Stop having fun. Stop exploring the world. Stop dreaming. Shed the adolescent in you as soon as possible, and become a cog in the machine. We are indoctrinated into this narrow view of life. Our minds are put in boxes. 

Reality TV, adverts dangling shiny new products in our faces, fear driven news channels and elections every four or five years keep us distracted from the vicious, stagnant trap that we are falling victim to. 

Politicians funding banks and corporations, who then fund politicians, who then further aid the financial elite. The people are compromised. They work all their lives, but still live in poverty. The only purpose of most of their jobs is to fill the pockets of some already rich business person. 

Attempts to change things are, if not ignored, then demonised by the media. Protest and revolution is marginalised. The police use violence against citizens who just want to stand in one place, together. They stop the people from being able to make a change. 

Every handful of years an election is held where some new politicians come along and shout “change”. But change never happens on any truly valuable scale. They feed false reassurance to the people, whilst going about business as usual. 

Under the current political systems in the world, ask yourself this - what kind of hope for the future do we have? Where is our happiness going to come from? What are we worth to the world, other than as profit machines? When are we encouraged to dream, to pursue our hearts desires, and formulate our own path in life? Where is our humanity? 

This is a false sense of prosperity. 

These are many, many times more reasonable than the 10 Commandments. 

Bertrand Russell is better than God. 

Why Are Religions Such a Common Feature of Human Societies?                 

Dan Dennett describes the function of an animals brain and nervous system in evolutionary terms as being a “future producer”. This means that the development of these systems allowed an organism to survive better because they allowed it to make models of the future, and so it would be able to avoid danger, and pursue pleasure in advance of actual events.

The brains which were better at predicting and avoiding perceived future threats will have been more prolific. So as humans, we have brains which are well equipped, and directly involved in assessing and trying to estimate the future.

As a species, through our intelligence, we have managed to create civilisations, moving on from the harsh wilderness our ancestors used to live in. We greatly reduced survival pressure as a result, and this has a large implication on how our “future producing” brains act. 

We began to have the leisure to contemplate further and further futures. Our species was no longer under such a constant threat by predators, and so we had the time to let our minds wander. We will have been able to speculate about our own mortality. Humans will have been faced with such unsolvable questions as “what happens after death?” and “what’s the meaning of life?”. As these questions were pondered, another evolutionary process will have kicked in. 

The approaches to these questions will have directly influenced survival chance, especially during the dark ages of humanity. Those who adopted world-views which made them feel that the events in their life were being watched over and controlled by gods, and that they would be greeted by these gods after death, will have had a survival advantage. They will have felt more secure about the future and been able to attribute a higher meaning to their lives, in a time when there was little or no way of finding truth about the universe. 

And so religious memes will have flourished throughout all human civilisations. Concepts such as the after life, loving gods and accompanying creation myths will have been very appealing to the “future producing” brain, and helpful. 

But it seems that today, the helpfulness of religious concepts is diminished, but the attractiveness of them seems still present. We now have science, a method of studying the universe we live in. This can make the future secure AND real. The data science reveals isn’t always more consoling than myth - but it isn’t myth. It is fact. 

Science has propelled the human species into the future, producing rapid advancement in almost every imaginable way - from sanitation to space travel. But our brains still hold the “future producing” design, and still yearn for security about death and the meaning of life. And so religion still spreads easily though modern civilisation. 

It seems to hold back from science, the thing that will truly allow humanity to stretch far into the future. The embracing of science seems limited, because it cannot offer an after life and great cosmic significance. But if these anxieties about the future can be overcome, and reality truly embraced, then we will ultimately have the best chance of surviving as a species in the long run. 

In what ways is the belief in God ACTUALLY a delusion?…

Definition of delusion - 

A false belief that is resistant to reason or contrary to actual fact. (Gale Encyclopaedia of Medicine)

I think that the term delusion, when applied to religion, should be interpreted not as a mere slander term, but as an actual medical, psychological description. To me it is clear that the medical idea of a delusion and people with strong religious conviction have a lot in common. 

Take some definitions for some specific kinds of delusion - 

delusion of grandeur , grandiose delusion: delusional conviction of one’s own importance, power, or knowledge or that one is, or has a special relationship with, a deity or a famous person. 

This delusion is obviously found in religious people. The idea of humanities cosmic importance is one which religious belief directly invents. Further than that, people who believe that God listens to prayers, looks out for our lives, and wishes to have a personal relationship with us, clearly have this delusion of grandeur. They believe that one species on a tiny planet in the vastness of space actually has significance in a large way - that the creator of the universe sent his son to be sacrificed JUST FOR US. God put all the plants and animals here JUST FOR US. God will intervene in the events of the Earth BECAUSE HE LOVES US SO MUCH. 

delusion of reference  a delusional conviction that ordinary events, objects, or behaviours of others have particular and unusual meanings specifically for oneself.

Many examples of this occur in religious practise. Transubstantiation - the idea that a cracker (made in a factory by humans) can turn into the body of an ancient Jew, because some man in a robe said some Latin. The idea that a rock (the black stone of Kabba) was sent down from God. The belief that rats are the incarnations of the god Karni Mata. The idea that ordinary events, like earthquakes or tsunamis or “miraculous” recoveries from the brink of death are signs from God. These types of beliefs clearly conform to the definition of a delusion of reference - objects and events that are clearly unexceptional are seen to have a greater meaning towards humanity. 

And these types of beliefs are absolutely delusions, referring to the definition at the top of the post. If you reason with people - maybe show them the ‘Pale Blue Dot’ photo, or ask them to look up at the sky and think about how important they really are, the delusion will most likely persist. If you show a Creationist some fossils, or a detailed map of the genomes of apes and humans, or a virus that evolves in resistance to antibiotics - they will dodge the evidence. If you ask people why, even though they pray for things every day, the world still plays by the rules of random chance, they will not stop praying. 

If you suggest that the “holy” stone that so many people consider divine is much more likely to be one of the many asteroid fragments which have fallen to Earth throughout history, rather than handed down from God, it will make little difference. When you point out that a little girl who suddenly overcame her fatal cancer is part of the small minority that this happens to, whereas all the others will die, it will not matter. It will still be attributed to god. Their beliefs are resistant to reason or contrary to actual fact.                       

So I think that, it is perfectly reasonable to refer to religious belief as delusional. And the implications of this are not as malicious as you may think. 

One of the important features of a delusion is that it is usually reactionary. They develop because of the need to fill certain needs, which the person themselves may not feel able to fill. People want to feel they are important in the universe, and that events in the world are planned and not just random. They want to feel loved and watched over. So religion meets these needs. 

And the development of a delusion can actually improve peoples lives. Having the things that people feel they lack fulfilled can have many positive benefits. This does not mean that shouldn’t be encouraged to embrace reality however. And so if movements of non-religious thinking want to be effective they need to recognize why people might need religion. 

And they need to understand that merely attacking the irrational beliefs is unlikely to shake them, depending on how deep set they are. The delusion will persist unless something as good or better can be offered to meet the needs that religion does.

We must approach debates with the religious in a way that is less aggressive, and more reasonable. That puts forward why how we believe morality, happiness, love and cosmic meaning can be found in  human life, without god, with empathy and compassion. Because that is the way to communicate ideas effectively, especially with people who may be gripped by delusion. 

It’s  the third annual draw Muhammed day!

Today is a day to stand up to religious bullying. Today is a day when we expose the childish, over sensitive branches of Islam for what they really are. 

Just because someone makes a personal choice to believe in an invisible God in the sky, and that an ancient text called the Qur’an is his revealed word is not a justification for telling others what they can and can’t do. I live in a liberal democracy, and I HAVE THE RIGHT TO DRAW ANY HISTORICAL FIGURE I CHOOSE. 

I have no sympathy for anyone who is offended by this day. You need to grow up and realise that there is a wider world out there, a world that will not succumb to the baby cries of your ONE religion. Too often have the liberal countries of the world been scared into compromising their free media because of Islamic fundamentalists. 

We must stand in solidarity with the Danish cartoonist, who was almost killed over drawing Muhammed. To the people who died in the resulting bombings and protests over it. With the South Park creators who received death threats for trying to make a cartoon with a message of freedom of expression. With Salaman Rushdie, who had to fear for his own and his families life for publishing a book. With Hamza Kashgari, who had to see 14,000 people join an online group calling for his death, over a tweet about some entirely tame twitter posts. 

 To all people who get offended by this day - too fucking bad. There are people who think differently than you out there. DEAL WITH IT. You are holding back world progress with your petty, fussy and aggressive religious bullying.

Understand that, your mythical stories about a desert man getting his philosophy from something invisible in the sky will go on exactly the same, whether some people decide to draw him or not. And so will our beliefs about free expression. 

I encourage anyone who agrees to reblog this /draw your own Muhammed!

One of the biggest, if not the biggest problem many people have in seeing the sense in an atheistic, naturalistic world view, is the idea of something and nothing. How can something have come from nothing? It seems intuitive that somethings cause must be greater than the thing itself, so how could nothing produce everything?

But modern physics is revealing that the reason the concept of something from nothing is so hard to grasp is not because it is impossible, but actually because our understanding of the universe is very limited. The reality is that is emerging is incredibly counter-intuitive to us. It turns out that we have been approaching the question wrongly. 

How can something come from nothing? Well, because nothing is something. The idea of nothing as being the complete absence of anything is wrong. Empty space has quantum fluctuations, and energy. You hear theists arguing that something can’t have come from nothing because nothing is “what sleeping rocks dream of”. Well of course it can’t and that’s because that definition of nothing doesn’t exist. Because it’s nothing. 

Our very ideas about the world, the nature of time and space and the origins of it all are clearly going to have to be adjusted if we want to be consistent with what the universe is showing us. We can already observe particles such as quarks which are essentially nothing. They have no measurable size. But they have properties in the universe. 

We need to understand that, just because something seems counter-intuitive to us as humans, does not mean it is not the case, and certainly doesn’t justify belief in fairy tales which allow us to sit comfortably in our cosy ideas of linear causation. Ultimately the universe decides what is true and what isn’t, regardless of our own prejudice. 

Stephen Fry representing. I agree with his point about Polytheistic religions, like the the ones of ancient Greece of Rome. These Gods were used to explain very real phenomenon of human experience and nature - war, love, the sky the sun - they filled the space of science before it existed and through the personification of these Gods, people could feel they had an understanding of the world around them. 

It is when monotheism stepped in that things really got ridiculous - one omniscient, all knowing, loving and creating being? Outside of space and time and infinite? Fuck that, give me Helios, the chariot riding God of the sun, or Neptune the God of the sea. At least these Gods reflected certain real phenomenon, and can be subject to testing - we can now look at the sun and see there is no Chariot pulling it around the Earth - in fact we orbit it. At least polytheisms actually reflect nature in the sense that they are mostly unkind and unloving too!

Monotheistic Gods just move the goal posts, meaning they can answer every question and never be disproven. As Hitchens said “that which explains everything explains nothing.” 

This is an amazing flash program, that lets you scroll through the various objects in our universe, from the tiniest sub atomic particles, to the largest galaxies. Click on any of them for information about them. 

Contemplating the scale of the Earth in proportion to the colossal stars, nebulae and galaxies out in space is made easy! Enjoy. 

Every day, a species of ape called humans lives it’s life on the planet Earth. Seven billion of them, wandering around it’s surface like ants on a hill. All of us experiencing what we call consciousness, but yet being entirely unconscious about the majority of our own cognitive function. And so none of us can truly understand who we are. 

Humans, the species on the Earth which appear to have greater self-awareness than any of it’s other animals, still descend into a bubble of their own lives, building a dam around the streams of consciousness which would threaten their fixation on their own small existences. 

This is because the reality of our place in the universe is not seen to be comforting. It seems anxiety producing. We have an instinctual desire to be loved, and watched over and to be in a nurturing environment, but the universe does none of this. It is cold, vast, dark, strange and chaotic. It shows no signs of loving us, caring for us, or even being a safe place for us to survive in. There are objects out there that would destroy every single one of us in an instant, and it wouldn’t even be the first mass-extinction our planet had experienced. 

The cosmos, at best, is indifferent to what happens to humans. And so as a reaction to this, we turn in on ourselves, and we turn against each other. We go about our days under the illusion that our lives have real significance. We invent creation myths, God’s to worship, political ideologies and economic systems that pillage the world and worship pieces of paper and metal. We fight wars over our differences, and sit back as billions of our own kind starve in poverty. 

Yet every night, the moon, the planets, and the stars become visible to the human eye. The cosmos makes it self known to us, but how many of us really know it? How many of us, every night, stare at the sky and wonder what is out there? Peer back in time at the light from stars thousands and thousands of light years away from us? Forget about the events, convictions and fears of the ant hill of our lives, and ponder the wider world that exists. 

It is evolution that has got us to this point, where we are so shut off from each other and the real world, and the only answer is that we must evolve forward. Each one us, at the bedrock of our lives, must allow the universe to cut our ego’s down to size. We must stop looking through a lens of ignorance, and stop repressing the truths of our existence. It is this repression that removes humility, and allows people to kill each other, hate each other and ignore each others suffering. It allows the individual ego to swell, and becomes a justification for tyranny.

 We must, at all times, be using the lessons of humility and modesty that our cosmic role teaches us. We are all fundamentally the same, as a species, all made of the same stuff, all with same organs in our skulls driving our lives. We must strip away the fear and aggression, and irrationality, that tries to run away from our true place in the world, and embrace it, no matter how we feel about it. The universe may be scary, but it is all we are, and all we have.

So, what can be said of the slippery fish that is the ontological argument for the existence of God. I find it to be more of a logical trap than an argument, actually.

The way that Anslem laid out the Ontological argument for the existence of God was this :

God is defined as “that than which nothing greater can be conceived.” It is the absolute maximum of all possible traits. It is infinitely great. Such a being MUST exist, necessarily, because the God that is exists is greater than the one that doesn’t, and God is the greatest thing conceivable. Also, because God has all traits to the maximum possible degree, God’s existence must be infinite, not finite. 

Yes, this argument pretty much boils down to “God exists, therefore God exists”. Yet it is still used as a knock down proof for God’s existence today. Lets lay out some of the many problems it has.

First of all, the argument is a priori (without experience of empirical evidence) and so from the beginning it is not sufficient proof for anything about the external world - how can you make a claim about nature with pure logic? Some form of observation must be involved to be considered proof. Like in physics, you need mathematical accuracy AND observation to have proof. So just like all attempted proofs for God, it suffers from the problem of the impossibility of it’s goal. 

Anslems argument also makes use of a very strange and frankly wrong hidden premise. This is that existence is a characteristic. Why is it that the God that exists would be in any way greater in concept than the one that doesn’t? Say I imagine a chair in my head. Say that chair coincidentally exists. Are they not the same chair in terms of their traits, only one is real matter and the other imagined matter? It seems you can have an idea of “that than which nothing greater can be conceived” without existence being required for that definition to fit. 

David Hume puts it best. He pointed out that existence cannot be a quality of an something, because objects are only physical qualities - take away all the qualities of an object, and there’s nothing left.

There’s no quality of existence left to remove - something’s existence is just a inference of the fact that you can experience qualities of it. And as we can’t experience any of God’s supposedly infinite traits to our senses, then there is no reason to believe it exists. 

And finally, the very concept of God existing infinitely…well infinity itself is a paradox, how can something be everything? The Ontological argument makes light of such a heavy and mysterious term, which may not actually exist. I am very sceptical of infinity, and feel everything is likely to be quantifiable in some form, and therefore finite. Anslem seems to think he can he get get an idea of infinity in his head though… seems pretty fucking unlikely he actually was to me! 

But lets say God is infinite… does that not mean, by definition he is everything? So then why would he create something! If God is infinite, why would it go, “better make another universe and a species of primates to watch over”. Well, it wouldn’t, because you can’t add to infinity! There’s always the Pantheist position, that everything is God, but in this case our universe would be like an atom in God’s big toe, and so his caring about our existence seems slim. 

Religion is a business… 

The modern wave of evangelical Christianity, hosted in “mega-churches” in America is nothing short of a business. A profit machine. They are tax exempt, get subsidies for multi-million dollar mansions, flashy cars, or a fucking mobile home for your dogs, in Janet Crouch’s case. As for someone like Ted Haggard, his massive financial perks for being a pastor at a mega-church was paying for his love of crystal meth and male prostitutes. But you know, it’s all for a good cause and all!

Some of these pastors even have fucking private jets! What would Jesus have thought of that!? If I’m not mistaken he wasn’t all that big on wealth… you know, yapping on about the poor being God’s most cared for, and how you will be judged by how you treat the worst off in society.

“But hey, we’re spreading the word of Jesus throughout the nation, what’s wrong with us acquiring a few Ferrari’s and couple of private jets - one for me and one for the wife, in the process? That’s clearly not the motivation for being a pastor. The motivation is the love of God…”

The thousands and thousands of people who fill these mega-churches every Sunday really need to stop and ask themselves whether most of the pastors that stand up in front of them, and spew Christian jargon in their faces, and probably have a little drum machine and some fancy lighting to make it all go down smoother  are really sincere. Because I reckon they are all fucking charlatans.

This would be the easiest possible way to make a million. I mean, I could fucking pass off as a pastor in one of these places. All you have to do is pick a few passages of the Bible, then start raising people spirits with a speech that will pass of as profound to the audience as long as words terms such as “holy-spirit”, “hallelujah”, “sin”, “saviour”, “Jesus”, “forgiveness” etc. are featured every second word. 

Everyone will start crying, having convulsions, jumping up and down and have a jolly old time with the holy spirit inside them… and then you get a big fucking tax deducted pay check after you were probably just showered will cash donations from the two thousand people in the church that you just conned. This has to stop. 

“I don’t know where I’m going, but I’m on my way.” - Carl Sagan

Life is riddled with anxieties, worries, fears. It seems that while living out the short flashes of consciousness that we call human experience, the ability to reach a state of contentment and happiness is obstructed by these, among many things.

People may be perfectly successful - have jobs, money, family etc. and there may be many things in their lives which bring them pleasure and quell the anxieties of existence. But there still seems to be an epidemic of unfulfillment and dissatisfaction with life. How can we as a species break through the traps of modern life, that seems to leave people so disenfranchised and even scared of their own paths into the future? 

As a neurotic and worrying person myself, I come into direct contact with the things I just mentioned. I am often faced with disappointment with myself and my life. It is usually because things didn’t work out the way I thought would be best, or because they didn’t fulfil their maximum potential. This way of thinking - that life should be a certain way, and if it isn’t then it is a let down, is a major obstacle in the pursuit of happiness. But I have started to learn that reaching a comfortable, contented state of existence is not all that difficult. There are just some tendencies which need overcome. 

These harmful tendencies include self-absorbed patterns of thinking, and individualised approaches to life and consciousness. 

The idea of the individual - that there is a subject and there is experience and that these are distinct, is the root of the problem. Because this sets up life as something which should be controlled. There is me, the person, and then there is stuff, which I come into experience with. This kind of thinking puts responsibility over these experiences in the hands of the experiencer, which largely doesn’t exist. 

Really there is no such separation. You can’t distinguish between an individual and what is experienced, because everything is an experience. Your very idea of yourself as an individual is an experience. If you experienced nothing, what would be left?

For me this idea takes away the sting of the anxieties and disappointments of life - because there is no personal liability if things don’t work out the perfect way, there is no dogmatic expectations put on the future, and no desperate need to crowbar the sequence of events that is life into any pre-set shape. The only necessary thing in human life is for experiences to be experienced, we don’t have a distant stance where we evaluate them and control them, we are them! 

As long as, in your life, you are doing the best you can to experience the world in the fullest and most fulfilling way for you as a person, and at the same time removing the ego that wants to stake claim to your conscious experience, and try to distance you from it, then I think contentment and happiness will arise. Because happiness isn’t a goal. It isn’t something which will happen if you try and find it, if you impose your own definitions and expectations of it. It is what will naturally come about when you truly let go of your mind, and allow your life to take whatever shape it needs to. 

This is very exciting, and one of the I most anticipate in the field of biology - a complete account for the human brain and it’s amazing complexity of functions and processes. I think steps like this will bring us closer and closer.

I am currently reading Dan Dennett’s “Consciousness Explained” and strongly push for people to take a materialistic, biological approach to all things brain related, including what many people find to be the “mysterious” phenomena of human consciousness. Finding these sorts of genes helps to piece together the puzzle of this picture of the human brain, and as it comes closer to being complete, the way we view ourselves and the future of our species will be revolutionised.

What if these sorts of genes could be manufactured and implemented in embryo’s to speed up our evolution? 

Here’s an expanded version of my Capitalism and moral intuition post. it would be great if you could  read it or “like” it or whatever. 

Thanks!

An often overlooked question in the God debate is, why has religion stuck around in our species? The very fact that it has and is so popular means that there must many ways, both evolutionary and psychological, in which it enhances human survival. The reason why I love Dan Dennett’s approach to religion is because he tries to solve the many questions the presence of religiosity in humans raises, and doesn’t just flat out attack it. Religion is something which I openly mock, and with good reason, but often the more practical thinking gets sidelined in Atheist commentaries for the easy to do sloganing and slandering. 

To explain why religion has done so well in our species, I think we need to look back to the point where our ancestors will have just been transitioning and developing higher levels of consciousness than primates - language, self - awareness etc. As these things began to emerge in the species, there is a big problem that will have faced the ones with these traits - they will have had no idea what the fuck was going on, to put it simply. Every single phenomenon, as they got more and more conscious and aware of their surroundings, will have become more and more confusing and frightening. A river will have seemed threatening, noisy and mystical. The sky and the sun will have been intimidating - they will have been worried it was going to fall on their heads at any moment! 

So, as animals do, they will have sought patterns and explanations for the things they saw around them to settle what will have been crippling fear and anxiety. The ancestors which were able to create explanations in their heads about the confusing phenomenon will have cured this anxiety, and so will have survived more than the ones who were stuck gawping in fear of the sky falling on them.

As this happens, cultural and memetic evolution will take hold (non-genetic evolution involving information packages harboured in brains) and through the sharing of stories about river gods, and sun chariots, the most satisfactory and seemingly sensible myths will have been more likely to survive and be passed on than the less so, and then you have a religion. This will have continued, and as mankind progressed, these sorts of polytheistic, fictional religions made way for the types of monotheistic, religions which claim their non-fiction, but have just as much grounding in myth as the former. They are just better organised. 

And now we have the hangover. People still have these sorts of anxieties and fears about the world around them, about unknowns. Where did I come from? What if this is all there is to life? Where can I find guidance during hard times? Does anybody care about me or love me? And religion still does the job of somewhat removing these anxieties in people who they are rife in. But it is no longer a weigh up between living in abject fear and anxiety or believing in myth. Now it is believing in myth against accepting and being comfortable about the notion of not having cosmic significance, a life after death or a rule book to live your life for you. 

We Atheists must put forward how we have now found the better belief system for enhancing human life, and we must preach the shedding of these primitive fears about man kinds existence in the universe, because with shedding these things, you shed the need to subscribe to ancient and barbaric holy books to give your life stability.