| Atheist Enlightenment
by Great Orion Voyager © 2009 thorkorps END THE DARK AGE: GOD IS A METAPHOR AND DOES NOT EXIST OUTSIDE OF IMAGINATION. Religion is preventing progress and lowering your quality of life. No religion should be supported by school vouchers, tax exemptions or any other funding. Science, Intellect, Morality and Justice must prevail. Churches, mosques and temples should be used as secular community centers where social and ecological nonprofit organizations can serve the Public Interest. It is time to evolve. Anyone who mistakes gods as real, anyone who mistakes mythology as history, anyone who mistakes the Bible as fact rather than metaphor, should be dismissed as neurotic: When any priest or preacher or minister or rabbi or mullah spews nonsense about gods that do not exist, they should be disrespected and ignored. Neocons are turning America into an Evil Christian Imperialist Theocracy. The World Trade Center was destroyed by religious fanatics. Religion is causing many bloody wars today. THIS ISN’T SPIRITUALITY OR MORALITY: RELIGION IS PATRIARCHAL TRIBALISM. Purpose of religion is to maintain Social Hierarchy. Believers, those with faith, those who join churches, defer their intellect to a cult: ALL RELIGIONS ARE CULTS. RELIGION IS THE BLOOD ENEMY OF SCIENCE: Medieval science was brutally snuffed out by the Catholic Church. Science was able to prosper and modernize the world only after the Pope was stripped of his power after centuries of Protestant wars. If the Pope was still all-powerful, we would still think the earth was flat. RELIGION IS A MISUNDERSTANDING OF SCIENCE, INTELLECT, MORALITY AND JUSTICE: Religious belief colonizes and corrupts the MORAL IMPULSE toward Social Progress, precisely why those against Progress encourage this religious colonization of intellect. Those who lack morals claim the strongest religious beliefs. God is a metaphor for Moral Conscience. It is absurd to pray to or worship a metaphor: STOP PRAYING AND START LIVING MORAL IDEALS. Atheist Golden Rule: DO UNTO OTHERS AS YOU WOULD HAVE DONE UNTO YOU: Compassion, charity and soup kitchens are vital for any sustainable community. NONPROFIT CHARITY SHOULD BE ENCOURAGED WITHOUT CULTIST INFLUENCE. Muslim mosques, Christian churches and Buddhist temples are among the world’s finest architecture: Magnificent paintings and sculptures, stained glass and architecture of churches, mosques and temples should be preserved and cherished as our inspirational heritage. Choral music, pipe organ music, chants and songs should be cherished without cultist influence. Churches, mosques and temples should be used as secular community centers where social and ecological nonprofit organizations can serve the public interest. It is time to evolve. RELIGION STUNTS INTELLECT: Sigmund Freud concluded RELIGION IS NEUROSIS: Those who believe in supernatural phenomena must be mentally ill. Carl Jung said the religious are attracted to religion out of a profound need to be racist and elitist. Jung concluded RELIGION IS PATRIARCHAL TRIBALISM: Believers defer their intellect to a cult: ALL RELIGIONS ARE CULTS. The religious are immature as toddlers unwilling to accept the fact that Santa Claus is a myth: They have difficulty defining where their wishes and metaphors end and where reality begins. Faced with the Abyss of Existential Angst, the religious regress to the toddler stage of egocentrism: ATHEISM IS FOR INTELLECTS STRONG ENOUGH TO ENDURE THE ABYSS OF EXISTENTIAL ANGST. Nietzsche says: “When you look into the abyss, the abyss looks into you.” The Abyss of Existential Angst invites madness: Life is meaningless. Nightmare horror and evil exist without justice. Totalitarian death squads slaughter whole villages. Open a newspaper and see photos of genocide, mass graves, victims of American cluster bombs, innocent kids with limbs blown off, while homicidal dictators sip champagne in five star hotels and get away with murder. No god. No justice. THE ONLY WAY TO COPE WITH INJUSTICE IS TO CORRECT INJUSTICE. Religious compassion is a weak version of True Compassion, which is Social Democracy: Catholic priests throughout Central and South America become Social Democracy activists, so the Pope excommunicates them: The Pope rejects his best priests once they realize True Compassion. Those brave priests who embrace Socialism should cherish their excommunication as a sacred honor. Neocons insist we must live by the Ten Commandments: The Ten Commandments command THOU SHALL NOT KILL, so what are neocons doing in Iraq? What are neocons doing eating meat? THOU SHALL NOT KILL means we all must be vegetarians. Half the Ten Commandments are useless: Thou shall make no graven images. Thou shall worship no other gods. Thou shall not mention the word God. Useless! Read the Bible: Mean-spirited violent vengeance stories. Perpetual tribal war. Blood feuds. A psychotic God commanding that whole cities be put to death for the crime of questioning Him, turning women to pillars of salt, ordering fathers to kill sons, murdering firstborn sons of everyone in Egypt for no reason, drowning the whole world. A New Testament Jesus screaming: Anyone who questions me shall burn in hell! Koran is the same tone and sentiment: Muslims, Christians and Jews base their so-called “spirituality” on bloodthirsty vengeful war gods. If they analyzed their own documents, they would have to conclude their religion is obsolete nonsense. Do not forget the Buddhist belief in reincarnation. ALL RELIGIONS ARE OBSOLETE NONSENSE. It is time to evolve. Nietzsche’s Zarathustra: “Man is a tightrope over an abyss tied between beast and Ubermensch: What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not an end. Man must be overcome. What have you done to overcome him lately? Behold! I teach you Der Ubermensch! He is this lightning! He is this frenzy!” Friedrich Nietzsche, 1887 “Indeed, we philosophers and ‘free spirits’ feel as if a new dawn were shining upon us when we receive the tidings that God is dead: our hearts overflow with gratitude, amazement, anticipation, expectation. At last our horizon appears free again to us, at last our ships may venture out again, venture out to face any danger; all the daring of the lover of knowledge is permitted again. The sea, our sea, lies open again; perhaps there has never yet been such an Open Sea.” Our Open Sea is now the entire Universe: Hubble Space Telescope has opened our eyes and expanded our WORLD MIND: Humans RISE ABOVE THEMSELVES when they explore Space. Humans TRANSCEND their own weakness when they fix their eyes on the Galaxy: AMERICANS CAN BE PROUD OF SPACE EXPLORATION: Hubble Space Telescope, walking on the Moon, robots on Mars and Titan. GREAT ACHIEVEMENTS! We walk on the Moon. We rove on Mars and Titan. We send Voyagers and Pioneers into Deep Space to other stars. We gaze to the edge of the Universe through Hubble Space Telescope. We peer into alien planets around distant stars. We bask in Enlightenment while half the world is still chained to Dark Age fear of ghosts and demons and gods that do not exist. END THE DARK AGE: GOD IS A METAPHOR AND DOES NOT EXIST OUTSIDE OF IMAGINATION. Religion is preventing progress and lowering your quality of life. No religion should be supported by school vouchers, tax exemptions or any other funding. Science, Intellect, Morality and Justice must prevail. Churches, mosques and temples should be used as secular community centers where social and ecological nonprofit organizations can serve the Public Interest. It is time to evolve. Spread the Good News! Salaam. Carl Sagan, COSMOS, 1980 “The Cosmos is all that is or ever was or ever will be. Our feeblest contemplations of the Cosmos stir us. There is a tingling in the spine, a catch in the voice, a faint sensation, as if a distant memory of falling from a great height. We know we are approaching the greatest of mysteries. The size and age of the Cosmos are beyond ordinary human understanding. Lost somewhere between immensity and eternity is our tiny planetary home. In a cosmic perspective, most human concerns seem insignificant, even petty…. Human history can be viewed as a slowly dawning awareness that we are members of a larger group. Initially our loyalties were to ourselves and our immediate family, then to bands of wandering hunter-gatherers, then to tribes, settlements, city-states, nations. If we are to survive, our loyalties must be broadened further, to include the whole human community, the entire planet Earth." Carl Sagan, PALE BLUE DOT, 1994 "Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The Earth is the only world known to harbor life so far. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. To my mind, there is no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly and compassionately with one another and to preserve and cherish that pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.” Carl Sagan, PALE BLUE DOT, 1994 "Science has far surpassed religion in delivering awe. We gaze across billions of light-years of space to view the Universe. We peer down into the core of our planet, and the blazing interior of our star. We read genetic language and uncover hidden chapters in the record of our origins. We refine agriculture, without which almost all of us would starve to death. We create medicines that save the lives of billions. We communicate at the speed of light and whip around the Earth in an hour and a half. We have sent dozens of ships to more than seventy worlds, and four spacecraft to the stars. We are right to rejoice in our accomplishments, to be proud that our species has been able to see so far.” Carl Sagan, PALE BLUE DOT, 1994 "Since, in the long run, every planetary society will be endangered by impacts from space, every surviving civilization is obliged to become space-faring, not because of exploratory or romantic zeal, but for the most practical reason: staying alive." Carl Sagan, THE DEMON-HAUNTED WORLD, 1995 "Whenever ethnic or national prejudices are aroused, habits of thought from ages past reach for the controls. Darkness gathers. Demons begin to stir.... If we can't think for ourselves, if we're unwilling to question authority, then we're just putty in the hands of those in power. But if citizens are educated and form their own opinions, then those in power work for us. In every country, we should be teaching our children the scientific method and the Bill of Rights…. In the demon-haunted world, this may be all that stands between us and the enveloping darkness. Carl Sagan, CSICOP Keynote Address 1987 "In science it often happens that scientists say, ‘You know that's a really good argument; my position is mistaken,’ and they actually change their minds and you never hear that old view from them again. They really do it. I cannot recall the last time something like that happened in politics or religion." Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan, SHADOWS OF FORGOTTEN ANCESTORS, 1992 "Humans who enslave, castrate, experiment on, and fillet other animals have had an understandable penchant for pretending animals do not feel pain. A sharp distinction between humans and 'animals' is essential if we are to bend them to our will. The behavior of other animals renders such pretensions specious. They are just too much like us." Friedrich Nietzsche, DER ANTICHRIST, 1888 “If one were to prove this God of the Christians to us, I should be even less able to believe in him. A religion like Christianity, which does not have contact with reality at any point, must be mortally hostile against the Wisdom of the World, which means Science. Faith is the veto against Science…. God was seized with hellish fear: Man had turned out to be his greatest mistake: He had created a rival for himself. Science is the Original Sin. Out of Paradise with man! Man shall not think. God invents war; priests have always required wars. War among other things, a great disrupter of Science! Incredible! Knowledge continues to grow in spite of wars! God makes a final decision: Man has become scientific. There is no other way: He has to be drowned! I have been understood: Science prospers only under happy circumstance. Consequently, man must be made unhappy: The logic of the priest in every age.” Noam Chomsky, Interview by Wallace Shawn, Oct 2004 "The God of the Bible, not only did He order His chosen people to carry out literal genocide, I mean wipe out every Amalekite to the last man, woman, child, and, you know, donkey and so on, because hundreds of years ago they got in your way when you were trying to cross the desert, not only did He do things like that, but after all, the God of the Bible was ready to destroy every living creature on earth because some humans irritated Him. That's the story of Noah. I mean, that's beyond genocide. Somebody offended Him, and He was going to destroy every living being on earth? And then He was talked into allowing two of each species to stay alive, that's supposed to be gentle and wonderful." Richard Dawkins, THE GOD DELUSION, 2006 "We all are atheists about most of the gods societies ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further. Are you telling me the only reason you don't steal and rape and murder is that you're frightened of God? The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, malevolent bully." Richard Dawkins, 1995 "The total amount of suffering per year in the natural world is beyond all decent contemplation. During the minute it takes me to compose this sentence, thousands of animals are being eaten alive, many others are running for their lives, whimpering with fear, others are slowly being devoured from within by rasping parasites. Thousands are dying of starvation, thirst and disease. It must be so. If there ever is a time of plenty, this will automatically lead to an increase in the population until the natural state of starvation and misery is restored. In a universe of electrons and selfish genes, blind physical forces and genetic replication, some people are going to get hurt, other people are going to get lucky, and you won't find any rhyme or reason to it, nor any justice. The Universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no God, no design, no purpose, no good, no evil, nothing but blind pitiless indifference.” Richard Dawkins, THE EVOLUTIONARY FUTURE OF MAN “Arms races probably account for the spectacularly advanced engineering of eyes, ears, brains, bat radar and all the other high-tech weaponry animals display. It is an article of faith among politically correct biologists that intelligence has nothing to do with genes.... But the likelihood is that, in 100,000 years time, we shall either have reverted to wild barbarism, or else civilisation will have advanced beyond all recognition, into colonies in outer space. We humans are an extremely important manifestation of the replication bomb, because it is through us that the explosion may proceed to the next stage and reverberate through deep space.” Richard Dawkins, Interview by Sheena McDonald “The universe is an extremely beautiful place, and the more we understand about it the more beautiful does it appear. It is an immensely exciting experience to be born in the universe, and look around you and realise that before you die you have the opportunity of understanding an immense amount…. It is helpful insight to say we are vehicles for our DNA, we are hosts for DNA parasites which are our genes.” Richard Dawkins “I'm a friendly enough sort of chap. I'm not a hostile person to meet. But it's important to realize that when two opposite points of view are expressed with equal intensity, the truth does not necessarily lie halfway between them. It is possible for one side to be simply wrong.” |