I am an Atheist

 

Picture This... ( a thought experiment)

 

Picture this:

You’re a fisherman at the start of the Iron Age living under Roman rule. You live hand to mouth in extreme poverty without any avenue of personal or economic advancement. Perhaps, you own a fishing boat and thus you are considered wealthy by your more impoverished and ignorant neighbors. 

You’re approached by a traveling, itinerant preacher and ordered to give it all up and follow him. 

You think ‘Give it all up? Give up the back-breaking toil dawn to dusk, the up-keep of the boat, nets, etc.; dealing with fishmongers, hiring fishermen, competing with other fishmen and boat owners … Give it all up for a life of wandering supplication? That might be a hard sell to your family, for sure. 

Nevertheless, you drop your chores and take up ‘apostleship’ with the rabbi. He changes your name from Cephas to Simon-Peter.

Others join a grown rank of work-a-day peasant-folk who follow this Iron Age proselytizer.

A couple of years go by; your itinerant life-style is supported (somehow?) but the daily toil on a fishing boat is no more. 

Then, the traveling preacher is arrested during a high Jewish holiday for sedition against Rome and is publicly executed by the Roman provincial government in a most grisly manner; crucifixion.

As a ‘disciple’ – uneducated, ignorant, superstitious and recently unemployed – you wonder what is your most likely next step; return to fishing and await arrest? Throw yourself on the mercy (Ha!) of the Roman authorities? 

No, you declare that the preacher really was a deity – the son of god – with a message of love and peace for the world. No sedition here; no, sir! After all, the preacher said that his ‘kingdom’ (oh, boy…!) was not of this world! No sedition; ergo no imprisonment, torture or crucifixion. 

(Gulp!)

The prospect of returning to a life of toil as a fisherman seems as undesirable as it is unlikely. You decide to go way out on a delusional limb and declare that you actually saw the ‘son of god’ after he’d died on the cross and had come back from the dead! 

The grift worked for a time. Why not try to keep it going? At least to avoid a similar nasty end. Seems plausible.

There are a raft of other itinerant preachers doing likewise; Simon Magus, Apollonius of Tyana and many others, that bloke from Tarsus – a Pharisee – (hrumph!); Saul (or Paul – huh… another name change. Personal note; you’re meant to meet him next week in Jerusalem.) 

When backed into a corner and asked if this story of the ‘son of god’, resurrection, et al. were true, you claim, with proper, righteous indignation that every word of your testimony is true.

Either that or suffer gruesome consequences… 

Consider the Atoms

 

From Guy Nancarrow March 8 at 1:01 PM  Admin of 'Carl Sagan's Vision'

'Consider the atoms. For 13.8 billion years, they drifted in the void—simple, silent, bound only by gravity and chance. Then, on a tiny rock orbiting an unremarkable star, something extraordinary

happened: dead matter began to dream.

 

Carl Sagan warned us: “Extinction is the rule. Survival is the exception.” Earth’s fossil record is a graveyard of experiments—trilobites, dinosaurs, towering ferns—all reduced to dust by asteroid strikes, ice ages, and oxygen famines. Yet here we are, the heirs of survivors, our DNA a palimpsest of 600 million years of neural improvisation. Your reflexes—the flinch from fire, the hunger for sweetness, the urge to protect a child—are ancient algorithms, sculpted by trial and error in a world where death was the default. 

Daniel Dennett’s insight cuts deep: “You don’t need a smart maker to make something simple.” Evolution is no blacksmith. It is a blind sculptor, chiseling life from randomness. A single-celled organism, mindless and hungry, splits into two. Over eons, those splits compound into eyes, wings, brains. Complexity emerges not by design, but by desperation—a billion tiny solutions to the cold arithmetic of survival. 

 

But it was Charles Darwin who shattered the illusion. Before him, life’s tapestry seemed threaded by divine hands. Darwin revealed a cosmos where dead matter, through patient iteration, could wake itself into being. No deity counted the sparrows; no plan guided the finch’s beak. Life was not bestowed—it emerged, a slow dance of mutation and necessity. His revelation was humbling: We are accidents with ancestry, stardust that learned to count its own steps. 

And what of us? For millennia, we told ourselves that gods or kings authored the cosmos. Then came Newton, who saw a universe governed by a few elegant equations. Einstein rewrote them, bending spacetime to his will. Hubble peered into the abyss and found galaxies fleeing into darkness, proof that the universe is neither static nor eternal. These were not discoveries of complexity, but of profound simplicity—laws so concise they could fit on a napkin, yet powerful enough to birth black holes and DNA. 

But here lies the paradox: From simplicity, complexity blooms. Dead matter stirs to life. Neurons fire into sentience. A species that once cowered in caves now builds rockets and writes sonnets. Your smartphone—a slab of glass and rare earth metals—contains more computational power than all the brains of the Cretaceous period. Yet it was forged not by a genius, but by the slow accretion of human curiosity, each breakthrough standing on the shoulders of ancestral tinkerers. 

 

We are the universe waking up. The same hydrogen born in the Big Bang now courses through your veins. The same thermodynamics that drags stars toward entropy also powers your cells, turning sunlight into thought. For 600 million years, life clawed its way from reflex to reason, from survival to poetry. And in the last sliver of cosmic time—a mere 0.000007% of Earth’s history—we glimpsed the truth: We are not above nature, but of it.Consider the atoms. For 13.8 billion years, they drifted in the void—simple, silent, bound only by gravity and chance. Then, on a tiny rock orbiting an unremarkable star, something extraordinary

happened: dead matter began to dream.

 

Carl Sagan warned us: “Extinction is the rule. Survival is the exception.” Earth’s fossil record is a graveyard of experiments—trilobites, dinosaurs, towering ferns—all reduced to dust by asteroid strikes, ice ages, and oxygen famines. Yet here we are, the heirs of survivors, our DNA a palimpsest of 600 million years of neural improvisation. Your reflexes—the flinch from fire, the hunger for sweetness, the urge to protect a child—are ancient algorithms, sculpted by trial and error in a world where death was the default. 

Daniel Dennett’s insight cuts deep: “You don’t need a smart maker to make something simple.” Evolution is no blacksmith. It is a blind sculptor, chiseling life from randomness. A single-celled organism, mindless and hungry, splits into two. Over eons, those splits compound into eyes, wings, brains. Complexity emerges not by design, but by desperation—a billion tiny solutions to the cold arithmetic of survival. 

 

But it was Charles Darwin who shattered the illusion. Before him, life’s tapestry seemed threaded by divine hands. Darwin revealed a cosmos where dead matter, through patient iteration, could wake itself into being. No deity counted the sparrows; no plan guided the finch’s beak. Life was not bestowed—it emerged, a slow dance of mutation and necessity. His revelation was humbling: We are accidents with ancestry, stardust that learned to count its own steps. 

And what of us? For millennia, we told ourselves that gods or kings authored the cosmos. Then came Newton, who saw a universe governed by a few elegant equations. Einstein rewrote them, bending spacetime to his will. Hubble peered into the abyss and found galaxies fleeing into darkness, proof that the universe is neither static nor eternal. These were not discoveries of complexity, but of profound simplicity—laws so concise they could fit on a napkin, yet powerful enough to birth black holes and DNA. 

But here lies the paradox: From simplicity, complexity blooms. Dead matter stirs to life. Neurons fire into sentience. A species that once cowered in caves now builds rockets and writes sonnets. Your smartphone—a slab of glass and rare earth metals—contains more computational power than all the brains of the Cretaceous period. Yet it was forged not by a genius, but by the slow accretion of human curiosity, each breakthrough standing on the shoulders of ancestral tinkerers. 

 

We are the universe waking up. The same hydrogen born in the Big Bang now courses through your veins. The same thermodynamics that drags stars toward entropy also powers your cells, turning sunlight into thought. For 600 million years, life clawed its way from reflex to reason, from survival to poetry. And in the last sliver of cosmic time—a mere 0.000007% of Earth’s history—we glimpsed the truth: We are not above nature, but of it.'

Did Somebody Mention 'Chinese Whispers'?

 

Imagine this scene in Judea or Anatolia or Alexandria:

 ‘Hey! Have you heard about this guy in Galilee? Jesus?

Man, loads of great stories about this dude. Got a minute?

He walked on water! No kidding. I know a guy who knows a guy who knew a guy that said he knew a guy who saw him do it. My cousin told me about it and my cousin wouldn’t lie about it. Very trustworthy dude; not too bright but he wouldn’t lie to me about this. 

Walked on water during a big storm on the Sea of Galilee. This guy, Jeshua ben Josef  I guess is his real name – a Jewish fella – palled around with fishermen, apparently. Anyway, aint that something?

Walked on water!

And he turned water into wine! Man, if I could do that, I could make a fortune!  I could stop being a tanner for one thing. Set up shop. Turn water into wine and make a fortune. 

So, anyway this Jesus guy; he went to a wedding and turned water into wine! Pretty cool, right?

No, he wasn’t just a magician. He did all kinds of magic stuff but…

Like I heard tell that he fed thousands of people with a just a few loaves of bread and a couple of fish! He multiplied that little bit and fed a multitude. That’s what I heard. No kidding!

But he never charged anyone. Man, I’d make a bundle but this guy, Jesus, did it to show he was special. Son of god or something.

But wait – one more – he came back from the dead! After being crucified, he came back from the dead. I shit you not! That’s what my cousin told me! Came back from the dead.

Okay. So that’s a bridge too far for you? Too much? My cousin swears by it, though. If you knew my cousin, you’d know he wouldn’t lie to me about such stuff. Really.

When was this? About 40 years ago or so, I guess.’

Now, imagine this scene being played out many times. Hear-say, gossip, tall tales all told with a level of fervency that would dispel doubt. 

Now, imagine that the stories are told in variations with embellishments and hyperbole to increase the effect of the stories upon the listener much as rumor and gossip is altered for effect. Now, imagine all this being done in various languages with colloquial nuance, asides and references. 

That might be what the first Gospel writer (whoever they were) might have used as the basis for ‘Mark’.

The Body & Mind of 'God'.

Where is the body of god? 

Does the Holy Trinity reside in any specific place?

Where did it reside before the creation of the universe?

Outside of space?

Outside of time?

Outside of space and time; what is that? 

If such a concept cannot be understood or conceptualized by the human mind, how can it ever have been conceived as an answer to the question ‘Where is god?’

The body – and physical nature – of god is related in the both the Old and the New Testaments of the Bible. 

Does that ‘god’ have a mind? 

Apparently so as Christians often speak of the ‘mind of God’.
Does ‘god’ have intentions and desires? 

If it created the universe, it – god – must have desired to do so. It must have intended to make the universe. It follows then that the creator-god must have had a mind. Was it a physical mind? If it was a physical, extant mind, then it must have existed in space. Existence necessitates both time and space.

Where did this mind (with its desires and intentions) exist before it had created space/time?

(By the way, if ‘god’ was an absolutely perfect, being – wholly and truly perfect, content, complete and self-sustaining without need for anything more than it was before the creation of the universe, there would be no logical reason for such a perfect being to desire anything more than itself.)

What is Faith?

What is Faith?

Faith is immaterial.

Faith has no atomic weight.

Faith has no mass.

Faith has no charge.

Faith is not an object; it is NOT something one has or possesses.

Faith is an element of a personal heuristic; Faith is part of one’s epidemiology. 

It is only by analogy that one can speak of ‘Faith’ as something one has. 

Those who claim to ‘have’ Faith are deceiving themselves. 

Faith is a delusion; Faith is analogous to a lens through which one sees the world. That world, then, also does not exist except within the heuristic formed by this delusion. God, demons, angels, miracles and so on are elements of the deception that a Believer asserts is true.

As Matt Dillahunty has asked many times; ‘Is there anything that cannot be accepted on Faith?’

The Wrong End of the Telescope

It is woefully hilarious that 'Believers' justify their nonsense by saying that it's 'natural'.

You know, like arsenic and volcanic eruptions.

The basic problem that 'Believers' have is that they persist in looking through the wrong end of the telescope. For them, the world was made expressly for the sentient puddle to inhabit. 

Religion may have been necessary in the earlier ages for civilization to coagulate around but, since the scientific revolution, religion has become a nuisance at best - an obstruction at worst.

Ask Giordano Bruno. 

Ask Galileo. 

Ask Copernicus.