too often i see non-believers pointing out the stupidity of religion, especially christianity, what with its biblically tall stories of talking donkeys, global floods, humanity descending from only two people, dudes walking on water, raising the dead etc etc etc….

i find this disappointing, because so fucking what if christianity is full of improbable tales? What difference does it make if christianity is an utter joke? Telling christians their religion is stupid is no different to telling someone that “Star Trek: The Next Generation” is stupid. So what if it is? As long as the person gets good things out of it, then so what?

the point of the bible is not in the particulars of its stupid stories anyway, those details describing the stupidity of christianity are irrelevant; the point of the bible and indeed, the point of *christianity* and the point of being a frikking christian in the first place is that everyone is to love one another, without exception.

The whole thing was summed up in the two commandments of Jesus, not the fucking TEN commandments. I know TEN sounds far more frikking impressive than TWO but the two commandments cover the TEN because the second commandment can be regarded as a generic guiding sort of commandment.

That is to say if you apply the “Love thy neighbour as you would have them love you.” commandment to the TEN commandments you get things like, “don’t steal… if you don’t want people to steal from you”, “don’t lie… if you don’t want to be lied to” and so on, “don’t covet someone’s stuff… if you don’t want them to covet your stuff” etc etc etc…

So instead of berating christians for believing in something that has stupid stories as part of its overall “philosophy”, berate them for *not* actually following the point of what those fucking stories in this bible of theirs were allegedly supposed to teach them!

Show me one person who actually does love everyone.

Go on. Here is a list of things to help you decide what excludes you from loving *everyone*.

** If you own a gun with the intention of defending yourself, then you do not love everyone because you are willing to *shoot* and possibly *kill* a person in order to defend yourself. That’s not loving everyone therefore you are not a christian.

** If you support war; the death penalty; assassinations; torture; They aren’t examples of loving everyone therefore you are not christian.

** If you are racist, bigoted, misogynistic, rude, mean, bullish, cruel, then you can hardly claim to love everyone and therefore you are not christian.

** If someone rapes your child and you hit that person, then you do not love that rapist. You do not love *everyone* and therefore you are NOT christian.

** If someone slaughters your whole family, would you hate them or love them for it?

See what I mean? How can anybody love every single person in this world without exception?

And *yes*, this is what Jesus taught. The prime example of this was when he was being tortured and was then crucified. He was supposedly the son of god and if we allow for the story told as told by the narrative of the bible to be true, he gave proof of this by performing all those charitable miracles like healing the sick, feeding the poor etc; In other words: Jesus could have stopped his torment at any time but he chose to NOT fight back because to fight back would involve hurting someone and hurting someone, anyone at all, is NOT loving everyone.

That is the point of christianity. Do no harm and love everyone, no matter what the fuck they do to you or the people you love, even if they try to kill you or the people you love.

“Forgive them father, for they know not what they do” … that is what somebody purporting to be christian should say whenever they are being persecuted or hurt or killed.

Them’s the rules. What’s that? You don’t like them? Then stop fucking pretending to be a christian.

It’s that fucking simple.

The first three hundred years of christianity is littered with stories of martyrs who were actually following Jesus’ teachings. There are stories of people with gouged out eyes, deliberately amputated hands, stonings, burnings at the stake, crucifixions etc etc etc. Look up the “Age Of Martyrs” if you want more details, I won’t bore you with historical fact.

But no-one follows the rules as set down by Jesus these days because he set the bar so fucking high that the vast majority of present day christians don’t even realise that they are nowhere near to adhering to the point of JC’s alleged teachings …

The point here is that christians don’t care about the fucking bullshit stories in their bible because they don’t even care to follow the fucking “love everyone” point/commandment of their precious christianity either – and I don’t have a problem with that, everyone has the right to defend themselves, but christians are openly contradicting their Messiah and that is a fucking lie and if you walk around telling lies, then you are a piece of shit lying cunt.

Sorry, but that’s what you are, don’t want to be regarded as a liar? then either throw away this christianity that you aren’t actually following anyway or shut that flap-trap of yours that keeps bragging that you are christian or – heaven forbid! – you actually start following Jesus’ teachings to the letter.

It’s that fucking simple.

They are the *only* three options christians and yes, I don’t give a flying fuck if you call yourself christian and don’t brag or even mention anything about it, that’s fine by me.

So my message to atheists is to tell christians to stop being such liars by telling them to stop this bullshit farce of pretending to be christian because the vast majority of christians are not anywhere near the ballpark of actually following their precious Messiah, not by a long shot and if atheists can’t do this, then these religious and anti-religious “crusades” they find themselves in will drag on for centuries.

Mark my words, the only reason christianity isn’t dead already is because atheists are being too tolerant of christians and their inherent inability to follow their own precious religion.

every now and then, some idiotic christian spouts off that because the current year is based on the alleged birth date of their precious Jesus Christ…. and that somehow means that Jesus is “real”..

*facepalm*

Being correct about Jesus being “real”, is irrelevant, even if you *are* correct, because aside from this being idolatry, but… what the fuck does the frikking year have to do with anything?

The year is an arbitrary numbering system that could have been based on anything, so how does the numbering of our years got anything to do with being a good christian? That *is* the point of being christian; that you be a kind and generous and loving individual, you know that, right?

That is all there is to christianity so if you need the constant stimulation in seeing that it is the “year of our lord” as some sort of reminder that you need to be (or are) a good christian, then your motivations for being christian are driven by selfishness because all *you* are interested in is seeing things that are christian and since *you* see christian things, that somehow makes *you* a believer, and that somehow makes *you* a good person and that somehow means that *you* get to live with god in heaven for all eternity when *you* die…..

#fail at being Christ-like much, or is it just a hobby?

but even if the year being based around Christ is supposedly some beacon in our history that proves that Christ is lord or some shite, then it should be pointed out that Christ was pretty much a nobody for the first three hundred years after his death… and that the Anno Domini calendar wasn’t devised until 525AD and wasn’t adopted by anybody until 532AD and was not widely used by many people until 800AD or so … and some countries didn’t adopt it until about 1400AD!

the Ancient Romans used the founding of Rome as the reference point for the year, which in our current scheme of years, was 753BC

the calendar we use today is based on ten month Roman calendar which then evolved into the twelve month calendar that was introduced by Julius Caesar at about 45BC and was slightly amended later on by Augustus in 4AD, this calendar was used up until 1582AD when Pope Gregory slightly changed it again..

but the point here is that we have had many calendars over the millennia and we didn’t start using the Anno Domini calendar until 532AD – so when some smart arse goes on about how the year being based on the “fact” that Jesus was born is proof of Jesus, then they can be told something along the lines of: if Jesus was so special, then why did it take over five hundred years to start using his birth year as the current year?

ps. the monk who “calculated” Jesus’ birth year, got it wrong, 2012AD should actually be 2016AD, by the way

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anno_Domini#History

RELIGIORANT

did aliens send us religion to slow us down?

mostly written 2011-Feb-05 … mostly …

if there really were an advanced alien civilisation out there in the galaxy, we wouldn’t know they were there – think about this….

1000 years ago, we sent messages via physical means, eg. courier, ship, horses, smoke signals, lights, carrier pigeon and 200 years ago we had discovered the telegraph

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semaphore_line
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrical_telegraph

and today we have planes, radio, telephones, satellites and the internet….

Point being is that we keep finding better and faster ways of communication, ideas that we totally would not have thought possible centuries before they were finally invented, so any advanced civilisation that is capable of building space ships is also likely to have an even more advanced form of communications than the basic radio signals that we send for long distance communications.

At our current level of technology, it’s likely we would not even be able to detect any advanced form of space-alien communications and even if we did, it’s likely that we are dismissing it as some sort of background “noise” from space because the signal is too faint to detect.

an example of an advanced form of communications an advanced alien civilisation could be something like “sub space” communications like in Star Trek where near instant communication is available over light years. If there were such a thing as sub-space communications right at this moment, we would have no idea that it was being used.

Imagine if one day we discovered sub-space communications and all of a sudden we are bombarded with 50 million simultaneous incoming message channels from thousands of alien worlds from all over the galaxy

So maybe these advanced aliens that have been around for a million years or so have been stopping by every now and then, maybe they stopped off once or twice a couple of millennium ago, and gave us a thing called “religion” by pretending to be gods, and maybe they actually had the best of intentions, and religion was given as a test, a test that we failed miserably.

Maybe these advanced aliens have been through galactic wars between different species before, and “The Galactic Council” has declared that all sentient species with the likelihood of developing space travel be given a test of their ability to “get along” with everyone?

Insert multiple religions all over the planet, to either teach us good moral behaviour, or have us turn on each other until we learn how to “get along” with each other.

Seriously, if not for the dark ages we may very well have become a space-faring planet by now where travel all over the solar system is a common place event. imagine if the (non-christian) Roman Empire didn’t fall?

Instead of us having the dark ages, the bloody Romans discover space travel by about the 1200s, colonise the solar system, move Venus into a ‘cooler’ orbit and turn it into a greenhouse planet to grow food for the solar system, and then we get our butts out to the galaxy at large by about 2000 and start finding other species to conquer or at least other habitable planets to ruin, imagine the Roman Empire, Mongolian, or some Islamic caliphate expanding for light years? *sigh*

so aliens, stopping by every so often, saw how disagreeable we were with our own species, as well as wiping out other species here on earth, and thought that it was a good idea to send us religion to teach us to behave, or slow us down.

maybe we’ve been so bad that it’s Galactic Law that we grow up slowly? and maybe there’s even a “no fly zone” of four light-years around our sun? So maybe it’s best that we get this angry streak out of our systems before we get out into outer-space and piss all over it as well?

RELIGIORANT

what you are babbling about is beside the point of your religion

mostly written, 21st June 2011 …. mostly

if someone tries to argue for christianity against an atheist with their lack of beliefs, the points of contention are usually nothing to do with christianity’s central message of “love thy neighbour”, the atheist should be using this to their advantage.

Instead of bamboozling believers by pointing out their logical fallacies or even how they have their “science” or “history” wrong, i ask them what does this they are prattling on about have to do with being the good moral person that christianity supposedly teaches them to be? ..

i mean, the point of JC’s teachings were to get people to be nice to each other at all times, right?

so what does “god making the universe”, “just believing in Jesus”, “saying prayers in public”, “teaching intelligent design”, “having ‘in god we trust’ on the money”, “going to church”, “just reading the bible”, “Jesus being a real person”, “worrying about others going to heaven or hell”, “abortions”, “things being miracles”, “god sending natural disasters as punishment”, “gay marriage and homosexuals in general”, “the bible being historically and/or scientifically accurate” and the myriad of other things that they prattle on about, what do all those things have to do with being the good person that christians often claim that being a christian makes them?

i find trying to relate with believers with science or logic to be a waste of time, it’s much easier to relate to them on their level, don’t get me wrong, knowing all the logical fallacies, languages, science and history is great, but trying to use them in an argument with believers (especially fundies), well, the whoosh factor on the believer is very high.

i mean, many don’t even understand their bible, so instead wasting your time arguing your point from your point of view, it’s a lot easier to just boil the whole argument down to the basic message of what christianity is about, and then arguing that christians should be showing tolerance, and acceptance for all their fellows humans, not bickering about “things”

i think this is the whole point of not committing idolatry, because when people worry too much about “things” to do with their religion, they end up not doing the actions that their religion has supposedly taught them to do, the very actions that supposedly make them a good person, but how can one claim to be a good person by doing nothing at all.

HISTORANT

we are not learning from history …

i’ve heard it often said that “the victor writes history in their favour” or something like that …

yet it seems that we are too arrogant to think that the history we know is wrong

often history is written with the facts of events presented accurately – but people are too stupid to ask what happened because of these events…

“oh look Helen, look what the bad guys did back in the bad old days”.. that’s how history is presented, it’s presented as a shiny object, all the dull rusty sharp edges are smoothed over..

people need to ask *why* did these things happen in the first place …

have you ever seen two kids fighting and the big kid has stomped the little kid, and because the little kid gets a broken bloody nose, ie. the little kid was hurt the worst, so nobody stops to ask what the little kid did.. they just think the big kid was being a meanie, coz the big kid, has been known to be a meanie in the past…

now the big kid maintains that his attack was perfectly justified, but no-one wants to hear why any more, because the little kid has cried so much and was so hurt and so mutilated and so humiliated, that *everyone* instantly picks on the big kid, and ridicules him and makes jokes and mocks him but …

still …

nobody asked the big kid why he broke the little kid’s nose by giving him a good punch, and eventually the tale of the little kid being punched by the big kid becomes so large, that no gives a rats arse about why the big kid did what he did, it would ruin the story.

why ruin the truth, with those pesky other points of view

but eventually some people do ask, well kind of, they have to read the history books about the event, because it’s too late now, as the big kid has long since died, and these curious people ask the question…

“Why did the big kid hit the little kid?”

and it turns out that somebody did have a different take on the “history” of that event, as it is rumoured that the little kid had taken the big kid’s money, in fact, the little kid, had taken the big kid’s entire family’s fortune, they were broke.

But often when you ask why and what happened, the little kids start asking you why you are being pro-big kid?…. they even have laws put in place, to protect the little kids from the big kids.

I’m not saying that the big kid did the right thing, far from it, but nobody saw what the little kid did, so a useful perspective on the events is often reduced to rumours, so all we see, is the seemingly over the top display of big kid retaliation.

But in my experience, the measure of the retaliation is usually in some sort of proportion to the initial event that caused the apparently over the top reaction.

just say, all the little kids had been taking money from the big kids for decades, and the big kids have just stood back and let the little kids look after the money they took. But each blow has a wearing down effect on the big kids and eventually, the big kids were scrambling to eat, to clothe and house their families…

in fact the whole big kid country is now in economic down turn, because the little kids have all the money

then one day…

a little kid, tries to take the big kids money again, and the big kid says NO! THAT’S ENOUGH….

and then the little kids get upset, but they have so much money now, that they can screw over the big kids, by getting all the little kids all over the world to pick on the big kids, in fact they are so rich now, they can hire other big kids to pick on the initial big kids, on their behalf.

President Barack Obama launched an extraordinary attack on the Supreme Court on Saturday, saying a ruling on corporate donations to political campaigns this week “strikes at democracy itself.”

Obama’s broadside was triggered by a 5-4 ruling by the court’s justices on Thursday that removed long-standing campaign finance limits and allowed corporations to spend freely in campaigns for president and Congress. In the ruling, the court’s conservative majority said the limits had violated corporations’ constitutional right to free speech.—
Obama says court ruling a blow to democracy

I have a very bad feeling about this…

Olbermann: U.S. government for sale

and people in my country want to emulate the USA political system… long live the Queen I say….

RELIGIORANT

extreme believer arrogance – miracles/prophecies…

this is an extension of a previous blog about “just how dumb are believers?” …

PROPHECIES? .. WHERE?

I *laugh* at every prophecy … well, i roll my eyes at least

seriously, what prophecies have come true? I’m thinking they are all, lies? affirmations? mantras? hoaxes? ahem … perhaps, BULLSHIT, is the right term?

why do ppl even need these predicted events? if they look forward to some prophecy fulfilment, are they not demonstrating that they lack faith by needing these “events” to provide some sort of validation to their faith?

and what if it *does* come true? will they then say, “told you so!” in selfish arrogance?

if Jesus returned tomorrow after 2000yrs of his followers saying that he’ll be back “soon” – it better be fucking good, I expect at least Metallica or Foo Fighters as a support act, or Boston or Toto.. TOOL would be a good support act for Jesus. Nirvana should not be too much of a tall order for Jesus to get as a support act either. hey? alright! do it!

every single prophecy I heard of that has “come true”, has merely been true because the person telling the story wanted it to be true with their vague interpretations of events.

if a prophecy was actually true, would we not learn about it in school?

“…and in history class today kids, we’re going to learn about Jesus, who rose from the dead, and saved the world from nasty sinners so that we may be here today.”

and even if by some stretch of the imagination, you can say that maybe there is some similarity between a prophecy and real events…. well…. so what? what’s the big deal?

what prophecy that’s supposedly come true has been of any consequence anyway? .. oh i hear you, standing up the back, shouting, “Jesus came true!!!” .. sit down and shut up, because by your own faith’s reckoning, Jesus became some super god dude and all that jazz, of his *own* accord!

Did we need a prophecy to make Jesus come about did we?

and what difference does any prophecy coming true have to do with anything anyway? does it makes some difference to having faith or not?

Jesus’ return has been on the cards for nearly 2000 years, listening to christians going on about the return of their lord is akin to listening to someone brag that they are going to win the lotto, every week, but then after fifty years of bragging, the guy finally wins, and then becomes *insufferable* with the bragging of saying “told you so”, all the while forgetting that he spent twice as much money than he won.

MIRACLE SCHMIRACLE

miracles? I say miracle schmiracle, what’s that you say, one person inexplicably had their cancer totally disappear? one person? that’s it?!

fuck the religious and their grasping for every shred of justification for their embarrassing fantasies…

can we aim a little higher people? perhaps, just a little bit? we can do baby steps if need be…. hmmm? *sigh*

a *Real* miracle, would be finding a cure for AIDS, or developing crops that could grow in spite of harsh conditions, and then distributing that to the entire world without care for making a profit out of it, as well as providing military support to dissuade looters and piracy of these foods and medicines…

Miracles are quick fixes of hope, the religious equivalent of a hit from the bong, a line or line of coke, they fade soon enough, then you’re back to how you were before.. looking for the next miracle fix just so you can feel all warm and fuzzy about hearing some ratification of this “faith” you claim to have…

ppl keep saying christ is going to return.. have you heard that story? I have, heaps of times, but it seems to remind me of that other story…. have you heard that other story, the boy who cried wolf?..

PROPHECIES AGAIN

.. but i’m sick of hearing about prophecies, oh yeah the rapture is going to strike in five minutes like a thief in the night, dude you said that like five minutes ago, and u said it yesterday, and last week, and it was actually the first thing u said to me when we “met” – so uhmm – howz about shutting the fuck up for a bit hey?

this is another display of extreme arrogance, god returns to rapture *everyone* up and take them to heaven, well, who says *you* are a part of this “everyone” that is going to be raptured up to heaven, anyway? hmmm? Is this not an extreme self adulation to tell yourself that, out of the entire universe, that *YOU* are special, that *YOU* have somehow arbitrarily chosen the god that made the universe, even though there are hundreds, maybe even thousands of gods that “made the universe” ????

and what are these people saying and admitting to anyway? would they not rather the world continue on as it is? or would they be happy to see the world destroyed and have everyone wiped out except for the twenty or so ppl who are saved??

anyone who *wants* the rapture to happen can go fuck themselves – it’s pretty simple to understand, and it can’t be dumbed down much more, if you want the genocide of the human race to happen, you’re an arsehole.

the genocide of the human race, is not something to look forward to you stupid pricks!!! fucking hell!! The Hitlers and the Stalins and the Maos killed millions of people – your Jesus wants to KILL BILLIONS.

Hitler and Stalin and Mao all combined added together, cannot even hold a candle to this Jesus you keep going on about.

and why do people who say they look forward to the rapture get upset when you tell them to shut the fuck up?!?!? their reaction is like you told them to get fucked when all they said was that they were going for a walk down the street to get a loaf of bread.

I can’t believe born-again-rapture-me-up-christians are so nonchalant with their verbal diarrhoea of the slaughtering of mankind in some final battle between good and evil.

a battle which, mind you, only took place since we’ve been around, you know those fuckers, god and satan, could have done this whole final battle of few thousand billion years ago, but no, they decided to bicker after *we* arrived…

that’s a bit sus don’t cha think? just a bit of co-incidence, hey??

the final battle for all good and evil – which could have raged at any time in the last trillion to the power of a trillion years, just happened to start, right about the same time we began to tell stories! what’s the chances of that?

DANG! what a co-incidence??!

you know if the bible is true, by some twisted version of the word “true”, then this battle between good and evil, came about because of *us* – somehow us being here made things go bad, right? So if everything was hunky dory before we got here, and if there was no evil before us. can we assume that without the “black” of evil there isn’t the “white” of good either, as everything would be a shade of grey with neither good nor bad around? that sounds very Buddha-ish …. Buddhism also just happens to be the only religion I can think of that doesn’t have a god, another co inky dink.

so if *we* are the cause of all good and evil, it’s just tiny baby steps to the conclusion that *we* made up the whole religion / god thing, isn’t it?

NAZIS

i am pretty sick to death of hearing about Hitler, the Nazis, the Holocaust and people *keep* saying to the whingers (like me)

“we must *never* forget so that it never happens again” ..

well… good… great idea… but forget what, exactly?

“we mustn’t forget that the Hitler and the Nazis caused the Holocaust…”

well… again… good… great thinking… Hitler+Nazis==Holocaust .. got it … but…

The next political party capable of committing such a thing as to rival the Holocaust that gets into power, probably won’t be called the “Nazi Party”, and the leader of the group will most likely not be called Adolf Hitler…

so this fretting over everyone being the new Hitler, this constant referral to ppl being Nazis, what *use* is it?

Of equal irrelevance is what Hitler and the Nazis believed in – who cares if they were christians? not all christians want to exterminate ethnic minorities.

who cares if Hitler agreed with the science of evolution, not every one who accepts evolutionary science has ordered millions of people to their deaths.

so no matter what Hitler believed in, it was obvious it came from many sources, are we just going to keep on blaming everyone because we *supposedly* believe in the same things as Hitler does, if that’s the case then every person has something in common with Hitler, you STUPID fuck tards.

Grow the fuck up, ALL of you.

What is vacant from all of these references to Hitler and discussions of what colour undies the Nazis wore, is any mention of *why* Hitler did what he did?

We keep going on we must never forget what the Nazis did…

well… good… great idea… but we know WHAT they did… we know WHO they did it to.. we know the names of the people who did these things…

but all of those things are irrelevant if we are *really* serious about stopping something like the Holocaust from happening again, because history has shown that time and time again over thru the ages that any person or any group of people can get together and do nasty things, no matter what they believe.

So what we need to know is *why* Hitler did what he did.

In *one* sentence, in your own words, *why* do _you_ think Hitler did what he did?