Do Believers Really Believe?

All Christians fail to act on their avowed beliefs. Suppose you believed that Heaven exists and that only some of us will qualify to live in it for ever, as the vast majority of Christians claim to. How would this affect your behaviour?

It would depend on what you thought were the admission criteria for Heaven. But whatever you took these virtues to be, they would utterly dominate your life. When everlasting bliss is on offer, nothing else matters at all. People who believed in Heaven would surely act quite unlike those who do not.

Yet the expected behavioural difference is not to be observed. The vast majority of Christians display a remarkably blasé attitude toward their approaching day of judgment, leading lives almost indistinguishable from those of us open non-believers. Put simply, they fail the behavioural test for belief.

Jamie Whyte

An excerpt from this article.

Religulous

This movie has been out for a few days now and reviews are mostly positive. I'm hopefully going to see it later this week, and maybe I'll post a mini-review. In the meantime, you can watch the trailer by clicking on the poster on the right, and here are the creators Bill Maher and Larry Charles talking about the film:

Quote of the Week

Religion is an illusion and it derives its strength from its readiness to fit in with our instinctual wishful impulses.

Sigmund Freud

Bertrand Russell's Wisdom III: Christ's Moral Character

There is one very serious defect to my mind in Christ's moral character, and that is that He believed in hell. I do not myself feel that any person who is really profoundly humane can believe in everlasting punishment. Christ certainly as depicted in the Gospels did believe in everlasting punishment, and one does find repeatedly a vindictive fury against those people who would not listen to His preaching -- an attitude which is not uncommon with preachers, but which does somewhat detract from superlative excellence. You do not, for instance find that attitude in Socrates. You find him quite bland and urbane toward the people who would not listen to him; and it is, to my mind, far more worthy of a sage to take that line than to take the line of indignation.

Bertrand Russell

From his article Why I Am Not A Christian.

What Does The Bible Tell Us?

Look at the bible as a pastiche, a collection of mutually and often internally inconsistent fragments slapped together for crude reasons of politics and art and priestly self-promotion and sometimes beauty and a lot of chest-thumping tribalism, and through that lens, it makes a lot of sense. It does tell us something important…about us, not some fantastic mythological being. It tells us that we are fractious, arrogant, scrappy people who sometimes accomplish great things and more often cause grief and pain to one another. We want to be special in a universe that is uncaring and cold, and in which the nature of our existence is a transient flicker, so we invent these strange stories of grand beginnings, like every orphan dreaming that they are the children of kings who will one day ride up on a white horse and take them away to a beautiful palace and a rich and healthy family that will love them forever. We are not princes of the earth, we are the descendants of worms, and any nobility must be earned.

PZ Myers

From his Pharyngula post Theology is a Deceitful Strategy.

Quote of the Week

I cannot understand why we idle discussing religion. If we are honest - and as scientists honesty is our precise duty - we cannot help but admit that any religion is a pack of false statements, deprived of any real foundation. The very idea of God is a product of human imagination... I do not recognize any religious myth, at least because they contradict one another...

Paul Dirac

Why Are There No Atheist Churches?

That’s our strength. We don’t need support groups. When I meet someone in Georgia, or Manila, or Calcutta who thinks like me, it takes a few minutes of conversation before we understand each other. We know there are millions of us all over the world. It’s an easy handshake of recognition. We don’t think “OK, now we have to get together every seven days, or twice a day, to shout and holler just to reassure ourselves that we still believe it.” We don’t need that. It can be believed without effort, without fanaticism. It’s an understanding, and it’s based on reason, and literature, and to some extent irony, and a little humor, and culture.

The fact that religion keeps having to pump people up at mass rallies is a sign of its weakness. It needs constant reinforcement, and would crumble without it.

Christopher Hitchens

Taken from this interview.

My God is a Little God

In some respects, science has far surpassed religion in delivering awe. How is it that hardly any major religion has looked at science and concluded, 'This is better than we thought! The Universe is much bigger than our prophets said, grander, more subtle, more elegant. God must be even greater than we dreamed?' Instead they say, 'No, no, no! My god is a little god, and I want him to stay that way'.

Carl Sagan

Quote of the Week

Doubting Thomas – the patron saint of scientists.

Richard Dawkins

Bertrand Russell's Wisdom II: The Argument from Design

Since the time of Darwin we understand much better why living creatures are adapted to their environment. It is not that their environment was made to be suitable to them but that they grew to be suitable to it, and that is the basis of adaptation. There is no evidence of design about it.

When you come to look into this argument from design, it is a most astonishing thing that people can believe that this world, with all the things that are in it, with all its defects, should be the best that omnipotence and omniscience have been able to produce in millions of years. I really cannot believe it. Do you think that, if you were granted omnipotence and omniscience and millions of years in which to perfect your world, you could produce nothing better than the Ku Klux Klan or the Fascists?

Bertrand Russell

From his article Why I Am Not A Christian.