Oh, what to do? Do we just wing it? Fear not, help is at hand, since in a local paper we saw the following public announcement explaining what we must do.

The Gospel Message
What is Our Purpose in this World?

This is the question most commonly asked since the beginning of time. The theory of evolution renders this question unanswerable, however the Bible record of creation supplies us with with a coherent answer, bringing a responsibility we are to fulfil if our lives are to have any meaning, which is surely what any enquiring mind desires.

In Daniel 5:22-23 we read of a great king of Babylon who was told by Daniel in BC600: You did not honour the God who holds in his hand your life and all your ways. Therefore that very night the king died.

What is our choice in this matter? Ignoring this aspect of our lives will be to our peril. It is wise to consider our reason for being here. The wise King Solomon said: Fear God and keep his commandments, for this is the duty of all mankind. (Ecclesiastes 12:13)

Regardless of common opinion in this matter, let us be among the number that love life and choose wisdom. That, in the end, will give life for evermore.

Also it's rather hypocritical for devout Christians to claim to 'be among the number that love life and choose wisdom'. Rather than love life, throughout their history Christians have likely ended more lives than any other group by a considerable margin. Think inquisitions, the burning of witches and heretics, crusades, pogroms, religious wars, their support of slavery, the Nazi holocaust, their opposition to certain medicines and vaccines, all supported by the Bible which documents untold genocides, massacres and unjust murders. And on top of that horrendous tally must be added the far greater number of lives harmed, and still happening today, such as persecution of homosexuals and banning condoms in AIDS ravaged countries. (And also the many lives that Jews and Muslims have taken (and are still taking) can surely be added to the tally, since they are all following the same god that clearly doesn't love life.) As for Christians claiming to 'choose wisdom', and I think by wisdom we can assume they mean knowledge, recall that in Genesis God forbids Adam and Eve to eat from the Tree of Knowledge. He wanted to keep them ignorant and submissive. The Bible repeatedly pushes blind faith over reason and evidence, with Martin Luther, leader of the Reformation in the 16th century, saying that 'Reason should be destroyed in all Christians' and 'Whoever wants to be a Christian should tear the eyes out of his reason'. Christianity has consistently feared wisdom, feared the knowledge that reason has delivered, and has deliberately destroyed untold books and entire libraries throughout the centuries, even creating a long list of forbidden books and burning philosophers like Giordano Bruno at the stake. To say that devout Christians seek wisdom (over faith and superstition) is as bogus as saying Muslims seek Jesus.

But moving on, the theory of evolution actually does answer the question about our purpose in the world, albeit indirectly. My dictionary defines 'purpose' as,

1) The object toward which one strives or for which something exists; an aim or a goal.
2) A result or an effect that is intended or desired; an intention.

Of course the silly Christians disagree, saying in the above blurb that 'the Bible record of creation supplies us with with a coherent answer', which is as moronic and childish as saying the stories parents tell little children give us a coherent answer to why Santa's reindeer can fly. But let's humour them and consider what they say is our purpose in the world — and what it would mean to you personally — according to that dusty old book that was written down on animal skins when people thought the world was flat and serpents and donkeys could talk.

So what does the above Christian argument state? Clearly it seems to say that if there is a god (clam down: there isn't) then our purpose in the world is to obey God's commandments without question, as a meek slave or servant obeys his powerful and vindictive master. Our purpose in life is not to question God's demands, or pick and choose from them, but to blindly carry them out, all of them. We were all created for one specific overriding purpose, to make ourselves familiar with God's commandments and obey them to the letter. This we are told 'is the duty of all mankind', and if we were to stray from the path of blind servitude, we are reminded that God holds our life in his hands, and will quickly take it from us as he did with the 'great king of Babylon' (and untold others). We are told that we should live in fear of God, lest some innocent misstep in our duties will see him send an assassin to kill us as we sleep.

So, given the chance to explain our purpose in the world, these experts in the Christian faith are very clear. It's not about the things everyone (including so-called Christians) generally worries about. It's not about career choices or lifestyle choices, it's not about obtaining wealth or knowledge, it's not about your sexuality or fashion choices, it's not about volunteering at the soup kitchen or convincing teenagers to take purity pledges. It's very simple, everyone's purpose is to obey God. People seem to always frame their perceived purpose in the world or what would give their life meaning as something that benefits them, such as getting a better job, earning more money, finding a more loving partner, moving to a safer city. Usually their lament is something like, 'Surely I was meant for something better than this'. But again the above Christian experts are very clear, stop thinking about the minutiae of your life; your purpose in life is not to fret over your mundane life choices, your only purpose is to obey God's commandments. Nothing more, nothing less. God doesn't care whether you are an accountant or a street sweeper, nor whether you are rich or poor. He only cares that you are following his rules of life. Your purpose is to obey, obey, obey. It's not rocket science. Stop making it about your life and your choices, it's not about you it's about God. Are you obeying his commandments to stone homosexuals, witches, psychics, atheists and disobedient children? That is your purpose in the world, to obey his orders to commit murder, not to question your career choices. Are you shunning women on their periods, are you refusing to wear clothes made of two different materials, are you adverse to getting tattoos and working on Saturdays, are you mutilating your son's penis, are you refusing to eat shellfish? That is your purpose in the world, to obey God's 613 commandments. As the above Christian text says, 'It is wise to consider our reason for being here', and that reason, or purpose, is to 'Fear God and keep his commandments', because he will kill you if you don't. Don't think he won't!

Again this all comes back to a simple master and slave scenario. We are the worthless, submissive slaves who must blindly obey all commands from a barbaric master who won't hesitate to kill us should we displease him. That's if we're lucky, if we're not lucky he'll torture us first, and then kill us. We exist solely for his pleasure. And yes, torture is one of his pleasures, recall that he has built a huge torture dungeon called Hell. Christians proudly call themselves God's servants, and they don't mean a servant in a 'Downton Abbey' sense, they mean it in the sense of a slave (think whips, beatings, shackles and rape), and since God brought them into the world, he owns them, watches them, let's his priests have sex with them as children, and attempts to control their every behaviour for every second of their life. As the above text said, this is 'the God who holds in his hand your life and all your ways'. So if this were true, would you be happy being God's slave, someone that has no life of your own, someone whose every waking moment from birth to death must be solely focused on pleasing him, doing the tasks he demands, no matter how onerous or depraved, and deporting yourself, whether in his presence or not (because he sees all), in a manner that he deems acceptable?

But maybe you have some difficulty visualising God as a barbaric, uncaring slave owner, ordering people around like they were animals simply bred for his amusement. So let's forget about God for a moment and consider a real world example. Imagine you're a teenager and a powerful old man who is a respected and feared leader in your community visits your home and tells you what job you're going to work at for the rest of your life, tells you who you must marry, where you will live, how many children you can have, who your friends will be, what food and drink you can consume, how you must dress and cut your hair, what books you can read and ... well, on and on it goes, you're given a long list of exactly how you must live your life to keep him happy. Your hopes and desires for the future, what would make you happy, are of no concern to this old man. He dictates how everyone lives, every aspect of their behaviour and appearance, even their private conversations, and he knows if anyone rebels, as his spies and hidden cameras are everywhere, on every street and in every room of every home. Any resistance to his dictates will result in horrific punishment, not just for yourself but often for your innocent family and friends as well. Clearly you would have little choice but to submit to the whims of this powerful old man with such an oppressive hold over your community, but would you be happy as his slave, his plaything? Surely any sane person would be utterly horrified to find themselves living such a miserable life, and would never voluntarily enter into such a situation, they'd never throw away a life where they got to choose how it is lived for one under the boot of a vicious tyrant. And yet this is exactly what Christians (and Jews and Muslims) do (the word Islam actually means 'submission'). How is the above example of a powerful old man controlling every aspect of your life any different to a powerful old god controlling every aspect of your life? Why would you reject the first and embrace the second? They're essentially identical, except for the fact that you actually get to meet the powerful old man, whereas no one has ever met or even seen the powerful old god. You'd have more reason to fear the old man because you know he's real, you've seen him punish people, and more reason to rebel against the old god because there's a good chance that his refusal to make his presence known means he's not real, merely a bogeyman used to scare children.

What we don't understand is why people that would never willingly accept a real person having such oppressive control over their life will gladly submit to far more extreme control of their life by a fantasy person. But that is the sad reality, billions of people worldwide believe God is their master and created them specifically to lend a hand with ... something, so for 2,000 years Christians have apparently been fixated on their purpose in the world. What did God put them on Earth to do, what task must they fulfil to give their life meaning? It's crucial that they know, since if they waste their life on social media then God's task, their purpose for being here, goes uncompleted and God's plan will have gone off the rails. And after they die, as he tortures them God will be heard screaming, 'I gave you one job ... one job!' So naturally superstitious Christians (and Jews and Muslims) want more details about the role they are meant to play in life, or more precisely, God's plan for the universe. But this question about individual purpose has tormented Christians for two millennia because no details have ever been forthcoming. Everyone the Bible talks about is long dead, so those living never find anything about their lives in there, and they never receive a written contract in the mail from God detailing what he expects from them (that they should sign and send back), or even a helpful text or voicemail with a concise summary of what their goals should be. This deafening silence, this dearth of critical information from God (or Jesus, I always get the two mixed up) has of course forced embarrassed Christians to invent a simplistic answer that will apply to everyone, to wit, your purpose, and yours and yours, everyone in fact, is to 'Fear God and keep his commandments'. It's so simple it's a wonder we haven't seen it on a T-shirt.

How can Christians actively push this message that everyone should be God's slave, that we must all 'Fear God and keep his commandments'? They even admit that he's not a kind, just and loving master, that we have good reason to fear him, reasons that are well-documented in the Bible. We suspect that most Christians say crap like 'Fear God and keep his commandments' because behind their devout façade they have no intention of keeping his barbaric, unjust and ridiculous commandments, and they don't fear retribution, since untold Christians have broken untold commandments over the centuries, and more so even today, and God hasn't lifted a single tentacle in anger, hasn't even struck someone with lightning while they were masturbating.

The reality is that you don't need an invisible sky fairy giving you orders to give your life meaning. While it's quite true that we are not born with an innate purpose in life, one we must discover and then fulfil, this means that we are free to determine what gives our life meaning. We get to decide what gives us pleasure, what projects we will work on, what goals we set and in what ways we can try and make the world a better place. We can give our life meaning by learning more about the universe and finding real people to love, not imaginary gods to fear.

Posted by the 'Silly Beliefs' Team, 30 Nov, 2024 ~ Add a Comment    Send to a Friend

We would hope you wouldn't support such a candidate. But what if you approved of some of his policies, like his promise to improve your lifestyle and increase your wealth, and he promised only be a dictator for a brief period, just long enough to 'drain the swamp' and clean up the trash in your country, where by 'trash' he means people that have criticised his proposed policies or made fun of his appearance and intelligence (or lack of), and just long enough to rewrite a few laws to return your country back to the paradise your god intended, full of god-fearing, gun-toting white folk?

I guess you've realised this isn't some fictional scenario from some dystopian movie. It is depressingly real. Donald 'Grab 'em by the Pussy' Trump has been reelected as America's president for another term. In this post we're going to look at just one example of him saying or doing something preposterous, something that should have eliminated him as a viable presidential candidate in 2024 (but didn't), and how his rabid supporters either ignored it as off-the-cuff nonsense or actually encouraged him to run with it. Of course even his supporters acknowledge that he often makes statements that are stupid, or offensive, ignorant, childish, threatening, vindictive or divisive, but they confidently assure us that it's just talk, election blustering, merely an act to get attention; he would never actually harm America or its citizens by behaving that way as president. And yet they seem to conveniently forget that he has already served one term as president, and he most definitely did behave in a multitude of ways that have seen him labelled as ignorant, offensive, vindictive, even treasonous. Each of those incidents on their own should have seen Trump rejected as someone deserving a second run as president, and taken together it's a wonder he hasn't been locked up to keep America safe again.

So let's look at just one of Trump's statements and consider whether someone like this is presidential material, remembering that we could have used numerous other statements and acts from him that would all reach the same conclusion, a conclusion ignored by the majority of Americans. In the week leading up to Trump's latest election victory, we saw a clip of him at one of his many campaign rallies where he was asked to promise voters that he 'would never abuse power as retribution against anybody'. Trump responded, 'Except for day one', meaning his first day back in office. Obviously concerned, the interviewer questioned Trump's vague response, and Trump replied:

'I love this guy. He says, "You're not going to be a dictator, are you?" I said: "No, no, no, other than day one. We're closing the border and we're drilling, drilling, drilling. After that, I'm not a dictator".'

Imagine if Trump had said he was going to be a murderer, rather than a dictator, for one day. Would people be happy with that? And as the president who is in charge of the US military and federal law enforcement agencies, he could murder a lot of his opponents in one day. And, yes, many of his supporters would be happy, overjoyed actually, because they would assume he was only going to kill those that had offended him (and them ... and no doubt God) in some way, you know, dirty scum that deserve to die. But decent people (you know who you are) would not vote for a presidential candidate who openly said he was going to murder innocent people (and escape justice), because decent people know murder is wrong, even if you are the US president. But equally people (even Trump's supporters) know that having a leader act as a dictator is bad (even if just for one day). This is America after all, the land of democracy, liberty and independence, where citizens choose how they want to live. The thought of having a dictator in charge of their lives rather than themselves is anathema to Americans, indeed Republicans especially fight continuously to have any control the government has over the lives of citizens to be at the bare minimum. And yet his supporters will happily let Trump be a dictator on the naive assumption that he would only be going after those that had offended him (and them) in some way, and who must be severely punished for not supporting the leader that God had chosen for America. Freedom of speech and expression in America is apparently not as a free as they make out, and extends only to your freedom to support Trump. And God. Half of Americans are fucking hypocrites. They vocally support democracy, but only if their chosen leader and party is in government. They staunchly back free speech, but only if you say things they agree with. They want their country to be peaceful and safe, but demand the right to wander the streets heavily armed. They loudly promote the belief that 'All men are created equal', but have historically excluded men that aren't white land owners, and all women (regardless of skin colour).

But let's be generous and say most Americans (including Trump supporters) wouldn't have voted for Trump if he had said he was going to be a murderer, rather than a dictator, for one day. Why can they not see that being a dictator — by definition a leader who abuses their power, a tyrant whose actions would be quite illegal under normal democratic law and harmful to most citizens — is little different from being a murderer? In fact many infamous dictators have committed untold murders and escaped justice. Be they murderer or dictator, no sane person wants either to run around free in their country. Trump supporters are simply showing their ignorance, and their lack of ethics, by being prepared to look the other way when Trump goes on his hatred-fuelled vengeance spree on his first day in office. Would they have accepted the same persecution from the Democrats had they won the election? Of course not. In a country that treasures the right to free elections and to support whom you choose, they would have deemed it totally unjust and unAmerican if the party that wins an election were to then use their new found power to attack and harm people in the losing party.

Plus if Trump can legally act as a dictator for one day then there is nothing to stop him changing the law to give the president more power to do as he pleases (as he already did in his last term). That's how dictators remain as dictators. Are many Americans really that stupid? (That's rhetorical, of course they are.) Trump could simply change his mind and say his one day as dictator is being extended to a week (so many to persecute and so little time) … and then to life as dictator (as some leaders in other countries have done). Once you are dictator then there is no one that can make you step down, short of a coup d'état or armed revolt.

Trump knows that Americans view a dictator as something to be feared, and yet he openly said that should they elect him he will become one, and the idiots still voted for him. Sure, he says it will only be for a short time, just long enough to hunt down his enemies, change a few laws and delete a few freedoms, but dictators are by their very nature people that you absolutely cannot trust, certainly not where the welfare and interests of their citizens are concerned. Dictators use their absolute power to fuel their self interest at the expense of their citizens. Dictators don't care about others, it's all about being the head honcho and having people grovel at their feet; narcissistic behaviour that is typical of Trump.

Remember that Hitler was fairly elected to power in 1933 just as Trump has been, and look how that turned out, with armed Nazis eventually roaming the streets persecuting Jews and eventually attacking and evicting them from their businesses, and then six years later he invaded Poland and started WW2. The US has seen armed militias roaming the streets harassing people that aren't Trump supporters for several years now, just like the Nazis did. And bloody pathetic US law allows them to do this, just as it will allow Trump to seek vengeance on anyone that didn't support him, will allow him to persecute them, fire them, arrest them and take them them court just so he can take revenge on people with differing views. Americans go on about liberty and justice and yet half of them will quickly turn into vicious, vindictive thugs when they assume power, deliberately ignoring the rule of law.

Don't believe us? It's been noted that 'Trump has a long history of endorsing police violence' and that 'Trump's recent call for a "violent day" of policing is part of his plan to push cops to be as brutal as possible and shield them from accountability'. This is related to Trump's call 'for "one real rough, nasty" and "violent day" of police retaliation in order to eradicate crime "immediately",' with Trump saying that, 'One rough hour — and I mean real rough — the word will get out and it will end immediately, you know? It will end immediately', and adding that, 'We're going to give immunity [from prosecution] to police, so they can do their job'. That is a perfect description of policing under a vicious and vengeful dictator, a short step away from police death squads, and note that this 'violent day' of policing is not part of Trump's first day in office (as a dictator), the move to brutal and unjust policing (and as if American police don't already kill enough innocent people) will just be a typical day at the office for Trump. The over 70 million Americans who voted for Trump will no doubt be hoping that if pulled over by the police they will be able to convince the baton-wielding and trigger-happy cops that they voted for Trump and therefore don't deserve a severe beating to keep them honest.

Trump — dictator for a day, that was just one in-your-face example provided by Trump himself that should have quickly convinced people not to vote for him, and there are untold other reasons why that racist, ignorant, petty, narcissistic, sexist, xenophobic, misogynistic, homophobic, anti-science, incompetent, vindictive, pussy-grabbing, convicted felon should been shunned at the polls, but instead the morons (who no doubt possess many of the same character flaws) voted to give him control of the nuclear launch codes, when even control of the TV remote in the spare bedroom would be a step too far.

Posted by the 'Silly Beliefs' Team, 08 Nov, 2024 ~ Add a Comment    Send to a Friend

Of course you're probably now thinking of those living in Russia under Vladimir Putin, or in North Korea under Kim Jong Un, or even those working in the US government if Donald 'You're Fired' Trump wins the upcoming election. Or maybe you're thinking of those trapped in a devout religious community, where dogma rules and the only thing up for discussion is how to get more converts. And they are all quite oppressive of course, dangerously so, but in this instance we're thinking of groups so common place that their power to suppress and shut down criticism and alternative views is often overlooked. We're talking about groups and organisations that many of us belong to, like archery, photography or astronomy clubs, groups for those into flower arranging, line dancing or stamp collecting, not forgetting model trains or Bible study, and still others for alien abductees, skeptics or atheists to chat with like-minded souls. Many of these groups publish a regular digital newsletter to keep their members informed about items of interest. That is generally a good thing, but have you ever wondered how open and forthright your group is? Sure they may put out information in their newsletters, but are you getting to see everything that they receive and hear of or are they being selective in what they publish? Will they always be honest and reveal every criticism they receive, will they print alternative viewpoints to theirs or challenges to the way things are run? Our experience says no.

We personally have written emails for inclusion into newsletters of groups we belonged to, like the NZ Skeptics and the NZ Rationalists (ie atheists), correspondence that they encouraged members to send in, and yet not one was ever printed, nor even responded to, solely we suspect because our emails challenged (politely) some view of the leadership of those groups. And yet the next newsletter would again implore members to write in and contribute to the group, but although it was never stated, clearly comments had to toe the party line. Working in the shadows, the committees running these groups have the power to control what their members are told.

We started this website solely because of an email we sent to a very popular, nationwide NZ magazine that was regularly publishing pseudo-scientific drivel spouted by weather astrologer Ken Ring. We expressed the opinion that there was no scientific evidence that astrology, a long debunked pseudoscience, could predict the weather months and years in advance, and that there was good evidence that Ring's predictions were no better than guesses, and often far worse. The magazine's editor forwarded the email to Ring who naturally implored them not to publish it. They complied, burying our criticism and assisting Ring to go on with his scam (and of course to make money for their magazine, which was seemingly all they really cared about). We know this because, strangely, the magazine editor felt the need to explain to us why we wouldn't be seeing our letter in print. So we wrote an article exposing Ring and his nonsense, started 'Silly Beliefs' and published said article on our website where, like the magazine editor, we had control of what would be published. However, unlike the magazine editor, we decided that anyone and everyone that wished to write to us expressing an opinion — either supportive or critical of the posts we made — would have their communique published unedited. Even (especially) the truly abusive ones. We happily print emails that are critical of our arguments (some polite, some not so much) and we've attempted to respond to the points they made. This is not about fragile egos, as we've said untold times we simply want to know the truth about the universe we live in, and be confident that the worldview we hold is the one best supported by the evidence. Thus we welcome criticism of our stance on various topics since it allows us to test how robust our arguments are, and if they flounder or are shown wanting, then we will happily admit we were wrong. We love the challenge of printing an email (angry or otherwise) that lists reasons why we might be wrong, and then attempting to explain why those reasons fail. If we can't answer the criticism with anything but insults, empty statements or diversionary tactics, or worse still, deleting the email and blacklisting the sender, then that would tell us that the criticism is likely valid, that our arguments are indeed flawed, that our confident stance is unwarranted. We have never resorted to those disagreeable responses, nor will we ever. If we can't expose flaws in an opponent's argument or we're shown flaws in our own, then we will readily admit that we were wrong or are at least now quite unsure where the truth lies.

If you challenge something we've written, we will consider the points you make, the evidence you provide and the articles you offer, and then openly publish our response for all to see. This for us is what true skepticism and critical thinking is all about. Openly acknowledging and considering alternative views, responding to criticism, admitting mistakes and siding with the outcome that is best supported by the evidence. Unfortunately some people when faced with a similar challenge, one that might potentially expose a flaw in their thinking (and perhaps cause some embarrassment), quickly send off a dismissive email in response (or not) and then surreptitiously move to have that person deleted from their mailing list. What follows is an account of one of those people.

Rachel recently contacted us to relate an email exchange she had with a group she belongs to, a group that puts out a newsletter for its members, and where in their latest newsletter they included a very brief mention of the benefits of Earthing (image below). Years ago we had written an article exposing 'Earthing' — the silly belief that the energy of the Earth can heal illness — as nothing but a scam, which Rachel had read and this motivated her to contact the editor of the newsletter and raise her concerns. It did not go well.

Below is the email exchange that Rachel provided us with. We have omitted the email addresses and the editor's full name, and edited out the name and details of the group the newsletter belongs to, since this is not a criticism of that group or its members. The group's core function has no obvious connection with Earthing and would not benefit by promoting it. The brief and apparently innocuous promotion of Earthing in its newsletter probably went unnoticed by most, and if you read on you'll see the members were never made aware of Rachel's concerns or the subsequent actions of their newsletter editor.

This post is about how one person with power over others can spread misinformation and/or disinformation and then suppress an attempt to expose that action. Even in good ol' NZ society, freedom of speech is not always possible. Some people fear the expression of views different to their own.

To: Editor
Subject: Promotion of Earthing

Hi,

In what was an otherwise enjoyable read, I was disappointed to see that someone decided to include links to articles on "Earthing" in the News section of the latest newsletter. We are often considered weird and wacky and receive enough bad press as it is without suggesting to the world that we also subscribe to the bogus notion that earthing can magically heal us and banish pain and suffering. There is too much misinformation circulating as it is, on all manner of topics. We shouldn't be adding to the noise.

Since you or your colleagues were prepared to read and consider the claims made in those articles, perhaps you'd also be prepared to read an article that debunks Earthing. Here is a link to one I read some years ago that I found informative (and links to four more are found at the end of the article):

http://www.sillybeliefs.com/earthing.html

Thanks,
Rachel

From: Alice [Editor]

Hi Rachael

Thanks for your comment. As you can imagine, we get quite a lot of content that people send or recommendations that people want us to include, which is why we merely provide the links for those who choose to read about it. Those who do not want to read it can simply scroll past. Just like the articles about sleeping naked etc. We are not claiming that everything on the internet is true though (as I cannot imagine that anyone can claim that).

May I ask what club/group you belong to, for reference?

Thanks,
Alice

To: Editor

Sorry Alice, but I believe editors have a responsibility to not print misinformation. Would you blindly provide links that people send in to neo-Nazi or anti-vax articles for those who might choose to read them? What about articles promoting racism, misogyny or that the moon landing was a hoax? And sadly I've met members who would lap them up, so … you know … maybe an idea for your next issue? 😉

You say you're not claiming that everything on the internet is true (and clearly much of it isn't), but one would expect that you do hope that your readers trust your publication, that they won't be misled by the information you provide. You can control what goes in your newsletter, unlike the internet, and surely readers assume that you have done your best to ensure that the lies found on the internet remain on the internet and what you have chosen to include in your newsletter is, as far as you can discern, factual.

To say that it's not your job to vet or fact check material that people want you to include, that it's essentially "buyer beware", is not how a reputable publication, in your case, a newsletter that is the voice of a national organisation, should operate. To expect readers to personally determine the validity of articles offered and to then either read or scroll past items based on nothing more than a link, is as irresponsible as Facebook saying they can't be expected to police hate speech posts or fake news concerning an election or pandemic. They also insist that they merely publish posts people send in and its up to readers to spot real news from fake (and yet Facebook does feel they have a duty, and the time and resources, to aggressively police nipples and nudity in general).

You mentioned the other articles in the News section, and clearly these items were included because it was felt that they were something members would get behind. However your intro to the Earthing links also implied that this was information that members would be interested in and that could benefit them. It asks, "ever wondered why it is so pleasant to kick off your shoes and walk barefoot on the earth? It is called "earthing or grounding” and has many benefits”. It promises to give the answer and assures the reader that the practice "has many benefits”. Again, if you hope your readers trust what they read, not on the internet, but in your newsletter, then why won't they read the articles thinking that you have recommended them? As you'll be aware, some contentious articles in various publications come with the disclaimer that the opinions expressed are those of the author and not necessarily those of publication, but the Earthing article does not. Even if it did come with a disclaimer, I'm still not convinced that an article promoting a practice that is clearly a scam and pseudoscience should be published at all. That's what Facebook and Instagram is for.

I guess we'll have to agree to disagree. I hope you enjoy the coming summer.

Rachel

From: Alice [Editor]

Hi there

As previously requested, please provide the name of the NZ group or club that you belong to. This is the mailing list for the members' Newsletter. It is not a mailing list for spam or abusive emails.

As I only have a name and a (questionable) email address and no further information, I will need to remove this email from the mailing list.

Cheers

It's not surprising, at least not to us, but Alice's response should be surprising, since here we have someone quite unwilling to either defend the practice known as Earthing, and thereby justify its inclusion in the newsletter, or apologise; openly admit that they didn't do their due diligence and it slipped though the cracks. As editor Alice should take responsibility for it getting in, either on purpose or accidentally. Instead she blames strangers, rather than seeing it as an editor failing at her job. One suspects that Alice might lean towards believing that there is something to Earthing, as Rachel tells us that in an earlier newsletter in an article about gardening, Alice says, 'I prefer barefoot gardening to really connect with the earth'. But if that were the case, why doesn't Alice even attempt to mount a defence? Perhaps she suspects that someone as skeptical as Rachel sounds, someone that claims to have read up on it, would bring a debate she couldn't win. Or conversely, she doesn't believe in or even care about Earthing, but at the same time she knows some members likely do and she doesn't want to offend them by printing Rachel's view that it's all nonsense, and here's the proof. Why stir up controversy when it can all be easily avoided by sweeping Rachel's email under the carpet. And to be on the safe side, let's take her off the mailing list lest she finds something else to take issue with. Oh ... and bring me the location of the group that's harbouring her.

Rachel's email was solely about whether Earthing was legit (it's not), and whether something so contentious should be promoted, even in passing, in the group's newsletter, yet Alice completely ignored this and instead took a combative attitude, demanding to know what group she belongs to. Why, so she can release the hounds? Determining Rachel's full name, the group she belongs to and the need for 'further information' is utterly irrelevant to her claim that Earthing is nonsense. Earthing is debunked or defended solely on reason and evidence, not on the name and location of the person making those arguments. Nor does what Alice considers 'a (questionable) email address' — that obviously is not questionable since it works — count as a good reason to dismiss anything from that email address. That's like saying search results from Google and tweets from Twitter should be ignored because of their questionable names. Instead of simply considering the validity of the argument, Alice, clearly not happy that the argument was even raised, goes after the person making it.

Alice demands that Rachel must 'provide the name of the NZ group or club that you belong to. This is the mailing list for the members' Newsletter', with the implication being that only verified, paid-up members can submit an opinion for possible inclusion in their newsletter. While possibly true, why doesn't Alice work on the basis that Rachel surely is a member, even if Alice doesn't know her personally, it is a NZ-wide group after all? Clearly this request is not about identifying her particular club per se, but in isolating Rachel and eliminating future emails. To justify ostracising Rachel and removing her from the mailing list, Alice labels her emails as being both spam and abusive. Of course this charge is both false and vindictive.

An online definition defines spam as:

'any unsolicited and often irrelevant or inappropriate messages sent over the internet, typically to a large number of users, primarily for advertising, phishing, spreading malware, or other similar purposes'.

But was it abusive? Abuse applies to 'injurious, improper, or unreasonable treatment', and in the context of an email, 'to assail with contemptuous, coarse, or insulting words'. Clearly none of those things apply to Rachel's emails. Since when, assuming you don't live under a dictatorship or in a religious community, is politely expressing a difference of opinion seen as a sign of personal abuse? However Alice's reply could be deemed somewhat abusive. The use of 'insulting words' in falsely labelling Rachel's comments as 'abusive emails', and blindly dismissing her opinion and blacklisting her could surely be called 'improper and unreasonable treatment'. So it appears that there was some 'abusive emails' in the above exchange, but they came from Alice, not Rachel.

Unfortunately, like Rachel, over the years we've encountered this complete lack of courage on the part of some people to enter the fray of an intellectual debate. Instead they become the coward that runs away, or the bully that threatens dire consequences, or that person that falls back on righteous anger and insults. What level of integrity can they claim if when faced with a challenge to their beliefs or actions they simply dismiss that challenge? As we've said before, it astounds us that committed believers in some claim or other that they've often put considerable time and effort into, indeed it's often life altering, especially for the god believers and the alternative healing folk — strict adherence to their silly beliefs often harm and sometimes even kill them — and yet as convinced as these people are in their views, most are never willing to debate their belief or willing to even list, without discussion, one or two reasons for its validity. We get quite frustrated when people reveal their fervent belief in some silly notion — be it God is real, dead people talk to psychics, homeopathy works, the Earth is flat or aliens abducted my dog — but if challenged they then refuse to defend their stance, seemingly expecting you to just blindly accept their wild claim, or if they are willing to pontificate they are like those annoying door-knocking, nonsense spieling Christians who view a discussion as them lecturing and you listening and nodding agreement (thankfully the pandemic seems to have reduced their numbers). As skeptics and atheists we also have strongly held beliefs, but if you challenge us to defend them then we'll happily, and calmly, enter into a discussion. We'll provide our reasoning and listen to yours. We won't just say you're wrong then ignore your response, or worse still, insult you and then blacklist you. Unlike the Alice's of this world, we don't fear being shown we are wrong, because in discovering that we were wrong, that would then mean that we are now back on the right path, back to being closer to learning the full truth about the world.

To finish with, let's give another example of a newsletter editor refusing to engage with her readers. This one contains a puzzle that you might be able to help us solve. A couple of years ago friends in the US sent us a joke in the form of a cartoon that was published in a newsletter they subscribe to. They didn't get the joke and wondered if we could explain what they were missing. Alas, we were equally mystified, as were friends we showed it to. But then things got stranger. In the next issue of the newsletter the editor, Melissa, published the following apology:

Again we were all mystified, still over what the joke was and now why it was considered so offensive. No doubt you are curious to see this cartoon, so below is the offending image. If you laugh or are horribly offended, please write and put us out of our misery by telling us what was funny or offensive.

As members, my friends emailed the editor seeking some clarification but got no reply. So we offered to try for an answer, and sent three separate, differently worded emails (from our personal email accounts) politely enquiring as to what the joke was and why it was offensive. The editor never replied to any of them. We then sent two differently worded emails to the cartoonist (who works independent from the newsletter) asking if he agreed with the editor's view that his cartoon was offensive. Again, no reply. What did the editor or the cartoonist have to lose by replying? Clearly the editor, and presumably other staff on the newsletter, now recognised something in the cartoon as being quite offensive, something that wasn't at all obvious when they first viewed it. They had to have the offence explained to them by a member, so why wouldn't they assume that other members might also appreciate an explanation? Why wasn't the editor prepared to enlighten us (or its members) so we don't unknowingly commit the same offence in a different situation? And no, my friends are adamant that the offence is not caused by the polar plunge(?) characters being naked, as the cartoonist often has fun with nudity with no complaints, and has again done so since this particular cartoon was banned. And the woman is covering her nipples, a body part that many American's find offensive, so it can't be that. Is the lack of diversity something we should find offensive, in that there is only one woman, no people of colour and no obviously gay people? What are we missing? Is it a "woke" thing?

Unlike Alice and her promotion of Earthing, Melissa was at least prepared to admit they got it "wrong" and issued an apology, but both Alice and Melissa are quite unwilling to explain or defend their actions and refuse to discuss the topic further. With Alice, members are left unaware that anyone even complained, while with Melissa they are told of a complaint but are denied any knowledge of what that complaint entailed. Both editors are apparently fearful of informing their members regarding alternative views or controversy, with both quite unwilling to let them discern an argument's merits or flaws for themselves. We're much freer than Russia, North Korea or the Christian Church, but our free society is not as free as we think. They may not have the power of a dictator or a pope, but even some lowly editors feel they have the right to control elements of our lives.

Posted by the 'Silly Beliefs' Team, 19 Oct, 2024 ~ Add a Comment    Send to a Friend

But enough about that wanker, we think the phrase 'yet another sexual scandal concerning a priest', even though it's one we now hear far too often these days, is only going to be heard even more frequently as the decades go by, not less, as the fucking Catholic Church isn’t going anywhere but those they abuse are now more willing to speak up. This is because more of these despicable crimes are being exposed and therefore the abused are more likely to be believed by their families and the police. As we’ve said many times, we don’t understand why Christians (not just Catholics) don’t wake up and leave the church in disgust. In places like Hollywood or scout troops the person in charge can get away with abuse because no one above this person, someone more powerful that could stop it, knows the abuse is happening. The abuser has no superior that learns of the abuse and goes to the police. But that’s not the case with the Church. There is a person above the abusive priests, ministers and bishops and that person is God. God knows about the abuse, he even watches it happen, and yet turns a blind eye. Of course we don’t believe there is a god, but Christians do, so they must know that this all-knowing god is choosing to watch the abuse and do nothing, and in doing nothing actively protects the priests and allows the abuse to continue. God is guilty by omission, by what he refuses to do. How can devout Christians believe in the power and goodness of God and yet not be troubled by God choosing to ignore the victim and instead helps the abusers hide from justice? They know God must know about these horrible crimes against their friends, neighbours, family members and maybe even themselves, and yet they still worship the asshole for keeping quiet. This makes them in our view almost as evil as the priests that commit the abuse and the Church that hides them.

Many Christians are of course very angry with those abusive priests and bishops, and call for justice, both from the police and the Church, but the fact that they never question God’s involvement would imply that they don’t believe God knew anything, and therefore could do nothing, but this in reality means that, deep down, they don’t really believe God actually exists at all. Because even if a supernatural being were to exist that doesn’t know things, that being certainly can’t be God. It is logically impossible for this all-powerful, all-knowing, all-good and loving god that Christians (and Jews and Muslims) believe to be real to actually be real. We've said it before and we'll say it again, religious people are really fucking stupid, and their stupidity is right this moment setting up another innocent child for 'yet another sexual scandal concerning a priest'. Many of God's priests are evil, without question, but a lot of the blame must also go to the ignorant fools, the parents, that groom their children so that they are happy and willing to go on overnight Church camps with God's pedophiles.

Posted by the 'Silly Beliefs' Team, 12 Oct, 2024 ~ Add a Comment    Send to a Friend

Anyway, Amy Dixon (right), mother of three sons, got upset when 'her 8-year-old son was exposed to some g-string wearers while he was at a swimming lesson', claiming the sight 'was pornographic', as explained in this article — 'Am I being a prude?' Mum tests the water on a g-string bikini ban at pool. Well, we shouldn't have to say this, but yes Amy, you are being a prude! This is NZ in the 21st century, we're not in Saudi Arabia nor Europe in the Middle Ages.

Dixon talks of not wanting be 'an overprotective mum' or 'an overbearing mum' and yet by trying to prevent her sons from simply 'seeing girls in g-string bikinis' that is exactly what she has chosen to become. She apparently recognises that her need for censorship means she has indeed become overprotective and overbearing, while not comprehending that this is a bad thing. Being overprotective means to protect too much, more than is warranted, to coddle or baby someone, and being overbearing means to be arrogant and domineering in manner. The very terms Dixon suspects describe her behaviour in this matter should signal to her that she has gone too far. Rather than try and convince society that we should all join her prudish campaign to protect children from women in bikinis, she should be questioning where her attitude toward the female body went off the rails and tipped her over the edge. Maybe see a therapist.

Revealingly, even though she is acting to protect her sons, at no time does Dixon say that any of her sons were offended, shocked, traumatised or even uncomfortable at sighting female flesh, if indeed they even noticed it. Even though she says, 'We're never completely comfortable to enjoy ourselves as a family' when at the river, beach or pool, we suspect she means that it's really just her that is uncomfortable around women in skimpy bikinis. One assumes her sons keep wanting to return to these places, and perhaps, if they think about it at all, are somewhat confused as to why mum is so flustered around bikinis. Of course the g-string bikinis these women are wearing is a red herring, they could be wearing underwear or micro-hot pants and tape over their nipples and complaints would still roll in. What these pearl-clutching morality crusaders fear is any form of clothing that exposes parts of the body (male or female) that they feel shouldn't be exposed, even skimpy attire that actually doesn't expose anything but by its censoring nature draws attention to parts of the body that are barely covered. What gets their heart racing isn't the bikini but what it hides, and they are incensed that in their view it doesn't hide enough. Their fear is that what is being barely covered — genitals, breasts, nipples and butt — is just one simple 'wardrobe malfunction' away from revealing a naked body to the world. And this ... we're guessing ... would result in the world coming to an immediate and horrible end. Not only would they surely view any sighting of a naked body as obscene, even skimpy swimwear that merely hints of nudity is deemed pornographic, and both will cause degenerate thoughts to arise ... even in 8-year-old boys. The issue isn't about bikinis, or at least not just bikinis, it's about banning any clothing or activity or behaviour that might suggest that we shouldn't be ashamed of the naked body, that suggests that seeing innocent nudity is harmless and certainly won't cause the collapse of society or end the world. No doubt overjoyed that public nudity is seldom witnessed, this issue is about self-appointed society reformers trying to ban anything that is even resides next door to nudity. We shouldn't ask what problem they have with bikinis, but instead go straight to the crux of their fear, what's the problem they have with the naked body?

Likewise other parents that supported Dixon's petition were in reality only expressing how this sight offended them, and then without actually asking their children (indeed they likely wouldn't ask for fear of causing even more trauma) they happily transfer their own negative feelings to their children, merely assuming with no justification that these scandalous bikinis must affect their children in a similar manner, worse even since children are still immature and quite ill-prepared to view a naked butt. A sight that will surely require hours of therapy to lessen the trauma. These prudes talk of protecting the children when clearly it's the adults that have the problem, they are merely assuming (quite wrongly) that their children are as offended by the same things they are. So instead of asking her children, Dixon instead speaks of her personal frustration at seeing girls in 'pornographic' bikinis, of 'having to be on alert, avoid places or look away', and wonders 'whether she was a prude or if other parents were also uncomfortable about having their children being exposed to skimpy swimwear'. Clearly the only person that is distressed at being exposed to what she labels pornographic swimwear is Dixon (and the other like-minded parents). She, not her children, is the one continually scanning the pool area for women exposing too much skin and then sounding the alert, no doubt screaming at her sons to look away, look away, lest their innocent minds be corrupted by the sins of the flesh. And if on the unlikely chance that her sons did come running to her in tears and clearly distressed (which we doubt has ever happened) saying they've just seen some near-naked shameless hussy wearing little more than a string and two postage stamps, one must ask where these children would have got such a negative view of women's bodies from. If children are offended by nudity (or in this case merely the hint of nudity), their own or that of others (and depressingly many are) that attitude only arises due to false indoctrination by parents and other adults. We have never seen any evidence that children — that haven't already been conditioned by their parents and society — are naturally fearful of nudity, or that their lack of fear harms them in any way. We can all easily explain how various things would most certainly harm children were they exposed to them, like loaded firearms, poisons, sharp knifes, exposed wires on electrical outlets and venomous snakes. Of course these things can harm adults too, but parents believe they have the maturity to handle them, whereas children don't. But for the life of us, we can't see how seeing a young woman in a g-string bikini at your local pool can harm children, or anyone. What are we missing? We wish that these morality crusaders would summon the courage to write to us (which would involve temporarily getting off Facebook and TikTok) and explain exactly how nudity harms children. Or adults for that matter.

To reiterate, it's just nonsense to say that innocent children, free of any indoctrination, are offended by nudity; it's as silly as saying children are immediately offended on seeing a statue of Adolf Hitler. By which we mean, for a child to take offence at a statue of Hitler one first has to teach them who Hitler was, and thus why glorifying him would be wrong, and it's the same with nudity, someone must first convince a child it is wrong. The belief that it is wrong is not something anyone is born with. So this takes us back to Amy Dixon, if her sons are indeed prudes like her, then Dixon only has herself to blame. Dixon needs to drop this bullshit that she is trying to protect her children from nudity, from some imagined harm that it causes, when clearly she is the only one that is traumatised by women in bikinis, fleshy sights that for her apparently conjure up forbidden, pornographic thoughts. These women just want to be left alone to enjoy a swim but Dixon sees them and her mind can't help but turn to sex. Dirty, dirty pornographic sex. Does Dixon really think that is what her 8-year-old son is thinking about when he sees a woman in a skimpy bikini? Again this is just Dixon taking her sexual thoughts and hangups and transferring them onto her son, who of course will be thinking nothing remotely like what his mother is thinking. As we've said, he may not have even noticed the skimpy swimwear. When we were kids we certainly didn't care what swimwear adults wore, we just wanted them to let us have fun, nor did we care if we saw them naked in the pool changing room, and if Dixon's sons truly are fixated on what swimwear women are wearing and how much skin they reveal, and are traumatised if it's too much, again we would ask what she is teaching them to focus on. If Dixon really wanted to protect her children and help them grow into decent, caring adolescents and adults she would teach them that the naked human body was natural and normal and nothing to be ashamed of. That it wasn't their place to dictate to women what they were allowed to wear or not wear. That a woman's body is her own, as is her choice of swimwear.

So what was the public feeling about this, did they feel Amy Dixon was a prude or not? The article itself merely talked of a divided opinion across the city, however when we read the article it was running an online poll: 'Should g-string bikinis be banned at public pools?', with the result at that time being 45% saying yes to a ban and 55% responding no. While we're pleased that the prudes are losing, the difference in opinion is depressingly close. If an official vote was held the prudes could easily bring in a ban, since in cases like this it's the prudes that get all agitated and would be well organised on Facebook and such and would likely turn out in larger numbers while people that would vote no probably wouldn't even be aware a vote was happening. Seriously ... they're trying to ban bikinis? Are they Muslims? It will never happen!

But it easily could. The article noted that the wearing of g-strings bikinis 'had caused debate across the United States, prompted bans in parts of Australia and recently sparked controversy in Taupo over whether g-strings could be worn at thermal spas'. So Amy Dixon is not just an isolated puritan on a mission, she has potential allies around the world. Plus the operations manager of the New Plymouth pool, Mike Roberts, said that while 'There was nothing written against swimmers wearing speedos or g-strings in terms of minimalist swimwear ... [he] believed it could be time for a change ... [and] was considering canvassing other aquatic centres on the topic'. FYI, men's speedos have been around since the 1930s, and first became popular in the '50s and '60s. Women's g-strings and thongs have also been around for ages (and no, while very similar, they're not the same thing. Trust us, we have, as they say, done our own research). G-strings were first worn by showgirls in the 1920s, with the thong bikini appearing in 1974. Since their invention, speedos, g-strings and thongs have only increased in popularity and become more prevalent, and yet despite this long history we're asked to believe that only now is society suddenly waking up to how obscene these items are. Of course that's not the case, instead we suspect that a few sheltered and easily shocked individuals who see themselves as guardians of morality have made it their mission to change attitudes back to when we were all God-fearing and bathers worn the old-fashioned equivalent of a onesie when swimming. And they are indeed seeing some victories. As we've mentioned previously, many pools in recent years have converted their open-plan changing rooms into private cubicles and one in Oz has even banned nudity completely in their changing rooms. Clearly more and more people, especially young people, both boys and girls, men and women, have become quite fearful of seeing naked bodies or exposing theirs, even in the innocent surroundings of the gym or pool changing room. And now the focus has moved from what can be revealed in the changing room to what can be revealed around the pool, and history has shown that public opinion can change what is and isn't deemed acceptable. A century ago they were also having this same ongoing debate about how much skin could be revealed while wearing a swimsuit, and it wasn't very much. Women couldn't even show their ankles, let alone their legs, and even men had to wear a top to cover their nipples. But slowly swimwear became more revealing for both men and women. Men could take their tops off, but women still couldn't, although eventually they were allowed a one-piece bathing suit that exposed the arms and legs, then a two-piece, but still the navel had to be kept covered. Then the bikini proper arrived which exposed the navel — shocking! They even had trouble finding a woman willing to wear it for a publicity photograph. Then in 1964 the monokini was introduced, and through the '70s and '80 topless women were a common sight on European beaches, with complete nudity on some. That was the pinnacle of freedom for both men and women regarding swimwear, and from there the debate about how much skin could be revealed was reignited for some reason and we have seen a regression in the amount of exposed skin ever since. Just as over the last century we saw swimwear slowly reveal more, we are now seeing the push for swimwear to reveal less. We have seen society become more progressive and liberating, especially for women, but there is no reason why it couldn't again become more backward and restrictive, especially for women, all it takes is enough stupid people to push for change. Enough people yearning for liberty and equality brought about positive change in society, meaning women could wear bikinis, and become prime minister, but equally, enough people yearning for the good old days when Jesus guided our actions, when women wore bloomers rather than panties and happily let the men run the country, enough people thinking like this could easily turn back the clock on all that has been achieved. Today the skimpy bikini gets banned, tomorrow the one-piece follows, then pools ban mixed-bathing sessions altogether. What's next? Ban the use of contraception, outlaw premarital sex, make criticism of religion illegal (it's called hate speech), re-criminalise homosexuality, remove the freedom to seek an abortion? Remember that the US has recently done just that with abortion and is working to do the same with contraception and gay marriage, so any argument that our modern society couldn't go backwards, that we surely couldn't lose the freedoms we fought so long and hard for is clearly bogus. As hard as many brave people fought for these freedoms, many ignorant, superstitious prudes are fighting just as hard to have them repealed. So petitions like that of Amy Dixon that are taken seriously by pool managers like Mike Roberts and spread by like-minded prudes on social media can seem like a joke when we first hear of them, but we ignore them at our peril. If we simply dismiss them as lunacy we may wake to find that a ban has been voted in behind our backs, and women wearing bikinis at the pool are being told to go put something decent on, there are children about.

We also note that the article explained that,

'There was nothing included in the aquatic centre's dress code that stipulated a minimum level of coverage for bathers. While swimmers were discouraged from swimming in bras and other undergarments for safety purposes, there was nothing to dictate a level of modesty, apart from adequate coverage of breasts for women'.

They also make the nonsense statement that 'swimmers were discouraged from swimming in bras and other undergarments for safety purposes'. Seriously ... safety purposes? There is effectively little or no difference between a bikini top and bottom and a bra and panties, anything that would make a bra and panties unsafe in the pool would apply equally to a bikini top and bottom, probably more so since g-string bikinis have ... well ... strings, which could get caught in vents and such. Maybe the prudish pool staff that enforce this silly rule might argue that the bra or panties, since they are not designed for swimming, might slip down while swimming, and this indeed might happen. But likewise we have lost count the number of times we've seen bikini tops and bottoms (that are specifically designed for swimming) slip down while swimming, and again those g-string bikinis and many ordinary bikinis are only held in place by flimsy strings and ties, unlike bras and panties that are often far more secure. Likewise the argument might be that some bra and panties become sheer or see-through when they get wet, exposing too much flesh for the prudes to bear, especially those nipples. But again, some bikinis also become see-through when wet, with the manufacturer later explaining that they were really only designed for walking around the pool or down the beach, not for actual swimming (come on people, read the label). Another excuse to discourage bras and panties is the belief that underwear can expose more flesh than a bikini, since unlike a bikini, underwear is not expected to be on public display. Yet again this is bogus, bras and panties often cover far more than a bikini does. If exposing too much skin is the concern of the pool staff and prudish mothers, then often a bra and panties would be the better option. The only real difference between a bikini top and bottom and a bra and panties is the label and whether they are worn at the pool or under clothes. If it's unsafe to swim in a bra and panties, it must be equally unsafe to swim in a bikini top and bottom, so either both should be banned or neither. Clearly the real reason bras and panties are discouraged is because they are far more closely associated with sex and nudity than is the near identical bikini. A bra and panties are the final things to be removed before sex happens whereas a bikini stays on and swimming happens rather than sex. This is just prudes being unable to separate sex and nudity, or in this case, sex and near-nudity, ie underwear. Yet strangely even though they claim that it's unsafe to swim in underwear, we are never advised to ditch our underwear or to 'go commando' while doing other things; there are no safety concerns expressed involving all the many other activities men and women perform, from skydiving and learning judo to playing tennis and actually having sex, all while wearing the same underwear.

Dixon acknowledges that if her ... what should we call it, her 'excessive flesh radar' ... detects 'someone dressed inappropriately' at the beach she can simply move away (or maybe flee is a better word), 'But I can't do that when we're at the pools'. So she then decides she needs to be able to police those 'dressed inappropriately', and by 'dressed inappropriately' she is not referring to a legal requirement, or even the Bible (no mention of g-strings in there), she is defining inappropriate dress simply as anything that makes her uncomfortable, which could be quite wide-ranging and totally weird and illogical. Her definition is utterly subjective, and could, and will, vary wildly from person to person, meaning it certainly can't be assumed that how one person feels is how everybody feels. Yet the ban she seeks would force the rest of us to conform to her own prudish demands, disregarding the wishes of everyone else in the process. What arrogance! Why is it that many people feel they have the right to force their beliefs onto everyone else, that we must meekly submit to their wishes? If a person in power attempted this we'd call them a dictator. Why does Dixon think she has a right to dictate how women dress, and that her proclamation overrides the very real right and freedom other women have to dress as they please, as long as it causes no harm to others? And let's remember that the mere skimpy nature of women's swimwear has never harmed anyone, anywhere, ever, so if no one is being harmed then no one has the right to ban a style of attire, especially if your only objection to that swimwear is the fact that you can't control your sexual thoughts.

Dixon also worried that she might come across as 'overly conservative or old-fashioned' ... umm, yes, clearly ... and wondered if her petition might be seen as being 'judgmental about young women's bodies and fashion choices'. Let's see, you're judging the bodies of young women and their choice of store-bought swimwear, and that judgement results in utter condemnation — labelling their behaviour pornographic — and then you attempt to have their freedom of dress (or undress) removed. Dictionaries define judgmental as someone who displays overly harsh or critical points of view, especially moral or personal ones. So yes, expressing your own moral and personal views in an overly harsh manner, and then expecting that pool management should force young women to cease and desist to match your prudish worldview is not only judgmental, if implemented it would be a backward step for women's rights, with the man in charge of the pool once again dictating what women could wear.

Reading the comments left by supporters of Amy Dixon's petition was quite depressing, just a collection of angry prudes venting at the world (and quite similar to the flood of ignorant comments left on conspiracy theory forums and the like). However they do serve to reveal how ill-conceived their arguments for a ban are, or what they no doubt mistakenly believe are arguments, since simply saying that we need to protect the children is not an argument, nor is saying that children are shocked by nudity. They are just simple statements, unsupported opinions that may or may not be true, no different from me saying we need to save the unicorns. So let's consider the typical views expressed in the petition's comments. First, disturbingly, two women thought they needed to explain just how filthy women actually are, and the serious health risk they pose to the rest of us:

'I'm tired of seeing bare arses strolling around, and putting themselves on seats that other people have to use also. It's gross. They should be disinfecting anything they put their anus upon.'
          Christine McPherson

'Wearing a g string is not only pornographic but unhygienic! Women are bending over and their rectums and vaginas are on show. Children are being forced to put up with this disgusting show. Women are sitting in public places and leaving body fluids which is leaving bacteria and other toxins behind! Due to the massive rise in sexual activity and sexual infectious diseases it's not safe for anyone!!'
          jody butcher

'When a woman has her regular flow of blood, the impurity of her monthly period will last seven days, and anyone who touches her will be unclean till evening. Anything she lies on during her period will be unclean, and anything she sits on will be unclean. ... Anyone who touches anything she sits on will be unclean; they must wash their clothes and bathe with water, and they will be unclean till evening. Whether it is the bed or anything she was sitting on, when anyone touches it, they will be unclean till evening.'
          Leviticus 15:19-23

'Children shouldn't be exposed to bare bottoms.'
          Christine Le Lievre

'THEY SHOULD BE PHASED OUT ... no kid should sea that'
          Kris Rule

'It's inappropriate for a child to be exposed to this !'
          Brenton Pickett

'It's an act of exhibitionism. — and, instinctively many view bare butts as a bit feral and primate-like. washington post.com: 2016/12/06 "chimps recognise rear ends like people recognise faces." Protect kids — and let them enjoy beauty, innocence and non-threatening images.'
          Anna Rotheray

'It's pornographic, the world is bad enough without having to subject our young people to this as well.'
          Paul Cannell

Then we had comments on how g-string bikinis, besides just being offensive, are putting children at real risk of sexual abuse:

'The rise of rapes on women also is a big concern.. women who sexually exploit themselves around others and children put not only themselves at risk but children as well!'
          jody butcher

'We want to end child molestation yet certain people promote sexuality to children by with this lewd public behaviour.'
          Jason Clement

'With a g-string bikini young girls are covering up less and less. What are they wearing next? Go bottom less or top less. Also, they are asking for trouble by turning lots of men on and we know where that leads to. G string bikinis should not be worn among very little children.'
          Ulla PRUDEN

'I am terrified my child 6, female, will ask for a g string bathing suit. She likes to be trendy. I feel it could risk her personal safety by attracting attention of a sexual predator if she wore one.'
          june rogers

Then we have these flawed arguments:

'Some people need protecting from themselves.'
          Kathryn Dixon

We also have this comment:

'Good luck to all those parents who are trying to raise their children with respect and don't end up with body issues. I commend you.
          Susanne Dunn

Another woman critical of women in skimpy swimwear argues that,

'I need positive role models in my children's lives.'
          Hazel Oxford

Next we have Angela wanting to go back in time:

'Why do women wear g string bikinis when men wear boardies? Let's all wear boardies so everyone can feel comfortable swimming.'
          Angela Ritchie

Let's finish with a final comment from someone who's apparently both ignorant and intolerant:

'Anyone who thinks this should be allowed to be worn is either a prude or a HO.'
          Adam Rybár

'I also want the women to dress modestly, with decency and propriety, adorning themselves, not with elaborate hairstyles or gold or pearls or expensive clothes, but with good deeds ... A woman should learn in quietness and full submission. I do not permit a woman to teach or to assume authority over a man; she must be quiet. For Adam was formed first, then Eve. And Adam was not the one deceived; it was the woman who was deceived and became a sinner.'
          1 Timothy 2:9-12

Reading through the comments made by Amy Dixon's supporters merely convinces us that the opposition to women's skimpy swimwear comes solely from ill-informed people that have likely had a conservative and sheltered upbringing, are probably influenced by religion even if they don't realise it, and that they don't have a single decent argument to support their case for a ban. What support they may seem to have is really just a gaggle of prudes fighting against modernity.

The article about Dixon's petition also referred readers to a similar incident that happened at an Auckland pool back in 2019 which saw the pool's (female) duty manager/lifeguard approach Yvette Harvie-Salter (right), 26, who was there 'with her partner to use the adults only sauna and spa — something she has done three times a week for the past two years'. She was informed that 'her bikini was inappropriate to wear at a public pool'. The duty manager said,

'it's not a rule at Albany Stadium Pool but all these mums have complained ... [so] you've got to wrap up. You've got to put a towel around you if you are wanting to walk around wearing that bikini'.

It's not even a g-string bikini, just a typical bikini, so it makes no sense to say that such a 'bikini was inappropriate to wear at a public pool'. In a pool in Iran or Saudi Arabia yes, but not in Auckland, NZ. In fact, the weird thing is that when saunas and spa pools first came to NZ people using them would have felt uncomfortable if a woman entered wearing a bikini; not because she was not wearing enough, but because she was wearing too much. Nudity was the norm in saunas, steam rooms and spa pools back then, just as it still is today in northern Europe where saunas were invented around 2,000 BCE. NZ happily adopted the sauna culture which included nudity, but in recent decades has regressed to banning nudity in almost all public saunas and spas and now demands swimwear (including bikinis) be worn. To be shocked when a young woman wears a bikini in a spa today seems the height of ignorance, considering that in the '80s everyone used to be naked. We've already gone backwards, this recent attempt to now swap bikinis for more conservative swimwear would be just one more step towards the abyss.

But back to Yvette, she added that, 'it was disappointing staff had chosen to support those who had complained, rather than support her'. It's hard not to suspect that the complaining mums were merely jealous of her youthful beauty. With nothing to be ashamed of body-wise, Yvette nevertheless said she 'felt like she was being body shamed', and clearly she was, although in reality the only ones who had a right to feel shame were the complaining mums for being unwilling to share the spa with an attractive young body. Clearly the pool's duty manager also felt intimidated by youthful beauty and insisted Yvette must cover up to comfort those unwilling to wear bikinis, whereas she should have been supporting a young woman's right to wear the swimwear of her choice, no matter how much it depressed the gaggle of mums. On a bright note, Rob McGee, head of active recreation at Auckland Council later offered 'a sincere apology' to Yvette for being 'made to feel unwelcome ... [and] uncomfortable', and acknowledged that the duty manager was in the wrong. However there was no mention of the requirement for better staff training around this issue, or even of a memo being sent out to remind staff that they weren't the morality police, and that bikinis have been accepted swimwear for untold decades. That incident was some five years ago, and now we have Amy Dixon again pushing the view that bikinis are inappropriate at a public pool. But if not at the pool then where ... the boardroom, the supermarket, the science lab? Clearly the message hasn't got through that the freedom to dress as we choose means exactly that.

The newsletter we saw that simply provided a link (without comment) to the embarrassing Amy Dixon saga also gave a link to another article which responded to Dixon's call for a ban, entitled 'A nudist and sex coach's view: G-string pool ban will do more harm than good'. Rightly critical of Dixon petition, Sofie Louise asks whether this ban would 'move New Zealand forwards or backwards?' Spoiler alert: it's backwards. We recommend you read the article to appreciate her full argument, but in brief she argues that 'Dixon, like the vast majority of our population, has been impacted by the rampant conditioning that tells us that women’s bodies are innately inappropriate and sexual ... [but are] these stringent beliefs ... actually true'?. Again, spoiler alert: no, they're not. Sofie Louise goes on to describe the innocent 'completely non-sexual' behaviour at nudist clubs and says that, 'They, along with the many family-friendly beaches strewn with topless women in Europe, also demonstrate that what needs to change is not people’s behaviour or clothing choices, but instead their attitudes'. Sofie argues that a ban

'would actually negatively contribute to the sexualisation of female bodies. It would teach young boys that women are sexual objects to be censored, yet men can wear speedos and budgie smugglers without any risk of the same narrative being applied to their own bodies, thus furthering the existing power imbalance between genders'.

A cartoon we first saw years ago (below) illustrates the clash of worldviews around the accepted exposure of the female body.

The young woman perfectly at ease in her bikini could easily represent the attitude of Yvette Harvie-Salter at the Auckland pool, someone just wanting to relax and clearly not harming anyone, while the woman in the burqa clearly stands in for Amy Dixon, a woman who views the amount of skin on display as quite inappropriate and even indecent. Each woman can't understand how the other would choose to dress as the do. However there is one crucial difference between the encounter in the cartoon and the encounters experienced by Yvette Harvie-Salter and Amy Dixon. The cartoon encounter suggests that while the two women are astounded by the other's attitude concerning exposure of the human body, their society apparently tolerates these different views, neither is calling for the police to act. Likewise Yvette Harvie-Salter, while reportedly 'flabbergasted' that other women (who presumably were not wearing bikinis) could be so critical and judgmental of her choice to wear one ... at a public pool ... and even conspired to force her to cover up, Yvette at no time took the same combative stance and demanded that the women instead should all don bikinis. Yvette showed tolerance, accepting that bathers should be allowed to wear what they wanted to, whereas the complaining women and pool staff were intolerant and demanded that women should dress to match their conservative values and expectations. It is the same with Amy Dixon, she exhibits blatant intolerance, and unlike the cartoon, she won't just quietly disapprove and walk on, she attempts to make her intolerance the law of the land, to have what she personally finds unacceptable and indecent be officially banned. While the women in the cartoon no doubt feel sympathy for each other and wish they could make them see how they have been misled by certain elements in society, they nevertheless accept each other's freedom to dress as she so chooses. But Amy Dixon and her supporters and the women harassing Yvette Harvie-Salter have rejected any thought of tolerance and believe they have the right and duty to dictate that all women must dress to align with their prudish attitudes. They don't like some behaviour of others and so immediately decide that those others must obediently fall in line with their values, and if they refuse, they must be forced to comply. How can they see themselves as decent people respecting the independence and freedoms of others if what they are really saying is we will let you lead your own life free of interference if your beliefs and values align with ours, but stray from the path we have chosen and we'll have the morality police cart you off to reeducation camps. These people are nothing but arrogant hypocrites.

And while we're discussing the cartoon, there are two other points it raises that are relevant to this current debate. Looking at the women in the bikini, the woman in the burqa says, 'Nothing covered but her eyes...', when quite clearly this is false, as her breasts, genitals and behind — the body parts that pretty much every religion and culture consider the most intimate — are covered by a bikini. We've seen and heard untold people talk of seeing a naked person when quite obviously that person was not naked at all, like saying people streaking in swimwear or seen in their underwear or coming out of the bathroom wearing a towel etc. are naked. Umm ... no, they're not. We can understand how some people might not want to see a naked person, in the same way I feel horror towards horror movies, but someone in a bikini, underwear or towel is not naked, they are not exposing the bits that would make a person naked, anymore than someone wearing a long jacket over a wetsuit is. When Amy Dixon and the women at the Auckland pool, like the Muslim woman in the cartoon, start seeing a woman in a bikini as essentially no different to a naked woman, then their prudishness has truly got out of hand. Even though a woman is acceptably covered in a bikini, their grubby minds run rampant imagining what is hidden under that bikini. They are complaining about the bits that aren't on display, but just on their minds ... obsessively on their minds. Some uptight people in this world complain (unjustly in our view) about naked people, but then we have another group like Amy Dixon and co who complain about people that are still one step away from being naked. And at the far extreme we have religious fundamentalists such as Muslims who even complain about people that are many steps away from being naked. And therein lies the problem, if we were to give into the demands of Amy Dixon and her ilk, why should we think that they would be content in just banning bikinis? With a victory under their belt, why wouldn't revealing one-piece bathing suits be next, since they are also only one step away from nudity? Then backless dresses and tops with low cut fronts, miniskirts, push-up bras, any item of feminine attire that exposes or highlights the female form, anything that is suggestive of the naked body under the cover of clothing. And the woman in the burqa is proof enough that this is no fanciful suggestion, once people who feel they are on a mission to save the world get power they often take their urge to control society to outlandish extremes. Rather than giving the Amy Dixons of this world the right to dictate a dress code for the rest of us, surely the most even-handed and equitable option would be to simply allow everyone to chose their own dress code.

The second point is that each of the women in the cartoon blames a 'cruel male-dominated culture' as being responsible for each others dress code. We would disagree. It can be safe to assume that the woman in the bikini has freely chosen to wear it, the choice was not forced upon her by men in her life or a male-dominated culture (even though she may live in a largely male-dominated culture). In the last century or so women have fought for the right to dress as they please, like wearing comfortable trousers rather than restrictive hoop dresses and corsets, and to reveal more and more of their bodies while swimming, playing sport or at work. And in a patriarchal society, most men fought them every step of their journey towards equality and independence. So it is quite false to say that a 'cruel male-dominated culture' forces women to wear bikinis; women fought for the right to dress as they please, and many choose a bikini. However, we would argue that the woman is indeed wearing the burqa due to a 'cruel male-dominated culture'. The Muslim woman may reply that she happily wears it, but while she may believe it is her choice we'd argue that she has been misled. She has made a (bad) choice based on erroneous information that has been provided by a 'cruel male-dominated culture'. I have worked with educated women in Muslim countries who quickly removed their burqas, stripping down to skimpy tops and jeans when there were no Muslim men about to control their behaviour. They hated wearing the burqas and only did so because males forced them to. And yes, there are Muslim women who willingly choose to wear burqas even when there is no legal compulsion to do so, like in western countries, but again, the only reason they do this is because Muslim males have convinced them that it is unacceptable and indecent to expose their skin or hair in public. Why do they believe they must be veiled in public? Because Islam demands it, a religion created and controlled by men. In reality there is nothing whatsoever in the Quran that stipulates women must wear burqas or hijabs or cover their hair. There is nothing in the Quran that prevents Muslim women from dressing as freely as non-Muslims, even a skimpy g-string bikini. The demand that Muslim women must dress in an unflattering tent (and that married women must remove all their body hair) came later from sexist Muslim men who wanted absolute control of their women and their sexuality. No thought was ever given to what the women might want. Muslim women being told how they must dress in public is no different to people like Amy Dixon wanting to tell NZ women how they must dress in public pools. The first is due to a 'cruel male-dominated culture', the second would be due to a 'cruel prude-dominated culture'. If women such as Amy did bring about a ban on bikinis they would just be aiding the machinations of men, since male-dominated fundamentalist religions (Islam, Christianity and Judaism) have for centuries controlled women's dress code, often even assisted by misinformed women. While there was no mention of religious undertones in these recent debates, we'd be surprised if this prudery couldn't eventually be traced back to some religious text. Someone told them that exposing too much female flesh was wrong. Do we really want to live in a society where the misguided beliefs of one group dominates another? Wouldn't it better to leave the choice of wearing a bikini up to the individual and to learn to tolerate the harmless behaviour of others? Don't we have far too many historical examples of arrogant people causing real harm due to their ignorant beliefs, like witches and homosexuals should be persecuted and killed, husbands can legally rape their wives, interracial relationships are disgusting, a woman's health would suffer were she allowed to participate in sports or higher education, the Negro's place in in the cotton fields, and the bloody Jews need to be sent to the camps. Do we really want to add 'women in bikinis are pornographic' to that shameful list? What's next, a woman's place is in the kitchen?

To finish on a humorous note, we'd also suggest you read the final article for which a link was provided, specifically 'How to protect your family against the 'pornographic' threat of g-strings'. Written by Alex Casey, it's a satirical dig at Amy Dixon's panic attacks over g-strings and the opening paragraph sets the tone of the article:

'A terrifying new epidemic is sweeping the nation and threatening to erode the very foundations of our society. Here’s how to keep yourself and your family safe'.

'the best line of defence is to stay at home in your bubble. Not only can public pools contain cases of g-strings, but ... individuals may also be exposed to other risks such as bare nipples, soaking wet bodies, and people squirting white fluid on one another. Positively pornographic indeed'.

Posted by the 'Silly Beliefs' Team, 18 Sep, 2024 ~ Add a Comment    Send to a Friend

Anyway, the Italian teenager Carlo Acutis, apparently realising that God was going to remain a no-show, dedicated his life to promoting God online, something God probably hadn't thought of, and like most really old people God probably doesn't understand computers anyway. Unfortunately before Carlo could sway a single atheist to the reality of God, he was struck down by cancer and died aged 15 in 2006. In the intervening years since his death he has been attributed with two miraculous cures, and yet, like Jesus before him, he couldn't even save himself. It was these two alleged miracles that tagged him as a saint in the eyes of the gullible, ie Catholics.

The above article says that, 'For something to be deemed a miracle, it typically requires an act seen to be beyond what is possible in nature — such as through the sudden healing of a person deemed to be near-death'. What bullshit. While it is rare, there are well-documented medical cases of spontaneous remission, also called 'spontaneous healing or spontaneous regression, an unexpected improvement or cure from a disease'. There is no need to fall back on gods to explain this, this isn't the Middle Ages. The simple fact is that some people do get better, even though doctors can't (yet) explain exactly why, although we suspect it will sometimes be because of how some treatment they have been receiving reacts in an unusual, unexpected and undetected way within the body. Just as a few people are immune from HIV infection for example, some people with a certain disease will have something different in their body that allows them to react differently to some chemical or radiation treatment that brings about a sudden and unexpected cure. And let's note that most people willingly accept all manner of medicines and undergo various treatments in the hope that one will cure them. And yet many claim, if they do suddenly and unexpectedly go into remission, that it was brought about by God, a miracle, and completely ignore what effect one or more of those many medicines and treatments most likely had. Just because doctors currently don't understand what the difference is that makes some people immune or makes them respond differently to others, just as for most of history people didn't understand why people even got sick and why some survived while others died, doesn't mean the answer must be a miracle from God. It was likely brought about by one of their many medical treatments having some unexpected curative effect, or they simply kept the patient alive long enough for the body's immune system to eventually combat the disease.

In the past every survival from an illness was called a miracle from God and every death was called a punishment from God. But surely we now have enough knowledge about the true cause of disease and the way the human body responses to it to confidently dismiss divine miracles as superstitious bullshit? We've found no angels on the clouds and no sign of God in space nor the devil in caverns beneath our feet, so why are huge numbers of people still rejecting reality and falling back on fantasy? Why do religious morons choose ignorance and stupidity over reason? If someone with terminal cancer claimed that invisible fairies living at the bottom of his garden cured him with a concoction of fairy dust and moon beams we would implore him to seek psychiatric help, and yet when someone claims an invisible sky fairy cured them of an illness (or saved them from a rampaging tornado) untold people respond as if that claim is perfectly rational, rather than being batshit crazy. Why are invisible garden fairies rightly thought of as quite ridiculous but invisible sky fairies are considered by billions of people to be as real as cats and dogs? Why aren't they receiving psychiatric help?

Christians claiming that some event is a miracle brought about by God is as ridiculous as someone insisting that planes fly by the use of magic. We would challenge and laugh at someone who attributed some event to magic, a spell conjured up in a witch's cauldron, so why don't we do the same when they point to miracles, where an invisible god in a faraway invisible fantasy land temporarily breaks the laws of physics to save one person out of hundreds or thousands? There is no more evidence for miracles than there is for magic, so why do people, especially journalists, pretend there is and give people a free pass to spout their nonsense about God rushing in to help? A TV news item the other night reported about a cop who was stabbed several times in the head and rushed to hospital where the doctors treated him, and he survived. His parents were interviewed and his father said he survived because God was looking after him. He didn't survive because his colleagues incapacitated his assailant preventing further harm or because the ambulance crew kept him alive en route to the hospital or because the doctors operated on him, no, he survived because an invisible sky fairy had his back! His father thanked God and completely ignored those that really saved him. How can religious nutters delude themselves like this? It's like little children believing that a fat Santa with a huge bag of toys can fit down their very skinny chimney. If God was really protecting the cop he would have stopped the attack in the first place, which would have been child's play, since God, being all-knowing, knew when and where the attack would happen, and God, being all-powerful, could have stopped the assailant BEFORE he stabbed the cop several times. God is not a very good bodyguard if all he does is visit his badly injured client in hospital after an attack, bringing some flowers and chocolates. Oh wait, he didn't even do that, not even a 'Get Well Soon' card.

That scenario is played out over and over again all over the world as deluded fools praise God for saving them or their family from some disaster. And yes, it's a shame God couldn't save their house or the lives of their neighbours, but then God can't save everyone or be everywhere at once. Oh wait, yes he can … so why doesn't he help out more? It amazes us how arrogant Christians are, that when they survive some disaster while all those around them perish they believe it's because they are so important to God that he would save them while letting untold others suffer and die horrible deaths. They believe they have some unknown but vitally crucial role to play in the world that God protects them from harm while smiting the rest. What arrogant assholes, believing they are one of God's favourites, one of his chosen few. Of course these assholes are well aware that untold people died or suffered while they came through unscathed, but instead of asking what sort of god would allow or even cause such destruction, suffering and death and only save them, a god they believe to be a perfectly good and loving god, they brazenly elevate themselves to someone God can't do without. They invent a fantasy to avoid admitting that clearly no god was involved at all. Fucking idiots all of them.

So, this dead 15-year-old kid Carlo Acutis is to be made a saint because he has been attributed with two miraculous cures by some group in the Vatican, the religious equivalent of a witches' coven or a circle of fairies, but how do the miracles work … or more accurately, how do the morons think the miracles work? I don't mean what are the physics of miracles, I mean who performs the miracle? Is it God waving one of his tentacles to cure the sick and dying or is dead Carlo Acutis bringing about the miracle cure personally on God's behalf? It's the belief of untold Catholics that saints can indeed bring about miracles which is why Catholics pray to saints and have jewelry and little shrines in their houses featuring their favourite saint. In a humorous and informative documentary I saw years ago, 'Religulous' (2008), Bill Maher interviewed senior Vatican priest Father Reginal Foster who revealed that,

'They had a survey here in Italy, you know, and they said, "In a crisis, what kind of saints do you pray to?" You know who's the sixth on the list? Jesus Christ.'

First, the Bible (ie God) clearly says that his followers are to worship no other gods, that they are not to ask others for help. For example:

'You shall have no other gods before Me. You shall not make for yourself an idol, or any likeness of what is in heaven above or on the earth beneath or in the water under the earth. You shall not worship them or serve them; for I, the LORD your God, am a jealous God.' (Exodus 20:3-6)

There's another problem with the childish believe that saints can either personally cure ill people because they somehow gain superpowers when they die, perhaps similar to what happens when you're bitten by a radioactive spider, or conversely they merely act as advocates and implore God to look again at the case of little Timmy, that Timmy's family believe God may have made a mistake in giving him cancer. The obvious problem with this scenario is that the saints, no matter what mumbo jumbo the Catholics perform in their rituals, are stone cold dead. They're not hearing any prayers or networking with God. No, seriously, the Bible clearly says that everyone who has died, including Catholic saints, remain dead, really dead, until Judgement Day, the Second Coming of Jesus, Armageddon and all that associated nonsense happens. No one goes to Heaven until they've been judged worthy, and to the best of our knowledge Judgement Day has not yet happened. Surely we would have noticed. And even then, almost everyone is going to fail Judgement Day and will find themselves on the down escalator to Hell. Again, this is all in the Bible, it's just bullshit when people say their recently deceased friend is now in Heaven with Jesus and other deceased family members. Rubbish, even if Heaven were real, no one gets the chance to even see if they can get in until Judgement Day, so all those saints are doing nothing but rotting in their graves, they are in no position to have a word in God's ear for you. Again, Christians' ignorance of their own Bible is just astounding, and it's not just the fools in the pews, the priests, pastors and ministers feed them these comforting lies, even though they at least must know it's untrue.

And what about the evidence for these miracles? There is none. In the movie 'Missing Link' (2019), Zoe Saldana's character said 'You talk about proof, but all you offer are words', and that observation also describes exactly the problem with the Vatican and their claims of miracles. They offer only words, mere opinion, that a miracle has occurred, they never provide proof in the form of evidence to back up their claims. Their press releases merely say that since they can't understand how some event might have happened then it must have been a miracle. This is a logical fallacy known as 'The Argument from Ignorance', and is no different to people in the past saying that because they didn't understand how earthquakes could happen or what comets were or what caused lightning and thunder then they must all be attributed to God working his magic. Why is it that only a small group of frock-wearing men in the Vatican can find clear evidence of miracles whereas scientists, the ones with the scientific qualifications and expensive instruments, have not found evidence for a single miracle … ever!? These cloistered, 'celibate', rosary and Bible clutching men whose only training is in quoting ancient Bible verses, exorcising demons and grooming choir boys arrogantly believe that they are somehow qualified to make judgements on scientific matters, disciplines they have no real knowledge of and often actively oppose. At the end of the day, the Catholic belief is that even though science might seem to explain how some things work in simple terms, God still does everything behind the scenes. Nothing just happens naturally, everything needs a first cause, and that first cause is God.

Of course that is all nonsense, since Vatican thinking hasn't advanced from it's superstitious origins millennia ago. They still think their deluded view of the world matters, and that we should take them seriously. This is as ridiculous and foolhardy as looking to the Kardashians for good advice, or Donald Trump. Why do Catholics believe the Vatican, an ill-educated group now on the fringes that has invented nothing, discovered nothing and contributed nothing of value to society over two millennia, and yet disbelieve scientists who have made amazing inventions, radical discoveries and life-saving contributions to society? Scientists have told us about viruses and galaxies and why the grass is green and the sky blue. They've saved untold lives with antibiotics and vaccines, they've landed probes on comets and discovered deep sea hydrothermal vents, and they've helped make our lives far more comfortable, safer and healthier than any time in history. Whereas the Vatican is only know for its army of pedophile priests, for the inquisitions, for the crusades, for witch burning, for persecuting homosexuals, women and atheists, for banning contraception, abortion, divorce, and even masturbation. In superhero comics and movies there is always a superhero, the one out to do good in the world and who is pitted against the supervillian and his evil henchmen who are out to control the world no matter how many they have to harm in the process. In the real world scientists are obviously the superheroes and the Vatican and its Catholic priests are the villains. As an evil empire the Vatican can claim many infamous successes, although most are in their past, like the crusades, but they are certainly still doing considerable harm worldwide. The sexual abuse of children still continues, women are harmed by their ban on contraception and abortion, the LGBTQ+ community is still persecuted, and believers are impoverished by having to donate to the already obscene wealth of the Catholic Church. That so many devout Catholics know all too well that these injustices are happening and yet still faithfully support the evil empire that is the Vatican is depressing to say the least. When they claim that the Catholic Church and its henchmen are morally good it just shows they know nothing of morality and ethics. They don't know how to think for themselves, they're like the Nazis who after the atrocities of the war claimed they were just following orders. Why such gullibility? Why do Catholics, some even quite intelligent, choose to believe the Vatican's claim that it has evidence for miracles, and yet that evidence fails to convince any scientist or well informed non-Catholic? Just as only naïve children believe in the Easter Bunny, why is it that only Catholics believe in dead saints working miracles? Children have an excuse for their ignorance, and they quickly grow out of it, but Catholics don't.

Let's look at how effective Carlo Acutis, or should we say God, has been at performing miracles. Carlo Acutis died in 2006 of leukaemia, a cancer that God apparently couldn't cure, or maybe in Carlo's case, didn't want to cure. Now in 2024 the Vatican has claimed that two miracles over that time can be attributed to Carlo Acutis. So in those 18 years that Carlo has spent dead, two miracle cures have happened (although without independent scientific verification). In those 18 years God cured two people. Let's agree that God is doing the miracles, Carlo Acutis hasn't become another Jesus and isn't performing god-like tricks from his coffin. Think about that, an all-powerful god that created the universe and all life in a mere six days could only manage to heal two people in nearly 20 years. Just two. How many people do you think a single hospital in a modern city could heal in a year? One … two, maybe dozens or even more? Now multiply that number by 18 years. Surely that healing rate would be more than two. A lot more. Clearly hospitals are far, far better at curing people or at least alleviating suffering than praying to God (via some dead saint) is. The above article said that the most recent person to be made a saint was Maria Antonia de Paz y Figueroa who died in 1799, so her cure rate is far worse than Carlo's. God took two and a quarter centuries to bring about her two miracles. There are currently over 8 billion people alive on the planet, and God is clearly struggling to save even one person each decade (referring to Carlo's miracles, far, far worse if we look at Maria's miracles), and while we don't know the figures for hospitals, worldwide the successes that doctors and hospitals have in treating illness must be magnitudes greater than God's pathetic efforts. And yet who do people drop to their knees and thank when a surgeon says, 'Good news, the surgery was a success'? God is who, not the doctors and nurses, they thank the one person that wasn't even there, not even to offer a comforting word. Think about it, there are over 8 billion people on the planet so the odds are extremely high that one or two people every decade or century will unexpectedly recover from what is usually a fatal illness, what we call spontaneous remission. Just as a handful of people always beat the very high odds and win the lottery. Is their win a miracle, brought about by God? Of course not, and neither are the rare cases of spontaneous remission. It's just blind luck. The Catholics (and the religious in general) jump on these rare events that we cannot (yet) explain and call them miracles, but this makes no sense since they're attributing these miraculous events to an all-powerful God that is all-good. If, being all-powerful, God could do anything he wanted and being all-good he would clearly want to help people, reduce suffering and prevent disasters (this is after all what good people that have the power to do good actually do), this would mean miracles should be happening often and everywhere as untold people are clearly leading lives that are not good at all. A benevolent god should be working obvious miracles around the clock, but he's clearly not.

So if 'miraculous-like' events are happening but are very rare, meaning events that are very surprising but don't actually break any laws of nature — they're weird but still natural and not supernatural — then reason would argue that no god was involved. Again, if God was involved we should expect real miracles to be happening all the time. They should be huge and obvious, not some unseen fix that happens deep inside the body that no one sees, and they should clearly break the laws of nature, and the evidence for this break should be overwhelming, not disguised as something natural as it is in so-called miracles. God wants us to acknowledge his power so miracles shouldn't be minor and unseen and hard to separate from what nature can do. And they certainly shouldn't just be contentious medical miracles. Unlike Hinduism and ancient pagan religions that have many, many gods who each have a specific job, like a god for healing, another for wine making and another for fertility, the Christian god is responsible for literally everything, from managing wars and health outcomes to controlling food options and sexuality, and let's not forget wrangling tornadoes and creating earthquakes and floods. So clearly God should be performing big, impressive miracles everywhere, and they should be blatantly obvious as real miracles. At the very least tornadoes should carefully avoid people, animals and buildings; bullets fired by criminals should suddenly stop mid-flight before hitting innocent people; planes whose engines fail should miraculously float to the ground; people who lose a limb or eye in an accident should grow a new one; and Donald Trump would realise the harm he's caused and donate his ill-gotten wealth to charity, and become a eunuch.

A world where God was working miracles would be obvious, like it was in the Old Testament of the Bible, where the Sun stopped in the sky, where men rose from the dead, where bridges weren't needed because the sea would part on demand or men simply walked on water, where burning bushes weren't consumed, where serpents and donkeys spoke, and where huge fiery stars (like the Sun) could fall to Earth and no one was harmed. Now those old time-y miracles fit the definition of real miracles, unlike today where Christians call falling off their bike and not dying a miracle. Why have they downgraded miracles to everyday events that clearly aren't miracles? Well, they're claiming natural events as supernatural because real miracles worthy of God obviously aren't happening these days, and in fact never have. That's right, the Bible lied. It's no more factual than 'The Lord of the Rings' and 'Harry Potter' books, which, unlike the Bible, don't even try to pretend they are anything but fantasy.

In one article proclaiming 'The miracles of Carlo Acutis' was the claim that his 'Body was found intact after burial', a claim that priest Father Marcelo Tenorio said came directly from Carlo's mother and asserted that Carlo's body had not undergone any decomposition after his death and burial. Is there nothing these superstitious, gullible fools won't believe? There was no talk of Carlo's saintly powers when he died, that only began years later, so there would be no reason to think God might be messing around with his corpse and preserving it, so the body was almost certainly embalmed to radically slow decomposition. And if miraculous preservation did happen, think about what that means. God wasn't interested in the slightest in helping Carlo when he was alive, he let him die painfully of cancer, and yet when he's dead he suddenly takes a morbid interest in his dead body and now finds the time to perform a miracle to keep it in good shape! That's just sick ... but then we are talking about God. He did the same with Jesus, ignored him throughout his life, even while he was being tortured and killed on the cross, but then later snuck into his tomb under the cover of darkness and made off with his dead body.

There's another huge flaw in the miracle claims and that is that no one, contrary to what they claim, can truly know who caused the miraculous event (assuming for the sake of argument that one did appear to happen). We've exposed this problem previously, but to recap, imagine some miraculous event occurs and is seen by many people of diverse religious beliefs. The Christian will attribute it to Jesus, the Jew will attribute it to Yahweh, the Muslim will attribute it to Allah, the Hindu will attribute it to one of thousands of gods, Shiva for example, while for the ancient Greeks it might have been Zeus, for the Romans Apollo, and Maori might still point at Rangi. The Catholics, like the Hindus, would attribute it to one of the more than 10,000 saints recognised by the Catholic Church, and maybe God as an afterthought. All that these diverse believers can agree on is that it appears supernatural, but beyond that they are just guessing and hoping it was their god. But it might have been a different god or a god no one has even heard of, or it might be advanced aliens just messing with us to see how gullible we are. We simply wouldn't be able to determine who was responsible, not even if they fronted up in person wearing a toga bearing the name tag 'Zeus', since they could still be lying for some godly (or alien) reason. So the same problem happens when some Catholic says Saint Adolf cured their ingrown toenail. How can they possibly know that a specific saint was involved and not a different saint, or even a different god? The 'Catholic LIfe Conference' notes that the Vatican has apparently recognised this problem and 'solves' it by simply stating that:

'The person who experiences a healing needs to pray solely to one person, so there is no confusion as to which saint interceded on their behalf'.

Even the two miracles attributed to Acutis are weak in the extreme. The first was 'healing' a 4-year-old child who had difficulty eating solid food due to a problem with his pancreas, and the second was a young woman who suffered a brain bleed after hitting her head ... and we all know that both are fatal, that no one ever recovers from eating difficulties and bleeding. Yeah right! In the first 'miraculous healing' attributed to Carlo Acutis we're told that:

'In Brazil, a boy named Mattheus was healed from a serious birth defect called an annular pancreas ... a serious condition that caused him difficulty eating and serious abdominal pain ... He was not expected to live long. His mother, Luciana Vianna, had spent years praying for his healing ... [then] he and his mother asked Acutis to pray for his healing ... "Mattheus ... expressed a singular wish, like a prayer: 'I wish I could stop vomiting so much.' Healing began immediately, to the point that the physiology of the organ in question changed," Fr. Gori said [the priest responsible for promoting Acutis' sainthood cause].'

What follows is one account of the second 'miraculous healing':

'a young woman ... fell from her bicycle ... [and] incurred a severe head injury. She was taken to the hospital, where her skull was opened to relieve pressure on the brain, but her situation was critical ... and a coworker of the girl's mother immediately began to pray to Blessed Carlo. Six days later, the mom went to Assisi to pray at Blessed Carlo's tomb. That same day, the girl began to breathe on her own. Within 10 days, she was discharged from ICU; the next month, she was discharged from rehab.'

Religious people in general, not just gullible Catholics, need to be dragged screaming and kicking into the modern world for their own good and the good of society. These morons are holding us back, just as they did in the so-called Dark Ages, a thousand years of stagnation and oppression. Belief in miracles, whether childishly attributed to a long dead saint or an imaginary god, is surely a sign of mental illness. There is no evidence that miracles are happening or have ever happened, just as there is no evidence for other things that these primitive holy books assert are real, like dragons, unicorns, talking serpents, magic, evil curses, demons, angels, heaven and hell. In the past untold homosexuals said they were utterly ashamed to reveal their sexuality, a shame that was unjustly forced on them by the Church, and largely still is, but the group that should be genuinely ashamed is the one that still believes in gods and miracles. Again, children can look at the evidence and quickly give up on belief in Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy and the Easter Bunny, so why can't the religious manage what even children can? Why can't they grow up?

Posted by the 'Silly Beliefs' Team, 31 May, 2024 ~ Add a Comment    Send to a Friend

But before God can really make a concerted push into Asia, it seems the Middle East, God's birthplace and old stomping ground, is still causing him grief. Even though pretty much everyone in the Middle East believes in him and only him, his devout followers are, once again, killing each other. In this most recent outbreak of hostilities — the October 7th terrorist attack on Israel by Hamas — it's Muslim vs. Jew, Palestine vs. Israel, and behind the scenes and in neighbouring regions, Muslim vs. Christian. As the latest battles are waged and the bodies fall, we hear the various followers of God uttering their distinctive battle cries; the Muslim screaming 'Allah Akbar' (God is Great), the Jews shouting 'Hallelujah' (Praise God), and the Christians bellowing 'Praise the Lord' (ie God).

So, will God's team win or will God's team win? Wait ... what? God clearly can't be supporting all sides, that's not how this nonsense works. God loves his obsequious followers and hates everyone else, everyone knows this. So why are Muslims, Jews and Christians all praising God as if he was on their side helping them wage war, that it's God against the heathens? All three seem to be under the delusion that God — the one and only god — is their god, looking out for them and only them, but clearly, if God were real he could logically only support one of them! But logic and reason is something that is largely beyond the grasp of religious folk, look at even silly Christians playing college football in the USA, where opposing teams, both devout Christians, each go into a prayer circle before the game and pray to God for his help in defeating the other team ... of praying Christians. It's the same with American politics, two groups of Christians each begging God to support them against the other group. As the mascot for both sides God is literally playing himself, so how could he both win and lose? The stupid Christians never seem to grasp this problem, that it is impossible for him to pick a side if he is literally on both sides. Of course you may agree that it's ridiculous for Christians to think that God can back both teams simultaneously and go to war with himself, but point out that in Gaza at the moment it's the Jewish god versus the Muslim god, two different gods doing battle rather than one god battling himself. But is that really the case? No, it is not.

The religions of the Jews, Christians and Muslims are collectively known as the Abrahamic religions (so-called because Abraham was the first prophet to all three religions). They all believe in the same god and the same origin stories — Creation in six days, Adam and Eve and the talking serpent, Satan, Abraham's planned sacrifice of his son Isaac, Noah and the flood, the Tower of Babel etc — they really only differ on how the final few chapters of their holy books play out. Jesus, Mary and Joseph even feature in the Quran. This is where three silly beliefs morph into one huge silly belief, the seldom acknowledged fact that the Jews, Christians and Muslims all believe in the same god, that's right, the same fucking god! The same god with the same name, although really it's a label more than a name. Unlike the world's other religions who all knew the names of their gods, and addressed them by their names, like Zeus and Osiris and Thor, the Jews, Christians and Muslims all refer to their god simply as God (like having a dog and calling him Dog), and while you might argue that Muslims are different in that they do call their god by his name — Allah — the fact is that Allah is simply Arabic for God. And they're not just being lazy and using the same simple label to describe three different gods, they're being lazy and using the same simple label to describe the same god. What most people don't realise or at least fully comprehend and the crucial thing to grasp here is that all three religions (unlike all the world's other ancient religions) are intimately connected. This means that if Judaism were to be exposed as false (I'm ignoring the fact that it has), then Christianity and Islam must collapse also, since they both have Judaism as their foundation. Let's consider the Christian connection. As much as Christians hate and are embarrassed by the barbaric stories of how God behaves in the Old Testament, preferring to only talk about the New Testament and Jesus and love (but not free love), they can't simply dismiss the old stories as myths Jews tell about their false god, as they can the Egyptian, Greek and Roman myths about their false gods, because the Jewish god is their god too! Every embarrassing story from the Old Testament that most modern Christians now wish they could disavow, stories that show God as unjust, barbaric, genocidal, vengeful and just plain mean and unhinged, stories that science has since shown are as ridiculous as belief in the Easter Bunny, or that history has shown to be utterly false, if these stories could be deleted from their Bible, as any decent editor would recommend they should be, doing so would destroy Christianity. Christians are stuck with ancient Jewish myths that they find personally embarrassing and false (especially when challenged by atheists), and none can say, hand on heart, that they find them enlightening and true, since if they did then they would be Jews, not Christians. This is so screwed up. How can Christians say they believe the Bible, as they must do, even though it includes the Old Testament stories the Jews tell about how the world began and how many ethnic groups he created and then slaughtered, while at the same time saying they believe the Jewish religion is false, when the Old Testament and the Jewish religion are essentially the same thing? And the same argument applies to Muslims, they also consider Judaism as a false religion and they can be as antisemitic as Christians often are. They dismiss the ancient Jewish myths but then include them in the Quran to explain how the world began, just as the Christians do in the Bible; they're true stories when they recount them but false when the Jews tell them.

Jews, Christians and Muslims are like three stupid brothers who each insists that their father loves them the most, and has promised that they, and they alone, will inherit all their father's assets. And, as lord of the manor, their brothers will have to submit to their rules. Continuing our brother analogy, the Muslim 'brother' would say he has two older brothers, the Jew and the Christian, but they are all estranged. The Christian 'brother' would admit to an older Jewish 'brother', also estranged, but would declare the Muslim 'brother' an outright impostor. The Jewish 'brother' however would insist that he is an only child, that the Christian and Muslim 'brothers' are pretenders to the throne, both deviously trying to claim his father and his ancient family history as their own, both adding their own bogus stories in order to take control of the family dynasty and destroy all opposition. And not only can the three stupid 'brothers' not meet without arguing, where things often turn physically violent, worse still their father has been absent for what seems like an eternity and thus the matter of who he loves (and who is telling the truth) can't be resolved. So, letting Judaism, Christianity and Islam stand in for the stupid 'brothers', is there any way to determine the 'brother' — the religion — that God (the father) supports and those he abhors? Is Judaism an only child and Christianity and Islam mere impostors clamouring to steal the power from the Jews, or did God, unhappy with his Jewish offspring, sire more children and transfer his favour onto them in the hope that one would finally obey him and make him proud? The Christians argue that God, displeased with the Jews, did indeed shift his love and support onto them. We're told that God made a new covenant (a binding agreement) with them, known as the New Testament, ripping up the binding agreement he had with the Jews, what the Christians call the Old Testament. But it gets worse if the Muslims are to be believed (spoiler alert, they're not). The Muslims claim that God once again became displeased with his chosen group, the Christians, and shifted his love and support onto the Muslims and made a new covenant with them. So much for promises and binding agreements. If either the Christian or Muslim account is true, then clearly God's word means nothing. Perhaps God breaking his covenant with the Jews and then the Christians is where the saying, 'Not worth the paper it's printed on' comes from. So who's right?

Let's for the moment entertain the childish notion that God is real, and on that premise look around the world and ask which of the three Abrahamic religions clearly has the support of a loving, all-powerful god and is flourishing, well on the way to world domination. The only conclusion, based on evidence and reason, must be that God has deserted all three and is off making new galaxies, because clearly the hundreds of billions we can see just from our vantage point is still not enough. For several millennia now God has deliberately hid his very existence from humanity, the era of miracles and angels walking the Earth is long over, which all makes the universe appear as if it is naturalistic in origin, not divine, and that any and every event has a natural explanation, with no need to invoke supernatural forces. Think for a moment about how the world would appear if there were no God. Events would happen at random and by natural means, by cause and effect, with no one pulling invisible strings behind the scenes. Earthquakes would be caused by moving tectonic plates, not God; raffle results would be due to chance, not God; success in exams would be due to knowledge and effort, not God; a hot summer would be caused by atmospheric conditions, not God. And that's exactly how science has found that the world does work, it's not just that we don't see any evidence for God at work, there is no need for a god to push things along. We don't need God to create tornadoes and killer viruses and racist cops for us, given time the universe is perfectly capable of doing that, nor do we need to be given a moral code by God to understand it's wrong to kill people. For good and bad, we're on our own. The world seems to function and events unfold as if there isn't an invisible god helping a specific group of devout believers while punishing all the rest of us. It seems that waiting for God to help is as futile as waiting for Santa Claus to deliver your kid's presents at Xmas. In other words, no one can even show that God exists, let alone who he might favour were he real.

Don't believe us? Let's see how this plays out in the real world. Historically there have been many thousands of religions with untold gods shared among them, sometimes these gods were aware of each other, often they were not. Pick any religion and you'll likely find that the gods of that specific religion will claim to have created the universe and all life, and that they maintain power over literally everything, with some gods rewarding good behaviour and punishing bad, while other gods couldn't really care less what we do, they're too busy attending orgies and lavish feasts. But even though all these thousands of religions claimed to have gods with unimaginable powers supporting the growth of the civilisation they created, not one god managed to rule the world, not even a good portion it, even just ruling some little backwater was an ongoing struggle for most gods. Every attempt by some culture to expand their dominion eventually failed, even though they were backed by their gods. It seems that the gods, all the gods, were grossly exaggerating their powers, their abilities and their reach. Unable to back up their lofty promises, one after another thousands of gods simply faded from history; and disillusioned people, having not learnt their lesson, sought new more powerful gods. This brings us to the Jews, who like all groups before them had many tribal gods to choose from, but again they were not performing well. So the Jews went through an elimination process to weed out all the useless gods and concentrate all their efforts, prayers, rituals and sacrifices onto just one god that might lift their lowly status in the region. They eventually settled on El, a tribal war god, later to be referred to as Yahweh (and several other aliases), but now known to most simply as God. The Jews, being an insignificant tribe with little land to their name, settled on a war god as they wanted to improve their lot in life, and that meant robbing from the rich and giving it to the ... umm, fuck the poor, keeping it for themselves. And if untold towns and cities had to be razed to the ground and innocent men, women and children slaughtered, then so be. They had a war god supporting them so genocide would be child's play and always the first option. Soon the Jews were lording it over quite a bit of 'prime' desert real estate, and a lot of dead bodies. But that was just the beginning. God told the Jews they were his chosen people and, with his help, they were destined to rule the world as kings. So are they? Umm ... no. Just like today, Israel's ancient neighbours contested their presence in the region, eventually leading to those bloody Romans and their spat with an uppity Jewish carpenter, which led to the Jews being dispersed and hounded around the world for centuries, vilified and massacred by Christians and Muslims alike. Millions were murdered by the Nazis while God was busy doing other things, and even now, having being gifted Israel back again (by the bloody Christians no less) they're once again struggling to rule their little bit of desert. Reliving events from the distant past, they've been attacked by several countries in recent decades and have been under constant threat of further invasion and terrorism. The recent October 7th Palestinian terrorist attack by Hamas on Israel left over 1,200 people murdered and some 250 taken as hostages, putting Israel at war once again. Considering their history and current dilemma, if that's what happens when God tries to help the Jews take over the world, I don't think the rest of us have anything to fear from a secretive group of Jews conspiring in some darkened backroom. God's powers were clearly never much to begin with and have only degraded over time. Even in the Bible God says sorry, he can't defeat an army that has iron chariots, so clearly he would be quite useless up against a modern army.

Next up we have the Christians, or as they were first known, the Jews, but over the first few centuries the cult's original Jewish members were ousted and replaced with Gentiles, non-Jews. And to distance themselves from the cult's Jewish origins they now called themselves Christians, even changing their founder's Hebrew name from Yeshua to the Greek name Jesus. And to really drive the nail home, they declared the Jews their sworn enemy. Their rise to power began with cuddling up to the Romans in the 4th century CE (the very people that had killed their Lord and Saviour) and this collaboration quickly led to a thousand years of ignorance, what is sometimes referred to as the Dark Ages. Knowledge in science, philosophy, medicine, engineering, art, literature etc held by earlier civilisations like the Sumerians, Egyptians, Greeks and Romans was not only lost, much of it was deliberately destroyed as Christians believed it contradicted the Bible (and it did) and therefore offended God. It wasn't just a period of cultural stagnation, the parts of the world Christianity lorded over actually went backwards, for a couple of centuries even bathing was considered sinful. Of course some things did go forward, like war and conquest to expand God's dominion and harvest new souls in the name of Jesus, and things like inquisitions, crusades and the burning of witches to punish those who wouldn't fall in line with God's teachings, all controlled by the Catholic Church and run from the Vatican. For centuries the Catholic Church was essentially the only Christian group. Catholic actually means 'universal' and reflects their long held belief that it is their God-given mission to proclaim Jesus Christ to the entire human race (and if we ever get into space, to the entire universe). So how's that going for them? Not so good actually. After a thousand years of kneeling in prayer, they started fighting among themselves and split into Catholics and Protestants, and things just got worse from there. Today there are over 44,000 different Christian denominations in the world, meaning Christians can't even agree among themselves as to what the true Christian beliefs are, let alone present a unified argument to Jews, Muslims or atheists. And God is apparently refusing to get involved, not giving them any hints as to where the truth lies. The Christian grip on the world and many of its people started to wane following the Renaissance, then the Scientific Revolution, the Age of Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution and the recent information revolution. Each advance in science and reason saw Christianity (and religion in general) pushed further into the background. Today it doesn't matter how loud Christians pray to their god, they still get pummelled with tornadoes, struck down by cancer, slaughtered in terrorist attacks, drowned in floods, sexually abused by priests, shot in mass shootings, and blown up by IEDs while fighting wars against Muslims. The powerful influence Christians once had is long gone, the protection they believed their god provided has vanished, and their dream of converting the world to Christianity is no more. Their now feeble god has been incapable of preventing the collapse of their empire. In the battle of religion and faith versus science and reason, God has been a no show.

That brings us to the Muslims. Not to be outdone, they believe they (again with God's help), rather than the Jews or the Christians, are destined to rule the world, destined to create 'dar al-Islam', the 'house of submission'. Submission, that sounds nice doesn't it, a world where we've all lost our personal freedom and have been forced to submit to someone else's desires and wishes? But again, as with the Jews and Christians, has God fulfilled his promise and brought us to our knees? Centuries ago, between the 8th and the 16th, historians talk of the Islamic Golden Age, a period when Christian Europe was experiencing the so-called Dark Ages but where advances in scientific and philosophical thought in the Muslim world was phenomenal (driven largely by access to ancient Greek and Roman documents). One might attribute this to God's help, but the reality is that the secular intellect of Arabs (who just happened to be Muslim) brought about these advances, not God. But eventually Islamic religious thought, rather than rational thought, took control and the Muslim world plunged into its own Dark Ages, one it has yet to recover from. Again, just like the Jews and Christians, there is no evidence of God going over to the Muslims and leading them to world domination. They had a period of superiority, both intellectual and political, but even during this time of expansion they were almost constantly at war with Christians or civilisations that they wished to conquer, none of whom were keen to submit for some strange reason, and even God apparently couldn't make the heathens see reason. Then it all went down hill, after the 16th century not only did they lose their intellectual curiosity and retreat into primitive religious dogma, they also lost much of the territory they had conquered. Unfortunately for the world at large, while the Arab conquerors went into retreat, they left their fucking religion to infest the locals, meaning there are now more Muslims in the likes of Indonesia than in Saudi Arabia. Muslim countries in the Middle East languished far behind advances in other parts of the world, and the current wealth possessed by many of these countries today is only due to their sheer luck of sitting above huge oil deposits desired by the West. And while the elite in these countries may now be rich and powerful, their average Muslim citizen shares in very little of this new found prosperity, a glaring disparity they are all too well aware of. But rather than take their frustration and anger out on their leaders who are hogging all the wealth, a few radical fundamentalists are blaming the West for the fact that their country's leaders are driving Ferraris while they must do with a donkey. In the last 50 or so years this anger has made itself known through terrorist attacks on Western targets, each one taking more and more innocent lives. While these attacks do indeed foment terror, there is obviously no chance of Western nations submitting to Islam. Every terrorist attack usually results in just more Muslims being harmed and killed in retaliation. If God is helping Muslims then he has to be the worst military strategist in the universe.

So whether we're talking Jew, Christian or Muslim, history and the current state of the world clearly shows that all three are failing very badly on their world domination goal (or even the goal of spreading peace and love as some modern believers argue is what they're now trying to do). Writing the comment 'Needs to do better' on their respective report cards would be a gross understatement.

Clearly God's absence (not even a supportive phone call) is embarrassing for Jews, Muslims and Christians alike. They have no idea how God's support for their cause might manifest itself, and so they simply fall back on the childish belief that God works in mysterious ways, meaning that if good things happen, then God loves and supports them. If boring, mediocre things happen, then God loves and supports them. And if really, really bad things happen, then God loves and supports them. As bad as things might seem to be going, don't worry, it's all part of his plan to help them. When a Muslim sees his family killed by a missile he still cries, 'Allah Akbar' (God is Great), and when a Christian sees his family killed by a tornado, he still drops to his knees and cries, 'Thank you Jesus' and 'Praise the Lord'. And when a Jew sees his family slaughtered by Muslim terrorists, he likewise still believes God remains on his side. Each person consoles themselves with the view that it could have been worse, at least God saved them, even if he couldn't save their family. In other words, no matter what happens, good or bad, it happened because God loves and supports them, and only them. So this pathetic logic means that people that believe they have a loving, all-powerful god on their side will, thanks to their god, get to experience a life that has good, mediocre and bad elements, and this indeed appears to be true. But we also know for a fact that people that don't have a loving, all-powerful god on their side will also get to experience a life that has good, mediocre and bad elements. We know in fact that many of these godless people will have many more experiences that are good rather than bad, while many of those claiming to have God helping them will have many more bad experiences than good. What this shows is that even if God is real, and is doing his best to help, God-fearing people will still fare no better in life (and will often fare worse) than godless people, that good and bad things will apparently happen at random to everyone regardless of whether they have God in their corner or not. Having an invisible god on your payroll is apparently irrelevant in the real world, as useless as employing leprechauns and fairies. It's blatantly obvious that believing in God offers no real protection or guarantee that things will go well, since godless folk succeed in life just as often as God-fearing folk, in fact they're often more successful since they know success will only come from their efforts, meaning they don't sit around praying and waiting for God to bring them good fortune. When NZ had a mass shooting we banned assault rifles, but when the US has yet another mass shooting they merely send their thoughts and prayers out into the cosmos. The superstitious morons expect God to fix problems they created, which, as history clearly demonstrates, never happens.

Returning to the latest God vs. God battle, I'm sure Ukraine is as pissed off with Hamas as Israel is, as it's taken the spotlight off their war. Ukraine was mentioned last night on the TV news for the first time in weeks, and only because President Biden was making excuses about how US money was now probably going to support Israel instead. As for my opinion of the players in the Israeli-Hamas conflict (glad you asked), I think they are ignorant, superstitious, racist, barbaric, murdering cunts ... to put it mildly. And by 'they' I mean the fucking Muslim fundamentalists. Oh, and the fucking Jewish fundamentalists. And let's not forget the fucking Christian fundamentalists. While it in no way justifies their actions, the Muslims wouldn't have murdered innocent Jews if the Jews hadn't stolen their land to form modern Israel back in 1948, and the Jews wouldn't have needed to steal back their (stolen) land if the Christians and untold other more powerful civilisations hadn't invaded their land (continuing a tradition that was already centuries old, eg Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians, Greeks, Romans, Byzantine Christians, Arabs, Mongols, Ottomans, British Christians etc) and then chased, persecuted and killed them for centuries (supposedly for 'Killing our Lord'). Do you notice a pattern here that perhaps suggests the Jews are not God's chosen people after all, or if they are, God is not anywhere near powerful enough to defeat invading armies and deliver on his promise? Anyway, after feeling some niggling guilt due to the Nazi Holocaust (remember the Germans were Christians too) the Christians then supported the Jews in getting their land back, which according to their Bible, wasn't actually theirs to begin with. They had committed genocide and stole it. If the Jewish account in the Bible is true (spoiler alert, it's not), the Jews invaded Canaan (what their god called the Promised Land) and killed everyone to steal land on God's instructions and with his help. So not the good guys.

While it might sound like the Palestinians are the innocent party in all this, you are never the good guy when you're the one killing innocent young people at a music festival. Why did it come to this, why are radical Palestinians utterly unwilling to negotiate or coexist with radical Israelis? Clearly the real source of their hatred for each other is their opposing religious beliefs, where their god tells them not to tolerate each other. Had Palestinians not been Muslim I suspect that there might have been a much better chance that they would have found a way to live peacefully together decades ago. So if it's their Islamic belief that fuels this conflict, why not blame the Arabs? Palestinians are only Muslim because Muslim Arabs led by Muhammad's armies invaded Palestine (and untold other countries) centuries ago and forced everyone to convert to Islam on pain of death. But world domination didn't go as planned, and now Muslims view the world as split in two; 'dar al-Islam' (as I've said) which means 'house of submission', which generally refers to those countries under Muslim governments, under Muslim submission, and 'dar al-Harb' meaning 'house of war', which refers to countries not (yet) under Muslim rule. It's the duty of every Muslim to enlarge the 'house of submission', to bring other countries under Muslim domination. Of course many Muslims are living peacefully in non-Muslim countries (the 'house of war'), and this is permitted under the Muslim worldview. They are told that if they are not yet powerful enough to overthrow their suppressors then they should play nice and bide their time until their numbers grow, and then strike. Fundamentalist Muslims have no problem murdering innocent men, women and children since Mohammed gave them the Quran, God's holy instruction book, where in one verse God says:

'And kill them wherever you find them, and expel them from where they had expelled you. Oppression is more serious than murder. But do not fight them at the Sacred Mosque, unless they fight you there. If they fight you, then kill them. Such is the retribution of the disbelievers'. (Quran, 2:191)

And yes, with each atrocity and violent incident, no matter which side commits it, you can usually apportion blame onto the aggressor, but the aggressor will of course cite a previous injustice that they believe warranted retaliation. In isolation it's easy (and accurate) to blame Hamas for their cowardly slaughter of over 1,100 Israelis on October 7th, but they are quick to argue that the loss of their land and disgraceful treatment by the Israelis justified the attack. But did it really, did it have any chance of resolving their conflict with Israel, or did it just invite more death and suffering on both sides? Throughout history untold lands have been stolen and their inhabitants killed, enslaved or evicted, sometimes on the orders or backing of a god, sometimes not, but it's impossible to right the wrongs of the past. Many more injustices and hardships would be created were we to even try. Every habitable spot on the planet was once occupied by some other group of people, who had in turn displaced some other group, and were we to insist that each group must now return land they currently occupy to the descendants of the previous occupants from whom it was taken, and that the departing owners must return to the land of their ancestors and reclaim their lost lands, then everyone on the planet would have to retrace the migration steps of their ancestors, until everyone would find themselves crammed back into East Africa. And of course, as they retrace the past, most people would find that their ancestors didn't own any land at all, that they were serfs, peasants and slaves. The argument would now change from you doing the right thing and returning your ancestor's ill-gotten land, to you demanding justice from the descendant's of kings, emperors and chieftains that oppressed your landless ancestors, demanding that they provide compensation by giving up some of their land and wealth. Obviously, not least because we don't have good historical records, progressively returning land and wealth to those that unfairly lost it is quite impossible. Even for the few that could trace their ancestry, that maybe wouldn't mind giving up land in Texas because they get to go back and claim a grand estate in France, they would then find that they have to give that up and return to a mud hut in a poor village in Russia, and oh dear, it seems that land was taken from a hunter-gatherer tribe, so back to yet another land, and so it goes, until you find yourself back in Africa where human migration began tens of thousands of years ago. Again, the past is awash with injustices, and clearly we can't rectify any but the most very recent events. We are stuck in the present, so that is what we must deal with, it's no good lamenting about past mistakes, saying if only they had done this instead of that. They didn't, so get over it. They really fucked up by creating Israel inside Palestine, but that is the reality now, neither side is going to pack up and leave, so both Israelis and Palestinians need to find a way to share the land and live together in peace, rather than childishly thinking that their god will soon come down and utterly smite their enemy. Untold other countries (usually secular in nature) contain various communities with different beliefs and lifestyles and yet still manage to peacefully coexist. These countries practice tolerance and secularism, including their Jewish and Muslim communities, whereas Israel and Palestine actively want the other gone, and as long as they each believe that their god supports them in this, their animosity and battles will continue. Their ignorance and superstition will keep them fighting, each trying to expel the other. Until they recognise the other as human and not a filthy heathen deserving of death then their joint suffering will continue.

How can anything realistically change, why will the Israelis cease their retaliation when they see Palestinians screaming 'Death to all Jews' as they carry out terrorist attacks in order to bring about the destruction of Israel, or even just protesting with the chant 'From the river to the sea' (implying the expulsion of all Jews); equally why will Palestinians cease their struggle when they see Israeli settlers shooting Palestinian landowners or see Israeli bulldozers demolishing their houses to build apartments for Israelis, when they live in a land where they don't have real freedom, justice, equality or safety. Each atrocity and injustice will just inflame their hatred and harden their resolve that nothing will change until their enemy is vanquished and they alone occupy the land. And why will Christians (mainly Americans) cease their support of Israel if they naively believe that saving the Jews is a condition of them getting into heaven? Seriously, that's why Christians have gone from persecuting Jews for centuries to now suddenly funding them. They don't feel guilty about past persecution of the Jews, after all the bloody Jews still killed Jesus (actually, no they didn't, the Romans did, and then only according to the Bible, not according to history). Now many Christians simply believe the Jews must be saved before God will reward them, that it's a necessary step in the process, they believe Zionism is a fulfilment of Bible prophecy. For Christians to be saved the evil Jews must first reconcile with God, and that starts by getting them all together in one place, like a concentration camp ... or Israel. Assholes. No player in this ongoing bloody conflict comes across as taking the moral high ground, and by morals we mean ethics, not backward religious morals that vary from religion to religion and century to century, primitive codes of morality designed to benefit God not humans. No one is offering the olive branch of peace and reconciliation.

And it pisses me off that I haven't seen any Palestinians in Gaza condemning Hamas for their surprise terrorist attack, all their anger is directed at Israel as if Israel's invasion was unprovoked. There were no marches in Gaza by Palestinians in protest at what Hamas, their own government, did. Palestinians were silent about the slaughter until Israel hit back, then their anger was directed solely at Israel, still not at Hamas for starting the war. Seriously, what did Hamas think Israel would do? Publish a strongly worded post on Facebook demanding their citizens be returned? One of the ethical criteria for fighting a just war is that you must have a good chance of winning. It's not just about being in the right. If you deliberately thrust your country and it's citizens into a war against a vastly superior and likely unbeatable enemy that will devastate your country and kill huge numbers of your citizens with no conceivable chance of victory, then the war is not just and should be avoided at all costs. Killing your own citizens just to express your anger is not just mindless, it's borders on evil. Clearly Palestine and Israel have a major problem to resolve, but just as clearly, Hamas fighting a war with Israel is not the way to do it. Maybe Hamas has been, once again, horribly misled by one of their religious myths, that of David defeating Goliath, and believe God will help them too. Likewise you don't see many Israelis condemning their government for provoking the Palestinians, for continually and illegally evicting Palestinians from their own land and crowding them into Gaza, and acknowledging that of course they will be resentful and angry. As history shows, angry fundamentalist Muslims can only be poked so many times before resorting to terrorist attacks, so why aren't more Israelis pushing to make life better for Palestinians rather than worse? Nor do you see Christians condemning Israel's displacement of Palestinians or admitting that they created this mess in the first place by allowing Jews to enter Palestine and displace the local Palestinians, simply because Christians naively believe an invisible god gave the land to the Jews. They can't deny that ownership since that would mean doubting what the Bible says. And in any case, the Christians were happy to give a bit of desert they didn't want to the Jews, desert that wasn't occupied by anyone "important", plus it got the Zionist Jews out of their own countries. I guarantee if the Jews had said that England or France or Hawaii was their Promised Land then the United Nations wouldn't have been so compliant to the Jewish request. And how can the Jews be so gullible, especially now? They were told they were God's favourite, his chosen people, and he was giving them a land of milk and honey. And yet he hid Hawaii from them, and numerous other lands that easily rank much higher than a bloody desert. Don't they realise they were conned? That educated people (OK, still stupid but highly educated compared to millennia ago) can still believe these fairy tales is just pathetic.

And again, let's remember that Jews, Christians and Muslims all believe in the same god, and believe in the same people that God interacted with, like Adam and Eve, Noah, Moses, Abraham etc. No one can say their god is more believable than the one the other groups believe in because it's the same bloody god and the same silly origin stories, spread over three different holy books in three different languages (albeit with three different endings). Worse still is that they are so immersed in these fantasies, fantasies no more believable than the Tooth Fairy, the Easter Bunny or Harry Potter, that they are prepared to murder innocent men, women and children to keep on their god's good side. Think about it, no sane person would kill to get a small plot of desert in Israel, the Jews merely want that worthless land because they believe it was a gift — a crappy gift — from God. A sane person would opt to purchase a delightful property in Hawaii or France or NZ without having to kill anyone, and with no fear that the neighbours were plotting to kill them to get the land back. A sane person would conduct a land deal where all parties would be happy with the outcome, where no one was harmed, either physically, financially or legally, where reason and ethics informed the decisions, not the ancient commandments of a tribal war god. Why does a Jewish family sell a luxury apartment in New York and move to a dusty, walled compound in Israel, on land that Palestinians had to first be evicted from? The oft-heard answer is to be closer to their God, but does that make sense since we'd told God is everywhere? Perhaps it's simply to be closer to their past, the land of their ancestors, but considering what a troubled past the Jews have had, invaded and conquered again and again, deserted by their god in times of need, and even punished by their god, often unjustly, on numerous occasions. Why would you want to be reminded of all that, especially when the land you want to suffer in is already occupied by people that don't want to sell? I've been to Israel, walked the ancient walls of Jerusalem, floated in the Dead Sea, and admired the view from Masada, an ancient fortress in the Judean Desert. It's an interesting place to visit for the ancient history, the scorching deserts and the kebabs, but, given a choice, why anyone would want to live there is beyond me. When you add the real risk of being killed by a religious fanatic day or night, that your bus might suddenly explode, and of being frisked by armed guards on simply entering a store, I would quickly be moving back to the country from where I came, where the biggest religious threat would be annoying door-knocking Christian evangelists wanting to tell me about some long dead carpenter.

That the Israelis are prepared to displace and even kill Palestinians simply to reclaim some worthless desert, desert that was never theirs to begin with, is abhorrent, but it's equally abhorrent that Palestinians are prepared to kill Israelis merely to inflict suffering and terror and express their anger with no hope that things will improve, indeed their actions will almost certainly make things worse for untold innocent people. And it's disgusting that untold Christians, Jews and Muslims around the world will either remain silent, refusing to support or condemn any party, even though their silence does support their particular religious group (like when Catholics refuse to condemn or even admit that their priests are abusing children) or they stridently support their group and condemn their opponents (like how Muslims in many Muslim countries joyously danced in the streets when the 9/11 attacks happened, even though innocent Muslims were also killed). Many religious people are ashamed of what others in their religion have done in the service of their god, but are too afraid to speak out since they fear they will be seen to be criticising God, especially since the people they are silently critical of appear to be far more religious than they are. But since these people committing heinous acts hear no criticism of their actions then this just emboldens them, convinces them that their actions are justified in the eyes of their fellow (gutless) believers. How can Hamas be convinced that their actions were harmful in the extreme, not to mention fucking stupid, when the only people their fellow Palestinians are condemning are the Israelis? Their silence regarding the wisdom of Hamas' deadly terrorist attacks can only reassure Hamas that their people are behind them. In a world without gods rational Palestinians and rational Israelis would both condemn the actions of their respective governments, removing them from power, and would then work together to find a lasting peace.

But we don't live in a rational world, the majority of humans, even in these enlightened times, still believe in gods. These atrocities will continue as long as different groups believe a sky fairy is telling them who to persecute. Nothing will change until people ditch their barbaric superstitions and start treating their neighbours as fellow humans that deserve respect and compassion, not as vermin that need to be persecuted and killed. That this nonsense motivated the behaviour of people centuries ago is sad and depressing, that it still does so today is astounding, and depressing. As I've said before, 'I truly want to like people, but they're just so fucking stupid'.

UPDATE: 9 Oct 2024. As we feared, one year after the attack on Israel by Hamas the conflict has only escalated. To date over 42,000 Palestinians have been killed and more than 97,000 wounded. Some of the missing hostages have been killed, 117 have been freed but nearly 100 hostages are still being held by Hamas. Gaza has been decimated by the fighting between the IDF (Israel Defense Forces) and Hamas, with Israeli soldiers having a clear military advantage over the Hamas fighters, and yet Hamas shows no willingness to withdraw and cease the fighting, let alone surrender. The carnage and the destruction is almost totally one-sided, inflicted not just on Hamas fighters but on Palestinian civilians and their communities. Hamas seems quite willing to sacrifice Gaza and its citizens to prove a point, that they are somewhat peeved with Israel. As we've already said, we find it quite evil that they choose to continue a war that is inflicting such suffering on their people, a war that they have, barring their god stepping in to help, no chance of winning. Each day just brings more suffering with no end in sight, and they don't seem to care. Worse still, the conflict has expanded to include other Muslim countries in the region. Hundreds of missiles have been fired at Israel by Yemen's Houthi rebels, hundreds more by Iran, and over 10,000 rockets fired from Lebanon by Hezbollah, all supporters of Hamas. These attacks have seen a military response by Israel, resulting in mounting death tolls in those countries while the missile attacks on Israel have caused very few deaths or little damage.

It seems that Hamas and its supporters have no problem with suffering immense losses, or having their actions inflict even far greater losses on their civilian population, all in order to try and drive Israel from the region, which is surely quite futile, as numerous losses should have taught them by now. If they realise this and merely want to give Israel a bloody nose and teach it a lesson, this again is just inviting disaster, since starting a fight just to give an opponent a bloody nose is quite stupid if in retaliation you know your opponent will then kill you. It doesn't matter if you think you are in the right, you, meaning tens of thousands of the people you claim you're trying to help, will be dead, and many more will be wounded and homeless. What will it take for these ignorant, superstitious, fundamentalist fuckwits to realise that donning a suicide vest and running at an enemy in a concrete bunker will not improve their life or the lives of their family? And no, they won't now be in heaven raping their promised 72 virgins, they will be quite dead, and even if that disgusting fairy tale were true, their family has lost their breadwinner and their children a father, and in their deeply patriarchal society this would essentially make life for their family far more dire, not better. This is not just a senseless and deadly feud that has been going on for centuries, it's far worse since it's not fought between equal combatants, so it's long past the time when the much weaker combatant should have realised that his side is taking most of the losses and is never going to win, that it's time to quit feuding and start working towards a lasting peace. But no, each time Hamas (and it's supporters like Hezbollah and Iran) suffer catastrophic losses and when one would like to think that Israel might be seriously considering ending their strikes which are becoming ever more deadly, thinking that surely now their enemy has finally learnt their lesson, that you shouldn't go into a cave and poke the bear, but against all reason Hamas and their allies just double down and fire more missiles, implying that they still have many more martyrs happy to die for their (lost) cause. It's vicious tit for tat, the feud is perpetuated, the fools would rather destroy their country and kill their citizens than consider living next door to the Jewish infidels. Better to be dead in heaven than alive with a Jew for a neighbour. That's true religion for you, it allows you to commit atrocities on Earth because you still have heaven to fall back on should things go badly wrong.

One thing that suggests that peace (or more accurately, a reluctant ceasefire) is still a long way off is that we continually see very angry Palestinian citizens on the TV news asking why countries like the US and Britain continue to support Israel by giving them weapons and funds. Why do these countries keep supporting a war that is causing so must suffering they ask, have they no morals or sense of what is right? However at the same time these same Palestinians refuse to condemn or ask why countries like Iran, Lebanon and Yemen and their Hezbollah and Houthi groups continue to not only support Hamas by giving them weapons and funds, but are actually entering the fight. Where do Palestinian civilians think their Hamas government is getting their AK47 assault rifles, ammunition and missiles from? While their Apple iPhone stores and local falafel takeaway have all been destroyed, are their local 'Guns R Us' outlets still doing a roaring trade? If Hamas didn't have outsiders giving them weapons, just like Israel, then the war likely would never have happened, or at the very least would have been over very quickly without the huge loss of life. It's sheer hypocrisy and wilful ignorance to maintain that your enemy should not be allowed to have allies but your side can have allies. That the US is being immoral for its support, but Iran is simply being a good friend for its help. If they condemn the US for it's support of Israel then they should equally condemn Iran for its support of Hamas. Just as the US would like to see that Israel remains a stable force in the region, Iran would like to see Israel disappear and be returned to the Palestinians, or more precisely, to fellow Muslims. So do they not realise that the likes of the US must continue its support because it knows that Iran will continue its support?

Another thing that angry Palestinian (and now also Lebanese and Iranian) citizens continually ask is why are Israeli soldiers attacking their community, can't they see that we are just civilians, there are no terrorists here? Of course the obvious response is, then who is shooting at the Israeli soldiers, who is forcing them to take cover and to engage in running gun battles and to call in air support? Where are the missiles coming from? Are we expected to believe that Hamas fighters can prepare to battle the Israelis and the local civilians won't notice their presence, won't notice the AK47s and RPGs and boxes of ammo? Won't even notice the much larger rockets, missiles and drones being moved, stored and then fired from their neighbour's backyard? Won't notice the tunnels being dug in local buildings and armed fighters coming and going from them? When Israeli soldiers uncover caches of weapons hidden in hospitals and schools, shocked workers exclaim, 'Wow ... I wonder how they got there!' It's hard to believe that a war could be going on under their very noses and the only combatants the Palestinian civilians ever claim to see are the enemy combatants, with the Hamas fighters moving unseen, like shadowy ninjas. The fighting in this war is so ferocious and ongoing because clearly Hamas (and the Hezbollah and Houthi groups) are putting up more than just token resistance, and you can't challenge a formidable force like the Israeli military in community after community without the local citizens knowing their own fighters are there. Clearly many people in every community in Gaza will know who the Hamas fighters are, where they are hiding and are supportive. On last night's TV news Israel announced it soldiers were returning to some suburbs where Hamas had been forced to flee from, but now Hamas was back and mounting a new offensive, and yet no Palestinian civilian complained, 'Oh come on ... your last battle destroyed everything and we're trying to rebuild and now you guys come back to have another go at the Israelis?' Instead they plead ignorance, insisting that Hamas hasn't returned, if it was ever there. Hell, it's probably just Israeli soldiers pretending to shoot at each other to make it look like Hamas is back. We can understand that Muslims will blindly back other Muslims, just as Jews support other Jews in their struggle and Christians back Christians against atheists, but for tearful Palestinians to say they have no idea why Israeli soldiers are carefully going door to door with guns, that no one there means them harm is something we struggle to accept. Clearly ordinary Palestinians are far more supportive of the actions of Hamas than not, just as the governments in Iran, Lebanon and Yemen and the majority of their citizens are supportive of the Hezbollah and Houthi groups that freely operate in their communities, which suggests that they are all still a long way from thinking that maybe it's time for this supernatural feud to end. They should stop playing the sympathy card and acting all innocent, they are all more than happy for the fighting and animosity to continue, at least until they win. But gods are immortal, so the senseless wars fought by foolish people in their name will be everlasting.

Posted by the 'Silly Beliefs' Team, 16 Dec, 2023 ~ Add a Comment    Send to a Friend

Comments:

1. Comment by Norman, 20 Oct, 2024

   HUMAN INTELLIGENCE ... WHAT???

   Haven't we discovered that the sun created our Solar System, including our planet, and that all humans came from Africa? As we evolved our skin and eye colors changed due to environmental exposure over the millennium. We have made wonderful progress in many ways due to a comparatively small percentage of the intelligent individuals discovering all this through the ages. But progress has been hampered drastically by those three terrible poisons of the Christians, Jews and Muslims.

   Humans are of many colors and we have long referred to ourselves "as the most intelligent species on the planet!" But when you look at the current global situation with all the thousands of deaths and dreadful destruction going on right at this moment, with the main civilized(?) country supplying 17.9 billion dollars worth of arms and munitions that is being used for these terrible crimes, with not the slightest effort to call a meeting of the warring parties to try to resolve and end this dreadful carnage, this Human behavior appears to be anything but intelligent!!! We all have two legs, arms, hands, ears and eyes, and walk upright. We have 10 toes and fingers and one head, but this is where the serious trouble arises, with the three main types of that superstition and bull shit poison that was forced into the grey matter that is between those ears during the last couple of thousand years, and the victims have paid a fortune over all this time to encourage this to happen as well. "Loving thy Neighbor, and thou shalt not kill" ... indeed!

   And even with all this past slaughter, our global population has exploded hugely in my lifetime, consuming vast quantities of coal, oil and other minerals and plundering the oceans, as well as the deforestation of millions of square kilometres of primeval forests and the increasing extinction of many species that have done nothing at all to deserve their demise. This is referred to as growing the "Economy"? At a fearful cost to our Planet, and now we are beginning to experience all the unknown repercussions that lie ahead. I'm very fearful of what lies not very far ahead for the innocent little children I see about me, with the big Climate Change 'Pendulum' gathering frightening momentum as it swings with gaining speed into the "death for all" zone. There is not the slightest concern coming from those three brands with their dreadful poison as they fire billions of dollars of death and destruction at each other, the Jews assisted by the $17.9 billion of US military aid! And they are just one country getting military aid from the US ... Intelligent Humans! Yeah right!

   Each time Netanyahu has been in power, there has been greatly increased tensions due to his actions in the 'Occupied Territories' of Gaza and to hear him crowing that he has/is defeating Hamas is amazing. What he caused and has done subsequently has only fed massively into the hatred of the Jews by not only the Palestinians, but many of the neighboring Arab Nations as well. He has already stated he wants his forces to have a continued presence in the West Bank from now on, and this will go down like a lead brick too. "Humans are the most Intelligent Species on the Planet?" ... Yeah! Right!!! There is a picture of the Earth on the net with a very pained expression and the caption: "What is the trouble?", with the answer ... "Humans!" Those words give the correct explanation that only a small number of us are heeding.

2. Comment by the 'Silly Beliefs' Team, 20 Oct, 2024

   Hi Norman. Well, you won't get an argument from us. You may have seen the sci-fi movie 'Independence Day' (1996), where all the countries of Earth unite as one to battle invading aliens. I loved the sentiment that this attack would finally make us realise that we were all human and our perceived differences were only superficial at best, like skin colour, and really stupid at worst, that different religions each believed that (an invisible) God created them as his favourite (and no one told the aliens). That said, it was just a movie, a Hollywood fantasy, and I'm not convinced that even a real extraterrestrial threat, be it aliens or a comet, would unite humanity. And even Hollywood agrees. For every movie where humanity unites against a common threat, there are a dozen more where opposing groups fight each other as the world burns, preferring to live alone in a dangerous wasteland of their making than in a safe and comfortable community ... with heathens. The recent worldwide pandemic saw some admirable cooperation between intellectuals in various countries, eg scientists, but it also saw the level of distrust between some countries rise and even violent conflict within countries, with citizens attacking citizens. Rather than unite against a common threat, divisions and distrust increased, especially around the effectiveness of quarantines, masks and vaccines. Worse still, we know for a fact that there is a considerable number of Christian fundamentalists, especially in the US, that are eagerly awaiting the violent end of the world, hoping that it will happen in their lifetime, and not only wouldn't they lift a finger to stop it, they would happily hasten it if they could. Likewise there are many Muslim fundamentalists that are more than happy to die as martyrs to get their 72 virgins. Uniting with the heathens, no matter the threat to the planet, would only see them go to Hell, so no, there will be no uniting of humanity. Not even against zombies. Like you say, it's bloody religion that stops us from working together. Arguing about an invisible sky fairy while the world burns.

This post is a follow-up to an earlier post, 'Suicide, souls and Xmas toys', where we responded to a question from Ben as to how, as atheists, we view suicide and its impact on the soul. Ben has since replied, and we're going to use that brief reply as a springboard to look a little deeper into the quite typical comments that all Christians make, without, in our view, really thinking too much about what it might mean, you know, if Heaven and Hell were actually real and souls went there to die.

We're going to pick apart some of the comments because we've discovered over the years and many discussions that while two debaters may not waver in their views, those listening to, or in this case reading, the arguments for and against may indeed be swayed in their view, since they are often not strongly committed to either side and can sometimes be persuaded to go where the evidence leads. So this is for the fence-sitters out there, that should they fall off the fence, would prefer to fall on the side of reason.

So first, here is the reply we received to 'Suicide, souls and Xmas toys':

An interesting response but one that was much expected.

To give my question some context; I have thought long and often about killing my self but I have a strong belief in God and an afterlife, although I have no idea of the form. This belief has stopped me since I also believe that one cannot walk away from one's troubles on this earth; they follow you and you still have to endure them.

How I envy your certainty that the concept of God etc, is nonsense. It would make my decision so easy. But for better or worse I am stuck with my faith and cannot shake it off. Perhaps atheists are the lucky ones. You can do as you wish and never have the need for feelings of guilt.

Cheers

Ben

Hi Ben. Thanks for your honest reply, and I guess, your continuing faith was also much expected.

I think it's obvious that neither of us are going to sway the other, you suggest as much when you say you're stuck with your faith, with a 'strong belief in God' that you 'cannot shake', and we've said that only strong evidence and robust arguments will cause us to doubt our atheism, something that no true believer over the years has ever produced. We should agree to amicably disagree. However your brief comments about the nature of God and the afterlife are quite typical of untold Christians in that, while honest, inoffensive and noncontroversial, they actually reveal nothing about God and the afterlife. All they seem to say is, 'I believe ... but don't ask me why'. So using your comments, we'll consider whether this belief sans reasons, held by Christians everywhere, is reasonable. But first we'll look at your observation about suicide and atheists.

We agree entirely when you say that, 'Perhaps atheists are the lucky ones. You can do as you wish and never have the need for feelings of guilt'. Some Christian friends and colleagues have expressed this sentiment, saying that they wish they could act as I do, treating death as rationally and dispassionately as I do, since even though in most things in life they act more like atheists than Christians, they still can't help but harbour this fear that God will torture them in Hell should they wander too far from the path he has signposted. Masturbation is one thing, but suicide is out of the question. So yes, we can do as we wish, but so can you, it's called free will, something we're told God gave everyone, even Christians. You can do as you wish, you simply choose not to because you fear the consequences, that eternity of torture. But even for atheists there are consequences with suicide, not for us personally because we are dead, but experienced by those we leave behind. Being dead we won't suffer any guilt, but prior to our death we could suffer considerable stress, anxiety and regret knowing that we won't be able to control what happens to family and friends impacted by our death or what happens to our assets. We wrote the following in a previous post but it bears repeating. You've no doubt heard that in one fantasy world a wooden stake driven through the heart is the way to stop vampires, but long before it was used on them it was employed by Christians in the real world for those who committed suicide. Justin Pollard writes in his book, 'The Interesting Bits: The History You Might Have Missed' that:

'The Christian view of suicide as a crime against the self dates back to at least St Augustine of Hippo but the rather harsh treatment of suicides in Britain goes right back to the Anglo-Saxon period ... Those who had ... killed themselves ... were guilty of a felo de se — a crime against the self, or self murder — and this deserved punishment. Obviously it's quite difficult to punish someone who's dead but you could punish their family, desecrate their memory and, assuming they were Christian, destroy their hopes of salvation. Those found guilty of felo de se were to have an ignominious burial. Their bodies were often dragged through the town and then buried without Christian rites in an unconsecrated place, usually a rural crossroads. For good measure a stake was then driven through their hearts ... Things were pretty bad for the family of the suicide as well. They were still around, and therefore could be punished. So they were. Someone guilty of a felo de se could have their entire estate confiscated and handed to the Crown, effectively disinheriting any heir'.

You may think that in the 21st century such injustices no longer happen, but even now many families feel shamed by a suicide and hide them, claiming it was an accident or natural causes. Even now the Christian Church still describes a suicide as a sinful person on his or her way to Hell. The media seldom acknowledge a suicide and often say a death was 'sudden' or 'unexpected', which can mean much more than suicide. Even with legal wills and better inheritance laws today there is still no guarantee that our estate will be distributed as we wish and our other instructions followed. Families of the deceased give them religious funerals that they categorically stated they didn't want, they bury them in places they didn't want to be, and they hire lawyers to fight to gain assets the deceased didn't want them to have. I know friends and family that have experienced all these things, where promises were made to the dying and then completely ignored following a death. So while we atheists certainly don't have to worry about being tortured by God were we to consider suicide, we would still have a lot of other stressful concerns to worry about. Even when to commit suicide would be a huge problem for many. Current NZ voluntary euthanasia laws exclude most people that would seek it, meaning they are forced to commit suicide, forced to opt for a painful and violent end because they are denied a peaceful one, and worse still, they are forced to commit suicide when they are still physically able to do so, meaning they are ending their life when life still has some meaning, rather than at a later time when life has become pure agony and they are incapacitated. We even know of doctors who say they would refuse to abide by their dying patients wishes as set out in a 'Living Will' or 'Advance Directive' where they categorically say they don't want life-extending treatments. They don't want to be kept 'alive' in a coma for months or years just because the hospital has fancy machines or because religious family members or doctors won't pull the plug. Suicide can be forced on us if we fear that we can't trust our doctors or family members to follow our wishes when an agonising illness befalls us, when they treat us the way they would wish to be treated and not as we asked to be treated. So yes, we atheists can do as we wish with no fear of God intruding into our deliberations, but it still isn't smooth sailing.

To explain why no suicide victim need ever fear experiencing feelings of guilt, or Christian need ever fear Hell, we love this quotation from the Greek philosopher Epicurus (341-270 BCE):

'Why should I fear death?
If I am, then death is not.
If death is, then I am not.
Why should I fear that which cannot exist when I do?'

OK Ben, while you and I are of course discussing suicide, we want to digress for a moment as some of our readers might interpret the statement that we atheists can do as we wish with no thought of guilt in a much wider sense in the disingenuous way that many Christians do. We're speaking of those that claim that since atheists don't believe in God we likewise don't have to obey his moral laws as set down in the Bible, and that makes us not amoral but immoral for some reason, meaning we are not just free to murder, rape and pillage, but we desperately want to do these things. We atheists can commit whatever atrocities we wish with no fear that God will punish us. This is what many Christians think atheists will do since we are not controlled by God's guidelines on right and wrong. We can do as we wish with no feelings of guilt or remorse since there is no right and wrong, there are just actions we want to do because they are pleasurable and actions we don't because they bring us no benefit. It's all about us. We've even encountered Christians who feared they would turn into such monsters should they ever lose their faith, meaning they were unwilling to listen to our arguments against God lest we succeeded in convincing them. Of course it should be obvious (but surprisingly it isn't to those that make this claim) that atheists are not immoral hordes ravaging the planet. Prisons are actually largely full of Christians. As we've said, there will always be consequences to our actions, even for atheists, and if we were to harm people we would indeed feel guilt, because we're humans not toasters, so to avoid feeling terrible we don't harm others. Of course we're sure some atheists are real assholes, as are many Christians (again, the prison population) but the great majority of atheists can simply do good because we feel that it's the right thing to do, both for our own well-being and that of others. When we see someone being harmed we don't have to consult the Bible to see how God wants us to behave, we don't need supernatural guidance in order to do the right thing. Were we to see someone drowning we would attempt a rescue, and we wouldn't stop were we to suddenly realise the drowning person was a local homosexual, because you know, God hates homosexuals, and would surely punish us for saving such an abomination. We would do what we wanted to do, what we thought was right, which would be to save a life, even though God might be silently screaming at us to let him drown. We atheists can indeed do as we wish, we could ignore a drowning man's cries, but the consequence of that for most atheists would be a lifetime of extreme guilt. While we don't have a soul, we atheists do have a conscience, we can feel guilt and shame, and while we can indeed do as we wish due to free will, our actions are constrained by what we feel is the right thing to do, what ethics tell us is the right thing to do, and what the law tells us we must do. So in reality we atheists are nowhere near as free to murder, rape and pillage as Christians claim. Christians have their fear of God's wrath to keep them honest, we atheists have our conscience and an ability to reason. It actually worries us to hear Christians claim they are good and moral, far more so than atheists, but were they to lose their faith they sincerely believe they would immediately start killing and raping. They're like a vicious attack dog held back by God's frayed leash, and should it break ... well it truly concerns us that Christians believe they would rip into their own children, that their humanity, which easily moderates the behaviour of atheists, wouldn't have a hope of holding them back. And for any Christian who argues that were they to lose their faith they are convinced they would still be decent, loving and moral, then what need is there for God and his list of morals if a secular alternative produces a good life, arguably a far better life, because it allows more pleasures, grants more rights and equality, and is achieved without the threat of violence?

You remark that, 'I am stuck with my faith and cannot shake it off'. However we'd would argue that is not true, in that you have already shaken off much of the true Christian faith. The early Christian Fathers and all the Christians of the intervening centuries would consider you, and the modern Christian Church, to be far closer to heathens than true Christians. They firmly believed that the world was created some 6,000 years ago, the most famous claim was made by Bishop Ussher who calculated creation happened on Oct 22nd, 4004 BCE. They believed the first humans were Adam and Eve who had an encounter with a talking serpent which resulted in their expulsion from the Garden of Eden, and that their children had sex with each other and populated the Earth. They believed early man built the Tower of Babel that almost reached God's driveway before God destroyed it. They believed seven representatives of all the clean animals on Earth (and two of the dirty ones), from penguins in Antarctica and dinosaurs in Nevada to the sloth in South America and the flightless kiwi in NZ all walked, swam or flew to the Middle East. There they obediently boarded Noah's ark for a year long cruise just before God flooded the entire Earth, murdering every human except Noah's family, and of course slaughtering all the innocent animals too. They believed the world was flat, and that the stars were just above the clouds. They believed angels strummed harps on those clouds and that deep below their feet were the burning pits of Hell. They believed the Sun went around the Earth. They believed slavery was approved of and regulated by God. They believed women were merely the property of men, little different from livestock, and could be beaten, sold or traded, as in marriage. They believed male homosexuals were an abomination that should be killed. They believed children that rebelled or spoke back to their parents should be killed. They believed children must respect their parents even if they abused them (it's one of the Ten Commandments). They believed rape victims, if they weren't stoned to death, should marry their rapists. They believed witches should be burned alive, after being tortured. They believed atheists should be killed. They believed in persecuting the Jews, ie killing them. They believed women shouldn't be given pain killers to dull the pain of childbirth because the pain was considered God's punishment for Eve's sin. They believed contraception, divorce, abortion, euthanasia, suicide and sex outside marriage were sins and made them illegal. They believed that even masturbation was a sin deserving of torture in Hell. They believed children could and should be beaten if they were disobedient, and that people of colour were subhuman and could be treated as such. They believed it was their duty to conquer other lands and forcibly convert their inhabitants to Christianity. They believed Jesus said they should kill those that weren't prepared to accept him as their king (and he did say that, according to the Bible). And on and on it goes.

Considering what has passed as the true Christian faith since its very origin two millennia ago and what you sincerely had to believe to be considered faithful, we suspect you have rejected most of the above, barring of course euthanasia and suicide and ... maybe eating shellfish. How can you seriously say you can't shake your faith in God when you have clearly rejected as nonsense much of what the Bible says about God? You say that, 'I have a strong belief in God and an afterlife, although I have no idea of the form'. Might it be that you 'have no idea of the form' because you have dismissed the descriptions of God and the afterlife detailed in the Bible after they were exposed as primitive, superstitious nonsense by modern knowledge? We've been above the clouds, even to the outer reaches of the solar system, and Heaven, with its streets of gold, somehow remains just out of sight, like that elusive pot of gold at the end of every rainbow. And why would Heaven have streets of gold and pearly gates and yet no mention of free WiFi? Clearly that was a vision imagined by primitive humans who dreamed of the obscene wealth of kings. If Christians wrote the Bible today, there'd be no mention of streets of gold and pearly gates, the luxuries a well-provisioned Heaven would have would be radically different, it would be all swimming pools, pizza parlours, penthouse apartments, chauffeured limousines and free Netflix. If gold is mentioned it would be gold fixtures in the bathroom and toilet (like in Donald Trump's pad). The same flaw, that primitive cultures can only write about the primitive stuff they know of, can be seen in the Book of Revelation, the last book of the Bible, where at the rapture or 'end times' God commands two horsemen called Death and Hell to begin the slaughter of all us atheists: 'And power was given unto them ... to kill with sword' (Revelation 6:8). Warriors on horseback, with swords. Why aren't they at least in fighter jets armed with nukes? And the four horsemen of the apocalypse will follow them to slay yet more unbelievers, and they will lead an army of 200 million horsemen. It's believed that God will unleash the largest army the world has ever seen because the first Christians living in ancient Roman and Greek society had no comprehension of technology more advanced than horses and swords, so they imagined God's warriors would also only have horses and swords, and that it would require a huge army, they couldn't imagine God sending out a fleet of automated killer drones. The Bible stories might have seemed amazing two thousand years ago but today they are quite laughable, and quite disturbing for someone promoting himself as a loving god.

We believe that all Christians, not just you, 'have no idea of the form' of God because all the arguments for gods have been conclusively challenged in the last century or so. The reasons people gave for millennia to support their faith have evaporated, theologians are now floundering, just as the ancient followers of Zeus and Osiris and Thor must have been forced to reconsider their beliefs and move on to new ideas about the world. Saying you have 'a strong belief in God ... although ... no idea of the form' is to me like saying you have no informed reason to believe, meaning no evidence or arguments to support such a belief, that you believe without reason, even against reason, that you believe solely on faith. Like most religious people you no doubt see this as a respectable way to view the world, but do you respect others as you expect them to respect you? By this we don't mean others Christians, we mean do you look at the claims made by, say, Muslims and Hindus, and sincerely acknowledge that Muslims have good reason to believe Allah exists and the same with Hindus and Shiva? Or do you think they are misguided to believe in gods for which they can produce no evidence of their existence, and that they are deluded to think the rest of us will just accept their unfounded claims on their word alone? Their faith may be sincere, handed down from father to son, but I suspect you find it lacking. If you didn't find a Muslim's arguments lacking then wouldn't you have converted to Islam? You must surely question their insistence on holding onto a belief, without evidence, without reason, on blind faith alone? As do we. If you would question a Muslim's faith, not his right to hold it, but its truthfulness, why won't you question your own faith?

Think of what Christianity and the world knows about God, his origin, his powers, his appearance, his creation of the universe and life, his rape of a virgin and the murder of his son, it all comes in its entirety from the Bible. There are no other sources of information about God. None. Sure some people say they see God's fingerprints in the world itself, in beautiful sunsets, in a baby's smile and the Ebola virus, and others say that God has spoken to them, helped them find their car keys, or cured them of a bad hangover, but then Jews, Muslims, Hindus and also followers of the ancient Egyptian, Sumerian, Greek and Roman religions have all insisted that the gods spoke to them too, so clearly those sorts of claims must be rejected as delusional. So everything we know about God comes from the Bible, nowhere else, but if much of what the Bible claims is clearly bogus when examined through the lens of science, history and ethics, then all we have left are some stories about some ancient humans in the Middle East struggling to make sense of the world, and in modern terms regarding ethics and justice, failing more often than not. At best all we can believe from the Bible stories is that various human cultures interacted, often violently over whose invisible god was the most powerful. Many of the stories about the history of the time, while sounding plausible, are still false, like camels didn't exist in Egypt when the Bible said they did, and their view of science was atrocious, like where it states that hail and snow is kept in storehouses, that the sea is held back by doors and bars, that the world rests on pillars and cannot move. And bats are actually birds. Right from Genesis, the very first book of the Bible, God's explanations are already full of holes, like when 'God said, "Let there be light," and there was light' on the first day of his six-day creation project. But then on the fourth day 'God said, "Let there be lights in the vault of the sky to separate the day from the night ..." And it was so. God made two great lights — the greater light to govern the day and the lesser light to govern the night', ie the sun and the moon. How could there be light on the first day when God didn't make the sun until the fourth day? Clearly the Bible writers didn't fully understand that light comes from the sun, and that the moon isn't a light at all, it merely reflects sunlight. No doubt Christians will blame these embarrassing errors on flawed humans misinterpreting God's words, but let's note that the Bible is riddled with errors and being all-knowing, God was well aware of every error that showed him in a bad light, but still couldn't be bothered to correct a single one; no revised and updated edition of the Bible was ever produced. But if many of the stories about how ancient humans understood the world read like the work of ignorant children, the stories about gods and demons, and especially God and his son, read like something Steven King would have written, the author of horror, supernatural fiction, crime and fantasy novels. If read as a fantasy and a horror they might work for some, but if read as a scientific and historical account of the origin of the universe and life, then they're about as believable as the amusing stories of SpongeBob SquarePants and his world in Bikini Bottom.

You yourself have said that you don't believe many of the claims made in the Bible, meaning you don't believe in its reliability. So if its clearly factually unreliable, especially in its fantastical claims, how can you believe its core claim is true, that an all-powerful, all-knowing, all-loving God exists, when that is the most fantastical claim of all, and therefore logically the most unreliable claim of all? How can you believe that a god that can do anything, big or small, good or bad, exists, but then say he couldn't have done certain things mentioned in the Bible? That's like believing that witches and magic are real but insisting that they can't fly on broomsticks. Surely if magic is real and untold stories throughout history have them riding on broomsticks that means that witches can likely fly on broomsticks. If the god of the Bible is real then nothing mentioned in the Bible is impossible for him, but if you start dismissing various events in the Bible attributed to God then you are clearly doubting the reality of God, you are downgrading God, eventually to a point where he vanishes, or at least changes from God to just a god, and a minor, petty god at that. And again, that is how he is described in several Bible passages, as just one minor god competing for a seat at the table.

You say that you envy our 'certainty that the concept of God etc, is nonsense'. We wouldn't say certainty exactly, not in the way that many Christians say they are certain God exists (and has a barbeque with our name on it, ready to roast us), and that nothing could make them change their mind (unlike us). We'd say we have a very high confidence that gods don't exist, in the same way that we are very confident that the Earth is a sphere, that bacteria cause disease and not evil spirits, that planes can fly, that Stonehenge is real, that gremlins don't exist, that astrology doesn't work, that Julius Caesar was real but King Arthur wasn't, and that aliens did not build the pyramids. Our extreme confidence arises from the robust evidence and arguments that support these views, but we also acknowledge that if stronger contradictory evidence was to surface we would revise our viewpoint and accept the new reality. We're not 100% certain that gods don't exist, we certainly can't prove it, we simply believe that all the available evidence strongly suggests that gods aren't real. To us it seems foolish to believe something that is contrary to the evidence. A phrase I saw years ago and adopted was, I see no evidence for gods or need for gods, by which we mean we see nothing in the world that has the stamp of a god on it, not even toast with the burnt face of Jesus (especially since no one knows what Jesus looked like). Furthermore, history has shown that everything in the world has or is likely to have a natural explanation. There is nothing for which we need a god or else it couldn't exist, not even the universe. Unlike the primitive past when they were invented, gods, like leprechauns and gremlins, are clearly superfluous to our modern needs. For the sake of simplicity and brevity our confidence does extend to often saying that gods aren't real, they don't exist, but we say this in the same sense that adults say Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy aren't real. Again, we can't prove gods or Santa aren't real, but the evidence overwhelmingly suggests they are not, and indeed untold physical laws would have to be broken for them to be real. The probability that Santa is not real is so high that people would laugh if we called ourselves agnostic about Santa's existence, and we believe the same applies to gods, the evidence against their existence is so high it is silly to pretend there is any doubt in our minds, they are so close to being impossible, certainly the Christian god, that they might as well be impossible. And the world largely agrees with us on this. All adults look at Santa and say, nope, not real. No one hedges their bets. All Christians look at Allah and Shiva and Apollo and say, nope, definitely not real. All Hindus look at Yahweh and Maui and Ra and say, nope, not real, and all Jews look at Jesus Christ and Quetzalcoatl and Odin and say, nope, definitely not real. This is no different to atheists looking at all those gods and saying, nope, not real. The process is identical, we all look at the evidence and arguments put forward by the true believers and we all see the flaws. The main difference between the way atheists and believers approach these different claims is that atheists use evidence and reason to determine the likely truth, whereas true believers aren't looking for the truth, they are convinced they already know it, they instead use evidence and reason to expose other beliefs as badly flawed, but they refuse to subject their own belief to the same scrutiny, they refuse to ask whether evidence and reason supports belief in their god, preferring instead to base their belief on faith. They demand (and rightly so) that other religions (and science) must front up with evidence, rejecting mere faith, but they then provide no evidence and fall back on faith when they argue their god is the only real god. Resorting to faith is like admitting that you've been down the evidence path desperately looking for some but couldn't find any, so you're now backed into a dark corner pleading that people just accept your word that your invisible god, that even you haven't seen, is actually real.

How can Christians be so convinced that a fantastical being that is deliberately hiding its existence from everyone is actually real, especially when they'd surely roll their eyes and say to Muslims and Hindus, 'Oh come on ... you expect me to believe that your invisible god is real and created the universe? Come back with some proof and then we'll talk'. When Christians say this our stunned response is always to ask: How can you say that you don't for a moment believe their nonsense but they should believe yours, even though both rest on the same empty arguments?

Let's go back to when you said, 'I have a strong belief in ... an afterlife, although I have no idea of the form'. It amazes us that people can have a strong belief in something that no one has ever seen, and at the same time admit they have no idea how it might work, or even if it's possible. Of course for Christians an afterlife means believing they are destined for either Heaven or Hell. Let's consider some points on how that might work. Most Christians (foolishly) believe they are destined for Heaven (even though the Bible clearly says otherwise), a paradise where 'life' will be perfect and pure bliss, where nothing negative that afflicts us on Earth can exist in Heaven. But surely there will only be Christians in Heaven, so how could that be paradise? Think back to the last annoying evangelist that knocked on your door and wanted to tell you about Jesus! How could an eternity of that be enjoyable? Anyway, of the roughly 110 billion humans that have been born throughout history, I'm guessing well over 95% weren't Christians, like the ancient Babylonians and Aztec and those Buddhists, so they're all in Hell. Of the very small minority that did claim to be Christian, a proportion would be homosexual, a great many would have blasphemed or got divorced or worked on the Sabbath or got a tattoo or masturbated or used contraception or consulted a psychic medium or read their horoscope or broke one of God's 613 commandments, so they're all in Hell too. Of course no one is actually in Hell or Heaven yet, contrary to what most Christians believe, they're all still rotting in their graves since no one goes to their allotted places until after Judgement Day, which we're pretty sure hasn't happened yet. But when that does happen (yeah right) a meagre handful of annoyingly pious Christians will find themselves in Heaven praising God while everyone else — their family, friends, neighbours, colleagues and untold good, decent people they didn't know — will find themselves in Hell. How can these Christians, if they have any humanity left, enjoy Heaven when they know their friends and loved ones are being tortured day and night by the very guy they're worshiping as a loving god? Many of these Christians actually believe, and we've been told as such, that they'll be allowed to spend their days gleefully watching the torture sessions before retiring back to Heaven at night for a relaxing spa and a nice red wine. How could anyone enjoy Heaven when they know what God is doing in Hell, to people that used to be their friends? How could that knowledge not ruin their day, in a major way? How could they feel blissful after seeing their friends tortured? The only way that everyone in Heaven wouldn't be severely depressed, angry and maybe even suicidal or considering a coup, would be if God erased their knowledge of Hell and of all the people imprisoned there. But if God erased all your memories of Hell and missing family and friends then most of your life experiences would vanish, meaning what you remember of your life on Earth would largely be a blank or a manufactured fantasy, and since who we are as a person is based on our life experiences and our memories of them, then the person in Heaven that looks like you wouldn't be you, but just an inferior copy modified to praise God and get him coffee. There is no way that Heaven could be a paradise if it's occupants still retain their humanity, still feel compassion for others, and also know of Hell's existence. Christians say monsters like Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, Saddam Hussein and serial killer and cannibal Jeffrey Dahmer might indeed be in Heaven if they asked for forgiveness from Jesus Christ and meekly agreed to submit to him as lord and master. But knowing what they've done, the unspeakable harm and suffering they've caused, would you be happy having breakfast with Hitler every morning, or relaxing in the spa pool with Jeffrey Dahmer? We wouldn't, but we know good Christians in Heaven would be completely happy and content to socialise with these vile killers, there would not be the slightest hint of anger or revulsion at what they'd done. We know this must be the case because emotions like anger and revulsion, plus what Christians label the seven deadly sins — pride, greed, lust, envy, gluttony, wrath and sloth — simply can't exist in Heaven. It can't be paradise if there's the risk that your weird neighbour might throw a gold pot plant at you in a fit anger, or if your greedy friend eats your last slice of pizza, or if the old guy from down the street keeps coming around lusting after your daughter, or worse still, Hitler comes to believe you're a Jew and plots with Satan to get you sent to Hell. But like it or not, negative emotions are as much a part of being human as are positive emotions, and how we balance them makes us who we are. But to make Heaven a paradise where nothing bad or negative ever happens, or even could happen, where people can't even feel stressed, tired or irritated, let alone annoyed that there is no sex, this would require that God strips those emotions from our psyche. Humans have shown that not all of us can reliably control our negative emotions, so God would have to lobotomise everyone to ensure compliance with his rules, so that everyone played nice; he remembers all too well what happened when he allowed Satan to think for himself. But that would mean that no one in Heaven was their genuine self, the person that died on Earth and they all believed would continue to live forever in paradise actually ceased to exist the moment they walked through the pearly gates. What remained was an automaton, a human-like being that God rewired to populate his resort and obediently worship him. God welcoming people to Heaven with the promise of paradise is like Dracula inviting people into his castle with the lure of a nice meal.

People also say they can't wait to be reunited with loved ones in Heaven, but there will be no marriage in Heaven (more depressingly, no sex, so again, how can it be paradise?) Christians talk of love suffusing Heaven, but we get the impression that it is not love for family and friends but a rapt and unwavering love for God, where an eternity will be spent joyously singing his praises. Entering into Heaven is entering into a cult where all your time will be spent idolising the leader, a cult that not even death can get you out of. But for the sake of argument, let's say God does allow you to reunite with loved ones. We've always wondered how they'd resolve the problem of, say, a man who had five wives (remarrying after each wife died). How could a woman be reunited with her husband if there is no marriage allowed, and even if that just means spending time with him in their new apartment, how would that work if four other wives are thinking the same thing? Does God clone the husband? And since the husband would have been a different age when each wife died, say 20 with the first wife and 70 with the last, how old does he appear in Heaven? Would the 20-year-old wife still find the 70-year-old husband attractive, and would the husband find it annoying that his young wife knows nothing of his last 50 years of life? Christians who claim to talk to dead people in Heaven (even though the Bible says they're not there yet, showing that most Christians don't read their Bible), claim that people appear in Heaven exactly as they did when they died, and they remain like that for eternity. Someone who dies at age six forever remains aged six, and someone who dies paralysed from the waist down remains that way. Babies remain babies, so who looks after them for all eternity? At least in real life babies grow up and leave home and their parents get their life back, but when the parents die of old age and find themselves in Heaven, are they suddenly saddled with looking after their dead baby forever? How would that not be torture, knowing your baby would never grow up? If one argues that of course babies would still age and grow up in Heaven, then what experiences would it have? If you say it would mature like a living child on Earth, how would that be possible if the experiences that Christians say a human must experience to learn right from wrong can never happen in Heaven? Christians argue that God had to create evil on Earth so that we would know good, that without evil the notion of good would be meaningless. But a child in Heaven would never experience danger, fear, illness, crime, jealousy, pain, loss, war, sex, sympathy, anger or altruism. By definition none of those experiences could happen in Heaven, the child would be quite ignorant of them all, meaning they would be a mere shell of a human.

Unbeknownst to many Christians, the Bible actually says that our bodily appearance in Heaven will be different to what it was on Earth. We all get new bodies, similar to Jesus' resurrection body, since Christ 'will transform our lowly bodies so that they will be like his glorious body' (Philippians 3:21). What arrogance, what vanity, what conceit that Jesus wants everyone to look like cheap copies of him. And note the blatant sexism that is typical of the Bible. While many old men might welcome taking on the bodily appearance of a 30-year-old Hebrew man (although we can be sure he looked nothing like Thor or Captain America from the Avenger's movies with their handsome good looks and six-pack abs), how many women will be thrilled to discover they now have a beard and a penis, albeit a glorious one? And does everybody get holes in the hands too, like Jesus had in his resurrection body? Some Christians on learning they will take on a different appearance in Heaven are understandably worried that their loved ones won't recognise them, and vice versa, but apparently God will give them the ability to recognise friends in a sea of Jesus doppelgängers, somewhat like the radio transponders commercial airliners use to identify themselves to airport traffic control.

When you think about how Heaven might work and how it might appear it becomes an impossibility, a ridiculous fantasy to pacify superstitious people. We guess that's why Christians are not encouraged to think about it, or even think, full stop.

Of course if one actually goes to Hell rather than Heaven, and again, almost everyone will according to the Bible, even for wearing clothes made from two different fabrics (I mean, seriously God, WTF?), then you will find yourself pencilled in for a torture session that lasts forever. But does it really last forever? Technically yes, but as far as the torture victim goes it doesn't, at least not as far as they perceive it. Torture only works as a punishment if you suffer badly, letting you eat pizza and ice cream is not considered torture. But how many times can you be genuinely tortured before the pain and horror simply wears off, until your body and mind simply becomes numb to it all, until you go insane and don't even register the ill treatment? It must be similar to someone giving you a fright or telling you a joke. The first time you jump in fear or laugh at the punchline. If they repeat the scare or joke maybe you still react but not to the same degree, and if they keep going BOO! or telling the same joke it quickly loses all its effect. You ignore the person and your mind and body just stops responding. Just as hearing the same joke repeatedly becomes annoying, maybe with torture your brain will become so twisted you'll turn into a masochist and actually get pleasure from the torture. Sure it might takes months, years, decades even, of constant torture until your mind simply breaks and ignores it all, but you've got not just centuries of torture, not just billions and trillions of years of torture, but an eternity. Torture will lose its effectiveness right at the very beginning of your sentence in Hell, in relation to eternity, after that all of the torture inflicted on you will be little different to torturing a rock. Let's be generous and assume for the sake of argument that it takes a decade of continuous torture until your mind is completely broken and no longer registers the pain and suffering. Let's label that first decade in Hell as a single torture session, and the second decade begins another session. The only way that each and every torture session, stretched out through eternity, could cause unspeakable pain and horror would be if God erased the memory and numbing effect of the previous torture sessions, so that as far as you were aware each session was your first. This way you truly would suffer an infinite number of torture sessions, and each would be unimaginably horrible. But again, because God has to keep erasing your memory to keep the torture effective, you essentially only get tortured for one session, then it's all over. Torturing you over and over for all eternity is a complete waste of time if you don't know you're being tortured over and over. You can't learn from the ongoing punishment because you don't realise it's ongoing. After God and his demons have tortured you for that first session they might as well just stop, because as far as you know they only ever do it once. Doing it for an eternity is just silly, a waste of time and resources.

And of course the problems that eternity creates don't just apply to Hell, it turns Heaven into Hell as well. Think of being in Heaven and doing your favourite things, like eating pizza and cheesecake, watching your favourite movies, playing tennis, chatting with your friends about the good old days. Considering you have billions and trillions of years (and that's just the start) to keep yourself amused, how long will it be before you've watched, not just the great movies, but even the crappy ones so many times you can't face watching another, and you are absolutely sick of, not just pizza, but every other dish available? Assuming of course you actually eat and drink in Heaven; some say you will, others say no, with Revelation 7:16 implying you won't: 'They shall hunger no more, neither thirst anymore'. Also the great majority of movies (and TV shows, books, video games, plays and other forms of entertainment) that are available on Earth to keep us amused and relieve our boredom will surely be off-limits in Heaven due to scenes of nudity, sex, violence, profanity, blasphemy etc, not to mention movies where atheists save the day. If there is no violence and crime in Heaven, and no streakers and no sex, then this must also apply to the movies on offer. Those available must be limited to the boring family movies currently shown on Christian TV channels. We humans quickly get bored with repeatedly doing the same things, going to the same places, talking about the same old topics, and that happens in far less time than a normal human lifespan, so how can Christians believe they would be blissfully happy doing the same things over and over for an eternity? A century or two maybe, but then the fun would end. And if socialising over a good meal and watching a great movie, things we consider entertaining while we're alive, are off the table, and they likely are, and sex is definitely a no-no, then we personally wouldn't last a year before severe depression set in. Some descriptions of Heaven say your days and nights will be spent continually praising God, and that alone would drive any normal person insane very quickly. Like Hell, the only way that people could remain blissfully happy for an eternity is if God erased all memories of boredom and repetition and made people think that each time they had pizza and watched a movie it was a new, or relatively new, experience. Like Hell, people in Heaven wouldn't realise they had already watched 'The Passion of the Christ' several billion times. (Yes, we know that movie has extreme graphic violence, but it's Christian violence which is good violence, you know, like God commanding the Israelites to slaughter the Canaanites, Perizzites, Jebusites and others.) God must continually reset everyone after a period of time (a very, very, very brief time compared to eternity). Heaven, and Hell, would be like that movie 'Groundhog Day' where the same day repeats over and over again with only one person realising this fact, and in Heaven and Hell that person would be God. For everyone else that day would be the first day, and only day, of their life in Heaven and Hell. Eternity is a nonsense if the occupants of Heaven and Hell will effectively never experience more than a single day (or year or century). God might as well just give them a 'day' and then destroy their soul, because as far as they are concerned that's all they ever experience. We challenge anyone to explain how Heaven could be a fun place if you're forced to spend an eternity there praising its owner, and you remember every boring second. It would be like meekly following Donald Trump around one of his golf courses, forever. No Christian has been able to answer our query, because none ever seriously think how Heaven and Hell might work, and because it's a childish notion conceived by ignorant, superstitious goat herders, it can't work. Heaven and Hell, like Santa's village at the North Pole, is a fantasy.

We simply can't understand how Christians can willingly give their time and money to a fantasy that was silly 2,000 years ago and is even sillier today, and can seriously limit their positive life experiences, like avoiding all the pleasurable 'sins' and wasting every Sunday going to church, a place that God won't even be seen in, all based on an ancient unfounded belief that has no demonstrable connection to reality.

Posted by the 'Silly Beliefs' Team, 30 May, 2023 ~ Add a Comment    Send to a Friend

Comments:

1. Comment by Ted, 01 Jun, 2023

   Hi John,

   I haven't commented for a long time, but I always read your site with interest. I think everything you say constitutes solid logical argument. You think about these matters in such depth and accuracy that any comment I might make would appear superfluous. I largely agree with Russell, who wrote long ago that he thought people embraced religion, not through analysis but through emotion. Emotions are by no means bad in that life on earth is brief and brutal and nature is red in tooth and claw, as the saying goes. The best of us use our emotions as drivers to mitigate as much suffering as we are able. Of course we can't all be like Fred Hollows, whose contribution was titanic, but most decent people do try, in their own fashion, to leave the world a better place than they found it, even in a small way.

   I know you are primarily concerned with logical analysis, and you do it very well indeed. I can only add a question from the emotional point of view. Why, when the real suffering and stupidity around us is so horrendous, do you think we persist in fabricating fairy stories that are also so abominably and grotesquely cruel? All the religions have world views, as you imply, that resemble stories by Stephen King. The Western and Middle Eastern ones are all perfectly hideous, some even asserting that suffering is good, and the Asian ones mostly state that we might just as well abandon thought altogether, look at our navels or contemplate a bizarre statue and hope it all goes away.

   It seems likely, does it not, that consciousness is strictly a property of the physical brain, of biological matter. In our present state of understanding neuroscience draws us irresistibly to that conclusion although the precise mechanisms elude our grasp for the time being. I agree with Daniel Dennett though that there is no reason to suppose a total understanding of it is impossible.

2. Comment by the 'Silly Beliefs' Team, 02 Jun, 2023

   Hi Ted. Thanks for your comments, and I can only agree with them. Consciousness, while currently not well understood, is clearly generated by the brain; mess with the brain and the conscious mind is equally messed with. There are untold things in the universe that we now understand at least the basics of, and yet centuries ago the most learned minds would have declared such explanations to be forever out of our reach. We shouldn't give up when it comes to understanding consciousness, although clearly many religious folk have, but I suspect that is because they don't want to admit that God isn't turning knobs and flicking switches in every human head (and in cats, sharks and sparrows), and accept that science has ripped yet another responsibility from God's slimy tentacles, that brains can run themselves, they don't need a conductor. After all, don't Christians themselves tell us God gave us free will, so how can that be true if God is generating our conscious awareness, if what we think and feel is all down to God manipulating our brains?

   And for me there is no doubt that people embrace religion via their emotions, certainly not by thinking about it rationally. The religious embrace heaven because it promises unimaginable pleasure and a reunion with loved ones, and they fear hell because it promises unimaginable pain and suffering. There is no asking how science or reason might view the reality of heaven and hell. Positive emotions like joy, love, compassion, happiness, altruism, friendship, beauty, laughter etc are a wonderful thing, and the world would be a miserable place without them, since the world (or is it God?) throws a lot at us that can generate negative emotions like fear, anger, hatred, disgust and mistrust, and some people (thanks God!) are imbued with those seven negative emotions of pride, greed, lust, envy, gluttony, wrath and sloth, which of course negatively impacts the lives of those around them. All humans have a psyche that has an emotional element and a rational element, and this is a good thing, but unfortunately, rather than require both elements to debate a new claim and agree on the best way forward, for many people the emotional element often takes charge and locks the rational element in the basement. It's not just religion, scams and fake news all rely on emotion running roughshod over reason, on people grasping for what they would desperately like to be true than what is actually true. COVID is a hoax and will quickly vanish because then life will get back to normal, and that would make them very happy. Their desire trumps the facts.

   It's true that many of the fairy stories that Judaism, Christianity and Islam tell are 'abominably and grotesquely cruel'. I suspect that ancient man was simply reflecting on their lives (and it was always a man, never a woman, one wonders how the fairy stories would have went had women told them). There is still real suffering and stupidity in the world today, but back when these stories were concocted life would have been far more horrendous, and people far more ignorant, and the common belief was that the world and people's lives were controlled by gods, because clearly the world couldn't run itself. Floods, droughts, storms and disease needed a god to cause them. Each life needed a god to create it and to end it. And of course everyone believed that this god, or more often gods, would naturally look and behave like them. Gods that humans invent always resemble and act like humans, albeit very powerful and arrogant humans, never like an octopus or even a bonobo.

   God didn't make man in his image as is commonly believed. Man instead made god in his image. And since man was more often vindictive, mean, barbaric, greedy, racist, sexist, homophobic and selfish than loving, caring, empathetic, sharing and inclusive, this means that the god in their fairy tales also took on these attributes, the vile ones far more than the good ones. Since men thought it was normal to own slaves, to treat women like property, to take what they wanted by force, to persecute homosexuals and foreigners, then of course the god they invented as their creator naturally approved of these practices. They made up stories of their god committing untold injustices, of punishing his servants (humans) for the slightest disobedience, of wiping out entire civilisations in order to take their land and resources, of raping a virgin to gain a son, and then later torturing and murdering that son and being praised for it. The stories of God's barbarity and megalomania clearly reflect how ancient man saw the world and his life. Of course there would have been many ordinary folk, including men, who were kind and decent, but the minority that had wealth and held positions of authority were desperate to keep it, and violence, or threats of violence, was often the only tool they felt they had to control the masses. For untold centuries, but especially back then, kings, emperors and chieftains ruled with absolute power over their people, step out of line and you were imprisoned, beaten or killed, and men likewise had absolute power over their women and slaves, again, step out of line and you were beaten or killed. If a ruler wanted more land and riches (or wives) he simply went to war and took it by force. Power and violence ruled the day. So of course they imagined that their god, like them, must also wield ultimate power and use unspeakable violence to maintain respect and obedience, and they could then defend their unjust behaviour by arguing that they were merely emulating God's methods, something he encouraged them to do. Since the rich and powerful believed that they deserved to control the masses, it was very convenient to have a god that also felt that way. Sure we killed and tortured people and stole their lands, they might say, but it's nothing that God hasn't done and even commanded that we also do. We are just obeying God. We don't necessarily want to kill homosexuals and beat uppity wives, but God demands that we do, so we have no choice.

   So I think religious myths were invented because they helped to explain the world, and the gods were just exaggerated versions of demonic kings because ancient man's ignorance couldn't imagine anything else. Bad things happen on Earth, more so than good, so clearly the gods must have more evil impulses than good. But millennia later we now know better, we know gods don't exist, we know that good and bad things happen due to random acts of nature and deliberate acts by humans. So why, as you say, do people still persist in believing ancient fairy stories that show their god to be 'so abominably and grotesquely cruel'? Perhaps modern belief is made easy because their god is not shown to be a monster. Consider that most all church sermons and all door-knocking evangelists and religious belief in general focuses solely on God's love and Jesus' sacrifice so that we can all go to Heaven and live out eternity in paradise. No mention is made of Jesus' sacrifice being God's murder, no mention of God raping Mary, if Noah's ark is mentioned with all those cute animals, no mention is made of all the humans and animals that God drowned. Some churches today actually deny that Hell is real, arguing that everyone goes to Heaven, but those that did bad things like murder and rape will not get an invite to God's special parties. That's what Hell means, that you won't have the same ready access to God that good people do. Some churches now also argue that God loves homosexuals and atheists, which means that, along with insisting that Hell doesn't exist, they are essentially saying that God's word, the Bible, is lying when it says quite categorically that Hell is real and God hates homosexuals and atheists. This shows that, while they won't openly admit that the Bible is wrong and God is a monster, some churches are rightly appalled at the injustices and immorality contained in the Bible and are actively trying to explain them away as misinterpretations, that when God said hate he actually meant love, that when God said he murdered thousands of innocent people he actually meant he threw a party for thousands of people with free wine and food. To this end the devious bastards now only promote the stuff that sounds good to the 21st century ear.

   These ancient fairy stories continue to persist because those spreading them only propagate the handful of stories that show God and Jesus in a good light, and they actively suppress the vile ones. In fact a large proportion of Christians are quite ignorant of the vile stories, they are quite unaware that they exist. I've lost count of the shocked and disgusted expressions shown by evangelists when I have asked them to justify some of God's and Jesus' unjust behaviour. First they adamantly deny such passages exist, and I believe their ignorance is often genuine, then they find themselves at a loss to defend such behaviour, and often come up with arguments that make them as reprehensible as their god. Just a few weeks ago I had door-knocking evangelists defending slavery in Biblical times by arguing that slavery was radically different back then, that slaves were happy being someone's property and were treated kindly like loved members of the family. The case of Africans enslaved by Americans in recent centuries was absolutely horrific and unjust they argued, but people enslaved by ancient Hebrews, Romans and Greeks were thankful to be slaves because unlike Americans, slave masters back then were loving and kind. This was a case of them having heard of God's love of slavery, but then being fed an utterly bogus argument by the Church in order to defend slavery if some atheist like me brought it up. It's the same with homosexuality and such, the Church knows that God's view and that of modern society are opposed, so they invent bogus arguments to highlight specific Bible passages that makes it appear that God loves everyone, contrary to what the Bible and God actually says. Most modern Christians are happy pushing a few select Bible stories because they are quite ignorant of the horror stories about their god, they're like someone pushing Hitler and the Nazis simply because they like the uniforms, and know nothing of their abhorrent actions. Of course many of the Church hierarchy will be well aware of God's misdeeds, but like kings of old, they want to hang onto their wealth and power, so they promote the few passages where God or Jesus says something nice and suppress the untold passages where they come off as monsters or ignorant fools.

   On the bright side Ted, surveys show that the younger generation is far less religious than their parents, belief is steadily decreasing. It took humanity quite some time to dismiss belief in Zeus and Osiris and fairies and gremlins, but eventually we woke up, I believe the same will eventually happen with God, Jesus, Allah and the Easter Bunny.

3. Comment by Ted, 10 Aug, 2023

   Hi John,

   My apologies for not commenting sooner on your excellent analysis of my question. You have hit on the essence of it, that as humans invented gods and religions, and as life contains much that is repulsive and hideous, the supernatural was endowed with the negative qualities of nature. That much, I think we can agree, is abundantly clear.

   The belief in an afterlife and the supernatural in general, however, also has widespread presence and implication, even among those who, at least ostensibly, abjure such convictions. For instance, there is to my mind a gulf of kind between asking ourselves what a wise parent might have said about some dilemma or course of action we are faced with and actually worrying that the parent is floating about somewhere judging our response. The former, depending of course on whether the parent really was of good character, seems largely harmless and possibly beneficial while the latter is a destructive fantasy. The only place a dead person is "floating about" is in our own brain, through remembered images, conversations and so on. To celebrate the memory of respected dead people with a good feed is innocuous but to actually put out a plate of food for them (yes, I have been present when this has occurred) is surely material for John Cleese.

   As far as concocting a heaven is concerned, that also is inextricably tied up with what we have actually experienced. Even supposing a disembodied consciousness could exist in a celestial paradise, what on earth would it find to do? I enjoy mathematics and music but their charm is essentially dynamic and heavily dependent on my physical brain and perception, which is unstable at the best of times. The prospect of having all problems solved, nothing to do, would completely destroy the fun of the former and the surprise of the latter. And in what state exactly would I enter the pearly gates? The inchoate mind of a baby, the blissful ignorance of my youth, the sober reckonings of middle age or the fractured thought of (possibly, hopefully not) dementia? The whole thing is just a mass of inconsistency and couldn't possibly exist.

4. Comment by the 'Silly Beliefs' Team, 11 Aug, 2023

   Hi Ted. It's refreshing to learn that there are others out there that can see through this nonsense that so many embrace. It truly astounds me that otherwise intelligent, educated people can be so ignorant and childish when it comes to their fanciful belief in an afterlife. An invisible luxury resort above the clouds where billions of dead people are shuffling around like zombies, all competing for a good vantage spot to spy on the living as we take a shower or paint the kitchen. And of these morons that believe in this imaginary resort, it worries me that many have positions of power and influence here on Earth. That, following God's dictates, people are refused contraceptives and even sex education, that women are denied abortions, that homosexuals, atheists and minorities are persecuted, that climate change is dismissed as a hoax, as was the recent pandemic, with vaccines a tool of the Devil, and where an imminent apocalypse is actually welcomed as God's plan to rid the world of the unbelievers (all terminated with extreme prejudice). All to bring in a paradise on Earth populated solely by white, heterosexual, fundamentalist Christian men and their obedient wives and children. Like Gloriavale on the West Coast, only there will be no escape from this one, and no police to call when God's servants start touching you inappropriately.

   I'm just mystified that in an era of advanced knowledge that such nonsense, such dangerous nonsense, can still be believed by so many and it can still hold such enormous influence over society. To me an adult believing in this bullshit is no different to one believing in Santa Claus, gremlins or leprechauns. It is irrational and childish in the extreme. Adults would be medicated and perhaps even locked up for their own safety or that of others, certainly monitored, if they professed belief in the latter supernatural beings, but when they openly profess belief in an invisible, vengeful, vindictive, manipulative god that wants their help to persecute his enemies and bring about the apocalypse, then society treats them with respect, seeks their advice and grants them positions of authority, even giving these deluded fuckwits command of nuclear missiles.

   I suspect, due to unavoidable revelations from science and secular society, that many of these servants of God are often wracked with doubt as to his existence, as the infamous Mother Teresa was in her latter years, but they are just too terrified to admit the obvious. Their fear of God, instilled in them as impressionable children, keeps them subservient, it has them singing God's praises loudly to drown out any troubling concerns some atheist may have raised. My experience is that true believers are simply too afraid to examine their religion too closely, they're genuinely fearful of what they might find, that's why their explanations about their religion are always so childish, on the level of a young child explaining Santa Claus. And if you try and discuss it with them, if you threaten to reveal errors, inconsistencies and impossibilities, not to mention horrible injustices, then suddenly and inexplicably they no longer want to discuss their god and the good news that moments ago they were so excited to share. Suddenly they have somewhere more important to be, and they flee like a vampire confronted with garlic or a cross, all to avoid hearing the truth. Many religious believers know or at least suspect their belief rests on a foundation of quicksand with walls of jelly, and to avoid embarrassment simply keep their belief a private affair. And by refusing to openly discuss it, they remain largely ignorant of just how silly the belief in an afterlife and in gods truly is. Worse still is that the religions have convinced society that a person's faith should be respected, that it shouldn't be questioned, challenged or ridiculed, meaning that the same childish beliefs will continue to be passed from generation to generation. We need to ditch that respect, it was created merely to protect the religious, to prevent us from asking embarrassing questions about their behaviour. We all need to challenge adults when they express belief in an afterlife and gods the same way we would if they said they believed having sex with children was fine. If their belief can stand up to scrutiny then they need to defend it, if they refuse to then we have to assume it can't be defended. When Christians refuse to discuss, explain and defend their belief in the afterlife, it's a clear sign that they can do none of those things, that their belief is based solely on blind faith and flimsy snippets of ancient ignorance. We need to expose that ignorance and challenge people when they say granny is watching over them from Heaven or that Elvis is with Jesus now. Dead people are no more socialising with Jesus than they are with the Easter Bunny. It's time they grew up, and we need to help them.