Its The End Of The World As We Know It and I Feel Fine.

There's been a whole lot of talk recently about the end of the world. Whether it comes from religious zealots preaching about revelation and the "second coming" or from 2012 enthusiasts fearing that the galactic alignment of the sun and the center of the universe will somehow magically cause the apocalypse, it's difficult to escape the fear. Well, I'm here to offer a little respite from all the hubbub. When I hear someone say they feel like they are living in the "End Times" I have to keep from laughing because people have ALWAYS felt that way throughout all of recorded history. There have been countless prophets and soothsayers throughout every civilization that work their believers into a frenzy by claiming the End is Near. There is an obvious motivation for claiming this. People are much easier to control if they are in fear. What bigger fear can there be than the fear of total annihilation? So when you see some movement or cult or preacher proclaiming the end of the world you can be sure that they are probably looking to recruit you by scaring you. Don't buy into the fear. It doesn't get us anywhere.

The truth is one day something will happen that will make this planet a lot less habitable for human beings. It's important that we face this fact without fear and look for solutions by acting rationally. If people are really worried about the end of the human race than the only thing we could do to forestall such an event would be to spread our species to another planet. That way if we were to lose this planet our species would still exist elsewhere. We need to work together as a species and put a united world economy towards the task of exploration and colonization of other planets. But until then don't be scared, just be rational.

Afghanistan - Hell on earth for women

Christopher Hitchens was right. Religion poisons everything, especially government. In Afghanistan they just passed a bill that makes it perfectly legal for a husband to rape his wife. This law was passed and signed into law by Afghan President Hamid Karzai effectively sentencing Shiite women in the country to a life of servitude to their husbands. This law is entirely based on a strict interpretation of the Koran.

Here in the U.S. people are shocked and appalled that such a law could ever be passed. But is it really all that surprising? Things like this are bound to happen in a theocracy, especially a theocracy based on a fundamentalist literal reading of scripture. It just goes to show the kind of things that happen when religion gets into government.

"But" you might say, "this is an Islamic theocracy, not Christian. If we had more of a Christian presence in our government we'd all be much better off." Well I heard a great quote recently, although I can't remember the source. The quote was, "There was a time when the Church was in charge, we called that era The Dark Ages." It's times like this when we need to fight to protect our first amendment rights and keep religion out of office, not the other way around.

The Westboro Baptist Church

I just found out that the Westboro Baptist Church is organizing a protest at my school George Mason. These people represent everything that is wrong with religion. They have staged protests at the funerals of soldiers, and the students of the Virginia Tech Massacre. They praise the brutal hate murder of Matthew Shepard as a message from God to all "fags" that God Hates them and plans to sentence them to eternal torture for enjoying anal sex. They call for all homosexuals to be killed and sent to hell for their "sin." These people are disgusting, reprehensible, and totally deserving of eternal punishment. Too bad I don't believe in hell.

What really grinds my gears is the arrogance these people show. I may not be a bible scholar but I still remember enough to know that humility is considered a virtue. Jesus supposedly said "the meek shall inherit the earth." He is also quoted as saying "Judge Not Lest Ye Be Judged" and "Let He Who is Without Sin Cast the First Stone." I am an atheist and even I can say that these concepts are a great way to live your life. Humility leads to peace. Arrogance leads to violence. I just wish that these people would pay more attention to moral ethics and less attention to bronze age superstition and bigotry.

Morality

Many people see morality as a gift from God that pushes us to do good. They feel that without God, a person is incapable of being moral. Indeed, the religious mind assumes all morality comes from God.

I am personally offended by this assumption. As someone who is living without any belief in a supernatural deity, I feel slighted when I hear someone say that I cannot be moral because I do not believe in God. They say things like "If there's no God, no heaven or hell, no punishment or reward why don't you go out killing and taking what you want? Why do anything to help anyone else if you do not think it is going to help get you into heaven?" These statements are not only ignorant and offensive, but they show the moral flaw that resides at the heart of the religious mind. In other words, they are implying that the only reason they do not kill or steal is because they are afraid of supernatural punishment. Were that punishment somehow proved not to exist, by their own admission, many religious people would react by going on a killing spree. I do not kill or steal because I am possessed with the evolutionary gift of empathy. I would feel terrible knowing that I had intentionally harmed another person. I do not need the added threat of eternal punishment to keep me from acting like a psychopath.

Similarly, when someone says the reason they do good is because they are compelled by the reward of heaven, that person shows his or her true selfishness. That means they may donate money to charity or work in a soup kitchen but they only do it so that they may be rewarded in the afterlife for doing so. I am charitable and good to other people for the same reason I do not hurt people: empathy. I feel good just knowing that I have done good. That is reward enough.

"So..." the religious person may counter, "Where then do you get your empathy? Do you deny that this is a gift from God designed specifically to give us a sense of morality?"

The answer (as usual) can be found in the theory of evolution. It began early in our history. We have not always been at the top of the food chain. Indeed, throughout most of our existence we have been relatively low on that chain. Therefore, we have had to develop certain strategies to avoid utter extinction. One of the major strategies we have used is to live in larger and larger groups. As these groups have become larger and slowly evolved from small bands of hunter gatherers to large cities, so too has our sense of empathy towards those with whom we live. This was necessary because as much protection as living in groups gives us from the outside environment, it does not protect us from other people within the group. If people can feel the suffering of other people they are less likely to knowingly cause that suffering. Over time our empathetic impulse has evolved so much that we can now feel for the suffering of all living beings, not just humans.

So please, if you are reading this and you are religious please think before you accuse us nonbelievers of being amoral. Morality is much older and more vital to society than the idea of God.

Astrology

Astrology... Who in there right mind could possibly buy into one word of that garbage? Yesterday, I was standing in line at taco bell and these three girls got in line behind me. So the first thing I hear one of them say is "Oh he is such a Gemini, one minute he's angry the next minute he's happy. All Geminis have that dual attitude."

I wanted to vomit all over her. She seemed to have been describing a friend of hers with a case of bipolar disorder. Yet she was wasn't attributing the swing is her friend's mood to drugs or a chemical imbalance or even anything that can truly affect behavior. She was blaming the fact that he was born in June... Then she went so far as to make a gross generalization and say that all people who were born in June behave this way. Biologist Richard Dawkins poses an experiment. Take your horoscope and replace your sign with your race or gender or sexual orientation. So lets say your horoscope says "Taurus: You have a motivational problem. You tend to be lazy and untrustworthy. Try to overcome this by associating yourself with a few hard working Virgos." Now replace Taurus with Hispanics and replace Virgos with Asians. How racist is that statement now?

"But Astrology is REAL! I read my horoscope yesterday and it said I would receive good fortune today and that I shouldn't trust and Virgos. Then later that day I found ten bucks but this guy tried to take it from me and say it was his! I knew he must have been a Virgo so I punched him in the face and kept the money! How do you answer that Mr. Cynical?"

I've heard this argument from personal experience before. Something happens that you can't explain and so therefore astrology or ghosts or Jesus or whatever your superstition is must be true. Well, arguments like that don't hold any water. The sheer number of coincidences that occur every second is staggering. Every second of every day something that only had a one in a million chance happens to someone. There are six billion people in the world and everyone of them as had something completely unlikely occur in their lives. But you must remember, none of those strange coincidences ever defied the laws of physics. Just because Jupiter was in the fifth house and Venus was in retrograde when something unbelievable happens to you doesn't mean that the planets had ANYTHING to do with it.

I just hope that people will start to use a little common sense and stop thinking like ignorant fools with bronze age superstitions.

Some thoughts on heaven and hell

The belief in heaven or hell, to me, seems utterly irrational. Hell is supposed to be the epitome of all our fears; a place where one is tortured in unimaginable ways for all of eternity. Yet, when one realizes the only reason we fear and feel pain in the first place, is our body’s natural survival instinct, it is clear that once you are dead, fear and pain are irrelevant. We fear that which may harm us or kill us, so once you are dead, what is there to fear? Our bodies feel pain to warn us of damage to our operating systems. Once you are dead, those operating systems have long since ceased to function, leaving nothing to even feel the damage.
The same is true for heaven. Heaven is supposed to be the place where every wish is fulfilled, every pleasure indulged, every whim attended to. Yet, pleasure exists only as a chemical reaction in the brain; evolved so that the species may have a better chance to propagate. For instance, we feel pleasure when we make love, because the more we procreate the better chance our species has to avoid extinction. So logically, we are more likely to procreate if that experience is also pleasurable. We feel pleasure when we eat or drink or consume things our bodies deem necessary because our bodies require nourishment, therefore, we are more likely to seek these things out if they are not only nourishing but pleasurable. What purpose does pleasure serve the dead, to whom procreation and nourishment are no longer necessary? Pain, pleasure, fear, hope, happiness, anguish, love, hate, all these things come to us not from some unquantifiable everlasting spirit, but from our D.N.A’s one and only directive: Replicate.

Things I do not believe in

Hello everyone, I am Gunslinger and I am a DJ on WGMU radio, George Mason University's college radio station. Since this is my inaugural blog posting, I figured I would acquaint myself with my new audience by sharing a few things about myself. First of all, I'm an atheist. That is to say, I do not believe in any sort of higher power or spiritual force or any other superstition you can think of. In fact there are so many things I have found insufficient evidence to believe in I've provided a list of things I think are, for lack of a better term, B.S.

1. The Judeo-Christian God: Yahweh/Allah/Jesus/The Holy Ghost. Whatever you call him, I see no reason to believe he exists and I believe he is a work of fiction.

2. Ghosts. I know you've probably had some strange experience where you were certain you've seen the disembodied spirit of one of your loved ones. However convincing that experience that was for you, it is not convincing for me as I was not there and could not corroborate your story. There's always a more plausible explanation.

3. Magic. The laws of physics are immutable and cannot be circumvented by uttering some gibberish or wiggling your fingers or hoping really hard.

4. Creationism. This goes hand in hand with not believing in God, but I feel like it warranted its own entry. Its just as silly to be a creationist as it is to be a member of the flat earth society. Both require a staggering amount of obliviousness.

5. Nostradamus. Or any other fortune tellers for that matter. Nostradamus has never PREdicted anything. All of his supposed "predictions" of events that took place after his death have only been attriubted to his "foresight" after the fact. This is whats known as a POSTdiction. Or in other words Doo-Doo.

6. Miracles. See entry for Magic.