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Just as long as religion has control of the schools, science will be an outcast. —Robert Green Ingersoll

Military Madness January 6, 2008

Posted by Rastaban in : Bush Wars, Christianity, Religion , 4 comments

No benefit for human beings is more obvious than the benefit of demilitarizing the world. Every dollar spend on weaponry and war is a dollar not spent improving our lives. As Glenn Greenwald’s review of military expenditures shows, one country’s outlandish military spending is driving a worldwide spike that, if not stopped, will make the 21st century far bloodier than the 20th (which was far and away the bloodiest in human history). That country, of course, is the United States, which in 2008 will spend $623,000,000,000 — approximately $123,000,000,000 more than the rest of the world combined, nearly 10 times more than China will spend and a dozen times more than Russia. The U. S. could dramatically slash its military budget in half — to $311 billion — and still spend more than the military budgets of the next 7 biggest spenders combined: China (65 billion), Russia (50 billion), France (45 billion) , UK (43 billion), Japan (44 billion), Germany (35 billiion) and Italy (28 billiion). Wouldn’t that be enough? (more…)

Torture and American Christianity December 25, 2007

Posted by Rastaban in : Bushwacked, Christianity, Civil Unliberties, Ethics & Morality, Religion, Torture , 5 comments

December 25, the holiday long celebrated as the birthday of the Unconquered Sun, but more recently as the birthday of Jesus Christ, the central figure in Christianity. Jesus is generally presented as a pacifist, author of the sermon on the mount with its beatitudes (”blessed are the peacemakers…”), but more recently his followers in America find it preferable not to love their enemies but to torture them.

These Christians, who generally call themselves evangelicals and fundamentalists because they take the fundamental tenets of their religion seriously, have managed to become powerful enough to dominate the Republican party and in 2000 they elected* one of their own as President of the United States. Within a year, this very Christian President began laying out plans for torturing his enemies.

Christianity and torture have, unfortunately, a long historical association. Indeed, the Spanish Inquisition perfected many of the most famous torture techniques, including waterboarding. You might think that Christians would be eager to strand Christianity’s associations with torture in the distant middle ages. You would think wrongly. Under the champion of Christianity residing in the White House, torture of prisoners became the official policy** of the U. S. Government. (more…)

Five Revelations March 26, 2007

Posted by Rastaban in : Christianity, Faith & Reason, Prayer, Religion, Unsacred Texts , 3 comments

I became an atheist through the back door, as explained elsewhere. It wasn’t until after I had been godless for several years that I began to discover the usual arguments that, for most non-believers, led to atheism. It was only as Christians tried to bring me back to God, ironically, that I began to see how ridiculous Christianity and the other revealed religions were, & how bizarre the jump from believing in God to believing in this or that particular revelation.

So Silent He is Not There

After reading Francis Schaefer’s He is There and He is Not Silent, I realized for the first time how silent God actually was. Sure, it was claimed that God had been loud thousands of years ago, that even today God spoke privately to the hearts and minds of individuals, but — and this is the kicker — publicly God is silent. Imagine, I realized, if Congress passed laws but never published them, instead only letting certain “blessed” individuals know, in private, what laws they had passed. In such a case, how could anyone be certain what the laws were, or whose claims to know the laws were legitimate? Yet that is the situation with God’s laws.

That is the great flaw of revealed religion. It is always a matter of a few individuals claiming to be “blessed” with knowledge of God’s laws and intentions. The rest of us always receive the revelations of revealed religions from other humans, not from God direct. In fact, anyone can claim that God spoke to them and therefore that they speak for God, but there is no way to confirm or deny those claims. Unless God speaks directly and universally to all of us, speaks publicly, we have no reliable way of knowing his intentions — other than by studying the nature of the world itself. (more…)

Templeton Prayer Study Flawed March 31, 2006

Posted by Rastaban in : Christianity, Christinsanity, Prayer , 5 comments

Touted as the largest scientific examination of prayer’s effect on hospital patients, the Templeton Foundation arranged for Christians to pray for 1800 heart patients and tracked the results. Prayer was not effective. According to CNN, “[t]he patients . . . were split into three groups of about 600 apiece: those who knew they were being prayed for, those who were prayed for but only knew it was a possibility, and those who weren’t prayed for but were told it was a possibility.” Arrangements were made for 3 different Christian groups to pray “starting the night before surgery and continuing for two weeks”.

But the study was flawed. And it was flawed in a way which reveals the underlying absurdity of prayer itself. (more…)

Clone and Punishment February 18, 2005

Posted by Rastaban in : Afterlife & Immortality, Christianity, gods & God , 12 comments

Imagine that someone took some stem cells from your bone marrow and created a clone of you. Imagine, however, that you have never met this clone, that it lives in a different place. A few months later you learn that this twin of yours has been injured. What is the likely effect of learning about its injury? It is natural to feel sympathy for the clone’s pain, but probably you would not react as strongly as you would to the injury of a close friend or sibling, for someone you knew and loved.

Imagine the news now comes that an enemy of yours has captured the clone and has begun to torture it, under the assumption that torturing your clone will have the effect of torturing you.

Undoubtedly you consider this behavior barbaric and evil. But you will probably also find it bizarre that your enemy honestly believes that inflicting pain on the clone will literally inflict pain on you — as if the clone was some kind of voodoo doll. You will consider the enemy’s behavior evil, certainly, but also stupid.

But what now if the clone is somehow downloaded with your memories, so that it becomes not just a duplicate of your body but also a duplicate of your mind. Would this new twist make a difference when the bad guy tortured the clone? Would it make it so that torturing the clone now had the literal effect of torturing you?

Quite obviously, it would not. (more…)

The Devil’s Christianity February 14, 2005

Posted by Rastaban in : Afterlife & Immortality, Christianity, The Bible , add a comment

When I was in my mid-twenties, it seemed that small saddle-stapled religious pamphlets were everywhere. Someone would ring the doorbell, smile and hand me a pamphlet explaining that Jesus was Lord. Someone else would accost me in the street and press into my hand a little booklet warning me that I would go to hell unless I believed. And in the bus station in Athens I found an entire rack of them, often complete with horned devil and pitchfork on the cover.

I longed to have something to retaliate with. So I made plans to create my own pamphlets to give in kind. I made lots of notes, and had titles planned out like: Is God Real? , Christian Vanity , Bad News for Modern Man , Is God Any Good? , The Faithlessness of Faith , and Make-Believe God.

But my favorite had the title, The Devil’s Christianity. I imagined it with a red and black devil lurking on the cover, much like many of their booklets. Only this one would put Christianity on the run.

And I more or less completed it, though I never managed to turn it into a pamphlet. This was partly because I found myself exposed to pamphlet-bearing Christian far less frequently after moving to Atlanta.

But here is the text. And yes, it does put Christians on the run! (more…)