"The moment we want to believe something, we suddenly see all the arguments for it, and become blind to the arguments against it." -- George Bernard Shaw
I do not comprehend how so many people are deceived by the falsehoods and illogical fallacies of things they were told and they believed immediately without proof or any hint of probability in the world in which we live, with the laws of nature and physics we have dealt with since our conception...
Just because your parents and family think something is true and take things "on faith" does not mean it can be proven or that it holds any merit.
Certainly the organizations formed around it have manipulated everything and brainwashed their subjects to believe in what can not possibly be real...
But if you were to OPEN YOUR EYES and LOOK at what you are saying and doing and blindly placing your livelihood in the fashion of... You would come to realize the wasted time and effort and energy of millions of followers of the improbable and illogical book and church which you hold so dear...
WHY?
WHY?
"Through the reading of popular scientific books I soon reached the conviction that much in the stories of the Bible could not be true... youth is intentionally being deceived by the state through lies." -- Albert Einstein
WHY are you so resistant to facing reality and reason?
WHY do you insist that your way is the only way and any variation of interpretation is evil?
WHY do you persecute your fellows and support war mongers who seek only to profit from your suffering and brainwashed fanaticism?
WHY do so many of you still believe in a God or Jesus or Mohammed or Allah or The Bible or The Torah or The Koran?
These legends have been stolen and manipulated for millennia from stories told by Egyptian parents to scare their children at night...
Myth does not justify mass murder in the name of the imaginary friend in the sky that you talk to...
Guilt? No.
Sin? No such thing.
Guilt is a feeling of wrong-doing after the fact.
Sin is something made up to make religious people feel guilty all the time.
I do not feel guilt.
"We must question the story logic of having an all-knowing, all-powerful God, who creates humans, and then blames them for his own mistakes." -- Gene Roddenberry
I feel the need to be responsible for my actions and I do take responsibility and openly explain when I know something I did resulted in something going wrong.
Some people think my open confession of wrongdoing is guilt, but it is not. It is in my nature to be open and honest, blunt and matter-of-fact.
Most people cannot comprehend why I am like this, because most people around me believe in guilt and sin.
Actions have consequences.
Mistakes teach us how our actions may lead to bad outcomes.
I believe in honesty, personal responsibility and respect. However, feeling at fault for an action or inaction which led to a mistake is not guilt to me. It is the self-correcting mechanism within my mind teaching me how to avoid those consequences - or better yet - how to replicate those consequences if I so wish to have them repeated.
Any questions?
"That is the most frightening sight I have ever seen... Run, little boy, run for your life!" -- Alfred Hitchcock
Upon encountering a priest in conversation with a little boy, a hand on the child's shoulder.
People have asked me if there is not just "something special in the air" around the Holidays.
Yes, there is something special. It is called nostalgia for the brainwashed ignorance of innocence and youth. It is also the genetic memory of being a part of the whole of this planet, having the axial tilt that it does, with the significance of the Winter Solstice, wherein almost every one of our ancestral societies took note of the sun at its most distant peak and - on some level - feared the end of the world every year.
Religion has done more harm to this world than good.
Certainly it has provided morality to those who think that the only way to know right from wrong is to follow one faith or another, but the damage to our societies and scientific developments over the centuries has made Religion the leading cause of mankind's current state of atrophy.
My Holiday Memories...
My family has been through tremendous events of horrific nightmares which have made us stronger, more resilient, and - for most of the others - more reliant on religion to scapegoat away all the bad things we have survived.
Christmas as a child was an exciting time when gifts were given and received, the tree at Granny's house was always beautiful and Granny's cookies and sweets - all handmade - were delightful.
As I grew into maturity and adulthood, the wonderment of it all faded.
When we are children, things are what they are and we believe our parents because they are our providers and we do not know any better. We do not have the foresight to ask how and why certain things are told to us when they are unprovable.
That does not mean I do not cherish the memories as they fade away gradually year after year from my mind...
What I have discovered is that, while I was unaware of it, certain evil events took place at and around Christmas after my father returned to us. Those evil things were a harsh slap in the face on the Holidays. I am reminded of them every time I hear those most famous of carols sung or played in my presence.
Most people have lived a life most likely more filled with less pain and suffering than me or my family.
I lived more than a full year (Thanksgiving 1995 through February 1997) homeless and endured two Christmases and two Thanksgivings with no choice but to resist and endure and deny the brainwashing methods of religious fanatics in the Rescue Shelter of Galesburg. That was a very difficult time in my life and I vowed to myself never to allow such horrific circumstances to take over my world again.
The origin of Christmas has nothing to do with Religion.
It is the Winter Solstice which all peoples recognize, and was celebrated long before the Church adopted it as a Holy Day for themselves. Like countless other "pagan" traditions and sacred days, the Church has incorporated them into their own celebration calendars in order to assimilate and brainwash even more hearts and minds of non-Christian societies and religions.
I respect and understand the joy in the gathering of family and friends to celebrate community and love one another. I simply have not had any form of that sensation or togetherness for nearly a decade now...
Certainly, I gather with my wife and her parents and we exchange gifts, but with the ever-increasing costs of living and stagnant or reduced incomes, it is constantly becoming more difficult to feel anything on these special days, even with family and gifts.
Now for my list...
Horrible things done in the name of religion:
"Millions of innocent men, women, and children, since the introduction of Christianity, have been burnt, tortured, fined, and imprisoned, yet we have not advanced one inch toward uniformity. What has been the effect of coercion? To make one-half the world fools and the other half hypocrites. To support roguery and error all over the earth." -- Thomas Jefferson
- Looting of Babylon by religious fanatics, who destroyed "evil mechanisms and monstrous creations" of the Babylonians (as in electricity, centralized plumbing and refrigeration, amongst other technologies fully in use in ancient times).
- The Crusades to the "Holy Land" wherein priests, knights, and peasants invaded, looted, raped, sodomized, murdered, and brought death to millions of innocent children, women, and men just because they did not believe in the teachings of the Roman Catholic Church.
- The invasion of the Americas by radical fanatics who held no respect for non-white, non-Christian peoples, considering them heathens and savages, only to slaughter, rape, destroy, and oppress my ancestors, the Natives of these lands.
- The Holocaust, wherein the devout and fanatical Adolf Hitler kissed the ring of the Pope and took the Pope's words of "Death to all Jews" to heart and brought death and destruction to Europe.
- The American Indian Holocaust, which gave Hitler the inspiration for his Death Camps, based entirely on President Jackson's Reservation System. The Trail of Tears, which is a stain of blood on the face of the United States much ignored but never forgotten and impossible to wipe away.
- Repeated invasions of the countries of the Middle East for religion and money and oil, regardless of how oxymoronic those are...
- The repeated and eventually final attacks on The World Trade Center, then the London Underground, amongst other Terrorist attacks by Islamic Radicals, who have skewed the peaceful writings of the Koran into death and destruction around the planet.
"I cannot believe in the immortality of the soul... I am an aggregate of cells, as, for instance, New York City is an aggregate of individuals. Will New York City go to heaven? No; nature made us - nature did it all - not the gods of the religions." -- Thomas Edison
The list goes on, and is easy to discover for anyone who seeks truth and answers without the taint of religious fervor. Yet I do not expect change to come swiftly or completely in any manner.
I know that countless people will be offended by these words. Some will take up arms and try to cut my analyses apart with quotes from their own book of religion.
If you take only a part of the book as true and claim that certain parts are not meant to be literal, then how can ANY of it be taken literally?
I pity the fools who still follow blindly without consideration for those of us who have seen the truth of reason and proven fact.
Yet I will not tolerate someone slashing at my personal non-belief with their redundant BULLSHIT brainwashed sanctified holier-than-thou attitudes.
I end with the words of a great man, a leader, one who lived and died and was a great leader of his day, having to deal with his own group of radical religious fanatics, who to this day seem not to know the full truth of his beliefs.
"Look back into history for the character of the present sects in Christianity; we find few that have not in their turns been persecutors, and complainers of persecution. The primitive Christians thought persecution extremely wrong in the pagans, yet practiced it on one another." -- Benjamin Franklin
