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.

Disproof of God

So far, I’ve dealt with a few proofs of God’s existence, so I’d like to submit this rather simple proof for the non-existence of God for approval or disapproval. Either way, I hope some discourse stems from it.

1. Evil exists. Most would consider this intuitively true, however, for the philosophers out there, we can take it as true that evil exists insofar as people agree that it does. In other words, there don’t have to be invisible rules in the sky saying :”never ever kill,” but as long as people agree that killing people is an immoral thing to do, this is sufficient for the logical proof herein.
2. God created everything, and is therefore responsible for everything that goes on. This is true per the Judeo-Christian notion of God. The problem people may have in this area may be the word “responsible.” All this is to say, however, is that anything created by God was created by God, this includes evil and the people who do evil things.
3. Therefore, God is responsible for the evil that goes on in the world. God is therefore immoral. This is true by extension of 2.
4. God cannot be immoral. This is true, again, per the Judeo-Christian notion of God.
5. Therefore, God cannot exist.

Conceptions

The exact nature of God and the conceptions of what he entails are well worth a short discussion. So let’s dive right in:

There are almost an infinite number of conceptions of God today and throughout history ranging from the Judeo-Christian conception (a God who listens to thoughts and answers prayers) to the Einstein conception (the natural laws and nothing more). If this is indeed the case, is it not ridiculous to claim with absolute certainty that one of these gods is the true God? (Or gods, in a polytheistic system).

Many have said throughout history that “god has many faces,” in other words, that there are many different versions of the exact same god. However, isn’t it true that all the conceptions of god are, for the most part, mutually exclusive? The conception of the afterlife in the Judeo-Christian version of God is completely incompatible with the Buddhist philosophy of rebirth. Likewise, Hades and Dante’s hell are completely different, even while appearing to be somewhat the same. Similarly, the differences can range from the Old Testament Judeo-Christian God who literally justified genocide upon infidels, and the Eastern philosophy of Jainism (a branch of Shramana of which Buddhism is something of a derivative) in which the monks literally sweep the ground where they step to avoid harming insects in their path. And we haven’t even touched upon such cults as Satanism and Wicca. Doesn’t this mutual exclusivity contradict the claim that “God has many faces?”

Going further on the subject, how can any one philosophy or religion lay claim to the idea that their conception is somehow the most valid? This deals with the root value or justification, is a person who believes that beauty is more valuable than progress any less right than someone who believes otherwise? As you delve deeper and further into ideas such as these, you see that every single conception of God has equal worth. Thus, any person who says that their God conception is the true God is always going to be wrong on any justification they may posit.