Does God Exist?
By: Nikhil Mahadea
Tags: God, Religion, Morality, Atheism, Christianity

Table of Contents

1. Intro

2. There’s No Evidence

3. Rhetoric Doesn’t Create God

4. There Have Been Thousands of Gods

5. We Invented God to Explain Things we Didn’t Understand

6. Religion is Based on When & Where You Were Born

7. Where was God for 13.8 Billion Years?

8. Only 5 Chosen People

9. Illiterate Beginnings

10. Are Scientists Atheists?

11. Were the Founding Fathers Religious?

A) Is America A Christian Nation? [sub]

12.Why Don’t Animals Pray?

A) Praying Has Been Proven Not To Work [sub]

13. Miracles Violate Proven Laws

14. Is God Really All-Powerful?

15. Why is There so Much Pain/Suffering?

16. Religion Impedes Progress

17. Is God Still Needed For Consolation, Inspiration & Moral Teachings?

A) Do We Need God To Be Moral? [sub]

18. Conclusion

19. My Story

1. Intro

Religion is a disease. In 2017, 87% of Americans believed in God.

And religion continues to grow. Between 2015 and 2060 religion is expected to grow 32%, with Islam growing the fastest.

The Audacity to Question

In almost all religions, it’s virtuous to have an unshakable faith and disrespectful to question God. Religion is a very sensitive topic. Some people are afraid to say “Merry Christmas” to the wrong people. This stops us from discussing religion and God.

However, nothing should be above criticism. You may get uncomfortable reading this. But all I ask is to do what I did when I first explored religion and god. Approach this book with an open mind and be willing to follow the evidence where it leads. As Bertrand Russell, once said, “Intellectual integrity is the habit of deciding vexed questions in accordance with the evidence, or of leaving them undecided where the evidence is inconclusive.”

If you truly believe God exists, then reading a book counter to your belief will give you new and different point of view, new information and hopefully new epiphanies. If not, then this will give you ammunition to strengthen your arguments. This is exactly the attitude I took when when I was a born-again Hindu exploring Christianity, Islam, Buddhism and eventually atheism. Either I’ll read the book and learn something, enlarge my perspective and diversity of point of views or I’ll have better arguments (ammunition) to strengthen my beliefs and point mistakes in atheism.

Some will say that this book is an attack on the religion and God. I won’t lie, it kind of is. But, it’s not an attack on religious people like Hindus, Muslims and Christians. My argument here isn’t that religious people are bad. My argument is that the existence of god, this theory/ideology is 99% false. My goal in this book is to show you that there’s no evidence that God exists.

When most people come in contact with new arguments contrarian to their beliefs, they completely dismiss them. They get angry and/or shoot the messenger. Schopenhauer has a famous quote on this. He said, “All truth passes through three stages: First, it’s ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Finally, it is accepted as self-evident.”

Religion did bring good things to the world, I won’t deny that. We got community, love, protection in a dangerous world, stopped fearing death. This is why people ‘fall in love with Jesus.’ There are good verses in the Bible and the Quran and most scriptures. But religion also has a dark side: the wars, the suffering — we’ll discuss later. My stance is that religion once played a useful role but it’s no longer useful.

A Focus on Christianity & Islam

I’ll focus on Christianity and Islam mostly because they’re the largest and fastest-growing religions (see figure #2). This doesn’t mean I won’t talk about Hinduism, Judaism and other religions — I will but only in the periphery.

Scriptures Used

I won’t use the most read Bible, which is the King James Version (KJV). KJV is read by 55% of Christians who choose to read the Bible. Instead, I’ll use the New Revised Standard Version (NRSV), recommended by Bart Ehrman, the New Testament Distinguished Professor at the University of North Carolina.

For the Quran, I’ll use the English translation by the Egyptian-born, Cairo University graduate, professor of Islamic studies at the University of London, Muhammad Abdel-Haleem. In 2008, he was appointed to the Office of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in recognition of his services to Arabic culture.

On top of that, I won’t use the Hadith (or Sunna) because these weren’t revealed by Allah. The Quran is what defines Islam — this is what was revealed to Prophet Muhammed by Allah, not the Hadith. As Reza Aslan, a religious scholar who studied religions at Harvard and a member of American Academy of Religion said,

These hadith were passed down from generation to generation and became increasingly convoluted and inauthentic, so that after a while, nearly every legal or religious opinion — no matter how radical or eccentric — could be legitimated by the Prophet’s authority.

He continues, these have been “muddled and totally unregulated, making their authentication almost impossible.” Aslan again,

Each successive generation…that was supposed to authenticate the hadith grew longer and more convoluted, so that in less than 2 centuries after Muhammad’s death, there were…700,000 hadith…the great majority of which were unquestionably fabricated by individuals who sought to legitimize their own particular beliefs and practices by connecting them with the Prophet.

By the 9th century, the situation got so out of hand that a group of legal scholars, working independently of one another, attempted to catalogue the most reliable hadith into authoritative collections.

While some hadith may in fact contain an authentic historical core that can be traced back to the Prophet and his earliest Companions, the truth is that the Sunna is a far better reflection of the opinions of the 9th-century Ulama than of the 7th-century Ummah.

On top of that, as documented by the Ignaz Goldziher (founder of modern Islamic studies in Europe), numerous hadith were verses from the Torah and Gospels, bits of rabbinic sayings, ancient Persian maxims, passages of Greek philosophy, Indian proverbs, and even an almost word-for-word reproduction of the Lord’s Prayer.

As Fatima Mernissi, a sociologist said, behind every hadith lies the entrenched “power struggles, conflicting interests” that one would expect in a society “in which social mobility [and] geographical expansion due to conquest [were] the order of the day.”

For this reason, I don’t use the Hadith.

Definitions

Before we start, it’s good to define words like God and theist, so that we’re on the same page.

God is a being who is: all-powerful, all-knowing, and all-good; who created everything out of nothing; who is uncreated and eternal; and a noncorporeal spirit who can grant eternal life to humans. In addition to his main work of creating the universe, He is still around to oversee, influence and be involved in the fate of his creation. He answers prayers, forgives or punishes, intervenes in the world by performing miracles, frets about good and bad deeds, and knows when we do them or even think of doing them.

A theist is defined as a person who believes in this God.

How This Book is Structured

As Sagan so eloquently said:

It is morally as bad not to care whether a thing is true or not, so long as it makes you feel good, as it is not to care how you got your money as long as you have got it. For me, it is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring

*https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2015/04/14/map-these-are-the-worlds-least-religious-countries/

*Some say religion is just a hobby or interest.

2. There’s No Evidence

The question of “Does God exist?” isn’t a matter of belief, it’s a matter of evidence. It’s not “Do you believe in God?” A better question is, “What evidence are there that God exists?” Only evidence must be of interest.

If God truly exists, we should have 1000s of peer-reviewed, hard evidence. This is the only proof needed. But we don’t even have one! If there was even one properly conducted, peer-reviewed study/experiment, that would be enough to create interest and probe deeper research. We’ve tried to prove God but no results.

What’s “Peer-Reviewed Research”?

Peer-reviewed research are studies or experiments done mostly by scientists to prove their hypothesis (or point). If the study/experiment gets statistical viable results, the discovery/idea is accepted in a peer-reviewed journal and receive lots of citations.

These journal are a database where scientists post their fruitful research so that others can assist, advance or even debunk the findings. Some may replicate the same study to see if the findings are legit. In this way, claims are tested. This keeps liars out, science on the cutting edge and the truth concrete.

If you’re trying to publish in a peer-reviewed journal with ideas that can’t be proven with hard and objective evidence, and instead you write about your strong personal convictions, your anecdotes and your emotions, not only will you get rejected, but you’ll be laughed out of the room.

Coming back to the point of this book, all religions have failed to provide this peer-reviewed, hard evidence.

So, Prove God Doesn’t Exist

It’s not on me (or anyone) to disprove God’s existence. When a scientist says smoking causes lung cancer, it’s on the scientist to prove this claim. It’s not on the rest of the world to disprove his claim. The burden of proof lies with the person expressing positive claim, the correlation.

Bertrand Russell (a very famous philosopher, polymath and Nobel laureate) had a great little anecdote to explain this. He said,

If I were to suggest that between the Earth and Mars there is a china teapot revolving about the sun in an elliptical orbit, nobody would be able to disprove my assertion provided I were careful to add that the teapot is too small to be revealed even by our most powerful telescopes. But if I were to go on to say that, since my assertion cannot be disproved, it is intolerable presumption on the part of human reason to doubt it, I should rightly be thought to be talking nonsense. If, however, the existence of such a teapot were affirmed in ancient books, taught as the sacred truth every Sunday, and instilled into the minds of children at school, hesitation to believe in its existence would become a mark of eccentricity and entitle the doubter to the attentions of the psychiatrist in an enlightened age or of the Inquisitor in an earlier time.

The burden on proof lies not with the doubter to go disprove that their isn’t a teapot revolving around the Sun. The burden of proof lies with Russell to prove that there’s a teapot revolving around the Sun.

In the same way, when a theist says “God exists”, it’s on him to prove this claim. It’s not on the atheist to disprove this claim. The burden of proof rests with the believers, not the non-believers. It’s the non-believers job to debunk fairies.

We can’t go around disproving the millions of far-fetched things that a facetious imagination might dream up.

A Book Isn’t Evidence

A book that survives for many years, no matter how ancient and special that book is, isn’t evidence for what it claims. Let me explain.

Fossils prove that dinosaurs existed . But a book on fossils without a fossil record doesn’t prove that fossils existed. Similarly, one book on God doesn’t prove God. We need God himself or other evidences to prove that He exists.

On top of that, to prove that Christianity or Islam or Judaism is true, we need more than one book, more than one source. One book isn’t not enough. In fact, we’d need extremely hard evidence. As Christopher Hitchens said, “Exceptional claims demand exceptional evidence.”

One anecdotal source — like testaments — could have been written by a crook, a liar or a con. If all it takes is for one book to prove the existence of something, then what stops a theist from believing in fairies, leprechauns and Big foot?

“But, God can’t be bounded by space/time. He’s outside our Universe!”

He’s outside space, time, matter, and thus needs no explanation. How then do we know God exists? A supernatural God that exists outside of space and time is not knowable to anyone because he isn’t part of the known universe. Thus, it’s not possible for anyone to know if there is a God or not.

On a side note, there’s no such thing as supernatural or paranormal. There’s just the natural. When theists invoke acts of creation and miracles, that’s the end of searching for them. For the scientists however, that’s the beginning. Science picks up where religion stops.

Either way doesn’t God, at some point, need to step in our universe to answer prayers or perform miracles. Why can’t we measure this divine action? And if the only way to make contact with God is though prayer, why hasn’t this been measured?

By Sidney Harris

What About the Soul?

The brain has now been probed to the point where no particular site remains where a nonphysical mind or soul can inhabit. In other words, the soul was never found.

When the 18th century chemist Joseph Priest tried to find the “vital force”, he weighed a mouse just before it died and just after it died and it weighed the same.

On top of that, embryos (specifically blastocysts) occasionally split, becoming separate people (i.e. identical twins). Is this a case of one soul splitting into two? Two embryos sometimes fuse into one — called a chimera — what then becomes of the extra human soul? Furthermore, how does a soul get released or absorbed into God? As John Watson, the psychologist who popularized the scientific theory of behaviorism said, “No one has ever touched a soul or seen one in a test-tube.”

Well what about “the mind”, Nik? Who or what within the brain monitors all the activity?

No one. There’s no single stream of consciousness in which all information is brought together by an executive ego. There are instead multiple streams of activity. Consciousness is the massive aggregate of all parts of the brain. There’s nothing mysterious or mystical about it.

In short, the explanation of mind is an empirical rather than a philosophical or religious quest.

In conclusion, if God exists, he would have made it easy to prove what is said in the bible. Instead we’re driven to the end of the universe and to the beginning of time, looking inside the smallest things (atoms) to find Him.

*“We can never absolutely prove the non-existence of anything. What matters is not whether God is disprovable (he isn’t) but whether his existence is probable. God cannot be technically disprovable but he is very very improbable indeed.” -Richard Dawkins

*Creationism, unlike science, predicts nothing. Along with it being obviously wrong, it is obviously not useful.

3. Rhetoric Doesn’t Create God

“The folly of mistaking a metaphor for a proof, a torrent of verbiage for a spring of capital truths, and oneself as an oracle, is inborn in us.” — Ray Bradbury

A person who doesn’t have hard evidence will resort to rhetoric and a priori arguments — which means by deduction instead of evidence — to prove his point.

The opposite are a posteriori arguments. This is deduction via observation, evidence and empirical data. It’s only through a posteriori arguments that we can prove god’s existence.

Back in the day, there were 3 famous philosophical/a priori arguments for the existence of God. The most famous of them is the ontological argument by St. Anselm, Archbishop of Canterbury (1033–1109 AD). He said, “It’s possible to conceive of a being than which nothing greater can be conceived.” In other words, just because we can think of Him, He must exists. This is very optimistic and flawed. It’s like saying, “Because I can think of floating mountains and blue elephants, they must exist.” All 3 philosophical arguments were disposed by Immanuel Kant in his tome, “Critique of Pure Reason.”

The Argument of First Cause

“My father taught me that the question, ‘Who made me?’ cannot be answered, since it immediately suggests the further question, ‘Who made God?’”

— John Stuart Mill

The argument of first cause was first brought up and defended by Aristotle (3rd century BC) in his “Prime Mover” argument. He said, “There must be an immortal, unchanging being, ultimately responsible for all wholeness and orderliness in the sensible world.” This was then defended by Saint Thomas Aquinas in his “The Argument of the First Cause.”

It was Galileo who finally did away with Aristotle’s argument. Aristotle had simply been playing word games, and obscure ones at that. Galileo put the arguments of his rivals into the mouth of a character he named Simplicio (sempliciotto in Italian) which was the embodiment of intellectual mediocrity.

The argument leaves the existence of God unexplained. An intelligent designer immediately raises a larger question: Who or what made God? If God is the origin of the universe, who made god? God was born, already clothed and knew the language of the the times?

*In other words, if the universe was created by God then who created God?

*What is the cause of God?

*If there is a god, why did God create the universe?

*Aristotle created “the prime mover”. This is the idea taken up by Christian, Jewish and Islamic traditions.

*One of philosophy’s most ancient and of-trusted maxims, Ex nihilo nihil fit = nothing can come from nothing. Philo: “throw several pieces of steel together, without shape or form; they will never arrange themselves so as to compose a watch.”

Francis Bacon said, “Argumentation cannot suffice for the discovery of new work, since the subtly of nature is greater many times than the subtlety of argument.” Richard Dawkins agrees. He said:

The grand truth about the cosmos follow from a mere word game…[However,] the existence or non-existence of God is too big a question to be decided by ‘dialectical prestidigitation’…A philosopher’s job is to find out things about the world by thinking rather than observing. [Observing is the scientist’s job.]”

Science isn’t philosophy. Science isn’t a person thinking about the truth. It’s a person observing and coming to the truth.

Here’s an example to make this simpler: If I’m accused of murder, and the prosecution asks me “if it’s true that I was in Chicago on the night of the murder?” I can’t use philosophical/a priori arguments to evade the question. I can’t say, “It depends what you mean by ‘true.’” Word games don’t get you out of murder. Only cold, hard evidence does. The same is true for God: word games don’t magically create God. What proves God’s existence is cold, hard, peer-reviewed evidence.

4. There Have Been Thousands of Gods

In the sphere of love and fidelity, there have been over 200 Gods. Ancient Egypt had over 2,000 Gods.

Beyond the fact that we’ve had thousands of Gods and 10,000+ religions, there have been thousands sects within a religion and cults that never turned into proper “religions.” Christianity alone has over 45,000 sects in 2021!

The fact that there have been thousands of gods should make everyone stop and ask if they’re praying to the right God. Why do we pray to Jesus, Krishna or Allah, when there are thousands of other gods? How come we believe in Christ but not Zeus? Krishna but not Ra? As Sam Harris, neuroscientist and philosopher said, “Anyone caught worshiping Poseidon, even at sea, will be thought insane.” Even if you decide to be religious, your chances of choosing the right religion is currently 1 in 5 (considering the largest religions in the world).

People all over Europe once prayed to the Babylonian gods Enlil and Ninlil. And then they stopped. Shouldn’t the world have ended when they stopped? Or were they in fact praying to nobody, just as we are now?

Why didn’t sea storms increase when we stopped worshiping Poseidon? Why didn’t the sky roar when we stopped worshiping Zeus? The fact that the world didn’t fall apart when we stopped praying and continued to functioned normally shows that we were praying to nobody. It also shows that if we all stopped praying to Jesus, Allah or Krishna right now, the world wouldn’t suddenly fall apart.

The fact that there are so many religions instead of just one shows how religion and God is man-made. Why isn’t their just one true religion? Why would God allow the creation of thousands of heretic religions to compete against His sacred religion?

Since all religions disagree with each other, not more than one of them can be true. If your god is the right one, how do you disprove the Hindu god, or the Scientologist’s god? As Sagan said, “The proponents of one cult still denounce as sorcery the cultic practice of another.”

On a side note, just because Islam is the newest, it doesn’t automatically mean that it’s the true/proper religion. And just because Hinduism is the oldest, that doesn’t make it one/true religion.

*http://skepdic.com/recencybias.html

We don’t pray to ancient gods like Pan or Osiris is because of something called “recency bias.” Recency bias is the tendency to think that trends and patterns we observe in the recent past will continue in the future. We are thus deluded to think of only recent events and recent gods.

5. We Invented God To Explain Things We Didn’t Understand

Why don’t we believe in Venus or Thor anymore? What happened to Apollo and Ares? They didn’t just disappear. Where did they go?

What happened is humanity progressed. Religion comes from a period of history where no one had a clue what was going on. The world dark, unknown, unpredictable and nature was a giant mystery. So to understand the world, our first attempt was to create myths, religions and gods.

We didn’t understand why the Sun rose and set, so the ancient Greeks created Helios and Apollo. On the other hand, the ancient Egyptians created Nut — also a sun god. We invented the God of rain, such as Tlaloc, to explain the rain cycle. We prayed to Aphrodite, Baal and Venus so our wives would get pregnant. We didn’t understand why the Milky Way had a white tint. So the ancient Greeks believed it was the milk from the goddess Hera — hence the name “Milky Way.” We didn’t understand male seminal emissions at night so the Persians invented succubis.

The voice in our head before 1000 B.C. was thought to be the voice of god, said psychologist Julian Jaynes. Mental illness, before the 18th century, was credited to supernatural causes. And insomnia was considered a punishment by demons.

In short, when we didn’t understand a phenomenon, we invented myths and gods to explain them. In fact, we automatically assumed it must be god. God was created to meet our incessant demand for knowledge.

Supernatural

But to claim a supernatural explanation for something is to not to explain it at all. Even worse, it rules out the possibility of it ever being explained. Just because we can’t currently explain a phenomena/mystery naturally doesn’t mean that’s it’s by default supernatural. As Johann Wolfgang Goethe, playwright and scientist said, “Mysteries are not necessarily miracles.”

Invoking a supernatural or paranormal explanations only provides a linguistic placeholder until we find the “natural” cause. What would you think of a detective who attempting to solve a murder was too lazy to try to work out the mystery and instead wrote it off as a supernatural cause?

As Hippocrates, the father of medicine said,

“Men think epilepsy divine, merely because they don’t understand it. But if they called everything divine which they don’t understand, why, there would be no end of divine things.”

When someone credits phenomena to God, it means they have no clue. When creationists leap from bafflement straight to a hasty invocation of the supernatural, they’re no better than the fools who see a magic trick and leap to the conclusion that it’s the paranormal.

*“Nature free at once and rid of her haughty lords is seen to do all things spontaneously of herself without the meddling of the gods.” -Lucretius

Science doesn’t say, “We don’t understand this, so it must be God.” The entire history of science shows that phenomena that was once thought to be in the realm of the supernatural (the Sun, rain, babies) actually have natural explanations. In fact, if the history of science shows us anything, it’s that we get nowhere by labelling our ignorance ‘God.’

If there is a supernatural phenomenon, you’ll need to prove this is correct via experiments, studies and peer-reviewed research.

God of the Gaps

This is a strategy most creationist use. A creationist will come up with an argument and if I (an atheist) don’t posses the expertise to counter the argument then intelligent design wins by default. Here’s their thinking: “I [name] don’t understand [insert biological phenomenon], I’m unable to think, I’m too naïve, too unobservant and/or too unimaginative to think how it works. Therefore it was God.”

For example, if we don’t understand how something as complex as an eye evolved (even though there’s a perfectly good explanation), then it must be God.

Instead of acknowledging our lack of knowledge, theists automatically assigned responsibility to god for what we don’t yet understand. This is called the “god of the gaps” argument. In other words, the word “god” has been used to conceal our ignorance. As Paul Dietrich said,

…[the pious] applies this term [God] when the spring of the natural, the source of known causes, ceases to be visible: as soon as he loses the thread of these causes, or as soon as his mind can no longer follow the chain, he solves the difficulty, terminates his research, by ascribing it to his gods….When, therefore, he ascribes to his gods the production of some phenomenon…does he, in fact, do anything more than…substitute…the darkness of his own mind…with reverential awe?

In other words, when one claims that anything mysterious and strange must be supernatural, he isn’t just saying he doesn’t currently understand it but that it will never be understood.

*We don’t know about the brain, but that doesn’t mean that the brain is unknowable.

Creation Myths

Most creation myths start like this:

In the beginning, people were created by gods. They’re the special beings at the center of the world. (In most tribal creation myths, they only mention the creation of that one particular tribe, not others.) The tribe emigrates to a promised land — or to a New World. The tribe meets the forces of evil. In a desperate battle for survival they triumphs against all odds. The hero descends to hell or is exiled in the wilderness. After a long odyssey, he returns — again against all odds — past fearsome obstacles to complete his destiny. The world ends in apocalypse — by flood, fire, conquerors, or avenging gods — then it’s restored by the heroic tribe.

Almost all religions from Buddhism to Islam feature this humble hero prophet/prince who identifies with the poor. I hope my dear reader can see that this is just beautiful hero-focused storytelling.

Hindus believed, amongst many creation myths, that Lord Vishnu woke up on top of a giant coiled-up snake that rested on top of an ocean of nothingness and out of his navel grew a lotus where Brahman sat. Brahman was Vishnu’s servant. So, Vishnu commanded Brahman to create the world.

What’s amazing about most creation myths is that they begin by assuming the existence of a living creature before the entire universe and everything in it was created. For example, in the myth above, how was a giant snake alive before the world was created?

Science To The Rescue

Because of science, we now understand phenomena that we once attributed to the supernatural. We know why the sun “rises”, why it rains, where babies come from, why earthquakes shake cities and why the Milky Way is milky. As Christopher Hitchens said:

What happens to the faith healer and the shaman when any poor citizen can see the full effect of drugs and surgeries, administered without ceremonies or mystifications? Roughly the same thing as happens to the rainmaker when the climatologist turns up, or to the diviner…when school teachers get hold of elementary telescopes…

To claim that science and religion can exists in tandem is ignorant. The existence of a creative super-intelligence is unequivocally a scientific question — as I mentioned in chapter #1. Religion tried to answer this 100s and 1000s of years ago but failed. Because they compete for the same place, it doesn’t mean they’re both legit.

**Dogma and blind faith rush in to fill the vacuum left by science.

*Richard Dawkins: “Science studies how the heavens go, religion how to go to heaven.”

So, Why Are Religions Still Around?

Because we haven’t solved everything.

Religions advanced and evolved throughout history to answer our problems and mysteries. In the Stone Age, no one worried about abortions or homosexuality. At primitive stages of humanity, we didn’t have to deal with these things. They weren’t important. What were important was when it would rain, when the sun rose and how our wives got pregnant. Thus, we created Indra, Helios, and Hera, respectively. As Hitchens said,

*Bronze Age ancestors created the great monotheistic religions.

There would be no such churches in the first place if humanity had not been afraid of the weather, the dark, the plague, the eclipse, and all manner of other things now easily explicable.

Now that we progressed, the rain, the sun and conception no longer mystify us. What we need now is a God to tell us if abortion is moral, if homosexuality is moral and what happens after death and the beginning of the universe. In short, we now need religion to tell us: who we are, why we’re here and the meaning of my life. So, we created Jesus, Allah and Krishna to answer these question. This is why Christianity, Islam, Hinduism are the dominant religions today and not Olmec, Ashurism or Tengriism.

*We no longer have a need for a God to explain what’s no longer mysterious.

*“Religion once offered answers to many questions that have now been ceded to the care of science.”

Death is our 2nd biggest fear. So what did we do? We created heaven so that we wouldn’t have to die. This is why 72% of U.S. adults believe in heaven and only 58% believe in hell. We want to live forever. Heaven is the theme park that solves this fear of death. As Sigmund Freud said, “[Religion] was too clearly derived from our own desire to escape from or survive death.”

The more the universe follows laws, the less room god has.

*There may not be any questions that science cannot answer eventually, in the long run, when all the facts are in, but certainly there are questions that the sciences cannot answer yet.”

*Darwin: “Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is those who know little, and not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science.”

*When science discovered protoplasm, theology said it was a miracle. When science came up with the DNA model, theology said that was a miracle. When science discovered human DNA, theology then said human DNA was special.

*Religion Reflects Our Human Wishes & Our Fears? As Thomas Hobbes said, “Fear of things invisible is the natural seed of that which every one in himself calleth religion.”

*Strollers for children, Jehovah for adults.

*South America’s Achagua tribe worshiped lakes.

*You can predict the future based on dice (cleromancy), dots on paper (geomancy), fire and smoke (pyromancy), entrails of sacrificed animals (haruspicy), animal livers (hepatoscopy), or shoulder blades of animals (scapulimancy).

Declining Number of Gods

We went through a progression from primitive tribal animisms (such as the American Natives’ religion) to polytheism (such as the Greeks), to monotheisms where we are now (such as Judaism). Hundreds of small gods explaining every human concern were replaced by one powerful god. There’s a pattern here: the number of gods are declining.

Ancient Egypt (3,100 B.C) had over 2,000 Gods. Ancient Greece (800 B.C) had 321. The Romans (753 B.C) had 231. And now, in 2021 we have 1 god for each religion. Will this trend continue?

Just as how the Mayan Gods died with the Mayan population and the Native Americans’ animism died with the Aboriginals, so will the gods of our contemporary religions die out when either we either our civilizations die out or we progress.

In fact, if all humans go extinct and every human artifact is destroyed, Jesus, Allah, Yahweh and Krishna would seem like they never existed. And if a totally new thinking species emerges, we’ll get totally new gods and new religions. In short, god dies with us. As Xenophanes, “Men always make their gods in their own image.” And as Voltaire said, “If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him.”

*Ricky Gervais: A puddle ponders, “I must have been designed because I fit this hole perfectly.”

*This is the wish to have parents and to not want to grow up.

6. Religion Is Based On When & Where You Were Born

Theists assume that they know, without any evidence, that the faith that they were born with is the one true faith. A different pair of parents is literally all it would take for this same theist to be of a different religion. Let me explain.

*If the true religion was truly Muslim, why didn’t God make all of us Muslims?

*The number one predictor of anyone’s religious beliefs is that of their parents and the religious environment of the family. We become a copy of Daddy’s beliefs, Mamma’s beliefs, society’s beliefs, and religion’s beliefs.

If a person was born in Arkansas today, there’s a high chance he would believe in Christianity. But if the same person was born in Afghanistan, there’s a high chance he would believe in Islam. And if he were born in Arkansas but 700 before, he would have been an animist (the philosophy/religion of the Native Americans). In short, our environment has a huge impact on the religion we follow. We’re victims of childhood indoctrination.

**Environment is what has led him to accept a religion.

*We aren’t born knowing God. God is leaned through our environment. It is from nurture, not nature that we know God.

When we’re born, we’re stamped with a religion: “He’s a Muslim kid”, “She is a Christian girl.” But, this isn’t true. It’s not right to label a child with the cosmic and theological opinions of their parents. Imagine parents labeling their children with political parties: “He’s a Republican kid”, “She’s a socialist girl.” We rarely do this for politics but for religion, it’s a given.

We’re all born a child of Earth first and a human second. No one is born a Christian, Hindu, communist or Republican. We aren’t a “Christian girl,” but a child of Christian parents. A child is too young to know the description of the religion, it’s beliefs, rules and history. What good is it to name a child a “Hindu daughter” when she has no clue what the beliefs or history of Hinduism is.

*We are human beings first, and then our religious beliefs — if we so choose to accept one.

Religion is something for a child to choose (or reject) when she becomes old enough to do so. There’s a time when they choose to dive into politics and pick a party and we let them do that. Yet, when it comes to religion, parents impose a religion as soon as the child is born or before she’s even born, “We’ll raise her to be Catholic.” As Hitchens said, “If religious instruction were not allowed until the child had attained the age of reason, we would be living in a quite different world.”

7. Where Was God for 13.8 billion years?

Where was God since homo erectus was on Earth — which was 1.9 million years ago? In fact, where was God for the 6 million years that our human species was on earth? But wait, where was god for the 4.5 billion years since Earth was formed. Let’s not stop there, where was god for 13.8 billion years since God created the universe?

For 200,000 years (the number of years we, Homo sapiens, have been on earth) there has been murders, rapes and liars, yet God didn’t do anything. Then suddenly in the last 1,400–3,000 years God decides to step to the plate. Why only in the last 7% of the Homo-sapiens’ time on earth? Where was god for the 197,000 years, the 93%?

Was he playing hide and seek? He creates the universe and then abandoned it for 99.99997% of the time (3,000 minus 13.8 billion). And then suddenly He shows up, not in the leading empires of the time like Rome, but in the backwater, barbaric and illiterate villages, to perform miracles and answer prayers.

*only in the iron age and only between 1000 B.C and 600 C.E,

*“The divine instruction is delivered only once, and for the final time, to an obscure personage whose lightest word then becomes law.” -Christopher Hitchens

On top of that, why didn’t He create Earth, the beloved location where his special species reside, right after he created the universe? Why did he wait 9.2 billion years?! In fact, why didn’t He create the human species right after he created Earth? Why did He wait 4.5 billion years after Earth was formed to create humans?

If we put 14 billion years on a Western calendar with each day representing roughly 38,000 years, we humans were put on Earth on the last hour of the last day of this cosmic calendar. Why did God wait that long? In this Calendar, God appears almost at the last second on this calendar. Why did he wait so long?

When the first Christian missionaries made their appearance in China, the Chinese asked, “If God revealed himself, how is it that he has allowed so many centuries to elapse before informing the Chinese?”

If the visible universe is the Oxford library, then our galaxy (the Milky Way) is a full stop on a page. And yet, this is the only place that God visited?

Do you, dear reader, actually believe that the main and most important events in history happened +/- 2,000 years ago? That it was at this moment that the heavens decided to intervening — once and for all by the way, never to be seen again?

God, so powerful that he can hear the prayers of +/- 7.8 billion people at the same time, everyday simultaneously, be everywhere and invisible at the same time and yet he had to rest for billions of years to create Earth and then billions more to create his most special specie. Seriously? Even when we take the religious version (God created the entire universe in 6 days and had to rest on the last), clearly our God isn’t all-powerful.

If we are God’s chosen and special specie, he wouldn’t have waited billions of years to create us. His waiting shows that we’re not the pinnacle of His creation but just afterthought. On top of that, the universe would have carried on almost exactly the same without us.

*Why did God create the world, chill for 13.8 billion years, appear in the 1st century and the 6th, via propheies etc and then dips again?

8. Only 5 People

God revealed himself to Jesus, Muhammad, Joseph, Moses, Abraham, the Rishis and some more people but why not the rest of us? There have been 108 billion people on earth since the first humans walked and God chooses to reveal himself to only ~5 people.

Five out of 108 billion, is 0.000 000 000 037 037 037% of the population. In any experiment such a finding would be unviable and a scientist would discard this as a mistake or something not worth pursuing.



Isn’t foolish (and a little cruel) to reveal Thyself to only 5 people? Why 0.00000000003% and not 99.9%? Aren’t I special? Am I not worthy to see my creator? Are they more deserving than me? Is that what God is saying, that he created 6 people that are better and more deserving than the rest of us?

Why does God wants us to believe the secondary word of a mortal person? Why not just reveal Thyself to everyone instead of having to go through a middle-man — wouldn’t this make everyone’s faith 100x stronger? And why can’t this be done right now, right this second? Are you not all-powerful? Furthermore, did God not know that by choosing 6 people, he would potentially allow this “enlightened” person to hold authoritarian and dictarial power over his special specie with his special religion?

On top of that, why reveal yourself and then disappear? This is like a father who only meets and talks to a couple of his son s— when he has millions, nay, billions — and tells this first son to tell the second about him. Because the father will never talk to the other sons. How cruel!

Furthermore, why not reveal himself, physically in the flesh, to all of us everytime our faith weakens? Beyond that, is this a one-sided relationship, where God gets to choose when he’ll reveal himself? Why can He show up when He wants and I can’t?

*If God wanted us to have his words, why didn’t he preserve his words?

*Why didn’t Mr. Powerful reveal himself to each and everyone one of us.

On another point, if all scriptures are such Holy books, why it is not re-introduced and re-revealed word-by-word by a Neo-Jesus every 100 years, in fact, why not every year? In this way God’s message does not disappear? Moreover, why are we not born knowing the word of God? Why isn’t blasphemy automatically opposed?

9. Illiterate Beginnings

Let’s concede that God’s revelations to the Messiah and the Prophet actually did happen. Then why did God reveal Himself to illiterate peasants (expect for Muhammad) in a desolated wasteland that was the home of idol worship, superstitions and already littered with existing prophets?

Jesus was an artisan and day laborer. His education would have been almost exclusively focused on learning the trade of his father instead of reading the Hebrew Bible. He was a “tekton,” which means woodworker or builder. This term was also used by the Romans as slang for any uneducated or illiterate peasant. Illiteracy rates in the 1st century was staggeringly high, particularly for the poor — which Jesus was. As Reza Aslan said, “It’s estimated that nearly 97% of the Jewish peasantry could neither read nor write.”

Jesus’s disciples, the Apostles, were also simple peasants: farmers and fishermen who couldn’t read nor write. Peter and John were said to be “illiterate” (Acts 4:13).

To the Egyptian official scribe Petaus, who lived in the year 184 CE, literacy meant simply the ability to sign one’s name. He claimed he could write, when in fact he was just copying. In 5th century Athens, at the height of the classical period, literacy rates were rarely higher than 10–15%. In fact, mass literacy only appeared with the advent of the industrial revolution.

The Greek philosopher Celsus (circa 177 AD) was against Christianity. He said that the Christians were ignorant lower-class people:

[The Christians’]…injunctions are like this. ‘Let no one educated, no one wise, no one sensible draw near. For these abilities are thought by us to be evils. But as for anyone ignorant, anyone stupid, anyone, uneducated, anyone who is a child, let him come boldly.’ …We see that those who display their secret lore in the market-places and go about begging would never enter a gathering of intelligent men, nor would they dare to reveal their noble beliefs in their presence; but whenever they see adolescent boys and a crowd of slaves and a company of fools, they push themselves in and show off. …In private houses also we see wool-workers, cobblers, laundry-workers, and the most illiterate and bucolic yokels, who would not dare to say anything at all in front of their elders and more intelligent masters. But whenever they get hold of children in private and some stupid women with them, they let out some astonishing statements, as, for example, that they must not pay any attention to their father and school teachers…; they say that these talk nonsense and have no understanding…But, if they like, they should leave their father and their schoolmaster, and go along with the women and little children who are their playfellow to the wool dresser’s shop, or to the cobbler’s or the washerwoman’s shop, that they may learn perfection. And by saying this they persuade them.

Father Origen, who was asked to reply to Celsus’ charges, didn’t deny that Christians were ignorant.

Prophet Muhammad, on the other, is said to be illiterate (7:157–158). But there’s no historical justification for it. A successful merchant like himself must have been able to read and write basic Arabic — names, dates, goods, services.

But let’s give Jesus and Prophet Muhammad the benefit of the doubt. Let’s concede that they were both literate and God really revealed to them. Then why did God pick a part of the world where most of the population were illiterate? Why didn’t the all-knowing and all-seeing God reveal himself to the Greeks, Egypt, Rome, Iraq and India who were all advancing knowledge at or before their times.

Iraq invented writing in 3,200 B.C. Ionia, in 600 BC, gave us Pythagoras. This is the place where science was born. Ionians were the first to argue that laws and forces of nature, rather than gods, are responsible for the order and existence of the world. Socrates, Aristotle and Plato — the founders of philosophy — were alive in the 5th-3th century BC. In Egypt, the pyramids and the Sphinx were built circa 2,500 B.C, a massive work of engineering. In 6th century BC, the Egyptian Pharaoh Necho circumnavigated Africa. And in 3rd century BC, Alexandria was a major intellectual center. So why did God pick the backwaters Jerusalem, Bethamel and Mecca?

When the Bible was claiming Earth was a few thousand years old, the Mayans, who ruled South-America between 2,000 BC and 250 AD, were thinking of millions, and the Indians were thinking of billions! On the other hand, Muhammad was born ina society with no fixed calendar, while the Romans already had a calendar for 500 years! The Arabian Peninsula at the time wasn’t regarded as an imperial civilization. For centuries, the Arabs lived a tribal, pastoral, seminomadic existence in the desert and its fringes.

Why didn’t God reveal Himself to all of these more advanced civilizations/cities? They were the intellectual hub of humanity but God decides to reveal himself in the desert in the middle of nowhere to the most illiterate, backward, barbaric, superstitious and savage tribes. While other parts of the world already had civilizations and empires! He reveals Himself in Jerusalem right next door to the mighty, flourishing, republican, Roman Empire, who was the seat of progress. As Hitchens said,

We won’t appear to the Chinese who can already read [and do science], or to the Indus valley who were leading knowledge but we will pick the Middle East. And, on top of that we’ll teach them rape, genocide, racism and slaughter.

On top of that, why didn’t God reveal himself to more literate and prominent members of society, instead of illiterate Jesus? Furthermore, since most people in Muhammad’s and Jesus’s birthplace were illiterate, how did God propose they would spread God’s message rapidly? Surely God wanted his message to spread to the entire world so He can help as many people not commit sin and go to Hell. Yet, God choose to reveal himself to illiterate tribes.

Would it have not been smarter if the population He revealed Himself to was literate and organized? This is a giant mistake for a God that claims to be all-powerful and all-knowing. In fact, the path God choose is the worst marketing and distribution system, especially when one has the advantage of being...God.

If God exists why didn’t he wait for the printing press to be created (15th century) and then reveal himself. In fact, why didn’t he reveal the printing press when he was reveling Himself?

10. Are Scientists Atheists?

“The world would be astonished if it knew how great a proportion of its brightest ornaments…are complete skeptics of religion…I am…one of the very few examples….who has not thrown off religious belief, but never had it.” -J. S. Mill

“No respectable scientist is also a born again Christian, not in this day and age.” -Edward O. Wilson

A study done by Rice University in 2015 found that scientists are generally less religious than the general population.

1. Feynman: “[I] was certainly not in any way religious.”

2. Spinoza: “Nature created itself.”

3. Steven Weinberg, Nobel Prize-winning American physicist, “Religion is an insult to human dignity. With or without it, you’d have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, it takes religion.”

Stephen Hawking, Carl Sagan and James Watson (the co-discoverer of the structure of DNA), are all atheists. Sagan put it beautifully, “If by ‘God’ one means the set of physical laws that govern the universe, then clearly there is such a God.…[but] it does not make much sense to pray to the law of gravity.”

*Democritus believed that the prevailing religions of his time were evil and that neither immortal souls nor immortal gods existed.

Stephen Hawking’s stated clearly, “There is no a God, I’m an atheist.” In fact, when he was invited to Rome to meet the late Pope John Paul II, he asked to be shown the records of the trial of Galileo. Galileo, a 16th-century astronomer, was spreading the Copernican view that the earth wasn’t at the center of the universe. The church, who taught that the earth was at the center, couldn’t handle it. He refused to give assent to any dogma. So they banned his work for 116 years after his death. He was indicted for godlessness.

*Hawking left nothing for a god to do; he is an atheist.

*”The universe can and will create itself from nothing. Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the universe exists, why we exist. It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper and set the universe going.” — Hawking

Newton was very religious. Right after he came up with his famous laws, he started searching the Bible religiously for secret messages. Almost everyone during his time, however, were religious. This was because of three reasons: there was less scientific support for atheism, social peer-pressure, judicial pressure.

*Newton built a universe that had no place for God. “Nature and Nature’s laws lay hid in night: God said, ‘Let Newton be!’ and all was light.” -Alexander Pope.

As Dawkins said:

“Raphael and Michelangelo were Christians –it was pretty much the only option in their time. If history worked out differently, and Michelangelo was commissioned to paint a ceiling for a giant Museum of Science, mightn’t he have produced something at least as inspirational as the Sistine Chapel?”

Was Einstein An Atheist?

Einstein’s profession was to study the universe, day-in day-out, 365 days a year. He was part of the upper tier of physicists leading humanity to understand the universe, the creation of matter and even the beginning of time itself. Hell, he was closer to God than any of us was ever was and will be.

*Astrophysicists are at the forefront of understanding the universe, not religion. It’s not the clergy who stay up late at night doing research.

Some accuse Einstein of believing in god. Here’s what he said,

“The idea of a personal God is quite alien to me and seems even naive…To sense that behind anything that can be experienced there’s something that our mind cannot grasp this is religiousness. In this sense, I am religious.”

He said he’s “religious” but look at the way he defined “religiousness.” He said, if we can’t understand something and we call it religiousness then “I am religious.” He goes on:

It was, of course, a lie what you read about my religious convictions…I do not believe in a personal God…If something is in me which can be called religious then it’s the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it.

Again,

I do not believe in the immortality of the individual, and I consider ethics to be an exclusively human concern with no superhuman authority behind it…I believe in Spinoza’s God….not in a God who concerns himself with fates and actions of human beings.

After declining the presidency of Israel, Einstein, “I believe in Spinoza’s God, who reveals himself in the lawful harmony of all that exists, but not in a God who concerns himself with the fate and the doings of mankind. [he said this after?]

Spinoza’s God wasn’t a supernatural God. It was just nature. Einstein and Spinoza both used the word “God” in the poetic sense because nature was so beautiful — but not so beautiful that it requires a supernatural being.

*God of Einstein and Spinoza, hawking = sum total laws of nature.

Again and again,

I have repeatedly said that in my opinion the idea of a personal God is a childlike one. You may call me an agnostic, but I do not share the crusading spirit of the professional atheist whose fervor is mostly due to a painful act of liberation from the fetters of religious indoctrination received in youth.

“From the viewpoint of a Jesuit priest I am, of course, and have always been an atheist.” -Einstein

In conclusion, Einstein was an atheist. When he was was offered to be the 1st president of Israel, he declined it because of Zionism’s trajectory.

I’ll leave you with his most famous quote on religion, “Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.”

“Great spirits, have always found violent opposition from mediocrities. The latter cannot understand it when a man does not thoughtlessly submit to hereditary prejudices but honestly and courageously uses his intelligence.” -Einstein

*The America of which Einstein so wanted to be a part that he moved here, seems to have enveloped itself in a fog behind which it’s tying itself in knots over evolution.

*The greatest scientists were mostly atheists.

Business People

George Soros is also an atheist http://bit.ly/1SZAraF

Bill Gates and Warren Buffet are both agnostic.

*Andrew Carnegie rejected Christianity and sectarianism, and was delighted to replace those views with evolution: “Not only had I got rid of the theology and the supernatural, but I had found the truth of evolution,” he wrote in his autobiography (p. 339).

*Andrew rejected Christianity and sectarianism, and was delighted to replace those views with evolution: “Not only had I got rid of the theology and the supernatural, but I had found the truth of evolution,” he wrote in his autobiography (p. 339). Andrew Carnegie, to Sir James Donaldson, Principal of St. Andrews:

“The whole scheme of Christian Salvation is diabolical as revealed by the creeds. An angry God, imagine such a creator of the universe. Angry at what he knew was coming and was himself responsible for. Then he sets himself about to beget a son, in order that the child should beg him to forgive the Sinner. This however he cannot or will not do. He must punish somebody — so the son offers himself up & our creator punishes the innocent youth, never heard of before — for the guilty and became reconciled to us. . . . . I decline to accept Salvation from such a fiend.”

11. Were the Founding Fathers Religious?

Let’s read from their own quotes.

Benjamin Franklin: “Lighthouses are more useful than churches.”

James Madison said,

During almost 15 centuries has the legal establishment of Christianity been on trial. What has been its fruits? More or less, in all places, pride and indolence in the clergy; ignorance and servility in the laity; in both, superstition, bigotry and persecution. …The basic premise … was that the glories and complexities of living nature were to be seen as prima facie evidence of God’s creative hand.

What about John Adams?

As I understand the Christian religion, it was, and is a revelation. But how has it happened that millions of fables, tales, legends, have been blended with both Jewish and Christian revelation that have made them the most bloody religion that ever existed?

Writing to Jefferson, Adams said,

I almost shudder at the thought of alluding to the most fatal example of the abuses of grief which the history of mankind has preserved — the Cross. Consider what calamities that engine of grief has produced!

What about Thomas Paine?

That these books are spurious, and that Moses is not the author of them; and still further, that they were not written in the time of Moses, nor till several hundred years afterwards, that they are an attempted history of the life of Moses, and of the times in which he is said to have lived….written by some very ignorant and stupid pretenders several hundred years after the death of Moses, as men now write histories of things that happened, or are supposed to have happened, several hundred or several thousand years ago…No grand and noble deity should have such atrocities and stupidities laid to his charge. …All national institutions of churches whether Jewish, Christian or Turkish, appear to me no other than human inventions, set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolize power and profit.

*”Each church accuses the other of unbelief; and for my own part, I disbelieve them all…My own mind is my church” -Thomas Paine

*“Whenever we read the obscene stories, the voluptuous debaucheries, the cruel and torturous executions, the unrelenting vindictiveness with which more than half the Bible is filled, it would be more consistent that we called it the word of a demon than the word of God.” -Thomas Paine

Paine was thrown in jail for his atheism.

What about Thomas Jefferson? Well, Jefferson had a lot to say about Christianity and religion:

Christianity is the most perverted system that ever shone on man…I am satisfied, and sufficiently occupied with the things which are, without tormenting or troubling myself about those which may indeed be, but of which I have no evidence. …Shake off all the fears of servile prejudices, under which weak minds are servilely crouched. Fix reason firmly in her seat, and call on her tribunal for every fact, every opinion. Question with boldness even the existence of a God; because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason than that of blindfolded fear.” …A professorship of theology should have no place in our institution. …The day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus, by the Supreme Being as his father, in the womb of a virgin, will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva. The priests of the different religious sects dread the advance of science as witches do the approach of daylight. …In every country and in every age, the priest has been hostile to liberty. …It’s easier to acquire wealth and power by this combination [opening a church] than by deserving them.” …May it [The Declaration] be to the world…the signal of arousing men to burst the chains under which monkish ignorance and superstition had persuaded them to bind themselves, and assume the blessings and security of self-government. That form which we have substituted, restores the free right to the unbounded exercise of reason and freedom of opinion. All eyes are opened, or opening, to the rights of man. …The general spread of the light of science has already laid open to every view the palpable truth, that the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately, by the grace of God.

As Jefferson’s days began to wane, he wrote to friends that he faced the approaching end with neither hope for heaven or fear of hell. In fact, almost all of the American founders died without any priest by their bedside (Thomas Paine too).

In fact, it’s quite probable that the first four presidents of the United States were Deists. Jefferson certainly didn’t believe in the divinity of Jesus Christ and while he was President wrote a version of the Four Gospels from which he removed all references to “fantastic” events, retaining only the ethical content of Jesus’ teaching.

*The founders most certainly were secularists who believed in keeping religion out of politics.

So, Is America A Christian Nation Then?

General William G. Boykin, Deputy Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence under President George W. Bush, went on a speaking tour to declare from the pulpit and in uniform that the United States was in a holy war as a “Christian nation battling Satan.”

He also helped organize the use of abusive treatment of prisoners in Iraq. Many of them testified that guards forced them under pain of torture to curse their religion, eat pork, and drink alcohol.

What Boykin doesn’t know is that America is a secular, non-Christian state and that the Founding Fathers were agnostics/atheists — as I’ve shown.

The Treaty With Tripoli

The fact that the United States wasn’t founded as a Christian nation was stated early in the treaty with Tripoli. Drafted in 1796 under George Washington, unanimously approved by the U.S. Senate and signed by President John Adams in 1797, the treaty of Tripoli contained the following declaration: “The United States is not a Christian nation any more than it is a Jewish or Mohammedan Nation.”

The paradox has often been noted that although the United States was founded on secularism, it is now the most religious country in Christendom. While England, with an established church headed by its constitutional monarchy, is among the least religious. In England, religion has become little more than a pleasant social pastime.

The Constitution

If we want multiculturalism we need a secular state and a godless constitution. With no national religion, people can believe in whatever they want. In other words, a secular state means religious freedom. That’s why the Founders demanded, in the Constitution, the separation of Church and State. And they bolstered that by writing in the First Amendment, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion.”

The Founders fought for individuals to exercise religion without persecution just as they fought against the establishment of religion by government.

By the way, Eisenhower encouraged Congress to add the words “under God” to the pledge of Allegiance because at the time communism was on the rise. Either then the pledge of Allegiance was written in 1892 and not by the Founders.

Protection Against One Powerful Religion

They also understood that to protect and defend people of faith, they’d have to prevent any one sect from dominating. As James Madison said, “A religious sect may degenerate into political faction.” If that happened, “the variety of sects dispersed over the entire face of it must secure the national councils against any danger from that source.”

Conclusion

So, is America a Christian Nation? No. In fact, the Founding Fathers would be appalled knowing that Americans thought so. Despite America’s secular origins and the fact that Silicon Valley is literally creating “artificial” intelligence (i.e. a new specie) religion is alive and growing.

In 2021, Christians made up 88% of Congress while only 65% of U.S. adults are Christians. That’s 88% of our politicians that believe that dinosaurs were on Noah’s ark, that the first humans were made from dirt and the divine breath in a garden with a talking snake by an invisible entity.

12. Praying Has Been Proven Not To Work

“If you murmur thoughts privately in your head, the fatherless man and his ‘father’ (who is also himself) will hear your thoughts and may act upon them. He is simultaneously able to hear the thoughts of everybody else in the world.” -Dawkins

Ambrose Bierce, a Civil War soldier, said one definition of praying is, “to ask that the laws of the universe be annulled on behalf of a single petitioner.” To think that God created the entire universe and millions of species to only have a relationship with one of them is bonkers to me.

Is it a Little Selfish When God Answers Our Prayers?

When we pray to God for a promotion that means that he has to take that promotion from someone else, someone who, we can expect, deserved that promotion. If we ask God to let us win the lottery that means he has to take the lottery from someone else. If we ask God to not let a fire start in a forest that means he’s disrupting the cycle of oxygen and carbon dioxide. In other words, whenever god gives us something, he’s taking it from someone else. Meaning when God intervenes he’s being selfish while creating a new injustice.

Let’s go deeper. When he answers our prayers it means:

That he isn’t omniscient because he should have seen the future in the first place — annulling the need for intervention. He’s a sadist because if he’s omnipotent then why are prayers even required? Why not just grant the wish without requiring a prayer or many prayers? He’s selfish because he’s favoring one person out of 7.8 billion.

Are There Any Statistics on Praying?

Millions of people in England recite “God Save the Queen.” In fact, it’s in the British National Anthem 8 times. And throughout England entire congregations pray publicly for the health of the royal family. So the queen and the royal family should live a very long time, right? And they should be extraordinarily healthier than most other people — who are only prayed for by our nearest and dearest? However, they aren’t.

Victorian statistician, Francis Galton, found that the British Royal family lived just as long as other wealthy, pampered aristocratic class. In fact, Galton prayed over randomized plots of land to see if the plants would grow any faster. They didn’t — of course.

The same thing happened in Maoist China where millions of people publicly wished that Mao Zedong live for 10,000 years. He didn’t — of course. He died like everyone else. Same with Ancient Egypt where the Egyptians urged the Gods to let the Pharaoh live forever. They also died. Of course?

In 2006, the American Heart Journal reported, “There was no difference between those patients who were prayed for and those who weren’t. There was a difference between those who knew they were prayed for and those who didn’t know, but it went in the wrong direction.” Those who knew they were prayed for suffered significantly more complications than those who didn’t. This was performance anxiety. Dr. Charles Bethea, one of the researchers, said, “It may have made them uncertain, wondering am I so sick they had to call in their prayer team?” Thus, not only does prayer not work, but it can also be detrimental.

Very pious people will say, “God was just busy on that day.” If so, then they’re telling us that the omnipotent and omniscient God isn’t actually omnipotent or omniscient. How is it that God can create 13.72 billion years, 10 million species, billions of galaxies, trillions of stars and planets in 6days but when you prayed on that day he was just “too busy.” He gives birth to a whole species, humanity, but won’t answer the kneeled begging of his own creation. What evil parent does such a thing? A sadist, in my opinion.

In Conclusion

Why do people pray for the dead if people go to heaven or hell based on their own sins anyway? If Lakshmi is the Hindu god of wealth, why are most Hindus poor? Praying doesn’t work. As Anne Royall, United States’ first secular lobbyist in the 1800s said, “Good works instead of long prayers.” And, as Robert G. Ingersoll, an American Lawyer said, “The hands that help are better far than lips that pray.”

On top of that, why are we the one that have to show all the love through the praying (begging) etc?

Why Don’t Animals Pray?

Not only do other species not pray, but they don’t have Gods and religions. There’s no Lord of buffalos or Father of the Butterflies. As Spinoza said, “If a triangle could speak, it would say, in like manner, that God is eminently triangular, while a circle would say that the divine nature is eminently circular. Thus each would ascribe to God its own attributes, would assume itself to be like God, and look on everything else as ill-shaped.”

In other words, if other species or even objects could invent God they’d invent him in their perspective. This explains why our contemporary gods are human beings and not another species. It also explains why the Thracian gods had blond hair and blue eyes. Our Gods aren’t human because God can only be a member of the most intelligent species but because our childlike ego wants it so.

*As humans, we wish to credit good things as miraculous and bad things as evil.

13. Miracles Violate Proven Laws

13. Are Natural Disasters Due to God?

Natural disasters don’t happen because God is angry or disappointed with us. Nor do they happen because people aren’t attending church. It’s not sins that cause hurricanes or earthquakes. Natural disasters aren’t violations of the laws of nature but are actually part of the inevitable fluctuations of nature.

*Epidemics are thought to be sent as a punishment for sin and were combated with repentance.

In fact, though we see monstrous natural events such as earthquakes and tsunamis as disasters, to Earth they’re a neutral event. Earthquakes and tsunamis bring Earth back to balance, back to stability. They relieve tension that’s built up. Thus, the Earth doesn’t see a storm as bad or good but instead, they just are. Let’s explain with an example:

A tiger is chasing a gazelle in the Savannah. Out of nowhere, an earthquake quakes(?) and creates an obstacle between the tiger (predator) and the gazelle (prey). Most of us will see it in the eyes of the gazelle, “Ohhh the earthquake saved the gazelle. Praise God!” But in the eyes of the tiger, it was a complete disaster. He didn’t eat which means he’ll go hungry and so will his cubs and he has a smaller probability of survival. It’s all perception.

How egoistic of us to believe that earth-shaking events, such as earthquakes or hurricanes, must always have a human connection. Why should a divine being, with creation and eternity on his mind, care for a species that's only been around for 6 million years. Whereas crocodiles have been on Earth for 200 million years!

Earthquakes, wars and disease all tend to make people religious. In fact, anything that causes alarm turns people to God. But it’s not God that creates lighting, thunder, rainstorms and hurricanes. It’s the water cycle and the weather cycles.

14. Is God Still Needed for Morality & Consolation ?

“People are innate romantics, they desperately need myth and dogma.” — E. O. Wilson

Some people admit that God doesn’t exist but that the psychological or emotional need for god — as a friend, father, confessor or confidant — makes religion invaluable. This comfort — the comfort of knowing that there’s someone watching us, guiding us and protecting us— means that religion is important and the belief in God is good for society.

*This is really just the fear of being alone.

Religion entertains, teaches us how to deal with the world, about good and evil, bravery and cowardness. It makes us think about the consequences of our behaviors and scares us with spooky stories. That without God and religion we’d turn into immoral and barbarous people.

People assume that religion teaches morality and that atheism teaches immorality. But someone can be great morally without being religious. In fact, many people can and are moral without religion. Claiming that atheism leads to immorality is a huge fallacy. It requires studies and evidence (chapter 1) which, as we’ll see, there isn’t

Religion at one time filled 2 main roles:

Understanding the world & giving it meaning (which we talked about in chp 4) Morality, reassurance, consolation and inspiration.

Understanding has been superseded by science. Morality, reassurance, consolation, inspiration — i.e. ethical instruction — has also been superseded. This one by ethics philosophers, the self-help industry and also by science — as I’ll show.

A Story: Erewhon Revisited

In Samuel Butler’s fiction book, Erewhon Revisited, the character Higgs arrives in a remote country. After spending some time there he escapes in a balloon. He comes back 20 years later and finds a new religion in which he’s worshipped under the name ‘Sun Child’ where it’s said that he ascended into Heaven.

Higgs hears two professors say to each other at the “Feast of the Ascension” that they never set eyes on the man Higgs and they hope they never will. They’re are the high priests of the religion of the Sun Child.

Higgs is annoyed. He tells them, “I’m going to expose all this humbug and tell the people of Erewhon that it was only I, the man Higgs, and I went up in a balloon.” He’s told, “You must not do that, because all the morals of this country are bound around this myth, and if they know that you didn’t ascend into heaven they’ll all become wicked.” Higgs is persuaded and goes away quietly.

Are religious people more moral than atheists?

I have no doubt that your acceptance of Christ (or Krishna or Yahweh) coincided with some very positive changes in your life. In fact, millions of people have had similar experiences: you were going through a bad phase in life, you stumbled upon the Bible (or the Gita or the Quran) and voila you fell in love and became a convert or a born-again insert religion here. It felt like finally finding something that makes sense and that can finally give your life meaning. It’s like being high on life. I know this because this was my exact experience.

Thinking that there’s someone out there who’ll save you or who’s watching over you may be emotionally satisfying and make us healthier, happier and more motivated, but that doesn’t prove that God actually exists.

The question of whether religion is true or not is one thing and the question of whether religion teaches morality or doesn’t is another. Meaning, the fact that religion has a good moral effect upon us is no evidence that religion is thus true and God exists. The idea that hell or Santa makes children behave doesn’t mean that they exists. And not believing in hell or Santa doesn’t make you immoral.

We don’t need religion or the belief in God to be moral. Morality doesn’t come from religion. Morality, in fact, precedes and predates religion. Jainism, a religion that emerged 600 years before Christ, is a better guide for becoming like Martin Luther King Jr. than Christianity is. Mahavira, a Jain “saint,” surpasses the morality of the Bible with a single sentence: “Do not injure, abuse, oppress, enslave, insult, torment, torture, or kill any creature or living being.” Gandhi got his doctrine of nonviolence from Jainism.

It’s true that Jesus said some profound things about love, charity and forgiveness — such as the Golden Rule. But, again, numerous teachers offered the same instruction centuries before Jesus. For example, Zoroaster, Buddha, Confucius and Epictetus discuss the importance of selfless love better than the Bible.

*‘Resist not evil, but whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also.’ That is not a new precept or a new principle. It was used by Lao-Tze and Buddha some five or six hundred years before Christ.

The problem with the Bible is that its teachings are so self-contradictory that it was possible for Christians to happily burn heretics alive for 500 years and follow in the steps of St. Francis of Assisi. Theists cherry-pick verses from the Bible to justify their impulses. If you look for evidence of one thing in the Bible, you’ll find it. And, if you look for the evidence of its opposite, you’ll also find it! As Dawkins said, “If you’re picking and choosing from scripture, you might as well throw it out and write another book.”

No serious student of history would agree that Christianity stood for better morality than other religions. In fact, those who wish to base their morality on the Bible either has some strange ideas about morality or have never read or understood it. For example, there’s a story in the Bible in which King David slept with a married woman, Bathsheba, and got her pregnant. In order to cover up his offense, he arranged for Bathsheba’s husband, a soldier, to die in battle. David then took Bathsheba as his own wife. How is this morality?

If we got our morals from scriptures, we would all:

Observe the Sabbath strictly and think it just and moral to execute anybody who chooses not to. Stone to death any bride who couldn’t prove she’s a virgin — when her husband pronounced himself unsatisfied with her. And execute disobedient children, sanction killing, make praying mandatory, scare the entire world of hell and impose impossible tasks and rules.

Evolution

Thank God (don’t actually) that our sense of right and wrong — like fair pay or the repulsion of cruelty — is derived from our Darwinian past not religion. It true, morality was built via evolution. As Dawkins said, “Our moral judgments evolved over millions of years.”

Studies of primate behavior reveal that morality precedes humanity itself. All of our primate cousins are partial to their own kin and generally intolerant of murder, theft, deception and sexual betrayal. Our natural impulse is to do good and be good. There are biological reasons why we treat our parents well and think badly of murderers, adulterers, thieves, and liars. We dislike them not because of religion but because of our own physical fear.

*In short, morality happens in spite of religion, not because of it.

Studies On Morality

During the 2017 Charlottesville protest — which was led by very religious right-wing groups such as white nationalist, Neo-Nazis and the KKK — where was their morality? Why didn’t the fear of God restrain them? Where was their legendary God-given morality? This was a natural experiment to test whether the belief in God makes us good. And, it doesn’t. People after Charlottesville protest say we need religion when what they really mean is we need police.

It’s absurd to believe that religion makes people conduct themselves morally while atheism makes people behave badly. If morality depends on religion then all 1.1 billion atheists in the world would all be criminals and make up a very large chuck in prison populations — which is untrue.

I’ll be the first to admit, some of the worst tyrants in recent history — Hitler, Stalin, Kim II Sung, Pol Pot and Mao — were all atheists. But that honestly doesn’t matter. What matters is whether atheism statistically and systematically causes people to do immoral things. If for example, 70% of atheist are delinquents, that would be good evidence against the teaching atheism — but it still wouldn’t prove that God exists.

Some say, religion answers the “why.”

In 2014, 22 out of 39 countries (a majority) said it’s necessary to believe in God to be moral and have good values. This was more common in poorer countries (African, Middle East, Latin America and Asia/Pacific countries) than in wealthier countries (Australia, Europe, North America — ex-US). The survey also concluded that individuals age 50 or older and those without a college education are more likely to link morality to religion. 59% of those without a college degree believe that religion makes us moral compared to 37% of those with degrees.

In 2013, researchers asked 1,252 adults of different religious and nonreligious backgrounds in the United States and Canada to record the good and bad deeds they committed or were the target of throughout their day. The premise was that if we get our morality from religion, then the results between the religious and nonreligious would differ. They didn’t. The study found that “religious and non-religious people commit similar numbers of moral acts.” So, atheism doesn’t influence people to do bad things. In other words, it’s not religion that makes a person good or bad. It’s the person’s own morals.

How about charity? Do the religious, since they’re more moral, give more to charity than atheists? A study done in 2013 shows that theists give 9% more than secularists. However, a word of caution. The money that theists give goes to a church and not an actual charity. Donating money to an organization that promotes his own religion and ultimately benefits the giver is not true “charity.” Christians helping Christians is not charity. That’s self-serving clocked in the guise of helping others, which is worse than outright self-serving behaviors!

Let me ask you a question, which is more moral: helping people purely out of concern for their suffering or helping them or because they’re Christian and you think you’ll be rewarded in the afterlife. I hope, the first choice.

By the way, if we’re doing something so that God can reward us, we really have no morality. We’re pleasing an entity to get a reward. That’s not sincere and genuine morality. That’s self-serving morality. In reality, we call this being the “teacher’s pet” or better yet, “kissing the boss’s ass.”

Check this! When the study demotes the money that goes to churches as charity, the 9% turns into zero. Meaning, theist and atheist give the same amount!

The Trolley Study

Theists agree over what’s right and wrong but they can’t defend why. In a 2006 experiment, Mark Hauser and his colleagues adapted their trolley experiment to a small Central American tribe called the Kunas. The Kunas have had little contact with Westerners and no formal religion. They changed the thought experiment of “trolley on rails” to crocodiles swimming towards canoes.” With corresponding minor differences, the Kunas showed the same moral judgments as the rest of us.

Meaning, the way people respond to moral tests and their reasons behind them are because of our evolutionary heritage and not dependent on religious beliefs.

Is Religious Upbringing Associated With More Altruism?

A 2015 study by the University of Chicago in six countries (Canada, China, Jordan, South Africa, Turkey and the United States) examined 1,170 children’s tendency to share, their inclination to judge and punish others for bad behavior. The study found that those from religious families were less likely to share with others than children from non-religious families.

On top of that, children from religious households judged anti-social behavior more harshly than non-religious children. This negative relation between religiosity and altruism grew stronger with age. Meaning, children with longer experiences with religion were the least likely to share.

A religious upbringing was also was associated with more punitive tendencies in response to anti-social behavior. In fact, the children from atheist or secular families were more altruistic! On top of that, children from religious households favored stronger punishments for anti-social behavior and judged such behavior more harshly than non-religious children. This study not only proves that scripture is not the only way a child can get moral teaching but also that religion is restarting ethics.

The lead researcher, Jean Decety said, “…the secularization of moral discourse does not reduce human kindness. In fact, it does just the opposite.” Theists assert we need religion to be moral. But I hope as you can see, that these studies take away religion’s monopoly on morality.

What’s more amazing about this study was who financially supported it. It was the John Templeton Foundation. A foundation who publicly asserts that their vision is “about the possibility of acquiring ‘new spiritual information.’”

How Are Animals Moral, If They Don’t Have Religion?

How do theists think animals live moral lives without religion? How is it that dogs, cats, birds behave morally without scripture? How is it that they don’t cause mass genocide to their own species while we do?

Most species don’t commit suicide, yet humans have been committing suicide in the name of religion for centuries!

In Conclusion

We don’t need God in order to be or do good. If people are good only because they fear punishment or hope for a reward (heaven) then we’re a sorry bunch.

If you agree that, in the absence of God and religion, you’d commit robbery, rape, and murder, then you reveal yourself as an immoral person. On the other hand, if you admit that you’d continue to be good even if you’re not under divine surveillance, you’ve accepted that God isn’t necessary for us to be good.

Even if the studies proved the opposite, that atheism led to moral chaos and less charity, this still wouldn’t suggest that Christianity, or Hinduism or Islam is true and that God exists. In other words, even if it were true that we needed to believe in God to be moral, this still wouldn’t prove that God exists. Let’s go one step further to clarify this. Even if the Bible was moral, it wouldn’t prove that that God exists.

*Even if all atheists were neurotic, suicidal and evil, this still doesn’t prove that God exists.

Even if atheism encouraged immorality, that would not imply the theory is flase.

And if some of you still get your morality from scripture, why not cut out the scriptures and pick up a book on ethics, morality and character? Motivators such as Tony Robbins and Robin Sharma can motivate us, teach us morality and character and make us happy.

We no longer need to confine ourselves to 1st-century or 6th-century moral teachings — which includes genocide, torture, rape, incest, sadism and misogyny. Instead, we can come to the right morals by debating what’s right and what’s wrong.

So, how do we know what’s good and what’s bad? For most of us, as Hauser showed, it’s intuitive. It evolved through evolution. For others, we can learn it by reading.

Socrates was a better man than Allah, Yahweh or Jesus. In fact, most people are more moral than these Gods! As Hitchens said, “The study of literature and poetry…for the…ethical questions with which it deals, can now easily depose [religion].

The question of the truth of a religion is one thing, but the question of its consequences and usefulness is another.

Shia ceremonies are partly borrowed from Catholicism.

******Piety, the Quran reminds believers, lies “not in turning your face East or West in prayer . . . but in distributing your wealth out of love for God to your needy kin; to the orphans, to the vagrants, and to the mendicants; it lies in freeing the slaves, in observing your devotions, and in giving alms to the poor” (2:177). Same as Jesus.

What a grin, meanwhile, on the face of those who accept the

cash donations that are made in lieu! The so-called Golden Rule, sometimes needlessly identified with a folktale about the Babylonian Rabbi Hillel, simply enjoins us to treat others as one would wish to be treated by them. This sober and rational precept, which one can teach to any child with its innate sense of fairness (and which predates all Jesus’s “beatitudes” and parables), is well within the compass of any atheist and does not require masochism[…]

*

**Maybe heaven was invented by someone who was trying to consol a grieving person.

*We no longer need religion to inspire or console us.

Shia ceremonies are partly borrowed from Catholicism.

*On top of that, Covid actually strengthened people’s faiths. This was a call for me to step in.

Conclusion

“We inhabit a universe where atoms are made in the centers of stars; where each second a thousand suns are born; where life is sparked by sunlight and lightning in the airs and waters of youthful planets; where the raw material for biological evolution is sometimes made by the explosion of a star halfway across the Milky Way; where a thing as beautiful as a galaxy is formed a hundred billion times — a Cosmos of quasars and quarks, snowflakes and fireflies, where there may be black holes and other universes and extraterrestrial civilizations whose radio messages are at this moment reaching the Earth. How pallid by comparison are the pretensions of superstition and pseudoscience.”

— Carl Sagan

“I worry that … pseudoscience and superstition will seem year by year more tempting, the siren song of unreason more sonorous and attractive. Where have we heard it before? Whenever our ethnic or national prejudices are aroused, in times of scarcity, during challenges to national self-esteem or nerve, when we agonize about our diminished cosmic place and purpose, or when fanaticism is bubbling up around us — then, habits of thought familiar from ages past reach for the controls. The candle flame gutters. Its little pool of light trembles. Darkness gathers. The demons begin to stir.”

— Carl Sagan

Thankfully, the importance of religion worldwide has declined from 61% in 2003 to 48% in 2020.

And in 2019, 22% said “humans evolved, but God had no part in the process,” compared to only 9% in 1999 that said this. Those that belive God created humans in the present form, dropped from 47% in 1999 to 40% in 2019.

From 2007 to 2019, Christianity declined from 78% to 65% and the unaffiliate grew from 16% to 26%. (Though, atheists and agnostics went from 2% to a messily 4.5%.

To your success,

Nikhil Mahadea