Teaching a Child About Atheism

I am an atheist and the father of a young daughter. I am delighted about the fact that I do not have to teach my child a thing about atheism. Nothing. The subject doesn’t even need to come up. The reason for this is that all people are born atheists. No one believes in any gods, angels, or that Jesus died for them on the when they are children. It is not until they are indoctrinated by their parents or religious leaders that they start to believe in such things. There is literal no such thing as a Christian child, or a Muslim child. Every one of them is a little atheist.
A good friend of mine, who is a Christian, expressed sadness about this fact. He said “It makes me very sad to know that your daughter will never get a chance to know god, or go to heaven.” On the contrary, my daughter will never be exposed to the doctrine that she is born evil. She will never have to endure the absurdity that no matter what she does in her life, without religion, she is a bad person, worth of punishment in and everlasting fire. She will never know what it is like to feel an unearned guilt. She will never think that things can get done in her life through prayer. Instead, she will learn that if she wants something, it is her responsibility to make it happen. She will learn that if she wants to make a difference in the lives of her friends, family and even strangers, it is her own effort that will do so.
This small child will never be taught unquestioning obedience. She will never be in the place of Isaac, about to be sacrificed, or Abraham, about to sacrifice what she loves. Instead she will learn that she must develop a hierarchy of values, and that it is the judgment of her own mind that must decide, not the whims of other people.
She will learn nothing of faith, humility, and sacrifice. Instead she will be armed with the values and virtues required for happiness in this world. Reason will replace faith. Integrity and independence will replace obedience. Pride and self-esteem will replace humility. Joy and happiness will replace sacrifice. She has nothing to gain from indoctrination with religion. She has her mind, and the world, to lose
There will come a day when she does learn of religion. I, certainly, do not intend to shelter her from opposing world views. She will learn them all in the manner that we learn today of the Roman, Greek, and Egyptian religions of the past; as mythology. And atheism will be as natural to her as the day she was born.

We Don’t Need the Bible

There are many millions of people who believe the Bible to be the inspired word of God — millions who think that this book is staff and guide, counselor and consoler; that it fills the present with peace and the future with hope — millions who believe that it is the fountain of law, Justice and mercy, and that to its wise and benign teachings the world is indebted for its liberty, wealth and civilization — millions who imagine that this book is a revelation from the wisdom and love of God to the brain and heart of man — millions who regard this book as a torch that conquers the darkness of death, and pours its radiance on another world — a world without a tear.

They forget its ignorance and savagery, its hatred of liberty, its religious persecution; they remember heaven, but they forget the dungeon of eternal pain. They forget that it imprisons the brain and corrupts the heart. They forget that it is the enemy of intellectual freedom. Liberty is my religion. Liberty of hand and brain — of thought and labor, liberty is a word hated by kings — loathed by popes. It is a word that shatters thrones and altars — that leaves the crowned without subjects, and the outstretched hand of superstition without alms. Liberty is the blossom and fruit of justice — the perfume of mercy. Liberty is the seed and soil, the air and light, the dew and rain of progress, love and joy.

In the chapter Is Christ Our Example?, Ingersoll says:

He never said a word in favor of education. He never even hinted at the existence of any science. He never uttered a word in favor of industry, economy or of any effort to better our condition in this world. He was the enemy of the successful, of the wealthy. Dives was sent to hell, not because he was bad, but because he was rich. Lazarus went to heaven, not because he was good, but because he was poor.

Christ cared nothing for painting, for sculpture, for music — nothing for any art. He said nothing about the duties of nation to nation, of king to subject; nothing about the rights of man; nothing about intellectual liberty or the freedom of speech. He said nothing about the sacredness of home; not one word for the fireside; not a word in favor of marriage, in honor of maternity.

He never married. He wandered homeless from place to place with a few disciples. None of them seem to have been engaged in any useful business, and they seem to have lived on alms.

All human ties were held in contempt; this world was sacrificed for the next; all human effort was discouraged. God would support and protect.

At last, in the dusk of death, Christ, finding that he was mistaken, cried out: “My God My God! Why hast thou forsaken me?”

We have found that man must depend on himself. He must clear the land; he must build the home; he must plow and plant; he must invent; he must work with hand and brain; he must overcome the difficulties and obstructions; he must conquer and enslave the forces of nature to the end that they may do the work of the world.

And this is the Hymn to Humanity:

For thousands of years men have been writing the real Bible, and it is being written from day to day, and it will never be finished while man has life. All the facts that we know, all the truly recorded events, all the discoveries and inventions, all the wonderful machines whose wheels and levers seem to think, all the poems, crystals from the brain, flowers from the heart, all the songs of love and joy, of smiles and tears, the great dramas of Imagination’s world, the wondrous paintings, miracles of form and color, of light and shade, the marvelous marbles that seem to live and breathe, the secrets told by rock and star, by dust and flower, by rain and snow, by frost and flame, by winding stream and desert sand, by mountain range and billowed sea.

All the wisdom that lengthens and ennobles life, all that avoids or cures disease, or conquers pain — all just and perfect laws and rules that guide and shape our lives, all thoughts that feed the flames of love the music that transfigures, enraptures and enthralls the victories of heart and brain, the miracles that hands have wrought, the deft and cunning hands of those who worked for wife and child, the histories of noble deeds, of brave and useful men, of faithful loving wives, of quenchless mother-love, of conflicts for the right, of sufferings for the truth, of all the best that all the men and women of the world have said, and thought and done through all the years.

These treasures of the heart and brain — these are the Sacred Scriptures of the human race.

Robert Ingersoll, About the Holy Bible

Caught in a contradiction.

I love this particular bit of illogic. Notice as the priest realizes it is absurd, but still isn’t willing to let it go. Thats the definition of evil. To willful do what you know is wrong.

Creation

Our countries culture has been so corrupted with mysticism and superstition that this movies producer can not find a distributor in the US, because everyone either fears the backlash from the religious, or simply thinks it wont make money, because of the number of ignorant religious type here.

I can’t wait to see it.

We Don’t Need Prayer

AngryDuck Funny Pictures

We Don’t Need Miracles

We Don’t Need Miracles

Being an atheist saved my daughter’s life. When my daughter became ill with a severe case of pneumonia I took her to the hospital where she was treated with modern medicine, by doctors and nurses educated in medical science. Using the latest knowledge from multiple scientific fields, they were able to pull her from the brink of death, back to full health, from a disease that in the past would have been fatal.

If I had been religious, however, like the Beagley’s, the Worthington’s, and the Neumann’s, we would have relied solely on faith to heal her. Instead of watching her progressively get better and know that powerful medications were easing her pain, I would watch day after day as she weakened, and would have to looked into those big brown eyes filled with pain, knowing that I was doing absolutely nothing to help her. She would have been sacrificed, so that I would have maintained my integrity, in a belief of a god that doesn’t exist. These three children each had illnesses which are completely treatable with modern medicine, and yet the religiously motivated hatred of science has caused people to turn their backs on it. And their children are the ones who pay the price. If it weren’t for the belief in God, and the spread of mysticism these children, like mine, would each be alive today. That is the price of faith, and the answer to Pascals Wager. If you as a Christian, and an advocate of faith are wrong, your children die. We don’t need God to heal the sick. We need the full power of the human mind, unmitigated and uncorrupted by deadly superstitions.

We Don’t Need Prayer

We Don’t Need Prayer.

Part One of the “We Don’t Need God” Series

Recently my daughter was in the hospital for a severe case of pneumonia. While she was there, being treated with modern medicine, using the latest advances in science and technology people would tell me an odd thing. They would say “We are praying for her.” While I certainly appreciated the sentiment, which was something like, we feel bad for your situation and wish there was something we could do to help, I couldn’t help thinking, if prayer actually worked, why would she have gotten sick in the first place. Surely there is someone out there praying that innocent children don’t have to suffer needlessly if God can stop it at will. And further, if prayer worked, why did I need to have her at the hospital at all? If god was going to miraculously heal her, you’d think he could do it in my living room, instead of at a state of the art multibillion dollar hospital that specializes in child care. Also, if god has a plan for everything, then it was part of that plan for my daughter to get sick. What makes these people think he would change his plan, god being all powerful and perfect, simply because you asked? God supposedly knows everything anyways; surely he knows you want a baby to recover from an illness. So what is the point of asking?

That sentiment in itself didn’t seem too bad until my daughter actually did recover from her illness. Then “God had answered everyone’s prayers.” Never mind the hospital,  doctors, nurses, medication, equipment, and the minds of the scientists who had discovered so much about the human body and had invented all these procedures my daughter had undergone to make her well again. To me it seemed that these superstitious people were spitting in the face of the doctors who saved my daughter’s life. It was not their achievement, and an achievement of science that she is alive today. It was because of prayer. It wasn’t because of the people in the hospital who spent a full month working with my daughter, using the scientific method to discover what was wrong with her, and then applying technology developed through scientific discovery. It’s not right that religious people should belittle those doctors by crediting the results of their studies and labor to prayer.

The truth is we didn’t need prayer for my daughter to get better. We didn’t need God at all. We needed the power of the human mind and the achievements of science.

We Don’t Need God to Cure Addiction

It is ironic to me that in seeking to recover from absolute, life wrecking addiction many counselors, specifically Alcoholics Anonymous and Narcotics Anonymous, would advocate another kind of dependence. Their 12 steps advise that believing that you have no power over your own life and that only a mystical god can heal you is the proper road to recovery. What they fail to realize, apart from the fact that there is no such thing as god, is that it is that kind of dependence which is soul-sucking. To offer the abdication of one’s mind and judgment as a remedy for the abdication of one’s mind and judgment, stating that a “different master” is what is necessary ignores a crucial element of human nature. Independence is a requirement of human life. It is the fire in a person’s soul. It is what enables them to drive themselves toward goals of their choosing. It also means that a person is responsible for the choices they make and the goals they set, and that the rewards or punishments from those actions are theirs alone to receive. By accepting the standard of dependence and irresponsibility, the counselors set the stage for psychological frustration, specifically a lack of self-worth that comes from knowing that life is worth living and that you are capable of living it.

Addiction to drugs and alcohol is a symptom of a minds attempt to escape, not from reality, but from itself. It is a manifestation of frustration, of the wordless struggle, implicitly stating “this is how the world is, yet it cannot be.” Faith, the belief in something contrary to the facts or evidence, is the main perpetrator of such cognitive dissonance.

In the realm of ideas, everything counts. One cannot simply say “If believing in god makes him happy, why not?” This precisely is why. This one false idea breeds ignorance and destruction into every mind that accepts it, and corrupts even the noblest of processes.

For true addiction recovery and prevention, we don’t need god. We need a a moral philosophy that teaches responsibility and independence, which we won’t find in any religion.

Smart Recovery: http://www.smartrecovery.org/
Rational Recovery: http://www.rational.org/
Secular Organizations for Sobriety / Save Our Selves: http://www.cfiwest.org/sos/index.htm
Women for Sobriety: http://www.womenforsobriety.org/

Science is one step closer to eternal life

Reversing the aging process

Real life miracles.

Evolution Reconfirmed

http://www.geneticarchaeology.com/Research/Genome_scientists_discover_that_evolution_sometimes_reinvents_the_wheel.asp

“Proponents of ‘intelligent design’ often argue that many features of living organisms are so complex that they could not possibly have been built up from scratch by a blind, non-deliberate process such as natural selection,” Storz said. “However, studies of genome evolution such as these demonstrate that natural selection is capable of fashioning exquisitely intricate and complex physiological systems, and that such systems may often be cobbled together from the products of duplicated genes that are co-opted for new roles.”