Why Christianity and all Religions are Bullshit.

Sorry to burst some people's bubbles out there. Well actually, no I'm not. Not at all.

If you have any intelligence at all to the point you know 1 + 1 = 2, and have at least rudimentary reasoning skills (I threw a lit stick of dynamite at a rock; the rock exploded; the dynamite must have caused the explosion), and yet you STILL believe in a supernatural God (a personal, monotheistic Western-style God, not "God" as being everything or nature itself), then please for the love of Him read this post.

Start here:

God's Plan
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-nayP4v4xYg

God is Imaginary
http://godisimaginary.com/

Why won't God heal amputees?
http://whywontgodhealamputees.com/

Jesus is Imaginary
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HUj8hg5CoSw

The Bible is Repulsive
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vkXOwBIRX7Y

The Bible and God are evil
http://www.evilbible.com/

Penn & Teller - The Bible is Bullshit
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8RV46fsmx6E

HERB - Had Enough Religious Bullshit
http://edkrebs.com/herb/

A rejection of Pascal's Wager
http://www.geocities.com/paulntobin/index.html

Debunking the Bible
http://www.cygnus-study.com/

The Skeptic's Annotated Bible
http://skepticsannotatedbible.com/

The Myth of the Historical Jesus
http://mama.indstate.edu/users/nizrael/jesusrefutation.html

Someone who has some sense - Richard Dawkins
http://richarddawkins.net/

Another one - Daniel Dennett
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-3133438412578691486

Then:

• Check the videos of other people on that page like E.O. Wilson
• Read stuff by Isaac Asimov, Carl Sagan, and Douglas Hofstadter
• Actually sit down and READ the Bible, objectively
• Actually sit down and read science books, objectively

and lastly and most importantly of all,

• THINK

For example...
An argument against God based on complexity/information content:

Here is one quick argument against a personal, omnipotent and supernatural God. If God created everything in the universe, he must be more complex than the universe. That is, he must contain more information and obey less restrictive laws than the universe itself to bring about this subcreation, over which he has complete power. Otherwise, he could not be aware of it all and understand it all and would not be omniscient.

The mathematician Kurt Gödel proved with rigid logic that it is impossible for any system to contain a complete explanation of itself. In his case he was referring to mathematics or logical systems, but the same logic can be applied to the universe. Something powerful enough to be all-aware and all-powerful over our universe must by definition have a complete understanding of that universe, PLUS SOME MORE. This is the information "outside the system" that allows him to operate upon the very laws and substance of that universe; to circumvent natural law and be supernatural.

So what created God? If you say another God or being, then the circle continues and this Meta-God must be even more complex and contain more information than the first God. And so on, ad infinitum. Is this what you believe? It's not what the Bible, Torah, or Koran say. The other option is that you believe God "always was and always will be" and this needed no creator. You could easily say the same thing about the universe, or some natural-law abiding multiverse in which it is one realm of many, and cut God, the middle man, out of the picture all together.

Why posit an unlikely explanation to make a supernatural (outside natural law) God-being which is unobservable, and which then goes on to create a universe, when with the exact same amount of credibility stretching, you could say the universe sprang into creation on its own or always existed. It's no more far-fetched than a God who suddenly appeared or who is eternal, right? Same idea? Yet Occam's razor says the simplest answer which explains observable results is likely to be the correct one.

Occam's razor is a guideline and not a proof, but it usually works damn well in the real world, and it would be far easier to postulate that something we know and can see, the universe, popped into existence by some quantum effect on it in the near-singularity stage, say, than it would be to say that that's what happened but there was ALSO an improbable God behind it, even more complex and in need of an explanation, which caused it to be so. There's no need for God to be in the background in this view of things. It can happen naturally by itself. It may strain the mind, but it's at least as credible as the God hypothesis, and it is something that is observable and testable.

In the real world, complex things get built up from simpler foundations. This happens naturally, and it also happens at the hands of people. We don't write a book with a single stroke, we put sentence upon sentence together and build the book up from lots of them. And each sentence is made from words, which are in turn collections of letters. We actually sit and write letters continually; the book is the end product. Books don't spring into existence nor would someone believe a book "always existed."

Single-celled organisms appear first in the fossil record, followed by cell colonies and then multicellular organisms. These build up as you move up the strata layers into more and more complex beings, until you have things like chimps, tigers, and us. Tigers don't appear from nothing in the fossil record, and then reduce over eons into single-celled organisms. In the same way, the universe has built itself into more and more complex structures since the time just after the Bang, when its whole was very nearly homogeneous with only the slightest quantum fluctuations.

So the last point I will make is that everything we know, natural and man-made, seems to go from simple to complex. What reason would we have for supposing there is ONE exception: an invisible, behind-the-scenes God who was not build up from lesser beings but who sprung into existence or always existed as an ultra-complex being more complex than the entire universe itself. It's possible, of course - you can't prove the nonexistence of something. But there is no proof for it. It's possible there is a toaster orbiting Pluto. It's possible people disappear from reality when you're not directly observing them. It's possible your whole life has been a dream. Anything you can think of is possible, but are any of these things *likely?*

I think you would agree they aren't, and if they are than our whole system of logic and belief in any sort of rational order to reality would fall apart and be wrong. There would be no basis for having any reason to make any decision, to believe or disbelieve in anything, or to progress in the understanding of anything, because existence would be fundamentally wacky and you'd go insane wondering if there was any sort of truth or reality at all.

But if you postulate that we are real, and that science has made huge strides in medicine, computers, and all the rest specifically by assuming things are real and obey real laws which we can test with the scientific method, you must face the fact that the universe DOES behave completely rationally all of the time as far as we've observed. There are phenomena we don't yet understand, but that has always been the case. Science marches toward understanding those things, and doesn't lazily attribute mysteries to God and be done with it.

End point: If Reality is self-consistent and can be accepted at face value, why do we need an irrational, unexplainable, and unnecessary outside-the-system entity (God) at all? There is no room for magical Gods in a rational view of reality. In fact, to believe in one would seem to disprove all the other rational views we hold, and we'd have to try to account for the anomaly, and that might be impossible. So we'd go back to believing in any old thing we read or someone tells us, and hate and kill people who did the exact same thing but with another book or story they heard. We would in essence be nothing but mindless animals.


Some other interesting things while we're at it:

Penn & Teller - Mother Teresa did not help the poor
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8q1m-8npkJ4

Penn & Teller - Gandhi was a nice guy if you weren't black
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j-QK35hYIWo

Penn & Teller - The Dalai Lama is not so innocent
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QXRmPwWGwBA


Resources:

The Skeptic's Dictionary
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Skeptic%27s_Dictionary

Skeptic.com, run by Michael Shermer
http://www.skeptic.com

Bad Astronomy - of course we landed on the moon
http://www.badastronomy.com

Snopes, to check all those internet and email rumors
http://www.snopes.com


KEEP YOUR OWN INDIVIDUAL MINDS OPEN, PEOPLE.

Don't believe what anybody tells you, including me, without convincing yourself first that it is true based on logic or experiment, not their word or my word. Not everything bit of information can be cross-checked of course, which is why we use a mix of past experience, common sense, and trust networks to judge the validity of most trivial things in near real-time. But when it comes to something important, like oh, say, living your entire life based around a book that contradicts itself over and over and advocates abhorrent evils, I think you owe it to yourself to demand proof. Extraordinary claims should demand extraordinary proof from the rational mind.

Be rational, please. Faith is letting someone else do your thinking for you; it makes you a sheep. It takes a bit more work to think for yourself, but hey, you're worth it when it comes to being the one who is correct and not the sucker, right?

Thank you for reading. Pathologically closed-minded people who enjoy conflict and who shun reason for fun or have no capacity for it, get the hell off my site. I get sick of dealing with people like you who contribute nothing but chaos to the world and tear down things that more rational minds have neatly constructed. Go sniff more glue or work on your "Darwin Award" entry.