2. Where religion would rely on belief before justification, atheists practice the opposite. With religion, there is a requirement to believe first. This is common in all religions. The creed is, belief first, then if someone asks you why, then justify. With atheists, we have a total opposite system, if you will, of beliefs. It's not an actual system, it's unorganized, it's decentralized, there are no preachers, there is no system of faith, it's completely up to the individual to keep learning and keep changing the way he or she understand how the universe works. That's why I keep writing.
Anyone who has followed this blog will know by now that I started off very agnostic. I was actually religious before that, and only stopped believing in God somewhere in October last year. Just over a year ago. But back to the subject at hand.
3. There are more contradictions within and between religions than there are within and between fields of science (philosophy not being counted as purely empirical science). Considering there are 3 major monotheistic religions, 1 major polytheistic religion, and possibly hundreds of off-shoots from these 4 religions as well as the hundreds of other belief systems(Scientology included) would imply the chances of one point of view being right would be 1 in a thousand(presuming there are that many different views). I would like to remind everyone that each and every religion presumes itself to be the one true religion. So on the off chance that the Mormons were correct, about 99.5% of the world's population will end up in hell. Think about that.
God is also said to be all-loving. This is almost universal across all religions. Assuming Christianity was the true religion, and God had the sympathy to allow every one from every offshoot of Christianity(collectively, the worlds most wide spread disease/religion) into heaven, that would still mean 2/3rds of the entire planet ending up in hell for simply not being born in the right place at the right time. That's 4,000,000,000 souls in hell. God's will? Maybe he's more of a sadist than a lover of all things.
Now if we change the rules a little bit, while maintaining the all-loving nature of God by saying God will allow any body with good intentions to enter heaven, granted that at the gates of heaven, he or she accepts God(or that version of God). If that were the case, then the most logical approach would be to reject God in our daily existence, and simply maintain benignity.
4. Theories and facts.
A scientific theory is a well supported body of interconnected statements that explains observations and can be used to make testable predictions
Scientists most often use the word "fact" to describe an observation. But scientists can also use fact to mean something that has been tested or observed so many times that there is no longer a compelling reason to keep testing or looking for examples. The occurrence of evolution in this sense is fact. Scientists no longer question whether descent with modification occurred because the evidence is so strong
With the above text in mind, we can dissect any apparent observation. I will now dissect 4 observations using the power of the internet and some facts that I already know of. The observations are gravity, evolution, emotion, and God. These observations, as you can tell, are increasingly difficult to explain, that is, gravity is explain quite simply, which is not the case for the explanation for God.
Gravity is and was a theory because there was a tendency for objects to fall. The first explanations for gravity by Greek philosophers are now considered obsolete. For a long time Newton's theories were considered as close a match to actual fact as you could get. Then Einstein came along with his theory, and up to this day, it is considered to be the closest you can get to to explain the FACT of gravity(sorry, I published it as "theory", I really meant fact).
We can observe that changes occur when an organism produces offspring. We observe that a child bares resemblance to both sides of the family, hence, the same organism is not simply being copied and pasted, but recombined with traits from other organisms. The theory here is said to be evolution, that is, the constant test of survivability of genetic traits through the process of natural selection. Gregor Mendel and Charles Darwin both had very different theories of evolution. Both of them had produced very close-to-fact explanations that seemed to fit the theory of evolution, but they were both incompatible with each other UNTIL the discovery of DNA. Since then evolution has been rewritten(by combining Darwinian evolution with Mendel's genetic model), tested and confirmed to be a fact; or at least to close to fact to be denied by any one with an ounce of biological knowledge or a Richard Dawkins book. To say that evolution is just a theory is to say that gravity is just a theory. Thus, we can conclude that although we cannot prove evolution, just as we cannot prove gravity, but the ever increasing evidence for both gravity and evolution must compel any sane person to believe they are both true, or at least as close to truth as we can get at the moment.
Emotion is next. We can observe that every living creature,on nearly every degree of sentience, has some degree of emotion or emotional response. The basic one being panic and aggression. We can observe insects to have both of these emotional responses at any rate, which is why I say they are the most basic. Let us also take into account the normal state of being, that is free of emotion, like when asleep(without a dream), or when idle. Since I already rejected philosophy as empirical science, I have to explain the phenomenon of emotion without the will to power theory. This might get messy. To test a basic emotional response such as fear, scientists have used artificially hatched chicks. By disallowing any 'teaching' from a mother hen, these chicks were hatched in a lab. A while later, a silhouette of a eagle(or hawk, I can't remember what they used) was shown to the chicks. As in, a figure of an eagle was made to seem as if approaching the chicks from above. The chicks responded exactly how you'd expect them to; by scattering and chirping madly. For more, read The Making of Memory. What we can conclude is that emotions are genetically imprinted to ensure the survivability of an organism. The moment an organism panics, all it's senses are elevated, it has the will to move with more agility, and therefore have a greater chance of escaping. It is not God's will, it's the organisms. If the genetics that are inherited by the chick(in this case) aren't best at what they do, then they will not survive to be passed down. We can now see that this testable hypothesis on emotion almost fits perfectly, but there is still much room for improvement, there probably already is, but I haven't read it up yet.
I will not go into the more complex emotions such as anger, love, curiosity and etc as I am not intrigued by any of them.
Sorry if I'm going off topic, but a possible theory for the existence of consciousness would be perhaps to master emotion, hence exponentially increasing the survivability of the organism as it should (but in our case only the Buddhists seem to get it) ensure the constant manipulation(control of emotion being a form of manipulation) of emotions to suite the situation.
Ok, last theory. God. We can observe that there are miracles, prophecies that seem to fit perfectly, signs of upper intelligence, a voice in the back of our heads that guides, a void that people need to fill, etc. So, God can be used as a theory. However, with all the theories above(I worked from the ground up, skipping chemistry, first with physics(gravity), then biology(evolution), psychology(emotion)), it can be seen that there doesn't necessarily need to be a higher power that works for the more complex systems of the universe by creating less complex systems.
The argument I'm trying to present here is that there is an assumption that God created us for the universe, which would mean God's objective would be our existence, and for that to happen, God would need to create all the other basics. This is a major flaw in the theory of God, considering the more basic theories already hint that the universe was made ground up, not the other way around.
Blanketing the God theory by saying God is omniscient, omnipotent and omnipresent, thereby proving that God could have created the universe for us seeing that for us to survive, a universe would need to be created is absolutely flawed.
The whole theory of God is in fact, absolutely flawed. It is a theory of infinite regress(who created the creator? If God one day said, let's start, what day was it and why that day? What was God doing before that? Did God ever wonder who created him? Why does God seem all too human in our minds?). It is also a theory that can always rely on being untestable. Whenever a testable trait is brought up, religious apologists are quick to argue and bring up revised versions of God's prophecies and methods. In science, revising a theory is ok because, as I've said, our knowledge on the universe is always expanding. Modern science in barely 200 years old, yet it's achieved more in the field of genuine truth finding than religion ever has.
What I'm trying to imply here is that there is something very wrong with religion. It isn't a good thing. I can compare it to a fallback plan for the stupid, cowardly and ignorant. I can relate it to a virus, always looking to spread itself(just think the three religions trying to get into space to convert the first(if any) intelligent alien life form). I can see that it fits the evolutionary failure of believing in those you believe in, where it's original purpose was to make sure people put faith in their parents or trusted friends, they would learn something that would help them survive, religion however has festered and continues to be passed down in the same way.
"[Religion has made] a virtue out of not thinking. It's nothing to brag about. And those who preach faith and enable and elevate it are intellectual slave holders, keeping mankind in a bondage to fantasy and nonsense that has spawned and justified so much lunacy and destruction."
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