BR The Happy Atheist Flashcards
BR the happy atheist by P Z Myers from library.
Card 01:
The faithful are fond of claiming that he is a God of peace and love, but most often he seems to be a God of nosy busybodies, prying prudes, and outraged promoters of arbitrary pettiness.
And at the same time, we have priests raping children, and their defenders are most irate at the people who ratted out the pedophiles in dog collars.
People are not religious because they are stupid; rather religion is a parasite of the mind that makes people do stupid things and think stupid thoughts and worst of all believe that freeing themselves of superstition would make them less human and and less able to cope with reality when the exact opposite is true.
If you made up a sign that said you can be good without God, billboard companies would refuse to run them. Bus drivers would refuse to drive buses bearing them, and sometimes people sneak out and vandalize them.
One of the serious purposes of sacrilege is to tell people that their beliefs are barbaric or wrong. One of the purposes of blasphemy laws is to silence critics of long hollowed discrimination.
Card:02
Under certain circumstances, urgent circumstances, desperate circumstances, profanity provides a relief denied even to prayer. Mark twain
Aztec priest 500 years ago were confident that the purpose of life was to rip the beating hearts out of prisoners as an offering to keep the sun rising every day.
Jesus did not save us from anything real, and his death made no change in the world. Ask a Christian, and they will tell you he is saving us from original sin, our flawed, weak, and errantly wicked nature’s. But that sin was an act committed by a pair of mythological ancestors that didn’t even actually exist.
Nobody needs to die to protect me from a fairytale.
Card: 03
When we die, we will enter no paradise, no hell, not even a grim gray after life of darkness and regret. We will just be gone. Everyone who has ever lived has simply ended and become nonexistent.
Life is for living, and it is wasteful to spend it fretting over what you will do when it’s gone. One reasonable response to mortality is to enjoy life now.
Religion has a real problem with initiatives. As long as the goodies are all in an invisible afterlife, it is hard to take them seriously.
It is not just that there is zero evidence for an afterlife, but claims that it exist or logically untenable.
Card:03
People say that in heaven you get to meet grandma and grandpa again I especially cannot believe any of it in the absence of reasonable evidence. It is really nothing but people making stuff up based entirely on what they wish were true.
A very noticeable mistake in Scripture is in Joshua 10:13 when Joshua commands the sun to stand still and not the earth. He has got it completely backwards.
If the Bible is completely infallible, then how in the world did God get it backwards.
“Science is what we do to keep from lying to ourselves.”
Dennis Rader, the BTK torturer and killer. Murdered at least ten people. Is a Christian, a devout member of Christ Lutheran church in Wichita, Kansas for thirty years and was elected president of the congregation council. Also a Cub Scout leader.
Card: 04
Best definition of an atheist. It’s an old APS who the Catholic Church cannot legally set on fire anymore.
Religions are the lies we tell ourselves to justify our biases.
Rationalizations, are all that religion can generate, do not represent the new knowledge; at best, religion generates comforting noise to mask the fact that someone is starving to death, or is dying of cholera, or has a Crusader stick a sword in his or her chest.
That is all it has accomplished in millennia of human history.
It has not improved our ability to grow food or to treat diseases. Nor has it given us new insight into our origins existence.
You would think an omniscient and omnipotent God when dictating his holy book to his prophets could have thrown in a few accurate suggestions that would’ve shown that he actually knows a bit more than the goat herder’s he was talking to.
Science and religion are incompatible in all the ways that matter. Science works. Religion doesn’t.
EOF
BR__World Religion
those with who won disagrees should not be regarded as enemies but rather as people whose views deserve careful examination and may shed light on one’s own views.
According to the world Christian and Cyclopedia, believers in the supernatural belong to 10,000 variations, most within 10 major varieties of organized religion Christianity is percentage of the population has remain remarkably stable, at about one and three, spread across some 34,000.
In general, rising levels of education and income have corresponded to higher rates of religious skepticism in the modern world. In particular, most scientist are atheistic, and the degree of skepticism appears to have increased sharply among the most distinguished researchers.
Many early American leaders namely Washington, Jefferson, Franklin, Allen, pain and Lincoln were non-Christian DES it is doubtful whether such skeptics of the divinity of Christ could be elected in present day America.
A gallop poll concludes that religious belief and practice rose in the 1990s after a long but modest decline that began in the 50s and 60s.
Meanwhile more than a third of Americans distrust nonbelievers. 70% consider them unsuitable mates.
What follows is a country by the percentage of non-believers in each country.
France 37%
Sweden 35% Japan 31% Denmark 31% Halen 29% England 25% Australia 24% Germany 24% , Norway 24% New Zealand 20% Canada 17% Switzerland 16% Spain 16% Austria 15% Italy 9% United States 8% Ireland 6% Portugal 5%.
With age, there are between 36 to 44,000,000 people infected with the aids virus worldwide. About 14,000 new infections occur daily mostly through heterosexual sex.
Polls consistently show that most Catholics disagree with the hierarchy’s ban on condoms. Yet the same hierarchy that controls 100,000 hospitals and 200,000 other social service agencies worldwide ban both education about and provision of condoms in their institution.
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