One of the biggest mistakes in the Christianity is that premise that you don’t have to DO anything, “All I need to do is to believe that His Son died for me, and that alone pleases Him and saves me.” Firstly that is creepy, and secondly stupid.

Somebody dying for me 2000 years ago or today for that matter, cannot take away the consequences and repercussions of any harm that I have created. No amount of prayer or absolution from me believing in Jesus will change any pain I have created.
What I do everyday and how I choose to be 100% affects other people, so I choose to think about what I do and act kindly. I choose morality, ethics and common sense amongst other things. My children learn from my example and how to be good custodians of this place called home. What kind of Mother would I be if I could violate or torment them and based on the fact that Jesus died on the cross for me – hey suddenly all is forgiven, but no wait there is more (and yes it sounds like a Verimark advert), it was fine for me to do that in the first place because I was pre-forgiven? Absurd. And to pass this ideology on to them, that would constitute a BAD mother!

I look around and see the good that people do everyday and how this makes a difference in our world. And it makes me really angry when I see committed Christians such as yourself committing “sins” or causing pain due to this lazy belief system, and on top if it judging all and sundry, in that we will be excluded from salvation. I do not need salvation or heaven or Jesus Christ, I need this world to pull itself straight, for people to treat one another with compassion and acceptance, then we will see real results.

And the burden of proof of existence of GOD/JESUS/HOLY SPIRIT, lies with them. Firstly, if he/they were that awesome and powerful etc, my belief or disbelief would not matter.

1) It’s impossible to prove that God exists. In His wisdom God decided to hide Himself from the “wise” and reveal Himself in the foolishness of preaching. (Thats scriptural.) There’s an assumption in science that only that which is measurable and observable exists. How would you measure God? But in all honesty, I don’t have an idea why He chose to do that. But I trust in His judgement. Since He knows best. (And yes, Deon, this is probably the exact mentality you are rebelling against. But is suits me.)

2) Have you ever considered that the only reason we have been given the ability to create offspring is to give us an idea of how much God loves us? In nr 2 you are assuming that the cycle of parent and child is some-how above God. What if God created the parent child cycle specifically because He Himself has a Son? We were created in His image after all. And to get to your point – only the saved are His children. And you can only be saved through faith in Jesus.

3)At any moment Jesus, being the Son of the living God, could have called on whole armies of angles to free Him. He didn’t. He endured the pain, poverty and humiliation of the cross. And He endured it for you…

4) Have you ever seen Lord of the flies? I truly believe that if children were stranded on an island somewhere, that is exactly what would happen. We aren’t naturally good. Any newspaper will tell you that. Nothing pure can come from something thats been tainted. We were all born as sinners. And joy isn’t the crime. Sin is.

As for the content of some of the comments, you go boy!

I, too, have taken the step away from the road enforced through religious dogma and bigotry, and found that there are things out there, outside of the “traditional” religious views that make my life a more fulfilling and all-encompassing viewpoint outside of the mainstream. One that is tolerant of others views yet not so dictatorial as to say as so many of my friends from those days have said… “If God said it, that settles it, I believe it…!” Bullshit!

I wrote a similar blog in my own blogging way, just no where near as eloquent as yours… attacking sacred cows and other mad ideas…

Keep up the good work, I shall be and have now become a follower, oh god no… pleeeaasse… not another messiah…

1) There is a God. (Insupportable)

The likelihood of a God is so terminally minute as to be insignificant. Like my earlier post, the burden of proof is on you to show his existence.

2) Jesus christ is the son of God (Ludicrous)

A being claimed to be omnipotent, omnipresent and omniscient has a “Son”? How absurd. If we’re all created by the wonder-spook, we’re all his children. No being this powerful could need a single vessel for his own family – all of creation is his family. Praying to Jesus that it gets through to God easier? Has the omniscient now become hard of hearing? This personalised attention by a deity little more than a scared child’s pipe-dream.

3) Jesus died for our sins (Ludicrous)

According to what records remain of his life, Jesus Christ died due to political machinations of the time that he failed to safely navigate. He had no choice in the matter, and certainly didn’t string himself up on the cross.

4) We require redemption (Disgusting)

This is truly revolting. The idea that we are born in “sin”, doomed to eternal suffering for the crime of drawing our first frightened breath upon this earth, is possibly the greatest crime to lay at Christianity’s doorstep (and I include it’s various genocides and witch-hunts among said crimes). To take the joy of being human, and living life, and pretend it to be a crime punishable by unimaginable torture is truly disgusting. The ease with which we all let this atrocity pass us by only illustrates how many absurdities society has accepted from religion.

Those are my major complaints, but before signing off I’ll answer your complaint, namely the fallibility of man. You are correct, we are not perfect. Enlightened minds make mistakes. But that’s the beauty of science – we accept that mistakes can happen, and when shown to be a mistake, we correct and update what we know. Religion, conversely, speaks in unprovable absolutes, untestable and hence uncorrectable.

-Ed.

You speak of science as if it is this cool unbiased unemotional entity that will bring the great “truth” upon the people. But it’s not. Science can be, and is, just as prejudicial as any of the most conservative religious sects.

Don’t get me wrong, I give credit and I am thankful for the contributions of these men and women of science. Without them we would not be having this conversation. I am really great full for having been born in this cyber age

But we must always remember that those scientists are just people, with their own convictions and insecurities. And it’s these qualities which would make them not always fully truthful.

I’ve heard about some “dots” that’s never been published. Things like relatively fresh Dinosaur bones with blood in them. Things like a ornamental copper bowl found in coal “millions” of years old. Or a human footprint found in a Dinosaur one. Now I’m not saying these facts are true. But suppose one of them was, and a scientist found and confirmed it. Do you honestly think they’ll ever publish something so totally and radically against the main streams of thought? They would be the laughing stocks of the scientific community.

Just look at the whole Copenhagen email hack incident. I believe the emails showed how scientists tend to ostracize those with opposing views than themselves.

Try taking the other side of the global warming debate some time, and you’ll quickly find something else that cannot be questioned.

You talk about how science is a shaky foundation based on a process of reason and logic and then claim to believe in a God that has no foundation in reason and logic at all. If you’re going to ‘believe’ in Jesus, you may as well believe in Allah or Unicorns or Science for that matter, because faith has no foundation at all except in personal preference. I will gladly take the incomplete but ever improving process of science and reason over faith any day. I would rather work with the few dots we have even though I know they may be replaced with more perfect dots in time to come, than work with the ‘perfect’ picture of a religion that cannot be questioned.

What I’m trying to say is that every so often very smart people get very comfortable in the thought that they’ve figured it all out. That they’ve mentally built this infallible fortress in their heads based on certain “facts” that they’ve collected over the course of their life times. And then one Tuesday morning something comes along that totally shatters that pretty little mental palace. I used to be one of those people.

I know how science works. It’s nothing more than a game of connecting the dots. Or rather finding a function that more or less passes through most of the dots. The dots in this case are facts and the function is a scientific theory.

But get this, if there are few enough dots, or if my function is sufficiently complicated, I can find a function or theory that will pass through every single one of those dots. To the layman it would look like I found the perfect fit. That is until a new dot pops up in a location that my function cannot fit through. Then it’s back to the drawing board. And I can either deny that the new dot that couldn’t possibly be there (but still is) exists, or I can make my function sufficiently complicated to accommodate the new dot. But then as people discover more stuff, another one pops up.

That makes for a very shaky foundation. (That being science). And did not accommodate too well with me.

People find a few skeletons here and there and then they need to create this mind blowingly complex web of theories to accommodate it all. (To fit through all the points.) But every so often they find something new that doesn’t fit in their web and they either have to deny it’s existence or they have to rewrite the entire theory web (again!).

I prefer the much simpler solution, because in my experience the simplest solutions are the most brilliant ones. But it’s the one solution science cannot embrace, the one that quite simply points to a Creator.

Also, I deliberately tried not to make any references to the bible in my first response. (Because it doesn’t seem to carry much weight with you.) I tried to not use any biblical foundations, but where I did it was to try and show you that I believe in a deity bigger than myself yet I do not feel obliged to smite unbelievers who do not share my point of view.

I tried to convey the idea that when you hear and accept the good news about Christ, there really isn’t any thing you have to do other than believe. Actually there is nothing you can do to increase your favour with God other than just believing in Christ. On the surface this probably looks like religious bible mumbo jumbo to you, but I said it in order to convey the idea that I don’t have to fight “Countless wars” or commit “Religious genocide ” or to “Resisting (often violently) scientific progress” in order to please my God. All I need to do is to believe that His Son died for me, and that alone pleases Him and saves me.

And whether the bible tells me this in this context is irrelevant to the argument. Seeing as the argument is about how religious beliefs will incite me consciously or unconsciously to do stuff to the detriment of mankind. But here I am, obviously believing in something religious/spiritual yet this belief at its core is not about my actions at all, but about believing the wonderfulness of Christ. And I don’t have to DO anything (at all) in order to faithfully live in that truth.

And I mentioned this because it seemed to be a facet that your argument was missing.

I’m probably some-one you’ll classify as a “True-Theists”, which is true to some extent, I suppose. Personally I believe that no-one will be able to change my mind not because of blind faith in God, but because I personally believe in the fallibility of the human mind. All of us think we know some-thing, and then creation comes along and pulls the rug right out from under us. Ex. In Europe, in the early 1900′s , I think, people believed and stated that black swans could not and do not exist. And then when they started the colonization of Australia, low and behold… they do. A few years ago very smart PhD level people actually believed that if you diversified risk enough it ceases to exist. So they spread their high risks right across the globe thinking the risk would simply go away. And none of those “smart” people saw that they were sowing the seeds of the biggest financial disaster in human history.

I can really tell that this whole religion thing is really a big deal to you. Why else would you spend so much time and effort on it? But from reading your article I kind of feel that you’ve missed something. Okay, maybe not really something. Rather some-one. A person called Jesus Christ. (I can see you rolling your eyes at me, please give me a minute to explain.)

The whole article “Imagine No Religion” hinges on the acts of man. You only looked at the things people do to make themselves right before God. How can the mere human acts redeem people before God if he had to send His only and beloved Son to pay for our transgressions? The point I’m trying to make is as follows: If we could redeem ourselves through our actions before God, then Jesus died in vain.

Let me make it even clearer. By the actions of Christ and by His actions alone, those that believe on Him, are redeemed before God. In a nut shell this means that nothing you can ever do in this life will count towards your browny points total before the throne of heaven one day. This also means that if you accept Christ into your life then nothing you ever did could deduct points ever again either.

Unfortunately not many people now this, so they try to earn the favour of God by their “good” deeds. And then when these dead works turn out ugly, people start writing articles about how religion is evil etc.

I used to be a very zealous person. I really love Warhammer fiction, but as you may now the forces of the imperium often come up against the vile hordes of chaos and the daemons that do their bidding. As a religiously minded Xtian I kind of had an issue with this. Until finally one day my guilty conscious could take it no more and I decided to burn all my books as an offering to my Just and Noble Lord. But a funny thing happened then. It was raining. So I thought I’d do it later. Then as time went on it kind of dawned on me, if the Lord wanted me to burn all my books, then why the hell was it raining? I later realized that my salvation did not depend on what I read. I later realized that one of the ways the Lord leads us is by the desires he writes on our harts, and to trust that He always loves us, no-matter what.

I still have my books, and I’ve added a great number of other ones to their ranks as well And I enjoy them immensely. I’m no longer led by my consciousness of sin. Rather I’m now conscious of Christ and of what He has done for me. His work is finished and nothing I can do can ever add anything to it. And He is showing me a great many things. And it’s awesome. And sometimes I feel a bit nutty. But it’s a small price to pay ,I suppose.