Similarities shared between humans and bonobos (pygmy chimpanzees).

On the Devil.

Do we really still have such a notion in our modern age? Haven't we progressed past nonsense of this sort? Apparently not. I was watching 'Big Questions' on BBC1 this morning, and the second question brought up was 'is the Devil real?' Being a Christian audience, a large number did profress a belief in 'a' Devil - although in differing degrees of madness.

What immediately came to me was the question: why would an omnipotent, all-wise, all-benificent god create a devil? Out of boredom? Out of hate? Out of incompetency? The Devil exists only because of religion - and only in certain cultures (although most have concepts of demons, spirits and djinns).

One man - an exorcist - kept harking on about his experiences. I had an inkling from the first that he was deeply ignorant of psychology and science, and he claimed that certain amazing things happened when he expelled demons from poor subjects (such as a shack blowing down in Nairobi and illnesses being miraculously defeated).

Straight away, I thought: why do all these subjects seem to be Christian? Why are only Christians ever the subjects of demonism and exorcism? Well, naturally because they're Christian - and they've read the mad book that's preached from every pulpit in Africa. Only this book hypothesises the existence of ghosts, unicorns, witches, demons, Satan, and exorcism. Christian dogma inculcates feelings of shame, sin, inferiority and unworthiness in its subjects - and it encourages them to be deeply ignorant of anything that might contradict their beliefs (from science to other cultural beliefs). It wouldn't surprise me if religious belief actually tends to increase mental illness - mental disorders stemming from sexual neuroses, extreme physical abuse, extreme pressure and fear, and extreme belief in things that are literally nonsensical and horrifying (like hell fire). 

When one doubts one's beliefs, one begins to think either one is being 'tempted' by the Devil, or one is questioning ultimate religious truths. Inevitably, mental disorders arise. So the root and the 'cure' of these particular disorders is religion: religion inspires madness, and makes people think that priests are best equipped to remove these blights. It is self-feeding and depends on the ignorance of its subjects. The 'cure' is nothing more than instilling more shame; making subjects try not to doubt the madness but have 'faith'. This abuse happens in children and adults - and children in some African countries are routinely labelled witches and are subjected to the most cruel and unthinkable treatments.

The Devil is a notion because of religion, and religions wouldn't have such power without the concept. Religion perpetuates belief in the Devil, and relies on such belief. Religion does evil, but somehow thinks of the Devil as being somehow exterior. It never thinks to look at the inner potential - for both good and evil - of humans. Religion excises blame and puts it in some other dimension from which it can't harm it. Religion is the main force of evil and confusion in this world, and it does nought but obfuscate and destroy minds.


Relevant texts:

The God Delusion
The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark
Why People Believe Weird Things: Pseudoscience, Superstition, and Other Confusions of Our Time 

Top ten creationist arguments.

Why religion almost certainly is the root of all evil.

Religion is unchanging. From the first muddled sources (i.e. the four sources of the Torah), pages were cobbled together (some 800 years after the life of Moses in 700-800 BC) and were expounded to reveal ultimate truths about the universe. Because dogma cannot change, religions cannot progress - and rarely make exceptions. Institutions struggle to keep up with modern findings, and certain individuals hold a monopoly on their supposed 'truths'. These individuals thus hold all the power and their followers are at their mercy - monetarily, educationally, and spiritually.

The truth is 'revealed' to certain empowered individuals; thus, what they say goes unchallenged amongst their followers, and everything they surmise is almost universally uncritically examined.

As I've said before, religion exists because of two human aspects: fear and vanity. We are helpless creatures adrift in a changing and unpredictable world, and so we like to think that there must be some divine purpose for our being here - after all, we are different from all the 'other' animals.

Religious people hold dear to the idea of virtue - that doing certain things is divinely ordained and acceptable. However, some religious practices contravene ideas of contemporary morality. For instance, some Christians are reticent to fund healthcare research, and often go as far as refusing themselves or their immediate family members medical treatment. Some Christians believe that disease and disability is a purification for sin and that, somehow, innocent children deserve to be riddled with cancers, bone disorders, chronic infections and other disorders; that the maimed have been maimed for a reason; that HIV is a punishment for homosexuality. (Christians and Jews believe that we 'inherit' the sins of our forefathers, and thus we remain forever tainted.*)

By allowing themselves to believe that all this suffering is part of a divine 'plan', they allow themselves to tolerate suffering that no conscientious person could. Not only do they tolerate it: sometimes they actively seek to encourage or enhance it. And this isn't confined merely to health: religious people in general tend to have issues with gender, race and sex equality, socialistic policy, the teaching of science, the expounding of certain knowledge, sex education, race mixing, inter-race marriage, gay rights, women's rights, and all manner of other things.

Religion is a force for evil because it retards moral and scientific progress. It hankers after dead traditions, dubious history, ridiculous notions; it panders to the darker side of human nature. It's a force of arrogance and convinces people not only that their god is the 'right' god, but that somehow they are different from other forms of life and thus can trample on anything they consider to be beneath them.

Religious people assume that god is needed for moral purposes. 'Without a god,' they ask, 'where would we get our morality?' Well, not from scripture, I can tell you. The very fact that we pick and choose chapter and verse suggests that we have certain ways of distinguishing moral categories that are apart from religion. We don't acknowledge parts of scripture that tell us to kill our children if they're disobedient, to stone homosexuals to death, or to stone rape victims to death if they don't scream loudly enough. Why not? Because we know it's wrong. We have a sense of what's moral and we pick and choose scripture to justify our moral inclinations. If you still feel that scripture does hold some moral worth even though you're inclined towards atheism or agnosticism, ask yourself why. There are far better moral examples, most of whom declared no belief in a personal god - and most of whom were far more moral and humble than Jesus; such people as Socrates, Plato, Confucius, Lao-Tzu, and the Buddha - all of these examples actually predate Christianity by up to 600 years.

The truth is that morality existed long before religion and is an evolved process. Morality doesn't come from religion; religion comes from morality. Early agriculturalists - living some 10,000 years BC - knew that to be successful, it was best if they didn't kill each other. Most of them were related - probably cousins - and conceded it was pretty wise if they didn't go around killing whoever they pleased: that would tend to undermine the whole agricultural community thing. So, they didn't kill each other; rather than doing this, they tended to be compassionate and discriminate against greed and violence (which aren't good for small communities). Compassionate behaviour aids the development of societies; greed never rules the day, although it does exist in small amounts in all species (although greedy subjects are often shunned after repeatedly exhibiting greedy behaviour).

Religion rejects any contradictory evidence, and most religious institutions tend to come around to the truth much later on. Only in the 1990s did the Vatican finally concede that Galileo was right about the Earth orbiting the Sun - some 300 years after his death and some 20 years after we entered the space-age! In our day, the Vatican still rejects evolution - although certain figures - especially Pope John Paul II - have accepted that it is no longer to be considered a 'theory' in any sense of the word.

What is the solution to all the problems that ail us in the 21st century? Well, firstly, religion (along with all other forms of superstition) needs to go out of the window - not in whole; just in government and the public sphere. We cannot continue living in such ignorance of science and the scientific method when our very lives depend on it. Light bulbs and agriculture don't work on prayer - and neither do generators, televisions, or medicines (not to mention nuclear bombs). We don't need any deity, and we don't need religious institutions. Believers will persist, but literal readings of scripture can't.

Scripture is nonsensical and self-contradictory, but that's only because it's not meant to be taken literally. We all know that Joshua didn't destroy the walls of Jericho just by blowing a horn; we all know that none of the Jesus miracles happened; we all know that the Earth wasn't created in six days - or any of that other guff. These are all, obviously, myths and can only be taken as deep metaphors. Early Jews and Christians underwent deep spiritual changes but didn't have the language capacity to explain them away. Thus, all they could do was somehow aggrandize these experiences to show how magnificent their awakenings were. Also, these early tribespeople were mostly illiterate, and of course knew nothing of science, history, geography, cultures outside the middle-east, Europe and central Asia - and a host of other things. The Bible cannot be taken literally or as historical fact - most of it never happened and never could have happened.

Religion is slowly dying all over the world: it cannot win. The only way religion will prevail is if, somehow, religious war obliterates all human life on this planet. What's the solution? Reason isn't small-mindedness. We should be open-minded, but not open-minded to the point where our brains jellify and come out of our ears. We should be skeptical of everything, and shouldn't concede anything to any institution because we feel that it either pleases people or is relatively benign. Intolerance shouldn't be tolerated, and the truth should always win over human emotion and wishful thinking. Science and ignorance do not combine; if we allow them to, this combustible mixture will surely blow up in our faces. It's time to put religion to bed for good and wake up from our childish reveries - the future is knocking at the door, and bigger, grander things await us than superstition and fear. God is a luxury we can no longer afford - at least not an external god. But if that's not 'god', then what is? Maybe all notions of god have finally died - and for the best. Language change alone cannot keep up with theological interpretation. Our ideas have progressed, and are progressing, sufficiently to let go of god. God is dead, and things have never looked brighter.

*The usual riposte to this is that Jesus overturned Original Sin by dying on the cross. However, certain questions follow. Jesus was born to a virgin - Mary - who was descended from Adam, and thus must've inherited Original Sin. If this is so, then Jesus is also a fallen being. However, Catholics got around this by postulating in 1852 the Immaculate Conception - that, aside from Jesus, Mary is the only person ever to be born without Original Sin. Like most Catholic doctrine, this is made-up; conjured out of thin air to get around dead-ends. Ironically, this creates more confusion and prompts us to ask the question: why would God make such an unnecessary theological pretzel? Why make humans fallen in the first place? The idea of Original Sin reduces human dignity and prompts believers to ponder the benificence and wisdom of their supposedly wonderful deity - deserving of ridicule and gall rather than genuflection and praise.

FSM lives!

Dismantling Intelligent Design.

Intelligent design. What is this irksome little imposter dressed up in science clothing? Is it, as the propagators of the ‘theory’ suggest, a controversy worth teaching? Or, rather, is it merely a controversy only within their minds? The latter tends to be more true, but the simple truth is that ID advocates want to inflate its status merely by postulating a controversy where none exists.

Intelligent Design rests on two things: ignorance and refusal. By keeping the public – i.e. the American public – in the dark about science, they serve to keep the public distrustful of science. Generally, ID advocates refuse to acknowledge the fact that natural things giving off the apparent illusion of design are not the end products of design, but rather of slow, incremental evolution.

Intelligent Design isn’t a ‘theory’ – the very association of the phrase ‘ID’ with ‘theory’ serves to discredit the word. There are two ways of typically defining a theory:

1. Something that serves to explain a phenomenon or a set of phenomena through evidence and experiment;  
2. A simple postulation about something couched in nothing but speculation.

Evolution isn’t a theory; it’s a scientific fact – a ‘type 1’ theory. There is so much evidence that it’s almost staggering: fossil records, population distribution data, anthropological and archaeological data, genetic distribution data – and all of this come upon independently, in many locations, all across the planet.

The only tenet of ID is ‘irreducible complexity’. All this means is the refusal to accept that something, like an eye, for example, could come about by chance over millions of years. Certain things, say ID advocates, are too complex to have come about by chance; they must have been divinely worked. Intelligent Design, however, overlooks one thing: when looked at carefully, life seems to be a hotchpotch of mediocrity. The human eye, for example, has two massive flaws: light has to travel through blood vessels dangling above the retina before it’s processed, and the human eye has a massive blind spot. What this means is that the human brain has to artificially ‘fill in’ the blanks – in effect, part of the visual image we see isn’t actually there at all.

It’s rather telling that octopodes have no such problems. What does this mean? Are we to take it that if there is a deity, or several, then it, or they, value octopode eyes over human eyes? We are left with one of four immediate possibilities:

1. There is no deity or deities;
2. There is a deity, or several, and it or they prefer octopodes over humans;
3. There is a deity, or several, and it or they are incompetent;
4. There is a deity, or several, and it or they don't care about human beings at all.

I haven't yet finished with the science, but I feel it's time to progress to more esoteric matters. This is usually the point at which I become foamy at the mouth because of the self-assertive arrogance of the Christian right. They assume that their god is the one true god, and therefore base their so-called 'theory' on a bronze-age, immoral, self-contradictory, laughable piece of literature called the Bible. This is apparently the book from which they derive their morality and sense of the world. At this point, I have to ask myself: really? Have they read this book? Surely we haven't been reading the same Bible.

Religion is based on two things: fear and vanity - and the one usually comes from the other. After developing self-consciousness some 200,000 years ago, we suddenly became awed by the world - and very frightened. Suddenly, we were plunged into an unsafe world full of rain and lightning and thunder and forest fires and predators scowling away in the night. We needed something to hold onto - something to give us security and meaning; we needed something that wasn't there.

The earliest religions were all forms of animism - in this worldview, everything - from a rock, to a tree, to a cloud - took on a 'spirit'. Nature was revered and worshipped, and everything seemed deeply mystical and holy. The first religions pertaining to deity worship were overwhelmed with female deities. This coincided with the agricultural revolution that occurred some 10,000 years BC. When hunter-gatherers first started settling into agricultural communities, they depended on harvests for their livelihoods. Some knew to measure the seasons by the stars, and others didn’t. All, however, saw the Earth (insofar as they could meekly perceive it) as being female: rain entered the soil (like sperm) and after a period of gestation, the seeds sprouted and grew into crops.

Religions were dominated by female worship until communities really started to develop. Often, they would expunge their resources or take note that their resources were quite scarce, so they would rove into foreign lands in search of wood, minerals, water and food. Of course, sometimes they came upon foreign peoples who had entirely different gods. Naturally, conflict often ensued because of the tribal nature of these early settlers. After a few millennia, all religions tended to be pre-occupied with the worship of male deities that more represented the warrior nature of their societies or civilisations – although some still retained some female deities.

These polytheisms naturally progressed into monotheisms – the first of which was Judaism. From Judaism, Christianity and - later - Islam emerged. These religions retained their tribal motifs, and their subjects learned to look at people of other faith backgrounds as being somehow 'other' and not a part of their god's people.

What strikes me about religion is the short-sightedness and self-centredness of its subjects. They all assume that there is a deity and that this deity takes the form of a human. This is so, naturally, because humans are self-conscious beings seeking meaning in a world that cares not for the needs of any individual species. It's quite conceivable that if, for example, rabbits were to suddenly develop self-consciousness they would design gods in rabbit form, and each other species would do the same with respect to their physiognomies.

By postulating the existence of a god or gods, people only serve to compound the issue. The First Cause argument shoots itself in the foot: something capable of designing complex things must be complex in itself - probably more complex than its creations. Such a being couldn't have just come about by chance, surely. Therefore, such a being - i.e. God - would've had to be created. But who created the creator? And who created the creator of the creator? A usual riposte is to speculate that God has always existed. But if God has always existed, then the universe has surely always existed. And if the universe has always existed, one doesn't need to bring a deity into the equation.

By bringing in an intermediary - i.e. a god - one serves to complicate the matter - whereas evolution solves the problem in a simple and elegant way. Something cannot have existed anterior to the big bang. Also, a deity can't reside within the limitations of the universe because then such a deity would be part of the creation (and thus cannot be creator). So, Intelligent Design has no basis in reality and is as dead as the First Cause argument and the god of the Old Testament. Evolution solves all of these problems; a deity merely serves to create confusion where none exists.

Some of my new songs.

Interesting Facebook status updates (some simple formulas).

Stupid concept 1 + stupid concept 2 = not much more than the sum total of both.

-Gay + -gay = heterosexual.

BNP member + psychoanalyis = good joke.

Beef + bread = where the fuck is the mustard?

-Gay x +gay = C grade in mathematics.

If several Holocaust deniers die in a forest, does anyone bother counting the dead?

Jesus + crazy = funny crazy.

Mohammed + crazy = *whistles*.

Scientologist + crazy = the square root of crazy.

A joke.

Recently, my friend died of a stroke whilst his wife was giving him a handjob. I phoned her up to offer my condolences and enquire into the circumstances of his death, asking her: 'how did he die? Stroke?' 'No,' she replied, 'several'.