Jennifer Lawrence

Religioucriticism.com

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Let’s imagine we’re sitting together having a relaxed, honest and open discussion about religion. On the table is a huge stack of white index cards and on each index card is one of thousands of different religions, gods, belief systems, along with arguments for believing in that particular religion or god. Maybe a card has a current religion, or maybe it has a older religion that no one believes in any more, or is largely forgotten. It doesn’t matter – the point is that they’re all here in this great big stack, except for the ones that you believe in – you religion’s not in this stack.

One at a time, I draw up a card and I read you the religion and god and arguments for why you should believe in it and you respond with the reasons you dismiss the arguments and why you don’t believe the religion or god, and I’ll write the responses down.

So we go through every argument ever made for every other religion, their gods, supposed holy books, witnesses, miracles, profits, saviours, prophecies, testimonies, answered prayers, faith claims, affects for good, archeological support; whatever the argument, we go through it. We note all your counter arguments and dismissals on the back on each card.

It won’t take long before we realize that there is a pattern. Your argument for dismissing one religion will likely be similar to a previous answer. We won’t need to write anything down any more – we can just refer back to a previous argument.

Once we get to the bottom of the stack, I take another card out of my pocket. This card has your religion and god on them, and all the arguments that you think support them. We go through that card and they are refuted referring back to arguments you made before, just as we did with all the previous cards.

The fact is that you’re an atheist in regards to thousands of other religions and gods. You already know everything there is to know about dismissing religious arguments. You’re an expert already. You rationally dismiss thousands of other religions or gods just like any atheist does. The difference is you don’t turn that critical side of your mind to your own beliefs.

This realization is all anyone needs to know to recognize their faith doesn’t stand up any more. It’s just question of how honest you can be with yourself.

Aside

1. Decide to arrange for something other than yourself to exist

2. Create a being by the name of Lucifer with full knowledge that this being will betray you and ultimately cause an infinite amount of suffering unnecessarily.

3. Allow an unfathomably horrific dimension of existence known as ‘hell’ to emerge created by yourself or perhaps Lucifer and allow that dimension to continue existing. Do not override or prevent such a thing. It will come into play later

4. Create objective unchanging moral prescriptions and base them upon whatever your nature happens to be and then label any action or thought contrary to these standards ‘sin’.

5. Be sure to include in these moral prescriptions edits for social and psychological health such as encouragement to beat ones children with a rod, permission to buy and sell slaves and will them as property to ones children for life, requirement that women not be allowed to teach or have authority over men and of course the instruction to kill anyone who expresses interest in worshiping other gods.

6. Design a physical universe, planets, animals and vegetation all with the appearance of age be sure to include in your creation biological flaws redundancies and over-complications that appear as if they were the product of blind cumulative processes, perhaps a urinary tract that runs straight through the prostate gland or a unnecessary appendix prone to inflation and rupturing, or maybe a respiratory and digestive system forced to share the same plumbing, (these are just a few working ideas).

7. Create a garden with a tree in it bearing fruit that when eaten provides knowledge of your objective moral standards, and create two sentient cognitive beings without knowledge or awareness of these standards and instruct them not to eat from the tree which would enlighten them (in other words, arrange it so that only AFTER they eat from the tree are they capable of understanding that doing so was a violation of objective moral standards).

8. Warn these cognitive beings that they will undoubtedly die if they eat from this tree, but don’t follow through if they do, then endow a reptile with vocal cords, lips or some other means of speaking audibly to your cognitive beings enabling it to make a convincing case to one of them for eating from the tree. Do not prevent this or intervene.

9. Now by this point make sure your cognitive beings have been equipped for reproducing themselves and multiplying, and because one of them has sinned, arrange that every single one of their descendants until the end of time will be born with an inherited sinful nature, defaulting in a future of everlasting torment. Do not by any means allow each of them to be born with a clean slate and the capacity for living a sin-free life if they desire as you did with your first two prototypes.

10. Endow these cognitive beings with a ‘soul’ which keeps their thoughts and feelings and other cognitive faculties in existence forever one way or another. And then allow the sinfulness of these beings to be incompatible with your presence and let hell be the only other place that they can go once they exit the the physical world, do not make any attempt to spare these souls the eternal torment of hell such as allowing souls to stop existing all together or creating additional realm for them to reside besides with you or in hell.

11. Over time allow these beings to populate the earth you’ve creating, knowing with infallible certainty of course that after so many generations they will disappointed you enough that you find it necessary to kill all of them in a global flood and start all over from scratch.

12. Now when this happens (again right on schedule) make an exception for one small family of cognitive beings who you deem righteous of course it goes without saying that powers of omnipotence allow you to know, again, with infallible certainty that this family to will ultimately disappointing in the same way that those who you drowned, rendering the entire endeavor futile, but for now it’s best that you pretend not to know that.

13. Instruct this small disappointment of a family to populate the entire world all over again by way of incest.

14. Declare that until further notice the only way for these cognitive beings to rectify their sinful nature while on earth is to preform ritual animal sacrifice’s and other acts of senseless violence, additionally when certain sins are committed by any one of your cognitive beings demand that the surrounding community kill that being themselves.

15. In the meantime perform many epic miracles for all to see and intervene often with your physical creations, stop the sun in the sky, part the red sea, turn rivers into blood, and women into pillars of salt, give men superhuman strength, speak to the thousands with a booming voice from heaven etc, but before these cognitive beings become advanced enough in the area’s of science and communication that they could actually document, share, playback and verify these epic miracles, make sure you stop performing them all together .

16. Decide at some point that the most pressing of your objective moral prescriptions are not as obvious to these cognitive beings as you once thought, take this opportunity to chisel your top ten moral concerns into two tablets of stone and commission one of your cognitive beings to deliver these tablets to the masses, (Note to self: Roughly half of these moral concerns should center around pleasing you, praising you and remaining loyal to you)

17. After several thousand years impregnate one of these cognitive beings so that she gives birth to your son in physical form, who also happens to be you, at the same time.

18. Allow this cognitive being who is your son but also you to grow up and make several revisions to you/your son’s original standards of morality then arrange for other cognitive beings to torture and kill you/your son, authorize this sacrifice of yourself as a means of granting all other cognitive beings immunity from the consequences of their sinful nature, which you allowed them to be born with in the first place.

19. Do not however make this sacrifice free, establish that none of these cognitive beings shall be eligible for benefits of this sacrifice unless they actively believed that it happened, in other words, despite the quality of their intentions any cognitive beings henceforth who finds themselves unconvinced these events actually took place, is unwittingly designating themselves for the endless suffering of hell.

20. With that established, be sure to refrain from making it clear and knowable to the rest of the world that these events actually took place, ensure that no cognitive being after the first century has the luxury of witnessing your son who is also you say or do anything to indicate he was a living guy. Again, make sure that all of this occurs before advancements in science and technology are available to verify for those who aren’t present.

21. Arrange so that the only surviving record of these events will be offered anonymously by non-eye witness’s translated to a language different from the one you/ your son will speak written no earlier than thirty years after you/your son preformed these miracles and makes these clams, however do make sure that these records feature the precept that believing in something without evidence is morally superior to investigation and verification.

22. Be sure that after only a few decades the only accounts of these events in existence are copies of copies of copies which will be verifiably altered and added to in historically and theologically significant ways from generation to generation, sect to sect. Do not preserve the original copies of these accounts, do not protect them from revision, do not set in place any mechanism of protecting them from being interpreted in hundreds upon hundreds of ways most of which being heretical and therefore punishable.

23. Do not bother to employ your omniscience in such a way as to discern which of these cognitive beings are truly rebelling, and which simply don’t know how to distinguish you from other versions of god which do not in fact exist.

24. Do not make it clear to these beings that you are are even here. Allow for your very existence to remain an easily debatable, easily questionable, easily doubtable proposition, allow billions and billions of souls to be unthinkably tortured for all of eternity regardless of their character, integrity, bravery, responsibility or conduct because they had not correctly assumed that the right set of propositions were true by the time their lives on earth were over.

25. And finally… when all is said and done demand that you be praised for this plan.

Checkmate… there’s Christianity for you. 

Above content borrowed from an atheist argument site. Very pertinent and specific. This piece yet again asks why an all knowing omnipotent being would go thru all this fucking drama that reads like a bronze-age episode of the Kartrashians!

Very intelligent man!

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Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Rochester.  Teaching at CSUS since 1996.  My main area of research and publication now is atheism and philosophy of religion.  I am also interested in philosophy of mind, epistemology, and rational decision theory/critical thinking.  

From thebraveatheist Center for Reason and Logic

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Personal anecdotes…..

Subject: Dave, 67yo Male

Occupation: Retired carpenter

Current Situation:  Resides with adult daughter and son-in-law due to recent loss of carpentry business and forced to take early Social Security. 

Dave grew up with a mother that had limited finances and relied on marriage and divorce to several different men to become the wealthy woman that she is today. She is very intelligent but favored using a dishonest approach to financial freedom instead of steady marriage and education to achieve her goals. Dave was taught by this woman that men were terrible creatures and only fit to be used for financial gain. As he grew to adulthood, Dave became hostile and opinionated to a fault, using a large stature to intimidate and physically humiliate others to bandage his abysmally low self-esteem. He does not interact well with others because he cannot allow them to possess their own opinions or political values and has been fired from jobs due to terrifying flares of temper. Dave is very rigid and short-sighted in his beliefs and never takes advice from others because as they are advising, he is formulating a mental response as to why their suggestion will fail. Personally, he dislikes me and will refute ANYTHING that I have to say even if I possess a degree in the subject matter that is being discussed. This is due to his jealousy of my current position that I have created by hard work and shrewd decision-making. I basically came from gut-wrenching poverty and homelessness to educated self-actualized success and have a family that I put ahead of everything. Dave left his family because of alcoholism and spent his entire life working on his own issues, but his family suffered because once he got sober he continued working to satisfy his own means and never thought of providing for his children in the future. Speaking with him is literally like a foray into the world of ‘I Can’t.’ 

Dave was advised in 2009 to move into renovations by his daughter who saw the construction industry fall flat in response to the recession, but he did not listen as per his usual assumption that he knew better. The resulting fallout was that he had to move in with us. Now imagine having to co-exist with a person who is anti-social and refuses to listen to most advice AND is used to judging others and running his own household. Between these two mindsets, you have a person who resents life in general and is depressed with immature coping mechanisms. He lashes out verbally, disparages opinions that he disagrees with and constantly has to remind others that he is a viable entity dependent on no other person except self. This is mostly true in that Social Security takes care of his contribution and that he helps with the cleaning and around-the-property chores. While doing this he constantly complains because people don’t do things the way he does them and criticizes opinions and beliefs that don’t align with his own. Worse yet, he has converted from knee-jerk bigoted conservatism to knee-jerk liberalism because their beliefs make him feel as though all of his bad decisions weren’t to blame for his position, just the actions of greedy Republicans, ( I am middle of the road politically and favor common sense to knee-jerk anything ). I don’t blame one side because I know that ALL of our Outlawmakers are responsible for the recession, but how do you explain that to someone who went from idolizing Bill O’Rielly to hanging on every word of Rachel Maddow? Bread-line convert, I know! Ya got Jesus only because YOU were effected by tragedy! 

thebraveatheist meanwhile, cools his heels in a situation between a worthless mother-in-law and an extremely irritating father-in-law who are in the same house( mine ), after 30 years of separation! They hate each other and THAT friction is palpable as well. The FIL contributes in chores and money but is used to being head of household in his OWN house, the MIL stiffs on the money and sits on her ass eating food that she doesn’t pay for AND recently took my car without asking and wrecked it while drunk! 

The entire house dynamic is set to change in 4 mos. but my wife can’t see the damage that 20 years of co-dependency has done to our family unit. She has bailed her mother out of tedious self-inflicted situations since our marriage and then three years ago added her dad into the mix. Between the two I have never known a marriage built on honesty and trust. My wife has told so many lies to cover up her mother’s screw-ups that they can no longer be counted. Things are supposedly changing with the mother moving out soon, but what do you do with the father who constantly challenges for head-of-household? 

Thank Godless for therapy! As a person who is well grounded, I still need advice on how to deal with these crazy people! I have since turned to my ‘higher power’ Mithra, to guide me thru this time with some human sacrifice and idolatry, and can only advise those going thru similar trials to ‘Let go and Let Gods, Goddesses and Fairies of the Underworld!’ 

On a footnote-My wife had a terrible childhood at the hands of these adult children but can’t seem to break the guilt that makes her take care of them. They were never there as parents OR providers and she has always played the mother in her and her mom’s relationship. A severe co-dependency issue to say the least. 

Well, this post was more personal, but gives some insight on why, or why not that people do what they do! It is loosely based in my atheism but not directly related to the issue. I feel that personal posts are very relevant from time to time and try not to flood my blog with them. Till the next post-Keep your feet on the ground and your thoughts based in reality! PEACE TO YOU MY BROTHAS AN’ SISTAS!! OUT………

 

 

We are NOT a significant race, we are but one of MILLIONS!

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