What the hell
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Twitter continues to both amaze and perplex me. In this case, I’m still shocked that a quick reply I made, in reaction to another reply to a tweet about religion, ended up being one of my top 2 or 3 most-liked tweets in the 15 years I’ve been on Twitter.
One thing I only talk about sometimes online, and nearly never talk about in real life, is the fact that I’m an atheist. It’s actually a very important part of who I am.
Only a few people I know personally officially know, although I think a few others have figured it out. I don’t mention it to my family and friends because most of them are religious, some very much so. I worry it will negatively affect my relationships with them.
I don’t mention it much online for some of the same reasons — because I’m still afraid that if I do, people who I do know pretty well online might suddenly not want to interact with me online. So if you get offended by honest reactions to your religion, you may want to skip this post.
But the fact that so many people liked and commented on my tweet makes me think that I don’t need to be so overly cautious about expressing my opinions on this. I do sometimes during live-tweeting for The Young Turks, since the three main hosts are atheist and/or agnostic, but outside of this I do only occasionally.
Cenk Uygur accepting the “Emperor Has No Clothes Award” from FFRF (via FFRF’s Facebook page)
I really don’t like offending people, but I also find religion (all religions I’ve read about, but I know Christianity best since that’s what I was indoctrinated in) to be one of the worst aspects of human civilization to still be around.
My (not-so-)hot take on Christianity — I don’t think it makes any sense that
there is an all-powerful invisible tyrant (ahem, I mean, “King of Kings!”)
whose own book alleges that he murdered millions of people over millennia because they made him mad, or even sometimes when they didn’t (but it must be my fault for not understanding why millions of helpless babies needed to die while the omnipotent Jesus was hiding from King Herod!) and
who punished humanity, especially women, for wanting to learn (you ate the fruit from the Tree of Knowledge, now you shall do everything humans with a penis tell you to do, and go through intense pain when you give birth!).
My sincere kudos to people who are Christian and who have learned to ignore the hateful parts of the Bible and/or emphasize the positive parts of the religion. There are very good, even inspiring parts here and there, and I would never say there is absolutely nothing good you could get out of the Bible or having faith.
But there isn’t anything that you couldn’t also come to on your own without religion. If you’ve ever heard the argument that people aren’t good because of religion, but in spite of it, that’s pretty much my feeling with the caveat that religion can teach you good things, but you almost always have to throw out a large chunk of bad things to get to it.
I think that almost everything related to the core beliefs of Christianity are either
abhorrent and something no one should aspire to as a worldview or moral system (George Carlin takes apart the 10 Commandments in the video below).
completely crazy when you actually think about them objectively
contradictory with other beliefs or the Bible, or
often a combination of these three.
I used to use the old argument and tell people, What does it hurt to believe? If you believe and there is a God, you go to heaven! If don’t believe and there is a God, you go to hell. And if there isn’t a God, it doesn’t matter either way, right?
Except that is the exact opposite of what millennia of civilization have finally taught us. Our lives should be guided by what we know, what is real based on facts we know now and what we’ve learned as a species, and a genuine curiosity to find out more about the world and our fellow people.
Almost all modern religion is guided by what someone believes without proof, based largely on books written thousands of years ago, following one of thousands of possible ways to interpret it and/or the edicts of church leaders. And in many cases, a willingness to oppress or kill anyone who doesn’t agree with you, or overlook that it happened.
The two things that finally broke me free from religion were
the question of suffering (which I later found out was the clincher for best-selling New Testament scholar Bart Ehrman as well)
the offensive, nonsensical story about how God allegedly saved humanity —
It’s scary at first for a lot of people (including me) to think there’s no God if you’ve believed it growing up, especially if you believe in eternal damnation for non-believers.
But if it’s just us humans trying to figure out what’s best for us and our planet, instead of some invisible god that we have no actual proof of and that no one can agree on what he/she/it would even want if they did exist, then I think we’d have a lot less problems with things like whether we should tell women what they can and can’t do with their bodies, or what consenting adults do in their own bedroom.
This post is already super long, but especially given the response to my tweet, I should maybe be less shy about my atheism and I will probably come back to this topic sometime. Unless the US finally comes to its senses and decides to actually respect the principle of State-Church separation.
No way in hell that will happen.
If you don’t yet, you can follow me on Twitter, too: https://twitter.com/EclecticMisc.
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