RELIGION IS PREJUDICE AND PREJUDICE IS HARMFUL

Religion is devotion to supernatural forces. Religion is always a form of prejudice. The faith of the freethinker is not, for the freethinker feels free to change anything she thinks is wrong. She is happy to disagree with her teachers. The surer you are that your beliefs are right the more your self-esteem will grow because then you are surer that you know the right way to live and treat others. You can’t have self-esteem unless you know you have the power to think correctly. The more you know that the more self-esteem you will have.
 
Religion always seeks an unfair advantage for people are afraid to disrespect or disobey their religious leaders in case they are offending God by going against the men or women of God. That is why Atheists should be troubled when they hear of anything that will increase religious faith happening. Religion expects you to believe everything it says is the word of God. It tells you that you have an obligation to believe certain things. You don’t have an obligation to believe anything and have the right to doubt and check everything. That is how progress is made. In so far that religion is biased, religion is dishonest.
 
To say God exists is to say that unbelievers are offending against the greatest being, the being who should come first because he is so good he is deserving of all devotion, and committing the greatest possible evil and therefore that they have less rights than believers. It says they should be prevented from promoting their views. We have a right to be offended by religious devotion. Religious groups that teach that God gave only one true faith should claim that they have the right to discriminate against one another if they are consistent.
 
What we need is a group that we feel part of that we meet every so often that makes us feel good about ourselves and about living in this world. We do not need religion. When religion thrives, it is because of the social element. It because of the frightful human tendency to conform with society which seeks to oppress individuality. People are often afraid to be different. And religion calls those who spurn it bad and uses threats of Hell to scare people into its ranks. Fear is fine when it protects us say when we cross a busy road. But fear of the supernatural and religion is harmful.
 
Religion is evil for people fight and kill over it.  It is wrong to promote anything unnecessary that kills even if it condemns killing. It gives evil people an excuse for doing evil so to promote religion is to promote harm. It is better for the Roman Catholic Church for example to disband than for it to cause one death for nothing is more important than human life.
 
We must be tolerant and not be disrespectful about religion to its adherent’s faces. It is because we oppose the beliefs that we have to be as nice and kindly as possible to those who follow religion. There is no other way we can get them to abandon them. It is important to be frank but not offensive. Anyone that cares about the truth will not be offended too easily.
 
If you belong to or claim to belong to a religion that should believe evil things, then even if it doesn't, you are being evil and supporting evil. A religion that doesn't understand or admit or see how evil it is meant to be is a religion that is being praised for going against itself. It is no compliment to praise it for you are praising ignorance and disobedience. Separate from it. An example is Christianity which says its Bible is authored by God despite saying he permitted parents to have their wayward drunken and lazy sons put to death by stoning and encouraged Abraham to slaughter Isaac his son just because he asked him to!
 

GOD IS A CORRUPTING BELIEF

Love is defined by believers in God as obeying God. Love should be implemented because it is seen as the right thing to do and not done to please a God. Do right because it is right and not because God or religion tell you.
 
To say that God lets suffering happen for a good purpose and because it is only a temporary thing is unacceptable because of our human dignity and nature. Human beings like dentists have to hurt other people because there is no other way but this is not true of God who has supernatural powers. To say God can allow suffering because it is only a temporary thing means that he should not be allowing it at all. Because if evil can be allowed temporarily just because it is temporary that does not change the fact that it is evil and it is incoherent to say that evil should happen. If we put people first we see their suffering as intolerant and despicable. If the suffering brings good we should still not approve of the suffering to any degree. If we say God allows suffering to happen and God is good then it follows we must callously approve to some degree of the suffering for he allowed it to happen. He made the virus that kills the innocent babies.
Liking is what is love to the atheist and liking is a selfish act. Unless we understand what we mean by loving others we will never understand Atheism and why self-esteem matters above all else. If we see doing good as something in which others matter more than us we will never be good at life for our self-esteem will be damaged and the urge to hurt others will grow in us.
 
When I help a person because I like them and go to a lot of trouble for it people say I am unselfish. This is not true and they know it. Liking is a self-centred act. It means I get something out of helping them. That is what I am doing it for. Let me explain. Liking you means only that I get pleasure from you. It is not you I value but what I get out of you.
 
Religion pretends it loves the sinner and hates the sin. You cannot really insult a thing but only a person. Insulting or hating the person’s act is insulting the person. Therefore there is no God and religion is hypocrisy. Practicing this hypocrisy is harmful for you are given the extra burden of trying to like yourself and others while knowing fine well that insulting the act is insulting the doer.
 
To adore God is to adore yourself for you have made God in your mind. It is because you are an egoist that God is just about you not God.
 
Prayer is not a harmless activity but thrives on faulty self-esteem for it says there is a power that looks after us and involves condoning the evil that is allowed by God to happen to people many of whom who have never hurt anyone. Magic is evil for the same reason.
 
How can we be optimists if there is no God to shower blessings on us in the future? If we love ourselves we will find that our love draws many amazing blessings to us so that we cannot be anything but trusting that the future will be good. Our philosophy of life gives us the power to change the world. Good gives birth to more good so our legacy of love will spiral into hearts that have not been born yet and will do so as long as there are people on this planet. We forget the indirect consequences of our goodness and how powerful we are and how much we should be proud of ourselves. We see only the short-term effects. Let us focus our mind’s eye and gaze into the mists of the future. We have to be either optimists or pessimists and it is certainly better to be optimistic. It feels better. It works better. Pessimism means that bad things that may never happen are being allowed to hurt us and bring us pain.
 
It is important to try and wean people off God and religion. The alleged proofs for God don’t work but if they did they could be used to show that there is a spirit like entity that is like a defective computer program that makes and designs the universe and messes up. The God of the proofs is not like a person anyway but is more of an intelligence.

MIRACLE AND AFTERLIFE EXPOSED

A miracle is an event like a dead man coming back to life that only a God can supposedly do. A miracle is not God fixing mistakes for God is all-powerful and never makes mistakes but he does them as signs of the faith in which the truth he revealed is preserved. The trouble is that one religion reports miracles that Jesus is not God’s unique Son and another reports miracles indicating that he is. To use miracles as evidence for religion is to say, “I just believe in the miracles of my religion and they are evidence that it is true.” That is bigotedly refusing to look at contrary evidence. It’s narrow and smacks of the insecurity that leads to fundamentalism and intolerance and ultimately bloodshed.
 
Miracles are too easily rigged to have much value and what you see yourself comes before anybody else’s testimony. That means if you see a miracle that denies that Jesus rose from the dead that means you lose any right to believe in Christianity anymore. It would be bigotry to deny this and religion does deny it so it is sectarianism.
 
It is wrong to celebrate a miracle when the miracle could have been used to preserve the life of a baby instead. God revealing himself and his doctrines like Jesus being the Son of God are miracles are likewise condemned. Miracles call us to faith meaning it is a sin or bad not to believe in miracles. That is the same as saying doubt is a sin but doubt cannot be a sin. Doubt is a duty for if we don’t question and check things out we are not careful and not really sincere for we hide from anything that might prove us wrong.
 
Revelation implies that we cannot figure things out on our own and that God won’t guide our reasoning powers from within us. The fact that there is so much disagreement in the world does not make revelation desirable for then we will disagree about it then. Revelation is really an attempt to make us do what some prophet wants even if it means that we have to ignore what our reason tells us. That is what happens when you see how people won’t doubt what Jesus said, or what Joseph Smith said or what Muhammad said.