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Religion Quotes by Roedy

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Is Atheism A Religion?

If atheism were a religion, it would have a holy book and a creed. It would hypothesise invisible supernatural beings and events. It would have a clergy. It would have a church, sermons, public prayers, ceremonies and hymns. It is missing all these things. So if you want to classify it as a religion, it is an extreme outlier. If atheism is a religion, then baldness is a hair colour. It is none-of-the-above in a list of religions.

Science has a set of rules of thumb to avoid self-deception. It has procedures for double and triple checking new knowledge. Some of the rules are formalised by the mathematics of statistics. These rules can be shown to actually work. They are not blind articles of faith. Though scientists tend to be atheists and atheists tend to be scientists, they are not the same thing.

Creationism is a hypothesis that came to priests in ancient times, who pronounced it as absolute divine truth without any evidence whatsoever. The competition, in science, came from millions of observations of our planet. It is anything but an article of faith. Granted, it might look that way to those who flatly refuse to study the story of how these conclusions were reached with observation, mathematical modelling, debate and experiment.

Religions do everything possible to discourage adherents from questioning the tenets of faith. They work hard to discredit scientists who do question their tenets and everything else. In contrast, in science, the best way to win a Nobel prize is to discover something that drastically upsets existing knowledge. Scientists do not hold blind faith in what is already presumed to be true.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Fundamental Assumptions

Christians make four fundamental assumptions without evidence. In other words, they just pulled them out of their collective asses.

  1. There is a god called Yahweh and he meddles in individual human lives, in particular answering all prayers.
  2. Yahweh dictated the bible to hundreds of anonymous people in a flawless process, most of whom were unaware Yahweh was directing them.
  3. The bible contains no errors no matter how many inconsistencies and discrepancies with science there are.
  4. After you die, you live a second infinite life in heaven or hell.

To me, all four assumptions are obviously untrue.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Throwing out Religion

When you throw out religion, you are just throwing out that which is untrue. You get to keep myth, poetry, emotion, love, sympathy, empathy, purpose, music…

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Understanding Atheists

I would think if you wanted to get inside the heads of atheists and understand how they think, the best way would be to read atheists and talk to atheists. If you ask creationists, you will get quite a warped view. For example, most creationists claim atheists reject god as though he existed but were found lacking. In fact, atheists classify Yahweh along with Zeus, Wotan, Krishna and all the other imaginary gods. They don’t see anything special about the gods of Israel. Christians can’t explain what makes their god so special either.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

60,000 Gods

There are 60,000 gods. They all seem pretty much the same. Each one focuses on a fairly narrow geographical region. I would not have expected that if one were a real god:

None of this happened. Christians pick Yahweh out of all the god choices just because he is the one their parents picked and brainwashed them into worshiping. Christians have never read anything about the other god choices, but they are absolutely sure Yahweh is valid and all the others are not. There is nothing special about Yahweh at all. Singling out Yahweh as the only real god makes no sense rationally.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

AA (Alcoholics Anonymous)

Christians cite AA as evidence of Yahweh’s existence because he reliably cures alcoholics. Lots of people show up on AA ’s door step who cannot stomach the notion of god. AA cheerily tells them to use anything they want as their higher power, even a tree. It will work just fine. It works by creating a less cocky over-confident attitude, not by divine intervention. The real secret is the endless meetings where people can socialise, tell stories about getting drunk, smoke, drink coffee and eat cheap sugary cakes without the temptation of alcohol.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Abandon Orphans

One of the cruelest Christian teachings is that you should have as many children as possible and brain wash them into the church teachings. You are supposed to turn your back on all the orphans with no one to care for them.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Abraham

Abraham is a key founder of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. He suffered from schizophrenia and heard voices commanding him to kill his son Isaac. He plotted to tie up his son, slit his throat and set fire him as an offering to the god Yahweh, treating him as a sacrificial bull. He was just about to slit his son’s throat, when the voices told him to desist. He had no evidence whatsoever that any of these voices were god. All three of these religions revere Abraham’s behaviour as the highest good. Nothing good can come from a religion founded on such madness. Today we would incarcerate Abraham in an institution for the criminally insane.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Abraham

Imagine you read in the Internet news a man had slit his son’s throat, and killed him. The man explained he did it because a disembodied voice told him to. Would you assume the man was mentally ill? Of course. Yet millions of Christians assure me this man was sane, and truly was obeying Yahweh, sacrificing Isaac without his consent.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Abraham Lincoln, Unfit for Office

Abraham Lincoln never attended church in his entire life. That would be sufficient to keep him from running for office today.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Abraham Was Criminally Insane

If Abraham had tried to murder his son today, there would be no question. He would be locked up as criminally insane. There would be no question that the demonic voices commanding him were not a god but his psychotic delusions. Why then so do many people treat Abraham himself as a saint? Founding your religion on a psychotic child killer is bound to lead to serious trouble.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Absence of Evidence

Absence of evidence is not proof of absence, but it is evidence of absence. For example, as every year passes without any evidence of sasquatches, e.g. a corpse, bones, DNA (Deoxyribonucleic Acid), it becomes ever more sure sasquatches do not exist. Ditto for gods.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Absent God

Our God Is A Mighty God
Our God Is An Absent God,
Nostalgic for hellfire fears —
Hasn’t Been Around For Years.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Absolute Morality

Every religion offers its own variant on morality. In addition, the legal system of every country offers yet another variant. To add to the confusion, every person adjusts the morality of his religion by ignoring most of his religion’s commandments or by deciding that some parts of it are so important, they should be mandatory for everyone else.

It is thus crazy to pretend there is but one unique, universal, absolute morality, built into the universe like the mass of an electron. Morality is an opinion. It evolves as groups of people form a consensus.

Even people who for example claim Yahweh is the only god, and wrote the only legitimate version of morality in the bible, ignore 99% of the commandments. The bible was written a long time ago by some morally-primitive humans. We have progressed quite a bit since then. We no longer keep slaves. We no longer stone non-virgin brides to death. We no longer kill Sunday shoppers. We no longer kill non-Christians. So it makes sense for modern Christians to use a much more enlightened morality than the hateful, cruel, blood-thirsty morality described in the bible. Since everyone ignores different bits of the biblical morality, or uses a different holy book altogether and since every society has a different morality, and gets along just fine, morality can hardly be called absolute.

I am baffled that anyone would claim morality is absolute, when it is abundantly clear it is not.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Absolute Truth

Evangelists claim they speak absolute indisputable truth. But that is not so. Not even evangelists of the same sect agree. They are all just making it up and trying to pass it off as god’s word. They are masquerading as god’s anointed agent to power trip and con people out of money.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Abstinence Only

Million of years of evolution has figured out ways to subvert the most earnest attempts at abstinence. You need a plan B — condoms or birth control.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Abstract Slither

I am not prepared to debate the existence of god in the abstract. The definition keeps slithering like an eel slathered in KY jelly. Pick the existence of a particular god, say Yahweh or Ganesh, then absurdity becomes ever so much more apparent. Besides, the Christians don’t really care about the existence of any god by Yahweh.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Abstract Thought

The human mind is capable of abstract thought, thinking about things that have no correspondence in the physical world, such as mathematics, computer programming and, unfortunately, religion.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Absurd Demand For Respect

Jews, Christians and Muslims demanding that others respect their customs and superstitions is as ridiculous as Morris dancers doing so.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Absurd Gods

Jews/Christians/Muslims are a bit like children who got carried away bragging about their fathers and gods. They claim their god is simultaneously omnipotent, omniscient and compassionate. How could it be there still be such suffering, injustice and cruelty on earth? God either does not care, does not notice or cannot rectify the problem.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Absurd Religions

All religions are absurd. The absurdity of a religion is immediately apparent to anyone who does not subscribe to it, but is invisible to a believer who has been told over and over it is true. For example:

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Absurd Religions

Christianity is unbelievably absurd. The catch is, Christians are so familiar with it since infancy, that it seems to make sense. Christians have no difficulty discarding Hinduism because it is just too silly for words. But they are blinded to the fact Christianity is even more ridiculous.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Abused Child Syndrome

It is odd the way Christians and Muslims turn to a god the worse God/circumstances treats them. It reminds me of the way abused children protest that their parents treat them well, perhaps hoping saying so will make it so, or that such lies will mollify the tyrant parent, or perhaps to hide their shame at having such a cruel parent.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Abusive God

When Christians make excuses for their cruel, vengeful, violent and capricious god, it reminds me of battered wives making excuses for their husbands.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Abusive Relationship

Job, like a battered wife who refuses to leave her husband, was in an abusive relationship with Yahweh.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Acceptable Lunacy

If it were revealed that a political candidate believed he had been abducted by aliens, TV pundits would rag him mercilessly. Yet if it were revealed he harboured even more improbable delusions such as talking snakes, that there was no need to preserve the forests because a dead man would soon miraculously restore them, that geologists had it all wrong because the earth was only 10,000 years old… oddly those same pundits would solemnly respect his beliefs. The moral of the story is, if you want to get away with craziness, don’t improvise, copy popular lunatics.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Acceptable Proof

Theists ask, What would you as an atheist consider acceptable proof a deity (not necessarily Yahweh) exists? Here are some suggestions:

Unfortunately for the theists, even with such a piece of killer evidence, they still have to overcome the mountain of evidence that everything Christians said about Yahweh is bunk. Most of this evidence would not apply to Yahweh specifically.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Accepting Absurdity

Christianity depends on accepting two kinds of absurdity.

  1. Miracles: claims that things that never happen and/or which violate the laws of physics, did indeed happen through supernatural interference with natural law.
  2. Ignoring logical inconsistencies and inconsistency with archaeology or history with the general explanation that things of the spirit are too complicated for man to understand.
~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Accepting Ideas

It is much easier to accept a idea, true or false, into fallow ground, where no prior idea, true or false, has already staked the territory.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

According to Judas

In the gospel of Judas, a foolish and evil god created the earth.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Accountability

Atheists hold themselves and each other accountable for their actions. Christians to not. They believe a few magic words, some mumbled prayers and a small donation erases all sin. How dare Christians claim to be more moral.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Accuracy of Genesis

According to Genesis, the first thing god created was light. This is not so. For the first 200 million years after the big bang, the universe was dark. The stars formed, then the universe lit up. Because light takes so long to get to us from the other side of the universe, we can see back in time.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Accusing Science of The Christian Vice

Christians chastise scientists for arrogance, for pretending to know everything. This is a slander. Sir Isaac Newton (1643-01-04 1727-03-31 age:84), the discoverer put it I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea-shore and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me. It is the Christians who project a fanciful construct of harps, demons, cherubs and seraphim on the unknown, pretending to know everything, based on nothing but imagination.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Act Of God

The term act of god is silly. It is a medieval notion that god smotes people for secret crimes. It should be replaced with the term widespread catastrophe, to indicate the real problem that in an earthquake or tsunami there would be too many simultaneous claims. The insurance company would not be able to pay out.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Acting Crazy

When you are a kid, you are allowed to be silly, to twist your face up, to make silly noises, to jump about, to flail your arms… When you become an adult you have to be much more constrained, except perhaps when you are alone in the bathroom staring into the mirror.

Voudou gives its followers permission to act in a crazy way, rolling about, and writhing in public in a grossly sexual way. Any behaviour is excused as demonic possession.

Many sects of Christianity have something similar. People can lie on the floor and twitch as if having an epileptic fit. They can babble nonsense syllables. They can feign catatonia. They can jump and dance. They can flail their arms about. They can huff-speak (adding a huff exhalation on the each phrase). They can scream and shout. Even extremely fat people allow themselves a bout of vigorous aerobic exercise.

This kind of craziness is fun. It might be safer for Christians to join an improv theater group. They could have the fun without the sinister indoctrination. Further it would cost a lot less.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Acting Like A Christian

Let’s say I went to buy a car. The salesman showed me a car three times size of what I was looking for. I told him That won’t do. Then he said If you don’t buy this car, I am going to send someone over to shoot your dog and your family too.

Then you went to a night school class and you said I don’t understand how you are supposed to just guess the integral. Surely there must some rules. The prof said How dare you question my authority. Some time in the next year a pack of pitbulls are going to jump through your front windows and tear you and your family to pieces and I will have nothing to do with it.

You’d think if Christians wore selling you such good news they would not have to threaten torture to get you to believe it.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Acting On Delusions

It is not what Christians believe that causes the trouble, it is the harm they do based on those delusions that is the problem.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Acting Silly

Imagine if some prankster founded a religion then told the people, you have to pretend to be pigeons and tape blocks to your heads, or men must wear doilies, or must never wash their bodies or trim their hair claiming the deity of deities commanded it. I know, I know, it already happened.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Activities For Boys

Activities for boys teach violence, cruelty and insensitivity to others. When the boys grow up, those most suggestible become soldiers or gang members. The activities, killing, maiming, stealing and raping, are the same. The main difference is the pay.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Acts of Charity

Whose acts of charity do you most admire?

  1. The man who is motivated by applause from his fellow men.
  2. The man who is motivated by promise of reward from the sky god after he dies.
  3. The man who does the job because the job needs doing.
~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Acts Of God

If the churches claim to be God’s representatives on earth. If they collect money in his name then surely they are also liable for acts of God.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Actual Source of Morality

Before Moses allegedly climbed mount Sinai to receive the Ten Commandment tablets, did people think it was ok to kill, steal and bear false witness or did they just naturally know not to from common sense?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Ad Hoc Miracles, Cheap

In the rules of Christian apologetics, it is legitimate to explain a biblical inconsistency by invoking as many ad hoc undocumented miracles as needed.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Addiction to Hope

Many people are so addicted to hope, they think it is a good thing to tell lies to create false hope. If somebody tried to cheer me up by telling me there was going to be a surprise party for me next week and it did not happen, I would feel worse than ever. You are better to give hope without telling lies or raising unrealistic expectations. What people need even more than hope is how to appreciate their life as it is.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Addictive Religions

Just as a Big Mac was designed purely to be maximally addictive, to maximise profit, with no concerned for nutrition, religions were designed to be maximally addictive, to maximise profit, with no concern for the welfare of the believer or for the truth.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Admiring the Christian Con

What if secular con men used scams as elaborate as those of the Christian church? Imagine:

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Admissible Evidence

What is admissible evidence for the existence of god?

We have had three millennia to collect this evidence. Yet, so far, nothing.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Advantage of Death

The main advantage of death is a moratorium on your todo list.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Advantage Of Truth

Obviously, if you believe things that are true and don’t believe things that are false you have an advantage. You accurately know how the world works, what you really have to do to achieve a given effect. Every time you refuse to believe something that is true, or choose to believe something that is false, you hamper your ability to act effectively in the world. Oddly, many people, e.g. Christians, think it wise to believe things that are likely false, for which their is no evidence. They hurt themselves and their families. They waste scarce resources on the church. They waste time praying. They may avoid doing something that would work for the problem at hand, like sanitation or antibiotics.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Advantages of Being Atheist

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Advantages of Polytheism

As religious myths go, polytheism has one huge advantage. As an polytheist, my default position is that your gods exist too. I don’t have to deny their existence or declare them wicked or kill you for worshiping them. It is just that I like mine better, or that mine specialise in requests from my locality or in my sort of needs.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

After Death

Where do you go when you die? Where do grasshoppers, rabbits, mice, elephants, dolphins, dogs, frogs, fish, bacteria… go? Nowhere. They just rot. Where do you Mr. Creationist get off on thinking you deserve to be treated specially? There is zero evidence for it. Have you ever touched a corpse? They are cold, like a piece of meat. They soon start to rot. You don’t see a ghost coming out of them like you do in the Christian movies. You Christians are so stuck up, such cowards. You even deny you die.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

After People

One of the most cheerful documentaries ever made is called After People that explores, in one episode, what would happen to various religious buildings, statues and icons if people suddenly disappeared. It is so pleasant to remind yourself that the symbols of cruel and irrational religious bigotry require constant upkeep by the fanatics. Without that attention they would instantly start deteriorating.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

After You Die

It is amusing when Christians say the only possibility they can conceive of is living forever in heaven. They have no trouble believing their pet goldfish simply ceased to exist when it died. They have no trouble conceiving that they did not exist before they were born. There is no reason to believe you don’t die. It is just wishful thinking. There is no evidence whatsoever for it. Ironically, eternal life would be infinitely, excruciatingly boring. It would be torture. Life has value only because it is limited. You should be grateful that you can die.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

After you Die

There is just as much evidence that after you die you turn into a hippopotamus and live in a river so packed with hippos you cannot move as there is for the Christian conceit. You can’t prove the hippo story is nonsense, but on the other hand, there is no evidence for it either. This is the same status as the Christian after-death myth.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

The Afterlife

The afterlife: never was an idea more firmly believed nor that had so little evidence.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

The Afterlife

I think people who claim they will live forever are stark raving bonkers. There is not a scrap of evidence. All they have is wishful thinking. There is nothing in nature that indicates there is something supernatural concerned with the morality of behaviour. Nature is full of cruelty. Nothing ever intervenes. Why would the afterlife apply to only one species, especially one of the newcomers? More human vanity again! We have all seen corpses rot. Just what is preserved in the afterlife? There is nothing unaccounted for.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Afterlife

If Christians seriously believed in the afterlife, they would dance at funerals.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Afterlife = Wasted Life

Belief in an afterlife is just an excuse to do nothing with this one.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Afterlife is Awful Either Way

The afterlife for the majority is eternal torment. The afterlife for the rest is eternal boredom and tyranny. If I seriously believed in an afterlife, with no way to opt out, not even suicide, I would feel like a rat trapped in corner. It would be horrible. At least, for me, as a non-believer in afterlife, no matter how bad things get, I know there is the option of suicide. I am not trapped. I am choosing to suffer.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Age of Consent

The age of consent in the Vatican is the lowest in Europe, 12.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Age of Humanity

Hindu fundamentalists assure me god told them people have been living on earth for over a million years. Christian fundamentalists assure me god told them people have been living on earth only 6000 years. Science says humans have been living on earth for about 250,000 years. Why would god tell two different bum-steer stories?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Agnosticism

Agnosticism is not believing the possibility god may exist, it is the pedantic notion that you can’t tell for certain if any gods exist. You could even be a Christian agnostic or an agnostic atheist. The way I look at it, if you can tell that there are no 3 metres (9.84 ft) diameter spiders that can leap 2 km (1.24 miles) into the air, you can with all practical certainty tell that Yahweh too does not exist.

Yahweh’s key advertised property is he promises to answer every last prayer. This does not happen. To me, that sufficient to prove Yahweh is imaginary. Second, Yahweh of the bible knows bugger all about science. The creator of the universe would have to.

Christians are 110% sure that Zeus does not exist without knowing the first thing about him. Surely Christians should even more easily be able to dismiss Yahweh.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Agnostics From Cowardice

I don’t think there are really that many agnostics. Surely most people who are agnostic imagine gods have much poorer odds than unicorns of existing. If you ask them Do unicorns exist? They would say No!. They would not beat around the bush with quibbles. They quibble about the god Yahweh to avoid being vilified by Christians or to placate them. You don’t see people saying idiotic things like I have no evidence that fairies exist, but, of course, such evidence could exist. I have a totally open mind on the matter. Given the complete lack of supporting evidence I’d estimate it 99.99% certain that fairies exist. the way they do with the god Yahweh.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Aliens

Imagine if some intelligent aliens visited earth. What would Christians make of them? The aliens would not be Christians. They might not even have any religion. Christianity is extremely geocentric assuming earth is the centre of the universe and nothing is happening anywhere else. They assume man is the paragon of animals. Would Christians adjust to the new information or would they refuse to admit the reality of the aliens because they conflict with scripture.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

All Christians Are Mentally Ill

It might be more productive to treat Christians and Muslims as patients rather than enemies. They are suffering from the most common mental illness, though one of the most serious conditions. With other mental diseases, rarely do you have other patients interfering with the treatment. It is hard not to be angry with these people for spouting such nonsense, hurting children, interfering in sane people’s lives etc. Think of the mad ramblings of people with Alzheimer’s. Getting angry does not help.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

All Opinions Are Equally Valid

Opinions, e.g. the best ice cream flavour, the best restaurant do not have absolute truth. Whether the earth revolves around the sun or vice versa, or whether climate change is valid are not amenable to opinions. They are assertions of fact. They are either true or false completely independent of how you wish them to be. You don’t get have an opinion on the age of the earth, whether animals evolve, whether homeopathy works, whether vaccines cause autism or any other matter mankind can test the truth of.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

All Religions Are False

I have to laugh when religious fanatics claims other religions are false. By definition all religions are false. They all make absurd claims without evidence. Further, their beliefs are invariable in conflict with science and common sense. They all make a virtue of believing their nonsense, without evidence, counter to all appearances.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

All Religions Disagree

Since all the religions of the world disagree, they can’t all be true, however, they can all be false. Indeed, they most certainly all are.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

All Things Are Possible

I have heard With god, all things are possible. Why then won’t god get onboard with ending poverty in Africa, with cleaning up the environment, with switching to clean energy…

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

All-Loving God

If you think God is all-loving, you have scrupulously avoided reading 95% of the bible.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Allocation of Misery

Christians must surely notice that wonderful things happen to evil people, and terrible things happen to good people. If there were a god, surely he would not do that.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Alternate Explanation for Virgin Birth

It is possible for a virgin to get pregnant without breaking her hymen. Sperm are determined little swimmers. How do Christians know this is not what happened?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Alternative Explanations

I had a slightly strange event. I lost my glasses. I searched my apartment for many hours to no avail. I knew they had to be in there somewhere. I wandered about for days using my badly damaged backup pair. I finally found my glasses intertwined in the rear carrier of my bicycle. I have no idea how they got there. I can’t think of any scenario that would put them there. Within in an hour, I discovered the Kryptonite bicycle lock had also gone missing.

Different people would leap to quite conclusions about the meaning of these two events:

The interesting thing is people have a knee-jerk way of responding to all unusual events. They will even get angry at people who even entertain any of the alternatives.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Alternative Theology

The people of Central America believe their gods called forth the world, then fought with each other and destroyed and recreated it several times over using the forces of nature. They had a battle with an earth monster, whose body now forms the mountains. This is a poetic way of describing the forces of nature: volcanoes, water, wind and tectonic pressures forming the earth. It is more accurate than the legend the Christians flog. Yet neither has any evidence. Both are just works of imagination.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Alternatives to Yahweh

By now, if you are Christian, you should have ample evidence that praying to Yahweh does not work. How do you know Yahweh is the best, when you have not even read about the others much less test driven them? There is the same amount of evidence for the existence of the other gods as for Yahweh. All the arguments you have heard for the existence of god apply equally well to all of humanity’s gods. Why not at least try one of the other ten thousand plus gods such as: Aa, AbilAddu, Addu, Adeona, Ahijah, Aku, Allatu, Alom, Amaterasu, Amurru, Anath, Anion-Re, Anu, Anubis, Aphrodite, Apollo, Apsu, Ares, Ariadne, Arianrod, Artemis, Ashtoreth, Assur, Astarte, Athena, Baal, Bacchus, Balder, Bau, Beltu, Belus, Bettis, Bilé, Bitol, Centeotl, Ceros, Circe, Consul, Cronos, Cunina, Cupid, Dagan, Dagda, Dagon, Dauke, Dea, Demeter, Dia, Diana of Ephesus, Dimmer, Dionesus, Dumu-zi-abzu, Ea, Earth, Edulia, El, Elali, Elum, En-Mersi, Engurra, Enki, Enurestu, Eros, Flora, Freya, Frigg, Furring, Gaia, Ganesh, Garuda, Gasan-abzu, Gasan-lil, Giant, Gitchi Manitou, Goibniu, Govannon, Gukumatz, Gunfled, Gwydion, Hadad, Hades, Hanuman, Helios, Hera, Hermes, Heroin, Huitzilopochtli, Indra, Isis, Istar, Isum, Ixmucane, Yahweh, Juno, Jupiter, Kaawanu, Kerridwen, Krishna, Kuski-banda, Lêr, Lagas, Lakshmi, Liza, Llaw Gyffes, Lleu, Loki, Lucina, Lugal-Amarada, Ma-banba-anna, Mama Quila, Mami, Manawyddan, Marama, Marduk, Mars, Marzin, Meditrina, Melek, Memetona, Mercury, Merodach, Mider, Minerva, Mithras, Molech, Morrigu, Mu-ul-lil, Mulu-hursang, Nebo, Neptune, Nergal, Ni-zu, Nin, Nin-azu, Nin-lil-la, Nin-man, Ninib, Nirig, Nuada Argetlam, Nusku, Odin, Ogma, Ogyrvan, Ops, Osiris, Pan, Persephone, Phoebe, Pluto, Plutus, Poseidon, Potina, Ptah, Pwyll, Qarradu, Quetzalcoatl, Re, Resheph, Rigantona, Robigus, Saga, Sahi, Samas, Saturn, Sebek, Shalem, Sharrab, Shiva, Sin, Sirtumu, Sokk-mimi, Sol, Statilinus, Suqamunu, Surya, Tagd, Tammuz, Thor, Tilmun, Tiu, U-dimmer-an-kia, U-ki, U-Mersi, U-sab-sib, U-Tin-dir ki, U-urugal, Ubargisi, Ubilulu, Ueras, Uhuru Mazda, Ura-gala, Utu, Vaticanus, Vediovis, Venus, Vesta, Vulcan, Wotan, Xolotl, Yau, Zagaga, Zaraqu, Zer-panitu, Zeus… If you are worried that Yahweh might be jealous, ask for permission by saying, Yahweh, If you have any strenuous objections to me to performing some prayer experiments to the second string gods, give me a sign by making a 30.48 cm (12 in) high, living blue elephant appear on my coffee table. He could easily do it if he wanted, right?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

The Amazing Con

One of the most amazing cons the Catholic church managed to pull off was convincing people that Catholics were much less likely than other people to be scoundrels.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

The Amazing Implications of Freedom of Religion

Freedom of religion is an extreme freedom, akin to permitting people the right to take a giant hit of LSD (d-Lysergic Acid Diethylamide) that permanently damages their brains, leaving them delusional and unable to reason.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

America

Every time I hear a song with an American city name in it, I cringe. I think of:

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

American Hypocrisy

Bryan Fischer’s America Family Association are attempting to block Muslims from building any more mosques anywhere in the USA. This, of course, is unconstitutional. The constitution guarantees freedom of religion. It shows you how much bigotry still remains at the heart of America. If Americans behave like medieval bigots, they have not a leg to stand on asking the rest of the world to show religious tolerance.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

American Ignorance

25% of American adults do not know the earth revolves around the sun. How could this be? It is taught starting in the second grade. It is taught in every video and documentary about astronomy. In history, the conflicts of Copernicus and Galileo and the church highlight it. What must happen is a preschooler is scolded for watching a science documentary by an ignorant church lady parent who associates all scientific knowledge with wickedness.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

American Morality

American Christians assure me their moral code is the only moral code worthy of the name. Have they ever looked at American murder rates, gun violence rates, rapes, thefts… compared with other countries?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

American Promotion of Religion

America was founded by a confluence of people from every conceivable religion. The founding fathers devised separation of church and state as a way from keeping them all from each other’s throats. Compared with Europe, they were spectacularly successful. However, two things tend to go wrong:

  1. The people tend to vote their churches privileges such as tax-free status and grants that non-religious groups do not get.
  2. In a town where religion in homogenous, they ignore separation of church and state. They deny equal access to other religions. They persecute atheists. They insist on religious indoctrination of the primary religion in public schools.

The state thus promotes religion/superstition. Without this help, it might fade away naturally.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

The American State Religion

What if America were to institute a state religion. What would it be like? It would have to be suitable for nearly all Americans including Christians, Catholics, Mormons, Jews, Muslims, Wiccans, Buddhists… It pretty much has to accept everything in terms of rituals and beliefs. It has to keep these warring factions from each other’s throats. It can’t force any rituals or teachings of faith on anyone or some will be furious. It could have a few articles of faith based on nationalism e.g.

What have we got? Something that sounds just like secularism.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

American Theocracy

Americans refuse to vote for anyone but a Christian, or someone who pretends to be one. That makes it dangerously close to a theocracy.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Amusing Christians

It is amusing when Christians look down at Mormons and Scientologists because they believe such bizarre things without any evidence to support them. They seem completely unaware that their talking donkeys, talking snakes, harp-farts and fairy tale geology are just as ridiculous.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

An Experiment

It would be interesting to select verses from the holy books of the various world religions, then modify the names to disguise the source. Then show them to believers of various faiths and ask if they believe the verse or not. How many would get a perfect score, rejecting the verses of all other religions but accepting all those of their own?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

An Intelligent Design Stomach

If my stomach were the result of intelligent design, I could pop by Sears and get my malfunctioning stomach replaced for under $100.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Ancient Drug

What if an ancient drug experienced a resurgence. It made people violent. It made crowds go berserk and murder their neighbours. It made people beat their children. It made people attack their own children’s genitals with knives and drink the blood. It gave them delusions they could not die. It made them hear voices whose commandments they obeyed without question. It made people stupid and gullible. Con men preyed on them. People were so keen on the drug they would force it on their neighbours and even their own infants. The people insisted this drug was harmless, nay beneficial and that people who refused it should be denied civil rights and citizenship. Would you be in favour of government programs to promote this drug? No? Then why do you allow your government to give tax deductions to religions which have the same effect?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Ancient Greeks Smarter Than Christians

Even the ancient Greeks understood there we are not the centre of the universe, that it was not created solely for our delectation. They believed there were other suns, with other planets, with other forms of life.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Ancient Greeks Were Must Better At Science That Ancient Jews

It is amazing how the ancient Greeks, reasoning from ordinary observations, such as the spread of moisture in the air, were able to guess so much about how the universe is constructed. They figured out it was made of atoms, that there were a finite number of types of atom and atoms had abilities to link to other types of atoms. In contrast, the ancient Jews did not get anything right.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Ancient Mistakes, Never Corrected

If you saw a massive pillar of fire or smoke, or a river running red with mud, you would ascribe it to a volcano, not a god’s wrath, but millions of modern Christians insist on claiming that an ancient pillar of fire was a god’s wrath, just because the people of the time mistook it for that. Such is the power of tradition to make people behave like idiots.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Ancient Proto-Religion

What was religion like 20,000 years ago? I suspect the hunger people feel today for religions may actually be a longing for the ancient proto-religion revolving around animal torture.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Ancient Religions

We have discovered signs of religion going back 40,000 years ago, maybe further (cave paintings, burial ceremonies). Yahweh, claiming to be the one and only god, did not show up until 3,000 years ago. You would expect Yahweh to have been sending messages to all of humanity starting at least 40,000 years ago. Instead we discover Yahweh interacting only with one small tribe after 37,000 years of silence. It looks much more plausible that a small group of Israelites created a set of polytheistic gods, including Yahweh the war god. They gradually reduced the number of gods, and gradually imposed them on their neighbours. In other words, men created Yahweh, not the other way around.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Ancient Science

The Christian claim is the information in the bible is more accurate than anything science knows today. In my study, every scientific claim in the bible is wrong, and acknowledged as so, even by Christians if asked without telling them the biblical source. Christians should be able to find some advanced knowledge in the bible that only Yahweh would know that people living thousands of years ago did not. I can’t find anything.

If there is nothing about science in the bible more advanced than the science of 2000 years ago, why are Christians preferring biblical science and history to modern day, which has the advantage of thousands of years of discoveries?

My conclusion is the bible was written by ancient humans without any help from Yahweh. It has none of his expected fingerprints. It should not be trusted any more than any other textbook of the era for science.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Ancient Stage Magic

When Christians think about magic in the present they think Las Vegas, sleight of hand and optical illusions. When Christians think about magic in the past, they think only of divine intervention. Do they think people were too dumb back then to do stage magic like making a rod turn into a snake? or fake a healing?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

And God Created the Irukandji

Irukandji jellyfish is about the size of a fingernail, but if it brushes you, it creates the greatest pain known to man. It uses this toxin to catch small fish. That strikes me as a rather cruel creation to come from the alleged benign designer of the universe. It sounds like the work of a sadistic psychopath, (or mindless pure selfishness, as Darwin suggested).

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Andromeda

Andromeda is a nearby galaxy. Have a look at it through the Hubble telescope. It is like looking at grains in a jar of Dijon mustard. Each grain is a star with surrounding planets. There are billions of them. Each one is a solar system not us. The notion Yahweh cares only about one such grain is absurd. It is like saying a surfer cares about only one drop in an ocean. Andromeda Galaxy via Hubble click to watch

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Anger At Yahweh

If you pray to the god Yahweh for something ordinary, like a boiled egg for breakfast, there is a good chance you will get it, but if you pray for something unusual like snow in July, it is most likely Yahweh will ignore your request. Yahweh never intervenes to protect you or anyone else. This makes anger at Yahweh common. Being angry with the god Yahweh is a bit like being angry with the building manager of a derelict building when there is no building manager. Anger at Yahweh, recognising what an asshole he is, is the first step to realising he is a fictional character.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Anger At Yahweh

When people get angry at the God Yahweh, I feel contempt. What they are doing is so childish:

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Animal Morality

Human morality is based on animal morality. It may surprise to learn that some animals live to a higher code than humans, e.g. bonobos, dolphins and whales, even some fish.

  1. Do not eat or kill your young.
  2. Do not eat or kill your kin.
  3. In combat for mates, inflict no permanent injury.
  4. Your top priority is providing for your offspring.
  5. Avoid incest.
  6. Respect other’s territory.
  7. No surplus killing (do not kill more than you can eat).
  8. Do not torment your food.
  9. Do not eat or kill members of your own species.
~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Anointing

One of the stranger things Christians do is pour cups of salad oil over each others’heads. This is supposed to bring them luck and erase past transgressions.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Another of God’s Broken Promises

In Biblical times when a people were conquered, it was a tacit admission the conqueror’s god was more powerful than theirs, so they would convert. When the temple was destroyed, the Jews were devastated. There god had broken his promise to maintain the temple into eternity. They decided to look for reasons to justify Yahweh punishing them that way and to cook up some ways to placate him.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Anthony Robbins

Anthony Robbins (1960-02-29 age:58) is a superb motivator. He is an expert in NLP (Neuro Linguistic Programming). However he lacks a general education and in particular an education in science. His astounding skill as a motivator seduces him to imagine he is an expert in everything, in particular how the universe and earth came into being. He mindlessly spouts silly creationist canards with all the understanding of two year old. He thinks he knows everything there is to know about evolution, even though he has not read even a single book on the topic. This expertise qualities him to lecture on such matters to his adoring fans. In the area of motivation, his intuition is unparalleled. Unfortunately, he imagines it is completely trustworthy on all other matters as well.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Anthropocentric After Life

I find it impossible to swallow the Christian theory of the afterlife because it is so man-centred and so tied to a particular culture, place and time. To Christianity, no other species exists but man. Not only in there no evidence for it, it smells very unlikely. At least the Buddhists postulate a cycle of rebirth of all species in a consistent way.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Anti-Christian

I oppose Christians not just because they are so wrong, but because they lie so much to defend their errors. They obviously must know they are wrong, or why would they lie? They persist in dishonestly defending error anyway.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Anti-Christian Jokes

We need some jokes to combat religion. They would poke fun at:

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Anti-Theists

The following people write books and make videos dissecting the irrationality and myths of Christianity.

  1. Richard Carrier
  2. Robert Price
  3. David Fitzgerald
  4. Michael Lawrence
  5. D.M. Murdoch (deceased)
  6. Tom Harpur (deceased)
~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Anti-VAXers

If you think you know more than your doctor about vaccines, then you probably know more about everything in medicine. You should stop going.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Apistevist

One who rejects faith as unnecessary, unreliable and inherently dishonest.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Apologetics

Apologetics is an unusually honest term from the Christians. They are apologising for all the errors and inconsistencies in the bible. They are apologising for the total lack of evidence to back up their claims. All they can offer is absurd rationalisations.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Apologetics

Apologetics is the sport of making up far-fetched excuses for the lack of evidence for Christian claims and for the abundance of evidence refuting Christian claims.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Apologetics

Professional Christian apologetics try to tell us that the mathematical findings of Stephen Hawking about the early history of the universe prove the existence of god. These Christians have no training whatsoever in math or physics. There is thus no chance they understand what Dr. Hawking is saying. We should led Dr. Hawking speak for himself.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Apologetics

Professional Christians are skilled in the tricky art of apologetics — defending nonsense and making it sound rational. You could look at it as a form of stage magic, deception or lying. To deal with it, you have to learn how it works. Some of it dates back to Paul of Tarsus, Augustine of Hippo and Thomas Aquinas.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Appeal of the Absurd

Most Christians could care less if what they claim to believe makes sense. The absurdity of it all is what appeals to them. They expect to be baffled by things holy.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Appeal of Flattery

Religion flatters second grade dropouts into claiming they know more about science than PhDs in particle physics.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Appeal of Group Feelings

Adults get hooked on religions because of the way they feel in the fellowship of believers, not because the religion seems more plausible or truthful than the alternatives.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Appeal to Laziness

Belief in prayer is the most common of human delusions. It starts in childhood when parents command the child to pray, despite lack of results. Eventually, some prayed-for thing happens naturally. Then they are hooked. Anything they want thereafter they pray for first. They attribute every good thing that happens to them as the result of this obsessive praying. The belief is seductive because it appeals to laziness. Why work when you can just pray for what you want? It turns people into lazy, ineffective slobs who imagine themselves holier than everyone else. They never check to see if those who don’t pray accomplish more or less than they do. They never do a controlled experiment to see if prayer has any effect.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Appeal of Reincarnation

Some people succumb to the lure of belief in reincarnation. But do they really want to be a baby again, unable to speak or move about, to be a child forced to eat food they detest, with every move controlled by others, to be a teen with the extreme sexual frustration and embarrassment of puberty or a young adult facing the brutal rejections and being suddenly dumped?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

The Appeal of Religion

The appeal of religion has nothing to do with the probability that some holy book is true. It is about the lottery-odds chance that if you pretend to subscribe, the religion’s deity will bestow special favours on you and smite your enemies. It other words, it is all about selfishness and wishful thinking.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

The Appeal of Silliness

Religions make themselves silly by claiming fanciful stories are literally true. Religions make themselves obnoxious by claiming to have an exclusive and inerrant handle on all knowledge. Oddly, the sillier and obnoxious a religion is, the more appeal it has.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Appropriate Contempt

In dealing with Christians, what emotion would best help them drop their delusions? contempt? fury? bemusement? condescension? scolding? horse laughter?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

The Aquarist

Have you ever heard of an aquarist who starved his fish to death? Who introduced plagues to kill them? Who allowed the water to dry up? Who punished them for ordinary fishy behaviour? An ordinary human aquarist treats his charges far better than the allegedly infinitely merciful Yahweh.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Are Christians Ethical?

Christians see atheists as evil, people to be silenced, bullied and contained. Atheists see Christians as ignorant, pathetic, deluded and crazy, people who need to be freed of their delusions. Who is more ethical?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Are You An Atheist?

How do you feel about Zeus, Thor and Horus? You have no fear of them. You don’t hate them. They are just characters in mythology. You are an atheist relative to those gods. How do you feel about Yahweh (or the god popular in your culture)? Same way? If yes, you are an atheist.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Are You The Second Coming?

Did you ever ask yourself Maybe I was supposed to be the second coming and I am really the only one who seriously gives a shit about saving the planet and the only one smart enough to know what to do and the whole world is waiting for me to get off my ass or waiting for me to reveal myself with silly impersonations of the time-traveling clown who affects medieval speech and mannerism they are expecting?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Arguing

Everyone had argued with someone with a closed mind, someone who refused to look at evidence. However, when Christians do this, it is exceptionally irritating. I find myself fantasising about killing them. What is it they do differently that is so irritating?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Argument Against Christianity

I would think the most potent argument against Christianity is this. There are 60,000 gods. Christians dismiss all but one of them as too preposterous to even investigate. Yet they single out one religion, Christianity, which is just like all the others, and swallow it hook line and sinker, even though there is no evidence for it whatsoever. What’s so special about Christianity? There is only one thing, their parents were Christian and they indoctrinated their children. There is nothing inherently special in Christianity, just an accident of birth. Unfortunately, I have yet to meet a Christian who would even consider this argument. They are so brainwashed that Christianity is right and all other religions are wrong, they cannot even theoretically conceive of it being any other way.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Argument For Lying

If you ask a Christian why he thinks the god Yahweh exists, he will usually answer something along the lines of God has to exist. If he didn’t, people would run amok. They would have no sense of right and wrong. This is not an argument for the god Yahweh existing, but rather an argument for the utility of lying to people that he does. The Christian seems to be doing a nudge, nudge, wink, wink, letting me know that he too does not believe in a mean old man spying from the clouds, but he wants me to help him perpetuate the lie on others. It is a supercilious way to view one’s fellows.

Of course, in most of the world, people have never heard of Yahweh, and behave just as well as Christians.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Arguments Against 2+ Gods

Christians love to argue why there can’t be less than one god, but I don’t recall them providing any arguments why there cannot be more than one.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Arguments Against There Being a Deity

The arguments against god include:

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Arguments for Christians

When you present your best, clearest, logically irrefutable argument to Christians and they ignore it or mock it, the tendency is become angry with them for their wilful stupidity. The problem is you presented them an argument that appeals to you. You need to come up with something that persuades them, not necessarily a fact-based, logical argument. Consider that if you appeal to authority of any kind, they have quite different authorities.

Imagine you were a psychiatrist treating a patient for delusions. If your treatment did not work, it is hardly the patient’s fault. They have suffered a deep trauma that left lasting brain damage.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Arguments for A Deity vs Arguments for Yahweh

Every argument a Christian has ever offered me for the existence of god applies equally well to Clarus the dogcow as to the god Yahweh.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Arguments for the Existence of God

All the arguments Christians give for the existence of god are for something that started the universe. In previous centuries, God had a lot more to do, such as raise and lower the tides. Today, it is more Christians are arguing for a set of cosmic jumper cables. God’s only remaining duty is ceremonially signaling the start of the big bang.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Arguments for God

Every argument you have ever heard for the existence of god was merely an argument for a mysterious entity with some particular supernatural power, not a full-blown deity. It was never an argument for a particular deity like Yahweh, Allah or Ganesh. Further, they did not argue for omniscience, omnipotence, infinite love… There is a tremendous amount of deception and self-deception in the god-proving business.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Arguments For A God, But None For Yahweh

Every argument I have heard for the existence of Yahweh/Allah would apply equally well to any of the ten thousand plus other gods man has postulated and to any other deity not yet proclaimed. Yet Christians are just as absolutely sure there is only one god and his name is Yahweh and they are of the existence of any god, even though they have not a shred of evidence for either hypothesis.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Arguments For Gods Are Arguments for Unicorns

Is there any argument for the existence of some particular god or god(s) in general that would not apply equally well to unicorns?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Arguments For God’s Existence

When Christians explain why they believe God exists, what they really do is give arguments for pretending that a god exists by repetitively attesting that they could not bear life without an imaginary friend.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Arguments Must Persuade

No matter how logically valid an argument is, if it does not persuade, it is not a good argument. The essential problem is Christians hold their beliefs not because they think they are true but because:

  1. They believe they will possibly be tortured for eternity if they reject them.
  2. Mom told them they were true when they were so young they believed everything mom said without question.
  3. The ideas make them feel good.
  4. They think other people will behave better if they believe. (Forget science which shows the opposite. Forget logic which shows the opposite.)
  5. Their friends claim to believe them and would reject people who do not.

An effective atheist argument has to take those five motives into account, not just show how irrational Christian beliefs are.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Arm Waving

Evangelists always shout and wave their arms. Normally the truth speaks for itself. They know they are selling lies.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Arms Against A Sea Of Troubles

There are many planetary evils you can take up arms against. Religion is the one of the more attractive, since it is sustained nearly entirely by human stupidity. There are no intractable forces of nature to contend with, no stupendous financial machine. You’d think all you had to do was explain to people where they were making errors in their thinking and religious superstition would evaporate like the witch in the Wizard of Oz.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Aron Ra

aka L. Aron Nelson, is a large, middle-aged, Texan, goateed, long haired YouTuber who publishes on clades (the tree of life), the insanity of southern creationists, evolution, breaches is separation of church and state. He has a wry sense of humour. He is quite intelligent. He came from a bizarre creationist background. He sometimes speaks as fast as a tobacco auctioneer. It is as though he is trying to dazzle you with his command of polysyllabic words.

Aron Ra home click to watch
~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Arranged Marriage

There is a difference between an arranged marriage and a forced marriage. In an arranged marriage, the partners must give their consent after they are 16 before they marry. It is time to put a stop to forced marriage. It leads to miserable marriages, domestic abuse, estrangements and suicide.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Arrogance of Prayer

Aside from the fact that prayer does not work, I find it unbelievably arrogant of people to tell an omniscient, infinitely wise god what to do.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

The Arrogant Claim

Christians make an arrogant claim namely that their religion alone is 100% true and the 60,000 others are pure fiction. They claim to know this without reading the holy books of any other religion and with cherry picking only a few pages of their own.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

The Art Of Manipulation

The primary technique of manipulation is telling lies. The manipulator promises that doing as he asks will lead to satisfying some strong basic drive or avoiding something feared. The satirical movie Idiotocracy lays the mechanism bare in its crudest form. The art reaches its peak in religious evangelism.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Artificial Intelligence

One task we might ask artificial intelligence to tackle is the consistency of all the biblical and historical documents we have, and prepare a list of the most glaring and important inconsistencies sorted in order by egregiousness. Perhaps Christians will then at least have a look.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Ascribing Malice

If things go wrong, the religious reaction is to look around for a culprit. It might be another person, a demon, a fairy, Yahweh, Satan. If your cow went dry, it must be the neighbour giving it the evil eye. The reaction to all this imagined malice was to severely punish, even without a stick of evidence. Of course, this cruelty did nothing to reduce bad luck.

When things go wrong, the scientists first looks for some material cause. Even when he decides the problem was caused by a human, he looks first to human imperfection as the cause, not malice, e.g. in a car crash.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Ashamed to be a Christian

Every religious sect claims it is 100% correct, and everyone else is in error. Then they refuse to provide any evidence to back the claim. That is so rude, so conceited and so improbable. I can conceive of someone with a Trump-sized ego thinking that, but not an ordinary human. Maybe what Christians are doing is like holding up their religion as a sort of lottery ticket, screaming they are sure they have the winning ticket. Just like any other lottery ticket buyers, they want to bask in the short-lived anticipation.



~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Asking God To Commit A Crime

Praying to god before a football game is pretty insulting. What you are asking is God to play favourites and fix the game.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Assuming All Other Religions are Wrong

The one question Christians refuse to tackle is Why are you so sure all the other religions are wrong? What is so different about yours? You admit you know utterly nothing about them. How can you possibly know yours is the best?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Assuming Religion is Good

The problem with religion is adherents have been told over and over and over it is the ultimate good. They never look to see if this is actually the case. If they did, they would see it for the hideous evil it is.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Assumptions About Life

Even though scientists knew perfectly well that physics and chemistry work the same way throughout the universe and that our sun in a perfectly ordinary yellow dwarf, they made two very strange assumptions:

That is so irrational. Why would we be so darned special? They should have presumed we are not special until proved otherwise. I think what happened is unconsciously scientists absorbed Christian beliefs about the universe being created purely as a playground for man. At least now the discovery of other solar systems has put part of this conceit to rest.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Atheism As Civil Rights

Atheism is more than just a philosophical position. It is a civil rights movement.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Atheism Is Not Another Religion

Religious extremists try to paint secularism as just another competing religion. Religion is asserting things for which you have no evidence. Secularism does not concern itself with such matters. Secularism is about everything but religion. Religious extremists are effectively claiming that not discussing religion in order to preserve the peace is itself a religion, thus they are justified in thrusting their sect forward to replace secularism as the state religion.

It is quite possible to teach ethics in a secular way, but religious extremists don’t care about teaching ethics; they want to instill terror of god Yahweh in children because they consider ethics equivalent to placating the vengeful god Yahweh.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Atheism Is Not Just Another Religion

One of the popular defences a religious apologist uses is to pretend religion is an arbitrary choice, like picking a favourite flavour of ice cream and atheism is just one of those choices. That is like including non-fiction as one of the possible choices of your favourite genre of fiction.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Atheism Is Not A Religion

If atheism is a religion, then not playing soccer is a sport.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Is Atheism a Religion?

Atheism has none of the characteristics of a religion (belief in a supernatural creator, holy books, services, ceremonies, singing, dogma, a building used only one day a week, miracles…). Perhaps more important is the US goverment and the goverment of Canada don’t consider atheism a religion. If they did, atheist organisations would be tax exempt like Christian churches.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Is Atheism a Religion?

No. To understand why, we need to understand what a religion is. It is a group of beliefs that have no evidence to back them. Religious people try to put a more respectable spin on this by saying is belief based purely on faith — believe without evidence. From the point of view of atheists, religions are just made up stories. From the point of view of religionists, religions are historical accounts of deities. Religions contain some factual beliefs too. Science concurs. There is a consensus of nearly everyone on earth. So these parts are not religious. They are science. Atheists say there is nowhere near enough evidence to support the notion there is a god. They trust science explanations instead. There is nothing in their belief system that is based on faith. It is all based on evidence. Therefore it is not religion.

Atheism does not worship anything. It does not have a god. It does not oppose Yahweh, it mere says there is insufficient evidence to suggest Yahweh is real. Most atheists don’t even claim Yahweh is definitely imaginary.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Atheism vs Humanism

Atheism and humanism are not the same thing. Humanism is atheism plus some other ideas.

Humanism is a philosophical and ethical stance that emphasizes the value and agency of human beings, individually and collectively, and generally prefers critical thinking and evidence over established doctrine or faith.

Atheism simply means you think there is no evidence for the existence of any gods. It is not about morals. Atheism does not come with a built-in moral code, but that does not mean it recommends evil. It says get your moral code from reason or elsewhere. You could have any moral system under the sun and pair it with atheism. Atheism does not imply acceptance of any particular scientific theories such as the big bang or evolution, though, of course, most atheists do.

Atheism does not imply you think well of humanity the way humanism does.

Christians have tried to make the public think that atheism is form of Satan worship. That is nonsense. Atheism recognises no gods.

Atheists do not hate Yahweh or rebel against him. They have no desire to be wicked. They are just very sure he is a character of fiction, like all the other 60,000 gods. Yahweh is thus irrelevant, just as what Zeus wants is irrelevant. Yahweh is just another god from fable. Most atheists are also disgusted by the barbarity of the Christian moral code and the way Christians try to pretend their bible contains a reasonable guide to behaviour in modern day.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Atheist Advantage

We atheists have a huge advantage. All the evidence supports our view. We don’t need to convince anyone of anything, just get them to look at the evidence.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Atheist as Amateur Shrink

An atheist proselytiser must be a psychiatrist. His goal is freeing others from delusions.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Atheist Belief

There is one thing that most atheists do believe, that almost certainly, nothing happens to your consciousness after you die. It just as nothing as your existence before you were born. There is nothing to dread.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Atheist Complaint with Christians

Atheists are not so much frustrated with Christians for stubbornly claiming the existence of god without evidence (and contrary to all evidence); they are mainly angry because of all the cruel and irrational things Christians believe with absolute certainty about what the creator of the universe demands of all humans (not just Christians) and then elect themselves as god’s fanatical enforcers.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Atheist Custody

Judges in the USA deny custody to parents because they are atheist.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Atheist Morality

Christians claim that because atheists reject the bible, they have no morality. They must run about murdering and raping. This is nonsense.

Why are atheists better behaved than Christians?

Do Evil in Return

I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return.

~ Wystan Hugh Auden (1907-02-21 1973-09-29 age:66) ~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Atheist Morality

Christians often tell atheists what they are certain atheists believe about abortion, murder, homosexuality, euthanasia, bestiality… There is only one belief that all atheists share, namely There is not enough evidence to conclude a deity exists. Because atheism is not a religion, and does not come with a list of dos and don’ts, atheists have to get them from some other source.

Because atheists get their dos and don’t and don’ts from various sources, it makes no sense to ask What do atheists believe about homosexuality?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Atheist Pilot

If I fly, I would like an experienced atheist pilot. I don’t want a Christian or Muslim for the following reasons:

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Atheist Pilots Please

The last thing I want to see on a pilot is a religious symbol such as a cross or crescent. It means that when the going get tough, this twit will start praying and thinking about his imaginary afterlife rather than focusing on his job.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Atheist Plus

Atheist is a misleading term. Most atheists also oppose any supernatural claims or claims made without evidence, not just deistic ones. They also oppose claims for the value of homeopathy, astrology, angels, UFO (Unidentified Flying Object) inductions, crystal healing, biblical inerrantists, prayer… You might call them scientists or anti-wooists.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Atheist Stats

Atheists take cheer from the statistics about the rapid decline of Christianity. We should not celebrate too quickly. In the period 1850 to 1900 atheism was much more widespread than today.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Atheist Takeover

In every state in the USA, the fastest growing religion is none.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Atheist vs Agnostic

You can be both and atheist and agnostic or just one or the other or neither. I am an atheist, but not an agnostic. I am as sure there is no god as I am that there are no leprechauns. I feel no need to hedge for a 0.000000000000000000000000001 probability to account for living in a Matrix vat.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Atheist vs Satanist

Christians claim atheists hate god. Christians have atheists confused with Satanists. Satanists hate god. Atheists think he is a character in fiction.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Atheists

Here are some atheists you may have heard of:

  1. Richard Dawkins
  2. Roedy Green
  3. Sam Harris
  4. Stephen Hawking
  5. Christopher Hitchens
  6. Paul-Henri Thiry, Baron d’Holbach
  7. Robert Green Ingersoll
  8. Bill Maher
  9. Randy Newman
  10. Aron Ra
  11. James Randi
  12. Bertrand Russell
  13. Penn Teller
  14. François Marie d’Arouet Voltaire
  15. Frank Zappa
~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Atheists and Believers

What is the practical difference between an atheist and a believer? An atheist notices world problems such as climate change, protecting the environment, finding new sources of energy, finding food and housing for the growing population, and says to himself It is up to us humans to solve. If we don’t do it, it won’t get done. A believer says These are god’s problems. There is no point in us tackling them. We will not succeed unless god wants us to. And if he wants these problems solved, he will solve them himself without our help.

Which position works whether you are right or wrong? Atheism is the prudent approach.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Atheists are Smarter than Christians

63 studies have confirmed that atheists are on average more intelligence than believers. Why would that be?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70) source

Atheists Barred

In North Carolina, the state constitution prohibits atheists from holding public office, even a notary public.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

IIRC (If I Recall Correctly) the federal constitution should long ago have forced out this bit of medieval thinking, but North Carolinans have fought hard to keep it.

Atheists Do Not Reject God

Christians refuse to understand atheists. They accuse atheists of rejecting god, as if atheists believed Yahweh the god existed, but despised him and thus refused to worship him. Atheists often point out what a nasty character of fiction Yahweh is and question Christians on why they would worship a figure so evil. Atheists do not mean by that to concede that god exists. Atheists simply think Yahweh is a character of fiction that some simple-minded people believe is real. He is no more real than Snow White’s evil stepmother. Arguments about Yahweh’s existence are even more idiotic than arguments about whether Snow White’s evil stepmother was real. (The evil queen violates far fewer laws of physics.)

For atheists, the existence of god is not a serious issue. The only reason it is debated is there are so many people suffering from the delusion Yahweh is real and committing crimes because of it.

Why do Christians so badly misunderstand atheists? Christians, are terrified of Yahweh. They presume everyone else must think as they do, even if others deny it. The fear is so intense, it overpowers rational thought. It is like a person terrified of spiders has trouble understanding his fear is not universal.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Atheists Know More Than Christians About Christianity

Most atheists know far more about Christianity than Christians do.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Atheists vs Agnostics

When people start discussing their conviction that god is a crock, they get suddenly all hypothetical and theoretical. They say I am agnostic. I cannot prove god exists, but they are just jerking your chain. They just are sure as they are that the Pacific Ocean exists. It is dishonest to suddenly don the cloak of ridiculous improbabilities, never used for anything else but discussing god.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Atheists Who Pandered To Religion

Historically, atheists have fostered religious delusions on the grounds the peasants needed the myths to keep their behaviour in check, though the controls were not necessary for the educated elite.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

The Atlas Delusion

People who are clinically deluded hang on desperately to their delusion even when others point out they have no reason to believe it and there are many reasons not to. They cannot explain why they are so sure the delusion is true, just that they feel utterly convinced there is no doubt it is true. They confuse this intense feeling with knowing.

I once met a glum mental patient in the Alameda Emergency Psych Ward who believed he was Atlas, supporting the world on his shoulders. Nobody could talk him out of it. I had idea. I said, Would you mind if I held the world for a while? He expressed great relief at being relieved of the duty. I pantomimed taking the world off his shoulders onto mine. He leapt up joyfully and ran off. A psychiatrist came and asked me what I did to cause Atlas’ astounding transformation. He was not freed of his delusion, but he was freed of much of its negative consequences.

Christians are similarly deluded and hold on like limpets to their delusions. We don’t normally think of Christians as deluded, but that is just because they are so common. I have tried many things to free them from their delusions. It is doubly hard because other infected Christians work hard to keep them deluded. I have yet to figure out some sort of intervention for Christians analogous to the one I used for Atlas, that will at least free them of the fear of being roasted alive.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Attached To Disease

Imagine trying to cure a disease that convinced the patient he was infinitely more worthy than everyone else. People being what they are, they become very attached to such delusions. They fight every attempt at treatment. Even though it is difficult, curing Christianity is possible. Don’t give up hope.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Attack

Christians complain that we atheists attack them viciously. A few centuries ago, when Christians were in charge, they viciously attacked atheists by burning them alive or boiling them in oil. All atheists do is present challenging arguments and ask questions. Christians have no grounds to complain.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Attack

Why is it that Christians attack atheists with 100 times the vehemence they attack other religions? Christians disagree 100% on dogma with both other religions and with atheists. Other religions merely promote conflicting fluffy nonsense without offering any evidence. Atheists present hard evidence why Christianity (and a few other religions) is untrue.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Attacking When the Mark Is Weak

One of the unconscious tricks Christians use to snare new converts is to wait until they are grieving over the death of a loved one. They say I’m sure they are watching you now. They have no evidence whatsoever for this. The lie however, is so emotionally seductive at this weak point, it becomes the entry point for the entire Christian poison pill.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Attending Your Own Funeral

Christians plan elaborate funerals with long guest lists because they imagine their ghost will also attend.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Attitudes Toward Death

If you are a Christian you can’t seriously believe the nonsense about the harps and the horned boys in red tights with pitchforks. These are elements of comedy. You can never have a good think about death and put it aside as reasonably settled. With atheism, death is just the end. I might think about how to wrap up my life affairs and arrange some sort of ceremony, but nothing is terribly pressing or interesting. Nothing happens so there is nothing to fret about. When I am dead, it is no longer my problem. I won’t be there. It is no more problematic than my non-existence before I was born. In contrast, the subject of death is so touchy for Christians, merely encountering or thinking about an atheist is sufficient to trigger depressed musings about death.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Attitudes Toward the Future

There are three basic approaches of dealing with the future:

  1. The grasshopper: Do what would be optimal if you hit by a bus tomorrow.
  2. The gambler: Do you best to predict what is going to happen, the bet the farm you are right.
  3. The boy scout: Be prepared.

Betting that Christianity is essentially correct is such a longshot, trillions to one against. We don’t usually think of Christians as irresponsible gamblers. That bet is based on nothing more than a gut feeling nothing more, but they find it absolutely convincing. I wonder if they feel that same way about the odds of winning the next lottery? It is the atheist who is fair and kind to everyone who is using a boy scout strategy.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Avoiding Christianity

The craziest, dirtiest, stupidest, greediest, bigoted, cruelest, most ignorant people I have ever encountered were Christian. They are obsessed with blood and sacrifice. Even if I suspected they were right, I could not bring myself to join them. They are just too revolting. It would be like going to live in a pig sty.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Avoiding Debate

Have you ever noticed how Christians avoid debating the truth of their articles of faith? Like cuttlefish, they sometimes emit a cloud of twaddle, simulating insanity, hoping you will give up on them. It’s as though they suspect you are right, but believe it would be wicked to abandon their faith.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Aztec Morality

Christianity borrows its morality from desert dwellers who lived 3000 years ago, who practised animal and human sacrifice. This makes as much sense as basing your moral code on that of the Aztecs.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Baby Bigots

Babies are born bigots. Most of them grow out of it if religion does not retard their development.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Bach the Prostitute

The best music in the world by Bach, Mozart and Handel was written to sell Christianity. That’s like discovering Nureyev did ads for Kentucky Fried Chicken.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Bach, Salesman for God

Bach and Mozart poured their hearts out writing religious music. It is used to this day to help sell religion. I wonder if they had known they were aiding a giant con what sort of music they would have written.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Backing the Wrong Horse

I wonder what percentage of Christians now realise they backed the wrong horse, but are too embarrassed to admit it?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Backward Countries

The most backward countries of the world are the most religious, usually Christian or Islamic. Ironically it is the west who forced Christianity on those nations. They took it seriously. The west now ignores nearly every single biblical commandment. The most backward countries are the ones who execute people simply for being attracted to the same sex, again a gift from Christianity. Since in the west created this mess, surely it is up to us to help alleviate it.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Backward India

India is sooo backward. How backward is it? Catholics there had the state arrest Sanal Edamaruku. He had debunked a phony Catholic miracle, a weeping statue, that was actually getting its tears from a leaking toilet. The clergy were knowingly serving this contaminated water to the faithful and wanted to keep up the scam.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Backward Swaziland

42% of the population of Swaziland are infected with HIV (Human Immuno-deficiency Virus). This is the worst in the world. Swaziland is a very Christian country, that even goes so far as to believe in the divine right of kings and that women are fully subject to men. In particular, women must defer to men on whether to wear condoms.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Bad Catholic, Bad Catholic

The Catholic church: it is not just wrong, it’s bad.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Badmouthing God

Satanists might badmouth Yahweh. They believe he exists, but we atheists merely say You Christians have failed to provide convincing evidence that Yahweh exists. If anything, we atheists are badmouthing Christians for being such poor debaters, or for their gullibility believing without any evidence, not Yahweh. We atheists don’t have any emotional feelings about Yahweh, because we have no reason to think he exists. It is not as though we hate Yahweh or rebel against him. To us, he is just imaginary. I don’t have any strong feelings about Fitzwilliam Darcy either because I know he is just a character of fiction (Pride and Prejudice).

Sometimes when we atheists try to shake up the false certainty of Christians, we will quote the bible, to remind them of the strange things it has to say about Yahweh or about the strange things it says he did. Christians often interpret this as hate. You can only hate that which is real. Christians imagine Yahweh is real. They can hate him (and surely must if they have read the bible) and so imagine atheists also can.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Baffling Believers

There are 60,000 gods. Most people dismiss 59,999 of them without a second glance. Your odds of picking the right none are pretty bad, even worse if you assume none of them are a good approximation to the real god. As an atheist, I find two things utterly baffling about believers:

  1. that they are so sure their chosen god exists, without evidence.
  2. that they are so sure none of the other gods exist, without even a cursory glance.
~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Baffling Christians

When I debate Christians I often say to myself, They can’t be serious. They surely don’t really believe this nonsense. What are they up to?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Bait and Switch

Debating Christians can be so frustrating. To them, the question is Christianity true? and does believing in Christianity make you feel good? are the exact same question. You ask them a question about Christianity being true and they answer with a statement about Christianity making them feel good. Maybe what they are trying to say is Christianity may not be true, but it makes me feel good.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Bait and Switch

Evidence for a intelligent designer who tweaked the universal constants is not evidence at all for the god Yahweh who demonstrates not even the most primitive knowledge of cosmology and who is preoccupied with human sex.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Balance of Male and Female

Parents who interfere with the equal balance of male and female babies are condemning their children to a much lower chance of finding a life partner.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Bald-faced Liars

Nearly every Christian I have met is a compulsive liar. He feels no shame so long as the lie promotes Christianity. Once someone tells the lie with a straight face they are absolutely sure their fearless leader rose from the dead, its all downhill from then on.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Bankrupt Christians

Recall just how fundamentally morally and truthfully bankrupt our Christian opposition is. They have not so much as an ounce of truth to support their assertions. All they have left are lies, deceptions and the other tools of con men. We are not dealing with equals. We are dealing with con-men or the mentally challenged.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Banned in Boston

In Boston it is illegal to put up a poster saying Religions are fairy tales for adults.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70) source

Banning Contraception

Christian whackos in a number of states are banning contraception by redefining a person to include a fertilised egg. This is insane. The population of earth is exploding. Only if we limit population do we have any chance at all of avoiding massive famines and global war. Even bears and deer have the sense to limit the number of offspring.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Banning Dancing

In Canada the government suppressed the first nations people by making it illegal for them to dance their traditional dances. It sounds absurd that the government would interfere that way, but back then Christians attempted to stop everyone from dancing and impose their sour view of life on everyone.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Banning Divorce

If the aim of the church is to maximise the congregation, banning divorce is a strange way to do it. Divorced couples don’t have more babies . Remarried ones do.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Banning Pornography

In 2014-09, the British decided to ban quite a large number of sexual acts in pornographic films including: female ejaculation, spanking and face sitting. No justification explaining the need for the measures is available. Presumably, there is some prude in power who finds these particular acts disgusting, who imagines he is the honourary mother of all Britons and who thinks his god put him in charge of British pornography.

I can’t think of any argument for banning harmless acts. Of course, you could at least make a case for banning harmful ones, e.g. bareback sex, needle sharing, extreme stretching leading to an emergency room visit afterwards, rape, use of firearms, simulated snuff, overeating or smoking on the grounds emulating the actors would harm someone.

Even when there is a clear harm from viewing something, you have to think twice about banning it. With fantasy life blocked, the porn aficionado with a smoking fetish, for example, will turn to real life or black market porn sources. As Napoléon observed One should never forbid what one lacks the power to prevent.

Further, you must build a logical case for banning some activity in porn films, such as simulated snuff, but permitting it in family-rated films.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Barbie Doll Beheader

The god Yahweh is as ludicrous as a religion made up by five year olds who threaten their little friends that they will chop the heads off their Barbie dolls in a sakerryfice.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

The Bargain Between the Church and paedophiles

The churches make a bargain with the paedophiles. The church says We will cover for you and provide you with an endless supply of obedient victims if you dedicate your life to spreading the faith professionally.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Bargaining with God

When someone claims he has made a bargain with God, consider that he made up all the conditions and penalties, that he has no evidence that his god accepted the bargain, or that his god even exists. His belief that he was able to coerce the creator of the universe into taking time out of his busy schedule to make a private deal with him shows delusions of grandeur. Its even nuttier than claiming to have made such deals with Bill Gates.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Barking Mad Christians

How do you tell a barking mad Christian from a merely insane one? Tell them some of the hundreds of logical consistencies in the Noah’s ark story then ask them if they still think it is literally true.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Bash the Victim

There was a series of gang rapes in a Bolivian, Christian, Methodist colony. The rapists drugged the victims unconscious, so that the women remembered nothing of the event. The church had taught women to blame themselves for this event. The women proclaimed God was punishing them for not being sufficiently diligent in offerings and other churchly services. Because of church indoctrination, they felt obligated to forgive the rapists, even though the rapists made no apology or compensation. The rapists turned out to be a band of Methodists, living within the colony. Methodist rapists is pretty high on the hypocrisy meter. Mind you one vigilante group buried a suspect alive along with the corpse of his victim.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70) source

Basis of Government

You don’t have a right to base law on lies, on statistics you just made up or on fiction. In other words, you have no right to try to impose your religious beliefs on others by building them into the law.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Batshit Crazy

Religions are by definition irrational — batshit crazy actually. If they were logical, rational and had evidence to support them they would be science, not religion.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Be Nice To Christians

Christians are just atheists before they have had a mindchange operation. Play fair with them.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Be a Sheep?

Christians often use the metaphor that sheep who blindly follow will go to heaven where more independent goats will go to hell. This whole idea of trying to persuade people not to think is the sort of thing a con man would do. If Christianity had the genuine article, an inerrant document written by god, they would demand everyone read it and thoroughly check it out. It would be an irresistible recruiting tool, sort of like the old Timex takes a licking keeps on ticking commercials.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Bearded Fairy

Yahweh is scary because of imposing Hollywood special effects. Yet Yahweh could be more accurately described as an undetectable, evil, perverted, bearded fairy who lives on a cloud. Without the grandiose title of god he does not seem nearly so imposing. All modern day Christians base their notions of god on Hollywood special effects. Yahweh is just a scary movie.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Becoming Christian

The biggest problem with becoming a Christian is not that you have to believe in an invisible, undetectable sky fairy but that you have to become an insufferable prick.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Becoming a Christian?

Let us say you become a Christian. Bit by bit you will come to notice how superior you are to ordinary people. You will start meddling in other people’s lives. You will start criticising others who don’t live up to your high standards. After all, you have the answers and they don’t. You don’t feel guilty about your nagging. You are doing them a favour. People might suck up to you to get you off their backs, but they would rather you were not around.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Begging for God

This idea of begging for money for god makes no sense. Allegedly god created the entire universe. If he wanted something, he could just create it by saying the right magic word. Obviously, the money is not really for god, but for someone who fancies himself an official agent, but they all tell the same lie, pretending the money is for god.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Behaviour When Unsure

The difference between a Christian and a scientist, is that when a scientist does not know for certain, he says I don’t know, whereas the Christian, when he has absolutely no clue, makes up some BS and claims it is absolute truth with absolute certainty. It is basically a matter of differing honesty. The funny thing is, when the scientist says I don’t know, the Christian reacts as if the scientist had just farted. Christians think it wicked to ever admit you do not know. Every crack of unknowing must be patched with bullshit.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Beige Putty

As an atheist, the world is full of mystery, puzzles, curiosity and strangeness. I pity my Christian neighbours. At their churches, they had and out buckets of beige putty labeled God Did It. They are required to fill every crack, anything interesting, anything unexplained with this putty. What a boring world!

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Being Brave

If people are afraid, they most commonly use two basic two approaches to handle it:

  1. bravery
  2. false reassurance

Religion is a type (2) approach to convince people that magic spells and incantations will protect them from harm.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Being Christopher Hitchens

It must have been so frustrating being Mr. Hitchens. It is so obvious for 10,000 reasons Yahweh is an imaginary bogey man. Yet Hitchens had to deal with Christians who are so terrified of Yahweh they could not even conceive of the possibility. It must have been like living in an insane asylum surrounded by a cult of invisible pink bunny believers, who attack each other in the night on bunny commands.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Being a Hero

Most children fantasise about heroically rescuing someone from drowning, fire or other disaster. As an adult, by donating a trivial amount of money, they can heal blindness, cure disease, prevent starvation, provide shelter etc., but they invariably throw the opportunity away, instead donating to churches which is effectively paying dues to a private club.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Belief In God

There are no good reasons to believe in god.

There are thousands of reasons not to believe in god.

There are many reasons to profess a belief in god. A politician cannot get elected without telling this lie. Children often tell it to avoid conflict with parents. Conscriptees tell it to avoid military service.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Belief in God

When people say they believe in god, they don’t usually mean they consider the preponderance of the evidence leads them to conclude with probability greater than 0.5 that god exists. They mean there might be a one in a million chance that some supernatural bastard will torture them for eternity. They simply can’t dismiss that possibility.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Belief in God ⇒ Dysfunction

Sociologists have found more dysfunctional a society, the higher will be the belief in god. When you can’t succeed in the real world, you grasp at straws. And further, the higher the degree of religion, the higher the dysfunction. Religion interferes with science, creates social tensions and makes people give up trying to improve this life.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70) Why Evolution is True click to watch

Belief in Hell

Why do people believe in hell?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Belief in Lies

If there were a headline that said Belief in lies down 25% or Belief in superstition down 25% people would cheer. But if it said Belief in religion down 25% which means almost the same thing, many people would wring their hands.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Belief In the Not No

Religion is the study of why people believe things that are patently not so.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Belief Locks

What holds religious beliefs in place? We have all seen how Christians flatly refuse to examine factual evidence, or even to examine conflicting verses in the bible. Even when you confront them with extreme contradictions in their beliefs, they refuse to acknowledge them. The suggests tho locks are not in the rational mind. I think there are two primary forces:

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Belief vs Fact

If I say lions are native to Africa, its that a fact or a belief? It is a fact because zoologists who study lions confirm it. Even though there is a remote possibility some wild lions might live in the Rocky Mountains, we say that is so improbable, for practical purposes we ignore it.

Does Yahweh exist? Some say yes. I say that is a belief, because Christians accept this proposition because of its emotional appeal or because a parent told it to them. This is not sufficient backing to rate as a fact. Lot’s of things that do not exist have emotional appeal. Parents tell their children lots of things that are untrue, often without even knowing they are doing so.

Christians usually brag they have no evidence or facts at all to support their beliefs. They just have faith, just an intuitive hunch, i.e. bugger all.

As a mathematician, I notice that the following statements are inconsistent:

Math says if there an inconsistency, then one or more of the premises must be untrue. In other words, Yahweh, as described by Christians cannot exist. Christians either have to change his attributes and deeds, to make them consistent, or give up entirely on his existence. I suggest dropping the absurd claim the creator of the universe wrote the bible. Ascribing that pile of crap to god is an insult.

But in summary, even though Christians dispute it, it is a fact there is no god, just as the range of lions is a fact.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Belief You Are God

Certain types of brain damage can cause a person to think they are god — that they are omnipotent. Oddly, the first time they try to levitate a glass of water and fail does nothing to dispel the illusion.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Belief-Proving Machine

The mind is a belief-proving machine. Once a belief gets a foothold, the mind tends to seek out confirming evidence and ignore counter evidence. This affects everyone, believers and non-believers alike. That is why you need a discipline like science to force you to keep considering all the evidence.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Beliefs

It would be nice if beliefs were generated by rational thinking. However, I don’t think that is true. They are mostly generated by peer pressure to get in sync with the beliefs of the tribe. Back in the 1970s I used this mechanism to help young gay people. They were miserable, lonely, closeted, bullied by Christians into self loathing, sometimes near suicide. All had to do was introduce them to a couple of dozen gay males who accepted themselves and had rejected the Christian hate story. It took no more than one evening for them to drop their old poisonous beliefs and adopt new much happier ones. What they effectively did was drop one tribe that was treating them extremely badly and adopt a new tribe that treated them well.

Christians do not realise their tribe is treating them poorly. It is extracting tithes. It is micromanaging their lives. It is making all manner of false promises. It is teaching them all manner of false science and history. It is a hierarchy. It is all about snootiness and looking down your nose.

What Christians need is some time in a new tribe (atheist) that treats them better. However, their clergy have taught them that even looking at some other tribe is the most extreme form of evil.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Believing Despite the Evidence

Many Christians admit there is no evidence for the existence of god and plenty of evidence there is no god. They make a virtue out of believing in god in the face of the counter evidence. It takes effort to believe the highly improbable and they are proud of their effort. To me it sounds like someone expressing pride that there were able, through great effort, to believe they could fly like Peter Pan.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Believing in Super Man

The movies let you pretend for a couple of hours to be Lois Lane or Jimmy Olsen, buddies with Superman, who can be counted on to bail you out of any conceivable trouble. Christians are so enamoured of the fantasy that they frantically lie to each other and persecute non-believers, to help convince themselves a similar Superman story it is really true, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Beneficent God

If god is beneficent, why hid he repeatedly wipe out nearly all life on earth in hideous catastrophes.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Benefits of Religion

What are the benefits of religion?

There is not much benefit to the believer. Most of the benefit flows the institution. They convince the believers to surrender their will and their sense of right and wrong. In a way the church behaves like a mind parasite, controlling the believer to ignore his own interests and do the church’s bidding.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Benign God Invented Predator/Prey?

For most creatures, life is about constantly evading predators and/or constantly evading starvation. The strange thing is, so many people are convinced a benign deity deliberately designed things this way.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Best Before Date For Truth

When you look back even 200 years at what was considered certain knowledge, it makes you wonder how much of what we hold true today will survive over the long term.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Best Counselor

If I wanted help with personal problems, the last person I would turn to would be a sanctimonious child molester.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70) Deliver Us from Evil

Betraying Kids

The military junta in Argentina swept into homes in the middle of the night and took the parents off for torture and death. They took the babies or forced pregnant mothers to give birth, changed the baby’s names and raised them as little right wingers. The kids sometimes discovered how the people they called mom and dad had betrayed them and killed their parents. I would imagine a similar rage and sense of betrayal happens when children find out their parents lied to them to sell them into Christianity.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Beyond Freedom of Religion

Freedom of religion was a momentous step in stopping religious fanatics from forcing their demented notions on others. However, we need to go further and gradually eliminate religion altogether. Holding onto it out of tradition is as wrong headed as holding onto public hangings or witch dunking. It amounts to cherishing obsolete science, primitive barbarities and ancient lies. People have a right to do crazy things only so far as they don’t hurt others. Christians don’t fit that criterion by a long shot.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Bi-polar Christians

People who imagine they have been possessed by the god Yahweh, have a sobering realisation to face: it is actually just bi-polar disorder.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

The Bible

Christians believe in a bible that bears no resemblance whatsoever to the actual one. If atheists could convince all Christians to read the bible cover to cover, Christianity would soon disappear from the earth. One of the main reasons people become atheist is they read the entire bible and are horrified, disgusted and repelled. Christianity persists because Christianity in practice is not bible-based and hence has no claim whatsoever to be divinely guided.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Bible Scholars

Bible scholars are absurdly biased academics. They make up the silliest excuses to patch up gaping holes in the bible. If they read the same data gently disguised, but were told it applied to some other religion, they would flat out reject it as nonsense.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Bible-based Climate Change Deniers

Bible-based climate change deniers base their certainty that nothing terrible could come to earth in the form of climate change on 9:11-13. If you read the verse, God says I will send no more floods. Climate change can also kill with heat or drought. Further God said I won’t destroy the earth, but that does not mean I will stop you from doing it.

Despite its reputation, almost nothing in the bible is true. You simply cannot rely on it. If you doubt, read the entire bible with a piece of paper with three columns. When you read something you think is true tick the first column. When you read something you don’t know if it is true, tick the second column. When you read something that you think is false, tick the third column. Christians claim your third column should be completely empty.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Biblical Authors

Dozen of people in ancient times wrote text that Constantine ended up including in his canonical collected that eventually became the KJV (King James Version) bible. Why did they do it?

I wonder if any of them considered the possibility their lies would be controlling people living thousands of years into the future.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Biblical Con Men

The writers of the bible demand:

These are not the rules of a wise creator. They are rules of unscrupulous con men. Even if there is a god, the bible has absolutely nothing to do with him.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Big and Little Religions

There are two kinds of religions: bullies that kill people and use various types of force or threat to gain new members or torment non-members and the small ones that don’t . I can put up with some nutty sect that leaves out dishes of honey at the foot of the garden for the fairies, but the first type, they really have to go. This planet cannot survive them and their crazy notions.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

The Big Bang

The big bang was not an explosion. It was the rapid expansion of space itself, smoothly and faster than the speed of light. It happened everywhere, even the spot where your heart is now. The expansion of the space of the universe continues to this day, even at the spot where your heart is now. We know this by looking at the microwave background radiation from the dawn of time, by examining the Doppler shift of light from distant galaxies and from the abundance of helium and other light elements that only could have been created in the super heat of the big bang.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

The Big Bang

Stephen Hawking’s latest thinking about the big bang takes quantum mechanics into account. He says the universe had no beginning, yet it did not exist forever. Quantum mechanics always screws with your mind like this. Your intuition breaks down because the universe works by totally different laws on the ultra-small scale. Consider, for example, that a circle is not infinite and it does not have a beginning.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

The Big Bang

The universe started out as a tiny black hole. There is no time in a black hole. Nothing changes. Another way of looking at it, time passes infinitely slowly. There was no time in which a creator god could have existed or created. Stephen Hawking on why there is no god. click to watch

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

The Big Ethical Question

How much does the suffering of others matter?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

The Big Lie

Religion is infuriating not because it is blithering nonsense, but because it is a carefully constructed lie intended to con the poor out of their money.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

The Big Morality Issues

Religions tend to focus on petty thou shalt nots. This allows believers to ignore the two big issues of morality — what do you do with your time and what you do you do with your wealth to contribute to your planet?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Big Picture

Humans have a failing. The tend to became narrowly focused and miss the big picture. Most commonly the pursuit of money leads people to destroy the environment and kill their fellows. Religion also causes people to ignore the evidence what they are doing is suicidal.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

The Biggest Con

Once a man convinces you that he speaks for a god, he has you by the balls. You will give him all your money, without resistance. You will hand over your wife. You will let him rape your children. You will kill whom he tells you to. That power over you is a great temptation to anyone holding. If anyone claims to have a special pipeline to a god, he is either deluded or a con man. Be aware especially of people who use costumes, ritual magic or eccentric ways of speaking to bamboozle you.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

The Biggest Lie

The biggest lie believed in North America is the existence of Yahweh. From that monster lie, thousands of other lies and evils flow, like creationism, the persecution of homosexuals and the meddling in the end-of-life decisions of others.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Biggest Source of Lies

What divides humanity? Lies and untruths. What is the biggest source of lies and untruth? Religion. If the world is ever going to work together, it will require dismantling the worst lies and untruths of each religion especially those use to justify stealing resources from or killing people of a different religion.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Biggest Source of Lies

What divides humanity? Lies and untruths. You don’t find people divided over a common absolute truth like 2 + 2 = 4. What is the biggest source of lies and untruth? Religion (with politics a close second). If the world is ever going to work together, it will require dismantling the worst lies and untruths of each religion especially those used to justify stealing resources from or killing people of a different religion.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Bigotry

Bigotry learned from religion is still bigotry. It is no more excusable than bigotry learned any other way.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

To the Bigots of the Anglican Church

You justify spitting on gays, preaching god hates them, that they should be killed, treating as second class citizens all because the bible calls for killing them. But you conveniently ignore the fact the bible also calls for killing everybody else too.

Biblical morality is so insane and so out of date, even the most fanatical Christians ignore it, while giving it lip service. e.g.

That’s not morality. That is obsessive-compulsive disorder. None of those commandments make any sense except avoiding shellfish in a world without refrigeration, but there is no need to kill anyone.

What is the matter with you that you can see how idiotic the bible is in these cases, but not in the case of gays?

The fact the church has officially and with eyes wide open embraced bigotry proves the church is hateful and obsolete. It is time to close its doors.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Bigots Don’t Like Being Called Bigots

I discovered to my surprise that bigots feel offended when you call them bigots. The religious promoting hate don’t think of themselves as bigots. They see themselves as superior people holding superior wisdom. It is important to let them know not everyone agrees with their self assessment.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Bigots Marching to the Grave

Christian bigotry is primarily promoted by people born prior to 1945. Thank-fully that generation are now dying off and taking their bigotry with them to the grave.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Billboards

Christians complain when atheists put up billboards questioning the claims of Christianity or promoting atheist ideas. Christians consider any disagreement with their faith (which has no evidence) as hate speech. Hate speech is speech which threatens violence, torture or death. I have never seen an atheist group do that. On the other hand, I have seen Christians use hate speech toward atheists, homosexuals or Muslims on a daily basis. If putting up a billboard is hate speech, count the Christian and atheist billboards. The vast majority of them are Christian. Hate is so familiar to Christians, they don’t even notice when they do it. They are just piously echoing Yahweh’s and Jesus’s hate speech.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Birth Control Does Not Work

Why does the pope endorse only birth control methods that don’t work? The only way to make new Catholics is to indoctrinate babies.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Birth of a Cult

On 2017-04-04 I witnessed the birth of a cult. I was listening to a Canada-wide CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation) radio broadcast about an inquiry into missing and murdered indigenous women. The founder of the cult said We must allow the dead women to direct the activities of the inquiry. To my horror, this nutty idea received thunderous applause. Dead people can’t direct an inquiry. What happens next?

  1. The cult founder will falsely claim through some vague process, involving ancient wisdom, the dead women are telling her how to direct the inquiry.
  2. Gullible idiots will then put her in charge of the inquiry.
  3. Once she has everyone following her directives, she will broaden them to include annual ceremonies, edicts on morality and anti-male and anti-white propaganda. She is now a full-fledged cult with herself as indispensable leader, ostensibly, who never commands for her own benefit. She just relays messages from the land of the dead. There is no means to argue with her.
~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Birthers

Over ¾ of North Carolina Republicans believe President Obama is not a citizen of the USA. Granted 8% of them don’t know that Hawaii is part of the USA. There is no evidence of any kind to support this view. There is plenty to disprove it. The delusion survives solely because racists tell it to each other, much the way the myths of Christianity survive in a body of believers. Average and below average intelligence humans tend to believe what they believe their fellows believe. It has nothing at all to do with evidence. It works much the way dogs in a pack don’t think for themselves. They defer to the alpha leader.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Black Attraction to Religion

I am surprised that black Americans are attracted to Christianity and Islam where they are told to shut up, don’t ask questions and do what you are told. I would think they got quite enough of that during slavery and segregation.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Black Christians

Slaveowners in America used the bible to convince themselves that owning, beating and raping slaves was a high and holy calling. They forced Christianity on the slaves because it made them more submissive. The hope of paradise after death gave them false hope. This made them less rebellious.

You would think the descendants of these slaves would strongly reject Christianity, but they don’t. They embrace it with more blind enthusiasm than almost anyone else. Christianity is insinuated into black culture and black music. There is no social life outside the church.

White supremacist southerners still feel virtuous about treating blacks as second class and harming them to the point of torture and murder. This is left over from the bible and slavery. The churches are still segregated. They are an evil reactionary force.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

The Black Church

The black church was forced on slaves to make them docile. It taught them to accept abuse in this life in hope of decent treatment in the afterlife. It is amazing anything at all good ever came from it.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Black Churches

In the days of the US civil war, Christians bellowed Genesis 9:25-27 and Ephesians 6:3 to prove slavery was not only righteous but mandatory.

The black slaves were conned into accepting Christianity to make them subservient. In Ephesians 6:5 God commands them Slaves, obey your earthly masters with fear and trembling, with a sincere heart, as you would Christ.

Christianity was a tool of oppression. Ironically, today, black Americans cling to the church even more tenaciously than whites, perpetuating the con.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Black Stockholm Syndrome

Black people, both in America and Africa were more oppressed by the Christian church than almost anyone else. Yet, strangely, they are far more attached to it than others. Why? Slavery did two terrible things:

  1. It beat in the habit of bowing to authority without question.
  2. It killed off the most rebellious and independent.
~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Blame Religion

It is quite a different thing when an Christian or atheist commits a crime and when a Christian or atheist commits a crime because their religion/philosophy commands them to. You can only blame the second on the religion.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Blaming God

Any time a Christian goes through a harrowing experience and they are later interviewed on the radio they will say something like I don’t why god let such a terrible thing happen to me. How stupid can they be! Have they never noticed that terrible things happen to good people all the time. god never intervenes. Events always take their natural course.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Blasphemy

I good idea does not need protection from criticism. A bad idea does. That is why there are blasphemy laws — to protect bad ideas.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Blasphemy Laws

A blasphemy law is an attempt to broaden the power of a religion by forcing non-believers to behave as if the religion were not blithering nonsense.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Blasphemy Laws

Why are there blasphemy laws? Because the clergy want to stop people even questioning their message. They know their message is a lie and cannot stand up to even the slightest examination. You might say it is a pro-monopoly law.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Blessing a Murder

You’d think the ultimate obscenity would offering a blessing to soldiers about to slaughter children, but it is common and no Christian ever complains.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Blessings

If I were on a jury trying a man who had strangled some nitwit Christian who said that people in the third world should treat earthquakes and hurricanes as god’s blessings, I would unconditionally acquit.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Blind Obedience

Christians tend to believe that blind obedience to authority is a Good Thing™ This would be true if the authority were wiser and more moral than you. But obeying someone who is corrupt is itself both cowardly and corrupt. Blind obedience is what got the Germans into such trouble under Hitler, Americans into the Viet Nam war and Christians in such trouble under a long succession of corrupt popes. I don’t mean by this you should resist direction from a loutish, stupid or corrupt police officer, only if he attempted to make you do something immoral.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Blind Obedience

There is no crime a Christian would not commit if they were deluded that Yahweh commanded them to do it.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Blind Worship of the Past

Blind worship of things past makes us select the worst of the medieval world to form today’s religions.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Blindly Repeated Lies

Nearly everything Christians tell you to recruit you is a lie that they just blindly repeat without thought. Even when you call them on their lies, they just shout them all the louder. So the strange thing is, Christians themselves know their religion is a con based on lies, but for some reason still promote it.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Blocking Christians

If it could be demonstrated with very high probability that Christianity were a dangerous delusion, would we be justified in repealing freedom of religion and pressuring Christians (and similar religiously delusional people) into treatment? To what extent should we block them from harming others with their delusions, particularly their own children? Or do we consider the right to harm others for religious motives a fundamental freedom?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Blood Drinking

Imagine a group of teens stumbled across the rituals of a bronze age cult that did human sacrifice, animal sacrifice, ritual cannibalism, ritual blood drinking. They believed in the death penalty for even the most minor infractions of a pointless life-engrossing game, with thousands of inscrutable rules. They then started focussing their efforts on recruiting more teens. What do you think we should do? Yes, these Christians are a menace.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Blood Sacrifice

Without the shedding of blood, there can be no forgiveness of sin. Where did this idea come from: an Aztec blood sacrifice cult, some Hawaiian volcano cult, cannibals living on a remote Indonesian island? Nope. Christianity! The essential event in Christianity is human sacrifice. An innocent person acted as scapegoat to atone for the sins of others to propitiate a sadistic god. This event is commemorated by literal blood drinking and cannibalism (if you believe in the miracle of transubstantiation.) If Christians ran across some Amazon tribe doing this, they would be horrified. They are numb to their own insanity because it is so familiar. This is disgusting and crazy. It should not continue, no matter how long the tradition.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Bogey Men

When a little boy is terrified of bogeymen under the bed, his parents reassure him the bogeymen are not real, but what really works is their own complete lack of fear. In a similar way, Christian adults have become frightened of an invisible, sadistic sky fairy planning to roast them alive. In addition to arguments why this fear is unfounded, we atheists must demonstrate a complete informed lack of fear in this imaginary monster.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Bogeyman Under the bed

under license from toonpool.com
under license from toonpool.com

Adult Christians like to taunt me that the god Yahweh must exist because I cannot prove he does not. I would like to show why that logic is fallacious.
son: Daddy, there is a bogey man under the bed.
father: No no, that is just your imagination. Here, let me show you with a flashlight.
son: But bogey men are invisible.
father: I see. I am waving a broom around all under the bed. I don’t feel any bogeymen.
son: But bogey men are transcorporeal.
father: Where’d you learn a strange word like that? What does it mean?
son: It means brooms go right through ’em.
father: Ok then, if bogey men are invisible and transcorporeal, how did you find out one was under the bed in the first place?
son: I heard a squeaking noise.
father: But everyone knows bogeyman don’t squeak. They make sort of breathy roaring noise like this, ahhrrr.
son: Eeek!
son: But it is written, He’s there, Dad, I promise. I can feel him with my soul strings.
father: Who written it? you? soul strings Who you been hanging out with, Oprah?
son: No, its in a book Ralphie owns.
son: Dad, why won’t you believe me? Why do you reject the living truth? Why do you hate me? Why have you forsaken me? Why dost thou abandon me to a fate worse than death?
father: What have you been reading? I am not harming you or abandoning you. You are just letting your imagination run away with you. I will sleep in the arm chair over there. If any bogey man attacks you I will come to your rescue and whack him with a baseball bat. I’ll leave the constellation turtle night light on. Now go to sleep.
son: But Dad. He’s indomitable. He will rip off your appendages. He will inject you with steroids. I don’t want to die…

Yahweh is just the adult version of an imaginary bogeyman under the bed. Christians too need help getting over their terror.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Bogeymen

Convincing Christians there is no need to fear Yahweh is similar to convincing children they need not fear invisible bogeymen under the bed. It is actually much harder because Christians are paranoid. They are convinced you are trying to trick them into harming themselves.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Bogeymen

It is very hard to reason a child out of his fear of a bogeyman under the bed. It is very hard to reason an adult out of her fear of spiders and snakes if her mother taught her when she was little that they were all very dangerous.

It almost impossible to reason a Christian out of their fear of Yahweh or a Muslim out of their fear of Allah. Humans have something equivalent to ROM (Read Only Memory) in computers. Anything mom tells them at a young age gets burned in, almost unerasably.

This is a Darwinian survival mechanism for parents to ensure strict compliance with any wisdom they consider of prime importance to survival. (Parents need to be careful about scaring toddlers off sex entirely for their entire lives, by accidentally triggering this mechanism, meaning only to discourage sex play, similarly for fearing strangers.)

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Bogus Claims

Oddly, Christians would sue Pfizer if they found out it had sold them a drug to cure cancer that never been tested and turned out to be totally useless. But they would never dream of even asking a faith healer to return the $1000 he conned for a proven useless healing.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Bogus Collecting

If I were to start collecting money on behalf of the Hudson’s Bay Company without first getting their permission, I could expect to cool my heels in jail, but if I collected on behalf of some god, without His permission, I will be applauded as a virtuous person, no matter how I spent the money.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Bogus Morality

What kind of morality can you expect from a Catholic who believes that by confessing to any conceivable crime, dropping an offering in the box and saying a few boring prayers as penance, it effectively erases the crime and all its negative consequences, and grants him cosmic forgiveness to boot?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

This is effectively the scuzzi argument the devil makes in the original movie version of Bedazzled.

Bogus Papal Vote

Almost nobody noticed how phony the election of Pope Francis was. Only 115 people had a vote and over half of them were appointed by Ratzinger. That is the sort of stunt you would have expected of Saddam.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Bogus Religious Morality

Religions claim they are the only ones capable of speaking about morality. Where do they get their information? They find some illiterate guy who heard voices who ranted in a desert thousands of years ago and take whatever he said without question no matter how silly,

Biblical morality is so insane and so out of date, even the most fanatical Christians ignore it, while giving it lip service. e.g.

That’s not morality. That is obsessive-compulsive disorder. None of those commandments make any sense except avoiding shellfish in a world without refrigeration, but there is no need to kill anyone.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Bogus Transubstantiation

The miracle of transubstantiation where a cracker allegedly turns into the body of Christ and a glass of wine turns into his blood, is a lie, humbug, a fraud. How do you know? Nobody can tell the difference between the untransformed and transformed food, not even the pope. They are absolutely identical. Nothing happens. There is no change/transformation of any kind.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Bogus Why Questions

When someone asks you a why question or a what-is-the-purpose-of question, they are often giving you a veiled command to read the mind of a non-existent god. It is much safer to insist on how questions.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Boils of Christianity

I see my task as pricking society’s boils of Christianity to let the pus drain.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Boko Haram

Boko Haram are worst sort of fundamentalists. They got a nutty idea into their heads that education is bad and that girls should be maltreated and further that they should kill or kidnap anyone who disagrees with them. What else can do you with a group that antisocial but exterminate them?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Bones

Why did not Christians preserve Jesus’s bones? Why did not Christians continuously venerate the site of Jesus’s birth and entombment? Possibly because Jesus was not historical and the bones and these sites do not exist.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Book Banning

In India, any book that fundamentalist Hindus or Muslims don’t like is banned. They think they have the right to tell others what they may read. Surely then they think others should have the right to censor their reading material.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Born Atheist

Everyone is born an atheist. Then, most of the time, they are brainwashed into some religion while they are still too young to resist.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70) Todd Stiefel interview click to watch

Borrowed Blood

You have saved us by the shedding of your eternal blood is an inscription on the wall of a temple dedicated to the worship of Mithras. This notion of blood and killing and sacrifice is part of the psychotic stew that makes up nearly all religious belief.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Both Fear and Love

Christians demand that you simultaneously fear and love an undetectable god. That is impossible. The intent is to keep those conned in a state of endless guilt.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Both Love And Fear Yahweh?

Christians demand that I simultaneously love and fear their god. The only person who could do that is one with Stockholm syndrome.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Bottom of the Totem Pole

Christians fancy themselves the most virtuous people in the world. If they knew how low I hold them on the ethical totem pole, they would be shocked.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Bowel Divination

Arguments for the existence of god are meaningless, idiotic word-salad miasmas. Analysing them is like sifting through their proponents’ bowel movements to perform divinations.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Boycott Domino’s

Tom Monaghan, founder of Domino’s Pizza, has used his wealth to promote various evil religious right schemes. For this reason, I would never consider buying a pizza there.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Brackish Death

If Noah’ flood reached the top of Mount Everest, that would have mixed all the ocean and fresh waters on earth. Would not all the water creatures of earth have perished from being in brackish water?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Bragging About Dad

Where did these grandiose notions about gods come from, e.g. omnipotence, omniscience, perfect love, perfect virtue etc.? I think they came from ancient versions of the equivalent to little boys bragging about their fathers, My god can beat up your god., So what? My god can see a billion cubits., Well my god can see a gazillion cubits., Well my god can see forever, so there!

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Bragging About God

Whenever I hear people bragging about the alleged magical powers of their imaginary deities, it reminds me of little boys bragging about the alleged superpowers of their fathers.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Brain Research

Imagine a group of cruel college students doing brain research. They discovered a way to plant ideas in minds in a way they could not be shaken loose no matter how crazy they were. They started implanting random crazy ideas into their volunteers, then laughed themselves silly as the volunteers suffered trying to integrate the incompatible implanted idea with everything else they believed.

This is not hypothetical. Mothers can inculcate whatever crazy ideas they please into their babes by threatening beatings, fire, abandonment or starvation even when they imagine their threats are not serious. They typically inculcate insane ideas about god and religion, and torment their child for a lifetime, imagining they had done a virtuous deed.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Brainwashing

If Christian parents were blocked from brainwashing their kids with the Christian religion, before they were old enough to understand what nonsense it is, Christianity would be extinct within a generation. That is why Christians fight tooth and nail for the right to indoctrinate other people’s children without their parent’s permission.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Brainwashing

If I imagine myself as a baby, not knowing anything about anything, I think I would strongly object to my parents traumatising me with threats of being burned alive as part of their introducing me to their religious beliefs. I can’t imagine any baby welcoming that sort of abuse. I don’t think we should tolerate it, even if we have for the last three millennia.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Brake Breakdown

I speculate that there are mechanisms in the brain to keep you from getting too elated or too miserable. When you die these may break down, leaving you to float off into elation or misery. This is perhaps how the heaven/hell myth got started.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Branding

Why do religions brand their children with irreversible circumcision and female genital mutilation? To brand them irreversibly as members of that religion. To make it impossible for them to leave. It is thus a crime to do these brandings without informed consent.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Break Your Mother’s Back

A child who obsessively avoids stepping on cracks will likely take up obsessive praying as an adult.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Breed and be Celibate

The Catholic church is schizophrenic. They scourge their members to breed even when the children are the result of rape, even when the pregnancy risks the mother’s life, even when they have ten kids already, even when they don’t have the enough money to feed and clothe the kids they already have, even when the earth already has ten times the population than it can sustain. On the other hand, they demand the priests remain celibate, except for molesting and raping children.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Breeding

The habit of Muslims and some Christians to breed like rabbits will destroy the world just as surely as a nuclear war. We have to stop them.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Breeding Uncontrollably

With the discovery of oil came the creation of tractors, fertilisers and a water pumps that allowed sufficient food for all. The Pope and other religious leaders acted with extreme selfishness and urged their followers to breed uncontrollably so that their church could overwhelm the others. Now here were are with 9 times as many people as the earth can support without oil and the oil supplies are beginning to dwindle. What those religious leaders did will result in such massive suffering such that no imaginable punishment is sufficient.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Brights vs Supers

brights : people who don’t believe in god.

supers : people who believe in the supernatural, e.g. miracles and god.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Bringing A Nice Boy Home To Dinner

When their son brings home a nice boy to meet a Christian family for Sunday dinner, they panic, even though it is the exact same thing they are happy to have their daughter do. There is nothing inherently wicked in the act itself. It is not like murder that is wrong no matter who does it. It horrifies them like the idea of men doing the laundry.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Bringing A Nice Girl Home To Dinner

When their daughter brings home a nice girl to meet a Christian family for Sunday dinner, they panic, even though it is the exact same thing they are happy to have their son do. There is nothing inherently wicked in the act itself. It is not like murder that is wrong no matter who does it. It horrifies them like the idea of a woman changing a spark plug.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Broad Application of God’s Existence Arguments

Any philosophical argument for the existence of one’s team god, e.g. the god Yahweh, serves equally well as an argument for someone else’s team god, e.g. Ahura Mazda, or for many gods. That the god of the universe would favour some tiny group of people strikes me as the epitome of conceit.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Bronze Age Fecundity

In the iron age, settlements were in constant danger of dying out from insufficient birth rate, accidents, disease and war. Naturally their religions stress maximal fecundity. Today, we have the opposite problem, but unfortunately the bronze-age religions we cling to still have not yet noticed.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

The Brutal Competition

If a frog has 9000 eggs, only 2 will survive to reproduce. In the long run, on average, this is true for every species, even humans. There is a brutal winnowing based on competition and a struggle to survive. What kind of deity would create a world where nearly every creature born suffers and fails?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

BS²

Because religions are based on BS, there is a temptation to sling BS about the BS.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Buddha’s DNA

Buddhists claim to have preserved one of Gautama Buddha’s teeth. If this tooth is genuine, some day, DNA analysis will tell us in microscopic detail what the Buddha was like.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Buddhist Afterlife

The Buddhists have a more plausible theory of the afterlife. It includes all beings, not just one special conceited species — man. They also have some weak evidence to support it. The Christians just say Have faith without offering even the tiniest shred of evidence.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Bullying God

I am astonished that Christians treat their god with such contempt, ordering him about, god, grant me strength to… or god, bless America!

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Bunny Heaven

If a child is still inconsolable four days after the death of her pet rabbit I could excuse someone telling a lie about bunny heaven, but if grown people tell each other lies about death being unreal or a secret boon, it is beneath human dignity.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Burden of Proof

Atheists will often try to convince creationists that they have the burden of proof because they are the ones making the crazy assertion about an undetectable deity. But this is self defeating. Whoever wishes to convince others has to take the burden of proof upon themselves. To scientists, proof and certainty belongs only in the realm of mathematics. To lawyers, proof means something else entirely, evidence that indicates guilt beyond reasonable doubt. What we really using in debates is evidence and arguments, not proof.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Burden of Proof

Christians get very upset when I tell them that those claiming something exists have the burden of proof to show it exists. Sometimes I take pity on them, and show them some arguments why god does not exist. If that does not work, I give them another set.

It is absurd they do not accept the burden of proof. Consider some dingbat who claims there are leprechauns living in his back yard. He refuses to present any evidence for them. He claims it is up to me to prove they do not exist. By that reasoning, by default, leprechauns exist, as do micro hippos that live in your closet and eat lint, as do pothole demons that create potholes when no one is looking, as do iridescent unicorns, as do 0.91 tonne (1 ton) koi, as do 60.96 cm (2 ft) diameter bright blue spiders that hide in couches, as do… until someone can figure out a way to prove they do not exist.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Burden of Proof

In all ordinary discourse, the person making the claim of the existence of some unusual creature bears the burden of proof, e.g. the Loch Ness monster. Christians are desperate since they have no evidence to present. So they demand the atheists prove Yahweh does not exist. We atheists can resist this cheat. However, we want to convince them of their error. They have persuaded themselves they do not need evidence. So, if we want to dispel their delusions, we must provide the requested evidence. Simply showing Yahweh is bogus will suffice. We don’t have to nail every conceivable deity of every conceivable definition.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Burial

Burial is not necessarily a religious ritual. You might bury corpses just to get away from the smell. You might build a small monument at the grave site to help people remember the deceased. There is no requirement for a belief in the afterlife.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Burn After Reading

At the end of the holy book The Book of the Law: Liber Al Vel Legis by Aleister Crowley is the suggestion that it would be wise to burn the book after first reading. Why would he say that?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Burning to Death

Have you ever seen a crime drama when the villain burns someone to death then gets a quasi-sexual pleasure watching them scream? This based on Christians. If you ever debate a Christian, within the first five minutes they will threaten you with eternal torment being burned alive. They get animated and excited contemplating your suffering. Christianity is a sick, sadistic cult. Its members should submit themselves for deprogramming. To see the effect in spades, watch videos of the Westboro Baptist Church.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Burning Gospels

The early church, at the instigation of Emperor Constantine, burned all holy gospels but four. This would be like Walt Disney Inc. using their legal muscle to eliminate all variations of Sleeping Beauty but theirs, then promoting it as a literal true story.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Business as Usual

When you study the historical behaviour of the Catholic Church, you discover that the current paedophile scandal is business as usual. It behaves far more like a crime family than a church.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

But Prayer Does Not Work

Even Dr. Richard Dawkins has said he would pray, if there were ever any evidence found it worked. There hasn’t been so far.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

But Why?

Christians and I disagree on a number of issues. They say that:

When I ask why, they answer The bible says so. Tradition. It is obvious to anyone with even a shred of morality. Those would be good reasons for designating these activities as sins, and threatening hell fire for indulging, but why impose these restrictions on adult non-believers as well who see nothing wrong with these activities?

If Christians insist on controlling me, they should at least provide a few reasons why their rules are for the general good. They don’t seem to understand, that these are religious restrictions, based on religions superstitions and misunderstanding of science. Christians are so conceited, they seem to think their ideas about morality trump everyone else’s. If they insist on controlling me to that degree, surely they should submit to my equal control over them.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Butterfly Wishes

Many religions wrap the dead in white cloth. They look like giant chrysalises. I wonder if the original intention was they, like butterflies, should awaken from the dead to a glorious metamorphosed existence.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Buying Adam

Not even all Christians buy the story of Adam and Eve as literally true.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Buying a Car, Christian Style

  1. The salesman explains only boorish people ask questions or demand to see the car.
  2. The salesman wears a cross. He is thus a holy trustworthy man.
  3. You ask no questions.
  4. You don’t ask to see the car. You must have faith.
  5. You believe everything the salesman tells you without question.
  6. You don’t go for a test drive. There is no reason other than faith to believe a car exists.
  7. You hand over your money without asking for a receipt.
  8. When you realise you have been had and you have no car, you recommend the salesman to others. Maybe if you suck up to the salesman, he will treat you better.
~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Caligula and Yahweh

The Roman Emperor Caligula commanded his legions to collect sea shells to prepare for the invasion of Britain. He was clearly bonkers, but his legions obeyed because they feared him. Christians are similar in the idiotic things they do commanded by their insane, cruel and not-even-extant god and for the same reason — cowering fear. Their groveling before a corrupt, imaginary god is so contemptible and so absurd.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Calling Out To God

Given God’s reputation for being such a prude, I wonder why so many people call out to him during sex.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Callous God

A local newspaper announced that a local woman had credited her faith in god with her ability to endure a stepfather slitting the throat of her five year old daughter. Wouldn’t she be asking herself why her god refused to intervene? Why did her god single her out for this tragedy? Her god refused to lift a finger in any way to help, hardly helpful. This sounds like Stockholm syndrome. What did she imagine this god was telling her that anaesthetised her?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Camping’s Victims

Harold Camping It is amazing that a known con-man like Harold Camping (1921-07-19 2013-12-15 age:92) could raise tens of millions of dollars with a hoary end-of-the-world scam. It is as if his brain-damaged victims fell prey to the Nigerian 419 letter scam after receiving 1000 such emails and sold off all their earthly goods and wired off the proceeds. Some stupidity is so immense it begs to be exploited.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Cancer Hypochonriacs

Have you ever met one of those cancer hypochondriacs? The answer to every question about every anomaly they notice about their body is It must be cancer. They remind me of those daft Christians to whom the answer to every question is It must be god.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Cannibal God

Think of those old black and white movies where cannibals put people in pot, without killing, cleaning or even undressing them. Then the cannibals dance and sing to the cannibal god. What Christians do is barely any different. I find it so hard to believe Christians are not pulling my leg when they tell me they take all of the Christian woo seriously. It is just so silly, so nonsensical.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Cannibal Religion

In movies of the 1950s a popular cliché was a tribe of Africans worshiping a giant wooden idol. How could they be so stupid not to notice it was just a big wooden mask constructed by the witch doctor? But then modern Christians are even more stupid. Their object of worship does not even exist. It is invisible and does nothing. It was constructed by the priests purely of ideas. It is con, just like the emperor’s new clothes. The con appeals to vanity, just the same way. It tickles people pink to imagine the creator of the universe takes time out just for them. How important they must be!

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Cannot All Be Right

All 60,000 religions can’t be right, however, they can easily all be wrong since there is no evidence for any of them and they are all composed of such similar BS.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Capricious Gods

The gods are capricious but nature is anything but capricious. There is no sign of them.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Car Accidents

There are about 38,300 car accidents deaths each year in the USA. There are about 4.4 million injuries. Most of these people are Christians who pray for their safety and the safety of their families. In the bible, God promise to grant every single prayer. Have a look for yourself:

Matthew 7:7-8
Matthew 17:20
Matthew 18:19-20
Matthew 21:22
Mark 11:24
John 14:14
John 16:23

These promises cannot even in theory be true.

What gives?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

The Case For Christianity

The whole case for Christianity is based on repeating lies, believing lies and ignorance of science.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Catch 22

If Adam had not yet eaten of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, how could god very well expect Adam to know it was wicked to eat it or that it was wicked to do something god had told him not to do?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Cathedrals

When I see a cathedral, I am overwhelmed at how much effort people will go to sell a lie.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Catholic Arrogance

22% of Americans identify as Catholics. However, they imagine that constitutes a majority. Further, they imagine the constitution does not apply to them, and they have the right to impose their superstitions on everyone else, e.g. abortion, contraception, euthanasia, homosexuality…

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Catholic BS

When I was a kid, a Catholic family lived two doors down. The oldest boy would explain the facts of life to us, such as his family was going to heaven, but it was iffy for the Protestant families and very unlikely for our atheist family unless I was exceptionally well behaved. Even then, the best I could hope for was purgatory. At the time, it did not occur to me what an insufferable little prick he was being. He did this with all kind heartedness, accurately relaying the BS he had been taught. This is the same sort of BS that young Germans were taught — that they were the master race.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Catholic Censorship

Normally if someone says something you disagree with, you debate the issue. If it is defamatory, and completely without merit, you might sue and let a judge decide which of you is right. But the Catholics have a completely different way of dealing with people who say things they do not like. They censor them, or in earlier times, kill them. They tortured and killed heretics. Today LifeSiteNews has banned me from their site. They don’t want to hear anything that is not 100% canonical. They even deal with reports of priests abusing children that way. The attempt to silence the whistleblowers.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

The Catholic Crime Syndicate

The Catholic church has been a crime syndicate masquerading as a religion for at least 900 years.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Catholic Overbreeding

We have allowed the church to masquerade the ultimate selfishness as a virtue. Every time they persuade a couple to spawn more than two future tithers, they are depriving some other couple of having any children at all. The earth cannot even sustain the population we have already burdened it with.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Catholic paedophilia

I don’t think there is much chance Pope Francis will do anything to discourage his priests from molesting children. paedophilia has been for centuries the church’s primary recruiting perk. The church is paedophile-friendly, arranges access, covers up and arranges transfers when there is heat. It provides respectability and an excuse for lack of sexual interest in adults. It provides a non-violent way to force children into sex using terrifying threats backed by religious authority. Who but a paedophile would vow never to have sex with an adult for the rest of their life? The Catholic church is already having a rough time recruiting priests. The church is no longer the safe respectable haven for paedophiles it once was. If Francis put a stop to the molestation, the church would wither from lack of priestly recruits.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Catholic Spin

The Catholic church is spinning its fight with Obama over full health care that includes contraception. The church claims it is an imposition on their religious freedom if they are prevented from interfering with their employee’s access to contraception. They are the ones violating individual freedoms. How is their freedom in any way impaired? It is not as though anyone is being forced to use contraception.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Catholics Imposing Superstitions on Others, Again

The Catholic church is complaining it is not being permitting to ram its religious superstitions down the throats of others. Nobody is in any way interfering with what Catholics do vis a via abortion or contraception. Their claim that a single cell should have the rights of a full grown human makes no sense without the goofy notion of souls possessing single cells like little demons. There is zero evidence for them. It is thus highly improper to force this superstition down the throats of non-believers, much less put skeptics in jail or kill them.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Cause

113 years ago Einstein blew the notion of cause out the water. He discovered that two different observers, both accurately measuring, can disagree on which of two events happened first, and hence which event caused the other. When you get close to the speed of light, the notion of cause makes no sense. Similarly, scientists have discovered a vacuum is a seething soup of particles popping into and out of existence. Religious people like to quote 19th century science before this was discovered.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Cause of Crop Circles

It would please me if it turned out crop circles were formed by some agent other than man, but I don’t run about claiming absolute proof that this is indeed so, when I have almost no evidence, much less proof. Further, I don’t call for the persecution of non-believers. I ask the same courtesy from the holders of religious beliefs.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Cause of WWIII (World War III)

There is one thing we know for certain about the person who will start WWIII. They will believe a disembodied voice in his ear commanding him to was the voice of this favourite imaginary deity.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Caving To Atheists

Christians complain that if they followed the constitution, and banned public prayer in schools, that would be equivalent to teaching atheism in schools. No it wouldn’t. In the name of peace, there simply is no discussion or exercise of religion, pro or con. If atheists truly had their way, the children would be taught what a con Christianity and Islam are.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

CBC and Religion

Intellectuals at the CBC keep dragging moribund religious ideas back on stage like a cat presenting a dead mouse hoping this time the listeners will find them acceptable.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

CBC Peddles Christianity

The CBC routinely promotes quackery as medicine and fiction as history. I refer to its attempts to sell Christianity.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Celebrating War Crimes

The height of hypocrisy is, on Easter, NPR (National Public Radio) celebrating US soldiers returning from Afghanistan. These soldiers killed an average of one civilian each. They were not defending the USA, but stealing Afghanistan’s natural resources. The makes them each war criminals guilty of a capital offense, the same as Nazis hanged at Nuremberg, not heroes.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Censoring Christians

The Omaha Coalition of Reason put up a billboard that said Don’t believe in God? Join the club. Christians wanted it taken down. They are such control freaks and so insecure in their faith, that they want to censor even knowledge of the existence of anyone who disagrees with them. Further, they presume they have the right to abrogate the constitutional freedom of assembly to non-Christians. Their belief that they are the god Yahweh’s chosen master race makes them behave so arrogantly.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Censorship

In the 1930s in America, a rabid Catholic prude named Joseph Ignatius Breen was put in charge of censorship of movies. This was a violation of church and state — imposing the beliefs of the Catholic Church on everyone.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Censorship

The word censorship is often misused. It means blocking people from access to reading or seeing something. It does not mean:

You have the right to show you works somewhere, not anywhere you please. However, if a newspaper routinely accepts material to distribute for a fee and they reject yours, that is censorship.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Ceremonies Without Consent

I heard a CBC radio item about John Gillibrand, an Anglican priest in Wales who put his autistic son through a confirmation ceremony. I got the impression the son did not understand what was happening. Churches routinely put people through ceremonies without consent or understanding, such as christening and circumcision. Such ceremonies have a long tradition behind them, but I still think they are improper.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Certainty is an Emotion

Certainty is an emotion, like joy or anger. It has been located in the brain. The problem is people treat it as if it meant rigorously proved/tested. The sensation of certainty has little to do with truth and more with solidarity.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Certainty in the Face of Zero Experience

I find it extremely odd that everyone is convinced his own religion is 100% true and all the rest are untrue even when he has zero experience with any religion but his own. His religion could well be the worst and he would have no way of telling.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Certainty Justifies the Means

Christians are so convinced they are right they can torment, bully, steal, torture and murder never once questioning whether what they are doing is acceptable. This what makes them such intractable enemies. They have no conscience. They have no respect for reason.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Certainty the Other Is Wrong

If you are a Christian, like me, you are quite sure Ganesh the elephant god of the Hindus is just a myth. If you are a Hindu, like me, you are quite sure Yahweh the sky god of the Christians is just a myth. Why do you each so clearly see why other people’s gods are myths, but not you own?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Certainty Without Evidence

Given how vast the universe is and how little of it we have explored, I find the certainty that Christians have that they are the acme of universal perfection and that the god Yahweh created whole thing solely for their delectation, the height of conceit.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Challenging God

When atheists debate about god, they are not challenging god. They are challenging stupid Christians who claim there is a god without a stick of evidence, and despite all the evidence to the contrary. The universe runs itself. There is not a trace of divine tinkering.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Championing a Religion

People champion religions, not because they believe them to be true, but because it tickles them to imagine they might be true.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Change Is Inevitable

If you lived in the dark ages, it would seem that nothing could ever change, yet it did, the Renaissance eventually flowered. Similarly people living today might imagine the world must forever be run my corrupt politicians, generals and corporations.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Changes In English

Think how much English has changed over the last 1000 years. Vocabulary has changed, spellings have changed, lower case letters were added, words were borrowed from other languages, even the grammar has changed. A scholar can roughly date a phrase of English prose by studying these changes. Hebrew similarly changed over 1000 years. Even the alphabet changed. Scholars have been able to date individual phrases from various ancient documents to discover that the old testament was written and edited over a period of 1000 years by several waves of authors. The oldest part is Exodus which was originally a poem.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Changing Perception of Mormons

When the Mormons started out, there would have been consensus that they were either charlatans or delusional. Few people would dismiss them as mentally ill today, even though their beliefs have not changed, only their numbers.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Charity

American Christians no not give to charities that actually attempt to relieve suffering in the world. They give to their church, and kid themselves this is charity. Their money is spent much the way country club dues would be spent. They are spending on themselves.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Charity

Charity it not just about donating money. It is about caring what happens to other people.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Charity

When in comes to charity, Christians are the biggest pikers. What’s the problem? Christians handle their charitable obligations by tithing to the church. This money is used to heat and maintain the church and the manse. It is used to maintain the gardens and lawns. It pays for the mortgage on the church building and property. It is used to pay the pastor to deliver a sermon each week. This money benefits the donors, not the poor. It is like paying your country club dues. It is quite a stretch to call it charity.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Charlatans

One of the most infuriating things about Christians is even ones with just a grade 2 education consider themselves the world’s experts on anything scientific. They are so patronising and so condescending when all they are doing is pulling conjectures a four year old my have out their asses and trying to fob them off as unquestioned truth.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Charlemagne the Christian

Charlemagne beheaded anyone who refused to be baptised, who cremated a corpse, or who worshiped a non-Christian god.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Charlie Hebdo

The Charlie Hebdo cartoons that caused all the fuss were never published in North America. They were too obscene. The media never mentioned this. I saw them by doing a Google Image search with safe search turned off, immediately after the attacks.

The cartoons included sodomy chains and anilingus chains. These were obviously intended to be maximally offensive. The offence was not incidental. It was not merely about depicting Mohammed.

I still think no picture justifies a murder, but I also think the content of the cartoons should be known to help explain the Muslim outrage.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Chauvinism

Perhaps the most preposterous thing about Christianity is its human chauvinism. According to Christians, earth is the center of the universe and man is the center of the earth; no species has any importance other than to serve man. It is just so idiotically conceited. Only men could have made up such a self-flattering religion.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Cheating

The unscrupulous bastards who stoop to the widest range of cheating tactics usually prevail. Karl Rove would be a classic example. Religion lets you pretend a god will give them their just deserts even if you can’t.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Cheating Christians

Wherever Christians publicly debate the existence of god, they invariably lie and cheat. I have two explanations for this:

  1. They know fully well that there is no god. They earn a money from the god con. This lying is just part of the overall con.
  2. They believe there is a god, but cannot come up with a decent reason to think so. In name of promoting truth, they lie.
~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Checking In

If once an hour you checked in what was going on with yourself, your town, your country, your planet, then asked If there were a loving god, could he possibly tolerate this? you might find yourself an atheist by tea time.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

The Cheek

A guy once embezzled my life savings then added insult to injury by having his lawyer write me a letter threatening to sue me if I ever mentioned his name in public. Similarly, Christians rip people off and trick them into handing over their kids for physical and sexual abuse. Then, if anyone so much as questions their conning spiel, they react in horror at the lack of respect for their beliefs. Such crooks! Such phonies!

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Cheek Swabs are Murder

Nowadays every cell in your body is a potential new human being. It is not just sperms, eggs and zygotes any more. Some Christian believe they are justified in murdering an abortionist because he destroyed a zygote. Now, to be consistent, they will have to kill anyone who cuts their finger or gets a DNA cheek scraping.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

The Cheese Shop

Imagine you went to Italy and visited the world’s biggest cheese shop. There were 60,000 varieties for sale. Your Christian companion said Order the Somerset Cheddar. It is the best selling. All the others are poisoned. You ask Why do you say that? Have you tried them? Heavens no. I don’t know the first thing about any of them. The people at the Somerset cheese works told me. They know cheese.

Christians try to convince me that all 60,000 religions but one are bogus. To me, Christianity looks just like the others. Christians can’t explain why it is the slightest bit different other than it was popular in the time and place they were born.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Cherry Picking

By cherry picking the most pleasing features of the universe and ignoring the repulsive, they convince themselves the universe is a perfect playground for man constructed by a loving deity.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Cherry Picking

Yes, the bible hates gays, but it also condemns nearly everyone else to death or worse. Why cherry pick? Very simple. Most people are not gay. They are however, Sunday shoppers, owners of statues, naughty children, adulterers… Gays are a safe alternative scapegoat.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Cherry-picking New Technology

Even the most orthodox religions still have to confront the changes in modern culture and technology, even if it just amounts to deciding to reject it. They have to decide whether to accept reproductive technology to tip the balance of male to female babies. They won’t necessary reject everything new if it helps them promote their ancient paternalistic beliefs.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Child Abuse

It is child abuse to deliberately teach children things that are not true. It is child abuse to teach children bigotry and cruelty. It is child abuse to teach children to be closed minded. That is why we should stop indoctrinating children with Christianity and Islam.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Child Naming

If you convert to the Muslim faith, you will be expected to take on an Arabic name — Mohammed is the most popular. Muslims give their children Arabic names, even when they come from quite different cultures. I think this is improper — children should chose their Arabic names when they formally choose to join the faith as a young adult. It is presumptuous to give them one as an infant.

Of course, Christians do the same thing. We don’t notice because most of the common Canadian/American/British names have Christian associations:

Adam, Calvin, Chris, Daniel, David, Deborah, Delilah, Ethan, Isaac, James, John, Joseph, Judith, Julia, Luke, Mark, Martha, Mary, Matthew, Michael, Oprah, Paul, Peter, Philip, Rebecca, Sean, Sebastian, Thomas, Tim, Veronica…

Some parents give their children archaic biblical names to unmistakably brand them as Christian/Jewish e.g:

Abner, Absolam, Beulah, Caleb, Christy, Christine, Ebenezer, Enoch, Esau, Gabriel, Jared, Javan, Jehosophat, Jemimah, Jethro, Joshua, Lazarus, Luther, Methusela, Micah, Mordecai, Moses, Noah, Phineas, Sampson, Seth, Uriah, Zachariah, Zackary…

It would be more respectful of parents to give their children religion-neutral names and let their children optionally pick a new name at a coming of age ceremony. What would be suitable religion-neutral temporary names?

Aidan, Albert, Alfred, Allen, Amelia, Anders, Arn, Astrid, Barry, Bernard, Bjorn, Brent, Brian, Brianna, Bruce, Cade, Cameron, Charles, Carl, Cary, Charlotte, Cinnamon, Clifford, Clint, Chloe, Connor, Conrad, Croft, Curtis, Cyrus, Dag, Dallas, Daphne, Dmitri, Donald, Donatello, Duncan, Dustin, Dylan, Eric, Erika, Federico, Felix, Frederick, Gary, Geneva, George, Gertrude, Gore, Gregory, Gunnar, Halle, Harry, Herman, Henry, Hugh, Jackson, Justin, Karen, Katherine, Kerry, Knute, Kurt, Larry, Leif, Leo, Leonard, Leonardo, Liam, Linda, Logan, Martin, Manus, Murray, Nadia, Neil, Niall, Nicholas, Nicole, Nils, Oliver, Pepper, Poppy, Ralph, Randolf, Ren, Riu, Ronald, Rudolf, Richard, Robert, Roger, Roy, Rufus, Rupert, Ryan, Sander, Sandra, Sandro, Sasha, Scott, Sean, Shane, Shannon, Stephen, Svend, Tara, Taylor, Terry, Travis, Trevor, Tyler, Walter, William… There are so many saints, it is hard to avoid those names.

It would be wise to Google the most popular baby names for the current year and avoid them. Back when I was a child, John was unusually popular. We had four Johns in our class to cause confusion.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Child Sacrifice

In one day, Incas rounded up 140 children, cut open their chests and pulled out their hearts. They did this to gain favour with their imaginary gods. And people claim religion makes people behave better!

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Child Torturer

If a man arranged to have his son slowly tortured to death, would you term him loving? I doubt it. Why then do Christians persist in labeling their god Yahweh that way?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Child vs Parent Rights

The right of a child not to be abused trumps the religious right of a parent to abuse.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Childhood Delusions

My younger sister believed humanity lived on the inside of a giant sphere with the sun at the center. My best friend Pete when I was 13 believed humans reproduced by going into an amnesiac coma and the male’s testicles burst open spraying blood containing sperm cells everywhere. As a child, musician Nile Rodgers thought that adults slept standing up. These strange notions were all based on misinterpreting what adults had told them. Children are hard wired to believe whatever claim is true, no matter how bizarre. In pre-history, children who ignored or questioned their parent’s survival advice usually did not survive. This is the vulnerability by which the god virus reinfects each generation.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

The Childish Argument For God

I find even professional Christians make a very childish argument for god:

Those are reasons they are attached to the notion of god, true or not. That they would like it if god existed has nothing whatsoever to do with whether he does. It is the argument of a spoiled child imagining the universe is constrained to conform to her preferences. When Christians argue like this, I can’s tell if they are dishonest or merely addled.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Childish Funerals

I think it reasonable to have some sort of ceremony to mark the end of a life, but I find it irritating when those running the ceremony pretend the deceased is hiding up in the rafters watching the proceedings.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Childish Generalisations

Americans think that all Muslims should grovel and apologise to them because of 9/11. It does not clue into these goofuses that it would be equally ridiculous to demand all Christians grovel and apologise because of Tim McVeigh. There is no evidence the people building the mosque in New York City had anything to do with 9/11, so there is no reason they should pretend to be guilty or deferential. For that matter there is no hard evidence any Muslim had anything to do with 9/11. All we have is Bush’s word, something proven less than reliable and a lot of unanswered questions.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Childish Things

Primitive peoples had almost no power over their lives, so to distract themselves, they pretended they did. Thus worship of Yahweh was born. Today we actually do have some control. Put away these childish things.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Children of Rape

This business of forcing women to bear the children of rapists sounds like something Hitler would have dreamt up to humiliate Jewish women. It makes absolutely no sense. Tea Party candidates insist that women bear the children of rape. What you are balancing is the life of a single cell against the life of an actual child who will be hated by its biological mother and ashamed of its biological father and itself for its entire life. It seems to me the life of a real child is far more important than the life of a potential one.

Even sperms and eggs are potential children, in exactly the same sense that zygotes are. It is insane to torment real children to honour an abstract religious principle that has no basis in reality. Claiming that every zygote is sacred is just as silly as claiming every sperm is sacred, every egg is sacred, every lymphocyte is sacred, every neuron is sacred, every erythrocyte… Blithering nonsense!

Cells die by the billions every day. The only people who weep over this mass slaughter, or who butcher women who have abortions are nutty Christians who don’t understand the cellular reality. Ironically, most of these same people also have no compassion for refugee children.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Child’s View of War

I grew up in Canada just after WWII (World War II). When I was young, I thought it happened long ago. I could never understand everyone’s fascination with this bit of ancient history. I saw them like Civil War reenactment enthusiasts. I also thought the Korean war was perpetual. It was just a place you went if you wanted to play war.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

China

The most atheist country in the world is China at 61%. It has only a sprinkling of religious people. China is rising in power and will eventually surpass the USA. Imperial powers always impose their religious beliefs on their subjects. I presume China will be no different.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

The Choice

If you are a Christian, sooner or later you will no longer be able to avoid the big choice: truth or God.

Why would you choose God over truth? Because your mother terrified you silly of god-under-the-bed. You are still an abused, traumatised child. You are no different from a child with an crippling phobia of spider or snakes.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Choice of Law

Christians justify vigilante murders of abortion doctors. If you challenge them, they will counter whose law do you obey man’s or god’s. We don’t have that choice. We have the choice between the law written by men of our time or the biblical law written by men thousands of years ago. I think we have learned something in all that time. In particular, we have discovered it leads to endless bloodshed if you let people force their religious laws on others, particularly when interpreted by fanatics.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

The Choice Is Wide

There are 60,000 religions. Religious people tell me their religion is the only correct one and following any of the others will lead to eternal damnation. There is no time to even learn about all the religions. How am I supposed to make an informed choice? And why is guessing incorrectly the biggest crime of all? It should not even be a sin. There is no malice intended. I think this is all bullshit. This threat of hellfire is just a filthy recruiting lie all religions use. Any organisation that would stoop to such depths deserves no followers. And that is just the beginning of the lies. Further, I don’t believe a supernatural being with even the most primitive understanding of fair play would condone such a contest. So I think all deities associated with religions that threaten apostates or non-believers cannot exist.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Choose a Creation Myth

Hindus have five different creation myths. Jews, Christians and Muslims insist every one accept only one and oddly one that for which there is no collaborating evidence and overwhelming scientific evidence it is false.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Choose Your Life Purpose

Just because life does not have a single given a priori purpose, does not mean it is without purposes. It is just that you get to choose you own purpose, as does everyone else. Christians believe if they acknowledged the choice, they would be miserable.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Choose Your Own Purpose

Everybody gets to choose their own purpose and change it as needed. The universe as a whole does not have a purpose any more than a mountain has a purpose. Asking what is the purpose of the universe is the same asking Why did god create the universe? What did he plan to use it for? If there is no god to have the purpose, there can be no universal purpose. So stop expecting science to answer meaningless questions like What is the purpose of the universe?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Choosing A God

There are two big questions:

  1. Is there a god?
  2. If so, which religion, if any, is the best to join?

People spend a huge amount of time on the first question, but none on the second. The first has almost no effect on your life at all. The second has far more consequences for your life. It determines your social circle, whom you may marry, your diet, your clothing, your customs, your morality, what impossible things you have to profess to believe, your social status, whom you hate… People choose their parents’ religion without examining even one of the 60,000 alternatives.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Choosing A Religion

Did you ever notice that people nearly always choose the same religion their parents did, that their neighbours did? Humans have something called confirmation bias. Whatever information you learn first you believe in preference to information you learn later. Confirmation bias makes you cling to the first religion you learn about. The effect is so strong, you will likely avoid even learning the basic facts about other religions. Nevertheless, you are convinced your religion is the best and the truest.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

The Christian Abuse Cult

Christianity is a cult that excuses the abuse of women on the grounds that is what people 2000 years ago did. Why did those ancient people do that? Because people even 2000 years earlier did it? Why did they do it? Because they could get away with it. It is pleasant to dominate and be served. The men were bigger and stronger than women. Women could not survive without them. It was not morality. It was might makes right.

The same process allows Christians to justify physical and sexual child abuse.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Christian Alchemy

Christians believe that if you tell a lie enough times, it becomes true.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Christian Altruism

A scientific study discovered that Christians are less generous and less altruistic than non-believers. Why might that be?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Christian Arguments

When Christians off the street argue for Christianity, they will say things like:

What there are really telling me is why they would like it if the Christian story were true, not why it is true. The universe does not conform itself to what you would like. Further, they don’t actually get these benefits by believing in Christianity. Prayer has been reputedly proven to be futile. Heaven is just a pipe-dream. The criminal justice system punishes criminals. There is no evidence any god does.

We are dealing with quite feeble-minded, infantile people suffering from Christian-induced brain damage. Logic is likely not going to be very effective.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Christian Arrogance

Christians always talk about god instead of a god It never occurs to them even the possibility their god Yahweh could be fiction and one or more of the other 60,000 gods could be genuine. They are utterly convinced of this without even the most cursory evaluation of any of the other gods. This arrogance is worthy of the most withering contempt.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Christian Astrology

A church is like an astrology club. A group of people get together and make up an entire body of knowledge and have fun testing each other on it, even though it has no connection to reality. A church is really no different, but it tries con others into giving it special privilege by bogusly claiming important magical knowledge. A church is even more ambitious. It tries to impose its beliefs on others by lobbying for changes in the law. To improve its status, it aggrandises itself with expensive architecture, elaborate costumes, magical paraphernalia… The astounding thing is how well they succeed at their bamboozling.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Christian Bigotry

The engine of Christianity is bigotry. Christians use religion to cloak their bigotry.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Christian Burial Superstitions

Christian bigots oppose Muslim cemeteries on the grounds Muslims don’t use embalming fluid or metal-lined caskets. They claim this practice pollutes the ground water. This is as nutty as Monsanto-controlled farmers complaining about their organic farming neighbours poisoning them with a lack of pesticides.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Christian Calumny

Christian assure me, that with absolute certainty, the creator of the universe will torture people for eternity for committing various victimless crimes. I can’t believe a creator of universes could possibly be so petty. Such vindictiveness sprouted from a poisoned human mind.

They also tell me this same creator placed all the gold on earth for anyone who wanted to dig it up.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Christian Cannibalism

The central feature of Christianity is a human sacrifice. The central ritual is cannibalism. When any other culture does this, Christians react in horror.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Christian Cannibalism

Usually when I talk of Christian cannibalism I am referring to ritual cannibalism in the liturgy. However, on 2014-01-13, a group of Christians in the Cameroons attacked a random Muslim man, hacked him to death and one of the party ate his leg down to the bone.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70) source

Christian Car Salesman

Imagine a used car salesman who kept saying that a car was wonderful, the best, but would not you in on any details about it, e.g. mileage, its accidents report, a mechanic’s report, or even the year of manufacture. He acted hurt that you did not just believe him. That is a bit like talking with a Christian who refuses to give any evidence to back up his claims.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Christian Cause of Recession

Americans are having a terrible time with their economy. The problem is, oddly, Christianity. Christians are hopelessly optimistic, gullible people who will believe what any charlatan tells them so long as it sounds pleasant. They have almost no interest in whether it is actually true. They have been trained in this sheep-like submission to crooks since birth. So they are vulnerable to politicians who lie to them that they can have their cake and eat it too — massive tax cuts, especially to the billionaires, no cuts in spending and pay down the debt. Honest politicians tell them they must pay higher taxes and accept across the board spending cuts to avoid the public debt dragging the whole country into bankruptcy. Christians turf these depressing but honest politicians out office. They prefer fairy tales.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Christian Cheats

Christians feel no guilt at lying and cheating to defend the faith because they believe it is highly important for others to believe the myths (even if they do not), so that others can be bilked or so that others will behave docilely.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Christian Cheats

It is naïve to expect Christians to cheat less than others. Consider the outrageous con artistry of TV evangelists with their fake healings and phony promises of health and fabulous prosperity. Further, Christians believe the effects of any sin can be magically undone with just an ecclesiastical ceremony. To a Christian, sin is only temporary and thus does not really matter. Christianity is much forgiving than the law. It thus encourages sin and cheating.

What sort of scoundrel prays to god to fix an athletic contest in his favour? What sort of conceited snot claims his special talents were a gift from God to reward him for his wonderfulness?

Finally, remember that almost every successful con man dons the mantle of a pious Christian to lull his marks. That smarmy piety should you on your guard.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Christian Cheek

The cheek of Christians who have never even taken a first year calculus course lets them tell Stephen Hawking he is all wet about the age and beginning of the universe. They are shameless with there arguments from ignorance.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Christian Cheek

Christians have such cheek to tell Dr. Stephen Hawking and Dr. Richard Dawkins they are wrong, when they have only an elementary school level (or less) understanding of mathematics and science.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Christian Child Abuse

Christianity is a form of child abuse, just as surely as sprinkling LSD on a child’s corn flakes. Both leave the children delusional and traumatised. We tolerate it for the same reason Ethiopians tolerate non-consenting female circumcision/genital mutilation/unsanitary clitorectomy and Americans tolerate non-consenting infant male circumcision — we have always done it that way.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Christian Child Abuse

Christians are adult abused children. The Christian rule book requires parents to beat their children and to instill in them a terror of the god Yahweh. They brutally terrify their children with stories of hell fire. The adult Christian has an inner child that needs reassurance someone will protect them from the monster, Yahweh. Pretty well the only way you can do that is to show them Yahweh is a preposterous bogey man of fiction.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Christian Child Abuse Complicity

A church typically exculpates itself for child abuse coverups by saying Mistakes were made. Passive voice is designed to avoid taking responsibility. Covering up and aiding a child molester and/or abuser is not a mistake. It is deliberate criminal act. A mistake would be failing to take a child’s isolated complaint seriously. Perhaps they mean We made a mistake. If we had been smarter we would not have got caught.

If any other institution but the church were found to harbour a child molestation ring, we would not think twice before shutting it down, no matter how prestigious the front. Since the criminal justice system is too timid, the churches caught doing this sort of thing need to be sued out of existence.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70) Deliver Us from Evil

Christian Child Abuser

When I was about nine, I waited at the Ambleside swimming pool in West Vancouver for my Mom to come pick me up. An elderly Christian man pressed me with stories of god and hellfire. I could not leave the rendezvous spot, so I felt trapped. He pressed tracts on me. When my mother arrived, she was furious. I figured she was mad because he might have been planning to abuse me sexually, but she was concerned about an even more damaging form of abuse, attempting to permanently traumatise and brainwash her child with fear.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Christian Child Abusers

When Christians abuse their children, I find it even more revolting than when psychopaths do. The Christian abuse is so unnecessary. Mild mannered people are under the delusion that Yahweh approves of and demands their cruelty.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Christian Child Predators

Fundamentalists make no bones about it. They are after your kids, the younger the better. Pre-school kids are easier to scare. Pre-school kids are more trusting. Pre-school kids are not able to tell truth from nonsense. If you let them at your kids they will create just as much trauma as sexual predators.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Christian Chumps

What chumps Christians are to hand over 10% of their income to charlatans, to commit all manner of immoral deeds, all the while feeling profoundly virtuous, tricked into it like a naïve little boy afraid of invisible bogeymen.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Christian Claims

The Christian makes two claims:

  1. There is an intelligent presence in the universe that micromanages human lives.
  2. That Christians alone have an exclusive infallible communication pipeline to this entity both to petition it and to discover its wishes.

Christians pretend that if there is even the remotest possibility that (1) is true, then (2) must inevitable follow. That is both absurd and preposterously conceited.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Christian Climate Deniers

It is little surprise that fundamentalist Christianity and global warming denying are strongly correlated. Fundamentalist Christians are schooled from birth in the art of wishful thinking and denying evidence that a god cannot be counted to rescue you from your folly.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Christian Comfort

I find it odd a Christian would characterise his faith as comforting. He believes a psychotic sky fairy monitors his every move, even masturbation and defecation. When people die, the fairy condemns all but 144,000 Revelation 7:3-4 of them to eternal torture. This is comforting? Even if you get into heaven, Yahweh still monitors your every thought to make sure you are continuously worshiping him. You get to play harps, sing praises to Yahweh, and worship forever. Your company is scolding Christian prudes. That is torture too, like living in North Korea.

As an atheist, when I die, I expect nothing to happen, like being under deep anaesthesia, or what it was like before I was conceived. This is painless and boredom-free. This is no scarier than having general anaesthesia. I have done that already. It is no scarier than an elevator ride. To me, atheism is infinitely more comforting than the Christian conjecture. Granted, that is not a reason why atheism has to be correct. The universe is not constrained to please me.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Christian Complaint

Christians often complain that atheists will not leave them alone. Atheists insist on questioning Christian superstition. Contrary to Christian claims, atheists do not attack Christians. They just disagree with them. They don’t beat Christians up or burn down their churches. Not even gay atheists do that even though they have extreme provocation. Why won’t atheists leave Christians alone? Because Christians won’t leave everyone else alone.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

The Christian Con

Christianity is a con. If Christians had not threatened you with hell fire when you were too young to realise you were being lied to, it would be completely obvious. You would have little doubt Christianity is the mother of all cons.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Christian Con

Christianity is one big con:

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Christian Con

Christians have conned people into handing over money by persuading them when they die they face eternal torment. The con succeeded wildly even though the Christians did not offer even a stick of evidence. In reality, death is no more of a big deal than an unwatered-plant or a up-turned goldfish. You experienced it before you were born and every time you had general anaesthesia.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

The Christian Con

In a con, a small group of con artists tell lies and make extravagant promises to the marks. The gullible marks give the con artists money or other valuables. The con artists do not make good on the promises. The best con artists are so smooth and practised their marks never notice they have been had. Is that not an accurate description of what goes on in every religion you have ever heard about? Religion is the original and most polished con. Though religion is a superstition and an error, more fundamentally it is a con. Christianity is such a highly evolved con that sometimes not even the con men themselves are fully aware they are crooks.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

The Christian Con

Like any con, Christianity works only if you don’t look at the spiel too carefully to see if it is plausible, true and consistent.

Like any con, Christianity works with carrot and stick. It makes promises it never keeps.

Like any con, Christianity appeals to greed, sadism and the dark side generally of the human personality.

Like any con, Christianity has to herd the gullible together and keep them away from the skeptical.

Ordinary cons are only after your money. The Christian con also wants you to hand over your children for sexual abuse. They also want to you surrender your will for general purposes.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Christian Conceit

The best estimate of the number of planets in the universe is 1022 in other words 1 followed by 22 zeroes. The Christian is so conceited he figures his planet Earth is the only one in the entire universe supporting life. The rest were allegedly created by god purely for man’s entertainment. He does not believe in god. He believes in astronomical luck.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Christian Conceit

Christians are so conceited that they imagine any voice whose source they cannot identify must be Yahweh himself.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Christian Conceit

Christians imagine they rate a gullibility/bullshit-forgiveness quotient 1000 times higher than anyone else. Where do they get off thinking should be treated so differently from the rest of us?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Christian Conceit

Christians often complain that atheists do not show sufficient respect for Christian beliefs. That is like a patient complaining that her psychiatrist does not take her belief that she is a werewolf sufficiently seriously. This is not a matter of respecting opinions. Christians are demanding atheists pretend to take their bizarre delusions seriously. Christians got in trouble by treating some fanciful ideas with far too much reverence. Christians refuse to acknowledge they have absolutely no evidence to back up any of their claims of fact. They are no different from people claiming to be werewolves who cannot show any evidence they are, just their heartfelt conviction and the observation that there are many other people who think the same way.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Christian Conceit

I am astounded at the hubris of Christians who pontificate claiming to have the final word on the big bang when they don’t even know a quark from a hadron.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Christian Conceit

I have to laugh at Christians when they look down their noses at polytheists or idol worshipers. Why is believing in one imaginary inconsistent god any less silly than believing in many imaginary tussling gods? Why is believing in an invisible god that does nothing any less silly than believing in a visible god that does nothing?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Christian Conceit

It perpetually astounds me the way Christians have no embarrassment whatsoever about their conceit embodied in their assertion that the creator of the trillions of galaxies, takes time out each day to speak words of mundane Ann Landers-style advice personally to them.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Christian Conceit

One of the most odious things about Christians and believers in general, is their monumental conceit. They believe they are the center of the universe and everything they see was custom created for their personal pleasure. In their view, no other species but man has inherent value. Other species have value only as they are useful to man. Prime Minister Stephen Harper is an epitome of the type. Their religion gives them an absurd sense of importance and entitlement. Even when science demonstrates this is preposterous, they cling to the lie. Only money and religious dogma are real to them.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Christian Conceit

Scientists estimate there are 400 billion stars in the Milky Way Galaxy. It takes light 100,000 years to cross it. There are 125 billion such galaxies. We have visited none of them. Yet Christians arrogantly announce the entire universe was created expressly for Christians. It makes me want to whack them with a shovel for being so conceited. It is sillier than a microscopic jellyfish announcing the entire ocean was created solely for its personal delectation.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Christian Cons

I was watching an episode of Midsomer Murders about a lawyer who had been artfully conned into thinking a wine cellar full of fake wine was actually rare and costly vintages. I said to myself, that is exactly how Christianity works. Like any con, it preys on people’s greed and wishful thinking. It lures them with promises of a life of utter idleness with streets of gold.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Christian Cons

When my mother was a young fashion model, she sent away $10 (a fortune at the time), for a device designed to make her breasts grow even larger. A package arrived in the mail containing a cardboard hand on which were printed the words massage will do the trick. Christians pull similar cons, promising far more than ample breasts, charging far more than $10 and not even delivering a cardboard hand.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Christian Conservatives

I have discovered something quite peculiar — the people most opposed to promiscuity, the people who believe marriage is such a wonderful institution that they call it sacred, the people who believe that children should only be raised by two-parent married couples, insist most strenuously on denying marriage to others.

They see themselves as so superior to everyone else, they believe that allowing others to partake would defile the institution. Normally, humans want to share institutions they value. These Christian bigots claim to be strong supporters of the US constitution, but ignore the first amendment and insist on imposing their religious superstitions on everyone.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Christian Consistency

Let’s say you went to a Superman movie. There was a tsunami. Superman was capable of saving everyone. However, he decided to stay home in bed and drink a beer. We in the audience would gasp, What happened to make Superman turn evil? Yet when Yahweh, who is reputedly even more capable than Superman, does the same thing in real life, people pretend the Yahweh is good, loving and beneficent. They make excuses for their deadbeat god.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Christian Constitutional Rights

In debating American Christians on YouTube, I discovered most of them are badly confused about their first amendment rights under the constitution. Let me sort them out:

Act Permitted Notes
pray in public
preach in public
pray in public schools
force other people’s kids to pray in public schools
pray in private schools
force other people’s kids to pray in private schools
kill homosexuals American law trumps religious law.
deny homosexuals accommodation American law trumps religious law.
stop people from saying Yahweh does not exist. Other people have freedom of speech. This does not count as hate speech. Other people are not required to show your religion respect. Of course you are not required to pretend to respect their religions either.
stop people from saying most of the bible is untrue. Other people have freedom of speech. This does not count as hate speech.
stop people from saying that all Christians should be killed. This would count as hate speech.
publicly announce that all gay people should be beheaded. This is hate speech, but it is so common, it would not likely be prosecuted.
persuade the city to fund an elaborate nativity scene and erect it on public property. The government is not supposed to promote or discourage any particular religion but this violation is so common, it would not likely be prosecuted. Sometimes the ACLU (American Civil Liberties Union) or a private citizen will sue.
a department store funds an elaborate nativity scene and erects it on their own property. This is perfectly ok. Private individuals or corporations are free to promote particular religions. It is only the government that is constrained.
hire only Christians. This is clearly discrimination based on religion, but oddly the courts permit this.
rent only to Christians or accommodate only Christians. This is discrimination based on religion.
~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Christian Contraception

The body has a natural contraceptive hormone called progestin. The body uses it so suppress a second pregnancy after one has already started. The secret of oral contraceptives is to use this natural hormone to prevent even an initial pregnancy. The church seems to think this hormone is wicked. Then, to be consistent, Catholic women should be forced to take drugs to suppress it, thus causing them to become fertile at all times, even when pregnant. If it is not a sin to be infertile when pregnant, then why not permit infertility at other times as well?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Christian Cowardice

In the bible, Yahweh behaves much like Hitler. No matter what terrible thing he does, he demands his followers praise it, and pretend it is a great and wonderful deed. But this sucking up and pretending is just cowardice.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Christian Crap

Christians know better. They have had the same benefit of education as everyone else, yet they spout crap about earthquakes being caused by their god punishing the wicked, as if the Japanese were unusually wicked, as if the Indonesians were unusually wicked, as if the New Zealanders were unusually wicked. What utter crap! Those smug Christian bastards deserve a shower of rotten vegetables or worse.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Christian Crazies on Spaceship Earth

Imagine you were an astronaut living on a space station. A fellow astronaut, who was a Christian, got into the emergency dental kit and was high as a kite on nitrous oxide N₂O. He was smashing the life support equipment that controlled the O₂ / CO₂ balance. You said Cut that out; you will kill us all, you idiot! He replied, I don’t believe in the O₂ / CO₂ balance. I have faith in God, not man’s science! You would not put up with him. You would be justified in sedating him, confining him or worse if necessary. That is exactly what is happening here on spaceship earth with the Christian climate change deniers.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Christian Darwin Awards

It is quite distressing for us atheists to watch Christians killing themselves off for the silliest of reasons. For example:

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Christian Deadbeats

In debates between Christians and atheists, all the facts in play came from science, not religion. Christianity contributes nothing to knowledge.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Christian Definitions

communion
ritual cannibalism ceremony
Eucharist
cracker
miracle
a cracker remains unchanged smelling, looking, tasting, feeling like cracker, however, we pretend it is raw human corpse meat.
~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Christian Delusions

Psychiatrists study people who have their own unique delusions. Anthropologists study groups of primitive peoples and their beliefs/delusions. But nobody seems to study Christians and Muslims in the modern world, their delusions, what holds those delusions in place and how they are transmitted from person to person. So many people share the delusions and so much media propaganda rains on those who do not share them, it becomes impossible to look objectively at them.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Christian Delusions of Grandeur

Christians are so magnificently conceited they imagine merely asking for what they want might make the universe leap to obey. This is a delusion of grandeur, the sort of thing cocaine addicts indulge in.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Christian Denial

Instead of teaching their children how to grieve, Christians teach their children denial and how to put pretend and put on a public face that they believe in the lie of eternal life. This leaves them even more incapable of dealing with death and even more vulnerable to the vultures who will extract money from them to perpetuate the myth of eternal life.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Christian Disbelief

I get the strangest feeling that nearly all Christians have little trust that what they officially believe is actually true. However, they stick with the religion anyway, probably for reasons nothing to do with religion.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Christian Dream Fog

Sometimes I dream about computer programming in my sleep. It is very frustrating. I am not clear on the goal and things happen that make no sense. When I wake up, the ineptitude of my dream thinking comes instantly clear. I suspect Christians live a perpetual dream-fog when it comes to science. When nothing makes any sense, no wonder they cling to the most simplistic explanations. Christianity can be looked on as a kind of retardation. The words cretin and Christian share the same etymology.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Christian Emetic

The most corny, nauseating bit of Christian tripe ever written is Wink Martindale’s Deck of Cards.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

The Christian Excuse for Procrastination

Trust God is the Christian excuse for doing nothing.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Christian Extortion

If somebody tries to sell you something and threatens you bodily harm if you don’t buy, that means whatever they were selling you is crap. That is why they resorted to threats. It is still true when Christians do it. That is one of the reasons you know even Christians think Christianity is crap.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Christian Extortion

Normally, issuing threats of violence to convince people to hand over their money is called extortion, but when a TV evangelist does it, it is called spreading the gospel. Normally, promising a hundred fold return on investment and delivering nothing is called fraud, but when a TV evangelist does it, it is called preaching God’s word. Its a wonder this God fellow has any credibility left.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Christian Extortionists

Imagine you ran a grocery store. A muscular little guy with a bald head and a profusion of tattoos came into your shop. He said that his friends were going to keep you alive indefinitely and torture you. The only way you could avoid this fate was to join their Christmas club. The dues were 10% of your income forever. There were no benefits to membership other than avoiding torture.

How is this extortion racket different from what Christians do? The difference is Christians make a less credible threat. The torture is supposed to happen after you are dead. We should be charging Christians with extortion every time they try to sell us their sick religion.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Christian Extortionists

The only way to consider the Christian threat of hellfire for refusing to join their invisible friends club as non-coercive is to realise the threat is bogus. If it were serious, I could take a Christian to court whenever he made such a threat. Christians would be indistinguishable from the Mafia shaking people down if they threatened the torture next Christmas instead of after my death.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Christian Fantasies

Some people fantasise about winning the lottery and buying a lakeside cabin. Christians fantasise about having an afterlife and owning a house made of solid gold.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Christian Folly

I have to laugh when Christians quote scripture in arguments with non-Christians. Surely they understand that nobody else’s scripture has any weight with them, so why should Christian scripture have any weight with anyone else?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Christian Forester

If a Christian fundamentalist were put in charge of the forests he would say, Cut as much as you want. Jaysus is coming soon anyway. He will first burn down all the damn trees, then replace them all.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

This actually happened when Reagan installed James Gaius Watt as Secretary of the Interior.

Christian Forgery

When Christian scholars finally had to admit the tail end of Mark (including the bit about handling poisonous snakes) was a forgery, tacked on much later, they decided it did not matter that it was a forgery because God must have inspired the forgers. The forgery was obvious because it did not appear in early copies of the manuscript.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Christian Heroin

To a Christian, it matters not a whit if what he believes in untrue, irrational, preposterous, contradictory or impossible. All that matters is it makes him feel comforted when he thinks it. It is reminiscent of the addict’s attitude toward heroin.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Christian Hypocrites

Christians are such hypocrites. They happily reap the benefits of 21st century science while spitting on it, declaring scientists instruments of Satan and pretending to prefer iron age science. Let them experience biblical age dentistry!

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Christian Ignorance

In the dark ages, Christians had no interest in mathematics, so they took the last remaining book by Archimedes The Method, scraped the writing off the parchment, and replaced it with religious superstitious drivel — a prayer book. Nova estimated this act set human civilisation back at least a century. Modern science is working to reveal the original work.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Christian Imposition

Christians have superstitions, mainly involving souls and the bible which give them political ideas about:

They are so steeped in their religion, they don’t see these beliefs as religious. They refuse to notice that non-Christians do not share them. They want to force those superstitions on non-Christians. In addition they want to force non-Christians to honour Yahweh with religious ceremonies. The constitution guarantees freedom of religion. That should include being forced to honour Christian ceremonies and Christians. The state is not supposed to encourage any particular religion — even the majority religion. Christians would be furious if Muslims did to them what they do to Muslims and atheists. Christian politicians ignore this part of the constitution.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Christian Inconsistency

According to a FOX poll, 74% of Americans believe in after-death eternal punishment. I find this baffling given that nearly all Americans cheered their soldiers off to Afghanistan and Iraq to exterminate children using the most painful imaginable means — chemical burning.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Christian Inconsistency

At the end-of-life, Christians are the ones most likely to demand extreme life saving measures. What’s with this? Don’t they believe in eternal life? It sounds like they don’t believe their BS either.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Christian Inconsistency

If Christians are so fanatical about the sanctity of life that they ban contraception, why are they not in the least perturbed by children suffering from malnutrition or US soldiers butchering Afghan children by the millions for no apparent reason? How do they justify withdrawing medical care from seniors?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Christian Inconsistency Vis a Vis the Constitution

Christians are unusually hypocritical when it comes to the US constitution. They believe strongly in a very broad interpretation of the second amendment. They are happy to sacrifice their children for it. Yet they completely ignore the freedom of religion provision of the first and fourteenth amendments which allows everyone to chose their own religion without interference or discrimination. Christians keep trying to force their religious superstitions down the throats of others using law. They seem completely unaware they are spitting on the constitution.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Christian Junk Science is Still Junk Science

Christians seem to think that they deserve equal time for their medieval science even when they have zero evidence to support it. They no more deserve time than people who claim alien abductions without evidence, or people who claim Nazis live under the North Pole, or the stork theory of reproduction, again without evidence.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Christian Know They Sling BS

Even though there is far more evidence for the risen Elvis and for alien abductions than for Christianity, Christians still insist there is utterly no doubt about their claims.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Christian Labradors

I am told that one big disadvantage of golden Labradors is that they like eating feces. You cannot break them of the habit. No matter what proper food you give them, they prefer shit. This reminds me of Christians who turn their noses up at scientific truth, preferring instead to wallow in religious superstition and quackery.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Christian Liars

A clergyman who writes a text giving false information about evolution is almost as reprehensible as a scientist who publishes falsified findings.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Christian Logic

The Christian reasoning for the existence of god works analogously to this: You can’t mathematically prove all the women found dressed in nighties in a bawdy house are prostitutes, therefore with 200% certainty, they must all be virgins.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Christian Magicians

Like all magicians, Christians use distraction, trying to get people to look in the sky and deep time for god, but god is really an illusion created in the here and now by the Christian to relieve the gullible of their money or to trick a parent into allowing parents to molest their child.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Christian Make Believe

Christianity is a form of make believe.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Christian Make Believe

Christianity is make believe for adults.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Christian Malice

A BC Catholic teen got pregnant because the church kept her so ignorant she believed that you simply decided whether or not to have children. They consider her gross ignorance a Good Thing™ I think it is extreme malice.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Christian Medical Priorities

A Christian would sooner spend $1 million on life support for someone who is brain dead with no hope of regaining consciousness, or forcing a patient in extreme pain with terminal pancreas cancer to stay alive than they would on patients with a good chance of recovery. Such are the times I want to slap them senseless.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Christian Medicine

In biblical days people assumed disease was caused by evil spirits. Treatment consisted in punishing the afflicted. Christians still subscribe to this primitive treatment of the ill when it comes to problems with the brain or the genitals.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

The Christian Money Con

One of the world’s oldest cons is that if you give money to god, god will supernaturally bless you with abundance. The only people who get rich from this scheme are the con men who accept the tithes in god’s name. The people with the really big money, like Soros, are all atheists. They don’t succumb to wishful thinking.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

It is a rather strange conception — god as high interest savings account. Further, who needs the corrupt intermediary? You are much more capable and efficient than any TV evangelist of spending the money directly on god’s work.

Christian Morality

Christians imagine others reject Christian morality because it is too strict. Not so. It is too crazy and too evil.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Christian Morality is Disgusting

Christians imagine that without Yahweh, there is no foundation for morality. Then how do they explain that atheists are more law abiding than Christians? Atheists make up 8 to 16% of the population but only 0.21% of the prison population. Christians who are a majority of 75% in the USA, make up 75% of the prison population. Further, the atheist Norwegians are closing prisons from lack of criminals. To Christians, this may be counter-intuitive. To atheists it is obvious. If you fill people’s heads with wrong ideas, they will behave in an irrational way.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Christian Morality is Invalid

Christian morality is invalid for many reasons:

Why are atheists better behaved than Christians?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Christian Murder Exception

If some people receive a get-out-of-jail free exemption on religious grounds, everyone should get it. The law is supposed to treat everyone equally. It is not supposed to create a privileged class.

So if John Christian can kill his kids by giving them quack medicine, so should John Atheist.

Looking at this another way, why are children left unprotected from whacko Christian parents but not from whacko Atheist parents? Surely Christian kids deserve equal protection. This is unconstitutional discrimination against Christian children.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Christian Murder Mysteries

Murder mysteries written by or for Christians follow a formula: there are two detectives, one intelligent and rational and the other not particularly bright. However, The dumb detective keeps burbling up a stream of information about the crime that they just pick out of the air with dreams or visions. They do no deduction or examination of clues other than possibly wandering around the crime scene. The information is always correct. The smart detective is humiliated by this. Nobody is ever skeptical, or accuses the dumb detective of acquiring the information in some underhanded way. This is Christian wish fulfillment.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Christian Narcissism

Christians are so self-centred, so narcissistic, so conceited. So long as all is going ok with them, they proclaim god to be just, kind, beneficent. Yet they know that is a lie. They blind themselves to the indescribable misery visited on other people, innocent people. They refuse to admit that either god is sadistic or god is imaginary, and hence there is nobody there to deal with all that misery, just us.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Christian Nightmare

I suspect Christians would be far more upset to discover that god calls himself Allah, than they would be if they discovered he did not exist at all.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Christian Odds

You have must better chances of winning the biggest lottery in your country every year or the rest of your life than of the Christians being right about God and the afterlife (which has about the same odds as Paul Bunyan and his blue ox babe being a true story).

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Christian Panacea

If Christianity is good for all society’s ills, how come the red states have more crime, more VD (Venereal Disease), more teen pregnancy, more infant mortality, fewer donations to charity, shorter longevity…?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Christian Peace

Americans claim, without their Christianity, there would be chaos. Yet Sweden is a much more orderly, peaceful and crime-free country than the USA and it is secular. The USA has more murders than any other developed country, more gun violence, more crime. Where is this alleged civilising influence?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Christian Persecution

Older Christians like to claim they are being persecuted. This is nonsense. No one is ever fired for being Christian. No one is ever turned away from accomodation for being Christian. No one is ever refused service in a restaurant for being Christian. No one is ever beaten to death for being Christian. Christians are the majority. They impose their superstitions on others contrary to the constitution, and they get away with it.

What they mean by being persecuted is their values are no longer mainstream, eg. gay marriage. They don’t feel welcome in the world any more. They think the world should turn back the clock so they feel comfortable again.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Christian Pilot

Would you fly knowing the pilot thought the optimal course of action in a tight situation was to pray to Allah or Yahweh for their own immortal soul?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Christian Pit Bulls

Imagine a pit bull tangled up in a fishing line. You do your best to free him, but he keep snapping at you, thinking you are trying to harm him. That is how Christians behave when you try to free them of crazy ideas that are hurting them.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Christian Plasticine

Christianity works by browbeating children into pretending to believe the patently untrue. Once they have learned to do this, they are vulnerable to all manner of nonsense including mediums, quack medicine, faith healers, get rich quick by tithing scams, unfounded conspiracy theories, Republican voodoo economics, homeopathy and attacking other small nations and stealing their natural resources in self-defence. They are plasticine in the hands of the professional con men. They will even had over their children to be molested or raped.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70) Deliver Us from Evil

Christian Plot

Even if the Christians don’t manage to take control of your child now through their relentless TV ministries and family values programming, they are planting the seeds of a phobia of god as bogeyman they will use later in life during a window of vulnerability.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Christian Polluters

Christians pollute the noösphere with their nutty, false and barbaric ideas. They harm the whole world, not just themselves. What ideas am I talking about:

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Christian Privilege

There are 60,000 religions. We in Canada give special status to Christianity. Like other religions, they pretend its stories and claims are absolutely certain even though archaeologists and historians say they cannot possibly be true. They offer promises of eternal bliss, in return for money. Yet there is no evidence they ever deliver. The churches claim to help the poor, but persuade the poor in the third world to give money to them. Ask yourself why is sexual abuse of children in the church so rampant? Because the government does not tax them, even atheists are forced to support them. The media treat them as a force for good. I consider them polished con artists.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Christian Procrastination

Instead of searching for a lost child, Christians petition the sky god to do the looking. Instead of enacting mining safely laws, Christians ask the sky god to suspend the laws of causality to rescue the trapped miners. Instead of moving their belongings to high ground, Christians pray to the sky god that their homes be spared the flood waters. Praying is not only useless, it is counter-productive because it displaces useful action.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Christian Prosperity Fails

Christian do two crazy things that interfere with their prosperity:

  1. Give large amounts of money to televangelists in the vain hope that Yahweh will direct fabulous wealth to them.
  2. Pray for money, but no nothing to earn it.
~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Christian Psychiatry

Debating with Christians is a specialty of psychiatry. The goal is to free the patient of a fear-based delusion shared by many of their peers. In turn, the patients and his peers are trying the install the delusion in you.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Christian Right To Abuse Children

When drug-addicted or alcoholic parents physically or sexually abuse their children, society protects the children by eventually taking them away, yet it permits those same parents to conceive and abuse as many more new children as they please because Christians believe the parents’ right to reproduce is unconditional and overrides the right of the child to be free from abuse.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Christian Right to be Nuts

Christians are as nutty as Morris dancers. They deserve the same respect and the same rights to act strangely. However, that does not include forcing their customs on others, especially children.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Christian Right to Inferior Daycare

In 13 states, all a person has to do is claim his childcare business has a religious affiliation and poof, all inspections go away and also all requirements for compliance with laws to protect the safety of his charges, including training, food safety, sanitation, criminal record checks, paedophile checks… Sean Faircloth: A Strategic Plan for Secular Success click to watch

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Christian Sadism

Christians like to torment teens by convincing them that sex is evil, masturbation is evil and even being horny is evil. This is sadistic. There is no fault in the teen. Raging hormones mean being horny out of your mind is absolutely normal at that age. Christians’ impossible demand that teens should have the sex drive of a nonegenarian makes teens both miserable and crazy. Christians pull this filthy stunt in order gain control over teens by inducing a phony guilt trip.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Christian Sadism

Clergy have become synonymous with child sexual abuse and physical abuse. A native boy at a Canadian residential school sprinkled some salt on his porridge. The loose cap came off the salt shaker and the entire bottle dumped out. The presiding nun made him eat it all. He vomited. She made him eat all the vomit. This is the sort of the bullying, sanctimonious mentality that Christianity creates.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Christian Salesmen

Christians use what should be illegal sales tactics for their lifetime health club membership with fees of 10% of income. They threaten reluctant marks with eternal torture by fire. If roof salesmen threatened little old ladies this way, we would lock them up. If the YMCA threatened kids this way, we would put them out of business. Why do we put up with it from churches. Mainly because we know it is bullshit, a empty threat. We assume everyone is smart enough to figure that out. Secondarily the churches have political power. They are exempt from all manner of laws. If Christianity had any value, Christians would not have to resort to strong arm tactics to sell it.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Christian Science

Christians routinely lie about the scientific accuracy of the bible. They don’t care in the least if it is actually true. All that matters is Does it sound scientific? and Does it create a warm feeling in my tummy?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Christian Scientists

Christians Scientists believe it should be possible to cure disease purely with the mind. The catch is, they cannot get it to work. Child after child keeps dying, but they won’t give up and try some medicine proved to actually work. They are aggressively stupid and monumentally stubborn. If they were just killing themselves, I could rejoice that such twits were leaving the gene pool, but it is a type of murder to deny children proper health care.

Even worse are people like Anthony Robbins and Deepak Chopra who preach this crap, but are quite happy to use western medicine for themselves. They sell this voodoo as science, so they entrap a whole new class of naïve victim.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Christian Scientists

Many people, including Richard Dawkins, have wondered how it is possible for people to be both scientists and Christians. A scientist works with a body of knowledge including astronomy, geology, archeology, quantum mechanics, medicine, chemistry, psychology…

A Christian rejects nearly all of science in favour of the assumptions of desert dwellers living 3000 years ago. They reject rationality, evidence. They trust superstition. They claim the sure fire way to get something done is to pray to a sky fairy, even though they know perfectly well it never works.

What they must do is partition their lives. At work they are scientists. At home, to please their parents, wives and neighbours, they give lip service to Christianity. They ignore the anti-science parts of Christianity but don’t make a point of it. They want to blend.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Christian Scofflaws

Churches routinely break the law and Christian insiders ensure they are not prosecuted. They do political lobbying and champion specific candidates and they demand the public illegally subsidise this activity with a tax break that nobody else gets for their lobbying efforts. The churches are demanding even more special privilege than they already have.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Christian Sewage

The more I study Christianity the more evil and loathsome it becomes. It is sewage sold as Perrier.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Christian Shakedown

The purpose of hell is to terrify people into obedience and most importantly terrifying them into handing over money to the church. There is no evidence it literally exists.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Christian Shame

Things have changed. In Canada, young Christians hide that fact from their peers to avoid ostracism.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Christian Slander

Christian slander atheists by claiming they yearn for a value system where love and compassion have no part. Everything is cold card cash and greed. Oddly this is the value system of the political arm of the Christian church — the Republican party.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Christian Smugness

It is not so much that Christians are a motley assortment of bigots, sniveling cowards, con men, superstitious twits, gullible idiots and people who manage to lead decent lives despite their poisonous beliefs, it is that they imagine they are superior to everyone else and that their false beliefs are what make them so damn superior.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Christian Stinginess

I you are a Christian, you believe nothing you do matters. God will override anything he does not like or fill in for your lapses. Christians often think misfortune is god’s punishment, so you do not want to interfere. You tend to hand over all your donations to the church where they do little good for the unfortunate. You are mainly concerned with racking up cosmic brownie points.

Atheists do not have this crazy thinking.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Christian Strangehold on Public Schools

When I was in public elementary school, I wrote an essay about some British boarding school boys sneaking out and drinking some wine. One my characters, whom I named Travers, said That’s ruddy good wine I was chastised, not for the theme, but for using the obscenity ruddy. You have to look back a few decades to see progress prying loose the Christian stranglehold on our schools.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Christian Stubborn Bigotry

Christians refuse to accept that other people’s right to be left alone trumps the right of Christians to harass them for ignoring Christian dogma.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Christian Superstition

One of the darker consequences of Christian superstition is it discourages people from donating their organs after they die. Christians vaguely imagine they will need them or having them removed will be painful. That same nuttiness makes Christians try to preserve their bodies from decay after they are buried.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Christian Survivor Conceit

Christians who get themselves in serious trouble, say crashing a plane in the wilderness, then survive invariably claim divine intervention saved them. The creator of the universe hand picked them to survive where normally he condemns people in such a situation to a ghastly death. It is a monumental ego trip. It never occurs to them to interpret their luck in a more mundane way with the anthropic principle. Some people in such a situation luck out and wander in the correct direction, most in the wrong one. Some people experience bad weather, some good. Some people manage to find water, some do not. Most people die. A small number survive. The only ones who tell tales of their adventure on radio are the survivors. There was nothing special about them, other than perhaps better survival skills. What is really annoying is the way CBC radio feeds their delusions in reporting the stories.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Christian Symbol

The Christians use a visual symbol, a man nailed to a cross of wood dying slowly. The problem is the Christians behave as if this symbol meant let’s string the bastards up.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Christian Taste

The strange thing about Christians is they think it inherently more plausible and simple that a man in the clouds runs the universe with magic than the universe runs by natural law. For them, that is the default position. Even though they have no evidence for it, they are absolutely sure this is true, only because they imagine it would be wonderful if a capricious, sadistic god were in charge. It reminds me of the scene is some movie where the audience has to clap and proclaim a belief in fairies to bring Tinkerbell back to life. It is a pervasive primitive belief that what you believe to be true is a potent force in shaping reality. However, it just shapes your perception of reality.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Christian Think

Christians tell us that we should worship Yahweh because he is such a thin-skinned bastard, he will torture us for eternity if we don’t, and will probably torture us for some minor crime even if we do worship. They fear him, and so should we. However, they can offer not a single stick of evidence to suggest why he might exist, much less torture people.

This is a bit like telling us we should vote for Donald Trump or he might start a nuclear war in a pique at rejection from the voters.

To me, this ostensible conversion is like the desperate plea of a mentally ill person asking for help getting rid of a demon. They want solid reassurance that a monster won’t hurt them. The existence of god is not an irrelevant intellectual problem to them. It is a matter of more peril than death itself.

Because the penalty for rejecting Yahweh is allegedly so high, Christians require overwhelming arguments. However, they won’t even consider any arguments because of the danger.

This god is a monster. He promises reliable aid, but never helps. He lets horrible things happen to children. He tortures people for eternity while he urges his followers to watch in glee. Christians, deep down, must hate him, but they have been told criticising god, even in thought, is punished with infinite torture. Christians won’t admit their hatred for god to others or even to themselves. The main reason they stay Christian is fear of Yahweh and his sadism.

Christians are so afraid of examining the question of whether Yahweh is real, that they the fail to notice how utterly absurd their reasons are.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Christian Threats

Almost every day some Christian threatens me with eternal torture. Almost never does he give me a reason why that threat might be genuine. It is as though he were threatening to sic a herd of flying pigs on me.

Could you imagine two paleontologists disagreeing on the age of some fossil threatening to murder the other’s children if they did not agree? Threats are a sign of utter desperation, that you have no facts to back your argument.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Christian Threats

Christians have no evidence to support their beliefs, so like any other thugs, they resort to threats and violence.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Christian Token Animal

Canadians use the beaver, a monogamous industrious vegetarian as their emblem. The Americans use the bald eagle, a predator that steals its food from other predators. The Muslims use the bee. Perhaps the Christians should use the mosquito, a conceited mosquito.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Christian Torturers

It is odd that Christians are so keen on torture. Have they forgotten their saviour was tortured to death by crucifixion?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

The Christian Transform

I can’t explain it.

Nobody can explain it.

Yahweh must have done it.

This obviously not so. Just because you can’t explain relativity does not mean Einstein could not. Just because nobody can provide an intuitive model for quantum mechanics does not imply adding Yahweh would help.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Christian Truth

Because Christianity is a fairy tale, Christians come to expect the truth to be a simple as a fairy tale. They refuse to spend any work at all learning about how the universe really works. That would take effort. Instead they prefer to listen to creationist lies about science because that takes no effort.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Christian Truth

Imagine a fireman asked Where’s the fire?
and a Christian answered On the fourth floor, suite 427.
The firemen dragged their equipment to suite 427 and discovered there was nothing there. The fireman confronted the Christian You lied to us.
The Christian answered Nope. With absolute certainty it is suite 427.
How do you know?
I don’t need evidence. I am a Christian.
But you pretended to know when you didn’t.
I was 100% truthful [What he meant was, I told you what I truly believed]. You have to have faith. That is why you cannot see the fire, but I can. It is like The Emperor’s New Clothes.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Is the Christian deluded or putting the firemen on?

Christian Used Car Salesmen

Christians are like used car salesmen. You ask for information on the car. They refuse to give it. They say If you don’t buy the car, were sending Vito around to break your legs and rape your wife. If the car had any value, why would they have to resort to strong arm tactics to sell it?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Christian Vandalism

Adults can donate their kidneys and corneas after they die. Embryos can donate their stem cells that others might walk. Christian superstition demands these valuable gifts be burned or buried.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Christian View

Normally Christian beliefs seems so nutty, that I never entertain them. However, when I was a boy, there was a kid, K. two years older than me who lead a small gang, who almost every day of my elementary and junior high life, beat me up. I recently discovered that when he grew up, he was convicted for trafficking a long list of drugs. Later in life he became a wealthy real estate con man. When the authorities were closing in, he died of a drug overdose, possibly a suicide.

I thought to myself, K. is a classic example of the kind of person that Christians say get tortured for eternity. The odd thing was then I started thinking thoughts like this I don’t want him tortured on my account. I wonder if there is anything I could do to get him pardoned. He has surely been tortured adequately by now ( 20 later.) God is quite insane, completely out of control. Yes, K. was quite a sadistic kid, but eternal torture is way out of proportion to his crimes. These Christian notions of vengeance are so much in the air (especially when I was a child) that I slipped into them without thinking.

My rational mind reminds me that K. is dead. Nobody is torturing him. Yahweh the torturer is an imaginary bogey man.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Christian View of Christians

One of the most amusing things about Christians is that they imagine others see them as morally superior to everyone else. Christian morality is 3000 years out of date. Thankfully, even Christians ignore most of it. Their good behaviour is motivated by fear of torture. They imagine this makes them superior to those motivated by love. Christians ignore the statistics that show high Christianity implies high crime, high divorce, high teen pregnancy and high abortion. What sort of morality leaves it up to an invisible man to solve the world’s problems?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Christian vs Jewish Traditions on Asking Questions

17% of Jews are atheist. The Jews have a very old tradition of debating the Torah. This questioning gradually lead to abandoning naïve views of god. In contrast, Christians are discouraged from even asking questions, but less debating the answers. Christians value a cow-like stupidity and unquestioning acceptance. Cretin is derived from the French word for Christian.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Christian vs Satanist

There are tens of thousands of gods, some beneficent some evil. Consider the possibility the Christian god is one of the evil ones and the Christian church is an evil institution, pretending to be virtuous. Look at the fruits.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Christian vs Scientist

Christians complain that scientists only deal with a subset of reality. Scientists complain that Christian lie by claiming their wild speculations are absolute truth.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Christian Vultures

Christians are at their worst when someone dies, exploiting the bereaved for money for magic ceremonies and pummeling them to convert when they are at their most vulnerable.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Christian Wealth Distribution

Unscrupulous people manage to trick gullible people into handing over their money. Over time then, Christians will tend to be both the richest and poorest people in the USA, but under-represented in the middle.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Christian! You Are A phony

Hey Christian! You are a phony. You don’t believe most of that nonsense you give lip service too. It is just that you think pretending to believe it helps your status in the community. You are a hypocrite, liar and coward. Challenge yourself:

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Christianity = Smallpox

What would you think of someone who deliberated harboured small pox and infected others? Christians harbour delusions seriously harmful to mankind and deliberately attempt to infect others with them, especially their beliefs that god will automatically clean up any environmental mess or damage made by man, including climate change.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Christianity is an Anti-Moral Force

Christians claim that you need to believe in Yahweh to behave morally. They ask, what other motivation to be have well is there other than fear of being roasted alive after death? I counter that belief in such a monster makes people behave even worse than they would otherwise.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Christianity and First Nations People

10,000 years ago, long before the Old Testament was even a set of oral stories, long before the Christians admit the world even existed, people were crossing from Asia to settle in North America. They have their own history that has nothing to do with Christianity (until the Christians came and gave them gifts of blankets seeded with smallpox and stole their lands). How could the myths of a desert people on the other side of the world have any relevance to them? What stupendous arrogance of that pathetic tribe to trumpet that their local customs were the only acceptable customs, beliefs and myths for the whole universe, when none of them had ever traveled more than 50 km (31.07 miles) from their birthplace and had utterly no idea what was going out outside their back yard!

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Christianity Can Be Cured

Please fund research for the mentally-disfiguring disease of Christianity.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Christianity Can Be Cured

Yes, we can find a cure for Christianity.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Christianity Causes Bad Behaviour

Not only is Christianity untrue, believing its lies makes 2/3 of people behave worse than they would have otherwise.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Christianity Causes Brain Atrophy

Perhaps one of the most negative effects of religion is it causes the brain to atrophy. Having a conversation with a Christian is a bit like having a conversation with a badly-programmed Chatty Kathy doll. They just start spouting meaningless gibberish and go on that way for sentences at a time.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Christianity Causes Divorce

The highest divorce rate is in the states with most conservative religious views. This suggests these views are unrealistic and toxic to relationships.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Christianity Causes Insanity

Christianity causes insanity, in the legal sense of being unable to distinguish right from wrong. Most Christians consider it more wicked to get a blowjob, masturbate, abort a fertilised egg or smoke a joint than to torture and kill a child in Iraq.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Christianity Causes STDs

The highest STD (Sexually Transmitted Disease) rates are in the states with most conservative religious views. This suggests abstinence-only is unrealistic and counter-productive.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Christianity is a Choice

People choose to become Christian. People choose to become bigots. They have no excuse.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Christianity the Couch Potato

Fighting Christianity is like fighting a 453.59 kg (½ ton) cretinous couch potato. You strike and your arm is engulfed in the pasty flesh. It stolidly endures simply because of its bulk.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Christianity Damage

If I told you about a man who thought sex was disgusting, who had never done anything in sex but the missionary position, whose sex acts always last less than 3 minutes, you know he is a Christian.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

The Christianity Game

Christians play a game where they try to spin every horrible or insignificant event as if it had deep positive meaning. They can’t say She died of cancer. That sucks. They need a fairy story/lie like God needed another soprano for the choir.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

The Christianity Game

People spend all kinds of time on video and board games, lost in imaginary worlds. Christianity is similar. The problem comes when Christians start thinking it is real and it gives them the right to manage other people’s lives, imposing Christian superstitions around birth control, abortions, euthanasia, funerals, homosexuality… on non-Christians. They start demanding their dream world be taught as fact in schools. They demand everyone pray to their gods. They demand tax money support their game. They are people who take their game far too seriously.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Christianity is in Bad Taste

I would reject Christianity on taste alone. It is kitsch. It is corny. It is ham-fisted, subtle as Hee Haw. It is silly. It is the Patsy Kline of religions.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Christianity in a Nutshell

Basically, Christianity is a con game to get people to hand over their money. Threatening torture after death helps reel in the dumb ones. Once rubes are reeled in, the preacher can steal them from other churches by telling them that hell was a lie all along. The key to Christianity is getting parents to sell the con to their kids while they are still too young to realise how silly it is.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Christianity is Just Another Religion

As a Christian, you believe every other religion is a con. Its founders and priests pretended to speak for god to gain power over others. What is so different about Christianity that makes you so certain it is different? Do not the paedophile scandals give you pause about its integrity?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Christianity Lacks Any Appeal

Christianity is such nonsense that the only way I could see anyone falling for it is by deliberately avoiding learning anything about it. Scholars know it is as loony as an Action Comic plot. Yet Christians pretend not to notice.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Christianity Makes Death Worse

Death is naturally sad, but Christians have made it terrifying.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Christianity Makes Life Less Tolerable

It seems to me, if I were broke and suffering from nausea, incontinence and a toothache, that it would just add to my misery to imagine a vengeful invisible man in the clouds were persecuting me with these troubles.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Christianity is a Mental Illness

Christianity is a form of mental illness. We don’t treat it as such because it is epidemic. The crazies have taken over entire countries.

There is a tendency to want to excoriate the Christians for their revolting behaviour, but it is just a symptom of their delusions. Most of them did not choose to be deluded. They were brainwashed into it with horrifying threats and, very often, beatings. Christianity officially teaches that beating children is required behaviour.

So hate the delusion and have compassion for those afflicted by it.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Christianity Is Not Monotheistic

Christians claim they are a monotheistic religion, yet they have a father, son and holy ghost. Further, they worship Mary and hundreds of saints in the churches using graven images. That sounds like polytheism and idolatry to me.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Christianity older that Aztec

Most people would consider it absurd and barbaric if the Aztecs continued to practice their religion of human sacrifice to this day. I consider it even more absurd that Christians practice their ritual cannibalism religion, unmodified, even older than the Aztec religion to this day.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Christianity as Parasite

A parasite is a creature that lives off its host. It does not care if its host suffers or dies. By that definition Christians are parasites on planet earth.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Christianity Terrifies

No matter how ridiculous Christianity is when you analyse it, it still terrifies people who were taught it as toddlers. The fear of hellfire is very convincing. It might help to remember that priests of almost every one of the 60,000 other religions sell their religions the same way. Those threats don’t scare you only because you have not been repeatedly exposed to them. I read the Qur’an cover to cover. It gave me nightmares for months. Even though I rejected it logically, the images of torment were so vivid, they still snuck into my subconscious. There is nothing unique about the Christian threats. There is no reason to take them any more seriously than Muslim threats.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Christianity Virus

Christians are perfectly ordinary mentally healthy people whose mothers deliberately traumatised them as toddlers with a fear of a bogeyman who was planned to roast them alive for eternity. Their foolish mothers thought this treatment would in some strange way be beneficial. This trauma behaves like a virus. It controls the mind and browbeats the poor Christian to infect others. The terror overrides reason, much the way a fear of snakes or spiders does.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Christianity vs Atheism

The difference between Christianity and atheism is this. When a Christian convinces you he is right, he immediately hits you up for 10% of your income for the rest of your life. A atheist does not. An atheist does not even ask you to show up once a week for singing or to go evangelising.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Christianity Without Yahweh

Bishop Spong said that Yahweh obviously did not exist, but Christianity still had value. I disagree. Christianity is not worth saving. Consider: what do Christian institutions spend their time doing?

In summary, they spend nearly all their time violating freedom of religion, by trying to force their superstitions on non-Christians.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Christianity, a Near Perfect Con

As cons go, Christianity is a remarkable achievement. It victims rarely demand compensation or prosecution of those that took them. It has such prestige, that even those who know it is a con, usually succumb to social pressure to respect it and pretend to take its claims seriously and remain silent about its criminality. It enjoys an untouchable status similar to the Mafia in Sicily or the drug cartels in Bagotá.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Christianity: a Backward Step

In one way, Christianity was a big backward step from Judaism. Jews were concerned with what you do, how well you followed the Torah — the law, the instruction. Modern Christian are far more interested in what you believe that what you do. Christians are quite happy to endlessly forgive child molesters so long as they profess the correct beliefs, e.g. that they have been saved or born again or slain in the spirit.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Christianity’s Biggest Problem

Christianity’s biggest problem is that Christians cannot get their story straight.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Christians and Cannibalism

Because of their death superstitions, Christians hold cannibalism, even of people who die by natural causes, to be a more serious crime than murder.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Christians and Causes

Christians have a schizophrenic view of causality. They believe humans have free will, namely their actions have no previous causes, but they believe everything else, including the universe itself, must have a previous cause.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Christians and Climate Change Deniers

Christianity and climate change denial often go together. Why? Both involve wishful thinking. Christians count on not dying with only the remotest chance of success. Climate change deniers use wishful thinking to convince themselves there is only a very small chance the earth is in danger. They are pathological optimists. They make a virtue of lying to themselves, calling it faith.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Christians and Contraception

Christians are irresponsible wanting to avoid contraception given that the earth has many times more people that it can sustain. What is unbelievably outrageous is them demanding to interfere in the family planning of non-Christians, as if they knew better.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Christians and Science

Christians often claim they reject science. They may even claim that all scientists are in league with the devil. Yet these same Christians use telephones, cellphones, computers, electricity, airplanes, cars, pharmaceuticals, canned food, refrigeration, microwave ovens, central heating, modern dentistry… If they were honest, they would reject all the fruits of science.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Christians are Crazy

Christians are stark raving bonkers. How can you tell?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Christians are Legally Insane

Kristianity causes insanity, in the legal sense of being unable to distinguish right from wrong. Most Kristians consider it more wicked to get a blowjob, masturbate, abort a fertilised egg or smoke a joint than to torture and kill a child in Iraq.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Christians Are Mentally Ill

There is little difference between a Christian and a mentally ill person suffering from delusions. A Christian suffers less stigma because there are so many sharing the affliction. Christians are far more dangerous because they act in concert cross-stimulating a common delusion.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Christians Are Not Serious About An Afterlife

If Christians truly believed in an afterlife, they would be eager to die, like Muslim terrorists. But they are more cautious and they cling to life even more than people who openly deny an afterlife.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Christians are Soulless

Christians like to loudly proclaim they are 120% sure they have a soul or that someone they despise lacks one. I don’t know how you tell given that souls are weightless, invisible and completely undetectable. Proclaiming you have soul as is as silly as proclaiming you have a 38.10 cm (1¼ ft) undetectable penis superimposed on your usual one.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Christians Are Such Utter Nitwits

Christians are such utter nitwits because they believe they can, purely through faith, live forever. Why don’t they try something a little easier to start, such as using faith, wishful thinking and prayer to fly up onto the roof?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Christians At NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Administration)

If a Christian fundamentalist were put in charge of NASA, he would fire all the scientists and hire a farmer who said, All ya have ta do is fill a big pipe with dynamite, point it at where ya wants ta go, light the fuse, an’ pray.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Christians Behave Worse

A university study discovered that Christianity caused 1/3 of its practitioners to behave better and 2/3 to behave worse. Would you prescribe a drug that made two thirds of the patients sicker and had the side effect of causing delusions?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Christians Behaving Badly

During the dark ages, Christians had everything 100% their way. Yet people behaved worse that at any other time in history. Murder rates were 30 times higher than now. How can Christians possibly claim their religious dogmas are necessary for public morality? As the tide of Christianity has ebbed, war, murder and rape have all subsided.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70) The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined

Christians Cause Sexual Dysfunction

Christians love terrifying and bullying children. No wonder so many adults have sexual dysfunction problems.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Christians as Cowering Children

Christians are like children frightened of the dark, clutching their teddy bears, trusting them to protect them from all harm.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Christians Dedicate Their Lives to Creating Misery

The Christian propaganda machine pumps out the notion that Christians are the good people and everyone else is not. Just think, are Christians truly just the same, more likely or less likely that average to make life miserable for others?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Christians Don’t Believe Their Own Lies

There was a newspaper article about a 12 year old girl who missed her dead father so much she hanged herself to be with him in heaven. Even Christians recognise this as a tragic story. Even they see what she did as foolish. Even Christians know in their hearts this afterlife story is bullshit, or else they would find the story endearing and the little girl brave and loving. So isn’t it time to stop teaching this crap to impressionable children? Isn’t it time to stop teaching it to soldiers too?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Christians Imagine They Are Qualified to Control Others

One of the most serious consequences of a Christianity infection is the subject believes they are more qualified than other people to run their lives and attempts using means legal and illegal to control others.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Christians in Nature

If you ever go into the wilds with a Christian they will not talk about what they see. They will instead distract themselves with fantasies about an imaginary man in the sky or their coming afterlife. They behave like a teenager with a an MP3 player glued to her ear as she canoes the pristine wilderness. They want to be cocooned from experiencing the here and now.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Christians Know They Are Frauds

It is pathetic that Christianity is wrong on so many points of fact. It is infuriating that the leaders of Christianity are well aware they are perpetuating a fraud. It is alarming that evangelical Christians want to terminate freedom of religion and impose their beliefs on everyone through force of law.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Christians Love Inconsistency

Atheists go apoplectic debating with Christians. They prove to the Christian that he must be wrong, beyond a shadow of a doubt, by pointing out how his beliefs are not consistent. The Christian is not in the least impressed. He has been trained since birth to embrace inconsistency. He feels no shame in believing mutually incompatible things or the logically absurd. The Christian decides if something is true only by how it feels in his gut, which has nothing whatsoever to do with logic. An atheist debating a Christian is the similar to a parent reasoning with a daughter about her choice of boyfriend. The daughter’s attraction has nothing to do with reason. It is similar to why it is so difficult to reason a child out of fear of monsters under the bed. The attachment to Christianity is emotional not rational.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Christians Making Things Worse, Yet Again

During the black plague in Europe, Christians tortured and killed randomly chosen innocent people hoping to convince their god to call off the plague. Christianity made the problem much worse than it need have been.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Christians Misunderstanding Atheists

Christians talking to atheists erroneously presume they are actually Christians, just pretending to be atheists. They assume atheists believe Yahweh, Jesus, the devil and the angels are all real. In reality, atheists have absolutely no fear of them. They have absolutely no interest in placating them. Christians have absolutely no fear of the Greek god Poseidon. They are quite sure he does not exist, even if they don’t know the first thing about him. That is how atheists feel about Jesus and Yahweh. They are just another pair of fictitious gods out of 60,000 gods, nothing special.

Christians love to tell each other than atheists have no morals. By any objective measure, they have vastly superior morals. There are several reasons for this.

Atheists reject the primitive morals of Christians. They wish to live to a higher standard. Christians often accuse atheists of pretending not to believe in Yahweh to avoid hellfire, so they can sin with impunity, but that would not work. Pretending god does not exist when he did would not protect you from his sadism. That is nutty Christian thinking. Atheist disbelief has nothing to do with fear of or disgust with the cartoonish Yahweh. It has everything to do with the overwhelming evidence he does not exist.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Christians more Malicious Than Criminals

Christians since the beginning have repeatedly endlessly that they are far more moral than non-believers. They have everyone cowed, afraid to point out how evil they truly are, as if it would be impolite to notice or call them on it. It is not as though they are exceptionally virtuous people with a few flaws; they hurt more people than the criminal classes.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Christians On Evil

Christians will be the first to tell you that man, not god is responsible for all the evil on earth, even though god is allegedly omnipotent and beneficent. Oddly though, Christians are first to block any government attempt to alleviate that misery.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Christians on TV

Think about a Christian you have seen on TV. Ostensibly, they were trying to sell you some crackpot idea, e.g. that you could pray away your cancer, or that you could use a green handkerchief to triple your income, or that a book that was wrong on every point of science or archaeology was perfectly reliable. But always, appeared at the bottom of the screen, an appeal for money for God. You have seen their mansions, so you know where that money really goes. However, when a scientist comes on TV and starts telling you mind-blowing things about the universe, there is never such an appeal for money. Christianity is really about conning people out of money. The whacko ideas are just the bait. Science is about sharing discoveries.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Christians Still Primitive

Christians talked of civilising the heathens. In particular they looked down on those who did human or animal sacrifice or who committed cannibalism. Oddly, they failed to recognise the central feature of Christianity was a human sacrifice and that communion is symbolic (though claimed actual) cannibalism.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Christians As Stupid Sports Fans

Christians are extremely boring to debate with. All they do is tell you their feelings, as if that any relevance whatsoever to truth. They never offer any reasons to support their assertions. They are like rabid sports teams who cannot quote a single fact to support their claim their team is the best. They imagine their own enthusiasm should be totally convincing.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Christians Torment the Dying

There is nothing so pathetic as someone faking a smiling face, or telling stories of preposterous optimism in the face of certain doom. It makes the doom seem even worse. It implies the doom is so awful, you cannot even acknowledge it. What a cruel stunt Christians pull on someone who is dying!

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Christians Trains Anders Breivik

Christians won’t want to embrace Anders Breivik, the Norwegian summer camp shooter, but they are the ones who trained him to have absolute confidence without evidence. This is the heart of terrorist thinking. He may be motivated by politics, but his insane conviction is rooted in religious training.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Christians vs Satanists

The main difference between Satanists and Christians is Satanists don’t claim to be morally superior to everyone else. The second difference is Christians imagine they have a right to meddle in the private lives of others, based on their misappropriated moral authority.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Christians vs. Scientologists

Since neither Scientology nor Christianity can present any evidence for their beliefs, I conclude that the odds either is true is vanishingly small. Since there is no truth in either religion, it makes sense to judge the religions by how well their adherents behave. In that department, the Christians have a long history of killing and torturing non-believers, supporting slavery, exploiting people in the third world and enabling paedophilic rape, something the Scientologists have not done on a mass scale.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Christians, Get Stuffed

Hey Christian! I have a bone to pick with you. First you tried to con me out of my money. Then you tried to get me hand over my kid for you to boink. Then you insulted me with gibberish and silly promises and idle threats, laughing at me, expecting me to fall for your holier and wiser than thou routine. You are playing one of the oldest, most polished cons. Get stuffed!

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Church and HIV

Let us say that an virgin girl is pushed into a marriage with a much older man with HIV. In that case, the Catholic Church says, this is an indissoluble sacrament. They must not use birth control to prevent the birth of HIV-infected children or to prevent infecting the wife. The church had the same attitudes toward syphilis when it could not be cured. This sounds like something Nazis would cook up. How dare they get on their moral high horse when they are deliberately infecting children.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Church Business

From the point of view of capitalists, churches are the perfect business:

More accurately they are the world’s oldest con.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Church Control Of Marriage

The church has incredible cheek to demand that it has the right to decide who can partner up and who cannot and further to demand tribute for an expensive ceremony for anyone pairing up. For centuries the church has claimed anyone who ignores their impudence is living in sin

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Church Crime

Perhaps one of the less obvious, but most serious, crime of the church is tricking people into being submissive to oppression. Slavemasters forced Christianity on slaves to make them meek. Modern day American blacks submit to inequality and financial oppression because the church teaches them too. The pattern is repeated throughout the third world. Part of the lie is convincing the marks that life does not matter. It is short, just a test for eternal life after death.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Church Evil

In order to control people, the church frightens them about perfectly ordinary things like puberty and death. This is so out-in-the-open and so traditional we don’t usually notice what a cruel, evil thing this is.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Church Gets Away with paedophilia Scandals

If any other institution but the church had been caught in mass paedophilic rapes, sexual and physical child abuse, all those responsible would have been driven out of society and all the institutions involved, disbanded.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Church Greed

Averaged over all churches, only 29% of contributions go to real world helping. Televangelists such as Joyce Meyer are lower, about 10%. By comparison 91% of Red Cross contributions do.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Church Meddling in Sex Education

The churches have no more business meddling in the sex education needed to contain the global AIDS (Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome) epidemic than epidemiologists have censoring the sermons of pastors.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Church Perks

Have you ever looked into what it takes to found a church or new denomination? Have you ever wondered why people keep founding new churches, pretty much the same as the existing ones? Have you ever considered what the official church designation gets you legally?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Church Proved Impotent

In the dark ages everyone found out the church was completely impotent when it came to the plague. It had no power at all to influence god. Today we have forgotten that lesson.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Church Segregation

93% of churches in the USA are still segregated.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Church Supports An Evil Dictatorship

Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe is the most psychotic, sadistic dictator alive today. Guess who are his main supporters? All of the 130 Christian churches!

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Church Urges Genocide

Rwanda is the most Catholic country in Africa. During the genocide, priests and nuns broadcast from their church radio stations urgings to murder fellow citizens.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Churches Want To Control Who Pairs With Who

For centuries, the churches convinced the population that no relationship was legitimate without church blessing. They convinced everyone, believer and atheist alike, that forming a relationship without this blessing was an unforgivable sin and that any children born were illegitimate bastards The notion is so universal that not even atheists noticed how high-handed and patriarchal it was. To this day churches strive to retain the power to decide who can pair up with who, blocking same sex couples for instance or interfaith marriages. They want to control everyone, not just their own flocks.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Circumcision

How did the insanity of infant circumcision get started? Circumcision was used as a tribal badge, a way of telling if someone was in or out. That seems odd. You’d think a tattoo more easily visible would work better. Given that Yahweh demanded anyone who put an adult penis in his mouth put to death, it seems odd he would demand rabbis put bloody infant penes in their mouths. Jewish parents, for religious reasons, put their sons through the pain and health risks (herpes) of circumcision. If they did it for any strong reason, we would likely lock them up. It is bizarre that, in the law, irrational motivation trumps rational. Further, if anybody but a mohel sucked on an infant’s penis, he would be locked up. We make a special religious exception to the law.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Circumcision

Why would parents hand over their newborn son to an unsanitary and painful procedure such as circumcision? They do it to prove they are dedicated members of the religious community. It is like a tribal tattoo or scaring.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Circumcision is Assault

In my view, male or female circumcision without the informed consent of the circumcised should be considered an assault. The courts are beginning to agree with me. They convicted a man of assault who tried to remove his son’s foreskin with a carpet knife. The Supreme Court of BC refused to hear his conviction. Mohels still are getting away with it, even when they are infected with herpes and suck the blood out of the penis wound with their mouths causing infection.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70) source source)

Circumcision Without Consent

Eventually, it will be a crime to circumcise a male or female without their consent, even an infant. Claiming religious tradition as an excuse will be as irrelevant as using it as an excuse for burning someone at the stake.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Claiming to Know

Christians like to pretend they know all manner of details about god, and his thoughts, yet they cannot even produce evidence of his existence. How can they know anything about an invisible, undetectable being? This is all just made up. They are just as silly as if they claimed to know whether fairies like sugar or honey on their cornflakes.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Claiming to Know the Mind of God

The job of someone who studies moral philosophy is to tell you about the history of what people believed on such questions as the morality of war. They are BSing if they pretend to know the mind of god on such matters.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Claiming the Moral High Ground

When Christians protest the presence of a female atheist student by pouring a bucket of urine over her and burying her washroom in feces, how can they claim the high ground that Christianity is necessary for anyone to behave morally.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70) The March of Reason 2 of 5 click to watch

Claims and Evidence

The more grandiose the claims a religion makes, the less evidence it can muster to support them.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Cleansing the Earth of Christians

If Christianity were such a great religion why does everyone fantasise about god cleaning the earth of them by hoovering them off into the sky?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Clear Water ⇒ God

A woman once told me that the fact water was colourless was proof of the existence of god. I retorted What colour would water be if there were no god?. In the Christian view, god assigns colours to objects purely on artistic grounds. It is completely arbitrary.

Science has a much more complex view. Quantum mechanics says that a material can only absorb or emit energy in discrete packets called quanta. These may correspond to visible light, invisible ultraviolet or invisible infrared. You have probably been to a mineral museum lit by black (ultraviolet) light. The minerals glow in the dark. They are absorbing quanta of UV (ultraviolet) and emitting quanta of visible light. Which wavelengths (colours of the spectrum) they absorb and emit depends on the states of the electrons in clouds around the atoms. The precise colours can be predicted mathematically as part of the science of spectroscopy. Water could not be other than colourless given its chemical composition. It neither emits nor absorbs. It will never change. I learned this in grade 11 chemistry in Canada.

So ironically, if water had been anything other than colourless, it would have sent the scientists reeling. If water turned pink every Easter, I think that would convince almost everyone of the validity of at least some Christian claims, but it does not and nothing remotely like it happens either.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Clergyman = Con Man

Asking could a physicist also be a clergyman is roughly the same as asking could a physicist also be a con man.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Clerical Magicians

Since the clergy claim to be able to convert wine into blood and wafers into the flesh of a dead man, we should call them by their proper names: magicians, shamans, con men…

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Clinging to an Imposed Religion

When the Europeans colonised North America and Africa they imposed Christianity on the people living there. Oddly, now the pressure is off, indigenous people still cling to the imposed religion. It is disgusting.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Clinging To Delusion

Deluded people maintain their delusion by fastidiously ignoring any evidence that counters the delusion. They treat those trying to prick the bubble of delusion as enemies. The delusion gives them a sense of great importance and power. It is always to some extent, a delusion of grandeur, even paranoia (that the universe would single them out for attack). Delusions are much simpler than reality. They are a way of filtering out an overload of information.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Clinging To Delusion

If a con man spiritualist reveals the tricks of cold reading that he uses to simulate talking to dead relatives, his audience will be furious. They desperately want their delusion. They imagine they gain comfort from the deception. Christians are much the same about clinging to their delusions even when they are pretty sure they are empty.

Richard Dawkins interviews Derren Brown on Cold Reading click to watch
~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Clinging To Error

When you confront a religious believer with errors and inconsistencies in their beliefs, how do they typically react? Irritation and anger. They don’t want to hear what you have to say. It is not like a belief in which grocery store has the cheapest cheese, or why Cro Magnons displaced Neanderthals in Europe where people are happy to learn corrected information. People strongly want to hold onto religious beliefs whether they are true or not.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Clinging To God

Why would an elite scientist cling to god? Because his child brain was traumatised with threats of eternal roasting. That child brain is still in there. It is still terrified. The adult brain operates independently. Logic has no effect on the child brain. It needs reassurance.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Clones are Just Twins

Because of their notions of invisible souls, Christians imagine that issues such as the civil rights of clones are necessarily complicated. Yet nature produces clones naturally, every time it creates identical twins. We need treat artificial clones no differently.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Clueless Christians

When I was a teen, my mom warned me to stay away from Christians, whom she considered dangerous and insane. Of course, I rebelled by sneaking off to go to various churches to interview the people there to find out why they went to church, why they believed in a god and what they thought this god was like. I discovered that people could not answer my questions. They had only the vaguest notions about their religion. Essentially, they went to church because their parents had started taking them there as very young children and they got into the habit.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Clueless Yahweh

Imagine going to San Francisco and visiting the Golden Gate Bridge. There you meet a scruffy fellow sleeping on a park bench who introduces himself as Yahweh Jones, chief architect of the bridge. You take this golden opportunity to learn more about its construction back in 1930.

You ask How did you compute the ice and wind loads back then without computers? He replies What’s a load? You ask How did you arrange the order of construction so that it would hold up before all the suspension cables were in place? He replies What did you have in mind? You ask How did you manage to set those huge pillars partly under water? He replies We just dropped ’em from heliocopeters if I recall rightly. It begins to dawn on you this man is a fraud. He knows absolutely nothing about bridge construction.

In a similar way, Yahweh the god demonstrates no understanding of science, quantum mechanics, astronomy, geology or biology though he claims to have created them all. God is allegedly omniscient so he is supposed to have complete knowledge of all science. He too is a fraud.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Coffins

Coffins are irrational.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Cognitive Dissonance

Christians claim to extremely value absolute truth, yet they blatantly lie and cheat to support this truth. Surely they know they are doing this. What stops them exploding from the cognitive dissonance? Are they just simple con men who don’t believe a word they say? Or do some of them believe some of their own lies?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Collapse of the Churches

People are leaving the churches in ever accelerating numbers. Why?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Collecting For the Benefit of the Non-Existent

If I were to start collecting money on behalf of fictitious endangered Patagonian fire-eating fish, I could expect to cool my heels in jail, but if I did the same thing on behalf of a non-existent god, I will be applauded as a virtuous person, no matter how I spent the money.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Collecting Money For God

This collecting money for god is such a scam. Allegedly, god created the universe. Surely he could create unlimited wealth if he wanted to. Further, not a penny of the money goes to god. Further, only a minute fraction of that money goes to good works. The rest goes to pampering the sellers of god, god’s con men. Even Mother Theresa collected money for the poor, then spent most of it on convents and gold altar decorations. Just look at the mansions, jets and limos of the TV evangelists and the megachurch pastors. That is what the boobs are buying with their tithes. They are lured with false promises of riches and pie in the sky after they die. My Christian landlady assured me she was completely certain she would have easy-to-clean solid gold countertops in her house in heaven, based on wishful thinking?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Comatose God

God is utterly undetectable. He never tweaks the universe. For all practical purposes, he does not exist. Everything just hums along perfectly obeying physical laws without his input.

If god exists, he is comatose.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Combating Christianity

I look on combating Christianity as an endless chore, like doing the dishes.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Comfort

It is so common to hear people to say something like, It is more comforting to me when I think of things as… That horrifies me. You don’t get to choose what you would like to be true. Religion has conned people into thinking the universe is a like a restaurant where you determine how it works by choosing from a menu or you just make it up.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Comfort Not Truth

Religion is a virtual thumb to suck. Comfort is all that matters, not truth.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Comfort or Truth

Atheists sacrifice comfort to find truth; Christians sacrifice truth to find comfort.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Comfort over Truth

In religion, comfort is all that matters, not truth.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Comforting Lies

If all you want is are comforting lies to help you deal with aging, losing your sex appeal, death etc. Why not make up your own? They can be ever so much more pleasant than the sour heavens religious people invent. And you don’t have to kowtow to anyone or pay them money for lying to you.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Comic Book Christians

Christianity is the comic book version for those who had trouble with second grade science.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Coming Backpeddling

I can hardly wait until science discovers the life is common in the cosmos and gains a foothold even on planets very different from earth. The Christian scoundrels will be scrambling to claim their scriptures never did claim earth was unique in the entire universe.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Coming Out

Back in 1970, people started telling their parents they were gay, pretty much for the first time. Attitudes changed so fast it took my breath away. It seemed on one day parents were killing and disowning their kids and the next where were marching for gay rights. Ditto for coming out as atheist. Nothing is going to change if you stay in the closet. Just be firm with your parents. Even if they disown you, you will no longer be cowering in the closet. You will have self-respect.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Commanded By God

Religious fanatics behave worse than anyone else when they are given power because they are delusional imagining every crazy notion that pops into their head is a command direct from their god. That belief compels them to commit unspeakable atrocities they might even consciously find repellent.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Commandment Exclusions

The ten commandments included some pretty minor sins and left out some major crimes like: rape, forced marriage, incest, polygamy and allowing someone to die when you could have helped them.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Common to All Religions

Here are some features you will find common to almost all religions:

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Common Christian Lies

Christians like to repeat lies they have heard. If they did even the most cursory research, the would discover how absurdly false they are.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Common Cold of Mental Illnesses

Christianity is the common cold of mental illnesses. It is a persistent set of delusions remarkably impermeable to contrary evidence.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Common Cold of Mental Illnesses

Christianity is the common cold of mental illnesses.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Common Intelligent Life

What is going to happen when we discover that life and intelligent life, are common both in our galaxy and in the universe?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Communion

Catholics claim when they take communion, the wafer turns in the flesh of Jesus, and the wine turns into his blood. This is a lie. It if were true, people would taste the raw putrid flesh and blood. People would choke to death frequently on the uncooked meat.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Communion

Out of curiosity, I once took communion. The wafer tasted nothing like putrid meat. The wine tasted nothing like rotting blood. The miracle of transubstantiation is a crock.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Comparing Four Religions

The three big problems to face in life are aging, sickness and death. Unless you can deal with them with equanimity, you are going to have a miserable time of it. The Buddhists tackle these problems as the central activities of their religion. The Jews, Christians and Muslims sweep them under the rug. They ignore aging and disease. All four religions try to pretend death does not exist.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Compassionate Christian

Every once in a while, I encounter a Christian such as Nancy Ford, Deacon to the city of Victoria who expresses enlightened attitudes. But she is like a stopped clock that is correct twice a day. Christians attitudes are based on tradition and faith (i.e. just made up without evidence). It is just a fluke when they are sensible, rational or compassionate.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Completely Bullshit

Christianity is completely bullshit. Even discussing it with Christians is like playing with their poo in public.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Complicit In Child Rape

Pope Ratzinger has been caught in coverup after coverup of priests molesting and raping hundreds of children of both sexes. If you tithe to the Catholic church, the world’s biggest paedophile ring, you are complicit in these crimes.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70) Deliver Us from Evil

Complicit In A Lie

If a reporter permits a lie to pass without so much as an eyebrow twitch, he is complicit in that lie and should be held responsible for lying too.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Compromise With Christians

When I was eight, I wanted to attend the YMCA (Young Men’s Christian Association) summer fun program. I watched my Dad fill in the form putting a dash in for religion, then modifying it by turning the dash for none into the bar of a G and spelling out ANGLICAN. I had never heard the word before and I asked what that meant. Dad said they might not let me in if we did not pretend to have a religion and Anglican was a historical family religion. I was quite horrified that my Dad would lie that way.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

The Con

To me, it is obvious the people running the churches, especially the TV ministries, are running a con. Just look how they spend the money on luxuries. Why would you believe a word they say? Why would the existence of gods, heavens and hells even be a consideration, considering the source?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Con Man Strategy

Con men convince their marks that believing in the improbable without evidence is a virtue. It makes their marks easier to gull.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Con Man Tricks

Imagine all the excuses a famous con man like Bernie Madoff may have given for why his marks could not see the books. Christians have a classic dodge to sell the god con. God will punish anyone who tests him. That must be one of the most brilliant works of con artistry in all history.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Con Men

Every Christian should study up on con men, by reading a book like Maria Konnikova’s The Confidence Game: The Psychology of the Con and Why We Fall for it ... Every Time They will learn about the psychology of con men, their tricks for deception and why they are successful at conning almost everyone. This will inoculate them against con men both secular and religious. They will be surprised to learn how organised religion uses the same techniques as traditional con men.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Con vs Violence

Intelligent criminals prefer to con their victims rather than bludgeon them. The church uses cons to extract money, to persuade people to hand over their power and to cover up sex crimes against children.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Con without Verification

Christian con men chose to honour their vacuous promises and empty threats in a way that nobody could ever check up on them.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

The Conceit Gland

Christianity causes the conceit gland to swell to twenty times normal size. It presses on the pleasure centres in the brain stimulating them creating an addiction similar to cocaine. This explains why Christians are so bloody obnoxious and so irrational.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Conceited Religious Half-Wits

Religions are galling because silly ninnies imagine they are vastly superior to me because they believe idiotic dogma. It is annoying having half-wits look down their nose at me.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Conceited Survivors

Among the most contemptible Christians are those like Pastor David Webster of Prince Albert Saskatchewan. He survived a plane crash and leapt to the conclusion the god Yahweh had rescued him and deliberately smote everyone else who died in plane crashes. He is so conceited that he decided that not only did the creator of the universe take time out of his busy schedule alter the natural unfolding of the universe for his benefit and that god Yahweh decided that he was the only person worth saving.

It would seem to me, that if Yahweh truly favoured Mr. Webster he would have spared him the trauma entirely. Surviving an air crash is a daily event. So is dying in an air crash. Neither is in the least miraculous, though it might feel that way to someone enjoying a narrow escape. Who dies has to do with the physics of the crash, not the preposterously high esteem Christians survivors hold themselves.

Mr. Webster so inflated his ego by this event, that he fancied himself favoured like some prophet of old and presumed the god Yahweh had personally called him to start a ministry and that Yahweh had delivered him a wife who believed his crap too.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Condoms

Pope Francis bans condoms on the grounds they block the creation on new Catholic contributors. However, they also stop AIDS which kills the unborn, children, mothers and fathers. Even if Pope Francis has no interest but crassly engorging his coffers, he should promote condoms.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Confession

Confession is a highly immoral sacrament. The sinner confesses to a crime such as child molesting. The priest is bound to secrecy no matter how much damage the sinner is doing. The priest assigns a token secret penance, typically saying three Hail Marys for molesting. The sinner makes a donation. The priest does some magic and presto, supposedly it is as if the sin never happened. The sinner is washed clean, eager to sin again. But of course the effects of the sin are unchanged. Confession does nothing to make amends to the victim or to discourage the sinner from repeating.

This just shows you what a con the church was all along. They fool the congregation into believing they can magically undo sins in return for cash. It is just a trick to pull in the rubes. It is a doubly wicked con because they not only rip off the congregation promising and not delivering, they lead them into moral degradation. Finally, the priests learn secrets on everyone that they can hold over them.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70) The Dark Box: A Secret History of Confession

Confession

There are many reasons why Catholic confession should be discontinued. Some of them have to do with child molesting:

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70) The Dark Box: A Secret History of Confession

Confirmation Bias

If you start from the conclusion, that everything had a divine creator, you will only see evidence to confirm that, namely confirmation bias. You will let slide logical fallacies arguing for a creator. You won’t check claims of scientific evidence supporting that position. You will refuse to properly understand the other explanation for apparent intelligent design, namely evolution. You will expose yourself only to straw men caricatures created by dishonest creationists. Evolution is one of the easiest scientific theories to understand. Once you understand it, it becomes all but impossible to conceive of how something so obvious could possibly be false. The problem with understanding it comes only from crooked people disseminating confusing nonsense about it. If you have a problem with the theory, the reason is you misunderstand it. You have been massively lied to. The theory itself is perhaps the best-tested theory in science.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Conflicts Between Scientists and Christians

In computer programming, things get most interesting and fun just after you discover you have made a mistake and you get to use your wits to track down the bug. The odds of getting a Nobel prize in physics are greatly improved if your experiment shows the exact opposite of what you expected. Scientists thus have not nearly the fear or embarrassment at being found wrong that Christians do. If you tell a Christian his argument is unconvincing because it contains a logical fallacy, he feels insulted, even wounded. If you tell a scientist the same thing, it is more like pointing out a calculator error, no big sweat. He is happy for the correction. The famous computer scientist Dr. Donald Knuth offered an escalating monetary reward for any time anyone ever found an error in his programming. He wanted to find his errors and correct them.

A Christian has essentially placed a bet on which religious framework is true. If he is wrong, he will roast for eternity. If anyone suggests that he bet on the wrong horse, he panics. He takes this accusation of incompetence very personally because this error is so grave, that it deserves eternal torment. The error says something very important about him — what the true god thinks of him, the ultimate report card.

If you reject an argument a scientist makes, the game goes like this. You state why you think his assertion is false. He gives additional reasons why the assertion is true, and he explains the flaw in your reasoning. You go back and forth pointing out the flaws in each other’s logic. If the evidence is overwhelming either way, one of you is obligated change his mind. If the evidence is not overwhelming, you talk about what sort of experiment or evidence-gathering could settle the matter. It is cheating to refuse to concede when the evidence overwhelmingly goes against you. It is cheating to counterfeit, doctor, lie about or use lawyerly tricks to mislead about evidence. Failure to observe these rules can result in the other party exploding in rage.

If you reject an argument a Christian makes, from their point of view, you are disrespecting them. If you held them in sufficiently high esteem you would trust what they told you, just on their say so. You are being impertinent. You are accusing them of lying. Christian arguments are basically assertions that show that something is at least remotely plausible. The beauty of an idea is much more important than how well it conforms with observations of the physical world. It is a Platonic way of thinking.

Further, there is no need to check accuracy if the feeling of truth is sufficiently intense (to know it in your heart). Your beliefs are things you choose, like your diet. You don’t change your beliefs just because somebody advocates something different, no matter how glib they were. You don’t pick your beliefs because some so-called expert told you some colour change in a test tube proved they were true; you pick them because they fit you because they are comfortable because they feel right. You certainly do not publicly disown your own beliefs cherished and nourished over a lifetime, maybe even handed down through the generations. That would be irresponsible flouting of tradition and a disrespect for your own integrity. You don’t just change beliefs like a leaf in the wind no matter what the so-called evidence (that you may not even understand). You must have faith in your convictions.

This attitude, the complete lack of interest in what is actually true, only what you wish were true, drives scientists to apoplexy.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Conformity and the Holocaust

Psychologists now think the driving force behind the Holocaust, was not hated, sadism or fear — merely conformity — the desire to fit it.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Confucianism

Confucianism is a much more dignified religion than Christianity. No tall tales, no miracles, no crazy threats, no off-his-rocker deity, no nonsense you have to pretend to believe. It simply explains how to behave well.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Confusing the Imaginary With The Real

When I was six, I liked drawing creatures I imagined lived in other parts of the galaxy. One, that I dubbed the Meadle, had a mantis-like head, giant dragonfly wings, and three legs. My mother forbade me drawing any more three-legged space creatures since they could be easily confused with creatures with giant penes. I thought my mother had a sex-obsessed mind. Christian too make up imaginary beings, angels, devils, gods… Even at six, I was fully aware my creatures were pure speculation. Christians, even as adults, claim theirs are absolute truth, even though they can present no evidence of any kind that they exist.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Conjecture Fraud

There is an unhealthy dichotomy in world views. The scientific view sometimes overreaches and claims anything it does not yet understand must be fraud or insanity. On the religious side, people pretend to fully understand the most fantastic woo when they have nothing but imaginative conjecture. It would be more mature to presume their are many things we do not understand and have not even conceived, that we have no business on pontificating until we do know what we are doing. Nearly always when the religious present us with unsubstantiated woo, it is nonsense or fraud. However, we must not let that numb us to the possibility of discovering something radically new.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Conned With Consent

When a televangelist tells you that if you send him $100 or more he will send you a free gift of a bar of olive oil soap made by a genuine Palestinian in the Holy Land, what is really happening is the is trying co con you into buying a bar of soap for the outrageous price of $100. By definition, if you have to pay for something, it is not a gift. If you bite, you have been had. He will not wire the money to god as vaguely promised. He will spend it on himself and his ego. If you want to do what is sometimes called god’s work, give it to a group with a proven track record of spending money efficiently to help the poor or preserve the earth. Televangelists are parasites who con the well-intentioned, indirectly stealing from the poor.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Conning the Aged

At a certain age, it dawns on you the odds of ever having sex with a being remotely close to your fantasies is, for all practical purposes, zero. You are then susceptible to religious con men who promise the desired experience and more, in an after life or a do-over reincarnation.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Conning Free Labour

The churches are among the most efficient and lucrative cons ever devised by man. One of the features that make such cons so efficient is they also con the workers into working almost for free and expect none of the spoils, unlike a traditional secular con where everyone involved gets a cut.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Conquering Fear Is All It Takes

If we are to convert Christians into atheists, we don’t have to convince them their gods are imaginary, but rather that they do not need to fear death. Their fear makes them cling to the nutty and quite undesirable idea of eternal life.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Cons

Cons work in a standard pattern. The mark gives money to a con man. It return the con man promises something very valuable in the future, e.g. cash, eternal life, a perfect body. The con man disappears before it is time to pay off. The church is one of the cleverest cons. Nobody finds out that it did not pay off since was not even supposed to pay off until you died. This allows it to keep conning people generation after generation. The marks never wise up. The con men like to pretend the marks are giving money to god. Of course they keep every penny.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Cons

Like all con men, religions get huffy when you expose how they deceive and exploit their marks.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Cons

No matter how much evidence to the contrary they see, marks of confidence schemes, secular or religious, insist they have not been had. They can’t bear the humiliation of admitting they were wrong, even if it costs them still more money.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Conscientious Objector

Consider two people applying for conscientious objector status. One is a Christian who belongs to one of the conscientious objector sects. The other is an atheist.

The Christian is essentially saying I suffer from a mental delusion that there is an invisible man hiding under my bed. I am afraid of him. Others have told me, without evidence, that he will torture me if I enlist. Further, members of my church will shun me if I enlist.

The atheist is saying he believes is wrong to kill people, especially children and civilians and he would simply freeze if forced to do so.

Which of the two is more sincerely a conscientious objector? Which is of the two is more likely to get the exemption? The Christian does not even have a reason. He has a voluntary mental illness, that he is promoting as a disability.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Conscious Cheetahs

In a forum on optimism broadcast on CBC radio Ideas, featuring Giuseppe Iaria, I believe I heard him say that cheetahs were not conscious. Yet they respond to all manner of stimuli. They react alertly. Perhaps he meant that they don’t have an internal experience. They are like computers — doing computations but not actually feeling anything. By what possible means could he know that? That assertion used to be stated in explicit religious terms as cheetahs have no souls. I think he is just repeating the old anthropocentric Christian assumptions that god loves us best, therefore we must be fundamentally better than other creatures.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Consciousness

Man has been trying to make sense of consciousness for thousands of years. The Christians came up with the idea of a homunculus in the sperm and in the brain and the soul which exists independent of the body. That is probably the closest model of what the average man has of consciousness.

I think the way to attack the problem is this: We need to subjectively assign a number 1 to 10 for how conscious we think we are. We then would measure the brain with NMR (Nuclear Magnetic Resonance) and other scanning techniques to see if there is anything physical happening that correlates. Then we can look for those patterns in fish and turtles to determine how conscious they are.

Pain and suffering are the practical aspects of consciousness. You treat a conscious chicken compassionately, but there is no need to treat an unconscious mechanical chicken that way because it cannot feel pain.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Consequences of Dismissing Science

Most Americans believe religion over science. This is bad news for Americans. This belief will erode their military and financial power. The biblical level of science is capable of generating only the standard of living enjoyed 3000 years ago. Of course, the rest of the world is relieved. The Americans have abused their rôle as #1 superpower. It was unexpected of them to abdicate without apparent pressure from the outside. Like the British, it will take them quite a while to acknowledge their loss of status.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Consequences of Prayer Working

If prayer were effective, every soldier on earth would be tortured to death.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Consider Buddhism

If you want a religion, try Buddhism. It makes way more sense that Christianity. You still get to pretend you will not die and you don’t have to be an asshole.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Consistency

When people concoct a religious worldview, or other complex lie, they can never fill in sufficient detail to explain everything or to ensure everything remains consistent. In contrast, reality has no such problem.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Consoling with Lies

Christians tell me they believe because it is consoling. However, Christianity consoles with lies. God will not rescue you. Trusting in supernatural aid will just get you in trouble. The truth will always be better for you in the long run than even the most beautiful lies.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Constantine The Idiot Christian

Emperor Constantine was a Christian and an idiot because he actually believed the false promises of Christianity. To defend Constantinople, he held up Christian relics, believing they had magic power to frighten off enemies. These little bits of bone and wood, of course, had no effect whatsoever and the city fell.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

The Constitution Says All Religions Must Be Treated Equally

Christians who tell Muslims they should keep their mosques away from ground zero are saying that Muslims are inferior, wicked, guilty, unclean… — in some way second class. It boils down to Christians are OK; Muslims are not. The constitution is clear. Religions must be treated equally. It is the only way to keep the peace.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Constitutional Rights

It is odd that Americans make reference almost daily to their second amendment rights. Yet for some reason, they completely ignore their constitutional first amendment rights. This is because Americans want to violate the first amendment rights of others and don’t want others to violate their second amendment rights. In both cases, Americans are trying to enforce conformity, for the sake of conformity, namely gun ownership and Christianity.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Constraints

We have three sorts of constraint on behaviour:

  1. Crimes for serious tortes.
  2. Manners for consideration.
  3. Sin to enforce religious superstitions.

Sin a game played by members of a given sect. It is irrelevant to everyone else. They like to pretend that cutting your lawn on Sunday is terribly wicked, worthy of death. Non-believers would say cutting your lawn before noon is inconsiderate because of the noise.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Constraints on the Universe

The universe does not care if you like the way it works. The math describing how it works may well be elegant, but there is no reason it has to be. It well may be comprehensible by physicists, but there is no necessity for it to be.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Contempt

I would feel some contempt for an old woman, standing on a stool, screaming her lungs out at a non-existent mouse, but I feel a great deal more contempt for a Christian cowering in terror at a non-existent, sadistic and all-benevolent god.

What makes it worse, these old bats deflect their rudimentary charitable urges to con men faith healers and televangelists harbouring dreams of unearned riches. They lobby to ensure bullies experience no interference beating up young presumed GLBT (Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual or Transgendered). They do their best to make the lives of unwed mothers as miserable as possible. And they feel so profoundly virtuous for spreading misery.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Contempt for Conmen

I feel the same contempt for clergy, televangelists and faith healers that I do for any other con men who earn their living selling lies.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Contempt for Worshipers of Evil

The old testament describes the creator of the universe as unspeakably evil. I have nothing but contempt for anyone who worships such an evil god. Cowardice is the only conceivable motive. It partly explains why Yahweh’s followers are so badly behaved themselves.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Contemptible Christians

One reason I find Christians contemptible is they say I don’t care about the truth. I want to believe the bible. I have a right to believe whatever I please. They are like little children who believe if they wish hard enough they can fly. They care only about what they wish were so, not what is actually so. They are a cult of deliberate self-deception and lying to others.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Continual Fear of Death

As far as we know, humans are the only animals aware that they will inevitably die. Humans react to this realisation with a similar sense of panic that an animal feels just before it is killed. To deal with the continual stress, humans put up a valiant defence — fantasies of eternal life after death and gods to manage the transition.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Controlling Others

Family values have nothing to do with what you do. They are about stopping other people from doing things your church disapproves of. So when a Republican beats his wife, or forces his wife to have an illegal abortion, or blows a policemen in a toilet stall, there is no violation of family values from his point of view.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Converging on the Truth

If people value truth, they will eventually converge and agree. If people worship stuff they just make up, then they will be at each others’ throats.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Conversations with God

If you were in a bus, and a man assured you he was chatting with god, would you want to sit closer or further away? Why then do you want to cosy up to similar schizophrenics, reputed to have killed thousands in ancient times, and take moral instruction from them.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Conversion Rates

There are far more people who deconvert from Christianity to atheism than convert from atheism to Christianity. The suggests when people get a good look at both, they choose atheism. The only people who stick with Christianity are those who have been conditioned never to question and never to examine anything else.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Convert Me

Christians tell me I should convert to Christianity, because as an atheist, I cannot possibly behave morally. The problem with this pitch, is nearly every Christian I have encountered behaves worse than I do.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Converting Fundamentalists

Most religionists cause no trouble to others. They just hurt themselves by harbouring delusions. The troublesome ones are the fundamentalists. They believe they have the right to control and bully others, forcing their crazy beliefs on others. This means two things:

  1. We need focus on converting only the fundamentalists.
  2. We don’t have to convert them to atheists, just to mild religionists.

We atheists think mainly about arguments to debunk the notion of god. We need something less drastic, that merely debunks fundamentalism.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Conviction ⇏ Truth

It is just as easy to feel certain about something that is not true as something that is true. Your conviction is not evidence for its truth. Further, there is the problem that conviction is easy to feign. It is the persuasive tool of con artists. Anyone who attempts to use it in place of evidence is suspect.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Convincers

Listen to Christians selling Christianity. They are not interested in the literal truth of the claims. They are interested in how it makes them feel. Listen to atheists selling atheism. They are not interested in how believing in a deity makes you feel. They are interested in the literal truth and consistency of the claims. Atheists feel extreme contempt for Christians for valuing feeling over truth. Christians see atheists as cold and heartless for valuing truth over feeling.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Convincing

If a Christian wants to convince me of his beliefs, it is not enough that he convince me has beliefs are possible. It is not enough to convince me they are plausible. Like a scientist, he must convince me his beliefs are nearly certainly true. To do that, he must have some solid reasons why his beliefs are true and why competing beliefs are not true.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Convincing An Atheist

I have watched Christians try vainly to convince atheists to believe. But they end up convincing atheists that all Christians are dishonest, stupid, morally bankrupt and gullible.

Truth is more important to atheists than anything else. Whether that truth is pleasant, convenient or comforting is completely irrelevant. When Christian argue that they choose what to believe based on how consoling the belief is, atheists retch in contempt that Christians could be so pig-like.

Atheists want to be sure they are not kidding themselves. They want mountains of solid evidence to back up what they decide to believe. When Christians dismiss evidence as irrelevant, atheists dismiss Christians as flibbertigibbets, even worse, delusional.

Christians commonly argue that if people did not believe the Christian dogma, they would run wild and murder and rape. This is clearly not so. This is not an argument for the existence of god. Christians implicitly admit their dogma is untrue. Christians admit they condone lying about it. So they are probably lying to the atheist about everything else too. Even if you condone lying, the argument is invalid. Non-Christians in Sweden behave much better than Christians in the USA. Atheists in the USA behave much better than Christians, as measured by the proportion in jail.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Convincing Arguments

Different people find different arguments convincing. For example, atheists like evidence and plausibility, whereas Republicans are susceptible to appeals to the herd instinct and Christians as susceptible to appeals to authority and are convinced something is true mainly if that is what they would most wish to be so.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

This may explain why the Christian conception of heaven is so kitsch. Christians prefer it that way.

Convincing Arguments

Evidence for the existence of a god or evidence for the non-existence of a god, first and foremost must convince the target audience to be converted. It could, in theory, even contain a logical flaw. A common flaw is creating an argument for a generic god, then doing a bait and switch to suggest that god had to be Yahweh.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Convincing the Stupid

The big problem with religion is it convinces stupid people they are absolutely right about something that is demonstrably false.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Copeland’s Crime

When Kenneth Copeland told his flock not to get vaccinated for measles, he hurt not only his own flock, but spread measles to the entire community. I think Copeland should be prosecuted for practicing medicine without a licence. And those harmed should sue him for every penny he has conned.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Corpse Worship

Desecrating a corpse is petty vandalism, like throwing rocks at a rusting car in a junkyard, or shooting tin cans discarded at a dump. A corpse is already in the process of putrefaction. Yet Christians are so superstitious, they consider desecration even more offensive than murder.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Corpse Worship

I think it highly improper of Christians to demand that rescue workers risk their lives to retrieve corpses from remote, dangerous places then send the bill to the taxpayer. It is a violation of church and state to force the general taxpayer to pay for a Christian religious burial rite. If Christians are worried that some believers will not be able to pay to retrieve corpses, they should set up a fund to cover the indigent. To me all this ritual magic with bodies is medieval superstition, akin to a childhood fascination with bodily secretions, especially when there are massive searches to find badly decomposed, buried bodies that are dug up and then reburied elsewhere, not even viewed.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Corpse Worship

The most peculiar thing about Americans is that they show far more respect and concern for corpses than living people.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Correlation

Listen to interviews on the radio. Some people have bad grammar. They use the wrong words. They mispronounce words. They clearly were poorly educated. Chances are, somewhere in the interview they will claim god intervened in their life.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Correlation of Christianity and Stupidity

Christians usually have sub-normal IQ (Intelligence Quotient) I am not sure if subnormal people are attracted to Christianity to attain a sense of importance or if Christianity destroys the intellect.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Cosmic Caulk

When the milk went sour, my distant ancestors in Scotland had no idea that bacteria caused it, so with complete conviction, they blamed fairies and witchcraft. That is no more ignorant than the way today’s Christians insist on using the god Yahweh as a sort of cosmic caulk to fill in any gap in our current knowledge.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Cosmic Purpose

Asking if the universe has a cosmic purpose is an incomplete question. Does the Tadpole Galaxy (aka Arp 188) have a purpose? To mankind it does not. It is one of billions of galaxies. If there is life there, it has a purpose to that life of supporting life. So when you ask if the universe has a cosmic purpose, you must specify to whom. When Christians ask this question they imply to Yahweh. Since there is no deity to have a purpose, there is no such cosmic purpose. What Christians are trying to do is ask Yahweh Why did you construct this universe?. If there is no Yahweh, you can’t do that, even in principle.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Cosmic Significance

Given the vast size of the universe, lusting for cosmic significance is a vain goal. Politicians go for big-frog-in-a-small pond significance. They fight wars to claim temporary dominance over chunks of the surface of our blue marble — spaceship earth. Their single-minded desire makes them trample others, including their own wives and children.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Cosmic Swell-Headedness

The idea that the creator of the universe would be more fascinated with you and your behaviour than even you are is the ultimate conceit.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Cosmically Conceited Christians

Christians hang on to the primitive conceit that mankind is the center of the universe, that everything was expressly created purely for their enjoyment. We now know this is utter nonsense, but the Christians still refuse to give up petty, conceited picture of the universe. The Centre of All Things click to watch.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Counteracting Christianity

In earlier times, people dealt with Christians trying to impose their brand of religion by killing them. Today we are roughly equally effective by pointing out the flaws in what they are selling.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Country Song

There is a country song where the singer crows that she is a good Christian woman complaining she is better than everyone else and should be treated better than ordinary people. This exaggerated opinion of themselves is one of the reasons I find Christians so nauseating.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Counts Count

There is no difference between a bat shit crazy person and someone who joined a religion with only one adherent.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Cowardice and the Afterlife

Humans are such cowards that they willingly allow themselves to be conned by those claiming death is not real and claiming to know the precise details of how the afterlife works.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Cowardice Over Mortality

Humans are such cowards when it comes to facing their own mortality that they willingly allow themselves to be conned by those claiming death is not real and claiming to know the precise details of how an afterlife works.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Cowardly Christians

I have such contempt for Christians. They are such cowards when it comes to death. They make up preposterous stories to reassure themselves. They get together once a week to do nothing but repeat these stories frantically chattering and chanting trying to convince each other that they are actually true. When will they grow up? They are behaving like three year olds.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Cowardly Worshipers

Even if you do believe in the ogre Yahweh, how dare you worship a god who stands by when infants are raped.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Cowering Christians

Christians are utterly disgusting. They are afraid of a bronze age bogeyman. They cower in fear at an imaginary monster, like 3 year olds afraid of dragons under the bed. They know perfectly well it does not exist, but they are too afraid to take the chance. So they keep paying extortion money to con men who tell them it is real. Pathetic!

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Crank Diets

Think how many crank food fads there are. I remember one, Adele Davis, who believed you should your cook meat overnight at barely warm temperatures. One of these obsessive cranks got to the Jews a long time ago to create the silly Kosher rules for them. Everyone should be free to eat crank diets, but not to impose them on others, or inconvenience others for them. They are just traditions. They don’t deserve to be taken nearly so seriously.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Crazies Treated As Sane

If someone went to a psychiatrist and announced that they had joined a cult that practised cannibalism and blood-drinking, how might he be treated? If that cult were Christianity, (which believes in a lame miracle that a cracker becomes the literal corpse of Christ, even though it still looks like a cracker), he would be sent out into the world as a perfectly sane man.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Craziest Claims

The crazier the church, the more likely it is to claim it has sole claim to truth, and that they have all the answers. The moderate churches don’t make such wild claims. Atheists say We don’t have the answers. You will have to think this through yourself. If these were brands of toothpaste, you would understand why the gullible boobs always buy the fundamentalist brand.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Crazy = Religious

If a visiting psychiatrist from another planet, who had never heard of earth religions, were presented with summaries of various earthling beliefs, he would not be able to tell the lunatics and the adherents of religion apart.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Crazy Christianity

Christianity is so crazy, so in violation of logic and common sense, talking to Christians is a bit like trying to convince a serial killer that murder is wrong. They are off in their own dream world with their own definitions of true, false, right, wrong, consistent, know, proof… They have no shame whatsoever about having inconsistent beliefs. It is as if they have a very specific delusional mental illness. They can appear perfectly normal when Christianity is not involved. Perhaps the best way to understand the existence of Christianity is as childhood trauma. Their parents conditioned them to be utterly terrified of Yahweh and hell. It is like a mega-phobia of spiders and snakes. The fact that Christians bring up Pascal’s wager as their prime argument for the existence of god, (which is actually a argument for trying to fool god into thinking you believe to avoid being tortured) indicates this fear is their prime motivation for belief.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Crazy Christians

Christians are crazy and dangerous because they have no common sense. They believe utterly horrible things are god’s will. They fight desperately for evil. They believe in an unspeakably cruel god.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Crazy Christians

Christians are just as delusional as most people incarcerated in mental institutions. The differences are:

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Crazy Like a Jew

An eruv is a string that encircles a home or town. Jews believe it enables them to carry objects out of doors on the Sabbath that would otherwise be forbidden by Torah. Not only Christians are insane. Why would the creator of the universe care if you carried your keys? What possible harm does it do to anyone? Why would a string be sufficient to persuade the creator of the universe to overlook this transgression? What possible difference could it make? Eruv-believing Jews are as nutty as mental institution inmates snapping their fingers to keep the tigers at bay.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Crazy Salesmen

Christians and other sellers of ideas that are not true resort to two desperate techniques:

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Creating a Child

Creating yet another child, where there are still abandoned children without parents, especially when that child is created through artificial means to stimulate fertility such as in-vitro fertilisation is cruel, hard-hearted, vain, selfish and anti-environment.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Creating Life

Science has already created life. Using off the shelf chemicals geneticists1 constructed the DNA for a bacterium and planted it in a bacterial shell. It took off living and reproducing — a new species of bacterium. In principle we could do the same thing with any other life form. This is not quite the same as creating life completely from scratch, but it does give us the god-like ability to create new species of plants and animals. We are already tinkering with the DNA of the next generation of children in a small way to correct defects.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Creating Life is not Magic

Even though humans have created new forms of life with a DNA sequencer, Christians continue to insist only Yahweh can do that.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Creating Morality

If you are for any reason having trouble determining right from wrong, here are some rules of thumb:

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Creating a New Religion

All religions are similar. Most are created by making a few modifications to an existing religion. To succeed, you must be a good liar, able to spout nonsense with convincing confidence. Here are some of the components you will need:

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Creation Conceit

Every North American Indian tribe has its own creation myth. But they have a feature in common with Christian myth, that the creator created everything purely for the enjoyment and convenience of humans. What a conceited notion!

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Creation Myth

Every culture on earth has its own creation myth. What are the odds the only accurate one would come from a desert tribe living in the bronze age?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Creation Science

Creation science was created from the imagination back in the bronze age and was never updated no matter what we learned. Scientific knowledge doubles every two years, based on experiments to discover what is really true. Creation science won’t let you do anything, not even make a round wheel. Science makes our whole technological world possible. You would likely not even be alive without it. I find it baffling that anyone would prefer the completely erroneous, completely useless, creation science.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Creative Anachronism

Imagine a group of creative anachronisms who wanted to relive the times of 1000 BC. They went into it whole heartedly. They used 1000 BC medicine, sanitation, food, clothing, customs, religion, lack of electricity, lack of fuels, no metals but bronze, child beating, wife beating, slave keeping, law, religion… total immersion. Then they decided weekends were not enough, they wanted to do this full time and force everyone to join in. These loons, who have not yet even tried the experiment themselves, are called religious fundamentalists.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Creative Anachronism

Members of the Society For Creative Anachronism make believe it is 1000 AD. Christians make believe it is 1000 BC.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

The Creator of Lions

Watch a video like Wild Lion Ganglands click to watch about lion behaviour. From a human morality point of view they are utterly degenerate. It is hard not to hate them they are so alien, so pointlessly cruel. But Christians assure us this behaviour is the handiwork of a loving god. No it is not. If a god created them, the god is a twisted sadistic fuck.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Creator of the Universe

Claiming the universe has a creator means just that. It does not have to be an invisible man with a beard, named Yahweh, who likes boinking married virgins. It need not be conscious. It could be a computer, a fundamental principle of physics, a function of quantum mechanics, Ganesh the elephant… An argument for a creator is not an argument for Christianity.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Credentials

If there were a god who wanted to be believed, he would have to show evidence to everyone, not just a few selected people who could well have lied or been mistaken. A demonstration for each generation should be adequate or a single impossible object for all time. But nothing. Apparently god does not care if anyone but some illiterate desert dwellers believed him.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Credibility of Psychics

Given that every famous psychic who claims to communicate with the dead has been exposed as a fraud, it is odd the lesser known psychics have any presumed credibility. Believers are like children who insist that magicians really do saw women in half, no matter how many times they see how the trick is done.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Criminal Behaviour

What would you call an institution that told lies to frighten or trick people into giving it massive sums of money providing nothing of value in return? What would you call an institution that pretended to offer care for children, but actually physically abused, terrified, molested and raped them? I’d call it criminal. You’d call it the holy church.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70) Deliver Us from Evil

Criminal Christians

Would we be better off if Christians or atheists ran the earth? We know what it was like when Christians had free reign — in the middle ages. I don’t think anyone would like to return to those days.

Christians assert that only they are truly moral. Yet when you look at the statistics, it is the very opposite.

This represents a complete failure of Christian morality.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70) Religion reverses everything by Aron Ra click to watch

Criminal Conspiracy

Christianity is a criminal conspiracy. Once you understand that, most of their bizarre behaviour begins to make sense.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

A Criminal Enterprise

It all makes sense when you realise the Catholic Church is a criminal enterprise, just like any other cult.

It such an old con game and such a slick one, with such excellent public relations, that people forget what its primary activities are.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70) Deliver Us from Evil

Criminally Delusional Christians

The average Christian is just as delusional as anyone incarcerated in an institution for the criminally insane.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Criminally Insane Christians

Imagine that someone went to a psychiatrist and announced that they had joined a cult that followed the religious beliefs of an obscure primitive iron age desert tribe. The cult’s holy book required members to murder those who made even minor violations of the social or dress code, even those outside the cult, attacking in groups to bash the victim to death with rocks and possibly to bury him or her alive in stones or by burning the transgressor alive. How might he be treated? With a stint in an institution for the criminally insane? If that cult were the Christians, he would be sent out into the world as a perfectly sane man.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Criminally Insane Christians

Imagine there were a pill that instantly cut your IQ in half when you took it. It allowed your pusher to control you, by making you susceptible to his every suggestion. It also made you mindlessly cruel by eliminating all doubt about your what you were told. That is what religion is.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Criteria For Heaven

Surely Christians can’t be serious that entry to heaven is based on which branch of which religion you subscribed to. Given that nearly everyone takes up the religion of one’s parents and given that religions work hard to prevent their adherents from learning about any other, that choice means almost nothing about the person. Surely such a winnowing would have to be based on something far more substantial.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Crocodile Worship

The Egyptians had it right when they worshiped crocodiles. The crocodile is one of the few large creatures with a chance of surviving man’s environmental destruction if we don’t hunt them to extinction first.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Crocodile Worship

In Madagascar the people worship crocodiles. The feed them great chunks of meat hoping the crocodiles will bring a big harvest. These people are not nearly as crazy as Christians. Christians worship a god they cannot see or detect in any way.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Crooked Corporation

What would you think of a corporation that:

If you would not approve of such a corporation, why would you excuse the same behaviours in the world’s churches?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Crooks

Can you decide he is a crook and decide not to trust him, or are you obligated to study his life to find every good thing he did to see if it compensates? People tend to treat professional Christians the second way.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Cross

Whoever designed English noticed that Christians, whose symbol is the cross, are often cross scolds.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Cross Checking

One way to decide what is true, is to make a presumption, then check if it jibes with the observed facts. Does the presumption fit with the facts? Are there any inconvenient facts that conflict? Does the presumption neatly explain or predict the facts? Check for yourself what happens if you presume Christianity is nothing but con whose purpose is to extract money from the gullible and to hand over their kids for sexual and physical abuse. This could be true both if there is or is not a god.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Crucifixion as Entertainment

In ancient times, people thought no more of going to a crucifixion for entertainment than modern day movie goers would of watching Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Crucifixion Obsession

Why are Christians so obsessed with the crucifixion? That is their favourite art subject. That is the symbol of the entire religion. You would think the resurrection would be more important. The Christian con artists are milking your empathy to create guilt and obligation. That can then easily be used to convince you hand over money.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Cruel God

If there were a loving god, he would never take your daughter from you with cancer.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Cruel God

Think how many millions of times have Christians prayed to their god to save them. Can you think of even once when he did? Think of all the people burned alive, consumed by disease, raped and murdered. If this god exists, he has a heart of stone.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Cruel God

What god would design a world where baby sea turtles, as soon as they are hatched must run a gauntlet of shrieking gulls and amassed ghost crabs where most are torn to pieces? If there were such a god, it would deserve contempt and pity, not worship.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Cruel God

What sort of compassionate intelligent designer of the universe would have set hordes of mosquitos to torment the caribou, blood sucking leaches to invade the rectums of hippopotamuses, spiders to paralyse and slowly dine on their living victims, or pancreatic cancer to torture old ladies?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Cruel Gods

Both Allah and Yahweh are reputed to be infinitely kind and merciful. But that cannot be true. According to the religious traditions, the creator of universe created everything including the bubonic plague, Ebola, pancreas cancer, Guinea worms, mosquitoes and black flies.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Cruel Lies

What a vicious lie to tell a child that her mother abandoned her to go on a permanent luxury vacation in heaven.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Cruel Parents

Anyone who teaches children that there is an invisible bogeyman under the bed is as either a mentally deficient ninny or a sadistic bastard. This includes most Christians.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

The Cruelest Con

Convincing believers that being horny is a mortal sin was the cruelest and cleverest trick the church has yet invented for dragging their marks about like pigs with nose rings. Extreme guilt make the imaginary punishment seem all the more terrible, real, deserved and probable. In that blubbering state believers are putty in the hands of the church ready to hand over any a lifetime of protection money to forestall the threatened torture. I find it odd that only a tiny minority of the general population seem to notice that churches are blatantly criminal enterprises — the world’s oldest con. It natural for criminals to deny their wrongdoing with all manner of lies, affect offended innocence and to falsely attack their prosecutors.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Cruelty of I’ll Pray For You

I’ll pray for you is a socially acceptable way of saying no when someone asks for help.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Cryogenics

So long as the cryogenics company does not make false claims, it is nobody else’s business. So often the government enforces religious superstitions and traditions on others involving the handling of corpses. There is no need, any more than regulation on rituals for the disposal of decomposed ape meat.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Cult Leaders Have Confidence

It is odd how people with truly crazy ideas like Savaranola, Hitler or Ayn Rand can collect cult followers around them. It appears the main thing they need is absolute confidence in the correctness and completeness of their simplified view of the world.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Cult Power

It is quite frightening when someone joints a cult, how their personality changes, how they become illogical, how they give up their friends, how they give a large amount of money to the cult. It is just as distressing when someone joins a Christian cult. It is so common, it easy to miss just how damaging to sanity it is. It is like they have had a lobotomy.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Cults to Avoid

You would probably want everyone to steer well clear of a cult that practised sexual abuse of children, ritual cannibalism and whose main rite consisted of consisted of contemplating torture. Yet you accept it as perfectly natural when it comes wrapped as a respected religion — the Catholic Church.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Curing Christianity

Christianity can be cured. Donate today!

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Daft

Christianity is utterly daft, but that fact escapes most people because it is so pervasive and familiar.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Daft

Christianity is utterly daft. The Aztecs used to cut out a sacrificial victim’s heart to slate the lusts of the deity. The ancient Hawaiians would throw a virgin into a volcano. Christians put on a elaborately embroidered dress. They get some boy attendants to dress in frocks. They flounce about waving incense. They think this will propitiate Yahweh. Seriously! Why because the performance made him laugh?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Daft

Christianity is utterly daft. You would think it would be folly to elect politicians suffering from delusions, but because the Christians have such power, only people without delusions are excluded from office.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Damn You Christians

Damn you all to hell, you meddling Christians! You twits who fear an invisible man in the closet spying on you when you masturbate! How dare arrogant, delusional idiots like you presume to dictate to me how I must handle my end-of-life decisions!

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Damned Meddling Christians

Christians are so smug and arrogant that I want to smack them senseless with a shovel. How dare they interfere with the end-of-life decisions some poor woman like Gloria Taylor dying of ALS (Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis) on a feeding tube, whose hands cannot move, who was not even be able to speak to curse her tormentors. How dare they claim to know more about her situation than she did. How dare they try to impose their barbarous iron age religion superstitions on her.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Danger of Science

Religion retards the advancement of knowledge by throwing up superstitions to confuse. Science advances knowledge. The problem with science is it often gives us too much knowledge too quickly before we are wise enough to use it. For example, we used the knowledge of engines to pollute the planet and bring on global warming. We used knowledge of logging to destroy the world’s forests. Einstein gave us the atomic bomb and we built a hair-trigger system to wipe out life on earth. Despite the many marvels, science is also giving us the tools to drive ourselves extinct.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Dark Age Christianity

In the dark ages, Christianity has no competition. God intervened no more than he does today, but people roasted others alive in god’s name far more frequently.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

The Dark Ages

There was a time when Christians ran the show. There was continuous war, plagues, witch burnings, superstition, no sanitation… We call it the Dark Ages.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70) The Dark Ages click to watch

Dark Matter

Nitwit theists are trying to sell the idea that dark matter is the god Yahweh. Though dark matter is still not fully understood by science, we know it is part of the universe. It has a location in space and time. It is like ordinary matter except it does not emit light. It generates gravity and is attracted by gravity. Dark matter is not intelligent. IT was created in the big bang along with the rest of the universe. These fools are almost as idiotic as coal worshippers.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Darwin Awards

Everyone has seen the Darwin awards where people do really stupid things and kill themselves. Every Christian deserves one too. They trust preachers who know nothing at all about climate change and ignore the scientists who do.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

De-Delusioning

Delivering a Christian from his delusions is a bit like removing a tooth. You have to push it to one side as far it is will go, then push a tiny bit further, then pull it back to the other side. The trick is to get the tooth moving a little, in any direction.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

The Dead Feel Nothing

Anything you do to the dead is infinitely less important than what you do while they are still alive.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Deadbeat God = No God

How could you possibly tell the difference between a non-existent god and a god that did not do anything, did not answer prayer, did not intervene to override physical laws, did not appear physically…?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Deadbeat Gods

When disaster strikes, you would think religious people would notice their benevolent gods either abandoned them or did not exist. In either case you would expect them to abandoned their gods. But they do the exact opposite. It is as though they all suffer from Stockholm syndrome.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Dealing with Death

If you are a Christian and someone close to you dies, the myths are horrible. First, your loved one abandoned you or God took them from you like some jealous rival. If the deceased is a partner, you imagine them watching you. You can’t get on with your life without being disloyal to the ghost. You feel guilty about not thinking about them. You are required to force yourself to be miserable for the rest of your days.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Dealing with Death

If you are someone who has trouble with death, who finds the Christian siren song of endless harp playing appealing I suggest you set up a tropical fish tank. Many species of fish live at best only a couple of years. You will get used to your fish dying. You will get used to the idea we have only a limited lifespan. It will seem only natural the same will happen to you with no great ceremony. You will see that death is ordinary and not at all mysterious.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Dealing With Ghosts

If someone believed the ghost of their dead mother was watching and criticising their every act, you’d think they would seek professional help excising the painful belief, even if they thought it were probably true.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Dealing with Liars

My rule of thumb is to stop believing anything someone says, once I have caught them in even one lie, (not counting white lies told to spare feelings or for politeness). Ever after, they are going to have to present evidence. I will hereafter not take what they say on face value. This rule usually makes me discount any Christian within the first 15 minutes of the encounter.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Dealing With A Priest paedophile

Imagine you were working in the Catholic church and you discovered a priest forcing or threatening children into sexual acts. What would you do? Here are some the most likely things I would expect of you:

Things I would not expect you to do:

However, how do staff at the Catholic church behave? Aid and abet the coverup. Why? I suggest it is because most of the staff are paedophiles or peeping-paedophiles too. What they did makes no sense from the point of view avoiding scandal. One rogue priest the church could easily survive, but not of the whole church aiding and abetting his crimes. They are each covering for each other. How else do you explain their behaviour? Even after the scandal breaks they keep making excuses for the culprit. That suggests the culprit has something on all of them too.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Death

The thing that bothers me most about death is that my todo list will remain undone. On the other hand, in the months preceding my death, likely I will not make any progress on it, so extra time would not help.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Death After Life

Christians believe in life after death. Atheists believe in death after life and life before death. Christians have no evidence; atheists do.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Death Bed Conversion

Christians claim that nearly all atheists have a death bed conversion to Christianity. This makes no sense. Why would absolute twaddle suddenly make sense on one’s deathbed? And why Christianity? Why not Islam, Mormonism, Hinduism, Buddhism? They all offer after-death goodies considerably more pleasant than Christianity promises.

This belief suggests that fear of Yahweh and his hell is by far the biggest selling point of Christianity. Christians are cowards motivated mostly by fear of an imaginary deity. What childish twits to be taken in by such a transparent con! They are as naïve as the cannibals worshiping a volcano god in a black and white B movie.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Death Before Life

Christians needlessly fret about how horrible it will be to cease existence. They forget they have already done it for billions of years without trauma prior to their births.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Is Death Certain?

I am an atheist and I am not certain that I will die and I think it unlikely that I will live indefinitely either. I would prefer the certainty of finite life, that most atheists share. The reason for my uncertainty is quite different from any I have ever heard.

Consider Wheeler’s many worlds hypothesis. Quantum uncertainty allows the universe to split in all possible (to be defined by quantum experts) directions from every point in space time.

You could classify branches by how quickly they lead to my almost certain demise. Though the probability densities get absurdly thin, even after centuries, there are likely some chains that would keep me alive. I am dead in nearly all universes, but in a few branches I live on, day after day.

I pity the mes in the ones where I linger indefinitely, though it might fun for the mes who get a rejuvenated body and mind, with some erasure of memories that haunt me like a sore tooth my tongue cannot stop probing.

The inspiration for strange ideas like this come from a class in theoretical probability (including Lebesgue measure) I took in fourth year university back in the 60s. It is also inspired by people often encountering me alive and being absolutely astounded. They are positive I had died. I speculated some sort of cross-pollination of many worlds, though obviously there are more mundane explanations. Further, I contracted HIV back in 1985. Every year the doctors would say I had at most one more year. I am still here, yet all my friends, who nearly all became HIV+, are dead. This is mildly spooky and is consistent my paranoid hypothesis. Again, there is no lack of mundane explanations.

Quantum Mechanics are so flipping weird, I don’t feel all that certain about anything a universe than contains them. The one thing I am sure of is that I am baffled. Without fully understanding quantum mechanics, I don’t think I can close the matter.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Death Of A Child

How could anyone who has been present at the death of child possibly believe in a benign loving deity?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Death is not Scary

Fear of death is irrational similar to fear of being trapped in a coffin underground. Your consciousness will not experience either, even if your body does.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Death Penalty

Oddly, Christians are very keen on the use of the death penalty as a deterrent. But for sincere Christians, it would have no effect. Execution just means early reunion with god. It would only work on atheists.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Death Stinks

Religion is a collection of lies for denying the unpleasant end-of-life. If people were braver, less inclined to fanciful imaginings or had some faith that artificial intelligence could postpone death indefinitely, there would be no more need for such lies.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Death Threats

If ever you get a telephoned death threat, consider. Why would someone about to murder you tip you off so you can prepare to defend yourself? Why would he leave his phone number in the phone company records traceable to a threatening call? The same applies to email death threats. I speak from experience. I have received about 3200 telephone death threats, nearly all from Christians and I am still here.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

The Death Wish

All religions are based on a death wish:

No animal is so stupid as to long for death. The religious are suffering from extreme pathology. There is no evidence that death is anything but oblivion. It makes sense only for those in extreme suffering.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Death — the Black Hole

Death is like a black hole. The closer you get, the faster it pulls, the faster you move into it. Once you fall in, nobody can see what happened to you. Even if you managed to survive, there is no way you will ever manage to tell about it. Though no one can observe your demise, the math makes it certain.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Death? So What?

Death is no big deal. Billions of people have done it, along with untold trillions of animals and plants. It is only your own death that is a big deal.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Debate

In debate, usually the atheists challenge Christians by giving their reasons why they think there are no gods, in particular Yahweh. Then Christians threaten them with torture for disagreeing with them. Then they make baseless ad hominem attacks. Why do Christian, off the bat, resort to cheating? Don’t they have any evidence to support their view? How can they look in the mirror and claim to be supporting absolute truth, but only have lies and cheating to do it?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Debate, the Saving Grace

Other than Zionists, Jews are so much more reasonable than Christians. The Old Testament is much crazier than the new, so how could this be? Christians are taught blind belief and obedience. Jews are taught to debate and think.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Debating Con Men

When you debate a con man, never forget the con man has no interest in discovering the truth. His job is to conceal it.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Debating is Futile

Watch a debate between an atheist and a Christian. No matter what either says, the atheists in the audience applaud when the atheist makes a point and the Christians in the audience applaud when the Christian makes a point. There is no change in the proportion of atheists and Christians over the course of the debate. The choice appears to be a matter of team loyalty rather than reasons. It almost seem that people do not have reasons for their choice. It is more like choosing their favourite flavour of ice cream, strawberry or chocolate. It is just a preference. They have no idea why they think the way they do.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Debating Mental Patients

When you debate fundamentalists it feels like you are debating mental patients. You are. These are people with borderline OCD (Obsessive Compulsive Disorder) and borderline schizophrenia, all untreated. You would not expect to cure OCD or schizophrenia using only logic.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Debating With Christians

Debating with Christians is like debating with small children. The difference is children are rarely under the delusion they know everything already.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70) Deliver Us from Evil

Debating with Criminals

It is difficult for Christians and atheists to debate civilly because each considers the other to be a brazen criminal.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Debunking Christianity

The Wizard of Oz was one of the best books ever written on the bogosity of Christianity.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Debunking Evolution

Christians don’t understand. If somebody came up with a legitimate criticism of evolution, scientists would be ecstatic with excitement. The story would be everywhere. Discovering something new is what scientists live for. Christians have quite a different approach to information that challenges their beliefs. They use censorship, scorn and threats to suppress the information.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Debunking Nutty Ideas

We must be braver. Nutty ideas deserve to be mocked and debunked whether their origin is secular or religious. Any nutty idea unopposed will grow and become more dangerous and harder to extinguish.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

The Deceased, Funeral Director

When someone dies, people fight over what the deceased would have wanted in terms of funeral arrangements. The deceased is the only person whose feelings do not matter. They will not be attending.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Deceptive Advertising

I have the same problem with god as with other products sold in late night TV infomercials — he does not perform as advertised, or more accurately, he does absolutely nothing.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Deciding to Be Straight

To those who claim sexual orientation is a choice, tell me about the day you decided to get turned on more by girls than by boys. Be honest! It just happened. A tsunami of sexual desire swept you away.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Deciding if God Exists

For atheists, it is all about the evidence whether there is or is not a god. For Christians, it is all about whether having a god would be a good or a bad thing.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Decline of Religion

Religion generally is fading away in the developed nations. It is not that people are having a midlife crisis and abandoning their faith. It is that elderly religious people are dying off and being replaced by younger people who have much less interest in religion. This effect has just started to engage in the USA. It has been apparent for some time in the rest of the planet. Young people are less willing to let the churches tell them what to do. Young people are more exposed to scientific thinking. Young people are more exposed to a variety of cultures and ideas.
Why there is no way back for religion in the West click to watch

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Declining Christianity

The two most important statistics measuring the decline of Christianity are:

  1. Reduced Sunday school enrollments. This is where people are most vulnerable to having irrationality inculcated.
  2. Reduced Easter Sunday attendance. This is where the annual shearing of the flock occurs to fund the activities of the church.

Of lesser importance is fewer people claiming to believe in some sort of supernatural deity that did the initial work getting the universe started.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Deconversion

Atheists spend huge amounts of time trying to get Christians to abandon their superstitions. Similarly, Christians spend huge amounts of skullduggery trying to convert atheists to Christianity. Yet both types of conversion are exceedingly rare. In the west, all religions are gradually disappearing, but not because anyone is converting. Each generation is more secular than their parents, and they stay that way for their entire lives. The drift is driven by development — economics, education and travel.

If atheists want to speed up this trend, they should work for greater development. They should focus on disrupting the indoctrination of the very young not on debating with adult Christians, e.g. teaching children to question what they are told and to use reason. But basically, atheists can relax. The Christians are gradually and inevitably disappearing, even in the USA.

Why there is no way back for religion in the West click to watch
~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Deconversion

I have watched a number of deconversion videos on YouTube where people tell their stories of abandoning Christianity. I have noticed some patterns.

  1. The process is gradual and proceeds in stages.
  2. The people who leave the faith are unusually ardent Christians and obedient children.
  3. People start by reading the bible in earnest cover to cover. They have questions and contradictions. Authorities brush them off or give them bullshit answers.
  4. The church teaches them that questioning and doubting is extremely wicked. They decide to dig for answers anyway.
  5. They start reading about science and evolution direct from the mouths of scientists. It makes sense. They begin to see the creationists had presented straw men versions of science.
  6. They realise the bible is riddled with error.
  7. They read atheist literature that debunks creationist arguments.
  8. The last step, which takes a long time after the intellectual conversion, is they lose their fear of hellfire. The fear of hell lingers long after belief in Yahweh.
  9. They come out publicly as atheist.
~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Deconversion

When Christians abandon the faith and became atheists, these are the reasons they give:

  1. They read the bible cover to cover.
  2. Hypocrisy of the church.
  3. Conflict between science and the bible.
~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Decorated Religion

Religion and superstition are free to compose their world view without constraints of truth. They can make it as exciting, intuitive, flattering, personal or terrifying as they please. In contrast most of what science has to say pretty mundane. The human mind prefers the drama of religion and societies will drift off into superstition unless constantly pulled back.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Decorating a Lie

No matter how you decorate a lie with musically exquisite alleluias, hosannas and Lord, Lords, it is still a lie.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Defending Against Truth

Not only does Christianity teach falsehood, it teaches how to defend against truth.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Defending a Con Man

When a friend falls under the spell of a con man, they will vigorously defend the con man, even after their bank account is emptied. Why?

Hint: every clergyman, priest and televangelist is a con man. He makes make false promises to induce you to give him money.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Defending the Faith

Those fundamentalists who answer doubt of their holy books with violence are tacitly admitting they have no evidence or reason to defend them. They are publicly declaring them fragile. That is surely even more damaging to the reputation of the books than the criticism. They are demonstrating to the world that even adherents do not trust the books.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Defending the False

There are thousands of holy books. Christian pick out one, discard the rest without reading them and claim that one is inerrant, despite the overwhelming evidence almost every line of it is fiction. They get away with this utilising dogged repeated assertion and threats.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Deference

Would you show deference to Bernie Madoff, a famous con man? Probably not. Why the do you show deference to the famous child molesters, con men and liars who con people with religion? Most people have bought the idea they are obligated to show deference, no matter how crooked a man of the cloth is.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Define True

Atheists and Christians never see eye to eye when debating because they use different definitions for the word true. Atheists mean something that is actually so. Christians mean something that makes them feel good when they believe it. It also means something that makes people behave well when they believe it. Whether it is actually so is secondary. This is why Christians consider it acceptable to lie to defend the truth.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Define Young Girl

Religious prudes will accuse someone of sexually abusing a very young girl. When you dig into the matter, you discover he had consensual sex with a 19-year old. This sort of exaggeration is a scurrilous lie.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Defining Consciousness

Scientists like to pretend they have solved the problem of consciousness. But all they have really done is to redefine it to something simpler.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Defining Faith

Faith is belief in something without evidence for it. In contrast, science is belief in something with evidence for it. Trust is confidence in someone or something based on a history of good interactions. Christians love to fool themselves by ascribing the virtues of trust when they actually have only faith.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Defining A Miracle

For a miracle to occur, something highly unusual must happen. Either unusually few or unusually many cures would be of interest. The catch is the number of spontaneous cures is the same with or without prayer.

What Christians effectively like to do is claim that someone winning the lottery is a miracle. No, that is rare as ticket buyers go. What would be a miracle is if nobody won the lottery for years at a time, or if there were 100,000 first place winners each time, (or more likely fraud).

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Defining Morality

Good and evil are not absolutes, hard-wired into the universe. They are not common to all societies. Each society creates its own definitions. Some rules are common to almost everyone, e.g. no killing. Others are common to just some of them, e.g. you must kill homosexuals. Christians believe their rules should be forced on everyone. However, they apply only about 1% of the rules in the bible to themselves. Christians insist their rules are the only legitimate rules in the universe because Yahweh wrote them into the bible. They even claim their rules are absolute as if they were burned into the universe, like the speed of light.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Definition Of American

Americans are species of Christian who believe it is a more serious crime to have sex with an 18 year old than to shoot them.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Definition of Atheism

The narrow definition is someone who is not persuaded by arguments that Yahweh (or some other deity) exists. It does not mean they necessarily feel confident in asserting that deity definitely does not exist.

The broad definition has faulty etymology. It means someone who rejects all claims without sufficient evidence. They reject faith as a way to determine truth. So for example they would reject Zeus, the Loch Ness Monster, homeopathy, healing prayer, Reiki, tithing your way to prosperity, Yahweh…

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Definition of Atheist

atheist: someone who does not buy the stories churches are selling.

anti-theist: someone who thinks that churches, televangelists, faith healers and the like are harmful and works to stop them exploiting people.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

If you haven’t noticed, I am an anti-theist, as are most of the famous so-called atheists, such as Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris.

Definition of Atheist

If you have faith, a firm conviction that there exists a supernatural, eternal being who spies on you and punishes you for breaking his rules, you are a theist. If you have such faith, but believe your god does not intervene in the universe, you are a deist. If you have no such faith, then you are an atheist. You don’t have to be 100% sure, just lack conviction in the existence of god.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Definition of Atheist

The Romans called the Christians atheists because they did not believe in their gods.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Definition of Atheist

The word atheism, to a atheist, simply means without a belief in any god. It comes from the Greek a without and theos god. However, to a Christian it has a quite different meaning. An atheist is someone allied with Satan to defeat Yahweh in battle and destroy all Christian values, including sensible ones like avoiding killing and helping the poor. Christians have the odd idea that atheists believe in Yahweh just as strongly as they do. This distorted picture of atheists was created by the church to justify killing atheists. However, in modern day there are two types of atheists, those who like to keep their beliefs to themselves and those who try to talk Christians and Muslims into giving up those beliefs for which they have no evidence.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Definition of Belief In God

When someone says they believe in God, they don’t mean they believe some intelligent designer created the universe, but that a particular book sponsored by a particular religion is the final authority on all matters of science and morality.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Definition of Believing in God

When a person asks if you believe in god, he means do you believe that his holy book is infallible?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Definition of a Christian

A Christian is a person who lies to defend a religion he knows is false.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Definition of a Christian

A Christian is someone who imagines he is so superior to everyone else that they should submit to him to let him micromanage their lives. He takes his direction from a book that he has never read, that he mostly ignores and that he falsely imagines he knows by heart.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Definition of a Christian

Christian: noun: the sort of person who points out to all assembled that someone present has just had a bowel accident, just in case there was any person who failed to notice the foul odour.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Definition of Christian

The words Christian and cretin come from the same root. A Christian is someone who pretends to be brain damaged. He is so convinced of the virtue of faith without evidence, he will lie to others to fake it.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Definition of Christianity

Christianity: the exaltation of ignorance.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Definition Of Death

Death is when the internal dream generator shuts down.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Definition of Emotion

Emotion is how the brain keeps track of what is significant. LSD overwhelms the brain, making even a grain of sand pregnant with cosmic significance.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Definition of Entertainer

Entertainer: noun. A person who tells lies for a living, such as a storyteller, politician, comedian or clergyman.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Definition of Evangelism

Evangelism is a commercial for an invisible product that does not do anything.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Definition of Faith

According to Dr. Peter Boghossian, faith is claiming to know things you do not know. So, if you say Life would be empty without faith what you are actually saying is Life would be empty if I stopped pretending to know things I do not know. Really?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Definition of Faith

Faith is believing without evidence. For the Christian, faith is the highest virtue. For the atheist, it is the ultimate foolishness. For the con man, it is the ultimate opportunity.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Definition of Faith

Faith is deciding what to believe depending on much you wish it were so, not by how much you think it is so. It is contempt for truth.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Definition of Faith

Faith is the deliberate lack of critical thinking. Faith is intentional gullibility. How can people be so bullied as to think this is a Good Thing™?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Definition of Faith

Faith is preferring wishful thinking to thinking.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Definition of Faith

Faith is pretending to believe an authority when you strongly suspect he is lying.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Definition of Faith

Faith is relying on someone who does not know either.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Definition of Faith Healing

Faith healing amounts to saying Go away you nasty disease or I’ll ask my invisible friend to beat the crap out of you. in a way that impresses the heck out of the patient.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Definition of Faith in God

When people talk about faith in god, they really mean faith in what some con man told them about god.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Definition of For Religious Reasons

When someone says they believe something for religious reasons, you can more accurately translate that as It is not literally true, but I and a number of others, think it would be wonderful if it were true, discounting any non-obvious negative consequences.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Definition of Freedom Of Religion

Freedom of religion amounts to freedom to indulge a mental illness/delusions and to inculcate them in children. It is the freedom to lie and to persecute arbitrary scapegoats. It is thus not inherently a good thing. It is a compromise, an uneasy truce, to keep people of different religions from killing each other. If religions dwindled, then freedom of religion would be treated the same way the as the freedom to refuse treatment for mental illness. The right to infect children would be curtailed, and those actively dangerous would not be permitted to refuse treatment.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Definition of Fundamentalist

Fundamentalists: nobody is surer they are right and nobody is more often wrong.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Definition of God

God is the adult version of monsters under the bed.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Definition of God

God is something that my enemies use an as excuse to behave monstrously.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Definition of God

God is a Star Trek Replicator in the clouds. Just ask for what you want and it appears in seconds. It can also handle large requests like Mercedes Benz’s, or a replaced heart. The only catch is, it is always out of order.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Definition of God

The god Yahweh is the grownups’ version of monsters under the bed.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Definition of God

The god Yahweh is in the same category as King Kong, Godzilla and the Gorgon Medusa — mythical monsters.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Definition of God

The god Yahweh is the projection of the Christian desire to deny pleasure to others.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Definition of God

The god Yahweh is the projection of the Christian desire to micromanage the lives of others.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Definition of God

The god Yahweh is the projection of the Christian desire to punish those they cannot control.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Definition of God

God: noun, an ancient con, particularly effective for separating little old ladies and seriously ill people from their life savings.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Definition of God

God: noun, an authoritarian voice that only psychotics can hear that commands them to commit crimes.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Definition of God

God: noun, an imaginary bogeyman and peeping Tom. Parents try to discourage their children from masturbating by telling them god is spying on them 24/7.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Definition of God

God: noun, an imaginary friend for simple-minded adults.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Definition of God

God: noun, an imaginary parent for adults who are afraid to ever be alone.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Definition of God

God: noun, the bogey man in the sky used by Catholic priests to terrify children into silence about their sexual assaults on them.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Definition of God

God: noun, a magic wish-granting genie. Alleged friend of con-men who exploit this special relationship to solicit funds from the gullible without providing any service in return.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Definition of God

God: noun, the mythical excuser that suspends normal morality, turning murder and rape of children into a virtue in time of war.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Definition of Hell

I imagine hell as being trapped eternally inside the It’s A Small Small World Disneyland attraction.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Definition of Idolatry

Idolatry is defined as trusting an object, person or idea to transform life for the better. What is the alternative? Trusting an imaginary being. So idolatry is not quite as foolish as it is made out to be.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Definition of Law

To a scientist, a law is a mathematical summary of how the universe has invariably been observed to behave. To a priest, a law is a commandment from God as to how the humans ought to behave.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Definition of Magic

Magic is the art of persuading people that they saw things that didn’t happen. Ditto for religion.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Definition of Morality

If you think of morality as just an arbitrary list of taboos, (such as Leviticus), of course, science cannot help you determine what is moral and what is immoral. However, if you think of morality as a list of rules of thumb to make a society run more smoothly for the benefit of all, then science can tell you which rules will have which salutary effects on happiness.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Definition of Morality

Morality is how you must behave if you want my approval.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Definition of Morality

When the religious right use the term morality, they mean condemning people for their private sexual practices. When atheists use the term, they mean not harming others, consideration for others, treating even your enemies fairly and leaving the world in good shape for future generations.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Definition of Myth

A lie implies trying to trick others into thinking something untrue is true. A myth, is just a fictional story, made up to entertain, instruct or persuade. The author makes no pretence it is true. Originally, before Christianity, Noah was a myth, but then Christians tried to fob it off as literal truth. The myth became a lie.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Definition of Person of Faith

When someone says I am a person of faith, what he means is I am a gullible boob who will believe absolutely anything with absolutely no evidence at all, hardly something to confess publicly.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Definition of Prayer

An Christian says to himself, I pray X happens. He means, I don’t think this will happen by itself so I am calling for divine intervention to make it happen. An Atheist says to himself, I hope X happens. He is just clarifying to himself his desired goal. This may help him plan the best actions to make it happen. When there is nothing you can do, both approaches are equally efficacious. In other words, even if you pray the universe just unfolds as it would have anyway. Prayer does nothing. If it did work, Allstate would offer a discount for being Christian. When there is something you can do, the atheist approach is more effective, rather than relying on a non-existing deity to do the work. That’s why Allstate does offer a discount for installing an intruder alarm, but nothing for praying to god to keep intruders away.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Definition of Prayer

Doing nothing while pretending to control the universe with your mind.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Definition of Prayer

Doing nothing while pretending the creator of the universe finds your yammering about your petty desires and pathetic little life fascinate him when he knows everything already.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Definition of Prayer

Doing nothing while pretending you have the ear of the creator of the universe.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Definition of Prayer

Doing nothing while pretending you have the full attention of the creator of the universe.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Definition of Prayer

If you must pray, do it in a rocking chair. At least then you will accomplish nothing twice as fast.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Definition of Prayer

Prayer is a way of insulting the creator of the universe by pretending to waste his time with trivia, babbling on and on about what he already knows. You treat him the way your mother treats you, phoning then talking non-stop not letting you get word in edgewise.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Definition of Prayer

Praying is just an obsessive compulsive disorder left untreated for religious reasons.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Definition of Prayer

Praying repeatedly is undiagnosed obsessive compulsive disorder.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Definition of Prayer

When a Christian says I pray that X happens. he is asking his god to deal with it. He is washing his hands of doing anything useful to make it happen. He is not requesting that anyone help. When an atheist says I hope that X happens. he is simply announcing his preference to one and all how he wants things to turn out. He is asking anyone in earshot to do what they can to help. He will himself do what he can to help. He has absolutely no belief that the desired thing will happen via supernatural intervention.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Definition of Purpose

The word purpose is a slippery word. It has many meanings. For example:

The concept of purpose presumes some being enjoying X as a means to an end. To be clear, you need to be explicit who that being is because the answer differs for different beings. People often pretend to be looking for a universal purpose, when they actually mean a purpose for an imaginary god, or that they imagine the universe itself is a god-like consciousness.

When apologists say The universe must have a purpose, therefore god exists. they are playing word games. The notion of universal purpose presumes a god. So they are basically presuming the existence of god to prove the existence of god to sneakily beg the question to trick people into accepting the notion of god, a rather dishonest bit of circular logic.

When you ask What is my purpose. What you are really asking is What task has god assigned to me?. Since there is no god, there is no such task. You have to choose some tasks yourself. If you don’t choose any, you will lead a useless life. The tasks you choose will presumably be much more suitable and useful than ones a church would assign to you. Further, you are free to change them at any point. It much preferable to being assigned some immutable, dreary purpose like selling Christianity door to door.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Definition of Religion

doing stupid things in the name of a deity.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Definition of Religion

A masochistic desire to surrender to a sadistic, unjust master.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Definition of Religion

A pathological attraction to that which is patently untrue.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Definition of Religion

Religion : noun, a phobia of an elderly, white-bearded, invisible man who likes to hide in clouds, spy on teenagers masturbating and torture people.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Definition of Religion

Religion is an early attempt at science, now extremely obsolete. Imagine 2000 years from now people who insist on using only year 2013 science. If was good enough for granny, it is good enough for me. They are the neo-Christians.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Definition of Religion

Religion is the belief that the universe is capricious, that it is not predictable, that it does not work with mathematical laws.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Definition of Religion

Religion is believing in something that is clearly not so. Similar beliefs include racism, attitudes toward drug enforcement, the efficacy of prisons, homeopathy, alien abductions, attitudes towards the poor… Oddly, of these, only religion has a good reputation.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Definition of Religion

Religion is believing things for which their is no evidence and pretending to know things you do not, then burning, torturing or in a profusion of ways harming those who refuse to go along with your delusion. Making excuses for it is stark raving bonkers.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Definition of Religion

Religion is about belonging to a team and surrendering your mind to the group. To belong to the group, you must at least pretend to believe whatever the group believes. What you believe has nothing to do with reason. It requires numbing the brain with cant provided by the group. The most intelligent people can’t stand this thought-denying strait jacket and leave.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Definition of Religion

Religion is a claim to know things with absolute certainty without any explanation of how these things were discovered or any evidence why they are true. It as silly as claiming with absolute certainty there are 23 different Higgs Boson particles without any supporting experiments or math.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Definition of Religion

Religion is a collective lie that groups of people tell each other to deny the unpleasant aspects of reality.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Definition of Religion

Religion is a cowardly response to the fear and sadness of dying. It is a comforting lie. Yet it is such a silly lie that nobody but suicide bombers truly believes it. It makes death all the more frightening, since, if death were not a truly terrible thing, why would we lie about it?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Definition of Religion

A religion is a cult that has enough money for a PR (Public Relations) department.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Definition of Religion

Religion is empirical claims by a large group of people that are presumed certainly true without evidence.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Definition of Religion

Religion is how the herd instinct expresses in humans.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Definition of Religion

Religion is a life lived in fear of things that do not exist.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Definition of Religion

Religion is like penis enlargement spam. It is a torrent of lies, that you can’t stop legally even though there is not even the tiniest shred of evidence to support the outlandish claims. Gullible twits keep buying it because they wish so strongly it were true.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Definition of Religion

Religion is like some twisted rôle-playing game where long ago the players forgot it was all make-believe.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Definition of Religion

Religion is man’s worst invention. What about war? We humans did not invent that. Hornets and ants were waging war for millions of years before humans stepped out on the planet.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Definition of Religion

Religion is promoting made-up stories as absolute truth then harming people who do not believe them.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Definition of Religion

A religion is a set of customs, values, ceremonies and beliefs for organising a society. The problem comes from arrogance when members believe theirs in the the only religion, that they are right and everyone else is wrong and as such they have a right to impose it on everyone else. They are the analog of fanatical bowlers who believe bowling is the only legitimate sport and attempt to ban baseball, basketball etc. and make bowling mandatory.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Definition of Religion

Religion: a mental illness kept out the DSM-III for fear of upsetting the majority who have it.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Definition of Religion

Religions are gigantic parasites on the body politic. It is only a matter of time until austerity demands they give up their privilege. It used to be that churches provided services akin to the modern community center, soup kitchen, homeless shelter, abused women shelter… They do longer do that, but still get paid as if they did.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Definition of Religious Freedom

Religious freedom protects you from interference when you want to do nutty things for religious motives. It does not really apply if you want to do sensible things for religious reasons. For example, if you were a Mormon and you grew vegetables in your back yard for religious reasons, nobody is likely to interfere. But, however, if you decided to hack off your labia and clitoris with a rusty razor, or treat your brain cancer with nothing but priest-blessed water, many people might be tempted to intervene. Religious freedom protects your right do silly and self-harmful things for religious reasons.

However, it does not protect your right to do harmful things to other people, including your children. It is debatable whether it should allow you to do nutty things to your children like make them wear doilies on their heads so they will be beat up at school. It does not give you the right to impose your religious beliefs or practices on anyone else (even if you are utterly convinced yours are divinely correct and everyone else’s are unspeakably evil). In particular, you may not force others to pray to your god or show deference toward it/them, or even acknowledge its/their existence.

Religious Freedom Restoration is completely different. It primarily permits Christians to persecute homosexuals and non-Christians and permits Christians to impose their religious observances on others in schools and public places.

Personally, I don’t think you should even be allowed to impose your religion on your own children. That should be their decision when they come of age. You can, of course, teach your children about your religion, but you should not be permitted to use threats, violence or force to shove it down their throats.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Definition of Special Pleading

A debating trick favoured by Christians. They claim a exception to the general rule without giving any justification for the exception. Normally blind faith is completely unreliable, but when Christians use it to determine truth, it is infallible.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70) Wikipedia definition Nizkor definition Rational Wiki definition Logically Fallacious definition

Definitions

People who have a firm conviction that there exists a supreme Being, are either Deist or Theist. Deists are people who believe in a supreme being, a creator who does not meddle in the affairs of the universe. They see god as a like a clockmaker who designed and wound up the universe and let it run by divine physical laws. Theists are people who believe in a supreme being who intervenes in the day-to-day operation of the universe, in particular answering prayer, rewarding the virtuous, punishing the wicked and impressing with miracles.

Technically, atheists are everybody else, anyone without such a firm belief, including anyone who rates it merely likely or unlikely there is a supreme being. However, in popular use, atheists include only people confident there are no supreme beings.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Definitions of Fundamentalism

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Definitions of Morality

The term morality refers to three different things:

  1. Imposing ancient rules of conduct derived from iron-age religions on others.
  2. Deciding what to do when short and long term interests call for different actions.
  3. Arranging group behaviour that benefits all, but which would be detrimental if most in the community did not co-operate.
~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Defrosting Christianity

In the old days before self-defrosting fridges, defrosting would take several hours. For the first few hours, nothing would appear to be happening, but drop by drop the ice was loosening. Then suddenly it would come crashing down in big sheets. I hope a similar process will erode Christianity and eventually bring it crashing down.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Degenerate Monotheism

When I was in high school, monotheism was presented as some great intellectual advance. Nonsense! It was a degeneracy, a triumph of simplistic dichotomous thinking.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Deists vs Theists

Deists are people who believe in a supreme being, a creator who does not meddle in the affairs of the universe. They see god as a like a clockmaker who designed and wound up the universe and let it run by divine physical laws. Theists are people who believe in a supreme being who intervenes in the day-to-day operation of the universe, in particular answering prayer, rewarding the virtuous, punishing the wicked and impressing with miracles.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

A Deity vs My Deity

The deist claims not only that a god exists, but he has special knowledge of what that deity desires. He claims nearly every other deist who makes that claim is wrong. Yet he expects us to kowtow to him alone merely because he has argued that it is possible a deity could exist (not necessarily his).

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Deity Without Afterlife

Even if a deity existed, that is not of much consequence unless there was also a afterlife. Clearly a deity does not punish or reward in our actual lifetime. Without an afterlife, there is no particular reason to placate him.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Deluded Christians

Christians are deluded into thinking their morality is what the creator of the universe wants. There is no such god. What they are really doing is following the dictates of ignorant desert dwellers of 4000 years ago. Read the bible. You will see how preposterously out of date it is. Following ancient moralities is not only foolish, it is evil and causes massive suffering.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Deluded in Public

Christians go on about their religious delusions, in public, to strangers. It is a bit like someone on the bus telling you about the colour and texture of their bowel movements or their techniques of masturbation.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Delusion the Universe Is Fair

One of the symptoms of infection by a god virus is a delusion that the universe is fair.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Delusional Christians

Christians are not just wrong, they are delusional. They cannot tell right from wrong. They cannot tell logical from crazy.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

The Delusional World

The problem with Christianity is that it creates an alternative reality, a delusional world to live in. Christians frantically lie to each other to maintain the illusion. They ignore the pressing problems of the real world and in the process seriously harm non-Christians.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Delusions

People with delusions cling to them strongly. They will not even consider the possibility they might be wrong. Why?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Delusions

What’s the difference between an ordinary delusion and a religious delusion? With an ordinary delusion, you believe something nobody else does. You are likely locked up because people think you are dangerous, even if your delusions do not involve violence.

With a religious delusion, a group of people get together, and construct a delusion consciously, and then with great effort each enters the common delusion. Because the body of deluded people has the political power of the religion, nobody is locked up or treated, even when their delusions are extremely dangerous. Usually, even deluded people are still sane enough to handle most aspects of their life especially when they confine their social circle to those who share the delusion.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Delusions of Grandeur

People who pray are suffering from an extreme delusion of grandeur, that the creator of the universe takes correction from them.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Delusions of Grandeur

Why is it that when people hear a voice in their head the first thing that comes to mind it, It is god, the creator of the entire universe come to personally visit me, the most important being there ever was. I am surprised people are so overtly grandiose. It is bit like imagining it must be Queen Elizabeth or President Obama when they hear a knock on the door. I would think they might presume something more modest such as a ghost, a shaman, a demon, a guru, a neighbour, the CIA (Central Intelligence Agency), an angel or their own subconscious. Imagining you are on par with Moses is self-flattery gone mad.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Delusions About Your Significance to the Universe

Giving up your belief in the Christian Sunday school god means giving up the fantasy that the creator of the universe cares about you and your petty concerns. There is plenty of love in the universe if you open yourself to others and if you are willing to care for yourself with the same kindness you might care for a child. If your are a cruel dictator, treating yourself worse than you would dream of treating any other person, then any amount of deluding yourself the creator of the universe adores you will not possibly be able to compensate.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Demanding Respect

Deists complain that we atheists show them lack of respect. What sorts of things do they expect us to do to show respect?

I don’t show this degree of respect to anyone, not even the leaders of my country, not even famous scientists. To encourage people like me to rise to this level, you would expect then the deists would show this exaggerated respect in return. What do they do instead?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Demanding Respect

When Christians demand respect for their religion, they are demanding that other people pretend to take it as seriously as they do. They want people to lie. They can’t stand it that other people think their religious is not only wrong, but preposterous.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Demanding What Is Easy For You Of Those For Whom It Is Difficult

It is tempting for those whose hormones no longer course to demand celibacy from others.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Demons and Gods

Men pray to imaginary gods to protect them from imaginary demons. The Christians thus spend more effort convincing the public of the existence of demons than of gods.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Denial You Were Conned

People who have been seriously conned often refuse to admit it. Why?

Religion is one of the most successful cons. It is legal. Anything goes. It has its tentacles into government and can thus operate out in the open.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Denying the Evil In The Holy Books

Every time a religious fanatic commits some ghastly crime, people from his religion will proclaim that sort of behaviour is not condoned by their religion or their holy book. That is not true. In holy books, invariably the deity kills and tortures non-believers or commands his followers to. For example, very little else but such killing of infidels happens in the Old Testament, the foundation of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Believers surely are aware of this, but they pretend it is not there.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Denying God

Religionists claim knowledge of the atheist mind. They claim atheists believe in the existence of their deity just as firmly as they do, but atheists hate him and refuse to accept his authority. They like to say atheists reject their deity. This is deceptive wording.

Atheists do not believe in the existence of deities. Therefore it is more accurate to say they deny the existence of that deity. They can’t logically deny a deity that does not exist.

Atheists may also judge the deity as a work of fiction, and make note what a bastard he is (or would be if he were real). Religionists mistake this contempt for actual fear and belief in the reality of the deity. Because religionists are so intimated by the stories of the deity, they can’t imagine anyone not being intimidated too.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Denying God’s Wickedness

Christians claim Yahweh is infinitely good, and he tortures people for eternity for minor crimes like jerking off (even once not knowing what it was), worshiping the wrong god or raking the leaves on a Sunday. Let’s say attorney general Jeff Sessions condemned someone to protracted torture until death for being Muslim (worshiping the wrong god). There would be a huge fuss, even among Christians. Sessions would be impeached. What Yahweh does is much worse. Yet Christians let the perfect Yahweh off the hook for crimes they would condemn in fallible humans. Christians are so afraid of Yahweh they pretend the worst imaginable evil is the highest imaginable good. What cowardly slime!

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Denying Pleasure To Others

The Christian’s greatest joy would be to destroy every pornographic image on the planet, except his favourites. His joy comes from denying pleasure to others.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Denying Reality

The Catholic church convicted Galileo Galilei of heresy in 1634. This was 40 years after Columbus, 100 years after Copernicus and 110 years after the reformation. The church to this day spreads FUD (Fear Uncertainty and Doubt) to block the advance of science. Science, without consciously meaning to, debunks religious myths, which erodes ecclesiastical power and wealth.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Denying the True Self

Every person has a true self. If he tries to be someone else, he is miserable. The church creates so much suffering by convincing people they should all be subdued and identical, the way that church wants them to be.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Depressing Christianity

The problem with subscribing to the Christian delusion is you believe you have no chance. A sky fairy who hates you and who is infinitely powerful will screw you no matter what you do. You are powerless to make anything good happen to you without first sucking up to this monster and groveling for a boon. For example, if you are in a canoe that tips over in the middle of a lake, whether you survive is 100% up to the sky fairy. Nearly always he does nothing. Very rarely will he send someone to rescue you (who of course will be completely unaware he was on a mission from Yahweh). If your number is up, nothing you can do will save you. There is no point in doing anything to improve your lot. This apathy must be extremely depressing.

The bible in Revelation 7:3-4 says only 144,000 Jewish virgin males go to heaven. Everyone else gets tortured for eternity. Even if you manage to squeak into heaven on some loophole, you have nothing but a monumentally boring existence with no possible escape ahead of you playing the harp and singing the praises to the cosmic North Korean leader. That is pretty depressing. Yahweh cannot be appealed to with rational argument.

Fundamentalists want all knowledge and social progress since 1 AD undone. Yuck. They claim the bible is the only source of knowledge and wisdom for all time, even though it got all the science it tackled wrong. These crazies are gradually taking over the government of the USA.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Deprogramming

Why work to deprogram Christians?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Deprogramming Christians

Deprogramming Christians is not so much explaining why there is no god, but rather showing them that Christianity is a clever con.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Deprogramming Christians

Why do I put effort in trying to deprogram Christians? Because it makes them do such terrible things.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Deprogramming Christians

Why do theists use such stupid arguments to defend the existence of Yahweh and the tenets of Christianity? Basically because they can’t think of any convincing ones. You would think the lack of arguments would persuade them they must be wrong. But when they were very young their mothers burned it into their liquid brains that even questioning the Christian faith guaranteed an eternity of being burned alive. Their brains later congealed making it impossible to remove this belief by ordinary reasoning. They feel compelled to defend Christianity’s claims, no matter how absurd, on pain of torture. For 900 years after Constantine, the threat of torture for questioning Christianity was carried out on earth. The threat of torture has a long history of being completely convincing.

Christianity is not an ordinary belief. We should look at it as like the result of brain washing endured by a POW (Prisoner Of War) in North Korean camp. It will not go away by simple reasoning. It must be deprogrammed like any other traumatically-installed belief. Unfortunately, such a procedure would be highly unpleasant and very few Christians would understand the benefits of subjecting themselves to it. Pretty much the only people who escape Christianity are those so curious as children, that even the threat of hellfire was not sufficient to extinguish their inquisitiveness. Eventually, that curiosity leads them to read the bible cover to cover. That takes them half way to atheism.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Derelict God

God is supposed to guide the stars and answer prayers, but he is 100% undetectable. Even Christians admit this. Stars follow Newtonian mechanics. There has never once been any sign of a star twitching at the hand of some supernatural tweaker. Every study of prayer shows it is ineffective. The same thing happens whether you pray or not. God is not performing his two key duties (or any others). There is no sign of his existence, not even of his past existence. The most logical explanation is he does not exist or has left the building.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Deserving Con Men

A secular con man, such as a Republican, convinces his fellows he deserves special treatment because of his inherent superiority. A religious con men convinces his fellows he deserves special treatment, including being given money tax free, not because he is so wonderful, but that he is the representative of some powerful and deserving supreme being who appointed the con man to speak on his behalf.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

The Deserving Wealthy

Christian doctrine says one should help the poorest of the poor first. Yet I have noticed that North Americans have nothing but contempt for the homeless. However, they are extremely generous to someone whose house has burned down or whose house was destroyed in a flood. The principle seems to be that when the wealthy lose, they are the most deserving.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Designer Heaven

Christians, and even more so Muslims, designed a horrible hell — having your flesh burned off, only to have it replaced so it could be burned off again. But the design of heaven could use some work. There is nothing to do in heaven, except play harp and sing Christian music. There is no escape. There is no sex. There is no marriage. This hell to me.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Desire To Be A Slave

The desire that a omnipotent bully of a god exist is a yearning to be a slave. That has nothing to do with whether such a god exists, but it says volumes about those who fantasize about one.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Desire for Son to Become a Priest

In some parts of the world, a mother’s fondest wish is for her son to become a priest. The woman is so bamboozled, she is willing to give up grandchildren and push her son into a life of crime. As a priest he will lie to people that he knows for certain that various impossible things are true. As a priest he will extort people with false promises of eternal bliss and empty threats of eternal torture. His victims are the poor, the ignorant and the gullible. He will create needless guilt and anxiety by browbeating children into thinking acts that harm no one are serious crimes. And, of course, he will either rape and abuse children or aid and abet others to do so. Logically, priests should have less prestige that bank robbers.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Desperate Christians

Why would someone desperately cling to such obvious nonsense as Christianity? It would have to be someone so terrified of non-existence that they would rather experience hell, or someone who could not let go of the fantasy of being reunited with someone who had died.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Desperate For Heaven

The man most convinced that a god will shower him with boons after his body rots is the man whom fortune treats most shabbily now, like a compulsive gambler utterly convinced a slot machine, with absolute certainty, will soon pay out simply because it hasn’t ever done so before.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Despising Wishful Thinking

If I decided what to believe based on wishful thinking, rather than what the evidence pointed to being true, I would intensely despise myself, thus I can’t understand how Christians live with themselves.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Destroying Christianity

The reason so many people fight so hard to destroy Christianity is because it is completely untrue. It turns people’s brains to pudding.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Destroying Common Sense

Con men needed a way to destroy their marks’ main defence — common sense. So they invented religion.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Destroying Musical Taste

One of the more unfortunate effects of modern Christianity is the way it destroys all vestiges of musical taste.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Detecting BS

If people cannot produce evidence and reasons for what they say, that is a pretty good indication they are BSing.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Detecting Lies

In a murder mystery, you detect the criminals by looking for inconsistencies in their stories. You look for motives to lie, dissemble or exaggerate. You take hearsay with a large grain of salt. You look for physical evidence to back up or refute testimony. You look for corroboration. If you brought the same skills to religion…

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Determining Truth

It is not unreasonable to settle a dispute by checking how either side’s story fits in the big accepted picture of reality. The correct view should normally be consistent with the big picture. However, this technique does not work when religion is involved because the big picture is just a fiction and as such has only weak internal consistency.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

The Devil

The devil is just an excuse for making fooling life decisions.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

The Devil

Everything you have learned about the devil from songs was just made up by songwriters.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Devil More Likely Than God

If there were a god, why do so many really horrible things happen to innocent people out of the blue? That sounds more like evidence for a supreme devil than a god.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Devil Worship

Worship of Satan is even more idiotic that worship of Yahweh. It has meaningless rituals, silly costumes, unsubstantiated belief. It does not even have some hypocritical virtue like Christianity does. It is so insulting when Christians accuse us atheists of devil worship, as if we were even crazier than they are.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Devil’s Advocate

For millennia, the Catholic church, when it was considering canonising someone, would invite people in to make the case for not canonising them. The consultants were rudely called devil’s advocates even though there were trying to help the church avoid embarrassment.

For example, the church invited Christopher Hitchens to act as devil’s advocate in the case of the canonisation of Mother Theresa. He told them about her sadistic and masochistic tendencies, her misappropriation of donations, her associations with dictators and mobsters and her lost faith in god.

The church has dropped this long-standing tradition. Their new policy is to sweep any negative information under the rug and hope it stays there.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Dichotomous Thinking

Christians are dichotomous thinkers. They divide all propositions into either true or false. Scientists tend to think about degree of accuracy. They might say Newton’s laws are true at least to 10 significant digits, but they fall apart when objects start moving near the speed of light. Then you have to use relativistic equations to get good results. We many eventually find yet another approximation to reality that is good to 20 significant digits. Even then we will still use the simple Newtonian equations when dealing with car crashes and Einsteinian ones for controlling GPS (Global Positioning System) satellites. Christians seem to think Einstein proved Newton (1643-01-04 1727-03-31 age:84) wrong. No, he found an even more accurate approximation for an extreme condition. Newton is just as correct as he ever was.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Dichotomous Thinking

People seem to be ridiculously polarised. Either they refuse the accept the possibility anything ever happening to them that is not fully understood by science, or they are completely gullible believing any supernatural/religious tales without any evidence to support them. Surely there is a middle ground where you acknowledge that science has only begun to understand the universe and that humans are smart enough to understand only a minute fraction of what is so.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

The Difference Between an Christian and a Psychotic

The only difference between a Christian and a delusional psychotic who thinks an invisible being is out to get him, is Christians have published a book about their delusions.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Difference Between Christians and Atheists

The difference between a Christian and an atheist is that Christians believe 59,999 religions are bogus and atheists believe 60,000 are.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

The Difference Between Religion and Science

Religion makes claims without evidence. Science makes claims with repeatable evidence.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

The Difference Between Religion and Science

Religions desperately fight against changing, even when what they are doing is clearly not working. They have an obsessive attraction to tradition. When science discovers it is wrong, it changes, at worst within a generation.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Difference Between A Scientist and a Believer

A scientist believes whatever has the most evidence. A religious person maintains loyalty to what his mother taught him. He will only abandon it when it becomes absolutely implausible. A perceived truer alternative is not sufficient to abandon the original beliefs.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Difference between a Scientist and a Christian

To a scientist, what matters is what is true. What you believe is irrelevant. To a Christian, what matters is what you believe. What is true is irrelevant.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

The Difference is Evidence

Every religion thinks it is the best, the only truth. Atheists are no different. The difference is atheists have some evidence to support their claim. Nobody else does.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Different Arguments for Different People

Atheists bombard Christians with arguments that atheists find compelling, why atheists find Christianity repulsive and wrong. However, the sort of people who succumb to Christianity are not the same sort that do not. They may abandon Christian superstition for quite different reasons than would persuade an atheist. We need to interview ex-Christians to find out what ideas helped them break free and compile them sorted by effectiveness.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Different Lie To Each Culture

If there really were a god, why did he tell a different lie to each of 10,000 cultures?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Dinosaurs on the Ark

Given that no human fossil has ever been found anywhere near a dinosaur fossil, it strikes me as absurd to claim dinosaurs and man roamed the earth together. It is even more absurd to claim that man domesticated all the giant meat-eating reptiles enough to wrangle them onto Noah’s ark.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Direct Government Church Subsidy

The German government collects an income tax and hands the money over to the churches. The tax is long standing and not quite as outrageous as it first sounds. If you belong to a church you must pay the tax. Your money goes only to your church. If you don’t belong to a church you don’t have to pay it. You don’t get to decide on the amount. If you don’t pay, you can’t belong to the church. About 70% of church revenues come from church tax. This is about €9,200,000,000 EUR (in 2010).

Proponents of the tax say it allows the churches to be independent. They don’t have to bow to consumer pressure with crass entertainments as they do in the USA. It is not just Germany who does this: Austria, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Iceland, Italy, Sweden, Switzerland do as well. Romania is considering instituting one. The government is subsidising the churches by collecting the taxes with the full force and authority of the state, using its knowledge of income and forcing a uniform tithe. The good news is, the whole game is backfiring on the churches. They are losing members because members don’t want to pay the tax.

In Canada and the USA, churches and televangelists don’t pay property and income taxes. This means even atheists are forced to subsidise the churches. A church is a type of club. The government should not be funding it.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Dirty Work

Religions, usually somewhat under the table, teach the faithful to kill their enemies and rivals. Religions create enemies where there need be none. Religions teach their followers to impose superstitions on others. As technology makes it easier for even lone individuals to wreck mass havoc, you don’t really want unnecessary enemies.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Disabled Children

Religious people spawn child after child, even when they produce nothing but severely disabled children, such as autism, retardation, Down’s syndrome, cystic fibrosis, cerebral palsy etc. Then they expect the rest of us to care for the children or subsidise their care. This is monumentally cruel and irresponsible. This may sound callous, but I think the condition for getting help from the government should be sterilisation of both parents. They have no right to impose such misery on their children motivated by their selfish desire to breed or some mad attempt to placate a sadistic deity.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Disagreeing with Sam

Sam Harris and I agree on most matters. We disagree on the following:

Sam Roedy Issue
Islamic suicide bombers are primarily motivated by a desire for heavenly reward.
Marital fidelity of strangers is my concern.
George Bush’s account of what happened on 2001-09-11 is accurate. People who hold other views are crazy.
My morality is very close to an objective universal morality.
Attacking Afghanistan was legal and justified.
Spirituality is a crock.
~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Disagreement About God

Why is there so much disagreement about god? There are 60,000 gods. There are 43,000 denominations. Because godists make it all up. There is no reason for it to converge on common facts. If god were real, like science, knowledge about him would converge on the truth There is no truth about god other than he is imaginary.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Disaster

To a church, a mass disaster is an opportunity to con the public into raising money for themselves.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Disbelief

I am astounded that anyone would believe something so silly and lacking evidence as a god, but I am even more astounded that Christians would pick one of the most petty, irrational, inconsistent, partisan, callous, sadistic, cruel and petulant of all possible gods to worship. Have they never read the bible?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Discarding Faith

No amount of reason will be as effective a string of personal catastrophes in persuading someone that his god does not exist. Discarding faith is preferable to acknowledging his god hates him or could not care less about him.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Discounting

A true scientist will not discount some phenomena based solely on the fact he can’t think of a mechanism to explain it. He bases it on the quality of the evidence.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Discovering God

Whether a god exists or not makes no difference. The important fact is all holy books of earth have bugger all to do with any deity. They are all counterfeit. They were written my humans to control and take advantage of other humans without the input of any deity. If we ever discover a god, we will have to start from scratch learning about him and his preferences. The holy books are all just wild speculation.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Discovering a Leprechaun

If a tiny person who looked like a leprechaun were discovered in Ireland, it would not change much. No laws of science would need to be revised. However, If we discovered evidence of the god Yahweh, absolutely everything would change, since Yahweh often overrides the natural running of the universe, by his own inscrutable reasoning. This is one of the reasons that the notion of a god is dismissed so casually. There is far too much observation of a universe without any sign whatsoever of such overriding. Amateurs who think they have seen such evidence simply don’t know how to compute probabilities correctly.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Discrimination

The majority religion always discriminates against the minority religions. For, example in Syria today, Muslims behead and crucify Christians. Christian Americans beat Muslims with baseball bats. All religions believe they are justified in violence against others because they have the perfect truth and nobody else knows anything. In fact, they are all equally ignorant. They are all mostly wrong. What we need to do is teach all religions how foolish they all are.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Discrimination

The more you study the world’s religions, the more apparent it becomes they are all total bullshit.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Discrimination Against Christians

When Christians complain about their rights being violated, they usually mean:

In North America, nobody interferes with their worship, ceremonies or churches. They have full religious rights by the normal definition. They are the majority. It could not very well be otherwise.

However, religion in general is waning inevitably. Young people are not interested and old believers are dying off. So Christians will eventually became a minority. They will be treated with humour and ridicule the way Mormons and flat earthers are today. However, I don’t think anyone is going to harm them or use force to deprogram them.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Discussing Private Matters

One of the least attractive features of Christians is their complete lack of shame or embarrassment about discussing the details of other people’s marital fidelities in public, even on national TV. To me this is an intrusive and as in bad taste as exposing details of domestic disputes over who left the toilet dirty or who emitted too much gas as they slept. It is a private matter.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Disdelusionment

Let every Christian be dis-delusioned!

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Disease as Punishment

One of the cruelest habits of Christians is telling people with cancer or other serious diseases it was a punishment from god. They have no evidence for that. That is so cruel to pile on somebody already suffering.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Disembodied Voices

The most terrible lie that Christians tell each other is that the god Yahweh speaks specifically to believers in the form a disembodied voice in their heads. These nitwits then mistake any grandiose voice in their head for the infallible guidance of the creator of the universe. They blindly do whatever the voice commands, even if it is utterly contrary to common sense or scripture. Abraham just about butchered his son Isaac from this error. They never do any checks. If the voice sounds like Charlton Heston, that’s all they need. They don’t even check if it knows scripture. Why would they be so stupid? Vanity. The notion that the creator of the universe and you are on a first name basis and he is coaching you to a magical future is intoxicating to the ego. These twits work hard to avoid looking at the mountains of evidence this voice could not possibly be the actual creator of the universe. They become for all practical purposes schizophrenics controlled by imaginary voices.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Disgraceful Christians

During the bubonic plague, Christians murdered the Jews, motivated by they whacko religion. In their sick view it was a sin to tolerate the presence of Jews.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Disgust

To be a Christian you must agree to drink human blood and eat human meat. That is so revolting, I cannot understand how anyone could comply. That is the sort of thing the Manson cult did.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Disgusting Thanks

Any time a Christian survives a flood or plane crash and they are later interviewed on the radio they will say something like I don’t why god saved just me and killed everyone else. I am so thankful. How revoltingly conceited to imagine they were superior to everyone else. How disgusting to think it a wonderful thing everyone else was killed but not them.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Dishonest Churches

Churches are much like dishonest businesses. The collect money based on promises they do not keep (promising prosperity, health or eternal life). They spend the money on themselves for ornate buildings, elaborate clothes, cars etc. They produce nothing. They increase intolerance, bigotry and hatred. They encourage scientific ignorance. Why should they get preferential tax treatment over ordinary businesses or clubs? I would think that special treatment would be unconstitutional. It favours large churches over small and god-based religions over secular philosophies.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Disillusionment

If you feel disillusioned, you must have been harbouring some illusions in the first place.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Disillusionment

If you feel disillusioned, you must have been illusioned.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Disillusionment

Let every Christian be dis-illusioned!

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Dismissing Christians

All you should really have to say to the Christians is, Begone you lying dirtbags. You made this all up as part of your con to rip me off. I am not buying such silly crap!, however, you can’t get them off your back that easily.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Dismissing Gods

There are some 60,000 gods. The argument against all of them is there is no evidence for their existence. There is no need to treat them all individually.

What I find amusing is Christians dismiss 59,999 gods without thought, without knowing the first thing about any of them, and then assume one of them effectively picked at random is 100% certain even though they have no evidence at all to support it or to suggest why it is different from all the others.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Dismissing Nearly All Gods

Most North Americans dismiss all of the 60,000 god myths but one. The only thing that distinguishes the one they single out from the rest is that their parents exposed them to it at tender age and told them it was true. Had that not happened, that particular god myth would have had no power above the rest. It would appear just as absurd as all the others.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Dismissing The Unexamined

I can’t get over that religious people have no shame whatsoever about their arrogance. They claim 60,000 of the world’s religions are bunk, except one, the one they fell into by accident of birth. They make this claim without even examining so much as one of the religions they rejected. That is like someone claiming the Lada is the best automobile when they had never driven or ridden in anything else.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Dismissing Yahweh

Everyone is pretty damn sure Clara the dog cow is not an existent god. I have exactly the same amount of evidence for Yahweh. So I am just as sure Yahweh does not exist. Why does everyone insist on making Yahweh a special case that requires an absurdly high bar to dismiss?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Disney Cult

Imagine if a sect got going that claimed the Disney animated characters were real. They used the films as evidence. They found people in mental hospitals who had encountered them in divine visions. They gained new recruits by spiking people’s coffee with LSD then using hypnotic induction. As the sect got larger it became taken seriously. They could force universities to host debates such as: resolved Goofy is Pluto’ father Others considered them crazy and tiresome, but they were such dedicated evangelists it forced everyone to humour them and debate topics as Prayer to Mickey is highly effective or There is only one religion and Mickey is its god and Walt its facilitator. These people would be less crazy and far less dangerous than Christians.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Disproving Madness

William Lane Craig makes all kinds of claims about god without evidence, then says he is not delusional because we cannot prove what he says is false. Had he told us that there is a giant blue teddy bear at the center of moon, that would be a clearly a delusion, even though there is no way to disprove it. It is a delusion because Craig would have no reason to suspect the presence of the teddy bear. He just made it up. He would have no evidence for his assertion. That is why it is a delusion, not because no one can disprove it. His claims about god are just as absurd and baseless.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Disrespecting Believers

Christian believers tell me that not only do they believe Yahweh exists, but that they worship him. They deeply admire him.

They also tell me that he torments with fire the majority of people after they die, for eternity. They also tell me in their bible, that Yahweh loves killing the first born of entire peoples. ( Exodus 11:1-13:16, Exodus 22:29, I Samuel 15:3, Psalms 137:9). Then there is the story of Job ( Job 1:1-42:17), where Yahweh torments an innocent man mercilessly to win a bet.

Why would anyone in their right mind worship such an evil sadistic bastard? It it like they are confessing to masturbating over photos of Hitler. The only excuse they ever offer is fear. They are afraid that if they did not worship this cunt, he would roast them for eternity. This is monumental cowardice, kowtowing to an non-existent celestial dictator. I cannot possibly respect such people or their beliefs.

They are like adults still cowering in fear of their childhood bogeyman under the bed.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Disrespecting a Cheese Sandwich

I can’t respect a religion that cons people into buying a cheese sandwich for $28,000 because the burn marks on it vaguely resemble a bearded man.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Distaste For Both Christians and Nazis

Christians have threatened by life thousands of times more often than Nazis have. So it is no great surprise I dislike both groups roughly equally.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Distrust the Delusional

We consider it poor form to discriminate against someone based on his religion, yet we consider it common sense to discriminate against someone who is delusional. Surely it is unwise to trust someone whose religion asserts the end times are near and that the end of the world is a Good Thing™ to captain a nuclear submarine.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Divide and Conquer

Divide and conquer! It is much easier to debunk Apollo than gods in general. We must look where religions differ and attack those differences. In doing that, we enlist the entire rest of the religious community as allies. They are already atheists to each others gods. Similarly, focus on the differences between Catholics and protestants and various protestant sects. It would not hurt to have the entire religious community echoing our arguments about how foolish they all are.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Divine Flatulence

I have to laugh at Christians with bad breath and flatulence preening themselves with the knowledge they were divinely created.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Divine Real Estate

God is supposed to be the creator of the entire universe, yet the gods heading up the various religions are extremely partial to small groups of humans. They give their followers divine permission to kill, enslave and torture their neighbours and expropriate their lands. I would have thought the god of the entire universe would have been more even handed. It is also odd that every religion claims to be god’s one and only chosen people. They can’t all be. The simplest explanation is they are all lying, making excuses for their own bad behaviour.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Do Atheists Persecute Christians?

We atheists leave the Buddhists, Jews, Zoroastrians… alone. Why? They leave us alone. They don’t try to force their religious beliefs on others. In contrast, Christians believe their majority status gives them the right to act as the official state religion and to force Christianity on everyone. They think they have the right to keep Muslims out of the country, even though the constitution says there must be no religious test. Atheists think that Christians and Muslims are both delusional, but we strongly support the right to practice those religions. Christians and Muslims do not return the favour. Their holy books command them to brutally murder all atheists.

When I come across mental patients who are delusional, I can’t help myself. I try to free them from the delusion, for two reasons: to stop them from hurting others, and so they can have more fulfilling lives. For the same reason, I try to free Christians and Muslims of false beliefs by providing evidence for why they are wrong. I do not harm them in any way. I don’t burn down their churches, even though they murdered my gay friends back in the 1970s and continue to murder gays today in Africa funded by rabid American Christians.

Christians are gullible victims of the church. There is no need to punish them further.

Disagreeing is not the same as attacking. Christians have gone paranoid on this point. They make a completely unreasonable demand that we atheists pretend they are inerrant. Yet Christians claim, all without evidence, that everything we atheists say is not only wrong, but a lie, motivated by the most vile motives.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Do It Now

It may take centuries to wipe the last vestige of religion from planet earth. That is no excuse either for or against procrastinating.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Do You Need God To be Moral?

Religious people claim you need to pretend there is a god watching you all the time to behave morally. But this is not so. Secular countries have much lower crime rates than religious ones. In the USA, religious people are disproportionately represented in prisons. Evangelicals have a much higher divorce rate. The religious have higher teen pregnancy rates and higher abortion rates. Child abuse and sexual abuse is higher in religious households and even higher in very religious households. Yahweh himself is a bad role model. He has no impulse control. He tortures and murders like a reincarnation of Jeffrey Dahmer. Religion is essentially lying to yourself with comforting wishful thinking. That cannot help but warp your moral sense.

The Damn Commandments click to watch

One of the causes of Christian immorality is confession. The sinner confesses to a crime such as child molesting. The priest is bound to secrecy no matter how much damage the sinner is doing. The priest assigns a token secret penance, typically saying three Hail Marys for molesting. The sinner makes a donation. The priest does some magic and presto, supposedly it is as if the sin never happened. The sinner is washed clean, eager to sin again. But, of course, the effects of the sin are unchanged. Confession does nothing to make amends to the victim or to discourage the sinner from repeating.

This just shows you what a con the church was all along. They fool the congregation into believing they can magically undo sins in return for cash. It is just a trick to pull in the rubes. It is a doubly wicked con because they not only rip off the congregation promising and not delivering, they lead them into moral degradation. Finally, the priests learn secrets on everyone that they can hold over them.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Doctor of Bullshitology

You would think a doctor of divinity would be a historian who specialised in the study of the religious beliefs of various peoples, but it is actually a degree in bullshitology. It is a game where people compose a collective work of fiction.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Doctor of Harry Potter

When evangelists claim themselves to be Doctors of Theology, just what knowledge did they study? What they spout is all made up. That is like being a doctor of Harry Potter.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Doctors or Amateurs

You have a choice between having doctors do abortions or amateurs doing them. Stopping abortions entirely is not possible because even the most rabidly pro-lifers arrange them for their daughters they get pregnant. The pro-life movement is about making it dangerous for other people to get abortions.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Dodging the Question

Christians say the origin of the universe baffles them. The only solution they can think of is a sky fairy did it. Christians are generally quite ignorant of the machinations of the universe. Scientists, in contrast, can think of dozens of other possibilities. But, the Christian hypothesis poses an even bigger question. Where did this magic fairy, much more complicated than the universe itself, come from? They announce the question is not valid. They might as well have said probing into the origin of the universe is out of bounds. They have nothing to say about how Yahweh created the universe, only some broad-brush strokes, that are not even correct. This is just a bit of verbal legerdemain to dodge the question.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Does Beauty Imply God?

Christians tell me their evidence for god is Just look around and see the flowers. Obviously because they are so beautiful to the human eye, they were created by a supernatural being named Yahweh [who lives on a cloud, likes to watch teenage girls and boys masturbating and who tortures people after they die.]

My question is What did you expect to see if there were no god? Evolution predicts a competition between plants to persuade insects to spread their pollen and larger animals to spread their seeds. It expects a riot of perfumes, shapes and colours tuned to the visual range of insects (which includes UV ). Did you even consider the possibility the flowers’ beauty is intended for bees, not you? Consider that the flowers and bees were here on earth long before humans. Also, do not confuse cultivated flowers like the pansy with wildflowers. Horticulturalists evolved domesticated flowers through artificial selection over the centuries to appeal to the human ideals of beauty.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Does God Exist?

If nobody can even define what god is, it makes no sense to talk about whether he exists. It is like asking if huffalumps exist.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Dogged Religiosity

When the ancient Mayans were faced with a century-long drought, they had only one way to deal with it — human sacrifice. Of course, sacrifices had no effect, but that did not deter them from escalating the intensity of the sacrifices. They refused to look for alternative solutions. The is one more example of how religion makes people terminally stupid.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Dominance

The reason Christians are so keen on imposing unconstitutional Christian prayers at the start of public meetings is as a dominance display, to tell the atheists and non-Christians that the Christians are in charge and they had better head to the back of the bus. There would be no point in it if the non-Christians did not mind.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Christians vilify Islam because it aims to convert everyone on earth. I always thought Christianity had the exact same goal.

~ Roedy

Dominionism

(1948-02-04 age:70)

Donate To Cure Christianity

With your donations to fund research, someday Christians may think again.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Don’t Expect Respect

I respect your legal right to believe in Christianity, but by no means does this imply I respect you for doing so. I think you are as dotty as the little old lady who assures me leprechauns have set up house at the foot of her garden.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Don’t Lie

In the movie 2001, HAL (Heuristic Algorithmic), the AI (Artificial Intelligence) computer goes insane. It turns out the reason was its programmers had lied to it. This is a metaphor for what happens when you feed a person a nest of lies, otherwise known as Christian dogma. It destroys their general ability to think.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Don’t Look

Christians claim all other religions are garbage, but they strongly don’t want you to study them to check if this is indeed true. The catch is Christianity is almost completely borrowed from earlier religions. Christians don’t want you to know that.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Door Knocking

Who would want to join a religion that demanded you knock on doors of people who strongly did not want to talk to you? What woman would want to join a religion where she had to give up all her civil rights to become a drudge and doorstop? What parents would join a religion that required handing over their kids to the clergy to molest? It is amazing the JWs can find even a single convert.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Dotty Christians

Christians have utterly no idea just how dotty they are to the non-believer. They sound like children making up absurd stories. Being asked to debate the existence of god, with a straight face, is like being asked to debate the possible existence of a miniature troll under the bridge over the garden pond. It is a preposterous assertion without evidence that should not need to be refuted. Atheists humouring a Christian with a debate about god is similar to a psychiatrist prompting for details about a patient’s delusions.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Doukhobors

Doukhobors were a religious sect in the headlines in BC Canada in the 1950s. They liked to protest by stripping naked and burning down their houses. They wanted to home school their children in Russian and religious doctrines. They believed in communal ownership of property. The Social Credit BC government of the time took their children away and put them in prisons called residential schools, where they could only see their parents through a fence. They were punished for speaking Russian. Similar to the residential schools for first nations children, the caretakers physically and sexually abused their charges and fed them small quantities of revolting food. To this day, the government of BC has refused to apologise.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Dr of Divinity

If you went to university to study for a Dr of Divinity, what materials could you study?

So what you really have is a Dr of Bullshitology or at best a Dr of Bible stories.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Dr. of Divinity

The difference between a Dr. of Divinity and a Dr. of Unicornology is the Dr. of Divinity refuses to admit he studies fiction.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

The Drake Equation

The Drake equation estimates there are about 10,000 intelligent civilisations just in our Milky Way galaxy alone. There are 60,000 religions on earth, so you might guess there are 100,000,000 of them in our galaxy, presuming the other civilisations are stuck in legacy superstition like us. What are the odds one of our earth religions is the true religion? When you consider the entire universe, the odds become infinitesimal. That means the odds of Judaism, Christianity or Islam being the true religion are negligible.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Drawbacks of Religion

Religion has the following drawbacks:

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Dreck

Christian literature is so insulting, both to the intelligence of the reader and to the creator of the universe who allegedly approved the dreck for publication.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Dripping With Insincerity

The very thought of Christianity makes me nauseous. It is so sickly sweet, dripping with insincerity and kitsch. It is the spiritual analogy of cheap sugar donuts.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

droite du seigneur

The way Christians talk about god’s will reminds me of droite du seigneur in historical Eastern Canada. The landowner had the right to screw anyone he pleased. In England, the King had that right too. Everyone just let him do it because there was no way to stop him. Christians don’t realise Yahweh is imaginary. They are caving in to fate. They imagine they are powerless. They act as if they had no ability to help themselves. They become totally passive. It is disgusting.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Dropping Belief

What does it take to convince a Christian to drop his belief? Same thing that did it to Darwin — the death of his daughter, Anne. Christians live in a warm fuzzy bubble imagining they are protected and loved by the sky god. When loved ones start dying horribly, that belief becomes untenable. Their folly does not dawn on them until their loved ones die. They don’t get it just watching others suffer. Does god hate them for no reason or was god a childish fantasy?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Dropping Religion

Dropping religion does not mean ignoring everything in life that science does not cover. It just means dropping the BS, the lies, the claims to know that which is unknowable. It means dropping the arrogant certainty.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Drugs and Christians

Consider people who take illegal drugs like cocaine, heroin, LSD, ecstasy…

Consider how closely that list matches the characteristics of Christians. Perhaps Christians have found some non-drug way to addle their minds, mimicking the effects of drugs.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Dunning Kruger

The Dunning Kruger experiment shows that the most incompetent people invariably rate themselves as better than average. This also applies to Christians who are incompetent in knowledge about religion. This gives them unwarranted confidence in their conclusions.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Duty To Orphans

So long as there is a single child on earth without a loving parent, it is immoral to spawn yet another.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Dying

When your computer dies, the data on your hard disk does not go anywhere. It is just irretrievably damaged. Similarly when you die, one or more of your crucial body parts is irretrievably damaged. That failure triggers a chain reaction fatally damaging all your other organs, including your brain. You don’t go anywhere; you just stop functioning, like a broken computer. Without an immune system to hold them in check, bacteria rapidly multiply and you start to rot like the piece of meat you are. There is no evidence for an afterlife. It is just wishful thinking for people too squeamish and conceited to accept that their death is no different than the death of any other animal.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Early Christianity

Starting about 500 BC, there were dozens of Christian gnostic sects. Modern day Christians assert Jesus was born 500 years later or 0001-12-25. They had all kinds of diverse beliefs about Jesus. The Marcionists asserted Jesus descended from heaven, without having a childhood. Others believed him to be a spiritual being who had been celestially crucified and risen without ever taking a step on earth. There was even a sex orgy cult. Most were gnostics who believed you did not need priests and bishops. You just needed to meditate, and any knowledge you needed would flow into you.

In 315 AD Emperor Constantine called the Council of Nicea. He wanted a new religion to unify the Roman Empire. He picked bits of the various Christian sects (mostly those who believed in a literal Jesus) and bits of various sacred writings. Then he ordered burned everything else. He and his successor enforced this new standard Catholic Christianity on the Roman empire by burning heretics and burning non-canonical writings. This violent suppression of diverse belief went on for 900 years.

Archaeologists have found many of the banned documents hidden in the deserts by the early gnostics. The people of the first century were in violent disagreement about whether Jesus was a human who walked on earth or a spiritual celestial being without a body. It would be arrogant of us to dismiss the issue out of hand.

By the way, Jesus is a Myth click to watch
~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Early Impressions of Jews

My early impressions of Judaism were based on watching our next door neighbours. They were relaxed, easy-going-people who did all manner of interesting things like woodwork, making wine, exotic foods, jazz and modern art. Later influences were Jewish comedians and Jewish delis. Jews struck me as a very strange target for discrimination.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Early Religion

The early priests pretended to know the will of the gods. What they were actually doing is guiding the people to do what the elite families wanted them to do.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Earth Cannot Survive the Parasites

Our earth is in such bad shape right now, it cannot survive with people actively trying to harm it or doing nothing to protect it. Earth can no longer afford parasites who dedicate their lives to selfish pleasures or trivia such as fashion, money, sports, cars and hunting. It is like chores needed to maintain a house. It works fine if everyone does their bit.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Easily Faked Miracles

It is interesting that the god Yahweh never heals burns, facial deformities or amputations, even though, reputedly, these would be trivially easy. Instead he performs only cheap miracles, easy to fake like healing blindness, deafness or lameness, or cancer when there is no diagnosis before or after the alleged merkle. Which is more probable, the miracle was faked or the creator of the universe, after a lifetime of ignoring your every prayer, decided to pull a spectacular miracle right under your nose for a stranger at an event intended to pry you loose from your money?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Easter Bunny

Nobody can disprove the existence of even the Easter bunny. So why do Christians make such a fuss over the fact nobody knows how to prove the non-existence of Yahweh? They seem to be claiming that inability is a serious reason to believe in the reality of the Easter bunny.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Easy to be God in Roman Times

In biblical times, people thought the emperors of Rome were gods. They were pretty gullible back then. Obviously, the emperors did not have to do anything supernatural to gain this status. I think we should take with a grain of salt any presumption of godhood during the period.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Easy Cons

Why are cons so successful? Why don’t people back out when they begin to get suspicious?

The Church’s Con

A church is an ancient, polished, sophisticated con. The con men promise eternal bliss and threaten eternal torment to extort money. The con is so old and so successful it is never prosecuted and even atheists generally do not recognise it as a con game. The clergy are a privileged criminal class. The church scam has promise of huge reward like a pyramid scheme and promise of magical dire calamity on defection like a chain letter. To play, you must donate money supposedly for God, which, of course, is nonsense. The Church staff spend it. Televangelists are notorious for the frivolous luxuries they spend it on (art, multiple jets, limousines and mansions) In addition, marks must also do a number of easy, silly, random things, like eat fish on Friday or pray to distract them from the basic con.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Eating Meat

If Christianity and god are eternal and unchanging, how did it come about that eating meat on Friday suddenly became OK?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Ecclesiastical Drag Queens

The Catholic church is run by ecclesiastical drag queens who have conned the poor into paying for their gowns.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Eclipse

For the eclipse of 2017-08-21 religious con men tried to bilk the flock by claiming the eclipse was a sign the earth was coming to an end. The charlatans did not mention there are 2 to 5 solar eclipses each year.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Effect of Belief

Do people behave better when they believe or when they do not? Norwegians are atheists. They have the lowest crime rate in the world. Americans are rabid Christians. They have the highest crime rate of any western country. Even within the USA most of the people in prison are Christian. There are hardly any atheists in prison, way lower than the number you would expect.

The more religious people are, the more likely they are to sexually and physically abuse their children.

Apparently, belief causes crime. Why would that be so?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Effect of Christianity on Behaviour

Christianity makes people behave worse. Here are two examples:

  1. Christian soldiers have less reluctance to kill because they harbour the delusion that killing people is only temporary. They believe their victims will rise again after death.
  2. Christians feel no pressing need to interfere when a priest molests a child because they believe the god Yahweh will punish the priest severely after he dies. For the child, it is just another of God’s tests.
~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70) Deliver Us from Evil

Effect of Religion

If it were not for religion, humanity would be much more advanced.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Effect of Religion

Religion is designed to turn a believer’s mind to mush by force feeding it nonsense. The believer can then be lead about like pig with a ring its nose with no will of his own, unaware even of his own self interest.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Effect of Religion

Religion makes people cling like limpets to ideas that are obviously not true.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Effect of Religion

A statistical study at the Jesuit Creighton University discovered that religiosity in democracies is associated with homicide, juvenile mortality, STD infection rates, teen pregnancy and abortion. It is a lie that belief in Christianity makes people behave more morally.

The quality of life is best in non-religious countries e.g. Canada, Sweden and Norway.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Effect of Religion on Morality

Christians like to claim that without Christianity public morality would go to hell. It turns out the very opposite is true. The more Christians there are the worse morality gets. You can see this in the statistics for countries or for various parts of the USA (Louisiana is worst). The more Christians, the more teen pregnancies, more repeat teen pregnancies, more abortions, more divorce, more tolerance for torture, more child abuse, more robberies, more assaults, more murders… It is not just that Christianity fails to improve morality, it makes it much worse.

Why would this be so? I speculate that Christianity makes people more dogmatic and inflexible. It makes them feel entitled and hence prickly. It cons them into thinking a suitable ceremony can undo the effects of any wrongdoing. Because they believe everyone lives forever, they don’t take murder as seriously.

You would think if Christianity made people behave better, there would be relatively few Christians in jail and a great many atheists (relative to their predominance in the general population). The actuality is the exact opposite. There are almost no atheists in jail.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Effects of Faith

Faith does not make you a better person. It makes you an irrational person who does cruel things without thinking them through.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

eGod

The bright yellow god helmet stimulates a spot in the right temporal lobe with a varying magnetic field creating an extremely strange subjective experience which Christians interpret as god’s presence. How long will it be until the faith healers develop this technology to the point they can use it to bamboozle the flock into handing over their life savings just by putting their hands on the sides of the mark’s head.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Ejecting False Ideas

It is much easier to accept a false idea than to eject one.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Elderly Vulnerable To Christian Threats

Why are the elderly so vulnerable to threats of hellfire?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Eliminating Christianity

I support the legal right of Christians to practice their faith. However, I also want to use non-violent means to wipe Christianity from the face of the earth. Why?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Eliminating Faith is More Important than Eliminating Religion

When atheists say they want to get rid of religion, they don’t really mean that. They just want to get rid of faith, believing firmly in things without evidence. Religion has all kinds of wonderful things part of it: music, art, ceremonies, fragrances, costumes, myths, stories, choirs, communal suppers, knitting socks for orphans, fund raising for various good causes, food banks, banquets, holiday traditions, sermons, moral codes, traditional foods… None of these things cause trouble. They enrich everyone’s life, not just the followers. The problem comes when a religion makes stuff up, claims, without a spec of supporting evidence that it is absolute truth and then claims everyone else who did the same thing is full of shit, and should be punished for it.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Eliminating Religion

Sociologists have found that religion is correlated with dysfunctional societies, e.g. extreme income inequality, corruption, lack of justice, lack of medical care, high infant mortality… People can’t get the solace they need from their societies, so they look to imaginary sky fairies. This suggests the way to rout the scourge of religion and its attendant aggressive ignorance is by improving the general conditions in society. They are clinging to narcissistic, grandiose images of the human place in the cosmos. We need to help them replace them with more realistic views.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Embracing Bronze Age Science

Of all the industrial countries, only the USA has embraced bronze age science and rejected evolution. This garbage education will eventually have consequences when the generation charged with running the country are incompetent to do so.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Embracing Error

If you go to school and learn about geography, you expect to have your existing beliefs challenged and corrected. Americans think that faulty beliefs about science, religion and to some extent medicine must be left undisturbed simply because there is a constituency who believe untrue things. They don’t care if these beliefs are actually true. They don’t care if they can’t give any evidence for these beliefs; they want their kids to believe them, even if they are wrong. This pig-headedness sends the international education rank of the USA, lower and lower each year. This will eventually be reflected in economic rank.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Embracing Faith

Embracing faith is like taking a mild acid trip. You stop experiencing the universe as it is, and start experiencing it as you would like it to be or sometimes as it is in your paranoid fantasies. This can be pleasant or comforting but it impairs your ability to make predictions, to function rationally and to attend to self-preservation.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Embracing Falsehood

Christians believe they are morally obligated to either ignore or force themselves to believe the parts of the bible they know are untrue. Swearing loyalty to lies to me is tantamount to swearing loyalty to Satan. What the heck are they doing?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Emotion of Certainty

Science has discovered that certain belief is an emotion. It even knows where it is generated in the brain. It is not a rational process. You might say that asking someone to give up false certainty is like trying to get them to forgo sexual pleasure.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Emotions at Death

I can see nostalgia, regret or sadness at facing the end of your life from natural causes, but fear??? Surely that is only possible if you have allowed yourself to be conned by unscrupulous Christians.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

The Emperor’s New Clothes

Christians tell their children the fairy tale of the Emperor’s New Clothes, never noticing it is an allegory about the fundamental Christian dishonesty.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

The Emperor’s New Transubstantiation

Hans Christian Andersen may have written The Emperor’s New Clothes to spoof the phony miracle of transubstantiation where priests claim to convert wine and a cracker into the blood and flesh of a dead man. It is not even a magic parlour trick. Nothing happens, yet people pretend there was a change to be considered holy, just as the townspeople in the fairy tale pretended to see the emperor’s clothes in order to be perceived as wise and competent.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Empty Promises

Christianity promises to heal the sick and feed the hungry, yet it almost never delivers. Oddly, people cling to these empty promises rather than supporting those who are actually healing the sick and feeding the hungry.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Empty Prophesies

The belief in prophesies that predict wars, famines, floods and hurricanes is so lame. Was there ever a year without wars, famines, floods and hurricanes? It is like a prophesy predicting rain or income tax.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Encounter with Ernest Angely

I once asked the televangelist faith healer Ernest Angley Why is god waiting to heal all these people? He responded by shrieking that I was possessed by the devil and commanded his bodyguards to throw me out onto the street. The truth was too embarrassing to reveal. His phony healings are best staged to maximise contributions. It is important that Mr. Angley and his special status with god, get the bulk of the credit.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Encountering a Con Man

When I encounter a religious con man like Jimmy Lee Swaggart, Ernest Angely or Peter Popoff defrauding elderly ladies, I feel a similar anger to that I would feel had they snatched their purses.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Encountering Woo

When I was a child I reasoned that likely mankind knew only a tiny fraction of what was knowable. Therefore, I should expect to encounter all sorts of baffling things like UFOs (Unidentified Flying Objects), ESP (Extra Sensory Perception) and ghosts that we might gradually figure out. However, in practice, any time I have encountered anything outside normal, nearly always it turned out to be trickery and fraud.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Encouraging Superstition

Every time you use the word luck or bless, you are helping spread superstition.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

End the Free Ride

Most of the churches teach hate, intolerance and all manner of wickedness, and that does not even count all the batshit crazy stuff. They should do this on their own dime, but they sponge off the community. The community pays for their police protection, water, fire protection etc. They pay no taxes. The constitution prohibits the government from favouring religions. Surely tax exemption is a huge favour. It should be abolished as unconstitutional. Why should people who find various church doctrines utterly odious be forced to subsidise their foul messages? It is like forcing people to bow down to false gods.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

End Justifies The Means

The problem with a utopian ideology, is the end is so attractive, there is no limit on the atrocity it justifies to attain it.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

End Kosher and Halal

Slaughter using Kosher and Halal rules originally provided for more humane slaughter and somewhat more sanitary killings. Today Jews and Muslims defend these techniques based on nothing but tradition. They realise these ancient techniques are less humane than modern techniques. They claim the Kosher and Halal slaughter are painless. We know that is not true by asking any human who had their throat slit. They are fighting against the spirit of Kosher and Halal. I don’t see any reason to humour them in this cruel behaviour.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

End Times Christians

End times Christians eagerly await nuclear war and encourage the end of planet earth by every conceivable catastrophe. I wish these criminally insane people would just commit mass suicide with Kool-Aid and leave the earth to the rest of us who want to preserve and cherish it.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

The End Times Con

Harold Camping

Christian con-men, in particular the late Harold Camping (1921-07-19 2013-12-15 age:92) bilked Christians over and over with his fake predictions of the end of the world, with his irrefutable evidence and sonorous tones. In the year 1000 con men convinced tens of thousands of people to give them all their property and goods since they would not need it, and it would encumber ascending to heaven. The con was revived for the year 2000. Barely five years ever pass without someone pulling a variant of the con, such as the 2012 end of the Mayan calendar which Mayans took as no more important than your car odometer kicking over 100,000.

What baffles me is why people fall for this con, time after time, then they have seen this con fail hundreds of times in the past. It is almost like Charlie Brown trusting Lucy van Pelt with the football, again and again. Matthew 24:36 say absolutely nobody knows when the end times is coming. That should shut up the Campings of the world, but it does not.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

End-Of-Life Plans

I think it wisest to tell no one of your end-of-life plans. That makes it more difficult for some busybody to interfere with your written directives.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Ending the World

One of the standard ways to pump up the popularity of a young cult is to pick a date and claim god is going to end the world. When the date passes, you make an excuse and pick another date, or just say it is real soon now. This is exactly what the JWs did. They picked 1914 as their end of he world date.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Endless Repeated Assertion

People have been debating the existence of the god Yahweh for perhaps 6000 years. If there were any decent evidence, surely it would have been presented by now. There is utterly nothing, just endless repeated assertion.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Endless Repetition

Christian BS becomes truth through endless solemn repetition.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Ends and Means

Because Christianity is a delusion, it is wise to eliminate it from the land. However, it is improper to kill Christians, or harm them in any way. We should treat them with the same compassion we treat other people with delusions. Legitimate techniques for eliminating Christianity include:

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Enforcing Infancy

Christian schlock teaches, If you want to make god laugh, tell him your plans. What an idiotic thing to say! as if having no plan at all is preferable. Christianity is a plot to keep people in an infantile state, easy to manipulate.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Enjoying Heaven

Listening to music over and over, no matter how good, is nauseating. Imagine being in heaven, playing harp and being forced to sing compliments to Yahweh forever. This is ultimate boredom. This is torture. It could only be considered pleasant in contrast with eternal hellfire.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Enjoying the Waning of the Church

It is highly unlikely all the Christian churches will disband in my lifetime, however, I work to that end. It may be possible to at least see they enjoy gradual negative growth.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Enough Life

I think of life as a bit like an amusement park ride. By the time it is over, you have usually had enough. You would not want it to go on forever.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Ensuring You Are Wrong

If you want to be fairly sure you are right, you have to charge someone with the job of proving you wrong.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Entitlement

Christianity developed a monumental sense of entitlement in its followers. They expect god, like some cosmic nanny to provide for them and clean up after them even beyond death. Metaphysically, they are deadbeat welfare recipients. God, like some corrupt government, does not provide the promised goodies, but the followers, like lottery ticket buyers, reassure themselves, the money is coming, real soon now.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Entrusting Children

The main lesson that has come out of the Catholic church scandal, is that it would have been much safer for parishioners to entrust their children to random strangers than to priests.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Envy

One of the functions of religion is to temper the envy of the old for the young. The young can perform all manner of extreme sports and extreme sex, even if they are outrageously rude, selfish and stupid. Religion has to provide some myth to justify this inequity.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Equal Rights for Christians

Equal rights for Christians! Christians deserve the same rights as any other delusional people.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Equal Treatment for All Religions

The way I read it, the first amendment requires the government to be blind to a person’s religion. They may not discriminate for or against any particular faith, including atheism. That means the government should not be able to treat a group of secular humanists who meet every Sunday any differently from a group of Southern Baptists. In other words, churches avoiding property taxes and churchgoers getting a tax deduction for contributions should be declared unconstitutional unless the secular humanists were to get those perks too. Put more bluntly, it is wrong and should be illegal for Christians to freeload off everyone else with special privilege based no nothing more than their religion.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Eradicating Faith

Think about how smallpox was eradicated, with millions of mundane inoculations. The eradication of faith will be done similarly, with millions of insignificant interventions.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Escape Into Fantasy

Ghastly experiences in  made famous Christian apologist C.S. Lewis become an atheist. However, he could not stomach the grimness of reality and took flight into fantasy. He concocted the delusion that imagination was a valid way of knowing truth and started to believe his own fantasies. He then decided to merge his fantasies with Christian fantasies. I consider him a despicable weakling who decides what is true, not on evidence, but on what he wishes were true.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Escaping the Sewer of Christianity

Man’s gradual escape from the insanities of Christianity is like crawling out of a sewer.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Esoteric Knowledge

Christians love to tell me that they, because of their religion, have access to esoteric knowledge, that I, as an atheist, cannot access. Muslims, Mormons, Hindus… tell me the same thing. If this were actually knowledge, in the sense of facts about the universe including any supernatural activity, the various religions should agree. They don’t. Therefore this cannot be knowledge. It is made up bullshit without value other than as fiction.

Christians deal with this problem by claiming their religion is true, and all the other religions are made up. The other religions do the same thing. However, I can’t see any reason to dismiss the other religions and swallow Christianity without question. There is simply nothing special about Christianity. Further, Christians have no means to demonstrate their esoteric knowledge is true.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

The Essence of Religion

The key thing to understand is religion is a con. A group of con artists get together and pretend to speak for god. They use elaborate buildings, costumes, wealth displays, music, smoke… to impress and bamboozle. They make fabulous threats and promises that, surprise, are granted only after death. Priests convince people to hand over their kids for molestation. The con artists convince their marks they must be obeyed because they are merely relaying god’s commands, not manipulating the flock for personal gain. Their goal is to strip those bilked of money and power. Sometimes the con men even convince their victims to fight and die for god.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Essential Christianity

The core tenet of Christianity is that, as a Christian, god loves me best, therefore my desires and needs trump yours. You must defer to me and do as I tell you.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

The Essential Problem for the Religious

The essential problem for the religious is Christians and Muslims have no case whatsoever. If they want to put up some resistance they must mount a straw man argument or simply lie. It is very hard not to feel extreme contempt for the religious when they do nothing but cheat in debate.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Estimating the Unknown

The Christians presume the unknown is filled with whatever they wish it were. They then lie and pretend they have absolute proof for their wild speculation. As a result, they are far too optimistic in estimating the unknown. In contrast, the scientists tend to ignore the unknown and don’t want to count on it containing any good news. The net result is they are too pessimistic in estimating the unknown.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Eternal Bliss

Supposedly heaven is like an overdose of fentanyl with eternal bliss. But Christians say if you perform good deeds like donate to charity anonymously, you will receive a special reward in heaven. What more could a Christian bliss-junkie want?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Eternal Christian Guilt

In 415 AD, Cyril, the bishop of Alexandria in Egypt, later St. Cyril, falsely stated that the astrolabes constructed by Hypatia, astronomer, mathematician and professor were intended for divination and that she was a witch. A mob of Christians took shards of pottery and ripped the skin from her body killing her. The least the Catholic church could do is rescind Cyril’s canonisation and the accusation.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Eternal Life

Eternal life sounds boring in the extreme. A more appealing perk for joining a religion would be do-overs. You get to relive certain moments in your life say up to 100 times. You could relive pleasant moment, or correct awkward moments.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Eternal Life

Eternal life! For pity sake! Grow up! Stop being such a child! There is no reason whatsoever to imagine you will not die. Touch a dead person. They are like a cold piece of meat. They are not coming back. Besides, you would not like eternal life. Eternity is much longer than the longest imaginable time. You would be monumentally bored. There would be no way out. Stop fearing death. Being dead is completely painless. It is just like the non-existence before you were born.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Eternal Life

Go away you evil Christians and your promise of eternal life. Eternal life is a curse. Hell is eternal torture. Heaven is eternal boredom. Who wants to live for eternity with every thought monitored by Yahweh, demanding you do nothing but praise him, surrounded by conceited Christians? I would far sooner prefer oblivion. Besides, Christians present not a stick evidence they can provide anything after death. They are simply making it all up to con gullible people out of their money. Look at the trillions they have already sucked out of mankind with this con.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Eternal Life

You don’t want eternal life. Eternity is infinitely longer than the age of the universe. Eternal life is infinitely boring, and you cannot die no matter how much you are bored with your life. If you are a Christian, all you get to do is sing praises to Yahweh. I would be sick to death of that after 15 minutes. Think how boring your companions would become after a mere 10 billion years. I want to live here on earth because there are so many things I want to accomplish. In heaven, there is nothing to accomplish. There is no motive to continue living. but you cannot die. Star Trek NG did a great episode on this problem when a member of the Continuum was terminally bored. You might want to live 200, 500 or even 1000 years, but there is no way you would enjoy living for eternity.

The churches have been running this classic con for millennia. They claim they can offer eternal life if you tithe to them. They offer no evidence they can or will deliver. The Christians have already milked this scam for trillions of dollars already. The irony is, the alleged prize is a living nightmare.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Ethical Standards

You would think a religion would specify the minimum acceptable standards for ethical behaviour. However, Christians and Muslims treat their religions as specifying the highest permissible standards of ethical behaviour.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Ethics of Belief

It is unethical to lie. Therefore it is unethical to pretend to believe something that you know is not likely to be so. Therefore it is unethical to profess a religion.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Euthyphro dilemma

Plato pondered Is the pious loved by the gods because it is pious, or is it pious because it is loved by the gods?

My answer is the question is meaningless because there are no gods. What is good is determined by consensus. Gods are just a bamboozling technique to get others to accept your moral code.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Evading Vice

Nietzsche pointed out that the way Christians dealt with misfortune, weakness and vice was to rename them and pretend they were virtues. For example: sexlessness ⇒ purity; weakness ⇒ goodness; submission to people one hates ⇒ obedience; not being able to take revenge ⇒ forgiveness.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Evaluating Claims

We should judge religious claims the same as any other, e.g. were there really hanging gardens in Babylon? Was there really a Noah’s ark? Does the Mafia fix football games? Does the god Yahweh fix football games based on which fans pray most?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Evaluating Religions

One way to evaluate religions would be to monitor how frequently in each day their clergy laugh.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Even Christians Know that Trusting God Is Mad

When a Christian sets out on a dangerous undertaking with absolute trust God will protect him, he is mad. He knows full well God does not routinely protect people from harm and Christians experience just as much mishap as anyone else.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Every Person You Ever Loved

Every person you ever loved was made of ordinary atoms obeying the standard laws of physics. Weren’t they amazing! Why would anyone complain the loved one was not enough, and demand some imaginary magic sky fairy sprinkles on top?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Everyone Disrobe

The racist Conservative Party have enacted a regulation that Muslim women must disrobe for citizenship ceremonies. (They must remove the veil they consider necessary for public decency.) I suggest a modest proposal. If Muslims must disrobe, so should everyone else, including the judge. After all, Christians can hide firearms, bottles of acid and bombs under all that unnecessary clothing.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Everything You About God Some Human Told You

Christians (and Muslims for that matter) don’t seem to understand their beliefs have absolutely nothing to do with a deity, but 100% with what other people told them. They confuse their trust in whatever created the universe with their trust in fellow fallible humans including a large helping of scoundrels eager to exploit the gullibility of their fellows.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Evidence

Christians believe 1000 metaphorical stories and outright lies are worth more than one fact in substantiating an assertion.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Evidence

If a state decides to make rejecting the state religion illegal, it behooves the state to post a list of the evidence for the state religion. I know of no religion with any evidence whatsoever. Perhaps this exercise would give them second thoughts.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Evidence

In a debate, theists never present evidence. The closest they come is saying I have done no study of science or history. I find the universe baffling. The only way I see it could work is using a skyfairy, or perhaps three skyfairies and a team of angels. And two of the skyfairies have to be named Yahweh and Jesus. The third one must not have a name. And I flatly refuse to read anything about how the universe runs itself with natural law. I also refuse to learn anything about any other religion. I know that would be all lies without even looking. Even if you just asked me to look at something in nature, that too would be a trick.

If you were a five year old child who had never been permitted to study the world around him or learn about science, that is just the sort of fairy story you would concoct. It is retarded.

Why is their only conceivable explanation so Christian-centric? How insanely paranoid to refuse to even look at the case for science! Christians are the ones trying to fob off a phony world view, not us atheists. Why would all the non-Christians conspire against Christians. Christians suffer under the delusion they are the center of the universe. They imagine nobody has anything better to do than think about Christians and how to deceive them. Christians are projecting their own lying and deceit on everyone else. How could all the non-Christians conspire? How could all the scientists and engineers of the world run it so successfully with a totally bogus system of knowledge? Think it through!

Christians forget, we atheists will give you way more evidence for science than you could possibly read. Yet you won’t offer us even one sentence of proper evidence or even a valid argument. You have already conceded the flat earth, the lack of a firmament, the lack of a celestial ocean, the non-existent pillars holding up the earth… You have already conceded the bible science is utterly wrong, e.g. that dove blood in the best way to cure leprosy. Why are you so stubborn about the age of the earth, the great flood and evolution?

Do you seriously believe that the training your surgeon took was all just devil worship? Why do you then let him cut you open? You are stark raving bonkers. Perhaps you could find a biblical surgeon who did not use anaesthesia, scrub up or sterilise his instruments.

It is amazing Christians can’t come up with even one fact to support their giant edifice of fiction. If they want to convert people, they are going to need at least a dozen facts. Imagine going into a court case without a single fact to back up your case. The judge would throw you out. We atheists are much more tolerant than judges. We debunk the feelings you give us and ask for true evidence. We give you as many chances as you need. I know why Christians find this so difficult because the deeper I dig into Christianity, all I find is more evidence why it could not possibly be true. I find absolutely nothing to support it. Why should Christians be able to find something to support this nonsense? Christians might as well be extolling an Archie comic book as the word of god.

Over the centuries, non-believers have convinced Christians to ignore the most barbaric and sadistic parts of the bible. If it were not for Christians conceding some of the faults in their bible, we would still be burning witches.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Evidence

It is quite amusing watching religious fundamentalists debating with atheists. The fundamentalist makes a supernatural claim, stating it as if it were some ordinary historical fact like Caesar crossed the Rubicon in 49-01-10BC. The atheist asks for evidence to support the claim.

Thinking that everyone shares his believe in the perfection and absolute authority his scripture, he quotes some scripture. The atheist replies, No, I meant corroboration. e.g. archaeology, other ancient manuscripts, civil records, astronomy…. The fundamentalist replies But I am totally convinced. I am 140% sure in my heart. Why won’t you believe me?.

The poor fundamentalist confuses feeling convinced (which is simply a side effect of his early brainwashing) and having evidence for his claims. He is convinced by the feeling of conviction, which has nothing to do with the truth of this assertion, and certainly nothing to anyone else. Think how many times when you bought a lottery ticket you were sure this time you would win.

Two thirds of people on earth reject the bible as authorative. Nearly all the ones that do were brainwashed into thinking that as infants before they were old enough to notice what nonsense it was and how it is completely counter to fact.

Imagine you were a sasquatch enthusiast. You had never seen one yourself. You had no photos, hair, DNA, scat, bones, fossils, cave paintings… However, you had a book, written anonymously, claiming anonymous people in the deep past had seen them. The book did not explain how the author discovered this information. How successful would you be convincing others that sasquatches exist doing nothing but quoting from this book? Your odds are similar quoting from the bible.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Evidence for Christianity

Consider the evidence you would require to convince you that sasquatches exist. Surely you should require equal quality evidence to believe the Christian story. The Christian story is far more far-fetched. But then look at the crap Christians offer up analogous to:

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Evidence for Confabulation

According to scholars, the epistles were the first part of the New Testament written. They make no mention of Mary, Joseph, the nativity, the star, the wisemen, the disciples, Bethlehem, Nazareth or even the crucifixion, not even a passing reference. This suggests to me these details may have been added later.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Evidence for a Demonic Deity

If you must have a deity, there is much more evidence for a demonic one than a loving one.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Evidence For God

Christians make up the silliest excuses for why there is no evidence that Yahweh exists. The reason Yahweh gives you no evidence of his existence is the same reason unicorns do not. They do not exist. Like all the other religions, Yahweh is a work of human fiction. Why should Christianity be the only exception in the 60,000 religions of earth?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Evidence for God

I have heard only one plausible, honest argument for god — the fine tuning argument. Christians almost never use it because they don’t understand it. It is generic. It works equally well for all religions. Scientists are the ones who came up with it. The rest of the arguments remind me of con games of the street people of New Orleans. Most of them are straw men claims about what science says. Oddly Christians can swallow talking snakes and talking donkeys, but have great trouble with the big bang, which is mathematically fairly well understood.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Evidence for God

I would find it convincing evidence for god if all on one day all creationists choked to death on a chicken weiner.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Evidence for God

When you consider all the bat-shit crazy, proven-false things Christians assert, when they say Believe in god because we do this is actually evidence for Yahweh’s non-existence.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Evidence for Life After Death

What is the evidence for life after death?

What is the evidence for death after life?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Evidence for Yahweh

If you ask a Christian what evidence they have for the existence of Yahweh or why they think Yahweh is more likely to exist that any of the other 60,000 gods, the closest you will get to an answer is Sure as shootin’, your gonna roast in hayell. I am 120% sure of it. In other words, they have no evidence at all, but at the same time claim to be utterly sure they are right. To me that is as nuts as if they claimed with complete certainty there were purple whales with yellow polka dots wearing pink tutus swimming in the Bay of Fundy even though they had not even a photoshopped image to support this odd contention.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Evidence god does not exist

Evidence that god exists:

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Evidence of Massive Prayer Failure

Think of all the people in all the concentration camps in WWII. Surely they prayed and begged their god for deliverance. Yet they went to their deaths by the millions. I consider that evidence prayer does not work.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Evidence Please

When you are debating with an atheist, they will often ask, What is your evidence for that? They are not demanding some mathematical formula or proof. All it means is Why do you think that is true? You can answer it by:

You will not get very far if you say I just know in my heart even if it is the reason. That assertion does not produce any like emotion of certainty in their hearts. Some people assure you they are absolutely certain they are going to win a bet on a horse race, but in actuality have nothing more than a feeling of certainty, which can be extremely intense, but with nothing to back it, leading them to rash action. Convincing evidence would be something you know about the horses or the owners, or the race being fixed. The state of your brain hormones is irrelevant to anyone else.

Trusting intense feelings alone is like emotional reasoning: He is good because I love him very much. or He is wicked because I hate him. You might more rationally say I love him very much because he is good. or I hate him because he is wicked.

You will also not get very far if you say Everybody already agrees with what I said. The person who asked for evidence most likely does not agree, or they would not have asked for evidence. He is politely offering to change his mind, if you will but share the reasons for your thinking as you do, (or of course he is hoping to demonstrate to you that you hold your beliefs for invalid reasons and you probably should adopt ones more in sync with reality). In either case, he acting for your benefit. If you cannot offer any reasons, it would be rather foolish of him to abandon his current views which probably have some weak evidence backing them. Further, it would be rather foolish of you to hold onto such admittedly baseless ideas so fiercely.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Evidence Yahweh Does Not Exist

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Evil Bastards

Christians are such evil bastards. The great irony, is they are completely unaware of it.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Evil Christianity

One of the reasons Christianity is evil is it teaches your behaviour does not matter. All that matters is blind faith with all doubt erased.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Evil Condoms

The Catholic church teaches South Saharan Africans that using condoms is extremely wicked. Why? They want the maximum number of babies to become new Catholics. The catch is millions of adults die each year in the region of HIV. If they are dead they cannot have babies or raise babies, so this makes no sense.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Evil God

Christians try to pretend their god is all knowing, all powerful and perfectly good. However, that is incompatible with all the evil on earth. Zeus and friends don’t have this problem. The Greeks made no claim their gods were beneficent.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Evil Institutions

What sort of things might an evil institution do?

Does that sound familiar?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Evil Spirits

Even the nominally monotheistic religions all have their Satans and evil spirits. They are like snapping sheepdogs used to herd the gullible into the god belief trap by snapping at their heels. Even the rabidly monotheistic Islam has a menagerie of imaginary beings: Jann, Jinn, Shaitans, Ifrits and Marids.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Evil Yahweh

Christians insist their god is just. But he:

It is utterly cowardly and disgusting that anyone would worship such a bastard or lie that he was just.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Evolution

The people most convinced that evolution is wrong have gone to extraordinary lengths to make sure they did not learn a single thing about it and also to stop their kids from doing so either. They must think it is probably right, but don’t want to be persuaded, or they would not be so afraid of learning about it. They want to be wrong!

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Evolution of the Belief in Life After Death

The Neanderthals covered the dead and red ocher and buried them. The Cro-Magnons included goods in the grave. I speculate the original purpose of the grave goods may have been just a way to show respect, similar to retiring the number of a hockey great. Later it would have evolved into the myth the goods could be used after death.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Evolution of Monotheism

The middle east started out polytheistic. However, some people attached themselves to Yahweh Sabaoth, (god of the armies) hoping for special privileges. They encouraged others to follow suit and to drop worship of other gods such as Baal and Asherah. Eventually, this evolved into monotheistic worship of Yahweh. Exodus 18:12 says Yahweh is greater than all the other gods, indicating at that point the Israelites were still polytheistic. Yahweh evolved from a local polytheistic god of war. Therefore he could not have existed before the big bang as Christians claim.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Evolution of Religion

Humans partake in two flavours of evolution, ordinary genetics and cultural evolution. Culturally, we have evolved religion. Why? Because it makes us better at warfare. (We don’t fear death. We are more ruthless with outsiders.) The warfare ability enhances our survival. Nobody said evolution is supposed to generate sweetness and light, just survivability.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Evolution of Religious Nonsense

Imagine a very primitive society. Somebody says What do you think happens to all the birds in winter? This is a totally novel question. Someone will come up with an answer very like what a child would come up with. It becomes the official best guess. Over time, it gains more and more prestige as the answer. Humans have a worship of past wisdom, for good reason. It worked. We survived believing it. It is foolhardy risking survival with untested new ideas. So that speculation gets stuck as absolute wisdom.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

The Evolution of Sacrifice

How did this god idea get such a foothold in man’s imagination? Possibly, long ago in Mexico, someone decided to leave some of the choicest kernels of primitive corn for the ancestor spirits by burying them. Over time this practice acted much like natural selection to improve the corn plant. Here is one of the extremely rare cases where a sacrifice actually did work reliably. It would seem quite plausible to a people without any understanding of genetics that the improved corn was a thank-you from some beneficent invisible entity.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Exactly One God

There are only two honest positions on the matter of gods existing. Either you believe all 60,000 exist or you believe none exist. If you claim just one or some exist, then you need evidence to treat some gods differently. If you claim only one god exists, you also have to show it is not an undiscovered one. Nobody ever presents such evidence.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Exaggerated Respect For Corpses

Christians and Muslims have an exaggerated respect for corpses. They are willing to risk the lives of teams to recover a corpse killed in war or in an accident. They are more concerned about damage to a corpse than damage to a child. This is odd. Their religious beliefs tell them a corpse is just a lump of decaying ape meat. It is not conscious. It is not unconscious. There is no soul present. There is no life left.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Exaggerated Respect for Corpses

One of the oddest things about Christianity is its superstitions surrounding death. They treat the dead with greater respect than the living. The are far less likely to speak ill of the dead than the living. They are more likely to comply with the wishes of the dead than the living. They get more upset about desecration of a corpse than they do an attack on a living child. They consider rape of a corpse a more serious crime than rape of a living person. This is all part of their fantasy that dead people are not really dead. It is part of the play acting to keep up the pretence.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Exalting the Irrational Over the Rational

When a group claims they have a religious reason for being treated specially, what they mean is they don’t have a reason. They just have always done it that way and want to continue. For example, we indulge those who don’t want to wear protective headgear when riding a motorcycle, pharmacists to refuse customers who do not share their religious views or who refuse military service for religious reasons. Yet we do not indulge those who want the same exemptions for actual reasons, such a protective headgear makes them claustrophobic, they believe such some medicines to be harmful or who oppose killing people on the grounds it just leads to more killing. We exalt the irrational over the rational.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Exalting the Murdered

Isn’t it strange how only the nicest people are ever murdered.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

The Exception

Christians find atheist arguments completely convincing, for all gods but one, namely Yahweh. They can never explain why the arguments do not also apply to Yahweh or what makes Yahweh unique. If they treated him like his contemporaries, Christianity would disappear overnight. I suspect they have been conditioned to fear Yahweh, much like a phobia of spiders. On a gut level they are utterly terrified of offending him, even when they are fairly sure he does not exist.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Exceptions to Discrimination Laws

The notion of religious exceptions to anti-discrimination laws, i.e. that religious people, such as Kim Davis, should get a get-out-of-jail-free card to exempt them from anti-discrimination laws, is absurd because nearly all discrimination is driven by religion. It would be equivalent to abandoning anti-discrimination laws altogether. Even non-religious discriminators could concoct some phony religious motivation for their discrimination and get off. Because the excuse is religious, it does not have to make sense.

The Kim Davis Story click to watch
~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Excess Fear Of Death

Christians tie themselves in knots with fear of death. They make up lies to help themselves pretend it won’ happen to them. Think, without death evolution would be impossible. The only time there can be change is when one generation gives way to the next. Even if natural death were eliminated, there would still be accidents and illness. You would caught off guard, with death sneaking up on you. If we lived to 1000 years everyone would be old. It would be a very rare event to see a baby. Political views would be stuck as they were 1000 years ago.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Excess Religious Freedom For Christians

I have a sincerely held belief that Republicans should not be entrusted with the care of children. This is not one of those baseless religious beliefs with no evidence. It is based on actual observation of Republicans. My rights are being violated when Republicans care for children. They must stop because my pain is far more important than theirs.

If I were to be an asshole and sued in the USA to stop Republicans from having children, I would think the judge ask himself, How much pain and inconvenience am I undergoing to see Republicans caring for children? How much pain and inconvenience would Republicans experience having their kids taken from them? The judge would then tell me to get stuffed.

However, this greater pain reasoning is not happening in court cases. The judges are Christian and thus always side with the Christians even when they have no case. They rule to allow Christians to force Christianity and Christian superstition down the throats of non-Christians. This is unconstitutional, but the judges pretend not to notice. Christianity has a way of anesthetizing the rational mind.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Excessive Influence

In England, only about 3% of the people attend church. Yet there are 26 bishops in the house of lords voting on bills that affect everyone. That is improper.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Excessive Morality Causes Violence

Christians imagine a lack of morality causes violence. The reverse is true. When someone feels someone else has not behaved up to their moral code is when they are most likely to take the law into their own hands and administer violent revenge. The problem is having too touchy a sense of morality.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Excluding Atheist Rights

Christian bigots want to legally define religion in a way that excludes atheism, so that the constitutional freedom of speech, freedom from government suppression and equal treatment granted to religion will not also apply to atheism. They wish to suppress and censor atheism by defining it as hate speech. How could they define them?

religion
a baseless, irrational set of beliefs about an undetectable controller or controllers of the universe for which there is not a shred of evidence.
hate speech
publicly disagreeing with Christians on any matter. Failing to show sufficient deference to Christian beliefs.
~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

My tongue is only partly in my cheek.

Excluding Women

Why are Catholic priests so reluctant to permit women into the clergy and to allow priests to marry? Very simple. The Catholic clergy is the world’s largest paedophile ring. Why else would men promise never to marry or have sex with any adult for the rest of their lives? If they were allowed to marry, paedophile priests would be pressured into marriage and their wives would never put up with them molesting children. They want a closed club without whistle-blowers of either gender.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Excuse For Atrocity

Once you are convinced you have god on your side, you are capable of any atrocity.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Excuse for Conning the Poor

Christian clergy excuse themselves for conning the poorest of the poor of their money by saying they give them hope of a better life in the hereafter. That is not a valid excuse. Secular con men too offer hope of a better life and do not deliver.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Excuse to Procrastinate

Prayer is just an excuse for procrastination. It is a way of shoving responsibility for your own failure onto an imaginary god’s shoulders. It is the ultimate loser life philosophy. It is like jumping out of a plane with a pretend parachute.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Excuses to Bully Others

If you enjoy being shocked, outraged, offended or insulted, you will enjoy fundamentalist Christianity or Islam. It will give you thousands of new excuses to force others to bend over backwards to placate your whims.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Excuses For God

God does not answer prayer. Test it for yourself. You don’t get what you ask for any more frequently than if you did not ask. However, over and over again in the bible, God promises to grant every single prayer, no exceptions. You don’t have to be sinless or even good. Click to read the precise promises:

Matthew 7:7-8
Matthew 17:20
Matthew 18:19-20
Matthew 21:22
Mark 11:24
John 14:14
John 16:23

These promises cannot even in theory be true.

In addition he promises to keep you from all harm in Psalms 121:7-8.

How do you reconcile this?

  1. God does not exist.
  2. God routinely breaks his most solemn and frequently repeated promise.

Neither of these two explanations is acceptable to a Christian, so they try lawyerly means to weasel out of the conundrum. One technique is to claim god did not promise to grant prayers but merely to answer them with:

They claim god doing nothing is a tacit way to answer no. They claim this counts as responding to the prayer. God nearly always tacitly says no.

This is nonsense for two reasons:

  1. Read your bible. God did not just promise to respond to all prayers, but to grant them.
  2. If I write to Santa Claus and ask for a pony, and he writes back and says no, that is answering. If he fails to respond to my letter, that is ignoring it. You can’t change the meaning of the word answer only in the context of prayer just to get god off the hook.

Try again Christians.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Excusing Bad Behaviour

One of the primary functions of religion is to allow people to behave badly and feel profoundly virtuous about it. Obvious examples are the Crusades, the Inquisition, the Salem witch trials and the Jewish invasion of Palestine.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Excusing Christian Violence

If a modern cult advocated even a tenth the mayhem the Christians do, the ATF (Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives) would send in bulldozers and flamethrowers.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Exemptions Only For Irrational Reasons

In countries where voting is mandatory, there is a religious exemption. Oddly, you cannot be excluded for a reason but you can for a superstition.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Existence of God

Any argument Christians give for the existence of Yahweh is based on what he allegedly did 13.82 billion years ago, 6,000 years ago or 2,000 years ago. They never argue some observation about Yahweh relevant today. Today, Yahweh never tweaks the universe. He never does anything. He does not even grant prayers as promised. Yahweh might have lived in the past but he is either non-existent, dead or comatose now.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

The Existence of God

To Christians, the debate over the existence of god is about the thin possibility some vague superbeing being might exist. To atheists, the debate over the existence of god is about the lack of evidence for the existence of Yahweh as defined in the bible, and the probability that Christians who wrote the bible were lying.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Existence Of A God Is Not the Same as Existence of Yahweh

Christians don’t understand the difference between evidence for a creator and evidence for the god Yahweh. Evidence for a creator is no more evidence for the god Yahweh myth than it is for the Pele myth.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Exodus Fraud

Christians tell us with a straight face that Moses wandered in the desert for 40 years with 2 million people. That is a crowd about the size of Houston Texas. Think how much food they would need every day, how much fuel, how much water, how much waste they would produce, how much sewage. Think of how many railway cars, trucks, planes and super markets are needed every day to serve modern Houston. They would have needed the low-tech equivalent in Moses’ day. The crowd was bigger than the most massive army of ancient times. They would have needed monumental supply lines. Yet archaeologists, despite a century of searching, have found absolutely nothing, not a skeleton, not a scrap of garbage, not a goat bone, not a button to mark their passing.

It is 209.21 km (130 miles) from Egypt to the promised land. Why did it take Moses 40 years? My dad trekked 80.47 km (50 miles) a day by horse. You would expect Moses to make at least 16.09 km (10 miles) per day. At that rate, Moses should have completed the journey in three weeks (or less) not 40 years. Most of the route is easy to follow along the coast. This is a tall tale.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70) Dr. William Morgan debunks Exodus among other things click to watch

Exodus Silliness

It is 209.21 km (130 miles) from Egypt to the promised land. Why did it take Moses 40 years? At the time of Exodus, Egypt occupied the promised land. So Moses could not very well leave Egypt. There was not much point in seeking refuge there.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Exorcism Dingbats

The Pope updated exorcism rituals in 1999. Half of Americans tell pollsters they believe in a literal devil. 10% claim to have communicated with him. What a bunch of dingbats!

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Expecting a Miracle

In the movie The Immigrant the preacher assures his Swedish-speaking flock that god will cause them all to speak English as soon as they land in America, so there is no need to study it. One teenage boy is skeptical and works to learn basic knowledge on the voyage. Of course, the entire group is dependent on the boy when they land. Christians hold the most preposterous notions about the infallible wisdom and knowledge they are supposed to automatically acquire, e.g. the exact age of the earth, merely from subscribing to the Christian myth.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Explain Cuckoos

Cuckoos lay their eggs in the nests of other birds for them to raise. Astonishingly cuckoos lay eggs that look almost identical to their hosts. Religion cannot in any way explain how this happens. Science can. Hint: in mammals females have XX chromosomes and males XY. In birds, females have XY chromosomes and males XX.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Explain the Unfairness

The world is incredibly unfair. It could not be that way if there were a just omnipotent god. The only explanation is there is no such god.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Explaining Disagreements

Is it not an amazing co-incidence that the god Yahweh always agrees with 100% certainty with anything a preacher says. But then, how is it possible that preachers disagree with each other so violently? Does Yahweh change his mind every microsecond? Could it be possible the preachers are all lying, that they have no evidence at all that Yahweh agrees with them? But then, with a character of fiction, such as Yahweh, it is somewhat ill defined what his beliefs are.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Explaining vs Selling

When a Buddhist talks to me about Buddhism, I get the impression he is trying to explain something. When a Christian talks to me about Christianity, I get the impression he is trying to sell me something.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Exploiting Science for Evil

It is ironic that evangelists use the latest science to deceive and influence people to accept blithering nonsense, crank science and hand over their money.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Extortion

Imagine if the Mafia started a new extortion racket. They persuaded people they had implanted devices in their brains that let them monitor every thought. The demanded money and obedience. They said they had enforcers on earth, in hell and in heaven who would make them a misery for eternity if they did not play ball. They would also make people hand their children over for sexual favours. I wonder how many boobs they could con?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Extortion

What if you heard about an organisation what was extorting people out of a tenth of their lifetime income, payable weekly. To enforce this, the organisation threatened to torture the person and their family. Would you consider these people criminals? What if I told you they also demanded you hand over your children for sexual abuse, including rape, what then? What if I told you these people pretended to be a benevolent organisation and called themselves the Catholic Church?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Extortion Racket

Christianity is an extortion racket. It is a Mafia protection racket in velvet gloves. The church says, Give us regular payments and do as we tell you in your every waking moment, or our enforcer will roast you alive for eternity.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Extraordinary Evidence

It is not that Christians refuse to provide extraordinary evidence for miracles, they can’t even provide any ordinary evidence. The evidence they provide is hearsay, passed anonymously through an unknown number of hands to be written down a century or so after the fact, then translated, copied and recopied by people editing, deleting and adding. You should not expect any higher fidelity than a rumour passed down a chain of the telephone party game. The resulting copies have tens of thousands of significant differences. For heaven sake, hearsay is not even admissible in traffic court.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Extraordinary Evidence

While it is true that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, that is not the problem with Christians. They don’t have any evidence.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Face the Facts

You have two choices, face the facts of what is most realistically likely to happen to you, or clutch onto some religious fantasy where the future is magically rosy. The catch is most religious fantasies offer you poor odds. They assert it is much more likely a truly hideous fate awaits you.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Factless Facts

The Songhees aboriginal people who lived where I do for hundreds of years before the coming of the white man, used to carve wooden boxes without tops. The bottom had a circular hole. At low tide people would line the boxes up along the ocean, hole up and do their business. High tide would remove most of the feces. A special slave class had to clean the boxes.

You don’t believe me? What if I told you I was 110% sure? How dare you call me a liar! Of course, this is complete BS. This is the way Christians debate, but just making up facts out of thin air as they go.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Fading Catholicism

According to CatholicsComeHome.org, world wide, 70% of baptised Catholics do not practice the religion.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Fading Religion?

Think how many incorrect/superstitious beliefs shared by nearly everyone have already faded away: flat earth, witchcraft, ghosts, fairies, curses, the evil eye, amulets, earth is the center of the universe, demons, alchemy, telekinesis, penis enlargement pills, palm reading, breast enhancement creams, clairvoyance, salt spilling, telepathy…

To go: homeopathy, faith healing, miracles, supernaturally weeping statues, snake handling, angels, life after death, prayer, crystals, pyramid power, seances, Friday 13, dowsing, religion in general, saying gesundheit when someone sneezes, astrology… Wishful people makes people cling to nonsense, even when they know it is nonsense and can see no possible mechanism it could work.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Failed Intuition

Religious people are willfully ignorant. They have no comprehension of the reality that the laws of the universe are very different on the very small and very large scale, or within a few million years of the big bang. Intuition simply fails. They imagine the entire cosmos has to behave the way it did last week in their back garden.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Failed Prayer

Every Christian knows that in the bible, god promises to answer every single prayer. Every Christian has prayed for someone with a serious illness only to have nothing happen or the disease get worse. Fundamentalist Christians claim every single word of the bible is perfect truth. But these do not add up. Christians can pretend they are consistent only by pretending not to notice their prayer had no effect. They can accept that god made a promise then did not keep it. Or they can accept that god is a work of fiction and has no power to answer prayer.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Failing Common Sense

When a Christian says, The universe could only have come into being by the agency of something outside the universe, something supernatural. what he really means is According to my common sense, according to my intuition of what is possible, the universe could only have come into being by the agency of something outside the universe, something supernatural.

If he has studied relativity, he is aware of how the universe on large scale spits in the face of common sense. For example, a twin can become drastically older than his brother. Nothing can go faster than light. Things that go very fast get heavier. Yet we know this craziness is true because the world-wide GPS system depends on relativistic corrections to clocks.

If he has studied quantum mechanics, he is aware of how the universe on a small scale also spits in the face of common sense. An electron can teleport from place A to B without going through the space between. Particles can just pop into and out of existence. A photon can pass through two separate slots at once. Yet we know this insanity is true because computers depend on it.

If he has studied radioactivity, he is aware how radioactive decay can be predicted statistically, but individual decays (Geiger counter ticks) are completely random and causeless.

Christians, if your intuition is so utterly wrong about things we have already discovered here on earth, how dare you be so sure your intuition is valid in such extreme conditions as the beginning of the universe. You have not the first clue how it should behave, you arrogant twits. And most of you know that, but that does not stop you pretending you do. You are such dishonest shits.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

The Failure Of Hell

In theory, you would think the threat of hell would make people behave better. But in practice, it does not work. Americans, who are mostly Christian, have one of the highest murder rates on the planet. Norwegians have one of the lowest and they are atheists. Proportionately there are almost no atheists in American prisons. Nearly everyone there is a Christian.

The more religious people are, the more likely they are to sexually and physically abuse their children.

What is going wrong?

Christians often argue that the universe would be horribly unfair if there were no hell. Therefore both hell and Yahweh must exist. What they are saying is because they would strongly prefer it if were a hell, the universe is constrained to provide one. That is just wishful thinking. It is the logic of a terrible twos toddler having a tantrum. It is like saying There must be pony waiting for me in the back yard because I demand it be so.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Fairies and Gods

If I have a conversation with a Christian and tell him I am quite sure there are no fairies. He will say I agree. If I say I am also quite sure Yahweh is a character of fiction. He will say But you cannot prove he does not exist. So what? I cannot prove fairies do not exist either. You cannot prove anything except in math, just show evidence. I am quite sure Yahweh does not exist for the same reason I think fairies do not exist — namely that I have never heard any evidence for their existence. Why should Yahweh be treated as a special case when it comes to determining existence?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Fairies vs Angels

Christians assure me that with absolute certainly angels exist and fairies do not. I don’t see that such certainty is justified. A fairy is just a small angel and an angel is just a big fairy.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Faith

Christians tell us they have no evidence that Yahweh exists or that the teachings of the church are true. We must take them on faith. Doing this without question is a highly wise and virtuous thing to do. If you must accept god by faith, then surely accepting other things by faith is a good idea too like: holocaust deniers, climate change deniers, flat earthers, homeopathy, anti-vaxers, Christian Scientists, Bernie Madoff, Donald Trump, cold fusion, perpetual motion machines, cars that run on water, eternal life… Maybe the same reason faith/gullibility is not a good idea in the real world is the same reason you should not be so gullible about religion and taking on faith whatever the Christian salesmen tell you. It is the nature of all con men (religious or secular) to talk you into having faith and to act huffy when you doubt them.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Faith

To the con man, the characteristic most desired in his marks is gullibility. Religious con men renamed it faith to make it sound more palatable. It means easily believing BS without evidence. It is a type of self-deception.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Faith

The enemy is not religion, but faith. Faith is absolute conviction in the untrue without evidence and counter to evidence.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Faith

Faith is going to great effort to believe things that are patently untrue because someone convinced you it was the virtuous thing to do.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Faith

Faith not only requires belief without evidence, it requires ignoring contrary evidence.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Faith

Faith is the refusal to consider evidence in deciding what to believe.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Faith

Faith is roughly a synonym for gullibility. When Christians try to sell their ideas, they urge their customers to have faith. It sounds better than asking them to be more gullible. Faith is only necessary in the absence of evidence. It is mostly used to encourage someone to believe something preposterous.

Asking people to have faith is a part of an ancient con. Faith has an implied vague, but substantial reward. The appeal of faith is the bogus reward for faith is so juicy, you should pretend to believe, and work hard later to actually believe, and to actively deny all reasons to reject the belief. You are not supposed to impartially judge the proposition, but to vigorously convince yourself to accept it, because of some mysterious benefit that will accrue if you believe it.

Churches have worked hard to polish the word so that people think of faith as something positive (by confusing it with reasonable trust) instead of something associated with chumps, suckers, dupes and patsies.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Faith

If you allow people to act simply because their faith demands it, you are giving them a licence to commit evil, for example, permitting Christians to harass gay people or giving them the right to burn witches.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Faith

Imagine if someone said I believe in sasquatches. When you ask why they reply You have to have faith. This is a non-answer. It means you should believe for no reason other than I believe. It is a appeal to be gullible. Faith is not a technique for determining truth. Faith is not a technique for determining truth. It is a technique for closing your eyes and believing nonsense purely to please crazy people.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Faith = Gullibility

Christians have a special word for gullibility to make it easier to sell as a virtue to their marks. They call it faith.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Faith and Gullibility

Every religion has a holy book. Christians tell us to ignore them all except theirs. They command us to believe only their book, without question. They give no reason why theirs alone is reliable. They can offer no corroborating evidence their book is true. They make dire threats if you persist in considering their book just a myth. Further, they have no plausible explanation for its many errors and inconsistencies, given that it is reputedly inerrant, authored by the creator of the universe. Christians call believing under duress without evidence faith. Everyone else calls it gullibility or sometimes abject capitulation.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Faith and Gullibility

You need faith to believe it. That is just another way of saying You have to be gullible to believe it. Faith is believing something just because someone told you, without evidence. In normal life, gullible people are idiots. In religion, the con men have tricked the marks into thinking gullibility is a virtue.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Faith is Arrogant

Faith is necessarily arrogant. If you pretend you just know without evidence, that is like claiming to be omniscient.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Faith Based Schools

Schools should not be permitted to indoctrinate children with religious superestitions. Failing that the government shoulsd not fund such indoctrination. If parents want it, let them fund their own religious schools.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

The Faith Con

Con men don’t want you to look too deeply. They will give you every excuse in the book to avoid letting you check up on them. Hint. All professional Christians are con men. They try to make gullibility into a virtue by calling it faith.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Faith as Euphemism

Faith is exactly the same thing as gullibility. However, religious people prefer the term faith because it cloaks how disgusting gullibility is.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Faith Healers

Did you ever notice that faith healers never work in hospitals with seriously ill people? They work with people ambulatory enough to get themselves to a faith-healing rally. They also work only with diseases without visible symptoms. You know people are healed only because they say they are. I once went to a Ernest Angley rally. After the healing, the old ladies all returned to their wheelchairs. They could all walk a little all along.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Faith Healers

How about practicing on rats first.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Faith Healing = No Healing

Faith healing means denying medical care. It is a religiously-motivated form of torture.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Faith in Falsehood

Christians often tell me that even if Christianity were not literally true, they would try very hard to believe it. It makes them feel good. I find this attitude odd. I can’t think of any other sphere but religion where people extol being wrong. Drugs also make you feel good, but that alone is not sufficient reason to embrace them.

Christians imagine that their faith makes them behave better, but by any objective measure, they behave worse than non-believers. Why would this be?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Faith in Falsehood

The most pathetic Christians are those who, when they discover that something they believed as part of their religious faith is completely and utterly false, pray for the faith to continue believing it as true.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Faith in Science

A Christian imagines that non-believers trust the scientists as blindly as they trust the bible, but with science, you have the option of at any time into digging into precisely why science believes what it does. It just takes study. Further, you can ask random people who were able to dig deeper than you were to see if they thought what they discovered was sound.

If a scientist publishes a paper with an error, it is profoundly embarrassing, probably marking the end of his career. Even when thousands of errors are found in the bible, nobody blinks an eye. Apologists make up strained excuses to pretend the errors are not there. Because there is such a different attitude toward error, science is much, much more reliable.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Faith in Yahweh vs Zeus

Christians admit they have no evidence that the god Yahweh exists. They take it on faith. They have no evidence Zeus exists either. Why not take Zeus on faith?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Faith Or Evidence

Con men like Ken Hovind try to sell you the idea you do not need evidence, that faith is better. Of course a con man would do this; he has a heck of a time finding evidence to support his lies. He needs an excuse for not having any evidence.

Relying on faith simply does not work. Consider that the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle puzzled where birds went in winter. He reasoned they must bury in the mud all winter to keep warm. People believed him, based purely on faith of his authority, for thousands of years even though it was complete nonsense. Aristotle trusted the first conjecture that popped into his head. He failed to seek evidence to support or debunk his hypothesis.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Faith as Skill

First, Christians tell me the scientists are mistaken and that primitive tribespeople were right all along in that the universe is actually micromanaged at the whim of invisible intelligent beings.

Then they have the cheek to insist that the alleged master controller of the universe is infinitely kind and merciful. Have they never been nauseous? Have they never had diarrhoea? Have they never been seriously ill? Have they never had a toothache? Have they failed to notice that animals are compelled to eat each other?

And to top it off, they allege all manner of impossible and absurd miracles for which there is no evidence at all, such as the story of Noah’s ark and the flood.

They treat the ability to pretend to believe all this nonsense, faith, as a sort of skill, like juggling, that I ought to develop.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

The Faithful Are Cruel and Stupid

Those who praise the Haitians for their faith in God are cruel and stupid. Any supposed God thoroughly abandoned the Haitians. It would be foolhardy for Haitians to put any more trust in him. Further faith in God is what caused the troubles in the first place. The Haitians trusted a totally indifferent God rather than sound engineering to protect them from earthquakes.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Fake Crutch

Believers often claim they could not cope with life without the crutch/lie of religion. They have never tried. What kind of a crutch is it that you know deep down is fake? Imagine using a fake crutch when you break your leg.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Fake Mermaids

J. P. Barnum used fake mermaids to draw in the crowds; churches use fake miracles. The crowds would not come without the lies.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Fake Trig

I was trained as a mathematician. What if a group of grade 5 students put out an Internet page called Math Simplified? It purported to teach trigonometry and calculus. The catch was, these students did not know the first thing about trig or calculus. The formulas were all wrong. They made this all up using an ouija board. I would be distressed at this nonsense interfering with people trying to get a math education. I would try to argue with them and persuade them to take the BS down. They would tell me this was their opinion, and it was just as valid as mine. I would explain their formulas are simply wrong. They don’t calculate the correct answers. They could test that easily.

This is how I feel about Christians. They make hundreds of claims that are flat out wrong. They lead people to make foolish life decisions. They take a devilish joy in promoting untruth.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Faked Miracles

How many Christians are properly aware that when they go to see a movie about miracles, every last one of them was faked with Hollywood technology.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Faking Action

Prayer is like those fake screensavers that employees can rapidly flip on to fool the boss they have been working. Prayer appeals to the laziness in humanity. To others it looks plausible you are doing something useful, but you are doing something pointless, but approximately as easy as resting in a chair.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Faking Divine Approval

In theism, God does not define the morality. A small number of people who found the religion define it. It does not fall out of the sky on titanium plates. Ordinary humans write it down and con others to believe a god wrote it. These founders have enormous weight. They can influence thinking about morality for thousands of years. People are terrified to update their thinking or augment it because they fear divine retribution. That is primarily why Christianity has become so evil. It is extremely out of date.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Faking Divine Favour

When I was young and handsome, I once attended a group of plump middle aged women who claimed they could communicate with the dead. They competed for my attention by pretending ghosts were pinching them. Christians do the same thing to impress each other by pretending God gave them private messages, when all that really happened is they heard a commanding voice inside their head, much like the nagging internal voice of a parent.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Faking Profundity

Christians will often believe any nonsense written in King James English. The famous fraudster Joseph Smith discovered if you put eth on the end of each word, the gullible will swallow it as absolute truth.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Falling For Faint Promises

When you reach a certain age, you are faced with grim facts: you will probably experience more and more pain, you will have less and less energy and you are never again going to have sex with people who look like porn stars. No wonder people succumb to empty promises of afterlife bliss from the Christians and Muslims even if they may think there is only a one in a trillion chance they are true.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Falling Prey To Religious Superstition

The way people so easily fall prey to religious superstition makes me ashamed to be a human.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

False Alarm Holy Spirit Visitations

The instant someone mistakes a pleasant bodily feeling as the holy spirit giving specific instruction, they are well on their way to madness.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

False Certainty

Feeling certain is not the same thing as having evidence. People can feel certain even about how dice will come up.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

False Christian Pride

Christians who imagine they are automatically morally superior to non-Christians need only consider public figures who profess to be Christian and look how they behave.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

False Claims

Christians are often patronising, claiming that only they have the refined sensibilities to appreciate something so esoteric as god. We atheists are not disputing claims of esoteric experiences, just with false claims Christians make about science, such as the age of the earth and whether a supernatural being will correct the problems of global warming.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

False Memories

False memories are just as vivid and believable as real ones because all memories are reconstructed from the bare outlines.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

False Morality

Christine O’Donnell, the Tea Party/Republican candidate for the Senate in Delaware in 2010, is a typical hypocritical Christian. She suffers from scrupulosity in sex. She organised a group called SALT (Strategic Arms Limitation Talks) to promote virginity and to suppress masturbation, then she improperly used campaign contributions for her rent and other personal expenses and stiffed her campaign workers their agreed wages. She is delusional. She imagines herself much more moral than average.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

False Question

Asking What is the purpose of the universe is bit like picking up a rounded rock by a river and asking What tool was this rock shaped to be? You are erroneously presuming that some intelligence deliberately shaped it. Just the mindless erosion of the river water rounded it, with no intent to use it for some purpose once it was sufficiently spherical.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

False Reassurance

When is it proper to give reassurance when you have no idea yourself how things will turn out?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

False Superiority

Christians imagine they are superior to everyone else because they are divinely ordered around.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

False Training

A traditional society uses carrots and sticks to ensure its members act in ways that help that society to flourish. However, in North America, corporations have usurped this function for the goal of increasing profit. They teach that disposable is cool, and conspicuous waste is how to prove your worth.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Familiarity Breeds Contempt

If chunks of the universe had a habit of winking out every once in a while the reappearing some time later, the religiously minded and the lay folk would not be fascinated by the big bang. The reason they consider it so magical is that, so far as we know, it happened only once. Such uniqueness demands fanfare and gods to celebrate it.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Fanciful Creatures

Minotaurs, satyrs, centaurs, fairies, trolls, leprechauns, unicorns, Pegasus, the Gorgon Medusa, gods… It is so utterly preposterous that grown men still debate the existence of such obviously fanciful creatures, for which there is no evidence.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Fat Gospel Singers

Why does God smite almost all gospel singers with gross obesity? You’d think people who performed such athletic music would be unusually trim.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Fate

When someone claims that some dreadful circumstance is their fate, what they are actually saying is Some all-powerful sky god has it in for me, so there is no use struggling. This is a terrible delusion that makes people needlessly give up.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Fate of a Child

About the only fate worse for a child than being born to drug addicts is to be born to fundamentalists. Not only are they abused, they become abusers.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Father of the Antichrist

John Nelson Darby (1800-11-18 1880-04-09 age:79) was a British evangelist who invented the Antichrist myth. He is one of those people Shakespear meant of when he said The evil that men do lives after them. The good is oft interred with their bones.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Faulty Intuition

Our intuition says things don’t just pop into existence without cause. Yet on the quantum level, it happens trillions of times a second. Our intuition was conditioned in a world of middle-sized objects where this just does not happen.

We are like a person raised in a desert denying the possibility of oceans. We are like a person who had never used a microscope denying the possibility of germs.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Favouritism to Fruitcakes

Constitutional freedom of religion gives special privilege to irrational religious people. There are all manner of laws that do not apply to members of particular religious sects, e.g. that you must have a photographic driver’s licence to drive, or that you may not carry a knife. Yet rational people must comply with them. This is unfair favouritism to the fruitcakes. The whole notion of religious exceptions to law is a sham since anyone can claim to believe any nonsense necessary to challenge a law they don’t want to obey. It should work this way. If a fruitcake religious person gets a special right, everyone gets it, even if they don’t care to use it.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Fear

Christians have a natural fear extreme heights, just like everyone else. Christians have a fear of getting in a car with a drunk driver, just like everyone else. Christians avoid swimming near great white sharks, just like everyone else. What does this mean? Christians are just afraid of dying as anyone else. They do’t really believe that BS about going to heaven after you die. It is just lip service.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Fear of Christians

One of my boyfriends, a Philippino, was so afraid of Christians he insisted on walking seven paces behind me whenever we were in public. He did not want them assuming we were a couple and causing trouble.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Fear Of Christians

Though Darwin had formulated his theory of evolution by natural selection by 1837, because of his fear of Christians, he procrastinated publishing it until 22 years later in 1859-11-24 in Origin Of Species. Even as it was, they mercilessly personally attacked him.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Fear of Death

Fear of death is a manufactured by religion. It is a childish fear of some sadistic deity. If you have ever had an operation under general anesthesia, you know what being dead is like. It is nothing, no experience of any kind, not even dreams. It is not in the least scary or unpleasant. What is scary is dying, surrounded by people whose religious beliefs insist they keep you alive and in extreme pain.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Fear of Death

I was raised atheist. I had no trouble with fear of death. I don’t like growing old. I don’t like not having time to accomplish everything I planned. The thought of Christians forcefully keeping me barely alive for years with tubes up my nose is horrifying, but being dead is not in the least scary. The only thing fearful about death for some people is the threat of a vindictive cruel god waiting for them to punish them for masturbating or breaking one of his other idiotic rules. I have already been dead, both before I was born and on the operating table. Nothing happened, not even a sense of the passage of time. The only things it makes sense to fear must happen when you are alive.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Fear of God vs Fear of Christians

I am no more afraid of Yahweh the god than the cookie monster. Christians, on the other hand, are scary. They are succeeding in destroying the planet with their prideful ignorance.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Fear of Gods

Putting the fear of gods into a child is as reprehensible as deliberately instilling a phobia of monsters under the bed.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Fear of Hell

The first argument a Christian uses in trying to convert me is Pascal’s wager. It is an empty threat to kowtow to a corrupt god, just in case. I have been listening to dozens of deconversion stories. The last thing to go in deconversion is the just in case fear of hell. Hell turns Christianity into an extortion racket. It should be prosecuted. Extortion should be illegal, even when done in the name of religion.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Fear of Metric

The USA and Belize are the only two counties still using Imperial measure. Why? American Christians have a superstitious fear of metric based on the fact it was devised by French atheists.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Fear of Yahweh

When I was a preschooler, my mom took me to see Walt Disney’s Snow White. During the scene where the witch climbed the mountain with the vultures circling, I hid under my seat in terror. When I was in university, I went to see Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho. I found it not nearly as scary as advertised. Now I am 70 years old, no movie seems that scary.

When Christians were pre-schoolers, their moms terrified them with tales of Yahweh and how he planned to torture them with fire for eternity. However, they failed to outgrow this childish fear. They never took the time to look at the threat rationally. It was too scary to even question much less reject. Christians are like superstitious people unwilling ever to take a chance by stepping on a sidewalk crack, even though rationally they can see it could not possibly cause any thing catastrophic.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Fearing for Atheists

What the god-besotted are saying is Given that god exists and is such a bastard, anyone would be nuts to tease him by saying he does not exist.

But of course, atheists don’t look at it that way. They are sure there is no god. They are surer there is no god than they are sure Emperor Palpatine (of Star Wars) is a fictitious character. Christians are acting like nitwits, slavishly following the dictates of a villain of fiction. Christians live in a world terrified of Emperor Palpatine.

The Christians do not understand they have no reasons at all to believe in this god. The only reasons they believe anyway is peer pressure and childhood brainwashing with threats of torture.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Fearing a Good Thing™

The dangers that cause people to go into a blind panic are usually not dangerous at all, e.g. tarantulas. Christians strongly fear a lack of an afterlife or lack of a punishing god. If they could relax and examine these fears rationally, they would realise acknowledging these actualities is liberating.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Fearing No God

Christians tell me they find the idea of a universe without a god terrifying. This makes no sense. A universe with a god tortures all but 144,000 male virgins for eternity. A universe with a god meddles in the expected unfolding of events. A universe without a god is straight forward. It is not treacherous or sadistic.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Feeling Bad About Dying

The main reason someone would feel bad about dying is that they have not got much accomplished in their life. Christians waste their lives on pointless activities. No wonder they are so afraid of dying and cling to false promises of extensions.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Feeling God

Christians often tell me that god appeared personally to them. When I probe, what they mean is they felt an intense, pleasant, warm, squishy feeling in their chest. But that is not god. God creates universes. God answers prayers. God knows everything. God is beyond time and space. That was just a warm squishy feeling.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Feelings

I have discovered that Christians do not care if what they believe is true. All they care about is whether believing makes them feel good. So here are some arguments why Christianity will make you miserable, not why its tenets are false.

If you believe in Christianity:

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Feigned Offence

Religions protect themselves from critical examination by teaching their adherents to affect massive offense when anyone even asks what the evidence is for some religious belief.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Feigned Victimhood

Humans were once prey animals. Our sense of morality is based on that. Before we humans commit any atrocity, we ritually claim we are a victim. It takes on ridiculous proportions e.g in Iraq where the USA claims it is defending itself from invasion. Sometimes a nation will even put on the charade of a false flag attack on itself to claim the virtue of victimhood.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Feigning Respect

If a group of people at a public meeting reverently mash up bananas and pack them into their ears and nostrils, am I obligated to pretend to take this seriously out of respect for these loons’ beliefs? I think not. Similarly I don’t see why I have to feign respect when Christians with pained expressions of reverence and lowered eyes petition the sky god to bend the laws of causality with a magic incantation. Christianity is just as silly as the banana mashers and far more malevolent.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Fighting Back

If Christians are going to force their propaganda down our throats for the entire month of December every year, I think it is perfectly fair to dedicate the month to exposing what bullshit it all is.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Fighting Bullies

Since bullying happens when adults are absent, the #1 thing you can do to stop bullying is to teach kids they have a moral duty to join forces to defend a victim. Even a reprimand from a third party is usually enough to stop a bullying event.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Fighting Evil

Beating up gays, treating women as second class citizens, raping children, female genital mutilation… are all evils. We should oppose them no matter what the motivations of those who promote them. Religion is just another name for ignorant tradition. It is the least valid of reasons to justify cruelty.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Finding Noah’s Ark

Claiming to have found a splinter of Noah’s ark is as silly as claiming to have found Paul Bunyan’s blue ox, Babe’s collar or Thor’s hammer.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Finding Others

What if we find a group of planets that have intelligent life sharing a language philosophy/religion. Our claims that the entire universe was created purely for man’s delectation will seem utterly mad.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

The Fine Tuning Argument

The fine tuning argument (that various universal constants, if different would have generated a universe that does not sustain life) is one of the most persuasive arguments the believers have ever used. The argument came from science. The latest multiverse thinking is ours is only one of impossibly many universes. Ours just fluked out with constants for our form of life. Other values might have generated other forms of life. Nearly all other universes do not have life.

Further our universe is not perfect. Only a tiny fraction of our universe supports life. Most of it is near absolute zero vacuum. If it were designed for life by an omnipotent god it would be a much better fit. Many Christians assert there is no life but on one planet in trillions of galaxies and planets, hardly fine tuned for life. There are many other technical arguments against the fine tuning argument. Scientists don’t take it seriously.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70) The Fallacy of Fine-Tuning: Why the Universe Is Not Designed for Us

First Life

The first life on earth got started about a billion years after the earth formed. From a astronomical point of view, this is almost instantaneously after the earth cooled sufficiently. Abiogenesis was no big deal. Christians have no problem believing life appeared in all its forms on the same day the earth formed, but they are certain the scenario gleaned from looking at the data must be impossible. How would a science-allergic Christian have the remotest idea how long it should take? All they ever do is blindly quote an ancient book written by ignorant desert dwellers, an extremely crude forgery of the work of the creator of the universe.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Fishy Partial God

There is something not right about a god of the universe presenting himself as a member of a particular tribe and pulling divine strings for that tribe to the detriment of its neighbours. I would expect a god of the universe to be more universal and impartial.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Flag Worship

Christians are not supposed to worship idols, but they do it all their time in their reverence for flags. Americans have many laws commanding respect for flags as if they were religious leaders, including giving them burials.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Flag Worship

Exodus 20:3 says You shall have no other gods before me.. Nearly all American Christians ignore this by treating a different religion with much greater respect. I refer to flag worship. There are all kinds of rules about the flag:

Sometimes these rules are enforced in law.

Flag worship is tied in with anthem worship. When the anthem is playing, you must stand with you hand on your left chest and stare straight ahead like a deer in the headlights.

When football players protested racism and police brutality by kneeling on one knee during the anthem, half the nation went berserk in outrage. You would think the players had sacrificed a baby. In contrast, they had no outrage at all about 3 million people in San Juan being left to thirst and starve to death without help, presumably because they were Hispanic.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Flat Earth

Christians routinely lie to me that they believe every word of the bible, 100%. They pretend to forget that the bible says the earth is flat, covered by a metal bowl called the firmament, with holes in it for light to shine through to form the stars. The sun and the moon are glued to it. Above that is a celestial ocean. How do you know that could not possibly be true?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Flavours of Con Artist

Funeral directors, used car salesmen, faith healers, sellers of weight loss potions, politicians, sellers of hair restoration potions, preachers… What do these have in common? They are all commonly con artists, but rarely prosecuted.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Flavours of Lies

There are four kinds of lies:

  1. dissembling
  2. withholding crucial information
  3. outright lying
  4. passing off rumour or unsubstantiated information as certainty

Nearly all of what the church says is a type (4) lie. So there is no such thing as good and bad religion. It is all bad. It is still lies. All churches attempt to delude their followers. They attempt to make them crazy by believing things that plain are not true.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

The Flaw in Christianity

Christianity has only one really serious flaw — none of it is true.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Fleecing the Flocks

American preachers lie to their flocks who have lost their jobs or their homes telling them that god will provide new jobs and homes if they but have faith (i.e. continue to tithe). This holds down the gullible as passive patsies for manipulation by Republican plutocrats and Christian con men. The flock sit with their thumbs in their orifices waiting like sloths for a god who never does anything.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Flipping the Bird

If you are an atheist, and a Christian says to you I’ll pray for you., this is the Christian way of flipping you the bird.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

The Flock

One of the most common Christian metaphors is the shepherd and sheep. Christians here are being usually candid. Shepherds shear, slaughter and eat their sheep.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Flowers Prove God

J. Lee Grady
J. Lee Grady

Naïve Christians such as J. Lee Grady claim the existence of flowers proves the existence of god because god must have designed them for the enjoyment of humans. You might ask why there were flowers here on earth so long before people? Why do they grow in remote places where there are no people to appreciate them? This is a remarkably self-centered, conceited question.

Plants evolved flowers to attract pollinating birds and insects, not humans. Some of the patterns in flower petals are only visible in UV, which humans cannot see but insects can. Flowers also evolved perfumes, some of which smell like rotting meat (hardly to appeal to humans) to attract insects. Flowers thus reflect the aesthetic sense of insects. We inherited some of that same sense of what is attractive.

bee balm under UV
bee balm under UV

Grady pontificated his theory of flowers, without even opening a book, without doing a google search, without running his idea past a botanist… Conceit and arrogance drove him at every turn.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Flying to Heaven

Claiming that Mohammed flew to heaven on a horse is even more absurd than claiming he farted purple smoke. At least purple smoke does not violate the laws of physics.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Flying to Heaven

Claiming that Mohammed flew to heaven on a horse is even more absurd than claiming you have a vacation cottage on the moon. At least we know the moon exists.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Focusing On the Flukes

The world seems more amazing that it actually is because we love to endlessly retell stories of how the factors lined up to allow one person to rescue another from a dangerous situation. We never talk about the failures, when there was nobody around to help, nobody around who knew what to do, nobody who could stay calm enough to act rationally or when all the best efforts simply failed.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Folly of Leaving it up to God

When it really matters, getting food, putting a roof over your head, looking after your kids, you know perfectly well leaving it up to god would be a disaster. You have to do the work yourself. So when it really matters, you use logic and self-reliance, not god. So why do you use god for anything?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Folly of Prayer

If Yahweh is billions of times more powerful and wise than a human, is not praying to him, just as pointless as an ant praying to a human, demanding it destroy her enemies, monitor the morality of her actions, arrange for her afterlife and give her personal instruction?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Fooled by Hypnosis

People without knowledge of hypnosis, altered states and trance induction are liable to mistake them for the holy spirit if they encounter in them a religious context.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Foolishness of Ancient Ethics

Alain Boton suggests even atheists should borrow a ethical system from some existing religion, even if you reject its supernatural claims, such as the existence of an avenging deity. This is not a good idea. These systems of ethics were created thousands of years ago and were frozen in amber. They are guaranteed to be rife with superstition and to be out of date and incomplete. They cause people to adopt narrow loyalties and to flatter themselves the most important creatures in the universe. You are better off to read more modern thinkers. On the other hand, it would be reasonable to borrow music or ceremonies and modify them.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

The Foolishness Of Expecting God To Act

Trusting in a god is like refusing to vote then complaining when your candidate loses.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

The Foolishness of Relying on Miracles

The notion that Yahweh the god can be counted on with absolute certainty to provide via miracle is perhaps the most absurd notion ever put forward by a religion. There are no instances of this happening anywhere in history, only in unsubstantiated myths.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

For Religious Reasons

Claiming you do things for religious reasons is an oxymoron. It is just another way of saying I don’t have a reason. This is simply the way my people have always done it.. Religious arguments are irrelevant in making group decisions other than within a church.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

For Whose Benefit Are Funerals?

Funerals should cater to the desires of those left behind, not the frustrated theatrical urges of the deceased.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Forced Conversion

Consider a religion that makes threats of torture, and actual murder, rape, whipping, branding etc. to convince others to convert to its beliefs. This suggests to me they can’t think of even one good reason to convert because there is no evidence whatsoever for their claims. They have to resort to violence.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Forced to Respect The Volcano God

I wish I could make Christians understand that when they force non-believers to respect their religion, they are just as obnoxious as cannibals demanding others prostrate themselves before the volcano god. That respect includes deferring to Christians on all matters of morality, sexuality, public prayers and legal ceremonies. Their religion has no more validity than any other. It actually has negative validity since in it easy to prove most Christian assertions false.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Forcing Children to Pray

How cruel to force children to pray for terminally ill relatives, as if it could possibly do any use. When the relatives die, the children take on the guilt imagining they prayed incompetently.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Forcing People to Lie

Religionists claim their religion must be subsidised by the state because it encourages morality, e.g. telling the truth. However, particularly Muslims and Christians, keep getting civil laws enacted that require people to lie — namely pretend to respect religion or pretend to believe its deity exists, or pretend to agree with its dogmas. For example, in Boston it is illegal to put up a poster saying Religions are fairy tales for adults.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70) source

Forcing Rape Victims to Bear Children

When Christians force raped children to bear children, their interest is not the unborn child. Their concern is increasing the number of contributors in the congregation. How do you know? They fight condoms, contraception and the morning after pill with just as much vehemence as abortion.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Forcing Religion on a Child

If I had a son, I would not saddle him with a name like Abdullah, Zeus, Thor, Krishna, Michael, Jacob or John pegged him as a member of some ancient superstition. In a free world, one of the rites of passage would be selecting a religion or life philosophy, without bullying from parents, schools or the government. It is abuse to force a religion on a child when they are too weak to notice the lies in what they are being told.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Forcing Religion on Children

It is not a good idea to sign up for a religion that will kill you or make your life incredibly miserable if you leave, e.g. Islam or JWs. It is high handed and evil to sign up a child for such without informed consent.

I think is it child abuse to sign a child up for a religion that traumatises them with threats that they and their family will be tortured for eternity by a god they are compelled to pretend to love.

I think it is wrong to teach a child lies for their own good.

Religions would go extinct if they did not force themselves on children before they were old enough to realise what batshit nonsense it all was.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Forcing Religious Superstitions on Others

Jews don’t force their dietary kosher laws on others. Muslims don’t force their dietary halal laws on others. Where do Christians get off on thinking they have the right to force their religious laws about sex on others? Religious laws apply only to people who subscribe to the religion.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Forcing Women To Bear Children Of Rape

Right wing Christians in the USA are trying to force women who have been raped to bear the child. Think for a second about the practical consequences of that for the child:

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Forgiveness

When I want to forgive someone, I just forgive them. I never sacrifice a small mammal, much less a child. Surely god can do anything a mere mortal like me can do. However, Christians tell me that to forgive, god requires extreme suffering and human sacrifice. If that were truly so, perhaps god could just keep his resentments to himself and refrain from sacrificing anyone.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Forgiving Themselves

Catholics glibly forgive the church any crimes it committed the past. Yet they still cling to the delusions that motivated those crimes.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Formal Apology

It is time the Catholic church made a formal apology and token restitution for torturing 60,000 women to death as witches or for using herbs to help people restore their health.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Former Slave Owners

If there in anything to reincarnation, then former slave owners who could not kick the habit are now living as pimps, child brothel owners, child soldier recruiters, executives who have their products manufactured in third world sweat shops, cattle, chicken and pig factory farmers…

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

The Foundation of Religion

Centuries ago in a mountain village in Japan lived a man with OCD. The idea of two identical objects he found abhorrent. There must be a way to easily tell them apart he preached. He would break into people’s homes when they were away and would put unique markings on their rice bowls and sake cups. Despite his mental handicap, he was rich and high status. When he died, the people kept applying the unique markings, as a sign of respect. The custom evolved. It was not enough to simply paint markings on, they had to be fired into the porcelain so they could not rub off. Later it became illegal to harbour two identical objects as this was an affront to god. This story is not true, but it illustrates how people with mental problems could be instrumental in getting goofy religious ideas started.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Founded on Abraham

The three religions of the book, Judaism, Christianity and Islam all trace their lineage to Abraham, a man who was a dangerous psychotic. No wonder no much insanity and violence has come from these three religions.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

The Founding Documents

The word Jesus appears nowhere in the founding documents of the USA. The USA was not founded on Christianity or the ten commandments. Many of the founding fathers were anti-Christian. They created an explicitly secular state to avoid the religious wars that plagued Europe. To have religious freedom, no particular religion can be given privileged status, not even the majority religion/sect.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Founding of a New Church

Anthropologists might decide that 2011-05-26 marked the founding of the Church Of Oprah when Oprah delivered her Whisperings sutra.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Founding A New Religion

Let’s say you wanted to get obscenely rich and decided to do it the L. Ron Hubbard way, by founding a new religion. What are some of the tried and true tactics?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Founding a Religion

Founding a new religion is like creating a new dance craze. You have to convince millions of people to do meaningless things. Only when you sell a religion, you have to talk your dancers into endless repetition of your rituals for generations to come.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

The Founding White Lie

Christianity started innocently enough, as a white lie. Someone was inconsolable at the death of a loved one or pet and someone else decided to soften the blow with an undetectable lie that the loved one was actually alive somewhere else and that they would eventually be reunited.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

The Fount Of Morality

It is ridiculous to call Yahweh the fount of all morality when he got another man’s wife pregnant.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Fractured Christianity

Christianity is fractured into 6 ecclesiasctico-cultural blocs, 300 major ecclesiastical traditions, and distinct denominations. If Christians can’t make up their mind what they want everyone to believe, how do they expect converts to become believers?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Francis of Assisi

In Franco Zeffirelli’s film Brother Sun, Sister Moon, Saint Francis of Assisi berates the pope for his obsession with amassing gold. We could use a modern day Saint Francis to chide Pope Ratzinger.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Francis Collins

Obama appointed a Christian, Francis Collins as head of the Nation Institute of Health. Collins has written that he believes god inserted morality into humanity some time after it split off from the chimpanzees and bonobos. That delusion means he cannot rationally decide which research projects about human behaviour to fund. He has already decided, without evidence, that human behaviour does not have natural causes.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Franklin Graham

Billy Graham’s son, Franklin runs a fraudulent aid organisation called the Samaritan’s purse. They took government money to Haiti after the earthquake, however, they refused any help unless the victims attended their church services. They used government money to sell their crooked church. And Republican Christians stand and applaud.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Franklin Graham on Who Is A Christian

Franklin Graham claims that Barack Obama is a Muslim because his father was a Muslim, even though Obama attends a Christian church. If that is so, all those millions of people his father Billy Graham converted to Christianity are not Christians either because their fathers were not Christian.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Fraternal Order Of Giant Sloths

Let’s say you belonged to the Fraternal Order of Giant Sloths (I hope a fictitious organisation.) It later came to your attention that the main activity of the entire executive, at all levels, was running a global child molestation ring. Why might you resign?

Why might you continue to belong?

I would expect the Fraternal Order of Giant Sloths to suffer a mass exodus. Then why doesn’t the Catholic Church?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Fraud

It is fraud to falsely promise extravagant goodies. It is extortion to threaten torture — unless you do it wearing a clerical collar.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Fraudulent Christians

Under the guise of offering unbiased information to young pregnant women on the pro and cons of their various options, Christian organisations bully those coming to them for advice into complying with the group’s religious doctrines. These groups are immune from prosecution for fraud.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Fraudulent Homeopathy

If the homeopaths were right, then all water has at some concentration been exposed in past to every conceivable thing, including, Queen Elizabeth urine, bat ear wax, birth control pills, dog feces, plutonium… So ordinary tap water already contains every conceivable medicine (and poison) in dangerously potent low concentrations. Read Hans Christian Andersen’s The Emperor’s New Clothes.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Free Speech

The most important free speech is that which Christians or Muslims find offensive.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Free Speech Allows Contradiction

Christians have the right to say hateful, foolish and untrue things, however, they don’t have the right to say them unchallenged or in places where they were not invited, such as funerals. Christians don’t allow just anyone to speak in their churches, so it would be hypocritical for them to expect the right to speak wherever they please.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Free Will

I think free will is an illusion, like the free will of actors in a movie who do the exact same things every time you play a DVD (Digital Video Disc) and who appear to be suffering from no constraint on their choices. Perhaps, more accurately, I think it will turn out to be a meaningless question. It is based on naïve assumptions about how choice works.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Free Will

If you watch a movie, the characters appear to have free will. They can make choices. The choices are partly but not completely predictable given what you know about their previous decisions.

Then watch the movie a second time. The actors do not appear to chafe at their lack of choice, but we do. We know how it will all unfold.

Watch the movie again 20 years later after you have forgotten it. The illusion of free will is restored, even though of course there is none.

My point is, whether you have free will or not, you cannot tell. It will not feel any different. Something outside is needed to observe.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Freedom From Religion

Freedom from religion means the state, or anyone else, cannot force someone else’s religion down your throat. They cannot force you to say their prayers. It is an important freedom both for believers and atheists. People who do not believe in freedom have tricked gullible Christians into thinking freedom from religion means the right to persecute Christians to stop them from forcing Christianity down unwilling throats.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Freedom Includes Freedom to Abuse?

In general, we believe everyone should have freedom of religion. But what happens when abuse of children is intrinsic to that religion, especially when they reach out to abuse other people’s children. The abuse includes sexual exploitation, beatings, denying health care in favour of prayer and terrifying with hellfire if they don’t subscribe to a particular religion.

In particular, fundamentalists insert Good News Clubs into the schools, pretending to the children their sadistic teachings are part of the school curriculum. They are taught it is sinful not to commit genocide if Yahweh so commands it.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70) Religious Child Abuse click to watch

Freedom to Lie

Freedom of religion is basically the freedom to tell a special class of lies. We prefer it to warfare between religious sects. Because the lies are labeled as religious beliefs, we can more easily dismiss them.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Freedom To Pray Is Never in Danger

Fundamentalists have been so intent on forcing others to pray, they have forgotten that the constitution protects their own right to pray wherever they please.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Freedom of Religion

Freedom of religion is an astounding right. It lets you believe crazy things, even serve as a judge or a president and be batshit whacko, yet face no consequences so long as enough other people share your delusions.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Freedom of Religion

Freedom of religion means freedom to perform ceremonies, without interference, that make no sense to anyone else. It does not give the religious people the right to force their religion and practices on others. It is not a licence to break the law. It does not force non-believers to sacrifice to mollify believers.

Sometimes freedom of religion is misused. For example, Christians try to deny housing to gay people. Native people try to interfere with how others use their land.

I am shocked BC Civil liberties is supporting a native push to block a ski resort on land they do not even own on the grounds of religious freedom. Protesting it is fine; I hope they win, but if they win on the grounds of religious freedom, that would be a horrible precedent.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Freedom Of Religion

Freedom of religion should ensure you can do anything others of other religions can do. However, it should not give you special privileges that no one else gets. So, for example, if you allow women of some religions to cover their heads, then you should permit all women to cover their heads, for any reason. If you allow Sikhs to wear a small ceremonial dagger, then you must allow all people to wear a small dagger. If you are not willing to allow everyone that privilege, then you should not permit it just to Sikhs.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Freedom of Religion

I think freedom of religion should include:

It should not include the right to call for violence against believers or denying them civil rights such as marriage, the right to vote, the right to adopt children etc. It should not give believers the right to deny any group civil rights on religious grounds.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Freedom Of Religion

If I as an atheist father allow my daughter to die from lack of treatment, that is a crime — failing to care for my child. Just because I am a Christian or have some nutty motivation for that same crime should not excuse me. Religion should not give you special privileges that others do not enjoy. It merely should make sure you get all the privileges others enjoy.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Freedom Of Religion

If you as a Potterian want to run your life by rules found in the works of Ms Rowley, then go ahead. Just don’t try to force me to join you. Christians ignore 99% of the rules in the bible. The only rule they consider important is harassing gays. Their own sins are unimportant, even murder (fixed with a hail Mary). Only the sins of others matter. Christians have a right to torment themselves, but not to force their insanity on others. That is what freedom of religion means. In return, others may not force their weird rules on Christians If you read the history of Europe, you will see freedom of religion is an incredibly good deal for everyone.

Modern day Americans imagine they would prefer a theocracy, forgetting the theocracy will be run by people with a completely different idea of Christianity from theirs.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Freedom of Religion

Most Christians are thoroughly confused about what freedom of religion means.

The basic idea is all religions are treated equally. Christians get in trouble when they insists their religion be given special privilege. They forget that everyone is convinced they represent the one true religion.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Freedom of Religion

When Christians learn in the USA the constitution grants everyone freedom of and freedom from religion, they argue, because Christianity is the one true religion, they should have the right to impose Christianity on others, the state should help them and they should be permitted to discriminate against and kill homosexuals. After all, the one true god commands it.

Everyone thinks their religion is the one true religion. The constitution treats all religions as equal. No religion gets special privilege. No religion rates a get-out-of-jail-free card to break the law and harm others, even homosexuals.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Freedom Of Religion is a Truce

Imagine a several mutually-hating gangs of criminal psychopaths took over an asylum and held hostages. The police negotiated a truce. That is roughly what freedom of religion is. We tolerate untreated mental illness when the delusional patients have banded together in sufficiently large numbers to be dangerous.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Freeing Christians

When you are trying to free a rusty pipe, sometimes it helps to both tighten and loosen it — anything to get some movement. Perhaps the same strategy would apply to freeing Christians from their crusty beliefs.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Fretting Over Heresy

Christians fret over heresy. They forget it is all made up anyway.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Fretting over Martians

Worrying about what some invisible foul-tempered old man in the sky thinks of your actions makes even less sense than fretting over what Martians think of them.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Frog Treatment

Imagine you went to your doctor complaining of a scaly bit of skin in the middle of your back. He referred you to a specialist. When you went to the specialist, he donned a female ballet costume, then danced a few bars of the black swan from Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake. Then he plunged his hand into an aquarium and grabbed a large frog which he held aloft, turning to present it to each of the four directions. Then he took a scalpel and slit its throat. Then he threw it into a blender. He then took springy sticks and flung the mess all over, except for the scaly patch in the middle of your back. You would be astonished. This would be so unlike any other treatment your doctor had prescribed before. I feel this way about Yahweh. He is so bizarre, so crazy, so unlike anything else I know about the universe. People who try to sell him to me must be putting me on.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

The Frog with Pink Toenails

Imagine I went to a British pub and I found in the back a painted brass frog with pink toenails. I asked what this thing was. The pub keeper explained it did everything — made the beer, made the heat, provided the water, provided the refrigeration… all out of nothing. I asked where it came from, how it worked. I was told, It’s mysterious. It has been here forever. It does not need an explanation. If you know what’s good for you, stop asking questions.

This is pretty much what happens any time I ask questions about this god Christians claim to love so much. They claim he has been here forever. I don’t think Christians realise how long forever is. It is longer than 10 followed by a million million zeros years, way way longer than that. Apparently he sat around for an infinite length of time doing bugger all, the couch potato of all couch potatoes. He did not even change his underwear. Then suddenly, without cause, his nature changed (something Christians claim he cannot do) and got industriously constructing an entire universe. But how could anyone know this? No one existed prior to the big bang and further there was no time for him to be idle in prior to the big bang.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Frustrating Christians

Christians can be so frustrating the way they cling to the absurd, refused to fight fairly in debate, lie, lie and lie some more, are so patronising, imagine themselves morally superior when they behave like a mob at a witch burning, are so willfully ignorant and despise logic. At times, I just wish every last one of them would drop dead. But then I remember, that even Einstein, had he been raised by fundamentalists, would detest math and science and would be as batshit crazy as William Laine Craig. Christianity is like some sci-if mind parasite that turns ordinary humans in the drooling idiots. Eventually, we will find a cure for it.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Fudging the Definition of God

If you define god as the sum total of all physical laws of the universe, then, of course, god exists. However, this god does not answer prayer, does not demand sacrifices, does not impregnate virgins, does not author books and has no opinions on what constitutes human moral behaviour.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Fundamentalist Killers

Secular con men rarely kill those who refuse to fall for their stories; you can’t say the same for Jewish, Christian and Muslim fundamentalists.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Fundamentalist Terrorists

Fundamentalist Christians are killing far more people than fundamentalist Muslims. They should be monitored at least as carefully.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Fundamentalists

The main problem with fundamentalists in that they insist I become a fundamentalist too.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Fundamentalists

People with only a partial complement of the genes for schizophrenia, often family members of schizophrenics, are invariably literal fundamentalists. Because these people carry schizophrenia genes, their children are at risk for full-blown schizophrenia. In primitive societies, such people usually become shamans.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70) Dr. Robert Sapolsky’s lecture about Biological Underpinnings of Religiosity click to watch

Fundamentalists = Luddites

Fundamentalists are unconscious Luddites. They throw up their smokescreens of superstition and irrational babble vaguely hoping to jam the explosion of scientific knowledge and technological change.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Funeral Racket

The touching Japanese movie Departures shows how ceremony can help people get through the death of loved one. On the other hand, I see people with very little money coerced into believing they must blow it on expensive funeral services, durable coffins, chemical treatments and burial plots. I can’t help but feel they have been bamboozled.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Funerals

The Province of BC spends $5 million for funerals for anonymous corpses or for people who cannot afford to pay for their own. Often nobody attends the funeral. This is government-funded religious superstition. I think the constitution should prevent the practice.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Funereal Toys

When an adult is killed by a car, Christians mark the spot with plush toys and balloons. These are left out in the rain to become mouldy as if to symbolically recapitulate the rotting of the corpse. Would it not make more sense to give the toys to needy children in honour of the deceased?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Futility of Debate

I have followed thousands of debates between atheists and Christians. Never once have I seen anyone shift position as a result, either one of the debaters or in the audience. I have seen people humiliated, but never shifted. When people are proven wrong they dig in ever more tenaciously.

Clearly, we need some new tactics. Part of the problem is debaters always offer arguments they find absolutely convincing, rather than what the opposition would find convincing. Another part of the problem is Christians have announced that they consider common sense, observation, reason and logic invalid. All that counts is scripture. The only convincing argument would be finding somewhere in scripture where the authors admit it was all a con. Roughly speaking Christians have vowed to remain believers no matter what.

Perhaps we should try straw men, ad hominems and condescension. That is what they use on us. Perhaps there is no hope for them. All we can do is try to contain the contagion and wait for the current crop of Christians to die off. In other words, focus on the young before Christianity reaches this advanced state of ossification.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Futility of Prayer

Are Christians really so stupid they don’t notice that prayer is futile? Or do they just lie to each other about it?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

The Futility of Prayer

If the people in 1347 had simply paid attention to who was most and least susceptible to the plague rather than wasting time praying to statues, they might have saved themselves an immense about of suffering.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Futility of Prayer

If you are ever raped, guaranteed, praying will be a complete waste of time. If you fight, memorise a detailed description of the assailant or collect a DNA sample under your fingernails, it might.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Futility of Prayer

When someone prays there is enough gas for a trip on a snowy night we know they are planning to be needlessly stranded.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Futility of Praying

Keeping hurricane victims in your prayers will do them absolutely no good. It will just trick you into thinking you are helping. It is a socially acceptable way doing nothing.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Futility of Punishment

One of the more important legacies of the church is the absolute faith that punishment will both erase the effects of wrongdoing and deter repetition. Most of the time, it does little to ameliorate the crime. It just adds to the suffering. Further, it creates the seeds of revenge. We need to look for better solutions.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Future AI

When artificial intelligences become sufficiently brighter than humans to gain autonomy, I would hope the first project they tackle is how to get humans to give up religious superstition.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Future Use of Churches

Some day the world’s synagogues, churches and mosques will join the great pyramids of Egypt, the Parthenon and Machu Picchu as tourist attractions where guides boggle young visitors with stories the ghastly things once done there. The names of the gods that inspired the malice will be forgotten except by Jeopardy contestants.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Gambling like Christianity

When a gambler who gets himself into financial trouble imagines that more gambling will get him out of it, he is suffering from a dangerous delusion. The same sort of wishful thinking that infects Christians is at the root of his problem.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Gangster Donor

When a gangster donates millions to a church, does that exonerate the gangster’s crime or does it imply the church too is corrupt?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Gaps in Knowledge

When a religious person discovers a gap in human knowledge, they fill in one of two ways:

If, for example, there were a gap in understanding weather, this lazy approach would not help you predict or track hurricanes. It would not help you control global warming. It would not help you predict forest fires. These are not answers. They are fake answers.

In contrast, a scientist looks on a gap as a puzzle, a challenge to figure out how the universe works on a deep level.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Generic Religious Defence

Every defence I have heard of Christianity would apply equally well to any other religion, especially Islam. Christians never explain why their god is real but everyone else’s is not.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Genesis of Evil

According to Genesis, eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge did not create evil. It just ended the era of stupidity when man did not notice it.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

The Genesis of Heaven

Imagine you were confined for the rest of your life in a dungeon like Guantánamo. You might swap stories with fellow inmates. You might collectively create an imaginary ideal world and make up stories about it just to distract yourselves from your misery. Over time, this imaginary world would become more real and more important to you than the actual one. Up until about 1900, life on earth was pretty miserable, filled with toothache, pestilence, hunger, hard labour, cold, oppression… in many ways worse than a prison. As Hobbes put it, life was nasty, brutish and short. So it was only natural for people to fantasise about a wonderful afterlife to come. The lie became real to them. The fantasy was so important to them, they killed or tortured people who dared remind them it was all made up.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Geographic Facts

If a holy book made the preposterous claim that Mount Everest were 128¾ km (80 miles) high, it deserves no more deference or circumspection than if a travel guide book had made the same error. Ditto for the age of the earth, the flatness of the earth, claiming the earth is the center of the universe or that prayer is an effective tool to find lost children.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Get Out Of Jail Free Card

Religious schools are permitted to beat children. Why should a god delusion make teachers rate a get out of jail free card? Atheism, a New Strategy click to watch

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Get Out Of Jail Free for Religious Camps

A number of states completely exempt religious boot camps from any regulation. They even permit students to be tied up and dragged behind trucks. They even permit felons to run the camps.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70) Religious Child Abuse click to watch

Getting Away With Rape

The Catholic church gets away with behaviour we would not tolerate from the Mafia. Tradition and fear of ecclesiastical magic protects it.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Getting into Heaven

If Christians read their bible they would see they have no chance whatsoever of getting into heaven. They are going to hell along with everyone else. If they read the bible and discover this, they blank out and pretend their reservation is all but assured. How do I know this?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Ghost Stories

Children love to scare each other with stories of the supernatural. Adults like to believe these stories even though there is no evidence for them. For pity sake you idiots. Grow up!

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Ghost Stories

Christians are like little boys encountering an abandoned house. They like to frighten each other by making up stories of ghosts, haunting and torment.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Ghost Story

Christianity is a ghost story told by an older brother.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Giant Snail Creator

Claiming that Yahweh created the universe is just as ridiculous as claiming a giant snail did it. The only reason Yahweh sounds less silly has nothing to do with evidence, but with familiarity.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Gilded Dog Poo

The Christian conception is so petty, so paltry. They are worshiping a lump of gilded dog poo refusing to look up at the stars.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Gilgamesh

The Babylonians had the myth of Gilgamesh written long before the Old Testament was written. In it:

Remind you of anything? This is just one of hundreds of examples of biblical plagiarism.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Gilgamesh

You expect nearly every culture to have a story about the worst flood that ever hit them. But in the Gilgamesh myth, which long predates Genesis, God asked a righteous man to build and ark, giving its precise dimensions, put two of each kind of animal on it. God flooded the world killing all the wicked. The man sent out a raven and a dove and he did a burnt offering.

If you were a fifth grade teacher marking papers, you would call that plagiarism.

The important difference is Genesis offers this as fact, where Gilgamesh is just a poem.

Genesis is like turning in a paper entitled My Summer Vacation then stealing the plot from Meatballs and desperately trying to justify its improbabilities.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Giordano Bruno

On 1600-02-17 the Catholic Church burned Giordano Bruno alive. Why? Because he rejected the most incomprehensible of the Catholic doctrines — the trinity and transubstantiation. He also rejected the virginity of Mary, which turned out to me a translation error of the term almah which meant young woman, not virgin. He was the first astronomer to speculate that stars were suns, surrounded by planets. The church has made no apology or confession of wrongdoing.

Why did they do this? They wanted to send a message to the public, that even though their doctrines were incomprehensible nonsense, they would tolerate no one questioning them.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Giving Credit

The difference between Canada and the USA is when some emergency happens and the flight crew do their job perfectly, they get the credit and the thanks. In the USA, the Christian god does, who supposedly merely decided effortlessly not to prematurely kill off some of his flock.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Giving a Pass To Criminal Organisations

We would not let a secular organisation continue to operate drug dealing, prostitution or terrorism rings so why do we let the church off the hook for systematic sexual and physical child abuse rings? Why have not these criminal institutions been shut down? It is simply custom. We have come to tolerate any amount of corruption from the churches out of a childish fear of their magic religious power to punish us in the afterlife.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Giving Thanks

Most cultures imagine giving thanks to some imagined creator is the most important thing you can do when fishing or hunting. It is completely useless. What does matter is leaving sufficient stock to spawn the next generation.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Goal Of Professional Christians

In the midst of an intense debate about the existence of god, never forget that the goal of the professional Christian is to con you out of your money and persuade you to hand over your child for physical and sexual abuse.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Goals of Religions

It might help think about some religion you do not like the first time you read this. What are the primary goals of a religion?

  1. Persuade adherents to hand over money.
  2. Gain control of the minds of adherents. They can then be asked to vote a certain way or harass some business or individual or allow their children to be sexually molested by priests without protest.

The religion has subgoals to help it along on its overall goals:

  1. Terrify adherents with the supernatural to the point they stop thinking clearly.
  2. Convince adherents that gullibility is actually a virtue called faith.
  3. Convince adherents that is rude and impudent to ask questions about the religion or its claims.
  4. Convince adherents to spend considerable effort to sell the religion to others.

This is exactly the way any scam works. What drives me crazy is the way religious adherents refuse to notice that their religions have all the classic hallmarks of a con.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

God As Abusive Parent

If the Christian god announces well in advance he is going to torture everyone to punish them for transgression by destroying the earth, that means humanity has no chance. Like an abusive parent, he will punish humanity no matter what it does. God supposedly designed humans, so if they have no chance to behave well, then that is god’s doing. He is punishing his creations for his own failing. He is a loser shithead. It is idiotic enough to believe this twit exists, but it is even more shameful to kowtow to this bastard.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

God and Free Will

Christians tell me that god’s prime directive is not to interfere with the free will of a rapist. But oddly, he cares nothing for the free will of the rapist’s victim to go about her business.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

God and Queen Elizabeth Dropped by for Tea

Claiming the creator of the universe is talking to you is crazier than claiming the pope dropped in unannounced.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

God and Weapons

If there were a god, any time anyone deployed a banned weapon, it would blow up in the face.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

God the Aquarist

Imagine a man who bought a giant aquarium and populated it with a wide variety of plants, fish and other creatures. He would amuse himself by taking a long sharp knife, swishing it through the water, and killing a hundred fish at a time. He would catch fish in a net, then set them on a dish outside the tank. He enjoyed watching them slowly die gasping for air. Then he drained the tank until all but eight of the fish had died. Yahweh is similar but millions of times worse. He tortures his charges for eternity to slake his sadism.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

God the Bogeyman

Children sometime develop an irrational fear of bogeymen under the bed. Just a few casual remarks from adults coupled with their own over-active imaginations are all it takes. No wonder Christian adults who mercilessly pound a fear of the bogeyman god Yahweh into children are successful. The adults deceive themselves that they telling these lies for virtuous motive, but they actually using this inhumane tactic to terrify the child into abject compliance to them.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

God as Bum

A man of the cloth is a patronising sod. He thinks he knows better than others how people should think and behave, so he feeds them terrifying lies to control them and incidentally trick them into giving him money for god as if the creator of the universe need to pan handle human money to accomplish his ends.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

God as Cleaning Lady

Christians are hostile to reason and science. They have a naïve belief that they don’t have to look after the planet’s survival because god, like some long-suffering cosmic mother, will do the necessary cleanup. Christians are the biggest cheerleaders for war. Tolerating Christianity is a bit like tolerating an escapee from an asylum doing jumping jacks in a lifeboat.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

God Craves A Relationship

Christians assure me that god craves a relationship with every human on earth. When I crave a relationship, I go out and meet people or I put an ad in the paper inviting people over. God hides. He hides so well that no one can find hide nor hair of him. Granted, there are some loons who claim to have found him, but they behave so badly it is obvious they are lying, and they have no evidence of the encounter, not even their own improved behaviour.

If relationships are what god is really craving, god should be out and about, encountering each human at least once per lifetime. He should be offering convincing evidence he is real. But there is no sign of him. The most probable explanation is he does not exist.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

God Created Cruel

If a god created the animal kingdom, then he is responsible for their appallingly cruel behaviour. I find it highly unlikely such a god would have the least interest in enforcing human notions of appropriate behaviour. In other words, if there is a god, he does not give a damn about the things he is reputed to obsess about.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

God Creating

The habit of positing a deity to explain anything unexplained has plenty of historic precedent. When Ben Franklin invented the lightning rod, some townspeople tried to get it banned because it thwarted god’s will. The catch is, inventing a god doesn’t explain anything, just gives a name for the phenomenon. Unfortunately, it also suggests futile activities like sacrificing babies to improve the rains. God-creating has always proved wrong. It is a lazy non-answer to pretend you know more than you do. It will surely prove wrong in the case of tho origin of the universe too given there are so many naturalistic hypotheses already for what happened near the big bang. The motive for god creating is not explanation, but extorting money or goods from fellow humans by pretending to have special powers over the newly-created god.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

God Designed the Mosquito?

If Yahweh designed every plant and animal on earth, then he designed not only the lamb and the sunflower but also cholera, the mosquito, malaria, hyenas, maggots, Montezuma’s revenge, crabgrass, stinging nettles… Are really prepared to accuse a perfect loving god of that?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

God Detectors

You could think of particle accelerators as god detectors, scanning for even the most minor conceivable miracles. For decades, billions of times a second they monitor collisions and the trajectories of the particles created. God could easily deflect one subatomic particle by even 1% and it would be noticed. It has never happened. Everything behaves perfectly normally. There is no sign of a god tweaking anything.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

God Did It

Christians like to pooh pooh science’s answers to the history of the universe and the history of life. They claim that simply because they cannot understand science without study, science must be wrong, and there is only one other alternative — the biblical story. They don’t consider as possibilities the sacred myths of other religions. To me, the Christian explanation has hundreds of holes it it. Further it is absurd. It is not even a plausible candidate even if science were wrong. The truth does not have errors in it.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

God Did It

Claiming God did it is even less useful and less informative than saying Atoms did it. Christians kid themselves that they have said something profound and have proved they have a complete understanding of the matter.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

God Did It

Everything we see has a naturalistic explanation. One little bit of it seems mysterious to us, so we label it god did it. Would it not be more likely it has a naturalistic explanation too? It is just too complicated for dolts like us to understand. Why should the whole universe be comprehensible to someone with a second grade education? or even an education like Stephen Hawking’s. Evolution is such a simple idea, the ancient Greeks could have stumbled on it, but they did not. Sometimes the scientific explanation takes a while.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

God Did It

Marking a problem solved with

god-did-it
gives you no more understanding than had you marked it
further-exploration-forbidden
~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

God Did It

Saying God did it explains absolutely nothing. You are no closer to understanding or predicting anything. You might as well have said Shit happens. Saying God did it is like saying Don’t worry your pretty little head about that. It is a call for wilful ignorance. It is a condemnation of curiosity.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

God Did It

When people insist on closing a mystery by saying god did it what they are actually doing is giving up in frustration from trying to find an explanation and trying to discourage future researchers from looking for one.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

God Does Not Favour Americans

Americans claim they are god’s chosen people. How could that be when their god blesses them with so many tornadoes, hurricanes, volcanoes, earthquakes… Further, their god placed several supervolcanoes beneath their soil (including all of Yellowstone). If any one of them erupts it will kill everyone in the country.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

God Encourages Crime

Crime is lower in the non-religious countries of the world. This is simply because religious superstitions about how to reduce crime do not get in the way.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

God Is Evil

There is plenty of biblical and real world evidence that Yahweh is evil. This, of course, contracts his supposed attribute of omnibenevolence. There is an easy way out of this contradiction. Christians cheerfully believe that 59,999 gods do not exist. Just add Yahweh to that list. As a side effect, they become more consistent to discard belief in all sky fairies. What they are doing now is like claiming no unicorns exist except Andra.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

God is Evil

When I say god is evil I am saying the fictitious character in the bible, Yahweh is evil and commands people to do evil deeds. So do villains in Harry Potter, but people have enough sense not to treat them as real. I have no other source of information about this fictitious character.

I also mean If Christians were indeed correct, and a god named Yahweh is micromanaging the world today, he is evil. I refer then to disease, hunger, war, bigotry, earthquakes, volcanos, hurricanes… He just stands idly by even when infants are being raped. I am trying to point out to them the inconsistency of their imaginary Yahweh being both infinitely loving and infinitely uncaring.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

God The Fluke

When someone survives an accident by fluke, Christians ascribe it to divine intervention. Yet if it truly were God, it should not happen only as a fluke. God is supposed to be 100% reliable.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

God the Game Fixer

The notion that the creator of the universe can be coaxed to fix athletic contests surely should be blasphemy.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

God Of The Gaps

God of the gaps is such a nutty idea — the notion that anything we do not understand must be caused by a god. Look over history at the thousands of things we did not understand that we understand now. None of them turned out to be a god. All of them turned out to be the natural unfolding of the universe. So in future, when we don’t understand something, the odds are overwhelmingly it is natural. It has almost no chance of being caused by a god.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

God of the Gaps

I don’t understand, therefore it’s got to be something mystical, but every single time previously when we were in this boat, the phenomenon turned out to have a physical explanation. Presuming metaphysics is the statistically least likely explanation.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

God of the Gaps

In historical science, when something has not been figured out yet, instead of saying We don’t know yet they would God does it. As things are figured out, e.g. cause of lighting, cause of weather, how the planets move, how elements combine, god gets retired. This has worked fine, except where bronze age holy documents weighed in. Christians then are reluctant to hand over understood activities from god to science.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

God of the Gaps

Most Christians claim that if there is anything that science cannot explain, or anything where science’s explanation baffles them, they presume god did it. The catch is, science is explaining more phenomenon at an increasing rate every year. Matters assigned to god are more and more frequently taken back by science. Every year, god has less and less to do.

Over the last century, Christians have noticed this problem. So they decided to dig in their heels and claim god has dominion over cosmology and evolution, even though science clearly says otherwise. Their purported claims are completely at variance with all observation. Their strategy is to retreat into delusion to defend their god’s turf.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

God of the Gaps

Whenever Christians debate with me, they will ask some question like:
What is dark matter?
I have to answer We don’t know yet.
Aha! You have just admitted god must have done it!
No I didn’t. We did not know what black holes were a short while ago. Now we do. There was no need to pretend god did it in the interim. The wind, lightning and storms we all used to think god did it. We were wrong. We simply did not know. They had natural causes. You might just as well said that pixies did it for all the evidence you have.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

God of the Ghetto

Christians are like ghetto kids seduced by the promises of a gangster they have never seen.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

God as Gladiator

Christians look on their god as the last man standing in some mass gladiatorial contest. He has no virtues other than strength and ruthlessness. It hit me most strongly listening to the Monteverdi Vespers of 1610.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Is God Great?

If god were great, he would do things, like keep his many promises to grant all prayers. But he is utterly undetectable. He never tweaks the universe. For all practical purposes, he does not exist. Everything just hums along perfectly obeying physical laws without his input.

He is like some elderly celebrity who has gone into hiding. He makes no movies. He takes no calls. He takes no visitors. He makes no press releases. He hands out no autographed photos. He could be dead and there would be no way for anyone to know.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

God Is Happy To Let Us Self Destruct

Perhaps the greatest blessing of the Beached Petroleum oil spill is it will disabuse the nutty Christian delusion that god won’t let us destroy ourselves.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

God Has No Compassion

Imagine a sadist who captured teenage girls, locked them in a dungeon and told them they would have no food but each other. He then equipped them with tools that could only be used to kill in the most hideously painful ways imaginable. If there is a god, that is roughly what he did to life on earth — hardly compassionate.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

God has Retired

Compare the god of the Old Testament with the one of today. He used to be very active, daily interfering in human events, throwing lightning bolts, commanding genocides, rapes and other crimes. Now he is all but undetectable. About all he ever does is a questionable healing that would have happened anyway. He’s melting. He’s evaporating like a piece of dry ice.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

God Healed Me

A Christian tells me I prayed to Yahweh and he healed my cancer. I respond Lots of people prayed and were not healed. Are you conceited enough to think you were more deserving than all of those who perished? Further, lots of people who did not pray to god were healed. In fact the exact same percentage who pray and did not pray are healed. If it were not that way, you would get a Christian discount on your life insurance, similar to a no-smoker discount.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

God is Illegitimate

You may notice I rarely refer to God. I usually say the god Yahweh or a god or, if I am feeling particularly contemptuous, Yahweh the god. I want my Christian readers to understand I consider their god just another run of the mill god, nothing special, without any claim be being the only god.

I think it highly unlikely any god exists, but if one did, the ones most plausible are: Giant, Minerva Sulis, Krishna, Ganesh, Pan, Allah, Freyja, Wotan, Demeter, Indra. Yahweh does not even make it into my top ten.

If Christians were to read the literature of other religions, they would soon discover how embarrassingly pedestrian, petty and juvenile the Christian literature is. Listen to Joseph Campbell tell stories about the god Indra. Now there is imagination worthy of a god.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

God is Inherently Mad

If no one has ever thought of god before and a scientist proposed the idea today, he would be sent off to an insane asylum. Everyone would consider him barking mad. The idea is so silly, it can only be entertained with repeated exposure since birth. People have forgotten how utterly nuts the idea is because it is so familiar.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

God is Love

If God is Love, then why not just say love, instead of using a confusing word that comes with a ton of baggage? There is something dishonest going on here, some sort of bait and switch.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

God Made Me Do It

When a Christian pleads in court God made me do it! even Christians take that as an insanity defence.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

God as Mafia Don

The Christian conception of god is much like a Mafia don, who pretends to be a great philanthropist while, behind the scenes, ordering his henchmen to shake down, beat up and torture.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

God Is A Monster

For a child, god is one of the monsters under the bed.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

The God Monster

Imagine how difficult it would be to allay your child’s fears of monsters under the bed, if there were at least four channels of family values TV at any one time persuading children the monsters were real. Ditto for the god monster who roasts children alive for playing doctor.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

God More Likely Than Yahweh

It is ironic but when atheists define god as a hypothetical designer of the universe, god is trillions of times more likely to exist than the Christian variant — that tribal Jewish deity and sadistic bastard described in the old Testament who calls himself Yahweh and boasts he created the entire universe when he did not exhibit even a knowledge of primary school science.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

God Never Says Anything Useful

How come when god allegedly speaks privately to preachers he never tells them anything intelligent or useful, such as how to end the conflict in Israel or how to make a malaria vaccine?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

The God Not Likely A Local God

There are over 60,000 Gods. Most people dismiss all, or all but one of earth’s religions without so much as a cursory glance, the same way scientists dismiss yet another perpetual motion machine. Even fundamentalists are not in the least surprised that people tend to adhere to the local most popular religion. Everyone would be dumbfounded if it turned out that intelligent beings in other parts of the universe subscribed to one of the earth religions. This means that people, in their hearts, know their own religion is merely a local folkway, not a universal truth.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

God Not Necessary

There are outward believers who, in their hearts, don’t believe in any god, but believe it necessary for society as a whole to believe in a sadistic sky god to persuade them to behave. A quick look at crime statistics, would show them atheists and atheist countries are far more law-abiding that Christian ones. They are actually making things worse by promoting Christian lies.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

God Offers No Extra Protection to Christians

If god protected Christians preferentially, then Allstate would have a discount on fire, theft, accident and life insurance for Christians. All that praying makes absolutely no difference.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

The God Shiva Exists

Christians will argue desperately for the existence of the god Yahweh despite all the evidence to the contrary. If all they were trying to do is argue for the existence of a god, any god, they would have a heck of a lot easier time promoting Allah or one of the Hindu gods. These gods are much more plausible and not nearly as ridiculous. But ironically, Christians dismiss these other gods without any investigation whatsoever. In fact they pride themselves on their ignorance of them as if it were some sort of virginity.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

God Spake To Me

Christians are always claiming god speaks to them. I don’t believe them. Why?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

God Spake Unto Me

John 5:37 says Yahweh never talks to people. If you hear god talking to you, you are just talking to yourself in a silly accent.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

The God Spot

I can understand that people pretend to be special agents of god or the devil in order to con others, but I don’t understand why humans have evolved a special god Spot in the brain that, when stimulated, makes them easier to con.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

God Talkers are Nuts

When someone claims the creator of the universe took time out to speak to him alone and give him some asinine advice, I am baffled that anyone considers him sane.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

The God Tip-Off

The more often someone accused of a crime invokes god, the higher the odds they will eventually be found guilty. God is the primary tool of the con man just as a lock pick is the primary tool of a burglar.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

God Told Me

I think anyone who admits to taking commands from god should be immediately locked up for psychiatric observation. Most of these people are harmless, but some are extremely dangerous. Why?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

God Told Me

If someone tells you god told him to do such and such a thing there are three possible explanations:

  1. He is a gullible twit who fell for a practical joke.
  2. He is schizophrenic.
  3. He is a liar.
~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

God Told Me

When I hear a voice in my head, I assume it is me and that it is imaginary. If it does not come from some outside source, by definition it is imaginary.

I often encounter mentally ill Christians who claim that God talks to them on a regular basis. I think this is highly unlikely. Why?

  1. John 5:37says that Yahweh never talks to humans.
  2. Why would the creator of the universe want to converse with a drooling idiot? It is like claiming Stephen Hawking drops by for tea every day.
  3. God never says anything of consequence, just platitudes. You would expect something like a plan for peace in the middle east.

These ninnies just assume the voice is God. How are they verifying that?

  1. They do no verification at all. They desperately want to be important in God’s eyes, so they will believe the voice is God, contrary to any evidence.
  2. Just because they hear a voice in their heads and they leap to the conclusion it must be God.
  3. The voice sounds like Charlton Heston playing God in a Hollywood movie.
  4. The voice claims to be God.
  5. The voice tells them things only they know. (This means absolutely nothing if the voice is them.)
  6. The voice has an encyclopedic knowledge of scripture.
  7. The voice tells them supernaturally wise things.
  8. The voice tells them verifiable things about the universe that nobody yet knows.
~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

God Told Me To Assassinate The President

People who believe that it is god hidden in the voices in their heads commanding them to bizarre acts, tend to act them out, out of fear and respect for the creator of the universe. Such voices are a symptom of schizophrenia. The mental illness tends to be overlooked by everyone if the voices identify themselves as god.

It starts innocently enough. The Christian, guided by wishful thinking, pretends a laudatory or encouraging thought/voice in his head is the creator of the universe dropping by for tea. It may say something Hallmarkian and saccharine (never a cure for cancer), which helps the illusion.

The Christian feels special. Now he is hooked. He will believe whatever nonsense that voice in his head comes up with, even if it tells him to start a dog-food diet or kill his mother.

Strictly biblical Christians reject these voices because they have read John 5:37. God does not talk to people (at least not any more).

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

God Told Me…

I just about throw up when Christians claim that God spoke to them personally. Sometimes they reveal the idiotic message. It is never a cure for cancer or anything useful.

For a start John 5:37 says God never talks to people. (I guess there are a few exceptions like Moses.) These people are talking to themselves, to an imaginary god in their head. How could they know that for certain?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

God Traces

If there were a god, there would be traces. The universe would, perhaps in some subtle small way, be different from a universe without a god. No Christian I have ever talked to has been able to point out this difference. Why complicate things with an imaginary god when you don’t have to. God makes no difference. God is irrelevant. God is warped wishful thinking. God is a nightmare used to abuse children.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

God Unnecessary

Christians ask atheists How can life have meaning without god?. Yahweh is odious in the extreme. Even as a fictional character terrifying adults into irrational behaviour, he is intolerable. If he were real, life would be unimaginably horrible. Everyone would become his abject slave. There would be no hope with such an all-powerful, sadistic, capricious bully running the universe.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

God vs god

I ask everyone to avoid using the word god as a proper noun, as if the word pointed to something unique that actually existed. You don’t want to tacitly concede to the preposterously conceited Christians that there exist no other gods worthy of serious study but Yahweh. So instead say the god Yahweh which would parallel the god Zeus which makes Yahweh just one of 60,000 other gods. If you want be a little cheeky, say Yahweh the god which would connote Jabba the Hut.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

A God vs The God

I can see how a Christian might claim there is a god, but I can’t see how they, in good faith, could claim there is only one and that it is named Yahweh. None of their argument for ua god apply. They know full well they have done no investigation of the other 60,000 gods. How could they possibly know theirs is the best?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

God of War

Yahweh started out as the god of the armies. No wonder he is such a cunt.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

God Will Get You For That

Christians argue that Yahweh must exist, or else Christians would have no motive to behave. They can argue it would be a good thing if crimes were punished after death, but just because they would prefer it, does not make it so. The rent fairy allegedly pays your rent each month. This would be wonderful if it were so, but preference is not evidence it is true.

It is rather irresponsible of Christians to teach their children the only reason to behave is fear of being tortured after death by a psychotic sky fairy. If ever it dawns on the children how silly this claim is, they will have no check on bad behaviour.

The fact is atheists behave much better than Christians. The murder and crime rate is the lowest in the world in atheist Norway. Contrast that with the astoundingly high murder and crime rates in the Christian USA. Within the USA, most of the people in prison are Christian. Almost none are atheist, even though there are substantial numbers of atheists in the general population. Why would this be so:

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

God Works In Mysterious Ways

If even I, a mere human, can see a better way through for god that permitting some catastrophe, then surely a true deity could do even better. Mysterious ways is just making excuses for a god so incompetent he might as well not even exist.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

The God Yahweh

I am trying to train myself to be consistent to use the term the god Yahweh when referring to the Christian supernatural being. I want to make it clear I categorise this god in the same bucket with all the other gods such as Zeus, Ganesh, Baal, Brahma and Allah. I want to make it clear I am not conceding there is anything special about the Christian god. Further, if any god exists, Yahweh is one of the least likely candidates as a description of it. Yahweh is a petulant spoiled brat, not the creator of worlds. Christians argue as if there were only two possibilities: god exists and his name is Yahweh or he does not exist. They imagine any argument for the existence of a god implies only the existence of the Christian god. However, any such argument applies equally well to any other god.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

God, Destroyer of Hope

Christianity teaches people to believe they do not matter — that they are impotent. They can do nothing unless god approves. People do not shape the future of humanity; god does. So they sit back on their asses and do nothing, and nothing gets done. Atheists know that nothing will improve unless they roll up their sleeves and do the necessary work.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Godless Cranium

Godless Cranium is an intelligent, young, Canadian YouTuber who represents himself as a mop-headed animated character. He is unusually polite and kind. He debunks crazed Christians and Creationists. I don’t know his real name.

Godless Cranium home click to watch
~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Gods are Created

No matter what the god, we can trace its creation by man in history. There was a relatively recent time before which any god you choose did not exist. In religious theory, gods have been here forever, but there is no evidence at all for that. For nearly all of time, they did nothing. They said nothing. They know nothing that their creators did not know. The are confused in exactly the same way their creators were confused. Gods are clearly works of fiction composed by humans. The only possible reason to presume otherwise is their creators made grandiose claims for them all without evidence. I don’t even believe a word Donald Trump says. Why should I believe the utterances of anonymous shamans living thousands of years ago without any evidence?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

God’ Omniscience

Yahweh is supposed to be omniscient. Since he created the universe, he must know everything about how it works. Yet Yahweh never once provided man with science more advanced than what he already knew. In fact, he gave bogus information such as sanitation was not necessary and washing one’s hands after defecating was not necessary. How do you explain this? Yahweh never speaks to man because Yahweh does not exist. These who speak in his name have no special knowledge.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

God’s Contributions

Not once in the bible did Yahweh offer any valid scientific knowledge. He did the opposite. He pooh poohed sanitation. He said the world was flat. He said there was a celestial ocean. Neither did he offer moral guidance. He did the opposite. He called for murdering people of neighbouring tribes. He called for executing people who worked their gardens on Sunday. He extolled slavery, including sexual slavery. He called for selling raped women off to their rapists.

It is absurd to think of Yahweh and the bible as a source of knowledge and morality.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

God’s Law

Christians try to force their customs on other claiming it is God’s Law as if the creator of the universe himself had composed it. That is a bald face lie. It was all made up, bit by bit, by ordinary humans. There is not stick of evidence any god had anything to do with it. The closet you come to God’s authorship is conceited con men selling their ideas by claiming Yahweh inspired them.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

God’s Limitations

Christians sometimes explain evil in the world by saying Yahweh has a limitation, he cannot override human will, as if all unpleasantness were human-caused. Then how can he torture people after they are dead? Do sinners give permission?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

God’s Plan

To a Christian, God’s Plan, is the Christian’s excuse for doing nothing to help.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

God’s Plan

The secular analog to god’s plan is doing the optimal thing at each moment. You don’t necessarily know what it is, but you have a good idea from past experience and exhortations from others what it is not. It works like a GPS. Even if you pay no attention to doing the best thing, when you start paying attention again, the system resyncs itself to your current situation.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

God’s Promises

The god of the bible keeps every promise. The god of reality never does. The bible says god never changes. That means the god of the bible and the god today are not one in the same.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

God’s Will

When I was a little boy, my dad told me about meeting a Christian. This man believed everything that happened, even minor things like getting a cut finger, or dropping a glass, were the activity of Yahweh. This man was completely resigned. He submitted utterly to the will of god. Oddly, he was completely happy. My father considered him crazy, but envied his happiness.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

God’s Work

If you are ever tempted to send money to one of those crooked TV evangelists for God’s work have a look at just how he spends that money. God’s work is a mansion, limo and private jet that would make Brad Pitt envious.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

God’s Wrath

What did God have against the animals that he had to destroy them all?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70) Ricky Gervais on Noah click to watch

Golden Plates

Mormons claim the original Book of Mormon was engraved on gold plates. Let us assume the plates were 20 × 13 × 0.30 cm (7.87 × 5.12 × 0.12 in) and there were 300 plates (600 pages). That is a stack 90 cm (2.95 ft) tall. This would weigh 452.09 kg (996.68 lbs). That is quite a haul. I suspect a seasoned criminal like Joseph Smith would have sold the gold rather than giving it back.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Good and Evil

Here is my explanation of good and evil, for what it is worth.

Good and evil are linguistic concepts. They are based on very primitive tropisms. Good: something single celled animals gravitate toward and evil: something they gravitate away from.

We humans have made it more complicated with addictions, preferences, wishes, prayers, laws, religious superstitions… but basically good is what we like happening to us and evil is what we don’t. Below that: good is what enhances our survival and reproduction. Evil is that which blocks it.

Our intellect has let us generalise to think about good and evil relative to others. When we do that, we call it morality.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Good in Christianity

When I rail against Christianity, Christians usually defend it by saying But what about all the good it does? It provides so much comfort! Offering false comfort to someone in danger is not a virtue. It makes them relax their vigilance. For example, Christianity causes people to become climate change deniers, basking in the warm glow of wishful thinking. Climate change is the greatest threat to them and their families. Another example, it comforts them that religious magic will solve their financial problems, leading them into financial ruin. Another example, Christians are usually anti-environmentalists, imagining god will clean up any mess or destroy the world soon so it does not need restoration.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Goodness of God

Debating the goodness of the god Yahweh is like debating whether sex with unicorns is immoral.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Goofy Predictions

There was an episode of the Twilight Zone called Four O’clock. A demented man, played by Theodore Bikel tries to convince an agent from the FBI (Federal Bureau of Investigation) that at 4 o’clock, all the evil people in the world will shrink to 2 feet tall. He offers no explanation as to how this might happen. This reminds me of Christians and their goofy end-of-the-world prophesies. Even though these prophesies are undated, Christians convince themselves that with absolute certainty they will manifest real soon now.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Gospel

Gospel music was designed to sell the lie of Christianity to slaves to make them submissive. They hung onto both the music and Christianity even after emancipation. Unfortunately, gospel is a very appealing form of music, and even in this day sells the lie of Christianity and submitting to corrupt authority to the whole world.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

The Gospel According To Mark

The oldest gospel in the new testament and thus presumably the most accurate is Mark. It was written about 70AD . However, we don’t have an original copy. All we have is a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy… from about 200 AD. Copies were made by hand, so each copy added new errors to the text which corrupted all subsequence copies.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Gospels Weak As Evidence

The gospels are hearsay, several times removed. They would have zero weight in court today. Yet Christians presume they must be 100% true. Have they never played telephone? We know absolutely nothing of the writers or those who relayed the stories. Why this blind trust? It is stupendous wishful thinking or stupendous stupidity.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Government or Organised Crime

You have a choice between having the government control prostitution or having organised crime run it. No prostitution is an option only in the mind of wishful thinking Christians.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Grace Etiquette

We have not yet officially worked out an etiquette when Christians and atheists meet for a meal. In a home with a Christian host, usually saying grace is imposed on everyone. In a restaurant, even Christians rarely say grace. In a home with an atheist host, there is no grace.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Gradual Separation

A fertilised egg is just as much an integral part of the mother as a lung cell. It gradually becomes a separate being. Therefore, at least in the early stages, there should not even be a question of whose choice to abort it is. Giving the choice to anyone but the mother would be as silly as arguing for the right of a mole to avoid excision.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Gradually Filling In The Detail

Think about the first maps of North America. Over the years they become more and more accurate. Uncharted coastline was filled in. More coastline detail was filled in. Rivers then smaller rivers were filled in. Eventually satellites measured the elevation everywhere. When GPS came in, it exposed errors in exactly where streets were and how they were spelled. Science works the same way, first getting the general lay of the land and gradually filling in more and more detail.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

The Grass-Painting Lion

One of the lesser-known deities is the grass-painting lion. He is responsible for painting all the grass on planet earth green. As everyone knows, without the tireless work of the grass-painting lion, grass would be red. He does not actually touch each blade of grass, so he is never seen doing his work, but the results are irrefutable proof of his existence.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Gratitude For Miracles

If ever you survive some catastrophe then publicly thank god for it, you deserve a smack across the chops with a rancid catfish. You are spitting on the people who worked hard to rescue you, perhaps risking their lives. They saved you, not god. Think about it. Precisely what did god do to effect your rescue? Bugger all!

You also spit on the thousands of people who experienced similar calamities to yours and did not recover. You are claiming you are so fucking superior that god saved you but killed everyone else. The fact you survived was just the luck of the draw, nothing whatsoever to do with your virtue, you smug prick.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Gravitas

If science told me they now had substantial evidence some sort of intelligence, perhaps an intelligent field, had designed the universe by selecting the initial conditions, I would be surprised but not incredulous. On the other hand, if they said Yahweh did it, I would check my calendar to see if it were April 1. Yahweh totally lacks the gravitas to have been creator of the universe. It would be a bit like being told Donald Trump, before becoming president, designed nuclear power plants. Yahweh is impetuous, impatient and ignorant. He is either ignorant of all science or he lied to his followers in every matter of science. He could not even solve a jig saw puzzle. Yahweh is like one of the villains in a Brothers Grimm tale. Universe-creating is way above his pay grade. He knows only a fraction about it that Stephen Hawking knows.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

The Great Consolation

All signs point to humans destroying themselves and the planet. This is somewhat depressing. However, in his huge universe are trillions of earth-like planets most supporting some kind of life. They will carry on even after we destroy our planet. Further, after a few million years, our planet too will recover, as it did after the KT event.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

The Greatest Scams

The greatest scams include:

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

The Greedy Church

The orthodox church in Romania is demanding the government build it a new giant cathedral, free. They make this demand even though the country is overflowing with churches and even though the country is in recession.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Green Bags for the Brain

You can buy chemically-treated green bags to prevent ethylene gas from turning vegetables to a fetid mush. What is the equivalent to protect the human brain from the Christian god virus?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Grim Christianity

Christians rely on science to determine which ancient documents are genuine, but then totally ignore science to determine which documents are true.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

GroupThink Terror

When it comes down to it, Christians cling to blithering nonsense because they don’t want to take the chance of being tortured by god for eternity. This is a real fear. The penalty is so awful, it forces Christians to do utterly insane things. The Mafia does not even threaten such ghastly torments. Group-think makes the threat plausible. The fastest way to get people unfrightened is to get them laughing at the thing that scared them.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Groveling To False Gods

When you see a scene in an old black and white movie where the tribespeople bow to the ground before a stone idol, how does it strike you? Silly, primitive, gullible, mindless? Do you feel contempt? When I see Christians lowering their eyes in fear and reverence of an invisible sky God hoping he can be cajoled, like a cosmic Santa Claus, to bestow benefits, I feel the same way. When a president does it, it is dismaying.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Growing Mormonism

One of the original tenets of the Mormon faith was that birth control was second only to murder in wickedness. How convenient! How could such a crackpot religion grow other than by brainwashing children?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Guilt and Sacrifice

The notion I am guilty for other people’s (e.g. Adam’s) wrongdoing is insane. There is no logic to it. In what possible way am I responsible?

Similarly the notion that torturing an innocent person or animal with the intent of undoing the negative effects of my wrongdoing is bonkers. It just creates more suffering. It does not work. The closest thing to it ever working was throwing human sacrifices onto a field where they acted as fertiliser.

Christians who say things like this to me are just an crazy as people who sit in mental institutions munching on their feces. They are beyond the bazoo. They seem completely unaware of how psychotic they sound.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Guilt Con

One of the key tools of the Christian con is guilt. If they can trick people into feeling guilty just for existing, they can trick them into handing over money to atone. That is why they invented original sin, transferring sin from others and morally corrupt infants.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Guilting Everyone Over Sex

Even the most saintly person would be embarrassed and guilt-ridden if the details of his or her sex life were made public, even if they consisted of perfectly normal and mainstream things like heterosexual attraction to people of the same age and masturbation. The church has systematically managed to make everyone in society feel an irrational guilt about sex in order to control them.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Gullibility

A Christian is someone who believes, without question, any tall tales told by anonymous Jewish strangers told more than 2000 years ago. It is inconceivable to him that someone from long ago could tell a lie or compose a myth. On the other hand, he believes all the scientists in the world have organised an air tight conspiracy dedicated to feeding him false scientific information. Meanwhile, the scientists keep the trains running on time with their false information.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Gullibility

Which is more likely, someone lied or a miracle happened? In modern day, you give almost nobody the benefit of the doubt of a miracle. But when it comes to people living 2000 years ago, testifying third hand, testifying anonymously, miracle is presumed far more likely than lie. Why the difference?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Gullible Christians

What do you call someone who invests in Bernie Madoff’s latest Ponzi scheme, after being repeatedly warned? A Christian.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Gullible Idiots Fall For Camping Scam Yet Again

Harold Camping It is disgraceful that more Americans acted on religious lunatic/con man Harold Camping’s (1921-07-19 2013-12-15 age:92) end of the world scam, than they did the warnings by geophysicists about earthquakes.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Guns At Funerals

What are soldiers doing when they shoot off guns at religious ceremonies? Are they reliving the joy of killing? Are they reliving the deaths of the fallen? The equivalent for civilians would be to stage a recreation of the failed attempt to restart the deceased’s heart with electric paddles.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Hack Porn

Only a Christian society would hand over something as important as erotica to be handled almost exclusively by hacks.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Haida Vandals

I don’t think the Haida should have any special ownership of skeletons thousands of years old, only ones that can be identified as family members. Indulging them is vandalism of valuable artefacts. It locks the door forever to understanding North American history. The Haida just want to destroy the skeletons in the name of religious superstition. This is very similar to what ISIS is doing with ancient cultural artefacts.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Hands Off Kids

You, Christian might imagine there is some small chance your devil-god Yahweh actually exists, but surely that does not justify traumatising a child with a fear of him roasting that child for eternity. You do? You sick sadistic fuck!

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Happen For a Reason

Does everything happen for a reason? Yes, in the sense that earthquakes happen when sufficient tension builds, but no, in the sense there is someone supernatural being composing a script to satisfy his inscrutable desires for all that happens.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Happiest Religion

I wonder which religion makes people feel the happiest, irrespective of its ultimate truth. I’m guessing the Rastafarians.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Harm of Prayer

People who rely on prayer seriously hurt themselves. For example, if they rely on prayer to cure a sick child the child could needlessly die. If they rely on prayer for money to pay the bills, they will be living on the street. If they rely on prayer to pass an exam, they will flunk. People desperately want prayer to work so they kid themselves it does. It appeals to the lazy bum and the procrastinator who does not want to do the needed work. If someone gets better by prayer who was not that sick in the first place, that is not evidence for prayer. Read about serious experiments to test it. It does nothing.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Harping on the Singularity of God Implies the Opposite

The Muslims make quite a point that they believe in only one god. To me it seems, by protesting so much, they are saying, Yes there are plenty of deities, but only Allah counts.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Harry Potter

Harvard Divinity professor, Casper ter Kuile, advocates treating the Harry Potter novels as if they were sacred texts. He claims doing so will bring blessings. I am not joking. I suppose any religious bullshit is as valid as any other.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Harry Potter

Religious fundamentalists of the future will mistake the Harry Potter books as literal truth. They will consider the movies capturing the events as proof.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Hasidic Jews

Hasidic Jewish males are kept ignorant without marketable job skills. They learn only a little English. This make it hard for them to be exposed to anything critical of the faith and to make it hard for them to leave.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Hating Christians

Christians claim that hate for Christians derives from unjustified hatred for Yahweh. To an atheist, the notion of Yahweh is of no more importance than the existence of Zeus. An atheist does’t hate Yahweh, any more than he hates characters in novels he has not read. But sooner or later, an atheist will encounter Christians who try to push their religion on him. They promote obviously junk science. They make silly magical claims. Christians hurt people he loves because they are pregnant out of wedlock or because they are gay. They interfere with birth control, abortion and euthanasia by imposing their religious superstitions as if they were scientific facts. Naturally, our atheist does not like people who hurt his friends. Christians are nasty and crazy. He does not hate their imaginary god; he hates them. If Christians did not try to interfere in the lives of others, atheists would find Christians of little interest.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Hating Christians

There are two kinds of Christians:

  1. Naïveboobs who truly believe it all.
  2. Professional sharks who know it is a con, who just pretend to believe it to fleece naïve boobs of their money or votes.

A atheist typically feels pity or frustration at a (1). They might see themselves as a lay psychiatrist attempting to free the boob of his delusions. They may feel contempt for a (2) as they would for any criminal.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Hating Yahweh

If you were a holocaust survivor, or the child of one, how could you possibly believe in a benign god? You would have to either become an atheist, or hate Yahweh with every fibre of your being. If you pretended to love him, it would be out of fear, like pretending to approve of Stalin.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Hatred Of Atheists

Americans hate atheists more than any other minority group, even gays, even rapists. Atheists usually remain in the closet to avoid Christian discrimination or call themselves by some euphemism such as non-religious. Christians flatly refuse to vote for atheist candidates. Christians even prevent atheists from running for public office in many states. Christians, without evidence, accuse all atheists of devil worship, child molesting and having no moral restraints.

Why are Christians so hostile? They are even more hostile than they are to Muslims and Hindus. I think it is this. Atheists like to poke holes in Christian beliefs. Christians are forced to confront that their beliefs have nothing but faith to back them. They come face to face with the fact there is no evidence whatsoever for their cherished beliefs. Christians then have to desperately shore up their faith with a stream of lies. This a painful process. They wish atheists would just go away. Discarding their religion would be monumentally disruptive and painful. The challenges that Muslims and Hindus make don’t shake their faith in such a deep way.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Having No Evidence Is Not A Reason to Believe

Christians have no evidence whatsoever for what they believe, but what is more infuriating is they make a virtue of it, as if there were something noble about a dotty old lady who insisted that with 110% certainty there were fairies in her garden just because she felt in her bones that it must be so.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Healing

Let us say a congregation prays for a child with cancer and the child recovers. All credit is given to god, even though the doctors did all the work. But then, what about the dozens of other children who did not recover? God could equally well have healed them, right? Why is he being so heartless? That child living would ruin god’s divine plan. Then why allow the child to be born at all? Why create all that needless heartache? The obvious answer is there is no god. The child who survived is just the statistical fluke. Prayer never produces results better than you would expect with no prayer at all. Christians will sometimes claim prayer works, but they can provide no peer-reviewed paper of an experiment to show that. People prayed for sometimes get better, but they get better just as often without prayer.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Healing With Prayer

Nearly always nothing happens when you pray, despite the fact the bible promises over and over that every prayer will be answered. Christians conveniently forget these failures. On the other hand, patients sometimes spontaneously improve whether people pray over them or not. It is just a coincidence when prayer appears to work. Every scientific experiment has shown prayer has zero healing effect. There is no more evidence that prayer heals than eating a red Smartie does. Sometimes you get better after eating a red Smartie, but that is not evidence it healed you. You would have got better anyway.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Hearing Voices

Strange as it sounds, Christians encourage their children to believe that the voices in their heads always come from the creator of the universe and must be obeyed without question, no matter how bizarre, including murder.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Hearing Voices

When a person hears disembodied voices, especially the voice of god, we invariably discover they have schizophrenia or temporal lobe epilepsy. Why then do we assume people in history who heard such voices did not have schizophrenia or temporal lobe epilepsy?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Heaven

Children sometimes pretend to believe in Santa Claus even after they have discovered the con. Why? Wishful thinking. Heaven works the same way.

Land of Cockaigne

Bruegel’s 1567 painting Land of Cockaigne shows the medieval concept of heaven, lying about in complete idleness and getting fat. To a modern day American, this no longer has much appeal. It is just daily life without the TV. The Muslims upped the ante with 72 virgins. With sex robots coming along, this too will pale. Religions foolishly freeze their heavens in time. They need to be kept up-to-date to have continued appeal.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Heaven

Handel’s Messiah is the most popular Christian-themed composition. Even atheists like it. But could you imagining singing it forever without a break. Christians claim that is what heaven is like. It is unbearably boring! And you are stuck. You can’t even die.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Heaven

The main tool that Christians use to terrify children into handing over 10% of their lifetime income, and submitting silently to sexual abuse is the threat of eternal hellfire. However, heaven too is also far from pleasant. Consider:

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Heaven is a Dictatorship

Heaven is an endless dictatorship you cannot leave. Why does anyone want to go there?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Heaven is Forever

Christians claim that 144,000 male virgins will be rewarded with eternal life after they die. I think Christians don’t quite understand how long forever is. It is much longer than 200 years, much longer than 1,000 years, much longer than 1,000,000 years much longer than 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 years. There is a lot of time to get bored living in a theocratic dictatorship in a park with a bunch of nitwits gathering grapes and singing hymns. No escape for any reason? Why does anyone see this as desirable? It sounds like something Jean-Paul Sartre would come up with. Further, why do so many think they are candidates when they are not even male or virgin much less in the required top 1 in 20,000 in Christian virtue.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Hell

Most people see hell as evidence that Yahweh is sadistic and unjust. However, hell is not the invention of a deity. It is the creation of ancient morally bankrupt Christians. It is a filthy sales tactic to use extortion to sell Christianity. Modern Christians still use it, though some don’t realise what a dishonest tactic it is. I think using extortion to sell religion should be illegal just as it is to use it to sell anything else.

If a salesman fails to sell you a car, his boss blames him. He does not blame the customer. He does not send out his goons to torture the customer. However, Christians lie that this is how it works with god as sales manager.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Hell

What is punishment for?

The Christian hell serves neither of these goals. (Christians are far more likely to commit crimes than atheists. Hell does not act as a deterrent). Hell exacts an infinite punishment for a finite crime. It exacts extreme pain for a crime that might have inflicted minimal pain, and in most cases none (such as picking the wrong religion). To yearn for hell for your neighbours, to the point of creating a delusion, should merit treatment and confinement. This hell is extremely unjust, far less just than anything that happens on earth.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Help for the Unscientific

Let’s say you are not a science person. You neither understand nor trust science. You can’t even open a tin of soup with an electric can opener. Even if an argument about the existence or non-existence of god seemed persuasive, it seems you easily could have been tricked. Your little mind is not competent to settle such grandiose matters. From your point of view, all the arguments about the big bang, evolution and creationism are irrelevant.

Try this. Read up on how all the other 60,000 gods came into being, created by man’s lies for nefarious purposes. Then ask yourself, What makes my god different? How do I know it is different?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Help Yourself

You may have noticed how quotations pop up at random all over my website, aimed as debunking Christianity. You are welcome to use any or all of the quotations in my quotation collection in a similar way on your own website. To get your point across these days, you have to shrink it to a sound bite.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Helping God Kill

People who kill in the name of their god apparently believe their god is not capable of deciding whom to kill or to smite them for himself.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Henry VIII

The Anglican church was founded by Henry VIII, arguably the vilest character in English history. Oddly, adherents of the religion don’t seem to think this matters.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Here is What I Believe

If I ask you about your religious beliefs, and all you can do is send me a link and claim that is what you believe, that is a lie. If you can’t explain what you believe in your own words, then you don’t understand it and thus you can’t believe it.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Hereafter

Clint Eastwood and Matt Damon, people who should know better, made a film called Hereafter to deepen the hold of the Christian delusions about the impossibility of dying.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Hinduism the Great Excuse

Hinduism is a giant rationalisation for doing nothing to help others. Bad health, disability, poverty is all a just punishment for something the afflicted did in a previous life. It results in a society that reeks with garbage and injustice.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Hindus

It is amusing to find out the term Hindu evolved from Europeans invading India referring to people who lived near the Indus river as Indoos. Hindu is not what the original adherents of the religion called themselves.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Hindus Outnumber Protestants

There are twice as many Hindus as Christian Protestants.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Hippatia

Hippatia was a female lecturer on mathematics and astronomy at the great library in Alexandria. In 414 AD, a Christian mob gouged her eyes out and skinned her alive. She should be considered one of the first martyrs to the cause of equal rights for women.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Historical Bad Behaviour

The Catholic churches historically did two really rotten things:

The modern church continues these sins in watered down form, e.g. trying to force Catholic dogma on non-Catholics and by pressing members to tithe. The modern day church has become the largest, most powerful paedophile ring in the world. Yet modern day Catholics pretend their church is the paragon of virtue.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Historical Christian Scoundrels

The scoundrels running Christianity today are fairly obvious, but it is not as obvious the early church leaders were con men too. Even back then they were telling their marks they had to believe without evidence.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Historical Curiosities

Imagine the future where the Jewish, Christian and Islamic gods are just historical curiosities like Zeus and Apollo.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Historical Founders

We have good evidence Islam, Mormons and Scientology all have founders who actually existed. We don’t have that for Christianity. So it is a bit thick of Christians to look down on these other religions as less legitimate.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Hitler Was A Christian

Hitler was a Christian, not an atheist. Every Nazi wore a belt emblazoned Gott mit uns god with us.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Hitler’s Religion

One of the common lies Christians tell is that Hitler was an atheist. He was a Catholic. What evidence is there to support that:

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Holier Christians

It is amusing when Christians who drink, gamble, hunt, take drugs, ogle women, charge usurious interest and eat pork claim to be holier than Muslims who do not.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Hollywood Con Men

Hollywood Christians love to lard their movies with preposterous co-incidences, then ascribe them to god. When people suspend disbelief to watch the movie, they incidentally swallow Christian superstition even though there is no actual evidence for it.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Holy Bestiality Batman

According to the Christians, the god Yahweh impregnated Mary. They were not married and they were not even of the same species. So you would characterise that act as both fornication and bestiality.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Holy Booze

The reason Christians worship alcohol as the blood of Christ and condemn marijuana as the devil’s weed, is that drinking alcohol gives them a hangover.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Holy Cattle

Religious folk claim there are ideas that are so holy, that nobody should be allowed to question them or mock them. However, they happily mock and spit on the holy ideas of other religions. If scientists were to declare evolution as such a holy idea, they would flatly refuse to honour it too. They rudely demand to be treated as a special case, where everyone else kowtows to them. So, I see no reason to regard any ideas as sacrosanct.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Holy Endorsements

Hucksters have known since the beginning of time how to use god’s celebrity endorsement to sell anything. He never asks for a commission. He never contradicts any claim they make. Republicans use him to sell war. Faith healers use him to sell prayer shawls. Meat packers use him to sell turkeys.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Holy Extortion

Let’s say a Mafia-looking guy approached you and suggested you might like to join his club. You get to go to a meeting once a week. They have cookies and coffee. The membership fee is 10% of your lifetime income. You politely decline. He explains the offer is not optional. If you refuse, his thugs will torture you for months. They are practiced in the art of keeping you alive for more torture. You might call the police. They laugh in your face because that is perfectly legal if he is a Christian.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Holy House Calls

Isn’t it odd that whenever a god pays a house call on someone, it is always the most popular local god. But gods are supposed to be universal. If there is only one true god, surely all house calls should be from him.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Holy Life

erythrocyte Do you consider it murder to kill the precious life shown at the right? Do you think it is right to assassinate those uncaring Nazis who wantonly destroy them and toss them in the garbage? If you answered yes, you had better never donate blood and never get a blood test or you will sacrifice billions of these innocent erythrocytes, also known as red blood cells.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Holy Odds

Even if you assume the odds are 100:1 there is a god, you still have 100 times better odds of being right if you presume there is no god, than you have in picking the correct god of the 60,000 possibilities.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Holy Perk

Churches have a special political perk. They can raise money without paying any taxes. They can use false promises and empty threats, completely legally. They use this money illegally for political purposes. Power from on high ensures they get away with it. So politicians have to suck up to religions and pretend to believe if they want to get elected.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Home Schooling

In the USA, religious parents can take their kids out of schools to home school them. But they do not have to offer any instruction at all, giving any old strange religious excuse. Parents have absolute authority to teach their kids any nonsense they want, or nothing at all. Surely kids should have some rights. A lack of education will ruin a child’s life. Surely kids should have some rights to a decent education, even if their parents want to deny them one.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Home Schooling

You might be tempted to give up on Christians who home school their children to ensure they learn nothing of science, computers and technology to fill their heads with bronze age myths. When the kids grow up, they won’t be able to get decent employment. The catch is, they will become lifetime welfare recipients. Ironically, welfare recipients have even more babies than other people. The problem will grow with each generation until it sinks the entire country economically.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Homeless

40% of homeless teens are LGBTQ (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transsexual or Queer). Their Christian parents disown them and toss them out onto the street. The parents feel profoundly virtuous about what they have done.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Homeless Messiah

Christians will never get over the shame that their Messiah was homeless and did not have a job.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

homeopathy

Homeopathy is a crazy religion. It claims the more dilute a medicine the more powerful it is. It dilutes to levels less than one atom per glassful, i.e. completely indistinguishable from distilled water. All water has at some point been in contact with every conceivable chemical, poison and feces so this must override any attempt at medication.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Homeopathy

If homeopathy works and poisons diluted billions of times still have effect, then that water must also remember all the spit, poo, urine and semen that was ever dumped into it since the beginning of time.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Hope for Consensus

The only hope for consensus among religious believers is that tiny shred of scientific reality they all hold as legitimate.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Hopeless

Christians often say I could never be an atheist. I could not stand a life without hope. Analogously, a Christian buys a lottery ticket then convinces himself that at the Christmas draw, the ticket will, with absolute certainty, pay out $100 million dollars. He does not care that this is a lie. All that matters is he gets to enjoy the anticipation. If he wants to do this fine, but he should not lie to others this is an absolute certainty, and they should buy lottery tickets too, when it is actually a longshot.

They are making their lives miserable. They cannot really fool themselves. The just convince themselves life is meaningless without a $100 jackpot. They refuse to enjoy what there is to enjoy.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Horrible Heaven

The Christian notion of heaven is not only preposterous and childish, it is monumentally tedious, with no challenges and no possibility of escape. Only a nincompoop would desire it. Death is a million times more desirable.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Horrible Heaven

In the middle ages, when most people toiled from dawn till dusk, the idea of sitting around forever doing nothing and getting fat was appealing. Today, it sounds nightmarishly boring. The appeal of the empty promise of Christian heaven is waning. Imagine the Vatican offered a choice of $1,000,000 cash now or the promise of traditional heaven later. How many would take either deal?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Horror at Brainwashing

Just as we look back in horror at slavery, whipping children and bull baiting, future generations will look back in horror at the way parents were permitted to brainwash their children into their culture’s religious superstitions with terror and punishment.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Horse Laugh Therapy

If someone is having a nervous breakdown and they are suffering from paranoid delusions, one of the thing you can do to help is give their fears a hearty horse laugh. You want to show them the fears are too silly to even debate and that you confidently have zero fear. I wonder how the same approach would work on Christians with a paranoid fear of an evil deity torturing them for eternity after death. The problem is they have fellow deluded Christians maliciously feeding the terror faster than you can dissipate it. Perhaps you will have to wangle away to isolate them from other Christians for a week or two.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

How To Be A Good Christian

  1. Make stuff up.
  2. Insist it is true.
  3. Kill people who don’t believe you.
~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

How the Bear Got His Stumpy Tail

I find it baffling that any adult takes the Christian account of creation seriously. It reminds me of the tall tale of how the bear got its stumpy tail or the wolf/salmon creation myth of the Haida.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

How Christians Detected A Witch

Christians once believed that if a woman took off her stockings and there was a rainstorm, it was proof she was a witch and they were thus obligated to burn her alive.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70) The Demon-haunted World: Science As a Candle in the Dark

How Christians Determine Truth

Christians decide what to believe based on what they wish were true, what makes them feel good when they believe it. Atheists decide what to believe by what the evidence suggests is true, whether they like it or not. Obviously, atheists are more likely to be correct because that is what they are aiming for. If you act in the world believing it is different from the way it is, you are going to do some very stupid things. For example, Christians as a whole have massively destroyed the environment acting on the false belief that Yahweh the god would soon destroy it all anyway. Another example, Christians kill each other in wars under the delusion nobody is really going to die.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

How Churches Extort Money From Non-Believers

You’d think freedom of religion would prevent a church, whose doctrines I find odious, from extorting money from me, yet it can do it in several ways:

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

How Could They Possibly Know?

Christians assure me their religion is 100% true and all others are false, even evil. They also assure me that they have never read any of the holy scripture of any other religion and know almost nothing about them. They know Christianity is the only true religion because their guts tell them is it so. In other words, they have an emotional attachment to the religion taught them as a child. But they would have the same emotional attachment to some other religion if that were the one taught. Look at how tenaciously Muslims are attached to their religion! There is nothing inherently superior about Christianity. Christianity is an accident of birth, rarely a conscious choice.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

How Could You Know?

Christians love to tell me things like god is omnipresent; god has always existed; god is omnipotent. god has no beginning or end.. How could you possibly know that? Did god tell you? You have never even seen him! This is just little boy bragging my Dad/god is bigger than your Dad/god. When I was a boy in grade 2, I loved to draw Martians. My mother was quite horrified at some of my designs that had three legs. I was just making this up, speculating. Christians do the same thing, but pretend their guesses are irrefutable truth. They have no shame about applying any attribute they please to god, just because it sounds impressive.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

How to Curse Someone

It is probably best for your mental health if, when you curse someone, you wish on them an affliction only severe enough to stop them from committing their evil. There is no need for them to be boiled in oil, even if they fully deserve it.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

How Dare You Pray!

There are many things about Christianity that make no sense to me. Assume I too believed the universe was run from a cloud by sadistic pervert who more than anything else liked to watch people masturbating. I might be interested in placating this horny old goat, perhaps by masturbating more, but I certainly would not be ordering him about, i.e. praying. Despite his cruelty, surely he knows far more than I do about how to run a universe.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

How Dare You!

Think of all the dreadful painful ordeals children have had to go through, often ending in their deaths or abandonment. You you sit there claiming their is an infinitely merciful god orchestrating all this? Bullshit. I spit on your god. I pee on him. I throw dog shit at him. I spray him with cat vomit.

He is an uncaring bastard if he has the ability to save these kids and does nothing. He deserves disdain not worship. He is a washed up useless turd. But, of course, the real explanation is there is no god. If there were one, even a half assed one with the morals of Donald Trump, he would do something for some of those kids, but we don’t even see that.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

How Did We Get Here?

How did everything get here? You have two choices: listen to people who lived thousands of years ago who just speculated then tried to con people into believing them by pretending they got their speculations straight from god.

Or you can listen to people to have observed the universe with sensitive instruments, who have sent probes into space, who have created math and checked it out to see if it were correct and consistent.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

How Does Religion Work?

Religion exploits two human frailties:

  1. gullibility
  2. peer pressure

When an adherent hears the same lie from many sources, no matter how absurd the lie, he will trust those sources over his own eyes and experience.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

How God Kills

People live longer in the non-religious countries of the world. This is simply because religious superstitions about health do not get in the way.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

How It Is Has Nothing With How I Wish It Were

Whether the universe is either finite or infinite has nothing whatsoever to do with how I wish it would be.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

How Many Buy Transubstantiation?

What percentage of people who claim their church literally hands out the flesh of Christ during the mass are lying and what percentage actually experience a delusion of chowing down on human flesh?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

How Many Children?

For the human species to be sustainable, couples must have an average of 2.00 children surviving to adulthood. If they have less, the population dies out. If they have more, you get environmental collapse, war, pestilence and famine. Religions, pressing for greater market share, irresponsibly urge their adherents to breed as much as possible. If some couples have more than two children it necessitates others having fewer. Only China seem to understand just how anti-social overbreeding is.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

How to Meet God

If you want to meet god, your best chance is to have a temporal lobe epileptic seizure. This was as true 3000 years ago as today.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70) Secrets of the Mind click to watch

How to Pick a Religion

  1. Are its claims true, evidence-based and sensible?
  2. Do people who subscribe to this religion behave better than average?
  3. Are people who subscribe to this religion happier than average?
  4. Do those running the religion extract more money from the congregation than would be needed for operating expenses?
  5. Does it adjust to changing conditions?
  6. Does it have rituals, foods and clothing you can live with?

In my experience, nearly every single religion fails on point (1). I found one, which does not bill itself as a religion, Living Love, that meets the criteria, but it is effectively defunct.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

How to Prove Yahweh Does Not Exist

If you can show me how to prove there are no leprechauns, then I will show you how to prove there is no Yahweh.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

How A Religion Grows

A religion grows by persuading its members to have large numbers of children, not by presenting persuasive arguments for its articles of faith.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

How Religion Ruined Indonesia

In Indonesia there is freedom of religion if you pick one of six faiths: Islam, Catholicism, Protestantism, Buddhism, Hinduism or Confucianism. You must pick one. Atheism is not permitted. It could get you killed. This reminds me of criminal gangs or colluding monopolies carving up a territory to exclude the competition. Religious insanity has turned Indonesia from a paradise to a cesspool. It is analogous to a cartel.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

How Religions Are Chosen

Children nearly always follow the religion of their parents or peers. Logic, truth or the inherent attractiveness of a given religion have little to do with it.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

How Science Differs From Faith

Christians try to pretend that science is just an another arbitrary belief like deciding to be Catholic or Anglican, or choosing a favourite flavour of ice cream. The difference is science must conform with evidence. Religions, like other fiction, don’t have that restriction. They are free to construct their truths out of thin air.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

How Smart Are We?

Religion encourages us to see ourselves as the paragon of animals, vastly more intelligent and worthy than any other creature, even creatures with brains many times the size of ours. Yet, genetically, we are almost identical to chimpanzees. We differ in only 2% of our genes. That means that 2% accounts for all the differences between chimps and humans. That means, objectively, we are probably only 2% smarter than chimps. That is hardly anything to brag about.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

How Stupid Can Christians Be?

During WWII, people would have wakened up each morning and said to themselves That damned Hitler is still alive. What is the matter with the Germans that they are still following that crazy evil bastard? I wake up each morning and say What is the matter with these stupid Christians? Why can’t they see how badly their religion makes them behave? Why can’t they see it is all utter bullshit? Why are they in total denial of reality?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

How Sure Are You?

Christians tease me by saying I cannot be 100% sure there is no god. I am more sure that Yahweh does not exist than I am that Daffy Duck does not rule the universe. After all, I have seen Daffy. For all practical purposes, that is as sure as I can get. If there is a god, the most likely one is Giant, pronounced with a hard G. Only I can see him (I vainly tried to introduce him to my friends — most embarrassing) and even I have not seen him in 55 years. Failing that, the Greek pantheon. Yahweh is way down the list. He behaves so badly I think he should be classified as a devil, not a god. He never helps anyone and he breaks all his promises. He is obscenely vain. Yahweh behaves like Trump, if he were a god.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

How to Waste a life

Belief in an afterlife is a recipe for procrastination and a wasted life.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

How Wishful Thinking Does You In

You can err by believing something untrue, or by refusing to believe something that is true. Wishful thinking will do you in every time. Fundamentalists believe that God will come and clean up the ecological mess they have made of earth. Africans believe all manner of irrelevant spells will protect from AIDS. Germans in . (Don’tI) refused to believe the holocaust going under their noses. Americans refused to believe the war crimes of their soldiers in Afghanistan and Iraq.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

How You Know Yahweh Does Not Exist

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Hubris

Both Stalin and Hitler believed divine providence had singled them out for their rôle in history. Christianity filled their heads with delusional self confidence that they could not err.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Huffy Christians

If you ask a religious person what evidence they have for their beliefs and they get huffy, it means they have no evidence to support them. If they did, they would just present their evidence, as they would in a non-religious debate, such as whether it is good idea to take vitamin-C tablets.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Human Extinction

Personally I think man will be extinct, or reduced to the stone age, by 2200. There are so many ways we could take ourselves out:

To pass this gauntlet we are going to have to be very smart, and very focused on the big picture. What are the main impediments to intelligent thinking?

We need people working on preventing the various avenues of extinction and on derailing the impediments to logical thinking. I doubt we will make it, but what else can we do in the meantime but give it our best shot?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Human Gods

We humans have become our own gods. We decide the temperature of the oceans. We create giant gyres of plastic swirling in the ocean. We decide the intensity of the hurricanes. We decide the depth of the oceans. We remove mountains in our lust for copper. We smite entire marine ecosystems with oil spills. We stop the flow of the earth’s mightiest rivers. We can wipe out a species with the stroke of a pen. We create new life forms to smite our enemies with plagues far more horrible than any ever seen before. With the press of a red button, we can cause the entire earth to disappear in a nuclear flash. We are just as irresponsible, cruel and nutty as the god prototype Yahweh.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Human Rights

Rights are only an issue for unpopular minorities. If we decided who should get human rights by voting, only the majority group would ever get rights. You have rights because you are a human, despite the fact some conceited Christian wants to make an exception for you.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Human Sacrifice

Christians insist that human sacrifice, especially of Jesus, benefits everyone. They think that magically the responsibility for sins jump to the sacrificial victim to be consumed by suffering and death. By what mechanism? The perps committed the crimes. They are just as guilty as they ever were. Degenerate Christian perps fool themselves that their responsibility has been magically lifted. The notion of scapegoating is insane. The perpetrator receives no correction. How are they ever to learn? You might as well have no justice at all. It is unfair to the scapegoat. The suffering of the scapegoat does nothing to benefit the original victim. This is a crazy idea from the deep past, as nuts as burying babies in holes to ensure pillars stand up. It is wrong. How is it possible Christians fret over abortion of a blastula too small to see and yet swallow sacrifice of human adults as a necessary good? There is no possible way that adding innocent suffering to the world can benefit anyone. That is magical crazy thinking. It is just plain nuts. Until they renounce this barbaric idea, Christians should be confined as criminally insane.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Human Sacrifice

The original idea of human/animal sacrifice was you gave a human/animal as a gift to the god of field fertility. You burned the body to turn it into smoke to waft the gift up to where the god was resting where he could enjoy it. He would be so pleased and he would make the fields fertile. This sort of worked, because if the ashes of the sacrificial victim were spread on the fields, they acted as fertiliser. The priests did not realise you could get much better effects with cattle dung.

This morphed into the idea that if you sacrifice a human or animal, with magic ceremonies, the guilt in you could be sucked out and transferred to the sacrificial victim. When they died, the harm of your sins would be magically erased. This is similar to Catholic indulgences, but without the sacrifice, where by paying a fee, the church would perform some magic to erase the effects of your sins. This was a con. There is no magic you can perform to undo the effects of a rape or murder.

What is so bizarre is people living to day still believe in this mumbo-jumbo when it involves the human sacrifice of Jesus.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Human Sacrifice

Proportionately there are far more Christians in prison than atheists. That is the fact. You can look it up. It does not matter if that violates your intuition or the lies fellow Christians have told you. Further, the countries with the lowest murder, rape and crime rates are Sweden and Norway. They are atheist. Not only does Christianity fail to make you moral, it makes you tend to become criminal.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Human Vision is Second Rate

Christians love to talk about the magnificence of human vision, allegedly the acme of Yahweh’s handiwork. Hubble looks at the heavens with far greater precision than the human eye. A hawk can see much better than we can. Lions can see much better in the dark that we can. Octopus have better designed eyes than we do. The human retina is defective because the nerves block the light. Bees can see UV; we cannot. Other animals got it right. What does that do for biblical Adam as apple of Yahweh’s eye?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Human-Chauvinism

I don’t know how long it will take, but humanism will eventually have the same malodour as racism and Christianity, i.e. considered pathetically chauvinistic. Here are some of the things that may prod mankind out of his preposterously human-centric view of the universe:

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Humane Slaughter

One of the original intents of the Jewish kosher (and Islamic Halal) rules for slaughtering animals was humane treatment of animals. Islam tells a story about a man who watered a thirsty stray dog and Allah forgave all his sins.

Now, at prodding from Dutch animal-rights activists, the Dutch parliament has voted to upgrade to even more humane slaughter standards. Oddly, the head rabbi of the Netherlands, Binyomin Jacobs, opposes this, claiming stunning animals prior to slaughter reminds him of the holocaust. He believes his religious right to kill animals inhumanely, dragging out death for two minutes or more, is being challenged and the motive for such changes is to destroy his religion, not the welfare of animals.

I think he is an idiot. More humane standards are logically upward compatible with the old kosher rules. They are in keeping with the spirit of both the Jewish and Muslim religions. I could imagine this foolish old rabbi complaining about stricter hygiene standards in restaurants on the grounds they were preventing him from eating clean food. The standards for treatment of animals even 200 years ago were atrocious. Adhering to the standards of 4000 years ago is barbaric.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Humans are Not Animals

Ignorant Christians insist that humans are not animals. They contend humans are a special, separate class, superior to all animals. Scientifically this utter nonsense.

How can you tell that humans are animals?

The only reason to classify humans as non-animal is vanity. Man likes to think himself special, egged on by religion. Yet humans can accept organ transplants from pigs. How could that be if humans were not animals?

When I was doing dolphin research, I felt in the presence of a species superior to humans. That a Christian thinks he is superior to a dolphin is laughable.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Humans Lie

Except when it does not matter, humans tend to lie. To deal with this, science has developed protocols for cross checking assertions. Religion on the other hand encourages flamboyant lying. In their view, the more outrageous an assertion, the more truthiness it has. Mary had one of the most spectacular lies ever for her pregnancy.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Humans Similar To Yahweh

The key attributes of Yahweh are:

Which humans does he remind you of:

None of these people were capable of torturing anyone for more than a decade or two, unlike Yahweh who reputedly does not give up even after the universe ends.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Humbled By God

Except for the ear, eye, calculating parts of the brain and touch, science has not yet created artificial organs superior to the natural ones. But we have only been trying for perhaps 100 years. Nature/evolution has had a 3 billion year head start. I wonder what man might be able to pull off with another 3 billion years. Even something as stupid as natural selection estimated to have IQ 1 can accomplish miracles with 3 billion years to work with. It is an unimaginably long time. The progress is completely undetectable it is so slow. If you made an animated video of the story of evolution where you collapsed each century of evolution down to just one second, the video would take almost a year to play.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Humiliation

We would sooner be wrong than admit we were wrong.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Humiliation of Being Wrong

It is fundamentally unfair that, after death, the Christian and Muslim does not have to face the humiliation of discovering he was wrong, where the atheist at least potentially does.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Humouring Christians

When someone is brain dead, it costs an enormous amount of money to keep them on life support. There is no chance they will regain conscious. However, Christians, confused by beliefs in non-existent miracles, badger hospitals to keep loved ones on life support. Hospitals humour them at massive taxpayer expense. Further, the delay means organs that could be recycled and save other lives, deteriorate. Christians should pay for the pointless life support themselves, just as they should any other medically useless procedure. We should not them get away with being so self-indulgent, selfish and silly.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Hunter Prey Spirituality

The business of a spiritual relationship between a hunter and prey is crap. The hunter deceives himself that he has the prey’s permission to kill it. His apologies, funeral ceremonies, sacrificial meat do nothing for the prey or its species. It is just mumbo jumbo to make the hunter feel better about himself.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Hurricanes

Contrary to evidence, Christians imagine the horrible destruction of hurricanes is caused by Yahweh’s malicious will. Why do they pray to this monster? He obviously hates them. They should get on with the rescue rather than sitting on their thumbs praying.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Hussein

Hussein was Mohammed’s grandson. Shia mourn two days each year for his death. This is as strange as mourning the death of Shakespear. Everyone of his generation are dead. He could not possibly be still alive, so mourning that he is not is batshit crazy.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Hydra

In Greek mythology, the hydra was a many-headed beast. Every time Heracles hacked one of the heads off, two grew it its place. This reminds me of the religious right meddling in everyone else’s affairs, from birth, to school, to marriage to organ transplants to end-of-life decisions, insidiously inserting their psychotic religious superstitions into every aspect of everyone’s life, like some foetid cancer. Heracles finally defeated the hydra by cauterising each of its wounds as he hacked off its heads.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Hypnosis

Crackpot therapists use hypnosis to convince people they have experienced an alien abduction. Ever after the patient is tied to the therapist and hands over significant sums to them. This made me wonder about the role of hypnosis in religion, tricking people into believing bullshit and handing over money week after week. Much of what religious professionals say is a boring word salad, just like a trance induction.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Hypnosis

Have you ever noticed how much Christians say is just a word salad, blithering nonsense. Sometimes it sounds on the surface like something profound, but when you examine it, it is just vague, meaningless noise. Hypnotists use that kind of speech for trance induction. We need a scientific study to find out how much of the attraction to Christianity is post-hypnotic suggestion. Hypnosis could be used to generate strange body sensations that could be mistaken for the presence of Yahweh or to convince people Yahweh will contact them.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Hypnosis

When I was 15, I had two friends who were sons of psychiatrists. We went on a fishing trip and it rained solidly. One of the things we did to entertain each other was to use hypnosis. With hypnotic suggestion, one of my friends became invisible to me, like a hole in my visual field. Also, on hypnotic suggestion, I fell asleep falling forward into the camp fire. They had to drag me out. When I hear tales of miracles, the first two things I think of are hypnosis and stage magic. There is no need to invoke the supernatural.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

I Cannot Really Die

Christians claim they cannot really die, but Muslims actually believe it. This is a valid reason for trying to keep nukes out of the hands of Muslims even more strenuously than Christians.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

I Don’t Know

Christians are afraid to admit they do not know the answers to some questions. They offer up speculations as if they were solid answers. They then congratulate themselves on knowing everything and spit on atheists who do not. Yet they learn nothing new through this little dodge. They just sow confusion with their lies.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

I Don’t Like Christians

I really don’t like Christians. Not only are they completely wrong about nearly everything, they are smugly proud of it. They think they are better than everyone else even though they are aggressively ignorant. They have no reasons for their beliefs, just a sheep-like adoption of cult cant. They think because they are automatically right about everything, they have the right to meddle in the private lives of non-believers. They demand special privilege. They imagine just because they intuit something, it trumps all common sense, all evidence, all logic and everyone else’s intuition. It is hard to refrain from screaming at them in frustration or doing them harm.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

I Get Annoyed When…

I get annoyed when…

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Icheneumon Fly

The ichneumon fly inserts its ovipositor into a caterpillar, paralyses it and lays some eggs inside the caterpillar’s body. The eggs hatch and slowly eat the living caterpillar. When Darwin found out about this, he could not believe a loving god could create such a horrible insect. Its behaviour is perfectly understandable by evolution. There is no need for the ichneumon to evolve mercy since that quality does not help it survive or produce more offspring.

Humans work hard to kill other animals humanely. If there were a loving god, he would have created all prey animals and insects to kill their prey humanely. The lack of this mercy is evidence there is no humane god, and no god at all since all gods are supposed to be loving by definition. In a similar way, why would a kind god have created viruses, diseases, mosquitoes and parasites to plague his creations? The god hypothesis contradicts the way things are. Evolution explains the way things are.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Iconography

A common figure in Christian iconography is an elderly, cranky, bearded, Jewish man, e.g. Yahweh, the apostles, Noah, Moses… When I see these people, I think That’s a homeless person. These are not people I would like to hang out with.

Younger males are usually depicted nude or almost nude with some coy garland hiding the genitals. The genitals are shrunk to an nondescript blob. The bodies are pudgy. There are not males. They are females with mastectomies. I think these images are supposed to be titillating, but I don’t find them appealing.

Females are depicted swathed in yards and yards of cloth with just the face and hands poking out. Such garments could not easily be cleaned, so would go years acquiring the odours of urine and feces. Not appealing.

When I went to visit the Roman baths in Bath England, I saw a shrine to Minerva Sulis. There was a large circular silver shield on the wall with her face on it. I was transfixed. It was as if time stopped. She radiated power and magnificence. It was like the air vibrated. Of all the religious iconography I have ever encountered, this was the one that most knocked my socks off. I could easily imagine someone living 2000 years ago believing this image had supernatural power.

There was another impressive encounter with religion, but not involving iconography. I was once sitting near some Hari Krishnas dancing and singing. A little girl from the group wandered over and gave me a bag of peanuts. Suddenly the boundaries between my body and the rest of the universe dissolved. It was delightful.

Christianity is like a musty old hall in comparison.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

The Ideal Con

In the movie The Sting, Henry Gondorff, played by Paul Newman, explained the best con is one where the mark never even figures out he has been had. By that criterion and by the total take, Christianity is the greatest con of all time.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Idiotic Prayer

I could smack Christians senseless who counsel praying to find a lost child. They might as well be saying Give up. Do nothing. What an utter waste of time!

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Idolatry

The ten commandments are extremely clear on the wickedness of idolatry, but oddly Christians, more than any other group, are the most prone to fall into idolatry in the form of flag worship.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

If the Christians were Right

If the universe were really run by an insane tyrant like Kim Jong-un, it might make sense to grovel and try to curry favour, and do whatever immoral or nutty thing he requested.

Christians feel alarmed that we atheists are taking large risks my thumbing our noses at Yahweh. We atheists are quite sure we are taking no risks at all, or at least no more than poking fun at Zeus. We thumb our noses to help you Christians lose you fear of imaginary bogeymen. Consider:

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

If Faith Healing Worked…

If faith healing actually worked, wouldn’t there be a resident faith healer at least in some hospitals?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

If a God Existed?

What if a god existed? What would he be like? I can answer that two ways:

  1. How does the bible describe Yahweh, the Christian god? Richard Dawkins summarises that as … 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.
  2. Ignoring the bible, what does observing the universe imply about the nature of any ruling deity? He is reclusive. He has not made an appearance or done anything detectable in at least 2000 years. Reports of appearances before that are questionable. He is completely indifferent to the fate of humans. He allows natural disasters, wars, famines, plagues, birth defects, protracted painful deaths… He does not block humans from doing stupid things like mass release of CO₂, pollution, stockpile nuclear weapons, stockpile biological weapons, widen the wealth gap to a chasm… He ignores all prayers. He does not appear to favour any religious group, e.g. by protecting their homes from floods and fires.
~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

As if Gullibility were a Virtue

Politicians parade their faith as if gullibility were a positive trait.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

If Prayer Were Effective…

If prayers had any effect at all, Nelson Mandela would have lived forever.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

If There Were A God

If there were a god, I would think he would be absolutely furious at those bilking the poor in his name to enrich themselves. He would be livid at those teaching doctrines of selfishness and cruelty in this name. I would expect he would dispatch lightning bolts to fry these people in a very public way. I would expect the earth to open and swallow up the TV stations broadcasting this BS. But this does not happen. Either god is complicit in these scams, he does not care or he does not exist. Non existence seems the most likely possibility.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

If There Were a God, How Would The World Be Different?

This list points out facts about the world that are inconsistent with there being a god. It describes how the world would be if there were a god.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Ignoble Chaplains

The function of a chaplain in to encourage soldiers to keep on killing when they start to have qualms of conscience. There is nothing whatsoever noble in the profession.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Ignorance = God

A Christian believes that anything he does not understand must be the direct handiwork of Yahweh the god.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Ignored Graven Images

Are not images on coins and bills of the head of state graven images?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Ignoring the Commandments

Given the way most Christians so cavalierly disobey what they claim are god’s commandments, they are hypocrites. They don’t seriously believe what they preach. They just want others to believe what they claim to believe.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Ignoring Commandments

Modern day Samaritans still perform animal sacrifices to Yahweh as demanded by the old testament. Modern day Jews and Christians are civilised and ignore those commandments.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Ignoring Evidence

Christians do not believe in evidence. Instead, they believe what they wish were true. Then they blithely ignore the inconsistencies. I see such people as like spoiled fat little girls who demand their parents shape the world to conform to their desires. Truth means nothing. All that matters is what they want. They are so self-centred. I find them so repulsive, I wish they would all drop dead.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Ignoring Inconsistency

Christians don’t accept that if two statements are inconsistent then one or both of them must be false. It is like dealing with someone whose religion also requires him to reject that 2 + 2 = 4.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Ignoring Religious Wrongdoing

Religious tolerance has gone to far when it causes people to look the other way at wrongdoing committed in the name of religion.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

The Illusion of Time

Einstein saw time as just another space dimension. You have a location in space-time. The present is where you are now on the time dimension. The past and future exist in completeness, just like the present. You can move around in space. Even when you do nothing, you move through time, toward the future. Space travelers can exist in the earth’s future. The Illusion of Time click to watch This suggests our fate is pre-determined, though unknown. Of course, religion knows nothing of this.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Illusions

When you see an amazing illusion, and you, you who has no training in the conjuring arts, can still figure out a way it could be done, you don’t presume you have just viewed the supernatural. Even when you view an illusion that baffles you, you still don’t presume the supernatural. So why do you presume the supernatural for very simple, easy-to-fake, illusions in the bible, when you did not even get to view them?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Images of God

Hindus tell me that god (Ganesh) looks like a cartoon elephant. Christians tell me the creator of the entire universe is a white bearded senile old pervert who hides in the clouds using his x-ray vision to watch people masturbate. Ancient Egyptians claimed god (Sobek) looked like a man with the head of a crocodile. Ancient Greeks claimed god (Zeus) transformed himself into a swan in order to commit rape of a human female. Christians claim their god (Yahweh) transformed himself into a shower of gold flakes in order to impregnate a human female. How is it believers are incapable of noticing how absurd all these claims are?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Imaginary Gods

All gods, including Yahweh, are imaginary. Men created them to gain power over others and to con them out of their money. There are two types of people who defend the gods as real, con men and their deluded victims.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Imaginary Monsters

Talking to Christians about god is like talking to children about ogres under the bed. No amount of logic will reassure them the monsters are imaginary.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Imaginary Seatbelts

Believing in god is like believing in imaginary seat belts. It gives you a false sense of security.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

The Imaginary Soul

Christians believe that the body is insignificant husk, that the invisible, undetectable soul is what is important. They believe this life is but a insignificant eyeblink. Real life starts only after you die. They have no evidence whatsoever for this ancient conceit. However, they are so sure it is true, they are willing to put people in jail or torture them for refusing to believe it and even kill innocent women, children and doctors. I refer to the consequences of the fanciful belief that make Christians imagine that contraception and abortion are wicked and that taking your own life to avoid a painful death is vandalism of Yahweh’s private property.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Imagined Atheism

Christians criticise atheism without first reading the first thing about it. They write about how they imagine it would be.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Imagined Malice

I have met a number of women who are convinced their computer has malicious intent toward them. They also imagine I have some supernatural power to intimidate their computers and cause them to behave in my presence. They may also ascribe this agency to other machines such as vacuum cleaners and refrigerators. This is a childish way of looking at the world, imagining intent when it is not there. Taken to extreme, humans imagine even the weather is out to get them and the agent of this malice is a deity.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Immaculate Conception

Yahweh allegedly impregnated another man’s 13-year-old wife. If a person did that, we would convict them of rape. Why is it so bleeding holy just because Yahweh did it? If your daughter or wife told you such a tale, what are the odds it was true? What are the odds it was just a big lie to cover up for a more conventional explanation?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

The Immorality of Christianity

The basic tenet of Christianity is that if you are good, you go to paradise. If you are bad you go to hell. At first glance, this seems fair. However, all sins are forgivable if if you believe. The one sin that is not forgivable is failure to believe in the particular sect’s doctrine. No matter how virtuous you are, you are bound for hell if you picked the wrong sect or if you picked none of them. It is like a lottery. You have to guess which is the one true religion/sect. If you guess wrong, you are tortured for eternity. There is no justice whatsoever in that. This is not a religion. It is a sick con game.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Immune To Prosecution

The pope’s butler has been arrested for whistleblowing his illegal activities. Normally the law gives safe haven to whistleblowers. The pope is a master of disguise. He is effectively a crime family don, but masquerades as someone who cannot sin.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Immunity From Prosecution

Churches have a remarkable immunity from prosecution, exceeding even than of corporations. However, this immunity is not absolute. They have been successfully sued by sexual abuse survivors. The Anglican church in Canada may have been dealt a death blow by such lawsuits. Perhaps churches can be sued for other crimes as well, or the criminal conspiracies within the church can be prosecuted. Without the people, the churches would be but empty shells unable to do more harm.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Implausibility

The beliefs of Christians are even less physically plausible than those of the Heaven’s Gate suicide cult.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Implausible God

Even Star Trek NG’s Q is a more plausible deity than the Old Testament’s god Yahweh.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

The Implication of Failure of Prayer

Is there a god? is too fuzzy a question to admit an answer. Just what counts as a god?

Instead, I will tackle a more concrete question, Does Yahweh, the god of the old and new Testaments, exist as described by the bible?

The bible says that the way god most commonly interacts with the universe is by answering prayer. According to the bible, he answers every single prayer, without fail. It says this in many places. So if Yahweh exists, there should be no unanswered prayers.

Every child has tried praying, and discovered it did not work. If it did, every child would have a pony. Every time scientists have explored this question, they found praying has zero effect. All it would take is one unanswered prayer to contradict the bible. In any case, the universe clearly does not contain a creature that answers all prayers. In other words, the universe does not contain a god as described by the bible. In other words, there is no Yahweh.

You can come up with all the explanations you want about why Yahweh does not or should not answer prayer, but that does not change the fact that the bible, the word of god, describes Yahweh as a being that answers all prayers from everyone. In other words, there is no god as defined by the bible.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Implications of 60,000 One True Religions

An atheist looks at the ten thousands religions, each one claiming it alone represents the wishes of the creator of the universe and thinks Even if one of those religions truly were the religion, the odds of any religion chosen at random being the true religion would be only one in 60,000. Clearly, humans are highly prone to creating false religions. Chances are they are all bogus, especially since none of them can provide evidence for their extravagant claims.

The adherents of religions all suffer from extreme arrogance. They have no problem whatsoever believing their religion is the true religion and everyone else is wrong, even if they have not even given a cursory glance at any other religion.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Implications of Belief In God

When someone believes in god, he is saying This world is shit. This can’t be the real thing.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Implications of Violence

Those advocating the most violent means to disabuse others of their delusions are usually entangled in some rigid, delusional belief structure themselves.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Consider Mao Tse Tung and his efforts to wipe out Tibetan Buddhism, or the American attempts to wipe out Islam in Iraq and Afghanistan or the Catholic church’s persecution of the Albigensian heresy.

Importance of Compromise

Democracy requires compromise. Fundamentalists refuse to compromise. When they participate in democracy, they create deadlock.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

The Importance of Plastics

Archaeologists, thousands of years from now, will discover giant deposits of plastics. Same will take this as irrefutable proof of the existence of god.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Imposing

Most Christians would think it improper to drag their non-Christian neighbours to church and force them to kneel, pray sing and take communion. Yet nearly all of them have no qualms about forcing their neighbours to observe their superstitions around organ donations, end-of-life, family planning and sex. They treat their crackpot beliefs about souls and their deity as if they were universally accepted science.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Imposing Religion

You have no more right to impose a religion on your child than you do on your next door neighbour.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Imposing Superstition

We should no more impose our religious superstitions on others than our techniques of masturbation. We should be similarly silent about them.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Imposing Taste

To me, paintings of Elvis on black velvet are the most disgusting form of art imaginable. However, I would never dream of lobbying to make them illegal, or killing people who owned them. However, there are some people, most commonly Christians, who think their taste should apply to everyone. They don’t like oral sex, so nobody else should either. They don’t like same-sex activity, so those that do should be put in jail or killed.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Impossible to Respect a Christian

How can you possibly respect a Christian or Muslim? He worships an incredibly evil god who tortures people with infinite pain for eternity for any transgression of his rules? They are more despicable than Hitler’s toadies.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Impotent God

If there truly were a god, the ground would have opened up and swallowed all the oil rigs long ago.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Impotent God

If there were a god, surely every church in the world by now would have been vapourised in the night and replaced by a vacant lot or the land restored to its original natural state.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Impotent God

If there were a god, surely he could be counted on to at least bellow at genocides.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Impotent God

Think of the monsters of history — Caligula, Nero, Vlad the Impaler, King Henry VIII, Hitler, Saddam Hussein, George W. Bush… Not once did anybody’s deity intervene to stop them. That means either all the world’s deities do not exist or those that do are hard-hearted bastards who are both useless and unworthy of worship.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Improvement

The improvement in the living conditions of mankind can be thought of as rooting out falsehoods and misconceptions and replacing them with truth. Christianity and Islam are the two biggest lies preying on mankind.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Impudent Prayer

I am surprised Christians have the courage to pray, much less in public. They are effectively saying to Yahweh Your divine plan sucks! Change it!

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

In God We Trust

During the cold war in 1956 the USA started using the motto In God We Trust replacing E pluribus unum. The idea was to separate the Christian Americans from the godless Communists. The establishment clause of the constitution says the government should not favour any religion. Because Christians are the majority, they successfully blocked honouring the constitution.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

In God We Trust

What does the phrase In God We Trust mean? It means Whatever needs to be done, we can trust an invisible man hiding in the clouds to do it. Given that this being has never done any work at human bidding before, the phrase effectively means There is nothing that needs to be done.. I think it rather cavalier to claim a monetary system runs itself. It requires considerable human labour to keep it running smoothly. We should thus remove the phrase In God We Trust from money, simply because it is not true, whether or not you believe in Yahweh the god.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Incest

If you literally believe genesis, you have to believe god commanded some of Adam and Eve’s descendants to commit incest. If you believe in evolution, there is no such problem.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Incompatibility

Have a look at the natural world. Get an overall idea how it works. One thing I notice is, to the natural world, humans are just another ape species. There is nothing special about us. There is nothing special about earth. The laws of nature perfectly mirror mathematics. Everything is quite logical. Then have a look at religion. No species matters but man. The Jews are god’s chosen people. Math does not apply in any way. Religion with its miracles completely violates the laws of the natural world. God is allegedly the creator of both. They don’t look like the handiwork of the same mind. They don’t have the same aesthetic.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Incompetent Celibate Perverts

Celibacy is the only sexual act that does not occur in nature in animals. Yet priests, who boast this perversion, are the ones who pontificate on sexual activity for everyone else. It is as goofy as assigning that rôle to child molesters.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Incompetent Christian Counselors

Even a religious person would be far better off to get counseling from atheists. Typical religious counseling suggests prayer and patience, in other words paralysis. Typical atheist counseling focuses on what you can do here and now to improve the situation.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Incompetent God

Yahweh did a really poor job of distributing his bible. It was scrambled by endless manual recopying. It was scrambled further by incompetent translations that ignored the original Aramaic and Greek. He was god. He could have made the copies himself in some indestructible materials, translated himself into all the world languages, present and future, and hidden the copies away safely so mankind would always have access to his precise word. He could have set up kiosks where you could ask for help with life problems. But he didn’t. He just disappeared. He abandoned his creation.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Inconsistencies

Christians are so strange. They imagine themselves groveling, miserable sinners, guilty of a non-crime Adam committed. On the other hand they believe Yahweh created the entire universe purely for their pleasure. Make up your mind. Does Yahweh love or hate humans?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Inconsistency

God is supposed to be omnipotent. Yet his followers claim he is completely incapable of raising money, and relies on little old ladies to do that for him.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Inconsistency

When people lie, they have a heck of a time keeping the story consistent. When people construct a group lie over space and time without consulting each other, the problem is magnified exponentially. Further, if dummies join the enterprise, they don’t understand the need for consistency.

The Ancient Israelites were surrounded by scores of little territories. It was so tempting to keep piling on grandeur to Yahweh to compete with the other gods. It was like little boys bragging My dad can beat up your dad.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Inconsistent Attitudes to Proliferation

How is it that a woman who decides to have no children at all is considered highly virtuous, unless she uses birth control to ensure her decision? Yet a women who has only one child is considered more wicked than a woman who has ten. Is having children a virtue or not in Catholic thinking?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Inconsistent Beliefs

How do Jews manage to simultaneously believe that the creator of the universe loves them better than any other beings in the universe and the holocaust was the worst thing that ever happened?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Inconsistent God

God reputedly knows the future, has free will and is omnipotent, but if he changes his mind using his free will, that proves he did not know the future accurately. Something has to give. Presumably god has just a estimate of what the future holds or his actions are totally constrained.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Inconsistent Punishment

The god Yahweh reputedly torments people for eternity with no possibility of reprieve for crimes as minor as a single count of having sex outside marriage. It strikes me as absurd that this same god would forgive much more serious crimes like murder, just because the perpetrator confessed the crime and gave some money to a religious con man.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Inconsistent Reaction to Humbuggery

It is odd that so many people are eager to offend frauds like homeopaths, spiritual mediums and psychic spoon benders but terribly reluctant to call people on religious humbug.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

The Incredulous Bishops

Bishops like to mock science by offering some mangled explanation of what science has to say, then announcing they cannot understand it, and therefore it must be wrong. They fail to notice that most second graders have a better science education than they do. They have spent their life avoiding a science education. They don’t understand any science, not just the science that conflicts with their bible.

What science says is backed by math and observation. Even if it boggles the mind, it is still backed with evidence. Most of advanced science requires a PhD to understand. The bishops expect to understand it with the equivalent of a second-grade science education. Further, they immerse themselves in false representations of science. They are afraid to even read science direct from the source.

With religion, everything is speculation pulled out of the ass, with no evidence at all to back it. It is simplistic wishful thinking that violates everything we know about reality.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Indian Atrocity

Sanal Edamaruku, an Indian skeptic, went to Mumbai and revealed that a miraculous weeping cross was really just a bit of statuary located near a leaky drain whose liquid reached it by way of capillary action. The local Catholic Church demanded that he retract his statements and when he refused, they had him arrested for blasphemy. Why does the Catholic Church get any respect at all? It is a blatantly criminal organisation. What is the matter with people? Do they fear its magic mojo?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Indian Partition

India was partitioned on 1947-08-14. Why? It was a desperate attempt to deal with the mutual hatred of Muslims and Hindus. It caused untold misery at the time dramatised in the movie Gandhi. It has caused all manner of misery in the 70 years since. Nobody puts the blame where it belongs, on the two religions which make people believe things that are patently untrue and kill people who refuse to believe them too. We must stop respecting instructions that cause people to behave so abominably. In theory religions, are supposed to make people behave better, but clearly they do the opposite for the majority of adherents. This has even been proved scientifically. We should stop excusing religions simply because they have good intentions.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Indignity to a Body

In Canada, there is a crime indignity to a body. I have noticed Canadians and Americans get far more outraged by assaults on a dead body than on a live one. For example, dragging a body behind a truck is much more newsworthy than dragging a living person behind a truck. This is irrational. A body is for all practical purposes just a hunk of decomposing meat. It is just superstition that makes people treat it with reverence.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Indoctrination

Christians abuse their children by lying to them that if they ever have sex with a male or female, after they die, they will be tormented in fire for eternity. They counter I am not abusing them; I am warning them. It says so in the bible. But they know everything about science in the bible is false.

We have known about these errors in the bible for centuries. Why are creationists still making such a fuss over evolution and cosmology?

They also know nearly everything about morality modern Christians ignore as barbaric. They know the bible could not possibly have been written by the creator of the universe. They are traumatising their kids with a myth that they have no evidence is true. The only reason they trust it is somebody told them to when they were too young to question the command.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Indulgences

Why does anyone trust the church and their notion of tithing your way into heaven, when they used to sell indulgences, where the corruption was even more explicit.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Infected Christians

This video The March Of Reason click to watch contains a number of interviews with fundamentalists. Watch the way they speak. They sound normal, then it is almost as if some other personality takes over and starts talking for them in a very mechanical way. If you did not know about religion, you would think it was some kind of brain damage. In this state, they mechanically quote pat phrases that make little sense. All logical ability disappears. They imagine they are speaking self-evident, obvious facts, when it actuality it is gibberish. In this state, their individual lives are meaningless. All that counts is spreading the message. This is what Darrel Ray calls parasitical infection by the God Virus.

The God Virus: How religion infects our lives and culture ~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Infecting With The God Virus

Just as a virus may attack only one organ, a religion may destroy only a part of the mind, leaving the rest fully functional. Deliberately infecting a child with a virus is a form of child abuse just as is infecting one with a religion.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Infiltrating The JWs

I infiltrated the JWs for a year. Here are some of the things I learned:

What should we do about them?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Infuriating Christians

The criminals I find most infuriating are those motivated by religion. These nit wits commit the more horrible crimes, e.g. hacking someone to death, all the while feeling profoundly virtuous about it because they imagine some deity said it was OK or even commanded it.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Injecting Superstition

It is so infuriating having fundamentalist Christians injecting their wilful ignorance into social and science policy. Imagine what it would have been like 200 years ago when nearly everyone had such beliefs and also believed in witchcraft, spells and all manner of superstitions.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Inmates Have Taken Over the Asylum

Imagine finding yourself in a mental institution where the inmates had taken over and had enacted laws that rewarded insane, irrational behaviour and punished rational behaviour. Would you feel constrained to obey the law? That is roughly the plight of the average American living in a country where Christians control the government.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

The Inquisition

During the dark ages, the Catholic church tortured 50,000,000 people (men, women and children) to death for failing to conform sufficiently to Catholic orthodoxy. This is a crime at least ten times as great as Hitler’s, yet we still pretend to respect the Catholic church.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

The Inquisition

The Roman Catholic popes tortured and executed 50 million people (including children) as heretics. This does not count those they put in prison for life. This is a crime 8 times greater than the holocaust. No pope has ever apologised. The Real History of the evil Roman Catholic Church click to watch

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

The Insane Father

Imagine a father who claimed he desperately wanted the love of his children. He murdered almost his entire family because he thought they were not good enough. He then left his kids a book of rules, but modified it in thousands of ways to make it look like a forgery. Then he hid from his children and never did anything that would let them detect his presence. In his book, he threatened to torture them for loving any other man but him. He claimed to spy on their every move. He further claimed to love them infinitely. Such a father could end up in prison. What the Christians ask us to swallow is even more insane.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Insane God

Christians worship a sadistic, insane and imaginary god. No wonder they are such crazy bastards.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Insanity and Faith

Insanity is believing ridiculous things. Faith is a special type of respectable insanity where at least 1,000,000+ people also believe more or less the same ridiculous things.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Inscrutable Bigots

It is revolting how Christian bigots behave, but we never know for sure how much worse or better they would have behaved without the influence of Christianity.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Insulting God

Gods such as Yahweh and Allah are allegedly all-powerful and indestructible. If a god wants to take revenge, it would be trivially easy. Why then are religious people so worried about protecting their god’s delicate sensibilities from the tiniest of slights such as drawing a cartoon, not believing in his existence or disagreeing with his stand on end-of-life decisions? I think it is a way of publicly demonstrating piety.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Insulting God

If there is a god, I think he would be quite insulted that we would ascribe earth and its creatures as his best handiwork.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Intelligence

On average, people attracted to religion have a 25% lower IQ. People who like to be told what to think and do, people who lack the confidence to think for themselves are attracted to religion. Even when they come to the conclusion religion is hollow, they are reluctant to leave. They have a very hard time the bucking peer pressure to stay.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Intelligence

There are two kinds of life philosophies:

  1. Ones where you try to make all your decisions with maximal intelligence.
  2. Ones where you deliberately suppress your intelligence for some decisions.
~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Intelligent Design

Intelligent Design is not a scientific theory. It is a religious hypothesis.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Intelligent Design

There is intelligent design in religion. L. Ron Hubbard designed Scientology and Joseph Smith designed Mormonism.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

The Intelligent Design Con

Intelligent design infuriates me for the same reason phony faith healer Peter Popoff infuriates me or the same reason I fume when Republicans explain they want to take money from the poor and give it as tax cuts to the rich in order to make the poor more prosperous, or when people try to trick the gullible into investing in free energy machines. I can’t stand seeing people conning others and getting away with it. Intelligent design is not a just a naïve competing scientific theory. It is a malicious, unscrupulous scam. It stinks to high heaven of ulterior motives.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Intelligent Design Implies Nothing

How much does the intelligent design hypothesis tell you about anti matter, quantum mechanics, DNA, organic chemistry etc. Nothing! Absobloominglutely nothing! It is utterly useless! In contrast, modern science tells you far more than you could possibly absorb. A theory that predicts nothing is like a car without an engine; it does not even rate being called a theory.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Intelligent People Reject Religion

The more intelligent you are, the less likely you will accept Christianity or other religion. Normally people defer to those they consider brighter than they are. But for religion, they emulate the simpletons. Though most Americans are Christian, almost none of the prestigious American Academy of Science are Christian.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Intercessory Prayer

Let’s say you have a seriously sick child, expected to die, you pray, and the child recovers. You attribute the recovery to your prayer and to Yahweh’s intervention. But there are ten other couples in the same hospital whose child died. How do you explain this?

Let’s say a few years later your child becomes seriously sick again. This time she dies. How do you explain that? There is no rhyme nor reason to it.

The truth is prayer does nothing. That has been demonstrated scientifically and statistically over and over and over. You are attributing a co-incidence to divine favour, out of massive conceit — your desire to see yourself as superior to others.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Interference With Religion

Clearly government has no right to interfere in your right to practice your religion. To me, encouraging you to practice one of the officially-recognized religions with tax incentives counts as interference.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Interfering With Education

The secret of humanity’s success is that parents teach their children not only what they have learned but what the society as a whole knows. Christianity and other dogmatic religions interfere with the process. Parents teach children extremely obsolete and inaccurate knowledge, tolerated because it is assigned religious significance.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Interfering With Organ Recycling

In a sensible society, your body parts would naturally be recycled for medical purposes after you are dead and have no more use of them. However, superstitious Christians have rigged the law do make it difficult for even non-Christians to give away their organs.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Interfering with Organ Recycling

Some Christians do whatever they can to interfere with organ transplantation. They discourage people from signing up. They successfully lobbied for laws that make it difficult to sign up. Yet I would bet if one of their kids were about to die, they would accept a transplant. There big shortage of organs for transplant. We need to change the rules so that:

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Interim Explanations

Not all that long ago, people did not know what caused thunder. So they plugged the gap with an interim vacuous explanation — Thor did it. In our time, lay people are baffled by the big bang and abiogenesis. So they plugged the gaps with an interim vacuous explanation — Yahweh did it. These just-so explanations get in the way of finding the real answer. They deceive people into thinking they already know, when all they did was make up a children’s story without evidence.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Intolerable to Disagree

Religionists have successfully sold the notion that merely disagreeing with them is an intolerable offence and an insult to their revered prophets.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Intolerably Disgusting

Christians tell me that it is intolerably disgusting to them that I consider males far sexier that females. They find it so disgusting, that they think I should be stoned to death, or failing that, my civil rights should be curtailed. And were I female, they would find it intolerably disgusting if I thought the opposite. In my view, they are outrageous busybodies. My thoughts and private actions are none of their business.

On the other hand, I find the thought of two naked Christians rolling about like pigs, attempting to breed more Christians intolerably disgusting. Even though the resulting damage to the environment is my business, I do not interfere. Why can’t we have a truce?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Intolerance

Intolerance is stopping people from being themselves, e.g. killing gays, putting them in jail, firing them, excluding them from neighbourhoods. I t is perfectly ok to challenge the beliefs of others. That does not interfere with their enjoyment of their existence.

Christians imagine the have a right to block anyone from questioning or mocking any of their beliefs. They consider that disrespectful. They are behaving like Muslims more and more each day. Nobody in any way interferes with Christian worship, except when Christians try to force it on others. The essential problem is Christians demand to maintain the special privileges they had in the earlier days of the USA when they had a monopoly. They believe they are entitled to them by Yahweh.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Intolerance for Difference

Christians have a low tolerance for any behaviour even slightly out of the usual no matter how innocuous. Christians in a small Welsh town had a Buddhist arrested for doing a walking a meditation (walking slowly).

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Intuition

The Christian assumes the universe has to work according to his intuition, honed only here on earth. All he has to do to discover how wrong that is, is to study relativity and quantum mechanics, or watch some movies of people in space. They fly in the face of your intuition. Once you see how wrong your intuition is, you pretty well have to give up the notion the big bang has to behave as you think it should.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Intuition

Our intuition is trained by watching how the world works. We expect it to behave the way it has in past. You can watch babies learning. You can see their surprise when the world fails to behave as they expect. Then that new knowledge in incorporated into their intuition and it no longer surprises.

A Christian’s intuition is extremely defective. Instead of being trained with accurate scientific information about the world, it is trained with fanciful mythical stories. They are trained to accept the impossible as normal and the probable as impossible. When this intuition is applied to something like the big bang, evolution or the age of the earth, their intuition ignores evidence and rejects truth. Christians are unaware of how damaged their intuitions are. They foolishly trust them as infallible.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Intuition

Your intuition only works in a world on a scale the size of earth. On the scale of the very small (quantum), or the very large or large time, intuition breaks down. The universe works differently from the way you are familiar. It is just your intuition that says everything needs a cause or a beginning. The reality is mind boggling. well beyond the capability of your average science-averse Christian. These other scales so freak the intuition, that scientists can only approach them with mathematics.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Invalid Arguments

In a debate about the existence of Yahweh, Christians will often say things like I just could not bear it if there were no god. or Without god, the universe would be a cold and lonely place without meaning. These are not arguments for the existence of Yahweh; those are arguments for pretending Yahweh exists.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Invalid Atheist Argument

There is an argument atheists often use against the existence of gods. I think it is invalid, but the Christians were asking for it when they asserted that they knew for certain that their god was perfect and all-beneficent. Atheists would argue, A god would have done a lot better job than this of creating a universe, so there could not have been a god involved.

Let’s say you had always lived in another universe where all the problems of this universe that we could identify had been fixed. Someone then asked you, Is your universe a good or a bad universe? What could you use for comparison? Just that new universe itself. It would have a worst thing, which we would consider barely something to worry about at all, but in that new universe it would be the worst thing in the universe. It would look very bad. Creators of ancient religions did not fall into this trap. The created their gods magnificent, but imperfect.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Invalid Excuse for Bad Behaviour

Many people excuse cruelty, bigotry, lying and all manner of idiocy in the name of religion. I don’t think religion is a valid excuse for bad behaviour.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Invalid God Arguments

I pull my hair out with frustration when a Christian argues god must exist because they would feel terribly lonely if he did not, or when an atheist argues that god must not exist because they don’t like bastards like god meddling in human affairs. Where did they get the absurd notion that the universe is constrained to please them? Whether you would like it if something were true has nothing whatsoever to do with whether it is.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Invisible Electricity

When I was little, I read a book that assured me electricity was invisible. Nonsense I thought, I have seen it with my own eyes. It is blue. It makes a crackling or buzzing noise and it has a distinctive smell. The author was trying to teach me science, the way he would religion, by demanding I submit to authority and deny my own sensory experience. Only much later did I learn that electricity is indeed invisible. I was just experiencing its effects on air.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

The Invisible Musician

Imagine if a friend asked you Are you familiar with the music of Billy Bumgarten? You replied No, could I hear some? He responded No, I don’t have any. Well, where could I hear some? You can’t. OK, well what does he look like? I don’t know, but he is the best musician of all time. But, you have never heard or seen him. Has anybody you know heard or see him? No. You are just screwing me around. You don’t even know if Billy Bumgarten exists or if he is any good.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Inviting Liars

There is really no point in inviting people who lie and people who have no understanding at all of the truth to the table when you are trying to discern truth. They just muddy the waters. Ignore the religious. We have heard them enough to know for certain they are nitwits with nothing to add.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Inviting Picketers

If someone wants to picket you, you are not obligated to invite them into your home, your yard or your place of business. You are not obligated to tolerate them inside public buildings such as court houses, schools and libraries. Christians imagine they have an exemption.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Invoking God To Clean Up

President Obama invoked god to help clean up the BP oil spill. He explained the god would not actually do anything, just be there. I gather this was intended to give heart to those working on this Herculean task. Even if this conceit did give heart, any feelings generated are in no way evidence for the existence of this capable deadbeat.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Invoking the Supernatural

Most of us don’t invoke the supernatural to explain the boiling point of water. It seems to me just as eccentric to invoke it to explain death.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Irish Cruelty to Unmarried Mothers

The Catholic Church in Ireland forces unmarried women to give up their children for adoption. The mothers are forced to care for their children for a year or two until an adoptive family is found.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Iron-age Myths

I find it painful that my fellow humans persist in clinging to iron-age myths, torturing, bullying and killing each other driven by these delusions and defending them with brazen lies. I gain some relief by describing this evil and condemning it.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Ironic Father

Clergymen who have vowed their penises will never touch an adult female insist others call them father. Who are they kidding?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Ironic Hijab

The theoretical intent of the hijab is modesty, to avoid attracting male attention, yet if a women wears one and walks through an airport, every eye will be upon her. It has also become a respectable way for a Muslim teen to rebel against her parents.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Irony

Isn’t it ironic that a religion that attempted to spread love and tolerance, morphed into the primary source of hate and bigotry.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Irony

Religious people demand that society at large indulge their religious dress codes and superstitions about things such as vaccines. However, religious institutions themselves, such as churches and schools are legally exempt. They routinely discriminated against others based on religion, and refuse to respect others’ superstitions and dress codes. They should at least treat others as they demand to be treated. I see no reason they should get special exemption to discriminate against others.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Irony of Book Burning

One of the great ironies of book burning is the person who benefits most financially from book burning is the publisher of the hated book.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Irrational Excuse

In the USA, it is illegal to abuse a child, even with rational excuse, but is it legal to do so with an irrational, superstitious, religious excuse.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Irrational Valued Over Rational

If there were some pandemic and the government mandated vaccination, people would be permitted to avoid vaccination on religious grounds, but not on rational ones, such as concern for a likely allergy. In other words, our society permits people to endanger others for irrational reasons, but not for rational ones.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Irrelevant God

Because they refuse to study science, Christians are under the delusion that the universe is a baffling place that we barely understand. If a Christian were to ask a scientist what outstanding unsolved problems are there that you might assume Yahweh as a reasonable solution. They will learn none. Science has come a long way since the bible was written. Yahweh is not needed to explain anything anymore. Bit by bit he has been retired.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Isaac Newton

Nearly everybody copies the beliefs of their peers. Choice of religion is rarely a matter of logic. Sir Isaac Newton was a great mathematician, but his religious beliefs got in the way over and over and sent him into the weeds. He assumed God would design the universe to be pleasing to man. He ignored reality in favour of religious speculation. Nobody had ever thought of the notion of atheism. It was not as though Newton chose theism by logical deduction. It just never occurred to him to doubt god. His thinking based on god seems infantile to us. Atheism did occur to the ancient Greeks, but Constantine and his successors tortured and killed anyone who deviated in the tiniest degree from Christian orthodoxy. Citizens beat Christianity into their kids so the state would not kill them. By the time of Newton, the notion of atheism had been exterminated. The church was so ferocious, nobody dared question even minor points of dogma. They burned people alive for minor disagreements.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Isolation

For thousands of years, religions could count on adherents knowing absolutely nothing about any other religion. They could count on adherents knowing no more about their religion, its beliefs and its history than the local cleric decided the tell them. Now everything has changed. Every child can surf the net. Radio and TV bring in programming from hundreds of sects. Books and eBooks are available in every store on religion, biblical scholarship, science, evolution, criticism of religion and hundreds of other religions. People are even debating such taboos as the existence of god, 24/7 in hundreds of Youtube forums. Religions are going to have to really work hard to keep people ignorant of all this. It is going to get harder and harder for religions to bamboozle the flock with lies and have them fail to notice.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

It Ain’t Necessarily So

An argument that the universe had a supernatural creator, e.g. the fine tuning argument, is not evidence that the creator(s) was/were in any way associated with your religion.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

It Depends on Grandma

Sometime a Christian will say to me, When I walk in the woods, everywhere I look I see god. I am baffled that this is not obvious to everyone else. It depends on what your grandmother taught you to do when you went on a walk:

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

It Did Not Have to Be This Way

Christians are often astounded life on earth is the way it is. They say, if the situation were even slightly different we humans would not be here. Why does a world without humans seem so impossible to them? Is it any more difficult to imagine than a world without elephants? If you throw a die, the odds of any one number coming up are one in six, somewhat improbable, but you know one of sides has to come up despite that improbability. The universe is an unbelievably enormous place. Because of that, highly strange and improbable things (such as the origin of life) are guaranteed to happen somewhere.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

It Does Not Matter

Some people worry about questions like Am I a brain in a vat in a simulated world? You cannot tell. Further, it does not matter, even if you are just a computer simulation. You predictions, consequences all will be the same if the simulation were well-done enough.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

It Does Not Matter Much if There Is A God

Whether a god exists or not has not much practical importance. What a religion’s holy book says is secondary. What really counts is what nutty or cruel things adherents of a religion do in the name of their god.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

It is in God’s Hands

When someone says It’s in God’s hands what they mean is I am unwilling to offer any help, or I am incapable of rendering useful aid. It is a euphemism.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

It is Not A Matter of Opinion

The campaign to discourage religion is similar to a campaign to get rid of incompetent teachers who tell children that 2 + 2 = 5. It is not about a mere difference of opinion.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

It is Rude To Ask For Evidence

Nobody complains when people ask for evidence for bigfoot, Nessie, alien space ships, yeti… Making a claim for Yahweh is no different so there should be some evidence. Without any evidence Yahweh lands in the same category as Valdermort and Superman. Such a consequential claim requires extra special evidence.

God is supposed to be omnipotent. If he wanted us to believe in his existence, he easily could have dropped a few hints, but he apparently chose not to. The most logical explanation is that he does not exist and the bible is a myth. We have no evidence for pink unicorns. We have no problem concluding that lack of evidence means there are no such thing. We don’t conclude they are hiding. In the bible, God was out and about for everyone to see. Where did he go? There are no signs of Yahweh: miracles, healings, answered prayer, voices in the clouds. The bible leads us to expect such signs of his presence. Maybe he died. Why do we think Yahweh should be treated differently from the pink unicorns?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

It Is Written

It is written. An ancient parchment scroll found in a Romanian cave announced that on 2020-02-20 at 20:20 the backs of all Christians will split open like a lobster and the Great Demon will be released. The pain will be like a whipping by a thousand pismires. There will be wailing and gnashing of teeth. Repent Now and save yourself the agony. Those who doubt will receive a triple dose of torture. The good news, is due to the mercy of our lord, you will not die in any case, but you will not be healed either. Spread the good news!

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

It’s not a Bug, it’s a Feature

I had to laugh at Dr. Craig Evans when he spun the fact the New Testament was so full of inconsistency and with outright contradiction with the Old Testament claiming the variety made the text more useful across cultures because you could cherry pick from it what you pleased.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

I’ll Pray For You

If someone says I’ll pray for you, what that means is I am not prepared to spend any energy at all doing something practical to help you. If you think about it, It is a very rude thing to say, on par with fuck you. If there is nothing much you can do in the situation, you can bring flowers, soup or a card.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

I’ll Pray For You

I’ll pray for you is the polite way of saying I’m not prepared to do anything practical to help you, but I wish you well.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

I’m a Christian

When a stranger comes up to me on the street and says Hi. I’m a Christian. I hear I work for the biggest con on earth. You should do me favours you would not do any ordinary person. You should be gullible and believe everything I say. I’m better than everyone else. My goal is to sell you a lifetime membership, that costs 10% of your income. What you get in return is the right to attend a weekly singing club that has no instruction.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

I’m Offended

Religious people often claim to be offended when we atheists ask them to provide evidence for their beliefs or when we point out how their beliefs are contrary to fact. They seem to think that as religious professionals, they are a privileged class permitted to assert whatever bullshit they want and never have to justify it. Religious people, just like other con men, feel offended when cornered, as well they should be.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

I’m Praying For You

I’m praying for you means I’m not willing to spend even an erg of energy doing anything practical on your behalf. It’s really a polite fuck you.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Jackass 3D

That is the top grossing movie in Canada on 2010-10-22 is cause for despair.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Jean Paul II’s Bogus Miracle

The Vatican wants to make Pope Jean Paul II the patron saint of paedophiles because he performed one miracle — one of the tens of millions of people he blessed got well. Any doctor with that bad a track record would lose his licence.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Jelly Beans

If somebody told me that eating 5 orange jelly beans a day would allow me to live forever, and offered no evidence to support this assertion, I would say You are as batty as a Christian.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Jerry Falwell

Jerry Falwell dedicated his life to deceiving people about what the word morality means.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Jewish-Muslim Tension

The friction between Jews and Muslims goes way back. In the time of Mohammed, the Jewish citizens of Medina sided with the invading Meccans against the Muslims, violating their agreement. The Muslims then executed 900 adult male Jews and sent the women and children into slavery as punishment for treason.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Jews and Nazis Have Something In Common

The irony is Hitler’s whacky notion of the master race is just a variant of the Jewish notion of God’s chosen people. Both those beliefs are toxic. They make those who believe them behave in an insanely entitled and insufferable way.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Jews Rejected The Afterlife

The early Jews believed that when you died you died. What mattered was life and living according with their god’s law. Later the notion of physical resurrection in a physical body took hold.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Jiminy Cricket

In the movie Pinocchio, Jiminy Cricket sings When You Wish Upon a Star lyrics It is Christianity lite, to soften kids up for the biggest Christian lie, that all prayers are granted.

When you wish upon a star
Makes no difference who you are
Anything your heart desires
Will come to you

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Jimmy Carter

Discovering that Jimmy Carter is a dyed-in-the-wool Christian is a bit like learning Mahatma Gandhi chewed tobacco, or that Martin Luther King put out saucers of lemonade for the fairies each evening. I wonder what he could have done without that delusion holding him back.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

John Lennon

(1940-10-09 1980-12-08 age:40)

Consider how big a kick in the pants John Lennon was able to give organised religion in his short 40 years. Imagine how the world might be now, had born-again Presbyterian, Mark David Chapman not stolen his second act from humanity allegedly under orders from Yahweh.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Jonah

A Christian is someone who thinks it is more likely that Jonah lived three days in the belly of a whale without air without being pulverised in the fore stomach or being dissolved is the highly acidic main stomach than somewhere along the line, a tall tale got mistaken as history. How could anyone be that aggressively stupid?

The reason is children of Christians are abused and traumatised by being threatened with eternal torture if they dare to doubt blithering nonsense shoved down their throats. That’s why they grow up to be such quivering idiots. Parents should be jailed for this cruelty and have their children taken from them if they persist in abusing them that way. It is almost impossible to cure that phobia. Young children are hard wired to unquestioningly believe their parents for a lifetime.

The #1 reason I am an atheist is my parents did not torment me that way, though a stranger once cornered me while I was waiting for my mom to pick me up from swimming and regaled me with hellfire. My mom just about bit his meddling head off. Hellfire is also the main tool paedophile Christians use to force their victims to comply.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Jonah

If Jonah had been swallowed by a sperm whale (the only species of whale with a big enough gullet), he would have suffocated in the esophagus, been pulverised in the fore stomach or dissolved is the highly acidic main stomach.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70) Jonah and the whale click to watch

Joseph Smith’s Con

Surely Joseph Smith was putting people on, naming both his angel (Moroni) and his religion (Mormon) variants of the word moron. He pulled the rubes in with tales a lost gold treasure. He claimed to have translated heiroglyphics without any study of Egyptology, without even looking at the figures, but by burying his face in a hat.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Josephus

Josephus wrote his work in 75 AD using Luke as his source. That does not corroborate the gospels.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

The Joy of OCD

Before you go into a mosque, you must ritually wash yourself. There are rules for exactly how you must do this and in which order. If you fart, you must start all over. Mohammed thus must have been OCD to have come up with this and hundreds of other magical rituals.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Joyce Meyer

Joyce Meyer and other televangelists use a simple technique milk their donors. She shows a helicopter shot of her many mansions, swimming pools, limos, yachts, airplanes, office building and properties. She claims that this opulence was all a present from God.

Do as I tell you, and God will be even more generous to you. Start by sending me money. This is an appeal to greed. She is asking her donors to gamble by investing a tithe to her and trust god will repay them by mysterious means.

She hints she did something to please god, perhaps a burnt offering or a tithe, and god amply rewarded her by mysterious means. That is not true. She got all her money by going on TV and asking ordinary people to send it to her, dishonestly promising god would pay it back manifold. She gained her wealth by conning people. Unfortunately, the law almost never prosecutes religious con artists. God had absolutely nothing to do with her wealth, unless you count religion-induced gullibility.

If you wanted to earn wealth the same way Meyer did, you would have to get on TV and start conning people. Obviously, tithing Meyer money is not how she made her own millions, but she lies that it will work for you.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Joyce Meyer

Joyce Meyer is one of the most unscrupulous religious con men. She brags about her wealth, and tells people god gave her wealth as a reward for tithing. Yet every penny came from marks she conned. God had nothing to do with it. Further she lies, that if you tithe to her, God will reward you manifold. This is nonsense. Marks get zero return on their money.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Joyful Dying

On 2015-06-18 a young man, Dylann Root, was accused of shooting and killing 9 people praying at a church in South Carolina. The reaction all over America was extreme grief and anger. Yet logically, Christians should have been rejoicing. These nine died at the optimal time, in prayer, martyred. They are in heaven now and will be for eternity. Our time on earth is but a transient vale of tears. Apparently, Christians don’t buy this story any more than atheists do.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Judge as the Do

Just as you judge Communism or Republicanism by the sum total of the actions of Communists or Republicans, so too you much judge Baptists by the sum total of the actions of Baptists. It makes no sense to judge them on some theoretical basis where you ignore the behaviour of people.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Judging Christianity

It is not a matter of positive/negative, comfy/distressing, useful/useless or moral/immoral. It is a matter of true/false. Christianity teaches falsehoods. It is always preferable to believe the truth. Sometimes, the truth hurts. Tough. If you hold false assumptions you cannot help but do stupid things. For example, if a Christian is deluded into thinking he will live forever, he won’t get on with making something of the only life he does in actuality have and he may take needless risks. He may even kill others casually.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Judging Deadbeat Yahweh

Presuming Yahweh as actually running the universe, what do I think of him? He is a deadbeat. He does nothing. He does not grant all prayers as promised. He does not heal people. He does not prevent disasters. He does not punish the wicked. He does not reward the good. He refuses to provide clear, relevant, up-to-date instruction. His science is considerably less advanced than the ancient Greeks. He has a preposterously inflated and delicate ego. He is totally indifferent. He is so useless and undetectable, he might as well not exist.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Judging God

What would you think of a bystander who stood by doing absolutely nothing while a pervert raped and murdered a child? He did not interfere. He did not call out. He did not call 9/11. He not come forward as a witness in court. He excused himself saying he did not want to interfere with the rapist’s existential freedom. I personally would consider him a psychopath, a cruel pervert. But when that bystander is the alleged deity Yahweh, Christians claim this behaviour is the acme of perfection. Bullshit! Absolute Bullshit!

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Judging Religions

One way to judge a religion is to count the number of times an adherent killed a non-believer or apostate to punish him for failing to believe. You might normalise the figures by the number of adherents.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Judgment Day

57% of American believe in judgment day. The notion is not taken seriously in other parts of the world. Why is that? Guilt?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Jumping to Conclusions About the Big Bang

Christians claim that Yahweh must exist because there was a big bang. Something must have caused it (not so, quantum events don’t need causes). The only thing they can think of to be a cause is Yahweh. I ask, why not something else, e.g. Shiva or a previous universe? All the big bang means is that nothing that happened prior to the big bang can affect this universe.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Junk Science

What do homeopathy, astrology and religion have in common? They make false claims about efficacy and the government takes no measures to stop them.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Junk-Preferring Christians

It is odd that Christians prefer to get their science from people who have no training and no credentials, who are reviled as charlatans by mainstream science. Do they also prefer to get their dentistry done by people with no training or credentials reviled by the College of Dentistry as charlatans?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Just for Us?

If Yahweh created the entire universe solely for our delectation, even if we traveled at the speed of light, it would take 100,000 years just to cross the Milky Way. Why would Yahweh create all those hundreds of billions of galaxies we could never get to?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Just Making It All Up

People who presume the existence of a god, go much further. They offer detailed descriptions of his actions motives and character. They refuse to admit they just made it all up just because it sounded good. They refuse to admit they have not a shred of evidence to support any of it. They merely argue but it would be awful if it were not so. What has their preference got to do with what is actually true? Nothing!

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Just a Product of Evolution

Christians often say I could not bear to be just the result of millions of years of evolution. That is because they do not understand evolution. It is much grander than being poofed into being by a magic trick like a rabbit pulled out of a hat. With evolution, every cell of your body is polished and repolished to a type of perfection.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Just Universe

In a just universe, those who have ordered or urged others tortured like Idi Amin, Bush, Cheney, Harper, Hitler, Karzai, Limbaugh, Pinochet, Pol Pot, Saddam, Stalin… would die of torture by the very techniques they imposed on others, but this is far from a just universe.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Just Your Opinion

A Christian is like a bratty child who says, two plus two is four? Hah! That’s just your opinion.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Justified Exceptions

The first thing Moses did after engraving the ten commandments, which included thou shalt not kill was to order a mass slaughter. It has been nothing but justified exceptions ever since.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Justified Revenge

Morally slaves have the right to slit the throats of their masters. Victims have the right to stab their rapists. If Christians revert to mass murders of gays, not just refusing to make wedding cakes, then gays have the moral right to burn down churches with Christians inside. That does not mean such revenge is necessarily the optimum strategy.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Justifying Evil

One of the functions of religions is to help people justify questionable actions so that the behaviour does not interfere with their exalted opinions of themselves.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Justifying Lies

Even an atheist is tempted to lie to a bereaved child, that a loved person or animal is not really dead, just somewhere else healthy and happy. Soothing that pain is the closest thing to a legitimate function for religion’s comforting lies.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Justifying Murder

Most murders are committed as a sort of vigilante death penalty. Murderers believe the victim has transgressed their moral code and needs to die. Ironically, the problem is too much morality, not too little.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

JW (Jehovah’s Witness) Sincerity

JWs insist on jerking the medical system around my demanding surgeons operate without a blood supply. What if they are just being assholes? We could ask they demonstrate their sincerity by submitting 100% to biblical medicine.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

JW Molesters

JWs have a similar problem with clergy molesting children than Catholic priests do. They have kept it out of the newspapers by settling law suits with a gag order clause.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

JW Sins

JWs consider the following things sinful: Christmas trees, going to college, having an inoculation, making friends with non-JWs, talking to anyone who has rejected the JW religion, even your own family, owning a flag, celebrating a birthday, celebrating any statutory holiday, going to a garage sale, sports…

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

JWs and Blood Transfusions

The bible has nothing to say about blood transfusions. It couldn’t very well since they were not invented until 1818. However, there are dietary restrictions against eating blood in: Genesis 9:4, Leviticus 17:10, Leviticus 17:14, Deuteronomy 12:23 and Acts 15:28-29.

Eating blood means eating a very rare piece of roast beef. Getting a transfusion is a medical procedure involving needles and tubes. They are not remotely the same thing. They have completely different purposes. The bible is telling you to cook your meat thoroughly to kill parasites, not to murder your kids. How stupid can JWs be? They are so aggressively idiotic, I feel tempted to give them a Darwin award and leave them to winnow their numbers.

Biblical morality is so insane and so out of date, even the most fanatical Christians ignore it, while giving it lip service. e.g.

That’s not morality. That is obsessive-compulsive disorder. None of those commandments make any sense except avoiding shellfish in a world without refrigeration, but there is no need to kill anyone.

Lay JWs should note that hundreds of millions of people have read the bible, and only the JWs twisted its words this way, for an excuse to kill their kids.

How did this insanity come about? I hypothesise a JW elder felt creeped out by the idea of transferring someone else’s blood into his body. It freaked him out so badly he commanded his flock never to have a transfusion, under any circumstances. It was better to die or to kill your child. He then told a little lie, that God hated transfusions and would make you very very sorry if you or your family ever had one and the bible confirmed this when interpreted by a wise elder like his esteemed self. This squeamish old geezer has killed thousands of innocent children with his lie.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

JWs and Blood Transfusions

I agree that adult JWs should have the right to commit suicide, by any means they choose including refusing blood transfusions. All citizens should also have this same right.

In Canada, JWs have the right to murder their children by denying them blood. This is surely more serious than aborting them, and more serious than infanticide. The practice must be stopped. Currently, no other group has the right to murder their children. Freedom of religion means no particular religion gets special treatment. By JW reasoning, Christians should also be allowed to shoot gay people because their religion demands it. One man’s religion must never override another’s rights including a child too weak to stand up to his parent’s insanity.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Kalām Argument

Kalām was an Islamic scholar centuries ago. He came up with an argument for the plausibility of the existence of a god. Modern Christian Creationist, William Lane Craig, added to the argument and claimed it proved the existence of the Christian god.

Kalām’s original version went like this:

Whatever begins to exist has a cause;
The universe began to exist;
Therefore:
The universe has a cause.

William Lane Craig’s version goes like this:

The universe has a cause;
If the universe has a cause, then an uncaused, personal Creator of the universe exists, who sans the universe is beginningless, changeless, immaterial, timeless, spaceless and enormously powerful;
Therefore:
An uncaused, personal Creator of the universe exists, who sans the universe is beginningless, changeless, immaterial, timeless, spaceless and enormously powerful.

What’s wrong with this argument?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

The Kateri Tekakwitha Scam

The canonisation of Kateri Tekakwitha is a scam just as surely as a Nigerian 419 email. Scammers exploit human weakness, such a vanity. They sucked in all manner of native and government leaders into colluding with the Kateri scam by stroking their egos. What malarkey is this? — that muttering to yourself a request to an imaginary ghost will cure cancer! Indeed! Somehow people nearly always fail to notice they are being scammed when the Catholic church (or other church) cons them. The Catholic church is so slick. It has polished its patter over centuries. In the movie The Sting, Henry Gondorff, played by Paul Newman, explained that the best con is one where the mark never even figures out he has been had.

We don’t let a new drug onto the market without a double blind test to make sure it was not just a co-incidence that someone got better, that it was actually the drug that did it. To do that you have to prove not only that people sometimes get better with the new drug, but they do significantly better than people who don’t get it. Nobody ever tests the absurd claims of faith healers for the fraudulent claims the Catholic Church makes for the power of dead saints, incantations or magic water to heal disease.

We humans have immune systems that have been honed by natural selection for millennia to get us better without any assistance. It is normal for humans to spontaneously get better. There is nothing supernatural about it! Put another way, nothing happens to nearly everyone who goes to Lourdes to be healed. Your chances of being spontaneously healed are just the same if you go or stay home. People get a temporary rush of being healed/slain in the spirit on TV, but that is no different from the rush of performing in a play, where you find you have extra strength and the ability to do pratfalls without pain.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Keats Was Wrong

Keats deceived the world when he said that truth is beauty and beauty truth. Mistaking beauty for truth is wishful thinking. Mistaking truth for beauty is callous indifference.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Keep on Lying

Any clergyman who ever stops to reflect about what he is doing has to come to the conclusion he has been conning his flock by selling them a delusion. What happens next? Most are too cowardly to admit their wrongdoing and keep on lying.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Keep ’Em Stupid

Christians oppose their children learning critical thinking. They don’t want them examining their religious beliefs. If the parents were sure Christianity were logically sound, they would welcome such education. It would cement religious belief. This opposition implies the parents know Christian beliefs are unsound, and they are trying to keep their kids from finding that out. In other words, they are trying to instill false, but useful, beliefs in their kids in order to control their behaviour.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Keeping Kids Ignorant

Religions instinctively know that they can only survive by keeping their children in ignorance. That is why they are so keen on getting control of education. Indoctrinating other people’s kids is a bonus.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Ken Dryden

Hockey legend Ken Dryden told a story about a young hockey player who was abused. Ken did not mention the other people who abused him. They were well-meaning Christians who convinced the teen he was irredeemably defiled. They made him feel extremely guilty for what happened. The boy threw all his hockey equipment in the garbage. Without Christian interference, the boy could possibly have weathered the seduction as a just a bit of bad judgment.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

The Key To Religion

You can’t make religion acceptable by improving it. Its fundamental property is believing outlandish things without evidence. That is what makes religion so evil. If you removed that key property, you would no longer have religion.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Kidnapping

Boko Haram kidnapping schoolgirls is so wrong:

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

These people would not be nearly such as scourge had the west not sold them modern weapons.

Kill the Atheists

For centuries, Christian have been claiming that non-believers are wicked and so defective they should be killed. I think it is time to tell the truth. It is the Christians who are defective, believers in absurd unsubstantiated notions. They are delusional. In word crazy. We don’t tolerate any other mental illness. I think it is time to stop looking the other way at this mental disease, just so many people have it and those that have it behave is such violent and unpredictable ways.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Kill Christianity, Not Christians

When atheists call for wiping Christianity from the earth, they are not calling for harming Christians in any way. They want to see them give up superstitions, particularly the superstitions that harm the planet or other citizens of the planet. The hope is they will see the error of their ways and be joyous they are now free of delusions that made them behave in hurtful ways. It will be like curing mental patients of insane delusions that tormented them and others.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Kill A Commie For Christ

In the 1960s, Indonesians killed 1 million of their fellows because they feared they might be communists. Their primary beef with communists was that they rejected both Islam and Christianity.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Kill Your Kids, Legally

In 39 states, parents are legally permitted to kill their children by denying them medical treatment on religious grounds.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Killer Christianity

What Happened

Makayla Sault, an 11-year-old Canadian aboriginal girl had leukemia. Oncologists wanted to give her chemotherapy. They predicted an 80% chance of success. Her parents were Christian pastors who distrusted western medicine. They insisted on only prayer, diet and vitamin C, all treatments known to be useless in treating leukemia. The Children’s Aid Society sued to take her away from her parents. The courts ruled that because Makayla was aboriginal and Christian, her parents had the right to withhold therapy even if it killed her. Of course, she soon died.

The Court’s Excuse

Normally such a child would be taken from her flaky parents. In this case because the child was aboriginal and Christian and because of all the fuss over children who had been taken from their parents en masse in the 50s and 60s to beat the Indian out of them in residential schools, it is politically difficult to take a child from aboriginal parents no matter how badly the parents abuse the child.

The Family Excuse

The parents believed that prayer, vitamin C and diet would cure the advanced cancer. A fraudulent Florida clinic charging exorbitant fees assured them they could cure with woo. I consider lying like that murder.

After the child died, the relatives defended their actions saying white oncologists knew nothing about curing cancer in native people. Her aunt claimed natives responded only to prayer and traditional medicine. IV vitamin C in her view was similar to traditional medicine. This woman got to babble on and on and on about her superior knowledge of medicine on CBC radio spreading her idiotic woo without being challenged by anyone for fear of sounding racist.

How The Law Should Work

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70) source, source, source

Killer Flood

There are epics showing people wallowing around in a few feet of water in Noah’s. If the story were depicted accurately, it would be more like putting all these people in a superheated blender.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Killer Raccoons

When I was eight, I went to Camp Howdy, a Y.M.C.A. summer camp, where an older boy earnestly assured me that raccoons liked to join you in your sleeping bag. If you moved at all, they would tear you apart. I took precautions into adulthood before I realised I had been had. Such boys who like to frighten younger children grow up to become Christians.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Killing Kids

Christians should have no more right to kill their kids by denying them medical attention in the name of religious delusions than paranoid schizophrenics.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Kind To Corpses

One of the craziest things about Christians is that they are more loving, gentle and respectful of someone after they are dead, than they ever where when they were alive. They will risk their lives to protect a corpse where they would not take such a risk to saving a living being.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Kindertotenlieder

Every hour, 1000 children under five die, usually horribly. What kind of god deliberately designs his universe for this to happen? Why is he making these children suffer? Why is he making their parents suffer? This god is reputedly omniscient. He could change this if he felt like it, but he enjoys watching their suffering. Is this a god worthy of worship?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Kinds of Christian

  1. Con men

    They don’t believe the Christian horseshit. However, they use it to con gullible Christians. Pope Leo X (1475-12-11 1521-12-01 age:45) was typical of this kind as are all televangelists. He said How well we know what a profitable superstition this fable of Christ has been for us and our predecessors.
  2. Cowards

    These people typically started out indoctrinated as Christian in childhood. They came to see it was nonsense, but they were to afraid to let their peers and families know.
  3. Sheep

    There are people who were naturally not too bright. All their lives, they did what their Christian community told them to do. They avoided learning anything about science. They only repeat the thoughts of other Christians. They do not even decide whom to believe or who makes sense for themselves. They have to ask someone else. They believe it wicked to put forward an idea of their own.
  4. Losers

    These people have almost no education and no money. They gain social status by affecting Christianity. They have never read the bible. They have bizarre theology pieced together from assorted people. They assure you the creator drops by for a chat with them every day.

Even when I know what is motivating them, it is very hard not to think Christians simply like wallowing in silliness and spreading it around, like golden retrievers with an attraction to feces.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

King Ferdinand: Book Burner

King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella of Spain in a fit of Christian idiocy ordered three million Arabic books and a million of their owners burned. The few that escaped are the main way we know anything about ancient Greek and Roman culture.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

King Henry VIII

It’s odd that such a sleepy and staid church as the Church of England was founded by such a colourful scoundrel — King Henry VIII.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

The Knitters

Imagine there were a child lost in the woods, and you were leading a team of men and women searching for her. Suddenly, your team sat down, took out wool and knitting needles, and started knitting pairs of pale mauve socks. You said What are you doing? Stop wasting time. Let’s get on with looking for that child! They responded We are doing the most effective possible thing. and went back to their knitting. These ninnies are like Christians who take prayer breaks whenever urgent action is required.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Knowing vs Believing

Even Christians know their beliefs are BS. They will tell you that they know Napoléon was defeated at the Battle of Waterloo in 1815, but that they believe Moses was found by the Pharaoh’s daughter floating in a reed basket. They are quite aware there is no evidence for the myth. Even they don’t consider the myth true in the ordinary sense. Its is a socially acceptable/required lie, (in their circles) like pretending actor David Duchovny is actually FBI agent Mulder Fox.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Knowing vs Pretending

People who want to know how the world really works become atheists. People who like to pretend the world works as they wish it did, become Christians.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Kohlberg’s Stages of Moral Development

Psychologist Lawrence Kohlberg identified six stages in moral development, not to be confused with Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. You could look at them as what motivates people to behave well.

  1. Obedience and punishment orientation (How can I avoid punishment? This might be from parents, law enforcement or the god Yahweh.)
  2. Self-interest orientation (What’s in it for me?)
  3. Interpersonal accord and conformity (Social norms) (The good boy/good girl attitude)
  4. Authority and social-order maintaining orientation (Law and order morality)
  5. Social contract orientation (co-operate with law because they create cohesion)
  6. Universal ethical principles (Principled conscience)
~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70) source

Kosher

Keeping Kosher is crazy, a form of OCD. It is a large set of nutty superstitions. People waste their lives on trivia trying to conform to them. Ditto for Halal. People ignore morality, and focus instead of this silly food game, as if playing it perfectly were the ultimate virtue.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Kristian Kitsch

Are Christian unaware of how corny and kitsch their religion is? Have they no shame to use a religion reminiscent of a tourist souvenir shop as their pipeline to god?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Lack of Evidence

It is not nutty beliefs that are the problem, it is strong attachment to beliefs for no reason. So, for example, it is a lot easier to persuade someone an urban myth they heard is false than it is to persuade them that priests perform magic that causes a cracker to turns into raw human flesh, even though it still looks and tastes like a cracker, a sort of Emperor’s new clothes miracle, apprehensible only to foolish, vain liars.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Lack Of Evidence

Normally when someone makes an extraordinary claim, we demand extraordinary evidence, e.g. a claim to have been abducted by a UFO. Christians offer no extraordinary evidence for their miraculous claims, not even ordinary evidence, just hearsay from deceased anonymous witnesses, evidence that would be ruled inadmissible in court. If god could create a miracle, surely he could create the extraordinary evidence needed to validate it.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Lack of Evidence

When I say there is no evidence of a global flood, I mean it is the sense of there is no evidence of an adult hippopotamus living in your son’s bedroom. It is not as though you did not look hard enough. If there were one, there would some very obvious evidence. The lack of evidence means you can be very sure there is no hippo.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Lame Gods

The notion of god is so bloody silly, much sillier than a superhero. They are created similarly by arbitrarily tacking on impressive attributes, even when they are mutually contradictory, even when they contradict reality, and especially where there is not a stick of evidence to support them. It is a child’s game. Speculate wildly to create the new even more impressive god, then declare for no reason that all the speculations are absolute, unquestionable truth. The process is so idiotic, gods do not even deserve refutation.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Land Con

The Jews and the Mormons used the same con, promising the faithful other people’s land, i.e. Palestine and Independence Missouri.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Laughing At The Egyptians

Why is it that people find it so easy to laugh at the ancient Egyptians and their elaborate fantasies of what happens after death, but fail to see that Christianity is no different.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Law

Civil law should trump religion. Civil law was agreed to by all. It is thus more sensible. This means no more child abuse, denying medical care, female circumcision, child marriage… No religious exemptions.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Law

The word law has two completely different meanings which often confuses Christians. Human laws are requests to behave a certain way, often along with threats if you refuse. Natural laws are descriptions of how nature invariably behaves. There is no choice or compunction involved. The planets move as they do for physical reasons, not because they are terrified of Yahweh’s wrath if they do not.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Lawn Chair Balloons

The term TSTL (Too Stupid To Live) is a perfect fit for father of five, Kent Couch. On 2007-07-07, he attached some balloons to a lawn chair and set of on a six hour flight which he described on CBC Radio DNTO (Definitely Not The Opera). He discarded all he could to gain height. His friend barely managed to persuade him not to discard his 13.61 kg (30 lbs) parachute. The flight was not going well and he had to abandon it. Unfortunately, the parachute did not open. The only thing he tried to make the parachute open was pray. It didn’t.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Laws of Nature

The laws of nature are fixed, unchanging. We have never observed any exceptions. This suggests, even if there were a god, he would have to act, like any other being, in accordance with those laws. He would not be able to set those laws aside and perform miracles. However, there is still a god loophole: Clarke’s third law: Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Lazy Christians

The laziness of Christians appalls me. Assuming they truly wanted to please a presumed creator of the universe, you’d think they would make an exhaustive enquiry to discover just what this creator expects of them. Instead, they take the word of the first snake oil salesman who comes along and refuse to revisit the matter ever after.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Learned Nothing in 3000 Years?

Christians make fools of themselves trying to defend bronze age science as superior to today’s science, as if it was impossible we could have learned anything in 3000 years.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Learning to Distrust the Church

It is not enough to shake the Christian loose of his delusions. We need to give him a coherent, realistic, not-quite-so-rosy replacement view of the church.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Learning About Other Religions

Religious fanatics argued that they had the right to keep their children from learning about any other religions in school. They worried their children might discover the truth that their religion was not the only religion, just one of many possible religions. The Supreme Court of Canada ruled that learning about other religions was a necessary part of living in a multi-cultural society and did not interfere with expression of any particular religion. I think that was a wise decision.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Least Plausible God

Even if there were a god, Yahweh is about the least plausible, most ridiculous candidate for a god I have ever heard of.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Leave the Christians Alone

It would be nice just to ignore the Christians, leave them to their delusions that eventually will drain them from the gene pool. But we can’t because they keep insisting their religious rules apply to non-Christians even more than to Christians.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Leave Us Alone

Christians often complain that we atheists write books and post videos debunking Christianity. Christians ask Why can’t you just leave us alone? Why can’t you just live and let live? We probably would stop complaining about you if you kept to yourself and stopped harming us. Even now, we do leave you alone. We do not go door to door. We do not picket your churches. We do not picket Christian book stores. We do not picket your funerals. You are not obligated to read our books and view our videos. But you make such nuisances of yourselves, we have to resist:

  1. Your holy book calls for the murder of gay people. Gay people do nothing to you. Yet you maliciously take out all manner of spite on GLBTQ people.
  2. The Catholic church runs the world�s largest paedophile ring.
  3. You impose your religious superstitions about condoms on the third world, forcing them to get HIV.
  4. You impose your religious superstitions about souls and god on everyone, demanding women die rather than abort a fetus.
  5. Out of fear of their madman god, Christians refuse to let those in agony die.
  6. Christians demand their religious superstitions be taught in schools to everyone in place of science.
  7. Christians force others to pray to their god is public gatherings and schools.
  8. Christians promote all manner of quack healing and let children die for lack of real medicine.
  9. Their holy book promotes slavery and black oppression.
  10. Nutty Christian religious beliefs about Israel have prolonged the conflict there 69 years.
  11. Christians deliberately traumatise their children with threats of eternal fire in order to indoctrinate them before they are old enough to reason. This is hideous child abuse.

Christians these obscene things because they imagine a terrible sky fairy commands them. The basic problem is this nutty belief in the sky fairy. That is what we work to debunk.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Legacy

One of the most valuable legacies you could leave to humanity is a technique for exposing lies. I salute Willard Libby for his discovery of carbon-14 dating. It exposed forgeries such as the Turin Shroud.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Leprechauns

Leprechauns and gods are similar. They live in books, songs, and paintings. They do not interact with the real world. Their attributes and descriptions all came from people who had never seen one.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

The Lesson of Genesis

One way to interpret the Genesis myth is that the sin of excess consumption is punished with banishment from an abundant environment — in other words greed leads to environmental collapse.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Letter From God

Think of the ways a deity could pass a message on to generations, with perfect accuracy, with no doubt of its authorship. Would it work through a committee of bumbling humans using ESP ? who did not even bother to write it down for 60+ years and then from hearsay? To even claim such bungling is so insulting to the deity. Get serious! You might etch it in metre high letters on the mountains. A deity would etch it on a set of titanium plates. It might put inside each human so they could hear it just by pulling their earlobe… It might provide it all languages or in a form your brain can understand directly without language. Maybe humans would be born automatically knowing the text.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Leviticus

What do we know about Leviticus? Well, he had OCD. Who else could make up all those nutty food rules and be so compulsive about others following them?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Leviticus is Superstition

Leviticus in the old testament is a collection of Jewish superstitions. They are as nutty as avoiding black cats or any of the other superstitions in The Encyclopedia of Superstitions.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Liar Believed

L. Ron Hubbard, founder of Scientology, was caught again and again telling lies. Yet no one seems to have demanded he tell them how and where he discovered all the claims he made in his books.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Liar Cameron

Actor Kirk Cameron claimed that science had been searching for 200 years for the crocoduck, a duck with a crocodile head. This was a bald faced lie. He used this as a straw man argument to ridicule evolution. He is a crook. He could not win his debate honestly so he cheated. That fact must chase him everywhere he goes for the rest of his life, just like Lance Armstrong and his blood doping.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Liar Joshua

There are a couple of problems with the Old Testament’s claim that Joshua swept through Canaan burning city state after city state to the ground. Archaeology shows this damage occurred over a period of 1000 years and many of the cities Joshua claimed to have leveled show no damage whatsoever.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Liars

It is extremely common for people to lie. People who lie cannot produce evidence. All they can do is dance about and bullshit you into giving them money without evidence. Conning money is a common motive for lying.

People who tell the truth are eager to show you evidence. They might not have it, but if the claim is true, likely someone else would also have observed it and will have evidence.

Which is more probable, someone lied or someone was the first contact point for an alien civilisation? Consider Trump. He lies hundreds of times a day, but so far, does not even claim to be the first contact.

Religion is a con to get money out of people. It regales with preposterous tales all without evidence and all of which contradict observed reality. Lying is by far the most probable explanation for what is going on. Some people are mesmerised by the fabulous tales and permit wishful thinking to seduce them into to swallowing them. It is like mistaking The Arabian Nights for accurate history because the stories are so appealing.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Lie Detector Test

I wonder what percentage of Christians would pass a lie detector test if you asked them questions like:

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

The Lie About Faith

Christians love to parrot the lie that you can beat any fatal disease with sufficient prayer, faith, will power and fighting. This is not only untrue, it makes terminally ill people feel guilty for their lack of success with these futile methods. This is not only untrue, it distracts terminally ill people from taking measures that would actually help. It is not only untrue, it tricks people whose disease is successfully being controlled with medication into tossing it away.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

The Lie Of Prayer

That prayer is effective is not only a lie, it is a malicious lie:

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Lies

The most common lie is repeating something as authorative where you cannot recall where you heard it or where you have no idea of whether it is true or not.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Lies are Thrilling

Christians prefer the obviously untrue. It is more thrilling.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Life After Death

I don’t believe in life after death; I believe in death after life. Why? If you have anaesthesia, you watch yourself disappear. Your ability to experience anything fades away to black and nothingness, not even experiencing a void. When you wake up again, it is as if no time has passed. You experience nothing in the interim. It is as if the time has been snipped out of your existence. Anaesthesia is a state part way between life and death. If you don’t even experience anything under anaesthesia, surely you would not experience anything while dead.

Secondly, without a functioning body and brain, just what is going to have the alleged after-death experience? My body and brain are the only things I have ever had experiences with before. If something else similar to me has experiences, e.g. a postulated soul that possesses/inhabits my body like some sort of trill, that is not me. What happens to it, I will never experience.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Life After Death

What is the matter with believing in life after death?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Life Cycle Of A Religion

  1. To start, a religion does not exist. No one has ever heard of the religion or its gods. There are no reports of any of the gods doing anything.
  2. Then comes the myth-building phase. Gods are borrowed and modified from other religions. Gods are assigned names and attributes. Amazing stories are composed about the gods. These stories usually take place in the indefinite past.
  3. The next phase is gaining converts, usually fanatics.
  4. A priesthood develops who cons believers out of money in return for the priest using influence with a god.
  5. The creation of new myths stops and the official myths are pruned back to a canonical set.
  6. The religion gradually becomes tamed as beliefs that are in conflict with the culture in which the religion is embedded fall away.
  7. New believers come primarily from indoctrinated children.
  8. The number of adherents gradually wanes.
~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Life Elsewhere

According to the Christians, god took only one day to create the entire universe, then puttered about another five days to create just one planet — earth. How would a Christian react to discovery of even rudimentary life in other parts of the universe and especially life that claimed the creator of the universe had lavished special attention only on them?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Life Purpose

If Yahweh gives your life meaning, what is it? I don’t recall reading in the bible The purpose of your life is X. Let’s say you think the meaning is something like Spreading Christianity. Raising money for the church. Saving souls from Satan. What if that life purpose leaves you cold?

If you were an atheist, you could choose your own purpose. You might decide it was ending hunger, protecting the environment, promoting social justice… If you got bored with it, you could adopt another.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Life Purpose

There is a British crime drama called Wire in the Blood. One episode, Hole In the Heart, opens with a young man about to commit suicide by jumping off a building. He explains that I don’t know what I am supposed to do with my life. He is suffering under the delusion Yahweh is supposed to give him a life assignment, but for some reason failed to do so. Such people would have no problem if they gave up on Yahweh and decided their life purpose for themselves based on what needs doing, what sorts of things they like to do and what sorts of thing they are good at doing. As as added bonus, they would get a purpose they can put their heart into.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Life Under Yahweh

To wish that Yahweh exist is to long for abject slavery.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Life Is Unfair

The Catholic church catches pedophiles all the time, then releases them to new pastures where people don’t know to guard their kids. I don’t know why, but belief in Yahweh encourages this behaviour. Perhaps it is because the bible repeatedly commandbs pedophilic slavery and never condemns it. never hand pedophiles over to the police.

Expecting pedophiles to be punished after death is silly. There is no evidence whatsoever it will happen. Further, it leaves the pedophile free to hurt as many kids as he pleases throughout his life. Better to concentrate on catching them before they have hurt a lot of kids. Punishing someone after death is closing the barn door after the horse has fled. It does not do the kids a lick of good.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Life Is Unfair

I remember when I was very young complaining about the unfairness of the world to my dad, he said The world is not fair. You will make yourself miserable if you pretend it is.

Is it fair that kids in Africa starve to death? Is it fair that kids who live near the equator have to put up with malaria? Is it fair Syrian kids can’t go outside without being shot? Is it fair black people get shot by police for the most trivial excuses?

The world is not fair. The only thing that is going to make it fair is you. Wishful thinking about an imaginary being that no one can see or detect will not help. It will make thing worse, because you will do nothing to promote justice waiting for your imaginary sky fairy to take action.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Lifeboat Rock

Imagine you are in a lifeboat, with no help in sight. One of your boat mates insists on standing up and rocking the boat. You explain this is dangerous. He could flip the boat. He is deaf to your pleas. This person will almost certainly be a Christian. This is exactly how he behaves around climate change, nuclear war, environmental collapse…

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Limits

Christians like to play a game with atheists. They ask difficult and often meaningless questions about the universe. If ever the atheist says I don’t know, maybe some expert does. They pounce Ah ha! That means god did it, and hence god must exist. The pretend God did it. is an answer that explains something. It is no more informative than saying The answer is mysterious. I don’t expect dogs to ever understand black holes. Similarly, I don’t expect even the smartest humans to ever understand all the deepest questions about the universe. Not knowing is to be expected. The biggest problem with Christians is they lie so often pretending to know with certainty when they have not the first clue.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Limits To Intuition

Intuition helps us discover truth, but it cannot tell us what is true. Our intuition/common sense works very well for life on earth on land, for a radius of about 0.52 megameter (323.11 miles) and for time from a second to 80 years. Outside that, it does not work as well because on different scales, the universe behaves in a counter-intuitive way. For example:

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70) Quantum Leap: how matter behaves at the atomic level click to watch

Lincoln’s Delusion

Lincoln suffered from a delusion that the civil war was God’s vengeance on America and thus should play out even if it meant killing everyone.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Liturgical Magic Tricks

A magician makes a large goose appear out of nowhere and assures you it is just an illusion. A priest holds up a cracker and claims you have just witnessed a miracle.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Living Among Fundamentalists

Imagine being whisked in a time machine back to medieval times. People believe in spells, witchcraft, spirits, ghosts, pixies, devils and explain everything around them in those terms. They have no interest in learning how things really work. This is what it is like to live surrounded by modern day fundamentalists.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Living Truth

When Christians talk of living truth, I think of those creatures that scurry away from the light when you overturn a rock.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Logic For Christians

Given the sideways logic Christians give me for why they believe in god, I suspect the most convincing argument that god is fictitious would be to demonstrate that it would be a Good Thing™ if he did not exist and that it would be exceedingly fortunate if there were no afterlife.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Logic Has Nothing To Do With It

Atheists seeking to cure Christians of their delusions focus on the nonsensical things that Christians believe. I think they might have better luck delving into how these Christians were abused as children and what they are still terrified of as adults. They have been so traumatised that logic has little part in it.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Logic To Religious Wackiness

Some religious craziness is not quite as nuts as it first looks, e.g. putting people to death for eating an oyster. Back in those days eating oysters was dangerous. There was no refrigeration. There was no red tide testing. There were no sewage treatment plants. On the other hand, much of it sounds like the ravings of some obsessive compulsive like keeping milk and meat utterly separate, or refusing to mix cotton and linen in the same garment, or avoiding letting semen touch the ground.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Logical Argument

No matter how philosophically perfect an argument is, if it fails to convince its intended audience, it is a failure. No matter how philosophically incompetent an argument is, if it convinces its intended audience, it is a success.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Logical Atheists

An atheist is not necessarily a scientist. He does not necessarily believe in or understand evolution. He is not necessarily rational. He simply doesn’t believe in the existence in any gods in the same way he doesn’t believe in the existence of fairies. He could, in theory, decide there is no god solely on the grounds the name Yahweh is so dorky that no god would call himself that, failing to even consider the alternative gods, or that this might not be the name god uses for himself. This is just what Christians call him.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Logical vs Feeling Arguments for God

Christians seem totally impervious to arguments based on logic, historical facts, biblical inconsistencies and biblical error. Why is that so? To Christians, facts are irrelevant. They do not trust themselves to reason things out. To them, logic is just smoke and mirrors. If an atheist convinces them there is no god, it is like a skillful magician tricking them into thinking a rabbit just disappeared. To them, trusting logic is as futile as trying to decide for yourself if an advanced mathematical proof contains an error, when you dropped out of math in grade 5. They feel no guilt about lying and deception in their own arguments because they believe that is what you, as the atheist magician, must be doing to make god seem to disappear. What counts are feelings. Feelings are genuine. They are Yahweh taking time out for you personally. They cannot lie.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Lonely Without My Imaginary Friend

Christians often say, I have to believe in god. I would be so terribly lonely without my invisible friend. There are 7.601 billion of us, plus animals and plants. Aren’t they enough? Is the problem you have alienated everyone with your batshit religion?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Long Life!

May you die when a church falls on you.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Atheist wish for long life.

Long Live Woo

Woo (things science snorts at) will not go away. I think there will always be things science is not ready to tackle yet and people will have endless enjoyment speculating. Even if they have nothing, they will make something up — Never let the facts get in the way of a good ghost story. Religion however, is dead, congealed woo. It is boring, institutional, rigid. By far the main reason people get involved in it is that someone brainwashed them as an infant. It is not something you would do for pleasure. When people truly have choice in the matter of religion, they will abandon it.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Longing for Brain Washing

Indigenous people who were raised in residential schools complain bitterly that they missed out of being indoctrinated into indigenous religions. If they talked to people about the pain of their struggles to free themselves from the superstitions of religions, they would be grateful they escaped that brain washing. However, residential schools attempted to instill Christianity with violence. That is an unforgivable crime.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Longing for Cosmic Significance

There is no animal but man that frets because it is not cosmically significant.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Longshots

Christians are well aware there is no evidence whatsoever they will be resurrected from the dead. All they have is 30th hand assertion from a guy most experts say never existed. They know it is a longshot, less that one in a trillion odds. But they go for it anyway, for the same reason they bet on longshots at the horse races. They are pathologically wishful thinkers and reckless gamblers. They are like heavy lottery ticket buyers who ignore the odds, and think only of the prize. They are the ultimate chumps. They never add up the lifetime take the church swindles them out of.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Looking At Christians

If you are an atheist and look at the strange things Christians do, you can’t believe they are serious. It must be something like Morris dancing or dressing up on Halloween.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Looking Away

When Archbishop Turquotte died, he was given a hero’s funeral. They completely ignored the fact he was a member of the world’s biggest paedophile ring.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Lord of the Flies

Imagine being the creator of the universe bombarded 24/7 by billions of greedy, petty humans demanding special treatment and privilege, following you around like a cloud of mosquitos. Gimme. Gimme. Gimme. To make it worse, these annoying little creatures are under the delusion this is what you demand of them.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Losing Faith

Christians imagine that if they lost their faith they would run amok raping and pillaging. Yet thousands of Christians every day lose their faith, and they do no such thing. Apparently, there is something other than faith holding people in check.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Losing Hold on Reality

To me, a Christian is like someone who dropped a few tabs of acid, and went to see Avatar and came out convinced it was a historical documentary.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Losing Tax Exemption

When a church conspires to deny freedom of religion to others and it is a primarily a front for criminal activity, it becomes reasonable to debate whether such a church should lose the special privileges churches enjoy such as freedom from taxes, i.e. free fire, police, roads, water, sewer…

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

The Lottery

One of the most brilliant metaphors about Christianity and its insane adherence to barbaric traditions was a short story written in 1948 by Shirley Jackson, called The Lottery

In a small village of about 300 residents, the locals are in a strange and nervous mood on June-27. Children gather up stones as the adult townsfolk assemble for their annual event, that in the local tradition has been practised to ensure a good harvest. Everyone has to draw a stone. The person who selects a specially marked stone is stoned to death. Nobody likes this, but everyone is enthralled to the tradition.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Love

Love, affection, consideration and kindness are good between any species, genders, ages or races. Oddly, Christians dedicate their lives to extinguishing them.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Love and Fear

Christians tell me I must simultaneously love and fear their evil god. If I don’t do both, he will roast me alive for eternity. This is impossible. I want to get away from things I fear. I want to get closer to things I love. I can’t do both at once. Further, I cannot love something I consider to be extremely evil. At the very best, I could pretend to, which would be immoral. The Christians are barking mad in their demands.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Love A Murderer

If someone truly believed that a god took their loved ones from them, they would hate him just as strongly as they would hate any other murderer. Yet they are required to pretend to love the bastard. What a weird, cruel trip to lay on someone!

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Loving The Spy

Christians say to atheists How can you stand life without an invisible man spying on you all the time looking for an excuse to roast you alive? Granted, they don’t put it quite that way. I have been to many churches. Except for the MCC (Metropolitan Community Church) and some black churches, the congregation were either bored out of their minds or in distress. They were anything but joyful. If these people hung out with atheists for a while, they might learn to enjoy their lives.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Luck

Why are some people so much luckier than others? Why did I get to be born in Canada instead of some third world sewer? The question implies a belief that the universe is or should be fair. Religious people paper over the problem by telling themselves god likes it the way it is. Buddhists tell themselves it is fair because your fortune depends on behaviour in previous lives.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Luck Religion

Luck is like religion but without a deity. Outcomes better than in past can be generated by magical acts that have no apparent connection with the outcome, e.g. like wearing dirty socks to win athletic contests. Christian eat magic wafers. Mormons wear magic underwear.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Ludicrous Yahweh

Yahweh is supposedly a perfect god, but he was unable to create a planet of sufficient quality to please himself. So he destroyed it in a fit of pique like some brat unhappy with his train set. As a god, he supposedly designed every aspect of the planet, but he blamed the creations. What an asshole!

Yahweh is supposedly perfect, and supposedly created the universe for the convenience of man. Why then did he create most of the planets as uninhabitable?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

The Lure of the Improbable

The stock in trade of screenwriters is the improbable and the fantastic co-incidence. Screenwriters have inadvertently convinced the public that whatever scientists say is inevitable, e.g. global warming they are convinced can never happen. Conversely, whatever the scientists say is highly unlikely, e.g. a god meddling in human affairs, they are absolutely certain happens every day with complete reliability.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Lying

Christians drive atheists nuts because they don’t consider it lying to assert something with 100% certainty for which they have no evidence whatsoever.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Lying

Even though Christians nominally subscribe to the ten commandments and believe lying is extremely wicked they reserve the right to lie to their children about Santa Claus. They also reserve the right to indoctrinate their children and their neighbour’s children with their denomination’s dogma. They also reserve the right to indoctrinate their children and their neighbour’s children with parts of the bible they know to be false.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Lying

If a scientist made claims, but had no evidence to back them up, he would be charged with fraud. Yet the religious do this every day, without shame, and try to claim their pronouncements are nonetheless infallible. Oddly this extremely lax standard for truth only applies to matters of religion. Christians are just as wary as anyone else when buying a new car.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Lying and Dissembling Should be Treated Similarly

Whether a politician outright lies or merely dissembles, the intent is the same — to deceive the public. The result is the same — the public is deceived. We should condemn both lying and dissembling.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Lying and Proud of It

Over the centuries famous Christians have admitted they lie to defend the faith. But is that not an admission that even they have weak confidence in it?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Lying Christians

All Christians are liars. They try to sell falsehoods. At best you could say they peddle ideas which remotely conceivably might be true, that have no evidence to support them, that have a ton of evidence to refute them, and that are comforting to weak-minded people.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Lying Christians

Christians have absolutely no shame about lying. Without any guilt at all they will tell a orphaned child that their mother abandoned them to hide in the clouds with god. They think they are sparing the child’s feelings, but lying to a child that their Mom abandoned them voluntarily is far worse that being told she can no longer we with them.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Lying Christians

Christians know Christianity increases violence, murder, abortion, teen pregnancy, STD… as proven by multiple studies, but they are so emotionally attached to Christianity that they lie that the opposite is true. In other words, they want Christianity so bad they are willing to put up with violence, murder, abortion, teen pregnancy, STD… Why? They fear hellfire.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Lying to Control

We humans make demands on each others’ behaviour. However, the Christian cheats in this process by lying that the creator of the universe commands everyone to give the Christian’s demands top priority, on risk of supernatural penalty.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Lying About Death

One of the primary functions of a religion is to lie to the followers about what happens to them after death. They pretend to have absolute certain knowledge, when it actuality all they have is idle speculation based on nothing at all. This is a wicked thing to do. Why?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Lying Disease

Christianity is a mental illness that forces its victims to lie without shame.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Lying For God

Religious people are so convinced their end goal is so glorious and true, that it justifies any conceivable means including lying, beatings and murder. A minor example: religious people went into British schools and brazenly lied that abortions cause brain cancer.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Lying to Himself

I think every Christian has had an experience similar to this. A young primary school teacher, who is universally admired, is stricken with brain cancer. Her students tearfully pray for her. The congregation prays for her. She dies. If god exists, he cannot be kind as advertised. Only a sadist would take such a woman at a young age. There is no way killing her that way is part of some beneficent plan. So either god is sadistic or, far more likely, does not exist at all. How can a Christian lie to himself about this obvious truth?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Lying to Kids

Every child has the right to the truth. We should start considering any sort of lying to children as child abuse, including teaching religious myths as literal fact.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Lying to Kids

The most important thing in talking to your kids is never to tell them anything you have no evidence is true. It is disrespectful to tell them lies you think would be good for them to believe.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Lying Manipulators

When people lie to manipulate others, it bothers me deeply. That is why I loathe religions.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Is Lying OK?

You may have noticed that Christians seem to have no compunction about lying. Don’t the ten commandments strictly forbid lying? No, they just say no false witness. Christians may lie all they like, just not falsely accuse others of crimes in court.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Lying to the Terminally Ill

If a doctor lies to a terminally ill patient they will recover, have they helped or hurt? If I had only two months to live, there are a number of things I might want to do differently. By lying, the doctor tricked me into doing the wrong things. He hurt me.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Lying About the Unknown

In the late 1800s, John Shelton, an American, claimed he had reached the north pole. He said at the pole was a gigantic diamond and a becalmed ship where sailors had nothing to eat but a drowned horse. Today, you might see this as allegory, but many took it as literal truth. Humans love to speculate about the unknown with tales feigning absolute certainly. Christians did the same thing about death.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Lying To Yourself

A rationalist might come to the conclusion that free will is an illusion, then go into a funk. He might then decide this way of viewing the universe, though true, was unpleasant. He might decide to act as if there were true free will. Like a Christian, he would deceive himself, however, I think if you asked him what he thought was true, he would say that free will was an illusion. He would not lie to others like a Christian.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Lying To Yourself

You might wish that after you die, you will be reunited with your loved ones, all in vibrant health. But how can you convince yourself this is indeed true? You find some gullible boobs, and you sell them the idea. Then you let their certainty convince you back. What Christians talking among themselves. All they ever do is assert how sure they are of various things. They never divulge any reasons for that certainty. They make their decisions about what to believe by taking a poll of their peers.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Mad Faith Healing

Christian scientists deny their children medical care no matter how serious the problem, no matter how long prayer has failed, no matter how clearly the writings of Mary Baker Eddy have been proven to be wishful thinking. This the sin of pride — shame at being proven wrong. For some strange reason, reading Mary Baker Eddy is considered a legal excuse for child abuse where other excuses are not. It is one thing to deny yourself medical attention to the point of suicide, but quite another to deny a child.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

The Madness of Noah

The story of Noah’s flood is self-contradictory. What is god up to with this flood? He is trying to kill all the people, except Noah’s family. Supposedly, he has nothing against the animals. He wiped out all the trees and plants, yet in some unspecified way, they allegedly survived. Surely it would be a more efficient to kill all the people, say a plague, in order to kill the people without hurting the animals and plants. He made a creation, then mostly destroyed it. But, as god, surely he knew well in advance he would be unhappy with the creation, so why did he make it that way in the first place? This story makes absolutely no sense no matter how you look at it. This is like some sort of comic strip where the author sometimes forgets about his character’s super powers.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Magic

If Criss Angel says I am going to show you an illusion then walks on water, you believe him. If psychic con man says I am going to show you an example of my psychic powers then walks on water, you believe him. If religious con man says I am going to show you an example of God’s power then walks on water, you believe him. I am surprised people are so gullible and inconsistent.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Magic Clothes

Why do the clergy, especially the Catholic clergy, wear such peculiar clothes? Like other stage magicians, they want a costume that suggests they have some magic special power.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Magic Options

Christians all the time say, If some feature of the universe were different, then horrors, the universe would be quite different from it is now. Well yeah. They seem to think the way things are is something special, something inevitable. It is perhaps just one of the trillions of possible ways things could have been. To me, it sounds as nutty as saying If Mrs. Jones had not picked the sunlight lemon chip at the paint store, her house might have been blue. The odds of it being yellow are astoundingly improbable given how many different paint chips there are.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Magical Me

If someone says I wish you well on your journey. they might mean either I like you and I will be happy to hear if things go well for you, or I have special pull with an supernatural being. If anything good happens to you on your journey, remember, it was me pulling strings for you.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Magician Excuses

The Christian assertion is god intervenes only rarely in the working of the universe, but never when scientists are watching. This vaguely reminds me of the plot of some fairy story I heard as a pre-schooler. This also reminds me of magician Uri Geller’s excuse when he could not perform one of his tricks.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Magnetic Insoles

Christians are like those who imagine that the key to a happy life is to insert magnetic inserts into your shoes. You could forgive them if they would just shut up about them for five minutes.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Magnetism = God

If you stimulate a spot in the right temporal lobe with a magnetic field, the subject will tell you they felt the presence of god, even though nothing miraculous happens and no special knowledge is obtained. This is a highly unusual subjective experience and people tend to label anything strange god even if that experience has none of the attributes of god.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Magnificent Con

Augustus Caesar convinced the Romans that Halley’s comet was the divine Julius Caesar’s spirit entering heaven. If you think about it, this con was much more plausible than any Christians try to pull. At least you could see the comet.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Majority Logic

Christians argue that Yahweh the god must exist because so many Christians think so. By that logic, stepping on a crack must be dangerous to your mother because so many people believe it. There is no evidence to support either idea.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Make Believe

Children love to pretend. Much of this is rehearsal for things they will do as adults. When children grow up, for the most part, they give up pretending, or if they do pretend, they don’t deceive themselves or others about what they are doing. However, some children grow up to be Christians. They never stop pretending, fuelled by wishful thinking. They sink into the habit of reflexively lying to themselves and others. They pretend they are not pretending.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Makeover

Unwashed people, in long filthy beards, and unwashed clothes, reeking of sweat and dead animals are not the best way to advertise a religion. If Christianity wants to expand, they will have to lose the beards, and go for cleaner, sportier clothes.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Making Big Changes

In general, you can only make very small changes. Big changes are made by chaining together small changes. It is fruitless trying to make the universe change too quickly, likely trying to drag your finger through a cornstarch suspension.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Making a Con Look Legit

Just as investors talked their friends into investing with Bernie Madoff, Christians talk their friends into contributing to their church. It is a way of easing doubt. If their friends think the con is legit, they can feel better about it too.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Malala Yousafzai

The Taliban shot a 14-year old Pakistani girl Malala Yousafzai because she wanted to go to school and because she condemned Taliban atrocities. Events like this are commonplace in Afghanistan and Pakistan, perpetrated by fundamentalist Muslims of all stripes. Why did this event catch the public imagination and cause such outrage, especially in Pakistan? We had a name, a photo, a bit of history and details of the attack. We also had the suspense of wondering if she would survive. It was media coverage that did it. Why then did the media give this story so much more weight? I very glad they have, but I wonder why it took so long.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Malaysian Airlines Flight 370

Malaysian Airlines Flight 370 crashed over the Indian Ocean on 2014-03-08. The son of a woman living in Beijing was aboard. She insists to this day her son is alive, even though bits of wreckage have been found washed up in Madagascar. There is no scenario where he would have survived. She does not care. She wants him to be alive. Evidence does not matter. We feel pity for this poor deluded woman who cannot face reality.

Yet what she is doing is no different from the average Christians who resolutely close their ears to evidence, and believe only what they want to be true.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Male and Female

Religion fills humans with absurdly conceited notions that they are special and the universe was created solely for their delectation. We refer to males and female zebras. We should in a similar way refer to male and female humans, to remind ourselves that we too are animals.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Males Caring For the Young

Humans are like the other animals where the males help raise the young. The males seek pleasurable sensations. The females seek to be provided for. Religion has taught us hypocrisy in this matter, condemning anyone who acknowledges these two facts honestly.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Man-Made Religion

If you assume religion is man-made, it makes ever so much more sense.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Mandatory Organ Donation

I think it should be illegal to destroy an organ that could be used to save a life. It is a type of indirect murder. Yet we permit Christians to bury and cremate such organs every day for purely superstitious reasons. Superstition should be no excuse for murder. Failing that, we should recycle organs unless the donor explicitly applied for a religious exemption.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Manufactured Guilt

Religions work by making you feel guilty about perfectly normal things:

They trick you into thinking it is both possible and desirable to totally suppress all normal sexuality. They frighten you by saying god the voyeur is spying on all your sexual activity. The terrify you by saying anything less that perfect sexual purity will send you to roast for eternity in hell. If you believe this bullshit, they will con you into giving them at least 10% of your income for your entire life and get nothing in return. They are con men milking an ancient and well-tested scam. They belong in jail.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Manufacturing Believers

Psychologists have found that if people are asked to pass on information they do not know is true, people will convince themselves it is true. This is the main way churches trick people into believing bullshit.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Manufacturing Faith

If people have seen pictures of something as children, it seems familiar to them as adults and they tend to believe in it without question: sasquatches, the Loch Ness monster, fairies, unicorns, leprechauns, trolls, a god sitting on a cloud above earth micromanaging the universe, angels, Noah’s Ark, parting the Red Sea, senior citizens giving birth…

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Manufacturing A God

If you were to create a metaphoric god that most accurately described the behaviour of the universe what would he be like?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Marathon Threats

In the movie Marathon Man the villain tortures the Dustin Hoffman character by alternately drilling his teeth without anaesthetic and offering some clove oil for the pain. This reminds me of the church, deliberately terrifying children by threatening eternal hell fire, then offering a bribe of eternal bliss. Of course, with the church, the manipulation is all psychological. However, it is no more beneficent than the machinations of the sadistic dentist.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

The Married Batchelor Proof God Does Not Exist

Christians claim Yahweh is both omnipotent and omniscient. So Yahweh knows ahead of time whether he will poof a rabbit into existence at noon tomorrow. Let’s say the answer is no. Come noon, Yahweh cannot very well poof a rabbit. So he is not omnipotent. It were able, he would not have been omniscient. Yahweh is logically inconsistent, a married bachelor. He cannot logically exist. Christians could rescue Yahweh, but only by dropping either his alleged omnipotence or omniscience.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Martin Luther

Though Martin Luther is usually presented as a hero, he is one of the more despicable assholes of history. The Anabaptists (forerunners of today’s Amish and Mennonites) believed that people should not be baptised at birth, but should affirm their faith for themselves. So Luther declared they should be put to death.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70) The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined

Mary’s Story

Mary prevailed with dogged use of the strategy And that’s my story and I’m sticking to it.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Masochism Prevalence

You never see a masochistic animal. Yet Christianity manage to instill masochism in millions.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Masturbation

Perhaps the most devious and malicious feature of the church con is convincing people that masturbation offends the deity as does looking at a handsome young man or woman and feeling lust. Not only do they create endless needless guilt, fear and misery, they extort money to atone for the transgression.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Mating Censorship

Reproduction in mallards has a number of stages, courting, mating, egg-laying and care and defence of the chicks. Christians have convinced everyone that all these stages are suitable viewing for children except mating. This pure superstition.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

A Matter of Trust

How do I know if something is true? First and foremost, does it jibe with my personal experience. Next, does it jibe with what people I trust said was so. What people do I trust? acknowledged experts, parents, people with a reputation of telling me things that turned out to be true based on my personal experience. What people don’t I trust? People I have caught lying, pretending to know what they do not, cheating, breaking promises, stealing, running con games… So why are my beliefs so different from a typical fundamentalist? They believed their parents just like I did. Their parents taught them that preachers were completely trustworthy. Mine taught me they were hypocrites and bullshitters.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Mean-Spirited Rapture

The belief in the rapture is not an innocent delusion. It causes people to become derelict in their duty to their country and the planet. Nothing matters to them. It is all going to be destroyed soon anyway. They care not a fig for the environment, endangered species, soil erosion, forests, clean water, climate change… I wish these dumb buggers would just slit each other’s throats (Masada style) and go to heaven if they are so goddamn sure of an afterlife.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Meaning

Christians often tell me they could not bear to live without the meaning Christianity gives them. I would think the very opposite would be true. Consider:

As an atheist, I have plenty of meaning in my life. I choose it. The meaning has changed at different phases of my life:

The notion that my life should be dedicated to serving a sadistic god is utterly repugnant. I am baffled that anyone does it. The only motive I can conceive of is a combination of gullibility and cowardice.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Meaning and Purpose

If god’s life has intrinsic meaning, why can’t yours? God does not need a god to give meaning to his life. Atheists don’t need a god to give meaning to their lives. Instead of accepting some dull purpose in life like singing praises to Yahweh, you can decide your own, like ending hunger, restoring the environment, social justice for gays or women, literacy… Further, at different stages of your life, you can change your purpose, without anyone else’s approval.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Meaning of God

In Danish, god just means good.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Meaning in My Life

Creationists claim that because I believe evolution and because I believe I am an animal, a primate, yet another of the ape/monkey clan and because I don’t believe in eternal life necessarily my life is without meaning, empty and miserable. That is simply not so. At different points in my life I have derived meaning from:

If were a Christian and my only choice for purpose in life was to kiss the ass of an infinitely evil bastard like Yahweh and the Catholic church, I would sooner kill myself. I am utterly baffled that any Christian would claim to crave this slavery and believe it necessary for existence.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Meaningless Questions

When a lay person asks a scientist Why are we here? or What is the purpose of the universe? they are presuming the existence of some deity, creator of man and the universe who has motivations. There is no such deity, so the questions are meaningless. However, people exist and they are free to assign purposes, relative to themselves, for everything. The human purpose for the horse is recreational riding. However, that not likely the way the horse sees it.

What actually happens if you sign up for a Christian purpose, is some schmuck will assign you one. He claims to know the mind of god, and he claims that’s god’s purpose. But he just pulled it out of his ass.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Measelists

The word Christian is a misnomer. It suggests Christianity is an essential part of a person, something impossible to change. It really means someone who has been infected by the Christian meme. We should find a term that expresses some optimism that it can be cured. It is like calling someone who has contracted measles a measleist.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Measuring Televangelists

You can tell how efficiently a televangelist is fleecing the flock by which time slots he buys and how many. The big timers air during the day. The little guys at 3 AM.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Meddling

We don’t allow a Jewish waiter to dictate which foods are suitable for those he serves. Why then should an insurance agent be allowed to interfere with a woman’s reproductive choices based on his religious quirks?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Meddling Christians

People who have few troubles imagine they will want to live as long as possible. Those burdened with heavy problems, especially terminal disease, would be happy to get it over with. The happy people cannot understand them and, if they are Christian, feel compelled to do all they can to interfere with any plans the burdened may have for an early exit.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Media Christian Propaganda

The History Channel, the National Geographic Channel and the Discovery Channel all air religious propaganda disguised as if it were hard science. If they must do this, how about some propaganda from a religion other than Christianity? We need a fresh misconception of the universe from time to time.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Medical Jargon

Why does medicine use such complicated long words when there exist short, accurate ones in English? I suspect it may be to help distance themselves from Christian superstitions about dead bodies.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Medieval Life

Let the following conjure up images: medieval plumbing, medieval medicine, medieval dentistry, medieval justice, medieval class system, medieval pest control, medieval religion. They are all pretty gross, right? Why are we clinging then to pre medieval religion?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Meet the Christians

What would you think of someone went to a psychiatrist and announced that they had joined a cult that followed the religious beliefs of an obscure primitive iron age desert tribe. The God of the tribe was into public farting. He insisted his followers eat feces and rape and kill non-cult members. How might you treat him? If that cult were the Christians, he would be sent out into the world as a perfectly sane man.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Mental Masturbation

God is defined as something beyond the capabilities of your mind to grasp. Throughout the ages, untold millions of people have chewed on this vague idea. Nobody produced anything. It was all a complete waste of time.

Some of the better liars persuaded their fellows some of their ideas came from the local god, and lorded it over everyone.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Mercy is Rare

The notion of an infinitely merciful creator god is a croc. It is extremely rare for any creature to act with any concern at all for the suffering of other creatures unless they are offspring.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Middle Eastern Religions

Why has the middle east spawned the world’s two most obnoxious religions? By obnoxious I mean religions whose adherents will pester, threaten torture or kill to get others to pretend to accept their twaddle. Perhaps it is because life in the middle east is so harsh that masses of people consoled themselves with the notion that death would be a step up. They could not tolerate anyone pooh-poohing their fantasy, their only hope.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

A Mild Hallucinatory Drug

Christianity is far from benign. Like a mild hallucinatory drug, it infects a population with a child-like tendency to wishful thinking that interferes with rational decision making.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Military Indoctrination

The practical reasons for a military trying to indoctrinate its troops with a religion are:

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Mind Blower

Would it not utterly blow your mind if it turned out that nearly every non-trivial, minimalist, consistent, abstract mathematical idea necessarily accurately describes something in the physical universe.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Mind Boggling Science

The universe is only 13.82 billion years old, yet can we see objects that are now 47 billion light years away because of the expansion of the universe. Isn’t that mind boggling enough for you? Why must you Christians sully your conception of the cosmos with imaginary kitschy angels with trumpets?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

The Mind Of Creator of the Universe

Churches claim to know the mind of the creator of the universe in minute detail. Yet, oddly, the creator refuses to do jack shit for them to validate that claim. This is the most absurd claim. The churches don’t even know how science works — an open secret in the mind of god.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Mind Parasite

Religion is a mind parasite.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Mind Parasites

Religions are like parasites of the mind. They take over and make the individual submit to it. The individual forgets to look after its own well being and instead dedicates himself to the well-being of the religion. This is analogous to the way various animal brain parasites work. Consider that Islam means submission.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70) Islam is a Parasitic Mind Virus click to watch

Mind Worm Parasite

When we atheists complain about Christians, we don’t mean the people literally. Christianity is like a mind worm parasite that takes over someone’s brain and renders them idiotic. It is horrible thing to see. The Christian is the victim of Christianity. Ants have brain parasites that make the ants stop caring for themselves and dedicate themselves to spreading the parasite. Christianity is like that.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Mindless Cruelty

Some Christian bigots are unaware of the harm they are causing. For example, when they pass laws to invalidate the marriages of same sex couples, they don’t think about the families that have to flee the state. When someone has to leave quickly, it is disruptive on the children and costly. They have to find new jobs and sell the house at a loss and abandon all memberships. They have to leave friends, family and familiar landscapes. How would the Christians like it if they were forced to leave?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Mindless Defences of Christianity

Most of what people say in defence of religion is utterly idiotic. We don’t notice how stupid it is because what they say is so familiar. Over and over in our lives people repeated these mindless saws (Adam and Eve not Adam and Steve) and nobody laughed.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Minimal Respect

To respect someone’s religion just means you will refrain from interrupting or picketing its ceremonies or attempting to get the adherents jailed for their beliefs or ceremonies. You can still think their beliefs are insane or immoral. You can still try to convince the adherents to give up their crazy ideas. You just won’t use intimidation, violence or force to persuade them. Not all religions deserve even that degree of respect, e.g. ones that institutionalise child abuse.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Miracle Donation

When a church accepts a sizable sum from someone deluded into thinking this may provoke a miracle, is the church guilty of fraud?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

This situation came up in the fictional Boardwalk Empire when a mother donated a massive sum to the church to atone for her sins that she felt provoked God into striking her daughter with polio, hoping it would convince him to relent.

Miracle Fraud

Every miracle is a fraud of this form: Something happened that mystifies us. We don’t have an explanation therefore we do have an explanation, it was Saint Michael interceding. That is just a speculation. There is no evidence for it at all.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Miracles

There are two groups of people who perform miracles:

Both just perform tricks i.e. illusions. The religious fraud claims god did it and it is a real miracle. The magician claims he did it, and confesses it is just an illusion.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Miracles

When you say something is a miracle, what you really mean is I have no idea what really happened.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Misery From Christians

Examine your life. How much misery came into it because of Christians meddling with your affairs or imposing nutty ideas on the government? Now, how much misery came because somebody had sex with someone of the same rather than opposite gender. It had no effect on your life at all. (You may have been dumped for a man, but is no different from being dumped for a woman.) You have no business trying to impose your opinions on others what do in the bedroom.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Misinterpreting Science

How long until some addled Christian claims the discovery of the Higgs-Boson particle at Cern means that Science has finally proved the god Yahweh exists.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Misplaced Reverence

People revere the wisdom of ancient religious texts presumably because the authors were allegedly wiser than we and closer to the gods. Yet we would never dream of trusting the wisdom of these same people on matters of sanitation, medicine, psychiatry, weather prediction, animal husbandry, navigation, womens’ rights…

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Missing Artifacts

If Yahweh is omnipotent, why did he allow the ark of the covenant, the ten commandments, the shroud and Jesus’s cross to go missing?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Missing Artifacts

If you imagine there is divine justice, you leave justice up to god. There is no divine justice, so you are just kidding yourself. You are thus ensuring there is less justice than there would be otherwise if you dropped your delusion. Believing in divine justice does not make it any more likely to be true. Christians arguing for Christianity seem to be claiming belief makes divine justice more likely to be true.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Missing Divine Intervention

Divine intervention has never stopped an unrighteous power. You might think Moses and Pharaoh were an exception, except there is not one speck of archaeological evidence to support Moses’ existence, or the exodus.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Missing Miracles

If Yahweh is so interested in monitoring even the thoughts of every human, is there not a single miracle (where the laws of the universe were suspended) to benefit a virtuous Christian or innocent child ever recorded in modern times? Why is there no evidence of any kind that Yahweh smiles on Christians and protects them from harm?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Missing Relics

Given that the Christians don’t have Moses’ Ten Commandments tablets or the Ark of the Covenant, the most important artefacts is their religion, it makes me wonder:

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Missing Wolf Hearing

If the ear were the result of godly intelligent design, the deaf would, for no more than the cost of a hearing aid, have their hearing restored to that of a wolf’s.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Mistaken Christians

In a religious survey in England, they asked respondents why they had ticked the Christian box. By far the most frequent answer was, I think of myself as a good person. They were not Christians at all!

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Mistaking God

It is embarrassing how frequently Christians confuse unusually intense emotion with demonic possession by the creator of the universe.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Misuse of the Valedictory Address

It has become fashionable for valedictorians to use the occasion for a spontaneous hour-long harangue on the necessity of converting to Christianity. Perhaps if someone were to press these young women for an hour on the necessity of submitting to Allah, becoming a Mormon or JW or abandoning religion altogether, they would have a glimmer of how rude and presumptuous they are to their captive audiences.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Mocking Christians

One way to mock the church is to pretend to take some of its nuttier doctrines seriously — exploring their ramifications, much the way Stephen Colbert does.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Modern Day Child Slaves

To this day, slave owners in Africa force children to fish for them. One of their boats is named Believe In God. Slaveowner still force Christianity down the throats of their slaves because it makes them more compliant.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Modern Day Witchcraft

In the 1980s Christians in Iowa accused a farmer of running a satanic cult that sacrificed animals and children. They burned down his buildings. Their evidence, the cows on a neighbouring farm were restless. What has changed with Christians since the middle ages?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Mohammed

In Pakistan, it is illegal to discard a business card of anyone named Mohammed (the most common given name).

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70) Testing Religion and Offence click to watch

Molesting Priests

How is it that priests do such a large percentage of child molesting?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Money for God

When a preacher says Give me some money for god you know that is a lie. There is no way for him to deposit the money in god’s bank account. God, as creator of the universe, has no need of money. The preacher is collecting money for himself and his own projects. When someone lies to me right of the bat like that, I have had it with them. I refuse to have anything further to do with them.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Monks

What occupation is more useless than a monk? They live off donations. They produce nothing. They contribute nothing. They live on palatial estates. They pay no taxes.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Monogamy

With a few other exceptions, including beavers and blue-footed boobies, other animals besides man are not monogamous. In most species, males mate with as many females as possible. It is thus perfectly normal for an alpha male humans to have a couple of other mates. People tend to elect alpha males to high public office. Then they spy on them and turn on them when they discover they are indeed alpha males, even when their mates have made no complaint. It is the epitome of Christian hypocrisy and busybodying. A Puritanical envy motivates them.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Monogamy vs Polygamy

Why would god tell some people that monogamy is absolutely mandatory and tell others that polygamy is absolutely mandatory? The simplest explanation is that two groups of people made up what God supposedly said. In other words, they lied in an attempt to frighten others into behaving as they wanted them to.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Monotheism

When I was in grade 7, we learned that Akhenaten made a major leap in the development of religions by inventing monotheism. I was unimpressed. I could see nothing more advanced about monotheism over polytheism. They were equally screws loose, though polytheism was more entertaining. What the teacher meant is Akhenaten brought religion closer to Christianity. Gore Vidal considered monotheism a very backward step.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Monotheism Not So Hot

Historians will tell you that monotheism is a higher form of religion than polytheism, though they will never give a reason why. I put this down to Christian chauvinism. I knew that Gore Vidal concurred with me and on 2012-05-13 I learned that Schopenhauer and Hume also share my dim view of monotheism.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Monsignor William Lynn, paedophile Enabler

Monsignor William Lynn, a catholic priest in Philadelphia, was convicted of endangering children by reassigning paedophile priests to fresh pastures. He excused himself by saying I was just following orders from Cardinal Anthony Bevilacqua. Surely he knows that excuse did not wash for Nazis. Why should it wash for Catholics? He is doubly guilty. He failed to report the paedophile priests and he failed to report Cardinal Bevilacqua.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70) source

The Monster Lie

If Christians lie to their kids about evolution, then, of course, the kids will be disillusioned and reject all their parent’s teaching when they finally catch them in such a monster lie. That rejection is the parent’s fault for lying not the fault of those who finally told the truth.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Monumental Conceit

We live on a minor planet revolving around an insignificant star in a run-of-the-mill galaxy. Yet we have the monumental conceit to imagine our local tribal gods rule the entire universe and we are the centre and purpose of the universe. When we finally contact some civilisations on other planets, it will give religion’s hubris a swift kick in the pants. Though I should never underestimate the ability of Christians to ignore facts buy burying their heads in the sand.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

The Moorish Golden Age

If you were raised in a Christian country you probably never learned anything about the Moorish era in Spain. Christians are embarrassed the way the Moors from North Africa for hundreds of years were so much more advanced in architecture, science, plumbing, mathematics, architecture, agriculture… than were the Christians. The Moors were an forward-looking, tolerant, rational people. You may be surprised to learn they were Muslims. Later Muslims turned their backs on this enlightenment to embrace deliberate fundamentalist ignorance and wilful stupidity. Oddly, the majority of Americans want to join them in fundamentalist medieval beliefs. There was a similar golden age in Sicily.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Moral Abdication

Christians want to abdicate responsibility for developing a moral code to anonymous, ignorant folk who dwelt in the desert 3000 years ago who entertained themselves with animal and human sacrifice. They can only maintain the fiction of this code’s modern suitability by refusing to read what that blood-thirsty ancient code actually demands. Instead, such codes should evolve over time based on discussions by all humanity, working to make the codes ever more fair and effective.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Moral Marshmallows

Christians are always trying to sell the idea that only they are moral since only they fear being roasted by Yahweh after death. Perhaps it is time to research the religious affiliation of criminals, dictators and dishonest businessmen and point out the association. My own thinking is anyone who would worship a deity as cruel as Yahweh has no gumption. They are a moral marshmallow.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Morality and God

If you think morality comes only from the church, that is an argument for pretending to believe in god and for lying to others about it to trick them into behaving. It also might be an argument for pretending to be god, and issuing degrees in god’s name, using fear of god to compel people to obey. It is not an argument for the existence of god. It might be nicer if there were a god issuing morality, but who says the universe has to be nice?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Morality Is Not Enough

Morality is primarily a list of things you should not do. It can be based on rationality, tradition or whimsy. Even if you perfectly conformed with some moral system, you would be a pretty pathetic and useless human being. True morality is about being of service to all of existence.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Morality Is Not Magic

Theologians for some reason imagine that thoughts about morality are special. They must be divinely inspired, or handed to you on a bronze tablet. They are just ideas about how you think people should treat each other. Even three year olds have no trouble thinking them up.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Morally Bankrupt Christians

A child dies every 17 seconds. God does nothing to help. According to Christians, most of these dead children are sent to hell. Their crime? Being born into a non-Christian culture. They worshiped the wrong god though no fault of their own.

Why does god behave this way?

God behaves far worse that Hitler ever did. Anyone who worships and sucks up to such a bastard hoping for divine favour is even more morally reprehensible than someone who sucked up to Hitler.

Such behaviour is both despicable and cowardly, and also foolish since there is no god to suck up to.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

More Education!

Christians and Jews study their ancient roots as if nothing else were going on back then but the primitive rites of their root tribe. What we need is more religious education, so that Christians and Jews learn they were just one of ten thousand all doing roughly the same thing, all trumpeting We’re #1. God loves us best with petty, embarrassingly foolish, nationalist, local religions all telling the same old stories in various permutations. If people won’t drop religion out of logic, perhaps they will drop it out of embarrassment.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

More Women Christians

Women outnumber men two to one in American churches. They are often attracted to such patriarchal institutions because they validate their traditional unliberated lifestyle choices.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Moribund Religious Ideas

Intellectuals keep dragging moribund religious ideas back on stage like some child who keeps fishing a flea-invested blanket out of the trash.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Mormon

It is obvious to everyone that Mormonism is a ridiculous con. What is the matter with people they can’t see that Christianity is too?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Mormonism

Mormonism has an insurmountable flaw. Without a doubt, the founder, Joseph Smith, was arrested and convicted for fraud many times before he started his religion. All the strangest features of the religion make perfect sense if you assume they were part of a giant con.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Mormonism: A Practical Joke

Joseph Smith left two big clues that he originally intended the Book of Mormon as a practical joke.

  1. He named the angel Moroni (one letter off Moron) as the spiritual author of the work.
  2. He name the people who fell for his story Mormons, (one letter off morons).

He later discovered telling such tall tales paid off big time in his ability to seduce young ladies in mass numbers.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Mormons

Though Mormons believe some of the silliest tall tales in all religion, their actions are unusually reasonable:

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Mormons

What a co-incidence! When a Mormon hears the voice of god, it tells them to screw multiple fourteen year olds. They can’t tell their own lusts apart from the creator of the universe. What a magnificent work of self-deception!

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Mortal Enemies

Atheists are so incensed at Christian foul play, that they bend over backwards to treat them fairly. We forget they are our mortal enemies, hell bent on destroying the planet. If Christians cannot be stopped, it is game over for everyone.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Moses in the Desert

Christians would have us believe that Moses took over a million people into a desert a mere 225.31 km (140 miles) across, and managed to get lost in there for 40 years. (That is a 3-day ride by horse.) Further he managed to find food for everyone and their animals. Further, they left not a speck of garbage, pottery, bones or even dried poop behind. Further, the Egyptians had no record of Moses, the Israelite slaves or their exodus. Exodus is just another tall tale the Christians try to fob off as true.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

The Most Common Moral Dilemma

The most common moral dilemma is facing some large calamity like a famine, hurricane or flood. You tend to be paralysed, knowing whatever you do will be just a drop in the bucket compared with what is needed, and knowing that most people will do nothing. What you have to do is think what contribution can reasonably be expected of you, and do your bit. The solution of the entire catastrophe is not your problem. The fact that most people are deadbeats is not your problem. Your contribution will be very important to a small number of people, independent of what anyone else does.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

The Most Dangerous Delusion

A man never behaves worse than when he thinks he is a god or when he thinks a god is personally directing him.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

The Most Evil and Obnoxious

Christians are the most evil, obnoxious people on the planet and are blissfully aware of how revolting they are to anyone but themselves.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

The Most Successful Con

At its core, religion is a con. It gets started when someone tells a lie in order to gain power over others, to get them to do what he wants, to get them to give him gifts. The particular nature of the lie has been refined over thousands of years. So the question is, why are so many vulnerable to this particularly potent form of con? Why are they so gullible? Another related question, is why is this con so effective?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Mostly Atheists

Even atheists tend to presume nearly everyone is a Christian, but if you check out almost anyone with a famous intellect, even people living two hundred years ago, you find they were all atheists.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Mother T.’s Stolen Million

Mother Theresa refused to return $1,250,000 in stolen funds that Charles Keating gave her. Christopher Hitchens detailed her many crimes in The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Motive for Madness

Why would anyone believe the utter nonsense required of Christians? They are in terror of death and torture after death and the professional Christians, with a straight face, promise to get them out of life without actually dying.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Motive For Preaching Thrift

Churches like to preach avoiding debt. This is a Good Thing™, however, the motive for doing this is to ensure the congregation have some money left over to tithe to the church.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Mourning A Trip To Heaven

Something does not quite add up. If I heard a friend of mine had won the lottery and had retired to a villa in Italy I would be happy for them, even if I thought I would never get to visit. I would not go into formal mourning. Yet when the loved ones of Christians die, it is a sombre occasion, a time of formal mourning. Christians must not really believe their own stories they tell to everyone else.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Movie Miracles are all Fake

Every miracle you saw in the movies was faked.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Movie Prayer

In the movies, prayer always works; in reality it works no better than doing nothing.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

The Murder

In the early 70s, I met a Greek Orthodox monk. He told me a story which I think was based on Anton Chekhov’s The Murder. It goes roughly like this:

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.

However, you can also err on the side of insufficient fanaticism. People allow militaries to build up arsenals of nuclear weapons that do nothing to protect and everything to threaten life on earth. They allow corporations to poison the water and soil. They allow industry to pump quantities of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere sufficient to cause enough climate change to kill billions of people. They stand idly by while their country starts resource wars against tiny countries that did not attack or pose a threat. They permit lending institutions to cheat, lie and financially destroy people. They allow religious fanatics to impose their insane views on others, such as cutting the genitals of boys and girls with unsanitary implements. Even small numbers of fanatics have the energy to get their way if you don’t block them.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Murderous Faith Healers

By tricking people into avoiding medical treatment for serious medical conditions, faith healers kill. Oddly, they are not prosecuted for either fraud or murder.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Muslim Heaven Questions

Well-behaved Muslim men are claimed to be assigned 72 virgins after they die. I gather they no longer see their wives. I would think many men would prefer to stick with their wives. Presumably these virgins did not live on earth, but were manufactured as needed. They sound as unappealing as an army of sex robots. Most 80 year-old men have long lost any interest in sex. What use would all these virgins be? I presume then part of the deal is your body and sex drive are super-rejuvenated. But what happens to well-behaved Muslim women? Do they get any partners? Are the partners manufactured as needed?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

My Crazy Neighbour

What if I told you my neighbour hears voices who command him to do odd things and he obeys? What if I told you my neighbour talks to dead people and claims they do his bidding? What if I told you my neighbour practices symbolic ritual cannibalism? What if I told you that my neighbour trusts in magic rituals to protect him from accidents and to find parking spaces? What if I told you my neighbour leaves notes under the door inviting me to join him in his rituals? Would you consider him as a baby sitter? What if I told you he did all these things because he was a Christian?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

My Purpose

My purpose in life is attempting to persuade the public and politicians to change their behaviour to create a saner, more sustainable and fairer world. I chose this purpose for myself. I am very glad I did not have to accept some incomprehensible purpose thrust on me by the Christian church. Years ago I asked the universe what the purpose of life was. The universe responded, with suitably impressive auditory effects, There isn’t one, a priori. You get to choose one for yourself. Don’t look so glum. It is much better than having one shoved down your throat..

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

My Religious History

I have always been atheist.

My mother detested Christians. She condemned their holier-than-thou attitudes and hypocrisy. She was especially contemptuous of Christians who believed in the virgin birth. Obviously, Mary lied. The virgin birth story was beyond ridiculous.

My Dad was an atheist and a rational engineer but whenever I asked questions about religion, he was careful to present both the atheist and religious case. As a child, he had been forced to attend a dreary Anglican church every day.

My mom wanted me to start school a year early, so she foolishly enrolled me in a Christian private school. I remember the daily bible readings which I treated as an adventure story. When Jesus was killed, we boys were shocked. The hero never dies. We all bawled our eyes out. Oddly, I don’t recall having any trouble at all with the King James English.

When I was eight, I applied to join the YMCA. My father wrote on the form that I was Anglican, a word I had never heard before. He said he was lying because the YMCA might reject kids without a religion. I was shocked and disappointed that my Dad was so cowardly.

As a teen, my Mom told me to stay away from Christians. Of course, I rebelled by sneaking into churches to interview people. I developed increasing contempt for Christians because none of them could define god or explain why they believed he existed.

When I was 21, I came out publicly as gay and lead a gay lib group called G*A*T*E (Gay Alliance Toward Equality). Christians attacked me with a vengeance with 3,200 death threats and 380,000 non-lethal threats. Christians publicly and shamelessly told the most outrageous lies about me. Christians were so hateful and irrational I decided that all religion had to go.

In the 1990s, I read both the bible and the Qur’an cover to cover. I was shocked at how crazy and poorly written they were. Apparently, believers were unaware of what crap their holy books contained.

I have written a number of essays countering religion on my website. I have also written hundreds of quotations, each covering a small religious issue. In my old age, I spend a lot of time on YouTube watching religious videos and making comments on them.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

My Religious Survey

When I was a teenager I was very curious why people believed in god and what they thought god was. I used to sneak out to churches (my mom wanted me to avoid Christians whom she said were crazy and insufferable) to interview people to try to find out. Nobody had any clue why! Their notions of god were extremely fuzzy. I don’t think they had ever thought about these questions. I think what happens is people are indoctrinated as toddlers. Whether it makes any sense or not, they just absorb it without question, like fear of spiders or rules about playing in streets. It never occurs to question. The fear of roasting alive keeps them away from abandoning the nonsense later in life.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Mysterious Ways

Christians, off the top of their heads, can tell me anything about god I might like to know. In addition they have access to a personal store of information that god told them personally via a voice in their head. But ask them a difficult question, one they cannot answer with BS they made up on the spot, and they try to fob me off with god has mysterious ways.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

The Mystery of Death

After death experience is hard to study. Everything we think we know is based on the experiences of people who were still alive at the time.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Mythical Moses

Popular culture treats the myth of Moses and his flight across the desert as a historical fact. Yet despite centuries of intensive archaeology not so much as a single shard of pottery been found to substantiate the story or even the existence of Moses.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Mythology

When I was very young, my parents gave me a copy of My Book House, The Bookhouse for Children by Olive Beaupré Miller. It came in a set of twelve richly illustrated volumes. Each volume was coloured a different shade of green or blue to colour code the age level it was intended for. It contained the stories and myths from many different cultures of the world. In particular, I became very familiar with Greek and Norse mythology. When I later encountered Christian mythology, it seemed of inferior quality. Its stories were lame and not convincing as true. Most Christians never become familiar with any other mythology, so have no idea how Christianity stacks up.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Nagging Clubs

Imagine if children set up nagging clubs to teach other kids tricks on how to nag their parents into submission to give them gifts and treats. That is what adult Christians do, only it is even more childish and more silly because:

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Narcissistic Personality Disorder

The character Yahweh in the Old Testament has a classic narcissistic personality disorder:

Such people are quite rare in real life. Donald Trump is one, perhaps explaining his popularity among ignorant Christians.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

National Geographic Christian Lies

My blood boils when even an august body like the National Geographic twists science to validate Christian superstition. In their Scientific Adam documentary on tracing mutations on the Y chromosome back in time, they suggested the scientific findings vindicated the story in Genesis. Yet even their own documentary showed the common male ancestor lived 40,000 years ago, not the 4,000 years claimed by genesis. Further, this common male ancestor was far from the first human, just the first whose descendants prevailed to the present day. To cap it off, the documentary whitewashed the racism and genocide of the old testament to claim its essential message was that all men are cousins.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

National Geographic Pandering

About half the science presented on TV is no more advanced than you would find in a medieval village. Even the National Geographic channel panders superstitious crap as science that they know appeals to their ignorant audience.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Natural Abortion

60-80% of fertilized eggs fail to implant and then another 15-20% of the fertilized eggs that do implant spontaneously abort. That gives us a 16-34% survival rate for fertilized eggs. A religiously minded person might say god condemns 66-84% of all babies to death in the time between conception and the start of pregnancy. Give his happens more often than not, calling for the public hanging of doctors who encourage this process, seems a bit overblown.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Natural Born Creators

Where do squirrels come from? — mother squirrels. Where do geraniums come from? — geranium seeds. Where to people come from? — mother humans. I would have expected that ancient, humans on noticing this pattern of creators, to presume the universe came from a mother universe not on something completely different from a universe.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Natural Morality

When Adam’s son Cain murdered Abel, he lied to god to cover up the crime. If he had no idea killing was wrong, why would he lie? The point is, knowing that murder is wrong is inherent in all human societies. They do not need an engraved tablet to inform them. There is no need to enforce obsolete 3000-year old notions of morality on modern societies.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Nature of the Big Bang

Despite its whimsical name, the big bang was not an explosion. Space itself expanded rapidly and smoothly. In the beginning there were not even any atoms to explode. It is still going on, ever faster. We can’t feel it because it is so universal and smooth. All those National Geographic fireball CGI (Computer Graphics Imaging) special effects have mislead generations of children.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

The Nature of A Creator

Even you accept the Christian there must be a creator argument, that creator was not necessarily Yahweh. It could have even been Poseidon or a blob of electrons.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

The Nature of God

God is vain, petty, jealous a control freak, just like a human. Man created god, not the reverse. A true god would be a god of the universe not just one insignificant species.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Nature Is Indifferent to Human Morality

Nature is utterly indifferent to human notions of morality.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

The Nature of Truth

The truth is tough. The more it is challenged, tested and debated, the more it shines as obviously indeed the truth. It requires no lies or dishonest debating tactics to defend it. Christianity is quite different. It is fragile. It hides from honest debate. Christians resort to lies and debating trickery to defend it. They know it is untrue, but for some strange reason imagine it would be a good thing if others trusted it as true. Christian parents isolate their children to protect this delicate tissue of lies because they know it is fragile and will shatter like a dandelion as soon as it is tested.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Nature’s Disinterest

Everything we have discovered about nature shows it to have no personal interest in us at all. But people imagine the spiritual realm is totally concerned with us. That strikes me as absurdly conceited.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Naziism Lite

You would hardly encourage Naziism lite. So why do people encourage moderate Christians given how evil fundamentalist Christianity is.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Nazis Demanding Respect

Christians demand respect for their religious beliefs. That is absurd. It would be immoral to pretend to respect those who make false statements and to honour bigotry. It is not that different from Nazis demanding respect despite their sins.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

NDEs (Near Death Experiences)

People who experience NDEs imagine they are proof of the afterlife and of god. Consider however, that:

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

NDEs

I was once having surgery to have an impacted wisdom tooth removed. The surgeon used general anaesthetic. I learned later, I partly woke up. I thrashed about. It took four people to strap me down, re-sedate me, and continue the operation.

The way I experienced this, I was in extreme pain, endlessly falling. I thought to myself, this feels like hell. Who would have imagined the Christians were right. This experience is no more evidence hell exists than dreaming of man in a red devil suit. I would not call this a death experience or a near death experience. I was far from death. It was just a dream that built my tooth pain into the plot. NDEs are just dreams, that build in low oxygen levels and high nitrous oxide levels into the plot.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Near Death Experience

When is a person most likely to hallucinate? When is a person’s brain is undergoing so much trauma, that it is unlikely to be functioning normally — when it is undergoing a near death experience. Wishful thinking makes people mistake hallucinations for objective reality.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Necessary Evidence

If Christians had evidence to support their religion, they would be shouting it from the rooftops. At least the Muslims can prove Mohammed existed. The Buddhists have a DNA sample. But Christians don’t have any evidence, so they try to make a virtue of believing without any evidence, which they call faith. The catch is, if you don’t require evidence, you can convince yourself of anything e.g. that your house is infested with tiny invisible house hippos, that there is an alien spaceship buried in your back yard…

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Needing God

It is sick delusion to think you need Yahweh. Yahweh never does anything good or bad for anyone. Life with Yahweh is identical whether he exists or not. He is like having a dead stuffed dog as a companion or a boyfriend who never visits. He might as well not even exist.

It is so pathetic when Christians claim he loves them to pieces, as evidenced by the fact there are carrots in the supermarket, as if Yahweh had a thing to do with putting them there. The carrots are there because lots of people busted their asses to put them there. If they did not do the work, there would be no carrots at all. Yahweh had no part in it.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Negative Effects of Church Attendance

Christians who attend church are more likely be fanatical, certain and dogmatic about their beliefs. It seems then, to reduce the worst aspects of Christianity, we need to find ways to discourage church attendance. One way is to force church-going Christians to pay taxes on their communal property and taxes on their contribution to the upkeep of that property just like everyone else, or equivalently give everyone else (religious and secular) the same deduction churches get for communally held property. Another way would be to picket the churches. Some people out of fear of confrontation or a knee jerk reaction to picket lines, will avoid crossing even the smallest and non-threatening picket line.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Never a Straight Answer

Politicians, Christians and used car salesman have a similar way of speaking. They will never give you a straight answer. They divert with an octopus-squirt of word-salad.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

New Calendar

Christianity has such a bad reputation and on general secular principles, it improper to impose its Gregorian calendar on the world. I think we should replace it with a sectarian calendar. Days in the year would be numbered 0 to 364 or 365 in leap years. Months would be numbered 0 to 11 and would consist of 30 days each. The last 5 days of the year would be for a special short month. There would be no rent or credit cards payments due. It would be used for celebration. Each year would start on Sunday. Days of the week would be numbers 0 to 6. When to start numbering the years? perhaps the big bang, the formation of earth, the founding of some global economic union. There would be no DST (Daylight Saving Time). There would be no hours, minutes or seconds, just fractional days. You could do most calendrical calculations in your head and they would be trivially easy to program on computer. Days would be displayed as YYYYYY-DDD.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

New Laws

People living 4000 years ago made up their list of laws and rules of thumb and sold them to their fellows by claiming Yahweh would hurt them if they did not comply. What to replace them with? Some new made up laws and rules of thumb, but ones better in tune with modern life and group consensus. mathematical laws.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

A New Religion

If I decided like Joseph Smith, L. Ron Hubbard or Leviticus to make up my own religion, it would need some sins. Here are a suggested starter set:

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

New Science vs Old Science

There is a big conflict between science and religion, or more precisely between current science and the 2000 year old science that got embedded into Christianity.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

A New Spiritualism

I hear people moaning that the west lost its spiritual core. The youth are disaffected. What we need in a new spiritualism. If find that idiotic. The problem is so many people running around with religious delusions that make them behave in crazy ways. Just replacing the delusions will not improve anything. It would be like a town with the young addicted to meth. The mayor’s solution is to hand out free LSD.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

New Testament Variations

Today we have uncovered 5,600 copies of the New Testament in the original Greek, all slightly different. The translators of the King James version had only 8 copies to work with and poorer quality copies at that being copies of copies of copies.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Newton

Newton is considered the greatest scientist of all time. However, he found god. He never made another discovery. It destroyed his brain.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Nigeria: Con Center of Earth

Nigeria is both the most religious nation on earth and the center of the world’s biggest email fraud. I doubt that is a coincidence. Christianity is one of earth’s most polished con games.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Nigerian 914 Religion

I wonder if the Nigerian 914 scam will ever evolve to the status of a religion too.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

The Night Sky

Christians stare out at the night sky and think of god. I can’t think of anything more irrelevant. The bible teaches the world is flat covered with a giant metal bowl called the firmament. Above that is super-clear water. The firmament has holes which form the stars. The sun and moon are glued to the firmament. It is all complete nonsense.

The bible has not the first concept of a star, a planet, a galaxy, a black hole, quasars, supernovas, magnetars, comets, asteroids, orbits, the rotation of the earth, the revolution of the earth around the earth, how eclipses work, how tides work… All the awe and wonder you know about the night sky came from science. Give credit where it is due.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Niqab

The niqab is a garment worn by some Muslim women to cover the face. It is intended to hide the face from all males. A burqa covers the eyes as well. These are a problem for Canadians:

The government could take six approaches.

  1. Give Muslim women exemption from dozens of ID-requiring laws. We would then improperly give Muslims special privilege that no one else gets. This would be a major security leak.
  2. Throw out all ID-requiring laws. Let anyone who wants to keep their face covered, even males. This is what the civil liberties people seem to be pushing. I don’t think they have thought this through.
  3. This a huge fuss over only about 15 niqab-wearing women. Make them reveal their faces, perhaps in private only to a female official. Many would consider this an unfair intrusion on Muslim religious rights. In theory Christians indulge in human sacrifice, but no one would grant them the religious freedom to do so. There are limits as to how far religious freedoms can be allowed to inconvenience everyone else.
  4. Temporary tattoo. The woman goes to the nearest motor vehicle branch where she verifies her ID to a female official. She gets a temporary unique tattoo on her hand. She can then go to the airport or any other place that requires ID and show her tattoo instead of showing her face. Ideally you need a scanner to verify the bar code. This would hardly ever be used.
  5. The Muslim countries of the world surely deal effectively with this problem. Let’s ask them how they handle it.
  6. Employ technology that could check ID even through a niqab. This would be extremely expensive when you consider how many places ID is checked. Presumably, it would be extremely accurate even for non Muslims. Religious fanatics would likely reject it too as too intrusive.
~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Niqab

Why do people get so emotional about the niqab? Why should anyone else’s fashions be your concern? I can think of two reasons:

  1. The person wearing the niqab can study you, but you can see nothing. They are as anonymous as bank robbers. It creates a deliberate inequality. It is as though they are looking down at you, laughing at you behind the mask.
  2. The presumed reason for the niqab is to prevent raising lustful or rapacious feelings. Accusing me of that is insulting.
~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

No Accounting for God’s Taste

According to Christians, god likes things just the way they are. He planned it this way. Since he is omnipotent, he could have had it any way he wanted, but he chose this way. I can think of dozens of ordinary people who I would trust to come up with a better plan. Is god incompetent, cruel or crazy?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

No Chance For Succour

A little girl whose father is abusive still goes to him when she needs protection, even when there is no chance he will provide succour. This is heartbreaking to behold. I feel the same way when I encounter Christians beseeching the sadistic sky god for help with their desperate situations. Because he does not exist he is guaranteed to disappoint. Nothing will happen that would not have happened naturally. People are deflected from effective action with pointless sacrifices that wasted precious resources. I wish I could wring the necks of those who deceived those poor gullible people.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

No Checking

Science is simple if you believe a god created the earth to perfectly delight his pet humans. All you have to do is figure out how you would like science to work and presto you know how it does, without even checking.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

No Christian Pilots Please

The idea of Christian or Muslim piloting the plane I am in is disconcerting. When the going gets rough these loons freeze and start praying instead of doing something useful.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

No Common Ground

The reason believers can have such violent conflicts that lead to murder is there are no facts on which to agree. Everything they assert is made up.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

No Evidence for Souls

Christians get very defensive when you point out there is no evidence for a soul. It is invisible, weightless and undetectable. It was postulated so there could be something to resurrect after your body dies and rotted. Its sole point is to support the Christian wishful thinking that they will live forever. When you tell Christians that they don’t actually have a soul, they take it you are accusing them of cruelty, lack of compassion, lack of tender emotions, lack of any moral sense and even of not being conscious. They insist, without evidence, that these faculties reside in the soul, rather than the brain as science has discovered. Confronting that souls are imaginary, like ether and phlogiston, alarms them because it means abandoning the fantasy of eternal after-death bliss.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

No Excuse To Behave Badly

Other people behaving badly is no excuse for me to behave badly.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

No Fundamentalist Nobel Prize Winners

It is no accident that fundamentalist Muslims, Christians and Jews have contributed so little, as measured by the number of Nobel prize winners. They are so busy lying to themselves about their religious myths they have no time left over to explore the truth.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

No God Here

How do we know God is not acting in the universe? The universe runs by natural laws. In the last 200 years we have had good instruments to watch the universe doing its thing. We never once saw physical laws violated — not a single instance of divine intervention. Christians, over the centuries have lied and claimed such interventions are common as dirt, but no evidence. There were some fortunate events, but they did not violate natural law. There was no god tweaking anything. Wishful thinking seduced Christians into lying.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

No Meaning Without God

When a Christian says My life would have no meaning without god, I think of drug addicts who say My life would have no meaning without meth.. Neither have tried a reality-based life.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

No Profit in Retaining Obsolete Parts of the Old Testament

What profit is there in retaining the insane verses of the Old Testament, particularly Leviticus? They only lead the feeble minded to commit murder.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

No Purpose is a Good Thing™

Christians panic at the discovery the universe appears to have no a priori purpose ordained by god. Yet this is a wonderful thing because everyone is then free to choose his own life purpose.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

No Respect

Religious people demand that I respect their beliefs. Absolutely not! I have no respect for false promises, empty threats or earnest lies.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

No Shame

If you are an atheist, you are promoting rationality. That is nothing to hide.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

No Sign of God

If god existed, I would have bumped into him by now.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

No Staring

If you don’t want people staring at you, don’t wear strange clothing.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

No Such Thing as Good Religion

Good religion is a contradiction in terms. It is like talking about truthful lies, ethical cons or profound nonsense.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

No Taboos

If you were to come over to my place for coffee, there is no topic I would consider forbidden. I find baseball boring, but certainly not taboo. That is because I am an atheist.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Noah Math

Christians claim Noah squeezed two of each of 8.7 million species into an ark and kept them alive for over a month. Think about a stadium, considerably bigger than Noah’s ark. Consider BC Place Stadium in Vancouver BC. You can pack about 60,000 fans into it for a concert. Noah’s ark reputedly held 290 times as many creatures as BC Place stadium. For a ballpark estimate, think about how much space 17.4 million humans take up. That is like two complete New York City fulls. Something has to give:

The whole story is so silly. Debunking Noah is like debunking the story of Paul Bunyan and his blue ox Babe, the Easter Bunny or Santa Claus. It is incredible that anyone could take this children’s story seriously.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Noah the Movie

Russell Crowe’s blockbuster movie Noah about the biblical fairy tale has hit heavy opposition. The Muslims are horrified that a prophet would be depicted and have banned it. Fundamentalist Christians consider the movie too dark. I find that an odd objection to a story about drowning nearly all life on earth including the plants and animals. I object to using Hollywood special effects to make plausible a ridiculous story, but censorship is not the correct response.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Noah’s Ark

The actual translation is Noah’s basket. It is these same word used to describe Moses’ reed basket. It was not a boat, but a big box, the same is the other flood myths from which the Noah story was copied.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Noah’s Famine

When the animals of the ark disembarked, what was there to eat after the flood had buried all the vegetation in salt water without light?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Noah’s Tall Tale

Biblical apologists look for massive prehistoric floods as the source of the Noah story. However, no matter how big a flood they find, they won’t find one that buried all the mountains of the earth, that was created with 40 days of rain. They won’t find any evidence for all the species of earth being reduced to two individuals from each species. And there is no way those individuals could all fit into a wooden boat along with food, water etc. It is a tall tale about some nasty local flood.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Nobody Approves of Anyone Else’s Religion

I have never heard anybody say anything good about somebody else’s religion, except for Buddhism. It is not even a proper religion. It does not even demand you pretend to believe any preposterous things.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Nobody Really Believes in Faith

If a billionaire attempted to cure his terminally-ill son by donating $500 to a faith-healing church, most Americans would consider him insane. Yet those same people when asked whether tithing in general would curry god’s favour, would answer yes.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

NOMA (Nonoverlapping Magisteria)

NOMA is Stephen Jay Gould’s dishonest lawyerly, cowardly trick to avoid controversy.

When a student asks Is there a god, he has little interest in the odds of Zeus existing or of the existence of some vague disembodied quantum organising force. He wants to know what science has to say about the stories his mother taught him.

The answer is, the evidence is overwhelming that those stories are mere myths. They are just teaching stories. They could not possibly be literally true. To answer otherwise is to lie. For the most part, it is not the core sciences saying this, (other than debunking Noah and Genesis), but archaeology.

It would be ridiculous to say, You should believe me because I am the eminent scientist, Dr. Richard Dawkins. Argument from authority is how the religious argue. Instead you say, I looked at the evidence and to me it was no contest. Have a look for yourself at the hard evidence. Here is a reading list.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Nominal Monotheism

The Catholics claim to be a monotheistic religion, yet Catholics pray to more different beings than the Hindus, namely Yahweh, the holy ghost, Jesus and the 810 saints.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Non Interference

One thing that distinguishes Christians is they reject the moral principle that you should not interfere in a situation when nobody involved wants you to.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Non-Believer Stats

Reporting non-believers are 1/5 of US adults.
In terms of actual beliefs and actions, the actual fraction is 1/4.
1/3 of age 18-29 are non believers.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70) Atheism For Dummies

Non-Evidence

Even if some people refrain from some wicked acts because of fear of eternal punishment does not make it any more likely that a punishing god complete with a hell actually exists, much less one as ridiculous as the god Yahweh.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Non-Religious Support

The Digital Nun said that most of the requests for prayer on their Internet Catholic prayer line come from people who are desperate, who cannot cope. They are seeking reassurance. People should be able to get such support without selling their souls to some religion.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Non-Stop Prayer

Monastics claim the ideal is continuous non-stop prayer. Have any of these people ever been in the presence of a child who constantly made requests for special favours?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Not Just Infidelity

Christians imagine that infidelity is the only important cause of divorce. I suspect it is far more likely a husband’s refusal to talk about the events of the day, or the wife’s packrat habit, or the husband refusing to pick up his own socks off the floor. Couples make no secret about what is really bothering them, and it is usually something so trivial their partner does not take the complaint seriously. I have seen couples easily overlook infidelity when the rest of the relationship is working well.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Not Just Wrong, Crooked

I don’t just say Christianity is incorrect, I say that it is a con, whose goals are to trick people out of their money and hand over their children to paedophiles. They are polished criminals.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Not Knowing

Christian: Doesn’t it bother you not to know the answers to all of life’s deep questions?
Atheist: Of course it does. That is why we have science to find out the true answers to those questions. I would far sooner not know than pretend to know the way you do.
~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Nothing is Absurd to Children

Pay attention to the misconceptions of small children. For example, my younger sister thought we lived on the inside of sphere. She thought that when you want to get married, you go to an auditorium. If you see a candidate, you chase them. If you don’t like someone chasing you, you run away. Christian children are taught that walking on water unquestionably happened. Children don’t yet have a built-in notion of what is absurd. They have what parents say, school, books, TV, movies all shaping their ideas of what is possible. So when in adulthood, an atheist and Christian start debating with each other, they both have totally different notions of what is absurd and what is possible. The other seems completely nuts.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Nurturing the After-Death Lies

This myth of life after death is kept alive by movies, stories and TV. It is just collective wishful thinking, people who wasted their lives and long for a second chance.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Nya, Nya, You Can’t Prove God Does Not Exist

Josh Wheaton, Christian evangelist
Josh Wheaton, Christian evangelist

This is a childish attempt to shirk responsibility for the burden of proof. Those who claim the Loch Ness monster is real must produce some evidence. It is not up to everyone else to prove her non-existence.

Josh, no one can prove invisible pink unicorns do not exist either, but you don’t assume they exist without evidence. Why do you treat deities differently? However, I can easily prove the creator of the universe had nothing to do with composing the bible. The bible is a forgery, a counterfeit. That completely pulls the rug out from under Christianity. You cannot trust the bible. It is just an ordinary book written by men. It is not an inerrant tome composed by the creator of the universe.

Also Josh, consider that things that do exist like whales, people have no problem coming up with evidence for their existence. It is only things that do not exist, like invisible pink unicorns and deities that present a problem.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Obeying Disembodies Voices

When Christians are polled, most of them claim they would kill their son, like Abraham, if they heard a voice in their head commanding them to. I find this quite disturbing. Presumably they would also accept a voice in the head as legitimate excuse for any murder, without requiring an insanity defence. I hope most merely think this is the socially acceptable answer, not what they would actually do. I would hope most people would consult a psychiatrist. I contend Christians are delusional and dangerous. We should find some way of treating them that balances their constitutional right to be crazy.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Object to BS, Religious or Otherwise

You ought to object to any religious utterance for the same reason you object to any other false claim. Religious speech should not be a protected class of humbug.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Objections to Yahweh

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Objective Morality

Christians like to claim biblical morality is objective morality. They claim it is built-in to the universe. It is the one special morality completely independent of man. However, if you study physics, there is no sign of a preferred moral code wired into the universe. Every religion makes such a claim. Will the real objective morality please stand up. There is nothing that singles out Christianity as any more plausible than any other religion.

The claim that biblical morality was composed by the creator of the universe implies the bible as a whole must have been composed by the creator. However, the bible is so full of error and inconsistency and it is so badly written that it is simply nowhere near the quality you would expect from the creator of the universe. In addition, the bible is flat out wrong on every pronouncement it makes about science and most of those about history. The bible was written by humans just like any other holy hook. Therefore the morality it describes is subjective, composed by humans, not in the least unique or special. You have to conclude, there is no such thing as objective morality.

The other problem is biblical morality is so absurd and barbaric, even the most fundamentalist Christians ignore 99% of it. It is a preposterous candidate for a universal objective morality.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Objective Morality

Christians often assert their superiority to non-Christians because only they have objective morality which I think is the same thing as biblical morality. Everyone else just has man-made relative morality which they claim is so inferior that all non-Christians rape, murder and steal at will with no restraint. They seem to think objective morality is an objective characteristic of the universe, burned into it like the speed of light. The other big advantage they claim for objective morality is a bogey man promises to torture people for eternity for ignoring any of its requirements. Claims by other religions for their own bogeymen are dismissed as void. It is so conceited and arrogant to dismiss the morality of every other religion and culture without knowing the first thing about them. Here are some problems with this attitude:

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Objective Morality

When Christians talk about objective morality, they are asserting that Yahweh’s opinion on morality is so important, that it is as if it existed in concrete form, like a law of nature. The idea that Christian morality is the same sort of animal as Newton’s laws of gravity strikes me as absurd. Even Christians ignore about 99% of god’s morality in the bible. Morality is about opinion and creating consensus about those opinions. Every culture has its own morality. It makes no sense to claim all morality comes from god when Christians assert only their morality comes about that way.

Biblical morality is so insane and so out of date, even the most fanatical Christians ignore it, while giving it lip service. e.g.

That’s not morality. That is obsessive-compulsive disorder. None of those commandments make any sense except avoiding shellfish in a world without refrigeration, but there is no need to kill anyone.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Objective Morality

Yahweh’s objective moral code is batshit crazy.

Biblical morality is so insane and so out of date, even the most fanatical Christians ignore it, while giving it lip service. e.g.

That’s not morality. That is obsessive-compulsive disorder. None of those commandments make any sense except avoiding shellfish in a world without refrigeration, but there is no need to kill anyone.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Obscene Names

You rarely see anyone with a surname of Shit, Crapper, Fuck… I suspect over coming centuries you will rarely see names like Church, Bishop, Pope, Saint, Parish, Priest, Parsons, Christian…

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Obscenity of Opulence

Catholics are well aware of the contrast between the grinding poverty of parishioners in the third world and the opulence of the Church. Catholics are well aware of how the church fosters and covers up systematic sexual child abuse. Nearly every Catholic as a child suffered emotional, physical or sexual abuse at the hands of the clergy. Yet Catholics still treat the institution with exaggerated reverence. What is going on? Stockholm syndrome? Feigned respect based on fear?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Obsession

If someone obsessed that after death a large black man with horns and a pitchfork would torture him eternally, you’d think he would seek professional help to talk him out of it, especially since there is no evidence it is true.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Obsolete Religion

Imagine you were a clergyman of a religion founded many centuries or even millennia ago. The founders were a rather conceited lot, and presumed their work was perfect and would never need any updating. They built-in to the religion that it could never change. You and your fellow clergymen notice the religion could use some updating:

What would you do?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Obsolete Thinking

3000 years ago, you might have ten children and feel lucky if even one of them made it to adulthood. Plagues, infectious diseases and accidents with livestock whittled away at the population. There were no antibiotics, surgery, dentistry or sanitation. People worried they would die out and urged each other to breed as fast as possible. Of course, today we have the opposite problem. The global population has grown many times larger than the earth can support. Unfortunately, crazy people have decided that obsolete 3000 year old thinking is what we need today. They breed like mad and torment those who do not want to and interfere with other people’s attempts at birth control. Why? Religious delusions. If there were not so many of them, they would be institutionalised.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Obviously Preposterous

The Hindu religion is blatantly obviously preposterous to Christians and the Christian religion is blatantly obvious preposterous to Hindus. Yet each is blind to the absurdity of their own religion.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Occupation for the Untalented

Even stupid people can prosper at preaching. When everything about what god wants you to do is made up anyway, any lie is as good as another. Further, the preacher can just make up god-based explanations of scientific and political questions of the day that appeal to their dim-witted flocks without any fear of ever being challenged.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

OCD

Consider the obsessive rituals of Christianity and Islam with washing (every motion specified) and praying. If you fart during the Islamic prayer sequence, you have start over. You only see this kind of behaviour elsewhere in OCD patients.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

The Odds

There are about 60,000 gods. At most one of them can be right. That means the odds of any given one of them is correct is pretty slim. That suggests it is most likely none of them are correct. Think of it this way. You learn that cars in general are so badly constructed, at most one of them could possibly be safe to drive. You would be crazy to put your faith in any car. You don’t even know there is even one safe car, much less how to pick it.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Odds of Survival

People do spontaneously heal from serious diseases, but making offerings to televangelists won’t change your odds one iota. The televangelists should be criminally prosecuted for fraud for suggesting they do.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Odds We Are Alone

There are at least a trillion other planets capable of sustaining life. Yet the religious persist in believing ours is the only one sustaining life. Compare that with the odds of winning a national lottery, 1 in 30 million — 33,000 times as probable. Why do they hold that view?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Offensive Christians

I find Christianity highly offensive and I firmly support the right of Christians to be offensive, especially in private or in places where I am not. I just wish Christians were not so conceited as to imagine others should curtail any activity that they find offensive, even in private or where Christians are not.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Official Bigotry In India

India is so backward that it is illegal not to specify a religion on a government form. None or atheist are not permitted options. Denying the existence of deities is illegal.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

The Old End-of-the-World Con

Harold Camping

That old scoundrel, Harold Camping (1921-07-19 2013-12-15 age:92) played the end-of-the-world con multiple times. Each time gullible twits quit their jobs and gave him all their goods, the day came and they were left with nothing. Why would anyone bet the farm on someone who had been wrong every time before? It is a very old con. Thousands fell for it in the year 1000 AD.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Old Pope

The best feature of Pope Joseph Alois Ratzinger is that he did not attain office until he was 78. If all goes well he will die soon. After he dies, perhaps they will make him the patron saint of paedophilic clergy.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

It turned out he abdicated, presumably to avoid prosecution for paedophilia.

Old vs New Miracles

Why are Christians so sure the miracles of the deep past were 100% genuine, but the miracles/magic of today is mostly fake?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Oldest City

The oldest city in the world is Damascus at 11,000 years. But Yahweh created the universe 6,000 years ago. What gives?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

The Oldest Con

Religion makes people docile. It makes them gullible. It makes them easy to exploit. It makes them easy to cheat. Yet most people still contend religion is a Good Thing™. Religion is the oldest and most successful con.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

The Olive Branch

According to genesis, all the olive trees on earth were drowned. So where did the dove’s olive branch come from? There is no way an olive grew into a tree in a few days. Noah did not take any plants into the ark, so how were all the plants eventually regenerated? All the fish would have been killed. The salt water fish would have died from too much fresh water and all the fresh water fish would have died of too much salt water. Genesis gives no explanation, especially great white sharks. It is all a tall tale.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

One Good Thing™

One Good Thing™ about religion is believers without special talents are sometimes convinced god has chosen them to do great things.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

One Screw = One Baby

When I was growing up, I was completely unaware of my parents’ sex life. I assumed they had sex once for each of my siblings and that was it. So why are Christians so worried about kids living in the homes of married same-sex couples? From the kid’s point of view, they have two moms or two dads, like the 50s sitcom My Three Sons. That is all there is to it.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

The One True Religion

Imagine you were a multibillionaire. You wanted to find the one true religion. You might hold a conference on some remote tropical island. You invite delegates, all-expenses paid, to come and make a case why their religion is the one true religion. Each would tell you their religion was perfectly true and everyone else was wrong, but nobody would be able to come up with any evidence at all to support the supernatural claims of their religion. You would discover they were all lying, slinging BS, pretending to know what they could not possibly know.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Only Books?

God reputedly, from time to time, writes books. Why no movies, CDs, live performances?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Only For Crazy Reasons

It is bizarre that we allow people to override usual dress codes, safety codes, receive special holidays, receive exemption from military service etc. purely on grounds of religious superstition. Yet, we will not accommodate the exact same requests made for rational non-religious reasons. We are promoting irrationality over rationality.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Only the Ignorant Need God to Explain Science

The people who insist that a god must exist to explain the mysteries of science typically know less about science than the average second grader.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Only One Religion

It is not even theoretically possible that more than one religion is correct. Even if one of those religions is correct, there are so many of them, you have only about a 1 in 60,000 chance of picking the right one. Further, it is certain that all religions are false because there is nothing about any of them to distinguish them as scientifically accurate. There is still a slim chance a god exists. It is just certain that no religion got the science of how his universe works correct.

So go ahead, believe in the microscopic odds of some god existing, but give up the absurd notion that your religion is infallible. It could not even get basic science right.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Only One True Ghost Story

If you think about it, the resurrection is just a hoary ghost story. Why do so many people believe it and discount all other ghosts, even ones they have seen themselves?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Only Resting

When director Tony Scott committed suicide to avoid the ravages of inoperable brain cancer, dozens of American celebrities denied he was actually dead, that he was only resting. They all said Rest in peace. Have none of these people seen the Norwegian blue parrot Monty Python sketch?
Mr. Praline: Never mind that, my lad. I wish to complain about this parrot what I purchased not half an hour ago from this very boutique.
Owner: Oh yes, the, uh, the Norwegian Blue… What’s,uh… What’s wrong with it?
Mr. Praline: I’ll tell you what’s wrong with it, my lad. ’E’s dead, that’s what’s wrong with it!
Owner: No, no, ’E’s uh,… he’s resting.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

The Only Unnatural Sex Act

The only truly unnatural sexual act is celibacy. It is unheard of in the animal kingdom. Priests practice it and have the cheek to pontificate that other peoples’ sex lives are unnatural.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Open Mindedness

If you have a mind so open that you let in ideas without evidence to support them, you are going to let in a lot of junk false ideas. Once you have accepted an idea, it tends to stick. You will automatically reject the truth on the matter when it is later presented to you.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Opium Dream

At the core of Christianity is an insane event. The creator of the universe allegedly turned into a man, had himself sacrificed, to impress himself, so that he would have an excuse to forgive the wrongdoings of mankind. This is a sadistic opium dream.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Opportunity of Now

Just as people living today might wish to have lived in the 1960s so they could have joined Martin Luther King in his fight for equal rights for blacks, people living a century from now might wish to live today so that they could join in the fight against religious superstition.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Opposing Con

Why does the Catholic church oppose gambling? They don’t like competition from another con competing for the mark’s dollar.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Opposing the Lightning Rod

When Benjamin Franklin invented the lightning rod, Christians opposed it on the grounds it was dangerous and immoral to thwart god from smiting the wicked with lightning bolts.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Opulence

The opulence of the church and the magnificence of the organ are design to make the audience forget how empty and futile the ceremonies and prayers are.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Ordinary Vampires

There are 10,000 people who identify as vampires in the USA. Some of them are so deluded that they imagine they actually are vampires and will live forever if they keep on drinking blood. I don’t find this surprising. Their beliefs are no more fantastical, silly or unsubstantiated than those espoused by the conventional religions.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Organ Donation

Don’t be an idiot. After you are dead, you don’t need your organs. Other people need them desperately. You can save eight lives by donating your organs. What gave you the idea you had the right to waste them and murder eight innocent people just because of your religious superstitions. You incredibly selfish royal asshole!

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Organ Donation

Refusing organ donation should require explicit opting out. It should be a matter ticking off a box on your drivers licence that you want your organs wasted. However, superstitious people have successfully lobbied to make it progressively more difficult to register. They have succeeded not only in wasting their own organs but in tricking others into wasting theirs. I talked to Christians who held the odd belief that Yahweh would need their rotted organs to recreate new ones in heaven, that he would be incapable of making new ones. I talked to others who were afraid of the pain. They imagined death is like being paralysed, but conscious, as your organs were harvested (as if being embalmed and buried in a box would be pleasant). People who refuse to donate are condemning others to death when we indulge their childish fears. This is insanity on a massive scale; it is a form of murder. It should not be socially acceptable or even legal.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Organ Donation

When someone dies and donates their organs, a panel of doctors has to decide the best place to use the organs. They look for a good genetic match, high probability of success, age of the recipient, desperateness of the victim…

People watching from the outside will feel cheated by the death panel if their candidate is not the one chosen and will imagine the panel conspired in some way to kill their friend.

The real problem is the shortage of donated organs. And whose fault is that? Christians! They have successfully lobbied to make it harder and harder to register for organ donation. Logically it should happen by default, opt-out, you are a presumed donator unless you selfishly and superstitiously request your organs be ritually wasted. Christians not only interfere with other Christians donating their organs, they work ceaselessly to block everyone from doing so. This is an indirect form of murder and you should let your local Christians know, in no uncertain terms, you don’t appreciate what they are doing.

The truly slimy thing about Christians, is they usually refuse to donate their organs, but eagerly demand organs from others.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Organ Donation

When you die, it is often possible to donate your organs to other people. Without these organs, the recipients will die. There is a desperate shortage of such organs.

The problem is many Christians object to organ donation for reasons that are not clear. They may imagine they will need the organs in heaven, or perhaps they fear the pain of having organs removed after death. It is not just that they refuse to donate their own organs, they work tirelessly from stopping anyone else from donating. I consider this tantamount to murder.

Imagine a man holding the heart of his recently dead son in a medical container. Standing before him is a man who says Please give me that heart. I need it for my son to live. The man with the heart responds No. I would sooner dash it on the ground and let it rot. I have no reason. I just don’t want to give it to you. That is classic dog-in-a-manger.

You would think Christians would want to curry favour with Yahweh by being generous with their organs, but they seem to think Yahweh would prefer them to waste their organs.

There are a number of different registration schemes. The better ones are near the bottom:

  1. If you want to donate, you must get a form, fill it and take it to the government. This is what Christians have successfully lobbied for in BC Canada. Otherwise, you are presumed to have requested your organs be destroyed.
  2. If you want to donate, you must tick a box on your drivers’ licence.
  3. If you don’t want to donate, you must tick a box on your drivers’ licence.
  4. If you don’t want to donate you must get a form and take it to the government. This is what Spain does. You might think the Spanish system was even better than the two box system. The catch is Christian medical providers subvert it by insisting on additional family approval. They refuse to consider that the default approval is binding.
  5. On your drivers’ licence or non-driver ID, you must tick one of two boxes. This what I consider the best scheme. You want to make sure your wishes are clear so doctors or family will have a harder time overriding them.

I think it is time to start publicly shaming people who order their organs destroyed rather that let others recycle them. Make them justify their dog-in-manger behaviour. I think we should fine the estate $5000 if they destroy organs.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Organ Transplant

Perhaps one of the most revolting things Christians do is work to prevent people from recycling their organs after death. I can understand them not wanting to share their own organs out of superstition or general squeamishness, but not blocking others. Have they not seen the joy in families whose child was rescued from certain death by an organ transplant? Why such a dog in a manger attitude? There is nothing else you can do with your organs after death. They will just rot if not recycled. What is this about? Some sort of denial of death and decomposition?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Origin of Church Tax Exemption

The original idea of subsidising churches by excusing them from taxes was that this was justified because they did good works the government would otherwise have to do such as:

The catch is modern televangelists collect millions of dollars, but do not provide any services back to the community. They masquerade as churches and thus avoid taxes. They are con men and leeches.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Origin of Gods

If one god created all the people, why are there so many different gods? It sounds much more likely people made up all the gods in ignorance of their true origin.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

The Origin of Hell

Almost everything Christians do is based on fear of hell. For example, a group of Christians won’t let their children watch YouTube videos out of fear of them being condemned to eternal hellfire. Because YouTube was recently invented, the parents could not very well have picked up this nutty idea from the bible. They got it from someone else telling it to them. But how did this person know the danger? Because he heard it from someone else, and so on. If you trace it back far enough, somebody just made it up, either maliciously or out of stupidity. Hell is a long-running urban legend.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Origin of Stars

According to Genesis, all the stars were created on the same day. But if we look through telescopes, we can see stars still being created. If we adjust for the speed of light, we can see stars being created over spans of billions of years.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Origin of the Universe

There are three types of hypothesis about where the universe came from:

  1. It was always here and always will be. This does the least violence to intuition, but it is incorrect.
  2. It sprang into being in a quantum fluctuation 13 billion years ago. This is what the evidence of many frequencies of radiation from space insists is the explanation.
  3. A god named Yahweh, who has always been here along with space, caused it to come into being from nothing, in 144 hours, 6000 years ago, contrary to all physical evidence. This explanation is a needlessly complicated and muddled version of the second. It is inspired by the conceit that nothing happens unless some person, god or demon wills it to. The idea started as the speculation of an iron-age desert tribe dweller who claimed he got it from supernatural sources. Strangely, the universe does not have a precise beginning.

When I was a child, I preferred (1), but now I think (2) is most probable perhaps with some wrinkles to come. I never gave any credence to (3).

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70) Quantum Leap: how matter behaves at the atomic level click to watch

Original Religion

Anthropologists are fairly certain they know what the religion of man was like when he left Africa. It was based on dancing and singing all night long. This created bonds and a natural high. It was not hierarchical.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Other Embryo Killers

Many pesticides and herbicides kill embryos. You’d think the rabidly anti-abortion folk would demand an end to the use of these chemicals, but they don’t. This is mandatory abortion on a mass scale.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Otherfication

Religion preaches otherfication. It lies that people of your religion are superior to others. Is lies that your nation is superior to others. It lies that your race is superior to others. It lies that other species are very different from you and have no purpose other than your pleasure. It teaches that the entire universe was created as a gift to you alone. Religion thus demands immoral self-centred behaviour. Science debunks these myths and naturally creates more moral behaviour motivated by informed empathy.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Otherwise Decent

Christians would be such decent people if Christianity had not addled their brains and given them an unwarranted superiority complex.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Outdated Con

Land of Cockaigne

Bruegel’s 1567 painting Land of Cockaigne shows the medieval concept of heaven, lying about in complete idleness and getting fat. Americans seem to have attained this version of heaven here on earth. Back then people’s lives of unremitting toil were usually cut short. The appeal of eternal life was strong. Today people routinely live into their 90s. By then, they have had quite enough living and are quite happy to have it over with. The appeal of harp playing and praising god for eternity, without sex or the usual earthly diversions, sounds excruciatingly boring. Christians are going to have to update their con.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Over His Head Answers

When a lazy person asks a question and discovers the answer is over his head, he decides the professor is a fool and prefers some simplistic and wrong explanation instead. When this happens to an intelligent person, they decide they need to do some background reading first to understand the answer.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Overbreeding

One of the most revolting things about religions in the way they pressure their flocks to have giant families. They do this to expand their base. The bigger the base, the bigger the take. They don’t care if these kids will grow up in poverty, with little attention from their parents. They don’t care if this stops the parents from accomplishing anything in their lives but daycare. They don’t care if they destroy the environment by pressing more people on it that it can sustain.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Overbreeding

Traditionally, people have had the right to have as many children as they wanted. However, humans are now overflowing the planet. Overpopulation is causing environmental collapse, famine, mass pollution, global warming… Technology now allows 60 year old spinsters to push out babies 8 at a pop, then dying and leaving them for others to raise. Religions still command their adherents to breed to the max. We simply can’t continue as we did.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Overcoming Fear of Death

If you are afraid of death, recall a time when you had general anesthesia. Recall how you simply disappeared. That is what death is like, except you don’t wake up. It is painless, not in the least scary, not that different from falling asleep.

If you are afraid of being dead, recall that you did not exist prior to your birth. Again, it was completely painless. There was no sensation of any kind. It will be just the same after you are dead. It will be disappointing that you won’t be able to accomplish anything more. You won’t be able to have any more experiences. You won’t be able to play with your friends, family and pets. But that is merely sad, not scary. Think of it as like the welcome end of a long roller-coaster ride.

The people who have the most fear of death are those who got caught up in the Christian scam that extorts money out of people with threats of eternal hellfire. Try reading my website to understand how you can tell Christianity is a con game, not to be taken seriously. Nothing happens when you die. It is not a disappointment because you have no consciousness to use to be disappointed. Stay away from Christians and funeral homes. They earn their money by scaring you.

If you are afraid of dying read up on NDEs. They are quite pleasant. Have you ever visited a recently dead relative? They will be smiling. As you die, N₂O (nitrous oxide, laughing gas) builds up in your blood. It is quite euphoric.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Overreaching

Any assertion of the form god exists is really an assertion of the form the god X exists and he behaves according to scripture Y and there are no other gods People who make this assertion are so arrogant they just assume you agree with them on X, so it need not be specified.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Overwhelmed by Suffering

If someone is overwhelmed with their own suffering, you can hardly expect them to place much importance on the suffering of others.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Overwrought Christian Music

What is most disgusting about Christian music is not the kitschy sentimentality, but the overwrought emotion used to sell a lie.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Oxymoron

Religious truths is an oxymoron.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Oxymoron: Faith-Based Education

Faith-based education is a contradiction in terms. Northern Ireland is clear argument against it. Each side is taught a different lie that sets them at each others’ throats for a lifetime.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Paedophile Pact

The Italian government and the Vatican have a treaty called a concordat that cannot be dissolved without the permission of both parties. It excuses the church from reporting priests who molest children.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Paedophile Priests

The #1 perk the Catholic church has for recruiting priests is sexual access to young children, and immunity from prosecution. The church cannot give it up or they would have no priests. Only paedophiles are willing to vow no sex with adults.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Paid to Lie

Everyone in court but the lawyers have to swear to tell the truth. Lawyers are paid to mislead, lie to and trick the jury into condemning and innocent man or setting a guilty one free. Only the most callous of people could withstand the inherent guilt of such a profession. Being a clergyman is similar. Part of the job description is feigning certainty when there is no grounds for certainty. Part of the job is milking the congregation by threatening and bribing them with an after-death bogeyman. Clergymen are like parents controlling their gullible children with promises of Santa bounty, except that they never deliver.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Pakistan

In Pakistan, because of religious and cultural custom, according to the BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation), girls are forced to marry before their 14th birthday. Parents do this despite the protestations of the girls because it is the right thing to do and because they love their daughters. Daughters older than 14 are considered old maids and unlikely to attract suitors. Parents want to fob off financial responsibility.

Rejected suitors often retaliate by throwing acid in the girl’s face. These girls usually bear a child within a year. Because they are so young and malnourished, they develop fistulas and become incontinent and unable to have intercourse. Because of the smell they are banished to cattle barns. Their husbands then abandon them. Despite this, tradition triumphs. What a revolting country!

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Pakistan Astonishment

Pakistani Railways Minister Ghulam Ahmad Bilour offered $100,000 of his own money for the heads of those who made a film that insulted the prophet Mohammed. He said he knew what he was doing was illegal but he had to stop blasphemy. The last person I would expect to indulge in vigilanteism would be a cabinet minister. The Prime Minister of Pakistan distanced himself from Bilour by stating this illegal act was not official government policy. However, to my astonishment, he did not expel Bilour from cabinet or hand him over for prosecution. I think the USA should withhold aid to Pakistan until Bilour withdraws the offer, is removed from cabinet and extradited. The way I see it, he is guilty of treason. He is usurping the power of lawmaker, judge, jury and executioner.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70) source

The Parable of the Young Christian

There was a young Christian bully named Jerry who used to threaten the other boys at his school that if they did not give him their lunch money, a spaceship would come, abduct take them and throw them into the sun. The sons of atheists answered him with a horse laugh. The sons of Christians fretted, But what if he is right?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Paranoid by Design

Our nervous system is paranoid. It would far sooner mistake a squirrel for a tiger than vice versa. It thus tends to overvalue the preposterous claims of eternal torment.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Parasites

You have probably heard of a mouse parasite that makes mice lose their fear of cats. The mouse gets eaten and the parasite infects the cat. Similarly there is a parasite that infects an ant which causes it to climb up a leaf stalk and wait there until a cow eats it. The parasite is taking over the brain, and making the host neglect its own welfare for the benefit of the parasite. This often happens in humans as well. A religion infects the brain and hijacks the motivational structure. The host may stop reproducing and devote all its efforts to spreading the religion. The religions con those who do this into thinking that was a very wise and noble choice.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Parasitic Christians

In New York City, the religious right’s lawyers fought a costly battle of attrition against the department of education and eventually forced them to set up 100 free-rent churches in school buildings. What parasites!

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Pardoning Belief

Believing in a deity is pardonable until you have learned enough science to find out how the world actually works.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Pardoning Yahweh

Christians excuse the god Yahweh for sadistic behaviour on the grounds he owns humans as slaves and therefore can do whatever he wants with them. We don’t allow people to do whatever they want to dogs just for their sadistic amusement. Ownership is no excuse for mistreatment. One might argue it is pointless to defy a deity because they are all-powerful, but that should not extend to pretending the deity’s behaviour is perfect. In practice, defying deities is quite safe. People who do so experience no larger share of sorrows. In fact, Christians defy tens of thousands of deities without the least anxiety.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Parental Dependence

I find it astounding that Christians publicly announce that they deeply grave a surrogate, artificial parent, an abusive parent. They want this so badly, they are willing to make up an invisible one and pretend it protects them. I would think they would be ashamed to admit to being so childish.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Parental Power of Child’s Religion

Children should have some legal recourse to stop parents from forcing a religion down their throat. It should be treated as a form of abuse. On the other hand, I think parents should have the right to veto a child’s choice of religion to keep them from getting involved with something like Scientology or the Heaven’s Gate Cult.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Part of the Con

When an aficionado of religion looks down his nose at me as his moral inferior, is he just putting me on, or is this just part of the con?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Partial God

If there existed an entity that had some but not all of the properties attributed to Yahweh, would he count as a god? What if he lacked omniscience, omnipotence, compassion, invariance, eternality, prescience, an interest in human affairs, response to prayer, invisibility, a hobby of creating universes, a delight in animal sacrifices, maintains an accurate database of living and dead sparrows… Surely such a being is even more probable than one with the full complement of godly properties.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Pascal’s Wager

The first argument a Christian will bring up to defend his belief in god is Pascal’s Wager This is the clue that logic has nothing to with his belief. It is fear. Christians were traumatised as children, taught to be terrified of an uncaring, cruel, vindictive, god whom they must pretend to love, or face being burned eternally.

They are victims of child abuse. No amount of logic will talk them out of it. They are like children terrified of monsters under the bed. A child may be 90% sure there is no monster under the bed, but just in case… Like children, Christians need reassurance they will be safe. They are victims of brainwashing at a very early age. The techniques to cure them of their delusions need to be similar to those you would use to reassure children.

Traumatising children that way should be a criminal offence.

If the logic of Pascal’s wager appeals to you, you should select the religion with the worst hell — namely Islam.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Pascal’s Wager

If you spend any time with proselytising Christians, sooner or later they will try the Pascal’s Wager pitch. Basically they suggest you pretend to believe in Christianity and pretend love the god Yahweh so that their nasty god won’t torture you after you are dead. Granted the odds are very slim the god Yahweh exists, but the penalty for ignoring the threat, if it is real, is very large. What do I take from this?

Why Pascal’s wager is not valid click to watch ~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Passing As Christian

Only cowardly wimps try to pass as Christian.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Past Experience

We know what to expect if the religious right comes to power in the USA. We have hundreds of years of European experience with the dark ages.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Pat Robertson

Pat Robertson announced the world would end in 1983. Further, he said that God had told him this personally. Even after proving himself an utter crackpot, his followers still send him millions of dollars each you to enact his fruitcake schemes. Harold Camping pulled the same scam over and over and over. Christians seem utterly incapable of recognising a scam.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Pat Robertson

People like Pat Robertson who imagine that plagues, hurricanes, floods, droughts, volcanos and earthquakes are caused by invisible spirits angry with the aggregate behaviour of the citizenry, are simply retarded. They should drool to warn others what nitwits they are.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Pathological Liars

Pathological liars believe their own lies. They can believe mutually contradictory things by temporarily ignoring some of their beliefs. Religious people are able to function both in the make-believe world of religion and in the real world of offices and computers. They have the essential skills of superliars.

Pathological Liars click to watch
~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Pathological Liars

Science has found that pathological liars have more white matter and less grey matter in their brains than normal people. They are able to hold many contradictory facts in their heads at once without dissonance. They believe their own lies. The lack of grey matter means reasoning is impaired. Remind you of anyone? Christians have no problem believing hundreds of mutually contradictory things. They lie outrageously to defend their faith, but don’t notice they are lying. They believe their own lies.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Pathological Passivity

All of this is for the good is a Jewish saying meaning that you should passively accept all that happens both good and bad. It is one thing not to needlessly upset yourself when terrible things happen, but that is not the same thing as refusing to defend yourself against horrible events just because you imagine Yahweh is directing them at you. Recall how colonists were opposed to Ben Franklin’s lightning rods, since they allowed people to escape Yahweh’s wrath.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Patron Saint Of paedophiles

Paul Jean Paul II is being fast tracked to sainthood. I guess they need a patron saint of paedophiles.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Patron Saint Of Poachers

St. Patrick was made a saint because he allegedly got rid of all the snakes in Ireland. The pagans there venerated them because they were so helpful keeping down the rodents that ate their crops. That is why he got rid of them, as a sort of ecological warfare, fueled by a Christian phobia of snakes. So St. Patrick is the patron saint of species extinction, vandals and poachers.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Patron Saint Of Republicans

St. Boniface had ancient holy oaks felled in the 8th century as way of smiting pagans who revered them. You might say he is the patron saint of Republicans and other anti-environmentalists.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain

The writers of the bible, knowing full well Yahweh did not exist, threatened readers. They commanded them never to check if Yahweh actually exists, or as they put it you must not tempt god.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Pedestrian Safety

Even Christians teach their children to look both ways before crossing the street, even though the bible promises all they need is a short prayer.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Pedophiles

Catholics complain bitterly when non-Catholics rage at them for enabling pedophile and child-raping priests. They claim the molesting of Catholic children is an internal matter and we should all mind our own business. They look on the protest as picking on Catholics. They fail to notice the general outrage when any organisation enables pedophiles, not just the Catholic church. They forget this is a criminal matter. Catholics are not exempt from criminal law.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Peeping Tom

If you seriously believed there were a pervert with X-Ray vision watching you at all times from a cloud, it would be very hard to have sex, masturbate or defecate without inhibition. It would be even worse than being in jail. Filling a child’s head with such crazy nonsense should be a federal crime.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Peer Fear

One of the reasons people pretend to believe in god is they rightfully fear ostracism from their religion-based social circle. JWs will even permanently shun immediate family members if they lose confidence is the faith.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

The Peggy Lee Arguments for God

Christians are the ultimate wishful thinkers. They consider self-deception virtuous and necessary to get through the day. They talk to themselves like this:

There has to be something more to life that what I have experienced so far. Life is empty and meaningless. Life would be so bleak if I did not talk myself into believing I will get to screw 777 virgins (or whatever turns their crank) when I die. Peggy Lee sang That’s all there is?How depressing! Who cares what is most probably true according to science? Science is cold and unfeeling and cruel. What’s this obsession with truth you atheists have, anyway? What matters is how what you believe makes you feel! What’s so wrong with a little optimism?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Pegida Orphans

Kim Fry inadvertently got caught up in a racist Pegida rally. She was horrified at the hate speech and wanted to charge them. She is going to have a tough slog fighting hate speech. The problem is the precedent. The churches have been urging the beating, torture and a killing of gay people for centuries. Nobody has been able to even get them to tone it down much less prosecute them. We have a long-standing precedent that egging on murder is perfectly OK that racists can hide behind.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

People Don’t Like To Be Lied To

Religious people often wonder why non-believers are so eager to debunk their magical claims. If somebody claimed that trees could be grown from pebbles without seeds and peddled magic tree pebbles, they too would find people angry with them. People don’t like to be lied to even when the lies are transparent.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Perks for Ministers

Tax exemptions that ministers get in the USA are unbelievably sweet:

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Perks For Priests

The church has a major problem finding priests who will work for very low wages. Traditionally it has recruited them by offering a perk — free access to abuse children. The church provides children, provides a way to coerce children (threat of death, hell, God-retribution), coverup and new pastures if things get too hot. The priest gets camouflage, an excuse for no adult sexual relations and respectability. The Catholic church is the biggest paedophile ring in the world. It cannot reform because it has no other way to recruit celibate priests.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Persecuting Bastards

To this day, Christians cling to a cruel medieval custom. If the parents of a child fail to perform the Christian rite of marriage, the church labels the child a bastard and punishes it, for its entire life, through no fault of its own.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Persuading Christians

I have tried hundreds of logical arguments to persuade Christians that they are deluded. So far, I have been completely unsuccessful. Perhaps what’s needed are emotional, irrational, nonsensical arguments, since that is what they throw back at me.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Persuasion

If you try to talk a Christian out of their delusions, this will inevitably happen. The Christian will espouse some article of faith. You give 10 air-tight reasons why that could not possibly be true. They don’t debate your reasons. They simply repeat their belief as though they had not heard a word you said.

What is going on? I think it is similar to trying to talk someone out of a fear of a harmless species of spider. The fear is so powerful, it totally overrides any logic. They simply cannot take the chance. Further, from their point of view, there is no benefit to dropping a pointless fear, and a big one to keeping a fear of a possibly harmless spider.

The indoctrination of children focuses on the fear of god and the threat of eternal fire. This brainwashing gets far more emphasis than avoiding wild animals, playing with matches, drinking cleaning supplies, avoiding strangers, avoiding cliffs, playing in the street… No wonder it is so hard to dislodge.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Persuasive Bullies

If you have never been bullied, you probably still understand the fear of being surrounded by a threatening gang. What is even more important is the pervasiveness. It never stops. Bullies are like a swarm of mosquitoes.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Pestilent Mohels

Jews traditionally have a rabbi called a mohel circumcise male infants in a ceremony called a bris. The procedure is unsanitary. The mohel uses a knife to remove the foreskin then puts the infant’s penis in his mouth and ritually sucks blood from the wound. The mouth and saliva are highly septic. Two mohels in New York city with herpes, who have already infected eleven infants and killed two, are insisting on continuing to perform the ceremony in the traditional unsanitary way. I object on five grounds:

  1. I don’t care how long-standing a tradition, no one has the right to deliberately infect an 8-day old baby with herpes and kill him.
  2. I don’t care how long-standing a tradition, no one has the right to perform an operation on a baby in septic conditions.
  3. I don’t care how long-standing a tradition, no one has the right to perform an operation on a baby without anaesthesia.
  4. I don’t care how long-standing a tradition, no one has the right to perform an operation on a baby without surgical training. And they certainly should not be drinking wine! Mohels, who lack medical training, often bungle the procedure, accidentally removing or deforming the penis. If you look at photographs of it being done in a hospital, it becomes clear that it is more complicated than it looks.
  5. Circumcision is painful and impairs sexual sensitivity for a lifetime. No one has the right to perform this operation without consent. It is not the parent’s decision, but the child’s. The decision should be postponed at least until bar mitzvah. The tradition already makes alternate provision for this.

At the very least, mohels should modify the ritual to make it sanitary and to refrain from performing it if they are infected with diseases harmful to infants.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Peter Pan Cult

Christianity could be described as a Peter Pan cult of children who adamantly refused to let go of their imaginary friends when they grew up.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Peter Popoff

Con man/preacher/psychic/faith healer Peter Popoff has announced a new con. You send him $100 and your financial troubles will be miraculously healed. He does not offer counseling or ever a pamphlet. If this guy did not use the smokescreen of preacher, he would be off to jail. Church’s primary activity seems to be providing immunity for a wide selection of criminals including con men and child rapists.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Peter Popoff, Murderer

Some district attorney should nail Peter Popoff on murder or attempted murder. That bastard talks old ladies into discarding all their medication, including absolutely necessary medication e.g. their insulin, claiming he successfully interceded with the god Yahweh to completely heal them, without doing any tests of any sort to see if his crazy claims were true.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Phony Ark Finds

Christians drive me crazy with their claims to have found the ark when all they found was an old piece of wood, or John the Baptist’s bones when all they found was an ossuary with the word John on it. By those standards of evidence, they could claim to have found Jimmy Hoffa using as incontrovertible evidence the skeleton of a dog named James.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Phony Certainty

Church leaders affect certainty and hope the congregation do not double check with anyone else.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Phony Faith

Christians will sometimes express their opposition to clear cutting old growth forests, or allowing tankers to spill oil by saying It’s not about money. It is a spiritual thing. It is about faith. But this is not so. Their faith teaches that all plants and animals have no inherent right to exist. They are chattels of man. Their sole function is to serve man’s purposes. Their faith teaches that the god Yahweh will soon destroy the earth, so there is no need to preserve biodiversity. Historically, Christians have destroyed large trees, considering them anti-Christian. This concern for the environment is a welcome breath of sanity, but it does not spring from Christianity.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Phony Faith

Faith can be used to justify any BS, including cons, including mutually contradictory assertions. In other words, it is absolutely useless for determining truth.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Phony Reassurance

I would think a Christian would feel a complete fraud every time they reassured others by praying for them, when they know darn well not a single one of their prayers ever made a stick of difference.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Pick Your After-Death Myth

One of the most commonly used tools a religion uses to gain converts and to control them is the after-death myth. Which one of these myths appeals to you most?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Picking the Right God

There are 60,000 gods. Nobody sits down and considers each one. I have sat through a sales pitch from perhaps 50 religions. It was pretty much accident which sales pitches I saw. I saw just a minute fraction of the possibilities. If the real god is in the set of gods for whom I was not exposed to a pitch, (or read no sales literature) is that my fault? Surely not.

I examined considerably more pitches than average. Let’s say I rejected 48 of the 50 as just too silly to consider further. If the real god is in the set I rejected, is that my fault? I would say the fault was the ineptitude of the presenter or the abominable quality of the sales materials.

I could perhaps excuse Yahweh filtering people for the heaven stream if they had a special talent for detecting genuine religious propaganda (presumably a necessary talent for employment in heaven). But why torture those not so discerning? Why not just kill them, the way a tropical fish breeder kills fish not up to snuff? Christianity and Islam strangely consider the failure to guess the correct religion as the ultimate wickedness.

Imagine you were the executor of a billionaire’s estate in the 1920s. 60,000 young ladies came forth all claiming to be his long lost daughter. They all had absurd tales to back their claims, but not a stick of evidence. Nearly all of them must be lying. Given that the billionaire was discreetly gay, you might be tempted to assume all these young ladies were lying.

This is how I feel looking at the field of 60,000 gods. I know at most one of them can be telling the truth. All of them appear to be bullshitters. None of them stand out as any different from the rest. The Christians and Muslims think I deserve eternal punishment because I can’t see that their religions look any truer than any of the others. I say Fuck all the religions! Their deities are sadistic crazy monsters. I would not worship them even if they were real.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Picking the Right Religion

If you seriously think there is a god, how do you hedge your bets? How do you know which religion’s story about god is closest to the truth? One way is to look for what is common to most religions and focus on that. Trust that this must be the most important stuff, or that you will be forgiven for assuming so.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Pitching Christianity

The reason a TV evangelist sells Christianity is the same reason Billy Mays pitches OxiClean. It is an easy way to make a lot of money. Most evangelists don’t even have to ship any product.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Pitiless Pixies

Fearing an odious old man hiding in the clouds is as potty as being afraid of pitiless pixies hiding in your cornflakes.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

A Place To Call Our Moan

A church is one of the few places where it is socially acceptable to moan Ain’t it awful and feel sorry for yourself.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Plagiarised Moses

Half a dozen religions that predate Moses share the same story about a prophet going up onto a mountain and god giving him the law on some tablets. But what is really amusing is they all have names very similar to Moses. The story is blatant plagiarism. No wonder there is no trace of the historical Moses or any of his deeds!

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70) The Unbearable Truth click to watch

Poetry of Science

Archaeopteris Christians complain that scientists have no poetry. Consider the illustration on the right. It is the first tree on earth — Archaeopteryx. Even looking at that illustration, I feel far more awe than I ever felt in a church or looking at a fanciful painting of the Genesis apple tree.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Pointless Attributing

Debating the attributes of a god is as pointless as debating the attributes of unicorns, fairies or angels. You need to get a good look at one before you can pontificate on its nature.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Pointless Creation

According to Matthew, the majority of people roast eternally in hell. Yahweh is allegedly omniscient. He knows before you are born if he will condemn you to eternal torment. Why bother creating hell-bound people? They would be much better off never born. This is just sadism.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Pointless Theology

Arguing theology is as pointless as debating whether unicorns are dappled.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

The Poisonous Lie

One problem with the Christian lie that you will be reunited with your loved ones in heaven, is that you give up too easily fighting a serious disease. An atheist knows this life is all we have got.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Polite and Crazy

Sometimes Christians are polite. That does mean they are any more right.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Political Clout

There are more atheists in the USA than there are Catholics. The atheists don’t believe in a god, but possibly to avoid discrimination, don’t necessarily call themselves atheists. Oddly, Catholics have the political clout to bully atheists telling them sex education, birth control, early abortion, euthanasia all should be illegal, but molesting children is a holy sacrament. Atheists need to get politically organised to push back at the Catholics and restore the constitution. They also need to push back at the fundamentalist war on science.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Polls

In the USA they take polls to measure who believes in the theory of evolution and who does not. Science is not a matter of belief. What they are really measuring is who has some basic understanding of the theory of evolution and who has not the first clue.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Polytheism

Christian snobbery presumes that monotheism is preferable to, and more advanced than polytheism. Monotheists have the embarrassing problem one god must produce both good and evil. He is thus mentally ill with a split personality.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Polytheism More Plausible

Every argument for a deity is an even better argument for polytheism. With polytheism, you don’t have the problem of single schizophrenic (but perfect) god responsible for both all good and all evil.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Pompous Ignorance

Christians think if they have not heard of something, it can’t possibly exist. Christians think if they don’t understand something, it must be wrong. These lazy bums imagine that science should be easily accessible to them without study.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Popping Into Existence

Christians like to argue that the universe could not come into existence from nothing without a cause. They offer as an alternative a more complicated theory, that a supernatural god through magical unknown means created it. However, Christians refuse to acknowledge that their theory has the exact same problem. God had no cause and no creator. What makes the whole argument so bloody silly is quantum mechanics has for over 100 years has shown us that particles pop in and out of existence, all the time, without cause. Further, when the universe was born, it was smaller than an atom, subject to quantum fluctuation.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Pornography as Virtue

Pornography teaches a virtue and a skill increasingly important as you age, namely enjoying the pleasure of others. Pinched, pleasure-hating Christians have given it an overly bad rap.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Positive Thinking

Positive Thinking has tremendous appeal to the foolish. They desperately want it to be so. It promises an effortless way to bring good luck. The catch is, it does not work at all. It is a complete waste of time. It tricks you into avoiding doing something that will actually work to bring benefits.

Don’t confuse positive thinking with avoiding despair. Instead of despair, it is better to take some real-world action to improve your lot.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Post-holocaust Believers

Even after the holocaust, there are still Jews who believe in protection by the grace of the god Yahweh. The extent of human self deception is beyond astounding.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Postponing Sainthood

If pope Jean Paul is canonised, then irrefutable evidence comes to light that he was the head of the planet’s biggest paedophile ring, the Catholic church will wish they had waited.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Potential Humans

The Christian opposition to stem cell research is based on the idea that a single cell embryo is a potential human. That makes as much sense as considering sperm sacred. They too are potential humans. Both have a slim chance to grow into a human if implanted in a uterus. Surely using excess embryos for research is better than keeping them frozen for years then discarding them — the current practice. This is not an ethical problem; it is problem of religious superstition.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Poverty

The most effective technique we know to eliminate poverty is female equality. Women can control their reproductive cycles. They can take a variety of jobs. Unfortunately, the Catholic church is dead set against female equality. They will not even allow female priests or cardinals.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

The Power Of Belief

Believing that people meet their dead loved ones after they die does not make it one iota more likely to be true. Try believing with all your heart that oranges have purple skins. Then go to the supermarket to see the effect.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Power of The Big Lie

If you have ever run a group or club that meets regularly, you know it is like pulling teeth to get people to bring cookies once in a while or chip in a few bucks for the coffee. I have to marvel at how the leader of even the smallest religious congregations talks the flock into providing him a house, clothing, enough to live on, a dedicated meeting hall with gold ornaments, stain glass, organ, polished, hand-carved wood… It is a testament to the power of the big lie.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Power Of Blackmail

When a priest hears the confessions of hundreds of people, he becomes the best informed man in the vicinity. He also has the power of implied blackmail and the power to use and strategically leak what he has learned.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Power of Religion

Religion makes certain enough to murder for the silliest of ideas.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

The Practical Argument Against Christianity

If you believe Christianity, and it is wrong, you have wasted the only life you have. There is no urgency to life. You thought your life was just the beginning of eternity. You goofed off. Christians rarely do a thing to help the environment. They are deadbeats.

Atheists know life is limited. Every day matters. Every interaction matters. Every drop of love matters. Atheists appreciate life because it is limited.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Practical Assassination Question

When John Kennedy, Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy were assassinated, Christians beat their breasts begging their god to explain why he did this. The rest of us pondered the much more practical question — what motivated the human assassins?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Practical Definition for Atheist

An atheist is someone who is very sure there is no god.
A deist is someone who is very sure there is a particular god and this god does not interfere in any way with the running of the universe.
A theist is someone who is very sure there is a particular god and this god tweaks the running of the universe and answers prayer.
A gnostic is someone who believes it is possible to know things about god and mysticism.
An agnostic is someone who believes it is not possible to know things about god and mysticism.
So strangely you could be an agnostic theist, or an agnostic atheist.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Praise Yahweh For Genocide

I find it odd that Christians most praise the god Yahweh on the occasion of a mass murder. You’d think they would be gently reminding Yahweh to look sharp.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Prayer = No Action

As soon as someone starts talking about praying, they are telling you they plan to take no action and are counseling you to give up too.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Prayer = Sloth

Like a child nagging her mom for candy, a Christian pesters their imaginary parent for special favours. Instead of doing something useful to bring about the desired result, they sit on their butts and mutter to themselves. How on earth did prayer get a reputation as a virtuous activity? It is sloth personified.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Prayer Is A Bad Habit

Prayer is a bad habit to get into. You might do it in an emergency when immediate action is called for.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Prayer is Bogus

Intercessory prayer does not work, period. It has been proven not to work over and over in experiment after experiment. It is just wishful thinking that it works. It is just a social convention, like saying How do you do? Pretending that is does work is lying, if not a criminal. You are trying to bamboozle people for some unconscious motive. The usual motive is to trick people into donating money. Perhaps you think the lie is just a white lie is similar to lying to children about Santa Claus.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Prayer Cannot Even Make Tea

Prayer is so ridiculous. I can’t even make a cup of tea by wheedling verbally with the universe. What on earth could delude me into thinking people could be healed by me muttering a few words?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Prayer Con

By ignoring all failed prayers, Christians take false credit for anything good that happens.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Prayer Corrupts

Prayer corrupts. For example it makes North Americans think they must be unusually worthy to live so high on the hog and that starving African children must be unspeakably wicked to deserve their fates. It has nothing to do with god or prayer or worthiness and everything to do with economic imperialism.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Prayer Negatives

Here are a few of the reasons I disapprove of prayer:

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Prayer is Procrastination

Praying to the god Yahweh is as pointless as praying to the Great Pumpkin. People know it, but they still do it because it makes them think they have actually done something useful. It is a procrastination device.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Prayer As Symptom of Mental Illness

Christian twits think that I prayed for it to be sunny tomorrow and it was. as evidence for the effectiveness of prayer. This person is mentally ill, with delusions of grandeur. He thinks he personally persuaded god to change the weather not just for him, but for millions of other people. My how important he must be! Prayer is masturbation fantasy for Walter Mittys.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Prayer is a Vice

I contend prayer is a vice. It is a holy excuse for procrastination and worse — giving up and doing nothing at all.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Praying

Praying in an emergency is both useless and dangerous. It distracts you from the activities necessary to save your life and the life of others. Oddly, radio and TV command everyone to pray in the event of a natural disaster.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Praying Cap

To a Mennonite woman, the most important religious duty is to keep a cap on at all times. This is a praying cap. She does not want to accidentally pray or think about praying without it least she offend god. To a Muslim woman, her most important religious duty is to wear an uncomfortable head and body-covering garment called a hijab. Why focus on the obviously inconsequential? It displays piety at a glance to others. It does not require discipline like treating one’s family kindly.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Praying to Satan

When Republicans pray for death or accident to befall their political opponents, just whom are they praying to?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Praying to Shitala

Shitala is the goddess of smallpox. To this day Indians pray and give offerings of fruit to her. The belief that the most effective way to prevent disease was prayer stopped people from looking for practical causes like rats and fleas or feces in the drinking water. There is no evidence that prayer has any effect. People do it out of wishful thinking and laziness. It is much easier than taking effective action.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Preacher = Dishonest Stage Magician

Preachers are like magicians. They love fooling people in return for money. They get really mad when someone publicly reveals the tricks of the trade.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Preachers are Crooks

A preacher hates an atheist for the same reason a con man hates an auditor.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Preachers Know they are Phony

Preachers create the magic of Christianity. What magician does not know his tricks are an illusion?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

The Preaching Atheist

Bobby Allison bills himself as the Preaching Atheist. He spent 30 years as a fundamentalist and fundamentalist preacher then decided it was all a crock. He gives short weekly sermons on YouTube. Superficially they sound like fundamentalist rants, but they are designed to wean people away from Christianity. He rattles the inerrantists by quoting obscure sections of the bible that tell people to do the exact opposite of what they are doing or want to do. He taunts them saying have no right to call themselves Christian when they so flagrantly ignore the bible. Each sermon is like a theatrical event. He has his tongue firmly in cheek. Sometimes it is hard to tell if he is chastising Christians to become better Christians or to abandon Christianity altogether. He has an astounding mastery of the bible. It is almost as if he has the whole thing memorised.

Bobby Allison’s YouTube page click to watch
~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Predestination

If Yahweh actually has accurate foreknowledge, then what happens in the future is predestined. That means we have no free will. Christians cannot have both a deity with accurate foreknowledge and free will. They are mutually contradictory. But then, logical inconsistency never slowed down a Christian.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Predicting Mayhem

If someone said to you, 30 years from now on September 10 at 11:06 in the morning, I am going to have a temper tantrum and kill ¼ of the population of this town, wouldn’t you think he was stark raving bonkers? This is roughly what Christians claim their god said in Revelation.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Prediction

I suspect that by 2115 if we have not offed ourselves with nuclear war, climate change or ecological collapse, we will have wiped out the major diseases: Campybacteriosis, Cholera, Christianity, Depression, Ebola, Flu, HIV, Hinduism, Islam, Leprosy, Lyme Disease, Malaria, Salmonella, Schizophrenia and TB (Terabytes).

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Preferring Easy Methods That Do Not Work

People would sooner take a pill, write affirmations about gaining health and beauty, or pray than go the gym or go on a diet. It doesn’t matter that these methods don’t work. They are easy and you can always find people who will take your money and promise you they do work.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Preferring Truth; Preferring Lies

If you had a very serious disease, would you want your doctor to accurately tell you your odds, or lie to you and give you hope? If you would prefer hope, you will also likely prefer the lies of religion. It is a matter of values. Which is more important to you, truth or feeling good?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Prejudice Against Reason

The constitutions of the United States and Canada provide freedom of religion. This protects actions motivated by superstition and irrationality, but not actions motivated by reason. For example a person may refuse military service because they assert the sky god will cause hurricanes, but they can’t refuse on the grounds the other side did nothing to justify invading them.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Preposterous Yahweh

Christians sometimes claim they can’t comprehend how anyone would not believe in Yahweh. Yahweh is as idiotic as anything in a Looney Tunes cartoon. It is really hard for me to believe people are serious when they claim he is real. They must have some ulterior motive for claiming something so preposterous is real. Do Christians get a toaster for every new tither they sucker in? To someone who claims to love Yahweh, have you ever read the bible? Yahweh is an asshole, a bigger asshole than Hitler. And you claim you love and worship this shithead? Do you also like getting peed on by men in black leather? It is masochistic to enjoy being tormented by cruel people or imaginary gods. It is not normal.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Preserving Life

If someone is drowning, should you jump into try to save them? It depends on whether you can save more people’s lives by jumping in or by staying out. Christians look at it differently. They think you should jump in even if it almost certainly means you will both die. This is because they imagine you will both go to heaven, so your deaths will be heroic or romantic rather than tragic.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Presumed Nature of a Creator

Even if you believed there were a creator, why would you think it was man in a white robe, who had a fascination with promoting Jews, whose favourite activity was torturing people, who was a peeping Tom. That is so bizarre. Why would the creator necessarily have a body? Why would it not be some kind of force field? or celestial body, or massive black hole? Why would it even have opinions on the social interactions of one particular species in one particular planet. Why was it not equally interested in dolphin morality? Christians have so many assumptions they never acknowledge. Why is Christianity’s description allegedly more accurate than any of the other 60,000 religions. Why did the creator waste so much of the universe making nearly all of it hostile to life if humans are so all fired important to it?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Presuming the Conclusion

I had to laugh at NPR ’s supposedly objective look at death. They phrased the question as What happens when you leave this world? They had already decided there was a personal consciousness after you die and that it leaves planet earth.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Pretence

The key characteristic of the Christian church is pretence. They are like a whore who puts on airs of being a virgin.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Pretending

If you lived under a horrible dictator like Kim Jong Un, Genghis Khan, Hitler… you would pretty well have to pretend to love him and kiss his ass just to survive. Presumably this is what is happening with those who believe Yahweh is real. He is more sadistic and capricious than any dictator that has ever walked the earth. Surely, Christians must secretly hate him with the most intense passion. They try to gain converts to curry favour believing they are betraying their friends.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Pretending To be God-Directed

Whenever I see some ignorant boob bragging that god directs his every move, but this advice is still not sufficient to get him a job, an apartment or a girl friend, I can’t help but think this guy is suffering from delusions of grandeur.

I have managed to talk to the CEOs (Chief Executive Officers) of perhaps half a dozen major corporations in my entire life. They are certainly are not on tap. It seems preposterous that the creator of the universe would take time out to personally guide my every move helping me decide whom I should put the make on. Surely, even if god existed, the best I could hope for its to talk to is one of his agents.

God never gives anyone a cure for cancer or the winning lottery ticket number. That voice in the boob’s head has no knowledge beyond what the person himself has. He is talking to himself. How could anyone mistake that no-nothing imaginary voice in his head for god? Gullible twits hear the word thou and instantly flatter themselves into thinking they are in the presence of the creator of the universe. They are so pathetic, so contemptible.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Pretending To Be A Superhero

When I was a little boy, my grandmother made me a red cape so I could run about her farm pretending to Superman. What I was doing is not that different from what adult Christians do, fantasising they will live forever in health and beauty. Christian have their superhero too, a guy who can raise the dead, walk on water, control the weather and take torture without batting an eye. These mythical heroes grow out of our desire for special powers like super strength and the ability to fly.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Pretending to be Useful

When Christians can’t think of anything practical to do, or don’t want to help, they pray, then pretend to themselves they have fulfilled their moral obligations.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Pretending To Believe

Why do you persist in pretending to believe your Christian religion when long ago you decided it was a crock?

Even if you have not the courage to come out of the closest, at least refrain from sacrificing your kids to this false belief system.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Pretending to Bless

The thing I miss being an atheist is the ability to bless things. It would be nice, by just a positive thought, to help some plant, animal or person thrive. But then again, Christians can’t bless either; they just pretend to.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Pretending Christians Are Sane

It is quite astounding that believers and atheists get along as well as they do. It is a bit like an accommodation between inmates of an insane asylum and the townspeople where the townspeople agree to let the loonies proclaim their ideas as equally valid to those of Einstein and Darwin on the local radio station.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Pretending To Have Supernatural Powers

Since time immemorial people have pretended they had supernatural powers if they spoke in ceremonious tones and wore special garments. A priest leading a congregation to protect soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan from bullets is just as silly.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Pretending to Know

People who pretend to know something they don’t really tick me off. There is no shame in not knowing. There is making up plausible lies. Oddly, Christians consider claiming to know something they don’t a virtue. They call it faith.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Pretending to Know

When Christians do not know, at least in general terms, it bothers them. So they fill in the holes with stuff they just made up and pretend it is known truth. I bet there is some Christian somewhere who knows what God’s favourite piece of human-composed music is and what pattern of flatware he uses.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Pretending To Love God

Christians seem to think they are obligated to pretend to love their god, no matter how badly he behaves. It is like humouring Genghis Khan.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Pretending to Love God

In 1961 there was an episode of the Twilight Zone called The Good Life about a monstrous six year old boy called Anthony with god-like powers. The townspeople were terrified of him and pretended to love him and approve of all his freakishly evil deeds. It struck me this was a great metaphor for Christians and their pretended love for the out-of-control vicious bastard the god Yahweh.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Pretending Not To Notice

Even though Yahweh confesses to multiple counts of irrational mass murder, his followers pretend not to notice.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Pretending to Pray

To me, praying is even sillier that plugging my ears with bubble gum and thus trying to bend the laws of causality. It is preposterously grandiose, attempting to influence an imaginary creator of the universe with mental wheedling, as if I would know better that he how things should be, even if he existed. It is so flipping arrogant, nattering at a deity babbling ceaselessly petty instructions on what he should do, as if he had nothing better to than listen to your kvetching. The closest thing to praying I have done is run across my grandma’s lawn when I was four years old wearing a superman cape, jumping, hoping to take off in flight. Even then I knew it was just pretend.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Pretending To Stupidity

Christians fear atheists. They find atheist logic irrefutable, but at the same time they know it is wicked to abandon the faith. So the Christians presume they lack the logical skill to see through the atheists’ logic, even for the simplest arguments. They presume the atheists are instruments of the devil or at least of evil. As a last ditch, they claim logic itself is invalid. As Christians come to realise they have nothing at all to support their faith, they feel a sense of panic.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Pretending Twaddle Is Science

There is nothing noble about pretending someone’s religious twaddle is equally valid as reality-based truth. It is just cowardice. Stop lying. You can still be polite.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Preventing Christianity

The best cure for Christianity is prevention.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Preying on the Weak

Lions look for weak or injured antelope to attack. Christians are similar. They look for people who have suffered an illness or psychological trauma to pounce. In that state, people tend to feel what they were doing was not working, so are open to alternatives. They will foolishly follow anyone who appears confident and optimistic.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Pride in Disability

People with deafness or attention deficit disorder are often proud of their disabilities, and often don’t want them corrected, or want to ensure that large numbers of babies continue to be born with them. They are much like Christians with their impaired reasoning ability and many delusions. At some point I think I will be reasonable to at least temporarily cure these people so they will know what they are missing. They will be too big a drain and danger to society to leave them totally alone. The only difference between them and other delusionals, is they share their delusions with millions.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Pride in Ignorance

Religion teaches people to be proud of their ignorance.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Pride in Stupidity

Belief is being sure of something for which there is no evidence. I am amazed how many people are so proud of their pig-headedness that they freely admit to having beliefs.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Priest-Scientists

Originally the priests and scientists were the same people. Priest-scientists at Stonehenge and Machu Picchu computed the solstices in order to determine the best time to plant crops. The wise men in Christian myth were astrologer-astronomers interested in a super nova. Then the groups split. The scientists were overjoyed to discover they were wrong and embraced new data. The priests were mortally embarrassed to be found wrong and tortured to death those who presented the new understanding.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Priestly Incompetence

It is not just that bishops are men, they are men who have rejected family life and who have rejected relationships, presumably because they are paedophiles or other outer philias and feel obliged to suppress them. These are the last people who should be making up the rules for heterosexual families. They are clueless. People will always take power if they can. The ones to blame are those who let these old birds bully them.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Priestly paedophilia Goes Way Back

If anyone be under the delusion that child molesting by the clergy is a recent or temporary phenomenon, read Daniel Dafoe’s Moll Flanders written in 1752.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Primal Terror of God

Children learn a fear both of god and of harmless garter snakes, the same way, by instinctually aping their mothers who learned the fear in turn from their mothers. Adults are just as reluctant to give up their fear of god as their fear of snakes. It is extremely painful to confront any childhood phobia. It has nothing to with reason and everything to do with primal terror.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Primate Ambiguity

I wonder how it came about that primate means both an archbishop and a monkey-like creature.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Prime Selling Tool

If you don’t believe (my version of) the truth, you are going to hell! : Prime selling tool for Christians.
If you don’t believe (my version of) the truth, we are going to make your life a living hell! Backup selling tool for Christians.
If you don’t believe (my version of) the truth, we are going to kill you! : selling tool for pro life Christians.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Primitive Religion

Early man (and primitive societies today) had no science. They invariably made up stories to explain their world. These stories were always populated by gods and spirits. Some of these stories were morality tales. Some explained the origin of the world. Some explained the natural forces. You could say the body of these stories formed a miniature religion. Most of these were local to a small band and have died out. We know of about 60,000 of them, and that is not counting the 43,000 Christian denominations.

A war-like tribe in the middle east created one of these mini local religions promoting their polytheistic war god to a monotheistic god which they imposed by conquest on their neighbours. Their god was not a universal god, but a god of the tribe, who taught them they were god’s chosen people and as such owned title to all their neighbour’s land and property and could be legitimately killed or enslaved. By a strange fluke, a Roman emperor became enamoured of a minor sect of this religion, and made it the official state religion where it grew to become the most popular religion on earth. Modern day Christians refuse to acknowledge their religion’s humble beginnings. They forget, it was just one of thousands. It has no more claim to ultimate truth than any of the others. They just assume there is no god except Yahweh and no religion except Christianity without any evidence or reason. They arrogantly pretend the other religions do not exist and have no legitimacy.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Prison

Fundamentalists fail to realise that choosing fundamentalism is like volunteering to live in a 1.83 metres (6 ft) square jail cell.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Prison Ministry

Churches love to minister to prisoners. The prisoners know if they pretend convincingly that they have converted to Christianity they will get early parole. The state is effectively paying prisoners to convert to Christianity. The constitution says there should be no preferred religion. You should have just as much right to be atheist as Christian.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Privileged Opinions

If it is socially acceptable to claim there is a god, then surely it should be socially acceptable to claim there is not. If it is socially acceptable to claim a god does such and such, it should be socially acceptable to claim it does not. Christians complain that it is rude and hateful of others to contradict them, but they don’t seem to realise they are contradicting others. They seem to think they are an exalted anointed class, sort of like Queen Elizabeth whom one does not contradict to her face. The thing that most bugs me about Christians is they demand others prove every statement, even where proof is theoretically impossible, and they refuse to even offer a shred of evidence to back their own assertions. This sense of entitlement and privilege is so galling.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Probability

There are 60,000 religions. Christians tell us that 59,999 are bullshitters. They claim only theirs is true. We have a choice:

  1. Christianity is bullshitting just like the others.
  2. Christianity alone is telling the truth, though it can offer no evidence of any kind to back up its claims.

The choice is obvious to people of every non-Christian religion. The choice is obvious to atheists. Christians claim they believe the claims, but for the life of them, they cannot give a single reason why they think that. It simply feels right since that’s what they learned in the cradle. It drives them crazy. They are %110 sure, but cannot explain why.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Problem Is Belief One Knows God’s Mind

It is not belief in a god that causes the trouble. It is a belief that one has infallible knowledge of what that deity demands.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

The Problem Of Evil

You have to plug your ears and put on blinders to ignore Ebola, the AIDS orphans, or the victims of earthquakes and tsunamis. You can’t blame that misery on human free will. There can be no loving all powerful god, none, and that includes Yahweh.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

The Problem With Faith

The problem with faith is it can easily lead you to become convinced you are justified in using any measure to get others to conform with the rules of your religion, even though you are dead wrong.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

The Problem With Religion

Religion reflects the best thinking of its time. Unfortunately, it freezes that thinking for eternity. In the meantime, people come up with better and better ideas that the religion ignores. So for example, patriarchy, hatred of gays and slavery were frozen into almost every religion. There is no mechanism to update them. Because believers falsely imagine a deity wrote the holy books, they are too terrified to improve them.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

The Problem with the Religious

The problem with the religious is they are ordinary mammals, who are absurdly conceited. They imagine they are are infinitely wiser than everyone else and infinitely more important than anyone else all because they belong to the right god club. What I find particularly shameful about the religious is they are always convinced their god club is one and only true club, even though they have taken not even a cursory peek at any other or at science. They flagrantly pretend to know what they could not possibly know. When you confront their lie, they have no shame.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

The Problems with Religion

Why is religion such a disaster?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Proclaiming Your Faith

Faith, pretending to know what you do not, is no virtue. It the #1 cause of foolish, hateful and irrational action. Faith is shameful. Proclaiming your faith, is like bragging that you never wash, always lie and molest children.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Procrastinating Yahweh

Why did Yahweh the god wait at least 100,000 years after humans appeared on earth before revealing his law or his existence? What are the rules for heaven/hell for these early people?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Profundity

Perhaps the most profound realisation of my life was looking at my sister and suddenly realising she had a hidden inner life equally complex to my own.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Profundity

Perhaps the most profound religious experience of my life was looking at my sister, and realising on a deep level, she was a fellow being like myself, with a complex, non-obvious inner life, like myself. I realised there was so much going on in minds of the people around me that I was oblivious of.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Progress

The ancient religions were polytheistic. Then they were replaced my monotheistic religions that had 1 god. People used to believe the gods of many different religions, then they narrowed it down to 1 religion. To hit the truth, they just have to go one step further to 0 gods.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Projecting onto God

If you look at an MRI of someone’s brain when they talk about what they believe and what their god believes, the exact same spot lights up. This suggests they are simply projecting their own beliefs onto a god. Further, if someone’s belief changes, their belief about what their god believes always changes to match.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70) MRI Scans click to watch

Projection

One of the key features of human psychology is projection. When people have socially unacceptable impulses, they deny them and project others as having them. Often they project desires to murder, torture, bully etc. on their deities.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Promise Everything; Deliver Nothing

Christianity is the ultimate con. It promises everything and delivers nothing.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Promoting Religion

Promoting religion makes as much sense as promoting gullibility, stupidity, ignorance and superstition.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Promotion

How to religions promote themselves?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Proof

The only two realms in which you can legitimately talk about proof are mathematics and the law. Even there, they mean quite different things. In everything else, proof is impossible. The inability to prove is normal. Further, the fact that you cannot prove one of alternatives A and B is true, does not mean that both alternatives are equally valid. One can be almost certainly true while the other is almost certainly false. Religious frauds like to pretend religious propositions are provable. They don’t even understand what the word prove means.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Proof of God

Imagine two men in a European coffee house in 1650. One asks the other Why is there disease?
The other replies I don’t know.
The first says Well I know. It is god. It is god punishing sin.
The first man is not only wrong, he lied. He did not know. He was just speculating.

Skip forward to the year 2015 with two men in a Starbucks. One asks the other You are a scientist. How did life arise on earth. I contend it is impossible.
The other replies Well, it cannot very well be impossible because here we are! We don’t know yet. However, we think it was by simple organic molecules forming, then more and more complex ones like nucleotides or it might have arrived on a bit of space debris from some other part of the galaxy.
The first says Well, if even you don’t know, that proves Yahweh did it with the holy word.
The second replies No it doesn’t. That is the silliest and most useless explanation I have ever heard. It is like saying leprechauns do it with fairy dust when I ask for a lesson on how to wire a house. It is just evading the question. Further, there is no evidence at all this god of your exists or that he could or did perform such magic or that poofing life into existence is even possible for anything. Further, even if some deity did it, there is no evidence at all it was yours.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Proof of the Non-Existence of God

If a benevolent god created human males, why is there hair surrounding the anus?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Proof There is No God

Believe it or not, it is possible to prove God does not exist. The problem is Christians got carried away larding him with magnificent attributes. They are mutually exclusive. In theory, there might be a god, but not a Christian god.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Proof Yahweh Does Not Exist

First, let us get clear on just what Yahweh is. He is the supernatural being as described in the King James Bible. He never lies. He can do anything. He is infinitely good. He is the author of the inerrant bible. He created the heavens and earth 6000 years ago. He answers every single prayer including prayers for healing.

So what then would be evidence Yahweh, as described in the bible, does not exist?

This argument just disposes of Yahweh. There still may be other gods, or gods similar to Yahweh with a severely restricted subset of his properties.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Proper Source To Learn About Evolution

A person who goes to theologian to learn about evolution, probably gets his pickup serviced by a moonshiner.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Prophesy

Everybody, all 7.601 billion of us make predictions. We have hunches. We extrapolate. We repeat the thinking of others. By chance, some of us have to be right especially when the predictions are vaguely worded, or predict inevitable things (there will be wars or an economic downturn/upturn). They get crowned seers, even though they have no more ability than anyone else.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Proposed Best Seller

If someone wanted to get on the New York Times Best Seller list, they might write a book called How To Get People To Lie For You. The CEOs of all corporations would buy it as would all the professional Christians.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Pros and Cons

One of the disadvantages of being an atheist, is you don’t get an I told you so after you die. One of the advantages of being a Christian is you are spared the humiliation of learning you were wrong after you die.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Pros and Cons of Stupidity

43% of Americans are young earth creationists. This is tantamount to rejecting all of science. The good news is this prevents most American from having any ability to dominate the rest of the earth. They cannot even do much within the USA to support the useful people. Nearly all significant professions require science.

The downside is Americans are climate change deniers. They insist on ever faster stuffing the atmosphere with greenhouse gases. The result of this aggressive ignorance is mass extinction.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Prosecute the Enablers

At least in my country, it is illegal to know about child abuse (physical or sexual) and fail to report it to the police. It appears the entire clergy of the Catholic church, including the current pope, were aware of hundreds of cases of sexual abuse and child rape and tried to cover them up by reassigning priests to new parishes where they could have a fresh start as a predator. If civil authorities would do their job and prosecute, the entire clergy would be in jail and this corrupt institution would collapse.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Prosletyser Responsibility

Both Christians and Muslims are fond of relishing the thought that anyone who rejects their efforts at proselytising will be severely punished in the afterlife. Surely the proselytiser has to take some of the blame. If proselytiser behaved badly why would anyone want to be like them? If they used dishonest arguments, why would anyone believe anything they said? If they quoted science they did not understand, would it not be rational to discount them as know-nothings? If they praised bigotry and hate, who would want to join them?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Prosletysing

When new Christians proselytize, they are sure the Christian experience is just what everybody needs. They refuse to acknowledge that other people care if the Christian message is actually true. All they care about is that it is appealing.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Prostitution Choices

Christians pretend you have a choice between legal prostitution or no prostitution. Not so. The choice is between legal prostitution and illegal prostitution.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Protected Priests

If a priest molests a child, they are almost never prosecuted. The incident is covered up and if necessary to prevent scandal, the priest is transferred to new pastures. Those aiding and abetting these crimes are paedophiles too, or those who believe the church should be protected from scandal, even if it means sacrificing children. (paedophile is the wrong word. It means literally people who like children. Rapists clearly don’t give a damn about children.) But what on earth is preventing parents from reporting rapes and forced sexual assaults and sex extorted with threats? Do they believe they are powerless against the church? Do they fear Yahweh’s retribution? The old goat is quite arbitrary and irrational. Do they fear the church? Do they fear social ostracism? Whatever it is, it must be quite powerful. Protecting kids is normally the top priority.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Protesting Silly Christian Nonsense

If you heard a lecturer on the radio claim that male mosquitos paid no part whatsoever in mosquito reproduction, or saw a television documentary about Nero that said he was born in 1800, or your child came home from school where she had learned that Superman was real and lived in Montréal, would you not protest? Then why don’t you protest when Christians proclaim equally silly nonsense? Why do you suddenly have to be polite and pretend to agree with not only nonsense, but outright lies?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Prove No Polka-dot Fairies

Christians have no evidence for the existence of their particular god, so they try to place the onus on others to prove conclusively there is no god of any kind. That is like dotty old ladies gloating that pink polka-dot fairies do indeed exist because nobody has offered convincing proof they don’t .

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Prove There Are No Leprechauns

You don’t believe in leprechauns just because no one has come up with a mathematical proof they do not exist. So why do Christians believe in Yahweh just because no one has come up with a mathematical proof he does not exist? To believe in some exotic species you need some evidence they do exist. There is none for leprechauns and Yahweh.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Proving the Existence of God

There is only one way to prove the existence of god. Unfortunately, it is dishonest. You redefine god to be something that does exist.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Proving The Ghoul Yahweh Does Not Exist

I cannot prove there is no ghoul who calls himself the god Yahweh, eagerly awaiting my death so he can get on with watching me tortured for eternity, but I can say I have never seen any evidence whatsoever that he exists.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Proving God Does Not Exist

Many people unfamiliar with logic have claimed it is impossible to prove god does not exist. According to the bible, god is detectable. He does things and did things in past. If god exists, there should be effects of these activities detectable. For example, if the bible is correct, there should be thousands of pieces of evidence confirming the age of the earth as 6000 years. However, every single piece points to it being 4.543 billion years old. Therefore the bible is wrong. The bible is the sole source of information about the existence of god. The bible can no longer be considered reliable. There are hundreds of similar arguments about the missing fingerprints of god.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Proving God Does Not Exist

You cannot prove god does not exist. So what? You can’t prove any of the other 59,999 gods do not exist either. They make equally lame threats for failing to worship them. You know all religions are more silly that the Beverly Hillbillies. You know they are all made up. These is almost nothing you can prove does not exist, except in the realm of mathematics, such as you can prove there does not exist two integers whose ratio squared is two. And even in mathematics you have to assume postulates. So why do you need absolute proof? 99%certainty is surely good enough for everything else in life.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Proving a Negative

In debates about the existence of the god Yahweh, both sides will often claim, You can’t prove a negative Mathematicians do this all the time. They use a reductio ad absurdum argument. Basically, they show that if X existed it would be absurd — self contradictory — or, more formally, that it leads to a contradiction of the fundamental postulates, therefore X cannot exist. In principle, we could find arguments to show that presuming the existence of Yahweh leads to an absurdity.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Prudes

Its a wonder that religious prudes don’t routinely suffer from multiple personality disorder with their repressed sexual side rebelling.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Psychic Fair

Psychic Fair Canceled Due To Unforeseen Circumstances

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Public Memorial Services

When there is a mass death, e.g. terrorist attack, mass shooting or bus crash there is a public memorial service. I find these nauseating. Why?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Public Money to Promote Woo

The CBC newssite and CBC radio has been treating the canonisation of Kateri Tekakwitha as a hard news story, as if praying to this woman were a more reliable way to cure cancer than taking chemotherapy or radiation. Equal Time! Equal Time!

What about Peter Popoff, Benny Hinn, Ernest Angley, Robert Tilton, Sylvia Browne (Montel William’s house psychic), James Van Praagh, Don Stewart and his green prosperity handkerchiefs, Philippine psychic surgery, homeopathy, astrology, samples of gabardine falsely claimed to be cut from Brother André’s coat provided by James Randi’s father, Lourdes water, snake oil… You can find dozens of people who will swear it worked for them.

And guess what, even atheists like me sometimes survive after medicine pronounces No hope. It is pigeon superstition to attribute good fortune to whatever wacko thing you last tried before your good fortune. You have to check out how it works/does not work for hundreds of others before you pronounce its efficacy.

It is irresponsible of the CBC to promote this quackery. It is like airing a financial advisor who promotes lottery tickets as the best way to save for retirement. He can easily find a dozen lottery winners to attest to the method’s success, but that means nothing about its general reliability. The CBC is tricking people into relying on useless therapy and avoiding unpleasant therapy that has some hope of working. It is not only stupid, it is irresponsible and malicious. It should be as illegal as marketing a fake cancer drug and all similar cons.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Public Prayer

Why do Christians insist on prayer at public events and forcing non-believers to pray along with them when:

~ Roedy(1948-02-04 age:70)

Punching Your Doctor’s Lights Out

If your baby daughter were ill with meningitis and you took her to the hospital and you later asked the doctor how should she was doing and he reassured you Oh she’ll be fine. I prayed to the latest saint Kateri Tekakwitha. You can always rely on God. There is no need to do anything else. St. Kateri has healed thousands. I don’t care what religion you are, you would punch his lights out and sue him for every penny and get him barred from practice. Healing by praying to saints is B.S. and everyone knows it, including you.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Punish Cigar Smokers

Perhaps the biggest appeal of Christianity is that they might just manage to torture for eternity those who smoke cigars in public.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Punishing Surrogates

One of the most pernicious and crazy ideas Christianity promotes is that you should punish or take revenge on someone completely unrelated to the criminal. The idea has spread to Islam. A group of Nigerian Muslims crucified a cat to protest an unflattering portrait of Islam in a film.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Puritanical Agenda

Christians have been extremely successful in implementing their Puritanical agenda. They have ordinary people believing that men who so much as lust after 17-year olds (e.g. by looking at naked pictures of them on the Internet) deserve the death penalty. They have ordinary people equating succumbing to seduction by a 16-year old to raping an 8-year old. They have convinced ordinary people that accusation, even by rumour is equivalent to conviction. On the other hand, they have the public looking the other way any sex crime committed by clergy. New Hampshire blesses marriage of females at age 13. There is no sense of proportion. This agenda has many of the characteristics of a witch hunt. Few people are willing to speak out about this muddle fearing being labeled a sexual predator.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

The Purpose of Christianity

If the ancients had not invented Christianity, we would have had to have invented it so we would have someone to ridicule with a clear conscience.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

The Purpose of Creation

Christians tell me Yahweh created the univerese so there could be humans and he could have a relationship with them. If that is so, why does Yahweh never make an appearence? Can he only tolerate humans who never wash?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Purpose of God

God is just a lame excuse for inaction.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

The Purpose Of Life

If you are an animal, the purpose of your life is to survive and reproduce. If you are a human you are privileged. You get to choose your purpose. You get to have multiple purposes and change them anytime you please. If you are a Christian, I have been told god assigns you a life-long purpose. However, nobody has been able to tell me what that purpose is. I presume it is something dreary like supporting the church financially and gathering souls for Christianity. Christians pretend they prefer to have a dreary one-size-fits-all purpose assigned to them than to choose their own.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Purpose of Life

What is the purpose of life? It does not have one because life as a whole does not have a consciousness or desires. Nearly all individual lifeforms act as if their primary purposes were to survive and reproduce. Humans pursue life goals of every imaginable description and sometimes ignore the usual two.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

The Purpose of Life

When someone asks, what is the purpose of life, what he is actually asking is What is Yahweh’s generic purpose for humans? Ironically, Christians usually do not claim to know what this is, just that it exists, and that life would be unbearable without it. If Yahweh does not exist, then question becomes meaningless. However, you are free to choose you own purpose, something much more useful, and clear than the official Christian-assigned purpose (such as going door to door handing out tracts spreading the so-called good news. How dishonest to peddle 2000-year old information as news.). Further, you can change your personal purpose later.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

The Purpose of Religion

The Hudson Bay Company decided to soften up the Algonquin Indians by importing priests to teach them to fear hell and hence be more amenable to manipulation by the white man. The plan worked.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70) The Invisible Nation click to watch

The Purpose of Religion

I suggest that the purpose of religion is to suppress innovation and change. In most of our evolutionary history this was an advantage. Today if you experiment with a new way of farming or a new hunting weapon, if it fails miserably, nothing terrible happens to anyone. 50,000 years ago, you might easily have killed off your whole family and some of your tribe. Survival was on the edge. You could not afford to drift far from the tried and true. Religion provided the motivations and threats needed to suppress innovation.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Purpose of Religion

The main purpose of a religion is to con the believers out of their money.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Purpose of Religion

The purpose of religion is to act as a damper on the rate of scientific discovery. For example, once religion got its hooks into Isaac Newton (1643-01-04 1727-03-31 age:84), his unparalleled torrent of scientific discovery stopped dead.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Purpose of Religion

Religion is the art of convincing people to believe that stories of magic are real in order to control their behaviour or to extort money from them. Oddly, modern people rarely believe magic is real, even when performed flawlessly under their noses live or on screen. However, many modern people have complete faith in hearsay claiming ancient magic performances were real.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Purpose of Religion

Religion has two purposes:

  1. Extract money from gullible people.
  2. Power trip others to control their behaviour.

The techniques are empty threats, false promises and earnest lies.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Purpose of Religious Tolerance

The primary goal of religious tolerance should be to stop large religions from lying about the smaller ones and using the power of the state to suppress the smaller ones.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

The Purpose of the Universe

Christians claim that Yahweh created the entire universe as a sort of playground for his pet humans.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

The Purpose Of The Universe

Christians presume the universe has a purpose. Why just one? Why any? Purpose implies some grandiose being trying to accomplish something. That strikes me as childish, presuming the entire universe must work the same familiar way as one’s own mind. It seems to me the universe is like water, moving in a predicable way, not because it as any conscious intention. What is the purpose of a tree? It depends who is asking, a logger, an artist, a bird, a beetle… Surely the universe is the same way.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Purpose Of the Universe

I once asked the universe if it had a purpose. It told me that it did not have an inherent one, but that I was free to assign it one. This was good news. A purpose I assigned myself would surely be more pleasing than a one-size-fits all. Purpose implies for the benefit of someone/something. The purpose of people, to earthworms, is to cultivate trees to drop leaves for them to eat.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

The Purpose of the Universe

What is the purpose for the universe? It depends whose purpose you are talking about:

Christians look at this question in a different way. They presume a god exists, and he created the universe for some personal purpose of his own. We are all obligated to work in alignment with it. The catch is, we have no idea what this purpose is.

Some Christians believe if you pray and meditate, god will give you a vision of your personal purpose, which he has assigned. You are then obligated to dedicate the rest of your life to this purpose.

Atheists say this god is imaginary and so are the hallucinatory experiences used to assign purposes. Atheists would far sooner assign purposes themselves rationally, and change them as necessary. Oddly, Christians find this freedom terrifying and utterly intolerable.

From the atheist point of view, the universe does not a have a built-in god-assigned purpose because it has no god. You get to choose it for yourself. Atheists live in the same universe as the Christians live in, just without the imaginary tyrant god. The universe has an abundance of genuine purposes, not just silly hallucinatory ones. Christians, when confronted by atheism, behave like children left home alone without abusive parents. They should be celebrating, but they cower in terror. Christian revulsion at a universe without pre-assigned purpose is the exact same thing as their fear of a universe without an abusive parental god.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

The Purpose of the Universe

What is the purpose of the universe is a meaningless question unless you presume the existence of a creator deity. It is equivalent to asking, What benefit did god hope to accrue by creating the universe?

For the atheist, to make sense of the question, you must specify for whom?. Every human can assign his own purpose and change it at any time, and ditto for the purpose of his own life. Worms see the purpose of the universe to provide dead matter to eat. Monkeys see the purpose of the universe to provide them with fruit trees.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Purpose Without God

I could pull my hair out in frustration when a Christian says I would have no purpose in life if I did not believe in god. Are you kidding? Do we live on the same planet? You would have nothing important to do? Consider some of the possibilities:

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Put Them Out Of Business

If a child rapist is caught yet again, you don’t just fine him and send him out into the world to repeat offend. You do something to make sure he cannot re-offend. So with institutions. If an institution, such as the Catholic church, is caught thousands of times in a conspiracy to rape children, you don’t just make them pay what amounts to a fine (lawsuit civil damages) and then carry on as usual. You put them out of the child-raping business.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Putting Down a Pet

The way we put down a pet and the way we put down a human under anaesthesia for an operation are almost identical. You feel your consciousness fade, then you wake up a few hours later feeling as if no time had passed. In between was a void, a nothing. Your heart was beating slowly. Your lungs were breathing very slowly. Your brain was shut down. That strikes me as exactly what death will be like — nothing, hence nothing to be afraid of, no more than going under anaesthesia. Now the suffering leading up to death is another matter. Sometimes Christians force people to endure months and months of extreme pain to satisfy the irrational, sadistic demands of the god Yahweh.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Putting Words in Yahweh’s Mouth

People can go on the radio and claim with utmost certainty what the god Yahweh is thinking without the slightly worry of ever being corrected by Yahweh himself. Yahweh™ is like in infinitely pliable lump of Play-Dough that can be moulded into any conceivable shape.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Quaint As Believing In Fairies

Imagine the future where belief in a god is as quaint as belief in fairies, witches or ghosts.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Quality of Debate

I am puzzled why Christians are such uniformly awful debaters. The most common response to any assertion is You will go to hell or You are an evil person which has absolutely nothing to do with the truth of the original assertion. The most common response to a constitutional challenge is a death threat or a threat of violence. You never hear any argument at all why the Christian privilege is constitutional. I was astonished to watch Bill Donohue, the head of the Catholic League, debate Christopher Hitchens. Almost his entire presentation was extreme ad hominems. Bill Donohue vs Christopher Hitchens click to watch Christians often make assertions about sciences, then flatly refuse to divulge the source. The other odd thing, there is no excellent debater for the Christian side. Even the most famous ones make silly arguments and dodge questions like children. Does Christianity literally rot the brain? Does Christianity only appeal to people with defective brains?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Quantum Mechanics

When Christians make claims about what is and is not possible in science, they usually ignore all discoveries since 1670 (the time of Isaac (1643-01-04 1727-03-31 age:84)). For example, quantum mechanics (discovered in the first three decades of the twentieth century) tells us that particles pop into and out of existence randomly.

Quantization and Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle click to watch This video by Dr Walter Lewin is an excellent easy-to-understand introduction to quantum mechanics. The only background you need is grade 7 algebra.

Studies of radioactivity (discovered 1896) tell us that on a microscopic level events can happen randomly without cause.

Studies of evolution (discovered 1858 continuing through this day) tells us that life on earth took 3.7 billion years to get to its present form, not seven days. Each creature came from parents just a tiny bit different from it. These differences gradually accumulated over time. The general drift was to fitter creatures (avoided predators, were good at food finding, were good at attracting mates, were good at fighting off disease, were good parents) simply because the less fit creatures died or dropped out of the mating game competition. To me, evolution is so obvious I can’t conceive of how it could not be so at least to some degree. Evolution is unbelievably slow (except in microbes). Evolving: The Human Effect and Why It Matters by Dr. Daniel J. Fairbanks will get you up to snuff on DNA and evolution. It explains reproduction and mutation on a molecular level.

Astronomers have taught us our universe is 13.82 billion years old not 6000 years as creationists claim. Our planet is perfectly ordinary, orbiting around a perfectly ordinary star on the edge of a galaxy, one of 200 billion. We are finding more planets similar to earth every day. It is highly likely that life is common throughout the universe. There is nothing special about us. We are not the centre of the universe and not the apple of god’s eye as we once imagined.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

The Question of Evil

Why are children starving to death? Why doesn’t God do anything to protect children from rapists? Why does God permit tsunamis?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Questioning Science

If ever you get some crazy idea like the earth doubles in size each year, and you have no evidence for this, just a hunch, there are three ways to handle this. You can assume either:

  1. Research scientists are all incompetent.
  2. Research scientists are all in on a conspiracy to deceive you.
  3. Research scientists know something you don’t.

Unless your name is Einstein, your best bet is the third option.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Questions to a Believer

There 60,000 religions. You have likely read the holy book of only one. Why are you so certain the first one you picked up was the best? You likely believe 99.998% of religions are false. What is unique about your religion that made you think it bucked the pattern?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Questions for Christians

  1. Why does Yahweh so rarely rescue people from the following predicaments?
  2. Why does Yahweh rescue heathens from the following predicaments equally often to Christians?
~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Questions for Quistians

A quistian is someone willing to at least question his faith.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Quiverfull

Quiverfull is a Christian movement that teaches the only function of women is to have as many babies as possible, ignoring all other considerations such as whether the parents have enough financial resources to support them. Quiverfull people have the morals of a tent caterpillar. Already man has taken over 98% of the land driving species after species to extinction. The planet can sustain only about a billion people. Driving the population up creates disease, water shortages, famine and war. It the ultimate selfishness. Granted, overpopulating is a selfish, inbuilt Darwinian drive, but nearly every human, but the Quiverfulls, has enough brainpower to understand why it must be resisted.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Rabbit Burying Ceremonies

If you are a Christian, surely at some point in your life you have seen a documentary about Hindu temple rituals. How can you claim that your temple mumbo jumbo is any different from their temple mumbo jumbo? There is nothing in the rituals to suggest your god has any more chance of existing than theirs. When I was a kid, we would make up elaborate ceremonies to bury dead rabbits and fish. People enjoy ceremonies, but they have nothing whatsoever to do with the actual existence of deities.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Rabid Belief

People will quite often tell you that no conceivable evidence, no conceivable experience, no conceivable argument could shake their belief that god exists. You don’t find people anywhere near that rabid about other unseen entities such as ghosts, the Loch Ness monster, leprechauns, fairies, closet hippos…

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Racism

Racism is at the core Christian faith. Racism lets Christians cheer at the idea of every Hindu child being roasted for eternity.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Rain Dances

There was a time when Christians could not conceive of the rains starting by themselves. They needed a god to command them to start. Most Christians no longer do rain dances to propitiate the gods, but they still persist in thinking the big bang could not have happened by itself. It needed a deity to command it. Perhaps when they understand the physics of the big bang as well as they do the evaporation and condensation of water, they will no longer feel such a pressing need for magic and miracles to understand their world.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Raised by Nazis

Christians are like children raised as Nazis. They are blind to the evils of the church. They know about them, but they discount them as not being significant.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Rapture

30 to 40% of Americans believe that Revelation e.g. being raptured up into the air, is literally true. No wonder these vandals are so willing to trash the planet. They believe god has scheduled it for destruction soon anyway.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Rare Is Not Miraculous

People are far too casual about declaring something a miracle. Just because various stellar or planetary alignments (e.g. transits, eclipses, occultations, galactic rotations…) are rare does not make them miraculous. People recovering from serious diseases are rare, that does not mean some sort of magic had to be involved. Winning lotteries is rare, as is being hit by lightning, but such events do no violence to our understanding of probability. There has to be some strong violation of our established understanding of what is possible. It cannot be a fish story. You need plenty of evidence people did not just make this up for various ulterior motives, like faking a Sasquatch sighting to increase tourism.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Rational Animals

One of my favourite things to watch on TV are documentaries about animal behaviour. I have yet to encounter any creature more irrational than the Christian.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Rational Death

If we were not so superstitious about death, we might handle it more rationally, like this:

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Rational Rules

Rational Rules is a YouTube channel hosted by an young, intelligent, handsome, long-haired, articulate man, Steve Jones, who sounds like the artful dodger in Oliver. He is big on logic, logical fallacies and syllogisms in religious arguments. I learn a lot from him.

Rational Rules click to watch
~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Ratzinger Aided and Abetted Child Rape

Pope Ratzinger was caught aiding and abetting child molestation. Everyone looked the other way. What will it take before Catholics put their feet down and say That is simply not acceptable — a video of him raping some altar boy?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Ratzinger and Hitler

Pope Ratzinger blames atheists for Hitler. This is odd given he was a member of Hitler Youth and Hitler was a Roman Catholic.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Reacting to Christians

I am frustrated and disgusted that Christians could be so gullible and stupid to believe, without evidence and despite all the self-contradiction.

However, I am horrified, disdainful and revolted that Christians would consider worshiping such an evil god, purely out of fear. Christians are like Hitler’s ass-lickers.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Reacting to Death

I keep tropical fish. One of my fish was a pearl danio. When I went to feed the fish, she would jump out of the water onto the floating plants, and enthusiastically slither about to get the food. She died recently along with Leonard Nimoy. The deaths bothered me much more than I thought they would. I did not imagine them in suitable heavens to soften the blow to myself. I just bit the bullet, and accepted they were both no longer part of my life. It cheapens life to tell lies about its end.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Reaction to a Predicament

A wise person when faced with a predicament tries to figure out what to do to improve the situation. A fool prays, effectively doing nothing.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Reading The Gospels

If you read the gospels one after the other, you will imagine everything described in any gospel happened. If you read all four gospels in parallel, you will discover each event is described in a mutually incompatible way.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Realistic Promises

Science is gradually replacing religion’s grandiose empty promises of safety with realistic ones.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Reality Based

People are used to the idea that religions cannot get along and cannot agree on anything. The root of the problem is religions are not reality based. There is no common ground. They are each off in their own little worlds. Scientists don’t have this problem. They all got together and agreed on exactly how long a metre is for example. They agree on how many elements there are. They agree on the mass of a standard volume of oxygen. Scientists like to talk about what you can see, hear, feel, smell and instrument readings — things that exist in our common reality. If religions would give up so much bullshitting aka lying aka making stuff up, they too would have a common ground.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Reality is Like a Dream

We are all hallucinating all the time, but in a very controlled way. Our ordinary experience of reality is a sort of dream, that is influenced by sensory input.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Reasoning From Postulates

The ancient Greeks discovered that rational thought works first by deciding on a set of self-evident postulates, then reasoning out from them. The catch is, if the postulates are wrong or inconsistent, everything that follows is nonsense. Even a genius like Newton (1643-01-04 1727-03-31 age:84) made the error of accepting as postulates the unsubstantiated religious beliefs of his contemporaries. We went into a dreamlike mad churning of fruitless deduction unaware of the root of the problem. Religion destroyed one of the finest scientific minds of all time. Granted mercury poisoning weakened his mind, setting it up for religion to kill.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Reasons for Belief

There are four reasons people believe things:

  1. Sociological: because by family or culture believe it.
  2. Psychological: because it gives me meaning or purpose.
  3. Deferential: because a teacher or a trusted book told me.
  4. Rational: because there is evidence and good argument for it.

Reasons 1 through 3 are shortcuts. They don’t take much work or time. Reason 4 forces you to take time and to trust your own conclusions.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Reasons to Reject the Church

On 2017-04-14 the CBC aired a documentary called Spiritual Millennials. The host opened by saying anyone who did not go to church was spiritually bankrupt. I could see some bigoted old walrus of a guest saying that, but not the host. People reject the church for many reasons:

There is nothing wrong with people who reject the church. In contrast, I question the morality of anyone who overlooks the church’s crimes in particular child rape.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Reassuring Traumatised Christians

What Christians need is not logical argument that Christian dogma is nonsense, but reassurance that the god Yahweh the bogeyman won’t torture them for eternity if they decide that a deity had no part in creating Christian dogma.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Recipe for Procrastination

Belief in an afterlife leads to procrastination. No wonder Christians on their deathbeds are so eager for a do-over in the afterlife. They have not yet done anything.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Recognising a False Religion

If your religion persuades you to do something stark raving bonkers, like kill people who have done you no harm, then your religion is stark raving bonkers, aka a false religion.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Reconciling Faith And Reason

The attempt to reconcile faith and reason has always failed and it will continue to fail. Why? Reason looks at what is actually so. Faith closes its eyes and speculates what would be nice if it were so. Guessing needs a thorough foothold in reality for intuition to work well. Proponents of faith carefully avoid learning anything about what is actually so.

The other fundamental difference is proponents of reason relatively rapidly change their minds and adopt a new improved answer. Proponents of faith assume the first speculation is the right one and never change their minds no matter what the evidence.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Recovery Missions

When a lost hiker is presumed dead, we continue looking to find the body. Why? We want to move it to a different spot on the earth considered by Christians for superstitious reasons to be more suitable. I disapprove of this because of:

I think people who want this service should pay for it themselves.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Recruiting Toddlers

Christians have little success recruiting adults to their con game. So they pick on toddlers, who are genetically programmed to believe whatever nonsense adults tell them. What’s worse, this nonsense because it gets presented in life so early is almost impossible to override later in life when it is discovered to be garbage.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Recycling Coffins

It would make more sense just to rent a fine coffin for the service than bury and destroy a perfectly good piece of cabinetry. Perhaps this is what morticians do under the table. People want conspicuous waste, though, to exude prestige.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Red Zebras

Did you know there are zebras with red and white stripes, also green and white and even cyan and black?
You mean painted, in a circus, or photoshopped?

No, I mean natural, living in the wild in Africa.
That’s odd. I have never seen a picture of one, much less on safari or in a zoo or game farm.

They exist, sure as I am standing here. Mark my word!
You’ve seen one?

No, but my Tibetan Guru Lomborg says they exist. He is an enlightened master and so is incapable of speaking untruth.
I think he is full of it. Show me one.

Prove they could not possibly exist!
I think you just made this up. Most things people just make up I could not prove could not possibly exist either, like Bertrand Russell’s teapot orbiting Jupiter. My lack of inability to prove impossibility is not evidence for their existence. Even if such zebras were possible, there is extremely slim to no evidence they actually do exist. You don’t find mammals of any species with those colours. There are no natural green pigments other than chlorophyll. Birds create green feathers with interference patterns not with pigments the way mammals do.
How do you explain the fact that no one but your guru has ever seen them? that no DNA has ever been collected for them? that there not even any UFO-quality photos?
At the very least you should hold onto your scepticism over this fanciful story until you see a hide, a photo or some accounts from professional zoologists. The only reason you believe in these zebras is because you would think it highly pleasant if they did exist. You are indulging in wishful thinking, not rational thinking.

Blasphemer! 110% guaranteed you will roast in hell for your unbelief.

This is the same sort of silliness Christians peddle about Yahweh every day and atheists humour them like psychiatrists humouring their delusional patients.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

P.S. I suspect someday a teapot will orbit Jupiter, as a prank from the graduating class in astrophysics at MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology).

Redeeming Features of Christianity

I have pointed out many times the evils of religion and why we would be better off without it, but has it any redeeming features?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Refusal To Accept Death

When I was a little boy, I would cry for days when a pet died. I dug up my sister’s turtle every day for weeks to see it if was still dead. I imagined my own turtle had run away and was living happily in a stream. Christians are like me as a child. They can’t stand it when people die, so they hang onto childish wishful thinking.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Refusal To Hire Christians

If I were hiring a geologist and an applicant assured me that all scientific theory about geology was incorrect, surely I would be within my rights to ignore him, even if his beliefs were religiously motivated. In a similar way, I think it valid to refuse to hire anyone with any religious views that would interfere with job performance. This could include people who insist on wearing religious costumes that were dangerous or distracting. Religion should not be a licence to ride roughshod over others.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Refusal to Pray

If I spill salt, I don’t throw it over my shoulder. If I get sick, I don’t pray. Why would I do something that has no evidence to be effective and no plausible mechanism for how it could be effective? It would be as silly and pointless as pouring a jar of honey on my head.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Refusal to Provide Evidence

When I challenge a Christian’s bizarre assertions, he almost never offers evidence or an argument to support them. Instead he argues that it is a good thing that people believe this assertion or that terrible things would happen if they did not. How do I explain what is going on?

The way then to free the Christian of his delusions is to demonstrate to him that his lies are neither useful nor moral, that they have the exact opposite effects that he imagines. He has morals similar to a used car salesman. He says which will get the effect he wants. Whether is it true is more or less immaterial.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Refusing to Believe Nonsense

Imagine how wonderful the world would be if people simply stopped believing things that the best minds on the planet have determined are definitely not true.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Refusing Blood Transfusions

If somebody got the nutty idea into their head they could survive without water, I doubt many people would feel wicked if they constrained and hydrated him, and then sent him off to a shrink to see if his delusion could be blasted out of him.

There cannot possibly be any rule against transfusion in the bible. Transfusions were not invented until 1818, long after the bible was written. The biblical rules are against eating poorly cooked, bloody meat which some JW prophet twisted to mean transfusion.

My thinking is, we should not let kooks like this bully us. I can’t demand a surgeon use silver scalpels because I fear turning into a werewolf, or to work with one hand tied behind his back. We should say This is the service we offer. If you don’t like it, go somewhere else. If they die, it is not necessarily a bad thing. The world is slowly being rid of fruitcakes. It is unprofessional to use techniques known to fail just to humour a customer. That would apply to a surgeon, dentist or engineer. You would not let a dentist fail to sterilise his instruments just to humour a patient.

If a parent killed their child by denying them food and heat, we would jail them. When they try to kill their child by denying them blood, we help them murder the child. This is absolutely insane. Religion compulsions are not reasons. They are irrational. They are pathological mass insanities. Yet we treat these nuttinesses with more seriousness than actual reasons.

How dare JWs demand special treatment costing perhaps 100 times more than usual. They have to recover in hospital for months afterwards. At the very least, they should pay the extra themselves.

I Won’t Have Blood! A Battle Between Belief and Duty? click to watch
~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Refusing Debate

Up until very recently, Christians wisely refused to debate. They would, however, happily execute or torture anyone who expressed disagreement. Now, on YouTube there are hundreds of debates. There are even a number of people who earn their living participating in such debates. Christians are now willing to expose themselves for the airheads they are. Even given the difficulty of making a case for Christianity, these blowhards do a quite incompetent and dishonest job. They come across like used car salesmen, relying on slithery language and dishonest debating tactics. Young people are curious. They are viewing these debates and making up their own minds more and more. The end of Christianity is mainly a matter of the aging of the population.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Regional Religions

Religions are regional. They favour a small tribe. Everything takes place in a small region of earth. The adherents later claim the religion is not only global but universal. Yet nobody else wants anything to do with it. It has to be imposed by force. What is wrong with this picture?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Regret

With most transgressions, you wish you hadn’t committed them, but with adultery, you wish you had.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Reincarnation

One piece of woo that I don’t feel comfortable dismissing is the stories of reincarnation from children 2 to 6 years old. Ostensibly children start talking about their prior lives. The parents then research the details and discover there was such a person with those life details. These could be lies. The child could be getting information about this life, possibly by parents or other relatives inadvertently revealing them, or by reading about them. If these stories are genuine, the universe is vastly queerer than science now supposes. Even children raised Christian can have such experiences.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Rejecting God

When a Christian confronts an atheist they often say Why are you rejecting god? They are not rejecting god. If they were, the atheist would say I believe a number of gods exist, including Yahweh and Poseidon. However, because Yahweh is such sadistic bastard, I am signing on with team Poseidon. That would be rejecting Yahweh.

What the atheist is actually saying is I don’t believe any gods exist. And that includes both Yahweh and Poseidon. I can’t very well worship or have a relationship with a god who is not there. I have nothing against these gods as characters of fiction. It is just that they don’t exist.

The atheist might try to explain this way. I doubt sasquatches exist. I don’t reject sasquatches. It is not that I don’t like them because they are too hairy or too smelly. It is just that I think they are imaginary. I don’t care about them one way or the other because they are not real. Until someone finds some evidence they exist, they are not worth thinking about.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Rejecting God

When a Christian gives a pitch to an atheist calling on him to worship Yahweh, the atheist will say But there is no evidence your god even exists. The Christian feels personally rebuffed and rejected. So they mischaracterise what the atheist said, claiming the atheist rejected god. Rejecting god would mean believing Yahweh exists but is such a bastard he does not deserve worship. The atheist is not passing any judgment on Yahweh other than that he is a character of fiction. What the Christian is doing is similar to trying to gain followers to worship Anne Shirley of Anne of Green Gables. The atheist is not rejecting Anne Shirley, just her plausibility as an object of worship.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Rejecting Gods

You already know what is like to be an atheist relative to the 59,999 gods other than your own. You already reject 59,999 gods, most without even a casual glance. What is so unique about the one you did accept? Is it anything more than the choice of your parents?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Rejecting Heaven

If were forced to choose between annihilation at death or eternity in heaven, there would be no question, I would pick annihilation. Why?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Rejecting Science

In Elizabethan times, the state executed suspected atheists or heretics.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Rejecting Science

When we present science to a creationist, there is nothing wrong with the science. They can understand it just fine with a little work. The objection has nothing to do with the science or how well it fits the facts. It is all about loyalty to the god story. That loyalty is held in place with childhood trauma, fear of being roasted alive forever. It has nothing to do with how well the god story fits the facts. No matter how crazy the god story is, no matter how improbable, they can’t take the chance of being roasted alive. It is as irrational and intense as a spider-phobia installed by a phobic mother even before the child could talk. Consider that the #1 argument Christians use for their belief is Pascal’s Wager — fear of torment from their loving god.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Rejecting Truth

Mankind is so vain that they reject the truth of man’s position in the universe as not good enough. Instead, they insist on being the center. They demand the sound of trumpets praising man’s unique glory.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Rejection

Christians often erroneously accuse atheists of rejecting god or hating god. That would apply to a real being, like Bashar al-Assad. I reject him. I want nothing to do with him. Further, I hate him for all the innocent people he has killed and tormented. Rejection and hating do not apply to a fictitious being like the Loch Ness monster, Lex Luther or Yahweh. I can’t very well have any sort of relationship with a make-believe being. I might say I would hate a being that behaved the same way as some notorious fictitious character such as Yahweh, but that is not the same as hating an imaginary being. That would be as childish as getting all emotional about some comic book villain. In fact, it is possible to relish dreadfully-behaved fictitious villains like Dexter.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Relationship with Man

Yahweh reputedly craves a relationship with man. Why then does he make himself undetectable? If I want a relationship with someone, the first step is to meet or at least exchange emails.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Relative Power

People claim their gods are omnipotent and infinitely cruel. This is just bluff to get you hand an over 10% of your lifetime income, or your child for priestly sexual abuse. Gods have no power at all. They never do anything. The closest they come to doing anything is having legends told about them. The goal is to make you feel powerless, to capitulate in abject terror. Study people who did things that should really have pissed off various gods. The gods did nothing. There is nothing to be afraid of.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Relieving Delusions

Oddly, I had better luck in a mental institution relieving people of their delusions than I have had with Christians. There are so many of them, they reinfect themselves.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Religion

Religion is choosing to pretend to believe lies.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Religion = Drugs

Religion makes people believe delusional things and behave in ways that are self destructive and destructive to others.

Even though religion is as prevalent as the common cold, it is still a malfunction of the human brain.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Religion = Optical Illusion

A religion is like an optical illusion. From inside the circle it appears as the ultimate good. From outside, as foolish, misguided, if not actively evil.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Religion = Punishment

The notions of religion and punishment are intimately intertwined. As we discover how little true choice life offers, we will become less and less interested in punishing. We will use it only when it would be an effective reprogramming tool, not just for revenge.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Religion is Always BS

I don’t think I have ever heard a guest on TV or radio spout nonsense when telling me how to fix a plumbing fixture, bake a dish or grow blueberries, but every time the topic of religion comes up, they just start spouting gibberish or making stuff up and no one calls them on it.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Religion and Curiosity

Religion appeals to those with no curiosity about how the universe is, only how they would like it to be.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Religion and Education

The primary enemy of Islam and Christianity is education. If children learn how the world really works, they learn how to analyse the bogus claims of the holy books for themselves. In the USA, people are proud of their scientific ignorance and work hard to destroy the education of children by firing teachers, putting nonsense in their text books and throttling funding. The more ignorant children are, the easier marks they are for religious dogma. For similar reasons, Muslims block girls from attending school at all.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Religion and Security

There is a strong correlation between atheism and security. Countries tend to be atheist where people do not fear the police, where there are no armed gangs, where there is a social safety net, where there is universal health care etc. Why would this be so?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Religion Anesthetises Conscience

The main advantage to a believer is it gives him an excuse to torment and kill infidels without conscience.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Religion Cannot Replace Science

Religion is no replacement for science. Religion will never tell you the first thing about how to design an airliner, build a computer, how to treat water to make it safe to drink, how to grow a turnip, how to devise a new AIDS drug, predict the weather or the climate. It will never give you an explanation for the precise light spectra coming from the far reaches of the universe. It will never teach you how to do a liver transplant. It will never teach you how to build a office tower than can survive a hurricane. Religion contains itself to a few minor domains:

Religion claims it teaches morality, but the type of morality teaches is morally bankrupt — a very primitive morality. Thankfully, for the most part, even Christians ignore it.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Religion Causes Depression

Religion causes depression. Why? Depression is caused when reality does not meet up to expectations. Religion creates unrealistic expectations. What is even worse than unfulfilled expectations is believing that god decided you were undeserving or wicked.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Religion as Child Abuse Excuse

Religion is no excuse for child abuse: beatings, forced sex, or withholding effective medical care.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Religion Is A Con

I have said many times that anyone selling religion is a con man and should be treated as such by the law. Joseph Smith, the founder of Mormonism, was arrested over and over and driven out of town, for conning people out of their money before he settled on the legal mega-con of religion.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Religion Con

Imagine an androgynous being came to the door dressed all in black. He/she said to you, Friend, soon, a red dragon 20 km (12.43 miles) across is going to hover over this city and fry everyone here with its fiery breath. But, I have this limited time offer. Give us a mere $20 a month with convenient pre-authorised chequing and I will personally guarantee that dragon will never hurt you. You would think either this person had escaped from a mental institution, or was pulling the cheesiest con ever, something thought up by a nine year old. So how come you fall for it when a Christian pulls the identical con?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Religion is a Con

Religion is a con. Its purpose is fraud to con people out of their money and to hand over their kids to be molested. You are dealing with criminals. They have no conscience about making false promises or empty threats to get you to give them money. Believing in hell is as naïve as believing you will get $3 billion from a Nigerian 419 scam, or believing your older brother about monsters under the bed. The lies are carefully constructed so there is no way to catch them on it. This is an ancient, highly-polished con.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Religion Con Games

Secular con men view the church’s various con games as playing tennis without a net.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Religion Correlates With Economic Inequality

One of the world’s leading scientists, Richard Dawkins, noted that religion correlates with economic inequality. Where there is more economic inequality there is more religion and where is less religion there is more economic equality.

This is as you would expect. Elites designed religions for the purpose of enhancing and preserving their privilege. They convince the gullible poor to endure their lot without protest because an angry god created the universe as it is and likes things the way they and the poor must have offended him is some way, so that is why they suffer and if they disturb the social order he will torture them.

Further, they must tithe to the priestly class. Religion is a scam to promote social inequality. Religion is the [effective] opium of the people. Watch how angry the con men get when you expose their ancient scams. I wonder if the Nigerian 914 scam will ever evolve to the status of a religion.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Religion Creates Poverty; Poverty Creates Religion

The poorest countries in the world are the most religious. The poorest states within the USA are the most religious. What does that imply?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Religion Cripples Children

It is obvious to most Americans that Islam makes lives miserable for the women who are indoctrinated into it during childhood. However, they are blind to the fact the same is true for Catholicism, Judaism and Southern Evangelical churches. Forcing any irrational beliefs/superstitions on children cripples, harms and hurts them.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Religion is Delusion

Ridding the earth of religion is roughly the same task as ridding the earth of delusion and mental illness.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Religion is Driving Man To Extinction

Religion is the keystone failing of man driving us to extinction. It is a childish belief in a magic invisible superparent in the sky who will look after us no matter what stupid things we do. It is like a cosmic maid. This superparent always ignores the wails of millions being tortured in concentration camps and prisons. But that does not stop man from having absolute faith in its benevolence. The delusion lulls mankind into thinking we don’t have to grow up and take care of our earth and each other. It also make man distrust science, our successful and systematic way of finding out what is truly so, replacing it with intuition and superstition. We are undertaking a giant experiment in Darwinian evolution. If the religious people kill themselves off, they will have provided strong evidence for it. The catch is, they will probably kill those who merely tolerated their nonsense along with them.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Religion Exploits Identity

Religion exploits the part of the brain that controls identity. You can’t rationally argue someone out of their religion because they see it as who they are. To drop the religion, they must not only come to see it as false, they must drop their emotional attachments to those who share the religion, they must wean themselves of the comfort of an imaginary superparent and they must create a new identity. So perceived truth or falsehood has almost nothing to do with attachment to a religion. Think of it as like weaning a child from a dirty security blanket or a teddy bear they pretend protects them from all harm.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Religion Facilitates Murder

One of the primary functions of god is to facilitate murder. Soldiers who have swallowed the god myth are mindless puppets who will kill simply by telling them that god commands them to. Telling them they killed in god’s name anesthetises their guilt afterward.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Religion for a Living

For pastors, religion is primarily a way the earn a living. No matter how they may try to deny it, that fact drives them.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Religion Freedom

Religious freedom is not religious privilege. Christians often claim they are persecuted because the constitution prevents them from forcing their religion on others. Christians can’t get over the fact the constitution treats them the same as anyone else.

Religious freedom also includes the right to choose no religion. In other words, religious freedom includes freedom from religion. In other words, religious freedom includes the right to choose atheism. In other words, you are allowed to believe what you want vis a vis sky fairies.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Religion as Game

If you get any group of humans, children or adult, together, they will play games, perhaps in the form of dancing, sports, parlour games, or social rituals. Humans love to make up complex, fairly arbitrary rules just to test their wits against each other. Religion with its memorised myths and rituals is just such an one-upmanship game.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Religion Is Just Another Junk Science

Asking if religion has a place in public life is the same question as asking if homeopathy, astrology and ghost banishing have a legitimate part of public life.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Religion Just Like Dear Old Dad’s

Nearly everyone selects a religion/life philosophy by looking to what their parents believed. The choice has nothing to do with the merits of the religion. That is why such outlandish and patently false belief systems can persist.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Religion Leads To Genocide

People commit genocide, say for example to expropriate land. But they also commit genocide because they are offended that the other worships a different god. That is genocide that would not happen without religion. Religion encourages killing because the devout sincerely believe that cannot die or kill. It is just a game. Killing is just a way of keeping score.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Religion is a Learned Phobia

Evolution demands that young humans accept whatever their mothers tell them without question. Logic has nothing to do with it. That is why religious belief is so impervious to the usual techniques of logical persuasion. Religion is more akin to a phobia than a belief.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Religion Is Like Smoking

Religion is like smoking.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Religion Makes Men Irrational

Religion often drives men to do irrational and destructive things. For example, the ancient Egyptians collected millions of wild animals from all over Africa, including falcons and baboons. They slaughtered them and mummified them as offerings to their gods.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Religion is a Megabusiness

In the USA, religion is not just business, but megabusiness, with all that implies.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Religion is a Mind Parasite

In the insect world, there are various parasites that take over the hosts’s brain and control it to do suicidal things that benefit the parasite, e.g. Ophiocordyceps unilateralis, zombie fungus. Religion behaves in a similar way:

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Religion is More Evil than you Think

Few people realise just how evil religion is. Its purpose is to destroy the ability to reason by terrifying children into believing complete nonsense, then controlling them like cattle the rest of their lives. It is a form of mental slavery or mental castration. It is a virtual mind parasite.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Religion is Never Checking

Religion is about doing crazy things while deliberately refraining from checking if they make any sense.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Religion is Not Pure Evil

Some claim that religion is pure evil. I think that is an overstatement. I am pretty sure there are people out in the most desolate parts of Africa attempting to help the people there. They would not do this if they were not deluded into thinking a god would reward them abundantly after they died, but that is not evidence for the existence of a god.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Religion is OK

Religion is a set of stories, music, costumes, cooking… This is great, especially when everyone shares with everyone else. The problem is religion refuses to acknowledge it is just speculation. Believers claim without evidence they are uttering absolute truth and nobody else is.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Religion or Mind Control?

Asking religion or mind control? is like asking duplicity or deceit?.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Religion Should Make People Behave

You would think a divine being could come up with a philosophy that made its adherents behave significantly better. By this measure Islam, Hinduism and Christianity are clearly bogus religions. One study discovered Christianity makes 1/3 behave better and 2/3 worse, hardly the philosophy of an all-knowing being. In my own life, by the far the biggest pricks have all been Christian and not just incidentally Christian. They are pricks because of their religion which makes them think they have a right to micromanage everyone else’s lives.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Religion of Slaves

Christianity is a religion of slaves. It started out as a religion of Roman slaves to help them feel superior to their masters. Slaveowners in the American south forced it on their slaves to make them submissive. British imperialists taught it to the peoples they conquered to weaken their resistance to exploitation. The Europeans taught it to the natives to make them hand over their lands without resistance. Today the wealthy encourage it for the poor all over the world to make them accept their lot without protest and to rot their brains with superstitions and false hopes to make them powerless.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Religion vs Cult

A religion is cult with a bigger bank account and better PR. Religions seem less whacky than cults because we have had more time to get used to them.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Religion vs Science

In science, groups of people double check information before disseminating it. In religion, a single person just pulls ideas out of his ass without any checking, and pronounces them infallible and fobs them off as the words of the deity. It is simply a con, nothing noble or true about it in the least. It is so amusing the Wizard-of-Oz pomposity and holier-than-thouness religious frauds manage to pull off as a smoke screen for blithering nonsense.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Religion Warps Natural Morality

Humans have an unconscious natural morality. For example, we don’t hurt babies. It takes a religion or a military to hijack that moral system and twist it into something that condones stabbing babies to death or blowing them up with bombs.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Religion-Motivated Child Abuse

Parents who treat their children biblically as chattels, beating them, denying them any privacy, sexually abusing them, or terrifying them must be made to stop. If they refuse, they should not be permitted to be left alone with children or to acquire any new victims through pregnancy.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Religions are Dad-Bragging Boys

Christians and Muslims are like two little boys bragging about their dads, trying to top each others’ stories with more and more outlandish claims.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Religions are Lies, not Opinions

For the most part, atheists have bought the big lie that religion is like an opinion of which type of ice cream one likes best. It is polite to respect other people’s opinions. But religion is not an opinion. It is a set of deliberate lies about reality. Lies do not deserve respect no matter how much tradition is behind them.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Religions Fade

The old religions of Zeus, Jupiter, Wotan, Taranis have faded away. So surely the Abrahamic religions can fade as well. Perhaps if we know what escorted the old religions off the stage the better we would understand how to purge the scourge of Abraham.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Religions Should be Criticisable

Religions are just schools of thought, like Keynesianism. They should be just as open to examination and criticism as any other school of thought. In many parts of the world, religions use their power and threats of violence to enforce false deference.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Religiosity Vs Wealth

religiosity vs wealth

This chart graphs religiosity vs wealth. Basically it shows that the more religious you are, the poorer you are likely to be, with one exception, the USA. It shows how religion preys on the wishful thinking of the poor.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Religious Activities

Religion is not about worshiping a god. It is about exalting irrationality. It is about persecuting scapegoats. It is about self-adulation. It is about singing the praises of blind ignorance.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Religious Advertising

Advertising works by triggering both positive and negative emotions. If you buy the product, you will get more sex, people will think more highly of you, you will feel more relaxed and competent. If you don’t buy the product you will be embarrassed by your body odour, ashamed of your lawn, fearful of burglars etc. Christians have taken this up a notch. If you buy, you will have eternal drugged-out bliss. If you don’t you will have eternal torment. It is an incredibly good con since no living person knows absolutely for sure that the promise is a lie.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Religious Anachronism

Everyone laughs at the Amish who want to stay over a century out of date, avoiding electricity and motor vehicles. Yet Jews and Christians want us to affect the behaviour of people who lived over 2000 years ago, when human sacrifice was common and rape was considered an ordinary spoil of war and there was no science only superstition and everyone beat their children to within an inch of their lives.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Religious Blinders

In the USA, Christians have successfully had critical thinking removed from the high school curriculum on the grounds it might lead children to question the fundamentalist dogmas their parents have indoctrinated them with.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70) Aron Ra on American Education click to watch

Religious Brain Damage

The religious fanatic can’t see any difference between these two questions:

  1. Is there any sort of intelligent being or process that designed and created the universe?
  2. Is the holy scripture of your cult inerrant?

Religion is a type of brain impairment, like a stroke, that selectively destroys specific types of logical thinking.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Religious Burial Superstitions

Religious superstitions include:

Those people to whom the superstitions are important should fund them, not the general public.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Religious Clubs

The US Supreme Court ruled that public schools must support religious clubs. I disagree. The constitution is supposed to stop the state from promoting any particular religion.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Religious Con Men

I detest con men, people who trick, especially the poor, out of their money. Televangelists and clergy prey on the gullible promising infinite eternal bliss if they play the con and infinite eternal torment if they don’t. Threatening torture is a form of extortion. The only difference from traditional con men is these con men are almost never prosecuted and their victims rarely catch on they are being had. The con has been around so long the perpetrators have become a special privileged criminal class. They have convinced even non believers they are doing nothing disreputable.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Religious Conceit

Most of mankind’s problems stem from his monumental conceit and self-centredness. He believes in religions that preposterously flatter him that the entire universe was created solely for his benefit and he is the center of it. He believes no other species matters at all. He steals lands from them and enslaves them, and even tortures them without even allowing the interests of those other species to be heard. In the process, he forgets that he too is an animal just as dependent on the other animals, plants, water, air and soil as any other animal.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Religious Discrimination

In the USA, you can be fired or denied employment based on your religion. This is a considered a religious right of your employer.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Religious Distraction

During the dust bowl religious people proclaimed the end of the world. They blamed the choking dust on enjoying sex. This distracted people away from the real causes of their misery, ploughing land that received only 25.40 cm (10 in) of rain a year with frequent droughts, land that was only marginally suitable for grazing, much less growing wheat.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Religious Diversity

Ironically, if you want religious diversity, you need a state with a godless institution. If the state adopts an religion, it will be forcing that one religion on everyone. Look at how that happens in the countries with a state religion.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Religious Education

Religious education. What an odd term for paying the state to lie to children!

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Religious Evil

Like nationalism, the main evil of religion is convincing adherents that their wrongdoing does not count and others deserve death and eternal damnation simply for failing to believe the same cant.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Religious Exemptions

I think the three general principles of religious exemptions should be:

  1. My right not to have your religion pushed on me trumps your right to push it, e.g. no public prayers.
  2. My right to health trumps your right to observe religious superstitions, e.g. universal vaccination. This also applies to protect the children of the religious.
  3. if a religious group is given a get-out-of-jail-free exemption to some law, then everyone else automatically gets it too, e.g. motorcycle helmet law exemption.
~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Religious Exemptions

People who belong to religions often receive special exemptions from the law. For example, Sikhs are permitted to carry a dagger in places, such as airplanes, where everyone else must be unarmed. Muslim women cover their bodies head to toe and refuse to allow their faces to be looked at for police identification. Jehovah’s witnesses refuse blood transfusions for their children, even when it means death.

I don’t think there should be any religious exemptions from the law. It is wrong to give people of certain religions special privilege. Religious excuses amount to I don’t wanna and my friends who go to the same church don’t wanna either. At best, the justification amounts to tradition. There is no practical or rational motive. This is about the weakest reason to exempt the law.

On the other hand we should not make laws to suppress the people of a particular religion. There has to be a practical reason for the law. We must be willing to make reasonable accommodation, e.g. allow Sikhs to wear a dagger welded into a sheath, or carry one that is too blunt to harm anyone. We could allow Muslim women to go to a government agency where their identity could be checked by women. They could then get a high tech, temporary tattoo on the hand that could serve as id for the next few days at airports etc.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Religious Exemptions

A religious objection is just a superstition. It can be humoured when it does no damage, but only then. Religious belief should never be a get-out-of-jail free card to break criminal law. Unfortunately, many Christians imagine god’s law trumps the constitution, even for non-Christians.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Religious Expropriation

Would you respect a religion that told its followers they had the holy right to evict non-believers from the homes and expropriate them for their own use?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Zionism is such a religion.

Religious Fiction

Religion is the only area of study, other than the study of literary fiction, where all the knowledge is just made up. It is the only area where lying is mandatory.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Religious Freedom

There are two types of religious freedom:

  1. Freedom to do irrational, eccentric things that non-believers do not appreciate.
  2. Freedom from others insisting you modify your behaviour to honour their religious superstitions.

Americans honour the first and ignore the second.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Religious Freedom

When Christians say they want more freedom, they mean:

They don’t need more freedom. They are the majority. People need freedom from them.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Religious Freedom

When liberals talk about religious freedom, they mean the right to practice their religion without governmental interference. They also mean the right to reject religion altogether. When conservatives talk about religious freedom, they mean the freedom to impose Christianity on others, e.g. harassing homosexuals, funding religious displays with public money and teaching creationism in public schools.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Religious Freedom vs Religious Equality

One of the biggest misconceptions that we need to blow out the water is that religious freedom gives you legal exemption to do anything your church, preacher or holy book tells you to, in particular, harm or harass non-believers.

Religious freedom is about restraining others from interfering with you, when you want to do nutty but harmless superstitions motivated by your religion. This constraint on others allows you to behave freely.

Religious equality means the government will not treat you any better or worse, just because of which religion (if any) you subscribe to. It must act as if it were blind to your religion, giving you no special favour or discrimination.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Religious Games

Religion has very little to do with beliefs about gods. It is mainly about picking a tribe and having fun making life miserable for the tribe’s scapegoat. It also provides a place where the untalented can enjoy the pleasures of a pecking order.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Religious Headgear

Sikhs are demanding exemption from the usual rules for a soccer uniform which requires a bare head. They want to wear a turban. It has not been determined if this gives them an unfair advantage (equivalent to gloved vs ungloved baseball). They want to do it for religious reasons. The whole point of uniforms is to ensure a perfectly level playing field. If an organisation has the right to insist on a uniform, they should have the right to enforce it. If somebody said they wanted to wear long pants, or spiked heels, that organisation should have the right to say No, that is not the game we are playing. Saying you have a religious reason for something is admitting you have no reason at all for it other than tradition. That is one of the weakest reasons for imposing your superstitions on others, demanding special treatment and special exceptions. If you give Sikhs the right to wear a turban, you must simultaneously give every play the right to wear whenever headgear they wish. You should not treat Sikhs specially.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Religious Hiring Discrimination

Churches have a loophole. They can discriminate on the basis of religion in hiring. However, they can also do this when hiring people to implement faith-based initiatives, when using government money. That is not right. Faith based initiatives are not a good idea since they give government a lever to manipulate churches.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Religious Humbuggery

The people running the religions have successfully conned the public into giving them respect, and fooled most people into thinking they are doing something serious. They use music, costumes, incense and soaring architectures to hide the fact it is all nonsense and flimflam. Even secular people kowtow to irrational religious demands as more valid than rational ones.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Religious Intuition

Our universe seems to run by mathematical laws. It can produce all manner of crystals with sharp angles based on the subatomic structure. Matter is scattered around the universe in galaxies and solar systems, stars and planets. On the microscopic level, the laws of the universe are completely different. They use the uncertainty of quantum mechanics. On the galactic level, relativity bends time in mind-boggling ways. On earth we have life, from viruses, to bacteria, to microscopic life all the way to whales. We have microscopic plants called plankton all the way to redwoods.

If you are an atheist, does your intuition tell you the universe is less or more ordered than you would expect? If you are a godwit, does your intuition tell you the universe is less or more ordered than you would expect?

What trained your intuition? It was trained by life on earth playing with objects roughly the size of basketballs. It is completely wrong when it comes to the microscopic or the galactic. Why then do you trust it in realms where it has no competence? Why are you so sure you know what a god-created or a god-free universe should look like?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Religious Keystones

Cal Lightman, played by Tim Roth, in an episode of Lie To me laid cult-think (and a religion is just a popular cult) out bare for study by exaggerating it. Key features are:

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Religious Knowledge

Religious knowledge comes into being when someone has a speculation. He fancies himself so highly, he thinks this idea is so wonderful, he imagines it came direct from the creator of the universe. He does not test the idea. He sells it to others by claiming it is god’s idea, not his, and hence must be accepted without question. Everyone takes the idea on faith and declares it must never be updated, no matter what counter evidence is discovered. It may remain frozen in the minds of adherents for thousands of years. Religious knowledge is not an alternative path to truth. It is simply guesswork, barely worth the paper it is written on.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Religious Liars

The religious often trim quotes to make them mean the exact opposite of the original. What does this imply? The religious believe they have no case. They feel compelled to cheat and lie. But why do they support a cause they know is wrong? Sometimes to make money conning people. Sometimes out of tribal loyalty. We see Republicans denying climate change despite the evidence because that is what the Republican tribe believes. Sometimes because they think it is good for society if other people believe the lie.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Religious Lying

Ever since the ancient Greeks, there have been philosophers who advocated concocting a religious myth and selling it to the populace as true to frighten them into behaving. They never tested to see if this lie actually had that effect. It was sufficient that it enriched the liars and gave them power over their marks.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Religious Marketing

Religion invented the principles of modern marketing:

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Religious Movies

Where do actors get the idea that when they play in a religious movie they must:

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Religious Names

It is disrespectful to give your child an obviously Christian or Muslim name, e.g. Noah, Abraham, Jemal. It presumes your child has no right to choose his own religion.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Religious Nostalgia

All the religions arose long before humanity even knew the most basic facts of the universe. The early priests were trying to figure how the universe worked without any tools. No wonder the answers they came up with are nonsense. You could say they were creating science version 0.9. The tools we have today are millions of times better. Russell Brand and the religionists have a nostalgic attraction to this earliest science. What they are doing is like insisting on using a computer with tubes and relays, and no transistors, out of some misplaced loyalty to history.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Religious Reason = No Reason

When you say I avoid eating fish on Friday for religious reasons, it means you don’t have a reason. Oddly not having a reason is considered a stronger claim to get what you want that if you had an actual reason.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Religious Rights

Ask yourself:

If you answered no to either of those questions and you brainwash children with religious beliefs for which there is no evidence and for which there is plenty of evidence the beliefs are false, why do you do it? Do you excuse yourself because you think these delusions and false beliefs will be good for them? Do you think your gut hunch that these beliefs might possibly be true is sufficient justification to lay those freakish trips on vulnerable children as absolute certainties? Have you any inkling how much suffering you have needlessly inflicted? You abuse children simply because that was the way your parents abused you and it feels natural. This emotional abuse is similar to generational cycles of physical and sexual abuse.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Religious Rights

If a Buddhist monk who has taken a vow to take no life applies for a job in a slaughterhouse and refuses to slaughter animals and is fired, he cannot very well claim religious discrimination. The job is simply a bad fit, much as it would be for someone allergic to cattle hair. If anything, the employer should be able to sue the monk for jerking them around. Your religion should not entitle you to be paid for work you refuse to do.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Religious Rights

Religious rights should allow you to worship as you please without interference. They should not allow you to impose your will on non-believers. They should not let you harm others, particularly your children. In particular, they should not give Christians the right to harass homosexuals.

If you provide a service to the public, your religion should not excuse racism, to refuse to serve some subset of the public. For example, if you issue marriage licenses, you must issue them for blacks, mixed race couples, homosexuals, Jews, Latinos, Muslims, untouchables… If you refuse, you should be fired.

The trickiest problem is Catholics who believe contraception, abortion and euthanasia are murder. Should a pharmacist be allowed to refuse to fill a prescription? Should a doctor be allowed refuse to let his patient talk to physician-assisted suicide counselor? I think they should be allowed to withdraw, but they must not seriously interfere the patient’s rights. They should be obligated to hand the patient over to someone without those objections. If they refuse to do so, they should be fired.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Religious Scientists

How can there be religious scientists? A young person was indoctrinated as a Christian, however, the parents did not actively discourage curiosity. The student learned science at university. This challenged religious beliefs, but they could not abandon them. The primal fear of eternal torture was too great, even if irrational. They learned to compartmentalise, effectively becoming atheist to do science and a Christian to socialise with their families.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Religious Second Hand Smoke

Religion is like tobacco addiction. You have no business forcing people to give up tobacco, but on the other hand, you shouldn’t have to put up with users forcing the stink on you, or trying to push it on others, especially your children.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Religious Sensitivity

A man will feel far more offended if you question his religion than if you criticise his wife, denounce his political party or trash his favourite football team.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Religious Speculation

Religious assertions about science are just speculation. Whenever they make a lucky guess, the religionists then try to claim that just making stuff up (revelation) is a more reliable road to truth than the scientific method. They also conveniently forget the 99% false guesses.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Religious Squabbles

I have extreme contempt for Christians and Muslims killing each other. It is as though they are arguing whether the sky fairy dyes his beard pink or blue. It is all bullshit. It is all just made up. Religion is just an excuse to fight.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Religious Subsidies

The government has for a long time given subsidies to churches to encourage church attendance, as if this made people behave better. Statistics show the opposite. Churches do not pay property taxes or income taxes. The US government gives the churches $82.5 billion dollars in subsidies each year.

There are groups that are very much like churches, such as the Humanist Association. They meet each week to discuss ethical and philosophical questions. They do good works. However, they get no subsidy at all? Why? Their beliefs are based on evidence. They are not batshit crazy enough to count as a religion worthy of subsidy. We only subsidise religions that are absurd.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Religious Symbols

When you wear religious symbols, what are you doing?

I think it reasonable for an employer to ask his employees not to proselytize, ditto school teachers. These affectations have no purpose other than tradition. It is odd we most honour eccentricities that are the most arbitrary.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Religious Taboo

One of the strongest American religious taboos is against cross examining any person who talks about what she/he will do after she/he is dead, or about her/his experiences talking with angels or dead people. It is similar the way American adults pretend to believe the Santa Claus myth in front of children.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

The Religious Temperament

Religion is about controlling people through fear. Fear of a bogey man invisible god does not work on non-believers. So they use threat of torture.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Religious Trap

Religions are a lot easier to fall into that get out of. Aren’t things like that usually called traps?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Religious Trinkets for Haiti

The people of Haiti need prayers and crucifixes as much as they need dried lizards. Instead, they need people eager to get on with the hard work of caring for the injured and homeless. Christians who waste time with liturgical magic are con men and/or lazy buggers looking for any excuse to avoid real work.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Religious Truth

Truths that are not based on facts are mere speculation. They are just made up and never tested. They might be true, but they don’t deserve the status of truth when they have the same provenance as fiction.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Religious Truth

When a Christian says something is true, they mean they think it would be beautiful/wonderful if it were true, therefore in their heart they know it has to be true. Christian truth is what everyone else calls wishful thinking, fabrication or outright lie. Because they are so loose with the word truth, you can never trust Christians.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Religious Vandal

Bishop Diego de Landa managed to destroy all but four Mayan manuscripts. He considered his act of cultural vandalism a virtue — eliminating paganism.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Religious Vs Scientific Truth Determination

The scientist is usually willing to admit he was wrong and to accept a new idea, but he will only do that when the evidence for the new idea is better than for the old. Religious people cling to old ideas. They require no evidence. They don’t mind mountains of contrary evidence. They pick their ideas based on how emotionally appealing they find them. Evidence is completely irrelevant.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Religious with Limits

You have the right to do irrational or downright nutty things, even suicidal things, e.g. refuse medical treatment, in the name of religion or eccentricity, but only if you don’t harm others.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70) Or as John Stuart Mill put it The only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not sufficient warrant .

Religiously Protected Crimes

Freedom of religion creates a protected class of crimes. In the name of religion, one may legally con people out of money, extort money with threats, lie, make false promises, make death threats, accuse others of wickedness without evidence, encourage others to commit murder and molest children.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70) Deliver Us from Evil

Relishing Suffering

Christians are obsessed with the cross. Normally people only relish the details of executions of criminals and people they hate. Christians get off on suffering, even god’s suffering. It is a sadistic religion.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

The Remote Chance

Every Christian who has tried to convert me admits the odds that god exists are very remote, however, if I reject the notion, and he does exist, god the ogre will torment me for eternity. This is more like capitulating to a Mafia don than worshiping a divine being, hardly exemplary behaviour. Even Christians think god is most probably imaginary. Imagine a little boy trying to convince you of the reality of monsters under the bed because of their viciousness.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Remote Possibility of God

Christians like to tell me that even though there is no evidence for god, I cannot mathematically prove he does not exist. Therefore I should do what Christians tell me and give them 10% of my income. I cannot mathematically prove that a coven of 12 tutu-wearing elves did not create and maintain the universe either. I have equal evidence for both. Every handwaving argument Christians give for a creator god applies equally well to the coven. Both gods are equally competent at ignoring prayer, doing nothing to protect believers from harm and failing to keep all promises. Yahweh is the Donald Trump of gods. Both are equally absurd. If I accepted Yahweh, to be consistent, I would have to accept the coven too.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Repeated Assertion

Christianity is the ultimate example of argument by repeated assertion.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Repeating Lies

Lies do not become any truer by repetition, but the do become more universally believed.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Repetition Makes Nonsense Sound Obvious

Christians have no evidence at all for their claims. It is just that they repeated the claims so often they sound obvious.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Reporting Shootings

I get annoyed at people of faith reporting mass murders. Why?

I know that most reporters are believers. However, they could be trained not to push their personal religious superstition on their audiences.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Reproducing Miracles

Modern day magicians can reproduce nearly all of the biblical miracles and many more impressive ones. That suggests we should not hold biblical miracles in such awe.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Reptile Morality

Reptiles are cold-blooded. They put considerable effort into finding and conserving heat. As a side effect, they need only about 1/10 the food of a correspondingly sized mammal. If intelligent life in other parts of the galaxy are similarly cold-blooded, they would look down on us humans for being so ridiculously wasteful of energy, both in terms of calories and in our use of energy-gobbling machines to magnify our energy consumption.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Republicans: Watch What I Say, Not What I Do

With Republicans what counts is what you say, not what you do. You can smoke pot, have sex in airport restrooms, cheat on your wife, molest your children, have an abortion, hire illegal immigrant servants, take bribes, worship Satan… so long as you publicly soundly decry these activities.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Requests from the Dead

Christians are so superstitious, that they will almost never refuse a request from a dead person, but they have no problem at all refusing while that person is still alive.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Residential Schools

The Canadian federal government decided the genocide of native culture and religion could best be implemented by taking native children from their homes and raising them in residential schools run by the Catholics, Anglicans and the United Church. The official policy was to take the Indian out of the Indian.

The children, both male and female, were beaten and raped. Even the female caretakers participated in the sexual abuse. The children were given inadequate amounts of food containing worms and insects. They were denied medical care. Their caretakers beat Christianity into them. They did this for seven generations before it was finally stopped. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission discovered thousands of unmarked graves. They estimated the churches killed at least 7000 children. Almost nobody responsible was criminally charged or publicly shamed.

I think those Christians should be charged and publicly shamed. I think the assets of those churches should be used to pay reparations. I think the doors of those churches should be permanently closed. Keeping them open is like maintaining monuments to the Nazis.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Resistance

If it is justified to throw someone out of a lifeboat for endangering the lives of its occupants, then it is also justified to throw a Christian climate change denier off lifeboat earth. Offering no resistance is like a Jew going meekly to Hitler’s death camps. Christians yearn to see earth destroyed. They have no right to take everyone else with them.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Resistance to Conversion

Look how many times throughout history that Jews, Christians and Muslims were threatened with death to get them to convert to a sister religion, but they were so terrified of torture in the afterlife, that they refused. No wonder it is so difficult to persuade them to give up their superstitions altogether using only reason.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Resolving Differences

People love to share whatever it is they know. That is one of the reasons people find it so hard to keep a secret. You normally would not want to broadcast knowledge that is not so. When you encounter someone who disagrees, say on the existence of god, one of you has to be wrong. How do you tell which? The scientist’s way of resolving this is you both present your evidence for your belief and your case against the other’s assertion. This may be followed by experiments to resolve contentious issues. The Christian’s way of resolving this is to plug one’s ears with wax to avoid contamination with dissenting ideas and denounce the other as wicked spawn of the devil.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Resorting to Magic

The same brain we use to solve problems and create scientific explanations, can also misfire and generate a belief in magic, superstition and religion. Watch a young child trying to make sense of the world. If we can’t think of a good answer, we satisfy ourselves with a bad one.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Respect

At the best, Christians should expect respect of their religion equivalent to the respect they offer volcano gods. To others, they are just as ridiculous.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Respect

Christians believe they are privileged to ignore the constitution and shove their religion down the throats of non-believers. They do this by forcing Christian prayer, teaching creationism instead of science, the annual Christmas avalanche, imposing Christian superstitions about euthanasia, abortion, and GLBTQ on non-believers. In some parts of the USA, you can go to jail for 12 months for refusing to acknowledge Yahweh as the source of all safety. That is positively medieval. Christians claim non-believers have no morals, we all rapists and we are all criminals. These charges are not in the least true.

When non-believers resist by saying they do not believe the bible, Christians leap to their feet, and scream they have been insulted and disrespected. Christians are completely unaware of how their day-to-day behaviour toward non-believers is insulting and disrespecting. Christians are being ridiculously sensitive. Telling someone you don’t agree with them is perfectly polite.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Respect for Delusion

Christians often demand that I treat their claims with the same reverence I would treat a scientist or historian presenting an alternate theory I disagreed with. I don’t always humour mentally ill people, by pretending to believe their delusions. I see no reason I should be forced to do that for Christians. If Christians want my respect, they would have to present evidence and respond to mine, the way sane people do.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Respect My Religion!

When a Christian commands me to respect his religion he is demanding I respect his hallucinations, his OCD and his rape of children. How can he even respect himself?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Respecting Beliefs

When people from different religions respect each others’ beliefs, they are like con men agreeing not to expose each others’ scams.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Respecting Christians

Imagine you came across a group of people who insisted 2 + 2 = 5, no matter what you did to demonstrate to them that could not possibly be so. They asserted the answer was merely a matter of opinion. Would you treat them as your intellectual equals? Would you respect their beliefs? Of course not. You would consider them raving loons, though you might keep that to yourself, the way you might humour mental patients or out of politeness. When Christians assert scientific absurdities they are claiming things even sillier than 2 + 2 = 5. The way they earnestly believe themselves to be experts requires stifling a horse laugh.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Respecting Faith

If a Christian says How dare you fail to respect my faith he might as well have said How dare you fail to respect my belief in leprechauns. Though both are highly unlikely, leprechauns are not quite as improbable as the god Yahweh.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Respecting Religion

Imagine a group of con men. They informally collude, agreeing to respect each others’ cons so they all can continue to fleece the gullible. That is what the churches have going with their agreement not to poke holes in each others’ BS. They convince everyone that religion is a sacred cow. You are not allowed to point out what bullshit it is. That would be rude. It reminds me of a taboo not to notice a kilogram of human feces on an altar in the family home. You have to pretend you approve and that it does not stink.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Respecting Religion

Respecting religion makes as much sense as respecting untreated schizophrenia.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Restricting Movement

How long before GPS technology is used to track everyone’s location and social status is measured by how large a territory you are permitted to wander without getting a special security clearance visa, even for movement in your own city or country?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Results of Abuse

Christians say, My father beat me to a pulp. I am living proof thrashing with a rod is good for the child. or My grandmother scared me silly with hellfire. It has made me an upstanding person. I respond No it didn’t. It made you into a pathetic shell of a person with your ability to reason cauterised, your compassion excised and your joy for life exterminated. You are suffering from Stockholm syndrome and you don’t even know it. Imagine if Kellogg’s used sales tactics like that in its ads aimed at kids.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

The Resurrection

If even St. John did not buy the resurrection, why should modern Christians?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

The Resurrection Religions

There are all kinds of religions whose god, has twelve disciples, is crucified, who dies for three days, and comes back to life. It turns out these are all astrological metaphors for the way the sun stops moving for three days each year at the solstice in the constellation of the Southern Cross. There are good reasons to think Christianity uses the same metaphor.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70) Religion debunked - Christianity - The Greatest Story Ever Sold click to watch

Resurrection Variations

The story of the resurrection has optional elements in the various gospels including a male angel, an earthquake, an opened/closed tomb and zombies running all over the place. Can you imagine telling the story and leaving out an element of the story that dramatic? If all variants were written by god, god surely should have got his story straight.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Retreat From Science

One of the reasons the USA is collapsing as a world economic power is the population is retreating from science into medieval religious superstition.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Retribution

When gays are murdered by Christian or Muslim extremists, retribution is illegal, but certainly justified. Nearly all the churches and mosques taught that it was a good thing to kill gays. Even the moderate ones egged the terrorists on.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Revelation: Yet Another Scary Story

Why is Revelation even scarier than Stephen King for some people? It is just another scary story, written by someone twisted, but otherwise an ordinary human. Even though there is no evidence at all Revelation is true, people enjoy scaring themselves by pretending it is. There is no reason a ancient futurist writer should be more accurate than one writing today. However, Christians idiotically presume anything written sufficiently long ago must automatically be 100% true, even when it obviously is not because of all the errors and inconsistencies.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Revering the Church

People who revere the Catholic church as god’s agent on earth, knowing how it exploits the poor and abuses children emotionally, physically and sexually, must have a pretty dim view of god.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Reversing the Population Explosion

Given what hell planet earth will be with twice the population and what a heaven it could be with half the population, You’d think sheer greed would reverse the population explosion. However, Catholics don’t think that way. They are willing to destroy the earth with a locust swarm of humanity so long as it ends with more Catholics than Muslims.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Revision via Schism

Churches claim their holy books were divinely written. Thus they cannot change them. The only way a church can substantially update its doctrine is to have a schism. Imagine if countries worked that way. Every time you wished to change a law, you had to split off a new country.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Revolting Attraction

The appeal of Christianity is utterly baffling. It is like an addition to kitsch, falsehood, hypocrisy and the phony.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Revolting Catholics

When Catholics discovered they had been donating 10% of their lifetime income to the world’s biggest paedophile ring, they did not bat an eye. When Catholics discovered they had been handing their kids over to priests for molesting and rape, they were unconcerned. What is the matter with these people? I would not let a Catholic in my home. These people are far worse than perverts. They have no excuse of any kind. They are motivated by phegmatism.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Revulsion

Have you ever encountered someone babbling or arguing to the themselves without a cellphone? You felt revulsion. Why? You want to avoid having to deal with someone who is not quite all there, who might do something unexpected and quite possibly unpleasant.

It never occurs to Christians that many people politely avoid them for the same reason. Christians harbour all kinds of delusions. They are more gullible than two-year olds. They are as stubborn as 90-year olds. They are barely literate but imagine they are greater experts on every conceivable target than anyone else on the planet. They have a small set of nutty ideas they repeat over and over.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Revulsion

There is no way I could explain to Christians how revolting their religion is, how silly, how obviously false. I will try. Imagine going to some desert island. Deformed, retarded people dragged themselves up to you and explained in pigeon English that the cheap, shoddy, dirty costume jewelry they were wearing allowed them to fly. They were trying to sell it to you. No one, of course, was willing to demonstrate.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) Tags

The Amish are resisting mandatory RFID tags on their cattle. I find it ironic that they would have almost no chance of prevailing in court even if they could prove the tags increased infection or were not necessary, but will have a very good chance with an irrational religious superstition that the tags are the mark of the beast.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Rhode Island

Roger Williams was kicked out of Massachusetts for promoting religious tolerance. He went next door and founded Rhode Island based on separation of church and state.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Ridding Christians of God Phobia

I am pretty sure there is at least one Christian who believes that the odds of the god Yahweh existing are better than the odds of winning the Lotomax. They are terrified of this sadistic old ghost and are terrified of offending him. One way to convince them this is an imaginary fear is to use blasphemy. Show them you are unafraid to say things this old goat would find infuriating and if he existed, worth a thunderbolt or two. The main way people lose fear is by watching other people showing no fear. Being polite and refusing to tweak Yahweh’s beard, makes it look like you are afraid of him too. Further, we should not pretend to respect that which we do not. It is dishonest and fools boobs who do respect it, into thinking everyone does. e.g. the Pope, crackers soaked in imaginary blood, Leviticus…

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Ridding the World of Superstition

Imagine a country where the majority of the people had a sexually transmitted disease and most refused treatment. As a doctor, you would have a heck of a time making inroads against the epidemic. No sooner had you treated someone, they would be re-infected. This is what faces a rationalist trying to rid the United States of religious superstition.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Ridiculing Christians

If even Voltaire ridiculed Christians, why should we pretend to take their beliefs seriously?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Ridiculous God

Christians sometimes say, I don’t believe in god sitting on a cloud with a white beard. That is ridiculous. Yet isn’t an invisible god sitting on a cloud who tortures people for eternity for the most minor transgressions even more ridiculous?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Ridiculous Yahweh

The main reason I reject the Yahweh hypothesis is that Yahweh is so totally unlike anything else in nature. Yahweh stinks of human-creation as much as a sweaty jockstrap. The universe treats mankind as just another species of monkey. The god of the universe should be not me so man-like.. Yahweh’s alleged parochial fascination and adoration of one tiny country, Israel is just ridiculous. It a result of Israeli conceit and chauvinism not divine attributes.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Right to an Opinion

Let’s say you tuned into CBC radio to listen to two pundits review two books about the history of the Algonquin people in Canada. Pundit A liked book A and said book B was rubbish and pundit B liked book B and said book A was rubbish. Then you discovered Pundit A had read both books, but pundit B had only read book B. Whose opinion would you value more? Christian pundits are like pundit B, trashing science without knowing the first thing about it, or why we think it is so, or the consequences to our technological world if science were indeed completely wrong. They are as fraudulent as pundit B.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

The Right To Be Wrong

Christians often argue for the right to believe whatever they want — for the right to be wrong. This right is guaranteed by the American and Canadian constitutions. However, if you know something is not so, and you profess that it is, you are lying with the intent of misleading others. Similarly, if you assert that something is definitely so, when there is nothing but wishful thinking to back it up, that too is lying. Lying is immoral by every religious and philosophical system. Further, lying to yourself inevitably leads you to make poorer quality decisions than if you base your decisions on what you think most likely is the truth.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

The Right To Life Ends At Birth

It is amusing how eager Christians are to use the latest fertility technology, but often reject other forms of modern medicine, particularly vaccines. They like creating life, but have not much stomach for sustaining it. For Christians, the right to life ends at birth.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Right?

They can’t all be right, but they can all be wrong (referring to the planet’s 60,000 religions.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Ritual Cannibalism

All priests claim to be capable of performing some amazing magic. They claim to convert a cracker literally into a bloody hunk of human flesh. They claim to convert a beaker of wine (or grape juice) literally into the blood of a man who has been dead 2000 years. If you look at the results, nothing changes. If you taste the wafer, it has not a whiff of meat. If you analyse the wine, there is not a trace of human DNA in it. They are lying. This is an Emperor’s New Clothes style miracle. If they are lying about this, what else are they lying about?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Roedy’s Epistle to the Corinthians

But it is not true!

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Imagine being able to send parchmentgrams, very terse, back into history.

Roman Christianity

Romans promoted Christianity? Some historians say they even had the gospels composed. Why?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Romans and Jews

Isn’t it odd in the new Testament the villains are played by the Jews, not the Romans, even though there was a Jewish rebellion against Rome going on at the time.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Rorschach Test

Christianity and the bible are like a Rorschach test. Different people see a completely different set of life rules. Most people ignore (or never read) 99%of the bible. People single out a few verses that they consider important, primarily for others to follow. The bible is a Chinese menu. It is also a sci-if novel about superpowers that would be fun if they were true, such as walking on water, making things appear just by wishing to a magic genie for them and controlling the weather.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

The Rotted Tree

The Catholic church has been tottering ever since 1347 when the great plague that killed half the population in Europe proved the church has no supernatural power whatsoever. Like a great tree, rotten to the core, it can still take centuries for it to fall.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Rubbish Sung is Still Rubbish

Rubbish, endlessly repeated, is still rubbish. Setting it to music, adding costumes, intoning in sonorous voices, echoed by angelic choir boys, wafting incense… It is still rubbish.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Rude Atheists

Christians often complain that atheists are rude to them. Atheists are contemptuous, short and angry. Why?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Rudeness of Virginity

I am surprised that people talk about virgins in polite society. They are effectively making comments about the state of various women’s vaginas. It is almost like Borat asking a woman if she has polyps in her ass.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Rules of Combat

Most birds and animals have strict rules of play for fights involving mating. Usually rules work to ensure no fatalities. The sparring pair work on the honour system. They need no referee. Humans, despite their 60,000 religions, have no-holds barred (including torture, banned weapons, attacking children and the elderly) for fighting each other. Oddly, Christians assert that only humans can be moral.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Rwanda

Rwanda is the most Christian country in the world in terms of ratio of churches to people. It is also famous for the Hutu/Tutsi genocide.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Saccharine Christian Propaganda

The comic strips Family Circus and Dennis the Menace represent the saccharine side of Christian propaganda.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Sacred Cows

Even though the Indian constitution claims it is a secular country, it is illegal to possess or eat beef because the Hindu religion claims cows are sacred.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Sacrifice

How would killing your kid’s pet guinea pig make anything better? It won’t undo any of your son’s transgressions. If you need something to die in agony before you can forgive, you are one sadistic puppy. The notion that a crucifixion undid the transgressions of the world makes absolutely no sense. If a god wanted to undo transgressions, he would directly undo them, or perhaps forgive them. There is no point whatsoever to even more suffering. That just makes matters worse.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Sacrificing Family Members

Pope Ratzinger pontificated that if one has HIV, one must not use a condom when having sex with one’s wife. Presumably the intent is to infect her with HIV, conceive a child and infect the child too with HIV.

This reminds me of the story of Abraham getting the nutty idea is his head that god wanted him to sacrifice his son Isaac.

Ratzinger also said it is preferable to rape a child than to feel sexual attraction to someone of the same sex without acting on it. Ratzinger is mad and apparently a paedophile himself. He belongs in a cell for the criminally insane. Thankfully he was quietly forced from office.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Sadistic Bastard

In story of Job, Yahweh tortures Job just for amusement. He kills his family. Christians tell me this demonstrates god’s love and goodness. I say it demonstrates that Yahweh is a corrupt, sadistic bastard, obviously. Why are Christians in such deep denial? Christians are trained from infancy to fear Yahweh. He is like some tyrant. They must pretend to love him. They must pretend he is virtuous. If they don’t he will torture and kill them. So they lie, and lie and lie.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Sadistic God

If you buy the Christian idea that everything that happens to you and others is god’s doing, then you cannot help but conclude he is a sadistic, uncaring bastard completely unworthy of worship.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Sadistic God

Imagine a psychopath who locked a family in a basement vault without food and told them to feast off each other. He provided no tools for humanely dispatching each other. Christians tell us such an elderly bearded mega-psychopath lives on a cloud and directs all species of earth to play his sick game. That is such a perverse fantasy that this ghastly feature of existence was deliberately intended.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Sadistic Saint

In 1712, 153 years after his death, the Catholic church canonised Pope Paul IV, the grand Inquisitor, master torturer and mass murderer. He is still a saint. What does that tell you about the true nature of the Catholic church?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Safe To Believe in God

Music composition is one of the few fields where belief in god does not make you incompetent.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Safety In Numbers

Pick a religion at random. Pick a belief in that religion at random. Imagine there were only one person on earth with that belief. We would consider them mentally ill. The only reason we treat them as sane is because there are so many other people sharing that belief. It is not because the belief itself has any merit. They are still deluded, just like a mental patient.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Saint Is the Opposite of Education

Naming a school, university or hospital after a Christian saint is an oxymoron.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Saintly Inquisition

Aquinas thought heretics should be killed outright. Augustine recommended torture for heretics. This lead to the inquisition. The modern church treats these men as saints.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Sales Pitches At Funerals

Funerals are a bonanza for the prosletysing pastor. He has a fresh captive audience that thinks it would be disrespectful to walk out. Nobody dare argue with the pastor or point out lies or distortions. It is his house, so he has the authority to command people to say or sing things they violently disagree with. The bereaved somehow think they are obligated to deliver their friends into the hands of these hucksters, even when the deceased is an atheist. The deceased, even when devout, would be mightily embarrassed if they knew what a crass experience they had subjected their friends to.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Sales Resistance

Atheism is a particular kind of sales resistance. Atheists don’t buy a sales pitch based on peer pressure and emotion without any supporting evidence. This should not be considered a wicked thing. It should be a rebuke to the incompetent sales pitch of the Christians. Parents who throw their 13 year old daughter onto the street for not being gullible to their inept Christian sales pitch are being immensely unfair.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Same Con; Different Stooges

Harold Camping Harold Camping (1921-07-19 2013-12-15 age:92) played the same end-of-the-world con three times, each time raking in millions of dollars and completely destroying gullible idiots who believed him and divested themselves of every possession. His is an old con, one most popular in the year 1000 and 2000. But what bothers me in the way the law and the media treat this old goat. They pretend he a pitiable character who was humiliated by being repeatedly mistaken in his calculations. source

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70) source

Same Dismissal

If you went to a mental hospital and a gaunt young man, one of the patients, wearing a towel draped around his head came up to you and said, God talks to me, you know. He told me that he hates you and he is planning to torture you., you would not take this threat too seriously. When a Christian makes a similar threat, he deserves the same dismissal. The only difference is there are so many delusional Christians there is not room in the mental hospitals for them all.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Sanctuary

Even in modern day Canada, the church can trump secular authority, by giving sanctuary to people the police wish to arrest.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Satan

Christians are somewhat confused about the rôle of Satan. Sometimes he is Yahweh’s formidable opponent. Other times to works for Yahweh as hell’s janitor.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Satanist Christians

Christians helped the Jews kick the Palestinians out of their ancestral lands because of a belief in biblical prophesy. These kooks are effectively Satanists because they are attempting to hurry up the reign of Satan.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Satanists

Christians are so annoying. They insist we atheists actually believe in god but hate him. They have us confused with satanists. We atheists merely assert that Christians have never been able to come up with sufficiently convincing arguments to support their absurd claims about the existence of god.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Saudi Nitwits

In Saudi Arabia, for religious reasons, women are not permitted to drive, even in an emergency. Saudi males consider it more important to express their superiority to females than to make it to the hospital in an emergency. A ambulance will refuse to transport a women unless accompanied by a male relative.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Saving Endangered Species

It really does not make much sense to pray to god for endangered species when it is humans driving them extinct.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Scale of Intuition

We humans spend our entire lives on the surface of earth at the size scale of apples and elephants. Our intuition develops based on what we see happening around us. Then we (especially Christians) childishly imagine that everywhere and everywhen else must behave the same way. It does not. At the quantum level, or the cosmic level, the rules are completely different.

You must abandon all common sense, and feel your way with the math that describes this weird world. Particles just pop into and out of existence. Touching an atom instantly changes another one light years away. Electrons jump from place to place without bothering to go anywhere in between. Radioactive decay happens completely randomly without cause.

This boggled even Einstein when he complained that God does not play dice with the universe. Quantum mechanics raped his intuition.

I am a quite limited being compared with the universe, so I quite expect to be boggled. The universe has no duty to make sense to my primitive intuition. It is childish of creationists to demand it do so over a century since we discovered it definitely does not.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70) Quantum Leap: how matter behaves at the atomic level click to watch

Scamming Millions with Religious Nonsense

Harold Camping Religious radio evangelist, that dozy looking man at the right, Harold Camping (1921-07-19 2013-12-15 age:92), predicted the world would end on 2011-05-21 at 6 PM (timezone unspecified).

Through such scams, he amassed $120 million. His followers were encouraged to give him all their possessions so they will be penniless and rapture-ready. His followers are apparently unaware of the antiquity of this scam. Evangelist con men scammed tens of thousands in the year 1000. The victims had to live out the rest of their lives in destitution.

The victims are incredibly stupid. If an evangelist truly believed this crap, why would they be accumulating goods?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Scapegoat Sacrifice

Surely someone has does an experiment. They slit the throat of the family guinea pig to see if things got better. Did people feel any less guilty? Of course not. They would feel even worse about tormenting the poor guinea pig. This Christian claim that torturing others is good for your well being is stark raving bonkers. An idea like that belongs more in ISIS culture than Christian.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Scapegoating

The notion of scapegoating is central to Judaism and Christianity namely that sins of one person can be propitiated by punishing someone or something else. That is a crazy and immoral idea. You might call it the fungible fluid theory of evil.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Schizophrenic on Satan

Satan is described simultaneously as the most beautiful of the angels and as a hideous, cloven hoofed, horned one. Will the Christians please make up their minds.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

The Schizophrenic Roots

If you are a Christian, your mind is probably roiling over with turgid fantasies about judgment day. How do you know how that stuff will happen? Somebody told you. How did they know? Somebody told them… If you take it back far enough the source is always some schizophrenic guy who heard voices in his head that he presumed were some deity. Would you pick stocks that way? Would you decide which brand of car to buy that way? Of course, not. Then why do you base your whole life on such blithering nonsense?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

School for Chumps

Imagine you were a crooked businessman. What would be your ideal world? You would want gullible customers who did not complain. You would want gullible customers who believed whatever you told them no matter how many times in past what you said had proved untrue or how preposterous your claims were. You would want gullible customers who would hand over their money and demand nothing in return. What would be the best school to create such customers? Hmm. Hint, it begins with Christian Church. It is school for making people stupid and gullible.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

School Prayer

Christians complain they cannot pray in school. That is not true. They can pray all they want. It is just they are not allowed to force everyone else to pray to their god. They imagine they should have that right because they think they are right and everyone else is wrong.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Sci-Fi Metaphor

One of the classic science fiction plots is some virus causes mass insanity. The protagonist is left as one of the few sane people. This, of course, is a metaphor for what it is like to be surrounded by people infected with religious beliefs.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Science Education

The USA used to be #1 in science education. Now it is #37, at the bottom of the pack of developed nations. How did this happen? Creationists invaded the classroom and replaced teaching science with teaching superstition.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Science is Futile

When someone says, Science does not and cannot understand that. God is in charge. He is effectively saying There is no point in trying to understand that, ever. It is impossible. Even trying to understand is highly wicked. Give up! I know this because of what some desert dwellers wrote 3000 years ago.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Science is Hard

Particularly Christians reject science because they refuse to do the work to understand it. Science is hard because the universe is complicated. Religions don’t have that problem. They can compose their story simple enough for even their most doltish adherents.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Science Prevailed Even in the Worst of Times

Even in times when the church has absolute power and nearly everyone was superstitious, science and reason gradually prevailed. The truth about how things actually work give you powers that false beliefs do not. This means the crazies will eventually be pushed back, if they don’t manage to destroy us all first.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Science Takes Work

Why do so many people reject science? Because to understand it properly is difficult. It requires mathematics. People would prefer to be lazy and believe some comfy wooly nonsense and deceive themselves they actually know something.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Science vs Faith

I watched atheists Larry Krauss and Michael Shermer debate Christians Dinesh D’Souza and Ian Hutchinson. The Christians taunted the atheists with how could scientists be sure that after watching Newton’s laws obeyed millions of times, it would be possible to notice god rarely performing a miracle and doing something non-Newtonian. The atheists pointed out nobody had ever seen this happen and if it did happen they would be sure to take a look. There are millions of instruments going about their routine business that would notice.

To me the Christians are barking mad. They are absolutely convinced of the existence of god even though they have never seen any evidence at all of his alleged bending of Newton’s laws. Further, they seem to think the relative certainty of the atheists is disreputable even though 100% of the evidence supports their contention there are no magical exceptions. In contrast, the Christians are 100% sure of god, without any supporting evidence whatsoever displaying not even a shred of embarrassment.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70) Debate: does science refute god? click to watch

Science vs Religion

One big difference between science and religion is that the experts in science claim to understand the science and they agree with each other. Religious experts, on the other hand, insist the tenets of their faith are incomprehensible and mysterious and they have reached no consensus.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Science vs Religion

Science does not work like religion. In religion, you just decide to believe anything that appeals to you. It has nothing to do with evidence or what is true.

In science, before something is considered true, several teams have to perform the same experiment and get the same result. It then has to be published in a peer review journal where a team of scientists go over the paper with a fine tooth comb looking for minor errors. People who read the paper, write in with their criticisms which are published. They ensure the results are consistent with other published papers. If anyone is ever caught cheating, that is the end of their career. It is not a perfect system, but for deciding truth, it works infinitely better than faith.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Science vs Religion

Science has a different set of tools for determining what is true about the universe. When religious people claim religion is better, it is not because religion gets more precise math on how the universe behaves. They talk about why religion is more emotionally satisfying. Science has two main techniques:

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Scientific Truth

In science, for an idea to be accepted, it has to be both true and useful. If it does not imply anything else, if it can’t be falsified it is just a decorative, useless truth. Creationists have nothing to say that is true in the scientific sense. That is why creationists have never been able to use their beliefs to invent anything or discover anything, not even once.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Scientific vs Christian Truth

When a scientist decides if something is true he takes his time.

On the other hand, the Christian decides by a much simpler process. He consults his gut.

This leads American Christians to some strange conclusions: e.g. that America did not invade Afghanistan or Iraq unprovoked, that American soldiers never killed any children, except a few in accidents, that American soldiers cannot commit war crimes since by definition anything America does is good, that the USA has the most solid economy in the world, that the US military is only used to defend freedom.

Christians deny this basic reality: whether something is true has absolutely nothing to do with whether they wish it were true.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Scientific Word Salads

One the popular styles of debating that the godists use is to throw out a word salad of scientific terms. What they say sounds vaguely like science, but it is just gibberish. Its point is to snow you, to try to convince you that they know more about science and religion than you and so you should defer. Deepak Chopra is a master of this. He is also a master of extracting money from the pockets of the gullible. Richard Dawkins is one of the few to call him on it.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Scientologists Vs Christians

Scientologists are just as crazy as the Christians; it is just that the Christians have had a 2000 year head start.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Scientology Plague

It is bad enough for Tom Cruise to believe insane things without using his celebrity to infect others.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Scorn Christians for their Own Good

Since Christians are motivated to cling to Christianity by fear of social disapproval, we who are hoping to free them of their delusions, pretty well have to use social disapproval when they engage in superstition. For now, I am not going after any other religion. Christianity is in my sites because they meddle so strongly in the affairs of non-believers, a side effect of the inevitable power corrupts.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

The Scoundrel Billy Graham

I consider Billy Graham a scoundrel because he preached things with utter conviction he had never checked even in the most cursory way to see if they were true.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Screw Respect

President Obama is calling on all religions to respect each other. In other words, everyone is supposed to pretend they believe the unsubstantiated assertions of every other religion. They are not supposed to let on they consider them absurd. That sounds on the surface like a noble goal, but it is actually a foolish conspiracy to keep people mired in superstition. We need a balance. We need to poke fun of each others’ religions, so that people know not everyone shares their beliefs, but not so viciously as to provoke violence.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Screw Truth

Christians don’t really care about the literal truth of their assertions. What is important is how they make them feel. They look on their doctrines as the rest of us might adjudicate music. I have heard Christians say they like Christianity because of the candles and the incense. The literal words are as irrelevant as do-wa-diddy-diddy.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Scrutiny

Scientific ideas and religious ideas should be subject to the same intense scrutiny.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Seagull Crucifixion

On 2012-08-02, a seagull impaled itself on a spike on top of St. Patrick’s Catholic church in St. John’s Newfoundland. They left it there for three days in the 30°C (86°F) heat until it died.

Liberal MP (Member of Parliament), Scott Andrews andrews.s@parl.gc.ca, of the Topsail United Church, said gulls are like seals… no one would miss one… get a hakapik [a tool for taking revenge on seals for eating fish by hacking them to death] and put it out of his misery.

So much for Christian compassion. I would have thought the notion of a three day crucifixion would have been more compelling to Christians. Did no one in the whole city have a suitable ladder or a 22 rifle?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70) source

Secret of Christian Virtue

Christians are like alcoholics who think booze in the secret of their exemplary virtue.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Secular Tolerance

In a secular society, just how free should fundamentalists be to live their traditional lives?

My thinking is, you should treat people who belong to fundamentalist religions the same way you would treat anyone else. You would not let your Humanist neighbours hurt their kids, so I see no reason to let fundamentalists get away with it.

If somebody put up a 12,000 watt Christmas display, I see no reason you should not ask them why they did it. If people wear odd clothing, peculiar hair styles or exhibited other attention-getting behaviour, surely they want to tell you why they are doing it, unless they are embarrassed about it, were bullied into it, and would rather not be doing it.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Seduced by Pride

People who imagine they possess some great overarching truth are apt to discount mundane, much more certain, truths. They lie to themselves. They bamboozle themselves, tricked by their own pride.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Seed Money Con

Imagine someone came up to you and said, I have the secret formula for eternal happiness. All you have to do is convince yourself the IRS (Internal Revenue Service) is going to send you a cheque for $100 million dollars, any day now. You just bliss out. Everything bad that happens is totally overshadowed by this good news™. All you have to do is give me $1000 seed money. You point out, Yes, but its is just not true. There is no reason to think this will happen. But you can’t prove it won’t. You counter, If you truly believe that, you will do stupid things, like mount up credit card debt expecting the IRS to pay if off. But you don’t understand. If you believe hard enough, it has to happen, guaranteed. I read it in a book, the Power of Positive Thinking.

You decide you have had enough of this nitwit and along comes evangelist pastor John S. Dickerson who tries to sell you a similar scam. His story is that a human sacrifice 2000 years ago has magic power to transform your life if you but believe you cannot die and sign up for donations to him for 10% of your income.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Seeding Life

Man is already talking about trying to engineer life for Mars. I find it odd that Christians consider it utterly impossible that some other intelligent beings seeded life on earth, but that, with total certainty, an invisible, omnipotent, omniscient, undetectable, omni-benevolent god seeded it then in a fit of pique destroyed most of it by causing massive amounts of water to manifest out of nowhere and then disappear again without leaving a trace.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Seeking God

Seeking god is a desire to be a slave, a desire to be told what to do, a desired to be spied on.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Seeking Help For God Delusion

Imagine the future where people who have a phobia of invisible spirits in the sky spying on them, get psychiatric help.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Segregation

Segregating children in religious schools has two functions:

  1. Ensuring they hear nothing that would cause them to doubt their parent’s sect’s religious dogma.
  2. Teaching them to hate people of other faiths.
~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Selecting a Car

What if people selected a religion, the way they select a car?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Selecting A Team

How does someone select a football team to root for? Usually it is just the local one. It might be a family tradition. There is almost no chance a person first made an exhaustive study of all the possibilities. Basically, people pick the one that people around them pick. I suspect people pick religions and political parties the same way because people in debate are usually completely inept in defending their ideology. It is as though they never bothered to study it. They just adopted it because others did, then fiercely identified with it. Christians will often say, I don’t know what I believe about that. I will have to consult my clergyman.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Selfish Catholics

Catholics are incredibly selfish. They go to extreme lengths to stop fellow Catholics from limiting their family size to two. Every child above two means someone else will have to go without children to sustain the planet. Catholics don’t care about them or sustaining the planet. All they care about is breeding an every higher proportion of the population as mindless Catholic rabbits so they can force their sick religion on everyone else.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Selling

Unlike Christianity, atheism is not selling any dogma. It is simply refusing to buy without good reason. If it is selling anything, it is selling the idea you should have a good reason before accepting an idea as true.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Selling Christian Superstition

Since there is no evidence for souls, angels, hell, demons, superstition etc. Christians have resorted to using Hollywood to sell them. Just count the number of ostensibly secular TV shows on at any one time selling this world view.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Selling Christianity

Mind-boggling stained glass sold Christianity in the middle ages the way computer-animated dancing clothes sell soap today.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Selling Christianity

When a scientist talks to me about his work, I get the impression he is trying to explain something. When a Christian talks to me about Christianity, I get the impression he is trying to sell me something he does not even believe himself.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Selling Christianity To Iraq

With official sanction, US soldiers hand out Christian medallions at checkpoints in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Taliban use this as proof that the US intends to interfere with their religion. Imagine the effect if occupying Muslim soldiers handed out Islamic medallions.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Selling Crap

If you teach religion in schools, what is your intent, promoting inter-religion understanding or convincing students their parents’ religion has an exclusive handle on the truth? Any sort of religiously-segregated schools promote the second.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Selling Harmful Products

Like a drug pusher, a Christian has no logical arguments to muster in favour of his product, so he resorts to peer pressure arguments such as I believe, with all my heart or Pretend to believe this doctrine and you will automatically become acceptable in my sight.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Selling By Intimidation

I would not mind so much if Christians said, I think society would run much more smoothly if we used the same social rules we had two thousand years ago, for example stoning adulterers to death and reviving slavery. But they realise this message would never sell. It is just too nutty. So they try to sell it through threats claiming that a very nasty supernatural being wants you to do this and will torture you if you refuse to comply. Imagine if Yugo sold cars that way, threatening torture if you did not buy one of their inferior automobiles.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Selling Lies

The best way to sell a lie is to set it to music.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Selling Prophesies

Prophesies are such nonsense, they could never be sold without stirring music and theatrical lies.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Selling A Religion

How do you sell a religion when there is no evidence to back up its absurd claims?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Selling Religion

Islam managed to outsell Christianity by promising a sexier heaven and a crueler hell. The appeal of religion is promised outlandish benefits. It is sort of like a lottery where there has never been a winner before, but the pot is a trillion dollars.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Selling Silliness With Singing

Christians have long ago discovered you can sell any silly idea by singing it often enough and loud enough with a large enough choir.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Selling Technology as Religion

When the conquistadors came to South America, they were easily able to sell Christianity. The native people abandoned their gods because the conquistadors had guns, iron and giant ships. Clearly the Spanish god was more powerful because of the gifts he bestowed on his followers. What if some race more intelligent humans came to visit earth. Would the Christians similarly abandon their god in favour of the gods of the visitors? Not likely because there have already been such visitors, the atheists and scientists who offered great technological bounty and the Christians spat on them and clung to their bronze age beliefs.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Selling Woo

The media create dramas where the bogus claims of psychics and priests are true. They do this fully knowing it is BS. Montel Williams says he considers Sylvia Browne a phony, but has her on once a week anyway. Wish fulfillment sells soap.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Sensitive Christians

When Christians go ape, picket and threaten to kill a female student just because she disagrees with their beliefs, what is going on? Why do they feel so threatened? They must have secret doubts they feel ashamed of. Her very existence triggers them.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Sentient Corpses

Americans spend thousands of dollars for chemicals and devices to slow decay of corpses. This is odd because they admit to no religious belief that requires an intact corpse for a happy after life. Similarly, they react in far greater horror to an indignity to a corpse such as urinating on it, setting it on fire, or raping it than they would the same indignity directed toward a living being. Perhaps they have some unacknowledged belief that corpses are sentient, at least for a few months.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Serious Debate

In debates about the existence of god, both sides throw out arguments they think will be difficult for the other side to refute. The argument might not even matter to them personally. I would like to see a debate where each side presented the most compelling reason for them personally to hold their position. Then the other side confines its remarks to trying to demolish that one argument. Both sides reveal their primary reason ahead of time. Presumably then, it is actually possible you may see someone shift positions as a result of the debate. Further, both sides would confine their comments to the same material rather than each wandering off in completely different directions and never properly crossing swords.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Serve God or Satan

Christians tell me I must choose between serving the god Yahweh or serving Satan. I refuse on three grounds:

  1. Neither exist, other than as characters in fiction.
  2. Both are unspeakably evil.
  3. Both inspire their followers to extreme evil.

I prefer instead to serve truth based on evidence and to protect my planet.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Services

If you watch the services of any religion, you will see pompous men, dressed in androgynous costumes, moving their arms ponderously, as if doing something very important. Yet, it has no more significance than a toddler waving her shovel. The grand pretence is the proceedings somehow conduct the universe. It is all so childish. It is even sillier than a shaman rattling to make the sun rise. It make believe for adults.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Serving Posterity

One advantage to dedicating your life to posterity, is that you will never have to confront abject failure. You will never know for certain how it will turn out.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Set Aside Childish Things

When you become an adult, you must put aside the things of childhood, like imaginary friends.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Setting a Pattern

When you listen to intelligent design people, you will catch them twisting the facts to support their claims, or making unfounded assertions. When you catch them doing that a few times, you can be pretty sure the arguments they make that sound good are similarly flawed, just you are not clever enough to catch them.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Settlements for Sexual Abuse

The Catholic Church has paid out over $1 billion in settlements for child sexual abuse cases since 1980. Over 100,000 victims of clergy abuse have come forward. If they were a chain of summer camps we would have shut them down long ago. They are protected from prosecution by primitive awe of religious magic.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Settling the Debate

Perhaps we could end the debate between Christians and scientists by claiming that in science God is translated as We don’t know yet.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

The Seven Commandments

Here are the actual rules by which the church runs today.

  1. Kill homosexuals. If you cannot get away with it, make the lives of homosexuals as miserable as possible.
  2. Do as you are told.
  3. Do not ask questions.
  4. Do not interfere with the paedophilic pleasures of the clergy.
  5. Take no thought for the morrow.
  6. Make no effort to improve your lot. You will have an eternity after you are dead to enjoy.
  7. Tell lies as needed to defend the faith.
~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Sex Cuffs

One of the key ways churches get their hooks into people is to make them feel guilty about masturbating, having sex or lusting. The church creates the guilt and offers the cure — ritual forgiveness.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Sex Education

Particularly in the 1980s and 1990s, Christians did everything they could to block sex education about safe sex. The net result was they murdered their own children, who contracted HIV because they had not an inkling how you get it or how to avoid it.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Shakespear Rejects the Afterlife

Shakespear based his play Romeo and Juliet on various Italian and English versions of it. In those other versions much is made of the idea Romeo and Juliet will meet in the afterlife. Shakespear took all that out. Why? Dramatic reasons to enhance the tragedy? Because he thought it was untrue? Most likely the latter. You don’t find it in other plays either.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Shame at God Delusion

Imagine the future where people who believe in a god rarely mention it to avoid ridicule. It would by like admitting to having an invisible rabbit friend, named Harvey.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Shame of Faith

I am a person of faith means I will believe darn near anything without any reason at all, hardly something to brag about.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Shame to Worship

How dare you worship a god who stands by when infants are raped.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Shameful Association

Logically, Christians should be as reluctant to advertise their affiliation to Christianity as Nazis are to Nazism.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Shameless Christians

What would you think of someone who recited nonsense rhymes when invited to speak at some solemn public occasion, such as a valedictory address, the inauguration of a president or the funeral of a notable person? That is how Christians sound to me when they shamelessly prattle on about their utterly irrelevant, invisible, undetectable man in the sky. I can’t believe the chutzpah of exploiting such captive audience situations to deliver infomercials for Christianity. They wouldn’t dare try to pitch OxiClean, life insurance or Amway franchises.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

The Sharpton Gambit

Christians like Al Sharpton like to play a little game something like this:
They say Explain to me why the moons and planets move in ellipses. You must answer in at most two sentences and you may not use any math.
You splutter It’s more complicated than that.
Ah ha! you failed. Therefore you confess that a god named Yahweh did it!
A variant is to ask a question that does not make sense scientifically such as Why isn’t everything on earth yellow with all those little drops of yellow paint hitting it from the sun?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Sheepdog Clergy

Clergy work like sheepdogs to ensure the flock are funnelled into thinking identically. The congregation all come to believe the identically false things. A society with only one religion naturally stultifies, since everyone thinks alike and eschews any new idea. Only people without any religion are open to innovation. They are the engines of new thinking.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Shit Happens

Shit happens sounds flip, but it is a profound philosophical revelation. Christians still believe that every time anything unpleasant happens to them, it is the god Yahweh punishing them for some transgression. They never seem to notice that the punishment bears no relation to the number or severity of recent transgressions.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Shun

The Christians in Nigeria are running amok killing people they disagree with. The Muslims in Saudi Arabia are running amok killing people they disagree with. We should not trade with either country until they bring these fanatics to heal.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Shy God

Why is god so shy? He is invisible. He is undetectable. He cannot be contacted. He refuses to offer any hard evidence of his existence, even though doing so would be trivially easy. The actual answer is the attributes of the non-existent god were constructed to make him as undetectable as possible, like the emperor’s new clothes. His undetectability is integral to the con.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Siding With The Priest

I find it so strange that Christians will side with the priest or pastor accused of forcing himself sexually on ten different teens or children. People lie under oath to protect themselves, not to ruin strangers for amusement.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Sikh Supremacy

Two Sikh men were barred from the Winnipeg Dollarama for carrying ceremonial daggers (kirpans). The two men sued. The clerks were chastised.

When I was running a business, there was absolutely no way I would have permitted someone with a weapon (gun, dagger, sword, bear spray…) on the premises. I didn’t give a hoot why they wanted to be armed. A religious reason is the least valid excuse. All it amounts to is tradition. It has no practical purpose.

If some proprietor wants to make an exception for Sikhs to his no-weapons policy, that is their prerogative, but the law should not hand out get-out-of-jail-free cards to people of privileged religions to override normal property rights.

Everyone must be treated equally. If Sikhs may legally carry daggers into places they are unwelcome, then so should everyone be permitted to do so.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Sikh Zealot

One religious Sikh zealot, Sant Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale, was able to trigger a spiral of violence that grew into a nightmare of slaughter and torture beyond belief. Each side, fuelled by religious bigotry, greatly escalated the violence, justifying it as revenge. If Sikhism and Hinduism were drugs that caused people to behave that way, they would have been long ago banned.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Sikhs

Sikhs have a custom they must not cut their hair or beards and must wear a turban. However, they have elevated this to an overwhelming life-and-death compulsion that they demand non-Sikhs accommodate:

Obviously Sikhs have the right to do as they please when they don’t interfere with others. I think non-Sikhs should humour Sikhs any time they can easily accommodate them. However, I don’t think Sikhs have the right to demand others inconvenience themselves to honour this silly superstition. Sikhs should never be granted exemptions to criminal law based on religious belief. If we decide to give them some exemption, then everyone should get it.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

The Silent God

Let’s say you decided to create a phony god. How would you deal with the problem of your fictitious god never said anything and never did anything?

The Silent God click to watch ~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Silent Gods

Yahweh claims to have always existed. Yet he was completely silent until 4000 years ago. Then he became silent again for the last 2000 years. Not only was he silent, he became undetectable. Further, he only appeared to people in a very small area. He claimed to be god of the universe. Surely, he should have appeared to all people of all time. All other gods have a similar pattern. They have a relatively short period of popularity then disappear. Why would a god’s existence depend on human belief, unless gods are a product of human imagination? Granted there is a period where people still give lip service to a god, after he stops interacting with the earth.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Silliness

Consider than Mormonism, JWs and Scientology grow with converts, not just by having an inordinate number of children like the Catholics and Muslims. This indicates religions can get their hooks into people no matter how silly they are.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Silliness

When Christians assert, If you but believe, you can create miracles, this is just as silly as children clapping at a Peter Pan play to bring Tinkerbell back to life.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Silly Christian Explanations

As global warming brings more and more hurricanes, tornadoes, droughts, floods etc, could the Christians please blame it on something half way plausible like emitting CO₂ or killing off 90% of god’s fish rather than failing to monitor and control which penises go into which holes.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Silly Debates

I find it mind boggling that grown men will, with straight faces, debate the existence of gods, for which there is no evidence. It is as silly as if there were debating the existence and properties of fairies, flying pink polka dot goats or Santa Claus.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Similarly of Religion to Organised Crime

The fundamental activity of all religions is extorting money with threats of after-death violence. The main difference between them and organised crime is the when the violence is promised.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Simple Lies

When I say God does not exist, I mean Your cock and bull story about god is a crock. Either you or someone else just made this up. You have no magic sources of information I do not. I am calling you out, not god. This is has nothing to do with god, but your credibility. My beef is not with god, but with your lies. Your story is fiction, just like all the other stories about god. There is nothing esoteric, mysterious or unfathomable about garden-variety lies.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Simple Morality

Morality is not as complicated as people make it out to be. What I personally consider immoral are those things I want other people not to do. People collectively decide on the things we really really don’t want others not to do. Those become laws. Some people have pretty crazy thing they don’t want others to do, especially things that harm no one, e.g. religious superstitions like raking leaves on Sunday. To try to convince others of the validity of their definition of morality, they call it absolute morality and make up a god who threatens to torture anyone who does not agree with them. This so childish.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Simplistic Morality

Fundamentalist religions trick their adherents into adopting a narrow and petty view of morality that consists of restricting sexual pleasure and rigidly following food taboos. Properly morality is much more complex: care/harm, fairness/cheating, liberty/oppression, loyalty/betrayal, authority/subversion and sanctity/degradation.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Sin

Sin is religious superstition. Every religion has its own set of ritually proscribed acts. For example, sins in Christianity include cutting the grass on Sunday, masturbating, having sex with someone with genitals like yours, eating shrimp… These acts harm no one, not even the person committing the sin. No matter how much sin a society indulges in, nothing bad happens.

In contrast, most cultures agree on a set of immoral acts that do harm others such as adultery, promiscuity, drunkenness, conning people out of money and giving them nothing in return, making false promises, charging exorbitant interest on loans, making empty threats, stealing, pretending you have powers to heal that you do not have, pretending to know things for certain that you have no way of knowing, treating others as your inferiors, scapegoating…

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Single Child Families

Given that the Christian god had only one child, why is the pope so opposed to birth control?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Singling Out Muslims

One of the reasons Americans tell me they are justified in killing Muslims (men, women and children) is stop them from segregating women, e.g. women must pray in a separate room at the mosque. Oddly these bigots don’t use this as justification for killing Orthodox Jews who do the exact same thing.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Sir Isaac Newton

Sir Isaac Newton (1643-01-04 1727-03-31 age:84) was arguably the greatest scientific and mathematical mind of all time. Unfortunately, he wasted the entire second half of his life chasing phantoms like alchemy and Christianity. Some accursed Christian convincingly lied to him. They might has well have destroyed his mind with a massive dose of LSD.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Size of the Universe

If Yahweh created the universe purely for the delectation of humans, why did he make the universe so big, with the limit of the speed of light, so that humans could only ever visit a minute fraction of it.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Skeptical Examination

Scientists are very picky about the truth and especially the details. They are ruthless with each other, and naturally they are ruthless with Christians. Christians are always trying to gloss over the holes in the bible or their logic. They wriggle away and refuse to even acknowledge the problems. Christianity is a giant lie and it completely falls apart if you examine it closely. It is not even internally consistent. The analysis makes Christians very uncomfortable. They have to keep making up ever wilder excuses for the errors/inconsistencies.

Christians want to examine only the big fuzzy picture. To scientists, this is not nearly good enough.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

The Skinny on Christianity

Christians behave badly because they suffer a delusion that a very bad-tempered deity commands them to do so. For example:

They claim their holy book was composed by a deity. They have no evidence for this. They have no evidence their deity even exists. There is plenty of evidence the bible is mostly error, not written by a deity. Pointing this out does not budge their delusions an inch.

Because Christians claim they do these evil things because Yahweh commanded them to and because they are the majority, the minority gives them a pass, and let them get away with this bad behaviour. We must stand up to them and say No more behaving badly. I don’t care if you are deluded into thinking a deity commands you to. That is not sufficient excuse. You already ignore most of the bible. Ignore the other obsolete passages too. Just because you are a Christian, is not a get out of jail free card. You are not exempt from the law.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Slandering Truth

Christians have a peculiar view of our universe. They assert everything true and rational about it is cold and heartless. Anything warm and fuzzy is irrational nonsense.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

The Slave Religion

Christianity is a religion designed for slaves. It seeks to convince slaves they are better than their masters and better off than their masters. It teaches submission to authority. Look at its history of slavery in Egypt.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Slave to Tradition

A woman was making a roast. She cut off the ends and discarded them. Her husband was watching and asked why she did that. She said, That’s the way mother always did it. She then phoned her mom to ask why she cut the ends off. Mom explained that she had only a very small pan and otherwise the roast would not fit. There was nothing the matter with the ends — no reason at all to discard them.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Slaves with Kg of Gold?

If the people Moses ostensibly lead of out Egypt were slaves, where did they get enough gold to make a golden calf?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Sleight of Mouth

A Christian argues that there is necessarily some sort of designer/creator of the universe and then by sleight of mouth, claims those arguments prove the infallibility of his book. The two issues have no connection.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Slippery Logic

Philosophers chastise scientists for insisting that nothing exists but science and the known material world. This is a straw man argument. No scientist would ever say that. Scientists are more aware than anyone how little we already know.

Sir Issac Newton (1643-01-04 1727-03-31 age:84) put it I was like a boy playing on the sea-shore and diverting myself now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.

Once the alleged philosopher has established the unsubstantiated arrogance of that position, he tries to sell you some airy fairy story for which they have no evidence, e.g. that the only explanation for some magic tricks reported third hand many decades after they happened by anonymous witnesses is the supernatural or that wishing aloud it the surest way to get what you want. What kind of philosopher resorts to tactics that would make a used car salesman blush?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Sloppy Standards

Christians use an incredibly sloppy logic when deciding such matters as does the god Yahweh exist or does prayer work. Ironically they would be up in arms if pharmaceutical companies used those same standards for testing the efficacy and safety of new drugs.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Slow Calculator

If god is supposedly such a hot shot designer, how is it that a $2 Chinese pocket calculator can do arithmetic faster and more accurately than his designs?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Slow Motion Train Wreck

Religion requires cloistering young minds and feeding them full of bullshit. They must be carefully isolated from competing bullshit or science. This is getting harder and harder to do. Science pervades every corner of life. Religion does not have a refutation for any but a tiny slice of it. Every religious YouTube video has every imaginable point of view represented in the comments. Even though George Carlin is dead, his barbs still hit home. Once the young person loses enough fear to examine his brainwashing, the edifice of nonsense comes crashing down.

Religion is a slow motion train wreck as the older generations die off. It really is all over but the shouting. Look at the withered size of congregations. Look how many churches have closed.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Smug Evil Christians

The most obnoxious thing about Christianity is it historically has persuaded its believers to mistreat, torture and kill others, while convincing their believers they are profoundly good, acting only in the interest of their victims.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Sodomy as Crime

Robert F. McDonnell, governor of Virginia, is trying to pass a law to make it offense for anyone (married or not) to commit sodomy (oral or anal sex ). If he succeeds and manages to prosecute, he will lock up the majority of the state’s teenagers. Why is what people do behind closed doors remotely any of his business? He is trying to impose his whacko religious notions on others.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Solace vs Truth

Christians seek solace. Atheists seek truth.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Sold As If True

The main thing wrong with Christianity is that they sell it as if it were true.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Solitary Confinement Parenting

Many children reach adulthood impaired by incompetent parenting, parental abuse or parental belief in toxic religious ideas. The modern nuclear family is almost like a 20-year solitary confinement sentence for the family. In my parent’s day, extended families exposed children to parenting from a dozen other adults, which helped balance and compensate for any weakness in the parents. The extended family also spelled the parents off periodically, letting them return with refreshed enthusiasm for parenting. We need to open up the parenting of children to regain that traditional advantage.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Something From Nothing

Christians often say You can’t get something from nothing. They make an exception, of course, for god, but oddly not for the universe which contains god. Their science is over a century out of date. That is their intuition, but at the quantum level, and near black holes, matter pops in and out of existence all the time. Intuition honed here on earth fails at the large and small scales. It fails at super high and super low temperatures. It fails at tiny and huge time scales. Human intuition has no experience outside the narrow temperate Goldilocks conditions of earth. It is arrogant to try to use your petty intuition to tell the universe what is possible.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Something From Nothing

People like Sean Hannity like to taunt that atheists believe the universe came from nothing. That is not true. Most atheists believe it came from a singularity . It is the Christians who believe a sky fairy poofed it out of nothing.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Something Out Of Nothing

Randi Kaye interviewed particle physicist Lawrence Krauss on CNN (Cable News Network). Particle Physics click to watch I felt the interviewer deserved a better answer to her question The notion of nothing creating something sounds every bit as unbelievable as saying that my god created all this. What do you say to those people?

He did not address her question as fully as I would have liked. I think he should have answered something like this: There in inescapable evidence for matter popping into existence out of nothing, spontaneously, randomly, without cause. Our instruments for exploring the quantum world, our math, our telescopes all show it happening. It is very counter intuitive for lay people because this popping into existence does not happen on the scale of watermelons that you and I live in and you can’t see the particles with the naked eye, but it is not speculation, but observed fact. On the other hand, there is no scientific evidence whatsoever for a god and further, there is no need for one. All we have are people’s gut reactions or feelings there is or ought to be one. The universe runs itself just fine without one. The universe does not need constant tinkering. It unfolds automatically according to beautiful mathematics. We have never found even one exception to operating by laws — i.e. evidence of divine tinkering.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

The Soul

The ancients wondered what it was that animated a corpse to make it a living body. They speculated a soul. They failed in attempts to weigh it. They failed to detect it in any way. It could not be touched or seen. However, souls allegedly had a complete set sense organs and nerve equivalents. Souls acquired a secondary purpose. Man started to kid himself that he could not really die, but corpses clearly just rotted in the ground. They could not very well rise and walk off to the happy hunting grounds. The soul was commandeered to solve this problem. Presumably it left the body at death and flew off to a eternal life in heaven or hell. Some souls hung around as ghosts. Oddly, ghosts were sometimes visible.

Except for the religious and the makers of Hollywood movies, the soul has been abandoned. The soul is incompatible with any known physics. Science now thinks of death as like a metabolic fire going out, not the exit of soul. The soul superstition is even more popular than sky fairies. In popular culture, saying someone is soulless means he lacks compassion. In summary, souls are just speculation. There is no evidence for them whatsoever.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

The Soul

The Christian notion of the soul is pernicious. It was a primitive attempt to explain consciousness. Christians imagined it was like an invisible cloud that lived inside your body. It experienced reality much like a homunculus. They postulated Yahweh inserted the soul into your body at birth, later amended to at contraception. They postulated the soul escaped the body at death and floated off to be judged and punished. Most Christians do not even realise the soul is an element of faith. They think it is real, even though there is not a scrap of evidence for it. Christians impose this crazy notion on others, and to a significant extent, non-Christians put up with it. The belief in the soul leads Christians to the following:

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Souls

Ancients puzzled over the difference between a live and dead body. Live things seemed so different from dead that they posited a soul, the essence of life. When something died this essence left the body. Nobody had seen a soul. Nobody could weigh it.

Then they elaborated. When the soul left the body, it went to be judged prior to infinite life. There was no evidence for any of this either. The notion appealed because wicked people who escaped punishment on earth were over-punished after death. It meant you did not really die and that you will be reunited with dead loved ones. Churches liked it because they could extract indulgences. It was all nothing but wishful thinking.

Then we discovered that life was a verb, not a noun. When you die, bit by bit the various activities of life shut down. There is no soul. There is no judgment. There is no afterlife. It is all just garden-variety biochemistry.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Souls

Souls have never been X-rayed, photographed, weighed or detected. Why then does anyone think they exist? It is just an old Christian superstition. Unfortunately, Christians jail or murder others who do not believe in the superstition. Were it not for the belief in a soul and Yahweh, there would be no reason to avoid abortion in the first months of pregnancy when the fetus is smaller and more primitive than a tadpole.

Movies often use special effects to simulate souls. That makes them more believable. It is a dishonest thing to do.

Even people who believe in souls cannot tell you just when they enter and leave the body, and where they hang out when not embodied. They cannot tell you how and when they are created or destroyed. If they claim to know, they just made it up. They can’t see, hear, smell or touch souls. They are a collective Christian delusion.

Christians may argue souls are supernatural, and thus cannot be detected. That is just the way souls are. Then fine, then how did anyone ever discover their existence? Someone way back in time must have just made them up.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Souls

There is no evidence whatsoever for the existence of the traditional soul. It is a cloud that enters the body some time after conception and leaves at death. It has no weight. It contains all the person’s memories. It is judged after death and sent to heaven or hell in a reconstructed body where it exists forever. Physicists say there is no physical mechanism that could support the soul.

A modern interpretation of the soul is consciousness. It dies when body dies. Conscious beings have greater moral value than unconscious ones.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Souls are Not Real

Surgeons are not taught to avoid damaging or disconnecting the soul.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Soup Kitchens

Most people think the purpose of a soup kitchen is to give a homeless person a hot meal. But the church sees it differently. It is a chance to proselytize. In return for a bowl of soup the homeless person must listen to a sales pitch for Christianity. His sales resistance is very low. Even homeless people count in the monthly tallies of converts.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Source of African Misery

Some claim that Africans need the consolation of a false religion to help them cope with their miserable lives. I suggest that belief in superstition is much of the source of their misery.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Source Of Belief

The only reason anyone ever considers the existence of Yahweh even remotely plausible is if his mother inculcated him with a terror of god, comparable to a phobia of spiders or snakes.

The fact that Christians always bring up Pascal’s wager as their prime argument for the existence of god, (which is actually a argument for trying to fool god into thinking you believe to avoid being tortured) indicates this fear is their prime motivation for belief.

To someone without such indoctrination, the notion is just as silly as saying Zeus, Clara the Dog Cow or Bugs Bunny runs the universe. It is so funny when grown men make such ridiculous assertions and treat them with such reverence. Christians have no trouble dismissing the myth of Zeus, but they have extreme difficulty noticing there is no difference between Yahweh and Zeus.

There are 60,000 gods. Yahweh is just one. There is nothing special about Yahweh other than his popularity in the USA, which is just a fluke of history. Constantine could easily have picked a different state religion. Further, almost everything about Christianity is plagiarised from earlier religions. Christianity cannot very well claim superiority to the originals.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Source of Belief

Where does a belief in god come from? It comes from somebody else, usually older, selling the idea. Where do they get the idea? From somebody else. If you keep following this chain you will eventually get to someone who just made it up. Where else could it have come from?

Where do scriptures come from? They are written by people who either claim to speak for a god or who are so deluded that they believe are taking dictation from a god. In either case, these are not the sort of people you would trust to babysit your kids or construct the rules of your society.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Source Of Fear Of Death

If it were not for the bogey man stories Christians told you as a child, you would have no fear of death. Yes, you would avoid it, but only because it stops you from having more life adventures, not because you are terrified of what might happen after you die. Yes, you might dread the pain of illness that precedes death, but not dying or being dead.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Source of Good

Christians erroneously believe that all good comes from their religion. They think that if religion were to disappear from their lives, so would good, comfort, companionship, caring, consideration etc. They don’t realise these things come from them.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Source of Misery

Christians make a rather odd claim. All misery on earth is caused by sin. Man forces god to punish him. So, for example, if someone had unprotected sex, god is forced to punish him with AIDS. Consider how cancer strikes the saint and the sinner equally. It has nothing to do with sin. Consider newborns with a heart defect, leprosy, ebola, malaria, guinea worms, dengue fever, being eaten by lions… Your plumbing springs a leak. Your car runs out of gas. These have nothing to do with sin. If you insist a god created these things, you have to accept your god is either:

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Source of Morality

Christians like to tell themselves that modern day notions of morality came from the bible, in particular the ten commandments. They think the US Constitution is a reworking of the ten commandments. This is nonsense. We ignore most of the ten commandments. You can read the bible cover to cover, and you won’t find a word about democracy, freedom, justice, fitting punishment, equality or freedom of religion. These notions all came from the ancient Greeks.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Source of Morality

Christians often say to me, If I didn’t believe in god, I would kill, steal, rape, molest children… How can that be? I don’st believe in god, and I don’t do any of those things. None of my atheist friends do either. Atheist Swedes do these much more rarely than Christians. Further, I don’t think any atheist I know has any particular desire to. Why is Christianity stirring up all these dark desires in believers?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

The Source Of Morality

Whales, dolphins, gorillas, bonobos, chimps… all refrain from murdering each other. This indicates the morality of refraining from murder is built into our genes.

Further, humans with a wide variety of non-Christian religions also refrain from murder. Clearly, Christianity is not the sole source of morality. Further, atheist countries like Denmark, Norway and Sweden have the lowest murder rates. The Christian USA has one of the highest rates. It looks more like Christianity causes murder.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Source Of Morality

You can get your morality from common sense and consensus, or by a fraud lying to everyone and pretending he has a pipeline to god, and handing over his version of morality. The second is obviously inferior since it comes from a kook and a liar, and it does not take input from everyone. Further common sense adjusts to changing times. The presumed word of god is frozen in time forever.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Source of Tension Between Religions

Christians, Jews and Muslims got along famously in 15th century Spain. This proves there is no scriptural roadblock to religious peace. The strife today is about retribution spirals, not differences over the alleged characteristics of an undetectable sky god.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Sources of Morality

There are two basic sources of morality:

  1. People get together, debate and hammer out what is moral and what is not. They embed some of it in law. They constantly debate it and rethink in terms of changing circumstances.
  2. People get together, debate and hammer out what is moral and what is not. They conspire to pretend their findings came straight from some deity. Nothing changes until the religion dies from arthritis.
~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Spaceship Earth

In biblical times, the world effectively ended 80.47 km (50 miles) away since very few people ever traveled more than a few miles from their birthplace. Today, it is quite possible to visit every country on earth in a single lifetime.

What we most need to understand is earth is like a spaceship. It contains our life support system. It grows all our food. It is our living space. It provides our recreation. It (along with the sun), provides all our energy. Just like a spaceship, if the life support system of earth goes off the rails, the passengers die.

We have people in the control room jumping up and down on the oxygen hose (speaking metaphorically). Anyone we send in to stop them, just starts doing the same thing. People need to realise what idiots we are being. We have two choices:

  1. mutual co-operation — treating each other as fellow ship mates
  2. going extinct (or at least back to stone-age level populations).
~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

The Span of The Human Story

If you condensed the story of life on earth down to one hour, the story of man, including prehistoric man, would fit into the last centisecond (1/100 of a second). The time of gods on earth would fit into the last 1/5,000 of a second. What were the gods doing all that hour before they put in an appearance? Why not a trace of them before that? The most obvious explanation is they did not exist yet. Man had not yet created them.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Speaking for The Creator of the Universe

I am astounded that anyone would be so arrogant as to presume to speak for the creator of the universe. Think about it. Only someone who was completely sure there would be no creator to answer to, would dare attempt it.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Speaking For God

Anybody can set themselves up in the god business and start collecting money. They can say any batshit crazy thing they please. They can threaten anyone they please with anything. The odd thing is Christians make no attempt to shut down the craziest and sleasiest practitioners or the ones who put Christianity in worst repute. They don’t seem to care at all who says what in god’s name. It is almost like pirates have an unwritten agreement to leave other pirates alone. It is like they agree it is all made up, so nobody has any right to complain about what others say.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Speaking for God

You often see an old patriarch/tyrant with total control of a small group of people, such as the late Fred Phelps (1929-11-13 2014-03-19 age:84) or the late Wiebo Ludwig (1941-12-19 2012-03-09 age:70). The #1 trick in his bag for maintaining his dominance is convincing the others he speaks for a god, either directly or by his ability to manipulate scripture.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Speaking in Tongues

Acts 2:1-4 says that on Pentecost the people spoke in their native languages, not in gibberish. Russians use Russian syllables to speak in tongues. Mexicans speak in Spanish syllables. There is no universal tongue language. The noises people make are just gibberish. If there were a common language you would be able to pick out common words for god, Jesus, praise etc.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Speaking in Tongues

What would be the point of a church inviting a man to deliver a lecture in Hindi, when no one in the congregation understood a word of Hindi? It would be even more pointless if the lecturer himself did not speak Hindi, just could read aloud a phonetic transcript, so he could not explain the meaning of the lecture or answer questions. It would be even more pointless if the language were not a language at all, just meaningless random sounds. Yet oddly many churches consider this speaking in tongues to be immensely valuable.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

A Special Case

Praying to the creator of the universe to set aside the normal rules of the universe and treat you as a special case is a bit like requesting Bill Gates make a personal house call every time Windows 7 crashes.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Special Dispensation to Bully

Christians are unusually evil because they think their god gives them special dispensation to bully others in the name of their god. They don’t understand, they made him up just as the adherents of every other religion did.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Special Treatment For Christianity

The wall separating church and state, in the USA, has crumbled. Christianity has bought special treatment.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Spirit

I detest the word spirit. It has no clear meaning. People use it to disguise the fact they are just blathering.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Spirit Mediums

Spirit Mediums are con men who pretend to converse with the dead relatives of their marks. You can tell they are fake because:

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Spiritual

The word spiritual is an idiotic word. It literally refers to talking to the dead, table rapping, ghosts and seances. People use it to vaguely refer to anything that is not rational and scientific. I think what people really mean is emotional.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Spiritual Realm

The spiritual realm is just speculation. We have no evidence that anything beyond nature exists. It safe bet that things exist we do not know about or understand, but our notions of the spiritual are works purely of the imagination, akin to what I did as a six year old drawing Martians. People desperately want there to be. Why baffles me. Yahweh strikes me as more cruel than any James Bond villain.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Spiritual Soup

The word spiritual is bandied about so much it has lost meaning. Literally it means belief in a spirit that leaves the body at death. First Nations people use it broadly to mean anything that is not commercial. Sometimes it means gullibility, enjoyment of superstitions presented without evidence.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Spirituality

I detest the word spirituality. It is undefined. People use it to claim they are better than others, in some vague way. I might define it as permitting oneself to believe crazy ideas without evidence, without requiring a blessing of them from a formal church.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Spirituality

Spirituality is a game of pretend. You make up stories that make you feel warm and fuzzy.

This is just wishful thinking. Oddly, some people think spirituality is something to aspire to. I find it childish, especially when people get dogmatic about their fantasies and force them on others.

Some people feel very uncomfortable when they do not know the answer to a question. Some of them make up stories to deal with the anxiety. Others feel excited at the puzzle waiting to be solved.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Spirituality

When someone uses the word spirituality, you know they are about to say something flaky.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Spoiled Brat Christians

To a Christian, a world without a god is not good enough. (Why they want an ogre spying on them and torturing them baffles me.) A world where you live one life then die, is not good enough for them. They are like little girls who pretend they are princesses.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Spreading the Christian Plague

It is bad enough for Pat Boone to believe insane things without using his celebrity to infect others.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Spreading the Mormon Plague

It is bad enough for Donny Osmond to believe insane things without using his celebrity to infect others.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Stage Magic

Christianity is based on the premise that if someone can do really impressive stage magic, they must be god, or at least have god’s ear. The best professional magicians of the modern era such as Doug Henning, Criss Angel, David Copperfield, David Blaine… can do stage magic quite a bit more impressive than turn water into wine. They don’t claim to be performing miracles. They don’t claim the ear of god. But if they did, by Christian standards, we would have to believe them.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Stale Religions

Nearly all religions are stale. (Scientology is fairly fresh, but was founded for disreputable purposes — to make money.) Religions were aimed at people living thousands of years ago. A lot has changed, but the holy books did not. Think how much has changed and how much has been recently invented. Should not the holy books be updated to be relevant? — It should explain what to do with cell-phones instead of goats.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Standard For God

God is reputably perfect, all wise, all powerful. If anything we should expect a higher standard of ethics from him than we do for fallible mortals. But the very opposite is true. We make excuses for his atrocious behaviour: Yahweh is petulant, psychotic, sadistic, irrational…

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Standards of Evidence

Christians shout to atheists, Lower your standards of credulity!. Atheists shout back Raise your standards of evidence!.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Standing Firm

Galileo stood firm against religion because he knew its teachings were wrong. Yet nearly all people who stand firm against some religion, do so because they prefer one set of almost identical delusions to another. Their opinions for and against have no evidence to back them, just prejudice. To me it is laughable that Muslims and Christians would rather die that switch. Both are equally silly and equally wrong.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Statical God Proof

The little Christian decided to prove scientifically that the god Yahweh exists. He took 5 pennies and started tossing them into the air about every 10 seconds. After 7 minutes he noticed that had all come up heads. He announced God has just graced me with a miracle since coming up 5 heads is very improbable, only 1 in 32.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Statistical Sampling

When you develop a new vaccine, you don’t just try it out on one person then make your conclusion. You have to check out the vaccine’s effect on thousands of people. Ditto with testing god. You can’t judge god just by how your life is going. You have to consider what he is doing in the lives of all 7.601 of us. You have ask why 7000 kids an hour die of malnutrition or disease. If you believe in god, you have to believe he gets a sadistic pleasure from this. Then you have to ask yourself, why am I worshiping such an evil entity, and why do I believe something that disgusting even exists.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Stealing Credit

When Charles Ramsey rescued Amanda Berry from a decade long abduction, Christians immediately took credit, Our prayers are finally answered! What absolute bull shit! If prayers worked, she would have escaped a decade ago. If Yahweh existed and had a microgram of compassion he would not have left her to rot for ten years. What revolting people!

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Stepford Christians

I think when Ira Levin wrote The Stepford Wives, I think he modeled his creep, smarmy, insincere-friendly characters on Christians.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Stockholm Syndrome

Stockholm syndrome is rational. It is an ancient survival tool. Bonding with your captor increases your odds of survival. Children who refuse to submit to brutal parental authority are more likely to die. Children in Christian homes threatened with hellfire and beatings are much like captive slaves in tribal war.

The children don’t know the threats are empty. Christian chestnuts are indistinguishable from threats to kill their dog, or literally roast them on a spit over a campfire after dinner. The #1 way Christians proselytize is with threats of torture, even to fellow adults. That is why so many submit to Christianity, apparently without resistance.

Those who submit even become convinced the evil Christianity commands of them is the highest good and they in turn impose it on their own children, much the way a tradition of sexual child abuse is passed down through the generations. Most Christians see nothing wrong with beating and traumatising children including handing them over to be sexually abused by priests.

It should be illegal to threaten a child with violence, just as it is an adult, even in the context of instilling religious beliefs.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Stoned Christians

A Christian lives in a stoned world similar to that of a user of psychedelics or someone undergoing a psychotic break. They consider the ordinary and the miraculous equally plausible, but preferring the miraculous explanation. They presume the voices in their heads are always the creator of the universe giving them personal messages. Disembodied evil forces threaten them.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Stonewalling paedophile Investigation

I wondered why the Catholic parishioners in Halifax applauded their Bishop and his stonewalling on investigating paedophilic priests. The reason might be they feel personally accused of the crimes. I would have thought ensuring safety of their children would trump all other considerations.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Stop Praying You Idiots!

It drives me crazy when there is a news item about a lost toddler and the relatives are all sitting around praying rather than getting out and searching. If the child dies of exposure because of their dithering, I think they should be charged with negligent homicide.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Stop Pretending

A crisis of faith happens when you suddenly stop pretending, for even a second, that you know things for certain that you don’t. It is a breath of true humility. It can be awe-inspiring or terrifying, as you choose.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Stopping Clocks

There are many stories about clocks that stopped when the owner died. That is pretty much what you would expect. When people are on the their deathbeds or dead they often fail to wind their clocks.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Stories and Metaphors

Beware the con man who offers a story or metaphor instead of evidence. He can cook the plot to go any way he wants. The story need have nothing to do with reality. We tell stories to children because we want to guide them, and they are gullible to the stories we concoct to manipulate them.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Strange Notions of Truth

Americans are the strangest people. They swallow impossible myths like Noah’s ark as absolute truth without any evidence at all and refuse to acknowledge global warming even when they can see it happening under their noses.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Strawman Arguments

When Christians, such as tract author Jack Chick, resort to straw man arguments (deliberately misstating/misquoting his opponent’s position), it is like altering the record of testimony, creating counterfeit evidence or tampering with evidence in a court case. Why would someone do it?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Strict Moderators

One of life’s amusing ironies is the leading atheist website, the Richard Dawkins Foundation whose purposes include promoting free speech and eliminating censorship, is run by a team of anonymous moderators, some of the strictest I have ever encountered on the net outside an openly redneck site. They censor posts without giving a reason. They do not notify the authors that their posts have pulled posts, but granted almost no site does. You can’t even find out the censored post’s author so you can’t ask the author what he said that might have offended. I have never seen a published policy of their ground rules about what is acceptable. They will also edit other people’s posts. They also bar people, myself included, without giving an official reason. I suspect they assume offenders are completely aware of their crimes that they imagine are solely designed to deliberately flaunt the authority of the moderators.

I can only guess at the criteria the moderators use for censorship. You will notice on the site almost nothing defending religion or Muslims or condemning ill treatment of religionists. You will notice nothing condemning American foreign or Israeli foreign policy, even in the context of religious bigotry. You will see very few links to other sites, other than in official news items. Physical security of events are not discussed. There is little pointing out inconsistencies in Dr. Dawkins’ statements, though there are plenty of incoherent rants against him plucked from the media. I suspect anything that suggests humans might actually shudder touch each other or lust for each other as part of their reproduction mechanism is also taboo. You will find plenty of raw meat attacks on Christians, priests and Muslims. The tolerance for extreme views here is quite high. I wrote many of them without problem.

It is not much of debate when you muzzle the opposition. At least Muslim fanatics are not at all shy about letting you know precisely what they consider acceptable. I suspect the problem is the moderators are overly protective of Dr. Dawkins who likely has little to do with the day-to-day operation of the website. Just the same, the site has a torrent of fascinating information about the misbehaviour of religionists.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Strong Atheists

I am a strong atheist. Not only do I assert there is insufficient evidence to claim a god exists (weak atheist), I assert there is no god. Apologists say I would have to know everything about the universe to be able to say that. However, I do not have to know everything about the universe to confidently tell you that leprechauns are fictitious. Why should I treat gods any differently?

I can recognise a tall tale. Recognising a counterfeit, a con, a phony, a lie or a myth has nothing do with knowing what is going on in the far reaches of the universe. There is nothing in the least supernatural about deciding if humans made up the gods. Oddly, Christians agree with me that in 99.99…% of the cases, they did. We disagree on only one case — Christianity. Deciding if gods exist is actually all about the mundane: whether ordinary humans told unusually bold lies.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Stubborn Christians

Christians have made it clear that absolutely nothing would shake their faith, nothing. For example:

We atheists have to assume this rejection of evidence is just a bluff. Christians want atheists to give up challenging their fragile faith. They don’t have much faith. They just believe strongly that good people should have faith.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Stupid Atheists

Christians often call atheists stupid for refusing to believe without evidence that Yahweh exists. What does stupid mean? Stupid people ignore or are unaware of important facts relevant to living a successful life. They can also be people unable to process, prioritise and evaluate facts.

In my experience atheists all read the bible cover to cover. They know at least a little about half a dozen other religions. They are aware of the history and archaeology relevant to Christianity. So what facts are they stupidly ignoring?

In contrast, the Christians I have encountered have only read a few famous selections from the bible. They are proud to know absolutely nothing about any other religion. They know nothing of the history and archaeology relevant to Christianity. It seems to me they are stupidly ignoring almost everything relevant.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Stupid Christians

Christians are incredibly stupid because depictions of miracles in movies convince them of the reality of god even though they know perfectly well every last one of the miracles were performed with special effects.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Stupid Christians

There are almost no Christians among Nobel prize winners. In my experience, Christians are remarkably stupid. They are rote learners. They refuse to think anything through for themselves. They refuse to question what they are told. They have no ideas of their own. They just regurgitate what someone else told them. Even the professional apologists are completely incapable of defending Christianity. When you ask them why they believe, all they can say is it feels true.

What is the problem. I think two things:

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Stupid or Crooked?

When atheists debate Christians, atheists presume they are dealing with the ignorant and simple minded. However, I suspect that often they are dealing with unscrupulous hucksters who make a living selling this crap. When you encounter deceit and trickery, chances are you have a con man. Don’t expect honesty or fair play.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

The Stupidest People in the World

There are so many people in the world, so harmful to the general good, I would just as soon see them drop dead. Here are some of the stupidest.

  1. climate change deniers. They will kill us all if we don’t stop them.
  2. creationists. They are working hard to destroy science education.
  3. Christians. They are working hard to promote superstition. They force their superstions on others.
  4. Republicans. They want the rich to get richer and the poor to get poorer.
  5. anti-environmentalists. They don’t understand that without an environment to sustain us, money is useless.
  6. soldiers. They will happily slaughter children the instant someone gives them permission to.
  7. NRA (National Rifle Association) members. They are willing to sacrifice children so they can play with army toys.
~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Stupidity!

So much stupidity! Where to start?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Subliminal Christian Superstition

I recently heard Sir Michael Redgrave read The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. I was struck by how riddled it was with Christian superstition, which was not as obvious when I first read it 56 years ago. It would have been very hard to avoid absorbing this nonsense in a world where Christian superstition came at you from all sides.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Subverting the Law

In the 1960s in the American south, if a black man attempted to register to vote, white Christians would see to it he lost his job or had his mortgage recalled. The Christians were deluded by their religion that their actions were perfectly holy.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

A Sucker Is Born

When the magician James Randi exposed faith healer Peter Popoff as a dangerous and utter fraud by showing how he used a radio to fake his messages from god on the Johnny Carson show, nearly all the viewer mail to the show wanted to know how to contact Peter Popoff so he could heal them. An eager, incredibly stupid sucker is born every minute.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Suffering Cannot be Blamed on Free Will

You can’t blame all suffering on free will. Earthquakes, volcanoes, hurricane, disease, genetic defects, accidents cause suffering that has nothing to do with human will.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Sufficient Proof of God

Christians sometimes ask what it would take to convince me there is a god. One way would be, if on the same day, all the churches in the world and all the mansions owned by televangelists disappeared into sink holes.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Sufficient Provisions

Egyptians believed you needed to pack enough goods in your grave to last an eternity in the afterlife. It must have been distressing to them to realise that eternity would exhaust any cache of provisions, no matter how large.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Sufficient Time

Even the ancient Greek philosophers understood that the universe does not need a creator, just sufficient time.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Suicide Bombers

If you want to persuade someone to blow themselves up and kill a bunch of children, you must start when they are young and tell them lies about the afterlife and the supernatural bounties there. Then you have to convince them that god hates those children and will reward them bounteously for killing them. You never see suicide bombers talked into their crimes with reason. I think we should try to interrupt this process right at the beginning, and get kids away from this malicious brainwashing.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Suicide Cult

Christianity is a mass suicide cult because they have successfully delayed acting on climate change. Unlike the Star Gate loons, they are killing everyone, not just themselves. The thing they long for most is the end of the world because they imagine they will be excluded.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Superheroes

Modern humans satisfy their desire for a supernatural hero to rescue them from all their troubles by watching Superman movies. Christians do it by retelling ancient tall tales.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Superior Swedes

The Swedes are atheist. They don’t use Yahweh threatening infinite torture to preserve social order. They have much lower crime rates than the USA. The barbaric Christian beliefs increase crime. Why?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

The Supernatural

Christians tell me there are all manner of supernatural beings. They are undetectable by science. They are completely separate from the material world. I have two questions.

  1. If they are undetectable, how it is that you know about them? It sounds like you just made them up because they appealed to you.
  2. If these beings are completely separate from the material world, how can they interact with it? To do anything, they have to push atoms around. Atoms need physical material forces to move them around. If these beings generated material forces, we could detect them.
~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Supernatural

Not once has it turned out something had a supernatural cause. Yet Christians are utterly convinced their supernatural deity managed to create the entire universe. Christians assert everything needs a creator, except Yahweh. Why should Yahweh be the only exception? Why should Yahweh be an exception at all? Quantum particles pop in and out of existence all by themselves. Clearly they too are an exception.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Supernatural Explanations

If you don’t confine yourself to naturalism in your explanations, you have to resort to the supernatural. By definition, there is no way to learn anything about the supernatural through the natural universe. The supernatural, being outside of the universe and outside time, has no observable natural effects, or else the effects would by definition be natural and amenable to scientific study. You cannot thus learn anything about the supernatural by studying the universe. So any alleged information about the supernatural must have been made up. i.e. it is a lie, or to put it more politely, it is mere speculation. It is thus fruitless to pursue supernatural explanations. You can never learn anything about the supernatural.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Superseding Religion

If you accept the notion of the greatest good for the greatest number, you can objectively discard most religious moral pronouncements as nonsense.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Superstition

To a child avoiding squeezing the nose to avoid brain damage, washing your hands to avoid disease and avoiding donuts to prevent heart attacks are all equally improbable superstitions.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Superstitious Americans

In 1996 96% of Americans told a Gallup pollster they believed in god; 90% in heaven; 79% believed in miracles; 72% in angels. Why? It certainly was not because of the preponderance of evidence; there isn’t any. I see two reasons: wishful thinking and herd conformity. Other nations are not nearly so superstitious, (e.g. 36% believe in god in the Czech Republic), so I suspect herd conformity is much more important than wishful thinking.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

The Superstitious Generation

Future generations will characterise our generation as superstitious and gullible, lead by the nose by corporations and churches with catch phrases to believe the preposterous and self-contradictory.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Superstitious Rats

Rats with damaged hippocampuses are more superstitious. They get nutty ideas into their heads about what causes what. I have noticed that Christians are usually stupid. I wonder if they have the same problem.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Suppressing Christianity

In China, the government attempts to suppress Christianity by pulling down the crosses on churches, citing building codes. This violates the Christians’ religious freedom. Further, it has the exact opposite of the intended effect. It just makes Christians doubly keen to defend their nonsense. To suppress Christianity, you must first convince Christians that the bible is bogus. You must stop schools from indoctrinating young children.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Suppressing Religion

I think all religions should be discouraged because they spread falsehoods and because they encourage people to behave foolishly and intolerantly. On the other hand, I think people should have the freedom to do what they please, even if silly, so long as they are not harming others. So where do I draw the line? The general principle is, we must judge behaviour the same way whether is it motivated by religion or something else. So for example:

Methods

Legitimate methods to discourage religion include:

Illegitimate methods include:

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

The Surgeon

If I notice my surgeon praying before an operation, what does this mean?

In contrast, if I see my surgeon is reading The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins on his Kobo, what does this mean?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Surplus

Imagine you owned a gold nugget the size of a Stonehenge stone and your friend owned a 28.35 grams (1 oz) gold nugget, which of you would spend money more wisely? Imagine you believed you would live forever and your friend expected to live 80 years, which of you would spend your time more wisely?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Surprising Right Wing Propagandists

Don’t support NOVA, the National Geographic or the Discovery Channel until they stop selling religion or right wing politics under the guise of science.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Survey Lies

40% of Americans, when asked on surveys, claim to attend church. If they were telling the truth there would need to be twice as many churches.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Survivors and Victims

If you credit god for everyone who survives a plane crash, you have to also assign him the blame for everyone that did not survive. He is allegedly omnipotent, so he could have saved everyone, but chose not to, hardly consistent with the merciful reputation he enjoys.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Suspension of Disbelief

Think how often we entertain ourselves by suspension of disbelief.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Swallowing Christianity

Christianity requires you to believe quite a number of very strange things:

Even though Christians have never seen any of these things happen, they have all the necessary gullibility to believe they happened long ago on the flimsiest evidence. There are thousands of other holy books with similar tall tales. Christians dismiss them all as lies without even reading them. Why the difference? Christians were indoctrinated to believe the biblical tales in childhood. They were threatened with eternal fire if they did not believe. They refuse to admit childhood indoctrination is why they cleave to Christianity and reject all other religions.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Swallowing Native Woo

Native people say a lot of silly religious nonsense. We tend to let it slide because:

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Swimming to Australia

How did the koala bear get back to Australia when he got off the ark? He can’t swim. The only food he can eat are eucalyptus trees which only grow in Australia.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Switching Sects

40% of Americans switch religious sects at least once in their lives. They reject the old lies, but immediately cling to a new set. Why do they believe that the new, equally without evidence, is any truer? It is as crazy as being burned by Bernie Madoff, then immediately looking around for another pyramid scheme to rip you off.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Symbolic Inaction

A Christian is a person who would prefer to impose a genuine replica, ostensibly cast in faux stone from Moses’ Ten Commandments tablets, mounted in every court house in the land than enact a law that reduced homicide 10%.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Symbolic Water

Water deserves to be a religious symbol, not just because it supports life but because it is a symbol of reconciliation because it is composed in precisely equal portions of hydrogen ions H⁺ (the strongest possible acid) and hydroxyl ions OH⁻ (the strongest possible caustic) forming a perfectly mild combination. In a similar way, table salt NaCl is formed of sodium, a metal so reactive it often spontaneously catches fire on exposure to air or water and chlorine, a poisonous gas used in warfare.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Symptoms of Christianity

The first symptom of brain damage caused by Christianity is a craving for kitsch.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Symptoms of Pathology

When a grown human insists on pretending there is a god, it means they have a socially-unacceptable, masochistic desire to be a slave.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Synchronised Displays

When humans gather for mass synchronised displays, I would strongly prefer it if they were life affirming rather than military or superstitious.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Systematic Abuse

To lock in lifelong control, priests systematically abuse children to undermine their ability to think for themselves.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Systematic Abuse

To lock in lifelong control, priests systematically abuse children with threats of after-death torture to undermine their ability to think for themselves.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Tablets Necessary?

Christians try to tell me that if Yahweh had not done his thing with the burning bush and the two tablets, it would never have occurred mankind that killing and stealing are wrong. How then could it be that every non-Christian culture also figured this out on their own?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Taking Credit for Others’ Work

Going back hundreds of years, missionaries have used technology to impress potential converts, suggesting the technology is an exclusive gift of their god. Their god had absolutely nothing to do with it. This is a dishonest way to sell Yahweh.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Taking False Credit

Hospitals are filled with severely ill infants. Some live and some die. Christian parents credit their prayer, virtue and pull with god when their babies live. What smug pompous, rude pricks! They are no better than the parents whose babies died.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Taking False Credit

When a sick baby survives, Christians are first to give themselves and the god Yahweh credit, but you never catch them taking any responsibility when a baby dies.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Taking Responsibility for Earthquakes

Those Christians who preach that their god is responsible for earthquakes, should not only pay reparations to the Sumatrans, New Zealanders and Japanese for their god’s misbehaviour, they should get down on their bellies and grovel out an apology for their lies about the gross immorality of the earthquake victims, including the children.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Talking Christians Out of Delusions

Using logic to help Christians discard their religious delusions is a bit like trying to talk down somebody who overdosed on LSD using only mathematics.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Talking Death Goat

Imagine that after you died, they told you what the one true religion was, but first you had to take an extensive interview with a talking goat. He would name one of the 60,000 religions, then you would tell the goat what you thought of it and why. Most of the time you would have to answer I don’t know the first thing about it, but I know I wouldn’t like it. You would say no to every one of the 60,000 religions, but one. Mathematically your odds of picking the right one are roughly 1 in 60,000. The experience might shake your smugness a little.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Talking About God

I find it revolting when people talk about god, same as when they tell any other hated-inspired lies.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Talking To God

If someone claims god told them to do something, what they meant is a voice in their head commanded them. They leapt to the conclusion it was god. Ask them how they knew it was god. Of course they could simply be lying trying to impress you. They are so conceited, they believe the creator of the universe stopped by for a chat. That is even more preposterous than claiming the leaders of the biggest ten countries on earth stopped by for tea. The nitwits were just talking to themselves.

Did god say anything only god would know? Did god say anything they did not already know?

If those questions do not embarrass them, quote John 5:37 which explains god never talks to mere mortals.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Talking To a Lizard

Trying to explain to a Christian why his beliefs could not possibly be true is like talking to a lizard. He can hear you but does not comprehend a word.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Talking Snakes

Books about talking animals are usually filed in the children’s section.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Talking Snakes

Why do Christians believe in talking snakes?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Tall Tales Asserted as True

A religion is a collection of tall tales that a group of people passionately insist are literally true, even though that have no evidence whatsoever to support them.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Taming Believers

To tame religion, it would suffice to get each man to give up the notion his religion is 100% true and all the others 100% wrong. When a Christian defends the notion of god, he does not mean the existence of a deity or creator, but of the story of the god Yahweh precisely as described in his holy books. Like you, he is already convinced all the other notions of god are false, but rejects the notion that his religion is no different from any other, even though it has no unique properties.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Taming Slaves

Christian slave owners forced Christianity on their slaves because it made them tame. The disgusting thing is the slaves did not reject this crap at the first chance. They are like Stockholm victims.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70) Uncle Tom’s Cabin click to watch

Tantrums

Fundamentalists Muslims and Christians shout loudly and threaten violence to get their way. The media nearly always give in to them. This is much like giving in to toddler’s temper tantrums.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Tarantula Eating

The Christian tradition forbids the eating of tarantulas, much as the Islamic and Jewish ones forbids the eating of pork. Imagine if you lived in a town where nearly every restaurant had a variety of tarantula dishes on the menu. You might try to convince your non-Christian friends to avoid tarantula, at least when dining with you, completely independent of your desire to convert them to a different religion. I have never tasted a tarantula, but I imagine it would taste like shrimp, also forbidden to Christians.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Target of Atheist Anger

Atheist anger is largely directed at Christians and Muslims who harm children or unfairly treat non-believers.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Tautology

If you define god as that which created the universe, saying god created everything is as vacuous as saying that chemistry is what draws couples together.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Tax Exemption

Political parties and religions are quite similar. They both have ideas on how people should behave. The both try hard to convince others to believe likewise. The difference is churches don’t pay taxes. This gives their ideas unfair weight in the public square. They should pay their own way like political parties.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Tea Party

The Tea Party is a Fundamentalist Christian extremist wing of the Republican party. It has a horrifying platform:

Their goal is to turn back the clock to the dawn of the Industrial Revolution — the days of Dickens.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Tea Party Parents

Right wingers care only about the right of parents to indoctrinate their kids with any crap they please. Wait a blinking minute! These kids are not chattels, not livestock, not slaves. They have a right to a proper education. They have a right to the best approximation to truth possible. Teaching kids a diet of lies is a type of child abuse that will cripple them for life.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Teaching Religion in School

The American constitution guarantees freedom of religion. This means the state and no one else is permitted to force their religion on you. And in turn, you may not force your religion on others. In particular, you may not impose your religion by forcing other people'’s kids to learn your religion as truth. I think religions should be taught in schools, but as peculiar behaviours of various groups on the planet, not as science. Atheism would fit in there too, though there is not much to say about it.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Teddy Bear For the Fearful

When people feel secure, they are less likely to believe in a god. Religion is a sort of teddy bear for the fearful.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70) source

Teddy Bears

Christians will buy teddy bears for dead children, but rarely buy them for living children not their own.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Telling God What To Do

George W. Bush says god bless America. Barack Obama says May god bless America The Republican commands god to bless. The Democrat hopes that god will bless.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Temple Grandin’s Delusion

Professor Temple Grandin (1949-08-27 age:68), autistic designer of cattle slaughter equipment, explains she believes in god because when she looks at Hubble deep space photos, she imagines planets circling around the hundreds of galaxies. She figures that in all that space, there must be something greater than us. I agree. It would be a astounding statistical fluke if we were the most advanced species in the universe. But even if there were trillions of species more advanced that us, that would not be evidence that any of them created the universe, intelligently designed every aspect of it and micromanaged the lives of all its inhabitants as gods are reputed to do.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

The Temptation to Lie

The temptation of art is to lie, to tell the story people want to hear regardless of truth. For example, showing a soul leaving the body, or groups of soldiers being gloriously resurrected, ignoring he fact all of them had killed or attempted to kill. It is not even valid within the Christian fantasy.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

The Temptation to Lie

Why has the myth of life after death shown up so often in so many cultures? If a child’s dog or grandmother dies, it is extremely tempting to tell the child some comforting lie about the dog being is some other place where it can see the child, awaiting reunion. The child, being gullible, accepts this story as true, even later in adulthood, then they repeat the lie believing it to be true, to their children. If the lie dies out, it spontaneously regenerates.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Tempted By Silliness

Sometimes I wish I could be young again so I could have sex with cuties. If I catch myself wondering if reincarnation or an afterlife would let me satisfy that desire, I tell myself grow up!

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Tenacious Beliefs

For atheists, the key fact about Christianity is its claims are either not true, inconsistent or unsubstantiated.

For Christians, the key fact about Christianity is what they have to do and say to fit into the Christian community.

When Atheists try to deprogram Christians, they need to break the bond to the Christian community even more than the bond to the dogma. This is why college students often give up Christianity. The bond to the home community is broken.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Tenacity of Belief

The crazier a religious belief and the more evidence it could not possibly be true, the more tenaciously the true believers believe.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Tenuously Connected To Reality

When you are dealing with someone barking mad, such as a fundamentalist Christian, it can be hard to know where to begin. You have to ascertain what tenuous threads still connect them to reality and use those tendrils to reel them back in.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Terminal Wishful Thinking

Republicans suffer from terminal wishful thinking. In particular, they imagine their bodies will go on and on in perfect health, never growing old or decrepit. Thus they imagine health care insurance to look after them when they eventually do get sick is not only unnecessary, it is an affront to their freedom. They crave the Philippine system where the hospital literally tosses you out onto the street the day you can no longer pay the bills. The hospital doesn’t care if expulsion is your death warrant. Republicans may think they want that, until, of course, they need medical care and their private insurance company decides they are not profitable enough to insure or too costly to pay out. This happens to everyone eventually. The only people who can feel secure under such a system have at least five million dollars socked away to deal with their own health problems and their significant other’s. Republicans are under the delusion, that real soon now, they will be that rich. That’s also why they lobby for the interests of those much richer than they are.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Terminally Stupid Christians

If they were not such irresponsible breeders, Christians would die out from terminal stupidity.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Termite-Infested Christianity

The Christian edifice looks substantial, but it is rotting away slowly from within, like a termite-infested house. People are gradually losing faith is its nutty doctrines. The last thing to go is public professing to be Christian. Even today, most of the people professing to be Christian have not been inside a church in over a decade.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Termite-ridden Church

The Catholic Church is like a house that has been eaten from the inside by termites. It rotten to the core. The whole edifice could come crashing down at any moment.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

The Test

God noticed that his test to determine who should get into heaven was letting in some quite selfish people, who were motivate purely out of fear of god, but not in the least by a love of the good or of fellow creatures. So he came up with a new test. He set up a bogus god, one quite evil who was sadistic, enjoyed torturing, killing children… He took delight in hurricanes and earthquakes and tsunamis. He send plagues of AIDS and Ebola and tuberculosis. This god behaved much like a mentally ill person. He constantly contradicted himself and common sense. The real god lied to people and told them this false god was the only god, and that people would be tortured for eternity if they did not worship it. Then he sat back and watched who compromised their morality just to save their skin. Over a billion people succumbed to the temptation.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

The Test

It would be so amusing if the real religious test was to see who would sheep-like worship an evil god just because he threatened hellfire or promised eternal bliss and their fellows pressured them to. Those who had no moral backbone and became Christians and Muslims would find themselves painlessly vaporised and eliminated from the next round.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

The Testicles Argument for God

Christians trust their feelings not their logic or facts. So strange as it sounds, here is the sort of emotional argument they use to cling to their faith:

But what if there is a god who will tear my testicles off and roast me on a spit after I die? I just can’t take the risk, even if it is only one in a million chance. I have to force myself to believe and placate no matter how silly it sounds. Besides, I can feel him in my bones spying on me.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Testing the Flat Earth Hypothesis

When I was four, my Dad told me the earth was spherical. I thought he was putting me on. People on the under side in Australia would fall off. He said that China was on the other side of the earth directly below us. So I went into the back yard and started to dig an enormous hole. I didn’t make it to China, but I managed to dig below the thick top soil layer and discover mysterious light brown dirt, possibly Chinese. So I started out a flat-earther, but I was willing, even in my childish way, to test the hypothesis.

My younger sister interpreted this to mean the earth was hollow. We lived on the inner surface, with sun at the center.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Testing God

Christians tell you that it is very wicked to test god. I find this odd. I would like think the genuine god would want his adherents to know when they were dealing with some imposter. I think the no-testing rule was made up by con-men promoting a false god. They know their god can’t pass any tests, to they con the marks into being deliberately gullible with this silly threat that god would be angry if tested.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Testing Prayer

When I point out to a Christian apologist that every scientific test ever conducted showed that prayer was ineffective, they will usually say God will not respond if you test him. I respond, There is no such exception in the bible. It says in many places Yahweh answers every single prayer, no exceptions. Prayers do not even have to be unselfish. Further, look at the results of prayer when they were not being measured. They are no better than when tested.

If prayer (tested or not) worked, Christians would get a reduced rate on their accident, home and health insurance. They don’t because Christians suffer from calamity at the same rate as anyone else. Their prayers do absolutely nothing for them. All they do is waste time and distract from useful action, creating the illusion of helping.

Oddly, Christian apologists are completely convinced, without evidence, that praying to any other god is futile, even though Muslims swear otherwise. Christians are claiming Yahweh is like some pompous ass who pretends not to hear if someone mispronounces his name.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Is That All There Is?

When I look at my body, I see matter. I experience consciousness. There is no sign of anything else: a soul, divine breath… These are just things people make up without evidence so that they can feel more important than other creatures.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Theocracy

Britain is one of only two sovereign states in the world to theocratically maintain the presence of unelected bishops within their political system (the House of Lords). The other is Iran.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Theology = Fortune Telling

A university teaching a course in theology is as ridiculous as teaching one in fortune telling.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Theoretical Doubt

Agnostics are playing word games to get the Christians off their backs. There 60,000 religions. Agnostics dismiss 59,999 of them as too silly to even consider, but they still consider one as unlikely as the existence of leprechauns. The doubt is only theoretical.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

There are no Beautiful Lies

Christians imagine they are protecting children, but what they are actually doing is teaching them lies. No matter how beautiful, lies eventually destroy.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

There Has to Be A Creator

Christians often argue that the universe had to have a creator. Their arguments are based on an absolute Newtonian view of the universe, ignoring quantum mechanics. But let’s assume they are correct. That creator could be a giant spiral mass off goo, a giant lemur, an invisible force… There is no evidence at all this creator had to look or act anything at all like Yahweh. All it had to do was create and exist prior to our universe, and for some reason not need creation itself.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

They Have Had Their Turn in Charge

Christians and Muslims have been ruling the world for centuries. The worst it ever got was the dark ages when the Christians had absolute control. Surely, by now if they were going to get it right, they would have done so. It is time to turf the bastards out.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Thinking Too Much

When a Christian goes to his pastor with a question, the pastor will usually say Don’t think so much. It is impossible for a worm like you to understand the mind of god. Just accept it on faith.. The Christian is not trying to understand the mind of god, just the bible, which was written by humans.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Third Time Lucky

It always struck me as peculiar that Yahweh would build a world, then smash it in a giant flood, like some petulant child tearing up a drawing he was unhappy with. If he were perfect, omniscient and omnipotent as advertised, surely he could get his universe the way he wanted it the first time.

However, he is not the only god with this failing. The gods of the Aztecs created the universe five times before they got one they were satisfied with.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Thomas Jefferson

Thomas Jefferson was a Christian, yet he rejected the resurrection and all miracles. He would never be able to run for office today.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Thou Shalt Not Kill

Just because Jewish, Christian and Muslim nations love to make war on each other, and execute criminals for serious crimes does not negate the validity of their common moral tenet — thou shalt not kill.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Thoughts About God are Irrelevant

An ant or a dog has no clue what humans are up to. So it seems logical that we humans would have no way of fathoming what a creature more intelligent than us, much less a god capable of creating entire universes, is thinking or what its capabilities are. All our speculation about perfect beings and the nature of god is as relevant as the thoughts of an ant or a dog are about human activities.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Threat Morality

If you feed the hungry because you fear Yahweh roasting your buns for eternity, that is not morality. That is not compassion. It is gullible fear.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Threatening Atheists

Why do Christians find atheists so much more threatening that say Hindus whose beliefs are completely incompatible. Atheists challenge the Christian con. Hindus run a sister con.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Threatening Kids

It is child abuse to threaten children with torture and torture of their families if they don’t do as they are commanded. It is the sort of thing commanders of child armies, paedophile priests and Catholic mothers do.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Threats

Christianity has no evidence to support it. To fleece people, they rely on nothing but empty threats. To make up for the complete lack of evidence for the reality of the threat, they puff it up to be unimaginably horrible and disproportionate.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Threats Fair Play?

If Scientologists threatened Christians with invisible soul-stealing assassins, would Christians consider this an acceptable recruiting technique? If not, why do Christians consider their endless threats of eternal hellfire fair play?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Three Arguments Against The Existence of God

  1. People claiming there is a god have the burden of proof, the same as if there were trying to demonstrate the existence of sasquatches, the Loch Ness monster or alien visitors. They refuse to offer any evidence whatsoever. As Christopher Hitchens observed What can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.
  2. The claimed attributes of Yahweh don’t make any sense. If Yahweh is outside space and time, he cannot very well have any effect on our world. Any effect we could detect has to occur somewhere in space/time. He is claimed to be both infinitely merciful and infinitely just. If he pardons a murderer, that is hardly justice.
  3. Everything in Christianity is based on the bible, which is riddled with inconsistency, error and ignorance. It could not possibly have been written by the creator of the universe.
~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Thumb Sucking

Christianity is like a thumb to suck, a lie to distract the Christian from the realisation he will die and decompose just like everyone else. Being dead is completely painless. Why the terror? You already experienced it for billions of years before you were born without any suffering.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Tiktaalik Love

Tiktaalik’s were the first animals to leave the oceans and walk on land. They are the ancestors of all amphibians, reptiles and mammals. I feel a great flush of love and admiration every time I see one depicted. If you go back enough generations, that’s what my great great … looked like.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Time Traveling Loonies

More that half of Americans claim to believe in a literal devil. 10% of them claim to have personally communicated with him. It is like having half the population time travel immigrants from the 16th century.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Tit For Tat

If Christians are going to interfere with science education, then they must expect science to interfere with what they teach in Sunday school.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Tithe Protection Racket

Tithes are a protection racket that work similarly to a Mafia protection racket. In both, the victim hands over a percentage of his profits in return for assurance he will not be tortured. The main difference is intimidation to encourage tithes is legal. Christians have no trouble seeing the parallel when a witch doctor shakes down the flock, but develop psychological blindness when a priest does the same thing.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Tithing

Televangelists like Pat Robertson command their flock to tithe to god. What bloody lie!. Tithes don’t go to god. They go to televangelists to support their extravagant life styles. The notion of god needing your money is absurd. According to Christians, god can manifest anything he wants.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Tithing

Tithing is the oldest, most profitable and most polished con. Contribute 10% to charity, but not to a church. A church is the most useless of charities. All it does for the money it gets is host a weekly sing along. It is based on the lie that god will miraculously repay you many times over.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Tithing as Club Dues

Modern tithing is not really tithing. It does nothing to help the poor. It is more like dues to a social club. The money goes to building maintenance, heat and paying the staff. It is spending for one’s own benefit, not particularly meritorious. It should not get a tax deduction.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Tolerance for Variation

Children are quite intolerant of variation. I remember thinking my neighbour was quite weird for calling her grandmother nanna. I was quite suspicious of my Aunt Clary who tried to pass off scrambled eggs prepared a different way from the one my mother used. Some people grow up without ever developing a tolerance for variation. They become religious bigots.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Tolerating Christian Humbuggery

If the Alcor Life Extension Foundation, a cryogenics company, made the same wild claims the Catholic church does, they would be shut down immediately. We tolerate Christian con-artistry out of tradition.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Tony Ticklinson

Tony Nicklinson Christians in England have successfully interfered with Tony Nicklinson’s right to die. He has ALS and is now too disabled to take his own life. The Christians have arranged it that if anyone helps him they will be charged with murder. A friend of mine Geoff Sirois died of ALS. It is an utterly nightmarish death. Nobody has the right to force another to go through it. Christians pride themselves on their compassion. On this issue they are sadists.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Too Good To Be True

If someone makes promises that sound too good to be true, they are. Don’t let wishful thinking tell you otherwise. Anything really that good, like fresh air, exercise and fresh food will be widely known.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Too Much Respect

Science treats the god hypothesis with far more respect than it deserves. The reason is so many people take it seriously. It is like a psychiatrist humouring a delusional patient. It is like treating the notion of gremlins as the cause of airplane crashes seriously.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Too Sanctimonious

Even Christians can’t stand Christians more sanctimonious than they are.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Tormenting Toddlers

Some Christian parents threaten their male toddlers with consequences most dire if they should ever put their penises inside a female. Some of these toddlers are obedient and learn to never even think about this ultimate crime and to contemplate it with disgust. Why then do Christians like to particularly torment the boys who did what they were told?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Tough Slogging

I have some bad news for those arguing for the existence of a god. Even if they persuaded me the universe did have an intelligent creator, they have ahead a job 100,000 times bigger, convincing me that the god was named Yahweh and did the absurd things reputed of him in the Old Testament.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Toward Objectivity

Doctors do not operate on their family members because they are too emotionally involved. Similarly, Doctors of Divinity should not pontificate on their own religions because they are too emotionally biased.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Toward A Rational Legal System

A rational legal system would be based on how much harm one does to others. A rational moral system would be based on how much harm one does to others and oneself. A Christian moral code is based on placating a fictitious god on speculative grounds. When Christians finally have their Oz green curtain moment, they will feel so silly.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Toward Theocracy

Fundamentalist Christians and fundamentalist Muslims are alike in that they aim to seize control of government, set up a theocracy and suppress all but their brand of religion. Humans are quite stubborn about exercising their chosen religion or lack of religion. If the fundamentalists persist, I expect a conflict that can only be resolved with the genocide of all fundamentalist Christians or Muslims or their forced conversion to a religion that plays well with others.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Toy Evil

One of the reasons I have so much contempt for Christians is their simplistic view of evil. To them it is a giant football game. Yahweh is the leader of one team; Lucifer is the leader of the other. Yahweh and his team behaves worse than their counterparts, but for some reason they are considered the team that we are supposed to root for. If someone commits a crime, it is because they have been seduced secretly by a member of Lucifer’s team. Good is defined as Yahweh did it. The only incentive to behave is a threat of imaginary torture after death.

The Christian view ignores personal responsibility. There is no examination of which particular behaviour is acceptable. There is no examination of what makes people behave badly, and why they reform. It lumps all wrongdoing together as if it were a type of porridge. Then of course they have scapegoating: human sacrifice to forgive the sins of a third party. They also have the notion of buying pardon for sins, where the money goes to the church, not the aggrieved party. It is corrupt at its foundations.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Tracking Everyone

Technology, initially introduced to track paedophiles, will inevitably be extended to track the reading habits and writings of everyone, to make sure they meet with the approval of the society’s most fanatical prudes and Stephen Harper. We have already seen that happen with technology track the movement of all vehicles, originally intended to find kidnappers.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Tradition

You would not want anything to do with traditional dentistry, sanitation, justice, science, medicine, humane treatment of animals… Yet somehow people imagine they would love traditional morality. It is utterly barbaric. It has been wrapped in religious robes to make it look more palatable. It is as revolting as cooking people in pots and eating them.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

The Tragedy Of Not Being Born

If on the night you were conceived, your parents went to a movie instead, you would not have been born. If on the night you were conceived, your father scratched his testicles, a different sperm would have been selected. You would not have been born. If your mother had remembered to take her pill, you would not have been born, but then a baby sister may have been born 3 months later. These are not tragedies, just minor variations in the way the tree of life unfolds. It is monumental conceit to imagine you should have been born rather than any of the other eggs and sperms. Christians, on the other hand, consider every moment with the potential to create offspring that failed to do so, a crime, even masturbation. They even demand rape result in childbirth.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Trained In Insanity

Christians are trained since childhood to accept things that don’t make sense, that are self-contradictory or utterly improbable. Pointing out the idiocy of their beliefs does not in the least deter them. They have been trained accept that the universe is not supposed to make sense and to distrust anyone who appears to make sense of it. They are a magician, a deceiver.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Training Myths

Religion is a set of moral training myths for children. Some people never outgrow them.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Traumatised by Christians

What do you do if Christians traumatised you as a toddler, terrifying you with a vengeful, exacting, cruel, all-seeing god and eternal suffering in hellfire for even minor transgressions? Likely you are very afraid of dying. Contemplating the end of your life fills you with dread, rather than the relief one might feel at the end of an exhilarating roller coaster ride. People who were fortunate enough to have avoided such abuse have no fear of hell. Hell is not objective reality, but a deliberately-created phobia. People (most likely your parents) induced the phobia in you control your behaviour. You were unfairly ambushed before you were old enough to psychologically defend yourself. You are a victim, but not a helpless victim.

If you fret but what if hell exists? remind yourself there is exactly the same amount of objective evidence for hell existing as there is that you are in danger of being kidnapped by fairies. Yes, I suppose they are both remotely possible, but not enough to warrant any practical consideration. Notice how this fear has been like a pall spoiling almost every otherwise joyous moment of your life. Because of your conditioning, it might feel as if there is plenty of evidence, but it all comes down to, a book that got almost nothing right said so In almost every case, where we can double check, we discover this book is in error. It is the very opposite of infallible.

If you fret but if I don’t believe in hell, I will rape and pillage, don’t be silly because people who don’t believe in hell usually behave considerably more ethically than Christians. Further, that’s an argument for lying to yourself. It has no relevance in determining if hell actually exists. Christians are the ones gung ho on the military and killing Muslims and bombing civilians for the fun of it. The US military is a quasi-Christian organisation. The reason you don’t pitchfork babies is fear of punishment, seriously? You are kind to babies because you love babies. You would never dream of treating them that way. Trust yourself. Your very worry you might run amok indicates you are strongly inhibited, completely independently whether hell exists.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Treating the Dead Better Than The Living

One of the reasons I am contemptuous of religious people is they treat the dead much better than they treat the living.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Treating the Plague

If we were hit by the bubonic plague again, we would do much better this time because we would use science to combat it instead of Christian prayers, flagellation, crucifixion and human bonfire sacrifice.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Treating the Plague

In the time of the bubonic plague, Christians beat people, flagellated people, crucified people, burned people alive and prayed. Of course, none of this worked. The Christian tradition is to pay no attention to whether your beliefs are actually true.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Treatment of the Homeless

During the month of December, Christians make great show of caring for the homeless, preparing banquets for them, collecting clothes and food. However, during the rest of the year they drive them out of town with dogs, spraying them with chicken manure and confiscating all their meagre belongings.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Trends

Every year there are fewer and fewer Christians. Moderate Christians are leaving the faith then not joining another. However, the percentage of Christians who are fundamentalist increases. This is because the pool of Christians is primarily drained of non-fundamentalists, leaving behind a bigger percentage of fundamentalists.

Why are there fewer and fewer Christians?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Triumph of the Atheists

The Christians know they are fading away. The only way they can survive is to convert other people’s children. That is why they are working so hard to inculcate Christianity in the public schools.

Why is this happening? Religions require keeping the flock in the dark and feeding them BS. With the Internet, the flock are exposed to criticism of their baseless beliefs and to the craziness of other religions.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Truce Between Criminal Gangs

Freedom of religion is a truce between criminal gangs.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

True Morality

There are two basic ways to live your life:

  1. Think through what is right and do it.
  2. Do what someone else tells you do, irrespective of whether it is right or wrong.

Following religion is cowardly. It is kowtowing to authority, usually corrupt, at least backward, always irrational. It is thus quite strange that so many people claim the source of morality is religion, not reason or common sense.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

A Truly Ignorant Christian Texan

A truly ignorant Christian adult Texan explained he believed in creationism rather than evolution because it was easier to understand. Christians had taught him that you decide what to believe based on how it appeals to you, independent of its truth.

Christians had made sure he never learned the basics of science namely that you judge two competing theories by comparing how they jibed with the observed facts. He did not know that all the data matches evolution, and everything about creationism contradicts observation.

For example: evolution fits observations of DNA, fossil record, observation of evolution and speciation in Mexican fish in the wild, the way bacteria, viruses and insects evolve immunity, artificial selection. Creationism gets the age of the earth wrong, predicts a DNA diversity collapse which did not happen, cannot explain how diversity could restore after the ark experience, predicts a global flood that did not happen, cannot explain layering of the fossil record, cannot explain ongoing evolution.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Trust In God, Except…

Trust in God, except when it counts.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

This is the pragmatic Christian view. By experiment, prayer has been found time after time to be 100% ineffective, but that does not stop Christian con men from pushing the party lie that it is 100% effective.

Trust Nukes Only To Atheists

Only countries where nearly all the citizens are atheist should be entrusted with nuclear weapons. Lunatics who believe they cannot die, such as the Christian Americans, Hindu Indians and Muslim Pakistanis are delusional and hence don’t take global nuclear war nearly seriously enough.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Trust vs Faith

Trust in the true will eventually prevail over faith in the false.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Trust Your Driver

Imagine a Greyhound bus driver who got up and went the washroom while he was driving. Passengers stared in horror. A Christian piped up Bus drivers have mysterious ways. You must have faith.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Trusting Anonymous Testimony and Hearsay

In a court of law, anonymous testimony is not permitted. Hearsay is not permitted. If a witness is caught in inconsistent or false testimony, that disqualifies everything else he says. Yet Christians accept all this inadmissible evidence as 100% reliable when it comes to religious dogma. Further, they accept gut feelings as fully reliable even when there is absolutely nothing in objective reality to back them up.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Trusting Clergy

Debates between Christians and atheists rarely end in consensus because of a fundamental difference in whom you can trust. To the Christian, the clergy are most trustworthy members of society. To the atheist, the clergy are con men, child rapists, liars, deceivers and worse. To the atheists, scientists are most trustworthy members of society because they subscribe to a code of conduct designed to discover truth and do extensive cross checking of each other.

To the Christian, scientists are people with a hidden agenda to destroy public morality. Scientists are wicked because they are unwilling to distort the truth to defend of religious moral codes.

To the atheist, the clergy are wicked because they are eager to distort the truth to defend archaic religious moral codes that promote slavery, homophobia, misogyny and bigotry.

To help a Christian out of his delusions we must shake him out of his blind trust in the clergy and find ways to assure him that science has no such hidden agenda. On the Christian side, it has not all that much to do with whether a deity exists, it is all about who is more trustworthy. A Christian completely distrusts his own ability to discover truth for himself. He believes he has no choice but to trust authorities.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Trusting God

I notice Christians are often unwilling to take measures to protect themselves, presumably because they entrust Yahweh to keep them safe. However, they are even more unwilling to take measures to protect others, so they must have some belief in the efficacy of practical safety.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Trusting God

Trusting god is the same as doing nothing. Think. When have you ever heard, except in fiction or rumour, of Yahweh doing anything to help you that would not have happened naturally anyway? Keep in mind Yahweh’s track record of promise keeping. He repeatedly promised to answer every prayer without exception.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Trusting a Jail Bird

Joseph Smith, the prophet of Mormonism, was a convicted con man. But oddly Mormons all believe his tall tales without a spec of evidence to back them up. Do they bug Bernie Madov to handle their investments from jail?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

The Truth

The big puzzle for me is how blatantly Christians are willing to lie for something they call the Truth. If Christianity needs lies to defend it, it can’t be true. Why are they bothering? They could just be simple con men, out for money and power. Or they could be arrogant people who think they know the truth despite the evidence.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Truth

In religion, truth is something that a religion’s founders speculated should be true. Its degree of truth depends on how long ago this happened. In science, truth is something in accord with reality that science can demonstrate is true.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Truth is not true

When a Christian talks about Truth, he does not mean truth in the ordinary sense of that which is actually so. The Christian warns you with a capital T that he means instead something that he reveres, possibly non-existent.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Truth or Comfort?

Whether someone is a Christian depends on one thing. Which do they love more, truth or comfort?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Truth vs Value

Atheists are annoyed that Christians are claiming outrageous things without evidence. Christians are telling lies that have negative consequences. Atheists are not claiming that all Christians always behave badly or that the Christian church has never done a good deed. The dispute is about the truth and reliability of religious claims. The value of religious faith is irrelevant when determining its truth. Christians turn every debate about the truth of Christianity to its psychological value and emotional appeal which is not at issue.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Truth About Yahweh

Christians would be a lot more plausible if they sold Yahweh like this. Yahweh is a mean, sadistic bastard. He has no particular fondness for humans. He enjoys torturing them after death and he enjoys torturing them while they are alive. He takes pleasure in the rape of a child. He loves to watch someone die slowly of pancreatic cancer. Ebola turns him on something fierce. That is why he is so strongly opposed to physician assisted suicide. It interferes with his sadistic pleasures. Christian pretend to love the bastard and pretend the creator of the mosquito is perfect and all-loving only avoid his wrath. His vanity is beyond measure.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Truth’s Worst Enemy

Doubt is truth’s best friend, faith its worst enemy.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Tudor Church Con

In Tudor England, the monasteries owned more than anyone but the crown. Tenant farmers worked the lands for them. The monks themselves did no work. They just twiddled their thumbs praying. The church today is not that different.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Turbans

Turbans, refusing to cut the hair, dietary rules, ritual prayers and special clothing are all deliberate distractions from what should be the concern of religion — ethical behaviour. By focussing on such trivia, believers can deceive themselves they are almost perfect, when in reality they are disgrace to the species.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

TV Desires

A god, watching human television, would conclude humans want more rape, adultery, murder and natural disasters.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

TV Teaching

In the interest of dramatic tension, dramas and other entertainments show us primarily violent, angry and dysfunctional people. They teach us to separate people into two categories: the good guys and the bad guys. Since people learn unconsciously by mimicking what they see, is it any wonder we have now a society of rude, drug-addicted, violent people?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Twisting Science

I am revolted by the intellectual dishonesty of Christians. They are happy to quote science, but only when they can twist it to support their superstitions.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Two Approaches to Morality

There are basically two kinds of people:

  1. Those who always seek to maximise their advantage relative to others.
  2. Those who have some sort of moral scheme to decide what is right. They do what they think is right rather that what is most to their personal advantage. Sometimes the right thing costs too much and they succumb to the expedient thing, but they at least attempt to do the right thing.

In my opinion, the first kind of people are a waste of carbon, though I am not about to actively harm them. Their mindless activities are destroying the planet.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Two Kinds Of Diseases

There are two kinds of diseases, ones that sometimes get better, either on their own or with treatment, e.g.:

There are others that never heal:

Religious people claim their god can heal any disease or infirmity. Then how come he never heals a disease that does not often get better on its own?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Two Kinds of Error

There two kinds of error:

  1. Believing things that are not true.
  2. Refusing to believe things that are true.

Magicians, con men and the clergy specialise in tricking us into the first error where politicians and military men specialise in tricking us into the second.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Two Kinds of Liar

There are two main kinds of people who say things that are not true:

  1. Con men who knowingly lie to pull one over on others for personal gain.
  2. Cretins who don’t know they are telling untruths. They mindlessly parrot what they have been told.

Christians come in both flavours.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Two Kinds of Truth

When a scientist and a Christian talk about truth, they are referring to something completely different. The scientist refers to valid assumptions that help predict how the world will behave. The truth may be elating or depressing or flat neutral. The key is that it be accurate. The Christians means words he finds thrilling or comforting. It measures intensity of emotion. True words can be brazenly false in the scientific sense.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Two Questions for Christians

  1. There are some 60,000 gods. The main ones still going are Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism and Jainism. Christians sometimes know a little about Judaism, but nothing about the others. Most religions promise to torture you for eternity of you don’t select their religion. I would think people who took these threats seriously would research carefully to be sure they were picking the religion most likely to carry through its threat. But they don’t. They do no research at all. Why such a casual attitude to such a momentous decision?
  2. If I went to a car dealer and the salesman threatened to torture me if I did not buy his car, I would conclude that salesman was a cad, and I would have nothing to do with him. That is not a legitimate way to sell cars. Why do religious people have any truck with salesmen of religions who threaten to torture them if they do not buy?
~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Two Types of Incest

Christians tend to react with equal horror to sex between blood siblings and step siblings. There is good scientific reason for avoiding blood incest — inbreeding leads to deformities and lack of robustness. That does not apply to step incest, between siblings or step-parent and child. There are obviously valid social reasons for avoiding step incest, but it need not be as serious a taboo.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Types of Error

You can err by believing something untrue, or by refusing to believe something that is true. Oddly gullibility can increase both types of error. Consider how gullibility causes a little old lady to believe a TV evangelist that sending him all her savings would be a wise investment. Consider how gullibility causes a Republican to trust a climate change denier without first checking his financial ulterior motives.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Types of Evidence

Imagine you testified in court.

Those who accept the bible, a major life decision, are basing it on evidence that would be thrown out of court.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Types of Love

  1. unconditional love: love no matter what they say or do, like love for a misbehaving child.
  2. conditional love: love with some conditions. Love only if the beloved behaves the way you want them to.
  3. Jesus love: love only if the beloved lets you control everything they think, say and do.
~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Types of paedophile Rings

Usually, when a paedophile ring is uncovered, the members are put in jail and prevented ever after from having access to children. The ring’s property is confiscated. Enablers are also prosecuted. However, when the biggest paedophile ring in the world is uncovered, we give them a tax break and let them continue business as usual.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Types of Prayer

Praying for rain is one of the most innocuous forms of prayer because there is no practical activity to bring on rain that prayer displaces. Praying for healing from an infectious disease, on the other hand, is irresponsible because it delays seeking effective medical treatment which hurts not only the superstitious patient but everyone she infects.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Types of Religion

The innocuous type of religion is like a Society for Creative Anachronism. They like to eat ancient foods, perform ancient ceremonies, perform antique music and wear historic clothes.

The types of religion that cause trouble do things like this:

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Ultimate Arbiters

It is ironic that Christians fancy themselves as the ultimate arbiters of right and wrong, when they are the group working hardest to drive man to extinction.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

The Ultimate Deadbeat Dad

Imagine a father who disappeared before his child was born and faked his own death, and went even further to plant evidence that he never existed. He never sent child support. He never sent presents or letters or photos. He never called. He hid so well even teams of detectives and scientists could detect absolutely no sign of him. All that was left of him was a document he might have written, but probably not, promising to roast his kids alive if they did not maintain the belief he was still living.

What would you think of this guy? Sick and cruel comes to mind. Infinitely kind and merciful is how Christians describe their god. They must have Stockholm syndrome to keep heaping praise on this shithead. The true answer is he never existed. There is no need to be angry.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

The Ultimate Hypocrite

The ultimate hypocrite is a military chaplain who helps soldiers overcome their guilt at raping, maiming and killing children.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Unappealing Appeal

What holds a believer is not the beauty or logic of the belief but fear of condemnation for noticing its flaws.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Uncaring God

If there truly were a god, he not put up with people murdering each other, especially soldiers raping, torturing and killing children. On the first offence, a bolt of lightning would dispatch the culprit and put and end to his criminal career.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Unchained to Reality

Religion has no tie to reality. It has no reality checks. It requires not even any internal consistency. The story can easily go spinning off in crazy ways because it need not have any visible effects in the real world.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Unconscious Optimism

Scientists have discovered our unconscious processing has an optimistic bias. It makes us overestimate our abilities and underestimate our challenges. This helps us keep going when we would logically give up. However, this optimism can be derailed into thinking that is harmful. For example, many people, based purely on optimism, discount the warnings from science about global warming, so are driving society to an unparalleled catastrophe, second only to global nuclear war. The optimism lead them, without evidence, to presume they will live forever after death. The result is they don’t take proper precautions to protect themselves from being killed in a war or accident.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Unconstitutional Income Tax Exemption

The American constitution says the government shall make no law concerning religion. How then does the US supreme court justify giving the church exemption from taxes? To do that they have to treat religions specially and make laws on just what constitutes a religion.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Unconstitutional Indoctrination

Even though it is unconstitutional, the US military promotes Christianity in its combat troops. Why? Devout Christians believe that they cannot really die. This makes them braver and greater risk takers. Further, since they believe they cannot really kill victims, they are not as reluctant to kill, especially civilians and children. They believe their victims will go instantly to heaven.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Unconstitutional Religion

Even though it is unconstitutional, the US military promotes Christianity in its combat troops. Why? Devout Christians believe that they cannot really die. This makes them braver and greater risk takers. Further, since they believe they cannot really kill victims, they are not as reluctant to kill, especially civilians and children. They believe their victims will go instantly to heaven.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Unconstitutional Texas Religion Test

The Texas state constitution requires office holders to swear that they believe in god. Nobody has challenged this in supreme court.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Understanding Atheism

Atheism seeks to correct erroneous magical thinking in the religious. It is similar to reporting errors in maps or correcting the pronunciation of news announcers.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Understanding Atheists

Christians often express disbelief that atheists truly have no belief in god. They accuse them of pretending not to believe so they can sin. This makes no sense. Yahweh allegedly will torture you whether you believe in him, pretend to believe in him, pretend not to believe in him or do not believe in him at all. Changing your beliefs does nothing to protect you.

If you are a Christian and want to understand atheists, read on. There are 60,000 gods. To the atheist, they are all the same. They are all absurd. There is no evidence for any of them being real. The written material provided about the deity sounds much more like fairy tales (talking snakes, donkeys and fig trees) and legends than serious history.

If you are a Christian, read some Muslim literature. It will seem absurd (splitting the moon in two, riding to heaven on a flying horse). To the atheist, the Muslim literature also appears absurd, and the Christian bible seems equally absurd. To the atheist, there is no reason to treat Christianity differently from any other religion.

As a Christian, you have two standards for plausibility:

An atheist has only one standard of plausibility. Imagine how incredible the bible would appear if you were sure a human had written it. That is how an atheist reads it because it is so inaccurate and so bungling a deity could not have written it.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Understanding the Sun

The ancients saw the sun rise in the east and disappear into the west only to magically reappear again on the eastern horizon the next morning. How did it get there? Surely it did not burrow through the earth! So many assumed it was reincarnated afresh each morning. The odd thing is most Americans revere these early notions of how the world works as more accurate than our modern understanding based on astronomy and lasers. They assume because a belief is ancient it must be correct. Oddly, they have no such exaggerated respect for religious traditions other than their own. Even more oddly, they are quite happy to entrust the navigation of jetliners and ships, space exploration, medicine, agriculture, oil exploration etc. to experts who use modern scientific thinking.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Undetectable Ether

In the 1800s scientists assured us that the ether existed. They gradually admitted there was no way of detecting it. They realized an undetectable ether and a non-existent ether were for all practical purposes, the same thing and they dropped the notion. In a similar way, Christians are still trying to promote an undetectable god.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Undetectable God

The biggest problem a Christian has is that god cannot be detected in any way. How can you write so many books about something, which even in principle, you cannot possibly know anything about? It is astounding how certain people have been over the centuries about the most minute details of the attributes of Yahweh the god and his desires and activities. It is all just blowing smoke. It is a giant BS con game. Nobody knows anything — not even whether Yahweh exists. They just pretend to. This akin to writing endless treatises on the undetectable soul or the care and feeding of undetectable unicorns.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Unearned Tax Freedom

Churches provide almost no services to society, yet the enjoy complete freedom from taxes whereas service clubs that provide all manner of services to the public don’t get any break at all. The tax break should be given for the income spent to provide a public service, not just for being a church.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Unemployable Fundamentalists

Every fundamentalist is effectively choosing a lobotomy. That person disqualifies himself from ever understanding science or getting a job that requires science or engineering. This is what is pushing the USA to become a third world nation. This is why its days as a superpower are numbered. Fundamentalists can only take the jobs rapidly disappearing from automation. We are rapidly moving to a time when all fundamentalists will live on food stamps.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Unfair Yahweh

How can a just god condemn people to hell for rejecting Christianity just because they never heard of it, or because they parents commanded them to accept some other religion?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Unfriendly Universe

Most of the universe will kill you instantly. So much for the notion a god created the universe as a garden of Eden for humans.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Unicorn Atheism

I don’t believe in ghosts, unicorns, alien abductions, seances or witches. I almost never think about my failure to believe because it is rare anyone hits me over the head with it. There is not even a word to describe my lack of faith. In contrast, Christians beat me over the head, try to take away my civil rights and threaten my life. They are the ones who label me atheist. If they left me and my friends alone, I would ponder the issue about as often as I ponder the possibility of alien abductions.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Unicornology

Theology is bogus for the same reason unicornology is. There are no facts, just imaginary lore.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Unicornology

A university degree in theology is as preposterous as a degree in unicornology.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Unicorns

Almost no one believes in the existence of unicorns. They are fairly plausible. They are just horses with horns. They break no laws of biology or physics. Yet all kinds of people believe in an utterly improbably Yahweh, that breaks every law of physics, that is unique.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Unimportance of Free Will

If someone could convince you that with complete certainty there was or was not free will, what would you do any differently?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Unimportant Question

Is there a god? does not deserve to be considered one of the big questions. It is on par with Are there leprechauns and talking snakes?. There is a god and he thinks my people are superior to all others is the biggest, most destructive of all the delusions.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

The Universal Aquarium

Nearly all aquarists dote on their fish. They keep them in carefully oxygenated, filtered water. They feed them expensive natural ingredients as close as possible to what they ate in the wild. They keep the temperature bang on at the ideal. There are only a few people, through inexperience or laziness, who do not.

This is the standard behaviour of ordinary human aquarists. It is superior to the compassion shown by the alleged Yahweh who has frequent temper tantrums where he metaphorically smashes his tanks or deliberately infects his tanks with a plague.

How can you claim Yahweh is perfect? He is worse behaved than a human two-year old. Yahweh has no more right to torment his living creations than an aquarist has to torture his fish. Yahweh cannot exist in reality because a being who behaves as Yahweh does, even if he existed, logically could not be a god. He would be a brat.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Universal Physics

I find it odd that scientists presume physics and chemistry work the same everywhere in the universe, but imagine biology could well be totally different or non-existent. Biology derives from biochemistry. This assumption only makes sense in the light of the absurdly conceited Christian notion that a deity created the entire universe as a present for man.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Universalist Assumption

The scientific assumption is that whatever we observe on earth is indicative of the way the universe behaves everywhere else. The religious assumption is that earth is the centre of the cosmos and that man is the acme of life in the universe. This incredible vanity has even infected many scientists.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

The Universe

The universe is far too complicated, far too mysterious for a Christian to understand.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

The Universe Is Not Simple

Christianity postulates that the universe is constrained to be simple enough to be fully understood by five year olds.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

A Universe Out Of Nothing

Christians often claim you need Yahweh to have created the universe because everything needs a creator (except, for some reason, Yahweh). This is simply untrue. The key fact is space itself used to be smaller than an atom, then smoothly and rapidly expanded to the size the universe is today. It is still expanding, ever faster.

The other key fact is in quantum mechanics, on a small scale, particles pop into and out of existence all the time, randomly, without cause, without intention. Creation is nothing special. Christians think it is magic because they are willfully ignorant of quantum mechanics. Quantum Mechanics boggles the imagination. Things behave on the small completely differently than they do at our scale. Yet your computer would not work if the math behind it were wrong.

Energy can convert into matter and vice versa, (the old E=mc²) so it is perfectly normal for matter to appear out of nothing (actually energy).

Matter appearing out of nothing is utterly ordinary. It happens billions of times a second right under your nose. Insisting it requires Yahweh is like insisting ocean waves require Poseidon.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

A Universe Without God

To the scientifically-illiterate Christian, a universe with God is much simpler and easier to understand than one without. To the scientist, a universe with a God is utterly baffling, unpredictable and unknowable. A universe without one is logical and potentially knowable.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Unjust Existence

One of the distressing facts about life for Christians is that it is blatantly unfair. How could a loving god be so unjust? Christians handle this dilemma by pretending that life is indeed just, at least in the long run. They pretend injustices are righted by God meting out rewards and punishments in the afterlife. The catch is there is no evidence whatsoever of this afterlife, rewards or punishments. Christians cling to this fantasy because they are deadbeats. This belief absolves that from seeking justice here on earth or going to the aid of anyone who is being unfairly treated.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Unlearning

Christians learned their delusions through hearing stories and songs. Perhaps that is how they will unlearn them.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Unlimited Prayer Requests

The Christians won’t tell you this, but, contrary to the bible, you don’t get an unlimited number of granted wishes/prayers.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Unnatural Acts

Celibacy is the only truly unnatural sexual act.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Unregulated Daycare

In 13 states of the union, religious childcare is exempt from the regulations on secular child care facilities. At religious day care, kids routinely die from things like being left alone in vans in the sun. They are left in their own feces. Similarly religious schools have greater leeway to physically abuse children that public schools. All a scoundrel or child molester has to do is claim religious affiliation and he’s in. Secular people are trying to protect Christian children, but Christians do whatever they can to endanger their own children. The expression TSTL applies.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Unscientific DSM (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders)

Because the DSM defines faith-based delusions as normal and distinct from other illusions, no scientist can study religious delusion pathology.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Unsigned Universe

If a god had created the universe, he would have signed it.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Unsolved Problems

Christians like to taunt non-believers by demanding they explain in terms comprehensible to a first grader how did the universe start or how did life start. When the Christians cannot understand the answers, they dance about claiming they have proved all science is impotent, and we must believe in their bronze age deity.

First of all, there are millions of unsolved problems in science. The more we learn the more we discover that we do not know, and the list of unsolved problems grows. The length of this list is not relevant to the question of whether a deity exists. Science has solved millions of problems. Our whole technological culture runs on scientific discoveries. Christianity has solved none. Christians have some gall to demand science have already solved all possible problems before they have any legitimacy.

Christians refuse to familiarise themselves with any science discovered since 1600. So they refuse to believe answers to their questions which involve things like radioactive decay, quantum mechanics, special relativity, general relativity and the Hubble expanding universe. They memorise straw man parodies of evolution, e.g. the jetliner in the junkyard, and refuse to believe truthful explanations even from the most impeccable sources. Christians are incredibly dishonest. I hold them in extreme contempt. They are such hypocrites because they claim to be more honest than average. In such debates they tell nothing but lies.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

The Unsolved Puzzle Proof of God

Christians often debate like this. They present a puzzle. If their opponent cannot answer it that supposedly proves god exists. That is as nuts as asking Do you know where your wife is? No. That proves she has been abducted by aliens.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

USA Was Not Founded As A Christian Nation

George Washington, John Adams and the unanimous senate passed a bill stating that in no way was the USA founded on the Christian religion.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Use of Churches

What good are churches?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Used Tesla Dealer

This is an apocryphal story. An atheist went to a used Tesla electric car dealership. He said to the salesman Please give me all the reasons why I should buy this car. The salesman gave his pitch. The atheist said Sorry, but that is nowhere near convincing enough. Besides some of your claims, like the car does not require electricity or other fuel, I simply do not believe. The salesman replied How dare you insult the infinitely wise Elon Musk. You are possessed by the devil. You refused the sale because you are a covert rapist and child molester. My sales manual warned me about evil bastards like you. You will be so sorry. We are going to send out a team of the sickest sadists in the universe to break every one of your bones, even the tiny ones in your ears. We will crush every one of your teeth with giant pliers. When we are done with you, you will easily pass through a cheese cloth sieve. I stamp my feet at you.

That is how Christians usually behave when atheists reject their pitch for the existence of Yahweh.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Useful Fasting

Humans evolved in an environment where the optimum strategy was to eat whenever food is available and to eat as much as possible. In our modern world, this leads to obesity, diabetes and cardio-vascular disease. Christianity with its Lenten fast and Islam with its Ramadan fast may unconsciously have been trying to artificially restore the environment for which we are adapted.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Useless Priests

An astrophysicist can explain with mathematical precision how the stars and planets move, their composition, the precise mix of colours of each star, how far away they are, how you can use light from far away to look back in time. What can the priests tell you? Nothing, not even why the stars don’t all fall down. Why do so many people prefer incompetent experts?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Uselessness of Theocratic Thinking

Any theocratic scientific theory is useless for engineering because and some point in the procedure it will say at this point a god performs a miracle. Unfortunately, engineers cannot perform miracles nor persuade a god to perform them on cue.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Uses of Time Travel

If ever we invent time travel, the highest priority should be tracking down various biblical figures and getting them proper treatment for their various mental illnesses. Maybe then Christianity could be nipped in the bud.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Using God To Impress

When someone says God called me to do such and such what does that mean? It means, I may look like a schlep and what I am doing may look utterly unimportant, but I am so special that the creator of the universe, manifested as a voice in my head, charged me above everyone else with this sacred and vitally important task.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Vague Doctrines

Why are religions so full of vague, illogical, obscure and ambiguous doctrines? Because clear ones are too easily dismissed as nonsense. I show deference to professors who understand the mathematics of quantum mechanics. Religions use this same effect to steal respect.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Value of the Evanescent

Butterflies, flowers contribute to joy for only a day. Christians tend to claim they have no value. They imagine only something eternal and unchanging counts. Your acts of today are for today. That the effects linger for centuries is unnecessary.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Value of Faith

Imagine someone who was extraordinarily conceited. They thought the knew everything. They believed they were morally superior to everyone else, and enjoyed looking down their nose. How do people get that way? Some are spoiled as children. Some join religions that teach them they are superior simply for joining that religion. Why then do you imagine that faith makes people behave better? It just convinces them to become snobs.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Value of Secularism

A Christian secularist is rare. Most Christians, on seeing themselves in the majority, feel no need for protection from other faiths (or non faiths). Instead they see it is a licence to bully, and impose Christianity on others.

We know from early American and European history that various Christian sects will happily murder each other if the state does not maintain a truce. Modern day Christians do not realise how valuable the state’s imposed secular truce is. It keeps a very good lid on the violence.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Valuing Corpses

One of the most irrational things Christians do is seriously risk the lives of young men to retrieve dead bodies. That is the triumph of superstition over logic.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Valuing the Irrational Over the Rational

If a parent kills their child by refusing them a blood transfusion, we consider that perfectly acceptable even if the parent offers no reason for doing so, just a religious belief that transfusions are wrong. Yet we consider it murder if the parent had a legitimate concern, e.g. risk of infection. There is something wrong with this picture. We are valuing the irrational over the rational.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Valuing Knowledge

If someone just dabbles with a body of truthful knowledge, he will tend to grossly underestimate its value. If someone just dabbles with a body of religious BS, he will tend to grossly overestimate its value.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Vanity

Given the vast size of the universe, lusting for cosmic significance is a vain goal. Politicians go for big-frog-in-a-small pond significance. They fight wars to claim temporary dominance over chunks of the surface of our blue marble — spaceship earth. Their single-minded desire makes them trample others, including their own wives and children.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

The Vatican Loves War Criminals

After WWII, the Catholic church did not excommunicate even a single war criminal or génocidaire. They only went after scholars and theologians.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Vatican Priorities

To this day, the priority of the Catholic church is to suppress scandal, not to protect children from abuse. Bishops still swear an oath of office to this effect.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Vatican Refusal to Prosecute paedophile Priests

Look at this from a Machiavellian point of view. The church has a major problem recruiting new priests. Traditionally the #1 perk it could offer was safe, unlimited sexual access to children. It also provided the paedophile with extreme authority to terrorise children into compliance. The church would cover and provide a cloak of respectability. If things got too hot, the church would arrange a transfer to new territory where the paedophile was unknown. With that gone, who would step up to be a priest? Without paedophile and paedophile voyeurs, there is almost no one left willing to become a priest. You can’t very well expect an institution to slit its own throat by prosecuting its priests.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Vatican Sexuality

The Vatican now bans gay priests. They ban celibate priests with a homosexual orientation. They even ban priests who support gay rights. On the other hand, they promote child-molesting priests. The good news is the Vatican is having a heck of a time recruiting new priests. They are deliberately drying up 70% of the stream — closeted gay people twisted by Catholic dogma into thinking they need to lead a life of celibacy to atone for their existence. This will make the church wither even faster.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Vatican Updates Exorcism

On 1999-01-26, the Vatican issued updated documents on how to perform exorcism rituals. How much longer must we wait for updated witch dunking rituals?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70) source

Vatican’s Murderous Lie

The Vatican spread a lie that women were better off if they did not use condoms, even if their husbands were infected by HIV. What would motivate the Vatican to tell such a monstrous lie?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Venerating Corpses

Christians venerate corpses and bones, treating them with even more respect than if they were alive. Some examples:

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Victim Pride

When Bernie Madoff pulled off his massive Ponzi scheme, his victims were humiliated. They did want anyone to know how gullible they had been. However, when people are conned by churches and televangelists, they brag about how much they were taken for.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Victims of the Catholic Church

Victims of the Catholic Church
Dates Age Person What He Did What Church Did To Him
1452-04-151519-05-0267 Leonardo da Vinci Doubted fossil sea shell could reach mountain tops in a global flood. nothing
1473-02-191543-06-2470 Copernicus Declared the sun was the center of the universe. Works were burned after his death.
15481600-02-1752 Giordano Bruno Declared the sun was the center of the solar system. Stars were distant suns. Burned at the stake
1564-02-151642-01-0877 Galileo Said the earth moved around the sun. Made a telescope and saw the moons of Jupiter. Called before the inquisition. Silenced and put under permanent house arrest.
1571-12-271630-11-1558 Johannes Kepler Said planets move in ellipses around the sun and discovered the mathematics that governs planetary speed. He was ignored until some time after his death.
~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Video Game

Imagine a video game where your opponents are trying to set the entire world on fire. Your main tool in combating them in trying to convince them verbally not to do that. However, they are irrational and don’t care if they burn to death. You have to try to convert them to rationality. They try to convert your forces to insanity. The opposition have only very limited ability to understand what you are telling them. They do not trust what you say and refuse to check up what you say for themselves. They do not believe in evidence. Some of the opposition, the leaders, are rational. They pretend to be believers for quasi rational but selfish motives.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Villain Yahweh

I really don’t like Yahweh, but then there are many villains of fiction I detest.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Violence Implies Uncertainty

Christian and Muslim fanatics who resort to violence and persecution to spread their dogma are tacitly admitting their teachings are too improbable to be convincing on their own.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Virtue In Submission

Christianity makes a virtue out of weakness, out of capitulating to evil authority. Christian preachers were used all over the world to soften up indigenous peoples to make it easier to steal their lands. It is no coincidence that Hitler’s Germany was taught to submit to arbitrary authority by Christianity.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Visitation From God

If you are a skilled psychologist, you can use emotion, music, hypnosis, release from fear, chanting… to induce a ultra-pleasurable state in your victim. It is then trivial to convince him this feeling as an impromptu visit from the creator of the universe. You can then fleece him for every cent he owns. The masters of this scam are usually called evangelists. To learn some of their tricks, read Battle For the Mind, A Physiology of Conversion and Brainwashing by William Walters Sargant.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Visual Gullibility

Over the millennia we humans have learned to be skeptical about any story we were told, but we automatically trust anything we see with our eyes. Unfortunately, we humans still tend to take as real anything visual. Photos and movies, even ones we know rationally are staged, fool us. Oliver Stone’s fictitious film version of history is more real than a printed page in a history book. Christians have exploited this visual gullibility to sell us all manner of fanciful supernatural notions.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Voice Commanding You To Kill Your Child

Most Christians claim that if they heard a voice in their head commanding them to kill their child, they would. They would consider this the only moral and proper course of action. I consider that insane, in the legal sense of being incapable of telling right from wrong. An evil act does not become good just because you imagined a deity told you to do it. It would not even become good if a real deity told you to do it. It would just mean the deity was behaving in a callous, malicious or capricious way.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Voluntary Crucifixion

When a Philippine Catholic priest persuades his flock to undergo voluntary crucifixion, it is not quite as evil as act as forcing people to undergo crucifixion, but it creates almost as much pointless suffering.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Voting for God

Christian: There are way more people who prefer that god exists than the contrary. Yahweh is the most popular god.
Atheist: Before you can have an election, you need at least one deity to show up who wants the office.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Vow Of Celibacy

What kind of person is willing to swear a vow of celibacy? Someone who has no interest in sex with other adults, someone willing to keep his sex life completely hidden. No wonder the priesthood attracts so many paedophiles.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Vow To Virtue

Let A be the class of all people on earth who ever vowed to do only God’s will. Let B be the class of all people who vowed to do only what was righteous. Which group do you think contains the greater percentage of murderers?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Waking From Reality

When you wake from a dream, the memory of it is often chaotic and absurd. Is there an analogous process to wake from ordinary reality? Some claim there is, but I have not yet decided if they are correct, deluded or pulling a con.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Waning Christian Financial Power

Educated intelligent people use effective methods to accumulate wealth and power. Christians use ineffective ones like tithing and prayer. Christians, in the long term then, will thus became less and less important. If you doubt, look how much their influence has waned since 1200.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Waning Religion

100 years ago, you would hear only the dogma of one church. The threats of hell fire would seem plausible because everyone in the community at least pretended to believe them. Now, people are exposed to hundreds of other cultures and their myths. They are exposed to the beliefs of other religions. They learn about the secular history in the first century. The threat of eternal torture loses its punch. It is just one of many similar stories. No wonder the power of the churches is waning.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Wanting There To be Yahweh. Really?

Even though I think people who believe is god are stupid, I can at least understand how they could have been sold the idea. However, what is really puzzling is why they would want some sadistic, immoral, capricious, celestial dictator spying on them, tormenting them and making up utterly silly rules.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Warring Sects

The civil war in the USA would still be raging if the north and south claimed different religious sects.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Wasps And Mosquitos Are Incompatible with a Loving God

How could there be a god, where there are wasps, mosquitos and Christians?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Wasps at a Picnic

Few people mind hummingbirds in their garden, but most find ants and wasps unwelcome. Why? Ants and wasps interfere with your picnic. This is why Christians are so obnoxious. They are like ants and wasps meddling in other people’s affairs that don’t concern them.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Wasted Corneas

A Christian dog in a manger tries to cremate or bury everyone’s perfectly good corneas.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Wasted Donations

The Christian churches teach their flocks that donations to charities that actually do something don’t count; only donations to the church count toward salvation. This deflects billions of dollars from useful to useless activities.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Wasted Lives

A great many famous thinkers wasted the tail end of their lives chewing on problems involving imaginary sky fairies, most notably Newton and Pascal. Imagine what they might have accomplished had they avoided that time-wasting tar baby.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Water Into Wine

For stage magic purposes, turning water into wine means giving water a purple colour. Nobody other than a shill has to taste it to see if it really wine. This is something any seven year old can pull off.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Water Into Wine

Novelist Malcolm Lowry convinced his friends that he had just changed water into wine, using only his charisma. It would not be that much of a challenge for illusionists Doug Henning, David Copperfield, Penn and Teller or Criss Angel or for a hypnotist like Milton Erickson. Oddly, today, this ability no longer gives these fellows the status of prophets.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

By the Way

Let’s assume Christians could prove a god created the universe. That would not mean Yahweh did it or that Yahweh exists. There are 60,000 god humans have asserted. The creator could be any one of them, or yet another god humans have not heard of. There is nothing special about Christianity. The only people who imagine it is were born where it was popular and their parents indoctrinated them into it. I read both the bible and the Qur’an cover to cover. I have embarrassing news for Christians. The bible has far more errors, far more inconsistencies, far more violence, far more insanity. If you read about the Hindu gods, they are much more civilised than Yahweh. Christianity is not even in the running as the most likely religion. Christians will forever be unaware of this because they imagine it wicked to learn anything about any other religion.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

We Are Not Alone

One in five stars have an earth-like planet. The religious notion that earth contains the only life in the universe becomes daily more preposterous.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Weak Evidence for Gremlins

I have seen more evidence for gremlins, sasquatches and the cadborosaurus than I have for the god Yahweh. Oddly, even that evidence does not persuade me to send 10% of my money off in the mail to those claiming to speak for them.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Weep at a Brain-Damaged Christian

Just as you can be simultaneously dismayed at and frustrated with someone with Alzheimer’s, it hard not to simultaneously weep and get angry with a Christian, Muslim or Jew, when a god virus has destroyed crucial, specific critical-thinking parts sections of their otherwise intact brains.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Weeping at Funerals?

If Christians are so absolutely sure that death is just a transition to heavenly bliss, why do they weep at funerals? They know in their hearts of hearts, just like everyone else, that they will never see their loved one again. They don’t really believe the heaven happy-ever-after BS, they just wish it were true. They just pretend to their fellow Christians that they believe it is true because that is what is socially expected of them.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Weight Loss Clinic Analogy

Imagine there was a large global chain of weight loss clinics. They promised eternal life and perfect health, but never delivered. They constantly pressured their clients for ever higher donations which were actually protection money. Over the decades they had tortured and killed 50 million people ostensibly for refusing to write endorsements. Prosecuting them was all but impossible. 1.2 billion people were so terrified of them, they would do whatever they could to interfere with any prosecutions. Did I mention they ran the world’s largest paedophile ring on the side? Of course, you know who I am really talking about — the Catholic Church.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Were You There?

Christians love to tell me with absolute certainty minute details of what happened in biblical times, but the only source they use is the bible. Where are they getting all this extra detail?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

We’ll Meet Again

The song We’ll Meet Again click to listen is the best Christian song. The melody and lyrics tug at the heartstrings of the desire to be reunited with someone who has been taken from you. It hints at the Christian heaven without being heavy handed. Beautiful as it is, it is still wishful thinking.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

We’re so Fucking Special

The Christian religion is predicated on the notion that earth is the only home to intelligent life in the universe and that god is fascinated with micromanaging man’s actions through threats of torture. There are trillions of other worlds. We have not yet studied even one of them. It is thus premature to presume the Christian hypothesis. As soon as we discover another intelligent species, especially one that enjoys more divine favour than we do, Christianity will have to collapse in embarrassment.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

What Amazes?

What amazes depends on your expectations. Evolution seems old hat to me because I used to breed tropical fish. Magnify the changes I saw by billions of years and you have far more than enough change to explain all life.

That a particle smaller than an atom might pop into existence all by itself, does not astonish me. Granted large objects don’t do that, but my eyesight is not good enough to see if that is how tiny ones behave. If it did, for me, it would be an undetectable, insignificant event. (Christians used to believe that mice just spontaneously appeared in clothes drawers, without the necessity of mother mice. Today they balk at the big bang having a subatomic particle appear out of nothing.)

However, the fact that the universe is still vigorously changing even after 13 billion years seems quite remarkable to me. It does not seem to astonish anyone else, though.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

What is Atheism?

Atheism is a complaint about the competence of theists. We atheists say, so far, theists utterly failed to come up with convincing evidence that a deity exists. If new evidence appeared, we atheists could well become believers. We atheists don’t claim there is no god, just that deists have made only the most pathetic case for one.

We atheists look upon you deists as we do people who claim there are aliens living on earth, there is a Loch Ness monster and there are sasquatches. All you deists do is hand wave… no DNA, no fur, no high res video. Your claims are far more outrageous than arguments for the sasquatch. You claim your god has properties no animal ever observed has and which are logically inconsistent.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

What Catholics are So Obnoxious

Catholics would be only 1/10 as obnoxious if they did not believe their opinions automatically trump everyone else’s.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

What Is Christianity?

Today, many people see Christianity as a discipline they voluntarily take on so they will behave more responsibly.

In future, I think we will see Christianity as an epidemic, that passes mostly via extended contact between parents and children. It causes persistent and dangerous delusions.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

What Is Death?

What is death? No more experience, worry or fear. No more ability to influence the universe and no more responsibility to do so. It seems to me about as scary as the end of a roller coaster ride or going under anaesthesia.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

What is Death?

What does it mean to die?

It is just a shutdown. You finally get to stop the frantic activity.

All this stuff about souls, judgment and eternal torment is just imagination. There is zero evidence for any of it. It has emotional appeal merely because the tales are so ghastly and so often repeated.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

What Do Christians Think Of Me?

I wonder what Christians really think when I point out what a bastard the god Yahweh is according to the old testament, or show the evidence that the god Yahweh has no more chance of existing than Sulis Minerva. Do they think I am doing something dangerous, or are they merely offended I find them ridiculous, like children afraid of bogeymen under the bed?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

What Do You Know About God?

The only property that theists can be sure god posseseses is that he is capable of creating universes. He is not necessary omnipotent, omniscient or omnibenevolent. These extra properties are just wishful thinking.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

What Does Why Mean?

When you ask a why question like, Why is the hinge on a microwave door on the left?, what you are actually asking is For what convenience was the hinge put on the left or What is the advantage to the user of putting the hinge on the left? but when you ask similar why questions on a grand scale like Why is there an earth? you are presuming the existence of some super-being capable of influencing the universe on this scale and having preferences and purposes. Until there is evidence of such a super-being, such questions are meaningless, though you are free of course to make up personal reasons why having an earth is convenient.

However, if you asked, Why is there a Mount Everest? what you could be asking is an explanation of the plate tectonics that thrust that rock so high in the air. But that is not really a why question. It is a legitimate disguised how question, How did Mount Everest come to be?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

What God Who Have Created Such Cruel Competition?

In the game of evolution, it is not enough that you win, others must lose because there are limited resources for the next generation. Cruelty of competition is at the very core of life. I find this fact a life a convincing argument that life could not have been designed by a benign god.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

What Is Good About Religion?

Is there anything good about religion?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

What Happens After You Die?

Dinesh D’Souza argues that atheists and Christians are both presuming knowledge about life after death that they cannot know. When I was four, my sister’s turtle died. I dug it up every day for weeks to see if it would stay dead. It did. There is plenty of evidence of this sort that creatures and humans stay dead, ditto for plants. On the other hand, there is no evidence of any kind for resurrection. Life after death is mere speculation and the nature of the assumed resurrection is just wishful thinking. Believing in life after death is like believing in other things for which there is no evidence such as spider men on Mars, the ability to fly by flapping your arms and the ability to attract Hollywood actors to pursue you and demand sex.

I similarly cannot prove that a team of leprechauns do not knock me out for 10 seconds every time I use the toilet with no one watching me using magic that makes me forget the event. But on the other hand, there is not a scrap of evidence it happens either. I don’t have to prove it does not. The fact I have no proof in no way increases the probability this nutty idea is true. Ditto for all the whacko ideas Christians just pull out of their asses. I challenge Christians to show me why any of the things they claim without evidence are any more likely than the leprechaun team.

Most likely, life after death is like life before you were born. There is no experience at all. This is not at all frightening, especially compared with infinite boredom of heaven or infinite torture of hell. I have been under general anaesthesia a number of times in my life. I woke up perhaps an hour later as if no time had passed at all. I had experienced absolutely nothing while under. Deep anaesthesia is the closest I can get to death without actually dying. So it seems to me that experience is the best approximation to death.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

What Happens After You Die?

What is the closest you have ever been to being dead? Your heart was barely beating. You were barely breathing. You were unconscious. You were not dreaming. It is general anaesthesia. You feel yourself disappearing over a period of a few seconds. A few hours later you suddenly pop back into consciousness. It feels as if no time at all had passed. Similarly being dead is experiencing nothing. After all, your brain is rotted. It is not capable of giving you experiences.

Consider also the time before you were conceived. You experienced nothing. You were just a twinkle in your father’s eye. Very few people experience any distress over those eons of non-existence (aka death) prior to conception. Nobody makes up silly stories about life before conception.

Death is nothing to be afraid of. Dying, however, can be a nightmare, especially if you have the misfortune to have Catholic caregivers who believe that imposing suffering is a virtue.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

What Happens After You Die?

What happens when we die? When I was four, I did an experiment to find out. Every few days I would dig up my sister’s dead turtle to see if it revived. It did not. Some snot came out of its nose, but that’s all. I presume the same applies to me because I am also an animal.

When I go under anaesthesia, I watch myself disappear. Nothing whatsoever happens. Later, I pop back into existence as if no time had passed. I presume being dead feels the same, without the revival. It is like the complete non-existence before I was born. All this stuff about heaven and souls is just wishful thinking. There is no evidence for it.

I have had some out of body experiences, but I was alive at the time. I see them just as vivid hallucinations of what the world would look like from a different vantage point. Everyone can do this, at least in imagination.

The Christian after-death myth to me is utterly ridiculous, because it applies to only one species, not even species with bigger brains than ours. Nothing in nature treats a single species in a unique way. Further, there is not a stick of evidence for the Christian story.

Mediums trick people into believing they can communicate with the departed. They sometimes bilk their victims for millions of dollars. Christians are gullible because they are so desperate to believe their loved ones are not really dead. Preachers bilk their flocks with a similar con.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

What Harass Christians?

Why do we atheists harass the Christians to give up their religious beliefs? Because when people believe things that are not true they are more likely to do crazy, harmful or foolish things.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

What If Christians Stopped Lying

Religious people pretend to know for certain that which is clearly impossible and counter to fact. They also claim to know for certain things that no one has any way of knowing. What if they could be persuaded to stop doing this? It would then be possible to resolve disputes by appeal to commonsense reality. We could enjoy the diversity without the insane violence.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

What If You Are Wrong?

  1. if the atheists are right, 4.9 billion are wrong.
  2. If the Christians are right, 5.1 billion are wrong.
  3. If Islam is right, 5.7 billion are wrong.
  4. If Hinduism is right, 6.3 billion are wrong.
~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

What It Is Like To Be Dead

I already know what non-existence is like. I did it for eons prior to the spring of 1947 when I was conceived. It was quite painless. That strikes me as the best evidence I have as to what it will be like after I die. To a Christian, this may sound odd, but that is surely the standard they apply to daffodils.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

What It Takes To Persuade

The atheist demands evidence of a deity before acknowledging its probable existence. The Christian demands absolute proof of the non-existence of all deities before acknowledging the possibility of the non-existence of Yahweh. (Even with such proof, the Christian would discount it as a trick, an illusion or something they might be mistaken about.)

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

What Motivates Atheists?

It almost impossible for a Christian to understand the motivation of the atheist trying to shake the Christian’s faith. The Christian imagines it has something to with the atheist wanting to watch the Christian suffer from God’s wrath. But the atheist is convinced no gods exist so how could such a pleasure even be conceived? Most people are not sadists. Sadism cannot be the motive. But then why is the atheist trying to disillusion the Christian?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

What the Pope Did

What would you think if the leader of the biggest paedophile and child rape ring on the planet went on TV and said, I ordered all my underlings to clam up and refuse to talk to the police. I have no intention of handing over my files on who molested whom to the police. I have no intention of paying extortion to the families of any of the children we molested. I have no intention of doing anything to stop my underlings from molesting all the kids they please. I have no intention of disbanding my institution. We are still soliciting contributions from the public. However, I, deeply and with a humble heart, apologise for all the children we molested and raped, but not for those we merely terrorised.

What would you think if this leader were wearing an embroidered gold costume and were named Joseph Ratzinger, aka Pope Benedict XVI?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70) Deliver Us from Evil

What Sells, Not What Is True

The trouble with corporations providing information is that they are provide whatever sells, not whatever is true. Thus they perpetuate myths.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

What Shattered Darwin’s Faith?

It wasn’t discovering evolution that shattered Darwin’s faith. It was the cruelty of the Icheneumon wasp grubs eating host caterpillars alive.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

What is a Soul?

Souls are imaginary. No one has ever weighed, detected or seen one. They are an old idea to explain the difference between living dead bodies and to help sell the idea of heaven/hell (similarly imaginary). Today we explain the difference by thinking of life as like a fire that extinguishes. Death is the cessation of biological activity.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

What A Waste!

When I see a gymnast with a spinal chord injury that confines him to a wheelchair, or a handsome fundamentalist Christian like Rick Brattin, Republican State Rep in Missouri, or an athletic young guy with brain damage caused by lack of oxygen during birth, I say to myself What a waste!

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

What Yahweh Does Not Know

The creator of the universe would have to know about the life cycle of the stars. The god Yahweh does not.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

What’s With the Sheep?

All these metaphors in the new testament about herding sheep mean nothing to modern people who have never even fed a sheep a handful of grass. You’d think the god Yahweh would have thought of that.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

What’s Wrong With Religion?

The main thing wrong with religion is it is not true.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Wheel Spinning

For thousands of years men have spun their wheels on the question Is there a god without coming up without even a single argument for or against that everyone finds convincing. If you want to chew on big questions try these instead:

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

When Christians Ran Things

Christians had their way 100% in the middle ages. Everyone, even kings lived in abject misery compared to the world science has made for us today. Christians, like everyone else benefit and rely on this science, yet they never waste an opportunity to malign science and scientists. What ungrateful bastards!

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

When To Expect Ridicule

When people do silly things or assert things that are obviously not true, they should expect ridicule, regardless of whether they were motivated by religion to makes asses of themselves.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

When is Faith a Virtue

Christians extol faith as a virtue. To a practical man, faith means trust that hard work will ultimately bear fruit. To a Christian, faith means believing highly improbable stories without evidence. Practical men call that kind of faith gullibility.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

When Religion Imposes on Non-Believers

Religion often asserts itself by demanding exemption from the usual rules or laws. For example:

Except for the Seventh Day Adventists, the motive for the exemption is tradition. This is a weak reason. I don’t think we should hand out get-out-of-jail-free cards, unless we are willing to give everyone the equivalent exemption. For example, if we allow Sikhs to modify RCMP (Royal Canadian Mounted Police) uniforms, everyone should have the right to modify a uniform, possibly to advertise religion (as the Sikhs do), political party or personal expression. You should not give a privilege just to Sikhs and Sikh motivation.

I think these religious groups would get further if they asked politely before they started throwing their weight around and having a tantrum. Demanding special treatment gets non-believers’ backs up. When believers imply they are better than everyone else, who deserve special privilege, the natural inclination is to try to thwart them.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

When Someone Insists 2 + 2 = 5

Imagine a bratty five year old who had not yet studied arithmetic in school insisted that 2 + 2 = 5. You set out two piles of two apples before him, and then merged the piles. You asked How many apples are there in that combined pile? He replied 5. You ask Do you know how to count? Do you know what five means?. He replied Of course I do.

You explain that for everyone else in the world 2 + 2 = 4. These are not matters of opinion. These are hard facts of life. He replies I don’t care. I like it better when 2 + 2 = 5, for example if you had two Coffee Crisps and two Walker toffee bars if when you combined them you had 5 treats altogether. You explain But that doesn’t work. You are no further ahead, you still have only 4 bars. Pretending the universe works differently than it does not constrain it to conform to your highness’ preferences.

Adult Christians do the same thing — ignoring reality and indulging in wishful thinking. For example, they insist prayer works when it never has. They insist that a soul is installed at conception, even though nobody has ever detected one. They insist they cannot die, even though everyone dies and rots. Of the 9 billion people on earth, none of them ever comes back from the dead or even sends a message only they could have sent.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Where are the Miracles?

Miracles popped up like crocuses in biblical times. You could spontaneously create one just by asking god to demonstrate his power. Today, there is almost nothing, just wimpy miracles like somebody got better from the flu after somebody else prayed for them. People recover from flu all the time without prayer. The secret is miracles are tales of supernatural events. It biblical times, people were completely credulous about the supernatural. Today they demand much stronger evidence. They think about how they could be tricked. Education has taught them to distrust magical stories. Oddly, they are completely credulous of miracle reports in antiquity without any witnesses.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Where Did Black People Come From

Christians tell me all humans on earth, white, brown, yellow, red, Inuit etc. are descendants of a white couple who lived 6000 years ago (or later from Noah and family). They changed drastically over the generations. They allegedly changed much faster than evolutionists would expect. Yet Christians insist that evolution is impossible. Are they just being perverse? Have they simply not noticed this problem with their story?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Where Does Morality Come From?

Christians imagine morality has to come from god. That is nonsense.

Cultures adopt rules of acceptable behaviours. They cook these up, the same way they compose laws — by discussion, and constant tinkering. It is really no more mysterious than you have a preference for peach or cherry jam. You have a preference that head bashing is forbidden. People tend to agree that barring rape is a good idea. They did this for millions of years even before there were any gods.

The bible was written by ordinary priests, not a deity.

Biblical morality is so insane and so out of date, even the most fanatical Christians ignore it, while giving it lip service. e.g.

That’s not morality. That is obsessive-compulsive disorder. None of those commandments make any sense except avoiding shellfish in a world without refrigeration, but there is no need to kill anyone.

The Scandinavian countries which reject this drivel are the most civil and violence-free on earth. The USA which swallows this crap more than any other western nation is the most violent. Biblical morality is clearly seriously broken.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Where to Groceries Come From?

Even Christians have enough common sense to go the grocery store to buy groceries, even though the bible promises all you have to do is pray for them, and your cupboards will fill.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Where’s God?

According to the Judeo-Christian tradition, Yahweh did not show up until about 3000 years ago. Yet Yahweh was supposed to be existing forever. Humans have been around 2 million years. Why did Yahweh wait so long before putting in an appearance? From what I have read of the history of Yahweh, he started out as a local war god then evolved into a monotheistic god about 3000 years ago. In an early version, he had a female consort. He could not have made humans because he came much later than they did. Humans created him.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Which God?

Christians, in trying to convert me to Christianity, make a few inept arguments for the existence of a god, but they never bother to make any arguments for why their god is the actual god and their denomination is the one god considers truest. There are 60,000. Your odds of getting the right one, presuming there is one, are pretty remote.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Which God?

We must not let religious people get away with talking about whether god exists. We must force them to continually specify which god they are talking about, to rub their noses in the fact their god is just one of thousands. Don’t use the term god yourself; say the god Yahweh to subtly make the point even if your opponent will not acknowledge it.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Which is Normal? Simplicity? or Complexity?

Humans have a preconceived notion that nature aught to be simple and when they discover complexity, the feel compelled to find some special explanation for it (e.g. by postulating a magic deity). But there is no priori reason that the universe has to be simple; it is just, for the most part, to the limited human mind, in the tiny part of space-time we live in, it appears to be comprehensible. So we presume simplicity must be the default.

You could equally well presume that the natural state of things is a complicated mess and whenever you find elegant simplicity, it demands a special explanation. Einstein was gobsmacked at how mathematically elegant (mathematician-speak for simple) the universe appeared to be. As he said The most incomprehensible thing about the world is that it is comprehensible.

Further, the very notions of simplicity and complexity are relative to the powers of the human mind to comprehend. It is like King Henry defining the yard as the distance from his nose to his thumb. What a conceited and provincial yardstick to use the powers of a primate brain as the only measure the complexity for the cosmos!

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Which is Worse?

Most people thing Yahweh is the brutal sadistic one, where Jesus is the kind, meek and mild one. But consider, Yahweh ended his torments at death. There was no afterlife in hellfire. Eternal torment was Jesus’s invention. Jesus was the bigger sadist.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Who is Crazier?

Who is crazier, Christians or Muslims? In Afghanistan, Muslims threaten to kill a female child (and her family) for playing squash. They also beat her.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Who is More Sacred? the Living or the Dead?

Americans are far more outraged by violations to corpses than to the living. Personally, if I had to be tortured, dismembered or burned, I would far sooner it were done after I were dead.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Who Owns My Kidneys

The hypocrisy of Christians never ceases to amaze me. They assure me that I have no right to physician-assisted suicide because their god Yahweh owns my entire body as a chattel, but they also assure me, Christians personally own their kidneys and have a right, nay duty, to destroy them on death rather than donate them.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Who Is Telling The Truth?

The essential problem in life is to figure out who is telling the truth and when and who knows what they are talking about. Religious people create a special problem because they often do not know they are spreading falsehoods.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Who Wants to Destroy Your Freedoms?

Americans worry that someone from overseas will take away their freedoms. Not bloody likely, at least not for another 50 years. However, daily, Fundamentalist Christians are taking away everyone’s freedoms via corruption of the Supreme Court through endless erosion of freedom of and freedom from religion. They want to impose their crackpot version of Christianity on everyone.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Why & How Religion

Most North American atheists started out Christian, then when they examined what they believed, realised it was nonsense and abandoned their faith. I am different. I started out atheist and stayed that way. I was, however, very curious why Christians believed as they did. After much research, I concluded they don’t know. I have never met anyone who could give a list of reasons. They just seem to feel it must be true. Reasons are superfluous.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Why All The Fuss?

If there were really a god, why all the showmanship — costumes, stain glass windows, vaulted ceilings, music… to make it look as though god were a big deal. It reminds me of all the banging and green smoke the wizard used in the Wizard Of Oz to intimidate his subjects.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Why Are Americans So Gullible

In the 1700s and 1800s millions of people in the UK and Europe left their loved ones and their homes and headed for America. Which people left and which stayed? There were posters advertising America as Eden where you could have all the gold you wanted just by picking it up off the ground. Primarily the gullible left and the sceptical stayed. To this day, America is populated by the gullible who embrace crackpot religions, crackpot medicines and crackpot politicians.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Why Are Christians So Stupid?

Surprisingly, science has figured out why Christians are so stupid, but it is not just Christians, it is everyone. Human brains have an odd feature. Whatever they hear first, they cling to, no matter what evidence they discover later that shows what they first believed is wrong. Christianity persists because it arranges that children first hear the Christian point of view, before they are old enough to notice how absurd and inconsistent it is. This is why Christians are so keen on indoctrinating other people’s children with their doctrines in public schools.

Why would humans have evolved such a counter-intuitive feature? Over nearly all of our span on earth, humans were hunter-gatherers. There was almost no change from generation to generation, no accumulation of new knowledge. The key to survival was slavishly following traditions accumulated over hundreds of thousands of years. This brain rule ensured we were safely conservative.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Why Are Drug Pushers More Ethical than Evangelists?

What’s the difference between an evangelist and a drug pusher? A drug pusher delivers on his promises.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Why Are People Still Christian?

You would think no one would believe in Christianity any more now that archaeology and science have debunked it. Why are people still Christian?

In 325 AD Emperor Constantine made Christianity the official religion of the Roman Empire. For the next 900 years, anyone who was not sufficiently Christian was burned alive and all his asserts were given to the Christian church. Parents had to beat Christianity into their kids lest they say a stray word that would lead to them being labeled a heretic. After 900 years everybody beat and threatened their kids out of habit without the threat of burning alive or tortured. Today, parents are still mindlessly indoctrinating their kids using threat of hellfire and early pounding with crazy beliefs before they are old enough to reject the irrational.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Why Are There Christians?

Why are people Christian? It because their mothers terrified them about what horrible things Yahweh would do to them if they did not toe the line. Things you learn very young stick with you, no matter how irrational they are. This is also true of species other than humans. Babies of mammalian species 100% trust any information their parents give them, and never question it.

If the existence of Christians had something to do with the inherent wonderfulness and superiority of Christianity, then adults all over the world would flock to it. They don’t. People indoctrinated with Islam stick to Islam. People who were indoctrinated with Hinduism stick with Hinduism.

Christian apologists claim that scientists of the past chose Christianity because of its inherent appeal and logic. The truth is they adopted it for the same reason everyone else does. Their moms beat it into them.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Why Are We Here?

The question Why are we here? can be rephrased to Why did god make us? What did he plan to use us for? In other words, the question makes no sense unless you assume there was a creator god to have a reason. In other words the question itself is nonsense. Ask instead what is my purpose in the universe. You get to assign that yourself and change it any time you like.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Why Are You Pretending?

What keeps you pretending to yourself and others that you believe in your Christian cult even though long ago you came to the conclusion it was a crock?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Why is Atheism Winning?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Why Attend Church?

Why do people go to churches, really?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Why Believe in God?

The only thing a belief in god has going for it, is there are a number of people who claim he exists. They can offer no reason, just their say so. It is like asking me to wear Nike runners, just because everyone else is. This is the same reason Trump offers for me to believe him. This is the same reason Bernie Madoff gave to his marks to believe him. Being gullible, and believing people who tell you bizarre things without evidence strikes me as a really naïve strategy. It has nothing to do with god. It is just that people are so busy conning each other.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Why is Christianity Popular?

Why is Christianity so popular?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Why Christianity Prevailed

Christianity was just a rag tag sect going nowhere until emperor Constantine picked it for the official religion of the Roman Empire. He codified its beliefs. He chose the books to go in the bible and burned the rest. Then he burned anyone who did not adopt Christianity. Constantine gave the assets of the people and temples he burned to the Catholic Christian church. This burning went on for 900> years. That is why Christianity flourished. That is the way religions spread — by the sword. Ask Mohammad. It was not something intrinsic to Christianity that lead to its success. Christianity was almost identical to a dozen other religions.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Why Christians are Annoying

I find Christians annoying for the same reason I find young children who insist that 2 + 2 = 5 annoying.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Why Christians are Christian

What percentage of nominal Christians are Christian because:

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Why Christians Are Less Moral than Others

Christians have so bamboozled the rest of us, we often expect them to be more honest than average. But consider. They promote an untrue story, a story they know is full of holes, but they do it anyway. The milk the congregation for money with all manner of threats, bribes and lies. They are thus more duplicitous than usual, more dishonest in debate (since they have no chance of prevailing otherwise) and just as crooked as anyone else. The Christian nation, America, attacked two small nations to steal their resources. They lied about every aspect of the operations. They tortured and used banned weapons. These are a people considerably less moral than average. Their religion teaches them the arts of deception and self-deception. The Christian nation Nazi Germany behaved similarly. Christianity taught them to think of themselves as the master race who could torment lesser races as they pleased.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Why Christians are So Annoying

Christians are annoying for the same reason children who insist that 2 + 2 = 5 are.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Why Christians are So Nuts

The central event of Christianity is unspeakably cruel and sadistic. Christians are taught to look on it as ultimate good fortune. No wonder Christians are so fucked up.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Why Christians Pretend To Believe

One of the reasons people pretend to believe in god is they want others to be sucked in. They think this delusion is what keeps other people in line. They fear what would happen to society if the delusion generally collapsed.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Why Christians Threaten To Kill Me

Christians have called for my death thousands upon thousands of times simply because I prefer male over female sex partners even though I have been celibate for 16 years, or because I disapprove of American soldiers killing Muslim children. I call merely for the death of the Christian church, not the Christian bigots themselves. I think my turn-about is more than fair play.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Why Christians Treat Murder Casually

The claim that Christianity makes people behave better is absurd. Christianity teaches that when you kill someone they don’t stay dead. To Christians, murder, especially in war, is not nearly as serious a crime as it appears.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Why Did Christianity Succeed?

There are some 60,000gods. Most have gone extinct or have only a few adherents left. Why did Christianity succeed where others failed? Christianity is almost identical to half a dozen other religions, right down to the reed basket, being born on December 25, virgin birth, water into wine, crucifixion, communion with bread and wine and resurrection…

Why? The Romans promoted Christianity, the Flavians may possibly even have composed it because it pacified the Palestinians. Then later imperial Britain and imperial America spread it with the sword. It helped pacify slaves and other subjects. Islam has a nastier, scarier god. That is why Islam is gradually displacing Christianity.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70) Did the Flavians compose the New Testament? click to watch

Why do atheists reject Christianity?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Why Do Christians Believe Nonsense?

Why did Christians entertain such crazy notions in the first place? They heard wild tales. Why do they believe these absurd tales but not others? Because their moms told the tales to them when them were very young and threatened them with hellfire if they failed to believe. They absorbed these nutty ideas when they were too young to defend themselves. They had not yet developed reason. That is why they have no reasons for their beliefs. It is like a phobia of spiders. It is beyond reason. Children are programmed to believe anything their parents tell them and to cling to those beliefs for a lifetime without question.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Why Do They Lie?

If Christianity were true, why would Christians have to lie like used car salesmen and use every dirty debating trick in the book to defend it? Surely absolute truth should stand on its own without lies to sell it.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Why Do You Believe God Exists?

If God is invisible and utterly undetectable by any means, what originally made you think he exists? It is just that having a parent in the sky comforts you and you think it would be a good idea if he did exist? It is just that you were a trusting toddler and you believed what others told you?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Why Don’t Atheists Run Amok?

Many Christians believe that because atheists have no fear of eternal torment, they must rape and pillage at will. That may well be what you would expect, but that is not what actually happens. The jails are overflowing with Christians. There are almost no atheists in jail, even when you account for their relatively lower populations. Atheist Sweden has a crime rate a small fraction of the Christian USA.

The question is not such much why are atheists so law abiding, but why are Christians such scoff-laws. Here are some reasons:

But what motivates atheists to behave well?

It does not really matter why. The bottom line is people without a god behave much better than those with one. So hoping to scare yourself into behaving better by forcing yourself to believe in a false god will simply not work.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Why Don’t Christians Leave the Faith?

When it finally dawns on a Christian how utterly ridiculous his beliefs are, he will almost die of embarrassment at what a twit he has been all these years. To avoid that pain, he re-clings to the craziness.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Why Extreme Religions?

Why is the USA plagued with so many extreme religious groups? The United States was colonised by all manner of minority religious groups fleeing religious persecution in Europe.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Why Faith Is Bad

Faith is bad because it leads us to make important life decisions using information that was just made up and that is untested. Faith is bad because it leads us to ignore evidence that one of our beliefs in untrue. Faith is bad because it leads us to pretend things are true that we know are not. Our decisions are most likely to have the desired results when we base them on what is true.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Why Fundamentalists Know They Are Wrong

Fundamentalist Christians assert the silliest crap. What if they too knew it was nonsense, but pretended to believe it because that is what their social group claimed to believe? If you debate them, they are completely incapable of defending their beliefs. They must know they are proclaiming nonsense. The problem is then not delusion or defective reasoning, but conformity and fear of offending the group. There are probably some too stupid to notice what they purport to believe makes no sense, but surely the ones with IQ over 100 are aware. What they need is encouragement to find new people to hang out with not bashing them with still more logic to debunk their purported ideology.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Why Hate Atheists More Than Infidels?

Believers of all religions hate atheists far more than they hate believers of other religions, Why?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Why I am Not A Christian

Independent of whether I thought there was a god, I would never become a Christian. I would not want to become like them. They are the most horrible people I have ever encountered. They are prejudiced, stubborn, ignorant, cruel, irrational, hypocritical, conceited… Their beliefs make them insufferable.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Why I am Not A Christian

Unlike American atheists, I was never Christian. As a teen, I was very curious about people who believed in god. I used to sneak out to churches to interview people to solve the mystery. My mom would never have approved. However, I concluded that nobody had the foggiest idea of why they believed in god or what god was. Believing in god was just something people claimed to do because other people did and because they thought it was the right thing to do. They did not think at all deeply about it. I was unimpressed. Further, I found Christians were often insufferable because they were so scornful of others and so convinced they were superior to others, just because of their choice of religion.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Why I Do Not Believe In God

I asked myself what in the main reason I do not believe in god? What is the reason that personally convinces me most? I think it is this: There are 60,000 gods, all equally absurd, yet all at some time taken completely seriously by someone. People always champion the existence of the god pushed on them in infancy. There is nothing inherently special about any particular religion. They all disagree. They are all based on speculation. There is no evidence to support any of them. They all conflict with science and common sense. None can show me any artefact that could not have been created by man. They are all parasites on their host societies in other words, cons.

At least 59,999 of the religions logically have to be false. They cannot all be right. There is no reason to imagine one of them is any better than the rest, so they are almost certainly false. Even if one of them were the true religion, the odds of it being Christianity would be only one in 60,000.

I have studied a number of religions and I would put Christianity near the bottom of the heap in terms of it likely being the true religion. Christians think it is so wonderful only because they have refused to look at anything else. Christians are the most hardened atheists when it comes to any other deity but Yahweh. Christians never give a reason for rejecting the 59,999 other gods, yet demand we atheists jump through hoops to reject Yahweh. They even reject Allah who is just Yahweh with a new name.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

I invite you to email me with your main reason why you do or do not believe in god, for publication.

Why I don’t Buy Christianity

There are thousands of reasons why I do not believe Christianity and why I think it would be a good thing if it vanished from the earth. These are the most important reasons that convinced me in descending order:

  1. Yahweh commanded thousand of groups of people be put to death. Modern day Christians cherry pick this list and decide Yahweh was not serious about any of them except the gays. Christians can offer no reason extolling this superstition above all others. This is the most disgusting feature of Christians and their religion.
  2. Christians refuse to acknowledge the separation of church and state. They are forever attempting to force their fictitious versions of science and history on others. Ditto for their superstitions about birth control, abortion, virginity, euthanasia and funerals.
  3. There is absolutely no trace of a deity tweaking the universe to override the laws of the universe, even by a fraction. If there is a god, he does not do anything at all, ever. He might as well not exist. If there were a god there should be some trace of his existence. The universe runs itself by mathematical laws. According to the bible, Yahweh pops up as frequently as a whackamole. Yet nothing remotely like that happens in the real world. The bible claims Yahweh is unchanging. Yet this hiding constitutes a major change.
  4. Yahweh/Jesus does not grant all prayers as repeatedly promised. This is his biggest promise. He fails utterly to come through.
  5. Not once did any of the 121 historians contemporary to Jesus so much as mention him. Yet he allegedly was the biggest thing to hit the earth ever. He allegedly performed supermiracles, like the zombie saints, an impossible, unscheduled, global solar eclipse and rising from the dead. If he did not even exist, he could not very well have performed any miracles, right? The whole story is made up. Christianity has no foundation.
  6. There are 60,000 gods. They all claim preposterous stories. They all claim to have an exclusive handle on the truth. I see nothing special about Christianity other than it was the most popular religion in the city I was born.
  7. Archaeology has shown that Moses, the exodus, King Saul and King David were all fictitious. If I catch you lying to me once, I don’t trust any thing else you tell me.
  8. In debates with Christians and creationists, they are completely dishonest. They must think they have no case, so they resort to cheating and lying. If even Christians do not buy their own story, why should I?
  9. The gospels tell the same stories with ever more elaborate embellishments. Apologists excuse the most egregious inconsistencies. Given that the bible is allegedly inerrant and composed by Yahweh, we should demand perfection.
  10. The Catholic church has two main functions:

    1. Aiding and abetting paedophiles.
    2. Extorting money from the poor.
  11. The most obnoxious people I know are Christians. Christianity, in so many ways, makes people behave badly. They are absolutely certain of everything they believe, but can offer not a single reason for any of it. They just make up stuff to be absolutely certain about. The stats show that atheists are far more law-abiding that Christians, the exact opposite of the endlessly-repeated Christian claims.
  12. Yahweh, as described in the bible, is a petty, sadistic, violent, capricious tyrant. Serving such a bastard would be evil, similar to kowtowing to Stalin out of fear. I find Christians so cowardly, even though their god is imaginary. It is disgusting to even associate with such people.
~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Why I Trust Science

I generally defer to what science says. The scientists have put more time into the problem, have better equipment than I to study the problem and have had the luxury of debating the problem with the planet’s most capable minds. The scientists have good reasons for thinking as they do an for rejecting alternate explanations. At the same time, I am well aware of how over and over scientists revised their theories with more sophisticated ones. Even when this happens, I notice the old theories are still much better than the competing amateur theories, such as the ones the Vatican espouses. At least the old theories explained most of the data. I don’t hold the same high opinion of military, government, legal and political authorities. They don‘t have the love of the truth. They see themselves as shepherds who use lies to direct the public.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Why Life After Death?

Why does religion nearly always make a bogus claim that you do not die?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Why No Commonality?

There are 33,000 different Christian denominations. They disagree on everything. Why can’t they get together on a common dogma? Because there is no evidence for a common truth about god. They each just made it up with wishful thinking.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Why Not Zeus?

Every argument I have heard in favour of god applies equally well to Yahweh and Zeus. When I ask Christians why they believe in Yahweh but not Zeus, they treat it as impertinent and refuse to answer. I gather they don’t have an answer other than Yahweh worship runs in the family. It must be a frightening question to them. To answer the question, they need to become aware of how their belief rests on thin air.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Why Oppose Christians?

The Christians imagine they are the good guys, but in my experience (as a gay man) they are the evil ones. They threatened to kill me 3,200 times. I love science; they detest science. Christians are trying to destroy the earth with climate change. Christians want the earth destroyed so they can have lunch with Jesus. I love nature. Christians hate it. Christians love myth. I love truth. Christians promoted slavery and promote racism. Christians promote child rape. I am just getting started. Christians are evil because they imagine Yahweh wants them to behave badly. These people are the major villains in my life. I feel obligated to oppose them.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Why People Are so Desperate to Sell Their Faiths

Why does someone desperately try to sell you his religion? Because if he can sell it to you, it gives him faith in his own sales pitch.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Why People Believe In God

I was raised as an atheist. When I was a teenager, my mother warned me to stay away from Christians. Of course, my rebellion took the form of sneaking out and going to churches where I interviewed people to find out why they believed in god. To my astonishment, none of them had the faintest clue. It was just something they had always done and did not question.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Why People Cling to Christianity

People cling to Christianity, even when it requires them to humiliate themselves pretending to believe a woman turned into a pillar of salt. They cling even when all the reasons to believe are shown to be clearly bogus. They cling even when they are taught the science that explains how the universe works just fine without supernatural tinkering. But why do they cling?

They are fully aware they are aging and will relatively soon die. Their loved ones will die if they have not already. All they have accomplished will turn to dust. They are betting the farm on a desperate longshot. They are counting on the lying Christians being right anyway, that this crazy religion will allow them to beat death.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Why Poisonous Mushrooms?

If Yahweh created earth for man’s delectation why are there poisonous mushrooms, tigers, stinging nettles, poison ivy, crab lice, mosquitos…

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Why Religion Appeals to the Elderly

As you get older, regret for the things you did not experience and can no longer experience becomes unbearable. This may be why the elderly so often succumb to the groundless do-over promises of religion.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Why Religion Is A Force For Evil

It is absurd to claim that religion is a force for good when Indians and Pakistanis hack each other to death and threaten nuclear war for no reason other that they subscribe to different sets of superstitions.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Why Science is Hard

My species’ brain spent most of its time evolving to solve problems like how to swing through trees gracefully, or how to hunt mastodons. It can only think in 3D, nothing higher. What happens at the quantum level spooks it. Thinking about objects traveling near the speed of light boggles it. My brain and intuition is not nearly up to the task of modern physics. But there is no way it should be. The history of my species contained no survival need for such skills.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Why is Science More Accurate Than Religion?

Just like science, religion speculates on what is true. However, when they discover they have made a mistake, they never admit it or correct it. Science does.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Why So Many Gods?

If god were real, or even loosely based on something real, why would every culture make up a new god or gods and holy books from scratch? Wouldn’t they all eventually converge on the one true god? By analogy, originally drawings of whales were quite fanciful, but over time they all converged to look like real whales.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Why So Many Priestly paedophiles?

Did you ever wonder why the Catholic church is so reticent to deal with the problem of priestly child abuse? Why they keep aiding and abetting paedophiles? It is simple. Over the centuries the seemingly legitimate excuses for adult celibacy, secrecy, power to terrify children, unquestioned authority over children and private access to children have attracted paedophiles.

The Catholic church is for all practical purposes the world’s biggest paedophile ring. It exists primarily for the mutual self-protection of paedophiles. Anyone who does not play ball is tossed out. If they started kicking out the paedophiles, there would be hardly anyone left. They are already having a very hard time finding replacement priests.

The institution now has a reputation that stinks to high heaven. It no longer has the same appeal to paedophiles. paedophiles want to avoid guilt by association. The Catholic church used to be the ultimate respectable disguise.

It is a crumbling institution. It falsely believed itself invulnerable to scandal. Sadly its victims, for the most part, still naïvely think the church is primarily a benign institution with a few bad apples.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Why there are no Gods

By definition, a god is both omnipotent and omnibenevolent. A god would not permit suffering. Even if there were some positive outcome from suffering, a god would be perfectly powerful enough to achieve the same end by some other means that did not require suffering. But there is suffering, horrible suffering, and no god does anything about it. If there were even one god, he would act. This means there must be zero gods. Case closed. If there is anything remotely like a god, he cannot be both omnipotent and omnibenevolent. This rules out Yahweh.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Why there is no ESP

If there were such a thing as ESP, then all the numbered Swiss bank accounts would have been drained.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Why There is No God

A typical Christian is awed at the earth, the bunny rabbits, the rainbows, the waterfalls, the mountains, the coral reef fish, the stars… He naïvely says to himself, These are all amazing. They are all utterly mysterious. My God must have made them all because there is no other explanation that I can think of. The scientist finds that explanation infantile. There is no evidence for it, and it explains nothing about how these things were created. Scientists have discovered natural laws that explain how these things were created in exquisite detail without resorting to supernatural intervention. Scientists find no need for the god hypothesis. The natural explanation is so much more plausible and so much more useful. Scientists laugh at Christians because they reject all science without any understanding of it.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Why Is There Religion?

I think religion evolved to stifle change.

Imagine some young Paleolithic farmer saying I think we should plant a month earlier than usual. Then we can eat a month sooner. The clan point out that the god Mojo commands the time of planting by omens in the stars. The boy is an infidel and they roast him alive and eat him, putting to bed this reckless idea that could have killed the whole clan if acted on.

It may turn out we kill ourselves with too rapid change, and Christian luddites were actually right, repulsive as their superstitions are.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Why Totally Undetectable?

If there were a god, why would he be absolutely undetectable? Should he not at least jiggle a remote planet every decade or so just to let us know he is there?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Why Was I Born?

Why was I born? This implies there was a being who had some choice in the matter of whether I exist. I asked my parents and their friends. The answer is quite mundane. My mom’s younger sister Rosalind had a daughter Kathy and my dad’s younger brother Jack had a daughter Mary. My mom liked playing with the babies and wanted one of her own. Most people pompously demand, but do not receive, an answer accompanied by trumpets.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Why Yahweh Cannot Exist

The god Yahweh is allegedly omnipotent and beneficent. He also allegedly answers prayer. If such a god did exist, then Yahweh would intervene to prevent hurricanes, genocides, child rapes and plagues. If such a god existed, Christians would experience more good fortune and less calamity on average than non-believers as a result of their prayers. So there may be other supernatural gods, but not Yahweh. If you want to cling to the notion of Yahweh, you will have to give up the notion he is both omnipotent and beneficent.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Why Yahweh?

Some people are passionately attached to imaginary beings. What I find odd is they seem to pick just one and angrily attack anyone who is attached to a different one. Usually, someone who likes cats, likes all cats, not just one particular one. The other odd things is their choice of imaginary being. Yahweh is an ugly, grumpy, bald old man who is so conceited he thinks the sound and odour of his farts are a blessing to others and loves more than anything else to kill people or torture them. Why not pick a more beautiful, better tempered imaginary being like Pegasus? Are they choosing an imaginary being to replace an abusive parent?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Why You Cannot Trust a Christian

Christians routinely assert things they have no way of knowing are true. They claim they are true with absolute certainty. Yet at best, they are remotely plausible. In other words, Christians always lie through their teeth. It is folly to believe a word they say.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Why You Do Not Want a Christian Doctor

Do you really want a doctor who thinks that if he slips up and you die, that you will be much better off playing harp in heaven than if he did his work correctly.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Why?

Why is the universe the way it is? That very question presumes a god who made a decision to create the universe a certain way. If you looked into a river and saw a pinkish rock next to a greenish one, and you asked Why is the pink one on the left? it would be an idiotic question. It presumes some god placed them that way for some godly aesthetic reasons.

The word why can also mean how did it come to be that?. If you ask How did the universe come to be the way it is?, that can have a naturalistic god-free answer.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Wicked Plants. Wicked Beavers!

God allegedly killed all the plants and animals on earth in Noah’s flood. He used as an excuse for his global vandalism a desire to punish wicked people. Why then harm innocent plants and animals? Yahweh is behaving like a psycho, but Christians pretend not to notice. If Christians are right, Yahweh continues his tantrums to this day with tsunamis, earthquakes, volcanoes, hurricanes, tornados and flood.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Willfully Blind

Anyone who claims to believe in a kindly deity who is concerned with the welfare of all creatures is willfully blind to the cruelty and suffering in nature. Watch the nature channel for a few hours. Contemplate you own back pain, the consequences of recycling a quadruped spine without proper redesign, toothache, Alzheimer’s, cancer…

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

William Lane Craig

When I listen to Christians such as William Lane Craig debate they are so incomprehensible, talking in abstractions that if I were debating them, I would have to throw up my hands in disgust and demand they assert something about the physical universe that has meaning before I could rebut. He quotes bits of science and math that he has absolutely no understanding of. He uses them like children use big words they don’t understand hoping to impress adults.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Willing Victims

One of the most disgusting things the whites who invaded North America did was force Christianity on their black slaves and on the natives. They did it to make them docile and stupid. It is so distressing to see a modern day black or native still caught in Christianity’s snare.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Wish-Fulfilling Fantasy

William P. Young wrote an extended parable called The Shack in which the Christian god is portrayed as a non-judgmental African woman. He explained in an interview on The Hour that he did not like the usual judgmental god depicted in the orthodox religions. What he fails to acknowledge is that all of both his and the orthodox depiction is just wish-fulfilling fantasy. None of it has any basis in observation.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Wishful Thinking

Christianity is founded on threats and wishful thinking. Wishful thinking is not only untrue, it generates false hope. It makes the eventual fall, the disappointment ever more painful. It gets even worse, if you believe the Christian lie that sufficient prayer will cure your child of cancer, when your child dies, you will not be expecting it. You will be extremely angry, disappointed and guilty — all from wishful thinking.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Wishful Thinking

Every religion is based on wishful thinking, for example:

Where are the Dumboist ear wigglers who think that my learning to wiggle their ears vigorously will be able to fly? Where are the sects where you send in some money to make your penis grow, receive some cologne to make you irresistible to women, or receive X-ray glasses to let you see through people’s clothes. Hmm. They exist, but we don’t call them religions even though they are cons based on wishful thinking.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Wishful Thinking

Here on earth terrible things happen to good people and bastards get away with murder and worse. People we love die from hideous diseases and accidents. Wouldn’t it be nice if somehow this were corrected after you die? The Christians want it so badly, they pretend it actually happens, even though there no reason at all to think so. All they have is unsubstantiated claims of their fellows who have no way of knowing that is true. How is this pathetic wishful thinking any different from Neanderthals placing tools in the graves of the fallen to use in the afterlife?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Wishful Thinking

The human frailty that con men find easiest to exploit is wishful thinking that there exists some relatively effortless metaphysical process that wards off unpleasant events and attracts pleasant ones.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Wishful Thinking

I find it so odd when a Christian says I am sure I will live forever because I cannot bear it to think that I will die. In other words you decide what is true by which you prefer. By that reasoning, everyone always wins the lottery. Every time you go fishing, you catch a 15 kg (33.07 lbs) fish. It is Keats’ silliness — Beauty is truth and truth beauty.

The other strangeness is why someone would want to pick grapes in heaven for 100+ billion years with no possibility of escape. Star Trek NG explored this when a member of Q’s continuum wished to die and asked permission of the others. He was totally bored with his hugely long god-like life.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Wishful Thinking

If you tell me Christianity is true because:

I will point out, none of that is evidence Christianity is true. Perhaps they are good reasons to join the Pentecostal church. You are basing your life on delusional wishful thinking if that is why you think Christianity is true.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Wishful Thinking

Nothing gets you into trouble faster than wishful thinking. Christianity is institutionalised wishful thinking.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Wishing to be Bamboozled

In the 1800s, two children bamboozled Sir Author Conan Doyle and Harry Houdini into believing fairies existed using primitive trick photography. No wonder Peter Popoff with a radio transmitter can still bamboozle his flock into believing the god Yahweh chats with him about defective kidneys and arthritic knees. People so thirst after the miraculous that they refuse to consider fraud.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Witch Doctor Christianity

I am surrounded by mindless superstition and vicious religion. At times I feel I might as well have been born in an African village and done battle with the local witch doctor.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Witch Trial Creators Should Remain Silent

Christians invented the witch trial. How dare they lecture us on morality. They don’t know the first thing about morality or fairness.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Witch Trials

Christians invented the witch trial where people are tortured to confess to preposterous crimes and give names, then those people in turn are tortured to give even more names. Christians are stupid beyond imagination. No animal does anything this dumb.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Witch Trials

One of the most revolting chapters in human history are the witch trials. They were triggered by a book called The Malleus Maleficarum, The Hammer of Witches. It was written in 1487 by a pair of sadistic German perverts Heinrich Kramer and Jacob Sprenger. Celibate clergy bought thousands of copies of its and masturbated themselves senseless and then set out to make their sadistic fantasies real. This would not have happened if the clergy had normal sex lives.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Without the Reformation

Imagine what today would be like if thousands of cults had not grown up to confront the Catholic Church which held a monopoly in Europe during the middle ages. Given how corrupt the church was at the time of the reformation, by now they would have cowed the faithful into handing over their children for the priests to molest, much like the Branch Davidians.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70) Deliver Us from Evil

Wolves In Sheep’s Clothing

One of the great aha moments of my life was realising that the churches were for the most part, not simply mistaken, they were deliberately fraudulent, running an ancient con game to cheat people out of their money and political power. They are the wolves in sheep’s clothing we were warned about.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Wonderful Torture

The fundamental act in the Christian drama is a gruesome act of torture which is celebrated as something wonderful. As far as I am concerned, that means Christians are psychopaths.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Wonderful Us

Christians say How could there be something so wonderful as us without a god. I suspect it will not be that much longer to that sort of statement sounds as silly and egotistical as an ant asking the same question.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Woo Programming

I was quite annoyed with the CBC for airing show after show promoting Christianity treating all manner of guff as serious intellectual topics. I wrote:

I am quite annoyed with all these shows promoting religious superstition.

The CBC is a crown corporation. The government is not supposed to be promoting religion, or one religion over another. Is that not specified in the constitution?

Promoting this nonsense is no different from promoting other quackery and superstition such as homeopathy, astrology, magic prosperity prayer shawls, miracle healing spring water, penis enlargement pills, surgery-free breast enlargement…

This sort of cheap programming is beneath the dignity of the CBC.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

The Word Atheist

We don’t have a word for someone who does not believe in trolls. We have the world atheist because there are so many people asserting the existence of bearded sky fairies. If they stopped doing that, no one would identify as atheist and the word would disappear. It is a word that means I don’t belong to the sky fairy cult. It would be meaningless without the cultists and would fade away. It exists only because such a large proportion of the population join the cult. We don’t bother with a world for non-trollarian because the default assumption is you are not a trollarian.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Word Salad

Why do you think preachers talk in that hypnotic word salad? They are hypnotising you into giving them money and expecting nothing in return.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Words of Comfort

If I were on my death bed, the last thing I would want to hear is a commercial from a Christian, for his mindless religion, backed with threats of torture. I would like to shoot the bastard. Instead, I would like to hear something like Death is something everyone goes through. It is even more common than facing your first day of school.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

A World Without Religion

I suspect Star Trek is a more persuasive argument than anything Richard Dawkins could come up with. It shows the religious what a world without their superstitions could look like.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

The World’s Biggest and Most Enduring paedophile Ring

Can you imagine any individual or organisation thriving after being convicted of thousands of counts of extreme systematic sexual and physical child abuse? Can you imagine people gullible and/or perverse enough to give them one tenth of their incomes in homage asking nothing in return to help them keep committing these crimes? The Christian church is run by the most expert of con men. They pulled it off, even when Michael Jackson could not, with his billions and far lesser criminality.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Worse Than Drugs

Christianity does not do as much damage to a brain as hard drugs, but it is harder to recover from.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Worse That Hitler

What would you think of a powerful leader who, in a fit of pique, killed all but a handful of people on earth? This crime would be worse than anything Hitler did, right? But according to Christians, this is what their God did with the Noah flood, and they think he is the kindest most wonderful thing since sliced bread. I think they are mad. Thankfully, Yahweh and Noah are imaginary. On some level, Christians are reacting as if they too believe they are mythical.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Worse That Useless Friends

What if you had a friend prone to health fad enthusiasms and the got it into their head the best thing to do the event of a heart attack was a chest massage with hot vinegar. Would you want them around if you had a heart attack? Of course, not. They would be fiddling around with the stove instead of dialing 911. Similarly, what if you had a friend who got it into their head the best thing to do in the event of a heart attack was to pray for divine intervention? People who hold delusions about effective remedies can kill you if you let them.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Worship

You would not think highly of a leader to ordered genocide after genocide, repeated slaughter of babies and the rape of little girls. What is the matter with your moral sense that you chose a god to worship who does almost nothing else but these deeds? What kind of degenerate are you?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Worshiping Al Capone

Christians tell me I should revere the churches because they sometimes do good works with some of the money they collect. That is like telling me I should revere Al Capone because he was a big tipper.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

worshiping the Deep Past

Religion places a holy shroud over the behaviours of the deep past. It is as idiotic as worshiping the way Neanderthals slaughtered their meat, captured their mates, resolved disputes, ignored hygiene and practised primitive science.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

worshiping Other Gods

One of the ten commandments forbids serving other gods. Yet Americans unabashedly indulge in flag worship.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Worshiping Your Child’s Killer

If your child died and you believed Yahweh the god could have saved him or her, how could you possibly continue to believe such a god existed, much less worship it.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Would We Be Better Off Without Religion?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Wrong Deity

Football players routinely pray before each game that god fix the outcome. This works on average only 50% of the time. This suggests the prayers are directed to the wrong deity.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Wrong or Deluded, You Decide

Are Christians merely wrong or are they deluded? Are they suffering from an error or from illusion? What is the difference? An illusion is fueled by wishful thinking.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Wrong Track Atheists

It has occurred to me that we atheists may be on totally the wrong track trying to shake Christians of their god delusions. Their rigid belief is just a symptom of a deeper problem. Christians are victims. They have suffered relentless attacks over their entire lives to erode their power to reason, not just about religion, but about everything, especially science and politics. They are drilled to submit to authority, no matter how irrational.

We atheists need to focus instead on rehabilitation of the damage to the frontal lobes, much as if we were helping along stroke victims, bit by bit re-exercising and reinvigorating the damaged tissues. As the ability to reason and make decisions for oneself recovers, the paranoia about an undetectable terror-god will naturally drop away. Many Christians might even welcome such help since it would aid them immediately to lead more satisfying, productive day-to-day lives, without having to give up any religious beliefs.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Wrong Two Ways

Christianity is not only factually wrong, it is morally wrong.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Yahweh Admits Existence of Other Gods

If there is only one god, Yahweh, why is he so worried about the worship of other gods in the Ten Commandments. He seems to be admitting their existence.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Yahweh and the Civil War

The civil war ripped America apart as no other has. Even 150 years later the scars are still apparent. Imagine if Yahweh had not entered into the conflict to inflame each side with righteous indignation. An end to slavery could have been peacefully negotiated recognising the economic difficulties it brought on. The slave owners would have had not a leg to stand to defend their brutality.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Yahweh and the Mayan Calendar

It is amusing that so many Christians believe that the god Yahweh is using a Mayan calendar associated with the pagan gods Kukulcan, the Feather Serpent and Gukumatz, the Lawgiver, to determine when to end the world.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Yahweh and Trump

Yahweh is the Donald Trump of gods. If Trump ever reads this, he will erroneously take it is a compliment.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Yahweh the Brat

Yahweh is like a sadistic brat who enjoys torturing ants with a magnifying glass. If he were real, surely his parents would show up eventually and put a stop to him torturing humans eternally.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Yahweh Created Himself

With a straight face, Christians tell me that the god Yahweh, a god highly partial to a small desert tribe, created the entire universe. Yet, by definition, the universe includes all that is. If you assume the god Yahweh exists, he too is part of the universe. Therefore Yahweh must have created himself! This is just as mind boggling as the Big Bang without the benefit of the evidence from quantum math and background microwave radiation.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Yahweh Disappeared

In olden times, Yahweh was very hands on, fixing wars, ordering genocides, sending plagues… Today he hides. Why the change? Atheists would say, Nothing changed. Yahweh was just as invisible back then as he is now. People just made up stories. We have mistaken them as historical events. It is like archaeologists two thousand years from now finding copies of Harry Potter thinking they accurately depicted life in our time.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Yahweh Does Not Understand the Basics of Universe Creation

Periodic Table
Periodic Table

Surely if the god Yahweh were the true creator of the universe, he would not forget that he composed the earth mostly of atoms of 92 elements, each composed of protons, neutrons and electrons in patterns based on standing waves and the magic number 8.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Yahweh Has No Place In Love

Christians claim without believing in the god Yahweh, there can be no warmth or love in your life. Cough. When first fell in love, did you even once think about some old bastard in the sky spying on you?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Yahweh is Insecure

Doesn’t Yahweh seem overly insecure for the reputed creator of the universe?

That is disgusting. That is like a human fretting about what ants think of him.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Yahweh Khan

Consider how much Yahweh is like Genghis Khan. He does what he pleases, killing and torturing without having to provide a reason. People defer to him simply because he has the power to hurt them. People give him tribute, not for services rendered, but just because he has the power to hurt them. The whole thing depends on fooling people that Yahweh has power to harm.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Yahweh the Liar

I would think that because it took 13.82 billion years for the light to reach us from the furthest stars, settles it that the universe is at least 13.82 billion years old. Even if you think Yahweh somehow faked this, that means that is what he wants you to believe. How dare you accuse him of lying.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Yahweh Likes Animals Better

If humans are the god Yahweh’s favourite species, why did he give octopi and hawks better eyes than us? Why did allow birds to fly but not us. Why can almost every animal run faster than we can? Why can’t we swim as fast as fish? Why don’t we live as long as tortoises? Why did he make us so stupid we destroy the planet that sustains us?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Yahweh Might Exist

Christians, especially when pitching Pascal’s Wager, say that the odds of Yahweh existing may be small, but you can’t rule him out entirely. I say, Yes you can. There is absolutely no evidence for Yahweh. Similarly, there is absolutely no evidence for invisible pink unicorns. Both have the same odds of existing. Nobody has any problems dismissing invisible pink unicorns. Therefore we can as easily dismiss the bogey man Yahweh.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Yahweh is No Different From Any Other God

Christians keep presuming their god is the only god worthy of consideration. I like to remind them that I do not concede that point and that I consider their god to be no more likely to exist than any of the other 60,000 candidate gods. So I avoid saying god and say instead the god Yahweh.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Yahweh Stress

I have been dealing with HIV since 1985. I think it gave me far less trouble than my Christian friends in a similar boat. The thing that bothered me was I had so much I wanted to get done that I would not have the time/energy to do. I did not waste a microsecond fretting over Yahweh the god judging or tormenting me. I wasted no time imagining I was being supernaturally punished. It was just some small creatures had taken up lodging and there were nasty side effects. I did not even feel any great antipathy to the viruses. They were just trying to make a living. Most of my friends died and I survived. Part of it surely has to be that I did not add unnecessarily to the stress with religious imaginings.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Yahweh Is Too Dumb to Have Created a Universe

The god Yahweh of the old testament does not have the IQ or patience to have created quantum mechanics, let alone the entire universe. It is like claiming Uncle Buford, who suffers from Alzheimer’s and dropped out of school in grade two, is the creator of the universe. It is just too stupid an assertion to merit debate. Psychiatrists debate whether aliens send mind control rays into their patients’ minds, not because the assertion has merit, but merely because their patients suffer from the delusion.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Yahweh the Twit

Christians explain away evil as god testing people by torturing them to see if they truly love him. If a husband pulled this stunt, we would call him a dangerous criminal psychopath. Oddly, Christians excuse this sort of psychotic behaviour in a supposedly perfect deity.

God often goes on and on and on tormenting people who have made it abundantly clear they either hate his guts or consider him a figment of fevered Christian delusion. Thus there is no point in the test other than the god’s sadistic pleasure. God is allegedly all knowing. He thus must know the outcome of the test. The torment is thus gratuitous.

The inescapable conclusion is if evil is god’s testing, then god is a cruel sadist and does not deserve worship. Honourable people would not cringe and pretend to love this tyrant, but confront him and let him know his behaviour is childish and must change. Christian suck up this bastard like courtiers cowering before Henry VIII’s insane behaviour.

An much more rational explanation for evil is that evils such as hurricanes and brain cancer are the result of blind natural forces, not the emotional tantrums of some obsolete desert sky god.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Yahweh the Volcano God

Yahweh was originally a volcano god. Volcanos are all about extinguishing and burying life. No wonder Christians take such glee in the violent end of the earth, having orgasmic fantasies about nuclear war. It also explains why they despise those who want to preserve the earth. Christians like Helen Chenoweth-Hage claim environmentalism is blasphemy, worshiping some other god but Yahweh. The way I see it, Christians are psychotic environmental vandals.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Yahweh vs Allah

Yahweh and Allah are supposed to be the same deity. Allah just means the god. But if you read the bible and the Qur’an cover to cover, you will see they have distinct personalities.

Yahweh is sadistic, capricious, irrational, inconsistent, vague, into magic, very partisan.

Allah is strict, no-nonsense, even-handed, consistent, clear, not big on miracles, universal.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Yahweh vs Zeus

Yahweh Zeus
Likes impregnating human females
Likes animal sacrifices
Intervenes in human lives
hosted athletic contests
commanded all gay people killed
inspired great architecture
supernatural helpers holy ghost, Jesus, virgin Mary, angels, devils, archangels, seraphim, cherubim, saints… gods, nymphs, satyrs
~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Yahweh, The Bastard

When Moses wanted to leave Egypt, Yahweh hardened Pharaoh’s heart to ensure he would not comply and sent plague after plague, finally killing all the innocent first born sons. Yahweh was just being a bully. How revolting is anyone who would kowtow to such a cunt!

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Yahweh, Local God

Yahweh claimed to be god of the entire universe, yet he behaved like a local tribal god. He told the Israelites that they were the chosen people. If he were truly god of the universe, Yahweh should have appeared to all the peoples of earth. He would not have a favourite. He would not have commanded the Israelites to butcher all the non-Israelites. The Israelites created Yahweh by borrowing the polytheistic Canaanite war god. There was no sign of him before that. It makes no sense a universal god would rely or one tiny uneducated tribe to spread the world to the planet.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Yahweh: Creator Of The Universe

Yahweh could not possibly have created the universe. Why?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Yahweh’s Activities

Reputedly, Yahweh has been around forever. How does he keep himself busy?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Yahweh’s Enforcers

In the middle ages, it became clear that Yahweh smote with plague devout and scoffer alike. The fear of an invisible, undetectable bogeyman lost its punch. So they decided to help Yahweh along is his terror campaign by torturing people who dared contradict the church in the minutest detail.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Yahweh’s Favourites

Christians are Christians because they were indoctrinated as children. They are gullible. They are sheep. They do what their peers do without thinking. They spit on logic, facts and science. Yet these retards are the sort of people Yahweh allegedly prefers. From the point of view of common sense, they are not virtuous people. They are easy-to-con people.

If Yahweh were real, there would be plenty of evidence for his existence lying around all over the place. But there isn’t. All the evidence points toward Christianity being a filthy con. So I think it highly unlikely Yahweh is real and he prefers brain-damaged people and considers brain-damage the ultimate virtue and lack of damage the ultimate wickedness. Those preferences makes much more sense if the clergy, not Yahweh, thinks that way. Dumb people are easier to con.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Yahweh’s Partner

In early Judaism, Yahweh had a female partner deity, Ashera.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Yearning for Slavery

It is bad enough that Christians are stupid enough to be taken in by a con that promises life after death, with the catch of eternal Big Brother surveillance of a sadistic god who watches every thought and deed and who punishes every transgression. It is shameful enough to be tricked into believing there is no hope of escape from this non-existent god. What is really deplorable, is Christians yearn for this slave-like existence. They yearn to give up their free will for eternity and be told what to do. They are like Muslims who choose the name Abdullah, which means slave of god.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Yet Another God Con

Christian Mingle is a dating service that makes the rather grandiose claim that there, the creator of the universe himself, will take time out to find you a suitable partner. There is no evidence that is true, but because the claim has the word god in it, these crooks can get away with this monstrous lie without criminal prosecution.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Yet Another Religious Con

Christianity is just another religious con. It always has been, just like every other religion. It is as phony as a perpetual motion machine, created with the same intent — fraud.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Yet Another Toxic Superstition

It is not normally considered religion, but it is certainly superstition and certainly fraudulent, — the harvesting of wild animal parts in order to stimulate fertility or male erections. The pointless suffering and destruction of wildlife for a lie is one more reason to rid the world of all superstition.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Yoga Posture

A yoga practitioner once encountered the Gautama Buddha and said I am so holy that I can stand on one leg for 24hours. Can you do that? The Buddha replied No, but any goose can.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

You and I

I am an atheist. I presume you are a Christian. I have never seen even the slightest trace of Yahweh. He has never said anything to me. He has never performed a miracle. You and I both live in the same universe. So presumably your experience is the same. If you concluded from that Yahweh exists, you must be kidding yourself. You must be deluded. You must be suffering from wishful thinking. There is absolutely nothing to support that conclusion.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

You Become What You Worship

If you focus your attention on a god who is a bully, who threatens people, who is peevish, jealous, capricious and sadistic you should not be surprised if you start manifesting these characteristics yourself.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

You Cannot Reason With Irrational People

People hold irrational beliefs for irrational reasons. Thus even perfect reason is not that powerful a tool to remove them.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

You Can’t Really Die

The nuttiest ideas that Christians have come up with are that you can’t die and you can’t really kill anyone. This makes them far too casual about death and killing.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

You Don’t Know Therefore God Did It

There are lots of things I don’t know. There are lots of things science does not know. Religion does not know either, but they pretend they do. Religious nuts seem to think if they can stump me with a question, it means Yahweh must exist. Nonsense. Usually, it just means I was not paying attention at one of my university classes or failed to do some reading. There no reason to think mankind should be finished the job of acquiring all possible knowledge. Scientists tell us every time they discover something it reveals another ten new questions. Discovery is an endless task. We have been at discovery seriously for only a few hundred years. It is absurd to expect completion.

I have extreme contempt for religious people because they like to pretend they have all the answers to all questions when their bible gets every piece of the most basic science dead wrong. None of their answers for anything are the tiniest practical use. They amount to nothing more useful than god did it.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

You Gotta Have Faith

Let’s say a con man said You are right. There is no reason you should believe me. I have no evidence to back up what I say. You just have to trust me. You gotta have faith. You would probably think How dumb does he think I am? If he has no evidence, how does even know for himself this story is true? However, if some professional religionist tried to sell you on the truth of stories about things you know are impossible, you would say, Excuse me for asking for evidence. My faith is weak. I am so ashamed. What you forget is all professional religionists, even the pope, are also con men. They makes their living by selling stories of impossible events and using the magical authority gained thereby to talk people into handing over money in return for nothing. The difference is ever secular con man is well aware he is a con man. A religious con man may be in denial about his profession.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

You have to be Kidding

If I were a Christian, I would be deeply embarrassed to admit my deity created the universe the same way stage magicians and Harry Potter did their magic, namely by uttering magic words.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

You Have Never Seen Yahweh

Other than in a movie, when have you ever seen the god Yahweh do anything, or even make his wishes known? The closest you will ever come is some pompous human claiming to act or speak for him.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

You Slithering Cowardly Worm

If you believe that a god exists, that god is a monster. He stands idly by while Americans drench Afghan children in white phosphorus, arguably the most painful possible way to die. He lets paedophiles rape and torture children. This is not a being that deserves respect, much less worship. If you worship that bastard out of fear, you are a slithering cowardly worm. You don’t deserve existence.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

You Won’t Like Heaven

Most Christians find even an hour a week of praising god insufferably boring. Imagine an eternity of it non-stop. I don’t think you even get to sleep in heaven. Even after a trillion years, there is no way out. You cannot even escape via suicide. You have read the bible. You know that Yahweh is more sadistic than any human in history. He wants you to suffer. Heaven is his vicious joke. You don’t get to accomplish anything. You don’t get to learn. You don’t get to make any of your own decisions. This is like some whacko summer camp run by nuns. You won’t like it, at least after a decade or so.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Your Favourite Pilot

Which pilot would you prefer?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Your Lying Eyes

You have a mental model of your apartment or home. You can picture in your mind the rooms, where the furniture is, where all the objects are. Even if you close your eyes, you know where to find the spoons, your socks, the dental floss… When you walk in, it is not as though you are seeing it for the first time. You are merely updating your internal mental model with the changes (are there dishes in the sink? Does the bathroom floor need to be cleaned?). If someone played a prank on you and reupholstered your chesterfield in identical fabric a shade bluer, then aged the new fabric with identical wear patterns, you probably would not notice. Even though you eyes would say, Chesterfields don’t just change colour. I must have misremembered the old colour. In a similar way, people who were religiously indoctrinated in childhood block out information that conflicts with their religious mental model of how the world works.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

YouTube Technology

Imagine how different our world would be had Voltaire the equivalent of YouTube to spread his ideas.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

You’re Going to Hell

When a Christian says to you Yer goin ta hayall they are giving you their best shot at convincing you to become a Christian. No wonder only the feeble minded and infants find their arguments convincing.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Zen Koan

What is the sound of one hand clapping?
Slap your forearm.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Zero Evidence

I have been interviewing and debating Christians for 55 years years. Surely by now, some Christian would have presented evidence to support their claims if they had any. All they ever do is wave their arms and attest to how fervently they believe, but never why. Why do they waste my time falsely claiming they have convincing scientific evidence?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Zoroastrian View

The Zoroastrians say that god and the devil are in constant battle and right now god is wounded and the devil is winning. This strikes me as a more accurate description of life on earth than the story the Christians peddle.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

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