U.S. Religious Knowledge Survey

“Atheists and agnostics, Jews and Mormons are among the highest-scoring groups on a new survey of religious knowledge, outperforming evangelical Protestants, mainline Protestants and Catholics on questions about the core teachings, history and leading figures of major world religions.” Pew Survey
When one is in the minority (2% of Americans are atheists or agnostic) it is difficult not to question one’s belief and questioning should include trying to understand the beliefs of others. It is unfortunate more people don’t question their belief perhaps then there would be better understanding of others and thus more tolerance. Many of the conflicts in the world would go away if people simply understood that belief is not knowledge. It is fine to believe in one God or many or none as long as one understands that they don’t KNOW; that another’s belief is no more or less valid.
Test your knowledge of religion:
http://features.pewforum.org/quiz/us-religious-knowledge/
and check out the Pew report:
http://pewforum.org/Other-Beliefs-and-Practices/U-S-Religious-Knowledge-Survey.aspx

Oh! Oh, oh….oh God! Ahhhhh. Mmmmm.

If you don’t recognize that as expletives expelled at the time of sexual climax, you will have to take my word for it that God is often invoked at the height of ecstasy. I have done both primary and secondary research and found it to be the case in English and Spanish and I suspect it is the case in most languages; at least that is my premise.
It hardly seems reasonable for men and women to call out to the God of the Bible at this time since Jewish, Christian and Muslim gods all seem to be down on sex—don’t masturbate, don’t have sex for any purpose other than procreation and Muslims seem to think that a man should not even look at a woman lest he be aroused. I don’t think when people call out “Oh, God”, or “Jesus!”, or “Dios, mio!” that they are thinking, “Oh God, forgive me for I have sinned.”
Consider the possibility that we are calling out to the God that gave us our life. It seems more likely that we are calling out “Thank you! Oh, God, thank you.” That God is quite different from the God so many worship through their religions. That is a sensual god, a god who gave us our senses of smell, touch, taste, sight, sound—senses that all work together during sexual intercourse to a crescendo, an explosion of feeling.
Shouldn’t we seek out the God who gave us those senses rather than worshiping a God conceived by men over two millennia ago? We know so much more about our world now than they knew then. By clearing our heads of that ancient concept of God, perhaps we can conceive of a God that will work better in the 21st century.

Set Yourself Free

The God you believe in is a rotten, vindictive, not very bright son of a bitch. You throw your hands up in shock and pray for me because I’m surely going to Hell? Read the Bible! Read the juicy parts where God tells you how to treat your slaves. Here’s a fun story in Exodus 32 where God, through Moses, saith go “throughout the camp, and slay every man his brother, and every man his companion, and every man his neighbour.” And, by golly, that day they killed about 3,000 men. That is the God of the Bible. Is that really your God?
I could come up with a better God. In fact, I have. Wait a minute. You have come up with a better God. I’m betting the God you believe in, the God you worship is, better than the God you will read about in the Bible. You think they are one and the same but, don’t trust me, read the God damned Bible. That jerk thought slavery was just fine. Why? Because slavery was just fine at the time the Bible stories were being invented. If “God” had come out against slavery, he would have had no chance gaining the hearts and minds of the people of his time. Oh, sure, he could have attracted the slaves but, hell, they were slaves. They weren’t in power. There was no chance of getting the middle class free men to latch onto a god who advocated something so foreign to their way of life.
Dump the Bible and think for yourself. Dump those who want to interpret the Bible for you, the priests, pastors, popes, bishops, ministers, imams, rabies and all the rest. Their interpretation is designed to enslave you. Be a slave to your own conscience. You, if you have come to this site, have a sense of right and wrong. You don’t need a heaven or hell to guide you.

Bible truth

Ah, the truth. The truth for you may be different than the truth for me. I think it is something each of us must find for ourselves. It is a pity that many people are taught at an early age that their religion is the only true religion and that they should not question it. If you are not questioning, you are not learning.
The truth regarding the contradictions in the Bible is that it was written by many men based on stories that were passed down orally through many generations with corrections, embellishments, errors and, I suspect, some intentional fraud. We should keep in mind that these men thought the world was the center of the universe and that the earth was flat. They should be admired for the philosophical/psychological truths they discovered but thinking should not stop.
Consider how much more we know today than was known 2,000 years ago about every field of thought—astronomy, geography, biology, chemistry, botany, psychology, psychiatry, etc.—while religious philosophy has stood still.
If you have debated with someone who takes the Bible literally, you have probably reached a point in the debate where your opponent says, “It is a leap of faith.” That is where a debate between rational or logical thought and religious belief has reached an impasse. That is where I say, “Leave your leap of faith behind and use your God-give mind.” By the way, when I say that, I am not stating my own belief on the existence of a Supreme Being but rather using language that should resonate with the person I’m debating.

Belief is not knowledge

Whether you believe there is one god, no god or many gods, your belief is no better than any of the others. You may believe in a compassionate god while others believe in a vengeful god. You are no closer to the truth than the others. No one knows there is or isn’t a god.
Perhaps the greatest good, certainly a great goal, for the future would be to have all people come to an understanding of the difference between knowledge and belief. Every belief is valid. I can make a case for there being four hermaphrodite Gods with purple hair who created the universe through a monster collision which is how they mate. The collision, of course, was a big bang and you can take it from there. Should I go a little farther? One of the purple haired Gods is my conscience, another plays with my conscience, testing it, another provides the world through which I pass, my perceptions, and the fourth is in charge of my interaction with other people.
Understanding the difference between belief and knowledge doesn’t diminish anyone’s belief. It might actually strengthen it because others would not be putting down your belief as being inferior to theirs. Imagine a world without religious conflict. Wow!
Whether you believe in a single god, several, many or none only makes a difference in how that belief affects the way you live your life. Those who feel others should believe as they do feel that way simply because in their heart of hearts they know they don’t know—if everyone believed as they did, they could feel totally comfortable with their belief. Since that isn’t going to happen, wouldn’t it be better to accept the simple fact that belief is not knowledge.

Bible diminishes this life

Let each of you look not to your own interests, but to the interests of others. – Philippians 2:4

That is the kind of advice from the Bible that sounds good but is off the mark; we should look to our own interests. Sounds selfish, right? I believe we should be selfish PROVIDED WE UNDERSTAND WHAT IS IN OUR BEST INTEREST.

Have you ever unselfishly helped someone out? There is the classic helping an old lady across the street; changing a tire for a stranger; helped someone reach something in a store; held a door open for a stranger; given a stranger change for a parking meter; etc. Think about some kindness you have offered without expectation of any return. How did it make you feel?

I have no idea how helping another might make YOU feel but it makes me feel good, so good that I am usually on the lookout for ways I can do another a kindness.

Sell all that thou hast, and distribute unto the poor, for it is easier for a camel to go through a needle’s eye, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God. – Luke 18:22-25

Living frugally and giving is not bad advice but doing it to get into Heaven saps the joy out of it. If you have given money to a cause you believed in, especially given more than you thought you could afford, you expected nothing in return other than thanks and a good feeling of having done something good. Giving anonymously actually intensifies the good feeling conversely if you give with an expectation of a return, the good feeling is dulled. Bequests are the greatest source of wealth for religions—people giving their wealth with the hope of getting into heaven. If only they had given their wealth to a good cause anonymously while they were alive, they would have realized the benefit, here in this life.

Liberals and atheists are smarter

Liberals and atheists are more intelligent than conservatives and the faithful. The theory put forward by Staoshi Kanazawa, an evolutionary psychologist at the London School of Economics and Political Science, is that anyone can go along with the usual but; the ability to think and reason has helped our species recognize and understand unusual situations and deal with them. This is from a study published in the March 2010 issue of the peer-reviewed scientific journal Social Psychology Quarterly.

The following three paragraphs are quoted from Science Daily.

Data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health) support Kanazawa’s hypothesis. Young adults who subjectively identify themselves as “very liberal” have an average IQ of 106 during adolescence while those who identify themselves as “very conservative” have an average IQ of 95 during adolescence.

Similarly, religion is a byproduct of humans’ tendency to perceive agency and intention as causes of events, to see “the hands of God” at work behind otherwise natural phenomena. “Humans are evolutionarily designed to be paranoid, and they believe in God because they are paranoid,” says Kanazawa. This innate bias toward paranoia served humans well when self-preservation and protection of their families and clans depended on extreme vigilance to all potential dangers. “So, more intelligent children are more likely to grow up to go against their natural evolutionary tendency to believe in God, and they become atheists.”

Young adults who identify themselves as “not at all religious” have an average IQ of 103 during adolescence, while those who identify themselves as “very religious” have an average IQ of 97 during adolescence.

If you are an atheist or a liberal or a liberal atheist, you are probably feeling pretty good about yourself about now. I’d suggest that you might consider going even farther than atheism. Atheists have been around a long time even dominating several cultures. Those of us who have minds should continue using them especially as regards beliefs that so dominate the destructive actions of our species.

If you doubt the studies cited consider Republican Bradley Byrne. Poor Bradley knows that the Bible is not literally true but to run for governor of Alabama he has to say that it is. Why does he have to lie and say something really stupid? Because nearly eight out of 10 Republicans in Alabama identify themselves as evangelical or born-again Christians.

Free thinker’s Satan’s slave?

A FREE THINKER IS SATAN’S SLAVE!” read the signboard of the New Canaan, Connecticut Baptist Church.

This church must know its flock well and know that there will not be any thinking, free or otherwise, going on when they read this.

The Merriam Webster dictionary defines a free thinker as “one who forms opinions on the basis of reason independently of authority; especially: one who doubts or denies religious dogma.”; and “slave” as “one that is completely subservient to a dominating influence”. Many churches are dominating influences over their flock and preach subservience to their belief making the followers of the religion slaves to their religion. Free thought, especially if based on reason independent of authority, is anathema to a religion that would accuse Free Thinkers of being Satan’s slave.

If you are a slave to your religion, throw off the bonds of slavery and join those who are free to think. You don’t have to give up your religion to be free, just feel free to reject the things that don’t make sense.

Many Gods

Ancient Rome abounded in gods and goddesses. The fire on the hearth was the sign and substance of the goddess Vesta, each person had a guardian angel which was also his soul that lived on after death. “On the farm there was a helping god for every task or spot: Pomona for orchards, Faunus for cattle, Pales for pasturage, Sterculus for manure heaps, Saturn for sowing, Ceres for crops, Fornax for baking corn in the oven, Vulcan for making the fire. Over the boundaries presided the great god Terminus, imaged and worshiped in the stones or trees that marked the limits of the farm….

“The Roman did not, like the Greek, think of his gods as having human form; he called them simply numina, or spirits; sometimes they were abstractions like Health, Youth, Memory, Fortune, Honor, Hope, Fear, Virtue, Chastity, Concord, Victory, or Rome. Some of them, like the Lemures or Ghosts, were spirits of disease, hard to propitiate….Never had a religion so many divinities. Varro reckoned them at 30,000, and Petronius complained that in some towns of Italy there were more gods than men.”

Having gods in everything is not all that different from monotheistic belief that God, their single god, is in everything which is certainly a lot easier than having to remember the names of all the different gods. However, I rather like the notion of many gods. I thank the cedar shingle god who has placed the right size and number of shingles in my hand before climbing the ladder; I thank the stone god for missing my bare foot when I drop a stone unwisely; I thank the rain god for holding the rain back until I am through picking the beans and if I give thanks prematurely, I laugh at the joke being played on me.

I suppose those who believe that a loving god could be so self-centered as to make the first three of His Ten Commandments be all about himself will be sure that I am on a course for hell. It is my hope that their beliefs make them as happy as the playful relationship I have with my gods makes me.

The quote above is from The Story of Civilization: Part III Caesar and Christ by Will Durant which I am currently enjoying. I have read four of the eleven volumes and highly recommend them to anyone who enjoys reading history

Sex, sex, sex

I love sex, don’t you? A study in 1993 determined that all but 5% of men and 11% of women have masturbated. In 2002 the Alan Guttmacher Institute found that by their late teenage years, at least 3/4 of all men and women have had intercourse, and more than 2/3 of all sexually experienced teens have had 2 or more partners. Links to these studies can be found at (http://www.kinseyinstitute.org/resources/FAQ.html#Weinstock).
Satan’s work or God’s? I’m going to go with God on this one. Why does anyone masturbate? Why would ¾ of teenage men and women have intercourse? You can answer that it is because Satan put the “dirty” thoughts in their heads but a religious person, someone who had been taught that these thoughts came from Satan and should be ignored and resisted, would surely ignore and resist them if they were just thoughts; but if the thoughts came from the body, the God-given body, the body that Satan is incapable of creating, then they would be more difficult to resist. Think about it. Think about the first time you masturbated. Were you just sitting around and some random thought came into your head, “I think I’ll play with myself”; or did you perhaps wake up one morning with a very pleasurable tingly feeling in your genitals, or were you looking at another person when the feeling came on? Isn’t that where it started, a tingly feeling? In erotic and pornographic literature it is frequently described as an itch but I prefer tingly. The point is that it came from your body. Either because it is rather mysterious because you had not heard anything about this feeling before and were perhaps a little afraid of being different or because you have been taught through your religion that doing anything about that tingly feeling is wrong, a sin; you address the new experience in private.
That, I believe, is the kind of environment in which Satanic (sinful) thoughts are more likely to flourish
If you think Satan is the source of sexual interest, I implore you to put your God-given mind to work. It is your belief in Satan and God that is messing up your mind. You believe that God and only God can create a person in a body. Comedians like to point out how conveniently God placed our hands in relation to our genitals—good for a laugh but also true. Oh, maybe it was just a mistake, an opening for Satan to go to work.
I don’t really believe Satan caused the writing of the Bible but it you read it looking for evidence that he did, you will find much to support the notion. While you are checking out the Bible check on God’s actions and words. He is really a nasty dude. It surpasses understanding why so many nice and lovely things are written about him in the Bible.