The Prodigal Atheist

 Christianity changes how we see other people, from being ends to being a means to an end, from  being people who we treat as we ourselves wish to be treated by others, to being people we treat in a way we think will save us from being mistreated in the next life by a God.

I can think of no greater form of violence to anything worthy of being called truth, and nothing more offenseive to nature, morality, and reason, than that Christians teach their children to love and worship a God who, rather than creating them with all of the perfection that any worthy parent would, created them instead as born sinners, and all so he could eventually butcher his own son to death for their spiritual deformities in order to establish a new and updated brand of religious proscribtions for the spiritual deformities that same God "intelligently designed" all children the worldover to be born with. The special brand of spiritual deformities such a God is said to have designed all human children to be born with, which the Christian religion calls "the stain of origian sin," are the sort that can only be fully forgiven by accepting a lifelong enslavement to the new brand of religion God wished to begin through the brutal murder of his own son. That bruta...

HOW CHRISTIANITY PREVENTS US FROM KNOWING THYSELF BY CREATING A FALSE SELF Consider the emotional and intellectual confusion and insecurity that religion installs in the minds of children by requiring beliefs in both an undefinable word like "God" and in things like an eternal soul. This results in teaching the child they are, at least on one sense, actually immortal, and having to meet God after they die amounts to teaching them they will be sent to the principle's office when their lessons here on earth have completed, to determine if you have passed or failed. The problem with getting a passing grade, they are subsequently taught to believe, is that the immortal soul they are born with is morally defective because it is marred by the stain of "original sin." And because it is, the child must fear it is destined to fail the test of life, and will therefore have to spend the rest of eternity in hell after they die. The only way to escape this fate is if - an...

Understanding the Different World Views of Christians & Atheists Perhaps the best way to understand why Christians and atheists see and interpret “miracles” differently is by understanding the difference between how two physicists looked at reality itself and saw two very different things. Those two physicists were Albert Einstein and Niels Bohr, and while one studied the motion of planets, the other studied the motion of subatomic particles.  Looking through the lens of classical physics, Einstein saw how planets operated in the universe in an orderly manner, obeying definite deterministic laws of Newtonian mechanics. For the Christian, those laws were written and set in motion by the hand of God. Bohr, on the other hand, saw something different. He saw the world through the prism of quantum physics, where reality itself was indefinite, animated by the unruly hand of a nature that, like the Christian God murdering the whole world with a flood, seemed free to ignore the laws ...

 Recently, a pamphlet was dropped at my house from a local Christian church. "God wants you to be 100% certain when you die you will go to heaven," it said. Of course, the pamphlet leaves out the fact that the Bible also says that no such certainty is available to us, for we are all condemned to, as the great St. Paul assures us in Philippians 2:12-13, "work out our salvation in fear in trembling."  Despite this glaring omission, the pamphlet goes on to assure the reader that there are several things a person must "know from the Bible to be 100% sure" you will go to Heaven and not hell. The first and most important of these is that "you are a sinner and you don't deserve to go to heaven, "for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God (Romans 3:23)." This reminded me of a classic nineteenth century fairy tale about an ugly duckling. It is the story of a duckling who, when hatched along with his brothers and sisters, is ridiculed ...

ASH WEDNESDAY IS when Catholics smear ash on their forehead in the shape of a cross to remind themselves that they “are dust and unto dust they shall return.” The point of smearing such ash on one's face, other than selling the Catholic brand of guilt, is to remind people that they should be ashamed of being human, and aspire to become "like God," just like the serpent promised Adam & Eve they would become if they ate of the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. After all, no "tree" (in the form of a cross) claims to be as infallible as Catholicism in proclaiming to know what God defines as good and evil. And the only way to overcome this shame is to aspire to "become like God" by shuffling loose one's own sinful and mortal coil and becoming completely a pure idea of one's righteousness. Outside of religion, an idea of one's self is defined as our ego, and the sense that a person's ego is so special that it deserves nothi...