But I Had A Personal Experience!

Why we cannot rely solely on individual memory to document events.

Remarkable false memories By Daniel Simons

I myself have personally had some pretty amazing experiences and witnessed amazing phenomena as products of meditation (and on occasion, medication). I have SEEN a golden, radiant book with letters of fire burning onto the pages (meditation), I have seen images of the future that have subsequently come to pass (lucid dreaming, meditation), and I have been 'miraculously' saved from physical harm (reality). Be they coincidences, hallucinations, lucky guesses, or who knows, maybe even some quantum process that we don't understand yet. But not a SINGLE one of those experiences is evidence for something supernatural or a soul. The dreaming brain is perfectly capable of generating PROFOUNDLY meaningful and deep, rich experiences that are indistinguishable from reality to the observer. I know this because I practiced at it for many years.

What About God

Let me be really clear here, I don't have a problem with the CONCEPT of a 'god' existing (if a 'god' exists fine -- prove it without resorting to lies, frauds, etc), but I DEMAND proof of EVERYTHING I choose to believe in -- ESPECIALLY when those things have large or profound impacts on my life. And I live as good of a life as I can, the existence or non-existence of a god has no bearing on me. I'm not perfect by any stretch but neither are any Christians and I would say I'm better than most.

Arguments that say life is too complex to just happen because of the nature of 'physics' are ridiculous because they propose that some infinitely complex and powerful agency JUST exists. They just make the problem WORSE, not better [and yes, Kalam, blah blah blah -- mental masturbation and nothing more, you cannot prove reality through logic - the axioms you use in logic are based on our imperfect OBSERVATIONS of reality]. I do believe that with extremely CAREFUL application of the scientific method we can EEK out semi-reliable knowledge of our world. But it is absolutely fraught with pitfalls.

The history of the texts used in the bible show that they are absolutely frauds, there are NO eyewitness accounts and absolutely NO contemporaneous accounts. The Testimonium Flavianum entry on Jesus is fairly clearly fraudulent and even if it wasn't it was written FAR too late and doesn't claim first hand knowledge. Where are the entries by Historians on the THOUSANDS of "Saints" risen from the dead? ZILCH. It is a LIE, a fake, and a fraud. At BEST, some of these people had ecstatic experiences and with their limited goat-herding knowledge they believed them.

For example, there is a lot of evidence that Judas of Galilee existed during this time period -- and absolutely ZERO evidence that the Jesus/Yeshua character of the bible existed. Absolutely ZERO. And interestingly, many of the things attributed to Jesus are DOCUMENTED by historians to actions of Judas of Galilee.

The synoptic gospels are all written 30+ years AFTER the alleged time of Jesus, they are all anonymous and ONLY by tradition attributed to Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. NONE are eye-witness accounts. Paul NEVER met Jesus, only claimed he saw him in what was essentially a vision. The earliest quotations from what we now call Matthew and Mark are NOTHING like the modern texts. There are THOUSANDS of errors/differences in the different versions of copies we have. We have NOT A SINGLE original autograph of ANY biblical text. We have only copies of copies of copies of copies. Yeah they are kinda sorta, mostly similar -- but then there are HUGE issues in the gospel accounts. See this video for just a FEW examples: David Fitzgerald Skepticon 3 "Examining the Existence of a Historical Jesus" (youtube).

[even if the texts CLAIMED to be eyewitness accounts there is no evidence they actually are because of the dates written]

So textually, the bible is an absolute mess. And even the more honest of the hardcore biblical scholars ADMIT that the accounts of Jesus are clearly false.

"The Jesus of Nazareth who came forward publicly as the Messiah, who preached the ethic of the kingdom of God, who founded the kingdom of heaven upon earth and died to give his work its final consecration never existed."
Albert Schweitzer(1875-1965, Nobel Prize 1952), Ph.D, Christian theologian and Dean of Theological College of Saint Thomas at the University of Strasburg
The Quest of the Historical Jesus: First Complete Edition, trans. W. Montgomery, et al., ed. John Bowden (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2001), page 478
http://www.earlychristianwritings.com/schweitzer/

And in some cases critical passages have clearly been added to the texts later (e.g., in 2 Peter).

And claims it has been faithfully transmitted? COME ON! There are THOUSANDS of Christian sects who disagree with each other over what the passages even mean. Which ONE of those THOUSANDS have it right in every regard? Even if one of them had the right of it there would be absolutely no way to know. They disagree on MAJOR issues -- do we have Free Will or not? How do you get to Heaven? Etc It's just utterly ridiculous to suppose anything has been faithfully transmitted.

And then we come to the actual history of the 'Christian' church itself. After 1800 years of slavery, abuse, torture, murder, selling of indulgences (and yes, I know what indulgences are), misogyny, prejudice, suppression of valid scientific knowledge that was viewed as in conflict with the claims of the church, utter destruction of native CULTURE after CULTURE after CULTURE after CULTURE after CULTURE after CULTURE after CULTURE after CULTURE... it is absolutely filthy and disgusting to me to even SUGGEST that these filthy, disgustingly evil BASTARDS have anything to do with God in any way, shape or form. And they were the SOLE arbiters of 'God' for 1500 years, until the Protestant reformation -- and do not be confused, that did NOT fix anything what-so-ever so don't tell me you follow some protestant branch and that makes everything ok -- it doesn't. Every dollar you give them is a dollar spent in hatred of mankind. They should be WIPED from the face of the earth forever (peacefully I hope -- I'm not an advocate of violence).

So all we're left with is a nice metaphor and a FEW little bits of clear thinking from the bronze age like "turn the other cheek" and "love thy neighbor" (things I almost NEVER see any christian practicing). And these FEW nice little bits are utterly washed out by all the absolutely VILE and DISGUSTING parts of the bible (god COMMANDS genocide after genocide after genocide after genocide, COMMANDS infanticide, COMMITS genocide and infanticide, etc) -- that is NO God that I wish to be associated with, it's disgusting, vile and evil nonsense. The bible says "By their fruit you will recognize them" and you have to be fucking blind not to see the evil fruits of the Christian religion.

Deut 7: When the LORD thy God shall bring thee into the land whither thou goest to possess it, and hath cast out many nations before thee, the Hittites, and the Girgashites, and the Amorites, and the Canaanites, and the Perizzites, and the Hivites, and the Jebusites, seven nations greater and mightier than thou; And when the LORD thy God shall deliver them before thee; thou shalt smite them, and utterly destroy them...nor shew mercy unto them

And for WHAT crime are the children to be put to death? Allegedly because their parents were committing child sacrifices -- do you fail to see the ignorance of this claim?


There are certainly many very GOOD people who just happen to have fallen for the Christian lies. They are lied to so I don't hold them directly responsible but their money certainly goes to support many agendas that I view as absolutely EVIL.

Whatever you might think about God the use of the Church to deny GOVERNMENT RIGHTS GRANTED EQUALLY TO ALL (e.g., gay marriage) is absolutely DISGUSTING.

For all those reasons (and more, as you see I have MANY thoughts on the Christian religion -- my position is NOT unconsidered) I will NEVER support any Christian church (maybe if Jesus or God comes and talks me into it and even they will have a difficult time). There are MOUNTAINS of evidence they are frauds, evil, liars, and corrupted. No. Thank. You.


I see no evidence for God in the general sense, other than it seems to make some people feel better to think that others will suffer in eternal torment for their sins while the person being comforted invariable will spend their eternity in heaven, DESPITE their own sins.

On the other hand... (and let me know if you cannot use Google and need citations for any of these, I will be happy to supply them but this is already very long)

• There is LOTS of evidence that very complex chemistry happens, even in outer space!
• There is LOTS of evidence that every chemical needed for life to "happen" (and I reject using the word "by chance" here unless you can demonstrate anything in the universe is truly Random -- things happen by laws of physics -- we don't understand those ultimate laws of physics and we may never fully understand them -- but we observe consistently that things happen according to rules and not by Will).
• There is LOTS of evidence that these chemicals CAN hit a point where they being to self-replicate -- even WITHOUT the complex arrangement we have today.
• There is LOTS of evidence that these self-replicating molecules will TEND towards self-replicating RNA and with the right proteins available RNA is converted into DNA
• There is LOTS of evidence that these self-replicating RNA and DNA molecules CHANGE over time in various ways that explain ALL the variations we see today
• There is LOTS of evidence that this happened only once on earth (the possible alternative is that it happened several times but in extremely similar ways)
• There is LOTS of evidence that this CANNOT HAPPEN TODAY BECAUSE THE CHEMISTRY HAS BEEN UTTERLY CHANGED BY EARLIER LIFE -- well it could happen today but the changes are MUCH closer to zero than they were 4 billion years ago
• There is LOTS of evidence that this process involved clay, geothermal vents, ice, lipid vesicles, etc
• There is OBSERVED cases of a single-celled organism evolving multi-cellular forms -- OBSERVED, we SAW this happen
• There is LOTS of evidence in DNA that things have evolved from form to form over billions of years
• There is LOTS of evidence in fossils that MATCH the DNA evidence - the timelines MATCH, the types of mutations MATCH, the rate of mutation MATCHES

There is so much evidence for abiogenesis and evolution that it is almost inconceivable that the theory is incorrect. It is POSSIBLE that it is incorrect and MANY details are yet to be worked out, but I seriously question your credulity at believing these moronic ID/Creation people who have almost NO evidence that matches their claims. And when they stick their necks out and make a claim like the flagellum being irreducible complex they get TORN TO PIECES by the science.

There are hundreds of thousands of HARDCORE scientific, published, PEER REVIEWED papers on these topics that examine in great detail EVERY aspect we have the funds and time to investigate and they ALL align in one direction and it sure isn't Creation.

More importantly -- it is UTTERLY unimportant to me if evolutionary theory is correct or not -- science will progress, we observe, we learn more. Science has NOTHING to prove to me or you because it is YOUR OWN CLAIMS that are in question and YOUR CLAIMS are extremely lacking ANY evidence or support. I don't need science, or evolution, or abiogenesis, or physics, or the Big Bang, or ANYTHING else to REJECT your claims as ridiculous, unsupported, and UNdemonstrated.

And yes, I am 'angry' about the atrocities committed by the Christian churches over the years (and YOU should be too) -- the actions of individual Christians are on their own head -- but the church as a whole is responsible for actions commanded by the church leadership over the years in dogma, deed, Edict or order.

For just a FEW examples: Edict of Milan, Pope Innocent III said "the Jews, by their own guilt, are consigned to perpetual servitude because they crucified the Lord...As slaves rejected by God, in whose death they wickedly conspire, they shall by the effect of this very action, recognize themselves as the slaves of those whom Christ's death set free...", Roman Catholic Papal bull, "Cum nimis absurdum" which required Jews in Vatican controlled lands to wear badges, and be confined to ghettos, Catholic Christians who massacred of Jews in Nemirov, Polonnoye, Tulchin, Volhynia, Bar, Lvov, Crusades, Inquisitions, LIES about condoms in Africa resulting in massive unnecessary suffering and death, fighting against human rights (e.g., gay marriage), promoting poverty and suffering and the oppression of women, etc.

This is an off the cuff rant so I apologize for any errors in the text, feel free to note any corrections or make fun of me.

Something From Nothing

It is often derisively claimed that 'atheists' believe that something came from nothing (despite the fact that "creatio ex nihilo" has been Catholic dogma for centuries).

Of course this is utterly ridiculous because what atheists actually believe is that theists have not met a reasonable burden of proof for their claims -- atheism itself doesn't proclaim to KNOW anything about the origin of the universe.

But as I see it, There are only two options that have been put forth:

(1) In the beginning there was absolutely and truly nothing, not the vacuum of space, not time, and NOT god but truly NOTHING. And then out of this absolute NOTHINGNESS sprang the SOMETHING that now constitutes ultimate reality. This SOMETHING may be our universe or it could even be a precursor that existed for mere moments or even unimaginably vast amounts of 'time' before our current universe.

or

(2) There was NO beginning. Whatever "is" is, is eternal (take that Bill Clinton). And by that I mean that ultimate reality must be SOMETHING and that something would have to be eternal. That SOMETHING may or may not be our spacetime.


Neither option can really be said to be 'more likely' since we have absolutely no frame of reference from which to judge such things. We can go on our own intuition but even extremely well-educated and intelligent individuals could disagree.

I am actually partial to (2) despite constant assertions by theists that atheists "must" believe that something came from nothing. In my view of (2), Universes sometimes spring quantumly from the eternal void (in a similar fashion to virtual particles) with a relatively infrequent intensity that unleashes something along the lines of the proposed quintessence ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quintessence_(physics) ) which causes a rapid, inflationary period in the early burst of energy that prevents the normal quantum collapse. [note that the void in this case is NOT the vacuum of space]

In this model our universe sprung from the void as an energetic fluctuation so violent it created its own spacetime. The remainder of the energy twisted into nanoscopic vortices which have continued to whirl for billions of years, twisting into ever heavier particles through gravitationally powered fusion and then exploding again and again until enough of their energy was spent that the earth could form out of the fiery violence and then cool to the point where organic chemistry could continue the dance at an ever finer pace, with ever more detail until, in a sense, we have crystallized out of the substance of the universe.

I see no need in all of this for a personal, theistic god, who bothers to answer poorly conceived, ignorantly vile, and conflicting prayers; who watches us pathetic humans with a critical eye jotting down every time someone masturbates for later retribution on their 'soul'; who creates us with a flaw, damns us for having it, and nearly destroys us. And then for a small band of relatively ignorant humans to claim that THEY know the mind of this god and THEY know this gods Will and Wishes, and that they are now his authority on earth over all others... And then, to ice the cake, after many claimed millennia of this god being AT THEIR SIDE (winning battles, slaughtering first-born, Engineering great vessels, flooding the entire Earth with an unimaginable quantity of water which then disappears, turning water into wine (I thought yeast did that), we're supposed to believe that just because we have scientific methods now that this god has gotten shy and gone completely undetectable?

I believe that we are responsible for our own actions and that we are held accountable to our human morals by society. There are 'right' and 'wrong' actions for humans but these moral concepts are creations of human brains and derive from our ability to formulate fairly accurate predictions of behaviors and consequences for actions.

If it were absolutely wrong to murder then it would have been WRONG for god to command Abraham to murder Isaac. And yes, I know god cheated in the end but it was STILL WRONG for god to have commanded it and it's wrong for people to consider this a work of any moral authority when it repeatedly commands murder, genocide, infanticide, genital mutilation, rape, and many other horrors and NEGLECTS to mention anything about things such as microbes.

But in the process of evolution humans have acquired a sense of empathy and compassion because having those allowed us to operate more effectively as a social group which has allowed us to survive. And we have, therefore, collectively agreed that murder is not one of the things we want to tolerate. And thankfully we have moved past the more ignorant "morality" of the bible. For example, we no longer force a virgin to marry her rapist or force him to pay a bride price to the father. Those things were NEVER moral, NEVER acceptable, and NEVER divinely commanded. They were the unfortunate laws of the time. Thank GOODness we have moved past them.

Human morality is constantly shifting, and changing, and adapting to the situation.

3000 years ago murdering other humans en masse was justified in THEIR minds. They were, in a sense, protecting their own. It wasn't morally right by todays standards but THEY didn't have much of a problem with it (although I'm sure the hundreds of thousands of people who were murdered probably objected). They also had little or no compunction against enslaving their enemies. Or beating them, sometimes to death.

And then things got really twisted up in their minds. They decided that, with their 'newly' found moral senses, they would make laws. Laws like, if your child is disobedient you can stone them to death. Laws like, women should be silent and subservient to men. Laws like, how much you can charge when you sell your daughter into sexual slavery. And Laws about taking slaves from your conquests. By ANY modern standard, these are immoral and primitive codes. EVERY modern Christian (sect) cherry picks through the Old Testament books and decided, based on nothing more than their own innate, modern sense of right and wrong, which of those codes they will decide still apply and of those which they still accept they redefine the appropriate punishments for them (very few modern Christian sects still hold to stoning people to death although they DO still exist).

And a few Islamic cultures (and other religions as well) also still practice stoning to death. They consider these actions moral, not just moral by human standards, but ORDERED by god and thus RIGHT by definition that CANNOT be questioned. Anyone who dares to question this authority is also Stoned to Death of course.

And even if modern Christians do not generally stone people to death they still follow this same kind of ignorant logic to equally ignorant conclusions about what is morally right because THEY believe it is ordered to be so by their "god" (because it is written in a book, written from 3500-1800 years ago approximately). And they ironically consider Themselves persecuted when challenged or asked to justify these beliefs.

Don't get me wrong, certainly not ALL christians nor ALL muslims are bad people (not even most of them) but they ALL support systems that are corrupted, violent, and by modern standards, evil. They also teach falsehoods, that even they don't claim to know directly or have ANY direct proof, as the truth. It IS folly and it SHOULD be unacceptable in this day and age.

If you really must believe in some kind of nebulous supreme power that is just fine with me. Be Deistic (god exists and created everything but is letting things run their course and has no influence over us and doesn't judge us) or Pantheistic (god is essentially everything, god is the universe and the laws of physics) or whatever floats your boat.

But PLEASE stop trying to claim any kind of personal and direct authority over others on the basis that you claim to know what this being might want from us.