Voicing Opinions

The Atheist Bus Adverts in London have been paralleled in Italy, Canada and other cities to varying degrees of success.

They have solicited Bus adverts by three Religious groups.

Interesting how the prudent wording ‘There probably is no God…’ of the Atheist ads was not matched by at least one of the Religious ads : ‘There definitely is a God …’.

The atheists wanted to show humilty and avoid Advertising Standards Association scrutiny. Interesting how the mentioned Religious ad was not subject to any ASA scrutiny at all, because the Religious group was the Christian Party, ad the ad was deemed a political ad. Yet it received the 4th biggest  level of public complaint.

The ads are moving to buildings, and diversifying their message.

But the Atheist-Religious conflict stakes have been raised.

Why are Atheists becoming active when they have a non-existance at the core of their Worldly view? It is simply to counter the excessive privileges Religion receives, such as Tax breaks. And the growing subversion of the concept of a secular government.

I am really intrugued as to where this will lead. Sadly, I suspect that the atheists will be outnumbered in number and experience – the Church has stoutly defended it’s comfortable position for decades, centuries, with force where necessary.

I met a very lively, friendly lady in a coffee shop the other day. Her beaming face has reappared a number of times since. Each time, she greets me as if a life long friend. OK, she may talk and interrupt a lot, but you can feel that her heart in in the right place.

Today, late on a Sunday morning, a cross adorned a chain on her neck, and a bible lay neatly in front of her on the table. Fortunately, she does not force her religion on me.

I strongly believe that her religion is a significant reason behind the flush of healthy life she exudes.

For myself, I feel a tinge of jealousy that she can retain a belief (in God) that carries this benefit. A conviction that God is n attendance at all times, looking after me would have been a powerful antidote to immense feelings of helplessness this week, where severe anxiety, and its peak state – a panic attack – have plagued my day and night.

Sadly, it is not just the feeling that I cannot trust in a guiding figure. More that I am acutely aware of the complete absence of such a force. So I am drawn into an even deeper negative malaise.

So my realisation that God does not exist, and that believers should be made to realise their mistake has gone almost full circle, where I am jealous of the benefits of a blind belief in something that cannot be proven. Almost full circle – I cannot cancel out my lack of belief. I cannot suddenly discard the edvidence against the existance of God just so as to gain the benefits of belief – the benefits of belonging to a Worldwide club!

There is a sad aspect to this – belief in a positive outcome for matters in your life, regardless of whether it is based on real facts or religion, has strong health benefits.

So please think before ever trying to bring a believer ‘down to earth’.

With the enormous power of thousands of years of indoctrination, with massive churches and cathedrals legitimising their activities, religions can carry out otherwise criminal acts. We appear to be morally obliged to accede to all requests made in the name of religion.

Islamists butcher the genitals of young females. Americans ostracise non-believers.

But religion, like atheism, is a belief system. You act according to what you believe to be true in the absence of form corroborating truth.

I would like to claim that my belief that the World was not created by an almighty power be respected in the same way that a religious view claims the converse. But more importantly, I want to claim freedom for those oppressed in the name of religion. And have the weight of numbers of atheists as my support – atheism is hardly a fringe, eletist belief system.

One of the key tenets of most juridicial systems is to punish in proportion to the crime.

If it is recognised that you are not responsible for a crime, and did not, indeed carry out the crime, then you are generally not punished.

 According to many religions, however, a lot of our suffering on this planet is a punishment for the crime of our forefathers. Such as Adam and Eve. Is God being entirely fair or rational in dispensing punishments in this manner?

The standard ‘defence’ by theists to such indiscriminately devasting disasters as the recent earthquake in China is that God works in mysterious ways. That his understanding and methods are beyond our comprehension. But as the same time, they endow him with an intimate, loving understanding of each and everyone of us, thereby knowing that we neither understand nor gain from these mysterious ways. The victims and families of victims of the earthquake feel intense pain and loss of life. The massive absence of compassion for these people is manifest. Did God really make all these people so as to allow them to perish so painfully and arbitrarily?

 What is more likely – that the observable and measurable friction of tectonic plates underground caused severe vibrations that caused many buildings to crumble, crushing most within – or that God arranged for this as some kind of punishment for the victims, their families, or mankind in general. Without uttering a word of explanation?

 If God is all powerful and loves us all, why fail to act when his beloved people are slaughtered? Why not arrange for any damage to be inflicted on prisons rather than schools?

God is supposed to be not only all powerful, all knowing, and all loving, but perfect.

Apart from being an impossible cocktail of attributes, it is way too easy to find Him behaving somewhat imperfectly.

If God is capable of stopping the painful deaths of thousands of innocent children in the recent Chinese Earthquake, then He is guilty of manslaughter through inaction.

Life on Earth is rich and diverse. There is a certain balance in all its inhabitants – we all have strengths and weaknesses. But the staggeringly enormous difference in the quality of life means that some people have a life beset by only the occasional set back, whereas others struggle with constant, enormous mental, emotional and physical burdens.

If God is all powerful, He is guilty of failing to give us all a balanced life. He allows extreme unfairness to persist.

Religion continues to benefit from a privileged respect that generally obliges us to respect the beliefs of a theist. As one article I read today pointed out, we should differentiate between a respect for the right to have a belief in something from a respect of the belief itself. The latter is not an obligation, especially if the belief is at odds with your own beliefs.

Rarely though, is a Religious belief a simple, passive thing, like believing that the Earth is round. It is expression of Religious beliefs that are troubling. If we should allow the right to a belief, there are times when the activation and material manifestations of a belief should most definitely not be granted.

For example, belief in Islam, in principle, is fairly harmless. Koran principally promotes respect for others. But, like many Religions, the ancient scripts are open to interpretation, and the beliefs can become extremist, even against the basic tenets of the faith. This is still fine, as long as they remain beliefs, and are not activated.

But the Islamist belief that homosexual sex is wrong is activated as the death of the ‘guilty’ person(s).

This is an extreme example of the danger of activated beliefs, near one end of a spectrum, with minor impositions to join in a prayer of thanks for a meal illustrative of the other end.

Religion’s privileged position in many societies confuses what it means by the respect of beliefs. It not only expects you to respect a belief differing from your own, but to passively respect the activation of that belief, with all that that might entail.

Fortunately in Britain, the predominant religion is Christianity, which tends to avoid extreme flavours of activation.

But why should a set of beliefs not only be granted a universal protection and acceptance, but also the activation of those beliefs, almost regardless of the consequences, just because those beliefs are labelled religious?

Supposing I were to have a belief that anyone who failed to eat a meal had to resume that meal before any other were proffered to them. You might respect my right to hold such a belief. You are most likely to deem this belief an overreaction on my part. You would probably treat me as crazy if I were to activate this belief with my family.

But incoporate this belief into a religion, and my right in the belief, the belief itself, and its activation would somehow have to be ‘respected’.

There are sad cases where an American child can die of a treatable illness because the belief (that prayer is the only appropriate action to take) of the child’s parents is similarly treated with this excessive 3 levels of respect. Similar behaviour outside of religion would see the parents sectioned for mistreatment and/or man slaughter through inaction.

Is it not better to be pragmatic about the beliefs of people, and treat them in their own right, independant of religious contexts? The World would probably be a lot healthier for it.

I have just read the story of a man who prays at the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem in the morning for World peace and later in the day for the eradication of illness. After doing this for 25 years, he was asked for his thoughts. He felt like he was just talking to a wall.

I have prayed in my time. A kind of half hearted prayer, since I have never been very religious.

But I want to know why Religious people pray. They are obviously asking for change, and God is apparently all powerful, so they should in therory be on the right track. But when asked about unanswered prayers, they shrug their shoulders and metion the catch-all phrase – It is God’s will.

But God is all knowing, so he knows what we want to change in the World before we pray. And He knows how important it is to us. If by praying, it makes it more special somehow, then why does He not take action?

For over a year now, I have befriended a cat that visits my house. Someone has said that she actually has an owner in my street, but either this is untrue, or the owner is negligent, since the cat eats a full breakfast every morning at my house., and would stay indoors all day and night if I let it.

In my own small way, I like to think that I am helping another creature. A creature that has a strange habit of attempting to eat my night time herbal tea bags. It wrips them to shreds because of the valerian in them I believe, which has an effect akin to catnip.

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 If you are a religious person, you would likely say that my drawing skills were God given. For as long as I can remember, I have been able to draw well, and was recently asked to draw a lady I had photographed at a coffee shop.

I started the drawing last night in just the right mood, with an almost clear head, and a calm energy. After two and a half hours, I had drawn all the hair detail – the hardest part of the drawing in this case. And went to bed very happy with my efforts and the look of the drawing.

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This morning, the cat appeared within seconds of the click of the kitch light switch, and had soon devoured the bowl of cat food. I was shaving and wondered if I had shut the door to the front room. The cat loves to go in there and sit on a leather chair that I am frightened it will claw to death.

Yes, the cat is in the front room – sat on my drawing, slopping a half eaten tea bag all over my drawing. The pages were curling, and unerasable tea and paw stains covered the drawing.

—

Now I call this a sign.

The all-powerful God, who is perfect, who is all compassionate, who loves me more than any human could, and who has given me a great talent, does nothing while a cat I care for destroys a drawing I was lovingly creating as a surprise gift for someone else.

Or, more likely, He does not exist. To me, the unfortunate scenario I have experienced is so much more likely to be harsh reality rather than God’s way. This is a further sign of the non-existence of God.

Please bear with me if you see some repetition of theme in my recent entries. I’m thinking around this one theme, and want to capture each step.

 You’ll occasionally hear on the radio that a singer was ‘blessed with a God given voice’, and it was their duty to make the most of it. There is something fundamentally appealing about this kind of declaration, and in a moral sense, there is. I have been gifted with drawing skills that I seldom use, and feel appropriately guilty. It is indeed a waste not to use them more.

But what does a ‘God given voice’ actually mean? There are many ways that a supernatural being might achieve this. He might have endowed you with this voice in your childhood. Or it might have been there from birth.

This makes me wonder whether God did indeed actually make me. But what exactly does that mean?

One of the reasons many theists believe in God is because the sheer magnificance of live on this planet cries out to our senses that it was designed rather than evolved. Even to me this is true. The World just feels too organised, too wonderful, too rich to have simply mechanically evolved without any coordinating party. But I have sufficient understanding of the theory of evolution to rationalise my feelings as simply that.

The crucial aspect of these feelings is that life on the planet feels designed. I emphasise this because there is an enormous difference between design and manufacture. Manufacture is often much less glamorous than design – the construction of my body, one cell at a time would be a highly protracted process.

If God made me, then he presumably constructed my cells and got them working together. But exactly when did he do this? You see, ‘me’ is not just the me that I am today, but it is the me that I was 10 years ago, and will be in 10 years time (if I last that long). I am a constantly changing ‘work in progress’. So either God made me at egg fertilisation time, and let nature take its course, or God is somewhat more involved, working on me as I evolve from an egg to an embryo to a baby and so on.

I want to ask a Christian this question for two reasons. One, to see if they had pondered the subject at all. And two, to see what their answer would be.

You see, the ‘God given voice’ was only operable some years after conception. Did God set the embryonic development in the right direction to result in this voice, or was He more involved? God cannot take too much credit for the former, since embryonic evolution does the work for Him.

If God is involved with us during our own life, working on every cell in our body on a second by second basis, where does He fit in with the mechanical aspect of cellular life, where genetic code governs cellular behaviour? And if He is that involved, then He is actively involved in creating cancerous cells and all manner of other problematic biological shortcomings.