Some people made silly comments about a post on a famous blog:

http://apostate.wordpress.com/about/#comment-20191

I’d like to point out to Jami (post of April 25) that atheist’s comments
about various religions are “inappropriate” only in the
frame-of-reference of those religionists. To the atheist, they are just
observations, fair game, etc.

It’s all silliness, after all; wish-fulfillment fantasies fleshed out
with all sorts of somber pronouncements, rules, customs, for the purpose
of holding sway over gullible humans.

Arguing among atheists over which religion is worse for something or
other is just a stylistic thing. All religions are worse than no
religion.

From a moral-and-ethical perspective, a good action is more moral when
it is performed consciously and willfully by a thinking, reasoning
atheist, than when that same action is performed by a religionist
because some other religionist told him that god blesses the action.

If your god is omniscient, then nothing that you do is done of free will,
therefore nothing that you do has the value of an action performed by an
entity who chose that action freely.

If your god is not omnicient… then what are you doing worshipping it,
anyway?

Religion’s only real benefit to the world is that it provides some
pre-packaged recipes for people who are too mentally lazy to think for
themselves and work out what is ethical. Discussion about any particular
religion or other is merely discussion of flavors.

I have more respect for the person who comes to a good ethical formula
by thinking and inquiring and vigorously paring-away and questioning,
versus one who accepts received wisdom and fails to question what comes
attached to the “wise” parts.

I’m not sure but I might have more respect for somebody who comes to a
_bad_ ethical formula by thinking and inquiring honestly, than for
somebody who just had it handed to them and swallowed it
unquestioningly.

Your ethics are the code of right and wrong, of good and bad, that you
espouse.

Your morals are how well you adhere to your ethics.

Nowhere in there is there need for some mythical superior being who
makes its needs and wants known via special select humans who somehow
can’t seem to prove that they have received those revelations, nor even
that they have gotten right what they claim they have received. The
chain-of-evidence is well and truly broken. Argument by assertion sways
only the weak of mind (he asserted… )

With reason, and the scientific method, if there’s some question about
how an explanation was derived, you just start over with basic empirical
evidence or basic theory and connect the dots. No unexplained or
unexplainable leaps are allowed.

With religion, it all starts out with an unexplained leap.

Similarly, belief in Santa Claus (or the Djinn or, or, ….)

I’ve seen nothing to persuade me that fanciful tales about one or
another of those entities are any less viable than fantasies about
somebody named God or Allah or whatever.

That is, not only do I find no compelling reason to believe in any of
them, I don’t even find any compelling reason to assign a relative
hierarchy to the likelihood of their existence. Do you? How so? Saying:
“It says so in the Bible/Q’uran” is not an acceptable answer.

(Catholics like to say “It’s a mystery.” I’m sure there’s an equivalent
catch-all Arabic phrase used by Muslim authorities.  Scientists might
say “It’s a mystery”, but then they’ll also say… “…but we’re working on it!”)

Or that’s the way I see it, anyway.

Copyright 2008