Willravel

All praise to Atheos, god of irony.

The idea of god was created thousands and thousands of years ago as mankind left being an innocent animal and became a sentient being. We, humans, had been developing improving methods of hunting and gathering food for many centuries, but had not developed the intellect to be self aware. With our mental development came said awareness and our drive to learn now included the concept of 'self'. In our search to explain our environment, we had to simplify everything as much as possible. We were able to figure out certain thing well enough; seeds can produce edible plants, certain prey moves in herds and requires a different strategy than prey that moves on it's own, women like guys on motorcycles. More complex things, however, were simply beyond our reasonable understanding. Take, for example, Earth's sun. Put yourself in the shoes of mankind all those thousands of year ago, without the benefit of astronomy and physics to explain our favorite mass of incandescent gas. All they knew was a very bright thing came every day, brining heat and light, and left every night, bringing dark and cold. They had no way to know about nuclear fusion or any way to comprehend the scale of 149,600 km. So when the question was asked of the first great minds, they tried to come up with an explanation that made sense. They gave it a persona. The Greeks, for example, thought that the sun was Helios, a supernatural being that rode a chariot across the sky every day. While we now understand, in some terms, what the sun really is, when the philosopher Anaxagoras introduced the idea that the sun was a giant flaming ball instead of Helios around 460 BC, he was imprisoned and sentenced to death for heresy. It was well over 100 years before the idea would be considered by what were then scientists. I wonder what argument a Greek from the 400 BCs would make to explain his faith in Helios. He would say, "I know this to be true because I feel the warmth provided by Helios. I see the chariot cross the sky every day. It is believed by every man, woman, and child I have or will ever know. The knowledge is hundreds, perhaps thousands of years old, and we have documentation of that."

We all, as humans, have an innate want for knowledge. As the first sentient creatures on this planet, we have a desire to move forward. Being in an intellectual vacuum is an uncomfortable state for a human being. Unfortunately, we did not instantly evolve a full knowledge of the universe when we crossed the threshold of sentience. Because of that, we have to slowly develop an understanding by observing and testing, but what tests could have ancient Greeks made to prove that the sun was not theistic, but nuclear in nature? The simple answer is that they couldn't. So, instead of saying 'I dunno', which as an unnatural state for a human, they guessed. Speculation ran wild and in the end the most fantastic, entertaining, or reasonable (in their mind) story survived. Call it fictional evolution. It sufficed for a time until progress was made. Our methods of testing improved and thus our understanding improved.

Now we saw the sun as a great ball of fire that circled around the Earth. Better, I'd say, but still not quite right. Again, our testing improved and our knowledge grew. Now the Earth revolved around the sun. Improvements were made again and again and again, and Helios was left in the proverbial dust, never to be worshiped again (yes, yes, poor Helios). Through scientific progress, it was made evident that Helios was an outdated explanation that was made when not enough evidence could be gathered to offer a theory. Helios went from a worshiped deity to a myth. The problem is, of course, that the blind devotion to the idea of Helios slowed scientific progress. He became a stumbling block. It was only when people could think outside of the Greek mythology that the fantastic idea could be overcome. He went from a stumbling block in advancement to long forgotten. Man had grown from it's infancy, and there were no more need for fantastic toys. It was time to see the world as it is.

In your own experience, you probably remember early childhood. Because you were not born with a full knowledge of the world, you had to strive to discover how the world works...but you didn't do that all the time. No, you probably were like me in that you loved to play with toys. The more amazing and odd the toy, the more interested you were. Hobbits and spaceships and transformers and such stuff probably covered your bedroom floor just as it did mine. Your head is in the clouds until your feet need to be finally planted in the ground. I'm sure that there are a lot of people out there that envy children for their innocence and ability to live in their own imaginations all day every day, but that's not reality. We live in reality and, one way or another, we have to one day face that cold, realistic fact.

Well you and I are like humanity. Religion was given birth at the beginning of our entry to sentience. Science, on the other hand, was not developed until man developed the ability to think rationally. Religion is the science of cavemen (unless you're in a Geico commercial), and science is the religion of the maturity of our species.

It always fascinates me when people present to me an old book of moral lessons and mythology as proof. I've read the Torah. I've read the New Testament of the Bible. I've read the Qu'ran. None of those books is even said in lore to have been written by god. Not only that, but god didn't take any steps to preserve the original writings of his servants. I dare you to go find the original manuscript written by Luke or Mohammad. All we are said to have are copies of copies of copies of copies. So who copied the original manuscripts? Why are there different versions of the same scriptures? Why did someone make the decision that one interpretation was right, and the other wrong? The official stance of the Catholic church: god wanted the original transcripts to perish. Why? "God moves in a mysterious way". Oh, dear. So a church that recognizes that god has seen fit to preserve wood from the cross of Jesus, the coat of Jesus, and the Shroud of Turin, which Jesus is said to have used to wipe his holy face, simply accepts that the manuscripts weren't that important? God prefers a handkerchief over the entire reason he supposedly sent his son to die? Can they also explain why the genealogy presented by Matthew and Luke are in conflict with one another? Poor Matthew. He was presented with two different stories about John the Baptist, one in which John whitenesses the heavens open and a dove comes down, and one where John sends two of his apostles out (two chapters after seeing the heavens open) to find out who this Jesus dude is.

Your faith is based on secondary documents, edited, altered, changed throughout history for hundreds upon hundreds of years.

No matter what religion you're in, you've witnessed your single religion split again and again over interpretations of the word of god.

And in your teachings, the antithesis of god, often satan, always is there to tempt you to turn on god. You're taught to fear turning from religion from early childhood, when your perception of the world is still developing. Of course you'd be afraid of us evil atheists. Of course you might hate us. Some may even envy us. I'll go out on a limb and say I'm a brave motherfucker for deciding to turn on something ingrained into my head since birth. A lot of people on this very sight gathered their balls and turned around and faced their demons only to find that they had been a slave to the echo of a guess that had gone on too long. I gotta tell ya, it's damned liberating.

Does god exist? Fucked if I know. The fact of the matter is, it makes no difference if god exists or not. If you want to worship an idea that was an interim between being born and starting to understand the world, that's your business. Just don't get up in arms when I sleep in on Sunday and get pissed when my daughter has to say, "One nation, under [a fictional crutch, an outdated tool of a society that had not yet developed the intellectual maturity to look at things reasonably], indivisible..." Don't get perturbed when you aren't allowed to teach that one day everything was blinked into existence in a classroom dedicated to science. Don't get fussy when we condemn a leader for making an important decision because "god told me to do it". Don't go crying to Muhammad when we call you insane for strapping bombs to your chest because of a small disagreement over the caliphs who supposedly succeeded Muhammad. Don't shit yourself when we say that belief in god isn't reasonable. And please, oh please, don't pretend like faith has a place in science.