Truth

A NOTE TO CHRISTIANS
To understand my motivation for this page, you must read the blog I link below, and watch these short videos.
An Atheist manifesto
Sam Harris speaking on "faith":
Some incredible words from Carl Sagan for you to think about:
Make note of this:
281 ways to get booted out of a blog discussion on my site
"Religious moderates are themselves the bearers of a terrible dogma: they imagine that the path to peace will be paved once each of us has learned to respect the unjustified beliefs of others. The very ideal of religious tolerance--born of the notion that every human being should be free to believe whatever he wants about God--is one of the principal forces driving us toward the abyss."
"Many religious moderates have taken the apparent high road of pluralism, asserting the equal validity of all faiths, but in doing so they neglect to notice the irredeemably sectarian truth claims of each. As long as a Christian believes that only his baptized brethren will be saved on the Day of Judgment, he cannot possibly "respect" the beliefs of others, for he knows that the flames of hell have been stroked by these very ideas and await their adherents even now. Muslims and Jews generally take the same arrogant view of their own enterprises and have spent millennia passionately reiterating the errors of other faiths. It should go without saying that these rival belief systems are all equally uncontaminated by evidence."
"The idea that any one of our relgions represents the infallible word of the One True God requires an encyclopedic ignorance of history, mythology, and art even to be entertained--as the beliefs, rituals, and iconography of each of our religions attest to centuries of cross-pollination among them. Whatever their imagined source, the doctrines of modern religions are no more tenable than those which, for lack of adherents, were cast upon the scrap heap of mythology millenia ago; for there is no more evidence to justify a beleif in the literal existence of Yahweh and Satan than there was to keep Zeus perched upon his mountain throne or Poseidon churning the seas."
"Nearly 230 milllion Americans beleive that a book showing neither unity of style nor internal consistency was authored by an omniscient, omnipotent, an omnipresent deity. A survey of Hindus, Muslims, and Jews around the world would surely yield similar results, revealing that we, as a species, have grown almost perfectly intoxicated by our myths. How is it that, in this one area of our lives, we have convinced ourselves that our beliefs about the world can float entirely free of reason and evidence?"
"Religious moderation is the product of secular knowledge and scriptural ignorance--and it has no bona fides, in religious terms, to put it on a par with fundamentalism. The texts themselves are unequivocal: they are perfect in all their parts. By their light, religious moderation appears to be nothing more than an unwillingness to fully submit to God's law. By failing to live by the letter of the texts, while tolerating the irrationality of those who do, religious moderates betray faith and reason equally. Unless the core dogmas of faith are called into question --ie, that we know there is a God, and that we know what he wants from us--religious moderation will do nothing to lead us out of the wilderness."
"Moderates do not want to kill anyone in the name of God, but they want us to keep using the word "God" as though we knew what we were talking about. And they do not want anything too critical said about people who really believe in the God of their fathers, because tolerance, perhaps above all else, is sacred. To speak plainly and truthfully about the state of our world--to say, for instance, that the Bible and the Koran both contain mountains of life-destroying gibberish--is antithetical to tolerance as moderates currently conceive it. But we can no longer afford the luxury of such political correctness. We must finally recognize the price we are paying to maintain the iconography of our ignorance."
"Technology has a way of creating fresh moral imperatives. Our technological advances in the art of war have finally rendered our religious differences--and hence our religious beliefs--antithetical to our survival. We can no longer ignore the fact that billions of our neighbors believe in the metaphysics of martyrdom, or in the literal truth of the book of Revelation, or any of the other fantastical notions that have lurked in the minds of the faithful for millennia--because our neighbors are now armed with chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons. There is no doubt that these developments mark the terminal phase of our credulity. Words like "God" and "Allah" must go the way of "Apollo" and "Baal," or they will unmake our world." ~Sam Harris (The End of Faith) New York Times best seller, and winner of 2005 PEN award
**Note: I would like to thank my friend Paul Tobin at The Rejection of Pascal's Wager for giving me permission to reproduce some of his articles in my blog for discussion. All articles written by Paul will have multiple links throughout them that lead to other articles on his website. Most of blogs below were written by Paul.

FAQ's:

Isn't God required to provide a moral yardstick?
Euthyphro's Dilemma Can atheists explain how morality could have arisen without God?
Evolution and the Origins of Morality Isn't any system of morality premised on atheism condemned to arbitrariness, where morality is reduced to mere individual or cultural preferences leading to moral relativism?
Metaethics and Atheism Aren't atheists merely immoral people who do not want to face God's judgment?
Are Atheists Immoral People? How can an atheist have a meaningful life?
Atheism and Meaning Why are you an atheist and not an agnostic?
Atheism and Agnosticism (What is the difference?) Didn't Hitler and Stalin's atheism lead them to commit atrocities that led to the deaths of millions of people? Hitler, Stalin and atheism Didn't Jesus do away with Old Testament law? But that's the Old Tetament!

Problems with God:

Theism: The burden of proof God and Christian Theology God and the Problem of Evil The God of Systematic Theology The Moral Argument The Teleological Argument Thomas Aquinas and the Five Ways The Ontological Argument Is the Universe fine tuned for life?
Problems with Christianity:
The creation myths: internal difficulties Quotes on biblical inerrancy The bible: not all versions are created equal God as abuser: Similarities between the Christian God and abusive spouses The flood myth: Babylonian origins 1 The flood myth: Babylonian origins 2 The non-existent tomb The Spurious Endings of Mark The Historical Reliability of Acts The psychological make-up of Jesus Internal Contradictions in the bible Replies to common fundamentalist apologetics Biblical errors: The Biological Sciences Biblical errors: The Physical Sciences The Rejection of Pascal's Wager LIBERAL MODERNIST THEOLOGY (IMPORTANT!!!) God and Christian Theology The God of the Bible The Creation Myths: Age of the Earth and the Universe The Bible Jesus The Divinity and Messiahship of Jesus Messianic Prophecies The Atonement The Doctrine of the Atonement Paul and the Origins of Christianity The Theology of Paul The Arian Controversy The Hero Pattern - How Jesus fits right in Mithraism and Christianity Parallels between Jesus and Horus, an Egyptian God Failed prophecies Psalm 22:16 A prophecy of the crusafixion? Anti-Rationalism in the Bible Manuscript Fallacies The Early Christians Another Point in Logic 101 Clear Contradictions in the Bible Sex in the evangelical world

Why blind faith can be dangerous:

Calling Faith Into Question ( IMPORTANT!!!! ) The Historical Record of Christianity The Persecution of Heretics The Pagans and the Early Christians Anti-Semitism The Wars of Religion The Spanish Inquisition The Inquisition The Crusades Witch Hunts The Root Causes of Religious Atrocities Slavery The Position of Women: The Hisorical Consequences The Christian Version of the "Hitler Youth"

VIDEOS:
THE GOD WHO WASN'T THERE RICHARD DAWKINS - - THE ROOT OF ALL EVIL? Kissing Hank's Ass Ricky Gervais on creation The homosexual evangelical Richard Dawkins reading from "The God Delusion" Proof that nobody will get into Heaven Proof that Jesus is imaginary, in less than 5 minutes Proof that the Bible is repulsive Proof that prayer is superstitious Proof that God's plan is impossible THE COLLAPSE OF INTELLIGENT DESIGN, and why ID is wrong! Why Creation 'science' is a "Bad Thing" GEORGE CARLIN ON GOVERNMENT, AND THE TEN COMMANDMENTS PAUL AND JESUS, nobody told Paul!
SCIENTIFIC STUFF:

15 answers to creationist nonsense Irreducible Complexity: The Cosmic Emperor's New Clothes The Second Law of Thermodynamics The Flagellum Unspun: The Collapse of "Irreducible Complexity" The Origin of Species The FACT of Evolution, TONS of links with evidence supporting evolution The Harsh Light of Science

Fun little stories/articles:

Outbreak: Implications of the UB virus and methods of containment, by Truth Machiavellian Government: individual moral conscience vs conventional morality A Beautiful Mind: an overview of game theory A physics exam I took on special relativity Does rebirth make sense? Annatta (non-self), a Buddhist teaching There's A Dragon In My Garage, by Carl Sagan The Theologians Nightmare, by Bertrand Russell A debate between and I.D. guy, and an evolutionist. Think like a fundie Einstein's View of God The Value of Beliefs

PHILOSOPHY/Articles THAT I SUGGEST--
PHILOSOPHY:

Secular Humanism The Antichrist - by Friedrich Nietzsche Friedrich Nietzsche's Overman Occam's Razor Cognitive Dissonance The appeal to fear

Why I am not a Christian - - God is silent, by Richard Carrier Why I am not a Christian - - God is inert, by Richard Carrier The Quran is no better than the bible: Quran contradictions

NOTE: Richard's reasons are the same as my reasons.
Quotes
"Do not believe in anything simply because you have heard it. Do not believe in anything simply because it is spoken and rumored by many. Do not believe in anything simply because it is found written in your religious books. Do not believe in anything merely on the authority of your teachers and elders. Do not believe in traditions because they have been handed down for many generations. But after observation and analysis, when you find that anything agrees with reason and is conducive to the good and benefit of one and all, then accept it and live up to it." ~ Siddhartha Gautama a.k.a The Buddha
"Under Christianity neither morality nor religion has any point of contact with actuality. It offers purely imaginary causes ("God" "soul," "ego," "spirit," "free will"--or even "unfree"), and purely imaginary effects ("sin" "salvation" "grace," "punishment," "forgiveness of sins"). Intercourse between imaginarybeings ("God," "spirits," "souls"); an imaginarynatural history (anthropocentric; a total denial of the concept of natural causes); an imaginary psychology (misunderstandings of self, misinterpretations of agreeable or disagreeable general feelings--for example, of the states of the nervus sympathicus with the help of the sign-language of religio-ethical balderdash--, "repentance," "pangs of conscience," "temptation by the devil," "the presence of God"); an imaginaryteleology (the "kingdom of God," "the last judgment," "eternal life").--This purely fictitious world, greatly to its disadvantage, is to be differentiated from the world of dreams; the later at least reflects reality, whereas the former falsifies it, cheapens it and denies it. Once the concept of "nature" had been opposed to the concept of "God," the word "natural" necessarily took on the meaning of "abominable"--the whole of that fictitious world has its sources in hatred of the natural (--the real!--), and is no more than evidence of a profound uneasiness in the presence of reality. . . . This explains everything. Who alone has any reason for living his way out of reality? The man who suffers under it. But to suffer from reality one must be a botched reality. . . . The preponderance of pains over pleasures is the cause of this fictitious morality and religion: but such a preponderance also supplies the formula for decadence..."
~Friedrich Nietzsche