Why Oppose?

People often ask me why I’m an atheist, and I generally just say that it’s because I’m a very analytical person by nature. I like to know the answers, and I like to find things out. Curiosity may be ill-advised for felines, but have found my questions to be the main drivers in my life. Consequently, I just cannot place any credence in the idea that there is an invisible man up in the sky who listens to thoughts and answers prayers. This is just a personal choice I have made.

However, there is a second, deeper reason to reject religion. Religion breeds within its ranks a certain type of person – a follower. This is not to say that all religious people are followers in any sense, because it really depends upon the type of person. Many of the nicest people I have ever met throughout my life have been deeply religious. The problem is that religion asks for faith, and this will always be bad because faith requires a blindness to fact, a willingness to accept even the most preposterous sounding ideas as truth, and an obedience to something without questions. God has no real evidence behind him, I should know, I’ve spend my life searching hopefully for it. This means that to believe you need faith.

Why is faith necessarily bad? Faith will always be bad because it represents a person who does not think for himself. A rational, thinking person unfettered by society will always look at the facts and not faith-based constructs about how the world is ordered. People would not assume that the world is flat on their own if they were given the available evidence that we have put together today. They would look at the evidence and conclude that the world is round, what would make them stray from this course? Someone telling them that the world is flat. Why? Just because.

A person who cannot think for himself, who lets others think for him, will always be dangerous. People like this have historically allowed themselves to be pulled into the worse situations possible. The holocaust would not have happened if Hitler’s soldiers had not been brain-washed to accept his orders with only the faith that there were good ends to come. The crusaders would not have gone out and killed thousands of infidels had they not been blinded by faith. The terrorist attacks on 9/11 would not have occurred had the terrorists not been brain-washed by a faith which led them to this course of action.

Some of the worst historical conflicts and atrocities have come as a result of religion. They have been a result of the blind faith that religion necessarily instills in people. Even without this history, however, even a small bit of the blind faith I’ve been talking about will always hurt the individual person, because it means that these people will be pre-disposed to take things that other people tell them to be the truth in varying degrees based on religious immersion.

Here lies my main quarrel with religion. I do not seek to change anyone’s mind on positions of religion. I argue against the evidence of God’s existence because it is my opinion, first, and second, because it represents a shroud of justification over ignorance which I seek to destroy. My purpose here is to open the minds of people to opinion and rational thought, to counteract religion. Reason is the most important thing in our world today, and if I make even a single person begin to think about the issues at hand then I will have fulfilled my purpose.