mom told them it was God’s only word, and that is enough. If I point his out, they will quote a verse in the Bible claiming to be God’s word, foolishly thinking they have provided evidence. All holy books do this, and that still does not make them God’s word. They refuse to see this. They start from the postulate the Bible is God’s holy word. They take that as self-evident, where anyone not raised in the faith takes it is as absurd.

Freedom of Religion

Consider the myriad ways that Kristians flagrantly violate this. The US Congress has passed a clearly unconstitutional law making it mandatory to display the Christian Ten commandments in schools and public buildings. Here are nine reasons why we should not do that.

In court proceedings you are expected to swear an oath to the Christian God on the Christian Bible. Kristians utterly refuse to see this as pushing their religion down others’ throats. They see it as combating evil. They claim that Kristianity should enjoy a special historically privileged position. What if the tables were turned and everyone were expected to swear allegiance to Allah on the Qur’an?

“The United States is not a Christian nation any more than it is a Jewish or a Mohammedan nation.
~ John Adams (born: 1735-10-30 died: 1826-07-04 at age: 90) in the Treaty of Tripoli (1797)

In Canada, MP Svend Robinson was demoted to the backbenches for tabling a petition by the Humanist Association of Canada that suggested that the nugatory references to the supremacy of the Christian God over the Canadian constitution be removed. He did not even sign the petition himself. Kristians demanded that the democratic right to petition the government, dating back to the Magna Carta, be abrogated.

Kristians routinely slander the Wiccan religion as witchcraft or Satanic worship. Further, they demand that all practitioners be drummed out of the armed forces. Kristians believe in freedom of religion, but only so long as it is Baptist or Pentacostal.

“The greatest tragedy in mankind’s entire history may be the hijacking of morality by religion.
~ Arthur C. Clarke (born: 1917-12-16 died: 2008-03-19 at age: 90)

Kristians routinely slander any form of atheism, such as Buddhism. They claim only those who believe in Jesus Christ and the sky god Jehovah could possibly have any moral values. If the behaviour of televangelists is any barometer of Christian moral values, Kristianity does not rank high on any scale but hypocrisy.

Babies and Bathwater

On the other hand it is not hard to find villains who rejected all manner of religion. Stalin springs to mind. Would he have been any gentler if fueled by Christian ardour?

Without Kristianity, you can still be your brother’s keeper. You can still ask yourself, “How should I act so that this works out best for all concerned?” You can still work to treat the Samaritans of your society as equals. You can dedicate your life to help those who need it most. You can still work for ruthless inner and outer honesty. You just don’t need to feed yourself lies about why you are doing it or about the supernatural magic protection you will enjoy while you do it.

Oh my Lord, if I worship Thee from fear of Hell, send me there;
Oh my Lord, if I worship Thee from desire for Paradise, exclude me thence;
But if I worship Thee for Thine Own sake, hide not from me Thine Eternal Beauty.
~ Rabi’a al-Adawiyya (born: 717 AD died: 801 AD at age: 84)

A female Sufi saint, Rabi’a, argued that if you do God’s will for thought of reward or for fear of punishment, you deserve damnation. Only if you do it for God’s sake is your work pure. In an odd sense then, the atheist who behaves well without thought of supernatural punishment or reward should be purer in God’s eyes than some silly toady who believed the superstitious hellfire/heaven stories.

The real God, if He exists, surely is not as sickenly foolish, petty, vain and hokey as portrayed by Kristianity. Consider instead becoming a servant of the real God or becoming a servant of mankind, the planet or the universe — something with a firm foundation. You do this because it is the right thing to do, not because you are motivated by a promise of a disproportionate reward. Even pigs will work for rewards.

The universe itself is a miracle, — the most direct possible message from the creator. If you want to know the Truth, study it, not just the works of man. Kristians are like people would rather read the Clif Notes version of Macbeth than view an original performance.

How To Rid The World of Christian Superstition

Minds great as Voltaire have taken a stab at discouraging Kristianity with less than stellar results. However, Kristianity has seen a remarkable decline in Canada and Europe. Since truth is on the side of atheism, and since the Internet has provided a means to sneak new ideas past the defences of the Kristian censors, and to seed them all over the planet, there are many new opportunities for deprogramming Kristians. The USA is still a major holdout. What can you to do help eliminate it?

• Fight any attempts to force Christian school prayer in schools.
• Lobby for teaching all the world major religions in anthropology class. Students will learn they are not the only ones convinced they have an exclusive magic handle on the truth.
• Fight teaching creationism in science classes. It should be taught in anthropology class along with the creation myths of other cultures.
• Don’t show false reverence for Kristianity. Try to treat it with the same respect you would have for astrology or 900 psychic numbers. Refer to it as “Kristian superstition”.
• Don’t concede that the Kristians have an exclusive handle on God. Refer to the “Kristian God” or the “Sky God”. The Kristian view of God is warped. Don’t insult the real God by confusing the true attributes of God with the Kristian caricature.
• Let Kristians know when they spout nonsense. Most are under the delusion nearly everyone finds them coherent, agrees with them, and respects them. They are used to looking down their noses at everyone else. Put them on the defensive for a change.
• Make it clear you do not condone violence against Kristians or any denial of their civil rights. They deserve the same compassion as any other delusional person. Encourage them to live the values Jesus professed such as the Golden Rule or being their brother’s keeper. Realise there are good Christians and sound parts of the Bible. Your complaint is with the superstition, the hate and the ecologically irresponsible parts of the Bible. Reassure them you do not consider Kristianity responsible for all or even most of the evil in the world. You would never guess I too hold that view, reading the rest of this essay. :-)
• If anyone seriously swallows the Kristian myth of life after death, they can kill people imagining they have done nothing serious, just sent them to heaven early. Fanatical Muslims are so convinced of a similar lie they happily kill both themselves and others in suicide attacks. The Inquisition happily tortured heretics thinking inflicting any amount of earthly pain was justified in hopes of eternal post-mortem reward. Seed doubt.
• Lobby to gradually phase out the various special income and property tax breaks for churches. They should get the same breaks as the equivalent secular institutions.

  In 1850, I believe, the church property in the United States, which paid no tax, amounted to $87 million. In 1900, without a check, it is safe to say, this property will reach a sum exceeding $3 billion. I would suggest the taxation of all property equally.
  ~ Ulysses S. Grant (born: 1822-04-27 died: 1885-07-23 at age: 63)

  The state subsidy for superstition today must be staggering. It is unconstitutional. It is treating those who subscribe to a religion preferentially.
• Lobby for truth in advertising. TV Evangelists make all kinds of unsubstantiated claims on TV. The TV psychics are forced to announce they are for entertainment only. Why do we let the Kristians get away with similar lies?
• Ask Kristians to remove the phrases in Leviticus that call for killing gay people and others. If they don’t really mean them, they should remove them from the standard distributed Biblical texts, keeping them perhaps in a footnote or in special scholarly editions. Jesus repudiated the Old Testament. Why do modern Kristians hold onto to the selected parts of it that give them a license to hate? We charge other hate groups for distributing hate literature. Why should Kristians be immune, just because they have got away with it for so long?
• If you are a Kristian yourself, expose yourself deeply to other religions and ruthlessly examine your own beliefs. Discard those that are merely comfortable, but without firm foundation.

“Jesus made a special point of discouraging the laying of emphasis on outer observances, and, indeed upon hard-and-fast rules and regulations of every kind. What he insisted upon was a certain spirit in one’s conduct, knowing that when the spirit is right, the details will take care of themselves. Yet, in spite of this, the history of orthodox Christianity is largely made up of attempts to enforce all sorts of external observances on people.
~ Emmet Fox (born: 1886-07-30 died: 1951-08-13 at age: 65) American evangelist.

The Murder

Matvey Terekhov lived in Russia with his cousin Yakov, who ran an inn. Matvey was once extremely religious and ascetic, but left asceticism behind. Yakov, on the other hand, was obsessively religious. During Lent they both fasted eating nothing but boiled potatoes. Yakov discovered that Matvey was secretly pouring some oil on his potatoes. Yakov was horrified. Yakov was overcome with anger and Aglaya, Yakov’s wife, hit Matvey over the head with a bottle, and killed him.

That is a great metaphor for what goes wrong when you base your life on endless petty thou-shalt-nots. You lose your sense of proportion. This story applies even more to Muslims that Kristians. They are driven nuts by fear of eternal roasting for violating trivial rules.

Is it OK To Be Polite to Kristians?

All three groups to this day attempt to suppress the civil rights of non-cult members. Historically all three groups have ritually murdered non-cult members.

Is it right to treat Nazi views with polite respect? Is it right to treat KKK views with polite respect? Is it right to treat Kristian views with polite respect? Do you have a moral duty to show at least some disrespect? Is showing respect just cowardly? Are you obligated to humour a fruitcake who insists Santa Claus is real, that alien beings live in his attic, that blacks or gays are inferior, that the earth is flat, especially when he can offer no evidence to support these outlandish claims? It would be preposterous to “respect” such nutty beliefs. They are garbage and deserve to be treated as garbage.

On the other hand, though spitting in a Nazi’s face might make abundantly clear what you think of his fruitcake superiority notions, it is unlikely to result in instantaneous conversion to some more benign life philosophy. Deeply satisfying as it may be, there probably exist more effective measures for persuasion.

Is Religious Tolerance A Good Thing™?

There are four parts to Kristianity.

1. the mumbo jumbo outrageous unsubstantiated claims, e.g. God will answer prayer, God will not allow the ecosystems of earth to collapse.
2. the erroneous science, e.g. creationism
3. the anti-gay attitudes.
4. the philosophy that you are your brother’s keeper.

It comes down to this, should you defend someone’s right to lie and make false claims? Do people have an inalienable right to spout whatever nonsense they please and expect all polite people to quietly let it pass unchallenged, just because it is a sacred cow labelled “faith”?

There is so much friction between religions, you might say yes. Just shut up and don’t make trouble. But perhaps the better approach is to challenge all these nutty religious beliefs. The friction exists because of the untruth in the various religions. If they were stripped bare to their true essentials, the conflicts would disappear.

If people bring up faith-based ideas in public, they had better be prepared to back them up and be challenged, just as they would if they made statements about global warming. Why should religious beliefs be protected from scrutiny the way other erroneous beliefs are not?

I am not suggesting putting all Kristians in jail, removing their civil rights the way they want done to gays, violence, cruelty or desecrating their churches. I simply suggest challenging Kristian lies or unsubstantiated claims any time they bring them up rather than letting them politely pass, feigning agreement. Treat their claims the same objectivity you would treat someone proclaiming the risen Elvis or that aliens were giving him stock market tips.

Further skeptics should counter any evangelistic activities by demanding equal time for rebuttal. Gradually we should make it illegal to advertise a religion/ministry with unsubstantiated promises, using the exact same truth in advertising law you use to counter unsubstantiated claims about any other product for sale on TV.

Hypocrisy

I distrust those people who know so well what God wants them to do, because I notice it always coincides with their own desires.
~ Susan B. Anthony (born: 1820-02-15 died: 1906-03-13 at age: 86), 1896

In Matthew 5:29 Jesus counsels cutting off your hand or plucking your eye should it offend you. Alex Kolansky, a Canadian eccentric, on reading this verse cut off his own hand. His hand had offended him by masturbating him. Nearly all Kristians would consider Kolansky deranged.

In Matthew 5:40 Jesus counsels giving your cloak to someone who takes your coat. What modern Christian would help a burglar load up the van with his possessions, or lend money to anyone who asked? That is clearly impractical.

Jesus was crazy as a loon. Anyone behaving as he did today, would be quickly diagnosed as psychotic. Yet Kristians insist on claiming he was sane while simultaneously ignoring him as a nutcase who did not mean what he said.

Other Religions

• Alcoholics Anonymous.
• Animism.
• Anti Baptist.
• Atheist.org.
• Australian Aborigine.
• Bahai.
• Baptist.
• Buddhism.
• Catholicism
• Christianity.
• Christian Identity.
• CCism.
• Confucianism.
• A Course In Miracles.
• Druidism.
• Ancient Egyptian.
• Eckankar
• Easter Bunny, another children’s training religion. A large rabbit hides coloured candy eggs in abundance for children to find. The rabbit carries these in a basket. The rabbit makes chocolate body castings of itself to distribute as well, sort of toy Eucharist. This breaks the kids in gently to the revolting ritual cannibalism of bloody flesh required of adults. Easter is the sugar festival to balance the dark side the force sugar festival on Halloween, when strangers are strenuously encouraged to give candy to children, under threat of vandalism, aka trick or treat. The eggs appear whether or not one is naughty or nice, so the Easter Bunny is not nearly as terrifying to children as Santa Claus. The funniest thing about Christians is their religion has even less evidence to support it than the Easter Bunny’s, but they don’t seem to notice just how preposterous their religion is. Kristianity does not seem utterly potty and absurd only from lifelong familiarity.
• The Family Federation For Cosmic Peace and Unification and the Cosmic Era of Blessed Family: aka unification church, aka the Moonies.
• Emissaries of the Divine Light.
• Female circumcision.
• Ferengiism. The belief that you must do whatever makes you the most money no matter what the short or long term consequences to yourself or others. It is the state corporate religion.
• Ancient Greek.
• The Green Man.
• Hawaiian.
• Heaven’s Gate.
• Hinduism.
• Islam.
• Jainism.
• Judaism.
• Landmark Forum née EST.
• Landover Baptist Church fundamentalist raving lunatics, and they are proud of it.
• Lifespring.
• Living Love.
• Church of the Latter Day Saints (Mormonism).
• Muggletonians (flat earthers).
• Native American.
• Natranism.
• Naziism.
• Ancient Norse.
• Pastafarians.
• The People’s Temple.
• Ramtha’s School of Enlightenment.
• Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence.
• Rastafarianism.
• Ancient Roman.
• Sahaja Yoga.
• Sai Baba.
• Santaism. The belief that a fat old man sneaks into children’s rooms at night, by slithering down narrow chimneys, to fill their stockings with goodies. He lives at the north pole. He has a reindeer sled. Santa Claus is a children’s training religion. Its purpose is to control the behaviour of children with supernatural bribery, and to soften them up for the even less plausible adult religion. The parents help foster the Santa illusion by actually providing the goodies. In the follow-on adult religion, Christianity, you don’t get any goodies at all, at least not till you die. Advertisers foster the notion of a very generous Santa in an attempt to arm twist parents into spending for elaborate gifts to make the child feel accepted by Santa. Guns, gun games and artificial guns the most common and desired gifts, now surpassing the perennial favourite, the pony. Most North Americans outgrow this religion at some point in childhood, with a quite painful period of disillusionment, (both about Santa not being real, and being lied and tricked by everyone) though nearly all adults believe in the religion enough to instill in to their own children.

  futilty of prayer

  It could be considered like hazing, an inter-generational cruelty or practical joke. Or it could be excused as performing bit of stage magic, that appears real in order to create an experience of bafflement and wonder. Santa reputedly has spies that watch children 24/7, called elves. When I was immersed in the Santa religion I made a top to bottom search in all possible hiding places in the house for these little traitors. I can still remember looking for them in the blinds. I strongly resented them watching me. I found both Santa Claus and clowns terrifying creatures, and I resented the way the Shriner clowns would persist in engaging me with their psychotic gestures even when it was obvious they made me extremely uncomfortable.
• Scientology.
• Shintoism.
• Sikhism.
• Taoism.
• Tibetan Buddhism.
• Transcendental Meditation.
• Unitarian Universalist Association.
• Virtual Church of The Blind Chihuahua.
• Voudou.
• Westboro Baptist Church: homophobia².
• White Supremacy
• Wicca

Why Believe?

Another computer noted that humans nearly always take on the beliefs of their parents. Another chimed in that humans take great care to shield their young from even knowing of the existence of competing religions and philosophies, and teach their young that it is exceedingly wicked and even dangerous to even investigate them. This is the main mechanism for persistence through the generations. Another computer noted that humans will super-revere some object or book. Over the generations the degree of reverence builds and builds. It becomes almost unthinkable to reject it, even though it has relatively little objective merit.

Another noted that the religion with the scariest story wins out, e.g. Christianity is scarier than Buddhism, and Islam is scarier than Christianity. Another pointed out that the religion with the juiciest heaven promise wins out, e.g. Buddhism offers yet another life slightly better than this one. Christianity offers freedom from toil. Islam offers both male and female houris to have sex with. Humans don’t choose a religion based on likelihood of truth, but to avoid the worst case punishment.

Yet another computer mused what would happen when humans made contact with missionaries from another part of the galaxy, with a high tech religion complete with holodecks to terrify the living daylights out of potential converts. How long would it take to wipe out all the earth religions? One possible defense would be to create a heaven on earth better than any promised in any of the religions. Another possible defense would be to educate people to select religions based on merit, probable truth and utility, not just on how terrifying the threats and promises. People should be encouraged to try various religions and philosophies out for a while before committing to them.

Your Brother’s Keeper

Every time a man changes jobs, it gives the insurance companies a chance to refuse insurance in case he has health problems. So many people go without medical care. It is a disgrace that the USA is so far down on the list of countries in terms of longevity, infant mortality and adequate medical care, and all because of greed.

Nobody seems to notice the unfairness of American workers earning $20.00 USD an hour where people in China doing the same work earn only $0.06 USD . We base all our decisions on economics. We do whatever makes the most money, especially in corporate decisions which have the biggest global impact. This leads us to rape the environment, and use our upper hand to push the poor in other countries even deeper into poverty. Trusting economics as the sole method of making decisions leads to insane behaviour.

Modern Kristianity never speaks out on these gross injustices. In South America it even encourages the oppressed to accept their oppression. It cozily co-exists with consumerism, accepting pledges by MasterCard.

Chickens are tortured by wiring their feet to the bottoms of their cages. We eat the eggs produced this way rather than free range eggs because they are a dollar cheaper. What kind of person are you that you want animals tortured to save you a buck? Have you ever heard a Kristian sermon on your moral duty to be kind other species?

Kristianity gives unction to people’s consciences. They can sleep walk through life imagining they are leading a virtuous life, where in actuality they are indirectly hurting animals, starving people in the third world, and raping the environment.

A churchman in a recent letter to the editor made the point that Christians have no real responsibility to seek ways to alleviate poverty. All that is required of us is to practice a little charity as we have opportunity. Is that what Jesus taught: just a little pocket change when we feel the urge?

The Kristian church is irrelevant to this age. All it can see are the sins and superstitions that were important to people 5000 years ago.

Ask Dr. Laura

Dear Dr. Laura

Thank you for doing so much to educate people regarding God’s law. When someone tries to defend the homosexual lifestyle, for example, I simply remind him that Leviticus 18:22 clearly states it to be an abomination. End of debate. I do need some advice from you, however, regarding some of the specific laws and how to best follow them.

When I burn a bull on the altar as a sacrifice, I know it creates a pleasing odor for the Lord (Leviticus 1:9). The problem is my neighbors. They claim the odor is not pleasing to them. How should I deal with this?

I would like to sell my daughter into slavery, as it suggests in Exodus 21:7. In this day and age, what do you think would be a fair price for her? I also know that I am allowed no contact with a woman while she is in her period of menstrual uncleanliness (Leviticus 15:19-24). The problem is, how do I tell? I have tried asking, but most women take offense.

Now I have a neighbor who insists on working on the Sabbath.Exodus 35:2 clearly states he should be put to death. Am I morally obligated to kill him myself? Then,Exodus 25:44 states that I may buy slaves from the nations that are around us. A friend of mine claims that this applies to Mexicans but not Canadians. Can you clarify?

A friend of mine also feels that even though eating shellfish is an abomination (Leviticus 11:10.), it is a lesser abomination than homosexuality. I don’t agree. Can you settle this? And Leviticus 22:22 states that I may not approach the altar of God if I have a defect in my sight. I have to admit that I wear reading glasses. Does my vision have to be 20/20, or is there some wiggle room here?

I know you have studied these things extensively, so I am confident you can help. Thank you again for reminding us that God’s word is eternal and unchanging.

The Counter Argument

“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 (born: 1483-11-10 died: 1546-02-18 at age: 62)

Is it necessary for the people to believe a lie to behave properly? Do they have to believe in some eternal torment? It does not work. Since the choice is binary, eternal bliss or eternal torment, there is no incentive to be better than average or to refrain from further sin once you have gone over the line, even if you do believe the con. If you believe in priestly magic to forgive sin, what incentive is there to refrain from sin other than the embarrassment of confession? It is building society on sand. A lie is not a firm foundation. Sooner or later the deception will out. It would be better to teach people to behave for reasons that make sense, that won’t fall apart under dissection. If you are going to tell a lie, it would be better to tell one closer to the truth, the law of karma, which in fact roughly applies to a single lifetime, and which gives incentive to avoid ever deeper sin and to aspire to ever higher virtue.

In my essay on euthanasia I tell the story of being present at David Lewis’s suicide. David was very frightened about his impending death. I told him all the after death myths I knew of, every culture, even ancient Egyptian. This seemed to calm him. When a child’s dog dies, it seem natural to reassure him that the dog is not really dead, but has moved on to some wonderful dog heaven, where he will soon be reunited. These are beautiful lies, but lies none the less. Perhaps reality is too difficult for humans to make it through unaided without a crutch of lies and wishful speculation. However, this still does not make the stories true.

There are obviously many strange things in this universe that are undreampt in our philosophy and science. I have written about some of my own baffling experiences. Among the most interesting are out of body experiences and near death experiences. Yet these experiences typically do not correspond with official Kristian dogma. Yet, on the other hand, they are influenced by religious beliefs. They do not confirm any particular dogma. They merely show how much we have yet to learn.

Racism

Antienvironmentalism

1. The leaders of the religious right have sold the childlike religious right the nutty idea that people who support the environment are literal tree worshippers, one step from devil worshippers. They refer to environmentalism as a modern idolatry. The cynically use the fear of non-Christian religions to whip the flock into line with the corporate agenda. Even the respectable Wall Street Journal fed the hysteria with a 1993 editorial that stated environmentalists promoted “a pagan fanaticism that now worships such Gods as Nature with a reverence formerly accorded real religions.”
2. Corporations have successfully fed the gullible religious right, along with everyone else, that it is safe to trash the environment, and that anyone who thinks otherwise is a kook who wants to live in the stone age.
3. The religious right believe there is no need to protect the environment because Jesus is coming soon and will restore it all.
4. The religious right believe that destroying the environment and causing Armageddon will pressure Jesus to show up earlier than he otherwise would.
5. In 1992 the Wise Use Movement declared that environmentalism was “the new paganism”. The movement reported that “trees are worshipped and humans sacrificed at its altar. It is evil. An we intend to destroy it.” This is as nutty as the stories about Jews boiling babies.

I find it ironic that conservative Christians insist that the story of Noah is literally true. In that story, God clearly wants every last one of his species to persist. Yet they voted for George Bush whose environmental policies are making species go extinct faster than at any time since the end of the dinosaurs.

“A left-wing cult dedicated to bringing down the type of government I believe in.
~ James Gaius Watt (born: 1938-01-31 age: 71), Secretary of the Interior, describing environmentalists

“A tree’s a tree. How many more do you need to look at?
~ Ronald Reagan (born: 1911-02-06 died: 2004-06-05 at age: 93)

“I do not know how many future generations we can count of before the Lord returns.
~ James Gaius Watt (born: 1938-01-31 age: 71), Secretary of the Interior, 1981-02-05

“We have every kind of mix you can have. I have a black, I have a woman, two Jews and a cripple.
~ James Gaius Watt (born: 1938-01-31 age: 71), Secretary of the Interior, 1983-09-21

“If the troubles from environmentalists cannot be solved by the jury box or at the ballot box, perhaps the cartridge box should be used.
~ James Gaius Watt (born: 1938-01-31 age: 71), Secretary of the Interior

“There will never be peace until God’s house and God’s people are given their rightful place of leadership at the top of the world. How can there be peace when drunkards, drug dealers, communists, atheists, New Age worshipers of Satan, secular humanists, oppressive dictators, greedy money changers, revolutionary assassins, adulterers, and homosexuals are on top…there is absolutely no way that government can operate successfully unless led by godly men and women operating under the laws of the God of Jacob.
~ Pat Robertson (born: 1930-03-22 age: 79) in his 1991 book The New World Order.

“You say you’re supposed to be nice to the Episcopalians and the Presbyterians and the Methodists and this, that, and the other thing. Nonsense. I don’t have to be nice to the spirit of the Antichrist. I can love the people who hold false opinions but I don’t have to be nice to them.
~ Pat Robertson (born: 1930-03-22 age: 79)

“The strategy against the American radical left should be the same as General Douglas MacArthur employed against the Japanese in the Pacific… bypass their strongholds, then surround them, isolate them bombard them, then blast the individuals out of their power bunkers with hand-to-hand combat. The battle for Iwo Jima was not pleasant, but our troops won it. The battle to regain the soul of America won’t be pleasant either, but we will win it.
~ Pat Robertson (born: 1930-03-22 age: 79), Pat Robertson’s Perspective, 1992-04

“Environmental policies are driven by a kind of emotional spiritualism that threatens the very foundation of our society. There is increasing evidence of a government-sponsored religion in America. This religion, a cloudy mixture of new-age mysticism, Native American folklore, and primitive Earth worship, is being promoted and enforced by the Clinton administration in violation of our rights and freedoms.
~ Helen Chenoweth-Hage (born: 1938-01-27 died: 2006-10-02 at age: 68) rep, R-Idaho, testifying to congress about her delusions. She had such a sectarian view of the world, that she can only grasp science in terms of warring cults.

“And the nations were angry, and thy wrath is come, and the time of the dead, that they should be judged, and that thou shouldest give reward unto thy servants the prophets, and to the saints, and them that fear thy name, small and great; and shouldest destroy them which destroy the earth.
~ Revelation 11:18 warning the Robertsons that God will destroy them for destroying the earth.

Fundamentalist Logic

Similarly, fundamentalists have no compunction about lying. Since they know the end is just, it is fine to use crooked means, e.g. to present a straw man argument to discredit evolution.

Like primitive man, they believe God micromanages the universe. If there appears to be a pattern, that is just God’s whim. There is no need for anything to make any sense at all. Contradiction in their beliefs does not bother them. They are quite happy to believe contradictions. Mathematicians and scientists, on the other become very uncomfortable when they discover a contradiction in their beliefs. They immediately assume they must have made an error. Fundamentalists have no such trouble. They simply assume they don’t fully understand the mystery. A contradiction is just another miracle to give praise for.

Fundamentalists claim that the Bible is inerrant, and that they follow every sentence of it to the letter. You can point out all kinds of sentences they clearly violate, and but they will never acknowledge they are doing that no matter how plain the violation, e.g. their failure to keep a perpetual fire burning in their altars. What they truly recognize as the authority is not the bible, but what their church tells them. They are obedient to authority and they see this as a virtue. It does not bother them that their own reading of the bible contradicts with authority. Authority knows better than they do. If common sense conflicts with authority, their own common sense must be wrong. They had it beaten out of them as children to trust “their lying eyes” or to dare question authority no matter how absurd its assertions.

The end result is fundamentalists will happily support a government that murders, steals, lies, rapes, takes from the poor to give to the rich, embezzles, deluding themselves they are doing this all for Jaysus in accordance with his explicit wishes. They trust authority more than they trust themselves.

You might counter that science too has statements that violate common sense, especially in quantum mechanics. But what the scientists are saying is that things work quite differently on the very small scale than they do on the ordinary scale. Common sense on the small scale needs to be conditioned by watching how things really behave on the small scale. There are no logical inconsistencies, just peculiarities. Science insists on revising itself to fit the observed facts. Fundamentalism does not care about facts. They are as irrelevant as dreams. Truth (with a capital T) is what religious authority asserts. Truth, in the fundamentalist view, has nothing whatsoever to do with how things actually happen in the real world. Facts are a distraction.

Mathematicians are happy to argue about either universes where there is only one parallel line possible through given point or universes where there are an infinite number. But in each, the rules are consistent. But unlike fundamentalist logic, in mathematics, there are no contradictions permitted within the scheme of assumptions.

So how then could you ever crack a fundamentalist out of his delusional world view? It won’t be by logic. I have heard only one case where that ever happened. It will be through powerful emotion, perhaps by seeing, for example, that “God” abandoned him or treated him or treated someone he loves completely unfairly. It won’t dawn on him until this hits him personally. Seeing the obvious general suffering of the third world population won’t do it. It might come eventually by showing people the awesome experience called the “presence of god” can be turned on an off with a switch attached to an electrode stimulating the “god spot” in the brain.

Finding a practical solution to this problem of freeing fundamentalist from their delusions is becoming more and more crucial. Fundamentalists are becoming ever more numerous and politically powerful, and their delusions vigorously propel prejudice, war and environmental destruction.

TV Evangelist Gerald Flurry tells his flock that all biblical scholars are under control of the devil and that one should resolve all questions of scripture without consulting experts of any kind, considering only the King James version of the bible. Flurry reminds me of the hick who said of the King James bible, “If it was good enuf fer Jaysus, its good enuf fer me.”

Fundamentalists infect others with their delusions using brainwashing techniques. Perhaps it is time to fight fire with fire.

Revulsion

If religions were paintings, Kristianity would be smoking dogs on black velvet. If religions were tableware, Kristianity would be Melmac. If religions were forms of entertainment, Kristianity would be Elvis impersonation. If religions were styles of home decoration, Kristianity would be kitsch. If religions were songs, Kristianity would be Billy Ray Cyrus’s Achy Breaky Heart. If religions were hairstyles, Kristianity would be Ernest Angley’s toupee. Kristianity is the epitome of tacky insincerity.

Sacrifice

Christians are encouraged to imagine they are causing Jesus pain by unloading their guilt and sin onto him. Even though it is a purely mental processes, it still teaches sadism, cruelty even to loved ones and shifting the blame to others.

Source

Consider being an anthropologist who studied a tribe that solemnly told you that:

• In the time of the ancestors, a man was born to a virgin mother with no biological father being involved.
• The same fatherless man called out to a friend called Lazarus, who had been dead long enough to stink, and Lazarus promptly came back to life.
• The fatherless man himself came alive after being dead and buried three days.
• Forty days later the fatherless man went up to the top of a hill then disappeared bodily into the sky.
• If you murmur thoughts privately in your head, the fatherless man, and his 'father' (who is also himself) will hear your thoughts and may act upon them. He is simultaneously able to hear the thoughts of everybody in the world.
• If you do something bad, or something good, the same fatherless man sees all, even if nobody else does. You may be rewarded or punished accordingly, including after your death.
• The fatherless man’s mother never died but 'ascended' bodily into heaven.
• Bread and wine, if blessed by a priest (who must have testicles) 'become' the body and blood of the fatherless man. [Cannibalism of this bloody mess is a Good Thing™].

What would an objective anthropologist, coming fresh to this set of beliefs while on fieldwork in Cambridge [England], make of them?
~ Dr. Richard Dawkins (born: 1941-03-26 age: 68), The God Delusion page 179

My Least Favourite Christians

1. George W. Bush: biggest phony of them all.

2. Peter Popoff

   Peter Popoff: still conning even after getting caught red handed using stage magic.
3. Benny Hinn: a local boy. Sucks more money out of the rubes than anyone else with his phony faith healing. A Canadian who pretends to be an American Republican.

4. Ralph Reed

   Ralph Reed: smarmy executive director of the Christian Coalition who was ruined by the Jack Abramoff bribery scandal. This guy was not only into personal corruption and greed, he conned millions well-meaning people into donating in the name of Jesus to candidates who promote war, poverty, pollution, global warming and bigotry not to mention abandoning those with AIDS in Africa.
5. Dr. Karl Coke is the most deceitful Christian on TV. He masquerades as a scientist then tells lie after lie about science. He claims for example that hypothesis is just another word for faith, and that the trust science has in it theories is just as baseless, arbitrary and fully equivalent to the faith Christian have in their dogma. He babbles on about dark matter when in actuality he has only a child’s understanding, imagining it is some sort of heavenly tithe.
6. Jerry Falwell, thankfully now dead from gluttony.
7. Pat Robertson, a wolf in sheep’s clothing.
8. Mike Huckabee, fundamentalist preacher and Republican presidential candidate who has an understanding of science that would shame a second grader.

9. Judah Smith

   Judah Smith: preys on children, teens and the college age. This makes him more harmful than those who prey on the already indoctrinated. He is fairly young himself. He has the cadences of the hypnotic inductions down pat.
10. Ted Haggard: the ultimate hypocrite, preaches gay discrimination while getting boinked weekly by a male prostitute enhancing the thrill with crystal meth.
11. Joyce Meyer: her voice sounds like a metal shredder. I’m astounded anyone can tolerate listening to her.
12. Jack & Rexela Van Impe: the “and bats will fly out your ass” end of times folks. He looks at the day’s headlines then finds some torturous explanation of how the bible predicted them. He never predicts tomorrow’s headlines of course; it is always after-the-fact justifications. This goofus could find proof of a Kennedy assassination plot in Dr. Seuss.

13. James Robison

    James Robison: folksy image, feigns ignorance to suck others into foolishness. He shows the same tape of a children in Africa over and over to milk people of compassion of their dollars. If he were actually doing something, surely there would be more than one tape and he might have at least one tape of the contributed dollars at work.

14. Fred Phelps, homophobic Christian

    Fred Phelps: paranoid about homosexuals, more deranged than evil. He has such a bee in his bonnet, he is probably fighting some very improper urges personally.
15. Ernest Angley: performer of phony “merkles” for money. When Robin Williams does his preacher schtick, he is aping Angley.
16. The endless list of Republican criminals who hide behind the cloak of Christian respectability and so called “family values” — code for anti-gay bigotry. Try googling Republican preacher and all you find are pedophiles and convicted criminals.

17. Kenneth Copeland

    Kenneth Copeland: he pretends to be retarded, feigning excitement over the mundane, using dramatic pauses, and shouting even to ask someone to pass the salt. He makes William Shatner look restrained. His saving grace is he often has guests who give sound advice on preserving good health.
18. Bishop Van Johnson: enormously overweight, Regina-based phony faith healer.
19. Billye Brim: another chainsaw-voiced preacher.
20. Morris Cerullo: aka Maurice Cerullo, grossly overweight phony faith healer.
21. Creflo Dollar: the old con — tithe to me and God will reward you a hundredfold.
22. Jimmy Swaggart: homophobe.
23. Sam Addai TV faith healer.
24. Ted & Tammy Faye Bakkker (thankfully dead) Tammy Faye Bakker was also known as Tammy Messner. I saw her on TV looking like a zombie and thought it was a SNL satire. But it was the effects of cancer. Apparently “God” does not like people collecting money for “God” then spending it on themselves.

    Why does Jim Bakker spell his name with two k’s? Because three would be too obvious.
    ~ Bill Maher (born: 1956-01-20 age: 53)

    She was so stupid she truly believed that God wanted her to buy clothes and shoes with all the donations. God as cosmic sugar daddy.
25. Peter Youngren, sells his crap by shouting it loudly over and over. He also likes to preposterously extend random words. He has a slight Dutch accent.
26. Rod Parsely, a dominionist whose booming Dr. Martin Luther King impersonations drip insincerity.
27. Pope Ratzinger. Before he was pope Benedict XVI, he was head of the Inquisition (now called the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith).
28. Billy Graham: the con man’s con man. He projected rock-like integrity as he skimmed millions of dollars from the gullible.
29. Joel Osteen. Here is a guy in it purely for the money. He says whatever the people want to hear. He does not have an ideological axe to grind.
30. George Wilmot of the Fort Worth Bible Students has the lowest IQ of any Kristian on TV. He is too stupid to be a con man. He is the guy with the gigantic ears who sounds retarded.
31. Isaiah58. These people claim to be raising money for elderly Jews. They play on the emotions with music and horrible stories of the holocaust which are irrelevant to the current day conditions.
32. Richard Ames: is a doddering elderly man who drones reading various obscure biblical passages as if they had any meaning or relevance. He never lets on what he thinks it is.
33. Willard Thiessen. This guy has more air time than almost anyone, and just drones on and on without saying anything.
34. Rhonda Lazerte perhaps the most inept preacher on TV. She drones and rambles as if she were stoned on valium.
35. Charles F. Stanley a kindly old-school preacher who lectures on the best way to behave ethically. At least his heart is in the right place.

Why Me?

If Christians just kept to themselves, like Muslims, or Buddhists, I would be happy to leave them alone. But they are constantly trying to impose their superstitions on others including me. These include:

1. beliefs in the necessity of tormenting homosexuals and denying them civil rights. I am gay. My teen years were a nightmare. Even though I was raised atheist, I was surrounded by Christians. I was in the closet and felt that people would never talk to me again if they ever found out I was gay even though I was a virgin. Later, after I came out publicly, I received over 300,000 abusive phone calls from Christians and over 3,000 death threats. Buddhist and atheists don’t do that.
2. beliefs about the need to punish or even kill people who have abortions, even aborting a single cell that has not yet implanted on the uterus.
3. wanting to teach false science about the origin of the earth and living species in schools.
4. wanting to force others to pray to their gods (they have at least four: Father, Son, Holy Spirit, Mary) and to show them respect. Recall early Christians chose to be eaten by lions rather than bow to false gods. Yet they won’t give others the right to reject their gods as false.
5. wanting to force terminally ill people in extreme pain to endure every last moment of agony to please Yahweh, the god of eternal torment.
6. interfering in birth control and STD prevention.
7. blood lust. Wanting to take the country to war to kill people of rival religions.
8. promoting racism. Churches are still segregated.
9. preying on the gullible and elderly to swindle them out of their life savings with phony faith healings and promises of financial increase.
10. Being so self righteous and acting as if their superstitious beliefs made them superior. It is galling the way they feel so smug about their aggressive ignorance.
11. President George Bush, a victim of religion mania, claimed he started both the war in Afghanistan and in Iraq because voices in his head he took to be God, ordered him to. He millennialist rapture views may well lead him to start a nuclear war with the intent of forcing Jesus to pay a premature visit to earth.
12. Opposing attempts to clean up the environment or handle global warming on the grounds Jesus is coming soon and he will clean it up.

Good News

America and Europe both have the same Christian roots, however America is much more religious than Europe. Yet America has more crime, more abortion, more drug use, more murder, more teenage pregnancy, etc. than Europe. So it appears religion is not necessary to preserve family values. It appears religion might even interfere with them.

Summary

The movie will also remind you how Kristians have no respect for reason. Reason is a dirty word to Kristians.

Modern Kristianity takes the teachings of Jesus and inverts them. Jesus teaches turning the other cheek. Kristianity teaches war. Jesus teaches tolerance. Kristianity teaches bigotry. Jesus teaches responsibility for the poor. Kristianity teaches exploiting the poor.

I wonder how much worse Kristians would have been if they did not even pretend to worship Jesus.

If only a few people were infected with Kristianity, we would treat it as a mental disorder. Kristians are completely delusional and far more dangerous than your run of the mill fruitcake. Everyone is too afraid to tackle them because they are so numerous, insane and vicious.

DVDs

• 	recommend DVD⇒The God Who Wasn’t There
  	DVD
  	by: Brian Flemming
  This movie debunks Christianity by showing how all parts of the Jesus legend were borrowed from earlier religions, and that even the church fathers admitted that. It also shows how early Christian writers were not talking about a literal historical person. Finally it shows how the Bible is at odds in many crucial places with established history. See the TheGodMovie.com website for a variety of clips.
  amazon.ca amazon.com chapters.indigo.ca powells.com amazon.fr barnesandnoble.com amazon.de amazon.co.uk

• The Rise of the Religious Right to political power. This is from the evangelical point of view. You might liken this documentary to Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph Of the Will.

  Jesus Camp , a what the evangelicals are doing to brainwash their kids. It is stomach churning.

Books

	recommend book⇒The Secular Bible: Why Nonbelievers Must Take Religion Seriously
		paperback
	ISBN13:	978-0-521-61824-3
	publisher:	Cambridge University Press
	published:	2005-09-05
	by:	Jacques Berlinerblau
An introduction to biblical scholarship for nonbelievers.
abe books.co.uk abe books.ca amazon.co.uk amazon.ca abe books.de chapters.indigo.ca amazon.de abe books.com abe books.fr amazon.com amazon.fr barnes and noble.com abe books.it powells.com iberlibro.com sony e-books abe books anz

	recommend book⇒The Making of the Fittest
		hardcover
	ISBN13:	978-0-393-06163-5
	publisher:	W. W. Norton
	published:	2006-10-09
	by:	Sean B. Carroll
We now have DNA analysis to track the history over millions of years of how species evolved. This book explains this new tool. If somebody wants to debunk evolution, they should at least know what it is, and why today’s scientists have such strong confidence it in.
abe books.co.uk abe books.ca amazon.co.uk amazon.ca abe books.de chapters.indigo.ca amazon.de abe books.com abe books.fr amazon.com amazon.fr barnes and noble.com abe books.it powells.com iberlibro.com sony e-books abe books anz

	recommend book⇒Why Evolution is True
		hardcover	kindle
	ISBN13:	978-0-670-02053-9	B001QEQRJW
	publisher:	Viking Adult
	published:	2009-01-22
	by:	Jerry A. Coyne
The book gets glowing reviews from famous scientists such as E.O. Wilson and Richard Dawkins. It reviews the evidence for evolution and explains the dishonesty in phrases such as ‘evolution is only a theory’.
abe books.co.uk abe books.ca amazon.co.uk amazon.ca abe books.de chapters.indigo.ca amazon.de abe books.com abe books.fr amazon.com amazon.fr barnes and noble.com abe books.it powells.com iberlibro.com sony e-books abe books anz

	recommend book⇒Astonishing Hypothesis: The Scientific Search for the Soul
		paperback
	ISBN13:	978-0-684-80158-2
	publisher:	Scribner
	published:	1995-07-01
	by:	Francis Crick
Crick won the Nobel prize as co-discoverer with James Watson for the discovery of DNA. In this book, Crick tackles the intractable question, ‘what is consciousness’.
abe books.co.uk abe books.ca amazon.co.uk amazon.ca abe books.de chapters.indigo.ca amazon.de abe books.com abe books.fr amazon.com amazon.fr barnes and noble.com abe books.it powells.com iberlibro.com sony e-books abe books anz

	recommend book⇒The Ancestor’s Tale: A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Evolution
		hardcover
	ISBN13:	978-0-618-00583-3
	publisher:	Houghton Mifflin
	published:	2004-10-27
	by:	Richard Dawkins
Tracing your ancestry all the way back to the origin of life. Read the first chapter.
abe books.co.uk abe books.ca amazon.co.uk amazon.ca abe books.de chapters.indigo.ca amazon.de abe books.com abe books.fr amazon.com amazon.fr barnes and noble.com abe books.it powells.com iberlibro.com sony e-books abe books anz

	recommend book⇒The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe Without Design
		paperback
	ISBN13:	978-0-393-31570-7
	publisher:	W. W. Norton
	published:	1996-09-19
	by:	Richard Dawkins
The title refers to the Rev. William Paley’s 1802 work, Natural Theology, which argued that just as finding a watch would lead you to conclude that a watchmaker must exist, the complexity of living organisms proves that a Creator exists. Dawkins argues that all appearances to the contrary, the only watchmakers in nature are the blind forces of physics, albeit deployed in a very special way. Natural selection is an anti-chance process, which gradually builds up complexity, step by tiny step. The end product of this ratcheting process is an eye, or a heart, or a brain — a device whose improbable complexity is utterly baffling until you spot the gentle ramp that leads up to it. Read the first chapter.
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	recommend book⇒Climbing Mount Improbable
		hardcover
	ISBN13:	978-0-393-03930-6
	publisher:	W. W. Norton
	published:	1996-09
	by:	Richard Dawkins
Explains how complex structures such as the eye can evolve without intelligent design. Read the first chapter.
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	recommend book⇒Devil’s Chaplain: Reflections on Hope, Lies, Science, and Love
		paperback
	ISBN13:	978-0-618-48539-0
	publisher:	Mariner
	published:	2004-10-27
	by:	Richard Dawkins
A miscellaneous collection of essays.
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	recommend book⇒The God Delusion
		paperback	hardcover	kindle
	ISBN13:	978-0-618-91824-9	978-0-618-68000-9	B000SEHG5U
	publisher:	Houghton Mifflin
	published:	2006-09-18
	by:	Richard Dawkins
This might be looked on as the founding document for the atheists’ lib movement. This is a gloves-off attack on religion and fanaticism. It ridicules Christianity and Islam. He argues that atheism provides a sounder foundation for morality. “The God Delusion is smart, compassionate, and true… If this book doesn’t change the world, we’re all screwed.” ~ Penn & Teller. Read the first chapter.
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	recommend book⇒The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution
		hardcover
	ISBN13:	978-1-4165-9478-9
	publisher:	Free Press Mifflin
	published:	2009-09-22
	by:	Richard Dawkins
This not only covers the evidence for evolution, he takes aims at the bogus claims of the religious fundamentalists that evolution is flawed. The evidence includes fossils, the genetic code of various species and the distribution of animals on the planet.
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	recommend book⇒The Selfish Gene
		paperback	hardcover
	ISBN13:	978-0-19-286092-7	978-0-19-929114-4
	publisher:	Oxford University Press
	published:	1990-10-25
	by:	Richard Dawkins
Explanation of how individual genes compete for survival, giving rise to the great complexity you see in plants and animals. Read first chapter.
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	recommend book⇒Unweaving the Rainbow: Science, Delusion and the Appetite for Wonder
		paperback
	ISBN13:	978-0-618-05673-6
	publisher:	Mariner
	published:	2000-04-05
	by:	Richard Dawkins
He shows that science has even more poetry and appreciation for the universe than religion. Read the first chapter.
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	recommend book⇒Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon
		paperback	hardcover
	ISBN13:	978-0-14-303833-7	978-0-670-03472-7
	publisher:	Viking
	published:	2006-02-02
	by:	Daniel C. Dennett
He studies why humans have evolved religion, and its maleficent role. He explores how ideas from prehistoric times have been passed down through the generations to haunt us today.
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	recommend book⇒Consciousness Explained
		paperback
	ISBN13:	978-0-14-012867-3
	publisher:	Penguin
	published:	1993-06-24
	by:	Daniel C. Dennett
An explanation that consciousness is like cultural software running on the parallel computing power of the brain.
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	recommend book⇒Darwin’s Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life
		paperback
	ISBN13:	978-0-684-82471-0
	publisher:	Simon & Schuster
	published:	1996-06-12
	by:	Daniel C. Dennett
A layman’s description of Darwin’s theory of evolution, and defense against the common attacks on it.
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	recommend book⇒Freedom Evolves
		paperback
	ISBN13:	978-0-14-028389-1
	publisher:	Penguin
	published:	2004-02-26
	by:	Daniel C. Dennett
In this book he tackles the problem of the soul and free will. He argues that there is indeed such a thing as free will, but it “is not a preexisting feature of our existence, like the law of gravity.”
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	recommend book⇒Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why
		hardcover
	ISBN13:	978-0-06-073817-4
	publisher:	HarperOne
	published:	2005-11-01
	by:	Bart D. Ehrman
Ehrman started out as a biblical literalist, and through scholarship became a skeptic. He documents the ample evidence of human fallibility and ecclesiastical politics in holy writ. To assess how ignorant or theologically manipulative scribes may have changed the biblical text, modern scholars have developed procedures for comparing diverging texts. And in language accessible to nonspecialists, Ehrman explains these procedures and their results.
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	recommend book⇒Creationism’s Trojan Horse: The Wedge of Intelligent Design
		hardcover
	ISBN13:	978-0-19-515742-0
	publisher:	Oxford University Press
	published:	2003-12-12
	by:	Barbara Forrest, Paul R. Gross
The authors explain why they wrote the book this way. Religious interference in American science and science education is an old story. But intelligent design proponents’ cultivation of support for efforts to eliminate evolution from public school science, or to disparage it, and to secure recognition of creationists’ claims of scientific legitimacy, are today enjoying unprecedented, nationwide success. For the first time, such claims seem to many lay observers to have become respectable. In fact, however, they are no more respectable as scholarly inquiry, or specifically as biological science, than were their discredited “creation science” predecessors. Unfortunately, this is not widely understood. Nor is the seamless continuity of “Intelligent Design Theory” with other recognized forms of creationism. Having examined in detail claims made by members of the “Wedge” we saw it as our professional and civic obligation to scholarship and science to prepare a fully documented account of their anti-evolution agenda. We came to understand that, for the well-being of science and science education, the seamless continuity of intelligent design and traditional creationism must be demonstrated for our colleagues and the knowledgeable public. The narrowness of Wedge strategists’ religious aims, which do not reflect the values of the broader, more tolerant religious community, must be exposed, as must Intelligent Design’s pervasively sham methods of inquiry. People who value science and the benefits of life in an enlightened society must be alerted to the Wedge’s political, cultural, and religious ambitions.
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	recommend book⇒Unauthorized Version: Truth and Fiction in the Bible
		paperback
	ISBN13:	978-0-679-74406-1
	publisher:	Vintage
	published:	1993-06-01
	by:	Robin Lane Fox
Fox explores the bible as a historian, explaining what is known to be true and false.
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	recommend book⇒The Scandalous Gospel of Jesus: What’s So Good About the Good News?
		hardcover	kindle
	ISBN13:	978-0-06-000073-8	B000W914NG
	publisher:	HarperOne
	published:	2007-11-06
	by:	Peter J. Gomes
Written by a Christian preacher who berates the church for teaching the worship of Jesus, rather than teaching his message. Jesus was far more concerned about his message than himself. He suggests if Jesus were to come back, he would want to hang out with society’s outcasts, just as he did back then, including gays.
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	recommend book⇒The Panda’s Thumb: More Reflections in Natural History
		paperback
	ISBN13:	978-0-393-30819-8
	publisher:	W. W. Norton
	published:	1992-08
	by:	Stephen Jay Gould
Gould points out all manner of utterly inept designs in nature. Unlike a celestial designer, natural selection always has to work by gently modifying the “previous model”. This leads to some clumsy bailingwire solutions. One of the examples is the light sensitive cells in your eye are or the wrong side of the retina, away from the light. Seriously, do you think an reputedly infinitely intelligent designer would make a blunder that profound? Other species got it right, and as a result have vastly superior vision to us.
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	recommend book⇒Rocks of Ages : Science and Religion in the Fullness of Life
		paperback
	ISBN13:	978-0-345-45040-1
	publisher:	Ballantine
	published:	2002-02-26
	by:	Stephen Jay Gould
I don’t recommend this book, though I recommend Mr. Gould’s other books on the topic of evolution. This book consists of a rather limp suggestion that the conflict between religion and science can be avoided if religion will butt out of matters of fact and science butts out of matters of ethics. I find this a foolish truce. Religion should not be left to deal with ethics. It has only inept tools — magic, myth, superstition and tradition. The study of ethics would do much better if augmented with comparative religion, anthropology, law, psychology, Darwinian evolution and experiment.
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	recommend book⇒The Pagan Christ: recovering the lost light
		hardcover
	ISBN13:	978-0-88762-145-1
	publisher:	Thomas Allen Publishers
	published:	2004
	by:	Tom Harpur
Tom Harpur is an Anglican theologian. He presents the evidence that Christianity is plagiarized from earlier religions and has no historical basis. The Jesus story is intended to be taken as allegory, not literally. The Jesus cult developed over time, starting with a set of aphorisms, and gradually adding details of Jesus’ life, much the way the story of Superman was elaborated. This suggests there was no historical Jesus. amazon.ca is the site mostly likely to have the book in stock since Harpur is a well-known Canadian theologian. You can see a summary on DVD
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	recommend book⇒Letter to a Christian Nation
		hardcover
	ISBN13:	978-0-307-26577-7
	publisher:	Knopf
	published:	2006-09-19
	by:	Sam Harris
This is a passionate argument for separation of church and state. Sam Harris fearlessly describes a moral and intellectual emergency precipitated by religious fantasies — misguided beliefs that create suffering, that rationalize violence, that have endangered our nation and our future. His argument for the morality, the honesty, and the humility of atheism is galvanizing. It is a relief that someone has spoken so frankly, with such passion yet such rationality
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	recommend book⇒The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason
		paperback
	ISBN13:	978-0-393-32765-6
	publisher:	W. W. Norton
	published:	2005-10-10
	by:	Sam Harris
Harris argues that in the presence of weapons of mass destruction, we can no longer expect to survive our religious differences indefinitely. Moderation in religion poses considerable dangers of its own: as the accommodation we have made to religious faith in our society now blinds us to the role that faith plays in perpetuating human conflict. Read more about the book at the SamHarris.org website.
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	recommend book⇒Mythology’s Last Gods, Yahweh and Jesus
		hardcover
	ISBN13:	978-0-87975-742-7
	publisher:	Prometheus
	published:	1992-06
	by:	William Harwood
Bible scholars have discovered all manner of interesting things over the centuries, but they immediately hid most of it away from the lay people on the grounds it would harm their faith. Harwood brings all this interesting material to light.
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	recommend book⇒American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War On America
		hardcover
	ISBN13:	978-0-7432-8443-1
	publisher:	Free Press
	published:	2007-01-09
	by:	Chris Hedges
This about how Dominionists are trying to destroy scientific debate by insisting opinions like Creationism be treated equally with facts like evolution. They twist the bible to support bigotry, homophobia and persecution of intellectuals. The movement’s call to dismantle the wall between church and state and the intolerance it preaches against all who do not conform to its warped vision of a Christian America are pumped into tens of millions of American homes through Christian television and radio stations, as well as reinforced through the curriculum in Christian schools. They lie about their ability to ‘cure’ same sex attraction.
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	recommend book⇒God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything
		paperback	hardcover	kindle
	ISBN13:	978-0-446-69796-5	978-0-446-57980-3	B000QUCO4Y
	publisher:	Twelve Books
	published:	2007-05-01
	by:	Christopher Hitchens
This is a historical look at Christianity and Islam. Hitchens shows why he believes religion to be a consequence of our evolutionary childhood, why he believes it should not be considered a source of morality and all the ways in which it has demonstrated its tendency to foster totalitarian malevolence. Hitchens is a great wit, however he is over the top in his fear of Islam. He is a Bush-supporting right winger who believes the Bush conspiracy theory of 9/11 and who thinks the solution is to kill all the Muslims. Other than that bit of nuttiness, he is entertaining and intelligent. It is fun to watch one so gullible accuse Christians of gullibility. Read the first chapter.
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	recommend book⇒Christianity: The Ultimate Urban Legend
		paperback
	ISBN13:	978-1-4120-8012-5
	publisher:	Trafford Publishing
	published:	2006-06-30
	by:	Paul John
This is a self-published Trafford book about inconsistencies in the bible. It is book 2 in a trilogy. This book covers the time period from Herod the Great’s death through the early 2nd century. He goes into the discrepancies between Paul’s and Jesus’s teachings. Paul John was raised as a Christian then came to examine his faith in adulthood.
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