If I believe in God and am wrong - then I have lost nothing.
As the former Data Security Officer for one of the world's largest government agencies, I have considerable formal training and experience with risk analysis and risk management.
Your assertion appears to be correct, but only upon
superficial analysis, and this error is what causes many risk analyses to fail disastrously, as yours does. It completely avoids discussion of the
reality that only an insignificant percentage of theists merely sit at home basking in the love of their imaginary deity.
The overwhelming majority of theists belong to one of the world's
organized religions. Most of these organizations (obviously I'm referring to the monotheistic, evangelical Abrahamic religions, which metastasize out of the Middle East like a cancer epidemic every couple of millennia and now dominate civilization) come with a gigantic list of requirements and prohibitions that go far beyond simple belief in a deity. They teach their members that they are just ever so slightly
better than non-believers, and this gives them not just the right but the
duty to at least harrass them and at worst persecute them in order to "save" them from their own "ignorance." Many of their diverse sects interpret this as a mandate to suppress the teaching and tolerance of "blasphemous" ideas and behavior within their countries, such as evolution, racial equality, first-class citizenship for women, homosexuality, music, dancing, and the keeping of mankind's oldest and most loyal companions as pets.
If the theist would kindly keep his belief-inspired behaviors to himself--such as refusing vaccination and ignoring scientific evidence--this would be bad enough but perhaps it would be a tolerable balance between individual rights and the maintenance of a civilized society. If he would just restrict it to his own family--not allowing "sinners" to patronize his business, sequestering his wife and daughters from public life (so long as they retain their legal right to flip off the asshole and walk out)--this would be markedly worse but a case could still be made for tolerating it in the name of "diversity."
But when these theists band together and achieve political power, all HELL breaks loose. They create entire nations in which members of one sect are given second-class citizenship by the dominant sect (the differences between which are so subtle as to be virtually indistinguishable to outsiders). Entire nations in which women are allowed to die in a burning building because it would be a "sin" for the fireMEN to carry them out. Entire nations in which gay people, people of African ancestry, adulterers and women who run for public office are murdered with impunity.
Worst of all, their nations go on campaigns to subjugate (or simply annihilate) other nations who do not practice the same brand of religion.
Belief in a god
almost never stops at the personal level--at least not in Abrahamic societies. It
almost always gives the believer a sense of superiority and a sense of mission: that he must spread his belief throughout the world--by violence, if necessary. Thus, the history of the monotheistic Abrahamic religions has been a non-stop campaign of violence and depravity.
- The cleansing of the Roman Empire when it first adopted Christianity as its state religion. (If you haven't seen "Agora," rent it.)
- The centuries of war between the Catholic (Rome) and Eastern Orthodox (Byzantium) empires over which version of Christianity was the "true" faith.
- The destruction of the "heathen" civilization of Egypt by the Muslim armies of Caliph Omar.
- The Crusades.
- The Inquisition.
- The century of non-stop war in Europe between the upstart Protestants and the entrenched Catholics that we shrug off as the "Reformation."
- The obliteration of two of the world's six precious independently-developed civilizations (Inca and Olmec-Maya-Aztec), for being "pagans," by the Christian armies of Europe, with the blessing and encouragement of the Pope--right down to burning the Aztec libraries and melting down the golden art of the Incas.
- The millennium of violent antisemitism that virtually defined European Christendom.
- The Holocaust, which was the culmination of that millennium.
- The current holy war, in which the Christians, Muslims and Jews threaten to annihilate each other (and themselves, not to mention all the rest of us) with nuclear weapons.
This is why we can't simply roll our eyes at the childish, irrational, antiscientific belief in gods, angels, demons, and other invisible and illogical supernatural phenomena for which no evidence has ever been found, and say, "Well some people are just stupid, let them have their silly fun."
Their "fun" constantly threatens to destroy
us personally and our civilization as a whole.
We cannot continue to tolerate these dangerous fools. We have to educate them before they do even more damage.
If I don't believe in God and am wrong - I lose much.
But you could say exactly the same thing about any carefully constructed fantasy of evil. If you believe that the Klingons are coming and learn all of their submission rituals, and you are right, you will survive their invasion, although as a captive. But if you don't believe, they will kill you.
Does this mean it's rational for you to believe that FTL travel exists, that creation of a galactic empire is economically feasible in an Einsteinian universe, and that the Klingons have a technology that can detect our presence? Is this
good risk analysis and risk management?
This is no different from belief in an invisible, illogical supernatural universe in which creatures and other forces exist which occasionally, capriciously, whimsically, and often
angrily perturb the behavior of the natural universe.
No wait. Actually, it is
quite different. People who believe in Klingons don't try to convince us that they have already been here. People who believe in gods constantly tell us that there is plenty of evidence for them. Yet the "evidence" never turns out to be valid. The best they come up with is one tortilla, out of the billions that are manufactured every year, which appears to have a scorch mark that resembles a person who lived two thousand years ago,
of whom there are no portraits against which to compare it for accuracy.
The Rule of Laplace reminds us that extraordinary assertions must be supported by extraordinary evidence before we are obliged to treat them with respect. The extraordinary assertion of the existence of a supernatural universe
has no evidence at all. To believe in it is irrational, foolish, in fact it is downright
childish. It is much more reasonable to believe that one will win the lottery. After all, every few months someone actually does. The probability is so small as to be inconsequential, but nonetheless
evidence exists to indicate that it is non-zero. There is no such evidence to justify belief in the supernatural.
Therefore we can give grudging respect to the person who thinks he will win the lottery, because out of the millions of them who say that, one will actually win it one day. By the same token, we owe only
disrespect to people who think gods exist. They are wasting their mental resources and leading civilization down dark paths, in order to not admit that it is a
fairytale like Santa Claus.
Atheists will say that believing, or practicing, out of fear is not belief but hypocrisy.
[Please do us the courtesy of using your spell checker.] You don't know much about atheists. It's not hypocrisy. It's simply
irrational risk management. You only have a finite amount of mental energy. Use it to accomplish things that will improve your own life, the lives of your family members, the welfare of your community, and the advance of this wonderful superorganism we have created, of which we are the cells, named
civilization. Don't squander it on an obsession with childish bogeymen. Look at how much intellectual energy
and physical energy and resources people waste by veering off course to avoid crossing paths with a black cat, by redesigning their living space (or turning down a good deal on a perfectly nice house) to improve its
feng shui, or by turning on a burner at sundown Friday and leaving it burning for 24 hours so they can cook on the Sabbath.
Supernaturalism
impairs one's quality of life in very real ways. In aggregate, it is a
drag on civilization
This then is the goal as set forth by Christ in the Gospels. The Goal of being perfect in Love.
[Please, please, please turn on your spell checker. You insult your readers with this lazy, haphazard writing.] Setting a goal does not automatically ensure that it will be met. The world's Christian population, taken in aggregate, has not acquitted itself well and, if Jesus were a real person, he would be ashamed of the things they have done in his name. The destruction of
an entire civilization, much less
two of them, is a "sin" which can never be atoned. There is nothing Christians can do to compensate the world for the wealth of philosophy, art, history, and culture that they destroyed in the New World. If Christianity survives for a million years, it will still be haunted by a legacy of unspeakable evil that will forever prevent it from deserving anyone's respect.
And we don't even need to talk about the Holocaust, in which Christians attempted to actually
exterminate an entire people. And please don't give me the facile bullshit about how that was fascism, not Christianity. Those people were Christians and they wholeheartedly supported it. Very few of them spoke out against it, and when the war was over and we experimented with letting the Jews move back to their old homes in Poland,
the motherfucking Polish Christians started killing them all over again.
Athiests can call into doubt many "historical facts" in the Bible. They can point to inconsistancies in christian faiths. But they cannot deny the root core of Christ' teaching which is Love.
I have no problem with Jesus. I love Jesus the same way I love Winnie the Pooh, Frodo Baggins, Santa Claus, Robin Hood, and dozens of other fictional characters. Fiction teaches us great things. It teaches us that there is good inside of us and all we need to do is to tap into it.
But I absolutely
despise the religion that has sprung up in Jesus's name, and if you think Jesus would be even slightly pleased with it, you are too far gone to reason with. On the balance, measured over the roughly two thousand years since Jesus's alleged birth, lifetime and death, Christianity has accumulated a legacy of overwhelming evil that will haunt humanity until our sun becomes a red giant and boils the life off of this hapless planet.
i am trying to use this as my goal and guide and ANY of the bible canons will be sufficient. Of course we must not forget or deny the necessity of the Love and discipline offered to us By Christ through the magisterium of His Church.
You've got to be joking. It is the
churches and the
church leaders who have led their followers to commit these unspeakable crimes against humanity.
If Christianity were merely a personal belief system, it might work. But when Christians get together, they rise up in unison in paroxysms of violence every two or three generations, and undo what little good work they might have accomplished between wars.
Christianity is evil and it is the duty of every decent, rational, educated human being to speak out against it.
