Response to a video.

First before I start I’d like to inform you that this is a response to Fakesagan’s video ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OcVev_RKW6E&watch_response  )to Paul’s ego video (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6H8c8R70UjI&feature=channel_page ) and he is basically supporting the idea that Secular Humanism is a cult who can turn to be dangerous( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secular_humanism ). Also before I go on I’d like to say that I wouldn’t call myself a secular humanist. I would call me a free thinking human that comes to various conclusions through thinking process (just like everyone else around here), but I guess if you’d like to label me you would call me an atheist. As for my beliefs I would say that I do agree with most if not all of the things that Secular Humanism supports but i wouldn’t go as far as to include me in their group. I would like to apologise but I don’t do video’s although it was suggested to me by a couple of people because I do not like the video recording process etc and English isn’t my first language and although I do have fluency I wouldn’t go as far as having to pick between greek/english words to get across what I have to say.

Cult (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cult)  typically refers to a cohesive social group devoted to beliefs or practices that the surrounding population considers to be outside the mainstream, with a notably positive or negative popular perception. The word “cult”, which has at least eight meanings, has been a source of confusion.

Secular Humanism (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secular_humanism ) is a humanist philosophy that upholds reason ethics and justice, and specifically rejects the supernatural and the spiritual as the basis of moral reflection and decision-making. Like other types of humanism, secular humanism isa life stance that focuses on the way human beings can lead good, happy and functional lives.

Secular Humanism is a philosophy it is not a cult. It does appear to be a cult  though when you see all the different groups and societies that have merged from it and as such I do get your reasoning on why it would appear to be a cult. But in the same way you wouldn’t go as far as to call Atheist’s a cult because they share the same philosophy that there is no god as the word suggests. In reality just like you explained it’s a philosophy just like Nitzche’s philosophy for life and just like any other philosophy. I would go as far as to extend it to the moral teaching of Jesus in that respect without all of the religious nonesense.

You say it’s dangerous because it’s utopian. The philosophy behind the idea of making the world a better place is always utopian and anything that promises just that should be avoided. I would like to say that I disagree with the whole idea of utopian principles. You brought up Marxism/Communism as an example of utopian system that came to be one of the most evil systems ever. I would like to point out that the system that was adopted in Russia was not the utopian system that Karl Marx suggested it was something entirely different. It was Bolshevik’s version of communism and it was edited to fit the situation and the gap that was left by lack of monarchy. Any system especially a political system must slowly be changed, at least in the consciousness of the people and this system hasn’t basically because the people were uneducated and the educated people were profiting by the monarchical system of the Tsar. Now Bolsheviks did just that and established a monarchy on communist principles. On the other hand I would like to point out that the current system of democracy that exists in the world is not a system where the views of the people is heard. In Ancient Greece all of the men (because women didn’t vote) had to vote on any issue and on any decision taken. Now people vote for other people that then take the decisions for them. Therefore the decisions taken are down to the voting of those people whose individual opinion might be lost through internal voting that occurs in the party as each party would support only one united view. Thus individuality is overall lost and the laws voted into place are in great deal against public opinion. It is however Utopian to think that for each decision public vote should be the one to decide because people don’t have the time nor care to do that. On the other hand it’s the right way to happen. Having this in mind I would like to explain why Secular Humanism is not a utopia. Because it tells you to look at the evidence and decide according to that. It doesn’t say anything else.

It is not wrong to hope for a better life and to seek for ways to improve the current living conditions and the world around you. It is not wrong to hope. Utopian systems fail only when they get abused and for that we have no-one else to blame but ourselves for allowing it to happen and for not being intelligent enough to stop it. And again Secular Humanism supports free thinking and free will which you support as well and so does Karl Marx but weirdly enough was not included in the interior policy of the Bolshevik party.

Secular humanism as you say promotes science and you say that in turn makes it hate all religious people. I do not understand the link between loving science and hating religious people. I do understand loving science and in turn thinking that religious belief are stupid – that I can see happening but the hate I don’t. It’s just like ideas, you wouldn’t kill someone for being stupid, you might explain to him/her why they are being stupid but you would never kill him for being stupid or acting stupid unless of course his stupidity is hurting you and by hurting I talk about physical damage and not sentimental/emotional damage. Because as we said Secular Humanism supports evidence  and nothing else and from what I understand your philosophy for life agrees with that.

I know it appears as though I am supporting Humanism and disqualifying your ideas but I am simply offering my point of view. I also agree that idea burying is one of the stupidest things ever, so is censorship. If something needs to be said it should be said. If we fear people are so easily malleable maybe we should improve the education system rather than avoid exposing the stupid and in turn go against the human rights and the democratic beliefs that we hold so dear.

I would like to continue with your examples of Authoritarian humanists as an example on how beliefs can turn to hate and maybe dangerous.  As I said managing to understand that using evidence to decide on things is not a hard concept to conceive and also the absence of god isn’t either. As you said ideas can be dangerous yes, and ideas can also be edited and changed to fit the beliefs that other people have. Yes it is easy to do that, but on the other hand it is up to us to spot the stupid. It is up to us to understand what’s going wrong in this world. It is up to us to disqualify the ridiculously stupid beliefs.

People are generally stupid and most of the stupid ideas will appeal to them. To give you an example, if you look at the people you hang out with you will see that their processing speed and ability to communicate are close to yours. So it’s easy to see that people with limited thinking ability will follow stupid ideas because they can conceive and understand them. It’s something that we have to live with. On the other hand though I wouldn’t consider Secular Humanism a dangerous cult like you do. I would much rather see it as an idea just like a boat of ideas that can never be seen to be right or wrong until it gets tried out and put to practise.

I hope I didn’t go too far off topic because this is something I do all the time.

Thanks  :)

 

Assisted suicide, is it wrong?

Before I start I’d like to say that I am studying medicine and that I have an exam tomorrow but when I stambled on this http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=bPS3pZGthw0 on youtube I couldn’t help it I had to produce something and put in my blog. 

Note: I am not going to give an unbiased view, I am sorry. I don’t have time and I don’t want to put an unbiased view on this. I will put my own opinion on the matter.

I believe that humans are creatures of free will. Certain individuals have a stronger sense of that free will. But in essence all people are free to do as they please as long as their freedom of will doesn’t harm the freedom of others. We all have free will but, in a democratic government we are free to express that will and we all do so every day by expressing our opinion, wearing t-shirts with logos, posting on websites, writing our own blog etc etc. There is also another concept that we all have. Our body belongs to us and we all have autonomy over our body. Autonomy which allows us to refuse medical treatment in the UK if we don’t want to get treated. As I said before, I am doing medicine and the central idea of medicine is to never do harm, and in biological terms the Doctors there are causing harm by assisting the patient to die. 

In the UK euthanasia is illegal. But it is legal for other animals if they are suffering with an incurable disease that is going to cause them pain and suffering. Euthanasia in that respect is considered the humane thing to do. And in all honesty it is the humane thing to do. You are letting your animal die pain free without even realising it is dying which for many people (most people wish that they would die in their sleep so that they would feel no fear about it) is the best way to go. In all respects though, euthanasia of a dog is worse ethically than euthanasia of a human being. The dog cannot grasp the idea of death, and it cannot understand the pain is going to get through and in a paternalistic way, we humans make the decision for it. Maybe if the dog had a voice and could comprehend thoughts such as these, it would choose otherwise, but since it’s an animal we consider it better (I know many people don’t, but I do) to make the decision for the dog and help it die. For a human being that decision comes after complex thinking. That decision for the person deciding to die is a long process full of fear, full of anger, full of of feelings of injustice but from what I get as the centre there assesses their psychological state never a feeling of depression so that they are consciously making the decision for themselves. So for a human being it is actually suicide just pain free. And the assisted part is in actually providing the barbiturate which depresses breathing and senses so you are basically dying a very pleasant death, in which by comparison to the death he was going to experience it would have been terrible.

But it’s not just down to that. If you knew you were going to die and you had a time frame for your death, wouldn’t you want your death to be in your own terms? In a setting that you choose, with people that you love and die without experiensing all the horror that is laid in-front of you? 

I will repeat it. In medicine we are told to never do harm. But we are told to respect a patients autonomy. We as human beings know that we need to respect each other’s freedom. We know that we have to respect the opinion of others, even though we don’t always do. But I don’t think that in this case medicine in doing harm. Medicine is helping someone have a pleasant and comfortable death. I know that doctors have a legal obligation to extend someone’s life as long as they can, but it’s their decision. If they could they would do it themselves. I feel that the doctors in that place are doing what every doctors should be allowed to do, when asked. It’s the right thing and it really is helping your patient. And since it’s their decision I feel that there is nothing wrong with it.

Also I feel that there is NO place for Religion on this matter. Medicine is based on science and there is no room for religion. Religion is solely allowed to play a role in the patients mind and if a doctor feels uncomfortable with it they should actually refer people to someone else. In this case it’s not a case where you need to report it. The decision is conscious, the patient knows what he wants and he knows what he is doing. And quite frankly just like a religious person, Craig Ewert even though an atheist, died holding just like any religous person his beliefs strongly in his death bed.

 

-Andreas

What is the purpose? Why really there is no point.

This is what I hear from most people nowadays. That I am a cynic, a very negative individual who gives no hope in anything, that I see no positive outcome from life. I’ve come to realise why people might be thinking that I am that. But before I go on expressing all my cynicisms and all my ideas, I’d like to explain that I was wondering about questions of purpose, of why I am here, of what happens after I die, of why do I exist now? I guess I did this not due to having too much time available but due to over-thinking and due to my questioning nature.

The universe therefore from my point of view, which is the more truthful point of view, is a purposeless place. The universe from the point of view of the universe it just happened, just like a drop of rain fell on my glasses this morning. It happened just like that with a specific simple beginning but it owes to me and to you no explanation why it happened. It most probably has no explanation of why it happened other than the physics behind it. The idea that I will find an explanation in the existence of the universe that it will give my life any sort of purpose just doesn’t stand. Because the universe is not me, the universe doesn’t care about me. At the level of the universe you don’t exist, from our point of view you are like an mere quark if not something less than that, that its existence or not doesn’t change me. so my existence or not doesn’t change and will not change the universe.

Moving on to a smaller scale let’s say our planet. Earth, our lovely mother Earth. Earth that provides the nutrients from which we built ourselves and our lives. Earth that provides the habitat and the place of where we base our existence. At this point I’d like to say that most of us are born and abuse the planet if not all of us. Earth provides us life and we are born and use the planet as if the planet owes us and not as if we owe the planet. We are born so stuck in our own realm that we do not even appreciate the only real purpose that we have the biological one. My death or my life doesn’t change the world. Equally like the universe the world doesn’t care about me. Earth doesn’t care about my existence, it will continue to exist without me.

Moving down to the people, to the world’s civilization. The 6 billion people that live on this planet. Equally these people don’t care about me in the same way that I don’t care about them. My death or my life, like their death will bring no change in my life. And if it does bring a change let’s say that the death of a person was the death of my friend, that change will end by me dying.

You see what people can’t see is that the world is not meant for them. All of us do think that the world is not meant for us, we understand that other people live around us and we accept their needs. But their needs we only accept so that they can accept our needs and so that we can live without problems. People can’t see that my life, is a mere product of chemical interactions of many compounds, atoms, molecules, that in turn didn’t come together by any purpose. Someone studying us from above can also make equations about our movements and predict our actions and classify us.

Being alive makes sense now that we are actually alive. Being alive didn’t make sense before our atoms came together and made us and it would certainly make no sense after we die. At a larger level we have no purpose. The question of what is our purpose and why we are here doesn’t have an answer. It doesn’t need an answer at a philosophical level to explain and give a purpose other than the predetermined purpose that is given to us by nature, ie to reciprocate and produce tiny replicates or half replicates if u prefer, of ourselves. My life really doesn’t have any meaning. Being afraid of dying really doesn’t have any point. My sense of self that lives inside my brain, by millions and millions of nervous pathways and synapses between them, will disappear no matter what when I die. My conscience will be eliminated and put away as if it never existed. And it will make no difference if it existed or not. We are so self centred that we can’t see that it’s pointless to care about living or dying in that level.

My death will not bring many people joy, hopefully but it won’t bring many people grief either. And after all it will be gone too along with every memory of ever existing. There ways to bypass this truth by believing in gods in afterlives, in monsters, in ghosts, in reincarnations. All of these are products of our fears, fears coming from our raised conscience and our appreciation of what the future holds for us.

But people tell you that you can enjoy the journey. The journey that will bring you joy. Well in reality the journey will bring you more sadness than joy. And you’ll remember more the sad times than the happy that will be a nice break from reality. As you’ll grow older you will find yourself continually more isolated. You will find yourself continually with less and less friends, especially real friends. You will find yourself with less people that directly love or have loved you as they will pass away. You will see everything that or almost everything that you built around your collapse, in terms of life, goals, people, your fake idea of purpose and you will eventually face your own mortality. The whole idea that the journey will be nice is a trick for people to live your life. A trick for people to do what they are supposed to do. Because let’s face it, life isn’t nice. Life has no purpose. Life is meaningless. Life is just something that happened. God doesn’t exist. There is no ultimate goal. There’s no immortal soul. There’s nothing that can make the burden of facing this life’s reality any easier.

But you see being human as we are we can trick our nature. Being human as we are doesn’t mean we can’t try to enjoy it. I don’t understand why, for someone that believes that there is no purpose in life, why I enjoy helping. You see I might deep down believe that my insignificance might become more of a significance in other people’s lives, even though those are themselves insignificant. You see for me I understand that the darkest hours is where any significance is accounted for. The darkest hours of other people, is the only way that I can see myself having any form of place. You see for me that gives me satisfaction, which is what it’s all about. Satisfaction not in the cheap sense of playing with my brain’s chemistry but in the sense of my brain rewarding me, through my conscience. You see for life to be enjoyable it doesn’t need a purpose. For life to be enjoyable it doesn’t need a cause. And for life to be enjoyable in the long term it doesn’t need you to worry about it. Because if there’s one certainty is the uncertainty of your existence and as human beings we enjoy certainty. So it doesn’t mean that if life is going to be evil with you, that if there is nothing to go after this, if when you die nothing really happens, if you are an approximated value of zero. Because like many zeros before you, you were born despite the probabilities against it and you exist and enjoy this level of self conscience.

That’s why you can’t ignore the evidence

Why can’t a person claim that the evidence point towards such existence? Why is it selfish to presume that there is a god? Why can’t you claim that the earth is 6000 years old? Why can’t you trust the teachings of the church? Why does science offer answers that are justified upon reasoning that can’t be clouded by a mere book?

A person can never claim that he has such evidence because there is no evidence to support such thing. Evidence that they may present are miraculous healings in which there is always a perfect reasonable explanation to back it up or some holy books that were written by god almighty or something in that sort. A person cannot claim that these things are evidence because they can always be explained by something else. Also a person talking to god is not evidence for the existence of god, it’s evidence pointing towards a hoax or towards a person suffering from psychosis. Other such evidence include the assumption that since there are no evidence to back up the non existence of god, therefore there is a god. So in this logic, if I don’t know if there is meat in my fridge, I assume that there is meat.

It’s selfish to presume there is a god because we point towards the existence of such god which bases around earth. Earth might be our home and to us appears gigantic but towards other places and with the vastness of the universe, it’s just extreme to think that the whole universe and the creator of such universe made all this for us. The Milky way galaxy, our galaxy, doesn’t revolve around us, and yet all we see is us in the picture of the vastness of something so huge we probably do not have the ability to imagine it. It’s like the ants believing in god and that they are the destined ones, or our cells believing in such thing. Don’t you feel so small when you imagine, what you really are, a person among billions, who lives on a tiny planet lost among the vastness of this universe that we know nothing about? I feel small but yet still I embrace this and have made my peace with it, as no matter how small I am, I have the opportunity to try and learn as much as I can about this universe and do not cloud my judgment because of a belief to a supernatural being.

The earth is not 6000 years old. Any scientist who believes this is not a scientist. He does not understand how the tests are made and how the results are obtained. He is just a sad person trying as hard as he can in order to obtain evidence that point towards the existence of the Christian god. You see for such people science contradicts their beliefs and instead of doing the right thing and accepting the evidence, they just close their eyes and their ears and listen to the word of god… whatever that may be.

The very fact that science or the theories in which the dating of bones or fossils is used in other domains of science, not just geology should be enough to prove to people that they are wrong to believe that the earth is 6000 years old. What I mean by this is, that MRI scanning or theory of decaying and half life of radioactive isotopes is used in medicine as well. There people trust their lives on theories that they are actually rejected by them afterwards. I think that no sane person would actually see any connection between the bible and the age of the earth at least.

Why can’t the Bible overwrite what is proven by scientific research? Simple. Empirical evidence is always better than the word of the pope or priests. If you seriously think that that is the word of god and being as such cannot be disproven even if there are evidence against it. So therefore any discussion towards that issue would be unnecessary as you would never change your mind. As such you would agree in views that greatly support your world view or are more psychologically appealing. Well that’s not how nature works, that’s not how the universe is. If people had the same mindset as fundamentalist Christians we would be stuck in an age where the earth would still be flat. Where most people would starve, where all free thinkers would be prosecuted, where people would be dying from black death or any other disease. You see everyone enjoys the good life, but when it comes to it no-one gives credit to the people that actually created that good life for them. And those people are scientists who were prosecuted at the beginning and were putting their life in danger in favour of this free thinking.

I think that it is time for all people to open their eyes and see the world just like it is. To not accept everything that’s they’ve been told. It’s time for people to understand that not everything that makes us emotionally happier is what is the truth. It’s time to understand that in this world religion has no place. In this world free thinking and reasoning should prevail.

Is atheism for everyone?

Is atheism for everyone? (Question asked by a friend)

I will try to tackle this question in the best way that I can and in the best way I think that is possible to answer such question. This question came to us by me telling them that my father and mother are not people who are ready to give up to religion. This question came by understanding that some people may not be very likely ready to accept such views or understand them just because of the intensity and the problems that they faced in their lives. This question came to me due to the belief of different people’s tolerance levels of life.

I will answer the question above in a simple 2 lettered word. No and I will try to explain my views why this is so.

I will start to explain this by avoiding arguments put forward by Sam Harris, by Richard Dawkins and by Christopher Hitchens. I do not think that intelligence has anything to do with the fact that some people can be atheists and some people can’t. I want to argue that most people can just accept that fact and other people just can’t. It might even be genetics who knows, but the fact that we find in studies that a very high percentage of the science literate population is atheist is mainly because of the fact that those people were exposed to arguments against God and have finally reached the conclusion that a supernatural being is improbable and most likely doesn’t exist and have thus called themselves atheists, just like I did.

The main problem to arguments put up like that is that we ignore the fact that many great people that are extremely intelligent and can probably do better than you in essays, in exams and can understand science better than you can are actually theists and belong to specific religions. That is a hole in the whole argument because such people are people with very high IQ levels and are genuinely very intelligent to be able to understand and explain many of the scientific theories that we have now. I would like to note here that I do not think that anything with science is hard if you just put your mind into it and have a passion for it so I am also not a great fun of the argument that science is only for intelligent people. So moving on from that I do not believe that science literacy would never change the mind of these people. People who are genuinely smart and who are science literate and still have some room in their lives for god. By the way I just want to mention that this last sentence doesn’t make their continuation of belief a positive thing.

In my view you either can or you can’t be an atheist. You either can understand life without god or you can’t. God lays somewhere deep inside our mind, somewhere deep in our understanding of our existence and our reason to be. Some people claim that the only reason they have for living on their lives is god. Otherwise this cruel and blood covered world makes no sense at all. Their life who is evidently going to end makes no sense and has no meaning. For some people is different than other people but I think there are only two reasons why people need god in their lives. The first one is that some people generally feel as if the world needs a maker, needs something better than this because they look around the world and they know that this is not good. Some people need an explanation because their brain cannot comprehend all these atrocities and deaths as normal. You see some people are genuinely sensitive and want to have a hope that something better may exist. Something pure and loving, something that can infinitely make them happy and they find that in god. Even though these people are wrong and basically ignore that is just human nature, the fact that we can never be happy that is one of their arguments. The second reason why some people might feel that way is fear of the end. Fear of death. I think that some people just fear death so much that basically look for life and need life to continue no matter what the cost. The same with before people experienced so much hatred they just need their life to continue in a better place. They don’t want everything to be for nothing, they can’t accept everything to be for nothing. I can’t see why they can’t just accept that, I know that it was hard for me at first but I guess some people just can’t grow into it.

I call these reasons life tolerance levels, which differ for many people. I think some people just can’t live with the idea that god doesn’t exist and even if evidence were there to show that he really doesn’t exist, not that will ever be an experiment that will actually prove something that doesn’t exist, but I guess there are tones of experiments that can’t prove something that should have existed, they would still be people with faith. People just can’t accept it. If there is no god then what makes sense? Exactly this is the question that is troubling their minds. This is the question. They need sense they need reason. I guess their tolerance levels for life are just different maybe lower. I do not want to make this as a weakness or make it appear as a sensitivity. This is just how people are, and if people need god to get them get through the day then I guess they can just have god.

Some people believe that a god exists because the beginning of the universe needs a spark or a tiny bit of extra energy to start everything and that that energy needed to come from something or someone. That belief is not hard to change, it’s not hard to go a step ahead and understand even that can be an even that we quite do not know and do not understand and that a supernatural being is not needed to explain it. But for someone who needs god to make them get through the day they would use god to make them do just that. For other people the equation concludes the improbability of such being and as such the decision comes easy, for other like me the decision for the lack of the supernatural was even harder but for other people such decision is impossible and just can’t happen.

So yes atheism is not for everyone and I guess it will take many years for it to be able to be compatible with everyone and I guess there is nothing wrong with that as long as it doesn’t stop human advancement and scientific progress.

Religion – The greatest threat in the modern world

Religion is the belief in a deity or if you prefer a supernatural being who created the world as it is or started the universe. A creator therefore of some sort that doesn’t obey to natural rules is the key concept of religion, where people come together and have a faith in a view of God which is specific.

Religion is the only thing I think about when I look at the future’s problems and the reason why these problems may be caused. Religion is the only thing I see blocking advancement. Religion is the only thing I see arming the hands of small kids with guns to kill infidels. Religion is the only reason I see why people would choose the supernatural views over the natural views.

Most people will think that this is not the case that religion is not dangerous. Religious people are most of the times quiet and nice people that gently live next to us. People like that could not possibly harm us in any way. I agree most people will not directly harm you. I am not going to go into the thinking of the fanatics nor compare religious people to the fanatics of their religion because I know that according to most religious people fanatics are simply people who do not understand the “meaning” of god. So I will just point out that most of the religious people hold beliefs that are outdated. What I mean by that is that they hold views that some times are as old as 2000 years old and sometimes even older than that. People base their morals on those views and their understanding of how the world works in opinions that are really wrong.

These views make people basically close their ears and eyes to the truth and progress. Progress in my book doesn’t just come with the increasing knowledge about the world which comes from science but it also comes from the lack of updating their morals. Morals are constantly updated and constantly changed towards the best I think. People are increasingly becoming more accepting to change and more accepting to people being different which includes homosexuality etc. I am not a homosexual so this doesn’t really affect me but many religions openly condemn homosexuality. Islam, Catholic and Orthodox Christianity are a few of the religions where homosexuality is considered abnormal to say the least and considered to be a very serious sin and is unacceptable. Some people do take this view very seriously and actually do not accept homosexuals, who are openly and widely accepted by society right now.

Religions make irrational things make sense. Irrational things such as the non consumption of pork meat, fasting, hiding any part of skin, getting crucified for Jesus, believing in resurrection, believing in after life are thought to be rational if you have your beliefs set on a religion. As humans we have common sense and we can actually understand that what we are actually doing or what we are actually believing is not reasonable, it’s not natural, it’s really not what we should have been doing. But faith comes to play a role. Blind faith is all you need. If you blindly believe everything starts to make sense. Every test that your body needs to undertake in order to feel “fulfillment”, any pleasure that is promoted by your physical needs should be controlled and limited if not stopped so that you should enjoy eternal life.

Religion wants the world to be illiterate. Religion wants the world to be poor. I know this doesn’t go along with the teachings of religion which basically teaches people to be nice to each other. But religion cannot survive without pain, without suffering without poor people. If there isn’t any of that, people start to turn into the more reasonable answers to the question on how we came to be and to the purpose of life rather than to irrational beliefs such as god. And illiteracy is not something the world needs right now. Just think about it for a second. If a person believes that everything came from a supreme being and that all the suffering on earth will be diminished once you are dead as you will go to god’s big hug and a place full of love then you can see how that can kill some of your humanism and most of your interest in finding more about your environment, about the world in general and the universe.

Religion hasn’t improved human life at all. When religion was introduced it may have done so, but everything from the computers we now use, the cars we now drive, the cures for many of the diseases comes from science. Our life is science made. What I mean is that most of the everyday comforts that everyone enjoys come from science and it is very astonishing on how all of us take all these things for granted where it needed centuries of research and questioning to achieve this level of understanding that can be useful to man. Religion served no role in this. Religion did not help this advancement and religion did not benefit from this advancement either.

I see the world changing towards the worse as people reject the new ideas, the new discoveries proposed from science and turn back to being religious and turn back to being illiterate. Global warming is a great issue and if the next president is a creationist one like Bush is it’s not likely that the global warming crisis will be controlled. Religion plays a very important role in Bush’s life which can explain many of the problems with his policies such as science illiteracy, such as war basing it on the concept that god actually told him to go to war, the otherwise almighty loving god.

Which is another problem. If you seriously believe that you have a personal relationship with god, it’s very likely that you will believe anything you want. What I mean by that is that if in your point of view god wants you to do something it’s very likely that you will go ahead and do it. For example I had a discussion with some of my friends and I was arguing that our morals did not come from god. So I argued: ” Do you think it’s immoral to kill someone? ” everyone then answered overwhelmingly “yes” so I argued well what if god actually came to you and talked to you and asked you to kill people in his name, would that be immoral? Then everyone stopped, then everyone had no idea what to say. Then they argued that if this is what god thinks then we certainly have got something wrong. But in further discussion they did say that if god says that it is the moral thing to do, they would go and kill people. You see people’s morals are blinded by their faith as easily as in that example. It’s never right to kill your fellow human beings. Never. No matter if gods or demons or Easter bunnies ask in your sleep that you should actually go and commit such act. That is the correct answer that is the moral answer.

You see religion has a funny way of looking at the world. It doesn’t look at it from a physical point, it’s looking at it from a supernatural point. People that are at the top of these religious establishments actually think that they are the messengers of god and that what they think is right is what should be right for everyone else. I do not believe in such things. I think that an action is right or wrong without involving religion into it. If I did a psychotic episode would probably turn me into killing people in the name of god like many psychotic popes did as well as many psychotic murderers who were unlucky not to be placed at the top of the catholic church, as well as many murderers did for the opposite of god, the devil.

You see if you do not believe in such establishments things such as understanding a scientific discovery without actually having to filter it through your religious beliefs comes easier. You see that keeping your morals aligned with the modern world comes easier if you do not have to filter them again through holy books. Committing murders or crimes comes less easy if you do not think that a divine force is driving you to do it. The world is more appreciated and enjoyed if you do not hold a belief that better things will come to you after you are dead. The world does survive without religion, I don’t see the world surviving with religion for very long. It is actually scary when I actually see how much belief people hold in fairytales but I guess that’s something I just have to accept because like with everything else, beliefs tend to differ even beliefs in science.

God does not exist

I find it preposterous that educated people still look up in the sky and see a “magnificent” being that doesn’t obey any physical rules that created and started the universe. I find it insane that we can look up in the universe around the stars and see ourselves, our existence as more important than anything else.

People with science background and science education cannot possibly look at the cosmos and see something that is indeed different from what you learned, from what you were taught, from what you know there is proof for. The universe is massive, there is no word that can actually describe the insignificance of our existence. There is no literature for something so small. If people were ever able to see atoms or electrons to that level and compare it to our existence, it will not even be close to the level of our relationship to the cosmos, our relationship to the universe. We can’t even see cells, we can’t even see the tiny structures of them and yet we appreciate and understand their existence, yet we value them of no significance in life (unless we incorrectly assume that human life is a single cell, like we incorrectly assume that in the case of fertilized eggs) as thousands of cells die every day and yet we don’t value them at all. Do you think that if this supreme-being existed and created this vastness of things that he would care at all about you? We would probably be the mistake in his experiment.

Can’t people see that religion has so many humane characteristics? Isn’t it just so obvious when you hear the stories and the different theories that every religion system has? If you take the bible and read it to a child he/she would probably take it as a very bad written fairy tale where the happy ending is nowhere to be found. I can make up more mystic stories by just explaining my view of the universe, the vast emptiness and the nothingness in our existence and how lucky we are to be here.

There’s no God, there’s no real reason for you being here, other than the reasons explained in Evolution. But being human as we are, we make mistakes, we look for reason, we look for purpose, we look to find understanding in the simplest question and the hardest one to ever answer – Why do I exist? Well that answer can very well be answered in a scientific point of view… but that’s not enough. Because being human that we are we look for a more satisfying question, a question more to our size, more to our way of life, an answer that can fit in the way we live our lives, in the way we experience and feel the world.

Well there is no answer that can satisfy that question from a philosophical point of view. I can’t really say that I can answer that question. But nonetheless we are here. You and me and everyone else is here. Out of so many million sperms and so many available eggs you are the one that was fertilized, you are the one that managed to go through pregnancy, you are the one that made it out to the world, and you are the one that has the ability to measure and understand the world and live all those experiences and you are the one that you will finally die. That’s life I guess, and since there is no answer to that question, you should try to look down to earth rather than up in the sky for answers. You should start living your lives for the only thing that’s worth living for, for you, for your children, for your friends, for your family and though temporary as we are and they are, that’s the only thing that gives us joy and happiness and we should start enjoying ourselves.

Happy New Year !

Enjoy your lives people.

Faithless believer

God, faith and a believer.

I’ve always been troubled by the very existence of God. In the end I would reach to the conclusion that there is no point in being here if in the end I was going to die and end up in nothingness. I’ve recently purchased a book ‘The God Delusion’ by Richard Dawkins in which most of my views and aspects towards life and religion were explained. In that book though Mr. Dawkins went even further to explain why and not just in his opinion, why most probably there is no God and if there is one he is a distant one that just watches and takes no action in whatever happens.

Now in my opinion there is no God there is no spirit in each and every one of us, the only thing we have different from the dog and the monkey are our larger brains which we can use more effectively than any of the other species on this planet. I will understand why some people feel the need to deny core FACTS that science has proven such as Evolution (Mr. Dawkins favourite subject) geological facts about the age of Earth and astrophysics about the vastness of the universe as well as physical understandings about matter in order to get through the day as they say. In order to find some purpose in life, in order to wake up and see it as another day towards paradise and not another day towards annihilation. Things like that I can understand as I do feel the fears that they feel, I too understand their believes as I was too raised Christian and it comes to me as a shock when they do not think with their brains and take literature extracts from a book that was written thousand years ago as facts and try to live their life accordingly. I was lucky to be raised not to be a blind Christian, but a true Christian based on the morals of love, and passion towards helping one another. (It’s one of the reasons I am going to be studying medicine in 2008). Other people are not that lucky and this is exactly what I do not understand. How can someone deny to his/her child the understanding and the knowledge of science in order to keep him under his/her rule, to be more precise how can religion deny to her children proven facts in order to stay in control of the whole picture (like they are doing in America).

Please take a moment and view this stand-up comedy extract by Lewis Black on youtube.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wOe7EuHclyo

It’s the tragic reality we live in put into humour but that’s indeed how the world nowadays works. And although sad but true people believe that kind of stuff.

In the book Mr. Dawkins would justify the need of a deity just like the child has sometimes the need of an invisible friend. Just like the child has the need of guidance. Just like all of us have the need of guidance. Just like sometimes we hear two voices in our brain (I would call the first one the voice of reason and the voice of your emotions) in order to see things from different prospective and take the right decisions. The guidance therefore comes in the form of a religion but what we don’t understand is that most times the religion is outdated, and old compared to the believes of modern people and as you can see from extracts from the New and Old Testament our views and our morals have changed so much we sometimes find ourselves hard to understand why did people think that way years before.

I do not believe in a deity or something supernatural but I do believe in people. I believe in reason and in the understanding that we are given one chance in this life and we should make the most out of it. I understand that and by doing so I respect my neighbour’s life and his whole being just like I want him/her to understand mine. I do not see something wrong in religion as long as the teachings do not stop people from being educated and do not harm by other people. I do not object religion I do not say it’s wrong. I was lucky to pick the good things out of Christianity and was lucky enough to be able to judge and have parents that would accept my views as in, let me do what I wanted as it is my life I am forming, and not someone else’s.

I wish to see the people loving their life and accepting the existence of other human beings. See somewhere further than their ego. People should lose their ego which lets them to form in my honest opinion cults/religions/groups etc and learn to live happily bonded with the rest of the world by accepting one another’s uniqueness and as a result allow each person to live without oppression and a need to succeed in the things that the rest of the people sees as important but he/she may not care a tiny bit about.

-pnx